2) Transparent
Somewhat appropriately, given that it’s a show about complicated identities, it’d be very easy to pass off Transparent as just an indie movie made for television. The usual signifiers of mumblecore moviemaking are present, including a sleepy-eyed visual palette, a story thick with family dysfunction, and the presence of a Duplass brother. But if you’re just watching Transparent for the surface narrative, you’re not really seeing it for the precisely constructed and challenging series that was the best new show of 2014 by a landslide.
Creator Jill Soloway and an incredible staff of writers and directors put “Amazon: original content generator” on the map with this heartfelt, incisive, painfully funny look at evolving definitions of sexuality and family. While Jeffrey Tambor’s transformative performance as an L.A. patriarch coming out as transgender was the hook that sold the show, the first season of Transparent ended having established the entire Pfefferman clan as the most obnoxious, self-centered and strangely sympathetic family of TV assholes since Arrested Development.
Soloway and company didn’t just bring over their arthouse sensibilities to TV, but fully adapted them to the strengths afforded by long-form, open-ended storytelling. Add on top of that the best cast collection of regulars and ringers this side of Mad Men, and the best direction in a comedy I’ve seen all year, and Transparent made for the perfect encapsulation of the diversifying TV landscape 2014 had to offer.