I’ve often argued that when it comes to ranking series, the second 10 can be a better indicator of an anime year year on the whole than the first.  In part, anyway, because of course the quality of the series at the very top is undeniably crucial.  And by that second measure 2020 did all right – not great, but respectably.  This list, however, does reveal 2020 to be a strikingly shallow year for anime, even more so than 2019.  Part of that is due to production delays of course, but we’d be kidding ourselves if we said it wouldn’t have been a weak year for depth anyway – as a look at the shows that were delayed bears out.

Often I can look at the Top 10 and #11-20 and see “tiers” – plateaus with big drop-offs which can tell you a lot about the strength of the year on the whole.  This time, honestly, that’s not so easy.  This whole second ten is much of a muchness – #11 is obviously better than #20, but there are no clear tiers this time.  There are no shows which feel like they should have been included in the top ten, because I had to stretch a bit to come up with those ten and they’re still distinctly better than what comes after.  And there were no agonizing omissions for the same reason – it was a bit of a struggle coming up with 20 shows I wanted to include.

With that said, these are certainly shows here I feel a lot of affection for.  And I find that the more scarcity of clearly elite series there is in an anime year, the more I tend to fall back on personal affection in compiling these rankings.

11. Mairimashita! Iruma-kun – I kind of missed the boat on Mairimashita! Iruma-kun, to be honest.  I never stopped watching it but I did stop blogging it for most of its run, and that was a mistake.  In my defense this series improved tremendously over two cours, fleshing out its cast and subtly growing more thematically ambitious.  At heart it’s a sweet series about an incredibly nice kid for whom things actually go kind of OK, which makes it a very refreshing change.  Happily a second season has already been announced, and will premiere in Spring 2021.

12. Kitsutsuki Tanteidokoro – Woodpecker Detective’s Office was another late bloomer, which raises the interesting point that the #11-12 series both improved over their run, while many of the top 10 struggled with endings.  After an uneven start this series delivered a lot of interesting character material, with one of the most fascinatingly unlikeable central characters of the year.  It was also lovely to look at, with a highly atmospheric depiction of turn of the 20th-century Tokyo.

13. Gegege no Kitarou 2018 – That Gegege no Kitarou finished one spot higher in 2020 despite being a better show in 2019 is an indication of how shallow this past year’s anime pool really was.  GGGnK didn’t end with its best material but on the whole it was still a very solid year, and on balance the 2018 may very well be the best of any of the franchise’s TV entries.

14. Haikyuu!! To The Top – To the Top is a somewhat difficult series to place, because the first cour was a lot better than the second.  I guess on balance it was mostly a wash, and indeed this is roughly where most Haikyuu entries have ranked on these lists.  I loved the Shouyou training arc, including the stuff following Tobio at the national training center, and the final few episodes were vintage Haikyuu action.  But too much of the stuff in-between dragged, and there was undeniably a significant drop in overall production values (which admittedly started from Olympian heights).

15. Mugen no Juunin: Immortal – Of all the shows in the Top 20, Immortal probably had the greatest range from its best episodes to its worst (though Fruits Basket is a contender).  I place it this high because director Hamasaki Hiroshi did an absolutely astonishing job with a clearly limited budget, delivering some of the most stunning imagery of the year, and because Immortal’s best episodes were truly great.  But it stumbled badly as it tried to cram far too much story into far too little time, a common malady afflicting anime adaptations these days (especially seinen ones).

16. Housekisho Richard-shi no Nazo Kantei – Not a lot of surprises from a series that I was expecting to fill a very familiar slot on the schedule, and which did exactly that.  And very well, too.  The mysteries were occasionally interesting and there were hints of some deeper character stuff between the two leads (just hints) but on balance, Jeweler Richard was mostly a relaxing and amusing slice of life series.  It should have ended after the tenth episode though…

17. Fugou Keiji: Balance:Unlimited – Oddly enough given that it’s here, I found Fugou Keiji to be sort of disappointing.  But that’s mostly because of what it turned out to be, not because it didn’t execute what that was quite well.  This was not the buddy cop show one might have imagined but basically a superhero series, effectively a Japanization of the Batman franchise.  And it was a lot of fun, although there were a couple of clunker episodes along the way.

18. Fruits Basket Season 2 – Same as GGGnK, pretty much – a weaker season which placed higher than the prior year thanks to the competition.  Furuba ventured into uncharted territory anime-wise this year, with mixed results.  For whatever reason this season almost totally ignored Kyou in order to obsess over Yuki even more than the manga does, but that will surely have to change in S3 unless it intends to radically rework Takaya’s ending (which would seem to cut against the reason for this reboot’s existence in the first place).

19. Kami no Tou: Tower of God – To say that this adaptation offered only a taste of the manhwa is an understatement.  Even given that the source material eventually devolved into a repetitive and self-indulgent mess, 13 episodes was still not nearly enough to dig into why Tower of God is such an interesting series, and Bam such an interesting protagonist.

20 Radiant Season 2 – Is Radiant a Top 20 series?  Honestly no, not in anything resembling a decent year.  But 2020 is what it was, and Radiant’s second season was certainly better than the first.  That’s thanks mostly to the fact that the anime stuck to Tony Valente’s material this time.  I would love to see Radiant be the forerunner to a new wave of manfra adaptations in anime, because there are a lot of good ones out there.  But so far there are no indications that it’s anything but a one-off.