To read about what this year’s television shows meant to 2017, see Alison Herman’s accompanying year-end essay.
10. Rick and Morty
Sometimes, it’s necessary to reclaim a piece of art from an obnoxious fan base. College creative writing workshops do not get sole ownership of David Foster Wallace; Instagram users do not have exclusive rights to old photos of Joan Didion; and the perpetrators of Szechuan-gate, meanwhile, are hereby divorced from the long-awaited third season of Rick and Morty, which somehow managed to exceed the expectations that built up over the Adult Swim cartoon’s 18-month hiatus. Never forget: Before a novelty sauce was the bane of McDonald’s employees nationwide, it was a nihilistic joke about a miserable bastard ruining his family’s lives for a hit of that sweet, sweet novelty condiment. Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s sci-fi adventure loves to toy with absurdly high concepts and freewheeling improvisation. Beneath it all, however, the show is a psychologically rigorous family drama, insistently returning to the complementary baggage of the Sanchez/Smith clan; Rick’s supergenius-fueled depression, Beth’s abandonment issues, Jerry’s toxic beta masculinity, Summer’s jaded cynicism, and Morty’s growing resentment are highlighted by madcap romp after madcap romp. Season 3 standout “Pickle Rick” became an instant classic by finally dragging everyone’s issues out in the open, with an assist from a Susan Sarandon–voiced therapist, and “Rest and Ricklaxation” and “The ABC’s of Beth” are equally shrewd in their insights on Rick’s contagious damage. Like Rick himself, Rick and Morty sometimes feels trapped by its own bone-deep pessimism, but it conveys that feeling with such wit and inventiveness one could imagine far worse fates than being trapped with this show.
9. The Good Place
When The Good Place premiered last fall, the NBC sitcom seemed like an on-brand, if not immediately exceptional, addition to Mike Schur’s congenitally good-natured oeuvre. Setting a comedy in a version of heaven where almost everyone is, by definition, a decent and contented person initially felt more like a personal writing challenge than a sustainable premise; besides, with the world offscreen rapidly descending into madness, Parks and Rec–style optimism felt decidedly outside the zeitgeist. We shouldn’t have worried. With the first season finale’s revelation that “the Good Place” is actually quite the opposite, Schur and his writers reinvented audience expectations of what a broadcast half-hour could set out to do: not just generate jokes or cultivate a charismatic ensemble, but tell a story with forward momentum that could shift and surprise as the plot goes on. And if the first season ended with astonishing promise, the second season has followed through, with Ted Danson off the leash (no longer having to play the part of guardian angel, he’s gone full demon), the action more madcap (one episode memorably burned through more than 800 different incarnations of the namesake setting), and the emotion disarmingly deep (even an omniscient robot gets a tearjerker moment). There won’t be new episodes until 2018, and a midseason hiatus has never felt longer.
8. BoJack Horseman
BoJack is often reduced to its de facto logline of “depressed talking-horse show,” but I find that Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s animated dramedy is simply about what it’s like to be a person (or an alcoholic horse, or a workaholic cat, or a happy-go-lucky dog whose blithe sunniness infuriates everyone around him). The fourth season featured animal puns aplenty and some of the most incisive social satire on TV, with an episode about Hollywood’s complicity in gun violence that grows more tragically relevant by the day. And as always, BoJack found a way to articulate abstract and elemental anxieties—What if you know a relationship is good for you but still can’t make it work? What if you’ve staked your sense of self on independence, but need help anyway?—by rendering them in candy-colored 2-D. BoJack is a thoughtful show on every level, from tightly crafted episodes to the slow-but-steady progression of its characters’ spiritual journey. At the end of the day, though, thought doesn’t count nearly as much as feeling. BoJack, if not BoJack, is as tenderhearted as they come.
7. Halt and Catch Fire
Over four microscopically rated seasons, Halt and Catch Fire became Peak TV’s own little engine that could. With less exposure than its spiritual ancestor Mad Men (and in less than half the time), Halt and Catch Fire told an equally rich story of men and women at work—the kind of work that defines you, collapsing the personal and professional to the point of making the distinction utterly moot. AMC gave creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers one final season to propel their heroes from the tech landscape of the late ’80s, when the internet was barely beginning to take shape, to the early ’90s, when ISPs abound and our heroes find themselves locked in a race to, essentially, invent Google. They don’t, but that’s beside the point: Cantwell and Rogers made a show about the joy of discovery and creation, the difficulty of struggle, and the depth of the relationships that come out of that struggle, which fosters love and hate of equal intensity. It’s a testament to their storytelling that a late-series death struck with such force, or that a character who began as a shallow retread of arrogant TV jerks past blossomed into a hero worthy of delivering the closing line. Halt and Catch Fire’s key players stumbled their way toward a future none of them could ever quite grasp, but the show itself knew exactly what it was doing.
6. Riverdale
Sometimes, one must apply the KonMari principle to list-making: Does this show bring me joy? Minute for minute, no show on television brought me more joy this year than the CW’s knowingly absurd Archie adaptation, a power-clash of a show that brings together ’50s aesthetics, ’80s teen drama, and a thoroughly contemporary sense of irony and camp. The result is a dizzying mashup of sensibilities—David Lynch meets John Hughes, The O.C. meets Hairspray—that stops just on the right side of total incoherence. In the twisted imagination of creator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, also in charge of the recently relaunched Archie comics, the eponymous town has been transformed into a PG-13 version of Blue Velvet’s Lumberton, terrorized by serial killers and heroin rings disguised as maple syrup companies while cheerleaders sip milkshakes at Pop’s. Jughead is an emo aspiring novelist on the verge of joining a motorcycle gang; Veronica is a reformed New York party girl whose parents call her mija; Cheryl Blossom is a full-blown GIF generator who made me literally scream with delight when she emceed a drag race a few weeks back. The plot can be messy, the character development inconsistent, the disregard for typical teen show bread and butter (like compelling romances) blatant. But Riverdale knows how to have enough fun that I simply don’t care, and that’s worth commending in itself.
5. Big Little Lies
Having it all, the California dream, the fantasy of having a kitchen island and an outdoor deck—Big Little Lies spent seven weeks alternately undermining myths about modern motherhood and blatantly indulging them. An Avengers for those of us who think the Marvel Cinematic Universe could benefit from a great deal more wine, this was a show by our brightest stars, for our brightest stars, and the passion Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Laura Dern brought to their roles was infectious. We shouldn’t overlook the details that gave those performances their backdrop: the perfectly cast supporting roles, like Robin Weigert as Kidman’s understanding yet insistent therapist; the cool-mom-core soundtrack; the unparalleled location scouting. A murder mystery, a social farce, and a searing drama all in one slick package, Big Little Lies wasn’t a Trojan horse so much as an unabashed multitasker. The tech executives and housewives and sole blue-collar worker who make up its cast may never be all things to all people, as impossible Monterey standards tell them they should be (for Kidman’s Celeste, clinging to her flawless image takes a nearly fatal toll). Big Little Lies itself, however, came impressively close.
4. The Keepers
A confession: Excellent though it might have been, I wouldn’t have predicted Netflix’s true crime series landing in my top shows of the year when it arrived on the streaming service this May. But as sexual violence and its insidious systemic roots in some of our most prominent institutions began to dominate the news this fall, my thoughts kept returning to the television show that conveyed the problem more powerfully and empathetically than any other work in 2017. The Keepers starts like a Making a Murderer–style investigation into a single killing, of nun and Catholic school teacher Cathy Cesnik in 1969. But it soon becomes clear that finding the killer is almost beside the point: It’s obvious who’s ultimately responsible for Cathy’s death and the suffering of the dozens of girls she was trying to protect. The unsolved case is just one symptom of a larger, deeply enraging truth: Neither Cathy nor the abuse victims at Baltimore’s Archbishop Keough High School ever got true justice. There’s little doubt at the end of its seven episodes that Father Joseph Maskell is a monster, or that he was protected by the Church and prioritized over the children whose lives he profoundly damaged. The Keepers is not a mystery. Instead, it’s a eulogy for Sister Cathy and a tribute to her former pupils, now women in their 60s, who pooled their resources to pursue closure and the truth. They’re heroes, but The Keepers never lets us forget their vulnerability or how it was exploited. The sight of a woman breaking down at her kitchen table 50 years after her trauma has stuck with me for months. I don’t expect it to go away.
3. The Leftovers
Ignore the conventional wisdom: Every season of The Leftovers was great. The final season of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s stirring HBO epic, which framed the grandest of cataclysms on the most intimate of scales, was a fitting last act to what now stands as an extraordinary trilogy. From Mapleton, New York, to rural Australia, The Leftovers followed one family as they internalized the impossible. In the process, the show achieved a near-miraculous balance. On the one hand, it existed in a constant, dreamlike fugue state, creating a world where people worship Gary Busey and light themselves on fire in the outback the same way denizens of the real world dutifully put up miniature trees in their homes. Yet even as its hero used a penis scanner on a possible trip to the afterlife, The Leftovers remained firmly grounded in human fragility. Ambiguous endings can feel like an infuriating cop-out, but The Leftovers—in which grieving mother Nora Durst may or may not have discovered where the 2 percent of humanity who vanished into thin air actually went—felt perfectly in line with the show’s exploration of belief’s psychological power. Personally, I’ll always be certain that Nora didn’t go through the machine that promised to take her to the other side, and that she’s simply relating the explanation for the Departure that gives her the most peace of mind. But I’m also content with any interpretation that allows fans to have as powerful an experience watching The Leftovers’ last moments as I did. After all, accepting other people’s way of processing the unknowable is what The Leftovers is all about.
2. Twin Peaks: The Return
No one knew what to expect from a version of Twin Peaks released nearly 30 years after the original’s heartbreaking cliffhanger, particularly because, unlike the first series, this new version was conceived as a finite story and directed entirely by David Lynch. Months after its completion, I still don’t entirely understand what we got—though as is always the case with Lynch, the ambiguity is part of the point. What’s certain is that Lynch blew up the story of a small town in a tug-of-war between good and evil into a heartbreaking saga of an America where evil had long since won, gone to seed in the absence of its homecoming-queen and FBI-agent guardian angels. Lynch remains infatuated with postwar Americana yet obsessed with digging into the rot at its core; here, he located the root of all evil in the detonation of the atomic bomb in the most formally audacious hour of television ever made. Nobody does dread, horror, or the grotesque better than Lynch, helped by a cast of malevolents that included addicts, abusers, and a perverted mirror image of hero Special Agent Dale Cooper himself. But Lynch is equally capable of evoking laughter (Dougie Jones forever) or even hope. As that harrowing final scream from Laura Palmer goes to show, you can’t undo history or the damage that comes with it. But the Dale Coopers of the world will keep trying to do some good, and that’s enough for me.
1. The Young Pope
Given the overstuffed year that would follow, it is astonishing that TV in 2017 peaked so early. Technically, Paolo Sorrentino’s sublime miniseries debuted in Europe last year, but America is the home of the divine/disturbed Lenny Belardo, and so it’s the American premiere date that counts. If Twin Peaks had the blessing of no concrete expectations, The Young Pope had the burden of know-it-all internet jokesters assuming it was the logical endpoint of superfluous sex appeal on Premium TV. Sorrentino’s first achievement was surpassing that reflexive judgment with the very joie de vivre so much sluggish television uses sex to make up for, guiding the viewer through an alternate-universe Vatican populated by CGI kangaroos and nuns with novelty T-shirts. The director’s second coup was successfully pushing The Young Pope past a celebration of its own eccentricities to an unlikely coming-of-age story. Neither would be possible without a tour de force from Jude Law, alternately fiendish and disarmingly naive in his portrayal of the wild-card pontiff. Together, The Young Pope’s seemingly disparate elements combined into the single most complete and cathartic viewing experience I had in 2017. Nearly a year after its January debut, The Young Pope remains as it was then: peerless.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.