The 3 Best New TV Shows to Watch Right Away-- I mean NOW!
A guide for the person with too many choices and not enough time.
With so many new TV series flooding our screens like a burst dam, it can seem impossible to catch our breath long enough to keep our interest afloat. There’s so much dark water swirling around to drag us under into wasting precious hours on something barely meh, that it’s a challenge to know which shows to devote our time to. So many become water-logged after a couple episodes and sink unmourned to the cold depths. Fortunately, here are three shows that are so good that you will be eagerly awaiting each new episode—and hoping there’s another season in the future.
Moon Knight Is the Best Marvel TV Show—Ever (Disney+)
Marvel has been pumping out new comic book-based superhero TV shows every few months and I couldn’t be happier. Each one has been smart, funny, and thoroughly entertaining. The shows aren’t just world building, or even universe building—they’re multiverse building. And they’re doing it Marvel-ously. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, Loki, Hawkeye—and even the animated What If…?—have all maintained the high quality writing, directing, and special effects of the Marvel movies. But I was especially surprised when Moon Knight somehow rose a notch above the others.
What does Moon Knight do that the others don’t? Most important, unlike the other series, this is an origin story about a Jewish-American man with dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities) who also channels an Egyptian god. This sounds more complex than it really is and part of the joy of the series is unravelling the mystery of how all the pieces fit together.
In the other Marvel series, the superheroes have already been established so they’ve all pretty much come to grips with who they are and what that means. In Moon Knight, the character we’re first introduced to, Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), is a nerdy nebbish museum gift shop lackey who is just starting to realize there’s something mystical happening to him. He blacks out and wakes up in another country being chased by trained assassins of a sinister cult, only to black out and wake up standing amid a circle of dead assassins.
It's this disorienting journey of discovering who he is and what he’s up against that adds a delicious layer of characterization that is less developed in the other Marvel series. Our personal connection with Steven Grant is more intimate than with the others and makes us care about him on a deeper level. That special relationship raises the stakes thereby making the suspense more intense.
Watch it, enjoy it—thank me later.