• True Detective

It’s the opinion of a number of people—professionals and laymen alike—that we’ve entered a second golden age of television. This is simultaneously great and really annoying. As the New York Times’s David Carr explained it back in March, “The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet and threatening to consume my waking life in the process.” Suffice it to say, there was a lot of stuff—and a lot of good stuff—on TV this year, but we have lives, and families (well, we have pets), and we didn’t get around to watching everything.

Black-ish (ABC)I’m not going to belabor the fine points of what makes some by-the-book family sitcoms funnier than others. Some have good writers, some don’t. Some have a likable cast, some don’t. What Black-ish has is Tracee Ellis Ross, who’s emerged as one of the funniest people on television. (An aside: SHE’S DIANA ROSS’S DAUGHTER.) She’s at her best when her cool, collected character is given permission to lose it, at which point Ross channels the kind of mania that won Laurie Metcalf a bunch of Emmys when she was on R­­oseanne. All right, and cute kids with good material don’t hurt either; the two young ones, twins Jack and Diane, are pretty great. —Gwynedd Stuart