Best of the tens?

[beer_good_foamy]

So here's a thing. A while back, me and some friends, all bitter old Buffy fans, decided to get drunk and put together a list of the best TV series of the 2010s. And to make it interesting, we used a format based on the podcast Screendrafts, which means that rather than vote together on a common list we all agree on (and which would be boringly predictable), each of us got to pick 4 pre-determined spots on the top 24 list which we then revealed in ascending order, which means this list gets a little... creative, and much more focused on personal favourites.

So, the list:

The criteria: The show had to have its first episode air between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2019.
...That's it. That's the criteria. Drama, sitcom, animated, reality, US, international, love all serve all.

24. Dark
23. What We Do In The Shadows
22. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
21. Pappas pengar
20. New Girl
19. Barry
18. Person of Interest
17. Orange Is The New Black
16. Justified
15. The Leftovers
14. BoJack Horseman
13. Mr Robot
12. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
11. Stranger Things
10. Fargo
9. Orphan Black
8. Vera
7. Derry Girls
6. Billions
5. The Americans
4. You're The Worst
3. Treme
2. The Good Place
1. She-Ra And The Princesses of Power

Now, the fun part of this format is that there are some dark horses here, some that ended up in positions they probably wouldn't on an aggregated list, and some heavy hitters that missed out completely. We had a lot of discussions afterwards and came to some conclusions, for instance:
- Nobody who'd seen the last two seasons really missed Game of Thrones
- Everyone loves Rick And Morty but hates the toxic fandom so much they left it off out of spite
- Most agreed Killing Eve would have been there if the third season hadn't sucked so bad
- Everyone's a fucking idiot, and how dare you play my #2 pick at #14, and are you kidding me, and...
- Everyone had a huge number of favourites they wanted to put around #10, nobody could say for sure they had a personal #1
- None of us had seen all these shows, but most of us thought we had some homework to do. (Which I'm ashamed to say I haven't done as much of as I should, hence putting this up here to kick my own ass a little bit.)

Questions? Comments? Guesses on which four spots are mine...? :)

Comments

Re: It's local max but I forget my password I'll find it at some point

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if you've watched the other Mike Schur shows of recent times, but I'll say that I think The Good Place feels more vital than Parks and Recreation (whose sunniness was eventually a bit too big a burden) and especially Brooklyn Nine-Nine, which feels like a bit of a throwback to an earlier era of workplace sitcom, albeit with more diversity. It's really *about* something. P&R sort of morphed from an Office-style show into a WE CAN ALL WORK TOGETHER IN POLITICS IF WE TRY where of course there's place for sunny fangirl progressives, stoic bean-counters, rugged individualist libertarians, etc. in our political machine, but at a certain point making it about *politics* rather than something much more abstract means that the reality that this isn't how politics actually works in the US eventually wears things down. Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn't about policework in any significant way at all, and I don't really buy the idea that it should address police brutality or whatever because it seems way out of what the show is capable of doing. And on the one hand, you know, workplace sitcoms generally use the workplace as a setting more so than a subject matter, but I think that on some level without a specific subject besides "let's hang out together and have jokes and try out different ships" the sort of sunny-jokey tone gets old. I'm not sure exactly what I want from sitcoms, lol (my wife was more into B99 than me, which is why I have watched so much of it despite not liking it all that much?), it's not like every sitcom is going to be "M*A*S*H" and have extended scenes of mental breakdowns over horrible wounds every three episodes, but anyway I guess my point is that The Good Place's wedding this particular style of joke writing to an existential philosophical fantasy is a stroke of brilliance.