My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2019

Loyal fans have been waiting for a whole year to get to this day.  Not to see my actual list, but to hear me chronicle my crippling addiction to television and see whether or not I was able to limit myself to following less than 100 shows this year.  Well I've got some bad news for you: if we're counting the shows I watched every airing episode of this year, that number reached 102.  I know, I really thought I was going to meet my goal in 2019.  And I was so close!  I know I said this last year, but I really am quitting more shows and not starting more altogether, they just keep making more of them every year.  Those numbers simply can't be beat.

One thing I've noticed with my list this year is that it feels a little different than previous years, and I can't tell if that's due to a change in my taste or a change in the trend of what gets made.  But I will say this year there's less Very Serious Drama For Very Serious People (your Mad Mens, your Americans) and more stuff, especially in the top 10, that might make you say "huh"?  The idea that great TV comes in all shapes and sizes is a mantra I've repeated alot over the years, and we would all do well to remember that as the landscape transforms a bit in the next decade.

My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2016

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

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

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

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

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

Orange is the New Black returns to form with a masterful 4th season

The critical narrative behind last year's third season of Netflix's popular prison dramedy Orange is the New Black is that it was a misstep, an exaggerated opinion as all internet opinions tend to be.  Season three was good, but the problem is that it clearly wasn't as good as the two that preceded it.  Some of that can be attributed to the fact that it's simply difficult to follow up on television that was as inventive and compelling as the first two seasons were.  But there are also concrete reasons to point to when it comes to the show's slight dip in quality last year: the increasing "summer camp" vibe sucked out the sense of danger and conflict, the rhythm of the show got too lackadaisical, and the flashbacks started to feel a little stale.

Needless to say, season four had alot at stake, and it does not disappoint.  Fittingly, the fourth season course corrects nearly every single problem that plagued the third.  Picking up right where they left off last year, the story tackles the influx of new inmates from the maximum security prison, which leads to an array of problems that create a beautiful, furious season about privilege, power, abuse, and institutional failures.

The show is overcrowded, but that's not a bad thing.

One of the biggest selling points of Orange is the New Black since its inception is the large cast of colorful characters it possesses.  And with each year, its rich bouquet of inmates keeps expanding, to the point of bumping against the limits of being able to keep track of it all.  So it's a pretty bold move for the show to shove an entirely new set of characters onto the audience right from the start of this season.

The massive size of Orange is the New Black is what makes it unique, but it also can be one of its weaknesses.  At this point, everybody has their own list of favorite characters, and it can be difficult for the writers to serve so many masters.  There are times in season four, especially in the beginning stretch, where the show runs into what I like to call "The Game of Thrones Problem," where we just cycle through snippets of each character's story before moving on to the next one and never returning for the rest of the episode.  It's just as likely that a character who stood out in previous seasons gets completely lost in the story.  (If you're Vicky Jeudy, who plays Watson, you have to be a little annoyed that you haven't gotten any meaty material in the last two years, right?)  It's impossible to get enough of the characters you love, simply because there are so many to love.

However, this isn't the worst problem in the world to have.  At a certain point, it's important to take a step back and be in awe of the sprawl that creator Jenji Kohan and her crew of writers are able to achieve.  I'd much rather have a show that's too immense than too narrow.  If anything, season four of Orange is the New Black suggests that we adjust the way we absorb these stories.  Maybe not every character needs to have a complete arc, especially when this season is full of such lovely and interesting little bends.

This is one of the most elegantly plotted series on television.

Part of the reason why the sprawl of the show goes down so easily is because it has the storytelling chops to match its size.  Audiences tend to associate good plotting with shows that do it in flashier ways, like Breaking Bad.  What Orange is the New Black has done for the last four years is more subtle, but just as rewarding.  Time and time again, I found myself surprised by how organic some of the plot turns of season four were.  You think a thread exists to serve its own purpose, but it also ends up tumbling into some larger story avenue.

Season four loads itself with so many recurring themes and motifs, these small stories that run parallel and add up to one larger story.  This is a strategy the show has been scratching at since day one, but it really crystallizes this year.  For structure nerds, it's one of the most purely satisfying seasons of televisions in a long time.

Season four tweaks its approach to flashbacks.

When Orange is the New Black began, its Lost-esque flashbacks of the inmates lives before they arrived at Litchfield were a vital part of the show's makeup.  Not only did it give an episodic backbone, but it served as an easy way to flesh out the characters and provide a break from the Litchfield setting.  However, by the time the third season rolled around, the show ran into the same problem that Lost had -- the flashback gimmick was getting a little creaky.  Lost found a way to revitalize its structure by incorporating flash-forwards, but Orange is the New Black arrived at a simpler solution this year: completely abandoning flashbacks in certain episodes.

Four of the 13 episodes this season don't feature any flashbacks, and those episodes end up working just fine.  They still employ scenes that serve as a breather from the usual Litchfield material, like chronicling Nicky's weeks at maximum security in "Piece of Shit," which allows the writers to only use flashbacks when the story calls for it.  And indeed, we do get some great first-time flashbacks for characters like Lolly and Maritza (for whom it's hard to believe there hadn't been one yet), as well as fascinating returns to characters like Healy and Soso.

That's not to say that there still aren't duds.  The Blanca flashbacks in "Turn Table Turn" fall particularly flat.  She's exactly the kind of character who has the mystique that would warrant a flashback, but what we were given just wasn't enlightening enough to match the power of her prison story, which lays ground for some of the most essential moments of season four.  Still, one miss is a much better ratio than last year, where it seemed like at least half of the flashbacks were unsatisfying.

Infrastructural changes abound at Litchfield.

The show is often at its most interesting when it's exploring the infrastructural and institutional issues occuring at Litchfield.  And with the massive increase of inmates, season four has no choice but to dive deeply into what it does so well.  In fact, so much of the major conflicts are borne out of the general frustrations that come from these people's spheres bumping up against each other more often than they usually would.  But I also love all of the small ways that overcrowding effects the day-to-day life at Litchfield, like the tampon shortage that arises.  It's stuff like that that add to the color and texture of the show, making the prison feel like a living, breathing place that functions even outside of what we are seeing.

The mass migration from maximum security, along with the walkout by many of the guards last season, leads to the prison incorporating a program to hire veterans as guards.  We quickly see all of the problems that arise when ex-military are guards of a prison.  They still treat everything like it's a war and they're an occupying force.  Throughout the season, we see them subjecting the inmates to stuff straight out of Guantanamo Bay, like making Blanca stand on a table for multiple days straight, or forcing two inmates to fight each other.

More so than ever before, Orange is the New Black is interested in the dynamic between guard and prisoner.  There's a deep power imbalance at work, and season four seems to be making a point of how those who are the most likely to exploit that imbalance are the ones who seek out such a position.  We see it in Captain Piscatella and the facility with which he strips away prisoners of their rights.  We see it in the contuining story of Coates and Pennsatucky.  And we see it in the psychotic guard who forces Maritza to swallow a baby rat.  These separate storylines all come together to paint a pretty clear picture.

Privilege, power, and race are examined more thoroughly than ever before.

If there's one main theme of season four, it's privilege and how people wield it.  And the show comes at that idea from a myriad of angles, but most notably via the arrival of celebrity chef Judy King (played by Blair Brown).  Every season, Orange is the New Black has a character that mirrors Piper in some sort of way -- think of how season two used Soso as a way to reflect on how Piper had progressed since she arrived at Litchfield -- and season four uses Judy King's outsized celebrity persona to further underline the points it has made about privilege since we were first introduced to Piper years ago.  In Judy King, we see a person who didn't ask for her privilege, but is well aware of it and will milk it for all it's worth.  And the privilege she manipulates makes life difficult for almost everyone else, as all the resources being devoted to her could've been distributed equally amongst all the inmates.

But this season also explores the ways in which privilege can be less conscious and deliberate through Yoga Jones.  She just stands to the side and soaks up all of the perks that come with being roommates with Judy, self-aware about it all but not truly self-aware.  It's an excellent observation -- even the most self-righteous can be intoxicated by power and privilege.

And of course, there's Piper, the show's original icon of privilege.  The panty smuggling business almost seems like a game to her -- emphasized by the way she does all that goofy posturing about being a "gangsta" early in the season -- because she has that luxury.  Nobody's really going to suspect her because she's a pretty white woman, and even if she was caught, the consequences wouldn't be that severe.  That's why she feels comfortable shifting the blame on to Ruiz, because she doesn't truly understand the gravity of what that means.  It's funny, then, that she inadvertently falls in with a group of neo Nazis -- that's a metaphor for the ways in which being problematic on a small scale can be just as harmful as overt racism.

Perhaps the most damning statement the season makes about privilege is how the people who have the power to enact change never do.  Caputo and Linda go to a prison convention in "We'll Always Have Baltimore," and we see them stumble upon multiple solutions to the feminine hygiene product problem at Litchfield, each of which they completely bypass and ignore.  Then there's Judy King again, who has an opportunity towards the end of the season to use her influence to make the world aware of the injustices happening in the prison, but chooses not to.  Over and over, we see people in power this season neglecting to help, simply because they can afford not to.

Orange is the New Black displays a sense of community not seen since Deadwood.

One of my favorite scenes in the classic HBO drama Deadwood, one of my favorite shows of all time, occurs in the third and final season, which finds the denizens of the titular town banding together when a man named George Hearst arrives with plans of taking over.  Hearst has men shoot at prominent citizen Alma Garrett in the middle of the town's thoroughfare, hoping that this will provoke a retaliation that will give him justification to crush those who stand in his way.  Seeing this, saloon owner Al Swearengen leaps to Alma's rescue and escorts her to safety.  Al doesn't even particularly like Alma that much.  But in a way, she's his people and when it comes down to it, he must stand with his people against injustice.

Orange is the New Black shares alot of DNA with Deadwood, but never more so than when it depicts characters seeing injustice and feeling compelled to act.  It happens in all the best moments of season four, like Red being moved to help Piper when she sees that Ruiz's crew have branded a swastika on her arm, or when Piper chooses to stand in solidarity on top of a table with Blanca, or when the conflicting races try to get on the same page to bring down Piscatella.

Like Deadwood, Orange is the New Black is fundamentally about broken, disparate people coming together to build their own community.  Season four solidifies the idea that these characters are small parts of a much larger body, constantly framing as many characters as possible in the same shot (particularly in penultimate episode "The Animals," brilliantly directed by Mad Men creator Matt Weiner).  Sometimes that body is at war with itself, but when a great pain strikes one part of the body, it's felt everywhere else.  The season builds to a tragedy that's almost Shakespearean in its chaos and inevitability, and its reverberations throughout the prison are some of the most gut-wrenching moments of the year.

Season four of Orange is the New Black is an exhausting experience.  It's so dense with themes and ideas that another 2,000 words still wouldn't sufficiently cover its depths.  And after a third season that left a few people worried, it's good to know that this show is still capable of telling vital, thoughtful stories.

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...

Season 3 is a minor step down, but Orange is the New Black is still terrific

For some reason, it seems like Orange is the New Black is fated to fall apart.  Maybe it's because Jenji Kohan's previous series was Weeds, a show most of its fans would agree flew off the rails as it went on.  Maybe it's because there's no real precedent for a show like this, so it's travelling on uncharted terrain.  Maybe it's because all things in life inevitably decay.  Either way, it seems like the writing is on the wall for Netflix's hit prison dramedy, despite the fact that its fantastic second season was better than the first.

That's why I'm thankful that the step down the show took this year isn't a worrisome one.  There's no doubt about it: season three of Orange is the New Black is not as good as the previous two.  In a way, it feels like a conscious effort to not be season two, which was much darker due to the focus on Vee's tyrannical reign.  There's a lighter tone this time around, as Kohan and the writing crew push the series back towards the comedy end of the spectrum.  As a result, it faces the problem that many shows that try to turn up the brightness run into, in that it's hard for the drama to feel a little less substantial and a little more fluffy.  Not only did Vee's presence make the show darker, but it gave the previous season a central post to revolve its entire story around.  Without a force like that, season three occasionally feels rudderless, with no real macro plot to hold everything together.  The closest thing it has to one -- MMR's takeover of Litchfield -- doesn't even directly involve any of the characters we care about.

Yet even in its lowest moments, the show always reminds you of just how special it is.  Sometimes you have to just take a step back and marvel at how many rich, layered characters it has, almost all of them women.  And they exist in a setting that isn't just a place, but a thriving ecosystem that feels like there's life in cracks and corners we aren't even privy to.  (In my review of the previous season, I compared Orange is the New Black to Deadwood.  That comparison applies tenfold this time around.)  The world keeps stretching further and further outward -- the connections between characters have been built, and now the writers are having fun letting them play out.

Such a massive show is bound to have entire subplots that don't work in each season.  This one seemed to have a few more.  Chiefly, it feels like the writers have completely lost the thread on Piper, despite Taylor Schilling continuing to give one of TV's best, most committed performances.  The romantic complications of Piper and Alex are still as much of a snore as ever, and the choice to turn Piper into something of a villain with the only occasionally amusing panty selling plot felt like a logical, but uninteresting endpoint.  Elsewhere, the Norma cult gave birth to some fantastic offshoot plotlines, but was a little messy in and of itself.  Other storylines just felt like all setup, like the machinations to get Blair Brown's celebrity chef character to Litchfield in time for season four.

But there is so much good material to drown out the few bum notes.  The show is always at its best when it's about systems failing people, and there are many examples of that in season three, the most compelling being Soso's arc, where better mental health care could've prevented her from reaching the point of trying to take her own life.  (This season turned Soso into one of the most vital characters on the show.  Soso!)  But Orange is also about people failing each other.  One of my other favorite storylines of the season is the conflict between Sophia and Mendoza, where pride and anger keep them from reaching an understanding between one another.  As we view more and more of these people's lives -- it seems like a series of escalating dares to see how minor of a character the writers can flesh out or give a flashback to -- this dramedy set in a minimum security prison becomes a rich tapestry of human experience.

The thing connecting these people this year is the theme of motherhood.  Even if Kohan hadn't made that explicit in pre-season interviews, it would have been obvious anyway, given the way season three continues to hammer the point home.  Almost every flashback contains a strained mother-daughter relationship in some way, Daya's pregnancy takes up a large amount of space in the prison storylines, Piper has an out-of-nowhere line where she gasps and says "I'm just like my mother" in episode two -- the list goes on.  For a while, it seemed like the show doesn't really have anything to say other than "mothers!," but it starts to take shape towards the last string of episodes.  So much of season three is about the ways each character finds comfort -- through sex, liquor, erotic fiction, schemes to keep the mind busy, faith, etc.  Motherhood is one of those things, but many of these women were robbed of good mothers or are being robbed of the opportunity to be a good mother.

Such is the nature of Orange is the New Black.  It always finds a way to bring everything together, and it's only until everything has snapped into place that the impressive structure reveals itself.  Season three bleeds all of its mini-stories into one another, culminating in a characteristically dazzling final trio of episodes.  "Trust No Bitch," the season finale, manages to wrap up almost every plotline in one single scene at a lake where the inmates gather, when a maintenance crew leaves the prison fence wide open.  It should land like something out of a hokey, soon-to-be-forgotten Sundance film, yet it feels absolutely powerful.  Through season three may have had some bumps along the road, an ending like that proves that Orange is the New Black is still a vibrant, special piece of television.

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)...

Season 2 of Orange is the New Black gets bigger and goes deeper

Season one of Netflix's Orange is the New Black ended on one heck of a cliffhanger, with Piper beating Pennsatucky to a bloody pulp, which left viewers wondering how far she'd gone and what the consequences would be.  "Thirsty Bird," the terrific second season premiere, teases out those answers over the course of an hour, as we pick up on Piper being escorted out of solitary confinement, put on a plane without any answers, and shipped off to a high security prison in Chicago.  Though we later learn that she's only there temporarily to testify in a trial, the episode does a good job of not only letting the suspense play out, but also fleshing out the Chicago prison, building it up as a parallel world to Litchfield.

Though the premiere is completely Piper-centric, she doesn't appear in the second episode at all, and recedes into being another part of the ensemble once she returns to Litchfield in the third.  Season two puts heavy focus on the black women in Litchfield, led by Vee, the season's primary villain.  As we learn from Taystee's first flashback, Vee plucked Taystee out of an adoption fair and became something of a mother figure, bringing Taystee into the fold of her drug-running business.  Once Vee returns to Litchfield, she tries to apply some of her illegal habits from the outside, preying on Suzanne's need for acceptance, Black Cindy's need for respect, and Taystee's inability to escape her past to recruit them into a cigarette smuggling business.  Much of the larger conflict of the season comes from the building race war that Vee and her crew incite in their efforts to resume the power that Vee had during her first stint in Litchfield.

But it's not just Piper or Vee and Taystee who get time in the spotlight, the season gives story time to dozens upon dozens of members of the show's deep bench of characters.  In many ways, Orange is the New Black reminds me of the great HBO drama, Deadwood.  I'm not the first to make that connection -- there were a few critics who pointed out this connection as early as the middle of the first season -- but it's hard not to bring up the comparison when talking about the worldview and use of ensemble in season two.  It takes a bunch of disparate characters and turns them into fully-realized human beings, and though you may not like all of them, you're certainly going to understand them.  Did you watch season one and think Rosa was an extremely minor character, or forgot who she was altogether?  Well Jenji Kohan doesn't think she's unimportant -- nobody is, in Orange is the New Black's opinion -- and Rosa's storyline in the season will be one of the most compelling.  Did you find Pennsatucky to be a cartoonish, one-dimensional character in the first season?  Well get ready for season two to make her one of the most endearing characters, while also not hand-waving away the fact that she still has some awful values.

Deadwood was one of the biggest and messiest shows of the last 15 years, but it didn't shy away from its messiness.  Instead, the show rolled around in it, and picked out little nuggets of beauty among the muck.  Likewise, season two of Orange is the New Black is far from perfect.  But it's so gargantuan and ambitious that you can't begrudge its messiness when it's riffing on so many different themes and exploring the stories of a countless amount of characters.

One of the season's major imperfections is its use of flashbacks.  In the first season, the flashbacks were a little more novel, and they effectively illuminated who the characters are now by showing their lives before they ended up in prison.  This season, they lost a bit of their novelty, even though the writers smartly avoid repeating characters who got flashbacks in the first season, aside from Piper and Red.  The problem is that too many of the flashbacks hit the theme of the episode a little too hard on the head (Rosa) or just aren't very interesting (Black Cindy).  Even still, some of the flashbacks work exceedingly well.  Morello's flashbacks in "A Whole Other Hole," which reveal that her engagement with Christopher is all a delusion and she merely stalked him after a first date went wrong, are as heartbreaking as any that the show has ever done.

A more welcome element of this season is its emphasis on the infrastructure of Litchfield.  It does this in ways both heavy -- the misallocation of the prison's budget leading to one of the dorm's showers backing up, which then leads to more tension between the different factions -- and light (Piper starting up a prison newsletter).  It's reminiscent of another mid-2000s HBO great, The Wire, in the way it examines the unfortunate ways systems fail people again and again.  The Wire was about the infrastructure's cold indifference to the people trapped inside of it, but Orange is the New Black is more about how ill-equipped the system is to properly deal with the people in it.  We see this in many different ways, from the prison deciding to just release the mentally ill old woman who manages to accidentally escape, to them not allowing Rosa to get a surgery that's important to extending her lifespan.

Season one was about the way communities slowly form, showing the small connections that can be made in a women's prison.  On the other hand, the second season, which had a recurring theme of rejection, found almost every corner of Litchfield at odds.  Eventually, everyone realizes that Vee is the outsider that has destroyed the harmony that they worked to create.  "We've Got Manners.  We're Polite," the season finale, is all about correcting that balance.  I love how everybody comes up with plots to bring her down -- Nicky and Boo setting her up with the heroin; Taystee, Cindy, and Watson confessing that they lied about their statements that incriminated Suzanne; Norma and Mendoza creating some concoction to slowly kill her; Healy fudging paperwork -- but in the end, it's Rosa who kills her as she escapes from Litchfield in a van.  She didn't even have that much of a vested interest in Vee, at least not directly.  But that's why her act is so important.  If the finale was about all of these disparate forces banding together for the good of the community, then it's fitting for Rosa to kill Vee because she was rude, and a poison to the prison.

"We've Got Manners.  We're Polite," is an over-sized episode, both in length and in breadth, and not everything works.  For instance, I'm not sure how I feel about how Figueroa was ultimately dispensed of (it's ugly in a one-sided way that the show rarely ever is), or Alex coming back, or the prospect of any more Larry and Polly material.  But the finale is representative of the season as a whole: it's a massive endeavor that works far more than it doesn't.  Shows like Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones achieve their scope through the miles of distance between their characters.  Orange is the New Black is so impressive because it gives off that sense of scope and mostly contains it to one place.  Ambition is one thing, but season two is one of the most astounding things to air this year because it manages pull almost all of it off.

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...

"Orange is the New Black" is Netflix's Most Impressive Work Yet

I had little to no expectations for Orange is the New Black in the weeks leading up to its premiere on Netflix.  Although I was much more positive on season 4 of Arrested Development than many critics, I found House of Cards so generic that I stalled around episode 8, and the universal panning of Hemlock Grove kept me away from ever even giving it a try.  Needless to say, I hadn't been that excited about Netflix's foray into original programming, especially when their only success was the continuation of a pre-existing property.  Further hurting matters was the fact that the show was by Jenji Kohan, who's most known for creating Weeds, a show that I was never particularly a huge fan of.  Its prison setting just seemed to serve as an extension of the direction that the latter seasons of Weeds took, so I was just planning on skipping the show altogether.  The rapturous praise that it got after critics received early screeners for the first three episodes was enough to convince me to at least sample the show, and I'm glad I did, because Orange is the New Black is a staggeringly brilliant, life-affirming piece of television.

The show opens on the story of Piper Chapman, an upper-class white woman who finds herself in jail because of her involvement in a drug ring 10 years ago, and although we follow her throughout the course of the season, it's very clear that she's just an entry point to the larger narrative that Kohan is trying to create.  The Litchfield prison is such a fully-realized world, filled with characters who could easily be the protagonists in their own right.  In a television landscape that's so white male dominated, it's refreshing enough to see women of all races and positions on the sexual spectrum, but the fact that they're all fascinating makes the show even more remarkable.  Over the course of 13 episodes, you'll seriously lose count of how many complex, interesting female characters there are on this show.  I've seen a few complaints about the opening credits, but to me it seems like the central idea of the show, presenting all the varieties of people in this world with equality.  In a way, the show is all about widening Piper's worldview and in turn, ours, by proving that everybody has a story to tell; not just you.  The show presents these women as having troubles like anybody else -- both petty (the jealousies of jilted lovers) and soul-plumbing (a transgendered woman not being able to get her estrogen pills).  Yet it also does a wonderful job of not making the prison be a wholly grim place.  The 6th episode, "WAC Pack," has frequent instances of the tiny joys one can find in such a situation: having an impromptu freestyle battle, finally getting the bathroom all to yourself, skirting off with somebody you like, etc.

Structurally, Orange is the New Black is just as bold and daring as it is with its characters.  The show employs the use of flashbacks, but not in the same way that Lost did, where the flashbacks functioned as a backbone to an episode.  Instead, they are used in a more free-form way, being sprinkled on when needed.  With so many characters to serve, things could feel overstuffed, but somehow it never does, as episodes can devote large chunks at a time to an individual storyline, before smoothly picking back up on a smaller story and just rolling along.  Eventually, the show reveals itself to be a surprisingly deft long-form narrative -- character details become larger plots, but the plot still largely exists to further these characters.  Even on a show like Mad Men, which is the best show on TV, people complain about how a season doesn't have enough Joan or Peggy or Roger.  What's most impressive about Orange is the New Black is just how many characters get a complete and satisfying arc by the end of the season.  The best episodes, like "Moscow Mule" or "Tall Man With Feelings," frequently feature separate plotlines converging and playing off of each other.  Others, like "Bora Bora Bora," are able to pull off the difficult balancing act of being really funny while also featuring incredibly dark material.  With all of these characters, storylines, and tones to balance, it all precariously approaches falling apart at any moment, but everything remains tightly bound together.

But it all comes back to Piper, who may not be more important or interesting than the scores of women on the show, but is at the center of it all.  "Blood Donut" is a perfect example of this, as it shows the collateral damage that is caused by Piper getting what she wants.  She may help somebody, but she also hurts another that she ultimately didn't have to in the process.  As Piper, Taylor Schilling gives a great, increasingly twitchy performance in the role.  Where another actress could've made this character extremely unlikable, Schilling is able to find the humanity in Piper, even when you often want to strangle her for her myopia and naivety.  Time and life function differently inside and out of prison, and Piper changes in ways that her family and friends can't understand.  Piper's season arc is one of the more clever aspects of the season, in fact.  Throughout the first half, it seemed like she was poised to have a breakthrough, becoming more aware of the world around her, just as the audience is.  Most of the second half, however, features her backsliding and becoming entrenched in the flaws deep within herself.

Part of this journey comes from her entanglements with her ex and former drug partner, Alex, who further complicates her relationship with her fiancee on the outside, Larry.  There's a real frankness to the sex and sexuality, and it never presents this bisexual love triangle as something that's broad or goofy, preferring to depict Piper's feelings as extremely complex and matter-of-fact.  In general, Orange is the New Black is the greatest case of showing how people can contain multitudes.  Piper and Alex's conflicts have a lot of baggage that comes with them, and it never boils down to concrete right and wrong, because both of them have their own failings.  Even a character as loathsome as Mendez, the prison guard, can have moments of humanity, like when he stands up for Sophia in "Lesbian Request Denied."  At the end of the day, although these individuals are in extreme circumstances, people are just people, and they all act out of fear, anger, love, and loneliness.

It is in these moments where the show truly shines, and fortunately it's filled with many deeply human, powerful scenes.  Take "The Chickening" for instance, which somehow finds strange beauty in everybody's quest to find a chicken that's rumored to roam the prison grounds.  It's something that could easily be a goofy runner, but ends up being a thematic backbone about hope in a largely hopeless place.  Orange is the New Black is a depiction of people trying to exist within a system that often overlooks them, and many of the stories ("Tit Punch," "Imaginary Enemies," "Blood Donut") are all about being unwanted.  That's why the story of Taystee is so moving, because everybody hopes to be released from prison, but when she does get out, she quickly realizes that jail time didn't equip her for the real world, and the system is almost designed for her to fail.  The last stretch of episodes in particular feature a fantastic level of emotional accretion, leading up to a Christmas pageant that should feel hokey, but is just overwhelmingly beautiful.  Like in season 4 of Arrested Development, the final shot is a striking one, and it leaves the viewer with tons of possibility for the next season.  Everything leading up to that scene offers enough to stew over as well, and it's likely that I'll still be unpacking this first season -- which I had no anticipation for, but ended up being floored by -- for months to come.  I never thought that the woman who created Weeds would make a show that would make me a better, more thoughtful person, but here is Orange is the New Black, easily one of the best shows of the year.