Category Archives: Human Target

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

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

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

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

10. John Pope – Falling Skies

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

9. Lumen Pierce – Dexter

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

8. Sophia – The Event

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

7. Ilsa Pucci – Human Target

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

6. Odin Sinclair – Caprica

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

5. Stephanie Powell – No Ordinary Family

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

4. King Arthur – Camelot

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

3. Nelson Hidalgo – Treme

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

2. Maggie Young – Rubicon

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

1. Oswald Danes – Torchwood: Miracle Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (35-31)

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Watching TV for a living is probably a depressing job. Poor Harry Hill is reportedly on the verge of quitting TV Burp because he can’t handle having to watch countless hours of Emmerdale and EastEnders. Poor bugger. I’m in a different situation. I watch a shitload of TV because I enjoy it, and can mostly focus on the good stuff, but even with a whole year to prepare for the Caruso Awards, I fall behind. There’s so much to get through, and some of it is really awful. I was genuinely looking forward to watching Camelot so I could have a good laugh, but watching it is agony. Next to Torchwood: Miracle Day and Blue Bloods, it’s the worst of the year.

It’s not just the bad stuff. I’ve also not watched Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, which is unforgivable. That said, part of the reason is the recent, tragic loss of Andy Whitfield, who played our noble hero. He wasn’t in Gods; his illness was the reason the prequel was created in the first place, in order to give him time to recover. Sadly that was not to be. Even though SoC is very much pro-Spartacus, the thought of watching it now is painful. Whitfield had enormous potential, and was a crucial part of the show’s success. His quiet nobility and command of the screen was memorable. He will be sorely missed.

Anyway, this weekend might — might — be the weekend that we watch all six episodes, so it should make it into this year’s awards (I’m that confident), so the real list, the top 30, should be ready to go next week. Until then, a taster. I watched enough TV over the least year that there were a few shows left over, and I thought I wouldn’t get to write about them. But this gives me a chance to hold off a little longer, and so here are the stragglers, the honorable mentions that lie just outside the main list. Nevertheless, they were genuinely good episodes, and I’m glad I get to honour them in my own small way.

35: The Event – Loyalty

The latest incoherent network LEP (Lost-Emulation-Project) spluttered along for five misfiring episodes, giving disgruntled viewers plenty of time to jump ship if need be, but early on there was a hint that there might be more to this alien invasion show than first appeared. Focusing almost solely on alien sleeper agent Simon, Loyalty used the previously exasperating flashback format the way Gods (Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof) intended; to give the viewer an insight into why a character behaves the way he does. The result is a surprisingly poignant tale of love thwarted by misplaced loyalty, as Simon leaves the love of his life for a cause that he can barely bring himself to believe in. Throw in an appearance by hardest-working-guest-star-of-2010-2011 Paula Malcomson and a well-staged FX blowout sequence involving a building being sucked into a wormhole, and you have a solidly entertaining 40 minutes of sci-fi TV.

34: Human Target – The Trouble With Harry

Not much in the disappointing second season of this DC Comics adaptation stood out, other than an amusingly Scroogelike Christmas episode (The Other Side of the Mall, featuring a terrific guest performance from John Michael Higgins) and this late season highlight. After weeks of perfunctory 70s style action nonsense, Human Target finally seemed to come alive and offer something other than cliches and repetitive arguments between the leads. Which is not to say The Trouble With Harry wasn’t riddled with the exact same cliches and arguments, but at least it did it with some verve. Getting first season showrunner Jonathan Steinberg back helped; he seemed to have a better grip on the characters than Matt Miller, who took over at the start of this season. Director Peter Lauer moves things along briskly, staging a couple of nifty action scenes that use the show’s seemingly paltry budget to great effect, and even manages to generate some tension; surprising considering the episode’s flashback format should make that difficult.

33: Glee – Furt

Glee‘s shambolic nature means that it’s next to impossible to care for any of the characters. They’re pieces in a game with no rules, and as such have no inner life to connect with. Events happen, desires are voiced, and dreams are crushed only for these things to be reversed in a short space of time; sometimes in the same scene. Nevertheless, the second season was better than the first, mostly by focusing on its strengths and giving some plotlines a real charge, especially the bullying arc that saw Kurt leave William McKinley High after being repeatedly humiliated by closeted homosexual Karofsky. This episode brings that plot to a head, and ends with Sue Sylvester, temporarily sympathetic as she contends with the reappearance of her awful Nazi-hunting mother (Carol Burnett), resigning as principal. Kurt also leaves for Dalton Academy, and his true love Blaine. Even better, Kurt and Finn’s single parents marry in a moving scene, and for once the flighty, impermanent nature of Glee didn’t matter. This is a show that is all about scenes rather than story, and the joyous marriage ceremony, uniting not just Burt and Carol but also their sons, is the best Glee scene of all.

32: Misfits – Episode Six 

Season two of Howard Overman’s irreverent superhero drama was another triumph of ambition and confidence over budget constraints, showing no sign of fatigue. It’s as if he’s single-handedly proving that the British model of TV writing (one author responsible for a short season of TV in order to maintain authorial identity) is the right way. Among the numerous highlights, perhaps this shone brightest. Our anti-heroes are outed by obnoxious probation worker Shaun, and instantly become famous. It’s the worst thing that can happen to the group; their selfishness and arrogance doom them all and the saintlike Daisy after they anger Brian (aka Milkneto, at least to us). The imaginative and deadly use of his superpower (Lactokinesis) is the key to this episode’s success. The group are genuinely in danger; Nathan’s grisly fate is particularly upsetting. In the midst of this, Simon finally discovers that he was/will be Superhoodie, and Alisha reveals she loves him. And that he is doomed to die saving her; classic good news/bad news. Of course, this episode led to an enormous plothole (Simon’s discovery should have been erased by Curtis’ last-act time jump but is still in place in the next episode), and the third season of the show will see Robert Sheehan gone and a team of new writers brought in, so this might be the show’s last great gasp. Fingers crossed I’m 100% wrong.

31: The Killing – Missing

After weeks of running on the spot, AMC’s remake of Forbrydelsen finally stopped moving for an hour, and provided the increasingly frustrated audience with the most moving and propulsive episode of the season. Shorn of the melodramatic sub-plots and histrionic nonsense that infests the programme, showrunner Veena Sud delivers what amounts to a bottle episode, even though the “action” ranges across rainy Seattle. Sarah Linden’s son Jack goes missing at the start of the episode, and she must find him as soon as possible, with the help of her feckless faux-gangster partner Holder. What follows is a quiet hour of conversation that reveals a shared background of parental absence which has scarred both detectives. Ironic, really, considering that the most nuclear family unit in the show – the Larsen family – was hiding terrible secrets that may have led to the delinquency and death of Rosie. Though little “happens”, there are more character revelations, surprises, and heartstopping moments than in the rest of the season put together, bolstered by superb performances from Mirielle Enos and Joel Kinnaman. If the show had just a couple more episodes as good as this, viewers would’ve been a lot happier.

Next week, the list proper, starting with 30-21. And hopefully some Spartacus.

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

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Please forgive me for that angry detour. And now, on with the complaining about bad TV.

Properly think through any second season revamps for shows that have only just avoided cancellation

V was never a good show (sorry @DarkEyeSocket). It was exactly the kind of nervous, apologetic sci-fi show churned out by a network with no real idea why they were revamping a beloved original other than that some mis-programmed spreadsheet somewhere said it was worth $Xm when actually it was worth a tin of chicken pie filling. For an alien invasion series that had a bunch of potential, V did nothing, it said nothing, its characters were inconsistent for the most part, it recycled plots over and over again, and it looked cheap. I couldn’t really hate it, though, mostly because things as time-distortingly boring as this usually only breed low, pulsating resentment.

That said, at least the showrunners seemed aware they had problems with the show; it limped into a second season with not much buzz and little critical attention, and so they needed to up their game to bring in new viewers. The first season ends with an overt act of aggression against evil alien leader Anna, which makes her lose her otherworldly shit and turn the skies red, while vowing to hunt the killer of her diabolically evil offspring. Exciting stuff (really, it was promising). So how did season two continue?

  • Anna does not get her revenge, and her “Red Rain” attack on Earth is instantly forgiven by everyone after a speech explaining that red rain is a nice thing.
  • Alien traitor Ryan vows to help Anna, then betrays her by helping resistance leader Erica.
  • He then betrays the humans by helping Anna. This is followed by another betrayal of Anna by helping Erica.
  • There are also lots of scenes of Ryan trying to sneak off, and onto, the alien mothership, pausing only to explain to people why he is sneaking off, or onto, the ship. No one seems that bothered.
  • Father Jack gets defrocked and wears a sad face for the rest of the season.
  • Jay Karnes appears. Shield fans are momentarily as excited as Firefly fans were when they saw Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin on the castlist for the pilot. This euphoria lasts about ten minutes.
  • Some stuff happens with Scott Wolf’s character but I wasn’t paying attention. I think he joins the Shriners? Or buys a dog?
  • Erica’s angry chip breaks because her vile teenage son has a number of tantrums related to him sucking as a person.
  • The rest of the resistance group congregates in its traditional awkward Circle of Debating to argue with her over every poorly-thought-through decision she makes from then on. This happens at least three times an episode.
  • The finale comes around after nine repetitive episodes, kills off a bunch of characters, introduces new ones, and completely changes the game in a number of ways that show great potential.
  • The show is then cancelled.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you have some radical ideas for how the show should be, introduce that shit IMMEDIATELY and don’t think you can just bluff your way through with low viewing figures. You don’t have time to be coy. The changes from season one to season two were just not dramatic enough. Look at how The Vampire Diaries stepped up its game about halfway through its first season, with an almost exponential increase in quality by the time the second season started. What looked like a tedious Twilight cash-in is now an indecently entertaining show with a modicum of justified critical respectability. That’s the model to emulate.

The other model to ignore was used by Human Target. SoC has long believed that dramatic shows with a small cast are onto a loser; you need a big cast of characters to have a wide array of storytelling possibilities to explore. Angel got really good when its core cast jumped from three to five, and the addition of Lorne in the fifth season pushed it over the top (Correction: TV writer and Angel fanatic @RowanKaiser maintains Lorne became a regular in season 4. Ooopsies!). Lost had a huge cast, and the show was able to fly off in directions no one could have predicted (especially as it wasn’t Purgatory at the end it was a Tibetan Bardo SHUT UP HATERS you just don’t understand Lost on the same deep level I do).

With a barely-serialised action show like Human Target, a huge cast wasn’t the point, but even though the first season was fun enough, three main characters (and no women) was a problem. Even at its best, it was a bit mundane, with not enough variety from week to week. Sadly, the introduction of two new (female) characters didn’t go the way I had hoped, not helped that showrunner Jonathan E. Steinberg was replaced by Chuck producer Mark Miller. As longtime readers will know, SoC is not fond of Chuck. It is the TV equivalent of mercury in the water table. It’s telling that Steinberg wrote some of the best episodes of the second season, proving he knows the show very well. Who knows why he was moved aside, but it didn’t work out.

Sadly the chemistry of Mark Valley, Jackie Earle Haley and SoC favourite Chi McBride was damaged by the introduction of Indira Varma and Janet Montgomery. Not because the actresses were bad; far from it. What was wrong was their effect on the spiky leads. Grouchy, mysterious Guerrero became an increasingly sentimental father figure for Montgomery’s Ames (an inevitable but unfortunate “arc” for a mean loner, I guess), Winston became superfluous as his position as “tetchy fusspot” was taken over by Varma’s new boss character Ilsa Pucci, and charming gadabout Christopher Chance fell for his new boss in a Moonlighting stylee.

All of those plot threads make perfect sense. They follow from what the characters were at the end of the first season and resolve their issues, more or less. Great if you only want one more season, but ruinous for a show that could have stayed on the air for a while, if it had ever learned to offer something, ANYTHING, that differentiated it from any number of crunching action shows on the air. The first season had a touch of quirk; it looked like it could go places. The second season made every character less compelling and added nothing else to make up for it. With its odd touches of character gone, the show dribbled to an ignominious end. A real shame.

So I guess the lesson I learned here is, if your show isn’t awesome enough at the end of the first season, make it more awesome, and not less awesome. I guess I’d like to see shows capitalise on the things that make them unique instead of excising them and aiming for the middle, but I think all of us already knew that. ::shrugs::

On a procedural show, a rigid format is a bonus. On a serialised show, it’s death

This is another way of saying “if you can’t break it, you’re gonna wear it out instead”. In the latest season of Dexter, our anti-hero improbably fell for Lumen, the victim of a gang of rapist murderers (::sigh:: What a delightful show) after accidentally saving her. Coming so soon after the death of his wife Rita, this plotline was introduced with the intention of bringing Dexter back from the grief he felt, though that grief was listlessly dramatised after the first episode, in which he snapped and finally killed an innocent guy (though he was a REALLY REALLY NASTY innocent guy, so it’s not like this guy mattered at all, right?).

The possibilities of this were promising, as was the show’s greater interest in using the secondary cast, especially weaselly tough guy Quinn. Could the show finally break new ground, stopping the endless loop of Serial Killer/Family Man dramatics? Sadly, no. While this season did a better job of weaving the secondary character arcs with Dexter’s, the usual flaws were abundant. In the season finale, Dexter is once more on the verge of being discovered by the police — this time his sister — but gets away with it because of her decision to just look the other way, which is conveniently made in such a way as to protect his identity. Once more Dexter has no agency in these matters, because acting to protect himself would put him in a format-ruining situation.

Even worse, his new love Lumen bolts almost immediately after the big finale due to contractual obligations and the necessity of resetting the show for next year, leaving Dexter bereft, just as he was at the start of the season. This season could have given Dexter an interesting arc, showing how his grief transforms him, curing his serial killer tendencies and turning him into a normal human being. But there’s money to be made in churning out years more of this crap, so Dexter has to walk on the spot for two more seasons (unless Showtime falls out with Michael C. Hall), thus rendering a promising idea about grief and loss into an underwhelming metaphor for how sucky it is to have a rebound relationship fall apart after a couple of months.

Part of the problem comes when a show is so wedded to its format that it cannot escape it. Dexter must remain a forensic expert working for the police, so he must never be caught and no one close to him can ever find out. He must also stay sympathetic so he can never kill an innocent (unless they’re REALLY REALLY POINTLESSLY ILLOGICALLY NASTY). Nevertheless, there has to be tension, so his secret identity is threatened until he is forced to do something that breaks his code and ooops! Someone else makes a decision that lets him off the hook. Every season ends like this. It taints every accomplishment of the show with a thick sticky veneer of pointlessness.

Look at Glee. The showrunners can add as many George Gershwin tunes and shots of the Lincoln Centre to their season finale, but it doesn’t make the tired formula any easier to digest. Even if the show didn’t have a writing staff of three, Glee has become far too reliant on a season arc that seemingly cannot change. Everything boils down to the club winning the regionals to get to the national championships, with each episode mixing up the relationships between the characters into a finite series of patterns. Who cares about Rachel and Finn? Do even Glee fans care? No one on the show has ever seemed to, so why should we?

Glee‘s three showrunners would do well to look at how Friday Night Lights transcended its similar school-year-based formula to provide seasons that felt individual. Not only did that break its formula at the end of season three — with Coach Taylor transferred to a new school – but each season felt distinct from the others either by making the Panthers lose early (season two, if the truncated arc went in the direction I think it was going), by introducing a new team with no hope of winning (season four), or taking them all the way to the top either as beloved heroes or despised underdogs (seasons one and five respectively). Glee has no interest in that. It has one story to tell, and apparently its fans are just fine with that. The rest of us crave more, though.

Avoid comedy episodes in a show that already wears its comedic moments lightly

One of the great joys of the last year has been discovering a real gem. Even with the huge amount of criticial praise thrown as The Good Wife, it still seemed like a soapy trifle, thanks to that premise and many of the trails shown on More4. How to describe the thrill of watching the show and realising it’s the most perceptive, adult, and well-constructed political dramas of our time, a West Wing without Sorkin’s blither clogging up the ethical debates and weighty interpersonal strife? With Friday Night Lights gone, The Good Wife is easily the best thing on network TV.

But it’s not all plain sailing. The show is often slyly funny, with jokes coming from character more than situation. Though Eli Gold is sometimes played for laughs, the show never goes all-out for cheap giggles, except for once. The late-season episode Foreign Affairs featured a cringe-inducing comedy sub-plot with a faceless “Hugo Chavez” appearing via teleconference, “hilariously” ranting about Courtney Love, with Fred Dalton Thompson – as himself – acting as Chavez’ lawyer in front of a star-struck Ana Gasteyer.

The effect is excruciating to watch. Maybe someone thought this would be a nice treat for the audience, or a break from the show’s usual heavy subject matter. Whoever that person is, they were wrong. The Good Wife is exactly as funny – and good-natured – as it needs to be. If you’ve mastered the tone of your show, any meddling will stick out like a sore thumb, especially as the episode ends on one of the most dramatic reveals of the season. Coming after the earlier hijinks, the big emotional scene at the end is muted.

Game of Thrones got the tone problem exactly right; by keeping the jokes to a minimum and localised mostly to Tyrion Lannister, who was then thrown into terrible situations where the contrast between his demeanour and the seriousness of his predicament gave insight into his character. The trial in the Eyrie, which sees him arrogantly acting like he has control of the situation when in fact he only prevails through good fortune and the kindness of Bronn — partially earned because of his humour — is a perfect example of the tension between humour and drama. And, just for good measure, the showrunners cut down heavily on the screentime for “comedy relief” Hodor. A very shrewd move.

Okay, there’s more to come. I know! It’s too much! Something broke in my head while I was writing this and now I can’t stop.

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous Gubbins of the Year

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It never ends! This is the bad thing about not blogging regularly: I have a year’s worth of observations stuck in my brain, and only by barfing them out here can I get some rest. Seriously, I haven’t slept in about eleven months. I just sit in the spare room going, “Jon Hamm: very handsome. Zachary Quinto: seen enough of him for another year”. Hopefully our pain will end soon and I can either never blog again or at least change the subject. Maybe I’ll just start blogging about books I never normally do that.

Best Couple of the Year (According to me and not Daisyhellcakes): Raylan Givens and Ava Crowder – Justified

Before we get into a more technical appraisal of what makes Raylan (Timothy Olyphant) and Ava (Joelle Carter) the most interesting couple of the year, we have to accept that two very good looking and sexy people with immediate and startling chemistry are already well on their way to becoming fan favourites. One of the key moments of the pilot for FX’s Justified came when our hero — hunting his former colleague and now nemesis Boyd Crowder — turns up on the doorstep of his high-school sweetheart Ava. It’s a scene that Scott Tobias describes well in his review of the episode:

I loved the chemistry between Raylan and Ava, Boyd’s sister-in-law, played by an absurdly sexy Joelle Carter. Ava is on the hook for murdering her abusive husband, which obviously puts her in danger with Boyd and company, but she and Raylan know each other, too. Their greeting on her front porch is something else, like an attraction so electric that they lose any sense of social or professional politesse.

Much of the first season concerns them fighting their obvious desires in a pretty half-hearted manner considering how soon in the season they hop into the sack, which naturally puts Raylan’s job in jeopardy. What’s most amusing about that is that he doesn’t really seem to care: he’s so laidback and confident he just figures it will resolve itself without his intervention. Of course, he is eventually temporarily suspended, and the relationship falters not long after that, but only because Ava won’t listen to Raylan’s good advice about getting out of town to avoid the wrath of the Crowders. Maybe that’s the key to the relationship: both of them are smart but bull-headed, and so the tension in the will-they-won’t-they plot — which often comes across as contrived — is an extension of a very believable dynamic. They’re not kept apart by social convention or contrivance or even Raylan’s job (because for the most part he doesn’t seem to think he needs to cut off his relationship with Ava): they’re always on the brink of splitting up because they won’t back down from their core beliefs.

Nevertheless, as great as this couple is, there is another romantic sub-plot for Raylan to contend with. His ex-wife Winona (Natalie Zea, completely forgiven for her depressing stint in Dirty Sexy Money after her appearances in Hung and Justified) is also on the scene, and though she is now married and has had enough of Raylan’s dark side for one lifetime, he obviously still loves her and has a chemistry just as potent as with Ava. Because basically Timothy Olyphant is very good at this: his chemistry with Molly Parker on Deadwood was similarly smoking. What the hell is going on with him? He is like a walking sexual reactor, giving off Orgone radiation and turning all of his co-stars into glowing, sex-irradiated hottness sponges.

Anyway, the relationship with Winona runs through more traditional routes — she’s married, he’s pissed her off, he’s conflicted because of his feelings for Ava — but that doesn’t stop them getting together eventually. We lucky viewers get to see our hero find a partner and then lose her, as well as pine for a lost love and then slowly rekindle it. How lucky we are to have a show with two compelling romantic sub-plots: most shows can’t manage one. Of course, there’s always a possibility that you will root for one relationship over the other, and that’s what happened at SoC HQ. I’m a member of Team Ava, and Daisyhellcakes is resolutely on the side of Team Winona. I think we can both agree that this is a far more interesting choice than Team Edward and Team Jacob, especially as there is a good case for either Ava or Winona, whereas if you’re Team Edward you’re mad, as Jacob is at least not a murderous corpse with a bouffant. Ava and Winona are well-realised characters, well-played by two talented actresses, and when they are onscreen with Raylan your TV will start to ignite and then fire outwards like some Martian heat-ray. I’ll stick with them, thanks very much. (ETA: Hello Olyphant fans on LJ! Shades of Caruso is proud to be Team Raylan first and foremost, because he’s one charming son of a bitch.)

Most Tragic Couple of the Year: Dale Tomasson and Alby Grant – Big Love

When I nominate this relationship as being the saddest of the year, I have to note that it’s a depressing cliche to see two gay men come together, be miserable because they know they can’t be together, and then have one of them take their own life because they can’t take the shame of it. It’s nothing new, and it reinforces cultural belief that a gay relationship must inevitably come with such crippling emotional pain that it’s not even worth doing. That’s the bleakest possible read of the relationship. What makes this a coupling that is worthy of praise is the lovely and disarming work by Matt Ross (never better than here) and Benjamin Koldyke, who play the two men as innocents struggling to make sense of their feelings while weighed down with fear. It’s a new note for Ross to play, and he really goes for it: his love for Dale is simultaneously sweet, creepy, and horribly depressing. Koldyke is ostensibly the elder here, and should be more responsible, but he turns into an adolescent whenever Alby is near. It’s heartbreaking to watch.

At least two shows this year managed to show gay relationships that were normal: a bit of an event, really. Modern Family had Cameron and Mitchell, who were a cuddly gay couple with an adopted daughter, and represented one of the few things I liked about that abominable show, though as this excellent article points out (thanks to @werdsmiffery for the link), there are big problems with the way they are portrayed in the most non-threatening manner possible. Even more notable was Caprica‘s Sam Adama, who has a husband (yes, wingnuts, a TV show featuring a planet that has LEGAL GAY MARRIAGE fuck you, and if that hurts your ickle feelings my heart soars to hear it). We don’t see him much, but then that’s the beauty of it. Sam is a gay man married to another and they do fine and it’s no big deal. Except it obviously is a big deal, otherwise I wouldn’t mention it, but I have to say, after months of hearing hate-filled douchebags pretending that their opposition to gay marriage is a constitutional issue (when it’s actually revulsion and anyone smarter than a fungus knows that it’s revulsion), just seeing an acceptance of gay marriage on a TV show made me absurdly happy. Some more screentime for Sam’s husband would be nice (mentioning him and then not showing him except for a quick glimpse seems like a dodge just as bad as Cameron and Mitchell showing so little affection), but even this small detail on the show not only makes the world of Caprica more interesting, it also makes the TV landscape a little less homogenous, a little more inviting.

Best Reality TV Moment: So You Think You Can Dance – Alex and Twitch

Reality TV doesn’t really do it for me. Sure, I adore Top Chef – surely the highwater mark for reality TV: talented people doing amazing things under extreme pressure with personal bullshit kept to the minimum for the most part — and I still like America’s Next Top Model for the most part, usually whenever the models are obviously following orders to worship Empress Tyra, but the shows that take place on a stage leave me cold. I have no time for X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent or Strictly Come Dancing, even though I appreciate those shows do a great job of uniting huge audiences together in a shared experience, and at their best can give a lay audience an insight into the techniques of the participants and the experts brought in to advise them. Nevertheless, when this happened, I stopped what I was doing and watched in dumbstruck awe.

Yes, it’s not embeddable. Stupid Fox: if ever there was an advert for their show, that is it. A better-looking version of the dance is here, but context is all. As you may have noticed, Alex is a ballet dancer (a very good ballet dancer too) who is out of his depth in this situation. He has no experience of hip-hop dancing, and is paired with a former contestant who excels at it. It’s also a two-man dance, something that usually brings out Nigel’s dodgiest and most defensive comments. That he reacts the way he does in that clip (i.e. not screaming that he’s a MANLY MAN and he loves BOOBS and not COCK) says something about the artistry of the choreography and the execution. Sadly, not long after this Alex left the competition, having injured himself during rehearsals. He’s still recovering, but hopefully will be back dancing soon. Nevertheless, he did leave us this, and Shades of Caruso salutes him and wishes him well.

Best Live TV Moment of the Year: The opening sketch of the 2010 Emmy Awards

Okay, so only the last bit is live, but it’s still a potent moment, especially the quick glimpse of the gang rushing to their marks backstage, with Jorge Garcia looking simultaneously determined and scared. Perhaps the reason this made me so happy was that it came towards the end of a long year of TV watching, and felt like the capper on the whole damn exercise. It made me slightly like Glee a bit more, gave me a thrill to see Hurley giving it all he’s got, namechecked Lost and Community – two shows I love that didn’t get anything during the ceremony — and featured Jon Hamm backing it up in front of Betty White: when Twitter memes collide. Most surprising of all, it constituted yet another girder in the bridge being built between my Jimmy Fallon apathy and the increasingly possible Jimmy Fallon fandom. If he’s gonna rock the Springsteen like that, I can’t help but forgive him for Taxi. (But oh, the forgiveness burns as it leaves my fingers.)

Best Title Sequence: Human Target

It’s a perfect combination of rousing music — courtesy of Battlestar Galactica hero Bear McCreary — and fascinating imagery, referencing Christopher Chance’s comic book history without going the boring route of having a bunch of panels with speech balloons: the usual tedious choice. The show is uneven, but this stirring opener makes it look like the most confident action show around.

Worst Use of Music: The Vampire Diaries – Bloodlines

Gina Torres shows up in the CW’s hit Twi-lite teen drama, mostly to remind the audience they could be rewatching a Whedon show instead, but also to get murdered by Damon. She’s betrayed him, and so he’s inevitably going to rip out her heart. It’s not played sad: it’s brutal, and obviously meant to be a reminder that Damon might seem charming from time to time, but he’s actually mad evil (it’s not subtle character shading, but it is welcome considering how everyone else is sleepwalking through the show). The tune we hear playing over this horrific moment? The chorus from this fluffy nonsense…

A 100% tonal mismatch. It’s almost impressive. Nevertheless it begs the question: does anyone on the show involved with the music licensing even pay attention to the show?

Best Use Of Guest Stars: 30 Rock

The wide array of celebrities appearing on 30 Rock might be used as a litmus test regarding your tolerance for guest stars: it’s either a crutch, or a good “get” (sorry, I won’t do that again). It’s a testament to the show’s popularity in the creative community that they can attract the people they do: having Elizabeth Banks and Julianne Moore play recurring characters on your show is pretty impressive no matter how you look at it. Still, if they were just playing versions of themselves it would pall immediately, but 30 Rock has given them terrific characters to work with. In seasons past the sight of Al Gore racing off to save a whale, or Handsome Jon Hamm living in his bubble, or Elaine Stritch being the archetypal disapproving mother, has almost erased their other work from our memory: while watching the pilot of Boardwalk Empire we kept expecting Steve Buscemi to reach into his pocket to pull out a can.

The fourth season featured some of the show’s best guest appearances to date, with Banks and Moore both terrific as Avery Jessup and Nancy Donovan splitting Jack Donaghy’s attention, and a lovely appearance by a very goofy Matt Damon in the season finale (and the opener for season five, as well as the live episode broadcast this week), but it was Michael Sheen’s bravura performance as weedy Wesley Snipes that stole our hearts. As great as he is in pretty much everything he’s in (including the second Twilight movie, a feat we thought impossible), from now on Sheens’s appearance in a movie — no matter how dramatic — will be greeted by us with cries of, “Why is your face like that?” or “I don’t want to go back to England. I can’t suffer through the London Olympics — we’re not prepared, Liz. Did you see the Beijing Opening Ceremonies? We don’t have control over our people like that!” We want him on the show every week: that’s how you do guest appearances.

Worst Use Of Guest Stars: Modern Family

And this is how you don’t do them. To be honest, I’d stopped the show before the guest stars started arriving en masse, but I did sadly see them transform Elizabeth Banks into a cartoonish party-hard maniac who literally wishes Cameron and Mitchell would kill their adopted child so they could go drinking more often (before, of course, falling for the little darling in the mawkish final scene). Words fail me on that one, and then start working again when considering the crushingly unfunny appearance of Edward “Vaudeville” Norton as a member of Spandau Ballet, now so destitute he is reduced to performing in the homes of fans for a few dollars. His Cockney accent is the worst thing I’ve heard all year, and makes Julianne Moore — with her risible Boston accent — sound like Ben Affleck. Fucking show: from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee!

New Favourite Actor: Joseph Fiennes – FlashForward

Joe F! I don’t think I shall ever see an actor hammier than thee. FlashForward was not a great show, and for most of its running time it wasn’t even diverting. Did anything interesting actually happen between the pilot and the insane gun-crazy finale? However, there was one thing that kept me glued to the screen: the towering display of eccentric enthusiasm from Joseph “Rather Handsome” Fiennes, who leapfrogged his brother to become my favourite Fiennes just through the use of one eyebrow. Photos barely do that eyebrow justice: you have to see it slowly creep up while his almost lipless (and yet still handsome) mouth gently parts in horror (or surprise, or joy, or intensity, or whatever) to get the Full Fiennes. No one on TV has ever given me such incidental joy since the Great Caruso first showed up as immobile scientist and deadshot Horatio Caine. As I’ve said before, it sounds like I’m just being mean, but I have such enormous affection for Fiennes and all of his metric tonnes of acting in this role that I wanted the show to continue simply because I knew I would miss him so much. And I do! His berserk energy was one of the highlights of the season (in the picture above he is throwing a phone across the room with all of his force. Yes! A backhanded throw! Where does he come up with these ideas?), and without it TV seems to be a paler place. Still, he is now working on Camelot, a Starz production seeking to pick up some of that Spartacus buzz. What makes that show even more promising? The showrunner is SoC nemesis Chris “Torchwood” Chibnall. There is a chance Camelot will make me spontaneously combust with mean-tinted joy. Let’s just hope any helmet he wears in the show has a gap so we can see his eyebrow. Speaking of which…

New Favourite Eyebrows: Ruth Wilson – Luther / The Prisoner

Her performances in Luther and The Prisoner are amiably mad, especially in the former, where she seems to be trying to channel every femme fatale in cinema history. It’s a delirious experience watching her flirt and pout while talking about murder in gallumphing, unsubtle dialogue that would sound impossibly stupid coming from any other actress. I doff my cap to her: she’s one of the things that made me like Luther even when I should have been despairing. She gets a bum deal in The Prisoner: Number 6 just rushes through her life, messing with her equilibrium, being so “sexy” (???) that she falls in love with him (or is that the special love-potion invented by Number 2?), and is then turned into a comatose speculative-universe-generating megabrain in the half-intriguing, half-nonsensical finale. But no matter what she is doing, and no matter how well she is doing it, it’s the eyebrows that drew me in. They are the Alpha and Omega of eye-mantelpieces, and I can’t wait to see what they appear in next.

Are these awards over? Can they be over? There’s still so much I had planned to say. ::sobs::

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Worst Episodes of the Year (20-11)

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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 (30-21)

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

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

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

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

30: The Vampire Diaries – Founder’s Day

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

29: Glee - Theatricality

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

28: Persons Unknown – The Way Through

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

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

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

26: Human Target – Lockdown

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

25. Louie - Bully

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

24. Hung - The Middle East is Complicated

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

23: Doctor Who – The Beast Below

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

22. The IT Crowd – Italian For Beginners

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

*I’ll stop that now.

21. The Office – Niagara

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

More unsettling enthusiasm to come…