My 50 Favorite Television Shows of the Decade: 2010-2019

There was a problem facing television as a medium in the 2010s, and if you've been online or reading my year-end lists then you know what I'm talking about: there's too much damn TV.  It's been an outright epidemic over the last 10 years, with new shows and delivery systems for those shows popping up at a rapid rate, far past anyone's ability to keep up with it all.  Somebody once aptly described a TV critic's role as being more like a book critic's nowadays -- there's too much for one person to consume, so you have to make peace with that and curate your experience by finding a niche.

Unfortunately, the influx of TV also led to more bad shows.  The rise of streaming and binge-watching has caused series to indulge in being nothing more than formless pieces of content.  Sometimes it can feel like every writer who knows how to construct seasons, episodes, and even scenes died near the end of the previous decade.  But the sheer magnitude of television in this decade means that there was still alot to love about television.  This list chronicles the best of the best from the 2010s.

The rules: These eligibility rules are slightly more complicated than the ones for the other two lists, so read carefully.  In order for a show to be eligible for this list, it has to have aired more than half of its total episodes within this decade.  Also, only those episodes that aired in this decade are taken into consideration when placing and ranking that show.  For example: 30 Rock is eligible for consideration because 72 of its 138 episodes aired after January 1, 2010 -- that's 52% for all the mathematicians out there -- but the only episodes that determine if it can make the top 50 are Season 4 Episode 9 through Season 7 Episode 13 (the episodes that aired in the 2010s).  Also, only continuing series are eligible for the top 50, while miniseries get their own mini list.

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...

2015 Emmy Award predictions

The 67th Primetime Emmy awards air tonight at 8:00 PM EST, so I figured I'd offer some predictions for how the night will go down.  The Emmys seem a little harder to predict than the Oscars, so I could end up with only a 50% success rate, but that also makes watching the show a little more fun.  As always, there will be some frustrating picks from the voters, but more and more it seems like their choices are falling in line with the critical consensus.  Let's hope that means Modern Family's reign of terror will finally come to an end...

Some pre-finale thoughts on Mad Men's final stretch

"Is That All There Is?"  That's the name of the song by Peggy Lee that bookends "Severance," the first of Mad Men's final seven episodes, and it serves as a road map to understanding this half-season in the way that all of the show's premieres do.  It seems like a question everyone has been asking themselves for the entirety of the series, only now it's with an increasing sense of urgency.  At the end of last year's masterful "Waterloo," all of the main characters essentially sold their souls to McCann for a fat paycheck and a promise of retaining the status quo.  When we return to them, they've got money, they've got power, and yet "Severance" makes it clear that there's still something missing.

"Is that all there is?" was a question many fans were asking at the start of this final stretch as well.  The first few episodes divided the internet, with the louder party lamenting that they weren't momentous enough and with only seven episodes left, Matthew Weiner and his crew of writers were "wasting time."  It's easy to see where the frustration came from.  "Severance" deliberately called back to many of the show's early elements -- misogynist pigs give Peggy and Joan a hard time at an important meeting, the name "Rachel Menken" is spoken for the first time since season one, there's more Don philandering -- in a way that felt poetic and meaningful, but could just as simply be seen as evidence that Weiner no longer had anything new to say.  And it certainly didn't help that Don's latest brunette fling, Diane, was way more flat and boring than any of the other sirens he's bedded in the past.  It became a fun game to watch a new episode on Sunday, then log on to Twitter to see people arguing over whether or not it was a disappointment.

But here's the thing about Mad Men: it's a show that Matt Weiner has always made on his own terms, and if viewers were on the same wavelength as he was at any given moment, then that was just icing on the cake.  And he's gained enough goodwill that one would think he'd be trusted to figure out a way for everything to come together, but apparently that trust wasn't there for many fans and critics.  I thought it was bold of him to make episodes so willfully alienating to some people, but thankfully, I also wasn't one of those people being alienated.  I've loved every single episode that has aired this year.  (Yes, even "New Business," which many people are already calling one of the worst episodes in Mad Men history.  What a loopy, brilliant piece of comedy that episode was, and it was heartening to see that the show still had something that light in its arsenal this late in the game.)

Every season of Mad Men has its own individual themes that bubble up alongside the show's larger ideas, and from the first few moments of "Severance," season 7B has been pushing the notion of "the life not lived."  When you're first born, life is a massive series of branching paths, a river that breaks into trillions of tributaries.  But then you go down one of those tributaries, and suddenly those other ones start to disappear, like they never even existed.  This happens again and again, all throughout your life, until at some point that display of forks just becomes a single line.

These final episodes have been all about characters wrestling with their lives not lived, those tributaries they missed floating down because they chose another route.  These moments work because Mad Men has always had an excellent grasp of its own history, playing off the tapestry of connections that have accumulated between its characters to wring emotion out of a little glance or a knowing line.  When Pete catches a glimpse of Peggy standing amongst a gaggle of children in "Time & Life," we know he's thinking about what could have happened if she had told him about her pregnancy way back in season one.  Another episode opens with an idyllic scene of Don standing in the kitchen with Betty and his children, and it's so easy to imagine that this is what life would have been like if the two of them had stayed together, before Henry walks in and dissolves the dream.  The show has always drawn power from the way its stories allow us to reflect on aspects of our own lives, and by pondering the "life not lived" of these characters, we're also forced to think about all of the lives we'll never get to live.

McCann's decision to absorb Sterling Cooper & Partners into their own firm offered an opportunity for most of the main characters to forget about the life not lived in exchange for the life they've always wanted.  Ted gets the pharmaceutical he was dreaming about in "The Forecast;" Pete gets Nabisco; Roger gets Buick; and Don gets his own great white whale, Coca Cola.  But if nothing else, Mad Men is about how ephemeral everything is.  That beautiful ad you worked so hard at perfecting?  It will eventually stop being printed in magazines or aired on TV.  That person you're so sure will be the answer to your problems that you jump into an affair or relationship with them?  Sooner or later, you'll realize that they didn't fill that hole inside of you.  Happiness fades in the world of this series, so it's no surprise that many of these people got what they wanted and again realized that it's not enough.

Does my life mean anything?  Did I make the right choices?  Is this it?  These questions are swirling around every character, but especially Don.  He's searching for meaning, and he's willing to do anything to find it.  His whole story has been about wrapping himself up in layers to get away from his true self: a false identity, a Grace Kelly type of wife, a typical American family, success and money.  Season 7B has found him slowly stripping those layers from himself.  He gives away $1 million to Megan in "New Business," he walks away from advertising in "Lost Horizon," he relieves himself of his car in "The Milk & Honey Route."  Who knows where this is all leading to, but something tells me we won't see a return of the Don Draper we've known for seven seasons.

It's easy to see meta meanings in these ruminations on life and success during this whole half-season.  Creator Matt Weiner has spent the last 8 years crafting one of the greatest TV shows of all time, and now it's coming to a close, leaving him with the task of figuring out what life has in store for him next.  So in a way, the ending of Mad Men feels like it's mourning the end of Mad Men, as I'm sure Weiner was thinking about how they'd have to break down all the sets for good when he was writing about the gradual emptying of the offices in the Time-Life building.

There's been a heavy feeling of finality to these past six episodes; you can really see what Weiner meant when he said that every episode would feel like a finale in some way.  So many scenes feel like they could very well be the last we see of certain characters, and it's not hard to imagine a series finale that's just all Don.  If that's the case, then the show has left us with moments that feel right for everyone, in a story sense if not in a cosmic one.

Season 7B has been structured in a way that makes the whole thing feel like an epilogue to a version of the show that ended last year with Bert Cooper's haunting song-and-dance warning that the best things in life are free.  Everything after the move to the McCann offices, in particular, resembles the loose and somber nature of falling action.  If Peggy's last image is her walking into the new offices with sunglasses on and a cigarette hanging lazily out of her mouth, and Betty's final moment is her greeting death with a practiced smile and perfect hair, and Pete's ending is reuniting with Trudy and looking towards Kansas with a boundless sense of hope; then those are fitting and believable conclusions for them.

In this age, we place so much stock in "sticking the landing."  Years and years of satisfying viewing experiences can be washed away by a disappointing ending to far too many people.  Matt Weiner himself said it best when he told the New York Times, "If you do your ending right, then it is a great ending.  It's not a reflection on the entire TV show, but it is a great ending."  In the same way, a bad ending isn't a reflection on the entire TV show either.  Luckily, I have very little fear about the series finale of Mad Men, given that the six that came before it have been as challenging, massive, and gorgeous as ever.

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)...

Episode of the Week: Mad Men - "Field Trip"

Episode of the Week is a recurring feature devoted to examining a notable episode from the past week of television.

Season 7, Episode 3

Mad Men has always been very good at depicting how ruthless time is.  It's a show about the tension between history, which moves forward with a shark-like certainty, and characters who may or may not be willing to progress along with it.  If you want to see how unafraid of major upheaval creator Matt Weiner is, then look no further than the state of many of the people who were considered the main characters in season one.  Don, Roger, Pete, Betty, Bert; they're all characters who once dominated Mad Men's universe, but now find themselves orbiting much further from the center.  Even Peggy Olson, the symbol of upward mobility in the early years of the series, constantly finds herself approaching ceilings she can't quite break through nowadays.

"Field Trip," the third episode in the show's final run, is all about this idea.  Given that it's a show that's somewhat about history, it's fitting that Mad Men is so well-versed in its own.  No other show on television creates parallels between past and present events in the story quite like they do, and the final season especially seems to be constructing a nice symmetry with the first one.  It's no coincidence that this week's episode is rife with callbacks to season one: Megan's agent calling Don to let him know of her antics in California bears a strong resemblance to Betty's therapist calling him many years ago, Anne Dudek makes her return as Francine (with a job!), and Ken Cosgrove even mentions Don's iconic carousel speech in passing.

It's all in keeping with the battle of new and old that dominates "Field Trip."  Roger's attempt to bring Don back into the Sterling Cooper & Partners fold is a literalization of that battle.  Don is happy (albeit with a few reservations) to learn that Roger wants him back, only to find out that Roger doesn't really have the power to make that decision.  Much like Don was replaced by Lou Avery, a man more willing to toe the corporate line, what used to be Roger's role in the company is increasingly being filled by Jim Cutler.  One of the subplots of the hour involves Harry Crane and his request to get a computer for the office, in order to give the burgeoning media department the data it needs to move the company forward.  It's telling that the computer comes back up when the partners are discussing whether they should bring Don back.  While there's not a one-to-one translation between the duties of the computer and Don, the juxtaposition further highlights the relentless wave of time and its role in these people's lives.  The world has less use for creative types with intractable personalities like Don, just as it has less use for maverick account men like Roger, and just as it has less use for old-fashioned housewives like Betty.

Give or take a "Shut the Door.  Have a Seat," or a "Gypsy and the Hobo," Mad Men is rarely known for being tense, but the entire sequence of Don unexpectedly returning back to the office is moist-brow suspense at its finest.  Director Christopher Manley makes Don seem so alien in this place that was once his domain.  Slow motion shots track his initial appraisal of the office, marking the changes that have occurred during his leave of absence.  Lou stands there in a still pose as Don approaches him, not as a man, but a figure who now has what he once did.  The camera follows the action with a hesitance to match Don's, after he realizes that nobody expected him to be there, and the one man who did has not even arrived yet.  Every frame is as concerned with the space around Don as it is with him, as characters pop in and out with their varied reactions to his return; from Ginsberg's delight, to Peggy's disgust, to Joan's bewilderment.

Writers Matt Weiner and Heather Bladt link Don's return back to work with Betty's more literal field trip with Bobby to his teacher's family farm.  In a beautiful bit of editing, the episode cuts the long, agonizing Don scenes with short bursts of the Betty storyline.  And while the claustrophobic office setting couldn't be more different than the pastoral farmland, the placement of those scenes alongside each other is very deliberate.  The interesting thing is that Don's story has parallels to the field trip on both the Betty and the Bobby side of the equation.  Both he and Betty find themselves expecting a pleasant outcome from their respective treks, only for them to be soiled in some way.  And like Don, Bobby just wants to be loved, but is treated with harshness even after he tries to make up for the mistake he made in giving away his mother's sandwich.  (That Don mirrors a child in any way speaks volumes about his character at this point.)

Mad Men has always had a fascinating relationship with change.  It's not quite as cynical as The Sopranos' "people can change, but most find it too difficult and quickly give up on their efforts" worldview.  No, Mad Men often shows its characters stuck in cycles, but they're much more aware of it and are trying to break free in incremental ways.  If there's anything to suss out about the final season after only three weeks, it's revealing itself to be about the characters still screwing up and having their flaws, but making inroads to improving.  The Betty storyline is a perfect example of that.  Her asking Henry why her children don't love her near the end of the episode is a heartbreaking bit of self-awareness.  A real attempt to show warmth on her part ends horribly, and it's easy to see her becoming a better person if she'd just stop getting in the way of herself.

That's why the final scene of the episode is such a powerful one.  After forcing him to sweat it out for the entire day, the partners finally invite Don into the conference room to speak with them.  The framing tells you all you need to know about the power dynamics in place at the office.  Bert, Joan, and Cutler are on one side of the table, filling the frame when the camera cuts to them; meanwhile Roger, Don's only ally, is completely isolated on the other side.  They offer him a contract that's completely constricting, one that bans him from drinking unless it's business related, forces him to stick to a script, and requires him to answer to Lou Avery.  Essentially, the contract strips Don Draper of everything that makes him Don Draper.  The camera then cuts to Don, zooming in on him as if he's thinking the same thing, preparing to give them a kiss off and start his own agency.  But then he says "Okay."  It's a rare moment of compromise from him, but a necessary one if he wants to avoid becoming a relic that just fades away.  Don has always been a man who runs, but this year has shown him actively fighting against that instinct.  This is a Don who waits, who stays, who apologizes and almost means it.  He's finally not getting in the way of himself, at least for now.

"Field Trip," is a near-perfect episode of television, even more so than last week's walloping "A Day's Work."  It may not be as flashy as some of the show's most praised episodes, but it deserves to be in the conversation of top 10 episodes when all is said and done.  Not only does it provide surface level excitement with Don's return to Sterling Cooper & Partners, but it's also thematically airtight all the way through.  It's the kind of literary episode that they did so well in the early seasons -- every piece just fits together.   Just look at how many different ways the "new vs. old" idea pops up, or how neatly the two main storylines align themselves, or the way Megan's audition plotline is like a micro version of Don's return to the office.  After a slightly off sixth season, season seven of Mad Men has been a return to form, an example of the show firing on all cylinders once again.  In just three weeks, it has disrupted the Hannibal vs. The Americans narrative that many people (including myself) seem to have constructed when talking about the best show of 2014.  Clearly, Matt Weiner wants a seat at the table too.

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...

Assessing Mad Men's Strange, Ominous, and Revealing 6th Season

At some point, I'm going to have to start a tally on this blog for every time I reference season 5 of Mad Men, given how many times I've already mentioned it in just 35+ posts.  I only reference it constantly because it's such a towering work of art, one of my favorite seasons of television ever.  There's not a bad episode in the bunch, but the middle stretch of episodes in particular -- from "Signal 30" to "Lady Lazarus" -- are probably the best string of episodes I've seen since the last 9 episodes of The Sopranos.  After such an artful, auteur-driven season, anything after that was bound to be somewhat of a letdown.  Season 6 of Mad Men almost felt conscious of this fact, seemingly going down its own rabbit hole and becoming as weird as ever.

Not since The Sopranos (maybe I need to start another tally) have I seen such bizarre things seem so natural.  By the time the second or third strange plot point occurs, you just sort of roll with it, like "yeah, that happened."  In one season, we got: Peggy stabbing Abe with a makeshift spear, Bob Benson and his gay grifter friend, Ken Cosgrove getting shot in the face, and the entirety of "The Crash."  The reason all of it felt so natural is because of how much it was in tune with the season's goal of presenting this world as one that is slightly oblique.  Season 6's events took place in 1968, and it kind of paralleled the time period, which saw the nation witness a side of themselves that they'd never seen before.  So it was only fitting that Mad Men felt a little less Mad Men-y this year too.  There was so much violence and tragedy in the world that it couldn't help but make its presence known in the show.  Sirens and news reports of national unrest could be heard and seen in many scenes throughout the season, as if the background was slowly seeping into these usually sealed off lives.

The off-kilter nature of the season made it feel like a slight disappointment for a very long time, which was something I didn't know how to process coming from my favorite show on television.  It's not that I thought it was a bad season, I don't think I could ever truly dislike a season of Mad Men.  There were some superb individual moments and episodes, but to me it wasn't creating a satisfying whole.  Perhaps it was just a me problem and not the show's problem, but I found the thematic throughline of the season and a given episode much harder to suss out.  I loved "The Flood," "For Immediate Release," and "The Crash," but nothing completely bowled me over the way that other seasons were capable of doing.

It wasn't until near the end that things truly started to cohere.  As it turns out, the key to the puzzle of the season was, naturally, Don Draper.  At the beginning of the season, when it looked like we were going to get the same old infidelity story and we kept getting flashbacks to Don's youth (flashbacks have never been the show's strong suit), it seemed like Matt Weiner was just treading water with the character.  Much like on Weiner's old job at The Sopranos, he highlighted the fact that Don is not somebody we're supposed to root for.  He's a man who does what he wants, with little regard to others, just leaving destruction in his wake.  This all culminated in the penultimate episode, "The Quality of Mercy," where Peggy literally calls him a monster, giving voice to many of the audience's thoughts as we've watched him over the last few years.  It was then that everything with Don began to transform.  Don's been driving everyone away in his life, particularly the women closest to him: Peggy, Sally, Joan, and Megan.  All of the flashbacks about motherhood and prostitution take on more power in this light, and what initially seemed aimless and ham-fisted revealed itself to be informative in regard to Don's slow wilting.

So, aside from Don, what was the season about as a whole?  In the finale, Betty has a line when she's speaking to Don on the phone about Sally where she says "the good isn't beating out the bad," and even though it was specifically about Sally's behavior, it's fitting for a season that's all about personal wars being waged.  Some were internal, like Don vs. his past, and others were external, but there was a tug of war going on in every corner of Sterling Cooper & Partners.  From the merger between SCDP and CGC to Don and Megan's marriage, season 6 was all about sustaining that which cannot be sustained.  We know that both are doomed to crumble, or at least slightly fall apart, and every episode has an ominous inevitability that Mad Men excels at.  Another big element of the season was the idea of ownership over things that can't be owned.  Prostitution, which often makes the customer feel like they have complete ownership even when they don't, is brought up multiple times throughout the season, and it ties into many of the stories this year, like Don and Ted's battle for Peggy.  They both treat her like she's the concept that they want her to be and not the person that she actually is.

What intrigued me the most about this season was how it subverted our expectations of what television does, but taking common ideas and putting a little slant on them instead of just eschewing them completely.  "History repeats itself" is not exactly new territory, but when other shows or movies try to play with that theme, they always treat time as if its a circle, neatly looping back where it started.  Mad Men is the first show I've seen that really gets how time works, and season 6 wasn't just about how history repeats itself, but instead about how it often folds in on itself.  The season constantly played on the ideas of doubles and duality -- Bob Benson's false identity mirroring Don Draper's, Sterling and Cutler playing similar roles, a character named Margaret getting axed as soon as Peggy comes back -- but it wasn't neat and clean in its parallels.  Characters' pasts bled into their present, creating an inseparable mixture within them.

We're also trained to believe in the idea that "the truth will set you free," yet throughout the season we got examples of that not being the case.  When characters gave into their desires or admitted something about themselves, it usually turned out to cause trouble, like the romantic entanglements of Peggy and Ted.  Even if it was just momentarily, like everybody being mad at Joan when she tried to go after the Avon account by herself or when Pete found out that Bob was lying about his identity, the true sides of these characters often threatened to topple their carefully constructed fronts.  We see this most significantly in the finale, where Don Draper, a man who's kept his past so guarded behind walls of his own making, finally reveals the real nature of his upbringing during a Hershey pitch.  For once, he's trying to better himself -- quitting drinking, deciding not to run away to California, opening up about his past -- and what reward does he get?  He gets suspended from his job, Megan walks out on him, and though he's made some roads to connecting with his children, they're only baby steps closer to him than they were before.

I usually hate it when seasons completely structure themselves around the ending, but "In Care Of" really worked for me in the way that it snapped together all of the previously disparate pieces of season 6.  It was all about these pyrrhic victories, how we may feel like we've made progress but we're still not any further down the road.  I suspect now that I know what the season was trying to get at, I'd enjoy it much more on the rewatch.  Even at the end of this initial watch, I thought this was still one of the best things on TV this year, a strange season from a willfully contrarian show.  If anything, it served as a nice precursor to the end, an interlude bridging the gap between the restless 5th season and a hopefully staggering final run.

The Canon #2: Mad Men - "The Suitcase" (2010)

My favorite image in the history of ever

The Canon is a recurring feature where I look back on movies, tv episodes, albums, books, etc. that I love; inducting them into my own imaginary canon of all-time favorite things.  (Inspired by the now-defunct podcast, Extra Hot Great)

There's a frequent occurrence in my life that I have dubbed "Night Madness."  It's a term I use to describe what often happens to me at night when I'm trying to go to sleep.  My brain decides that since it doesn't have to devote its energy to walking and talking, instead of getting some sleep, it's going to reallocate that energy to fretting over everything.  And I mean everything.  Past mistakes and embarrassments, current predicaments, and future prospects all meld together to form a miasma of stress that clouds my brain and prevents it from any hopes of peace.  Eventually, all of this stressing just spins out of control, to the point where I feel like I'm going to scratch off my skin or that my brain will pop out of my skull at any moment.

Mad Men's classic episode, "The Suitcase," is Night Madness in televisual form.  Plopped right in the middle of the show's towering 4th season -- the 7th episode of each season is usually known to be the most experimental -- "The Suitcase" serves as both a detour from the action of the season and also a ruminative inspection of everything that has happened up to this moment.  It's a big night for America, as the upcoming fight between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston is poised to be the event of the year.  But it's also an important night for Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, with the deadline for their Samsonite ad looming.  The episode could be classified as a bottle episode, choosing to mainly focus on Don and Peggy as they toil away on a pitch in the dead hours of the night.  Incidentally, there's also a confluence of circumstances in both Don and Peggy's lives too that add to the stakes of the night.  Don receives an urgent message from California that's likely to be about Anna's deteriorating health and he's dreading making the call.  It's also Peggy's birthday and she's got big dinner plans with her fiancee.

One of the joys of long-running serialized television, and why I vastly prefer television to movies, is that it allows for a grand construction of character arcs and relationships.  There's this slow accumulation of information that you gain about everyone and if you have a show as good as Mad Men, which constantly calls back events from the past, it can be extremely satisfying to see small details pay off in big ways.  Part of the reason why "The Suitcase" is one of my favorite television episodes of all time (really, I'd only put Buffy's "The Body" and maybe an episode or two of The Sopranos above it) is because it's all about the payoff.  Everything we see is a result of things that have happened to these characters over the past three and a half seasons.  The main tension running through the episode is one that's been present throughout the whole season: Don and Peggy's growing distance.  Despite the fact that just at the end of the third season, Don was begging Peggy to come back and work for him, he's been unnecessarily cruel to her in the 6 episodes that come before this one.  Don's lack of appreciation, coupled with Peggy feeling like he stole her idea for what eventually became the award-winning Glocoat commercial and Duck Phillips courting her to work with him, are all ingredients contributing to the stew that is Don and Peggy's estrangement.

From there, "The Suitcase" lets the tension explode.  Don and Peggy argue, and the amazing performances by Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss -- neither of which won an Emmy that year -- really sell the raw emotions of these two fighting about everything that's been bothering them over the last few months (and years).  There's a weird flow of moods to these arguments too -- one second they're bickering and the next second they cool off a bit, only to get into a bigger fight.  Through these scenes, we get to see just how much they're tied to each other.  Both are guarded individuals, consumed by their work, and drawn together because of their mutual understanding of one another and the things they know about each other that nobody else does.  The episode makes a point of constantly giving Peggy the chance to choose between Don and something else and she always chooses Don.  When she has multiple opportunities to just leave Don to be a grouch all by his lonesome, she decides to stay with the man who gave her a career instead of being with her family.  Later, when Duck shows up and scuffles with Don, she could easily leave with Duck, who seems to appreciate her talent more, but she still sides with her old mentor.

The Don and Peggy relationship is my favorite thing about Mad Men.  Sure, I love its beautifully glacial pace and its examination of how people react to the societal changes barreling towards them, but the show would lose a significant amount of its heart without Don and Peggy on the fringe, occasionally having a moment of solidarity.  Much like Peggy does, all I want to see is Don approve of her and voice his respect for her.  This constant push and pull between Don's callousness and his need for Peggy doesn't seem like it would be fertile territory for dramatic tension, but it works immensely.  At the same time, if the balance veers too far in any given direction, then the whole foundation falls apart.  I always joke that I will stop watching the show if Don and Peggy ever kiss, and even though I'd never quit my favorite show on television, I'd probably never forgive it either.  Luckily, Matt Weiner has such a perfect command of the boundaries of their relationship that I trust him not to.  Platonic friendships are hard to come by on television, but Weiner has crafted one of the greatest of all time, and some of the best moments of "The Suitcase" come when Don and Peggy directly assess the state of their relationship.

Once all the fighting falls away, the episode slows down and takes on a more languid feel.  The two begin to open up to one another about their parents' deaths, relationship troubles, Don's experience in the war, Peggy giving up her baby at the end of season 1, etc.  There's a real somberness to these scenes and the script and performances perfectly capture the rhythm of a conversation between two individuals wearily commiserating in the dwindling hours of the night.  On a show that's built around opaque interactions, it's refreshing to see the rare moment of clarity that Don and Peggy share with each other.  The night is set to the backdrop of Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston, two titans battling until only one is standing, so how beautiful is it that Don and Peggy entered the night at odds and came away with a new appreciation of one another?

Night Madness is full of sorrow and regret and rage.  It's terrifying and it hurts.  What's worse is that you go through it all alone.  "The Suitcase" finds beauty in the idea that you don't have to go through it by yourself.  The sadness will still come, but it's so much less painful to suffer through when you have somebody to share it with.  Don may know that Anna, the woman who knew him the most, is probably dead, but he sees her ghost while laying in the lap of Peggy, the only other woman who understands him.  "Open or closed?," Peggy asks Don the next morning in regards to his office door, when the haze of the night has ended and the reality of daylight has set in.  They may never speak of the night before ever again, much like they never previously spoke about the things they told each other in the moment, but they'll always have that shared experience.  "Open," Don says.