Josef Woodard’s 2017 Top 10 TV and Films

Much as I crave time away from screens, the going is getting tougher. Only a couple of years back, I joined the revolution of obsessive TV watchers, giving into urgings of family, friends, and media pundits who insisted that television is a vastly improved and more artistically respectable domain in the post-Netflix epoch. Duly noted, and duly inducted into the proverbial living room/screening room. Case in point: 18 blissful, head-scratching, dream-scaping hours lost in the world of David Lynch’s masterpiece Twin Peaks: The Return.

Even so, nothing can compare with the experience of a film seen on a big screen in a darkened theater with members of one’s species (and the field is riper lately in Santa Barbara, with the impressively improved film rooms of The Hitchcock Cinema & Public House and the state-of-the-art new Riviera, under the control of the mighty Santa Barbara International Film Festival). What follows, then, is my dual 2017 Top 10 list, for small and large screens.

Film

1) The Other Side of Hope
2) The Florida Project
3) The Square
4) Mother!
5) Brigsby Bear
6) Dunkirk
7) Maudie
8) The Big Sick
9) I Am Not Your Negro
10) Paterson

TV

1) Twin Peaks: The Return (Showtime)
2) Godless (Netflix)
3) Big Little Lies (HBO)
4) Mindhunter (Netflix)
5) She’s Gotta Have It (Netflix)
6) The Deuce (HBO)
7) Comrade Detective (Amazon)
8) Feud: Bette and Joan (FX)
9) Fargo (FX)
10) The Young Pope (HBO)