Another year, another 10,042 television shows from which to make a list.

This is not a “best” list — a poor word to apply to something as wide-ranging, unquantifiable and subject to taste as television. Perhaps one day someone will write an algorithm that will objectively and accurately determine the quality of a work of art, and God help us all. For now, you are stuck with opinions, including your own.

What do these series — 14, squeezed into 10 items — have in common? They were all new in 2019, a self-imposed restriction that leaves out “Schitt’s Creek” and “Fleabag,” but which seems only fair to the mass of fresh TV teeming at the critical shore. I’m somewhat surprised to find, looking over the list, that more than half involve some sort of supernatural element; perhaps it’s because they’re able to play with form and ideas in ways that more everyday series are not, or that there’s just a lot of that stuff around nowadays, reality failing our present needs. Several involve violence in a way that does not mar their deeper goodness. Most were created and/or carried by women.



Above all, they gave me pleasure: I laughed, I cried, I hid my eyes when the going got rough. I was shown something I hadn’t seen before. Most have real heroes at their center: flawed, complicated — because who isn’t — but not antiheroic. There are enough villains dressed as heroes in the world I get as news; these shows, in their various ways, stand up for life, love, difference and possibility. They make me feel we might have a chance.

In no particular order:

