In mid-March, as the reality of our quarantined circumstances was swiftly setting in, a friend asked me what essential movies they should watch to pass the time. I tossed off a few suggestions but quickly found myself turning to television shows instead. It just made more sense to steer someone toward a 6-, or 10-, maybe even 20-hour viewing adventure in this time of, well, so much time.

There was a visit to Schitt's Creek to be enjoyed, the jittery paranoia of Homeland to return to, a state of Euphoria to be experienced. An almost absurd abundance of television—actual good television—lies out there, waiting to be seen, a varied landscape we pay tribute to in this issue, as Emmy season begins to ramp up. We haven't abandoned movies by any means—I personally have enjoyed catching up on a lot of missed classics while sheltering in place. But television, in all its comforting sprawl, has often seemed the better option.

The coronavirus outbreak forced an already-developing narrative into hyper speed: The movie theaters closed and audiences flocked, in even bigger droves than before, to conventional TV and, particularly, to streaming platforms. A new marketing angle bloomed overnight, as content providers realized their situational power. TV could act, in some ways, as a savior, occupying our attention to keep us committed to our social distancing. Television became, rather surprisingly, a tool in the fight against a pandemic.

Of course, applications like Zoom, FaceTime, and Skype also helped people come together, beaming into one another's screens from the confines of their atomized lives. But there in the background of all that virtual socializing was television, the connective tissue of the isolation experience. The emblem of that phenomenon is, almost certainly, Netflix's Tiger King, a documentary series that arrived just as millions of Americans were banished to their houses for an indefinite stretch of weeks. Even though the series is pretty bleak in its depiction of the follies of American life, it was so nice to all gawp at something, filmed in the Time Before, together. Sure, reactions were staggered, with some viewers a couple of days or episodes behind others. But we were all still collectively heaving toward the show's conclusion. It was bonding, this collective binge, a convocation that didn't seem feasible in a time of isolation.

For all its strange darkness, Tiger King is likely to be one of the TV watersheds of this troubled year, a classic forged in the fires of panic. The television of old used to draw people together—scant offerings meant limited choice—while streaming and the wilds of the vaster internet seemed to push us all out on our own private vectors. This crisis, though, has gathered many of us closer again, millions of couches all pointed at the same flickering light for days on end. Lucky for us, then, that the glowing boxes of our fascination have so much to offer, the best of which you'll see in the following pages.

I cannot wait to rush back out to a movie theater, happily awash in its bigness and the cozy formalities of public ritual. But when this is all over, I think I might still, on occasion, see if a friend or two want to stream a show together and compare notes over text—not as a replacement for any cherished old rite, but as an addition, yet another way to manage the great adventure set before us in the age of peak everything. Which is, of course, to watch as much as we can.