I watched a grand total of 3 new to me seasons of TV last year:
Master of None (Season 2)
Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Season 3)
Better Call Saul (Season 1)
Master of None perfectly captures what I feel in life right now and Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang bring a sensibility to TV that captures experienced: these brief situations that give you insight into some facet of life as different people pop in and out of your life and things rarely go where you hope. You get what you think you want but it ends up not being satisfying. You feel like you've compromised on life and betrayed who you want to be just to gain some status. Relationships don't work the way you'd hope, the dating scene is absolutely miserable. This is such a raw, honest show that exposes the melancholy of the season of life I'm going through.
Kimmy Schmidt already feels like it's overstayed its welcome with a standout episode being the Lemonade spoof. As the show goes on, the little nuggets of morality in each episode feel more and more trite and forced. I feel so talked down to as if the writers aren't sure I understand how these situations are forcing the characters to grow. I don't remember the first two seasons being this on the nose. Maybe I wasn't paying attention.
Better Call Saul is the antidote to the moral simplicity of Breaking Bad. Saul is placed in lots of moral quandaries, but instead of being another shallow anti-hero, he tries to navigate this space between bending the rules to make ends meet and occasionally do the right thing even when it sucks. James McGill comes across as a human being who is a mix of conflicting tendencies and internal struggles that are complex and intriguing. The show uses that to drive the drama instead of simply throwing situations out that so we can see the anti-hero do bad things and become progressively more evil. It stinks that we know where this is going, the perpetual problem with prequel, which makes me a lot less motivated to watch future seasons as I could not care less how this ties into Breaking Bad.
I also watched the first 4 episodes of Twin Peaks revival but I already talked about those and--the next four I've watched so far this year, over in the
Twin Peaks thread.