I wish I could say there was a particular rankings-based method to how I divided the list, but in all honesty, I just wrote it out and then split it evenly by word count. The list is dropping in three parts, one each morning from Wednesday to Friday.

Onward with part one, which we’ll get out of the way fairly quickly:

Stuff I Didn’t See

Chernobyl, Succession, Watchmen

*shrug* I might get around to Chernobyl; it’s short.

BoJack Horseman

I meant to finish this before I wrote up this article, but I’ve been putting it off for higher-priority stuff, and then I just didn’t. (I was disappointed in season 5, but I’ve heard enough good things about season 6 to try again.) If it warrants mentioning, I’ll write up an addendum once I get to it, or edit this article, or whatever.

Undone

I put this in for you, Julius. He says it’s good. I’m gonna make some time to see it.

Now, the list:

28. Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Season 6
NBC

Honestly, I could barely tell you a thing about this season of the show. But I liked it enough to keep watching every episode and to stay with it next season, and that’s literally enough for this list.

27. Good Talk with Anthony Jeselnik
Season 1
Comedy Central

Wish we’d gotten more than six episodes of this; I was a big, big fan of The Jeselnik Offensive. This format takes the energy down a notch, where Jeselnik sits down one-on-one with a variety of comedians, probably because Comedy Central didn’t want to risk Jeselnik commenting on the news and making an entire continent pissed off at him again.

Still an enjoyable and funny show, though not one that had me singing its praises the way Jeselnik’s last show did (or the way his specials often do).

26. Stranger Things
Season 3
Netflix

This one suffered compared to the first two for two reasons: One is the opening couple of episodes, where Hopper inexplicably reverts to the same drunken misanthropic asshole he was at the start of the series. That compounded the second, where the big character moments for Hopper and Billy sort of lay flat– both of them were portrayed as such assholes that their Heroic Moment didn’t create the desired response, and worse, didn’t really connect to their past actions in the way good drama does (particularly Hopper’s).

Nonetheless, most of the cast is as great as ever, some of the new additions are terrific (loved Maya Hawke this season), and the show managed to sustain my interest even as the plot built slowly (and was ludicrously built around Scary Russians, a trend that’s worryingly formed in Hollywood since the 2016 election). So, it was fine enough to deserve mention here.

25. American Dad
Seasons 15 and 16
TBS

I’ve been sort of steadily catching up on American Dad, so admittedly it’s a bit of a blur, but I’m astounded as to how well the show keeps up the quality and consistency this late in the game. It’s not perfect– I have noticed the new seasons are leaning on gore-based humor a little much for my liking, where the comedy is simply supposed to come from how grotesque it is– but for a show that’s been on this long, with 276 episodes at the time of this writing, the fact that it isn’t a shell of its former self is an incredible achievement.

We got at least one all-timer in this batch, too: the Twilight Zone-esque “Rabbit Ears,” wherein Stan finds an old, huge CRT TV on Heavy Trash Day and becomes obsessed with a Playboy After Dark-style show that has no listings or record of ever existing. “Top of the Steve,” where Steve gets admitted to an all-girl’s boarding school by mistake until Roger realizes he’s dangerously close to spinoff territory, is also a highlight. And even though Family Guy (pre-cancellation) did a Willy Wonka riff already, “Jeff and the Dank Weed Factory” works because it involves Stan developing a grudging respect for Jeff after seeing him capable in his own environment. Also, it has Snoop Dogg.

24. Lights Out with David Spade
Season 1
Comedy Central

I like my panel shows, I like my “comedians talking about comedy” shows, and this newest vehicle for David Spade not only cranked out a ton of episodes, but also had a wide variety of good guest stars, from comics more known to comedy nerds (Tim Dillon, for example) to old friends from his SNL days (Adam Sandler gets an entire episode as the only guest; the episode with past “Weekend Update” hosts is maybe the best of the season).

Spade does a remarkable job of keeping with the times, at a time when so many comedians his age seem to be railing about how they don’t get young people and that’s the young people’s fault. He doesn’t come across as someone trying to be younger than he is, either, just someone who’s adapting to a changing world, and I appreciate that.

(Did you know David Spade was a main cast member on two different sitcoms that ran for seven seasons? Now you do.)

23. Game of Thrones
Season 8
HBO

First, I’m just going to say that I at least enjoyed the action and finding out exactly how all the major plot pieces finally fit together. I really enjoyed the performances, too; in the hands of lesser actors, the characters’ behavior would have been incomprehensible. That said, I’m now going to repeat my post on “TV moments of 2019”:

Game of Thrones: “Dany kind of forgot about the Iron Fleet.”

The best thing you can say about season 8 of Game of Thrones is that the performances combined with the plot points let you construct a plausible narrative of character motivations for their decisions. Of course, the writing is supposed to do that work, and season 8 was a damning indictment of David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as storytellers. While the last few seasons, though often compelling, had moments where the writing clearly suffered from not having George R.R. Martin’s text to draw from anymore, they were usually moments of dialogue (“You want a good girl but you need the bad pussy” is probably the leader for “unintentionally hilarious line of the decade”). This, though, was something else; Benioff and Weiss showed they had seemingly no idea how to construct a narrative, instead just making sure the final season checked off the narrative boxes they were told to.

Their lack of care and their disinterest was made even more clear by the “inside the episode” segments, where they offered no analysis or insight, often just repeating to the viewer what they had just seen on screen. The chosen moment is from a rare time where they tried to explain how a plot event happened; fittingly, their explanation is the lamest and most implausible one possible: the story’s great conqueror simply forgot about an entire fleet of ships mobilized against them. You couldn’t sum up the laziness Benioff and Weiss brought toward the series end better if you tried.

Fittingly, they’d go to compound their mistakes by talking at a panel how they essentially learned on the job how to run a $1 billion TV show, which almost immediately lost them their deal to write a Star Wars series. (The euphemism “scheduling conflict” has never been so transparent.) It’s hard to come up with a bigger indictment of Benioff and Weiss’ abilities than that they were in charge of what was arguably the most anticipated final season of television of the 21st century, and they bungled it so badly that the entire show has become an afterthought.

In the final analysis,

22. The Good Place
Seasons 3 and 4
NBC

Hoo boy. This show went from #8 in 2017 to #15 last year to #22 this year. It slipped last year in part because the early part of season 3 was kind of dull and wheel-spinning; unfortunately, the show has become more and more that with time. Whereas for two seasons the show burned through plot quickly and kept up the viewer excitement created by a world where plausibly anything could happen and the status quo could completely change at any time, the final two seemed to deliberately slow down, less interested in the metaphysics of its world than in rehashing old plots. (I don’t know how many episodes or plots we need about our Good Place Crew trusting one another, but I do know we don’t need this many of them reassuring each other that they’re all great.)

Admittedly, this ranking might be colored by the episodes I’ve seen in 2020, wherein one was given to absolutely no plot at all, and another spent half its time on the “character reassurance” plot we’ve seen over and over. I was excited for a show that Michael Schur created with a strong and fast-moving plot that would outweigh the tendency toward stagnation and love-fests that previous showed he worked on or created fell into; it seems like, with the critical climax approaching, he’s fallen into his old habits of “Everyone is great and everyone gets what they want.” The performances and characters are still terrific, but The Good Place went from arguably the best show on network TV (as my 2017 rankings suggested) to not even the best show in its one-hour NBC time block. (Which, admittedly, still makes it one of the best shows on network TV. Just not the hilarious thrill ride it used to be.)

21. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Season 4 (Part 2)
Netflix

It’s been nearly a year since this dropped, so forgive my shoddy writing. Kimmy Schmidt certainly delivered with a final season at a level with the rest of the show– and, really relevant to recent pop-culture discourse, one of the best Cats jokes I’ve ever seen. Kimmy gets a strong ending, too, sweet and in a way that feels appropriate and earned. Titus Andromedon remains one of the funniest sitcom creations of the last five years. Bon voyage, Kimmy.

20. Rick and Morty
Season 4
Adult Swim

It’s hard to rank this higher with only five episodes, especially when one of those episodes I found a bit disappointing. Still, this remains an incredibly funny show and one of the most inventive on TV, one which always carries the potential to be the best show airing, potential it occasionally lives up to (“Edge of Tomorty: Rick Die Rickpeat” and “Rattlestar Ricklactica” being the best examples this year).

You know what this show is; you know if it’s for you.

19. Veep
Season 7
HBO

Veep became a different show after Armando Iannucci left the series and handed showrunner reins over to David Mandel. I didn’t care for Mandel’s version as much, although it gave us at least one truly great comic plotline in the rise of Jonah, but the final season gave us a Veep ending appropriate for the show it became, if not the show it once was, as Selina mounts another run for president.

The ending of Veep carries some clear influence from The Shield, and its final scene resonates in the same way: Selina Meyer, having gotten everything she wanted, alone in her office, having destroyed every relationship she ever had to get there. It was strong and effective; after some early-season stumbles, the final season snapped into focus on Selina’s will to power and what terrible things she would do to get and maintain it. By the end, she’s driven off everyone who matters– her most consistent operative, Amy; her own daughter Catherine; even Gary, her unfailingly loyal bagman, gets the cruelest fate of all. A potent ending, even if an Iannucci-run show almost certainly would have taken these last three seasons a different direction.

One thing that really worked for me in the Mandel era: the rise of Jonah. It peaks this season, with more and more preposterous details coming out about his life and with him finding a strong support base among equally angry, entitled white males. This base of support allows him to broker a deal at the nominating convention; naturally, as we find out later, he almost immediately fucks it up.

The throw forward to Selina’s funeral was a nice touch, too; it was worth seeing exactly how everyone’s lives ended up (including, again, Catherine, living with Marjorie in Europe and not even attending, watching on TV with their now-grown son Richard). Perhaps my favorite touch of all– aside from, possibly, Selina’s ex-husband Andrew turning out to have faked his own death (a strong possibility all along)– is Dan, who realizes that DC life isn’t for him and becomes a southern California realtor with a hot younger wife. Okay, scratch that: It’s President Richard Splett.

Part two of our list comes tomorrow morning and part three Friday morning.

We’re getting closer now to the top of the list. Here are six more standout shows:

12. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Season 4
Netflix

Kimmy Schmidt‘s final “season” has, as has become weirdly commonplace in recent years, been split in two. (The final six episodes, the “second half” of season 4, were just released less than a week ago.) What I did think about the first “half” of season 4 (screw this, I’m just calling it season 4) is that the six episodes we did get were of the show at the top of its game. Highlights include Lillian tagging along with Kimmy to a tech conference that ends up with her being mistaken as a guru and convincing everyone to let loose and have sex, and “Party Monster: Scratching the Surface,” entirely given over to a fictional Netflix true crime documentary about Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne, Kimmy’s abductor, arguing for his innocence (primarily through an idiot DJ and an MRA who lives with his mother). As the show goes into its final episodes, it’s hitting its stride on all fronts, and even if I don’t have a fun video like last year’s “Boobs in California” to embed, “Party Monster” works a stand-alone episode if you’ve never seen the show and just want to get a taste of its humor.

11. Corporate
Season 1
Comedy Central

One of the best new shows of the year, Corporate arrived with a fully-formed worldview, dark and bleak and, in truth, the natural endpoint to office comedies which either highlight the workaday drudgery (The Office) or the clearly evil omnipotent corporation (Better Off Ted). Created by stars Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman along with Pat Bishop, the show’s palette of grays and dim lighting give it the bleak feel of the late-capitalism perspective on corporate life: A relentless grinding away of humanity, without hope for better, simply because it’s the only way to survive in a world which no longer even makes a pretense toward freedom, of markets or otherwise. (“I’d rather give up on my dreams and live in a one-bedroom apartment than chase them and live in an efficiency apartment.” “Capitalism is a prison.”)

But, uh, it is a comedy, and so, again calling back to The Office and Better Off Ted, it mines hilarious material both from the mundane ways people cope with corporate life (and particularly as contrasted by childishly-optimistic Matt vs. coping-through-nihilism Jake) as well as the absurdly evil maneuverings of Hampton DeVille itself, at this point really heightened from the real world only in presentation and not substance (best represented by the intense and imposing presence of Lance Reddick as CEO Christian DeVille). Two standouts among the season are “The Long Meeting,” which brings in Fred Willard as an old-school member of upper management (and in typical Fred Willard fashion, everything that comes out of his mouth is pure gold), and season finale “Remember Day,” which is the sort of surprising-yet-inevitable depiction of a corporation co-opting a tragedy for profit that it’s as surprising it hasn’t been done before now as it is funny.

10. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Season 2
Amazon Prime

And in the very opposite of visual style from Corporate, we have The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I’ve said many times before that I don’t care about the visual aspects of television nearly as much as the storytelling aspects, but sometimes a show comes along with such a precise and vivid sense of style that it simply compels my attention. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is one such show, and season two is even more on point with the fantastic recreation of 1950s New York City (and Paris, for a bit) and the costume design. (Hell, even I’m jealous of Midge’s ability to coordinate and wear hats.)

Of course, none of that would mean much if the show wasn’t a lot of fun to watch, too, with great performances all around and the highly stylized Amy Sherman-Palladino dialogue that rises up to the level of care put into every other aspect of the production. Midge’s growth into a standup is almost preposterously easy as depicted on the show, but as much fun as it is to see her perform, the more important aspect of the season is how her double life is starting to fray at the edges and eventually become untenable to maintain as a secret. Perhaps just as important is how Midge’s father Abe starts reconciling his inclinations for the familiar and the conservative with the fact that his wife and children have rich inner lives that don’t jive with his impressions.

The show has some great comedic moments, too– and not just when Midge is on stage. The Bell Labs scene had possibly the best recurring-buzzer gag since “Complaint Box.” And Susie, Midge’s manager, deciding she needed to be nearby to get Midge gigs while the Weissmans were at… for lack of a better term, I’m calling it “Jewish Family Summer Camp” in the Catskills, doing so by just buying a plunger and posing as a staff plumber. (And it’s pretty sweet how the real staff warms to her.)

Substance is more important than style, but whew, when the style is so thoroughly coordinated in all aspects and so dazzling, style is extremely pleasurable.

9. Brockmire
Season 2
IFC

I was a bit of a latecomer to Brockmire, but the Hank Azaria vehicle was the sort of genuinely dark comedy you don’t see enough of these days. Azaria plays Jim Brockmire, former major-league play-by-play announcer whose life went to hell after he caught his wife cheating on him. After going on a ten-year bender or so, season 1 saw him try to reclaim his career by heading to West Virginia and the minor leagues, to be the play-by-play announcer for the Morristown Frackers, and along the way delivering one of the funniest segments on TV in 2017 (his impassioned ranting about a rival town that sparks a fan riot at the game).

Season 2, with Jim’s success in Morristown having translated into a job with New Orleans’ AAA team– as well as into his “Brock Bottom” podcast, celebrating his debauchery and bringing in more money than his actual job– maybe isn’t quite as good as season 1 (although it’s a hard call, honestly), but has a lot to recommend for it, with the brisk pace of the plot, sidekick/producer Charles’ growth out of Jim’s shadow and into his own man, a competition with an upstart young broadcaster for a major-league job, and Jim dealing with the past in ways that are sometimes sentimental, sometimes less so. (His scene on the mound with former Morristown pitcher Pedro Uribe is a comedy highlight.)

Beyond that, the season outdoes BoJack Horseman at its own game of “formerly successful, self-destructive alcoholic talent barely crawls back at redemption,” particularly with a great scene of Jim trying to do the right thing at the worst possible time, and then most of all in the finale, when Jim hits rock bottom by taking up with someone who truly is the abyss, who’s committed to self-destruction in a way that makes everything we’ve seen Jim do up to this point seem like pretending at it.

8. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Season 13
FXX

Not quite on the level of season 12, but also not nearly as uneven as critics suggested, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia manages to deliver in typically outrageous Sunny fashion, whether answering the question of whether Dennis will come back, competing to win an escape room (a natural fit for the Gang’s dysfunction), or… well, beating up a bunch of children. (And, of course, the Gang has taken to quoting Donald Trump with regularity.)

The Gang, in their own fashion, has tried to take on the issues of the day, from the question of how to label the bar’s bathrooms to possibly the best overall episode of the season, “Time’s Up for the Gang,” with its perfectly dark twist on the subject matter. Then, of course, there’s the season finale, surely much discussed by now, and deservedly; “Mac Finds His Pride” provided perhaps the single most stunning sequence on scripted television this year.

This part of the list, it can be hard to separate one show from another in terms of quality. Sunny gets the nod over the previous few for what is, admittedly, perhaps a sign of bias– that it was one of my few watch-it-immediately appointment-viewing shows, and it never let me down, and was outrageously funny for stretches and episodes. But who cares if that’s biased? This is all subjective anyway, and in the end I have to find a reason to break the tie. I liked the last few shows quite a bit, but I didn’t anticipate them each week the way I did It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

7. Superstore
Seasons 3 and 4
NBC

There were a few missteps here and there in 2018’s Superstore episodes– I really hated what they did with Sandra, Carol, and Jerry, for example– but when the show both delivers so much good material, and is so compulsively rewatchable, I was able to overlook those for what the show delivers on. It’s consistently funny in that well-observed character-comedy way, with a great cast top to bottom– Jon Barinholtz as recurring character Marcus is a highlight; nearly everything he says is riotously funny– and even some plot points that pay off the drudgery and exploitation of big-box stores in a way one wouldn’t really expect to see on network television. (And even with some moments of kindness; see what Glenn does for Mateo in “Managers’ Conference.”)

Weirdly, the two leads might be the weakest part of the show; it seems like creator (and Office alum) Justin Spitzer wanted to create a Jim/Pam dynamic between them, but Jonah and Amy are not nearly as believable or interesting as a romance. Thankfully, the show began to shift away from the importance of that pairing and into letting all the actors do what they do best. (Besides Barinholtz, Lauren Ash and Mark McKinney rate as highlights among the main cast, and Johnny Pemberton is hilarious any time he shows up.)

The show has that feel of being easy to rewatch without ever going stale that is rare to pull off but so rewarding when a show lands that dynamic. I know Greg Daniels and Michael Schur have both gone on to do many different other things since then, but Superstore is, more than any of their shows, the modern successor to The Office.

TOMORROW: The final six.

24-15. PRETTY GOOD YOUNG GUNS (AND TWO OLD GUNS)

24. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Season 3

Season three of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt expanded our characters’ quests for self-growth; no longer was this just about Kimmy trying to get past her trauma, but she’s making everyone around her better people as well. Lillian, Jacqueline, and Titus all learn to take a chance on love (and Titus starts confronting what a shitty person he’s been). Plus, we get great stuff like Kimmy as hostage negotiator, Jacqueline trying to taking down the Washington [BLEEP]skins, and Titus going LEMONADE upon seeing Mikey with another man.

Best of all, it gave us one of the catchiest earworms of the year: Titus, after taking a job recording vocals for a conspiracy theorist songwriter (Judah Friedlander) whose conspiracies are often racist, asks his soul for forgiveness before taking on the last number, a song that betrays all his principles. I’m talking, of course, about “Boobs in California.”

23. Angie Tribeca
Season 3

When season 1 of Angie Tribeca dropped all at once last year, it came off like a fun Police Squad! homage, albeit one with a little bit too much winking and mugging. Season two represented a significant leap forward for the show, committing to the absurd reality of the world while also adding long-term plotting, dramatic stakes, and great guest appearances (Heather Graham and Maya Rudolph among the best). Season three continues this trend, with a hilarious running CSI riff about how many of the episodes take place in a different city. If you wanted something like Police Squad!, Angie Tribeca is the closest thing you’ll get on our side of the shores¹, and if you didn’t get enough Deon Cole from Black-ish, you can rectify that problem here, too.

1 – Not to leave that implication hanging, I’ve heard good things about the UK’s A Touch of Cloth, but I’ve never seen it.

22. Santa Clarita Diet
Season 1

Surprisingly for a show starring Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant, Santa Clarita Diet dropped to relatively little fanfare when it was released on Netflix early this year. Victor Fresco’s latest high-concept sitcom, however, turned out to be a fun, breezy show (well, sort of, considering the topic) with enough momentum to keep the viewer hooked. The premise was simple: What if you woke up one day and somehow became a zombie who could only eat human flesh? That’s what Santa Clarita realtor Shiela Hammond is dealing with, as her laid-back (and now put-upon) husband Joel tries to manage this with a minimal amount of murder, while also hiding it from their daughter and their nosy sheriff’s deputy neighbor. Barrymore and Olyphant are great (the latter in particular is playing a type less Seth Bullock and Raylan Givens and more “high school athlete and surfer dude in his 40s”), but the real stars are the high school-aged kids, next door neighbor Skyler Gisondo and (especially) Hammond daughter Liv Hewson.

21. Trial and Error
Season 1

Anyone who’s failed to fill their “mockumentary about a weird small town” hole since Parks and Recreation ended would do well to check out Trial and Error, a self-contained season about a murder trial in a small fictional South Carolina town. Perhaps the closest analogue is “Parks and Rec if Ben were the main character and also a trial lawyer.” East Peck is easily as weird as Pawnee, the jokes never stop coming, and Nicholas D’Agosto (Masters of Sex, Review) makes an excellent straight man as the New York lawyer (and yes, in East Peck, “New York” carries the connotation you think it does) assigned to defend poetry professor Larry Henderson, charged with the murder of his wife.

John Lithgow is incredible as Henderson; he manages to be sincere and guileless, making you believe he actually didn’t do it, while doing so many stupid, boneheaded, irrational things, and just plain ignoring his defense attorney’s advice so often, that you believe he certainly could’ve done it. The whole cast is great; Lithgow likely won’t be returning for season two, as the show will focus on a new case, but the best of the returning actors is Jayma Mays, who infuses DA Carol Anne Keane with an aggression and sexuality than can best be described as “scorching.”

20. Superstore
Seasons 2 and 3

Anyone who’s failed to fill their “breezy workplace comedy” hole since The Office ended would do well to check out Superstore, created by former Office writer/producer Justin Spitzer. Superstore is set in a Wal-Mart analogue called Cloud 9 and features Ben Feldman as the business school dropout who takes a job there on a whim, America Ferrera as the former teen mom who’s been stuck in this management job to make ends meet for years, and Mark McKinney as the well-meaning but often milquetoast and inappropriate boss. (A highlight from the Valentine’s Day episode is McKinney’s Glenn realizing, during a sexual harassment seminar, that his pursuit of his wife, a co-worker at his father’s store whom he asked out for a year and who only went out with him because his father threatened to fire her if she didn’t, was inappropriate: “Jerusha, our whole marriage is based on a sex crime! No, no, no, you only think you love me. You were my victim!”)

The whole cast is great; Lauren Ash is a particular highlight as a rough analogue to Female Dwight, similarly no-nonsense about authority and the rules while also lacking social graces and having weird obsessions of her own (in this case, birds instead of beets). An easy to watch and easy to rewatch hangout sitcom.

19. Great News
Seasons 1 and 2

Anyone who’s failed to fill their “absurdist behind-the-scenes-of-a-TV-show comedy” hole since 30 Rock ended would do well to check out Great News, produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, and created and run by 30 Rock writer Tracey Wigfield (also featured in the cast as Beth). 30 Rock was originally pitched as being about a news show, and Great News returns to that concept, with Briga Heelan (Ground Floor) as an up-and-coming, ambitious producer who doesn’t have much of a personal life, and Comedy Legend Andrea Martin as her mother, a well-meaning meddler who takes an internship at the news network. It doesn’t quite have everything 30 Rock did, but few shows could live up to that mantle, and it delivers absurd and quick humor as well as anything on TV.

The two news anchors are probably my favorite performances of the series: John Michael Higgins is predictably delightful as the bombastic veteran anchor Chuck Pierce, worried about becoming irrelevant in the modern age. (Check out his attempt to explain Internet acronyms from the season 1 finale.) But the revelation here is Nicole Richie, whose vapid, style-obsessed persona gives way to a lot of hidden ambition, killer business instincts, and in general much more savvy than she lets on. The show’s a real treat, and arguably it, and not Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, is the true heir to the 30 Rock throne.

(And yes, believe it or not, all three of these previous shows aired Thursday nights on NBC. Is Must-See Comedy Thursday back? Check back in the next couple of days just to be sure!)

18. Curb Your Enthusiasm
Season 9

While this wasn’t the most consistent season of Curb, the fact that it delivered as many laughs as it did after six years off the air was an accomplishment in its own right. Larry seems to have even fewer fucks to give now; you can almost see the wheels turning in his head as to whether or not he should say something, and then deciding to because he just doesn’t care about the social consequences anymore. This occasionally results in absurd and unbelievable behavior from Larry, but those moments weren’t enough to ruin the season for me, stacked up against the funny ones.

The seasonal arc, which revolves around Larry trying to put together a musical called Fatwa!, then having an actual fatwa declared on him after mocking the Ayatollah on Jimmy Kimmel, gave us some great comedy, particularly from guest appearances by Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth Banks. The whole season had some great guest stars; F. Murray Abraham and Lauren Graham deserve shout-outs as well, but the real treat is Lin-Manuel Miranda, who quickly develops a petty rivalry with Larry for the ages, one that ends in hilarious, winking fashion. And to top it all off, the show gave us “Foisted!”

17. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Season 1

Well, I love standup comedy, and I love fast-talking, witty women set in a time period where they could be called “dames,” so this was right up my alley. Amy Sherman-Palladino’s latest focuses on a housewife who’s driven to standup comedy by a personal crisis. (Oddly enough, the inciting incident is similar to that in Crashing, although here it’s much more clear that the wronged party is in the right, and we actually see her struggle to recover from it, as well as take action to move forward, not just have breaks fall into her lap.) Occasional anachronisms aside– and my personal distaste for seeing a woman pine for a loser, no matter how much of a life they’d built together– the show is a blast. Rachel Brosnahan is pitch-perfect as Miriam “Midge” Maisel, whose quick thinking proves handy not only on a standup stage but also when sensing an opportunity (such as bailing Lenny Bruce out of jail when she’s also arrested for “indecency”). Alex Borstein is also terrific as Susie, the comedy club booker who sees just how talented Midge is and decides to become her manager, also becoming her friend despite herself.

The show also depicts an accurate (from what I’m told) portrayal of Upper West Side Jewish life in the 1950s; my favorite performer in that regard is Tony Shalhoub as Midge’s father Abe, a master of gruffness and deadpan comic timing. (Kevin Pollak, of all people, is a revelation as Midge’s father-in-law Moishe, and I mean that in the most literal sense: I was shocked to discover Pollak was the actor in question.)

16. The Mick
Seasons 1 and 2

If you weren’t getting enough Kaitlin Olson from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, then FOX’s starring vehicle for arguably our funniest comic actress (and almost certainly our most gifted physical comedienne) will scratch that itch. Olson’s Mickey is a similar dirtbag to Dee, but more of a shrewd scammer and with different motivations; she’s now got to take care of her sister’s children after their parents were arrested for massive securities fraud. What starts as a con grows into a grudging acceptance by all parties of the necessity of this arrangement, and it’s consistently hilarious. Olson is of course terrific, but the rest of the cast steps up their game too, whether it’s Scott MacArthur as Jimmy, Mickey’s sort-of boyfriend and a wise old dirtbag fool; Sofia Black-D’Elia as high school senior and budding female-Dennis-Reynolds Sabrina; Thomas Barbusca as wussy, snotty embodiment of privilege Chip; Jack Stanton as guileless, sweet, yet accidentally terrifying Ben; or Carla Jimenez as the housekeeper Alba, whose main concerns are “protecting Ben” and “finally having someone to unwind and cut loose with.” And yes, I just listed the entire main cast, because they are all that good.

15. Bob’s Burgers
Seasons 7 and 8

Another show whose consistent goodness and occasional greatness seems to be overlooked simply by being such a veteran. In many ways the spiritual successor to classic Simpsons, Bob’s Burgers hasn’t shown any hints of slowing down or declining in quality as it hits the midpoint of its eighth season. The Belcher family remains as weird and delightful as ever; Teddy has an even bigger presence, as the loyal and upbeat version of Bill Dautrieve to Bob’s Hank Hill; the recurring characters are as always used well; and the show’s even begun to experiment with form.  (The season eight premiere rotated numerous animation styles based on fan art of the show; the Christmas episode was the show’s first official hour-long.) It’s hard to find new things to say about the Belcher clan and the strange people that surround them, but sometimes, being just as good as ever and just as reliable as ever is good enough.

Coming tomorrow: Part 3 of 4.

Anyway, we all got really excited when they announced they were going to be starring in a movie as sisters, creatively titled Sisters, and the first actual full-length trailer for that motion picture is out now! Take a look!

It’s an amusing trailer, if not high on laugh out loud moments (the Ballerina Box excepted), but then again Spy had a pretty bad trailer and look at how that turned out. Hopefully the fact that the trailer is just “amusing” means that they’re not giving away all of the best gags in the trailer. The film is directed by Jason Moore, who directed Pitch Perfect which everyone seemed to like, and is written by Paula Pell, who’s worked with Fey and Poehler extensively before, so you know she has a good grip on what makes their humor work.