4. The Leftovers, HBO
Early on, The Leftovers — a drama taking place after the mysterious disappearance of two percent of the world’s population — was unwatchably grim. In its second season, the show is certainly still (very!) sad, but we’ve moved beyond the simple pain of grief into something more searching and curious. The action and the first season’s central actors have moved to a Texas town where no one vanished. As a result of this seeming miracle, goat sacrifices and religious pilgrimages have become unremarkable; human frailty, by contrast, seems strange. Having gotten sheer brutality out of their system, the show’s writers have figured out that the central story of The Leftovers is an unsolvable mystery, the sort of enigma that makes life painful—and ecstatic, too.
3. Fargo, FX
The second season of this anthology series has little to say about the Coen brothers’ 1996 film; indeed, it takes place nearly 20 years previous, in 1979, with candidate Ronald Reagan ascendant. Reagan, played by Bruce Campbell, promises to fix an America that appears to be coming apart at the seams, nowhere more so than in the upper Midwest, where corruption large and small has taken root at more or less every level of society. Situations escalate endlessly as they do on the best comedies: No show does a better job of showing how average people get sucked into madness. (Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons, as a naive married couple in a hell of their own making, are best in show.)
2. Mad Men, AMC
Mad Men’s story wrapped up in the first part of the season, which is why its final episodes were so gloriously watchable. This structure indulged us last looks at the lives of each character, especially Don, on a vision quest whose pointlessness was the point. There was tragedy (in January Jones’s transcendent performance as a dying Betty) and, for other characters, the sort of unglamorous joy that comes from simply continuing on in a life’s work. Rarely has a protracted final season felt quite so much like a victory lap.
1. Veep, HBO
There’s no way to know which — if any — of the many politics-themed shows on TV accurately depict what goes on among our government’s most powerful. But Veep, more than ever, depicts just how those walls of power tend to close in tighter and tighter as one’s power grows. As President, former VP Selina Meyer is beholden to advisers, rivals, and her own vanity. Expertly played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, she’s both a fumbling female Nixon and humanizing proof that any of us could become Nixon, given the right set of allies and adversaries. As the race for the White House heats up with banalities and absurdities, Veep is not merely the best-executed show of the year. It’s the most relevant.
http://time.com/4130167/top-10-tv-shows-2/