14. “Search Party”
Another first-season wonder that placed on our Best TV Shows of 2016, the premise of Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers and Michael Showalter‘s “Search Party” pitches it somewhere between 2014 indie “Wild Canaries” (which, coincidentally, also starred the awesome Alia Shawkat) and much-missed HBO show “Bored To Death,” in that Brooklynista Dory (Shawkat) reinvents herself as a part-time sleuth. But where those other touchpoints had a certain deadpan whimsy, “Search Party” has real darkness at its heart: It first manifests itself when you realize that the characters of Dory and her self-absorbed millennial circle are designed to be insufferable for satirical purposes, but then really starts to bite as she goes down the rabbit hole of real-world consequences to her bored-little-hipster-girl hobby. But the real reason we’re completely agog for season 2 is the final episode, in which the show’s storyline pushes beyond the point of no return in terms of that darkness — it didn’t end on a cliffhanger so much as on the moment after that, after you’re already plummeting towards the ground. It’s with almost ghoulish anticipation that we want to watch how season 2 lands.
Airdate: None yet, if it even makes it to air in 2017 — that’s more of a hope than a certainty right now.
13. “Review”
You’re on notice: Comedy Central’s “Review” is one of the best shows of any kind of the last few years, and yet few seem to watch it, so you have just a few months to catch up before its third and final season airs. To the uninitiated, it stars creator Andy Daly as Forrest MacNeil, a man who reviews life experiences, a premise that does absolutely no justice to the dark depths to which it goes, the cumulative brilliance of its torturous plotting, or the wringer through which Forrest (mostly rightly) has been put through. It’s generally been something of a ratings minnow, but Comedy Central greenlit a shortened third and final season last year, Daly and director Jeffrey Blitz are wrapped on it, and we should see it soon. We find it hard to believe that it can top the glorious comic lows of the second season — which included Forrest burning his father’s house down while reviewing ‘Being A Little Person,’ founding a cult which he was then kicked out of, and ending up in prison before taking a Reichenbach Falls-style conclusion. But the show’s so exceptional that we’re simultaneously sure that it can.
Airdate: Daly says he’s been given a tentative airdate by the network, so hopefully that means sooner rather than later.
12. “Girls”
Another show reaching its final season in 2017, it’s hard not to feel that the sixth season of “Girls” marks something of an end of an era. Even acknowledging the…narrowness of its world view, Lena Dunham’s creation was the first show to really take the anxieties and angst of the millennial generation seriously, and could prove to be a touchstone in the way that “Friends” was for Generation X. It’s also a rare show that has peaked late, with last year’s Season 5 being the show’s best run of episodes ever, maturing slightly while still exposing the hypocrisies and naivety of its characters, and we certainly hope that Dunham and co-showrunner Jenni Konner can keep the quality up. Indeed, it’s the rare show that has kept its core cast and crew together over the years, with Adam Driver for one sticking with it despite his resulting movie stardom (even the magnificently awful Desi is back, per the trailers). Hopefully, it’ll go out on another high.
Airdate: Begins on HBO on February 12th.
11. “Master Of None”
If there’s one thing we all need to thank “Parks And Recreation” for, it’s the never ending supply of Leslie Knope gifs for all occasions. But if there’s two, the second is definitely that it launched the TV career of Aziz Ansari, who turned in one of the most genuine, idiosyncratic and immediately essential comedy shows of 2015 in “Master Of None” (and whose stand-up is pretty great too). Ansari and co-creator Alan Yang (whose alter ego, Brian, is played onscreen by Kelvin Yu) then took a break in 2016, citing the fact that the show is so personal to their experiences that they kind of needed the time to go have some more. The good news is that Netflix will be airing season 2 in the spring, apparently part of the season is set in Italy, and best of all for fans of season one, yes, Ansari’s scene-stealing real-life parents will again feature. Speaking directly to issues of racism and problems of cultural identity surrounding first-, second- and third-generation immigrants, but doing so with a light, self-deprecating, extremely endearing touch, “Master Of None” is a show we’re going to need this year, more than ever.
Airdate: April.
10. “The Americans”
Like many of the other shows above, “The Americans,” a show that never quite took off in the ratings, has been given notice for its final season. But unlike “Girls,” “Review” and “Halt & Catch Fire,” “The Americans” isn’t ending this year — instead, its imminent season 5 will be the penultimate year, with FX giving creator Joe Weisberg an additional year to wrap things up, with the final season airing in 2018. And that can only be a good thing: The drama about Soviet spies undercover in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s (a premise that’s only gotten more relevant with time…) has been consistently brilliant from day one, and still makes a good case for being the best drama on TV every week it airs. Season 4 finally saw the awards bodies wake up to it, with Emmy nominations for Best Drama Series, Actor and Actress finally arriving, and we hope that that encourages more people to catch up and join the show for its fifth run, particularly with the drama continuing to heat up.
Airdate: We assume it’ll begin in March, as it did last year.
9. “Transparent”
If seasons 2 and 3 of Jill Soloway‘s beautiful, thrillingly smart and deeply funny “Transparent” didn’t quite attain the same dizzying heights of season 1, that’s only because the show’s debut run was one of the most perfect single seasons of television ever made. Both the following seasons have expanded the canvas and added an almost impossibly dazzling array of new colors to the palette, to the point that these tightly scripted and carefully labored-over episodes now feel effortless, as though we’re simply observing this family we now know so intimately. Brilliantly performed (not a sour note among the whole ensemble cast, but Jeffrey Tambor‘s Maura is particularly notable for his totally unsentimentalized portrayal), almost recklessly brave, but never less than intelligent and kind in its conclusions, really, “Transparent”‘s greatest value for the last few years has been in providing us with a ready supply of Soloway’s unique voice, and making her a power player in contemporary TV. We have absolutely rock-solid faith that Season 4, which was announced months before last year’s episodes even aired, will only confirm and consolidate that.
Airdate: None yet, but likely September, similar to seasons 1 and 3.
8. “Game Of Thrones”
It had become a little patchy, if never less than compulsively watchable, but last year the sixth season of HBO’s all-conquering fantasy epic (the first that was set entirely adrift from the George RR Martin books) restored our faith, and just in time for it to ramp up into its penultimate lap. The palpable sense of building momentum (something we’d missed a little) was confirmed in the announcement that there will only be 13 further episodes — and this season, the 7th, will comprise seven of those rather than the usual 10. Showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss maintain that that is because of tight timing and the demands of the increasingly spectacular and cinematic filmmaking, which is also the reason this season will air a little later than usual. So we’ll have a month or two longer to wait to see what happens to the various warring Houses of Gryffindor, Atreides, Montoya, etc., whether You-Know-Nothing-Jon-Snow and the Dark Knights will prevail against the Ice Hell Zombies, whether Blondie and her dragons Eragon, Errol and Puff, will get enough boats to cross the ocean, and just how many orgies they can cram into seven episodes. Ten? Sixteen? It’s anybody’s guess!
Airdate: Midyear.
7. “Rick And Morty”
Production schedules and the busy schedule of co-creator Dan Harmon mean that we haven’t seen new episodes of “Rick And Morty,” his amazing sci-fi animated comedy put together with Justin Roiland, since October 2015. But the wait should be over soon enough — while a firm date hasn’t arrived, we’re certain to see the third season of the show in 2017. Loosely answering the question “what if Doc from ‘Back To The Future‘ was an amoral drunk?,” the show’s probably the most inventive, consistently funny and sometimes even curiously moving animated series on right now, and while the mind boggles at where Harmon and Roiland can go from here, their form suggests that they’ll go to some amazing places. After a cliffhanger at the end of season 2, there could be some more serialized elements to the third season, but our guess is we’ll probably have much more in the way of the bold experimentation that marked the opener to the last run, and probably more big-name guest stars, à la Key & Peele, Jemaine Clement, Christina Hendricks, Werner Herzog and Stephen Colbert in the past.
Airdate: Nothing confirmed, but episodes are apparently finished, so we assume that there’ll be something soon.