It’s been a long year. Have you noticed?

Each December, I write a festive rant about my loathing for Top Ten lists. It’s always the same: lists are reductive, phony, anti-art. Online, they work first as clickbait, then as groupthink. They force critics to rate radically dissimilar projects—the epic, the dramedy, the sleek time-killer, the ambitious game-changer that doesn’t quite cohere—so that algorithms can crunch out a blandly universal must-see selection. I don’t like math, and if I knew anything about how numbers worked I wouldn’t have gone into arts criticism. Plus, I haven’t seen all the TV, and neither have you.

Last year, my solution was to make everything No. 1. This year, I’m a wearier, cagier, crankier individual, with situational anxiety and an allergy to my own enthusiasm. Watching television in the age of Trump, and during the Grand Sexual-Harassment Reckoning, has recalibrated my switches. It’s not that I love the medium any less: it’s an escape and a tonic, a lens to see the world more clearly or less clearly, depending upon one’s preference. But, these days, my opinions on everything feel like a wonky Geiger counter; often, I don’t even agree with myself. Also, I’m currently on book leave. So, for simplicity’s sake, I’ve simply chosen the ten shows that I looked forward to the most, then added two more, because I have no self control. They’re mostly shows that took big risks; but, equally important, they offered big pleasures. I knew what my No. 1 was. But the rest are jumbled together, so don’t you dare think they’re in order.

But, first, some caveats. Owing to the laws of physics, there are many 2017 seasons that I’ve heard were good but didn’t catch up on, including the latest episodes of “Mr. Robot,” “Vice Principals,” “Black Mirror,” “Queen Sugar,” and my beloved and frequently overlooked “Outlander.” There are a ton of terrific shows that might easily have made the list had you caught me on a different day, especially the glamorous “Feud” and the unglamorous “American Crime,” as well as “The Americans,” “Mindhunter,” “Girls,” “Halt and Catch Fire,” “Veep,” “Dear White People,” “BoJack Horseman,” “Catastrophe,” “Better Things,” and “Transparent.” I haven’t included some promising newbies, like “SMILF,” or the raucous tween-sex animated series “Big Mouth.” I excluded some exceptional stand-alone episodes—especially “A Brief History of Weird Girls,” from “I Love Dick”—because I was ambivalent about the shows that contained them. Also, I’ve only seen half of “Twin Peaks: The Return.” Maybe on purpose? I suspect that I’ve been unhealthily avoiding being informed on “Twin Peaks” in order to duck out on having a clear opinion, like with Israel, or fracking. Anyway, my plan is to watch it in January, on the best screen that I can find.

With its didgeridoos, alternate universes, Biblical exegeseses, horny-lion cults on boats, and that sob-inducing soundtrack, “The Leftovers” was easily the best thing I saw this year. It had what critics crave: wit, beauty, joy, surprise, originality, the thrill of disorientation, strong emotion, big laughs, great performances, and wonderful music. What was it about? The end of the world. Death in general. Suicide and divorce. It was a show about grief that felt like pure joy. I looked forward to every episode, more than any other show.

Runners-up, not in order:

The pitch—a David Simon show about porn—made me groan, and not in a good way. But “The Deuce,” set in Times Square in the nineteen-seventies, took big swings and connected. (O.K., not every time: no one needs two James Francos.) Like “The Wire” and “Treme,” it’s a city show, an exposé about capitalist exploitation. But “The Deuce” never felt like agitprop: it was reliably anti-pedantic about human behavior, darkly funny, with bold insights about the endless varieties of desire, how it sprouts through the cracks even amid ugliness. Maggie Gyllenhaal was top-notch as a streetwalker turned smut tyro, but the rest of the cast was solid, too, particularly Dominique Fishback, Emily Meade, and Chris Coy, as a gay, dry-humored bartender.

Photograph Courtesy Comedy Central

“Broad City”

This year, TV’s woke-est smutty-buddy comedy took place in an icy New York winter. The show let its characters age up, deepening their emotional palate without losing any of their zaniness. Horndog trickster Ilana got a job and lost her orgasm, flattened by post-Trump depression. Abbi sprouted gray hairs and accidentally killed a cat. Stand-alone gimmicks had big payoffs, especially a vacation in Florida and an animated drug trip. “Broad City” reflected the Zeitgeist before anyone got Reckoned with: one of the best episodes ended with a literal witches’ coven, howling in cathartic release in Central Park. I watched it three times.

“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”

A black comedy with a candy heart, a low budget, and ratings to match, this is the show I currently look forward to most every week, now that the “The Leftovers” has Departed. It’s got glorious, risky, and frequently risqué musical-comedy numbers (my favorite being a legitimately hot Fosse pastiche that made strong use of the word “cocksuredness”). This season, it took a significant leap, in an episode in which the dumped-at-the-altar, suicidal Rebecca Bunch finally got the news: her problem isn’t heartbreak but borderline-personality disorder. Like its heroine, the show is beautifully imperfect, a real original. You find me another vaudeville rom-com about mental illness that doubles as a stealth interrogation of certain self-destructive patterns one might summarize as “femininity poisoning,” and then we’ll talk.

“American Vandal”

Bingeing this dopey—and then weirdly affecting—Netflix true-crime satire was the most fun I had all year. “American Vandal” is a mockumentary, narrated by a pretentious high-school kid, that treats a case involving twenty-seven spray-painted penises with the forensic intensity usually accorded a fetish murder in rural Louisiana. It takes the piss out of highbrow shows like “Serial” and “Making a Murderer” so effectively that it might as well be marketed as a catheter. And, with a standout central performance by Jimmy Tatro, it manages to capture unusual themes about high school, the nature of bro culture, and Internet fame.

Gorgeous, sensual, and seductive, beautifully directed by Jean-Marc Vallée, with perfect, slow-build pacing, this beachside murder mystery was the year’s best surprise. Among an A-list cast of movie stars, Nicole Kidman stood out, playing a woman struggling to admit the truth about her abusive marriage. By the final episodes, the plot became a wrenching exploration of the hidden bonds between women who have been hurt, a #MeToo thriller with the rare finale that satisfied on all levels.

Tig Notaro’s semi-autobiographical half hour, about an L.A. podcaster who moves back to small-town Louisiana after her mom dies, is a miniature that never feels small. Wry and leisurely, tough but humane, with a Southern authenticity that’s rare on TV, it’s about how a family copes with secrets, and how damaged people find ways to tell the truth. There’s plenty of material to praise, including the show’s gutsy episode based on rumors about Louis C.K. that have since been confirmed, but the show’s strongest appeal is simply its characters—eccentrics, all: Tig, her troubled brother, Remy, and her repressed stepfather, Bill. A bittersweet joy.

“Search Party”

After the fabulously violent conclusion of Season 1, doubters wondered if this noir-sitcom—last year’s wittiest sleeper—had anywhere to go. Instead, the show pulled off a daring Season 2 by diving straight into the moral abyss and letting its Brooklyn narcissists come unstrung with guilt. A bravura performance by John Early pushed it straight onto this non-list.

“Lady Dynamite”

Like “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “Lady Dynamite” mimics its mentally ill protagonist’s mania. Like the late, great “Enlightened,” it’s a satire that simultaneously mocks and embraces New Age self-help values. Based on Bamford’s own recovery from bipolar disorder, the show splits the character’s life into three narrative slices—past, present, and future, each with its own color palette and editing style. This season, the main story arc was about Maria getting married and coping with intimacy. But the standout segment was the “future” slice—a jittery, surreal sci-fi fantasy that was challenging to watch, and entirely worth it: a scathing fantasia about every one of Hollywood’s ugliest, most freakish, most crazy-making tendencies, cranked up to eleven.

“GLOW”