The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous TV Gubbins of the Year
It’s not over! I feel like a horror movie antagonist popping out of hiding ten minutes after the credits have finished rolling, but yes, the Caruso TV Awards have one last gasp before I retire them until the end of the year, when I will be almost as fanatical about the best and worst movies of 2011. This post should have been done at the start of the week but the 2011 London Film Festival kept me very busy, with one movie shutting down my brain for a couple of days (thanks for the mental shutdown, Take Shelter). This post is the first large blip on an EKG after my brain comes back to life. Enjoy.
Best New Show: Game of Thrones
Longtime readers will know that I have a habit of getting inordinately excited about big summer movies, to the extent that I can be bouncing up and down with anticipation years in advance (I’m looking at you, The Avengers. No, seriously, I’ve rewatched your trailer 288 times). TV is a different thing. The uncritical part of me will look forward to, say, a new Terminator movie or a second try at Daredevil just because of my affection for the franchise or character no matter how boneheaded it might turn out to be (though I hope David Slade can resurrect the DD franchise), but it’s rare that TV shows will be based around them.
Yes, a new version of Hawaii Five-O or Charlie’s Angels will pop up from time to time, but I’m not going to be excited about them in the same way, because when network TV pilfers from itself it betrays the dearth of imagination that critics feel is most rife during the summer film season. These shows are often contemptuous of the audience and cranked out like story-sausage, as brilliantly argued here by Linda Holmes. Who on earth set their TiVo with a quickened pulse when they realised there was gonna be yet another attempt to defibrillate the long-dead corpse of Knight Rider?
This is one of the things that has contributed to the renaissance of TV drama. Original dramas are being created all the time, and while many will be inspired by books or films or historical events, or be created to glom onto the success of some other show, much of the time these shows are distinct and arrive with no expectations. I have a pretty good idea of what The Avengers will be like — condensed awesomanium, of course — but I don’t really know what Boss or Homeland or Revenge will be like, to name three critically acclaimed new shows from the new TV season. I look forward to watching them, but I’m not chewing my knuckles.
This wasn’t the case with Game of Thrones. Though I’d only had a year’s worth of exposure to George R.R. Martin’s magnificent fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, the wait for HBO’s adaptation was nigh-unbearable, partly because they kept so much of it under wraps for so long. At least it felt that way. I recall being so excited about it on the day before it aired on UK’s Sky Atlantic that it disrupted my sleep. Ridiculous, yes, but this passion wasn’t unique. It’s doubtful that anyone who loves the books was agnostic about the show. All it had to do to be instantly amazing was not fuck up, and the pre-aired clips shown on the HBO site proved that the look and feel and language of the books was intact.
Just getting it right would have been enough, but Game of Thrones was so much more than just a competent adaptation. It was vivid and pacy and funny and dark and exciting, building such a head of steam that the last three episodes eclipsed almost everything else shown on TV this year. It was spot on from the very first beautiful shot of the snowy North, but it kept giving us little treats throughout: the brilliantly staged fight in the Eyrie; the superb casting (bringing in Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister made me finally like Charles Dance); the chance to finally see the grasslands of the Dothraki Sea, and King’s Landing, and the dragon heads of the Red Keep, and the Twins standing on either side of the Trident.
To those who loved the books, attempting to convert the doubters was surprisingly easy. The fatuous but compelling comparison made by the showrunners (“The Sopranos in Middle-Earth”) was enough to tempt some to give it a try. As expected, the end of the first episode, with Bran in the tower, was exactly the right kind of hook to keep viewers coming back, and draw new viewers in as those who gave the show a try dropped their bacon sandwiches en masse. Just by using GRRM’s superb storytelling tricks, the audience grew and became more fervent as each new bombshell dropped, as the ruthless became purely evil, the virtuous died, and the rest of the characters became more complex and unpredictable.
One of the great joys of experiencing this glorious success was seeing the enthusiasm for this show grow almost exponentially as the series progressed. My Twitter feed, which already included several very happy ASOIAF fans, became filled with sceptics turned rabid believers as this narrative behemoth powered toward its stunning finale. “Fucking Joffrey!” became a rallying cry, memes like Tyrion slapping the young prince and Stupid Ned Stark proliferated, and longtime fans chewed their lips in wait for the end of episode nine, with THAT ending, knowing that a few million more people would experience the same extreme denial that we did. One good friend of the blog had an epic mental meltdown on Facebook. That’s the beauty of ASOIAF.
So basically, all HBO did was take a beloved and brilliantly written book, get two big fans (D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, who is now forgiven for his involvement in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to write and oversee it, throw a shitload of money and talent at it, promote the shit out of it with a perfectly judged drip of information, and wait for every passionate creative individual involved in the show to pay tribute to that story’s ferocious narrative drive. They built it, and we did indeed come, in droves. It’s that simple. Just make something awesome. Commit to something of enormous scope. Don’t hesitate or cavil or second guess. Just be bold, and the audience will love you for it. Thank you to everyone who made this first, incredible series. It was a blast.
Worst New Show: Camelot
Recently a TV critic asked me why I watch so much TV; it’s troubling, in a way, if someone who watches TV for a living thinks I’m watching too much. The easiest answer is that I enjoy it, especially when it’s good but even when it’s bad, because as I pointed out at really really really insane length a couple of weeks ago, there are lessons to be learned by watching anything closely enough. That means committing to some shows that are truly dire in order to see whether it can be turned around. Parks and Recreation started out with a really poor first season but has since become essential viewing. The same thing happened with The Vampire Diaries; what looked like Twilight-lite (yes, that bad) is now one of the highlights of the TV week. Even if something bad doesn’t improve much, surely it’s only fair to complete a journey to fully understand the directions you’ve been given.
But SoC has to confess, this award for Worst New Show is being given to Starz’ Camelot without reaching the final destination. I’m sorry. I tried. I tried so hard to finish it, and put this post off all week so I could try to get through the last four episodes of the short ten-episode-season, but it’s impossible. Something this boring and aimless is like an affront to the viewer, and all I can do is bitch about it from a position of 20% ignorance. Feel free to dismiss my complaints, but enduring this glacially-paced monstrosity felt like a battle for my soul. This morning it took three hours to watch a single episode as everything in the house distracted me from the endless, dreary conversations conducted in underlit rooms. I’ve got better things to do.
Nevertheless, Camelot was already number one on my bad shows list after just a couple of episodes, so finishing the series was nothing more than some kind of bizarre flagellation. Longtime readers will know that I hold Joseph Fiennes in the highest low regard; his LOADED performance in FlashForward is justifiably legendary. They will also know of my war against Torchwood, whose first two years were overseen by Chris Chibnall. Camelot united these two creatives, which drove SoC into paroxysms of joy. Within a few minutes our expectations were met; the first episode of Camelot was as shambolic and absurd as we had hoped, and the next few weeks did little to dispell that. However, while Torchwood was a hysterical abomination, this was merely dull.
And that’s the problem. I’ll admit, it’s incredibly mean-spirited of me to hope that a new show will be bad in a certain way so that I can enjoy mocking it (see also: The CW’s Ringer, which started out ridiculous but now seems to be settling down, unfortunately). However that’s preferable to the miasmatic tedium that surrounds this ill-conceived take on the Arthurian myth. Even after a seemingly infinite number of adaptations of the Arthurian myth, there is still magic in this tale. It’s one of the greatest stories of all time, one that contains so many elements compatible with Joseph Campbell’s concept of the eternal narrative it’s possible that the story will never die. And yet Camelot does its best to smother it with a pillow made of gloom and worthy realism.
Now, that’s fine. A deconstruction of the Arthurian myth is a perfectly valid approach, and though many objected to Jerry Bruckheimer, Antoine Fuqua and David Franzoni’s “historically accurate” version, I thought it was an interesting idea undone by some pretty weak execution. It helps that the Clive Owen version is so different from previous interpretations that it almost stands alone; part of the novelty of it is seeing how the myth and the (questionable) realism crossover. Camelot sometimes feels like this is its goal, but it muddies the water by introducing anti-realist elements like Merlin and Morgan Le Fay’s use of magic. It’s down-to-earth and fantastical at the same time, and that’s a big part of the problem.
It’s a fantasy that’s not allowed to be fantastical because that would clash with the realism. It’s not totally realistic because that would stop them being fantastical. The result is an awkward mix of the two, with Merlin’s constant complaining about how much his magical powers make him sad unfortunately setting the tone for the show. Chris Chibnall has stated that Camelot is meant to be a political take on the myth, a contemporary retelling that uses modern-day idealism as its basis (possibly taking JFK’s “Camelot” as its starting point in an amusing reversal). However this faux-seriousness means every opportunity the show has to spread its wings is curtailed in case it undercuts the message. In short, Camelot hates fun, and won’t let you have dessert until you’ve finished all the vegetables.
This isn’t the only time Chibnall has done this. The very worst episodes of Torchwood are the ones that profess to be making a serious point about morality or modern life. Who can forget Countrycide, which dared to take on the very serious subject of rampant cannibalism in the north of England? Or Meat, which opened a window on the depraved and cruel world of the carnivore by dramatising the fate of poor Spacey the Space Whale, a creature that is kept alive in order to be carved up over and over again for meat, just like in a real abattoir with real cows. See also his ponderous Silurian episodes in Doctor Who that belaboured a point about the failure of diplomacy between two intractable opponents over two self-important hours.
These berserk attempts at dramatising serious issues with untenable fantasy comparisons betray the showrunner’s belief that a point MUST BE MADE at all times. Bollocks to fun; drama is here to teach us stuff, and must not allow for any levity or liveliness. At its worst, Sorkin’s West Wing was the preachiest and most condescending show on TV that wasn’t Studio 60, but dammit, in those early seasons that show was hugely entertaining. That bitter medicine went down easily because West Wing teemed with event, its purpose greased by sassy dialogue and vibrant performances. Camelot‘s seemingly endless walk-and-talks are conducted in the gloom of portentousness; it’s an interminable lecture about good and evil conducted by a depressed professor.
This is before we get into the ill-defined characters, the lack of event (a sub-plot about Morgan taking the place of Igraine to foment discord between Arthur’s boring knights takes most of the season to kick in), the poor production values, the omnipresent exposition, the weak performances from much of the cast, the sense that the season arc is being made up on the fly, with new characters constantly introduced while old ones are sidelined far too quickly. Worst of all, the central narrative line of the series seems to be about the illicit love between Arthur and Guinevere. Perhaps with some chemistry between the actors this would have seemed compelling, but… actually no. There was nothing that could save it. The show is held up by string instead of cables of steel, and as a result whenever Camelot needs to rely on this wet romance for narrative strength, it collapses.
While it’s unfair to criticise Camelot for what it’s not, it unfortunately exists in a world that has given us Game of Thrones and Spartacus. The narrative complexity and ambition of GoT shows Camelot up as the weak gruel it is, trouncing it in every way. I was willing to concede that this might be attributable to differing budgets, but GoT — which was shot in Ireland and Malta — cost about $50-60m for ten episodes while the budget for Camelot was $7m an episode, and that was only shot in Ireland. Of course those figures could well be unreliable, but the fact is that while GoT has a sweeping, epic scope, Camelot feels like it’s set in one dingy room. It’s not lack of money that holds it back; it’s failure of ambition.
The comparisons to Spartacus are even more damning. Chibnall and the rest of the Camelot team are under no obligation to emulate that show, of course, but it might have been prudent to see how vibrant and endlessly entertaining Steven DeKnight’s unrestrained TV classic can be. I’m not just talking about the infamous Fighting and Fucking formula either. There isn’t a single boring moment in Spartacus‘ run to date; every scene and line and performance adds up to a greater whole. There are few shows as pleasurable to watch as Spartacus; it’s endlessly entertaining, surprising, and beautifully presented. And it’s cheaper than Camelot too; the budget is about $5m per episode thanks to New Zealand tax breaks and creative use of effects.
Camelot wasn’t doomed by money or competition or audience antipathy or even the scheduling difficulties that made its stars unavailable for another series. It was doomed because it was the opposite of fun. You can put that down to hesitation or lack of ambition or muddled intent. What matters is that sitting through each episode felt like swimming through quick-set concrete. Still, even that’s not what makes SoC angriest. Has anyone heard anything about the King Arthur movie that was to be based on a treatment by Warren Ellis? This is the last I heard of it. There are a million possible reasons why the project has disappeared, but if this dull-as-ditchwater reimagining of the myth contributed to that movie’s descent into Development Hell, everyone involved has earned my eternal wrath.
Best Pilot: The Walking Dead
When I say Game of Thrones was the only show of the year to get me pre-excited, I’m omitting the AMC adaptation of The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Tony Moore which, for a while there, was the biggest game in town for horror and comic nerds. I was infected too; even though the comic leaves me cold, the thought of a zombie TV show helmed by a horror movie old-timer as Frank Darabont was good enough to raise expectations through the roof. And before anyone calls into question the use of the term “old-timer”, I remember seeing Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob back at the old ABC in Walsall in ’87 and ’88 respectively, and both were co-written by Darabont. I was a teenager then, so I’m sorry, but that makes him a goddamn horror movie old-timer and that’s that.
Both of those movies thrilled me when I was a TEENAGER OH GOD I’M SO OLD, and The Mist blew my mind a few years back, so I figured The Walking Dead was in good hands. Now, most of the current opinion of the show revolves around the latter half of the first season, which disappointed most people, and the start of the second season hasn’t exactly thrilled many people either. The consensus seems to be that this was a wasted opportunity, and one that might become even more frustrating with AMC cutting the show’s budget and driving Darabont to quit. Glen Mazzara runs things now, which has caused concern. I haven’t seen his Starz show Crash, which was widely mocked and hated by some critics, but I wouldn’t want to blame Mazzara — a long-running producer and writer on The Shield — as he ran a TV show based on the world’s worst ever movie. Only an evil tree can grow from a bad seed.
As for Darabont, he may have his detractors, but as someone who risked life and limb to see The Blob not once but twice at the local fleapit, I’m definitely in the love camp. I mean, did you experience the despair that gushes out of that photo I linked to earlier? That was some 1950s kitchen sink bullshit, I tell you. You don’t know what it was like going to the Walsall ABC on a Saturday night during the 80s. You can buy Kevlar at your local Asda nowadays but back then it was impossible to find it anywhere. It’s one thing to shoot angry looks over your shoulder whenever some clown at the recent London Film Festival arrives 25 minutes into a movie and hits you in the back of the head with his Moleskine-filled satchel, but try doing that to 300 hormone-fuelled Tasmanian Devils screeching with derisive laughter and pelting you with Smarties. You have to be devout to go through something like that once, let alone twice.
Anyway, forget about the torrent of bullshit and bad blood that has poured over the audience since the pilot first aired, and try to remember it untouched by controversy. Watching it again for this post, I was struck once more by just how bold and beautiful it is. How many other TV shows are willing to depict the end of the world in such stark and uncompromising terms? How many other TV directors would leave so many long, dialogue-free scenes in their show? Has any other show started with the hero shooting a child in the head? This is Darabont’s favourite trick, it seems, as kids die memorably in The Mist and The Blob. Perhaps that’s what every show needs. Maybe more people would watch The Good Wife or Community if more zombie kids got shot during the cold open.
What kind of people are we that we would watch The Walking Dead in droves just to see if any little girls will be blasted to death this week? Obviously, we’re people who like the fact that for a while there seemed to be a new show that would actually put its characters through weekly horror movie hell just for our ghoulish entertainment, and the thrill of that possibility was enough to make this AMC’s biggest hit. Darabont’s assured handling of the first episode was good enough that I’d put this hour of TV above most of the tiresome zombie movies of the past few years. Setpieces like Grimes’ walk through the hospital, or his ride into a seemingly deserted Atlanta were riveting and terrifying, but mostly they were made with care, attention to detail, and the courage to take things slow. Darabont treated the subject with deadly seriousness, and we responded with instant admiration.
After that the series became less interesting, sillier, and confused in tone, leading to a desperately underwhelming finale at the CDC. A real shame, because the first couple of episodes were so good it looked like we were in for a real treat; the second episode was very strong too, with its Excellence Quotient bolstered by 1000 Michael-Rooker-As-A-Loathsome-Redneck points. Hopefully at some point this show will get back on track with or without the input of Darabont, but even if it doesn’t we still have this remarkable exercise in sustained tension and atmospherics, impeccably performed by all, with special SoC love for Andrew Lincoln and Lennie James representing for the UK.
Worst Pilot: Blue Bloods
Earlier this year BSkyB launched Sky Atlantic, its secret weapon in the battle to win over the middle-class liberals who had resisted giving money to the monolithic Murdoch machine. After scoffling up every prestige show from the US that it could, it promised a roster of TV shows that not only included all HBO shows, but also Mad Men. How could the bottle-of-Merlot-a-night crowd cope without their beloved Mad Men? It was also a great way for Murdoch, Tempter, Son of Perdition, to strike yet another mean-spirited blow against his PSB enemy. “Screw you BBC”, it screamed with all of those adverts featuring Don Draper and his glass of booze, “all you get now is European dramas, and no one wants to watch those. Erm…”
Sky Atlantic’s first night promised the first episode of Boardwalk Empire, and numerous documentaries bragging about the sets and Martin Scorsese and, er, the sets, and the costumes, and that Steve Buscemi. This generated insanely high expectations that no show could have matched (well, Game of Thrones could have, but that’s just my partisanship talking). Nevertheless, this was a statement of intent. This channel was SERIOUS. It was the home of QUALITY DRAMA. It was worth the Sky subscription all on its own, even though daytime was filled with repeats of X-Files, thirtysomething and Star Trek: Voyager. This was where the best of the best could be found. They could have called it Sky Emmywinners, it was so loaded with quality.
And so, all of those people who tuned in to watch Boardwalk Empire hung around to watch the next show on the roster; Blue Bloods. To a UK audience who might not be as aware of its network, non-cable pedigree, this might have seemed like another prestige drama, just one that stars Wahlberg the Lesser and Tom Selleck and his Amazing Utility Mustache, instead of Buscemi, Shannon, Whigham, Pitts and DABNEY COLEMAN FTW. Sky Atlantic was not in the business of explaining that while Boardwalk Empire was funded by subscription and could make an effort to be distinctive without alienating its targeted audience, Blue Bloods was a commercial show dependent on advertising revenue and would therefore not offer a similar experience for the audience. To those who hadn’t read up about it, it was as if these wildly different shows were being treated as equal.
Let’s put it this way; Sky1 shows lots of commercial stuff, but Blue Bloods isn’t even good enough to be shown there, let alone this new prestige channel. I’m not saying it’s bad because it’s not as good as Boardwalk Empire; I’m saying it’s bad because it’s awful, and awful because it’s bad. It’s so awful. It’s so bad. It’s AWFUL! AWFULAWFULBADAWFUL. It was almost amusing to see UK newspaper reviews the next day. Some critics seemed to express great befuddlement at the gulf in quality between the two shows, having fallen for Sky Atlantic’s trick. SoC has gone on the record as saying that Boardwalk Empire was a disappointment, but compared to the pilot of Blue Bloods, the first episode of Boardwalk Empire was the entire first season of Deadwood and fifth season of The Shield combined.
How bad is the exposition in this show? So bad that The Soup, which is usually content to focus its derision on terrible reality shows, featured a long clip from the beginning of the pilot in which the assorted members of the Reagan family (!!!!) just name each other and explain their relationships with each other. Never – NEVER – have I seen anything as clunky as this. There is no attempt to wait for this information to be parceled out through the rest of the episode. In fear of losing the audience before the second ad break, we’re bombarded with clumsily-acted meteors of information. Yes, there are a lot of central characters to introduce, but exposition this ugly just screams of desperation.
Mind you, they have a lot to get through in this first week. Not long after the clumsy download of names and relationships we see a young girl abducted, and not only that, she’s diabetic and needs an insulin shot. Even the addition of a ticking clock at the bottom of the screen would seem less manipulative than this. An abducted child is a staple cop show plotline (CSI: Miami has had several), but it’s usually reserved for sweeps week, and an audience that has seen way too many of these shows can usually sleep through them as they rarely offer anything new. This is no exception.
We get emotive pleas by hysterical parents, growled lines by impatient macho cops as they race around the city, and intolerant comments about characters who don’t represent the most basic church-going football-watching red-blooded mainstream “norm” (here it’s a doll collector, who is the recipient of several sneering comments from Wahlberg 2.0). Blue Bloods isn’t about to delay its dive into the pool of mediocrity; it’s gleefully skinny-dipping by the time most lowest-common-denominator ratings-chasing shows would be bending down to undo their shoelaces.
Once the kid is found midway through the episode, things get worse. Wahlberg is such a maverick cop he had to torture the vile, gloating kidnapper to find out the kid’s location, and this means evidence is inadmissable blah blah you know the drill by now. This automatically leads into a debate about the use of coercive interrogation techniques (AKA toiletboarding); it’s the kind of thing added for some topicality, but this show has a new twist. Fascist cop Wahlberg’s sister is wet liberal lawyer Bridget Moynahan, meaning this debate can be conducted between siblings who don’t get on.
It’s like a power-up bonus for this overused scenario. It comes at the expense of logic, sadly. Having Moynahan represent her dick brother to the DA is so improbable that the scene comes to a close with her pointing out that she would have to recuse herself from the case if it went any further. And who comes out best in the argument? Do you really think a show about a family of cops that already features a scene where both journalists and bloggers are treated like obstructive shit-sculptures by morals-fetishist Tom Selleck is going to approach this subject with any restraint? Wahlberg dismisses Moynahan’s complaints with ease and contempt.
The scene is even framed with her sitting down and Wahlberg looming over her (no mean feat; he’s about three feet shorter than her, by my calculations); he’s the boss and she’s the subordinate, wasting her time with woolly ideas about human rights while he’s out banging the heads of cartoonishly evil paedophiles against the side of a stinky toilet because might makes right. You can practically hear the capital-punishment supporting patriarchs nodding sagely in their comforters while wifey washes the dishes like a woman should.
This debate continues later over a family dinner (where the main course is yet more exposition) during which Wahlberg asks Moynahan if she would feel the same way about protecting the rights of paedophiles if her daughter was abducted. She, of course, has no response to this, other than to spell out that she hates paedophiles just as much as he does, just in case the audience thinks that defending the rights of all citizens to a fair trial is the same as joining NAMBLA. This isn’t a reasoned debate; it’s a loaded argument for the abolition of human rights and the rule of law designed to give the right-wing audience something to fap over, with the fact that seriously I’m not kidding the family really is actually called THE REAGAN FAMILY being the NRA-supporting cherry on top.
The show oozes with disdain for moral equivalence or reasoned thought. A Judge Dredd TV show would be less aggressive in its promotion of strict force, though of course the intention there would be satirical. Blue Bloods is Judge Dredd without the jokes. Or the helmet. Or the futuristic setting. Or anything, really. But you get my point. The success of resolutely unliberal shows like CSI: Miami, and reports like this one showing that the most successful shows on US TV are watched by Republicans, could well have influenced the ideological positioning by the network, who happily loaded the pilot with brusque manly men, submissive women (please don’t tell me Moynahan’s lawyer is anything other than a Strong-Female-Character-In-Name-Only), and black and white villainy.
As the show progressed it introduced a season arc about the corrupt Blue Templar organisation within the NYPD, so the water did get muddied as it went along, but an hour of this fascist-pandering horseshit was enough for SoC. Which is a shame, as dialogue as bad as, “We need to find this kid. Alive,” or, “You know, there’s no shame in talking about what happened in Iraq,” would have kept us happily chuckling until Torchwood: Miracle Day came along.
And that’s that for another year. Thanks to everyone who has commented on, liked, or retweeted these long long articles. I’m now going to go soak my fingertips in water for a few hours.
The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Worst New Characters of the Year
As I said yesterday, there were very few good roles for actresses this year, but even more annoyingly, there were plenty of bad ones. It’s the usual thing; most shows need a shrewish nagging wife to make things hard for the male lead, or some sexy bikini-clad hottie to titillate (poor Grace Park in Hawaii Five-O, spending even more time in her smalls than Daniel Dae Kim), or they have little to do and are only there as a signifier of gender issues — e.g. Boardwalk Empire‘s Margaret Shroeder wasn’t terribly written, but she did seem to ping-pong between two differing emotional states, all the while standing in for oppressed women everywhere. As the year wore on this list looked like it was going to be all women; that really scared me. I’m not a misogynist!
Thankfully a lot of the shows I watched in the last couple of months provided some truly terrible male characters, but nevertheless, it’s troubling that this was the case. A momentary blip? Or a consequence of Jeff Robinov’s infamous statement that Warner Bros. wasn’t going to make movies with female leads any more? Probably not the latter, but I like to bring that up as often as possible, that a moneyman in charge of a studio thinks there’s no audience for movies with a female lead. It’s not the quality of the movies; come on, it’s gotta be the broads putting people off, man. SMFH.
So yeah, here’s some more hate. Apologies for complaining about the number one choice here again, but honestly, that character is one of the worst errors of judgement ever made in TV drama. That it happened on Jane Espenson’s watch seriously depresses me. I don’t blame her for any of it; partisan of me, yes, but I just cannot believe she wasn’t overruled a lot on that misbegotten project.
10. John Pope – Falling Skies
There’s a case to be made that Pope is actually the best character on Falling Skies. He’s certainly the only character played with any sense of fun; kudos to Colin Cunningham for avoiding the mogadon gas that seems to have been pumped into the set. Nevertheless, he’s just there to fill the gruff badass slot that shows seem to have these days; the same as Gawain in Camelot and Kyle Hobbes in V. It’s a thankless role, because no matter how long his hair, how broad his performance, how “dangerous” he might seem at first, you know the cowardly alien invasion show will do all it can to soften the character for primetime viewing. And so, after just a single episode, the vicious bastard who killed one of the 2nd Massachusetts’ numerous African-American redshirts (seriously, the black actors on this show needn’t bother clocking in at the start of the day; they’re little more than cannon fodder), and who led a band of bastards so bastardly it’s made pretty clear they repeatedly raped the only woman in their ranks, is quickly given the task of being camp cook. He’s not so bad after all, you see, because he knows about herbs and stuff. Not long after that he’s bonding with Noah Wyle’s youngest kid. Falling Skies‘ central, enormous disconnect is most transparent here; the idea of the show is meant to be bleak, and its treatment uncompromising, but instead what we get is a sanitised slice of cowardice that satisfies no one. Pope could have been a modern day Ham Tyler. Instead he’s a declawed Wolverine. I dread the inevitable crying fits he will have in season two.
9. Lumen Pierce – Dexter
SoC wants to be very clear here; any dislikings here are not aimed at Julia Stiles, who does superb work as the vengeful rape victim who teams up with Dexter to hunt down and kill a group of extremely nasty scumbags. Her work elevates the show in much the same way as John Lithgow did as season four’s Trinity Killer, with the bonus that her naturalistic take on the character provides an interesting contrast to the cartoonish performances around her. It’s Lumen herself who is the problem. For all of the interesting character moments throughout the season — her initial disastrous impulsiveness, the conflict between her urge for revenge and her fear of it — she still ends up leaving in the finale as much for franchise-supporting convenience as anything else, which once more shows up the programme’s mechanical nature. Once the season is done, the guest star leaves. Knowing this is how the show operates, much of the season feels like a waste of time; she won’t be around soon, so why invest in her? She’s just yet another character drafted in to give Dexter something to bounce off, one more twisted mirror to reflect an aspect of Dexter’s “complex” persona which amounts to nothing in the way of change or growth. Add to that her damsel-in-distress function for hero Dexter, and you have the most frustratingly almost-awesome character of the year.
8. Sophia – The Event
Though the second half of NBC’s Sci-Fi Frustration Engine was tighter than the first, the radical reboot that got us to that point had some negative repercussions as well. The afore-mentioned resemblance to 24 was the most egregious, but worst of all was making Sophia the Wussy Alien into Sophia the Unbelievably Cruel and Evil Alien in the space of an episode. In the first half of the season the “leader” of the aliens was an ineffectual loser whose words carried zero force; the regularity with which her subjects disregarded her orders or basically just fronted on her became a running joke. The showrunners were obviously aware that they had created someone with all of the moral authority of an oven glove and killed off her son in one of the most interesting episodes of the season. This was enough to turn her into a badass hell-bent on killing millions of humans. That’s inconsistent at worst, promising at best, but sadly the showrunners had cast soft-spoken Laura Innes as Sophia. When playing a compassionate alien she was fine. As a potentially genocidal vengeance-crazed villain? Not so much. The disconnect between the initial conception of Sophia and her eventual turn was the killing blow for the show.
7. Ilsa Pucci – Human Target
In the first season of Fox’s generic action series, Chi McBride was cast as Winston, the witheringly sarcastic but level-headed partner of protagonist Christopher Chance, fretting about the legality of their operations but always coming through in the end. By the final episode of that season, their friendship was well-established, and that perpetual panic was rendered obsolete. Come the second season, and for some reason he was still being dismissive of his partner’s abilities, but this time he plays second-fiddle in the chide stakes to new benefactor Ilsa Pucci. While Winston has concerns based on his understanding of what his colleague is involved in, Pucci is an outsider who perpetually stresses out about the legality of their actions, and spends most of the episode being a McKee obstacle; fine if the show didn’t already have someone in that position, but untenable here. Indira Varma is – as ever – utterly charming as the innocent caught up in the shady goings-on, but the character is a terrible drain on the show’s energy. Even more frustrating, a mid-season attempt to deepen her character is squandered almost immediately, before we get into the usual sub-Maddie-and-David romance bollocks in the last few episodes. Of all of the ideas behind the show’s unsuccessful revamp, Pucci’s redundant introduction was the worst.
6. Odin Sinclair – Caprica
Admittedly there’s only a bit of screentime given to lecherous monotheist Odin Sinclair, what with Caprica being ripped from our hearts by Syfy as they attempt to purge their schedule of, you know, sci-fi. Which is fine by me; he represents the only upleasant spot in the final run of this magnificent show. He’s a great representation of Caprica‘s unorthodox characterisation. There’s barely a single character in this show that doesn’t defy categorisation; they all feel like recognisable humans, filled with contradictions and weaknesses and flaws. And so Odin is a slimy little opportunist who uses a Lacy Rand avatar for porn purposes, smokes space weed like an intergalactic beatnik, and then somehow manages to actually seduce the real Lacy Rand as some kind of awful bonus. Horrible that the writers would do that, but I guess his tiny rebellions and doofus-cool are realistic. He’s the show’s bad boy, and at least does better than the similarly-creepy but far-more-dead Philomon from the first half of the show. So if he’s such a cleverly-drawn character what is he doing on this list? Well, I reckon I’m allowed to stick at least one character on here just because I just can’t stand them, even if that character is intentionally awful and given some compelling qualities. Oh Lacy Rand, you can do a lot better than this sleazy little hipster schmuck.
5. Stephanie Powell – No Ordinary Family
Rowan Kaiser of the AV Club wrote a great piece about No Ordinary Family‘s conservatism, a right-wing viewpoint perfectly encapsulated in the character of Stephanie Powell. Her power is superspeed, a gift that Barry Allen and Wally West would use to travel through time or pass through solid matter. Hell, even Heroes‘ Daphne used it to steal things. In No Ordinary Family, for the most part, Stephanie’s superspeed gives her the ability to get all of her chores done quickly. This is a character written to be smarter than almost everyone else in the show, a scientist researching the mysterious plant that gave them all superpowers. And yet this is merely a “Strong Female Character” get-out clause, her intelligence practically added by default as there needed to be a scientist in the main cast and her husband Jim is written to be an emasculated child whose arc from dope to hero is more important than her actualisation. And so, instead, Stephanie just races around, hoovering and making dinner and lunch for her navel-gazing, lazy family of odious self-regarding jerks, just like a good housewifey should. That’s when she’s not a relentless Claire-Dunphy-esque buzzkill, nagging her nigh-invulnerable super-strong husband to stay home so he doesn’t get hurt, because the presence of whiny behaviour from women in bad TV shows supersedes logic. Man, fuck this show.
4. King Arthur – Camelot
Okay look, in the long game for this show I’m sure Arthur was meant to become a kingly king, a man who leads men, the ruler who unites the lands of Albion, searches for the Grail of Christ and fights the forces of the evil Morgana le Fay, and how better to begin this monumental arc than by casting the guy who looked like he was suffering from tuberculosis in Tim Burton’s magical screen version of Sweeney Todd. SoC has nothing against Jamie Campbell Bower; his rendition of Johanna in Todd is quite lovely. Nevertheless, it’s hard going watching this wispy-bearded incarnation of Arthur, who seems completely out of his depth at every step. It’s a version of the myth that sees him improbably capture the hearts of his followers despite looking like he’s going to burst into tears throughout, but no amount of swords pulled from waterfalls are going to convince the audience that he’s worthy. If they really were planning to toughen him up over the course of the show, they would have needed about 20 seasons to realistically get to that point. The show’s insistence on making Merlin the guiding hand means the central character is little more than a puppet. He does have some agency, at least, but unfortunately his act of rebellion against his mother and medieval consigliere is to stalk and pester Guinevere, all the while whining at her about how much he loves her and why don’t you love me back I’m totally the king cuz Mr. Merlin says so waaaaaahhhhh. Basically, he’s me when I was fifteen. No one followed me into battle when I was a teenager, so why the hell should I believe that anyone would pledge allegiance to this fey twerp?
3. Nelson Hidalgo – Treme
Last year SoC gave its prestigious Worst Character of the Year award to Treme‘s Sonny. Who could argue with us that the barely-talented, energy-sucking, self-pitying creep didn’t deserve his place at the top of the list? Well, David Simon for one. Okay, he didn’t respond to us specifically. Such was the furore about Sonny that Simon mentioned it in one of his customary defensive and self-aggrandizing interviews, bitching out fans for not waiting to see what character magic he weaved with Sonny in the future. And, to a certain extent, he was right. Sonny has struggled towards respectability this year. I’m sure that this year’s addition of opportunistic braggart Nelson Hidalgo will yield some interesting narrative further down the line, but as with Sonny, the main problem, above and beyond his obnoxious personality and forced bonhomie, was that he was painted as such a broad villain, an almost comically corrupt individual whose worst crime is almost his patronising cultural tourism, that all the audience can do is stare in disbelief as the air curdles around them. Treme can be very subtle, and it can clang like a struck anvil. This year, the sound of that anvil was a wheedling cry of, “Cuz, cuz, cuz!” Don’t let the rusted storm door hit you on the ass on the way out, Nelson.
2. Maggie Young – Rubicon
Perhaps it was Rubicon‘s mid-season change in direction that left Maggie the pouting PA so lost and aimless. Certainly the early episodes hinted that Maggie would be interesting even if only as the woman who betrays our hero in a femme fatale style, a possibility hinted at by her vampish demeanour and heavily-stressed sexiness. In that case we can blame the second showrunning team for not finding anything for Maggie to do for the majority of the season. Rubicon‘s biggest novelty — and arguably its greatest weakness — was its insistence on depicting workplace drama at such length. When the usual flirtations and power plays were enacted against the sinister espionage backdrop, the contrast was entertaining. Maggie’s problems – feckless husband, unrequited love, guilt over her early betrayal of Will – were played against nothing compelling, which meant they were just bog-standard plots lifted from other stories. With nothing to do Maggie just hovered in the background, mouth slightly open in a perpetual expression of cluelessness. Was she meant to be the show’s Joan, sultrily swishing through the American Policy Institute corridors like a sexy panther? Or was she just a loose end that no one could tie up? Whatever her initial purpose was, by the fifth episode she was a drag on proceedings, and merely got more useless. Rubicon ground to a halt whenever she appeared; a problem on any show, and deadly on something as slow-paced as this.
1. Oswald Danes – Torchwood: Miracle Day
In this terribly angry post, SoC expressed its opinion about paedophile Oswald Danes at great length, stressing our disbelief that anyone in any writers’ room on the planet would think that adding a convicted child rapist and murderer to your show was a bonus. This wasn’t a Todd Solondz, Happiness moment where that nice Dylan Baker plays a paedophile as a thwarted, lovestruck criminal and plays with your expectations. That was truly provocative storytelling. Adding a child rapist to a dim-witted sci-fi action show can only be worthwhile if something is said, or some idea is explored.
I think the idea here is that humanity will embrace someone awful if they are the beneficiary of a miracle, thus showing how easily gulled we stupid humans are in the face of the impossible, or that the media can manipulate our opinion about absolutely anything becase we’re such sheep, even though the media doesn’t seem to be any better at this than the paedophile himself as the show goes on. Whatever the point meant to be made here, Oswald Danes was meant to die in the first scene, at the very moment the polarity of the… thingy (this is as technical as the explanation in the show) is reversed using Jack’s blood, and he didn’t. So he is the new messiah. But no one thinks this about any one of the hundreds of thousands of other survivors that should have died at that exact moment. Eh?
And so Oswald just hangs around for a few hours, making some speeches and doing this weird leering thing with his distorted face as if someone keeps shoving invisible turds under his nose, getting into fights because he disgusts people, or being treated like a compassionate visionary because he knows how to manipulate people into liking him, depending on whatever garbled point is being put across that week. Of course this means he joins the long line of Torchwood characters with no coherently thought-out personality, who are merely introduced into the story to get the narrative from point A to point X through sheer bloody-mindedness, and not through the traditional storytelling method of depicting recognisable human beings acting with consistency and agency and propelling the plot through actions that reveal something about themselves.
If I were to be generous (which I’m in no mood to be, to be honest; it’s been a crap day thus far), Torchwood exists as a counterweight to Doctor Who‘s relentless positivity about the potential and wonder of humanity. This show is all about making a very strong point about how terrible and venal and mundanely evil we are, though it has yet to even once dramatise this point in a convincing way. And before anyone cites Children of Earth, please don’t. The characters in that series bore so little resemblance to humans that it might have well been set in the Tubbytronic Superdome. Any potential connection between their behaviour and ours was stretched to breaking point by their improbable and hysterical evil.
In that sense Oswald Danes is consistent with previous Torchwood characterisations, but if you take a step back and try to look at him objectively, you see that he was an experiment gone horribly wrong, a story device added without properly considering what he was meant to do. As such, he wastes the viewer’s time. That’s bad enough, but he’s also a paedophile. You put a child rapist in your show, RTD, and he served no purpose. There was no story told here, no allegory or examination of morality or even plot mechanics. His presence in the show is like an enormous stinky shitstain wiped across the franchise. In all the time I’ve been writing about TV, I’ve never seen any decision as wrongheaded and ill-intentioned as this one. It’s an idea whose time will never come.
Okay, one last post. I feel like I’ve given birth to a litter of extremely large and angry babies. This blog should have asked for an epidural.
The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best New Characters of the Year
In case you hadn’t noticed from my various rants about banks and politicians, I’m of the left, politically speaking. Like yer actual stereotype, I agonise about things I say on here, hoping that my fellow liberals don’t shun me for breaking one of the literally millions of rules we have to abide by (the handbook they give you when you join the left is hundreds of pages long, but then so is the handbook for the right). Just this morning I made a joke about that halfwit Gervais and his pathetic attempts to feel better about finding the word “mong” funny like the cruel little piece of shit he is, and I fear that a TV writer I respect – a man who would never be as brazenly cruel and stubbornly contemptuous as Gervais) — might think I was serious. This will keep me up for hours, I know it.
So you can imagine my horror when this year’s crop of TV shows included so few strong female roles, or strong characters for ethnic minorities. Strong male characters are everywhere, but women were sorely shortchanged, usually included only as eye fodder or as obstacles (also known as “wives” to bad TV writers). I considered gaming this list to get more women and minorities in; “Chalkie” White from Boardwalk Empire almost made it in but when it was apparent he was only going to be in the show for about fifteen minutes it didn’t seem worth it. As for female characters, barely any came to mind.
It’s genuinely shocking that it has come to this. In the last couple of years we got Lucretia and Illythia in Spartacus: Blood and Sand. We got Alicia Florrick, Diane Lockhart and Kalinda Fricking Sharma in The Good Wife. We got Annie Edison, Britta Perry and Shirley Bennett in Community, Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation, Sue Sylvester in Glee. This is only off the top of my head; give me more time and I’ll come up with a ton more. Ava Crowder and Winona Hawkins on Justified! Two more. But this year? Hardly any. It’s a pitiful state of affairs. It almost makes me wish David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman got picked up, even though it would have been dreadful and probably would have set feminism back fifty years. Anything just to break up this miserable sausage fest.
And so, my list has been unliberalified. It remains obsessed with testosterone, but only because you, the reader, deserve my honest opinion. Please don’t judge me; judge the sexist pigs who run TV. Bastards! Down with the patriarchy!
10. Mrs. Blankenship – Mad Men
Mad Men is a funnier show than its reputation suggests; even as far back as the first season there were wonderfully dry moments. As the show has progressed through the Sixties, the tone has become lighter to reflect the way society became looser and more manic; a change most noticeable in the more colourful environs of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce as well as the fashions. Mrs. Blankenship – Don’s choice for secretary to prevent himself from foolishly sleeping with more staff – has attracted criticism for being too broadly drawn, but she’s in keeping with the change in tone. It also allowed us to see someone be treated like crap by the increasingly tetchy Don Draper but not let it bother them, much as Peggy eventually figured out how to repel his hostility. When Mrs. Blankenship died, the show suffered greatly, and not just because her death was a miserable return to season one’s clunky metaphors (this time about the death of the old America). It also meant we lost the most reliably funny character on the show. Let us bow our heads and remember Roger Sterling”s moving tribute: “She died like she lived — surrounded by the people she answered phones for.”
9. Alderman Ronin Gibbons – The Chicago Code
I’ll be honest. As much as I liked The Chicago Code I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. That’s partly because it was so obviously going to be cancelled it felt like a waste of time to get invested, but also because it was such a bizarre hodge-podge of cable-esque ambition and network compromise, rattling through so many plots and sub-plots that the only thing I felt by the end of each hour was numb exhaustion. It was up to main character Jarek Wysocki (supercharismatic Jason Clarke) to set the pace; he spent most of the series seemingly out of breath as he raced into shot and out spewing exposition like a broken fire hydrant. Hence SoC’s love of Alderman Ronin Gibbons; yet another villain in this great year for villainy. It’s not just his deviousness, and the oleaginous demeanour as he hides his corrupt ways from the police. It’s also not just the opportunity to get a hit of Delroy Lindo every week. We loved him because when he was onscreen, doing his calm evil thing, the show slowed down long enough for us to relish what showrunner Shawn Ryan was trying to do.
8. Gary Bell – Alphas
Oh how my heart sank when the pilot of Alphas introduced highly autistic Gary Bell, a “transducer” who can see and manipulate electromagnetic signals. There were tics everywhere, mostly in how Bell tweaks empty air and looks into streams of glowing data. It was all so gimmicky it became uncomfortable to watch. Autism is so often ill-used in drama (usually in some kind of awful savant genius plot) that its inclusion here seemed like an immediate mis-step. How wrong I was. Thanks to the work and research of British actor Ryan Cartwright, and a great writing team, Gary is sympathetically unsympathetic, a rounded character with goals and dreams of his own, instead of being a cypher. Yes he has powers, but it’s a show about superpowered individuals so it’s not based on the usual misunderstanding of what autism is. It wasn’t long before Gary became a fan favourite, providing most of the humour and heart to this entertaining show.
7. Agent Nelson Van Alden – Boardwalk Empire
This misfiring prestige drama needed a hook from the beginning that didn’t involve real-world articles about how expensive the show was, or how great it was to have Martin Scorsese on board, and erm… look at the sets! In order to give TV writers and critics something to sell to the audience it would have benefited a great central character, and instead we got tetchy Nucky; a good enough character, but no Tony Soprano. It needed menace and instead we got Nucky being a bit useless and Jimmy Darmody brooding in his Chicago hotel room. SoC loves Steve Buscemi, and likes Nucky Thompson a lot, but Boardwalk Empire suffered by not having someone larger than life in the central role. Luckily it had Nelson Van Alden in the background, and most of the first season’s best moments come from him. Personified by the amazing Michael Shannon as a repressed Hulk in a suit, this barely-sane monster went from awful righteousness to spiralling insanity as the season progressed. His religious epiphanies and sordid failings were electrifying. If you need a good reason to stick with Empire, he’s your man.
6. Louis Canning – The Good Wife
One of the many, many, many, many, many joys of this simply astounding CBS political drama is its large cast of recurring characters, often played by superb character actors such as Martha Plimpton, Joe Morton, Gary Cole, etc. etc. ad infinitum. It took approximately 30 seconds for Michael J. Fox to become our favourite antagonist yet; his first appearance, sneakily taking advantage of Alicia Florrick’s innate sense of decency, set up his character perfectly. Even better, the writers play clever games with our own sympathies. In every appearance so far, Canning’s motives are called into question; is he really as unscrupulous as he seems? Surely he can’t be. He’s played by Michael J. Fox! He’s suffering from a debilitating disease and so deserves our sympathy! And yet he remains a villain, but a villain with understandable and occasionally defensible motives. There’s a number of thin lines involved in constructing a character this odious and simultaneously delightful, and the writers — and of course, Mr. Fox – have done an incredible job in bringing him to life. Long may he haunt Lockhart-Gardner’s conscience.
5. Truxton Spangler – Rubicon
Why is American Policy Institute head Truxton Spangler on this list instead of suave, mysterious, deadly Kale Ingram? Mostly because Spangler – the man behind the mysterious plan that powers the entire series – is unlike any other villain around. He’s a bit absent-minded, eccentric (his love of cereal and insistence on eating it quickly so that it doesn’t get soggy), and lovable, so much so that when he realises he has been rumbled by Will Travers and must dispose of this complication, you end up feeling more sorry for him than you do for the show’s protagonist. Spangler’s a well-written character – just look at the tie speech in episode 4, which is probably the highpoint of the entire series – but he would be nothing without Michael Cristofer’s enigmatic and unpredictable performance. While the rest of the cast glowers or simpers, Spangler is vibrant even when sprawled in his chair, grinning with dastardly joy as his plan comes to fruition in the penultimate episode. Ingram can’t compete with that. And besides, he’s called Truxton Spangler, for crying out loud. Need there be any other reason?
4. Hank Dolworth – Terriers
It seems a bit unfair to include one half of the private investigator team from Terriers, when both Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue) and Britt Pollack (Michael Raymond-James) were such agreeable anti-heroes, but it’s obvious that Hank is the focus of the much-missed FX series. It’s his stubbornness, his vindictiveness and newly-awakened sense of civic duty that kickstarts the show, as he seeks to avenge the death of an old friend and uncover corruption that threatens his beloved Ocean Beach. He’s obnoxious and driven, unpredictable and often a bit callous. He also has his heart in the right place, and he’s loyal, and he’s brave. Logue is perfect as the rapscallion; his casting accounts for about 70% of Terriers‘ success (scientifically speaking). Shows with morally shady main characters are more common now (Dexter, The Shield, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, etc. etc.), but a show with a main character who’s a bit of an asshole? That, oddly enough, took more balls. In a perfect world, we could have spent more time with the lovable jerk.
3. Gatehouse – The Shadow Line
“You are the threads. I am the rope.” This line, delivered with a straight face, directly to camera by Stephen Rea, was the perfect capper to Hugo Blick’s bonkers thriller. As the final episode’s glurp of exposition revealed, the man who was running the conspiracy at the heart of the show was Gatehouse all along. This was not really news, especially to the audience. As great as the rest of the cast was (especially Chiwetel Ejiofor and a never better Christopher Eccleston), this was Rea’s show from the first moment he appeared onscreen. In any other context his stillness – punctuated by moments of creepily balletic violence – and his affected drawl, would tip over into mood-puncturing silliness, but Rea teeters just on the edge, a perfect visual accompaniment to Blick’s oppressive and mannered atmospherics, whether he’s hiding in the shadows, perched on a scaffold in the corner of a room, or skulking in an Irish clock-repair shop. By the end of the series we know almost nothing about Gatehouse, other than that he’s smarter than everyone, and more prepared. It’s as if he’s the God of the ShadowLine-niverse, and a twisted God at that. He’s an unforgettable creation; a bogeyman for adults.
2. Mags Bennett – Justified
In a list dominated by memorable villains, it’s dastardly redneck matriarch Mags Bennett who stands out the most. It’s not because she is quietly menacing and formidable, though she is. It’s not because she has a secret weapon – her poisonous “apple pie” – that generated more tension than any other plot device of the year, while also lending a fairy tale dimension to the otherwise grounded crime drama. It’s not even because she is eventually revealed to be even more callous and selfish than initially thought; midway through the season we discover that her plan is to betray the very people she professes to support, a move that sets her up as the enemy of those townsfolk, to her general indifference. No, the reason why Mags is the villain of the year is her mysterious sadness, her misguided motherly love that leads to her jeopardising her cause and alienating her sons as she desperately tries to keep hold of Loretta, the daughter of the man she kills in the first episode. This crazed desperation is hidden by her calm determination, leaking out at the wrong moments and ruining her plans. Thanks to the incredible Margo Martindale – in what is possibly the TV performance of the year – that contradiction is heartbreaking, while its unpredictability leads to some of this season’s most surprising and disturbing moments.
1. Tyrion Lannister – Game of Thrones
Game of Thrones had one of the hardest tasks of all the shows made this year. Adapting a series of books so beloved demanded great care so as not to anger the fanatical audience. Perhaps the realisation of Tyrion Lannister was the litmus test; get this right and the fans would relax – get it wrong and you might as well stay away from Comic-Con for the rest of your career. The fringe quibblers who still found something to carp about can go pound their indifferent, bile-spattered keyboards. The rest of us can rejoice at the magnificent incarnation of this much-loved character, brought to life with such life and soul that the show is poorer whenever he is absent. He also gave the show its first meme-able scene:
Peter Dinklage has rightly been lauded; this is the role of a lifetime. He embodies every contradictory nuance of the maltreated nobleman – Tyrion’s cruelty, compassion, sadness, joie de vivre, his tenacity, his cowardice and courage, his isolation and capacity for affection, and his deprecating sense of humour. The show might have been a hit without him, but he quickly becomes the focus of the audience’s attention, even more so than the “star” of the show, Sean Bean as deluded “hero” Ned Stark. What’s even better is that those of us who have read further know just what’s in store for him in season two; arguably his finest moment and his darkest moment, tragically intertwined. We can’t wait to see Dinklage bring those scenes to life, in all of their heart-stopping power.
Tomorrow, the worst new characters, with a number one choice as predictable as Tyrion.
The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (10-1)
And now, the big top ten. Looking at this list again, I’m absolutely awed by the quality of these episodes. Every one of them is a mini-masterpiece of drama or comedy. This might be the best year of TV I’ve ever seen, thanks to the two best shows on TV (Breaking Bad and Community), some thrilling new additions to our watch-list (step forward Game of Thrones and The Good Wife), and a sadly departed classic going out on a high (::pours out a 40 for Friday Night Lights). Even a disappointing season of one of my favourite shows (Sons of Anarchy) finished on a rousing note. If you’re just checking this list out and you haven’t seen some of these shows, please don’t read my mini-review. I’ve tried to avoid spoiling, but nevertheless, I recommend every one of these shows, from the pilot to the current day. They are all exemplary, the best of modern TV, as deep as oceans and as fulfilling as a really nice chocolate ice cream dessert, except with no calories. Your life will be richer for watching them.
10. The Good Wife – Real Deal
CBS’ gratifyingly complex political thriller The Good Wife has plots as tangled as a Gordian knot, but this season highlight represents the plotting highpoint. The return of dastardly lawyer Louis Canning puts the lawyers of Lockhart-Gardner into a tailspin, as the manipulative representative of Big Pharma announces that he has had a change of heart and wishes to represent the victims of a toxic dumping scandal. As those victims were already being courted by Alicia and Will, a race begins to sign the most victims to each suit. Canning’s motives are called into question throughout the episode; has he seen the light, or is this a ruse to lower the pharmaceutical firm’s payout? As fascinating as that plot is, the imminent equity partner vote designed to oust shady partner Derrick Bond is where the greatest pleasures of this masterclass in drama lie. In what is possibly the cleverest twist of the TV year, Bond’s Macchiavellian nature is laid bare with a revelation out of the blue, forcing Diane and Will to step up their game in order to save their law firm. Add to this a delightful subplot about Eli Gold, whose cynicism is melted upon coming into contact with one of Peter Florrick’s most passionate supporters, and an appearance by Method Man (METHOD MAN!), and you have what is the most memorable and entertaining episode of a stellar second season.
9. Sons of Anarchy – NS
Was it worth it? The disappointing third season of FX’s biker drama took an unexciting trip to Ireland for most of its run, replacing the bluesy theme tune with a flute-heavy monstrosity, filled the cast with new and unappealing characters, turned the palette to bluey-grey, and squandered SoA’s traditional direct and effective plotting with unspoken illogicality (the reason for hiding Jax’s son Abel) and tedious padding (the seemingly endless debates about going to Vancouver; a nightmare for an audience that knew this would be a wild goose chase). Viewer sympathy drained away, and showrunner Kurt Sutter turned his anger on the fans who were complaining. But was it worth it? For giving us a season finale as balls-out thrilling as this one? Hell yes. All criticism faded from my mind as the tension ratcheted up to exhausting levels, before Jax enacted his plan to turn the tables on the Russian gunrunners, Jimmy O, and dastardly ATF psycho Agent Stahl. The nerve-wracking, lengthy sequence of double- and triple-crosses, expertly handled by Sutter in the director’s chair, made this fan delirious with joy. Sad to see one of the show’s best characters die, but what a perfect way to go, and what a treat for the loyal fans who stuck with it to the end. It’s arguably the show’s finest hour yet.
8. Friday Night Lights – Kingdom
As good as Friday Night Lights was, it could be hard to watch at times. It featured a cast of characters so beautifully realised that seeing them face heartache, rejection or catastrophe could be a wrenching experience. The final season of the masterful family drama didn’t stint on the pain, but much of it was confined to the second half of the season, building up tensions before the euphoric release of the dazzling final episode. Kingdom saw the East Dillon Lions facing the South Kingdom Rangers, the team that battered their morale the previous year. Many dramatic threads are introduced and then abandoned as the team romps to an easy victory, followed by numerous drunken and good-natured celebrations, with even the usually taciturn teachers and coaches letting their hair down. Even the ill-advised shenanigans of the kids don’t have terrible repercussions; this is an episode without melodramatics. A merry episode, then, and perhaps the most joyously entertaining one in all five seasons, with the extra bonus of finally giving the hither-to unbearable Julie plot-thread an unexpected edge. From here, the core characters experienced dark times, but this brief, glorious respite was the most memorable of the season, reminding the viewer of what it was they loved most about the soon-to-end show.
7. Justified – The Spoil
The episode before this (Save My Love) has superbly judged episode-long suspense as Raylan and Winona attempt to return stolen money to Harlan County lock-up, and the next episode (Brother’s Keeper) ends with a nerve-wracking sequence as Raylan’s efforts to protect Loretta end up with one of the Bennett clan dead at the bottom of a mine-shaft. Both are worthy contenders for this list. Nevertheless, sometimes the connective tissue just wins out through grouchy charm and low-key dramatics. After being rumbled by his boss Art, Raylan is given the job of protecting Black Pike Mining executive Carol Johnson as punishment; a situation made worse by a hangover that makes the usually charming Deputy US Marshall turn into a grouch with a hair-trigger. Consumed with his own problems, Raylan tries to stay out of trouble, but instead is dragged into an electrifying set-piece debate in front of the whole town, and is pushed and pulled by Carol, Boyd, Mags and her sons, not to mention his own father; his increasingly tetchy behaviour is a joy to watch, single-handedly justifying Timothy Olyphant’s Emmy nomination. There were more exciting episodes this season, but the wordplay employed by the town’s major players, and the sense of local history infecting every decision and emotion, are perhaps the best example of Justified‘s near-perfect writing.
6. Fringe – Subject 13
Fringe features so many mind-melting tricks and ideas that it’s easy to forget that at its core the show is about the pain of loss, and lies that eat away at the soul. The stunning third season finally found an emotional hook to hang its high-faluting sci-fi ideas on, and the result was an immensely satisfying experience of growing complexity. This episode, a sibling to season two’s superb Peter, is a flashback that further expands the show’s mythology and reveals the origin of Peter and Olivia’s relationship. We see two children suffering from the fateful decision of Walter to abduct Peter from Over There, two identical couples on the verge of collapse, and two Walter Bishops struggling to find a way to solve their problems, no matter what it means they will lose in the process. Every person in Walter’s life begins to suffer under the weight of his remorse, with only Olivia coming out ahead, but at a cost that the audience sees every week with every death and terrible occurrence that follows from her accidental trip to the other universe, and Walter’s decision to protect her at the cost of his son’s freedom. While not as flashy as last season’s stand-out White Tulip, the horrible sadness that frames every scene in this makes it very nearly as memorable. It’s high-concept sci-fi, but Fringe‘s great achievement is how it dramatises the misery caused by good intentions gone awry, and the dishonesty we accept so that we can live with awful choices.
5: Community – Cooperative Calligraphy
The best new show of last season returned with a very satisfying opener before falling into a what felt like a slump, with two highly anticipated themed episodes falling a little flat. After the triumph of season one’s Modern Warfare, these seemed like a problem; if the show was going to try to emulate the brilliance of that episode, would that decision yield returns that diminished even further? It can be argued that later episodes were better, and it’s testament to Community‘s brilliance that three other episodes (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Critical Film Studies and Paradigms of Human Memory) could have taken this place. But Cooperative Calligraphy was the one that reassured us that Community was still capable of being ambitious, funny, and emotionally honest in a way that no other show on TV can manage. The bottle gimmick is brilliantly used to expose the fractures within the study group, setting up the dramatic fireworks of the rest of the season, while proving that the creative team were not about to abandon perceptive and honest character comedy in order to rely on genre spoofs or post-modern smart-assery. In a season that contained numerous classics, this episode by the amazing writing/directing team of Megan Ganz and Joe Russo was possibly the most important. It’s a statement of intent; from here we know this show will play brilliant conceptual games with the audience, but the core of the show — this community of lost souls — will always be more important.
4: Treme – Do Watcha Wanna
Critical chatter about the second season of David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s TV show/educational civic project seemed to focus on how it might now live up to the mighty Wire by introducing darker elements. Crime returned to New Orleans and the lives of many of the protagonists were horribly changed as a result. Nevertheless, Treme didn’t really transform much. Yes, there was a police cover-up plot that ran through the season, and will likely continue into next year, but otherwise Treme remained the same obstinately slow-moving, anti-conflict meditation on art and culture that it always did. What mattered was how Simon and Overmyer continued to flesh out this corner of the world, and the characters that populated it. The result was a work of consistent beauty and power, but no episode summed up their ambition and intention more satisfyingly than the season finale, which brought reconciliation to LaDonna and Larry, strife to Toni and Terry, peace to Davis, hope to Antoine, happiness to Albert, and new opportunity to Sonny, Janette and Annie. With Friday Night Lights now sadly gone from our screens, it’s up to Treme to paint a picture of contemporary American life and community with the same empathy; this nigh-perfect explosion of sadness and joy proves the show is up to the task. Storm clouds may have gathered over New Orleans, but in this season, and especially here, the sun still shone through.
3: Game of Thrones – Baelor
For some of us who had read George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, it was obvious from the way that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had paced the show that this episode was going to be the big one. Foreknowledge of the shocking events within did nothing to diminish its dramatic power, as honourable but foolish Ned Stark stumbles into a situation he could not have predicted. The final scene – so brilliantly realised in the books – was done justice by director Alan Taylor, and then some. With an epic sweep and a sense of enormous gravity, the oblivious viewer’s expectations are turned upside-down, causing the best kind of emotional pain and discombobulation. Those final moments are so well-handled the show deserves this position for that alone, but that would be forgetting the other episode highlights: the introduction of decadent Walder Frey; the completion of Robb Stark’s triumphant plan; the horrifying revenge of Mirri Maz Dur, and Jorah Mormont’s clumsy but valiant defence of the woman he loves; and Tyrion Lannister’s drunken preparations for war with companions Shae and Bronn. The team behind Game of Thrones had shown enormous confidence straight out of the gate – that can happen when adapting such remarkable source material. And yet, who truly expected something as powerful as this episode so early in the show’s run? It was their crowning glory.
2: Breaking Bad – Crawl Space
The gap between episodes two and one are wafer-thin, and have caused literally minutes of intense reflection. The effect Crawl Space had on the two-thirds of the SoC Massive who watch Breaking Bad was nothing short of a state of desperate horror, a clawing sense of misery and shock that haunted us for days. Everyone who has seen this episode knows what I’m talking about; the bravura final moments where every plot thread in the previous 10 episodes comes together, as if from nowhere, in a sequence of escalating disaster. The maneuvering by the writing team, putting every piece into the right place to trigger this moment, is the kind of long-form storytelling trick I adore, and the end of Crawl Space represents one of the best examples of this kind of intricate plotting. That’s before we get to the stunning direction by Scott Winant; who can forget the beautiful long shot of Walter arrogantly bartering for his life as clouds trail shadows over the desert, or the instantly iconic final shot. It’s also arguably Bryan Cranston’s finest hour. The entire cast is as great as ever (with credit due to guest star Christopher Cousins as the brilliantly realised, truly unsympathetic asshole Ted Beneke), but Cranston is on fire here. He has next year’s Dramatic Actor Emmy sewn up. The memory of Walt, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, lying in a metaphorical grave with Dave Porter’s oppressive soundtrack thudding in the background, will stay with the viewer forever.
1: Mad Men – The Suitcase
So why, when Breaking Bad‘s Crawl Space is as perfect an hour of TV as will ever be made, have I chosen Mad Men‘s The Suitcase for the top spot? Simply because while I am in awe of Crawl Space, much of its impact is due to very smart people working out ideas in a room over a long period of time. That sounds like faint praise; it’s not meant to. Crawl Space is an almost miraculous piece of writing and direction. We’re lucky to have experienced it. Nevertheless, when you go back through the season you can see groundwork being laid. In a million years I would never be able to come up with something as brilliant as that, but I can now almost see the cogs and gears in it, and thus trace that back to a drawing board. I marvel at it, but it can be broken down.
The Suitcase, on the other hand, completely mystifies me. It’s not perfect the way Crawl Space is, but that imperfection, that looseness, is what makes it the most remarkable episode of TV of the last year. I’m sure it’s possible to dissect this the same way I suspect Crawl Space can, but right now it baffles me, and I’m grateful for that chance to enjoy something while switching off that analytical part of my mind that has mutated over the last few years. The richness of its metaphors, the elegance of its dialogue, the effortless and logical resolution of so many arcs; The Suitcase is a masterclass in how to write for TV without showing the workings.
It’s as smooth and perfect as an egg; watching Matthew Weiner’s work here is pure joy. Director Jennifer Getzinger does credit to this remarkable script, drawing career-best performances from Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss as they battle and bond over the course of a night. The progression of their relationship, so often a source of mystery in the show, is here laid bare; they progress from antagonistic colleagues to trusted friends as Don succumbs to grief and reveals his vulnerability, while Peggy becomes stronger and more confident knowing that her work is valued. Their eventual understanding is profoundly moving, and pleasingly symmetrical.
As I said before, it’s “imperfect” in the way that it’s not something that looks like it was made by a genius with charts and graphs, even though it’s rich and complex enough to justify repeat viewings (Daisyhellcakes has watched it about nine times by now). It’s not a crystalline monolith of plotting, or a mechanical thing to be admire, but it’s just… dammit, it IS perfect. It’s just it’s a different kind of perfect.
More to come. Yes, I’m not done yet. I still feel an irresistible urge to talk about the best and worst new characters of the season, and pick my best and worst new shows of the year. The best new show is an absolute no-brainer, I’ll admit.
The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (20-11)
2011 has been a bit of a crap one for movies so far. There’s very little I’ve outright loved — only Attack The Block, Rango, and Fast Five have really fired my imagination, and even the current London Film Festival has left me cold so far. It’s made me worry that there’s something wrong in my head. Have I experienced too many stories? Have I become immune? Will I never again enjoy a story without thinking the final act needed an extra level (The Skin I Live In) or thinking someone else did it better (Rampart = A trailer for The Shield)?
Perhaps it’s good, then, that I’m doing this list now. Ordering these shows has been a nightmare. They’re all truly great hours (or half-hours) of TV, with barely a micron of difference in quality between them. Even the top spot (in my next post) was hard to decide on, as there were three episodes that were eligible candidates. I’m happy with my final choice, but it took some pondering. I think I’m good with this part of the list as well, though I’m sure I’ll regret something once I’ve hit Publish.
20. Big Love – The Noose Tightens
The final season of HBO’s underrated polygamy drama had a lot to do before it came to a close. The first few episodes appeared to be concerned with dealing with the fallout from the previous, much-derided season’s worst excesses, as well as setting up the biggest plotquakes to come. The result was a dispiriting lack of urgency for several episodes, but a forgiveable one when this barnstorming hour is taken into account. Everything that had been set up thus far kicked off here: Margene’s guilt over her underage marriage to Bill leading to her hysterical reaction to Cara Lynn’s affair with her tutor; Bill’s desperate anger and bullying of Barb as she prepares to spread her wings and leave his church; Alby’s plot to finally free himself of his arch-enemy Bill with the help of Verlan; the wives facing up to the fact that they are likely to lose their husband as Bill pleads with Senator Dwyer to drop the procurement prosecution aimed at Barb. It’s a packed episode; fireworks go off in every scene, leading to a heart-stopping finale with Alby’s mania finally finding a victim. Chloe Sevigny, who has always been the best thing about Big Love, reaches new heights here, her performance ranging from blazing defiance to mortal terror. The show – and the masterful creation that was Nicolette Grant-Henriksen – will be greatly missed.
19. Terriers – Fustercluck
Viewers who caught the first three episodes of FX’s almost uncategorisable slum-noir P.I. show were likely confused as to what they were getting. The tone seemed at odds with expectations; neither as funny as Ted Griffin’s work on Ocean’s Eleven, nor as gritty as Shaun Ryan’s Shield, it seemed to straddle a number of genres. There were also quibbles about the overall structure; was it going to be serialised or episodic? The fourth episode was where Griffin’s masterplan came into focus, and also made it clear that the first three episodes were actually tonally consistent, not to mention intentionally unpredictable. Hank and Britt – two well-drawn characters unlike pretty much anyone else on TV – come into focus as two street-smart chancers making it up as they go along, and getting themselves into more trouble than they bargained for when they become accidentally responsible for the death of the shady real estate developer who hired them in the first episode, whose body they are then forced to hide. With that act the show suddenly made a weird kind of sense; these were not the normal TV heroes, and this was not a normal TV show. Most shows have a format for you to hold onto, but at this point Terriers leapt into the unknown, and became essential viewing.
18. The Vampire Diaries - The Descent
No matter what your feelings about the capabilities of handsome Ian Somerhalder as an actor, his Vampire Diaries character Damon was always one of the best things about this oft-po-faced supernatural teen drama. It’s only fitting that the best episode of the massively improved second season should be Damon’s finest hour. Our anti-hero takes on the responsibility of looking after his sexual partner Rose as she slowly succumbs to the mortal wound inflicted by a werewolf. Other momentous events happen in this episode, all courtesy of SoC writing heroes Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, but the episode makes the list thanks to the final ten minutes, beginning with a surprisingly moving fantasy scene with Damon easing Rose’s pain with a manipulated dream that allows her some dignity and comfort before he euthanises her. Our new awareness of his compassion is then blown away in a horrifying final scene, as a clearly mentally unstable Damon finds a lone woman driving through Mystic Falls, and regretfully but violently kills her. The final shot of the episode, showing Damon’s vampire eyes, bloodshot and almost glowing with confusion and malevolence in the darkness, is the most chilling of the entire 2010-2011 TV season. It’s not the only time The Vampire Diaries outdoes its prestige TV rivals by messing with the audience’s expectations, but it’s the most memorable.
17. Boardwalk Empire – Paris Green
For SoC there was no greater frustration this year than that experienced while watching Boardwalk Empire. The setting, cast, and production values were all well within our wheelhouse, but the show never took off the way we had hoped. Time will tell if this is just a stumble before a sprint, but until then we can at least be grateful for this memorable late-season belter. For the most part Paris Green appears to be a quiet meditation on the imminent death of the Commodore, which leads to a series of revelations for Jimmy Darmody. Once more Michael Pitt excels as the bitter, thoughtful heavy, burning with frustration at his lot in life and torn between two emotions as his father nears death. Of course, in the final surprising act it isn’t his father who dies, but a man with a secret allegiance to Nucky Thompson – the man who acted as a guardian to Jimmy. Poor Agent Sebso, who finally proves to be as foolish as his cover persona seemed, is coerced into his own death at the hands of his unhinged boss. Michael Shannon shakes the screen as the evangelically-powered Nelson Van Alden, blasphemously baptising his Jewish lackey in a final scene of terrifying power that goes disastrously wrong. If only the rest of the series had scenes as riveting as that, or the beautifully shot moment when the two prohibition agents initially find the baptism site. Hopefully season two will harness the potential of this delirious insanity.
16. Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – The Bitter End
Most, if not all, Spartacus fans would have been fine with the show taking a year-long break while star Andy Whitfield recovered from cancer, but the showrunners cleverly and graciously gave him time to rest by creating this prequel mini-series while keeping him on staff in order to support him, in the hope he would return. Sadly, this was not to be. With only six episodes in the series it was possible that Gods of the Arena wouldn’t achieve the same narrative momentum that the first season did which, if you don’t recall, was moving as fast as a bullet train by the time the final episode arrived. The worries were for naught; with many of the familiar characters in place, Gods of the Arena had a head start. Even with so much of the story already told, GOTA still managed to throw in a few surprises, especially the insight into just how cunning Lucretia truly is. The last episode of the season was a balls-out shocker with an amazing final setpiece; a huge ruck in the new arena which features the immensely satisfying resolution of numerous arcs, including the developing animus between Batiatus and Solonius, the reason for loathsome Ashur’s hatred of Crixus, and the surprising reason why Gannicus isn’t present in the House of Batiatus in Blood and Sand. It’s thrilling, shocking, gorgeous and gaudy and as addictive as smoking, just as we had hoped.
15. The Walking Dead – Days Gone By
I’ll have more to say on this in a forthcoming post. I’ll link back once it’s published. For now, just look at that awesome picture and try to remember how promising that pilot was, how excited everyone got when it aired. So long ago…
14. Parks and Recreation – Fancy Party
There were funnier episodes in the third season of Parks & Recreation (also known as The Show That Shades Of Caruso Once Foolishly Said Was Terrible But Actually Turned Out To Be One Of The Great Sitcoms Of Our Time, for short), and there were more ambitious ones, but no other episode this year encapsulated the life-affirming fantasy elements of this show so completely. The city of Pawnee transforms all who live under its umbrella of optimism, and all who have committed themselves to following this remarkable show are similarly affected by its cheer-inducing rays. This episode saw April and Andy get married after being together for a little while (“My Brita filter is older than their relationship,” says Ben, adding, “Wait a second, should I change my Brita filter?”). The sensible characters object, the foolish characters rejoice, and for once common sense is utterly wrong. Only in Pawnee can an obviously disastrous life-decision be the only right thing to do, and not just because their young love finally motivates Leslie to begin her courtship of Ben. It’s also encapsulates the beauty of Parks and Recreation; a sentimental show that makes that oft-derided philosophy acceptable, a sitcom that offers the audience a chance to embrace light in a dark world, without shame. Long may it run without being tampered with by NBC executives.
13. Caprica – Apotheosis
If SoC had its way, Caprica would still be with us. Its cancellation was inevitable, seeing as only about fifteen people watched it, but at least the show went out in style. Last year saw the similarly regrettable cancellation of Dollhouse; another cerebral sci-fi show that had more on its mind than episodic threats or tedious alien invasion plots. That final season almost fell apart under the weight of completing its story. The last few episodes were a mad dash through several seasons of plotting, and I’m grateful for that, but it did mean the finale was compromised. Caprica comes up with a solution that is simultaneously more satisfying and yet still upsetting; the show ends with a montage of what would have come if Caprica had run for ten years like it should have. The tease is fascinating, forming a link between this Battlestar Galactica prequel and the rest of the franchise. The main body of the episode is magnificent too: we see the Graystone family find peace as they reconcile with the avatar of Zoe; we see the failure of Clarice Willow’s dastardly plan, as Daniel and Amanda Graystone thwart the Soldiers of the One in their quest to promote the Monotheistic Heaven; and we see the Adamas take their revenge on the Guatrau following the death of the first Bill Adama. It’s a great season finale, and the only thing that stops it from being a great series finale is that it shouldn’t have been a series finale. ::wears black gloves in mourning, as is the Tauron way::
12. Rubicon – A Good Day’s Work
Rubicon travelled a short distance from 70s-style conspiracy drama to cerebral 24-style topical thriller with some peculiar baggage including the spate of uninvolving office romances and a malfunctioning sub-plot featuring Miranda Richardson as a woman being sad in some rooms. It was the eleventh episode that fulfilled the promise of both versions of the show, with our paranoid hero Will Travers finally revealing to Catherine Rhumer the results of his research; shadowy corporation Atlas-McDowell is in the Shock Doctrine business, wrecking the world and profiting from the chaos. The show suddenly comes into focus, and writer Zack Whedon and director Brad Anderson crank up the suspense with a nerve-wracking fight scene between Will and smug assassin Donald Bloom. It’s the build-up and pay-off that seals the deal; Truxton’s anguish when he realises what he must do to protect his evil cabal, and Kale’s efficient disposal of the dead body of his former lover. This immensely exciting hour of TV ends with Will slowly falling apart, as he realises just how much danger he is in. Plus we get to hear Rocket from the Crypt’s On A Rope over the sound of a body being dismembered. How often does that happen on TV?
11. The Shadow Line – Episode Six
Addicts of Hugo Blick’s dread-soaked drama, shunned by those who proved immune to the almost other-worldly oddness of it all, could well have felt vindicated in their obsession by the rush of shocking moments that occur in the middle of this episode. The first half of it seems like an elaborate set-up for an imminent disaster, which comes during a typically lengthy set-piece that sees Jonah Gabriel face off against his would-be assassin Gatehouse in the home of his mistress and secret son. The audience, of course, knows that they are not alone, and the traps set by both Gatehouse and Glickman end up going horribly wrong. This ten minute centrepiece, in an already exciting episode, is one of the crowning achievements of the TV year, a sequence of bombshells layered so expertly over each other, occasionally in contravention of usual dramatic logic, that any quibbles about the plausibility of it fade away. It’s deliberately played straight at the audience, who can only react with numb horror. Which is not to say that’s the only good thing about the episode. Gatehouse’s final scene, rising like Lazarus to face his would-be assassin, is memorably chilling and, as with the rest of this remarkable show, commendably precise in execution.
Top ten tomorrow. If I can stop shuffling the order around.
The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (30-21)
In a previous post I remarked that I wouldn’t be able to write about Spartacus: Gods of the Arena as I hadn’t seen it; a terrible oversight partially explainable as discomfort following on from the tragic fate of star Andy Whitfield. Mostly it was down to altered priorities throughout the year. We had to catch up on Parks and Recreation and The Good Wife, which took up a fair amount of our allocated TV watching time. Work comes first, after all, with Twitter checking in second place, I’m ashamed to say.
Parks and Recreation was once dismissed by us at length, and The Good Wife never seemed to be something we would be interested in, but the critics urging the audience to give them a chance are 100% correct; both shows are magnificent, and well worth your time if you don’t already watch them. To be honest, I think The Good Wife could be marketed better; there’s an audience waiting out there for something this sophisticated, but they might be put off by publicity that makes it look like some kind of soapy fluff about working moms. FFS, this is the most intelligent show on network TV, a genuine marvel. It should be watched by anyone with an interest in the modern world; no other show feels as much of its time as this one.
As for our previous damning criticisms of Parks and Recreation, I’d just like to say even though that first season was pretty weak, my immediate dismissal of it — considering that even at its worst it was never even a fraction as bad as the truly odious Modern Family — still stands as the greatest mistake this blogger has ever made, at least until I decided to finish this blogpost in the KFC in Leicester Square, just because it had free wi-fi. Doesn’t anyone on this planet know how to chew with their mouths shut? I’m forming Misophonics Anonymous tomorrow. [/intolerant asshole]
Anyway, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena doesn’t feature in the 30-21 list; it’s much better than that. Which is not to denigrate the following ten shows; they’re all wonderful in their own right. #arsecovering
30: The Trip – Hipping Hall
Shades of Caruso was bound to enjoy Michael Winterbottom’s navel-gazing curio just for the scenery; a recent holiday has made us very pro-Lake District, and seeing its breathtaking beauty again was a real treat. The short series works well as a whole; the differences from one week to the next are negligible but when seen as a single entity, the growing loneliness of “Steve Coogan” and the contented obliviousness of “Rob Brydon” are obvious. The fourth week, however, gave us a new take on their tiresome games of one-upmanship, as the two comedic actors are joined for dinner by assistant Emma and photographer Yolanda. The most excruciating scene of the year sees “Rob” unleash a slew of bad impressions, while “Steve” shrinks on horror before joining in, unable to let his companion be the centre of attention. Meanwhile, Emma and Yolanda’s laughter becomes more and more forced, and the comedians’ banter becomes crueller. It also sees “Rob” step out of character and make an ill-advised, almost unwatchable move on Emma, a plot development that the real Rob Brydon asked Winterbottom to remove from the truncated movie version. Sorry Rob, that was a great scene, and your discomfort ensures this episode’s place on this list.
29: Bored to Death – I’ve Been Living Like A Demented God!
It’s easy to dismiss HBO’s light comedy about mildly disaffected middle-class New Yorkers as nothing but froth, but if it had more bite, it wouldn’t work at all. As such, it’s content to be an endearing diversion with the occasional very good joke about how useless and self-absorbed the intelligentsia of the East Coast are. It’s a slight Woody Allen-esque sitcom, back when Woody Allen was still funny and had something to say. This episode is the highlight of its second year, bringing about the return of Kristin Wiig and John Hodgman. Wiig has little to do other than play a femme fatale pick-up for Zack Galafianakis’ suddenly virile Ray, but John Hodgman gets to do all sorts of amusing things, and takes to physical comedy with gusto as he rolls around in dirt while trying to avoid a group of angry (but not too angry; this is mild comedy, after all) drug dealers. We also get to see poor George dealing with his prostate cancer diagnosis and his hilarious response to a mandatory drug test at work; his frantic but composed pantomime of panic when trying to tamper with his urine sample is a little gem. Even better, his final scene with a very enthusiastic Jonathan is incredibly sweet; a perfect encapsulation of what makes this show so lovable.
28: Luther – Episode 3
Last year Shades of Caruso took great pleasure in deriding the BBC’s hysterically overwrought serial killer drama Loofah, with its needlessly flashy compositions, poorly judged performances, incoherent plotting and modish “edginess”. This year, SoC scratches its head, staring in bemusement at the four episodes that exploded into the Beeb’s schedule like a not-terrible howitzer shell of semi-competence. Connected by one plot-thread – albeit a not-particularly great one – the two two-parters offered more fun and more purposeful storytelling than was expected. Many of the old problems remained, but with a modicum of restraint Loofah became far more compelling, with our apocalyptically glum hero now approaching iconic status as London’s tortured protector. This episode was the best of the quartet, mostly for the two main setpieces depicting the Dice Killer impassively going about his murderous business; director Sam Miller brilliantly keeps the action simple, and the effect is unforgettable. Much of that is down to the bold use of London locations; when the killer walks calmly through Liverpool Street station in the cliffhanger ending, the effect is one of absolute terror. The gloves came off this year; the flaws mean so little when they’re part of something as scary and confident as this.
27: Psychoville – Sunnyvale
Shades of Caruso foolishly missed the first season of this exceptional horror-comedy when it originally aired, meaning 2009′s awards didn’t include praise for “David and Maureen”, the “one-shot” homage to Rope that could be the best thing produced by the BBC in the last decade. It’s hard to pick a stand-out episode from Psychoville‘s second season when each episode is as good as every other, but this half-hour probably wins out, and again Hitchcock is at the heart of it. The main setpiece, a play on Strangers on a Train set in an old folks home, is a comedic delight, powered by the interplay between the delightful double-act of Mr. Jelly and Claudia Wren. On top of that we find out the dark secret behind Ravenhill Psychiatric Hospital, and Mrs. Kenchington’s familial history. It also stands as one of the purest expressions of Shearsmith and Pemberton’s vision of England’s contradictory nature; that cheery surface hiding a dark core, perfectly visualised here with the image of a stash of Nazi memorabilia hidden under a collectible toy shop. (Confession: one of the main reasons this episode deserves a place on the list is for the joke about the Nazi memorabilia website NaziBay.)
26: Doctor Who – A Good Man Goes To War
Rumours of strife on set and within the show’s production staff appeared in Private Eye several weeks after this season took a break, but it could be argued that the wildly variable quality of the episodes was a sign that something was up. The previous season was patchy, but this was on a different level. Part of that was showrunner Steven Moffat’s obvious ambition; numerous plot threads had been introduced that were waiting to be tied up, meaning audience members who were not in the show’s thrall would likely end up being frustrated. Thank the Heavens for this memorable mid-season finale, which saw the show firing on all cylinders once more. With a cast of previously introduced minor characters returning to help the Doctor rescue Amy and her soon-to-be-born baby (whose identity is sadly signposted with obnoxious obviousness in the episode’s opening moments), the show’s energy returned with a vengeance. Despite budgetary restraints, Who felt epic once more, with Matt Smith on scorching form, doing justice to Moffat’s riotous inventions and crazed plotting. This is what the show should be every week; a madcap, exhilarating blast of imagination, powered by sheer force of will.
25. The Office – Garage Sale
After what feels like a million seasons of increasingly depressing shenanigans in Dundler Mifflin’s despair-pit, it was time for Steve Carell to detach the chains around his ankles and escape the show that had helped carry him to stardom. Much of the season was spent waiting for him to leave the office, with the only drama derived from speculating about how it would happen. Thankfully, while those episodes had only glimmers of the show’s previous genius, the final five minutes of this Carell-written episode provided a genuinely magical moment. Cleverly set up as an imminent disaster, Michael Scott’s marriage proposal to Holly is instead a gloriously sentimental and moving triumph that pays tribute to Scott’s relationship with the core cast, leads to a well-judged mood-puncturing joke, and ends on an out-of-the-blue declaration of our hero’s intention to leave. It’s possibly the most simultaneously surprising and unsurprising character note in the history of the show, and it worked like gangbusters. Tears flowed like the water from the Scranton branch’s sprinklers.
24: Louie – Subway / Pamela
The first segment of this episode is almost wordless; it’s a beautifully shot, almost poetic sequence with Louie taking a trip on a subway, encountering great beauty and terrible poverty in a single moment, observing the patter of a young boy with great astonishment, and then imagining himself as the feted hero of his carriage by mopping up a noxious brown liquid. The words come later, as Louie spending an afternoon with his friend Pamela. What starts as a loose segment with our dopey hero hanging out with the ever-acidic Pamela shifts into mortifying comedy territory as Louie goes for broke and professes his undying love; it’s a long, beautiful, uncynical speech. It would be a joy to listen to if it weren’t for the knowledge that Pamela is never going to be won over. The result is a growing sense of doom; anyone who has ever harbored a crush on someone who has no interest will tear off their ears and poke out their eyes at the miserable truth presented here. It’s not all bad, though. The punchline, in the final shot, is a cracker. Good final monologue too, if depressing. But it’s the good kind of depressing; a perfect description of the show.
23. Alphas - Blind Spot
In the unexpectedly long run of NBC’s dire Heroes, there were moments of brightness that never truly removed the murk. Company Man in the first season was easily the highlight, combining spectacle and character drama in a way it never managed again. In a shorter space of time, Syfy’s Alphas reached a point where its massive ambition led to this mini-action epic; a perfectly constructed action TV classic that evoked happy memories of the first two X-Men movies. The irony that the show was co-created by Zak Penn, writer of the despised third X-Men movie, is not lost on me. Ira Steven Behr’s clever script puts the ramshackle Alpha team in the position of questioning Dr. Graham Kern (a brilliantly menacing Brent Spiner) in their base, smugly assuming they were in control. As the perfectly paced episode progresses, they come to realise they’re actually at the mercy of not one but two antagonistic forces powerful enough to kill them all. This was where Alphas began to prove it belonged in the top tier of this year’s new shows, packing in a decent amount of low-cost action, setting a light under the season-long Red Flag arc, and tying off some loose threads into the bargain. And the best thing about it? Two episodes later we were given a satisfying, exciting, and emotionally wrenching finale better than anything Heroes could ever have managed. This is how you do superhero TV.
22: 30 Rock – Double-Edged Sword
For a couple of years SoC has railed against the 30 Rock backlash, as fans complained that the show had lost its freshness and had become mired in self-referential games. We argued that it remained fresh and funny, that the post-modern games were smart enough to render the criticisms redundant, and that the show still had some life. This year, we caved. Fatigue seemed to infect what was once the wittiest show on TV, not helped by the ascendence of Community and Parks and Recreation to the position of sitcom superiority. Still, all was not lost; Double-Edged Sword was as sharp as 30 Rock‘s best, partially because there seemed to be things at stake within the show. Jack and Avery’s mad-dash out of Canada before their child is born, Tracy’s realisation that his EGOT is more a curse than a blessing, and Liz’ sad epiphany that a comfortable relationship is just as untenable as a fraught one; not only all thematically linked (the double-edged sword from the title) but present to enable the show to make a self-referential joke about thematic linking in sitcoms. Sad that the show had to make a sacrifice to regain its mojo; the loss of Matt Damon’s brilliantly realised Carol at least gives us a superb sub-plot about the petty tyranny of pilots, and a running joke that SoC is very grateful for, concerning that stupid-ass owl movie Legends of the Guardians.
21: The Venture Brothers – Assisted Suicide
Mid-season breaks are usually a great help for creative teams facing deadlines, especially when the show in question is animated, but for the audience it can often be a mixed blessing, Though the wait for the fourth season might have been unbearable without it, the break robbed the show of its momentum. It wasn’t until this triumphant episode that the fourth season lived up to previous seasons, as The Monarch invades Rusty Venture’s mind to wreak havoc. Only Doctor Orpheus can save him, leading to encounters with Rusty’s id, ego and superego; a hysterically funny adventure on first viewing, but a revealing and sad peek into Rusty’s psyche when watched again. All of his motivations are laid bare; thankfully this is a show that has no interest in curing Rusty, though there is a touching grace note in the final scene in which Rusty relates an anecdote about his awful childhood; yet more proof that this exceptional show is more humane than anything else on Adult Swim. Also great: Brock Sampson and Sergeant Hatred’s battle for the Venture Brothers’ affections, more Shore Leave excellence, and the long-awaited kiss between 21 and Dr. Mrs. The Monarch. An instant classic.
More tomorrow. I promise I won’t keep bringing up how much I hate Modern Family. Even though it’s abysmal.
The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (35-31)
Watching TV for a living is probably a depressing job. Poor Harry Hill is reportedly on the verge of quitting TV Burp because he can’t handle having to watch countless hours of Emmerdale and EastEnders. Poor bugger. I’m in a different situation. I watch a shitload of TV because I enjoy it, and can mostly focus on the good stuff, but even with a whole year to prepare for the Caruso Awards, I fall behind. There’s so much to get through, and some of it is really awful. I was genuinely looking forward to watching Camelot so I could have a good laugh, but watching it is agony. Next to Torchwood: Miracle Day and Blue Bloods, it’s the worst of the year.
It’s not just the bad stuff. I’ve also not watched Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, which is unforgivable. That said, part of the reason is the recent, tragic loss of Andy Whitfield, who played our noble hero. He wasn’t in Gods; his illness was the reason the prequel was created in the first place, in order to give him time to recover. Sadly that was not to be. Even though SoC is very much pro-Spartacus, the thought of watching it now is painful. Whitfield had enormous potential, and was a crucial part of the show’s success. His quiet nobility and command of the screen was memorable. He will be sorely missed.
Anyway, this weekend might — might — be the weekend that we watch all six episodes, so it should make it into this year’s awards (I’m that confident), so the real list, the top 30, should be ready to go next week. Until then, a taster. I watched enough TV over the least year that there were a few shows left over, and I thought I wouldn’t get to write about them. But this gives me a chance to hold off a little longer, and so here are the stragglers, the honorable mentions that lie just outside the main list. Nevertheless, they were genuinely good episodes, and I’m glad I get to honour them in my own small way.
35: The Event – Loyalty
The latest incoherent network LEP (Lost-Emulation-Project) spluttered along for five misfiring episodes, giving disgruntled viewers plenty of time to jump ship if need be, but early on there was a hint that there might be more to this alien invasion show than first appeared. Focusing almost solely on alien sleeper agent Simon, Loyalty used the previously exasperating flashback format the way Gods (Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof) intended; to give the viewer an insight into why a character behaves the way he does. The result is a surprisingly poignant tale of love thwarted by misplaced loyalty, as Simon leaves the love of his life for a cause that he can barely bring himself to believe in. Throw in an appearance by hardest-working-guest-star-of-2010-2011 Paula Malcomson and a well-staged FX blowout sequence involving a building being sucked into a wormhole, and you have a solidly entertaining 40 minutes of sci-fi TV.
34: Human Target – The Trouble With Harry
Not much in the disappointing second season of this DC Comics adaptation stood out, other than an amusingly Scroogelike Christmas episode (The Other Side of the Mall, featuring a terrific guest performance from John Michael Higgins) and this late season highlight. After weeks of perfunctory 70s style action nonsense, Human Target finally seemed to come alive and offer something other than cliches and repetitive arguments between the leads. Which is not to say The Trouble With Harry wasn’t riddled with the exact same cliches and arguments, but at least it did it with some verve. Getting first season showrunner Jonathan Steinberg back helped; he seemed to have a better grip on the characters than Matt Miller, who took over at the start of this season. Director Peter Lauer moves things along briskly, staging a couple of nifty action scenes that use the show’s seemingly paltry budget to great effect, and even manages to generate some tension; surprising considering the episode’s flashback format should make that difficult.
33: Glee – Furt
Glee‘s shambolic nature means that it’s next to impossible to care for any of the characters. They’re pieces in a game with no rules, and as such have no inner life to connect with. Events happen, desires are voiced, and dreams are crushed only for these things to be reversed in a short space of time; sometimes in the same scene. Nevertheless, the second season was better than the first, mostly by focusing on its strengths and giving some plotlines a real charge, especially the bullying arc that saw Kurt leave William McKinley High after being repeatedly humiliated by closeted homosexual Karofsky. This episode brings that plot to a head, and ends with Sue Sylvester, temporarily sympathetic as she contends with the reappearance of her awful Nazi-hunting mother (Carol Burnett), resigning as principal. Kurt also leaves for Dalton Academy, and his true love Blaine. Even better, Kurt and Finn’s single parents marry in a moving scene, and for once the flighty, impermanent nature of Glee didn’t matter. This is a show that is all about scenes rather than story, and the joyous marriage ceremony, uniting not just Burt and Carol but also their sons, is the best Glee scene of all.
32: Misfits – Episode Six
Season two of Howard Overman’s irreverent superhero drama was another triumph of ambition and confidence over budget constraints, showing no sign of fatigue. It’s as if he’s single-handedly proving that the British model of TV writing (one author responsible for a short season of TV in order to maintain authorial identity) is the right way. Among the numerous highlights, perhaps this shone brightest. Our anti-heroes are outed by obnoxious probation worker Shaun, and instantly become famous. It’s the worst thing that can happen to the group; their selfishness and arrogance doom them all and the saintlike Daisy after they anger Brian (aka Milkneto, at least to us). The imaginative and deadly use of his superpower (Lactokinesis) is the key to this episode’s success. The group are genuinely in danger; Nathan’s grisly fate is particularly upsetting. In the midst of this, Simon finally discovers that he was/will be Superhoodie, and Alisha reveals she loves him. And that he is doomed to die saving her; classic good news/bad news. Of course, this episode led to an enormous plothole (Simon’s discovery should have been erased by Curtis’ last-act time jump but is still in place in the next episode), and the third season of the show will see Robert Sheehan gone and a team of new writers brought in, so this might be the show’s last great gasp. Fingers crossed I’m 100% wrong.
31: The Killing – Missing
After weeks of running on the spot, AMC’s remake of Forbrydelsen finally stopped moving for an hour, and provided the increasingly frustrated audience with the most moving and propulsive episode of the season. Shorn of the melodramatic sub-plots and histrionic nonsense that infests the programme, showrunner Veena Sud delivers what amounts to a bottle episode, even though the “action” ranges across rainy Seattle. Sarah Linden’s son Jack goes missing at the start of the episode, and she must find him as soon as possible, with the help of her feckless faux-gangster partner Holder. What follows is a quiet hour of conversation that reveals a shared background of parental absence which has scarred both detectives. Ironic, really, considering that the most nuclear family unit in the show – the Larsen family – was hiding terrible secrets that may have led to the delinquency and death of Rosie. Though little “happens”, there are more character revelations, surprises, and heartstopping moments than in the rest of the season put together, bolstered by superb performances from Mirielle Enos and Joel Kinnaman. If the show had just a couple more episodes as good as this, viewers would’ve been a lot happier.
Next week, the list proper, starting with 30-21. And hopefully some Spartacus.
The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Fifth
My pledge to be better tempered didn’t really last. Warning: this is a long and angry one, and it starts with me sounding like an enormous prude. For the record, I am in fact an enormous prude, and all sorts of squelchy on-screen genital manipulation just makes me ill. Luckily I live in a country with universal healthcare, to help me when I’m poorly. OH WAIT SILLY ME apparently I don’t any more. Thanks for brainwashing all the people, money. You truly are the root of all evil. On a day like today, whining about sapphicalism and rampant Torchwoodery seems extra-pointless, but I’ve written my last few Lessons I Learned From Bad TV now, so eat up.
Just because you can put girl-on-girl action into your show doesn’t mean you have to
HBO rightly prides itself on its intelligent, adult drama, but it has, on occasion, overstepped the mark. Game of Thrones had a stellar first season, but even if no episode was actually bad, there were mis-steps. In You Win Or You Die, a mostly good episode was marred by the excruciatingly awful fingerbanging scene, with Littlefinger monologuing about his achy-breaky heart while two women were given the thankless task of writhing around in the background with their boobs emoting like crazy. Poor Esme “Clothes Optional” Bianco (who played Ros); an actress whose near-constant nudity made even Paz De La Huerta look demure.
The scene acted as a laborious visual metaphor for Littlefinger’s philosophy (borne of his bitterness over never winning the love of Catelyn Stark née Tully) and an exhibition of his callous, controlling nature, but more than that, it was endless and laboured, giving away too much about his motivation and thus nullifying the shock of his betrayal at the end of the episode. That’s a bit better than Boardwalk Empire‘s similar scene with Angela Darmody and her lover Mary Dittrich. Yes, it set up the unfortunate beating of Mary’s photographer husband in a later episode following a misunderstanding. Yes, it displayed Mary’s love for Angela. But did we need three and a half deeply unsexy and actually quite unnerving minutes of it?
It’s not prudishness that makes me rail against this; it’s concern that someone at HBO is telling the showrunners to create talking points about the shows involving girl-on-girl action. It’s good to see lesbian relationships on TV; Shades of Caruso is all for it, but please don’t tell me that the Boardwalk Empire scene was included with the intention of celebrating a gay relationship, or trying to “normalise” gay lifestyles on TV. As ever, the ladies have to get nekkid and roll around hooting with orgasmic joy; fun (and edumacational) when served up in small doses, but these overlong scenes crossed over from “progressive” to “leering exploitation”.
For two intelligent shows to pander like that sours the relationship between creators and audience, who don’t want to feel that someone is throwing in sex scenes just because “hey, it’s HBO and that’s what we do”. It feels disrespectful to all concerned. Compare the outrageous sapphic writhing to the shaving scene between Renly and Loras in Game of Thrones, which was sensual, unexploitative and filled with information about the relationship between the two men. That didn’t patronise us. The lesbian love scenes were only there to titillate, and were so cynically added that the main reaction they generated in SoC was embarrassment for all involved.
Points also to Torchwood: Miracle Day for showing what many felt were unnecessary sex scenes between Jack and various men. SoC has far more time for something that shows a loving relationship in Immortal Sins which also just so happened to appear on primetime terrestrial TV, especially as Russell T. Davies has explicitly said he wants to do exactly that. Portraying a gay relationship in a well-known, popular show with a wide audience will have more impact than a gratuitous bit of lesbian sex on a cable network catering to an audience who have paid for the service and expect to be challenged. What we’re saying is more gay sex on TV, but also more gay relationships, and more humanity. Or are we asking for too much?
Don’t be Torchwood
Dammit! As soon as I praised Torchwood: Miracle Day a torrent of bile poured up my spine and into my brain to counteract it. Much as Casanova Frankenstein cannot help but antagonise Captain Amazing, I have to write about Torchwood. This year, however, it’s different. SoC is no longer alone in melodramatically and ineptly waving a plastic gun in the general direction of sci-fi’s most overrated show, and while it feels good to be part of a wider movement against bad TV, there is a sad element to this, and that is our old bugbear; anti-American sentiment.
Online comments about BBC/Starz’ collaboration have been as brutal, mean-spirited and entitled as anything SoC has written in the past; in fact, compared to the vitriol aimed at it our previous criticisms seemed quite mild. I have no problem with this; the show was a catastrophic failure on just about every level. When the only good thing I can say about a supposed high-octane action show was, “I quite enjoyed the moments when the writers couldn’t help but show off all of the research they did into death and population levels through long and clunky monologues about insects,” you know something has gone wrong.
No, my problem with the criticism was that the critical narrative became, “the decision to take our beloved, perfect UK show to the States without our explicit say-so has ruined it by making it more Hollywood.” There is no greater insult in pop-culture discussion than “it’s just Hollywood”. Did you know that in Hollywood they only speak with words of two syllables or lower, and they repeat everything every five minutes in case you missed something? Did you know it’s illegal to not have plastic surgery? No one in Hollywood reads, you see. Bill Hicks said so. It must be true!
UGH. Please hear me when I say Torchwood: Miracle Day was only as bad as the first two seasons of Torchwood, and only a bit worse than Torchwood: Children of Earth. It’s always been this ramshackle. That’s what makes it so delightfully entertaining. It’s a car-crash and always has been, except now it’s a car-crash that has Bill Pullman, Mekhi Pfifer and Lauren Ambrose in it. Their presence hasn’t suddenly ruined the show. Pfifer’s Rex Matheson is no more or less obnoxious than Owen in the first two seasons (and has the same immortal-but-broken plot that Owen had in season two). And Bland Esther Drummond, with her uselessness and ill-defined character? How soon we forget Toshiko Sato.
It’s easy to blame the failure of Torchwood: Miracle Day on some new element, especially one that is bandied about so regularly, but really it was doomed by the oldest element of all. The show was developed poorly from the start, with a hysterical tone bolted onto an ill-defined initial premise that removed the appealing campness of its main character and replaced it with unnecessary modish gloom as a substitute for actual thematic weight. It was broken before it even reached the cameras, and since then the show has doubled down over and over again on this theory that it’s actually a very meaningful and searching exploration of big ideas when it’s actually a bone-headed melodrama delivery system.
The US collaboration with the show didn’t suddenly introduce anything other than too many episodes; this could have been an efficient two-parter, but just as Children of Earth took too long to tell its story, this tried to fool us into thinking a lot was going on when the majority of it was spent wasting time explaining instead of revealing, or introducing half-formed ideas that are never paid off (e.g. Oswald Danes, the biggest single waste of TV time since the invention of the cathode-ray tube). Yes, it’s a shame the story was stretched to ten episodes, but BBC Worldwide is trying to create franchises that it can sell around the world and so adjustments to the format are necessary. It’s not just Starz that’s to blame for this. They only got the BBC out of its funding problems by co-producing, which is going to have to happen more often with the licence fee hobbled by the Tories.
And as for the ten-episode mini-series format, if this interview is to believed the idea came from Russell T. Davies, not from some Starz mandate. It’s something he intends to keep doing, but as I said regarding Camelot, the show needs to sharpen its focus if its ever going to rise above its ignominious past. It’s possible to do that even with a long-arc serialised season. The highlight of the season was Immortal Sins, the flashback episode that fleshed out Jack’s past. It had its problems (oh so many problems), but it had an emotional charge and a straight-forward narrative. It belonged in a better show.
Especially as the show proper was all over the place, and a simple throughline would have done wonders, even if the traditional Torchwood flaws (risible attempts at machismo, excessive padding, shonky lighting, hysterical overacting, etc.) were present. Torchwood‘s focus on the mystery of death has been one of the few interesting things about it, even though it never really seems to come up with a coherent idea about it. The central idea of this season — that death is replaced by planet-wide immortality — is unusual and full of potential. RTD seemed to agree; it felt like this was a response to the US debate over healthcare, and the ridiculous “Death Panels” idea floated by Sarah Palin.
Unfortunately, the inherent silliness and illogicality of Palin’s made-up Death Panels meant that this show’s own Death Panels made absolutely no sense. The big reveal in the middle of the series is that camps have been set up to house the millions of terminally injured but non-dying patients who are triaged into one of three categories, with Category One being for those pronounced brain-dead, or in a state of incapacity that would equal death if the mysterious mystery at the heart of the show hadn’t made everything “superalive” or whatever the daft exposition would have it. Category One patients are incinerated out the back, and this is portrayed as a horrible thing.
More horrible than lying on a dirty hospital bed, stinking of filth, trapped in agony and unable to do anything about it? In the middle of the season Torchwood seemed to be using your classic anti-euthanasia argument, multiplied to infinity. It’s rather confusing. Until that point, the show goes to great lengths to explain that humanity is totes fucked by the lack of death, and drastic measures are called for, so you’d think euthanasia is a worthy solution, especially when the healing abilities of humanity have not been clearly explained by the showrunners. Can people heal? Rex is injured throughout; a frustrating and pretty much unworkable idea which also makes a mockery of the resolution to the mystery; the big stone thing that resets humanity after coming into contact with Jack’s blood only confers immortality, but not his rapid healing ability, which makes no sense at all.
So anyway, we’re meant to think the euthanasia is horrible, so it’s portrayed as a particularly barbaric act by a) having the victims burned alive while still conscious, and b) showing Doctor Vera Juarez being murdered by the insane caricature of a demented perverted racist bureaucrat played by poor Marc Vann from CSI and Lost. Firstly, why aren’t the victims knocked out first? Why just burn them without palliative care? I’m sure the showrunners would say, “Because humanity is so evil!!?!” but this is just absurd loading of the equation, and thus any point to be made here is swallowed up by the contrivance necessary to get there.
The other point, that the bad guys are going to use the classification of life and death as an excuse to kill off people who aren’t actually ready for death (either by the evil evilness of Dr. Pervy Bureaucrat or just by the usual slippery-slopiness of moral arguments as experienced by philosophy students), is the usual kind of anti-government hysteria that inspired Sarah Palin to expel the phrase-turd “Death Panels” in the first place. The mundanity of evil and all that. Just to undercut this point more, the show had already by that point shown that there was a group of doctors who were making informed medical decisions, giving hope that a sudden, massive change in the nature of life and death would bring about a well-considered solution by the world’s greatest minds, but I suppose Torchwood is merely imagining the worst possible outcome. Who needs subtlety when showrunners can add subtlety-free supervillains, thus abrogating their responsibility to provide a balanced ethical quandary for us to pick over?
Of course, writing this on the day that The House of Lords decided to allow the privatisation of the NHS means my arguments about the better nature of man seem particularly wrong-headed, but I honestly don’t believe that such a process would be approached with such stupidity. It’s a depressingly negative view of government, so needlessly melodramatic that I wonder if RTD was actually satirising the infinite stupidity of Sarah Palin and her desperate Tea Party cultists. These are people who are so detached from decision-making, so mystified by rationality, so devoid of empathy and so threatened by “Elitism” (aka “Not being incredibly, proudly incurious about the way the world works”) that they would happily assume anyone who has read a book about anything is secretly a Nazi, and therefore would happily doom us all because the only thing they have on their side is the ability to be monstrous fucking bullies without the capacity for reflection and who can then ride roughshod over the rest of us like Klansmen of the modern age. They literally have absolutely no shame, no shame at all, no urge to accept that they’re wrong or confused by life, no awareness of their monumental awfulness, no realisation that history will judge them as the worst of the world, who need to just back off and let the fucking adults sort this shit out. All they have is cruelty, and an urge to masturbate frenetically at the thought of a fellow human suffering. Shun these vile assholes out of society, into the naughty corner, until they forget the point of the Randian soundbite that pissed them off in the first place and triggered their anti-intellectual pogrom.
::Deep breaths:: So anyway, the central idea of the show makes very little sense when you pick it apart. This isn’t the only thing wrong with it. There’s some misguided idea that featuring an unrepentant paedophile as a main character, whose good fortune in being executed at the moment that immortality falls on humanity means he and he alone is somehow treated as a Messiah, will make for some compelling drama or give them the chance to explore some point about evil mistaken for good simply because a miracle occurs. It’s another moronic idea, that only works if you accept that humans will look to this man as the Second Coming. Why him? Just because people are paying attention to his imminent death? Yet again Torchwood is mistaken in thinking the worst of humanity in an attempt to clumsily bolt some “Meaning” onto their show.
And yet this is dramatised in such a way as to make no real point. Oswald Danes, portrayed by Bill Pullman as a haggard sack of seizure-esque acting tics — all clenched jaws, rolling eyes, waggling arms; a billion metric tonnes of acting in need of direction — makes no sense at all. What is he there for? Could the show have done without him? All he does is fill time and give Lauren Ambrose (as the excessively-named Jilly “Jilly Kitzinger!” Kitzinger) something to do. Which is fine for Lauren Ambrose fans such as myself, but seeing her playing the gallumphing loudmouth Jilly Kitzinger was torture. Yes, I was not a fan of Jilly Kitzinger. Sorry, Jilly Kitzinger fans! (Someone please tell RTD that repeating a funny name over and over again does not count as dialogue.)
Oswald serves zero purpose in the show. There is no point made about human gullibility because it is literally IMPOSSIBLE that anyone would embrace a man as disgusting and unapologetically mustache-twirlingly evil as this when his survival is only as “miraculous” as the millions of other technically-identical incidents that happened at the same time around the world. There’s no point made about morality (his evil is never questioned or modulated) or redemption (he doesn’t give a shit right to the end). All that happened is that someone in the writers’ room said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and no one had the balls to say, “No, because there’s nothing we can do with that character.”
And don’t get me started on the finale. For it to work, most of the characters had to become psychic. Why did Jack stockpile his blood? How did he know it would be important, especially when his immortality was linked to his status as a “fixed point in time” (AKA a convenient Doctor Who plot point inserted to stop the omnipotent characters just fixing every problem in the first act of each episode) and not just because he was filled with magical go-juice? How did Rex know that the blood could be destroyed in a secret attack, thus inspiring him to replace his own blood with Jack’s just on the off-chance? What if anything had happened to him as well? Awfully convenient that it didn’t.
And as for the reveal that everything that had happened for the whole series was merely a way for the big bad to prepare for an even bigger evil plan, does anyone else wonder if RTD is secretly screaming in horror that there will be another series, and he’s going to have to actually come up with something that explains the hundreds of plotholes, inconsistencies and transparent narrative fudges that made the show look like a rat-eaten patchwork quilt? Because if he actually has a grand plan for next season, I’ll eat Captain Jack’s lovely coat.
Look, I know that there are fans out there who might wander across this blog and either praise me for taking a stand against the sullied US version of their favourite show, and there might be other fans who come armed with large metallic drums full of Grade-A FanWank to prove me wrong about some plot criticism. If you want to do the latter, please don’t bother. I’m sure there were dozens of lines added at the last minute to try to excuse a plothole, some magical bit of exposition that adds another rule to the already rule-heavy narrative. They’re magical wands inserted into the story to excuse a poorly thought-out plot which, as with Children of Earth, was little more than a handful of setpiece moments that RTD was attached to and wouldn’t abandon even when he didn’t have time to come up with an organic, logical plot that connected those events. The fantastical magical exposition that litters his work means nothing. It’s just words.
That’s all this show has been. A bunch of words that mean nothing, as empty as the blurb on the homepage of a creative consultancy’s website. All posture, all flash and dazzle, ineptly served up with nothing underneath other than a hundred ideas mashed together in the hope that it will seem relevant or meaningful or emotionally resonant. But what we need is one idea, polished and presented with less gaudy tinsel, no posing, no dullard-baiting “adult content”. I’d take a single thought-provoking, challenging idea over any of this. It was a disaster. You want your Caruso Awards Worst Episodes of the Year list? Torchwood: Miracle Day is the top ten.
Well, I got angry then. Blame that news about the NHS. Last week I was pissed about the BBC and now this. Congratulations, Tory shitslime. Your desire to turn this country into a less pleasant version of Westeros is going according to plan. ::sigh:: Now I’m depressed. And so I am now about to move onto the best episodes of the year! I’m going to enjoy that. Good TV; I watch that too, you know.
The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Fourth
Longtime readers will know that I’ve dedicated much of the last few years obsessively watching Cuse and Lindelof’s sci-fi masterpiece Lost, and that I liked the finale. Many didn’t, and with great and terrifying vehemence. I half-expect friend-of-the-blog @MhairiMcF to throw a sharpened copy of season 6 at my throat for suggesting it was a success right to the final, beautiful shot. I appreciate this is not the general consensus, but I’m a MAVERICK who’s not afraid to say what he thinks, except for when I write huge caveat-posts attempting to explain away my horrible cowardice.
Anyway, I’ve spent a long time boring my loyal readers about that Ben Linus and the very significant shot of an Avalon (not Apollo) chocolate bar in the finale (the key to it all), and I’m about to do it again even though it is no longer with us. No, come back! Please don’t run away; I’m trying to work out some thoughts on the nature of mystery in narrative, and how to set up small plot bombs on the way to the big stuff. This is even more on my mind after watching the masterful Breaking Bad season 4 finale, which paid off stuff I didn’t even realise needed to be paid off. Truly Breaking Bad is a thing of great wonderment. If you care about TV or storytelling, it has much to teach you. (Spoilers for Lost and Doctor Who follow.)
There’s a way to create mystery without also creating frustration and boredom
As a die-hard fan of Lost, in a world in which such an opinion makes a person some form of awful pop-culture pariah, I’m aware that my thoughts on long-arc mystery stories may be dismissed by you, the reader, especially by the time you have finished the next part of this sentence; I think Lost, a show now widely considered to have completely arsed up the landing, is one of the best examples of generating mystery in a long-run show. The finale transformed many former fans into board members of Pitchforks and Torches Inc., and I understand that, even while I pledge my allegiance to it. The final answers couldn’t satisfy everybody, though sadly they seemed to piss off almost all of the fans.
Nevertheless, it must have been doing something right to keep as many people invested for so long, and my super-scientific study of the show has identified two important elements in the way the mystery developed; the greater mystery of the Island was supplemented by smaller mysteries that were resolved in the meantime, and the larger mysteries were supported by numerous hints and clues that allowed audiences to create their own theories about what the ultimate meaning of the show might have been (and I still maintain that the genius of the show is that many unresolved elements have kept these debates going among my brothers-in-arms, who hide from view for fear of being murdered by haters).
Examples of the former are numerous. Though the new consensus on Lost is that many mysteries were dragged out for a long time, it took less than a (short) season to find out What Lies In The Shadow Of The Statue. The hatch is a mystery for about half of the first season, and then we found out what was inside at the start of the second. Even the reason for polar bears being on the island is revealed very early on, if you were willing to expend a bit of energy reading up about the Dharma Initiative online. Etc. etc. etc. The resolutions may have disappointed some, but the timescales were often shorter than critics maintain.
It’s easier to keep viewers invested if you’re throwing bones to them at regular intervals. Even better, giving the audience room to create their own theories helps too, and Lost was very good at introducing plot elements that serviced alternate interpretations throughout its run. Almost every revelation was ambiguous enough to strengthen all giant theories. The best example might be the run-up to season five’s finale. There was a chance that detonating a nuclear bomb at the site of the Swan Station could save the heroes or trigger the events that doom them; the summer after that incredible final whiteout aired was a great time to be a committed Lost fan, as debate raged over which possible interpretation was the right one.
And so to this year’s shows. Three examples of disappointing-to-disastrous long-arc planning come to mind; Doctor Who, The Event and The Killing, all of which fail in different ways and to different degrees. Who ended strongly with The Wedding of River Song, paying off the events of the season opener in a reasonably satisfying way, though it also repeated one of the show’s long-standing mistakes; not giving the audience a sense of when the end game will arrive. Lost had the benefit of having an end date, as well as a goal for the characters (getting off the island for good), that made sense to all viewers. An essential element of successful element of long-arc storytelling is giving clues as to the shape of the final story, which can be done without giving away any plot elements or surprises. That’s where Steven Moffat’s show falls down. How, and when, will Who end?
Of course Who isn’t going anywhere — it has become very lucrative and ridiculously popular, no matter how the press likes to spin the viewing figures by pretending timeshifting doesn’t exist — but it seems obvious now that what had seemed to be one season arc in Moffat’s first year was actually the beginning of a multi-season arc of head-melting complexity. Massive kudos to him for doing that, but the feeling that answers and resolutions are on the way is constantly being stymied. Having a better idea of when this long story will finish would help shape our expectations, but as the final scene of The Wedding of River Song came around, only then did it become apparent that we weren’t going to find out everything just yet.
And that’s fine, even if some of the answers we’ve had along the way (River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter, and she “killed” the Doctor) are not really surprises at all. Nevertheless, the big arc is not paying off quickly enough, or establishing a recognisable shape, to allow the casual viewer to get a grip on it. Moffat has rejected criticisms that the show is too complicated to understand, and I’m willing to agree with him on that, but it is very complex, and the millions of ideas being thrown out are not allowing the viewer to paint a picture in their own head of what the final story will look like, even if they’re completely wrong because there are still some tricks up Moffat’s sleeve.
What are The Silence? What is their plan? Did I miss this? I must admit the gabbled dialogue distracts me so much I miss a lot of the detail. They’re a religious order? Like the Order of the Headless and the future militant arm of the Anglican Church? At times like this I enjoy Moffat’s ambition, and I look forward to his resolution, but I feel like I do when I read some of Grant Morrison’s craziest comics; like I’ve come in halfway through the story and have missed a lot of important plotpoints, and I can’t prioritise which loose ends and currently redundant events will end up being relevant to the big arc, and so have forgotten many of the key moments and characters whenever they pop up again. Even if I get comments explaining this stuff to me, I can’t make it make sense in my head. As a result, despite sporadic bursts of great enjoyment, the show has become less interesting to me.
I’m not sure how this can be fixed, though it would be nice if we wasted less time on standalone episodes and actually spent more time fleshing out these concepts instead of leaving them as tantalising hints of a greater universe. Perhaps that would make the show more comprehensible, and allow us to interact with it more (though I can see from a quick search that Who theories are almost as widespread as Lost ones). I’m aware that feeling like an outsider here is how many felt with Lost, and basically I’m getting a taste of what it was like to casually watch Lost in a state of frustration. Maybe Who‘s ultimate failing is to not be “my kind of thing” the way Lost was, which is no fault of the show.
The Event‘s long-arc failed mostly because the mysteries posed early on were thrown out as the show tried to find a form that was appealing to anyone. The aliens were pretty sympathetic in earlier episodes, which meant the show’s bad guys were often humans. Obviously this was too confusing for viewers, who abandoned the show after its spectacular pilot, and so the show contorted itself into knots trying to move the aliens into a villain role, though it commendably made their motives justified on some levels. The Event was at its best when it explored this moral quandary, which sadly wasn’t often enough.
It also didn’t help that the show spent a long time dramatising the mysterious actions of James Dempsey (Hal Holbrook), a shady conspiracy archetype injecting himself with YouthJuice and conspiring with various characters from his gloomy Office of Mysterious Conspiracy. What could he be doing? Was he a threat to humans or aliens? Before the end of the season, perhaps sensing that the show was going in the wrong direction, we find out he’s one of a race of Sentinels who protect the Earth from alien invasion. And then, moments after revealing this, he kills himself so the show can become a 24 clone. He’s never mentioned again. Any investment in this plot was a waste of time, and that’s a deep wound to a show based on resolving a mystery.
Even a scene as ridiculous as Hal Holbrook shooting himself in the head after telling the protagonist to stop wasting time chasing him instead of looking for aliens (hell of a nod and a wink to the audience there) is preferable to the tricks played by the team behind The Killing, which dragged a relatively simple story out to absurd length by introducing suspects, making them seem as guilty as it’s possible to be, and then excusing them three episodes later in the most contrived manner possible and never speaking of them again. The show isn’t about people, or life, or even about the murder of Rosie Larsen and how that affects her community. It’s a shell game.
The Killing does just about everything wrong in making a long-form show about a single case. Though it’s been a long time since I saw the first season of Murder One, I remember it did a number of things right that The Killing didn’t even try to do. It supplemented the main mystery (Did Neil Avedon kill Jessica Costello?) with other plots, not least the tension between lawyer and professional BADASS Teddy Hoffman and his nemesis Richard Cross. There was always something else going on, and payoffs littered the first season. There’s no comparison between those plots and The Killing‘s secondary stories. A delayed wedding? A search for a mole in a political campaign (yes, a subplot similarly plagued by red herrings) dramatised by literally THOUSANDS of scenes involving William Campbell and his minions arguing about emails? Who cares?
Murder One also promised a resolution by the end of the season, and we got one. I remember thinking it was pretty satisfying, especially the final fate of Cross, which was poignant and brilliantly performed by Stanley “Ol’ Dependable” Tucci. The Killing hinted at something similar and then went out of its way to render the majority of the season completely superfluous. As with all of those shows that plot for the finale (see previous posts), it made the viewer conscious that they had wasted a lot of time. It wasn’t just the lack of resolution; it was realising that the build-up had been empty entertainment calories. That was the show’s great betrayal. A disappointing ending is one thing, but to regularly piss on us on the way there is unforgivable.
Pandering to an inappropriate audience doesn’t work
No Ordinary Family was not much fun to watch, despite the entertaining interplay between Michael Chiklis and Romany Malco, but then it was aimed at a very specific demographic. To a family with young teenage children, the show might have been a lot of fun, like an undemanding Incredibles rip-off with some bland banter and a couple of poorly shot action scenes in a car park every week (seriously, the majority of the show’s “action” takes place in the same car park, and usually involved someone being punched into the side of a van). That audience never really materialised, but instead of trying harder to win that audience over, it became more interested in chasing a nerd audience that would never accept it.
Throwing in references to specific comic tropes, or casting actors from Battlestar Galactica (a show aimed squarely at adults, let’s not forget), was not going to bring in an audience that would not be served by anything else in the show. Most comic fans were rightly wary of the low-level superheroics on display. It was not a show for them, and no matter how hard Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim tried (the guys who co-wrote the execrable Green Lantern, FFS), superhero fans were more likely to enjoy Alphas, a show that was smarter, funnier, and more gratifying than this. Guest appearances by Brent Spiner, Rebecca Mader (who also showed up in No Ordinary Family, playing a similar character) and Caprica‘s John Pyper-Ferguson made much more sense; they played internally-consistent villains, and were gratefully received by fans who appreciated that they were being catered for by showrunners who understood their interests.
More to come. I’ll keep the Lost chatter to a minimum. (SMILEYFACE)
The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Third
Please forgive me for that angry detour. And now, on with the complaining about bad TV.
Properly think through any second season revamps for shows that have only just avoided cancellation
V was never a good show (sorry @DarkEyeSocket). It was exactly the kind of nervous, apologetic sci-fi show churned out by a network with no real idea why they were revamping a beloved original other than that some mis-programmed spreadsheet somewhere said it was worth $Xm when actually it was worth a tin of chicken pie filling. For an alien invasion series that had a bunch of potential, V did nothing, it said nothing, its characters were inconsistent for the most part, it recycled plots over and over again, and it looked cheap. I couldn’t really hate it, though, mostly because things as time-distortingly boring as this usually only breed low, pulsating resentment.
That said, at least the showrunners seemed aware they had problems with the show; it limped into a second season with not much buzz and little critical attention, and so they needed to up their game to bring in new viewers. The first season ends with an overt act of aggression against evil alien leader Anna, which makes her lose her otherworldly shit and turn the skies red, while vowing to hunt the killer of her diabolically evil offspring. Exciting stuff (really, it was promising). So how did season two continue?
- Anna does not get her revenge, and her “Red Rain” attack on Earth is instantly forgiven by everyone after a speech explaining that red rain is a nice thing.
- Alien traitor Ryan vows to help Anna, then betrays her by helping resistance leader Erica.
- He then betrays the humans by helping Anna. This is followed by another betrayal of Anna by helping Erica.
- There are also lots of scenes of Ryan trying to sneak off, and onto, the alien mothership, pausing only to explain to people why he is sneaking off, or onto, the ship. No one seems that bothered.
- Father Jack gets defrocked and wears a sad face for the rest of the season.
- Jay Karnes appears. Shield fans are momentarily as excited as Firefly fans were when they saw Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin on the castlist for the pilot. This euphoria lasts about ten minutes.
- Some stuff happens with Scott Wolf’s character but I wasn’t paying attention. I think he joins the Shriners? Or buys a dog?
- Erica’s angry chip breaks because her vile teenage son has a number of tantrums related to him sucking as a person.
- The rest of the resistance group congregates in its traditional awkward Circle of Debating to argue with her over every poorly-thought-through decision she makes from then on. This happens at least three times an episode.
- The finale comes around after nine repetitive episodes, kills off a bunch of characters, introduces new ones, and completely changes the game in a number of ways that show great potential.
- The show is then cancelled.
I guess what I’m saying is, if you have some radical ideas for how the show should be, introduce that shit IMMEDIATELY and don’t think you can just bluff your way through with low viewing figures. You don’t have time to be coy. The changes from season one to season two were just not dramatic enough. Look at how The Vampire Diaries stepped up its game about halfway through its first season, with an almost exponential increase in quality by the time the second season started. What looked like a tedious Twilight cash-in is now an indecently entertaining show with a modicum of justified critical respectability. That’s the model to emulate.
The other model to ignore was used by Human Target. SoC has long believed that dramatic shows with a small cast are onto a loser; you need a big cast of characters to have a wide array of storytelling possibilities to explore. Angel got really good when its core cast jumped from three to five, and the addition of Lorne in the fifth season pushed it over the top (Correction: TV writer and Angel fanatic @RowanKaiser maintains Lorne became a regular in season 4. Ooopsies!). Lost had a huge cast, and the show was able to fly off in directions no one could have predicted (especially as it wasn’t Purgatory at the end it was a Tibetan Bardo SHUT UP HATERS you just don’t understand Lost on the same deep level I do).
With a barely-serialised action show like Human Target, a huge cast wasn’t the point, but even though the first season was fun enough, three main characters (and no women) was a problem. Even at its best, it was a bit mundane, with not enough variety from week to week. Sadly, the introduction of two new (female) characters didn’t go the way I had hoped, not helped that showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg was replaced by Chuck producer Mark Miller. As longtime readers will know, SoC is not fond of Chuck. It is the TV equivalent of mercury in the water table. It’s telling that Steinberg wrote some of the best episodes of the second season, proving he knows the show very well. Who knows why he was moved aside, but it didn’t work out.
Sadly the chemistry of Mark Valley, Jackie Earle Haley and SoC favourite Chi McBride was damaged by the introduction of Indira Varma and Janet Montgomery. Not because the actresses were bad; far from it. What was wrong was their effect on the spiky leads. Grouchy, mysterious Guerrero became an increasingly sentimental father figure for Montgomery’s Ames (an inevitable but unfortunate “arc” for a mean loner, I guess), Winston became superfluous as his position as “tetchy fusspot” was taken over by Varma’s new boss character Ilsa Pucci, and charming gadabout Christopher Chance fell for his new boss in a Moonlighting stylee.
All of those plot threads make perfect sense. They follow from what the characters were at the end of the first season and resolve their issues, more or less. Great if you only want one more season, but ruinous for a show that could have stayed on the air for a while, if it had ever learned to offer something, ANYTHING, that differentiated it from any number of crunching action shows on the air. The first season had a touch of quirk; it looked like it could go places. The second season made every character less compelling and added nothing else to make up for it. With its odd touches of character gone, the show dribbled to an ignominious end. A real shame.
So I guess the lesson I learned here is, if your show isn’t awesome enough at the end of the first season, make it more awesome, and not less awesome. I guess I’d like to see shows capitalise on the things that make them unique instead of excising them and aiming for the middle, but I think all of us already knew that. ::shrugs::
On a procedural show, a rigid format is a bonus. On a serialised show, it’s death
This is another way of saying “if you can’t break it, you’re gonna wear it out instead”. In the latest season of Dexter, our anti-hero improbably fell for Lumen, the victim of a gang of rapist murderers (::sigh:: What a delightful show) after accidentally saving her. Coming so soon after the death of his wife Rita, this plotline was introduced with the intention of bringing Dexter back from the grief he felt, though that grief was listlessly dramatised after the first episode, in which he snapped and finally killed an innocent guy (though he was a REALLY REALLY NASTY innocent guy, so it’s not like this guy mattered at all, right?).
The possibilities of this were promising, as was the show’s greater interest in using the secondary cast, especially weaselly tough guy Quinn. Could the show finally break new ground, stopping the endless loop of Serial Killer/Family Man dramatics? Sadly, no. While this season did a better job of weaving the secondary character arcs with Dexter’s, the usual flaws were abundant. In the season finale, Dexter is once more on the verge of being discovered by the police — this time his sister — but gets away with it because of her decision to just look the other way, which is conveniently made in such a way as to protect his identity. Once more Dexter has no agency in these matters, because acting to protect himself would put him in a format-ruining situation.
Even worse, his new love Lumen bolts almost immediately after the big finale due to contractual obligations and the necessity of resetting the show for next year, leaving Dexter bereft, just as he was at the start of the season. This season could have given Dexter an interesting arc, showing how his grief transforms him, curing his serial killer tendencies and turning him into a normal human being. But there’s money to be made in churning out years more of this crap, so Dexter has to walk on the spot for two more seasons (unless Showtime falls out with Michael C. Hall), thus rendering a promising idea about grief and loss into an underwhelming metaphor for how sucky it is to have a rebound relationship fall apart after a couple of months.
Part of the problem comes when a show is so wedded to its format that it cannot escape it. Dexter must remain a forensic expert working for the police, so he must never be caught and no one close to him can ever find out. He must also stay sympathetic so he can never kill an innocent (unless they’re REALLY REALLY POINTLESSLY ILLOGICALLY NASTY). Nevertheless, there has to be tension, so his secret identity is threatened until he is forced to do something that breaks his code and ooops! Someone else makes a decision that lets him off the hook. Every season ends like this. It taints every accomplishment of the show with a thick sticky veneer of pointlessness.
Look at Glee. The showrunners can add as many George Gershwin tunes and shots of the Lincoln Centre to their season finale, but it doesn’t make the tired formula any easier to digest. Even if the show didn’t have a writing staff of three, Glee has become far too reliant on a season arc that seemingly cannot change. Everything boils down to the club winning the regionals to get to the national championships, with each episode mixing up the relationships between the characters into a finite series of patterns. Who cares about Rachel and Finn? Do even Glee fans care? No one on the show has ever seemed to, so why should we?
Glee‘s three showrunners would do well to look at how Friday Night Lights transcended its similar school-year-based formula to provide seasons that felt individual. Not only did that break its formula at the end of season three — with Coach Taylor transferred to a new school – but each season felt distinct from the others either by making the Panthers lose early (season two, if the truncated arc went in the direction I think it was going), by introducing a new team with no hope of winning (season four), or taking them all the way to the top either as beloved heroes or despised underdogs (seasons one and five respectively). Glee has no interest in that. It has one story to tell, and apparently its fans are just fine with that. The rest of us crave more, though.
Avoid comedy episodes in a show that already wears its comedic moments lightly
One of the great joys of the last year has been discovering a real gem. Even with the huge amount of criticial praise thrown as The Good Wife, it still seemed like a soapy trifle, thanks to that premise and many of the trails shown on More4. How to describe the thrill of watching the show and realising it’s the most perceptive, adult, and well-constructed political dramas of our time, a West Wing without Sorkin’s blither clogging up the ethical debates and weighty interpersonal strife? With Friday Night Lights gone, The Good Wife is easily the best thing on network TV.
But it’s not all plain sailing. The show is often slyly funny, with jokes coming from character more than situation. Though Eli Gold is sometimes played for laughs, the show never goes all-out for cheap giggles, except for once. The late-season episode Foreign Affairs featured a cringe-inducing comedy sub-plot with a faceless “Hugo Chavez” appearing via teleconference, “hilariously” ranting about Courtney Love, with Fred Dalton Thompson – as himself – acting as Chavez’ lawyer in front of a star-struck Ana Gasteyer.
The effect is excruciating to watch. Maybe someone thought this would be a nice treat for the audience, or a break from the show’s usual heavy subject matter. Whoever that person is, they were wrong. The Good Wife is exactly as funny – and good-natured – as it needs to be. If you’ve mastered the tone of your show, any meddling will stick out like a sore thumb, especially as the episode ends on one of the most dramatic reveals of the season. Coming after the earlier hijinks, the big emotional scene at the end is muted.
Game of Thrones got the tone problem exactly right; by keeping the jokes to a minimum and localised mostly to Tyrion Lannister, who was then thrown into terrible situations where the contrast between his demeanour and the seriousness of his predicament gave insight into his character. The trial in the Eyrie, which sees him arrogantly acting like he has control of the situation when in fact he only prevails through good fortune and the kindness of Bronn — partially earned because of his humour — is a perfect example of the tension between humour and drama. And, just for good measure, the showrunners cut down heavily on the screentime for “comedy relief” Hodor. A very shrewd move.
Okay, there’s more to come. I know! It’s too much! Something broke in my head while I was writing this and now I can’t stop.
-
Who We Are
admiralneck
daisyhellcakes
masticateur
Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
