The best TV shows of 2017 (so far)

The shows that have stood out to date have readily crossed both styles and boundaries: Big Little Lies, for example, appeared to be a soapy murder mystery, but it soon distinguished itself as powerful, fascinating drama about the choices women are compelled to make.

Add alternate histories and comic book labyrinths, not to mention Jude Law as the head of the Catholic Church, and you have a top 10 that will keep you both guessing and engrossed

Community star Donald Glover painted a funny, fraught vision of his home town that both sends up cliches about African-American communities and deepens the true underpinnings. Powered by the beats, verbal dexterity and attitudes of hip-hop, with Glover's Ern as a college dropout managing his rapper cousin, Atlanta had a street corner specific authenticity and a yen for formal experimentation – one episode was a talk show parody with sharp edges.

The pairing of Damian Lewis and Paul Giamatti, as a hedge fund mogul and a powerful US attorney respectively, continues to flourish on this pungently enjoyable drama where the two adversaries don't so much prosper as secretly battle to maintain their privileged seat at the table. The second season added twists and new characters, but it continues to make the exercising of power a dangerous and much more humanly flawed occurrence than other shows about the 1 per cent.

Transplanted from Sydney's suburbs to the Californian coastline, Liane Moriarty's novel took radical, revealing shape on the screen, giving Reese Witherspoon and particularly Nicole Kidman, as an abused wife in a seemingly perfect marriage, drawcard roles. A whodunit where the who wasn't known until the finale, the series was defined by both tart, combative exchanges and school pick-up intrigue that dug down to reveal feminine conflict and bonds.

Like its debut season, the second go around for this unpredictable British comedy clocked in a succinct six half-hour episodes, but that was more than enough to confirm the gifts of the show's young creator, writer and star, Michaela Coel. Playing Tracy Gordon, an outlier in a deeply religious family trying to make sense of society's supposed norms (and lose her virginity), Coel brought an absurdist glee to her depiction of life on a London council estate. 

Just concluded, the sixth and final season of Lena Dunham's brash, bittersweet sitcom went out on the same terms it arrived in 2012: unafraid of its characters' flaws, astutely directed, and both funnier and more emotionally genuine that its persistent detractors imagined it to be. The show's four 20-something female protagonists were rarely in the same scene – or state of mind – which spoke to its refusal to neatly sum up anything about their generation, except the idea that it's easy to be misunderstood. 

Moving around the Sunday night schedule, much like one of its fugitive characters, the sixth season of this age of terror thriller finally brought Claire Danes' former CIA agent, Carrie Mathison, back to America. While the show didn't call the US election result – the fictional president-elect is female – the plot points of a deep security state and the growing manipulation of public opinion through the internet is very much on trend. Characters such as Carrie and Rupert Friend's Quinn are operating from positions of vulnerability, and Homeland has become about where your loyalty lies: country, friends, or just yourself?

​An antidote to the blockbuster culture of the comic book movie, Legion was a strange sideways step into a corner of the X-Men universe, where the concepts of mutants with special powers and mental illness coalesced on a show where the visual motifs and distinct, often deliberately repetitive, rhythms, were full of unexpected allusions as the life of David Haller (a terrific Dan Stevens, formerly of Downton Abbey) was interrogated. Between Legion and Fargo, creator Noah Hawley has revealed himself as one of television's signature auteurs.

Plainly suiting the times, or at least our heightened fears, this alternate history set in a 1960s where the Allies lost World War II and the world is controlled by now rival totalitarian states in the form of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan struck a delicious, destiny-laden balance in its second season. The evocative drama matched the otherworldly mystery of parallel realities to a potent depiction of how life may – or may not – change when freedom is deposed.

An examination of America's racial divide that is currently airing on Foxtel's Showcase channel, Shots Fired inverts expectations to reveal the underlying issues. Here the unarmed motorist shot during a police stop is white, while the officer who pulled the trigger is black. Gina Prince-Blythewood and Reggie Rock Blythewood's drama takes in political angling, media ricochets, and the personal loss that can reveal where a community truly stands. It's a smart, investigatory and self-aware series.

Further proof that television is a rewarding destination for filmmakers with a personal vision, this European co-production is the obvious work of leading Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino. Like his previous features, it tells the story of a newly elected and chaos-causing American Pope, played with charismatic anger by Jude Law, with offbeat tableaus, a fascination with flawed faith, and moments whose weirdness is nonetheless illuminating. 

The Americans (Showcase): Get your wigs ready – the fifth season of the Cold War espionage drama returns to Foxtel on May 11.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (Netflix): Season three of the comic whirlwind about Ellie Kemper's gone and come back girl debuts May 19.

Twin Peaks (Stan): The first episodes in 26 years of David Lynch's cryptic mystery begin streaming on May 22.

Game of Thrones (Showcase): July 17 brings the seventh – and second last – season of the fantasy blockbuster. Expert tip: more characters will die gruesome deaths.

Pulse (ABC): Currently undated, this new ABC drama stars Claire van der Boom (Rush) as a financial analyst who takes up medicine after a life-saving kidney transplant.