Meet our new and improved Best TV of 2013 list; all it wants is to love you
You might have already noticed a little something different with our year-end best of TV list if you’ve been poking around the site this morning, so we thought it would be good to give you an idea of just how we arrived at our list and why we made this change.
The long and short of it is that doing a best-of list for TV at the end of the year has always been an ungainly fit for a medium whose seasons run from June to May a lot of the time. Do we vote a network show that spent one half of the year in great shape and the other half in merely pretty good shape down? Or do we celebrate each program for the heights of what it accomplished? What’s more, our lists have always been prone to simply featuring the series that everybody on our staff watched ending up highly rated. And in a year with so much great TV that we struggled to get our list down to just the 40 shows we’re highlighting (and took some shortcuts along the way to include a few more programs), that felt like even more of a disservice to some of the smaller programs not everybody was able to get to.
So this year, we gathered the core TV Club staff in an offsite forum, and we all talked about the shows we did and didn’t want to see on our year-end list. We started by having everybody nominate three shows they wanted to see in the discussion, then made sure we didn’t have any obvious shows missing. At one time, there were well over 120 shows in consideration, but as time went on, things narrowed down to about 25 shows or groupings of shows that we were passionate about in 2013. From there, Todd VanDerWerff, Erik Adams, and Sonia Saraiya made some final, difficult cuts to get that down to a list of 15 shows that we will highlight individually in the next three weeks.