BoJack Horseman: Season 5

One of the simplest challenges in the current TV landscape is consistent greatness. Feels like every year a whole dozen new shows capture the zeitgeist for a hot second, make waves, earn that workplace cafeteria "hey have you guys seen -" buzz, and then fade away somewhere in the second season. It wasn't always this way! Only like five years ago, I could enter a given year knowing that Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and Mad Men and Parks and Recreation would be four of the best shows on TV all year, and they always were, and that was that. But these days, whether its due to anthology formats, extended hiatuses between seasons, or the general glut of television in general, it just seems harder for shows to be consistently very good. The Americans just went out on a high note, but took a minor faceplant in Season 5. Fargo felt completely strained in Season 3 after being a consensus "best show on TV" candidate for two years. And plenty of reliable old comedies like Archer and Always Sunny have been inconsistent at best in recent memory.

Credit, then, to BoJack Horseman for a fourth straight season of very good television. The fastball is slipping a little, maybe - Season 4 was already a small step down from Seasons 2 and 3 - but this is still arguably the best show on earth when it comes to mixing absurdly stupid laugh lines with deep and cathartic emotional punches.

Nothing gold can stay, and creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has been candid about how he could see this show lasting for ten or even twenty years, so it's going to be inevitable when - not if, but when - BoJack has a season that feels lazy or misguided or out of touch or uninspired. I mean, you can only burn so bright for a short amount of time - look at how quickly another wildly creative animated show like Rick and Morty hit a snag, and look at how deeply lazy and bad old stalwarts like The Simpsons and South Park have grown over the years.

Eventually, BoJack Horseman will get bad. But I'll take every season I can get until then.