2019 in TV Shows

Better late than never! Another year, another recap of all the great (and not so great) shows we’ve watched in the past year!

If you follow this blog, you’ll know that I watch quite a lot of TV. I also like quantifying things. It was only natural that I come up with a way to mix those things, and find out more about the time I spend in front of the screen. Enter Traktivity.

Just like last year, I’ve used the tool to create a little summary of the year.

First, some numbers

431 hours in front of the screen: 494 TV episodes, 39 movies. It always makes me feel a bit guilty to see this added up. That’s 17 days out of 365!

Considering that last year we racked up 533 hours, I guess that’s an improvement :)

As you can see, most of this was TV. We’ve watched a grand total of 49 different shows this year.

TV

Here is a quick overview of most of those 49 shows. Some are ongoing shows you most likely already know, but we had a few pleasant newcomers this year, that I’ll try to outline below.

Just like last year, Drama and Science-Fiction are the dominant genres we watch:

And just like last year, Netflix is a clear winner once again. I suspect Disney+ may get bigger in 2020 though. :)

Drama

So much drama this year again :)

Once again, I’ll pick This Is Us as the winner in this category. Here are a few others that we enjoyed:

• The Deuce was a great view into prostitution and the growth of porn in New York, in the seventies and eighties.
• We enjoyed The Good Fight, it went really all in into its analysis of the current political climate in the US. We are looking forward to the new season.
• Dead To Me is a good dark comedy / drama, with 2 great actresses with a great chemistry.
• Big Little Lies is another dark drama with great actresses, it was really good to binge watch the first two seasons.

Science-fiction

We’ve watched so much this year, it’s hard to pick the best! If I had to pick only four, I’d probably pick the following:

• The Expanse once again nailed it with this fourth season. The book it was based on was my least favorite of the series, but they made some clever writing choices to improve on the books.
• The Boys was the Superhero show we needed this year. I must admit I grew tired of the classic superhero shows, and this was a refreshing take on the genre.
• Living with Yourself was perfect, and Paul Rudd was the right man for the role.
• The Mandalorian was probably the biggest surprise for me. I had added the show to my watch list because I was curious; I wanted to see how the saga would translate into a series, and to be honest I had very low expectations. It turns out it was great, both for folks like me who already know a lot about the Star Wars universe, but also for folks who may not have followed everything that has happened to the universe in the past 20 years. I would really recommend it.

We watched a lot of other science-fictions series, but all in all I think those were the really refreshing shows in that overcrowded genre nowadays.

Honorable mentions would probably be:

• Watchmen: you really can’t go wrong with HBO shows. This show is so much better than Snyder’s movie.
• Counterpart: although the second season wasn’t as good as the first one, it was still a great watch. We got to learn more about the origins of the Crossing, and this alone was worth it, along with J.K. Simmons’ great acting.

Comedy

We’ve watched some really good comedies this year, old and new. Shows like The Good Place, Superstore or Modern Family are always good choices for a bit of light comedy. Two of those are ending after quite a few seasons, but it’s never too late to start watching. :)

There were also two new entries to our list:

• Fleabag was great if you like dark humour. The main actress is just great, and breaks the fourth wall regularly, which adds to the fun!
• Russian Doll was a good spin on time travel with a spin, I’d really recommend it.

What’s for 2020?

This year should be full of good shows:

• This will be the last season of Homeland.
• The Good Fight continues.
• Westworld‘s season 3 started and is still great.
• Outlander is still on our watchlist and the new season has been good so far.
• The Witcher, Altered Carbon, … Netflix has tons of good shows to deliver!

What about you? What are you watching?