(Photo by HBO)
The Best TV Movies of 2019 (So Far)
Identifying a “TV movie” is more difficult than ever. The Television Academy put new rules into place this year that would prevent titles like Black Mirror from entering episodes under 75 minutes into the “Television Movie” Emmy category. The title’s 61-minute “San Junipero” won the 2017 award in the category. (On the flip side, shorts now must be at least 2 minutes long.)
So, when we’re compiling a list of “Certified Fresh TV Movies,” we’re faced with making choices like whether or not individual episodes of an anthology film series like Black Mirror should be listed in such a way that they are eligible for Certified Fresh designation as the title’s one-off “Bandersnatch” is.
Fortunately/unfortunately, the individual episodes for season 5 don’t meet the scores required for consideration anyway.
Read also: “The Best Black Mirror Episodes to the Worst, Ranked”
We pulled together a list of TV and streaming film titles that do meet the eligibility criteria to be Certified Fresh, which is a minimum of 40 reviews (higher than the 20 needed for TV seasons) with at least five reviews from “Top Critics.” We also took into consideration whether a title’s primary release was in theaters or on broadcast, cable, or streaming. So limited releases that saw only festival screenings or had very small theatrical time and number of theaters, but then was available broadly on a streaming service, were included as well.
Read on to find out which titles in this very exclusive category came out on top for 2019.
71%
75%
78%
78%
80%
84%
84%
86%
88%
93%
89%
93%
98%
99%
