The 10 best TV series of 2021

It seems fitting that, in another year dominated by the pandemic, many of the programmes in the TV poll hinge on grief and loss.

At the top of the list, Russell T. Davies’s opus on the gay community and the Aids crisis in the 1980s, It’s a Sin, hits triumphant highs with the joys of a group of young characters coming together, coming out and finding themselves, before tragedy after tragedy occurs, striking down friends, lovers and flatmates who are closer than family – all in the face of the scrutiny and paranoia which went with the misinformation and stigma that characterised the reaction to Aids in Britain during the period. Olly Alexander shines as central character Ritchie, but it’s Callum Scott Howells’s endearing Colin who is afforded the most heartbreaking journey, as he collapses and is detained in hospital under a Public Health Order.

Davies has spoken about how he drew on his own experiences of the period to write the series, as well as how the death of his husband from brain cancer is reflected in Colin’s death. He could not have known when writing the series that those experiences of grief and isolation would resonate so sharply with so many when the series was eventually aired in January 2021, a month in which the UK averaged over 1000 Covid deaths per day.

Released as a box-set on Channel 4’s on-demand platform All 4, It’s a Sin drove record streaming numbers for the service. A few months later the government announced plans to privatise the public service broadcaster, raising questions about its future…

Read the full introduction: The best TV of 2021: the year in television

John Hoffman & Steve Martin, UK

This apartment block-set murder-mystery comedy has former Disney child star Selena Gomez teaming up with a pair of comedy veterans – they make for a winning combination.

We say: One of the year’s most surprisingly satisfying combinations came in the form of veteran comedy stars Steve Martin and Martin Short teaming up with singer, actress and millennial icon Selena Gomez to solve a murder. They play neighbours in the Arconia, an affluent Manhattan block full of eccentrics which is stunned when a resident meets a grisly end. Martin and Short are reliably hilarious as a duo and they are ably accompanied by Gomez, whose droll delivery gives a perfect balance to the trio – they are true crime fans who decide their local murder would make a good podcast series. Amid the comedy there is tenderness and regret, and an exceptional, silent episode which is told from the perspective of a deaf character. (Lisa Kerrigan)

Where to see it: On Disney+

Jac Schaeffer, US

The ever-expanding Marvel Cinematic Universe takes a startling new turn with a sitcom featuring detailed retro stylings, sprawling backstories and a terrific performance from Elizabeth Olsen.

We said: “It was a risk to kick off the MCU’s presence on the Disney+ streaming platform with something so apparently niche and disorienting… Creator Jac Schaeffer draws on I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show and other rerun fodder, playing a longer game than the comparable Pleasantville (1998) with an opening salvo of episodes that are almost pastiche rather than the expected superheroic fare. Each inhabits a different decade: 1950s (Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience), 60s (Don’t Touch That Dial) and 70s (Now in Color). It’s much more than slapping live audience laughter on the soundtrack and including commercials for a Stark toaster or a Hydra watch. WandaVision deploys details of art direction, performance style, camerawork and effects to evoke the time periods (plus witty theme tunes/songs/title sequences).” (Kim Newman, S&S April)

Read the full review: WandaVision presents a bold, old-school spin on Marvel stalwarts

Where to see it: On Disney+

Hwang Dong-Hyuk, South Korea

Hwang’s visceral and addictive smash hit survival series turns playground memories into something sinister.

We said: “It’s not hard to see why this South Korean miniseries is the most watched Netflix show on the planet. While some allusions might fly over non-Korean heads, the economic anxiety and class struggle informing the narrative are not just universally relatable, but wrapped in the sort of addictive genre packaging that Westerners have embraced in the work of filmmakers such as Bong Joon Ho (Parasite, Snowpiercer) or Lee Changdong (Burning).

“Visceral survivalist thrills counterpointed by childhood memories hook viewers in; the progressively deepening characterisation holds their interest; and a couple of cunningly interwoven subplots help sidestep repetitiveness. Squid Game is a winning addition to the burgeoning dystopia subgenre, stirring horror, science fiction and social commentary into only the latest manifestation of pop culture’s favourite way of critiquing the dog-eat-dog world of late capitalism.” (Anne Billson, S&S December)

Read the full review: Squid Game is a winning addition to the burgeoning dystopia subgenre

Where to see it:  On Netflix

Mike White, US

Exploring the clashes between a Hawaiian resort’s serving staff and their wealthy clientele, this series undercuts the glamour of its holiday destination with lashings of claustrophobia.

We said: ““You have to treat these people like sensitive children. They want to be the special chosen baby child of the hotel.” General manager Armond’s brisk instructions to new recruit Lani (Jolene Purdy), as they welcome VIP guests to a week at a luxury island resort, are the first snarky shot fired across the class barrier. For The White Lotus, a smart six-part class-clash tragicomedy about trouble in a Hawaiian holiday paradise, is one long pop at privilege. Joining (b)eat the rich social satires like Parasite, Knives Out, or TV’s billionaire-baiting Succession, it sticks a subtle knife into the juicy, self-justifying rationalisations of the well-off, rather than the mega-wealthy – relatable people, “next-door-neighbour rich”, as writer-director Mike White observed slyly when interviewed.” (Kate Stables, S&S October)

Read the full review: The White Lotus satirises the empty lives of a Hawaiian resort’s wealthy clientele

Where to see it: On Sky and Virgin Media

Jesse Armstrong, US

The much-anticipated Season 3 of the Roy family feud offers more of the same dramatic power-plays between members of the media dynasty, but the writing is sharp and funny as ever.

We said: “In truth, Season 3 – at least, in the seven episodes available to review – offers more of the same. While Kendall, the closest the show gets to a beating heart, is further isolated from his family, the programme essentially rehearses the same bids for primacy. This is no bad thing when the programme makers are so confident and the writing is so fine: this new season has the feel of an exhibition match, where every zinger, every masterly side-eye is honed to perfection. Succession’s biggest asset has always been its exhilaratingly athletic dialogue, and this season is bursting with belters. In Episode 1, Logan barks at his chief operating officer, “If your hands are clean, it’s only because your whorehouse also does manicures.”” (Caspar Salmon, S&S December)

Read the full review: Succession returns for a third season with another spectacular Roy family feud

Where to see it: On Sky and Virgin Media

Jimmy McGovern, UK

A far cry from the usual sensationalism of onscreen depictions of the prison system, McGovern’s miniseries is brutally realistic.

We said: “In a TV drama landscape dominated by slick, twisty thrillers or true crime dramatisations, Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing, real-feeling three-part prison drama grabs you by the throat. A two-man journey through Britain’s broken prison system, one that’s brutal on both sides of the bars, it’s an immersive if gruelling trip into a parallel hidden society. What keeps you gripped are the two superb central performances, with a determinedly subtle Stephen Graham finding truth and a skewed honour in Eric’s impossible situation. Sean Bean, showing the piercing, well-intentioned vulnerability he found for McGovern in Broken, is astonishingly good in a role miles from his rough-but-noble-warrior persona in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Game of Thrones. To McGovern’s credit, he paints each man’s capacity to endure and change with a beautiful simplicity, despite the institutional inhumanity that surrounds them.” (Kate Stables, S&S September)

Where to see it: On BBC iPlayer

Andrew Haigh, UK

Haigh explores the turbulent relationships between men aboard a 19th-century whaling ship in this epic but intimate five-part drama.

We said: “Andrew Haigh’s five-part adaptation of Ian McGuire’s 2016 novel compels on several levels: as an intensely felt meditation on masculinity, as a thrilling technical achievement and as a ripping yarn. Extraordinarily effective as both narrative and spectacle, this work is also an elegy to the purity of the Arctic. Shooting on location – drama has never been made so far north before – has secured a startling authenticity of atmosphere. The images captured serve to remind us of both the beauty of the region and the fact that its commercial exploitation has by now reached a point of no return. Indifferent profiteering is part of what Haigh interrogates here – “The money does what it wants to,” whaling tycoon Baxter (Tom Courtenay) assures ship’s captain Brownlee (Stephen Graham), “it don’t care what we prefer.” But as the strange and thorny rivalries and entanglements of this drama reveal, greed for profit is only part of what drives humans to besmirch the innocent and desecrate the beautiful.” (Hannah McGill, S&S October)

Read the full review: The North Water takes viewers on a brutal voyage to the Arctic

Where to see it: On BBC iPlayer

Brad Ingelsby, US

Kate Winslet excels as grieving mother and weary police officer Mare Sheehan in Ingelsby’s investigation of a small-town Pennsylvania murder.

We said: “Meticulous production design and the show’s lived-in interiors hint at the community’s warmth, keeping things rust-belt-real and grounded, right down to the crocheted blankets and card games. This authenticity is well judged, never tipping the show’s tone into Fargo knowingness, or Ozark-style snobbery about redneck lives.

True, Winslet leans in hard to the Pennsylvania accent, but her commitment to the role goes beyond pronouncing ‘water’ as ‘wooder’ and embracing a scrubbed face and a perpetual parka. What makes her first cop role riveting is the finely accomplished, arthouse subtlety of her” performance. Tiny, resonant shifts in her voice, expression or gestures signal Mare’s complexity. “Canny plotting, combined with this first-class playing, makes Easttown look sharply convincing as a town splintered by murder. If the show’s stop-start love triangle and lightly comic interest in Mare’s lesbian daughter’s love-life feel more filler than killer, the show lays down a well-judged string of shocks and cliffhangers from Episode 2 onwards to hit its thriller marks.” (Kate Stables, S&S Summer)

Where to see it: On Sky and Virgin Media 

Barry Jenkins, US

Jenkins’s gorgeous-looking adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is breathtaking storytelling which curves its way through an alternative history of slavery.

We said: “A lustrous, richly detailed epic, shot in swooning colours by James Laxton and scored with a symphonic track by Nicholas Britell, Jenkins’s ten-episode adaptation of The Underground Railroad breathes evocative life into Whitehead’s magic realism. Jenkins’s work grapples with a twofold task: to not just visualise things that never were, like a gleaming skyscraper piercing the sky in 1850s South Carolina, but also things that did happen but are too terrifying to witness – such as the grisly scene in the opening episode of an enslaved man being whipped and set on fire.

The Underground Railroad gives thick, viscous life to stories that, while spinning a fantastical yarn, also serve to fill an absence in our cultural and cinematic record. Jenkins’s series is a corrective to American cultural history; a memorial to the lives of African Americans past and present; and, at its deepest level, an act of speculative autobiography and revisionist authorship by a Black American filmmaker.” (Devika Girish, S&S May)

Read the full review: The Underground Railroad curves its way through an alternative history of slavery

+ interview: Barry Jenkins is rebuilding American history with The Underground Railroad

Where to see it: On Amazon Prime Video

Russell T. Davies, UK

Davies creates an evocative, personal time capsule of a 1980s London beset by the Aids crisis – it’s the first great British series on the subject.

We said: “Despite the swagger of its protagonists, It’s a Sin expertly depicts how shame, nurtured by the homophobia prevalent in the British press and, of course, Thatcher’s government, intensified the Aids crisis. He may be, as one character labels him, “beautifully gay”, but Ritchie struggles to come out to his family. Gay men die alone in hospital beds, believing they deserve to be sick and dying.

Broadcast in the middle of another pandemic, the drama feels frighteningly prescient. Ritchie’s beaming monologue to camera, as he rejects the early warnings about HIV – “How do I know? How do know it’s not true? Because I’m not stupid!” – could have come out of the mouth of an anti-masker. And hints of homophobia recently resurfaced through a media focus on areas known for gay nightlife, with Soho in London and Seoul’s Itaewon district hinted at as breeding grounds for the spread of Covid-19.

It isn’t as provocative as Queer as Folk nor as visionary as Years and Years, but It’s a Sin is Davies’s most moving and personal drama to date. It’s a rare series that is as full of love for its flawed, perfectly imperfect characters as it is sick with anger at the society that failed them, and stands as a passionate, beautifully gay tribute to all the smalltown boys, everywhere.” (Alex Davidson, S&S March)

Read the full review: It’s a Sin is a love letter to 1980s gay culture – and hate mail to the era’s homophobic hegemony

Where to see it: On All4

Co-editor, Black Film Bulletin in Sight and Sound, UK

1. In Treatment (Season 4)
2. It’s a Sin
3. Scenes from a Marriage
4. The Chair
5. The Kominsky Method (Season 3)

• It’s a true feat of craft when an intimate exchange between two characters lingers with you days and months beyond the end credits. Penned principally by writer Chris Gabo, the moments that belong to In Treatment’s ‘Brooke’ and ‘Eladio’ (masterfully embodied by Uzo Aduba and Anthony Ramos) equate to nothing less than magic. A masterclass. If perfection exists, this is it.
• Blessed by the pen of Russell T. Davies and anchored by a stellar ensemble cast, It’s A Sin succeeds in being profoundly joyful and heartachingly tragic all at once, making it a haunting homage to queer culture, life, and death amidst the 80s HIV/AIDS epidemic. It’s one of the finest and bravest British works to ever grace the screen.
• Oscar Isaac. Jessica Chastain. Again: Oscar Isaac. Need I say more?
• In a televisual era marked by #MeToo and the culture’s lingering struggles to reckon with various ‘intersections’ of the ‘identity politics’ crossroads, The Chair delivered something smart, contemplative, complex and purposeful. Finally.
• In the terrain of acerbic wit peaking, the pairing of screen titans Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin was destined to amount to a monumental TV event. The Kominsky Method did not disappoint. May it rest well in TV heaven.

Head curator, BFI National Archive, UK

1. Ethos
2. It’s a Sin
3. Squid Game
4. The Underground Railroad
5. When the Dust Settles

Turkish drama Ethos (Bir Başkadır) crept onto Netflix at the end of 2020, but I have only recently discovered it and it is, without doubt, my series of the year. It’s hard to describe its emotional power and richness in a sentence, but it’s somewhere on an unexpected trajectory from Nuri Bilge Ceylan to Pedro Almodóvar!

Honourable mentions for the returns of Call My Agent (Fanny Herrero) and Shtisel (Ori Elon; Yehonatan Indursky).

TV critic and broadcaster (co-host of Must Watch podcast on BBC Sounds), UK

1. It’s a Sin
2. Time
3. Mare of Easttown
4. RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (Series 2)
5. We Are Lady Parts

• What else? Powerful, historical, remarkable television. It created a discourse on current HIV prevention and government inaction in the 1980s. One of the most important television programmes this decade.
• Jimmy McGovern dramas are unmissable generally, but his take on incarceration and criminal justice was absolutely blistering and thought-provoking. Starring Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, it was also a unique and powerful thriller.
• Starring Kate Winslet, Mare of Easttown captured the audience’s desire for authentic, realistically depicted crime dramas on television. I wonder how many other shows will follow.
• The second season of the UK version of the Drag Race franchise was British entertainment television at its best. As well as lifting the country’s spirits in the middle of a third lockdown, it also educated the public on many important issues, from being non-binary to the impact of homophobia.
• A hilarious, original idea by Nida Manzoor. At a time when the future and distinctiveness of Channel 4 is being debated, this is a perfect example of what Channel 4 can and should do.

Associate editor, Sight and Sound, UK

1. It’s a Sin
2. Uprising
3. The North Water
4. Squid Game
5. Time

Critic and researcher, UK

1. The Underground Railroad
2. It’s a Sin
3. WandaVision
4. Sex Education (Season 3)
5. The Serpent

Plenty still to catch up on and with the new series of Succession ongoing, that’s sure to join the list as well.

Cinema curator, Barbican, UK

1. It’s a Sin
2. Alma’s Not Normal
3. Mare of Easttown
4. WandaVision
5. Pose (Season 3)

• It’s a Sin is Russell T. Davies’s finest series to date. Too many incredible moments to list – I’ve seldom loved a fictional man as much as Callum Scott Howells’s Colin. But the final episode was particularly electric, featuring two brilliantly acted monologues from Ruth Sheen (“What the hell were you looking at?”) and Lydia West (“All of this is your fault”) alongside Keeley Hawes’s best ever performance.
• Alma’s Not Normal is British tragicomedy at its best and announced a major new comedy talent in Sophie Willan, who finds riotous comedy in even the sitcom’s bleakest moments. Nothing made me laugh harder in 2021.
• Kate Winslet excelled in Mare of Easttown (Brad Ingelsby), and shared amazing chemistry with Jean Smart as her mother, while Cailee Spaeny gave a heart-breaking performance as a single teenage mother betrayed by almost everyone around her. And while Marvel movies are not really my thing, WandaVision (Jac Schaeffer) is a true surprise, a wickedly clever plunge into the complexities of grief.
• Finally, one of the saddest highlights for me was saying goodbye to the characters of Ryan Murphy’s Pose, a truly groundbreaking show which featured the best two musical TV moments of 2021 – Lil Papi’s tear-jerking, unashamedly cheesy rendition of ‘I Swear’ and the fabulous, rain-soaked final dance of Pray Tell and Blanca to Diana Ross’s ‘Ain’t Know Mountain High Enough’. I miss them all already.

Film and TV editor, The Skinny, UK

1. Invincible
2. Only Murders in the Building
3. The Other Two (Season 2)
4. Guilt (Series 2)
5. The White Lotus

Forget the endless products that come down the Marvel and DC content chutes. None of those films and shows can hold a candle to the bouncy but brutal animation Invincible (Robert Kirkman), which managed to deliver all the thrills of the best superhero movies while simultaneously subverting everything they stand for. Comedy Only Murders in the Building (Steve Martin, John Hoffman) pulled a similar trick with the whodunit formula, sending up the true-crime podcast craze while providing all the genre’s ghoulish pleasures – a convoluted mystery, multiple red herrings, wild twists.

The Other Two (Chris Kelly, Sarah Schneider) is included because it’s the funniest show on television right now, while also being a pin-sharp satire on internet culture and modern celebrity. Guilt S2 (Neil Forsyth) and The White Lotus (Mike White), meanwhile, make my list simply for the quality of their writing, their crisp performances and their onyx black senses of humour.

TV programmer, UK

1. Ted Lasso (Season 2)
2. Endeavour (Series 8)
3. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Season 8)
4. Pennyworth (Season 2)
5. It’s a Sin

Academic, UK

1. Brand New Cherry Flavour
2. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Season 2)
3. Midnight Mass
4. The Underground Railroad
5. We Are Lady Parts

As a university lecturer I must also mention The Chair (Amanda Peet, Annie Julia Wyman), which conveyed extremely well the frustrations and absurdities of modern academia.

Writer and curator, UK

1. Uprising
2. Drama Out of a Crisis: A Celebration of Play for Today
3. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Season 2)
4. Stath Lets Flats (Series 3)
5. Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan

Film critic and academic, UK

1. We Are Lady Parts
2. Sex Education (Season 3)
3. RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (Series 2)
4. The Crown (Season 4)
5. The Chair

In another year fraught with lockdowns, political turmoil, and bad news, TV screens have offered warmth, familiarity and escapism. While serious and sometimes upsetting stories in The Crown S4 (Peter Morgan) defied my need for upbeat narratives, its sumptuous design and cosy nostalgia for a time made simpler in retrospect saw a welcome return from the royal melodrama. The first season of The Chair (Amanda Peet, Annie Julia Wyman) gave us Sandra Oh on top form while attempting to address complex and challenging arguments about identity and power in academia. Nida Manzoor’s riotous and bold We Are Lady Parts was a by turns moving and laugh-out-loud breath of sitcom fresh air that overturned the ‘feminist killjoy’ stereotype. And in two very different ways, Sex Education S3 (Laurie Nunn) and Drag Race UK S2 provided welcome space for sensitive and much-needed mainstream representation of LGBTQ+ people that made me cry with laughter, sadness and sheer joy at seeing shows that respect queer and trans lives. Here’s to more of the same in 2022.

Writer and critic, UK

1. The North Water
2. It’s a Sin
3. The Serpent
4. The Underground Railroad
5. Hemingway

The North Water (Andrew Haigh) was by far the best series I saw this year but I have to own a connection. It was produced by Kate Ogborn, my wife. If it were not so, I believe I would still think the same.

Film critic, UK

1. It’s a Sin
2. Mare of Easttown
3. This Way Up (Series 2)
4. Ted Lasso (Season 2)
5. WandaVision

Writer and film historian, UK

1. The Chair
2. It’s a Sin
3. Mare of Easttown
4. The North Water
5. Time

Curator, UK

1. The Underground Railroad
2. It’s a Sin
3. Time
4. Uprising
5. Only Murders in the Building

Film critic, UK

1. The Underground Railroad
2. Succession (Season 3)
3. We Are Lady Parts
4. Invincible
5. The Other Two (Season 2)

Another fantastic year for the seemingly never ending ‘golden age of television’, but nothing came close to Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad. An adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Jenkins’s faultless masterpiece tested the limits of the form and created something beautiful, important and wholly unique. The show was under-promoted, under-seen and under-recognised by awards bodies but hopefully, like some of the best of television, will be continued to be discovered for many years to come.

Web editor at Harper’s Magazine and freelance critic, US

1. The Good Lord Bird
2. El Cid (Season 2)
3. American Crime Story: Impeachment
4. Only Murders in the Building

Critic and writer, UK

1. It’s a Sin
2. Mare of Easttown
3. Brand New Cherry Flavour
4. Alma’s Not Normal
5. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Season 2)

• Russell T. Davies celebrates queer joy and friendship in a 1980s set drama that is at turns delightful and devastating as it follows a tight-knit group of friends’ lives during the AIDS epidemic. La!
• Brad Ingelsby’s compelling character portrait wrapped up in a crime show boasts an excellent cast featuring unforgettable performances from Kate Winslet, Jean Smart, Julianne Nicholson and Evan Peters. 
• Another nightmarish horror series from Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion, Brand New Cherry Flavor tastes like Lynch meets Araki with a dash of Cronenberg. The excellent Rosa Salazar stars as a filmmaker who clashes with a sleazy Hollywood producer, and then strikes a pact with Catherine Keener’s tantalising witch to burn him with fire.
• Written by and starring Sophie Willan – who mines her own personal experience growing up in foster care and as an adult living under Tory austerity – Alma’s Not Normal is a hilarious, multifaceted and empathetic comedy grounded in reality.
• With I Think You Should Leave, Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin have created a comedy sketch show for our times that riotously navigates social anxiety, obnoxiousness and awkwardness in the digital age with ridiculous gags that gleefully blur the lines between outrageously funny and desperately sad.

Lead film critic at the i, UK

1. Four Hours at the Capitol
2. It’s a Sin
3. Mare of Easttown
4. The Underground Railroad
5. The North Water

TV programmer, BFI Southbank, UK

1. Help
2. Time
3. The North Water
4. Only Murders in the Building
5. Guilt (Series 2)

With Help, Jack Thorne once again demonstrates his versatility and brilliance as one of the UK’s greatest writers working in TV today and he is in the same company as Jimmy McGovern for his powerful drama, Time. Both productions demonstrate a strong creative renewal in UK drama. Andrew Haigh’s The North Water was superbly ambitious and cinematic, while at the other end of the spectrum Only Murders in The Building (Steve Martin, John Hoffman) and Guilt (Neil Forsyth) both prove that good TV does not have to be about scale and budget but has always been about character and sharp dialogue.

Critic/journalist, UK/India

1. Mare of Easttown
2. Squid Game
3. Tabbar
4. Line of Duty (Series 6)
5. The Investigation

Journalist/programmer/video essayist, UK

1. Mare of Easttown
2. Ghosts (Series 3)
3. Ted Lasso (Season 2)
4. Only Murders in the Building
5. The Underground Railroad

Film critic (Sight and Sound, Total Film), UK

1. Mare of Easttown
2. The White Lotus
3. The Investigation
4. Time
5. Hemingway

Managing editor, Sight and Sound, UK

1. The North Water
2. The Terror
3. The Underground Railroad
4. Can’t Get You Out of My Head
5. The Investigation

Digital production editor, bfi.org.uk, UK

1. Mare of Easttown
2. It’s a Sin
3. Succession (Season 3)
4. Squid Game
5. Match of the Day

Film critic, UK

1. The White Lotus
2. WandaVision
3. Succession (Season 3)
4. The North Water
5. Can’t Get You Out of My Head

Programmer, The Badlands Collective, UK

1. Midnight Mass
2. Evil (Season 2)
3. The White Lotus
4. I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson (Season 2)
5. WandaVision

Writer and producer, UK

1. It’s a Sin
2. Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution
3. The Underground Railroad
4. The White Lotus
5. Succession (Season 3)

Editor-at-large, RogerEbert.com; staff writer, New York Magazine, US

1. The Underground Railroad
2. Succession (Season 3)
3. Squid Game
4. We Are the Brooklyn Saints 
5. Reservation Dogs