Category Archives: Doctor Who

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 Episodes of the Year (30-21)

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In a previous post I remarked that I wouldn’t be able to write about Spartacus: Gods of the Arena as I hadn’t seen it; a terrible oversight partially explainable as discomfort following on from the tragic fate of star Andy Whitfield. Mostly it was down to altered priorities throughout the year. We had to catch up on Parks and Recreation and The Good Wife, which took up a fair amount of our allocated TV watching time. Work comes first, after all, with Twitter checking in second place, I’m ashamed to say.

Parks and Recreation was once dismissed by us at length, and The Good Wife never seemed to be something we would be interested in, but the critics urging the audience to give them a chance are 100% correct; both shows are magnificent, and well worth your time if you don’t already watch them. To be honest, I think The Good Wife could be marketed better; there’s an audience waiting out there for something this sophisticated, but they might be put off by publicity that makes it look like some kind of soapy fluff about working moms. FFS, this is the most intelligent show on network TV, a genuine marvel. It should be watched by anyone with an interest in the modern world; no other show feels as much of its time as this one.

As for our previous damning criticisms of Parks and Recreation, I’d just like to say even though that first season was pretty weak, my immediate dismissal of it — considering that even at its worst it was never even a fraction as bad as the truly odious Modern Family — still stands as the greatest mistake this blogger has ever made, at least until I decided to finish this blogpost in the KFC in Leicester Square, just because it had free wi-fi. Doesn’t anyone on this planet know how to chew with their mouths shut? I’m forming Misophonics Anonymous tomorrow. [/intolerant asshole]

Anyway, Spartacus: Gods of the Arena doesn’t feature in the 30-21 list; it’s much better than that. Which is not to denigrate the following ten shows; they’re all wonderful in their own right. #arsecovering

30: The Trip – Hipping Hall

Shades of Caruso was bound to enjoy Michael Winterbottom’s navel-gazing curio just for the scenery; a recent holiday has made us very pro-Lake District, and seeing its breathtaking beauty again was a real treat. The short series works well as a whole; the differences from one week to the next are negligible but when seen as a single entity, the growing loneliness of “Steve Coogan” and the contented obliviousness of “Rob Brydon” are obvious. The fourth week, however, gave us a new take on their tiresome games of one-upmanship, as the two comedic actors are joined for dinner by assistant Emma and photographer Yolanda. The most excruciating scene of the year sees “Rob” unleash a slew of bad impressions, while “Steve” shrinks on horror before joining in, unable to let his companion be the centre of attention. Meanwhile, Emma and Yolanda’s laughter becomes more and more forced, and the comedians’ banter becomes crueller. It also sees “Rob” step out of character and make an ill-advised, almost unwatchable move on Emma, a plot development that the real Rob Brydon asked Winterbottom to remove from the truncated movie version. Sorry Rob, that was a great scene, and your discomfort ensures this episode’s place on this list.

29: Bored to Death – I’ve Been Living Like A Demented God!

It’s easy to dismiss HBO’s light comedy about mildly disaffected middle-class New Yorkers as nothing but froth, but if it had more bite, it wouldn’t work at all. As such, it’s content to be an endearing diversion with the occasional very good joke about how useless and self-absorbed the intelligentsia of the East Coast are. It’s a slight Woody Allen-esque sitcom, back when Woody Allen was still funny and had something to say. This episode is the highlight of its second year, bringing about the return of Kristin Wiig and John Hodgman. Wiig has little to do other than play a femme fatale pick-up for Zack Galafianakis’ suddenly virile Ray, but John Hodgman gets to do all sorts of amusing things, and takes to physical comedy with gusto as he rolls around in dirt while trying to avoid a group of angry (but not too angry; this is mild comedy, after all) drug dealers. We also get to see poor George dealing with his prostate cancer diagnosis and his hilarious response to a mandatory drug test at work; his frantic but composed pantomime of panic when trying to tamper with his urine sample is a little gem. Even better, his final scene with a very enthusiastic Jonathan is incredibly sweet; a perfect encapsulation of what makes this show so lovable.

28: Luther – Episode 3

Last year Shades of Caruso took great pleasure in deriding the BBC’s hysterically overwrought serial killer drama Loofah, with its needlessly flashy compositions, poorly judged performances, incoherent plotting and modish “edginess”. This year, SoC scratches its head, staring in bemusement at the four episodes that exploded into the Beeb’s schedule like a not-terrible howitzer shell of semi-competence. Connected by one plot-thread – albeit a not-particularly great one – the two two-parters offered more fun and more purposeful storytelling than was expected. Many of the old problems remained, but with a modicum of restraint Loofah became far more compelling, with our apocalyptically glum hero now approaching iconic status as London’s tortured protector. This episode was the best of the quartet, mostly for the two main setpieces depicting the Dice Killer impassively going about his murderous business; director Sam Miller brilliantly keeps the action simple, and the effect is unforgettable. Much of that is down to the bold use of London locations; when the killer walks calmly through Liverpool Street station in the cliffhanger ending, the effect is one of absolute terror. The gloves came off this year; the flaws mean so little when they’re part of something as scary and confident as this.

27: Psychoville – Sunnyvale

Shades of Caruso foolishly missed the first season of this exceptional horror-comedy when it originally aired, meaning 2009′s awards didn’t include praise for “David and Maureen”, the “one-shot” homage to Rope that could be the best thing produced by the BBC in the last decade. It’s hard to pick a stand-out episode from Psychoville‘s second season when each episode is as good as every other, but this half-hour probably wins out, and again Hitchcock is at the heart of it. The main setpiece, a play on Strangers on a Train set in an old folks home, is a comedic delight, powered by the interplay between the delightful double-act of Mr. Jelly and Claudia Wren. On top of that we find out the dark secret behind Ravenhill Psychiatric Hospital, and Mrs. Kenchington’s familial history. It also stands as one of the purest expressions of Shearsmith and Pemberton’s vision of England’s contradictory nature; that cheery surface hiding a dark core, perfectly visualised here with the image of a stash of Nazi memorabilia hidden under a collectible toy shop. (Confession: one of the main reasons this episode deserves a place on the list is for the joke about the Nazi memorabilia website NaziBay.)

26: Doctor Who – A Good Man Goes To War

Rumours of strife on set and within the show’s production staff appeared in Private Eye several weeks after this season took a break, but it could be argued that the wildly variable quality of the episodes was a sign that something was up. The previous season was patchy, but this was on a different level. Part of that was showrunner Steven Moffat’s obvious ambition; numerous plot threads had been introduced that were waiting to be tied up, meaning audience members who were not in the show’s thrall would likely end up being frustrated. Thank the Heavens for this memorable mid-season finale, which saw the show firing on all cylinders once more. With a cast of previously introduced minor characters returning to help the Doctor rescue Amy and her soon-to-be-born baby (whose identity is sadly signposted with obnoxious obviousness in the episode’s opening moments), the show’s energy returned with a vengeance. Despite budgetary restraints, Who felt epic once more, with Matt Smith on scorching form, doing justice to Moffat’s riotous inventions and crazed plotting. This is what the show should be every week; a madcap, exhilarating blast of imagination, powered by sheer force of will.

25. The Office – Garage Sale

After what feels like a million seasons of increasingly depressing shenanigans in Dundler Mifflin’s despair-pit, it was time for Steve Carell to detach the chains around his ankles and escape the show that had helped carry him to stardom. Much of the season was spent waiting for him to leave the office, with the only drama derived from speculating about how it would happen. Thankfully, while those episodes had only glimmers of the show’s previous genius, the final five minutes of this Carell-written episode provided a genuinely magical moment. Cleverly set up as an imminent disaster, Michael Scott’s marriage proposal to Holly is instead a gloriously sentimental and moving triumph that pays tribute to Scott’s relationship with the core cast, leads to a well-judged mood-puncturing joke, and ends on an out-of-the-blue declaration of our hero’s intention to leave. It’s possibly the most simultaneously surprising and unsurprising character note in the history of the show, and it worked like gangbusters. Tears flowed like the water from the Scranton branch’s sprinklers.

24: Louie – Subway / Pamela

The first segment of this episode is almost wordless; it’s a beautifully shot, almost poetic sequence with Louie taking a trip on a subway, encountering great beauty and terrible poverty in a single moment, observing the patter of a young boy with great astonishment, and then imagining himself as the feted hero of his carriage by mopping up a noxious brown liquid. The words come later, as Louie spending an afternoon with his friend Pamela. What starts as a loose segment with our dopey hero hanging out with the ever-acidic Pamela shifts into mortifying comedy territory as Louie goes for broke and professes his undying love; it’s a long, beautiful, uncynical speech. It would be a joy to listen to if it weren’t for the knowledge that Pamela is never going to be won over. The result is a growing sense of doom; anyone who has ever harbored a crush on someone who has no interest will tear off their ears and poke out their eyes at the miserable truth presented here. It’s not all bad, though. The punchline, in the final shot, is a cracker. Good final monologue too, if depressing. But it’s the good kind of depressing; a perfect description of the show.

23. Alphas - Blind Spot

In the unexpectedly long run of NBC’s dire Heroes, there were moments of brightness that never truly removed the murk. Company Man in the first season was easily the highlight, combining spectacle and character drama in a way it never managed again. In a shorter space of time, Syfy’s Alphas reached a point where its massive ambition led to this mini-action epic; a perfectly constructed action TV classic that evoked happy memories of the first two X-Men movies. The irony that the show was co-created by Zak Penn, writer of the despised third X-Men movie, is not lost on me. Ira Steven Behr’s clever script puts the ramshackle Alpha team in the position of questioning Dr. Graham Kern (a brilliantly menacing Brent Spiner) in their base, smugly assuming they were in control. As the perfectly paced episode progresses, they come to realise they’re actually at the mercy of not one but two antagonistic forces powerful enough to kill them all. This was where Alphas began to prove it belonged in the top tier of this year’s new shows, packing in a decent amount of low-cost action, setting a light under the season-long Red Flag arc, and tying off some loose threads into the bargain. And the best thing about it? Two episodes later we were given a satisfying, exciting, and emotionally wrenching finale better than anything Heroes could ever have managed. This is how you do superhero TV.

22: 30 Rock – Double-Edged Sword

For a couple of years SoC has railed against the 30 Rock backlash, as fans complained that the show had lost its freshness and had become mired in self-referential games. We argued that it remained fresh and funny, that the post-modern games were smart enough to render the criticisms redundant, and that the show still had some life. This year, we caved. Fatigue seemed to infect what was once the wittiest show on TV, not helped by the ascendence of Community and Parks and Recreation to the position of sitcom superiority. Still, all was not lost; Double-Edged Sword was as sharp as 30 Rock‘s best, partially because there seemed to be things at stake within the show. Jack and Avery’s mad-dash out of Canada before their child is born, Tracy’s realisation that his EGOT is more a curse than a blessing, and Liz’ sad epiphany that a comfortable relationship is just as untenable as a fraught one; not only all thematically linked (the double-edged sword from the title) but present to enable the show to make a self-referential joke about thematic linking in sitcoms. Sad that the show had to make a sacrifice to regain its mojo; the loss of Matt Damon’s brilliantly realised Carol at least gives us a superb sub-plot about the petty tyranny of pilots, and a running joke that SoC is very grateful for, concerning that stupid-ass owl movie Legends of the Guardians.

21: The Venture Brothers – Assisted Suicide

Mid-season breaks are usually a great help for creative teams facing deadlines, especially when the show in question is animated, but for the audience it can often be a mixed blessing, Though the wait for the fourth season might have been unbearable without it, the break robbed the show of its momentum. It wasn’t until this triumphant episode that the fourth season lived up to previous seasons, as The Monarch invades Rusty Venture’s mind to wreak havoc. Only Doctor Orpheus can save him, leading to encounters with Rusty’s id, ego and superego; a hysterically funny adventure on first viewing, but a revealing and sad peek into Rusty’s psyche when watched again. All of his motivations are laid bare; thankfully this is a show that has no interest in curing Rusty, though there is a touching grace note in the final scene in which Rusty relates an anecdote about his awful childhood; yet more proof that this exceptional show is more humane than anything else on Adult Swim. Also great: Brock Sampson and Sergeant Hatred’s battle for the Venture Brothers’ affections, more Shore Leave excellence, and the long-awaited kiss between 21 and Dr. Mrs. The Monarch. An instant classic.

More tomorrow. I promise I won’t keep bringing up how much I hate Modern Family. Even though it’s abysmal.

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

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Longtime readers will know that I’ve dedicated much of the last few years obsessively watching Cuse and Lindelof’s sci-fi masterpiece Lost, and that I liked the finale. Many didn’t, and with great and terrifying vehemence. I half-expect friend-of-the-blog @MhairiMcF to throw a sharpened copy of season 6 at my throat for suggesting it was a success right to the final, beautiful shot. I appreciate this is not the general consensus, but I’m a MAVERICK who’s not afraid to say what he thinks, except for when I write huge caveat-posts attempting to explain away my horrible cowardice.

Anyway, I’ve spent a long time boring my loyal readers about that Ben Linus and the very significant shot of an Avalon (not Apollo) chocolate bar in the finale (the key to it all), and I’m about to do it again even though it is no longer with us. No, come back! Please don’t run away; I’m trying to work out some thoughts on the nature of mystery in narrative, and how to set up small plot bombs on the way to the big stuff. This is even more on my mind after watching the masterful Breaking Bad season 4 finale, which paid off stuff I didn’t even realise needed to be paid off. Truly Breaking Bad is a thing of great wonderment. If you care about TV or storytelling, it has much to teach you. (Spoilers for Lost and Doctor Who follow.)

There’s a way to create mystery without also creating frustration and boredom

As a die-hard fan of Lost, in a world in which such an opinion makes a person some form of awful pop-culture pariah, I’m aware that my thoughts on long-arc mystery stories may be dismissed by you, the reader, especially by the time you have finished the next part of this sentence; I think Lost, a show now widely considered to have completely arsed up the landing, is one of the best examples of generating mystery in a long-run show. The finale transformed many former fans into board members of Pitchforks and Torches Inc., and I understand that, even while I pledge my allegiance to it. The final answers couldn’t satisfy everybody, though sadly they seemed to piss off almost all of the fans.

Nevertheless, it must have been doing something right to keep as many people invested for so long, and my super-scientific study of the show has identified two important elements in the way the mystery developed; the greater mystery of the Island was supplemented by smaller mysteries that were resolved in the meantime, and the larger mysteries were supported by numerous hints and clues that allowed audiences to create their own theories about what the ultimate meaning of the show might have been (and I still maintain that the genius of the show is that many unresolved elements have kept these debates going among my brothers-in-arms, who hide from view for fear of being murdered by haters).

Examples of the former are numerous. Though the new consensus on Lost is that many mysteries were dragged out for a long time, it took less than a (short) season to find out What Lies In The Shadow Of The Statue. The hatch is a mystery for about half of the first season, and then we found out what was inside at the start of the second. Even the reason for polar bears being on the island is revealed very early on, if you were willing to expend a bit of energy reading up about the Dharma Initiative online. Etc. etc. etc. The resolutions may have disappointed some, but the timescales were often shorter than critics maintain.

It’s easier to keep viewers invested if you’re throwing bones to them at regular intervals. Even better, giving the audience room to create their own theories helps too, and Lost was very good at introducing plot elements that serviced alternate interpretations throughout its run. Almost every revelation was ambiguous enough to strengthen all giant theories. The best example might be the run-up to season five’s finale. There was a chance that detonating a nuclear bomb at the site of the Swan Station could save the heroes or trigger the events that doom them; the summer after that incredible final whiteout aired was a great time to be a committed Lost fan, as debate raged over which possible interpretation was the right one.

And so to this year’s shows. Three examples of disappointing-to-disastrous long-arc planning come to mind; Doctor Who, The Event and The Killing, all of which fail in different ways and to different degrees. Who ended strongly with The Wedding of River Song, paying off the events of the season opener in a reasonably satisfying way, though it also repeated one of the show’s long-standing mistakes; not giving the audience a sense of when the end game will arrive. Lost had the benefit of having an end date, as well as a goal for the characters (getting off the island for good), that made sense to all viewers. An essential element of successful element of long-arc storytelling is giving clues as to the shape of the final story, which can be done without giving away any plot elements or surprises. That’s where Steven Moffat’s show falls down. How, and when, will Who end?

Of course Who isn’t going anywhere — it has become very lucrative and ridiculously popular, no matter how the press likes to spin the viewing figures by pretending timeshifting doesn’t exist — but it seems obvious now that what had seemed to be one season arc in Moffat’s first year was actually the beginning of a multi-season arc of head-melting complexity. Massive kudos to him for doing that, but the feeling that answers and resolutions are on the way is constantly being stymied. Having a better idea of when this long story will finish would help shape our expectations, but as the final scene of The Wedding of River Song came around, only then did it become apparent that we weren’t going to find out everything just yet.

And that’s fine, even if some of the answers we’ve had along the way (River Song is Amy and Rory’s daughter, and she “killed” the Doctor) are not really surprises at all. Nevertheless, the big arc is not paying off quickly enough, or establishing a recognisable shape, to allow the casual viewer to get a grip on it. Moffat has rejected criticisms that the show is too complicated to understand, and I’m willing to agree with him on that, but it is very complex, and the millions of ideas being thrown out are not allowing the viewer to paint a picture in their own head of what the final story will look like, even if they’re completely wrong because there are still some tricks up Moffat’s sleeve.

What are The Silence? What is their plan? Did I miss this? I must admit the gabbled dialogue distracts me so much I miss a lot of the detail. They’re a religious order? Like the Order of the Headless and the future militant arm of the Anglican Church? At times like this I enjoy Moffat’s ambition, and I look forward to his resolution, but I feel like I do when I read some of Grant Morrison’s craziest comics; like I’ve come in halfway through the story and have missed a lot of important plotpoints, and I can’t prioritise which loose ends and currently redundant events will end up being relevant to the big arc, and so have forgotten many of the key moments and characters whenever they pop up again. Even if I get comments explaining this stuff to me, I can’t make it make sense in my head. As a result, despite sporadic bursts of great enjoyment, the show has become less interesting to me.

I’m not sure how this can be fixed, though it would be nice if we wasted less time on standalone episodes and actually spent more time fleshing out these concepts instead of leaving them as tantalising hints of a greater universe. Perhaps that would make the show more comprehensible, and allow us to interact with it more (though I can see from a quick search that Who theories are almost as widespread as Lost ones). I’m aware that feeling like an outsider here is how many felt with Lost, and basically I’m getting a taste of what it was like to casually watch Lost in a state of frustration. Maybe Who‘s ultimate failing is to not be “my kind of thing” the way Lost was, which is no fault of the show.

The Event‘s long-arc failed mostly because the mysteries posed early on were thrown out as the show tried to find a form that was appealing to anyone. The aliens were pretty sympathetic in earlier episodes, which meant the show’s bad guys were often humans. Obviously this was too confusing for viewers, who abandoned the show after its spectacular pilot, and so the show contorted itself into knots trying to move the aliens into a villain role, though it commendably made their motives justified on some levels. The Event was at its best when it explored this moral quandary, which sadly wasn’t often enough.

It also didn’t help that the show spent a long time dramatising the mysterious actions of James Dempsey (Hal Holbrook), a shady conspiracy archetype injecting himself with YouthJuice and conspiring with various characters from his gloomy Office of Mysterious Conspiracy. What could he be doing? Was he a threat to humans or aliens? Before the end of the season, perhaps sensing that the show was going in the wrong direction, we find out he’s one of a race of Sentinels who protect the Earth from alien invasion. And then, moments after revealing this, he kills himself so the show can become a 24 clone. He’s never mentioned again. Any investment in this plot was a waste of time, and that’s a deep wound to a show based on resolving a mystery.

Even a scene as ridiculous as Hal Holbrook shooting himself in the head after telling the protagonist to stop wasting time chasing him instead of looking for aliens (hell of a nod and a wink to the audience there) is preferable to the tricks played by the team behind The Killing, which dragged a relatively simple story out to absurd length by introducing suspects, making them seem as guilty as it’s possible to be, and then excusing them three episodes later in the most contrived manner possible and never speaking of them again. The show isn’t about people, or life, or even about the murder of Rosie Larsen and how that affects her community. It’s a shell game.

The Killing does just about everything wrong in making a long-form show about a single case. Though it’s been a long time since I saw the first season of Murder One, I remember it did a number of things right that The Killing didn’t even try to do. It supplemented the main mystery (Did Neil Avedon kill Jessica Costello?) with other plots, not least the tension between lawyer and professional BADASS Teddy Hoffman and his nemesis Richard Cross. There was always something else going on, and payoffs littered the first season. There’s no comparison between those plots and The Killing‘s secondary stories. A delayed wedding? A search for a mole in a political campaign (yes, a subplot similarly plagued by red herrings) dramatised by literally THOUSANDS of scenes involving William Campbell and his minions arguing about emails? Who cares?

Murder One also promised a resolution by the end of the season, and we got one. I remember thinking it was pretty satisfying, especially the final fate of Cross, which was poignant and brilliantly performed by Stanley “Ol’ Dependable” Tucci. The Killing hinted at something similar and then went out of its way to render the majority of the season completely superfluous. As with all of those shows that plot for the finale (see previous posts), it made the viewer conscious that they had wasted a lot of time. It wasn’t just the lack of resolution; it was realising that the build-up had been empty entertainment calories. That was the show’s great betrayal. A disappointing ending is one thing, but to regularly piss on us on the way there is unforgivable.

Pandering to an inappropriate audience doesn’t work

No Ordinary Family was not much fun to watch, despite the entertaining interplay between Michael Chiklis and Romany Malco, but then it was aimed at a very specific demographic. To a family with young teenage children, the show might have been a lot of fun, like an undemanding Incredibles rip-off with some bland banter and a couple of poorly shot action scenes in a car park every week (seriously, the majority of the show’s “action” takes place in the same car park, and usually involved someone being punched into the side of a van). That audience never really materialised, but instead of trying harder to win that audience over, it became more interested in chasing a nerd audience that would never accept it.

Throwing in references to specific comic tropes, or casting actors from Battlestar Galactica (a show aimed squarely at adults, let’s not forget), was not going to bring in an audience that would not be served by anything else in the show. Most comic fans were rightly wary of the low-level superheroics on display. It was not a show for them, and no matter how hard Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim tried (the guys who co-wrote the execrable Green Lantern, FFS), superhero fans were more likely to enjoy Alphas, a show that was smarter, funnier, and more gratifying than this. Guest appearances by Brent Spiner, Rebecca Mader (who also showed up in No Ordinary Family, playing a similar character) and Caprica‘s John Pyper-Ferguson made much more sense; they played internally-consistent villains, and were gratefully received by fans who appreciated that they were being catered for by showrunners who understood their interests.

More to come. I’ll keep the Lost chatter to a minimum. (SMILEYFACE)

The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The 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 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Worst New Characters of the Year

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Even the best show can be hamstrung by the introduction of a poorly realised character. Most showrunners will realise the folly of their ways and kill them off as quickly as possible: look at how speedily Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof got rid of Nikki and Paolo in Lost. Some characters can improve over time as they become more shaded: last year we railed against Dollhouse‘s Topher Brink, who was at first an unwatchably annoying creep who tried so hard to be cute and funny while just setting our teeth on edge. This year he became our favourite character on the show, just by dialling down the eccentricity and playing up his loneliness and fear. Kudos to Fran Kranz and the Dollhouse team for fixing what had been the most annoying thing about an otherwise exemplary show.

Other characters can be a puzzling mixture of good and bad. Damon from The Vampire Diaries is, at his worst, a smug prick who wishes he was Spike from Buffy, not helped by Ian Somerhalder’s questionable performance and habit of pulling in his chin whenever he’s trying to deliver a “witty” bon-mot. However, at his best he’s almost complicated. The late season revelation that he was once a more honourable man than his Angel-Puppet-lookalike brother Stefan makes him far more interesting, and when Somerhalder plays up his vulnerability and sad rage he becomes the best thing about the show by far. It’s enough to make me glad I hung around long enough to see his transformation into a compelling character, though he still fails to be funny whenever he tries.

Nevertheless, some characters are just wretched in conception and execution, and nothing can fix them. Here are the worst characters of the season, and if the defensive creator of the most heinous character doesn’t like my decision, he can kiss my arse.

10. Merritt Grieves – Happy Town

ABC’s feeble Twin Peaks pastiche had one thing going for it: an interesting cast. M.C. Gainey, Frances Conroy, Steven Weber, Amy Acker and Stephen McHattie showed up from time to time, usually struggling to make something of the strained dialogue. No one suffered more than Sam Neill, a capable actor here transformed into a sleazy English shop owner with a TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS history. Watching him attempt to breathe life into the bag of “weird” characteristics that was Grieves — sadly with only a wispy fraction of his usual twinkly-eyed charm — was a depressing and distracting experience. He needn’t have bothered. As with all of the other loosely sketched townsfolk, there was no meat to the character: he was just a collection of quirky character elements that were shuffled together in a writers room that must have stunk of desperation, and only becomes interesting in the final episode of the truncated series. Nevertheless, even the shocking last minute revelations that OMG he actually wears a leather jacket in his spare time! don’t make him any more compelling. Some questions really don’t need to be answered.

9. Jim Moriarty – Sherlock

Running through the mini-series was the knowledge that this new, terrifically entertaining Sherlock was going to face off against a re-envisioned Moriarty, the archetypal supervillain dolled up for the new age with the same care and thought that Moffat, Gatiss and McGuigan had lavished on Holmes and Watson. The final five minutes of the series were charged with even more expectation than the rest of the series, and so what do we get? Heath Ledger’s Joker? Terence Stamp’s Zod? Hell, did we even get Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor, a villain who is largely played for laughs but has a cold, cold heart underneath? No. We got Jim Carrey’s Riddler who sings half of his dialogue as if he were the lovechild of Bruno and Dame Edna. While the concept of “Jim” Moriarty remains solid (a villain for hire: nice idea), the execution was appalling. Hammier than John Simm’s Master, this Moriarty did the deadliest thing imaginable: in five minutes he stole from the best new BBC drama in years all the tension it had worked hard to generate. Maybe it can be salvaged in the next series, but for now, our enthusiasm has been put back to Defcon One.

8. Maddux Donner – Defying Gravity

Though showrunner James Parriott denies creating Defying Gravity as a Grey’s Anatomy analogue, Maddux Donner still feels like a McDreamy substitute, with his will-they-won’t-they relationship with Zoe and his friends-with-benefits partnership with Nadia. At some point in the development of the series it must have seemed like there was potential for a longrunning love triangle plot, enhanced by Donner’s tragic past and the complications of his previous dalliance with Zoe — which of course led to her having the abortion that defines her personality as a woman who regrets that decision to the exclusion of all other emotions or motivations. How sad, then, that instead of Patrick “Oilslick” Dempsey the showrunners cast Ron “Doughball” Livingstone, possibly the least alluring and mysterious actor on the planet. What might have been intense and sexy was instead petulant and grumpy, a sour centre for this sugary show. His pouty affect and grouchy demeanour is so potent no one else on the show has enough charisma to contend with it. There’s a lot wrong with this show, but Donner is the puffy millstone around its neck.

7. D.S. Ben Holt – Paradox

The highpoint of BBC’s dour sci-fi procedural came during the second episode, as the unexplained image-downloading force from the nether realms of the multiverse (or maybe it was GOD ZOMG) sent our dreary heroes another set of puzzle pieces which would help them prevent a tragedy of some kind. The last image, one held back from the depressed band of detectives, showed D.S. Ben Holt dead on the ground, with one eye pointing off in the wrong direction. To anyone who was as sick of his relentless, aimless fury as SoC was, we could only assume it was because a rage embolism had made his brain pop as if it contained a bomb like in Mission Impossible 3. The answer was more mundane (fate intended for him to be electrocuted), but worse was that the character survived, which meant three more episodes with him being inexplicably VERY ANGRY about everything. And that’s all. How do you write about someone that one-dimensional? He’s an angry cop. He has kids, I think. He shags Tamzin Outhwaite twice. But mostly he’s just very, very, VERY angry. It barely even qualifies as screenwriting.

6. Tyler Evans – V

Major network shows, the potential tentpoles, are bound to have all of their edges smoothed down in order to appeal to the most viewers, and the big-budget remake of V was no exception. None of the characters showed any hint of life, something that even the not-that-great original managed. Of all the poorly realised mannequins in the main cast, the most awful has to be Tyler Evans, another pouty teenager in a season that had already tortured us with whiny Jeremy Gilbert from The Vampire Diaries. Tyler is entitled and belligerent, but his worst crime is to restrict Elizabeth Mitchell’s range to little more than repetitious motherly concern. His histrionic bitching and one-note obsession with the V’s are extreme enough that he comes off as more unhinged than passionate, which might account for the hints that he might have a more complicated parentage than originally thought – anything to make him more interesting. The show would be more fun if the showrunners just killed the little creep off, but sadly there seems to be some kind of arc playing out here. All we can do is stick our fingers in our ears and wait it out.

5. Steve Fleming MP - The Thick Of It

A hero needs a good villain, and a great anti-hero/villain needs a great monster. Malcolm Tucker has butted heads with some repellent arseholes before, but it’s telling that his greatest threat prior to the third season of The Thick of It was himself, as seen in the specials. Maybe Armando Iannucci and his writers should be commended for inventing someone who is able to stop Tucker in his tracks, but to do so they had to inflict upon the viewer someone so repellent that it’s almost impossible to watch without cringing. Fleming is an unhinged bag of tics, unpredictable and ruthless enough to finally ruin Tucker’s career and terrify the assorted chumps of DoSAC, but pitched at such a weird level of energy that he no longer resembles a human being. The main cast might be heightened to a level of hysteria, but they’re recognisably human. Fleming’s stylised mania represents the first failure of the Thick Of It team. The casting of cuddly sitcom favourite David Haig doesn’t help. Luckily, in the final moments of the season we’re introduced to Tom Hollander’s Cal Richards, a Satanically evil, non-irritating antagonist. More please!

4. Every character that isn’t Sue Sylvester, Principal Figgins, or Kurt – Glee

Sue Sylvester’s hatred of the Glee club is entertaining enough that it’s worth keeping them around simply so she has something to bellow at. Other than that? There is no reason for any of them, except for the hilarious Principal Figgins, Kurt (when he’s not being a sociopath), and maybe Brittany when she doesn’t garble her lines. Everyone else cannot even be considered a character: they’re more like plot-enablers, or song delivery systems. No one else has a consistent personality, sometimes changing in the middle of an episode for no reason than that there is another song coming along that they need to be able to sing as if it conveys their inner thoughts. As the showrunners only bothered to come up with three plotlines for the show — oh no, Glee club is in trouble: I love you but you don’t love me: no one really understands me — these get swapped between the characters to make the show seem more versatile. Don’t be fooled. They’re hollow shells. The disdainful laziness of the showrunners is even more of an insult than the distressing number of harridan women and victimised men polluting the show.

3. Amy Pond – Doctor Who

Sometimes you can see the kernel of a good idea in a bad character, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when they quickly become intolerable and wreck every scene they are in because of that good thing gone bad. Amy Pond was designed to be an alternative to the doe-eyed simpering groupies that had previously accompanied the Doctor, but while the concept of “Strong-willed Independent Woman” sounds fantastic on the page, in execution we just got a sulky teenager bellowing her charming catchphrase, “SHUT UP!” every few minutes. Lacking a sense of wonder for the most part, you have to wonder why the Doctor bothered with her. That question looms over the entire season. Is there something more to Amy? Is there a secret even she doesn’t know she’s keeping? The major arc of the season seems to be leading to a big reveal, but no, she’s just someone who lost her memory and can magic the Doctor back from oblivion by shrieking “SHUT UP DOCKTORRRR!” at the cosmos. For all the hints and nudges, she turns out to be little more than the Time Traveller’s Fishwife, making her the least interesting companion in years.

2. Claire Dunphy – Modern Family

Of all the grotesque caricatures infesting this rancid comedic corpse, Julie Bowen’s Claire Dunphy is perhaps the worst of them all. A joy-vacuum that sits and snipes at all around her, her role as the nagging, sensible wife of dopey Phil would already make her eligible for this list, just for being a particularly unpleasant stereotype before we even get to the fact that she’s not that funny and Bowen’s comic timing is non-existent. Maybe that’s not her fault: it’s not like there are any really memorable jokes to work with here anyway, other than to stare at her silly husband with what often appears to be genuine loathing. No, the worst thing about Claire Dunphy is a simple one. Just as you don’t give the same name to two characters in a narrative, you shouldn’t give two characters the same nervous, disapproving, square personality when they don’t illuminate different aspects of that personality. Her brother Mitchell has exactly the same role in the broad canvas of the show, and the same role in his relationship with Cam: to be a huge downer. Jesse Tyler Ferguson is better at keeping the energy up during his scenes, and so avoids my wrath, which I instead aim at Claire with both barrels.

1. Sonny – Treme

Perhaps the most unsurprising inclusion on this list, feckless wastrel Sonny (performed with excellent self-absorbed petulance by Michiel Huisman) is universally despised by Treme fans. In this interview with Alan Sepinwall, David Simon gets defensive about the criticism of Sonny, maintaining that he’s not interested in making all of his characters likeable. Here’s some news for the great creator: audiences aren’t interested in that either. There’s room for awful characters in all fiction, but Sonny is a particularly wretched example, a whiny jerk who wrecks lives with no sense of having hidden depths that would explain why he is the way he is. What’s the worst thing about him? Not his paranoid narcissism, or his pathological self-destructiveness, or his mojo-absorbing treatment of poor blameless Annie, which reduces her to a needy loser who eventually finds her inner strength more for plot convenience than any sense of character revelation. It’s in the finale flashback, where we see him walking down the pre-hurricane streets of New Orleans wearing FUCKING CAPRI PANTS! Truly unforgivable. Let’s hope he either finds his inner-Thelonious in season two, or falls into a pothole, never to be seen or heard from again.

I’d like to say I’m finished, but I’m still not done. In the next post, best new show and pilot! Worst new show and pilot! And maybe some other stuff if the Internet will let me.

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Best New Characters of the Year

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Yes yes, I’m still not done. Traditionally Shades of Caruso feels obliged to praise showrunners for creating new characters that embody all that is great about a show, draw attention to aspects of the show that we hadn’t spotted before, or make us want to watch something that otherwise we wouldn’t be that bothered about. Previous years have seen us hurl garlands at Walter Bishop from Fringe and Dr. Amber Volakis from House like we were throwing love-frisbees. Who will win this year? Will it be Amy Pond? (Clue: no.) Will it be a sexy new vampire on True Blood? (Clue: No, because we haven’t watched it, despite all of the sexiness.) I’d like to think our choice is utterly uncontroversial. We’ll save the controversy for the following post, which will be about the worst new characters of the year. Rules apply: only characters introduced in seasons completed by the time the awards started are eligible, and only one character per show can be included, except for the two exceptions seen below, who made it onto the list because I think the relevant shows have two important, likeable characters that share a lot of traits and also show how issues of race can send two similar people down completely different roads.

10. Dan Stark – The Good Guys

Matt Nix’s endearing cop show sadly doesn’t have the consistency to become a regular watch, but whenever it comes on, your attention will inevitably be held by Bradley Whitford’s full-powered performance as retro-cop Dan Stark. He’s more than just a mustache-delivery system. Due to his time on Sorkin-Shows — where the amount of dialogue exceeds molecules in the universe — it’s forgivable to think that verbal humour is all Whitford can bring to a role, but much of the pleasure of his turn as the American Gene Hunt depends on his bizarre physical comedy. It’s worth tuning in each week to catch his weird stiff-armed high-kicking combat stance, let alone his clueless pronouncements and hysterical technophobia (as shown above). It’s a joke that’s been done elsewhere, but Whitford’s lively energy is infectious. Colin Hanks is a good foil, and RonReaco Lee is funny as a Huggy-Bear-esque snitch, but they don’t even need to be there for The Good Guys to work. It’s Whitford’s show: everyone else is just visiting.

9. Dr. Bennet Halverson – Dollhouse

Adding a character to this list of awesomeness should be a happy moment, but there is a twinge of sadness here. Though Dr. Bennett Halverson is introduced with a flourish and allowed at least one classic episode almost to herself, we don’t get a chance to see just how great this character could have been. The sense that there was a 500-page story-bible written about her various exploits is there in every scene. Halverson’s unpredictability, impishness and ruthlessness shine through Summer Glau’s most winning performance yet, so much so that we can go from being charmed by her to hating her guts in an instant. Other than Echo, she’s the most complicated character on the show, something made very clear even though her character is disposed of in a hurry, just like the show. You just know her final moment was meant to be a fourth season shocker, something that would have built to an amazing emotional crescendo. Unfortunately, we just a fraction of the ultimate plan. It’s enough to create a strong negative emotion, but still only a ghost of that all-too-familiar Whedon-pain.

8. Vince Howard / Luke Cafferty - Friday Night Lights

Sometimes all it takes for a character to win over an audience is just being a good guy. Not a Nice Guy, but someone who is shy and dopey and overly polite and too sincere for his own good. Luke Cafferty is a slave to his manners, his own worst enemy, a guy who makes a series of stupid mistakes and suffers terribly for them all while trying to do the right thing. Vince Howard is on the knife-edge of taking a wrong turn in his life that he can never return from, all the while knowing what the right choices are. Luckily for them, they’re in a show that has at its core a simple message: you can be better, and you can transcend this. Maybe I instantly loved both characters because they were just regular good guys who refuse to let misfortune grind them down, but I also wonder if I loved them because they enable Coach Taylor to do what he does best: change lives, save young men from the hell of their mistakes, and inspire them to be better people. After all, at its best Friday Night Lights is like uplift-porn.

7. Lucretia – Spartacus: Blood and Sand

In the new age of TV, we demand bad guys who are nuanced and not just evil. Spartacus starts off with a hissable villain in the form of Gaius Claudius Glaber, the legatus who ruins the life of “Spartacus” after our hero dares to question his orders. It’s telling that Glaber then disappears for the majority of the season, to be replaced with the glorious duo of Batiatus and his wife Lucretia. While SoC has long considered John Hannah to be a not-great actor, his work here has prompted a rethink. Nevertheless, as entertaining as the spluttering lanista was, he’s nothing without Lucretia. She works less as a Lady Macbeth and more as an equal, independently following her own plans to aid their political ambitions. What’s best about her — other than Lucy Lawless’ fine work — is that her plans don’t work out as well as she hoped: her “friend” Ilithyia eventually escapes her web of blackmail, and her inevitably doomed love of Gladiator Crixus proves to be just one part of her downfall. It’s that vulnerability and fallibility that makes Lucretia one of the most entertaining bad guys of the year.

6. Troy Barnes – Community

I agonised over which character on Best New Sitcom Community would make the grade here. Someone had to. Creator Dan Harmon did a fantastic job of populating the show with a central cast of memorable characters, and carried that good work through the season by altering relationships and focus to take advantage of growing chemistry and hidden acting strengths. All of the main characters (and secondary characters such as Star-Burns and Dean Pelton) are brilliantly realised, but the most consistently funny member of the core group has to be Troy Barnes, the dopey but good-natured former quarterback who loves Robin Williams, thrives on best friend Abed’s pop-culture savantism (even when he doesn’t quite understand it), has a notable way with words, and can harmonise even while scared of rats. Most importantly, Troy is a great showcase for the amazing Donald Glover, the Spider-Man who sadly never was. His ascent to immense super-stardom begins here.

5. Zoe Graystone – Caprica

Caveats naturally apply here, as of course the character of Zoe Graystone only exists in Caprica for a few minutes before being blasted into smithereens by crazed monotheist terrorists. The “Zoe Graystone” that captured my imagination is a computer extrapolation of metadata turned into a virtual avatar, hooked up to a robot, and then magically transformed into the first Cylon. Perhaps it’s this berserk origin story that makes her so fascinating, as she acts as a futuristic techno-Trinity of Mother, Daughter, and Holy Robot. Perhaps it’s seeing her grow — in the few episodes we got before Syfy maddeningly took the show from our screens — from a clueless, hostile teenager into a confident woman grieving for her own life and desperately trying to escape her physical prison. Mostly it’s because the most complex character in the Caprica-verse is played with such quirky energy by Alessandra Torresani, who drops into the nerd-culture consciousness with a splash and makes a meal of it. If she hadn’t been right for the part, the show would’ve been doomed. Thankfully, she’s perfect.

4. Davis McAlary / Antoine Batiste - Treme

Treme is about a number of things: it’s a critique of the Bush administration’s abandonment of a devastated city; a celebration of American culture and history; an organic musical that lacks the intentional artificiality of Glee; a thesis on the differences between commercial culture and “authentic” artistic endeavour. Most of all, it’s an attempt to document the “feel” of New Orleans, and though Albert Lambreaux’s furious Mardi Gras Indian chief might be the most detailed character in terms of introducing a slice of history that is unfamiliar to mainstream audiences, it’s lovable chancers Antoine and Davis that provide most of the laughs. Their lackadaisical personal lives are contrasted with their loyalty to local history, as Davis battles to preserve something of the town he loves and Antoine just gets on with being an essential part of Jazz culture. They’re also unreliable and shifty, with Antoine’s lovelife and Davis’ questionable appropriation of African-American language and culture being the salt in their sugary personas. They also serve as a subtle comment on race in America: while Antoine struggles, Davis coasts.

3. Raylan Givens – Justified

Shades of Caruso has many criteria for selecting the best and worst characters of the year, but there are some criteria we don’t often mention. One is Outrageous Hottness. I will admit to some weakness on occasion, but only one character made both myself and co-blogger Daisyhellcakes sit up in our chairs and say, “Hello!” Super-cool gunslinger Raylan Givens could turn even an unturnable head with his handsomeness, his pulse-quickening height, his lovely hair, his odd-but-sexy walk, and his excellent hat. Even better, the character is created by Elmore Leonard and is therefore rounded, funny, dark, and mysterious. Timothy Olyphant eschews the glumness of his previous TV character — Deadwood‘s terrifying Sheriff Seth Bullock — but keeps the Western elements. Raylan is a sharp-shooting, quick-witted, no-bullshit hero with terrible arch-enemies, compromised friends, a bad temper, a bit of a problem with drink, and two beautiful women who love him as much as he loves them. Basically, he is AWESOME and everyone who has yet to watch Justified needs to so they can contract Raylan Fever.

2. Lane Pryce – Mad Men

Ah Lane Pryce, let me count the ways that I love thee! SoC was already in the bag for Lane in the third season: his ups and downs in season four confirm the wisdom of our decision. In his first season as a secondary character, Lane is introduced as a stiff British dope who makes his American colleagues uncomfortable. As the season progresses, we see how he becomes won over by the American way of thinking, to the detriment of his marriage. It says a lot about Jared Harris’ wonderful performance that when it seemed he will be transferred from New York to India by his masters in London, we were mortified. Thankfully he is saved by THAT lawnmower, and stays long enough to see his exciting new life in New York jeopardised by PPL’s plans to sell off Sterling Cooper. There’s much to love in the stupendous season finale Sit Down And Have A Seat, but the greatest moment might be Lane turning on his bosses, saving the day and hanging up on them with a cheery “Very good. Happy Christmas!” like a puppet who just cut his strings. It’s an uplifting, delightful scene, and his emerging joie de vivre is infectious.

1. Sue Sylvester – Glee

It’s tempting to forgive all of Glee‘s flaws just because of Jane Lynch, though that would entail a boatload of forgiving. In a regular episode of Fox’s outrageously successful musical, there’s probably about five minutes of Sue Sylvester screentime, on average, and many weeks that five minutes can be enough to make watching the rest of the featherlight chaos worthwhile. Her florid dialogue, abuse of students, and quips about Will Schuester’s hair are comedy gold, but casting the magnificent Jane Lynch was the instant masterstroke. Party Down‘s loss is Ryan Murphy’s gain. Would Glee have any worth without her?  She’s the only reason Shades of Caruso has not yet given up on it. That’s how good she is: she utterly counteracts the considerable suck of the rest of the show. She’s the funniest thing on TV that isn’t in an NBC sitcom, and a source of unending joy. Don’t thank Murphy for it, though. His decision to make her a secret softy — her sister has Downs syndrome, and her interactions with her display a lighter side that no one else ever sees — could have ruined her. The only reason it doesn’t is because Jane Lynch is a comedy master worth approximately 58 Lily Tomlins (I say this as a fan of Lily Tomlin). We’re lucky we get to see her at the top of her game.

Coming up: the worst new characters of the year.

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (30-21)

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The Caruso Awards traditionally occur at the beginning of the new US TV season, which lands a few days into September. I say traditionally, but as ever these awards are being announced a couple of weeks late. Partly this was due to the late finish of the second season of Hung (Shades of Caruso prides itself on being one of the nine or ten internet venues that still cares about that show now that it’s obvious Ray Drecker’s mega-wang isn’t going to be displayed). Mostly it’s because time is tight, and this year —  in which SoC has been on lengthy breaks for long periods — there has been more to write about in order to catch up. Bear in mind, to judge the state of TV more fairly, SoC has seen over thirty shows in their entirety this year. That’s not easy, though thankfully it’s mostly been a blast, despite the best efforts of ABC.

Some of the awards given might seem a little odd, and so clarification is necessary. To qualify for these awards, shows must have finished their current run by the time we publish. This means the fourth season of Mad Men, the second half of the fourth season of The Venture Brothers, and the first season of Rubicon are sadly not eligible for awards, though Mad Men 3 and the first half of Venture Brothers 4 are. Though this means you will have to cast your minds back to last year to remember how great SoC’s pick of Mad Men‘s exceptional third season was, it keeps things in line with previous years. Regrettably — and much to the frustration of SoC co-founder Daisyhellcakes — this means the list will not feature the recently aired episode The Suitcase (aka Elisabeth Moss and Jon Hamm’s award reel), which might represent the pinnacle of Matthew Weiner’s career so far. I’m tempted to add it to the list anyway, but instead will adhere to the other main rule of the Caruso Awards: only one episode from the most recently completed season is eligible.

This might seem arbitrary, but this is to prevent this top thirty from being dominated by most of Mad Men 3, half of Sons of Anarchy 2, and all thirteen episodes of the third season of Breaking Bad — a season of such humbling perfection that the only logical response is genuflection and obnoxious hyperbole, of which this is an example. It’s only fair to give all the shows I’ve watched a chance, meaning even flawed shows like The Vampire Diaries and Glee get a chance at a placing. We aims t’be fair. If I get time I might give some props to other highlights from my favourite shows (God knows I agonised over what were the best episodes from the aforementioned instant classic seasons), though the already ridiculous length of these posts tend to suggest there will be a competition between myself and you, dear reader, for who gets bored first.

And so, with no further ado, here are the episodes ranked 30-21 in SoC’s top thirty of the season. The next two posts will come before the end of the week. Remember, there WILL be spoilers. SPOILERS! Okay? If you see a show listed here that you intend to watch at some point, I’ve tried to be kinda vague but let’s be honest, you shouldn’t know ANYTHING about them. You have been warned. WARNED IN ALL-CAPS!

30: The Vampire Diaries – Founder’s Day

Like an undead O.C., The Vampire Diaries burned through a lot of plot in its first season, which is easy when you happily grab story elements from so many other sources. Though SoC found much of this teenage angstiness rather dreary — not helped by the stultifying blandness of the protagonist — showrunners Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson did an okay job of throwing up cliffhangers strong enough to keep even sceptics tuning in. It’s tempting to criticise the season finale for having the same flaws as the previous episodes, but the various plot strands came together better than expected, and featured a couple of genuine shocks and some unexpected gore. It also deftly set up some intriguing plot threads for next season, including the return of A FACE FROM THE PAST and WEREWOLVES and so on and so forth. It might have been chapter-end-by-numbers, but it rose above its usual level of dull professionalism for a moment, achieving everything you could hope for from a season finale. SoC would be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge that pleasant surprise, and praise the showrunners for spinning out a potentially boring Twilight cash-in into something that will keep us watching for at least another year (especially now ace writers Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain have signed on).

29: Glee - Theatricality

The zeitgeist-hogging breakout hit of the year came, went, and then came again as Fox extended its original run of thirteen episodes with a further nine, meaning the showrunners were forced to undo all of the closure of the original season finale and put the characters through the same old dramas all over again (except this time sans Jessalyn Gilsig, for the most part). The redundancy of much of the show to this point (with the same plots cropping up again and again) dogged this final stretch even more than usual, but one revisit was worthwhile. While the main character conflicts ran in ever-decreasing circles, the side story of Kurt’s attempts to connect with his father hit big here, with a devastatingly performed scene in which Kurt’s father destroys Finn for insulting his son and mocking his sexuality. Even if this arc had seemed to have reached a satisfying conclusion earlier in the season, the showrunners are to be commended for returning to the well if it gives us a moment as cathartic and unexpected as this. Also this episode: the Glee club perform Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance with great verve, and Brittany wears some lobster claws in one of the best sight gags of the year.

28: Persons Unknown – The Way Through

Shades of Caruso attempts to give every show a chance, even when the first few episodes turn out to be underwhelming. A lot of the time our initial bad impressions are correct, but the times we’re proved wrong justify our patience. Then there are the other shows, that intrigue us from the get-go and then turn out to have been a terrible, terrible, oh my so terrible mistake. As much as it seems right to exclude from our list all shows that eventually turn bad, that would be dishonest. This third episode of the NBC mini-series seemed to hit a nice groove of mystery show and political commentary. Our seven captives — trapped in a weird small town by a mysterious antagonist — are beginning to get desperate, resorting to tunneling under the invisible barrier keeping them trapped. When this fails, they end up fighting over three gas-masks, and the true nature of some of the “inmates” comes to light. Not much is given away, but weird sci-fi touches like underground metal barriers and smoke traps mix with unnerving contemporary symbolism — prison motifs and subtle references to Abu Ghraib and torture — to generate a powerful mystery that eventually comes to naught. A shame, but credit where credit is due — up to this point, Persons Unknown captured my imagination.

27. Check It Out with Dr. Steve Brule – Food

For those of us who consider John C. Reilly to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, a performer possessed of astonishing timing that allows him to deliver both normal comedy and grating anti-comedy with perfect judgement — and a fantastic singer into the bargain — this has to be included. Perhaps its greatest achievement is to avoid the hit and miss nature of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job by focusing on just one character, expanding our understanding of the good “Doctor” by showing his interactions with others and placing him in new settings. Anything that gives Reilly more material to work with should be applauded. While later episodes could get bogged down with a single joke stretched beyond humour into the realm of the experimental, this season opener just concentrated on letting Dr. Steve Brule do his thing, which include a humiliating attempt at flirting with a woman who turns out to be his cousin, falling face-first into a cake, and getting territorial with “Dr. Jimmy Brungus”.

26: Human Target – Lockdown

For five episodes Fox’s Human Target provided mild diversion, with DC Comics hero Christopher Chance and his squabbling associates Winston and Guerrero protecting various non-player characters from uninspiring antagonists in a variety of familiar settings. For the sixth episode, with the template of the show established, Human Target began to flex its muscles a little. Ostensibly a hostage rescue plot bolted onto a Die Hard framework, viewers were treated to a slick and exciting forty-five minutes of pure action-movie drama directed with confidence by 24 veteran Jon Cassar, and plotted smartly enough to finally match the plot mechanics with some believable human stakes. Filling the cast out with dependables such as Kevin Weisman, Mitch Pileggi and Autumn Reeser was a great move, but nothing made this episode stand out as much as the imaginative showdown set piece in an elevator, with Mark Valley excelling as a Bourne-style fighting machine. It’s just a really thrilling hour of adventure TV, something that is deceptively hard to do as well as it was done here.

25. Louie - Bully

How odd it feels to praise a sitcom for not being funny. Most episodes of Louie contain at least a few belly laughs (usually during Louis C.K.’s excellent stand-up routines) and quietly amusing “sketch” sequences, but Bully contains almost no jokes, instead spending almost its entire length depicting a single experience, its unexpected aftermath, and then exploring the backstory. Like some weird cross of A History of Violence and James Watkins’ Eden Lake, Bully picks at a modern variation on an age-old fear in fine detail, with Louie — on what seems to be a successful date — unwisely confronting a group of rowdy teenagers, resulting in total humiliation. His date ruined, Louis is inspired to follow his tormentor home. What follows is a long, almost wordless sequence that builds on the horrible, miserable tension of the preceding scene, and culminates in a showdown that ends in an unexpected way. Though the neat answers of the final scenes might be a little trite, it is still an unexpectedly troubling journey into the male psyche, paced with skill by Louis C.K. and beautifully shot by Paul Koestner.

24. Hung - The Middle East is Complicated

The second season of HBO’s likeable comedy was criticised for being unfocused or underpowered, but for this viewer it remained a funny, unpredictable half an hour featuring enough lovable characters that a lack of urgency was not a deal-breaker. This episode appeared to be more chaotic than most, with some highly entertaining work from Anne Heche, Lennie James and Gregg Henry, but under all the comic setpieces and drama there was a very simple through-line: while everything explodes around male prostitute Ray Drecker, he finds the way to endure. At this point in the show’s run Tanya and Lenore’s battle for Ray’s soul (i.e. power over his magical cock) appears to be going in circles, but Ray is given perspective on this when dealing with the differing points of view of his Israeli neighbour and a Lebanese client, who both express disgust over his ignorance of Middle Eastern politics and the origin of hummus. Surrounded by furious mania and cyclical conflict, Ray retreats to a safe position, and thus finds a way to make his prostitution work: removing his prejudices and loyalties from the equation in order to satisfy the person he is with: the prostitutional equivalent of Switzerland, a safe haven for those who need him. Thomas Jane’s final scene, with him reassuring guest star Merrin Dungey that he was on her side, was well-earned, well-played, and particularly satisfying.

23: Doctor Who – The Beast Below

It was all change on Doctor Who this year. The busy but entertaining season premiere did a terrific job of introducing super-likeable new Doctor Matt Smith. It also gave us Amy Pond, who — as an entirely new character — had more to prove. This episode gave us the best example of her pluck, evading mysterious Smilers and saving the day despite the Doctor having a hissy-fit about how crap humans are. Considering how rarely he did that during Russell T. Davies’ tenure as showrunner, this return to curmudgeonliness was more than welcome, as was Amy’s heroic act. Partially because she saves the day, saves the space whale (no news if it is related to Spacey the Space Whale from Torchwood‘s execrable Meat), and earns a Golden Ticket to Doctor Wonka’s Adventure Factory, but mostly because she actually terminates the monarchy on Starship UK. An anti-monarchy message in a children’s TV show? Add to that the nifty political satire earlier in the episode, where Amy blindly votes at random and has no recollection of her decision-making process — bold of Steven Moffat to suggest the British people are being bamboozled by political messages that cloud their judgement — and you get an unusually acidic episode of Who. It was also the last time we would like Amy Pond. More on that later.

22. The IT Crowd – Italian For Beginners

The latest season of The IT Crowd was arguably the best yet, possibly a consequence of Matt Berry getting more screentime as Douglas Reynholm. It’s also great that the show seems more confident about keeping the characters apart in their own plots, with only the slightest hint that they might coalesce at the end. Linehan’s love of the absurd is tonally different enough from Larry David’s approach (rooted more in uncomfortable truths in the real world) that his love of Seinfeld is only occasionally obvious, but here he gets to show off his understanding of Seinfeldian-structure with several joyous flourishes, especially the way he sets up Moss’s fear of childbirth and the IT-Crowd-niverse’s iPhone fixation with sly jokes in the first act before paying them off with a wonderful unifying set-piece in Namco. However, the episode’s crowning glory might be his brilliant fusing of Linehanian madness and LarryDavidian* observational cringe-humour in the sub-plot featuring Roy’s girlfriend, orphaned when her parents died in an inexplicable and surreal accident that possesses him in the same way a UFO sighting drove poor Roy Neary crazy in Close Encounters. It’s a sub-plot fit to sit alongside those of Linehan’s comedy idols.

*I’ll stop that now.

21. The Office – Niagara

I was dreading it. One of my least favourite episodes of The Office was Phyllis’ Wedding, but only because Michael Scott crossed so many lines in his desperate need to be the centre of attention that he became utterly unlikeable. Of course that was the point, but the rage his solipsism induced is no less vivid. For a few episodes after it was hard to see him as a silly oaf and not as a spoilt and spiteful child prone to unforgivable tantrums. The Office is not in the habit of retconning this behaviour, so there was no chance Michael wouldn’t attempt to hijack Jim and Pam’s wedding. Thankfully everyone got to have their cake and eat it. Even though Michael and the rest of the Dunder Mifflin team do indeed take over the ceremony by doing an imitation of the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video that colonised the Internet last year, the showrunners knew to give Jim possibly his finest moment yet — anticipating this display and organising a different marriage ceremony for him and Pam on the Maid of the Mists. It’s a funny episode all round, and has some clever plot developments (not least Dwight and Michael’s romantic successes), but it’s the glorious shot of the newly-betrothed couple – in full wedding gear - on the deck of that boat that sets this episode miles (and miles and miles and miles) apart from the rest of the season.

More unsettling enthusiasm to come…

Emulate The Blessed DJ

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For the first time in a couple of years, it seems we’ve taken a break from music gaming. With much of our spare time used up on TV shows that are failing to live up to their potential, attending the London Film Festival and having to brave the mosh-pit-simulator that is Leicester Square, or tweeting until 2 in the morning, we’ve not spent much time on Rock Band. Even The Beatles: Rock Band — a game I’ve been going on about for a while — only got a few hours of play, partially because we’ve not had a chance to use the extra mics we bought, and partially because while it’s been fun learning more about the band, it’s been less fun playing Paul’s songs.

macca

He seems to be a kickass bass player, but his songs are the worst kind of mawkish tripe. I mean, Hello Goodbye has nineteen actual words in it (not counting the three nonsense words at the end), repeated over and over again in combinations of varying meaning but persistent insignificance. This Spitting Image sketch once struck me as cruel, but no longer:

Luckily, with other songs, The Beatles: Rock Band has done exactly what I had hoped: given me a better understanding of the appeal of the Fab Four. The unbearable repetition of their songs on the radio during my childhood was enough to create a mental block between me and the band, but that Rock Band magic has worked again, with the interaction between the player and the song breaking down that mental barrier so that I can finally get “into” the songs to experience their beautiful structure. McCartney’s bass lines are surprisingly complex, Ringo’s drumming occasionally much stronger than myth would have have it, and the songs by Lennon and Harrison are all inspiring and complex. Simultaneously playing guitar and singing on Here Comes the Sun is guaranteed to cheer me up.

And yet we’ve let it gather dust for now, and even Rock Band itself has been played infrequently. This, despite the recent DLC addition of ten Queen songs, including Under Pressure and Somebody To Love (my two favourite Queen tracks), a Raconteurs track-pack, and The Metal by Tenacious D (previously on Guitar Hero 3 but now given full Rock Band attention). This busy-ness — plus lack of funds — means I’ve paid little attention to the forthcoming release of Activision’s DJ Hero, which is expensive, potentially time-consuming, and based on dance music. As I have little interest in dance music or culture, this indifference was inevitable, but the real killing blow was the baffling gameplay videos (here’s one)…

…and the perplexing turntable peripheral. The actual experience of using the peripheral and seeing your actions keep the song going are not adequately conveyed by the information given out thus far. The Rock Band and Guitar Hero controllers are pretty self-explanatory. Strum, hit and bellow, and the lights on the screen do the happy thing yay. In contrast, how does that turntable controller enable you to do the things on the screen? It made no sense to me. Until today.

controller

An impulsive trip to my local branch of Game paid off nicely this morning. The turntable controller had been set-up with a demo of DJ Hero, and no one else in the shop seemed even slightly interested. Maybe it was that alienating peripheral, with its peculiar buttons and knobs. Whereas my first try at Guitar Hero 2 had been intuitive, here I had to go through a series of tutorials hosted by Grandmaster Flash which quickly explained the basics of the game with enormous enthusiasm. Following that were three easy game tracks: Marvin Gaye – “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” vs. Gorillaz – “Feel Good Inc.”, Gwen Stefani – “Hollaback Girl” vs. Rick James – “Give It To Me”, and Black Eyed Peas – “Boom Boom Pow” vs. Benny Benassi – “Satisfaction”. Either the songs got easier as I went along, or the learning curve has been worked out well, as I went from three stars on track one to four on track two and five on the last one. In Easy mode there is no cross-fading or complicated scratching. You just push the buttons when necessary and half-ass the scratching. Simple.

Well, simple-ish. The scratching is not as easy as I’d hoped. For a start you’re supposed to let go of the button as soon as the scratching symbols have passed through the active area on screen, but if you’re holding the button and using that for leverage you can’t let go without the turntable getting away from you: disastrous if another scratch symbol is coming up. The other problem is caused by physics. Scratching while holding down the green button is easy enough as it is at the edge of the circular turntable, but the blue button is nearer the center, so it’s harder to push and pull the circle around, thanks to Pi or some other geometry thing. My struggles with Blue Scratching rocked the display around enough to attract the unhappy-seeming attentions of the shop owner. This was not good: he is so grizzled and rugged that I suspect he is actually the Authentic Battle Damage version of some other guy.

screenshot

Even more annoying, the cross-fader switch has three positions, but the default position in the middle is very tough to hit. There is a slight click when you get it into position, but when swiping back and forth quickly, it’s easy to go too far without feeling that tactile reminder. I suspect this is something that will become second nature in time, but on advanced levels, with rapid cross-fader spikes zipping around, there will be many points lost, and much frustration added. A stronger bit of feedback from the controller would have really helped. I would also have liked to know what the purpose of the middle “effects” button is. As far as I could tell it was there to send out the odd “ZORB!” sound when pushed. The effects dial allows you to change the effect, so for a while there I was sending out a series of ear-scritching “PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW” sounds that made the entire shop’s energy turn against me. It was much more fun during the third song, where pressing the middle button makes an androidal lady intone “Sat-is. Fack. Shun” over and over again. No one seemed to mind that as much.

Other than choosing lasers over booms, the basic tutorial didn’t give a hint as to what the effects dial does, but apparently you use this in the same way you use the Whammy Bar on a Rock Band/Guitar Hero controller, to “customise” the sound on screen. As with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, all this pointless distortion does is ruin the song, and from what I can tell from other tutorials posted on YouTube, it doesn’t even serve a purpose with charging up the “Euphoria” bar. Maybe it does and we’re not privvy to that info just yet, but the Whammy Bar at least allows you to gain more Star Power / Overdrive points if you rattle it around as hard as you can, further ruining the song you’re playing.

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As for Euphoria, it doubles multipliers just like with the rock games, but it doesn’t generate the sense of satisfaction you get in the rock games. Star Power or Overdrive are triggered by the Guitar Neck Tilt Move, the Drum Fill Move, or the Eccentric Microphone Scat Singing Move, which effectively — and entertainingly — mimic the show-off actions of a typical rock douche. Triggering this score multiplying mode by just pushing a button lacks that translation of action and effect that makes Rock Band and Guitar Hero feel even more like a replication of the live music experience. That said, how could DJ Hero trigger Euphoria otherwise? Have you wave a Wii-mote style Glowstick peripheral over your head? Require you to chew on an E peripheral? There’s no easy way around it, I guess.

Though the display had a guitar controller hooked up to it for the DJ Hero/Guitar Hero mash-up game mode, there was no one around to play it with. The shop owner was too busy giving me stinkeye, and the four kids who congregated behind me to watch as I demolished Benny Benassi’s infectious monstrosity looked too scared of the flashing lights and raving avatars to join in. (It was definitely the game that scared them. Not me. Honest.) I guess that co-op mode would be a lot of fun, and would probably be the thing that tips me over into buying the game, but I note that the only other party gameplay modes are just using multiple turntables to battle against each other. That made sense back in the days when the only peripherals around were guitars, so you could have boring face-offs in Guitar Hero 3 (no amount of complicated Snapped String weaponry could make that mode any less of a failure), but here it shows up the biggest problem with DJ Hero: it might be a great solo player game, and it might be an even more entertaining turntable/guitar co-op game, but it will never be able to replicate that amazing four-player co-op that makes Rock Band the best party game in the world.

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It has been proven again and again that if you get a large enough group of people into a room and start playing Rock Band at midday, you will still be going at midnight with only the occasional break to eat Pringles. DJ Hero isn’t going to have that, and it isn’t going to have that instant click of cognitive understanding that Guitar Hero and Rock Band has. Once you get going on DJ Hero, it’s enormous fun. The demo I played was way way way too short, and I’m sure I would’ve stayed there all day if I’d had the chance. It even made me tap my foot, which is a big deal for someone as dance-averse as me, no counting that Megadog/Eat Static gig I went to that very very nearly converted me to rave culture because it was so fucking out-of-the-body AWESOME to the extent that even to this day I’m convinced someone slipped me a mickey early in the night and had a right old laugh watching me stomp around the dance-floor like a malfunctioning Cyberman. However, I’m not sure that’s enough. When I win the lottery, I’ll get it. Until then, maybe I should go and practice Fat Bottomed Girls, now that I’ve paid for it an’ all.