Mitchel Broussard’s Top 10 Most Memorable TV Moments From 2015

Small moments make up the best TV. You're more likely to remember a particular show for some indelible line of dialogue or a random scene that feels inconsequential in the moment but lasts beyond season finales and cancellations than something more obvious. They're the quotable, rewind-worthy, text-your-friends-immediately moments that are the reasons hashtags are born and Twitter riots begin. What better reason to celebrate such moments than the oncoming New Year? We Got This Covered is here to list those little moments of beauty, terror, humor, and surprise that made 2015 TV addictively great. There's no real rule here (besides the obvious 2015 caveat): if it was on TV or streaming platforms in an episodic format, it was fair game for addition. Side note: I've already done my Top 10 TV Shows of 2015 list, and those are inarguably home to some stupidly great TV moments this year. As such, I can't totally ignore them when making this list, but I'll try to focus on some new series as best I can. With that, here's number ten... (Obviously, spoilers for all shows listed) 10) Wayward Pines - The Truth Any and all comparisons of Fox's Wayward Pines to Twin Peaks are utterly justified. Creepy town, quirky denizens, and weird occurrences all swirl in and out of Wayward Pines' thought-to-be-only first season. It's easy to remark on these wack-a-do moments after watching the whole first season (if this show could be nominated for an Emmy in anything, it'd be Supporting Actress for Melissa Leo), but it's the set-up of every explanation for the show's gonzo world that results in its lynchpin moment. In a moment of suitable meta-relevance, Principal Megan Fisher (Hope Davis) sits young Ben (Charlie Tahan) and two of his classmates down in a floor-to-ceiling white room, teaching the trio of the "New Generation," and the audience, about The Truth. Turns out, the entire show has taken place in the year 4028, Toby Jones is actually David Pilcher, a mad-scientists-of-sorts who decided the world was ending and that putting a group of people into cryo-freeze to form a new society in the post-apocalypse would be the only saving grace of mankind. Oh, and there are mutant zombie people. Crazy? Yes. Intriguing? Unendingly. Dumb? When thought about too much over the next five episodes, yep. But, for one fleeting moment, The Truth stung deeper and harsher than most post-Lost sci-fi television for the simple brazen act of, ya know, speaking the truth. 9) Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt - Peeno Noir There is no Top 10 TV Moments List of 2015 without Titus Andromedon's Ode to Black Penis. There's a lot of pitch perfect weirdness in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt's freshman season, but the instantly-famous moment in the show's sixth episode feels like a microcosm of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock's zany creation - madcap and just-dumb-enough with the perfect sprinkle of self-aware satire. The song builds from Titus' (Tituss Burgess) need to create a music video as a possible addition to his acting oeuvre, so he enlists stoop lady Lillian (Carol Kane) and gets access to the house of Jacqueline Voorhees (Jane Krakowski as Kimmy's boss) to make the over-the-top, heavily rhyming earworm. It's hard to pinpoint what makes Peeno Noir such a stand-out comedic high-point in a show that is essentially one giant stand-out comedic high-point, but Burgess' commitment to his similarly-named counterpart is high up there. "Peeno noir, leather bar, oh so close and yet so far," he croons from behind the banisters of Jacqueline's luxurious Upper East Side McMansion. Including locations such as an abandoned chandelier warehouse and an uber-classy local strip club, subsequent rhymes rope in everything from Tom Berenger and Roseanne Barr to Myanmar and a mid-sized car. It's a sequence that's impossible to successfully praise in a vacuum (so watch it for yourself), but one that's totally earned within the context of the show's bizzaro world. Peeno noir, caviar, this show can be spec-tac-ular. 8) Crazy Ex-Girlfriend - Ass Blood All it took was one "Sexy Getting Ready Song," and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had won me over. The pilot paints an appropriately quirky depiction of one slightly fractured woman's cross-country quest to be with the man she loves, because they dated in high school for a few weeks, and he barely remembers her. What could have been crass exploitation and blatant sexism is a maelstrom of twenty-first century millennial irony and I-don't-care-what-you-think feminism. But I've already discussed why Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one of the best things on TV, so let's talk about ass blood. As Rebecca (Rachel Bloom) belts out the titular song, centering on getting ready for an impending date with total-babe Josh, she stands inside of a beautiful, spotless bathroom along with a coterie of beautiful women all beautifully made-up. Okay, not so true: in reality, she's standing in her own crappy southern-California bathroom, plucking eyebrows, shaving her legs, and bending over to place a wax strip on her nether-regions. The ass blood flies, her wax strip comes back with questionably brown-and-red liquids, and an inevitable rap cameo careens to a halt when its singer remarks on Rachel's "nasty-ass patriarchal bullshit" of a women's hygiene regimen. CW, you are officially forgiven for that title. 7) The Last Man on Earth - R.I.P. Phil Miller Before The Last Man on Earth had enough cast members to perform its own off-broadway rendition of Rent, the weird little Fox sitcom was about one down-on-his-luck schmuck named Phil Miller, the last guy on the planet. The show's pilot is subsequently a slight revelation in its unorthodox singular nature of cathartic wish fullfilment: Phil bowls for fish tanks instead of pins, fills a kiddie pool with margarita mix and sprinkles its edges with salt, cuts a hole into a diving board when his in-home plumbing system goes south, and you can imagine the rest. It's endearing stuff, full of appropriate pathos in Will Forte's desperate attempt to experience people again ("Hello God, first of all apologies for all the recent masturbation. But that's gotta be on you"), and it comes to a head in his suicide attempt at the pilot's end. After a flirtation attempt with a cute mannequin comes to a disastrous end, Phil resigns to check out by crashing into a large rock. As Mark Mothersbaugh's upbeat-yet-somber score rises, Phil's huge pickup truck barrels to his final resting place. For a few scary moments, The Last Man on Earth flirts with a dead serious denouement (hampered slightly by the fact that the pilot was a double-header premiere), bookending an odd, experimental 22 minutes of TV in a way that feels appropriate in its one-two punch of darkness and levity. Then Phil sees a beacon of smoke, stumbles onto a bra hanging from a clothesline, and discovers that the name of his show is carrying the baton of Cougar Town in its amusing-but-frustrating falsity. Still, Phil's drive represents the show's opening salvo thesis statement: it was going to be weird, it was going to be funny, it was going to be sad, and it wasn't going to be for everyone. 6) Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. - The Monolith The eponymous Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had just won a victory over twist-Big Bad Jiaying, the spread of the Inhuman terrigen crystals appeared to be foiled, and the gang was finally resting at S.H.I.E.L.D. home base. Then, the packet of crystals that Daisy knocked into the ocean take a long journey into fish oil pills. Also then, Simmons investigates a slight crack in the case guarding the imposing Kree Monolith that's been acting as a mysterious question mark most of the season. The case cracks open, the Monolith liquefies, knocks Simmons onto her stomach, and absorbs her into nothingness. The show had been riding on a fizzy high ever since The Winter Solider kicked the cinderblocks out from underneath S.H.I.E.L.D.'s foundation, but this season two finale was another level of blindside: out-of-nowhere creepiness (is that hunk of cement alive?!), the worrying death of a leading cast member, and the mythos-expanding Big Question surrounding it all: where did the thing come from in the first place? That's all well and good, but Simmons' wide-eyed horror as she's pulled back into an alien structure is in-the-moment, jaw-dropping TV, and maybe the best see-ya-next-year cliffhanger of 2015. 5) The Leftovers - "It's Mine" You couldn't swing a bat within the town of Jarden, Texas without hitting an emotionally resonant subplot nestled within the matryoshka doll that is The Leftovers season 2. As a result, there are an annoying amount of brilliant moments here that could have been chosen: Kevin's visit to the afterlife hotel, the brilliant pay-off of that knock-knock joke, the dizzying no-context first ten minutes of the season - all would suffice. Yet, here I am, with this tiny scene from "No Room at the Inn" burned into my brain after all is said and done. Reverend Matt Jamison (Christopher Eccleston) and comatose wife Mary (Janel Moloney) lie smuggled inside of a trunk, attempting to get back into Jarden. The car stops to inspect a wreck, wherein Matt discovers the deceased form of the man who stole his and his wife's all-important wrist bands in a moment of attempted good faith earlier in the hour. Norah pulls a dead dog off the road, Matt begins ripping the bloodied band off of the upside-down corpse, and off in the distance the dead man's son watches from the bushes. "It's mine," the reverend justifies to the toddler, who then wordlessly holds up his own stolen band to Matt. It's classic Leftovers: simultaneously triumphant (Matt and Mary can get back into Jarden!) and a right-hook of devastation, played all the more perfectly with the poignancy of Eccleston's fervent desperation to keep his faith in the face of a world that's slowly turning its back on the man upstairs. 4) Mad Men - Peggy's First Day Mad Men's final seven episodes were a long time coming. The show wasn't averse to making its fans wait long in between seasons, but the half-way split of Season 7 into two runs (one in 2014, the last this year) seemed particularly cruel. It also had the unfortunate task of capping a show that, by and large, essentially never dipped below being described as Extremely Good Television. I have my own qualms with the show's final episode, although I'm still in the camp of by-and-large adoration, but it's the third-to-last hour of the series, "Lost Horizon," in which Mad Men actually feels like it's closing its doors for good. Don's still on a spiritual journey (or whatever), Joan is still battling 1960's work-place sexism, and Peggy and Roger are finally bonding. "This is more attention than I've ever gotten from you," she admits to her boss-of-nearly-a-decade as they sit downing a bottle of Vermouth in the cavernous and abandoned hallways of SC&P, her barred from entry to the new McCann-Erickson offices, him unable to let the past go. He plays the organ, she rollerblades through the desolate office, and they bond over just-passed-away Bert Cooper's tentacle erotica office artwork. But it's Peggy's triumphant waltz down the hallways of McCann the following morning - rocking a hangover, smoking a cigarette, and carrying a box of office supplies along with Bert's not-well-hidden raunchy artwork - that feels like the show finally confirming what everyone has known for years: this isn't Don's story, it's Peggy's. The final hours culminate in Don's full-circle journey from stern relic of the past to wisdom-filled vision of the future, but Peggy's trip from scared secretary to a middle-finger meme-generator was Mad Men at its trippy best: a smart show about smart people selling dumb things suggesting that sometimes the bravest thing of all to do is sell out. 3) Game of Thrones - The Massacre at Hardhome It's easy to remark on the inconsistency of Game of Throne's fifth season after the four exceptional years that came before it. I liked the show, nearly as much as ever, in its fifth year, but it became harder to fully anticipate each episode on such an uneventful set-up that is required by the series' source material. Nevertheless, there are great moments here: Cersei's Walk of Shame, Arya's weird arc in the House of Black and White, and Daenerys' first flight on Drogon. But it's the battle north of the Wall in the Wildling nexus dubbed Hardhome that skyrockets the final episodes of Game of Thrones' fifth season onto the level of earlier years. Jon and Tormund are trying to convince the wily Wildlings into uniting with the Night's Watch against the impending horde of White Walkers, not to mention their growing army of the undead. Not much goes to plan, and the Walkers descend on the peace accords with a desolate and grim fury. The slow-build of the show's structure lends itself to satisfying the-shit-has-hit-the-fan moments, and Hardhome's freaky man-vs-dead-man battle of the Night's Watch, Wildling, and Wight forces - with White Walkers standing ominous guards on a nearby bluff - could easily break into a Top 5 All-Time Game of Thrones Moments list. The capping shot, of the Night's King standing on a pier as Jon and company paddle to safety, is a line-drawn-in-the-sand, come-at-me-bro moment that finally feels like co-creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss assuring the show's fervent fanbase: yes, we know these forces have to battle it out sometime, we know where this is going, we got you. 2) You're the Worst - "You Stayed?" Calling You're the Worst a half-hour comedy is like calling Game of Thrones a medieval fantasy - it's a disservice to the nuance of the show. You're the Worst is also hiking away from its blatant macabre silliness that dominated season one; the characters are still deviously humorous in their self-aware misanthropy, but the year's 2015 run gave one in particular a surprising origin story for all of the personality traits we've come to love. Gretchen, it turns out, has been diagnosed with clinical depression since she was young. As she tells boyfriend Jimmy mid-way into season two, she can usually deal with it with her classic brand of cutting wit and carefully weaponized distance from others. That's the entire reason Jimmy fell for Gretchen in the first place, a bold statement for a series known for bold statements, even if it occasionally careened year two of You're the Worst into some of the most maudlin "sitcom" episodes I've ever seen on TV. It all culminates in the penultimate episode of the season, when Jimmy is seduced by a cute bronze-medal Olympian/bartender to ditch Gretchen's can't-be-fixed depression behind for a weekend at a woodland cabin. He does so, leaving Gretchen lying in a lump at their Los Angeles abode, but when the sultry bartender arrives to pick him up, he dives for the bushes, embracing the rom-com you knew who to choose all along cliche as he walks back into the house. There, he silently builds a pillow fort around his living room floor-locked girlfriend, before embracing her. "You stayed?" An introverted, rock bottom Gretchen asks in full-on tears. "You stayed." Sad in its spoken clarity but euphoric in the potentially bright future it hints at for such well-drawn, weirdo characters, those two words - and the moment they embody - finally justify a gloomy twist that could have otherwise driven a great show into a mawkish mess. 1) Sense8 - "I Can't Leave Her" Leave it to the show with the psychic orgy to construct the most devastating season-ender of the year. The 12 episodes before Sense8's season one curtain call are overflowing with enough moments for their own year-ending top ten list: that ridiculous-yet-not-tacky orgy, 4 Non Blondes karaoke, Wolfgang's shootout, Daniela's reaction to Hernando and Lito... I'll stop myself now. But it's the season finale - and the slow realization that if this sprawling ensemble has a main character, it's Tuppence Middleton's Riley - that wedges Sense8 into the brain with no way out. Here we learn that Riley was in a car crash that killed her husband, Magnús, immediately, and left her to give birth to a baby girl, Lúna, on the ceiling of the overturned vehicle. She perseveres, escaping with Lúna into the Icelandic wilderness and eventually coming to rest on a snow-capped hillside, her newborn frozen in her arms. In the present storyline, once it's up to her to get an unconscious Will to safety after their big break from Mr. Whispers and BPO - protecting the cluster in the process - she pauses, wondering if it's time to just give up. "I can't," she stutters after Will asks her to get in the ambulance and drive them to safety, looking down at a phantom of Lúna in her arms. "I can't leave her." It's a clever reversal on viewer expectation (easy to assume Will would mutter those words) and a sucker punch of empathy for hands-down the best creation of the series. It combos Sense8's best assets (deft emotional undercurrents, cool sci-fi touches, gorgeous landscapes) into one coalesced moment of epiphany for its viewers: the show was never about how "cool" it is to live someone else's life, but how easy it is to forget that everyone we glimpse on the street has not only faced love, joy, and happiness, but world-ending, can't-move-forward-from-this trauma, sadness, and death.