Till We Are Asked to Rise: 2016 in review

My annual year in review. 2013 found me enthralled by Elementary and The Killing, puzzling over some of CBS's scheduling moves, and taking a nostalgic tour of Vermont with a Newhart rewatch. In 2014, I savored Grantchester and Peter Capaldi's first season of Doctor Who, and binged the works of Stephen Poliakoff and Richard Armitage. Last year, I took on everything from The Mentalist to The Man in the High Castle, from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend to Limitless to Gypsy. As in earlier posts, I do not purport to have watched every great show on television this past year; this is not a "best of 2016" list. These are simply the shows I watched, the trends I noted, the risks I respected, and the mistakes I lamented.

Looking over my 2016 blog entries, I see that I hardly wrote about any series that are currently airing. I wrote nostalgia pieces: three about Knots Landing, three about classic Doctor Who. Early in the year, I penned an appreciation of Mike & Molly, which was wrapping up its six-season run (splendidly), and a farewell to The Flash and Arrow, which weren't wrapping up their runs, but which had driven me away. Was my ignoring the current crop of shows a mark of how little they were firing my imagination, or was I so overwhelmed by all the solid series airing that I didn't want to take time away to write them up? Was 2016 a good year or a bad one?

I'm still not sure.

The Five Best TV Shows You Might Not Be Watching

I was put on six months medical leave in September, and decided to join Twitter: my husband figured it would be a good way for me to stay "connected" while I was housebound. I found a lot of folks who shared my passion for television, but I also started to feel that -- with so many choices these days in terms of "what to watch" -- my new online friends were overlooking some of the very best series. I've spent the last few months talking them up on Twitter, but I thought, why not gather them and praise them here, where I wouldn't be limited to 140 characters? Herewith: five series that add immeasurably to my viewing pleasure, but that haven't yet reached the audiences I feel they deserve. Three are UK productions, and although they've done well there, a lot of US viewers are only now discovering them. The other two are US shows that -- splendid as they are -- have never blossomed into huge hits. But all five are so worth a look, or better, a binge.