Category Archives: Justified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Spartacus: Vengeance – Libertus

9. Louie – Daddy’s Girlfriend Part 2

8. Fringe – Welcome to Westfield

7. Homeland – The Weekend

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

5. Luck – Episode 4

4. Community – Remedial Chaos Theory

3. Breaking Bad – Dead Freight

2. Mad Men – Far Away Places

1. Game of Thrones – Blackwater

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

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

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

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

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

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


10. Mrs. Blankenship – Mad Men

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

9. Alderman Ronin Gibbons – The Chicago Code

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

8. Gary Bell – Alphas

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

7. Agent Nelson Van Alden – Boardwalk Empire

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

6. Louis Canning – The Good Wife

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

5. Truxton Spangler – Rubicon

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

4. Hank Dolworth – Terriers

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

3. Gatehouse – The Shadow Line

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

2. Mags Bennett – Justified

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

1. Tyrion Lannister – Game of Thrones

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

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

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

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (10-1)

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And now, the big top ten. Looking at this list again, I’m absolutely awed by the quality of these episodes. Every one of them is a mini-masterpiece of drama or comedy. This might be the best year of TV I’ve ever seen, thanks to the two best shows on TV (Breaking Bad and Community), some thrilling new additions to our watch-list (step forward Game of Thrones and The Good Wife), and a sadly departed classic going out on a high (::pours out a 40 for Friday Night Lights). Even a disappointing season of one of my favourite shows (Sons of Anarchy) finished on a rousing note. If you’re just checking this list out and you haven’t seen some of these shows, please don’t read my mini-review. I’ve tried to avoid spoiling, but nevertheless, I recommend every one of these shows, from the pilot to the current day. They are all exemplary, the best of modern TV, as deep as oceans and as fulfilling as a really nice chocolate ice cream dessert, except with no calories. Your life will be richer for watching them.

10. The Good Wife – Real Deal

CBS’ gratifyingly complex political thriller The Good Wife has plots as tangled as a Gordian knot, but this season highlight represents the plotting highpoint. The return of dastardly lawyer Louis Canning puts the lawyers of Lockhart-Gardner into a tailspin, as the manipulative representative of Big Pharma announces that he has had a change of heart and wishes to represent the victims of a toxic dumping scandal. As those victims were already being courted by Alicia and Will, a race begins to sign the most victims to each suit. Canning’s motives are called into question throughout the episode; has he seen the light, or is this a ruse to lower the pharmaceutical firm’s payout? As fascinating as that plot is, the imminent equity partner vote designed to oust shady partner Derrick Bond is where the greatest pleasures of this masterclass in drama lie. In what is possibly the cleverest twist of the TV year, Bond’s Macchiavellian nature is laid bare with a revelation out of the blue, forcing Diane and Will to step up their game in order to save their law firm. Add to this a delightful subplot about Eli Gold, whose cynicism is melted upon coming into contact with one of Peter Florrick’s most passionate supporters, and an appearance by Method Man (METHOD MAN!), and you have what is the most memorable and entertaining episode of a stellar second season.

9. Sons of Anarchy – NS

Was it worth it? The disappointing third season of FX’s biker drama took an unexciting trip to Ireland for most of its run, replacing the bluesy theme tune with a flute-heavy monstrosity, filled the cast with new and unappealing characters, turned the palette to bluey-grey, and squandered SoA’s traditional direct and effective plotting with unspoken illogicality (the reason for hiding Jax’s son Abel) and tedious padding (the seemingly endless debates about going to Vancouver; a nightmare for an audience that knew this would be a wild goose chase). Viewer sympathy drained away, and showrunner Kurt Sutter turned his anger on the fans who were complaining. But was it worth it? For giving us a season finale as balls-out thrilling as this one? Hell yes. All criticism faded from my mind as the tension ratcheted up to exhausting levels, before Jax enacted his plan to turn the tables on the Russian gunrunners, Jimmy O, and dastardly ATF psycho Agent Stahl. The nerve-wracking, lengthy sequence of double- and triple-crosses, expertly handled by Sutter in the director’s chair, made this fan delirious with joy. Sad to see one of the show’s best characters die, but what a perfect way to go, and what a treat for the loyal fans who stuck with it to the end. It’s arguably the show’s finest hour yet.

8. Friday Night Lights – Kingdom

As good as Friday Night Lights was, it could be hard to watch at times. It featured a cast of characters so beautifully realised that seeing them face heartache, rejection or catastrophe could be a wrenching experience. The final season of the masterful family drama didn’t stint on the pain, but much of it was confined to the second half of the season, building up tensions before the euphoric release of the dazzling final episode. Kingdom saw the East Dillon Lions facing the South Kingdom Rangers, the team that battered their morale the previous year. Many dramatic threads are introduced and then abandoned as the team romps to an easy victory, followed by numerous drunken and good-natured celebrations, with even the usually taciturn teachers and coaches letting their hair down. Even the ill-advised shenanigans of the kids don’t have terrible repercussions; this is an episode without melodramatics. A merry episode, then, and perhaps the most joyously entertaining one in all five seasons, with the extra bonus of finally giving the hither-to unbearable Julie plot-thread an unexpected edge. From here, the core characters experienced dark times, but this brief, glorious respite was the most memorable of the season, reminding the viewer of what it was they loved most about the soon-to-end show.

7. Justified – The Spoil

The episode before this (Save My Love) has superbly judged episode-long suspense as Raylan and Winona attempt to return stolen money to Harlan County lock-up, and the next episode (Brother’s Keeper) ends with a nerve-wracking sequence as Raylan’s efforts to protect Loretta end up with one of the Bennett clan dead at the bottom of a mine-shaft. Both are worthy contenders for this list. Nevertheless, sometimes the connective tissue just wins out through grouchy charm and low-key dramatics. After being rumbled by his boss Art, Raylan is given the job of protecting Black Pike Mining executive Carol Johnson as punishment; a situation made worse by a hangover that makes the usually charming Deputy US Marshall turn into a grouch with a hair-trigger. Consumed with his own problems, Raylan tries to stay out of trouble, but instead is dragged into an electrifying set-piece debate in front of the whole town, and is pushed and pulled by Carol, Boyd, Mags and her sons, not to mention his own father; his increasingly tetchy behaviour is a joy to watch, single-handedly justifying Timothy Olyphant’s Emmy nomination. There were more exciting episodes this season, but the wordplay employed by the town’s major players, and the sense of local history infecting every decision and emotion, are perhaps the best example of Justified‘s near-perfect writing.

6. Fringe – Subject 13

Fringe features so many mind-melting tricks and ideas that it’s easy to forget that at its core the show is about the pain of loss, and lies that eat away at the soul. The stunning third season finally found an emotional hook to hang its high-faluting sci-fi ideas on, and the result was an immensely satisfying experience of growing complexity. This episode, a sibling to season two’s superb Peter, is a flashback that further expands the show’s mythology and reveals the origin of Peter and Olivia’s relationship. We see two children suffering from the fateful decision of Walter to abduct Peter from Over There, two identical couples on the verge of collapse, and two Walter Bishops struggling to find a way to solve their problems, no matter what it means they will lose in the process. Every person in Walter’s life begins to suffer under the weight of his remorse, with only Olivia coming out ahead, but at a cost that the audience sees every week with every death and terrible occurrence that follows from her accidental trip to the other universe, and Walter’s decision to protect her at the cost of his son’s freedom. While not as flashy as last season’s stand-out White Tulip, the horrible sadness that frames every scene in this makes it very nearly as memorable. It’s high-concept sci-fi, but Fringe‘s great achievement is how it dramatises the misery caused by good intentions gone awry, and the dishonesty we accept so that we can live with awful choices.

5: Community – Cooperative Calligraphy

The best new show of last season returned with a very satisfying opener before falling into a what felt like a slump, with two highly anticipated themed episodes falling a little flat. After the triumph of season one’s Modern Warfare, these seemed like a problem; if the show was going to try to emulate the brilliance of that episode, would that decision yield returns that diminished even further? It can be argued that later episodes were better, and it’s testament to Community‘s brilliance that three other episodes (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Critical Film Studies and Paradigms of Human Memory) could have taken this place. But Cooperative Calligraphy was the one that reassured us that Community was still capable of being ambitious, funny, and emotionally honest in a way that no other show on TV can manage. The bottle gimmick is brilliantly used to expose the fractures within the study group, setting up the dramatic fireworks of the rest of the season, while proving that the creative team were not about to abandon perceptive and honest character comedy in order to rely on genre spoofs or post-modern smart-assery. In a season that contained numerous classics, this episode by the amazing writing/directing team of Megan Ganz and Joe Russo was possibly the most important. It’s a statement of intent; from here we know this show will play brilliant conceptual games with the audience, but the core of the show — this community of lost souls — will always be more important.

4: Treme – Do Watcha Wanna

Critical chatter about the second season of David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s TV show/educational civic project seemed to focus on how it might now live up to the mighty Wire by introducing darker elements. Crime returned to New Orleans and the lives of many of the protagonists were horribly changed as a result. Nevertheless, Treme didn’t really transform much. Yes, there was a police cover-up plot that ran through the season, and will likely continue into next year, but otherwise Treme remained the same obstinately slow-moving, anti-conflict meditation on art and culture that it always did. What mattered was how Simon and Overmyer continued to flesh out this corner of the world, and the characters that populated it. The result was a work of consistent beauty and power, but no episode summed up their ambition and intention more satisfyingly than the season finale, which brought reconciliation to LaDonna and Larry, strife to Toni and Terry, peace to Davis, hope to Antoine, happiness to Albert, and new opportunity to Sonny, Janette and Annie. With Friday Night Lights now sadly gone from our screens, it’s up to Treme to paint a picture of contemporary American life and community with the same empathy; this nigh-perfect explosion of sadness and joy proves the show is up to the task. Storm clouds may have gathered over New Orleans, but in this season, and especially here, the sun still shone through.

3: Game of Thrones – Baelor

For some of us who had read George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, it was obvious from the way that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss had paced the show that this episode was going to be the big one. Foreknowledge of the shocking events within did nothing to diminish its dramatic power, as honourable but foolish Ned Stark stumbles into a situation he could not have predicted. The final scene – so brilliantly realised in the books – was done justice by director Alan Taylor, and then some. With an epic sweep and a sense of enormous gravity, the oblivious viewer’s expectations are turned upside-down, causing the best kind of emotional pain and discombobulation. Those final moments are so well-handled the show deserves this position for that alone, but that would be forgetting the other episode highlights: the introduction of decadent Walder Frey; the completion of Robb Stark’s triumphant plan; the horrifying revenge of Mirri Maz Dur, and Jorah Mormont’s clumsy but valiant defence of the woman he loves; and Tyrion Lannister’s drunken preparations for war with companions Shae and Bronn. The team behind Game of Thrones had shown enormous confidence straight out of the gate – that can happen when adapting such remarkable source material. And yet, who truly expected something as powerful as this episode so early in the show’s run? It was their crowning glory.

2: Breaking Bad – Crawl Space

The gap between episodes two and one are wafer-thin, and have caused literally minutes of intense reflection. The effect Crawl Space had on the two-thirds of the SoC Massive who watch Breaking Bad was nothing short of a state of desperate horror, a clawing sense of misery and shock that haunted us for days. Everyone who has seen this episode knows what I’m talking about; the bravura final moments where every plot thread in the previous 10 episodes comes together, as if from nowhere, in a sequence of escalating disaster. The maneuvering by the writing team, putting every piece into the right place to trigger this moment, is the kind of long-form storytelling trick I adore, and the end of Crawl Space represents one of the best examples of this kind of intricate plotting. That’s before we get to the stunning direction by Scott Winant; who can forget the beautiful long shot of Walter arrogantly bartering for his life as clouds trail shadows over the desert, or the instantly iconic final shot. It’s also arguably Bryan Cranston’s finest hour. The entire cast is as great as ever (with credit due to guest star Christopher Cousins as the brilliantly realised, truly unsympathetic asshole Ted Beneke), but Cranston is on fire here. He has next year’s Dramatic Actor Emmy sewn up. The memory of Walt, in the midst of a nervous breakdown, lying in a metaphorical grave with Dave Porter’s oppressive soundtrack thudding in the background, will stay with the viewer forever.

1: Mad Men – The Suitcase

So why, when Breaking Bad‘s Crawl Space is as perfect an hour of TV as will ever be made, have I chosen Mad Men‘s The Suitcase for the top spot? Simply because while I am in awe of Crawl Space, much of its impact is due to very smart people working out ideas in a room over a long period of time. That sounds like faint praise; it’s not meant to. Crawl Space is an almost miraculous piece of writing and direction. We’re lucky to have experienced it. Nevertheless, when you go back through the season you can see groundwork being laid. In a million years I would never be able to come up with something as brilliant as that, but I can now almost see the cogs and gears in it, and thus trace that back to a drawing board. I marvel at it, but it can be broken down.

The Suitcase, on the other hand, completely mystifies me. It’s not perfect the way Crawl Space is, but that imperfection, that looseness, is what makes it the most remarkable episode of TV of the last year. I’m sure it’s possible to dissect this the same way I suspect Crawl Space can, but right now it baffles me, and I’m grateful for that chance to enjoy something while switching off that analytical part of my mind that has mutated over the last few years. The richness of its metaphors, the elegance of its dialogue, the effortless and logical resolution of so many arcs; The Suitcase is a masterclass in how to write for TV without showing the workings.

It’s as smooth and perfect as an egg; watching Matthew Weiner’s work here is pure joy. Director Jennifer Getzinger does credit to this remarkable script, drawing career-best performances from Jon Hamm and Elisabeth Moss as they battle and bond over the course of a night. The progression of their relationship, so often a source of mystery in the show, is here laid bare; they progress from antagonistic colleagues to trusted friends as Don succumbs to grief and reveals his vulnerability, while Peggy becomes stronger and more confident knowing that her work is valued. Their eventual understanding is profoundly moving, and pleasingly symmetrical.

As I said before, it’s “imperfect” in the way that it’s not something that looks like it was made by a genius with charts and graphs, even though it’s rich and complex enough to justify repeat viewings (Daisyhellcakes has watched it about nine times by now). It’s not a crystalline monolith of plotting, or a mechanical thing to be admire, but it’s just… dammit, it IS perfect. It’s just it’s a different kind of perfect.

More to come. Yes, I’m not done yet. I still feel an irresistible urge to talk about the best and worst new characters of the season, and pick my best and worst new shows of the year. The best new show is an absolute no-brainer, I’ll admit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Make sure you’re making the right show

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

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

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

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

Whenever you can, do more drafts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Dan Stark – The Good Guys

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

9. Dr. Bennet Halverson – Dollhouse

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

8. Vince Howard / Luke Cafferty - Friday Night Lights

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

7. Lucretia – Spartacus: Blood and Sand

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

6. Troy Barnes – Community

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

5. Zoe Graystone – Caprica

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

4. Davis McAlary / Antoine Batiste - Treme

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

3. Raylan Givens – Justified

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

2. Lane Pryce – Mad Men

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

1. Sue Sylvester – Glee

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

Coming up: the worst new characters of the year.

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (10-1)

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As I said in an earlier post, Shades of Caruso needlessly busted ass to watch as much TV as possible in an effort to widen the scope of these awards. It meant catching a lot of reliably great shows and finding some new favourites, such as Justified, Community, and Spartacus: Blood and Sand. Naturally it also led to the discovery of some new sources of bemused frustration like V and Luther, which stand alongside long-time SoC bêtes noire such as Dexter. Even though we watched over thirty shows in their entirety, there were some that fell by the wayside. Well-regarded shows like Archer, Bored To Death and Cougar Town threatened to take up even more of our time, as well as established fan favourites like Southland and True Blood (three seasons behind on that one). Who knows, maybe this list would be completely different if we had seen those shows. Maybe there would be sexy vampires all over this list, having all of that sex they have all the time because vampires are all about the superpowered sex-genitals after all.

This is a last burst of positivity before I put on my mean face next week, but I hope my extreme giddiness goes some way to mitigating that inevitable negativity. The majority of the shows featured in this final post are genuinely incredible episodes, better than almost all of the films I’ve seen in the last few years. Certainly my number one pick rivals (but doesn’t quite top) my favourite hour of TV ever, The Shield‘s Postpartum. More on that season-dominating masterpiece down the page. Rules applying from the previous posts: only completed seasons, only one episode from each season, there will be spoilers, though I’ll keep them mild, etc. Here are the first and second parts of the list, in case you’ve come here a-fresh.

10: Treme - Smoke My Peace Pipe

David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s civic-minded project drew attention to the recovery of New Orleans after Katrina, and balanced joy and sadness with enormous skill. One of their greatest achievements was ensuring the show focused as much on the indomitable spirit of the residents as it did the sickening failure of the American government to come to their aid. This episode felt like the moment the balance shifted. The closure of Desautel, which had been brewing since the first episode, hits harder than you’d expect, with the always superb Kim Dickens doing a great job at conveying how the restaurant’s failure is a cultural loss as well as a personal one. Albert’s protest at the Cooper projects starts off well but eventually becomes terrifyingly violent. Antoine’s mentor passes away, Davis sells out, and Annie fails an audition. It’s all great drama, but low-key compared to the revelations about LaDonna’s brother Daymo. His body is finally found in a makeshift morgue: the back of a freezer truck containing stacks of corpses, the unclaimed victims of the hurricane. The wordless moment with Khandi Alexander leaving the truck and looking around at dozens of identical vehicles, all containing lost bodies, is possibly the most wrenching image of the year.

9: 30 Rock - Emmanuelle Goes to Dinosaur Land

Take that, backlash! Forget the complaints about 30 Rock running out of steam: the fourth season of my favourite sitcom EVER was arguably the best since the first, building on a slow start to end on a series of hysterical high-notes. 30 Rock‘s alternate universe – a universe that also seems to contain 60s ad agency Sterling Cooper, if a mid-season throwaway line is to be believed – grows each year, and this is never more apparent than when revisiting the show’s cast of amazing secondary characters. The first half of the two-part season finale sees Jack still unsure which of his perfect partners to commit to, and Liz Lemon desperately revising her past boyfriends to find a date for a series of weddings — the combination of plots mean we get some choice moments with Elizabeth Banks, Julianne Moore, Jon Hamm, Dean Winters and Jason Sudeikis. This fealty to the show’s history also raises the hope that we will see Michael Sheen’s magnificently clueless Wesley Snipes in future seasons: his terrified rant about the London 2012 Olympics was pitch-perfect. Even better was Tracy Jordan’s trip into his own past. Breaking through some serious psychological blocks, Tracy rattle through a rush of memories as if they were some kind of hysterical “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” of bleak poetry. “I watched a prostitute stab a clown! Our basketball hoop was a ribcage!” By now 30 Rock is operating on a level of imagination and boldness that all other sitcoms can only look at with miserable envy. Long may it reign.

8: The Thick of It – Episode 4

“I made my daughter come to this fucking school away from all her friends and she just turned into a total fucking droog!” The Thick of It is often spoken of as just a display of poetic profanity and a cynical dissection of modern politics with little “heart” in it. In the latest season showrunner Armando Iannucci and his band of improvisational writers and actors expanded upon the specials (Rise of the Nutters and Spinners and Losers) which had touched upon an emotional angle that critics often miss while praising the breathtaking wordplay. Though this episode features a memorable verbal demolition of odious Phil Smith by Malcolm Tucker, it is DoSAC head Nicola Murray’s quandary that sets it apart. The decision to send her daughter to a comprehensive school to avoid a political scandal backfires after she bullies another pupil. With her daughter facing “exclusion”, Nicola begs the blameless headmaster for help, which he duly provides. Horribly, as the spin doctors and press conspire in the background, the headmaster is forced to resign. More than any other episode, this is where the miserable cost of our ghastly, dead-end spin-obsessed politics is expressed with the greatest clarity. It’s hard enough seeing decent people like Murray and opposition counterpart Peter Mannion being manipulated by unscrupulous, short-sighted spin-doctors as it is, but it’s the final scenes of Nicola (great work from Rebecca Front) breaking down in Tucker’s office that make this arguably the best episode of The Thick of It to date.

7: Sons of Anarchy – Balm

The sophomore season of Kurt Sutter’s hyper-macho biker epic was arguably less outrageous than the first, but more coherent, ambitious, and exciting. It had everything you could hope for: porn wars, sickening revenge, neo-Nazis getting stomped, healthcare PSAs, violence against eyes, an infected scrotum, double/treble/quadruple crosses, and lots and lots of cigars. Racing through ten UK drama’s worth of event in thirteen breathless episodes, it’s hard to pick a highlight, but praise is due writers Dave Erickson & Stevie Long and ace director Paris Barclay for confidently placing a calm in the middle of the storm, and yet still managing to provide the most dramatic and moving moment of the season. At this point SAMCRO VP Jax Teller has been pushed so far by his anger at “King” Clay Morrow that it is jeopardising the club, to the extent that even his allies realise it would be best for him to leave and go Nomad. The episode unfurls at a slow burn, the sound of rock music and bike engines subdued, as the club members come to terms with their decision to lose the young prince. Realising the club will be doomed without her son, “Queen” Gemma makes a fateful decision that changes everything. The final montage, featuring career-best work from Katey Sagal, Charlie Hunnam, Ron Perlman and Maggie Siff, is quietly devastating.

6: Community - Modern Warfare

It’s not even the funniest episode of Community‘s freshman year (that would either be Beginner Pottery with its insane boating setpiece, or The Art of Discourse, featuring the exhausting “Duh! A-DUHHH!” showdown), but when the magnificent first season closed, this — with a college-wide paintball game used as an opportunity to pay homage to the entire action genre — was the one everyone remembered. And with good reason. Though on first viewing it seems a bit like a wasted opportunity, subsequent viewings reveal a humbling mastery and understanding of the genre, above and beyond the spot-on references. The structure of the episode — with the cast whittled down, allegiances made and broken, friendships betrayed and then restored in times of adversity — refer to all action movies, not just specific ones, all while telling a story relevant to the characters and the season as a whole. That’s the key to Community‘s success. Beneath the hipster attitude and referential fireworks, the show is about a group of lonely individuals slowly accepting their need for each other, a point missed by the show’s critics who don’t even notice what the show’s name means. Modern Warfare dares to remove those alliances and affections, and the result is discombobulating: proof that the core characters have grown on us. Other than that, numerous highlights spring to mind: Jeff’s ruthless use of Pierce as a decoy; the hilariously mean-spirited (and accurate) digs at Glee; the many Mexican standoffs. Best of all is Senor Chang entering the common room in a wonderfully well-judged nod to both Hard-Boiled and Scarface. Perhaps the best compliment I can give the episode is this: I would happily pay $16 to watch a 90 minute director’s cut at the cinema.

5: Fringe - White Tulip

Has a show ever rebounded from a slump with a run of such unexpected excellence? The second season of the other Abrams-produced sci-fi show had — for the most part — lived down to complaints that the show was merely an X-Files rip-off after abandoning the momentum from the end of the previous season for several uninspiring standalones. One-third of the Shades of Caruso Massive had given up, and another third was considering it. Then, there was the miracle. A couple of episodes were reassuringly good, though the threat of a return to procedural doom remained. Then came Peter, a superb flashback episode that gave a sometimes bland show a powerful emotional core to build on, and then a couple of weeks later came this time-travel story about two men who have lost a loved one, and the terrible things they will do to dull their pain. The existence of Fringe is entirely justified by this episode alone. Guest star Peter Weller and fan favourite John Noble do stunning work here, with a beautifully performed scene about God and science being the riveting centrepiece of a sensitively written episode, but it’s the time-spanning, faith-inspiring final scene that pushes this into the pantheon of truly great sci-fi TV, alongside Star Trek‘s The City on the Edge of Forever, ST:DS9‘s The Visitor, and The X-Files‘ Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.

4: Friday Night Lights - The Son

By now it feels like praising this nigh-perfect drama is an act of defiance against an indifferent world, but it’s been worth it. Slowly but surely people come around to its understated charms and well-judged realism: this year it even got some Emmy nominations. Four years too late, but still. This fourth season was arguably the best yet, spending more time in deprived East Dillon and exploring the African-American experience that made up such a significant portion of H.G. Bissinger’s book. Most of the original characters have left by this point, making way for memorable newbies like Vince Howard and Luke Cafferty, but the most memorable and affecting moments of the season belonged to Matt Saracen. As with Buffy‘s The Body, this episode deals with the aftermath of terrible loss with a laser-like focus, to the extent that it’s hard to remember anything else about it. Zack Gilford’s performance is the stuff of legend, a towering display of technique and honesty that caught FNL fans by surprise. Instead of your tidy TV funerals, with their acoustic guitar backing and choreographed tears, we see unchecked anger, horror, messy humanity and the confusion it can generate in those on the periphery of a tragedy. For this episode’s bravery and sensitivity, the only logical response from the audience is a kind of grateful awe.

3. Lost - Ab Aeterno

The tale of Richard “Ricardo” Alpert’s arrival on the island was the closest the sixth season of Lost came to providing an episode as moving as The Constant or La Fleur. While fans’ expectations of a flurry of answers was stymied, those of us who value Lost as much for its superb storytelling as for its skill at generating compelling mysteries were thrilled by this sweeping, epic tale of love lost and found. At the heart of it was a heart-breaking performance from Nestor Carbonell, showing us a completely different side of his immortal Other, whose confidence and gravitas were replaced by fear, sadness, and frustration. His final scene of redemption, aided by great work from the underrated Jorge Garcia, was just as powerful as the final scenes of The Constant: a miracle considering the tragic story of Alpert was being revealed for the first time with no significant build-up. Praise is also due to Tucker Gates for creating such a rich visual experience: many shots here became instantly iconic. Somehow he managed to make the island seem like new, just as we began to realise that the tales on the island were as old as time itself. The final moments, which gave us a sense of the enormity of the animosity between Jacob and The Man in Black, took the breath away, and cast the entire series in a new light.

2: Mad Men – Sit Down and Have a Seat

A common complaint during the third season of Mad Men was that it lacked the focus of the first season. The ambling pace that had set the show apart had become too slack, until there appeared to be no direction to it. As the main characters were all falling apart perhaps that formlessness seemed apt, but for those who had taken Matthew Weiner’s comments about not planning season arcs to heart, the downbeat atmosphere and increasing pace of dissolution were signs that the show had been planned too loosely, and that a satisfying resolution was impossible. Nothing could have been further from the truth: the season finale was a spectacular success, turning the show on its head and providing more laughs and thrills than any action-oriented show made this year. From the moment Roger, Bertram, Don and Lane come up with a plan to create Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, to the final scenes with the new ad company taking shape in a hotel room, Sit Down and Have a Seat was a joy to watch, as assured and hipster-cool as a 60s heist movie, but providing devastating character beats and pay-offs with what seemed like no effort. It proved the naysayers wrong, made perfect sense in the context of the season, and showed the faithful that the best cable show on TV was willing to throw its format and icy tone out of the window, meaning we can all rest assured that the show’s best years could well be on the horizon. If anyone reading this doubts that, I suspect they have yet to see season four’s The Suitcase, the masterful bottle episode featuring Don and Peggy on a long dark night of the soul. As mentioned before, award rules mean I can’t include it in this year’s list, but it is such a miraculous episode I can guarantee it will be on next year.

1: Breaking Bad – Full Measure

When SoC saw The Shield‘s Postpartum, our reaction was a kind of horrifying existential nausea that lasted for days. It’s an emotion that no other narrative or work of art has been able to generate in our guts. Until now. Breaking Bad has excelled at exploring how even the strongest sense of morality can be corrupted by fear or greed. By the third season things have spiralled so far out of control that Walt’s sense of humanity is in danger of becoming completely distorted. Is he involved in a criminal drug-dealing industry because he needs to be, or because he’s secretly enjoying the power it gives him? Showrunner Vince Gilligan tested audience sympathy in the second season by giving Walt an opportunity to do a good thing with terrible consequences or a terrible thing with seemingly good consequences, and the ensuing carnage was on a scale that no one could’ve anticipated. This time around we see the fallout from his criminal activities on a much smaller scale, and the result is far more upsetting.

In the third season we spend a lot of time rooting for Walt because we want his partner Jesse to survive, if not for Jesse’s sake then for the sake of Walt’s soul, to see all of the horrific choices he has made become justified. We’ve come to an understanding with him, knowing with awful certainty that he is now capable of doing terrible things to help his family and friends. The audience can be forgiven for pessimistically thinking there is no moral line left to be crossed, but little did we know. The finale of a pretty much perfect season (every episode would qualify for the top ten of this list, and three of them would top it) finds new horror to explore, placing our drug-dealing anti-heroes in mortal danger with their only hope being an act that will ultimately corrupt their souls. All the audience can do is wait and endure the dread as the intricate plot plays out like clockwork, all while posing a question that cuts right to the heart of our humanity: how far would we go to ensure our survival?

Can The Best Show On TV maintain this level of excellence? Will the audience still root for Walt and Jesse in the fourth season, and if we do, is it because secretly we realise that we might do the same thing if we were in the same situation? Have Vince Gilligan and his incredible writing team written themselves into a corner? Sadly the wait for those answers is longer than ever: the hiatus between seasons is almost unendurably long. In the meantime, everyone who reads this blog and hasn’t seen this phenomenal show yet has plenty of time to catch up. You won’t regret it.

That’s my pick of the bunch in this long and ultimately wonderful season, but unfortunately where there is light there must also be dark. It’s not pleasant for Shades of Caruso to dwell on the bad shows of the year, but dwell it must, if only to justify sitting through the crap and lance the boil it has left on my soul. That’s a crappy journey I shall embark on next week, but it won’t all be me complaining: I’ll put some happy stuff in there too, including the best new characters of the year, the best new shows, and miscellaneous things about stuff. Join us then.

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

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A quick reminder of the stupidly complicated rules of the Caruso Awards: only shows whose latest season (or half-season) has finished by the time of publication are eligible, hence the inclusion of an episode of The Venture Brothers from ages ago; and only one episode of each season is allowed. This is to prevent Spartacus: Blood and Sand from dominating the list (just like the gladiator Spartacus dominates the arena!). Apologies for any poor editing here. Much to my eternal shame I’ve discovered that no matter how long I spend picking over these goddamn things some awful mistake (or twelve) will always slip through. It’s like I’ve been cursed by some grammar-witch for all of my shaky writing. Somewhere in this house is a haunted Thesaurus that needs to be exorcised. And with that superstitious outburst, on with the praise, and the SPOILERS…

20: Misfits - Episode 4

Post-Heroes, it’s perfectly understandable that any “metahuman” show introducing a character with the power to travel through time is going to give the viewer pause. The narrative knots created by Hiro Nakamura in that horrid show were so complicated the showrunners could never untangle them, even with some desperate efforts in the final season. You can imagine our pleasure when this Curtis-centric episode managed to adhere to plainly obvious temporal rules, kept things straight and logical, and revealed heaps of new information about our favourite lairy superpowered ruffians. The main thread of the episode is Curtis’ efforts to make amends to his former girlfriend in a Butterfly-Effect-esque sequence of disastrous trips into his own past, but it mostly resembles Firefly‘s excellent backstory-heavy Out of Gas. By giving us more of a sense of just how messed up our heroes were before The Storm transformed them, showrunner Howard Overman humanises even the most annoying of the group. Though Curtis is the central character, it might be Nathan who benefits most. The endless sarcastic asides from the obnoxious little gobshite are given context as we see the antagonistic relationship he has with his father (a perfectly cast Dexter Fletcher). It’s a clever development that gives Robert Sheehan new notes to knock out of the park.

19: Caprica - Ghosts in the Machine

Where once this blog railed against Battlestar Galactica and the way it frayed and fell apart before our eyes, this thought-provoking prequel series did much to repair the damage done to its parent show by nervy Syfy chiefs. Ronald D. Moore, David Eick and Jane “Unappreciated Genius” Espenson replaced the sprawling and ill-tended mythos with greater focus and fewer characters. With a sturdy base and a dependable cast, the showrunners were able to explore sci-fi concepts with the rigour Galactica once did and then add some welcome melodrama. This grounds the speculative fiction in human emotion, the centre of which is the grief felt by two families who lost daughters in a terrorist attack, not realising that those children exist in a new state elsewhere. Here we see Daniel Graystone’s suspicions about the erratic behaviour of his lone Cylon come to a head just as Joseph Adama searches for the incomplete avatar of his daughter in V-World. While the grief-stricken Tauran lawyer approaches his daughter from a position of supplication, Daniel attempts trickery and calculation to try to get Zoe Graystone to reveal her secret existence within the Cylon’s robot shell. The tragedy is that neither father is willing to accept that their children have moved on in more than one sense. For all its speculative ambition, it’s the human truth of this rift that makes this show — and this episode in particular — so memorable.

18: Big Love – Sins of the Father

The oft-derided fourth season of Big Love was actually pretty great for most of its truncated run if you were willing to roll with Bill Henrikson’s decision to run for Senator — merely his latest bad idea in long line of them. A couple of early episodes were blackly comedic mini-classics, amping up the absurdity of the show while not becoming unpalatable. Sins of the Father rose above them all with its Godfather-like depiction of a man losing everything. However, while Michael Corleone loses everything by allowing his dark heart to overwhelm him, Bill loses everything with the revelation of his own hypocrisy, turning his back on son Ben after he admits to having feelings for Margene even though he was once cast out by his own father. Director David Petrarca and writer Seth Greenland do a superb job of making Bill’s ridiculously overwrought internal struggle make sense to an audience who would probably just forgive Ben, couching the drama in terms of Bill’s very specific insecurity: will he be usurped by his own son one day? For a show primarily about religion, Big Love deserves praise for playing these themes and Biblical references so lightly. Add to that a couple of great comic set-pieces involving Bill’s three wives, Bill Paxton’s best performance to date, and a sense of dramatic urgency the show has often lacked, and this episode can be placed next to last year’s Come, Ye Saints as a keeper.

17. The Venture Brothers – Pinstripes and Poltergeists

It’s tempting to hate Pinstripes and Poltergeists for being the final part of the bisected fourth season, just to be petty. The sudden disappearance of The Best Animated Show On TV was especially galling as it was finally picking up a good head of steam. Nevertheless, at least the show left us with something that is, as 21 says, “like Christmas, a first BMX bike, and meeting the cast of Firefly all in one”. Highlights include the long-delayed introduction of evil bureaucrat Monstroso (“Cigar?”), Rusty Venture discovering chatrooms and pop-ups, and the revelation that Brock Samson has been living on the Venture compound all along while working with the shadowy organisation S.P.H.I.N.X. (“Sphinx!”). Perhaps the best thing about this episode is that it can be used as a perfect example of how The Venture Brothers is more than just a snarky pop-culture melange. The characters have evolved so much that Brock’s outburst to Rusty about being close to Dean and Hank, yet not being able to contact them, has an emotional power unheard-of in Adult Swim’s roster: see also 21′s vengeful pursuit of Brock, which is finally resolved with a fight, an understanding, and an alliance against a common enemy. It’s enough to tug the heart-strings. There is also the small matter of 24′s ghostly nature: the revelations about him in this episode have made his continued “existence” as big a mystery as any number of polar bears, Rambaldi devices or parallel universes in the Bad Robot canon.

16: Dollhouse - The Left Hand

It’s easy to miss classic TV episodes when their parent network decides to burn through a condemned series with a burst of two-parters. After the second season of Joss Whedon’s brainwipe thriller started with a series of underwhelming standalone episodes, we were treated to a quick rush of excellent, mythology-heavy dramas that expanded the backstory of our characters and the shadowy Rossum Corporation, along with some of the most head-melting concepts in popular sci-fi drama. This season highlight was the best mix of mythology and standalone episode before the showrunners were regrettably forced to cut their five-season plan short. Our hero Echo and poor manipulated Senator Daniel Perrin are held captive in the Washington DC Dollhouse by slimy Stewart Lipman (a welcome appearance by SoC favourite Ray Wise) and the complicated Dr. Bennett Halverson, who is torturing Echo for a past transgression. The LA Dollhouse attempts to save its Active using two Tophers (both played brilliantly by Fran Kranz and a never better Enver Gjokaj), but the web of double-, triple-, and quadruple- crosses wrecks their plans. It’s a packed-to-bursting hour of action TV, both thrilling and funny. Truly, no other show on TV could dramatise such potentially alienating hard sci-fi ideas about personality-cloning and mind-manipulation with such playfulness.

15. Party Down – “Not On My Wife” Opening Night

My love of Cheers (a deep, deep love) did not migrate to spin-off Frasier, whose tone irked despite the generally excellent cast. The general air of satisfaction generated — possibly because the obvious jokes were interspersed with the odd reference to Mahler — swamped the gags that did work. All was forgiven when the show concentrated on farce, which it did brilliantly. Party Down, on the other hand, has a better episode-to-episode hit:miss ratio, and adding farce pushes Opening Night to the top of the heap. The aspiring actors and writers of the catering team are forced to work through the opening night of a farce performed by a community theatre group they consider beneath them, and end up embroiled in a whirlwind of sexual misadventure, misunderstanding, and escalating panic. It’s a superb example of the genre, with veils, masks, secrets and lies in abundance, but while John Enbom’s expertly judged script (and David Wain’s perfect direction) are to be praised, it’s the little things that stick in the memory: Casey’s inept flirting with the lesbian producer from Warners; Roman’s Bacchanalian behaviour; Kyle’s pitiful attempts at being sexy; and Ron misreading Lydia’s signals and ending up with a faceful of mace. The sight of his puffy, snot-covered face will linger in my memory forever.

14: Justified - Long In The Tooth

Whenever a show makes a big splash with its first episode, there is often a worry that comes with it: will this show keep the quality up? Will it somehow ruin it, go in the wrong direction, abandon everything that made that first hour so good? In a post-Sopranos age, we expect the best shows to be serialised, and the procedurals of network to be less impressive. Would Justified be able to create a serialised drama out of its short story origins? Or would it be little more than a well-shot villain-of-the-week show? The fourth episode of the phenomenal first season went both ways. Alan Ruck plays a crook on the lam from our hero Raylan Givens, forced to give up his career as a dentist after a memorably nasty encounter with an obnoxious patient. The episode works extremely well as a one-off: Ruck is perfectly cast as the impulsive but likeable foil to laidback Raylan, and his character is so well-drawn it’s genuinely upsetting that he can’t become a regular on the show. What makes this our favourite of the consistently stellar first season is the knowledge that even though Justified eventually becomes more serialised (even taking into account the nerve-wracking shoot-out with Miami goons near the end), it could have been a great, unorthodox procedural too. No matter what the showrunners did, we were prepared to love it unconditionally.

13: Sherlock - A Study In Pink

It’s rare that a TV show can come out of nowhere and capture the public’s imagination with the modern publicity machine being what it is. Perhaps because UK TV often has big events that don’t add up to much it was easy to expect little from Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ “reimagining” (forgive me) of Britain’s most beloved fictional character, especially with Rupert Murdoch’s snivelling toadies in the Sun spreading snide rumours about reshoots and disastrous pre-screenings. Thankfully it was just the odious Antipodean arsehole playing shenanigans: the first episode of Sherlock was a supremely confident, exciting 90 minutes of TV, instantly transforming Benedict Cumberbatch from that guy who appeared in the things into a TV icon, all spindly limbs and ghostly face, his lovely coat flapping in the wind as he chased villains around Cardiff London. Paul McGuigan invented a visual palette that was showy but not intrusive, with a brilliant floating-text conceit that allowed us to see Sherlock’s thought processes. Even better, Moffat filled the movie-length pilot with plot and event, moving things along at a clip and never relying on tedious exposition to bloat out a flimsy script. It felt substantial, like the arrival of your new favourite thing. We can only hope this was not a fluke: more on that to come.

12: The Pacific – Okinawa

Saying The Pacific wasn’t as feel-good as Band of Brothers seems crazy: after all, the original HBO mini-series featured the hell of war in startling, miserable detail. Nevertheless, it’s not called Band of Brothers for no reason. The most important point the series made was that in the middle of the carnage and horror, there was someone there who had your back, who would remind you of your humanity and your responsibility to everyone around you. The Pacific has very little of that uplift. The ninth episode of this ten-part mega-downer is possibly the bleakest hour of TV screened since the BBC’s Threads, as the 1st Marine Division find themselves trapped in a purgatorial war of attrition with a ruthless enemy at the base of an almost impassable mountain. Joseph Mazzello does excellent work as Corporal Eugene Sledge, pushed to the edge by relentless rain, despicable and dehumanising Japanese tactics (often involving civilians and children), and the low morale of his companions, most of whom die in agony because of mistakes borne of fatigue. With his humanity seemingly crushed forever, we watch in dread as he finds a dying Japanese civilian – the victim of an artillery strike he was involved with – and brace ourselves for further horror. The choice he makes is revelatory, cathartic, unforgettable. So yes, a gruelling hour of drama, but also an essential one.

11: Spartacus: Blood and Sand – Whore

This indecently entertaining sword-and-sandals epic never stints on surprisingly graphic sex and violence, with boobs, dongs, blood, buttocks and heads flying at the camera with such regularity you’d be forgiven for thinking it was originally meant to be screened in 3D. Neither the sex nor the violence were that important, certainly on a plot level, being there mainly because Starz were happy to let the showrunners go a bit mental. However this season highlight used graphic sex as a way to explore not only the levels to which the slaves of Batiatus’ ludus are expected to lower themselves, but also as a way to further dramatise the antagonism between our hero Spartacus and delightful snake-woman Illythia, wife of his mortal enemy Gaius Claudius Glaber. Most of the episode does a good job of adding new levels of debasement to the proud gladiators, now fully expected to be prostitutes as well as warriors, but it’s Lucretia’s conniving which makes this an instant classic. Playing a trick with masks to teach her former friend Illythia a lesson, the plot to humiliate her spins out of Lucretia’s control in the final moments. TV has arguably never seen a sequence as pornographic, violent, and purely Grand Quignol as this, but it never abandons character or plot for a second, a detail that you might miss as your jaw dislocates from dropping so fast.

The final ten will be here tomorrow. Anyone who has followed my tweets of the past few months will probably find few surprises: many of the episodes that broke the top ten drove me to such paroxysms of joy that I went a bit nuts over there. We’re talking many, many multiples of 140 characters.