The Top 20 Shows Of 2012 (#20-11)

14. Key and Peele (Comedy Central)

Now that thousands of original comedy skits are just a Youtube click away, it seemed like the world would never have need of another sketch show. Keegen-Michael Key and Jordan Peele spent much of 2012 disproving that assumption, not by shaking up the sketch show format, but by making one that was the best source for inspired comedy shorts, regardless of medium. Covering a wide variety of premises -some as specific as Obama having an anger translator, or riff-heavy as a running gag about the increasingly ludicrous names of football players-, Key and Peele managed not one, but two seasons of sketch comedy more consistently hilarious than most sitcoms.

Whether leveraging their biracial background into wildly hysterical bits that doubled as observant commentary on race, or just goofing on their favorite movie clichés, Key and Peele were peerless in their ability to bait you into thinking you know where a sketch is going, before taking things to weird, and wonderfully silly new territory. Factor in the top-notch production values, and you’ve got one of the year’s best surprises.

• Best Episodes: “Pilot,” “Episode #2.2”

13. The Thick of it (BBC)

The first season of HBO’s Veep offered a skewed vision of the compromise and embarrassment hiding beneath the dignified sheen of high-level politics (and provided a showcase for Julia Lewis-Dreyfus’s four-letter vernacular), but the return of The Thick of it, the British series which inspired Veep, made it apparent how big the gulf is between a comedy that’s pretty good, and satire that’s truly transcendent. Stuck between the local heart of Parks of Rec, and the imagined magic that comes with the big office on The West Wing, Armando Iannucci’s uncompromisingly bleak look at inert party bickering, and bureaucracy was every bit the scathingly funny hate letter to government it had always been.

With Malcolm, Nicola, and Peter all caught in the media’s sights following a single suicide in London, the final series raised the stakes, but didn’t forsake the overwhelming sense of futility driving the biting humor, and lyrical cursing. Only a show as perceptive, and brilliantly written as The Thick of it could make you sad that a product of such unflinching cynicism is no longer with us.

• Best Episodes: “Episode #4.3,” “Episode #4.7”

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