The 29 Best TV Shows of 2021

We spent 2021 still in this interminable pandemic, but that never stopped the pipes that provide us with content from spewing out its usual mix of liquid honey and total sludge. While the lockdowns in 2020 accounted for delays on production on a number of popular series, a handful of them finally got to grace our screens once again this year. Although, even with hit, awards-favorite shows back on their air again, we still found ourselves bingeing dozens of new gems, too, and international series proved to dominate streaming viewership now more than ever. To help you navigate the excess of TV that is the streaming era we're in, we're rounding up the stand-out series of the year that are absolutely worth watching. We hope you like always having something in your queue. 

Please note: We've considered only scripted episodic shows and miniseries here, so you won't find any docuseries, unscripted or one-off specials, or made-for-TV movies on the list. Also, only shows that made their US debut during calendar year 2021 are eligible.

ALSO READ: Our list of the best movies of the year, and for even more TV, check out our round-ups of the best series of 2020 and 2019

Season 2. 13 episodes.
Evil continues to be the best show you're not watching (and if you are, good, I won't sic George the demon on you in the middle of the night). In its second season, the show explores the consequences of the bloody actions of Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) at the close of Season 1, while also keeping the series light on its feet as Kristen, David (Mike Colter), and Ben (Aasif Mandvi) investigate stories of ifrit fire spirits, elevators to Hell, and UFO coverups. Its best episode to date is nearly dialogue-less, wherein the trio is called to check out a posthumous sainthood in a monastery whose residents have taken a vow of silence—which, if broken, would release something horrible into their midst, naturally. The show retains its devilish charm even in its darker moments, and, in its new home on Paramount+ (the first season was broadcast on CBS), allows it to go even deeper into the weird shit. —Emma Stefansky

Season 2. 10 episodes. 
Ten years after the events of Season 1, the year is 1983 and the American Space Program in this alternate timeline is in full swing, with more and more astronauts serving on missions to the palatial Jamestown moon base, carrying out scientific research projects, fielding talk show interviews, and trying to keep one step ahead of those dastardly Soviets. Ed Baldwin (Joel Kinnaman) is now Chief of the Astronaut Office, Molly Cobb (Sonya Walger) is ambitious to a fault, and Gordo (Michael Dorman) wants nothing more than to get back into a spacesuit. The second season of the show ups the ante, playing around with Cold War politics in a new technological era, where the dreams of the erstwhile Space Age—cell phones, electric cars, lady astronauts (gasp)—have become an easily attainable reality. —ES

Season 1. 10 episodes.
Isaac Asimov's Foundation is not the sort of book you read and wonder, Why hasn't this been adapted into a laser-blasting, spaceship-exploding blockbuster space opera yet? The best way to describe the first book in Asimov's centuries-spanning series is "groups of guys sitting in rooms and discussing events that you never actually get to see"—not exactly material that lends itself to the neon light show sci-fi entertainment we've grown to expect. But trust that Apple TV+'s adaptation of Foundation, starring Jared Harris as psychohistorian Hari Seldon and set in the far future of humanity at the beginning of the end of a galaxy-wide empire, has pulled off the unenviable task of adapting the core ideas of what made the books so revolutionary in the first place, while adding new notes of emotion and excitement to expand the world. —ES

Season 1. 8 episodes.
Take a huge dose of early 2000s, TRL-era nostalgia and mash that up with the comedic sensibility of the Tina Fey-Robert Carlock universe established in 30 Rock, and you've got Girls5Eva created by Meredith Scardino. The premise of this Peacock series finds the four surviving members of a Spice Girls-esque girl group—the fifth died in a tragic infinity pool accident—reunited after their one-hit-wonder is sampled on a rap track. All at creative and emotional impasses in their lives they decide to give fame another shot. Anchored by excellent and hilarious performances from Renée Elise Goldsberry, Sara Bareilles, Busy Philipps, and Paula Pell, Girls5Eva is as absurd as it is sweet, never losing sight of the strange bond between the women at its center. —Esther Zuckerman

Season 1. 10 episodes.
It's understandable if HBO Max's Hacks sounds a bit familiar when you first hear the premise. Do you really want to watch another show about the trials and tribulations of being a comedian? The trick co-creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs, and Jen Statsky pull off is finding a sharp, nuanced take on the see-sawing dynamic between legendary Vegas stand-up act Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) and the young comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder) exiled to the desert to punch up her aging employer's material. If the two characters simply bickered the whole time, trading barbed put-downs and inter-generational zingers, the show would get tedious fast. Instead, the writers and performers carefully draw out the connections and the tensions between the two women, lending the showbiz plotlines a Larry Sanders-like complexity. Similarly, the world around Vance, from the soda dispenser in her kitchen to the Ace Ventura slot machine in the casino, is layered with funny, glitzy specifics that make the show feel both surreal and lived-in. —Dan Jackson

Season 1. 6 episodes.
This South Korean supernatural drama from Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho has an exhilarating opening sequence where gorilla-like creatures emerge from nowhere and clobber an unsuspecting individual in a crowded cafe. Then, these mystical beasts, bathed in a strange gray smoke, disappear into a portal, leaving a charred corpse in their wake. From there, the story blends elements of a True Detective-like police procedural with a Leftovers-style meditation on faith, bouncing between scenes of shocking violence, arch satire, and character-driven melodrama. The narrative, adapted from a webtoon by writer Choi Gyu-seok, presents a tonal challenge, but it's one that Yeon is prepared to tackle with all the restraint of a rampaging ape crashing through a wall of concrete. —DJ

Season 2. 6 episodes.
What a balm it is to know that How To with John Wilson has returned to our televisions. Upon first debuting in late 2020, the HBO series, in which the titular documentarian explores the many hilarious eccentricities of life in New York City, offered an unexpectedly profound meditation on contemporary existence. Season 1 ended with the early days of COVID-19, but Wilson opted to avoid pandemic fodder the second time around—a refreshing choice that results in episodes like “How To Appreciate Wine,” “How To Remember Your Dreams,” and “How To Be Spontaneous.” With the same mild-mannered charm and droll wit, Wilson and his team (which now includes comedian Conner O’Malley and revered New Yorker journalist Susan Orlean) continue to craft a show that’s at once informative, wistful, and pleasantly strange. —Matthew Jacobs

Season 2. 6 episodes.
The first season of I Think You Should Leave, the absurdist sketch show from former SNL writer and Detroiters co-creator Tim Robinson, was a miracle. At a time when so much sketch comedy feels stale, bumbling through the same tired premises and predictable punchlines, Robinson and his collaborators, including performers like Patti Harrison, Conner O'Malley, and Sam Richardson, manage to subvert expectations and still deliver consistent laughs. Part of that has to do with the speed of the sketches, which often establish an idea very quickly (Dan Flashes sells pricey shirts with elaborate patterns) and then blows them ("Shut the fuck up, Doug!") up before it gets old. Robinson's boorish characters, always quick to anger but also incredibly sensitive, have only grown funnier and more oddly poignant in the new season. Even at their most repulsive and belligerent, they have a humanity to them that keeps the show from ever wearing out its welcome. —DJ

Season 5. 10 episodes.
Issa Rae's HBO comedy has long felt like a show that could never really end, starting with its groundbreaking debut and calibrated growth every following season. With its fifth installment, Rae decided it was time to wrap up her love letter to LA. The season isn't a grand send-off, but instead a continuation of what fans will miss about it, being a funny yet somber look at how messy adulthood can be. Molly (Yvonne Orji) and Issa's cracked friendship is on the mend, but even as the two face wins career-wise, millennial dread still creeps in, leading them to question their own success. Of course, Issa remains enmeshed in relationship drama, but screentime is also given to Lawrence and Nathan to look at their paths. It's what the show has always done best: giving heft to the mundane conflicts young people face, even in bouts of hysterical daydreams and mirror raps. —Sadie Bell

Season 1. 8 episodes.
For all of its intense bloodshed—and there is tons of it—Invincible, the animated series adapted from The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman's comic series, wrings out as many laugh-out-loud moments as possible in its complicated, The Boys-adjacent understanding of what it means to be a superhero. Chalk it up to its absolutely stacked cast—Steven Yeun as a teen balancing high school life while learning that he can fucking fly, Sandra Oh as his human mother, J.K. Simmons as his stronger-than-god father, and Gillian Jacobs, Zazie Beetz, Jason Manztoukas, Walton Goggins, etc. surrounding them—who bring the necessary intensity and charm to their characters wading into a messy universe-wide conspiracy stuck with the foibles of an earthbound mindset. —Leanne Butkovic

Limited series. 5 episodes.
This groundbreaking limited series out of the UK starts off as a party. The first episode is a celebration of gay life, following three young men who come to London and eventually become flatmates in a dilapidated but loving home known as the Pink Palace. But even these ebullient moments are filled with dread. Russell T Davies, best known for creating Queer as Folk and rebooting Doctor Who, has made one of the definitive pieces of television about the AIDS crisis. It's not perfect—and many critics have noted how the show missteps by focusing on how its protagonists contract the virus—but in its messiness and brutality it's also teeming with honest emotion. It's a Sin is vital not because it chronicles a disease but because it chronicles the lives that were altered and cut short by that disease. —EZ

Season 1. 8 episodes.
This genre-blending dark comedy proved that Annie Murphy is far more than the ditzy Alexis Rose on Schitt's Creek. In Kevin Can F**k Himself, Murphy plays Allison, the long-suffering wife of obnoxious mid-Massachusettsan Kevin McRoberts, her dolt of a high school sweetheart who keeps her on a short financial leash and preys on her guilt. The genius here isn't merely in the story as its sold, in which Allison becomes determined to discreetly murder Kevin when she discovers he irresponsibly emptied their savings. Its blend of a multi-camera sitcom format and prestige drama honors the conventions of each before shattering them every time Allison steps through a door. —LB

Season 1. 6 episodes.
The MCU's favorite trickster is finally the star of his own show, dropped smack-dab in the middle of a time-hopping mystery involving the most formidable power in the multiverse, and it's only a matter of minutes before he starts misbehaving. After Loki uses the Tesseract to bloop himself out of his own timeline in Avengers: Endgame, he's quickly apprehended by enforcers from the Time Variance Authority, who plan to delete him from existence now that he's unwittingly escaped his predestined path. But he's saved just in time by Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson), an energy drink-guzzling TVA agent at the head of a case that, without revealing too much, he believes only Loki can solve. Loki allows its title character to take up more space as an antihero rather than sidelined as a tragic villain, and star Tom Hiddleston is so good at mixing bad guy Loki's growled, villainous threats with the panicked, out-of-his-depth bounding around he does here that you wonder why this franchise hadn't been letting him do that this whole time. —ES

Parts 1 and 2. 10 episodes.
Each episode of Netflix's new hit Lupin, a nimble caper series starring Omar Sy (The Intouchables) as gentleman thief Assane Diop, builds to the type of rug-pulling flashback that you might find at the end of an Ocean's movie. Disguises are ripped off; diamonds get pocketed; the dashing hero slips away, again. It's a classic heist-movie device that could get repetitive or predictable but, through the mercifully fast-paced 10 episodes of a first season that began in January with Part 1 and concluded with June's Part 2, Lupin and its endlessly charming leading man execute each reveal with a high degree of finesse. With a show like this, getting fooled is half the fun. —DJ

Limited series. 7 episodes.
Prestige crime series have become increasingly clichéd, but Mare of Easttown uses the specificity of its setting—a gray Philadelphia suburb where, according to a standout SNL sketch, “water” is pronounced like “wooder''—and a brilliant cast to rise above the genre’s more familiar trappings. Instead of a trite depiction of white working-class America, Easttown sketches a nuanced portrait of an addled community held together by shared history. Kate Winslet is revelatory as the titular detective, her bitter glares and hardened voice blanketing a deep well of anguish. Surrounded by a gifted supporting cast that includes Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart, Evan Peters, Angourie Rice, and Guy Pearce, Winslet takes us on a journey through one dedicated woman’s circumstances as she investigates a murder that exposes hard truths about those she loves. —MJ

Limited Series. 7 episodes.
With shows like The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, along with high-profile Stephen King projects like Gerald's Game and Doctor Sleep, filmmaker Mike Flanagan has proven himself to be a master of the horror adaptation. As a storyteller, he finds his own way into tricky, difficult material. Midnight Mass, a miniseries about a religious awakening in a sleepy offshore fishing community, is an original tale, drawing from Flanagan's own struggles with faith and sobriety, but it has the same richness and complexity of his literary interpretations. The creepy saga of Father Paul, a charismatic priest played with a haunting stillness by Hamish Linklater, pairs elegantly with the struggles of pregnant school teacher Erin (Kate Siegel) and guilt-ridden ex-venture-capitalist Riley (Zach Gilford), creating a web intrigue that converges in some of the most shocking and satisfying moments Flanagan has ever dared to put on screen. Like a great sermon, it pushes the audience right to the edge. —DJ

Season 2. 9 episodes.
The second season of Apple TV+'s game dev workplace comedy deepens the relationships between its key characters while staying true to its own impish spirit. With Raven's Banquet in their rear view, Ian and Poppy—now co-creative directors, uh-oh—butt heads over plans for the next expansion, while Rachel and Dana manage their fledgling relationship and Jo relishes the power of being Brad's assistant-turned-sworn enemy. The season kicked off with the superb special episode "Everlight" in April, and its back half is structured around a thrilling yet absolutely devastating arc involving backstory scribe C.W. Longbottom, who gets his own 1970s-flavored standalone episode this season (Mythic Quest continues to kill it with the standalones) and a follow-up that expands the limits of comedy TV. —ES

Season 1. 10 episodes.
The unlikely murder mystery-solving trio of Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez added a wholesome touch to crime dramas. As three residents in an Upper West Side apartment, their shared obsession with true-crime podcasts brings them together and inspires them to put their sleuthing skills to use when another one of their neighbors dies under suspicious circumstances. Co-created by Martin and John Hoffman (Grace and Frankie), the series pokes fun at the culture around podcasting and true crime, while inevitably turning the viewer into an armchair detective themselves. Anybody may be a suspect at the Arconia (which has dozens of colorful tenants, making for many solid guest stars), but the series will leave you feeling warm, as it's ultimately about lonely people finding each other. —SB

Season 2. 10 episodes.
During its first season, the hilarious series from Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider The Other Two lingered in relative obscurity on Comedy Central. It made the jump to HBO Max with it's miraculously good Season 2, where it finally gained the attention it deserved. The second season followed the continuing exploits of Brooke (Heléne Yorke) and Cary Dubek (Drew Tarver), the adult siblings of a teenage superstar Chase Dreams (Case Walker). This time around, both Brooke and Cary nudge a little closer to fame of their own, Brooke becoming a manager for Chase and their talk show host mother, Pat (Molly Shannon), while Cary gets himself cast in a movie and finds his way into the orbit of a gay-baiting straight celebrity who wants to use him as arm candy. The series remains as outrageous as ever—the penultimate episode involves an image of netherregions that will remind you to check whether a photo is live forever more—while also remaining a potent look at loneliness and the cost of pursuing fame. —EZ

Season 1. 8 episodes.
This FX on Hulu comedy follows four friends living on an Oklahoma Native American reservation trying to make enough money to leave. It opens with the group stealing a truck full of Flaming Flamers chips, giving the truck to some meth heads and keeping the chips for themselves to sell. The series from Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi mashes up this kind of wild action with magical realism and melancholy as it tracks these kids' lives which are defined by both mundanity and ridiculous situations. It's anchored by the incredible work of Devery Jacobs, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Lane Factor, and Paulina Alexis, all wonderful discoveries who ground the show. —EZ

Season 3. 9 episodes.
TV's most abominable family has returned for the cruelest and most morally bankrupt season of Succession yet. Staging the title fight showdown between Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) and his father, Logan (Brian Cox), while the other Roy siblings swat hands for daddy's love, Season 3 revels in the utter sense of entitlement oozing off the ultra-privileged family as they fight to maintain control of media conglomerate Waystar Royco following Kendall's cruiseline bombshell from the Season 2 finale. If you had any remaining fondness for the Roys, it will quickly be tossed into the shredder as Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kiernan Culkin) play kingmaker to a truly detestable presidential nominee (since "the Raisin" doesn't run again in the Succession-verse) and Kendall throws an all-out narcissistic birthday rager. These aren't good people, by any means, but they sure do make for good television. —LB

Season 1. 9 episodes.
The reigning hit of Netflix in 2021, Squid Game shirks the modern streaming pitfall of being widely watched and extremely mediocre. Viewed by a staggering 142 million households, the record-breaking series from South Korea is a gripping capitalist commentary as a destitute ensemble endures deadly rounds of schoolyard games for a chance at ₩45.6 billion, created as a betting arena for the mega-rich. Its obsessive memefication is both a testament to the size of the hallyu wave in the United States and the richness of its dense (yet admittedly unsubtle) text. The trail of crumbs left along the way becomes all the more surprising and clever once you arrive at its twisty, inconclusive end. —LB

Season 1. 6 episodes.
If you long for the swoons and frustrations of rom coms, head on over to HBO Max, which has imported Starstruck from the UK. Created by and starring Kiwi comedian Rose Matafeo, Starstruck puts a spin on Notting Hill. Matafeo's character Jessie has a drunken New Year's Eve hookup with a handsome man who just happens to be movie star Tom Kapoor (Nikesh Patel). Each of the six episodes jump between seasons as Jessie and Tom flirt and elide one another. The chemistry between Matafeo and Patel will tug at your emotions while you'll cackle at the comic creation that is Jessie, who wears her confidence on her sleeve and crumbles when it fails her. —EZ

Season 1. 8 episodes. 
If you're one of the recent converts to CBS's Evil after the first season dropped on Netflix and have been craving more ever since, turn on HBO's Spanish-language horror series about disgraced exorcist Padre Vergara (Eduard Fernández), who teams up with a small town's mayor Paco (Miguel Ángel Silvestre, whom you may recognize from Netflix's Sense8) and veterinarian Elena (Megan Montaner) to solve supernatural mysteries related to the legendary 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot for betraying Jesus, seemingly possessed by demonic energy. Their investigations into hauntings, ouija boards, and one absolutely monstrous giant spider-baby reveal a devilish conspiracy 2,000 years in the making. —ES

Limited Series. 10 episodes
The Underground Railroad, Barry Jenkins' extraordinary adaptation of Colson Whitehead's book, is not just the best series to ever stream on Amazon, it's a landmark of this era of television. The series starts in Georgia where Cora Randall (the stunning Thuso Mbedu) is a slave. When she escapes with her lover Caesar (Aaron Pierre), they are introduced to Whitehead's central conceit: That the Underground Railroad was actually a system of locomotives. Jenkins captures the unnerving magical realism of Whitehead's idea—helped by another fantastic score by Nicholas Britell—all while never losing the weight of the terrible history he is representing. The show unfolds slowly, but confronts its audience as its characters, in Jenkins' now classic closeups, stare directly into the camera. —EZ

Season 1. 9 episodes.
What started as a charming pastiche mixing classic sitcom television and the deepest of Marvel Comics lore became a strikingly effective character study for two of the most shafted Avengers. Wanda Maximoff is living in a world of I Love Lucy bliss with her loving husband Vision, but things in the cutesy, all-American town of Westview are not as they seem. Why are Wanda and Vision trapped in a TV sitcom? Isn't Vision supposed to be dead? Is anyone coming to get them out? WandaVision's sunny exterior hides a darkness within, and turns a sprightly homage-driven series into an examination of grief on a chaotic, interdimentional scale, not to mention an action-packed lead-in to the MCU's Phase Four. It's worth watching for Vision's cozy sweaters alone. —ES

Season 1. 6 episodes.
A sublime comedy of manners with a melancholic bite, The White Lotus is so good that you should watch it twice. In just six episodes, the brilliant Mike White (Enlightened) crafts an accomplished upstairs-downstairs satire set at a posh Hawaiian resort where rich people demand picture-perfect vacations. What starts as a portrait of juicy travel tensions becomes a sensitive exploration about class dynamics, cultural appropriation, and accidental murder. Jennifer Coolidge gives one of the year’s best performances in any medium as a batty loner there to scatter her dead mother’s ashes, but Murray Bartlett, Natasha Rothwell, Jake Lacy, Connie Britton, Alexandra Daddario, and relative newcomer Fred Hechinger are every bit as compelling. —MJ

Season 1. 10 episodes.
Yellowjackets crash landed onto Showtime and put every other survivalist series that came before it to shame. Told in two timelines, the dramedy follows the unfortunate fate of a high school girls' soccer team whose plane to nationals goes down in the Ontario wilderness in the '90s, and checks in with the remaining survivors in the present. While those who got out alive told the media otherwise, their will to live turned feral—giving the show a mysterious edge, as someone in the present is threatening the adult women to share what really happened in the 14 months they were stranded. Anchored by performances from both the young cast and their adult counterparts (played by a handful of '90s icons, including an excellent Melanie Lynskey and terrifying Christina Ricci), it doesn't shy away from emotional complexity, graphic imagery, and dark humor in its dual assessment of womanhood. —SB

Season 1. 6 episodes.
Ziwe, the comedian, is not writing jokes for a cozy night in for Ziwe, the late-night talk show adapted from her Instagram Live series Baited. Her questions for her guests—the likes of Fran Liebowitz, Eboni K. Williams, and Julio Torres in-studio; Stacey Abrams, Lil Rel Howery, and Gloria Steinam over video chat—are provocatively inspired about race and class, almost always borderline unanswerable. Whether she's moderating a roundtable with a group of real-life Karens, asking Andrew Yang who his favorite billionaire is (trick question; there are no good billionaires), or cutting to a song about infantilizing women, Ziwe, impeccably dressed, governs her own world with panache. Should you choose to accept her invitation inside, you shall be greatly rewarded. —LB

Want more Thrillist? Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and Snapchat.