2019 in Television

Television of the year, 2019:

• Chernobyl
• Tell Me Who I Am
• Star Wars: The Mandalorian
• The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
• Louis Theroux:
• The Night in Question 
• Mothers on the Edge
• Surviving the Most Hated Family in America
• Line of Duty: Season 5
• Unbelievable
• True Detective: Season 3
• When They See Us
• The Devil Next Door.

Honourable mention:

• David Bowie: Finding Fame
• The Last Czars
• Stranger Things: Season 3
• Game of Thrones: Season 8.

In a strong year for historical dramas, HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl was an atmospheric piece of filmmaking that managed a balanced portrait of tragedy and institutional incompetence. (Its occasional liberties with historical accuracy were disclosed and justified in the epilogue.) Meanwhile, Netflix dramatised the 2008–2011 Washington and Colorado serial rape cases in Unbelievable; and the streaming service also released When They See Us, which was based on the 1989 Central Park jogger case.

Tell Me Who I Am was the year’s strongest documentary: a British film about Alex Lewis’ amnesia, his complicated relationship with his twin brother Marcus, and the final shocking revelations about their childhood. Louis Theroux made three more documentaries about sensitive subjects on the BBC; and the bizarre court battles of suspected concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk were documented in The Devil Next Door. (Demjanjuk’s court appearances had already been discussed in some depth in 2018’s more satisfying The Accountant of Auschwitz, about Oskar Gröning.)

2019 saw the reboot of Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal via the prequel series Age of Resistance: a bold undertaking that expanded on the show’s mythology in an inventive manner, while maintaining the dark tone of the 1982 film. Later in the year, the Star Wars saga launched its first live-action series The Mandalorian, which follows the adventures of a bounty hunter in the period following the events of the original trilogy. The series maintains a restrained Western-flavoured tone, while expanding on the universe but staying respectful to its core elements (a feat that The Rise of Skywalker catastrophically failed to achieve).

BBC police drama Line of Duty entered its fifth series in a typically bold manner, but was ultimately a little dissatisfying. Disillusionment with the last season of HBO’s Game of Thrones has been well documented, but the show did manage one final spectacular battle in the episode ‘The Long Night’. True Detective returned, and while it failed to match the quality of its first season, the third instalment was a significant improvement on the second one and more in keeping with the original tone.