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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

Many of the year’s best shows approached storytelling in the episodic form from clever, distinct perspectives.

The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014
Photo: Cinemax

Though True Detective doesn’t appear on this list, one can’t discuss television in 2014 without addressing HBO’s gloomy mega-hit. The cult-like success of Nic Pizzolatto’s grisly, lugubrious procedural, which follows Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey’s agents of good on a decades-long hunt for a mutilator of children in the Deep South, seemed tied directly to its unexpected succinctness, a breathlessly efficient yet never hurried use of the miniseries format in eight installments. Structure, however, seems less and less important in television nowadays, and many of the year’s best shows approached storytelling in the episodic form from clever, distinct perspectives. Sherlock, with its three-episode structure, felt more harmonious than ever in its nuanced focus on Sherlock and Watson’s co-dependency; Louie remained gleefully chaotic in its jumble of storylines and splintered relationships throughout its 13 episodes this season; and BBC’s bracingly inventive In the Flesh, two seasons young, brandished honed satirical chops and an emotionally volatile dramatic narrative across six unrelenting and astonishingly lean hours.

Streaming continued to play a major role in the evolution of television, with Netflix producing and signing on for a startling amount of original programming this year, to say nothing of the still-thriving House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black. Amazon came out of the gate strong with the underrated Alpha House and Jill Soloway’s moving Transparent, a comedy whose rattling sincerity is a rarity on television. The latter series is yet another paradigm of an increasingly common conception of the television season as an event, one that might have an encore, but doesn’t necessarily need one. New narrative challenges, as well as thematic concerns, can be tackled under the same heading, and the visual and dramatic worlds of these series can be comfortably reset after each season, a tactic popularized most memorably by FX’s unwieldy American Horror Story. At a time where the Marvel and DC universes are essentially bringing the episodic nature of television to the movie theater, TV seems to be drifting toward a newfound comfort with singular works by major artists in a variety of formats and with minimal narrative or conceptual limitations.

Perhaps nothing speaks to the reinvigorated state of television, and its liberating qualities as a visual artist’s medium, than Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick, Cinemax’s very first out-and-out triumph. This story of surgeons doing exploratory surgeries and experimental operations serves as an imagistic laboratory for the auteur to work on all manner of shot composition, editing rhythms, and historical context and symbolism. Soderbergh’s visual signature is all over The Knick, and not an episode goes by where one doesn’t get the sense that he’s challenging himself technically with the same rigorousness and passion as the pioneering doctors the series depicts. Along with the announced return of Twin Peaks, Cinemax’s critical hit suggests many more big-studio outcasts may find fruitful exile in television, no longer just a repository for all the great stories that the movies don’t have the time or patience for. Similarly typified by a single directorial voice, namely Cary Fukunaga’s, True Detective ends with a cynic finding hope in the light, and one can similarly find hope for television in the shows on this list, even if, like The Knick, the subject matter of many of them often suggests a tendency toward the darkness. Chris Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

25. Orphan Black

The maddeningly uneven second season of BBC America’s rollicking parable of the clash between science and religion veers from the merely utilitarian (“Governed As It Were by Chance”) to the positively inspired (“Knowledge of Causes, and Secret Motion of Things”), all the more frustrating for its glimpses of antic genius. That Orphan Black snuck onto this list at all is thanks to the incomparable Tatiana Maslany. As a full complement of human clones (bickering, backstabbing, chasing, dancing, embracing, and even imitating each other), she manages to disappear fully into every role, an act of artistic daring that marks hers as perhaps the finest performance(s) on television. Matt Brennan


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

24. In the Flesh

Dominic Mitchell’s elegantly pulpy BBC drama strongly echoes the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in its depiction of zombies returning to their fractured communities and living as haunted copies of their former selves. It hangs amid the denizens of the fictional town of Roarton, Lancashire, drawing tension less from the expectation of teeth-to-neck clampdowns than from the intertwining of private dreams and wounds very much rooted in a people’s class aspirations. Cannier still is how it subverts the conveniences we crave from both zombie and terrorist dramas by casting the hero at its center as a gay man whose sexual awakening comes to seem like a pipe dream in a world where even the most sincere show of affection suggests an act of political manipulation. Ed Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

23. Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge offered a smorgasbord of some of the finest American acting of the year, of any medium. The players who made up the large, amazing cast were more than excellent though: They merged into a community, complementing one another as actors to offer the convincing illusion of people who’ve been stewing in one another’s respective juices for all their lives. That verisimilitude informed the miniseries with a rare and greatly poignant integrity, as it displayed a remarkable empathy for American disappointment without resorting to platitude or self-pity. Small stories of heartbreak circled one another, intensifying over time and on the rebound, occasionally weighing on characters to degrees that threatened or succeeded in surmounting them. Yet, Olive Kitteridge was ultimately life-affirming, as it embraced its heroine’s worldview that to hurt is to live. Chuck Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

22. Gotham

Setting down a sturdy network police procedural within the city limits of comic-book culture’s most famed locale, Gotham breathes new life into Batman by refusing to take him so damn seriously. In fact, kindly, puckish Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) and the other future heroes and villains populating Fox’s playful reinterpretation exist primarily as foils for the incorruptible Detective James Gordon (Ben McKenzie). As Gordon wrangles his raffish partner, Harvey Bullock (Donal Logue), and underworld temptress Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith), McKenzie’s wry grin becomes an emblem of Gotham’s foremost advantage, which is the delight it takes in reviving the source material’s bright, cartoonish charm. Brennan


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

21. Fargo

Rather than merely expand on Joel and Ethan Coen’s classic dark comedy, this bloody and beguiling tale of Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), a travel agent who murders his belittling wife, refracts its source material, scattering familiar bits of Coen lore among Minnesota’s desolate expanses; one bathroom-set murder recalls the opening kill from No Country for Old Men. As Nygaard set himself against Officer Solverson (Allison Tolman) and Billy Bob Thornton’s devilish killer, Fargo’s creators found plenty to mock about undue greed, excused desperation, and crippling loneliness, but it’s not all a square dance at the gallows. The whole intricate, grisly ordeal ends with a loving family patched together amid the chaos—the quiet, sweet center to a violent winter storm. Chris Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

20. The Leftovers

Brutal. Bleak. Depressing. Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s stunning vision of a world peering into the abyss of the Sudden Departure, in which two percent of the population inexplicably vanishes, thoroughly deserves each of these adjectives. They’re high praise, for The Leftovers emerges, haltingly, as television’s most honest depiction of individual and collective grief. Indeed, though allusions to the spiritual shadow the series throughout, in the form of prophets and pogroms, Rapture and religious conviction, the horror of The Leftovers is ultimately existential: The residents of picturesque Mapleton, New York confront despair in distinct, often mercurial ways, but all share in the fear of meaninglessness itself. Brennan

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

19. Girls

Girls’s friction continues to spring from Lena Dunham’s apparent willingness to try anything: One week, Hannah (Dunham) is a slapstick cartoon straight out of the dumbest of rom-coms, the next she’s a vividly frightened and confused young woman of startling pathos. The season’s biggest surprise was Marnie (Allison Williams), who blossomed from an often mean-spirited, vacuous joke to a universal embodiment of the longing that comes from watching all your young friends “find themselves” while you seemingly await for your life to arrive on the periphery. Dunham’s walking a high-wire, and, like Woody Allen before her, our sense of her character and the persona of her character’s creator have inseparably fused, informing her work with an element of immediacy that was magnified by the show’s unexpected divergence into pure melodrama. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

18. Game of Thrones

The character of Westeros, how its borders are constantly being rewritten by the various clans who live throughout it and jockey for its ultimate power, is the grand focus of Game of Thrones. Menace is constantly brimming, chaos a promise, and while the series hasn’t always walked the finest of lines between political theater, soap opera, and gonzo pulp, it’s eased its typically steely fixation on this dominion’s intricate political machinations by focusing more on how they intersect with emotional and psychological trauma. As tragedies continue to literally and figuratively cleave families and friends apart, dispersing them across the many realms of Westeros, the ardent focus on, say, a dwarf’s defiance against those who wish him dead, or a little girl’s existential resolve to return to wherever there may be a home for her, more than ever reveals how the personal is inextricably bound to the political in this fantastical universe. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

17. Looking

For better and for worse, Looking is Weekend in miniature. For better because it taps into so many truths about gay experience and romantic relationships that are bracing in their relatability, and for just how little we’ve ever seen these truths about gay lives depicted on screen. For worse because every episode is an explosion of articulate feeling that gives the impression of watching relationships running their course in fast-forward—of lovers in bloom having conversations across the period of a day that, in the real world, would be stretched out across days, months, maybe years. This, though, is justifiable, as there’s an honest, curious, sometimes bruised yearning to the show’s mad rush to reveal just how much gay identity is inflected by race, the hazards of class, and LGBT history. Its almost ephemeral depiction of its characters’ lives, like so many gay bodies, suggests a reckoning with the possibility that it may not be here tomorrow. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

16. The Walking Dead

By the end of The Walking Dead’s fourth season, Terminus had already been revealed to be no sanctuary, and the thrilling first half of season five went to lengths to make it clear that there was no safe haven left in the new world. The villains Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his group encounter are either gripped by the power they held in the old world (the Grady staff) or excuse their cynicism and barbarism with the state of civilization (the Hunters). The series raises these rivalries to the level of grandiose warfare, powered by ironclad opposing philosophies about what the new world should be, and who belongs there. The show’s ambitions have grown considerably, and the conflicts have similarly become more primal, more scarring. The failure of the D.C. plan and the loss of one of their core members has left our group in the wild, and that just so happens to be where this resilient series thrives. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

15. Orange Is the New Black

Separating inmate Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) even further from her privileged former life, enriching the personal histories of its diverse ensemble, upsetting Litchfield’s informal hierarchy with the addition of a complicated villain (Lorraine Toussaint’s bewitching Yvonne Parker)—the sophomore season of Jenji Kohan’s communal portrait of an American prison improved on the first by nearly every measure. Even so, the soul of the series remained intact. An acid critique of the carceral state couched in melodrama’s heightened affect, Orange Is the New Black is, finally, a clarion call for the humane treatment of our unjust system’s many-hued survivors—and a funny, moving model for how to do exactly that. Brennan


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

14. Masters of Sex

Showtime’s period drama, based on the real-life relationship between sex researchers and secret lovers Bill Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), lands a few blows at greatness in its second season, never more forcefully than in the third episode’s tremendous sparring match. After “Fight,” Masters of Sex may be forgiven for allowing its proliferating subplots to slacken, even as Sheen and Caplan continued to find richer registers of frustrated attraction in television’s sexiest affair: That single, bruising hour of personal and political role-play musters more erotic charge than most screen romances manage in the course of an entire series. Brennan


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

13. Please Like Me

From the foot-tapping whimsy of the opening credits to the bumbling sexual adventures of our awkward protagonist, Josh (writer/creator Josh Thomas), Australia’s Please Like Me, which airs on Pivot in the U.S., easily earns the fond feelings its title solicits. But the second season, though less sleekly constructed than the first, discovers in the blessed mess a new vein of yearning—for connection, for confidence, for certainty. The lovely “Scroggin’,” a delicate soft shoe in the wilderness between Josh and his mother, Rose (the superb Debra Lawrance), is a microcosm of the empathic whole, wending its way over life’s roughest terrain by acknowledging that the desire for familial and romantic attachment knows no age. Brennan


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

12. Sherlock

For two seasons, throughout one cracker of a mystery after another, Sherlock has delighted in tracing its prismatic narrative avenues straight to the mind of Benedict Cumberbatch’s titular detective. But in its third season, which began with Sherlock having to explain to Watson how he orchestrated his elaborate death and ended with promise of the deliciously devilish Moriarty’s (Andrew Scott) return, the emotional stakes of Sherlock’s sleuthing have never felt higher. At the top of his game in the season’s second episode, wherein Sherlock is tasked with delivering a best man’s speech at Watson’s (Martin Freeman) wedding, Cumberbatch not only delights in peacocking his character’s powers of intuition, but in fervently and sincerely laying out the evidence of his love for Watson as a friend and friend only, he appears almost elated at no longer having to entertain the gay subtext that Steven Moffat had been cloyingly teasing throughout the show’s run up to this point. Gonzalez

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

11. Bob’s Burgers

Growing pains and nostalgia for youth continue to provide the grist for Bob’s Burgers’s finest flights of alternately absurd and poignant fancy. It was in Louise rejecting the ritual of the slumber party foisted on her by the ever-meddlesome Linda, in Tina unconsciously making herself the belle of Tammy’s bat mitzvah, and in the spectacle of perverse regression that leads to Tina losing her rare toy pony at the latest Equestra-Con. The heart of the show’s empathetic regard for family, its devotion to the attachment of parenting, is in the way it perpetually catches these children anarchically teetering on the precipice of adulthood, their parents infiltrating their youthful reveries, often perversely and sans condescension, in order to help the little ones realize their sense of independence. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

10. Homeland

When Homeland teased us this season with the reappearance of Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), it corroborated at least my suspicions about his death being an elaborate con, while also suggesting that the series, as it did during the tail-end of its initially spectacular second season, would once again fall down the rabbit hole of impersonating 24’s wild gesticulations of soap-operatic plot. But this admittedly manipulative audience ruse, a projection of Carrie’s drug-addled mind, was also symbolically and boldly part and parcel with the show’s commitment to articulating the dense maneuvering necessary to gaining the upper hand in the War on Terror. From Haqqani’s (Numan Acar) shooting of Aayan (Suraj Sharma) to Carrie (Claire Danes) deliberately leading Saul (Mandy Patinkin) into the clutches of the Taliban, Homeland’s most spectacularly tense set pieces this season were emblematic of the show’s continued deftness at braiding together its characters’ private and public rituals of deception. Gonzalez


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

9. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

While some viewers still bicker over whether this riveting and hilarious HBO series is a news program or a comedy series, John Oliver continues to polish and deepen his already sterling comic persona. Oliver’s crucial analysis and scrutiny of major institutions always seems to center on how they present themselves publicly. A now-infamous shot from Ferguson opens up his discussion of militarized police departments, while a dubious claim of charity spurs his dissection of the Miss America Pageant. Much like The Daily Show, Oliver’s new show suggests an evolution of both news and comedy, an intensely investigated breakdown of distinctly American institutions that seem all too happy to watch the country keep breaking down. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

8. Broad City

“Ab, Ab, Ab, no joke,” Ilana (Ilana Glazer) promises her partner in crime, Abbi (Abbi Jacobson), at the outset of Broad City. “Today is the day we become Abbi and Ilana, the boss bitches we are in our minds!” Through hurricanes, bad theater, faraway weddings, and shellfish allergies, Comedy Central’s irascible heroines exceed even Ilana’s high expectations. Maintaining the loose, eccentric rhythms of the web series on which it’s based, Broad City is both wickedly funny and strangely sweet: Nothing else on television pays such hilarious homage to the nasty, dirty, inappropriate patter that is the currency of platonic affection. Brennan

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

7. Transparent

Creator Jill Soloway’s sun-splotched Amazon.com dramedy, starring the formidable Jeffrey Tambor as a trans woman working through the consequences of coming out to her wayward adult children, possesses the faded magic of a home movie. While deftly shifting between past and present, however, Transparent carves out a vision of television’s future—a warm, multilayered, faintly radical portrait of the modern family from an Internet-shopping behemoth and an indie writer-director, sketched in 10 gemlike half-hour segments. In other words, it’s a work of unexpected, imperfect alchemy, inviting not merely admiration, but something like love. Brennan


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

6. House of Cards

In the second season of David Fincher’s malevolent political drama, the ascension of the Underwoods, played with magnificent theatrical oomph by Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, pivoted on a mock-Shakesperean duel with President Walker (Michael Gill) and the First Lady (Joanna Going), with Spacey’s Francis preying on his boss with increasingly beguiling political maneuvers. The drama’s intricacies grew near preposterous, but House of Cards consistently kept its tone balanced, indulging a sense of grand melodrama without ever going soft on its stakes and its painful punishments. Francis’s epic showdown with Raymond Tusk (Gerald McRaney) had the scope of a John le Carré jaunt, but the show’s salvation remains in its dark wit, its ability to both understand modern politics as embellished performance and know that the consequences aren’t minute, and often come with casualties. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

5. The” knick

The Knick proves that a filmmaker can take refuge in the roomy, plot-centric realm of television without losing the strengths they bring from their first medium. Steven Soderbergh, who directed all of the first season’s 10 episodes, frequently imparted more information about the characters and the milieu in a succinct, un-showy tracking shot than a routine drama can fit into an hour’s running time. The plot, a collection of soap operas set within a crumbling New York City hospital at the dawn of the 20th century, mattered only as containment; it was the canvas on which Soderbergh rendered his virtuosic brush strokes. The director’s true achievement was to create a historical past that was bracingly alive and rife with inscrutably tactile energies that transcended the deadening, sanitized platitudes with which classroom textbooks insidiously traffic. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

4. Louie

The radical fourth season of Louie ends with an overflowing tub, one that’s simply too small to contain Louie C.K.’s ample frame after Pamela (Pamela Adlon) asks him to share a bath with her. This, of course, is after C.K. has romanced a Hungarian immigrant throughout the six-part “Elevator” storyline, received a brisk class in humility via a Comedy Cellar waitress (Sarah Baker) in “So Did the Fat Lady…,” and was struck by some sage advice by way of a pickled dentist, played by Charles Grodin, one of C.K.’s comedic forefathers. These wondrous interactions, along with a trip back to our hero’s pot-steeped teen years, brought out a newfound, unforced sophistication in the series that was previously felt only in fits and spurts, but didn’t stem the tide of absurdist jokes, surrealism, and philosophical musings, spilling out uncontrollably over the lid of C.K.’s id into the streets of New York. Cabin

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The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

3. Hannibal

There were missteps in the second half of Hannibal’s sophomore season—uncertainties that indicated the sort of growing pains associated with gradually expanding a show’s world for a long, epic haul. Like the title character, creator Bryan Fuller was clearly setting his chess pieces up for a grand gesture that proved to be pivotally successful in raising the stakes of every development that preceded it. The finale, which portrayed Hannibal’s (Mads Mikkelsen) “coming out” party to the world, his fully open, active emergence as a metaphorical monster of Sherlockian omnipotence, was as beautiful, terrifying, and moving as it had to be in order to restore the series to its prior level of confident emotional majesty. Fuller and his crew continue to somehow honor the purplish killer-as-superhero grotesqueries of the Thomas Harris source novels while elevating the material to the level of operatic pop art. Bowen


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

2. Mad Men

In which Don Draper (Jon Hamm) confronts the computer, and the meltdown of SC&P seems to really settle in. To make matters worse, the disintegration of Don’s marriage to Megan (Jessica Paré) seemed to prod at Don’s fractured identity, one he might never resolve. In the first half of its final season, Mad Men continued to avoid allowing the tremendous buoyancy and detail of its aesthetic to override the depth of philosophical and societal struggle that underline each interaction between Matthew Weiner’s company of lost souls. All the pent-up frustration and panic seems to spill over in “The Runaways,” with Ginsberg (Ben Feldman) getting carried off to an uncertain fate, but the series touches the sublime with “Waterloo,” providing a graceful, inspired epitaph to one of Mad Men’s core figures, one followed directly by an echoing silence that speaks to the inevitable, uncertain end of one of television’s undeniable high-water marks. Cabin


The 25 Best TV Shows of 2014

1. The Americans

At the center of FX’s brilliant spy drama lies alarming issues of identity and allegiance, complex matters for Elizabeth and Phil Jennings, played with stunning, mercurial dramatic nuance by Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell. In the wake of the butchering of a fellow family of spies, the Jennings found themselves at odds with Lee Tergesen’s Larrick, a crafty, expertly trained American cutthroat, but the real danger came from inside the home, in the expectation that spying was a family business. The writers weaved a defiantly intricate network of national loyalties, emotional entanglements, professional betrayals, personal attacks, and psychological manipulations, all while staggeringly attuned to the styles, vernacular, pop culture, and mood of the time. The Jennings, along with Agent Beeman (Noah Emmerich) and Nina Sergeevna (Annett Mahendru), are at war with their invented selves, and The Americans similarly pits the global politics of the era against intimate matters of marriage, sex, parenting, education, religion, and death. The result is a distinctly intelligent work of spy fiction written with a backbone of expert detail, an account of geopolitical panic and the braiding of identity and nationality as diseases that may not travel in the blood, but are often administered by those closest to you. Cabin

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