The 20 Best TV Moments of 2011

The most brilliant half-hour of TV that aired in 2011, no question. All the absurdist satire – a parody of My Dinner With Andre, for fuck's sake – lurches into an intense moment of human interaction, as two twits struggle to have a "real conversation." ("You know who has real conversations? Ants! They talk by vomiting chemicals into each other's mouths!... Humans are more evolved. We lie.") You couldn't ask for a more succinct statement of what TV is, how TV works, and how TV brings people together, mostly by telling blatant lies to our faces that somehow mutate into real emotions. (Even if the moral of the story is, "Sometimes emotional breakthoughs are overrated.") Pure genius – no wonder NBC has it on the chopping block.