Time to start my Top 220 TV shows! That's up from 180 shows last year
. Once again as you can tell, I watch way too much television. Almost all of the shows on the list aired in the year 2015, with some being leftovers from 2014 I finally got around to watching. So lets begin with the list! Here we start off with 7 comedies and 3 dramas:
The Top 220 TV Shows: 220-211
220) "Scream Queens" FOX
Leading off my Best of 2015 is Scream Queens. One of the worst television programs to air this year, and appropriately landing at the lowest position on my list. Offensive, unfunny, and misguided, Ryan Murphy once again disappoints as he often does. I couldn’t even make it past the first few episodes to see how the show would inevitably lose plot points, fall apart, and have characters come out of character to fit some idea Ryan Murphy thought was clever (which often never is). Plain, dull, and uninspired. For Jamie Lee Curtis, Nasim Pedrad, and Niecy Nash’s sake, I hope people forget they were ever involved in this show. I usually can hate watch shows, but this one I couldn’t even touch. Seeing the reaction of the members on this site after the finale aired made me glad I gave up on this garbage now kicking off my Best of 2015.
219) "Mulaney" FOX
Last Year: 178
A show starring Martin Short, John Mulaney and Nasim Pedrad, what could go wrong? So so so much. This show about … well… it’s not really about anything. It’s a group of friends and associates who um… do stuff? This show had no real focus and the humor fell flat often. The show was picked up originally for 6 episodes, picked up 10 for more, then was forced to stop production after the 13th episode. And for some reason FOX aired them all out of order (like they sometimes do). For some reason I kept watching the final 5 episodes they burned off this year. Poor Nasim landing on the two lowest spots. She deserves a better platform.
218) "The Messengers" CW
After being on a roll recently with their new shows including The Flash, The 100 and iZombie, I figured The CW had figured out how to bring great TV to the public. Then they aired this show. Did they watch the same pilot episode I watched? It was dull, slow and the acting was questionable. Maybe they thought with some world building the show could grow. The show was about a group of young adults who have been awaken and now have powers, given to them by the pending apocalypse and need to stop it. The characters never fully developed, though I did enjoy one plot twist slightly. A “messenger” we believed to be one of the good guys, was in fact one of the horsemen of the apocalypse! Actions and consequences were meant to try and seem grand and all important, but the show just idled and no one really seemed committed. The show was canceled shortly into its run, though I finished it all the way through in the end.
217) "Happyish" Showtime
Kathryn Hahn, Steve Coogan, and Bradley Whitford was more than enough to get me to want to check this show out. I don’t even know what I watched. This show is about a man who isn’t really happy with life, family issues and his job. He works at an ad agency and 99% of the show was someone complaining. On and on. Trying to make it seem like some big statement on life and how we live as human beings. Its also one of those dramas pretending to be a comedy but still get called a comedy or dramedy. Philip Seymour Hoffman was originally going to pay the Steve Coogan role but after his death, Showtime re piloted and re picked up the show. They would have been better off letting it go. It got canceled after this first season.
216) "Man Seeking Woman" FXX
I don’t even know what happened most of the time on this show. If you ever saw the show Wilfred, that may be the closest thing I can compare it to. Jay Baruchel stars as a guy trying to get through life in an over the top world where it is pretty much the inner workings of a stoners mind. He dated a troll, met cupid, and went on other surreal adventures. I really couldn’t get into this one, and I love “stoner” comedies when they do them right. Paired up with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I can see why it got renewed for a second season, but it really needs to tone it back a bit for me to continue on this journey.
215) "Weird Loners" FOX
Another questionable pick up from this past year. How this show impressed FOX execs baffles me. A group of younger adults trying to navigate life with all the quirks and hiccups life can throw at them. With only 6 episodes, it wasn’t a huge commitment, but after the demise of Happy Endings (and Flashforward to a degree), I felt obliged to finish the show for Zachary Knighton. Wasn’t really worth the time. I laughed a little, but it felt like the show knew it had a limited time to work with, and never developed the characters quick enough.
214) "The Returned" A&E
A remake of a critically acclaimed French drama. What can go wrong? Everything. It was boring, everything felt slurred, overly dark and uninspired. A group of people in a town who all died come back to life and forever change those they returned to. Old secrets come to life with them, and new secrets are made. A bunch of recognizable names were among the cast including Michelle Forbes, Mark Pellegrino, Kevin Alejandro, and Jeremy Sisto. None of them could help the boring writing and the inevitable cancellation it got after just one season. And it left on a really strange cliffhanger but I can’t imagine anyone will be too upset by not finding out what happens next.
213) "Cockroaches" ITV2
A comedy about life post war in a war and nuclear ravaged earth. I only found out about the show because I was such a fan of Jack Whitehall’s Bad Education which ended last year. A family tries to find refuge after finally leaving the wife’s parent’s fallout shelter. They soon run into a group of survivors, some they know, some they don’t and try to get society going again. Did I mention this was a comedy? The humor was strange, over the top and really nothing too exciting. I haven’t even heard if the show was picked up for another series, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it ended. This reminds me I need to track down The Bad Education Movie that came out this year. And The Inbetweeners 2 Movie. Yay British humor!
212) "Legends" TNT
Last Year: 155
I really don’t have an answer to this question. Why did I continue watching this show after a horrible and misguided first season. Well maybe I have a partial answer. After not knowing what kind of show it wanted to be in Season 1, they rebooted the show leaving only Sean Bean’s character as a lead. Morris Chestnut popped up again to try and connect the two series but it didn’t do much. When it returned this year, the ratings dropped hard and it actually just got canceled today! What timing. Anyway, they picked up with the storyline of Sean Beans character not knowing who he really was anymore after adopting so many Legends (undercover aliases he adopted for cases he worked on as a spy). He’s in Europe and some terrorist attack or something is happening. The show visually got dark where I can hardly make out what’s going on in scenes, flashback pop up haphazardly and go back and forth jarringly. Sometimes writing these out I wonder why I don’t drop shows like this faster.
211) "The Odd Couple" CBS
Another remake! What can go wrong! After a terrible pilot, CBS had this show re shoot a new pilot. And it was still pretty terrible. So I can only imagine how horrible the original was. Matthew Perry is the sports radio host and womanizer who lives with his friend who is separated from his wife and is a neat freak. Imagine all the laughter from that alone! It was not funny and somehow managed to snag a second season (give it up for in house productions!). Yvette Nicole Brown deserves so much more than what she is given on the show. I will say it did improve slightly over the course of its first season run, but it’s not great by any stretch of the imagination.
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I always forget how much time this stuff takes to put together! The write ups should get better from here on out since I will be enjoying them more as I go on haha. The Top 220 TV Shows: 210-201 will be up next!