This list may not be as definitive as our best-of-the-year list — no human can watch every episode of TV made in a year — and it includes many less-than-famous titles. But for my money, it is always the most fun list to put together. What you learn, spending a year watching series after series that you may never end up writing about, is that greatness can pop up anywhere, sometimes where you would expect it, sometimes in an offbeat documentary or an off-the-radar streaming curio.

A critic ends every year with a pocketful of these randomly acquired gems, and it’s a pleasure to dump them out on the table for you here. Enjoy, and feel free to share your own. JAMES PONIEWOZIK

‘Baby Reindeer’

Episode 4

Created by and starring Richard Gadd, and based on his life, “Baby Reindeer” knocked me out this year with its gnarled and uncompromising depictions of stalking, sexual assault, shame and ambition. Episode 4 is among the more gripping, disturbing hours of TV I’ve ever seen, as Gadd’s character, Donny, finds himself being groomed, drugged, raped and manipulated by a man he revered, a man who promised to help his career. “Reindeer” rejects anything resembling tidy morality and instead digs into the complex mechanisms of victimhood, the various distorting lenses of abuse. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONS

‘The Bear’

Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Napkins’

This season of “The Bear” was a meal better gazed upon than eaten, dazzling on the screen but torpid in its story. But “Napkins” took us back, both in narrative time and to the energy and go-for-broke emotion of the earlier seasons. It follows Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas) on a humiliating job hunt and through the doors of the title restaurant — then still an Italian beef sandwich joint — for a good cry, a restorative meal and ultimately a job. A tribute to the power of work to provide purpose and restaurants to provide restoration, “Napkins” stepped back from the season’s abstractions and offered a meaty mouthful. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK

‘Blue Lights’

Season 1, Episode 5: ‘The Q Word’

The Northern Irish series “Blue Lights” is the best new police procedural to come around in a while, and it finds fresh ways to go through the genre’s familiar paces. One young cop continually turns down assignments, and we quickly see that she is both entitled and — much more unusual for this kind of show — a coward. In this taut episode, she found herself in the field and was forced to make a choice, in a moment that was truly shattering. (Streaming on BritBox.) MIKE HALE