Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
2017 was a great year for episodic television. From dramas to comedies, Netflix to NBC, every week seemed to offer a new bit of brilliance somewhere on the vast TV landscape. When compiling a list of the best hours (or half-hours) that TV had to offer this year, there was a lot to consider. Some of the shows that we thought were strongest across the board — HBO’s Big Little Lies; Netflix’s Big Mouth — may have been better accomplishments as full entities, and while they had some great episodes, there were ten out there that shined even brighter.
The episodes that made this list delivered something indelible, a moment or a feeling that we’d continue to carry with us. The era of binge-watching has made it harder for us to linger on single episodes for very long, and as a result, it’s harder and harder to pick out just one when we’re wolfing down six or eight or ten at a time. The episodes on this list really had to work hard, then, to make an impression.
Two runners up, I’d like to mention:
- Will & Grace‘s “Grandpa Jack,” easily the best installment of the newly revived NBC sitcom, which took on the specter of gay conversion camps with forthrightness while never sacrificing their broadly comedic vibe. It was a hell of a needle to thread, and they threaded it.
- Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s “Can Josh Take a Leap of Faith?” the second season finale that ended on such a perfect note of anger and sisterhood and a tableau that if it wasn’t borrowed wholesale from The Craft, it should’ve been.
Also, word to the wise, but since we’re going to be discussing these episodes, you might come across some spoilers, in text or video-clip form. Tread carefully if you’re scared.
And now, our top ten, in chronological order that they aired …
One Day at a Time: "Quinces"
Season: 1
Episode: 13
Network/Platform: Netflix
Aired: January 6, 2017
The unexpected brilliance of the One Day at a Time remake has a lot to do with the timelessness of Norman Lear’s concept (single mom trying to make it with two kids and a horny super), a lot to do with writers Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce’s ability to translate that concept into a modern-day story about a Cuban-American family, and a lot to do with a truly stellar cast, particularly Justina Machado and Rita Moreno. Given Lear’s shows’ legacy of confronting the issues of their day, it didn’t come as a huge surprise when teenage Elena (Isabella Gomez) came out as gay. What was particularly smart was the way the show weaved this revelation into the show’s intergenerational story of immigrants and assimilation. From the beginning of the series, Elena had declared she didn’t want a quinceañera, and her mother, Penelope, wasn’t taking it well. Her initial discomfort with her daughter’s sexuality all felt like pieces of the same puzzle of a woman trying to pull together the life she thought she’d have with the one she’s living. The season finale pulled all of these threads together, throwing Elena a quinces on her own terms, and leading up to a family-bonding moment that was sensitive but not saccharine, a well-earned moment of family closeness that drove home how close we’d come to the Alvarez family across 13 episodes.
The Good Place: "Michael's Gambit"
Season: 1
Episode: 13
Network/Platform: NBC
Aired: January 19, 2017
The tail end of The Good Place‘s first season wrapped up at the very beginning of the year, and it might’ve been easy to forget it in the 11 months that followed if it wasn’t the single most memorable TV episode of the whole year. The genius of the twist at the end of The Good Place season 1 is that this wasn’t the kind of show that had us expecting there would be a twist at the end of The Good Place season 1. The characters were busy trying to figure out a way for Eleanor (and my beloved Jason Mendoza) to stay in the Good Place, and there were still many things about this show’s vision of the afterlife we didn’t know about, but it’s not like this was the Lost island where we were constantly on the lookout for the rug to get pulled out from beneath us. When Eleanor finally figured it out, it was a bombshell that changed the way the entire series felt. It was an ingenious twist, yes, but it also mean that a lot of the show’s weirdly moralistic jagged edges suddenly had a purpose.
The Mick: "The New Girl"
Season: 1
Episode: 11
Network/Platform: FOX
Aired: February 28, 2017
The bad-behavior sitcom is incredibly easy to do, but incredibly hard to do well. The temptation is to just revel in the characters’ awfulness without doing anything with it. The characters don’t necessarily need to be redeemed, but unless we’re given some undertones we weren’t expecting, it all just becomes a cesspool of ugliness. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is a show that’s spent a lot of time on both sides of that divide, which might be why Caitlin Olson has been so incredibly deft in keeping her lead character on The Mick on the right side of it. When her sister and brother-in-law go on the run from the Feds (damn white-collar crime), Mickey inherits their mansion, their kids, and their housekeeper. Mickey’s a trashy mess, but the kids are privileged monsters, too, and their combative relationship can be breathtakingly nasty, wildly funny, but also not infrequently sweet. And it’s smart, too, in the way it tackles taboo subjects from some unexpectedly enlightened angles. “The New Girl” is the best example of that, with Mickey looking for a shortcut as usual by passing youngest child Ben as a transgender girl. Ben isn’t transgender, but he’s decidedly doing his own thing, and Mickey’s self-interested deception ends up coming around to a celebration and fierce defense of raising kids to be exactly who they are.
Top Chef: "Comida Final"
Season: 14
Episode: 14
Network/Platform: Bravo
Aired: March 2, 2017
After a few seasons where Tom Colicchio’s fondness for bros really threatened to plummet the show into self-parody, Top Chef came roaring back with a half-all-stars, half-newbies season that was as exciting a race to the finale as anything we’ve seen this year. There wasn’t a whole lot of suspense as to which 5-6 chefs would be there at the end (is there ever on this show?), but once we arrived at the end game, featuring the bulldozing Brooke, unpredictable Shirley, dastardly John, plucky Casey, and lovable Sheldon, the competition kicked into another gear. All-Star seasons, at their best, can do great things with character arcs because they’re like second acts of plays. Some time has passed, circumstances may have changed, but now we know these characters’ deepest hopes and fears. Brooke’s bugaboo with Last Chance Kitchen, say, or John’s struggles to avoid being the villain again, or Casey desperate not to become a three-time loser.
Top Chef brought all of these stories to the forefront and then played them through to their thrilling, devastating, even touching conclusions, with a finale episode that felt both correct and uplifting. Brooke and Shirley’s family visits were more than the usual late-season tearjerker. They were chances for these women to more fully complete their stories. When Shirley has that moment with her mom, where her mom seems to finally see her daughter for the first time, it’s breathtaking.
The Leftovers: "The Book of Nora"
Season: 3
Episode: 8
Network/Platform: HBO
Aired: June 4, 2017
Ending a TV series well is damned hard. Just ask Damon Lindelof, he’ll tell you. But Lindelof and Tom Perrotta brought The Leftovers in for a landing in a way that satisfied the show’s fans in a way the Lost finale never could, mostly by remaining steadfastly ambiguous about the sudden departure that set this entire story into motion. “The Book of Nora” whittles down this vast canvass of characters to essentially just two: Kevin and Nora, who managed to find each other in the aftermath of mysterious catastrophe and spent the better part of three seasons trying desperately to hold onto one another while each got pulled down whatever rabbit holes they thought would help them explain what had happened. But truly it was Nora who always represented the core struggle of The Leftovers: when there are no answers to what happened, all that’s left is to wrangle with the grief and the unmooring. That’s what Nora does in the series finale. The story she tells Kevin at the end in that breathtaking scene might be the truth, or it might be a story she made up to explain away her absence. The point isn’t what has happened, but the decisions these characters are making right now. The Leftovers ends not looking back but facing forward, a rare piece of actual inspiration in a year we spent truly reeling.
Master of None: "Thanksgiving"
Season: 2
Episode: 8
Network/Platform: Netflix
Aired: May 12, 2017
Lena Waithe spent the first season of Master of None playing sounding board and occasional provider of queer perspective to Aziz Ansari’s Dev. In season 2, the show made the smart decision to bring her a bit closer to the front, which ended up paying huge dividends in the “Thanksgiving” episode, which traces Denise and Dev’s friendship over the years, checking in on them over a series of Thanksgivings (Dev spends the holiday with Denise’s family since his own family doesn’t celebrate it). The levels that Waithe and Ansari’s script get to in such a short time are so impressive: we get a great look at Dev and Denise’s friendship, understanding the both of them better; we get a look at the ways in which Denise’s gayness has informed her own identity; and we get a look at the ways in which Denise’s gayness has informed her relationship with her family. Diversity on TV isn’t just about checking boxes on the roster for a cast or a writing staff. It’s about bringing in perspectives that deepen, contrast with, and even challenge the perspectives we’re used to getting. Seeing the comedic world of Master of None through Denise’s eyes is enlightening, funny, and deeply touching. It’s a story we didn’t even know we needed to be told.
The Keepers: "The School"
Season: 1
Episode: 2
Network/Platform: Netflix
Aired: May 19, 2017
Netflix’s docu-series The Keepers was, much like 2017, an unfolding nesting box of horrors. The deeper we got into the mystery of Sister Cathy Cesnik’s 1969 death and the dark secrets that the Catholic church in Baltimore had been keeping all these years, the more terrible and wide-reaching the story got. If episode 1 laid out a mystery for viewers to hop aboard and try to solve, it was the second episode that disabused everyone of any notion that this was going to be a zippy true-crime whodunnit. The first-person account of Jean Wehner that takes up the bulk of this episode is such a clear-eyed, detailed, and fully emotional exposition, it’s almost hard to believe she’s not an actor. How this woman is even holding it together is a wonder, but she’s absolutely riveting, and the show is willing to stick with her and support her story throughout. It’s a bracing, often disturbing hour that is absolutely essential for the rest of the series to work. It does, making the producers of The Keepers just the latest people to owe Jean Wehner a debt of gratitude.
Playing House: "You Wanna Roll With This?"
Season: 3
Episode: 5
Network/Platform: USA
Aired: July 7, 2017
The third and final season of Playing House felt like we were in bonus territory. For a while, it didn’t seem like we were ever going to get a third season, until we found out why the delay: co-star and co-creator Jessica St. Clair’s breast cancer diagnosis. When the show returned for season 3, we knew to expect Jessica’s real-life health problems to be reflected on screen, and they were, with Emma’s diagnosis and treatment closely mirroring St. Clair’s. The episode that focuses on Emma’s treatment wasn’t the season’s funniest (for that, try episode 2, where Emma tries to help Bird Bones get out from under a pyramid scheme), but it was the most emblematic of the show at its best: placing Maggie and Emma’s loud-and-proud friendship front and center, ready to get each other through a bitch like cancer. As a super fun bonus, Laurie Metcalf and Michaela Watkins guest star as Emma’s surgeons, suddenly giving the show a quartet of comedic actresses as formidable as any you’d find on TV this year.
There’s nothing extra-special harrowing about Emma’s double mastectomy. The doctors are kind, funny, and helpful. Maggie is the rock Emma needs her to be. Mark comes through with the socks at the end. Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair are smart enough to know that when the antagonist is cancer, you don’t need to gin it up with any extra theatrics. We know the stakes. Getting to be there alongside Emma and Maggie as things get scary is all this show’s devoted audience ever wanted. One last time, Playing House delivered for us.
Stream Playing House's "You Wanna Roll With This?" on Amazon Video.
Vice News Tonight: "Charlottesville: Race and Terror"
Network/Platform: HBO
Aired: August 14, 2017
The white-supremacist marches in Charlottesville, Virginia, this summer were two of the scariest days in recent American history. The specter of violent racism taking to the streets, fully armed and angry and ready to make their move. Plenty of news outlets covered it, but it was Vice News Tonight‘s on-the-ground, embedded reporting that brought the full impact of the events into our living rooms. Reporter Elle Reeve, delivering a remarkably unobtrusive and spotlight-eschewing first-person account that still managed to spark with personality (“So Trump but more racist”), got perspectives from both sides of the barricades. But rather than distract their audience with any kind of “fine people on both sides” false notions of balance, Vice told the story as it was, getting the words from the people on the ground, including placing Reeve in a terrifying van ride with neo-Nazis armed to the teeth and laying out their strategy. At a time when the social order seemed most in danger, Vice News Tonight took us exactly where we needed to be.
Stream Vice News Tonight's "Charlottesville: Race and Terror" on YouTube.
Halt and Catch Fire: "Ten of Swords"
Season: 4
Episode: 10
Network/Platform: AMC
Aired: October 14, 2017
Another perfectly rendered series finale to a show that was never a ratings blockbuster but had earned its fans and appreciators the hard way. The fourth season took our computer-programming pioneers into the midst of the dot-com ’90s, and true to form, they never quite managed to be in the right place at the right time. Forever missing their moment, the protagonists of Halt and Catch Fire (one thing the fourth season reminded us was that they’re all protagonists) marked the course of American entrepreneurial success as an accident of luck and timing as much as it is a triumph of inspiration and drive. Halt and Catch Fire didn’t set out to expose the American dream as a lie (look out your windows, it’s been done), but one fringe benefit to following the stories of Joe MacMillian, Gordon and Donna Clark, and Cameron Howe is that their successes, their failures, and their might-have-been regrets were never, in the end, as important as the mere fact that they made the decision to work together in the first place. Few shows ever get to end on a flawless note. Halt and Catch Fire very nearly does. That they come close (“I have an idea”) before adding just that one more scene that skirts perfection ever so slightly, ultimately couldn’t have been a better tribute to the vision of the show.
