In the past, Vulture has traditionally shared a list of the best TV shows of the year so far at around the midpoint in the 365-day calendar. Last year, we did the same thing but continually updated the list on a monthly basis, both as a service to readers and also to help us keep our TV clutter properly organized.
For 2018, they’re making another change: We’re starting the process earlier by publishing our “best TV shows so far” list at the end of April. Why? Because, as illustrated by the fact that the summer movie season basically started while it was still snowing in parts of New York, traditional methods of marking time have lost all meaning. So we may as well go ahead and get this thing started.
Rather than go out with a blaze of glory, Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields’s drama about Russian spies hiding out in 1980s Washington, D.C., ended with a bittersweet chapter that derived most of its power from its understanding of the main characters’ fears and desires. But the rest of the season was no mere setup to that great payoff: It showed married KGB agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), their children Paige and Henry (Holly Taylor and Keidrich Sellati), FBI agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich) and former KGB operative Oleg Burov (Costa Ronin) struggling to come to terms with a world that was changing so fast that nothing made sense to them anymore. The key to the show’s peculiar magic was its refusal to offer viewers subtext on a silver platter, lit with a tiny spotlight, as so many post-Sopranos dramas tend to do. —Matt Zoller Seitz
Donald Glover’s half-hour comedy-drama was more surprising, beautiful, and mysterious in its second season than in its first — a remarkable achievement considering how boldly that first batch of episodes advanced the form. Largely avoiding situations that would bring the show’s ensemble together for a single event or plotline, Atlanta Robbin’ Season scattered them to the four winds, the better to allow each to go on a self-contained adventure that was shaped as elegantly as a postmodern short story and revealed character mainly through incidents. Even more daringly, the main character in each episode was often placed in a reactive position, encountering a series of bizarre or terrifying characters that became the de facto lead for that week’s tale; “Teddy Perkins,” a miniature horror-psychodrama starring Lakeith Stanfield’s Darius, and “Woods,” which sent Brian Tyree Henry’s Alfred on an odyssey through what felt like a cursed fairy-tale forest, were the most vivid examples, but they all had a touch of this quality. Every one raised powerful questions simply by presenting a series of indelible images: Rorschach tests for viewers. —MZS
Producer-director Ryan Murphy’s most uncompromising, mysterious, off-putting, ultimately devastating mini-series is the story of an assassin’s journey through misery and derangement that doubles as an expose of American homophobia in the 1990s. The most daring thing about it is its structure, which starts with the killing of Gianni Versace and works its way gradually backward through time, a gambit that cements a feeling of awful inevitability even as it explores cultural root causes. —MZS
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One of the strongest new shows of 2018 is this wild mix of action, crime, comedy, and Hollywood satire carried by an outstanding lead performance by Bill Hader. As Barry, Hader is a hit man so anesthetized to the grotesque nature of his job that he has practically forgotten how to have emotions. Which is why he’s surprised when an accidental visit to an acting class — taught by Gene Cousineau, who’s played with endearing arrogance by Henry Winkler — gives him the ol’ theater bug. When genuine feelings of guilt and grief eventually spill out of Barry at an unexpected time, it’s extraordinary to behold. —Jen Chaney
The continued artistic development of this series about New York money and the government servants who try to regulate it has been thrilling to behold. Content early on to be perceived as an unusually eloquent dick-measuring contest, the series eventually revealed itself as a critique of machismo, set in a world where men who typically haven’t been in a real fight since childhood use the language of barbarian conquerors to describe pushing electronic funds around. And yet, series creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien and their collaborators have created characters that are fully dimensional people that you feel for, ones you laugh with as well as at.
This season doubled down on the tactical maneuvers as well as the armchair psychoanalysis and pathos, and the result was the show’s best consecutive run of episodes to date. —MZS
Lena Waithe’s drama about a working-class, predominantly black Chicago neighborhood is the kind of drama that’s barely made anymore. Taking its cues from Robert Altman, Spike Lee, and such life-of-the-city ensembles as The Wire and Treme, it is driven almost entirely by characterization and atmosphere, interlinking narratives by theme and feeling and not solely by the whims of plot. —MZS
Justin Simien’s literary-flavored, seriocomic account of life on a racially mixed college campus pulled off a miraculous evolution in its second season. Right out of the gate, it had improved on its source material — Simien’s same-titled feature film — by giving the main characters more breathing space and the narrative more nooks and crannies. The show’s sophomore outing was more structurally and aesthetically daring, with long dream sequences, moments of surreal psychedelia, and an entire episode staged as a two-character play and unfolding within the confines of a campus radio station. The photography, direction, music supervision, and editing seemed to be having as much fun as the ensemble cast, trying out bold ideas to see if they’d play (they nearly always did), digging deep into the history of the university and the nation that surrounded it, and ending with a cliffhanger so unexpected that it made you laugh out loud at the show’s gleeful audacity. —MZS
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