Welcome back to my personal list of the best TV of 2016! This part kicks off the first half, and stops just short of the top 10. We got 1970s disco! We got horse boys! We got threesomes! Read on.
You can find the first half of the list here and the top 10 here.
25. Mozart in the Jungle: I think Mozart in the Jungle defines the age of peak TV almost as much as anything. It airs on a streaming service, Amazon Prime. It has very niche appeal, largely revolving around a symphony orchestra and their various quirks and trials. It doesn’t get a whole lot of buzz (despite some recent Golden Globe wins), yet has still made it to a third season. The lead character is an oboist. There’s absolutely no way this show would have been picked up even five years ago, yet I couldn’t be happier it was — it’s a pure delight and severely, severely underrated.
The third season was the show’s best yet; as it ages, it only seems to get better and more confident, with it taking more risks, whether it be for more whimsical flights of fancy or adding new and exciting storytelling methods. Gael García Bernal continues to shine as the orchestra’s conductor Rodrigo, keeping a frankly insane amount of manic momentum going throughout the entire season, while Lola Kirke as the aforementioned oboist Hailey continues to prove herself as one of the best up-and-coming actresses. The supporting cast is so large and varied and well-written and performed that I couldn’t even begin to single anyone out — just know that juggling this many characters and giving them all excellent moments throughout the season is a truly impressive feat as far as I’m concerned. I won’t say there weren’t some contrived or downright silly moments, or that it couldn’t seem a little fluffy at times, but the unique energy usually made up for the shortcomings, and the main theme of love and passion for art remained at the forefront throughout.
24. Love: Love is the sort of show that doesn’t really sound especially special or unique when you describe it. Judd Apatow, Lesley Arfin, and Paul Rust’s Netflix show is a TV romantic comedy about two white thirtysomethings coming together in Los Angeles. Not something that would necessarily inspire excitement. However, it works tremendously, largely in part to the pedigree in its cast and crew, as well as providing a more genuine, down-to-earth spin on a tried-and-tested formula.
One way in which Love stands out is that it takes it slow — the lead couple don’t meet until the end of the first episode or even go on their first date until well into the second half of the season, slowly orbiting each other up until that point. It also isn’t afraid to have the central characters be completely terrible people — Gillian Jacobs’ Mickey is an opinionated, boozing hot mess, while Rust’s Gus is the epitome of the passive-aggressive “nice guy” with a completely warped view on romanticism — while delving into their lives enough to make them mostly sympathetic. Meanwhile, Claudia O’Doherty became one of the breakout stars of the year due to her hilarious performance as Mickey’s roommate Bertie. Many episodes were helmed by some of the best actor-directors working today, such as John Slattery and Steve Buscemi, which helped create a more realistic, lived-in feel. And it was consistently funny as hell throughout, with me legitimately having to rewind certain scenes multiple times due to laughter and needing to see them again.
23. Peaky Blinders: Steven Knight’s 1920s crime drama had already proven itself to be one of the most exciting, vibrant and worthwhile British dramas perhaps of all time in its first two seasons, but the third took the show to new heights, raising the stakes dramatically and taking on a darker tone while keeping the action as propulsive as ever, ensuring the 18-month wait for the further adventures of the Shelby family was more than worth it.
Getting the Shelbys involved in international intrigue could have proven a misstep for the show — certainly nothing about the first two seasons suggested we’d be seeing Russian Duchesses and the like — yet it felt perfectly suitable, with the family essentially being used as pawns by much larger forces. Similarly, the move away from less bombastic action into more grim, downbeat, claustrophobic territory proved effective, with lead Cillian Murphy especially rising to the task, filling patriarch Tommy Shelby with more paranoia and mania than ever before while having to deal with new fatherhood. The addition of the always-incredible Paddy Considine, though, though, was likely the strongest step — he filled the role of Father Hughes with an absolutely terrifying menace that might not have been matched on television this year by literally anybody. Partway through the season’s airing the show got renewed for two more, and I’m not at all surprised — when you have a show this strong, you keep it going as long as you can.
22. Easy: One of my favourite recent trends in television, when it’s done right, is the re-emergence of the ‘anthology show’ — a TV series where each season or even episode can have a completely different storyline and characters. Given new life by Black Mirror and various Ryan Murphy projects, 2016 proved to be the year the format made its way to comedy, with mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg writing and directing every episode of this Netflix series. It’s another “inessential” show, largely focusing on various partnerships of well-off Chicago folk, yet Swanberg’s usual improvisational nature gives it a truly authentic bent, and the storylines are small enough to feel true-to-life while also funny and cute enough to not feel worthless.
Throughout Easy’s 8 episodes, we meet an array of genuinely loveable characters played by stars who maybe wouldn’t have had the time for a full series, such as Dave Franco as wannabe brewer Jeff, Orlando Bloom as sexually experimental husband Tom, and Marc Maron as frustrated comic creator Jacob. While there are definitely episodes which are stronger than others (the one episode not in English ends up an unfortunate, over-obvious misstep), it never loses sight of its realistic tone, and each episode tackles some interesting themes such as using real experiences for artistic inspiration, different viewpoints on long-term relationships, and the poisonous nature of gender roles. My favourite episode, however, was the sixth — it isn’t much more than “a married couple have a threesome”, yet is one of the sweetest, kindest, most downright goddamn lovely episodes of television I’ve ever seen.
21. Game of Thrones: While I’ve never stopped enjoying Game of Thrones, the show definitely hit a few snags in its past couple of seasons. A mixture of the original books losing their focus, the writers being unable to adapt these new storylines in a more interesting way, and some truly questionable filmmaking decisions led to many wondering if the show could ever return to the heights of the first three seasons. Luckily, it appears that the knowledge that they were definitively overtaking George R. R. Martin’s incredibly slow pace gave creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss the kick up the ass they needed to begin propelling the narrative forward in new and exciting ways.
But first they had to trim a lot of the fat. Large parts of the season still dragged, particularly the storyline involving Arya, who was blatantly kept in a holding pattern until the end of the season, and the King’s Landing storyline involving the Faith Militant. But other major storylines, for characters such as Jon, Daenerys, and Bran, were given a huge kick up the ass and led to some truly revelatory and moving moments (just the phrase “Hold the door!” can send even hardened fantasy fans into floods of tears). And although it took a lot of deliberate stalling to make it happen, the final episode was perhaps the best GoT episode of all time, full of truly epic moments which brought us into the show’s endgame with beautiful, reckless abandon. This was for sure a bridge between the second act subplots and the eventual endgame, but the final two seasons promise to be full of huge, exciting, defining moments fans have been waiting years for, and I’m more excited about the return of the show than I have been in years.
20. Veep: Initially I had made plans to drop HBO’s political satire this year, owing to the departure of creator Armando Iannucci and the ever-growing list of good TV, but a wealth of positive pre-air reviews caused me to hold off and give it a try. I’m extremely glad I did, as new showrunner David Mandel created potentially the show’s strongest season yet, taking the show in some new directions while keeping the comedy as sharp and hysterical as ever.
The fourth season ended with lead Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) as President, but having just tied at the general election, which Mandel plays up perfectly, mixing the impending Congressional vote on the presidency with general Presidential duties and issues with Meyer’s personal and family life. There are many ways in which the season could have done some serious shark-jumping — hapless White House liaison Jonah running for office? Selina’s daughter comes out as gay and falls in love with her mother’s secret service lookalike? — but these storylines are handled so perfectly and with such a good mix of absurdity and the show’s usual acidic, biting humour that they blend in almost seamlessly. The season’s penultimate episode, presented as a documentary created by daughter Catherine, comes as close as a Veep episode has to topping last year’s incredible “Testimony”.
19. Girls: My third HBO show in a row, and second to be on its fifth season, Girls seemed to have spent its past couple years finding a more user-friendly version of itself that was less immediately off-putting but also far less daring, with none of the high notes of its first two seasons. It never got too bad, but I was absolutely suffering from some fatigue. Last year’s announcement that the show would end in 2017 seems to have dragged Lena Dunham out of this rut, and the fifth season was back up there in TV’s higher echelons.
A lot of this season’s success seems to have been due to remembering that the leads don’t especially need to be sympathetic for the show’s success, most especially when it comes to Dunham’s role as Hannah Horvath, who was as side-splittingly infuriating as ever before in her attempts to have a ’normal’ job situation and relationship. And while other characters seemed to be growing up — getting married, or moving across the world for a job opportunity — they quickly found themselves adrift and as confused as ever. Plus the satire on the New York City art scene, among other things, ended up as incisive as ever, with my favourite concept involving a play showing everyone in an apartment block’s lives during the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. You know, classic comedy!
18. The Get Down: If you wanna be really objective, this is probably the show on here that deserves its placement the least. Hell, it didn’t even air a full season, due to delays and a ballooning budget causing Netflix to only release the first six episodes of Baz Luhrmann’s 1970s musical drama as “Part 1”, with the rest coming sometime in 2017. Yet it ended up this high by being an absurdly bombastic, supremely entertaining beast which switched between different genres and storylines with ease, all while having some of the single best visuals television has ever been able to muster.
Technically, “musical drama” doesn’t even begin to cover the dramatic array of styles presented in each episode — it’s more of a….let’s say political-fairy-tale-hip-hop-comedy-coming-of-age-musical-graffiti-period-disco-drama, focusing on a group of teenagers in the Bronx who begin to find their place in a run-down, dysfunctional city via music. The visual style is absolutely relentless, all kinetic camera movements and quick cuts, and helps the story feel truly mythological, while the music, whether old cuts or original material, brings passion and fire into each scene, with the performance scenes putting Glee and its ilk to shame. It had some less interesting characters and lacked a sense of direction, but I couldn’t be more willing to wait and see if it flounders or finds its feet. Roll on Part 2!
17. BoJack Horseman: By now, I think every trade and entertainment site has run some kind of thinkpiece and/or interview on Netflix’s animalated (because it’s animated and about animals! feel free to use this, every writer ever) dramedy, so you don’t need me to sell it to you — Will Arnett is a sad actor horse in a satirical Hollywood and it’s all funny but also super about depression and stuff and lots of people are actually dogs and that. After a lame but promising first season, this became Netflix’s easy best show last year, and this year managed to live up to that by tightening the screws on each character while still managing to provide wit and sheer lunacy in equal measure.
Following BoJack’s (Will Arnett) hunt for an Oscar nomination for a role in a Secretariat movie that he didn’t actually play provides a strong spin on the previous seasons, where he is being lauded for something he didn’t do as opposed to disliked for something he did. His fruitless search for happiness continues to have tragic consequences, yet there were also some episodes that broke for the format and showed the creative team can tell all sorts of stories — the almost completely silent underwater episode was a moving masterpiece, while the season also tackled flashbacks (complete with a gluttony of 2007 jokes) and bottle episodes. It may have repeated itself slightly, but it’s still remarkable how much emotional depth can be found in a silly comedy about animals in Hollywood — you can count on one hand the number of shows in history that have depicted depression in such an honest way.
16. Transparent: The third season of Transparent feels, at times, like a show going through its own transition. The previous two seasons seemed to tell the story of Maura Pfefferman’s (Jeffrey Tambor) struggle perfectly, and this year perhaps had lofty expectations to live up to — when you tell a story so perfectly and completely, how do you continue it without diminishing returns? BoJack actually suffered from the same issue, but while that chose to in many ways tell the same story Transparent deciding to go deeper and more spiritual, delving more into character’s pasts and how their faith guides them than ever before.
This was the least good season of Transparent so far, feeling somewhat unfocused and lacking strong core themes compared to before, yet didn’t actively do anything I didn’t like — it’s just somewhat more forgettable than the others, which makes it a little harder to discuss as a whole. But it still had plenty of incredible writing and acting, from Maura exploring her gender reassignment surgery options to her children’s desperate need to find somewhere they fit, whether it be Temple, the arms of the teacher you’re assisting, or tied to an X-type thing getting flogged. But the real star of this season was Judith Light as Shelly — previously a major supporting character, she truly became one of the leads this year, with the snippets of her attempts to make herself into a brand some of the funniest TV moments of the year before it comes to a head in the season-ending, show-stopping musical performance — one of the most powerful moments any media in 2016 had to offer.
15. One Mississippi: There’s been some talk in this list already about what Matt Zoller Seitz has termed the “comedy in theory” or CIT — a show that fits the usual format for a comedy, but tells stories that can be darker or less joke-filled. Amazon’s One Mississippi could easily be the poster child for this story type — it’s fundamentally a comedy, created by and starring a stand-up comedian (Tig Notaro), yet spends very little of its time trying to make you laugh, with any comedy coming from absurdity or character types rather than the jokes or the situations. It’s living proof of the versatility of comedy and of television in 2016, and ended up also being one of the most uncomfortable and moving shows of the year.
A lot of this comes from the autobiographical nature of the show — Tig plays herself, and her real-life double mastectomy and childhood molestation are included as plot elements. Teaming up with writer Diablo Cody for the scripts was a strong move, and the show itself is quite reminiscent of her 2011 movie Young Adult, all sharp edges and awkward silences. The story involves Tig returning to her home town upon the death of her mother, and could sometimes be too typical when it comes to Tig’s childhood assumptions being subverted, but mostly seemed fresh due to some greatly moving scenes and characters, from John Rothman as Tig’s creepy stepfather Bill to a woman with a mastectomy fetish in one of the most hilariously gross scenes of the year.
14. The Good Place: Michael Schur has long been one of my favourite comedy writers, starting with his work on the American Office. One theme that always seems to colour his work, from Parks and Recreation to Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is the value of human decency, co-operation and simply treating each other kindly. In The Good Place, the first sitcom he’s created solo, this is more at the forefront than ever before, revolving around a selfish person who has died and ended up in the “Good” afterlife by mistake.
Conceptually, this provides a lot of interesting themes and discussions for episodes — “don’t be selfish” and such are fairly basic morals, but the use of ethics philosophy to back up the storylines goes a long way towards having it all seem more meaningful. These storylines are backed up by an incredible cast, most especially with the legendary Ted Danson as the guardian of the neighbourhood and Kristen Bell as lead Eleanor, while the concept is ripe with the great writing team (mostly from Parks) to come up with excellent comedic opportunities, from the all-giving nature of the good afterlife to showing exactly what acts give people positive or negative moral net worth. And in only eight episodes it’s showed no inclination to be stuck in a rut and has barrelled forward with a sharp, exciting serialised storyline. The final five episodes of the first season air next month, and I’m insanely excited to see how they wrap this show up.
13. Better Call Saul: The second season of the Breaking Bad prequel was a tough sell to some. After seeming to have witnessed Jimmy McGill’s heel turn at the end of the first season, creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould threw us for a loop and instead took a slower route, showing Jimmy’s attempt to do good in a “real” job. It put off many who wanted to see star Bob Odenkirk go all Saul Goodman immediately, but was absolutely the right choice — his frustration with red tape and confusing rules is expressed perfectly, yet he has enough potential and builds up the connections that his turn to the darker side will be even more realistic and tragic, with the rivalry between him and his brother Chuck proving especially heartbreaking.
Meanwhile, the show gave around half of its time over to being a simultaneous prequel for enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut. It’s a risk to put so much focus on a fan favourite character such as Mike, yet Gilligan and Gould show you his thought processes and determination so perfectly that he remains an engaging character to watch, with the ending to his storyline a thrilling capper. I’m very glad they’re choosing to take the slow route with Saul: it’s really making it feel like its own story while still taking place in the same universe. Plus the cinematography is as moody and gorgeous as ever, while there’s still plenty of opportunity for complete hilarity out of literally nowhere — peach cobbler, anyone?
12. Adventure Time: Yet another victim of Cartoon Network’s bizarre scheduling, Adventure Time aired the vast majority of its episodes in the earlier half of the year, with some breaks, before having a gigantic gap of over four months — when it only aired the finale before going right back on hiatus. This confusing scheduling wasn’t helped by the sometimes scattershot nature of the show’s seventh season, which sometimes felt like the writers wanted to over-correct from a darker season 6. However, there have been enough all-time classic episodes and hilarious moments that even the weaker eps can’t stop AT from ranking high up in any list I make for as long as it’s on the air.
While I will always love the more existential tone of s6, it was good to see the comedic heart of the show come back in funny, goofy episodes such as “Scamps” and “The Thin Yellow Line”. My favourite writer on the show, Jesse Moynihan, left during this season, but some of his final episodes like “Crossover” and “Normal Man” are moving, thoughtful masterpieces, while Tom Herpich upped his game with “The Hall of Egress”, an ode to maturation that was the show’s best episode this season. Certain ongoing elements, such as the Ice King’s crown, provided intrigue, while “Elemental” dealt with the universe’s history and “Summer Showers”, “The Music Hole” and more were wonderfully emotional treatises on the power of art. Oh and a bananas good stop-motion episode. The show will be returning early in 2017 for its final two seasons, and I hope to god both that they can wrap the story up well and that Cartoon Network can actually air it properly.
11. Rectify: Number one with a bullet as far as “most unfairly unknown show of the decade” goes, SundanceTV’s Rectify closed off its run this year with acclaim from all around the web but still no real viewership. It’s a shame, as Ray McKinnon’s empathetic Southern Gothic drama has a depth of feeling almost entirely unseen on television. I’d honestly say it’s one of the most beautiful shows of all time, showing a man’s release from death row after a near 20-year imprisonment with true grace and serenity, while sympathising with every member of the small town he’s from as they react to his release.
The final season took a mild risk and left lead character Daniel Holden mostly separate from the family who had supported him for the past three years, yet in the end it was for the best, leading to a season which showed everyone finally moving on from the hurt and decisions that had defined them for decades, creating their own stories and not allowing themselves to be stuck in place. While all the performances, particularly Aden Young as Daniel, were always a cut above, Clayne Crawford was absolutely superb portraying a man finally letting go of his resentments and frustrations. Although some criticised it for not having the dramatic intensity of the previous seasons, to me this was the perfect send-off, putting time into the characters futures in a way that lets you know they’ll last. And that finale……I don’t cry a lot at TV/film anymore, but it had me bawling like a baby. I’ll miss this show a lot.
Come back tomorrow for the top 10!
