It’s that time of year again. Time to look back on the best creative endeavours on the small screen over the past 12 months. Time to reflect on what we love, what we hate, and what we value. Is it nostalgia? Is it robots? Is it the fact that you can finally disable that judge-y ‘are you still watching’ feature on Netflix?

This list of our favourite shows is by no means exhaustive — no one can watch everything, and it is also okay if we like different things! — but it does offer you some good suggestions for things you may have missed. If you’ve been following closely, you might find some double ups — we published a similar list earlier in the year. That’s since been updated though because frankly, we don’t want any death threats about not including Westworld.

Enjoy!

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Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

This has not changed since mid-year: the best show of 2016 was a multi-camera musical dramedy about mental illness and late-20s existential dissatisfaction starring a cast of scrappy Broadway regulars.

Rebecca Bunch (co-creator Rachel Bloom, who won a much-deserved Golden Globe for the role last year and has scored another nod) is a New York lawyer sleepwalking her way through all the right decisions when she runs into Josh Chan, the guileless SoCal bro she dated for one whirlwind summer at theatre camp. She decides to throw her recent promotion to the wind to move to the strip mall paradise of ~West Covina, California~. (Which happens to be where Josh lives, but that’s not why she’s theeeerrrre…) Inching ever closer to a full-on breakdown, Rebecca’s brain peppers her new life with musical interludes.

The show’s feminism is worn on its Top 40-parodying sleeve, examining beauty standards, body image, female friendships and rivalries, and how much it actually sucks to have giant boobs.

Ultimately, the show is about the little fairytales we tell ourselves as we resist the harsh realities of adulthood, and how clinging to the shiny imaginary versions of our lives can stop us from dealing with the problems, and the potential, right in front of us. It’s lost none of its momentum or wince-inducing realness as it hurls itself tits-first into its second season, which has included a budget-busting Beyonce-esque conceptual art video, and a tap-dancing number on a giant butt. (RIP, superior animated credits — although the “BLAM!” gets funnier every time.)

Can you catch up now? Crazy Ex-Girlfriend screens on Eleven during its season run. It’s currently off-air and unavailable on Tenplay. Time to start writing letters to every local streaming service.

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Stranger Things

This unexpectedly huge, meme-spawning, aesthetically flawless pastiche has been the streaming phenomenon of the year. If it’s not your cup of tea, you’ll know straight away and you can get on with your life; if it is, you’ve probably already devoured the whole thing like a family-sized bag of Maltesers in an irresistible all-Sunday binge.

In a world of dense, emotionally ambiguous prestige drama, Stranger Things is straightforwardly archetypal and familiar in a subliminal sort of way; it’s as comforting as it is unsettling, like the imperfect flicker of a well-worn videotape. It captures that impossible feeling of watching an old favourite for the very first time.

Can you catch up now? Stranger Things is available in full on Netflix.

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Westworld

The other behemoth of the TV year was this Nolaned-up reboot that had Prestige Television written all over it. It had a stellar cast (when will someone give Jeffrey Wright the role that will give the Academy an excuse to give him a damn Oscar?), a production budget not that far off the actual operating budget for a robot-staffed theme park, and that primo Sunday night HBO real estate. It was supposed to fill the Game Of Thrones-shaped hole in your life, with its articulate range of characters peppered along the good/evil continuum, a veneer of vaguely philosophical brooding, and a decent amount of dirty fucking and casual murder.

For the most part, it succeeded: Westworld looked beautiful, it was darkly absorbing enough to look forward to every week, and thanks to that trademark Jonathan Nolan clue-dropping, it will even reward re-watching. But the real pleasure — particularly if you couldn’t resist joining the hordes of internet sleuths who managed to deduce or predict every single secret and twist well in advance — was in the performances.

Wright has never had a bad moment on camera, but brought quiet humanity to every gesture; Evan Rachel Wood made the goody-goody and the badass in her character equally convincing; James Marsden continues to be the best in the business at finding the shades of heartbreak in the blandly noble leading man; and Thandie Newton made a solid case for why she should be the next Bond. (Why fuck around with female or POC dream casting when you can have both?)

The standout performance of the whole season, though, was three minutes into the pilot when a relatively unknown character actor, Louis Herthum, worked through a crazy stack of layers of consciousness. It made Sir Anthony Hopkins look like a cardboard cutout.

Can you catch up now? Westworld is available to stream in full on Foxtel Play.

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Casual

If you’ve worked out how to get access to Hulu, you might have encountered this Jason Reitman-produced gem of a show, which is, in pretty much every episode, so perfect and funny and real that I get this irrational anger at it for being so good.

It follows a recently divorced mother (Michaela Watkins, who you might recognise from her steely work in various Transparent flashbacks) and her teenage daughter (who is, incidentally, one of the best-written adolescents on TV) as they move in with her shiftless startup-millionaire younger brother, and all try to get laid and form connections and work out what the hell is going on with other people.

That’s the bones of it, but it’s the exquisite layers (sharp writing, wryly subversive sexual politics, and pitch-perfect acting) that make it what it is: sidesplitting in a way that tears your guts out at least once an episode and never goes for easy laughs or easy answers.

Can you catch up now? Casual is exclusive to Hulu.

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Full Frontal With Samantha Bee

Samantha Bee’s former proving ground, The Daily Show, now feels more toothless than Jon Stewart’s Mitch McConnell impression, but Samantha Bee brought the rage from day one of her new gig. With the fierce directness of a centaur with laser vision, she’s interspersed dick jokes about the presidential race with a matter-of-fact approach to putting the powers that be on blast over underserved issues like rape kits.

Like with Inside Amy Schumer’s first season, having a woman take on these issues with such an incisive mix of crassness and precision feels overdue, incisive, gleeful and necessary as fuck. John Oliver is all well and good, but this is what “nailing it” looks like.

Can you catch up now? Full Frontal airs Tuesdays at 8pm on SBS2. You can catch up through SBS On Demand.

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BoJack Horseman

I’m sorry, I still can’t talk about this season without going foetal in anguish and awe. Here’s my incredibly articulate and mature review of possibly the most sophisticated, emotionally raw, and pun-dense seasons of television ever made:

Can you catch up now? BoJack Horseman is available to stream in full on Netflix.

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Girls

As awkward and direct as ever, Lena Dunham’s opus came roaring back into form this season, showing most of the characters at their worst and the storytelling at its very best. With the most nakedly emotional and intensely funny writing since its first season, phenomenal highlights like The Marnie Episode and Hannah’s single-take Moth story in the finale meant that the show’s going into its sixth and final season with a renewed sense of who its people are, and what it wants to be.

Can you catch up now? Girls airs on Foxtel’s Showcase during its season run. It’s currently off-air. Sorry! 

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Crashing and Fleabag

All hail the new auteur queen of hot messes, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. In two near-perfect TV shows in the one year, full of sex, fart jokes and a vague aroma of hangover hair, she’s quietly redefined the comedy of Saturn-return existential angst.

Can you catch up now? Crashing is available to stream in full on Netflix. Fleabag is exclusive to Amazon Prime (which has just launched in Australia).

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The Girlfriend Experience

This glacial, claustrophobic Soderbergh spinoff isn’t for everyone, but if you get sucked in, it’s mesmerising. The show is a sex-industry Mr Robot without the cynical whimsy and the unreliable narrator. Riley Keough’s chilly blankness, the unsettlingly voyeuristic framing, the ubiquitous grids and cages of glass surfaces and metal lines that overlaid almost every scene, its pity and fear of men’s desires, the addictive abruptness of each instalment: it’s dark and explicit and unflinching and a really terrifying way to spend a weekend afternoon.

Can you catch up now? The Girlfriend Experience is available in full on Stan.

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The Kettering Incident

Twin Peaks: Tasmania is a just-barely inclusion on this list given the insanely open-ended cliffhanger/reveal of its finale. Up until that point, its moody, elliptical movements towards a conclusion were fascinating, and didn’t telegraph whether the Strange Goings-On were genuinely supernatural or something that could all be easily explained away.  

It’s stylish — the camera takes beautiful advantage of its eerie coastal location — and specifically Australian, without that stilted, affected dialogue far too many local scripts still inexplicably suffer from, while taking all the right cues from Scandi noir. After the disappointment of Secret City, this quietly beautiful Foxtel Original is ready to play with the peak-TV big boys — provided they can actually get star Elizabeth Debicki back to film the next chapter in between Marvel movies and making out with Tom Hiddleston.

Can you catch up now? You can watch the full series on Foxtel Play.

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Special Categories

Hardest swerve off the rails: UNreal. Way to ruin some of the most interesting female characters on TV, show. Fingers crossed things pick back up in the third season, which will feature a female “suitor”, but there’s a lot of faith needing restoration (IDEA: bring back Faith).

(Honorary mention: everyone’s former favourite TV show, American Politics).

Best abortion: Tied between Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, You’re The Worst, BoJack Horseman, and Jane The Virgin — all of which had main characters choose to end a pregnancy while in different romantic situations, all for different reasons, none with the kind of soul-shattering, meta-moralising anguish TV writers used to think was a mandatory emotional throughline for such arcs.

That’s not to say it was a casual thing for any of the four women in question — they considered it, but chose not to have a baby and dealt with various (and character-appropriate) levels of repercussions for themselves and their relationships. For all four of them, it was also the right decision. That in itself is quietly revolutionary.

Also:

Best relentless visual gags: Angie Tribeca. The star-studded parody series is the ultimate mindless hangover binge, and never lets even the most throwaway cop show cliche go past without making it incredibly, perfectly literal. It’s gloriously clever-dumb — if you still get a kick out of the “lend me your ears” joke in Men In Tights, then run, don’t walk, to fire up that Stan account.

Best weed: High Maintenance, which is about weed in the way Friday Night Lights is about football. And shout-out to Jess and Cece from New Girl getting blazed and watching the 1980s Anne Of Green Gables and pondering the hotness of Gilbert Blythe (#RIPJonathanCrombie).

Best Britishness: The Night Manager. This flawlessly enunciated spy drama is all well and good — crisp dressing, crisper consonants — but it’s little things like Olivia Colman offering Tom Hiddleston a biscuit and not taking no for an answer that made it truly delightful.

(Right Honourable Mention: The Crown, but it loses points for making us feel sexual feelings about Prince Phillip).

Best arms: Luke Cage. There was no competition for this category and it requires no further explanation.

Best crying: Grant Gustin on The Flash. Has the male star of a superhero show ever cried so much, and so appropriately? Gustin is charming as heck as cheery speedster Barry Allen, but even when the show is at its cheesiest and/or laziest and/or time-travelliest, he can bring it home with some well-placed waterworks that never feel cheap or unearned. The cinematic DC universe could use a little of its small-screen counterpart’s emotional openness.

Best save: Nashville. Hoooooo boy, that cliffhanger was a gamble — so much so, a non-cliffhanger version was apparently filmed as well — but it might have made the difference in terms of fan reactions to the show’s cancellation and thus its subsequent resuscitation. The increasingly crazytown bananapants soap made a few seriously cooked decisions in its nearly-final season, so here’s hoping for a closing run full of well-adjusted Deacon, gleefully bonkers Juliette, and absolutely no Cash or Layla ever again.

Best portrayal of PTSD: Outlander and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. At opposite ends of the genre spectrum (and colour palette), two very different shows refused to take the easy way out with characters who have been through some serious shit.

Neither Sam Heughan’s Jamie nor Ellie Kemper’s Kimmy were getting over their respective traumas in a hurry, and the way the effects lingered over their performances and relationships is a blueprint for writing and performing smarter, deeper character development.

Best pseudo-Sunnydale: Wynonna Earp. This underrated comic book adaptation has a smart-mouthed heroine with a special weapon, a sweetly kickass sisterly sidekick, a surly immortal love interest, a goody-two-shoes love interest with a secret, a small town setting with an unusual number of supernatural occurrences, a queer couple made for Tumblr-obsessing, and snarky one-liners for days. Which streaming service do we have to pester to get Canadian Zombie Badlands Buffy legally available here already?

Best value streaming platform: Stan. Netflix is great for their Originals and is starting to get the hang of weekly fast-tracking (I don’t know why they’re doing it with Frequency, of all things, but man that show is fun). Stan, meanwhile, has been on the fast-tracking train for ages, with shows like Younger and iZombie (fingers crossed for a lot more CW shows to turn up next year) and beloved Amazon Prime binge-dumps including Transparent and Mozart In The Jungle.

It also has a surprisingly kickass film selection that ranges from Fellini to Wake In Fright to all three Sharknados, and it’s put a toe in the original-content water with No Activity. It’s the best mix of new, old and cult options on offer, and worth your dollars for Daria alone.

Best Rory Gilmore love interest canon basically-a-confirmation that was the only good thing about the Gilmore Girls revival apart from Emily’s storyline and Sutton Foster: TEAM JESS AND JESS’S INEXPLICABLY BUFF TORSO (I MEAN LIKE SERIOUSLY HE IS AN AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER, IF THERE ARE ANY AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS OUT THERE WHO ARE THAT SWOLE AND ALSO GIVE REALLY GREAT AND INSIGHTFUL LIFE ADVICE, PLEASE GET AT ME) FOREVER.

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Caitlin Welsh is a freelance writer who tweets from @caitlin_welsh.