Paste Power Rankings: The 5 Best TV Shows on Right Now, from Mare to The Bite

Two of our current favorites, Mare of Easttown and Cruel Summer, both make the case for why a weekly release schedule is good. For one, it keeps everyone talking about the shows longer, but more importantly, it’s a more rewarding viewing experience. Am I dying for new episodes? Yes! But that’s exciting, and it’s fun to theorize about who the killer might be, or what the truth is, in the meantime. It’s a TV experience that binge-watching threatened to end, but we’re thrilled that it has seen a resurgence lately and seems here to stay.

The rules for the Power Rankings are simple: Any current series on TV qualifies, whether it’s a comedy, drama, news program, animated series, variety show or sports event. It can be on a network, basic cable, premium channel, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube or whatever you can stream on your smart TV, as long as a new episode was made available the previous week (ending Sunday) —or, in the case of shows released all at once, it has to have been released within the previous four weeks. The voting panel is composed of Paste Editors and TV writers with a pretty broad range of tastes.

Honorable Mention: The Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime), Everything’s Gonna Be Okay (Freeform), Trying (Apple TV+), Gomorrah (HBO Max), Mythic Quest (Apple TV+)

5. The Bite

Network: Spectrum
Last Week’s Ranking: Not Eligible
This Week: A delightful skewering of the pandemic that you can really sink your teeth into.

Leave it Robert and Michelle King, the husband and wife team behind Evil and The Good Fight, to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic with such hilarious aplomb; the Kings have always had the ability to make viewers laugh while helping them to confront some harsh truths. Rachel (Audra McDonald) is a doctor living in New York City spending her days doing tele-visits while her husband Zach (Steven Pasquale) is in Washington, D.C. working for the CDC. Rachel is navigating patients who don’t exactly take the virus seriously. “I’ve lost my sense of taste which is fine. It keeps me from snacking,” a patient tells Rachel after attending a COVID party. Rachel’s upstairs neighbor Lily (Taylor Schilling) continues her dominatrix business virtually. But when one of Rachel’s patients is bitten by a grocery clerk at Trader Joe’s, Rachel soon realizes this latest variant of the virus is more concerning than anyone could have known.

The Kings’ trademark skewering of pop-culture is on delightful display (a website called Room Rankers watches the world’s rooms “so you don’t have to”), and its takedown of the political system is spot on: government officials want to call the outbreak Sun-9 because “the S sound is more pleasing to the ear.” The six-episode series is reminiscent of the Kings’ short-lived BrainDead, but even more relevant now. Our only regret is that its airing on Spectrum, which means far too many viewers won’t be able to see this fantastic series.—Amy Amatangelo

---

4. Cruel Summer

Network: Freeform (Next day on Hulu)
Last Week’s Ranking: 4
This Week: Anyone else running over to Reddit immediately after watching for theories?

I had to give up taking notes on Cruel Summer, Freeform’s new 90s-set teen mystery series, about 2,000 words in. That said, the very density that prompted me to get 2,000 words deep in a meticulous kind of madness before changing course is precisely the thing that’s likely to turn Cruel Summer into the internet’s next big generation-spanning hit. Truly, from its complex, triple-layered timeline to its compellingly intimate POV-flipping narrative structure to its viscerally accurate mid-90s details, Cruel Summer is custom-built to be an object of social media obsession.

In the one corner, you have Aurelia’s Jeanette Turner, who at any given moment is a sweetly awkward 15, or a recently popular 16, or a universally despised 17, and who may or may not be guilty of compounding another girl’s trauma. In the other corner, you have Holt’s Kate Wallis, who at any given moment is a universally beloved 15, or a freshly traumatized 16, or an acidly angry 17. In between them, you have a gulf of not-knowing—a not-knowing that at any given moment might come from one character’s inherent duplicity, the natural gaps in another’s first-hand knowledge of a situation, or the fundamental unreliability of memory even before intense emotion is involved. There are some truths that are more real for some characters, and less for others; some realities that are more tangible in one moment than they are in the next.

The likelihood that one girl is lying and the other telling the truth hangs over Cruel Summer like a thundercloud, but in giving the audience just one walled-off chunk of each girl’s side of the narrative at a time, the possibility that they’re both telling a story that’s true to them is just as present. In floating the mid-90s media’s take on Jeanette and Kate to the top of its story over and over again, Cruel Summer adds an important third perspective on the nature of reality, and all the ways in which it can be warped in the name of “truth.” —Alexis Gunderson

---

3. Girls5eva

Network: Peacock
Last Week’s Ranking: Honorable Mention
This Week: It gets the early aughts so, so right.

Meredith Scardino’s series, which is also executive produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock—her bosses from Netflix’s Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—focuses on the four remaining members of a one-hit wonder ‘90s girl pop group. Thrown together then by a lecherous and demoralizing manager, they had nothing in common, no autonomy over their talents or their bodies, and no idea what they were getting into. They sang songs entitled “Jailbait” and “Dream Girlfriends” (which included lyrics like “We’ve got the kind of birth control that goes in your arm. And tell me again why Tarantino’s a genius”). Now Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry), Dawn (Sara Bareilles), Summer (Busy Philipps), and Gloria (Paula Pell) have all but been forgotten by anyone beyond a bored Wikipedia editor—until a chance at a comeback has them taking a second look at where they’ve been and where they’re going.

Girls5eva is a cautionary tale about the era of low-rider jeans and sateen “going out tops”; about a time when young girls were supposed to giggle when their boyfriends compared them to the women in Maxim magazine and didn’t flinch if their professors offered to buy them drinks after class. But it also has a special present for the Gen Xers, late Millennials, Xennials, and anyone else who groks with its commentary on aging and the frustration and rage one can feel over being ignored and underappreciated—especially the frustrations we have with ourselves for not being “better.”—Whitney Friedlander

---

2. Hacks

Network: HBO Max
Last Week’s Ranking: 1
This Week: A devilishly wry comedy that is also full of pathos.

HBO Max’s latest series Hacks follows 25-year-old writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) as she tries to get her comedy career back on track after losing her job due to a bad tweet. Her journey takes her to Las Vegas, where she reluctantly starts writing material for Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a comedy veteran whose life is much like the china she collects: beautiful to behold, but cold and empty within. Deborah fills her life with work due to the absence of a personal life, which she’s eschewed ever since her husband left her for her own sister decades ago.

The show is a traditional odd couple pairing. Ava is bisexual, a Bernie supporter, and a chronic oversharer—in essence, your classic media depiction of a millennial. Deborah is brash, saying whatever she likes regardless of how others feel, and surrounds herself with gaudy opulence. Over the course of the series, they realize just how similar they are. Both of them are career-obsessed, more than a little self-centered, lack a personal life and, in the words of one side character, they’re “both psychotic bitches.”

Smart and Einbinder deftly pull off this two-hander thanks to their respective talent and excellent chemistry. Smart is at her peak here, moving from hilarious in one scene to quietly heartbreaking in the next. Deborah can be truly unlikable at certain moments, but the sensational Smart plays her with such subtlety and warmth that you still care about her—even though she has live fish pumped into her man-made lake.

With a strong cast and some stellar directorial choices, Hacks is a necessary addition to your summer watch list. —Clare Martin

---

1. Mare of Easttown

Network: HBO
Last Week’s Ranking: 2
This Week: We. cannot. wait. until. the finale.

Is there such a thing as a sober, carefully considered obsession? If so, that’s what we encounter in the HBO limited series Mare of Easttown, a show that is ostensibly about a series of deaths in a hardscrabble Pennsylvania town, but is, in reality, about the heavy pain of being alive. The plights of our time are all on display in the series—poverty, depression, drug addiction, suicide—and the debilitating effects are handled with masterful subtlety. This is a Kate Winslet vehicle through and through, and for an actor once described as having the “soul and attitude of a jobbing actress, trapped in the body of a movie star,” here again we see her embodying a pained, difficult character who is not always sympathetic. As Mare Sheehan, police detective and former high school basketball star, she has suffered, and suffered, and suffered some more in ways that leave her defiant, sarcastic, and cynical, but too tough to be broken. It’s not an easy psychological space to occupy, but Winslet, looking appropriately haggard except in the rare cases when she decides to be beautiful—moments of hope that are almost more painful than the perpetual fatigue of reality—is more than equal to the task, carrying the show with all the brilliance you’d expect from somebody so talented. If you come to Mare for Kate Winslet, as many will, you won’t be disappointed.

There can be a nagging tendency, when depicting “strong women,” to atone for years of under-representation on the screen by turning them into invulnerable super women, conflating the two genres—drama and comic book—that should be kept separate. Mare stands out for its realistic depictions of this strength, highlighting not just the impressive resilience of its women, but the ways in which the need for this resilience takes its toll, both over time and in harsh, shattering moments. When those characters falter, or even break, it only serves to highlight that underlying strength; these are portraits written and directed by human beings with a deep understanding of how life works on the psychological margins. —Shane Ryan

---

For all the latest TV news, reviews, lists and features, follow @Paste_TV.