20. Sex Education – Initially about a high school boy who offers sex advice to his classmates, the second season mostly dispenses with this hook. Similar to how I felt the first go-around, I find that I like this show in spite of itself, or, rather, in spite of its super annoyingly written main character. He’s definitely the weakest, most unlikeable link, as he’s forced to endure and act out every conceivable teenage rom-com cliché, while the wonderful supporting characters around him get to be the real reason to keep watching.

19. Dispatches from Elsewhere – Created and staring Jason Segel and based upon an apparently real-life thing, this whimsical show, which turns super meta in the end, is about an elaborate quasi-treasure/scavenger hunt that sees its participants running all over Philadelphia finding clues and solving puzzles, all the while trying to figure out if what they’re experiencing is real or not.

18. Industry – I actually grew to dislike the central characters (first-years at a prestigious London-based financial institution) more and more as the season went along, to the point where I truly wanted them all to burn-out and fail, but, paradoxically, I still quite liked the show itself, largely thanks to its fast-paced narrative (which sometimes left me confused about the passage of time), stylish aesthetic, and, most of all, great music.

17. Perry Mason – This one took me a few episodes to get into, both because its start was so relentlessly grim (the first episode shows us a dead baby with its eyes stitched shut) and because I found it difficult to follow the convoluted plot. I stuck with it for the incredible 1930s production design and the central performance by the always great Matthew Rhys, and eventually I came to appreciate what it was doing. That being said, I still don’t really understand what Tatiana Maslany’s Sister Alice McKeegan’s character, and the church to which she belonged and preached for, was all about, or what purpose their inclusion ultimately served.

16. Never Have I Ever – Mindy Kaling’s coming-of-age series about an Indian-American girl navigating the semi-standard high school experience is funny and clever, and mercilessly free of a lot of the irritating tropes upon which similar shows repeatedly rely.

15. The Boys – With the over-saturation of boring super-hero movies, with their generic plots and pre-determined outcomes (the question is never will a caped/spandex-clad so-and-so succeed in saving the day, but how and when), I find The Boys TV show a breath of much-needed fresh, obscene, gore-punctuated air.

14. & 13. World’s Toughest Race and Alone – Though I despise camping (because of the bugs and lack of plumbing and being woken up at the crack of dawn), I love endurance shows where people pit themselves against nature and push the boundaries of their physical and mental tolerance.

The Mark Burnett-produced World’s Toughest Race is a revival of his Eco-Challenge show that pre-dated Survivor. This round, which takes place in Fiji, sees 66 teams competing to complete a 671+-kms course that involves everything from cycling to paddle boarding, to out-rigger canoeing, to swimming.

Alone is pretty much the exact opposite of an Eco-Challenge, in that it plunks a bunch of outdoorspeople down by themselves in the middle of nowhere and then waits to see which one of them lasts the longest. In this latest installment, season seven, the goal was to survive for 100 days in the Great Slave Lake region of the Northwest Territories during winter.

12. & 11. The Good Fight and Evil – I’m grouping these two shows together because they’re both from the unique minds of Robert and Michelle King (who also created The Good Wife and Braindead).

The fourth season of The Good Fight was cut short because of the pandemic, but what they managed to shoot before the shut-down is great, weird, unconventional TV about such topics as a secret Get-Out-of-Trouble system for the uber-rich and powerful, and Jeffrey Epstein’s… well, I don’t want to ruin it, except to say that, had I a million guesses, I never would have predicted the season’s final image.

Evil, in its first season (I’m including it here because its final episode aired in early 2020), took a bit of time to find its rhythm, but once it did, this show about investigators for the Catholic Church – a priest-in-training, a tech expert, and a skeptical clinical psychologist who look into cases of the purportedly supernatural to figure out if they’re legit or not – just got increasingly better and creepier and off-the-wall bonkers.

10. Curb Your Enthusiasm – I’m not normally a fan of cringe humour, as it usually gives me unbearable second-hand embarrassment (for example, just thinking about The Office episode “Scott’s Tots” makes me shudder), but when it’s Larry David who’s provoking such situations I can handle it just fine. Maybe it’s because David doesn’t feel any embarrassment himself, or maybe it’s simply because the scenarios are just so ridiculously hilarious. Either way, season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm – where, amongst other things, Larry opened a coffee shop for spite, Jeff was mistaken for Harvey Weinstein, and Leon… well, Leon just did his Leon thing – was a total delight.

9. The Plot Against America – Even though David Simon’s latest potent, poignant, and powerful endeavour (based upon the titular Phillip Roth novel) is, technically, fictional, and is set in the beautifully re–created early 40s – in an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh becomes president by promising not to involve the US in WWII, thus setting off a homegrown wave of anti-Semitism – it’s so grounded in a tragic truth that it feels mere inches away from being a full-blown reality, thus making it, for me, right up there with Chernobyl as one of the most difficult shows I’ve ever watched. In particular, the devastating, single-shot, phone call scene (if you’ve seen the show, you know what I’m referring to) has stuck with me more than anything else I watched in 2020.

8. The Outsider – This dark (literally and figuratively), slow-burn adaptation of the Stephen King novel about some kind of mythic entity that feeds off tragedy and subsumes its victims was one of the most entrancing shows I watched all year. The low-key cast is wonderful, as is crime writer extraordinaire Richard Price’s scripting (he wrote the majority of the teleplays).

7. Homeland – This series seems to have fallen out of critical favour over the years, but it’s always remained one of my absolute favourites, largely due to Mandy Patinkin’s Saul Berenson and Claire Danes’s Carrie Mathison, the latter being a CIA analyst whose bipolar disorder leads her to lay waste to her personal and professional life as she tries to save the world from all manner of terrorist threats. What I particularly appreciate is how relentless its narratives are, particularly how they follow Carrie to her logical extremes. This eighth and final season, largely set in Afghanistan, was a worthy uncompromising end to a great show.

6. Small Axe – There’s an ongoing debate about what category to place Steve McQueen’s historical anthology series about West Indian immigrants trying to navigate decidedly unfriendly (to say the least) London institutions. Is it a TV show with five thematically connected episodes? Or, is it a bunch of individual feature films, chronicling such stories as a one-night reggae party (Lovers Rock), the trial of the Mangrove Nine (Mangrove), and a Black police officer’s attempt to reform the London Metropolitan Police from the inside (Red, White and Blue)? What nobody is arguing about is the superb quality and unfortunate relevance of each one of these episodes/films/shows.

5. Unorthodox – The Queen’s Gambit was the Netflix show about a girl who strives to overcome her restrictive lot in life that got all the notice in 2020, but, for me, Unorthodox, which is about an Hasidic Jewish woman who decides to flee from her stifling orthodox community to Berlin, was the one that really deserved all the praise. To be clear, I did enjoy The Queen’s Gambit, but the difference between my emotional connection to Anya Taylor-Joy’s enigmatic Beth Harmon and Shira Haas’ resplendent Este Shapiro was night and day.

4. The Mandalorian – This show, or, more specifically, Jon Favreau, just gets me (and, apparently, millions of other Star Wars fans, too). The Mandalorian stripped the franchise down and took it back to where it all started, to what made Star Wars the phenomenon that it is, this being stories about compelling characters who go on simple, yet interesting, adventures in a lived-in galaxy far, far away. In addition to giving us all the Baby Yoda-time we could ask for – Baby Yoda eating fish eggs (and, yes, controversially threatening to kill off an entire species in the process), Baby Yoda eating blue space cookies, and, best of all, Baby Yoda reacting to the sound of his real name – it also finally made Boba Fett the super cool bad-ass his whole look suggested he always was but the movies had never afforded him opportunity to demonstrate.

3. What We Do In the Shadows – This show would have found a spot in my top ten solely because of the episode where Matt Berry’s vampire character Laszlo goes into hiding and adopts the disguise of regular human bartender Jackie Daytona. That this was only a smidgen of the hilarity on display in the show’s sophomore season (Colin Robinson’s promotion, Laszlo and Nadja’s musical act, the phishing attempt/electronic curse) easily makes it one of the absolute best things on TV in 2020.

2. Better Call Saul – I more endured and appreciated Breaking Bad than I actually enjoyed watching it, but I love every single immaculately conceived, magnificently scripted and acted, sometimes tragic, but always perfect moment in Better Call Saul. I remain amazed this prequel show is as good as it is. To rework a quote from Manhunter’s Dr. Lecktor, Better Call Saul inherited the lofty mantel of its predecessor and somehow managed to surpass its achievements.

1. How To with John Wilson (HBO – It wasn’t long into the first episode of this first-person docu-series – which sees Wilson go from a WrestleMania tailgate party to visiting a guy who claims to catch sex predators in his spare time to spring break in Cancun – that I knew it was going to be my favourite show of the year. Other things documented by this sublimely beautiful series include a scaffolding convention, an unruly banquet for referees, Kyle MacLachlan repeatedly swiping his metro card, and an anti-circumcision activist who… no, I really can’t spoil that last one.