I should hope that people would understand for an opinion publication that everything we state is just our opinion. "We think Enlightened is the best show of 2013" is a weak headline, because the "we think" is understood.

Well, once you get past season one, all bets are off.

Shortly after it completed its fourth (and best) season, The Wire popped up atop a bunch of TV critics top 10 lists, and they were accused of favoring things people hadn't seen over the OBVIOUS champion (I forget what it was at the time, but it was almost certainly either Lost, 24, or Heroes), because they were just…

One plan for next year is to link every day to an explanation of the rules like this one, because a lot of people missed the early Newswire about what we were doing this year and didn't quite understand what was going on. We'll also hopefully have a list of links to previous articles in the series with every article.

I think we've been too entertained by the reveal of the top three this year to ditch it entirely.

I think Enlightened can be watched in a variety of ways, which is part of why I love it so much. But my interpretation isn't that Amy is some kind of person who "breaks good" so much as that she's someone who does good in spite of herself. The one thing the show is quite clear on is that her actions in the finale are…

I think Digi was the only entrant in the cookie sweepstakes. But he probably would have won even if there were others. 18/25 is damn good.

I have been following TV really seriously since about 1995, and writing about it in some capacity since 2003. This is the best year I can remember. The only ones that come close are 2004 and 2005.

We wrote an article about Mr. Grobet earlier this year: http://www.avclub.com/artic…

Enlightened: The number one TV show of mainstream America.

We've written about the show so much in the past year. I wanted to find a new angle.

Considering I wrote this piece long after we had voted Enlightened top show and considering it took me the better part of a week to think of what angle I was going to take, I am going to call bullshit on this one.

But if you want to cherry-pick lists, I can offer you a bunch that have Enlightened in their top five, or I can point to James Poniewozik, critic for Time, who named it best show of the year. (There are plenty of others; James is just the biggest name and a good friend.) There's no giant contrarian conspiracy here. It…

Matt also did not pick either of the two shows you mentioned, though? He picked Arrested Development?

Our previous show of the year winners:

Yeah. Would have been one step too many for our poor, beleaguered copy editing team. Maybe we'll figure out a way to do something similar next year.

Somehow, Sims won custody of my wife. It was a dark time.

Oh, I'm not trying to sound angry or anything. And I'm sure some of those who voted for Enlightened did so to be a little contrarian. But I think overall, as a group, we eventually concluded that Enlightened had a slightly stronger season.

HBO will renew anything for literally any reason. Its ratings will certainly not be the reason it's renewed if it is.

Thank you! That's what we aimed for.