As we watch the media concentration tighten, with either Netflix or Paramount about to own Warners with its extensive film and also television catalogue, this is a good time to reflect on what the last TV season hath wrought.

I watched 89 series this year and valued about one third of them, though I am selective and often won’t go near series I know I will not be attracted to. Although there was much to like, the worst were more shocking in their betrayal of any standard of decency, though many, such as Adolescence, were praised for maintaining it, while the best at times hardly stood out.

Here is why:

Streaming television is everywhere a middle-class phenomenon in terms of its makers, though not in terms of its extremely rich owners (Larry and David Ellison of Paramount+, Jeff Bezos of Amazon Prime and MGM+, Ted Sarandos of Netflix). The Western and in some cases global middle class is mired in an ever-deepening imbroglio due to the crimes of its leaders (genocide in Gaza, proxy war in Ukraine, blowing up Nord Stream and releasing the world’s largest methane cloud, to say nothing of the movement before our eyes, with Trump and Zelensky, from an oligarchy to an open kleptocracy).

That class needs to reconcile its tentative support for, or at least non-violent objection to these crimes by “seeing both sides.” All this makes for weaker television where there are no villains or exploiters, only well-meaning but misunderstood individuals, and everyone has their reasons. Never mind that some people’s “reasons” caused great harm and should have landed them in jail.

Best:

Matlock (CBS) - A masterful series that managed in the first season to be both political and personal. Maddie’s (Kathy Bates) ongoing quest to hold to account the drug company Wellbrexa, liable for the overdose death of her daughter, also had her championing down-on-their-luck clients each week. The added bonus was that this series was also a powerful examination of the triumphs and tribulations facing seniors, appropriate because its network CBS has a largely geriatric audience.

American Primeval (Netflix) - This series charted American savagery with the Mormons as equivalent to our modern fundamentalists, Christian and zionist, prattling on about “the promised land,” and behaving, in their violent eradication of anyone who stands in their way, like todays’ settler-colonialists.

Prime Target (Apple TV+) - From the opening ATM explosion in Baghdad duplicating the Israeli beeper attack on Lebanon, to the nefarious darkness shrouding and linking Cambridge tech to a group of Brit intelligence, American NSA and financial interests, this Apple TV+ series stood out for its take on the interconnections in this linkage.

Common Side Effects (HBO Max) - Mike Judge in satirical Silicon Valley mode in this HBO Max biting anime-portrait of drug companies as ruthlessly pursuing an Asian homeopathic specialist who has discovered a cure for the world’s diseases using a type of mushroom. That cannot be allowed to stand because it exposes the companies not as purveyors of wellness but as profiting from the perpetuation of sickness.

A Thousand Blows (Disney+) - Steven Knight continues his recounting of the savagery of British capitalism (Peaky Blinders, A Christmas Carol, Taboo) in this Disney+ series which recounts a partially true story of a Jamaican boxer, Hezekiah Moskow, and his relationship with Mary Carr, the “queen” of a gang of all-female thieves in London’s working-class melting pot, the East End in the 1880s. The “savagery” of the East End is constantly contrasted to the “civilised” West End, where the profits of 19th-century British mercantile and factory capitalism, wage slavery at home and actual slavery abroad, have accrued. 

The White Lotus (HBO Max) - Season 3 of this HBO Max series, set in Thailand, amps up the violence and fraud that the American tourists bring with them when “at leisure.” The group consists of one killer, one swindler who contemplates doing in himself and his family, a sexually incompetent son who covers his incompetence with aggression, and a masterful turn by Parker Posey as a pill-popping matriarch oblivious to it all.

Long Bright River (Peacock) - Oscar winner Amanda Seyfried sheds her blonde trophy wife Marion Davies image (from Mank) and instead embraces a role as a working-class Philadelphia cop who, on her beat in Baltimore’s Kensington, due to her empathy for the street women, is able to spot a serial killer whom the rest of the force simply ignores.

Dark Winds (AMC+) - This third season of the Lakota crime series on AMC+ has Jessica Matten’s border agent uncovers a trafficking outfit tied to a prominent rancher while taking up with a fellow agent who may not even be half of what he seems. Ingenious linking of the two plots as all roads lead back to the reservation.

Nautilus (Amazon Prime) - A politically astute reimagining of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues with the British East India Bay company, described as 19th-century Nazis, as the villains, and the heroes a group of multi-culti misfits escaped from a company prison in Bombay.

The Rainmaker (USA Network) - This series, based on a John Grisham novel, is a welcome return to liberal values now abandoned by most contemporary liberals. A smart young lawyer takes on a corporate law firm in a case involving the death of an African-American woman’s son, reinvigorating the old liberal alliance between a white enlightened middle class and a black working class, an alliance all but shattered as white elites campaign for war, not social justice, under the guise of “human rights.”

Special Mention:

The Lowdown (Hulu) - Episode 9, written by Walter Mosely, is superior to any hour of television this year. Mosley cross cuts between a white supremacist preacher calling his congregation “warriors for God” to a joyful reenactment by the town’s children of the Oklahoma land rush, a monstrous theft of Native American land. Graham Greene appears as a partially demented, partially truth telling, Osage deed holder that a developer is trying to swindle, warning the developer’s agent that “land will drive you crazy,” echoing the perpetual thirst for land and resources that still motivates much of today’s imperial thieves.

Worst:

The Ridge (SKY TV) - A piece of Sky TV nastiness that begins as a typical and enervating woman returning to New Zealand from Scotland to find her sister’s killer, but then morphs into the opposite with the Scottish anaesthesiologist revealed as a serial killer, going in the blink of an eye from Florence Nightingale to Jeffrey Dahmer and with whom we are supposed to sympathise.

Adolescence (Netflix) - A long take, real-time Netflix series highly praised for its “understanding” of Britain’s youth. The problem is that, in Keir Starmer’s elitist, neoliberal England, the source of the violence that is unleashed in the series is working-class men and the boys they raise, while the assigned role of its mostly passive and victimised women is to socialise this violence, neatly letting out that the violence is fostered by Starmer’s austerity.

Black Rabbit (Netflix) - A noir version of The Bear with New York resto owner and his ne’er-do-well brother at odds. Romanticises the biz, as all workers, blissfully unaware they are being exploited, rally around the cause of the owner. Tell that to the Starbucks employees struggling to unionise.

The Chair Company (HBO) - Ron Trosper, perhaps the least funny actor on television, whose literal fall from grace in front of his employees occasions his obsession with the company who made the chair. Humourless in the true sense of the word, that is, Trosper’s leaden performance is utterly without humour. Who on earth could have thought this was a good idea?