My Top Ten TV of 2025, Conclusion: Jury Prize

 

Every year I give what I call the grand jury prize, honoring series and actors that fall just beneath my qualifications for the top ten. These include certain promising new genre and sources of original programming that might fall under the radar.

 

Most Gifted Actor of 2025

Walton Goggins

This past spring the rest of America finally figured out what I did as early as 2010 and fell in love with Walton Goggins. Goggins has been one of the greatest performers in any genre practically since Peak TV began for his work as Shane in The Shield. There's been nothing he can do since, whether it be Boyd Crowder is Justified, his constant work in the HBO comedies of Danny McBride or guest spots in shows like Sons of Anarchy. So it's a crime worse than most of the unscrupulous (but always charming) characters he's played that from the debut of The Shield he received exactly one Emmy nomination for his work in the last twenty years.

Now, it's looking like the Emmys are finally catching up with him. In perhaps the most serious season of The White Lotus to date his depressed and broken Rick was one of the most wrenching and tragic characters in a show mostly based on comedy the past two seasons. It was the perfect mixture of every genre Goggins has played in his entire career to this point and ended with what has been the saddest death in the show's entire run. It really looked like Goggins was going to get his first Emmy this year and I'm not entirely sure I can forgive the Academy for not giving it to him.

However it looks like they are finally going to make up to it. Goggins received back to back Emmy nominations for the first time in his career, having been nominated for playing the Ghoul in the first season of Fallout in 2023. Now back for a second season there's a good chance he'll be back in the Emmy ranks again. And Sunday nights in March and April on HBO were pretty much a night of Goggins as the final season of The Righteous Gemstones gave us one last chance to see (perhaps more than we really wanted) another of his iconic characters as 'Baby Billy' the oldest member of the preaching family. Throw in a dynamite SNL stint where among his other gifts he helped put 'Guns' in the Constitution and its understandable why everyone fell in love with him.

 

Most Gifted Actress of 2025

Kaitlin Olson

There were a couple of candidates for this particular spot, especially considered that two of the greatest actresses in TV made multiple appearances in my top ten list. Julianne Nicholson showed her dramatic chops as Sinatra in Paradise and received an unexpected Emmy nomination (though not by me) and everyone fell in love with her as 'Dance Mom' on Hacks and she deservedly won her second Emmy. Carrie Coon was the heavy favorite to win Best Supporting Actress for her wonderful work in the third season of The White Lotus and she will definitely receive her third consecutive Emmy nomination for her work as Bertha in Season 3 of The Gilded Age.

It was easy, however, to list who the most valuable player of 2025 was when it came to TV and that's another actress who has finally been getting her due. Kaitlin Olson returned to her iconic role in the most recent season of It's Always Funny in Philadelphia.  She also had an incredible part in the crossover with Abbott Elementary when she tried to break up Gregory and Janine. Then in Season 4 of Hacks she returned as DJ the now born-again Christian daughter of Deb who we immediately saw while she loved God found a way to market her brand – and laid down the law with her mother. How she found the time for all of this while starring in her phenomenal ABC series High Potential when she plays Morgan, the genius cleaning lady-turned-consultant, a role that is proving to be as game changing for her as Saul Goodman was for Bob Odenkirk, is a question I'm not sure Morgan could answer. Olson joins the ever growing list of complicated heroines on TV, an antithesis to her trashy character on Sunny and she handles all of them with incredible work. Can an Emmy finally be in her future?

 

Two Different Kinds of Mystery Novel Adaptations

No Will Trent did not take a decline in quality in its third season; it's still on track to be one of the best shows of the decade. But I figured I'd let some new faces join the top ten this year. Both the character and the show had some extraordinary moments. Will spent the first half of the season dealing with how he'd had to burn down his relationship with Angie. He headed into a new romance which seems to have burned up (I hope we haven't seen the last of Gina Rodriguez) nearly torched his relationship with his partner Faith when he tried to save her son, and finally ended up meeting his biological father at the worst possible time. The season ended with him by the bedside of his surrogate mother not sure what will happen next.

Everyone in the cast has been having just as hard a time. Angie finally seems to have moved on from Will, was in a healthy relationship, then her mother died, then she spiraled, then she found out she was pregnant. She spent the final episode first climbing through a vent and then with the baby daddy in a sonogram – with Will on the outside. Michael Ormwood spent most of Season 3 raising his kids, then learnt he had a brain tumor, and collapsed at the end of the season. Faith spent the season worried about her son, then learned he was working for a drug dealer. Amanda spent most of this season handling the insanity – and then took a bullet in the chest.

I can't wait until next week when Season 4 begins. I will have to wait slightly longer for the fourth season of another brilliant adaptation of mystery novels to return but Season 3 of Dark Winds was by far its best yet. Joe Leaphorn spent the season dealing with the guilt and ramifications of his decision to kill the man responsible for his son's death, first as an FBI agent came to investigate, then when his wife learned the truth. He escaped with his badge intact but his marriage may never be. Chee helped him investigate the problem of the son of a missing friend that led to a barrage of murders and a chase on a train. And Bernadette spent the season as part of border patrol, looking into a case of human trafficking only to find there was no one she could trust.

The third season was incredibly dark, in both real ways and surreal ones. The fifth episode saw Joe having been wounded, reliving the worst moments of his past in a dream sequences that had all the trademarks of a Lynch scene but was far easier to get to the point of. And it drew riveting performances across the board: Deanna Allison's monologue where she told an FBI agent the pain she'd gone through ever since her son had died should have earned her an Emmy nomination. Throw in that it gave us one last chance to see Robert Redford (in a cameo with co-producer George R.R. Martin) and you had a series that restores luster to the brand of AMC.

 

Long Live The (Stephen) King

The Institute & Welcome to Derry

We're all used to seeing Stephen King done on the big screen and he has been done well on streaming in past years. Even his pseudonym Richard Bachman had his day in the sun this past fall. Now on two different kinds of adaptations of his work we see that television is absolutely getting King right.

First came the debut of an adaptation of a recent novel The Institute. Adapted for MGM+ it took the world of one of the more gentle horrors in King's work and adjusted just enough to make it fit into ours. Mary Louise Parker gives a standout performance as Miss Sigsby, the ultimate product of ends justifying the means, even if that means using children as guinea pigs until they die. The Institute may have itself been destroyed in the season finale but there's more than enough material for a second.

Just as astonishing was Welcome to Derry, the Stephen King adaptation I've been waiting for my whole life. And judging from the enormous ratings so were a lot people.  Set 27 years before the events in the films of the Muschiettis we see a new sent of children dealing with deaths of those around them and just what it was like to live in Derry when Pennywise was around in the past. The answer: pretty horrible. And that's before the military decided it was its mission to find a way to harness the evil that lurks in the sewers.

With Easter Eggs that didn't feel like fanservice, Welcome to Derry answered questions I'd never thought to ask and that made a remarkable about sense. Furthermore by working within the bounds of the original novel the writers made it clear that they didn't have to change that much to make the story work. The series also did something few horror series have done in Peak TV and be genuinely frightening as well as gory. The Black Spot episode will rank as one of the tour de force moments in 2025.

The writers clearly have a plan and they laid the groundwork for it perfectly all season, hiding their secrets in plain sight. We may not see Dick Hallorann in Season 2 but this is Stephen King's Maine. There are a lot of characters who've been round.

 

 

RETURN OF A KILLER FRANCHISE

Dexter: Original Sin and Resurrection

The prequel to Dexter  Original Sin almost from the start justified its existence. By looking into the Morgan family and starting to show that there were cracks in it even before what happened to Dexter, we saw a darker side. And Harry Morgan went from being somewhat heroic as a ghost to someone who might very well have unleashed more evils than we could have expected. By getting a glimpse at younger versions of the characters such as LaGuerta and Angel we saw new sides to them as well as seeing as a teen how Dexter first unleashed his Dark Passenger.

Personally I would have preferred another season of Original Sin to spending more time with Dexter in the present after New Blood. Then I actually saw Resurrection and I began to see its virtues. We saw Dexter trying to reinvent himself in New York, trying to rebuild his relationship with Harrison who he'd done much to destroy and was recovering from the horror. We saw Dexter find himself in a collector of serial killers featuring some incredible guest roles from Krysten Ritter to Neil Patrick Harris to Uma Thurman. And Peter Dinklage gave one of the most frightening performances in his entire career.

We were reminded through both the specters of Dexter's past and in his present that he couldn't stop hurting people. This was made clear most tragically in the fate of Angel Batista, who knew the truth about Dexter spent all season chasing him, paid the price – and with his haunting last words made it clear he would never forgive him. Dexter has reinvented himself yet again and once again the path is clear. But we all know that there will always be a conflict between his need and the collateral damage he keeps causing. He protected his son this time and Harrison doesn't seem upset by who he is. But we all know what happens to those who love Dexter and that there's no real happy ending. But it'll be glorious to see him try to avoid it.

 

Peak Jeopardy Returns!

In truth I didn't think I'd be writing one last note on Jeopardy this year. It had been good, but not great. Then in the last weeks of July we were graced by the presence of sixteen game winner Scott Riccardi who managed to win an impressive $455,000 before being laid low. Then Season 42 started on a far stronger note, with higher paydays and more consistent winners then we got throughout Season 41  And then the eligibility period for the 2027 Tournament of Champions with yet  began another super-champion Harrison Whitaker who won 14 games and just over $374,000 before December became the cruelest month.

Throw in the appearance of a (non-evil) twin brother of Jeopardy super champions Ray Lalonde Ron and the viewer sees how the family of Jeopardy continues to expand in the post-Trebek era. Who could ask for anything more? (Well, maybe bring back the College Championship.)

 

And that's it for 2025.  I'll ring in the New Year with my recap of the final week of the Jeopardy semi-finals and look out this weekend for my predictions for the 2026 Critics Choice Awards as Emmy Watch 2026 officially begins.

Happy New Year!

 

My Top Ten TV Shows of 2025, Part 2: The Top Five Shows of the Year

 

 

5. Paradise (Hulu)

Let's not kid ourselves: the twist at the end of the first episode of Paradise  is the kind of thing that is out of either a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie or 10 Cloverfield Lane. And it might very well be too much for many viewers to stick with it past the Pilot. The reason it works – and why the first season is a masterpiece – is twofold.

The first reason is that the showrunner is Dan Fogelman whose previous masterpiece This Is Us started with a similar twist and then spend the entire series basically doing similar tricks with both the format and chronology to tell a bigger story. Fogelman has never done twists because he can, he does so for emotional reasons and to draw anticipation for every part of it. He will show what's going to happen to his characters and then draw every element of emotional power out of it.

So while it could have just as easily been a gimmick that he chose to reunite with Sterling K. Brown, who won an Emmy for playing Randall Pierson, Fogelman  and Brown take every chance to make clear that Xavier Collins is NOT Randall. Yes he is a father of two kids and a devoted friend and he has a lot of emotional baggage from the loss of his wife. And he's also one of the few black men in the openly white world that is Paradise. But he also a force of honesty and righteousness, perhaps one of the few people left on Earth with a clear sense of right and wrong. And that makes him a hero, not because he wants to solve the murder of the former President but because he's taking a stand even when everyone wants the status quo maintained.

The second reason it’s a masterpiece is because most shows that deal with the end of the world are not interested in world building. That's basically much of what Season 1 of Paradise is about. Fogelman does this by telling each episode from the perspective of a major character: Sinatra in the second (Julianne Nicholson) the psychiatrist who serves as her aid (Sarah Shahi), even Cal Bradford himself (James Marsden) and so on throughout each episode. By the time we get to the penultimate episode of Season 1 where we actually see the apocalypse unfold through TV reports, a panicked White House and a President who decides not to follow the script – creating all kinds of chaos on the ground and in the air – we finally understand the emotional wreckage that has been driving every single character who survived and is living in Paradise. When we finally learn who the murderer is – and the full metaphor to today's world is made bluntly clear – it is one of the most stunning moments of the year and perhaps the decade so far.

Many were surprised when Paradise was nominated for Best Drama and Brown, Marsden and Nicholson all received Emmy nominations this past July. I predicted all four. This is not a humble brag; anyone who watched this show knew it was a masterpiece. It is just as dark and unforgiving as other great shows that had their second seasons this year (Andor, Severance, The Last of Us) but unlike all of them it ended on a sense of hope, however remote one can find at the end of the world. I don't know what Season 2 will be like, either inside the bunker or outside it. But I know that Fogler has always found a way to find ways to get to the heart better than any showrunner. It was there in the message Cal left for his son, it's there in Xavier's search for his wife and I know we will find it no matter what awaits us.

 

4. The Studio (Apple)

I suspect part of the reason it took me until well after The Studio had received an awe inspiring 24 Emmy nominations to finally get around to watching it was because I had been there before a few months before it debuted with HBO's The Franchise, a so-called satire that used a comic book franchise to essentially do what I now consider the HBO approach to all major institutions in comedy: attack every part of it with a kind of nasty mean-spiritedness, punctuating by horrible name calling and a genuine contempt for everybody in it.  I'd never really liked this brand of comedy whether it was Curb Your Enthusiasm, Silicon Valley or anything that Ricky Gervais or Armando Ianucci did for HBO and I had really hoped it was dead and buried. (I was relieved when the show was cancelled after one season. And I feared The Studio would be more of the same.

To be sure there is a fair amount of backstabbing, power plays and sucking up going in Seth Rogen's Hollywood but it's always done in such a way that really seems like this is the sausage getting made, not that the sausage is disgusting even when your finished as you get with so much of HBO. And Rogen always went out of his way to make it clear that everyone of his characters was never as unpleasant as any of the ones I've met in the Meyer White House or Pied Piper nor were they idiots who had gotten as far as the Peter Principle.  It would be a cliché to say that The Studio is a love letter to all things Hollywood but that's genuinely true. Rogen clearly loves movies as much as Matt Resnick does and that's seen in really every long take, every character name and even most of the movies that are being made. The best joke is that Matt, for all his jadedness, still cares about every part of the industry while most of his associates think he's an idiot for doing so. It's that heart that makes The Studio sing and shows like The Franchise crashed.

And this is clear not just with his brilliant cast of regular but all of the directors and talents he gotten to play slightly skewered versions of themselves. Here is Ron Howard, taking the time to humiliate Matt against his nastiness. Here is Olivia Wilde being such an auteur that no one is willing to call mean. Here is Martin Scorsese, charmingly saying he wants to make a $200 million movie about Jonestown and being upset when its canceled. Every cameo is gold and does it with incredible attention to detail that people like me can appreciate. Perhaps the best thing I loved about the Golden Globes episode was that every step of the way the presenters, the host and all of the people who gave acceptance speeches all seemed very realistic winners of actual awards. (I really loved how Jean Smart and the writers from Hacks were present considering that they have regularly attended every Golden Globes in the last three years – and will now be competing against The Studio this year.)

Did the Emmys go slightly overboard when it came to giving it a record eleven Emmys? Perhaps. But  considering how long Rogen's been in the trenches both in TV and film and has never won anything, how can anyone deny him becoming the first person in history to win Emmys for acting, writing, producing, and directing in the same year, outdoing Orson Welles and Warren Beatty at the Oscars? And having watched the entire show play out, ending in a season finale that should have been disastrous but ended in joy despite all odds, well, then there's only one thing left to say about The Studio: Thank you, Sal Saperstein! (And come on we all want to know how many times that's going to be said at this year's Golden Globes!)

 

3. Hacks (HBO Max)

Another year, another top ten list with Hacks being third. This is a testament to another series that, like Abbott Elementary, is already one of the all-time classic comedies. And who could have thought that Season 4 would be its most realistic season in its run? Certainly the showrunners couldn't.

After half a century of struggling Deb Vance (four time Emmy winner Jean Smart) finally got her shot at late night. Of course it started with the fact that Ava (Hannah Einbinder finally got her Emmy!) had to blackmail her in order to do it. It is telling that for most of Season 4 we cared far more about the damaged relationship between our two heroines then whether they'd have a successful show. The fact that Deb finally showed herself willing to put someone else above her own needs was one of the most moving moments in four incredible seasons.

Truthfully what I found the most realistic part of Season 4 was not the fact that Deb eventually had to give up her dream in order to stand up for her friend. As we all know that's not what has happened in late night this past year. What was more fascinating and no doubt missed was the struggle the two were putting up between showing something meaningful in their work (as Ava insisted Late Night be about) and Deb's determination to get a big audience as possible. The bosses made it very clear the danger late night was in even before the first episode aired (another warning sign about the health of the industry before this) so it is telling that Ava has taken the view of what might be considered the Stephen Colbert/Jimmy Kimmel version and Deb took the position of Jay Leno. The argument was never resolved one way or the other but it's a conversation Hollywood should be having – and I'm not sure they are.

That part aside Hacks remains just as magnificently funny as ever, not just with its two main leads but watching its supporting cast. Paul W. Downs has achieved perhaps the most unlikely role as Jimmy and Megan Stalter's Kayla steals everything that isn't nailed down.  Julianne Nicholson showed off her comic gifts in a way I haven't seen her do in twenty-five years of watching her and we were gifted with a wonderful group of performers from Helen Hunt to Tony Goldwyn and even more brilliant cameos then usuals.

This year will be the final season for Hacks. I have no idea how Jen Statsky, Lucia Aniello and Downs will end the incredible journey of Deb, Ava and everyone around them. I will be sorry to see it go but I know that Deb herself, they will always leave us laughing and crying, having created one of the masterpieces in this decade, if not this century so far. (For your next project, maybe do a Jimmy and Kayla spinoff?)

 

2. Yellowjackets  (Showtime)

It doesn't take a Citizen Detective to figure out that I think that Yellowjackets is one of the greatest shows on TV today. Even before I spent much of Season 3 speculating and reviewing about it I had ranked the series the best show of 2023. Judging by the immense numbers of people who have looked at my articles on it this past year a lot of you feel the same way. I may very well have run out of words to say why I think it's just as much a masterpiece as ever. But I'll try.

When we saw the opening minutes of the very first episode the question on everybody's mind was: "What could have turned this group of high school teenage girls into butchers and cannibals?" When that scene got replayed at the end of Season 3, the viewer had an answer: they did. Some might desperately want to speculate that theirs something in the woods that turned them into that. But Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson seem to be leaning in very hard on the idea that there never was a wilderness: just them.

And the scariest thing about Yellowjackets at the end of Season 3 is that even after all of the horrible things that have happened, both in the woods and in the present everyone who survived to that point refuses to accept that basic idea. In the opening minutes of Season 3 a teenage Shauna writes in her journal: "Once upon a time a bunch of girls got stranded in the wilderness and went completely f---ing nuts."  And by the time Season 3 ends we are convinced more and more that is all that happened.

But the tragedy of the show is that none of the girls then or grown up have accepted that it is all that happened. They believed there was spirit as girls; they have spent the last twenty five years denying it, shifting responsibility, saying they can't remember anything happened, placing the blame on each other. When all that really happened was a combination of trauma, mental illness and a series of completely logical events then and their own delusions.

In the 35 years since Twin Peaks debuted no other series can claim to being the heir of David Lynch more than Yellowjackets. This is true in every detail, from the casting of the girls as adults as former child stars (this year Hilary Swank joins the insanity) from the increasingly bizarre dream sequences and hallucinatory actions (this year we had a frog orgy!) to the incredible level of guest casting (this year Joel McHale became a survivalist guide completely unprepared for what he sees in the woods). And the writers have actually gone to a place scarier than any monster in either the original series or the revival: the idea that sometimes the most dangerous thing in the woods is just you.

It was announced, somewhat surprisingly, that the fourth season will be the last one earlier this year. Considering that Season 3 ended with the girls connected with rescue that actually seems to be a good thing: the writers have no intention of overextending themselves. But it also means were coming closer to an end that is sure to be insane and terrifying as everything we've seen before. But if it doesn't end with a lot of Emmys – certainly one for Melanie Lynskey – in the final season, then in my opinion, that deserves every member of the academy being hunted down and having their hearts eaten.

 

1. The Pitt (HBO Max)

It might seem like I'm delusional if I made the argument that there are common threads between Yellowjackets and The Pitt, my choice for best show of the year. But there are certain commonalities.

For one thing, The Pitt is a mashup of genres like Yellowjackets is, though in the former case, it's just two even though they shouldn't work together at all. It is the meshing of the medical drama such as ER with the real time aspect of 24.  These two absolutely should not work together at all and yet Scott Gemill has made them work absolutely perfectly. Dr. Robby (Noah Wylie) is in an underfunded Pittsburgh emergency room for a twelve hour shift that would be the longest day of the life for most real people but until the final events actually seems like a pretty light day. And not just Dr. Robby but the entire staff has to deal with a  crisis that Jack Bauer never had to: an underfunded ER with angry patients, horrible technology and a never ended cycle of crisis that not even Chloe O'Brien could help him through.

There's also the very similar theme between the two, only in The Pitt it's far clearer: mental trauma. In the pilot Dr. Robby has to go to the roof of the building where the night shift head (Shawn Hatosy in a brilliant Emmy winning role) is not seriously but seriously considering jumping. And as the shift goes on its clear everybody is suffering from similar stretches. Dr. Robby is here on the fifth anniversary of the death of his mentor and keeps telling everyone he's fine. Dr. Collins is hiding her pregnancy and by the time the shift is half over she'll have suffered a miscarriage. Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball) is ultra cynical and we learn halfway through he's addicted to painkillers. Dr. Samira is compassionate and moves at a slow pace because she cares and there's a sense she's addicted to these kinds of traumas. Dana Evans (Katherine LaNassa) the head nurse seems to be the most together until she gets beat up by a disgruntled patient. It's a bit of a stretch to imagine them going from this to drawing from a deck of cards and making sacrifices to the woods but far less than one might think (And considering that all of this done to the backdrop of a bureaucratic supervisor who seems more concerned with patient satisfaction scores when there's an eight hour wait time for a doctor, I think we all know who's heart they'd want to rip out.)

Now of course the biggest difference between The Pitt and not only Yellowjackets but any drama I've seen on TV in a long, long time is that the drama is not in watching bad people doing bad things but flawed people trying to do their best in a system that keeps slamming them and never gives them a moment to breathe.  There wasn't a single regular in The Pitt I didn't feel sympathy for and even empathy for during the entire series. There's not an antihero to be found, just people struggling with a system that was broken when they got into it and is now completely melting down. And that's before a mass casualty that floods the ER at the end of the season.  For a television show on any service to do a show with basically good people is rare; coming from the network that started the revolution with The Sopranos and The Wire is astounding.

And just as promising is how favorable the response has been from critics and audiences alike. For the second consecutive year the Emmys was spot on when it gave its Best Drama prize to The Pitt along with four other Emmys. Noah Wylie has had this coming for nearly thirty years but just as deserving were LaNassa and Hatosy. And it makes sense that audiences responded as they did. After a decade of the worst impulses being reflected in even the best of art and much of the 21^st century being devoted to the worst aspects of man's cruelty to man,  we need more shows like The Pitt. My top ten list reflects how the best shows of this year show that aspect of humanity so well but none more than a show where even those who win for it go out of their way to thank the first responders and hospital workers across the nation. They are the real heroes of this world and while the characters on The Pitt may not be, they are a reasonable facsimile and everything the world needs.

 

Tomorrow I'll wrap things up with my Grand Jury Prize for 2025.

My Top Ten TV Shows of 2025, Part 1: Introduction and 10-6

 

Before we begin let's talk about where TV is and where it isn't.

First of all I think the part of Peak TV that was all about the White Male Antihero is officially dead and buried. Some, perhaps many, will mourn this and rightfully so. If, however, that particular genre had started to pay increasingly diminishing returns in recent years – and for me personally the well had started to run dry well before the 2016 election -  you might count it a blessing.

To be sure the darkness that surrounds television, much like the world we live in today, will never truly go away and I was drawn to more than my share of those series as this list will illustrate. But increasingly I found myself more inclined to find brilliance in a different kind of television that has become more prominent in the 2020s. The kind of dramas and comedies that are built more around community then individualism. The kind of television shows that deal with people trying to do good against impossible odds, even knowing they might – and possibly will – fail. And more and more they are the kind of series that are built around women and minorities, far more often in the same cast.

What follows as always is the usual list my readers have come to expect from me over the years: a list that is often an alternative to the group of ten best we get from most groups (though there certainly will be overlap) a list that tries to strike a balance between all models of television be they streaming, cable  and in quite a few cases, network television. In an era where we needed our art to be as much as escapist and aspirational as we do grounded in reality I found these shows were more than willing to do so.

For this part I will deal with 10-6 on the list.

 

10. Doc (Fox)

If nothing else 2025 marks a remarkable about face in the medical drama. After twenty seasons of drowning in Grey's Anatomy with no sign of anyone taking that show off life support, viewers got a series of brilliant hospital dramas that were actually more about medicine and less about bed hopping. The most promising start (debuting weeks before the most important one) same with Fox's Doc, which debuted last January and has done something that has also become more appreciated in the last few years: running a full season.

Doc's premise deals with Amy Larsen, played by that masterful actress Molly Parker. In the pilot she suffers a car accident that causes a form of amnesia that causes her to forget the last eight years of her life. The last thing she remembers is being a wife and mother of two. Now her husband has divorced her and remarried, her daughter is estranged from her and her son is dead. Amy has to relearn all of this as well as the fact that in the previous eight years she became increasingly cold and impersonal driving her family away and almost everyone else at the hospital she was chief of staff. She has one friend left in psychiatry.

Parker is brilliant as we watch her relearn every part of herself through medicine and the many messy parts of her personal life including who she pushed away and who became closer. Yet Doc did everything its could to make it about medicine far more than personal as well as practice. Each season it has put a remarkable actor in as a professional nemesis. In Season 1 it was Scott Wolf as a doctor who was lying to her about a professional judgment. In Season 2, it is Felicity Huffman as an old friend of Larsen who wants the best from everyone but who also did much to wreck the personal life of her favorite student. Doc is too good a show to paint either character as one dimensional villains (we'll be seeing Wolf back when the show resumes) and it makes clear that everybody – even the intern who is currently wrecking her professional life – has a reason for what they do, even if it’s a flawed one.

Doc does have a love triangle at his center, complicated romantic relationships between its staff and will have major traumas but it has a basic respect and humanity for its characters that is more present in the first year than I ever saw in the five seasons I spent at Seattle Grace before checking out. We need Amy Larsen more than the Meredith Greys in our world and I'm grateful for a show that gives us one.

 

9. CBS Thursday Night Matlock and Elsbeth

Those of you who read these lists know that I have a habit of 'cheats' like this when their warranted. That being said ranking the two female led CBS TV shows that make up Thursday night is perhaps my most forgivable one over the years, particularly considering what remarkable things they've done with the formula.

Matlock is a reboot of the Andy Griffith series in name only. Kathy Bates Mattie acknowledges that in this world Matlock is a TV show and that she – and the writers – are using to create the kind of genius series that no one could have thought of when we heard the idea. Bates has already won her share of awards for this show (and an Emmy will come I'm sure of it) for her work as Madeline Kingston, a former attorney who went to work at Jacobsen Moore to find out which attorney hid information that could have exposed the opioid crisis ten years earlier and saved countless lives – including her daughter.

In Season 1 she spent most of it both trying to get the truth and forming an unlikely bond with Olympia (the incredible Skye P. Marshall) who assigned her to a team with two interns and then found them bonding. Eventually Olympia learned of the truth and not long after learned a darker one – her ex-husband Julian (an exceptional Jason Ritter) did so in a last ditch attempt to win his father's approval, which we know he will never get.

Season 2 has unfolded with Olympia and Maddie playing chess to try and both find the truth and gain the upper hand over each other as well as trying to rebuild their friendship. This has unfolded over a series of well-done cases, a brilliant supporting cast both in the office and the home front (Sam Anderson is brilliant) and a back and forth play with flashbacks not done this brilliantly since Billions ended. It's a magnificent drama that I expect Emmy nominations for in the future.

I don't have to hide my love for Elsbeth the brilliant show that has officially (and deservedly) been categorized as a comedy by the Critics' Choice Awards, who nominated both it and its wonderful star Carrie Preston for awards at the end of the year. Every time Preston is onscreen the viewer's heart lifts as we see one of the sweetest and good-natured protagonists in TV history, a brilliant logician and crime solver who feels empathy and sympathy for the criminal she locks up on a weekly basis. And she's such a good person that most of them even like her when they do it. How could they not?

And because this show was created by the Kings of TV (Robert & Michelle) it has increasingly been able to gently poke at all the aspects of the formula in the way the Kings always do, frequently making topical jokes but never to draw attention to them and increasingly bringing in characters from the Good Wife Television Universe to join in the fun. This year Sarah Steele has joined as a regular as Marisa Gold who is following in her father's footsteps as a political consultant for a mayoral candidate who seems to good to be true – and as we saw in the winter finale, almost certainly is. It's telling that the reason we're bothered is because we're more upset as to how Elsbeth will take this because we love her so much.

I hope the decision to categorize Elsbeth as a comedy leads the Emmys to finally give it and the show the nominations it deserves. (Then again it is a King show so they know the odds are stacked against them.) What I do know is that with these two incredibly brilliant female led dramas in prime-time and led into with the powerhouse comedy Ghosts Must See TV Thursday exists again on network TV. And we're all the richer for it.

 

8. Abbott Elementary (ABC)

Just because Abbott Elementary is slightly lower on my list this year then usual (this is the first time it isn't in the top five of my end of year list) does not mean that it has suffered a drop in quality. If anything four seasons in Quinta Brunson and her incredible cast continue to find new and wonderful ways to make us fall in love with the remarkable cast and school – though that last part is about to change.

We started the year with a wonderful crossover with It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, followed it up with Janine and Gregory continuing to build on their romantic relationship, saw as the District finally found out about the 'bribes' that they had been taking from the local golf course which led to Ava being fired – and landing on her feet.

Naturally we had a wonderful period when Gregory managed to be principal and found out Ava's filing system was based on reality TV, Ava having a wonderful career as a motivational speaker, the entire community and the class rallying for Ava to get her job back (which in Ava fashion she has completely forgotten at the start of Season 5) and a wonderful trip to the Please Touch museum where we saw how much the kids loved their faculty, and how both Ava and her new beau and Gregory and Janine are solid couples.

Then throughout Season 5 as the relationships have gotten better, the school is starting to fall apart. Literally. The gas malfunctioned in the season premiere (leading the cameraman to pass out) the school failed its phone policy and in the winter finale the boiler broke down so badly that the entire school will have to be closed down for the foreseeable future – and the school will be taking place in a mall. (I really want to see the new opening sequence next week.)

All of this has led to the usual sterling run of acting which naturally the Emmys didn't bother to give an award this year (Janelle James is crying out for one) and the wonderful moments that you never know you needed until they do. I didn't know I needed to see both the Abbott faculty and the student body doing the Macarena and now I can't believe I lived this long without it. But there are signs of personal growth and change. Ava has made up with her father after years of estrangement last season but at the winter finale Janine finally made a break with her dysfunctional mother and we know there are going to be a consequences. (Though if they mean Taraj P. Henson doesn't show up anymore I'm staging an intervention.)

I don't know how much longer Abbott Elementary will stay on the air until Brunson decides she wants to move on to other things. (She's talked about in interviews in recent months.) What I do know is that we should rejoice at the fact that not only did she create one of the greatest shows of the decade but one of the greatest comedies of all time. To say the show's made the honor roll is an understatement.

 

7. All Her Fault (Peacock)

Overall this year I've been underwhelmed by the caliber of limited series that all services had to offer. I was one of the few people who believed Adolescence was one of the most overrated shows of 2025 (and I stand by that) and while there were some very good limited series in a more comic mold this year (Dying for Sex and Sirens both had exceptional moments) until this December I wasn't sure there'd actually be a limited series on my ten best of 2025.

Then I saw the first episode of All Her Fault and I knew I was looking at a potential masterpiece. Halfway through the potential was gone and when it was over I wasn't surprised that this had become the most watched original program in Peacock's history.

I've written an article praising in great detail this past week, so for purposes of this column I'll talk about the incredible things that helped it play out which by and large was its incredible cast that didn't have a single weak link. From Sarah Snook to Sophia Lillis never once did we see an actor who didn't have a false note in them. Unlike the overwhelming majority of even the best limited series, in which every character has something dark beneath the surface that makes them capable of horrible things, the genius of All Her Fault was that while it illustrated all of its characters were flawed  they were all doing their best to overcome it and were in many cases succeeding until the horrible tragedy that was Milo Irvine's abduction laid all of their problems bare.

The brilliance of All Her Fault is the title was actually a lie – everything that happened was all his fault: specifically Peter Irvine, played by Jake Lacy in a performance that started with his usual nice guy persona and then went into levels of such darkness that not even his work in The White Lotus (previously the greatest example of his malevolence) could come close to the true emptiness of the soul within. A man devoid of compassion, who could only see people in regard to himself, who genuinely believed all of the horrible things he did were for a greater good for the people he loved. Even Walter White would be appalled by this man's monstrosity – and might well have applauded how he met his fate.

It's difficult to say that the cast is all doing their best work on TV mainly because from Snook to Abby Elliott to Jay Ellis all have done incredible work over the years. What I will say is that at the end of the series, with one key exception, I actually agreed that these characters (with the exception of Peter) were "These Nice People." As for the 'Killing Each Other' part, well, most of the deaths are basically the results of the one bad person and since he felt no remorse about it, I can't exactly argue about what happened to him.

Both the series and Snook have been nominated for Best Limited Series and Best Actress by the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice, with the latter group also nominating Pena and Lillis. How many awards they will starting next week is hard to say but this is a show that deserves to be contending for Emmys next summer. If it isn't, it really will be all the Academy's fault.

 

 

6.The Gilded Age (HBO)

This year apparently everyone seems to have stop hate watching The Gilded Age and realized it was a good show. As someone who always considered it a masterpiece (it has been on my top ten list every season since it debuted) I have considered the people who have only watched it ironically with the same disregard Agnes Van Rijn feels towards, well, everybody. Only while most times they don't deserve it, those people absolutely do.

The pace did pick up a bit from previous seasons but you also got a sense that showrunners Julian Fellows and Salli Richardson-Warfield are now comfortable enough with the setup to begin to start taking apart the foundation they've built bit by bit. This was seen most obviously with the decision to start tearing apart all the goodwill we'd felt about Bertha Russell (the incomparable Carrie Coon) from someone doing everything to climb the social ladder and make her something of a monster, choosing to marry off her daughter to a Duke to help her own social standing more than any compassion for who her daughter loves and torpedo her relationship with both George and her son. At the end of the third season she is at the absolute pinnacle of the social ladder but her husband has left her, her daughter is on the other side of the world and her son has made it clear that  she is in it for herself and no one else.

We saw a similar struggle between Agnes and Ada as with the death of her husband and the loss of Agnes' fortune (due to Oscar) Ada is now in charge of the household. We saw Ada spend the season struggling to find a cause and deal with the very real pain of her husband's death. We saw Agnes try to find a place in society now that she no longer had money. By the end of the season they had found a new way of doing things and a new way forward and it was a wonderful balance to what was happening across the street. Christine Baranski and Cynthia Nixon continue to do some of the best acting in their long and already ridiculously distinguished TV careers.

And that was just the tip of a delightful universe led some of the most brilliant cast members, including some of the greatest actresses who are working today. From Louisa Jacobson, Denee Benton and Talisa Farmiga to Kelli O'Hara, Audra MacDonald and joined by the incomparable Phylicia Rashad this is one of two of the great female driven masterpieces on TV today. (We'll get to the other in the top half.) With impeccable scenery and cinematography and some of the greatest and wittiest dialogue I've heard on TV (and they don't even need to say goddamn!) The Gilded Age is one of the great joys I get watching television. And if you were only watching it ironically, well, as Agnes might say, clearly you weren't brought up right.

 

Tomorrow I'll deal with the top five shows of 2025.

Homicide Rewatch: The Wedding

 

21. The Wedding

Written by Henry Bromell

Directed by Alan Taylor

 

So much of The Wedding has such very clear soap opera qualities that they almost cry out for parody. Meldrick Lewis has announced he is getting married that day to a woman that no one, not even Kellerman, has heard of until now. He then hijacks the entire unit to help him by the flowers and meals for the wedding, promising to pay them later. Understandably most of the unit thinks that this is a joke.

One of the guest is a very pregnant Mary Pembleton and at the climax of the wedding she goes into labor, scaring the hell out of the usually unflappable Frank. (Andre Braugher gets to demonstrate his gift for comedy in most of the episode which is a nice change of pace.)

And in the one investigation that the episode deals with because the squad has been hijacked into planning Meldrick's impromptu wedding Al is forced to go out on the street with Kay Howard as secondary. (Though Giardello is the primary, the name will go under Howard's on the board.) In the course of it he will shoot and kill an innocent man he believes is a suspect.

I can understand why Kalat in his book tried to describe as "Welcome to All My Children: Life on the Street!"  And yet I remain fond of this episode for many reasons. One of them I can't reveal just yet because it has to do with the season finale but I can work around it. What I can say is that these kinds of events – weddings, birth, celebrations – were not uncommon themes at the center of season finales both at the time and now, certainly on network television. The idea of the cliffhanger was not carved in stone for television in the 1990s, save for genre TV, and most season finales brought a sense of closure for the year gone by with some kind of celebration. ER's first season had ended with Carol Hathaway's wedding and even though it didn't end in a marriage, there was still a sense of celebration. NYPD Blue had ended its second season with Sipowicz marrying Sylvia so even the most watched police procedural would keep to this.  The only difference between this every other series is that The Wedding is the penultimate episode of Season 4 – and that I can say makes me think it was a great trick

Next there's that The Wedding is one of the most playful episodes in Homicide's history. This was always a dark show with what humor it provided of the very black variety. The show would occasionally ease off the tension for a while in its early seasons, first with 'Night of the Dead Living' in Season One and to a different extent in The Gas Man last year. (It would do so again in another episode the following season.) But its rarely done an episode that would not be out of place on a workplace comedy during this era or later ones, where almost one in the case spends most of the episode dealing with relatively light-hearted things. Pembleton is not angry because a confrontation in the Box is going poorly but because he has to figure out what kind of flowers to buy, there's tension between two detectives not because of how an investigation is going but because they're openly flirting with a beautiful woman. Even in the wedding itself is hysterical as we see Scheiner being his thoroughly cranky self not even wanting to dance with Russert's grade school daughter – and then kvetching when she dances with other people instead of him.

But as always the humor carries a darker edge even there. Meldrick announces that he's getting married in the teaser and immediately throws up into his desk drawer. Kellerman doesn't take him seriously for many reasons, not the least of which that Meldrick has apparently been dating this woman for months and has not felt sure to tell anyone least of all its partner who has been incredibly open about the things he cares about. We're reminded about Lewis wondering why people don't open up to him and tell them their life stories in Stakeout and there's a clear hint here: its always been a one-way street. He didn't tell Mike about his brother Anthony or about living in Lafayette Terrace and now he seems fit to spring a surprise wedding on the entire unit without thinking of their feelings or thoughts. The fact that he's essentially basically causing the entire squad not to work a murder is another sign, albeit a subtle one. One almost wonders if Lewis is 'lucky' that this was apparently one of the few days in Baltimore history only one person got murdered; would he have felt compelled to do this had a red ball started?

And critically it's only after he has gotten married (not exactly a spoiler) that Lewis finally spills his guts to Kellerman.  He has spent the entire episode saying that he is love with Barbara beyond compare, has truly been devoted to her for seven months, is incredibly grateful to everyone and even tells Giardello that this will be the happiest day of his life. But only after he is officially married does he confess that he threw everything together at the last moment so he wouldn't have a chance to talk himself out of it.

Because Meldrick has basically held the details of his life so close that we never know them unless he tells we know nothing about his courtship with Barbara before or even after.  She seems to be a symbol of something to him, something that he claims that he wants. And the moment he gets he starts to spin out about the decision he's made. Near the end of the episode he asks Mike in the openness that he hasn't shown before: "I'm doing the right thing?" And Mike can only shrug because he knows all too well where this ends. It's possible Lewis never confided in his partner because he didn't want his cynicism to rain on his parade. As we shall see in the very next episode, a little bit of reality might have been welcome.

Another reason this episode registered is that for really the first time in Season 4 the writers give Melissa Leo something to do. And I mean a lot.  We heard a few times in Season One that Kay had a sister named Carrie that she was very close to. When she visited her family on the bay her father talked about her but she wasn't there and Carrie was the only Howard relation that didn't show up when she was shot last season. Now it turns out she's been in Florence all this time and she's flown 4000 miles to visit her sister. And its clear from the start that Kay found it easier to love Carrie when she was across the ocean because she's grumbling from the moment she and Carrie walk in the precinct.

Now Carrie is listed in the credits as being played by 'Margaret May'. In fact this is actually Melissa Leo in a dual role. And she is so good at it that it wasn't until I got the guides to the series two years after witnessing the episode that I realized this fact!  (The NBC press team admitted it but I didn't know that.) The disjointed camera work does much to hide the fact that Kay and Carrie are never in the same scene at the same time but honestly even if they were I might very well not have known.

It's clear that the two sisters are related in appearance and I can tell with the benefit of hindsight how alike they look. But it is how different Carrie is from Kay that the viewer is truly fooled. By this point Leo has completely established the professional Kay Howard, who doesn't wear make up and dresses in men's attire far more then women's. (There were very homophobic suggestions about Leo during this period because of it.) And we get just as clear a picture of it in The Wedding: Kay is just as professional as ever, has the complete hard edge as before, has no patience in the interrogation room or the squad.

Contrast that with her work as Carrie who from the start seems naïve, selfish, flirtatious and perfectly aware of the havoc she's wreaking on the squad room.  Its hysterical to watch Kyle Secor and Reed Diamond who have played such hard edged and steely detectives during this period basically turn themselves into Jell-O as Carrie flirts with them, these detectives who are laser focused in interrogations reduced into asking Carrie about the sandals she makes. Its understandable why Kay spends the entire episode terrified of what happens with her sister among her colleagues – as well as the fact that she never seems to blame either Mike or Tim for their actions. Late in the episode she tells Tim that her sister's crazy: 'Carrie sees a life as a game. She who has the most fun wins." Understandably Tim immediately goes after her and eventually she has to pull him off Mike.

That the two of them end up in what amounts to a dick-measuring contest on the dance floor is far from shocking and naturally Carrie is upset after spending the entire episode happily leading both men on that they take it seriously. "I don't want to dance with either one of you!" she shouts in tears. I am not the type of person to blame women for certain actions but in this case I agree with Kay: they're better off without her.

And this is matched by the fact that the episode also puts Howard on the street for the first time in a while, partnered with Giardello as he investigates the shooting of radio shock jock Kevin Lugo. We hear a bit of Lugo's broadcast and we quickly realize that he is very much of the Howard Stern-Don Imus type of broadcaster: "He liked to spice up his opinions with opinions." That's putting it mildly. We hear him saying he believes at the age of 20 one out of every five people should voluntarily kill themselves for population control and that abortion should be not merely legal but mandatory for all parents with an IQ of less than 100. (Looking from today I'm not sure whether today's progressives would want his support on this issue even though I know damn well they agree with it even though they'd never say so.)

Yaphet Kotto gets to give his best single performance of the season as we see him genuinely testing his ability as an investigator on what appears to be a stone cold whodunit. Half of Baltimore and much of the nation well could have wanted him dead (there's no way in 1996 the writers could have foreseen how much this would play out in today's America) and they get what appears to be a lead when a local sleaze says that a guy named Raymond Desassy was paid to kill Lugo. He's vague on details and he clearly wants the reward offered. Giardello and Howard go to check it out.

The scene that follows is one of the signature pieces of Homicide. We follow Gee and Howard through the halls of a decaying building. We see children playing, a bouncing ball go buy. They go to his apartment and when they see Desassy he pulls a gun and fires on them. Both Howard and Gee return fire, Al's shot kills him. We see Giardello enraged.

Then they learn Desassy was in jail that night for trying to rob a 7-11 and they didn't find out because of a computer glitch. They bring the informant into the squad (critically this unfolds as Meldrick is getting married) and he's shocked to learn this. He called it in as a practical joke – and seems hurt that Al shot his friend, even though he had to know this was a possible consequence.

Al is not in a mood for partying but he goes to the reception anyway. He spends much of it drinking in a corner with Kay thinking about the only time he shot a man. He looks at Meldrick and says only: "I miss my wife."

And then of course Mary, who is very pregnant, starts to go into labor. It's been hysterical watching Braugher throughout this episode. When he thinks that this is a joke he calls Meldrick scum and says: "I'm going to take my wife home. Then I'm going to find Lewis. And when I find him, I'm going to kill him. I'm  a very clever detective and I will find a way to kill him that I will not be caught. He will simply disappear and like all sphincters before him, he will not be missed." He actually gets up just as Lewis gets into the hotel ballroom and then helps lead the cheers.

He gets nervous the more Mary dances certain that she will give birth on the dance floor despite Mary's reassurances. When she starts going into labor he shouts for a doctor and when Scheiner says so, the look of clear horror on his face is wonderful. Then we see a panicked Frank leading his wife into the ambulance and its both funny and sweet to see the strong, hard Pembleton whose been so ambivalent about his child's potential birth much of the season turn to basically every panicky father when Mary goes into labor.

And a wonderful moment comes when everyone goes back into the ballroom. Brodie yells at Giardello. He pauses. Then a honest, open smile – one of the first purely happy ones we've seen him give all series appears – and he walks back in. He knows he'll have to deal with the consequences of the murder tomorrow but for now, he's going to eat, drink and be merry.

This is a sweet, brilliant episode that for another show then or now could have been a perfect season finale. The reason that Homicide is a masterpiece is because next week is the season finale – and its only after its done that you realize just how brilliantly the writers have done their job.

 

Notes From The Board

"Detective Munch" Munch is the most committed to the idea that this is a practical joke and even after the wedding takes place tells Megan: "What if this Barbara Shivers is in on this?" Russert's only response is: "How paranoid are you?" He's actually one-upped in this episode when he meets Lewis' mother and she says: "Oh you're the guy who took all those drugs in the sixties and damaged his mind. I'm sorry." Munch is actually struck dumb as Russert chuckles at him.

At some point between now and the season finale the killer of Kevin Lugo will be caught; his name is written up in black. As with so many cases that change from red to black over the course of the season that are just on the board, we never find out why.

The murder of Raymond Desassy will come again in Homicide: The Movie. Note that during this episode we never hear anything about him having a wife.

Foreshadowing? : During this episode Russert tells Munch that this is the first wedding she's been too since her husband died. She tells him she's been shy ever since everything with Felton and now she's beginning to think her daughter needs a father. This may be an explanation to Russert's character next season.

On The Soundtrack: The real life band Lazy Boy plays much of the music for the Wedding at the Belvedere hotel. Listed among their songs are 'Club Urchin, Latin Quarter, The Mole and Junction City."

Jeopardy Season 41 Second Chance Recap: Week 2 Finals

Melanie Hirsch vs. Michelle Tsai vs Guy Barnum

 

Game 1

 

In many ways Game 1 of the finals of Week 2 seemed like it would be the polar opposite of last Week's Game 1 Final -  a fast start that ended with something that looked like it would give one player an enormous advantage going into the second game. It turned out differently than anyone expected, certainly me.

In the Jeopardy round Melanie got off to a quick start when she found the Daily Double early in ON THE BOOKSHELF. She wagered the $1000 she could:

"Anthony Swofford's experience in the First Gulf War led to his memoir called this, also the nickname of a Marine." She knew it was Jarhead and took the lead. From then on it was a back and forth between her and Guy with Guy eventually taking the lead back in the final clues of the round. Still it was incredibly close: Guy had $6000, Melanie was next with $5600, Michelle wasn't far behind with $4800.

Early in Double Jeopardy Michelle took the lead, helped by Guy getting a $2000 clue incorrect SCIENCE & NATURE. She found the first Daily Double early in PLAYING THE NUMBERS. She bet the $6400 she had:

"A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy' was 9^th on a list totaling this number of proposals in 1918." She knew this referred to Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and doubled her score to $12,800.

In the next three clues her lead expanded as both Melanie and Guy got clues wrong in the category THE KAISER'S COLLEGE OF MUSICAL KNOWLEDGE and she got two clues correct. By the time she found the other Daily Double in PEOPLE & PLACES she had $16,400 to Guy's $2000 and Melanie's $2800. She bet $3000:

"Outside of India Canada has one of the largest populations of followers of this religion founded by Guru Nanak." She knew it was Sikhism and went up to $19,400.

Michelle would finish Double Jeopardy with an impressive $24,600 built on the fact she only got one answer wrong.  Melanie gave thirteen correct responses but gave four incorrect ones (almost all of them in Double Jeopardy) while Guy gave 22 correct responses but three incorrect ones and all of them were in $2000 clues. As a result Guy had $8000 and Melanie had $6000 going into Final Jeopardy of Game 1.

The category for Final Jeopardy was 18^th CENTURY LIT. "In this work, 'the boys and girls would venture to come and play at hide-and-seek in my hair."

Melanie's response was revealed first. She wrote down: "What is Gulliver's Travels?" That was correct. Like me she reasoned that the people playing in the hair were Lilliputians. She did what she had to do and bet $6000, giving her $12,000.

Guy's response was revealed next and he also wrote down: "What is Gulliver's Travels?" He also bet everything, giving him $16,000.

Michelle, however, wrote down: "What is Rapunzel?" It cost her $5400, leaving her with $19,200.

So at the end of Game 1 it is a far closer match with just $7200 separating first place from third. It is still anybody's game going into Game 2.

 

Game 2

In the Jeopardy round Guy struggled early while Melanie would get off to a fast start helped by finding the Daily Double on the third clue in HISTORY 'P's and 'Q'. The only one with money at $800, she bet the $1000 she could.

"Surname of General Grigory, wooer of Catherine the Great; he was said to have fabricated fake villages to win her favor." Melanie knew it was Potemkin and moved up to $1800. She held her lead for the rest of the Jeopardy round though Michelle closed the distance substantially by the end. Melanie finished with $6200 to Michelle's $5400 while Guy trailed badly with $800.

Early in Double Jeopardy Guy got a golden opportunity when he found the first Daily Double in ALPHABETICALLY FIRST. He wagered the $3600 he had:

ALPHABETICALLY FIRST…of the traditional birthstones." He pondered and as time ran out he guessed: "What is agate?" It wouldn't have mattered if he'd gotten it in time; agate was not a birthstone. They were looking for amethyst.  He dropped to zero.

Four clues later he found the other Daily Double IN A MYSTERY. (And so you know in Double Jeopardy we had consecutively A RIDDLE, RAPPED, IN A MYSTERY, INSIDE AN ENIGMA. Churchill would be so proud. Anyway…)

With only $1600 Guy bet the $2000 he was allowed to. "In this short story by Edgar Allan Poe, C. Auguste Dupin solves the mystery of an apparently stolen item being used for blackmail." This time it worked out for Guy he knew it was 'The Purloined Letter'.

The match continued at a more even level then we'd seen in Game 1's Double Jeopardy. Guy and Melanie each gave 16 correct responses – Melanie only gave one incorrect response; Guy gave four including his incorrect Daily Double. Michelle gave 19 correct responses and three incorrect ones (there were at least two she wished she could have taken back when she gave them.)

At the end of Double Jeopardy Michelle was in the lead again but with a much narrower margin then at the same point in Game 1. She had $14,600 to Melanie's $10,600 and Guy's $9200.  With the scores so close at the end of Game 1 , it was anybody's game going into Final Jeopardy.

The category was THE 21^ST CENTURY. The deciding clue was: "In 2015 a foreign government said this would be abolished to 'increase labor supply & ease pressures from an aging population." This would be the first Final Jeopardy in the Second Chance Tournament to this point that all three players got correctly (and I was completely stumped by)

Guy wrote down his response at the last moment. "What is The One Child Policy?" That was correct; China ended in a decade ago. Guy bet $3801. That gave him $13,001 today and his two day total was $29,001.

Next came Melanie. She also had the correct response. She wagered almost everything: $10,500. That gave her $21,100. Her two day total was $33,100.

It was all on Michelle. She had "What is The One Child Policy?" Her wager was $601. That put her at $15,201. Her two day total was $34,401 and by a very narrow margin she had well-earned $35,000 and her spot in Champions Wildcard.

(For those who don't understand the math as well. At the end of Day 1 Guy was her nearest opponent and she was betting enough so that if he bet everything she would have $1 more than him. There's a possibility Guy miscalculated going into Final Jeopardy but I'm not sure it would have made much of a difference.)

 

Once again we've had a week of even more thrilling matches and an even more exciting final that last week. For what's it worth Week 2's contestants were clearly more on the ball when it came to Final Jeopardy than Week 1's: out of the fourteen contestants still present in Final Jeopardy across the week, eleven of them came up with correct responses. Oddly enough Michelle, the ultimate winner was the only one of the three finalists to not respond correctly to all three Final Jeopardy clues in the games she played but she more than earned her Second Chance. (And I love her fashion choices by the way.)

 

We'll ring out the year with the third and final week of Season 41 Second Chance. And I'll ring in 2026 with the recap of Week 3 semifinals.

Why The Left Lost So Badly Against Donald Trump And What We Need to Learn from It

 

 

This year has marked the tenth anniversary of Donald Trump announcing his first run for President.  Not entirely simultaneously – there is some debate as to when the official battle began –  every coalition of the modern left: women, African-Americans, LatinX, the LGBTQ+ community, students, intellectuals, Hollywood has been engaged in a battle with him and the MAGA movement for 'the heart and soul of America'.

I think it's well past time to acknowledge a truth that they absolutely never will. They lost.  And I'm not simply saying that because Trump is constitutionally ineligible from running for a third term or the fact that at the most recent meeting of Turning Point the gathering said that they were endorsing JD Vance for President, the first time in nearly a decade a major conservative group has endorsed candidate that was NOT Trump. (Yes I know what a danger Vance might be, one article at a time.)

I mean that if we as a country are to move forward in this post-Trump future we are clearly heading towards now the left has to do something it has not done in any of the articles I've seen at this site, in other online publications, any magazine or really anything that is listed as having a left-bias.

Because the one common thread between all of these articles whether Trump was in office or not, every time 'the movement' suffered a horrible defeat – and there have been too many to count at this point  - every time a norm was violated, every time Trump said or did anything in office or that the conservative movement did during Biden's term, the one thing the left has not acknowledged is that is a defeat for them.

They've labeled it as a defeat for many things: America, people everywhere, society, institutional norms, harmony. Honestly they've mentioned a lot of terms. What they haven't done – and trust me, I've saved the receipts – is say that they personally lost. Oh to be sure, they might give surface talk to a minority group, if they are a part of it and I have no doubt that some of them feel that defeat more personally then others. I have little doubt that in their hearts and minds they feel outrage and despair. But the thing is after spending so much time around them I've always been able to detect two related things.

The first is a sense of detachment. Oh to be sure, they'll say all the right things about the defeat society has gone through, how America, the world, all groups everywhere will have a horrible loss that we may never recover from. But I always got a sense that for them, it was kind of an abstraction. I'll admit some of that may just be my opinion as a cis white male but it comes from something subtler that I noticed when Biden won election and took office.

For the past four years they had shrieked at the apocalypse how bad things were going to be and how we were all doomed. I naturally assumed that they would ease off when Biden was elected or that they would write fewer articles. Neither happened.

 First they basically immediately went back to their old standard of 'there is no real difference between the two parties." Every time I read that sentence I did a double take. Did they not live through the same four years I did? I know they did, they were complaining in the most strident possible terms during that period. But I truly believe that having lived through four years of the worst and most fascist President in history they would at least finally be willing to drop that distinction. I didn't expect them to all immediate register Democrat and swear fealty to that party for life but at the very least I thought they would drop that chestnut.

What happened was that their loyalty to Joe Biden clearly disappeared on election night 2020 and his honeymoon with them ended on Inauguration Day. One of the reason I suspect for Biden's horrible polling numbers throughout his Presidency is that the same party loyalty that kept Trump's numbers from every dropping below 40 percent was due to how ride or die his support with Republicans always were. Biden clearly never got that kind of loyalty from the Democratic base and I suspect much of that might have come from the left's decision to go back to their ideological purity standard once he'd done the dirty work of getting their enemy out of office.  

The left historically has always been more loyal to ideology then political party but the fact that they could say with a straight face that they had now labeled the GOP as effectively crypto-fascist was somehow  as bad as one that was keeping faithful to democratic institutions and norms caused me to lose whatever respect I had for their principles by the time of the 2022 midterms. As the red wave seemed increasingly inevitable I honestly thought the left was looking forward to it even more than Republicans were. I certainly got a lot of articles predicting, with something close to anticipation,  America fragmenting into several states during this period. When it never happened, naturally, they chose to argue this was a mandate for a leftwing agenda which is of course what the left always argues a Democratic win is a mandate for.

The left, I've come to realize, takes a 'heads we win, tails you lose' approach to elections. If the Democrats win, it is because they have embraced progressive values and it is their moral duty to enact them regardless of the majorities in Congress or the White House. If the Republicans win, it's because Democrats did not embrace a significantly left wing standard which the American people obviously want. How this latter part squares with their own description of the Republican party as being tantamount  to dictatorship based on far right ideology is a circle they have never bothered to square in any of their articles.

Conversely when Republicans win elections as they did last year, it is not the left's fault but rather proof that all things involving America – democracy, capitalism, politics – are irrevocably broken and that our society is a racist, oppressive regime with no redeeming values. You would think this would bother them but in so many of these articles I've always detected a sense of schadenfreude, as if they seem to be taken a perverse pleasure that the country they live in will suffer such horrible things.

I get this feeling from every member of the progressive coalition particularly in the aftermath of last November. They actually seemed happy that so many people in red states were going to suffer economically as a result of the policies of the administration, that they were going to lose so much of the social safety net that DOGE was going to take away, that they were going to suffer horrible sickness and death under Robert F. Kennedy's medical policies. All of this things were going to affect them too, to be sure, but that seemed to bother them less than the fact that everyone who voted for Trump was going to suffer just as much.

To be sure they will mark on how the administration  has been doing much to hurt their history, their beliefs, and even their rights and the attacks by the administration truly do horrify the conscience, certainly for me who believe in their values even if I question their approach.  But it's always done in that same detached fashion.

I've always sensed that detachment because during the decade of all things Trump I've always seen the left never choosing to fight the one battle that matters: political. They have fought on every single one that doesn't really: education, protesting, stating over and over how America got here in their articles, speaking out against the President in public forums on Hollywood stages, in art, in books – all performative and stylistic gestures that can be seen very simply as 'playing to your base'.  They have basically made it very clear that at least half the country, possibly more, is no longer members of a political movement or a party but an enemy combatant and barely human. They are not people worthy to be in the Democratic tent; they made their choice when they chose to register Republican. They are all racist, homophobic, misogynistic, pro-life, gun-toting people who want to keep all people – even themselves, oddly enough – under the thumb of the oligarchs, the fascists, the corporations, the dictator. They will suffer the most under the GOP and would seemingly benefit the most from these progressive policies. But they are not worthy of redemption.

I get this spitefulness in every Daily Kos post I read before I gave it up, so many of the articles I read in Harpers, so many Hollywood shows, really everything the left has written or done in the last decade. It is keeping with a movement that prefers burning things down to reform, that think institutions are irredeemable because of their history, who have convicted the past on the indefensible crime of being the past. It is not an attitude that is inclined to bring people together or find a way to move forward.

And that brings me to the real problem of the left during the era of Trump. For ten years they have focused their energy on a man who is the manifestation of all the things that they loathe and who against everything they say they stand for. Yet in ten years I have yet hear any leftist really say what they're for. To be sure the Justice Democrats and Bernie Sanders are very clear on all the problems society is facing but that movement has essentially failed for all intents and purposes because it was too unrealistic for the masses to accept in 2018. The Republicans have triumphed well before Trump's arrival on the scene by saying that all the things that Democrats will bring about if they win office and that if you vote Republican we can stop it. Morally it is completely bankrupt but as a way to get their agenda accomplished, it has succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Historically and especially in the last decade the left has failed to come up with a unifying message to get people to vote for them in the same huge numbers that they have for Trump. This tracks because during the decades prior to 2016 while everyone from the Reagan revolutionaries to Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party has infiltrated the Republican party with the purpose of changing to its agenda, the  left has basically not done that. They will acknowledge every detail of their strategy – Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society – but always leave out that those same options were clearly available to the left at every step of the way and they didn't come up with an equivalent.

Perhaps that would mean admitting the greater truth the left has never really wanted to: by and large their policies and approach have historically never had as huge a following among the American public as those of the right. Far right candidates have always had an easier time winning elected office then far left ones throughout American history if not in most democracies.  The left has only been able to succeed in America when it is part of a party and its always been a fringe element of that party, whether Republican or Democrat. And those politics have always done well only in the urban sections of our country rather than the rural ones, with only one clear exception the Populist Party in the 1880s and 1890s.

This gets to the core of the left's problem over the 21^st century. When the Democrat Party built it New Deal coalition in the 1930s, it was the party of the working class American while the Republicans were the party of the elitists. In 2024 it is now clear that the reverse is true. There's also the issue that the one driving force for the electorate is now and has always been the economy and the average well-being of the American.  This has never been an issue that the left cared that much about. They've tried to deal with it in different ways – income inequality, the evils of corporations, the top one percent – but critically none of that involves has ever really involved the working class. Famously the left dismissed the idea that Americans cared about 'the price of eggs' as a euphemism for the racist standard that Trump was talking about last year.

This has always been their weakness. In the last decade they've done everything they could to negate the idea of Republicans being good on the economy while doing everything in their power to argue that economics, whether it be working class Americans, the national debt, inflation, are less important to people then the issues they care about. Basically if you're a working class American who's struggling to make ends meet, the left is telling you to vote Democrat because Republicans will not make your life easier and if you do you're a racist.

I remember reading an article in Daily Kos with the sentence: "The rich man has thirteen cookies; the white man has one cookie and the black man one cookie. Republicans win by telling the white man "The black man will steal your cookie!" The obvious solution – that all of these parties work together to loot and pillage ever single rich persons home to get all the cookies so that everybody has more – is always left out. Partly because all the left doesn't want to get its hands dirty and more likely because they themselves have six or seven cookies (but not thirteen that would be indefensible) and they don't want those poor people taking from them. It's why Hollywood and academics lecturing America on income inequality and corporate greed has always sounded tone-deaf in my ears. "We need to tax the rich!" they cry. "But not us. We're not that rich!"

Why am I bringing up all these old chestnuts? Because it looks that what is finally causing Trump's following to crack after ten years is the one weapon the left never once tried to bring him down with during that period: the economy, stupid. (That is a purposeful dig as David Hogg for attacking James Carville earlier this year. Good luck recruiting progressives by the way.)

It is very clear that November's election across the board as well as so much that has followed has been a referendum on the idea of affordability. That is what Abigail Spangenberger and Mikey Sherill campaigned on when running for Governors of Virginia and New Jersey respectively and won by ten or more points in their respective elections. It is clearly the issue that swing district Republicans are the most concerned about. And it is an issue our current President clearly has no ability to deal with, considering that he called affordability  'a Democratic Hoax' at a campaign spot, has given his economic handling an A with at least six pluses and that in his speech he basically argued that the economic was stronger than it had ever been.  That he is falling victim to the exact same problems that Biden fell ill too more than anything else during his campaign is another great irony. The fact that he is spending a fortune on renovations for the White House while Americans are suffering with bread and butter issues will bother them far more than the idea of his destroying a historic building or putting his name on the Kennedy Center, trust me on that.

Now to be fair there was a fair amount of hue and cry from the left about 'Liberation Day' and the havoc the tariffs have wreaked on the economy back in May. But almost immediately they moved on to the ICE raids, the National Guard in cities and more importantly to them Colbert being canceled and Jimmy Kimmel being suspended. They actually seemed annoyed that now Trump voters were upset because their pocketbooks being affected was causing them to turn against the man that to them they'd followed blindly for ten years with no deviation. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that they were more of touch with American voters then they wanted to admit and that white working class voters actually do care about pocketbook issues rather than being the racists they think they are. To be fair, they might be. Two things can be true at the same time, despite what the left thinks.

I suspect that we are going to come out on the other side of it staring with next year's midterms in the House and possibly the Senate. But I need this point to be clear. When it happens it will be despite everything the left has thrown in their arsenal to get the country to change, not because of it.

As always you fought the battles  only on the grounds you were willing to fight on: the ones that mattered to you alone and not most Americans. The Republicans fought the battle on the one front that mattered and they won. You got humiliated, crushed, slaughtered, annihilated, obliterated, and all the other synonyms I can think of.  I think that was the point because you've made it clear multiple times you would rather lose horribly in an election rather than sacrifice your ideological purity then win narrowly and be forced to govern.  Perhaps some of you were hoping that the Republicans would be so destructive that America would finally embrace the leftist utopia you've always wanted even though you've never been able to define it when I've asked.

To be clear, it has not destroyed America. It has done severe and blunt damage to our institutions but it hasn't wrecked them irrevocably. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have mourned their loss if they had; you've made it clear you didn't like them when Democrats and the liberal order was in charge.  As someone who never truly believed in your rhetoric during the first Trump administration I'm sure the only people disappointed they will survive is you.

But America will emerge and we will be  wiser. I certainly am. I don't know where our ultimate salvation will come from. But I now know sincerely it will never come from the left. America doesn't want what you're selling, if indeed you were selling anything but smugness and despair. And since I know you will neither admit defeat nor acknowledge your mistakes I will no longer look to you for answers. I'm pretty sure most of the world never was, so you won't miss me. And I certainly won't miss you.