Superlatives season rolls on! Whenever I put together a list of my top 10, or even top 20, shows of a given year, there's always a question of how to judge returning shows against brand new ones. One the one hand, it's both more exciting when a new show is good than when a good show continues to be good. And it can be more fun as a critic to shine a spotlight on a less-heralded rookie than to simply remind people of series they already know about.
Alan Sepinwall
Still, my picks for the year's 10 best new shows featured seven newbies to three veterans — one of them a very old veteran at that, in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia — not because I'm all about the new, but because this happened to be an excellent year for debuts. So much so that we're taking a break from looking at the year's best episodes so I can talk some more about other great new series — or, in some cases, limited series meant to air this year and only this year.
(Note: I haven't seen enough of Heated Rivalry yet to feel comfortable putting it here; I'm hoping to catch up and write about it in the coming weeks. Similarly, I've only seen a handful of I Love L.A.'s, and while it's grown on me, I need to watch more. Even in post-Peak TV, there are surely a lot of shows I would really like that I just didn't get to.)
In alphabetical order: