Television

Ethan Hawke has been acting since he was a kid. His latest project the Good Lord Bird is about abolitionist John Brown, and is based on the book by James McBride.

"There's not a lot of heroic acts in middle school," Maya Erskine said in this 2019 interview. She and Anna Konkle play 13-year-old versions of themselves in the comedy series PEN15, now in season 2.

The Emmy and Tony award-winning actor talks about growing up gay in Tennessee, losing theater friends during the AIDS epidemic and playing the head of a family-owned media group on Succession.

The HBO show uses sci-fi and superheroes to examine American racism. Cord Jefferson wrote the episode in which the main character goes back in time and to relive the trauma of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.

Michaela Coel says she initially wanted to create a series about sexual assault because of her own experiences. But as she heard from other people who had similar stories, she began to think more broadly. "I realized that many people had some sort of experience that was connected to mine," she says. "There were so many different ways to explore consent and how it affects us today. What better place for a story than one that I felt many people could find an identification in?"

Welsh actor Matthew Rhys plays the title role in the new HBO series, Perry Mason. His version of the iconic criminal defense attorney is younger and more hardboiled than the one Raymond Burr played in the popular TV show from the '50s and '60s. The new series focuses on Mason as a divorced private investigator in the early 1930s in Los Angeles — before he became a lawyer.

Azaria has voiced dozens of Simpsons' characters, starting with Mo the bartender. In the IFC comedy series Brockmire he plays a troubled baseball announcer who always speaks in his broadcaster voice.

RuPaul is the most successful drag queen of all time. His reality competition series for drag queens, RuPaul's Drag Race, is now in its 12th season. He'll talk about how he began his career, broke thru to wider audiences, and how he uses drag to challenge preconceived notions of gender and identity.

In the HBO series, which was adapted from Stephen King's novel, the Australian actor plays a detective trying to solve a murder — and resisting the idea that the killer may be a supernatural entity.

Good TV seems to be coming at us in increasingly large quantities and from so many different directions. Just last month, two major services — Apple TV+ and Disney+ — launched, joining the crowded field of streaming services. All this added up to a great year for quality television. Here's a list of my favorite shows of 2019.