Before continuing with our rankings, a quick reminder that this list isn’t a bell curve—the majority of the shows on this 88-item list are above-average. It’s a little nuts that I can comfortably recommend 50-plus television series from a single year, but welcome to #PeakTV.
If you missed the prior installments of the Manifesto’s 2016 rankings, you can find them at the following links:
#s 88-71
#s 70-51 Read More
I have a confession to make. I should probably tell this to someone more qualified to process my shame—a friend, a rabbi, a shrink—but instead, I’m going to tell you. In the year 2016, I watched 88 different TV shows.
That’s right. Eighty-eight.
This is, of course, far too many television shows for any functional adult to watch in a given year. Yet it is also somehow not enough. When I started this project in 2014, I’d seen 50 shows that year; last year, I upped that total to 62. Now I’m at 88, and that gargantuan figure still constitutes a measly 19% of the year’s scripted shows. #PeakTV isn’t just a glorious era for the medium of television—it’s also inhumane.
But this is the world we live in, and I’ve made my peace with it. Each of the past two years, I’ve included a brief laundry-list of shows that I regretted not watching. This year, I’m done apologizing. If the forthcoming series of posts fails to include your favorite show, by all means yell at me about it; I’ll then politely remind you that I watched 88 freaking TV shows last year (for the record, I watched every episode of each show on this list—no pop-ins here), so I’m sorry that I couldn’t make room for your precious little SyFy drama or Adult Swim comedy. (Also, I’ll try to watch it next year, promise.)
Per usual, we’ll be releasing our rankings over five separate posts, with a new post dropping each day this week, concluding with the top 10 on Friday. As always, if you find yourself flabbergasted that I could somehow rank Show X above/below Show Y, please bear in mind that (1) ranking works of art is a fruitless and arbitrary exercise, and (2) my taste is better than yours.
Without further ado, here begins the Manifesto’s ranked list of every TV show we watched in 2016:
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After two straight years of hitting on 80% of our Oscar nomination predictions, the Manifesto improved dramatically this year, rocketing all the way up to… 81% (56 out of 69). The Academy’s choices proved relatively middle-of-the-road, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing—sure, I could (and, in this very post, will) quibble about a few candidates that were unjustly omitted, but for the most part, this year’s nominees constitute a respectable and enjoyable slate of movies. Just keep that in mind when you’re reading a bunch of “The Oscars are out of touch!” hot takes over the next month.
Here’s a quick look at the major categories in light of this morning’s announcement.
BEST PICTURE
Arrival
Fences
Hell or High Water
Hidden Figures
La La Land
Lion
Manchester by the Sea
Moonlight
Hacksaw Ridge
Analysis: I went low, they went high. Go figure. Still, although I incorrectly surmised that Hacksaw Ridge would fail to make the cut, I hit on my remaining eight guesses. With the caveat that I’ve yet to see Lion (this weekend!), it’s a strong Best Picture contingent overall; at least four of these nominees are likely to end up on my top 10 list, and the remaining are diverting at worst.
Current favorite: La La Land. The only potential challenger I see is Moonlight, but for it to make headway, the frontrunner is going to have to experience significant backlash. And by “backlash”, I mean something more potent than the current deluge of insufferable “think-pieces” that are popping up online like faux-insightful whack-a-moles. Read More
With the nominations for the 2016* Academy Awards being released tomorrow morning, it’s time for the Manifesto to unveil its official predictions. I’ve hit on a mediocre 80% of my predictions each of the last two years, so we’ll see if I can improve on that mark this year (I don’t have high hopes). Per usual, we’re only predicting nominations for 13 categories; we’ll have predictions for the winners in all 21 feature fields prior to the big show on February 26.
(* Although most websites refer to these as the 2017 Academy Awards, all of the movies were released in 2016, so I prefer that nomenclature.) Read More
