American Housewife

Conviction

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow

Feed the Beast

Fuller House

As predicted way back in January, the first episode of Netflix's Fuller House was, indeed, the single most excruciating episode of television for all of 2016, a steady death march of flaccid punchlines, bloated nostalgia, over-eager callbacks and self-congratulatory back-patting extended over 35 minutes so that the actors could stare directly into the camera for 13 seconds in an attempt to reunion-shame the Olsen Twins for having better things to do.

There probably were approaches in which a Full House reboot could have acknowledged the passing of time without hollow pandering and shameless rehashing of a past viewed exclusively through rose-colored glasses, but nobody involved in Fuller House wanted that. Probably the audience didn't want that either, a reminder that if we don't collectively demand better, then better won't be given to us. Netflix also had a stinker with the laughless Will Arnett booze-redemption comedy series Flaked, but at least Flaked had the conviction of Arnett's passion for the material. — D.F.

Pure Genius

Vinyl/Roadies

The Walking Dead

I don't know if you've heard this, but Negan is a bad, bad man. In 2016, The Walking Dead aired eight episodes of people talking about how bad Negan is, followed by eight episodes of Jeffrey Dean Morgan sneering, monologuing and peacocking to illustrate how bad Negan is. Along the way, Negan became so bad he became boring, or else the endless conversations and displays of his badness became so overblown that I became desensitized.

The Walking Dead has now killed off too many characters whose names I remember and done too flimsy a job of introducing new characters, with exhaustingly long periods separating characters and diluting the connections between them. Something needs to be done to reinvigorate the Walking Dead zombies and, more importantly, to reinvigorate the show's pacing. The latter process could be started by AMC telling producers, "Get back to doing regular-length episodes, not every story requires 90 minutes," something AMC will never tell the producers of TV's highest-rated show. — D.F.

The X-Files

Fox brought The X-Files back this winter to great excitement and for three episodes in the middle, the revival ranged from OK ("Founder's Mutation" and "Home Again") to really good (Darin Morgan's "Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster"). But those episodes were bookended by a trio of lifeless entries stuck in a mythological rut, full of robotic performances and paced like a slug on a salt flat. Maybe it's a coincidence that the three lifeless episodes all came from series creator Chris Carter and the three superior episodes from other contributors in the show's vast stable, but it sure didn't feel like it. Promise me more X-Files episodes from people named Morgan, Wong or, in an ideal world, Gilligan and I'm enthusiastically on-board. But my desire for more of Carter's X-Files is now exhausted. — D.F.