Brooke Taylor - a seemingly composed and wise analyst whose personal life (including a precipitous fall off the wagon) was every bit as messy as her patients’ - it had a brilliant actor who could step into the big shoes left behind by original In Treatment star Gabriel Byrne. And in Orange Is the New Black alum Uzo Aduba as Dr. The brilliant-but-forgotten late-2000s psychiatry drama had a format - each episode is one therapy session, usually with only two people in the room - that made this revival a relatively safe and easy thing to produce during the early days of the pandemic. On the whole, Loki was an imaginative, unpredictable treat. Yes, it can be frustrating when the Disney+ shows start to feel like long teasers for upcoming MCU films, but it helps when those moments feature actors as good as Jonathan Majors doing the teasing. This spinoff about Thor’s impish brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) was simultaneously a buddy comedy (with Owen Wilson at his most relaxed and charming), an unlikely romance where Loki fell in love with a female version of himself (Sophia Di Martino), a time-bending adventure with a lot of Doctor Who DNA, and a character study that effectively sorted through the contradictions of someone who’s been both a villain and a hero throughout his MCU run. Though not all of their offerings have worked ( The Falcon and the Winter Soldier waves hello), the Marvel Studios team so far has a much higher small-screen batting average than their Marvel TV production predecessors did with shows like Iron Fist and Inhumans. There’s been a lot of great work on the small screen this year. We’ve got tragedies that offer surprising moments of comedy, plus comedies that unexpectedly demand to be taken seriously social satires produced in different countries that could not possibly resemble each other less and even a pair of Avengers spinoffs that have nothing in common other than some shared Marvel backstory. The thing about the streamers is that there are so many of them, and they’re producing so much varied content, that this list contains multitudes. There’s still good work being done in traditional TV - The Wonder Years is in the midst of a fine reboot on ABC, for instance, while Starz’s Blindspotting was one of several cable shows from our midyear best-of list that just barely missed the cut for this final one - but it may be time to get used to streaming hegemony in rankings like this. Of the 20 wonderful shows we picked for our list of the year’s best television, 15 of them debuted exclusively on a streamer, and the other five came from places like HBO and FX, where the line between the linear channels and, respectively, HBO Max and FX on Hulu has become so blurry as to seem nonexistent. The entire TV business has been focused on streaming for a while now, but 2021 felt like the year the industry began treating its streaming platforms as the alpha and omega, with traditional broadcast and cable networks viewed as content suppliers for series’ eventual streaming homes, at best.
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