What began as a slightly soapy portrait of an affluent coastal town transformed into a really gripping, moving character drama about trauma, toxic relationships, and the challenges in being a “good parent.” The murder mystery / greek chorus thread was easily the weakest, but that did little to take away from the really strong performances from Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman, or the hilarious little Darby Camp.

Oh man, what an odd season. I just LOVED the first half. It was threatening to finish at #1 at about mid-September. All our characters were in drastically changed places in their lives, and it was fun and tense and great seeing everyone handling their new circumstances. So much potential for cool storylines. Then just as my actual #1 started trending upward, You’re the Worst belly-flopped. They decided Edgar wasn’t being “the worst” enough, and forced him down a road I didn’t quite buy. They couldn’t find interesting things to do with Lindsay’s new direction, and ended up teaching her the same boring lesson multiple times. The finale ALMOST ended in a pretty cool place, then I guess the show lost its nerve and cheaped out. I’m not sure what to hope for in the upcoming final season, since it kinda left off in a boring place.

Michael Scott Foster was a brilliant addition in the second half of Season 2. His energy fits in perfectly with the rest of the cast, and his chemistry with Rachel Bloom is fantastic. The songs don’t hit at a 100% rate, but there are still gems, and the characters continue to go through believable and at times hilarious evolutions. Rebecca in particular is able to change in real ways, but continue to find new ways to be flawed and hilarious. Trent. The comparison with Breaking Bad has been made multiple times, but the cliffhanger end of S2 E12 is up there with Walter White growling “Run!”

Season 3 so far has been a lot more hit-and-miss. It doesn’t know what to do with Josh, which makes sense because he really was only there as a device for Rebecca. Some of their takes on genres didn’t feel warranted, and just took me out of the show. But Rebecca’s arc has been really compelling and moving and pushes even further into this latest trend in TV to give mental health a real serious look and hopefully move the needle in de-stigmatizing those types of issues.

In some ways, this show is a lot more simplistic and less grounded than the rest of the top shows, but it was just such a delightful journey that I didn’t care. It was funny, idealistic, and full of wacky caricatures. I’ve only seen a small bit of Gilmore Girls, but Miriam is clearly drawn similarly to Lorelai Gilmore, in how she runs circles around all the idiots around her, but is marvelously entertaining in doing so. Shit, Marvelous is in the title. Not taking it back. And Rachel Bosnahan, who was serviceable in House of Cards and Manhattan, is shockingly good in this. No offense to her other roles, but they didn’t give me an indication she had this fast-paced dynamism in her. The secret weapon though is Alex Borstein, who has a marvelous (fuck!) chemistry with Mrs. Maisel as her tough but vulnerable manager who comes alive as much as her comedy protege. And finally, Tony Shalhoub plays another “type” I’ve seen before, but has this pitch-perfect delivery that frequently made me spit out my soup. (Okay, you caught me, I don’t eat soup. But I had to clean something off my TV.) While many of the moments could potentially be described as cheap, they were still thrilling and fun and there was just a lot of joy to be found in this marvelous (@#$%) show.

While the recent discoveries about Louis CK have tarnished anything with his name on it these days, I can’t help but hope that Pamela Adlon’s Better Things was more her than him. While certainly having the same haphazard, unstructured feel of its predecessor, Things is more mature and self-assured. Pamela isn’t the put-upon sad sack spectator that Louie frequently was. She is flawed, in different ways, but takes responsibility for everything she does. It is unfortunate to me that this brutally honest, melancholy, moving season has to come with that asterisk, but Adlon’s (who directed every episode) fresh voice I feel has to be recognized, and I’m going to give her credit despite all the nonsense.

Alright, sure, Planet Earth sticks out a bit compared to the usual fictional, scripted TV I normally include. But I’d argue that a lot of the appeal is in the carefully crafted stories pulled from the thousands of hours of gorgeous nature footage compiled. The first Planet Earth was jaw-dropping and made me look at nature in a fresh, new way, and the most recent incarnation was no different. Just watch the Ibex sidling an inch from death every day along the steep cliffs, or a bat fight a scorpion… all narrated with weight and class by David Attenborough. if this show doesn’t make you want to splurge on an ill-advised 4k TV, I don’t know what will. Just a monumental achievement in TV and a joy to experience.

While Season 1 was mostly a quirky oddity with moments of catharsis, Season 2 completely redefined itself with a much deeper empathy toward its characters and a focus on personal discovery and growth. In the first few episodes, this centered mainly on Chip (the central, less irritating Zack Galifinakis twin brother), picking up where the first season left him, running away from his life to live on the road. This adventure tempered his egotistical personality from the first season and made him feel more human in fun and compelling ways. However, the remainder of the season was really focused on Chip’s mother Christine (Louie Anderson), whose health scare last season acted as a wake-up call, and pushed her to focus on herself and her well-being and her life, which was one of the more touching characters arcs of the year. I was once again struck by how Louie Anderson disappears into the part, and paints this heartbreakingly genuine portrait of a character you can’t help but cheer for.

You’ve seen this already. It won the Emmy, won the Golden Globe. It’s been established as a very good, extremely timely show. The flashbacks of the leadup were chilling in how familiar they felt, in a world where what was normal or acceptable changed overnight. A world where fear makes people act against their own best interests, like Serena (classic Trump voter) does. I found myself comparing the show to the Negan arc on The Walking Dead. Both were bleak, heavy, violent… but Handmaid’s wasn’t relentless, and took no perverse joy in torturing its characters. It didn’t kind of fetishize its villains with an “iconic” instrument of brutality or cool swagger. We got to live in Offred’s head and get a measure of satisfaction hearing her tell her captors to go fuck themselves. We got the occasional glimpse of humanity and hope sprinkled in with the gloom. I loved how we were just thrown into this world with just enough to follow the beats we needed, and we slowly get fed the complexities of the parties involved and how we got to where we were. Most of the characters that seemed like one thing at the start turned out to have their own conflict, and weren’t so easily distilled. It didn’t quite keep the full momentum through to the very end, but I was impressed by how much mileage there was in this dystopian world, and how it ended up being much more than the dark mood introduced in the strong pilot.

It was a tall task to top the stellar second season of The Leftovers (my favorite show of 2015), and while Lindelof and Perrotta didn’t quite manage it, they still put together a hell of a send-off. Where season 2 felt like a huge departure (PUN INTENDED!) from the first, the 3rd and final season felt a bit like a retread in places. It also felt a bit more disjoint, like it was a series of strong one-off stories, rather than the more cohesive arc of season 2. The biggest disappointment for me was Episode 7, which was essentially an attempt to one-up the already flawless “International Assassin” episode from S2, and seemed to miss the point of what made that so amazing in the first place. Yes, it was certainly wackier. However, those few nits aside, there was still a good deal of new stuff to unpack here, and those disjoint stories did add a lot, especially for some of the characters who hadn’t gotten much attention previously, in particular Kevin Sr and Laurie. While the finale was a bit divisive, it gained additional levels in subsequent viewing, and I thought it was a really beautiful and unexpected way to end the series.

“Computers aren’t the thing… they’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” It’s the frustratingly vague pearl of inspirational wisdom dropped by slick snake oil salesman Joe McMillan early on in season 1. Over the course of 4 seasons, that central theme holds true in numerous different and often unexpected ways for our central characters, no more so than in the stirring final chapters.

You may have read my impassioned plea from before the season started to get you all on board the Halt Train™. I wanted to make sure you were patient with the slimy Joe, the overlooked Gordon, the punk-hacker Cameron, and the underutilized Donna, to see what they would all become with the training wheels off.

Halt and Catch Fire started out of the gate tackling a fairly unique space, as a show about a group of people building something. No sexy murder mysteries, no gunfights, no mobsters, no robots trying to discover how to be human. In other words, the stakes couldn’t be lower. As much as I adore the show, it’s not too hard to see it being a tough sell for their marketing team. “It’s the 80s. Three young unlikeable professionals are trying to build a slightly faster computer.” Now, their actual preview for the series premiere was actually pretty cool, and set to Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams”, so when I saw it, as computer professional and a child of the 80s, I was on board. Disappointingly, the first episode was not the sexy, fast-paced, exciting heist I expected from the trailer, but rather a Don Draper type dude blackmailing his way into a job building a pretty boring-sounding computer, so that’s where I stopped.

While constructing the “Giant” of the first season wasn’t necessarily peak TV drama, over the next few seasons, the show would find ways to mine drama out of a group of people creating something together. Different personalities clash over the future direction, or between art and commerce, or how to balance family with an all-consuming fledgling startup. Halt for me was at its best (and most tragic) when it positioned characters I loved against each other, but each side really had a valid point, and goddamnit, just stop fighting, okay??

In addition to being about building something, it was as much a show about how to deal with failure. Characters were constantly recovering from that fatal mistep and figuring out “what’s next.” Characters reinvented themselves, and so did the show. Over the course of the series, it shifted the focus to a new venture and a new team, a new setting, and even a time jump or two.

I struggle a bit to find words for why the final season struck me so deeply. I suppose the show had made me extremely invested in these characters and relationships, and their final arcs felt both surprising and perfect in just about every case. Not everything was a happily ever after, but when I think back on where everyone was left off, I smile. When I think of the final two lines of the series, I smile. The ending hearkened back to where the series started in a number of ways and reminded us of how much everyone had grown and changed through the fights, betrayals, forgiveness, and moments of putting ego aside. Some characters grew apart, and others found a way to get over past hurts and reunite. An awkward teenage girl finds a place she is appreciated and understood building software with weirdo grownups, in one of my favorite unexpected arcs of the series.

At risk of belaboring this point, this season was headlined by three prominent female characters who were REALLY good with computers. While the focus on female tech geniuses isn’t new this season, film and TV could certainly use more representation like it to normalize the idea that women can be good at science too. This is one reason the story with the young girl felt so important as well, that the adults in her life were encouraging of her interests and gave her the opportunity to excel at what she loved. Hopefully these examples will inspire some of the literally hundreds of viewers of this critically acclaimed series to get into math and science. *sly wink*

Finally, I just want to give a shout out to the music of Halt and Catch Fire. A great soundtrack can really enhance the connection you make with movies and TV, like they’d grabbed me with their trailer, and their soundtrack was pretty special. Obviously they had some 80’s selections, since that was the setting of the show, but they weren’t generally the obvious picks like you’d find in Stranger Things. There were some deeper cuts from some artists you know, a lot of tracks that had that 80’s feel, but were actually indie tracks from the last decade. The original score was a subtle, smooth set of instrumental tracks that felt both modern and a callback to the synths of the 80’s. The few older tracks I knew before the show are now forever imbued with more weight from the meaty scene they played over, and the new ones I downloaded because of the show will only ever make me think of Donna and Cam.

It’s amazing to me how commonplace it is starting to feel to get a final season of a great show leaving at its peak, and on its own terms. Two years ago, Justified went out on a high note, last year it was the introspective Rectify (NOT the same show), then this year we got a near-flawless resolution for Halt and Catch Fire, a show that, to my bewilderment, no one has seen, ever. I have a feeling this might grow more commonplace with the expanding landscape of TV, and the lowered pressure on a show to appeal to a wide audience and bring in more revenue for Charmin. Artists seem to be getting a bit more free rein to build (and finish) things according to their vision. This means sometimes you’ll get a LOST, but other times you might get a Halt and Catch Fire.