The 20 Best (and 5 Worst!)
(IFC)
BEST: 14.Mr.
Plus, it had actual robots.
Patrick Harbron/FX; Eric Liebowitz/Netflix; Macall Polay/TBS; Prashant Gupta/FX; Jackson Lee Davis/Sundance TV
They rocked a tough challenge: getting us to care about androids lacking any authentic character.
We left her staring at her reflection, looking either profoundly lost or horribly exposed.
9 show,Search Party, albeit different in personality.
louisck.net
I could linger forever in its ambiguities, but that might be missing McKinnons concluding points.
An increasingly wrenching final season has dialed down the surrealism as Daniels hazy-headed journey approaches hard revelations.
By the finale, I might be borrowing against next years Kleenex budget.
Netflix
And here is a knockout artistic triumph for Pamela Adlon, star and co-creator (with Louis C.K.)
ofBetter Things, keeping it real and making it all wonderfully entertaining.
We need a culture of better things that recognizes everyones experience;Better Thingsadvances that vital mission.
Saeed Adyani/Netflix
Now we know him as something else: a storyteller of singular, invaluable vision.
BEST: 4.The People v. O.J.
Simpson: American Crime Story(FX)
2016s other hot take on O.J.
Casey Crafford/History
The stakes were apocalyptic; the battlefields were intimate.
Good soldier Elizabeth destroyed an immigrant family living the American dream, snuffing out a life-giving friendship.
An extraordinary, wildly meta finale celebrated and critiqued binge escapism in fraught times that demand our engagement.
Ursula Coyote/AMC
We need happy places where we can vent our stress, but were not meant to live there.
BEST: 1.O.J.
: Made In America(ESPN)
The American tragedy that is the life of O.J.
Rhys Thomas/IFC
Simpson contains a multitude of themes that sum up the story of us, right here, right now.
- We see ourselves inO.J.
Made in America.
Sarah Shatz/USA Network
Do we dare look?
Wasted: a ready-to-rock cast led by Bobby Cannavale, and our time.
Had it been live, it might have felt alive.
ABC/Scott Everett White
But the cast couldnt match the manic energy of the original players.
Incorporating the crowd-participation rituals only accentuated the going-through-the-motions hollowness of the whole dead-inside thing.
Everything intriguing was subverted by tortured characterization, ridiculous plotting, and dubious casting.
ABC/Ryan Green
Taken with the lacklusterConvictionandNotorious, ABCs Shondaland-forged genre of potboiler soap may be tapped out.
WORST: 2.Fuller House(Netflix)
Best reboot of the year?Gilmore Girls.
And the meta-shaming of nonparticipants Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen?
Richard Cartwright/The CW
WORST: 1.Who Killed JonBenet?
(Lifetime)
With hot trends, you take the good and the gross.
Last year the true-crime wave unleashed by Serial gave usThe Jinx.
This year:Who Killed JonBenet?
It was gross, a sensationalistic cash-grab that mixed schlocky re-creations and news footage.
Having Phoebe Lawrenson narrate as JonBenet from beyond the grave.The Lovely Bonesthis was not.
Macall Polay/TBS
Justin Lubin/NBC
Jackson Lee Davis/Sundance TV
Justin Lubin/FX
Guy D’Alema/FX
Prashant Gupta/FX
Patrick Harbron/FX
Eric Liebowitz/Netflix
ILLUSTRATION by LINCOLN AGNEW for EW
HBO
Steve Wilkie/Fox
KC Bailey/ABC
Michael Yarish/Netflix
Bob Akester/Lifetime
