Personal growth isn't easy, so maybe it's fitting that a series about it shouldn't be either. At first blush, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern) is easier to gawk at than to like. A corporate executive who suffers a nervous breakdown after an affair, she has an epiphany at a pricey therapy retreat, then returns to her old life, demoted at the office, living with her mom (Dern's actual mother, Diane Ladd) and trailing passive-aggressive spirituality. At first, Amy seems so deluded and self-righteous that you want to smack her into a shivasana pose. But Enlightened, written by Mike White (The Good Girl), isn't interested in mocking easy New Age targets or valorizing Amy. Instead, it takes her journey seriously, if sometimes seriously enough to laugh at it. Subtle and gorgeously directed (by guests including Jonathan Demme, Miguel Arteta and Nicole Holofcener), it's a darkly funny, empathetic story of a flawed woman learning that sometimes a journey of a thousand miles begins with a good sharp kick in the ass. (HBO)
9. The Good Wife
One test of a good show is its ability to outlive the high-concept premise that got it on the air. The Good Wife started out as a ripped-from-the-headlines story of political wife Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), cheated on by her husband, who strikes out on her own after the scandal that humiliates her. By its third season, that hook is almost gone; what's left is not just a good drama but several good dramas at once, each of them sophisticated stories about power in various forms: There's the interoffice politics of the Gardner-Lockhart law firm, the actual politics of in-house spin savant Eli Gold (Alan Cumming) and his clients, the sexual entanglements of Alicia and her old-new flame (and boss) Will (Josh Charles) and a string of interesting stories about how technology and media have changed life, politics and the law. Oh yeah, and the most reliably intriguing courtroom cases on TV. The ability to keep growing: that's what makes a good Wife great. (CBS)
Community is television's first Cubist sitcom. Like the still lifes of Picasso or Braque, it starts with a simple tableau: a set of friends/acquaintances/nemeses in a community-college study group. Then, episode by episode — like a painter breaking a guitar into geometric shapes — obsessive creator Dan Harmon rearranges its component parts to play with perspective and create a picture truer than real life. One week the story is built around seven alternative timelines. Another, it's a parody of My Dinner with Andre. Another, it's told entirely through flashbacks to Community episodes that were never made. It's not just invention for its own sake but a way of using the storytelling frame to show how each character in the ensemble relates to the whole. Yet Community is not some high-art experiment but hilarious, good-time entertainment; it both defies sitcom formulas and lovingly embraces them. Unfortunately, NBC has just placed the low-rated series on hiatus. It should return later next year, and it may yet be renewed. If not, what we've gotten is worth hanging in a museum. (NBC)
7. Friday Night Lights
Over five seasons of trying to get more people to watch this gem of a drama, we fans have told our friends, "It's not really about football." Now it can be told: We were lying! Well, not entirely. There was much, much more to this story of small-town Texas life than the high-school football team that was at its core (first, powerhouse West Dillon, then wrong-side-of-the-track underdog East Dillon). There was family, faith, love, money. But it all came down to applying to larger life a lesson we know from sports: there is no I in team. FNL was always sincerely about community, about the idea that every person, grownup or teenager, is part of a larger system of dependence: a town, a school, a family, a marriage. The final season of this drama came down, as you would expect, to a final dramatic game. But the real action was always just as much in the stands. (DirecTV/NBC)
6. Homeland
The best new series of the fall, Showtime's terrorism thriller came along just in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11. A decade after the attacks, we've stayed safe. We've become more alert. But — as this intense psychological drama asks of its characters — what have been the trade-offs? Are we wounded? Are we traumatized? Are we, maybe, a little crazy? Homeland sets out these questions through two damaged characters who start out as adversaries but find themselves deeply linked. Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), a CIA analyst, learns from a source that a U.S. soldier imprisoned in Iraq has been "turned" by terrorists. This leads her to suspect Sergeant Nick Brody (Damian Lewis), a freed POW and national hero. Is Carrie on to the perfect sleeper agent, or is she influenced by post-9/11 guilt — as well as a mood disorder she's been hiding? Brody is behaving suspiciously, but is it proof of guilt or the scars of eight years in hell? The performances are fantastic — Carrie is a throbbing nerve, Brody thrums with repressed pain — and the show is both thrilling as a mystery and an acute study of how people mourn for lost time they can never get back. (Showtime)
5. Game of ThronesGeorge R. R. Martin's grownup fantasy novels were not supposed to be filmable. They have a vast sprawl of locations and a Domesday Book's worth of characters, and their sheer length made The Lord of the Rings look like a pamphlet. Well, dragons should be too big to fly, and yet somehow they manage. This lavishly constructed season pared the first novel to its sinewy medieval essence, a thrilling political drama with epic sweep and classic HBO moral complexity. It was equally fearless in slashing its characters — spoiler alert! — killing off what seemed to be its protagonist, Ned Stark (Sean Bean) and proving that we should never feel safe with it. Most important, it took a vast panorama of art-directed exotica — mountain fortresses, nomadic encampments, lavish whorehouses and a 700-ft. ice wall — and made it all feel dead real with grounded performances from Peter Dinklage, Emilia Clarke, Kit Harington and a stunningly good collection of child actors. Set amid the battle for a declining kingdom in a world whose magicians were long dead, Game of Thrones was nonetheless magic through and through. (HBO)
4. Justified
In its first season, in 2010, Justified had the goods: its roots in Elmore Leonard's whip-crack crime writing, a mesmerizing lawman lead in Timothy Olyphant's Raylan Givens and the new-old-Appalachia setting of Harlan County, Kentucky. In its second season it explored something else: history. There was the history of its setting, where — in the running story of the season — the plots of a local pot-growing clan entwined with the business plans of a mining company. And there was the history of bad blood between said Bennett family and the Givens brood, all the childhood and generational resentments spilling out as Raylan lit on the trail of crafty gang mama Mags (Margo Martindale). Mags could be cold and ruthless but also compelling, as she laid out the story of Harlan's people, used for decades by miners and left with "the spoil," the sadly poetic name for the leavings of strip mining. Martindale's stunning perfomance was like Mags' trademark, poisoned "apple pie" moonshine: bracing, fiery, sweet and deadly. (FX)
In the sixth episode of Breaking Bad's fourth season, chemistry teacher turned methmaker Walter White (Bryan Cranston) reassures his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn), who is afraid that he might open his door one day and find a man with a gun ready to end him. "I am the one who knocks," he boasts. It's not true when he says it, but this season, which follows White one more rung down his damnation ladder, shows his transformation into that man. It continues the thread of Bad's magnificent third season, in which Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) transformed from White's boss into his deadly enemy. White and Fring — in his eerie placidity, one of TV's most memorable villains — played each other like chess masters, White's troubled partner Jesse (Aaron Paul) their key, twitchy pawn. White won that match, making another, still graver moral sacrifice to do it, leaving us to wonder how much lower he can go in the show's coming final season. TV's best drama knocked again; we gladly answered. (AMC)
2. Parks and Recreation
You can make a decent sitcom with one funny character. You can make a really good sitcom with a strong ensemble. But many of the great sitcoms create worlds — whether it's the insular world of Cheers or the expansive one of The Simpsons. To the ranks of these sitcoms welcome Parks and Recreation, the current sitcom most pleasant to live in. Pawnee, Ind., has grown over three-plus seasons into a fleshed-out world on the order of Springfield, complete with a mediasphere (like morning-zoo crew Crazy Ira and the Douche), a cross-county rival (snooty neighbor Eagleton, where the air smells like vanilla cupcakes) and a thriving local industry (the Sweetums junk-food company). And the cast of the Pawnee Parks and Rec department has become a Cheers-like chemistry factory, from aspiring pol Leslie Knope (sitcom MVP Amy Poehler) to gruff überman Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) to sweetly nerdy bureaucrat Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott). Hail, Pawnee: first in friendship, fourth in obesity — and tops among fictional TV destinations. (NBC)
1. Louie
Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? Really, each episode of Louis CK's intensely personal FX show is more like an essay: a set of anecdotes, vignettes, stand-up routines and outtakes that add up to a reflection on what it means to be human. Death, war, divorce, masturbation, parenting, unrequited love — no subject was beyond the reach or ambition of this stunning series. In its second season, Louis CK's confidence as a director, writer and performer elevated this low-budget DIY series to the best thing on TV, unlike any show current or past. Louie can swing in a scene from raunchy hilarity to holy-crap wisdom because what Louis CK ultimately is after is not laughs or tears but intensity. This is the TV series as worldview, an R-rated meditation that lets the viewer see life as something ridiculous, terrible and beautiful. (FX)
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