The best-directed episodes of television in 2018 (so far)

Here’s a rundown of best-directed single episodes of television released in 2018 so far.

So far, 2018 has been a very strange year for film and television. Avengers: Infinity War felt less like a film and more like the most expensive season finale in history. Conversely, TV shows like Westworld and Atlanta featured compelling one-offs episodes that felt a lot like movies.

There are a lot of reasons for this creeping paradigm shift. Following the unprecedented success Marvel had with that cinematic universe, all the major studios have started investing heavily in episodic storytelling. Economically, it makes a lot of sense to engage audiences with a story that unfolds over the course of the fiscal year. Consequently, this results in a lot of films that play like episodes of the TV show that’s in the middle of a season.

Conversely, television has become so stratified it no longer needs to function as a mass medium. That is to say, individual TV shows don’t need to be as broadly appealing as possible anymore. Like independent films, they can be become profitable by appealing to a relatively narrow slice of the total viewing audience. As such, TV now offers much more appeal to filmmakers who want to tell small and idiomatic stories about difficult subjects like addiction, racism, and grief.

Six months in, this year has seen the release of a lot of excellent television that couldn’t exist at any other point in history. Here are seven individual episodes of television that I consider to be the best directed so far.

Note: this article contains spoilers.