Tuesday, October 06, 2026
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A great episode of TV has the power to totally sweep you away—or, at the very least, put down your damn phone. This morning, Esquire's entertainment team ran down our favorite TV episodes of the year so far. Check out my top pick, and the rest below.—Brady Langmann, senior entertainment editor
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From Emmy Award sweepers (Widow’s Bay) to powerful literary adaptations (East of Eden) and hilarious new comedies (Adults), TV really has it all this year.
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Is it just me, or did TV feel exceptionally good this summer? It’s not an entirely surprising sensation—the networks always pack their late-summer/early-fall release calendars with titles sure to draw eyeballs back to the screen. This summer was all about House of the Dragon, East of Eden, Dutton Ranch, and the return of Ted Lasso. But newcomers like DC’s Lanterns and FX’s crime drama Furious made big impacts as well. That’s not easy to do, especially around Emmy season.
Hopefully by now, audiences who hadn’t caught up to Widow’s Bay before it swept the awards show have also come around to its comedy-horror genius. If that wasn’t enough, the first half of the year also saw the end of The Bear, the last episode of Hacks, and a stellar second season of The Pitt—a show so popular that “The Pitt” and “series finale” may never share a sentence in our lifetime. But have we already seen enough good TV this year to declare one the best show of 2026? Better yet, is there even such a thing as “enough good TV?”
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For a year or so in my twenties, I had the pleasure of working at an outdoors store in Chicago. The store was called Uncle Dan’s and it was basically a local version of an REI. Unfortunately, my girlfriend could never remember the store’s name. She told everyone I worked at Dick’s Sporting Goods, which deeply insulted me. I liked hiking and camping, not dribbling different sized balls. I am outdoorsy, not athletic. I’ve never worn cleats in my life, but I’ve bought so many Merrells, I should have a style named after me. Anyway, the time I spent working at Uncle Dan’s—or as we now refer to it in our house: NOT DICK’S SPORTING GOODS—made me an expert in outdoor gear. I can tell you why Osprey makes a better backpack than Deuter and recite from memory the specs of an Arc’teryx outer shell. I even know what Gore-Tex is and how it works. But none of that compares to the amount of useless information I have about water bottles.
I probably sold over 1,000 of them. Need proof of my expertise? Let’s see how many water bottle brands I can still recite from memory: Hydro Flask, Nalgene, Platypus, Snow Peak, Klean Kanteen, Stanley, Yeti, Katadyn, LifeStraw, CamelBak... I think that’s enough. But ask me which one of these brands made the best water bottle, and I’d be hard-pressed to answer, because they all had issues. The Hydro Flasks leaked; the Yetis were too heavy; the straw on the Camelbak was impossible to clean; and the Nalgenes, though adorable, were impossible to drink from. What I learned from the year I spent hawking water bottles is that there’s no such thing as a perfect water bottle. At least there didn’t use to be. Enter the Owala Free Sip.
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If we’re talking strictly about personal experience, Samantha Sloyan is the wrong person to play the mother in Carrie.
The Margaret White of Stephen King’s novel—and the way Sloyan portrays her in Mike Flanagan’s new TV adaptation—is fanatical, stifling, and merciless with her daughter. Comparatively, Sloyan’s own parents were … wonderful, tirelessly encouraging her acting passion and always pushing her to get out and make the most of the world.
Sloyan is so empathetic that she even feels compassion for Margaret White, a notorious harridan who truly puts the “mother” in the word smother. “The more I have talked about Margaret, the more I really believe it’s just her heart slowly breaking the whole time,” Sloyan says. “Her whole world was Carrie, by her own doing.” She suspects something unspeakable happened to Margaret once upon a time, hardening her to the core. “She just doesn’t want whatever that was to happen to Carrie,” the actress says. “None of it is correct.”
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