Yes, The Good Wife, Orange Is the New Black, Parenthood, and Mad Men were all fantastic this year — but this is about the newcomers. Presented here in no particular order. Caution: Potential spoilers ahead!
1. The Honorable Woman (SundanceTV)
Sundance TV
Old vendettas die hard in The Honorable Woman, a twisty geopolitical potboiler that examines the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of one family. It's hard to categorize this drama, which is equal parts domestic drama, espionage thriller, and political think piece, but it transcends each of those genres to become something wholly original.
Baroness Nessa Stein (a stellar Maggie Gyllenhaal) is attempting to fix unrest in the Middle East by using her philanthropic organization to bring fiber-optic cables into the West Bank, after ascending to control of the company when her brother Ephra (Andrew Buchan) mysteriously stepped down from the role. But when the young son of Ephra's housekeeper (Lubna Azabal) is kidnapped, long-buried secrets are unearthed as Nessa fights to prevent herself from being "compromised." The nature of life, however, is that we are each compromised in a variety of ways, and Nessa's secrets prove to be deadly for those around her.
Gyllenhaal is at the top of her game here, turning out a performance that is hypnotic to watch; her Nessa is at turns sly, haunted, and calculating. She's joined by one of the best casts this year, which includes Stephen Rea as a grizzled MI6 operative beset by rivalries, Eve Best, Janet McTeer, Katherine Parkinson, Tobias Menzies, Igal Naor, and Lindsay Duncan.
From its stunning opening credits sequence to its shocking conclusion, The Honorable Woman is a glittering drama that manages to be diamond-hard as well: It forces the viewer to see the damage done on both sides of the conflict and on the lives of those caught the crossfire and its aftermath. Is the path to a clear conscience paved with vengeance or with forgiveness? And, when backed into a corner, does such a thing as "honor" ever truly exist? Or is it a facade that we drape around ourselves, comfortable in our safe houses? As The Honorable Woman seeks to answer these questions, it also delivers a chilling and first-rate thriller that will have you enrapt. Not to be missed. —Jace Lacob
2. How to Get Away With Murder (ABC)
Getty Images/Mitch Haaseth
How to Get Away With Murder isn't a perfect show: The framing device didn't quite click for me over the course of its autumn run, and Viola Davis' Annalise Keating seems like a wildly inconsistent character, ricocheting from jagged sobs to cold-blooded ruthlessness. But let's be clear: This show, created by Peter Nowalk and executive produced by Shonda Rhimes, is one that is wholly driven by powerful ideas, and it has been thrilling to see those concepts play out in a murder mystery/legal drama format.
Whether it was Annalise stripping off her wig and makeup before uttering those now-infamous nine words ("Why is your penis on a dead girl's phone?") or the representation issues kicked up by the show, How to Get Away With Murder has left its audience with much to discuss and analyze, even if the murder plot itself has been fairly formulaic. It's a MacGuffin, however, because the real drama to be found is in the way the show depicts Davis' Annalise as a sexual being (a rarity on primetime dramas for middle-aged dark-skinned women) or the way that Connor (Jack Falahee) engages in random hook-ups as a cover-up for what's really going on. (He also just, well, loves sex.) That cerebral, status-quo-challenging element of the show is so provocatively unpredictable that it warrants inclusion here. Murder might be most foul, as in the best it is, according to Shakespeare, but Murder itself is tantalizingly delicious. —J.L.
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