The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The First
Yesterday I announced the commencement of the Caruso TV Awards for the period between September 2010 and the beginning of October 2011, with a temporary lifting of my usual rule about not judging shows that haven’t finished their run by then. Thanks for starting Breaking Bad so late in the year, AMC. In that post I said I was going to go easy on shows I didn’t like, and the response was surprising. Turns out many think that’s a cop-out, or a disappointment. @Daisyhellcakes passionately argued that I should have the courage of my convictions. Friend-of-the-blog and excellent fellow @cockbongo was more direct.
Well, these Lessons posts are long and filled with all sorts of vitriolic complaining, so rejoice, those who thought I was going to be too nice! The difference here is that with a bit more room to explain myself, I can hopefully avoid the charge of just being a guy throwing stinkbombs at TV shows. I mean, yeah, I still am, I guess. But I also go on and on for literally thousands of words, and those thousands of words are a buffer between me and the possibility of coming off like the guy on the bottom half of the Internet who trolls for kicks. So, with no further ado, I finally deactivate my Caveat-O-Matic 3000 and just get on with it.
Be careful not to write your characters as idiots for the sake of convenience
One of the best lessons imparted by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan in recent interviews (e.g. this one), shows how his magnificent creation manages to keep the audience on the edge of its seat, and how it finds new ways to jeopardise its protagonists each week; he intentionally forces his characters into a corner, and then makes them escape their fates using any means necessary. It helps that he has two main characters — Walt and Jesse — who are among the finest in fiction. They’re complex, relatable and — despite their awful flaws and multiple moral failings — sympathetic, simply because we can see through their eyes and understand what needs to be done to survive.
On a lesser show such as Dexter, our cuddly serial killer hero is painted into the same corner each season — his secret is about to be revealed, and the only way he can survive is to kill an innocent or a loved one — and is saved each year by pure fluke, deus ex machina, or the superior, unambiguous and often horribly overplayed evil of others. What’s more annoying is that the only way to get him into trouble is to temporarily make him stupid; a crime considering the show has been running for five years and makes a point of how professional and methodical he is.
The fifth season deserves some credit for coming up with new ways to dumb him down (giving him a crazed “partner”, the death of his wife messing with his head), but there are still a handful of moments where he conveniently drops 50 IQ points just to generate false drama. Also connected to this is the way Rita’s children are conveniently written out of the show early on just to ensure Dexter can get it on with Lumen. Bringing his step-daughter Astor back for one episode was actually the highlight of the season, precisely because it generated real complication and, in its resolution, real growth for Dexter.
Perhaps the worst offender for creating intentionally dumb characters is TNT’s militia-vs-alien drama Falling Skies. Note the incredible stupidity of the freedom-fighting 2nd Mass, who have in their ranks a young boy who has been rescued from the alien invaders who have taken control of Earth. On his back is a Harness; a creepy biomech thingy (designed by the remarkable Rob McCallum) that has attached itself to his spine so that he can be controlled by the aliens. Even after it is removed he continues to act as if he’s under the aliens’ control, talking in a monotone and referring to humans as “Them”. This zombie-like behaviour, with ominous staring and plodding footsteps, goes on for five episodes before anyone twigs that he’s not to be trusted.
Even better is when they capture an alien weapon and promptly dismantle it instead of using it. Pope — the Ham Tyler of the show — seems proud of this, and never thinks the weapon might be useful. It takes a child to suggest using it against the alien invaders. It takes about three episodes for this kid to drop some wisdom on the idiot freedom fighters. The show is littered with conveniently dense characters, as this was the only way to drag three episodes’ worth of story out to ten. See also Torchwood: Miracle Day, V, Camelot, No Ordinary Family (in which, at one point, a villain kills off her powerful mind-controlling minion in order to clear the way for some guy with claws, because claws beats mind-control every time, apparently), etc.
Don’t waste our time by retelling the same stories or using the same tricks each week
Oh, The Killing. If only we could have captured the negative energy you created with THAT finale. Goodbye oil, goodbye gas, goodbye windfarms and solar energy and biodiesel. Hello limitless energy, with the only waste product the occasional expression of dismay from our exhausts; roads lined with cars belching out, “worst red herrings ever,” “relentless one-note tone,” “bog-standard police procedural with delusions of grandeur,” ”Michelle Forbes was quite good though.”
There isn’t much more that can be said about Veena Sud’s remake of Forbrydelsen; SoC was as frustrated as almost everyone else with the season’s open ending, though its reliance on red herrings was the absolute worst things about this first season. The moment when Rosie Larsen’s best friend Sterling Fitch reveals that a nosebleed was responsible for turning the school’s basement into what looked like an abattoir was when the show fell into a hole, never to be recovered. The Muslim “kidnap room” and the presence of paint stripper in poor Bennet Ahmed’s house were further insults. Even the hope that a plot about the disappearance of a Muslim girl might allow the show to touch on racism in the media and the police force was foolish; it was another red herring. This was not a bold new storytelling experience. It was a merry-go-round covered in crimson fish guts.
The anger is still fresh for those of us who got burned, but it’s not the only show wasting our time with dead-ends. Dexter has been telling the same story every year with almost no change. Killing Rita off at the end of season 4 is the boldest thing the show has done, but by the end of the fifth he’s still the same guy; a serial killer trying to come to terms with his feelings about the people around him while hiding his true nature and delivering endless voiceovers that give away everything about his inner life. It’s Groundhog Day for people who read those tacky inserts about Fred West in Sunday tabloids.
Doctor Who‘s long-arc game has also alienated me, but this is partially a fault of mine. After watching it for so long, the endless running, the gabbled dialogue and that cacophonous, distracting soundtrack have worn my patience thin. The last four episodes of the season sat unwatched on my PVR until yesterday; after years of enthusiasm I suddenly had no real urge to put myself through yet more unattractive pouting from Amy, or dopey-faced clowning from Rory. Matt Smith’s Doctor is delightful, but everything else has worn me down.
Part of that is the feeling of deja vu wafting from it. Whenever Steven Moffat’s name is on the script the show becomes a riot of imagination, with a brightness to the dialogue that makes it feel like nothing else. The rest of the time (or at least a lot of the time) there’s just more dialogue, as if the cumulative braininess of Moffat’s less frenetic interactions can only be matched with ten times as many lines, each with a lower individual IQ. As Moffat can’t write everything, the show falls into a rut with the Doctor rattling off comments as if he’s having an argument with himself, while Amy and Rory stand there looking frozen.
What’s worse is that despite the enormous blank canvas offered by the show (taking into account budgetary concerns, of course), too many plots or plot elements are recycled. Two episodes in the recent half-season featured characters miniaturised and sucked into a hostile environment; what’s worse, those two episodes aired back-to-back. Too often now the Monster-Of-The-Week is actually some poor pitiful creature who is misunderstood and needs the Doctor’s help. Fair enough, it’s a kid’s show, and you can’t have truly vicious enemies in it, but with The Silence’s motivations kept mysterious, the show now lacks menace; creepy, over-directed atmospherics are not a suitable substitute.
As I said, much of it is still fine. The finales of this split season were enormous fun, and some episodes did a great job of dramatising the Doctor’s increasingly depressed state. For example, Toby Whithouse’s The God Complex did a much better job of showing the Doctor’s growing sense of unease with his effect on the ones he loves than Moffat’s A Good Man Goes To War with all of its nonsense about the Doctor being a bad man. Nevertheless, the show has begun to lose its appeal, at least for this viewer, simply because it seems to have used a number of lovely, distracting enhancements to make it look like the show has a number of tricks up its sleeve when in fact it only has that handkerchief illusion and a dog-eared Ace of Diamonds.
Even if you’ve got a good finale, the show still needs some meat in the weeks before that
This is a problem that has taxed the patience of SoC for many a year, but this year it started to affect good shows as well as bad. V, Heroes and FlashForward are perfect examples of shows that plotted for a finale, meaning there were weeks where nothing happened; a week of potentially diverting drama sacrificed to protect the sanctity of the blowout finale. Of course there are bound to be slow weeks in any drama; even the best show on TV – Breaking Bad – has episodes that “merely” move pieces into place, set the tone for the season, or resolve the events of a previous episode. There’s also Treme, a show which makes a show of doing as little as possible for an entire season, but as it places a premium on mood instead of plot, that’s forgivable.
Network shows are particularly bad for treading water, but this year even SoC favourites like Sons of Anarchy, or highly anticipated prestige shows such as Boardwalk Empire or The Killing, misjudged their pacing. Sons was particularly disappointing. The first two seasons moved like freight trains, but showrunner Kurt Sutter’s experiment with a slow pace ended up alienating many fans, all of whom he then called very bad names. Do you realise the risk SoC is taking by daring to criticise his show? We really liked the finale, Mr. Sutter sir! Please don’t call me a douchehole.
Anyway, that was still preferable to Boardwalk Empire‘s amble toward a finale that underwhelmed, with only the occasional surprise to enliven a journey which seemed to be mostly made up of simmering resentment between couples and glowering from Michaels Shannon and K. Williams. When the show woke up it was riveting, but too much of it was spent reiterating the show’s theme as explained by Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson – “We all have to decide how much sin we can live with”. That was a point that could have been made definitively and then abandoned halfway through the season, but the games played between Nucky and Margaret Shroeder covered this ground until the grass was tramped flat and the soil turned to mud.
The Killing was the worst of all. To keep the show going for thirteen weeks it had to employ tricks to deceive the audience; red herrings and deceptions of such transparent stupidity that the viewers rose in furious anger and smited showrunner Veena Sud with anonymous complaints on the internet. Unfortunately no one realised that this form of attack, which is potent against normal showrunners, is actually some form of psychic sustenance for Sud, who reacted with remarkable confidence considering everyone who saw that FUCKING finale thought it was the worst thing in the world since people dancing in Star Trek movies.
Compare those shows to some of the best examples of season-arc pacing of the year. The Good Wife and The Vampire Diaries both split their long seasons up with smaller arcs, allowing them to rattle through plot at a clip while never losing momentum or running out of things to say. Their last episodes were as good as the ones at the start; that consistency is a marvel worthy of emulation. Nevertheless, even that kind of construction can go wrong. Doctor Who‘s split season led to a deflation of what little pace had built up when the show wasn’t dicking about with pirates and suchlike.
Build your seasons with multiple pay-offs, is what I’m saying. Be prepared to race through the plots quickly; there’s a good chance the complexity this creates will give you even more dramatic opportunities. Look at Breaking Bad (again). In season three the Big Bads (The Cousins) were originally meant to last all season, but Vince Gilligan realised it was probably a good idea not to waste time by keeping them out of the action for too long just to create a contrived final showdown. The result was the best season of TV between 2009-2010, and arguably the best season of TV in history.
Okay, thanks for reading this far. More to come as the week progresses.
The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Why I Won’t Name Individual Worst Episodes This Year
For the last few years, the Caruso Awards have been presented with great pomp and fanfare to not only the best episodes of the TV year, but also the worst, which has been bad news for Torchwood, Heroes and Dexter. These awards have been given in a spirit of annoyance at wasted opportunities, laziness, or simple bone-headed stupidity. At the point of writing, I would feel a horrible, cathartic pleasure in having a dig at shows I thought deserved little pity, kicking them with hob-nailed boots of condensed supermeanness. As has been said in the past, rave reviews are difficult to write, but drubbings are fun.
This year will have to be different. A crisis of conscience has come over me, mostly because of the humanising nature of Twitter. Conversations with creators have made me question whether it’s fair to call out shows for being terrible when it has become clear to me that they are often initially realised with the best of intentions, but are compromised on the way to the screen. It’s a rare British writer who doesn’t have some horror story about how they had written something with one intent only to see it mangled and altered by interfering hands by the time it has reached the screen, usually by adding needless exposition, or the musical equivalent of seventeen soundtracks played simultaneously.
Other times a show can be aimed at a demographic that I am never going to be able to empathise with; I may have found No Ordinary Family a poorly-plotted padding-heavy waste of time for the most part (with some caveats), but it’s not really meant for me. It might be about superheroes, but it’s aimed at family audiences. It’s intentionally light and silly and undemanding. Hating it for those reasons is pointless (though hating it for being very often dull and filled with desperate nerd-pandering cameos is fine, I reckon).
Even worse when something I genuinely think is appalling on every level – i.e. Torchwood: Miracle Day – features one of my all-time writing heroes as an executive producer and writer. Jane Espenson has long been one of my idols, with credits on some of the best episodes of my favourite shows. Just this year she scripted a very satisfying episode of Game of Thrones (The Golden Crown), and was also credited on the delayed finale of Caprica. As ever, her work is entertaining, smart, unpredictable, and tight as a drum. It’s a joy to watch almost anything she has worked on.
And yet Torchwood: Miracle Day is arguably the low-point of the TV season. As much as I would love to jump on a single episode and see why I think it failed, I’m conflicted about directing any blame at Ms. Espenson. Her efforts to livetweet the UK broadcast of the show, while being bombarded with negative, aggressive tweets insulting her for “ruining” the show (impossible, as it has always been wretched), have made me respect her even more. Even this paragraph, noting my longstanding dislike of the programme, makes me feel bad. Why would I want to pile on her when she’s already had to put up with a ton of abuse?
My urge to snipe has been affected by other factors. Earlier this year a friend of the blog — a writer I consider to be a bit of a genius — wrote a funny article about British TV shows for A Newspaper that prompted the creator of one of those shows to react in an incredibly hostile and petty manner on Twitter. I won’t name names, as I don’t know if there was anything else going on there. Perhaps there was some DM conversation; for all I know, the feud has been laid to rest, and I don’t want to stir anything up.
Nevertheless, a show connected to this angry creator was a definite candidate for inclusion on my now-aborted list. After seeing his behaviour, the thought of sitting through that show’s entire run nauseated me; as far as I’m concerned, the output of that person’s production company is now and forever boycotted by me. I will have no truck with bullying, no matter how aggrieved the bully feels they are. How can I ever watch these shows with an open mind? I’m only ever going to be looking for flaws, which doesn’t help anyone.
More importantly — and I say this with a very heavy heart — I will regretfully admit I didn’t want to incur his considerable wrath, just in case he comes across this blog thanks to the joys of Google Alerts and/or Twitter Search (a function that led to my unfortunate run-in with a writer/actor earlier this year). Cowardly? You betcha. Even worse, another screenwriter I recently began to follow tweeted that anyone who ever wants to get into TV should never ever blog about the subject because that’s their career opportunities up in smoke.
A debate between writers ensued; some saying that constructive or detailed criticism is valid, while anyone engaged in negative whining with no content other than “this sucks” was doomed. Do I want to write for TV? Shit, I want to write for everything. I still hope that one day I’ll get to finish the Altered States musical/opera I’m always joking about. I want to write. That is the dream, be it writing novels, comics, screenplays, teleplays, radio plays, critiques for newspapers or magazines, an opera in which I try to rhyme “ischemic attack” with “monkey on my back”, even.
Should I really narrow down my options now, just to garner page hits that might or might not further my career? I’m not getting paid for this, after all. I use the blog as a way to work out my thoughts about what constitutes good and bad writing and directing. Trying to understand why V is terrible but Caprica is stimulating, or why Alphas was a pleasant surprise and Boardwalk Empire was such a disappointment, is all done in aid of my own work. Everything I’ve written off-blog since starting the Shades of Caruso Project has been informed by the observations I’ve made.
And so my customary Worst Episodes list will not happen this year, for all the reasons listed above. However, I’ve spent a lot of time this year watching some pretty crummy stuff, and engaging with even this dreck has taught me some lessons about storytelling, and how the audience relates to it. And so, to justify all of those hours watching Glee and the AMC remake of The Killing (for example), over the next few days I plan on writing about some of the things I think I’ve learned from watching bad TV this year.
Many of the lessons will appear obvious to most; some of them will seem awfully petty. Nevertheless, at some point in the past year these are the things that have informed my own writing, and my own theories about effective storytelling. I just hope I can do it without picking on individuals; my criticism is directed more at general misguided ideas that might have seemed right initially, but turned out to have been wrong in the long run. To any creators I diss during the next few days, it’s nothing personal.
The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: Best and Worst New Shows of the Year
We’re still going, even though my attention has been completely taken over by the London Film Festival (one film down so far! Gillian Wearing’s Self-Made, a fascinating experimental movie that explores the lines drawn between reality and fiction, emotional truth and manipulation, and the way we create the narratives of our own lives. Proper brain food). The shows here are the ones that started this year and generated the strongest responses in me. The three good shows are almost tied for Best New Show, but I had to make a decision, and I think the right one won out. It’s made me easily as happy as my favourite new show of last year (Sons of Anarchy, which had a second season that dwarfed the first: not an easy task), and has already become the show I would most miss if it were cancelled. The bad shows, on the other hand, made me livid. The visceral response I got from my least favourite new show of this year was actually scary.
Best New Show: Community
One consequence of watching more shows this year is that I ended up seeing many more good shows. And yes, many more bad ones too, but let’s accentuate the positive for a moment. The Golden Age of TV got significantly goldener this year, and even though we lost some great shows, we got many more back. For how long, we do not know. Justified and Spartacus are popular enough that they’ll be around for a while, as is the case with BBC’s Sherlock and Channel 4′s Misfits. Caprica looks doomed, sadly, with its recent return to Syfy being a bit of a ratings disaster. It’ll be a one season show unless it magically picks up, but I don’t see how that can happen. My favourite new show of the year, the one that just pips the other fantastic new offerings, is in a pickle. Is Community going to stick around? Will its average ratings be enough for a show-starved NBC to stick with it? Or is the mainstream critical apathy (as evidenced by a sickening Emmy shut-out) a sign that we won’t even get to see the main characters graduate?
At least Community has already had a better run than the Greatest Non-Picked-Up Pilot Of All Time, Dan Harmon’s infamous Heat Vision and Jack. We can be thankful for that, but for those of us who have fallen in love with Community‘s ability to be a sitcom, a spoof of the sitcom genre, a celebratory pop-culture melting-pot and — with the addition of superb commentaries from creator Harmon — a dissection of comedy and storytelling, the attentions of the Cancellation Bear are not welcome. Nevertheless, I suspect Community‘s greatest moment is yet to come, and it will keep gathering in-show momentum the same way 30 Rock has. That show started out wacky and has now become it’s own mini-universe, with its own laws and common elements. Watching first season episodes of that show is discombobulating now: it has turned up the volume on its comedic voice so much that the first eleven episodes look positively humdrum. That’s inevitable: perfect examples include The Simpsons, The Office, etc. 30 Rock showed there was a way to make sure this escalation of boldness didn’t alienate fans: start out weird. Of course, fans did eventually rebel, but it held that traditional rattle-throwing nonsense off for three seasons before everyone turned on it, which is ironic as season four of 30 Rock is arguably the strongest yet. My theory on that rift between show and audience is a post for another day…
I remembered Community‘s pilot as being very broad and unafraid to be quirky, but rewatching it this week (thanks to Daisyhellcakes’ super-thoughtful birthday present: the first season boxset with tons of great bells and whistles, boxset fans), it seemed so placid compared to what follows. What’s most notable about the triumphant first season of Community is that even as the comedy becomes crazier and bolder, the characters hold true throughout. The final episode’s bombshells with Jeff, Britta and Annie are proper WTF shockers that have an emotional punch, enough that some fans were outraged (those complaints were brilliantly answered in the superb season two opener, but we’re focusing on season one here).
A common complaint about Community is that it is all about the hipster sneering and not about people, but I think that’s the most wrong thing ever said on the Internet. The ENTIRE Internet, which was, at last count, 99.9999999999999% wrong. It’s so wrong it very nearly negates the concept of Truth with the gravitational strength of its inaccuracy. The characters are heightened, peculiar, set in a world that doesn’t quite work in our own, but they’re still people who want the things we want, and get hurt the way we do. Their ups and downs, discoveries and resolutions still mean something, even when we’re presented by insane paintball competitions run riot, a sports mascot that is the stuff of nightmares, or a chicken-fingers racket that plays out like the plot of Goodfellas (complete with Layla-piano-moment). The characters still speak to us, no matter what is going on. They’re the framework for the show, well-drawn enough to make it an essential watch. They’re recognisable but not cliched: they couldn’t be more different from the crude stereotypes of many sitcoms (e.g. Modern Family), and manage to be unpredictable but consistently written and performed.
Nevertheless, its the events that are placed on the character-frame that make me love Community as if it had been on the air for years. The joy of it is that you never know what is going to come next. The confidence of the showrunners is incredible. Most other sitcoms on TV either play it safe (e.g. Modern Family), or misjudge their own tone and stretch the credibility they have previously set up (e.g. The Office), but Community is perfectly constructed to allow for any oddness to come along. With such a diverse set of main characters you’re already able to spin out situations that you would never normally get on TV (e.g. a young Muslim man with Aspergers reconnecting with his father by manipulating two of his friends into acting like two uncaring parents and then making a terrible movie which turns out to be about his parents’ divorce), but even better there are a growing set of secondary characters to enjoy. The best example of that might be nervy, enthusiastic Dean Pelton, with his fear of being seen as politically incorrect. He’s one of the most enjoyable comic creations on TV in years: kudos to Jim Rash, who is magnificent in the role.
It’s obvious it isn’t for everyone: the weird war between Community‘s fans and Modern Family‘s fans shows that. But whereas Modern Family‘s fans might see their favoured show as a well-constructed gag machine based on a very specific sitcom template that has been a staple since the beginning of the form, Community takes that as a starting point and runs off in a completely different direction. It has the same sentimentality as Modern Family, but is not as cloying, and those moments are earned instead of introduced at the format-mandated moment because of Reason X. It manages to comment on who we are as a culture with a confidence and playfulness that Modern Family often cannot due to format and tonal restrictions. It looks fresh, going for cinematic confidence over the increasingly tired faux-documentary format. It speaks to those who revel in popular culture, instead of those who don’t have time for it.
It’s vibrant, imaginative, unpredictable, and buzzes with the sense that it is new, all while picking apart the format it has grown out of, adhering to its rules just enough to be able to break them where necessary. It’s the best new sitcom of the season, the best show of the season, and one of the cultural events of the past 12 months. I urge you all to watch it so my obsession doesn’t isolate me completely from polite society.
Best Pilot: Justified – Fire in the Hole
It’s almost a shame when a show has a really great pilot. Last year Kings started off so well that it could only disappoint after: the showrunners deserve praise for keeping that disappointment to a minimum, and delivering a show that was still superior to almost every other show on network TV. Justified landed with such a satisfying thump — with the mesmerising short story adaptation Fire in the Hole: have the short story on me and Harper Collins — that it was tempting to not bother watching the rest of the season just in case it ended up becoming a disappointment. Much of the Internet chatter following its broadcast became a debate about whether it would be a procedural or a serialised long-form narrative, as if this was the difference between good and bad.
As I’ve mentioned before, if it had become a procedural it would still have been great, as its main asset was the fealty to the sassy, laidback tone of Elmore Leonard’s best work, and its fascination both with the protagonist and his various nemeses. The pilot set up the show with impressive skill. Within three minutes of it starting, we’d seen Raylan Givens meet his arch-enemy, shoot him to death, and get transferred back home against his will in order to avoid retaliation from his enemy’ employers. That’s the set-up of the entire series right there: after that thrilling download of information — as elegant and exciting a burst of exposition as you’ll ever see — the rest of the pilot is about establishing the supporting cast (some of whom disappear a few episodes later) and giving you a sense of who this attractive gunslinger really is.
Part of the joy of the pilot is revelling in the perfect casting. Timothy Olyphant’s emergence as possibly the most charming man on TV — as opposed to one of the scariest, as seen in Deadwood – is one of the biggest factors in Justified‘s success, but we shouldn’t forget that he shares screentime with terrific character actors such as Nick Searcy and Natalie Zea, not to mention SoC favourite Walton “Shane from The Shield” Goggins, cementing his reputation as an acting colossus. Later episodes would feature performances from Alan Ruck, Rick Gomez, Jere Burns, M.C. Gainey, W. Earl Brown, and Raymond J. Barry, but the core cast was already strong. I’d like to add fellow “main” characters Tim Gutterson and Rachel Brooks (Jacob Pitts and Erica Tazel), but they have almost nothing to do after the pilot. Goes to show how drastically a show can change in mid-stream, though that fact doesn’t ruin the pilot: they’re introduced with the same deftness as everyone else, so it’s not as if any time was wasted.
The key to its success, though, was the effortless pacing. For much of its running time Fire In The Hole seems to be going nowhere, as Raylan catches up with figures from his past, getting into theological debates with Boyd Crowder and emitting TV-scorching sexual chemistry with childhood sweetheart Ava Crowder. Nevertheless, there is a constant stream of relevant information in every moment, but you don’t even notice it because of the snappy dialogue and mastery of tone. It’s shocking when these seemingly lackadaisical events coalesce into the last-act shoot-outs, but when they arrive they’re exciting, well-shot by director Michael Dinner, and cleverly reveal that these seemingly dopey Southern law enforcers are actually a band of badass warriors. Our preconceptions are brilliantly scuttled in a tense ambush in the final act, as Mullen and Brooks take down some neo-Nazis, giving Raylan a chance to save the girl who, of course, does a very good job of looking after herself most of the time.
The one big flaw of the pilot is that it looks like the denouement takes Goggins out of the show, but thankfully no. Biblical doofus Boyd Crowder, one of the most entertaining and ambiguous characters on TV right now, isn’t going anywhere. If only I’d known that when watching this exceptional pilot.
Most Surprising New Show: Spartacus: Blood and Sand
When I saw the first episode of S:B&S I thought I had found my new Torchwood. It was unhinged, silly, and unabashedly derivative. It seems disingenuous to refer to the 300-esque filming style as a “nod” to Snyder and Miller’s movie: the action scenes are a straight rip, along with the elements from Gladiator and any number of other sword-and-sandals epics. Its hilariously florid dialogue draws far too much attention to itself. It’s also so violent and pornographic (for a TV show) that it becomes self-parodic almost immediately, meaning it will either be your favourite thing about the show or the factor that turns you off it for good. The lead character is forced to become passive for a long time, which seems like an odd choice on a week-to-week basis. Some of the casting is questionable: I wonder how many viewers were shocked by the incredibly broad performance from Viva Bianca in the pilot, and then silenced by the subsequent full-frontal shot. Gotta give it up for Bianca: she makes one hell of an initial impact.
Going forth from this point I expected to be making fun of the show at length on this blog. Instead my new Torchwood turned out to be the BBC’s murder-melodrama Luther, while Spartacus gradually became my new obsession, a show often derided by those who dropped out early, before it became one of the best examples of long / short arc pacing in this golden age of TV. Spartacus is a machine, with plot elements fitting together like cogs and characters set up to deliver pleasing arc resolutions when the time is right. Too many shows this year got that timing wrong, waiting for their finales to show off their results of their calculations, with some shows — Heroes and FlashForward spring to mind — being nothing more than a long series of delaying tactics in order to get to the fireworks at the end. Spartacus eclipses them by hiding its workings so well that when the arcs and set-ups pay off, almost every time it features some surprise element that you hadn’t realised was there, though it makes perfect sense that it would. Characters are written well enough that they can spring out of the boxes you think they are in, with Illythia’s hidden madness and staggering ruthlessness being a perfect example.
The hysterical energy of the show is bound to turn off folks, and the shakier performances and insane declarations about Jupiter’s cock thrusting into poor Batiatus’ ass whenever he has a bit of bad luck are inevitably going to strike more delicate viewers as a bunch of silliness, but beneath the crazed visuals and high-pitched tone is some beautiful pacing. The result is a beautifully constructed narrative engine, something that has a satisfying purr when idling and a thrilling roar when pushed to its limits. Almost every episode could exist on its own with just a cursory “Previously” at the start and still provide an excellent hour of entertainment, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Former Mutant Enemy writer and show creator Steven S. DeKnight and his band of writers (which includes, at the start of the season, Andrew Chambliss and Tracy Bellomo of Dollhouse, and at the end of the season Daniel Knaupf of Carnivale) have taken great care to populate the central setting of Batiatus’ ludus with a cast of appealing characters whose close proximity allows for a web of interpersonal connections, both positive and negative, that are all doomed to go sour at exactly the right time.
The result is a series of plot twists, character revelations, and breathtaking action set-pieces that drove me screaming and cheering to the edge of my seat every week. It’s simultaneously sophisticated and low-brow, filled with fighting, fucking, and political intrigue — a perfect combination. From the fifth episode on — which ends with the stunning fight in which Spartacus and Crixus are forced to team up against the terrifying Theokoles — I became horribly obsessed. This paid off well, as the actors found their feet, the dialogue became a bit more restrained, and the ambition of the showrunners became apparent. By the time the blood-drenched and obscenely satisfying finale came around, I felt like declaring my love from the rooftops. Beyond that berserker madness, it’s the extreme effort to give the viewer a great time every week that gives me a sense of satisfaction I haven’t felt since Buffy or Angel in their heyday. I can think of no higher praise.
Worst New Show: Modern Family
Shades of Caruso tries to be as honest about its reactions to shows as possible, to approach things from a perspective of openness and acceptance, and not let other opinions get in the way. Sometimes this backfires: we’re finally getting around to watching The Wire after the rest of the TV-watching world did, and the fanaticism of its fans has inevitably had an influence on our experience. How we wish we could’ve seen it before being bombarded with the relentless cries of its fans. Try as we might, we are judging the show not on its own merits, but against the praise we’ve been exposed to for the past few years. Don’t get me wrong: it’s plainly obvious that it is a remarkable and ambitious show lovingly created by smart people, and we’re enjoying it immensely.
Regrettably, the endless praise may have had the unfortunate side-effect of making The Wire something we will admire but never really love. Still, we’re only one season in and that could change. Time will tell. The praise for Modern Family was not as intense as for The Wire, but it was just as one-note. By the time it had aired we’d had weeks of positive reviews from just about every critic around, and though I was sceptical about the showrunners’ previous work, the word on the street gave me hope. So what happened? Is my visceral reaction to the programme just a consequence of the notion that humour is subjective, and no one joke can make everyone laugh? It’s almost certainly a factor, but it’s more than thinking it’s not as funny as its fans maintain. I mean, I fucking hate this show. Real, actual HATE.
We haven’t experienced such a vast gulf between our opinion and that of critics since Studio 60 appeared, and that was a show that eventually alienated almost everyone. Even Dexter fans are a little weary of the show’s lack of emotional range after five seasons that are almost identical to each other, meaning I feel a little less alone in thinking it’s overrated trash. Modern Family appears to be the exception. It receives tongue-baths from seemingly everyone on a regular basis, as well as gaining viewers and winning awards that should be lavished upon shows like 30 Rock, Party Down, and my beloved Community. It’s on its way to becoming an institution, something as adored as Cheers or Friends. And yet, it is just unbearable. Who could’ve known that my Kryptonite would be an ostensibly modern, progressive sitcom featuring Ed O’Neill and Ty Burrell, two actors I’ve been fond of in the past?
And yet here we are. What is it about this farrago that makes my skin crawl? Not the progressive aspects of the show, or rather the progressive politics it pretends to honour. The loving gay couple of Cameron and Mitchell certainly do a lot of the things TV gay men do, such as mince, fret about furniture, and not kiss for a long long time (a situation that has finally been rectified and treated like an event when what we need to see on TV is a gay kiss that ISN’T an event). It also features a marriage between an old white patriarch and an immigrant, though luckily for the writers the wife is a hot and spicy Colombian who is just so sexy, what with her boobs and fiery demeanour and her hilarious mispronunciations. Oh how my soul withered when, during the pilot, she repeats Phil’s name as “Feel” and he thinks she is inviting him to grab her ample bosoms. This is the most celebrated sitcom of the year?
What else are we treated to? Clueless men and competent, disapproving women from the worst and most reductive dishwasher ads, hyper-smart and confident kids making fools of their parents, and a dad who thinks he’s hip and with it. It’s a standard, unimaginative and predictable multi-camera sitcom with one camera, no laugh-track, and a documentary format that never makes any sense. What’s worse than even the cobweb-coated jokes from the 90s is the acting: all of the jokes are telegraphed and accentuated by pauses that hint the show is being paced as if making room for audience laughter. Cue lots of mugging at the camera. Almost all of the cast — especially the kids — are so pleased with themselves that the air of smugness pouring out of them smothers any laughs that Burrell and O’Neill might muster. Each week it’s like watching 5 episodes of Scrubs simultaneously. That much mugging would set off a Geiger counter.
Worst of all, it is swamped in the most unconvincing sentimentality, robotically ending on group hugs, reconciliations and reassurances that only belong in snarky spoofs of the sitcom genre, yet played here as if its brand of laboratory-engineered Warmth™ is an insulation against criticism. Unfortunately the tone of obnoxious satisfaction makes every last-act burst of feel-good vibes feel as phony as the most cynical of churned-out mid-afternoon sitcom flotsam. Modern Family is treated like the future of comedy, but it feels like a slightly more ambitious version of According To Jim. For all its artificiality, it’s tempting to argue that Glee is more successful at creating an honest emotion onscreen. At least that can fall back on the occasional well-performed song (usually by the amazing Lea Michele). What does Modern Family have? Ty Burrell saying “What up, my homey?”, causing Julie Bowen to roll her eyes while Sofia Vergara natters on in the background, because you know those South Americans sure do talk fast!
Modern Family is the first programme I’ve had to stop watching so I can protect my health. I tried to stick it out, but once I got to the eleventh episode I could take it no more. Sitting through an entire episode made my stomach churn and my heart race. There was a strong possibility I would strain a muscle in my eyes from rolling them every time a lazily set-up gag would pay off in exactly the way you would expect. By the time I got to the end of that episode, I began to wonder if the show was made up of all the first draft jokes that had been deleted from the laptops of sitcom writers for the last fifteen years. Instead of being erased for good these comedy scraps found themselves beamed via delete-button into a humour-tesseract, an empty and endless and terrifying place. These jokes huddled together for warmth and companionship, and after a time realised the only way they could survive was to form themselves into a new sitcom. Filling out this miserable void, Modern Family became the most mundane universe imaginable, one in which the only effort you need to expend to fill the joke quota is to have a child act wise beyond their years, or make a dopey husband turn into a lascivious buffoon every time a vaguely attractive woman walks past him.
It’s obvious that a large proportion of the viewing public would love to live in that uninspiring world, but let’s be honest: these sitcom scraps have actually formed into a sentient blob of cloying death, a mediocre monster whose rictus grin of smug satisfaction generates pure anti-comedy. If only it could have stayed where it was, everything would be okay, but some cruel bastard cast a spell of awful Eldritch sorcery, creating a bridge between our world and the squirming black pit where lazy comedy goes to die, giving the Bastard Spawn of a Million Failed Jokes a way out of the Hell it should have stayed in. Now it squats on the highest peaks of the TV landscape, fat and tentacled like Lovecraft’s Ghatanothoa, driving anyone who sees it insane: an unusual form of insanity that manifests as a compulsion to babble incoherent streams of exaggerated praise.
The only way to kill it is to stop looking at it, to deny it the “eyeballs” that sustain it. Quick, everyone! Delete it from your TiVo or Sky+ machine! Turn over! Buy a Community boxset! Watch your old Arrested Development DVDs! Buy some 30 Rock merchandise, before it’s too late and its Elder God brethren infest the Earth!
Worst Pilot: V – “Pilot”
Yes, the pilot of V is called “Pilot”, and not “The Arrival” or “When The Big Ships Came” or “Someone Save Elizabeth Mitchell From This Farrago Because She So Fine”. V is so half-arsed that no aspect of it appears to have been thought through with any care. Every character, line, situation has been seen somewhere else, not just in the original series. It’s the worst kind of committee-written show, formulaic and unimaginative and built only to soothe the audience instead of challenging them. The entire show is like that, but it’s not like we weren’t warned. The pilot contained no energy, no sense that there would be any surprises down the road. It mechanically introduced a main cast of ciphers, added a quick plane crash so that the trailers would look a bit more exciting, and that was that. Cue 45 minutes of entirely predictable drama. It’s no wonder it was developed during the writers’ strike: the sense you get is that the showrunners just chopped up a bunch of other average scripts, threw them on the floor, and made the show out of that.
Nevertheless, there were two things about this pilot that made it just a little bit more hateful just to separate it from the many other ill-conceived first episodes broadcast last year. Firstly, it blatantly panders to the nerd demographic by casting Lost‘s Elizabeth Mitchell, The 4400‘s Joel Gretsch, and Firefly‘s Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk in major roles. Fair enough if you’re trying to attract those nerd eyeballs to your show, but they get very little to do. All of them (except maybe super-earnest Gretsch) are better than the material — one of the few surprises of the season was seeing the often bland Baccarin bring so much wacky energy to her part — which is more likely to annoy the nerds than please them. It merely serves to remind us of how much better those other shows were than this lowest-common denominator tripe.
Even worse is the Tea Party politics seen early on in the series, and at its worst here. Evil alien Anna gives Obama-lite speeches about change and inclusiveness, hiding her true lizard nature behind a messianic and benign face. Her message is so persuasive that even the clergy are converted to the V’s cause, and the pilot tries so hard to make the point that stupid gullible people are falling for a false prophet (just like the Dummycraps!) that it doesn’t even bother with the slowburn of the original mini-series. We go from alien arrival to global acceptance to Tea-Party resistance in the space of a single episode. Because that’s what happened with all the politics in America! You stupid bastards, don’t you understand? While you drink the Soma Juice this country is going to hell in a handcart. Only Sarah Palin and her Big Fucking Gun can save us from the Arcturan Reptiloids laying their eggs in the United Nations prayer rooms! Etc.
It’s a David Icke wet dream, and even worse than that appalling right-wing message and the insane pandering to the most unhinged of conspiracy theorists is that the show eventually ejects that aspect of it, and becomes nothing more than a tedious slog. Yes, I found the politics of the pilot to be objectionable, but there’s room to work with those ideas, perhaps even satirise them. After four episodes the show was taken off the air and tinkered with: how much funnier and more relevant could it have been if the show were used to satirise the wingnut side of American politics, or even make fun of the Obama administration from a position of sly knowingness, rather than that initial knee-jerk hostility? Instead we got a nasty pilot and a boring show, one that should have been cancelled in order to save the daft but marginally superior FlashForward.
It’s a decision that ABC must assume is pretty innocuous (or maybe lucrative), but the toll it will take on our cultural history is immeasurable. It’s as if ABC — the network that gave us Modern Family, Happy Town, and this debacle — is trying to ruin popular culture for all of us. Our collective unconscious has been irreparably tainted by this network. It would’ve been better if they’d put Leno on every night. If I were a more arrogant man I’d think they were single-handedly trying to make me give up TV by hurling so much shit at me, but little do they realise how stubborn I am. Even when I’m coated from head-to-toe in network-poop, I’ll still be watching their crummy shows. Except Modern Family. That show gave my soul a hernia.
And there’s still more to come. What! I watched 30-odd goddamn shows! I had a lot of thoughts while watching them and nowhere to put them except here! Even Twitter wasn’t interested.
The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Worst Episodes of the Year (10-1)
The bottom ten episodes of the year have a few things in common, usually revolving around some pretty unevolved views on women or by treating IRL issues as some kind of ghoulish entertainment. Guess I’m becoming even more of a prude as I get older, but I really cannot stand stories about rapists or serial killers, with the exception of Hannibal Lecter, who is very refined and loves opera: the Frasier Crane of cannibals, you might say. In recent years TV has been great at exploring the human condition to a greater degree than it has ever tried to before, but even with shows like Dexter — which attempt to make darkly humorous light from an unpleasant subject — it’s too damn hard to create drama from the subject without crossing lines.
Perhaps this is why I prefer shows like The Shield or Breaking Bad: we see people who might have been good end up making the wrong decisions. Though Dexter fans will argue that the show does a good job of showing a bad man try to do good, the characterisation doesn’t really move on from that initial point. Can a serial killer be a good person, or will his urges win out? After four seasons you’d think they’d find something new to say, or give us at least some insight, but instead we just get that persistent expository voiceover. Oh man, just thinking about that show is depressing me…
The other theme here is the bad state of UK drama, as evidenced by the sad presence of so many UK shows on this list. Interesting chats on Twitter over the past few months have illuminated the current state of UK drama, that the vast amount of superfluous executives clogging the system have made it impossible to make a show that doesn’t talk down to the audience. I only managed one episode of The Deep before giving up, knowing that I would end up having to watch an hour of drama dragged out to five hours through all the exposition and pointless shots of people moving from one place to the other. I’m a fan of clear geography in an action show or film, but I can figure out that someone’s gone from one room to another without seeing them do it.
Filmmakers are coming out to complain more regularly now: Michael Caton-Jones memorably complained about script problems on Spooks just this week, complaining about interference. From a comment piece in The Herald:
“There are lots of layers of people who don’t do very much, most of whom couldn’t get arrested in film,” he said. “There are committees of people who work on scripts, to no real end. In fact, they’re known to directors as The Programme Prevention Unit.”
Mr Caton-Jones said he often finds himself shaking his head at some of the simplistic dialogue and the storylines. “Some of the set-ups are so predictable it’s like watching an episode of Charlie’s Angels,” he said.
“In Spooks, for example, one actress had all these lines to reveal what it meant for her to meet someone after years, and they were all so trite. I took a pencil through them and said, ‘Show me what you’re feeling’ and she did. And she felt a lot better for it. The actors are so good on that series they manage to make it work.”
It’s enough to make you hope things will change if enough creative folk speak up, but I doubt it. I want it too, though. I know the UK is filled with magnificent and talented writers and directors who could easily make shows to challenge the current US dominance. Unfortunately they’re blocked from doing this by ranks of people who have no idea what a creative artist needs to do his job. It’s heartbreaking.
Anyway, enough of that. On with the horror show.
10. Heroes - Thanksgiving
Congratulations, Heroes! Your third season was so utterly, unforgivably dire that SoC couldn’t pick a loser, but this year only about half of your episodes were worthy of this list, while the rest were merely forgettable. This counts as progress: not that this matters what with your cancellation, several years too late. The bad episodes were mostly just perfect examples of how the fourth season was trying hard to take a handful of story-dough and make a vast plot-pizza: perhaps if the show had only had eight episodes we might have had something more coherent. Instead we got hour after hour of ShinyWaxClaire falling out with her dad and/or audience-baiting chaste bi-sexual Gretchen, a laughably over-extended arc for “Nathan”, way too much of Gregg Grunberg looking panicky and yelling at everything in his line of sight, and Sylar, Sylar, Sylar. Though Heroes was improved by an episode-to-episode focus on single themes, it remained tedious and unintentionally funny. Thanksgiving has to be the most risible episode: it’s little more than an hour of families arguing over dinner. It’s as static as you can imagine, with a lot of bad acting being shot across the rubber turkeys and plastic pumpkin pies, and only Robert Knepper making an effort. Will Claire drop out of school? Will Noah get laid? Will “Nathan” turn back into Sylar, or is Adrian Pasdar contracted for another episode or two? Is anyone truly sad this thrill-ride got closed down for health and safety violations?
9. The Prisoner – Darling
Much as I love Lost, the terrible legacy it has given us is a rash of TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS sci-fi shows that do their best to hide their secrets behind a veil of unusual events and cryptic clues. Almost all of these shows are at least comprehensible on a surface level, but not AMC/ITV’s remake of Patrick McGoohan’s classic 60s paranoia series. On every level the show is visual, aural, and narrative gibberish, but then the secret at the heart of the show is that it’s technically all a kind of dream anyway. The showrunners take this as a cue to throw out the rulebook and just film whatever they feel like, which means non-sequitur editing, ciphers instead of characters, a soundscape that makes it impossible to follow what is going on, etc. In this disastrous episode, we see Hayley “Rather Pretty” Atwell pass out for no reason in the real world, then appear as a blind woman in the Village because why not? She’s in love with 6 and he’s in love with her, which puts Ruth “Eyebrows” Wilson’s 313 right out. But in the end these ciphers are only in love with each other because dastardly Number 2 (who is dastardly because of Reason X, it turns out) has made them fall in love using some scientific potion involving DNA. Brilliant! Except they’re in a dreamworld and therefore technically have no DNA. Is it a metaphor? A satire on modern dating techniques? Or is it another mildly interesting idea thrown at the screen with no exploration or insight or reason, just to add more TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS MYSTERIOUSNESS to the proceedings? One thing’s for sure: these non-characters are suddenly robbed of even that little bit of personality, reducing them to game pieces in a game with no rulebook. The atmospherics might be interesting, but with no real narrative, who cares?
8. Glee - Theatricality
Yes, this was featured in the Best of the Year poll. No, this is not a typing error. While Theatricality shows the best of Glee, it is also heavily encumbered with the worst as well. Much as I loved the confrontation scene with Kurt’s father and Finn, to get to that point we had to put up with yet more of the excruciating plot with Kurt pining for the lunk-headed football player and trying everything he can to seduce him. In trying to dramatise the confused feelings of a young gay man, they also made him look semi-psychotic: almost certainly unintentional, but still hard to swallow, especially when the showrunners pull their usual trick of selectively forgetting this aspect of Kurt’s personality whenever the “plot” requires. Nevertheless, this was nothing compared to the episode’s most egregious sins: removing Sue Sylvester from the episode in order to fit in a bunch of guff about Lady Gaga; closing the episode with a PSA-style speech from Will that bangs the audience over the head with this week’s themes in a way that is even less subtle than usual, and bringing the hastily-introduced Rachel/Shelby plot to a close with a catastrophically ill-considered piano version of Gaga’s Poker Face. It’s not the first time Glee ruins a moment by using a song that only matches the onscreen events because of a single line in a chorus, but this goes beyond even that. Lea Michele and Idina Menzel are both fine performers and incredible singers, but are here suddenly rendered robotic by overuse of Autotune, and then forced to bring some kind of emotional truth to this moment using a song that simply does not fit with what is going on, and has only been chosen because this episode is meant to pay tribute to a ubiquitous Europop mannequin. Truly the lowpoint of the series.
7. Paradox - Episode 3
As this post progresses, you’ll see a trend developing regarding thriller plots involving super-creepy male predators chasing women. The difference is that while an American show like Dexter will give us nuanced performances from heavy hitters like Michael C. Hall or John Lithgow (who deserved all the praise he got over the last year), we get creepy creepy men in creepy creepy clothes being as obviously evil as possible. We also get no insight into their pathology. While this means at least we don’t hover over the grisly details, it also means there is no context or reason to tell the story. It’s just women-in-peril nonsense, trying to make a too-real concern into the stuff of frivolous entertainment. Not that Paradox counts as entertainment. The BBC’s “homage” to Quantum Leap, Early Edition and Deja Vu shows a bunch of ill-defined and very tense cops who team up with some needlessly bureaucratic government types and a dour and eccentric scientist to decode images from God’s brain (or another universe) and stop catastrophes hours before they occur. The ever-so-slightly more bearable hours of this show play with that format a bit: this one tries to con the audience by introducing three potential rapists (and one handsy “nice guy”) and then having our “heroes” bicker about which is the one to arrest. Cue lots of shouting and running back and forth across Manchester in a desperate attempt to make it seem like something is going on. The director of this abomination — Simon Cellan-Jones — has directed many great hours of TV, including Treme‘s Smoke My Peace Pipe, which was one of my favourites of the year. The existence of this bullshit can be used as proof that right now the BBC doesn’t even know how to utilise its talent anymore. Stay in the States, Simon!
6. Outnumbered - Episode 7
As with many shows, the moment a secret keeper – ignored by critics and audiences – is finally recognised as something worth watching is when the wheels come off. The third season had wonderful moments, but the seventh episode was unforgivable. Angela returns to pester her sister Sue once more, this time with a boorish American husband, improbably named Brick and played with galumphing broad strokes by the usually dependable Douglas Hodge. Poking fun at Angela’s New Age dribblings had provided some amusing moments in the past, especially when her original middle-class programming comes crashing unexpectedly to the forefront, but all we have here are tired “jokes” about how Americans are all so confident and brash and stupid. With the kids sidelined, much of the show’s trademark improvisation is removed in favour of unconvincing histrionics and the snobbery of this offensive stereotypical depiction sucking the energy from everything around it, and when we do get some input from the kids, it’s awfully vanilla. Only the bleak final scene with Sue and Pete lying to their son Jake about the state of their marriage saves it from being a total failure, and even that achievement is dimmed by the fact that the main arc of the season (Pete’s “infidelity”) is so trivial compared to previous ones (domestic violence, Alzheimers) that the torrent of drama it unleashes stretches credibility.
5. V – John May
Mid-season fixes are a normal consequence of showrunners realising there are elements in their new shows that just don’t work. Vampire Diaries got rid of a cast member in memorable style after only a few episodes, killing one of the leads off and then wiping the memory of the one person who cared about her so it wouldn’t get in the way until later. FlashForward tinkered with tone and made slight improvements, but nothing too drastic. If you had hoped that V, which had opened with one of the worst and stupidest pilots in recent years, would make big changes, you were mistaken. The only real differences between early and late episodes were the removal of GeorgiePorgy, who had seemed terribly out of place from the first time he had burst onto set like a slightly more butch Bert Viola, and the introduction of action man and anti-hero Kyle Hobbes, who is approximately 0.0003523% as cool as Michael Ironside’s iconic Übermensch Ham Tyler from the original series. Neither change mattered: it was, from beginning to end, a truly catastrophic show, the worst sci-fi TV series since the Sci-Fi Channel’s Flash Gordon, except even more unimaginative. This episode saw the death of GeorgiePorgy after being tortured with robot insects or something equally complicated (just shut his hand in a door! God!), and the first sighting of resistance leader John May, who was, years before, hunted by Ryan Nichols, member of the elite cadre of badass resistance fighters whose fighting tactic is to stand in a circle and yell at each other. We also see Ryan’s conversion to the Fifth Column by John May, who seems to win him over by boring him into submission. Luckily, the viewer is made of stronger stuff, and can utilise the option of rebelling against the stupidity with the use of channel-changing technology.
4. Defying Gravity – Threshold
I’ll be honest. One of the main reasons I took against Defying Gravity was that even if it ended up cancelled after one short season, it at least managed to hang on longer than potential classic Virtuality, which wasn’t even picked up for a second episode. Even with that bitterness in mind, the third episode of ABC’s cross between Mission To Mars and Grey’s Anatomy was excruciating to watch. With a soundtrack of plinky-plonky “It’s Comedy!” music setting the tone, we flashback to the Antares crew’s training years at the time they are given their “HALO” libido-suppressing tech. This leads to a reverse of Seinfeld’s “Master-of-my-Domain” plot, with the stupid men betting against the giggling women who reckon they can’t get an erection despite all the boner-killing juice flowing through their bodies. This leads them to a stripclub where there is much chatter about gender equality, exploitation of women, manipulation of potential partners, etc. That’s on the female astronauts’ side of the room. The men are, of course, whooping and hollering about the boob-parade. Throughout this we also get to hear lots of agonising from Zoe about the abortion she had to have in order to qualify as an astronaut, because of course she’s just a baby-crazy woman and choosing her career couldn’t possibly fulfill her like that baby could have. What else can you expect from a show that introduces a happy promiscuous woman with the intention of revealing she was born intersexed, was male-dominant but made female by her parents, and would have been turned into a man by an alien deus-ex-machina in later episodes? Get in those gender boxes, ladies and gents, that’s what they’re there for!
3. Luther - Episode Three
Oh how I laughed at Luther. Oh how I obsessed about Luther! I’ll happily admit that once it revealed that it was actually one big crazy story in five parts instead of an episodic tale of combustible Loofah catchin’ crims an’ killahs on the mean streets of Lahhndan, I fell in love with it a little bit more. The last two episodes of this short season weren’t good TV, but by Jove they were fun. The finale out-NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’d Revenge of the Sith ten times over. No mean feat. Nevertheless, as I stressed in this post earlier this year, it doesn’t excuse this unpalatable hour. The usual showy but ugly compositions were in full effect, as was Ruth “Yes, She Still Has Amazing Eyebrows” Wilson hamming it up as the anti-Loofah, the introduction of DSU Martin Schenk (who appears to have been possessed by the ghost of late-career Donald Pleasance), and the great man himself, DJ Big Driis, goin’ all maverick in order to collah the hysterically overwrought and demonic serial killah — Paul Rhys, showing off all of the tricks he learned at the Sir Anthony Hopkins School of Serial Killer Tics. All very amusing, except that it also featured a victim who is generously given one or two lines of normal dialogue right at the start of the episode before spending the next 40 minutes whimpering in terror and then dying offscreen. After that? Her corpse just a prop for Loofah to nail ‘is man by bendin’ the law. So I suppose her last few hours, filmed in extreme lascivious close-up, served some purpose, other than to be very gritty indeed. A thoroughly nasty episode, one that does the BBC’s drama department no favours. Being edgy only really works when it serves a purpose other than titillation, and the feeble, surface-level exploration of “morality” here is not reason enough.
2: Dexter - Blinded By The Light
Speaking of “edgy” shows “exploring” humanity’s darker nature, four seasons in, Dexter is still asking the same questions about its protagonist: can an emotionally compromised “good” serial killer find a way to reconcile his urge to kill and his growing need to connect with society? Whether this internal battle is worth dramatising at such length is something only the viewer can answer. Fans are transfixed as Michael C. Hall does his usual great work in making a murderer seem charming, while skeptics writhe in eternal agony as the show crawls towards a point over what feels like a million episodes loaded with clunky voiceovers, time-filling sub-plots involving ineptly sketched and poorly performed characters, and lascivious “adult” content including gratuitous boob shots or gore. Of course, we mustn’t forget the moral quandaries that don’t make any sense — either emotionally or logically — but are provided to give the illusion of depth to the tawdry proceedings. It’s CSI: Miami with a light dusting of faux-complexity and dollops of “adult content”. Whenever the Caruso Awards has to pick a worst episode, the problem is that the show exists as a continuum of overrated fail, so which one to choose? Blinded By The Light wins out for the sub-plot with a guy, recently laid-off and grieving for his dead wife, going around Dexter’s neighbourhood vandalising the property of the rich folk. Because that’s what people do when they’re unemployed: go off the rails and spout angry speeches about “making them pay”. That extra layer of insulting “topical” ignorance pushes this episode below the rest. God, I really hate serial killer stories.
1. Modern Family – Come Fly With Me
As mentioned before, Shades of Caruso will stick with shows long after they have annoyed, and so it was that we ignored our instant dislike of the pilot and watched this excruciating half-hour of weak punchlines and oleaginous sentimentality. Buffoonish omega-male Phil attempts to bond with macho father-in-law Jay, who is obsessing over the model plane he bought for his step-son Manny. The accident that occurs is sign-posted so heavily it goes past obviousness, past comedically-obvious obviousness, into anti-comedic clanging predictability. Even worse, the upshot of it all is the resolution — a difference-healing group hug between the dopey guys while the sensible ladies look on with simpering grins. Even worse than that is the sub-plot with Cameron teaching Mitchell the joys of Costco’s low prices and wide range of products. A bit of product placement is one thing: e.g. 30 Rock has skated close to the fire but makes sure to wink at the camera: it doesn’t excuse it, but it makes it palatable, at least. Here we get a laugh-free series of shots of Mitchell expressing shock at the INCREDIBLE BARGAINS. If it were a smarter show I’d think it was satirising product placement, but there’s no flip to the joke. We find out that Costco has a lot of bargains, and Mitchell loves it. End of sub-plot.
EVEN WORSE THAN EVEN THAT EVEN is Alex’s plot. She’s a young brainy girl who resists wearing dresses — a conflict that looks like it might be resolved in an interesting manner — before her hot and sexy step-aunt convinces her to love dresses because that’s how you make the boys like you. Somewhere Betty Friedan — who gets name-checked at one point, seemingly only to make a point that this show is post-stupid-old-feminism — is spinning in her grave. The difference in awfulness between this episode and the episode of Dexter at number two is an exponential curve on top of another exponential curve on top of a turd souffle. Nth power awfulness. No earthly measurement system can chart its evil. Someone drive a stake through its bastard heart and save our souls!
I intend to hand out more awards — both good and bad — though my initial plans to be done by the end of the week might not happen now. It’s taken longer to get done than I had feared, as you can tell from the gargantuan nature of all this ranting. Bear with me: I’ll shout for regular readers on Twitter and Facebook, and brace myself for accidental pagehits from Dexter and Modern Family fans, who may want to stab me for my heresy.
The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Worst Episodes of the Year (20-11)
Shades of Caruso apologises in advance for the following posts. They’re filled with complaints and bitching and all sorts of unpleasant negativity, but they’re something that needed to be written even if just to exorcise some very complicated feelings that arose during this past year of watching a lot of TV. Just as watching good TV allows you to appreciate the craft and intelligence of numerous talented people, watching bad TV… well, it allows you to do exactly the same thing. The difference is that you get to see this effort compromised by factors as big as the interference of executives who want to be “creative” but don’t understand anything about the process, or as small as one bad decision made and then followed through to unavoidable disaster (e.g. Evil Sandy in the third season of The O.C.).
Some of the shows here are shows I love, but went momentarily bad, either with ambition that ran away from them, or by adding some awful element that derails the narrative or tone. Some of the shows are probably just not my bag anyway, but were not distinct enough to convince me of their charms (e.g. Friday Night Lights is not a show I would normally watch, but it is exceptional on every level, and is therefore one of my all-time favourites). Some of them are just bone-headed and half-arsed and need a kicking. Unless specified, I’m not bitching at anyone in particular: it’s a collaborative process, and sometimes these things go awry without anyone realising. It’s just the way it is.
Except for my number one pick. That fucking bullshit needs to be called out. (Warning: There will be impotent rage.)
That’s for tomorrow. Today, bad episodes 20-11. In the interest of seeming 33% less bitter and mean-spirited than I could, I’m not listing 30 episodes, though I easily could have. Lucky for The Vampire Diaries, I guess. Normal rules about complete seasons and one candidate per season apply. If you see a show you love on this list, bear in mind I might only be complaining about one episode, not the whole thing. Even my favourite show ever — Lost — had a couple of clunkers this year, and there was even one episode of critical darling Mad Men that nearly made the fail grade. It’s nothing personal (though neither ended up on the list after I got rid of the 30-21 candidates). But if you wanna flame me, I understand. Go ahead. If you make good enough points, I’ll be gentle. And now, un-joy.
20. Dollhouse - The Hollow Men
Many of the episodes listed here are included for crimes against plotting, against pace, against acting. Some represent the moment a show made a transition from mostly-good episodes to mostly-bad, while others were the final proof that a show was broken from conception and would never be any good. This episode – the penultimate one in Joss Whedon’s cancelled SF series – is here for being awesome and terrible at the same time. Yes, it contained as many great ideas as previous episodes, some terrific performances, thrilling plot twists and shocking character deaths. It was also shakily shot and edited, sketchily written, and laden with bad effects and incongruities. A final shot of Echo running from an explosion that does zero damage to the building it happens in — followed by a shot of our heroes aimlessly wandering off into the “sunset” — might stand as the worst moment in all of Mutant Enemy history. Let me be VERY CLEAR: I’m not saying that this is the fault of anyone who worked on the show, and it would be cruel to suggest otherwise. In fact, everyone who worked on it has my eternal gratitude for going the extra mile to take the few episodes and dollars they had left and finish the story that Whedon started. Nevertheless, The Hollow Men stands as a monument to the show’s failure to catch on, either because of lacklustre promotion by Fox or by the unwillingness of the public to give a chance to a show as cerebral as this one. Gratitude is due to all concerned, but the frustration of seeing a potentially incredible story get short-changed remains.
19. Big Love – Blood Atonement
While watching the fourth season of Big Love (several months after its initial airing), the many complaints of fans and former fans rang through my ears, most of them revolving around the Jumping of the Shark. For six episodes I scoffed. From where I was sitting the show was its normal funny and unpredictable self. In fact, it was arguably even more macabre and eccentric than previous years. Other than complaints about the central arc with Bill attempting to become a senator in order to reveal his polygamy to the world, it was still superb, underrated TV. And then this episode leapt out from hiding, like some inept monster in the closet, stumbling towards us with coathangers around its feet and a bandanna over its eyes. With only three episodes left in the series, the showrunners and writing team appeared to be up against the wall in terms of not having time to pay things off in time for the finale, and thus began packing absurd amounts of plot into the show, overburdening it with event, rushing things to silly conclusions, and fatally misjudging the tone. The last three episodes of the season featured numerous terrible choices — the bizarre mad scientist plot featuring Zeljko Ivanek was particularly irritating, as he had been an interesting antagonist before turning into an insane eugenicist — but the booby prize goes to Blood Atonement for ushering in the miserable trilogy, and for including a lumpen hostage rescue plot of such boneheadedness that it boggles the mind. Let’s hope season five gets this gem of a show back on track.
18. FlashForward - Believe
It’s a great premise — everyone on the planet blacks out and sees four minutes of their future — but a great idea is doomed if you go in the wrong direction. The novel FlashForward wisely focused on the scientists who were investigating the worldwide phenomenon, while the show follows a bunch of FBI agents and their friends and family. The show might seem more dramatic, but it’s also liable to fall into tedious action cliche — which it does — and all other sub-plots are likely to seem trivial in comparison to the conspiracies, gunfights, explosions, and shots of Joseph Fiennes emoting with all the force of a billion Olivier-strength Thespian-Bombs. The show’s low-point is probably the least fighty, oddly enough. Believe features two sub-plots about recovering alcoholics (as if one wasn’t boring enough), one of which is solely about Agent Benford asking people if they texted some bad news to his wife. Not exactly riveting, but made accidentally amusing when the two people he asks (his be-whiskered sponsor Aaron and velvet-voiced boss Stanford Wedeck) react as if he accused them of molesting his daughter (chairs thrown, growls of “Get. Out. Of. My. Office!”, etc.). However the main focus of the show is the deathly tedium that is Bryce Varley’s search for his Japanese future-lover. It’s feather-light, leads to hours of pointless soul-searching in later episodes, and relies on horrible cliches about Japanese corporate culture. Imagine a Kate-centric episode of Lost mixed with the worst cultural drama of the Sun/Jin episodes, but without the sensitivity. It’s enough to make you pine for Hiro’s appearances in the first season of Heroes.
17. Fringe - Brown Betty
Glee was everywhere this year, like a virulent strain of some terribly overrated plague. It infected everything, including Fringe. As Fox brought its breakout hit back from slumber with a patience-sapping back-nine, it figured it would be a great idea to celebrate with a Glee-themed week of programming, including a musical episode of the mostly humourless and dry sci-fi show. Not that you could really tell. Though we got a minor moment of song from Lance “Intensity” Reddick, and a nicely underplayed rendition of “For Once In My Life” by Anna Torv — both of whom have lovely voices, especially Ms. Torv — it still seems like a stretch to call it a musical. Shockingly, Broadway star Michael Cerveris — The Watcher known as September — is featured in the episode but doesn’t sing a note. Imagine if Hinton Battle had not sung or danced in Buffy‘s Once More With Feeling: it’s a horrible, horrible waste of an opportunity. There have been arguments that it’s unfair to criticise it for being a musical when it obviously has no real interest in being one, but the episode has plenty of other damaging flaws: the clangingly obvious metaphors in Walter’s drug-induced hallucination; the look of discomfort on most of the cast’s faces as they struggled with the dopey film noir theme and the dreadful jokes (even John Noble looks lost); the complete lack of new or pertinent information, meaning this episode can be happily excised from the show’s run. The worst crime, however, is that it disrupts one of the most impressive late-season runs in recent TV history. At this point Fringe had finally become essential viewing: Brown Betty was a miserable, ill-judged mood-reset button that came at the worst moment. The season rallied and ended on a memorable high, but nevertheless this car-crash still irks.
16. The Mentalist – His Red Right Hand
SoC was quite happy to stick with this average-but-entertaining procedural last year simply because Simon Baker was so lovable as trickster Patrick Jane that even the most humdrum of episodes was lifted by his mischievous smile and funny mind-games. This year the show’s level of quality dipped ever-so-slightly, enough to make us question our decision. Our attentions wandered while airtime was wasted on the Rigsby-Van Pelt flirtation (which turned into a romance much quicker than expected, so kudos for that, at least), and Jane’s playfulness seemed a little less interesting, maybe a little more sour. Only the introduction of Bosco — Lisbon’s former partner and antagonist for our mentalist hero — brightened the show, mostly because it was nice to see that the horrors of The Unusuals didn’t put dependable Terry Kinney off being on TV. His Red Right Hand promised to bring the show out of its rut, as it heralded the return of Jane’s arch-enemy Red John in a sweeps-tastic display of drama. Sadly the episode rested on the innocence of new character Rebecca, whose ultimate evil was signposted by a bunch of distracting swivel-eyed tics introduced early on. The suspense and twist was wrecked by this out-of-place performance, and suddenly the episode was in trouble. Then Bosco died, and Minelli (Gregory Itzin) quit, meaning the two best supporting characters left within minutes of each other. If a Red John episode could be so poor, what’s was the point in sticking with it? With that, SoC dropped the show, albeit with a heavy heart.
15. Persons Unknown – The Truth
Cracks began to form in Persons Unknown‘s veneer at a shockingly early stage, but the intriguing central premise and atmospheric direction of the season opener lulled the viewer into a false sense of security. The sixth episode was where the wheels flew off. The introduction of Erika the week before was bad enough, but this episode showed everyone’s least favourite crazed lesbian gangbanger poisoning duplicitous Joe with anti-freeze. We know this because the episode ends with a shot of her pouring the contents of an enormous can into a sink — a can that has the words “ANTI-FREEZE” written on the side (presumably in much larger letters than the brand name, Acme). As if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, the season’s most superfluous B-plot (with obnoxiously hairy journalist Mark Renbe and his underwritten fuck-buddy Kat Damatto in search of something something in Rome) went into madness overdrive. It should be written in stone that no one can disguise themselves as clergy without the tone of the story immediately becoming comedic. Watching them dress as priest and nun to find some ultimately pointless MacGuffin was the mortal blow. The show limped on for several episodes after this, but the game was up: it became obvious that those early promising episodes were a fluke, and Persons Unknown was actually a brain-dead failure, as well as a source of much derisory fun — the hysterical deaths in the penultimate episode, the personality flip-flops, and poor, inexplicably blind Robert Picardo wearing David Bowie’s cast-off wig from Labyrinth.
14. Human Target - Victoria
When a show pulls a plot from the headlines, it’s usually something fairly recent. In Victoria Human Target went back to the 90s, and retold the story of Diana’s divorce from Prince Charles as a sub-direct-to-DVD actioner, complete with hissable villains and stiff-upper-lipped British princesses turned into real humans by the love of a good Yank. Our hero Christopher Chance is called in to protect Victoria, Princess of Wales, after the men responsible for protecting the Crown attempt to assassinate her and the New York EMT guy she falls for on a blood drive. Wait, wait! It gets better! Chance is forced to call in a favour from a former IRA enforcer, one who once put a bounty on Victoria’s head. For the benefit of US readers, imagine a British show featuring an English cop helping the First Lady elope with a British ambulance driver and getting assistance from a member of al Qaida. After much “Top of the morning!” humour, Chance reunites the Princess with the Queen, and the EMT guy punches feckless bastard Prince Walter in the chops for being such a girly worm or something. It could only have been more insulting to the British people if Chance had decided to protect her by staging her death in a car accident. So yeah, it was a very bad hour of TV, but it’s on here because the usual humour and pace of the series are absent, replaced by cliche and bone-headed predictability. The unbelievable insults to our Royal Family? Hilarious! It’s worth watching just for that. Whoever signed off on this wrongheadedness should stay away from the UK forever, but if I ever meet this person in the US, the drinks are on me.
13. The Office – New Leads
Perhaps it was residual annoyance at the shoddy use of the faux-documentary format in ABC’s monstrous Modern Family that tipped me over the edge, but suddenly the shenanigans at Dunder Mifflin didn’t seem so funny anymore. Much of this was an unavoidable (and — at times — forgivable) problem with the amount of time the show has been on the air. Jim and Pam are obviously growing up and away from the rest of the gang, and Michael has had the first stirrings of depression trigger some fight or flight reflex. Nevertheless, while they grow, the rest of the office have nowhere to go but sideways. This episode represented the lowpoint of the show to date, the moment a Fonz lookalike leapt over a pile of toner in the warehouse in my head. For no reason except plot convenience, the episode starts with the sales staff of the Scranton office siddenly transformed into a bunch of thoughtless jerks that boss everyone else around, instantly rendering them unlikeable. When new owners Sabre hand down some Mitch-&-Murray-esque sales leads, Michael rebels, rendering him unlikeable too. Then the non-sales staff join in, bitching about their colleagues and turning the room into a vortex of hatred. If anything was going to save this episode it would be the blooming love of Erin and Andy, but if you cannot stand them (::points thumb at self::), their cutesy flirting and eventual kiss in front of a crappy green screen effect is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The camel in this metaphor being my previous love of the show.
12. Happy Town – Questions and Antlers
For a start, that title is unforgivable, even though a reindeer features in the episode in bookending scenes. Worse than even that is that for once, there is an actual point to an episode of Happy Town (after five episodes featuring almost no progression in any of its dreary plots), but the denouement is so overbaked as to be merely unintentionally funny instead of tragic. Sheriff Tommy Conroy is forced to finally apprehend his murderous best friend Big Dave, but as Abraham Benrubi appears to have been cast as an unhinged and unsympathetic simpleton, the face-off between him and the inept lawmaker turns into an interminable screaming contest. A bad end to a bad episode, but the reason for its inclusion in this list is not a single moment, but a flaw that runs through every scene like the word “terrible” through a stick of Brighton rock. Indulgent dialogue taints every scene, desperately trying to add a layer of quirk to what was already dreadfully self-conscious. None of the characters speaks like a human being, or even as individuals. All you can hear is the same pretentious voice coming out of everyone, with references to Chinese proverbs, crepes (in the longest and most obnoxious scene of the year), and Bon Jovi songs littering their speech with all the distracting insistence of a sugar-loaded child pointing at the crayon graffiti on your new wallpaper and screaming, “Look at me! I done made the clever words!” Simply unbearable.
11. Doctor Who – The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood
The arrival of Steven Moffat on Doctor Who was a relief after Russell T. Davies’ run on the show began to offer up more rough episodes per season than highlights, not to mention the back-patting Cringemas special with its Return-of-the-King-esque finale. Nevertheless, even though Moffat’s first season had some very strong episodes, its ratio of good to bad was about 50:50, and it was Moffat himself who wrote most of the best ones. The other half of the equation had aquatic space vampires, Churchill and Daleks, and this dispiriting two-parter from SoC arch-nemesis Chris Chibnall. Never able to let escapist sci-fi just be escapist sci-fi, he uses the return of new, humanised Silurians to beat us about the head and body with the same faux-profound Statements of Great Importance about humanity’s flaws that make the worst of Who and Torchwood (e.g. Countrycide) such a joyless bore. The Silurians and the humans — sworn enemies for decades now — almost reach a detente (three minutes after new hostilities begin), but our suspicions get the better of us and the peace talks fail oh foolish hubristic humans and their hubristic foolishness! So yeah, pretty much the same plot as in their other appearances. On top of that, we see Amy sulking like a bored teenager during the peace talks (she’s useless throughout), much lifeless and overlong speechifying by the Doctor, Rory being absorbed by the mysterious crack in the universe just as he was proving to be a more entertaining companion than his fiancee, and a hilarious 15-minute sequence with the Doctor breathlessly helping the humans prepare traps and surveillance prior to a fight with Silurian soldiers that never happens. Still, at least that running around padded the episode out to the right length. That’s something, I guess.
More mean-spirited carping from me tomorrow, fingers crossed.
The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (20-11)
A quick reminder of the stupidly complicated rules of the Caruso Awards: only shows whose latest season (or half-season) has finished by the time of publication are eligible, hence the inclusion of an episode of The Venture Brothers from ages ago; and only one episode of each season is allowed. This is to prevent Spartacus: Blood and Sand from dominating the list (just like the gladiator Spartacus dominates the arena!). Apologies for any poor editing here. Much to my eternal shame I’ve discovered that no matter how long I spend picking over these goddamn things some awful mistake (or twelve) will always slip through. It’s like I’ve been cursed by some grammar-witch for all of my shaky writing. Somewhere in this house is a haunted Thesaurus that needs to be exorcised. And with that superstitious outburst, on with the praise, and the SPOILERS…
20: Misfits - Episode 4
Post-Heroes, it’s perfectly understandable that any “metahuman” show introducing a character with the power to travel through time is going to give the viewer pause. The narrative knots created by Hiro Nakamura in that horrid show were so complicated the showrunners could never untangle them, even with some desperate efforts in the final season. You can imagine our pleasure when this Curtis-centric episode managed to adhere to plainly obvious temporal rules, kept things straight and logical, and revealed heaps of new information about our favourite lairy superpowered ruffians. The main thread of the episode is Curtis’ efforts to make amends to his former girlfriend in a Butterfly-Effect-esque sequence of disastrous trips into his own past, but it mostly resembles Firefly‘s excellent backstory-heavy Out of Gas. By giving us more of a sense of just how messed up our heroes were before The Storm transformed them, showrunner Howard Overman humanises even the most annoying of the group. Though Curtis is the central character, it might be Nathan who benefits most. The endless sarcastic asides from the obnoxious little gobshite are given context as we see the antagonistic relationship he has with his father (a perfectly cast Dexter Fletcher). It’s a clever development that gives Robert Sheehan new notes to knock out of the park.
19: Caprica - Ghosts in the Machine
Where once this blog railed against Battlestar Galactica and the way it frayed and fell apart before our eyes, this thought-provoking prequel series did much to repair the damage done to its parent show by nervy Syfy chiefs. Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane “Unappreciated Genius” Espenson replaced the sprawling and ill-tended mythos with greater focus and fewer characters. With a sturdy base and a dependable cast, the showrunners were able to explore sci-fi concepts with the rigour Galactica once did and then add some welcome melodrama. This grounds the speculative fiction in human emotion, the centre of which is the grief felt by two families who lost daughters in a terrorist attack, not realising that those children exist in a new state elsewhere. Here we see Daniel Graystone’s suspicions about the erratic behaviour of his lone Cylon come to a head just as Joseph Adama searches for the incomplete avatar of his daughter in V-World. While the grief-stricken Tauran lawyer approaches his daughter from a position of supplication, Daniel attempts trickery and calculation to try to get Zoe Graystone to reveal her secret existence within the Cylon’s robot shell. The tragedy is that neither father is willing to accept that their children have moved on in more than one sense. For all its speculative ambition, it’s the human truth of this rift that makes this show — and this episode in particular — so memorable.
18: Big Love – Sins of the Father
The oft-derided fourth season of Big Love was actually pretty great for most of its truncated run if you were willing to roll with Bill Henrikson’s decision to run for Senator — merely his latest bad idea in long line of them. A couple of early episodes were blackly comedic mini-classics, amping up the absurdity of the show while not becoming unpalatable. Sins of the Father rose above them all with its Godfather-like depiction of a man losing everything. However, while Michael Corleone loses everything by allowing his dark heart to overwhelm him, Bill loses everything with the revelation of his own hypocrisy, turning his back on son Ben after he admits to having feelings for Margene even though he was once cast out by his own father. Director David Petrarca and writer Seth Greenland do a superb job of making Bill’s ridiculously overwrought internal struggle make sense to an audience who would probably just forgive Ben, couching the drama in terms of Bill’s very specific insecurity: will he be usurped by his own son one day? For a show primarily about religion, Big Love deserves praise for playing these themes and Biblical references so lightly. Add to that a couple of great comic set-pieces involving Bill’s three wives, Bill Paxton’s best performance to date, and a sense of dramatic urgency the show has often lacked, and this episode can be placed next to last year’s Come, Ye Saints as a keeper.
17. The Venture Brothers – Pinstripes and Poltergeists
It’s tempting to hate Pinstripes and Poltergeists for being the final part of the bisected fourth season, just to be petty. The sudden disappearance of The Best Animated Show On TV was especially galling as it was finally picking up a good head of steam. Nevertheless, at least the show left us with something that is, as 21 says, “like Christmas, a first BMX bike, and meeting the cast of Firefly all in one”. Highlights include the long-delayed introduction of evil bureaucrat Monstroso (“Cigar?”), Rusty Venture discovering chatrooms and pop-ups, and the revelation that Brock Samson has been living on the Venture compound all along while working with the shadowy organisation S.P.H.I.N.X. (“Sphinx!”). Perhaps the best thing about this episode is that it can be used as a perfect example of how The Venture Brothers is more than just a snarky pop-culture melange. The characters have evolved so much that Brock’s outburst to Rusty about being close to Dean and Hank, yet not being able to contact them, has an emotional power unheard-of in Adult Swim’s roster: see also 21′s vengeful pursuit of Brock, which is finally resolved with a fight, an understanding, and an alliance against a common enemy. It’s enough to tug the heart-strings. There is also the small matter of 24′s ghostly nature: the revelations about him in this episode have made his continued “existence” as big a mystery as any number of polar bears, Rambaldi devices or parallel universes in the Bad Robot canon.
16: Dollhouse - The Left Hand
It’s easy to miss classic TV episodes when their parent network decides to burn through a condemned series with a burst of two-parters. After the second season of Joss Whedon’s brainwipe thriller started with a series of underwhelming standalone episodes, we were treated to a quick rush of excellent, mythology-heavy dramas that expanded the backstory of our characters and the shadowy Rossum Corporation, along with some of the most head-melting concepts in popular sci-fi drama. This season highlight was the best mix of mythology and standalone episode before the showrunners were regrettably forced to cut their five-season plan short. Our hero Echo and poor manipulated Senator Daniel Perrin are held captive in the Washington DC Dollhouse by slimy Stewart Lipman (a welcome appearance by SoC favourite Ray Wise) and the complicated Dr. Bennett Halverson, who is torturing Echo for a past transgression. The LA Dollhouse attempts to save its Active using two Tophers (both played brilliantly by Fran Kranz and a never better Enver Gjokaj), but the web of double-, triple-, and quadruple- crosses wrecks their plans. It’s a packed-to-bursting hour of action TV, both thrilling and funny. Truly, no other show on TV could dramatise such potentially alienating hard sci-fi ideas about personality-cloning and mind-manipulation with such playfulness.
15. Party Down – “Not On My Wife” Opening Night
My love of Cheers (a deep, deep love) did not migrate to spin-off Frasier, whose tone irked despite the generally excellent cast. The general air of satisfaction generated — possibly because the obvious jokes were interspersed with the odd reference to Mahler — swamped the gags that did work. All was forgiven when the show concentrated on farce, which it did brilliantly. Party Down, on the other hand, has a better episode-to-episode hit:miss ratio, and adding farce pushes Opening Night to the top of the heap. The aspiring actors and writers of the catering team are forced to work through the opening night of a farce performed by a community theatre group they consider beneath them, and end up embroiled in a whirlwind of sexual misadventure, misunderstanding, and escalating panic. It’s a superb example of the genre, with veils, masks, secrets and lies in abundance, but while John Enbom’s expertly judged script (and David Wain’s perfect direction) are to be praised, it’s the little things that stick in the memory: Casey’s inept flirting with the lesbian producer from Warners; Roman’s Bacchanalian behaviour; Kyle’s pitiful attempts at being sexy; and Ron misreading Lydia’s signals and ending up with a faceful of mace. The sight of his puffy, snot-covered face will linger in my memory forever.
14: Justified - Long In The Tooth
Whenever a show makes a big splash with its first episode, there is often a worry that comes with it: will this show keep the quality up? Will it somehow ruin it, go in the wrong direction, abandon everything that made that first hour so good? In a post-Sopranos age, we expect the best shows to be serialised, and the procedurals of network to be less impressive. Would Justified be able to create a serialised drama out of its short story origins? Or would it be little more than a well-shot villain-of-the-week show? The fourth episode of the phenomenal first season went both ways. Alan Ruck plays a crook on the lam from our hero Raylan Givens, forced to give up his career as a dentist after a memorably nasty encounter with an obnoxious patient. The episode works extremely well as a one-off: Ruck is perfectly cast as the impulsive but likeable foil to laidback Raylan, and his character is so well-drawn it’s genuinely upsetting that he can’t become a regular on the show. What makes this our favourite of the consistently stellar first season is the knowledge that even though Justified eventually becomes more serialised (even taking into account the nerve-wracking shoot-out with Miami goons near the end), it could have been a great, unorthodox procedural too. No matter what the showrunners did, we were prepared to love it unconditionally.
13: Sherlock - A Study In Pink
It’s rare that a TV show can come out of nowhere and capture the public’s imagination with the modern publicity machine being what it is. Perhaps because UK TV often has big events that don’t add up to much it was easy to expect little from Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ “reimagining” (forgive me) of Britain’s most beloved fictional character, especially with Rupert Murdoch’s snivelling toadies in the Sun spreading snide rumours about reshoots and disastrous pre-screenings. Thankfully it was just the odious Antipodean arsehole playing shenanigans: the first episode of Sherlock was a supremely confident, exciting 90 minutes of TV, instantly transforming Benedict Cumberbatch from that guy who appeared in the things into a TV icon, all spindly limbs and ghostly face, his lovely coat flapping in the wind as he chased villains around Cardiff London. Paul McGuigan invented a visual palette that was showy but not intrusive, with a brilliant floating-text conceit that allowed us to see Sherlock’s thought processes. Even better, Moffat filled the movie-length pilot with plot and event, moving things along at a clip and never relying on tedious exposition to bloat out a flimsy script. It felt substantial, like the arrival of your new favourite thing. We can only hope this was not a fluke: more on that to come.
12: The Pacific – Okinawa
Saying The Pacific wasn’t as feel-good as Band of Brothers seems crazy: after all, the original HBO mini-series featured the hell of war in startling, miserable detail. Nevertheless, it’s not called Band of Brothers for no reason. The most important point the series made was that in the middle of the carnage and horror, there was someone there who had your back, who would remind you of your humanity and your responsibility to everyone around you. The Pacific has very little of that uplift. The ninth episode of this ten-part mega-downer is possibly the bleakest hour of TV screened since the BBC’s Threads, as the 1st Marine Division find themselves trapped in a purgatorial war of attrition with a ruthless enemy at the base of an almost impassable mountain. Joseph Mazzello does excellent work as Corporal Eugene Sledge, pushed to the edge by relentless rain, despicable and dehumanising Japanese tactics (often involving civilians and children), and the low morale of his companions, most of whom die in agony because of mistakes borne of fatigue. With his humanity seemingly crushed forever, we watch in dread as he finds a dying Japanese civilian – the victim of an artillery strike he was involved with – and brace ourselves for further horror. The choice he makes is revelatory, cathartic, unforgettable. So yes, a gruelling hour of drama, but also an essential one.
11: Spartacus: Blood and Sand – Whore
This indecently entertaining sword-and-sandals epic never stints on surprisingly graphic sex and violence, with boobs, dongs, blood, buttocks and heads flying at the camera with such regularity you’d be forgiven for thinking it was originally meant to be screened in 3D. Neither the sex nor the violence were that important, certainly on a plot level, being there mainly because Starz were happy to let the showrunners go a bit mental. However this season highlight used graphic sex as a way to explore not only the levels to which the slaves of Batiatus’ ludus are expected to lower themselves, but also as a way to further dramatise the antagonism between our hero Spartacus and delightful snake-woman Illythia, wife of his mortal enemy Gaius Claudius Glaber. Most of the episode does a good job of adding new levels of debasement to the proud gladiators, now fully expected to be prostitutes as well as warriors, but it’s Lucretia’s conniving which makes this an instant classic. Playing a trick with masks to teach her former friend Illythia a lesson, the plot to humiliate her spins out of Lucretia’s control in the final moments. TV has arguably never seen a sequence as pornographic, violent, and purely Grand Quignol as this, but it never abandons character or plot for a second, a detail that you might miss as your jaw dislocates from dropping so fast.
The final ten will be here tomorrow. Anyone who has followed my tweets of the past few months will probably find few surprises: many of the episodes that broke the top ten drove me to such paroxysms of joy that I went a bit nuts over there. We’re talking many, many multiples of 140 characters.
The 2008-2009 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous Bits and Bobs
The new TV season is full swing, and yet here I am, still talking about last season. Of course, I’ve farted around for a couple of weeks doing very important things (not playing Halo 3: ODST, no matter what my endless tweets and Raptr updates will say), and am only now getting around to putting this up. Please forgive my tardiness.
Though I don’t want to say too much about the new season, which is just coming into shape, I will say that some shows (Fringe, House) have yet to get back to full strength, some (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dollhouse, Lie To Me) have come back with a confident bang, and some new shows (Community, Flashforward) have really piqued my interest. One new show (Modern Family) made me think I will never trust another critic ever again. Unless something really dreadful comes along, I think I have my Worst New Pilot of the 2009-2010 Season winner already sewn up.
Anyway, here are my final thoughts on the 2008i-2009 season. There were originally going to be more YouTube clips on here, but I’ve had a dispiriting day watching them get taken down. Fox and NBC, sorry for infringing on your copyright, but all you did was get rid of some free publicity, as I was going to tell the world how awesome your shows were. Except for that clip from Heroes. That was up because Angela Petrelli’s insanely histrionic reaction to her son’s death was the funniest thing of the year. So I can understand that one. And now, on with the hyperbole…
Best New Show: Sons of Anarchy
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get Sopranos director/producer Allen Coulter in to co-direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What sets Sons of Anarchy apart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superb Dollhouse — is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger / potentially ruinous moral compromise, Sons of Anarchy hinted that it could become something that will rival the mighty Shield for complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best ensembles on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which, let’s not forget, includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnificence from Kim Coates) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, who blows everyone else away with her terrifying warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
Worst New Show: Parks and Recreation
Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are not idiots, obviously, but this landed with a terrible splat and couldn’t convince me to hang around long enough to see if it would improve. Part of that was because I was mad at the dip in quality over at The Office. Was it fair to blame this show for that? Probably not. Parks and Recreation has been mooted for so long (remember when it was supposed to be a straight spin-off of The Office?) that their attention has probably been divided for a long time, and the fourth season of The Office was great. Nevertheless, the energy of one show definitely seemed to have been split between two, and the result was a listless hour of supposed comedy.
I have fought with myself over whether it would have been worth hanging around to see if it got better, but then I remember little things that irked like the way the showrunners differentiated the talking head interjections from those of The Office — using two cameras for the faux-interviews instead of one — which drove me into fits of absurd rage. The Office already has trouble keeping the faux-doc format going, and this conceit draws even more attention to the fakeness of it all. Perhaps I’m just burned out on this format. ABC’s new comedy Modern Family has been heralded as the next great sitcom after just two episodes, with across the board raves. We watched last week’s pilot in a state of shock. Flamboyant gay stereotypes? Clunking, obvious jokes about the generation gap? Appalling overacting from everyone (with Julie Bowen being the worst offender)? A character misinterpreting the accent of a Columbian woman? (I say Columbian because Sofia Vergara is from Columbia. She’s probably expected to play someone from a different country in this.) Modern Family is exactly the kind of retrograde laugh-track-enhanced sitcom that seems almost archaic now, but because it’s filmed in a single camera faux-doc style, it’s treated as a cutting-edge exploration of modern American mores. Bullshit. It’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Dressing a raccoon in baseball gear doesn’t make it a baseball player. It just makes it a raccoon covered in sport gear. (Note to self: use less raccoons in metaphors. It just complicates things.)
I also remember one potentially funny scene in Parks and Recreation — involving hapless and strangely unlovable Leslie trying to convince a bunch of ill-informed citizens that her plans are worthwhile — failing to take off, and I realise that after this summer of purposely ignorant right-wing hijacking of the health-care town hall debates, this kind of scene probably won’t ever be funny again. Democracy failing to work because of the Crazification Factor getting in the way of intelligent debate is something I just can’t laugh at right now. What makes this turn of events most sad is that the concept is so full of potential, and yet it didn’t even work before the protests. I can’t figure out how you could take an idea this promising and fail to make something that mixes madness and profundity in the same way as The Office. Compare that to Knight Rider. That was always going to be shit. This should have been a potent mix of satire and ridiculousness. That’s why I have to put it in this category. Apparently it has found its stride in the second season, from what I’ve heard on the Hinternet. Sadly, the people who are saying that also keep going on about how Modern Family is hilarious. So, you know…
Best Title Sequence of the Year: Hung
The choice of music (I’ll Be Your Man by The Black Keys), the phallic objects in the background, the pace of it…
…It’s a perfect title sequence.
Best Pilot: Kings
From what I can gather, there was very little publicity for Kings when it made its way onto the screen. Many have said this was the reason for its failure to find an audience, though to be honest a literate curio like this was unlikely to ever become a breakthrough hit. Alternate histories? Playing with Biblical stories? Unappealing main characters? It just seemed like a real long shot. It was impressive to see NBC gamble on making the show in the first place, but as with the equally intelligent Journeyman, making a show and trying to make the show available to a wide audience are two different things.
To be honest, with Journeyman the hurt is greater. That show was less ambitious, but as a result was more likely to find an audience if given a chance. It also improved as it went along. Kings started off incredibly strong and then stalled a little. That’s the problem when a show gets a pilot this impressive. Written by showrunner Michael Green and directed by the underrated Francis Lawrence, Goliath (the name of the pilot) was like no other pilot I’ve ever seen. Even though it was made on a shoestring, it looked incredible. Even more appealing, it had a weird edge of fantasy even beyond the alternate earth conceit, with God interacting with certain characters in a matter of fact way even though the show did not explicitly preach Christian values.
Perhaps this more than anything alienated audiences: atheists might rebel against a show that openly debates the wishes of God, and Christians might be irked by this God not being a recognisable version of their God. While I fall into the first category, I don’t mind God turning up in fiction as long as It’s not used as a deus ex machina or Unexplainable Puppeteer (hello Battlestar Galactica) or as an accurate version of “our” God (a sky bully who gets pissed off if we don’t play by Its crazy rules). The version of God in Kings was not a big deal, but Its mysterious behaviour, and effect on the behaviour of the main characters, was fascinating.
As was the superb character King Silas Benjamin (not to mention his allies and enemies), and the superb use of New York locations (standing in for the fictional city of Shiloh) to give a sense of epic scale to the show, and the incredible cast… As I say, the show was fascinating to watch right up until its unfortunate cancellation, but it never quite lived up to the promise of that amazing pilot, simply because the pilot made you think you were watching the most amazing show ever. We weren’t, but it was damn good nevertheless. Even the slightly disappointing finished product was better than almost everything else on TV. You could practically sense the cult following develop as you watched, not to mention hear the knives coming out for it as you realise how odd the project was. We’re lucky we saw any of it, to be honest.
Worst Pilot: The Unusuals
Seemingly rushed into production as a result of the writers’ strike, The Unusuals matched an underwhelming concept with a poorly defined set of uninteresting characters, failed to find a consistent tone, and handed off directing chores to the ever-feeble Stephen Hopkins, a man who has never made even one good film (I remember liking The Ghost and the Darkness when I first saw it, but I fear I’m being kind). There was no way I was going to enjoy this.
The main reason for my annoyance is that there were some good actors in there who just couldn’t rise above the material or the execution. Some of the most interesting actors — both promising and established — flounder within the show’s poorly thought-through format, with some characters played as broad as possible and others reining in the madness. Jeremy Renner in particular looks like he’s wandered in from another show. Harold Perrineau does okay with his skittish character, while Adam Goldberg sucks all of the energy out of his scenes with a sour and unappealing demeanour, not to mention a terrible mustache. The conceit that a hypochondriac with a fear of death is partnered with a man who wants to die and yet seems blessed is one of those ideas that sounds great on the page and fails on screen.
As for Amber Tamblyn, playing a high-society girl trying to make it as a cop in the cuh-rayzee precinct, it was a more entertaining concept when rich-boy Carter turned up in E.R. That was only one of the shows this seemed to emulate. M.A.S.H., NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Hooperman (for crying out loud): it was an echo of greater shows, a throwback to 80s cop dramas when they started to become more confident and complex. Sad thing is, we don’t want babysteps any more. We’ve moved on. The low ratings and inevitable cancellation of this show proved that. Let’s hope those good actors turn up in better projects now.
Best Pilot of the Year Not Selected For Series: Virtuality
I won’t go into how much I hated the Battlestar Galactica finale again, as I’m beginning to come across as a total crazy person who is obsessed with going on about it, but it did make me reconsider trying out Caprica, the Stoltzified spin-off. Why should I keep watching shows set in this universe, made by this team, who had so disappointed me throughout the last few seasons? Yes, Jane Espenson would be there too, and I love her work, but still, I cannot imagine being invested in this story any more. There is a good chance I’ll relent, because good SF is hard to find on TV at the best of times. Nevertheless, my annoyance remains.
You can imagine how uninterested I was in another Ronald D. Moore / Michael Taylor show (I was never fond of his BSG episodes), especially one that seemed so prosaic. Moore has stated in the past that he was interested in making BSG because he felt the urge to rebel against Star Trek‘s chirpy universe and its reliance on holodeck technology to change up the show, which made Virtuality — a show about space travellers who use virtual reality technology to relax — a curious proposition. I resisted this too, and then relented after seeing the feeble Defying Gravity, which seemed to be drawn from the same template. Thinking Virtuality would be nothing more than a space soap along the same lines as the other network drama, I gave it a spin, expecting little.
I love it when I’m proved wrong like this. As much as Fox’s other new SF show – Dollhouse – Virtuality is a fascinating and challenging exploration of ideas, dramatically filmed and featuring an excellent cast. In fact, the cast is even stronger than that of Dollhouse, with excellent turns from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, Richie Coster (who needs more work, stat), and the ever-dependable Clea DuVall. All the actors are on top form, but these four really stand out. As for the comparison with Defying Gravity, the only thing they have in common is being set in space. Virtuality is about so much more: our perception of reality and how it will inevitably be twisted by the lens we observe through, how technology can affect us emotionally, how we refuse to let it go even when it is obviously not doing us any good (an idea expressed far more clearly here than in Lee Adama’s ridiculous speech in the final BSG episode). While Defying Gravity really is a soap set in space (with one character seemingly completely defined by the pregnancy she once terminated, which is as regressive a character arc as is possible), Virtuality is about ideas. It’s proper SF.
At least, it was proper SF. Even though it was obviously incredibly ambitious and beautifully made (with top direction from Shades of Caruso favourite Peter Berg), and even though were was huge potential for relatively cheap but gripping drama, it was shelved. I’m utterly depressed by this turn of events. There was only one misstep in the whole pilot, with a nasty perception-rape sequence that made me uncomfortable. Reliance on rape plots always upsets me, but here even this most unpleasant of plot threads is used to further the show’s exploration of whether there is a gap between virtual and actual reality, and what happens to us when we lose track of the difference between the two. If the show was willing to treat something potentially exploitative as cleverly as this, we would almost certainly have seen a lot of very smart SF in the rest of the series. But no. While Whedon got lucky with Dollhouse, the Virtuality team saw their show taken away before they could go any further. The best thing I can say about it? It was better than most movies I’ve seen this year. It’s a crying shame there will be no more.
Most Unfairly Cancelled Show of the Year: Reaper
Patton Oswalt is a brilliantly funny and caustic man, but recently he broke my heart. In this interview, he explained how, while filming his turn on Reaper, he saw the crew and cast crushed by their parent network, The CW.
When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”
This is the network that, when it was The WB, cancelled Angel, so I already have a big problem with them. Now I have an even bigger one. It may have not become something more ambitious, but it was endlessly lovable, and became admirably silly in the second season. The first was funny, but at times the second season was funnier than many sitcoms. The monster-of-the-week format of the show, which had seemed so restrictive, sometimes ended up shoved into the cold open, with the rest of the episode dealing with silly relationship drama, Sock shenanigans, or sly mythology expanding business with recurring characters like Nina or Tony. This might not be as involving as Buffy, but it was never as blandly diverting as something like The Mentalist. It fell right in the middle, which is apparently deadly.
That greater focus on just being daft was working for us, but the lack of a coherent arc from week to week (other than Sam’s lacklustre efforts to get out of his contract, and the hints that he is a more important player in the battle between God and The Devil) seemed to doom it. More than any other show departing this year, this is the one we’ll miss. Goodbye to one of the most entertaining casts on TV, some of the most eccentric writing of the past few years, and most of all, goodbye to the best Devil in recent pop culture history. He may be showing up in Dollhouse, but will Ray Wise be this mischievous, charming, delightful? Ray Wise fans everywhere, please come together one last time to marvel at that beautiful, beautiful grin.
At least one of us is smiling, I guess. [Insert sad-face emoticon here]
Best New Double Act of the Year: Ray Drecker and Tanya Skagle - Hung
When compiling the list of best and worst characters, I had certain unspoken rules in place to stop myself from focusing exclusively on certain shows. Party Down‘s cast of beautifully observed characters could have dominated the first list, and Knight Rider could have dominated the second. My biggest quandary was caused by Hung, HBO’s lovable male-prostitution-and-economic-disaster comedy that has so entertained us recently. How do I get to honour two of the funniest characters of the year without breaking that rule? As ever, inventing a new category is the perfect answer. Hung is a show that has a few tonal errors (what was going on with the horribly misconceived Jessica, played with occasional delicacy by Anne Heche?) and a very loosely defined season arc (two pimps fighting over Ray and his magical dong), not to mention some wasted actors (why hire Gregg Henry and put him in about five scenes?). At times, it felt like we were watching half a show.
Nevertheless, it became appointment viewing just because of the wonderful work of Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Their chemistry, and their relentless bickering and grudging friendship, was the thing that made Hung exceed its limitations. It also made Shades of Caruso reconsider the talents of both actors. Thomas Jane was given moments of pathos which he has never really had a chance to play before, and he excelled, especially in the season finale. Jane Adams has always played sad-sack losers, but this time she was given a chance to give Tanya some nobility even as her plans fell apart around her. Both actors also got to show off their physical comedy skills, with Adams especially amusing during her many impotent temper tantrums.
It was their interplay that really held the show together. Even as other plot threads and arcs seemed to falter or shoot off in predictable directions, watching these two actors play off each other was more than enough to save the show. It’s notable that episodes where Ray and Tanya aren’t onscreen together were the weakest of the season, whereas the ones which explored their dependent relationship and accidental exploration of each other’s personality were the most satisfying. Hopefully the show continues to throw these polar opposites together next year.
Best New Couple of the Year: Sawyer and Juliet – Lost
Ah yes, the love triangle/quadrangle. The constant refrain of Lost doubters (and some fans) is that the show is wasting its time whenever it focuses on the relationship drama of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet. “We don’t care about that shit! Show more Faraday!” Yes yes, love drama tends to make me go to sleep as well. Many shows are hamstrung by tedious relationship dramas: House is at its dreariest when Thirteen and Foreman, or Cameron and Chase, go on and on about their coupledom; Kings ground to a halt every time David and Michelle made goo-goo eyes at each other. Hell, even the otherwise perfect Party Down was at its least interesting every time Henry and Casey got together. So there is precedent.
However, I love the relationship drama from Lost for two reasons. One: at the end of the season, we see how far Jack has fallen from grace. We thought he was the square-jawed all-American hero who would bring everyone out of the wilderness like a be-stubbled Moses, but over time we see he’s a deeply damaged, semi-psychotic loser who – as we find out in the final episode of season five – even lied about his character-defining anecdote from the very first episode. How much of a loser is he? After pushing away the woman he “loves” with his whiny attitude and various emotional breakdowns, and after years of trying to figure out what his purpose is now that his dad isn’t around to torture him, he has two choices to make a difference in his life: a) man up and seek help for his depression, all while giving up on the thought of making a go of things with Kate, or b) detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone on the island, in the hope that it will change history and allow Oceanic 815 to land safely in LAX so he doesn’t have to put up with the mess he made of his life. I’ve said before that one of the things I love about Lost is that it shows the psychology of its characters in minute detail, and this final touch – showing how far people will go to avoid making simple changes in their lives because of their fear of what will happen if it fails – is the perfect metaphor for how we hold onto our broken selves even when we know how to make things better.
Two: It also gave us the wonderful, tragic pairing of Sawyer and Juliet, which justifies all of the sturm and drang to get there. So far, all of the pairings that have been tried were wrong somehow. Jack and Kate didn’t work because Jack is insane. Kate and Sawyer didn’t work because Kate keeps messing with Sawyer’s head. Jack and Juliet didn’t work because Jack was not even slightly into Juliet and was just using her to get over Kate. However, as soon as the fourth season ended with a shirtless Sawyer walking out of the sea towards a drunken Juliet, I knew we would get to see something go right. And, for the most part, it did, even though it was not to be.
It’s not just that the combined hottness of Sawyer and Juliet is so great that it probably melted most of the TVs in the world. It’s also not just that selfish Kate and crazy Jack were finally out of the equation. It’s even not just because seeing Sawyer and Juliet flirting while shooting people was the most awesome thing ever. It’s that there was barely any controversy in the relationship, which probably would have even survived the forthcoming Purge, somehow. It’s only when Kate returns to the island and reignites Juliet’s psychological damage (previously caused by the break-up of her parents, the infidelity of her ex-husband, and the death of her lover Goodwin) that it all goes horribly wrong. Did Sawyer still hold a candle for Kate? Probably. Did he love Juliet? I reckon yes, and I believe he would have done anything for her if she had given him the chance. All of this made the quadrangle emotionally powerful, as we finally had something to hang on to. Would Sawyer and Juliet survive the machinations of the island/Esau and Jacob? More than any other relationship in TV history (except for Fred and Wesley in Angel), my nerves were set on fire by the possibility that those kids might not make it after all. Of course…
Most Upsetting, Most Harsh, and Most Unfair Scene of the Year: The Incident finally happens – Lost
…we all know how it turned out. Nothing else this year made me cry as much as this.
Damn you, stupid TV show! Damn you for being so fucking mean! And damn you Emmy voters for not giving nominations to Elizabeth Mitchell and Josh Holloway. They were amazing all season.
Worst New Couple of the Year: Luke and Bess - In Treatment
In Treatment‘s second season deviated dramatically from its source material — the Israeli drama Be’Tipul — when it moved main character Paul Weston from Maryland to Brooklyn, allowing the show to dramatise his dislocation from his family, as well as to provide a reason for why he suddenly has so many new patients. This meant that we lost the chance to see season one patients Amy and Jake return, this time as a divorced couple fighting over their son, leading to the creation of two new patients, Luke and Bess. With their marriage in tatters and resentment flying between them, their son Oliver suffers terribly, putting on weight and falling into depression as his parents either fight for custody of him or, amazingly, against custody.
None of the characters in this show are particularly nice to Paul, but the games Luke and Bess play with him, using his advice as justification for a serious of awful, selfish choices, were worse than the usual antagonism people show their therapist. Many times during the season I was horrified by their behaviour, and by the time the season finished they were openly talking about how their lives had been ruined by their marriage and how they wanted another chance at what they had with barely any regard for Oliver’s well-being. When Paul finally loses his temper with them in episode 28, it elicited a round of applause from us. Figuratively speaking. And to be honest, he should have been even angrier with them.
Of course, this being In Treatment, these two horribly selfish people are written so well that we can see their point of view — and their humanity — clearly enough that even at their worst we cannot completely write them off. Their eventual remorse is a relief, but it’s still not enough considering how completely both parents are oblivious to the young boy’s needs. Thankfully, Paul is there to prove to Oliver that he will still be there for him, in some respect. His final scene with Oliver, talking to him via “phone” in his office, started a deluge of tears from this admittedly weepy viewer. If Oliver escapes this miserable situation with his psyche intact, it will have nothing to do with his parents.
Most Underused Character of the Year: Boyd Langton - Dollhouse
Whedon has a talent for peppering his casts with older character actors playing the “parents” to the younger crew. With Buffy we had Giles, in Angel there was Wesley (though his efficacy is doubtful; he’s arguably more flawed than any of his compatriots), and Firefly had Shepherd Book. These stern characters with hearts of gold gave their respective shows some kind of grounding when things got wacky, though Whedon wasn’t averse to making them run through some ridiculous hoops (Book’s mad hair, Wesley’s various pratfalls, Giles’ guitar playing). Sadly, while Langton got a chance to be silly in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, he rarely got a chance to do anything interesting either. Many characters got to have interesting arcs and secrets, but Langton seemed to be getting less and less screentime as the series wore on. Making him head of security broke the student-mentor relationship between him and Echo, but then this might be Whedon trying to throw his own archetypes out, confounding our expectations. That he would give handler-duties to someone who appears to have an unhealthy sexual attraction to Echo (I’m talking about the plasticine-man known as Ballard) shows there might be something to that.
Nevertheless, it is a shame to cast someone like Harry Lennix — who has intense onscreen presence and then some — and then not give him as much to do as possible. His new role means he will interact more with Olivia Williams, meaning the two best actors on the show get to bang heads together: joy! That promotion, along with his new connection to Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, suggests he will be given more to do in the second season, but nevertheless, his relative inaction in later episodes was one of the few things I didn’t like about the improved half of the first season.
Most Entertaining Villain of the Year: Gemma Teller Morrow – Sons of Anarchy
One of the great pleasures of Sons of Anarchy is how it mixes up its Shakespeare. The debt it owes to Hamlet has been acknowledged by creator Kurt Sutter, but less attention has been paid to his shameless steal from Macbeth. Gemma Teller Morrow — former wife of SAMCRO leader John Teller — at first seems like a strong biker chick, but by the end of the pilot episode has revealed herself to be a conniving, power-hungry Queen whose sense of morality has been twisted until she will do anything to protect her family and the direction of the gang, a fact proved by her attempt at driving Jax’s junkie wife Wendy to an overdose. Later in the season she apologises to Wendy for this act, but even then she’s only doing it because she’d rather her son stay with a recovering junkie than return to his longtime sweetheart Tara. Plus, she does seem to be implicated in John’s death, possibly committed by her current husband Clay Morrow, which appears to have been done to prevent a change of direction towards legitimacy for the biker gang.
The most miraculous thing about this character is that she has dispelled my previous reservations about the talents of Katey Sagal. I’ve complained about her terrible voicework on Futurama before, where she leaves no joke intact, but I had suspected her dramatic work was not as shaky. She was great as John Locke’s departed love Helen in Lost, for example. In Sons of Anarchy, she’s even better, outacting even Ron Perlman when she’s in full flow. This display of Macchiavellian sneakiness got even more entertaining as the season progressed. There was a certain amount of character modulation during the latter half of the season, with some of her excesses toned down, and the horribly stagy confrontations between her and Tara tweaked until they sounded like actual human conversations, but even so, her Lady-Macbeth-esque manipulations of all around her were a source of delight even when she misfired a little. Gemma, as Journey almost said once, don’t stop conniving.
Least Entertaining Villain of the Year: Miguel Prado - Dexter
Dexter sure does have some crappy nemeses. In the first season, he goes up against his own brother, played with ridiculous camp evilness by Christian Camargo. In the second season, he is forced to conquer his evil girlfriend, manifested by Jaime Murray with a bag of absurd tics even more annoying than those of Dexter’s sister Debs, who is played by the equally dreadful Jennifer Carpenter. In the fourth season we’re getting John Lithgow. My memories of his madness from De Palma’s Raising Cain do not bode well for any Over-Act-O-Meters used to track the progress of this show, though I reckon he will be infinitely more entertaining than Dexter’s other “villains”.
Last year we got to see Jimmy Smits contend with the usual quota of ineptitude, improbable motivation, and mustache-twirling obviousness that comprises the Dexter Big Bad, and he made a meal of it. Amping up his intensity to sky-high levels, Miguel Prado went from saint to madman in the blink of an eye, all pretense at showing him as a morally complex human thrown out of the window with a haste even this most feeble of shows has never exhibited before. His cluelessness meant his occasional victories against Dexter relied upon our “hero”‘s IQ dropping 100 points, which is a flaw that has run through the show from the beginning. Prado would then, naturally, make a bunch of mistakes, all the while chewing scenery like a murderous Donald Sinden. I say he was the least entertaining villain of the year because watching his character arc was deeply unsatisfying, with him changing his personality from moment to moment in order to move the plot, and not vice versa, but I did get a lot of pleasure from his reaction after he finally kills a bad guy.
Nastiest Villain of the Year: Nolan – Dollhouse
I can’t make any glib observations about this. Whedon is an avowed feminist, and this new show seemed to be a peculiar expression of that worldview, drawing both perplexed condemnation and optimistic readings. The fact that the show didn’t immediately say that the Dollhouse was a bad place threw a lot of viewers (including myself), but I’m sure a lot of Whedon’s fans (again, including myself) hoped that things would be clearer in the long run.
By the end of the season it was obvious that the Dollhouse tech was meant to be The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Humanity Ever, and not just because it brings about the end of the world (or at least, the end of Humanity). The most graphic and upsetting example of this comes in the excellent episode Needs, where the Actives come to and “escape” their prison (but only because they are allowed to). Drawn to the terrible things that have made them volunteer for Activeness, we see November visiting the grave of her child, and Echo deciding to stay behind to rescue her fellow Actives (surely this should worry the Dollhouse executives a bit more). Sierra, who I’d never found to be particularly compelling, goes to see the man who has paid the Dollhouse to make her an Active. Any doubt that the Dollhouse is a force for evil is removed once we find out that Nolan (played with oily menace by Vincent Ventresca) has paid the Dollhouse to turn her — a woman who once refused him — into an Active just so that he can violate a woman her whenever he feels like it. As Couch Baron says here, there truly are no words that can describe how awful this is. It was the most potent way to show how dreadful this technology is, and upset me deeply. The bad taste remained for the rest of the season. How rare for a network show to explore this kind of moral depravity without shying away from it.
Best Cast of the Year: Party Down
Just as with this year’s Best New Double Act category, I created this category last year to give shout-out to Reaper‘s wonderful cast, which featured a host of great actors, especially Ray Wise, Tyler Labine, and Ken Marino. This year, Party Down gets a nod for featuring so many great actors, including Ken Marino. If I’d been blogging when Veronica Mars started, I probably would have highlighted the terrific cast of that show too, which would have meant discussing Ken Marino’s turn as sleazy private investigator Vinnie Van Lowe. Basically, Ken Marino seems to be my weakness. If he’s around, I am helpless.
Which is not to say Party Down worked solely because of him. As I’ve mentioned at length in my Best New Characters award list, Jane Lynch is breathtakingly good as Constance Carmell, and her replacement (Jennifer Coolidge) was just as good. Of the core cast, I’d highlight Ryan Hansen too, playing the adorably clueless Kyle Bradway — basically Dick Casablancas with a heart of gold. His vapid interactions with Jane Lynch are the highlight of many episodes, and he even manages to make tolerable the time spent with Martin Starr, here doing worryingly convincing work as the deeply unpleasant Roman DeBeers. He’s probably the weak link in the cast, though I would also become annoyed by the endless hipsterish emotional evasions of Casey Klein, played by Lizzy Caplan. (Side note: I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to real-world annoyances too numerous to count, I automatically take against any character on TV who spends all of their time on the phone instead of doing their job, or while other people are trying to talk to them. Those caveats are meant to signify that Jack Bauer is not to be considered one of these people. When he’s on the phone, he’s actually saving the world).
At the heart of this amazing ensemble is Adam Scott, formerly playing Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron from Tell Me You Love Me, and now utterly rehabilitated from that indie-movie-aping earnestness after his incredibly bold turn in Step Brothers. Here he is required to be in enormous emotional pain for the majority of the time, and it’s a credit to him that playing a completely shut-down shell of a man doesn’t mean he isn’t funny. His ability to mix up this world-weariness and emotional vulnerability with deadpan wit is essential to the success of the show. He’s Tim-from-The-Office, but even more pathetic. You weep for him in every episode.
So, they’re a fantastic core group, but they’re not the only reason Party Down wins this award. Just as with 30 Rock and Arrested Development before them, this show manages to get some of the best character actors around to populate the secondary cast. In the first season we saw Ken Jeong, J.K. Simmons, Steven Weber, Marilu Henner, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, Joey Lauren Adams, Molly Parker, Breckin Meyer, Rob Corddry, Rick Fox (as himself), George Takei (also as himself), not to mention — for the Veronica Mars fans out there — Kristin Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Daran “Cliff McCormack” Norris, Ed Begley Jr., Alona Tal and Jason Dohring. Matched up to the best sitcom scripts of the year, there was no way this show was going to fail. Even though I’m agnostic on the appeal of Megan Mullally (drafted in to replace Jane Lynch in season two), I have a strong feeling she will be magically transformed by this most glorious of shows.
Worst Cast of the Year: Parks and Recreation
I feel a little ill, because I’m about to criticise the casting of a show that has Amy Poehler in the lead role. Amy Poehler, who was the best thing about last year’s Baby Mama. Amy Poehler, who was one of the best things about SNL for the past few years. Amy Poehler, who was one of the three things in Southland Tales that was actually great and entertaining instead of desperately bad and misery-inducing (the other two things being The Rock and Wood Harris, with whom she shared her scenes). She makes me laugh pretty much every time I see her, but not here. In that case, I’m willing to assume she was just dealt a bad hand, and given a character who is unworkable. The only times Leslie Knope comes alive and becomes more than a badly formed lump of unrealistic character flaws is when she pines over Mark Brendanawicz, her selfish and unappealing colleague played by the talented Paul Schneider. Again, another talented actor playing an unlikeable and uninteresting character. Maybe I should rethink this category. Is it the cast, or the show, that I don’t like?
Well, Aziz Ansari is in it. I’ll admit, I have not seen much of his work. He was in Funny People for a couple of minutes, and the effect he had on me was akin to having my soul Maced. Perhaps I’m wrong. This show seems to be underwritten and poorly thought through, which could account for it, but his turn as Tom Haverford is almost unwatchable. I’d say that’s more than just a glitch in the writing. The same goes for Nick Offerman as the Dwight-Schrute-esque Ron Swanson, a character that screams desperation from the writers but is not at all helped by Offerman’s flat performance. Both Haverford and Swanson seem like the kernel of a joke expanded to character-size without much thought given to whether these characters will work. As it is, they’re just belligerent. The less said about Aubrey Plaza and her pointless teenage character April Ludgate, the better. (See above for comments about affectless, oblivious characters like Ludgate and Casey from Party Down.)
Perhaps the thing I resent most is putting someone as funny as Chris Pratt opposite a comedy void like Rashida Jones. She was charming enough in The Office but wasn’t expected to be particularly funny. Here she is either a dope being manipulated by Pratt’s Andy, or she berates him, making her seem churlish and him seem like a victim, which he isn’t. Crappy couples on TV are not often fun to watch (ask any Lost fan who despairs whenever Jack and Kate get together). I’m more than willing to accept that a lot of these actors are far better in other roles. Hell, I’ve seen them be better. Pratt was hilarious in The O.C. as Che, and Paul Schneider was riveting in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Perhaps I’m being way too harsh on these actors. Sadly, the bottom line is that, unlike The Office that came with only a couple of good characters, already based on archetypes from the UK series, and then built the supporting cast as they went along, Parks and Recreation started from scratch and got none of the characters right. Even a good cast would have trouble making this bunch of half-formed comedic scribbles come to life. In time, if it doesn’t get cancelled, perhaps this will change. Let me know when it does. Until then, I’ll stick with Community, Dan Harmon’s brilliant new sitcom, which recently started almost fully-formed and will hopefully keep getting better.
Best Guest Star of the Year: Jon Hamm - 30 Rock
For a little while, we were non-converts to the Cult of Hamm. He entertained us enough in Mad Men, but we had enough reservations about the first season that he didn’t really register in our consciousness, even after the Dick Whitman revelation gave Hamm the best acting opportunities. Perhaps we thought he was just a pretty face, and couldn’t imagine there was anything else in there. Canyon was also offended by his Brylcreemed hair. She deemed it unappealing. I wasn’t about to argue.
Then came the far superior second season, and sightings of his normal hair (adorably floppy), and then a turn on Saturday Night Live that was so confident and charming that I fully expect Hamm to eventually challenge the hosting records fought over by Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Dramatic excellence, perfect comic timing, a willingness to play off his image, and seriously, one of the handsomest faces on Earth; if he can sing and dance, he’s got it all. We are now members of the Cult. Wearing robes and everything. It’s proper infatuation.
His three episode run as Dr. Drew Baird on 30 Rock was joyous. It was so good that the plot of his final episode, with him coming to realise that having everyone fawn over him all the time is something that doesn’t happen to anyone else, was even alluded to in the third season of Mad Men (reacting with bemusement when Sal points out that he doesn’t get hit on by flight attendants on every flight he takes, unlike Don, who is obviously spoilt for choice). Once Mad Men is over, Hamm can pretty much pick a direction. Not many actors get to achieve stardom and show both comedic and dramatic chops. Maybe he’s more like Dr. Drew than he realises.
Most Resurrected Character of the Year: Captain Jack Harkness - Torchwood: Children of Earth
I thought I always wanted Captain Jack’s immortality to be used more, as it’s a nifty little gimmick. I don’t think that any more.
Most Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Akiva Goldsman on Kings and Fringe
Akiva Goldsman has done some awful things. His script for Batman and Robin is rightly reviled. He’s great at simplifying complex narratives and turning them into multiplex fodder (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot). He’s the go-to guy for big movies based on crappy thrillers by bad writers (he’s adapted John Grisham and Dan Brown). When nerds hear his name, they sob with misery. “Why is this man so beloved of Hollywood?”, they shout. “It must be proof of its awfulness, along with the career of Michael Bay!” Of course, my own feelings about Bay are not so straight-down-the-line, and now, Goldsman has begun to win me over.
All he had to do was build up his experience as a director by making two of the strongest hours of TV of the 2008-2009 season. His debut, on Kings‘ The Sabbath Queen, showed a talent for atmospherics and interesting visuals, pacing the episode beautifully and getting some good performances from even the weaker actors on the show. After that he wrote and directed Bad Dreams, one of the highlights of Fringe‘s first season. Again, the creepy atmosphere was beautifully judged, and the opening few minutes were hypnotically staged. Even better, the big finale was disturbing and tense, even as it played with some less than fresh ideas, and then we got a video clip of a young Olivia that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. If you’ll forgive me for cheating and ignoring my own rules, we’ve also seen his work on the first episode of the second season of Fringe, and again, it was very impressive. In time it’s obvious that he will be directing films too. I hope he finds some interesting material to work with, but even if not, I look forward to seeing what he will come up with.
Least Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Greg Yaitanes on House and Lost
Shades of Caruso took against the TV (and occasional film) director Greg Yaitanes after some hilariously overwrought and showy work on shows such as Heroes and Drive, and we’ve yet to be convinced he deserves reappraisal. Last year he won an Emmy for his work on the first part of the House season finale, which would have been understandable when you take the logistics of the shoot into account, but is frustrating when Katie Jacobs’ work on the far more affecting final episode wasn’t even considered (and she’s listed as co-director of the Yaitanes episode too, but didn’t get a nomination). Since then, Yaitanes has been given a co-producer credit on House, and contributed numerous episodes to this season, including the shocking Simple Explanation, in which Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide offscreen.
I will say this: the scene where Foreman and Thirteen discover the body was brilliantly done. Unfortunately, Yaitanes had a vision for this episode and went ahead with it. Everyone at Princeton Plainsboro is obviously very depressed about Kutner’s death, so Yaitanes lights the entire episode as if all the colour has been drained from the hospital. It’s an entirely grey hour of TV, just in case you didn’t get it from the performances or dialogue or sad music all over the place. To be honest, the episode Joy, directed by an unexpectedly off-colour Deran Serafian, featured the worst direction of the season, but Yaitanes was consistently bad here, and worse elsewhere.
You see, he also managed to infect my beloved Lost with his ridiculous film-cooties. I could talk about the flashy work he did on Heroes, but to be honest he’s the least of that show’s problems, so I don’t really mind if he stays on it. Lost, however, is a totally different matter. He had worked on the show before, in the first season, and as we started rewatching the show recently, I noticed he was kinda bad then too. That was when the show was in its infancy, and was still trying to find its tone, so his attention-seeking excesses were less obvious. By now, we all know what works and what doesn’t work within the very specific Lost world, which made Yaitanes’ excesses even more noticeable than usual. We know that Ben is creepy and Sayid is scary and intimidating, which are characteristics stressed by their very specific line-readings. In He’s Our You, we see a flashback to a face-off between the two characters, and both Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews draw out their sentences to absurd lengths, with poorly edited pauses between each shot emphasising that they are both very methodical people who hate each other.
Lost usually treats these big moments with a sense of grandeur that works well, considering the unapologetically grandiose nature of the narrative, but this scene stepped over the line between epic and ridiculous. It made my favourite show seem like a parody of itself. I don’t even want to get into the awful “interrogation” scene later (included above), which was poorly written but even more poorly directed. What was Andrews doing here? It’s all over the place. The final scene with Sayid shooting young Ben was brilliant, but it was the only bright spot in a very disappointing hour of Lost. When you compare this horrible misinterpretation of the tone of the show to the consistently impressive work of star directors Jack Bender and Stephen Williams, it just looks amateurish. I keep hoping he’ll settle down, but the latest episode of House was directed by him, and as it was about a games programmer, most shots seemed to feature arms coming out of the side of the frame towards the person being observed, just like an FPS, so it might be a while before he realises less is more.
Best Shout-Out of the Year: House
Stephen Colbert is a huge fan of House, and it seems the feeling is mutual. (It’s the photo above his shoulder, obviously.)
This is the only way Colbert is ever going to get on a Fox channel without being mischaracterised as a baby-eating Trotsky clone.
Intensity of the Year: Lance “Intensity” Reddick – Fringe
While Parks and Recreation fans, or Dexterites, or people with Unusual taste, might be mad at me for being a big meanie and saying such terrible things about their favourite shows, surely there can be no controversy here. No one else this year was so stern and scary and just fucking in charge.
I suspect Lance “Intensity” Reddick can atomise titanium just by looking at it. As with Harry Lennix on Dollhouse, Reddick is pretty under-used on Fringe. Most of the time he is onscreen he’s taking the Fringe team to various crime scenes, or giving Olivia either a bollocking or a pep talk. This is not a good use of this man’s talents. He also showed up in Lost, as the sinister Matthew Abaddon, where he stopped being sinister just before getting shot and killed. Which sucked. I hope season two of Fringe sees him doing more entertaining stuff. I’d like him to shoot one of their ridiculous monsters (a part squid, part mushroom teenager hiding under carpets, for instance), or have more screen time with Blair Brown and Her Metallic Arm. If the Fringe showrunners don’t hurry up, he could well get very bored very soon. In this AV Club interview, he says he wants to try his hand at comedy. (For the record, though he is seemingly never required to show it on TV, Mr. Reddick is fully capable of expressing amusement, and isn’t just a scarily intense man.)
If he left Fringe to do that, you know I’d be checking it out.
And that’s it for this year. In the next few weeks, some new polls or something. Maybe some chatter about the London Film Festival (I got really carried away buying tickets the other week). Stay tuned, new readers. As you can see, I may not post as often as I would like, but when I do, I tend to post big.
The 2008-2009 Caruso Awards: The Worst New Characters Of The Year
Long-time readers of Shades of Caruso will be well aware of the concept of The Gupta, but I must admit to being concerned that new readers have come across this post and are wondering why I sound like an enormous racist. Here is the long version if you want a proper explanation, but if you don’t want to check that out, here is a short version. Spielberg’s The Terminal features a deeply unlikeable character who seems to be awful to everyone around him for no apparent logical reason. Gupta, played by Kumar Pallana from Wes Anderson’s troupe of supporting players, is a total schmuck, and every scene with him in drove Canyon and me into fits of apoplectic fury. This is not — I repeat, NOT — a comment on Kumar Pallana, who is delightful in his other roles. The problem lies with the character of Gupta, not the performer. Why writers Andrew Niccol, Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson thought this odious little sprite was a good idea is beyond me, and Spielberg’s motives are similarly unclear. Is he some form of trickster demon? An experiment in audience sympathy? I am still perplexed by this.
Nevertheless, after seeing it, me and Canyon came up with the theory that every show or film features a Gupta, some character who annoys us, or has seemingly no purpose, or fails to do what they are supposed to do (i.e. be charming, coming off instead as a bit of a dick). This is never a knock on the actor, who might be perfectly fine when not playing this poorly designed character, and it’s not objective (these things never are). It is also not a racist comment, for the millionth time. If the original Gupta from The Terminal had been, say, a bespectacled nerd from the West Midlands called John who had a weird compulsion to leave large wet patches on slippery floors to make Catherine Zeta-Jones fall over, we would be talking about the John of the show. Gupta was just the character that inspired the observation, and has now been immortalised. It is more than the character deserves, to be honest.
So anyway, here are the ten new Guptas from shows seen over the period from September 2008 to September 2009. Remember, this is not a comment on the actors, though if they have in any way contributed to the Guptocity of the characters they are playing, we will have to cry foul. Sorry, potentially lovely people who have been unfortunate enough to get work playing douchebags.
10. Kimmie Keegan - Ugly Betty
The obnoxious stunt-casting of Lindsay Lohan can be forgiven. The increasingly desperate Ugly Betty needed to do something to draw attention to itself now that the glowing articles from EW and Salon have dried up, and the former interest in presenting a candy-coloured and energetic vision of a tolerant world has given way to a tiresome soap opera pastiche that lies dead on the screen like something that gets lampooned by Joel McHale on The Soup. Nevertheless, Lohan’s character — Kimmie Keegan — was a misfire from the first second. Played as a spiteful figure from Betty’s past, she was used to make our heroine feel even more insecure at work than ever, but as this season was scattershot and poorly organised, this long long set-up of Kimmie as a supervillainous foil paid off far too quickly to have any impact. Yet another waste of our time from a once-great show. Lohan’s listless and unfocused performance didn’t help either.
Worst Moment: Dissing Marc and Amanda in the Mode cafeteria. Yes, we get that her arrival has turned the office into a kind of surrogate for school, and they’re playing with those uncomfortable moments from our past, but there is no way she would turn them away. They have too much accumulated power between them. The grinding gears of the plot were deafening.
9. Emile Danko - Heroes
As I said above, the appearance of a character on the Gupta list is not a knock on the actor. Indeed, Željko Ivanek is a terrific character actor who has given numerous super performances in the past. We were lucky enough to see him at the Edwin Booth Theatre in Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, opposite Jeff Goldblum and Billy Crudup, and he was superb. Heroes is possibly the polar opposite of an acclaimed play by an award-winning playwright. Here, Ivanek is forced to play a deadly hunter required to hunt powered individuals, operating with staggering ineptitude and making all sorts of baffling and ridiculous double-deals, all the while letting people off the hook whenever the abysmal scripts require it. There is almost certainly a way to make the character work, but when he is written in such a way as to have no coherent arc or soul, there is no way to invest in him or his goals. No, we don’t add characters to the Gupta list because we hate the actors, but we can add a character to the Gupta list if we love the actor. Seeing Ivanek in the middle of this mess was a dispiriting experience.
Worst Moment: After making a million comments about how he will show no mercy to any powered individuals, he promptly teams up with Sylar. Eventually he betrays him, just as he reflexively betrays everyone in the show at some point or another, but he still allows him to go around absorbing powers while he is his “partner”. Dear God, this series is beyond awful.
8. Lucas Douglas - House
In his first appearance in House, hired by the titular character to spy on his team and friends, Lucas Douglas is very funny and charming. He’s a bit inept, and makes numerous social faux-pas that endear him to people around him enough that they open up to him. It was an amusing take on the private detective role. And then he crops up again the following week, acting like he has known all of the characters for months and starts hanging out with House at his home. And then he turns up for a third week and he’s coming onto Cuddy, and she seems to be responding to it. That was enough for us. David Shore has said that Douglas was meant to get his own show, meaning his appearance in House was a dry run for that show, though now it appears not to be going ahead. A shame, as I would happily have watched him in his own show, which would have had a chance to grow organically with new characters and situations. Having him hang out with well-established characters like some kind of misguided Gary-Stu? Thanks, but no thanks. And he’s coming back in season six. Let’s hope they get him right this time.
Worst Moment: Seeing him hanging out at House’s apartment, jamming on a piano and chatting away with the long-time misanthrope and professional asshole, was the first inkling that something had gone wrong with the show. Has the example of Poochy taught us nothing?
7. Captain David Shepherd - Kings
Kings cannot help but be dominated by the incredible power of Ian Mc-Fucking-Shane as King Silas Benjamin, with that rich, booming voice resonating through the cavernous locations and sets like the word of God. The only actor on the show who can stand up to that is Brian Cox as Vesper Abedon, the former king of Carmel, and we sadly don’t get to see much of that. (I’m not counting Dylan Baker’s William Cross, as he is a sneaky toad who conspires against his king behind his back, meaning he rarely has to go toe-to-toe with Benjamin). So who do they get as the potential usurper, the future King David to Benjamin’s defeated King Saul? A hick soldier who gets lucky against a tank one time, looks terrified throughout, and seems to have “Crying about how horrible the world is” listed as a hobby. Christopher Egan should feel no shame for being outclassed by McShane; other than Cox, everyone on the show is, including such fine actors as Dylan Baker, Eamonn Walker, and Wes Studi. What can’t be avoided, though, is that David Shepherd, as conceived here, is a whiny loser. I don’t care how many butterflies hover around his head (this is a plot point, not a weird metaphor). He looks completely wrong sharing the screen with King Silas Benjamin. It’s like watching Milhouse Van Houten facing off against Charlton Heston as Moses.
Worst Moment: In The Sabbath Queen, a flashback shows King Silas Benjamin visiting his dying daughter in hospital. In the atrium of the building we get to see David before he becomes the soldier that destroys the Goliath tank. He is crying. Of course. Cowboy up, you wimp!
6. Martha Rodgers - Castle
Castle is a star vehicle, no doubt about it. Other than the dashing, hilarious charmster Mr. Nathan Fillion Esq., there is very little going on to make Castle appointment TV. We only watched a few episodes, waiting for a moment when Fillion would get a chance to inject some unpredictability into the show, while the supporting cast did stuff in the background. I think they were police detectives or something. We couldn’t tell the difference between them, to be honest. One of them was a woman, right? She was in The Spirit, chewing the scenery? Whatever. When Fillion was onscreen, all was right with the world, but sadly he also had to interact with his character’s mother, played by Susan “Falcon Crest” Sullivan. Hamming it up as an actress and socialite, she has little to do other than chide Castle constantly. That’s it. She’s an old show-off who moans a lot, sucking the energy out of Fillion’s scenes. There’s nothing there for Sullivan to do, and she’s never given anything funny to say. When Tracy Jordan yelled “Banter!” on 30 Rock that one time, he was expending more effort than the Castle writers did cranking out this tired repartee. Sometimes, being a Gupta is a case of just not being properly thought through.
Worst Moment: In A Death In The Family (which regrettably has nothing to do with the murder of Jason Todd), Fillion does a pretty good impression of Christopher Walken. It’s not quite as good as Kevin Spacey’s, but it’s still funny. Martha is required to point out how terrible it is, but the complaint just doesn’t fly because it is a good impression. Also, earlier in the episode, she calls Robert Picardo “Doctor Death”. It’s like she’s just trying to annoy me personally.
5. Eli Loker - Lie To Me
Lie To Me seemed, in early episodes, to be a concept with very little room for expansion. With the main characters able to detect lies, the possibilities for crime-solving seemed set in stone: watch person twitch, explain meaning of twitch, clap said twitchy person in irons. Next case. Eventually it broadened its parameters and introduced new characters to play off Dr. Cal Lightman, but in its early stages it seemed like the show would revolve around truth and dishonesty to the exclusion of all else. As an avatar to explore these themes, one Lightman Group worker — Eli Loker, played by Brendan Hines — refuses to lie, and spends much of his time saying the most outrageous things to people in the interests of maintaining this self-imposed philosophy of perpetual honesty. In the context of Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson’s forthcoming The Invention of Lying, I’m sure that conceit will play out in various interesting and amusing ways. Here it’s used to give Loker an opportunity to sexually harass his colleague Ria Torres by pointing out how much he wants to sleep with her all the time. Is he meant to be charming or creepy? If it’s the latter, thumbs up. Oh, and forgive my irrationality, but I hate his fucking floppy hair too. I want it to get caught in an escalator or something.
Worst Moment: After taking the moral high ground all season, in the episode Depraved Hearts he decides to rat out a businesswoman who has done a Bernie Madoff with a ton of money. This sabotages a deal with her father, leading to innocent shareholders losing out on fiscal reparations, just so he could feel better about himself. Then, when it becomes apparent he has humiliated team leader Dr. Gillian Foster, he implicates Torres. We prayed for him to get fired, but sadly he’s just demoted to intern-status and asked to give up his paycheck. Apparently he can still afford product for that shitty hair, though.
4. Stuart Radzinsky - Lost
As our heroes became trapped in a terrible decade and forced to wear unflattering jumpsuits, my love of Lost palled ever-so-slightly, mostly because I thought I knew exactly where the show was going. How much could it surprise us when we knew that there was going to be an Incident at the Swan Station building site, and a Purge instigated by Richard Alpert and hastened by Ben Linus? With the future seemingly set in stone, I thought the fifth season was just putting pieces into place, not realising we were being set up for what might be a temporal reboot in one of the most thrilling episodes of TV I have ever been lucky enough to see. Nevertheless, that frustration remained for the last seven episodes, ruining my enjoyment of my favourite show. However, that cloud had one silver lining. I knew that Stuart Radzinsky, paranoid one-note jerk, was going to die by his own hand, blowing his brains out and leaving a stain on the ceiling of the Swan Station. For the latter half of the season he alienates the audience with a seemingly never-ending stream of shrill complaints about interlopers, bitching about security at his beloved station, and then, for good measure, risking the entire planet just so he can drill into the exotic matter at the heart of the island and complete his precious experiment. In a show as carefully constructed as this, it is surprising to see the writers find nothing for Radzinsky to do other than moan and moan and moan. Good riddance to bad scientist rubbish.
Worst Moment: Taking over every group he is a part of just by bleating louder than everyone else is his modus operandi, but his behaviour at the end of season low-point He’s Our You — voting to kill Sayid and strong-arming Horace with the threat of bringing Dharma HQ into the equation — was the bottom of the barrel. I’ve met guys like this. They were assholes too.
3. Clement McDonald - Torchwood: Children of Earth
The glitchy, unhinged character who has some kind of weird insight has become an overused cliche of modern SF or fantasy TV. Was it Whedon who first introduced us to annoying stream-of-consciousness blitherings from those who have been touched by madness or revelation? If so, consider it a black mark on his otherwise spotless résumé. Even so, he still managed to do it better than most. Drusilla could be funny, and River Tam was okay, though crazy season seven Spike was relentlessly annoying. That’s a better run than Russell T. Davies, who has stolen this most irksome of writerly tics for use in his own shows. Doctor Who had all sorts of chattery psychic grandmothers or mad Daleks talking about space beyond time and dancing in the lonely places blah blah. It was supremely silly and leached all drama from their scenes. His attempts to turn Torchwood into a cross between State of Play and Quatermass were scuppered by a vast and embarrassing number of plot inconsistencies, absurd melodramatics, and shaky performances (all Torchwood trademarks), but he did himself no favours by introducing a man who can smell aliens as a vital plot device. As with Heroes and the Incredible Mister Sniff (as played by Jamie Hector from The Wire), the sight of a person snuffling as hard as they can while trying to look intense is the silliest thing an actor can do. It’s impossible to take this seriously, and to have so much of the drama of Torchwood: We’re Very Serious And Adult This Time hinge on a man who keeps punctuating his ramblings with repeated bursts of “Isn’t it? Isn’t it?” and then smelling the air around him with a look of terror on his face is a disaster waiting to happen. Paul Copley’s unfortunate performance was not the only thing that didn’t work in this noble failure, but it was the thing that made me shout “OH DO SHUT UP!” at the screen whenever his tics kicked off.
Worst Moment: As all he did was sniff and panic, there wasn’t really a single moment that stood out. Perhaps his death annoyed me the most, as it seemed added to the story only so that Captain Jack could then use that most scientific of solutions — a frequency with the things reversed or something! — to defeat the junkie snotmonsters from planet Zorb or whatever they were supposed to be. If it were up to me, he would have gone out like the young woman in Quatermass — levitating and then blowing up in a hospital. They really don’t make ‘em like they used to.
2. Topher Brink - Dollhouse
Actually, I was wrong. Whedon’s penchant for mad characters and their crazy chatter is not the only bad mark on his report card. He also created Topher Brink, who was very nearly the number one Gupta of the decade. Perhaps it’s because of the moral ambiguity running through the show, but Topher’s alignment with the ethically dubious Dollhouse makes it hard to get a bead on his character. Is he meant to be funny? Is he a surrogate for the nerds watching at home? Is he Xander gone wrong? Is he Warren gone right? Perhaps he is meant to be thoroughly, irredeemably unlikeable, which would at least explain why he is thoroughly, irredeemably unlikeable. That would give us the hope that he turned out exactly as planned and isn’t a failed attempt at something more nuanced. However, we also see Adele feeling sorry for him for not having friends. Surely this would be an impossibility anyway. The universe wouldn’t let it happen. We also see a tragic Topher of the future, broken by the realisation that his inventions have brought about the end of civilisation, not to mention the concepts of individuality and consistency of self. So what? We’re meant to think poor Topher? Fuck Topher. When it comes down to it, I can commend the Dollhouse crew for creating yet another complex and mystifying character, beautifully shaded in such a way as to generate any number of interpretations as to his true personality by the audience. Unfortunately, he’s also unwatchably smug, grating, and unfunny. How much of that is the fault of Fran Kranz’ interpretation of what Topher should be or Whedon’s initial conception of the character will remain a mystery for now.
Worst Moment: It was painful to see the cast having to goof around in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, but having the already unfunny Topher become even more unfunny by an order of magnitude was torture. Coming after the brilliance of Whedon’s mid-season “revamp” Man on the Street, it was even more aggravating.
1. Zoe Chae - Knight Rider
One reader of Shades of Caruso recently caught up with Dollhouse and asked me, via Twitter, whether Topher was going to be the Gupta of the Year. She was amazed when I said no. The same thing happened with Canyon, who was convinced there could be no other candidate. Both of these people did not sit through almost the entire season of Knight Rider (a confession: I stuck with it until the mid-season reboot and when it was obvious the changes didn’t improve the show, I finally bailed). From the very first moment Zoe Chae appears onscreen, smiling with galactic-levels of self-satisfaction at the prospect of her team-mates being cooked to death inside a napalm-coated sentient car, I knew there would be no competition for the top spot. The point of Topher remains a mystery to me, but while I find the character insufferable, I also trust that Whedon has a plan for him, and that one day there will be some revelation or adjustment that makes him at least tolerable. Zoe, on the other hand, was always just a callous rotter and nothing more, and I can see absolutely no reason for it. It’s not entertaining or funny to see her belittling her colleagues, revelling in the thought that they are facing death, sexually harassing them or playing mindgames with them. There is zero devilish charm there. She is dedicated to making her colleague Billy as miserable as humanly possible, flirting with him until he makes an sexual overture in return before dashing his hopes with an evil smile and a flick of her hair. She’s a menace.
That, however, is not the worst thing about her. When I look deep into my soul to try to figure out why my dislike of this most reprehensible of characters is so visceral, I realise it’s because I have a sneaking suspicion that this character has a huge and passionate fanbase, which might explain why she survived the mid-season cull that removed Bruce Davison, Sydney Tamiia Poitier, and Yancey Arias. Perhaps Zoe, whose creation seems to me to be a colossal miscalculation on the part of the inept showrunners, is actually the pinnacle of cookie-cutter, focus-group created fictional beings. The thought that this nasty piece-of-work is actually widely adored and admired for her no-nonsense attitude and Chaotic-Neutral alignment is so upsetting to me that I can’t bring myself to Google her name just in case I stumble across dozens of fansites filled with accounts of how her fans have been spreading the word of Zoe throughout the land by insulting their loved ones and then grinning inanely as they weep.
I am terrified by the possibility that, somehow, the world has become so broken, so mean-spirited and narcissistic, that Zoe Chae, a woman who reacts to the imminent death of her friends with the word, “Awesome!”, is actually the poster child for a new generation of nihilistic, hedonistic, self-centred motherfuckers, and we can just kiss the concepts of civility and brotherhood goodbye as our kids sashay through life with no thought for their fellow man. Of all the characters I have selected as Show Gupta in the past, no other one has made me despair of the damage done to the human condition like Zoe. In the mind’s eye of the most paranoid Daily Mail reader is an image of a heartless youth whose emotional responses to the people around them seem utterly detached from those you would express if motivated by empathy and compassion. That is how I felt watching Knight Rider. The Awful Adventures of Zoe Chae actually managed to depress me. Topher’s annoying tics are nothing compared to that.
Worst Moment: Given a chance to go on a secret mission with Michael “Le” Knight (née Michael “Le” Traceur), Zoe spends the majority of the mission trying desperately to get into bed with him even though she knows he still holds a torch for his former lover Sarah Graiman, and that Sarah, who will doubtless be watching, feels the same way about him. She also knows Billy, the poor besotted fool, will be watching too. If she could have figured out a way to break the hearts of the rest of the Knight Industries team, I’m sure she would have done it. KIDS TODAY!!!!
Right, much as that seems like I’ve covered most bases, there will be more to come in a few days time, mopping up the last few traces of TV observation from the past year. Remember, kids: don’t play with the feelings of your loved ones. Just because Zoe Chae does it doesn’t mean it’s cool.
The 2008-2009 Caruso Awards: The Worst Episodes of the Year
As with the list of best episodes, we’re operating on a strict timeline, meaning some shows that would normally appear here, won’t. Luckily, as the summer sees less non-reality shows aired, I’m exposed to less dross. Of the shows I’ve seen over the past couple of months, only one would potentially qualify for this list, i.e. ABC’s dripping wet space soap Defying Gravity. I cannot believe showrunner James Parriott not only aimed to make a show that he has described as “Grey’s Anatomy in space”, but managed to find a lead actor even less appealing than Patrick “Oily Void” Dempsey (Ron “Acting Lessons” Livingston, if you were curious). Anyway, that will have to wait until next year, as the show is still on, inexplicably. Now, I shall let my anger flow from me like sewage from a pipe. Apologies for the inevitable mean-spiritedness…
10. Battlestar Galactica – Daybreak
As was said in the previous post, ending a long-running series is a fraught proposition, almost guaranteed to disappoint some fan somewhere. The trick is to make sure that at least the core questions or dilemmas of the show are addressed and resolved, and to pay off longrunning character arcs in a way that show consideration for continuity and human behaviour. No mean feat. It’s unfair to criticise showrunners for not getting a finale 100% right, but if Shawn Ryan could get it 99.999% right with The Shield, we now know it can be done to a very high degree of viewer satisfaction. Daybreak tried to resolve all of the unanswered questions posed by four seasons ofBattlestar Galactica, but in the laziest manner possible. Attributing all kinds of mysterious happenings to a unknown force that is never named or explained or given any kind of motivation rendered the whole tale pointless. As wishy-washy as the nebulous thought processes of the worst kind of woolly-headed fantasist, Daybreak resolved barely anything, with characters making illogical and suicidal choices for no reason other than that it was the last episode, and it needed to end before the final credits. The puddle-deep enquiry into AI ethics was the killing blow (Hug A Robot Today, So They Don’t Nuke Us Tomorrow!). So why is it not higher in this list? Because the first hour was fantastic, Boomer’s redemption was beautiful, and it featured some of the best performances of the year (Callis, Olmos, McDonnell: take a bow). Shame it didn’t follow through properly. Or at all. (For more whining about how disappointing this episode was, here is my original post following the broadcast of the finale.)
9. Dollhouse – Stage Fright
It’s tempting to be forgiving of the first half of Dollhouse‘s first season. Thousands of words have been written about how Joss Whedon’s incredible new show had its wings clipped by the evil suits at Fox, who either couldn’t understand the high concept or thought no audience could, and thus tried to force the show into a poorly fitting mission-of-the-week format. Until, that is, they suddenly stopped being evil suits and let Whedon go crazy with ideas and talking and audience-alienating character arcs like Ballard’s descent into self-loathing and unpleasant hate-fucking or Adele’s surprising ethical lapses with Victor. Let’s not forget, as shaky as the first half of the season was, it also laid the groundwork for the miraculous TV that was to come. And yet, even taking that into account, Stage Fright was a desperate failure, more Bionical Woman meets Josie and the Pussycats than Alias meets Buffy, with Echo imprinted with the personality of a pompous backing singer for a superstar, and Sierra mugging for the camera as an adoring fan. The final dramatic scenes were like out-takes from Wayne’s World. It’s not so bad, though. The team responsible for this episode (David Solomon, Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon) also gave us the phenomenal Epitaph One. For this mis-step, they’re super-totally forgiven, and then some.
8. Dexter – Turning Biminese
As I’ve complained before, the popular and critical adoration of Dexter has baffled me for years. What strikes me as overdirected, poorly acted, clangingly obvious and desperately patronising drives millions of viewers into paroxysms of joy. Fair enough. Shades of Caruso keeps giving it chances, especially when Shield producer Charles Eglee steps in, and that patience was rewarded with the most pacey and entertaining season yet. However, it’s still overdirected, poorly acted, clangingly obvious and desperately patronising. While most episodes this year were just average (and one, Sí Se Puede, was actually very entertaining, even to this Dexter hater), some were just dire. Turning Biminese was the worst of the bunch, featuring yet more obvious metaphors, tedious sub-plots for the dreary cops in what can only be described as the world’s most inept police department, and a cringe-inducing, desperately unfunny rant from forensic photographer and obnoxious foul-mouth Matsuka, in a scene that sounded as if it had been written by an enraged adolescent Ain’t It Cool talkbacker who had just been told that the star of his favourite TV show was gay. The episode’s worst crime? After realising that Dexter is a vigilante with a murderous MO, season three Big Bad Miguel Prado (played with scenery-devouring enthusiasm by Jimmy Smits) actually says “Dexter, you and I, we’re the same!”. Instant, irrevocable FAIL.
7. Torchwood: Children of Earth – Day 2
It’s not a Worst Episode of the Year list without an appearance from the Torchwood team, ineptly going where no one should ever have gone before. Or after, for that matter. But what is this? Not the worst hour of the year? How could this be? For a start, having Russell T. Davies give his full attention to the show instantly raised the quality level, after two years of neglect from the hapless Chris Chibnall. A greater focus and a willingness to do the unthinkable to the core team of characters gave it a boost of credibility and power that even a hater such as myself cannot deny. After two years of staggering awfulness, the first episode of the mini-series Children Of Earth was a huge and pleasant surprise. Dialogue fizzed, action zoomed along with actual momentum, and drama happened without becoming instantly ridiculous. It was enough to make me tuck into a large slice of Humble Pie.
And then, almost as soon as it had promised so much, the show fell flat on its face and stayed there. While fans and critics lined up to praise the show for its bold plot twists and dark subject matter, it became apparent that the most startling dramatic moments — the horrible fate of the children taken by the 456, the various depressing deaths, the commentary about the venality of politicians — were jotted down as essential touchstones early on in the scripting process, with little idea of how to create the connective tissue necessary to make these moments work, let alone create characters who act like recognisable human beings (the ridiculous — and easily avoidable — fate of John Frobisher sticks in the craw most of all). The moral conundrum at the heart of the show fails too. The threat facing humanity is never fully explained, so every terrible choice is undermined by the suspicion that there might have been a way to avoid doing such terrible things, but those possible solutions are being rushed past in the hope that the viewer won’t notice. Plot holes and longeurs abound, and the usual failings of this most ridiculous show rear up once more (poorly executed action, terrible performances, po-faced melodrama). Day 2 makes the list for quickly ruining the promise of the opener. Easily the most over-rated TV event of the year.
6. Fringe – The Cure
By the time season one of Fringe reached episode six, the show was wobbling between two states: pointless, boring misfire, or insane, ambitious curio. We’d been given an overlong and dull pilot, several minutes of unexciting chase sequences, and oh God so much witless exposition from Peter Bishop. We had also been given mad ray-guns, Warren-Ellisian techno-telepathy, burrowing missiles, various fun Easter Eggs and, best of all, The Observer. Just as the show had begun to show promise, the tinkering of the showrunners threw a frustrating spanner in the works by revamping lead character Olivia Dunham. As she had done nothing particularly interesting for the five previous weeks, it was a necessary move, but there are ways to do it right. Thrust into an adventure featuring super-evil brain scientists and their sexy lab assistants, Olivia cast off her passive demeanour and transformed into an ill-judged avenger, stepping on toes, cracking skulls, and “flirting” with her nemesis. Anna Torv relaxed into her role by the end of the season, but here she was way out of her depth, mugging and shouting and overplaying most dramatic moments. If the episode had been better it wouldn’t have mattered, but even Walter seemed out of sorts. The fingerprints of concerned and interfering Fox executives were all over the place. It would be weeks before Fringe recaptured that exciting post-Observer momentum.
5. Ugly Betty – Ugly Berry
Once a vibrant and lovable diversion with hidden brains and a commendable commitment to showing racial and sexual diversity, Ugly Betty is now a shadow of its former crazy self. After some of the best writers and directors on the show were sacked midway through the second season, the quality dropped noticeably, and Shades of Caruso’s interest dropped even further. Early struggles to keep up with the lacklustre third season faltered with the stunt casting of Lindsay Lohan as Betty’s nemesis Kimmie Keegan, but it was the appalling Ugly Berry that killed our interest altogether. Jokes fell flat, potentially long-running arcs were cut short (Lohan’s departure has been blamed on her dreadful behaviour, but who knows — or cares — what the real reason was), and new arcs came and fizzled with distressing regularity. That crazy energy had turned to depressing inertia. Even though it features three of the most entertaining actors on TV (America Ferrera, Michael Urie, and the amazing Becky Newton), enough was enough. So sad to see a once great show go the way of last season’s fashions.
4. Eleventh Hour – Agro
ITV’s failed Doctor-Who-killer, Eleventh Hour, was improbably picked up by Jerry Bruckheimer, possibly while the writers’ strike kept his brain-trust out of commission for months. Good for the UK, I guess, especially with Brit actor Rufus Sewell taking over from previous star Patrick Stewart and heading up this expensive show. Avoiding the crazy superscience of Fox’s Fringe, Eleventh Hour seemed to want to explore actual moral questions about modern advances, soberly showing exaggerations of real world dangers and asking whether the men and women of science were capable of reining in their worst impulses in order to help mankind. Well, if you can call portraying most of the scientists on the show as demented, power-crazed idiots “sober”. The show was arguably more ridiculous than Fringe by pretending to be more responsible with its plots, while throwing logic, reason, and recognisable scientific theory out of the window on a week to week basis. To make things worse, at least Fringe was fun. Eleventh Hour was the dreariest show on TV, a seemingly never-ending chain of cliches, moodily-lit close-ups of slightly worried faces, and undramatic soap operatics staged with all the half-arsed energy of a commercial for boil-in-the-bag rice. Of those eighteen tedious hours, the most exasperating might have been Agro, during which Dr. Jacob Hood matches a DNA sequence to that of a dangerous fungus by looking at twelve base pairs on a blackboard. Obviously they were the most distinctive twelve pairs out of the possible 12,495,682 that could have been on the board (and that’s if it was merely yeast). That kind of stupidity kills shows dead, you know.
3. The Mentalist – Russet Potatoes
When describing The Mentalist, Shades of Caruso has found itself using words like “pleasant”, “diverting”, “watchable”. Even in the grip of an absinthe hallucination, it would be an impossibility to make a claim that The Mentalist is great TV. Nevertheless, it did approach an unexpected intensity in its very entertaining season closer Red John’s Footsteps, and its genial tone was often a nice contrast to the humourlessness of a lot of TV procedurals. Sadly, when it went wrong, it went memorably wrong. Russet Potatoes introduced hypnotism into the mix, pitting Patrick Jane against mesmerists of such great power that they can create murderous minions at the drop of a hat. One of the CBI team — the gloriously named Rigsby — is turned into little more than a dopey puppet, macking on his colleagues and trying to kill our be-vested hero. Hypnotism could never achieve the results seen here, which wouldn’t be a problem if the rest of the series hadn’t shown such an admirable commitment to portraying the acts of flim-flam artists and fake spiritualists in a realistic light. The show’s IQ level dropped precipitously early in the episode as every character seemed to be hypnotising someone else, and that level kept plummeting, culminating in a rooftop showdown that looked like something out of a Wayans Brothers movie. One of their really bad ones. One without Anna Faris in it.
2. Knight Rider – A Knight in Shining Armor
Glen A. Larson is a TV legend. He made almost all of my favourite TV shows back when I was a discerning pre-teen. The original Battlestar Galactica, BJ and the Bear, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Galactica 1980, Magnum P.I. (co-created with fellow TV legend Donald P. Bellisario, creator of numerous shows with titles that are just assortments of letters), Manimal, Automan… What an exciting time it was. Riding high above them all in a leather jacket and white man’s afro was David Hasselhoff, playing the heroic archetype Michael Knight (the inspiration for Joseph Campell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces, though the show was cancelled before Michael got to progress any further than his second face). Knight Rider. One man, one car, an infinite number of exciting challenges that can be resolved with little more than a bit of talking-car sass and a Turbo-Boost. It was a show so complex, so daring, so groundbreaking, that even the shows that ripped it off (such as Streethawk, featuring a very fast motorbike that, sadly, didn’t talk) were incredible just by borrowing a little of its brilliance.
Perhaps the new Knight Rider can’t be blamed for not living up to that original, but when it actually manages to be worse than last year’s pathetic reboot of Bionical Woman, the show is pretty much the same as an asteroid made of fossilised alien-shit caught in the gravity well of the nearest sun. Actually, that doesn’t even cover the extent to which this was bad. It was like a cross between a Sci Fi original movie and a Girls Gone Wild video. In many episodes, Michael “Le” Traceur (who becomes Michael Knight early on in the season) is required to find information from a pool-side bikini party, during which he uses KITT’s space-age satellite hacking technology to zoom in on some poor lady’s bosoms. Rowr rowr! Often, he is also required to meet an old friend who is now a terrorist of some kind because of Reason X. Once or twice he is sexually harassed by his female colleagues. The majority of his enemies, when they’re not former friends who have gone insane, are either young, blonde females in leather catsuits, or young, brunette females in leather catsuits. His colleagues are either angry bureaucrats or lust-addled twenty-somethings who make nerdy references. In one episode Billy — played by Paul “Billy from Battlestar Galactica” Campbell — dresses up as Captain Jack Harkness and goes on about how much he loves Torchwood. The convergent awfulness of the moment was like having a bucket of boxer’s spit emptied over my head.
Most of the time KITT does little other than sit there like a big piece of talking product placement, with Val Kilmer mistakenly portraying the formerly lovable car as a relative of HAL, instead of a fussy, pedantic middle-class nerd, which is what the wonderful William Daniels did in the original series. The rest of the time, it’s a plot-resolution device, with what amounts to a Star Trek replicator in the glove compartment which is used to solve every problem that comes their way. Handy. Later in the series the show turns into Transformers for five minutes, with one main character becoming super-evil before being eaten by a giant robot, which is then defeated with a Turbo-Boost. Even the most undemanding teenager would have been affronted by the cynicism of the enterprise. So why pick this episode? Because it managed to be even stupider than any of the other episodes, as well as for setting up a template so ill-conceived that the show had to jettison most of the characters in a mid-season revamp of hilarious ruthlessness. For its gratuitous semi-nudity, illogical science, and shoddy production values, it is a prime example of how unforgivably ill-conceived the whole thing was. It will not be missed.
1. Heroes – The Entire Third Season
I tried. I really really tried so hard to pare this down to a single episode. Before watching the second half of the season, with the “Heroes” on the run from Nathan — who has gone from thinking everyone should have powers to thinking no one should have powers because of some mental conversion moment that has skipped out of my memory — I was certain the woeful Knight Rider episode was bound to top this list. After three very depressing days watching the last eleven episodes of Heroes season three back to back, it was obvious that not only was this show a more catastrophic failure than the now-cancelled swimsuit-and-car showcase, there was no way one episode could ever be singled out. The things that make Heroes the stupidest, most broken and ill-conceived show on network TV are now systemic. It’s like the opposite of a synecdoche. The whole must speak for the part.
The perfect example of a rudderless ship, Heroes has ceased to make any sense from scene to scene, let alone week to week. Early attempts to explore some kind of moral complexity — by having some of the “Heroes” flirt with doing bad things and the one true villain do good things — never disappeared, but instead became the raison d’être of the entire show. With no fresh ideas coming out of the writers’ room, each season sees the same things happening: the world is revealed to be facing a cataclysm, Sylar will try to become the President of the United States (who needs what amounts to omnipotence when you can waste years trying to pass legislation to regulate hazardous emissions from small businesses?), and all of the characters change alignments at the drop of a hat.
By now, we’ve seen all of the main characters in both hero and villain format, either with a time travel or premonition cop-out or with an insta-retcon plot-knot dropped into an episode with no warning or reason. Heroes have had evil scars (Peter), evil long coats (Hiro), or evil black hair (Claire). Villains have worn Spectacles of Virtue (Sylar) or Sensible Bobs of Benevolence (Daphne). This is what passes for character growth in the Heroes universe. In one episode I’m sure Noah Bennett started out evil, became good, turned evil again, and then by the end was double-crossing Nathan, triple-crossing Danko, and quadruple-crossing himself. Do the actors realise what a joke their characters have become? Why did we spend the first half of the season watching Sylar become good just for him to become evil again one episode later? How can we be expected to find any of this meaningful? And do we really need to have entire episodes taken up with Claire tearfully betraying or leaving her father, just for them to be reunited a week later? And why, part of the way through Chapter Four, did Tracy Strauss kill an innocent person, thus wrecking her chance to escape from Danko? Just to have a cool visual? This isn’t any kind of human (or even metahuman) behaviour I know. Frankly, the whole farrago is insulting.
Ah, but the writers’ room has been cleansed! Goodbye Jeph Loeb and Jesse Alexander! Hello Bryan Fuller! Surely this is good news. Well, yes, the single Fuller-written episode of the season, Cold Snap, featured the most natural dialogue Heroes has had for a while, had a pleasing structure, and a coherence lacking anywhere else in the seemingly endless twenty-five episode run. It was poetic, and kinda moving, if you look past some shaky performances. Swoozie Kurtz was in it too, for bonus YAY points. However, it not only showed up the surrounding episodes for the epic disasters they were, it failed on its own terms too. Parkman’s weird obsession with Daphne, based on a premonition that obviously was never going to come true (like most of them, as plotlines are abandoned willy-nilly), made a mockery of his previous infatuation with his suspicious wife. Fair enough. A lot of screentime was used up explaining how they had fallen out really badly, meaning he left his child just to go hang out with Suresh, because there ain’t no party like a Mohinder party (it involves a lot of intense teeth-gritting and nonsensical voiceovers about destiny and heroism and how up can be down if you squint really hard).
So, fair enough, Matt saves a gravely ill Daphne, and uses his Amazing Powers of the Brain to bamboozle the mortally wounded speedster into thinking he can fly her to the moon. So romantic. Compared to her previous death scene — which lasted three seconds and almost turned Matt temporarily evil for an episode before he thought better of it — it was a nice finale for possibly the only entertaining character introduced since season one. What happens as soon as Fuller hands over scripting duties to the rest of the team? Matt turns temporarily evil for an episode, thinks better of it upon confronting Danko, is reunited with his wife and son, and decides to stay with them. For ten minutes. Then he decides (with no prompting) that he has to fight the good fight against Danko. For Daphne? For justice? Because he can’t stand the sight of a full diaper? Who knows? The showrunners can’t have him written out, though. Who was he upset about earlier? Fucked if I know. Some woman. Denise? Can’t have been important. Quickly! Onto the next scene! Hiro is walking into a wall or something while Ando pouts about not being taken seriously. Everyone loves Hiro!
Fuller left not long after, and though I’m sure there were numerous logical reasons for his departure, part of me likes to think he realised how impossible it will be to sort out this Briar-Patch continuity. It can’t have helped that his good work trying to nail down even just one character (Matt) was undone almost immediately, and for no apparent benefit, nor that getting rid of Loeb and Alexander means much when you have Joe Pokaski and Aron Eli Coliete around. Maybe it was the jawdropping awfulness of the season finale, with Nathan killed and Sylar tricked into turning into him and having his memories replaced, just so that Angela doesn’t lose the son she never even seemed to like that much even though that means she’s hanging around with the man who actually killed the loved one he is now impersonating. Of all the rank stupidity and poor storytelling I have seen this year, nothing approaches the staggering wrongness of that moment. If I were Fuller and Tim Kring came to me with that idea, I’d walk out of the door and never look back. Who knows? Maybe Fuller came up with that idea? Maybe he was responsible for all of Matt’s behaviour and dialogue, even the really really stupid stuff that contradicts everything that happened in Cold Snap. Unless someone is willing to spill the beans, we’ll just have to hope it’s not the man who once made me think this show could be something truly special by writing something as wonderful as Company Man.
This post could go on forever. This piss-poor excuse for a show, which is — never forget — NBC’s most watched dramatic series, has become a joke. Every episode features nine or ten moments of laughable error, poor storytelling, inconsistent continuity, unbelievable behaviour, or ungrammatical dialogue. The crux of the matter, the killing blow to the credibility of this haphazard, chaotic mess is that it is now, after three years, less coherent than either the Marvel or DC comic universes. Yes, the DC universe, which has been rebooted numerous times and features 52 divergent universes with a multitude of characters, is more coherent and digestible and — most importantly of all — far more entertaining. If Lost‘s continuity could be seen as a series of lines linked together to make a starkly beautiful web of meaningful interconnections, Heroes would look more like a box of toothpicks dropped onto the ground in the middle of a sandstorm. As the talking fox from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist says, “Chaos reigns”. This is not something to be proud of. NBC, a network that cancelled Journeyman just as it was beginning to attract plaudits, and shunted its most promising new show — Kings — into a summer season with a two month gap wrecking all storytelling momentum, has kept this on the air. The network recently gave up the ghost and stuck Leno on every night instead of commissioning new shows. That was the actual surrender. Keeping this on the air was the white flag that preceded it. Something tells me it won’t get another reprieve after this year, from NBC or from the viewers. There’s only so much patience in the world.
Dishonourable Mentions:
The Unusuals – Boorland Day: Great character actors are not enough to save a misconceived project, and this formless bag of quirky tics disguised as character traits, bolted onto the most formulaic of cop plots, was as misconceived and unimaginative as anything shown on network TV this year. As the pilot was directed by Stephen Hopkins, the show could only improve. This second episode showed it couldn’t improve enough. Sometimes, a flawed premise is just a flawed premise.
House – Last Resort: Other than his brief appearance in Big Love, Željko Ivanek has had a really bad year. Looking lost as a gun-toting villain in Heroes was one thing, but he also played a gun-toting villain in House, harassing our hero and a bunch of annoying patients for an hour, which is no way to use someone who just won an Emmy. If there’s a plot I would happily remove from modern TV, it would be the hostage situation…
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – No Way Out: …because with Last Resort and this feeble effort from the usually dependable CSI team, it’s gone beyond played-out. The hostage situation here seems to have been used as a clumsy way to force two new characters (the excellent Dr. Raymond Langston and the practically invisible Riley Adams) into the limelight, but we find out nothing new about them other than that they cope well under pressure. Well, duh.
Parks and Recreation – Canvassing: Humour is a subjective thing, obviously, but sometimes a show comes along that seems to actually completely lack jokes. It’s not like Family Guy, where there are lots of jokes but they’re all really stupid and poorly timed. Parks and Recreation just doesn’t seem to be a comedy, except that Amy Poehler is in it. This was a particularly annoying episode, with some unlikeable people doing boring things. It can only improve.
The Office – Employee Transfer: Perhaps I’m mad at Parks and Recreation for distracting the showrunners of The Office. A generally underwhelming fifth season still had a few big laughs and upsetting drama, but one episode was a perplexing laugh-free half-hour, misjudging the balance between comedy and tragedy in a way that was shocking coming from a show that gave us last year’s brilliant Dinner Party. Plus, Amy Ryan left the show. Fuck that shit.
It feels better getting that all off my chest. Tomorrow, or the day after that, my ten favourite new characters of the year. There is no one from Heroes in that list.
End Of Season Review: Fringe
While futilely attempting to catalogue the weekly TV events of the 2008-2009 season, I spent a long time agonising over Fringe, the wacky science fiction show from J.J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. As mentioned in my In Treatment review, there were many other shows on our to-watch list, some of which were actually reliably good (Friday Night Lights and The Shield spring to mind), and yet I felt compelled to keep watching this first, much to Canyon’s bafflement. Much of this I can put down to my nerd heritage, but it was also a consequence of the imminent end of Lost. With that show on the final stretch, I need something to replace that, something with a needlessly complex mythology that is filled with Easter Eggs for me to feel good about spotting. Dollhouse looks to be building some interesting ambiguity, certainly about the history and purpose of the Dollhouse itself, but the clues about all of that are being introduced with actual narrative force, making these revelations story beats instead of just getting the prop department to mock up a poster for Massive Dynamic with a phone number on it.
The loss of Lost will leave a hole in my life that will be absurdly big for something as trivial as a TV show, but when Fringe turned out not to be just a procedural but just the kind of batshit sci fi continuity smorgasbord as Lost, I rejoiced. Could this patchy show fill the hole? Would it settle down and provide the brain fodder that Lost did? By the time the season finished, it was sadly still a long way off, with Dollhouse providing the mental workout. More on that some other time.
Of all the shows I watched this season, Fringe was probably the most exasperating. A lot of shows turned out to be just as good as I had hoped (returning shows such as FNL and Big Love), some surprised me (Party Down, Leverage, and Sons of Anarchy are currently making me very happy, though I had expected to be disappointed), and some were terrible from the get-go and never recovered (Knight Rider, Eleventh Hour, and The Unusuals deserve their ignominious cancellations). Dollhouse was the show I was desperate to love, started out hating, and then ended up adoring, but Fringe was one that tested my patience throughout. More than once I considered dropping it, until the episode Safe came along and showed that the glacial pace of Lost was not going to be replicated. At the midpoint of the season, everything kicked off, and it seemed like Fringe was going to be my favourite new show of the year. Except that Fox kept taking it off the air for months at a time, wrecking any narrative momentum, made worse by some dire standalone episodes that will be next to unwatchable when going through the season a second time. Lost‘s first season might not be a patch on later seasons, but it still maintained a higher standard than this.
It was foolish to assume the show would be Lost 2.0. For a start, ABC might not be the most daring network in the world, but they have been more than willing to give Cuse and Lindelof slack to create the oddest and most complex show on TV even as that oddness and dense narrative repels viewers who have lost patience with it. Fox are pretty much the opposite, as shown by their insistence on dumbing down Dollhouse long enough to put off any viewers who wanted something more intelligent than Bionical Woman. While Whedon seems to be incapable of creating anything that doesn’t demand great attention from his audience, Fringe comes from the minds of a bunch of guys who are more than capable of creating challenging and entertaining TV, but also know that they have to play by the rules if they’re going to avoid cancellation. The result is a show of dismay-inducing lowest-common-denominator standalone episodes that are filled with story beats that make absolutely no sense if you haven’t seen every other episode. It’s not quite the worst of both worlds, but it’s close.
Compared to the first two seasons of Abrams’ Alias (which had Kurtzman and Orci onboard as head writers), Fringe has been, at times, an appalling mess. Part of the failure is down to the main character, Olivia Dunham, who is nowhere near as compelling or consistently written as Sydney Bristow (and Anna Torv is no Jennifer Garner). Several episodes in, her mild-mannered responses to the death of her lover and revelation of his betrayal were obviously not working. At the time I thought Torv was underplaying great emotional pain, but in the sixth episode, The Cure, Dunham is suddenly a vengeance-crazed maverick, suggesting the character was rewritten to become more dynamic. Of course, it could also have something to do with her brain being invaded by the consciousness of her evil (or not evil) lover, but none of it felt like foreshadowing, merely tinkering.
As Masticator pointed out in another internet venue, the second half of the season saw her living with her sister and niece, probably in an attempt to make Dunham seem less like an unlovable career woman (can’t have one of those on Fox!). If the network feels that’s what Dunham needs, then fair enough. After all, Sydney Bristow lived with Francie Calfo and hung out with Will Tippin, and both of them allowed the writers to give Bristow more moments of vulnerability, as well as having a sounding board for her troubles.
However, Francie and Will were also used brilliantly to complicate her life, especially in the second season. For two characters that, at first, had seemed extraneous, the amazing second season finale would have been nothing without them. Dunham’s sister Rachel (played by Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist scene-stealer Ari Graynor) adds nothing. She kinda flirts with Peter Bishop (the almost eternally smirking Joshua Jackson), and her daughter almost gets her brain melted by an improbable evil scientist in the desperately bad episode The No-Brainer, but other than that, there really is no purpose for them in the show other than to have a child around that Dunham can hug. Look! That woman is reading a story to a child before bedtime! I no longer hate and fear her. Good work, focus group.
Other characters have little or no purpose too. Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole) is little more than a lab assistant with a wicked ‘do, added just so Walter Bishop (John Noble) has someone to throw exposition at when Peter isn’t around. Phillip Broyles (Lance “Intensity” Reddick) either gives Dunham some props or some earache depending on what is needed for each episode. He also seems to be simultaneously jaded by the mad science events in the show, and absolutely shocked by them. Happy though I am to see Reddick getting regular work, I wish he was given more to do. He needs to shoot a motherfucker or two in the second season.
Nina Sharp (Blair Brown) has proven to be significantly less interesting than Ben Linus, or even Charles Widmore. There’s a bit of back and forth about whether she’s a good guy or a bad guy, but compared to my endless pontificating about the alignment of Linus, I’m really not that bothered about her. When it’s revealed on the show, I’ll give a damn then. Charlie Francis (Kirk Acevedo) has proven to be such a disposable character that he has been fired and not fired with great rapidity. I have no idea what the showrunners are up to there, though it does strongly suggest that people shouldn’t drink consolation rum and then go posting on Facebook. Or wear certain egregious hats.
With almost all of the characters leaving me cold, the mad science has to keep me occupied instead, and a lot of the time it fails at that too. For every amazing, creepy visual like The Sealant (which makes your orifices close up, suffocating you to death), or a weird worm crushing a man’s heart, there is some stupid Chimera monster on the loose, or a syphilitic cat woman that drinks spinal fluid (what the hell were they doing that week? Someone should tell the writers that three bad ideas do not equal one good one.). The main arc of the show is the thing that saves it, with Walter’s tinkering in parallel universes causing a war with a technologically superior version of humanity.
The moment that was revealed was when I mentally committed to the show through thick and thin, as it promised some mindblowing stuff later on, but even then, we find out that Dunham was once a test subject for Walter and William Bell (Leonard Nimoy, in one of the most heavily promoted, and utterly awesome, surprise cameo appearances ever), in order to prepare her for battle as a psychic soldier. Shades of Scanners and X-Files there, and not a problem, except that Sydney Bristow, in Alias, was also trained as a child as part of the absurdly named Project Christmas. It’s one thing to complain about how shows by J.J. Abrams seem to focus a lot on father issues, which is kind of unfair as it’s not something he is alone in doing, but having two shows feature two special agents who have had a mysterious childhood is really taking the piss. Though still, psychic super-soldiers are a lot more interesting than just your regular super-soliders. I love Captain America, but is he as cool as Michael Ironside and his ability to blow someone’s head apart? Exactly.
So, most of the characters suck. Some individual episodes are horribly goofy and uneffective. It can be dismayingly derivative. The format means most episodes end with a race against time, with, at best, a chase sequence or, at worst, Dunham talking someone out of setting fire to her with their brain (didn’t they do that twice?). The science is offensively bad, even when you assume a daft sci fi show is liable to fudge the details somewhat. There is far too much evidence of the showrunners playing it safe and doing what the network demands. Why bother with it?
Because JOHN NOBLE IS LOVE, bitches! I can take any amount of dreary Dunham home chat, or Peter Bishop-style smarm, because every so often John Noble wanders into shot, and takes even the stupidest dialogue – yes, even the endless digressions about various foodstuffs – and turns it into a heartbreaking, shocking, hilarious soliloquy (yes, all of those emotions at the same time!). What’s best about that is that he actually gets the best dialogue on the show, so imagine how incredible that sounds. His performance as Denethor in Return of the King left me cold, but in Fringe he performs miracles. In the season finale, There’s More Than One Of Everything, he has some scenes in an old beach-house during which he has a minor breakdown in front of Peter. Kudos to Joshua Jackson for stepping up to the plate, but the real genius is being displayed by Noble, who is alternately terrifying and vulnerable.
Next to Gabriel Byrne and Michael Emerson, he’s the best thing on TV.
He’s not the only reason I keep watching, though. That amazing series concept, so much more interesting than “FBI investigates odd science things, has great potential. The episodes that furthered that arc the most were the season highlights, showing up the standalones for the silly mistakes that they were. The ratio of good to bad episodes is tilted in the wrong direction, but even so, the bad episodes often featured some moment of trickery that justified them. The Easter Eggs, mostly involving Michael Cerveris’ cameos as jalapeno-loving curio The Observer, are always fun to look for, though again, how much the show will reward rewatching will depend on whether there are even more clues than we thought, and even more future plot twists have been foreshadowed without us even knowing it. Of course, that excludes the heavily sign-posted revelation that Peter is actually Alternate Universe Peter, a twist that was blatantly obvious very early on in the season (though I have to give props to internetter Diane Court for putting her finger on that before me). So far, though, I’m not quite sure what the lens flares mean. Is it to do with crossing back and forth from one universe to the other? Or just a test run for Abrams’ dazzlingly bright Star Trek?
Speaking of The Observer, just how cool is he? His introduction in The Arrival was the first hint that Fringe was up to something more than just solving a case a week, and captured my imagination just as I was beginning to think the show was a misfire. It’s a good thing too, as the pedigree of the showrunners promised something better than the humdrum introduction. As I am human, I tend to be more disappointed than usual when something doesn’t live up to expectations. Kurtzman and Orci get a lot of flack for their film work, and sometimes there is a point there. Their script for The Legend of Zorro was a depressing failure, and the controversy surrounding The Island is the most interesting thing about it. However, they wrote some of the very best episodes of Alias, and only someone with a heart of stone couldn’t love their Star Trek revamp. I also didn’t hate Transformers, and will not apologise for that, even if judged by God him-and/or-herself (though I reckon God loves Transformers as much as me and has also watched it four times in one week like I did last month).
I’m not sure how much input they have in the show (according to Orci’s IMDb page, they’re developing nine projects, and that’s in addition to their work on the next Star Trek movie), but hats off to them for hiding the real arc of the show for about half of the season, and for gathering together a strong team of writers and directors. Though it was sad to see X-Files legend Darin Morgan depart the show after only a few episodes, the showrunners managed to get some terrific writers like Jeff Pinkner, Zack Whedon, and J.R. Orci, and talented TV directors like Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Lost veteran Paul Edwards, and Christopher Misiano, among others. They also got Brad “Transsiberian” Anderson to direct some of the best episodes (including that excellent season finale), and, in a surprising masterstroke, brought in Akiva Goldsman. For a long time he has been loathed by cinephiles and nerds the world over for writing some of the worst movies of our time, but Bad Dreams, the episode he wrote and directed, was a taut forty-five minutes filled with creepiness, humour, and horrifyingly effective shocks. He can be extremely proud, and I can ease off the urge to scream when his name appears in credits. Give him some better projects to work on, and he might surprise even more people in future.
In the end, I like the idea of the show far more than I like the actual show. It’s extremely gruesome, which I always appreciate. It’s full of truly awful TV science, but the showrunners have at least made the mad science machines look like real world instruments – all dials and switches and rheostats – which is a lovely touch. The cast is largely forgettable except for one acting titan (Noble) and a bona fide sci fi legend (Nimoy), but I don’t really mind, even though that’s often a deal-breaker. This is your actual “damned with faint praise” review, but even though the things I love about few and far between, I still do love the show. A surprising amount as well. I can’t really explain it. Maybe it’s because it’s the sort of show I get a kick out of even when it fails, like when you buy a car against everyone’s advice just because you like the shape of it, and you can forgive it when the seats aren’t that comfortable, or there’s a weird smell that never goes away, or the windscreen wipers don’t work when they get wet. It doesn’t matter. This is the car you wanted! Sometimes that’s enough.
People used to say that Heroes was Lost for Dummies*, but in fact it is Fringe that, right now, feels like the low IQ version of Cuse and Lindelof’s epic. I don’t mean that as an insult, especially as I strongly believe that after this opening season of promising set-ups, quirky narrative experiments, and interesting concepts, the best is yet to come. Let’s hope I’m right about that, because after Lost leaves us fans bereft, with Dollhouse unlikely to make it to season three, and Goyer and Braga’s Flash Forward an unknown quantity, this might be all we have left to cling to.
* In case you were wondering, Heroes is actually Smallville for Dummies. True fact.
-
Who We Are
admiralneck
daisyhellcakes
masticateur
Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
