Back to Life

Daisy Haggard’s downbeat gem took on a tough topic – a woman’s return to her home town after a stretch behind bars – and turned it into a meditation on grief, regret and the passing of time, though with enough gags to keep things zipping along.

What we said: A few episodes into Back to Life, I felt like pushing it away in protest. “No, no!” I cried inwardly. “It’s too much! It’s too good!” Read the full review

Barry

In its second season, this black comedy about a hitman who catches the acting bug took its story into darker territory, with Barry’s attempts to extricate himself from his past life only dragging him further into oblivion. Things aren’t going to end well.

What we said: Though it’s a comedy rather than a thriller, Barry replicates much of what made Breaking Bad irresistible. Read more

Broad City

After five virtually flawless sitcom seasons, Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson’s millennial kweens went out in the same way they came in: with gross-out gags, madcap surrealism and one of the greatest on-screen friendships in TV history.

What we said: This season has given Abbi and Ilana the best possible send-off. It has been joyful, silly and wild, and while it feels like the perfect and necessary time to wrap up their adventures, it is poignant that they’ve done so by reminding you just how good those can be. Read more

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A fitting, shocking end ... Catastrophe. Photograph: Channel 4

Catastrophe

Another comedy that went out on a high, Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney’s tale of floundering parents managed to deliver more home truths about the family unit, pay fond tribute to late guest star Carrie Fisher – and offer up one of the most shocking endings in recent TV history.

What we said: From first to last, Catastrophe has been an unremitting triumph. Read the full review

Chernobyl

Already sitting atop IMDb’s top 250 TV shows list before the final episode has even aired, Sky and HBO’s restaging of the Soviet nuclear disaster captures the ineptitude, corruption and horror at its core.

What we said: Chernobyl is a disaster movie, a spy movie, a horror movie, a political thriller, and a human drama, and it spins each plate expertly. The terror is unflinching and explicit, and its images of burned bodies collapsing into putrid decay are impossible to forget. Yet it never feels shocking for the sake of it, only as haunting and horrible as its subject matter demands. Read more

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Finally ... David Attenborough lays bare our greatest threat in Climate Change: The Facts. Photograph: BBC/Polly Alderton

Climate Change: The Facts

After years spent hinting at the damage done to our planet by the climate crisis , David Attenborough finally laid out the threat in all its magnitude, in a documentary that may just have turned sceptics into believers.

What we said: This is a rousing call to arms. It is an alarm clock set at a horrifying volume. Read the full review

Dead Pixels

E4’s comedy accurately captured the loneliness and mundanity, but also the sense of community, that comes with picking up a controller. All that, and it was as addictive as an all-night Fifa session to boot.

What we said: This wickedly entertaining new sitcom may have been inspired by the massive success of online games like World of Warcraft but, thankfully, you are not required to know your Azeroth from your elbow to enjoy it. Read more

Derry Girls

One of last year’s surprise hits, Lisa McGee’s Northern Irish comedy didn’t let things slip in its second season, with its quartet still finding teenage kicks in the midst of the Troubles. The scene in which teens from both sides of the sectarian divide unleashed a barrage of stereotypes about each other (“Protestants hate ABBA!”) is among the year’s funniest.

What we said: Derry Girls’ magic remains intact. The evocation of the 90s is as lightly done as ever (Elizabeth Hurley is fleetingly referenced – “She’s a total ride, but she paperclips her frocks together”) and the Troubled setting never overwhelms but simply throws into relief the ordinariness of the girls’ lives in the middle of extraordinary depths of conflict. Read the full review

Don’t Forget the Driver

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bleak comedy … Toby Jones in Don’t Forget the Driver Photograph: BBC/Sister Pictures

Pulling off a state-of-the-Brexit-nation series looked a tall order, but Toby Jones’s understated comedy-drama was taller, finding humour and pathos in its tale of a coach driver who discovers a refugee hiding in his wheel arch and a body washed up on the beach.

What we said: If it is a comedy, it is one with the bleakest tragedy at its heart. But whatever label you put on it, it is a fine, fine piece of work. Read the full review

Fleabag

Back for its second (and, as it turned out, final) outing, Fleabag added a hot priest into the already heady mix of biting wit and family dysfunction – and it built to a heart-rending ending with a wedding, a mad dash to the airport … and a fox. Unforgettable.

What we said: Series two raised the bar. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s risks were so impressive all one could do was shake one’s head in appreciation. Read the full review

Game of Thrones

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Unquestionably the TV event of the year ... Game of Thrones. Photograph: HBO

Did the gargantuan fantasy drama stick the landing in its final season? That’s an argument for the comments section, but both in the scale of its six episodes, and the fevered discussion they prompted, it was unquestionably the TV event of the year.

What we said: The ending was true to the series’ overall subject – war, and the pity of war – and, after doing a lot of wrong to several protagonists, it did right by those left standing. When you play the Game of Thrones, you win or you die. Overall, I think, it won. Read the full review

Gentleman Jack

Sally Wainwright travelled back in time for her latest piece of thrillingly human Yorkshire drama, with this real life tale of Anne Lister. Suranne Jones has received rave reviews for her portrayal of the 19th-century industrialist and diarist, who developed a code to hide her lesbianism.



What we said: It’s Regency Fleabag! Because the heroine occasionally breaks the fourth wall and exteriorises her inner monologue. But it’s set in Halifax in 1832, so it could be Northern Jane Austen. Then again, it’s about Anne Lister, who has been dubbed the first modern lesbian, so maybe it’s Queer Brontë ... You can afford to have a little fun with Gentleman Jack; Sally Wainwright clearly has. Read the full review

Ghosts

The Horrible Histories team offered up more unashamedly silly comedy with this spirited sitcom about a group of ghouls going to war with the new owners of a crumbling mansion.

What we said: In making us giggle at the supernatural, Ghosts is very British. But it is American in the sense of having a gag-to-airtime ratio much higher than British sitcoms normally manage these days. Read the full review

I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson

This deliriously absurd sketch show from a former Saturday Night Live player was hailed immediately as one of the greatest Netflix shows to date.

What we said: I wolfed down the entire series in one sitting, genuinely incapacitated with laughter. And then I watched it all again. I’m at the stage where I’m cherrypicking sketches now, but I’ve seen my favourites six or seven times. I’m fully obsessed at this point. At its peak, I think I Think You Should Leave might be one of the funniest things I have ever seen. Read more

Leaving Neverland

A devastating four-hour exposé of alleged child sexual abuse by Michael Jackson. Wade Robson and James Safechuck chillingly and plausibly outlined their accounts of childhood grooming by the man that they, and the whole world, worshipped.

What we said: An astonishing piece of work. Relentlessly spare and unsensationalist, it manages better than any other in its genre not to let its attention wander from the survivors’ testimony. Footage of Jackson is confined almost wholly to that of him with the boys themselves on stage, private calls between them and family snaps. He is never allowed to overwhelm the story. Read the full review

Line of Duty

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Complex … Martin Compston and Stephen Graham in Line of Duty. Photograph: BBC/World Productions

Jed Mercurio’s police corruption masterpiece returned for a fifth outing after a two-year wait, bringing with it a stunningly complex performance from Stephen Graham, more urgent exits required … and heartstopping, jaw-dropping action to the last.

What we said: As ever, nothing is wasted; not a scene, not a line, not a beat. It fits together flawlessly – you can imagine Mercurio sitting like a watchmaker at his table with the parts spread before him and fitting the loupe to his eye before assembling the whole thing and listening for its perfectly regulated tick. Read the full review

Mum

Stefan Golaszewski’s sitcom tour de force ended on a heartwarming high. Over three lovely series, Lesley Manville and Peter Mullan as Cathy and Michael gave us the gift of a quietly epic romance that will echo down the ages – and kept the tears in our eyes.

What we said: Mum might have looked like it was just a sitcom, but it had something beautiful to say about love and loss. It’s said it. Read the full review

Pose

Assembling the largest collection of trans actors in televisual history, Ryan Murphy’s big-hearted drama about the voguing scene in 1980s New York had style, grace, swagger and sass for days. What’s not to love?

What we said: Razzle-dazzle showmanship isn’t Pose’s only source of infectious joy. Watching the slow, still-unfolding process of these characters becoming more and more their true selves is as exhilarating as the opening bars of Cheryl Lynn’s Got to be Real. Self-actualisation isn’t easy, but it sure is beautiful. Read the full review

Pure

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frank and fearless ... Pure. Photograph: Sophia Spring/Channel 4

Following a young woman with a form of OCD called Pure O, which manifests as constant invasive thoughts about sex, this comedy-drama was among the year’s frankest and most fearless TV.

What we said: The drama and the gags are never sacrificed to worthy exposition, virtue-signalling or finger-wagging, but, at the same time, the series has so evidently been made in good faith that you can surrender to it entirely, never fearing that it will put a foot wrong. Read the full review

Russian Doll

A hipster Groundhog Day, but also so much more, Natasha Lyonne’s comedy about a thirtysomething trapped in a time loop of death and rebirth proved a truly mind-bending proposition.

What we said: Russian Doll is an acquired taste. But do persist: there is such a fine, idiosyncratic, impressive show nested within. Read the full review

Sex Education

Gillian Anderson starred as Jean, a sex therapist whose son Otis (Asa Butterfield) – though too anxious to masturbate himself – sets up a sex advice service at school. A punchy, horny comedy, with the added bonus of the fantastic Ncuti Gatwa as Otis’s best friend Eric. Worth watching for his heroic prom outfit alone.

What we said: Endlessly and seemingly effortlessly funny, in a naturalistic way that doesn’t have you listening for the hooves of the next gag thundering down a well-worn track but, like Catastrophe, catches you almost unawares and makes you bark with laughter. Read the full review

The Last Survivors

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sam Dresner, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Frank Bright and Susan Pollack ... The Last Survivors. Composite: BBC/Minnow Films Ltd

Arthur Cary’s thoughtful, wonderful and always dignified 90-minute documentary heard the stories of some of the last living people who survived concentration camps as children. A very important work indeed.

What we said: For an hour and a half, I was crying, especially when Cary followed three generations of Holocaust survivors to Auschwitz, knowing all the time that tears are not enough. Nor guilt. Read the full review

The Other Two

How would you react if you could barely get cast as Man Who Smells Fart in an advert while your kid brother became a Bieber-esque teen hearthrob overnight? That’s the premise of this brilliant satire, which skewers our pop-culture-obsessed society spectacularly.

What we said: It has heart, charm, steel, belly laughs and a gimlet eye. Get on it. Read the full review

The Victim

John Hannah and Kelly Macdonald starred in an intelligent drama about a vigilante attack on a potential child killer that managed to ask ever more challenging questions as its episodes rolled on.

What we said: It is a drama that resonates with its time by asking what constitutes a victim and how much leeway we allow in bestowing that status. Do they have to be perfect? How sure do we have to be? And what happens when the perpetrator becomes a victim too, of a different kind? Read the full review

The Virtues

Shane Meadows reunited with This is England star Stephen Graham for an unflinching drama about a troubled dad attempting to reunite with his long-lost sister and process childhood sexual abuse.

What we said: Unspoken pain infuses every scene, every gesture and expression from Stephen Graham and in doing so lays the foundations to do justice to the suffering of victims everywhere. Read the full review

The Yorkshire Ripper Files

Liza Williams’s three-part documentary revisited one of the biggest – and longest – murder manhunts in British history, taking us back to a time so different it seemed almost foreign.

What we said: At its best, Williams’ series – with its mixture of archive footage and new interviews – is a social document. The hindsight it offers is not primarily about the mishandling of the investigation, but of the grim tone of the times. Read the full review

Best TV of 2018 so far Read more

This Time With Alan Partridge

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Appalling company ... This Time With Alan Partridge. Photograph: Colin Hutton/BBC/Baby Cow

The excruciating monkey tennis-pitcher went back to the BBC for a One Show-style magazine programme. Inevitably – and hilariously for viewers – it wasn’t the smoothest of returns.

What we said: We get the heroes we deserve, and as you finish writhing in agony and lie limp from laughter, hatred, panic, despair or in awe at the end of another half-hour in his appalling company, you can only reflect that if Brexit means Alan then the whole business just got more complicated still. Read the full review

Veep

A last hurrah for Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s mendacious yet incompetent vice-president, in a political satire that was perfectly attuned for these most buffoonish of times.

What we said: Louis-Dreyfus has won a record six Emmy awards for her role as Selina Meyer, and, frankly, it’s no wonder. She is magnificent, brittle and furiously amoral. In this seventh and final season of Veep, it appears to be getting out while it still has a hope in hell of making its fictional world look more comedic than the real one. Read the full review

When They See Us

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Almost unbearably harrowing ... When They See Us. Photograph: Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix

Ava DuVernay’s staggering miniseries about the Central Park Five showed how a group of young boys came to be falsely convicted for raping a young white woman in 1989. It is unbearably harrowing to watch the boys, as young as 13, get violently coerced by police into giving confessions.

What we said: The performances are uniformly astonishing – especially from the central five, Asante Blackk, Caleel Harris, Ethan Herisse, Marquis Rodriguez and Jharrel Jerome, most of whom are just a few years older than the teens they are playing. They capture the innocence, in all senses, of children, and the permanence of its loss. It feels like a great privilege to see them. Read the full review

Years and Years

Russell T Davies’s hugely ambitious drama followed a family through the next 15 years of British life, taking in the migrant crisis, terrifying technological innovations and Trump’s increasingly fraught face-off with China.

What we said: For a series that compresses 15 years into six hours, it seems to pass in the blink of an eye thanks to Russell T Davies’s trademark humour, compassion and the kinetic energy with which he infuses every project. We do not deserve Davies, but thank God he’s here. Read the full review

100 Vaginas

Following her projects about breasts and penises, artist Laura Dodsworth photographed a range of women’s vulvas, then showed the sitters their vaginal portraits and interviewed them for their responses. The result? Intimate, empowering television, unlike anything that has ever aired before.

What we said: A gently but relentlessly radical documentary. It’s not until you see a full set of female genitals filling your screen that you realise how little you see anything of or about them in wider culture. Read the full review