TV of 2021

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I’m going to break a habit and rank my TV shows, 1-25, rather than just group them by excellent to terrible. While I’m not sure these rankings are definitive, in the sense that Lupin and Wynonna Earp might swap places if you ask me on another day, I’m fairly certain that It’s a Sin is always going to beat out You and The Nevers is always going to beat The Queen’s Gambit despite them both being in my top tier. I’m not sure if that’s just increase confidence, all the same caveats about wildly differing genres from previous years still apply, or something else, but this year I was able to settle on a fairly stable and happy ranking.

In addition, my top three tiers really go from Chef’s Kiss to Very Good. Even in tier four they’re shows that were flawed but ok. Hell, even in tier five they’re shows that were deeply flawed but I watched - there are shows not on this list that I gave up on and so didn’t review.

Without further ado, on to the list.

  1. It’s A Sin
  2. Squid Game
  3. Lupin
  4. Wynonna Earp (Season four)
  5. You (season three)
  6. A Discovery of Witches (season 2)
  7. The Nevers
  8. Sexify (season one)
  9. Vigil
  10. The Great
  11. The Queen’s Gambit
  1. Motherland Fort Salem. Season 2
  2. Locke and Key (Season 1)
  3. Shadow and Bone (Season 1)
  4. Sex Education (season three)
  5. Bonding (season 2)

  1. Fate: The Winx Academy
  2. Clickbait
  3. Biohackers (season two)
  4. The Pursuit of Love
  1. The Irregulars
  2. Midnight Mass
  1. The Wheel of Time
  2. Revolution of the Daleks
  3. Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (Chapters Three and Four)
  4. Dr Who - Flux

This list is quite hard to generalise. Midnight Mass and CAOS both pass the Russo Test for LGBTQIA representation (although you can argue they don’t do it well). Lupin hardly passes any of my tests but places really highly, so does Squid Game. Some shows I’ve rated more highly than the internet buzz because I’m not familiar with the material they’re based on or because I have some different attitudes to things than the ultra-aggressive kiddies of today. I’m not saying they’re wrong, just that I’m less aggressive in my attitudes. That said, I have watched some things based on recommendations from friends, despite my reservations about certain people being involved in the creative process and ranked the most most obviously problematic of those really highly.

There are shows like MFS and Sex Education that have stumbled slightly, but only slightly, while CAOS and Dr. Who have really fallen off a cliff.

Looking at the stats for the year we have 80.8% passing the Bechdel test - and certainly a number, but not all, of the shows that fail pass in some or many of their episodes but don’t pass in every one. Moving on to the Ko test for representation of WOC, 76% pass and there is one null (Squid Game), so this is out of 25 rather than 26. Finally the Russo Test for representation of LGBTQIA characters is passed by 69.2% of shows, with 1 also marked as a query (3.8%). Of the 27% that are marked as failing some have LGBTQIA characters that, for various reasons do not pass the Russo test. Some are only present in a few episodes, some fail to pass all the parts of the test. So only 15.4% have no representation at all. Comparing this to last year, there’s a slight dip in shows that pass the Bechdel test again, but this is small enough it’s probably sampling error (change one show and we’ve basically got the same number as last year), the Ko test is up (but again by the sampling error margin). The Russo test passes are up at lot, from 52% to 69.2%. That’s much more than sampling error (which would make up ≈8% - one show different last year, one show different this year). If you split what I watch into UK Network TV, Netflix Originals (shows like You and Sex Education), Netflix Imported TV (so things like Squid Games) and US TV, the numbers start to get a bit small to be sensible in some cases. But, UK TV does better than average (80% pass), Neflix originals are just under the average (57% pass), Netflix imports do quite badly (33% pass) and US TV does really well (100% pass). This is certainly not the case in general from the GLAAD report for US TV and I don’t watch enough UK TV to be sure (I think it does better than US TV but not that well in general) so I think there’s still pretty strong bias in what I watch showing here.

As usual, there is also some bias in what I bother to write about. I know there is TV I watched and didn’t write about. For example I tried to watch both Hellbound and Lucifer season 5 and found one dull and the other annoying. You won’t find them in the list because I just didn’t want to write about them. I watch a variety of quiz shows, some silly (Richard Osman’s House of Games) some insanely hard (Only Connect) but it never occurs to me to review them. It makes me wonder whether the fact that 16/26 shows fall into my top two categories reflect the fact that I largely only bother to finish watching shows I really like more than the quality of the TV out there?

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