Man of Steel
Zack Snyder rebuilt Superman from the ground up, and the results still split people more than a decade later. Henry Cavill plays Clark Kent as a drifter who has spent his whole life hiding what he can do, and the…
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Angel
The Buffy spin off moved the vampire with a soul to Los Angeles and quietly became a different, better show than most people remember. Where Buffy was about surviving growing up, Angel is about a grown man trying to atone for a century of atrocities and learning that redemption is not a finish line but a job. Angel Investigations, a detective agency that helps the helpless, gives the series a noir spine Buffy never had, and the early case of the week years use the city's neon rot far better than most LA dramas.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Joss Whedon's high school horror riff did something television had not managed before: it took the dumbest possible premise, a cheerleader kills vampires, and used it as scaffolding for the most literate genre drama of its era. Buffy Summers moves to Sunnydale, a town built on a Hellmouth, and over seven seasons the show treats every monster as a metaphor for something real: first love that literally leaves a scar, the person you sleep with turning into a monster after, a mother's death that no slayer strength can fix. The gimmick was monsters, the subject was growing up.
A Killer Story
HBO's three part true crime documentary digs into the 2002 Topeka murders of Mike Sisco and Karen Harkness and the two decade legal saga that followed, and it wisely spends as much time on the amateur investigators as the crime. Eileen and Keen Umbehr, a Kansas couple who became obsessed with the case after reading about it, spent years pushing a theory that prosecutors eventually used to convict Dana Chandler, and director Matthew Galkin builds the series around an uncomfortable question: what happens when true crime fans become part of the story?
ThunderCats
The 2011 Cartoon Network reboot that took everything great about the original and gave it real stakes, serialized storytelling, and animation that finally matched the epic feel the 80s version always reached for. Lion O, Tygra, and Cheetara were reimagined…
ThunderCats
Thunder, thunder, thunder, ThunderCats, ho! The 1985 classic: the survivors of the dying planet Thundera crash land on Third Earth, and young Lion O must grow into the leader his Sword of Omens demands while Mumm Ra the Ever Living…
Todd McFarlane’s Spawn
The HBO animated series that proved adult animation could be genuinely dark and cinematic. Al Simmons, a government assassin, is betrayed and murdered, then returns from Hell as Spawn, a Hellspawn warrior caught between the demon Malebolgia who owns his…
Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown
The best travel show ever made, and one of the best shows of any kind of its decade. Bourdain went to the Congo, Libya, Iran, Myanmar, the Bronx, and everywhere in between, eating what locals ate and asking the questions…
The Rehearsal
Nathan Fielder helps people rehearse their biggest life moments by building exact sets and hiring actors to play everyone in their lives, and the result is the most profound thing comedy has produced in years. It starts as a show…
How To with John Wilson
John Wilson wanders New York filming strangers and life’s weird margins, then cuts it all into documentary essays about things like small talk, scaffolding, and memory, and the results are hilarious, sad, and profound, usually in the same scene. It…