The Best Television Shows of 2016
From Catastrophe and Fleabag to High Maintenance and Insecure, The Atlantic’s writers and editors pick their favorite television shows of 2016. (For a deeper dive, there’s also a roundup of the year’s best TV episodes.)
Atlanta
It may be clichéd to say that a show is “like nothing else on TV,” but in ’s case, it’s true. When Donald Glover’s half-hour FX dramedy debuted in September, it immediately defined its own visual language (polished, meticulous), narrative style (loose, like a dream), and tone (seductive or somber, depending on the scene). The pilot feinted in the direction of a rags-to-riches hip-hop story before hitting viewers with a daisy chain of mesmerizing tangents. It delivered the year’s best experimental show-within-a-show episode (“B.A.N.”—sorry, ). It turned the city of Atlanta itself into a character, with its own idiosyncrasies and banalities. It went weird without cribbing from the playbook—a deceptively tricky achievement—and gave pop culture the surreal gift of a Black Justin Bieber. Ithad one of the best debut seasons in recent memory.
