Television has long been catching up to film in quality. It offers a unique format to tell a story, and in recent years authors have finally been taking advantage of it. David Lynch showed that it was possible, if not yet feasible, to run a show with artistic merit with Twin Peaks; but it wasn't until the early 2000's, with The Sopranos, that television really came into its own. Since that illustrious show broke open the floodgates, directors like Martin Scorsese and Michael Mann have been a part of creating wonderfully detailed pilots. I would argue that since the year 2000 television has gotten better every year... until last year. Mad Men, the best still running show right now, had no episodes air in 2011; Modern Family got stuck in a rut that everyone should have seen coming and despite still featuring a stellar cast seems to be telling the same stories over and over; and new shows like New Girl (starting to hit its stride in 2012) and The Killing have been completely underwhelming.
Is this the start of a new downward slide in quality? Or just a blip in the slow march towards cinema's death? While the death of cinema might be premature, I'd say that this is an anomalous year, a momentary blip in the sloooooooow transference of the moving image from the movie theater to our living rooms. Networks, having yet to figure out how to make money off the 20-somethings, have increasingly looked to capitalize on the aging baby boomers. CBS in particular being the poster boy for releasing backwards programing, that is soon to be reviled. NBC, on the other hand, looks more like a cable channel in terms of ratings than the network powerhouse of old which featured behemoths like Cheers, Friends, and Seinfeld. Yet, in this age of re-watching and catching up on cult shows of the past, it's programming seems set to be influential for years. In the midst of this transition and dip in quality there were some good shows to be seen. Naturally, I haven't watched everything, in fact I haven't even watched everything that's supposed to be great, but out of what I have seen this is the best of 2011 in television:
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