The Seventh Annual Andy TV Awards: Comedy Series

Time to continue my picks for nominees and winners for the past year of television, as though I actually have the ability to grant awards. If you missed it, here’s the first post of the series picking the Comedy Acting categories.

The Seventh Annual Andy TV Awards: Comedy Acting

If you want to see how these went last year, and how infrequently I blog, scroll down just a bit.

It’s that time of year again when I finally update my blog, pick the very best in the world of television. While most of the TV internet is using the opportunity of the Emmys to pick from the Academy’s flawed list of nominees, I use my time wasted watching too much TV judgement to pick the most deserving nominees AND winners for the acting and show categories. Unlike the Academy, I base my decisions on entire seasons worth of television, and not just submitted episodes (since, you know, no one is submitting episodes to win fake internet awards).

Top 10 TV Shows of 2011

Surveilling the 2011 TV landscape

While my top albums of the year list diverged from critical consensus due to a mixture of life-related ignorance and trend-related indifference, this list will look like a lot of the others you’ve seen elsewhere. It’d be nice to make a statement and be more original, but best is best. When it comes to TV, consensus tends to emerge because even critics have to limit their viewing, as it requires more of your time to watch a tv series than watching a movie or listening to an album. So the critics do some sampling, champion their favourites, and I listen.

And even though I’m selective when it comes to my TV-watching, it’s still the medium that dominates most of my time. There’s so much good TV out there that even I can’t keep up, so for 2012, I’m trying to reduce my consumption to only greatness. If a TV show can’t meet the standards of the series you see here (or fails to continue to meet previous standards), then it’s gotta go. After all, I gotta make room for other great shows (some of which might even be missing here, although probably not). So if you’d like to be more selective with your viewing, consider this a guide of what should stay in your line-up.

The Sixth Annual Andy TV Awards – Drama Series

Here it is, the final entry in my 2011 TV Awards series, mere weeks after they were relevant. I must say, that save Dexter, the Academy actually nailed this category. If they simply replaced that with Justified (which was oddly absent despite nominations for Timothy Olyphant, Walton Goggins, and winner Margo Martindale), this might have been the best group of nominees I’d ever seen out of the Emmys. They chose four of my six nominees, with the fifth being the toughest omission I had to make in years.

In case you missed it, here are the other posts for the Sixth Annual Andy TV Awards:

• Introduction and Guest Acting
• Comedy Acting
• Drama Acting
• Comedy Series

Read on for the final award of the night, the winner of which also gets the title of “Best Show of the TV season”.

Top 20 TV Shows of 2010

This would make my TV watching so much easier.

I had big plans for my year end TV post to finally dive into podcasting to discuss my list with my TV viewing-and-life partner. I did a good amount of prep so we wouldn’t stumble around the whole time, gave my wife the hard sell to convince her to humour me (a pattern in our relationship), and set aside a night to record (cutting into valuable TV watching time). We talked for about 2.5 hours, going over the greatness of the year in TV, each of the top 20, and a little bit about different shows that missed the list. Sure, that’s a long podcast, but with editing and splitting, I think it would’ve been a fun two-parter. It was all pretty cool… until I realized that I completely screwed up the recording (largely due to the high potentiality that I forgot to hit the “record” button before we started).

We thought about redoing it, making it shorter in the process, but never got around to it. Now we’re over two months past the end of the year, which is a little late to be talking about the previous year of a continuous medium like television. Not only are we past the point of relevance for such a list, the past two months for fresh content makes it pretty difficult (how do you talk about a show in terms of 2010 if it’s continued to run new episodes since then?).

But… I already made the list. And the internet isn’t going to break if one more list is added to it, even one that’s a little late to be relevant. After all, I didn’t spend my time watching all or at least a majority of 41 different shows to not tell people what I think of them. So even though it’s entirely unlike me to do so, I’ll be posting them without comment, since I’ve already spent 2.5 hours sharing my thoughts with my number one reader on these, in addition to thoughts I already typed in last year’s Andy TV Awards and thoughts I’ll share in this year’s awards. But I’d love to discuss any show here if you’re interested, so leave a comment and we can chat.

And now, the list.

Give Cougar Town a chance… despite the name

TV Talk: Cougar Town

Starring: Courteney Cox, Christa Miller, Busy Philipps, Brian Van Holt, Dan Byrd, Ian Gomez, Josh Hopkins

Series Creator: Bill Lawrence and Kevin Biegel

TV Talk: United States of Tara

TV Talk: United States of Tara

Starring: Toni Collette, John Corbett, Rosemarie DeWitt, Brie Larson, Keir Gilchrist

Series Creator: Diablo Cody

The wife and I polished off the first two seasons of United States of Tara in the matter of a few weeks, prompting me to interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to resurrect an old feature of the blog: TV Talk, where I “talk” about something on TV in a more free-flowing, non-reviewy kind of way (well… if you read it out loud, it’s almost like talking). This talk will be spoiler-free, so if you haven’t watched the show yet, read this to find out if you should.

TV Review: Skins – Volume Two

Skins Volume Two

Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Mike Bailey, April Pearson, Hannah Murray, Joseph Dempsie, Larissa Wilson, Dev Patel, Mitch Hewer, Kaya Scodelario, Aimee-Ffion Edwards

Series Creators: Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain

TV Review: Skins – Volume One

Skins Volume One

Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Mike Bailey, April Pearson, Hannah Murray, Joseph Dempsie, Larissa Wilson, Dev Patel, Mitch Hewer

Series Creators: Bryan Elsley and Jamie Brittain

TV Talk: My Television Schedule

Here’s something many of you probably never expected to hear me say (or read me write for that matter): I watch too much TV. Okay, I don’t really mean that, at least not in the traditional sense. I don’t actually have a problem with the number of hours I spend in front of the television (well, okay, in front of the computer which is in front of the television), but rather the number of shows I’m currently watching.

What’s the issue? Well, every week it seems that most of my free time is spent keeping my DVR clear of the new shows that air, leaving me less time for other important matters, like movies or TV box sets (ha… and you thought I was going to say “reading”). This is an issue because there’s a good chunk of TV series that I’m currently following that aren’t as good as the ones I’d like to be watching on DVD (The Shield in particular). So I figured a good exercise would be to look at all the TV series currently airing new episodes that I follow, and maybe make some choices that will ease my burden (or, you know, “burden” as it were). After all, the last time I used this space to muse about a show that I no longer cared for, I cut the cord a week later.

Plus, I thought it could be fun for you all to see exactly what I’m watching, day by day. You know, if you were wondering.

TV Review: Breaking Bad – Season One

Breaking Bad Season One

Starring: Bryan Cranston, Anna Gunn, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris, Betsy Brandt, RJ Mitte

Series Creator: Vince Gilligan

TV Review: The Shield – Season One

The Shield Season One

Starring: Michael Chiklis, Kenneth Johnson, Benito Martinez, Catherine Dent, Walton Goggins, Michael Jace, Jay Karnes, CCH Pounder

Series Creator: Shawn Ryan

TV Talk: Heroes Season Three Premiere

TV Talk: Heroes Season Three Premiere

Starring: Kristen Bell, Jack Coleman, Greg Grunberg, Ali Larter, James Kyson Lee, Masi Oka, Hayden Panettiere, Adrian Pasdar, Zachary Quinto, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Dania Ramirez, Cristine Rose, Milo Ventimiglia

Series Creator: Tim Kring

Top 25 Episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Top Five.

This is it, the end of the list. If you were saving your comments for the list in full, speak now. I don’t really mind if few people were reading this, it was fun to put together either way. If you wanna see all the screen caps I made, including episodes that didn’t make the cut, you can see them HERE. If you want them for yourself, feel free to take them. It’s not like I own the copyright. Just don’t hotlink.

Top 25 Episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Numbers 10-6.

Here it is, the start of the top ten. A quick note to be made here is that I didn’t miss number 8. Number 7, “Graduation Day” is a two-part episode, and thus is a tie. It is both number 7 and 8 on the list, or, 7a and b. If I were only doing a Top Ten, then I’d probably just rank it as one episode, but since this is a Top 25, I figured that they should take their own spots on the list as a tie. To see what ranked 15-11, click HERE.