I’ve found the practice to be instructive in many ways, but most of all it has been fun. Now as we leave a movie theater, my wife wants to know what my grade is going to be, and I ask her grade. How dare I give True Grit a B, she tells me, since it was easily an A- at least. (Much like what happened to Kelli Marshall, I was talked into a B+.) One of the joys of watching film is the company of the people we watch it with, and most of my cinema experiences this year have been with my wife, whose taste fortunately overlaps a great deal with mine.

I watched 170 films in 2010, roughly one every two days. And if I counted correctly, I watched over 50 films with a 2010 release date. That means there are still a lot of films, including many critical favorites I didn’t see. No Dogtooth. No I Am Love. No Certified Copy. No Sweetgrass. But you can see grades for all the films I did watch here (sortable by release date).

What I can give you are some brief thoughts on the films I rated highest upon watching. I haven’t returned to most of these, so I would expect some to change. (There were sound problems in the theater for Winter’s Bone, which might get bumped up to an A. I suspect Mother would rate higher, as well. Inception, which I did see twice, dropped from an A- to a B+ on second viewing.) As it is, no film struck me as having enough richness and few enough flaws to get a perfect A, a grade I seem more willing to give to older films than newer ones (an issue I’m still pondering).

Enough. It’s time for the results. Here are my fourteen favorite films of 2010, as well as two “solid Bs” that didn’t get nearly enough love from critics.

Group: A-

Winter’s Bone, Debra Granik: Exquisite specificity of place and character, beautifully rendered. Its plotting borrows from film noir, but it’s real strength is giving us a character (Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree) and a place (rural Ozarks) rarely seen in film. This is why we need an independent cinema.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Edgar Wright: Maligned for failing to develop sufficiently its female characters and for being too long (I’ll concede the second point), SP is one of the finest examples of how a talented director can carefully develop a story through every tool at his disposal. Nary a shot is wasted in this tightly constructed film. A joyful viewing experience.

Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese: Another film that polarized critics, I found SI to be a glorious revival of a cinema of mood, feeling, and visual acuity. The plotting isn’t great, and it has a couple scenes too many, and (like another hit this year) the final reveal is unimportant and distracting. I often find Scorsese to be cold, but there is a warmth that comes through the purity of this vision, and I love the film for it.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, “A Banksy Film”: Setting aside whether the film itself is a hoax (another distraction), Exit is a superb character study of a man who sets out to record the world, then finds himself pulled into and pushed to the front of it. Hilarious, tense, thought-provoking … isn’t this what we want from our movies?

Catfish, Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman: A film with far more interesting things to say about on-line culture and its effect on human interaction than the perfectly fine but bizarrely overrated The Social Network, Catfish is another superb documentary that hits a wider range of emotional responses than nearly any scripted film this year. What I love most about it, though, is the way it introduces the viewer to how Facebook and other social media services work through smartly linked visuals. The editing achievement of the year.

Group: B+

Inception, Christopher Nolan: It has nothing interesting to say about dreams or the subconscious, but it is a damn fine heist film.

Mother, Bong Joon-ho: Another genre-blasting achievement from the world’s most exciting director.

127 Hours, Danny Boyle: Dizzying, subjective, smart filmmaking with some stupid miscalculations in the final third.

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski: Sharp, spare direction and two fine performances from Olivia Williams and Pierce Brosnan make up for a so-so script.

Toy Story 3, Lee Unkrich: Some days it seems the folks at Pixar understand filmmaking better than anyone on the planet. The studio as auteur?

The Secret in Their Eyes, Juan José Campanella: A fine film about passion and restraint, with one exquisite chase scene done in one long take.

True Grit, Joel Coen and Ethan Coen: It’s nice to see the Coens expand beyond the limits of their vision of the universe by pursuing a new limitation: genre conventions.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg: A solid documentary about a fascinating figure that doubles as a meditation on gender, the ethics of entertainment, and hard work.

Underrated Films from Disreputable Genres

Knight and Day, James Mangold: I appreciate that some people can’t get past Tom “The Grin” Cruise and enjoy a straight-up action flick, but that’s too bad because this was a solid piece of filmmaking. We all say we want coherent action set-pieces, so why don’t we go see films that give them to us? And are we so far beyond the Hollywood star that we can’t enjoy the star-driven picture any more?

Letters to Juliet, Gary Winick: When we watch TCM we swoon over these pictures, so why don’t we support the few that are still made today? Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave gave two of the best performances of the year, but we’re not supposed to say so because this is a romantic drama of the European excursion variety.

So, here we go with Unheralded Television Performances in 2010, and the performers who may have drawn attention away from these achievements.

Olivia Williams, Dollhouse

The focus: Enver Gjokaj

Gjokaj gave what was probably my favorite performance of 2010, as they only truly believable doll in the Dollhouse. When he became Topher, it instantly became one of the great impressions in the history of television. But in a subtler position, Olivia Williams gave us a cool but never cold, strong but never invincible, tricky but never tricked Adelle DeWitt, head of the Los Angeles dollhouse. Simultaneously, she gave one of the strongest supporting roles of the year in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. A great year for her.

Ray Romano, Men of a Certain Age

The focus: Andre Braugher

Braugher got the Emmy nomination, and I have no complaints about that. Scott Bakula got a good share of attention for his fine performance here, coming off his guest stint on Chuck. But this little-watched TNT drama, created by Romano, got its emotional center from Romano as the core of this trio of friends. Whether hanging out at their favorite diner, running his party goods store, or contemplating his failures as a father to his nervous preteen son, Romano brought a somewhat slack-jawed but always compelling look at a man struggling to keep his life circling the drain rather than running down it.

Joshua Jackson, Fringe

The focus: John Noble, Anna Torv

There’s a lot of love for John Noble’s performance as Walter Bishop, which has improved since his awful first season. And Anna Torv was asked to do a lot in the front half of the third season, and found a way to pull it off. But it seems that nobody has mentioned the fine job that Jackson has done playing charming but not smarmy, serious yet never self-serious. He manages Noble’s performance as Walter with aplomb and has found a delicate way to convey Peter’s friendship with Olivia.

Andrea Anders, Better Off Ted

The focus: Portia de Rossi, Jonathan Slavin, Malcolm Barrett

I wrote in my Best of 2010 list about de Rossi, Slavin, and Barrett. But let us not forget Anders and her kooky, energetic, and occasionally hilarious performance as love interest to Ted Crisp. Her role was tough because she was asked both to be the grounded, sane one next to de Rossi, Slavin, and Barrett, and the crazy, unhinged one next to Jay Harrington and her mostly anonymous coworkers. And she did it.

Ken Marino, Party Down

The focus: Lizzy Caplan, Adam Scott, Jane Lynch

Caplan was wonderful. Scott was serviceable as the audience’s entry point into Party Down Catering. Lynch got a lot of the kudos for her performance in the first season. But Marino’s lovesick Ron Donald with his Soup R Crackers franchise dream was both more emotionally moving and more hilarious than any of the other three. In a really wicked ensemble that only got better when Megan Mullally joined the cast in season two, Marino stood out with his puppy dog looks and killer comic timing.

Aimee Teegarden, Friday Night Lights

The focus: Connie Britton, Kyle Chandler

Some characters are great because of the actor’s performance. Some characters are written so beautifully, it’s difficult to know how much credit to give the actor. Teegarden falls into this latter category. A little stiff and wooden in the early seasons, she’s now become my favorite authentic representation of teenage life on television over the last ten years. The Taylor family oozes authenticity, and while Britton and Chandler get most of the credit, Teegarden deserves credit for holding her own in scenes with them and finding a way to let the writers develop compelling stories of love, friendship, and learning around her character.

Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation

The focus: Nick Offerman, Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari

It seemed that NBC was developing P&R as a star vehicle for SNL alumna Poehler. At times the first season felt that way. But the ensemble quickly developed and Offerman, Pratt, and Ansari gave performances so beloved, that Poehler became a little lost in the lovefest. So consider this a mild corrective to that.

Neil Flynn, The Middle & Garrett Dillahunt, Raising Hope

These are two uneven but occasionally hilarious shows that don’t get a lot of attention. Nearly all of Raising Hope‘s best scenes include Dillahunt, who helps elevate so-so material with fabulous line readings. I know him mostly for more dramatic roles (including this year’s excellent film Winter’s Bone), but he’s even better in a comedic role. Flynn takes a nearly opposite approach, toning down every would-be joke until it seems he’s trying to turn The Middle into a low-key family drama. He manages to be a wonderful combination of classic daddy-knows-best sitcom dad and playful yet lackadaisical partner in crime.

Is it the funniest show on TV? Most weeks, yes. (But it gets some serious competition from #3 at times.) But it’s also a rich, warm, smart, sophisticated, superbly acted, sharply written show. That’s why it’s number one. Unlike Modern Family, which throws some sentimental goop onto the ends of its shows in the least compelling manner possible, Community has built a cast of characters who genuine like each other and who we can care about, so when it goes for sentimental it succeeds beautifully. It seems the greatest divide among the passionate fans of the show is just which episode is the greatest, which says a lot about how many truly excellent episodes of television it has already given us. Funny, smart, sexy – will you marry me, Community? (I’ve previously written about Community here.)

2. Terriers

Oh, Terriers, how we loved you so. You brought us so much humor, so much intrigue, so much Donal Logue. You will go down as one of the all time great one season wonders. You reminded us that great characters can be funny and tragic, and that the best stories are sometimes the least conclusive. We praised you in life, let us praise you in death. And for those of you have yet to experience the charms of Terriers, let me tell you that it even with some unresolved stories, it is well worth your time to watch all 13 episodes.

3. Parks and Recreation

I’m pretty sure I could sit and watch Leslie Knope recount Friends episodes for hours on end. Sadly, we only got about 90 seconds of that in “Telethon,” one of the many hilarious episodes from the show’s second season. Happily, P&R has created one of the strongest ensembles on television, who take their already solid scripts and find ways to ground them in the absurdities of every day life. (I’ve previously written about Parks and Recreation here.)

I’m going to pause here because I think there’s a significant drop-off at this point. Basically, from here on out any of these shows can be randomly substituted with something from the Honorable Mention list and it wouldn’t make much difference, and the order is just how I felt at the moment and doesn’t even reflect my own opinion most of the time. So above this line: classic, awesome, perfect, other superlatives. Below this line: all solid, and the list just reflects the arbitrary restriction to Top 10.

4. Sunday Night Football

In an age of terrible sports broadcasting, Sunday Night Football rises above its rivals by its beautiful competence. Sports may be the last great must-watch-live television of the twenty-first century, but there’s no inevitability to that, particularly if the quality continues to slide. So, kudos, NBC, for putting together a solid team of smart folks who celebrate, explain, and critique what is happening on the field, and for some pretty smart choices about which games to show. You’ve surpassed the more storied Monday Night Football in quality and interest.

5. Better Off Ted

Phil and Lemm were two characters sent from the comedy gods to entertain us mere mortals. Yet Portia de Rossi somehow stole every seen she was in, even with these two comic goldmines. I hesitate to call this the best satire of recent years only because when 30 Rock decides to go after NBC, it reaches the same heights.

6. Friday Night Lights

Still the best portrayal of family, small town life, local politics, and high school on TV. To say that Connie Britton and Kyle Chandlers are the best dramatic actors on TV is only to say that you’ve watched the show.

7. Fringe

Last spring, Fringe transition from solid monster-of-the-week goofs to dense mythology and, amazingly, became better for it. This fall started slow, but it has slowly amped up the drama.

8. Mad Men

Perhaps the most cinematic show on television (and not always in a good way), Mad Men turned in another solid season of drama with only the sparest sprinkling of levity. As Don Draper becomes less and less interesting, the pleasure of watching has shifted to Betty, Roger, Joan, and the rest.

9. The Middle

A take on the family sitcom so old-fashioned, I sometimes forget it’s a single-cam show. Like a comfortable sweater that you are pleased to take out of the closet when the seasons change, The Middle is there to remind you that not all sitcoms have to reinvent the form, satirize their corporate owner, or embrace the mockumentary style. Sometimes doing old things well is good enough.

10. At the Movies

With hosts A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, At the Movies was again a fun-to-watch show where movies were respected, loved, and occasionally deflated in a tone that was neither arrogant or pandering. With the throw-back graphics and cheesy theme music and lack of shouting and syndication model, the show was a television dinosaur, but a great one.

Honorable Mention: 30 Rock, Castle, Dollhouse, Louie, Men of a Certain Age, NFL Matchup, Party Down, Raising Hope, Sherlock, Work of Art

Not Eligible (Because I Haven’t Seen the Relevant Season): Breaking Bad, Dexter, The Good Wife, Justified, Lost, Rubicon, Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead, the HBO shows (Big Love, Boardwalk Empire, Bored to Death, Treme)

Special Award for High Highs and Low Lows: Glee

• 154 plays: U2, No Line on the Horizon
• 140 plays: Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
• 118 plays: Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
• 117 plays: Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
• 117 plays: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz!
• 106 plays: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, s/t
• 99 plays: Metric, Fantasies
• 92 plays: Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career
• 88 plays: Sin Fang Bous, Clangour
• 85 plays: Mos Def, The Ecstatic
• 83 plays: Monsters of Folk, s/t
• 79 plays: Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
• 75 plays: Blind Pilot, 3 Rounds and a Sound
• 69 plays: Passion Pit, Manners
• 69 plays: Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
• 61 plays: Ida Maria, Fortress ‘Round My Heart
• 59 plays: Bishop Allen, Grrr…
• 59 plays: The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You
• 50 plays: God Help the Girl, s/t

My interest in television began in the summer of 2002. I had watched more television than was probably healthy while growing up, but television was an escape, a mindless activity to relieve boredom. I watched Saturday morning cartoons, CHiPs reruns, and other stuff that would interest a kid in the 1980s. A lot of the television I watched as a kid was old RKO and MGM movies on AMC, back when AMC was what TCM is now. In the 1990s, I watched TV Land on Nick at Night, where I learned about how a sit-com works and first encountered the Jewish Comedian Type by watching The Dick Van Dyke Show. I watched NBC’s TGIF line-up, and later its Thursday night block, so I saw ER and Friends from the beginning, but eventually lost interest in each.  Through all of this, I just watched TV for something to do.

When I started graduate school in the fall of 2001, I intentionally did not own a TV. I feared how I would do in graduate school and that such a mindless diversion might keep me further behind my peers. I should be reading novels. Russian novels. Important literature. In my first six months of graduate school, I read Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. I know I read other things as well (I remember getting ideas from the Pulitzer Prize winners list), but the Dostoyevsky stands out. How else would this humble Midwesterner talk to these Ivy League snobs? What if my professor made some obvious reference to some book not in my field but that every educated person should have read?

By my birthday in January, I was ready to accept a television as a gift from my parents. I realized that not having that pressure valve I grew up with wasn’t going to help me any. I had a $30 VCR attached to the 19″ TV (which a friend convinced me was bigger than anyone really needed), and had wires that would connect my laptop to the TV so that I could watch DVDs. I was expanding my film interests via Netflix, then a relatively new service. I also tested it by renting a disc of a show I had heard about but never watched, My So-Called Life. I enjoyed the first disc enough that I decided to purchase my first ever TV on DVD box set. I watched the series through, and found myself interested in this world of a mopey teenage girl, her even mopier love interest, and a sexually confused teenager trying to forge an identity for himself. I was a bit embarrassed to enjoy a show like this, but I understood well enough that this was something more than just pandering to an audience. There was something very beautiful and moving about this portrayal of high school. The topic of the show might be embarrassing, but I didn’t feel embarrassed by what these characters were saying or doing. They were believable, they had lives, and I didn’t feel like the show was praising their self-centeredness as much as lovingly showing that this is how life was for some people. In some ways, it was the flip side to Freaks and Geeks, a show my roommates and I gathered weekly to watch during my senior year of college. We laughed at these geeks because we were these geeks. But here was a show that felt very unlike my own experience of high school, but that I completely believed was somebody’s experience.

That show pales in comparison to the one that I discovered about the same time. Reruns were airing on weekends, and the commercials seemed pretty corny, more or less indistinguishable from Highlander and Xena. But I gave a chance to show called Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. And it turns out, it was pretty funny.

I was friends with a comedy writer at the time; he has written pieces for The Onion and McSweeney’s. He loved a character called the Mayor, and while he wasn’t willing to say he liked the show, he absolutely loved that incongruence between the 1950s TV dad and pure evil. What can I say? He was right about the Mayor. That gave me a little confidence to Netflix the first season of Buffy on DVD. (I’m not sure that we were using “Netflix” as a verb in 2002, but we certainly do so now.) What I discovered was that beneath the cornball exterior was a show that I really enjoyed. Here was a show working in a genre that I knew nothing about – horror – and yet I could understand that they were playing off genre staples, even if I had know real knowledge of those genre tropes. Here was a show that was incredibly witty where many of the best lines went to the most picked-on guy in school. Here was show where the very feature that made someone special and likeable was also what made them unpopular. Here was a show in which good battles against evil, but the lines are murky and the enemy is ever shifting.

Beyond all the elements that I liked about the show, one thing stood out to me then and made me fall in love with television as a medium. With BtVS, I discovered television’s power for serial story-telling. Unlike the sit-coms I enjoyed as a kid, or The Simpsons episodes I watched each day in college, this was a show that trusted the viewer to follow these characters through their lives. We trusted Joss Whedon to helm this story, a trust he earned in the show’s magnificent second season. Whedon trusted his writers ground the supernatural silliness in real human (okay, or vampire) characters, trusted his actors to switch from broad comedy to fear to grief in the coarse of a single episode or even scene, and ultimately trusted his audience to follow him through this world. This was a totally new idea to me in 2002. Here was a show that rewarded dedicated viewing in the proper order. It was a sea change in my thinking, the sort demanded by Alfred Hitchcock when he demanded that theaters allow no late entrants to Psycho.

And this was made possible by two emerging media: Netflix and TV on DVD. I think DVD has done more to help television than it has to help film. Studios may line their pockets with each successive technological improvement in home viewing (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray), but the real change in movie viewing happened when VHS allowed people to watch films in their home on their own schedule. Television never performed well on VHS, so it was with the advent of DVDs that television entered its heydays. Netflix allowed one to sample these expensive box sets before buying them (or instead of buying them), and their contribution should not go unnoticed. But the real change happened with the ability to purchase an entire season of a television show and watch it as quickly as one dared. In the summer of 2002, I was taking an intensive Latin course, which I would rush home from each afternoon to plow through the newly released third season of Buffy on DVD. I didn’t have to wait 30+ weeks to watch the show as it aired; instead I could enter a world’s mythology and live in it for days or weeks at a time. This was unprecedented in the history of television. TV box sets of shows people loved in the ’90s, like Friends, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld were huge money-makers in the early years of this decade, but it was the ability to find more obscure shows that really transformed television.

Many others have told the story of what happens next. A show like Lost works because fans can devote themselves to rewatching it on DVD. A show like Survivor is heralded by the networks for its watch-now (read: no one cares about the DVDs) ratings. (A stunt less successfully attempted by Jay Leno’s move to prime time late in the decade.) A new business model emerges where shows like Family Guy and Futurama return from the grave because of strong DVD sales, shifting the emphasis from initial airings and syndication to initial airings, syndication, and DVD sales. (Later to be supplemented by iTunes rentals, Hulu viewings, and transmedia sales.) HBO can build its audience through fans discovering The Sopranos and Sex and the City on DVD. People can encounter international imports like The Office and Slings and Arrows for the first time. People can continue to be TV snobs, but in a new way. (“I don’t own a TV, but I love The Wire.”) Most importantly in this talk about the impact of TV on DVDs, however, is the thing that first drew me into the idea of television: a really good story told over a 6- or 13- or 22-episode season is a wonderful thing. A film may benefit from being concise and particular, but no film matches what a great television show like The Wire can do over five magnificent seasons. One hundred or more characters, each as focused and real and well acted as any on film, interacting in a complex drama set against the background of a city more real than any non-resident’s idea of the real Baltimore. And it’s not just The Wire. There are a dozen or more shows that have each used television’s unrivaled power of serialized, pictorial story-telling to achieve new levels of artistry. The technology and the shifting media models (let’s not forget the rise of cable) made it possible, but it was the David Simons and Ronald D. Moores and the Amy Sherman-Palladinos who rose to the challenge and gave us all a reason to appreciate what has happened this decade.

At this website, I hope to celebrate inessential things: things that are not necessary for survival, but that make life wonderful nonetheless. And television in the 200os was wonderful indeed.