favorite current shows other than twin peaks and the handmaid's tale

To make up for posting so infrequently, instead of a general catch-up post, a list post. This isn't a list of shows currently airing, but rather, shows that are "current" in that new episodes are either currently airing or forthcoming; shows that are not "done." I'm going to leave Twin Peaks out, partly because it's so obvious, and partly because what the fuck is there to say about Twin Peaks right now? Likewise for The Handmaid's Tale.

You're the Worst and Love. Network TV has played around with romantic comedies, but other than How I Met Your Mother -- which was really a hang-out comedy with the Ross-and-Rachel of it all turned up -- hasn't had many post-Mad About You successes. A to Z was better than you would think from the high concept, but was one and done. Other experiments like Mixology or just about any David Walton show quickly came and went, while an American remake of Gavin and Stacey was canceled before air. The Mindy Project is sort of a borderline case.

But leave the broadcast networks and it's another story. Aziz Ansari's Master of None -- not on this list because at the moment he's not planning to make more seasons -- works in a lot of the same territory as his surprisingly good book Modern Romance. FXX's Man Seeking Woman is not my cup of tea, but has successfully gone for a few seasons.

And two of my favorite series are FXX's You're the Worst and Netflix's Love. I'm grouping them together here, and it's not like they don't have plenty in common -- both are about deeply dysfunctional young couples who meet in the first episode of the series, and for that matter, in both shows, at least one member of the couple works in the entertainment business. (On You're the Worst, Gretchen is a publicist while Jimmy is a novelist gradually depleting the advance from his first book; on Love, Mickey works in radio and Gus is an aspiring screenwriter who works as an on-set tutor for one of the young stars of a Charmed-like TV show.)

Despite this, they're not that similar, largely because each has its own distinctive voice. You're the Worst goes to some dark places -- even before a multi-episode arc in which one character is so deep in clinical depression that they barely engage with the rest of the cast -- and Gretchen and Jimmy start out pretty close to broken. They meet at the wedding of Jimmy's ex, who is the sister of Gretchen's best friend. They hook up. They don't hate being around each other but take forever to admit that there is anything between them but sex. They are both regularly horrible to each other and to people around them, though primarily verbally. Somehow, though, they ground a cast that includes characters who are, in the main, drawn more broadly than they are: the mean, cartoonishly dumb, but delightful Lindsey, Gretchen's best friend, in a not-quite-loveless-but-close marriage to uberdork Paul; Becca, Lindsey's older sister, and her douchey husband Vernon whose friendship with Paul is at the center of one of the show's best episodes. The most grounded, most human character is Edgar, Jimmy's roommate -- an Iraq War veteran whose PTSD has left him unemployed and who basically cooks for Jimmy in exchange for rent. Edgar is fantastic, and the writing of his arc is inspired, and Desmin Borges is one of several actors on this show who should have been nominated for an Emmy.

Love is an Apatow-produced show, but generally doesn't seem like it except at the fringes: Andy Dick recurs a couple times as himself, Freaks and Geeks alumni Dave Gruber Allen and Steve Bannos have recurring roles, and Iris Apatow plays the kid Gus tutors. The series opens with Gus and Mickey going through breakups before meeting by chance encounter at a convenience store. Gus is, on the surface, the classic nice guy, but given to passive aggression, judgment, and controlling behavior; you could easily believe he's a few bad breakups or job losses away from becoming the initial-capitals Nice Guy who spends all his time on the internet bitching about women. Mickey is, on the surface, a mess -- a drug addict, an alcoholic, a love and sex addict, cynical and manipulative -- but more self-aware than Gus, and certainly much more aware of what she needs to work on. Gus hangs out with a large group of friends (and I think probably doesn't have many close friends) who watch movies and make up new theme songs to them -- which is a fantastic recurring bit. Mickey has a new roommate, Bertie (the all-star Claudia O'Doherty), who is damn near the soul of goodness.

Gus and Mickey don't hook up right away -- in fact, Mickey tries setting up Gus and Bertie in one of the first season's best and most awkward episodes -- but the sparks are obvious. By the time they do, you know them both well enough to kind of wish they would cool it and work on themselves for a while, which is a neat trick to pull in a show like this. They spend all of season two either fighting or giving you the sense that a fight is right around the corner.

There is a lot to love about Love if it's for you, but Gillian Jacobs, as Mickey, is the anchor. Co-creator Paul Rust is no slouch as Gus, but Mickey is so self-destructive, sometimes so awful, that making us love her is just more uphill work than showing the cracks in Gus's nice guy facade. You root for both of them -- they have just enough on the ball that it seems like, okay, you guys are being terrible people right now, but we can see the potential for you to not be terrible, so please get it together. (I wouldn't characterize You're the Worst this way, which is one of the key differences: you root instead for Gretchen and Jimmy to stop being terrible to each other, so that they can join forces and be terrible to the world. If the distinction seems trivial, probably neither of these shows is for you.)

Either of these shows can make you squirm -- Love moreso perhaps since You're the Worst is a little less real, a little broader. Depending on where you draw lines in terms of the likeability of characters, they may or may not be your thing.

Closely related here is Catastrophe, on Amazon Prime. Co-created by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, Catastrophe follows Sharon and Rob after they conceive a child in a one-night stand (well, one-weekend stand, if I remember right). I'm discussing it separately from the above two shows in part because their relationship advances more quickly, in part because the characters are slightly older and the show doesn't have that "kids figuring their shit out" vibe (I don't know exactly how old any of these characters are supposed to be, but Horgan and Delaney are in their 40s, while the stars of Love and You're the Worst are in their 30s). The relationship issues that are dealt with are different, there's a kid involved, their friends are married with kids -- it's a different vibe from the other two.

Horgan is a genius, incidentally, and this is the show that's easiest for Americans to watch -- Pulling is one of my all-time favorite shows, but I don't know if it's still streaming anywhere in the US; she also created Divorce for HBO.

Better Call Saul. The reason this Breaking Bad prequel is so good is that it isn't a Breaking Bad prequel: the show has little to do with setting the table for Walter White's arc from Mr Chips to Scarface, and likely won't even add many surprises to the backstories of his main nemeses. By instead tracing the early stories of Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill and Mike Ehrmantraut, who are both significant to Breaking Bad, it makes its own fun. Most of the time it's really two shows happening simultaneously: Jimmy's life as a lawyer, Mike's life as an ex-cop, both of them struggling for different reasons to stay on the straight and narrow and also having different reasons for the times they bend the rules. Sure, there are Breaking Bad cameos, and some of them are exciting, but this show could arguably go on for five or six more seasons before the name Heisenberg is mentioned.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is my favorite show on network television in years. It's a hard sell, which is part of why it's also the lowest-rated scripted show that hasn't been canceled (another part is that it's on The CW). It's a musical romantic comedy in which the lead, Rebecca Bunch (played by co-creator Rachel Bloom), is ultimately also the villain -- she is nearly always either pursuing the wrong course, doing terribly unhealthy things to try to Get The Guy, or being self-destructive. The show knows this, mind you, and sometimes so does Rebecca, who devotes one song to self-loathing and another to the realization that "I'm the Villain in My Own Story."

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is intended to be five seasons, with a specific structure that was pitched when the show was first developed. The first season begins when Rebecca moves from New York to West Covina, California, taking a huge pay cut to take a job in a two-bit local law firm, all in the name of pursuing her ex-boyfriend Josh Chan, who she hasn't seen since summer camp ... and who turns out to be engaged. In classic romantic comedy fashion, she immediately meets Greg, a guy who is probably a better match for her (Rebecca is a genius; Josh could understudy for Joey Tribbiani). Her new co-worker Paula, played to perfection by Donna Lynne Champlin, acts as an audience surrogate, egging Rebecca on and rooting for the hypothetical Rebecca/Josh relationship as a way to live vicariously through her.

It's hard to get across how many things make this show work so well. It's a show that understands people better than television comedies usually do. It's a show that invests real writing energy and screen time into showing how one-on-one friendships work, not just relationships, and not just group dynamics, which are the usual fodder of hang-out comedies. It's a show that cast a Filipino man as the romantic lead and spends time showing his family life. It's a show that's absolutely frequently cartoonish -- it has to be -- but still makes room for a subplot about a middle-aged man realizing he's bisexual. It's a show that is ostensibly built around Rebecca's stalker-ish behavior towards Josh, and equally unhealthy behaviors later, but constantly challenges and interrogates not only the correctness of her decisions, but her motivations and the deeper issues surrounding them -- usually while being funny. There's a dream sequence on a plane with angels and a therapist. There's Rebecca's own Crazy Ex-Boyfriend in a later subplot with real potential. There's Patti Lupone as Rebecca's rabbi!

It's a magical show. There is nothing else quite like it on television.

In brief:

Superstore, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place are my favorite network comedies. The first two have terrific ensemble casts, the kinds of casts where there really are no weak characters or weak performances (which is not to say there's no way to pick favorites -- Mark McKinney and Nichole Bloom on Superstore, for instance, and Stephanie Beatriz and Andre Braugher on Nine-Nine). The Good Place is its own thing, and it's hard to say much about what's great about it without getting deep into spoiler territory (which is particularly tough since the season ended on a cliffhanger) -- the characters are not quite as well-developed as any of these other shows (though given creator Mike Schur's history, that will probably change over time, as it did on Parks), and it is maybe a comedy of ideas more than characters, but they are very good ideas.

Top Chef and Chef's Table are the only "reality" shows I really watch or enjoy (I'm not sure whether to count The Great British Baking Show as a current show). The most recent season of Masterchef Junior soured me on it -- it was as though they had focus-grouped it and decided they needed to amplify the worst things about the show. Top Chef, on the other hand, just came off one of its best seasons.