Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Karolina Wojtasik/HBO, Larry Horricks/Netflix, Euan Cherry/Peacock via Getty Images, Warrick Page/MAX, Mike Judge/Disney, Lucasfilm Ltd., Netflix
There are countless ways to make television, which means there are countless ways to be great on television. A great performer can burn brightly off the glossy sheen of serialized drama and would do so differently but no less substantially than if they popped up in a reality competition show, an animated sitcom, or a loose variety show. The 18 performances that follow represent just a portion of that range. They span genres, formats, and storytelling styles. They come from leads who shoulder entire series and ensemble players who steal scenes from the margins, from relative newcomers making striking first impressions and veterans sharpening what they already do best. You may notice that we generally skipped the most obvious choices and the ones already amply celebrated, though in a few cases, we simply couldn’t resist. This list reflects our favorites, not an attempt at completeness. That in itself underscores what a strong year it’s been for television. —Nicholas Quah
There was always an incongruous delight in having the raspy, New York–born Pamela Adlon voice a goofy prepubescent kid from a small-town Texas family. That dissonance is a big part of what made her delivery of “That’s my purse! I don’t know you!” so iconic in the first place. On paper, Adlon isn’t doing anything radically different in this year’s excellent King of the Hill revival — for the most part, Bobby Hill still sounds like Bobby Hill — but time has done its work on both performer and character. Adlon, now in her late 50s, naturally brings more lived-in warmth to Bobby, now aged up into his early 20s and navigating adulthood with the same wide-eyed earnestness that once fueled his childhood shenanigans. What’s remarkable is how gracefully Adlon continues to thread that needle: Bobby still has the musical, slightly off-kilter cadences that made him so quotable, but there’s a new softness and self-knowledge rippling underneath. Adlon makes Bobby feel new again without ever letting go of the boy we knew. —N.Q.
The Traitors is an incredibly compelling reality TV show, but as a game, it can be frustratingly lacking. The Faithful are tasked with rooting out the Traitors in their midst, but with no real clues to parse, they mostly just go by vibes. The only way to proactively play the game is to put on a show at the roundtable deliberations, and that’s exactly what Bob the Drag Queen did in The Traitors’s third season. A seasoned drag queen knows how to utilize their sense of humor and command of a room, and Bob did both. Through sheer force of personality, Bob initially disarmed the Faithful, forming bonds with the likes of Gabby and his fellow Traitor Danielle, but when cornered by Dylan Efron and “Boston” Rob Mariano, Bob fired back with ferocity. He swore to the God he didn’t believe in, he called Boston Rob a little bitch, he besmirched the acting career of Zac Efron. Bob’s was a game designed to burn brightly and leave a mark on the floor where he stood, and while he was the first Traitor banished, he did not go quietly. —Joe Reid
Coverage of Mo has primarily focused on series creator and star Mo Amer, given that it’s a fairly autobiographical version of his own life. But the second and final season really belonged to Farah Bsieso, who plays Mo’s mother Yusra as a woman of many contrasting cultural and personal obligations: She wants the best for her sons but is unable to understand how they might be different from her; she wants to follow Palestinian traditions while also challenging herself as an American entrepreneur. Yusra could have just been a ball of anxieties, but Bsieso always found the character’s core of compassion, the deep belief in the value of human life that leads to her accepting Mo’s non-Palestinian partner, making friends with Texan cowboys, and compulsively watching videos of Palestinian families and children under attack by Israeli military forces. Thanks to Bsieso’s openhearted performance, and all the anguish and resilience within it, every Middle Eastern viewer saw part of their own mother in Yusra. —Roxana Hadadi
Noah Hawley’s galaxy-brain spin on the Alien franchise left me cold, but that didn’t temper the delight of some of its performances, even Samuel Blenkin’s feet-first peacocking as Boy Kavalier. But the show’s most indelible turn comes from Babou Ceesay as Morrow. The corporate heavy in eternal service to Weyland-Yutani, he plays the series’ most stoic figure, a half-man, half-machine who has lived too long, seen too much, and committed enough sins to be permanently steeped in existential self-loathing. Morrow is (slightly) more grounded as a character concept than Alien: Earth’s Peter Pan hybrids, those adult synthetic bodies uploaded with the consciousness of children, and that’s precisely why Ceesay shines. Watchful, efficient, and bone-deep tired, he makes Morrow almost relatable, a dude who’s basically stuck in the same corporate job for far too long, clinging to what he needs to believe is a sense of duty and responsibility. Somehow, he makes a violent operative who terrorizes a young boy someone you don’t root against. In fact, you might just understand where he’s coming from. —N.Q.
Cliff Curtis is a perennial “Oh, that guy!” who has long deserved a big juicy role of his own, and he gets just that in Thomas Paʻa Sibbett and Jason Momoa’s big Hawaiian epic Chief of War. As the warrior prince Keōua, a rival to Momoa’s Kaʻiana, Curtis is phenomenally imposing, a slab of masculinity just looking for a neck to snap to prove he’s alive. Often placed in the middle of a volcanic landscape that smokes and smolders, Keōua’s all squints and snarls; in one deranged, perfect scene, as an act of provocative revenge, he punches himself in the face long enough to dislodge a tooth, and then a couple episodes later forces an enemy to do the same thing. Keōua is a force of pure aggression and chaos, and Curtis gives him the very mortal qualities of pettiness and jealousy to round out a fantastic villain. —R.H.
It’s too bad that Poker Face is ending — in its current form, at least — just when it set up Patti Harrison as the perfect foil for Natasha Lyonne. The second season’s best reveal was that Harrison wasn’t just playing Alex, an awkward but well-meaning New Yorker who, as one of the first real friends Charlie has made in years, learns about her lie-detector abilities and tags along on her exploits. In the finale, Poker Face drops the bomb that Harrison was also playing the world’s preeminent assassin, the Iguana, who befriended Charlie in order to find the mob snitch the Iguana was hired to kill. In assassin mode, Harrison replaces Alex’s motormouthed kookiness with a top-tier power bitch, and the ease with which she toggles between these personalities is so exceptional you almost wonder if Poker Face is tricking you again. Harrison’s specific brand of outsize mania created wonderful friction with Lyonne’s more laid-back neuroses, and it’s too bad that in whatever form Poker Face may return, we won’t get that dynamic again. More baddies for Harrison, please! —R.H.
Lee Raybon is as much a song as he is a rich, flawed, fully dimensional character, and Ethan Hawke sings him with such gusto, he’s bound to get stuck in your head. Hawke has that rare distinction of being one of his generation’s most versatile actors while still carrying an unmistakable spark of himself; you can drop him into The Purge, The Good Lord Bird, or the Before trilogy and watch him fully inhabit the role while tracing a continuous emotional through-line. The vibrant elocution, the admiration of existence, the flair that convinces you he could talk his way out of a run-in with fish-egg smugglers — it’s all in Lee. Within the Hawke canon, Raybon feels closer to Jesse Wallace than to, say, the Grabber, largely because he gives Hawke room to be someone who so deeply loves the world, beauty, and truth that you could never mistake him for a cynic, even when life has beaten him down. At the same time, Lee’s so high on his own supply, it’s not surprising when innocent people get hurt in the wake of his crusade. It’s a testament to Hawke’s performance that you can love him, feel sorry for him, and loathe him all at once, and it’s a testament to his charisma that he can spend big stretches of the series looking like a beat-up dog and still look so damn good. —N.Q.
American neo-westerns still have the tendency to slip into noble-savage clichés, and American Primeval isn’t entirely free of the trope. Derek Hinkey’s character, the Shoshone warrior Red Feather, is almost always frowning at white settlers, looking undeniably foreboding with his face slathered in black paint and galloping on horseback into battle. But the Netflix miniseries is more subversive than it initially seems, presenting the Mormon church as a malignant force that normalized religiously motivated violence and weaponized stereotypes about Indigenous Americans. Within that tableau, Hinkey’s anti-assimilation separatist feels not fetishized but justified. Hinkey finds both viciousness and vulnerability within Red Feather, crafting, through his fierce physicality and long, unblinking gazes, a man aware of the world steadily leaving him behind. Hinkey’s surrounded by other actors doing exceptional work — particularly Shea Whigham, Irene Bedard, and Taylor Kitsch — but given a character who easily could’ve been a bundle of stereotypes, Hinkey pushes Red Feather in another direction. —R.H.
If The Office’s first season missed the mark because audiences found its attention-seeking boss, Michael Scott, too difficult to stomach, The Paper’s first season misses the mark because it overcorrects too much in the opposite direction. The not-quite-spinoff begins with a pump fake where it introduces a similarly over-the-top boss figure in the form of Sabrina Impacciatore’s Esmeralda Grand, then demotes her to a lesser role in favor of Domhnall Gleeson’s less compelling Ned Sampson. To give the writers the benefit of the doubt, it’s possible they didn’t know in advance just how mesmerizing Impacciatore’s performance would be. How could they, when at no point in the season does she do anything a reasonable person could predict? She stresses the wrong syllables, contorts her face into a boardwalk caricature’s, and gestures wildly during every line delivery. It makes the rest of the show’s comedy feel too grounded by comparison, but you don’t want Impacciatore to tone it down. Rather, you wish the rest of the cast would rise to her level. —Hershal Pandya
In Tokyo Vice, Show Kasamatsu’s baby gangster Sato was a consummate cool guy, cutting an unmistakable figure in perfectly fitted suits and blowing smoke rings with ease. His character in The Narrow Road to the Deep North could not be further from that, and his believability as an agonized Japanese major struggling with his orders is a sign of Kasamatsu’s broadening range. In Justin Kurzel’s miniseries, Kasamatsu’s Major Nakamura is an ambitious upstart who immediately recognizes the impossible situation he’s in, commanding Australian POWs to bushwhack through a jungle to build a railway for Japan’s emperor with encouragement like, “This is an honorable mission, one you should feel proud to be part of.” But with no food or resources and widespread illness and discontent, how’s Nakamura supposed to get that done? Whatever violence the major enacts against these POWs will stain his soul, but refusing to follow his own orders will doom him. Kasamatsu’s increasingly brittle affect and abrupt line deliveries show how this is tearing him apart until a final, sweaty breakdown mirrors what the POWs are going through. This performance is a great contrast to his work on Tokyo Vice but also a fantastic expression of how the hierarchies that demand submission ultimately break everyone. —R.H.
As Black Rabbit’s Friedkin brothers, Jude Law is hot as hell and Jason Bateman’s working a hilariously scraggy beard, yet whenever the pair share a scene with Troy Kotsur, the only thing you can look at is Kotsur’s face. His presence as NYC loan shark Joe Mancuso is undeniable; Kotsur’s eyes are like two portals beaming out all the resignation, disgust, and irritation he has in his heart for his wannabe gangster son, the Friedkins who try his patience, and a changing New York City leaving old-timers like Mancuso behind as gambling goes digital. Even when the series de-ages him in a later episode, the effect can’t dampen Kotsur’s inherent magnetism and ability to become a man whose mind is always working all the angles. —R.H.
When a show is built around one actor, that actor better be damn good — especially when the series is released as a binge. If the performance can’t captivate viewers from the jump, the show threatens to disappear into the streaming abyss. Thankfully, North of North has Anna Lambe, a Canadian Inuk actress whose warm, sympathetic presence as Siaja immediately invites you to settle into the rhythms of the coming-of-age story’s triumphs and travails. There are hints of Parks and Recreation and Schitt’s Creek in her decision to leave her unfulfilling marriage and chart a new career path for herself, but Lambe’s performance is so winningly distinct and the series’ Indigenous sensibility so specific that North of North always feels like it’s doing its own thing. Lambe exudes a cheery optimism without falling too deeply into blinkered naïveté, her huge smile both genuine and an armor against a traditional culture that wants her to be a “good wife” and little else. The tension between the audience wanting the best for Siaja while her community dissuades her is key to North of North’s appeal, and that all comes down to how strongly Lambe anchors the series around her. —R.H.
The Pitt works so well because it’s full of unshowy displays of compassionate competence, and although the show’s star, Noah Wyle, and its cadre of supporting doctors (Taylor Dearden, Isa Briones, Fiona Dourif) grab most of the spotlight, a show this hectic and fast-moving requires a baseline. That glue, The Pitt’s tone-setting benchmark, is Katherine LaNasa’s performance as Nurse Dana Evans. Dana is often physically and narratively at the center of The Pitt, directing and facilitating all the action that swirls around her. She’s also the pivot point — plots scattered throughout the emergency room funnel back through her for a final reaction before transforming into new story lines. Every time, it’s LaNasa’s performance that guides and grounds the show’s broader tonal range. Pragmatic, unflappable, and just a few ticks toward the warmer side of cynicism, her work is what stitches the show together. —Kathryn VanArendonk
Michael Chernus is nightmarishly good in Devil in Disguise, nailing serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s ability to con everyone around him — which is exactly what makes Gabriel Luna’s work as detective Rafael Tovar so exemplary. Tovar is the one officer who immediately sniffs out that there’s something weird about Gacy, and Luna incrementally nudges the character further and further into obsession. His body does the work: His hunched body curves into itself as he digs into the soil under Gacy’s floorboards; when he drives Gacy to court, his posture tightens as his eyes flicker to the rearview mirror; and his long strides out of the prison where Gacy’s execution has taken on a circuslike appeal communicates his contempt for the whole affair. It’s unclear how true to life Luna’s performance is — Tovar doesn’t factor too heavily into the series’ real archival footage — but who cares if he’s a good mimic? Luna’s descent into Tovar’s disgust and exhaustion tells the Gacy story just as well as Chernus’s mercurial performance. —R.H.
It’s never a comfortable position to play second fiddle. Stories bend toward heroes and villains, and the toadies and fixers and strivers need to stay in the lane of functional plot-movers where they belong. But Matthew Macfadyen has an incredible, improbable ability to inhabit losers and turn them into magnetic, indelible protagonists. In Death by Lightning, his performance as Charles Guiteau incinerates any attempt to categorize the presidential assassin. He is ambitious, ruthless, violent, and manipulative, and in the same breath he is childlike, incapable of understanding consequences, and full of hope and good intentions. Michael Shannon is noble and avuncular as James Garfield, and Betty Gilpin is the show’s pragmatic, insightful anchor, but Macfadyen’s ability to turn Guiteau into a coherent, terrifying, tragic figure blows everyone else out of the water. —K.V.A.
Wendi McLendon-Covey has been a sitcom staple since 2003, going from series regular on Reno 911! to series regular on The Goldbergs and guesting on roughly a dozen others along the way. All those comedic reps bear fruit in her role as St. Denis Medical’s Joyce, the high-strung executive director of the mockumentary’s titular hospital. She’s mastered every type of comic beat a network sitcom can sustain: She can go big out of nowhere and toss off lines casually with pitch-perfect timing; she can telegraph insecurity and a lack of self-awareness with the same facial expression; and her bumbling physicality is expertly choreographed. In a show full of great performances, particularly those of David Alan Grier and Mekki Leeper, McLendon-Covey outshines them all through pure, practiced professionalism. —H.P.
Emmy voters should be embarrassed until the end of time for failing to nominate any of Andor’s ensemble in the major acting categories. No Diego Luna for Best Actor, no Stellan Skarsgård for Best Supporting Actor, no Elizabeth Dulau for Best Supporting Actress, and, most irritatingly of all, no Genevieve O’Reilly for Best Actress. If the first season of the series was Luna’s, with Cassian Andor undergoing a journey of radicalization that would turn him into a central figure in the Rebellion, then the second season belonged to O’Reilly’s Senator Mon Mothma as she realized all of her political wheeling and dealing wasn’t enough to put a stop to the Imperial Empire’s authoritarianism. O’Reilly starts Mothma from a place of sophistication, grace, and panicked resolve, then steadily turns her into an avatar of disgust at the Senate’s collection of corrupt pushovers and cowards. Her speech about the Empire’s Ghorman genocide is an urgent appeal for moral reckoning that is Andor at its most clear-eyed and O’Reilly at her best. Her ability to be composed and aghast in equal measure made Mothma one of the series’ most fascinating creations: a woman constantly navigating what she can do to make the promise of democracy real. —R.H.
The Righteous Gemstones got to wrap up on its own terms, so its ending was less of a bummer than it could have been. Nevertheless, it’s a travesty that Emmy voters will never get another chance to recognize Edi Patterson’s virtuoso performance as Judy Gemstone. In Gemstones’s final season, Patterson added to her tragically underappreciated comedic résumé by channeling Edi’s vitriolic outbursts into a feud with an emotional-support monkey and funneling her violently inappropriate sexual energy into a feckless attempt to blackmail her dad’s new girlfriend. “Miss Lori, quit!” she says as she writhes limply against her father’s uninterested paramour. “Quit raping me!” There are actors who do broad physical comedy and actors who subtly reveal their character’s interiority. Across Gemstones’s run, Patterson established herself as the rare actor who can do both in the same scene. —H.P.
One of The Gilded Age’s abundant joys is how, even though every actor is working in a different register, the whole thing somehow holds together. Louisa Jacobson plays the period drama in the straightest possible way; Morgan Spector is in robber-baron drag. With Blake Ritson, we see someone giving a full-tilt soap-opera performance in the very best sense. Oscar Van Rhijn’s mustache and drawling line deliveries suggest a dab of villainy, a vibe only strengthened by his scheming with Kelley Curran’s sneaky Enid Winterton. But The Gilded Age doesn’t do pure villains with its main cast, and Oscar totters between failson and tragic figure, the closeted heir of the Van Rhijn family dragged to hell and back after being defrauded of his mother’s fortune. Ritson plays Oscar as a man perpetually tightening around himself, his big, darting eyes equal parts searching, scared, and self-loathing. That tension snaps into an even wilder key when the show hands him one of its most bizarre turns: Oscar watches his lover abruptly, almost absurdly, get run over by a carriage. The moment is as upsetting as it is totally wacky, and what’s astonishing is how Ritson holds Oscar steady in a place of genuine grief that almost makes you forget how insane this plot choice is. —N.Q.
As Carol, one of the last people on the planet with any real autonomy who also happens to be the most miserable, Rhea Seehorn is tasked with carrying nearly the entirety of Vince Gilligan’s strange, singular new series on her back, and she shoulders the burden like it’s nothing at all. There’s the fun, loud stuff: white-knuckling through the relatively benign end of the world in the premiere or demanding an empty Sprouts Market be filled up as a petty act of independence against the peaceful hive mind. But it’s the smaller, quieter moments that emphasize just how compelling she is to watch, with reminders that the last person on Earth is someone in a state of perpetual grief. Every nuclear-grade side-eye, every tightly held upper lip, every flicker of desperation: Seehorn renders these details so legible that decoding her face becomes a kind of game. Pluribus is about many things, maybe everything, and without her ability to hold all that in her face and body, it simply wouldn’t work. —N.Q.
The no-questions-asked best performance from Severance’s second season, Tramell Tillman’s Mr. Milchick defines a tone entirely unto himself; no one else controls the same mix of tragedy and humor. While so many Severance characters are caught in the same mystery mechanics and search for deeper truths, Tillman’s performance puts Milchick on his own separate journey within the show’s strange alternate reality. Most of Severance’s characters look hopelessly flawed against the world’s stark backdrops, but Tillman makes the mannered, controlled Milchick both the enforcer and chief subject of Lumon’s fierce anti-humanism. The most memorable Tillman image from season two is likely him leading the marching band in the finale, but his best scenes are in the tiny arc following Milchick’s obsession with odd words and how it intersects with him thinking about Lumon’s representations of race. His expression in those scenes, so full of fury and self-recrimination, turn Milchick into Severance’s most compelling mystery. —K.V.A.
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