Who Has Given the Best TV Performance of the 2020s?

I'll give you a hint: It's not anyone from "And Just Like That."

You will not believe me when I tell you this, but we are already more than halfway through the 2020s. We have, in all likelihood, already reached the crest of Peak TV and are now, slowly, making our way down the back slope. While we don’t know what the future of television may hold, your friends at Ministry of Pop Culture were in lockstep agreement that the past 5+ years has seen an overabundance of exceptional television.

So we began to debate a surprisingly tricky question: What is the single best performance in a television series of the 2020s? See our answers below, along with some honorable-mention selections thrown in for good measure. And please add your nominees in the comments!

Murray Bartlett in The White Lotus

(HBO)

I binge-watched the first two seasons of White Lotus recently and, amid a myriad of Cadillac, blockbuster performances, I cannot stop thinking about Murray Bartlett as Armond. Bartlett's performance as the resort's unraveling hotel manager was so deliciously wicked, wild, and precise. His snarl and overall facial expressions, terrifying. His ability to make you hate him and sympathize with him, uncanny. His descent into madness over the course of the season, perfection. It is a true tribute to Bartlett's chameleon nature that I was deeply shocked to discover he also played Oliver Spencer on Sex and the City?!? Please rewatch Season Four's “All That Glitters” and revel in the full range of this incredible actor. —Thea Glassman

(Paramount +)

Christine Baranski, The Good Fight and The Gilded Age

Diane Lockhart is indisputably one of the best roles in the past 25 years to come out of network television (and I'd say TV in general). Baranski first began portraying the fiercely feminist attorney in 2009 in a supporting role on The Good Wife. When that show ended, co-creators Robert and Michelle King gave the actress her own spinoff, The Good Fight. The series concluded in 2022, which means 13 years of playing the same role!

Yet Baranski's portrayal of Diane never got rote or stale. If anything, it was thrilling to see Diane Lockhart become a protagonist of a series that had her biases and belief systems constantly challenged after joining a Black-owned law firm. Diane's indignation was also a proxy for many viewers, as she and her colleagues took on cases based on real events, including the goings-on during the first Trump administration.

Despite her liberal politics and her goal to fight “the good fight,” Diane was never a perfect character, and that was the point: she constantly had to face her own contradictions, including her marriage to a Republican and her deployment of her white privilege in a Black law firm. Baranski portrayed these dimensions beautifully and often with a lot of humor, and for viewers who first met her in The Good Wife, it was a rewarding experience to see Baranski portray this character for over a decade.

A few years later, she and her Good Fight co-star Audra McDonald¹ joined The Gilded Age, which saw Baranski portray someone Diane Lockhart would have rolled her eyes at: a blue-blooded matriarch who hates change and hates her wealthy new neighbors even more. Baranski is hilarious in her portrayal of judgmental, stuffy Agnes Van Rhijn, and adds dimension to what could be a one-note role by showing hints of vulnerability underneath her icy veneer.

One of the positive developments in pop culture in recent years is the rise of midlife-and-older women on television, with Baranski long leading the charge. Here's hoping she continues on television and cast in roles worthy of her talents for years to come. —Kirthana Ramisetti

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(HBO)

Heléne Yorke in The Other Two

With all due respect to Jason Sudeikis, Jeremy Allen White, Bill Hader, and Jeremy Strong, let’s give our flowers to someone who hasn’t already received them by the bushel. And while my heart wants to simply state “Noah Wyle in The Pitt” and drop my mic, I’d prefer someone we spent a bit more time with over the course of the decade. So my choice is Heléne Yorke from The Other Two. Playing Brooke Dubek, flop-sweat sister to teen pop idol Chase (Case Walker) and daughter to daytime-TV superstar Pat (Molly Shannon), Yorke begins The Other Two desperate for success that never quite arrives. Slowly, assiduously transforming herself into a girlboss icon, Brooke makes herself over into the image of success she sees in the mirror, but Yorke’s performance, in which she conveys equal parts hunger, disdain, self-critique, and fury, is quietly expert. We are always on the brink of turning on Brooke, but Yorke keeps us from ever doing so.

There are many—perhaps too many—television series about stardom and success—but what The Other Two did best was keep its supernovae at a distance. Brooke loves and cares for her brother and her mother, but what they have, she can never acquire. The Other Two is like a twenty-first century I Love Lucy, with Brooke, and her actor brother Cary (Drew Tarver), desperate for success that never arrives. Yorke is brilliant at making us feel that hunger, and also note the patent artificiality of her constant makeovers. And then, in the show’s final season, something really interesting happens. The Other Two becomes a show about growth without ever losing sight of being a comedy.

Brooke’s fuckboi ex Lance (Josh Segarra) becomes a nurse, cares for COVID patients, and is crowned People’s Sexiest Man Alive. Brooke realizes that she, also, wants to grow up. Lighting a fire in Lance’s apartment that allows him to heroically rescue his neighbors, attending a play about AIDS that turns into a grueling endurance contest, agreeing to plant trees in the Bronx and then finding that she has absolutely no patience for anything of the sort, the concluding arc of episodes of The Other Two is about Brooke hungering for decency and being unable to find it.

Television—like life—is often crammed full of selfish, self-absorbed people. Without prosthetics or wigs or any other actorly fluff, Yorke transforms herself from within, giving us television’s richest portrayal yet of a recovering narcissist finding her way to a kind of grace. In the series finale, Chase and Pat are mercilessly mauled on social media for their participation in Brooke’s “Night of Undeniable Good” fundraiser, and Brooke takes all of the blame, resigning as their agent. Being an adult, Brooke finally comes to understand, means you don’t always get to star in your own story. —Saul Austerlitz

(Apple TV+)

Jon Hamm in Your Friends & Neighbors

The role of Don Draper on Mad Men was so iconic—and I don’t throw that word around lightly—that it had the power to not only make a career, but also to suffocate it with its indelibility. He has, of course, had no trouble getting work since, appearing in movies such as Baby Driver and Top Gun: Maverick, as well as on TV’s Fargo and Landman, all while continuing to remind us that he’s funny, too, in often Saturday Night Live-adjacent projects like 30 Rock, Bridesmaids, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. But no role has made me forget Don Draper, while still drawing on a number of his charms, quite like Hamm’s recent turn as the disgraced hedge fund manager Andrew Cooper on AppleTV+’s Your Friends & Neighbors. As Coop turns toward robbing his ultra-wealthy neighbors under the financial pressure of maintaining his family’s lifestyle, the character smoothly blends everything we loved about Draper—the suave, cold, calculating confidence—with the goofy, vulnerable side that allows Hamm to be very funny when he wants to. I believe him when he’s looking longingly at ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet); I believe him when he’s pratfalling in a pool of blood; I believe him when he’s blackmailing a high-priced lawyer or confronting a country club manager with steely, scary resolve.

Coop’s final choice of the first season is an infuriating one that only a still-at-the-top-of-his-game Hamm could sell. I can’t wait for season 2. —Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

Honorable mentions (presented in alphabetical order):

Jodi Balfour, For All Mankind

Jon Bernthal, We Own This City

Matt Berry, What We Do in the Shadows

Cate Blanchett, Mrs. America

Lionel Boyce, The Bear

May Calamawy, Ramy

Anthony Carrigan, Barry

Michaela Coel, I May Destroy You

Alan Cumming, The Traitors

Mackenzie Davis, Station Eleven

Taylor Dearden, The Pitt

Bridget Everett, Somebody Somewhere

Ana Fabrega, Los Espookys

Meghann Fahy, The White Lotus

Will Ferrell, The Shrink Next Door

Nathan Fielder, The Rehearsal

Railey and Seazynn Gilliland, High School

Sarah Goldberg, Barry

Renée Elise Goldsberry, Girls5Eva

Jeff Hiller, Somebody Somewhere

Sarah Kameela Impey, We Are Lady Parts

Devery Jacobs, Reservation Dogs

Zoe Kazan, The Plot Against America

Richard Kind, Everybody’s Live

Anna Konkle, Pen15

Dan Levy, Schitt’s Creek

Britt Lower, Severance

Matthew Maher, Our Flag Means Death

James Marsden, Jury Duty

Steve Martin, Only Murders in the Building

Paul Mescal, Normal People

Ambika Mod, One Day

Ebon Moss-Bachrach, The Bear

Genevieve O’Reilly, Andor

Edi Patterson, The Righteous Gemstones

Frankie Quinones, This Fool

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Never Have I Ever

Tim Robinson, I Think You Should Leave

Adam Scott, Severance

Andrew Scott, Ripley

Rhea Seehorn, Better Call Saul

Sarah Snook, Succession

Jeremy Strong, Succession

Jason Sudeikis, Ted Lasso

Drew Tarver, The Other Two

Vince Vaughn, Bad Monkey

Anjana Vasan, We Are Lady Parts

Lydia West, It’s a Sin

Kate Winslet, Mare of Easttown

Leo Woodall, One Day

Noah Wyle, The Pitt

What did we get right? Who did we miss? And who do you think gave the best TV performance of the 2020s so far? Let us know in the comments!

1. McDonald and Baranski are theater royalty, and teamed up with Meryl Streep for this warm and terrific performance of "Ladies Who Lunch" for a tribute to Stephen Sondheim, which you can see here.