The A.V. Club’s favorite TV episodes of 2021

There’s always been an implicit wisdom to the hooky casting gimmick of , the ingenious choice its creators made to play themselves as middle-school girls: Maybe honestly capturing the myopia of adolescence requires growing out of it first. My favorite of this month’s (sadly final) crop of new episodes is the one that explicitly breaks from the perspective of its 13-year-old protagonists. “Yuki,” which Maya Erskine wrote and directed, dramatizes an eventful, bittersweet day in the life of Maya’s mother (wonderfully played, as always, by Erskine’s actual mother, Mutsuko). The episode lightly riffs on a couple of giants of world cinema with a romantic reunion straight out of an Edward Yang film and a jukebox scene that’s a little Wong Kar-wai. But what’s truly lovely about it is the earnest attempt at supplying the character with an interior life that her children couldn’t possibly see or grasp at that age. The kind of empathy “Yuki” expresses comes only with age, arriving when you start to understand your parents as more than just your parents. I will deeply miss this show, and the truths it uncovers through hindsight. [A.A. Dowd]