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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

The year in television was all about characters keeping up with the times.

The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012
Photo: FX

The year in television was all about survival, the problems and possibilities of characters keeping up with the times and outlasting the people around them. This was true in the lives of our favorite characters: Leslie Knope emerging victorious over her city council opponent only to sink into the deep end of retail politics; Walter White and Nucky Thompson growing bored, anxious, and vicious with their newly uncontested power; Don Draper, after surviving a dalliance with alcoholism and depression, becoming a grump who doesn’t like the Beatles; and Louie finding true love only to lose it in the most surreal and cruel way imaginable.

If this theme was made real for the characters on the best shows this year, it also applied to the series themselves. With three very notable exceptions, our list is comprised entirely of returning shows, and some of the most fascinating stuff happening on the small screen involved showrunners dealing innovatively with the pitfalls of long-form storytelling. Homeland has spent much of its second season narratively justifying the literal survival of one of its central characters; The Walking Dead has been tasked with convincing its audience why it should continue to exist at all; and the writers behind Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and 30 Rock have all begun the delicate process of engineering a long-awaited finale.

This year’s best new shows were no less concerned with the logistics of survival, and no less immune to the whims of tragedy and triumph. Despite debuting to almost no audience, David Milch’s brilliant horse-racing drama Luck was renewed within days of its premiere only to be brought down by reports that several horses died during production. In April, Lena Dunham’s Girls premiered to a thick fog of buzz and bluster about the show’s insularity, its toxicity, the weight of its star, its lack of racial diversity, and its casual and cringing attitude toward sex. The series, however, is set to provide a text for the twitterati well into 2013. As the Quality Television era grew nearly old enough to drive this year, we witnessed a handful of great series no longer worried about how to make it, but about how to make it last. Phillip Maciak


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

25. Adventure Time

As Adventure Time’s colorful characters begin to shed their mostly childish personalities and adopt more mature dispositions, so, too, does the show’s world begin to evolve into a darker, edgier beast. The Cartoon Network series has already begun its fifth season, but its fourth, which delivered 26 consistently offbeat episodes of animated eccentricity set in and around the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, firmly cemented it as the best cartoon on TV with no specific demographic in mind. While the ads and merchandise are obviously aimed at youngsters, Adventure Time’s creators clearly craft each episode for all to enjoy, filled with fresh slang and utterly unique, unearthly visuals. Mike LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

24. Weeds

Some shows end with a neat summation of why we loved them in the first place. Others have more explaining to do. When, in Weeds’s weepy series finale, Andy (Justin Kirk) tells Nancy (Mary-Louise Parker) that it’s time for her to face herself, he places the show firmly in the latter camp, finally calling attention to the neurosis that has sustained eight seasons of Showtime’s stalwart comedy. Nancy’s self-sabotage had become so egregious over the years that it sometimes felt like a plot device; even so, Parker’s performance was urgent enough to suggest an inner machination at work. It might seem a bit convenient that the series fades to black just as Nancy’s inner journey begins, but for a show that once seemed to be tailspinning toward a cynical bang, Weeds’s final moments of poignancy were surprising and affecting enough to be anything but a whimper. Daniel Goldberg

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

23. The Good Wife

Stacked with veteran network talent, featuring sharp case-of-the-week plotting, and boasting possibly the greatest roster of guest stars since The Love Boat, The Good Wife, notably the only network drama on our list, is the embodiment of old-school, small-screen class. But far from toeing a traditional line, the series is also as boldly sexual—and sexy—as any of its premium-cable peers, it repeatedly shows off a fresh and credible grasp of contemporary technology, and, this season, has raised the bar on its own already complex gender dynamics by adding a feminist supervillain (played by Maura Tierney) to the mix. The Good Wife is a teasing reminder of the pleasures of restraint. Maciak


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

22. Portlandia

The array of archetypes portrayed by Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen on Portlandia aren’t impressive in their scope so much as their narrow specificity, each one delicately carving Portland’s milieu into a well-observed sub-niche. Armisen plays multiple variations of the emasculated goof while Brownstein portrays a bevy of self-righteous killjoys with great aplomb. Yet Portlandia is so much greater than the sum of its caricatures. That the show’s humor is entirely derived from its two co-creators gives it a winning constancy, while the improvisational aspect adds an almost surreal element to much of the dialogue. In fact, the bizarre obsession with food (a mixologist crafts a cocktail with rotten banana and eggshells, a waiter asks patrons if they would like to “lobsterize” or “breakfastize” their meals, locals mob a restaurant in search of marionberry pancakes) suggests the fever dream of a very hungry hipster. Goldberg


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

21. The League

The key to The League’s success is the constantly expanding personal history of cumulative shame shared by the members of the titular fantasy-football league. Through nicknames, odd predilections and reactions, and cultural and sexual hang-ups, embarrassments are crucial to the show’s unique humor, but married creators Jeff and Jackie Marcus Schaffer rarely look for the squirmy moments where an individual’s arguably irregular preferences collide with the thick artifice of social norms. Rather, The League provides a bold and manic take on (mostly) male bonding, wherein each character’s perversions are ridiculed, but also quickly accepted with the knowledge that the others in the league have all done something equally disgusting, disturbing, or dumb, and will likely sink even lower in the future. Chris Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

20. Boss

In some ways, Boss’s first season served as a lengthy piece of groundwork, demonstrating just how far mayor Tom Kane (Kelsey Grammer) was willing to take his ethos of not-quite-necessary evils. Season two capitalized on that foundation to dazzling effect, repeatedly posing the question of Kane’s possible redemption by way of a housing-redevelopment project and answering loudly, “Not so fast.” The murdered Ezra Stone (Martin Donovan) appears as a kind of hallucinatory Greek chorus, commenting on the action with chilling thematic revelations. The high-toned diction is alternately sung and spat out by the gifted cast, many of whom boast a theatrical background. But the writers also know that when the stakes are truly high, power is best projected silently. Disconcertingly intimate close-ups and atonal blips on the soundtrack added cinematic lyricism to the proceedings, proving that this is no stage play for the small screen. Goldberg

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

19. Bunheads

Based on a morbid spit-take of a premise (Vegas showgirl marries stalker in drunken weekend only to be immediately widowed and inherit his mother’s ballet studio), featuring a seductively goofy central performance by Broadway star Sutton Foster, and introducing a genuinely delightful ensemble of teenage actresses, Bunheads was the most surprising show on television this year. Like David Milch, Amy Sherman-Palladino has an unmistakable voice—fully formed complex sentences striated with obscure cultural references from the ’80s, ’90s, and today!—that can either be mesmerizing or infuriating, but, as Bunheads proved over and over again, there’s a lot of heart underneath all that style. In the season’s closing image of a group of recently pepper-sprayed ballerinas reciting “O Captain, My Captain” to their showgirl mentor, Sherman-Palladino announced that she was back and that we should all be paying attention. Maciak


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

18. Treme

The third season of David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s Treme confirmed the show’s place alongside Simon’s The Wire as an essential study of a community in crisis, growing and regrouping, laughing and loathing. On the surface, the season was business as usual: Toni (Melissa Leo) and Terry (David Morse) continued to seek justice in a lawless land; LaDonna (Khandi Alexander) continued to find her footing after her brutal rape; Janette (Kim Dickens) continued to contemplate a return home and opening a new restaurant; and Davis (Steve Zahn) continued the search for the right outlet for his hometown enthusiasm. As always, the devil is in the details and the creative forces behind the series prove consistently attentive and rousing in charting both the communal and personal triumphs and disappointments in a landscape of vibrant characters, played by one of the best ensemble casts currently on television. Katrina has broken all of Simon and Overmyer’s lost souls, but astonishingly, almost none of them remain so. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

17. Bob’s Burgers

Praise Archie Bunker for flushing the toilet on All in the Family, paving the way for the family unit at the center of Bob’s Burgers to stand around the kitchen sink and acknowledge that sometimes you have to get creative when pops is on the throne. The essence of the series remains the children, whose humor is a gut-busting, sometimes poignant response to all of the world’s wonders and inconvenient truths. It’s in the butt-loving Tina describing, on a dime, “lady parts” as the “vagina and the heart,” and in Gene conflating curious cuisine with curious movies, declaring that a turduken is “a poultry within a poultry, it’s like Inception with meats.” Always there’s an understanding throughout Bob’s Burgers that this family would fall apart if they stopped cracking wise. Ed Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

16. Childrens Hospital

In the season-four finale of Childrens Hospital, fake footage from a security camera shows the writers—supposedly all middle-aged black and Asian women—groaning that they have to work all weekend, with one buxom Caribbean noting that she’ll be missing Shabbat. There are more jokes in that shot than I can list here, but chief among them is the notion that the series results from hours of labor by a beleaguered staff. In Childrens Hospital, narratives are left tangled and ignored; the series presents a fictional version of itself that has been on since the 1970s and was remade by the BBC; and the writers barely manage to allocate the show’s impressive roster of comedians within its 10-minute container. Childrens Hospital has both the stamina and the gall to jump the shark in every episode and still wipe the slate clean for the next one, allowing viewers to vicariously experience the childlike joy of making a mess and walking away from it. Goldberg

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

15. New Girl

This Zooey Deschanel vehicle debuted last fall with a series of almost unbearably—dare I say it—adorkable episodes that felt like webisode spin-offs of the actress’s iPhone commercial. But, miraculously, by the start of 2012, New Girl had managed to right itself with a truly inspiring stretch of self-aware, pitch-perfect half-hours. From cancer scares to class anxiety, New Girl became a goofball comedy with a melancholic soul, and, in the process, a showcase for outstanding, bipolar comic performances from Max Greenfield and Jake Johnson. The series still has some problems to work out (the arrested development of its star and the nonentity that is Winston, played by Lamorne Morris), but even at its worst, very few shows can pull off the hybrid sensibility of off-the-wall lunacy and genuine emotion that New Girl practically patented this year. Maciak


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

14. Boardwalk Empire

Yes, Boardwalk Empire has always looked amazing, but its routine was growing stale, its characters wearingly dwarfed by the show’s obsessive fixation with historical and genre signifiers. In its third season, the writing is all-killer-no-filler, the actors actually seemed to become their characters rather than artlessly pose as them, and the crisscrossing storylines finally began to click within the Prohibition-absorbed universe. None of this is illustrated more soundly than in the transcendent “Sunday Best,” which largely puts aside the characters’ criminal activities in favor of several vignettes of its regulars having—or attempting to have—normal Easter dinners with their families, a far tenser affair than any of the show’s melodramatic set pieces. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

13. 30 Rock

In the first episode of 30 Rock’s penultimate season, Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) sends up Liz Lemon’s (Tina Fey) workaholism by claiming that her failure to show up before her actors must be a “sign of the apocalypse.” But while Liz let her plebeian dreamboat move in with her, conquered the perfectionism that threatened to tear them apart, and even managed to rescue their relationship after a trip to IKEA, her anxiety still anchors the series through its final season. 30 Rock feeds on dysfunction like Liz feeds on sandwiches, what with Jack’s egging one-upmanship and Jenna’s behavior suggesting the comorbidity of several personality disorders. Perhaps it’s fitting that the series finale is roughly scheduled to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar. For many of us, the deliverance of Liz Lemon from her toils at NBC represents the end of the world as we know it. Goldberg


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

12. Archer

Archer’s excellent third season continued to build on the insanely in-sync interplay between its loony batch of egotistical ISIS employees. Through batshit-crazy spy-game plots, like throwing naïve agency accountant Cyril (Chris Parnell) into the field alongside the show’s titular pompous operative (H. Jon Benjamin) and the ever-vain Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler) in the South-American drug cartel escapade “El Contador,” Archer repeatedly revealed itself as a genuine cable rarity: an animated series that can go for broke and still remain grounded in some sort of bizarrely human, relationship-driven reality. Its deeply disturbed characters, no matter how heinously they behave toward each other, emit a certain magnetism, like a group of acquaintances you wouldn’t trust with the life of a stranger, let alone your own, yet somehow wouldn’t mind hanging around with on a weekly basis. LeChevallier

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

11. Futurama

Another year, another series of sterling disquisitions by this ever-trenchant program on the existential panic we feel in trying to keep up with the sometimes wondrous, sometimes horrific advances of our human evolution. Grace, hilarity, and heartache abounded: Bender allowing his son to sacrifice his memories of him so the boy robot could bend objects again; Fry and Leela’s severed arms, hands tightly interlocked, spiraling through the infinity of space; and Farnsworth altering his parent’s “retirement simulation,” moving them from a rundown apartment to the farm where they once lived. But it was the mid-season finale, a trio of wildlife stories presented as a nature program from an alien world, that roundaboutly arrived at the show’s most essential truth about our human existence: that this world isn’t worth living without nookie. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

10. The Walking Dead

The search for home and faith still drive the central characters in The Walking Dead, but it’s no longer shielded in speeches and indecisiveness. It’s clear now that the gloves are off, whether in the prison taken by Rick’s (Andrew Lincoln) group or the bucolic community built by David Morrissey’s covertly ruthless and sadistic Governor. The return of Merle (Michael Rooker) and the emergence of Michonne (Danai Gurira) symbolically lay bare the dividing moral routes of the two groups that will inevitably converge. Corroded by loss, cynicism, isolationism, and vengefulness, the Governor is Rick stripped of his complicated but moral compass and enduring, unlikely faith, while Rick finds himself at once challenged and renewed by the birth of his daughter. The philosophical hesitancy of the characters has given way to an ironclad, primal belief in survival, but the series is most surprisingly adept at contemplating where the line should be drawn, or if there even is a line to be drawn anymore. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

9. Justified

As Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant), the face and attitude of primal western law in the age of incorporated criminals, stares down the crimes of his past, once seen as everyday business, Graham Yost’s nuanced series continues to provide a complex study of an America built and sustained by crime. Neal McDonough’s ferocious, pill-popping Quarles offered a galvanizing central nemesis, but the real story remains with Givens’s relationship with his father, Arlo (Raymond J. Barry), and Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), brilliantly detailed figures of homegrown criminal enterprise in civil war with lawman Givens. Through Givens’s connections with these characters, as well as Mykelti Williamson’s Limehouse, the head of a formidable criminal enterprise in the disenfranchised African-American community, Yost has created a marvelously entertaining, sprawling, and contemplative study of the rural and wooded South in transition. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

8. Game of Thrones

Once a certain head was separated from the body of a certain ostensible protagonist, there was a real possibility that HBO’s Game of Thrones would begin to behave like a chicken with its head cut off. But just as the series turned that killer twist into two transcendent hours of television, it came back for a second season with a pledge to not look away from the carnage. Sacrificing the grand shocks of the first season for solid architectural work and for the most part foregoing quick cuts and jabs for extended set pieces and tortures, Game of Thrones became a study of the character of its universe. As war broke out among the families of Westeros, the series focused on detailed case studies in the exercise of power, writ small and large. Game of Thrones is still the perviest series on TV, but it might also be the most perversely moral. Maciak

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

7. Luck

Sadly, HBO had no choice but to put the best new drama of the year out to pasture before it could really stretch its legs. Thankfully, the existing nine episodes of David Milch’s ensemble spectacle act as a remarkably compact standalone miniseries. Every separate narrative deserves its own spin-off: Chester “Ace” Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) and Gus Demitriou (Dennis Farina) taking on Mike Smythe’s (Michael Gambon) mob of elderly ne’er-do-wells; Turo Escalante’s (John Ortiz) peculiar romance with stable veterinarian Jo Carter (Jill Hennessy); blundering bookie Joey Rathburn’s (Richard Kind) relationship with his interchanging, damaged jockeys. Then there’s the hilarious, enlightening, and often poignant rags-to-almost-riches tale of Luck’s improbable Fab Four: Marcus (Kevin Dunn), Jerry (Jason Gedrick), Lonnie (Ian Hart), and Renzo (Ritchie Coster), who must constantly adjust to the pratfalls that come with being both newly affluent and eternally lonely, something that’s unavoidable within the fickle microcosm of horse racing. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

6. Parks and Recreation

Comedy is timing and Parks and Recreation proves that not all good comedy is whip-fast and frenetically paced. The series doesn’t deal so much in jokes as it does in memorable slogans that perfectly encapsulate character, and even fans who are behind on the new season can probably guess which character muttered the line, “Government is inefficient and should be dissolved. Please hold while I transfer you.” Aside from last season’s tensely satirical campaign run, the series has always been extremely low on stakes—even for a comedy. In spite of its willingness to embrace change, Parks and Recreation remains deeply aware that repetition is largely what drives viewers to keep tuning in. As soon as Leslie (Amy Poehler) remarks that “everything’s different,” Jerry (Jim O’Heir) walks by with his hands superglued together, prompting Anne (Rashida Jones) to assure her, “Not everything is different, right?” Goldberg


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

5. Breaking Bad

It was a banner year for Rian Johnson, whose Looper will likely land on dozens of Top 10 lists. Johnson can also lay claim to one of the best television episodes of the year in Breaking Bad’s gut-wrenching “Fifty-One.” For a season full of memorable shots both wide (The Most Awkward Impromptu Family Meal Ever in “Buyout”) and close-up (the tarantula crawling out of the mason jar in “Dead Freight”), the most intensely rattling image was that of a completely submerged Skyler White (Anna Gunn) adrift in the Whites’ now iconic swimming pool. The sight of Skyler, fully clothed, her garments billowing in what would be a makeshift watery grave is symbolic of the negative effect Walter White (Bryan Cranston) has had on each and every unfortunate individual he comes into contact with. Walt had cancer and now he’s taken the form of the deadly disease himself. LeChevallier


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

4. Homeland

In 2001, months after 9/11, 24 seemed to perfectly capture the fervor of the Bush administration’s bloodlust, waterboarding audiences with its frenetic style as the impulsive Jack Bauer, week after week, used violence as a justification for keeping America ostensibly safe. Maybe it’s because Homeland has come to prominence under the watch of a more cautious, conscientious commander in chief that every aspect of its production, from its depiction of violence to the role of technology within the C.I.A., feels so credibly articulated. This phenomenally acted series, which may seem soap-operatic only to someone who hasn’t heard of the Patreaus scandal, conveys weekly through its impeccable paralleling of its characters’ private and public rituals of deception both the emotional fallout of the war on terror and the moral compromises frequently necessary to attain and maintain power in the halls of our American government. Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

3. Mad Men

In its fifth and finest season to date, Mad Men arrived at more perceptive truths about its characters and the world they live in than ever before. Less moralizing, more melancholic, the series saw everyone at a crossroads: Don the husband and businessman reeling from a co-worker’s tragic death and arriving nervously and insecurely at middle age, Betty souring into an even worse mother as she loses control of her body, Peggy realizing the limits of her tolerance upon second-guessing her decision to leave her money-stuffed purse in the same room as a black woman. In toto, the season presented its richest tapestry yet of a generation’s struggle with changing times, the anxieties of being morally right, doing good by being true to self, and the perils of doing wrong by being true to someone else’s sense of truth. And it arrived at these insights without ever breaking a sweat. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

2. Louie

The radical and brilliant third season of this absurdist-cum-existentialist comedy serves as an endless debate between the profoundly profane comic’s wild id and sober super-ego. While tending to his two daughters as a single father, the comedian finds time to ponder death and social worth with Robin Williams, fall head over heels for Parker Posey, vie for David Letterman’s job against Jerry Seinfeld (with some help from David Lynch), make peace with Marc Maron, and go down on Melissa Leo in the front seat of a truck. C.K.’s inventiveness and delight in creation is matched by a genuine sense of discovery in each of his narrative concepts, both miniature (“Never”) and major (the Late Show arc). Each episode illuminates his complex and fearless humanism in ways that confront and transcend issues of class, race, sex, nationalism, and family. Singular and inimitable in its frenzied hunger for openness and life experience, Louie may be the first instance of a true auterist narrative television series in America. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2012

1. Girls

Even before its release, Lena Dunham’s Girls was being effusively praised as a work of prophetic generational vision and pilloried as crypto-racist, hipster tunnel vision. That the series both invites and repels those critiques, that Dunham’s Hannah can be both a voice of a generation and an embodiment of all of that makes that generation monstrous, is a testament to just how good Girls is. A no-wave feminist revision of Sex and the City, a sometimes blindingly funny satire of young New York entitlement, and a frequently heartbreaking ode to being lost, Girls, down to the Simon and Garfunkel song that played over the credits in the pilot, recalled that other great white divisive comedy about generational melancholy, The Graduate. And like that film, Girls isn’t only a capital-M manifesto about the mid 20s. In fact, if its cultural ambitions made it great, zeitgeisty think-piece fodder, the fine grain of Girls’s central relationships made it great weekly television. Maciak

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