The A.V. Club’s favorite TV episodes of 2021
Succession, Ted Lasso, Pen15, Loki, and more of our favorite episodes of the year
TV Features Mutsuko
Screenshots, clockwise from top left: The Bachelor: After The Final Rose, What We Do In The Shadows, Ted Lasso, Loki, Succession Graphic: Natalie Peeples
The A.V. Club’s end-of-year coverage is officially underway—check out our picks for the best TV performances and film scenes. Before our best TV shows list arrives next week, we’re looking back at our favorite episodes of the year with this week’s AVQ&A:
What was your favorite episode of TV this year?
91 Comments
What if this wasn’t a slideshow though? Just like a regular article, to provide your readers a better experience?
What a unique request. I bet they change by tomorrow morning.
They never will, and I’ll never stop asking
Never stop never stopping
OK but why? They’ve obviously made up their minds on this. Writers for the site have admitted they have no input in this decision, and I assure you no one who works at the corporate level gives the first fuck.
Same reason I post online comments and respond to them: I enjoy screaming into an endless void.
You get one click for an article and multiple clicks for a slide show.
But impression time for a single slide is very low – typically not long enough to register with the viewer, and time on page is tracked by the marketing agency to gauge efficacy of the ad buy.
I would have thought so, but I can’t think of any other reason you’d do it that way.
I’m sure that’s why they do it. My point is just that even under that rationale it doesn’t make sense. They’re pissing people off for no reason.
‘They’re pissing people off for no reason’ – The A.V. Club.
An invigorating post in its unrepentant nature, and yet tragic all the same.
Any interest in giving readers a better experience died a long time ago when they switched to Kinja. Here’s the list of slides by author (in case there are you want to skip, at least you don’t have to click through every slide):
Slide 2 – Chavez: For All Mankind, “The Grey”
Slide 3 – Barsanti: Loki, “Journey Into Mystery”
Slide 4 – Hughes: What We Do In The Shadows, “The Casino”
Slide 5 – Sanchez: Succession, “All The Bells Say”
Slide 6 – Anderson: Ted Lasso, “No Weddings And A Funeral”
Slide 7 – Schimkowitz: Mythic Quest, “Backstory!”
Slide 8 – McLevy: Yellowjackets, “Pilot”
Slide 9 – Inhat: The Bachelor, “After The Final Rose” special
Slide 10 – Dowd: Pen15, “Yuki”
They can’t…they are so close to their dream of a slideshow composed of slideshows…and then they can embed slideshows within those slideshows and so forth until the heat-death of the universe…or until they get less stupid owners.(PS to the owners of this site: Polygon does lists too and they manage to avoid the slideshow trap. Plus, their design is a good deal more impressive as a whole.)
What’s bizarre is that most media companies that actually track metrics like time spent on a page, etc. gave up on slideshows several years ago because there’s not time for the ads on a given slide to make any sort of meaningful impression. Giz is pissing off its users for no reason.
Click the “List Slides” button, scan the titles, click the ones that sound worth reading.
I know I should stay out of it, but what exactly is the aversion to slideshows? I genuinely don’t get it. It’s not like peek-a-boo. Whatever was on the last slide doesn’t cease to exist when you click next.I will acknowledge that slideshows do kind of suck, I guess. But they aren’t new, and they’re not that hard to read. I would understand it if we were all still on dial-up or something, but even with my backwoods internet they work fine. For me it just comes down to whether I’m interested in the content or not. Just like for any other article.I couldn’t be more ambivalent.
It’s precisely because they only suck just a little. Suck too much and you will lose too many users. They and most other things on the web now all suck juuust a little, until every website has reached the optimal awfulness.
Personally I like to zoom the page on AV Club articles (and most other sites) to the width of the embedded images, the slideshow format resets this with every page and is pretty annoying. Instead I shrink the window until the article shows as a single list, but I’d rather slideshow articles were just a list in the first place.
I really liked Beard After Hours, I thought it was tremendous, and a nice way to use up one of the two extraneous episodes the showrunners were saddled with.
Also, it helps if you saw the 1985 Scorcese film After Hours. And if you haven’t, you should. Beard After Hours is an homage. In the original article, the author complains about the pacing. This is deliberate. Some parts are drawn out to a painful degree. Not everything has to be fast, and you don’t have to cut every 1.5 seconds. Not everything has to be interconnected with everything else. There isn’t a reason for a lot of stuff that happens in real life. It’s ok if there isn’t a reason for something in a tv show other than if it is entertaining.SURRENDER DOROTHY!
After Hours is one of Scorsese’s most frenetic movies…I’m not as harsh on Beard After Hours as many (though it does sit in a weird spot within the season’s arc, and I wasn’t really invested in Beard’s relationship), but the homage doesn’t really go past the title and “one crazy night” premise.
Actually, there are quite a few After Hours references in that episode. For example, Beard constantly dropping his keys was an homage to the great scene in the film when Linda Fiorentino drops her keys down from the loft to a startled Griffin Dunne. After Hours is my favorite film of all time and the Beard episode is easily my favorite of Lasso.
I thought a lot of complaints about “Beard After Hours” had to do with season structure, and how people were disappointed not to see the immediate fallout of the Man City game with the other characters. And I get that.But I’m with you, I love it. The pacing within the episode was fantastic. I get that headspace that Beard was in and the ensuing wandering that entails. I’ve had nights that, while maybe not quite as dire at times, were similarly driven by a need to get out of a really bad headspace, were propelled by copious amounts of booze, and were filled with ups and downs with a strange array of characters. Basically, I identified, and thought they did a beautiful job capturing a night like that.
I agree, it’s my favorite episode of the series so far. I even think it was pretty necessary to the season as a whole. It was the only episode that really dealt with the crushing defeat of losing to Man City.
I like the show a lot, but one issue I have is the open disinterest it has for soccer team, the actual thing all these people are supposed to be doing. I’m not wishing for the show to get deep into the weeds of game strategy or anything, but I’d prefer a kind of Friday Night Lights-level of focus, instead of the show frequently ending with the point that it’s just a game and doesn’t really matter.
I think you’re wrong about open disinterest. I think a big issue is that it’s really, really hard to stage legitimate soccer action with actors who were hired because they’re actors. They’ve done a good job of faking it, but they have to keep it to a minimum.Also, every time I hear the creators talk, it’s about them bonding over a found love of soccer when they were working together in Europe. All that said, I felt like season 1 did a much better job of balancing it than season 2. S1 had the perfect amount of actual game footage and focus on team results — just like Major League. S2 underdid it by a fair amount.
I felt weird about it because I didn’t want to see him save his toxic relationship.
OK, but I’m not sure we’re supposed to see the ending of the episode as happy. He’s sort of surrendering to a relationship that, for whatever reason, he emotionally needs, and there’s a catharsis there, even if ultimately it’s a mistake.
I like your view way better than “happy ending”, and I bet you’re right in what they were going for. I’m not sure they achieved it, because we just haven’t seen enough of her. (Or maybe because it’s just sort of an impossible thing to pull off.)
I’m not sure I’d say I really liked it, but I appreciated how it suggested a season that often felt too safe could go in weird directions. I was not a big fan of No Weddings and a Funeral, which felt too sappy and featured the random plot of Jamie confessing his love to Keely. For my money, the season’s best episode was Headspace, which completely felt like it was going for a too-easy, Ted Lasso-y ending, but had a nasty shock instead.
While I like both shows, I’d consider both the mostly jokeless, 50-minute slog of “No Weddings And A Funeral” and “Backstory!”, hampered by an incredibly grating lead performance by Josh Brener, to be the worst episodes of each shows’s respective second season.“All The Bells Say” is of course the obvious but nevertheless correct pick for best episode of the season.
I like “Backstory!” in a vacuum and found Brener grating mostly in the way the character is supposed to be, but it’s undercut as part of the larger show by having this apparently lifelong, character-defining schism completely resolved in the next episode, an issue repeated with Poppy and Grimm’s rift. MQ is doing prestige television dramatic beats on a sitcom timeframe, and it doesn’t totally work. “A Dark Quiet Death” is still their dramatic high water mark because it it doesn’t get reset and the characters just have to live with the consequences and go on with their lives. If the next episode involved them getting remarried, it wouldn’t be remembered half as fondly.
I think you’re underselling MQ on Backstory!/Peter. I suppose you could argue they shouldn’t have run the episodes back to back, but they gave over a whole episode to healing the rift after giving a whole episode to all the time up to it. It’s not like the rift between the three was relevant to the dynamics of the show, just to who Longbottom is and how he got to be what he is.Agree that Poppy/Grimm’s rift hasn’t worked. It doesn’t track and seems to have no permanent stakes. I think that’s because McIlhenney is so far up his own ass he can see what he had for lunch, and Grimm is his avatar. He seems to think he’s mocking himself and tech bro culture, but he can’t help but slip in that he’s actually the one who’s really right about everything; he’s got about as much self-awareness as Elon Musk.
The problem is that it’s a relatively complex and nuanced take on who Longbottom is, both explicitly and by implication. He’s a man who chose quick success based on a fraud over real human connection and a difficult opportunity for growth. His flair and bombast is an overcompensation for the fundamental insecurity he feels from knowing that his reputation and public persona is based on a deception. The sheer volume of psychological defense mechanisms and self-justifying lies and half-truths he must have constructed in the intervening decades to keep from spiraling would be central to his identity. Realistically, those are the kinds of things that most men his age never succeed in fully unpacking, and definitely don’t just sort of get over in an evening.
It feels like the show was too scared to examine this too deeply for fear of making him unlikeable. Instead, they scrambled to assure us that he’s better now immediately so we didn’t have to sit with the mundane tragedy of it for more than an episode, and it just rings false. It’s the same with Poppy and Grimm. They say cruel things to each other that they forgive way too easily and under duress, but by the end we’re celebrating their codependent friendship without really acknowledging how their relationship would actually be pretty self-destructive and terrible over time, even though we’re supposed to take problems seriously in the moment.
I hear what you’re saying, but I feel like there were too very distinct problems for Longbottom. One was his fraud and its lifelong effects, the other was his jealousy and anger about the other two getting together. I felt like his eventual reconciliation with the guy only addressed the latter.He’s still fundamentally insecure and broken, but he did get a moment of fellowship with one of the (apparently) few people in his life who ever liked him.I can see how you’d want them to put more time between the episodes, but in the timeline of the show it doesn’t make a difference. And I feel like it hits better, when the backstory is fresh.
For me, it’s “The Wellness Center” episode of What We Do In the Shadows.
Shit was TV really that bad this year?
No this list is just bad.
The first episode of Foundation. Despite the show going on to be just ok, the first episode of the series was/is about as good as an episode of tv can be. I can’t remember the last time a pilot episode hooked me so hard.And the other is the “Dave” episode of Dave. This series as a whole has been phenomenal, but the last episode of the series is a rollercoaster of emotions that finishes with an ending that is both surprising and joyous. I don’t think words can really explain how good it is, it’s simply a superb ending episode that only really works after seeing the episodes before it.
Any episode from this season’s Doom Patrol. That show is beyond great. I really hope Frasier gets some award show love.
Your comment may have just given me the push to finally watch Doom Patrol. It’s been in my queue for ages, and it just looks so entertaining. My wife and I are between shows right now, and she keeps requesting a 30-minute show that’s fun.
It’s more than 30 minutes and boy does it get dark but it’s also kooky and hilarious. I like comic shows but this show is so much better and more than a comicbook show.
Dark is totally okay by us!
pfft of course DC
I bet you like your batman with stubble as well you grimdark.
Huh?
…FUCK!
Not all of Doom Patrol totally works for me — some of the conflicts are clumsily or anti-climatically resolved; its color palette is unnecessarily drab, fo one thing — but their commitment to off-the-wall shenanigans gives me a lot of affection for it. If you’d told me ten years ago that we were getting a live action Dead Boy Detectives, I’d have said you were nuts.
For me it was the glorious confluence of the 8th Annual “On Cinema Oscar Special” and the “Our Cinema Oscar Special” back in April. Nothing else even came close.
I can’t understand why not one episode of Dave Season 2 is on here.
Enlightened Dave
No love for “Hunting” or “California Dreamin’” from Reservation Dogs, that’s a damn shame.
WandaVision Ep1 should be on here. Nothing Ted Lasso should be on here. Otherwise solid list, I mean, you could probably throw a couple dozen other things on here with no regrets (Reservation Dogs, Shrink Next Door, just to name a few off the top of my head).
I really wish we had gotten more scenes with just Ted and Rebecca. I can only think of a couple from the season, and I want to see more of their friendship in the third season. While keeping it purely platonic.
I’m not sure there’s a lot to do with Ted and Rebecca now. After the Season 1 reveal, the show could have kept her in a semi-antagonistic relationship with Ted — after all, he is exasperating, and does things that are bad for business. But instead, they turned her into another creampuff. As the Christmas episode showed, there’s not necessarily a lot of mileage to be gotten out of Ted and Rebecca just being super nice to each other.
A semi-antagonistic relationship between Ted and Rebecca could and should have been something maintained, since comedies pull this off all the time. They can both still be likeable characters, a recent example being Brooklyn 99 with Jake and Cpt. Holt
I agree. S2 as a whole suffered from the lack of a villain. Jamie’s dad and Rupert just weren’t present enough, and it took the whole season to get Nate to that point.That said, I think they’ve set themselves fantastically for S3. I bet with Nate going villain to redemption or villain to failed-redemption, they’ll have just that element they were missing.
I think I’m the only who’d be fine if Ted and Rebecca got together. I’m not actively rooting for it or anything, but I think they’d make a good couple–better than the ethically dicey, go-nowhere Rebecca/Sam pairing at least.
I’m certainly not *opposed* to it; it just feels a little cliche to me. On top of that, I like Ted and Sassy together, in the limited times we’ve seen them.
It certainly would have improved that particular episode if they’d talked together about their dads – those two parallel conversations ruined the episode for me due to the massive imbalance between the two experiences.
I nominate the penultimate episode of Castlevania’s final season. While the finale was all post-climax denouement and very good, they clearly have been saving all of their animation budget for the reunion between Trevor and Sypha and Alucard, who haven’t seen each other since season 1, a huge mistake finally rectified in an epic way.
Hell yes
the reunion between Trevor and Sypha and Alucard, who haven’t seen each other since season 1, They defeated Dracula together at the end of season 2.
Oh, that’s right. Sure as hell feels like a three year gap, though, doesn’t it?
Squid Game’s “Gganbu” is one of the greatest episodes of television this century. I’ll put it up against anything.
I would have included Mare of Easttown’s ‘Illusions’, which had what might be the tensest TV scene in years. If you’ve seen the show, you’ll remember the moment. Absolutely masterful.
I was so excited to work on one of my own favorite episodes (Journey into Mystery) and work on Alligator Loki <3
But I loved What We Do In the Shadows and Succession, but I have to nominate Reservation Dogs and Only Murders in the Building as well.
I have to throw in with that Bachelor special as well. For season after season we’ve seen contestants keep POC around, just to pare it back to their own when it got late in the game. Presumably to bolster their personal cred. You finally get a couple that breaks the pattern and boom, immediately she’s busted dressing like an antebellum plantation owner just a couple of years earlier. You get the unsurprising public response saying “SEE? What did you expect?” Matt feels betrayed and I’m sure somewhat foolish. Given the show’s history, the fact that Matt and Ocho didn’t let her off the hook at all was frankly astonishing. Pretty much the only real moment in the show’s entire run.
I’m willing to buy that it’s the best episode of the Bachelor ever. I’m unconvinced that that puts it in “best show of the year” territory.
Grading on a curve, I suppose. It just defied so many expectations. It was also probably whiplash for the typical fan of the show.
There is zero justification in putting any Bachelor episode into a top-ten…this immediately became a worthless list with that add.
They solved race.
Lol, the Bachelor. Just put this website out of its misery already.
The New Patty episode from Kevin Can F Himself was a real standout for me this year. They did a great job with the upping the sinister nature of Kevin while upping the laugh track too, and I think that’s where we begin to get Patty, and why she is the way she is.
really loved the trolley birthday party episode on Work In Progress. Just intimate and real.
I’d put “The Escape” above “The Casino” but they are both pretty stellar.
I’d have included the episode “The Boy From 6B” of ‘Only Murders in the Building’, which has almost zero dialogue to reflect the deafness of the character Theo, played by a deaf actor. Even scenes that don’t feature Theo are without speech, and there’s really only one scene in my opinion where it seems contrived. Plus James Caverly, the actor who plays Theo, is great in this episode, able to switch between vulnerability and menace at the drop of a hat.
One word:Gganbu
I just watched Casino last night, and while it had a few great moments, this whole season feels off thus far. The comedy is bigger and less dry, the characters somehow more broadly drawn, and Matthew Berry seems to be sleepwalking.
Gosh Ted Lasso ate it this season. And this is coming from a guy who liked season 1 so much he made a season 2 recap series that took up all HIS DAMN TIME THIS SUMMER
My top 5? (I’m still sorting, but I generally liked these):
American Crime Story: Impeachment, “Man Handled.” As tense as the show ever gets, and a true turning point for both Monica and the series.
Godfather of Harlem, “The Hate That Hate Produced.” The S2 finale deals with the 1964 Harlem Riots, and also the Civil Rights Act passes.
Invincible, “Where I Really Come From.” The shit hits the fan when Mark and his father finally come to blows. Incredible pathos from Omni-Man.
Squid Game, “Gganbu.” The challenge with the most morbid twist, that eliminates half the principle characters in heartbreaking fashion.
9/11 One Day in America, “First Responders.” Our 20th anniversary called for a slew of retrospective documentaries, but I found these first-hand stories of resilience the most powerful.
I forgot Invincible came out this year. I probably would had that same episode as one of my favorites(I must’ve watched it 4-5 times.)
Praise for the Invincible shoutout. That episode was on another level.
I just realized what a crime it is that it wasn’t listed here. Maybe the best episode of television I saw this year although that Loki episode definitely has legs.
I loved On Becoming a God in Central Florida, with the best episode I think being Many Masters, although they are all great. But I see now that was a US 2019 release which Netflix released in the rest of the world in 2021.
My other favourite is Netflix’s Strappare Lungo i Bordi (Tear along the Dotted Line), with the ultimate episode hitting like BoJack Horseman’s best penultimate ones (and I’m not the only one who thinks that; it currently scores a 9.5 on the IMDb.)
And of course What We in the Shadow’s Casino episode, but that speaks for itself.
I don’t know that I can crown Yuki the best ep of Pen15 given how much it sidelined the two girls, but damn that whole show was great. The Yuki ep was great though, and I loved what appeared to be actual home movies of the mom from that era. And it had a sweet coda with the (current-husband) dad being a good guy, so yeah, I really liked it too.I feel like the show hit a different gear in the 2nd half of season 2, even as much as I loved the first 1.5 seasons. In hindsight, I realize I spent a lot less time reveling in the nostalgia (for a time I wasn’t even really part of — I was 13 in 1990, they’re in 2000) and being completely invested in their stories and perils.Great show, could not recommend more highly.The cartoon ep in the middle of season 2 might have actually been tops for the year for me, though it was hard to look at — seeing them as they see themselves after the caricature.
We got “Loki” but no “WandaVision”….?
Guessing there was a thin fanboy line to tread there.
Squid Game – “Red Light, Green Light”I don’t know which was my favorite part, the part where Seong Gi-hun wins a prize at the arcade for his daughter, the part where he gets slapped in the face for about an hour, or the moment we find out what happens to the losers in the game Red Light, Green Light.WandaVision – “Breaking The Fourth Wall”Favorite moments: when Wanda confronts SWORD after they send the drone after her and everyone realizes just how powerful she is, and it was Agatha Harkness all along!
Hawkeye – “Ronin”Kate & Yelena’s dinner.Mare of Easttown – “Sacrament”When it all comes out.Superman & Lois – “Pilot”It’s nice to have a Superman that isn’t grim dark all the time.Falcon & Winter Soldier – “One World, One People”Introducing Captain America.
Squid Game – “Red Light, Green Light”I
don’t know which was my favorite part, the part where Seong Gi-hun wins a
prize at the arcade for his daughter, the part where he gets slapped in
the face for about an hour, or the moment we find out what happens to
the losers in the game Red Light, Green Light.WandaVision – “Breaking The Fourth Wall”Favorite
moments: when Wanda confronts SWORD after they send the drone after her
and everyone realizes just how powerful she is, and it was Agatha
Harkness all along!
Hawkeye – “Ronin”Kate & Yelena’s dinner.Mare of Easttown – “Sacrament”When it all comes out.Superman & Lois – “Pilot”It’s nice to have a Superman that isn’t grim dark all the time.Falcon & Winter Soldier – “One World, One People”Introducing Captain America.
Just got finished binging the two seasons of MQ, and I agree, Backstory was amazing. It must have cost a pretty penny to make, too, with all the period pieces/scenes, which you wouldn’t expect to see in a show like this.