Year-End Lists

A hand-curated, browsable index
of notable year-end lists.

New Yorker: Emily Nussbaum: Definitely Not a Top Ten List

18 December 2017

Writing in The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum provides this wisdom about lists:

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.

After some important caveats and context, she offers these favorite TV shows:

[see also 20192018]

Runners-up, not in order