Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Chatter

Margaret’s Picks for the Best TV of 2017 (So Far)

Watching is The New York Times’s TV and film recommendation newsletter and website.

Happy July, everyone. We’re halfway through the year, and below I’ve sorted through what I think are the best TV shows of 2017 so far — a strange and joyous task. I’m including any show that aired any new episodes this calendar year or became available to American audiences in 2017, even if it aired earlier in its nation of origin.

These are my arbitrary rules, and I love them as I love all arbitrary things.

Image
Carrie Coon and Justin Theroux in “The Leftovers.”Credit...Van Redin/HBO

‘The Leftovers’
Where to watch: HBO Go
Add it to your Watchlist

One time on the El in Chicago, I saw a man finish his book, clap the cover closed, draw the book to his chest, close his eyes and inhale deeply, like a mom in a fabric-softener commercial. He had a serene look on his face, as though he were thinking, “Now that was a book.” That’s how I felt at the end of HBO’s imaginative, operatic “The Leftovers.” Now that was a show.

I want shows that have big ideas and big feelings, but I also want shows that care about how people truly think and behave. I like shows in which serious people in serious moments still crack jokes, and shows in which emotional conflicts are not based on lies but on genuine no-win differences. This is “The Leftovers,” completely.

I also want shows that are alive — this sense of essential TV-ness. For most media (movies, books, albums, plays, paintings, photographs) we get to enjoy work only when it’s finished. Television shows are habitual works in progress, growing and changing along with and on behalf of their audiences. “The Leftovers” — like its characters, like its viewers — changed over the years, and found meaning in growth.

More excellent dramas: “The Americans” had an off year, but it was still head-and-shoulders above just about anything else. “Better Call Saul” uses sometimes larger-than-life characters to cultivate moments of ecstatic story, in which the show’s ideas and performances, the grounded parts and the loopier parts, suddenly all match up perfectly.

[ Like “Game of Thrones”? Sign up for our Season 7 newsletter. For eight weeks, our obsessive experts will send you exclusive interviews and explainers, as well as point you to the internet’s best articles on that week’s episode. ]

Image
Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan in “Catastrophe.”Credit...Ed Miller/Amazon Prime Video

‘Catastrophe’
Where to watch: Amazon
Add it to your Watchlist

No other show right now, drama or comedy, understands its characters quite as well as “Catastrophe” does. This adult rom-com, created by and starring Rob Delaney and Sharon Horgan, can put its characters in any situation — generously in love, bitterly arguing, in moments of absolute joy or of deep human anguish — and the behavior doesn’t feel forced or phony. The show is hilarious, and the jokes illuminate the characters’ specific points of view — they’re not just interchangeable zingers.

Please Like Me
Where To Watch: Hulu
Add it to your Watchlist

The fourth and final season of this tender Australian comedy debuted on Hulu in January. The series creator, Josh Thomas, stars as Josh, a young gay man with goofball friends and lovable but challenging parents. It’s the kind of comedy that makes me aspire to be part of the main friend group, if only I had a quirkier sweatshirt wardrobe. The show is smart and funny and compassionate, and it’s frank about mental illness and about sex.

More wonderful comedies: Amazon’s “I Love Dick,” a beautiful ode to obsession from the “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway, is gutsy and wry and smart — and, like “Catastrophe,” a few episodes too short for my liking.

Chewing Gum,” a sometimes-raunchy British comedy about a young woman trying to find her path, had a stellar second season. The final season of “Girls” was wonderful, even though I did not love the finale. Season 3 of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” had some of the best jokes the series has ever had — including digs at Robert Moses’s racist urban planning strategies — but also the silly sight-gag of having Titus wear multiple pairs of sunglasses at once. Glorious. Finally, “Veep” had perhaps its best season ever. It’s a filthy masterpiece.

Image
Regina King, left, in “American Crime.”Credit...Nicole Wilder/ABC

‘American Crime’
Where to watch: Netflix
Add it to your Watchlist

Season 3 of this anthology drama focuses on contemporary slavery in America, and it’s gutting without being preachy. Regina King, playing a weary social worker, delivers a short monologue in the second episode that is among the best scenes of the year — a beautiful marriage of writing, performance, direction and purpose.

“I feel like I’m on this lifeboat that only holds 10 people,” she says. “And there was a time that I didn’t care that it only held 10 people. I’d try to get 100 people on that boat. But now I just accept 10 is all I can get. Maybe 10.”

With these few lines, the audience can understand this character — and everyone like her, everyone good but put-upon — and how she sees the world, and also how the world sees her. Just extraordinary.

Other terrific mini-series: Hulu’s “National Treasure,” about a famous comedian accused of sexual assault, is perceptive and tense without being lurid. “Shots Fired,” starring a fantastic Sanaa Lathan as a troubled-cop character who’s usually a man on other shows, explores racial politics in the fallout of a police shooting — the shooting of a white college student by a black police officer. “Fargo” continues to be one of TV’s most effective mood-creators, a show whose atmosphere is so fully actualized you sometimes feel as though you’re intruding. And “Big Little Lies,” easily the buzziest mini-series of the year, was beautifully realized and narratively satisfying in a way shockingly few shows are.

Image
Stephanie Beatriz and Andy Samberg in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”Credit...John P. Fleenor/Fox

‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’
Where to Watch: Netflix
Add it to your Watchlist

This giddy, bawdy, brilliant musical pulled off quite the feat in its sophomore season: It took you where you thought the show would take you, but then it kept on going right past that. The show specializes in neuroses, and this whole season was about digging into the origins not only of Rebecca’s anxieties, but of everyone’s, and also into the fallibility of their respective coping mechanisms. All that and Patti LuPone as a rabbi? Never leave me, “CXG.”

‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’
Where to watch: Hulu
Add it to your Watchlist

“Brooklyn Nine-Nine” has fully become its happy, absurd, loving self, the true heir to the kindness-comedy “Parks and Recreation.” It’s a show that never, ever piles up on my to-watch list — if there’s a “BK99” available, it’s the first thing I watch.

This season, the show committed to more episodes that pit the Nine-Nine against the world, and that’s where many of its most fruitful sources of humor come from. That and the disdain with which the characters spit the word “pilsner.”

Other network comedies that were fantastic this year: When Zoey on “black-ish” got into college this season, I cried real tears. “The Last Man on Earth” sometimes frustrates me, but it never bores me. The “Bob’s Burgers” episodes about Louise’s mock trial and Tina’s debate brought special joy to my life. And “The Good Place” — just squeaking onto the list, having aired four episodes in January — was snappy and enjoyable at the beginning of the season and then “oh my God” great by its finale.

Also wonderful: “Jane the Virgin” remains a beautiful dramedy and, more important, it’s television’s most story-obsessed show. Its third season took some big gambles with the plot, and they paid off.

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT