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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

This year’s TV revealed new characters and narrative landscapes that cumulatively push toward artistic expression and personal liberation.

The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016
Photo: Netflix

Much like the interweaving two worlds of HBO’s Westworld, the ones who make the place and the place itself, 2016 advanced two visions of where television is heading. The year’s biggest populist debuts—Westworld, Stranger Things, and This Is Us, to name just three—borrowed frameworks and ideas from a host of familiar sources in a counterintuitive attempt to make something truly their own. Those three shows in particular seem to not-so-quietly want to be about every social injustice under the sun while also being a calculated entertainment, one that has no patience for the complexities of race, sexism, violence, nostalgia, fiscal well-being, and self-knowledge.

This is where the second vision comes in. Former web series like Insecure and High Maintenance found fascinating new pockets of story and behavior, given a bit more money to experiment with music, bigger names, and broader canvases, courtesy of HBO. The Girlfriend Experience allowed two sharp, unmerciful directors—Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz—to open up about the psychological undercurrents of female prostitution and gender roles in a strikingly nonjudgmental way. Shows like this, unafraid of contradictions and complicated scenarios, suggest the salad days of 1990s American independent film, where proven talents were given creative freedom and a little extra funding to further their idiosyncratic takes on the world at large.

Other shows on our list, from Easy to Horace and Pete, similarly fall under this rubric, but to lump them into just two groups—the cumbersome yet empty, and the small yet resonant—also works as a limitation. Where does one file the staggeringly funny and fearless Atlanta, Donald Glover’s hyper-relevant depiction of twentysomething livelihood in Georgia’s rap game? Did anyone think a series about a married team of Russian spies undermining the U.S. government would work, let alone become one of the greatest feats of modern political storytelling? Ten years ago, the pitch for Transparent would have likely caused network execs to hurry Jill Soloway out of the room. Hell, it probably still would at any place other than Amazon or Netflix.

As much as the big hits signal business as usual, television, like cinema, is still a wild frontier for people with big ideas and creative energy to spare, and 2016 revealed new characters and narrative landscapes that cumulatively push toward artistic expression and personal liberation. Chris Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

25. Orange Is the New Black

To say that the strongest season of Orange Is the New Black to date ended on an over-determined note would be an understatement. Many gears were set into motion so that the death of one of the show’s most beloved characters could reverberate with the frustrations that drive the Black Lives Matter movement, and the process was one that felt as if it had been workshopped to death. The series was more confident, less manipulative, when exposing its characters’ public hang-ups and private strengths—attributes these individuals deploy toward either virtuous or nefarious ends. It also bloomed in its depiction of Lori Petty’s Lolly, empathetically observing the dimensions of her mental illness. Indeed, Orange Is the New Black proved itself to be more sublime than ever when focused on the micro, intuitively recognizing that even the little joys that prison life can bring to an inmate are deceptive, as they too hinge on a relinquishing of power. Ed Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

24. Happy Valley

After a night on the town, Yorkshire police sergeant Catherine Cawood’s (Sarah Lancashire) protégée, Ann Gallagher (Charlie Murphy), drunkenly confesses that she believes God is just the best in all of us, and Catherine has more good in her than anyone else she knows. That sweet yet messily realistic scene (soon after her confession, Ann vomits) is typical of this series, whose genius lies in illustrating what it means to be a good person without being the least bit preachy. The acts of mercy Catherine is constantly engaged in are resolutely, sometimes even comically secular, like that night of drinking, which she orchestrated for Ann’s sake after noticing that the younger woman needed “cheering up.” But they’re often also wrenchingly difficult, like her battle to protect the grandson she’s raising from his psychopathic father, whose many crimes include having driven Catherine’s daughter to suicide. Her actions are always rooted in a profound moral clarity and loving acceptance of human weakness that’s inspirational without a hint of mawkishness. Elise Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

23. Insecure

Branching out from her excellent Awkward Black Girl web series, Issa Rae’s opaquely self-reflexive comedy is also one of the most quietly curious depictions of a Los Angeles that exists far from the film and music industries. Rae’s character works for a youth-outreach nonprofit called We Got Y’All, but she has dreams of becoming a rapper. Issa’s frustration with her job and the indecision that plagues her romantic relationship make the show’s title more direct than playful. Made up of images that are at once poised yet slightly off-kilter in their framing, Insecure suggests that the feelings of uselessness that can often come from working for a singular social good at once fuel and obfuscate creative desire. It’s the surreal, lacerating, and often very funny happenings of the day that give Issa’s detonations of imagination and physical energy meaning, and what makes the pockets of West Coast experience that Rae captures feel so melancholic and universal. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

22. Bob’s Burgers

The best laid plans of the Belchers often go awry. But Bob’s Burgers is fixated on the resourcefulness that’s possible even in conflict, an ethos handily articulated when Louise tells Gene, “When life gives you moldy melons, you make moldy melonade.” In one episode, Tina insulted a teacher just so she could get detention and crush on a boy, and in the next, Gene and Louise felt that sabotaging the annual school play was a sensible way of getting a half day before Thanksgiving. Disappointment naturally ensued, and yet the Belcher children emerged from the ruin of their failed expectations with a richer understanding of themselves and the world around them. This is a series that has you smile at Bob securing for his children a cuddle session with an albino polar bear, then disarms you with a corker of a gut-buster, as when Louise looks at the bear and says, “I changed my mind about having kids. I’m going to have one, and feed it to this bear, because I love him so much.” Throughout every episode of Bob’s Burgers, the sentimental and the anarchic walk gloriously hand in hand. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

21. Jane the Virgin

Like its title character, sweet-natured, straight-shooting romance novelist wannabe Jane Villanueva (Gina Rodriguez), Jane the Virgin has a lot more going on than a casual observer is likely to give it credit for. That it has roots in Latin American culture is just one of many refreshing and distinctive things about a series that gleefully explores and explodes stereotypes about female sexuality. This season, Jane finally lost her virginity in a scene that was wonderfully anticlimactic, as she learned that having sex isn’t synonymous with having orgasms—and that the importance of a woman’s virginity may be a tad overrated. The college degree Jane is pursing this season in creative writing and her telenovela-star father’s (Jaime Camil) attempts to break through to an American audience provide more outlets for the show’s running dialogue on how to write an entertaining yet truthful story, which winkingly refers to the melodramatic elements—including drug lords, love triangles, and long-lost twins—that help make Jane the Virgin’s undidactic messages go down so easily. Nakhnikian

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

20. American Horror Story: Roanoke

At first, it was easy to doubt American Horror Story: Roanake for appearing content to simplistically treat our obsession with reality television as a horror unto itself. But then, around the moment the show ballsily announced that only one of its characters would be alive by the end of its compact 10-episode run, Roanake revealed itself to be reflecting back at us the basic desires of our consumerist culture. With each and every unceremonious death, we were foisted into a new and unexpected rabbit hole of fractured psyches and confronted with the ultimate horror of our thirst for commodification. And the show revealed the fake as the new real through the delirium of Ryan Murphy and company’s pop-camp aesthetic, itself a reflection of our increasingly performative everyday lives. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

19. South Park

In terms of being “in the know,” South Park set a high bar last year that one might have thought was insurmountable. But that was before it even seemed remotely possible that Donald J. Trump could become the leader of the free world. From one trenchant episode to the next, each one completed just before airtime so as to ensure maximum verisimilitude, writer-director Trey Parker drew elaborate links between, among other things, the improbable rise of Mr. Garrison’s presidential campaign, the WTF trolling of Denmark, and a gender war at South Park Elementary. In its uniquely perverse and anarchic way, the series plumbed the wreckage left by WikiLeaks, Gamergate, and the men’s rights movement to arrive at the most complete understanding yet of how our country, gripped by an anxiety-induced sense of nostalgia, could transform itself into Trumplandia. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

18. Easy

Joe Swanberg’s Easy is about sex even and especially when it doesn’t appear to be. Each episode offers a self-contained narrative about characters who live in the filmmaker’s home city of Chicago, wrestling with how obligation and class identity bleed into their interactions with their lovers. The series is organized around theme rather than a narrative arc, and that fact alone suggests a looseness, an openness, of which this age of television is in need. Contemporary prestige dramas—i.e. shows produced on newer cable stations or directly for streaming, targeting millennials, Gen-Xers, and media critics—have grown adept at merging the tropes of soap operas with the platitudes of history books with the higher, often impersonal production values of films released during Oscar season. What Swanberg brings to the medium is his sense of cinema as a self-critical gateway toward achieving an empathetic awareness of microscopic need. Chuck Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

17. Broad City

In which the unimpeachable comedic team of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer continue to intimate and imitate the most “objectionable” traits of New York millennials. Where High Maintenance works more off the intimate city knowledge of Girls, Broad City continues to express an irrepressible dream of the city as the playground of the truly careless and possibly liberated. Early into the season, co-op culture got a proper comeuppance with some help from Melissa Leo, but Jacobson and Glazer criticized the lack of personal responsibility in society even more than the stereotypical white bohemian types that haunt co-op groceries. There were similar moments that took on the importance of brunching, sample sales, birthright trips to Israel, and insufferable day jobs in the five boroughs. The dream of New York is still alive for the duo, but exploring the embarrassments, bizarre detours, regrettable decisions, and wasted days that punctuate and disrupt that dream is just as important to them. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

16. The Night Of

What makes The Night Of so powerful and painful to watch isn’t the immediacy of the night in question, but the slow-burning way in which things continue to go poorly for Nasir Khan (Riz Ahmed) in the months leading up to his trial for manslaughter. We’re never shown what really happened in the time between Khan blacking out and waking up to find his one-night stand savagely murdered, but we’re given ample evidence of what follows: a soon-to-retire detective instructing the officers who initially arrested Khan on how to best testify against him, a prosecutor ignoring evidence that contradicts her closing statement, defense attorneys more interested in money or publicity than justice. The Night Of’s most affecting statement is Khan’s incrementally documented transformation from a seemingly mild-mannered student to a hardened thug; he may not have been a criminal before going to jail, but he’s certainly become one in order to survive. Aaron Riccio


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

15. American Crime

American Crime’s second season begins with a single line of audio from a 911 call. By omitting context, it forces viewers to question everyone’s potential guilt and possible victimhood, and reveals that they’re almost always wrong in their prejudgments. By consistently eschewing a straightforward narrative, using scenes of slam poetry and ballet to help convey complicated emotions, American Crime successfully shatters our preconceived biases. Such efforts make this series as ambitious and expansive as The Wire, focusing not on just a single crime, but the systemic crime created by racist and classist discriminations and the indifference of faculty and police. Riccio


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

14. Girls

The penultimate season of Girls was one of the show’s strongest, as the creators behind this often comic, always insightful exploration of late adolescence in the early-21st century gained confidence and skills along with their characters. The backlash against the show’s last two seasons probably has a lot to do with the fact that the first couple got more than their share of hype, but it’s also at least partly a reflection of our discomfort with the whiny, hipster-Brooklyn white privilege and ludicrously elongated upper-middle-class American adolescences of the characters themselves—and of a strong streak of misogyny expressed by disgust at things like the gloriously human imperfection of Hannah’s (Lena Dunham) naked body. But Girls’s role as a Rorschach test for our feelings about so many hot-button issues shouldn’t obscure the fact that the show gets so much right, portraying its characters and the world they inhabit in loving, living detail and with a knowing wink. Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

13. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

When the first waves of terror following the election of Donald J. Trump started to hit, one of the few voices I genuinely wanted to hear from was John Oliver. And of course, when he returned the Sunday after the election, he laid out the path to, at best, a horror show and, at worst, the beginnings of a true American autocracy, while also levying a healthy series of exasperated, furious one-liners. Those who accused Oliver of being incapable of connecting with the working class might be right, but it wasn’t like he wasn’t trying. The two episodes that preceded the “President-Elect Trump” episode tackled opioid addiction—tied to Big Pharma’s relaxed regulative authority—and multilevel marketing, where companies like Amway were revealed as predatory pyramid schemes that fiscally destroy desperate individuals. In his third season as Jon Stewart’s most influential successor, Oliver also took on Clinton, Guantanamo, Brexit, abortion, congressional fundraising, and more, delivering wise, uproarious, and relentlessly researched primers on increasingly timely subjects. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

12. Black Mirror

Voltaire once suggested that if God didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him. Black Mirror warns us of the cost of doing so, using technology as its omnipotent stand-in. Each episode introduces a new, seemingly innocuous gadget that’s wormed its way into the masses and then demonstrates its repercussions. We may not yet rate social interactions and people as we do products and services (“Nosedive”), and our augmented reality games may not yet be wholly immersive (“Playtest”), but the emphasis is, terrifyingly, on “yet.” By employing a different genre for each episode, from the procedural (“Hated in the Nation”) to the war drama (“Men Against Fire”), Black Mirror avoids repetition while still hammering home an overarching theme: It only takes a slight shift in context to change a tool’s use from good to bad. Riccio


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

11. High Maintenance

High Maintenance more than made good on its transition from the Internet to HBO. Its intimacy has been retained, and yet the narrative strands have grown more thoughtfully variable and distinct in their reflection of the adult rituals, wild yearning, and long-overdue release that power the denizens of New York City’s boroughs. In its six quick, emotionally resonant episodes, the series also revealed the neuroses, deep-seated fears, self-delusions, and artful exercises of oft-ignored New Yorkers, most resonantly in the interactions between Ben Sinclair’s nameless pot dealer and an actor pretending to be wrestling with masculinity and a nervous, extensively shy admirer, played with endless empathy by Michael Cyril Creighton. More than ever, the show’s tapestry of unexpected connections and backstories reach deeper into the quotidian experiences of city life. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

10. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story

Twenty-one years after the O.J. Simpson trial surfaced a racial divide that came as news to many white people, America is once again grappling with shocking evidence of that divide. Maybe that’s why this year brought us two excellent serialized tales of the trial, O.J.: Made in America and this case study of how justice can be warped by forces like fame, money, racism, and sexism. The People v. O.J. Simpson uses reenactments of key parts of the trial and behind-the-scenes dramatizations of Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.), his “Dream Team” of defense attorneys, and his prosecutors to surface the central irony of his case: A man whose fame granted him special treatment by nearly everyone avoided conviction for a crime he almost certainly committed by claiming to have been framed by police who actually cut him extra slack. Examining those events through the lens of our slightly more progressive time allows us to see some things more clearly, including how shamefully Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) and battered wife Nicole Simpson were mistreated. Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

9. Transparent

We got to know the Pfeffermans a little better this season as they learned more about themselves, making two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress on the parallel but separate quests for self-knowledge that make Transparent so addictive. A major focus of the season was on the difficulty of achieving true intimacy within sexual relationships, particularly if you don’t understand yourself well enough to know what you want. After alienating Vicki through typically selfish behavior, Maura (Jeffrey Tambor) tried something entirely new by hooking up with a man, while her children all did the approach-avoidance dance with past and current lovers. The family turned more to religion for answers too, showing an increased interest in the temple and putting their own spin on rituals like the Seder in the season finale. They may not ever succeed, but the Pfeffermans are trying as hard as any family on TV to obey the Delphic dictum to “know thyself.” Nakhnikian

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

8. Better Call Saul

In its second season, Better Call Saul firmly established itself as a softer, nerdier, more moving and original counterpart to its source of inspiration, Breaking Bad. The latter never entirely divorced itself of macho fantasy, while Better Call Saul perceptively examines the torment of living as a symbolic artist in a world governed by corporate efficiency. Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) might be a shyster lawyer, but he’s a poet of the form, a flamboyant master of bullshit who can’t bring himself to play by the staid rules of his older and more respected brother, Chuck (Michael McKeen). All of the show’s ingeniously staged crime capers, perpetuated by Jimmy or his occasional partner-in-crime, Mike (Jonathan Banks), are rooted knowingly in a need for self-actualization as a remedy for loneliness. The trick of the American dream is that it’s always just a teensy bit out of sight, discernable only in the teasing horizon. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

7. Horace and Pete

Louis C.K. resists the insidious striving for faux-“reality” that governs so much popular art. Horace and Pete is defiantly artificial, calling attention to its own construction, which oxymoronically empowers the series to plumb emotional realms unreached by most television, rendering it vividly real. The wedding of TV-industry formalities with C.K.’s own obsessively verbose parables of tolerance and empathy cumulatively serves to interrogate the “rules” of anticipation and payoff that govern most TV shows, questioning the rules of social life by extension and implication, pinpointing the arbitrariness of much convention, highlighting the control over our own lives that we unquestioningly cede. C.K.’s freedom and confidence as an artist serve as a counterpoint to the constriction felt by his characters. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

6. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

There are countless songs about people who are “crazy in love,” but only Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is, well, crazy enough to actually live in the reality of such lyrics. Spot-on parodies of artists as diverse as the Spice Girls and R. Kelly help to cushion what’s often very dark material, from alcoholism to abortion. The show also makes everyday heartbreak a little more manageable, as when the memories of a bad breakup are brought to life by a pair of singing ghosts who, after breaking out the old soft shoe, bring a whole new meaning to “tapping that ass.” As in Sondheim’s best musicals, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s quick-witted lyrics manage to seamlessly mash together highbrow literary references with the kitsch of Sweet Valley High, all without ever missing a note. Take it from Rachel Bloom, the show’s creator and star: When life gives you lemons, make a spoof of Lemonade. Riccio


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

5. Silicon Valley

A series of major fumbles and callous corporate maneuvers in Silicon Valley’s third season allows Mike Judge to consider the psychological tactics, egotistical behavior, and sheer absurdity that clash together at the impasse of business and technology. More than ever in the show’s run, the fight between creativity and commerce that the Pied Piper team witnesses reflects Judge’s own oft-public Hollywood troubles. The series continues to offer a variety of symbolic inventions and images that highlight the laughably bizarre means by which the tech industry attempts to replace organic ideas with clearly false, market-driven opportunism. Silicon Valley may end up being recognized as Judge’s magnum opus in this sense—a complicated, heartfelt, and intensely uproarious articulation of the struggle to freely realize one’s creative yearnings, whether in business, technology, or art. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

4. The Girlfriend Experience

Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz, two independent filmmakers overseeing a mainstream project for the first time in their careers, walk a tonal tightrope in The Girlfriend Experience. They clearly don’t wish to fall into the moralizing trap of judging Christine (Riley Keough), or pitying her, by providing a pat “explanation” for her attraction to the sex trade. Instead, they settle on an aura of erotic melancholia that plays to their own gifts for behavioral portraiture while honoring the broad tropes of the corporate sex thriller. Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film of the same name was unsatisfyingly vague about sex, more interested in the director’s characteristic explorations of the manifestations of capitalism. It was formally impressive but self-conscious, intellectualized, and ultimately uncomfortable with its premise; the series, on the other hand, dives into the sex, daring to locate Soderbergh’s capitalist themes between the sheets. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

3. BoJack Horseman

Ah, Bojack. Will you ever learn how to get out of your own way? To tell you the truth, I kind of hope not, much as I want that for you, since the pleasure/pain of watching you stumble through life as a self-sabotaging depressive is so wincingly exquisite for its multitudes of meaning. Ending on that beautiful scene of Bojack watching mustangs run free and encompassing both the tragedy of Sarah Lynn’s death and the brilliant, almost word-free encapsulation of alienation and missed signals that was the “Fish Out of Water” episode, this season rode BoJack Horseman’s signature tone of psychologically acute surrealism to new emotional depths. Nakhnikian


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

2. The Americans

The idea of rigid political ideology as a sort of terminal disease simmered beneath the surface of every action in The Americans this season, the show’s finest to date. The path toward a self-determined identity seemed to be held at bay by notions of family and religion, which could be seen clearly in Paige’s (Holly Taylor) work at church and her budding romance with Matthew (Danny Flaherty), the son of F.B.I. Agent Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich). But not everyone can be saved from the tangles of belief and loyalty. William Crandall’s (Dylan Baker) final confession to Beeman reveals an ocean of regrets, from long-lost love to his real opinions about his government, and Baker gives each word an ample feeling of ache and an unmistakable fury. His final utterances offer a poignant, devastating climax to an eruptive season, where the impending end of the Cold War could be seen in nuanced, even eloquent, but never simple terms. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2016

1. Atlanta

Over the course of its extraordinary debut season, Donald Glover’s Atlanta evolved from a seriocomically wise slice of African-American life into a despairing and nearly free-associative satire of the most insidiously powerful commodity driving American society at large: an image that begets profit. Everyone in this series is pushing their contrived shtick, whether it’s Glover’s Ern, who enjoys his conception of himself as a sensitive intellectual too good for the violent life that feeds him, or Brian Tyree Smith’s unforgettable Paper Boi, a gangster who can’t entirely hide the vulnerability residing underneath his shopworn braggadocio. What Glover and his collaborators consistently locate is the existential desperation unifying all people below a certain economic equator. The characters are forever scrambling for the meme or connection that will allow them to join the club of the rarefied and the comfortable, who are also eventually revealed to be trapped in a strange and prefabricated reality, erected on foundations of classism, racism, sexism, and self-loathing. Bowen

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