11 of 2020’s best TV shows, video games, podcasts, and more

11 of 2020’s best TV shows, video games, podcasts, and more

Christina Animashaun/Vox; Sabrina Lantos/FX; Getty Images; HBO; You’re Wrong About; Renegade Game Studios

From Taylor Swift’s twofer to a video game set in hell, these pop culture things got us through 2020.

It’s useful to make distinctions when discussing pop culture. The best books are different from the best movies, and heaven help you if you try to compare the best albums to the best TV shows.

But increasingly, those distinctions don’t really matter when it comes to how we live our lives. I might segue seamlessly from watching a TV show to listening to an album to playing a video game, and then I might go right back to the TV show. Especially in quarantine, our experiences of pop culture have been defined as much by the vast buffet of options in front of us as they are by what was “the best.”

One thing I realized when I sat down to make a list of the year’s best culture was that I couldn’t possibly hope to consume it all. So I allowed my colleagues Alissa Wilkinson and Constance Grady to underline the best films and books of the year, respectively, and then I decided to take on everything else. These aren’t “the best” of the year, though I heartily recommend all of them. But these are the 11 TV shows, podcasts, albums, and games that most moved, impressed, and invigorated me in 2020.

Alice Is Missing

The cover of Alice Is Missing shows a woman overlooking a small town.Courtesy of Renegade Game Studios
Alice Is Missing offers incredibly emotional, thoughtful role-playing.

Some of the best role-playing game sessions of my life have been thanks to Alice Is Missing, which plays out almost entirely through text messages on your phone.

Players take on the roles of teenagers in a small town to search for the titular Alice, who has indeed gone missing. The characters they inhabit and the motivations those characters have for finding Alice are determined before gameplay begins. Once the game starts, a playlist of music counts down the 90 minutes players have to text their findings to each other — because they are playing teenagers, so of course they are communicating via text. That text message aspect makes it the perfect game for a night of socially distanced fun.

This game is moving and thoughtful and funny and heartbreaking in all the ways I want games to be. Designer Spenser Starke is one of a handful of folks in the RPG sphere whose games I always try, and I can’t wait to play this one again.

Purchase Alice Is Missing in physical form or as a digital version on Roll20.

Babylon Berlin

A woman dressed as a 1920s flapper sits at a bar holding a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.Netflix
Liv Lisa Fries stars in Babylon Berlin.

Netflix’s German import launched perhaps its most audacious storytelling to date when season three dropped in January.

Set in 1929 Berlin, on the verge of the stock market crash, Babylon Berlin follows detective Gereon Rath and would-be detective Charlotte Ritter as they uncover massive criminal conspiracies that allow them to almost see the growing threat of the Nazi Party, while never quite understanding what’s about to happen. The third season features a masked killer on a film set, who stands in as a symbol for any number of potential horrors (The rise of fascism! The sidelining of women in the early film industry! Greed!), but also a race against time to save the life of a beloved character, made a scapegoat for a Nazi plot.

No show on television right now has the sprawl and storytelling ambition of Babylon Berlin, and even when it’s doing something I don’t quite jibe with, I enjoy watching it grapple with a massively important moment in history from the point of view of people who don’t know what lies ahead. And I have thought about the final shot of the season three finale more than almost any other shot in film or on TV this year.

Watch Babylon Berlin on Netflix. There are three seasons, with 28 episodes across them. All episodes are between 45 and 60 minutes long. A fourth season will go into production in 2021.

The one-two-three punch of Fiona Apple, Phoebe Bridgers, and Taylor Swift

Phoebe Bridgers onstage playing guitar and singing.Rich Fury/Getty Images for Visible
Phoebe Bridgers performs during Red Rocks Unpaused in September.

My wife accused me of only listening to sad music by white women this year, and technically, she’s wrong (I listened to a lot of different music, Libby!). But she’s also more or less right because the albums I kept coming back to were Fetch the Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple, Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers, and the pairing of folklore and evermore by Taylor Swift.

All three artists released music that spoke eerily to the times we are living through. Apple’s album, which she released earlier than she’d planned to once she realized how much it resonated with the current moment, was recorded over the course of three years, and yet the lyric, “Fetch the bolt cutters/ I’ve been in here too long” was a whole mood. Bridgers’s Punisher was my favorite album of the year, capturing an ephemeral sense that something massive is ending but something tentative is beginning. And both of Swift’s albums, the only ones discussed here that were actually written and recorded in quarantine, are infused with the delicate feelings of being all alone with your thoughts.

I think all four of these albums will have long lives beyond 2020. I also know that every time I hear Apple’s “I Want You to Love Me,” Swift’s “Exile,” or (especially) Bridgers’s “I Know the End,” I’m going to have a flashback to standing on an empty street corner, in a massive city, wondering where everybody went, music pulsing in my ears.

Listen to all four albums on all major music platforms.

Hades

A screenshot of the video game Hades showing an interior landscape with a character running through explosions.Supergiant Games
Hades features several monsters you have to learn how to defeat.

I don’t normally enjoy video games like Hades. For starters, it’s one difficult challenge, where you’ll die a lot. For another, it’s part of a genre — the “roguelike,” an action/RPG mash-up where each play-through takes place in a brand-new iteration of the central dungeon, creating endless replayability — that I haven’t really clicked with before. And for still another, to see everything in it requires lots and lots of time I don’t often have. (Honestly, you might not ever see everything in this game.)

But I love Hades. It might be one of my favorite video games ever made. As you take on the role of Zagreus, son of Hades, who is trying to escape the Underworld, you’ll find yourself confronted with new and different challenges every time you play the game. Many of those challenges will kill you, but then you’ll go back to the beginning, where you’ll have more wisdom of the challenges to come, as well as better weapons and friends to help you along the way. My favorite moments in the game are often after I die, when I go back to square one and lick my wounds alongside the many mythological friends waiting for me there.

Also, there’s something about trying and failing to escape Hell that really speaks to 2020 in particular. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Hades is available on Steam, the Epic Games Store, and Nintendo Switch.

Harley Quinn

The cartoon characters Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, covered in muck, in their apartment.DC Universe
Just another roommate sitch with Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.

Extremely funny and effortlessly queer, Harley Quinn is notable not just for how it skewers superhero tropes but for how it skewers sitcom tropes. It’s more or less The Mary Tyler Moore Show with a murderous supervillain at its center, and then it peels back the text of that earlier series to reveal the queer subtext underlying the Mary/Rhoda friendship all along.

The show’s first season, which aired in 2019, was a bit hit-or-miss, but its second, which debuted earlier this year, was consistently terrific — particularly when it pertained to the will-they/won’t-they relationship between roommates Harley (an excellent Kaley Cuoco) and fellow supervillain Poison Ivy (Lake Bell). The two are just trying to figure out a way forward from their past villainy, while also trying to figure out what to do with their obvious attraction to one another. It’s a bright, poppy story about redemption and girls kissing, which doesn’t take a simplistic or prurient approach to either.

Oh, also, it’s incredibly funny. There are few shows I laughed at as much as this one in 2020, and I can’t wait for season three.

Harley Quinn is streaming on HBO Max. There are two seasons of 13 episodes each, and the episodes all run around 22 minutes. Season three is in production.

How To With John Wilson

John Wilson holding his video camera while standing on a New York street.HBO
John Wilson takes his camera everywhere.

What a weird wonder How To With John Wilson is! After every episode, I found myself thinking, “That was it?” because I felt so detached from the big TV critic hype around the series. But by the end of the (superb) first-season finale, I realized that the whole was truly greater than the sum of the parts.

It’s hard to describe this series. It falls somewhere in the Venn diagram intersection of “found-footage art” and “stunt comedy,” as Wilson travels first around New York City and then other locales, camera always affixed to his eye, to explain how to perform seemingly straightforward tasks. What’s ingenious about the series is the way it embarks on zigzagging tangents when you least expect it. An episode about how to make small talk builds to a profound moment of human connection on a beach at MTV Spring Break. An episode about how to remember things concludes with an astonishingly funny trip to a series of dollar stores. And an episode about how to make the perfect risotto … well, I don’t dare even slightly spoil that one.

At only six episodes, each about a half-hour, How To With John Wilson makes an effort to notice and even appreciate the fleeting, mundane aspects of human life, whether that’s struggling to swipe a subway card or seeing a dog pee on the street. It made me miss the wide and open world more than I already did.

How To With John Wilson is available on HBO and HBO Max. Season one contains six episodes of around 30 minutes each. The show has been renewed for a second season.

I May Destroy You

A person wearing a colorful shirt and jacket studs up to their waist in the ocean. Behind them are low-rise buildings along the shore.HBO
Michaela Coel plays Arabella in I May Destroy You.

Fascinating and funny and frustrating in equal measure, I May Destroy You was the TV show I spent the most time thinking about in 2020.

British creator Michaela Coel turned reflections on her own sexual assault into a 12-episode series examining power dynamics, issues of consent, and the sheer difficulty of finding one’s way through a thicket of trauma. She also stars as Arabella, who goes out for a night with friends, only to wake up the next morning groggy, with vague memories of having been raped. In the ensuing weeks, she struggles to regain control of her life and her writing, even though her trauma feels all-consuming. And throughout, her friends have their own encounters with the many tiny ways we erode other’s consent almost as a matter of course. The “I” and the “You” in I May Destroy You shift a little with every episode.

Coel herself has given interviews that some sexual assault survivors have found troubling, and the series’ insistence that none of what it confronts has any easy answers can be taken a bit too far (though the elliptical season finale might be the best TV episode of the year). But it’s the one TV show from 2020 worth arguing about over and over and over again.

I May Destroy You is available on HBO Max and HBO. It’s 12 half-hour episodes long, and those 12 episodes tell a complete story.

Mrs. America

A woman standing in an elevator is surrounded by men in suits and ties.Sabrina Lantos/FX
Cate Blanchett was mesmerizing as Phyllis Schlafly in Mrs. America.

Come to think of it, most of the best TV shows of 2020 resisted being pinned down, where one person’s thought-provoking was another person’s problematic. That description fits I May Destroy You, but it also fits FX’s Mrs. America, a terrific miniseries about archconservative activist Phyllis Schlafly’s attempts to stop the Equal Rights Amendment from being added to the US Constitution in the 1970s.

Across nine hour-long episodes, Mrs. America probes both the meteoric success Schlafly achieved by affixing herself, remora-style, to the hull of the patriarchy, as well as the cracks in the foundation of the era’s feminism. Creator Dahvi Waller shows admirable patience and restraint in building her ultimate case, to the degree that some viewers feared the show might be Schlafly apologia across the first several episodes. And honestly, if you couldn’t stomach those early episodes, I don’t blame you.

But the whole of Mrs. America reveals a series that is angry and frustrated at the ways in which white American women allow their proximity to power to render them blind to the need to actually create a better world for women who aren’t, well, white American women. It’s a failure that ends up hurting all women.

Mrs. America is streaming on Hulu. There are nine hour-long episodes.

Sarah Z’s YouTube channel

A person sitting on a couch speaking and holding up one finger holds a “respect women” coffee mug in their other hand. A text box reads “champagne on me if john kills mary xoxo.”Screenshot from Sarah Z’s YouTube channel
Sarah Z is up on the Johnlock conspiracy.

Sarah Z — or, if you’re Canadian (like Sarah herself), Sarah Zed — has long been one of my favorite YouTube essayists, for her thoughts on all manner of cultural topics. She mostly covers stories about a quotient of people and characters most readily categorized as “the ridiculously online,” but she’s also made room for other pop culture thoughts in recent years. She sits in front of a camera and talks (and talks and talks and talks), and while she occasionally cuts away to footage of what she’s talking about, the primary appeal is her thoughts, which are funny and incisive.

Even by her own high standards, 2020 was a standout year for Sarah Z. She examined the tragic history of DashCon (a convention for Tumblr users). She unpacked the conspiracy theories surrounding the Johnlock ship from the TV show Sherlock. She dug into why so many young people have become “Doomers.” She took on J.K. Rowling’s transphobia. And she dove into the history of “My Immortal,” the most infamous fanfic of all time.

All these videos have great stories at their core, but in 2020, Sarah Z came into her own as someone who turned the raw flow of information on the internet into a narrative. Faced with an online world of chaos, Sarah Z made sense of it all.

Sarah Z’s channel is on YouTube.

What We Do in the Shadows

The three vampires from What We Do in the Shadows try to enter Colin’s room.FX
The vampires from What We Do in the Shadows are some of TV’s funniest characters.

Allow me a second to spread the good news of FX’s wildly funny vampire comedy, which is probably the most inventive, audacious, and hilarious show on the air right now.

A TV follow-up to the cult film comedy of the same name, the series took wing in its second season, which aired in the spring. Following the low-key adventures of a bunch of vampires living together in the same house on Staten Island, the series made a lark out of whether vampires, who are dead, have ghosts; what happens when one vampire tries to run away and start a new life in a small town as a normal guy named Jackie Daytona; and the doomed musical collaboration of the show’s central couple, Nadja and Laszlo. It was all superbly silly, but with strong, well-constructed stories, thanks to producers Paul Simms and Stefani Robinson, some of the best comedy writers out there.

Also, you have not lived until you’ve heard every other member of this cast say “Colin Robinson,” the name of the show’s ultra-boring energy vampire.

What We Do in the Shadows is streaming on Hulu. Two seasons of 10 half-hour episodes are currently available. Season three will air in 2021.

You’re Wrong About

The logo for You’re Wrong About features puffy letters on a rainbow background.You’re Wrong About
That thing you thought you knew? You don’t.

There are a lot of good podcasts where two people gab about some interesting bit of history they’ve done a tiny bit of research on so they can crack jokes. There are even more terrible podcasts where two people gab about some interesting bit of history they’ve done a tiny bit of research on so they can crack jokes. But what unites them all is the tiny bit of research. In most shows of this form, the comedy comes before the research. And honestly, that’s how it should be much of the time.

But You’re Wrong About is different. Co-hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall put in the work. In every episode, one of the two hosts presents a story from history that the conventional wisdom is — you guessed it — wrong about. The other host makes jokes as the first delves deeper and deeper into the meticulously collected information they’ve brought to the table. Occasionally, a guest pops in with their own deeply researched take on some bit of seeming ephemera.

All podcasts rely on great chemistry, and Hobbes and Marshall’s friendship drives so much of You’re Wrong About’s appeal. But even more impressive is the way both puncture historical myths and the built-in prejudices that inform so much of what we think we know about the past.

You’re Wrong About is available on all major podcast platforms. New episodes are released weekly. If you’re curious about where to start, check out the recent miniseries on Princess Diana.

Author: Emily VanDerWerff

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