The weirdest, most wonderful year in TV

How weird was that? The year in television was one vast and often chaotic canvas, reflecting and illuminating the world from which it is wrought.

It was a year in which escapism was elusive. It began with the inauguration of Donald Trump and ended with women changing the entertainment world in a revolution from within.

There was a lot of excellent TV and a lot of it inextricably linked to the surreal quality of the Trump era, brief though it is so far. The times we live in have a tousled quality and TV content illustrates that, to the extent that everything seems like a commentary, an allegory or a glossary referring to political and social turmoil.

Even the Emmy Awards connected viscerally with current events. Host Stephen Colbert opened by wondering how big the audience was for the Emmys telecast. Out came former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, smiling broadly. "This will be the largest audience to witness an Emmys, period, both in person and around the world," Spicer said. That's precisely what he said about the crowd size at Trump's inauguration, despite unambiguous photographic evidence to the contrary. How weird was that?

Multiple late-night shows became required viewing. Multiple dramas continued to underline that television, especially on cable and streaming services, is the paramount storytelling platform of the start of the 21st century. There was example after example of outstanding artistic ambition. TV drama and comedy tested norms, beguiled and challenged, embraced inclusiveness and acted as a vehicle for dissatisfaction and lamentation.

Such is the number of outstanding productions that a list of top 10 stellar works is inadequate. Here, I offer 12. As a result, most network TV series or specials are omitted. The restoration of Will & Grace was fun but the sort of goofy fun that pales beside HBO's Insecure or Netflix's American Vandal. Such series as SEAL Team and Wisdom of the Crowd offer often-baffling insight and entertainment, being calculated to piggyback on the impetus that elected Trump. A short list of 12 also means the powerful conclusions to The Leftovers on HBO and Rectify on Sundance and Netflix are excluded. And with Netflix presenting original series almost every week, the selection becomes a bewildering throng.

What's certain, though, is that the Canadian industry should feel deeply inadequate, once again, in this climate. There were standouts – another batch of Letterkenny episodes, the Global/Lifetime series Mary Kills People and the Rogers/City drama Bad Blood. All good, often gripping or mischievous, but they seem lightweight when compared with the best of drama and comedy made elsewhere. Apart from a handful of documentaries, little that's made in Canada is important to our understanding of this era.

There is both ephemeral television and substantial TV. The year 2017 offered further evidence that a golden age continues and TV is the best-equipped storytelling medium to describe and apprehend the vast and chaotic canvas of now.

Twelve shows that mattered

The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu, Bravo in Canada)

The superbly made adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel was a key cultural moment of the year, offering a terrifying what-if portrait of a misogyny-anchored culture and it looked like an interpretive key to Trump's rise and triumph. Not faithful to the novel and the better for it, the series' setting was a war-ravaged place run under the puritanical dictates of authoritarian church and state where the sole role of women is to be prisoners who provide children. Elisabeth Moss deservedly won an Emmy for her role, her flexible face conveying every nuance of the series. It isn't much of a stretch to say the series helped propel forward the #MeToo groundswell.

GLOW (Netflix)

A comedy but a stinging one. Creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch and co-executive producer Jenji Kohan ( Orange Is the New Black) used the material and the setting – female actors playing female wrestlers on a mid-eighties TV series – to deliver an often caustic commentary on the lack of roles for women then and now. But as bittersweet comedy. Alison Brie was the nominal star as Ruth, an actress scratching out a living in L.A. and trying to avoid the ultimate defeat of doing porn. But the entire ensemble was exceptionally good.

Fargo (FX)

"Prepare yourselves for unfathomable pinheadery," the promo from FX said.

As with the first and second seasons of the great anthology series, the content, style, tone and ambition of the third season were idiosyncratic. As usual, in its sinews, it had the dream-like chill of the harsh Minnesota winter and tone of rueful comic acceptance of evil.

Emmit and Stella Stussy (Ewan McGregor and Linda Kash), nouveau riche and naive, have no idea what it means when a cryptic, menacing Englishman (David Thewlis) calls in a debt. Emmit's brother Ray (also played by McGregor) has a score to settle, too. Mind-boggling violence gives way, often, to dark playfulness.

Mindhunter (Netflix)

In the late 1970s, two FBI agents begin interviewing serial killers for insight. A short summary can't do justice to this unnerving, incongruous and, at times, brilliantly funny drama. In the seventies, the idea of psychologically profiling serial killers and other criminals was something that policing bodies derided. Thus, the series was a journey, an origin story and made with such care it left you reeling. In a year in which so many new Netflix series were duds, Mindhunter was a masterful use of TV as long-form storytelling.

The Deuce (HBO)

David Simon's eight-part drama, a work of old-school naturalism, observes human behaviour in a formidably grimy world – New York in the early 1970s at the start of of commercial, filmed porn. It's about the people at the bottom; the sex workers, the pimps, the drug addicts, the bartenders and waitresses, the desperate and doomed. There is surface lubricity but it's only on the surface, just as the garbage on filthy Manhattan streets is desultorily there. It's about how people act in this environment. Maggie Gyllenhaal is deservedly nominated for a Golden Globe for her role as Eileen/Candy, the sex worker forging her own path.

Master of None (Netflix)

Genre-defying, funny, original and poignant – the second season of Aziz Ansari's series has exquisite emotional precision. It is a testament to the strength and vigour of TV today that such a series can be created and thrive. In the first season, Ansari created not a new kind of character – a single guy in New York in search of love and creative work is hardly new – but a new kind of ambience for such a comedy. It is bittersweet, grown-up and touches lightly but with force on the impact that Dev's Indian ethnicity has on his life. The freshness of the second season, much of it set in Italy, was simply exhilarating.

Alias Grace (CBC/Netflix)

The second series this year based on an Atwood novel was almost as extravagantly great, but not quite. As tightly wound, stark and knowing about its central female protagonist as The Handmaid's Tale, it just lacked the visual splendour and force of the Hulu series. A more elliptical adaptation, it reached into the elusive soul of Grace Marks (Sarah Gadon) and showed what happens to women of strength, cunning and intellectual vitality. Adapted by Sarah Polley and directed by Mary Harron, the series amounts to a murder mystery set in Victorian Canada and its momentum is in Gadon's outrageously seething performance.

Feud: Bette and Joan (FX)

Two screen sirens battle each other and Hollywood ageism and sexism. Like much of Ryan Murphy's work, the miniseries is superficially camp and acid-toned, but under that surface it has hard, unsettling truths. Basically, it's about Joan Crawford (Jessica Lange) being desperate for work in the Hollywood of 1961, and deciding that the way back to popularity, acclaim and financial stability was to make a movie with her old enemy, Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon). A long, tangled quarrel between two famous, talented divas, but slyly more about how Hollywood discards women and how these two women undermined each other.

Big Little Lies (HBO)

Pulp fiction with an all-star cast – Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgard, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern – and a vicious take on rich-white-people problems. But also a very grown-up, sensitive and grim chronicle of people sustained by their nerve-jangling neuroses. And all of it made startlingly gorgeous but jagged through Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée's direction of every episode. Not a redundant moment or scene in it.

Cardinal (CTV)

A rare example of a gripping, pristine Canadian crime drama. At times breathtaking, it was landmark Canadian TV. Based on Giles Blunt's novel Forty Words for Sorrow – but subtly and deftly shifting away from the last third of the novel – the six-part drama amounts to an austere but entrancing story about two cops, John Cardinal (Billy Campbell) and Lise Delorme (Karine Vanasse), determining there is a serial killer in a place called Algonquin Bay, Blunt's version of North Bay. The use of the landscape, gorgeous and threatening, is eerily wondrous.

The Vietnam War (PBS)

At 18 hours long in 10 parts, the most demanding of Ken Burns's doc series (this one created, written and directed with long-time creative partner Lynn Novick) presented, as clearly as possible, the labyrinthine history behind the United States' involvement in Vietnam and the ensuing quagmire of war. Since Burns seeks truth, not a mere accumulation of impressions, what was striking was that it amounted to an ominous cautionary tale. The truth is very hard to find and the number of people who told the truth about Vietnam was tiny. The archival footage is stunning and sometimes soul destroying, and the necessary overriding emotion that emanates from it is despair.

The Americans (FX)

Who would love a series about endless, callous deception by Soviet spies in 1980s Washington? The critics and a small audience. The plot points are all heart-scalding betrayals. There's nothing uplifting about The Americans, but it stubbornly clings to its pessimism and as the series nears its end it paints an even bleaker picture of political orthodoxies. The Soviet spies played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys are the most heartbreakingly real couple on TV.

Terrible trends and disasters

Marvel adaptations: Too many series arrived from the Marvel comic-book universe. Legion (FX) was good, Jessica Jones (Netflix) is captivating, and returning, but Inhumans on ABC and Iron Fist on Netflix are just insultingly, lazily bad.

Half-baked Canadian drama: Literally, some Canadian dramas are done on half the recipe or undercooked or insolently derivative. CBC's Bellevue started strong and then quickly wasted away to hopeless hokum, to the point where a person shouted at it, "Yes, I, too, have seen True Detective!" The Disappearance on CTV began as weirdly innocuous and stilted, then soared for two hours and returned to being eye-rollingly bland and ordinary.

Canada's 150th-birthday specials: CBC's Canada: The Story of Us managed to insult regions, groups and intelligence, all in some pathetic urge to tell us an official version of who and what we are. Another CBC effort, We Are Canada, was the epitome of very, very tedious TV. Allegedly about "passionate change-makers," it had no passion and presented no discernible notion of change – a series as dull as its awful title.