Best Shows of 2014

Now that I only use this blog to post these lists instead of writing on it all the time, I find that the TV list comes more down to "shows I want to write about" than "shows I objectively think are the best". At least, this is what sticks out to me when I look back on the year of television. It's what I really remember watching.

Best of 2014

9. Tim & Eric's Bedtime Stories (Adult Swim)


Tim and Eric have always been halfway between bizarre sketch comedy and some sort of horrible David Lynchian nightmare, so it was fun to watch them embrace that second aspect of their work. Some episodes of Bedtime Stories don't even have jokes at all, focusing instead on dark (but still oddball enough to obliquely be considered comedy) story concepts in a Twilight Zone sort of way. Other episodes are just straight comedy, and it's best to think of it as them applying their style to slightly longer-form television and really seeing where their minds will take them. It's often not a very nice place.

8. Doctor Who (BBC)


I was looking forward to seeing the first "old" Doctor of the new series, and I was not disappointed. It's Doctor Who, so of course there's some weak episodes, and I was a bit put off by the Doctor's new habit of insulting his companion Clara's appearance. But that character became a real strength for the show this year as her relationship to the Doctor changed significantly as a result of his regeneration, and her courtship with new character Danny Pink was also a huge asset. After they got on a roll, the show had a string of episodes as strong as anything I've seen the series do, and I liked the renewed focus on good individual stories over convoluted season-long plots that never end up anywhere good. I'm looking forward to more adventures through space and time.

7. Community (NBC)


I don't know if Community truly belongs up here, but just the fact that they took a show that was basically dead, brought back the original creator, lost two main cast members, and ended up with something that didn't suck, that was actually quite good, is pretty amazing. It's not up to the heights of the first three seasons at their best, but damn it, it was Community again. We'll see how the new season on Yahoo works out, but I'll always remember what they pulled off in their last year on NBC.

6. The Legend of Korra (Nick)


Despite weird manipulations and bumbling by Nickelodeon, the crew of one of the best animated action series in years managed to put out not one, but two seasons of their follow-up to Avatar: The Last Airbender in 2014. They were the better two seasons of the show, up there with the best in the whole franchise, and a great way to say goodbye to this setting, if that's what we end up doing. Korra's central characters are older than Avatar's, and that comes through in the story, which is ultimately a more mature tale about growing up and learning you have to face your own troubles before you are able to help others, and that kicking someone's ass isn't always the answer. Not that kicking ass doesn't work once in a while, as the action scenes in these two seasons are up there with anything you'll ever see on TV. It's also great to see a prominent same-sex romantic relationship come to pass in something kids might see.

5. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (FOX)


I'm afraid Neil deGrasse Tyson will become too big for his own good. He's a great ambassador for the value and wonder of science, but he doesn't know everything, and sometimes it seems like he thinks he does. His talents are perfect for Cosmos though, his homage and successor to his mentor Carl Sagan's old series about all the wonders of molecules, galaxies, and everything in between. A lot of what you'll learn in Cosmos is stuff all adults should probably know already, but the fact that Tyson and his crew are still bringing people that information in a smart and accessible way is great, and I love how they directly confront some of the bigger human obstacles in the way of progress. At its best, Cosmos captures the awe and wonder I feel at the real size and possibility of the universe and humanity's future in it, and I think it should be required viewing for anyone with the smallest curiosity about life as we know it.

4. Boardwalk Empire (HBO)


The sense of history in Empire's final season is inescapable, as it closes in on some people, opens up possibilities for others, and brings ultimate closure to far too many. They only got eight episodes and had to skip past several years of juicy gangster dealings, but I feel like we ultimately got everything we needed. Empire isn't quite the epic of crime, family, and politics it wanted to be, but it did an admirable job of working with what it had and providing some great characters and unforgettable moments. A great deal of those moments involve people getting shot in the face, but a lot of times that's how these things went.

3. Game of Thrones (HBO)


A Storm of Swords is my favorite book in the series, and the fourth season of the show mostly adapted its second half, so of course I liked it a lot. However, they also showed a greater ability to change and shift characters and stories around where needed, which is great, because they're going to need it as they go forward into the more recent books. Not every change totally worked, especially one unfortunate sort-of-rape scene that came off worse than the original material, but on a more general level, they're doing a great job of turning a humongous epic into a manageable episodic story, without really making it feel any smaller. One of the most purely enjoyable shows to just watch from week to week.

2. True Detective (HBO)


Coming right in the middle of the McConaughey renaissance (the McConaissance), True Detective used his and Woody Harrelson's skills to their full extent to craft a great, haunting Gothic-noir-mystery-detective THING that defied easy definition and got at the heart of the struggle between good and evil. It covers years of an investigation into a series of strange killings in Louisiana that end up getting connected with a chain of Christian schools, references to an obscure forgotten city (which got me and many others to read The King in Yellow), and a whole lot of problems for the two leads. It will be hard for the unrelated second season to recapture the magic of the first, but we'll always have the lead performances, Cary Fukunaga's great direction, and the flat circle of time to think about.

1. Rick and Morty (Adult Swim)


Rick and Morty is a show about a brilliant old man with a drinking problem who brings his simple-minded but good-hearted grandson with him on trips to other dimensions for various ends which usually end up only serving him. That right there is enough for a good Adult Swim show, but Rick and Morty is definitely something more, already on the same level in my estimation as The Venture Bros. and possibly higher. There's a ton of imagination in every single episode. It will surprise you with story resolutions that are more disturbing than what they could easily get away with, and then follow that up by turning it into something that really profoundly affects the characters. It's sometimes a story about a failing marriage, and mines that for real emotion rather than simple laughs. It's also extremely funny every single week. I laughed out loud multiple times in every episode. That just doesn't happen, you know?

Delayed Entry

This is the best show that didn't air in 2014 but I didn't watch until then.

Prime Suspect (BBC)

The gritty British detective drama that I assume is the basis for the DNA of every British detective drama that followed. Over the course of over a decade, Helen Mirren played Detective Jane Tennison, one of the best realized characters in television. She's a brilliant detective, but also a flawed one; a good person, but also a flawed one. We see the arc of her career in a way you usually don't in a TV show, and along the way she investigates some truly unsettling and cleverly twisty crimes. The double length format is a bit of a slog at times, but if you watch Prime Suspect you watch the maturation of television as a medium. There aren't usually easy answers.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Season 3

Thanks to a few issues I thought Avatar's third and final season was probably the weakest, but still provided a satisfying conclusion to the story and was certainly worth watching. As Aang and his friends get closer to their goal of ending the war, things get more serious and start to weigh pretty heavily on them, as the overall tone shifts slightly. The main characters aren't as kind-hearted and fun-loving as they were when their journey started, which is an obvious thing to happen over time with the future constantly weighing on you, it just isn't used effectively to improve anything. There's still plenty of nice moments and cool action scenes, it just isn't as fun to watch overall. There's one scene in particular that illustrates how the characters could have been handled better, when several antagonists are at a campfire on the beach. They all have things from the past that affected them and drove them towards their current place in life, which is fine and all but the awkward way they all whine about what happened to them in turn just wasn't well written and is kind of hard to watch.

I also have an issue with the pacing for the whole season. There are two big events that occur, halfway through and at the end. That's fine, but because of how everything plays out in relation to these big events, it feels like the first half is filler and too much is forced to be crammed into the second half. Each season, or "book" is named after the element which Aang must master, but he really doesn't spend much time learning about fire like he did water and earth, we're just to take it as read that he did. Either his fire teacher should have been established before the first event, or if they wanted to have it happen like it did (which was pretty appropriate to the story), the first event should have happened sooner. Despite my problems with the season overall, the individual episodes still adhered to the series' high standard of quality, and after a fairly humorous (and really meta) recap, the finale really was everything it should have been. Really impressive action and exactly the ending the story and characters deserved. Besides a couple loose ends left hanging, it was pretty much perfect. And so ended the surprisingly good series, which taking into account the whole picture, is probably the best thing Nickelodeon ever produced.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Season 2

Avatar's second season goes along much in the same way as the first, with a few little changes here and there. It didn't seem to have quite the same amount of embarrassing moments, but not quite the same amount of awesome moments either. It's still a good fantasy action show that succeeds based on its characters. There was always a good chemistry between the Avatar and the two siblings, and the addition of a fourth human party member is a nice one, even if they seem to dip into the well of blind jokes a little too often. They're all fairly funny and capable fighters, and although the constant teasing of their various crushes is a bit irritating as always, it doesn't really get in the way. The primary antagonist from the first season was a somewhat sympathetic character, at least more complex than you'd expect from a kid's cartoon, and his role changes even more as he wrestles over who he really wants to be in season two. At times he can be a prick, but his evolution is one of the series' more interesting aspects.

I'm not quite sure how I feel at the overall direction of the plot in comparison to the first season. There's a greater sense of continuity as the characters are clearly moving on a set path towards a goal, instead of hopping from place to place in various one-offs as the plot moves in jumps and starts, and usually I like that. It's just that some of plot points are more frustrating than I'd like and while the story is interesting, it's the unique and exciting action sequences that drew me into the series, and they're slightly stifled in this season. It's not a big problem though, as things keep moving forward at a generally quick pace and there are still some great scenes. They also do some things that are a little darker than I expected, showing the seedy underside of the earth benders and further driving the point home that things aren't purely good or evil. I'm in a hurry to watch season three and see how the tale ends.

Avatar: The Last Airbender - Season 1

When I heard about Avatar, I was pretty skeptical. Another action show for kids that seems to completely bite anime's style doesn't sound like the best thing over. But after being surprised to hear from many people online that it was actually quite good, I decided to give it a try, and wasn't disappointed. For all intents and purposes, Avatar's first season basically IS a good anime series. It does a lot of things better than most actual anime, using what works and ignoring some of the more tired elements. The animation, especially during action scenes, is smoother than what you usually ever see in a weekly show like this, and the art design is reminiscent of some great things, like the works of Hayao Miyazaki - if you're going to borrow, borrow from the best.

My one problem with it is an unavoidable one - being a show made for kids, it does some things only kids would like. It's generally a serious fantasy story, but it has a strong emphasis on humor, humor that succeeds about as often as it doesn't. It has some witty lines, but a lot of stuff kids might find clever just falls flat at this point. It never becomes a big problem, although it makes some episodes harder to watch than others. Looking past that though, Avatar is a very well done series. After the opening episodes that establish the world and what's going on, there's a nice balance of interesting one-off episodes and plot progression to keep it enjoyable throughout, as it moves steadily towards the season one finale, which is suitably climactic. It's not quite the most original story ever, but there's enough to it to keep you moving forward. And the fights are really about as good as could be hoped for. They do some really creative stuff with the various elemental powers, and the mix of music and animation is always extremely satisfying. Even if you need a kid to justify watching it, it's a pretty cool series.