Category Archives: Boardwalk Empire

The Caruso TV Awards Are Dead; Long Live Another Huge Post About TV

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Once upon a time Shades of Caruso flourished like a beanstalk borne of magic beans, sprouting poorly edited posts on a regular, almost daily basis. It was a simpler age, when I had lots of downtime at work and could futz about there in the company of other people similarly unoccupied. Ah, t’was glorious in that subterranean office, with nothing but lots of frothing about Torchwood and attempts to create running gags about Reed Richards to fill the billions of empty hours. As I’m sure many of you know, blogging can be addictive, and for a while there it grabbed me with greater force even than smoking or pasta. The Publish button was the plunger on a syringe full of opinion-smack, and refreshing the Sitemeter page was the high.

Luckily the love of a good woman and general indifference from the blogosphere persuaded me to scale that shit back a lot, but even so the sense of obligation remained, as if I had to keep something going for the sake of… I don’t know, truth or something? Or maybe to lance the boil of opinion in my head that constantly replenished itself over time? Probably more like that. I had thoughts that needed to be shared, it seemed, but now I so rarely blog the upshot is that the thoughts pile up, and I end up writing epic posts that are just stupidly long. 6,000 words on Prometheus? 9,000 on The Dark Knight Rises? 10,000 in total over three posts about the Lost finale (still one of my least-read blogging projects)? The less I blogged the more I wrote, paradoxically.

The busiest period of the Caruso year is September to December, where I seem to focus most of my energy. First comes the Caruso TV Awards, in which I would choose the best and worst episodes of the year, best and worst characters, and then sundry other observations I had accumulated during that TV season, though the size of those posts meant they would be finished about a month into the new season, rendering them even less relevant. Then comes the two weeks of the London Film Festival, during which time I’ve reviewed every film I’ve seen there for the past three years, leading to either barely any hits (Bernie/The Monk) or big numbers, such as my absurdly glowing review of Black Swan, which got mad hits (like it was Rod Carew). And finally, in December, a blow-out with the Shades of Caruso movie awards, which takes me months to write. I’m not kidding; I started working on this year’s awards in August.

But why? To have a voice? If part of living in the new world is servicing the compulsion to continually scream, “I am alive, in the world, and I opine!” then I have Twitter for that, and Letterboxd if I can be bothered to put up with the worst of the commenters there (the good people make up for it, but being talked to like a 6-year old two weeks ago because I didn’t ejaculate with glee over Rian Johnson’s otherwise very good Looper was enough to put me off for a while). Am I doing this for my loyal readers? I do have some and they mean the world to me, but when I have #TheProject sitting unwritten in the writing study in the cobwebbed west wing of my mind, the thought of doing this in the hope that I might somehow enhance the wider cultural debate even a little seems absurd and quite arrogant.

Of course, I also feel compelled to do it, which explains why I spent weeks building up the courage to write about The Dark Knight Rises, and I feel much better for sliding that out of my head and onto the page like I’m moving Iron Man armour schematics from screen to screen like Tony Stark (quick thank you to everyone who RTd it or commented on it or offered kind words; it’s a huge relief when I get positive feedback). There’s also my standard response when people ask why I do this; watching and dissecting TV shows is how I catalogue how I feel about works of fiction, how they have failed or succeeded, and how I can develop my own writing or understanding of story structure and artistic accomplishment through those studies. That’s the best reason of all, and watching TV has been incredibly educational in that respect.

But sometimes it feels like the lesson is merely, “Be more like the writers of Breaking Bad and The Good Wife, and less like the writers of CSI: Miami and Dexter“. That’s a broad lesson that’s learned already, and picking these things apart to see how they tick (or clunk) isn’t as useful as it once was. Actually, I’m learning more about writing fiction by writing fiction, though I’m glad I spent so long preparing my brain-soil before planting idea-seeds. All those hours watching The Shield / Buffy / Lost and learning about character and pace and timing of revelation really paid off, I can feel it.

And so, to my point. The LFF reviews will probably remain, though I might make them smaller. The end of year awards will remain because they make Daisyhellcakes laugh and I get a shitload of hits for them (I think it’s just image-trawlers but still). The Caruso TV Awards? No can do anymore. They take forever, I get about 12 hits a post, and no one ever mentions them even on Twitter, where no thought is left untranscribed. It’s a waste of time I could spend elsewhere. Agonising over that series of posts, which I dreaded for months, has been one of the most depressing things about this year, when much of the time I wanted to work on #TheProject.

Giving up on that plan has lifted an enormous weight off my shoulders; the weight of having to watch the rest of Revenge, the second season of Boardwalk Empire, or any of Grimm after that risible pilot. I honestly think I would have killed myself if I’d felt obliged to watch the second season of Falling Skies just for the purpose of writing 200 words about it that no one would even have noticed. As for the sitcoms; I will only endure comedies starring Zooey Deschanel or Krysten Ritter if someone pays me megadollah, and, as I have found to my great embarrassment, no one wants to do that, so you can forget it.

And why should I write a huge post about these things even for money? There are more than enough people doing that on a weekly basis anyway. The AV Club alone covers literally every episode of every TV show airing at the moment. Sometimes I wonder if they’re going to start recapping the news. The vast majority of their reviews are so far-and-away better and more insightful than anything I could come up with that the futility of it seems even more overwhelming, and even if that wasn’t the case, do I really want to become an active, visible member of a critical subculture in which writers I like can be pilloried and insulted by fans with the permission of bitter showrunners, as those who have criticised Sons of Anarchy or Community have found? What’s to be gained from participating? It’s just asking for trouble.

But those observations remain in my head, standing between me and #TheProject like an inspiration dam, making a blog purge necessary. So I can get on with my goddamn life, here’s what I thought of TV this year. I wrote a shit-ton; feel free to bail now if you want, I’ll understand:

A million people can tell me that Boardwalk Empire improved in its second season but it would have had to be reset entirely for me to even think about giving it a chance. Plus I know everything that happens at the end because Twitter. A character I didn’t care about killed another character I didn’t care about? Maybe if that suddenly transforms the show into The Chalky and Van Alden Intensity Hour in the third season, then I’d think about it. Perhaps I’d have been more willing to watch Boardwalk Empire if I hadn’t tried to get through the interminable Hell on Wheels. Five episodes in I had to give up. A Western! And I couldn’t get through it! I blame the drama-dampening work from Colm Meaney, who was only slightly less hammy than he was in Get Him To The Greek, which is still a huge Serrano Ham of a performance. Even Common and The Swede couldn’t keep me watching. Sorry AMC.

And sorry for not being more enthusiastic about The Walking Dead aka The Neverending Circular Conversation About Oh The Humanity n’ Ting. A lot of folks hated the fact that it was set on one farm. I understood the need for this; budgetary constraints made it necessary, and to be honest it’s theoretically possible that a show could work from one locale. But if the only thing that happens is that everyone has conversations about the thing that’s on their mind? For several weeks? And all anyone ultimately does is swap philosophical positions with someone else, before swapping back? I don’t care how many main characters you massacre, I stopped caring 8 hours ago. There’s no drama here anymore. There’s just talking and an occasional zombie ZOMBIE THEY’RE CALLED ZOMBIES NOT WALKERS ZOMBIES FOR FUCK’S SAKE ZOMBIESZOMBIESZOMBIES.

This lack of enthusiasm spelled doom for other shows. Revenge seemed like it would be campy fun but it wasn’t compulsive enough or trashy enough to keep me and Daisyhellcakes interested. A lot of folks like it but time is just too precious to use on something I think is okay. Especially when you waste 13 hours on Alcatraz, which seemed like it might have been a grower like Fringe, but was merely a series of narrative dead-ends before the enormous cul-de-sac that is Being Cancelled. They couldn’t even make good use of the excellent chemistry between Jorge Garcia and owner of the Best Hairstyle of the Season Sarah Jones. I don’t know if I’d like more of Alcatraz, but I’d like more of those two. However, watching that meant I never even got around to Person of Interest / Awake / Enlightened / Boss / House of Lies / Magic City etc. At least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

Two fairytale shows arrived and became hits, improbably. The pilot for Grimm so offended me with its dreary sub-Buffy mythology that I dropped it instantly, and even though it’s apparently OMG sooooooooooo good now, again, my priorities have finally shifted, hallelujah. Once Upon a Time, on the other hand, was only really marginally better but for a Lost fan such as myself, that dual-timeline structure was like finding a packet of chocolate in the back of the cupboard that you’ve forgotten about. For all its many faults it was a great bandage on the wound that is the absence of Lost, plus it’s nice to watch less demanding, pleasant shows now and again. Best of all, it featured a fantastic villain in Rumpelstiltskin, one good enough to keep me tuned in even during the longueurs. Hopefully the second season will make good on the first’s promise.

Some of our favourite shows returned and were merely just good. Nothing spectacular, just eminently watchable and occasionally inspired. The Good Wife had its weakest season yet but it was still so sharply written and bouncily performed that even a few malfunctioning plotlines and strangely curtailed arcs couldn’t ruin it. Can anything? The show is a miracle of network TV; a pacy procedural that’s culturally relevant and politically complex without alienating the audience through impenetrable continuity. It’s still the most entertaining show of the week almost every week; nothing else surprises me as often or makes me feel as happy. I hope it runs forever.

Fringe understandably felt a little off because of the wait so many of us had for the timeline in which Peter exists to come back into being. Peter did return, but neither universe had ever known him. Still we waited for a reset but it never came, and maybe fans were disappointed that Olivia regained her memories of him because of love. But the show is about love, more than any other TV show except maybe Once Upon A Time. The wobbles in mid-season settled once the show basically came out and said, “IT’S ABOUT LOVE! CHILL OUT, NERDS!” and looking back it was stronger than it first seemed, and had a surfeit of terrific hours, as Noel Murray found recently. It would be churlish of me to be too critical of a show this entertaining and increasingly emotionally charged, especially if it’s willing to send two characters back to the Big Bang itself, just because it could.

The sitcoms, on the other hand, were a mess. The Office finally broke us, and we stopped watching it, our “Memories Of The Office” switch firmly stuck in the “That was a shit show overall” position. Maybe unfair, but the woeful start to the season was enough to banish many of the good memories. It should’ve ended halfway through season five, I tell you. Parks and Recreation was thankfully better, but the Leslie/Ben relationship annoyed Daisyhellcakes to distraction, the insane and desperately unfunny Tom and Anne coupling infuriated us both, and the promising campaign arc didn’t provide the LOLz we were expecting. A good idea in theory, but one poorly implemented, even with great guest turns by Paul Rudd and Kathryn Hahn (aka the hardest working woman in showbiz). Veep was good but worked better if you thought about it as a drama with jokes. Hopefully it’ll hit its stride soon and find its own voice.

Even Community disappointed this year, with a terrible split between bland formula and crazy concept stuff. The ambition gap between the two was way off; season two seemed perfectly blended in comparison. Which is not to say there were no great episodes; as it wore on it felt like there were good and clever things being done but they were being lost in the shuffle. I’ve spent the whole year trying to figure out what it was that bugged me about this season, and the main candidates were the long set up for arcs that got paid off in baffling haste, the endless, increasingly unfunny references to Inspector Spacetime (the worst running joke in the history of comedy), and that the performances were pitched way too manic and perky compared to previous years, which I attributed to everyone wanting to please the NBC box-tickers. And we all know how that turned out. [Edited to add: FFS]

But holy crap, 30 Rock bounced back with a bang, surprising everyone, and by everyone I mean 100% me and about 80% Daisyhellcakes who didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did which is no knock on her because seriously I was SO THRILLED by this season you have no idea, guys. About four weeks into this year it kicked in and went from “About to be dropped” (yes, my favourite sitcom, and the previous season had been so bad I honestly nearly gave up) to “highlight of the week”. I want to hug everyone involved for finally fixing the Kenneth problem (i.e. they gave him something to do and cut back on his screentime), revitalising Tracy by pairing him up with Jenna (who had similarly become tiresome), and just doing everything better and funnier and snarkier and smarter and better and betterer and betterest.

Which is more than I can say for The Newsroom, which was so unbelievably, monumentally terrible on almost every conceivable level that I’m amazed even Aaron Sorkin’s most die-hard fans didn’t suddenly realise their Studio 60 boxset was filled with lemons. We tried to tell them to do what we did, and turn those lemons of preachy, repetitious tone-deaf mansplaining into the lemonade of mockery! Oh how we laughed as Sorkin turned his female characters into desperately flailing and shallowly-drawn comic relief! Oh how we marvelled as he filled the screen with Sorkin surrogates (Sorkingates) for everyone to fawn over, listing the person’s achievements and TELLING us they’re great so Sorkin never has to figure out how to SHOW us that greatness! Oh how we despaired whenever he’d get within pissing distance of a good point and then cut to the Maggie-Jim-Don-Lisa-Sloan (Oh lovely Sloan!!!) love pentagon or Neal going on about Cthulhu or some shit.

By the end of ten deliriously awful episodes we thought people would finally see that those of us who are fans (seriously, we are) but who feel obliged to call him out on his worst excesses were right all along but no, his more devoted/blinkered fans doubled down, and as the final episode aired, all of them spontaneously said, “he stuck the landing”. Yes, but he landed on a PILE OF FUCKING LEMONS AND KILLED EVERYONE ON BOARD! HE’S NOT AN ELEGANT GYMNAST! HE’S AN AIRBUS A380 BECAUSE THAT’S THE ONLY PLANE BIG ENOUGH TO CARRY HIS EGO, AND THE PILOT OF SAID METAPHORICAL PLANE WAS DISTRACTED FROM HIS PURPOSE BY A RIDICULOUS CONSPIRACY SUBPLOT ABOUT PHONE-HACKING, AND SO NOW WE’RE ALL DEAD AND COVERED IN PIPS!

Honestly, there were two shows I wanted to write about each week this year, the first being The Newsroom so I could list all of the imbecilities, and the other being Lena Dunham’s Girls, but that would mean I would be adding fuel to the awful fire that has raged across the Internet for months now, only to flare back up again last weekend when a very ill-worded tweet (if I can put it rather mildly) from Caitlin Moran led to many angry followers damning her and Dunham as at worst racists or at best feminists with too narrow a focus on their own issues. I have no wish to risk offending anyone who has any strong opinions either way about this show, so I will direct you to these two superb and insightful posts about the controversy from Sarah Ditum and Bim Adewunmi (and this new, excellent one from Ms. Bim), note that it was easily my favourite new show of the year (sorry), and leave it at that.

Mad Men! It was the season where all the metaphors and messages were really offputtingly obvious! Except that season one did that as badly and no one complained then. Admittedly this season was a retrograde step back from the fine-tuned subtlety of seasons 2-4, but even then it was still elegant, impeccably made, and filled with deliriously pleasurable moments. Yes, the Joan thing was unfortunate, but if Janet Street-Porter is to be believed in this column about that piece of shit Jimmy Savile, women were a commodity in this era and Joan was never going to escape it, and in fact was being used as a prop way back in the first season. The past was a miserable wasteland for a lot of people, and focusing on the mechanics of this plot overlooks the horror of the reality, and the brilliance of the storytelling here (as upsetting as this storyline was, at least Joan is finally an agent in this decision, and wins big as a result). And hey, at least we got Far Away Places, the infinitely clever and bold portmanteau episode that almost rivaled last year’s masterpiece The Suitcase. That more than made up for Don’s absurd throttling hallucination a few weeks earlier.

Fans also turned on Breaking Bad, not long after Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a review saying the train heist was one crazy step too far into the realms of action movies. Considering the MAGNETS, BITCH setpiece just a few weeks earlier, escalating Walt and Jesse’s ambitions and abilities a little bit more is not a dealbreaker, and betrays a dismissive attitude toward the action genre (disclaimer: my favourite movie genre next to superheroics). That episode of BB was easily the highlight of the truncated season, but I guess someone had to be the first to backlash against it. After that there was a tide of complaint about the hurried pace. Yes, it was regrettable. No, it didn’t mean the show was ruined, as will become apparent when it’s over and the plan makes sense. I have faith. Move along. Move along.

Did anyone complain about Game of Thrones? If so I didn’t hear it over the sound of me screaming “OH GOD THIS SHOW IS THE BEST!” This is the only season I watched twice this year and it works much better in one quick go, but even week to week it was remarkable. In one block, though, the War of the Five Kings is propulsive, thrilling and necessarily absurd in equal measure; the politics of the crazy situation are held up as the joke that they truly are without the stakes being diminished. And Brienne! And Jaqen! And Arya and Tywin chilling in the Banquet Hall Of Conveniently Face-Obscuring Shadows! And White Walkers! AND MOTHERFUCKING TYRION AT THE BATTLE OF BLACKWATER BAY! I spent ten weeks pooping myself over this masterful exhibition of imagination and emotion, and I can’t wait to watch it again for the third time. Best show of the year.

Basically HBO had an amazing year, and that’s not even considering the other instant classic show they had and then cancelled in a panic like it was an accidental Amazon double order. Michael Mann and David Milch’s Luck was a fascinating artifact, a labor of love from the writer and a triumphant return to TV for the director, but ultimately a sadly incomplete triumph, the ultimate in coitus interruptus. Watching it after the cancellation was frustrating, especially when it sank its hooks in early. I heard some say they “got” the show during the exquisitely shot horse race in the fourth episode, but some of us fell in love right away, and not just because its confidence and focus quickly erased the memory of John From Cincinatti. And the races? Simply some of the best setpieces in the history of the medium. Every one made me crane forward in my seat and scream at the TV. The last episode shouldn’t have mattered because of the cancellation, but I screamed anyway, and cheered at the results. Just look at the fourth episode race; it’s glorious.

Writing about a show as powerful, ambitious and off-kilter as Luck is one of the reasons why I wanted to blog about TV in the first place, but the downside of that is the obligation to cover other things, to make sure I’m not just watching shows from one country. Consider this another reason for giving up; I couldn’t bring myself to watch Borgen or The Bridge after the disappointment of the original Killing, have yet to try Continuum, and barely watched any UK shows. Missed Blackout, missed The Hour, missed Line of Duty, have never wanted to watch Downton Abbey and never ever will, am almost 100% sick of Doctor Who and the relentless one note smart-arse dialogue, not to mention the Doctor’s current arc as “sulky child man who twirls too much”.

Other than that there was the now-off-the-love-list Misfits which sadly had a really poor third season, what with Rudy basically being Nathan after a Find/Replace script job in the wake of Robert Sheehan’s departure. True, Joe Gilgun managed to make it seem like that wasn’t the case by adding notes of self-doubt, and his performance was the only bright spot of the show’s year, but we could still tell it was meant to be Nathan. By the middle of the season 10 minutes of drama was being dragged out to 45 mins a week, and when three other leads left the show that was it. Stick a fork in us; we’re done. Doubt I’ll stick with Who either, unless I’m wrong about the new companion, aka Sexxy McDalek.

Another bad thing about blogging is seeing people react badly to a show you like and having to deal with the inevitable arguments. If I’d been doing a weekly column about Homeland when it aired in the UK I think I would have entered a mild depression at the reaction to the show’s finale. Many seemed to think that the dramatic choice made by Brody was a cop-out, made necessary by the imminent second season (cue complaints about the US strategy of making more episodes), that he should have blown himself up and be done with it like would have happened in a short-run UK series, which wouldn’t be expected to flog the story to death. At around this point someone will inevitably mention Fawlty Towers.

To say I disagree with this would be to be talking around the fist I have crammed in my mouth so I don’t say anything that would be construed as too hostile (the last thing I’d want to do while talking about something as essentially unimportant as a TV show). But, if Brody set off the bomb then the entire season, with all of the debate about his motives and the extent to which he has turned against the US, would have been for nothing. It would have been ten episodes of watching a clock tick down, Brody would have been reduced to a fuse, and Carrie would have been vindicated but what then for her? This way, yes, there is a possibility that the show will go on too long or lose its momentum, but we also get to see Brody continue to wrestle with his obligations with new, even higher stakes, and Carrie can continue her fight for respect. That’s where the drama of this brilliant show lies, not in waiting for things to just end. It’s not Day of the Jackal, the series. It’s The Manchurian Candidate, and it will run for as long as it needs to. (Edited to add, having seen the second episode of season two, I feel utterly vindicated in this belief.)

Short runs lead to stories with the potential to only do approximately as much as other shows of similar length, with a consequent fall in dramatic and emotional potential as more event possibilities are curtailed. Though I like lots of short-run dramas (Edge of Darkness and The Shadow Line, in recent years, are a perfect length), the rise of longer continuity-heavy dramas has revolutionised TV drama, and despite viewer argument over the padding in Lost (which I didn’t mind) or other disliked network shows, such long-run shows will always win out in my eye just because they can do things you won’t expect (if they’re bold enough). Seeing a key line by Xander at the end of season 2 of Buffy being brought back with three years of subsequent drama in season 5 was like an epiphany for me. See also The Shield; the perfect seven-season show in which everything that happened mattered, cumulatively. Homeland has the potential to match that achievement.

Of course I get that shows run out of steam, as shown by The Vampire Diaries‘ third season. As a soap opera about two families of vampires it was a lot of fun, and Ian Somerhalder, Candice Accola and Joseph Morgan are still good value for money, but this season was entirely composed of moments of necessary détente punctuated by someone saying, “I’ve just found out there’s an ancient spell and/or amulet that will magically kill the thing we previously said was unkillable,” before someone else finds it and double-crosses everyone else by conveniently destroying it. By the halfway mark the repetition got pretty goddamn annoying. Hopefully the finale’s shocking events can reset this, because spending a whole season attempting to generate tension while also going out of its way to maintain the status quo meant what was once vital became as lifeless as about two-thirds of the cast. (P.S. I’m now a Klaroline shipper, just accept it haters.)

One show that has been fallen right into a balance between a short and long run is Spartacus, which has, through awful circumstance, run 6 episodes longer than it might have (the mini-season Gods of the Arena), but is still facing its final season as Steven S. DeKnight probably wisely reckons there isn’t enough story to keep it going beyond the next year. The sad outcome of this is a season that got rid of many of its best characters, leaving behind a stripped cast and a million corpses. That finale was great but if you want more of the show, it’s so horrible to see so many terrific foes or beloved heroes bite the dust that eventually the joy is tainted. Nevertheless, it was another strong year for TV’s most outrageous show, and as with previous seasons, once it got into its stride it was exhilarating. It will be sorely missed.

It would have been nice to watch American Horror Story to see how a show is willing to reinvent itself drastically in order to keep a story going while also providing the closure that people wanted from a short run, especially as this would maybe soften my argument about Homeland, but after giving up so much of my life to Glee (which I finally dropped this year), one episode was enough. I might still go back to it, especially as the idea of it appeals more than the bizarre execution (plus, Connie Britton Connie Britton Connie Britton), but I’ll only do it if someone can promise me I don’t have to see Dylan McDermott frantically jacking his dick in the midst of a nervous breakdown again. It was bad enough watching Damian Lewis do that in front of a horrified Morena Baccarin; like some kind of awful nightmare the night after a Firefly / Band of Brothers marathon. Whoever told TV executives that “the kids these days just love sad wanking” must stop this madness now.

FX was lucky to have AHS there because otherwise I would have ignored it as part of what might be a subconscious war against the network for cancelling Terriers. Still haven’t finished season 3 of Justified; we just don’t have the enthusiasm we once had. And I didn’t watch season 4 of Sons of Anarchy either. That’s how boring the third season was, no matter how well it ended. I’ll get to it eventually but conflicting reports about its quality are not making me want to hurry. As for Louie, it was FX’s finest hour, but even though I loved almost every episode I’m never enthusiastic about watching it. This hesitance mystifies me. If it wasn’t for Daisyhellcakes pushing me into it I would’ve missed that amazing episode with Parker Posey, or that insane Letterman three-parter, which were among the best TV of this year.

But maybe this is the problem. I’ve got so much on my mind lately that I find it hard to switch off enough to even get through a half-hour show that will almost certainly entertain me, and then something that has given me such pleasure like Sons of Anarchy languishes unwatched on the Sky+ box for months. Perhaps this is part of the malaise that has made me get annoyed at every nearly every film I’ve seen this year, or maybe my mind is champing at the bit to stop watching other people’s fiction and just get on with my own. I have to get #TheProject out of my head, you guys. You’re gonna love it, I think.

All I know is, this year I tried to watch TV to generate thoughts to fill out these posts, and even though this is yet another epic, it’s nothing like what I expected. This is surely a sign that I should just watch TV for me, and not bother trying to add to a cultural conversation that is doing just fine without my occasional post. Let’s hope that refocusing my energy means I have time to create something more constructive, while approaching TV shows as entertaining diversions, not homework assignments. I’ll keep you all posted. In the meantime, here are my top ten episodes of the year, for completion’s sake.

10. Spartacus: Vengeance – Libertus

9. Louie – Daddy’s Girlfriend Part 2

8. Fringe – Welcome to Westfield

7. Homeland – The Weekend

6. Girls - Welcome to Bushwick a.k.a. The Crackcident

5. Luck – Episode 4

4. Community – Remedial Chaos Theory

3. Breaking Bad – Dead Freight

2. Mad Men – Far Away Places

1. Game of Thrones – Blackwater

Anyway, thanks to all who have ever commented on the Caruso Awards; your kindness gives me strength. I’ll be back soon enough, hopefully.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous TV Gubbins of the Year

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It’s not over! I feel like a horror movie antagonist popping out of hiding ten minutes after the credits have finished rolling, but yes, the Caruso TV Awards have one last gasp before I retire them until the end of the year, when I will be almost as fanatical about the best and worst movies of 2011. This post should have been done at the start of the week but the 2011 London Film Festival kept me very busy, with one movie shutting down my brain for a couple of days (thanks for the mental shutdown, Take Shelter). This post is the first large blip on an EKG after my brain comes back to life. Enjoy.

Best New Show: Game of Thrones

Longtime readers will know that I have a habit of getting inordinately excited about big summer movies, to the extent that I can be bouncing up and down with anticipation years in advance (I’m looking at you, The Avengers. No, seriously, I’ve rewatched your trailer 288 times). TV is a different thing. The uncritical part of me will look forward to, say, a new Terminator movie or a second try at Daredevil just because of my affection for the franchise or character no matter how boneheaded it might turn out to be (though I hope David Slade can resurrect the DD franchise), but it’s rare that TV shows will be based around them.

Yes, a new version of Hawaii Five-O or Charlie’s Angels will pop up from time to time, but I’m not going to be excited about them in the same way, because when network TV pilfers from itself it betrays the dearth of imagination that critics feel is most rife during the summer film season. These shows are often contemptuous of the audience and cranked out like story-sausage, as brilliantly argued here by Linda Holmes. Who on earth set their TiVo with a quickened pulse when they realised there was gonna be yet another attempt to defibrillate the long-dead corpse of Knight Rider?

This is one of the things that has contributed to the renaissance of TV drama. Original dramas are being created all the time, and while many will be inspired by books or films or historical events, or be created to glom onto the success of some other show, much of the time these shows are distinct and arrive with no expectations. I have a pretty good idea of what The Avengers will be like — condensed awesomanium, of course — but I don’t really know what Boss or Homeland or Revenge will be like, to name three critically acclaimed new shows from the new TV season. I look forward to watching them, but I’m not chewing my knuckles.

This wasn’t the case with Game of Thrones. Though I’d only had a year’s worth of exposure to George R.R. Martin’s magnificent fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, the wait for HBO’s adaptation was nigh-unbearable, partly because they kept so much of it under wraps for so long. At least it felt that way. I recall being so excited about it on the day before it aired on UK’s Sky Atlantic that it disrupted my sleep. Ridiculous, yes, but this passion wasn’t unique. It’s doubtful that anyone who loves the books was agnostic about the show. All it had to do to be instantly amazing was not fuck up, and the pre-aired clips shown on the HBO site proved that the look and feel and language of the books was intact.

Just getting it right would have been enough, but Game of Thrones was so much more than just a competent adaptation. It was vivid and pacy and funny and dark and exciting, building such a head of steam that the last three episodes eclipsed almost everything else shown on TV this year. It was spot on from the very first beautiful shot of the snowy North, but it kept giving us little treats throughout: the brilliantly staged fight in the Eyrie; the superb casting (bringing in Charles Dance as Tywin Lannister made me finally like Charles Dance); the chance to finally see the grasslands of the Dothraki Sea, and King’s Landing, and the dragon heads of the Red Keep, and the Twins standing on either side of the Trident.

To those who loved the books, attempting to convert the doubters was surprisingly easy. The fatuous but compelling comparison made by the showrunners (“The Sopranos in Middle-Earth”) was enough to tempt some to give it a try. As expected, the end of the first episode, with Bran in the tower, was exactly the right kind of hook to keep viewers coming back, and draw new viewers in as those who gave the show a try dropped their bacon sandwiches en masse. Just by using GRRM’s superb storytelling tricks, the audience grew and became more fervent as each new bombshell dropped, as the ruthless became purely evil, the virtuous died, and the rest of the characters became more complex and unpredictable.

One of the great joys of experiencing this glorious success was seeing the enthusiasm for this show grow almost exponentially as the series progressed. My Twitter feed, which already included several very happy ASOIAF fans, became filled with sceptics turned rabid believers as this narrative behemoth powered toward its stunning finale. “Fucking Joffrey!” became a rallying cry, memes like Tyrion slapping the young prince and Stupid Ned Stark proliferated, and longtime fans chewed their lips in wait for the end of episode nine, with THAT ending, knowing that a few million more people would experience the same extreme denial that we did. One good friend of the blog had an epic mental meltdown on Facebook. That’s the beauty of ASOIAF.

So basically, all HBO did was take a beloved and brilliantly written book, get two big fans (D.B. Weiss and David Benioff, who is now forgiven for his involvement in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to write and oversee it, throw a shitload of money and talent at it, promote the shit out of it with a perfectly judged drip of information, and wait for every passionate creative individual involved in the show to pay tribute to that story’s ferocious narrative drive. They built it, and we did indeed come, in droves. It’s that simple. Just make something awesome. Commit to something of enormous scope. Don’t hesitate or cavil or second guess. Just be bold, and the audience will love you for it. Thank you to everyone who made this first, incredible series. It was a blast.

Worst New Show: Camelot

Recently a TV critic asked me why I watch so much TV; it’s troubling, in a way, if someone who watches TV for a living thinks I’m watching too much. The easiest answer is that I enjoy it, especially when it’s good but even when it’s bad, because as I pointed out at really really really insane length a couple of weeks ago, there are lessons to be learned by watching anything closely enough. That means committing to some shows that are truly dire in order to see whether it can be turned around. Parks and Recreation started out with a really poor first season but has since become essential viewing. The same thing happened with The Vampire Diaries; what looked like Twilight-lite (yes, that bad) is now one of the highlights of the TV week. Even if something bad doesn’t improve much, surely it’s only fair to complete a journey to fully understand the directions you’ve been given.

But SoC has to confess, this award for Worst New Show is being given to Starz’ Camelot without reaching the final destination. I’m sorry. I tried. I tried so hard to finish it, and put this post off all week so I could try to get through the last four episodes of the short ten-episode-season, but it’s impossible. Something this boring and aimless is like an affront to the viewer, and all I can do is bitch about it from a position of 20% ignorance. Feel free to dismiss my complaints, but enduring this glacially-paced monstrosity felt like a battle for my soul. This morning it took three hours to watch a single episode as everything in the house distracted me from the endless, dreary conversations conducted in underlit rooms. I’ve got better things to do.

Nevertheless, Camelot was already number one on my bad shows list after just a couple of episodes, so finishing the series was nothing more than some kind of bizarre flagellation. Longtime readers will know that I hold Joseph Fiennes in the highest low regard; his LOADED performance in FlashForward is justifiably legendary. They will also know of my war against Torchwood, whose first two years were overseen by Chris Chibnall. Camelot united these two creatives, which drove SoC into paroxysms of joy. Within a few minutes our expectations were met; the first episode of Camelot was as shambolic and absurd as we had hoped, and the next few weeks did little to dispell that. However, while Torchwood was a hysterical abomination, this was merely dull.

And that’s the problem. I’ll admit, it’s incredibly mean-spirited of me to hope that a new show will be bad in a certain way so that I can enjoy mocking it (see also: The CW’s Ringer, which started out ridiculous but now seems to be settling down, unfortunately). However that’s preferable to the miasmatic tedium that surrounds this ill-conceived take on the Arthurian myth. Even after a seemingly infinite number of adaptations of the Arthurian myth, there is still magic in this tale. It’s one of the greatest stories of all time, one that contains so many elements compatible with Joseph Campbell’s concept of the eternal narrative it’s possible that the story will never die. And yet Camelot does its best to smother it with a pillow made of gloom and worthy realism.

Now, that’s fine. A deconstruction of the Arthurian myth is a perfectly valid approach, and though many objected to Jerry Bruckheimer, Antoine Fuqua and David Franzoni’s “historically accurate” version, I thought it was an interesting idea undone by some pretty weak execution. It helps that the Clive Owen version is so different from previous interpretations that it almost stands alone; part of the novelty of it is seeing how the myth and the (questionable) realism crossover. Camelot sometimes feels like this is its goal, but it muddies the water by introducing anti-realist elements like Merlin and Morgan Le Fay’s use of magic. It’s down-to-earth and fantastical at the same time, and that’s a big part of the problem.

It’s a fantasy that’s not allowed to be fantastical because that would clash with the realism. It’s not totally realistic because that would stop them being fantastical. The result is an awkward mix of the two, with Merlin’s constant complaining about how much his magical powers make him sad unfortunately setting the tone for the show. Chris Chibnall has stated that Camelot is meant to be a political take on the myth, a contemporary retelling that uses modern-day idealism as its basis (possibly taking JFK’s “Camelot” as its starting point in an amusing reversal). However this faux-seriousness means every opportunity the show has to spread its wings is curtailed in case it undercuts the message. In short, Camelot hates fun, and won’t let you have dessert until  you’ve finished all the vegetables.

This isn’t the only time Chibnall has done this. The very worst episodes of Torchwood are the ones that profess to be making a serious point about morality or modern life. Who can forget Countrycide, which dared to take on the very serious subject of rampant cannibalism in the north of England? Or Meat, which opened a window on the depraved and cruel world of the carnivore by dramatising the fate of poor Spacey the Space Whale, a creature that is kept alive in order to be carved up over and over again for meat, just like in a real abattoir with real cows. See also his ponderous Silurian episodes in Doctor Who that belaboured a point about the failure of diplomacy between two intractable opponents over two self-important hours.

These berserk attempts at dramatising serious issues with untenable fantasy comparisons betray the showrunner’s belief that a point MUST BE MADE at all times. Bollocks to fun; drama is here to teach us stuff, and must not allow for any levity or liveliness. At its worst, Sorkin’s West Wing was the preachiest and most condescending show on TV that wasn’t Studio 60, but dammit, in those early seasons that show was hugely entertaining. That bitter medicine went down easily because West Wing teemed with event, its purpose greased by sassy dialogue and vibrant performances. Camelot‘s seemingly endless walk-and-talks are conducted in the gloom of portentousness; it’s an interminable lecture about good and evil conducted by a depressed professor.

This is before we get into the ill-defined characters, the lack of event (a sub-plot about Morgan taking the place of Igraine to foment discord between Arthur’s boring knights takes most of the season to kick in), the poor production values, the omnipresent exposition, the weak performances from much of the cast, the sense that the season arc is being made up on the fly, with new characters constantly introduced while old ones are sidelined far too quickly. Worst of all, the central narrative line of the series seems to be about the illicit love between Arthur and Guinevere. Perhaps with some chemistry between the actors this would have seemed compelling, but… actually no. There was nothing that could save it. The show is held up by string instead of cables of steel, and as a result whenever Camelot needs to rely on this wet romance for narrative strength, it collapses.

While it’s unfair to criticise Camelot for what it’s not, it unfortunately exists in a world that has given us Game of Thrones and Spartacus. The narrative complexity and ambition of GoT shows Camelot up as the weak gruel it is, trouncing it in every way. I was willing to concede that this might be attributable to differing budgets, but GoT — which was shot in Ireland and Malta — cost about $50-60m for ten episodes while the budget for Camelot was $7m an episode, and that was only shot in Ireland. Of course those figures could well be unreliable, but the fact is that while GoT has a sweeping, epic scope, Camelot feels like it’s set in one dingy room. It’s not lack of money that holds it back; it’s failure of ambition.

The comparisons to Spartacus are even more damning. Chibnall and the rest of the Camelot team are under no obligation to emulate that show, of course, but it might have been prudent to see how vibrant and endlessly entertaining Steven DeKnight’s unrestrained TV classic can be. I’m not just talking about the infamous Fighting and Fucking formula either. There isn’t a single boring moment in Spartacus‘ run to date; every scene and line and performance adds up to a greater whole. There are few shows as pleasurable to watch as Spartacus; it’s endlessly entertaining, surprising, and beautifully presented. And it’s cheaper than Camelot too; the budget is about $5m per episode thanks to New Zealand tax breaks and creative use of effects.

Camelot wasn’t doomed by money or competition or audience antipathy or even the scheduling difficulties that made its stars unavailable for another series. It was doomed because it was the opposite of fun. You can put that down to hesitation or lack of ambition or muddled intent. What matters is that sitting through each episode felt like swimming through quick-set concrete. Still, even that’s not what makes SoC angriest. Has anyone heard anything about the King Arthur movie that was to be based on a treatment by Warren Ellis? This is the last I heard of it. There are a million possible reasons why the project has disappeared, but if this dull-as-ditchwater reimagining of the myth contributed to that movie’s descent into Development Hell, everyone involved has earned my eternal wrath.

Best Pilot: The Walking Dead

When I say Game of Thrones was the only show of the year to get me pre-excited, I’m omitting the AMC adaptation of The Walking Dead by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Tony Moore which, for a while there, was the biggest game in town for horror and comic nerds. I was infected too; even though the comic leaves me cold, the thought of a zombie TV show helmed by a horror movie old-timer as Frank Darabont was good enough to raise expectations through the roof. And before anyone calls into question the use of the term “old-timer”, I remember seeing Chuck Russell’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and The Blob back at the old ABC in Walsall in ’87 and ’88 respectively, and both were co-written by Darabont. I was a teenager then, so I’m sorry, but that makes him a goddamn horror movie old-timer and that’s that.

Both of those movies thrilled me when I was a TEENAGER OH GOD I’M SO OLD, and The Mist blew my mind a few years back, so I figured The Walking Dead was in good hands. Now, most of the current opinion of the show revolves around the latter half of the first season, which disappointed most people, and the start of the second season hasn’t exactly thrilled many people either. The consensus seems to be that this was a wasted opportunity, and one that might become even more frustrating with AMC cutting the show’s budget and driving Darabont to quit. Glen Mazzara runs things now, which has caused concern. I haven’t seen his Starz show Crash, which was widely mocked and hated by some critics, but I wouldn’t want to blame Mazzara — a long-running producer and writer on The Shield — as he ran a TV show based on the world’s worst ever movie. Only an evil tree can grow from a bad seed.

As for Darabont, he may have his detractors, but as someone who risked life and limb to see The Blob not once but twice at the local fleapit, I’m definitely in the love camp. I mean, did you experience the despair that gushes out of that photo I linked to earlier? That was some 1950s kitchen sink bullshit, I tell you. You don’t know what it was like going to the Walsall ABC on a Saturday night during the 80s. You can buy Kevlar at your local Asda nowadays but back then it was impossible to find it anywhere. It’s one thing to shoot angry looks over your shoulder whenever some clown at the recent London Film Festival arrives 25 minutes into a movie and hits you in the back of the head with his Moleskine-filled satchel, but try doing that to 300 hormone-fuelled Tasmanian Devils screeching with derisive laughter and pelting you with Smarties. You have to be devout to go through something like that once, let alone twice.

Anyway, forget about the torrent of bullshit and bad blood that has poured over the audience since the pilot first aired, and try to remember it untouched by controversy. Watching it again for this post, I was struck once more by just how bold and beautiful it is. How many other TV shows are willing to depict the end of the world in such stark and uncompromising terms? How many other TV directors would leave so many long, dialogue-free scenes in their show? Has any other show started with the hero shooting a child in the head? This is Darabont’s favourite trick, it seems, as kids die memorably in The Mist and The Blob. Perhaps that’s what every show needs. Maybe more people would watch The Good Wife or Community if more zombie kids got shot during the cold open.

What kind of people are we that we would watch The Walking Dead in droves just to see if any little girls will be blasted to death this week? Obviously, we’re people who like the fact that for a while there seemed to be a new show that would actually put its characters through weekly horror movie hell just for our ghoulish entertainment, and the thrill of that possibility was enough to make this AMC’s biggest hit. Darabont’s assured handling of the first episode was good enough that I’d put this hour of TV above most of the tiresome zombie movies of the past few years. Setpieces like Grimes’ walk through the hospital, or his ride into a seemingly deserted Atlanta were riveting and terrifying, but mostly they were made with care, attention to detail, and the courage to take things slow. Darabont treated the subject with deadly seriousness, and we responded with instant admiration.

After that the series became less interesting, sillier, and confused in tone, leading to a desperately underwhelming finale at the CDC. A real shame, because the first couple of episodes were so good it looked like we were in for a real treat; the second episode was very strong too, with its Excellence Quotient bolstered by 1000 Michael-Rooker-As-A-Loathsome-Redneck points. Hopefully at some point this show will get back on track with or without the input of Darabont, but even if it doesn’t we still have this remarkable exercise in sustained tension and atmospherics, impeccably performed by all, with special SoC love for Andrew Lincoln and Lennie James representing for the UK.

Worst Pilot: Blue Bloods

Earlier this year BSkyB launched Sky Atlantic, its secret weapon in the battle to win over the middle-class liberals who had resisted giving money to the monolithic Murdoch machine. After scoffling up every prestige show from the US that it could, it promised a roster of TV shows that not only included all HBO shows, but also Mad Men. How could the bottle-of-Merlot-a-night crowd cope without their beloved Mad Men? It was also a great way for Murdoch, Tempter, Son of Perdition, to strike yet another mean-spirited blow against his PSB enemy. “Screw you BBC”, it screamed with all of those adverts featuring Don Draper and his glass of booze, “all you get now is European dramas, and no one wants to watch those. Erm…”

Sky Atlantic’s first night promised the first episode of Boardwalk Empire, and numerous documentaries bragging about the sets and Martin Scorsese and, er, the sets, and the costumes, and that Steve Buscemi. This generated insanely high expectations that no show could have matched (well, Game of Thrones could have, but that’s just my partisanship talking). Nevertheless, this was a statement of intent. This channel was SERIOUS. It was the home of QUALITY DRAMA. It was worth the Sky subscription all on its own, even though daytime was filled with repeats of X-Files, thirtysomething and Star Trek: Voyager. This was where the best of the best could be found. They could have called it Sky Emmywinners, it was so loaded with quality.

And so, all of those people who tuned in to watch Boardwalk Empire hung around to watch the next show on the roster; Blue Bloods. To a UK audience who might not be as aware of its network, non-cable pedigree, this might have seemed like another prestige drama, just one that stars Wahlberg the Lesser and Tom Selleck and his Amazing Utility Mustache, instead of Buscemi, Shannon, Whigham, Pitts and DABNEY COLEMAN FTW. Sky Atlantic was not in the business of explaining that while Boardwalk Empire was funded by subscription and could make an effort to be distinctive without alienating its targeted audience, Blue Bloods was a commercial show dependent on advertising revenue and would therefore not offer a similar experience for the audience. To those who hadn’t read up about it, it was as if these wildly different shows were being treated as equal.

Let’s put it this way; Sky1 shows lots of commercial stuff, but Blue Bloods isn’t even good enough to be shown there, let alone this new prestige channel. I’m not saying it’s bad because it’s not as good as Boardwalk Empire; I’m saying it’s bad because it’s awful, and awful because it’s bad. It’s so awful. It’s so bad. It’s AWFUL! AWFULAWFULBADAWFUL. It was almost amusing to see UK newspaper reviews the next day. Some critics seemed to express great befuddlement at the gulf in quality between the two shows, having fallen for Sky Atlantic’s trick. SoC has gone on the record as saying that Boardwalk Empire was a disappointment, but compared to the pilot of Blue Bloods, the first episode of Boardwalk Empire was the entire first season of Deadwood and fifth season of The Shield combined.

How bad is the exposition in this show? So bad that The Soup, which is usually content to focus its derision on terrible reality shows, featured a long clip from the beginning of the pilot in which the assorted members of the Reagan family (!!!!) just name each other and explain their relationships with each other. Never – NEVER – have I seen anything as clunky as this. There is no attempt to wait for this information to be parceled out through the rest of the episode. In fear of losing the audience before the second ad break, we’re bombarded with clumsily-acted meteors of information. Yes, there are a lot of central characters to introduce, but exposition this ugly just screams of desperation.

Mind you, they have a lot to get through in this first week. Not long after the clumsy download of names and relationships we see a young girl abducted, and not only that, she’s diabetic and needs an insulin shot. Even the addition of a ticking clock at the bottom of the screen would seem less manipulative than this. An abducted child is a staple cop show plotline (CSI: Miami has had several), but it’s usually reserved for sweeps week, and an audience that has seen way too many of these shows can usually sleep through them as they rarely offer anything new. This is no exception.

We get emotive pleas by hysterical parents, growled lines by impatient macho cops as they race around the city, and intolerant comments about characters who don’t represent the most basic church-going football-watching red-blooded mainstream “norm” (here it’s a doll collector, who is the recipient of several sneering comments from Wahlberg 2.0). Blue Bloods isn’t about to delay its dive into the pool of mediocrity; it’s gleefully skinny-dipping by the time most lowest-common-denominator ratings-chasing shows would be bending down to undo their shoelaces.

Once the kid is found midway through the episode, things get worse. Wahlberg is such a maverick cop he had to torture the vile, gloating kidnapper to find out the kid’s location, and this means evidence is inadmissable blah blah you know the drill by now. This automatically leads into a debate about the use of coercive interrogation techniques (AKA toiletboarding); it’s the kind of thing added for some topicality, but this show has a new twist. Fascist cop Wahlberg’s sister is wet liberal lawyer Bridget Moynahan, meaning this debate can be conducted between siblings who don’t get on.

It’s like a power-up bonus for this overused scenario. It comes at the expense of logic, sadly. Having Moynahan represent her dick brother to the DA is so improbable that the scene comes to a close with her pointing out that she would have to recuse herself from the case if it went any further. And who comes out best in the argument? Do you really think a show about a family of cops that already features a scene where both journalists and bloggers are treated like obstructive shit-sculptures by morals-fetishist Tom Selleck is going to approach this subject with any restraint? Wahlberg dismisses Moynahan’s complaints with ease and contempt.

The scene is even framed with her sitting down and Wahlberg looming over her (no mean feat; he’s about three feet shorter than her, by my calculations); he’s the boss and she’s the subordinate, wasting her time with woolly ideas about human rights while he’s out banging the heads of cartoonishly evil paedophiles against the side of a stinky toilet because might makes right. You can practically hear the capital-punishment supporting patriarchs nodding sagely in their comforters while wifey washes the dishes like a woman should.

This debate continues later over a family dinner (where the main course is yet more exposition) during which Wahlberg asks Moynahan if she would feel the same way about protecting the rights of paedophiles if her daughter was abducted. She, of course, has no response to this, other than to spell out that she hates paedophiles just as much as he does, just in case the audience thinks that defending the rights of all citizens to a fair trial is the same as joining NAMBLA. This isn’t a reasoned debate; it’s a loaded argument for the abolition of human rights and the rule of law designed to give the right-wing audience something to fap over, with the fact that seriously I’m not kidding the family really is actually called THE REAGAN FAMILY being the NRA-supporting cherry on top.

The show oozes with disdain for moral equivalence or reasoned thought. A Judge Dredd TV show would be less aggressive in its promotion of strict force, though of course the intention there would be satirical. Blue Bloods is Judge Dredd without the jokes. Or the helmet. Or the futuristic setting. Or anything, really. But you get my point. The success of resolutely unliberal shows like CSI: Miami, and reports like this one showing that the most successful shows on US TV are watched by Republicans, could well have influenced the ideological positioning by the network, who happily loaded the pilot with brusque manly men, submissive women (please don’t tell me Moynahan’s lawyer is anything other than a Strong-Female-Character-In-Name-Only), and black and white villainy.

As the show progressed it introduced a season arc about the corrupt Blue Templar organisation within the NYPD, so the water did get muddied as it went along, but an hour of this fascist-pandering horseshit was enough for SoC. Which is a shame, as dialogue as bad as, “We need to find this kid. Alive,” or, “You know, there’s no shame in talking about what happened in Iraq,” would have kept us happily chuckling until Torchwood: Miracle Day came along.

And that’s that for another year. Thanks to everyone who has commented on, liked, or retweeted these long long articles. I’m now going to go soak my fingertips in water for a few hours.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Worst New Characters of the Year

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As I said yesterday, there were very few good roles for actresses this year, but even more annoyingly, there were plenty of bad ones. It’s the usual thing; most shows need a shrewish nagging wife to make things hard for the male lead, or some sexy bikini-clad hottie to titillate (poor Grace Park in Hawaii Five-O, spending even more time in her smalls than Daniel Dae Kim), or they have little to do and are only there as a signifier of gender issues — e.g. Boardwalk Empire‘s Margaret Shroeder wasn’t terribly written, but she did seem to ping-pong between two differing emotional states, all the while standing in for oppressed women everywhere. As the year wore on this list looked like it was going to be all women; that really scared me. I’m not a misogynist!

Thankfully a lot of the shows I watched in the last couple of months provided some truly terrible male characters, but nevertheless, it’s troubling that this was the case. A momentary blip? Or a consequence of Jeff Robinov’s infamous statement that Warner Bros. wasn’t going to make movies with female leads any more? Probably not the latter, but I like to bring that up as often as possible, that a moneyman in charge of a studio thinks there’s no audience for movies with a female lead. It’s not the quality of the movies; come on, it’s gotta be the broads putting people off, man. SMFH.

So yeah, here’s some more hate. Apologies for complaining about the number one choice here again, but honestly, that character is one of the worst errors of judgement ever made in TV drama. That it happened on Jane Espenson’s watch seriously depresses me. I don’t blame her for any of it; partisan of me, yes, but I just cannot believe she wasn’t overruled a lot on that misbegotten project.

10. John Pope – Falling Skies

There’s a case to be made that Pope is actually the best character on Falling Skies. He’s certainly the only character played with any sense of fun; kudos to Colin Cunningham for avoiding the mogadon gas that seems to have been pumped into the set. Nevertheless, he’s just there to fill the gruff badass slot that shows seem to have these days; the same as Gawain in Camelot and Kyle Hobbes in V. It’s a thankless role, because no matter how long his hair, how broad his performance, how “dangerous” he might seem at first, you know the cowardly alien invasion show will do all it can to soften the character for primetime viewing. And so, after just a single episode, the vicious bastard who killed one of the 2nd Massachusetts’ numerous African-American redshirts (seriously, the black actors on this show needn’t bother clocking in at the start of the day; they’re little more than cannon fodder), and who led a band of bastards so bastardly it’s made pretty clear they repeatedly raped the only woman in their ranks, is quickly given the task of being camp cook. He’s not so bad after all, you see, because he knows about herbs and stuff. Not long after that he’s bonding with Noah Wyle’s youngest kid. Falling Skies‘ central, enormous disconnect is most transparent here; the idea of the show is meant to be bleak, and its treatment uncompromising, but instead what we get is a sanitised slice of cowardice that satisfies no one. Pope could have been a modern day Ham Tyler. Instead he’s a declawed Wolverine. I dread the inevitable crying fits he will have in season two.

9. Lumen Pierce – Dexter

SoC wants to be very clear here; any dislikings here are not aimed at Julia Stiles, who does superb work as the vengeful rape victim who teams up with Dexter to hunt down and kill a group of extremely nasty scumbags. Her work elevates the show in much the same way as John Lithgow did as season four’s Trinity Killer, with the bonus that her naturalistic take on the character provides an interesting contrast to the cartoonish performances around her. It’s Lumen herself who is the problem. For all of the interesting character moments throughout the season — her initial disastrous impulsiveness, the conflict between her urge for revenge and her fear of it — she still ends up leaving in the finale as much for franchise-supporting convenience as anything else, which once more shows up the programme’s mechanical nature. Once the season is done, the guest star leaves. Knowing this is how the show operates, much of the season feels like a waste of time; she won’t be around soon, so why invest in her? She’s just yet another character drafted in to give Dexter something to bounce off, one more twisted mirror to reflect an aspect of Dexter’s “complex” persona which amounts to nothing in the way of change or growth. Add to that her damsel-in-distress function for hero Dexter, and you have the most frustratingly almost-awesome character of the year.

8. Sophia – The Event

Though the second half of NBC’s Sci-Fi Frustration Engine was tighter than the first, the radical reboot that got us to that point had some negative repercussions as well. The afore-mentioned resemblance to 24 was the most egregious, but worst of all was making Sophia the Wussy Alien into Sophia the Unbelievably Cruel and Evil Alien in the space of an episode. In the first half of the season the “leader” of the aliens was an ineffectual loser whose words carried zero force; the regularity with which her subjects disregarded her orders or basically just fronted on her became a running joke. The showrunners were obviously aware that they had created someone with all of the moral authority of an oven glove and killed off her son in one of the most interesting episodes of the season. This was enough to turn her into a badass hell-bent on killing millions of humans. That’s inconsistent at worst, promising at best, but sadly the showrunners had cast soft-spoken Laura Innes as Sophia. When playing a compassionate alien she was fine. As a potentially genocidal vengeance-crazed villain? Not so much. The disconnect between the initial conception of Sophia and her eventual turn was the killing blow for the show.

7. Ilsa Pucci – Human Target

In the first season of Fox’s generic action series, Chi McBride was cast as Winston, the witheringly sarcastic but level-headed partner of protagonist Christopher Chance, fretting about the legality of their operations but always coming through in the end. By the final episode of that season, their friendship was well-established, and that perpetual panic was rendered obsolete. Come the second season, and for some reason he was still being dismissive of his partner’s abilities, but this time he plays second-fiddle in the chide stakes to new benefactor Ilsa Pucci. While Winston has concerns based on his understanding of what his colleague is involved in, Pucci is an outsider who perpetually stresses out about the legality of their actions, and spends most of the episode being a McKee obstacle; fine if the show didn’t already have someone in that position, but untenable here. Indira Varma is – as ever – utterly charming as the innocent caught up in the shady goings-on, but the character is a terrible drain on the show’s energy. Even more frustrating, a mid-season attempt to deepen her character is squandered almost immediately, before we get into the usual sub-Maddie-and-David romance bollocks in the last few episodes. Of all of the ideas behind the show’s unsuccessful revamp, Pucci’s redundant introduction was the worst.

6. Odin Sinclair – Caprica

Admittedly there’s only a bit of screentime given to lecherous monotheist Odin Sinclair, what with Caprica being ripped from our hearts by Syfy as they attempt to purge their schedule of, you know, sci-fi. Which is fine by me; he represents the only upleasant spot in the final run of this magnificent show. He’s a great representation of Caprica‘s unorthodox characterisation. There’s barely a single character in this show that doesn’t defy categorisation; they all feel like recognisable humans, filled with contradictions and weaknesses and flaws. And so Odin is a slimy little opportunist who uses a Lacy Rand avatar for porn purposes, smokes space weed like an intergalactic beatnik, and then somehow manages to actually seduce the real Lacy Rand as some kind of awful bonus. Horrible that the writers would do that, but I guess his tiny rebellions and doofus-cool are realistic. He’s the show’s bad boy, and at least does better than the similarly-creepy but far-more-dead Philomon from the first half of the show. So if he’s such a cleverly-drawn character what is he doing on this list? Well, I reckon I’m allowed to stick at least one character on here just because I just can’t stand them, even if that character is intentionally awful and given some compelling qualities. Oh Lacy Rand, you can do a lot better than this sleazy little hipster schmuck.

5. Stephanie Powell – No Ordinary Family

Rowan Kaiser of the AV Club wrote a great piece about No Ordinary Family‘s conservatism, a right-wing viewpoint perfectly encapsulated in the character of Stephanie Powell. Her power is superspeed, a gift that Barry Allen and Wally West would use to travel through time or pass through solid matter. Hell, even Heroes‘ Daphne used it to steal things. In No Ordinary Family, for the most part, Stephanie’s superspeed gives her the ability to get all of her chores done quickly. This is a character written to be smarter than almost everyone else in the show, a scientist researching the mysterious plant that gave them all superpowers. And yet this is merely a “Strong Female Character” get-out clause, her intelligence practically added by default as there needed to be a scientist in the main cast and her husband Jim is written to be an emasculated child whose arc from dope to hero is more important than her actualisation. And so, instead, Stephanie just races around, hoovering and making dinner and lunch for her navel-gazing, lazy family of odious self-regarding jerks, just like a good housewifey should. That’s when she’s not a relentless Claire-Dunphy-esque buzzkill, nagging her nigh-invulnerable super-strong husband to stay home so he doesn’t get hurt, because the presence of whiny behaviour from women in bad TV shows supersedes logic. Man, fuck this show.

4. King Arthur – Camelot

Okay look, in the long game for this show I’m sure Arthur was meant to become a kingly king, a man who leads men, the ruler who unites the lands of Albion, searches for the Grail of Christ and fights the forces of the evil Morgana le Fay, and how better to begin this monumental arc than by casting the guy who looked like he was suffering from tuberculosis in Tim Burton’s magical screen version of Sweeney Todd. SoC has nothing against Jamie Campbell Bower; his rendition of Johanna in Todd is quite lovely. Nevertheless, it’s hard going watching this wispy-bearded incarnation of Arthur, who seems completely out of his depth at every step. It’s a version of the myth that sees him improbably capture the hearts of his followers despite looking like he’s going to burst into tears throughout, but no amount of swords pulled from waterfalls are going to convince the audience that he’s worthy. If they really were planning to toughen him up over the course of the show, they would have needed about 20 seasons to realistically get to that point. The show’s insistence on making Merlin the guiding hand means the central character is little more than a puppet. He does have some agency, at least, but unfortunately his act of rebellion against his mother and medieval consigliere is to stalk and pester Guinevere, all the while whining at her about how much he loves her and why don’t you love me back I’m totally the king cuz Mr. Merlin says so waaaaaahhhhh. Basically, he’s me when I was fifteen. No one followed me into battle when I was a teenager, so why the hell should I believe that anyone would pledge allegiance to this fey twerp?

3. Nelson Hidalgo – Treme

Last year SoC gave its prestigious Worst Character of the Year award to Treme‘s Sonny. Who could argue with us that the barely-talented, energy-sucking, self-pitying creep didn’t deserve his place at the top of the list? Well, David Simon for one. Okay, he didn’t respond to us specifically. Such was the furore about Sonny that Simon mentioned it in one of his customary defensive and self-aggrandizing interviews, bitching out fans for not waiting to see what character magic he weaved with Sonny in the future. And, to a certain extent, he was right. Sonny has struggled towards respectability this year. I’m sure that this year’s addition of opportunistic braggart Nelson Hidalgo will yield some interesting narrative further down the line, but as with Sonny, the main problem, above and beyond his obnoxious personality and forced bonhomie, was that he was painted as such a broad villain, an almost comically corrupt individual whose worst crime is almost his patronising cultural tourism, that all the audience can do is stare in disbelief as the air curdles around them. Treme can be very subtle, and it can clang like a struck anvil. This year, the sound of that anvil was a wheedling cry of, “Cuz, cuz, cuz!” Don’t let the rusted storm door hit you on the ass on the way out, Nelson.

2. Maggie Young – Rubicon

Perhaps it was Rubicon‘s mid-season change in direction that left Maggie the pouting PA so lost and aimless. Certainly the early episodes hinted that Maggie would be interesting even if only as the woman who betrays our hero in a femme fatale style, a possibility hinted at by her vampish demeanour and heavily-stressed sexiness. In that case we can blame the second showrunning team for not finding anything for Maggie to do for the majority of the season. Rubicon‘s biggest novelty — and arguably its greatest weakness — was its insistence on depicting workplace drama at such length. When the usual flirtations and power plays were enacted against the sinister espionage backdrop, the contrast was entertaining. Maggie’s problems – feckless husband, unrequited love, guilt over her early betrayal of Will – were played against nothing compelling, which meant they were just bog-standard plots lifted from other stories. With nothing to do Maggie just hovered in the background, mouth slightly open in a perpetual expression of cluelessness. Was she meant to be the show’s Joan, sultrily swishing through the American Policy Institute corridors like a sexy panther? Or was she just a loose end that no one could tie up? Whatever her initial purpose was, by the fifth episode she was a drag on proceedings, and merely got more useless. Rubicon ground to a halt whenever she appeared; a problem on any show, and deadly on something as slow-paced as this.

1. Oswald Danes – Torchwood: Miracle Day

In this terribly angry post, SoC expressed its opinion about paedophile Oswald Danes at great length, stressing our disbelief that anyone in any writers’ room on the planet would think that adding a convicted child rapist and murderer to your show was a bonus. This wasn’t a Todd Solondz, Happiness moment where that nice Dylan Baker plays a paedophile as a thwarted, lovestruck criminal and plays with your expectations. That was truly provocative storytelling. Adding a child rapist to a dim-witted sci-fi action show can only be worthwhile if something is said, or some idea is explored.

I think the idea here is that humanity will embrace someone awful if they are the beneficiary of a miracle, thus showing how easily gulled we stupid humans are in the face of the impossible, or that the media can manipulate our opinion about absolutely anything becase we’re such sheep, even though the media doesn’t seem to be any better at this than the paedophile himself as the show goes on. Whatever the point meant to be made here, Oswald Danes was meant to die in the first scene, at the very moment the polarity of the… thingy (this is as technical as the explanation in the show) is reversed using Jack’s blood, and he didn’t. So he is the new messiah. But no one thinks this about any one of the hundreds of thousands of other survivors that should have died at that exact moment. Eh?

And so Oswald just hangs around for a few hours, making some speeches and doing this weird leering thing with his distorted face as if someone keeps shoving invisible turds under his nose, getting into fights because he disgusts people, or being treated like a compassionate visionary because he knows how to manipulate people into liking him, depending on whatever garbled point is being put across that week. Of course this means he joins the long line of Torchwood characters with no coherently thought-out personality, who are merely introduced into the story to get the narrative from point A to point X through sheer bloody-mindedness, and not through the traditional storytelling method of depicting recognisable human beings acting with consistency and agency and propelling the plot through actions that reveal something about themselves.

If I were to be generous (which I’m in no mood to be, to be honest; it’s been a crap day thus far), Torchwood exists as a counterweight to Doctor Who‘s relentless positivity about the potential and wonder of humanity. This show is all about making a very strong point about how terrible and venal and mundanely evil we are, though it has yet to even once dramatise this point in a convincing way. And before anyone cites Children of Earth, please don’t. The characters in that series bore so little resemblance to humans that it might have well been set in the Tubbytronic Superdome. Any potential connection between their behaviour and ours was stretched to breaking point by their improbable and hysterical evil.

In that sense Oswald Danes is consistent with previous Torchwood characterisations, but if you take a step back and try to look at him objectively, you see that he was an experiment gone horribly wrong, a story device added without properly considering what he was meant to do. As such, he wastes the viewer’s time. That’s bad enough, but he’s also a paedophile. You put a child rapist in your show, RTD, and he served no purpose. There was no story told here, no allegory or examination of morality or even plot mechanics. His presence in the show is like an enormous stinky shitstain wiped across the franchise. In all the time I’ve been writing about TV, I’ve never seen any decision as wrongheaded and ill-intentioned as this one. It’s an idea whose time will never come.

Okay, one last post. I feel like I’ve given birth to a litter of extremely large and angry babies. This blog should have asked for an epidural.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best New Characters of the Year

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In case you hadn’t noticed from my various rants about banks and politicians, I’m of the left, politically speaking. Like yer actual stereotype, I agonise about things I say on here, hoping that my fellow liberals don’t shun me for breaking one of the literally millions of rules we have to abide by (the handbook they give you when you join the left is hundreds of pages long, but then so is the handbook for the right). Just this morning I made a joke about that halfwit Gervais and his pathetic attempts to feel better about finding the word “mong” funny like the cruel little piece of shit he is, and I fear that a TV writer I respect  – a man who would never be as brazenly cruel and stubbornly contemptuous as Gervais) — might think I was serious. This will keep me up for hours, I know it.

So you can imagine my horror when this year’s crop of TV shows included so few strong female roles, or strong characters for ethnic minorities. Strong male characters are everywhere, but women were sorely shortchanged, usually included only as eye fodder or as obstacles (also known as “wives” to bad TV writers). I considered gaming this list to get more women and minorities in; “Chalkie” White from Boardwalk Empire almost made it in but when it was apparent he was only going to be in the show for about fifteen minutes it didn’t seem worth it. As for female characters, barely any came to mind.

It’s genuinely shocking that it has come to this. In the last couple of years we got Lucretia and Illythia in Spartacus: Blood and Sand. We got Alicia Florrick, Diane Lockhart and Kalinda Fricking Sharma in The Good Wife. We got Annie Edison, Britta Perry and Shirley Bennett in Community, Leslie Knope in Parks and Recreation, Sue Sylvester in Glee. This is only off the top of my head; give me more time and I’ll come up with a ton more. Ava Crowder and Winona Hawkins on Justified! Two more. But this year? Hardly any. It’s a pitiful state of affairs. It almost makes me wish David E. Kelley’s Wonder Woman got picked up, even though it would have been dreadful and probably would have set feminism back fifty years. Anything just to break up this miserable sausage fest.

And so, my list has been unliberalified. It remains obsessed with testosterone, but only because you, the reader, deserve my honest opinion. Please don’t judge me; judge the sexist pigs who run TV. Bastards! Down with the patriarchy!


10. Mrs. Blankenship – Mad Men

Mad Men is a funnier show than its reputation suggests; even as far back as the first season there were wonderfully dry moments. As the show has progressed through the Sixties, the tone has become lighter to reflect the way society became looser and more manic; a change most noticeable in the more colourful environs of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce as well as the fashions. Mrs. Blankenship – Don’s choice for secretary to prevent himself from foolishly sleeping with more staff – has attracted criticism for being too broadly drawn, but she’s in keeping with the change in tone. It also allowed us to see someone be treated like crap by the increasingly tetchy Don Draper but not let it bother them, much as Peggy eventually figured out how to repel his hostility. When Mrs. Blankenship died, the show suffered greatly, and not just because her death was a miserable return to season one’s clunky metaphors (this time about the death of the old America). It also meant we lost the most reliably funny character on the show. Let us bow our heads and remember Roger Sterling”s moving tribute: “She died like she lived — surrounded by the people she answered phones for.”

9. Alderman Ronin Gibbons – The Chicago Code

I’ll be honest. As much as I liked The Chicago Code I couldn’t bring myself to finish it. That’s partly because it was so obviously going to be cancelled it felt like a waste of time to get invested, but also because it was such a bizarre hodge-podge of cable-esque ambition and network compromise, rattling through so many plots and sub-plots that the only thing I felt by the end of each hour was numb exhaustion. It was up to main character Jarek Wysocki (supercharismatic Jason Clarke) to set the pace; he spent most of the series seemingly out of breath as he raced into shot and out spewing exposition like a broken fire hydrant. Hence SoC’s love of Alderman Ronin Gibbons; yet another villain in this great year for villainy. It’s not just his deviousness, and the oleaginous demeanour as he hides his corrupt ways from the police. It’s also not just the opportunity to get a hit of Delroy Lindo every week. We loved him because when he was onscreen, doing his calm evil thing, the show slowed down long enough for us to relish what showrunner Shawn Ryan was trying to do.

8. Gary Bell – Alphas

Oh how my heart sank when the pilot of Alphas introduced highly autistic Gary Bell, a “transducer” who can see and manipulate electromagnetic signals. There were tics everywhere, mostly in how Bell tweaks empty air and looks into streams of glowing data. It was all so gimmicky it became uncomfortable to watch. Autism is so often ill-used in drama (usually in some kind of awful savant genius plot) that its inclusion here seemed like an immediate mis-step. How wrong I was. Thanks to the work and research of British actor Ryan Cartwright, and a great writing team, Gary is sympathetically unsympathetic, a rounded character with goals and dreams of his own, instead of being a cypher. Yes he has powers, but it’s a show about superpowered individuals so it’s not based on the usual misunderstanding of what autism is. It wasn’t long before Gary became a fan favourite, providing most of the humour and heart to this entertaining show.

7. Agent Nelson Van Alden – Boardwalk Empire

This misfiring prestige drama needed a hook from the beginning that didn’t involve real-world articles about how expensive the show was, or how great it was to have Martin Scorsese on board, and erm… look at the sets! In order to give TV writers and critics something to sell to the audience it would have benefited a great central character, and instead we got tetchy Nucky; a good enough character, but no Tony Soprano. It needed menace and instead we got Nucky being a bit useless and Jimmy Darmody brooding in his Chicago hotel room. SoC loves Steve Buscemi, and likes Nucky Thompson a lot, but Boardwalk Empire suffered by not having someone larger than life in the central role. Luckily it had Nelson Van Alden in the background, and most of the first season’s best moments come from him. Personified by the amazing Michael Shannon as a repressed Hulk in a suit, this barely-sane monster went from awful righteousness to spiralling insanity as the season progressed. His religious epiphanies and sordid failings were electrifying. If you need a good reason to stick with Empire, he’s your man.

6. Louis Canning – The Good Wife

One of the many, many, many, many, many joys of this simply astounding CBS political drama is its large cast of recurring characters, often played by superb character actors such as Martha Plimpton, Joe Morton, Gary Cole, etc. etc. ad infinitum. It took approximately 30 seconds for Michael J. Fox to become our favourite antagonist yet; his first appearance, sneakily taking advantage of Alicia Florrick’s innate sense of decency, set up his character perfectly. Even better, the writers play clever games with our own sympathies. In every appearance so far, Canning’s motives are called into question; is he really as unscrupulous as he seems? Surely he can’t be. He’s played by Michael J. Fox! He’s suffering from a debilitating disease and so deserves our sympathy! And yet he remains a villain, but a villain with understandable and occasionally defensible motives. There’s a number of thin lines involved in constructing a character this odious and simultaneously delightful, and the writers — and of course, Mr. Fox – have done an incredible job in bringing him to life. Long may he haunt Lockhart-Gardner’s conscience.

5. Truxton Spangler – Rubicon

Why is American Policy Institute head Truxton Spangler on this list instead of suave, mysterious, deadly Kale Ingram? Mostly because Spangler – the man behind the mysterious plan that powers the entire series – is unlike any other villain around. He’s a bit absent-minded, eccentric (his love of cereal and insistence on eating it quickly so that it doesn’t get soggy), and lovable, so much so that when he realises he has been rumbled by Will Travers and must dispose of this complication, you end up feeling more sorry for him than you do for the show’s protagonist. Spangler’s a well-written character – just look at the tie speech in episode 4, which is probably the highpoint of the entire series – but he would be nothing without Michael Cristofer’s enigmatic and unpredictable performance. While the rest of the cast glowers or simpers, Spangler is vibrant even when sprawled in his chair, grinning with dastardly joy as his plan comes to fruition in the penultimate episode. Ingram can’t compete with that. And besides, he’s called Truxton Spangler, for crying out loud. Need there be any other reason?

4. Hank Dolworth – Terriers

It seems a bit unfair to include one half of the private investigator team from Terriers, when both Hank Dolworth (Donal Logue) and Britt Pollack (Michael Raymond-James) were such agreeable anti-heroes, but it’s obvious that Hank is the focus of the much-missed FX series. It’s his stubbornness, his vindictiveness and newly-awakened sense of civic duty that kickstarts the show, as he seeks to avenge the death of an old friend and uncover corruption that threatens his beloved Ocean Beach. He’s obnoxious and driven, unpredictable and often a bit callous. He also has his heart in the right place, and he’s loyal, and he’s brave. Logue is perfect as the rapscallion; his casting accounts for about 70% of Terriers‘ success (scientifically speaking). Shows with morally shady main characters are more common now (Dexter, The Shield, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, etc. etc.), but a show with a main character who’s a bit of an asshole? That, oddly enough, took more balls. In a perfect world, we could have spent more time with the lovable jerk.

3. Gatehouse – The Shadow Line

“You are the threads. I am the rope.” This line, delivered with a straight face, directly to camera by Stephen Rea, was the perfect capper to Hugo Blick’s bonkers thriller. As the final episode’s glurp of exposition revealed, the man who was running the conspiracy at the heart of the show was Gatehouse all along. This was not really news, especially to the audience. As great as the rest of the cast was (especially Chiwetel Ejiofor and a never better Christopher Eccleston), this was Rea’s show from the first moment he appeared onscreen. In any other context his stillness – punctuated by moments of creepily balletic violence – and his affected drawl, would tip over into mood-puncturing silliness, but Rea teeters just on the edge, a perfect visual accompaniment to Blick’s oppressive and mannered atmospherics, whether he’s hiding in the shadows, perched on a scaffold in the corner of a room, or skulking in an Irish clock-repair shop. By the end of the series we know almost nothing about Gatehouse, other than that he’s smarter than everyone, and more prepared. It’s as if he’s the God of the ShadowLine-niverse, and a twisted God at that. He’s an unforgettable creation; a bogeyman for adults.

2. Mags Bennett – Justified

In a list dominated by memorable villains, it’s dastardly redneck matriarch Mags Bennett who stands out the most. It’s not because she is quietly menacing and formidable, though she is. It’s not because she has a secret weapon – her poisonous “apple pie” – that generated more tension than any other plot device of the year, while also lending a fairy tale dimension to the otherwise grounded crime drama. It’s not even because she is eventually revealed to be even more callous and selfish than initially thought; midway through the season we discover that her plan is to betray the very people she professes to support, a move that sets her up as the enemy of those townsfolk, to her general indifference. No, the reason why Mags is the villain of the year is her mysterious sadness, her misguided motherly love that leads to her jeopardising her cause and alienating her sons as she desperately tries to keep hold of Loretta, the daughter of the man she kills in the first episode. This crazed desperation is hidden by her calm determination, leaking out at the wrong moments and ruining her plans. Thanks to the incredible Margo Martindale – in what is possibly the TV performance of the year – that contradiction is heartbreaking, while its unpredictability leads to some of this season’s most surprising and disturbing moments.

1. Tyrion Lannister – Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones had one of the hardest tasks of all the shows made this year. Adapting a series of books so beloved demanded great care so as not to anger the fanatical audience. Perhaps the realisation of Tyrion Lannister was the litmus test; get this right and the fans would relax – get it wrong and you might as well stay away from Comic-Con for the rest of your career. The fringe quibblers who still found something to carp about can go pound their indifferent, bile-spattered keyboards. The rest of us can rejoice at the magnificent incarnation of this much-loved character, brought to life with such life and soul that the show is poorer whenever he is absent. He also gave the show its first meme-able scene:

Peter Dinklage has rightly been lauded; this is the role of a lifetime. He embodies every contradictory nuance of the maltreated nobleman – Tyrion’s cruelty, compassion, sadness, joie de vivre, his tenacity, his cowardice and courage, his isolation and capacity for affection, and his deprecating sense of humour. The show might have been a hit without him, but he quickly becomes the focus of the audience’s attention, even more so than the “star” of the show, Sean Bean as deluded “hero” Ned Stark. What’s even better is that those of us who have read further know just what’s in store for him in season two; arguably his finest moment and his darkest moment, tragically intertwined. We can’t wait to see Dinklage bring those scenes to life, in all of their heart-stopping power.

Tomorrow, the worst new characters, with a number one choice as predictable as Tyrion.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (20-11)

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2011 has been a bit of a crap one for movies so far. There’s very little I’ve outright loved — only Attack The Block, Rango, and Fast Five have really fired my imagination, and even the current London Film Festival has left me cold so far. It’s made me worry that there’s something wrong in my head. Have I experienced too many stories? Have I become immune? Will I never again enjoy a story without thinking the final act needed an extra level (The Skin I Live In) or thinking someone else did it better (Rampart = A trailer for The Shield)?

Perhaps it’s good, then, that I’m doing this list now. Ordering these shows has been a nightmare. They’re all truly great hours (or half-hours) of TV, with barely a micron of difference in quality between them. Even the top spot (in my next post) was hard to decide on, as there were three episodes that were eligible candidates. I’m happy with my final choice, but it took some pondering. I think I’m good with this part of the list as well, though I’m sure I’ll regret something once I’ve hit Publish.

20. Big Love – The Noose Tightens

The final season of HBO’s underrated polygamy drama had a lot to do before it came to a close. The first few episodes appeared to be concerned with dealing with the fallout from the previous, much-derided season’s worst excesses, as well as setting up the biggest plotquakes to come. The result was a dispiriting lack of urgency for several episodes, but a forgiveable one when this barnstorming hour is taken into account. Everything that had been set up thus far kicked off here: Margene’s guilt over her underage marriage to Bill leading to her hysterical reaction to Cara Lynn’s affair with her tutor; Bill’s desperate anger and bullying of Barb as she prepares to spread her wings and leave his church; Alby’s plot to finally free himself of his arch-enemy Bill with the help of Verlan; the wives facing up to the fact that they are likely to lose their husband as Bill pleads with Senator Dwyer to drop the procurement prosecution aimed at Barb. It’s a packed episode; fireworks go off in every scene, leading to a heart-stopping finale with Alby’s mania finally finding a victim. Chloe Sevigny, who has always been the best thing about Big Love, reaches new heights here, her performance ranging from blazing defiance to mortal terror. The show – and the masterful creation that was Nicolette Grant-Henriksen – will be greatly missed.

19. Terriers – Fustercluck

Viewers who caught the first three episodes of FX’s almost uncategorisable slum-noir P.I. show were likely confused as to what they were getting. The tone seemed at odds with expectations; neither as funny as Ted Griffin’s work on Ocean’s Eleven, nor as gritty as Shaun Ryan’s Shield, it seemed to straddle a number of genres. There were also quibbles about the overall structure; was it going to be serialised or episodic? The fourth episode was where Griffin’s masterplan came into focus, and also made it clear that the first three episodes were actually tonally consistent, not to mention intentionally unpredictable. Hank and Britt – two well-drawn characters unlike pretty much anyone else on TV – come into focus as two street-smart chancers making it up as they go along, and getting themselves into more trouble than they bargained for when they become accidentally responsible for the death of the shady real estate developer who hired them in the first episode, whose body they are then forced to hide. With that act the show suddenly made a weird kind of sense; these were not the normal TV heroes, and this was not a normal TV show. Most shows have a format for you to hold onto, but at this point Terriers leapt into the unknown, and became essential viewing.

18. The Vampire Diaries - The Descent

No matter what your feelings about the capabilities of handsome Ian Somerhalder as an actor, his Vampire Diaries character Damon was always one of the best things about this oft-po-faced supernatural teen drama. It’s only fitting that the best episode of the massively improved second season should be Damon’s finest hour. Our anti-hero takes on the responsibility of looking after his sexual partner Rose as she slowly succumbs to the mortal wound inflicted by a werewolf. Other momentous events happen in this episode, all courtesy of SoC writing heroes Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain, but the episode makes the list thanks to the final ten minutes, beginning with a surprisingly moving fantasy scene with Damon easing Rose’s pain with a manipulated dream that allows her some dignity and comfort before he euthanises her. Our new awareness of his compassion is then blown away in a horrifying final scene, as a clearly mentally unstable Damon finds a lone woman driving through Mystic Falls, and regretfully but violently kills her. The final shot of the episode, showing Damon’s vampire eyes, bloodshot and almost glowing with confusion and malevolence in the darkness, is the most chilling of the entire 2010-2011 TV season. It’s not the only time The Vampire Diaries outdoes its prestige TV rivals by messing with the audience’s expectations, but it’s the most memorable.

17. Boardwalk Empire – Paris Green

For SoC there was no greater frustration this year than that experienced while watching Boardwalk Empire. The setting, cast, and production values were all well within our wheelhouse, but the show never took off the way we had hoped. Time will tell if this is just a stumble before a sprint, but until then we can at least be grateful for this memorable late-season belter. For the most part Paris Green appears to be a quiet meditation on the imminent death of the Commodore, which leads to a series of revelations for Jimmy Darmody. Once more Michael Pitt excels as the bitter, thoughtful heavy, burning with frustration at his lot in life and torn between two emotions as his father nears death. Of course, in the final surprising act it isn’t his father who dies, but a man with a secret allegiance to Nucky Thompson – the man who acted as a guardian to Jimmy. Poor Agent Sebso, who finally proves to be as foolish as his cover persona seemed, is coerced into his own death at the hands of his unhinged boss. Michael Shannon shakes the screen as the evangelically-powered Nelson Van Alden, blasphemously baptising his Jewish lackey in a final scene of terrifying power that goes disastrously wrong. If only the rest of the series had scenes as riveting as that, or the beautifully shot moment when the two prohibition agents initially find the baptism site. Hopefully season two will harness the potential of this delirious insanity.

16. Spartacus: Gods of the Arena – The Bitter End

Most, if not all, Spartacus fans would have been fine with the show taking a year-long break while star Andy Whitfield recovered from cancer, but the showrunners cleverly and graciously gave him time to rest by creating this prequel mini-series while keeping him on staff in order to support him, in the hope he would return. Sadly, this was not to be. With only six episodes in the series it was possible that Gods of the Arena wouldn’t achieve the same narrative momentum that the first season did which, if you don’t recall, was moving as fast as a bullet train by the time the final episode arrived. The worries were for naught; with many of the familiar characters in place, Gods of the Arena had a head start. Even with so much of the story already told, GOTA still managed to throw in a few surprises, especially the insight into just how cunning Lucretia truly is. The last episode of the season was a balls-out shocker with an amazing final setpiece; a huge ruck in the new arena which features the immensely satisfying resolution of numerous arcs, including the developing animus between Batiatus and Solonius, the reason for loathsome Ashur’s hatred of Crixus, and the surprising reason why Gannicus isn’t present in the House of Batiatus in Blood and Sand. It’s thrilling, shocking, gorgeous and gaudy and as addictive as smoking, just as we had hoped.

15. The Walking Dead – Days Gone By


I’ll have more to say on this in a forthcoming post. I’ll link back once it’s published. For now, just look at that awesome picture and try to remember how promising that pilot was, how excited everyone got when it aired. So long ago…

14. Parks and Recreation – Fancy Party

There were funnier episodes in the third season of Parks & Recreation (also known as The Show That Shades Of Caruso Once Foolishly Said Was Terrible But Actually Turned Out To Be One Of The Great Sitcoms Of Our Time, for short), and there were more ambitious ones, but no other episode this year encapsulated the life-affirming fantasy elements of this show so completely. The city of Pawnee transforms all who live under its umbrella of optimism, and all who have committed themselves to following this remarkable show are similarly affected by its cheer-inducing rays. This episode saw April and Andy get married after being together for a little while (“My Brita filter is older than their relationship,” says Ben, adding, “Wait a second, should I change my Brita filter?”). The sensible characters object, the foolish characters rejoice, and for once common sense is utterly wrong. Only in Pawnee can an obviously disastrous life-decision be the only right thing to do, and not just because their young love finally motivates Leslie to begin her courtship of Ben. It’s also encapsulates the beauty of Parks and Recreation; a sentimental show that makes that oft-derided philosophy acceptable, a sitcom that offers the audience a chance to embrace light in a dark world, without shame. Long may it run without being tampered with by NBC executives.

13. Caprica – Apotheosis

If SoC had its way, Caprica would still be with us. Its cancellation was inevitable, seeing as only about fifteen people watched it, but at least the show went out in style. Last year saw the similarly regrettable cancellation of Dollhouse; another cerebral sci-fi show that had more on its mind than episodic threats or tedious alien invasion plots. That final season almost fell apart under the weight of completing its story. The last few episodes were a mad dash through several seasons of plotting, and I’m grateful for that, but it did mean the finale was compromised. Caprica comes up with a solution that is simultaneously more satisfying and yet still upsetting; the show ends with a montage of what would have come if Caprica had run for ten years like it should have. The tease is fascinating, forming a link between this Battlestar Galactica prequel and the rest of the franchise. The main body of the episode is magnificent too: we see the Graystone family find peace as they reconcile with the avatar of Zoe; we see the failure of Clarice Willow’s dastardly plan, as Daniel and Amanda Graystone thwart the Soldiers of the One in their quest to promote the Monotheistic Heaven; and we see the Adamas take their revenge on the Guatrau following the death of the first Bill Adama. It’s a great season finale, and the only thing that stops it from being a great series finale is that it shouldn’t have been a series finale. ::wears black gloves in mourning, as is the Tauron way::

12. Rubicon – A Good Day’s Work

Rubicon travelled a short distance from 70s-style conspiracy drama to cerebral 24-style topical thriller with some peculiar baggage including the spate of uninvolving office romances and a malfunctioning sub-plot featuring Miranda Richardson as a woman being sad in some rooms. It was the eleventh episode that fulfilled the promise of both versions of the show, with our paranoid hero Will Travers finally revealing to Catherine Rhumer the results of his research; shadowy corporation Atlas-McDowell is in the Shock Doctrine business, wrecking the world and profiting from the chaos. The show suddenly comes into focus, and writer Zack Whedon and director Brad Anderson crank up the suspense with a nerve-wracking fight scene between Will and smug assassin Donald Bloom. It’s the build-up and pay-off that seals the deal; Truxton’s anguish when he realises what he must do to protect his evil cabal, and Kale’s efficient disposal of the dead body of his former lover. This immensely exciting hour of TV ends with Will slowly falling apart, as he realises just how much danger he is in. Plus we get to hear Rocket from the Crypt’s On A Rope over the sound of a body being dismembered. How often does that happen on TV?

11. The Shadow Line – Episode Six

Addicts of Hugo Blick’s dread-soaked drama, shunned by those who proved immune to the almost other-worldly oddness of it all, could well have felt vindicated in their obsession by the rush of shocking moments that occur in the middle of this episode. The first half of it seems like an elaborate set-up for an imminent disaster, which comes during a typically lengthy set-piece that sees Jonah Gabriel face off against his would-be assassin Gatehouse in the home of his mistress and secret son. The audience, of course, knows that they are not alone, and the traps set by both Gatehouse and Glickman end up going horribly wrong. This ten minute centrepiece, in an already exciting episode, is one of the crowning achievements of the TV year, a sequence of bombshells layered so expertly over each other, occasionally in contravention of usual dramatic logic, that any quibbles about the plausibility of it fade away. It’s deliberately played straight at the audience, who can only react with numb horror. Which is not to say that’s the only good thing about the episode. Gatehouse’s final scene, rising like Lazarus to face his would-be assassin, is memorably chilling and, as with the rest of this remarkable show, commendably precise in execution.

Top ten tomorrow. If I can stop shuffling the order around.

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Fifth

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My pledge to be better tempered didn’t really last. Warning: this is a long and angry one, and it starts with me sounding like an enormous prude. For the record, I am in fact an enormous prude, and all sorts of squelchy on-screen genital manipulation just makes me ill. Luckily I live in a country with universal healthcare, to help me when I’m poorly. OH WAIT SILLY ME apparently I don’t any more. Thanks for brainwashing all the people, money. You truly are the root of all evil. On a day like today, whining about sapphicalism and rampant Torchwoodery seems extra-pointless, but I’ve written my last few Lessons I Learned From Bad TV now, so eat up.

Just because you can put girl-on-girl action into your show doesn’t mean you have to

HBO rightly prides itself on its intelligent, adult drama, but it has, on occasion, overstepped the mark. Game of Thrones had a stellar first season, but even if no episode was actually bad, there were mis-steps. In You Win Or You Die, a mostly good episode was marred by the excruciatingly awful fingerbanging scene, with Littlefinger monologuing about his achy-breaky heart while two women were given the thankless task of writhing around in the background with their boobs emoting like crazy. Poor Esme “Clothes Optional” Bianco (who played Ros); an actress whose near-constant nudity made even Paz De La Huerta look demure.

The scene acted as a laborious visual metaphor for Littlefinger’s philosophy (borne of his bitterness over never winning the love of Catelyn Stark née Tully) and an exhibition of his callous, controlling nature, but more than that, it was endless and laboured, giving away too much about his motivation and thus nullifying the shock of his betrayal at the end of the episode. That’s a bit better than Boardwalk Empire‘s similar scene with Angela Darmody and her lover Mary Dittrich. Yes, it set up the unfortunate beating of Mary’s photographer husband in a later episode following a misunderstanding. Yes, it displayed Mary’s love for Angela. But did we need three and a half deeply unsexy and actually quite unnerving minutes of it?

It’s not prudishness that makes me rail against this; it’s concern that someone at HBO is telling the showrunners to create talking points about the shows involving girl-on-girl action. It’s good to see lesbian relationships on TV; Shades of Caruso is all for it, but please don’t tell me that the Boardwalk Empire scene was included with the intention of celebrating a gay relationship, or trying to “normalise” gay lifestyles on TV. As ever, the ladies have to get nekkid and roll around hooting with orgasmic joy; fun (and edumacational) when served up in small doses, but these overlong scenes crossed over from “progressive” to “leering exploitation”.

For two intelligent shows to pander like that sours the relationship between creators and audience, who don’t want to feel that someone is throwing in sex scenes just because “hey, it’s HBO and that’s what we do”. It feels disrespectful to all concerned. Compare the outrageous sapphic writhing to the shaving scene between Renly and Loras in Game of Thrones, which was sensual, unexploitative and filled with information about the relationship between the two men. That didn’t patronise us. The lesbian love scenes were only there to titillate, and were so cynically added that the main reaction they generated in SoC was embarrassment for all involved.

Points also to Torchwood: Miracle Day for showing what many felt were unnecessary sex scenes between Jack and various men. SoC has far more time for something that shows a loving relationship in Immortal Sins which also just so happened to appear on primetime terrestrial TV, especially as Russell T. Davies has explicitly said he wants to do exactly that. Portraying a gay relationship in a well-known, popular show with a wide audience will have more impact than a gratuitous bit of lesbian sex on a cable network catering to an audience who have paid for the service and expect to be challenged. What we’re saying is more gay sex on TV, but also more gay relationships, and more humanity. Or are we asking for too much?

Don’t be Torchwood

Dammit! As soon as I praised Torchwood: Miracle Day a torrent of bile poured up my spine and into my brain to counteract it. Much as Casanova Frankenstein cannot help but antagonise Captain Amazing, I have to write about Torchwood. This year, however, it’s different. SoC is no longer alone in melodramatically and ineptly waving a plastic gun in the general direction of sci-fi’s most overrated show, and while it feels good to be part of a wider movement against bad TV, there is a sad element to this, and that is our old bugbear; anti-American sentiment.

Online comments about BBC/Starz’ collaboration have been as brutal, mean-spirited and entitled as anything SoC has written in the past; in fact, compared to the vitriol aimed at it our previous criticisms seemed quite mild. I have no problem with this; the show was a catastrophic failure on just about every level. When the only good thing I can say about a supposed high-octane action show was, “I quite enjoyed the moments when the writers couldn’t help but show off all of the research they did into death and population levels through long and clunky monologues about insects,” you know something has gone wrong.

No, my problem with the criticism was that the critical narrative became, “the decision to take our beloved, perfect UK show to the States without our explicit say-so has ruined it by making it more Hollywood.” There is no greater insult in pop-culture discussion than “it’s just Hollywood”. Did you know that in Hollywood they only speak with words of two syllables or lower, and they repeat everything every five minutes in case you missed something? Did you know it’s illegal to not have plastic surgery? No one in Hollywood reads, you see. Bill Hicks said so. It must be true!

UGH. Please hear me when I say Torchwood: Miracle Day was only as bad as the first two seasons of Torchwood, and only a bit worse than Torchwood: Children of Earth. It’s always been this ramshackle. That’s what makes it so delightfully entertaining. It’s a car-crash and always has been, except now it’s a car-crash that has Bill Pullman, Mekhi Pfifer and Lauren Ambrose in it. Their presence hasn’t suddenly ruined the show. Pfifer’s Rex Matheson is no more or less obnoxious than Owen in the first two seasons (and has the same immortal-but-broken plot that Owen had in season two). And Bland Esther Drummond, with her uselessness and ill-defined character? How soon we forget Toshiko Sato.

It’s easy to blame the failure of Torchwood: Miracle Day on some new element, especially one that is bandied about so regularly, but really it was doomed by the oldest element of all. The show was developed poorly from the start, with a hysterical tone bolted onto an ill-defined initial premise that removed the appealing campness of its main character and replaced it with unnecessary modish gloom as a substitute for actual thematic weight. It was broken before it even reached the cameras, and since then the show has doubled down over and over again on this theory that it’s actually a very meaningful and searching exploration of big ideas when it’s actually a bone-headed melodrama delivery system.

The US collaboration with the show didn’t suddenly introduce anything other than too many episodes; this could have been an efficient two-parter, but just as Children of Earth took too long to tell its story, this tried to fool us into thinking a lot was going on when the majority of it was spent wasting time explaining instead of revealing, or introducing half-formed ideas that are never paid off (e.g. Oswald Danes, the biggest single waste of TV time since the invention of the cathode-ray tube). Yes, it’s a shame the story was stretched to ten episodes, but BBC Worldwide is trying to create franchises that it can sell around the world and so adjustments to the format are necessary. It’s not just Starz that’s to blame for this. They only got the BBC out of its funding problems by co-producing, which is going to have to happen more often with the licence fee hobbled by the Tories.

And as for the ten-episode mini-series format, if this interview is to believed the idea came from Russell T. Davies, not from some Starz mandate. It’s something he intends to keep doing, but as I said regarding Camelot, the show needs to sharpen its focus if its ever going to rise above its ignominious past. It’s possible to do that even with a long-arc serialised season. The highlight of the season was Immortal Sins, the flashback episode that fleshed out Jack’s past. It had its problems (oh so many problems), but it had an emotional charge and a straight-forward narrative. It belonged in a better show.

Especially as the show proper was all over the place, and a simple throughline would have done wonders, even if the traditional Torchwood flaws (risible attempts at machismo, excessive padding, shonky lighting, hysterical overacting, etc.) were present. Torchwood‘s focus on the mystery of death has been one of the few interesting things about it, even though it never really seems to come up with a coherent idea about it. The central idea of this season — that death is replaced by planet-wide immortality — is unusual and full of potential. RTD seemed to agree; it felt like this was a response to the US debate over healthcare, and the ridiculous “Death Panels” idea floated by Sarah Palin.

Unfortunately, the inherent silliness and illogicality of Palin’s made-up Death Panels meant that this show’s own Death Panels made absolutely no sense. The big reveal in the middle of the series is that camps have been set up to house the millions of terminally injured but non-dying patients who are triaged into one of three categories, with Category One being for those pronounced brain-dead, or in a state of incapacity that would equal death if the mysterious mystery at the heart of the show hadn’t made everything “superalive” or whatever the daft exposition would have it. Category One patients are incinerated out the back, and this is portrayed as a horrible thing.

More horrible than lying on a dirty hospital bed, stinking of filth, trapped in agony and unable to do anything about it? In the middle of the season Torchwood seemed to be using your classic anti-euthanasia argument, multiplied to infinity. It’s rather confusing. Until that point, the show goes to great lengths to explain that humanity is totes fucked by the lack of death, and drastic measures are called for, so you’d think euthanasia is a worthy solution, especially when the healing abilities of humanity have not been clearly explained by the showrunners. Can people heal? Rex is injured throughout; a frustrating and pretty much unworkable idea which also makes a mockery of the resolution to the mystery; the big stone thing that resets humanity after coming into contact with Jack’s blood only confers immortality, but not his rapid healing ability, which makes no sense at all.

So anyway, we’re meant to think the euthanasia is horrible, so it’s portrayed as a particularly barbaric act by a) having the victims burned alive while still conscious, and b) showing Doctor Vera Juarez being murdered by the insane caricature of a demented perverted racist bureaucrat played by poor Marc Vann from CSI and Lost. Firstly, why aren’t the victims knocked out first? Why just burn them without palliative care? I’m sure the showrunners would say, “Because humanity is so evil!!?!” but this is just absurd loading of the equation, and thus any point to be made here is swallowed up by the contrivance necessary to get there.

The other point, that the bad guys are going to use the classification of life and death as an excuse to kill off people who aren’t actually ready for death (either by the evil evilness of Dr. Pervy Bureaucrat or just by the usual slippery-slopiness of moral arguments as experienced by philosophy students), is the usual kind of anti-government hysteria that inspired Sarah Palin to expel the phrase-turd “Death Panels” in the first place. The mundanity of evil and all that. Just to undercut this point more, the show had already by that point shown that there was a group of doctors who were making informed medical decisions, giving hope that a sudden, massive change in the nature of life and death would bring about a well-considered solution by the world’s greatest minds, but I suppose Torchwood is merely imagining the worst possible outcome. Who needs subtlety when showrunners can add subtlety-free supervillains, thus abrogating their responsibility to provide a balanced ethical quandary for us to pick over?

Of course, writing this on the day that The House of Lords decided to allow the privatisation of the NHS means my arguments about the better nature of man seem particularly wrong-headed, but I honestly don’t believe that such a process would be approached with such stupidity. It’s a depressingly negative view of government, so needlessly melodramatic that I wonder if RTD was actually satirising the infinite stupidity of Sarah Palin and her desperate Tea Party cultists. These are people who are so detached from decision-making, so mystified by rationality, so devoid of empathy and so threatened by “Elitism” (aka “Not being incredibly, proudly incurious about the way the world works”) that they would happily assume anyone who has read a book about anything is secretly a Nazi, and therefore would happily doom us all because the only thing they have on their side is the ability to be monstrous fucking bullies without the capacity for reflection and who can then ride roughshod over the rest of us like Klansmen of the modern age. They literally have absolutely no shame, no shame at all, no urge to accept that they’re wrong or confused by life, no awareness of their monumental awfulness, no realisation that history will judge them as the worst of the world, who need to just back off and let the fucking adults sort this shit out. All they have is cruelty, and an urge to masturbate frenetically at the thought of a fellow human suffering. Shun these vile assholes out of society, into the naughty corner, until they forget the point of the Randian soundbite that pissed them off in the first place and triggered their anti-intellectual pogrom.

::Deep breaths:: So anyway, the central idea of the show makes very little sense when you pick it apart. This isn’t the only thing wrong with it. There’s some misguided idea that featuring an unrepentant paedophile as a main character, whose good fortune in being executed at the moment that immortality falls on humanity means he and he alone is somehow treated as a Messiah, will make for some compelling drama or give them the chance to explore some point about evil mistaken for good simply because a miracle occurs. It’s another moronic idea, that only works if you accept that humans will look to this man as the Second Coming. Why him? Just because people are paying attention to his imminent death? Yet again Torchwood is mistaken in thinking the worst of humanity in an attempt to clumsily bolt some “Meaning” onto their show.

And yet this is dramatised in such a way as to make no real point. Oswald Danes, portrayed by Bill Pullman as a haggard sack of seizure-esque acting tics — all clenched jaws, rolling eyes, waggling arms; a billion metric tonnes of acting in need of direction — makes no sense at all. What is he there for? Could the show have done without him? All he does is fill time and give Lauren Ambrose (as the excessively-named Jilly “Jilly Kitzinger!” Kitzinger) something to do. Which is fine for Lauren Ambrose fans such as myself, but seeing her playing the gallumphing loudmouth Jilly Kitzinger was torture. Yes, I was not a fan of Jilly Kitzinger. Sorry, Jilly Kitzinger fans! (Someone please tell RTD that repeating a funny name over and over again does not count as dialogue.)

Oswald serves zero purpose in the show. There is no point made about human gullibility because it is literally IMPOSSIBLE that anyone would embrace a man as disgusting and unapologetically mustache-twirlingly evil as this when his survival is only as “miraculous” as the millions of other technically-identical incidents that happened at the same time around the world. There’s no point made about morality (his evil is never questioned or modulated) or redemption (he doesn’t give a shit right to the end). All that happened is that someone in the writers’ room said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and no one had the balls to say, “No, because there’s nothing we can do with that character.”

And don’t get me started on the finale. For it to work, most of the characters had to become psychic. Why did Jack stockpile his blood? How did he know it would be important, especially when his immortality was linked to his status as a “fixed point in time” (AKA a convenient Doctor Who plot point inserted to stop the omnipotent characters just fixing every problem in the first act of each episode) and not just because he was filled with magical go-juice? How did Rex know that the blood could be destroyed in a secret attack, thus inspiring him to replace his own blood with Jack’s just on the off-chance? What if anything had happened to him as well? Awfully convenient that it didn’t.

And as for the reveal that everything that had happened for the whole series was merely a way for the big bad to prepare for an even bigger evil plan, does anyone else wonder if RTD is secretly screaming in horror that there will be another series, and he’s going to have to actually come up with something that explains the hundreds of plotholes, inconsistencies and transparent narrative fudges that made the show look like a rat-eaten patchwork quilt? Because if he actually has a grand plan for next season, I’ll eat Captain Jack’s lovely coat.

Look, I know that there are fans out there who might wander across this blog and either praise me for taking a stand against the sullied US version of their favourite show, and there might be other fans who come armed with large metallic drums full of Grade-A FanWank to prove me wrong about some plot criticism. If you want to do the latter, please don’t bother. I’m sure there were dozens of lines added at the last minute to try to excuse a plothole, some magical bit of exposition that adds another rule to the already rule-heavy narrative. They’re magical wands inserted into the story to excuse a poorly thought-out plot which, as with Children of Earth, was little more than a handful of setpiece moments that RTD was attached to and wouldn’t abandon even when he didn’t have time to come up with an organic, logical plot that connected those events. The fantastical magical exposition that litters his work means nothing. It’s just words.

That’s all this show has been. A bunch of words that mean nothing, as empty as the blurb on the homepage of a creative consultancy’s website. All posture, all flash and dazzle, ineptly served up with nothing underneath other than a hundred ideas mashed together in the hope that it will seem relevant or meaningful or emotionally resonant. But what we need is one idea, polished and presented with less gaudy tinsel, no posing, no dullard-baiting “adult content”. I’d take a single thought-provoking, challenging idea over any of this. It was a disaster. You want your Caruso Awards Worst Episodes of the Year list? Torchwood: Miracle Day is the top ten.

Well, I got angry then. Blame that news about the NHS. Last week I was pissed about the BBC and now this. Congratulations, Tory shitslime. Your desire to turn this country into a less pleasant version of Westeros is going according to plan. ::sigh:: Now I’m depressed. And so I am now about to move onto the best episodes of the year! I’m going to enjoy that. Good TV; I watch that too, you know.

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Second

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Normally I’d add a big opening paragraph to this, but it’s been a busy day (i.e. I’ve been on Twitter AND Facebook), so I’ll just get to the next three lessons I learned by watching bad TV over the past 13 months.

An agenda can be a bonus, but a lot of the time your show will be better if it’s not about anything

What was the point of Camelot? As far as SoC could tell, it was yet another unnecessary retelling of a tale already well-covered elsewhere. However it was apparently a metaphor for a new way of politics; I can imagine Arthur was meant to be an Obama-type, even though I’d say the last image I’d come up with if asked to picture an iconic leader is a pasty white boy who looks like he’d cry if he had to pick up a spork, let alone Excalibur. That said, I love the thought that Joe Fiennes was playing Merlin as a cross between lovable Obi-Wan and loathsome Donald Rumsfeld, and not a bald Goth with a bad case of dysentery. Maybe I should go back and finish it after all.

SoC has nothing against using a story to relate a political idea or as a metaphor for contemporary times; historical drama and sci-fi are littered with examples of such thought-provoking tales (example right off the top of my illness-addled head; everyone go read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War immediately). One of our all-time favourite shows – Buffy the Vampire Slayer – is rich with metaphorical intent. But sometimes less is more (or, in the case of Seinfeld, nothing is more).

There are mild examples of this. Boardwalk Empire is as vulnerable to the temptation to bang us over the head with “How Things Have Changed And Yet Stayed The Same” story elements as the first season of Mad Men; hopefully that will settle down soon. Connected to that, the worst moments of the otherwise exceptional Treme come when characters spout on-the-nose info-dumps about the state of post-Katrina New Orleans. That’s more forgivable; Treme exists in part to draw attention to a subject that far too many people know nothing about. Still, on a narrative level, David Simon’s preachifying can take you out of the show.

Then there are the more noticeable examples. It’s an odd coincidence that many of SoC’s least favourite shows of the year had a metaphorical agenda. Falling Skies was created by Robert Rodat, the charming fellow who ignored the existence of the non-US Allies in Saving Private Ryan, and equated the British Redcoats in the American Revolutionary War with the Nazis in his monstrous alternative history fantasy The Patriot. This alien invasion show works as a simple survival tale like The Walking Dead or Jericho, with our heroes bravely fighting back against an evil occupation force using guerrilla tactics. It also works as a pro-NRA wank fantasy for anti-government conspiracy theorists who think we’d be better off in a world which had no electricity, but conveniently still had antibiotics.

It’s absolutely no coincidence that protagonist Professor Tom Mason is an expert on military history whose dialogue is peppered with anecdotes about military campaigns, or that the show is set in Boston not far from Lexington and Concord, or that Will Patton — the head of the 2nd Massachusetts – has a teeny-tiny ponytail as if he’s wearing an Eighteenth Century Queue. Fine, so Rodat had some left-over research from The Patriot that he wanted to use, and wasn’t afraid to draw a parallel between the arrogant invading forces of the British and a disgusting race of spider-like monsters that abducts children. But the show hints at other metaphorical meanings, most notably the nostalgic yearning for a time when your mettle was tested in the fire of battle for freedom.

The show is obsessed with two things; children and ammo. The majority of the dialogue in the pilot consists of characters discussing what ammo they need, what ammo they wish they had, ammo supplies, gun comparisons, etc. It’s not just the macho guys; women and children join in though hey, they’re not in charge or anything (let’s not go too crazy here). These survivors are so committed to the cause that they exhibit no other interests. Rodat seems to pine for a life like this, and certainly it calls back to The Patriot and Mel Gibson teaching his children how to kill dastardly Redcoats. Rather that than play video games; one facetious exchange has SoC favourite Moon Bloodgood express gratitude for the EMP blackout that has removed those AWFUL video games from the equation. (SMH)

The children occupy the rest of the show’s attention. They are abducted by the evil Skitters and forced to wear Harnesses which control their minds, turning them into slaves for the mysterious Grey overlords that control these drone forces. Falling Skies spends all ten episodes agonising about this fact, which drives almost all of the action. (It also reminds me of Tom Clancy’s books; it seems that 67% of conversations between militaristic right-wingers are about how great kids are and by the way, how’s the wife? Weird.)

On an emotional level that’s valid, but it also smacks of anti-government paranoia; the idea that our children are being brainwashed by the dark forces who control our country, and therefore we have to fight against this oppression and save our children from indoctrination. The idea of a militia to protect against invasion from outside is one thing, but Falling Skies reeks of Tea-Party anti-government fears. Steven Spielberg was involved in this? And Graham Yost, Mark Verheiden and Melinda Hsu Taylor? It’s a right-wing wet-dream hiding behind a listless sci-fi actioner, like something Newt Gingrich would cook up. It’s even more disheartening than Dexter‘s explicitly pro-capital-punishment bullshit.

As a left-winger I’m bound to find this unsavoury, but it’s not like I think these things shouldn’t be said. Dollhouse was a show that put the viewer in a very uncomfortable position, rooting (to a certain extent) for one section of a company that enslaved people and turned them into mind-wiped prostitutes. Joss Whedon, infamous male feminist, caught a lot of flak for doing that, but the show asked a lot of difficult questions and challenged the viewer. Falling Skies isn’t asking questions; it’s fapping over a copy of Jane’s Defence Weekly and adding poorly written comments about Big Government to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. And don’t get me started on Dexter. The only question it asks, “Which execution turned you on the most, you voyeurs?”

No, my problem with making a show that’s about something is that the message can swamp the drama. It’s impossible to watch Falling Skies without thinking the showrunners are trying to push a philosophy, and no amount of heated conversations between militaristic Will Patton or kindly, non-military-but-equally-as-bloodthirsty Noah Wyle will fix that. See also alien-invasion conspiracy theory hodge-podge The Event, a show so bound up in War on Terror symbolism that its mid-season revamp turned it into a sci-fi version of 24, not to mention one that so slavishly copied the original template that episode 20 (One Will Live, One Will Die) blatantly rips off the eighth episode of 24‘s fifth day, with an attack on a shopping mall.

Compare that to Alphas which, as this review points out, is informed by the War on Terror but survives as a lively and likeable action show without being crushed under an avalanche of obnoxious meaning. Or compare it to Game of Thrones (based on the War of the Roses but not about it), orJustified, or The Vampire Diaries, or any number of shows that have a theme but no intention of banging a message into our heads; they flourish without that burden. I guess the rule is, the less general your point, the better.

Make sure you’re making the right show

Thank you to ace writers/pop-culture thinkers @AmeliaMangan and @Ruby_Stevens for their recent Twitter conversation about NBC’s swiftly-cancelled superhero show The Cape. During the discussion one of them (I think it was Amelia but please correct me if I’m wrong) noted that a show about a cop framed for supervillainy who is taught how to be a boring superhero by the head of a nefarious circus filled with petty thieves should really have been a show about a nefarious circus filled with petty thieves especially when the head of the nefarious circus filled with petty thieves is played by KEITH DAVID COME ON! [/GOB Bluth].

It’s a very good point that I hadn’t even noticed until then. Yes, I can imagine the thought of making a show like that would be pooh-poohed after the cancellation of Carnivale and the tedium of the last season of Heroes, but the alternative — focusing on a guy with a SUPERPONCHO who mopes in an attic because he misses his annoying kid — is just perverse when you’ve managed to hire Keith David and all of his vast reserves of charisma to appear in your show.

But then I guess you can never win in these matters. A lot of folks hated Lost when it gave Ben Linus more to do, but seriously, if you cast Michael Emerson and he creates such a memorable character in such a short space of time, you’d be an idiot not to capitalise on that, and fuck the haters. As it stands, The Cape is a perverse, frustrating near-miss. As a weird Darkman-homage it has some perverse charm, but it was always more of a curio than a viable series. In years to come it may only be remembered as the punchline of a joke in Community; I hope the season 2 DVD of that great show has a feature that explains what Abed thought deserved “six seasons and a movie!”

Mind you, changing direction in mid-show has mixed results. The Event was not a great show, but it had some good ideas, and the potential to explore some interesting themes. Sadly it jumped so violently from one format (sci-fi conspiracy theory show) to another (humdrum 24-esque War-on-Terror analogue) that it only succeeded in shaking off viewers. It’s a more dramatic version of the course-correction shown by Rubicon — another show that started as a conspiracy thriller and then became a cerebral version of i in later episodes — but while AMC’s cancelled show made its transition relatively easily, The Event was drenched in the flop-sweat of a dozen panicky high-level meetings. Every show undergoes a process of discovery as it progresses, but it’s rare that a show can survive such a radical overhaul at that late stage.

Whenever you can, do more drafts

Camelot was a show so poorly conceived, written and acted that even I, a man who has watched numerous seasons of shows he hates (Dexter, Heroes) couldn’t even make it through ten episodes. Much of that was down to the realisation that there wasn’t going to be enough event to keep watching, though the promise of more superscowling from SoC acting hero Joe Fiennes and occasional Mirrenesque stripping scenes from the not-unattractive Eva Green did tempt us. But no, it was too painful to see them trying so hard to make being stuck in that morass seem worthwhile. They both deserve better.

The killing blow came early in the season, with Arthur (here imagined as a wet rag with a snivel painted on it) and Guinevere (a medieval version of the most popular girl in school) bonding and flirting on a parapet in Camelot itself. Maybe it was a result of co-creator Chris Chibnall having to find an extra 10 minutes of drama compared to the 50 minute-long episodes of Torchwood that he worked on before, but in a show already heavy with padding, this scene was murderously boring to watch. The banter was stilted and contained no pertinent information about character or plot. It was just two people chatting, charmlessly.

It was as if the concept of subtext didn’t exist in Ye Olde Britaineenneee, and the result was dead air. It wasn’t the only scene to stumble like that. An earlier moment with Arthur trudging out of his family home like a less-butch D.J. Qualls visiting a Renaissance Faire was similarly devoid of oomph. His father says goodbye to him, and that’s it. There’s no drama. It could easily have been written out, or something could have been added; some ambivalence, some mystery, a set-up for a future event. Anything. But no. The show needed, for some reason, to show that Sean Pertwee would miss his seemingly consumptive child. So he says goodbye and looks sad.

There’s just one layer there. Unfortunately for Starz and the Camelot team, viewers are becoming more sophisticated, and demand something more from their drama. They need more than just a surface that iterates something that can easily be assumed. There has to be some way to bring this alive, even if it’s just a liberal dose of “Conflict” sprinkled over the top. Of course, in lesser storytelling “Conflict” becomes nothing more than yelling, and we could have ended up with little more than Sean Pertwee telling the little scrote to go back to his room, but when done right, that scene could have come alive.

It could well be that the showrunners had no time to go back and rewrite. Certainly it seems most shows are written at such a gallop that there is no time to go back and revise the work. Plus, writing sure isn’t as easy as it seems. Nevertheless, we still get complex, layered episodes of TV every week from many other sources, where each scene works on multiple layers, calling back and forth through individual hours or full seasons, as part of a larger whole or just as a single bright moment. If some showrunners can polish their scripts, then it’s possible for anyone to give it a try. Doubtless there are a million reasons why it’s difficult to do it, but if you’re not the kind of screenwriting miracle worker who knows how to add a ton of audience-satisfying subtext and complexity in the first pass, at least one more draft should be a priority.

Part the third tomorrow, as long as I don’t decide to go on LinkedIn and Google+ as well. #SocialMediaTimeSuck

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The First

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Yesterday I announced the commencement of the Caruso TV Awards for the period between September 2010 and the beginning of October 2011, with a temporary lifting of my usual rule about not judging shows that haven’t finished their run by then. Thanks for starting Breaking Bad so late in the year, AMC. In that post I said I was going to go easy on shows I didn’t like, and the response was surprising. Turns out many think that’s a cop-out, or a disappointment. @Daisyhellcakes passionately argued that I should have the courage of my convictions. Friend-of-the-blog and excellent fellow @cockbongo was more direct.

Well, these Lessons posts are long and filled with all sorts of vitriolic complaining, so rejoice, those who thought I was going to be too nice! The difference here is that with a bit more room to explain myself, I can hopefully avoid the charge of just being a guy throwing stinkbombs at TV shows. I mean, yeah, I still am, I guess. But I also go on and on for literally thousands of words, and those thousands of words are a buffer between me and the possibility of coming off like the guy on the bottom half of the Internet who trolls for kicks. So, with no further ado, I finally deactivate my Caveat-O-Matic 3000 and just get on with it.

Be careful not to write your characters as idiots for the sake of convenience

One of the best lessons imparted by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan in recent interviews (e.g. this one), shows how his magnificent creation manages to keep the audience on the edge of its seat, and how it finds new ways to jeopardise its protagonists each week; he intentionally forces his characters into a corner, and then makes them escape their fates using any means necessary. It helps that he has two main characters — Walt and Jesse — who are among the finest in fiction. They’re complex, relatable and — despite their awful flaws and multiple moral failings — sympathetic, simply because we can see through their eyes and understand what needs to be done to survive.

On a lesser show such as Dexter, our cuddly serial killer hero is painted into the same corner each season — his secret is about to be revealed, and the only way he can survive is to kill an innocent or a loved one — and is saved each year by pure fluke, deus ex machina, or the superior, unambiguous and often horribly overplayed evil of others. What’s more annoying is that the only way to get him into trouble is to temporarily make him stupid; a crime considering the show has been running for five years and makes a point of how professional and methodical he is.

The fifth season deserves some credit for coming up with new ways to dumb him down (giving him a crazed “partner”, the death of his wife messing with his head), but there are still a handful of moments where he conveniently drops 50 IQ points just to generate false drama. Also connected to this is the way Rita’s children are conveniently written out of the show early on just to ensure Dexter can get it on with Lumen. Bringing his step-daughter Astor back for one episode was actually the highlight of the season, precisely because it generated real complication and, in its resolution, real growth for Dexter.

Perhaps the worst offender for creating intentionally dumb characters is TNT’s militia-vs-alien drama Falling Skies. Note the incredible stupidity of the freedom-fighting 2nd Mass, who have in their ranks a young boy who has been rescued from the alien invaders who have taken control of Earth. On his back is a Harness; a creepy biomech thingy (designed by the remarkable Rob McCallum) that has attached itself to his spine so that he can be controlled by the aliens. Even after it is removed he continues to act as if he’s under the aliens’ control, talking in a monotone and referring to humans as “Them”. This zombie-like behaviour, with ominous staring and plodding footsteps, goes on for five episodes before anyone twigs that he’s not to be trusted.

Even better is when they capture an alien weapon and promptly dismantle it instead of using it. Pope — the Ham Tyler of the show — seems proud of this, and never thinks the weapon might be useful. It takes a child to suggest using it against the alien invaders. It takes about three episodes for this kid to drop some wisdom on the idiot freedom fighters. The show is littered with conveniently dense characters, as this was the only way to drag three episodes’ worth of story out to ten. See also Torchwood: Miracle Day, V, Camelot, No Ordinary Family (in which, at one point, a villain kills off her powerful mind-controlling minion in order to clear the way for some guy with claws, because claws beats mind-control every time, apparently), etc.

Don’t waste our time by retelling the same stories or using the same tricks each week

Oh, The Killing. If only we could have captured the negative energy you created with THAT finale. Goodbye oil, goodbye gas, goodbye windfarms and solar energy and biodiesel. Hello limitless energy, with the only waste product the occasional expression of dismay from our exhausts; roads lined with cars belching out, “worst red herrings ever,” “relentless one-note tone,” “bog-standard police procedural with delusions of grandeur,” ”Michelle Forbes was quite good though.”

There isn’t much more that can be said about Veena Sud’s remake of Forbrydelsen; SoC was as frustrated as almost everyone else with the season’s open ending, though its reliance on red herrings was the absolute worst things about this first season. The moment when Rosie Larsen’s best friend Sterling Fitch reveals that a nosebleed was responsible for turning the school’s basement into what looked like an abattoir was when the show fell into a hole, never to be recovered. The Muslim “kidnap room” and the presence of paint stripper in poor Bennet Ahmed’s house were further insults. Even the hope that a plot about the disappearance of a Muslim girl might allow the show to touch on racism in the media and the police force was foolish; it was another red herring. This was not a bold new storytelling experience. It was a merry-go-round covered in crimson fish guts.

The anger is still fresh for those of us who got burned, but it’s not the only show wasting our time with dead-ends. Dexter has been telling the same story every year with almost no change. Killing Rita off at the end of season 4 is the boldest thing the show has done, but by the end of the fifth he’s still the same guy; a serial killer trying to come to terms with his feelings about the people around him while hiding his true nature and delivering endless voiceovers that give away everything about his inner life. It’s Groundhog Day for people who read those tacky inserts about Fred West in Sunday tabloids.

Doctor Who‘s long-arc game has also alienated me, but this is partially a fault of mine. After watching it for so long, the endless running, the gabbled dialogue and that cacophonous, distracting soundtrack have worn my patience thin. The last four episodes of the season sat unwatched on my PVR until yesterday; after years of enthusiasm I suddenly had no real urge to put myself through yet more unattractive pouting from Amy, or dopey-faced clowning from Rory. Matt Smith’s Doctor is delightful, but everything else has worn me down.

Part of that is the feeling of deja vu wafting from it. Whenever Steven Moffat’s name is on the script the show becomes a riot of imagination, with a brightness to the dialogue that makes it feel like nothing else. The rest of the time (or at least a lot of the time) there’s just more dialogue, as if the cumulative braininess of Moffat’s less frenetic interactions can only be matched with ten times as many lines, each with a lower individual IQ. As Moffat can’t write everything, the show falls into a rut with the Doctor rattling off comments as if he’s having an argument with himself, while Amy and Rory stand there looking frozen.

What’s worse is that despite the enormous blank canvas offered by the show (taking into account budgetary concerns, of course), too many plots or plot elements are recycled. Two episodes in the recent half-season featured characters miniaturised and sucked into a hostile environment; what’s worse, those two episodes aired back-to-back. Too often now the Monster-Of-The-Week is actually some poor pitiful creature who is misunderstood and needs the Doctor’s help. Fair enough, it’s a kid’s show, and you can’t have truly vicious enemies in it, but with The Silence’s motivations kept mysterious, the show now lacks menace; creepy, over-directed atmospherics are not a suitable substitute.

As I said, much of it is still fine. The finales of this split season were enormous fun, and some episodes did a great job of dramatising the Doctor’s increasingly depressed state. For example, Toby Whithouse’s The God Complex did a much better job of showing the Doctor’s growing sense of unease with his effect on the ones he loves than Moffat’s A Good Man Goes To War with all of its nonsense about the Doctor being a bad man. Nevertheless, the show has begun to lose its appeal, at least for this viewer, simply because it seems to have used a number of lovely, distracting enhancements to make it look like the show has a number of tricks up its sleeve when in fact it only has that handkerchief illusion and a dog-eared Ace of Diamonds.

Even if you’ve got a good finale, the show still needs some meat in the weeks before that

This is a problem that has taxed the patience of SoC for many a year, but this year it started to affect good shows as well as bad. V, Heroes and FlashForward are perfect examples of shows that plotted for a finale, meaning there were weeks where nothing happened; a week of potentially diverting drama sacrificed to protect the sanctity of the blowout finale. Of course there are bound to be slow weeks in any drama; even the best show on TV – Breaking Bad – has episodes that “merely” move pieces into place, set the tone for the season, or resolve the events of a previous episode. There’s also Treme, a show which makes a show of doing as little as possible for an entire season, but as it places a premium on mood instead of plot, that’s forgivable.

Network shows are particularly bad for treading water, but this year even SoC favourites like Sons of Anarchy, or highly anticipated prestige shows such as Boardwalk Empire or The Killing, misjudged their pacing. Sons was particularly disappointing. The first two seasons moved like freight trains, but showrunner Kurt Sutter’s experiment with a slow pace ended up alienating many fans, all of whom he then called very bad names. Do you realise the risk SoC is taking by daring to criticise his show? We really liked the finale, Mr. Sutter sir! Please don’t call me a douchehole.

Anyway, that was still preferable to Boardwalk Empire‘s amble toward a finale that underwhelmed, with only the occasional surprise to enliven a journey which seemed to be mostly made up of simmering resentment between couples and glowering from Michaels Shannon and K. Williams. When the show woke up it was riveting, but too much of it was spent reiterating the show’s theme as explained by Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson – “We all have to decide how much sin we can live with”. That was a point that could have been made definitively and then abandoned halfway through the season, but the games played between Nucky and Margaret Shroeder covered this ground until the grass was tramped flat and the soil turned to mud.

The Killing was the worst of all. To keep the show going for thirteen weeks it had to employ tricks to deceive the audience; red herrings and deceptions of such transparent stupidity that the viewers rose in furious anger and smited showrunner Veena Sud with anonymous complaints on the internet. Unfortunately no one realised that this form of attack, which is potent against normal showrunners, is actually some form of psychic sustenance for Sud, who reacted with remarkable confidence considering everyone who saw that FUCKING finale thought it was the worst thing in the world since people dancing in Star Trek movies.

Compare those shows to some of the best examples of season-arc pacing of the year. The Good Wife and The Vampire Diaries both split their long seasons up with smaller arcs, allowing them to rattle through plot at a clip while never losing momentum or running out of things to say. Their last episodes were as good as the ones at the start; that consistency is a marvel worthy of emulation. Nevertheless, even that kind of construction can go wrong. Doctor Who‘s split season led to a deflation of what little pace had built up when the show wasn’t dicking about with pirates and suchlike.

Build your seasons with multiple pay-offs, is what I’m saying. Be prepared to race through the plots quickly; there’s a good chance the complexity this creates will give you even more dramatic opportunities. Look at Breaking Bad (again). In season three the Big Bads (The Cousins) were originally meant to last all season, but Vince Gilligan realised it was probably a good idea not to waste time by keeping them out of the action for too long just to create a contrived final showdown. The result was the best season of TV between 2009-2010, and arguably the best season of TV in history.

Okay, thanks for reading this far. More to come as the week progresses.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Why I Won’t Name Individual Worst Episodes This Year

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For the last few years, the Caruso Awards have been presented with great pomp and fanfare to not only the best episodes of the TV year, but also the worst, which has been bad news for Torchwood, Heroes and Dexter. These awards have been given in a spirit of annoyance at wasted opportunities, laziness, or simple bone-headed stupidity. At the point of writing, I would feel a horrible, cathartic pleasure in having a dig at shows I thought deserved little pity, kicking them with hob-nailed boots of condensed supermeanness. As has been said in the past, rave reviews are difficult to write, but drubbings are fun.

This year will have to be different. A crisis of conscience has come over me, mostly because of the humanising nature of Twitter. Conversations with creators have made me question whether it’s fair to call out shows for being terrible when it has become clear to me that they are often initially realised with the best of intentions, but are compromised on the way to the screen. It’s a rare British writer who doesn’t have some horror story about how they had written something with one intent only to see it mangled and altered by interfering hands by the time it has reached the screen, usually by adding needless exposition, or the musical equivalent of seventeen soundtracks played simultaneously.

Other times a show can be aimed at a demographic that I am never going to be able to empathise with; I may have found No Ordinary Family a poorly-plotted padding-heavy waste of time for the most part (with some caveats), but it’s not really meant for me. It might be about superheroes, but it’s aimed at family audiences. It’s intentionally light and silly and undemanding. Hating it for those reasons is pointless (though hating it for being very often dull and filled with desperate nerd-pandering cameos is fine, I reckon).

Even worse when something I genuinely think is appalling on every level – i.e. Torchwood: Miracle Day – features one of my all-time writing heroes as an executive producer and writer. Jane Espenson has long been one of my idols, with credits on some of the best episodes of my favourite shows. Just this year she scripted a very satisfying episode of Game of Thrones (The Golden Crown), and was also credited on the delayed finale of Caprica. As ever, her work is entertaining, smart, unpredictable, and tight as a drum. It’s a joy to watch almost anything she has worked on.

And yet Torchwood: Miracle Day is arguably the low-point of the TV season. As much as I would love to jump on a single episode and see why I think it failed, I’m conflicted about directing any blame at Ms. Espenson. Her efforts to livetweet the UK broadcast of the show, while being bombarded with negative, aggressive tweets insulting her for “ruining” the show (impossible, as it has always been wretched), have made me respect her even more. Even this paragraph, noting my longstanding dislike of the programme, makes me feel bad. Why would I want to pile on her when she’s already had to put up with a ton of abuse?

My urge to snipe has been affected by other factors. Earlier this year a friend of the blog — a writer I consider to be a bit of a genius — wrote a funny article about British TV shows for A Newspaper that prompted the creator of one of those shows to react in an incredibly hostile and petty manner on Twitter. I won’t name names, as I don’t know if there was anything else going on there. Perhaps there was some DM conversation; for all I know, the feud has been laid to rest, and I don’t want to stir anything up.

Nevertheless, a show connected to this angry creator was a definite candidate for inclusion on my now-aborted list. After seeing his behaviour, the thought of sitting through that show’s entire run nauseated me; as far as I’m concerned, the output of that person’s production company is now and forever boycotted by me. I will have no truck with bullying, no matter how aggrieved the bully feels they are. How can I ever watch these shows with an open mind? I’m only ever going to be looking for flaws, which doesn’t help anyone.

More importantly — and I say this with a very heavy heart — I will regretfully admit I didn’t want to incur his considerable wrath, just in case he comes across this blog thanks to the joys of Google Alerts and/or Twitter Search (a function that led to my unfortunate run-in with a writer/actor earlier this year). Cowardly? You betcha. Even worse, another screenwriter I recently began to follow tweeted that anyone who ever wants to get into TV should never ever blog about the subject because that’s their career opportunities up in smoke.

A debate between writers ensued; some saying that constructive or detailed criticism is valid, while anyone engaged in negative whining with no content other than “this sucks” was doomed. Do I want to write for TV? Shit, I want to write for everything. I still hope that one day I’ll get to finish the Altered States musical/opera I’m always joking about. I want to write. That is the dream, be it writing novels, comics, screenplays, teleplays, radio plays, critiques for newspapers or magazines, an opera in which I try to rhyme “ischemic attack” with “monkey on my back”, even.

Should I really narrow down my options now, just to garner page hits that might or might not further my career? I’m not getting paid for this, after all. I use the blog as a way to work out my thoughts about what constitutes good and bad writing and directing. Trying to understand why V is terrible but Caprica is stimulating, or why Alphas was a pleasant surprise and Boardwalk Empire was such a disappointment, is all done in aid of my own work. Everything I’ve written off-blog since starting the Shades of Caruso Project has been informed by the observations I’ve made.

And so my customary Worst Episodes list will not happen this year, for all the reasons listed above. However, I’ve spent a lot of time this year watching some pretty crummy stuff, and engaging with even this dreck has taught me some lessons about storytelling, and how the audience relates to it. And so, to justify all of those hours watching Glee and the AMC remake of The Killing (for example), over the next few days I plan on writing about some of the things I think I’ve learned from watching bad TV this year.

Many of the lessons will appear obvious to most; some of them will seem awfully petty. Nevertheless, at some point in the past year these are the things that have informed my own writing, and my own theories about effective storytelling. I just hope I can do it without picking on individuals; my criticism is directed more at general misguided ideas that might have seemed right initially, but turned out to have been wrong in the long run. To any creators I diss during the next few days, it’s nothing personal.