10 Best TV Episodes of 2018
When TV show creators boast that their season is “really a 10-hour movie,” odds are they’re either relatively new to the medium, or are trying to impress bosses who are. Television isn’t “movies, only longer,” and even intensely serialized shows like Breaking Bad or The Americans understand the value of making each installment its own memorable experience within the larger story.
This year was something of a mixed bag for passionate defenders of the episode like me. On the one hand, we got more new dramas than ever (particularly on the streaming networks) blindly following the 10-hour-movie model, and struggling to maintain interest over the long haul as a result. On the other, the year still had an awful lot of great individual episodes, particularly from shows willing to radically shift their perspective, setting and/or tone for a bit.
Below are 10 of my favorite episodes of television from 2018. Some are standout segments of shows that made my overall top 20 list — and could have easily just included episodes from those shows, including The Americans‘ finale and “Something Stupid” from Better Call Saul, both of which I omitted for the sake of variety — while others are examples of uneven series temporarily achieving their full potential. Some exist very much within their respective shows’ usual continuity and style, while others illustrate just how elastic a fictional universe can be. All are worth revisiting, even in an era crowded with programs fighting for your attention. To the victors go the streams.
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‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine,’ “The Box”
Long before he was giving TV’s funniest deadpan performance as Captain Raymond Holt, Andre Braugher was a very different kind of cop as master interrogator Detective Frank Pembleton on Homicide: Life on the Street. “The Box” — where Holt and Andy Samberg’s Jake Peralta have one night to get a confession from a clever murder suspect (This Is Us‘ Sterling K. Brown) — was both tribute to Braugher’s Pembleton days and a marvelous illustration of how to turn a sitcom relatively serious, then pivot back into humor when the suspect, and the viewers, least expect it.
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‘The Magicians,’ “A Life In the Day”
The Syfy fantasy series has come to specialize in using format-breaking experiments to break up its (admittedly convoluted) ongoing story arcs. This year, it offered several gems along this line, including the musical “All That Josh” and the fractured caper story “Six Short Stories About Magic” (one of the six told largely in sign language). The best, though, was this episode where Quentin (Jason Ralph) and Eliot (Hale Appleman) go on what seems like a simple quest to solve a puzzle and instead need a lifetime — over which an aging Quentin gets married and has children and grandchildren — before they can finish it and return to their twentysomething selves. It’s a familiar genre staple (multiple Star Trek spinoffs have done their versions of it), but one particularly well-suited to a show about the perils and responsibility of adulthood. The magical setting allowed both the heroes and the audience to quickly accept what was happening and legitimately grapple with the messy emotions of it all.
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‘The Haunting of Hill House,’ “Two Storms”
We’re not only in Peak TV, but Peak Oner, the practice of presenting a long scene that has the appearance of being filmed as one continuous take. True Detective Season One made it cool, and now everyone from Daredevil to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is trying it. This middle chapter of The Haunting of Hill House took it to an extreme, though, with an entire episode that seemed to be a oner, despite moving back and forth between two houses in two different eras. (As Hill House creator Mike Flanagan explains in this Twitter thread, it was actually five long takes stitched together, plus a few visible cuts near the end.) There can be times when TV’s love for this neat new trick can feel like a self-indulgent distraction from the story being told, but “Two Storms” actually enhances the entire Hill House experience (before the concluding episodes start to lose the thread). There’s a forced theatricality to filming the show in this way, which only enhances the sense of being trapped in Hill House (and, decades later, Shirley’s funeral home) as the lights go off and on and ghosts keep popping up around corners. Jump scares can be fun with good editing (and Hill House has plenty of them in other chapters), but the level of dread that comes from feeling like this is actually happening because there aren’t any cuts is damned impressive.
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‘Kidding,’ “The Cookie”
Jim Carrey’s TV comeback varied wildly in tone and its characterization of his role as an iconic children’s show host going through an emotional breakdown after the death of his son. But periodically — particularly in episodes, like this one, directed by Michel Gondry — it understood exactly what it was and who Jeff Pickles was, and magic followed. This time around, Jeff is trying to convince his terminally-ill girlfriend Vivian (Ginger Gonzaga) to continue with her treatment despite hopeless odds. As he has the puppets from his show — including a new one modeled on Vivian herself — sing to her about the value of letting your story continue to an unknown ending, it becomes easy to understand the transformative power this sad man can still wield when his focus is clear.
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‘Forever,’ “Andre and Sarah”
In perhaps the biggest deviation from a series norm on the list, no Forever regulars appear in this episode until its final seconds. Instead, “Andre and Sarah” is a largely standalone story about its two title characters — star-crossed realtors played by Jason Mitchell and Hong Chau — wasting chance after chance at living a happy life together. Despite only appearing in this one episode, Andre and Sarah and their relationship felt far more real and fraught than what was happening with Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph in the other nine installments, even as their story explored many of the same themes about the importance of taking risks for love. Less an example of a disappointing show temporarily solving its own problems than an alternate path you wish the creators had traveled all along.
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‘GLOW,’ “The Mother of All Matches”
Yes, I spent a lot of this year singing the praises of a different GLOW Season Two episode: “Bad Twin,” which is presented entirely as an episode of the show-within-the-show. For pure fun, that’s hard to top (it even finishes ahead of the highest-ranking episode on this list), but “The Mother of All Matches” is in many ways the more impressive departure from GLOW business-as-usual. By focusing on the lonely and complicated lives of Debbie (Betty Gilpin) and Tammé (Kia Stevens) as they prepare to face each other in that week’s big wrestling match, “Mother” has to stay within the more mundane reality of GLOW itself rather than the absurd fantasy of “Bad Twin.” But by zooming in on just these two women, the narrative significantly alters our perspective on both a main character like Debbie and a relatively minor player like Tammé (one of the few disappointments of the season is how it mostly forgot about her after this episode). And it does the best job the series has to date of illustrating how the scripted wrestling storylines can come to mean something profoundly real to the people performing them.
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‘One Day At A Time,’ “Not Yet”
The setup: Each member of the Alvarez family enters the hospital room of Lydia (Rita Moreno) to say a potential goodbye as they wait to see if she’ll recover from her stroke. The result: a collection of monologues that are at times heartfelt, at others broadly comic — the blend the new One Day has made its own, but with both halves going deeper because of the stakes and the presentation. Good luck keeping your eyes dry either when Penelope (Justina Machado) climbs into her mother’s hospital bed to give her permission to go, or when the episode’s title phrase is said.
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‘Castle Rock,’ “The Queen”
Here’s an example of another horror series, like Hill House, that didn’t know quite how to end the arc of its season, but managed to put together an incredible standalone episode before that happened. This one — in the vein of Lost‘s famous “The Constant,” only sadder and scarier — literalizes the dementia of Sissy Spacek’s Ruth Deaver by showing her moving backwards and forwards through the events of her life. At some points, she seems totally in control, at others utterly powerless about where she is and what she can do. It’s not only an amazing showcase for Spacek, who has some experience holding the screen in a Stephen King (or King-adjacent) nightmare tale, but one that retroactively enriches much of what happened in the series prior to it.
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‘BoJack Horseman,’ “Free Churro”
The most theatrical, surprisingly so, episode of this bunch: a half-hour animated monologue delivered by a narcissistic, drug-addicted horse/man. Technically, “Free Churro” is two separate monologues: a brief rant from BoJack’s bitter father after picking his son up (late) from soccer, then the adult BoJack’s much longer eulogy of his late mother Beatrice. But since Will Arnett (never better) plays both, and since both men are sorting through their complicated, mostly resentful feelings about Beatrice, it feels like one big, messy, beautiful speech. In talking about how television taught him all the wrong, superficial lessons about how to treat people, BoJack unwittingly demonstrates how a better-written TV show — even a weird cartoon like this one — can dig so much deeper than he ever believed.
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‘Atlanta,’ “Teddy Perkins”
Could it be anything else? The show of the year delivered the episode of the year: a stunning, eerie detour from what we’d grown accustomed to even from an unpredictable project like this. Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) travels out of town to pick up a used piano with multicolored keys, offered by the eponymous Teddy, played by Atlanta creator Donald Glover, unrecognizable under Michael Jackson whiteface. Teddy and his reclusive musician brother Benny Hope serve as stand-ins for decades of famous, tragic and/or self-hating black musical stars like Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye as the episode ponders whether great art can only come from great pain and how much African-American performers feel they have to hide their own blackness to appeal to a predominantly white audience. In a year of remarkable haunted-house stories, this one was the scariest, and the saddest, and the one with the most to say about the world we live in.