Second to last entry. We’re getting close to the top. One cartoon, one miniseries, and two familiar fixtures in the top 10 of these lists. Let’s do it.
Intro here and 43-40 here and 39-36 here and 35-32 here and 31-28 here and 27-24 here and 23-20 here and 19-16 here and one-offs/shows ineligible for the list here and 15-12 here and 11-8 here.
7. The Honourable Woman – 2013: Not Eligible
If it’s a little hard to explain how a slow, deliberately paced character sketch like Olive Kitteridge hooks viewers, it’s incredibly easy to explain how British miniseries The Honourable Woman gets viewers on board. It’s a taut, suspenseful British spy thriller in a classic John le Carre vein. The Honourable Woman follows the ex-Israeli Jewish British brother and sister executives running a company that used to make weapons but now is attempting to install infrastructure in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Buried within their personal histories, their company’s history, and espionage agencies in the UK, US, Israel, and Palestine, are mounds of secrets and lies. Each episode slowly pulls off another layer of the onion that is the story, getting closer and closer to the truth. Every major character holds the truth close to the vest and knows more than some people but less than others. Moreover, The Hounrable Women, perhaps because of its miniseries format, has that very rare attribute: the truly satisfying ending. That is so hard to pull off but so beneficial, leaving a wonderful taste in my mouth as I think about the show months after watching.
6. Game of Thrones – 2013: 2
Game of Thrones is the best epic on TV, spanning dozens of characters and several far-flung locations. The sheer scope of the show in an incredible achievement that no mega-budget series can match, and the show constantly manages to smartly marry very human ideas with blockbuster spectacle. The series impressively avoids getting out of hand despite its breadth, cross-cutting and presenting coherent narratives within episodes in interesting ways, and honing themes about leadership, government, and power, among many others. While some of the fight scenes seem a tad long for a show that needs to squeeze hundreds and hundreds of pages into a ten episode season, they are never anything less than brilliantly directed and choreographed, the biggest this season being the battle at the wall. Admittedly, I’m biased by having read the books, and while I try to be self-aware of that bias, it seeps into my opinions on the show, sometimes favorably, and sometimes less so. Every episode a couple of changes bother me, and most I can put aside due to time constraints or other tv limitations, but occasionally there’s a glaring mess up. This season, the biggest was the Jaime – Cersei rape scene, which came off very differently than in the book, and the biggest problem may have been that the creators didn’t realize that what they put on screen was clearly rape. Still, there’s no show that feels like week-to-week event viewing more than Game of Thrones, no show that makes you look forward to every Sunday as if anything could happen.
5. Rick and Morty – 2013: Not Eligible
Rick and Morty debuted in 2013, but aired only three episodes. The out-of-nowhere-jump-to-the-top-ten pick of this year (the honorary Eagleheart slot), Rick and Morty is the story of the travels through time and space of Rick, a slightly behind-the-eight-ball teen and Morty, his alcoholic mad scientist grandfather. The characters are bizarro riffs on Doc and Marty from Back to the Future and the plots can get both insanely complicated and hysterically funny. Rick and Morty is hilarious but also engrossing science-fiction, rolling through tropes and homages both generic and specific, and mind-fuckingly confusing plots which reward repeated viewing and stand up as entertaining outside of the laughs. Multiple episodes heavily involve recursion, and the penultimate Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind posits an infinite number of dimensions with an infinite number of Ricks and Mortys. Rixty Minutes, on the other hand, featuring a series of interdimensional television programs was only funny, rather than plotty, but worked incredibly well anyway. Rick and Morty, for a series this off the wall, had a surprisingly high hit rate, and I can’t wait for it to come back.
4. Mad Men – 2013: 7
Mad Men has never had a bad season, but season 6 may have been its weakest. No more though, as the first half of season 7 sees the show back in top form, full of classic moments and episodes, that continue to pad the numbers on an already established inner circle hall of fame case. Only the annals of all-time lists await Mad Men. The season is much more dynamic than the prior season, which felt limited by its dreary Don-Sylvia romance and the didn’t-quite-deliver-on-the-amount-of-attention-paid-to-him Bob Benson. Pete, Peggy, and Don, were all in different places this year, but bonded for the Burger Chef account, which drove much of the middle of the season, with Peggy stepping in as troubled Don’s superior who, because he was still a partner, had only limited power over him, making their already complex relationship increasingly awkward. Roger gets his mojo back (remember when we all thought he was on the brink of a possible suicide attempt?) by assembling a deal to sell SC&P to McCann, overriding Jim Cutler, who eventually joins the unanimous vote to take the deal, because, well, it’s a lot of money. Don’s marriage with Meghan disintegrated, which had seemed inevitable for some time, after both made one more effort to keep something together that clearly wasn’t working any longer. The season went out in style, with an inspired tribute to the great Bert Cooper, which I really wanted to say should have felt totally out of place, but I can’t.
Television, the Drug of the Nation 