Top TV Shows of 2017 (runner-ups)

Television is always tricky to rank and quantify in a list like this, anytime you start a show you’re potentially jumping on board for 5 years of ups and downs. If you continue watching a show, it’s likely because your invested in the character’s story and want to find out what happens to them. There are also new shows added every year that compete with ones you’ve watched for years; the sixth season of a show may be comforting, but is not as exciting as the newest and hottest show out there. How do you compare the two? It’s difficult, but that’s what we do here, so let’s do it. First, a few runner ups that I enjoyed.

A technicality, I’m only picking complete seasons, because I don’t think it’s fair to judge something when it’s whole story has not been told, so The Good Place season 2 and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend season 3 are not included, though they are amongst my two favorite pieces of TV released this year.

Veep (season 6)

veep

Fresh off the Boat (season 3)

HUDSON YANG, IAN CHEN, CONSTANCE WU, FORREST WHEELER

Review (season 3)

Review_303_Highlight1_Thumbnail

Review’s 3rd and final season might have cracked the top 10 if it hadn’t been only three episodes. Nevertheless, Review ended the only way it could have, brilliantly pushing Forrest’s neurosis to the most extreme–an endless place of self-sabotage.

Catastrophe (season 3)

catastrophe-season-3-c3_081116_110_edm2656_rt2_fnl.lg_rgb-h_2017

Dear White People (season 1)

27-dear-white-people.w710.h473.2x

The Handmaid’s Tale (season 1)

Faithful

Trial and Error (season 1)

trial-and-error

Making History (season 1)

making_history_s01e01_still_4

Making History (and Powerless below it) were both network shows cut off in the middle of their seasons due to a lack of interest by their network’s audiences. This was a huge bummer because both were charming little shows, neither had the extreme ambitions of your HBO miniseries’, but would have been fun to continue watching. Making History had all sorts of alt-comedy folks and played with American history in ways that were interesting, while Powerless was the only piece of comic book fanfare in the last 10 years to just straight up fail (it makes sense then that it would be the only one I really paid attention to).

Powerless (season 1)

Powerless - Season 1