I realized recently that, at this point in my life, I’m excited for just about one thing per year on average. In 2020, it was The Devil All the Time; in 2021 it was Licorice Pizza; 2022 was Batman and Nope; 2023 was Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3; and 2024 was all about Longlegs. Well, so far, 2025 looks to be the year of The Last of Us season 2.
Two teasers have dropped in recent months, and I’m going to do something I never do and actually embed one of them here for your viewing pleasure:
Just look at it and soak in the hype.
I’m someone who considers the modern era to be a Golden Age of TV. In fact, I’d go a step further: the 2000s and 2010s completely transformed the way I look at TV (the 2010s especially). I was never into game shows or soaps, barely into sitcoms, fucking despise corporate news, and only enjoy one or two cooking shows. It wasn’t until TV became a longform alternative to cinema that I really took notice. Somebody like Christopher Nolan would say that TV at its best can’t compare to the grandeur and gravitas of the “theater-going experience,” but the truth is that theaters suck. I can count the number of memorably enjoyable theater experiences I’ve had in my life on one hand. But I digress.
The point of this post is to say that when I think about my favorite shows, almost all of them were released in the past 15-20 years. Whenever I see someone compile a Top 50 or Top 100 Shows of All-time, I know I won’t be able to contribute one of my own because 1) I haven’t seen that many, and 2) I’ve always struggled with assessing shows holistically. I find it too difficult to reconcile all the good seasons with the bad ones (assuming a show is uneven, which most are) and come to a definitive, all-encompassing grade or score or ranking. So, instead, I’ve decided to compile a list of my favorite Seasons of Television.
I like to look at it that way: these aren’t just seasons of separate shows; these are seasons of television as a whole. I associate them as much with each other as I do with their own respective canons. (For instance, I’ll always associate Leftovers season 3 with Twin Peaks: The Return because they both aired in 2017.)
I assume (not just hope) that this list will change after April, and that’s a good feeling: to have complete confidence that some piece of media is going to deliver based on the material and people involved. The only downside if that happens is that the one thing I have to look forward to this year will have come and gone before 2025’s halfway mark.
Anyway, here’s the Last of Us teaser again:
1. Mindhunter Season 2 (2019)
What’s funny is there’s nothing all that special about this season in the grand scheme of Mindhunter. Objectively speaking, it’s a logical and seamless continuation of season one’s tone, style, themes, and subject matter. Its most captivating qualities are largely incidental: the Atlanta child murders, the late 70s/early 80s soundtrack, Charles Manson, David Berkowitz, et al. In terms of execution, I can’t honestly say it does anything ‘better’ than the first season (though, the absence of Debbie is a definite plus). The only thing I can really say is that if season one was about success then this season is about failure, and the murky, complicated emotions that arise from that create a more palpably menacing, hopeless atmosphere.
2. Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
My favorite work by my favorite filmmaker. That’s a big endorsement, sure, but this is a lot like Mindhunter season 2 insofar as it feels sort of incidental for Lynch because this just happened to be where he was at at this point in his career (which just happened to be at the end of said career...). It’s too big and unwieldy to unpack in this little blurb, so I’ll focus on what I feel is the show’s most noteworthy strength: mystery. Lynch’s entire body of work - music and painting included - always seemed to center around the idea of “creating mystery.” His distinct brand of humor and terror and weirdness was always in service of that. To that end, The Return is his most effectively maddening puzzle box.
3. Arrested Development Season 2 (2004)
I flipped a coin to decide between the first two seasons. Together, they feel like one long season - so much so that, no matter how many times I revisit them, I often forget where one ends and the other begins. Other sitcoms have made me laugh harder or louder, but none have made me laugh nonstop for this long. In terms of laughs-per-minute, it’s the funniest sitcom I’ve ever seen (seasons 1 & 2 specifically). Perhaps even more impressive than that, though, are the tender moments sprinkled throughout which are drenched in irony and undercut by call-backs, puns, and punchlines, yet somehow still manage to work on a sincere, unironic level.
4. Norm Macdonald Live Season 1 (2013)
For all their political incorrectness and bloviating about free speech, “edgy” comedy podcasts of the past 10 years haven’t managed to feel remotely as candid (or as funny) as this. In a world full of comics who “don’t give a fuck,” Norm truly didn’t give a fuck, and his improv skills were, in my opinion, not only underrated throughout his career, but wholly unmatched. All three seasons are brilliant, but the first one is the funniest because Norm wasn’t yet trying to take the show seriously on any level whatsoever.
5. True Detective Season 1 (2014)
I’ll keep waiting around for another season that’s as good as this one, but the truth is that it was lightning in a bottle. Just like The Dark Side of the Moon or the original Alien, this is the kind of peak that never comes again, to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson. The desperate and obvious - and, at times, haphazard - attempts to recreate its magic in the later seasons only drew more attention to Nic Pizzolatto’s shortcomings, and the various rip-offs in the years following only solidified how inimitable it was.
6. The Last of Us Season 1 (2023)
“What if The Walking Dead was actually good?” I’m generally not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction because it’s rarely done well. Most movies/shows/books in this genre are either too depressing, too pretentious, too hokey, or just plain boring. The Last of Us, on the other hand, somehow finds the sweet spot - it’s everything you’d expect in terms of content and tone, except vastly more engrossing and emotional (and scary). And the performances are some of the best I’ve ever seen.
7. The Leftovers Season 3 (2017)
This was my least favorite season up until recently when I binged the entire series for the first time since it originally aired, and I discovered that that was the proper way to experience it. Watching this season in quick succession makes it feel like an 8-hour finale rather than eight separate episodes which, on their own, can seem somewhat underwhelming compared to previous seasons. That’s because this one is the most subdued of the three; the melodrama is dialed back considerably and the big musical crescendos are fewer and farther between. The final episode, especially, is probably the subtlest Lindelof has ever been. Now it’s my favorite season for that very reason.
8. Chernobyl (2019)
Radiation terrifies me. Nuclear weapons terrify me. Oppenheimer tapped into the latter fear; Chernobyl tapped into the former. Together they make for a pretty solid “Double Feature” (even though they’re technically different mediums). Not just because of the subject matter, but because of the tone as well. The palpable sense of doom that permeates every second of this miniseries is something you can’t manufacture; as good a fiction writer as Craig Mazin obviously is, this show’s most riveting quality is the nonfiction element.
9. Watchmen (2019)
I could write a book on this one, and not entirely for good reasons. There’d be a whole chapter titled ‘How Not To Do A Finale.’ And it’s funny because Lindelof’s reputation for crafting unsatisfactory finales had eluded me up until this point. I enjoy the LOST finale, and Leftovers’ ending is perfect, so the exhilarating brilliance of the first 90 percent of Watchmen served as nothing more than confirmation bias that Lindelof was an underappreciated genius with an unblemished track record... and then he burned me. This show could’ve been my #1 of all-time - it was that good - but it jilted me at the altar, so instead it lands at #9, which is more than it deserves.
10. The Night Of (2016)
This miniseries aired right around the time I was coming to the realization that I’m more than just a passing Zaillian fan; I’m a card-carrying Zaillian-head. And this series marks the biggest, boldest presentation of his style to date. Part courtroom drama, part police procedural, part psychological thriller, all wrapped in a thick atmosphere. And don’t let the opening credit sequence fool you, it’s not a True Detective wannabe (though if it were repackaged as TD season 3 I wouldn’t object). Also, it introduced me to the brilliance of Bill Camp.
