It's another long holiday weekend, and without any singing to do, I'm hoping to make some progress on my manuscripts. But before I do that - and also as a way of getting myself into a writing-friendly mindset - here are a few things that happened across my TV or computer screen in the past year. I stopped calling this a "Best of" list a few years ago, because I don't really watch enough stuff to have an opinion on what's the best of everything. These are just a few things that I liked.




For the Best Hour of TV Drama, I'm choosing the season finale of WGN's Manhattan, which recreated the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb. How do you create suspense around a historical event that everyone knows happened? Manhattan found a way, using the season to set up two characters who wanted to stop it, and then giving those two characters a free shot at stopping it. We know they won't - but why won't they? I have to nitpick a little about the dramatic license taken at the end (no one would actually have been able to stand outside staring at the explosion with unprotected eyes), but that's not enough to spoil the hour that precedes it.

And while I'm on the subject of Manhattan, John Benjamin Hickey's role as Frank Winter has got to be my favorite character of the year. I really like Peter Capaldi's run as the Doctor on Doctor Who - he may be my favorite Doctor of the new series - but liking the Doctor comes naturally to me, so I wanted to go with a less obvious choice.



The Best Half-Hour of Anime was the final broadcast/streamed episode of Sound! Euphonium. An earlier episode of this show made the internet explode, but the finale was special to me because I've never seen anything that captured the experience of performing music so well. The school concert band finally performs in the competition they've been preparing for throughout the series, and we go along for the ride through the eyes of the various band members. They even showed us that astonished sense of "What the heck did we just do?" that comes after you really nail a performance.

Sound! Euphonium also includes my favorite anime supporting character of the year, Sapphire Kawashima. At first glance, she looks like just another "moe" character, complete with an even more nauseatingly cute look-alike little sister. Under the surface, though, lurks a musical warrior, with fond memories of the time a blister popped in the middle of a performance and she bled all over her score. From the middle of the series on, the fingers on her left hand are covered with an increasingly intricate web of protective tape, all without much attention called to it. It's just there. I like little touches like that.



He's here, he's there, he's everywhere - Hiroshi Abe, one of my favorite Japanese actors, starred in two dramas I really liked this year. In the TV movie, Ichiban Densha ga Hashitta, he played an engineer trying to get Hiroshima's streetcars running again after the atomic bombing in 1945 (something that really happened, by the way). In the series, Shitamachi Rocket, he played another engineer, this time in charge of a small factory (about the size of the ones I've always worked in) trying to survive in the often corrupt and hostile world of big business. I should mention that Shitamachi Rocket was the #1 show of Japan's Fall 2015 drama season. Imagine that, a show about a factory designing and making things, doing their jobs and loving what they're doing, without a bunch of sleeping around and other nonsense. This is why I watch Japanese TV, because a show like this would never even get on the air in the US.



She's here, she's there, she's everywhere - Nicola Walker showed up three times on my computer this year. I already knew her as Liv Chenka, current companion of Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor in the Big Finish audio dramas. This year, the Eighth Doctor wrapped up his Dark Eyes series and began a new one, Doom Coalition, with Liv Chenka still along for the ride. Meanwhile, Nicola showed up on two different short British crime dramas. On the BBC's River, she played the ghost of the title character's murdered partner, and on ITV's Unforgotten, she played the lead detective investigating a forty year-old murder case.



Lastly, there's my favorite sports moment. It was a year when a lot of my teams finished second - Vanderbilt baseball, the Indiana Fever, the Ottawa RedBlacks - and considering that every other team but one didn't even make it that far, those can all be considered highlights. But the biggest of them all came in November at Martinsville Speedway, when Jeff Gordon battled his way to a victory and earned a spot in the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship race a few weeks later. This was Jeff's farewell season, and while he didn't win the championship, the way he got there was a moment of racing glory. One of racing's all-time greats got to go out on top.

And with that, we say goodbye to 2015. Time to see what 2016 will bring us.