Small things dominated small screen in 2014

“Broad City” (Comedy Central). Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer’s glassy-eyed aspirational comedy of friendship and survival feels like the future.

“Jane the Virgin” (CW). A delicate comic mix of telenovelistic melodrama and emotional naturalism, animated by fine performances of which Gina Rodriguez’s is only the most discussed.

“Powerless” and “Happiness” (PBS). From the series “Independent Lens,” two gorgeously rendered documentaries set at the intersection of old and new, the first about an Indian electricity thief, the second focusing on a 9-year-old Buddhist monk, a journey to the city and a television set.

“Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways” (HBO). Like “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown,” Dave Grohl’s musical travelogue understands place as the desire to make a place.

“True Detective” (HBO). The nominal mystery was disappointing (another serial killer, meh), but more than offset by the mood, the talk and the two-headed lead performance of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, getting to the bottom of each other.

“Black Jesus” (Adult Swim). Aaron McGruder’s affectionately irreverent Christ-in-Compton fable is part Bowery Boys, part “Boyz in the Hood,” part loaves and fishes — funky, farcical, streetwise, spiritually correct.

“Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (HBO). Working very much in the tradition of his old boss, Jon Stewart, Oliver makes the astonished rant his extended-play own; clips reliably go viral.

“Bee and PuppyCat” (Cartoon Hangover) and “Over the Garden Wall” (Cartoon Network). Old-school animation rules: Natasha Allegri’s Kickstarter-funded series concerns a human girl and her pet-shaped alien roommate, inter-dimensional temp workers when they are inspired to get out of the house. Patrick Hale’s sumptuous musical fantasy is an adventure through Americana.

“Cubed” (Above Average). Dry office comedy in 12 episodes/encounters; you could watch them all in the time it takes to drink your coffee.

“The Missing” (Starz) and “The Honorable Woman” (Sundance). Deliberately paced, beautifully shot, high-toned, twisty mysteries feature international locations, distressed parents, three-dimensional characters in the fore-, middle- and background, memorable acting everywhere.

No, thank you: “Stalker” (CBS). ‘Nuff said.

In this year of television I found myself often excited by small things — some new, some new to me, perhaps having earlier escaped my notice by virtue of their very smallness. Some were small in the sense that they did not take up much time, others in that they were not conspicuously ambitious nor ambitiously conspicuous.

Many lived — continue to live — not on conventional television but on the Internet or on the server farms of great streaming services. Yet even these straight-up TV shows are not the sort you see advertised on the billboards or buses; you need to go find them. (Though sometimes, it’s true, they do find you.)

The Great Golden Second Coming of Television has seen the birth of new forms, as when galaxies collide. Not surprisingly, much attention has been paid to the bigger objects: the big dramas, painted on big canvases, perhaps with big stars from the big screen, displayed in the bigger venues. Works of capital-Q quality, such as “True Detective” and “Transparent,” dominate the cultural conversation.

Ambition comes in many sizes, however. Tiny things may be bursting with concentrated energy; all the matter that exists, some say, was once packed into a dot next to which a Tic Tac would seem an Everest. Some of the best TV I saw this year lasted less than a minute.

There was nothing in 2014 more formally audacious than Casper Kelly’s “Too Many Cooks,” an 11-minute set of increasingly dissonant variations on a 1980s imaginary sitcom theme that crept into the world via a 4 a.m. slot on Adult Swim before going code-red viral on the Internet. And in a year that was phenomenally rich in quality television — they could stop making it now, and you’d still have enough good things to hold you into the next decade — no discovery was more welcome to me than that of Benjamin Apple, maker of oddball Web videos.

I first encountered Apple via “Cubed,” a spectacularly compact, deadpan office comedy presented under the auspices of Above Average, the Internet arm of Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video. From there I followed the breadcrumbs to his YouTube site Channel “Ben” (721 subscribers), where he posts short works, usually in thematic weeklong sets, many of which use stock footage and computer-synthesized voices. It’s a kind of video sketchbook that lets you watch an individual comic intelligence at work.

Like Apple, Todd Bieber (YouTube channel: Documentaries by Todd Bieber, 4,549 subscribers), is associated with the Upright Citizen’s Brigade. His “Gary Saves the Graveyard,” a five-part Web comedy about a graveyard caretaker and his yet-to-pass-over charges, is the last wonderful thing I’ve seen in 2014 (so far). Like his lovely pocket-sized personal documentaries — some about animal rescue, others about finding the owners of lost objects or turning a small urban dead space into a vegetable garden — it’s a story about the impulse to help, with lovely performances by actors you’ve likely never seen but should (in the cosmic justice sense) see more.

You can wait a long time for cosmic justice, though. Meanwhile, there’s a cosmos to explore, click by click, station to station, for any who care to adventure there.