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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

The year saw TV not only taking on stories that film studios lost interest in a while ago, but starting to create cinematic visions out of these stories.

The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015
Photo: Brooke Palmer/NBC

One of the best shows of all time was canceled this year due largely to low ratings, an outdated metric only useful in convincing companies to buy ad time. The only studio that had any real power to give Hannibal new life was Amazon, which holds the program’s streaming rights. They did nothing, finally, incapable of even finding some middle ground that would allow Netflix or Hulu to take the ball and run. And thus, both TV distribution and the increasingly important streaming services were complicit in the loss of one of the few genuinely groundbreaking shows, in terms of both visual and narrative ambitions, that’s ever come down the pike.

In other words, not even television’s newest leaders, among them Netflix, FX, and AMC, can make all audiences happy. Hannibal’s cancellation left a distinct sting, due to creator Bryan Fuller’s visionary sense of style and the perceptive thematic backbone of what was, in the end, a romance between two apex predators. But the NBC program’s legacy keeps the door open for similarly exhilarating shows to get picked up in the future.

One could see a propensity for visual invention and complex narrative byways in the first season of USA’s extraordinary Mr. Robot, which brandished a similar, though admittedly less accomplished, sense of visual rhythm and editing. Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Master of None also showed an unerring curiosity in reflecting the perspective and inner lives of its characters through their aesthetics and the trajectory and details of their storytelling methods.

This is all to say that 2015 saw television not only taking on stories that the big movie studios and producers lost interest in a while ago, but also starting to create genuinely cinematic visions out of these stories. The Knick continued to give Steven Soderbergh the narrative laboratory in which to experiment with a seemingly endless variety of montages, cuts, and angles in its bracingly ingenious second season. And even the shows that didn’t quite invoke an illustrative, noteworthy style, such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Transparent, and Homeland, embraced sensitive subject matter with an unshakeable tough-mindedness and thoroughly experiential timbres.

That Hannibal offered both elements and continued to push its own boundaries makes the series all the more haunting, beyond even its grotesque set pieces, but the fanbase the series cultivated, and the mad appetite for new heights of artistic expressiveness that Fuller consistently engendered, have created a lingering assurance that shows of this caliber can foster serious devotion. In fact, many of them already have. Chris Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

25. Inside Amy Schumer

In a year that saw Amy Schumer go from television’s most lacerating comic mind to Judd Apatow’s muse and Jennifer Lawrence’s writing partner, her sketch show remains the most noteworthy part of her blossoming career. Her opus may be her 12 Angry Men parody, setting Paul Giamatti, Vincent Kartheiser, Jeff Goldblum, and nine more men as the deciders of her hotness, but all of Inside Amy Schumer’s episodes offered a plethora of proddings against the masculine gaze. The third season, which began with her “Milk Milk Lemonade” deconstruction of backside fixations, touches on aging and femininity, the false nobility of men who protest makeup, Bill Cosby, and countless other indignities suffered by women in a man’s world. Rarely does Schumer’s observations on these matters not end in riotous waves of laughter, but the comedian doesn’t align herself with a specific strain of feminism or a popular view of how men and women should act. Her views are distinct and challenging, and Inside Amy Schumer’s ultimate aim seems to be as much about female empowerment as it is about independence in every sense of the word. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

24. Homeland

In which all of Carrie Mathison’s (Claire Danes) chickens come home to roost as she attempts to get her life, and that of her daughter’s, in order while working as head of security for a philanthropic organization in Berlin. Divorced of both Carrie’s connection to Brody and, to a degree, Saul (Mandy Patinkin), Homeland started venturing into far more complex terrain as a political thriller in its fifth season, touching on the largely positive yet undeniably unseemly pact forged by Germany and America to be the watchdogs of the world. In ignoring their own complicity in the fractious state of the modern world, these major world powers were reflected in Carrie, whose attempt to go legit implodes when she realizes she’s the focus of an assassination plot, originally thought to be aimed at her employer. The politics and technical detail in the dialogue remain nuanced, well-researched, and relatable for a relative layman, but the show’s strongest power is still that of the haunted, unpredictable patterns of a brilliant woman attempting to do good, even as she seemingly wrecks and ravages everything she touches in the world. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

23. Marvel’s Daredevil

More important than even its patient sense of characterization, Netflix’s striking adaptation of Daredevil offered the first fully cohesive style in a Marvel Comics adaptation. The show’s shadowy aesthetic, shaped by Cabin in the Woods director Drew Goddard, potently reflects the perspective of the hero himself, Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), the blind lawyer turned righteous street-level vigilante. No other Marvel work, on the big or small screen, has offered such a consistent level of thoughtful imagery, including gorgeous long takes of kinetic fist fights and intimate moments between the vibrant line of characters, which often unfurl without music or quick, distracting cuts. Considering that most superheroes begin as local crime fighters, it’s astonishing that Netflix has produced the first Marvel adaptation that has the unmistakable, authenticate feeling of small-scale community and neighborhood geography, one that helps cultivate an outraged civilian into an emblematic hero. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

22. Looking

Michael Lannan and Andrew Haigh’s misunderstood slice of San Francisco life always bore the weight of expectation well, never more so than in its gorgeous second season, 10 episodes so lovingly crafted they hardly felt “crafted” at all. With naturalistic long takes and intricate compositions, however, Looking marshaled a precise and potent style in the service of its empathic narrative, as fine a meeting of form and function as appeared on TV this year. As Patrick (Jonathan Groff) embarked on a new romance with Kevin (Russell Tovey) and ambled through the East Bay with Richie (Raúl Castillo), perhaps wondering what might have been, the entire ensemble came into focus, aided by frank and funny turns from Lauren Weedman and Daniel Franzese. By the end of the series finale, “Looking for Home,” which culminated in a claustrophobic, three-minute shot that laid bare Patrick’s every vulnerability, every disappointment, Looking emerged as a tender masterpiece in the vein of Enlightened, an intimate handbook for finding one’s voice. Matt Brennan

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

21. You’re the Worst

This smart, slightly acidic rom-com was bracingly unsentimental during its first season, when Jimmy (Chris Geere) and Gretchen (Aya Cash) were a couple of millennials hardened by single life who hooked up because they were the two worst-behaved guests at a wedding, parted ways with no intention of getting together again, and were later somewhat mortified to find themselves falling in love. The series followed Gretchen and Jimmy to a deeper place this season as the two, now officially a couple and living together, gradually let down their guards and got to know things about one another—like Gretchen’s bouts of clinical depression—that add poignancy and emotional depth to their sparring exchanges. Elise Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

20. Portlandia

The fifth and, to date, best season of Portlandia began with a dive back into the pasts of two of is most colorful characters, feminist bookstore owners Toni and Candace. It was a delirious act of contextualization, an almost metatextual response to the pervading belief that a series predicated on lampooning an insular culture is itself unable to transcend insularity. A few episodes would similarly follow suit, as standalone peeks at the hang-ups that plague a single pair of the show’s gallery of players, as in Nina and Lance seeking therapy after dating for “three or four years” (read: seasons). Like this gender-swapped couple, the season was fixated on taking it to the next level, and to sometimes poignant returns. Even when an episode proceeded as a jamboree of skits connecting many of the show’s motley characters across a single narrative or thematic through line, it felt as if audiences were finally given a rich sense of why and how this patch of Oregonian solid was the perfect place for them to lay down the roots of their deliriously eccentric energies. Ed Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

19. South Park

South Park spent much of its latest season calling out social constructs that sneak inside our heads and control the way we think and act, from the seductive, fake online news stories that fool everyone but Jimmy in “Sponsored Content,” to the knee-jerk celebration of LGBT culture that makes even Tweek and Craig’s parents kvell over their ostensibly brave gay sons in the wake of false rumors that they’re lovers. The series is also still rudely honest enough to give us a Caitlyn Jenner whose post-surgery face looks like a cubist painting, and silly enough to have her plow into a pedestrian every time she goes for a drive. South Park may look as if it was drawn by a six-year-old, but it’s consistently turning out some of today’s funniest and most incisive satire. Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

18. Justified

Justified’s gloriously propulsive final season didn’t quite stick the ultimate landing, ending on a note, somewhat similar to Mad Men’s conclusion, that’s too determined to stuff compellingly unstable characters into staple places. And while we’re carping, Avery Markham’s (Sam Elliott) master plan, after so many episodes’ worth of wonderful, careful buildup, seemed so distressingly small once the dust settled over the entire arc. For all the clout this villain exuded, he simply always hired more goons in the face of escalating warfare with Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) and Boyd (Walton Goggins). But the anticlimax of that revelation indicates the show’s sense of humor and political maturity. The difference between a Boyd, a deadly scrapper, and an Avery, a thug with a patina of class, is understood to be one of luck of the social draw. Chuck Bowen

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

17. Louie

Louie’s fourth season fused sitcom with socialist soap opera, while the fifth season re-embraced a standalone episode structure that’s only superficially conventional, which is to say that the overwhelming social weight of the fourth season was subsumed into fleeting physical gestures in the fifth. An episode devoted solely to nesting nightmares is one of the most adventurous 20-some-odd minutes in the show’s history, occasionally rivaling Hannibal for irrational formal extremity. Another episode, featuring a gathering for parents, has the compressed emotional force of a Raymond Carver story. Tying Louie’s ambitions together is the durable persona of star-creator-director Louis C.K., who’s grown into a reliable under-indicating actor, fashioning himself as a neutral Kuleshov face on which to reflect increasingly audacious textures. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

16. Broad City

With the sole exception of Louie, no other modern series has proven capable of simultaneously finding the wonder, absurdity, and indomitable hassle of living in New York’s five boroughs with such unerring verve and humor as Broad City. The perils of making extra scratch with nanny and babysitting gigs, the lunacy of a nine-to-five at a start-up, and the wide-eyed rapture that comes from discovering and returning to the small stretch of real estate known as St. Marks are all crucial bits of story that are scattered throughout season three of Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobsen’s uproarious series, and that’s not even getting into their dating lives. These loopy, imaginative adventures, however, only thinly veil a distinctly feminine, experienced perspective of what it’s like to be young, ambitious, and dead broke in NYC, and yet somehow, the series never even hints at stressing pathos. Yaz, queen, New York is an exhausting place to live, work, and mate, but Jacobsen and Glazer look beyond the inherent cynicism that comes with the MetroCard and the Film Forum retrospective pamphlet to see the still potent magic of this place and its people. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

15. Jane the Virgin

The birth of the baby with whom she was accidentally impregnated by a careless gynecologist at the start of last season focused all of Jane’s (Gina Rodriguez) attention on motherhood. It had a similar effect on this light-footed dramedy/spoof telenovela, paring away a couple of subplots that had been getting a little too baroque (that Sin Rostro business, for one) to get back to basics. But there’s still plenty of melodrama to trip up kind, earnest Jane, and to keep our suave but chummy narrator alternately flummoxed and delighted, as Jane figures out—with the help of the mother and grandmother who raised her—how to be a mother while pursuing her dream of being a writer. Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

14. Mr. Robot

Sam Esmail’s ferocious hacking drama hit like a revelation, with imagery and angles that came to symbolize the disjointed reality through which computer genius Elliot (Rami Malek) lives, increasingly unable to distinguish the roiling war for the freedom of information and intellect from the contentious personalities inside his own head. The fight against E Corp is a fight for one’s own identity, to be one’s self, but what’s one to do when that freedom only reveals a far more personal conflict? Can Elliot be the world’s savior when he seems terminally incapable of saving his own mind? Hacking proves the perfect symbol for the psychological subversion that Elliot, along with his friends, family, and even enemies, cannot help but indulge: a perfectly attuned, ultimately imaginary system infiltrated by sudden, substantial reminders that power isn’t absolute or centralized, and no one has full control of illusion or reality. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

13. Transparent

Jeffrey Tambor’s odd blend of clueless narcissism and warm sincerity fits Maura, the loving but sometimes damagingly oblivious patriarch turned matriarch of a close but dysfunctional clan, much better than the muu-muu-like garments she favors. The show’s first season focused primarily on Maura, as she came out to each member of her family and experienced life as a woman. This season, it spends more time with other members of the family as they explore their own sexuality—and their near-universal inability to form long-lasting intimate relationships. Daughter Ali (Gaby Hoffman) is trying to make sense of the family history of secrecy and sexual nonconformity. Her quest is a reminder, like the show’s bittersweet opening credit sequence, that LGBT people have always been part of society, even though society has so often tried to deny their existence. Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

12. The Leftovers

Structurally, there was no other series on television this year more effectively and empathetically laid out than The Leftovers. Audiences were made to feel like surrogates of the show’s characters, new and old, across a series of stacked timelines from episode to episode, and by the end the season we came to comprehend everyone’s eternal grasping for a sense of home and camaraderie on a level beyond the corporeal. Having Patti Levin (Ann Dowd) live on as a manifestation of Kevin Garvey’s (Justin Theroux) guilt was an unfortunate reminder of the new-age hokum that co-creator Damon Lindelof’s Lost often succumbed to, and the wearingly digressive “International Assassin”—for its psychoanalytic literalizing of the idea of crossing over, and for being redolent of one of The Sopranos’s worst episodes—was a miscalculation that felt impossible to recover from. But by the time the series brought us back to Miracle, and Meg Abbott (Liv Tyler) definitively revealed herself as a scarier successor to Patti’s Guilty Remnant throne, the show’s metatextual gamesmanship spectacularly bloomed as a horrified comment on a world struggling with terror, of people desperate to run to a place where everything is safe only to realize that no such place may exist. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

11. Silicon Valley

You’ve probably heard that tech money is driving San Francisco’s building boom, that the tech industry is stripping the city of its culture. This engine of cultural warfare is powered by narcissism, greed, and an almost autistic obliviousness that this poison-pen letter to Silicon Valley renders with razor-sharp wit and sans sentimentality, which is remarkable given how strongly Mike Judge empathizes with working-class frustration. The series, more brilliantly than ever, articulates the ways with which tech gurus write more than just code, but perversely write the language of everyday existence. And as the second season of Silicon Valley rip-roaringly barrels its way toward its only superficially hopeful conclusion, there’s a queasy sense that once Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) realizes his dream of bringing Hooli to prominence completely on his own terms, he’ll be so destroyed by all of the embarrassments he’s encountered along the way that he’ll come to believe in Gavin “Billionaires Are People Too” Belson’s (Matt Ross) mantra: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.” Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

10. Better Call Saul

Better Call Saul began its inaugural season with a sly, black-and-white prelude that reinforced the sense that, on Breaking Bad, we hardly knew Saul Goodman, né James McGill. What followed, then, was a getting-to-know-you spell by which more than just this one man’s pains and humiliations were opened up to audiences. Across 10 character-centric episodes that are master classes in spry direction and exquisitely air-tight storytelling, laced with vast pathos and bracing humor, Jimmy and his brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), are locked in a kind of death match between hope and fear. One sibling feeds off of the other until Jimmy emerges broken and bitter, and as such a little more recognizable as the cynical lawyer who represented Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. If Breaking Bad was a major deconstruction of every limitation of the American dream, then Better Call Saul emerges as an even more studied look at the emergency exit through which men like Jimmy and Mike Ehrmantraut (a haunting Jonathan Banks) are desperately pushed in order to savor their piece of the pie. Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

9. Marvel’s” jessica=”” jones

Marvel’s Jessica Jones breaks so many molds, and with such brio, that it feels almost super-heroic. In immediately denying us Jessica’s (Krysten Ritter) origin story, it keeps her at arm’s length—a masterstroke because the series understands that it’s a story Jessica isn’t ready to give yet, freely and under her own terms. If the violence on Marvel’s Daredevil, no matter how kinetic and operatic in its brushstrokes, is primed to excite, the violence on Jessica Jones seeks to disarm our pleasure centers. And if this violence is so discomforting, it’s because of how hauntingly, stubbornly, necessarily it’s rooted in the traumas that connect the victims of the ominous Kilgrave (David Tennant). The aesthete in me wishes the series exhibited a more uncommon visual style. At the same time, maybe the show’s portrait of abuse, of heroes and villains whose shows of strength and mind control are so recognizably human, wouldn’t exert half the chill that it does it didn’t approach us so unassumingly. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

8. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

If The Daily Show still seems like a nightly debate against the fog of cynicism that modern news and politicians propagate, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has proven to be the great editorialist unknotting heady, complex issues that are often all too easy to ignore in the rush of daily, self-centric life. In other words, Oliver’s series is a far more personal affair. The sophomore season of this essential HBO program found time to obliterate any arguments against D.C. statehood, taking in refugees, and serious treatment of mental disorders, and still had time to both found and close the Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption church. Beyond this, Oliver made his most consistently wrenching, thoughtful, and painfully hilarious argument for the better treatment of our prisoners, whether in terms of bail, a lack of public defenders, job placement for former inmates, or their general health. The former Daily Show heavyweight makes arguments that are plainspoken without being condescending, funny without being flippant, and important without being pious. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

7. Master of None

It took Aziz Ansari, who’s already written a bestseller about modern romance, to finally find the bruised heart of the age of digital dating and on-the-fly hook-ups within the first 10 episodes of Netflix’s Master of None. The Parks and Recreation alum wrangled some subtly impressionistic directors, including James Ponsoldt and Lynne Shelton, and a vibrant supporting cast, top-lined by Noël Wells and Eric Wareheim, to help mold his wry, hopeful view of finding love, a sustainable career, and one’s self in a great American city. Of course, this is ignoring the fact that Master of None is arguably one of the most racially aware and progressive comedy series of all time, with episodes like “Indians on TV” and “Parents” taking a long, wise look at how history and race can get easily whitewashed in America, either due to one’s own passivity or by the designs of a predominantly white culture. And yet, Master of None is ultimately a classical romantic comedy in the mold of the very best films by Albert Brooks, Elaine May, and Paul Mazursky, unafraid of happy endings or happiness in general, even if Ansari’s view of true joy and self-knowledge may not be exactly what your idea of such things are. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

6. Fargo

Even more than its excellent first season, the second season of Fargo channeled the absurdist humanism of the Coen brothers’ film. The series features a rogue’s gallery of characters, each motivated by an urgent mission and many at least “a little touched,” as someone says of Kirsten Dunst’s accidental gangster Peggy Blomquist. Jean Smart’s grimly effective gang matriarch and the matter-of-factly unhinged characters embodied by Dunst and Zahn McClarnon, not to mention Bokeeem Woodbine’s sardonic henchman, are as indelible as the ones Steve Buscemi and Frances McDormand played in the film. Although they appear to be on a collision course toward mutually assured destruction, watching these vivid oddballs crash into one another in a deadpan dance of life, death, and (at least for Peggy) self-actualization is an oddly joyful experience. Nakhnikian

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

5. BoJack Horseman

The second season of Netflix’s debauched talking-animal saga is a more confident blend of the various tones it assumed last year—simultaneously melancholic, angry, goofy, playful, and often uproariously funny in a distinctively what-the-fuck fashion. The series no longer oscillates between comedy and drama in the relatively clean either/or alternation that defined the first season; those moods are now merged and subsumed into a surprisingly terse satire of capitalism. It exudes a tough-love sense of humanity that recalls the later comedy of George Carlin. All platitudes are fair game for lambasting, including the liberal clichés that are used as a mode of practicing an insidiously fashionable elitism that begets yet another form of social distance. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

4. Mad Men

Cool tomcat and longtime shape-shifter Don Draper (Jon Hamm) may have found yet another way to adapt in the final scene of this elegant series, but he spent most of the last season sidelined as people he once eclipsed without even trying—like his long-suffering colleagues Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) and Joan (Christina Hendricks), and his freethinking wife, Megan (Jessica Paré)—began to come into their own. As the series completed the arc it had been slowly building for eight years, Mad Men left us with an indelible portrait of the root-deep changes that shook up American culture in the 1950s and ’60s, both for better, as in the emergence of feminism and civil rights, and worse, as exemplified by the increasing cynicism and sophistication of the pitches the gang at Sterling Cooper developed to sell America to itself. Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

3. The Americans

Throughout The Americans, there’s an ever-present sense of an unwieldy narrative arc being perpetually built up, which has become a noticeable trend in primetime television. Each episode works within a tenuous, vast web of national and personal loyalties, to say nothing of the popular history and culture of the era, but if one can barely grip the shape of a season’s narrative, it’s because of how the political is so duplicitously subsumed in the personal. The plotting is less tight-knot than the characters, who are all prone to gestures that are at once expressions of sincerity and manipulation. In this way, The Americans locates a stirring balance between the brooding, heated familial melodrama and the equally taut, often lethal procedures of its infectious spy drama in ways that often evade works set in the 1980s. For the show’s creators, the attention is less on the characters donning Springsteen jeans or Cyndi Lauper hairdos than how they reconcile their individuality with their accepted national identity and “duties.” Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

2. The Knick

Three episodes into the new season of The Knick and there was a sense that the series had already reached its expiration date, that the writers had gotten all they had to say about its milieu out of their system. The exposition-heavy, sometimes anachronistic dialogue can still be maddening, but the diamond-hard precision of Steven Soderbergh’s direction is no longer outpaced by the melodrama. The passion of his aesthetic is now evident beyond the halls of the Knickerbocker’s surgical theater, where the first season yielded its purest and most lucid wonders. Now, outside the Knick, and within the walls of buildings where society, polite and otherwise, pushes and tugs at modernity’s evolution, the camera shoots its way through the hustle and bustle of the characters’ personal dramas with a dazzling peculiarity that conveys life during this particular moment in turn-of-the-century New York City as a perpetual out-of-body experience. Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2015

1. Hannibal

Hannibal’s third season will be remembered as the one in which creator Bryan Fuller and his talented team resolutely doubled down on the show’s figurative agency, embracing atmospheric dread and sensuality as the ultimate signposts of human character. This amazing horror soap opera will haunt mainstream television in the same fashion with which Hannibal (Mads Mikkelsen) lingers over his symbolic lover and rotating bête noire, Will (Hugh Dancy), casting a pall over the medium that’s really a dare. Like David Lynch before him, Fuller has shone a light over TV’s capacity for eccentric, expressionist, follow-thy-master poignancy. Television is often compared to the novel, in an over-compensating effort to elevate its reputation. What if it were to emulate a short story or poetry collection, in which every tale, or every stanza, is unique yet cumulatively webbed together by their creator’s obsessive, reaching curiosity? Bowen

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