End-Of-Year: 2014 TV Nominees

Happy 2015, all! After the seemingly long holiday hiatus, new episodes are airing tonight on TV! Of course, I'm just now thinking about my favorite TV shows and performances of 2014. Apparently I saw about 80+ TV shows last year which includes a handful of reality TV shows which I don't count for my year-end list to keep me slightly more sane.

With that said, below are my personal nominations for Best Drama, Best Comedy, Best New Show, and Best Ensemble. I'll do another post tomorrow about my favorite individual performances.

Best Show, Drama

Agents of SHIELD
The Americans
Game of Thrones
The Good Wife
Hannibal
How to Get Away with Murder
The Leftovers
In the Flesh
Mad Men
Vikings

Cannibals, zombies, vikings, spies... my tastes do run the gamut usually, but I like my genre shows clearly. A few of these choices made my list last year, but new additions include a Marvel show that showed great improvement and a couple of divisive freshman TV shows.

Best Show, Comedy

Brooklyn Nine-Nine
The Comeback
Faking It
Fargo
Jane the Virgin
Looking
Orange is the New Black
Parks and Recreation
Shameless
Veep

Comedies don't get as much buzz as dramas and apparently the sitcom is dead and yet I look at this list which includes a couple of network sitcoms as well as shows from Netflix, MTV, and the CW. Great comedies are out there and you just need to go out and find them.

Best New Show

The Affair
Black-ish
Broad City
Enlisted
Faking It
Fargo
How to Get Away with Murder
Jane the Virgin
The Leftovers
Looking

There was also a lot of great new shows that came out this year. Of course a few of them are in non-traditional channels or have already been canceled because of lack of viewers which just goes to show that people really need to give new shows a chance and do a bit more digging to find that wonderful show from all the noise out there.

Best Ensemble

Brooklyn Nine-Nine
Fargo
Game of Thrones
The Good Wife
Jane the Virgin
The Leftovers
Orange is the New Black
Parks and Recreation
Shameless
Veep

Pretty self-explanatory category. All of these shows' casting directors should get an award, because their ensemble is just so uniformly great in that while they succeed as individual actors, it's when they all work together that make their show as great as they are.

As I said above, I'll post my favorite actors from the past year tomorrow and then hopefully in a few days, I can follow it all up with my ranked list my favorite TV shows along with my top picks for each of the categories above.