Favorite 20 TV Shows of 2016 From robotic slavery & transactional sex work to talking horses & poop jokes

15

Lady Dynamite

Created by: Pam Brady & Mitch Hurwitz

[Netflix]

What comes after post-postmodern? New New Sincerity? Whatever stupid label you could generate for its truly peculiar brand of subversion, Lady Dynamite has anticipated it, embraced it, and collapsed it. Grossly, it’s a metacriticism on meta media, a deconstruction of flashback narratives (Present, Past, Duluth?), a satire of surrealist comedy shows, a no-holds-barred narrative of navigating mental illness, a goddamn pterodactyl. Maria Bamford as herself not only squashes every single wall left standing from Louie, but in an unprecedentedly self-aware performance, constructs new spaces only previously familiar in our own heads; some scenes are so strange, it’s like watching a sitcom set in a mathematically impossible dimension where we’ve all solved the Jacobian conjecture, but not our own happiness. And while it stylistically takes cues from shows as diverse as Arrested Development, Bojack Horseman, and The Sarah Silverman Program, its Gestalt aesthetic feels completely uncharted. Finally, a comedy that eloquently captures the ineloquence of break down, as much a corporealization as it is a hallucination of not knowing what you’re doing… more than half of the time. –Jackson Scott

14

Veep

Created by: Armando Iannucci & David Mandel

[HBO]

Veep’s repertoire presents a perversion of our public thing, not our republic: it only suggests policy behind closed doors, alternately animating unrehearsed political performance in naked view of We the Voyeurs. It is fictional witness against the popular fallacy that public life can transcend personality, conviction, or ambition. And though the events of the show’s fifth season made a token no less, they offered a turning point and a question mark: disgraced among élites and disfavored by the public, Selina Meyer is not back by popular demand. Her lack of a true mandate, the ensuing drama and immediate downfall, were even more poignant and relatable than previous, offering not only tragic comedy, but something reflective of an incumbent American self. Yet again, this fictional District, a pseudo-Jeffersonian replica, transcended mere duplication: that of high office, of name, date, and birth, of L.C.D. demand, etc. Rather it imbued a crazed hyperbole, a deliberate hysteria un-associated with the conventional or applied, to the already hyper-normal. Third-rail in full grasp, Veep’s fifth season presaged our post-electoral theater of politics-as-not-usual: unattached, unremitting, unrepentant — though never unamused. –S. David

13

OJ: Made in America

Dir. Ezra Edelman

[ESPN]

Sports can be as fiery a talking point as religion or politics. When two of the three intertwine and become a national talking point…. well, yikes. 2016 saw a Super Bowl halftime show with Black Panther imagery, and six months later, a 28-year-old quarterback sat down during the National Anthem. It also saw needed reminders that race and games are not newfound bedfellows; in a year beset by #FakeNews and a troubling conflict between emotions vs. facts, sports journalism had quite a year. Credit is due to ESPN and its triumphant 30 for 30 documentary series for giving directors like Spike Lee and Ezra Edelman freedom to encompass some touchy shit. While Spike’s Lil’ Joint 2 Fists Up spent one hour chronicling the ascent of Black Lives Matter and its impact on the University of Missouri’s most prized aspect — football — Edelman’s OJ: Made in America took over seven. It was one of two binge-ready miniseries (the other being the campy dramatization The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, or: “The One Where OJ Totally Did It”) about the first of many times a nation would unite to binge-watch the news. As Edelman tactfully demonstrates, the shitfuck-crazy “Trial of the Century” was never cut-and-dry, proving wrong those who assumed former QB/spokesperson/actor OJ Simpson, accused of murdering wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman, would be found guilty. To understand the whims of “how could a jury possibly come to that decision so quickly,” Edelman traces not just Simpson’s arc from birth to Hertz to The Naked Gun, but the black Los Angeles projects he grew up in and later disassociated from. Culling archival footage going back half a century, as well as interviewing key names like detective Mark Furman, prosecutor Marcia Clark, and those formerly near and dear to Juice, Made in America is remarkable in demonstrating how a group of people, after years of being treated like dirt, could vote based more upon “fuck yous” than facts. –Snacks Kyburz

12

Horace & Pete

Created by: Louis C.K.

[Pig Newton]

After ditching the innovative and critically acclaimed Louie after five seasons, Louis C.K. returned to television like a comic to a fresh hour of stand-up. Reinvigorated and inspired, specifically by Mike Leigh’s early televised plays, Louis’s surprise release of the ineffable and achingly humane Horace & Pete saw him breaking completely free from network constraints. It challenged not only television’s often slick, streamlined aesthetic template with a strikingly minimalist style and loose structure, but also its methods of promotion, distribution, and standardization of length and format, releasing episodes of varying run times for purchase on his own web site with no details about when and how many more new episodes would appear. What could’ve been a mere stunt instead became one of the year’s most daringly personal and emotionally devastating television events with more empathy in its self-contained 10 episodes than most shows have in 10 seasons. Using brilliant performances from Steve Buscemi, Alan Alda, Edie Falco, and Louis himself, Horace & Pete transformed its two small sets — a bar and an apartment — into depressingly comic worlds that were microcosms of our own. Its touchingly melancholy examination of a family damaged by generations of emotional abuse deftly weaved in astute observations on race, politics, sex, and death, shrewdly reminding us that, although the past is seen through rose-colored glasses, it is the present we must reckon with. –Derek Smith

11

Bojack Horseman

Created by: Raphael Bob-Waksberg

[Netflix]

In season three, filled to the brim with ressentiment yet unwilling to really face his own culpability in how wretched a person he’s become, Bojack Horseman (voiced heartbreakingly and hilariously by Will Arnett) turns his focus outward to find ways of becoming OK with himself and his place in the world. The genius of the series’ most recent season dwelt squarely with how bravely it confronted the things about its characters that would normally turn off an audience. As the characters we’d had a chance to grow with became increasingly desperate and despicable, the fine line between ridicule and a forlorn honest accounting of personal failings started to blur, and those with the resolve to stick with it to the end enjoyed some pretty indelible storytelling along the way. Season 3 also featured one of the most remarkable 25 minutes of animation we saw this year, featuring an entirely silent rumination on the discomfort with the possibility of connection felt by one who has so completely othered himself from those around him. Does it seem as weird to you as it does to us that the most human character on American television right now is a talking horse? –Paul Bower