"When I published my lists of the best dramas and comedy episodes last year, I struggled with definitions, and so did some readers. How, they wondered, could the darkest and most humiliating Girls and Louie episodes be described as "comedy," or, for that matter, particularly funny? And should animated shows be grouped in with live-action half-hour comedies? As an end run around those issues, I thought about titling these lists "best hour" and "best half-hour," but as you'll see, thanks to the more elastic running times of streaming series like Arrested Development and occasional super-size very special episodes of regular shows, temporal adjectives didn't do the trick, either.
(...)
The important thing to know is that when I think back on the year in TV, these are the episodes I think of most often, because for one reason or another, they made a strong impression."
-Matt Zoller Seitz
