TV has become the medium of our age – partly due to changes in technology, partly due to the absolute glut of TV shows that are made nowadays. Amid a sea of reboots, spinoffs, and streaming phenomena, it can be tough to separate the wheat from the chaff, so The Postrider asked three of its most obsessive TV watchers for three of their must watches of the year, and the results were a pretty diverse array of prestige fair, sci-fi spectacle, and slapstick comedy. We hope you find something below that you like. Happy watching!

Andor

Though a fan of the original series, I have never considered myself a Star Wars person. Despite trying to get into other parts of the universe like Clone Wars and the new films, the only part that got me wholeheartedly was Rogue One. When I heard Andor was a prequel to the Gareth Edwards film, I was intrigued enough to give it a shot. It turns out this is what I have always wanted from a Star Wars story: to see the creation of a real rebellion.

At its core is the slow burn shift of Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) from a rogue into a genuine rebellion fighter. Yet where other series might dabble with building him up for an episode and then lean on his backstory or his love interest to spark him into action, Andor takes its time. The title character slowly builds his reasons to fight, dries it with the growing oppression of the empire, and sparks it with the crackdown on everything he holds dear.

If Andor was just a story about Cassian it would be good enough. What makes it great is its ability to weave than narrative into a nuanced insight into the nascent rebellion network through the eyes of Luthen Rael (Stellan Skarsgård) and its bickering members, a picture of a blue-collar community on the edge of the galaxy chafing under the fresh imperial boot, and making a compelling narrative of the imperial officials trying to catch them all.

Never did I think I would watch a show actually willing to show the paranoid tension of a secretive rebellion and make me care about the interoffice politics of the imperial intelligence office. Andor’s many points of focus weave and support one another so well; it’s the closest I have ever seen a fantasy series to evoking The Wire. – Chris Choban

Atlanta (season 4)

Donald Glover’s surreal, inventive Atlanta emerged from a four year hiatus with two full seasons in 2022. Season 3, which split its time between Earn (Glover), Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), and Van’s (Zazie Beetz) journey through Europe and short, satirical one-offs, was a disappointment that indulged in experimentation and provocation over quality storytelling. But season 4 was a welcome return to form in which Glover re-embraced the impish humor and targeted pathos of the first two seasons and proved that the multi-hyphenate, who can sometimes come off as standoffish and misanthropic, could still turn out something with wit and heart. It’s hard to make a good show about someone who’s achieved their goals, but Glover pulls it off by embracing the weirdness that has always been Atlanta’s calling card. A time warping shopping mall, a secret network of D’Angelo’s, and a totalitarian Tyler Perry stand-in all pop up this season, providing both laughs and food for thought – for the first time in a full season, this show felt smart in a fun way instead of an annoying way. It also provided some genuinely moving moments, primarily in “Snipe Hunt,” which sees Glover deliver one of the most touching speeches in recent television history and, if necessary, acts as a satisfying denouement for one of the 2010s’ defining shows. – Michael Lovito

Better Call Saul

A man walks into a lawyer’s office. Over the course of the next 18 months, they’ll have ruined each other’s lives. Of course, this is the “bad joke” way to describe the oeuvre of New Mexican crime created by Vince Gilligan. Back in 2009, we were introduced to a character named Saul Goodman, played with slimy, snarky charm by Mr. Bob Odenkirk. He had the appearance of a carnival barker/ambulance chasing attorney, which belied his intense knowledge of the law and how to break it effectively (not to mention his underground network of criminal contacts). These inherent contradictions made him a character worthy of his own novel, rather than merely a bit supporter to Walter White, so its fortunate that he received his own show, which in many ways is superior to its pulpy forebear.

Before Saul was Saul, he was Jimmy McGill. Over the course of five seasons, we watched as he could not help himself and engaged in increasingly petty and dangerous criminal behavior. We knew where this was all heading, and we were frequently teased with the allure of a post-Breaking Bad storyline. Going into this sixth season, we wanted to see the final destruction of Jimmy, and how he morphed fully into Saul. What the writers, led by Peter Gould, delivered this season were some of the most tragic and dark episodes of television this franchise has produced.

Better Call Saul was always a more leisurely paced show then Breaking Bad. Where the great “Ozymandias” was a tour-de-force episode of television that acted as that show’s climax, in Better Call Saul’s similar climax spread out over three episodes. Similarly, the last four episodes act as an epilogue, comparable to the disquieting “Felina”. When Breaking Bad went off the air in 2013, this writer was one of the few who felt the show had missed a beat in its final hour. In the ensuing decade, between El Camino and Better Call Saul, you can’t help but feel the show’s whole world has been fully rounded to an extent that is rarely seen on television. It’s hard to say goodbye to Albuquerque, but it’s a little easier knowing none of our friends are there anymore. – Louis Ryan

The Dropout

Having seemingly used up the serial killer kind of true crime, streaming services have resorted to dramatizing the ever expanding foibles of tech-adjacent white collar crooks. WeCrashed, Super Pumped, and the dueling Fyre Festival documentaries all tell competent enough stories about some of the decade’s greatest swindles and busts, but none of them dive as deep as The Dropout, which transcends the thoroughly covered rise-and-fall story of Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos and takes aim at the various pathologies we’ve allowed ourselves to indulge in during the “tech era.” Portrayed by an Emmy-winning Amanda Seyfried, the Holmes of The Dropout is more than just a scheming hack – she’s a child of the “think different” movement, a striver convinced she can only make a difference by making the impossible possible, and very good at convincing naive boomers who wish they had her ambition that she’s the real deal. Disconcertingly sterile and streamlined, The Dropout feels like a Mac ad from hell, playing off of the viewers’ nostalgia for the music and tech trends of the last 20 years (Wolf Parade! Angry Birds!) all while exploring the empty promises inherent in the bright, chrome future we all imagined for ourselves. It is, perhaps, one of the most definitive works about the millennial experience ever made. – ML

Man vs. Bee

In recent years, the discussion of what makes a movie different from a tv show has become effectively blurred. It‘s all unfortunately melded together to form one giant mass called ‘content.’ Netflix has become the forerunner, if not the champion, of creating streaming content on par with the likes of pay channels like HBO or the big Hollywood studios, partnering with many of the great creatives in show business like Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach to produce content for them. One partnership that will hopefully bear fruit in the years to come is with British comedian Rowan Atkinson, who starred in Man vs. Bee.

Atkinson is no stranger to slapstick shenanigans, having starred as the titular Mr. Bean, a character who has achieved worldwide fame with his non-lingual comedic hi-jinx, in a 14-episode series, two feature films and an animated series. As he aged, Atkinson seemingly retired the character, implicitly following the rule that pratfalls are less funny and more scary when they happen to old people. At 67 years old, Atkinson has decided to buck the trend. He has returned to a slapstick with Man vs. Bee, a series that more or less plays as a feature film divided into nine parts on Netflix.

Atkinson plays Trevor, a well-meaning man who can barely hide from his own incompetence. Trevor fulfills his comedic destiny of causing destruction to a wealthy couple’s elaborate high-tech residence, spurred on by a common bumblebee. This series asks the real question, though: Who is the real bumbler? Man or bee? Atkinson provides plenty of laughs throughout this series, with enough of an emotional story to distinguish it from Mr. Bean. – LR

The Rehearsal

Nathan Fielder’s long awaited follow up to his cult hit Comedy Central series Nathan for You, The Rehearsal’s basic premise is so simple as to be confusing. Fielder finds real life people on the precipice of a difficult moment and offers them the chance to rehearse that moment, in excruciating detail, on a set built to perfectly replicate their daily life. The series begins as a weirder and more complicated version of Nathan for You, but once Fielder agrees to help a woman simulate 18 years of motherhood over the course of a few months, things quickly become much, much stranger, and the lines between fact and fiction become blurred in bizarre and startling ways. Is this show unethical? Exploitative? Maybe, but it is also undeniably brilliant, and we should all count our lucky stars that Fielder is using his dark talents to create entertainment, and not to conquer the world. – ML

Severance

What if a fever dream had a plot? This is the best description I can give for Severance, an undeniably beautiful, deeply creepy, always longing show that has all the emotions of a weird tone piece as well  as a strange yet coherent plot.

In the near future, biotechnology corporation Lumon Industries creates a new “severance” procedure to separate people’s work and personal memories. Yet as you follow Lumon employee Mark S (Adam Scott), from his strange work in the office to his depressed life outside, the boundaries of his life begin to unravel around him. – CC

A mix of office thriller, surreal mystery, and small town character study, Severance had me excited every week to jump back in and find the next level of the conspiracy and try to understand the laberine cult that controls Lumon.

Single Drunk Female

A show where normal human beings are alcoholics, Single Drunk Female takes nearly every trope you’ve seen about what it means to be an alcoholic and what it means to be in recovery, and either upends or empathizes with it. From the overbearing mother, to the type A sponsor, to the “trashy” friend, Single Drunk Female’s well written and acted characters form an entertaining and believable world where getting sober sucks, but you can do it if you take it one day at a time. – CC

We Own This City

David Simon making a cop show? Set in Baltimore, you say? Gimme a break! A lot of reviews for We Own This City acknowledge the inherent slam dunk of Simon tackling such subject matter, which helped him achieve great success in television, particularly with Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, and The Wire. Since the conclusion of The Wire in 2008, Simon has remained relegated to the venerable Home Box Office, tackling subjects like the Iraq War (Generation Kill), pornography (The Deuce), fascism (The Plot Against America), and urban housing development (Show Me a Hero). Now, in 2022, he returns to the subject of policing. And this time, this Charm City-tale is a whole lot less charming.

Helmed in partnership with longtime collaborator George Pelecanos, this show takes on a non-linear pseudo-journalistic account of the Gun Trace Task Force, led by Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, played with trademark conviction by a Bawl’mer accent sporting Jon Bernthal. The police here are less focused on solving crimes and keeping the streets clean than they are in clocking overtime and being as corrupt as possible. Unlike The Wire, which was a fictional show, this mini-series is based on a non-fiction book, concerning real events, written by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton.

Events of recent times have brought much attention to the nature of policing in this country, and this show would seem like a timely response, regardless of when it aired. Reinaldo Marcus Green handles the direction of the entire show and does it well, but what  really matters with a Simon production is the screenplay. Classic Simon tropes of futility with institutions rear their head once again. A new twist is the introduction of flashbacks, making this a non-linear narrative. It is unsure how much is gained by the approach, and it’s honestly confusing even for someone paying extreme attention, as one should do with a show from the creators of The Wire. This writer always said that The Wire is a show that teaches you how to watch it. We Own This City has the disadvantage of only being six episodes, so there’s only so much time a viewer can be expected to get over this learning curve before they just stop bothering and give up. Either way, it’s clear from the handling of the subject matter that I think it’s highly unlikely that we get someone like Jimmy McNulty from Simon and Co. ever again. Once a bell is rung and all… – LR