TV Talk: Limited series, comedies lead TV’s Top 10 of 2021

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers viewing tips from 2021.

While there’s still plenty of new TV this month — “Sex and the City” sequel series “And Just Like That…” streams on HBO Max Thursday but wasn’t available for review by deadline — December also offers an opportunity to take stock of the TV/streaming year that’s been.

We’re out the other side of covid-impacted production delays and the pipeline of programming is now spewing out new shows faster than any one human can watch them. Let that serve as a reminder that what follows is a top 10 of the best shows I’ve watched this year.

Surveying the list, what’s remarkable is the rise of the limited series. At least four of my Top 10 (including a 10th place tie because I just couldn’t cut one more good show) fall into this category that basically didn’t exist a decade ago until FX’s “American Horror Story” came along (sure, there were miniseries, but that was mostly a dormant genre circa 2011).

Limited series offer the opportunity to tell a finite story. Yes, HBO ordered another season of “White Lotus,” but like “AHS,” the next season will be set at a different White Lotus resort featuring largely new characters.

You can check out all of these series at your leisure on their assorted streaming/on-demand platforms:

1.“Succession” (HBO): TV’s best black comedy masquerading as a drama, “Succession” enjoys the highbrow imprimatur of HBO thanks to amazing dialogue and well-defined characterizations, but at its core it’s “Dallas” with deeper psychological underpinnings for why its characters behave as they do.

2. “Maid” (Netflix): What’s stuck with me most after watching this limited series based on the Stephanie Land memoir is its pro-social value, offering a road map to women in abusive circumstances. Sure, it was an entertaining underdog story, too, with a riveting performance by star Margaret Qualley and an excellent turn by her real-life mother, Andie MacDowell, but more importantly, “Maid” was a potentially impactful series that has the opportunity to help women in dire straits improve their lives.

3. “Hacks” (HBO Max): As a comedy legend and her millennial protégé, Jean Smart and newcomer Hannah Einbinder make this comedy the best two-hander going today. Often caustically funny, but never without heart, “Hacks” was anything but hacky.

4. “Schmigadoon” (Apple TV+): A joyfully subversive musical series that shows its love for movie musicals and Broadway shows even while critiquing the characters-breaking-into-song genre.

5. “It’s a Sin” (HBO Max): Truly moving without being manipulative, this miniseries about young Londoners during the AIDS crisis homes in on the homophobia of the era that made treatment of the disease so much more painful than it needed to be.

6. “The White Lotus” (HBO): Initially a slowly unraveling social satire, this comedy of the wealthy and ill-mannered goes where a TV show has never gone before as one stressed-out character becomes entirely unhinged to a scatological degree.

7. “Reservation Dogs” (FX on Hulu): A sometimes melancholy dramedy about four Native American teens in Oklahoma, “Reservation Dogs” delivers finely-drawn characters, but was never too self-serious, breaking for silly asides, particularly when they involved Bear (star-in-the-making D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) communing with his vision of a buffoonish spirit guide.

8. “Midnight Mass” (Netflix): Writer Mike Flanagan (“The Haunting of Hill House”) explores with depth and complexity questions of faith and religious zealotry in this sometimes-talky (but with good reason!) horror miniseries.

9. “The Other Two” (HBO Max): Absurd Hollywood/gay culture shenanigans blend with a story of sometimes-fraught family ties in this niche winner about two siblings trying to prove they can be successful in the shadow of their talentless, pop star little brother.

10. “WandaVision” (Disney+): So the ending was more typically Marvel than the beginning but what a magnificent, mysterious start as “WandaVision” aped classic TV conceits.

10. “Ghosts” (CBS): Who says a broadcast network comedy can’t grow its audience? When the fall TV season began in September, “Ghosts” (9 p.m. Thursday, KDKA- TV) seemed like an odd-show-out, a single-camera comedy on a network full of multi-cam sitcoms with laugh tracks. But “Ghosts” started with decent ratings that have grown since, almost unheard of in this day of the ever-shrinking prime-time broadcast TV audience. Broadly comedic without being dumb and clever enough to show some smarts, “Ghosts” is evolving into an all-around delight.

Honorable mentions: “Abbott Elementary” (ABC), “All Creatures Great and Small” (PBS), “American Rust” (Showtime), “Bridgerton” (Netflix), “The Chair” (Netflix), “Cruel Summer” (Freeform), “Cowboy Bebop” (Netflix), “Dopesick” (Hulu), “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay” (Freeform), “Evil” (Paramount+), “For All Mankind” (Apple TV+), “Genera+ion” (HBO Max), “Girls5eva” (Peacock), “The Good Fight” (Paramount+), “Mare of Easttown” (HBO), “Mr. Mayor” (NBC), “The Morning Show” (Apple TV+), “The Nevers” (HBO), “Only Murders in the Building” (Hulu), “Pose” (FX), “Superstore” (NBC), “Ted Lasso” (Apple TV+), “Resident Alien” (Syfy), “Rutherford Falls” (Peacock), “Squid Game” (Netflix), “This is Us” (NBC), “The Underground Railroad” (Amazon), “What We Do in the Shadows” (FX), “Yellowjackets” (Showtime).