David Bianculli

It's the show I recommend most highly, but with a major caveat.

It's grim, and it's almost unbearably intense.

Intensity, it turns out, is a common factor among many of my very favorite shows from this year.

HBO Max's The Pit was a medical show with an impressively credible tension factor.

So was Netflix's The Diplomat, with its unpredictable, high-stakes plot twists.

And so was FX's The Bear, even though it wasn't about life or death, just appetizers and entrees.

The Bear even calls itself a comedy, but it's not.

Much, much too dramatic for that.

A couple of my other favorite TV dramas, almost equally intense, featured ragtag, mismatched investigative teams thrown together to solve specific crimes.

One, HBO's Task, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with lots of emotional baggage, played by Mark Ruffalo.

Another, Netflix's Department Q, was headed by a brooding, intelligent guy with even more emotional baggage, played by Matthew Goode.

His character is returning to work after being shot and almost killed.

And at first, he's openly hostile to his police-appointed therapist, played by Kelly MacDonald, who's as sharp and brittle as he is.

No more than normal.

And maybe it's just me, but this year I definitely gravitated to dramatic shows that made me uneasy.

It was another great season for Netflix's Black Mirror, and the end-of-year final episode of another dark Netflix fantasy series, Stranger Things, is eagerly awaited by many.

Including me, because I've seen all the new episodes leading up to it, but the finale is being kept under wraps.

That show's been around since 2016, almost a decade.

But other terrific genre shows were new takes on old ideas.

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein on Netflix was an excellent and very different adaptation.