Time does 2 lists every year-10 Best series and 10 Best Episodes. You can go to these links to see the full write ups and give them the clicks.
The Top 10 TV Shows
10. Love, Netflix
9. Speechless, ABC
8. Veep, HBO
7. Better Call Saul, AMC
6. O.J.: Made in America, ESPN
It’s a somewhat brutal coincidence that this virtuosic series aired after The People v. O.J. Simpson seemed to have exhausted all possible conversation about the trial. But the two projects actually complement each other beautifully. The fictional FX series is content with a cipher at its center, plumbing just about everything but Juice’s psyche; the ESPN documentary (which is being submitted to the Academy Awards as a single, very long film) pursued the former football star’s motivations with a singleminded obsession. Tracking Simpson’s life from star athlete unconcerned with the social-justice concerns that obsessed his peers to disgraced would-be reality TV performer, director Ezra Edelman finds stunning footage to tell his story. The verdict? In Edelman’s telling, Simpson spent his life trying to outrun his race, only to see his white friends abandon him after the racially divisive trial—and after that, his appetites doomed him. That two projects as accomplished as 2016’s two O.J. stories could coexist does more than testify to the beautiful breadth of TV these days: It shows us just how multifariously relevant the Simpson story, presumed for too long to be half-forgotten tabloid trash, really is.
5. Atlanta, FX
4. Late Night With Seth Meyers, NBC
3. The Americans, FX
2. The Girlfriend Experience, Starz
1. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, FX
What else is there to say? This majestic piece of television said it all over the course of ten episodes of unparalleled sophistication and confidence. Gender, race, class, and celebrity all butted up against one another over the course of Simpson’s trial, as the series laceratingly shows. The series is at once merciful to its characters—everyone from widely-mocked defender Johnnie Cochran (Courtney B. Vance) to hated prosecutor Marcia Clark (Sarah Paulson) gets given back their humanity—and relentless in its depiction of their complicity in a system that, on many levels, failed to deliver justice. The depth of the show’s ideas make one wish there was, somehow, more, but the show’s remarkable cohesion of rhetorical and visual style makes a compelling case for the miniseries as TV’s perfect form. The season’s ending, with Simpson (Cuba Gooding Jr.) freed but a pariah, was the stuff of Greek tragedy—and the show’s creators, not shy about being showy, pitched it, perfectly, at just that level.
The Top 10 TV Episodes
10. “Stephen Colbert’s Live Election Night: Democracy’s Series Finale,” Showtime
9. “San Junipero,” Black Mirror , Netflix
8. “Meth(od),” High Maintenance, HBO
7. “Fallen Heroes,” The Carmichael Show, NBC
“The Cosby Show was so important,” Jerrod Carmichael (played by Jerrod Carmichael) tells his family as they debate the legacy of disgraced comedy icon Bill Cosby. “It made us realize we could go to college. I mean, we didn’t, but we knew we could.” This episode, the strongest, in a terrific season, applied Carmichael’s template of half-hour-long round-robin debate to a topic that cut very close to the bone. Every character in Carmichael’s universe had a strong opinion about Cosby’s misdeeds and his legacy—or several, butting up against each other—and the debates were at once vibrantly hilarious and rightly dispiriting. Carmichael, a contrarian by nature, knows that this debate’s impossible to settle. Cosby’s impact, after all, is ratified by the fact that a sitcom about a black family living in suburban Charlotte is closer to unremarkable today than it would have been in the 1980s. And the diminishment of his legacy is proven by the fact that this family rejects respectability politics, that in their endless arguments they are as unapologetically outspoken and crass as white families have been allowed to be. The whole series is a debate about its NBC predecessor: This one, brilliantly, just moved the matter from subtext to text.
6. “The Winds of Winter,” Game of Thrones, HBO
5. Megyn Kelly’s interview with Newt Gingrich, Fox News
4. “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, FX
The People v. O.J. Simpson was so strong across the board, and so unified in its vision and style, that it’s hard to pick out a single installment worthy of special consideration, but the episode dealing with Marcia Clark’s particular challenges as a female prosecutor is such a good showcase for Sarah Paulson that it deserves special mention. The series at large used the trial to prismatically examine every conceivable issue connected to it; in miniature, this episode looked at all the different sorts of misogyny Clark faced, and all the ways in which she failed to make the trial any easier on herself than it might otherwise have been. The scene in which Clark, having so internalized the critiques of herself and so misread what the public wants of her, flaunts a grievous new perm—that’s heartbreaking stuff.
3. “Hope,” Black-ish, ABC
An acquittal of a cop in a fictional racially-motivated misconduct case sets off the action of this episode, sophisticated even by Black-ish’s high standard. The debates that ensue among the Johnson family—over whether to raise children with hope or fear, over whether to protest or avoid rocking the boat—feel only more relevant now than they did when the episode aired in February. The episode manages to deal in granular detail with concerns many families face, all while shrewdly managing to use each character to their best comic effect.
The famous scene from that episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvykfyGTnbQ
2. “Toast Can’t Never Be Bread Again,” Orange is the New Black, Netflix
1. “Fish Out of Water,” BoJack Horseman, Netflix
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Both OJ series were out of this world and both worth watching. But that ESPN documentary was amazing.
