Rollo Tomasi’s Top Ten TV Shows of 2017
4. The 100
Season 4 of The 100 was problematic, with cartoon / comic book elements thrown in – Octavia Blake (Marie Avgeropoulos) falling off of a cliff that was 400-500 feet from water below after being run through with a sword, surviving the fall, the blood-loss, and wound. Besides baffling moments and writer creative decisions like that (e.g. Bellamy Blake (Bob Morley) helped murder 300 Grounders yet faced no punishment for it), this season of The 100 was solid, with great character and dramatic moments, especially towards its spectacular ending.
When Season 5 begins, I look forward to seeing how five years has changed aspects of different characters’ personality.
13 Reason Why‘s first season was brutal, tragic, and well-acted television. It was also the best TV series about teens and high school on air in 2017. There were so many things that were recognizable about what the students were gong through but it wasn’t in a sensationalized format like 90210, Riverdale, or other primetime dramas about high-school life.
Normal TV series rarely provoke an emotional reaction in the viewer. Most give the viewer what they were expecting or have seen before with new wrapping paper around them. 13 Reasons Why was something different. 13 Reasons Why tapped into something so real the viewer could not help but react. That was one of 13 Reasons Why‘s purposes – to create a reaction in the viewer. Its purpose also was to tell an engaging story. 13 Reasons Why succeeded in both. Multiple times during the season, the viewer wanted to give Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) a hug so that she knew that someone in the world got her, saw her, the real her, and cared about that person.
Read my full review for the season here.
2. Mr. Robot
Season 3 of Mr. Robot may have been the best season of the series so far with Episode 6 (eps3.5_kill-pr0cess.inc) its pinnacle. I haven’t watched sections of a Mr. Robot episode more times than I did with eps3.5_kill-pr0cess.inc. In Season 2, the aggrandized plot was unexpected (a good thing). In Season 3, the various plots and people striving to maintain, unravel, and cover up the E-Corp hack and the partial economic fall of United States’ society blew the mind of the viewer.
The two halves of Elliot Anderson (Rami Malek)’s mind came into their own during Season 3, each getting time to shine and to interact with others, especially Mr. Robot.
When the trailer for the first season of The Handmaid’s Tale premiered, I didn’t even watch it (a tragic mistake). I thought “yeah, yeah, another dystopia TV series.” Even the title for the series seemed lame. The old adage “never judge a book by its cover” never rang more true than with The Handmaid’s Tale. By the first episode, if not the second episode, I was hooked. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – they actually brought back slavery, all the violence associated with it, and a society that benefited from its exploits. The twist was that Gilead didn’t enslave foreign people, Gilead disenfranchised then enslaved their own.
The dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale was immediately recognizable because its setting was today and its inhabitants were people that we see on the street everyday. The viewer could see themselves in that world, a victim of that world, or a person running to be free of that world.
The world of The Handmaid’s Tale would be nothing without the characters and the storylines that inhabited it. Everyone, outward or inward, in some way, shape, or form, had been mutilated by Gilead, even if that person or people weren’t consciously aware of those scars.
Table of Contents
Honorable Mentions
Black Mirror, Vikings, Game of Thrones, Taboo, Legion, American Gods, The Punisher, Gunpowder (though it was a mini-series), and Counterpart.
2017 TV shows I Have Not Seen
I can only rate the TV shows that I have watched on a regular basis. I have not seen: Big Little Lies, This is Us, Blindspot, Scorpion, Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, Riverdale, Empire, Gotham, and many other series and mini-series that aired in 2017 yet.
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