The 20 Best New TV Shows of 2019

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – December 29, 2019

Above are the highest-scoring first-year TV series debuting in the United States between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. Shows are ranked by Metascore (an average of grades from top professional critics on a 0-100 scale) prior to rounding, and any programs with fewer than 7 reviews are excluded.

(Note that limited series, as well as TV movies and specials, are ranked in a separate list.)

12 of 21 photo by Alex Lombardi

82 PEN15 (Hulu)

(#12) We might be in a golden age of coming-of-age comedies on both the big and small screen. But this 10-episode Hulu original managed to shake up the usual formula with a unique twist: Two of the 7th graders in this middle school comedy are played by fully grown adults—the show's creators, Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine, who star as versions of their real (awkward) selves in the year 2000. Their classmates? They are played by actual 13-year-olds. What could have been gimmicky (or, worse, creepy) in the wrong hands is instead hilarious, insightful, and endlessly charming, making for one of 2019's best comedies. It'll be back in 2020 for a second season.

“An impossible masterpiece of teen TV that is authentically raw but also dreamily weird, a goof-off LOL comedy full of traumatic middle-school melancholy.” —Darren Franich, Entertainment Weekly

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