There are some new shows we also recommend that are brand new this week. Our editor, who is a sci-fi/fantasy buff, will love the dystopian "Station Eleven" (HBO Max). As a true crime buff, we are excited about "Landscapers" (HBO Max), with the extraordinary, award-heavy Olivia Coleman. And as we wrote last time, "With Love" (Amazon Prime) is more than just holiday froth with a Latinx cast. This is a limited series about the breadth and depth of how we feel about one another and oh how we need that, right now.

We also recommend "Reservation Dogs" (FX) and "The Sex Lives of College Girls" (HBO Max) for their very different takes on what it is to be coming of age Gen Z.

The Best of 2021
Here are what we thought were the best TV series featuring LGBTQ characters in primary roles, not as tacked on adjuncts to cis-het normativity. These series made queer, trans and nonbinary characters integral to their plots.

"Pose"
We will forever be grateful to this series for highlighting the lives of trans people and people with AIDS in ways we had never seen on screen before. We fell in love with the characters and the women and men who played them, notably Michaela Antonia Jaé Rodriguez, who, as Blanca, was the mother so many of us needed in our queer homeless youth; Billy Porter, whose Pray Tell churned up the screen with pain and pathos and resilience; and the luminous Indya Moore, whose Angel Evangelista broke our hearts again and again.

"Pose" is a series we will remember forever. It marked a time of great upheaval in our current LGBTQ landscape as it told stories from our collective queer, gay, and trans past. It also declared, more than any other series in 2021, that all Black and brown lives matter; on Netflix and FX.

"It's a Sin"
While "Pose" took many of us back to the bleak and angry days of the AIDS crisis with a compelling look inside that time with characters of color, a vantage point that had been largely hidden, "It's a Sin" follows several gay men in 1980s London. The men form a friend group, but the HIV/AIDS crisis in the U.K. threatens them and everyone around them. "It's a Sin" is a complex, funny, moving, and heartbreaking look at the AIDS crisis in the U.K., and it will leave you reeling in a similar way to "Pose."

Welsh show runner Russell T. Davies is best known in the U.S. for "Queer as Folk." "It's a Sin" has all the depth and pathos and wry humor that the original British series had and the American version did not.

The acting, direction, and writing in "It's a Sin" are stellar. Ritchie (Olly Alexander), Roscoe (Omari Douglas), Colin (Callum Scott Howells), Ash (Nathaniel Curtis), Arthur (Stephen Fry), and Henry (Neil Patrick Harris) are among the key players. Each is superb in their role, with Harris delivering one of his best performances in years.

The total range of the period is addressed, including the AIDS denialism that beset a swathe of the gay community, fed by outlier scientists and certain gay newspapers, even as people were dying every day.

Intergenerational relationships play a distinct role – both Roscoe and Colin are involved with older men – which is both true to reality and presents a looming question: Will any of these young men live to be the age of their benefactors? (See Feb 23 column.)

As with "Pose," these are real and realistic characters with a plethora of foibles. But they are so believable and true to both their time and our memory of it that you cannot look away. This is our history – tragic, survivalist, and resilient – on HBO Max.