NPR's Favorite TV Shows Of 2019
NPR's TV critic and Pop Culture Happy Hour hosts pick 19 of their favorite television and streaming series of the year.
Chernobyl (HBO)
At a time when some modern politicians label any fact they dislike as fake news, there is no better moment for a miniseries dramatizing the collision between government propaganda and a massive nuclear disaster. Jared Harris is equal parts anxious impatience and weary fatalism as the real-life scientist who pushed the Soviet Union in 1986 to accept that an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was an international disaster caused by its own substandard design. Chillingly re-created with passionate performances — Stellan Skarsgard is a secret MVP as the Soviet apparatchik who slowly realizes the state is dead wrong — this miniseries shows the human cost where political convenience outweighs factual reality. — Eric Deggans
The Crown (Netflix)
The cast is different, but everything else — the sumptuous production, the period details and the central gimmick (namely: the series' insistence that whatever minor diplomatic could feasibly doom the British Empire itself) — is veddy veddy much the same. Comfortingly so. Olivia Colman is marvelous as the doughty monarch who longs for a simpler life that's less
