No, THESE are the must-see TV shows of the year so far imho lol

I mean, if you're going to watch something, it might as well be good, right?

Hello! It’s July, and that means we made it halfway. Halfway! It’s basically nearly Christmas! You can book your beach retreats and buy summer music festival tickets and we only have to survive winter and two elections to get there! Fun!

In the clusterfuck Trump-era Clovid-bomb of 2020, making it to July is something to celebrate. No fireworks? No worries! I thought I’d spend today celebrating all of the good things on TV that have taken our minds off all of the bad things that have happened this year.

Did I miss anything? Got anything to recommend to me? Let me know! With 500+ shows being released every year, I don’t have enough eyeballs to watch all of the things. But I try, I really do.

Cheer (Netflix)

What we’ve lacked in live sport lately has been made up by the sheer volume of quality sports documentaries coming through. Has anyone watched The Last Ride, the doco about how brutal WWE wrestler The Undertaker refuses to retire? It’s quite hard to find but the first 13 minutes are on YouTube. It’s a hell of a way to follow-up The Last Dance, the Netflix series about the great basketball destroyer Michael Jordan, which is a great kick-on from the excellent cheerleading series Cheer. Want to see athletes pushing their bodies to extreme? Coaches losing their cool? Insane athletic routines? It’s all right here. Cheers, indeed.

ZeroZeroZero (Wherever you can find it)

I’ve written about this show before, about how hard it is to stream this, legally speaking, in New Zealand. But a mate got in touch and told me there is a way, a sort of backdoor route through an Australian streaming service. Guess what - it worked! Guess what else - it’s worth the effort! ZeroZeroZero is some serious international cinematic shit, like Narcos crossed with Gomorrah and Sicario then blessed with an unlimited budget. The very last scene might be the best ending to a TV show I’ve ever seen.

I May Destroy You (Neon)

Some, like my buddies over on excellent telly podcast The Watch, are already calling I May Destroy You the best show of the year. I’m only four episodes into this 12-parter, so it’s a little too soon for me to agree. But there’s one thing I’m certain about: Michaela Coel is going to be a dominant cultural force in the coming years. If you’re looking for the next Phoebe Waller-Bridge, she’s right here, and if this is how Coel’s kicking things off, I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Lenox Hill (Netflix)

If you’re after a show that completely captures this moment, right here, right now, you can’t go past Lenox Hill. But, as a documentary filmed in a small Manhattan hospital, this is not an easy watch: the first episode contains multiple births, gruesome surgery scenes, and a man getting a boil lanced off his butt. They’re not the moments that stay with you - it’s the doctors meditating before surgery, cracking under the strain, struggling to deliver bad news, and celebrating the good, that really connect. All that would be enough, but episode nine was filmed during Covid-19, and it’s an absolute heartbreaker of an episode, one of the most raw and visceral half-hours of TV I’ve seen. Watch at your peril.

What We Do in the Shadows (Neon)

This didn’t need to be as good as it is. But the second season of the second spinoff of Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s Wellington-based cult vampire movie from 2014 sure has fangs: the laugh count’s higher, the chemistry’s better, and the characters go deeper. The episode dedicated to Colin - the energy-sucking vampire, and we all know one of those - is one of the funniest things I’ve seen this year, or any year. Long may this run.

Survivor: Winners at War

Look, don’t judge me. We’ve all got a version of what this show means to me. Maybe yours is The Office, or The Bachelor, or, God help you, Friends re-runs. Whatever it is, it’s the show you turn to when a worldwide Pandemic hits, America loses its collective mind, Kanye starts mass-building yurts and you just need comfort viewing. No big format changes, no weird new hosts, no strange new twists, just rinse and repeat, season after season. Survivor’s been doing that for 40 seasons, and it works for me. Also: this had Jeff Probst iso-hosting the finale from his shed, and that was a vibe.

• NB: Look, it’s hard to watch everything, but I try, I really do. To that end, I have to admit the following things: I have not finished Little America, Middleditch & Schwartz, Homecoming S2, Mythic Quest: Raven's Banquet and Betty, but I’m loving them all. I’m also yet to see the final season of Better Call Saul, Dark’s third season, The Great, High Fidelity or Normal People, but I will, I promise. As for The Outsider, Space Force, Upload, Tiger King, Dave, Ozark’s third season and Run, I have seen them, and I have thoughts, but not good ones. As for Devs, I’m still making my mind up about that one. Finally, I mostly watch cooking shows, so you shouldn’t trust anything I say, like, ever.