TV has never been this good. And there’s never been this much of it. It’s both a blessing and a curse to have so much excellence on television, with game-changing, genre-melding, truly original series on every channel—and now all over the Internet, too—but with nowhere near the hours in the day necessary to relish them all. It’s been a special pleasure, however, to try. So from the movie star takeover of cable (True Detective, Fargo) to smaller scale comedy charm (Broad City, Orange Is the New Black), here’s our picks for the best of the best: shows that had us laughing, crying, and often doing both at the same time throughout 2014.
Beth Dubber/Amazon
Time is a flat circle. Matthew McConaughey is a brilliant actor. Audacity can at times be boring. Those are the takeaways from HBO’s always ambitious, often over-reaching neo-noir crime series True Detective, which rightfully captured the zeitgeist during its brief 2014 run—inspiring breathless, sometimes endless, analysis of mythology, foreshadowing, and cultural application. True Detective was hardly perfect and often infuriating, but the assurance and confidence of its stylized storytelling and the bravura performances from McConaughey and his partner-in-crime-solving, Woody Harrelson, proves that, sometimes, overhype doesn’t have to lead to disappointment.
Jim Bridges/HBO
HBO’s quiet gem of a comedy was never going to be a big hit. It was never going to be buzzy, certainly not when Lena Dunham and Aaron Sorkin and Hollywood’s coolest creative were running the halls of the cable network. But it’s the underratedness of Getting On that makes it so special. Set in the extended care unit of a hospital, Getting On rises to the comedy’s greatest challenge—making death funny—while maintaining its delicate balance of poignant and hysterical. Niecy Nash’s soulful, skeptical performance is a revelation, while Laurie Metcalf’s fecally obsessed physician is ripe with deranged comedy. At its heart, though, Getting On is a workplace comedy—just about a workplace where everyone around the employees keeps dying.
Lacey Terrell/HBO
Still standing among the graves of the glut of fallen efforts in TV’s rom-com revival—A to Z, Manhattan Love Story, Selfie—is You’re the Worst, a bold FX comedy starring two absolutely despicable lead characters trying desperately not to fall in love each other and doing everything they can to keep from forging an intimate connection, in spite of their natural chemistry. And wouldn’t you know it? It’s this pair of selfish buffoons who were actually the most charming, most relatable, and easiest to root for of all this year’s fledgling TV couples. You’re the Worst is the realest romantic comedy TV has ever aired, in every uncomfortable, embarrassing, and crude way that superlative suggests. If love is a battlefield, these characters are incessantly at war. At hysterical, ridiculous, face-palming war.
Byron Cohen/FX
The party line on Louie is well-trodden by this point. It’s TV’s best half-hour drama. It just happens to be a comedy. While season four of Louis C.K.’s FX comedy masterpiece occasionally dived a little too far into the incredibly specific mind of its creator-star-writer-director, it continued to push the boundaries of half-hour television storytelling: in tone, in scope, in subject matter, and in point of view. When Louie was at its best this year, as it was with the watercooler “So Did the Fat Lady,” it was everything we’ve embraced about the show. It was provocative, unusual, funny, and sad. Shamelessly and aggressively confronting taboos—especially in the “Fat Lady” and “Pamela” episodes—Louie continued its necessary mission: pressing creative limits while pressing our buttons.
KC Bailey/FX
No recent TV series has been the subject of more handwringing that Mad Men. This past season of the series sent a clear and blessedly confident message from its creative team about all of that waffling about losing its mojo: we really don’t care. The result was a shaky start giving way to a sharp, rousing final run that yielded some of the series’ greatest moments yet. Peggy and Don swaying to Sinatra? Peggy’s Burger Chef pitch, a rival to Don’s “The Wheel” as a defining series moment. Pete’s unspooling, Don finding his footing, Megan blossoming and then Megan’s stifling, Bert Cooper’s final dance: the first half of Mad Men’s swan song was tinged with conflicting nostalgia, regret, wit, warmth, and its signature rational lunacy. As an appetizer to 2015’s end run, it was the perfect tease.
Jaimie Trueblood/AMC
In the nine years since getting canceled unjustly after one brief season, The Comeback has had a charmed existence. Discovered, in a pop-culture snowball effect, over time by discerning audiences who heard about how—the branding that’s trailed the series for nearly a decade—ahead of its time it is, Lisa Kudrow’s brutal satire of reality television had the luxury of its brief, brilliant run. Its one-and-done perfect season is part of its lasting legend. So with a winking acknowledgement of its own role in forecasting the degradation, exploitation, and shamelessness that would become modern-day reality TV, The Comeback charged forward boldly in its long awaited second season: by giving Valerie Cherish a small victory. Now cast in a HBO drama based in part on her own life, and still followed by a documentary film crew, Valerie now has the ego boost of a win from which we can watch her fall, cringing at every hilarious indignity along the way. It’s the “one more take” we’ve waited a decade to get.
HBO
The best comedy series these days come when there’s a clear, singular voice shining through—think Inside Amy Schumer, Louie, or Girls for example. Broad City, Comedy Central’s sloppy-smart sketch show from Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, has two distinct voices and, as it turns out, double the fun. It’s tempting to call Broad City’s selfish, hapless stoners a sendup of wayward millennials, but that does a disservice to the empowered control Abbi and Ilana have—or at least are convinced they have—over their messy lives. Brash, feminist, raunchy, unapologetic, and all those words used to describe edgy female-driven comedy these days, Broad City bucks the thinkpiece trend by being two very simple things in addition: goofy and fun.
Linda Kallerus/Comedy Central
There are times when watching Hannibal that it’s impossible to believe that this show airs on a broadcast network. Staged as if some sanguine ballet, the series’ gruesome violence and gore is at once horrific to watch and, thanks to showrunner Bryan Fuller’s whimsically morbid mind, transfixing and beautiful. But it’s not just the fountains of crimson blood in any given episode that make Hannibal a remarkable broadcast show. It’s the complicated storytelling that finds tension in silence, excitement in slow-burn, comedy in darkness, and chilling—but tender—fun in the examination of the nature of evil.
Brooke Palmer/NBC
Orange Is the New Black pulled off a clever party trick in its second season. Netflix’s prison dramedy both expanded its universe and embarked on much-needed creative focus, giving the show’s deep, deep ensemble of talented actresses showcases while dialing back on the fish-out-of-water narrative of occasionally insufferable lead Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) and instead crafting a season around the reign of terror of a new Big Bad, Lorraine Toussaint’s terrifying, complicated Vee. Furthermore, the rabid consumption with which audiences binged and raved about the series proved how much they not only tolerate diversity in their TV shows—something that was probably news to a TV exec or two—but actually crave it. Not only that, its success shows that a series can be weird an unabashedly silly, but still be highbrow…and that maybe that phrase “highbrow” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Jojo Whilden/Netflix
Part satire part hardcore investigative reporting, Last Night Tonight With John Oliver took the model that made him—Jon Stewart’s Daily Show—and somehow, and quite implausibly, made it even smarter. American political satire, as it turns out, is even more insightful out of the mouth of an incredulous Brit. But that’s not what makes Last Week Tonight the most biting commentary on TV. It’s the facts. Blurring the line between journalism and entertainment that Stewart and Colbert have been softening for a while now, Last Week Tonight’s blistering takedowns aren’t just oratories from a mountaintop—they’re delivered bolstered by bulletproof facts, figures, and reporting. A jaw-dropping, hilarious takedown of the Miss America pageant that went viral this fall was dubbed investigative journalism by the Associated Press and “investigative comedy” by a Syracuse University pop-culture expert. However it’s classified, it’s become not just entertaining, but necessary television.
HBO
Fargo should’ve been an untouchable property. The Coen Brothers’ 1996 sinisterly comic murder mystery is damned near perfect on its own. And while FX and showrunner and writer Noah Hawley may have been out of their minds for daring to touch it, we’re glad they did: their limited series version of Fargo was damned near perfect, too. A hypnotizing slow-burn murder mystery that was wryly funny, hyper-violent, and chilling as a Minnesota winter day, the series brilliantly and unmistakably lived in the Coen Brothers’ world while shifting the narrative left-of-center. The result was an impeccably crafted “real-life” cat-and-mouse hunt of its own with Billy Bob Thornton (never better), Martin Freeman (tragic and delightful), and breakout star Allison Tolman, who stormed Hollywood with her star-is-born performance as the ambitious young police officer in hot pursuit.
Veep didn’t break new ground or reinvent the wheel in its third season. It did something even better: It took an already well-oiled machine and got it moving faster, smoother and, ultimately, more hilariously. Veep’s success always hinged on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s perfectly honed batty intelligence, a tour de force comedy performance serving as the pillar for the ensemble of repugnant, barely competent lunatics orbiting around her to ping off. The brilliance of the most recent season was the careful choreography in place that controlled that bouncing chaos, creating a series that was tighter and smarter, landing more of the its rapid-fire jokes than before. For sheer entertainment value, good luck finding another series with more laughs-per-episode. (Or more four-letter words.)
Paul Schiraldi/HBO
Trying to describe why we love Transparent is nearly impossible, like trying to describe why we love breathing and white wine and chocolate and happiness. Watching it is a pleasure we didn’t know was necessary until we sampled it for the first time. Jeffrey Tambor as Mort, a Los Angeles father who comes out to his family as a transgender woman named Maura at age 60, is a tragic inspiration, navigating newfound self-confidence, crippling insecurity, boundless love for his family, and a developing love for who he really is: a she. His three children, played by Amy Landecker, Gaby Hoffman, and Jay Duplass, are all little shits going through their own radical personal transitions, and handling them with respective reckless, self-sabotaging lack of grace. As peculiar and progressive and, at times, ugly as this family dynamic is, the beautiful thing about Transparent is the impossible-to-shake ways you see yourself in it.
Beth Dubber/Amazon
The Good Wife does what all those high-pedigree, big-budgeted, edgy and hip cable dramas do so well—twists, shockers, murder, sex, and morally corrupt protagonists—but with one added element that elevates it above its competition: class. With one gunshot this past March, The Good Wife completely shifted course. Sadness, consequence, betrayal, and forgiveness colored what was already TV’s most reliably interesting and resonant procedural “case-of-the-week” drama. Throw in career-best work from Julianna Margulies as Alicia balanced grief, a new firm, and a political campaign; a breakout turn from Matt Czuchry as Cary Agos faces prison and the reality that system he’s made his career in may not be just; and the most talented ensemble on TV, from Christine Baranski’s elegant Diane to the all-star roster of guest players, and you have the only true must-watch TV drama of the year.
Justin Stephens/ CBS
