All the shows we binge-watched in 2019

  • 28 Dec - 03 Jan, 2020
  • Mag The Weekly
  • TV TIME

As Netflix's treasure of original TV shows continues to expand, almost keeping up with the tech-giant’s high streaming speed; it's worthwhile to look back at all the hits it delivered in the year. The now-dominant streaming platform is best known as the company that changed the way TV is consumed. While a majority of our favourites could be found on Netflix, there were a few we got our hands on via good-old torrent links. Here is looking at every show that the staffers at MAG binged-watched.


Stranger Things

Stranger Things which ran for its season 3 this year was full of the same kinds of joyful moments that made its breakout first season so fun. 80s nostalgia, plucky kids, pre-teen awkwardness, scary-but-not-terrifying monsters, goofy minor characters and emotional reunions were some of the elements to sum-up the entire plot of the series. As it continues, the show’s world gets a little bigger than Hawkins, Indiana, and the stakes get a little higher, but at its heart, six kids must face up to their monsters, metaphorical and real, to a perfect ‘80s soundtrack.


Orange is the New Black: Money Heist: Part 3

The construct of the show feels cinematic and the last season is also one of its most ambitious, the train is firmly and unerringly back on the track. The show has always tracked bigger conversations about incarceration, with reporting about the horrors of private prisons and stories about the torturous impacts of solitary confinement. All of that is still true in season seven and Piper Chapman; now out on early release and struggling to meet the onerous demands of her parole.


Peaky Blinders: Season 5

Cillian Murphy and Sam Neill star in this rock’n‘roll gangster drama set in 1919 in the West Midlands industrial city of Birmingham. Season 5 puts the Shelby family in the middle of a financial crash and sees them contend with the growing threat of fascism. The story is structured around an increasingly vulnerable and emotionally isolated Tommy, who, as a veteran of the First World War has seen better days. This time, though, Knight takes his torment of Tommy up a notch, giving him a growing and consuming addiction to opiates.


Money Heist: Part 3

The third season of the show has a higher production value and a higher budget. One of their own, Rio is captured, and so the robbery becomes a monstrously difficult effort to draw the enemy out and rescue him. It certainly commands the screen with its upgraded visual flair. The lead-up to the robbery is a wonderful tension-filled build-up, with the scale so much bigger and dangerous. Alvaro Morte’s Professor commands and controls the operation with just as much compassion and dedication. Itziar Ituno’s Raquel finds herself in a completely different circumstance but rises to the occasion.


Game of Thrones: Season 8

The eighth and final season sees Daenerys Targaryen arrive at Winterfell as Jon, Sansa and Arya unite once again. To sum it all up with multiple twists and turns happening in the season like Daenerys the conqueror quickly indicates that she’s not done with warfare and promises to “liberate” people from tyranny all over the world. Jon realises he’s not into that plan and stabs his queen in front of the Iron Throne, which Drogon then impressively melts before taking his mother’s body to parts unknown. In the wake of that carnage, Westeros’s surviving leaders gather to sift through the mess.


Dark: Season 2

There was so much anticipation leading up to the release of this new season, and it was well-deserved. This season of Dark was full of many twists, with the main characters trying to change the unchangeable apocalypse. As it begins, Winden has been destroyed by a nuclear explosion. It is less devastating to the storytelling than it sounds, because the action is evenly shared between the 1920s, 50s, 80s, the present and the grumpy, irradiated 2050s. Protagonists start appearing in different decades with abandon.

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