What a terrible year it’s been for our planet. I don’t fancy myself a hysterical individual by any means and I try to maintain a healthy distance from the outrage-perpetuation machine of modern social media. Still, when things are this undeniably terrible, what else is one to do but panic? Fires in California, hurricanes in Texas, the daily affronts to our decency and sanity coming from the White House, the increasingly plausible threat of nuclear conflict with North Korea. All of this is just another way of asking: can you really fault folks for yearning to escape through the latest Netflix binge?
This was, while perhaps not the most consistent year for small-screen storytelling in recent memory, certainly one of the weirdest. In pop-cultural terms, 2017 will forever be remembered as the year David Lynch scrambled our collective brains like a breakfast hash and re-wrote the language of a T.V. procedural with “Twin Peaks: The Return,” as well as perhaps the year that “The Leftovers” officially inherited its mantle as one of HBO’s all-time definitive dramas. Some of the most memorable fictional creations to be seen on television this year were shit-talking clergymen, depressed alcoholic horses, Texan artistes and Bakersfield clowns. It’s been a wild ride for small-screen obsessives through what has turned out to be a relentless, unforgiving year — one that I can only hope gives way to some kind of light in 2018. All vague intellectual noodling aside, I hope you enjoy this little list I’ve put together.
P.S. not doing a “Worst Of” category this year. That shit’s for the birds. — NL
10. “Rick and Morty” (Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland).
I think we can all kind of agree that “Rick and Morty” fans, by and large, kind of suck, no? I don’t mean to paint in such generalized strokes but jeez, many of the “Rick and Morty” faithful are a pedantic and often grossly self-pleased bunch, given to harassing the staff’s female staff on the grounds of them somehow not “getting” the show they helped to create, and other such off-putting behaviors. And then, of course, there’s the issue of certain fans pitching adolescent hissy fits when they didn’t get their fix of the promotionally-endorsed Schezuan sauce promised to them by McDonald’s by way of “Rick and Morty’s” bugged-out third season premiere. My gripes about the “Rick and Morty” fanbase aside, Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s gleefully nihilistic sci-fi cartoon adventure is still one of Peak T.V.’s most enduring pleasures: a show that’s both aggressively smart and soothingly dumb in about equal measure, where you’re likely to find incisive commentary on divorce and abandonment issues wedged in next to “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” references and gory gladiatorial space battles. Season three of “Rick and Morty” was, as the wizened, alcoholic mad scientist Rick Sanchez promised to his stammering grandson Morty in the kickoff episode “The Rickshank Redemption,” “the darkest year of [their] adventures” to date. Boy, he was not kidding. This year, Rick turned himself into a pickle and murdered a bunch of people, Beth and Jerry finalized their divorce, and both Rick and Morty reached the brink of psychological collapse before treating themselves to a bit of the alien spa life. Dan Harmon’s entire creative persona is predicated on him being the cleverest individual in the room at any given moment, and “Rick and Morty’s” relentless smart alecky-ness might be tough to take if the show weren’t so savagely uproarious at every turn. The show boasts more genuine intrigue than “Doctor Who,” demonstrates a greater understanding of the benefits of science fiction world-building than the dreary “Westworld,” and displays more bugfuck thematic scope than “Futurama,” which is perhaps the most obvious precedent for Harmon and Roiland’s twisted, dimension-hopping buddy comedy. Then again, all these highfalutin comparisons aside, “Rick and Morty” also happens to be perfect viewing if you’ve just crushed two bongloads and are looking to take an extended trip to Froopyland. Pickle Riiiiick.
9. “American Gods” (Bryan Fuller and Michael Green).
Channeling the very peculiar voice of English fantasy author Neil Gaiman to any visual medium cannot be easy. Mr. Gaiman, in irreverent, spooky works like “Neverwhere” (in which a mild-mannered man discovers an underground city beneath the subways of London) and “Anansi Boys” (in which another mild-mannered man discovers he is the descendant of a centuries-old trickster God), infuses stark Lovecraftian horror narratives with a distinctly British wit that often smacks of P.G. Wodehouse. “American Gods” is Gaiman’s most ambitious and well-known work: a mischievous, darkly comic fable about the Old Gods and the New that unfolds on the dusky backroads of a largely imagined America. To think anyone could have captured its terror and magic and kept it intact in the television medium may have been too much to hope for. Then again, we weren’t expecting “Hannibal’s” Bryan Fuller to step up to the plate. Fuller has an enviable talent for orchestrating gaudy operettas of sound, color and blood, and in the first season of “American Gods” on Starz, the “Dead Like Me” showrunner and his producing partner Michael Green have translated Gaiman’s exacting vision to another platform with great fidelity, all while bringing their own signature, kinky obsessions to the fore. “American Gods” is nothing less than a phantasmagoric folktale about who Americans have chosen to worship in this past century, and why. It contains appearances from a shit-talking Irish leprechaun played by Pablo Schreiber, a righteous, scorched-earth monologue delivered to a ship full of slaves, a deity named “Media” (played by a misty-eyed Gillian Anderson), and enough uncensored sex and violence to make you pine for a fourth season of “Hannibal”. Some critics lambasted the allegedly wooden performance of lead actor Ricky Whittle as the show’s lead, a hulking ex-convict named Shadow Moon, but I found that Whittle channeled Shadow’s damaged essence with an admirable sense of restraint. If you’re not much for restraint, all the better to bask in the demented glory of Ian McShane’s turn as Mr. Wednesday: a peanut-scarfing, parka-clad demonic trickster who turns out to be an unassuming reincarnation of the Norse God, Odin. “American Gods” was never going to be subtle and there were times where Fuller and Green very nearly lost the thread of what they intended to create. All the same, this is one of the most original and arresting visions of the year: a full-bore swan dive into a seductive American nightmare. Fuller and Green’s recent departure from the show aside, let’s hope this show can maintain its savage luster in season two.
8. “Master of None” (Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang).
When Aziz Ansari wrapped the masterful first season of his Netflix comedy “Master of None” in 2015, there was a lot of speculative chatter about where the show would go after its rueful, open-ended finale. So what did the 34-year old “Parks and Recreation” actor do pre-season two? He embarked upon a single man’s sojourn to Italy, immersed himself in cheese and pasta-making courses, and pondered his next move. It’s no huge surprise that the first few episodes of “Master of None’s” sweet and heartbreaking second season take place in the land of love and opera, though hardcore cinephiles may be tickled to observe knowing allusions to both Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thieves” and Eric Rohmer’s “Love in the Afternoon” sprinkled throughout this season’s fleet, imminently bingeable ten-episode run. “Master of None’s” second run doesn’t carry with it the joy of discovery that the first season possessed: that feeling that overtakes you, the viewer, when you start watching a truly great show and it feels as though you are tapping into something unprecedented and completely new. That said, “Master of None’s” whip-smart yet unobtrusive commentary on the immigrant experience and the 21st-century dating ritual is still peerless, as evidenced in a pair of episodes in which a string of first dates is sewn into a tapestry of romantic ennui (“First Date”), and another where Aziz’s real-life parents chastise his fictional counterpart, Dev, for giddily indulging in pork treats. Aziz’s love of food and comedy informs every facet of this show, even relatively dark tangents such as the one that involves a charismatic celebrity chef (a scene-stealing Bobby Cannavale) with dark sexual predilections that seems to carry with it echoes of Ansari’s real-life mentor, Louis C.K. Ansari is also more generous, letting his Big Bud Eric Wareheim do some sturdy directing throughout the season, while letting co-star and consummate scene-stealer Lena Waithe pen the season’s most affecting episode, “Thanksgiving”. A self-serving thread near the end (one that caters to the modern romantic comedy’s dreaded “nice guy” trope in a strangely unironic fashion) keeps this season from reaching the blissful highs of season one, but “Master of None” is still one of the smartest and most soulful comedies made for the small screen. There’s no word on when we may get a season three, but here’s to hoping Aziz takes another trip around the globe in the hopes of figuring all that out.
7. “Insecure” (Issa Rae and Larry Wilmore).
I was never a fan of the show “Girls” for a number of reasons, chief among them being that I was constantly being told that “this is what members of [my] generation look like” from my fellow millennials. I must confess, reader, that I have never met any real person as narcissistic, or with as poisonously warped a view of his or her own value, as the fictional creations on Lena Dunham and Jeni Konner’s longstanding gentrified-Brooklyn sitcom. My distaste for “Girls” largely has to do with Dunham frequently mistaking self-pity for comic insight, though this is a trap that Issa Rae’s radiant “Insecure” — an infinitely wiser, funnier, and far superior depiction of the pitfalls of 21st-century womanhood — almost entirely avoids . Unlike the miserable hipsters on “Girls,” the characters on “Insecure” are not equipped with the privilege to lie around all day and feel sorry for themselves. Since the show focuses on a dynamic, appealing ensemble largely composed of actors of color, “Insecure” ends up exposing the privilege-as-a-crux that has become the undoing not just of “Girls,” but of similar funny-sad, overwhelmingly white television comedies in that same vein. “Insecure’s” first season was crass, winsome and thoroughly charming, even if it sometimes felt like Issa Rae and her creative team were warming for the bigger game that they were getting ready to play in season two. With that in mind, the show’s sophomore round is a thrilling improvement on all the elements that made “Insecure” a treat in its first season: Rae’s beautifully calibrated mix of awkwardness and bravado, generous and empathetic writing, deft music supervision that leans heavily on under-utilized hip-hop and neo-soul, and a depiction of the African-American experience in Los Angeles that wisely sidestepped any misguided depiction of inner city posturing were all enhanced and expanded upon in this new chapter. “Insecure” was never in a hurry to prove anything to anyone, and why should it be? This show is sexier, smarter, more confident and more deliriously funny than 90% of comedies currently on televsion. And season two’s sensitive depiction of the mending rift between Issa and her sorta-decent ex-boyfriend Lawrence (played with low-key charisma by Jay Ellis) culminated in a bittersweet season finale in which our two lovesick principals are afforded the luxury of dreaming out the future they could have never had together, all of it played out against a deliciously languorous Inglewood backdrop. Take that, “La La Land”.
6. “Better Call Saul” (Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould).
There’s a certain joy in reading crime novels by legends like George V. Higgins (“The Friends of Eddie Coyle”), Elmore Leonard (“Freaky Deaky”), and George Pelecanos (“Hard Revolution”) that is only tangentially related to the vicarious pleasures of observing the American criminal. Rather, the joy to be had in these works comes from their unerring specificity — the way in which lowlives and hoodlums exchange quasi-poetic conversation over beer and cigarettes, for instance, or the color and make of a certain kind of American muscle car that doesn’t get manufactured anymore. There is a leisurely, unhurried quality to this kind of storytelling that is so powerful that it can make you forget you’re spending time in the presence of immoral lunatics. “Better Call Saul,” which began as a kind of sleepy spinoff and sort-of-prequel to “Breaking Bad,” one of the most lauded and adrenalized prestige dramas of our time, is this kind of story. Vince Gilligan’s superb, bitterly funny series began as a look at how hustlers at the bottom interact with each other. In the show’s third and best season, “Saul” became a frightening morality play about a man who has no sense of traditional morality. That man would be none other than Slippin’ Jimmy McGill (played with devastating comic timing and sly humanity by the great Bob Odenkirk), whose eventual transformation into the hard-nosed, cynical lawman-above-the-law Saul Goodman (one of the chief ancillary characters on “Breaking Bad”) has yet to take place. Those who watched “Breaking Bad” licking their lips in anticipation of cartel violence and grandstanding acts of betrayal may be left cold by “Saul’s” often wandering piece and its tendency to go for dark laughs over outsized theatrics. However, for those who possess the requisite degree of patience, “Better Call Saul” offers an embarrassment of riches that “Breaking Bad,” for all its innumerable virtues, often did not. “Saul’s” third season dove deeper into Jimmy’s fractured psyche, examining both his relationships with budding legal superstar Kim Wexler (the undervalued Rhea Seehorn), as well as his sanctimonious, prideful, do-gooder of a brother, Chuck (Michael McKean, turning a supremely difficult character into a sympathetic one). And then, of course, there is the indelible Mike Ehrmentraut (national treasure Jonathan Banks), whose own conversion from a gruff parking station attendant into a merciless enforcer provides the show with a riveting alternate journey. “Better Call Saul” is a great visual crime novel for our times, and if it ends on a note as high as the ones it has reached throughout season three, it stands to potentially transcend “Breaking Bad” in the greater pop cultural canon.
5. “Big Little Lies” (Jean-Marc Vallee and David E. Kelley).
I wrote “Big Little Lies” off as enjoyable highbrow trash when the show first premiered on HBO in the early half of this year. To me, it seemed to be the kind of glossy prestige vehicle whose engrossing veneer more than compensated for its utter lack of depth. Oh, reader, how very wrong I turned out to be. Though there were better and more consistent shows to air in 2017, I’m not sure that there has been a show that has improved so noticeably from this rich melodrama’s intriguing but uneven pilot episode to its sublimely ridiculous and genuinely shattering finale, where all the disparate pieces of David E. Kelley and Jean-Marc Vallee’s rapturously fragmented tale finally snapped into a kind of perfect synchronicity. It would be easy enough to view “Big Little Lies” as a sophisticated marriage of upper-class lifestyle porn and bitchy, backstabbing, capital-D Drama, and to be sure, the show can certainly be appreciated on that level. And yet, as the show proceeded in letting its screwy tale unfold, “Big Little Lies” revealed an unassuming depth: here was a story about women bound together by grief and repression, afraid to lash out against the male tormentors in their lives for fear of violent reprisal, but seeking understandng in each other’s company all the same. It didn’t hurt that “Big Little Lies” boasted what was surely one of the most fabulous acting ensembles of the year. Nicole Kidman quietly continued her insane 2017 winning streak playing a woman at the mercy of an awful white-collar brute (Alexander Skarsgård, terrific), while Reese Witherspoon utilized her perky, All-American niceness to terrifying effect as Monterey’s reigning Supermom, and young Shailene Woodley buoyed the show’s heart and soul whenever Kelley’s scripts threatened to spill over into polished histrionics. “Big Little Lies” was also directed with a painterly eye by “Wild” and “Dallas Buyer’s Club” director Jean-Marc Vallee, who continues to lend a docu-realistic texture to material that might otherwise be classified as corny. HBO may have to say goodbye to “Game of Thrones” soon, but “Big Little Lies” is actually a lot more fun to watch with your friends — who needs frost demons when you’ve got Elle Woods wielding a pump heel like it’s a deadly weapon?
4. “Vice Principals” (Danny McBride and Jody Hill).
Back when “Vice Principals” debuted in 2016, a lot of television critics found themselves (rightfully) asking if it was acceptable to laugh at the exploits of two nasty, entitled white men working overtime to sabotage the reputation of a woman of color. For sure, it can be tough to chuckle at xenophobia and toxic masculinity when our current president makes those two tenants a big part of his domestic agenda. “Vice Principals” star Danny McBride and series co-creator Jody Hill have always enjoyed turning calamity and tragedy into bawdy redneck farce: their micro-budged breakout “The Foot Fist Way” and their classic HBO comedy “Eastbound and Down” are both prime examples of this. Still, was “Vice Principals” going too far? The show’s stellar second season — which is, in almost every conceivable way, an improvement on its first — answers that question with frightening assurance. This show was never about indulging the inexcusable shenanigans of its two lead boobs, delusional hardass Neil Gamby (McBride) and conniving, heartless schemer Lee Russell (a terrifying Walton Goggins). “Vice Principals” has always been about setting these men up for a fall — albeit, with biting humor and great attention paid to throwaway detail. Season one established the crime, watching with amused horror as Gamby and Russell proceeded to systematically destroy the life of a smart, qualified woman that they perceived to be their enemy. Season two is about the punishment. It’s also a looser, funnier, slightly less misanthropic collection of episodes, wherein Gamby learns to not be such a colossal prick all of the time, and where we get a disturbing glimpse into the private life of Lee Russell (just wait until you meet his twisted sisters). The second season, beautifully helmed by McBride’s film school buddy and “George Washington” director David Gordon Green, also made ample room for the show’s superlative ensemble cast, from hard-nosed disciplinarian and former private investigator Nash (Dale Dickey of “Winter’s Bone”) to Edi Patterson as Gamby’s unhinged, maniacal former flame, Miss Abbot. “Vice Principals” is still rude and crude to the bone, and it may be too bitter a pill for some to swallow, but it’s also a show with a great deal to say about the fractured, divided state of our country: the bullies who dwell at the bottom, dreaming of a better life, and the reticent souls who might guide us toward a better day.
3. “I Love Dick” (Jill Soloway and Sarah Gubbins).
So much Peak Television is centered around male desire (the desire for money, power, sex, or all three) that it can be easy to forget that there aren’t many shows centered around the female equivalent. Shows that ask vital questions about female psychology — who are the women we choose to center stories around, what do they want, who do they want — are an essential part of the artistic tapestry of 21st-century television, even if they are few and far between. Jill Soloway got a head start with her groundbreaking Amazon series “Transparent,” which still stands (even after a slightly rockier-than-usual fourth season and some end-of-the-year production troubles) as Peak T.V.’s most cutting look at intersectional sexuality. If there’s any justice in the world, Soloway’s new show, “I Love Dick,” will usher in a new era of idiosyncratic, female-centered storytelling. “I Love Dick” is artsier and more avant-garde than “Transparent” ever was: as unconventional as Soloway’s breakout show often is, it’s still a dysfunctional-family sitcom often played in an aching minor key. “I Love Dick,” in comparison, is borderline-unclassifiable. Is this show a satirical cringe comedy about the emotional limitations of intellectuals? A poetic examination of female lust? A sociological expose of the vibrant arts scene in Marfa, Texas? Perhaps all of the above? However you wish to classify this galvanizing Amazon series, one thing is for certain: “I Love Dick” is one of the year’s most genuinely radical art pieces in either the film or television medium. Soloway’s tough-shit humanism extends to every character in the show’s varied and colorful ensemble, be it the sex-deprived, fearsomely intelligent writer played by Kathryn Hahn, or her ineffectual egghead husband (played by Griffin Dunne with more conviction and humanity than he’s displayed in years). There’s also, of course, the show’s shadowy namesake hero: that would be Dick himself, played by the great Kevin Bacon as the outsized embodiment of a very specific kind of female-centered lust (he’s a rugged, cowboy type known for creating minimalist architecture that is undeniably phallic in its structure). I admit, reader, I could have just as easily watched a whole show about a pot-puffing, trailer-dwelling artist played by a gifted newcomer named Roberta Colindrez. Soloway directed the show’s pilot and also its heart-shattering, structurally unorthodox fifth episode, “A Brief History of Weird Girls”, though the show also boasts some remarkable female talent behind the camera in the form of “Boys Don’t Cry” director Kimberly Pierce, as well as “American Honey” and “Fish Tank” helmer Andrea Arnold (a fellow “Transparent” vet who directed four of “I Love Dick’s” eight episodes to date). “I Love Dick” is clearly designed to make some viewers uncomfortable, but that may be precisely the point: this is a show that wants to confront and challenge your ideas about what is traditional, and present you with a worldview you’ve never quite seen before. Though I feel like “Transparent” could very well be near the end of its series run, I hope Amazon affords Jill Soloway the freedom to make shows like “I Love Dick”for a long, long time.
2. “Twin Peaks: The Return” (David Lynch and Mark Frost).
Though I can practically hear the tittering of fingers on keyboards as I write this — the sound of hyper-verbal cineastes working diligently on countless David Lynch think pieces, no doubt — I sort of hope that we can all resist the urge to analyze the already-iconic third season of “Twin Peaks” to death and simply let it be. Has there ever been a show on American television more brilliantly designed to fly in the face of the kind of needless fanboy speculation that dominates “Game of Thrones” message boards? Granted, there were those among us who perhaps wished for a more (gulp) traditional, less abstract visit to the town of “Twin Peaks”: something akin, perhaps, to the first season of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s game-changing small-town murder mystery. That was Lynch in the era of “Blue Velvet” and “Wild at Heart,” still spinning more-or-less traditional narratives (the feckless gumshoe, lovers on the run, etc.) but with a proclivity for perversity and surrealism that was as bugged-out as anything since the infamous golden age of Pasolini. “Twin Peaks: The Return,” however, exists in the terrifying shadow zone that is post-“Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire” Lynch. This Lynch has zero interest in traditional plotting, standard narrative structure, or just what the fuck you think he might be up to. As a result, “Twin Peaks: The Return” was less about the who and why of Laura Palmer’s murder, and more of a spiritual inquiry. It was about the return of Agent Cooper to his true self, as he branched off into the malleable identities of a grinning numbskull named Doug E. Jones, as well as a snarling, long-haired maniac named Dark Coop who seemed to be harboring the ghost of the original “Twin Peaks’s” Killer Bob. The show’s third season was about the return of a certain ethereal malignancy to the town of Twin Peaks itself, with specters of long-forgotten sins coming back to haunt the lives of characters who looked fresh-faced twenty-seven years ago and now have years of woe and compromise written into their faces. “Twin Peaks: The Return” was also, of course, about the return of David Lynch himself. Lynch has proclaimed that his current movie pitches are too weird for the major American distributors, and so he’s instead opted to make an uncompromising eighteen-hour art movie disguised as a standard season of television. In an era where revolutionary adjectives are often employed to assuage the sensibilities of liberal viewers whose own tolerance for transgression has grown formidable, the electroshock freakiness of “Twin Peaks: The Return” is enough to stir-fry your synapses. There hasn’t been anything on T.V. in years that is this shocking, darkly funny or genuinely original. To be honest, reader, I’m not sure there ever will be. At the very least, can we all agree that this season’s nightmare-inducing eighth episode (“gotta light”) is perhaps the greatest experimental horror movie of the year that just so happens to be on Showtime?
- “The Leftovers” (Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta).
2017 was a year defined by loss. Some were minor losses, like those of us living in liberal coastal cities losing their goddamn minds over the ugly ineptitude of our current political regime. Other losses were more severe, such as those who lost loved ones to gun violence, and others who lost their homes in natural disasters. An oft-mentoned principal of loss is the act of acceptance: the idea that those of us who have suffered losses must come to terms with our irrevocable forfeiture and take incremental steps towards whatever tomorrow may bring. For my money, there is no show in the history of American television that more powerfully examines the concept of loss than Damon Lindelof’s revelatory “The Leftovers,” which graduated from being one of HBO’s darkest and most vexing dramas to being an explosively emotional, almost impossibly satisfying narrative examination of how we all collectively process pain. The show’s first season had a kind of grounded science-fiction bent to it (much like Lindelof’s other watershed program, “Lost”) that could be frustrating if you were not used to showrunners requesting that you meet them more than halfway. In its second, and now third season, however — and I truly believe that this final season of “The Leftovers” will go down as one of HBO’s best standalone seasons, period — Lindelof and his team have wisely kept the focus on the story’s inherent humanism, all while maintaining the show’s richly-developed fantastical elements as a kind of beguiling window dressing. This was the year that former Mapleton, New York, police officer Kevin Garvey officially became a deity, where Carrie Coon’s Nora Dunn (giving the year’s most magnetic television performance) managed to locate her cosmic purpose, and where the show’s promised apocalyptic event — the Great Departure — was finally, sort of, explained. “The Leftovers” is the kind of show that bleeds from your nightmares into your waking day, filling your head with Biblical images of despair and rebirth, so it’s kind of a shock that the third season ended on a genuine note of hope. There are passages in the show’s series finale, “The Book of Kevin” — like preacher Matt Jamison imparting his final words to Nora, or Kevin and Nora’s final, innocent dance beneath the stars — that are some of the most heartrending moments of television I’ve ever seen in my life. For a show whose engine runs on a canny blend of mystery and magical realism, I was not expecting the emotional gut-punch that the last two episodes of “The Leftovers” delivered to me. And yet, this conclusive masterstroke is but one of the many reasons I believe that Lindelof’s enigmatic exploration of fate and consequence will go down as one of the great programs in HBO’s history. At the very least, we got to see a slow-mo trampoline montage set to Wu-Tang Clan’s “The Jump Off”. I can’t be the only one who was over the moon about that, right?
Runner Ups: Netflix’s exuberant, female-led wrestling laffer “GLOW” turned out to be one of the year’s most welcome surprises, while that other, decidedly more tragic Netflix staple, the animated showbiz satire “Bojack Horseman,” used its fourth season as an excuse to eschew Bojack’s increasingly bleak narrative for a sharp focus on its supporting players. “Silicon Valley’s” fourth season proved that the quick-witted ensemble of HBO’s serrated coder comedy will no doubt endure the departure of T.J. Miller’s Ehrlich Bachman, while “Game of Thrones” remains Peak T.V.’s most enjoyably vicious large-scale video game. The return of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” wasn’t quite the delirious high that one might have hoped for, although “The Pickle Incident” and “A Disturbance in the Kitchen” are classic, squirmy “Curb” installments. “Transparent,” which has seen a pretty big shake-up this year over the Jeffrey Tambor controversy, lost a bit of steam in its fourth season but nevertheless retained its wistful, emotionally complex insights on intersectional sexuality, Judaism and feminism. Elsewhere, Paolo Sorrentino’s freewheeling papal freakout “The Young Pope” — in which Jude Law played a preening, narcissistic Pope given to guzzling Coke Zero and hanging out with kangaroos — proved to be the craziest, least classifiable show of the year.
“Mindhunter” translated the gloomy, exacting talents of director David Fincher into an engrossing small-screen experience, and FX’s clown comedy “Baskets” took a quantum leap in its genuinely tragic second season. The pilot for Noah Hawley’s “Legion” was one of the most psychedelic and electrifying hours of television to be seen all year, though the episode of Tig Notaro’s “One Mississippi” where she directly takes on the rumors surrounding her former mentor Louis C.K. gives Hawley’s show a run for its money. David Simon’s “The Deuce” took its time in telling an often-electrifying and just-as-often-frustrating story of sex as a business during the messy midpoint of the 20th century in America. Another show that improved throughout the course of its latest season was “Top of the Lake: China Girl,” which graduated from being another one of Jane Campion’s heavy-handed, symbolically loaded morality plays into a genuinely gripping police procedural. The third season of “Fargo” was a giddy, glib nightmare of mayhem and merrymaking that was enjoyable even when it (literally) got lost in the woods, while director Antonio Campos lent his unsentimental authorial hand to USA’s surprisingly engrossing psychodrama “The Sinner”. “Room 104” showcased the eclectic talents of the brothers Duplass post-“Togetherness” — not to mention those an impressive stable of up-and-coming indie filmmakers — while Joe Swanberg’s lovely “Easy” proved to be just as emotionally engaging in its second season. Apart from “The Young Pope,” Steve Conrad’s satisfyingly out-there spy caper “Patriot” gets points for being one of the year’s most tonally bizarre shows, and “Late Night with John Oliver” continued to make sense (as much as one could) of the increasingly frightening and unpredictable world we inhabit.
… and that’s all, folks! See you this time next year.
