‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.

‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.

‘Dickinson’: The Apple TV+ series is a literary superheroine’s origin story that’s dead serious about its subject yet unserious about itself.

‘Inside’: Written and shot in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special, streaming on Netflix, turns the spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.

Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics: Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. But Ellis, who went on to earn degrees at Brown and New York Universities, has fully leaned into them and made them her own: whether that’s showcasing her comedic chops in “Undercover Brother” or gravitas in dramas like “Ray” and “The Help.” Looked at in one light, it’s a typical part in a career that can perhaps be best characterized as a series of roles ranging from minor to supporting. Now, she’s just weeks away from the release of a biopic that is generating Oscar chatter about her performance: “King Richard” is the story of Richard Williams (played by Will Smith), the father of tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams. “My feet had no path and he just gave me one,” she said in an recent interview. She began her undergraduate studies at Tougaloo College, the historically Black university where an acting instructor encouraged her to consider taking the craft seriously. The 52-year-old Mississippi native grew up on a farm and had no drama experience outside of performing in Easter and Christmas plays at church. The actress Aunjanue Ellis is nearly 30 years into an onscreen career, but until about a decade ago, she thought it was all a fluke.

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