When it came time to decide GameSpot’s top 10 shows of 2020, it wasn’t an easy task. In a year where many of us spent months at home locked down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, TV was an escape. That should be evident in our top 10, filled with shows that made us think (Devs), scream in terror (The Haunting of Bly Manor), relive past glories (The Last Dance), and simply feel good (Ted Lasso). When it came to deciding our top TV show of 2020, though, the answer was clear.
FX’s Season 2 was the perfect escape from this year. It made us laugh nonstop, it constantly surprised us, and it managed to take a stellar first season and actually improve on it to create a more interesting world, filled with disco vampires, socially awkward slayers, and a society of the undead that wants nothing to do with the characters we’ve grown to love since the series premiered in 2019.
In Season 2, Harvey Guillén turned in what is hands-down one of TV’s greatest performances of 2020 as Guillermo, a wannabe vampire who is at odds with his own lineage as a vampire hunter. How can he be destined to kill what he longs to become?
While this story stretches throughout Season 2, the show’s primary vampires Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) end up in a variety of zany adventures, from Colin going mad with power, creating clones of himself to drain the energy of anyone in sight, to Laszlo’s eternal battle with vampire landlord Jim (Mark Hamill), resulting in the birth of Jackie Daytona. This show is silly in the best way possible, and it would be difficult to find an episode in its second season that wasn’t an outright success.
Ultimately, while was the escape we all needed in 2020, that’s not why it’s GameSpot’s show of the year. This is a wonderful show deserving of recognition any year. To take a cult favorite faux-documentary (the show is based on a 2014 movie) and spin it onto a show for a mainstream audience is a feat. However, it’s one that showrunner Jemaine Clement, who also co-wrote and co-directed the film, has succeeded at and will hopefully continue doing for many years to come. After all, now that Guillermo has revealed to his masters that he’s a vampire hunter–by killing many, many vampires in front of them–we can’t wait to see the dynamic around the house when the series returns.
