Mike@Nite’s Top 5 TV Shows of 2017

The other day, I posted my list of my top ten movies of the year, because I am an insufferable film geek and you all must listen to me. But I'm also an insufferable TV geek, so I put together a list of my top 5 TV shows of 2017 too!

Honorable Mentions: Game of Thrones, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Better Call Saul, Fargo, Rick and Morty

5. Master of None - Aziz Ansari's slice-of-life Netflix comedy drama took an already almost-perfect first season and got more ambitious with it. The first episode pays homage to Italian New Wave films of the 1940s and '50s, and from there it jumps to episodes about the realities of dating through apps like Tinder, episodes about the perspectives of different characters, and a Thanksgiving episode that is one of the best episodes of TV I've ever seen, period.

4. Bojack Horseman - This animated Netflix series about a talking horse who stars in movies is one of the saddest shows of all time. It's also one of the funniest, cleverest, most subversive shows I've ever seen. If a line isn't crushing me emotionally, it's making me marvel at how well-constructed a joke it is. This latest season (Season 4) didn't hit me like Season 3 did, but it's still an incredible show.

3. The Good Place - This show is kind of a miracle. Michael Schur, the creator of Parks and Recreation, took this high-concept comedy about a woman who dies and ends up in Heaven and upended it to become one of the most intense shows on TV. Every episode ends on an insane cliffhanger, the story is so compelling, and I've felt my jaw drop from the sheer audacity of this show on more than one occasion. Oh, and also, it's absolutely hilarious.

2. The Leftovers - The final season of this little-watched but strongly-beloved HBO drama aired this year, and it delivered as many answers as it possibly could have. By which I mean, it offered none, but the show was never about the answers anyway. The finale is one for the TV history books, and I think this show will get a whole lot more love as more people discover it over the years.

1. Twin Peaks: The Return - I genuinely can not believe that this is a thing that aired on television and that I got to watch it for a whole glorious summer. David Lynch resurrected his groundbreaking cult series Twin Peaks and broke new ground for the modern age of television. It's slow and it's patient and it's frustrating and it's beautiful and it's weird and it's insane and it's funny and it's horrifying and oh so many other things. Twin Peaks: The Return isn't just the best thing to air on TV this year, but one of the biggest accomplishments in television, period.