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.
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)
It never ends! This is the bad thing about not blogging regularly: I have a year’s worth of observations stuck in my brain, and only by barfing them out here can I get some rest. Seriously, I haven’t slept in about eleven months. I just sit in the spare room going, “Jon Hamm: very handsome. Zachary Quinto: seen enough of him for another year”. Hopefully our pain will end soon and I can either never blog again or at least change the subject. Maybe I’ll just start blogging about books I never normally do that.
Best Couple of the Year (According to me and not Daisyhellcakes): Raylan Givens and Ava Crowder – Justified
Before we get into a more technical appraisal of what makes Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) and Ava (Joelle Carter) the most interesting couple of the year, we have to accept that two very good looking and sexy people with immediate and startling chemistry are already well on their way to becoming fan favourites. One of the key moments of the pilot for FX’s Justified came when our hero — hunting his former colleague and now nemesis Boyd Crowder — turns up on the doorstep of his high-school sweetheart Ava. It’s a scene that Scott Tobias describes well in his review of the episode:
I loved the chemistry between Raylan and Ava, Boyd’s sister-in-law, played by an absurdly sexy Joelle Carter. Ava is on the hook for murdering her abusive husband, which obviously puts her in danger with Boyd and company, but she and Raylan know each other, too. Their greeting on her front porch is something else, like an attraction so electric that they lose any sense of social or professional politesse.
Much of the first season concerns them fighting their obvious desires in a pretty half-hearted manner considering how soon in the season they hop into the sack, which naturally puts Raylan’s job in jeopardy. What’s most amusing about that is that he doesn’t really seem to care: he’s so laidback and confident he just figures it will resolve itself without his intervention. Of course, he is eventually temporarily suspended, and the relationship falters not long after that, but only because Ava won’t listen to Raylan’s good advice about getting out of town to avoid the wrath of the Crowders. Maybe that’s the key to the relationship: both of them are smart but bull-headed, and so the tension in the will-they-won’t-they plot — which often comes across as contrived — is an extension of a very believable dynamic. They’re not kept apart by social convention or contrivance or even Raylan’s job (because for the most part he doesn’t seem to think he needs to cut off his relationship with Ava): they’re always on the brink of splitting up because they won’t back down from their core beliefs.
Nevertheless, as great as this couple is, there is another romantic sub-plot for Raylan to contend with. His ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea, completely forgiven for her depressing stint in Dirty Sexy Money after her appearances in Hung and Justified) is also on the scene, and though she is now married and has had enough of Raylan’s dark side for one lifetime, he obviously still loves her and has a chemistry just as potent as with Ava. Because basically Timothy Olyphant is very good at this: his chemistry with Molly Parker on Deadwood was similarly smoking. What the hell is going on with him? He is like a walking sexual reactor, giving off Orgone radiation and turning all of his co-stars into glowing, sex-irradiated hottness sponges.
Anyway, the relationship with Winona runs through more traditional routes — she’s married, he’s pissed her off, he’s conflicted because of his feelings for Ava — but that doesn’t stop them getting together eventually. We lucky viewers get to see our hero find a partner and then lose her, as well as pine for a lost love and then slowly rekindle it. How lucky we are to have a show with two compelling romantic sub-plots: most shows can’t manage one. Of course, there’s always a possibility that you will root for one relationship over the other, and that’s what happened at SoC HQ. I’m a member of Team Ava, and Daisyhellcakes is resolutely on the side of Team Winona. I think we can both agree that this is a far more interesting choice than Team Edward and Team Jacob, especially as there is a good case for either Ava or Winona, whereas if you’re Team Edward you’re mad, as Jacob is at least not a murderous corpse with a bouffant. Ava and Winona are well-realised characters, well-played by two talented actresses, and when they are onscreen with Raylan your TV will start to ignite and then fire outwards like some Martian heat-ray. I’ll stick with them, thanks very much. (ETA: Hello Olyphant fans on LJ! Shades of Caruso is proud to be Team Raylan first and foremost, because he’s one charming son of a bitch.)
Most Tragic Couple of the Year: Dale Tomasson and Alby Grant – Big Love
When I nominate this relationship as being the saddest of the year, I have to note that it’s a depressing cliche to see two gay men come together, be miserable because they know they can’t be together, and then have one of them take their own life because they can’t take the shame of it. It’s nothing new, and it reinforces cultural belief that a gay relationship must inevitably come with such crippling emotional pain that it’s not even worth doing. That’s the bleakest possible read of the relationship. What makes this a coupling that is worthy of praise is the lovely and disarming work by Matt Ross (never better than here) and Benjamin Koldyke, who play the two men as innocents struggling to make sense of their feelings while weighed down with fear. It’s a new note for Ross to play, and he really goes for it: his love for Dale is simultaneously sweet, creepy, and horribly depressing. Koldyke is ostensibly the elder here, and should be more responsible, but he turns into an adolescent whenever Alby is near. It’s heartbreaking to watch.
At least two shows this year managed to show gay relationships that were normal: a bit of an event, really. Modern Family had Cameron and Mitchell, who were a cuddly gay couple with an adopted daughter, and represented one of the few things I liked about that abominable show, though as this excellent article points out (thanks to @werdsmiffery for the link), there are big problems with the way they are portrayed in the most non-threatening manner possible. Even more notable was Caprica‘s Sam Adama, who has a husband (yes, wingnuts, a TV show featuring a planet that has LEGAL GAY MARRIAGE fuck you, and if that hurts your ickle feelings my heart soars to hear it). We don’t see him much, but then that’s the beauty of it. Sam is a gay man married to another and they do fine and it’s no big deal. Except it obviously is a big deal, otherwise I wouldn’t mention it, but I have to say, after months of hearing hate-filled douchebags pretending that their opposition to gay marriage is a constitutional issue (when it’s actually revulsion and anyone smarter than a fungus knows that it’s revulsion), just seeing an acceptance of gay marriage on a TV show made me absurdly happy. Some more screentime for Sam’s husband would be nice (mentioning him and then not showing him except for a quick glimpse seems like a dodge just as bad as Cameron and Mitchell showing so little affection), but even this small detail on the show not only makes the world of Caprica more interesting, it also makes the TV landscape a little less homogenous, a little more inviting.
Best Reality TV Moment: So You Think You Can Dance – Alex and Twitch
Reality TV doesn’t really do it for me. Sure, I adore Top Chef – surely the highwater mark for reality TV: talented people doing amazing things under extreme pressure with personal bullshit kept to the minimum for the most part — and I still like America’s Next Top Model for the most part, usually whenever the models are obviously following orders to worship Empress Tyra, but the shows that take place on a stage leave me cold. I have no time for X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent or Strictly Come Dancing, even though I appreciate those shows do a great job of uniting huge audiences together in a shared experience, and at their best can give a lay audience an insight into the techniques of the participants and the experts brought in to advise them. Nevertheless, when this happened, I stopped what I was doing and watched in dumbstruck awe.
Yes, it’s not embeddable. Stupid Fox: if ever there was an advert for their show, that is it. A better-looking version of the dance is here, but context is all. As you may have noticed, Alex is a ballet dancer (a very good ballet dancer too) who is out of his depth in this situation. He has no experience of hip-hop dancing, and is paired with a former contestant who excels at it. It’s also a two-man dance, something that usually brings out Nigel’s dodgiest and most defensive comments. That he reacts the way he does in that clip (i.e. not screaming that he’s a MANLY MAN and he loves BOOBS and not COCK) says something about the artistry of the choreography and the execution. Sadly, not long after this Alex left the competition, having injured himself during rehearsals. He’s still recovering, but hopefully will be back dancing soon. Nevertheless, he did leave us this, and Shades of Caruso salutes him and wishes him well.
Best Live TV Moment of the Year: The opening sketch of the 2010 Emmy Awards
Okay, so only the last bit is live, but it’s still a potent moment, especially the quick glimpse of the gang rushing to their marks backstage, with Jorge Garcia looking simultaneously determined and scared. Perhaps the reason this made me so happy was that it came towards the end of a long year of TV watching, and felt like the capper on the whole damn exercise. It made me slightly like Glee a bit more, gave me a thrill to see Hurley giving it all he’s got, namechecked Lost and Community – two shows I love that didn’t get anything during the ceremony — and featured Jon Hamm backing it up in front of Betty White: when Twitter memes collide. Most surprising of all, it constituted yet another girder in the bridge being built between my Jimmy Fallon apathy and the increasingly possible Jimmy Fallon fandom. If he’s gonna rock the Springsteen like that, I can’t help but forgive him for Taxi. (But oh, the forgiveness burns as it leaves my fingers.)
Best Title Sequence: Human Target
It’s a perfect combination of rousing music — courtesy of Battlestar Galactica hero Bear McCreary — and fascinating imagery, referencing Christopher Chance’s comic book history without going the boring route of having a bunch of panels with speech balloons: the usual tedious choice. The show is uneven, but this stirring opener makes it look like the most confident action show around.
Worst Use of Music: The Vampire Diaries – Bloodlines
Gina Torres shows up in the CW’s hit Twi-lite teen drama, mostly to remind the audience they could be rewatching a Whedon show instead, but also to get murdered by Damon. She’s betrayed him, and so he’s inevitably going to rip out her heart. It’s not played sad: it’s brutal, and obviously meant to be a reminder that Damon might seem charming from time to time, but he’s actually mad evil (it’s not subtle character shading, but it is welcome considering how everyone else is sleepwalking through the show). The tune we hear playing over this horrific moment? The chorus from this fluffy nonsense…
A 100% tonal mismatch. It’s almost impressive. Nevertheless it begs the question: does anyone on the show involved with the music licensing even pay attention to the show?
Best Use Of Guest Stars: 30 Rock
The wide array of celebrities appearing on 30 Rock might be used as a litmus test regarding your tolerance for guest stars: it’s either a crutch, or a good “get” (sorry, I won’t do that again). It’s a testament to the show’s popularity in the creative community that they can attract the people they do: having Elizabeth Banks and Julianne Moore play recurring characters on your show is pretty impressive no matter how you look at it. Still, if they were just playing versions of themselves it would pall immediately, but 30 Rock has given them terrific characters to work with. In seasons past the sight of Al Gore racing off to save a whale, or Handsome Jon Hamm living in his bubble, or Elaine Stritch being the archetypal disapproving mother, has almost erased their other work from our memory: while watching the pilot of Boardwalk Empire we kept expecting Steve Buscemi to reach into his pocket to pull out a can.
The fourth season featured some of the show’s best guest appearances to date, with Banks and Moore both terrific as Avery Jessup and Nancy Donovan splitting Jack Donaghy’s attention, and a lovely appearance by a very goofy Matt Damon in the season finale (and the opener for season five, as well as the live episode broadcast this week), but it was Michael Sheen’s bravura performance as weedy Wesley Snipes that stole our hearts. As great as he is in pretty much everything he’s in (including the second Twilight movie, a feat we thought impossible), from now on Sheens’s appearance in a movie — no matter how dramatic — will be greeted by us with cries of, “Why is your face like that?” or “I don’t want to go back to England. I can’t suffer through the London Olympics — we’re not prepared, Liz. Did you see the Beijing Opening Ceremonies? We don’t have control over our people like that!” We want him on the show every week: that’s how you do guest appearances.
Worst Use Of Guest Stars: Modern Family
And this is how you don’t do them. To be honest, I’d stopped the show before the guest stars started arriving en masse, but I did sadly see them transform Elizabeth Banks into a cartoonish party-hard maniac who literally wishes Cameron and Mitchell would kill their adopted child so they could go drinking more often (before, of course, falling for the little darling in the mawkish final scene). Words fail me on that one, and then start working again when considering the crushingly unfunny appearance of Edward “Vaudeville” Norton as a member of Spandau Ballet, now so destitute he is reduced to performing in the homes of fans for a few dollars. His Cockney accent is the worst thing I’ve heard all year, and makes Julianne Moore — with her risible Boston accent — sound like Ben Affleck. Fucking show: from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee!
New Favourite Actor: Joseph Fiennes – FlashForward
Joe F! I don’t think I shall ever see an actor hammier than thee. FlashForward was not a great show, and for most of its running time it wasn’t even diverting. Did anything interesting actually happen between the pilot and the insane gun-crazy finale? However, there was one thing that kept me glued to the screen: the towering display of eccentric enthusiasm from Joseph “Rather Handsome” Fiennes, who leapfrogged his brother to become my favourite Fiennes just through the use of one eyebrow. Photos barely do that eyebrow justice: you have to see it slowly creep up while his almost lipless (and yet still handsome) mouth gently parts in horror (or surprise, or joy, or intensity, or whatever) to get the Full Fiennes. No one on TV has ever given me such incidental joy since the Great Caruso first showed up as immobile scientist and deadshot Horatio Caine. As I’ve said before, it sounds like I’m just being mean, but I have such enormous affection for Fiennes and all of his metric tonnes of acting in this role that I wanted the show to continue simply because I knew I would miss him so much. And I do! His berserk energy was one of the highlights of the season (in the picture above he is throwing a phone across the room with all of his force. Yes! A backhanded throw! Where does he come up with these ideas?), and without it TV seems to be a paler place. Still, he is now working on Camelot, a Starz production seeking to pick up some of that Spartacus buzz. What makes that show even more promising? The showrunner is SoC nemesis Chris “Torchwood” Chibnall. There is a chance Camelot will make me spontaneously combust with mean-tinted joy. Let’s just hope any helmet he wears in the show has a gap so we can see his eyebrow. Speaking of which…
New Favourite Eyebrows: Ruth Wilson – Luther / The Prisoner
Her performances in Luther and The Prisoner are amiably mad, especially in the former, where she seems to be trying to channel every femme fatale in cinema history. It’s a delirious experience watching her flirt and pout while talking about murder in gallumphing, unsubtle dialogue that would sound impossibly stupid coming from any other actress. I doff my cap to her: she’s one of the things that made me like Luther even when I should have been despairing. She gets a bum deal in The Prisoner: Number 6 just rushes through her life, messing with her equilibrium, being so “sexy” (???) that she falls in love with him (or is that the special love-potion invented by Number 2?), and is then turned into a comatose speculative-universe-generating megabrain in the half-intriguing, half-nonsensical finale. But no matter what she is doing, and no matter how well she is doing it, it’s the eyebrows that drew me in. They are the Alpha and Omega of eye-mantelpieces, and I can’t wait to see what they appear in next.
Are these awards over? Can they be over? There’s still so much I had planned to say. ::sobs::
A quick reminder of the stupidly complicated rules of the Caruso Awards: only shows whose latest season (or half-season) has finished by the time of publication are eligible, hence the inclusion of an episode of The Venture Brothers from ages ago; and only one episode of each season is allowed. This is to prevent Spartacus: Blood and Sand from dominating the list (just like the gladiator Spartacus dominates the arena!). Apologies for any poor editing here. Much to my eternal shame I’ve discovered that no matter how long I spend picking over these goddamn things some awful mistake (or twelve) will always slip through. It’s like I’ve been cursed by some grammar-witch for all of my shaky writing. Somewhere in this house is a haunted Thesaurus that needs to be exorcised. And with that superstitious outburst, on with the praise, and the SPOILERS…
20: Misfits - Episode 4
Post-Heroes, it’s perfectly understandable that any “metahuman” show introducing a character with the power to travel through time is going to give the viewer pause. The narrative knots created by Hiro Nakamura in that horrid show were so complicated the showrunners could never untangle them, even with some desperate efforts in the final season. You can imagine our pleasure when this Curtis-centric episode managed to adhere to plainly obvious temporal rules, kept things straight and logical, and revealed heaps of new information about our favourite lairy superpowered ruffians. The main thread of the episode is Curtis’ efforts to make amends to his former girlfriend in a Butterfly-Effect-esque sequence of disastrous trips into his own past, but it mostly resembles Firefly‘s excellent backstory-heavy Out of Gas. By giving us more of a sense of just how messed up our heroes were before The Storm transformed them, showrunner Howard Overman humanises even the most annoying of the group. Though Curtis is the central character, it might be Nathan who benefits most. The endless sarcastic asides from the obnoxious little gobshite are given context as we see the antagonistic relationship he has with his father (a perfectly cast Dexter Fletcher). It’s a clever development that gives Robert Sheehan new notes to knock out of the park.
19: Caprica - Ghosts in the Machine
Where once this blog railed against Battlestar Galactica and the way it frayed and fell apart before our eyes, this thought-provoking prequel series did much to repair the damage done to its parent show by nervy Syfy chiefs. Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane “Unappreciated Genius” Espenson replaced the sprawling and ill-tended mythos with greater focus and fewer characters. With a sturdy base and a dependable cast, the showrunners were able to explore sci-fi concepts with the rigour Galactica once did and then add some welcome melodrama. This grounds the speculative fiction in human emotion, the centre of which is the grief felt by two families who lost daughters in a terrorist attack, not realising that those children exist in a new state elsewhere. Here we see Daniel Graystone’s suspicions about the erratic behaviour of his lone Cylon come to a head just as Joseph Adama searches for the incomplete avatar of his daughter in V-World. While the grief-stricken Tauran lawyer approaches his daughter from a position of supplication, Daniel attempts trickery and calculation to try to get Zoe Graystone to reveal her secret existence within the Cylon’s robot shell. The tragedy is that neither father is willing to accept that their children have moved on in more than one sense. For all its speculative ambition, it’s the human truth of this rift that makes this show — and this episode in particular — so memorable.
18: Big Love – Sins of the Father
The oft-derided fourth season of Big Love was actually pretty great for most of its truncated run if you were willing to roll with Bill Henrikson’s decision to run for Senator — merely his latest bad idea in long line of them. A couple of early episodes were blackly comedic mini-classics, amping up the absurdity of the show while not becoming unpalatable. Sins of the Father rose above them all with its Godfather-like depiction of a man losing everything. However, while Michael Corleone loses everything by allowing his dark heart to overwhelm him, Bill loses everything with the revelation of his own hypocrisy, turning his back on son Ben after he admits to having feelings for Margene even though he was once cast out by his own father. Director David Petrarca and writer Seth Greenland do a superb job of making Bill’s ridiculously overwrought internal struggle make sense to an audience who would probably just forgive Ben, couching the drama in terms of Bill’s very specific insecurity: will he be usurped by his own son one day? For a show primarily about religion, Big Love deserves praise for playing these themes and Biblical references so lightly. Add to that a couple of great comic set-pieces involving Bill’s three wives, Bill Paxton’s best performance to date, and a sense of dramatic urgency the show has often lacked, and this episode can be placed next to last year’s Come, Ye Saints as a keeper.
17. The Venture Brothers – Pinstripes and Poltergeists
It’s tempting to hate Pinstripes and Poltergeists for being the final part of the bisected fourth season, just to be petty. The sudden disappearance of The Best Animated Show On TV was especially galling as it was finally picking up a good head of steam. Nevertheless, at least the show left us with something that is, as 21 says, “like Christmas, a first BMX bike, and meeting the cast of Firefly all in one”. Highlights include the long-delayed introduction of evil bureaucrat Monstroso (“Cigar?”), Rusty Venture discovering chatrooms and pop-ups, and the revelation that Brock Samson has been living on the Venture compound all along while working with the shadowy organisation S.P.H.I.N.X. (“Sphinx!”). Perhaps the best thing about this episode is that it can be used as a perfect example of how The Venture Brothers is more than just a snarky pop-culture melange. The characters have evolved so much that Brock’s outburst to Rusty about being close to Dean and Hank, yet not being able to contact them, has an emotional power unheard-of in Adult Swim’s roster: see also 21′s vengeful pursuit of Brock, which is finally resolved with a fight, an understanding, and an alliance against a common enemy. It’s enough to tug the heart-strings. There is also the small matter of 24′s ghostly nature: the revelations about him in this episode have made his continued “existence” as big a mystery as any number of polar bears, Rambaldi devices or parallel universes in the Bad Robot canon.
16: Dollhouse - The Left Hand
It’s easy to miss classic TV episodes when their parent network decides to burn through a condemned series with a burst of two-parters. After the second season of Joss Whedon’s brainwipe thriller started with a series of underwhelming standalone episodes, we were treated to a quick rush of excellent, mythology-heavy dramas that expanded the backstory of our characters and the shadowy Rossum Corporation, along with some of the most head-melting concepts in popular sci-fi drama. This season highlight was the best mix of mythology and standalone episode before the showrunners were regrettably forced to cut their five-season plan short. Our hero Echo and poor manipulated Senator Daniel Perrin are held captive in the Washington DC Dollhouse by slimy Stewart Lipman (a welcome appearance by SoC favourite Ray Wise) and the complicated Dr. Bennett Halverson, who is torturing Echo for a past transgression. The LA Dollhouse attempts to save its Active using two Tophers (both played brilliantly by Fran Kranz and a never better Enver Gjokaj), but the web of double-, triple-, and quadruple- crosses wrecks their plans. It’s a packed-to-bursting hour of action TV, both thrilling and funny. Truly, no other show on TV could dramatise such potentially alienating hard sci-fi ideas about personality-cloning and mind-manipulation with such playfulness.
15. Party Down – “Not On My Wife” Opening Night
My love of Cheers (a deep, deep love) did not migrate to spin-off Frasier, whose tone irked despite the generally excellent cast. The general air of satisfaction generated — possibly because the obvious jokes were interspersed with the odd reference to Mahler — swamped the gags that did work. All was forgiven when the show concentrated on farce, which it did brilliantly. Party Down, on the other hand, has a better episode-to-episode hit:miss ratio, and adding farce pushes Opening Night to the top of the heap. The aspiring actors and writers of the catering team are forced to work through the opening night of a farce performed by a community theatre group they consider beneath them, and end up embroiled in a whirlwind of sexual misadventure, misunderstanding, and escalating panic. It’s a superb example of the genre, with veils, masks, secrets and lies in abundance, but while John Enbom’s expertly judged script (and David Wain’s perfect direction) are to be praised, it’s the little things that stick in the memory: Casey’s inept flirting with the lesbian producer from Warners; Roman’s Bacchanalian behaviour; Kyle’s pitiful attempts at being sexy; and Ron misreading Lydia’s signals and ending up with a faceful of mace. The sight of his puffy, snot-covered face will linger in my memory forever.
14: Justified - Long In The Tooth
Whenever a show makes a big splash with its first episode, there is often a worry that comes with it: will this show keep the quality up? Will it somehow ruin it, go in the wrong direction, abandon everything that made that first hour so good? In a post-Sopranos age, we expect the best shows to be serialised, and the procedurals of network to be less impressive. Would Justified be able to create a serialised drama out of its short story origins? Or would it be little more than a well-shot villain-of-the-week show? The fourth episode of the phenomenal first season went both ways. Alan Ruck plays a crook on the lam from our hero Raylan Givens, forced to give up his career as a dentist after a memorably nasty encounter with an obnoxious patient. The episode works extremely well as a one-off: Ruck is perfectly cast as the impulsive but likeable foil to laidback Raylan, and his character is so well-drawn it’s genuinely upsetting that he can’t become a regular on the show. What makes this our favourite of the consistently stellar first season is the knowledge that even though Justified eventually becomes more serialised (even taking into account the nerve-wracking shoot-out with Miami goons near the end), it could have been a great, unorthodox procedural too. No matter what the showrunners did, we were prepared to love it unconditionally.
13: Sherlock - A Study In Pink
It’s rare that a TV show can come out of nowhere and capture the public’s imagination with the modern publicity machine being what it is. Perhaps because UK TV often has big events that don’t add up to much it was easy to expect little from Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ “reimagining” (forgive me) of Britain’s most beloved fictional character, especially with Rupert Murdoch’s snivelling toadies in the Sun spreading snide rumours about reshoots and disastrous pre-screenings. Thankfully it was just the odious Antipodean arsehole playing shenanigans: the first episode of Sherlock was a supremely confident, exciting 90 minutes of TV, instantly transforming Benedict Cumberbatch from that guy who appeared in the things into a TV icon, all spindly limbs and ghostly face, his lovely coat flapping in the wind as he chased villains around Cardiff London. Paul McGuigan invented a visual palette that was showy but not intrusive, with a brilliant floating-text conceit that allowed us to see Sherlock’s thought processes. Even better, Moffat filled the movie-length pilot with plot and event, moving things along at a clip and never relying on tedious exposition to bloat out a flimsy script. It felt substantial, like the arrival of your new favourite thing. We can only hope this was not a fluke: more on that to come.
12: The Pacific – Okinawa
Saying The Pacific wasn’t as feel-good as Band of Brothers seems crazy: after all, the original HBO mini-series featured the hell of war in startling, miserable detail. Nevertheless, it’s not called Band of Brothers for no reason. The most important point the series made was that in the middle of the carnage and horror, there was someone there who had your back, who would remind you of your humanity and your responsibility to everyone around you. The Pacific has very little of that uplift. The ninth episode of this ten-part mega-downer is possibly the bleakest hour of TV screened since the BBC’s Threads, as the 1st Marine Division find themselves trapped in a purgatorial war of attrition with a ruthless enemy at the base of an almost impassable mountain. Joseph Mazzello does excellent work as Corporal Eugene Sledge, pushed to the edge by relentless rain, despicable and dehumanising Japanese tactics (often involving civilians and children), and the low morale of his companions, most of whom die in agony because of mistakes borne of fatigue. With his humanity seemingly crushed forever, we watch in dread as he finds a dying Japanese civilian – the victim of an artillery strike he was involved with – and brace ourselves for further horror. The choice he makes is revelatory, cathartic, unforgettable. So yes, a gruelling hour of drama, but also an essential one.
11: Spartacus: Blood and Sand – Whore
This indecently entertaining sword-and-sandals epic never stints on surprisingly graphic sex and violence, with boobs, dongs, blood, buttocks and heads flying at the camera with such regularity you’d be forgiven for thinking it was originally meant to be screened in 3D. Neither the sex nor the violence were that important, certainly on a plot level, being there mainly because Starz were happy to let the showrunners go a bit mental. However this season highlight used graphic sex as a way to explore not only the levels to which the slaves of Batiatus’ ludus are expected to lower themselves, but also as a way to further dramatise the antagonism between our hero Spartacus and delightful snake-woman Illythia, wife of his mortal enemy Gaius Claudius Glaber. Most of the episode does a good job of adding new levels of debasement to the proud gladiators, now fully expected to be prostitutes as well as warriors, but it’s Lucretia’s conniving which makes this an instant classic. Playing a trick with masks to teach her former friend Illythia a lesson, the plot to humiliate her spins out of Lucretia’s control in the final moments. TV has arguably never seen a sequence as pornographic, violent, and purely Grand Quignol as this, but it never abandons character or plot for a second, a detail that you might miss as your jaw dislocates from dropping so fast.
The final ten will be here tomorrow. Anyone who has followed my tweets of the past few months will probably find few surprises: many of the episodes that broke the top ten drove me to such paroxysms of joy that I went a bit nuts over there. We’re talking many, many multiples of 140 characters.
Before I get into why I think the final episode of Lost was the perfect capper for an incredible series while also being an exasperating near-failure that seemed determined to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory, please allow me to quote my previous blogpost, in which I wrote an elaborate love letter to the Lost showrunners:
Cuse and Lindelof told us the show was about character, and we all say yes, yes, what about the mysteries? But when Jack stood up to meet his destiny, the argument-for-character-drama won out. As much as I want questions answered, I know now that Lostdoesn’t necessarily need two hours of exposition about every single mystery still hanging. It will win out if the Man in Black is defeated, Sawyer meets Juliet in the sideways world, Jack is redeemed in both worlds, and my boy Frank Lapidus somehow thrives.
As you can imagine, the fact that all four things happened in epic, beautiful fashion made me deliriously happy, no matter what my initial reservations were. As soon as Miles and Richard saw my hero Frank floating on a bunch of inflatable life-vests, I think I cheered, or applauded, or something. It was emotional, I know that much, and got way worse as it progressed. A quick survey of Lost fans on Twitter and Facebook has shown that tears were shed at Sawyer and Juliet’s reunion, as well as Jack’s perfect death, and that the fight between our hero (yes, after all that whining and crying, Jack was a goddamn amazing world-saving hero) and the Man in Black was as epic and gratifying as it gets. For fulfilling those four criteria, Lost was already ahead of the game.
Nevertheless, I’d be lying if I said that it wasn’t dicey for a while. The growing realisation that Cuse and Lindelof had explained everything they intended to explain a couple of weeks ago made my stomach plummet, and the sight of the Oceanic survivors (and a couple of notable guests) sitting in a church waiting to walk into the light was not pleasant. Regular readers might remember my evisceration of the Battlestar Galactica finale, which I felt was a hollow, unsatisfying and pretentious mess. There were so many unanswered questions, which I angrily considered to be individual insults to the intelligence of the viewer.
You can imagine the knot that developed in my guts as the Lost finale progressed, each passing second devoid of answers. The hope that there would be one spectacular reveal that tied everything together dwindled and vanished by the halfway point: by then it was obvious we were getting pure story, not revelation, with an epilogue of woolly-headed mysticism to boot. That realisation was nowhere near as upsetting as the fact that I was almost certainly going to do what I had once mocked BSG fans for doing: forgiving a show for being a sugary coating around an enormous black hole devoid of answers.
It’s important to me to establish just why I found it satisfying when it did some of the same things that the BSG finale did, but which didn’t satisfy me at all. Was it simply that I liked one show more than the other? I had gone off BSG by the end of the second season, with a brief spike during the New Caprica occupation in season three, and the odd episode written by the magnificent Jane Espenson, whose sparkling dialogue and intelligence stood head and shoulders above the incoherent dourness of many episodes. In contrast, Lost was a near-constant delight, a journey that engaged me in a way that only a few other shows have managed before. While BSG‘s characters mostly left me cold — either by being boring or inconsistently written — the main characters in Lost were beautifully wrought and complex. When BSG finished I only really cared about four characters. When Lost finished, it was like I was saying goodbye to an entire world populated by fascinating individuals. There really was no contest.
Nevertheless, I was slightly ashamed as the final images of the Oceanic 815 footage rolled over the credits, knowing that I had ejected the critical thought processes I had angrily, impotently aimed at BSG in favour of giving myself up to Lost‘s final sentimental — and, at first glance, inconsistent — act like a brainwashed cult member. Would I have to retire from the Internet? Would some of the BSG fans I scorned come back to haunt me? Oh how I had mocked it for the angels, and the confused mythology, and the feeble explanations for some of the mysteries (the Opera House revelation was one of the dampest squibs ever), and the reliance on an omnipotent, unexplained, and motivation-lite God to answer all of the questions. And yet here was Lost, with a church and a Gods ‘R Us Room of Religious Symbology (some sort of Robert Langdon wet dream of menorahs and crucifixes) and the possibility that ::gulp:: they had been dead all along. My stomach has rarely plunged that suddenly and precipitously.
Even though I’ve had time to mull over the implications of those final moments, have come to accept them and love them and make arguments in my head that it was not Purgatory but a Tibetan-style Bardo that our heroes found themselves in, I won’t lie: my faith wavered. For about 20 seconds — pretty much from the moment Christian appears (though hey, how great to see John Terry again) until he stresses that the island and the adventures we followed for six years really happened and really mattered — I nearly metaphorically crumpled the show up into a ball and threw it into the bin. Part of this was a charge that has lingered: that the flash-sideways scenes have little connection with the main thread of the story. Daisyhellcakes has been vocal in her disappointment, and I see her point: it really does feel like a weird epilogue that came out of nowhere. It’s a criticism that I am working on reconciling, and will get to in a future post.
Mainly, though, the ending made me dread the gloating — something I had thought of as inevitable, but suddenly realised was going to be more fervent and hostile than I could have imagined. My immediate negative reaction came about partially because I felt momentarily betrayed, and partially as a pre-emptive strike before venturing onto the net to read the inevitable anger from former fans who felt even more aggrieved than I did, and non-fans gloating at anyone who had stuck with the show from the beginning. But I couldn’t dismiss those final moments. Was it my innate sappiness? The immunity from disappointment I mentioned in my previous post? A gut response to that stirring music by Michael Giacchino, which over the past six years has been arguably the most moving and ambitious score in TV history? No matter what it was, the ending felt right.
And that’s the key. Considering how the show had engaged my brain for six seasons, it had also worked on my heart as well without me realising it, so much so that Afterworld reunions like the one between Sawyer and Juliet devastated me. Even more surprising, considering my antipathy toward them, the reunion of Claire, Aaron and Charlie generated a similar response. By the time Jack hugged his father and told him he loved him, our living room was ankle-deep in tears, and the final shot of Jack’s eye closing made me cry so hard the saltwater shot out from my face as if my tear-ducts were water cannons. It was devastating. Call it fan service, or a failure of nerve, or a dreadful betrayal of our trust. I don’t care. It stabbed me in the heart with a blade of pure emotion, and so I am unable to feel betrayed. There have been few works of fiction that have affected me that profoundly.
Nevertheless, even over the sound of my racking sobs and occasional moans I could hear a small part of my brain saying, “But who was in the cabin that time?!?” As time passed I would remember some other question that had not been answered, a list that grew with the help of Daisyhellcakes, who was simultaneously moved by the emotional journey and irked by the lack of answers and tangential sixth season “epilogue” thread. Our reactions were similar in all but degree, and it has become my personal mission to explain why I felt the ending was a triumph despite its flaws, why I think the show would be diminished by answering too many of the questions it has posed, and how watching it as it aired is the only way to properly experience it in its full glory.
It’s all about faith. As I’ve said before, I’ve stuck with the show for this long due to my faith in Cuse and Lindelof’s ability to wrap everything up, mostly because hints and clues have hinted at a rigid internal logic. It’s as if we’re getting the jigsaw pieces, and they’re the right colour and there seems to be the right amount, but we have no real idea how they fit together. The final season was going to be, for most — if not all — fans, the photo on the back of the box that would show us how it all fits together. The tantalising links between the pieces we had given gave me confidence that the show was going to work out, and I felt satisfied that a show that addressed the conflict between men of faith and men of reason would rely upon the faith of its viewers to sustain itself.
Pre-finale, this faith was little more than an intellectualising of my expectations and my indulgence of the show’s slow-drip of revelation. I never really felt “faith” in the way that those with religious beliefs do. I had proof of my belief in the good intentions of the showrunners (contrary to popular belief, a lot of Lost‘s mysteries were answered, in a round-about way), which I had mistaken for blind faith. It took the finale to kickstart that particular… emotion? Subset of thought? I’m not really sure what to categorise faith as, but I feel it now.
If I’m honest with myself, Lost fluffed it with the last episode. It proved that the show was not going to address many questions posed by viewers (which is only irksome because of the once-charming, now seemingly aloof behaviour of Cuse and Lindelof in interviews), and then kow-towed to the fans with a soppy final scene designed to give them a happy ending even though their A-plot was destined to end on a mix of ups and downs. And yet I didn’t care, and in fact experienced some kind of hallucinogenic weep-overload euphoria. Not only did I not care about all of the finale’s flaws, but I seemed to be overwhelmed by an epiphany that this was a perfect ending, something that managed to hit every single emotional sweet-spot in my heart, but also keep my brain engaged with the show probably from now until the end of civilisation. It’s no coincidence that the fans and former fans are still debating this show across the net.
Those who feel betrayed will fade away and lose their enthusiasm for pointing out how wrong the rest of us are, but I have a feeling the show is not about to vacate the space it has taken up in my brain any time soon. Someone could sit down and tell me the show was a failure on every level (and many have spent the past few weeks doing just that), but even if I agree with many of these points, it will not shake my faith and love for the show even a jot. In my heart, the show did what it set out to do, and I’m not about to turn my back on it, or the time I have spent watching it and enjoying it. That’s the macro-level answer, but a micro-example might help: when the final season started to load up on religious symbolism and magical rituals to a greater degree than in previous seasons, I was willing to go along with it, especially as it didn’t negate the potential science answers.
When Mother passed on the guardianship of the island to Jacob using blessed wine, and when Jacob and Jack did similar things with water, there was a power and logic to those moments borne of the viewer’s understanding of the significance of that act in the traditions and mythologies of our religions, but without tying itself down to a single version of those myths. It was its own myth, with its own power. I don’t need to know why the role of guardian can only be passed in this manner, or the specific wording of the blessing Mother and Jacob (but not Jack) bestowed upon the magical liquid, though I understand why others might consider that a cheat. I just know that it made sense to me, and I suspect Joseph Campbell might have felt the same way (which is apt considering the debt the show owes to Star Wars, that most Campbellian of modern myths).
Is this my way of avoiding the uncomfortable truth, that a show about mysteries ended with no real answers? This appears to be a sticking point with a large section of Lost fandom: Daisyhellcakes and I have gone back and forth on this one quite a lot, and I can see her point of view, and that of everyone who feels cheated by not getting the answers they wanted. Not just that, but the way that Cuse and Lindelof spent the last few years cultivating that air of mystery and acting as if there were some revelation on the way. Looking back on footage of their Comic-Con appearances, and reading their interviews, it does indeed stick in the craw that they played the “Will we get an answer on this?” game when the final episode proved they had no intention of doing anything like that.
I’ve seen some fans counter this by saying that anyone who is disappointed with the resolution is “watching it wrong”, which is condescending to the nth degree. I hope that that isn’t the impression I give when I say that yes, answers would have been nice, but as much of the fun of Lost has been debating the “meaning” of it, the finale accomplished something I didn’t think was possible: it ensured its own longevity without having to resort to endless spin-offs & supplemental materials (not counting the epilogue to be included in the DVD and Blu-Rays of the final season, which shows Hurley and Ben’s recruitment of one more important former islander to help them do their “work”, whatever that is).
The finale also put the rest of the series into a new perspective, now we can stop fretting about whether the show would answer all of the mysteries, and instead revel in the game that can now be played with its Swiss Cheese structure. Instead of a solid block of story we got something riddled with holes, but though critics would charge the holes go nowhere — a consequence of the show being made up on the fly with no coherent mythology inside it – I think it’s just like that cheese in that the holes connect with each other, and we’re able to use those links to get a better idea of what the island is.
You could call them plot holes, but I prefer to think of them as “Interactive Plot Gaps”, and I’m totally serious when I say that the key to loving the show has been engaging with those unanswered questions. Many look at the unfinished tapestry in disgust and anger: I and many others just get to work finishing it off. I mocked the BSG fans for letting their dedication to the show evolve from fanwank into fanfic, and yet here I am, doing exactly the same thing, but perhaps on a larger scale. (That said, I do think the few answers we got from Lost were more satisfying than the many we got from BSG, but that’s just me.)
Cuse and Lindelof have been smart enough to throw enough detail, obfuscation, and symbolism into the narrative mix that there are a vast number of interpretations, which will allow fans to bicker and debate and split into factions from now until the end of time. Is the island a source of some magical power source from beyond time? Is it Omnium, as in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman? Does it rest on top of the Chamber of Guf /Well of Souls as posited by Darthshatner on Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel board? Do the mechanical power down / boot up sounds we hear when the plug is removed mean the island is some kind of enormous machine (powered, of course, by water and light, which is apparently the way things work on the island)?
I’m sure there are arguments for all of these viewpoints littered throughout all six seasons of the show, and none of them are demonstrably wrong. The showrunners have done an incredible job of hinting at two possible interpretations of each event, in order to cultivate our discussions or play with our expectations, a perfect example being an alternate world that we all assumed to be a parallel universe caused by the detonation of Jughead, when in fact it was the afterlife. This speculative tension is the special aspect of Lost that has made it officially my favourite TV show of all time (which doesn’t mean I don’t still love you, Buffy!). It will forever exist as an uncertain waveform that will never collapse, a cat in a box both alive and dead simultaneously. Some fans feel that is an insult and a betrayal: I think of it as a gift.
One of Daisyhellcakes’ other criticisms — I think it was one that was shared by other fans including Whitechapeler and friend of the blog Cat Vincent — was that the sudden change in focus by the fans from a fascination with the mysteries to the characters was a way to insulate themselves from failure, a last minute attempt at avoiding the crushing disappointment that seemed inevitable as the final season progressed with many of the island mysteries unsolved. In several interviews conducted in the final weeks of the show, Cuse and Lindelof stressed that their interest was in the characters, and in giving them the final episode they deserved. Their traditional way of answering questions with vague hints at least addressed the fact that the fans were interested in those answers, but in the final few weeks they maintained it had been about the characters all along. It’s hard not to think we’ve been gulled.
I certainly revised my expectations as they promoted this new line, and I will admit some of that was in order to protect myself, but when I think back to the previous seasons, my main memories of any revelations are inextricably tied up in the characters. Finding out Pierre Chang was Miles’ father was not as much of a revelation as it was a way to show why Miles is the way he is. Discovering Anthony Cooper was not only Locke’s father but the original Sawyer was a startling moment not because we found this out (most fans suspected it anyway), but because we saw how Locke was unable to kill him and Sawyer could, and how Sawyer was affected by finally exacting revenge on the man who destroyed his family. Knowing that failing to input the numbers into the computer triggers an electromagnetic incident, but it’s Desmond’s mad panic, Locke’s realisation that he is wrong, the knowledge that this might be what brought these people to the island: that’s the significant part. Otherwise it’s just a broken machine.
The finale certainly helped bring that home, as the Afterworld gave us glimpses of the characters’ pasts, flashing before us with Michael Giacchino’s heart-breaking score rising over them: an effect guaranteed to stir heavy emotions in those members of the audience who felt especially attached to these beautifully realised fictional people. Maybe this was Cuse and Lindelof’s final argument, pushed at us with as much emotional power as they can muster. With each reunion I felt my annoyance with the dearth of answers dwindle a little more, and when we saw Hurley metaphorically absolve Ben of his sins and give him the one thing he always wanted — acceptance by a father figure — I was totally won over.
All of the character arcs were fulfilled with such skill — look at how even a secondary character like Richard gets to complete his journey by losing his suicidal impulses — that I could quite happily forget about the mysteries, and just be grateful that we got to see Ben saved, Sawyer free to find his daughter, Kate’s mind made up (a bit late, but still), Hurley shaping his future (and possibly all of our futures), and Jack happy in the knowledge that he saved his friends, the woman he loved, and possibly the whole world. There could be no more perfect ending for him.
Nevertheless, despite that, the mysteries are still compelling enough that I want to ponder them, and to attempt to match up the Afterworld epilogue with the rest of the series, if only because that is the most troubling artistic choice Cuse and Lindelof made. Did they really fluff it at the end? More to come, in parts two and three…
During the penultimate episode of Lost the main character — Jack Shephard — quietly makes a choice, accepting enormous responsibility with a quick and resigned “I’ll do it.” No one questions him, there are no histrionics. He makes his choice, and that’s that. Daisyhellcakes — who has accompanied me on this island journey – was distracted from this moment by the sound of sobbing coming from the other side of our uncomfortable and cat-clawed sofa. I was in a figurative glass case of emotion, devastated by that choice. Though it’s not the first time I’ve cried at Lost – you should have seen me at the end of the fifth season — this was the first time I seemed to be crying at something that didn’t seem that emotional on the surface. Why the hell did I cry?
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been experiencing a wave of sadness that it’s almost over, but it’s not just because my favourite show — in fact possibly my favourite ever story — is about to end. Part of it is the sense of occasion: as I said to ace tweeter @iambags on Friday, this final week feels like a royal wedding, though it’s not just localised to one country. All across the world people are dealing with this in their own way, either by doing what I’m doing with this post, or by getting really creative. This fan-made trailer has it right when it calls the finale “The Most Anticipated Episode In Television History”…
If that wasn’t enough to choke me up, this nearly finished me off: a superbly edited and written love letter from The Injustice League, featuring enough clips of iconic moments to reduce any Lost fan to emotional blubber.
To outsiders (or, as that song correctly identifies non-Lost fans, Others) this post is going to seem like an absurd perspective-free joke, but Lost has been a big deal for me since the first season, which I caught on DVD while going through some stressful events five years ago. It really helped me get through the tumult, and then did the same again, earlier this year, during which we undertook The Great Lost Rewatch. It has helped me out mentally, and probably spiritually as well. As an atheist I only have the word of believers that faith is a quantifiable and recognisable part of their mental landscape. I’m probably going to unintentionally insult many by saying this, but the only event in my life (other than the experience that the humans refer to as… love?) that has given me an insight into what it is to give yourself over to something even though it could well turn out to be a mistake is the commitment I’ve shown to watching, debating, and pondering Lost.
Yes, that’s a mighty bold claim to make about a TV show, even one that I have considered to be an emotional balm, and anyone reading this who doesn’t watch it — or really love it — will think I’ve taken leave of my senses, but for many fans, sticking with the show and defending it from the tedious criticisms of people who abandoned it early on or didn’t bother because “it just looks stupid” has demanded more than the usual level of fan commitment. From the amazing pilot onwards the show has rested on certain mysteries that prop up the entire narrative structure, and in fact the show itself has not just been about faith and belief in a mysterious purpose, but is also about maintaining an air of ambiguity and mystery that demands the audience has faith and belief in the mysterious purpose of the showrunners. Just as the flashback-laden plot structure was echoed by time-travel events in later seasons, the events in the show and the fan’s relationship with the show has grown to echo each other. Our brains (Jack) say it’s just a TV show and is destined to fall apart at the last hurdle: our heart (Locke) tells us there will be a satisfying ending that will justify the wait.
For the record, I’m not comparing God to a bunch of writers who used to work on Deadwood, Buffy, and Nash Bridges, and I’m not saying my experience with Lost is comparable with someone’s experience of God (whatever that might feel like), but I am saying my enjoyment of the show relies upon my belief that it will all have been worth it, and for the most part the show has felt coherent enough and complex enough that I have been able to hold forth about it against unbelievers with great confidence and even greater obnoxiousness. Nevertheless, the sixth season has seen the largest backlash against Lost since the beginning of the third season, where the wheels seemed to be idly spinning a bit too often. This year, as every episode passes without explaining what the Hurleybird was, or why the Dharma Initiative were playing around with Skinner boxes, my fellow Lostians have become angrier and angrier.
Two of my favourite TV critics –AV Club writer Noel Murray and AVC/HitFix/LA Times blogger Todd Van Der Werff — have been objective but also thrilled by the narrative boldness on display, but other critics have not been so kind. Heather Havrilevsky made me laugh (and froth at the mouth) earlier this week when she criticised the show for letting her down: amusing considering I have never — never in the last four years at least — read a review from her that didn’t complain about the show not being fun enough. Why anyone would rather the show had been little more than an adventure romp in the jungle ending each week with a freeze-frame of the characters laughing in their cave hidey-hole instead of featuring scenes with the consciousness of a beloved character being blasted into another universe by an electromagnetic shed is beyond me.
I gather Maureen Ryan has been vocally angry about it, especially the very contentious episode Across The Sea, but I can’t even look for her recaps for fear of bursting a blood vessel (here is a post in praise of Across The Sea from Overthinking It: essential reading). I’m still pissed at her for calling out Cuse and Lindelof in an interview for daring… DARING… to include a time-travel season in THEIR show. That, and blindly defending the chaotic end of Battlestar Galactica, and spoiling the end of Mad Men in a tweet several months ago, which resulted in my angriest unfollow yet (that showed her!). Earlier this week Alan Sepinwall posted an interview with Cuse and Lindelof that made the showrunners seem like testy assholes. It’s true, they do seem to lose their tempers, but seeing as Sepinwall pretty much asks the same question (“Why is the story going in the way that it is going and why are you not doing what is expected?” or thereabouts) in 15 different ways, I’d lose my temper too.
But then I’ve found myself getting increasingly annoyed by all of this to a degree that is scaring me. I won’t lie: this season has been a rollercoaster for me too, testing my faith far too often. Seeing other people allow their disgruntlement to completely turn them against the show has been exactly the kind of thing that makes me question my own feelings. Am I fooling myself? Some critics and hardcore fans I once allied myself with have jumped ship, and I’m left behind with no life-jacket. After the amazing season opener, there have been numerous moments where doubt has crept in. The temple scenes were mostly a bust (seeing John “Sol Star” Hawkes wasted as the pointless translator Lennon really pissed me off), some of the character deaths were fudged, and some of the answers have had their effect blunted by being hinted at before they are fully answered: deadly when a fanbase will pick over every line to the degree that it does, meaning the eventual reveal comes too late.
The negativity surrounding the final season has taken a toll on me (cue violins). I couldn’t help but feel deflated when What They Died For finished, even though I had been moved on an emotional level. With only a couple of hours to go there was still too much to be explained, and no time to do it. That said, this wave of panic feels more like an intensification of the perfectly natural faith-testing doubt I already had. What galls me is that I had already tried to avoid this, and it was all for naught. I began pre-emptively ejecting questions I wanted answered even before the season started, hoping to prevent any disappointment. First to go was, “What is the source of the electromagnetic energy?” I’m happy to accept that the island is a special place with a special thing on it that makes weird shit happen. Unless Cuse and Lindelof invent a new element — Mysterianium — there is no way a concrete answer would work. It’s magical stuff, either God’s Blood or supermagnetic 4D anti-matter. In my head, that’s fine.
Nevertheless, other questions (What are the rules that Ben was talking about in The Shape of Things to Come after Alex was killed? What is the nature of the corruption that allows The Man in Black to control people? How did MiB visit Jack in LA as his father?) are being scratched off my list as well, and soon I’m going to be left with nothing. That would be fine, but this week I’ve felt like the guy who throws every bit of luggage, seating, and extraneous material from a plane running out of fuel, but we’re still going to crash into the mountain no matter what.
It’s not like Cuse and Lindelof are unaware of these concerns: apparently the DVD/Blu-Ray of season six will have a feature where they explain things that have been left out. Their common defence whenever a critic has asked why we didn’t get to see Alvar Hanso and Gerald De Groot in front of a whiteboard covered with equations that explain everything have often said that it’s the characters that matter the most, and I’ve held onto the belief that they get that right even while my concern has grown, and for the most part this season has proven me right. The sideways world has featured many satisfying moments, such as Jack letting go of his anger at his father by bonding with his own son, or Sun and Jin becoming a happy couple without Jin’s corrupted values and paranoia getting in the way.
I have no doubt that the character’s arcs will all work out: my concern with the answers to the mysteries is that I will end up trying to answer them after the final episode has aired in much the same way I railed against BSG fans when their finale left dozens of loose ends: by explaining away inconsistencies at such length that it stops being fanwank and ends up becoming fanfic. I’ve already been taking solace in the fact that a lot of questions have already been answered but people kept bringing them up because they thought the answers were so unsatisfactory that there had to be something more there (e.g. Ben’s comments about the “Magic Box” and his subsequent abrupt about-face: guess he really had been pulling Locke’s leg after all). There is a very good chance I will be waving away concerns in the next few weeks in a way I found insufferable in BSG fans. I’m dreading it. I’ve bought some crow pie just in case Lost ends up fluffing it as badly as that show, but I don’t want to eat it. Crow tastes all nasty, like.
Debate about the meaning of the show is one thing, and will follow on naturally from the discussions that have formed so much of the Lost experience over the last six years. Once it’s all over, and the final DVD has come out, we’ll all be in a better position to assess what worked and what didn’t. Nevertheless, I worry that we will be trying to connect dots that aren’t meant to go together. During the Great Lost Rewatch we were pleased to see some mysteries made more sense once we applied knowledge from later seasons, with my favourite being Locke explaining the rules of Mouse Trap in season one, foreshadowing the events in the shadow of the statue at the end of season five. This gives me hope that in the minds of the writers there is a concrete answer to almost everything, but how will we know what is on the right track and what is an error of comprehension, and how much of our own explanations will be an entirely new story that we invent ourselves that misses the point of the show?
And yet despite all of these concerns, there are some things that give me hope, and make me believe we were right to commit to the show all along. Many of the complaints have been aimed at two of the most daring episodes: Ab Aeterno and Across The Sea. Ab Aeterno ruffled some feathers by showing us a Richard Alpert that had no answers of his own, in contradiction to what people had expected (i.e. he knew everything, and his flashback episode would reveal tons of new information), but most people responded to its incredible sweeping romantic moments and thought it was probably the highlight of the season so far (an opinion I share). However, I wonder if the free passes handed to it were only because the Jacob/Man in Black episode was coming up, which would surely answer everything, right?
Wrong. The sight of two confused and very human characters stumbling through the earliest years of the story and not giving anything up other than some vague information about the Mysterianium was the final straw for many, who hilariously and melodramatically vowed not to watch the last three episodes in protest. I’ll be honest: the thought of these two characters — who many assumed were God and Satan, or thereabouts — as just a couple of confused boys who fell out over a difference of opinion is so pleasing to me I want to hug the show all over again. For a long time I have been comparing the show to Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, a magnificent book which features huge events over a large period of time, but all in the service of making a tiny, seemingly insignificant thing happen (no spoilers, as everyone should read it). When Lost seemed to be introducing two demi-gods, that little absurdist element from Vonnegut’s book vanished, and I was sorry to see it go.
Happily, even though the stakes on the show have been revealed to be world-destroyingly vast, at the heart of it is still this mad idea that everyone who has been on the island has just been a normal, flawed person who has gotten in over their heads. To those who complain that the Dharma Initiative ended up meaning nothing (a viewpoint that I find absolutely baffling: the show could not have progressed without these hippie mad men in the background), I say this: they were just guys with too much money on their hands who came into contact with a magical island and made the same silly mistakes as Jacob and The Man in Black and back beyond them, probably to the dawn of thought itself. It was another iteration of this point: we’re insignificant, and vastly important, both at the same time.
Our troubles and misunderstandings shape us as much as these events of enormous scope, and though we are fools, we are also potential saviours. This aspect of the last few episodes is one of the things I have loved most about the show so far, and What They Died For continued that by having possibly the most momentous scene in the entire series be a chat during which all of the expected fireworks and melodrama were reduced to the tiniest of character moments, and what had been treated by fans as something as immutable as the carvings on the Ten Commandments tablets was “just a line of chalk in a cave.” This beautifully refined balance between the epic and the mundane is surely enough to give the show a break for almost any crime. Other than killing off Frank Lapidus. I think that’s going to annoy me no matter what happens. (We miss you Frank, you beautiful bastard!)
So it’s not all agonising for this doubting Thomas. As this week of worry has progressed, I’ve found myself taking consolation in my previous state of mind, that the story has been told so well so far, and has given me so much pleasure, that it is only fair that I forget about judging the finale as a success or a failure, and just accept whatever Cuse and Lindelof throw at me. As O.C. showrunner Josh Schwartz says in this Vulture post, when asked what advice he would give the Lost showrunners about their finale:
There is no advice that I can give to those guys. What they’re doing is on its own level. Anything goes, and I’m along for the ride. I will watch any way that they want to end the season at this point. No rules apply to this show.
He’s right: after all of this joy, how can I turn on them? I want to love the finale, so I’ll bloody well love it and that’s that. I wanted to love the end of BSG but to be honest I’d given up on it and become increasingly more annoyed by it about four episodes before the end of the second season, and only the New Caprica episodes gripped after that. Lost has never let me down, and my dip in enthusiasm this week was more to do with my worries about the imminent finale. The episode itself was great, with my favourite character Ben Linus getting to be the coldest badass he has ever been, and the scene with Jack that hit me with such force. This is a show that I don’t actually know how to hate. I just don’t know how that is possible.
So I can rationalise away my fears, and crystallise what I have loved about it, but what about the grief? And believe me, there will be grieving once the screen goes black (or white, as in the fifth season). Perhaps I can take solace in the knowledge that the show will almost certainly live on after it is over, as the debates rage. When this is all over, there will be happy fans and grouchy former fans who think the show failed, but I’d hope that everyone who has taken this journey feels it was worthwhile, if only for the mental workout it has given us. I feel bad for anyone who decides to give the show a try after the final episode airs, because they will have missed out on the slow build and the conversation between viewers and creators alike. I’d almost argue that we have all become “creators” as we watch and theorise, interacting with the show to an extent that it no longer qualifies as passive entertainment.
When I tell people one of my hobbies is watching TV I feel this swell of shame for admitting to enjoying something that doesn’t involve kayaking, but loving Lost leads to debating, interacting, studying. How telling that the final Lost ARG is Lost University: the community of like-minded people who have expanded their knowledge of the world just because of this TV show has made me feel as connected with humanity as I once felt while trapped on a small campus in the middle of the country, many years ago. We were in it together then, and bonded en masse. This feels much the same, but without the excessive drinking. It’s been humbling to see how many Lost fans are out there having the same emotional response as me; hundreds of thousands of fans on message boards, showrunners and writers and chat show hosts. Those of us who have metaphorically been touched by Jacob are in this together, and knowing I won’t be alone in feeling like crap tomorrow. Somehow the thought of a choked-up and bereft Jimmy Kimmel makes me feel better. Sorry, Mr. Kimmel.
So why did Jack’s decision make me cry? On some level I was crying because it’s almost over, but also because, maybe subconsciously, my faith was strengthened by the show’s confidence in bringing us to that point in such an emotionally satisfying way. In the face of a potentially calamitous final episode, there was a moment of quiet, perfect grace in the middle of all of this tempestuous attention, all of these end-of-season articles, complaints from former fans, and relentless promotion from ABC. Cuse and Lindelof told us the show was about character, and we all say yes, yes, what about the mysteries? But when Jack stood up to meet his destiny, the argument-for-character-drama won out. As much as I want questions answered, I know now that Lost doesn’t necessarily need two hours of exposition about every single mystery still hanging. It will win out if the Man in Black is defeated, Sawyer meets Juliet in the sideways world, Jack is redeemed in both worlds, and my boy Frank Lapidus somehow thrives. I don’t know that these things will happen, but I do know more tears will be shed, and for the first time this week I’ve been able to expect that they will be tears of joy. I’ll see you on the other side, brothers.
The new TV season is full swing, and yet here I am, still talking about last season. Of course, I’ve farted around for a couple of weeks doing very important things (not playing Halo 3: ODST, no matter what my endless tweets and Raptr updates will say), and am only now getting around to putting this up. Please forgive my tardiness.
Though I don’t want to say too much about the new season, which is just coming into shape, I will say that some shows (Fringe, House) have yet to get back to full strength, some (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dollhouse, Lie To Me) have come back with a confident bang, and some new shows (Community, Flashforward) have really piqued my interest. One new show (Modern Family) made me think I will never trust another critic ever again. Unless something really dreadful comes along, I think I have my Worst New Pilot of the 2009-2010 Season winner already sewn up.
Anyway, here are my final thoughts on the 2008i-2009 season. There were originally going to be more YouTube clips on here, but I’ve had a dispiriting day watching them get taken down. Fox and NBC, sorry for infringing on your copyright, but all you did was get rid of some free publicity, as I was going to tell the world how awesome your shows were. Except for that clip from Heroes. That was up because Angela Petrelli’s insanely histrionic reaction to her son’s death was the funniest thing of the year. So I can understand that one. And now, on with the hyperbole…
Best New Show:Sons of Anarchy
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get jusdhfjsh in to direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What setsSons of Anarchyapart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superbDollhouse– is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger and potentially ruinous moral compromise, the show became something that could well rival the mightyShieldfor complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best casts on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnignificence from the ever-awesome Kim Coates, let’s not forget) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, wwho blows everyone else away with her unhinged warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get Sopranos director/producer Allen Coulter in to co-direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What sets Sons of Anarchy apart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superb Dollhouse — is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger / potentially ruinous moral compromise, Sons of Anarchy hinted that it could become something that will rival the mighty Shield for complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best ensembles on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which, let’s not forget, includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnificence from Kim Coates) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, who blows everyone else away with her terrifying warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
Worst New Show:Parks and Recreation
Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are not idiots, obviously, but this landed with a terrible splat and couldn’t convince me to hang around long enough to see if it would improve. Part of that was because I was mad at the dip in quality over at The Office. Was it fair to blame this show for that? Probably not. Parks and Recreation has been mooted for so long (remember when it was supposed to be a straight spin-off of The Office?) that their attention has probably been divided for a long time, and the fourth season of The Office was great. Nevertheless, the energy of one show definitely seemed to have been split between two, and the result was a listless hour of supposed comedy.
I have fought with myself over whether it would have been worth hanging around to see if it got better, but then I remember little things that irked like the way the showrunners differentiated the talking head interjections from those of The Office — using two cameras for the faux-interviews instead of one — which drove me into fits of absurd rage. The Office already has trouble keeping the faux-doc format going, and this conceit draws even more attention to the fakeness of it all. Perhaps I’m just burned out on this format. ABC’s new comedy Modern Family has been heralded as the next great sitcom after just two episodes, with across the board raves. We watched last week’s pilot in a state of shock. Flamboyant gay stereotypes? Clunking, obvious jokes about the generation gap? Appalling overacting from everyone (with Julie Bowen being the worst offender)? A character misinterpreting the accent of a Columbian woman? (I say Columbian because Sofia Vergara is from Columbia. She’s probably expected to play someone from a different country in this.) Modern Family is exactly the kind of retrograde laugh-track-enhanced sitcom that seems almost archaic now, but because it’s filmed in a single camera faux-doc style, it’s treated as a cutting-edge exploration of modern American mores. Bullshit. It’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Dressing a raccoon in baseball gear doesn’t make it a baseball player. It just makes it a raccoon covered in sport gear. (Note to self: use less raccoons in metaphors. It just complicates things.)
I also remember one potentially funny scene in Parks and Recreation — involving hapless and strangely unlovable Leslie trying to convince a bunch of ill-informed citizens that her plans are worthwhile — failing to take off, and I realise that after this summer of purposely ignorant right-wing hijacking of the health-care town hall debates, this kind of scene probably won’t ever be funny again. Democracy failing to work because of the Crazification Factor getting in the way of intelligent debate is something I just can’t laugh at right now. What makes this turn of events most sad is that the concept is so full of potential, and yet it didn’t even work before the protests. I can’t figure out how you could take an idea this promising and fail to make something that mixes madness and profundity in the same way as The Office. Compare that to Knight Rider. That was always going to be shit. This should have been a potent mix of satire and ridiculousness. That’s why I have to put it in this category. Apparently it has found its stride in the second season, from what I’ve heard on the Hinternet. Sadly, the people who are saying that also keep going on about how Modern Family is hilarious. So, you know…
Best Title Sequence of the Year:Hung
The choice of music (I’ll Be Your Man by The Black Keys), the phallic objects in the background, the pace of it…
…It’s a perfect title sequence.
Best Pilot:Kings
From what I can gather, there was very little publicity for Kings when it made its way onto the screen. Many have said this was the reason for its failure to find an audience, though to be honest a literate curio like this was unlikely to ever become a breakthrough hit. Alternate histories? Playing with Biblical stories? Unappealing main characters? It just seemed like a real long shot. It was impressive to see NBC gamble on making the show in the first place, but as with the equally intelligent Journeyman, making a show and trying to make the show available to a wide audience are two different things.
To be honest, with Journeyman the hurt is greater. That show was less ambitious, but as a result was more likely to find an audience if given a chance. It also improved as it went along. Kings started off incredibly strong and then stalled a little. That’s the problem when a show gets a pilot this impressive. Written by showrunner Michael Green and directed by the underrated Francis Lawrence, Goliath (the name of the pilot) was like no other pilot I’ve ever seen. Even though it was made on a shoestring, it looked incredible. Even more appealing, it had a weird edge of fantasy even beyond the alternate earth conceit, with God interacting with certain characters in a matter of fact way even though the show did not explicitly preach Christian values.
Perhaps this more than anything alienated audiences: atheists might rebel against a show that openly debates the wishes of God, and Christians might be irked by this God not being a recognisable version of their God. While I fall into the first category, I don’t mind God turning up in fiction as long as It’s not used as a deus ex machina or Unexplainable Puppeteer (hello Battlestar Galactica) or as an accurate version of “our” God (a sky bully who gets pissed off if we don’t play by Its crazy rules). The version of God in Kings was not a big deal, but Its mysterious behaviour, and effect on the behaviour of the main characters, was fascinating.
As was the superb character King Silas Benjamin (not to mention his allies and enemies), and the superb use of New York locations (standing in for the fictional city of Shiloh) to give a sense of epic scale to the show, and the incredible cast… As I say, the show was fascinating to watch right up until its unfortunate cancellation, but it never quite lived up to the promise of that amazing pilot, simply because the pilot made you think you were watching the most amazing show ever. We weren’t, but it was damn good nevertheless. Even the slightly disappointing finished product was better than almost everything else on TV. You could practically sense the cult following develop as you watched, not to mention hear the knives coming out for it as you realise how odd the project was. We’re lucky we saw any of it, to be honest.
Worst Pilot:The Unusuals
Seemingly rushed into production as a result of the writers’ strike, The Unusuals matched an underwhelming concept with a poorly defined set of uninteresting characters, failed to find a consistent tone, and handed off directing chores to the ever-feeble Stephen Hopkins, a man who has never made even one good film (I remember liking The Ghost and the Darkness when I first saw it, but I fear I’m being kind). There was no way I was going to enjoy this.
The main reason for my annoyance is that there were some good actors in there who just couldn’t rise above the material or the execution. Some of the most interesting actors — both promising and established — flounder within the show’s poorly thought-through format, with some characters played as broad as possible and others reining in the madness. Jeremy Renner in particular looks like he’s wandered in from another show. Harold Perrineau does okay with his skittish character, while Adam Goldberg sucks all of the energy out of his scenes with a sour and unappealing demeanour, not to mention a terrible mustache. The conceit that a hypochondriac with a fear of death is partnered with a man who wants to die and yet seems blessed is one of those ideas that sounds great on the page and fails on screen.
As for Amber Tamblyn, playing a high-society girl trying to make it as a cop in the cuh-rayzee precinct, it was a more entertaining concept when rich-boy Carter turned up in E.R. That was only one of the shows this seemed to emulate. M.A.S.H., NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Hooperman (for crying out loud): it was an echo of greater shows, a throwback to 80s cop dramas when they started to become more confident and complex. Sad thing is, we don’t want babysteps any more. We’ve moved on. The low ratings and inevitable cancellation of this show proved that. Let’s hope those good actors turn up in better projects now.
Best Pilot of the Year Not Selected For Series:Virtuality
I won’t go into how much I hated the Battlestar Galactica finale again, as I’m beginning to come across as a total crazy person who is obsessed with going on about it, but it did make me reconsider trying out Caprica, the Stoltzified spin-off. Why should I keep watching shows set in this universe, made by this team, who had so disappointed me throughout the last few seasons? Yes, Jane Espenson would be there too, and I love her work, but still, I cannot imagine being invested in this story any more. There is a good chance I’ll relent, because good SF is hard to find on TV at the best of times. Nevertheless, my annoyance remains.
You can imagine how uninterested I was in another Ronald D. Moore / Michael Taylor show (I was never fond of his BSG episodes), especially one that seemed so prosaic. Moore has stated in the past that he was interested in making BSG because he felt the urge to rebel against Star Trek‘s chirpy universe and its reliance on holodeck technology to change up the show, which made Virtuality — a show about space travellers who use virtual reality technology to relax — a curious proposition. I resisted this too, and then relented after seeing the feeble Defying Gravity, which seemed to be drawn from the same template. Thinking Virtuality would be nothing more than a space soap along the same lines as the other network drama, I gave it a spin, expecting little.
I love it when I’m proved wrong like this. As much as Fox’s other new SF show – Dollhouse – Virtuality is a fascinating and challenging exploration of ideas, dramatically filmed and featuring an excellent cast. In fact, the cast is even stronger than that of Dollhouse, with excellent turns from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, Richie Coster (who needs more work, stat), and the ever-dependable Clea DuVall. All the actors are on top form, but these four really stand out. As for the comparison with Defying Gravity, the only thing they have in common is being set in space. Virtuality is about so much more: our perception of reality and how it will inevitably be twisted by the lens we observe through, how technology can affect us emotionally, how we refuse to let it go even when it is obviously not doing us any good (an idea expressed far more clearly here than in Lee Adama’s ridiculous speech in the final BSG episode). While Defying Gravity really is a soap set in space (with one character seemingly completely defined by the pregnancy she once terminated, which is as regressive a character arc as is possible), Virtuality is about ideas. It’s proper SF.
At least, it was proper SF. Even though it was obviously incredibly ambitious and beautifully made (with top direction from Shades of Caruso favourite Peter Berg), and even though were was huge potential for relatively cheap but gripping drama, it was shelved. I’m utterly depressed by this turn of events. There was only one misstep in the whole pilot, with a nasty perception-rape sequence that made me uncomfortable. Reliance on rape plots always upsets me, but here even this most unpleasant of plot threads is used to further the show’s exploration of whether there is a gap between virtual and actual reality, and what happens to us when we lose track of the difference between the two. If the show was willing to treat something potentially exploitative as cleverly as this, we would almost certainly have seen a lot of very smart SF in the rest of the series. But no. While Whedon got lucky with Dollhouse, the Virtuality team saw their show taken away before they could go any further. The best thing I can say about it? It was better than most movies I’ve seen this year. It’s a crying shame there will be no more.
Most Unfairly Cancelled Show of the Year:Reaper
Patton Oswalt is a brilliantly funny and caustic man, but recently he broke my heart. In this interview, he explained how, while filming his turn on Reaper, he saw the crew and cast crushed by their parent network, The CW.
When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”
This is the network that, when it was The WB, cancelled Angel, so I already have a big problem with them. Now I have an even bigger one. It may have not become something more ambitious, but it was endlessly lovable, and became admirably silly in the second season. The first was funny, but at times the second season was funnier than many sitcoms. The monster-of-the-week format of the show, which had seemed so restrictive, sometimes ended up shoved into the cold open, with the rest of the episode dealing with silly relationship drama, Sock shenanigans, or sly mythology expanding business with recurring characters like Nina or Tony. This might not be as involving as Buffy, but it was never as blandly diverting as something like The Mentalist. It fell right in the middle, which is apparently deadly.
That greater focus on just being daft was working for us, but the lack of a coherent arc from week to week (other than Sam’s lacklustre efforts to get out of his contract, and the hints that he is a more important player in the battle between God and The Devil) seemed to doom it. More than any other show departing this year, this is the one we’ll miss. Goodbye to one of the most entertaining casts on TV, some of the most eccentric writing of the past few years, and most of all, goodbye to the best Devil in recent pop culture history. He may be showing up in Dollhouse, but will Ray Wise be this mischievous, charming, delightful? Ray Wise fans everywhere, please come together one last time to marvel at that beautiful, beautiful grin.
At least one of us is smiling, I guess. [Insert sad-face emoticon here]
Best New Double Act of the Year: Ray Drecker and Tanya Skagle - Hung
When compiling the list of best and worst characters, I had certain unspoken rules in place to stop myself from focusing exclusively on certain shows. Party Down‘s cast of beautifully observed characters could have dominated the first list, and Knight Rider could have dominated the second. My biggest quandary was caused by Hung, HBO’s lovable male-prostitution-and-economic-disaster comedy that has so entertained us recently. How do I get to honour two of the funniest characters of the year without breaking that rule? As ever, inventing a new category is the perfect answer. Hung is a show that has a few tonal errors (what was going on with the horribly misconceived Jessica, played with occasional delicacy by Anne Heche?) and a very loosely defined season arc (two pimps fighting over Ray and his magical dong), not to mention some wasted actors (why hire Gregg Henry and put him in about five scenes?). At times, it felt like we were watching half a show.
Nevertheless, it became appointment viewing just because of the wonderful work of Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Their chemistry, and their relentless bickering and grudging friendship, was the thing that made Hung exceed its limitations. It also made Shades of Caruso reconsider the talents of both actors. Thomas Jane was given moments of pathos which he has never really had a chance to play before, and he excelled, especially in the season finale. Jane Adams has always played sad-sack losers, but this time she was given a chance to give Tanya some nobility even as her plans fell apart around her. Both actors also got to show off their physical comedy skills, with Adams especially amusing during her many impotent temper tantrums.
It was their interplay that really held the show together. Even as other plot threads and arcs seemed to falter or shoot off in predictable directions, watching these two actors play off each other was more than enough to save the show. It’s notable that episodes where Ray and Tanya aren’t onscreen together were the weakest of the season, whereas the ones which explored their dependent relationship and accidental exploration of each other’s personality were the most satisfying. Hopefully the show continues to throw these polar opposites together next year.
Best New Couple of the Year: Sawyer and Juliet – Lost
Ah yes, the love triangle/quadrangle. The constant refrain of Lost doubters (and some fans) is that the show is wasting its time whenever it focuses on the relationship drama of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet. “We don’t care about that shit! Show more Faraday!” Yes yes, love drama tends to make me go to sleep as well. Many shows are hamstrung by tedious relationship dramas: House is at its dreariest when Thirteen and Foreman, or Cameron and Chase, go on and on about their coupledom; Kings ground to a halt every time David and Michelle made goo-goo eyes at each other. Hell, even the otherwise perfect Party Down was at its least interesting every time Henry and Casey got together. So there is precedent.
However, I love the relationship drama from Lost for two reasons. One: at the end of the season, we see how far Jack has fallen from grace. We thought he was the square-jawed all-American hero who would bring everyone out of the wilderness like a be-stubbled Moses, but over time we see he’s a deeply damaged, semi-psychotic loser who – as we find out in the final episode of season five – even lied about his character-defining anecdote from the very first episode. How much of a loser is he? After pushing away the woman he “loves” with his whiny attitude and various emotional breakdowns, and after years of trying to figure out what his purpose is now that his dad isn’t around to torture him, he has two choices to make a difference in his life: a) man up and seek help for his depression, all while giving up on the thought of making a go of things with Kate, or b) detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone on the island, in the hope that it will change history and allow Oceanic 815 to land safely in LAX so he doesn’t have to put up with the mess he made of his life. I’ve said before that one of the things I love about Lost is that it shows the psychology of its characters in minute detail, and this final touch – showing how far people will go to avoid making simple changes in their lives because of their fear of what will happen if it fails – is the perfect metaphor for how we hold onto our broken selves even when we know how to make things better.
Two: It also gave us the wonderful, tragic pairing of Sawyer and Juliet, which justifies all of the sturm and drang to get there. So far, all of the pairings that have been tried were wrong somehow. Jack and Kate didn’t work because Jack is insane. Kate and Sawyer didn’t work because Kate keeps messing with Sawyer’s head. Jack and Juliet didn’t work because Jack was not even slightly into Juliet and was just using her to get over Kate. However, as soon as the fourth season ended with a shirtless Sawyer walking out of the sea towards a drunken Juliet, I knew we would get to see something go right. And, for the most part, it did, even though it was not to be.
It’s not just that the combined hottness of Sawyer and Juliet is so great that it probably melted most of the TVs in the world. It’s also not just that selfish Kate and crazy Jack were finally out of the equation. It’s even not just because seeing Sawyer and Juliet flirting while shooting people was the most awesome thing ever. It’s that there was barely any controversy in the relationship, which probably would have even survived the forthcoming Purge, somehow. It’s only when Kate returns to the island and reignites Juliet’s psychological damage (previously caused by the break-up of her parents, the infidelity of her ex-husband, and the death of her lover Goodwin) that it all goes horribly wrong. Did Sawyer still hold a candle for Kate? Probably. Did he love Juliet? I reckon yes, and I believe he would have done anything for her if she had given him the chance. All of this made the quadrangle emotionally powerful, as we finally had something to hang on to. Would Sawyer and Juliet survive the machinations of the island/Esau and Jacob? More than any other relationship in TV history (except for Fred and Wesley in Angel), my nerves were set on fire by the possibility that those kids might not make it after all. Of course…
Most Upsetting, Most Harsh, and Most Unfair Scene of the Year: The Incident finally happens – Lost
…we all know how it turned out. Nothing else this year made me cry as much as this.
Damn you, stupid TV show! Damn you for being so fucking mean! And damn you Emmy voters for not giving nominations to Elizabeth Mitchell and Josh Holloway. They were amazing all season.
Worst New Couple of the Year: Luke and Bess - In Treatment
In Treatment‘s second season deviated dramatically from its source material — the Israeli drama Be’Tipul — when it moved main character Paul Weston from Maryland to Brooklyn, allowing the show to dramatise his dislocation from his family, as well as to provide a reason for why he suddenly has so many new patients. This meant that we lost the chance to see season one patients Amy and Jake return, this time as a divorced couple fighting over their son, leading to the creation of two new patients, Luke and Bess. With their marriage in tatters and resentment flying between them, their son Oliver suffers terribly, putting on weight and falling into depression as his parents either fight for custody of him or, amazingly, against custody.
None of the characters in this show are particularly nice to Paul, but the games Luke and Bess play with him, using his advice as justification for a serious of awful, selfish choices, were worse than the usual antagonism people show their therapist. Many times during the season I was horrified by their behaviour, and by the time the season finished they were openly talking about how their lives had been ruined by their marriage and how they wanted another chance at what they had with barely any regard for Oliver’s well-being. When Paul finally loses his temper with them in episode 28, it elicited a round of applause from us. Figuratively speaking. And to be honest, he should have been even angrier with them.
Of course, this being In Treatment, these two horribly selfish people are written so well that we can see their point of view — and their humanity — clearly enough that even at their worst we cannot completely write them off. Their eventual remorse is a relief, but it’s still not enough considering how completely both parents are oblivious to the young boy’s needs. Thankfully, Paul is there to prove to Oliver that he will still be there for him, in some respect. His final scene with Oliver, talking to him via “phone” in his office, started a deluge of tears from this admittedly weepy viewer. If Oliver escapes this miserable situation with his psyche intact, it will have nothing to do with his parents.
Most Underused Character of the Year: Boyd Langton - Dollhouse
Whedon has a talent for peppering his casts with older character actors playing the “parents” to the younger crew. With Buffy we had Giles, in Angel there was Wesley (though his efficacy is doubtful; he’s arguably more flawed than any of his compatriots), and Firefly had Shepherd Book. These stern characters with hearts of gold gave their respective shows some kind of grounding when things got wacky, though Whedon wasn’t averse to making them run through some ridiculous hoops (Book’s mad hair, Wesley’s various pratfalls, Giles’ guitar playing). Sadly, while Langton got a chance to be silly in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, he rarely got a chance to do anything interesting either. Many characters got to have interesting arcs and secrets, but Langton seemed to be getting less and less screentime as the series wore on. Making him head of security broke the student-mentor relationship between him and Echo, but then this might be Whedon trying to throw his own archetypes out, confounding our expectations. That he would give handler-duties to someone who appears to have an unhealthy sexual attraction to Echo (I’m talking about the plasticine-man known as Ballard) shows there might be something to that.
Nevertheless, it is a shame to cast someone like Harry Lennix — who has intense onscreen presence and then some — and then not give him as much to do as possible. His new role means he will interact more with Olivia Williams, meaning the two best actors on the show get to bang heads together: joy! That promotion, along with his new connection to Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, suggests he will be given more to do in the second season, but nevertheless, his relative inaction in later episodes was one of the few things I didn’t like about the improved half of the first season.
Most Entertaining Villain of the Year: Gemma Teller Morrow – Sons of Anarchy
One of the great pleasures of Sons of Anarchy is how it mixes up its Shakespeare. The debt it owes to Hamlet has been acknowledged by creator Kurt Sutter, but less attention has been paid to his shameless steal from Macbeth. Gemma Teller Morrow — former wife of SAMCRO leader John Teller — at first seems like a strong biker chick, but by the end of the pilot episode has revealed herself to be a conniving, power-hungry Queen whose sense of morality has been twisted until she will do anything to protect her family and the direction of the gang, a fact proved by her attempt at driving Jax’s junkie wife Wendy to an overdose. Later in the season she apologises to Wendy for this act, but even then she’s only doing it because she’d rather her son stay with a recovering junkie than return to his longtime sweetheart Tara. Plus, she does seem to be implicated in John’s death, possibly committed by her current husband Clay Morrow, which appears to have been done to prevent a change of direction towards legitimacy for the biker gang.
The most miraculous thing about this character is that she has dispelled my previous reservations about the talents of Katey Sagal. I’ve complained about her terrible voicework on Futurama before, where she leaves no joke intact, but I had suspected her dramatic work was not as shaky. She was great as John Locke’s departed love Helen in Lost, for example. In Sons of Anarchy, she’s even better, outacting even Ron Perlman when she’s in full flow. This display of Macchiavellian sneakiness got even more entertaining as the season progressed. There was a certain amount of character modulation during the latter half of the season, with some of her excesses toned down, and the horribly stagy confrontations between her and Tara tweaked until they sounded like actual human conversations, but even so, her Lady-Macbeth-esque manipulations of all around her were a source of delight even when she misfired a little. Gemma, as Journey almost said once, don’t stop conniving.
Least Entertaining Villain of the Year: Miguel Prado - Dexter
Dexter sure does have some crappy nemeses. In the first season, he goes up against his own brother, played with ridiculous camp evilness by Christian Camargo. In the second season, he is forced to conquer his evil girlfriend, manifested by Jaime Murray with a bag of absurd tics even more annoying than those of Dexter’s sister Debs, who is played by the equally dreadful Jennifer Carpenter. In the fourth season we’re getting John Lithgow. My memories of his madness from De Palma’s Raising Cain do not bode well for any Over-Act-O-Meters used to track the progress of this show, though I reckon he will be infinitely more entertaining than Dexter’s other “villains”.
Last year we got to see Jimmy Smits contend with the usual quota of ineptitude, improbable motivation, and mustache-twirling obviousness that comprises the Dexter Big Bad, and he made a meal of it. Amping up his intensity to sky-high levels, Miguel Prado went from saint to madman in the blink of an eye, all pretense at showing him as a morally complex human thrown out of the window with a haste even this most feeble of shows has never exhibited before. His cluelessness meant his occasional victories against Dexter relied upon our “hero”‘s IQ dropping 100 points, which is a flaw that has run through the show from the beginning. Prado would then, naturally, make a bunch of mistakes, all the while chewing scenery like a murderous Donald Sinden. I say he was the least entertaining villain of the year because watching his character arc was deeply unsatisfying, with him changing his personality from moment to moment in order to move the plot, and not vice versa, but I did get a lot of pleasure from his reaction after he finally kills a bad guy.
Nastiest Villain of the Year: Nolan – Dollhouse
I can’t make any glib observations about this. Whedon is an avowed feminist, and this new show seemed to be a peculiar expression of that worldview, drawing both perplexed condemnation and optimistic readings. The fact that the show didn’t immediately say that the Dollhouse was a bad place threw a lot of viewers (including myself), but I’m sure a lot of Whedon’s fans (again, including myself) hoped that things would be clearer in the long run.
By the end of the season it was obvious that the Dollhouse tech was meant to be The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Humanity Ever, and not just because it brings about the end of the world (or at least, the end of Humanity). The most graphic and upsetting example of this comes in the excellent episode Needs, where the Actives come to and “escape” their prison (but only because they are allowed to). Drawn to the terrible things that have made them volunteer for Activeness, we see November visiting the grave of her child, and Echo deciding to stay behind to rescue her fellow Actives (surely this should worry the Dollhouse executives a bit more). Sierra, who I’d never found to be particularly compelling, goes to see the man who has paid the Dollhouse to make her an Active. Any doubt that the Dollhouse is a force for evil is removed once we find out that Nolan (played with oily menace by Vincent Ventresca) has paid the Dollhouse to turn her — a woman who once refused him — into an Active just so that he can violate a woman her whenever he feels like it. As Couch Baron says here, there truly are no words that can describe how awful this is. It was the most potent way to show how dreadful this technology is, and upset me deeply. The bad taste remained for the rest of the season. How rare for a network show to explore this kind of moral depravity without shying away from it.
Best Cast of the Year:Party Down
Just as with this year’s Best New Double Act category, I created this category last year to give shout-out to Reaper‘s wonderful cast, which featured a host of great actors, especially Ray Wise, Tyler Labine, and Ken Marino. This year, Party Down gets a nod for featuring so many great actors, including Ken Marino. If I’d been blogging when Veronica Mars started, I probably would have highlighted the terrific cast of that show too, which would have meant discussing Ken Marino’s turn as sleazy private investigator Vinnie Van Lowe. Basically, Ken Marino seems to be my weakness. If he’s around, I am helpless.
Which is not to say Party Down worked solely because of him. As I’ve mentioned at length in my Best New Characters award list, Jane Lynch is breathtakingly good as Constance Carmell, and her replacement (Jennifer Coolidge) was just as good. Of the core cast, I’d highlight Ryan Hansen too, playing the adorably clueless Kyle Bradway — basically Dick Casablancas with a heart of gold. His vapid interactions with Jane Lynch are the highlight of many episodes, and he even manages to make tolerable the time spent with Martin Starr, here doing worryingly convincing work as the deeply unpleasant Roman DeBeers. He’s probably the weak link in the cast, though I would also become annoyed by the endless hipsterish emotional evasions of Casey Klein, played by Lizzy Caplan. (Side note: I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to real-world annoyances too numerous to count, I automatically take against any character on TV who spends all of their time on the phone instead of doing their job, or while other people are trying to talk to them. Those caveats are meant to signify that Jack Bauer is not to be considered one of these people. When he’s on the phone, he’s actually saving the world).
At the heart of this amazing ensemble is Adam Scott, formerly playing Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron from Tell Me You Love Me, and now utterly rehabilitated from that indie-movie-aping earnestness after his incredibly bold turn in Step Brothers. Here he is required to be in enormous emotional pain for the majority of the time, and it’s a credit to him that playing a completely shut-down shell of a man doesn’t mean he isn’t funny. His ability to mix up this world-weariness and emotional vulnerability with deadpan wit is essential to the success of the show. He’s Tim-from-The-Office, but even more pathetic. You weep for him in every episode.
So, they’re a fantastic core group, but they’re not the only reason Party Down wins this award. Just as with 30 Rock and Arrested Development before them, this show manages to get some of the best character actors around to populate the secondary cast. In the first season we saw Ken Jeong, J.K. Simmons, Steven Weber, Marilu Henner, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, Joey Lauren Adams, Molly Parker, Breckin Meyer, Rob Corddry, Rick Fox (as himself), George Takei (also as himself), not to mention — for the Veronica Mars fans out there — Kristin Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Daran “Cliff McCormack” Norris, Ed Begley Jr., Alona Tal and Jason Dohring. Matched up to the best sitcom scripts of the year, there was no way this show was going to fail. Even though I’m agnostic on the appeal of Megan Mullally (drafted in to replace Jane Lynch in season two), I have a strong feeling she will be magically transformed by this most glorious of shows.
Worst Cast of the Year:Parks and Recreation
I feel a little ill, because I’m about to criticise the casting of a show that has Amy Poehler in the lead role. Amy Poehler, who was the best thing about last year’s Baby Mama. Amy Poehler, who was one of the best things about SNL for the past few years. Amy Poehler, who was one of the three things in Southland Tales that was actually great and entertaining instead of desperately bad and misery-inducing (the other two things being The Rock and Wood Harris, with whom she shared her scenes). She makes me laugh pretty much every time I see her, but not here. In that case, I’m willing to assume she was just dealt a bad hand, and given a character who is unworkable. The only times Leslie Knope comes alive and becomes more than a badly formed lump of unrealistic character flaws is when she pines over Mark Brendanawicz, her selfish and unappealing colleague played by the talented Paul Schneider. Again, another talented actor playing an unlikeable and uninteresting character. Maybe I should rethink this category. Is it the cast, or the show, that I don’t like?
Well, Aziz Ansari is in it. I’ll admit, I have not seen much of his work. He was in Funny People for a couple of minutes, and the effect he had on me was akin to having my soul Maced. Perhaps I’m wrong. This show seems to be underwritten and poorly thought through, which could account for it, but his turn as Tom Haverford is almost unwatchable. I’d say that’s more than just a glitch in the writing. The same goes for Nick Offerman as the Dwight-Schrute-esque Ron Swanson, a character that screams desperation from the writers but is not at all helped by Offerman’s flat performance. Both Haverford and Swanson seem like the kernel of a joke expanded to character-size without much thought given to whether these characters will work. As it is, they’re just belligerent. The less said about Aubrey Plaza and her pointless teenage character April Ludgate, the better. (See above for comments about affectless, oblivious characters like Ludgate and Casey from Party Down.)
Perhaps the thing I resent most is putting someone as funny as Chris Pratt opposite a comedy void like Rashida Jones. She was charming enough in The Office but wasn’t expected to be particularly funny. Here she is either a dope being manipulated by Pratt’s Andy, or she berates him, making her seem churlish and him seem like a victim, which he isn’t. Crappy couples on TV are not often fun to watch (ask any Lost fan who despairs whenever Jack and Kate get together). I’m more than willing to accept that a lot of these actors are far better in other roles. Hell, I’ve seen them be better. Pratt was hilarious in The O.C. as Che, and Paul Schneider was riveting in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Perhaps I’m being way too harsh on these actors. Sadly, the bottom line is that, unlike The Office that came with only a couple of good characters, already based on archetypes from the UK series, and then built the supporting cast as they went along, Parks and Recreation started from scratch and got none of the characters right. Even a good cast would have trouble making this bunch of half-formed comedic scribbles come to life. In time, if it doesn’t get cancelled, perhaps this will change. Let me know when it does. Until then, I’ll stick with Community, Dan Harmon’s brilliant new sitcom, which recently started almost fully-formed and will hopefully keep getting better.
Best Guest Star of the Year: Jon Hamm - 30 Rock
For a little while, we were non-converts to the Cult of Hamm. He entertained us enough in Mad Men, but we had enough reservations about the first season that he didn’t really register in our consciousness, even after the Dick Whitman revelation gave Hamm the best acting opportunities. Perhaps we thought he was just a pretty face, and couldn’t imagine there was anything else in there. Canyon was also offended by his Brylcreemed hair. She deemed it unappealing. I wasn’t about to argue.
Then came the far superior second season, and sightings of his normal hair (adorably floppy), and then a turn on Saturday Night Live that was so confident and charming that I fully expect Hamm to eventually challenge the hosting records fought over by Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Dramatic excellence, perfect comic timing, a willingness to play off his image, and seriously, one of the handsomest faces on Earth; if he can sing and dance, he’s got it all. We are now members of the Cult. Wearing robes and everything. It’s proper infatuation.
His three episode run as Dr. Drew Baird on 30 Rock was joyous. It was so good that the plot of his final episode, with him coming to realise that having everyone fawn over him all the time is something that doesn’t happen to anyone else, was even alluded to in the third season of Mad Men (reacting with bemusement when Sal points out that he doesn’t get hit on by flight attendants on every flight he takes, unlike Don, who is obviously spoilt for choice). Once Mad Men is over, Hamm can pretty much pick a direction. Not many actors get to achieve stardom and show both comedic and dramatic chops. Maybe he’s more like Dr. Drew than he realises.
Most Resurrected Character of the Year: Captain Jack Harkness - Torchwood: Children of Earth
I thought I always wanted Captain Jack’s immortality to be used more, as it’s a nifty little gimmick. I don’t think that any more.
Most Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Akiva Goldsman on Kings and Fringe
Akiva Goldsman has done some awful things. His script for Batman and Robin is rightly reviled. He’s great at simplifying complex narratives and turning them into multiplex fodder (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot). He’s the go-to guy for big movies based on crappy thrillers by bad writers (he’s adapted John Grisham and Dan Brown). When nerds hear his name, they sob with misery. “Why is this man so beloved of Hollywood?”, they shout. “It must be proof of its awfulness, along with the career of Michael Bay!” Of course, my own feelings about Bay are not so straight-down-the-line, and now, Goldsman has begun to win me over.
All he had to do was build up his experience as a director by making two of the strongest hours of TV of the 2008-2009 season. His debut, on Kings‘ The Sabbath Queen, showed a talent for atmospherics and interesting visuals, pacing the episode beautifully and getting some good performances from even the weaker actors on the show. After that he wrote and directed Bad Dreams, one of the highlights of Fringe‘s first season. Again, the creepy atmosphere was beautifully judged, and the opening few minutes were hypnotically staged. Even better, the big finale was disturbing and tense, even as it played with some less than fresh ideas, and then we got a video clip of a young Olivia that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. If you’ll forgive me for cheating and ignoring my own rules, we’ve also seen his work on the first episode of the second season of Fringe, and again, it was very impressive. In time it’s obvious that he will be directing films too. I hope he finds some interesting material to work with, but even if not, I look forward to seeing what he will come up with.
Least Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Greg Yaitanes on House and Lost
Shades of Caruso took against the TV (and occasional film) director Greg Yaitanes after some hilariously overwrought and showy work on shows such as Heroes and Drive, and we’ve yet to be convinced he deserves reappraisal. Last year he won an Emmy for his work on the first part of the House season finale, which would have been understandable when you take the logistics of the shoot into account, but is frustrating when Katie Jacobs’ work on the far more affecting final episode wasn’t even considered (and she’s listed as co-director of the Yaitanes episode too, but didn’t get a nomination). Since then, Yaitanes has been given a co-producer credit on House, and contributed numerous episodes to this season, including the shocking Simple Explanation, in which Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide offscreen.
I will say this: the scene where Foreman and Thirteen discover the body was brilliantly done. Unfortunately, Yaitanes had a vision for this episode and went ahead with it. Everyone at Princeton Plainsboro is obviously very depressed about Kutner’s death, so Yaitanes lights the entire episode as if all the colour has been drained from the hospital. It’s an entirely grey hour of TV, just in case you didn’t get it from the performances or dialogue or sad music all over the place. To be honest, the episode Joy, directed by an unexpectedly off-colour Deran Serafian, featured the worst direction of the season, but Yaitanes was consistently bad here, and worse elsewhere.
You see, he also managed to infect my beloved Lost with his ridiculous film-cooties. I could talk about the flashy work he did on Heroes, but to be honest he’s the least of that show’s problems, so I don’t really mind if he stays on it. Lost, however, is a totally different matter. He had worked on the show before, in the first season, and as we started rewatching the show recently, I noticed he was kinda bad then too. That was when the show was in its infancy, and was still trying to find its tone, so his attention-seeking excesses were less obvious. By now, we all know what works and what doesn’t work within the very specific Lost world, which made Yaitanes’ excesses even more noticeable than usual. We know that Ben is creepy and Sayid is scary and intimidating, which are characteristics stressed by their very specific line-readings. In He’s Our You, we see a flashback to a face-off between the two characters, and both Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews draw out their sentences to absurd lengths, with poorly edited pauses between each shot emphasising that they are both very methodical people who hate each other.
Lost usually treats these big moments with a sense of grandeur that works well, considering the unapologetically grandiose nature of the narrative, but this scene stepped over the line between epic and ridiculous. It made my favourite show seem like a parody of itself. I don’t even want to get into the awful “interrogation” scene later (included above), which was poorly written but even more poorly directed. What was Andrews doing here? It’s all over the place. The final scene with Sayid shooting young Ben was brilliant, but it was the only bright spot in a very disappointing hour of Lost. When you compare this horrible misinterpretation of the tone of the show to the consistently impressive work of star directors Jack Bender and Stephen Williams, it just looks amateurish. I keep hoping he’ll settle down, but the latest episode of House was directed by him, and as it was about a games programmer, most shots seemed to feature arms coming out of the side of the frame towards the person being observed, just like an FPS, so it might be a while before he realises less is more.
Best Shout-Out of the Year:House
Stephen Colbert is a huge fan of House, and it seems the feeling is mutual. (It’s the photo above his shoulder, obviously.)
This is the only way Colbert is ever going to get on a Fox channel without being mischaracterised as a baby-eating Trotsky clone.
Intensity of the Year: Lance “Intensity” Reddick – Fringe
While Parks and Recreation fans, or Dexterites, or people with Unusual taste, might be mad at me for being a big meanie and saying such terrible things about their favourite shows, surely there can be no controversy here. No one else this year was so stern and scary and just fucking in charge.
I suspect Lance “Intensity” Reddick can atomise titanium just by looking at it. As with Harry Lennix on Dollhouse, Reddick is pretty under-used on Fringe. Most of the time he is onscreen he’s taking the Fringe team to various crime scenes, or giving Olivia either a bollocking or a pep talk. This is not a good use of this man’s talents. He also showed up in Lost, as the sinister Matthew Abaddon, where he stopped being sinister just before getting shot and killed. Which sucked. I hope season two of Fringe sees him doing more entertaining stuff. I’d like him to shoot one of their ridiculous monsters (a part squid, part mushroom teenager hiding under carpets, for instance), or have more screen time with Blair Brown and Her Metallic Arm. If the Fringe showrunners don’t hurry up, he could well get very bored very soon. In this AV Club interview, he says he wants to try his hand at comedy. (For the record, though he is seemingly never required to show it on TV, Mr. Reddick is fully capable of expressing amusement, and isn’t just a scarily intense man.)
If he left Fringe to do that, you know I’d be checking it out.
And that’s it for this year. In the next few weeks, some new polls or something. Maybe some chatter about the London Film Festival (I got really carried away buying tickets the other week). Stay tuned, new readers. As you can see, I may not post as often as I would like, but when I do, I tend to post big.
As with the list of best episodes, we’re operating on a strict timeline, meaning some shows that would normally appear here, won’t. Luckily, as the summer sees less non-reality shows aired, I’m exposed to less dross. Of the shows I’ve seen over the past couple of months, only one would potentially qualify for this list, i.e. ABC’s dripping wet space soap Defying Gravity. I cannot believe showrunner James Parriott not only aimed to make a show that he has described as “Grey’s Anatomy in space”, but managed to find a lead actor even less appealing than Patrick “Oily Void” Dempsey (Ron “Acting Lessons” Livingston, if you were curious). Anyway, that will have to wait until next year, as the show is still on, inexplicably. Now, I shall let my anger flow from me like sewage from a pipe. Apologies for the inevitable mean-spiritedness…
10. Battlestar Galactica – Daybreak
As was said in the previous post, ending a long-running series is a fraught proposition, almost guaranteed to disappoint some fan somewhere. The trick is to make sure that at least the core questions or dilemmas of the show are addressed and resolved, and to pay off longrunning character arcs in a way that show consideration for continuity and human behaviour. No mean feat. It’s unfair to criticise showrunners for not getting a finale 100% right, but if Shawn Ryan could get it 99.999% right with The Shield, we now know it can be done to a very high degree of viewer satisfaction. Daybreak tried to resolve all of the unanswered questions posed by four seasons ofBattlestar Galactica, but in the laziest manner possible. Attributing all kinds of mysterious happenings to a unknown force that is never named or explained or given any kind of motivation rendered the whole tale pointless. As wishy-washy as the nebulous thought processes of the worst kind of woolly-headed fantasist, Daybreak resolved barely anything, with characters making illogical and suicidal choices for no reason other than that it was the last episode, and it needed to end before the final credits. The puddle-deep enquiry into AI ethics was the killing blow (Hug A Robot Today, So They Don’t Nuke Us Tomorrow!). So why is it not higher in this list? Because the first hour was fantastic, Boomer’s redemption was beautiful, and it featured some of the best performances of the year (Callis, Olmos, McDonnell: take a bow). Shame it didn’t follow through properly. Or at all. (For more whining about how disappointing this episode was, here is my original post following the broadcast of the finale.)
9. Dollhouse – Stage Fright
It’s tempting to be forgiving of the first half of Dollhouse‘s first season. Thousands of words have been written about how Joss Whedon’s incredible new show had its wings clipped by the evil suits at Fox, who either couldn’t understand the high concept or thought no audience could, and thus tried to force the show into a poorly fitting mission-of-the-week format. Until, that is, they suddenly stopped being evil suits and let Whedon go crazy with ideas and talking and audience-alienating character arcs like Ballard’s descent into self-loathing and unpleasant hate-fucking or Adele’s surprising ethical lapses with Victor. Let’s not forget, as shaky as the first half of the season was, it also laid the groundwork for the miraculous TV that was to come. And yet, even taking that into account, Stage Fright was a desperate failure, more Bionical Woman meets Josie and the Pussycats than Alias meets Buffy, with Echo imprinted with the personality of a pompous backing singer for a superstar, and Sierra mugging for the camera as an adoring fan. The final dramatic scenes were like out-takes from Wayne’s World. It’s not so bad, though. The team responsible for this episode (David Solomon, Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon) also gave us the phenomenal Epitaph One. For this mis-step, they’re super-totally forgiven, and then some.
8. Dexter – Turning Biminese
As I’ve complained before, the popular and critical adoration of Dexter has baffled me for years. What strikes me as overdirected, poorly acted, clangingly obvious and desperately patronising drives millions of viewers into paroxysms of joy. Fair enough. Shades of Caruso keeps giving it chances, especially when Shield producer Charles Eglee steps in, and that patience was rewarded with the most pacey and entertaining season yet. However, it’s still overdirected, poorly acted, clangingly obvious and desperately patronising. While most episodes this year were just average (and one, Sí Se Puede, was actually very entertaining, even to this Dexter hater), some were just dire. Turning Biminese was the worst of the bunch, featuring yet more obvious metaphors, tedious sub-plots for the dreary cops in what can only be described as the world’s most inept police department, and a cringe-inducing, desperately unfunny rant from forensic photographer and obnoxious foul-mouth Matsuka, in a scene that sounded as if it had been written by an enraged adolescent Ain’t It Cool talkbacker who had just been told that the star of his favourite TV show was gay. The episode’s worst crime? After realising that Dexter is a vigilante with a murderous MO, season three Big Bad Miguel Prado (played with scenery-devouring enthusiasm by Jimmy Smits) actually says “Dexter, you and I, we’re the same!”. Instant, irrevocable FAIL.
7. Torchwood: Children of Earth – Day 2
It’s not a Worst Episode of the Year list without an appearance from the Torchwood team, ineptly going where no one should ever have gone before. Or after, for that matter. But what is this? Not the worst hour of the year? How could this be? For a start, having Russell T. Davies give his full attention to the show instantly raised the quality level, after two years of neglect from the hapless Chris Chibnall. A greater focus and a willingness to do the unthinkable to the core team of characters gave it a boost of credibility and power that even a hater such as myself cannot deny. After two years of staggering awfulness, the first episode of the mini-series Children Of Earth was a huge and pleasant surprise. Dialogue fizzed, action zoomed along with actual momentum, and drama happened without becoming instantly ridiculous. It was enough to make me tuck into a large slice of Humble Pie.
And then, almost as soon as it had promised so much, the show fell flat on its face and stayed there. While fans and critics lined up to praise the show for its bold plot twists and dark subject matter, it became apparent that the most startling dramatic moments — the horrible fate of the children taken by the 456, the various depressing deaths, the commentary about the venality of politicians — were jotted down as essential touchstones early on in the scripting process, with little idea of how to create the connective tissue necessary to make these moments work, let alone create characters who act like recognisable human beings (the ridiculous — and easily avoidable — fate of John Frobisher sticks in the craw most of all). The moral conundrum at the heart of the show fails too. The threat facing humanity is never fully explained, so every terrible choice is undermined by the suspicion that there might have been a way to avoid doing such terrible things, but those possible solutions are being rushed past in the hope that the viewer won’t notice. Plot holes and longeurs abound, and the usual failings of this most ridiculous show rear up once more (poorly executed action, terrible performances, po-faced melodrama). Day 2 makes the list for quickly ruining the promise of the opener. Easily the most over-rated TV event of the year.
6. Fringe – The Cure
By the time season one of Fringe reached episode six, the show was wobbling between two states: pointless, boring misfire, or insane, ambitious curio. We’d been given an overlong and dull pilot, several minutes of unexciting chase sequences, and oh God so much witless exposition from Peter Bishop. We had also been given mad ray-guns, Warren-Ellisian techno-telepathy, burrowing missiles, various fun Easter Eggs and, best of all, The Observer. Just as the show had begun to show promise, the tinkering of the showrunners threw a frustrating spanner in the works by revamping lead character Olivia Dunham. As she had done nothing particularly interesting for the five previous weeks, it was a necessary move, but there are ways to do it right. Thrust into an adventure featuring super-evil brain scientists and their sexy lab assistants, Olivia cast off her passive demeanour and transformed into an ill-judged avenger, stepping on toes, cracking skulls, and “flirting” with her nemesis. Anna Torv relaxed into her role by the end of the season, but here she was way out of her depth, mugging and shouting and overplaying most dramatic moments. If the episode had been better it wouldn’t have mattered, but even Walter seemed out of sorts. The fingerprints of concerned and interfering Fox executives were all over the place. It would be weeks before Fringe recaptured that exciting post-Observer momentum.
5. Ugly Betty – Ugly Berry
Once a vibrant and lovable diversion with hidden brains and a commendable commitment to showing racial and sexual diversity, Ugly Betty is now a shadow of its former crazy self. After some of the best writers and directors on the show were sacked midway through the second season, the quality dropped noticeably, and Shades of Caruso’s interest dropped even further. Early struggles to keep up with the lacklustre third season faltered with the stunt casting of Lindsay Lohan as Betty’s nemesis Kimmie Keegan, but it was the appalling Ugly Berry that killed our interest altogether. Jokes fell flat, potentially long-running arcs were cut short (Lohan’s departure has been blamed on her dreadful behaviour, but who knows — or cares — what the real reason was), and new arcs came and fizzled with distressing regularity. That crazy energy had turned to depressing inertia. Even though it features three of the most entertaining actors on TV (America Ferrera, Michael Urie, and the amazing Becky Newton), enough was enough. So sad to see a once great show go the way of last season’s fashions.
4. Eleventh Hour – Agro
ITV’s failed Doctor-Who-killer, Eleventh Hour, was improbably picked up by Jerry Bruckheimer, possibly while the writers’ strike kept his brain-trust out of commission for months. Good for the UK, I guess, especially with Brit actor Rufus Sewell taking over from previous star Patrick Stewart and heading up this expensive show. Avoiding the crazy superscience of Fox’s Fringe, Eleventh Hour seemed to want to explore actual moral questions about modern advances, soberly showing exaggerations of real world dangers and asking whether the men and women of science were capable of reining in their worst impulses in order to help mankind. Well, if you can call portraying most of the scientists on the show as demented, power-crazed idiots “sober”. The show was arguably more ridiculous than Fringe by pretending to be more responsible with its plots, while throwing logic, reason, and recognisable scientific theory out of the window on a week to week basis. To make things worse, at least Fringe was fun. Eleventh Hour was the dreariest show on TV, a seemingly never-ending chain of cliches, moodily-lit close-ups of slightly worried faces, and undramatic soap operatics staged with all the half-arsed energy of a commercial for boil-in-the-bag rice. Of those eighteen tedious hours, the most exasperating might have been Agro, during which Dr. Jacob Hood matches a DNA sequence to that of a dangerous fungus by looking at twelve base pairs on a blackboard. Obviously they were the most distinctive twelve pairs out of the possible 12,495,682 that could have been on the board (and that’s if it was merely yeast). That kind of stupidity kills shows dead, you know.
3. The Mentalist – Russet Potatoes
When describing The Mentalist, Shades of Caruso has found itself using words like “pleasant”, “diverting”, “watchable”. Even in the grip of an absinthe hallucination, it would be an impossibility to make a claim that The Mentalist is great TV. Nevertheless, it did approach an unexpected intensity in its very entertaining season closer Red John’s Footsteps, and its genial tone was often a nice contrast to the humourlessness of a lot of TV procedurals. Sadly, when it went wrong, it went memorably wrong. Russet Potatoes introduced hypnotism into the mix, pitting Patrick Jane against mesmerists of such great power that they can create murderous minions at the drop of a hat. One of the CBI team — the gloriously named Rigsby — is turned into little more than a dopey puppet, macking on his colleagues and trying to kill our be-vested hero. Hypnotism could never achieve the results seen here, which wouldn’t be a problem if the rest of the series hadn’t shown such an admirable commitment to portraying the acts of flim-flam artists and fake spiritualists in a realistic light. The show’s IQ level dropped precipitously early in the episode as every character seemed to be hypnotising someone else, and that level kept plummeting, culminating in a rooftop showdown that looked like something out of a Wayans Brothers movie. One of their really bad ones. One without Anna Faris in it.
2. Knight Rider – A Knight in Shining Armor
Glen A. Larson is a TV legend. He made almost all of my favourite TV shows back when I was a discerning pre-teen. The original Battlestar Galactica, BJ and the Bear, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Galactica 1980, Magnum P.I. (co-created with fellow TV legend Donald P. Bellisario, creator of numerous shows with titles that are just assortments of letters), Manimal, Automan… What an exciting time it was. Riding high above them all in a leather jacket and white man’s afro was David Hasselhoff, playing the heroic archetype Michael Knight (the inspiration for Joseph Campell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces, though the show was cancelled before Michael got to progress any further than his second face). Knight Rider. One man, one car, an infinite number of exciting challenges that can be resolved with little more than a bit of talking-car sass and a Turbo-Boost. It was a show so complex, so daring, so groundbreaking, that even the shows that ripped it off (such as Streethawk, featuring a very fast motorbike that, sadly, didn’t talk) were incredible just by borrowing a little of its brilliance.
Perhaps the new Knight Rider can’t be blamed for not living up to that original, but when it actually manages to be worse than last year’s pathetic reboot of Bionical Woman, the show is pretty much the same as an asteroid made of fossilised alien-shit caught in the gravity well of the nearest sun. Actually, that doesn’t even cover the extent to which this was bad. It was like a cross between a Sci Fi original movie and a Girls Gone Wild video. In many episodes, Michael “Le” Traceur (who becomes Michael Knight early on in the season) is required to find information from a pool-side bikini party, during which he uses KITT’s space-age satellite hacking technology to zoom in on some poor lady’s bosoms. Rowr rowr! Often, he is also required to meet an old friend who is now a terrorist of some kind because of Reason X. Once or twice he is sexually harassed by his female colleagues. The majority of his enemies, when they’re not former friends who have gone insane, are either young, blonde females in leather catsuits, or young, brunette females in leather catsuits. His colleagues are either angry bureaucrats or lust-addled twenty-somethings who make nerdy references. In one episode Billy — played by Paul “Billy from Battlestar Galactica” Campbell — dresses up as Captain Jack Harkness and goes on about how much he loves Torchwood. The convergent awfulness of the moment was like having a bucket of boxer’s spit emptied over my head.
Most of the time KITT does little other than sit there like a big piece of talking product placement, with Val Kilmer mistakenly portraying the formerly lovable car as a relative of HAL, instead of a fussy, pedantic middle-class nerd, which is what the wonderful William Daniels did in the original series. The rest of the time, it’s a plot-resolution device, with what amounts to a Star Trek replicator in the glove compartment which is used to solve every problem that comes their way. Handy. Later in the series the show turns into Transformers for five minutes, with one main character becoming super-evil before being eaten by a giant robot, which is then defeated with a Turbo-Boost. Even the most undemanding teenager would have been affronted by the cynicism of the enterprise. So why pick this episode? Because it managed to be even stupider than any of the other episodes, as well as for setting up a template so ill-conceived that the show had to jettison most of the characters in a mid-season revamp of hilarious ruthlessness. For its gratuitous semi-nudity, illogical science, and shoddy production values, it is a prime example of how unforgivably ill-conceived the whole thing was. It will not be missed.
1. Heroes – The Entire Third Season
I tried. I really really tried so hard to pare this down to a single episode. Before watching the second half of the season, with the “Heroes” on the run from Nathan — who has gone from thinking everyone should have powers to thinking no one should have powers because of some mental conversion moment that has skipped out of my memory — I was certain the woeful Knight Rider episode was bound to top this list. After three very depressing days watching the last eleven episodes of Heroes season three back to back, it was obvious that not only was this show a more catastrophic failure than the now-cancelled swimsuit-and-car showcase, there was no way one episode could ever be singled out. The things that make Heroes the stupidest, most broken and ill-conceived show on network TV are now systemic. It’s like the opposite of a synecdoche. The whole must speak for the part.
The perfect example of a rudderless ship, Heroes has ceased to make any sense from scene to scene, let alone week to week. Early attempts to explore some kind of moral complexity — by having some of the “Heroes” flirt with doing bad things and the one true villain do good things — never disappeared, but instead became the raison d’être of the entire show. With no fresh ideas coming out of the writers’ room, each season sees the same things happening: the world is revealed to be facing a cataclysm, Sylar will try to become the President of the United States (who needs what amounts to omnipotence when you can waste years trying to pass legislation to regulate hazardous emissions from small businesses?), and all of the characters change alignments at the drop of a hat.
By now, we’ve seen all of the main characters in both hero and villain format, either with a time travel or premonition cop-out or with an insta-retcon plot-knot dropped into an episode with no warning or reason. Heroes have had evil scars (Peter), evil long coats (Hiro), or evil black hair (Claire). Villains have worn Spectacles of Virtue (Sylar) or Sensible Bobs of Benevolence (Daphne). This is what passes for character growth in the Heroes universe. In one episode I’m sure Noah Bennett started out evil, became good, turned evil again, and then by the end was double-crossing Nathan, triple-crossing Danko, and quadruple-crossing himself. Do the actors realise what a joke their characters have become? Why did we spend the first half of the season watching Sylar become good just for him to become evil again one episode later? How can we be expected to find any of this meaningful? And do we really need to have entire episodes taken up with Claire tearfully betraying or leaving her father, just for them to be reunited a week later? And why, part of the way through Chapter Four, did Tracy Strauss kill an innocent person, thus wrecking her chance to escape from Danko? Just to have a cool visual? This isn’t any kind of human (or even metahuman) behaviour I know. Frankly, the whole farrago is insulting.
Ah, but the writers’ room has been cleansed! Goodbye Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander! Hello Bryan Fuller! Surely this is good news. Well, yes, the single Fuller-written episode of the season, Cold Snap, featured the most natural dialogue Heroes has had for a while, had a pleasing structure, and a coherence lacking anywhere else in the seemingly endless twenty-five episode run. It was poetic, and kinda moving, if you look past some shaky performances. Swoozie Kurtz was in it too, for bonus YAY points. However, it not only showed up the surrounding episodes for the epic disasters they were, it failed on its own terms too. Parkman’s weird obsession with Daphne, based on a premonition that obviously was never going to come true (like most of them, as plotlines are abandoned willy-nilly), made a mockery of his previous infatuation with his suspicious wife. Fair enough. A lot of screentime was used up explaining how they had fallen out really badly, meaning he left his child just to go hang out with Suresh, because there ain’t no party like a Mohinder party (it involves a lot of intense teeth-gritting and nonsensical voiceovers about destiny and heroism and how up can be down if you squint really hard).
So, fair enough, Matt saves a gravely ill Daphne, and uses his Amazing Powers of the Brain to bamboozle the mortally wounded speedster into thinking he can fly her to the moon. So romantic. Compared to her previous death scene — which lasted three seconds and almost turned Matt temporarily evil for an episode before he thought better of it — it was a nice finale for possibly the only entertaining character introduced since season one. What happens as soon as Fuller hands over scripting duties to the rest of the team? Matt turns temporarily evil for an episode, thinks better of it upon confronting Danko, is reunited with his wife and son, and decides to stay with them. For ten minutes. Then he decides (with no prompting) that he has to fight the good fight against Danko. For Daphne? For justice? Because he can’t stand the sight of a full diaper? Who knows? The showrunners can’t have him written out, though. Who was he upset about earlier? Fucked if I know. Some woman. Denise? Can’t have been important. Quickly! Onto the next scene! Hiro is walking into a wall or something while Ando pouts about not being taken seriously. Everyone loves Hiro!
Fuller left not long after, and though I’m sure there were numerous logical reasons for his departure, part of me likes to think he realised how impossible it will be to sort out this Briar-Patch continuity. It can’t have helped that his good work trying to nail down even just one character (Matt) was undone almost immediately, and for no apparent benefit, nor that getting rid of Loeb and Alexander means much when you have Joe Pokaski and Aron Eli Coliete around. Maybe it was the jawdropping awfulness of the season finale, with Nathan killed and Sylar tricked into turning into him and having his memories replaced, just so that Angela doesn’t lose the son she never even seemed to like that much even though that means she’s hanging around with the man who actually killed the loved one he is now impersonating. Of all the rank stupidity and poor storytelling I have seen this year, nothing approaches the staggering wrongness of that moment. If I were Fuller and Tim Kring came to me with that idea, I’d walk out of the door and never look back. Who knows? Maybe Fuller came up with that idea? Maybe he was responsible for all of Matt’s behaviour and dialogue, even the really really stupid stuff that contradicts everything that happened in Cold Snap. Unless someone is willing to spill the beans, we’ll just have to hope it’s not the man who once made me think this show could be something truly special by writing something as wonderful as Company Man.
This post could go on forever. This piss-poor excuse for a show, which is — never forget — NBC’s most watched dramatic series, has become a joke. Every episode features nine or ten moments of laughable error, poor storytelling, inconsistent continuity, unbelievable behaviour, or ungrammatical dialogue. The crux of the matter, the killing blow to the credibility of this haphazard, chaotic mess is that it is now, after three years, less coherent than either the Marvel or DC comic universes. Yes, the DC universe, which has been rebooted numerous times and features 52 divergent universes with a multitude of characters, is more coherent and digestible and — most importantly of all — far more entertaining. If Lost‘s continuity could be seen as a series of lines linked together to make a starkly beautiful web of meaningful interconnections, Heroes would look more like a box of toothpicks dropped onto the ground in the middle of a sandstorm. As the talking fox from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist says, “Chaos reigns”. This is not something to be proud of. NBC, a network that cancelled Journeyman just as it was beginning to attract plaudits, and shunted its most promising new show — Kings — into a summer season with a two month gap wrecking all storytelling momentum, has kept this on the air. The network recently gave up the ghost and stuck Leno on every night instead of commissioning new shows. That was the actual surrender. Keeping this on the air was the white flag that preceded it. Something tells me it won’t get another reprieve after this year, from NBC or from the viewers. There’s only so much patience in the world.
Dishonourable Mentions:
The Unusuals – Boorland Day: Great character actors are not enough to save a misconceived project, and this formless bag of quirky tics disguised as character traits, bolted onto the most formulaic of cop plots, was as misconceived and unimaginative as anything shown on network TV this year. As the pilot was directed by Stephen Hopkins, the show could only improve. This second episode showed it couldn’t improve enough. Sometimes, a flawed premise is just a flawed premise.
House – Last Resort: Other than his brief appearance in Big Love, Željko Ivanek has had a really bad year. Looking lost as a gun-toting villain in Heroes was one thing, but he also played a gun-toting villain in House, harassing our hero and a bunch of annoying patients for an hour, which is no way to use someone who just won an Emmy. If there’s a plot I would happily remove from modern TV, it would be the hostage situation…
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – No Way Out: …because with Last Resort and this feeble effort from the usually dependable CSI team, it’s gone beyond played-out. The hostage situation here seems to have been used as a clumsy way to force two new characters (the excellent Dr. Raymond Langston and the practically invisible Riley Adams) into the limelight, but we find out nothing new about them other than that they cope well under pressure. Well, duh.
Parks and Recreation – Canvassing: Humour is a subjective thing, obviously, but sometimes a show comes along that seems to actually completely lack jokes. It’s not like Family Guy, where there are lots of jokes but they’re all really stupid and poorly timed. Parks and Recreation just doesn’t seem to be a comedy, except that Amy Poehler is in it. This was a particularly annoying episode, with some unlikeable people doing boring things. It can only improve.
The Office – Employee Transfer: Perhaps I’m mad at Parks and Recreation for distracting the showrunners of The Office. A generally underwhelming fifth season still had a few big laughs and upsetting drama, but one episode was a perplexing laugh-free half-hour, misjudging the balance between comedy and tragedy in a way that was shocking coming from a show that gave us last year’s brilliant Dinner Party. Plus, Amy Ryan left the show. Fuck that shit.
It feels better getting that all off my chest. Tomorrow, or the day after that, my ten favourite new characters of the year. There is no one from Heroes in that list.
In years past, at the beginning of the new US TV season, Shades of Caruso has handed out plaudits and grouchy insults to shows from the previous year. Here are the entries from2006-2007, and here are the threeentries from2007-2008, where I went nuts over Lost and sneered at the continual failure of Torchwood. This year is slightly different. Firstly, there will be more of it, simply because I seemed to watch even more TV than in previous years, and secondly because this is a new blog and I should land with a splash, right?
Anyway, an explanation of why some shows are on here and some aren’t. As I’m judging from 2008-2009, using the first week of the new season as a cut-off point, I’m including shows that have finished their season by now. This means I’m assessing the first season of Hung (which finished last night), but not the third season of Mad Men (it finishes in a few weeks). There are a couple of popular shows missing that I’ve not yet had a chance to see (Damages, True Blood, the second season of the excellent Breaking Bad). Hopefully I’ll be up-to-date on them by next year, because I really do need to be watching even more TV, obviously. Anyway, here are my favourite single episodes of the year.
10. Fringe – Safe
There were probably better episodes of Fringe in the first season, but Safe was where the intended pace of the show was revealed. Instead of ambling like early seasons of Lost, Fringe was going to pay things off as fast as they could be introduced, and while this made a mockery of the original “disposable sci-fi procedural” format, for fans of intricate mythologies and bold narrative leaps, Safe was manna from heaven. It also featured some of the most sophisticated storytelling of the season, with both Walter Bishop and Olivia Dunham struggling to take command of their faulty memories, while a skilfully deployed red herring distracts the viewer from the true goal of the Big Bad, the oily David Robert Jones. If future seasons of Fringe can crank out a greater percentage of thrilling hours such as this, we will be a lot more forgiving of the weak monster-of-the-week nonsense necessary to pad things out.
9. Party Down – James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion
At first, Party Down seemed like it would be an Office-style cringe-com focusing on Ken Marino and his portrayal of the hapless and officious Ron Donald. Fair enough, but you would expect more from the creators (Paul Rudd, plus Veronica Mars showrunners Rob Thomas, John Enbom, and Dan Etheridge). A couple of episodes in, and it was clear that the show was channelling — and possibly surpassing — a different UK sitcom: Fawlty Towers. Beautifully plotted and performed to perfection, the year’s best new sitcom improved week by week, even surviving the loss of cast member Jane Lynch (replacing her with Jennifer Coolidge was a masterstroke). Every episode has its considerable pleasures, but this wins out simply for the final, brilliantly timed shot during the credits, working not only as a brilliant sight gag, but also as an upsetting cliffhanger and commentary on the disappointments of life. But, you know, more funny than profound.
8. Friday Night Lights – New York, New York
After the second season disappointed some demanding viewers (though that was not the case here at Shades of Caruso), the showrunners took strength from their guaranteed thirteen-episode season order and delivered a run of episodes that bordered on perfection. With no single episode better or worse than any other, selecting a highlight is a nightmare, but it was the departure of Jason Street — Scott Porter, hopefully going on to mega-stardom, as should everyone on this show — that inspired even more tears of sadness and joy than usual. As this show is gloriously sentimental in the best possible way, that’s saying a lot. With Street and best friend Riggins cast adrift in New York, the showrunners risked failure by showing two Midwest yokels struggling to find their way in the world in that hostile environment, but their determination and love for each other becomes inspiring, and the happy ending is truly earned. Even at the end of a major character’s arc, we’re still finding things out about who he is and what he can do. For the third year running, Friday Night Lights provides the best depiction of young people in all of pop culture. Who needs vampires when you’ve got a show team this good?
7. Big Love – Come, Ye Saints
The third season of Big Love — also to be known as The Best Season Yet — felt more complicated and dense with possibility than ten multiverses. With a cast of characters that dwarfs even Lost‘s pantheon of weirdos and damaged losers, the story possibilities for HBO’s polygamy drama are endless, but you don’t expect the showrunners to test that supposition by lighting the fuse on a dozen plot fireworks each week. Though such narrative richness is to be applauded, the most simple episode of the season was arguably the best, though simplicity doesn’t mean undramatic. A pilgrimage for the Henricksons, from their home in Utah to a Mormon pageant in New York, turns into a hellish experience for the entire family, as much a tribulation as a road trip. Events from as far back as the first season finally blow up, shaking Bill’s faith in his family, his calling, and himself. Progressing expertly from comedy to tragedy, writer Melanie Marnich and director Daniel Attias twisted the screws with consummate skill. The most underrated show on TV continued to amaze.
6. Mad Men – The Jet Set
Critical darling Mad Men began to exceed expectations in the second season, moving beyond the first season’s reliance on cultural juxtaposition and exploring the characters as much as the period setting. Episodes created complex narrative and thematic patterns that rewarded repeated viewings, achieving a richness and unpredictability that is usually only found in novels.
Even taking this complexity into account, The Jet Set was a cut above, changing the locale and format so completely that it was like watching an experimental short stuck into the middle of the season. The preoccupations of the show to that point — the growth of the youth movement, the value of experience, fear of obsolescence, the attractions of the unfamiliar — were painted with a richer palette, as Don has a holiday in the sun with gloriously decadent Europeans. Possibly the most thought-provoking episode of the most intellectually stimulating show on TV.
5. Sons Of Anarchy – The Pull
For a show as violent and unpredictable as this, it takes a lot to outdo itself in terms of shock value. Taking the moral muddiness of The Shield as a starting point, Sons of Anarchy lived up to the promise of its early episodes with a shocking display of narrative confidence. By the halfway point of the episode there have already been two failed assassination attempts on major characters. As if that wasn’t enough, the Hamlet-inspired show’s Ophelia-surrogate — Tara, played by Mad Men‘s Maggie Siff — is placed in a terrifying situation and kept there for ten unbearably tense minutes, as she tries to outwit her insane stalker, played with surprising menace by Jay “Dutch from The Shield” Karnes. The resolution of this stand-off is unforgettable, pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable on TV. In a flurry of jawdropping violence, with a side-order of sex, the year’s best new show arrived with a gloriously amoral bang.
4. Dollhouse – Epitaph One
It looked like the most disappointing new show of the year for almost half a season, before creator and all-round genius Joss Whedon took control of the reins and steered Dollhouse into ever-more fascinating directions, delivering more philosophical enquiry and narrative tricksiness than almost every other show on TV. Several good-to-great episodes rounded out its initial Friday night Fox run, and one or two of them could have been included lower on this list. However, the best was saved for last. Missing out on a US broadcast, Epitaph One was premiered at Comic-Con and broadcast internationally, becoming a sensation. Rightly so. What had seemed like a promising show suddenly became one of the most daring and exciting things on network TV for years, easily as intelligent and surprising as Battlestar Galactica or Lost at their best. Expanding the scale of the show from assignment-of-the-week action shenanigans to post-apocalyptic tech-nightmare epic, Whedon and his amazing staff of writers pulled the rug out from under the audience with all of the skill of a consummate showman. The battle to keep this amazing show on air for as many seasons as possible starts now.
3. In Treatment – April: Week 4
The format of In Treatment, that has so upset delicate TV reviewers in the past, lends itself to long build-up and eventual pay-off of varying degrees. The result is that, while every week has its pleasures and trauma, it’s the final week of confrontations, breakthroughs, and regrettable failures that provides a good proportion of dramatic beats. This was different. At roughly the halfway point in the second season — seventeen episodes into its thirty-five episode run — the most moving and startling confrontation to date happens, and the ramifications of it affect everything that follows. Therapist Paul — Gabriel Byrne in a career-best performance — is forced to intervene in the life of patient April — Allison Pill, also in a career-best performance — after she refuses to get treatment for her life-threatening lymphoma. Two stubborn individuals meet head-on in a draining confrontation, with April terrified of taking control of her future, and Paul scared to become too involved in yet another patient’s life. Despite their reservations, and even though Paul’s decision dooms their therapeutic relationship, he has no choice but to cross an ethical line. Emotionally exhausting and pitched perfectly it is, as I have said before, a masterclass in acting and writing.
2. Lost – The Incident
The fifth season of Lost gave us the most shocking tone twist yet: presenting domestic bliss in the middle of the usual head-bending surprises. That calm was threatened throughout by an approaching storm, The Purge. With much of the island’s past set in stone, and Faraday’s rules of temporal solidity stressed on a regular basis, the time travel plot seemed to put too many constraints on what had previously seemed to be a web of narrative possibility. At least, until The Incident shattered all of our expectations, generating unpredictability out of the most cohesive and restrictive continuity on TV. What had seemed like a strange late-series rut was preparation for the biggest mindfuckery yet, casting new light on who our heroes are and how they came to be, and then leaving their fate in what amounts to an Eigenstate of uncertainty. Following the final, shocking white-out, no one knows what will happen next, but then this is what the die-hard Lost fan wants most of all: the itch of confusion, bewilderment, and dread, something akin to a perverse punishment, especially for fans of gun-toting fertility experts. In 2010, pop culture is about one thing and one thing only: finishing this incredible journey, and bringing these characters home.
1. The Shield – Family Meeting
One of the biggest problems with the new breed of serialised long-form TV drama is that there is always the possibility that shows will falter at the last post, tainting what has come before. Sometimes the finale is deemed unsatisfying by the fans (The Sopranos, Buffy), or it doesn’t provide satisfying answers to long-running mysteries (Battlestar Galactica), or it just stops dead with no closure at all (Deadwood, Twin Peaks). Committing to a show can be a risky proposition. Will this investment of time pay off? Perhaps more than any other show yet made, The Shield rewarded its viewers’ patience, ending on an incredibly satisfying high, and paying off seven seasons of increasingly tortured narrative with more brio and boldness than anyone could have hoped. Other than a couple of Farmington cops, every arc played out in ways that hardly any viewer could have expected, without betraying any of the characters’ core personalities, or by following the easy path. Shane and Ronnie’s final moments, in particular, still chill the blood months after first viewing.
At the core of the show was Vic Mackey, morally compromised hero or self-justifying maniac, depending on how you look at him. It was Michael Chiklis’ stage to play on, and the whole enterprise depended on him stepping up to the plate. In Family Meeting, he managed to top his breathtaking work in the penultimate episode Possible Kill Screen. Vic’s final scene, with our anti-hero standing on the edge of a metaphorical precipice, rendered this viewer speechless with anticipation and delirious pleasure. It was as perfect an episode of TV as will ever be made. To those who have yet to watch The Shield, you can jump in with confidence. The rest of the series is worth anyone’s time, but the last ninety minutes was something else: a storytelling accomplishment that viewers will be talking about for decades to come.
Honorable Mentions:
Hung – The Pickle Jar: HBO’s adorable male prostitution fairy tale hit its stride four episodes in. The final scene, with Thomas Jane breaking through Margo Martindale’s defences, was one of the highlights of the year.
Better Off Ted – Racial Sensitivity: The deceptively innocent corporate satire really showed the bite behind its chirpy exterior for the first time, as a glitch in Veridian Dynamics’ new security system turns the clock back to the days of segregation. It’s funnier than it sounds.
House – Birthmarks: The fifth season of House featured few highlights, but the reunion of House and his best friend Wilson was gold. Working through their differences on a road trip to attend a funeral for House’s father, Hugh Laurie and Robert Sean Leonard proved, yet again, that they’re the best double act on TV.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – 19 Down / One To Go: Writing a beloved character out of a popular show in such a way as to not annoy every fan must be almost impossible, which makes this two-parter — during which Gil Grissom solves one last serial killer case with the help of new team member Dr. Raymond Langston — all the more notable. The creepy performance by Bill Irwin and the happy ending were the cherries on top.
30 Rock – Generalissimo: Bouncing back from a disappointing sophomore year, 30 Rock fully embraced absurdity and delivered episodes to rival the first season. This featured numerous hoary sitcom stereotypes, but for Alec Baldwin’s turn as Hector Moreda, and Jon Hamm displaying his considerable comic talents, it wins out.
Tomorrow, I’ll announce my least favourite episodes of the year. For those who have followed this blog for a long time, there is a shock number one. Because, for once, it’s not Torchwood. There was a lot worse out there. A lot worse. I couldn’t believe it either…
::Disclaimer – It’s hard to write a definitive End of Season Review for a show that, technically, has not aired all of its episodes. The thirteenth episode of Dollhouse has been held back for DVD release as a result of Fox’s meddling with the original pilot, with the hint that it would be shown in foreign markets. That means England, right? And it’s on Sci Fi UK? Hence my tardiness with this, waiting to see if it would air on UK TV. Of course, I won’t know until Sci Fi updates its website, which is still saying they’re only showing nine episodes. Well done, website.::
When I was trying to figure out how to begin writing about the almost completed season of Dollhouse, the only approach that seemed to give the proper background seemed to be the “Harry Knowles Approach”, where I recount a long and disjointed series of anecdotes (linked by ellipses, of course) proving that whereas you, the reader, for example, might think that you are the biggest Joss Whedon fan, in fact it is I who is the biggest fan, and have the most Whedon-related memorabilia, and so I am more qualified than anyone to take on this task so there. If you don’t believe me about Knowles, this is just one example of his weird impulse to be the biggest expert on every subset of fandom going. Or the man who has the biggest obsession with oral sex and defecation.
Of course, I’m not the biggest Whedon fan in the world, as I have yet to stalk him or name one of my children Xander or Illyria. I do have a cat called Zoe, named after Gina Torres’ character from Firefly, but naming cats after TV characters, products, concepts, or smells is not weird or stalkery. However, I would not be here writing this blog about various TV shows if it wasn’t for Whedon. Who knows, I might be doing something more constructive, like snowboarding, or rock-climbing, or being an alcoholic. So I owe my bones and my liver to Whedon, at the very least. At the very most, there is my immersion in the TV-obsessed corner of the internet, which has given me good friends, lots of interesting chatter, and a wonderful wife [who is also obsessed with Whedon -- Canyon].
I’d long been excited whenever a show ventured into long-form territory, but before Buffy, DVRs, and DVD boxsets, it was rare to see it in anything non-soap opera. Star Trek: TNG did it every so often, and of course there was Murder One, which was pioneering and unpopular. Buffy was lucky enough to have it both ways, with your monster of the week format plus a close-ended arc running through the season. Around the time that I fell in love with Buffy (a few years after smarter people than I had already figured out how good it was), 24 came along with the same approach to season arcs, and with The Sopranos mopping up awards everywhere, the format finally got enough critical, popular, and nerd acceptance to become the next big thing. N.B. Babylon 5 did it as well, with a five-year plan not dissimilar to that of Lost. I’m aware of that. Despite its rabid fanbase, it never captured the popular imagination. Though Buffy was a show with only a cult audience, it is still referenced by popular culture maven in a way J. Michael Stracsynski’s show isn’t. By the way, “maven” is the plural of “maven”, right?
However, it’s been a long time since Whedon did any TV stuff. Angel was cancelled about five/six years ago, and since then I’ve become obsessed with a number of different shows, some of which are more “respectable”, but less fun. I’ve also been bitten by the Lost bug, a show that has become so complex and ambitious that almost everything else feels like Dallas in comparison. Happy though I was about Whedon’s return, I felt a certain amount of ambivalence, partly because of concern that his style of show would seem clunky after experiencing the scope and eccentricity of Lost, but also, of course, because of the Curse of Whedon. A high-concept sci-fi show on Fox? As soon as the pilot was reshot and the show was relegated to a Friday night slot, in an echo of the way Firefly was treated, it was obvious that getting attached to it was a really bad idea.
To make things worse, the pilot left me totally cold. As part of the infamous Fox Fuck Five episode stretch, with Whedon apparently spaying his show at the behest of Fox executives, it looked cheap and poorly conceived, a world away from his last major directorial effort (Serenity), and in terms of audience satisfaction, not a patch on his last “minor” directorial effort (the epoch-shattering masterpiece Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog). The next four episodes were worse, with episodes two and five vying for worst of season. Or is it two and three? Or four and five?
What was so bad about them? Many of the negative points of that opening stretch of episodes have been picked at for months now, but I have to say I agree with pretty much all of them. Dushku-as-lead was never going to work out, even with the formidable Sexy Faith Dance on her side (she cracked that bad boy out in the pilot, just for sexiness fans everywhere). As a dramatic guest star she worked wonders on Buffy, but with zero range and saddled with the part of an identity-shifting woman of many faces, several early scenes felt like pranks being played either on us or on Dushku herself.
As Canyon said many times while we were watching Dollhouse, Sarah Michelle Gellar was no Streep (hell, she was no Jennifer Garner), but at the very least she was appealing and could sell a joke, and even had a few stand-out episodes (I think she did some great work in Buffy seasons five and six). Dushku has an even more difficult job: making the audience care about someone who has no personality for us to empathise with. There are some skillful actresses out there who might have stood a chance, but Dushku does a terrible job. From what I gather, we weren’t the only viewers who tuned out whenever she appeared.
She wasn’t the worst thing about that opening stumble. For a while the show feels like some kind of bizarre hybrid of Alias and Joe 90, an adventure show about secret operatives operating secretly, doing various odd jobs around LA. As we’re to assume our characters will be working for some benevolent organisation, it’s jarring to see the Dollhouse staff doing things that are morally repellent. With Boyd Langton (the ever-excellent Harry Lennix) representing the conscience of the show by questioning the motives of the Dollhouse, we realise we’re meant to be rooting for the Dolls, not their bosses, but the show doesn’t go far enough with that at first. We just get a sense that this is something the show will address in good time, once the benevolent adventurey stuff slows down a bit. Though Whedon does a good enough job of introducing some of that moral complexity in the pilot, the next four episodes are so formless that our disgust over the concept of removing the “self” from a person and replacing it with another isn’t allowed to crystallise earlier. It didn’t help that the first thing we see is Dushku willingly signing herself over to the Dollhouse. If that’s the way it works, then it can’t be that bad, right?
The “monster” of the week concept didn’t work either. With Echo traipsing off to do various good things (such as saving a hostage, or infilitrating a cultist compound), we get hints that there is a bigger story to be told, especially as we see FBI loser Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett) investigating the mysterious organisation. Perhaps it’s because we also tuned out whenever Penikett and his Scrunched Up Face Of Impotence lumbered onto set [with his Constipated Ken Doll Walk, no less - Canyon], but this thread felt malformed as well. Hints and winks were one thing, and it was great to know the show was obviously building to something, but I got the sense that Whedon, after years of watching Battlestar Galactica and Lost gain the nerd fanbase he once owned so completely, realised that the old format, of a large amount of MotW episodes sprinkled with liberal amounts of long-form soap operatics and season-arc revelations, was due for a spruce up. Dollhouse‘s greatest early flaw was that it didn’t get the season arc moving fast enough, which we can lay at the feet of Fox.
With only thirteen episodes, Whedon needed to get cracking, and instead we got museum robberies and bodyguard duty for some obnoxious singer. Fringe was luckier with more episodes, and still squandered about 65% of the season on nonsense. Dollhouse didn’t get that luxury, and yet for almost half of its run it danced on the spot. That episodic format was a poor fit from the outset, a piss-poor attempt to attract viewers who enjoyed the week-by-week simplicity of pre-Buffy TV, which is why I couldn’t help but compare early episodes with Bionical Woman (please forgive me for that, but it’s true).
Sadly, Fox didn’t realise that we’re not just post-Buffy now: we’re post-Lost. That show has rewritten the rules for what audiences are willing to tolerate. Yes, the show has lost a lot of the viewers it had in its first season, but as Cuse and Lindelof have said in interviews, Lost was never meant to be a ratings-crusher. And yet, despite that shrunken audience, it’s still a bona-fide hit, watched around the world by millions, and discussed and debated more than any other show on TV. The likely audience for something as wilfully peculiar as Dollhouse has been watching Lost and Galactica for years and is not interested in that old way of telling a tale any more. Dollhouse could have been setting itself up for the long haul right away, and would have retained its modest initial audience. Instead, the show felt outdated and slight straight away, and that loyal audience departed in droves. A singularly depressing outcome for those of us who were still hoping the show would come good.
And yet there was hope. Early on in promotional interviews, there was talk of the mythical Sixth Episode, the game-changer that would make us all feel bad for doubting Whedon. This made me feel very uncomfortable, coming as it was from people involved with the show. In addition to thinking that playing up chatter about how the network had finally stopped meddling with the show was, to put it mildly, ballsy and suicidal, I just couldn’t see how the show could pull itself out of its tailspin. Whedon had always managed to weave comedy and drama brilliantly, but Dollhouse‘s first five episodes were clunky, lifeless and laughably unmoving.
And yet it was I who was the fool, as Whedon — who, I should never forget, is one of my five favourite writers in any medium ever for the very good reason that he’s a trillion times smarter and funnier than me — slapped me in the face with that sixth episode like a fish (though a fish with Patton Oswalt attached to it), and showed us all what the show was supposed to be after all. Viewers had several criticisms of the show, and after Man on the Street, almost all of those criticisms blew away like the chaff they were. Here’s a quick rundown of what I thought were the failings of the show, and how they were addressed in the second half of the season.
1) You can’t care about the Actives because they are just shells.
This was, for the first half of the season at least, a major concern, and seemed like the major dealbreaker for the series. Whedon may have started the pilot with Caroline giving herself up to the Dollhouse, but this glimpse into who she is before having her personality extracted isn’t enough to create a bond with her. Dushku’s flat performance certainly doesn’t help. If anything, prior to episode six, the only real reason to give a damn about her is because Boyd does, and Lennix nails that caring mentor role so well we want Echo to prevail just so Boyd’s day isn’t ruined. As for Sierra, Victor, and the others, they’re shit out of luck. For instance, Victor’s affection for Sierra just seems creepy, especially as we realise how she is being abused.
The miraculous second half of the season solves that brilliantly, but not straight away. Episode six makes Echo seem like even more of a puppet, and episode seven adds confusing detail to Caroline’s past, but episode eight, Needs, shows the core attributes of each Active and finally generates that empathic core we need in order to care for these people. Echo was heroic already, Victor was caring and traumatised, November was unable to cope with grief, and Sierra was defiant, though it was this trait that doomed her to a horrific fate.
That episode was so strong, and so brilliantly conceived, that from that moment on it was impossible not to root for these characters, but just to make sure, we see that the “soul” of the Active can bleed through the construct downloaded into their brain, as both Alpha and Echo become what they were always meant to be in the final episode. And yet people still complained about not caring about the characters by the end! I find this utterly baffling.
2) The show doesn’t seem to be about anything, or know what it’s about.
In an interview conducted after the show began its rise, Whedon uncharacteristically and undiplomatically carped about the interference with his show while it was still airing (he usually waits for his work to be finished and released before complaining). Even more surprisingly, he admitted that he was upset that some episodes of the show hadn’t been about anything, and singled out Tim Minear’s True Believer, saying it wasn’t about anything. He later explained that his quote was taken out of context, and said he had to apologise to Minear, but even so, he hit the nail on the head, albeit inadvertently.
Up until the sixth episode, Dollhouse ironically suffered from an identity crisis. It wasn’t just that the show had turned out to be a hodge-podge of action/adventure sub-genres (she’s a bodyguard! She’s working with the ATF! She’s a cat burglar!), though that was confusing. It also had an ill-defined core idea. For the first five episodes it was a caper show that left a bad taste in the mouth, hinting at the ethical and scientific ramifications of Dollhouse technology but burying that enquiry under A and B plot business, as well as using up valuable TV real-estate setting up hints about the future. A lot of effort was being expended, but with the empathy gap listed above, Dollhouse needed to grab the mind while the heart was out of reach. Sadly, the first five episodes were unfocused and over-complicated, and without a sense of conceptual continuity from week to week, it felt as unsatisfying as late-series Battlestar Galactica, except with the added narrative complication of trying to get Dushku into as many fetishy costumes as possible.
Again, the sixth episode saved the day. With unusual but welcome directness, Whedon used a series of vox pops in which people discuss the urban myth of the Dollhouse, and its ramifications for society and humanity. Even though we had seen the Dollhouse through the disgusted eyes of Ballard, we’re seeing his reaction, and therefore have our own reaction to his reaction. Is he just in this because of a fixation on Caroline? How much of his search for the Dollhouse is motivated by a need to prove his superiors wrong? With the sixth episode, we get context to realise that the Dollhouse truly is an awful place, and the tech is evil, to the extent that it could possibly poison the human condition irrevocably. Such a thought is available if you ponder it long enough, but having a fictional scientist say, out loud, that this is the worst thing in the world, and will ruin everything, is a sobering moment. Of all of the things I loved about this first series, it was that moment I remember most clearly. It shook me up.
3) Hold on. So, the Dollhouse is actually evil?
It’s inevitable that sci fi action/adventure shows on network TV will focus on the heroics of a bunch of photogenic ladies and gents, as that is the acceptable story we identify with the most. Though villains and anti-heroes have their place, it’s rare to see something from the point of view of the bad guys. Of course, Whedon has, in the past, explored dodgy morality in his heroes. Angel in particular explored the pros and cons of doing business with evil, and former show producer Shawn Ryan based an entire show (The Shield, obvs) around a bad man, and that resulted in seven brilliant seasons of TV.
However, the seemingly incomplete explanation of what the Dollhouse does meant we were never really sure if the Dollhouse was doing something good or bad. I’m not sure if this was intentional or an unwanted side-effect of the pilot reshoot. Ballard might maintain, from the very beginning, that the Dollhouse is a bad place, but he’s such a self-righteous blowhard that it’s difficult to side with him. Plus, Tahmoh Penikett has one facial expression — extreme disgust — so for all we know, he thinks PopTarts or living room furniture or friendly neighbourhood hotties are sickening.
Over time we begin to understand that the Dollhouse almost certainly is evil, but that jibes with the idea that we’re watching an action adventure series, certainly in the early episodes. Thankfully, with the sixth, the action adventure format mostly drops away, leaving us with a fascinating moral puzzle to unravel. Brilliantly, the show keeps pulling the rug out from you, making sure the viewer remains unsure about those motives in a way that would make Lost showrunners Cuse and Lindelof proud. Painting ostensibly evil characters like Adele and Topher as lonely souls who use the Dollhouse to connect with other people humanises them, making it harder to see them as carton villains, though Fran Kranz’ performance is so irksome that I only “sympathise” with Topher at a remove. Olivia Williams’ performance is so much more nuanced that it genuinely becomes hard to see her saddened in later episodes.
Other characters are shown to have weaknesses. Dr. Saunders is obviously a tragic figure, disfigured by Alpha and seemingly appalled by much of what goes on in the Dollhouse, though later revelations about her character call some of those feelings into question, not to mention the actual workings of the Dollhouse tech (I’m trying really hard not to spoil here). As for Ballard and his relationship with Mellie, you can see that the writers had great fun making Ballard as big a douchebag as possible. Even though Angel was a character capable of good and evil, he always had a nobility, even when he became Angelus. Ballard is just a sleaze. For those who have yet to see the entire series, there is a great fight scene coming up. If you dislike Ballard as much as I do, you’ll enjoy it greatly.
So, our notions of good and bad are tossed up in the air on a weekly basis, but even then, I cannot get Needs out of my head. When I found out why Sierra is in there, it settled something for me. No matter what the purpose of the Dollhouse is, I want to see it burn to the ground just for what they’ve done to her. Of all the things I’ve seen on TV this year, even including the finale of The Shield, nothing has upset me as much as that revelation. Fuck the Dollhouse, and fuck Adele for going along with it.
4) Is this actually going anywhere?
More than anything else I’ve said here so far, it hurts to admit that, in the first five episodes, I got the distinct feeling that the show had no plan for the future. It wasn’t just the confusing concept, either. Even Whedon admitted in those interviews linked to earlier that he had not come up with a good enough reason for people to hire Dolls when they could just hire normal people. I remember fanwanking that, in the pilot, someone would want not just a good hostage negotiator but the bestest negotiator EVAH, but midwives? That just made no narrative sense, other than to have an action adventure show with a greater variety of possible scenarios, instead of just a spy show (how many times can we see Sydney Bristow trying to recover a MacGuffin of some kind? Hence, double-triple-agents and Rambaldi devices).
After episode six, the episodic format pretty much faded away, not just to provide some momentum heading into the season finale, but also to show that the Dollhouse writers were telling a different story. Instead of Bionical Woman resets at the end of each episode, it became apparent that a mythology was being created, with clues being littered everywhere. Things that seemed ambiguous early on began to be addressed, such as the revelation of the mole’s identity, the reasons why the main Actives are in the Dollhouse, and what Alpha is. Even though we don’t get the answers to everything, we now get the sense that things will be revealed at a pace somewhere between Fringe-fast and Lost-slow, especially as the introduction of Omega suggests that this season was merely prologue to the real story.
5) Is this format too much for Eliza Dushku?
Upon hearing about the concept behind the show, many people joked that Dushku would not be up to the task of playing multiple characters, as much of her work had shown she had minuscule range. Regrettably, the first five episodes did nothing to dissuade viewers’ fears, with Dushku playing the various personalities with little tweaking other than changes to the level of sassiness or concern on her face. Thankfully, the sixth episode came along and…
…Sorry, don’t know what I was thinking there. Not even that episode could fix her performance, which continued to be the weakest link in the show. What it could do was allow the other actors on the show to take up some of the slack.
Sadly, this is a mixed blessing. Scenes involving Tahmoh Penikett and Miracle Laurie are painful to watch, with her line readings garbled and his face scrunched up in eternal anger. Fran Kranz’ Topher starts out obnoxious and overplayed, and continues to be obnoxious and overplayed right to the end. Dichen Lachman has difficulty projecting anything other than half-hearted sexiness or vulnerability a la Dushku, which is annoying and limiting especially when Needs reveals her tragic backstory.
Thankfully there are some terrific actors onboard who save the day. The ever-dependable Harry Lennix is superb as Echo’s handler, effortlessly projecting machismo, authority, and tenderness. Olivia Williams’ performance as Adele starts out well and becomes more and more compelling as new and unexpected character traits are layered on. Reed Diamond’s Dominic has less to do at first, with some peculiarly broad villainy early on, but by the time Needs rolls around, he is firing on all cylinders, and is the only cast member who walks out of the egregious “comedy” episode (Echoes) with his head held high.
The real revelations are the performances by Enver Gjokaj, as Victor, and Amy Acker, as Dr. Claire Saunders. I was always a fan of Acker on Angel, even during her early, unsubtle hours with the broad accent. Though her character, Fred, annoyed many (including Canyon, who has never been able to fully accept Fred into her heart [she's not Jesus! -- Canyon]), Acker silenced a lot of her critics in the final episodes of Angel, as she became Illyria. Sadly, she only had a few episodes to show what she could do, but in Dollhouse she does excellent work as the agoraphobic medic. It’s depressing to see her paired up with the fidgety and “quirky” Topher, though her sour stillness is a nice contrast. She particularly shines in the final episodes of Dollhouse‘s first season, as we find out more about Saunders and how Acker’s character came to be the way she is.
And where the hell did Gjokaj come from? His laughable accent in the first couple of episodes made me ignore him whenever he appeared onscreen, but with the third-episoode reveal of his Dollhood, Gjokaj began to pretty much own the show, especially in Needs and Omega. As for his “impersonation” of another actor on the show, all I can say is wow. Of all the Dolls, Gjokaj is the only actor who has figured out how to make them sympathetic and distinct even though he is required to play different people each week. It’s always a pleasure to see someone break out, and if Dollhouse had failed to get a second wind, I would still have been grateful to it for alerting me to the presence of this actor. Let’s hope that, if the show only manages one more season, we get to see a lot more of Gjokaj.
There is another terrific actor on the show, though not for long. I shall keep quiet about that, even though the majority of the Internet knew about his casting about four seconds after it happened. Suffice to say, Mutant Enemy fans in the UK will be thrilled out of their minds when they see him.
6) Is this show going to be worth sticking with?
If the points above don’t convince you that I think it is, then nothing will. I cannot deny that, even after the sixth episode, there is some shakiness. Echoes is embarrassing to watch, and desperately misconceived. Whedon fans know that he likes to challenge his actors and make them do things they wouldn’t normally, but we don’t know these characters well enough to respond to their “wacky drunk” selves. Other than Reed Diamond’s unexpectedly funny turn, I’d much rather that episode didn’t exist. Tim Minear’s finale is also disappointing, with only the memorable scene showing Alpha’s “Frankenstein’s monster”-esque birth working well. Though it is packed with fascinating revelation and intriguing set-ups for the second season, there is some unforgivable reliance on cliche and coincidence, much of which neuters the drama. Also, Dushku is forced to share the screen with two actors who make her look even more foolish than usual.
However, this is nothing to be concerned about. The second half of the season features at least three instant classic episodes, filled with philosophical enquiry, rug-pulling narrative trickery, and action. Though all of Whedon’s shows have had depth, this could turn out to be his deepest and most thought-provoking show yet. I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that it’s going to be worth the effort, because months ago, I was despairing. Considering how I once unironically compared this to Bionical Woman and Knight Rider, it’s testament to Whedon’s formidable storytelling and showrunning skills that I now think that — if allowed to continue for more than one season — Dollhouse has the best shot of replacing Lost as the smartest and most challenging sci-fi show on TV. Let’s hope it stays around long enough to prove me right.
By now, we’ve seen all of the main characters in both hero and villain format, either with a time travel or premonition cop-out or with an insta-retcon plot-knot dropped into an episode with no warning or reason. Heroes have had evil scars (Peter), evil long coats (Hiro), or evil black hair (Claire). Villains have worn Spectacles of Virtue (Sylar) or Sensible Bobs of Benevolence (Daphne). This is what passes for character growth in the Heroes universe. In one episode I’m sure Noah Bennett started out evil, became good, turned evil again, and then by the end was double-crossing Nathan, triple-crossing Danko, and quadruple-crossing himself. Do the actors realise what a joke their characters have become? Why did we spend the first half of the season watching Sylar become good just for him to become evil again one episode later? How can we be expected to find any of this meaningful? And do we really need to have entire episodes taken up with Claire tearfully betraying or leaving her father, just for them to be reunited a week later? And why, part of the way through Chapter Four, did Tracy Strauss kill an innocent person, thus wrecking her chance to escape from Danko? Just to have a cool visual? This isn’t any kind of human (or even metahuman) behaviour I know. Frankly, the whole farrago is insulting.
