The NSV Awards: The Best TV Of 2018

Welcome to my very, very late NSV Awards. But better late than never, as they say! Up first is my top 25 TV series' of 2018. This list is limited to any series that aired episodes within the 12 months of 2018. For example, this list encompasses both the back half of season 2 and the first half of season 3 of The Good Place. Therefore, as I did not catch up on them, the following series were not eligible: Adventure Time, Better Call Saul, GLOW, Grace And Frankie, Harlots, Legion, My Brilliant Friend, Orange Is The New Black, The Americans, The Handmaid's Tale.

And a very special thanks to my partner Adam Robertson for illustrating the beautiful cover image! He and some friends are creating a game, Little Reaper. Follow their progress on their Facebook page!

Honourable Mentions: Mr. Pickles (Adult Swim), Nailed It (Netflix), The Great Australian Bake Off (Lifestyle), Final Space (Netflix), Drunk History (Comedy Central), Trial & Error (NBC), The Curious Creations Of Christine McConnell (Netflix), Media Watch (ABC Australia).

25. Westworld (HBO)

Image via HBO

Puzzle box show that sometimes forget it's about mysteries and realises it's a great show. Even at it's most frustrating, Thandie Newton's performance as Maeve helps keeps things afloat.

24. Queer Eye (Netflix)
Uplifting (if ever so slightly regressive) queer positive television. Jonathan Van Ness is my everything.

23. Killing Eve (BBC America)

Image via MPAA

Sandra Oh! Phoebe Waller-Bridge! Jodie Comer! That pink dress!

22. Jane The Virgin (The CW)
With only a handful of episodes, the show plumbed deeper emotional depths after Xo's cancer diagnosis and Petra's bisexuality. Not ready to let this go.

21. Brookyln Nine-Nine (Fox)
Just as I finally fell head over heels in love with this show, it got cancelled. Thankfully, it was saved, so more silly, hilarious, very sweet TV.

20. The Magicians (Syfy)
The best genre show you're not watching. After several inconsistent years, a strong quest narrative united the characters and focussed the show.

19. Slutever (Viceland)

Image via VICELAND's Twitter

By far the most sex positive thing I've ever seen. If only we were all as open-minded as Karley Sciortino.

18. The Good Place (NBC)
Shined just a little less brightly in it's third season as concerns about the show's endgame plagued me. Still, few shows are as clever or as funny. Worth it for the Janets episode if nothing else.

17. She-Ra and The Princesses Of Power (Netflix)

Image via Overly Animated

Fun, feminist, fabulous. More reboots like this! I will do anything to protect my pure angel Bow.

16. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (The CW)
Struggled slightly on it's transition to a portrayal of the difficulties of becoming (and staying) mentally healthy, with several dead end subplots. Thankfully, the fourth season refocussed just in time for the 2019 endgame.

15. Superstore (NBC)
Uses it's incredibly diverse cast to brilliant effect, tackling hot button issues in a way that is often strikingly nuanced and screamingly funny. Another great show y'all should be watching.

14. Channel Zero: Butcher's Block (Syfy)

Image via Syfy Wire

Utilises the tropes of (intensely, deeply messed up) horror to explore the complexities and fears of intergenerational trauma and mental illness, making for disturbing, unforgettable viewing.

13. American Vandal (Netflix)
How did this get cancelled? In its second season, American Vandal became more expansive and poignant, revealing itself to be a compelling, sympathetic evisceration of the horrors of social media. Thank God I grew up just before that kinda stuff.

12. The Shivering Truth (Adult Swim)
Adult Swim at its most Adult Swim, but stranger and darker and sadder than that. Imagine an absurd premise, taken to its logical conclusions and milked for all its grim beauty.

11. The Break With Michelle Wolf (Netflix)
The year's most painful cancellation. Michelle Wolf showed a rare willingness to get mean, to go for the jugular in a way that no other late night show host was capable of. She DESTROYED Republican politics and was not afraid to go after controversial topics (like her own network's obsession with true crime shows). A breath of fresh mean air. Just as it got great, it was canned. Typical.

10. Bob's Burgers (Fox)
Finally, finally caught up to this show, the most consistently weird, hilarious, lovely tihng on TV. I love all the characters, but hold a certain soft spot when it comes to Zeke. Such a pure-hearted, aggressive little weirdo.

9. The Terror (AMC)

Image via The Atlantic

Genuinely terrifying, addictive chiller offered a fictionalised take on a pair of ships that became lost in Antarctica in the 1840s. Filled with great performances and gruesome deaths so vivid that The Terror also acts as a kind of play on mortality, survival and man's capacity for cruelty.

8. Shaun Micallef's Mad As Hell (ABC)
Australia's equivalent to American comedians like John Oliver and Samantha Bee, offering an incisive and very funny look at our frequently absurd politics. Micallef matches that absurdity with over-the-top (yet strangely charming) caricatures which allow him to poke fun at everything from trickle down economics to Peter Dutton's resemblance to a potato.

7. Atlanta (FX)

Image via Looper

Donald Glover's uber-weird, fiendishly clever social satire stayed just as great in it's long-awaited second season. While I do think it would've been better served by an overarching narrative, the power of many of the individual episodes cannot be denied. The Teddy Perkins episode is the freakiest thing.

6. One Day At A Time (Netflix)
Why doesn't this show get more love? It looks and acts like a traditional multi-camera sitcom, yet uses that structure to explore topical issues in a way that doesn't feel manufactured. Gender nonconformity, mental illness, and immigration affect normal, everyday people, so why shouldn't they talk about it? No show made me laugh or cry harder, especially in the last episode. Powerful and vital.

5. Gogglebox Australia (Network 10/Lifestyle)
I kid you not but this may be the most diverse, important show currently airing. By highlighting multiple families from differing backgrounds, sitting around the box and commenting on what they're watching, it shows us what unites us. Be that arguing over The Bachelor or crying over Go Back To Where You Came From. It shows us who we are. And quite often that involves finding sexual innuendos in Gardening Australia.

4. Pose (FX)

Image via Out.com

A show so good that I'm (almost) willing to forgive Ryan Murphy for the trashfire that was The Assassination of Gianni Versace and the last few seasons of Glee. Pose acts as a corrective to the problems inherent in RuPaul's Drag Race by placing drag back into it's original historical context: as an escape and survival technique for queer people of colour in a predominantly white, heterosexual world. Pose was the source of queer joy in 2018, by simply showing people of colour finding happiness, love and family. Actually casting queer actors in the roles certainly helped.

3. BoJack Horseman (Netflix)

Image via Indiewire

After a focused, profoundly devastating season four, 2018 saw BoJack Horseman turn inward. It critiqued BoJack's role as an antihero and as a figure of sympathy, arguing that we shouldn't be celebrating his actions because they have real consequences to those around him. In the era of #MeToo (and with a lead like BoJack who has done terrible things), this felt particularly brave and difficult; to look inward, examine the series' key failings and try to address them. But it's also a fan of a defiantly stupid animal pun or a moment that stops you in your tracks and rips your heart out. 

Again, BoJack spirals out of control, hurting everyone around him. One could call that repetitive, but I'd argue that's the point. He can only break free of that spiral when he hits rock bottom. And maybe this is it. Maybe it's not. But what incredible, groundbreaking TV it makes out of that pain.

2. Hannah Gadsby: Nanette (Netflix)

Image via The New Yorker

Speaking of pain. My partner and I saw this live at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2017. We watched and laughed until it stopped being funny, and starting hitting raw nerves. When we walked out, I remember feeling numb for hours afterwards. It ruined me. I knew it would be big and wanted desperately to see it again.

It's hard to overstate why this is so important. Gadsby finally points out that our obsession with suffering with mental illness for the sake of art is unhealthy. That jokes only go so far when it comes to hiding pain. That to be queer and a woman in this society is not easy.

When I rewatched it again, that pain returned. And the power that comes with it. Because even though Gadsby is clearly incredibly emotional at the show's end, she is the most powerful person in the room. Finally I, as a gay person suffering with mental illness who uses creativity as a coping mechanism, felt seen.

1. Steven Universe (Cartoon Network)

Image via Syfy Wire

To get into why Steven Universe deserves my top spot on this list is impossible to do. Because to do so, I would have to spoil the many twists and turns this show took viewers on in 2018, and that wouldn't be fair. Those revelations work best when you know nothing about them. Nothing can prepare you, but in hindsight they make perfect sense. Their implications change everything about the show, yet work to further and deepen the show's key themes and ideas.

What I can say is that it's the first kids show that feels open about it's queerness (this year featured a same-sex marriage!). That it's the first show I've seen that manages to combine the epic and the personal, and which has such incredibly nuanced and real characters, and then keeps making them deeper.

I've already seen the handful of episodes released in 2019. They guaranteed this show another top 5 position. Watch this show.