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.
