SeriesTop: the TV calendar of 2018-19

The week of television

For half a century American television was organised like a calendar. Each network built its schedule night by night, Monday for one kind of audience, Thursday for the biggest comedies and dramas, Friday for older viewers and procedurals, Sunday for the prestige dramas of cable and the animated comedies of FOX, and viewers planned their weeks around it. In the late 2010s that calendar was still alive, but a new rhythm had arrived beside it: the streaming services that released a whole season in a single day. The 2018-19 season sat exactly on that border. It saw the end of Game of Thrones and of The Big Bang Theory, the first seasons of The Haunting of Hill House and The Umbrella Academy, and the first year in which a Netflix release felt as much like an event as a Sunday night on HBO.

SeriesTop was a TV site of 2018 whose home page opened with a calendar of new episodes, day by day. This guide turns that calendar into a guide to the whole season. It gathers 174 American series that aired episodes between 15 September 2018 and 31 May 2019, and files each of them by the night on which most of its episodes of the season aired, either on the broadcast networks or on cable and streaming; the seasons that arrived all at once on Netflix and the other streamers form two shelves of their own. Each series has its English synopsis, its seasons and episodes, and a Watch now button that opens it on JustWatch. The guide The TV calendar explains the idea, and the guide Start with SeriesTop picks one series from each family.

The fourteen shelves are grouped in three families. Weeknights holds Monday to Thursday, eight shelves and 101 series; The weekend holds Friday and Saturday together and Sunday, four shelves and 47 series; and All at once holds the 26 series of the two streaming shelves. Together the 174 series carry about 429,000 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.64, and the most voted of all is Game of Thrones, with about 28,000 votes, the great Sunday-night event of the season.

The calendar of 2018

The Wayback Machine keeps a copy of seriestop.net from 15 September 2018, under the name series-top.online. The page is almost black. At the top sits the logo, a small red television set with the name of the site written in a cursive hand, and a dark box with the buttons Register and Login. A dark menu bar carries three uppercase links in cyan, Calendar, New Episodes and Find Series, with the current page framed in a glowing yellow border, and a light search field framed in orange. Then comes the calendar: a black bar with the date in orange, September 15, 2018, and under it dark grey boxes, each with a thumbnail and the title of an episode in grey, the day's new episodes of series from My Hero Academia to the late-summer cable dramas. A list of the most popular series of the week, with cyan number badges, and a dark footer close the page.

This guide keeps that look: the black page, the cyan menu with its yellow frame, the orange search field, the black bars with orange titles, the dark boxes and the cyan badges. The calendar itself becomes the board of the home page, a week in seven columns, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, Sunday and the streaming drops, with the networks above and cable and streaming below. Each card carries the first network of its series and its night, such as ABC · Mon or HBO · Sun, and behind every card there is a full page with the synopsis, the seasons and the Watch now button, which opens JustWatch, the service that shows where the series can be streamed or bought in your country. The guide The calendar of 2018 describes the capture.

How the shelves work

The guide begins with the American scripted series that aired at least three episodes between 15 September 2018 and 31 May 2019 according to TMDB, leaving out talk shows, news, reality, children's programmes, soap operas and documentaries, and keeping only series in English. For each series it looks at the dates of those episodes. If three or more episodes share the same date, the season was released all at once, and the series goes to one of the two streaming shelves, Netflix or the other services. Otherwise the series goes to the night of the week on which at least 60 percent of its episodes aired, and to the networks or to cable and streaming according to its first network: ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and The CW count as the networks. Friday and Saturday share a shelf, because Saturday was by then the quietest night of American television, and each shelf keeps its thirteen most voted series.

The night comes from the American air dates on TMDB, which follow the original broadcast; a series that moved during the season is filed by the night of most of its episodes. The network on the card is the first network of the series, which is sometimes older than the season: Supernatural began on The WB before it moved to The CW, and American Dad! began on FOX before it moved to TBS. The guide How the shelves work sums up the rules.

Weeknights

The first family, Weeknights, covers the four nights from Monday to Thursday, the heart of the American television week, when the networks fight for the largest audiences of the year with their medical dramas, their police procedurals and their comedies, and cable answers with its own prestige series. Its 101 series hold about 228,000 votes and an average of 7.62. The guide Weeknights sums it up.

Monday

The shelf Monday on the networks opens the week with doctors, first responders and superheroes. Its most voted series is The Good Doctor, of ABC, with Freddie Highmore as a young surgeon with autism at a hospital in San Jose, one of the great network hits of the late 2010s, and FOX had 9-1-1, the emergency calls and rescues of Los Angeles by Ryan Murphy. The CW gave Monday two series of its DC universe, Arrow, the vigilante archer who started that universe in 2012, and DC's Legends of Tomorrow, a team of misfit heroes travelling through time. NBC launched Manifest in September 2018, the mystery of the passengers of a plane who land five years after they took off, and CBS launched Magnum P.I., a new version of the detective of the 1980s, the same week; FOX had The Resident, a darker medical drama, and the mini-series The Passage, about a girl at the heart of a vampire experiment.

CBS filled its Monday with Bull, with Michael Weatherly as a trial psychologist, and with comedies, The Neighborhood, new in October 2018, about a white family that moves into a Black neighbourhood of Los Angeles, and Man with a Plan, with Matt LeBlanc; NBC added the spy thriller The Enemy Within in February 2019. The thirteenth series of the shelf is the animated American Dad!, which by then aired on TBS.

The shelf Monday on cable and streaming holds two of the best rated series of the guide. Chernobyl, of HBO, with an 8.7, the five-part story of the nuclear disaster of 1986 written by Craig Mazin, aired on Monday nights in May 2019 and became one of the most talked-about series of the year; Better Call Saul, of AMC, also with an 8.7, the prequel of Breaking Bad, followed the lawyer Jimmy McGill in its fourth season in the autumn of 2018. Cartoon Network had three animated series on Monday, The Amazing World of Gumball, Steven Universe and Teen Titans Go!; AMC added the martial-arts saga Into the Badlands and the gentle oddity Lodge 49; Freeform the final season of Shadowhunters. Mars, of National Geographic, mixes drama and documentary about the first colony on the planet; I Am the Night, of TNT, with Chris Pine, revisits the Black Dahlia case; and The Venture Bros., of Adult Swim, and Agatha Raisin complete it.

Tuesday

The shelf Tuesday on the networks is led by The Flash, of The CW, the most voted series of the shelf, with Grant Gustin as the fastest man alive, and by The 100, the post-apocalyptic drama of young survivors returning to Earth. ABC launched The Rookie in October 2018, with Nathan Fillion as the oldest rookie of the Los Angeles police, and The Conners, the spin-off created after the cancellation of the revival of Roseanne; NBC had This Is Us, the family saga told across several decades, and the new medical drama New Amsterdam, also of September 2018.

CBS owned Tuesday with its police dramas: NCIS, the longest-running series of the shelf, which began in 2003, its spin-off NCIS: New Orleans, and FBI, the new series of Dick Wolf of September 2018. FOX had the mutant series The Gifted and the third season of Lethal Weapon, with Seann William Scott in the place of Clayne Crawford; The CW launched Roswell, New Mexico in January 2019; and black-ish, of ABC, continued its comedy of an upper-middle-class Black family.

The shelf Tuesday on cable and streaming mixes thrillers and comedies. The Purge, of USA Network, is the series of the horror franchise in which all crime is legal for one night; Project Blue Book, of History, follows the investigations of UFOs by the US Air Force in the 1950s; Mayans M.C., of FX, is the spin-off of Sons of Anarchy on the Mexican border, and the Australian Mr Inbetween, also of FX, the life of a hitman who is a devoted father. Fosse/Verdon, with Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams, and Miracle Workers, with Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi, are two of the new series of the spring of 2019; The Bold Type and its fellow Freeform series Good Trouble follow young women in the cities; and You Me Her, Absentia, Wrecked, Loudermilk and the Sky mystery The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair complete it.

Wednesday

The shelf Wednesday on the networks is one of the best rated of the guide, with an average of 7.91 and eight series rated 8 or more. Its most voted series is Riverdale, of The CW, the dark teenage version of the Archie comics, with its murders, its secret societies and its diner. NBC turned Wednesday into Chicago night, with the three series of Dick Wolf set in the same city, Chicago Med, Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D., scheduled back to back and often crossing over; CBS had Criminal Minds, the profilers of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, then in its fourteenth season, and the military drama SEAL Team.

ABC kept its comedy block on Wednesday: Modern Family, the mockumentary of three related families that had won the Emmy for best comedy five years in a row, The Goldbergs, a family comedy set in the 1980s, and the new Single Parents, together with the spy comedy Whiskey Cavalier in February 2019. The CW added Jane the Virgin, the telenovela parody, in its final season, and the new football drama All American, from October 2018; FOX had Star, a musical drama about young singers in Atlanta, in its last season.

The shelf Wednesday on cable and streaming belongs largely to FX, with four series. American Horror Story, the anthology of Ryan Murphy, was in its eighth season, Apocalypse, in the autumn of 2018; It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the comedy of four selfish friends who run a bar, was already in its thirteenth season; What We Do in the Shadows, from the film by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, began in March 2019 with four vampires sharing a house on Staten Island; and You're the Worst reached its final season. South Park, of Comedy Central, the oldest series of the shelf, began in 1997, and Suits, of USA Network, the legal drama of a firm in Manhattan, continued after the departure of Meghan Markle in 2018.

The streaming series of the shelf were released weekly on Wednesdays: The Act, of Hulu, with Joey King and Patricia Arquette, the true story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and her mother. Syfy had three series, The Magicians, HAPPY! and the new Deadly Class, set in a school for assassins in the 1980s; Freeform had Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists and grown-ish, the spin-off of black-ish; and Mr. Mercedes, from Stephen King, completes it.

Thursday

Thursday has been the great night of American television since the 1980s, and the shelf Thursday on the networks is the most voted shelf of the weeknights, with about 62,000 votes and the best average of the weeknights, 7.99. Its most voted series is The Big Bang Theory, of CBS, the comedy of four physicists in Pasadena, which ended in May 2019 after twelve seasons and 279 episodes; its prequel, Young Sheldon, aired just after it. ABC filled Thursday with the series of Shonda Rhimes, Grey's Anatomy, then in its fifteenth season, and How to Get Away with Murder, with Viola Davis as a law professor.

NBC moved Brooklyn Nine-Nine to its schedule in January 2019, after FOX had cancelled it and fans had protested online, and kept The Good Place, the philosophical comedy of the afterlife with Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which began in 1999 and is the oldest series of the shelf. The CW had three series on Thursday, Supernatural, the brothers Sam and Dean Winchester hunting monsters since 2005, Legacies, a new series of October 2018 set in a school for supernatural teenagers, and iZombie; FOX had the final season of Gotham, the young years of the Batman villains; and CBS had Elementary, a modern Sherlock Holmes in New York, and S.W.A.T..

The shelf Thursday on cable and streaming holds eleven series. CBS All Access, the streaming service of CBS, released four of them weekly on Thursdays: Star Trek: Discovery, in its second season in early 2019; The Twilight Zone, the revival by Jordan Peele; The Good Fight, the legal spin-off of The Good Wife; and the anthology Tell Me a Story. Freeform had Siren, a mermaid thriller in a fishing town, and Marvel's Cloak & Dagger; Comedy Central had the final season of Broad City and the new The Other Two; FX had Better Things, with Pamela Adlon; and Tacoma FD and the anthology The Romanoffs complete it.

The weekend

The second family, The weekend, covers Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Friday has long been the night when the networks schedule their procedurals for older and loyal viewers, Saturday the night of reruns and children's channels, and Sunday the great night of the week, when the cable channels premiere their most ambitious dramas and FOX fills the evening with animation. Its 47 series hold about 126,000 votes, and the guide The weekend sums it up.

Friday and Saturday

The shelf Friday and Saturday on the networks holds twelve series, and it shows why the industry called Friday the death slot: many of its series were in their last seasons or had been moved there to finish their runs. CBS owned the night with three long-running crime series, Hawaii Five-0, Blue Bloods, with Tom Selleck as the police commissioner of New York, and MacGyver; NBC had The Blacklist, with James Spader as a master criminal who helps the FBI, Blindspot and the supernatural Midnight, Texas; ABC had Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the most voted series of the shelf, Fresh Off the Boat and Speechless; and FOX had Last Man Standing, the Tim Allen comedy it had revived after its cancellation by ABC, and the legal drama Proven Innocent. The CW closed the run of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the musical comedy of Rachel Bloom, in its fourth and last season.

The shelf Friday and Saturday on cable and streaming opens with the two series of DC Universe, the streaming service launched by Warner in 2018: Titans, the dark version of the Teen Titans that premiered in October 2018 and is the most voted series of the shelf, and Doom Patrol, a team of damaged heroes, from February 2019. Syfy had its Friday horror and fantasy, Z Nation, Van Helsing and Wynonna Earp, the descendant of the famous marshal hunting demons in a western town; Cinemax launched Warrior, a martial-arts drama in the San Francisco of the 1870s based on writings of Bruce Lee, in April 2019. Disney Channel had Andi Mack, Raven's Home and the cartoons of Mickey Mouse, and Nickelodeon Game Shakers; the anime-style RWBY, released online on Saturdays, the HBO anthology Room 104 and the Texas western The Son complete it.

Sunday

The shelf Sunday on the networks holds nine series, led by the animated block of FOX. The Simpsons, the oldest series of the guide, began in December 1989 and was in its thirtieth season in 2018-19, already the longest-running American scripted series in prime time; Family Guy and Bob's Burgers followed it on the same night. CBS had NCIS: Los Angeles, Madam Secretary, with Téa Leoni as the secretary of state, and the new God Friended Me, about an atheist who receives friend suggestions from an account called God; The CW moved Supergirl, born on CBS, to its Sunday and launched the reboot of Charmed in October 2018; and NBC had the second season of Good Girls, three suburban mothers turned criminals.

The shelf Sunday on cable and streaming is the most voted shelf of the guide, with about 77,000 votes, and it holds the great event of the season: the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones, of HBO, from 14 April to 19 May 2019, the most voted series of the guide. HBO also had the third season of True Detective, with Mahershala Ali, and the second season of Barry, with Bill Hader as a hitman who wants to become an actor. AMC had the two zombie series, The Walking Dead, in the ninth season in which Andrew Lincoln left the role of Rick Grimes, and Fear the Walking Dead; Showtime had Shameless, in the season that saw Emmy Rossum leave, and Billions; Starz had Outlander and American Gods.

The new series of the shelf is You, with Penn Badgley as a bookseller who stalks a young writer: it premiered on Lifetime on Sundays in September 2018 and became a worldwide hit only when Netflix released it in December. Killing Eve, of BBC America, with Sandra Oh as an intelligence officer and Jodie Comer as the assassin she hunts, was in its second season; SpongeBob SquarePants, of Nickelodeon, lost its creator, Stephen Hillenburg, in November 2018; and The Last Ship, of TNT, ended its run. The guide Sunday night follows the best Sunday of the season.

All at once

The third family, All at once, gathers the series whose seasons of 2018-19 arrived in a single day, the new rhythm of television that Netflix had introduced with House of Cards in 2013. It is the best rated family of the guide, with an average of about 8, and its 26 series hold about 75,000 votes. Binge-watching, the word for watching a whole season in a weekend, had become so common by then that the networks themselves started to release some of their series online in one go. The guide All at once sums it up.

Netflix, all at once

The shelf Netflix, all at once is the best rated shelf of the guide, with an average of 8.07 and nine series rated 8 or more. Its most voted series is Lucifer, the devil who runs a nightclub in Los Angeles and helps the police, which FOX had cancelled after three seasons and Netflix revived with a fourth season in May 2019, after a campaign by its fans. Netflix also revived Arrested Development, born on FOX in 2003, whose fifth season was split in two, and it released the last season of House of Cards, its first great series, in November 2018, after the departure of Kevin Spacey, with Robin Wright as the president.

The new Netflix series of the season are some of the most voted of the guide. The Umbrella Academy, from the comics of Gerard Way, the adopted superhero siblings who must stop the end of the world, arrived in February 2019; The Haunting of Hill House, by Mike Flanagan, the family haunted by the house of their childhood, in October 2018; Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the dark version of the teenage witch, in the same month; and Love, Death & Robots, the adult animated anthology produced by David Fincher and Tim Miller, in March 2019. Narcos: Mexico moved the story of the drug wars to Guadalajara, and The OA, with Brit Marling, returned for its second and last season.

The season also marked the end of the Marvel series of Netflix: the third season of Marvel's Daredevil, released in October 2018 and often called the best of the series, and the second season of Marvel's The Punisher, in January 2019, were both followed by cancellations, as the Marvel characters moved to the new service of Disney. The animated Castlevania, from the video game, and Big Mouth, a comedy of puberty, complete the shelf.

Other streamers, all at once

The shelf Other streamers, all at once holds the seasons released in one day by Prime Video, Hulu, YouTube Premium, DC Universe and the children's channels. Its most voted series is Cobra Kai, the sequel to The Karate Kid set thirty years later, whose second season came out on YouTube Premium in April 2019, before the series moved to Netflix; YouTube Premium also released Wayne, the road comedy of a violent teenager, in January 2019. Prime Video had seven series on the shelf, counting The Chosen: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the housewife of the 1950s who becomes a stand-up comedian, in its second season in December 2018; The Man in the High Castle, the alternate history in which the Axis won the war; Bosch, the Los Angeles detective of the novels of Michael Connelly; Hanna, the girl raised as an assassin, new in March 2019; Sneaky Pete; and the horror anthology Lore.

The best rated series of the shelf, and of the whole guide, is The Chosen, with an 8.8, a drama about the life of Jesus seen through the people who met him, which began in April 2019 as one of the largest crowdfunded productions in television history. Hulu had Marvel's Runaways and Future Man, and the animated superhero series Young Justice, revived for a third season on DC Universe in January 2019 after years of fan campaigns, and the Disney XD cartoon Star vs. the Forces of Evil complete it.

The networks

By first network, CBS leads the guide with twenty series, ahead of FOX with fifteen, ABC with fourteen, NBC with thirteen and The CW with twelve, so that the five broadcast networks account for 74 of the 174 series. Netflix follows with eleven, Prime Video with nine, FX with eight, Freeform with seven, AMC and Syfy with six each and HBO with five. Each network had its personality. CBS was the network of procedurals and multi-camera comedies, from NCIS to The Big Bang Theory; NBC of the Chicago dramas and the smart comedies of Thursday; ABC of Shonda Rhimes and family comedies; FOX of animation and genre series; The CW of superheroes and teenage drama; and HBO, AMC, FX and Showtime of the prestige dramas and comedies that won the awards. The guide The networks lists them all.

The finales of 2019

The spring of 2019 was a season of endings. The Big Bang Theory signed off on 16 May after twelve seasons, and three days later the finale of Game of Thrones closed eight seasons of the most watched series of its time, amid one of the loudest debates ever about the ending of a series. Gotham, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Broad City, You're the Worst, Shadowhunters, Z Nation and The Last Ship ended their runs during the season, and the Marvel series of Netflix closed with the cancellations of Marvel's Daredevil and Marvel's The Punisher. House of Cards had already ended in November 2018, and iZombie, Jane the Virgin and Elementary began their final seasons in the spring, to end in the summer of 2019.

Some endings were only pauses. Lucifer and Brooklyn Nine-Nine came back from cancellation on new homes, Netflix and NBC, after campaigns by their fans; Young Justice returned after six years on DC Universe; and Cobra Kai, born on YouTube, would later become one of the great successes of Netflix. The guide Endings and returns follows the series that ended and those that came back.

New in 2018-19

Forty-eight series of the guide premiered from September 2018 onwards, and the collection New in 2018-19 gathers them. The networks launched The Rookie, New Amsterdam, FBI, Manifest, Magnum P.I., The Neighborhood, The Conners, God Friended Me, Legacies, All American and the new Charmed in the autumn, and Roswell, New Mexico, The Passage, Whiskey Cavalier and The Enemy Within in midseason. Cable and streaming launched Titans, Doom Patrol, Chernobyl, The Act, What We Do in the Shadows, Fosse/Verdon, Warrior, Deadly Class and The Twilight Zone, and the all-at-once services The Haunting of Hill House, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, The Umbrella Academy, Love, Death & Robots, Hanna, Wayne and The Chosen. Of all those premieres, The Chosen, Chernobyl and The Rookie are the best rated. The guide The new series lists them by month.

The comedies

Comedy is everywhere in the calendar, and the collection Comedies gathers the 62 series of the guide that TMDB counts as comedies, from the animated Sunday of FOX to the network sitcoms and the half-hour comedies of cable. The multi-camera sitcom with a live audience, the format of The Big Bang Theory, Young Sheldon, The Neighborhood and Man with a Plan, lived mostly on CBS; the single-camera comedies of NBC, The Good Place and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, lived on Thursday; and cable and streaming had the darker or stranger comedies, from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and What We Do in the Shadows to Barry and Big Mouth. Sixteen series of the guide are animated, from The Simpsons and South Park to Steven Universe and Castlevania.

Superheroes every night

In 2018-19 there was a superhero series on almost every night of the week. The CW had built its Arrowverse, a shared universe of DC heroes begun with Arrow in 2012: Arrow and DC's Legends of Tomorrow on Monday, The Flash on Tuesday and Supergirl on Sunday, and in December 2018 the three main heroes met in the annual crossover event, Elseworlds, across three nights. FOX had Gotham, the city before Batman, on Thursday and the mutants of The Gifted on Tuesday; ABC had Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on Friday; and Freeform had Marvel's Cloak & Dagger on Thursday.

The streaming services had their own heroes. DC Universe, the new service of Warner, launched with Titans and Doom Patrol and revived Young Justice; Netflix ended its Marvel series with Marvel's Daredevil and Marvel's The Punisher and started a new family of misfit heroes with The Umbrella Academy; Hulu had Marvel's Runaways; and Cartoon Network had the comic heroes of Teen Titans Go!. The superhero series of the guide, more than fifteen in all, show how the genre that dominated the cinemas of the decade had also taken over the television schedule. The guide Superheroes on TV lists them night by night.

The procedural empires

Two producers ruled the networks of the late 2010s with families of procedural dramas. Dick Wolf, the creator of Law & Order, had five series in the guide: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, on the air since 1999; the three Chicago series of NBC, Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D. and Chicago Med, scheduled together on Wednesday; and FBI, his first series for CBS, new in September 2018, which soon had spin-offs of its own. CBS, for its part, had the NCIS family, NCIS on Tuesday, NCIS: New Orleans after it and NCIS: Los Angeles on Sunday, the most watched drama franchise in the world at the time.

The medical drama had a golden season too. Grey's Anatomy, in its fifteenth year, became the longest-running medical drama in American prime time; The Good Doctor, The Resident, New Amsterdam and Chicago Med filled the other nights; and the first responders of 9-1-1, Chicago Fire and S.W.A.T. completed the picture of a television in which hospitals, fire stations and police precincts were the great stages of drama. The guide The procedurals lists them by family.

The eve of the streaming wars

The 2018-19 season was the last before the great streaming services of the old studios arrived. During the season, Disney announced Disney+, which would launch in November 2019 with the Marvel and Star Wars series; WarnerMedia prepared HBO Max, which would bring together the libraries of HBO and Warner; Apple prepared Apple TV+; and NBCUniversal prepared Peacock. CBS already had CBS All Access, with four series in this guide, from Star Trek: Discovery to The Twilight Zone, and Warner had DC Universe. The networks began to keep their series for their own services, and the shelves of this guide show the last season in which Netflix could still count on series born elsewhere, such as Lucifer and Arrested Development, to fill its catalogue. The guide The streaming wars tells that story.

Teen television

The CW and Freeform were the networks of teenagers and young adults, and their series are among the most voted of the guide. Riverdale, the most voted series of the weeknights, turned the wholesome Archie comics into a noir soap opera; Legacies, from the world of The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, opened a school for supernatural teenagers; Roswell, New Mexico brought back the aliens of the town of 1947; and All American followed a high-school football star from South Central Los Angeles in Beverly Hills. Freeform had Siren, Shadowhunters, Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists, grown-ish, Good Trouble and The Bold Type, and Netflix had its teenage witch in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, from the same comics publisher as Riverdale.

Premiere week

The networks opened the season, as every year, in the last week of September, and the calendar of that week reads like a summary of this guide. On Monday 24 September 2018, ABC brought back The Good Doctor, while NBC launched Manifest and CBS the new Magnum P.I.. On Tuesday, NBC returned with This Is Us and premiered New Amsterdam, and CBS opened its new season of NCIS together with the new FBI. On Wednesday, NBC filled the evening with its three Chicago series, while ABC returned with Modern Family and launched Single Parents. On Thursday, ABC brought back Grey's Anatomy and How to Get Away with Murder, and NBC The Good Place and the twentieth season of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. On Friday, CBS returned with Hawaii Five-0, MacGyver and Blue Bloods, and on Sunday 30 September FOX opened the thirtieth season of The Simpsons and the new seasons of Family Guy and Bob's Burgers, while CBS launched God Friended Me.

The cable and streaming services kept their own calendar, spread across the whole year: the Netflix horror of October, the HBO prestige series of the spring, the summer dramas of USA Network and FX. That is why the cable shelves of the guide begin as early as the summer of 2018 and run until the end of May, while the network shelves follow the classic season from September to May. The guide Premiere week lists the premieres night by night.

The children's channels

The children's and family channels also kept a weekly calendar, and ten series of the guide come from them. Cartoon Network had The Amazing World of Gumball, with an 8.5 one of the best rated series of the guide, Steven Universe, created by Rebecca Sugar, the first animated series of the channel created by a woman alone, and Teen Titans Go!; Disney Channel had Andi Mack, a drama of middle school that became the first series of the channel with a gay main character, Raven's Home, the sequel of That's So Raven, and the cartoons of Mickey Mouse; Nickelodeon had SpongeBob SquarePants, on the air since 1999, and Game Shakers; and Disney XD had Star vs. the Forces of Evil, whose last season arrived in batches. The families who watched them belong to the same calendar as the adults of Sunday night, and their series fill some of the quietest shelves of the guide, Friday and Saturday.

Votes and ratings

The ratings of the guide come from the voters of TMDB, and they say as much about those voters as about the series. Television ratings there run higher than film ratings, because the people who vote for a series are usually those who watched it to the end, and the guide has 58 series rated 8 or more, a third of the total. Genre series and streaming series collect the most votes: the fantasy, horror and superhero series of Sunday night and of Netflix lead the lists, while long-running procedurals with huge broadcast audiences, such as NCIS or Blue Bloods, have far fewer votes than their viewers would suggest. The best way to use the ratings is therefore inside a shelf, comparing series of the same night and the same kind of audience, rather than across the whole calendar. The guide The figures gives the numbers for each shelf.

SeriesTop in figures

The 174 series of the guide carry about 429,000 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.64, and 58 of them reach 8 or more; the collection Rated 8 or more gathers them, best first, from The Chosen, at 8.8, to the series at 8.0. The most voted are Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Lucifer, Riverdale, The Good Doctor and The Big Bang Theory. Counting every season they have aired up to today, the series add up to about 1,100 seasons and 19,000 episodes; the longest are The Simpsons, with more than 800 episodes, SpongeBob SquarePants, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and NCIS, each with more than 500. Today 102 of the 174 series have ended, 49 were cancelled and 23 are still returning. The guide The figures gathers every number.

Where to begin

For a first week with the calendar, take one series per night: The Good Doctor on Monday, This Is Us on Tuesday, Chicago Fire on Wednesday, The Good Place on Thursday, Blue Bloods on Friday and Barry on Sunday, and keep a Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House, for the weekend. For a single evening, watch Chernobyl, five episodes that make one of the best series of the decade. For a long winter, the great ongoing sagas of the season, from Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead to Supernatural and Grey's Anatomy, have hundreds of hours behind them. And to compare two rhythms of television, watch a weekly series and an all-at-once series of the same genre side by side, such as Titans and The Umbrella Academy.

How to use SeriesTop

The home page opens with the introduction under a black bar and then the week, a calendar of fourteen boxes in seven columns, one column per night from Monday to the streaming drops, with the networks above and cable and streaming below; each box shows the family, the shelf and its number of series, and leads to the row of that shelf further down. Each row opens with a black bar and its title in orange, with a More button that opens the full shelf. The cards are dark boxes with the poster, the rating, the year of the first season and, at the bottom, the first network and the night in orange; under each card come the first genre and the number of episodes. The menu at the top leads to the three families, and the search box finds any series by its title; the guide Search tips explains how.

The series page has the English synopsis, the seasons and episodes, the cast, the creators and the genres. The Watch now button opens the series on JustWatch, which shows the services that offer it in your country, and the button Add to My List keeps it in My list, stored in your browser. The guide How to use SeriesTop explains each part, and the guide The Watch now button explains how JustWatch works.

Questions