Apparently there are thirty-six days left until 2017 and so now seems like as good a time as any to pool our collective television brains and establish what were the definitive fifty best hours (or maybe a little longer) of the small screen for 2017.
When submitting your entry, remember to try and spoiler any major surprises just in case your write-up prompts someone to check out the show for the first time. Nobody wants to know that Fred kills Wilma in episode nine.
Let’s start with…
1.
“San Junipero” - Black Mirror (Episode 4, Season 3)
Almost certainly the standout episode in a very strong season, it’s hard to discuss this episode without explaining what makes this episode so special. Indeed, for the first half of the episode, it’s hard to see how “San Junipero” even fits into Black Mirror - a show of technology, paranoia and unease with the world.
Bucking the usual trend of dystopian futures and murderous phone apps, “San Junipero” takes us to the titular Californian town during the 1980’s and charts the growing romance between Yorkie and Kelly (heart-warmingly portrayed by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis). The episode does such a great job at establishing these two characters and investing you in their developing relationship that, by the time it begins to play its cards in the second half, you want to see what lies at the end of their journey.
“San Junipero” may be the least flashy episode of the season, but it’s an incredibly effective piece of television that exists as both a great love story and as evidence that the show doesn’t always need to - as writer and showrunner Charlie Brooker said - “power down 200 miles per hour toward Dark Town”. It really is one of the very best television episodes of the year.
Why You Should Watch It: So you know why your co-worker is suddenly crying at her desk to Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is A Place On Earth”.
The People vs. OJ Simpson - “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia”
It’s still unfathomable to me how good this show really was, and how it turned decades-old punchlines into real drama and tragedy. That alchemical conversion was most striking in Sarah Paulson’s showcase for Marcia Clarke and the world’s most tragic perm. It’s heartbreaking but unsentimental, darkly funny and acted to the nines. Could’ve been titled “Emmy, Emmy, Emmy”.
[CENTER][SIZE=24px]“The Winds of Winter” - Game Of Thrones (Season 6, Episode 10)[/SIZE][/CENTER]
Perhaps not the most popular choice for the episode of the season… certainly “Battle of the Bastards” finishes the arcs that the whole season was visibly building up to (Snow vs Bolton & Daenerys vs Slavers Bay). The real central story to Game of Thrones has always been events in King’s Landing however, and boy does this episode deliver. The season was full of resurrections and surprise back-stabbings and for this episode, we pretty much all knew how Cersei was going to escape justice from the hands of the High Sparrow and her enemies. In the age of Reddit speculation, it’s impossible to surprise an audience with a plot development that is so built up on established events without it being completely ludicrous and out of left field.
Faced with this dilemma, Game of Thrones did the only thing it could do… it produced one of the most elegantly paced and perfectly crafted ten minutes of drama this year. Lena Heady is perfect as she watches the Great Sept from afar as she waits and hopes for her plan to come to fruition, relying on a mere two allies and a small group of viciously stabby children. A slow, graceful introduction that culminates in one of the most subtle and self satisfied moments of victory I’ve seen a villain do in a long time.
Doesn’t hurt that the show finishes on one of my favorite tropes, which is Evil Pyrrhic Victory. “The Villain who gets everything they want, but loses everything they cared about in the process”
God I really don’t want to lose Cersei, but she really deserves it.
I leave you with Light of the Seven, the first major use of the piano the score for GoT has used, and easily my most listened to piece of music this year:
4. MULDER AND SCULLY MEET THE WERE-MONSTER, THE X-FILES
Yeah, the X-Files reboot had some problems. But for one shining, glorious episode, everything was the way it should. Darin Morgan’s pitch-perfect script feels exactly of a piece with his prior contributions - playing with the monster’s perspective, with narrative reliability, the relative competence of Scully and Mulder - and doing it with a wonderfully light touch. This is bolstered by a hysterical guest performance by Rhys Darby, who completely nails the perspective-switch on the werewolf that compromises the episode’s biggest twist. Guy Mann is a splendid comic creation, and he and Mulder play off each other beautifully. Meanwhile, Anderson has a great time once again playing Scully as the lone bastion of sanity in this insane world - and she even gets a new dog named after a Melville character as a reward.
And Morgan brings it all home in the final moments, as Mulder shakes the monster’s hand and has his faith restored. It’s a rare win for the guy, especially in the Morgan X-Files. But by God, he’s earned it.
Probably the perfect episode to recommend to someone who wants a taste of what The Crown is about without committing to the entire run, “Act of God” centers on the infamous Great Smog of 1952 that kept all of London locked down for several days. And it’s an apt metaphor for the states of both the yet-to-be-coronated Elizabeth and her government, both unsure of what to make of the other, both trying to find their way through their own respective fogs.
Bojack is the best comedy running, and generally its animation serves to disguise the fact that it’s also the most bracing. This (mostly) silent episode at an underwater film festival instead uses it to tell a more whimsical (if still melancholy af) story, with the chronically depressed protagonist becoming the hero of a Chaplin-esque lark. It’s beautiful, it’s touching, it’s funny, it’s sad and it’s laden with puns. And it ends on the absolute perfect, really the only, note it possibly could.
Beating out the previous seasons “Escape from LA” in the brutal watching stakes (which it skillfully calls back to), this is like watching the last half of requirm for a Dream. But harsher. And funnier. Too describe it (“the bender to end all benders”) without massive spoilers does it so little justice, as it uses everything that’s gone before to absolutely eviscerate Bojack. Some truly amazing voice work lends it that extra gravitas. This one just blew me away when I watched it.
Episode Thirty - Last Week Tonight (Episode 30, Season 3)
The final episode of the season and the first after the results of the 2016 election, it was clearly not the episode host John Oliver had envisaged.
In place of the usual format, where the host briefly discusses the week’s news before moving to a longer speech on a focused topic, Oliver instead devoted nearly all of the episode to the results. Over the course of the finale’s running time, Oliver not only took aim at Trump and the media, but he asked his audience to do more than just passively agree with him. “We’re going to have to stand up for one another” he told his audience after highlighting some of Trump’s potential policies, "If you care about women’s health, donate to Planned Parenthood or the Center for Reproductive Rights,” he implored. “If you don’t believe manmade global warming is a ‘silly issue,’ donate to the National Resources Defense Council. If you don’t think refugees are a terrorist army in disguise, donate to the International Refugee Assistance Project.”
The episode finished with a video containing a message that most of us would certainly appreciate whether due to the political surprises, the death of celebrities we loved, natural disasters, or simply for our own personal reasons: Fuck you, 2016.
A[SIZE=18px][CENTER]9. [/CENTER][/SIZE]
[SIZE=18px][CENTER]“Congressional Ball” - VEEP (Episode 7, Season 5)[/CENTER][/SIZE]
“You’re playing a very dangerous game of chicken with the head fuckin’ hen.”
Armando Iannucci may have flown the coop but that didn’t hamper the ability of Veep’s creative team to conjure up the kinds of vicious bullseye take-downs that’d make the devil himself wilt, nor did it prevent Julia Louis-Dreyfus from proving once again that she deserves literally all the awards, sinking her verbal claws into both Tom James and Penny Nickerson in two of the most magical confrontations the show has ever concocted.
Nor did AI’s departure hamper their ability to make Jonah Ryan’s delusional idiocy endlessly entertaining, showing, if anything, they could pump up those jams to even greater levels of magnificence by having the “seven foot seven goony-looking Lithuanian who’s going to drop dead of Marfan Syndrome” run for congress, putting his weapons-grade buffoonery on a literal pedestal and into the literal spotlight in ways it never had been before while also allowing the mining of more and more gold from the infinitely deep vein of his right hand man Richard Splett (“We’ve been getting increasingly angry letters from Tom Petty, but hey, who hasn’t?”).
Add in Mike’s typically ham-fisted attempts to get a job with the NHL by crowbarring goofy hockey metaphors into his speeches and gormless Gary apparently being considered #21 in the list of “Washington’s 50 Hottest Staffers” and the Season 5 team showed they could come up with a cracker of an episode whether the show’s Godfather was at the helm or not.
“The Vanishing of Will Byers” – Stranger Things, Season 1, Episode 1
There may be more satisfying or thrilling episodes in the season, but nothing can match the sheer giddy realization of just what the Duffer Brothers are pulling off as the premiere episodes unfolds. This is a show lovingly, unapologetically in love with a time and place, and this is the magical first date.
I’ve yet to see Bojack, but for my money, this beautiful and strange examination of loneliness and disappointment was my surprise favorite this year. This particular entry begins to provide the context for the relationships between Chip and his ‘wife’, Penelope . . . and, more appropriately, him and his mother, Christine (Anderson’s work here and throughout is incredible). The increasingly solipsistic statements the French translation cassette tape makes as Chip sneaks away to smoke, the boorish manner in which Chip interrupts the Easter service to tell his mother that her car is about to be towed, and the entirety of the awkward and informative intrusion into Martha’s families’ church luncheon table by the two Baskets are the standout bits of the episode, but the final moment with Martha (who by all rights should stand alongside another Martha this year), driving and singing along with Neil Diamond, her voice subtly cracking under the weight of her sadness, is the real shimmering tear that is shed.
While it might ruin any rewatches of earlier episodes since Gretchen and Jimmy come off as the worst human beings to inhale oxygen, I think this is the best episode of You’re the Worst. The current season has been very uneven, but this view in to Edgar’s life is better drama than most shows could ever muster. It portrays the struggles veterans go through in America, a subject woefully undertold. Desmin Borges goes above and beyond in his portrayal of a veteran on the edge, and deserves every praise possible. I believe it to be the best serious episode of a comedy ever.
The pilot demonstrated that familiar McBride/Jody Hill nastiness, but it wasn’t until the next episode, where the two protagonists burnt the principal’s house to the ground, did it become clear that this show was most certainly not fucking around. Witness the birth of Lee Russell, potentially the most evil character to appear in anything this year. Whenever Vice Principals reached for the black-hearted ugliness demonstrated in this episode, it was at its best.
A fun-if-uneven half-season ends on its highest note. The climactic musical number is probably the most exhilarating sequence I saw all year. When the Star Wars music hits . . . WOW.
Broad City is rolling strong in its third season, and the premiere is a very funny if for-the-course episode of the gals swimming upstream through the chaos of NYC to accomplish a simple task and embarrassing themselves (well, Abbi anyway - Ilana isn’t really capable of embarrassment) at a high society function. But the episode itself is just gravy on top of one of the comic smorgasbord that is the opening bathroom montage. A more perfect, and perfectly in character, two minutes of comedy did not exist in 2016.
The horror equivalent of MAD MEN’S “The Suitcase”, this episode focuses on just two characters, tortured Vanessa Ives (alternate-universe Emmy winner, Eva Green) and her mysterious “orderly” at the insane asylum (Rory Kinnear). The best goddamned acting in any show, genre be damned.
Whatever you may think of the show that developed afterward, the opening episode for HBO’s latest big venture was incredibly strong. Set thirty years after the book (and movie) on which it’s based, the pilot does a great job at grounding the science-fiction elements for an unfamiliar audience whilst introducing the main characters - both human (“Guests”) and robot (“Hosts”) - of the show.
That the episode manages to effortlessly set up what could be an otherwise confusing concept - “Would you like some dystopian sci-fi corporate thriller with your western, mam?” - is only one part of what impresses. It manages to take the audience’s expectations and flip them on their head (a sequence seemingly introducing a new human to the park soon turns out to be a pre-conceived storyline being played out between two robots, for example) whilst also allowing for humor amongst the violence (the highly theatrical and much heralded arrival of an infamous bandit is quickly concluded in an exceptionally mundane way).
When was the last time an episode was able to make you excited for what was to come next simply because someone swatted an insect?
After a mid-season lull, episode 9 of Better Call Saul’s second season turned things around and had me on the edge of my seat. Mike begins to demonstrate that he’s a true badass when he takes down one of Hector’s trucks with a spike strip. Gilligan and Co. brilliantly capture Chuck’s descent into madness as we see the effects of Jimmy tampering with the address listed on the documents. Our hearts break when Kim really starts to show that she is as corruptible as the rest of them. And I almost slipped off the edge of my seat when Jimmy bribes the clerk, and then Chuck shows up to confront the clerk before falling and gruesomely slamming his head.
I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of Better Call Saul, but this episode redeemed a season that had begun to slag a bit. On top of turning the season around, it also notched the show up another level and proved that it is very much deserves to exist. It made an argument that it’s not unreasonable to mention Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul in the same sentence.
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