Top 50 TV Shows of 2012
1. Bob's Burgers (FOX)
2. Happy Endings (ABC)
3. New Girl (FOX)
4. Suits (USA)
5. 30 Rock (NBC)
6. Bullet In The Face (IFC)
7. Childrens Hospital (Cartoon Network)
8. Sons Of Anarchy (FX)
9. The Daily Show (Comedy Central)
10. Parenthood (NBC)
11. Community (NBC)
12. Funny Or Die presents Billy On The Street (Fuse)
13. Veep (HBO)
14. Episodes (Showtime)
15. Homeland (Showtime)
16. Breaking Bad (AMC)
17. Saturday Night Live (NBC)
18. Workaholics (Comedy Central)
19. Justified (FX)
20. The Soup (E!)
21. Nashville (ABC)
22. The Colbert Report
23. Suburgatory (ABC)
24. Ben & Kate (FOX)
25. How I Met Your Mother (CBS)
26. Girls (HBO)
27. Key & Peele (Comedy Central)
28. Last Resort (ABC)
29. Breakout Kings (A&E)
30. The Mindy Project (FOX)
31. Conan (TBS)
32. Louie (FX)
33. Haven (SyFy)
34. Web Therapy (Showtime)
35. True Blood (HBO)
36. Shameless (Showtime)
37. Fairly Legal (USA)
38. The Eric Andre Show (Cartoon Network)
39. Boss (Starz)
40. Alcatraz (FOX)
41. Smash (NBC)
42. Magic City (Starz)
43. Rizzoli & Isles (TNT)
44. Cougar Town (ABC)
45. Raising Hope (FOX)
46. Parks & Recreation (NBC)
47. Unsung (TV One)
48. Don't Trust The B---- In Apartment 23 (ABC)
49. Eagleheart (Cartoon Network)
50. The Newsroom (HBO)
Last year I did a pretty ridiculous list of my top 50 shows of the year, to kind of cap off a period when I was a stay-at-home dad and was just consuming an absurd amount of television and keeping up with as many shows as I could take the slightest bit of interest in. This year, I got out of the house a bit more (and also my son was old enough to have favorite shows and kept the TV tuned in to Sprout whenever he could), so inevitably I saw a bit less. And considered the amount of shit I took for last year's list from other internet dorks, it might've been good to just drop it this year, but really getting some praise for the list from one of my favorite people who writes about TV, Rich Juzwiak, outweighed all the other stuff.
Throughout the year, I dropped out of shows that weren't holding my interest too much (The Killing, Game of Thrones, Being Human, Portlandia, Wilfred, Once Upon A Time, and Modern Family were casualties, among others), and got a better idea of what I really enjoyed, which was nice. And ultimately this list only has 27 of the same shows as last year's list, so there was a lot of turnover and some great shows premiered or came into their own. I also thought about doing a top 10 of the worst scripted shows I saw this year, but AV Club did one of those and nailed a lot of the shows I was going to talk about (House of Lies, Brickleberry, Anger Management). So while I won't go overkill with 50 blurbs, I'll at least offer from scattered thoughts about some of the shows on the list:
* I loved "Bob's Burgers" from the jump, but after its second season squeezed out only 9 episodes from March to May, I figured it would soon join the graveyard of short-lived FOX cartoons not created by Matt Groening or Seth MacFarlane. Instead, it returned with a full 20+ episode order for the third season, got even funnier, and the ratings even went up a bit. And, more importantly, I now really feel like I love the show as its own thing, its characters and comedic rhythms now their own thing, distinct from "Home Movies" and the other things I've enjoyed from the cast and creator before.
* There's something so shamelessly basic about shows like "Happy Endings" and "New Girl" doing the old 30ish attractive mostly white urbanites palling around "Friends" thing, to the point that their pilots actually featured the same token black guy. But something funny happened, or more accurately dozens of funny things happened, every week, on both shows, and I can't hate, as much as I wanted to when "New Girl" premiered amidst an obnoxious Zooeygeist. It also helps that they have ultimately become pretty distinctly different shows at heart -- "Happy Endings" aggressively silly and obnoxious, "New Girl" a little more rooted in the relationships between characters.
* I've been doing year-end TV lists on this blog since 2006, the year "30 Rock" debuted, and it's been in the top 5 every year without fail. It makes me sad to realize this will probably be the last time, unless the final five episodes airing in 2013 are good enough that I really want to go nuts with continuing the tradition. Fucking amazing show, though, barely ever dipped in quality.
* Bullet In The Face reportedly repulsed the IFC execs that ordered the series so much that they decided to just cap it at the 6 episodes produced and quickly dispose of them as a "two night mini-series event," which makes the show's nasty tasteless broad satire even more enjoyable to me.
* Sons Of Anarchy has become, in the last couple seasons, perhaps the most consistently gut-wrenching show to watch ever, in terms of emotional impact, shocking plot twists, and visceral violence and ugliness, more than even Breaking Bad at this point, which I've never totally loved but probably appreciated more sincerely this year than I ever have.
* Parenthood is my favorite show that I somehow managed to snub completely on last year's top 50 -- I just go through phases of being actively annoyed and frustrated by the characters on the show and then going back to loving and identifying with them. In that way it's probably one of the most realistic shows about family on television, particularly at a time when there are so few shows about family. And it's been pretty great this year.
* Community, my #1 the last two years, only aired 12 episodes this year, and for the most part they weren't the show's best work. But more than that, the bullshit surrounding the show just reached a ridiculous peak this year, with the fanbase getting a little too rabid (and again, I say that as someone who thought it was the best show on TV two years in a row), the ultimately unnecessary supporting player Chevy Chase causing a bunch of grief and leaving way later than he should have, creator Dan Harmon being ousted and the new showrunners (who worked on Happy Endings, which lately had been funnier) getting harassed on the internet before even starting the job, and now who knows if anything will happen beyond this upcoming run of episodes or whether they'll be good. But seriously, good shows get low ratings and don't last all the time, it's not that big a deal, everyone on this show will go on to do other great things (or just have a terrible indie rapper career). The fanboy persecution complex stuff is just insufferable and really started to effect the show on a creative level, I think.
* With NBC's lineup faltering and ABC and FOX stepping up their comedy divisions, those networks ended up on pretty equal footing in my estimation -- each has 6 shows in this list. CBS only has one, though, mostly for old time's sake. How I Met Your Mother is also lower on this list than it's ever been, but that's just because I've barely seen it this year -- my son rarely gets to bed before 8:30, and for some reason HIMYM is one of the only major network shows that Comcast doesn't make available on demand, so I haven't seen a single episode of the current season and only most of the previous one. Looking forward to catching up on DVD at some point, though, last I saw I felt the show still had some life in it, considering how long it's been on the air.
* Last Resort was my favorite fall pilot, which I joked about being the best episode of Star Trek in decades -- seriously, the honorable but conflicted captain, the moral quandaries about war, the cheap effects and "shake the camera and jump around when the ship gets hit" scenes, the tense interactions with the natives when the ship lands, it would've been a great Next Generation teleplay. But it squandered a lot of that potential in the subsequent episodes, and I wasn't too heartbroken to see it get canceled. A noble experiment, though.
* Shows I really was bummed to see go off the air this year: Breakout Kings, Fairly Legal, Boss, and Alcatraz, which was really the only of the many post-Lost high concept shows that was any fun at all. Shows that debuted this year that I enjoyed enough to put on the list, even though I'm really just waiting to see if 2013 really cements them as consistently great: Billy On The Street (seriously, people need to see this), Veep, Ben & Kate, Girls, Key & Peele, The Mindy Project, several others. Newsroom had little fleeting moments of what Aaron Sorkin actually is good at, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go but down from here.
Last year I did a pretty ridiculous list of my top 50 shows of the year, to kind of cap off a period when I was a stay-at-home dad and was just consuming an absurd amount of television and keeping up with as many shows as I could take the slightest bit of interest in. This year, I got out of the house a bit more (and also my son was old enough to have favorite shows and kept the TV tuned in to Sprout whenever he could), so inevitably I saw a bit less. And considered the amount of shit I took for last year's list from other internet dorks, it might've been good to just drop it this year, but really getting some praise for the list from one of my favorite people who writes about TV, Rich Juzwiak, outweighed all the other stuff.
Throughout the year, I dropped out of shows that weren't holding my interest too much (The Killing, Game of Thrones, Being Human, Portlandia, Wilfred, Once Upon A Time, and Modern Family were casualties, among others), and got a better idea of what I really enjoyed, which was nice. And ultimately this list only has 27 of the same shows as last year's list, so there was a lot of turnover and some great shows premiered or came into their own. I also thought about doing a top 10 of the worst scripted shows I saw this year, but AV Club did one of those and nailed a lot of the shows I was going to talk about (House of Lies, Brickleberry, Anger Management). So while I won't go overkill with 50 blurbs, I'll at least offer from scattered thoughts about some of the shows on the list:
* I loved "Bob's Burgers" from the jump, but after its second season squeezed out only 9 episodes from March to May, I figured it would soon join the graveyard of short-lived FOX cartoons not created by Matt Groening or Seth MacFarlane. Instead, it returned with a full 20+ episode order for the third season, got even funnier, and the ratings even went up a bit. And, more importantly, I now really feel like I love the show as its own thing, its characters and comedic rhythms now their own thing, distinct from "Home Movies" and the other things I've enjoyed from the cast and creator before.
* There's something so shamelessly basic about shows like "Happy Endings" and "New Girl" doing the old 30ish attractive mostly white urbanites palling around "Friends" thing, to the point that their pilots actually featured the same token black guy. But something funny happened, or more accurately dozens of funny things happened, every week, on both shows, and I can't hate, as much as I wanted to when "New Girl" premiered amidst an obnoxious Zooeygeist. It also helps that they have ultimately become pretty distinctly different shows at heart -- "Happy Endings" aggressively silly and obnoxious, "New Girl" a little more rooted in the relationships between characters.
* I've been doing year-end TV lists on this blog since 2006, the year "30 Rock" debuted, and it's been in the top 5 every year without fail. It makes me sad to realize this will probably be the last time, unless the final five episodes airing in 2013 are good enough that I really want to go nuts with continuing the tradition. Fucking amazing show, though, barely ever dipped in quality.
* Bullet In The Face reportedly repulsed the IFC execs that ordered the series so much that they decided to just cap it at the 6 episodes produced and quickly dispose of them as a "two night mini-series event," which makes the show's nasty tasteless broad satire even more enjoyable to me.
* Sons Of Anarchy has become, in the last couple seasons, perhaps the most consistently gut-wrenching show to watch ever, in terms of emotional impact, shocking plot twists, and visceral violence and ugliness, more than even Breaking Bad at this point, which I've never totally loved but probably appreciated more sincerely this year than I ever have.
* Parenthood is my favorite show that I somehow managed to snub completely on last year's top 50 -- I just go through phases of being actively annoyed and frustrated by the characters on the show and then going back to loving and identifying with them. In that way it's probably one of the most realistic shows about family on television, particularly at a time when there are so few shows about family. And it's been pretty great this year.
* Community, my #1 the last two years, only aired 12 episodes this year, and for the most part they weren't the show's best work. But more than that, the bullshit surrounding the show just reached a ridiculous peak this year, with the fanbase getting a little too rabid (and again, I say that as someone who thought it was the best show on TV two years in a row), the ultimately unnecessary supporting player Chevy Chase causing a bunch of grief and leaving way later than he should have, creator Dan Harmon being ousted and the new showrunners (who worked on Happy Endings, which lately had been funnier) getting harassed on the internet before even starting the job, and now who knows if anything will happen beyond this upcoming run of episodes or whether they'll be good. But seriously, good shows get low ratings and don't last all the time, it's not that big a deal, everyone on this show will go on to do other great things (or just have a terrible indie rapper career). The fanboy persecution complex stuff is just insufferable and really started to effect the show on a creative level, I think.
* With NBC's lineup faltering and ABC and FOX stepping up their comedy divisions, those networks ended up on pretty equal footing in my estimation -- each has 6 shows in this list. CBS only has one, though, mostly for old time's sake. How I Met Your Mother is also lower on this list than it's ever been, but that's just because I've barely seen it this year -- my son rarely gets to bed before 8:30, and for some reason HIMYM is one of the only major network shows that Comcast doesn't make available on demand, so I haven't seen a single episode of the current season and only most of the previous one. Looking forward to catching up on DVD at some point, though, last I saw I felt the show still had some life in it, considering how long it's been on the air.
* Last Resort was my favorite fall pilot, which I joked about being the best episode of Star Trek in decades -- seriously, the honorable but conflicted captain, the moral quandaries about war, the cheap effects and "shake the camera and jump around when the ship gets hit" scenes, the tense interactions with the natives when the ship lands, it would've been a great Next Generation teleplay. But it squandered a lot of that potential in the subsequent episodes, and I wasn't too heartbroken to see it get canceled. A noble experiment, though.
* Shows I really was bummed to see go off the air this year: Breakout Kings, Fairly Legal, Boss, and Alcatraz, which was really the only of the many post-Lost high concept shows that was any fun at all. Shows that debuted this year that I enjoyed enough to put on the list, even though I'm really just waiting to see if 2013 really cements them as consistently great: Billy On The Street (seriously, people need to see this), Veep, Ben & Kate, Girls, Key & Peele, The Mindy Project, several others. Newsroom had little fleeting moments of what Aaron Sorkin actually is good at, but I'm not sure it has anywhere to go but down from here.
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