Baker's Dozen: The Best of 2017

My annual year in review, following overviews of 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

I gave up on a whole lot of shows in 2017: Preacher, NCIS: Los Angeles, The Magicians, This Is Us, Ray Donovan, Riverdale. There were bad creative moves that seemed to drag on endlessly, or a string of sub-par episodes that wore me down. Typically, when I do these year-end posts, I start with a quick round-up of the series I watched: the trends I noted, risks I respected and mistakes I lamented. And then I devote the rest of the essay to "the year's best," arranged by genre. But doing that sort of overview of 2017 stumped me. Shows seemed either toweringly good or thumpingly disappointing -- there was so little middle ground -- and I really didn't want to devote multiple paragraphs to series that gave me little pleasure. So I'm revising my format: eliminating the negative, as Johnny Mercer put it, and accentuating the positive.

And so, here are thirteen shows that represent the very best of my TV viewing in 2017. (As always, I do not purport to have watched every series that aired this past year; these are merely the ones I was drawn to, that didn't disappoint.) Some are just getting underway, and show enormous promise; others are nearing the end of their run, and going out in style. All were extraordinarily entertaining.

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.

Madam, I'm Adam: 2015 in review

My annual year in review. You can check out 2013 here, and 2014 here. As always, I do not purport to have watched every great show on television this past year; this is not a "best of 2015" list. These are simply the shows I watched, the trends I noted, the risks I saw taken, and the mistakes (plenty of 'em this year) I saw made.

The good got better, and the bad got worse -- but only the bad got rewarded. That's what I got from my TV viewing in 2015: the saddest life-lesson ever.

Limitless and Madam Secretary: Welcome Home, CBS

Last January, in my year-in-review post, I made note of my "big break-up" with CBS, and my decision to start devoting more time to other networks. It's not like I'd been an exclusive CBS follower, heaven knows, but truly, since the early 1970's (and it probably began with The Mary Tyler Moore Show), I'd say 90% of the shows I watched were on CBS. I started to feel a certain "brand loyalty" to the Tiffany Network, with its "welcome home" slogan, and I'd invariably sample their new shows first, and stay with their shows longer. And as I look back on over four decades of TV viewing, I find that most of the shows that stick with me -- and often that I've chosen to write about here -- aired on CBS: from the aforementioned Mary Tyler Moore Show to WKRP to Knots Landing, from Newhart to Picket Fences to Everybody Loves Raymond, from Survivor to Cold Case to Mike & Molly. But as a viewer, it was hard to justify that brand loyalty after a while: not just because there was so much great television on other networks, but because the CBS luster was fading.

The Sorry State of TV Villains

Greg Sumner: Abby, you don't believe in anything.
Abby Ewing Sumner: That's not true: I believe in money... and power... And in the end, power is much more fun."

When did TV villains stop being fun? What happened to the baddies who could delight us with the arch of an eyebrow, or the simplest of sinister inflections? When did subtlety become a lost art? All through the spring, I kept seeing Vincent D'Onofrio lauded for his turn as criminal mastermind Wilson Fisk in Daredevil -- Rolling Stone headlined him as "the best new villain on TV" -- even though his overblown performance trampled all story-line logic. Is that kind of garishness and ghoulishness what we now associate with great acting, or is there something deeper going on? Now that we feel less safe than ever -- in our churches, in our schools, in our movie theatres -- with hate groups on the rise and police departments committed to racial profiling and excessive force -- now that everything's hitting horribly close to home, is quiet menace simply too terrifying? Even on shows with "realistic" settings, do we need our villains to be grotesques, for our own comfort? There's probably better acting on television now than at any point in the past. But when it comes to the "bad guys" -- the ones whom we often found ourselves rooting for, despite ourselves, because they were so damned entertaining -- we're failing miserably. And Daredevil is a prime example.