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From a new season of Succession to reboots of Gossip Girl and (eventually) Sex and the City, TV has seen plenty of heralded returns in 2021—and bid a few fond farewells, too. (We’re looking at you, Shrill, Pose, and Insecure.) Yet there have also been lots of exciting new additions to the small-screen cannon, spanning the worlds of organized crime, academia, the comedy circuit, fashion, and even veterinary medicine. (In the streaming era, anything goes.)
Worried about what you might have missed this year? Well, we’ve rounded up the shows that Vogue editors and writers loved the most. Find our list of the best TV shows of 2021 below.
All Creatures Great and Small
How to Watch: Stream on Amazon with PBS Masterpiece.
In January, Marley Marius wrote that a “comforting quaintness courses through All Creatures Great and Small,” a series adapted from the writings of veterinary surgeon James Herriot. “In turns engagingly procedural and thoroughly sweet, it would make for pleasant viewing any year, but with, well, everything going on, the show’s verdant landscapes and uncomplicated ethics feel especially welcome this winter.”
Anna
How to Watch: Stream on AMC+.
Like Squid Game, Taylor Antrim noted in November, the dystopian Italian drama Anna “is about survival in a pitiless future, about haves and have-nots, and the show punctuates its storytelling with harrowing violence—but Anna is a series that makes you think and feel as much as wonder what nightmarish thing might happen next.” He continued: “The six episodes alternate wondrous, dreamlike imagery with cruel sequences that may keep you up at night—made all the more nightmarish by the idea of violence done by and to children. This may not be your cup of tea (nor may a story about the aftermath of a plague—Anna began filming six months before COVID-19 hit, a fact noted at the beginning of each episode), but the rewards are vivid: astonishing production design, poignant performances by the young actors, and a sense of unpredictability all too uncommon in formulaic TV right now.”
The Chair
How to Watch: Stream on Netflix.
In Netflix’s The Chair, Sandra Oh stars as the freshly appointed head of a disintegrating college English department. Enrollment is down; a handful of dinosaur professors have not updated their syllabi for decades; and her closest friend and potential paramour—a rumpled Jay Duplass—cannot seem to make it to his own lectures on time. An older generation (mostly male, mostly white) have long stuck their heads in the sand, and Oh’s character has been rewarded for her years of scrambling with the unglamorous task of digging them out. A gentle-hearted satire, The Chair is neither condemnatory nor celebratory, but rather a sweetly sardonic depiction of campus life, where truth is hard to find.—Chloe Schama
Hacks
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
If the first episode of Hacks, starring Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder, plays like a typical generational comedy—in it, a 20-something comedy writer meets a 60-something comedian about a job—the series soon reveals more complicated and compelling truths about its two central characters. “It’s increasingly clear,” Liam Hess wrote in June, “that their shared flaws transcend any kind of easy generational explanation, instead offering a kind of before and after of what it means to work as a woman in entertainment, carefully leavened with enough silliness to avoid feeling too on the nose.”
Halston
How to Watch: Stream on Netflix.
Fashion, sex, drugs, drama—the life of Roy Halston Frowick had all of that, and Halston, the Netflix miniseries from executive producer Ryan Murphy, captures it. Ewan McGregor stars as Halston, an American designer as inventive and inspired as he was troubled, with Krysta Rodriguez, Rebecca Dayan, and Sietzka Rose as Liza Minnelli, Elsa Peretti, and Karen Bjornson, just some of the muses, friends, clients, and collaborators who filled out his glamorous circle. “I’ve found that Halston was so interesting because his environment was so controlled while his creativity was so chaotic,” Murphy told Vogue earlier this year, and director Daniel Minahan explores both sides of that dichotomy: the vision of slicked-back chic that emerged from his studio, as well as the personal and financial crises that led to his untimely undoing.—Marley Marius
Kevin Can F**K Himself
How to Watch: Stream on AMC+.
In the inventive AMC series Kevin Can F**K Himself, Ilana Kaplan wrote in June, Schitt’s Creek star Annie Murphy plays Allison, “a dowdy sitcom wife in Worcester, Massachusetts, who has had enough of the humiliations her husband has inflicted on her and decides to exact revenge. Allison is looking for a way out of her airless, claustrophobic marriage, and the show manifests her drive through a unique, genre-bending form in which Murphy’s character lives in two worlds: a multicam sitcom where she grins and bears the indignities of her situation and a dark, single-cam prestige drama that underlines her suffocating rage and anguish. Murphy walks through doors or other passageways and the format changes—a jarring and effective shift that, in its contrasts, highlights the artifice and contrivances of the sitcom world.”
Laetitia
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
Wrote Antrim in September: “The mesmerizing and painfully sad new French series Laetitia is technically a true-crime drama, but that overused genre label doesn’t do justice to the delicate, emotional work director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade has achieved across these six episodes. De Lestrade is best known as a documentarian—his addictive 2004 series The Staircase in many ways kicked off the current true-crime boom—but Laetitia shows he’s equally talented as a writer and director of actors. Though based on the notorious and brutal murder of a teenager in France in 2011, the series achieves the storytelling immersion of great fiction.”
Loki
How to Watch: Stream on Disney+.
“You can’t make a show about the god of mischief unless you’re willing to get weird, and Marvel’s Disney+ series Loki is just that,” Janelle Okwodu wrote in July. “A time-traveling dramedy about Norse deities who make poor life choices, Loki crams an immense amount of information and action into six episodes. While there’s plenty of phase-four exposition and references to the comics, there’s also an evil cartoon clock, romantic comedy subplots, alligators, alternate timelines, and a mustachioed Owen Wilson.”
Maid
How to Watch: Stream on Netflix.
Netflix’s Maid stars Margaret Qualley as Alex, a young mother who turns to domestic work after leaving her abusive partner. “Without money, a degree, or much family support to speak of—Andie MacDowell (Qualley’s real-life mother) plays Alex’s bipolar artist mom, and her father is mostly out of the picture—she finds herself at a loss, navigating a catch-22 safety net: In order to qualify for the benefits that will sustain her, she has to obtain the very thing she lacks, a paycheck,” Chloe Schama wrote earlier this month. Yet Maid is no slog: “Qualley’s performance lights up the small screen, while MacDowell’s skrewball antics, stopping just short of caricature, give her scenes a madcap pleasure. She may not be of much use to Alex, but in all her gray-haired glory, she sure is a delight to behold.”
Mare of Easttown
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
“I have a weakness for the cheap thrills of a thriller, the benign jeopardy of the fantastic,” Raven Smith wrote in May. “Step forward Mare of Easttown, the Kate Winslet–fronted HBO drama that’s keeping audiences engrossed (and ever so slightly depressed) with its portrayal of police detection in rural Pennsylvania. As we try and ascertain who done it (and the tricky vowels of the rust belt accent), episodes offer precisely what we want from a police drama: a sense of authenticity, minus the actual banality of real life. The show is equally drab and riveting, claustrophobic and caustic. I’m going nuts on thesaurus adjectives to stop myself writing gritty, cliché as the word is, but Easttown is Gritopia, and the show is greased by the brutal tenacity of Winslet in the titular role.”
Nine Perfect Strangers
In the latest star-vehicle for Nicole Kidman, Nine Perfect Strangers, she plays a seraphic guru presiding over a secluded retreat where a cadre of broken people have gathered to skinny-dip, guzzle tropical smoothies, and investigate their dysfunction. There are other motives at play, however, and even in the sparkling sunlight, things begin to get a little dark. The ominous overtones can’t dispel the series’s lush appeal, though. As in Big Little Lies, which was written by the same novelist, Liane Moriarty, and adapted by the same team, suffering has never looked so good.—C.S.
The North Water
How to Watch: Stream on AMC+.
“Why do I love brutally grim historical seafaring epics—especially to extreme latitudes—in which heavily bearded, frost-encrusted, monomaniacal captains stare balefully into the frozen wastes and insist that their ship can go just a bit further without getting trapped in the pack ice?” Antrim asked in July. Whatever the reason, The North Water scratched exactly that itch. “If you like arctic survival thrillers, go-for-broke character acting (here, on the part of Colin Farrell), and don’t mind seeing almost no women onscreen whatsoever (which comes with the genre territory, I’m afraid), please find your way to AMC+,” he continued.
Only Murders in the Building
How to Watch: Stream on Hulu.
I came to Only Murders in the Building from a place of familiar desperation: I needed a new show. And I’ll admit I was skeptical, even after my very discerning friend recommended it to me. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez co-starring in a murder-mystery show? I like all three famous figures just fine—but together? “It’s a lark!” my friend said. “And such good New York City real estate.” While I was, truthfully, drawn in by the siren song of aspirational apartments—the show is set in a fictional historical landmark named The Arconia—Only Murders quickly became my favorite new show of the season. (I found myself looking forward to Tuesdays. Imagine!) The Hulu series, co-created by Martin and Grace and Frankie’s John Hoffman, is a modern whodunit filled with meta jokes, unlikely friendships, twists, turns, and a lot of star cameos (Tina Fey, Nathan Lane, Sting). In short: It’s a lark! And now that season one is over, my Tuesdays have never felt more bereft.—Jessie Heyman
Pen15
How to Watch: Stream on Hulu.
As Emma Specter wrote of the cult-favorite show earlier this month: “Pen15 has tackled tough stuff before—Anna’s parents have been in the process of slowly and painfully divorcing onscreen since at least the show’s third episode, and Maya’s discomfort with her Japanese identity led to one of season one’s best episodes, ‘Posh’—but the second half of season two, which hit Hulu on December 3, pulls no punches when it comes to investigating the (at times) acute pain of being young and female in the world.”
Philly D.A.
How to Watch: Stream on PBS.
How real, fundamental, sustainable change happens is something that’s been on many minds in the past year, and Philly D.A. is a riveting docuseries that sheds light on one corner of that tumultuous process. Filmmakers Ted Passon, Yoni Brook, and Nicole Salazar follow Larry Krasner, a civil rights attorney who sued the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times throughout his career, from his long-shot election as Philadelphia district attorney in 2017 as he tries to overhaul the criminal-justice system from the inside, arguing for a kind of radical, systemic change that seems near impossible in the face of institutional inertia. It’s an ambitious, sprawling epic (set to an excellent score by electronic musician Dan Deacon) that has rightfully drawn comparisons to The Wire, not least because of its constellation of vivid, flawed, truly human characters. (Episodes four and five, centering on the impact of incarceration on the lives of individuals and their loved ones, are especially compelling.) Thanks to wide-ranging access to what’s referred to as the black box of criminal justice, the series clearly and movingly depicts the nuts and bolts of an institution that dictates a substantial amount of local policymaking and proves the old—and in these times oft-forgotten—adage that all politics is local.—Lisa Wong Macabasco
The Pursuit of Love
How to Watch: Stream on Amazon.
Wrote Marius in July: “Fans of Bridgerton and last year’s stylish spin on Emma will adore The Pursuit of Love, Emily Mortimer’s new adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s eponymous 1945 novel. It stars Lily James and Emily Beecham as Linda Radlett and Fanny Logan, two cousins-slash-best-friends leading rather divergent—if often intertwined—lives between the wars. Where Fanny is the sensible, stable one (steered straight by the antics of her mother, known within the family as “The Bolter”), Linda is romantic to a fault; her love affairs luring her to Oxford, the South of France, and Paris. Both Beecham and James are wonderful in their roles, as are Mortimer (as The Bolter), Dominic West (as Linda’s domineering father, Matthew), and Andrew Scott (as the Radletts’ eccentric neighbor, Lord Merlin).”
Reservation Dogs
How to Watch: Stream on FX.
In Reservation Dogs, from filmmakers Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo, four Indigenous teenagers long to flee their Oklahoma reservation for the exotic land of California—but first, they must secure the money for their getaway. “As the four teens plot their grand escape, we’re offered an intimate glimpse into their lives on ‘the rez,’ as they call it—both the good and the bad,” Christian Allaire wrote in August. “While they have, on the one hand, a robust community there, they also lack resources and opportunities. (We learn that the four friends have recently lost one of their peers, Daniel, his death vaguely attributed to ‘where they live.’) Along the way, we’re also introduced to something that’s been missing on television for a long time: Indigenous humor. The show reminds you often of how badly Native people have been treated, but it encourages you to laugh about it too.”
Sasquatch
How to Watch: Stream on Hulu.
In April, Antrim reviewed the haunting docuseries Sasquatch, centered on a gruesome triple murder in northern California’s Emerald Triangle. “By exposing the dark side of a seeming California paradise, Sasquatch achieves a searching and eerie gravity,” he wrote. “‘A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up,’ Joan Didion wrote in her journalistic memoir, 2003’s Where I Was From. It’s that air of contradiction—a quintessentially California paradise populated by horrors—that makes Sasquatch such a memorable watch.”
Scenes from a Marriage
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How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
In September, Marius wrote about Scenes from a Marriage, Hagai Levi’s affecting adaptation of the Ingmar Bergman classic. “The new series transports Bergman’s story from Sweden to Boston, with Erland Josephson’s Johan becoming Oscar Issac’s Jonathan and Liv Ullmann’s Marianne becoming Jessica Chastain’s Mira,” she noted. The show also quietly alluded to the complexities of its own creation: “Scenes From a Marriage was filmed last fall, in the throes of COVID-19, and though the action takes place before the pandemic, the series acknowledges the weirdness of its circumstances,” she continued. “The first four episodes begin with a flourish of vérité, revealing the goings-on on set—Chastain and Oscar shrugging off their coats and finding their marks; masked production assistants scurrying to and fro—before the scene work starts. As a framing device, those moments both announce the show as a work of drama—here, there be actors about to do some acting!—and further contemporize it.”
The Serpent
How to Watch: Stream on Netflix.
As Antrim wrote in March, a Tahar Rahim’s latest series “is the true-life story of Charles Sobhraj, a French serial killer who murdered hippie tourists in Southeast Asia in the ’70s. Costarring Jenna Coleman as Sobhraj’s accomplice, The Serpent, a BBC-Netflix collaboration, was a huge hit in Britain earlier this year and mixes sexy, sun-splashed 1970s escapism with the dark allure of true crime.” In her own review, also from March, Schama posed a compelling question: “Should a show about a serial killer be quite so enticing?”
Snabba Cash
How to Watch: Stream on Netflix.
“Well-paced and studded with thrillingly choreographed (and quite violent) action set pieces, Snabba Cash is, most impressively, a triumph of casting,” Antrim wrote of the series, a gender-flipped reboot of a Swedish crime-film trilogy, in April. “Evin Ahmad plays our heroine Leya, a single mom and AI entrepreneur, whose intelligence and savviness is mixed with a desperation to climb out of her humble circumstances. Her slow-burn romance with Salim, a lieutenant in the local drug trade, played by Alexander Abdallah, gives the show genuine heat. The supporting characters are all great: especially Olle Sarri as tech titan Tomas Storm and Dada Fungula Bozela as a menacing drug heavy. The production design is astonishingly good—from the costumes to the cars to the trappings of 1% tech-investor world—and a sense of mounting tragedy sweeps you to the end.”
Station Eleven
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
This month, Antrim hailed Station Eleven the best new show of the year. “It’s haunting, gorgeously made, heartfelt, an end-of-the-world vision that lifts you up as much as it gives you nightmares,” he wrote. “It may also be the year’s hardest show to recommend. Will you watch a 10-episode series in which the globe is decimated by a novel flu strain?” Still, the series, he continued, “is uncanny television. A dystopian series full of death and menace that threads in so much humanity and optimism that you want to be in its precarious world. I was gripped, cheered, and horrified.”
Succession
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
Of Succession’s celebrated third season, Antrim wrote in October: “Jesse Armstrong’s satire of wealth, media, and—increasingly this season—American politics hums with menace, with cynicism, with familial cruelty, but in its wit, its headlong pace, and the brilliance of its character building, it also reminds us that TV used to be good and single-handedly renews hope that it can be again.”
This Way Up
How to Watch: Stream on Hulu.
Of the show, starring Aisling Bea and Catastrophe star and co-creator Sharon Horgan, Schama wrote this summer: “Watching This Way Up is like eavesdropping on a happy, zany family; Bea and Hogan talk at such a rapid clip (and with such dense—to my American ear—Irish accents) that I sometimes had to rewind in order to catch the jokes. (Is this what they call craic? Bea and Horgan are first-rate actors, but they genuinely seem to be cracking each other up.) The show is packed with the kind of verbal acuity beloved of Fleabag fans but buoyed by an almost slapstick physical humor that makes it its own cheerful affair.”
Too Close
How to Watch: Stream on AMC+.
No one balances the pleasures of highbrow and lowbrow TV quite like the British. Exhibit A: Too Close, a three-part drama streaming in its entirety on AMC+. It’s two leads, Emily Watson and Denise Gough, lend considerable acting firepower to what is essentially a sexy suburban potboiler. Watson plays Emma, a forensic psychologist assigned to unlock the mental secrets of Connie (Gough), a posh mom who has inexplicably attempted to murder two children (including one of her own) by driving off a bridge. One wants to be solemn in the face of such tragedies, but Too Close is delightfully twisted. Incarcerated and subject to Emma’s forensic interviews, Gough goes full Hannibal Lecter—a twitchy, well-heeled psychopath who manipulates as much as she confesses. Why did she speed off the bridge? To find that out, Emma will have to share some of her own torments. These are all of the privileged domestic variety: failing marriages, sexual fantasies, queer-curiosity, infidelities, pill popping. Too Close is Big Little Lies meets Mindhunter, equally absurd and addicting.—Taylor Antrim
The Underground Railroad
How to Watch: Stream on Amazon.
The Underground Railroad, filmmaker Barry Jenkins’s dreamy, exquisite, and semi-exhausting 10-part adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is not a binge watch. Many episodes are over an hour in length and the series doesn’t have momentum so much as an accruing gravity, a deepening air of tragedy. We are in the antebellum South, at a cotton plantation in Georgia where Cora (Thuso Mbedu) and Caesar (Aaron Pierre) escape hellish treatment and flee along the railroad—here an actual, rickety underground train with escape hatches on the road north. Whitehead’s magic-realist conceit is richly rendered on screen, and the performances are powerful. Mbedu—a newcomer from South Africa who auditioned for the part—has a difficult task, carrying a nearly wordless burden of trauma, but she is impressive, charmingly youthful one moment, harrowed by time the next. Joel Edgerton is more expansive, and frightening, as Ridgway, a slave hunter, and his sidekick, played by Chase Dillon, is the series’s young scene-stealer. Jenkins’s storytelling, as Cora moves from state to state, may not be fast paced, but the series is suffused with unforgettable imagery—luminous landscapes, nightmarish tableaux. The Underground Railroad is not an easy watch, but an indelible one.—T.A.
The White Lotus
How to Watch: Stream on HBO Max.
A decade ago, with Enlightened, Mike White discerned that the path to transcendence is often paved with materialistic diversions. In his new series, The White Lotus, a literal boatload of drifting souls are grasping for a more grounded tether to their very glossy lives as they sail toward a luxury Hawaiian resort. Even in paradise, these guests—played by a fantastic cast including Connie Britton as a hard-driving corporate executive, Sydney Sweeney as her disaffected daughter, and Jennifer Coolidge as a teary solo traveler—keep stumbling over their own intentions, while the staff of this tiki-torch-lit retreat hustles to pick them up. The staff’s own weaknesses and foibles, in turn, underline that the road to higher ground is a rough and winding one, no matter where you're starting.—C.S.
Yellowjackets
How to Watch: Stream on Showtime.
Specter praised the drama series, which follows the members of a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness for 19 months, in her November review, writing: “While TV plane crashes are familiar fare (Grey's Anatomy and Lost spring to mind), focusing the series on the harm that young women can do to one another—in extraordinary circumstances as well as in everyday life—sets the series apart, making Yellowjackets genuinely frightening and thoroughly unmissable.”
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