A NUMBER of series rose above their labels and companies to strike blows aimed at illuminating social problems.

The 10 here are those gems which contradict the general trend toward meaningless frivolity and fiddling while the planet burns or is consumed in a either a nuclear holocaust or a viral apocalypse.
 
Dopesick documents the spread of oxycontin in the Appalachian population, a group of workers that will become redundant as coal disappears and now consigned to death by overdose.

Michael Keaton is particularly effective as a country doctor who undergoes a painful metamorphosis.

Meanwhile, two dogged state prosecutors attempt to sound the alarm after the Sackler scion first pushes the drug and in a final cowardly act attempts to remove the family wealth from any financial liability.

Goliath Season 4’s final series is about an alcoholic but crusading lawyer played impeccably by Billy Bob Thornton.

David E Kelly’s trademark courtroom reversals and heroics are in the service of proving that the drug company was not in the business of easing pain but rather in the much more profitable business of “promoting addiction.”  

The pilot of The White Lotus series about privileged tourists lording it over still colonised Hawaiian natives was the best hour of television this season.

It featured a pregnant worker in the hotel forced to give birth in a back office because she was afraid to leave her job for fear of being fired.

Thin Ice was best political thriller of the year. The Swedish series, on Amazon Prime, centres on the exploitation of the Arctic as a way of profiting from global warming.

The show encompasses the indigenous question in Greenland, Danish profiting from its control over that land mass, and Russian, US (Trump: “just buy Greenland”) and Nordic jockeying for position to mine the area and control its seaways.

Tandav, an Indian series from Amazon, begins with a farmers’ strike in Delhi at the moment when farmers were actually in the street protesting Indian Premier Modi’s attempt to make their lives more onerous, so they be absorbed by Indian agribusiness.

The police massacre the demonstrators, while in the upper echelons of Indian society a palace coup brings a conniving son to power in a critique of the viciousness of Modi-style neoliberalism.

This Danish series Pros and Cons, on Amazon Prime, follows the exploits of two scam artists, Eric and Nina, who give up the game and instead go straight, only to find that their jobs either pay little or involve necessary sexual liaisons to get ahead.

As good a representation of the desperation of the Western capitalist working class as television allows as they strike pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies in the business themselves of scamming their customers.

The Unusual Suspects series, Disney +, focuses on the high-end relationships between gated community privileged wives and their maids as the two discover they have more in common then they think, as each are left high and dry by men who cheat them and join forces to plan a heist to secure their future.

French series Germinal — in this year of Starbucks, Uber and Amazon unionising — available on Amazon Prime, masterfully refashions Zola’s quintessential tale of a mining strike in a way that casts a long shadow over today’s corporate landscape.

The gray palette and earthily complex depiction of the strike returns this series to what the French do best, a recounting of their own history.

Disney + series For Life — Season 2 began with Aaron Wallace winning his release from prison where he, like many black men, was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit.

Next, now prosecutor Wallace places on trial a cop in a Black Lives Matter plot that proves that serial TV can tackle current issues with an urgency that belies the usual use of the form to surround viewers with hyper-mediatic and slick modes of endless referentiality.

The reward for this trailblazing — the series was cancelled.

Kate Winslet was astonishingly authentic in HBO’s Mare of Easttown series about her detective tracking a murderer, but also confronted with the decaying situation of an US working-class left for dead in a Pennsylvania ex-mining and manufacturing town.