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...

The 100 proves that season 1 wasn't a fluke

I can't remember the last time I was more nervous about a show's sophomore year than I was for season two of The CW's post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama The 100.  After binging on the first season in the span of a few days, I wrote a piece that heaped praise upon the show, calling it the best sci-fi series on television.  My effusive adulation even convinced some friends to give it a chance.  So after all of the proselytizing I did after the first season, I would've had quite a bit of egg on my face if it completely tanked afterward.  That was a very real possibility.  When you're watching a show that's on a prestigious cable network and made by reputable creators, there's more faith that if it starts good, it will remain that way for a while.  With a show like this, it's hard to tell whether or not everyone involved just stumbled upon momentary greatness.  Not to mention the fact that genre concepts generally tend to have a shorter shelf life anyway.

Thankfully, creator Jason Rothenberg and his team of writers kept charging ahead, picking up where season one left off without missing a beat.  The previous season closed on that haunting image of Clarke trapped in a brightly lit, white room that we find out is in Mt. Weather, a massive underground bunker that has housed a society of people for the 97 years since the Earth was irradiated.  Above ground, the other surviving members of the 100 are greeted by the adults from the Ark, which crash-landed on the planet in the season one finale.  Uneasy alliances were a major theme of the season, especially in the beginning, where the teens who'd had months to handle things on their own had to deal with being under the strict rule of the adults from The Ark once again, while Clarke and the rest of the gang at Mt. Weather were left to figure whether or not their hosts were as benevolent as they made themselves out to be.

Season two made The 100 a bigger and more expansive show, both in terms of the amount of stories it was forced to juggle and the physical ground it had to cover.  It stretched out the episode count to match that ambition, increasing from last season's 13 to a total of 16.  This led to some more flabbiness in the storytelling, where it felt obvious that two or three episodes in the middle were just people either standing around or deliberately being moved like pieces on a chessboard, in order to set up the real action.  An increased episode order also carved out space for some iffy subplots, like Jaha and Murphy's trek through the desert, which had a satisfying and bugnuts conclusion, but required lots of meandering to get there.  With so much sprawl and ambition, I occasionally found myself missing the simplicity of season one's balance of Earth stories and Ark stories.

Still, those minor flaws did little to mar the season as a whole, which ultimately ended up being the stronger effort.  This year, The 100 continued its trend of tough, intelligent sci-fi, delivering some of the most brutal and unflinching conflicts on television.  When I wrote about the show last year, I made some superficial comparisons to Battlestar Galactica, but I think it mirrors BSG in much deeper ways too.  Those parallels really clicked when I listened to an episode of the Nerdist Writers Panel featuring staff writer Kim Shumway, when she said that they break stories based around decisions characters have to make.  That's vintage Battlestar, which continually had its characters show you who they are through the tough choices they were asked to grapple with.  The 100 did that in season one and didn't step off of these characters' necks in season two.

The bulk of those tough decisions seemed to rest on the shoulders of Clarke (or, I should say, CLARKE!).  One of the greatest strengths of the show is its ability to really dig into its characters and allow them to grow and change in fascinating and logical ways.  But nobody has gone through a better character arc than Clarke Griffin, who has not only evolved into the best character on the show by a wide margin, but one of my favorite protagonists on TV.  Last week, I found myself randomly going back to watch the pilot, and I was stricken by how different everyone is in it, but especially Clarke, who comes off as a major wet blanket in that first episode.  It's a real night-and-day difference from the Clarke at the end of "Blood Must Have Blood," hardened and scarred by all of the punishing ultimatums placed upon her.

One of the most crucial quotes of season one was, "Who we are and who need to be to survive aren't the same thing."  This season was about those contrasts becoming less clear.  All of their time on the ground has turned everyone into different people.  Their tough choices are no longer a thing they can divorce from their true selves, it's something they have to reckon with.  These are rich, complicated ideas the show is chewing on, and it doesn't get enough credit for taking them on and exploring them effectively.

It's able to ask difficult questions and present weighty themes, yet it never lets plot fall by the wayside either.  Season two just kept churning on, exploring the shifting conflicts between the various factions at play.  (And at this point, the numbers are piling up: the Grounders, the dwindling 100, the adults from the Ark, Mount Weather, etc.)  Many genre shows fall into the trap of having plot for plot's sake, and villains that are mere obstacles without logical motivations, but the writers managed to avoid both of those problems.  Every story development came from a place rooted in character, and though the people from the Ark are the focal point of the show, it's becoming increasingly clear that there are no real good guys or bad guys.  That's what makes the two major twists in the "Blood Must Have Blood" two-parter -- Lexa betraying Clarke, and Clarke choosing to irradiate all of Mount Weather -- such doozies.  They're both powerful moments that challenge our perceptions of characters and the places the show is willing to go.

In my blurb for this show on my Best of 2014 list, I wrote, "The 100 is dark stuff, and whenever you find yourself asking, 'are they really going to go that far?,' the answer is almost always 'yes.'"  If Rothenberg and company aren't careful, the show could become a tiresome series of progressively worse things Clarke must do, but right now the grimness is perfectly calibrated.  I still encounter people on the internet who scoff at The 100 just because it's on The CW, or because its first few episodes were a little on the rough side.  What a shame too, because they're missing out on one of the most gripping shows on television, one that just keeps getting better and better.

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...

The 100: TV's best sci-fi show comes from an unexpected place

It's time to stop writing off The CW.  Around the internet, it still gets treated as the annoying teen sibling of the rest of the major networks, and any new show that they put out is met with groans and skepticism.  But while it hasn't produced the next great drama yet, The CW has put out some decent shows over the last few years.  The Carrie Diaries was fun before it got cancelled.  Reign is super fun, while also being a bizarre mess.  The Vampire Diaries was known for its blistering plot momentum and jaw-dropping twists in its heyday.  I don't watch Arrow, but people never shut up about how good it is.  In most of those shows, you still have to deal with teen characters making moony-eyes at each other, but they're good despite that problem.  They still put out shows of questionable quality, to be sure, but even most of those are more mediocre than terrible.  And yet, as a whole, The CW doesn't get taken very seriously by many television fans.

Even I sort of dismissed The 100 when it first came around.  For the uninitiated, the show takes place 97 years after nuclear warfare has left the Earth uninhabitable, and the few thousands who were able to escape fled to a space station named The Ark.  Unfortunately, The Ark's oxygen supply is running low, to the point where there will be none left in six months, so the station's council decides to send 100 juveniles in their prison to Earth to see if it has become livable again.  I found the premise intriguing and enjoyed the pilot well enough (I never graded it for Pilot Talk, but I probably would've given it a B), but I decided not to continue with the show because some part of me thought, "This is a CW show.  It's not that important for me to keep watching."  After hearing from people I trust that the show had improved and gotten really good, I decided to binge on the 13-episode first season, and regretted giving up on it in the first place.

The 100 divides its story time between the teenage characters on Earth and the adults who remain on The Ark.  In the former section, the show bears some resemblance to Lost.  The group quickly discovers that they're not alone -- a mysterious group of people called The Grounders (this show's The Others) have somehow survived all of these years, and they don't seem too friendly.  But it's not just a human factor that the 100 have to deal with, there's also strange phenomena occurring all around, from a periodic toxic fog -- some might even call it a...smoke monster? -- to mutated two-headed animals roaming around.  In these earthbound sections, the show is about society trying to come together, and it effectively portrays the struggle of a group attempting to accomplish anything without rules or boundaries.  There's also a bit of angst and resentment from some in the group, who decide to take off the bracelets that monitor their vitals, in order to make the adults on The Ark who banished them think that they're dead.  Throughout the first season, the writers -- a staff that includes alumnae from prestigious shows like The Shield, Angel, Dollhouse, and Spartacus -- generate lots of tension from the fact that the teens on Earth have no idea what's going on up in The Ark, and vice versa.

In the portions of the show that take place in space, The 100 begins to take after Battlestar Galactica.  If the stuff on the ground is about society coming together, then the material in orbit provides a look at the last vestiges of a society that has fallen apart.  Because the oxygen supply is dwindling on The Ark (this show's version of BSG's final fleet), the council of leaders have to take desperate measures to conserve resources.  As a result, all crime is made punishable by death, people will have to be "floated" periodically (out into space, essentially being put to death as well) to keep the population manageable, and most citizens are left in the dark about the 100 being sent to Earth.  While the material with the teens can be leavened by the awe that the characters get from being in a wide open place they've only read about but never experienced, the scenes on The Ark don't shy away from the bleakness of the situation.  These are rough, dire circumstances, and the characters react appropriately.

So yes, The 100 cribs liberally from Lost and Battlestar Galactica in its early episodes -- and there's an element almost directly lifted from Firefly in the later episodes -- but it does so with confidence and aplomb.  It's obviously not as good as any of those influences, but it's still surprising that it's as good as it is.  And it goes to some dark places.  In just one season, it's already featured a child suicide, a brutal torture scene, and biological warfare.  But it also raises some surprisingly thought-provoking ideas along the way.  "Who we are and who need to be to survive aren't the same thing," a character says at one point, voicing the major theme of the show.  The 100 explores what it truly means to be a leader: the burdens they carry, the demons they have to live with, and the difficulty of choosing between what is right and what is good for the group.  Moral quandaries abound in the process.  Do I torture a prisoner to save my friend's life?  Do I let 1000+ people die to allow 700 to survive?  How do I retain my humanity in the face of great desperation?  And the show doesn't offer easy answers either.  One of the early crises of the show involves The Ark having to float 300 of their citizens to preserve more oxygen, unless they hear back from Earth and get confirmation that there are still people alive from the group they sent down.  The characters on Earth are able to send a signal to The Ark, but only after the deadline, and a section of people on the station still die because of it.

This being a CW show, you still have to sit through the obligatory romance storylines.  The love polygons don't have much spark, mostly due to wooden performances from some of the actors who play the teenage characters on Earth.  But it seems like the creators know this, and compensate by filling the adult cast with great sci-fi alums from Lost (Henry Ian Cusick), Battlestar Galactica (Alessandro Juliani, Kate Vernon), Person of Interest (Paige Turco), and Dollhouse (Dichen Lachman).  They also make up for it by having the teens be well-written, for the most part, so you pay less attention to the acting and more to the strong characterization.  The focus characters of the 100 all have clear motivations, and there's a substantial amount of conflict that comes from the moments when these various ideologies clash with one another.  Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and Bellamy (Bob Morley), the two main leaders, have particularly compelling arcs over the course of the season, as the responsibility of making the tough decisions inform the characters they grow into.

The first season does a good job of keeping the threats constant.  Some of it feels a little inorganic -- the way the council on The Ark continuously finds out that the amount of time they have left before the oxygen runs out was less than their calculations implied comes to mind -- but the dangers on Earth come along in natural and exciting ways.  It's well-paced from start to finish, climaxing with a finale that's chock full of major moments.  Its conclusion goes out on an exciting note that leaves me excited about the potential of season two.  The 100 might not seem like anything special at first, but it's got some strong characters, effectively bleak moments, and surprising plot turns.