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...

Love, happiness, and the beautiful lie of UnREAL

There was a directorial move that happened over and over in the first season of UnREAL, Lifetime's excellent new series about the behind-the-scenes workings of a Bachelor-esque reality show called Everlasting.  A scene would start with a tight shot of a moment between members of Everlasting's cast, and just as it starts to feel like a genuine point of connection, the camera peels back to show the artifice behind it all.  Just beyond that real moment is an array of lights, cameras, and crew; all peering intently, trying to figure out how they can warp this scene into something that will provide the most entertaining television.

Every character has to remind themselves and the people around them that they're crafting a show, with almost every episode featuring some variation of the line "none of this is real anyway."  But is it quite so simple?  Sure, there's manufactured drama and contrived scenarios galore in UnREAL and Everlasting.  Yet there are real stories unfolding too.  A mentally ill woman desperately trying to cling to her job and her sanity at the same time, a repressed woman coming to terms with her sexuality, a rich playboy seeking redemption.  Therein lies the magnificent tension of the show, the way that reality tends to bleed all over "reality."

UnREAL is a deeply cynical show.  It offers a glimpse at the top-down process of a group of ruthless, ratings-minded people packaging up the myth of True Love to an American audience that will eat it up.  They've gotten to a point where they can predict how the public will react to every event, coming up with preset rules to follow: "sluts get cut," black women never win, the suitor that all of these women are competing for has to be likable.  In last Monday's season finale, executive producer Chet thinks he's come up with an incredible idea -- having bad girl Britney come back in the final round after an early exit at the beginning of the season -- only to be reminded that the show has done the very same thing three previous times.  Everlasting is programmed to a tee, but sold under the illusion that it's getting bigger and better and fresher.

The producers of Everlasting are the means by which the show is able to concoct the best possible results.  And the contestants are merely their playthings -- twist them up and watch them go.  But the level of gamesmanship goes beyond that.  Everybody is producing everybody.  As a result, there is plotting to the show in the truest sense.  Many of the best moments come from the complex web of deceit the writers spin: a character manipulating another character into manipulating another character; or somebody thinking they know the game somebody else is playing, only for that person to be playing a second game.  Lies, both big and small, are being sold everywhere.

And perhaps the biggest lie of all is the idea that any of these people can find happiness and fulfillment, either professionally or romantically.  If that's the goal, then they're searching in the wrong place.  After all, some of these women are looking for love in front of a camera, and the audience on the other side watches with hope that somebody will find it too.  One of the most brilliant aspects of the season finale is that even Quinn and Rachel start to buy into the lies they sell, mistakenly thinking that they've found something real in Chet and Adam, respectively.  You may not be able to find love in a hopeless place, but UnREAL deftly fools everyone into believing they can.

Pilot Talk 2015: UnREAL

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

Mondays at 10:00 PM on Lifetime

It's always fun to see a show come around and surprise everyone.  Such is the case with UnREAL, Lifetime's absolutely terrific new drama about the behind-the-scenes workings of a Bachelor-esque reality show.  The network is known more for its rinky-dink original movies than its television series, and the shows that it does have don't exactly generate much buzz outside of the mom circuit.  With that precedent, there was no reason to believe that this show would be any different.  Coupled with a premise that seems to have a very narrow appeal, and a trailer that doesn't really inspire interest, things didn't look so good for UnREAL.  Thankfully, those portentous signs didn't pan out, because this is one of the most enjoyable pilots of the last few television seasons.  It's the kind of show that makes me recall one of my favorite mantras: Great TV comes in all shapes and sizes.

I was reminded of another mantra I've been using while watching this pilot too.  That is, "Trust people who have made great TV before to make great TV again."  UnREAL is co-created by Marti Noxon, known primarily from her longtime work as a writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  She gets a good amount of guff from Buffy fans for being responsible for the divisive-but-actually-great sixth season of that show, but it's hard to deny that she played a big part in making one of the greatest shows of all time, the good and the bad of it all.  Her gifts shown in her previous work shine throughout this pilot, so of course "Return" is a pretty funny episode of television.  It really gets the look and feel of shows like The Bachelor, including all of the ridiculous elements that come with it.  You have to know a genre well to effectively skewer it, and Noxon (who co-wrote the episode with Sarah Gertrude Shapiro) seems to understand reality shows on a deep level.

But UnREAL succeeds because it's more than just a satire.  Between the moments of poking fun at reality shows, it's a straight-faced behind-the-scenes show, and an extremely compelling one at that.  There's a buzzy, chaotic energy that all the best of these kinds of series have contained within "Return."  The production behind Everlasting, the show's Bachelor stand-in, feels like a fully realized and sketched out world straight from the beginning.  It's populated by colorful, ruthless characters who bounce off of each other with a verve uncommon to pilots.  This isn't picking up on a reality show that's beginning its first season, or showing a new crew who's not used to working with one another, it's just about people in the middle of doing their business as they always have.

Our only point of entry is Rachel Goldberg (Shiri Appleby) whose first day on set is chronicled throughout "Return."  But even that's not straightforward.  She's not the fresh-faced new kid that you'd usually see centering this type of show; this is her return as an producer on Everlasting after an apparent nervous breakdown forced her to take a leave of absence.  That history she has with the other characters gives the pilot extra texture and tension.  Rachel is a fascinating character -- there's so much at stake for her, and Appleby completely sells the toll it's taking on her.

UnREAL is a very interesting look at the way producers like Rachel shave the edges off the contestants to the point where their personalities start to take on a totally different, more archetypal shape.  It's almost like an art to these people.  The right amount of pushing and cajoling can produce great TV, but it's also a delicate balance.  Push too much and everything topples over.  There's a sequence in the middle of the episode where we see Rachel prep each of the contestants on the show for their one-on-one with the bachelor that's absolutely masterful.  In it, we learn so much about the show's true aims, about the gap between who these people are and how they're presented, about the stakes for Rachel (this job could, quite literally, drive her mad).  It's really heartbreaking when we see a real, beautiful moment of emotion from a contestant get warped into something juicy for the viewers at home.

At one point, the show's cutthroat executive producer, Quinn (played by the always fun Constance Zimmer), talks about how hard it is to make a show without a villain.  Luckily, UnREAL itself is chock full of them, and they all happen to be the people pulling the strings to make this reality show.  All around, this is a confident and terrific pilot from what I hope to be an exciting, morally complicated series.  I never thought I'd have a season pass for a Lifetime show, but UnREAL is very much the genuine article.

Grade: A-