Stay Cool By Watching the Best TV Shows of 2021 (So Far)

Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture.

Manage newsletters View in browser with Kevin Fallon Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. This Week: Go outside? Gross! Watch these shows instead. Top Chef has been flawless. Very! Important! Jonathan Taylor Thomas update! Never not thinking about The Rosie O'Donnell Show. This horrible, heinous news week? No thank you!!! The Best Shows to Catch Up on This Summer It is July 4th weekend! The country is reopening! People are making plans, something at once wonderful and absolutely horrible!    It is #HotVaxSummer. It is "Finally Hug Your Loved Ones" time. It is "Go to Those Canceled Weddings," "Have an Even Bigger Birthday Bash to Make Up for That Shitty Last One," and "Wait in Line for Bars and Not Be Mad About It" season. It is the "Feel Even More Alone Because Everyone's Doing Things But You're Still Home By Yourself Hugging Your Air Conditioning" hellscape many of us have been dreading.   We all have our journeys. A recent one of mine took me on what was supposed to be a lovely evening stroll through New York City after a long work day of eye-frying screen time. My body rejected it completely. The entire concept. The sweat was instant, and there was so much of it that my grave concern triggered a throbbing headache. My face, already red from the heat and the aforementioned spewing firehose of perspiration, started to break out and my eyes began itching. What am I allergic to aside from, apparently, existing outdoors like a normal human? Couldn't say. My hands started to turn another color. (?!?!?!)    This is all to say, so happy for you, the people who are rabid and ready to be unleashed back into the world. I briefly tried it, and will instead be back on my couch watching television. Should you like to spiritually join me, I have some recommendations for you to watch. I am an expert, after all: This is literally all I've done for the last year and a half and, apparently, all I will do until my air conditioner shorts out and I combust.    Think of it as, at this halfpoint of the year, sort of a Best of TV in 2021 (So Far) list. But it's also not really that. As the summer amps us up and we crave fun, but maybe not the kind that causes sunburn, it's mostly a list of really entertaining things you might have missed that I think you should catch up on.   Hacks: Icon Jean Smart as a foul-mouthed, fed-up, but incredibly driven aging stand-up comic would be reason alone to tune in. That the series deepened into an exploration of self-worth, the limits we place on ourselves, how we run toward and away from family and connection, and mortality is icing on an already decadent cake. Mare of Easttown: I advise you not to trust anyone who wasn't a fan of this show. Kate Winslet, with her outrageous Delco accent, is perfect. Jean Smart—there she is again—is perfect. Julianne Nicholson, oh my god, is absolutely perfect. Evan Peters is perfect in a very specific way in that I've never seen such good drunk acting. This is a murder mystery that is thrilling at every twist and the rare one to produce a gratifying ending. It's also a beautiful portrait of generational trauma and the ways in which tight-knit communities carry their scars.   Girls5eva: Tony-winner Renée Elise Goldsberry of Hamilton plays a diva former member of a '90s girl group whose prized possession is a see-through piano she calls Ghislaine: "I named it 20 years ago. It was a pretty name then, it's a pretty name now. I'm not changing it." Sara Bareilles sings about her fear that she'll accidentally send a picture of her vagina to her dad. Paula Pell and Busy Philipps are flawless. And, beyond all that, Tina Fey makes a cameo as a fever-dream Dolly Parton—something that, implausibly, 100 percent works.   For All Mankind: You know that thing where a show starts pretty meh, so you abandon it. But then everyone insists it gets good, and then next thing you know, season two has aired and people talk about how it might be the best drama on TV? Friends, behold For All Mankind.   Top Chef Portland: I can't remember the last time I thought a season of a reality competition series was this good. And 18 seasons in, which is just remarkable. Obviously I cried at least once an episode.    Search Party: When a show is branded a "cult favorite," the misconception is that it's only for a niche audience. I reject that when it comes to Search Party. Yes, its audience was small, yet passionate. But the brilliance with which it cycled through millennial satire, procedural drama, courtroom black comedy, survivalist thriller, and even horror—all with, somehow, a straight face and unrivaled wit—should be for everyone. At least everyone with taste.   Chad: Give all credit to Nasim Pedrad for sticking with a passion project so preposterous for so long. In Chad, which took years to finally hit screens, she plays a high-school boy navigating the pressures of tenuous teenage social circles and hormones. As in, yes, she plays the boy. It works, and is so poignant and awkward that it's no surprise that reviews often mentioned Lisa Kudrow's The Comeback as a cringe-comedy reference point.   Pig Royalty: Discovery+'s series about warring families of pig showers—as in, people who parade their pigs as if in a beauty pageant—summons Shakespeare, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Queer Eye, and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo as references, all swirling in one, beautiful sty.  WandaVision: At this point, if you still need me to explain why this show is good, it is very clear you have no straight men in your life.    In Treatment: Uzo Aduba is serving looks. She is serving acting. She is serving therapy. There are about 400 episodes in a season of In Treatment, all mini-plays that individually rank among the most electric half hours on TV but, cumulatively, make up one of the most intelligent series reboots in recent memory.   It's a Sin and The Underground Railroad: If the idea is "carefree entertainment," my God, I would never recommend these to you. But if the idea is "the best TV of 2021 so far," these should be the first two shows you turn to. What Will I Do Without My Perfect Season of Top Chef?  At the time I am filing this newsletter, I will not yet have seen the finale episode of Top Chef Portland, which concluded late Thursday night. Yet there is little in the world I have more confidence in than it being absolutely perfect. That is how steady the hand has been that guided the venerable Bravo competition series through this fantastic season of television. The weekly ritual for Top Chef fans is whipping up whatever paltry food of their own to eat while watching the night's episode, with then a subsequent dash to social media to fawn over how surprisingly profound, cathartic, and indisputably competent this season has been.  It was shot during the pandemic, in a bubble that disrupted the show's elaborate production norms. As other reality series have shown us, such constraints shouldn't have created something this good.    But this landing, stuck with a Simone Biles level of precision, follows what had already been a seasons-long evolution of the show away from manipulated reality-TV fireworks—villainry, cutthroatness, implausible situations—and towards an embrace of skill, compassion, craft, and camaraderie. That the show has become so tender is what has made it so fun.   We don't just learn the chef contestants' resumes, but also the devastating impact that the pandemic has had on their careers, their families, and their employees. It's immediately clear that it's not just a competition, but an unbelievable opportunity to cook and collaborate again amidst a world shutdown.    The emotion extended to judges Padma Lakshmi, Tom Colicchio, and Gail Simmons, who joined the cast in a production bubble, as well as an assembled group of all-stars from the show's past. The familial aspect instilled the show with a sense of appreciation and mentorship. "Pack your knives and go" may still have been the catchphrase, but the ruthlessness of the chop was, in a noticeable and moving way, missing.    It became a richer, more poignant, and often more humorous and electric version of itself because it singled out the basic elements that sometimes get lost in over-producing and deepened them.    This is in stark contrast to other series like RuPaul's Drag Race, which has become almost cynical in its incessant production cycle and continued reliance on egregious complications and twists, or even some versions of Real Housewives, which have struggled to hold on to the core of what made the show not just entertaining, but valuable, while diversifying casts and responding to the weightier issues of the world they exist in.  If you've ever watched Top Chef, I would suggest going back and bingeing this season. It's really worth it, especially if you have any institutional memory of how it evolved to get here. The Emotional Return of Jonathan Taylor Thomas It is tempting to roll your eyes and laugh at an Us Weekly headline that reads, "Jonathan Taylor Thomas Spotted in Hollywood for the 1st Time in Years: Photos"—complete with an all-caps "EXCLUSIVE" badge over it—except that I cannot express how deeply, truly important this news is to me. To you. To so many millennials. To society.   The Home Improvement/The Lion King star is, iconically, THE millennial child crush.  There is a sweet spot where, if you were a girl born in the last four years or so of the '80s, you were in love with Jonathan Taylor Thomas, perhaps to the point that you had scribbled "Mrs. JTT" in multiple school notebooks, shrieked when you didn't land on him as your husband in a game of MASH, and wallpapered your room with his magazine covers.    If you were a boy, you couldn't shake the feeling while watching him outsmart Tim Allen (in hindsight, not an impressive feat) that you desperately wanted to be like this guy, or at least his friend.    Or, if you were like me, it was a torturous, potentially traumatizing combination of both. You didn't know that you were gay, or what being gay was, or that you could even be it, so you just lived with the confusing fact that you were obsessed with this guy on TV and cried because you could never get your hair to part the way that his did.  This is a digression because there is news. He has been spotted! Thomas famously disappeared from Hollywood long ago. Now here he is, be-still-my-heart, and he is...wearing a mask under his chin? Has a graying scraggly goatee? Is vaping???!!    I'm going to need to take a personal day. Do We Appreciate The Rosie O'Donnell Show Enough? On the subject of gay origin stories, like so many people my age, especially gay men, The Rosie O'Donnell Show was as much a haven as there came, even if we weren't quite sure why. It opened up a world that we knew that, immediately, was our world, even if we had no idea it had existed until that point.    Whatever there is to say about the role of kindness, fandom, or where serious issues belong in daytime TV, it's Rosie's show that started the conversation. During extremely tough periods of my life, the show was a daily light. I've said it before, but Rosie O'Donnell is the only celebrity I've ever written to. In any case, journalist Ashley Spencer reported a sensational story for Vulture about the series on its 25th anniversary, elucidating much better than I just did about why it was so revolutionary and the impact it continues to have. Read it!  Always Go to Wikipedia First  For much of this week, I was in such a state of disgust I couldn't tell which way was up and what story I was retching over.    Bill Cosby, Phylicia Rashad, Britney's conservatorship request, James Franco's sexual assault settlement, the New York Board of Elections' incompetence, every tragic update from Miami, Serena's withdrawal from the French Open, NXIVM's Allison Mack sentenced... My God, all of that and I haven't even brought up the IKEA bisexual couch.    This is just to say that, after such a dizzying, dismaying week, I am forever grateful to the heroes of the internet: the "shitty person died" Wikipedia updaters. Honorable mention: The "shitty person who defended her rapist sitcom husband" Wikipedia updaters. Summer of Soul: The summer's best concert happened in 1969. (Friday in theaters and on Hulu) Fear Street Part One: 1994: I have no idea why this week's such a millennial's walkthrough childhood nostalgia, but this R.L. Stine adaptation is great. (Fri. on Netflix) I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson: All I can say is, finally!!! (Tues. on Netflix) Gossip Girl: Strong feelings will be had, but it's nice for there to be a reboot that seems like an event. (Thurs. On HBO Max) The Boss Baby: Family Business: Blown away to learn that the Boss Baby sequel is subpar. (Fri. in theaters and on Peacock) The Forever Purge: The only thing that should be murdered during the annual purge is this franchise! I am sure others have made this joke! (Fri. in theaters) Advertisement © Copyright 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC 555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011 Privacy Policy If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, click here to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can safely unsubscribe.