With stars like Mahershala Ali, Toni Collette, and Meryl Streep slumming it on the small screen, 2019 was another year dominated by miniseries, anthologies, and bite-sized seasons. Although a handful of new faces were able to enter the collective consciousness, the year’s best work came from familiar names and shows.
Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) adapted Homecoming—a psychological thriller podcast about a caseworker trying to remember what happened at a mysterious government-contracted facility—for Amazon this year. The show, starring Julia Roberts, is expertly crafted, and its twists and turns are a fitting callback to the paranoia cinema of the 1970s. Yet, TV was so good this year that Homecoming didn’t crack the top 10. The list:
Nearly 500 scripted TV shows aired in each of the last two years, and that number is expected to grow moving forward. As such, your television backlog is probably already overwhelmingly long and getting longer by the minute. Still, BBC America’s Killing Eve, a cat-and-mouse game between MI5 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and psychopathic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer), deserves a spot atop your binge list.
A Mixed Review 