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hsmtmtsnet · 4 years

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“Do you see why we love the theatre, people?” an over-serious drama teacher once exclaimed. (Her name was Ms. Darbus and she is an icon for High School Musical lovers.) Well, Disney+ has given us a new reason to love the theatre: High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.

The Disney+ series, created by Broadway scribe Tim Federle, takes place at “the real” East High—where the original High School Musical was filmed. The students there have never put on a production of High School Musical: The Musical, but the new drama teacher, played by Broadway’s Kate Reinders, rectifies that toot suite. Filmed mockumentary style, the show features confessionals with the teens in the cast and teachers in the halls about the drama onstage and off.

Joshua Bassett and Olivia Rodrigo, play Ricky and Nini—the most shippable couple since Cory and Topanga. When HSMTMTS kicks off, the students are just back from summer break and Ricky and Nini are back from their own break. You see, Nini told Ricky she loved him (in the earworm of a love ballad “I Think I Kinda Ya Know”) but Ricky, reeling from his parents’ separation, couldn’t say it back and instead said they should take a pause. Nini went off to drama camp and found a new leading man; but now Ricky wants her back. When Nini sets out to audition for Gabriella in East High’s High School Musical, Ricky decides to win her back by auditioning for Troy.

The new series, which wrapped filming in Salt Lake City in August, has transcended the original—and its musical stage adaptation—with its purity of heart and musical theatre excellence. The cast, including Bassett (now 19) and Rodrigo (now 16), often sing live and give new meaning to no marking full out in showstopping dance routines. Over the course of nine episodes thus far, HSMTMTS has proven ridiculously relatable and sharply witty.

Before the Season 1 finale hits the streaming service January 10, Playbill spoke to Rodrigo and Bassett about life on set, creating fresh characters, writing original music for the series, and what to expect in Season 2.

Did you grow up with High School Musical or was it something that you were actually too young for? Olivia Rodrigo: I totally grew up watching this film. I had High School Musical lunchboxes, and I had Troy and Gabriella Barbie Dolls and the whole shebang. I went back and re-watched all the movies once I booked the role with fresh eyes and a new mature perspective. It’s really amazing. I was just always such a musical kid and so watching Troy and Gabriella burst out into song on my TV was just such a magical experience. Joshua Bassett: I was so young when I first saw it that I do not remember. I honestly started seeing it before I was capable of making memories. Josh, were you always drawn to musicals as a kid, or more drawn to music? Bassett: Definitely both. The music was my favorite part of the musicals, but I did everything from obviously High School Musical [as J.V. Jock #2]. I did Peter Pan, I was Peter Pan, but I also was Chip in Beauty in the Beast. I was the White Rabbit in Alice and Wonderland. I was a random tree in The Wizard of Oz. My dad is a musician, so that’s pretty much in my blood. My sister started doing musical theatre before I could even remember. When I was old enough to do it, there was no question. It was like, “Well, of course I’m going to do it.”

In the beginning of the series, Ricky’s friend Big Red says to Ricky, who is clearly a musician—carrying around his guitar—”I thought you hated musicals.” You are the kid who scoffs at musicals, but loves music. Do you think about the gap in people’s minds between music and musicals and how this series might ingratiate them towards musical theatre? Bassett: I love that question because I think there’s a stigma in general about musical theatre, but specifically for guys. A lot of guys probably think, “Oh, musical? That’s lame.” But musicals are pretty awesome. One of my favorite things [was when] two eight and nine-year-old boys ran up to me and they were like, “Oh my gosh. I love your show. I sing all the songs all the time.” I just thought that was the sweetest, most awesome thing—to be inspiring younger boys to do it and not be afraid. What’s really cool is how people can see Troy Bolton, who plays basketball, who’s also in musical theatre, and now Ricky Bowen, who’s a skater and “Oh, he’s too cool for musical theatre,” but he does it for love and then finds out he loves musical theatre just as much.

Was your audition like a musical theatre audition? Bassett: Well, the walls [were] paper thin. There’s like 10 people before me. You can hear them all belting out these insane showtunes. I was just like, “Oh, boy. Everyone’s going to have to hear me sing when I go in there.” [On my final audition] I actually sang three songs in that one: a Bruno Mars song [“Count on Me”] and then I sang a song that I wrote, and then I actually sang a another song that I had written for this girl to ask her to homecoming, on the ukulele. Rodrigo: I went in and did the sides, and sang “Price Tag” by Jessie J, and they had me sing a song with Joshua, to test our chemistry, and we just love each other so much. So it was electric from that first audition. Bassett: “Count on Me” ended up being the song that—once I got the role—they had Olivia and a bunch of girls come in and sing and read for the role of Nini. I was like, “Do you know this song?” She said, “Sure.” We literally stepped inside an office and I stole a guitar from a girl in the waiting room and we just worked out a quick rendition of “Count On Me” by Bruno Mars. She just figured out the harmony in literally one minute in a random executive’s office. Olivia knocked it out of the park and I think that’s when everyone knew it was the right fit. Rodrigo: We really got to know each other after we auditioned, we spent six months in Utah together and that’s really great. He’s my best friend. To be able to work with him every day and sing songs with him, and write with him, and act with him, is just amazing. And he inspires me as a performer as well as just a person. I wouldn’t rather do it with anybody else. Bassett: I don’t want to say it was fate, but honestly, part of me feels like there was something that just got us in the same place at the same time. We just instantly connected on multiple different levels. There was just magic in there. Rodrigo: Funny story. I knew Joshua before, but he claimed that he didn’t remember meeting me, which he did many times, and I still give him crap for it.

What was it like to discover and form these new characters over the course of the season? Bassett: The description of Ricky is basically me. I read it and I was like, “What? Who’s following me around and writing about my life?” The way he operates things and how he has problems with saying he loves people and all that stuff. I definitely can relate to that in my life. Rodrigo: Nini was a character that was so similar to me already. It’s written very authentically. I actually think that the writers though, have taken some bits of my life and put it into Nini’s. If not, then they’re just like psychics and they are just good at writing and doing their job. I was on the phone with my best friend talking about how unconfident I had been feeling and she was talking to me and she said, “Oh, Olivia, you’ve never felt this way before you started dating guys.” Next week, Courtney goes [to Nini], “Oh, you wouldn’t have been this unconfident if you didn’t let guys have such a monopoly over your brain.” And now, Tim was asking me about some experiences that I had with growing up in creativity and he said that he was going to have Nini experience that in Season 2.

Josh, what do you most commune with in Ricky? And, Olivia, for you with Nini? Bassett: He comes up with this outlandish plan to win [Nini] back and to last-minute go and audition for the musical and everything. Obviously, that can tie back to the homecoming thing. This girl that I wanted to ask to homecoming, she rejected three guys who asked her prior. I was like, “Okay. I’ve really got to go big or go home here.” So that night, I stayed up all night and I wrote the song. Then I bought her flowers. Me and my friends drove over to her house. I knocked on her door and sang the song. I just went for it. That mentality is what I definitely connected to with Ricky. Rodrigo: Nini is very confused throughout most of the first season and I was definitely very confused filming the first season, as well. Growing up is just hard. And being a girl in the 21st century, not knowing what boys are good for you, and how to communicate your feelings, and if you’re good enough to have received all these opportunities that you have been given… I think that me and Nini are just sharing these experiences in real time, so it was really an honor to play that.

We grew up with princess movies and women who needed the man to rescue them and then we swung so far the other way with “I don’t need anyone,” so to see Nini negotiating relationships was refreshing. Rodrigo: It’s definitely more realistic. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t need a man.” But it’s like, “Are you really going to do that?” Or is it, “I’m confident with myself and a man”? Is just like to be able to augment my amazingness? What have you learned from inhabiting Nini? Rodrigo: Nini handles tough situations with a lot of grace, and I think that I want to try to be more like her in that regard. She’s always kind to people and always knows what she wants and not afraid to say it. That’s a great thing to be confident in yourself that whatever life throws at you, you can handle it with love and respect.

As a musical series, you guys have experts in Tim Federle and Kate Reinders. What have you learned from working with them? Bassett: Fun fact. Me and my siblings went to New York in I want to say 2016, maybe even 2015. We saw Something Rotten!. My sister saved the Playbill—they save all the Playbills. It turns out we saw Kate Reinders in Something Rotten! on Broadway years and years ago. Didn’t find that out until about halfway through the filming process. Rodrigo: All of my cast members are teaching me about musical theatre. We did a press tour in New York and we all went to Dear Evan Hansen together and Jagged Little Pill. It was Matt Cornett’s—who plays E.J.—his first Broadway show and so all of us kind of got to teach him this is what happens. He was just so in awe. Bassett: One of the really unique things about this show is it feels like we’re in a musical in the sense that we have the same kind of spirit, we’re this team effort. I think that mirrors the theatre community that you don’t often see in Hollywood. I always say Kate Reinders is the mother of the show. She is the emotional backbone for all of us because she has so much spirit in that world. [HSMTMTS] has the heart of musical theatre with the scale of a TV show.

And you guys often sing live! Was that nerve-wracking? Liberating? Bassett: That was a thousand times more liberating. It’s funny. I booked the job and then my first session, I talked to the head of music at Disney and was like, “Are we going to sing live on the show? Because they did that for La La Land. They did a lot of live scenes and stuff, and I just think that it’d be really cool.” I was already pitching the idea. Tim is actually our biggest champion in that.

The chemistry crackles when you guys sing live—just like it did in Episode 8 during that emotional scene where we learn the origin of Nini’s name. What was it like shooting such an intimate moment? Rodrigo: I actually have always been curious about the origin of Nini’s name and Tim had always been coy about like where it came from, but it’s one of his friend’s sister’s names, I think. This bond that Ricky and Nini have is just so sweet and loving and they’re with each other as friends forever. You know they’re friends first and they are there for each other.

What was your favorite scene to shoot in Season 1? Bassett: My favorite scene to shoot in the show so far was in Episode 10. It was one of the best moments I’ve ever had in my acting career. It was liberating and exciting. Tim actually gave me the freedom to improvise. They kept the tape that I improvised on, so I’m expecting a writer credit. No, I’m just kidding. That scene was very special to me. I think people are going to love it. Rodrigo: I love doing group scenes cause I get to hang out with everybody and we’re all just such a big family. There’s so much laughter and love. Filming “Born to be Brave” was amazing and all the other cast members came to watch and it was like 11 o’clock at night but they came on their day off to come watch us film this number and my best friend was in from L.A. She flew in for this number and afterwards it was 1AM and we all went to IHOP. It was one of the most magical days of filming.

What this teaches me is that it is a universal truth that after you do a musical you go to a diner. Rodrigo: They actually make a joke about that as the last episode.

You both wrote songs for Season 1. Olivia, I came across that song that you wrote when you were six and I’m like, “She was writing songs when she was six?” Was it always second nature to you both? Rodrigo: I have old notebooks, just chock-full lyrics that I’ve written when I was super young and you could barely read and write. I love singing and expression and emotion. It’s really cool that I get to write for the show on such a large scale. I can’t believe they let a teenager do that. Bassett: I was constantly creating ... Most of them were just jokes and me and my sisters being goofs, but I was constantly at the piano, coming up with these dumb short snippets of things. Just allowing myself to do whatever I wanted. It didn’t matter. No one was going to hear them. I did not know what I was doing. I could fake it enough, although I still don’t know what I’m doing, by the way.

Olivia, you wrote “All I Want” on your own. Were you given the context of that song before writing it? Rodrigo: We filmed that song as a reshoot, so we filmed all 10 episodes and then Tim came up to me and said, “I think Nini might need a song in Episode 4.” They let me do it because nobody is going Nini like I know Nini.

Do you start from lyrics? Do you start from music? Rodrigo: It changes from song to song. Usually for me they come at the same time. I’ll find the chords that I like and then put lyrics to them and maybe a thought. You wrote “Just for a Moment” for Episode 9 together, but I know you wrote it early on in the season before you knew where the song or the story would go. How was that, writing blind? Rodrigo: We were just shooting in the dark a little bit and it was a strange experience. That was the first time either of us had co-written a song. I would kick out stuff on the piano and send a voice memo to Josh, and he would do the same. We finally decided on a melody that we liked, and then came together and camped out in my apartment for a day and wrote all the lyrics. He wrote his character’s lyrics, and I wrote Nini’s lyrics. We were a little bit stubborn and it was hard to work with each other sometimes. It was such a great learning experience. I’m so inspired by Josh and I learned a lot from him and I hope that he learned something from me.

What skills have you been honing in the songwriting process now, working in a professional environment? Rodrigo: It’s definitely a whole different ballgame, writing for Disney and I’m writing knowing that the song that I write is going to be consumed by people. Writing something with that knowledge is a little bit daunting, at first, and it’s kind of hard to be vulnerable when you know that people are going to listen to it. Bassett: I think the important thing is to just not take it too seriously. I think people put this expectation on themselves. “I need to write a hit. I need to be honest.” Just be honest and be yourself. Don’t put any expectations on the product. Everything will work out.

Looking back at season one as a whole, what is most important for you to carry in to Season 2? Rodrigo: We filmed Season 1 in such isolation and we didn’t really know what was going to happen to the show. We knew that we felt super passionate about it. After seeing the response, I love seeing people really resonate with the themes that I find really important, like LGBTQ representation, truthful teenager stories, with people that might not look like she’s the average movie star but actually look like a real teenager that one would see at their high school. Bassett: I think what’s really neat about this cast is that you would not believe the hidden talents that everyone in this cast has. It is mind-blowing. Every single day on set, we’ll find something out about someone. Like, “Wait. You do this, too?” So I think as Tim and the writers found that out more, I think they’re going to write more things that cater to us as actors that we can incorporate into our characters. I’m really excited to help shine the spotlight on everyone else.

As the next chapter of the High School Musical anthology and canon, what does that feeling and what do you hope the impact of it is on other kids now or other audiences in general? Rodrigo: High School Musical and musical theatre, in general, has always been a safe haven for people who have felt like outcasts or felt weird or different. This show acts as just yet another place for people to feel they belong and for people to feel represented. I think that’s a really lovely thing and I’m really happy that we get to portray that.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Office: The Farm Spin-Off Would Have Wrecked Dwight and Angela’s Ending

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Warning: contains spoilers for The Office seasons 1-9.

“Geese and goats and Schrutes and hijinks at the Bed and Breakfast” is how Rainn Wilson, the actor behind The Office‘s Dwight K. Schrute, summed up proposed spin-off The Farm, which never went beyond its pilot episode. Speaking to fans on a Reddit AMA back in 2012, Wilson called the Dwight-focussed show a terrific, weird yet accessible rural family comedy. Had it been ordered to series, it would have told the story of the Dunder Mifflin paper salesman running a 1,600 acre farm and B&B with his brother and sister.

“It would have been a really big hit,” The Farm writer-director Paul Lieberstein told ‘The Office Deep Dive with Brian Baumgartner’ podcast in 2021. Lieberstein was co-showrunner on The Office for seasons five to eight, and played HR manager Toby Flenderson on the comedy. He told podcast presenter Brian Baumgartner how disappointed he was when NBC chose not to pursue the project in 2012, blaming a change in management. “I don’t see how someone could not give The Farm a chance. Not give the Dwight spin-off a chance,” he told the podcast.

The year before, Comcast had bought a controlling share in NBCUniversal, which resulted in a change of NBC Entertainment Chair. The new boss, says Lieberstein, did not champion The Office. “I have to say that they didn’t even know all of the characters’ names at that point, they weren’t really following the show. I think we were just a disappointing line item at the time.”

Lieberstein had planned for the spin-off to develop into a mockumentary about the hardships of running a small family farm “at a time when they’re being squeezed out”, he told The Daily Beast in 2018. “It would have old characters and new, and they’d have kept the B&B going. It would have been a lot of fun.”

The spin-off’s major new characters were introduced in the unaired pilot, 12 minutes of which were chopped up and edited into season nine The Office episode ‘The Farm’. A pre-Silicon Valley Thomas Middleditch played Dwight’s unlikely brother Jeb, a hapless drifter who’d stumbled into Californian weed farming. Roswell’s Majandra Delfino played their pseudo-intellectual, amateur poet, Chicago-dwelling sister Fannie, single mother to nine-year-old city mouse Cameron, played by Mom’s Blake Garrett-Rosenthal. The 12 minutes of the pilot shown laid the groundwork for Dwight to take ‘Cammy’ under his wing and school him in Schrute tradition.

‘The Farm’ episode also introduced a new love interest for Dwight in the form of Esther Bruegger (played by writer-director Nora Kirkpatrick). Bruegger’s character was an attractive, younger-than-Dwight sprout farmer from a neighbouring farm, who recurred as Dwight’s girlfriend on season nine of The Office until Dwight and Angela finally reunited and went on to marry in the series finale. If The Farm had come to fruition though, that series finale would have been entirely different.

Angela Kinsey – the actor behind The Office’s uptight, judgmental accountant Angela, who had a long-running secret affair with Dwight – was not part of The Farm’s cast. After the end of The Office, Kinsey was lined up to star alongside her real-life pal Rachael Harris in FOX sitcom pilot Dirty Blondes, a post-divorce female friendship comedy by Black-Ish’s Stacy Traub. When that didn’t happen, Kinsey starred alongside The Daily Show’s Rob Riggle in the pilot for oddball family comedy The Gabriels. That one didn’t go either, but if either had gone to series, then Kinsey obviously could not have also been part of The Farm, meaning that ‘Dwangela’ wasn’t always destined to be Dwight’s romantic endgame. Perhaps Kinsey would have made Lilith Sternin-in-Frasier-style guest appearances in the spin-off, but it seems that she and baby Philip weren’t always intended to be Dwight’s big story.

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The original plan, if The Farm had gone to series, was for the backdoor pilot to have slotted in around episode five of The Office’s final season. At that point, Dwight had given up on Angela after (wrongly) learning in the season premiere that he wasn’t the biological father of her son. Rainn Wilson’s character would have been written out of the show around the mid-season point, leaving Dunder Mifflin for an Angela-free future.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, Dwight would also be leaving for a Mose-free future. Mose Schrute was Dwight’s strange cousin, a recurring character who lived at Schrute Farms and popped up to add weird vibes whenever the story ventured in that direction. Any fan would have expected Mose to be a cert for The Farm spin-off, but that was an impossibility. Mose’s character was played by one of the show’s writer-producers Michael Schur, and originally intended as a seldom-seen joke. The character though, proved a fan favourite, so the team kept finding ways to bring him back.

At the end of season four, Mike Schur and Greg Daniels left The Office to run its first ever spin-off, a city council-focused comedy that eventually became Parks & Recreation. In 2013, Parks & Rec was entering its fifth season, and there was no way that Schur would have time to run that show and continue playing Mose. Schur told Aint It Cool in June 2012 that Mose’s absence from the series proper would be explained, “and that the explanation was too funny to reveal ahead of the pilot’s airing.” A tragic farm-related accident? Scouted for a new season of Amish in the City? Or perhaps Mose finally elopes with his lady scarecrow… we’ll never know.

When NBC declined to pick up The Farm, the decision was made in good enough time for Dwight to be re-inserted as a lead into the last half of season nine, and for the series finale to be written around his and Angela’s wedding. An unintended victim, showrunner Greg Daniels told fastcompany.com in 2013, was British actor Catherine Tate who played Nellie on The Office:

“The toughest part was for Catherine Tate. There was going to be this zone where Rainn had left and Ed Helms was doing The Hangover [Part III] and we had talked to Catherine about the character of Nellie kind of filling the gap and being the driver of comedy A-stories in that period. Then when The Farm didn’t go, Rainn kind of came back and filled that role. So I think we kind of wasted a brilliant comedian this year a little bit with Catherine Tate.”

Greg Daniels, 2013.

‘The Farm’ half-hour eventually aired as episode 17 of the season, which introduced Dwight’s new girlfriend Esther just in time for Angela’s marriage to her closeted gay husband Senator Robert Lipton to have fallen apart, creating a mini love triangle. Who would Dwight choose, a young teutonic beauty who knew her way around a combine harvester, or his ‘Monkey’?

Dwight chose Monkey, and promised to raise her son Philip despite not being his biological father. That’s when Angela told Dwight that she’d faked the DNA results and Philip was, as suspected, his son. ‘Faked the results’ isn’t quite how editor-producer David Rogers put it in this 2013 interview with Office Tally. Rogers explained that lines had been cut from scenes suggesting that when Dwight took a used diaper from the garbage to test Philip’s paternal DNA, he accidentally picked up one used by Jim and Pam’s baby or another child, hence the lack of a match. In the end, that explanation was dropped to simplify things.

Dwight and Angela’s one-year-later wedding story in the series finale gave The Office the perfect premise to reunite the show’s cast, many of who had left Dunder Mifflin for pastures new. It let Steve Carell make a deliberately low-key cameo (he didn’t want to draw focus from the main event) as Michael Scott, Dwight’s surprise best man. It let Jim and Dwight show their brotherly affection for each other, after years of enmity. And it gave Dwight and a partially redeemed Angela – who’d been brought low by the end of her marriage and lost some of her sharper corners in the process – a happy ending. Had The Farm happened, all of that would have been different.

Some think that that NBC’s decision not to move forward with the spin-off was no bad thing. When writer of The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s Andy Greene was asked about the defunct series in this Jeremy Roberts interview, he clearly thought it was for the best:

“Everyone I spoke to felt it was a bad idea. I agree. You don’t want to spend that much time with Dwight on the farm. He’s funny at an office with people that are his total opposites. “The Farm” is a salvaged failed pilot that they chopped up into a regular episode because NBC didn’t want to pick it up. The whole thing was just a colossally wrong-headed idea and one of the worst Office episodes ever.“

Andy Greene, 2020.

Dwight works so well as a character in The Office because he’s the chaotic element in Dunder Mifflin’s everyday mix, the unpredictable wildcard in a place of crushing predictability. Surround Dwight K. Schrute with characters as unhinged as he is, and he loses his unique power. If The Office is ultimately about – as Pam says in the show’s last ever line – seeing beauty in ordinary things, then The Farm, with its oddball characters and outlandish Schrute family traditions, would have been anything but ordinary, so maybe wouldn’t have captured the same beauty.

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The Office: An American Workplace is available to stream on Netflix in the UK, and on Peacock in the US.

The post The Office: The Farm Spin-Off Would Have Wrecked Dwight and Angela’s Ending appeared first on Den of Geek.

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jordoalejandro · 7 years

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The First Annual List of TV Shows I Saw the Past Year

Earlier this year, I decided that I would attempt to create a ranked list of the TV shows I'd watched the past year and a half in a manner similar to the Annual Lists of Movies I've been doing the last six years. This led to a couple of realizations.

Number one: I think I'm watching too much TV. The list I've compiled features over 60 shows and doesn't include non-scripted reality and competition shows (which I don't watch a whole ton of) and non-narrative shows, like Saturday Night Live (which I do watch quite a few of).

Quick side rant about SNL: I hear a lot about how SNL isn't funny anymore (though that criticism was much less prevalent after this last season, which got a lot of acclaim, rightly, for its excellent political skits). Here's the truth about SNL: it was always hit and miss. That's the danger of doing an hour and a half (give or take) of live comedy skits every week. Some are going to work out great, some are going to bomb. People who think back too fondly on the early years as the pinnacle of the show remember only a handful of specific, classic skits from the many years they're thinking of. I implore you to watch a full episode of one of the SNL throwback episodes they air sometimes. The original cast was as prone to duds as any cast since. SNL has always been funny. And SNL has always been not funny. It's the nature of the beast.

Anyway, Saturday Night Live, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Late Night with Seth Meyers, Conan, and various other non-narrative shows won't be considered for this list, even though I watch and enjoy them.

Number two: television has become overwhelming. As many shows as I do watch, there are still shows I'd like to see that I haven't gotten around to. For example, there are several things on HBO I'd like to watch. And I have access to HBO. I just haven't found the time or motivation. I've fallen behind on a lot of my Netflix viewing as well. And while I was researching my list by going over the lists of shows from the last year and a half, I realized there's several series on Hulu and Amazon I'm interested in as well that I will likely never get around to. Which brings me to...

Number three: I feel much, much less confident and much, much more vulnerable about this list than I do about any of the Annual Lists of Movies I've done. I mean, those I do with a reasonable level of self-doubt. I know my choices aren't always going to line up with everybody else's, but I at least watch a lot of the films that come out, blockbusters and awards films alike, so I have some sense of what people are talking about.

With TV? I don't know. I feel like I have weird taste in TV. I watch a lot of what might be considered bad shows. At the very least, they aren't the cool shows. I haven't seen Game of Thrones or Westworld. I haven't seen The Handmaid's Tale. I'm not really in on the TV zeitgeist is what I'm saying here. Like, I've seen some of the heavily talked about stuff, but guys... I dunno, I guess I'm just feeling kinda lame. Like, you guys are the cool kids watching all your killer sentient robots and dragons and such, and I'm over here watching cheap basic cable dramas and later seasons of comedy shows you've all given up on years ago.

So my vulnerability comes partly from that, but it also comes from the time commitment. I don't want to recommend any of the TV shows I've watched. And some are really good! But this isn't just saying, "Hey, you should check out this movie." If I tell you that, and you see a stinker of a movie, it's an hour and a half wasted. I can't tell you to commit ten-plus, twenty-plus hours of your life to something I like. Maybe it tickles my fancy in a way that is specific only to me. And what if I'm raving about the third season of a show? Are you supposed to go back and watch it all to get what I'm saying? I wouldn't recommend it. Just keep doing you. Watch whatever you're gonna watch. Nothing I write is a recommendation.

See? No confidence in this list. At all.

The long and short of it is this: I'm just doing this for fun. For my own amusement. I like ranking things. I like writing about things. If I keep doing this list, I'm excited to continue comparing some of these shows throughout the years, seeing them rise and fall against each other.

But basically, take this whole thing with an even larger grain of salt than you would my movie lists.

Because I have no idea what I'm doing.

The next time I do this list, it will be for all the TV shows whose seasons debut after this year's Emmys. This year's list will include every show I watched that aired an episode after January 1st, 2016. Some shows will be judged on multiple seasons this way. Some shows I'm going to have to judge on partial seasons because the Emmys will occur while they are in mid-season. I reserve the right to go back later and update this list if the shows have an unbelievably amazing season finale or dive right off a cliff.

All right. Take a deep breath. Let's do this.

61. Search Party (Season 1 - 2016, TBS) - This one just did not connect with me at all. It's filled with awful, borderline sociopathic characters with almost no redeemable qualities. And not just like, one or two. There's no likeable character in pretty much the whole cast. And look, fine, it's a dark comedy, so some of that's to be expected, but there just isn't enough here to make this palatable. The humor isn't great. It too often wants the characters' horrible or quirky behavior to do the heavy lifting, then tries to fill in the rest of the joke quota with people's loud outbursts, which mostly come in the form of screaming overly sexually explicit stuff amongst company. The central mystery of the show also didn't do anything for me. It's so nebulous that you don't ever really care. There are so many false leads and soft connections from one thing to the next that you sort of realize it can't really ever go anywhere. Overall, just a real disappointment. I do feel like there's something buried within here about a group of Millennials being so in search of meaning in their lives that they concoct a mystery out of thin air that only they can solve. It could've been a tight little indie movie, even if the truest payoff to that story would be the reveal that nothing has actually happened. I'm talking a full, meaningless, nothing of a finale, followed by character introspection. I created this whole thing from nothing. I behaved like a lunatic. Why? It'd be an insanely huge letdown of a payoff -- a complete letting out of all the air in a balloon -- but that would be the point. Of course, it would be very hard to get away with such an ending, even as an indie movie. There's no way to get away with it if you're doing ten episodes of a television program on a basic cable network. It's way too much of a time commitment to ask of people and then treat them like that. So, instead, the show opts to kind of fill time with a half-baked mystery and whimsy nonsense to make it through its episode order. I probably would not have completed the full first season if not for having the entire thing sitting on my DVR -- it aired in its entirety over one week -- so I just powered through instead. It's been renewed for a second season, but I'm bailing out here.

60. You, Me and the Apocalypse (Season 1 - 2016, NBC) - So, here's the thing: because I came up with this list idea in 2017, in the middle of the TV season, I hadn't been taking notes. Thus, with some of these shows, I'm just not going to remember enough to really delve into them. Like this one. I do remember not really caring for it. It's a dark comedy like Search Party, and it suffers from the same problem: it's just kind of dark without ever really being funny. Guys, you can make dark comedies, but please don't forget that comedy is right there in the title of the genre. It's half of the equation.

59. Frequency (Season 1 - 2016-2017, CW) - This series was just too drawn out. The idea worked pretty well as a movie. It told a neat little story that wrapped up everything in an hour and a half. This show basically retold the movie but stuffed it with lots of filler and false leads to pad it out to 13 hour-long episodes. It's ultimately not worth it. Better to just watch the movie instead.

58. Quantico (Season 1 - 2015-2016, ABC) - I recorded this show as a Put-It-On-In-The-Background-While-I'm-Doing-Other-Stuff kind of show, but even then it was too bland and didn't go anywhere enough for me to want to stick around. I bailed after season one.

57. 24: Legacy (Season 1 - 2017, FOX) - A real mess, though at least somewhat entertaining in a train wreck kind of way. Corey Hawkins' main character, Eric Carter, was generic and dull. The plot, even though they only had to fill twelve episodes, was meandering. And there were a handful of awful subplots that didn't go anywhere, forced cameos, and bad side characters to boot (which, in fairness, is a 24 trademark that was established long before this soft reboot came around). I know 24 has always had issues, but I think I'd been willing to overlook them in the past because Jack Bauer was a compelling character. Without him, and without Chloe to play off of, 24 is just an overly-long, bad action movie.

56. Blindspot (Season 1 - 2015-2016, NBC) - This was a replacement level mystery thriller. Most of its episodes were just FBI missions that were fairly forgettable. The bigger mystery of the show was mostly exhausting instead of captivating, and was too often dragged out by people just refusing to give the main character answers for no real reason other than to prolong the story. I dropped out before season two.

55. The Muppets. (Season 1 - 2015-2016, ABC) - I actually felt it started out... okay. Not earth-shattering, but a funny enough mockumentary taking place behind the scenes at the Muppets. Most people didn't seem to like it, though, so the big wigs planned a creative overhaul. There was all this news about how they were going on hiatus and changing showrunners and yadda yadda, and then they came back, and nothing really seemed to change. If anything, I think it got less funny. So, they tried it two ways and it just never came together right. The cancellation was probably justified. Pretty disappointing.

54. Atlanta (Season 1 - 2016, FX) - Here's one where I feel vulnerable, because I'm aware of the acclaim this show has received. It just never clicked in a fully gripping way for me. I didn't ever commit to setting a full season pass for it on the DVR. Every week, it did just enough in comedy or storytelling to get me to set the record for the next week, but never enough in either for me to go, "Yeah, this is something I can't afford to miss." I will say, the acting from the leads and the cinematography are both strong. I just think the show felt a little too rudderless, too often for me. I don't think I'm coming back for season two.

53. The Guest Book (Season 1 - 2017, TBS) - I liked Greg Garcia's other works so I figured I'd check this one out. It's sort of an anthology comedy, where every episode tells a different, unrelated story. It has a few laughs, but does suffer some dry periods. Also, the risk of doing an episodic comedy like this is that you have 22 minutes to set up the new characters and story, tell the story, add in the jokes, and pay the whole thing off. Sometimes that's just not enough time to really craft a story that's going to work in a convincing way. There are a handful of episodes in season one that have that issue, ending in somewhat simplistic payoffs that aren't particularly interesting or satisfying. I'm on the fence about coming back for this one if there is a season two. I worry that because of its format, it may never be able to rise to the storytelling levels of My Name is Earl or the earlier seasons of Raising Hope. [As of 9/16/17, I’m through episode 1.8. There are two more episodes left to air in season one. // Update (9/29/17) - Finished the season, and the finale actually addressed some of my concerns. Throughout the first season, there were a handful of regular side characters -- mostly townsfolk, like the innkeepers -- who had minor stories during each episode. These were normally just a couple minutes out of each episode, never felt particularly interesting, and often just served to advance the main story's plot. I didn’t give them a whole lot of thought, chalking them up to being mostly glorified set decoration and providing flair. However, the season finale served as an episode dedicated to wrapping up the side characters' stories, and it actually worked surprisingly well. I found myself suddenly interested in these characters who I didn't care for most of the season. I'm not sure if this fully eases my initial concerns about this show's storytelling abilities, but, at the very least, it does give me some more confidence about season two. I'm still on the fence, but I'm leaning towards giving it another shot.]

52. MacGyver (Season 1 - 2016-2017, CBS) - I feel doubly vulnerable here. One, admitting that I watch this show and two, adding that I... kinda... enjoy it? Don't get me wrong. This isn't what I would call a "good" show. The characters are mostly bad clichés and the writing, from dialogue to plot to character development, is very silly. Also, the way they get him to MacGyver stuff is often ham-fisted. That said, it's a great Put-It-On-In-The-Background show because I don't really have to pay much attention to it. I can look up every now and then and the characters will be bickering in the middle of a chase, or he'll be putting some contraption together, or something will be blowing up. I mean, if that's not perfect P-I-O-I-T-B material, then what is?

51. Wrecked (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2017, TBS) - This is a replacement level comedic Lost parody -- though, if you think about it, there isn't anything mystical in this show, so it's really more Lord of the Flies than anything. Either way, it's an okay show. Some laughs, some funny ideas, but nothing really groundbreaking or special. If you aren't on board already, you don't need to be.

50. People of Earth (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2017, TBS) - This one sort of misses the mark with me. Not that I don't like it. I enjoy it for what it is, but I really think it could've worked so much better as a movie telling a simpler story. There's definitely something interesting to be explored here: what are people who claim to have been abducted by aliens missing in their own lives that causes them to believe this? The show does touch on this, and when it does, it unearths some nice moments of vulnerability and character that are surprisingly moving and, I feel, the real high points of the show. (One example being episode 2.6, "Aftermath," which deals with the group grieving, and in doing so, exposes some of their very real emotional issues.) Unfortunately, People of Earth has a lot more screen time to fill, and because of that, the show has to have actual aliens and an evil plot that needs to be solved, all of which I find less interesting than a pure character study would have been. [As of 9/16/17, I’m through episode 2.8. There are two more episodes left to air in season two. // Update (9/26/17) - Finished the season. It ended fine, on par with the rest of the episodes, but I will say, the thoughts of What are we doing here? Where are we going with all this? started creeping into my head. I don’t know if I feel that way fully about the show yet -- I’ll check out season three -- but it’s not a great sign.]

49. When We Rise (Miniseries - 2017, ABC) - I found this a little too melodramatic sometimes. Also, it was maybe too neat? Following the same characters across different ages as they Forrest Gump’d their way through the history of gay rights felt less necessary than just finding new people in each era to tell their part of the story, especially because the main characters were recast as their older selves half-way through anyway. And this is maybe nitpicky, but at some points, the production values were just awful. Like, low-budget green screen stuff that was so bad as to be distracting. Overall, though, it's an important story. In all honesty, it probably means more if you are gay. I can imagine not having a whole ton of interest in sticking with it for the eight hours if you aren't or aren't close to someone who is. Having skin in the game helps.

48. Limitless (Season 1 - 2015-2016, CBS) - Limitless was a fun concept that became too bland by trying to stuff it into an FBI procedural. The show did some stuff well, though. The writing was often clever and snappy, and Jake McDorman was a charming lead. I thought there was maybe a second or third gear to be found in this show that might've come out with more seasons, but it got cancelled after one, so we'll never know.

47. Scream Queens (Season 2 - 2016, FOX) - I appreciate that everyone involved, from writers to actors, knew it was a very silly show and didn't try to do much more than roll with that. Season two had some laughs but was still a drop in quality from season one, which wasn't amazing, though better overall. After season two ended, you kind of felt it was time to go, so it wasn't too sad to hear of its cancellation. It was fun enough while it lasted.

46. Life in Pieces (Season 1 - 2015-2016, Season 2 - 2016-2017, CBS) - CBS's version of Modern Family is slightly better than replacement level. The writing can get lazy and goofy a little too often and drop into the cheesy sitcom level, but it usually does well to rise above that and provide some clever laughs. It helps that the show's format is committed to doing four, mostly separate stories every episode, so if one isn't working, it's not long until the show moves on to something hopefully better. The cast has decent chemistry with one another which helps elevate the show's quality a bit as well. Life in Pieces settled into a groove very quickly, even possibly out of the gates. That's both good and bad. It's consistent, at least, but it also hasn't done much growth in two seasons, and it's possible there isn't a whole lot of room for it to grow, which could lead it to become stale real quick.

45. Workaholics (Season 6 - 2016, Season 7 - 2017, Comedy Central) - I felt it was a fairly consistently funny show throughout its run. The shtick got a little tired after a while, and some of the episode plots in the later seasons were maybe not the most natural fits with the theme of the show, but the cast and crew were still able to piece together some quality episodes until the end. It was an impressive run for a group that was mostly nobodies when the show started.

44. The Last Man on Earth (Season 2 - 2015-2016, Season 3 - 2016-2017, FOX) - This show pains me. I never know what to do with it. Back at its inception, it was going to be a film, which I think was probably, likely, the better way to go with this. The pilot episode is still one of the show's best -- funny, sweet, sad, touching -- and you could see how it could be stretched to an hour and a half and be this great, weird, dark and yet humorous little movie about isolation, grief, and then hope. You know, that sort of thing. Of course, it became a show. That's not to say it's bad. The Last Man on Earth does manage to get back to the heights of the pilot every now and then, normally when it juggles that funny, sweet, sad, touching vibe. Episodes like 2.11, "Pitch Black," 3.6, "The Open-Ended Nature of Unwitnessed Deaths," and 3.10, "Got Milk?," all were excellent and reminded me why I began watching this show. The problem is, though, the show too often deals in fart jokes and silly character behavior and undercuts itself. I wonder if it's a by-product of having to stretch a concept to fill too many episodes. The best episodes of the show seem to come at the beginning and end of the season and around the mid-season finale. The filler episodes in between feel more like treading water. Frustrating.

43. Angie Tribeca (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2016, Season 3 - 2017, TBS) - It's a very silly show with occasional moments of real hilarity. It goes for the multiple jokes a minute model and some do land well, though most are just sort of in the okay-to-decent range. I will say it has really improved in seasons two and three. The show knew exactly what it was going for from the get-go, but the writing has gotten sharper and funnier as the show has gone on. It's still not an upper echelon comedy show and doesn't come close to the quality of its obvious influences -- Airplane and The Naked Gun are some of my favorite movies of all time, so I might be holding the standard too high -- but I do like that there's a show of this style on the air. They don't make comedy like this much anymore -- it mostly comes in the form of far too broad, embarrassingly cheap movies -- so having a show like this be, at the very least, decent, is a nice thing.

42. Prison Break (Season 5(?) - 2017, FOX) - I don't know if this is season five of the show or like, a miniseries, or whatever. Doesn't really matter. Either way, this was actually better than I expected it was going to be. That's not to say it doesn't have problems. There are several moments of outright ridiculousness and a big plot twist that's fairly obvious. Also, most of the characters outside of Michael and Lincoln, even most of the major returning ones, are pretty pointless, and a fair few of their storylines just fizzle out. Really, most of the characters in this show are just fodder for Michael. But... there’s some decent prison escape stuff and some decent chase stuff in here, and all that at least made the show entertaining enough to be worthwhile.

41. Legends of Tomorrow (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2016-2017, CW) - This isn't a show to think a whole lot about. I contend that most, if not all, time travel stories fall apart if you begin to examine the logic behind them even a little bit, so it's best to just have fun. This show was okay in season one but did start having some more fun and got more enjoyable in season two. It still sometimes lands on the too-much-cheese side in story, dialogue, and graphics, but it's watchable entertainment nonetheless.

40. Nobodies (Season 1 - 2017, TV Land) - This was pretty good. The three leads, who also wrote every episode, play off each other well. They have good chemistry, clearly honed by spending real life years doing work and improv together. There's some funny sending up of Hollywood in here, too, helped by a surprising amount of big name cameos. My one issue is that I found the show got a little too loose, sometimes. The plot would occasionally grind to a halt while the actors just kind of... talked. That's not to say the conversations weren't funny, but they did lead me to think, more than once, about where this was all going.

39. Riverdale (Season 1 - 2017, CW) - Riverdale is a strange show that's fun to watch because of how strange it is. It's filled with wacky twists and seemingly dozens of love triangles -- from the teenagers to their parents, everyone in town is love with each other. It does get a lot of easy mileage by being a dark, brooding take on the classic Archie comics but it still works overall. (13 episodes in, at least... It remains to be seen if it will get stale.)

38. Those Who Can't (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2016, truTV) - A pretty decent workplace comedy. Like Nobodies, the best humor in this show comes from the great chemistry and banter between the main cast. (Again, they're a comedy troupe who've put in a lot of real life years to get to this point and it shows.) Where I think Those Who Can't pulls ahead of Nobodies is in the writing and supporting cast. The writing in both storylines and jokes is sharper, and the characters that surround the main trio all have unique, memorable personalities that add something to the overall product.

37. Modern Family (Season 7 - 2015-2016, Season 8 - 2016-2017, ABC) - I won't pretend there isn't any storyline fatigue here. I mean, the show is about this one family. How many stories can you really tell about them? It doesn't help that the children haven't, for the most part, turned into interesting adult characters, forcing the producers to leave a lot of the heavy lifting to the already established adults (specifically, Ty Burrell, who provides the majority of the comedy at this stage). Still though, the joke writing remains sharp and the layered jokes are great, as always. The show has a couple of truly excellent episodes every season, sprinkled amongst the mostly decent other ones.

36. Son of Zorn (Season 1 - 2016-2017, FOX) - I admired this one for its novel approach. It's a funny, weird premise that ultimately touched on more universal themes: divorce, family, feeling out of place and feeling isolated. Jason Sudeikis was pretty good as Zorn, but this show was really elevated by the strong supporting work from Tim Meadows and Artemis Pebdani. Son of Zorn was cancelled after one season and I was sad to see it go.

35. The Blacklist: Redemption (Season 1 - 2017, NBC) - Redemption had some cool stories, but it really did nothing too radically different from the main show. Ultimately, the execution was fine, but there just wasn't enough of a point here. Plus, this show pulled a fairly main character out of the flagship show, didn't really write him out of that show, and had him travel all around the world in this show doing missions. It created some weird inconsistencies, at least in my head, so that while I was watching this, I was thinking, "Don't the characters in the main show wonder where this guy is? Doesn't he have a family who is missing him right now?"

34. The Blacklist (Season 3 - 2015-2016, Season 4 - 2016-2017, NBC) - This is a show that lives and dies on the adversaries, both big bads and monsters of the week. As for the big bads, the early season three adversary was decent, but the late season three through early season four arc was a real dud. It was filled with too many instances where it was unclear of where allegiances lay, and instead of being tense, it felt manic. Nobody trusted anybody and yet, no one wanted to kill anyone because of whatever their relationship was with them. I sort of lost interest in trying to follow who was mad at who. The show recovered after that, though, and the back end to season four was much better, featuring what was probably the best big bad in the show's history. Actually, the back end of season four had a similar setup to the back end of season three -- a very personal big bad -- but the conflict flowed smoother. As for the monsters of the week, there were some memorable ones, but I will say, the plot is becoming a little too predictable: the FBI does the legwork, then James Spader swoops in at the last minute, delivers a monologue that's on the edge of unhinged, and shoots the bad guy. James Spader's character, Red, is unpredictable, which makes him interesting, or, at least, has so in the past. But if you start to expect an unpredictable character to do something unpredictable every time, it becomes predictable, you know?

33. The Mick (Season 1 - 2017, FOX) - This was a pretty funny, semi-dark, anti-family comedy, that at the same time, is still kind of an in earnest family comedy. It surprised me with the amount of depth and heart it showed sometimes when it didn't have to, when it could've turned into its cynicism. Kaitlin Olson is a good lead, the kids all contribute, and there's excellent supporting work here from Carla Jimenez and Scott MacArthur.

32. The Flash (Season 2 - 2015-2016, Season 3 - 2016-2017, CW) - I enjoy these CW superhero shows. The big bads in The Flash have gotten a little stale but the show as a whole is still entertaining, producing several fun episodes every season.

31. Arrow (Season 4 - 2015-2016, Season 5 - 2016-2017, CW) - I think had I done this list last year, The Flash would've been higher than Arrow. Season four wasn't great. I think Arrow suffers when it gets too mystical. It works better grounded and grittier. Season five was a really good return to form in that sense. I also generally think Arrow does better, more practical action scenes than The Flash, which can get a little too CGI heavy for my taste.

30. Timeless (Season 1 - 2016-2017, NBC) - I enjoyed this time travel show more than Legends of Tomorrow. It has better production values for sure, which helps in recreating all that old timey stuff, and that's pretty important. Fake looking sets and props can pull me out of a viewing experience quicker than even bad acting can. Like Legends of Tomorrow, Timeless has fun with the concept of time travel, throwing its characters back into some interesting periods, having them interact with famous figures, and putting together some real quality episodes. It got cancelled this past May, and then revived a few days later for a ten episode second season due to air next Summer. This delights me, not just because I'd like more of this show, but because giving the producers more episodes -- and what are probably, in all likelihood, going be their last episodes -- might allow them to go all-out bonkers with the time travel and warping of timelines and all that wacky stuff that comes with the genre. I'd be happy with more regular episodes, but if they go the full on "fire off all the cannons in one last hurrah" road, I think this could be a fun one to watch down the stretch.

29. The Detour (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2017, TBS) - Like The Mick, The Detour is an upending of the family comedy that is still a family comedy at heart. I do think season one was a bit better because it forced the family together on a road trip. Season two lost some of that focus. That's not to say season two was less funny -- both seasons provided lots of laughs -- but on a story structure level, I enjoyed the first more. I find my biggest issue with the show comes when they go for gross out humor every now and then. Some of it works, but it mostly just feels gratuitous.

28. Trial & Error (Season 1 - 2017, NBC) - This was a really well done, humorous mockumentary. Much of the comedy is maybe more clever than it is laugh out loud, but it's still pretty enjoyable. John Lithgow does great supporting work here as Larry -- a role that calls for him to be, at various times: goofy, dark, mysterious, and frustrating, all while still remaining sympathetic. Sherri Shepherd is also excellent. Her supporting character, Anne, provides most of the show's laugh out loud moments.

27. Brockmire (Season 1 - 2017, IFC) - This is a great, adult comedy, though it probably works better if you're a fan of baseball and have some knowledge of the people who show up and what's being parodied. If you don't know baseball, your mileage may vary. Hank Azaria and Amanda Peet give strong performances and work really well together.

26. Bob's Burgers (Season 6 - 2015-2016, Season 7 - 2016-2017, FOX) - Bob's Burgers found its groove fairly early on and has put out quality stuff on a consistent basis since. The voice actors are all on-point and are able to create decent comedy just from their banter. The plots are usually pretty clever and often do a good job of building to an interesting, humorous crescendo. It's a good fit in the FOX Sunday lineup.

25. The Real O'Neals (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2016-2017, ABC) - Season one was decent, but I found it got much more comfortable in season two, becoming more consistently funny. There's good supporting work here from Mary Hollis Inboden and, especially, Matt Oberg, who was a minor player in season one but was incorporated more into season two and was a big reason the second season was so much better. The actors in the central family also do a pretty solid job, though outside of the main character, Kenny, it did feel like they hadn't quite figured out what to do with all of them. I think, given some more time, the writers would've been able to hone those characters and find them better storylines. Alas, the show was cancelled after 29 episodes, so they won't get that chance.

24. Galavant (Season 2 - 2016, ABC) - This was light and fun. It was a musical comedy that didn't take itself too seriously and wasn't afraid to get meta every now and then. In fairness, it sometimes went too long without any real laughs, but I felt it made up for any lulls in humor with some pretty good songs. In fact, a year and a half later, the music from "Galavant Intro" still pops into my head every now and then. I can totally see how this show wouldn't build a big enough following and I get why it was thus cancelled, but I think it's a shame. It was a very likeable show.

23. Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Season 3 - 2015-2016, Season 4 - 2016-2017, FOX) - This is a weird show for me, personally. It's a show that I'm never excited to see pop up in my DVR, and yet I find myself enjoying every episode I watch. I never could put my finger on why I was so conflicted about it until recently. And listen, this is going to sound insulting, and it maybe, kinda, sort of is, but here it goes: this is a really fantastic show despite the fact that there are almost no good characters in it (minus Captain Holt, who is multilayered and excellent). What I mean by this is, the show is so funny and well written that it rises far above its characters and premise. This is why I feel no enthusiasm when I see the show was recorded. I don't particularly want to spend time with any of the characters. They almost all started out pretty broad and mostly unlikeable and have never really changed. But once I get into an episode, I'm reminded that the writing is so smart, the plots are well done, and the jokes are really funny. So, see, what I'm saying is not actually an insult, it's backhanded high praise. I guess.

22. Great News (Season 1 - 2017, NBC) - I thought this one was pretty good in just the small taste I got of it in its first season. There are some hints of brilliance here, even if it's not quite there yet as a whole. I have high hopes for Great News though. I think it could come into itself really well and become another Tina Fey 30 Rock-type, quality comedy.

21. The Simpsons (Season 27 - 2015-2016, Season 28 - 2016-2017, FOX) - This old train keeps chugging along, delivering a few plus episodes every year and mostly decent ones (and, to be fair, a few that are clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel for story ideas). I know it's not cool to like The Simpsons anymore (or it hasn't been since like the third episode of the second season or whatever), but it's like comfort food to me, and I still get some laughs from it, so I stick with it.

20. Class (Season 1 - 2017, BBC America) - So, I think the optimal number of episodes for a TV season is somewhere in the 10-13 range. Any fewer and you're generally left wanting more, and any more than that and you start running into issues with filler episodes. Class had eight episodes in its first season and it absolutely could've used two more, at least. The beginning and the ending of the season felt too rushed. Almost all the relationships were established very quickly in the first episode and could've used a few more to come together. And at the back end of the season, a lot of the plot hinged on relationships between characters that we just didn't see enough of to really get a true feel for. Basically, the season-long arcs needed more room to breathe and develop. On the bright side, the episodes in the middle of the season were really good, the high points coming in episodes 1.6 ("Detained") and 1.7 ("The Metaphysical Engine, or What Quill Did"). Both episodes gave the characters chances to expand on themselves, while placing them in interesting sci-fi scenarios. Class was a good show overall, but it likely would've been several spots higher on this list if it had at least one more episode in the beginning of the season to develop relationships more, and at least one more before the season finale to better set up the emotional stakes to come. (Also, fair warning, the show has been cancelled after one season and the last episode ends on something of a cliffhanger, so if you’re considering looking into this, that might be something to factor in.)

19. The Mist (Season 1 - 2017, Spike) - Let's talk vulnerability again. If I say anything positive here about The Mist, I do believe I will be the first person on the internet to do so. The Mist is amazing in the sense that it has somehow managed to piss off three very distinct groups of internet people. First and foremost, fans of the original novella and/or 2007 film are upset that this show is only very loosely based on those works instead of a direct adaptation. In fact, this show shares almost nothing with them: not characters, stories, or giant Lovecraftian monsters. (The giant Lovecraftian monsters being missing from the show seems to be the crux of the majority of these complaints, which, in a sense, I understand. You tuned in looking for one thing and didn't get it. Okay. But I kept seeing these complaints pop-up after every episode. I mean, no monsters episode one? Shame on the show. None in episode two or three? I guess, still shame on the show. If you're still watching episode nine waiting for the giant monsters to show up and you don't realize this show isn't going down that road -- at least not yet -- then come on, man, shame on you.) The Mist the show really doesn't share much with The Mist the book and The Mist the movie other than a setting in Maine and the idea that there's a spooky mist. Personally, I don't mind this. My issue with the Frequency adaptation was that it tried to be too much like the movie without really branching off into its own thing. I'd rather a show try something different. Otherwise, why not just watch the movie again? The second and third angered groups are mirrors of one another. The second group is upset that the show touches on issues like rape, LGBT people, and other things deemed too social justice warrior-y (imagine this written in that spooky, blood dripping font). Seriously, go check out the reviews on IMDb and count how many of the bad ones use at least one of these terms: “liberal,” “agenda,” social justice,” “politically correct,” etc. I mean, don’t actually go and read them. Never do that. Just know that it’s a lot of them. You get what I’m saying. The third group is upset that the show doesn't handle these issues with the most grace. I probably come down closest to the third group's point of view. The show doesn't handle these issues well. I get why people don't care for it, even if I think they're being maybe a bit unduly harsh. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd even recommend watching this show. It's very clumsy. Characters make lots of nonsensical decisions just to advance plots. There are a few twists and turns that aren't handled well. Dialogue can be awkward sometimes, and at other times feel forced. And yet. AND YET! ... I like this show. I think I watch it the way I watch old James Bond movies. I feel like I'm hate watching it, except I don't hate it. I feel like I'm watching a train wreck, except it isn't wrecking. It's running fast and loose on those rails, for sure, but I don't think it's off them. I'm tuning in with enthusiasm every week to see what crazy stuff is going to happen, intentional or not, and the show doesn't disappoint in that sense. Sometimes it does something really creepy, and sometimes it does something really nutty, and sometimes it does something sort of surprisingly sweet or funny. And then sometimes, the writers do something nutty that isn't meant to be nutty, but definitely plays out that way, and that's also kind of fun. Either way, I'm constantly entertained by this program. I'll also add just some genuine praise at the end here: the show looks good -- it's shot well and feels appropriately eerie at all times -- and I think the actors are doing a decent job with the given material. Maybe chalk it up to airing in the slower Summer months, but this is one of the few shows I actually actively looked forward to every week. And if this show gets cancelled and we never get more episodes, well, we'll always have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appearing out of the mist, shooting a priest with an arrow, and dragging him off into the forest to kill him while a nude Frances Conroy stands nearby. This is a thing that really happened on the show. [Update (9/27/17) - The show was cancelled today, and even though it felt somewhat inevitable, the news is still just... crushing. I find myself thinking about this show a lot, even like a month after it has ended. It has stuck with me in a very weird way. It also means the spec script I was strangely compelled to write for this shall never see the light of day. Oooh. Is that a joke? Is he being serious? I guess we’ll never know...]

18. Family Guy (Season 14 - 2015-2016, Season 15 - 2016-2017, FOX) - Family Guy is still really good for a couple laugh out loud moments each episode, and a couple of conceptually interesting, outside-the-box episodes each season, which are often the high points.

17. American Dad (Season 13 - 2016, Season 14 - 2016-2017, TBS) - The show, fortunately, hasn't experienced any drop in quality in moving from FOX to TBS. It's a great comedy that is at its best when it gets really weird and dark, and it can often get really weird and dark.

16. Fear the Walking Dead (Season 2 - 2016, Season 3 - 2017, AMC) - This can be a real frustrating show. It constantly takes two steps forward and one step back. Sometimes it's a big step, sometimes it's just a little step, but either way, it never seems to maintain its forward momentum. Season two was better than season one, and season three is better than season two was, but the show still makes some vexing choices, mostly with its characters’ behaviors and motivations. That said, I find myself liking a lot of the show. I like the setting. I like the mood. I feel like it's carved itself out a nice piece of the Walking Dead world and is telling stories unique to it. The show has two characters -- Colman Domingo's Victor Strand and Rubén Blades's Daniel Salazar -- who are fascinating and entertain me almost every time they're on-screen. Kim Dickens's Madison Clark has slowly been getting to this point, but she still suffers from the steps-back thing. I think Fear the Walking Dead could possibly wind up with some better seasons than the flagship show, but it hasn't been able to quite reach its potential yet. [As of 9/16/17, I’m through episode 3.10. There are six episodes left to air in season three. // Update (10/16/17) - Finished the season. I don’t want to pat myself on the back too much, but I really think my "two steps forward, one step back" analysis nailed this show. I found myself turning that exact thought over in my head after almost every episode in the back half of season three. Characters grow in an interesting way, but the plot feels super contrived to get them there. Or the plot takes an interesting turn, but then the characters act like dummies. I feel like the problems all stem from the show not knowing how to handle its characters. Madison's looping character arc is to be calm and collected for a few episodes, then act psychotic, and when pressed, yell about how she'd do anything to protect her children. Intriguing characters like Strand and Daniel are pushed to the sidelines to give more time to Alicia, complaining again that she's not a kid anymore and needs her space, or Nick, going through another battle with the newest manifestation of his addiction problems. Oh man, he's addicted to danger now instead of drugs? That's nuts. Developing characters, some on the cusp of potentially interesting character growth, get killed off, seemingly at random. It happened twice in season three -- once in the premiere and once in the finale -- and was done so carelessly, it left almost zero impact. You're thinking, What? Did he just really die? ... Huh. There's something to be said for watching a show where no character feels safe, but if the deaths feel too random, then they become pointless. There's a big difference between that and feeling constant fear for the characters' safety. One is having two main characters go to war and knowing either could die. The other is having a parachuting circus bear land on top of one of your main characters and eat him alive. If it feels like that's the case with a show, then who cares? Why should I invest emotion into any of these characters if they can apparently be crushed by a runaway snowmobile at any moment? ... This addendum came out a lot more negative than I intended. I like the show. I still feel it has potential to be better. I just hope it can get there someday.]

15. The Walking Dead (Season 6 - 2015-2016, Season 7 - 2016-2017, AMC) - It certainly has developed a pattern at this point, where you sort of know the season's most exciting points will come at the beginning and end and the middle parts of the season will slow down a bit and contain some filler. Still, the filler in The Walking Dead can be quite entertaining, even at its measured pace. Occasionally, too, you get a filler episode that's brilliant. Episode 6.4, "Here's Not Here," is an episode told almost entirely in flashback, but it's one of my favorite hours of television in the past few years. The show has its faults, absolutely, but it also tells good stories set in an interesting world and is filled with a cast of intriguing characters played by quality actors. Also, Trevor from Grand Theft Auto V shows up every now and then and that's a really fun little thing for me and almost no one else who I watch this show with.

14. The Grinder (Season 1 - 2015-2016, FOX) - This one's cancellation hit me hard. The Grinder was one of my favorite broadcast comedies. It was filled with sharp writing, great running jokes, good cast chemistry, and even some subtle but well-done meta jokes. I think this is the quality and type of show that could pick up some cult status down the road if people come across it.

13. Archer (Season 7 - 2016, FX; Season 8 - 2017, FXX) - I don't know of many shows this late into their runs that try out such wildly different approaches to storytelling. These approaches work to differing degrees. I think season eight's "Dreamland" worked better than their private eye run in season seven, but neither works as well as the spy stuff from the earliest seasons. Still, there's excellent, smart writing here, and great cast chemistry, and when the two combine and all the characters are bantering, it doesn't really matter what the setting is, it's hilarious.

12. Review (Season 3 - 2017, Comedy Central) - Review is such a funny show presented in such a cheery way that it really sneaks up on you how dark it truly is. Season three was a great, hilarious way to bring to an end what was a really underappreciated series. Andy Daly was tremendous throughout the entire run. Five stars.

11. Gotham (Season 2 - 2015-2016, Season 3 - 2016-2017, FOX) - I enjoyed season one. It was a stylistic police procedural set in Gotham City, pre-Batman. Interesting enough. Probably would've settled in somewhere in the 30s on this list. But Gotham really found itself in season two. It got more serialized and, at the same time, it started letting loose. Since then, it's become one of my favorite shows because everyone involved seems to be having fun: the writers appear to be trying to out-crazy themselves with their plots and over-the-top dialogue, and the actors are reveling in all of it, giving big performances at every turn. On top of it all, it's just a compelling show to look at, full of weird colors, and interesting costumes, and intentional anachronisms. I don't come in anymore trying to hold on tight to the Batman canon, I just enjoy it for the wackiness it is.

10. Eyewitness (Season 1 - 2016, USA) - I really liked the characters in this show. Eyewitness features perhaps the best portrayal of a gay relationship I've seen on television. That's maybe not too high a praise seeing as many gay relationships are between minor characters or are just lightly touched on, if a show bothers to include them at all. (And a lot of relationships, though maybe more so in film than television, often seem to end in some kind of penance-like tragedy.) Eyewitness does something fairly unique, as far as mainstream television series go: it allows the gay relationship to be front and center. The gay characters are the leads and thus their wants and motivations are handled with a lot of respect from the writers. Their relationship is allowed to play out and breathe and grow because its central to the plot of the show. I really appreciate this show quite a bit just from that perspective. The show also does another relationship well: the marriage between Julianne Nicholson's Helen and Gil Bellow's Gabe is also, perhaps, one of my favorite portrayals of marriage on television, at least in the last handful of years. (Of course, looking over my list, it doesn't seem like I watch a lot of shows involving married characters, so maybe this isn't too high a praise either.) Helen and Gabe's relationship goes through a lot of ups and downs, depicting the difficulties of marriage and love under stress, and keeps you invested the whole time. These characters aren't perfect and they make bad decisions, but do so in a way that's, for the most part, logically consistent -- coming from a place of uncertainty, anxiety, or fear. This isn't to say the show is flawless. It isn't. Like many a serialized show, sometimes characters will make a questionable move to advance the plot that gives you pause. And there are some subplots that seem just a bit like filler to make it to that full ten episodes. In general, though, the show is a pretty tightly plotted thriller with some great characters (including some supporting ones I haven't mentioned but that fill out the cast well), interesting aesthetics, excellent music selections, and solid acting from its leads -- especially Tyler Young and James Paxton, who play the gay teens, and who throw themselves pretty fearlessly into the love story. Eyewitness was originally pitched as an anthology series, but its fans liked the main characters so much, they started an online push for more stories involving them in any potential second season. They got loud enough that the show's producers responded, saying that they were strongly considering scrapping the anthology idea and brainstorming how to continue the characters' stories. Of course, this all hinged on getting a second season pickup, which failed to materialize, rendering the whole discussion moot. I find myself of two minds about this. On one hand, sure, I would've loved to see more of these characters. On the other, I'm aware that you can't just have a show about how life is great for everyone. That asking for more episodes means asking for more suffering for these characters (especially on a serialized show), and maybe these characters don't need to suffer more. Maybe throwing these very small town characters into another murder mystery would feel cheap and bend the limits of plausibility. Maybe trying to stretch out character arcs that were only planned for one season into multiple seasons is asking for trouble. Perhaps, in the end, it's best to just let these ten episodes stand as the neat little complete story that they are, and remember the show as that.

9. Superstore (Season 1 - 2015-2016, Season 2 - 2016-2017, NBC) - This is an excellent comedy. It feels weird to call it a throwback, but it sort of is a throwback to the late 2000-early 2010s slice of life, workplace comedies like The Office and Parks & Recreation that, for one reason or another, don't seem to be as in vogue anymore. The characters on this show started out solid and have grown. The writing, in both jokes and plot, is sharp. And the cast really gels from top to bottom. One of the best comedies on network television.

8. The Good Place (Season 1 - 2016-2017, NBC) - The degree of difficulty is very high for this show. It's a heavily serialized comedy, which means it could easily get lost in storytelling and miss out on jokes, and, conversely, easily do too many jokes at the expense of storytelling. The Good Place falls into neither trap. It tells a compelling story, full of twists and turns and flashbacks, and remains hilarious while doing so. The show has great producer bloodlines -- a lot of people who formerly worked on Parks & Recreation, including creator Michael Schur, work on this show -- but even then, it really surprised me with its quality. The whole main cast is very good, led by Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, who's doing some of his best work in years. I thoroughly enjoyed the first season and I'm very curious to see where it goes.

7. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (Season 3 - 2015-2016, Season 4 - 2016-2017, ABC) - Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has two of my favorite characters on television, Phil Coulson and Melinda May, who are portrayed wonderfully by Clark Gregg and Ming-Na Wen, and are a big part of the reason I look forward to each episode. Beyond that, though, the show itself is cleverly written. It's filled with great, snappy dialogue and really excellent sci-fi stories -- especially season four, which was essentially broken into three different, riveting chapters. Also, it mixes in some cool spy stuff every now and then, which is always welcome. This show hits a lot of my favorite genre sweet spots and is a ton of fun.

6. American Crime (Season 2 - 2016, Season 3 - 2017, ABC) - This show is not a ton of fun. American Crime is a gritty, intense look at some truly dark subject matter. I went back and forth on where to rank this on my list. Since it's an anthology show that tells a completely different story each season, I considered ranking season two and season three as separate shows. I ultimately decided against it, but had I done that, season two would likely be higher on this list, potentially in my top three. Season three would be much lower. Season two was an emotional powerhouse of a show. It had several stunning moments of incredible acting, directing, and writing. It was not afraid to let heavy moments sit and featured some amazing long shots that cut right through you. Season three, unfortunately, seemed to lose its focus. It had too many major stories and none of them really had the kind of impact the one, central story of season two had. I also think season two did a good job of focusing on the crime itself, which became the source of the drama that unfolded. Season three focused too much on the social impact of various crimes, which, in theory, could've been an interesting path to take, but in practice, just wasn't dramatically strong enough.

5. Animal Kingdom (Season 1 - 2016, Season 2 - 2017, TNT) - This show shares some producer bloodlines (Jonathan Lisco, Christopher Chulack, and John Wells) with another show I used to love: Southland. You could even see some of that show's gritty style in season one of Animal Kingdom. And while I liked season one, I think it was sometime around the early part of season two that it hit me that this might be one of my favorite shows on TV. I feel like the writers made some very subtle adjustments early on in season two that made the show more, let's say... accessible. Animal Kingdom is adapted from the 2010 Australian film of the same name. It's a family crime drama (or a crime family drama, either/or) with interesting characters and a cool setting -- a Southern California beach town is fairly unique for the kind of story being told here. They also manage, several times each season, to pull off some really fun to watch capers, which range from humorous to thrilling. It's appropriate that the show is called Animal Kingdom, because the main family does sort of remind you of a pack of wolves. They're violent and aggressive and voracious (in a couple of ways). They'll snip at each other, allegiances will shift, tensions will arise, but ultimately, you do feel like they are part of the same pack. That, in the end, they (mostly) do care for each other, even if it seems like an uneasy alliance amongst predators.

4. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Season 2 - 2016, Season 3 - 2017, Netflix) - 30 Rock is one of my all-time favorite comedies. I don't think Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is exactly at 30 Rock's level, but when it's firing on all cylinders, as it often does, it's damn near close. Ellie Kemper does a great job playing Kimmy, a character whose ticks could be grating if Kemper's acting wasn't so charming, and Tituss Burgess's Titus Andromedon is one of the funniest characters on television. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt currently holds the position of my favorite television (slash-internet television) comedy.

3. Fargo (Season 3 - 2017, FX) - I do believe this was the weakest of all three of Fargo's seasons, but, even then, it's still among the best shows on TV. Top notch writing, acting, direction, cinematography, music -- just the complete package. I really love all the little references and homages to other Coen Brothers' works, too. It's such a great show. Season three slowed down just a bit in the middle, but it had a decent finish and a couple of really brilliant episodes in 3.3, "The Law of Non-Contradiction," and 3.8, "Who Rules the Land of Denial?". I eagerly await any more stories in this universe.

2. Person of Interest (Season 5 - 2016, CBS) - Person of Interest was five seasons of excellent action, sci-fi, paranoia thriller drama, and probably one of my favorite drama series of all time. These final episodes were among some of its best, filled with strong, emotional storytelling and great acting. The series finale was fantastic. A great send off to a great show.

1. The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story (Season 1 - 2016, FX) - God this series was brilliant. And strange. And engrossing. And all at the same time. It felt very real, and yet, at the same time, completely over the top. It somehow cast fresh light on a story we all sort of knew and kept it interesting, despite the fact everyone is familiar with how it ends. It had great direction and strong music choices. It did some great recreations of events. And, most importantly, there's really superb acting here from Sterling K. Brown, Sarah Paulson, and Courtney B. Vance. Also, possibly John Travolta? A year and a half later, I'm still not sure if he missed the mark as Robert Shapiro, or if he was genius in the role. I enjoyed it, and maybe that's what counts most? Ultimately, whether I liked or didn't like everything that happened in this show, it enthralled me at the time and has stuck with me for a long time since. And that has to count for something, right?

Okay, just a few more miscellaneous notes on shows I started watching and never finished, because I've already written this much, what's a little more?

-Baskets (Season 1 - 2016, FX) - I watched several episodes of season one but dropped out somewhere in the middle. I just wasn't getting enough humor out of it to continue spending more time with Galifianakis's character. I do want to point out, though, that Louis Anderson was terrific. At a certain point, his performance was pretty much my only reason for watching. I just got tired of sticking with the show just to get the few minutes of his character out of the episode.

-Lethal Weapon (Season 1, 2016-2017, FOX) - I watched a few episodes. There were some decent action sequences and good chemistry between the two leads, but ultimately, I just wasn't getting enough enjoyment out of the whole thing to keep recording it. I had a moment where I questioned if I needed to keep watching this: will this provide me anything? And just asking that was enough to give it up. Plus, I already had one dumb, police procedural to put on in the background with MacGyver, which I liked slightly better, so I went with that instead.

-Pitch (Season 1 - 2016, FOX) - I watched like three or four episodes. I was intrigued by the concept and liked that the show got to use real baseball teams and stadiums. It just felt like there was less and less baseball stuff each successive episode and more melodramatic relationship stuff, which wasn't particularly interesting.

-Powerless (Season 1 - 2017, NBC) - This had such a talented cast and a fairly interesting premise. Unfortunately, it was just never clever or funny enough. It was like on the edge of funny, but more often than not, it acted like a lackluster, cliché office comedy. Tremendous opening credits, though.

-Training Day (Season 1 - 2017, CBS) - There was just nothing here for me. It was a cop show with a little dark underbelly stuff but not enough to really stand out as anything new. I do remember thinking that Bill Paxton was far and away the most interesting part of this show, bringing some life to an otherwise rote procedural. Then again, Bill Paxton often was the most interesting part of whatever projects he participated in. It's a huge shame we'll never again get to experience him liven up other works.

Finally. We're done.

Hopefully this will all be cleaner next year. First, I spent a lot of time this year explaining my thoughts on shows while next year, I might just be able to do shorter recaps of the season. I don't know. We'll see. Sometimes I get to ranting and can't be stopped.

Second, it's not going to be a year and a half of shows.

Third, in making this list, I found myself slightly horrified by how much TV I've watched. Out of shame, I might end up watching fewer shows next year. Of course, shame doesn't seem to have a lasting effect on me. I'm pretty good at getting over it. For example, look at any of the movie or TV lists I've published on the internet for any and all to read!

All right. That's enough. If you read this much, thank you. Enjoy the Emmys.

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Annual Lists of TV Shows I Saw the Past Year

#Reviews #Annual Lists of TV Shows I Saw The Past Year

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