The INSIDER Summary:
• The networks stepped up, and scripted TV in 2016 has been full of variety.
• "Atlanta" on FX ranks #1 for its surrealism and beauty.
It's always tough to narrow an entire season of a vast medium down to a Top 10 list, but for 2016 it's damn near impossible. This is, hands down, the best year for scripted television since I became a critic of film and TV 25 years ago; it might be the the best year since I started watching TV as a kid in the 1970s. The sheer variety of subjects, modes, and styles was dazzling, and it wasn't just premium cable and streaming services that delivered wild innovation and pitch-perfect classicism; the networks stepped up, too. My initial Top 10 list had nearly 30 titles on it, and the longer I sat with it, the more I added. Some notable programs that didn't make my Top 10 list — such as USA's Mr. Robot and HBO's Westworld — were so formally ambitious that they deserve respect, too; their failures are more interesting than most other shows' successes. So it might be best to think of this list not as the cream of the crop, but as the tip of the iceberg.
10. Search Party (TBS)
Co-produced by Michael Showalter, Sarah-Violet Bliss, and Charles Rogers (among others) this was one of the year's biggest surprises. Swooping out of nowhere to capture a particular slice of the Zeitgeist, this series about a group of spoiled, clueless New York 20-somethings searching for a disappeared classmate managed to brutally satirize specific kinds of entitlement while taking the dawning self-awareness of its heroine (Alia Shawkat) seriously.
9. Horace & Pete (LouisCK.net)
Louie creator Louis C.K.'s mini-series looked and sounded like a taboo-busting 1970s Norman Lear sitcom but channeled the contained, corrosive despair of a postwar stage drama, depicting a bar full of mostly embittered and delusional Brooklynites with compassion and an eye for eccentric detail. It overreached at times, but who cares? There was nothing else like it, and the devastating finale pretty much ruined Simon & Garfunkel's "America" for all of time.
8. Rectify (Sundance)
The fourth and final season of Ray McKinnon's series about a newly released death-row inmate took the show in an even more unabashedly New Testament direction, stressing healing, forgiveness, and transformation. Along with Atlanta, OWN's Queen Sugar, and Cinemax's 1970s drama Quarry, it was also part of a great wave of new Southern fiction that counteracted many of the stereotypes that still fuel too much of American TV.
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