Sketch of the Year: “Spoiler Alert”

The best Portlandia sketches lovingly satirize the most indulgent aspects of modern interaction.  “Spoiler Alert” takes long-overdue aim at today’s culture of spoiler avoidance and demonstrates that refusing to set any time limit on spoilers threatens to reduce the viewing public to a squawking, incoherent mess, in the same style that was warned about regarding readership one-upmanship in the Season 1 classic, “Did You Read?”  This sketch also manages to deepen the show’s mythology, as it revisits characters from the Battlestar Galactica-inspired “One Moore Episode,” AND it manages to present the best homage to the series finale of Newhart that I’ve ever seen.

Runners-Up:
“Renaming NE 15th Avenue” – “Call me a traditionalist–” “You’re a traditionalist.”

“Unconventional Art” – “Anything can be art!” taken to the nth degree is kind of hard to think about, if you think about it.

“Birthday Loan Application” – The latest appearance from one of Kumail Nanjiani’s painfully officious bureaucratic types.