You won’t either.ĭarby lives with Sara (Zoë Chao) and Mallory (Sasha Compère), diverse roommates whose lives are vastly more complicated and perhaps more involving than hers, or at least I think their lives may be those things. Over the course of eight episodes sent to critics (out of the full season of 10), she works her way through a number of tangentially related jobs that she conspicuously doesn’t care about. Our heroine here is Darby (Kendrick), who aspires to do something nonspecific and boring in the city’s art world. Instead we get a bland story of a pretty 20-something white woman living beyond her means in New York City, going through a series of heteronormative relationships and one-night stands marked by minor incompatibility, temporary inconvenience and collective, muted banality. Either way, it’s a pretty good idea for a show, albeit one that demands a dynamic main character with a dynamic set of dating experiences leading to an interesting personal evolution on the road to love. So it isn’t even exactly a proof-of-concept so much as a proof of lack-of-conviction. For the first few episodes of the season, the story is told with a romance-per-episode structure, but that’s abandoned around halfway, with episodes that lay a flimsy foundation for the main character’s romantic patterns. The gimmick to Love Life, created by Sam Boyd, is that it uses a single season to chart a character’s emotional journey from first romance to last. It’s a toothless, dull proof-of-concept that any network or service could have produced, made more worrisome if it’s also meant to be a toothless, dull proof-of-concept for HBO Max. So you can choose how much of a mission statement you want to read into this: Love Life boasts an interesting and potentially innovative anthology structure but introduces that format with the most conventional and least interesting incarnation imaginable. With those caveats out of the way, here are the shows I considered the 50 best of the 2010s.The reality is that Love Life probably earned the title of HBO Max’s first scripted series (not starring Elmo) because of availability and not some grand intended pronouncement that the Anna Kendrick-fronted anthology represents the very model of the streamer’s original content. It also largely foregoes miniseries, even great ones like Show Me a Hero or Chernobyl, favoring instead the idea of television as an ongoing experience over years. (Apologies to all who want to make like Joan in the SDCP elevator now.) Otherwise, this list leans heavily toward scripted series and narrative fiction - and often towards series that deftly balanced comedy and drama - with a sprinkling of sketch comedy and children’s programs. So Breaking Bad qualified for both, while Mad Men qualified for the first rule - and would have made the top 10 just based on its 2010s seasons - but not the second. Here, we decided on only two: 1) The majority of episodes had to have aired in this decade and 2) No more than two seasons can have aired prior to 2010. The last time I ranked this many shows, there were a lot of rules involved. The rush for cable networks to follow HBO, FX, and AMC into the prestige-drama business, plus the arrival of Netflix and the Streaming Wars, means there’s exponentially more programming to consider. Should they be eligible? If so, do we factor in their entire runs, or only the episodes that aired this decade? Mostly, though, it’s just about how much television we’ve gotten over a period that’s come to be known as Peak TV. Some of that is the fact that several inner-circle TV Hall of Famers began in the 2000s and continued into the 2010s. Identifying the best series of the 2010s isn’t nearly as simple. (Say, Taxi, Barney Miller, The Jeffersons, and Laverne & Shirley?) At the end of the 1970s, for instance, you could easily assemble a sterling top 10 featuring Roots, the four sitcoms that aired together in CBS’ legendary 1973 Saturday night lineup ( All in the Family, M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show), and a handful of the Seventies’ other great sitcoms. Ranking the best television shows of any decade is a complicated task, but some decades are easier than others.
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