The 21 TV shows that explained the 2010s

In the 2010s, television fell apart.

I don’t mean that literally; there is currently more television than ever before, great heaping gobs of it. TV journalist Liz Shannon Miller has calculated the number of shows making their American debuts in primetime or on a streaming service every year for the past half decade; her tally for 2019 is an astonishing 688, and she’s pretty sure she missed some. It is humanly impossible for any one person — or TV critic — to catch up.

Rather than ushering in a new golden age, or even continuing the old one, the sheer glut of 2010s programming led to entropy. Many great TV shows were still made — and happily, many of them were told from the points-of-view of people of color, women, and LGBTQ people.

But those great TV shows were often harder to find than they would have been in the ‘90s or 2000s. Whatever conversation existed around the best of TV seemed to happen not at water coolers actual or virtual, but in a one-sided dialogue with the self. What did you think of that Netflix drama that debuted in 2015, but you’d only just watched? The only person you could really ask was you.

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