By Jon Kissel
The best of TV in 2016 had plenty of room for new shows. Several of TV's best dramas either ended their run (Hannibal, Mad Men, Justified) in 2015 or didn't air new episodes in 2016 (Fargo, The Knick). However, with no shortage of new series on new networks/websites that are increasingly willing to give carte blanche to previously underserved kinds of showrunners, there will always be plenty of content to take the place of what leaves the airwaves. For those who knew where to look, 2016 keeps up the pace of greatness that has characterized the medium for years. TV unquestionably qualifies as the vast wasteland, but in between those vast expanses of ghost hunting nonsense and reality TV dreck, the Golden Age continues to thrive.
The best of TV in 2016 had plenty of room for new shows. Several of TV's best dramas either ended their run (Hannibal, Mad Men, Justified) in 2015 or didn't air new episodes in 2016 (Fargo, The Knick). However, with no shortage of new series on new networks/websites that are increasingly willing to give carte blanche to previously underserved kinds of showrunners, there will always be plenty of content to take the place of what leaves the airwaves. For those who knew where to look, 2016 keeps up the pace of greatness that has characterized the medium for years. TV unquestionably qualifies as the vast wasteland, but in between those vast expanses of ghost hunting nonsense and reality TV dreck, the Golden Age continues to thrive.
20 |  Idiotsitter The debut season of Jillian Bell's and Charlotte Newhouse's comedy about a spoiled rich girl and her socially inept tutor is a student of dumb, riotous comedies. Their show possesses the shaggy charm of Hot Rod (that's a compliment) and the pratfalls of Tommy Boy. Bell's destructive but somehow sympathetic Gene is well-matched with Newhouse's frumpy, near-deranged Billie, complementary trainwrecks trying to teach the other whatever it is they know best. |
 Silicon Valley The third season of Mike Judge's tech-world satire kept up its expected joke density despite the occasional frustrating turn. TJ Miller's Erlich Bachman reached new heights of irritation in his too-generous screentime, but the show makes the list on the strength of its considerable highs, particularly a third-episode rug-pulling gag that shocks as much as it amuses. | 19 |
18 |  Baskets Alternately melancholy and absurd, Baskets matches the sad clown nature of its titular hero. With Zach Galifinakis starring, Louis CK producing, and Tim-and-Eric mainstay Jonathan Krisel directing, the alternative comedy pedigree is strong with this one. Few others would have thought to cast Louis Anderson as Chip Baskets' mother, a role he infuses with as much humanity as ridiculousness. The flawless deadpan of Martha Kelly completes the picture. |
 Girls The penultimate season of Lena Dunham's show finally gave redemptive and interesting arcs to some of its most annoying characters. There's still the contest to determine which of the central foursome is the absolute worst week to week, but previous mainstays found themselves less on that list than usual. Jessa (Jemima Kirke) was put in a can't-look-away relationship with Adam (Adam Driver), Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) spent several enthralling episodes in Japan, and even the insufferable Marnie (Allison Williams) found a modicum of self-awareness in getting out of one terrible relationship while having the foresight to rekindle what would have been a worse one. At the center, Dunham's Hannah turned into her skid before pulling out of it in an excellent finale. After its best season, Dunham will have a hard time topping herself as she wraps up her often-controversial series. | 17 |
16 |  One Mississippi The first of four singular visions by comedians to be on this list, Tig Notaro's One Mississippi is a heartfelt exploration of the aftermath of a terrible period in her life, where she had just recovered from breast cancer and a somehow-worse than-cancer intestinal infection. Returning home to her small Southern town in the wake of her mother's death, she grapples with her childhood and what her life is now going to be like in the wake of all that trauma. Not particularly beyond a chuckle here or there, One Mississippi instead has the dry wit of Notaro's routine interspersed with the honesty that modern stand-up thrives on. |
 Vice Principals From the team behind Eastbound and Down comes 2016's most prescient show. Vice Principals examined privilege through two of the year's most trying anti-heroes. Danny McBride reprises his difficult-asshole shtick to strong effect as Neal Gamby, co-vice principal and rival to Walton Goggins' Lee Russell (who will put the po-po in your ho-ho). They team up to supplant the supremely qualified outside hire Belinda Brown (Kimberly Hebert Gregory), purely out of frustrated masculinity and a false sense of entitlement. Pitch black and building to a shocking ending, Vice Principals dared to wonder at what American men might do when their sense of themselves is threatened, and then was topped by reality a few months later. | 15 |
14 |  Game of Thrones After a dismal fifth season, Game of Thrones recovers with its most spectacular outing yet. Its big set pieces, coming with increasing frequency as the series nears its end, are unparalleled, even as the motivations leading up to them get lost in the weeds. Questionable decisions get made, but showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss have gotten better at bludgeoning the viewer into submission, both with cash-fueled grandeur and emotional beats that hit hard as characters finally begin to curl back into a handful of locations. As frustrating as it is wondrous, Game of Thrones sixth season achieved a cinematic level of quality rarely seen on television. |
 The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Tina Fey's Netflix series vastly surpassed its shaky first season with a more confident season two. Ellie Kemper's titular character dug deep into her dark past with the help of Fey's frequently-blitzed psychiatrist, Tituss Burgess' eccentric Titus Andromedon struggled with a regular relationship, and Jane Krakowski's shunned socialite finally broke away from her 30 Rock character. Speaking of Fey's masterpiece, Kimmy Schmidt is never going to be able to match 30 Rock's level of joke density, but it has achieved something Fey's earlier series was never able to muster: emotional resonance. | 13 |
12 |  Lady Dynamite Another autobiographical series from a female comic, Maria Bamford's Lady Dynamite uses every trick in the book, from meta asides to broken timelines to surreal anti-comedy. Chronicling the amplified Bamford's successful past, depressive collapse, and present-day mild resurgence, the series is whiplash inducing as it flits between each setting, helpfully tinted for ease of watching. As daring in its structure as it is with its jokes, Lady Dynamite is packed with memorable bits, from the Bamford's Herzog-ian-voiced pugs to an Orwellian segment in a Mexican school for future department store employees. A descendant of Arrested Development, this is a series in need of repeat viewings to catch everything. |
 The Americans Always a chilly show, The Americans put together its best and most affecting season by finally bringing several storylines to a close. The effect of watching this series has been cumulative, as the weight of so many bodies folded into suitcases and assets callously discarded comes to rest on viewer and character alike. Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell also went bigger than they previously had in the series, especially the latter. It's long been apparent that both are masters of the suppressed emotion and they're now stretching their legs a little. Formally, this is probably the best show on TV, an undeniable achievement of directing and writing and acting, though it often has a difficult time leavening all the heaviness with humor, something the great dramas of the Golden Age never forgot. | 11 |
10 |  Bojack Horseman Another dense comedy dealing with depression in its main characters, Bojack Horseman is fantastically adept at flipping the switch between uproarious comedy and searing drama. In its version of Hollywoo(d), where talking animals coexist alongside humans, Bojack (Will Arnett) is now on the awards circuit, desperately seeking the validation that his past as a hacky sitcom actor and unloved foal have denied him. There's also a music video in which a dolphin belts out gloriously violent lyrics about abortion, hopefully cementing Brrap-brrap-pow-pow into the cultural lexicon. With its blackest ending to a season yet, Raphael Bob-Waksberg's show is now at the point where it would be most surprising if anything good happened to its deeply-broken, if bitingly funny, characters. |
 Full Frontal With Samantha Bee The most cutting in an increasingly crowded field, the take-no-prisoners Sam Bee is an excellent avatar for the enraged of us, still waiting for the bottom of political life to be found. Though the vast amount of her acrimony is saved for conservatives, specifically the religious right and Trumpists of the world, Bee's best segments are often about her frustrations with liberals, accurately pinning so many of the current political landscape on their failure to participate in the 2010 elections. She saved her best work for an episode right before the election, in which she posited that Hillary Clinton's life has hinged on a failure to pass the DC bar exam, a flub that sent her to Arkansas, where constricting Southern norms of behavior warped a fire-breathing feminist into the multi-faced, overly cautious candidate who ultimately allowed a demagogue to assume the big chair. Bee's fire will be desperately needed in the uncertain years ahead. | 9 |
8 |  Bob's Burgers Settling into a comfortable groove, Bob's Burgers is the latest descendant of The Simpsons' legacy, far surpassing the present version of The Simpsons to claim it. The love that Bob Belcher and his family have for each other is always at the center in a show completely absent of any of the mean humor its Seth Macfarlane-created neighbors exclusively traffic in. Now in its seventh season, Loren Bouchard's show isn't reinventing itself on a weekly basis because it's found a formula that works; stay cheerful and stick to who the characters are. Practically a procedural now, this is pure comfort food, leaving one with a smile after every credits sequence. |
 Insecure Another passion project from a comedian, Issa Rae's Insecure finds new things to say about an increasingly tired genre. It might be another show about millenials struggling to find themselves in a big city, but the perspective and the voice behind the series injects tons of life into the proceedings. Fundamentally a show about female friendship, Rae and Yvonne Orji (playing Rae's best friend) feel like they have years and years of history between them. The relationship side of Insecure is also genuinely investing, with each party understandable in their motivations and sympathetic in their reactions. A big blow-up stands as one of the most raw and memorable scenes of the year. Rae comes out of 2016 as one of the best discoveries, leaving viewers anxious to see what she does next in season two. | 7 |
6 |  Better Call Saul The creators behind Breaking Bad always had life and death stakes hanging over their landmark series, ratcheting up the tension on scenes as straightforward as a conversation between a husband and wife. Their prequel series, Better Call Saul, has none of that, as it features characters we know will be alive when it catches up to Breaking Bad. Somehow, this is no impediment to one of the tensest shows on television, and one that could be judged as an equal, if not superior to its acclaimed predecessor. In its second season, Bob Odenkirk continues to amaze as Jimmy McGill, a man who tried the sweet life on someone else's terms and decided to take a pass. His escalating war with his judgmental brother (Michael McKean), and a symmetrical criminal descent for Mike Ehrmentraut (Jonathan Banks) added momentum and incident, but the true find is Rhea Seehorn as Jimmy's colleague. Seehorn got her own showcases this season, and covered them in superlatives written on multi-colored post-it notes. The third season promises to be just as enthralling, with the reintroduction of a certain tie-straightening chicken purveyor. |
 American Crime Story: The People Vs OJ Simpson The first of several OJ-centered works in 2016, this is a miniseries that benefited from keeping Ryan Murphy behind the camera and out of the writers' room. Deeply skeptical that Murphy would succeed where he usually fails in the soapiest way imaginable, showrunners Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski allayed my doubts with a sympathetic portrayal of an almost too-perfect anecdote of American history. Humanizing the many principals involved in the case, especially Sarah Paulson's Marcia Clark and Courtney B. Vance's Johnny Cochran, while never losing the thread of the double murder at the center, Alexander and Karaszewski make what was riveting news into a riveting adaptation. | 5 |
4 |  Atlanta The final auterist comic package combines the honesty of One Mississippi, the perspective of Insecure, and the absurdity of Lady Dynamite. Donald Glover's Atlanta shunned plot for tone, making each episode an adventure as his Earn, a disillusioned millenial who left behind a more lucrative life to take a big risk, partners with Brian Tyree Henry's Paper Boi. One week might satirize public television forums, another might focus solely on Zazie Beetz's Van, reducing the other main characters to cameos. Rife with instant-classic images and interactions (black Justin Bieber, lemon pepper wet), Glover is operating on a plane all his own, clearly given carte blanche to do whatever he feels like. In Atlanta's first season, he proves that FX was right to give him the keys to the kingdom. |
 Orange is the New Black The fourth season of Jenji Kohan's dramedy set in a women's prison found the series at its most heartbreaking. Now fully in the throes of a privately-run corporation, who have instituted overcrowding to go along with the essential penny-pinching cruelty that is their modus operandi, the inmates of Litchfield are pushed to the point of rebellion in the most empathy-generating show on TV. Balancing the subtle with the overt, Kohan and her team made the case for the racial gap in the justice system with example after example of how the rules are different for different people. Always taking counter-intuitive paths to arrive at thematically relevant conclusions, the show asked its characters how much sin they're comfortable with, a question that's getting asked in a softer and softer voice for many of them. With the introduction of sadistic guards, the show's never been more didactic, but that hasn't kept it from being some of the most powerful material on TV. | 3 |
2 |  OJ: Made in America Ezra Edelman's comprehensive examination of OJ Simpson's life is required viewing for anyone living in today's America. Specifically the story of a man who only valued his own needs, and broadly about how corrupt institutions make justice next to impossible, Edelman's opus is, as previously stated, a perfect representation of so many intersecting narratives distilled into one murder trial. That trial doesn't even start until the fourth hour of the series, with the previous hours laying the track of decades of racial tension and police abuse that mirrors the violence in OJ's marriage to Nicole Simpson, meticulously laid out in incident after incident. Another hour is devoted to OJ after the acquittal (spoiler), a bacchanalian decline of tragic proportions. By the end, the viewer is able to understand the why of what happened, while still marveling at all the outrageous detail. Plus, it has no Kardashian kids, elevating it over American Crime Story (I see you, Ryan Murphy). |
 Veep Few shows have their best season five years into their run, much less after changing showrunners (David Mandel in the place of creator Armando Ianucci), but Veep's fifth season wowed week after week with its uncanny ability to top itself. Surely, they won't supplant Selina Meyer's (Julia Louis Dreyfuss) public meltdown at her mother's funeral, and then they break out the saga of Jonah Ryan's (Timothy Simons) vulgar run for Congress. Just when I thought the campaign ad to end all campaign ads, starring Ryan, is the apex of the season, Selina's daughter's documentary reframes the entire season and adds jokes on top of jokes on top of jokes. Truly one of the all-time comedy seasons, Veep was operating at the peak of its considerable powers just in time for real world politics to call its bet and raise it. When the viewer is longing for the stability of the Meyer White House, the world has truly fallen apart. | 1 |
RSS Feed
