My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2016

It has become a ritual now to talk about how there's too much TV at the beginning of these year-end lists.  You would think the bubble would burst eventually on the amount of content there is out there, but it hasn't yet.  But while the amount of networks and original programming continues to increase, my personal watching bandwidth has finally started to taper off.  After regularly watching 125 shows in 2015, my numbers were down slightly to 115 this year.  Overall, it has had a positive effect though.  I may have watched less TV in 2016, but it mostly just meant that I watched less shows that I thought were okay or even actively bad.

Even still, my plan for 2017 is to watch even fewer shows by cutting down on series I'm getting sick of.  That means after its head-scratching second season, I'm giving the axe to Fear the Walking Dead.  I've been hesitant about dropping Arrow and The Flash because I feel like I need to watch them for DC completionist reasons even though their obnoxious melodrama reduced me to watching every episode at half attention, but I've finally made the decision after their mid-season finales that I'm removing them from my life.  I'm even considering nixing something like Bojack Horseman, which I've tuned into out of critical obligation, since everyone goes nuts over it, but I don't enjoy very much.

I'm not sure how well this will fare for me, since my TV-related fear of missing out is overwhelming. After all, I just got finished cramming Sweet/Vicious and Crazyhead into the last week of the year because people I trust said they were good and I wanted determine if they were eligible for my list.  Watching less TV is just going to lead to more potential instances of me passing up a show and then hearing it gets great, or quitting a show right before it turns things around.  That terrifies me!

All of this is a way to say that TV is in a wonderful place right now, and trying to manage your intake and still devote enough time to movies, music, and living life is a good problem to have.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on the episodes they aired in 2016.  This is a pretty plain and simple rule for cable dramas, where full seasons usually air within a single calendar year.  However, it gets slightly messy when considering network shows, which usually air the first half of their season in the fall and the second half starting January of the next year.  So something like, say, Black-ish would be judged based on the second half of its second season (which aired at the beginning of the year) and the first half of its third season (which started in the fall of this year).  As for what constitutes a TV show, anything that airs on, you know, a TV station counts.  But shows that air exclusively on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon count too.  The line is getting more blurry every day, but I'm still counting out independent YouTube webseries (though I recommend the excellent Pantheon University anyway).  Okay, everything clear now?  Good, let's get this list started...

Even if you didn't like season one, American Crime is must-see TV this year

The fun of the seasonal anthology series is that not liking the show now does not necessarily mean you won't like it forever.  So what if one season is bad?  The next season is a completely different story with totally different characters.  The possibilities of that slate-wiping are endless.  (Of course, the same team of writers are most likely going to be working on the show, so you could end up disliking it in any iteration.  Five seasons of empirical evidence have shown that American Horror Story is always going to be bad to me.  So it goes.)

Put simply, I didn't enjoy ABC's American Crime very much last year.  Network drama has been frustratingly staid in recent years, so I appreciated the first season's efforts to transcend broadcast expectations.  But in an effort to be more than "just a network drama," the show oversold its prestige factor.  What resulted was a season of television that shouted "THIS IS IMPORTANT" at the audience at least three times per episode.  And despite its declarations, most of its points about race, class, and crime were lazy and surface-level.

So regardless of the new beginnings season two promised, I wasn't very excited about more grandstanding and chest-puffing from creator John Ridley.  The fact that the male-on-male sexual assault angle this year felt like it was pitched down the middle for that kind of self-importance only made things worse.  And yet, the first three episodes of the season have done nothing but blow away all expectations.

The show narrows its scope this year
Season one focused on the aftermath of a home invasion in Modesto, California that led to the death of veteran Matt Skokie.  But from that simple premise spun all manner of tangents, introducing characters and subplots that barely felt related to the core of the story.  It felt like the season wanted to address race and class issues in America, but couldn't find a way to connect those themes to the narrative without making the murder feel like an afterthought.  The second season tells a different story, one that involves an underprivileged male student at a private school in Indianapolis who is allegedly raped by a member of the prestigious basketball team at a party.  Unlike last year, season two locks into its central story and stays with it, roping in the same themes Ridley was toying with in the first season without any wandering.

Essentially, both seasons are about the ripple effects of a single crime, but in the first season that crime feels like it swallows up a whole city, while the second season's crime is rooted in an individual community.  That tightening of focus proves to be the right move.  Where American Crime often felt like it was biting off more than it could chew in season one, this year is a perfectly sized morsel.  So far, season two has been significantly more straightforward, and that's one of the reasons why it's so much more compelling.

Season two corrects many of the first season's mistakes
You'll know you're in good hands very early into the premiere, when Ridley (who wrote and directed the episode) subverts expectations that the audience might have, not just based on years of television viewing, but also from watching his own show last year.  There's a scene where Kevin (Trevor Jackson), the African American star of the basketball team, is driving down the street and blasting rap music when the lights from a cop car begin flashing in his rear-view mirror.  But once the cop pulls up aside him, it's revealed that the he's a friend of the family and just wanted to relay a message to Kevin's mom.  It's a small moment, but one that lets you know that this season isn't interested in the pat story turns it may not have been able to resist in the past.

Another moment introduces us to basketball coach Dan Sullivan (Timothy Hutton) sneaking a video of a cheerleader doing a provocative dance during practice.  Our first instinct is to groan at another creepy teacher plotline, but a few scenes later we learn that it's his daughter, and he's only recording her dance to show her mother what their child gets up to at school.

The first three episodes haven't entirely rid themselves of the anvilicious details that dragged season one down.  A scene in the premiere involves members of the basketball team passing around pictures of various female classmates in the locker room after practice.  "I so wanna rape that," one of the players says about a girl, and the clunk of that inelegant line threatens to drown out the rest of the scene.  Another scene features two black teens making out while a Kendrick Lamar song intones "Complexion don't mean a thing" in the background.  But these moments are much easier to swallow when they happen once or twice an episode as opposed to once or twice per scene.

It also accentuates season one's positives
Even in its less interesting narrative moments, the show was always a visual powerhouse.  Season one tried to present itself as "more than your usual network drama" in many ways, but the one aspect where it completely succeeded was in its cinematic direction.  This season is no different, and now that they are servicing a story that's more compelling, the visuals take on even more weight.  Ridley and his team of directors frequently employ tight, searching closeups.  These episodes are full of emotionally charged scenes, and you get to see all of the subtleties through the micro-expressions on the characters' faces.

Many of the actors who appeared on the show last year make a return in season two, and they all get the opportunity to show their range by playing characters who are much different from the ones they played in the previous season.  Felicity Huffman, Timothy Hutton, Lili Taylor, and Regina King are all giving incredible and nuanced performances.  Some new actors, like Hope Davis, get added to the rotation and fit right into the ensemble too.  But what's most impressive are the younger actors, who carry the most weight, given that the crime of the season is centered around them.  Season one's biggest acting weak spots were all found within the teenage characters, but Trevor Jackson, Joey Pollari, and Connor Jessup rise to the occasion.  With such rock solid work from the whole cast, the season is able to sell moments that could otherwise come off as overwrought.

We're only a third of the way through the season, so it could easily fly off the rails, sinking into all of the pitfalls it has managed to avoid.  But evidence from these three episodes alone indicate that everyone involved has figured out what they're doing, and are executing a carefully constructed plan.  If that's the case, we may have one of the best network drama seasons in a long time on our hands.

Pilot Talk 2015: Week of 3/1/2015

Every TV season, networks bring out a new crop of shows, in hopes that they'll be the next big hit.  Pilot Talk is devoted to figuring out whether these shows are worth your time based on the first episode.

American Crime (ABC, Thursdays at 10:00 PM)
For a while now, the major networks have been trying to create a drama that feels like it could be on cable, but what they usually get is something that's superficially "cable," but without the soul and quality of the best shows cable has to offer.  Consider American Crime another entry into that category.  It comes from Oscar winning screenwriter John Ridley -- a fact ABC wants you to remember in every one of its promos -- who's clearly trying to make an Important Show.  Above all else, American Crime is very impressed with its own seriousness, to the point of it being laughable.  The show is unsubtle in its statements about race within this story about the murder of war veteran Matt Skokie.  That's not to say unsubtle is automatically bad -- after all, Do the Right Thing isn't exactly understated -- but Ridley clumsily beats his point into the audience's head with his histrionic writing.

So is there anything to like about American Crime?  Yes, of course.  I do enjoy the way it's carving out the city of Modesto so far, even if it's not clear how everything connects.  We're introduced to everyone from Skokie's parents (Timothy Hutton and Felicity Huffman) to a Hispanic family tangentially connected with the investigation to a pair of wandering junkies.  And as blunt as Ridley's writing choices may be, this pilot is excellently directed, containing a film-like quality that you don't see on many other ABC shows.  For now, American Crime isn't all that satisfying, but it could come together and form something brilliant.
Grade: C+

Battle Creek (CBS, Sundays at 10:00 PM)
Battle Creek is based on a script that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan wrote over a decade ago, so naturally CBS would want to capitalize on the interest his name brings now.  Really, that's about the only reason why anybody is talking about this show, which is an otherwise standard buddy cop procedural.  Dean Winters and Josh Duhamel star as the mismatched pair of Detective Russ Agnew and FBI agent Milt Chamberlain (yes, really), and they've got an amiably combative chemistry.  The pilot is bogged down with some cheesy and forced lines ("Milt, you're good at everything!"), but it generally hums along with a competency you'd expect from people like Gilligan and David Shore, who serves as the actual showrunner on this series.  Bryan Singer adds even more prestige, giving the episode a stylish look by directing it with lots of warm tones and smoky air to the Battle Creek police station.  Still, it's hard to begrudge anybody who comes away from this pilot feeling like nothing of substance happened.
Grade: C

The Last Man on Earth (Fox, Sundays at 9:00 PM)
In a TV landscape full of derivative ideas, The Last Man on Earth feels like an exciting breath of fresh air.  If its premise -- a virus that kills off the world's population in 2019 leaves Phil Miller (Will Forte) is the last man remaining -- feels like it would be better suited for a movie, that's because it originally started out as one.  Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Clone High, 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie) came up with this idea as a feature film before bringing it to Will Forte, who turned it into a treatment for a television show.  As an actor, Forte gets to play squarely in his wheelhouse.  He's always been excellent at balancing unhinged and humane, and Phil Miller is the perfect vehicle for that, as we see the hilarious and harrowing effects being the last man on Earth would have on somebody.  As a writer, he's just as impressive.  Not only is the pilot very funny, it somehow never gets boring, even though there's only one character.  Credit goes to Lord and Miller as well, whose visual flair gives the episode a Keaton-esque sense of energy.

Anyone who thinks about the setup of the show for more than a second can suss out that it's unsustainable, and that The Last Man on Earth is a very deliberate title choice.  Kristen Schaal shows up at the end of the first episode as Carol Pilbasian, presumably the last woman on Earth.  The second episode is a significant step down from the pilot, mostly due to my hesitance about Carol as a character.  At first she seems like a relatively normal person, who just has different and funny personality traits.  But she quickly just becomes a stock crazy woman, and after an entire episode of Phil praying for a female companion, the punchline is "can you believe he's stuck with this nutjob?!"  That most of the second episode is focuses on their hacky "nagging wife, beleaguered husband" dynamic is a little disappointing.  Still, I love the tension between these two differing viewpoints on how to live as the last people on Earth.  If the show can focus more on that theme, it could turn things back around for episode three.
Pilot Grade: A-
Second Episode Grade: B

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix, All 13 episodes released March 6th)
Ellie Kemper has always been underrated, so it's nice to see her finally get a leading role in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the new show from 30 Rock creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock.  Kemper plays the titular Kimmy Schmidt, a woman who attempts to start her life over in New York City after she escapes a doomsday cult, and she gets to do her over-the-top exuberance that she did so well as Erin on The Office.  There are some very funny jokes in this first episode, but it's also missing the snap and zip of 30 Rock at its peak.  Oddly, there seems to be something wrong with the background sound of the show -- in that there isn't any -- and it's really dulling the comedy.  It's like somebody forgot to record room tone and add it in post.  As of right now, it's nice to have the Fey and Carlock style back, even if it's not quite operating at peak potential.  Plus, this show is not really made for this style of review.  The Netflix model imagines that you won't just stop after watching the first episode.  So take this grade as a very optimistic B.  I'm with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt for the long run.
Grade: B