What was once heralded as the Golden Age of television is now being stressed over as #peakTV—there is so much good TV that your DVR would just about combust trying to keep up with it all. That doesn’t even include the streaming services churning out binge-worthy content! (And yet we still end up watching that marathon of Chopped, amiright?) But rather than complain, let’s celebrate all the excellence this year had to offer. Picking just 15 meant leaving some favorites on the cutting board. No show was as simple a pleasure as The Great British Bake-Off. Odd Mom Out announced Jill Kargman as one of cable’s sharpest new voices, while Black-ish’s Kenya Barris brought voice back to broadcast comedy. I still will never miss an episode of The Good Wife. And as for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Americans, Orange Is the New Black, Parks and Recreation, Marvel’s Jessica Jones, and Jane the Virgin? There simply wasn’t room. There was room, however, for these 15 spectacular shows. Meet me on Twitter to debate.
Photo Illustsration by The Daily Beast
It took a show as big, as brash, as bold, and as unapologetic as Empire to bring buzz back to network TV, and, for the love of Boo-Boo Kitty, we’re glad this is the show that did it. The success of Empire can’t be detangled from the weight of the themes it tackles, nor should it be. Mental illness, racism, homophobia, the incarceration system, #BlackLivesMatter, feminist power, and black power all drip-dropped through the series like a heavy bass beat on one of its ambitious original hip-hop tracks, each one dealt with so loudly but also so delicately that Empire finishes each episode with a veritable mic drop. Few performances last year were as tender as Jussie Smollett’s gay musical prodigy Jamal, and none were as ferocious and real as Taraji P. Henson’s, roaring week after week as the formidable Cookie Lyons. Season two of Empire has been a bit messier than the first. But for its unabashed embrace of soap opera, messaging, and black voices, we say God bless this mess.
Chuck Hodes/FOX.
For a dollar: Did anything make you laugh more this past year than Billy Eichner storming the crowds in Times Square with Julianne Moore, who proceeded to act at tourists for tips? The brilliant sketch was the crowning achievement of Eichner’s game show, which packs more laughs into a half-hour than most Emmy-winning comedies. The celebrity guests have gotten bigger—Sarah Jessica Parker, Tina Fey, and, oh yeah, Michelle Obama all appeared this year—and the sketches have gotten grander—watch Amy Sedaris gamely slide down the Kerry Washington waterslide of tears in the “Shondaland Obstacle Course,” or Rachel Dratch play Leah Remini’s “Escape From Scientology.” Eichner’s delightfully specific sense of pop-culture humor, however, is as acute and random as ever. And, for all of the show's increased profile, nothing beats the abrasive run-ins with strangers on the sidewalk who are “quizzed in the face” about celebrities by a screaming gay running the streets of New York. It’s maniacal. And maniacally funny.
Nathaniel Chadwick for truTV
For all of the moody angst that permeates all those cable dramas that have popped up in this so-called Golden Age of TV, most are missing the one key ingredient that makes The Knick such engrossing viewing: some good old-fashioned badassery. The Steven Soderbergh period medical drama stars Clive Owen in the pinnacle of tortured genius roles—a woefully drug-addicted, but brilliant surgeon. It’s easily one of TV’s most gruesome, but at the hand of Soderbergh, most beautiful shows. Race, abortion, immigration, and the wealth gap turn up to add some modern resonance to the series, and electronic music soundtracking turn-of-the-20th century medical procedures sparks the Victorian drama with some rock-and-roll savagery. But it’s the can't-look-away character study at its heart that makes The Knick so engrossing and so sublime.
Paul Schiraldi/HBO
Is it a cheat to put two shows from different streaming services together in one slot? Yes. But my rankings, my rules. Truth be told, Catastrophe and Casual are great complements to each other on your next streaming binge. Each puts its own spin on the rom-com genre: Catastrophe takes a high-concept set up—Rob (Rob Delaney) moves in with Sharon (Sharon Horgan) after getting her pregnant while on a work trip—and infuses it with an edgy, 2015 version of screwball rom-com banter. Rob and Sharon are crass and occasionally salty, but star-crossed and hilarious in the way we all wish we could be. Casual, on other hand, complicates Valerie’s (Michaela Watkins) foray into post-divorce dating with idiosyncratic sibling dynamics. Boasting a narrative confidence that’s rare for a brand-new series, both Catastrophe and Casual are nuanced love stories with a rare focus: being a grown-up in the dating world in 2015.
Hulu
When it was announced that Caitlyn Jenner would document aspects of her very public transition in a reality series, there was ceaseless, feverish debate over the project’s wisdom—or tackiness, or nobility, or shamelessness, or irresponsibility, or necessity, all depending on who you asked. But when I Am Cait finally unfurled, skeptics who feared that Jenner would squander teaching moments in favor of empty-calorie entertainment—this is a Kardashian-Jenner we’re talking about—were proven wrong. I Am Cait took on a word almost never associated with reality TV—“responsibility”—as a mission. The result was a series that was joyous, emotional, and only occasional preachy, that attempted to broaden the narrative of the trans experience outside of Jenner’s own while remaining deeply personal to the star herself. For all of its imperfections, so much credit is due for trying—trying to navigate the tensions between responsibility and publicity, activism vs. fame, and education vs. entertainment while raising the bar for what reality TV can be.
James White/E!
UnREAL was a nuanced take on psychological warfare. It was a cultural fun-house mirror sending up the diametric push-and-pull between things that gratify us and disturb us, that arouse us and disgust us, that excite us and depress us. All that, and almost implausibly, it was a series about the making of a Bachelor-like reality TV series…that aired on Lifetime. It was a spell-binding soap opera that pulled the curtain back on how drama is manufactured on reality shows, how participants are manipulated, and how ignorant and even complicit these people are about the whole thing. Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer, playing producers of this fictional (but all-too-real) reality show, juggle their jaded exploitive streaks with pangs of conscience and regret that amount to two of the most complicated and riveting female performances of the year. But most importantly, just like the franchise it both pays homage to and tears down, UnREAL was plainly fun to watch and addicting—which is why we keep going back.
James Dittiger/Lifetime
It may amount to sacrilege to say that Game of Thrones, at this point in its run, can be too full of its own grandness, its mythology, or its complicatedness for its own good. But that any series in this age of splintered and delayed TV viewing can incite any sort of widespread passion is nothing short of a miracle. To that regard, Game of Thrones is one of the last remaining drops at the water cooler, and, with the exception of one or two broad strokes too many this past year, doesn’t take that status lightly. More sweeping than ever, but also with more intensity in its still moments, no series is as thrilling or as puzzling—in the way that we have come to demand our shows to challenge us. And as a stand-alone hour, “Mother’s Mercy” is a triumph, featuring the finest direction perhaps in the series’ history, a tour de force from Lena Headey, and the kind of grueling viewing experience Thrones fans live for. (Demerits for toying with our hearts with this Jon Snow stuff, though.)
Macall B. Polay/HBO
What can be said about Mad Men that hasn’t already been written? Seriously, single scenes alone from the series’ final season have been essentially novelized by critics eager to dissect every frame, bar of music, and bead of Jon Hamm’s sweat for meaning, both in the series and in life. The entertainment value of the swan-song episodes of Mad Men is inextricable from the impact the series has had on the landscape of a television as a whole. Still, this final stretch featured series-best performances from Christina Hendricks—delivering a Betty Friedan-invoking speech that had fans cheering yaass—and Hamm, weathering the lowest rungs of his seven-season plunge to rock bottom like a champ. The end moments ranged from abusive (what did January Jones ever do to Matthew Weiner?) to infuriating (a rom-com end for Peggy, really?) to provocative, as the end of a series of this caliber should be. Now raise a Coke in its honor—and maybe add a splash of whiskey in it for Don.
Justina Mintz/AMC
The third season of Inside Amy Schumer was a start-to-finish comedic middle finger—carefully manicured with a nice coat of erudite perspective—to the idea that comedy should be classified by the gender it appeals to more. Sketches like “Last F**kable Day” and the “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer” episode—easily the best comedy episode of the year—are brazenly feminist, timely, intelligent, and important. No comedy series this year was able to “say something” with as much authority while still make us laugh at poop jokes, or has been this aware of the pulse of pop culture. Of course, in 2015 Amy Schumer just about was the pulse of pop culture, making her standout season of Inside Amy Schumer all the more a pleasure.
Matthew Peyton for Comedy Central
There’s no reason a comedy in its fourth season should be sharp-shooting with this much precision, let alone energy. Its operatic use of foul language should be passé by now. Its ensemble of bumbling sociopaths should have devolved into caricatures of themselves. The jokes should be cheap and clichéd by now. Veep should be old news. But with some big creative cajones—who cares that the show is called Veep, let’s make the main character president!—award-worthy work from the likes of Tony Hale and Anna Chlumsky, and a continued unparalleled showcase for comedy’s gift to us all, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Veep continues to be the most well-executed, tightest-written, and best-acted comedy on television.
Patrick Harbron/HBO
Mr. Robot was the best kind of new drama: surprising. Year after year, “the next Mad Men,” “the heir to Breaking Bad,” or “your next Game of Thrones obsession” premieres. These are three of the best dramas to ever be on television. Why not borrow Mad Men’s stylish period angst, or Breaking Bad’s morally shaded poetry, or Game of Thrones’s scope and ambition? The pleasure of Mr. Robot, however, was its singular, original creative voice. It’s a series that was tricky, but not confusing. Puzzling, but not frustrating. Compelling, but not masturbatory. Mr. Robot was as stunning visually as it was intense, resonant, and complicated: a vigilante hacker with possible Dissociative Identity Disorder grapples with morphine addiction while attempting to save the world with 1s and 0s. It’s bleak stuff, but oh-so thrilling. And as for breakout star Rami Malek? Hello, friend.
David Giesbrecht/USA
Season one of FX’s romantic comedy—or anti-romantic comedy, depending on who you talk to—was brilliantly conceived in its own right. Two toxic, terrible people (played to despicable splendor by Aya Cash and Chris Geere) see their one-night stand blossom into true love, the cynical romance-haters kicking and screaming towards that inevitability. Yet their tortured union is exactly what makes them TV’s most relatable and real couple, and, with their whiz-bang quippy banter and a ridiculous BFF sidekick each, also the funniest. Season two of You’re the Worst wouldn’t have had to alter that formula and it still would’ve been among the year’s best. But its unexpected detour into an examination of a character’s crippling depression was more poignant, nuanced, and organic than a show like this should have the capacity to pull off. But, quite simply, it did.
FX
Examining a crush of weighty topics—despair, spirituality, existentialism, the afterlife, confusion, the supernatural, race, and family—it’s no wonder that the first season of The Leftovers nearly collapsed, with creator Damon Lindelof sweating to keep the show, about the aftermath of a “disappearance” in which two percent of the world’s population mysteriously vanished, creatively afloat. Wisely rebooting season two by transplanting the narrative to Jarden, Texas, a miraculous town where no one disappeared, Lindelof was able to recalibrate his barrage of provocative twists and fine-tune his riveting character study of protagonist Kevin Garvey, Justin Theroux in the year’s most complex, exhausting, and impressive dramatic performance. A show this abstract begs dissection, contemplation, and self-analysis, and that’s exactly what happened this year, to profound and occasionally haunting—even transformative—effect.
Van Redin/HBO
Will you still love me if...? It’s a simple question with exponential profundity when asked by Maura Pfefferman, a trans woman played by Jeffrey Tambor who comes out to her family at age 70. Season one of Jill Soloway’s powerful masterpiece juggled Maura’s cautious first steps into public life as a woman with the unraveling lives of her three children, each on a spectrum of narcissism so irritating because they’re, in some regards, so relatable and real. Season two expanded the scope away from Maura’s narrative to dive deeper into the spiraling lives of the Pfeffermans, all the while tackling broad themes of shame, home, and self-respect along with further exploration of the trans experience. So often lost in the discussion of the power of Transparent as a pop-culture beacon in a greater cultural trans movement is acknowledgment of how deeply funny it is. The cast is unmatched—with Tambor, Amy Landecker, and especially Judith Light crafting some of the messiest, most moving performances on TV. (Flicky-flicky thump-thump, indeed.)
Jennifer Clasen/Amazon
Fargo, FX’s risky and masterful anthology series, has over the course of two sensational seasons taken the rules of television and, well, thrown them into the woodchipper. Dare to touch the untouchable perfection of the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film? A fool’s errand. Expand its universe by creating a narrative that doesn’t remake or reimagine the you-betcha brilliance of the film’s characters and plot, but instead simply exists within that world and its mood? Ambitious, but smart. Pull it off and then come back on with a second season filled with new characters, new actors, new plots, and a new time period? Creative anarchy, which turned out to be a stroke of creative genius. Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, and Jean Smart led a season as menacing and macabrely humorous as the first, but which ramped up the style, cinematic loftiness, and slickness of the storytelling. Unlike showrunner Noah Hawley, we’re not practiced in retooling creative perfection in our own voice, so we’ll let Vanity Fair writer Joanna Robinson’s spot-on summation of the show’s accomplishment echo our feelings: “Fargo has the literary prowess of Breaking Bad, the devastating ennui of Mad Men, and the pulpy violence of The Sopranos. It's the UberDrama.”
Chris Large/FX
