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Friday, Dec 21, 2012 2:29 PM UTC

The Blue Glow TV Awards: Top 10 Shows of 2012

The best shows rated by the best critics SLIDE SHOW

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The Blue Glow TV Awards: Top 10 Shows of 2012

This year, we launched our first annual Blue Glow TV Awards. We assembled a panel of judges by cherry-picking among our favorite critics in print and online, and then we asked them to rank their top five favorite shows of 2012. We assigned 10 points to the No. 1 choice, 9 to No. 2, et cetera. For those judges who offered 10 selections, because they had a lot of love to give: We just took the top 5 from their lists. For the two voters who could not choose favorites and opted out of ranking altogether, we assigned 5 points to each of their selections. From the results, we compiled this definitive list of the 10 best shows of 2012. Note: “The Walking Dead” and “Game of Thrones” are tied.

(ABC Family): 11 points
“’Bunheads’ flouts nearly every ‘rule’ of good drama: It’s set in an extremely low-stakes environment where everyone talks like a Broadway devotee on speed and goes on about mostly nothing much. There’s no moody antihero, just a dynamic, bantering Vegas dancer and her teenage charges chattering in a sleepy California town. And yet it has coalesced into something funny, sweet, moving, substantial and original about the necessity and difficulty of change.” — Willa Paskin, Salon

(NBC): 18 points
“’30 Rock’ has had a wonderful comeback year, and part of that has stemmed from having its finger firmly on the pulse of who we are right now.” — Todd Van Der Werff, AV Club

(HBO): 24 points
ThinkProgress’ Alyssa Rosenberg says of “Game of Thrones”: “No show is producing a greater number of tremendously impressive performances, covering more territory, or having more fun with itself.”
(AMC): 24 points
The Awl’s Heather Havrilesky says of “The Walking Dead”: ”It’s hard not to encounter the around-the-clock slaughtering of repugnant, brain-dead beasts as an accurate metaphor for navigating an election year.”
(NBC): 37 points
“What Amy Poehler does, week in and week out, is just amazing to me. Anything they need her to do, she does. Be insane (and insanely funny)? Easy. Be the perfect straight woman? On it. Make me cry like she’s a character on ‘Parenthood’? Done. It’s not just that she can do so many things, but that she’s so great at all of them. It would be a waste of half her skill set, but I could imagine a universe where she transitions into a ‘Lou Grant’-style ‘Parks and Rec’ spinoff drama where Leslie gets a very low-level position in Washington; she could absolutely carry that.” — Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

(FX): 55 points
“Louis C.K.’s monologue in which his character asks out a beautiful, smart bookstore clerk played by Parker Posey is brilliant in how it veers from comedy to pathos and allows Louie to ask a woman out by essentially throwing himself on her mercy … After all that, when she says yes, we’re as surprised as he is.” — Eric Deggans, Tampa Bay Times

(HBO): 62 points
“Great TV is about voice above all, and not only does Lena Dunham have it to spare, she found a way to translate it into a brutally funny, messy, moving treatment of a comedy antiheroine.” — James Poniewozik, Time magazine

(AMC): 86 points
“No series has ever snatched a character away from an audience that loved him and then made that character so irredeemable. None.” — Tim Goodman, Hollywood Reporter

(AMC): 94 points
“It’s not the newest of cable’s sexy prestige dramas, it’s no longer the flashiest and certainly it has the fewest disembowelments per season (unless you count what life did to Lane Pryce). But it remains the best thing on television: smarter, deeper, sadder, weirder than any of its competitors … The only thing more depressing than watching Don Draper lose his swag and misunderstand the Beatles is the realization that there are only two more seasons left to see him do it. When Megan walked out of the office, the elevator at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce was briefly replaced by a bottomless pit. The meaning was clear: Everybody’s going down.” — Andy Greenwald, Grantland

(Showtime): 97 points
“Season 2 even more harrowing, far more romantic, a tad more frustrating than Season 1; not for a second do I doubt it was the most intriguing drama of the year.” — Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

 

Blue Glow TV Awards: Top 10 Shows of the Year

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  • No. 10: "Bunheads"
    “'Bunheads' flouts nearly every 'rule' of good drama, and yet it has coalesced into something funny, sweet, moving, substantial and original about the necessity and difficulty of change." —Willa Paskin, Salon

  • No. 9: "30 Rock"
    "'30 Rock' has had a wonderful comeback year, and part of that has stemmed from having its finger firmly on the pulse of who we are right now." —Todd Van Der Werff, AV Club

  • No. 7: "Game of Thrones" tied with "The Walking Dead"
    "No show is producing a greater number of tremendously impressive performances, covering more territory, or having more fun with itself than 'Game of Thrones.'" —Alyssa Rosenberg, ThinkProgress
    "It's hard not to encounter the around-the-clock slaughtering of repugnant, brain-dead beasts as an accurate metaphor for navigating an election year." —Heather Havrilesky, the Awl

  • No. 6: "Parks and Recreation"
    "What Amy Poehler does, week in and week out, is just amazing to me. Anything they need her to do, she does. Be insane (and insanely funny)? Easy. Be the perfect straight woman? On it. Make me cry like she's a character on 'Parenthood'? Done. It's not just that she can do so many things, but that she's so great at all of them." — Alan Sepinwall, HitFix

  • No. 5: "Louie"
    "Louis C.K.'s monologue in which his character asks out a beautiful, smart bookstore clerk played by Parker Posey is brilliant in how it veers from comedy to pathos and allows Louie to ask a woman out by essentially throwing himself on her mercy … After all that, when she says yes, we're as surprised as he is." — Eric Deggans, Tampa Bay Times

  • No. 4: "Girls"
    "Great TV is about voice above all, and not only does Lena Dunham have it to spare, she found a way to translate it into a brutally funny, messy, moving treatment of a comedy antiheroine." —James Poniewozik, Time magazine

  • No. 3: "Breaking Bad"
    "No series has ever snatched a character away from an audience that loved him and then made that character so irredeemable. None." —Tim Goodman, Hollywood Reporter

  • No. 2: "Mad Men"
    "It's not the newest of cable's sexy prestige dramas, it's no longer the flashiest and certainly it has the fewest disembowelments per season (unless you count what life did to Lane Pryce). But it remains the best thing on television: The only thing more depressing than watching Don Draper lose his swag and misunderstand the Beatles is the realization that there are only two more seasons left to see him do it." —Andy Greenwald, Grantland

  • No. 1: "Homeland"
    "Season 2 even more harrowing, far more romantic, a tad more frustrating than Season 1; not for a second do I doubt it was the most intriguing drama of the year." — Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

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What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

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  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

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