10 Best Drama Series Of 2015

Shock. Gasp. Repeat. The formula for the newest member of ABC's Shondaland Thursday lineup turned out to be a simple one — even as every one of its core characters got more deeply entangled in a web of deceit, debauchery and the occasional death. Ballsy enough to kick off its electrifying second season with Viola Davis' mercurial law professor Annalise Keating bleeding out from a gunshot wound, creator Pete Nowalk & Co. managed to keep us speculating, guessing and (perhaps hardest of all) caring about his merry band of murderers.

If you've ever bemoaned the trashy state of reality TV, yet secretly watched a housewife flip a table or two, you are Rachel Goldberg. If you've simultaneously held hope in your heart and cynicism on your brow, you are Rachel Goldberg. If you've pined for someone you knew was no good while stringing along someone you knew wasn't good enough, you are Rachel Goldberg. If you've loved and loathed your boss in equal measures, you are Rachel Goldberg. In short, we're all Rachel Goldberg, and the UnREAL heroine's plight — and wicked sense of guillotine humor — spoke to us on a cellular level. Rachel, will you accept this key to our hearts?

When a beloved X-Files producer takes on a classic by a master sci-fi novelist, you're already primed for an otherworldly treat. So while it's no surprise that Amazon's Man in the High Castle proved an engrossing, intriguing alternate-reality drama, we were taken aback by how easily we fell in love with the Philip K. Dick adaptation. The series' shocking visuals (a swastika on the United States flag?!) juxtaposed with its personal stories (Juliana and Joe and the big secret between them) and air of mystery (who is the Man in the High Castle?) made for a binge-worthy drama that left us thinking: What if?

FX's Cold War-era drama has always centered on covert operations. But in Season 3, the series had its characters spill more secrets than ever before – Elizabeth and Philip told their daughter the truth about their double lives! Philip revealed himself to his "wife" Martha! The FBI uncovered the bug planted in Season 1! – deepening relationships and raising the stakes with captivating intensity. And when Philip was forced to seduce a teenage girl for intel, the resulting scenes were impossible to look away from — even in all their uncomfortable glory.

A girl walks into a bar... and leaves a half-dozen banged-up rugby players in her wake. A string of such NBD moments for the titular hero-turned-private eye could easily have fueled a series, but Netflix's Daredevil follow-up raised the game by, as with the red-masked Matt Murdock, spending wonderfully languorous moments getting inside Jessica's head. Add in a highly (ahem) adult tone and the deft tackling of "consent" issues, and the result turned out to be the small-screen's best all-around superhero drama.

It's easy to forget that at this time last year, America hadn't even met — much less made TV icons of — the outlandishly outsized Lyon family. Just 20 episodes later, though, Fox's hip-hop soap opera has changed the TV landscape — drawing monster ratings, provocatively tackling a host of social issues and championing a foot-to-the-pedal style of storytelling that makes DVR-ing an "at your own risk" proposition. To paraphrase the sublime Taraji P. Henson's ferocious matriarch Cookie, "Oh, and Anika, this is a show!"

If the premise for USA Network's summer drama — drug-addled computer genius gets recruited by cyber terrorists (activists?) seeking to destroy the nation's financial institutions — sounded ambitious, the end result proved doubly so. Propelled by a fearlessly harrowing performance by Rami Malek as unreliable narrator Elliot, Mr. Robot took viewers on a paranoid thrill ride that explored the darkest corners of corporate and consumer culture — and included one of the wildest and most meticulously planned twists (which we won't spoil for the uninitiated) in recent TV history.

"Well, this is a deal." Just as Sheriff Larsson summed up the Waffle Hut massacre, one could use those five words to remark on the eclectic, eccentric world Noah Hawley created for Season 2 of FX's riff on the Coen Brothers' film universe. The plot — in which a happenstance hit-and-run thrust meek marrieds in the path of warring crime organizations — was tight, intense and darkly comedic, but it was the cast (led by Patrick Wilson, Jean Smart, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Jeffrey Donovan and Bokeem Woodbine) that made this frigid region a true joy to visit.

Refusing to play it safe in its second season — its first without Tom Perrotta's source material as a guide — this rare drama that's as bleak as it is beautiful continued to stun by moving to a new setting, introducing a new family whose secrets were as dark as even Kevin and Nora's, and boldly expanding on its intriguing mythology. Add to all that a string of tour-de-force performances that have earned the cast TVLine's Performer of the Week/Honorable Mention honors virtually every week, and you'll understand why we find the HBO sleeper so, if you'll pardon the pun, rapturous.

How fitting it is that the second season of John Logan's sublime monster mash-up left us — even now, all these months after the finale — haunted. From swoon-worthy dialogue that read like poetry to performances as raw as an open wound (that Billie Piper monologue alone!) and cinematography so lush it should be hung in a museum, the Showtime series distinguished itself not just as television's finest drama — but also as a breathtaking work of fine art.