My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2015

90% of every best TV of the year feature makes some mention of "Peak TV," a term coined by FX president John Landgraf to explain the current overabundance of not just television shows, but quality television shows.  Even I've introduced at least three of my pieces this year by talking about this concept.  It's an annoying term, especially given its ubiquity, but it's also useful to describe today's landscape.  For obsessive completionists like myself, there's just too much TV.  The total number of shows I watched regularly in 2015 was a whopping 125, spread across 36 different networks.  Trust me, it's as exhausting as it sounds.

But this so-called state of Peak TV has also led to an interesting niche-ification of television.  Just a decade ago, there were 10 or 15 shows that almost everyone could agree upon as "the best shows on television."  And they usually boiled down to only a couple types of shows.  Now, great TV comes in all shapes and sizes.  So if you don't like that show all the critics are currently obsessing over, there are 50 more for you to try out.

For example, I don't like Bojack Horseman very much.  Critics are in love with it and think that it's an honest depiction of depression, when I find all of its emotional beats to be extremely hollow.  Season two of Transparent, which has a 93 on Metacritic, was a bit of a mess if you ask me.  Fargo, the show everyone won't shut up about being the best thing they've seen on television in a long time?  Kind of overrated!  And even still, there is an endless supply of shows that I loved, as you'll see from my list.  What a time to be alive.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on the episodes they aired in 2015.  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, Fresh Off the Boat would be judged based on the second half of its first season (which aired at the beginning of the year) and the first half of its second 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.  Okay, everything clear now?  Good, let's get this list started...

What's going on with Hannibal this season?

Season two of Hannibal was a rip-roaring run of television, one that confirmed the show's status as one of the best things airing.  It all culminated in the shocking bloodbath of "Mizumono," a finale that left the audience with a collective feeling of breathless anticipation for season three, just to see what creator Bryan Fuller and his team of writers would come up with next.  Naturally, these early stages of the show's third season have been about reckoning with the events from last year, putting the pieces of this world back together after Hannibal Lecter so thoroughly shattered it.

Fuller reintroduced everyone back into the mix slowly, teasing fans with a hypnotic and tense premiere episode that only featured Hannibal and his partner-in-crime/hostage Bedelia Du Maurier.  After a year of waiting to see who made it out of "Mizumono" alive, Fuller cleverly (or cruelly, however you prefer to think of it) made us wait another week.  Episode two flipped things with a mostly Will and Abigail affair, only the latter was revealed to be a figment of the former's imagination.  Jack's survival gets confirmed in "Secondo," the following episode, and by episode four we learned the fates of everyone involved in the season two finale, as we saw that Alana lived, but not without significant emotional and physical damage.

In these episodes, the show moved at a dreamy, leisurely pace, and the visuals had a woozy look to match.  The first three installments were all directed by the great Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, who amped up the beauty on what was already unquestionably one of TV's most gorgeous shows.  This wasn't his first time in the saddle -- you might remember him from his two directorial efforts last season, where he was able to deliver some imagery that deviated from the show's usual style without feeling completely alien (see: his truly mesmerizing, amorphous sex scene in "Naka-Choko").  Natali is less interested in the grotesque tableaus established by David Slade in the pilot than he is in gauzy scenes that dissolve together and layer over one another.  I love his half-lucid approach to visualizing scenes, and his work in "Antipasto," "Primavera," and "Secondo" resulted in some of the most stunning shots in Hannibal history, which is saying something.

Brian Reitzell's score seems to have found another gear too.  He has a way of finding clashing, abrasive sounds and blending them together for a wild and hair-raising effect.  Hannibal is hardly a scary show, but you wouldn't know it from just listening to Reitzell's score.  Just a few notes are enough to make you leap out of your seat.  His sonic wizardry couples with the stable of directors' haunting imagery to create a wholly original aesthetic value that makes you wonder just how this show ended up on TV, let alone NBC.  It feels like watching an hour long avant-garde film every week.

If only the story felt as satisfying.  While it's nice to bathe in the show's sumptuous style, the narrative has no forward momentum so far this year.  A little breather post-"Mizumono" was probably necessary, but these first few episodes have felt less like a change of pace and more like outright stalling in search of a plot.  Things are proceeding in a circular motion, as the story continually doubles back on itself.  We've gotten numerous flashbacks to the second season (as if anyone could ever forget it), and even the new material will do something like present Will in Florence, but then shift into reverse, spending two whole episodes showing the process that lead he and everyone else to that point.  There's elliptical and then there's just plain dithering.

I had a thought while watching this week's "Cotorno": Is this show just not as interesting now that everybody knows what Hannibal is up to?  The first two seasons wrung buckets of tension from dramatic irony.  Everyone watching knows Hannibal's true nature, and we're just waiting for the characters on the show to catch up.  Season two raised the stakes even more, presenting Will as the only one convinced of Hannibal's evil for the majority of the episodes, and introducing a new level of gamesmanship between the two.  Now that everybody is aware of Hannibal's murderous ways, it's just a straightforward race to get him, rather than the mystery it was in season one or the cat-and-mouse game that existed between he and Will in season two.  Because the show can't move too quickly and have Hannibal get caught, it runs the risk of turning him into a supervillain, always two steps ahead even when it seems like he isn't, and somehow scampering off just in the nick of time.

Really, the problem boils down to structure more than anything.  Season two was breathlessly paced, constantly lunging forward with reckless abandon.  Even the trial episode near the beginning, which seemed to be most people's least favorite episode last year, moved the story forward much more than anything we've gotten so far this year.  Season three probably couldn't ever match that, but the first season didn't have a bullet train narrative either, and it worked out fine.  What it did have was the underlying structure of its cases of the week to hold everything together.  We live in an age where the word "procedural" gets a reaction similar to a baby being forced to eat vegetables, but it's awfully valuable in giving episodes a structure while you play around with longer narratives in the spaces between.  Without that, season three is waffling under the weight of its own intense serialization.  After all, even season two had a case of the week in over half of its episodes.

These complaints aren't show-killing ones though.  Season three may be a step down from its first two seasons, but a limping Hannibal is still stronger than almost everything else on television.  Plus, there has been some compelling material amidst the sluggishness.  As mentioned before, "Antipasto" was a great premiere, and this season has continued to explore its most fascinating theme: the idea that it's both terrifying and liberating for somebody else to truly know you.  If nothing else, season three has emphasized just how brilliantly laid out season two was, giving so many characters different motivations for wanting to seek vengeance against Hannibal Lecter.  We're only five episodes in, so things could come together eventually and render all of these points moot.  I just hope it happens sooner than later, especially given that this season could very well be its last, if nobody else picks it up after NBC cancelled it.  So get it together, Fuller and crew -- stop stalling and show us your design.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2014

"Great TV comes in all shapes and sizes."  That's become my motto over the course of this year, and something I want people to remember when they find themselves pre-judging a show based on some arbitrary standard.  We're increasingly moving away from the idea that every good drama has to be an antihero show in the vein of The Sopranos and every comedy has to be something fast-paced and single-camera like Arrested Development.  Now, we're living in an age where the best new series of the fall is a CW show based on a telenovela (watch Jane the Virgin, people!) and one of the best comedies of the year is a charming little Australian show that airs on a network called Pivot (watch Please Like Me, people!).  Say it with me now: Great TV comes in all shapes and sizes!

2014 was not quite as good of a year for television as 2013, which I consider the best year of TV since I started following the medium closely.  Last year featured a breadth of terrific new shows, but some of them faltered a little bit in 2014 (Masters of Sex, Orphan Black).  Even still, there are so many great shows popping up out of new places.  For example, this year saw Amazon solidify themselves as serious content creators with Transparent, Jill Soloway's shaggy, intimate tale about family and identity.  As a result of this continued expansion of the medium, I watched more television than ever this year -- the number of shows I followed completely in 2014 was a whopping 104.

There was quite a bit of turnover between my list last year and the one this year, with 14 of the shows that appeared on 2013's list being absent on this one.  Even what I consider to be some of my favorite shows are missing.  Game of Thrones had a fourth season that had some astonishing individual moments, but the show as a whole feels like it's increasingly spinning off its axis.  For every time Girls was brilliant in season three, it was just as maddening a scene or two later.  Orphan Black was fun and exciting while it was airing, but a bit of a mess when viewed in hindsight.  Justified had a chance to go down as one of my favorite dramas of this generation -- and it still does, if it sticks the landing -- but it's hard to see this year as anything other than a misstep for the show.  And I've thoroughly enjoyed the final season of Parenthood, but NBC chose not to air the entire run in 2014, so the material that would've likely pushed it in to the top 20 won't appear until next year.

Another trend I noticed is that this year was a better year for comedy than last year, if my lists are anything to go by.  Last year only featured two pure comedies, while this year has triple the amount at six.  So don't let anybody tell you that TV isn't cyclical.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on the episodes that they aired in 2014.  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, Brooklyn Nine-Nine would be judged based on the second half of its first season (which aired at the beginning of the year) and the first half of its second 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 Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon count too.  Unfortunately, "web series" don't qualify (but watch Jules and Monty anyway, because it's great), even though that distinction is becoming harder and harder to make.  Okay, everything clear now?  Good, let's get this list started...

My Emmy wish list ballot

I follow award shows, but I've never been one to get emotionally invested in them.  If a good show wins an award, it doesn't validate my tastes, and if a bad show wins something, I don't consider it a crime against humanity.  The Emmys are a weird beast -- the nominations are based on a very specific kind of buzz, and once the voters decide they like something, they tend to nominate that thing over and over again.  After a while of paying attention to them, you eventually start to realize that The Emmys are a pointless endeavor.  So what better way to celebrate a pointless award show than by making my own pointless nominations?

This year's awards will be honoring television that aired from June 1, 2013 to May 31, 2014.  That means, for example, that the season of Orange Is the New Black that's eligible is only the first season.  In formulating these wish list nominations, I took this very meaningless thing seriously by following the rules and going by the official ballot of eligibility in each category.

Now before getting into my nomination choices, let me just explain one thing that confuses most people: The Hanging Episodes Rule.  Obviously, there are many shows whose season runs right through the cutoff date.  For instance, Game of Thrones season four began in the eligibility window (April 6th) and ended outside of the window (June 15th).  The Hanging Episodes rule states that if half of the episodes in a season fall within the eligibility window, then the entire season is eligible, and any episode that hasn't aired at the time of nominations will be made available to voters.  Thus, all of Game of Thrones is fair game.

So is everybody up to speed on all things Emmy now?  Okay, let's dive into my personal picks (NOTE: the choices in each category are ordered from favorite to least favorite)...

Is Hannibal vs. The Americans the new Breaking Bad vs. Mad Men?

During the years that they were both on the air in the same calendar year, Breaking Bad and Mad Men were the two shows that battled it out for the unofficial title of Best Show on Television.  For the most part, there was very little question about the two shows' superior quality.  Both had a hand in ushering in the era during which AMC was seen as the new powerhouse network, an era that seems to have ended just as quickly as it came.  But even though many TV fanatics could agree that these were the two best shows on television, they were split on which one was actually the best show on television.  One's preference served to define them in some way: were you the kind of person who had a stronger response to Mad Men's sleek literary style or Breaking Bad's pulpy morality tale?

Now that Breaking Bad is over and Mad Men is entering its final season in a week, there's a void that's been left at the core of the television landscape.  Justified is near the end of a weak season, True Detective's quality doesn't quite match its pedigree and praise, and Enlightened was cancelled just as it was making a case for its place atop the TV Parthenon.  The two shows that appear to be the common response to the "what's the best show currently on television?" question are Hannibal and The Americans.  It's a pairing that doesn't seem to be as battle-ready as Mad Men and Breaking Bad were.  Those two had the benefit of being on the same network, centered around anti-heroes, and indebted to different aspects of The Sopranos.

At first glance, The Americans couldn't be more different from Hannibal.  One is a network drama while the other one is on cable.  One is about a serial killer, the other is about a pair of Russian spies in the 1980s.  But the coupling of the two brings out some interesting parallels.  Both were a part of the wave of great new television shows in 2013 -- a wave that included other potential contenders for the Best on TV title like The Returned, Rectify, and Orange is the New Black -- and while I admired them during their first seasons (The Americans ended up at #20 on my best of 2013 list, Hannibal at #12), I could never cross into the territory of fully loving them like many others did.  The Americans and Hannibal each had a cool vibe -- the latter in its clinical process, the former with its tight control and restraint -- that held me at a distance.  Yet in both shows, I saw something that implied those first seasons were only setup for when we got to the true fireworks factory in their second seasons.

Breaking Bad and Mad Men both had assured debut years, only to blow those respective seasons out of the water with their sophomore efforts.  If the parallels were to hold, it would only be fitting for Hannibal and The Americans to do the same.  And for the past 6 weeks, they've done just that, completely surpassing any kind of expectations that I had at the start of the year.  I predicted that The Americans would have a gigantic leap in quality in 2014 in my write-up for the show at the end of 2013, but if I'm being honest with myself, that was more of a wish than a guarantee.  It has had a leap though, mostly because the stakes feel so much higher this year.  Even in the first season, the show was always as much about a marriage as it was about spies (if not more so), and so far season 2 has stressed that point even more, after Philip and Elizabeth find the dead bodies of their two comrades and the couple's daughter when a mission goes wrong in the premiere.  The reminder of how much their duty is putting their family in danger is one that has hung heavily over these first six episodes, informing every decision they make, without it ever feeling heavy-handed.

Like Hannibal, The Americans is about the push and pull between its two main characters, and the marriage between Philip and Elizabeth is more layered and complex than ever.  Season 2 has delved deeper into the idea of roles and the way they factor into these people's lives.  It's about how their roles as spies and their roles as partners bleed into one another in ways both intentional and not.  This year, every character is crumbling under the weight of their own deception.  To match the complicated emotions running through the characters, the plot is even knottier this year.  You'll often have to watch each episode twice to get it, but you when you do get a grasp of it, you realize it's some crackerjack spy storytelling.  It's dizzying to see how many threads showrunners Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields are tugging at, crossing and looping them around each other masterfully.  The lid is kept so tight on the show that when it finally comes off and the plot intersects with the relationship drama, it's thrilling, devastating stuff.

Meanwhile, Hannibal may not be as concerned with the concrete logic of its A to B plotting, but season 2 has had a similar ramp up in story.  This season opened on a scene showing Jack Crawford and Hannibal Lecter coming to blows at some point in the future, but instead of it feeling like a spoiler, it was just an indication of how the events would be proceeding this year.  The plot has moved way faster than you'd expect, with Hannibal's body count increasing and his sphere of influence increasing faster.  Season 1 ended with a reverse of what we've come to expect from this story: with Hannibal free and Will Graham behind bars.  You'd think that imprisoning the lead would handcuff the show, since so much of its hook last year was the complicated relationship between these two broken men.  But the battle between the two of them has only become more intense this year.  Being locked behind bars has caused Will to think of more cunning measures to prove his innocence, making desperate attempts to show that the guilt lies on Hannibal's head instead.

For Will, being trapped in his own head is far worse than being stuck in a cell, and the visual manifestations of his psychoses have only increased to reflect the darkness invading him.  If season 1 coasted along on its oblique dreamlike logic, then season 2 of Hannibal is pure nightmare theater.  The show's visuals are by far the most stunning on television, generating just as many chills from a simple framing choice as they do from an elaborate crime scene tableau.  This year, the sounds have stepped up to match the sights, with the score becoming more eerie and intrusive with each new episode.  Together, all of the show's technical elements serve to key the audience into the parts of the characters' inner psyche that they may not even be aware of.  Like the show's titular cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal is equally concerned with the artistry surrounding its story.

So if these two programs are the new titans that will be battling it out for televisual supremacy, then which one is the Mad Men and which one is the Breaking Bad?  There's not a one-to-one translation, really.  There's something to the sophistication and emotional temperature of The Americans that is strongly reminiscent of Mad Men, but its tightly constructed plot is very Breaking Bad.  Hannibal's got a more immediately hooky premise in the way that Breaking Bad did, but its favoring of atmosphere over plot recalls Mad Men.  In the end, The Americans is more like Mad Men and Breaking Bad is more like Hannibal, which makes the battle even more interesting, since I like Mad Men more than Breaking Bad but Hannibal more than The Americans right now.

Mad Men and Breaking Bad both had second seasons that are some of the best television seasons of last 10 years, and while neither The Americans nor Hannibal have quite reached that level halfway through, they're not far off from the trajectory.  Together, all four shows are an example of the anti-sophomore slump -- the "sophomore skyrocket," if you will.  The internet has a need to pit shows against each other for no real reason, so the latter two are just next up in the queue now that the former two are on their way out.  So is Hannibal vs. The Americans the new Breaking Bad vs. Mad Men?  Sure, why not?

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2013

Are you sick of hearing about whether or not we're in the golden age of television?  There has been alot of hand-wringing about that lately, spurred on by the fact that 2013 was an unequivocally great year for TV, the best that I've seen since I started following the medium closely.  Not only was the year remarkable for its depth of quality, but also for its breadth.  Good television has been popping up from every corner, with networks like Sundance making their debut in original programming and online sources like Hulu and Netflix expanding their market.  One of the shows in end of the year discussion, Borgen, released episodes on LinkTV -- whatever that is!  It's interesting to think that a little over a decade ago, most of the talked about TV shows came from the big four networks (CBS, Fox, NBC, and ABC) and HBO.  Now I literally get anxiety thinking about all of the great television coming from so many different places that I'll never get around to watching.  (For how much TV I already watch, see the full list linked to at the bottom of this post.)

Television lists are harder than music and film lists to do, because the main television season is spread out over two calendar years, with many shows starting their seasons in September and not ending until April or May.  This is becoming less of an issue, as summer is seen as a television ghetto less and less every year, and cable shows tend to air their entire seasons in a single calendar year.  Nevertheless, for each television show, the only episodes eligible for ranking purposes are the ones that aired in 2013.  That seems like an obvious thing, but it always throws some people.  This can sometimes work to a show's advantage.  For example, Parenthood was very high on my list last year because it aired all of its best material (the end of season 3 at the beginning of year, the beginning of season 4 in the fall) in 2012.  On the other hand, New Girl was never going to land in my top 20 this year, but it ended up being way further down on my full list because its third season has been so terrible, it's tarnished the quality of the back half of season 2 that aired at the beginning of the year.  Is all of that clear?  Okay, good.

For all of my talk about the breadth of the television landscape, my top 20 consists of a small cluster of networks, but there are still some unexpected ones.  The list heavily favors cable to network, with 16 belonging to the former and 2 belonging to the latter (and 2 coming from internet-only sources).  My top 20 is also low on straight comedies, consisting of mostly dramas and shows that are listed as "comedy" but are mostly dramatic.  This is mainly because of how good this year was for drama, but it also was a very weak year for comedy, particular network comedies.  So enough analysis of the list, let's move on to the actual thing...

Hannibal, Bates Motel, The Following, and Violence on Television

The world is a scary place to live in, and with events like Steubenville, Aurora, and the Boston marathon bombings constantly popping up in the news, it's hard not to feel like things are getting worse and worse.  One thing that they all have in common is the violent nature of these crimes.  All of the violence that we see on scripted television shows is definitely not the cause of this, but this televised violence uncomfortably reminds us of the very real violence that happens every day.  This last television season had three new shows that put violence at the forefront: Hannibal, Bates Motel, and The Following.  As somebody who grew up listening to Eminem and playing Grand Theft Auto, I can't believe I'm raising this question, but have we gone too far with the level of violence that appears on the small screen?

To me, it all comes down to what each show has to say about their violence.  Hannibal takes the cold and clinical approach, simply stating "The world is messed up" and leaving it there.  The Following takes things a bit further and shouts "The world is messed up!  Look at how messed up the world is!" right in your face.  Bates Motel, on the other hand, ponders "The world is so messed up!  Let's figure out why!"  Each of these shows' respective mission statements say alot about their overall quality.  Part of the reason why I enjoy Hannibal the most is that it's very smart about its violence.  It's gruesome and grotesque (to the point where I question if it's appropriate to air on NBC), but in an artful way that never seems gratuitous and is always about getting to a deeper character focus.  It's a show where the people that inhabit it are literally haunted by all of the death that surrounds them.  Where a show like The Following tries to give the protagonist a generic alcohol problem that it never even explores, Hannibal's characters are constantly dealing with the psychological toll of their jobs.  Filled with hallucinations, fugue states, and a lack of temporal continuity -- Hannibal isn't a dream, it's a living nightmare.

Now, what Bates Motel is trying to do -- to get to the root of the violence of the world -- is admirable, but the problem is that the intellectual digging leads nowhere.  When trying to figure out why the world is so messed up, the reason becomes the result and vice versa.  The show has a recurring element of violence, particularly sexual violence, against women, but it doesn't have anything to say about it.  Bates Motel just flails around for meaning, simply saying "There's sexual violence because...umm...sexual violence!"  Shows often take time to figure things out, but it doesn't work the same when you're putting violence out there and searching for the meaning behind it later.  Without any meaning, it's just gross and manipulative.  Over the course of the first season, the show tried to build Norma Bates as this tragic figure, surrounded by sexual violence.  She almost gets raped in the pilot, her boyfriend ends up being involved in some kind of strange Asian sex slave ring, and this pile of violence and misery just brainlessly builds and builds.  The reveal of Norma's history of molestation as a child in the season finale was the last straw for me.  It's just ugly to suggest that every problem with the world and the people in it is because of sexual violence.

I gave up on The Following long ago, but it's slightly easier to forgive its splashy and nihilistic violence because the show is so dumb.  What's so frustrating about Bates Motel is that it's clearly struggling to present interesting ideas.  Despite all of the problematic things the show has to say, there are a handful of things that do work.  As the season progressed, it became clear that the writers were at least somewhat aware of its campiness, and the humor became one of the most delightful elements of each episode (particularly from Vera Farmiga, who needs to be nominated for an Emmy for her performance).  Additionally, the way that the setting seems to exist out of time, with its old fashioned sets and costume designs mixing with modern technology, is effectively unsettling.  And deep within itself, Bates Motel has the capability of exploring its central mother and son relationship and towing the line between discomfort and downright inappropriateness.  Yet all of these ideas are suffocating under the weight of Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin's cheap thriller sensibilities.  The bizarre camp, small-town drama, and violent horror just don't mix very well.

Hannibal has its fair share of violence against women and to be honest, the over-reliance on putting women and children in danger general is a prevailing weakness in most television shows.  I can understand the impulse -- putting women and children in jeopardy feels like an instant injection of drama into an episode's veins -- but the convention has become trite and weak.  The difference with Hannibal though is that it doesn't just toss violence out for hollow shock value (like The Following does).  No, in Hannibal, the impalings, corpse totem poles, and angelic murder scenes are deeply unsettling.  Not since the days of watching Are You Afraid of the Dark? before naptime in elementary school have I been genuinely scared by a TV show.  But maybe people are scared or creeped out by Bates Motel and The Following too and I'm just not on either show's frequency.  Hannibal's heart is cold, Bates Motel's beats irregularly, and The Following has no heart and soul at all -- it's all just a matter of preference which one you like the most.  Hint: you should like Hannibal the most.