Category Archives: Luther

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: The Best Episodes of the Year (30-21)

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

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

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

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

30: The Trip – Hipping Hall

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

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

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

28: Luther – Episode 3

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

27: Psychoville – Sunnyvale

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

26: Doctor Who – A Good Man Goes To War

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

25. The Office – Garage Sale

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

24: Louie – Subway / Pamela

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

23. Alphas - Blind Spot

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

22: 30 Rock – Double-Edged Sword

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

21: The Venture Brothers – Assisted Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Title Sequence: Human Target

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

Worst Use of Music: The Vampire Diaries – Bloodlines

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

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

Best Use Of Guest Stars: 30 Rock

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

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

Worst Use Of Guest Stars: Modern Family

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

New Favourite Actor: Joseph Fiennes – FlashForward

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

New Favourite Eyebrows: Ruth Wilson – Luther / The Prisoner

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

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

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: Best and Worst New Shows of the Year

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We’re still going, even though my attention has been completely taken over by the London Film Festival (one film down so far! Gillian Wearing’s Self-Made, a fascinating experimental movie that explores the lines drawn between reality and fiction, emotional truth and manipulation, and the way we create the narratives of our own lives. Proper brain food). The shows here are the ones that started this year and generated the strongest responses in me. The three good shows are almost tied for Best New Show, but I had to make a decision, and I think the right one won out. It’s made me easily as happy as my favourite new show of last year (Sons of Anarchy, which had a second season that dwarfed the first: not an easy task), and has already become the show I would most miss if it were cancelled. The bad shows, on the other hand, made me livid. The visceral response I got from my least favourite new show of this year was actually scary.

Best New Show: Community

One consequence of watching more shows this year is that I ended up seeing many more good shows. And yes, many more bad ones too, but let’s accentuate the positive for a moment. The Golden Age of TV got significantly goldener this year, and even though we lost some great shows, we got many more back. For how long, we do not know. Justified and Spartacus are popular enough that they’ll be around for a while, as is the case with BBC’s Sherlock and Channel 4′s Misfits. Caprica looks doomed, sadly, with its recent return to Syfy being a bit of a ratings disaster. It’ll be a one season show unless it magically picks up, but I don’t see how that can happen. My favourite new show of the year, the one that just pips the other fantastic new offerings, is in a pickle. Is Community going to stick around? Will its average ratings be enough for a show-starved NBC to stick with it? Or is the mainstream critical apathy (as evidenced by a sickening Emmy shut-out) a sign that we won’t even get to see the main characters graduate?

At least Community has already had a better run than the Greatest Non-Picked-Up Pilot Of All Time, Dan Harmon’s infamous Heat Vision and Jack. We can be thankful for that, but for those of us who have fallen in love with Community‘s ability to be a sitcom, a spoof of the sitcom genre, a celebratory pop-culture melting-pot and — with the addition of superb commentaries from creator Harmon — a dissection of comedy and storytelling, the attentions of the Cancellation Bear are not welcome. Nevertheless, I suspect Community‘s greatest moment is yet to come, and it will keep gathering in-show momentum the same way 30 Rock has. That show started out wacky and has now become it’s own mini-universe, with its own laws and common elements. Watching first season episodes of that show is discombobulating now: it has turned up the volume on its comedic voice so much that the first eleven episodes look positively humdrum. That’s inevitable: perfect examples include The Simpsons, The Office, etc. 30 Rock showed there was a way to make sure this escalation of boldness didn’t alienate fans: start out weird. Of course, fans did eventually rebel, but it held that traditional rattle-throwing nonsense off for three seasons before everyone turned on it, which is ironic as season four of 30 Rock is arguably the strongest yet. My theory on that rift between show and audience is a post for another day…

I remembered Community‘s pilot as being very broad and unafraid to be quirky, but rewatching it this week (thanks to Daisyhellcakes’ super-thoughtful birthday present: the first season boxset with tons of great bells and whistles, boxset fans), it seemed so placid compared to what follows. What’s most notable about the triumphant first season of Community is that even as the comedy becomes crazier and bolder, the characters hold true throughout. The final episode’s bombshells with Jeff, Britta and Annie are proper WTF shockers that have an emotional punch, enough that some fans were outraged (those complaints were brilliantly answered in the superb season two opener, but we’re focusing on season one here).

A common complaint about Community is that it is all about the hipster sneering and not about people, but I think that’s the most wrong thing ever said on the Internet. The ENTIRE Internet, which was, at last count, 99.9999999999999% wrong. It’s so wrong it very nearly negates the concept of Truth with the gravitational strength of its inaccuracy. The characters are heightened, peculiar, set in a world that doesn’t quite work in our own, but they’re still people who want the things we want, and get hurt the way we do. Their ups and downs, discoveries and resolutions still mean something, even when we’re presented by insane paintball competitions run riot, a sports mascot that is the stuff of nightmares, or a chicken-fingers racket that plays out like the plot of Goodfellas (complete with Layla-piano-moment). The characters still speak to us, no matter what is going on. They’re the framework for the show, well-drawn enough to make it an essential watch. They’re recognisable but not cliched: they couldn’t be more different from the crude stereotypes of many sitcoms (e.g. Modern Family), and manage to be unpredictable but consistently written and performed.

Nevertheless, its the events that are placed on the character-frame that make me love Community as if it had been on the air for years. The joy of it is that you never know what is going to come next. The confidence of the showrunners is incredible. Most other sitcoms on TV either play it safe (e.g. Modern Family), or misjudge their own tone and stretch the credibility they have previously set up (e.g. The Office), but Community is perfectly constructed to allow for any oddness to come along. With such a diverse set of main characters you’re already able to spin out situations that you would never normally get on TV (e.g. a young Muslim man with Aspergers reconnecting with his father by manipulating two of his friends into acting like two uncaring parents and then making a terrible movie which turns out to be about his parents’ divorce), but even better there are a growing set of secondary characters to enjoy. The best example of that might be nervy, enthusiastic Dean Pelton, with his fear of being seen as politically incorrect. He’s one of the most enjoyable comic creations on TV in years: kudos to Jim Rash, who is magnificent in the role.

It’s obvious it isn’t for everyone: the weird war between Community‘s fans and Modern Family‘s fans shows that. But whereas Modern Family‘s fans might see their favoured show as a well-constructed gag machine based on a very specific sitcom template that has been a staple since the beginning of the form, Community takes that as a starting point and runs off in a completely different direction. It has the same sentimentality as Modern Family, but is not as cloying, and those moments are earned instead of introduced at the format-mandated moment because of Reason X. It manages to comment on who we are as a culture with a confidence and playfulness that Modern Family often cannot due to format and tonal restrictions. It looks fresh, going for cinematic confidence over the increasingly tired faux-documentary format. It speaks to those who revel in popular culture, instead of those who don’t have time for it.

It’s vibrant, imaginative, unpredictable, and buzzes with the sense that it is new, all while picking apart the format it has grown out of, adhering to its rules just enough to be able to break them where necessary. It’s the best new sitcom of the season, the best show of the season, and one of the cultural events of the past 12 months. I urge you all to watch it so my obsession doesn’t isolate me completely from polite society.

Best Pilot: Justified – Fire in the Hole

It’s almost a shame when a show has a really great pilot. Last year Kings started off so well that it could only disappoint after: the showrunners deserve praise for keeping that disappointment to a minimum, and delivering a show that was still superior to almost every other show on network TV. Justified landed with such a satisfying thump — with the mesmerising short story adaptation Fire in the Hole: have the short story on me and Harper Collins — that it was tempting to not bother watching the rest of the season just in case it ended up becoming a disappointment. Much of the Internet chatter following its broadcast became a debate about whether it would be a procedural or a serialised long-form narrative, as if this was the difference between good and bad.

As I’ve mentioned before, if it had become a procedural it would still have been great, as its main asset was the fealty to the sassy, laidback tone of Elmore Leonard’s best work, and its fascination both with the protagonist and his various nemeses. The pilot set up the show with impressive skill. Within three minutes of it starting, we’d seen Raylan Givens meet his arch-enemy, shoot him to death, and get transferred back home against his will in order to avoid retaliation from his enemy’ employers. That’s the set-up of the entire series right there: after that thrilling download of information — as elegant and exciting a burst of exposition as you’ll ever see — the rest of the pilot is about establishing the supporting cast (some of whom disappear a few episodes later) and giving you a sense of who this attractive gunslinger really is.

Part of the joy of the pilot is revelling in the perfect casting. Timothy Olyphant’s emergence as possibly the most charming man on TV — as opposed to one of the scariest, as seen in Deadwood – is one of the biggest factors in Justified‘s success, but we shouldn’t forget that he shares screentime with terrific character actors such as Nick Searcy and Natalie Zea, not to mention SoC favourite Walton “Shane from The Shield” Goggins, cementing his reputation as an acting colossus. Later episodes would feature performances from Alan Ruck, Rick Gomez, Jere Burns, M.C. Gainey, W. Earl Brown, and Raymond J. Barry, but the core cast was already strong. I’d like to add fellow “main” characters Tim Gutterson and Rachel Brooks (Jacob Pitts and Erica Tazel), but they have almost nothing to do after the pilot. Goes to show how drastically a show can change in mid-stream, though that fact doesn’t ruin the pilot: they’re introduced with the same deftness as everyone else, so it’s not as if any time was wasted.

The key to its success, though, was the effortless pacing. For much of its running time Fire In The Hole seems to be going nowhere, as Raylan catches up with figures from his past, getting into theological debates with Boyd Crowder and emitting TV-scorching sexual chemistry with childhood sweetheart Ava Crowder. Nevertheless, there is a constant stream of relevant information in every moment, but you don’t even notice it because of the snappy dialogue and mastery of tone. It’s shocking when these seemingly lackadaisical events coalesce into the last-act shoot-outs, but when they arrive they’re exciting, well-shot by director Michael Dinner, and cleverly reveal that these seemingly dopey Southern law enforcers are actually a band of badass warriors. Our preconceptions are brilliantly scuttled in a tense ambush in the final act, as Mullen and Brooks take down some neo-Nazis, giving Raylan a chance to save the girl who, of course, does a very good job of looking after herself most of the time.

The one big flaw of the pilot is that it looks like the denouement takes Goggins out of the show, but thankfully no. Biblical doofus Boyd Crowder, one of the most entertaining and ambiguous characters on TV right now, isn’t going anywhere. If only I’d known that when watching this exceptional pilot.

Most Surprising New Show: Spartacus: Blood and Sand

When I saw the first episode of S:B&S I thought I had found my new Torchwood. It was unhinged, silly, and unabashedly derivative. It seems disingenuous to refer to the 300-esque filming style as a “nod” to Snyder and Miller’s movie: the action scenes are a straight rip, along with the elements from Gladiator and any number of other sword-and-sandals epics. Its hilariously florid dialogue draws far too much attention to itself. It’s also so violent and pornographic (for a TV show) that it becomes self-parodic almost immediately, meaning it will either be your favourite thing about the show or the factor that turns you off it for good. The lead character is forced to become passive for a long time, which seems like an odd choice on a week-to-week basis. Some of the casting is questionable: I wonder how many viewers were shocked by the incredibly broad performance from Viva Bianca in the pilot, and then silenced by the subsequent full-frontal shot. Gotta give it up for Bianca: she makes one hell of an initial impact.

Going forth from this point I expected to be making fun of the show at length on this blog. Instead my new Torchwood turned out to be the BBC’s murder-melodrama Luther, while Spartacus gradually became my new obsession, a show often derided by those who dropped out early, before it became one of the best examples of long / short arc pacing in this golden age of TV. Spartacus is a machine, with plot elements fitting together like cogs and characters set up to deliver pleasing arc resolutions when the time is right. Too many shows this year got that timing wrong, waiting for their finales to show off their results of their calculations, with some shows — Heroes and FlashForward spring to mind — being nothing more than a long series of delaying tactics in order to get to the fireworks at the end. Spartacus eclipses them by hiding its workings so well that when the arcs and set-ups pay off, almost every time it features some surprise element that you hadn’t realised was there, though it makes perfect sense that it would. Characters are written well enough that they can spring out of the boxes you think they are in, with Illythia’s hidden madness and staggering ruthlessness being a perfect example.

The hysterical energy of the show is bound to turn off folks, and the shakier performances and insane declarations about Jupiter’s cock thrusting into poor Batiatus’ ass whenever he has a bit of bad luck are inevitably going to strike more delicate viewers as a bunch of silliness, but beneath the crazed visuals and high-pitched tone is some beautiful pacing. The result is a beautifully constructed narrative engine, something that has a satisfying purr when idling and a thrilling roar when pushed to its limits. Almost every episode could exist on its own with just a cursory “Previously” at the start and still provide an excellent hour of entertainment, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Former Mutant Enemy writer and show creator Steven S. DeKnight and his band of writers (which includes, at the start of the season, Andrew Chambliss and Tracy Bellomo of Dollhouse, and at the end of the season Daniel Knaupf of Carnivale) have taken great care to populate the central setting of Batiatus’ ludus with a cast of appealing characters whose close proximity allows for a web of interpersonal connections, both positive and negative, that are all doomed to go sour at exactly the right time.

The result is a series of plot twists, character revelations, and breathtaking action set-pieces that drove me screaming and cheering to the edge of my seat every week. It’s simultaneously sophisticated and low-brow, filled with fighting, fucking, and political intrigue — a perfect combination. From the fifth episode on — which ends with the stunning fight in which Spartacus and Crixus are forced to team up against the terrifying Theokoles — I became horribly obsessed. This paid off well, as the actors found their feet, the dialogue became a bit more restrained, and the ambition of the showrunners became apparent. By the time the blood-drenched and obscenely satisfying finale came around, I felt like declaring my love from the rooftops. Beyond that berserker madness, it’s the extreme effort to give the viewer a great time every week that gives me a sense of satisfaction I haven’t felt since Buffy or Angel in their heyday. I can think of no higher praise.

Worst New Show: Modern Family

Shades of Caruso tries to be as honest about its reactions to shows as possible, to approach things from a perspective of openness and acceptance, and not let other opinions get in the way. Sometimes this backfires: we’re finally getting around to watching The Wire after the rest of the TV-watching world did, and the fanaticism of its fans has inevitably had an influence on our experience. How we wish we could’ve seen it before being bombarded with the relentless cries of its fans. Try as we might, we are judging the show not on its own merits, but against the praise we’ve been exposed to for the past few years. Don’t get me wrong: it’s plainly obvious that it is a remarkable and ambitious show lovingly created by smart people, and we’re enjoying it immensely.

Regrettably, the endless praise may have had the unfortunate side-effect of making The Wire something we will admire but never really love. Still, we’re only one season in and that could change. Time will tell. The praise for Modern Family was not as intense as for The Wire, but it was just as one-note. By the time it had aired we’d had weeks of positive reviews from just about every critic around, and though I was sceptical about the showrunners’ previous work, the word on the street gave me hope. So what happened? Is my visceral reaction to the programme just a consequence of the notion that humour is subjective, and no one joke can make everyone laugh? It’s almost certainly a factor, but it’s more than thinking it’s not as funny as its fans maintain. I mean, I fucking hate this show. Real, actual HATE.

We haven’t experienced such a vast gulf between our opinion and that of critics since Studio 60 appeared, and that was a show that eventually alienated almost everyone. Even Dexter fans are a little weary of the show’s lack of emotional range after five seasons that are almost identical to each other, meaning I feel a little less alone in thinking it’s overrated trash. Modern Family appears to be the exception. It receives tongue-baths from seemingly everyone on a regular basis, as well as gaining viewers and winning awards that should be lavished upon shows like 30 Rock, Party Down, and my beloved Community. It’s on its way to becoming an institution, something as adored as Cheers or Friends. And yet, it is just unbearable. Who could’ve known that my Kryptonite would be an ostensibly modern, progressive sitcom featuring Ed O’Neill and Ty Burrell, two actors I’ve been fond of in the past?

And yet here we are. What is it about this farrago that makes my skin crawl? Not the progressive aspects of the show, or rather the progressive politics it pretends to honour. The loving gay couple of Cameron and Mitchell certainly do a lot of the things TV gay men do, such as mince, fret about furniture, and not kiss for a long long time (a situation that has finally been rectified and treated like an event when what we need to see on TV is a gay kiss that ISN’T an event). It also features a marriage between an old white patriarch and an immigrant, though luckily for the writers the wife is a hot and spicy Colombian who is just so sexy, what with her boobs and fiery demeanour and her hilarious mispronunciations. Oh how my soul withered when, during the pilot, she repeats Phil’s name as “Feel” and he thinks she is inviting him to grab her ample bosoms. This is the most celebrated sitcom of the year?

What else are we treated to? Clueless men and competent, disapproving women from the worst and most reductive dishwasher ads, hyper-smart and confident kids making fools of their parents, and a dad who thinks he’s hip and with it. It’s a standard, unimaginative and predictable multi-camera sitcom with one camera, no laugh-track, and a documentary format that never makes any sense. What’s worse than even the cobweb-coated jokes from the 90s is the acting: all of the jokes are telegraphed and accentuated by pauses that hint the show is being paced as if making room for audience laughter. Cue lots of mugging at the camera. Almost all of the cast — especially the kids — are so pleased with themselves that the air of smugness pouring out of them smothers any laughs that Burrell and O’Neill might muster. Each week it’s like watching 5 episodes of Scrubs simultaneously. That much mugging would set off a Geiger counter.

Worst of all, it is swamped in the most unconvincing sentimentality, robotically ending on group hugs, reconciliations and reassurances that only belong in snarky spoofs of the sitcom genre, yet played here as if its brand of laboratory-engineered Warmth™ is an insulation against criticism. Unfortunately the tone of obnoxious satisfaction makes every last-act burst of feel-good vibes feel as phony as the most cynical of churned-out mid-afternoon sitcom flotsam. Modern Family is treated like the future of comedy, but it feels like a slightly more ambitious version of According To Jim. For all its artificiality, it’s tempting to argue that Glee is more successful at creating an honest emotion onscreen. At least that can fall back on the occasional well-performed song (usually by the amazing Lea Michele). What does Modern Family have? Ty Burrell saying “What up, my homey?”, causing Julie Bowen to roll her eyes while Sofia Vergara natters on in the background, because you know those South Americans sure do talk fast!

Modern Family is the first programme I’ve had to stop watching so I can protect my health. I tried to stick it out, but once I got to the eleventh episode I could take it no more. Sitting through an entire episode made my stomach churn and my heart race. There was a strong possibility I would strain a muscle in my eyes from rolling them every time a lazily set-up gag would pay off in exactly the way you would expect. By the time I got to the end of that episode, I began to wonder if the show was made up of all the first draft jokes that had been deleted from the laptops of sitcom writers for the last fifteen years. Instead of being erased for good these comedy scraps found themselves beamed via delete-button into a humour-tesseract, an empty and endless and terrifying place. These jokes huddled together for warmth and companionship, and after a time realised the only way they could survive was to form themselves into a new sitcom. Filling out this miserable void, Modern Family became the most mundane universe imaginable, one in which the only effort you need to expend to fill the joke quota is to have a child act wise beyond their years, or make a dopey husband turn into a lascivious buffoon every time a vaguely attractive woman walks past him.

It’s obvious that a large proportion of the viewing public would love to live in that uninspiring world, but let’s be honest: these sitcom scraps have actually formed into a sentient blob of cloying death, a mediocre monster whose rictus grin of smug satisfaction generates pure anti-comedy. If only it could have stayed where it was, everything would be okay, but some cruel bastard cast a spell of awful Eldritch sorcery, creating a bridge between our world and the squirming black pit where lazy comedy goes to die, giving the Bastard Spawn of a Million Failed Jokes a way out of the Hell it should have stayed in. Now it squats on the highest peaks of the TV landscape, fat and tentacled like Lovecraft’s Ghatanothoa, driving anyone who sees it insane: an unusual form of insanity that manifests as a compulsion to babble incoherent streams of exaggerated praise.

The only way to kill it is to stop looking at it, to deny it the “eyeballs” that sustain it. Quick, everyone! Delete it from your TiVo or Sky+ machine! Turn over! Buy a Community boxset! Watch your old Arrested Development DVDs! Buy some 30 Rock merchandise, before it’s too late and its Elder God brethren infest the Earth!

Worst Pilot: V – “Pilot”

Yes, the pilot of V is called “Pilot”, and not “The Arrival” or “When The Big Ships Came” or “Someone Save Elizabeth Mitchell From This Farrago Because She So Fine”. V is so half-arsed that no aspect of it appears to have been thought through with any care. Every character, line, situation has been seen somewhere else, not just in the original series. It’s the worst kind of committee-written show, formulaic and unimaginative and built only to soothe the audience instead of challenging them. The entire show is like that, but it’s not like we weren’t warned. The pilot contained no energy, no sense that there would be any surprises down the road. It mechanically introduced a main cast of ciphers, added a quick plane crash so that the trailers would look a bit more exciting, and that was that. Cue 45 minutes of entirely predictable drama. It’s no wonder it was developed during the writers’ strike: the sense you get is that the showrunners just chopped up a bunch of other average scripts, threw them on the floor, and made the show out of that.

Nevertheless, there were two things about this pilot that made it just a little bit more hateful just to separate it from the many other ill-conceived first episodes broadcast last year. Firstly, it blatantly panders to the nerd demographic by casting Lost‘s Elizabeth Mitchell, The 4400‘s Joel Gretsch, and Firefly‘s Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk in major roles. Fair enough if you’re trying to attract those nerd eyeballs to your show, but they get very little to do. All of them (except maybe super-earnest Gretsch) are better than the material — one of the few surprises of the season was seeing the often bland Baccarin bring so much wacky energy to her part — which is more likely to annoy the nerds than please them. It merely serves to remind us of how much better those other shows were than this lowest-common denominator tripe.

Even worse is the Tea Party politics seen early on in the series, and at its worst here. Evil alien Anna gives Obama-lite speeches about change and inclusiveness, hiding her true lizard nature behind a messianic and benign face. Her message is so persuasive that even the clergy are converted to the V’s cause, and the pilot tries so hard to make the point that stupid gullible people are falling for a false prophet (just like the Dummycraps!) that it doesn’t even bother with the slowburn of the original mini-series. We go from alien arrival to global acceptance to Tea-Party resistance in the space of a single episode. Because that’s what happened with all the politics in America! You stupid bastards, don’t you understand? While you drink the Soma Juice this country is going to hell in a handcart. Only Sarah Palin and her Big Fucking Gun can save us from the Arcturan Reptiloids laying their eggs in the United Nations prayer rooms! Etc.

It’s a David Icke wet dream, and even worse than that appalling right-wing message and the insane pandering to the most unhinged of conspiracy theorists is that the show eventually ejects that aspect of it, and becomes nothing more than a tedious slog. Yes, I found the politics of the pilot to be objectionable, but there’s room to work with those ideas, perhaps even satirise them. After four episodes the show was taken off the air and tinkered with: how much funnier and more relevant could it have been if the show were used to satirise the wingnut side of American politics, or even make fun of the Obama administration from a position of sly knowingness, rather than that initial knee-jerk hostility? Instead we got a nasty pilot and a boring show, one that should have been cancelled in order to save the daft but marginally superior FlashForward.

It’s a decision that ABC must assume is pretty innocuous (or maybe lucrative), but the toll it will take on our cultural history is immeasurable. It’s as if ABC — the network that gave us Modern Family, Happy Town, and this debacle — is trying to ruin popular culture for all of us. Our collective unconscious has been irreparably tainted by this network. It would’ve been better if they’d put Leno on every night. If I were a more arrogant man I’d think they were single-handedly trying to make me give up TV by hurling so much shit at me, but little do they realise how stubborn I am. Even when I’m coated from head-to-toe in network-poop, I’ll still be watching their crummy shows. Except Modern Family. That show gave my soul a hernia.

And there’s still more to come. What! I watched 30-odd goddamn shows! I had a lot of thoughts while watching them and nowhere to put them except here! Even Twitter wasn’t interested.

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

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The bottom ten episodes of the year have a few things in common, usually revolving around some pretty unevolved views on women or by treating IRL issues as some kind of ghoulish entertainment. Guess I’m becoming even more of a prude as I get older, but I really cannot stand stories about rapists or serial killers, with the exception of Hannibal Lecter, who is very refined and loves opera: the Frasier Crane of cannibals, you might say. In recent years TV has been great at exploring the human condition to a greater degree than it has ever tried to before, but even with shows like Dexter — which attempt to make darkly humorous light from an unpleasant subject — it’s too damn hard to create drama from the subject without crossing lines.

Perhaps this is why I prefer shows like The Shield or Breaking Bad: we see people who might have been good end up making the wrong decisions. Though Dexter fans will argue that the show does a good job of showing a bad man try to do good, the characterisation doesn’t really move on from that initial point. Can a serial killer be a good person, or will his urges win out? After four seasons you’d think they’d find something new to say, or give us at least some insight, but instead we just get that persistent expository voiceover. Oh man, just thinking about that show is depressing me…

The other theme here is the bad state of UK drama, as evidenced by the sad presence of so many UK shows on this list. Interesting chats on Twitter over the past few months have illuminated the current state of UK drama, that the vast amount of superfluous executives clogging the system have made it impossible to make a show that doesn’t talk down to the audience. I only managed one episode of The Deep before giving up, knowing that I would end up having to watch an hour of drama dragged out to five hours through all the exposition and pointless shots of people moving from one place to the other. I’m a fan of clear geography in an action show or film, but I can figure out that someone’s gone from one room to another without seeing them do it.

Filmmakers are coming out to complain more regularly now: Michael Caton-Jones memorably complained about script problems on Spooks just this week, complaining about interference. From a comment piece in The Herald:

“There are lots of layers of people who don’t do very much, most of whom couldn’t get arrested in film,” he said. “There are committees of people who work on scripts, to no real end. In fact, they’re known to directors as The Programme Prevention Unit.”

Mr Caton-Jones said he often finds himself shaking his head at some of the simplistic dialogue and the storylines. “Some of the set-ups are so predictable it’s like watching an episode of Charlie’s Angels,” he said.

“In Spooks, for example, one actress had all these lines to reveal what it meant for her to meet someone after years, and they were all so trite. I took a pencil through them and said, ‘Show me what you’re feeling’ and she did. And she felt a lot better for it. The actors are so good on that series they manage to make it work.”

It’s enough to make you hope things will change if enough creative folk speak up, but I doubt it. I want it too, though. I know the UK is filled with magnificent and talented writers and directors who could easily make shows to challenge the current US dominance. Unfortunately they’re blocked from doing this by ranks of people who have no idea what a creative artist needs to do his job. It’s heartbreaking.

Anyway, enough of that. On with the horror show.

10. Heroes - Thanksgiving

Congratulations, Heroes! Your third season was so utterly, unforgivably dire that SoC couldn’t pick a loser, but this year only about half of your episodes were worthy of this list, while the rest were merely forgettable. This counts as progress: not that this matters what with your cancellation, several years too late. The bad episodes were mostly just perfect examples of how the fourth season was trying hard to take a handful of story-dough and make a vast plot-pizza: perhaps if the show had only had eight episodes we might have had something more coherent. Instead we got hour after hour of ShinyWaxClaire falling out with her dad and/or audience-baiting chaste bi-sexual Gretchen, a laughably over-extended arc for “Nathan”, way too much of Gregg Grunberg looking panicky and yelling at everything in his line of sight, and Sylar, Sylar, Sylar. Though Heroes was improved by an episode-to-episode focus on single themes, it remained tedious and unintentionally funny. Thanksgiving has to be the most risible episode: it’s little more than an hour of families arguing over dinner. It’s as static as you can imagine, with a lot of bad acting being shot across the rubber turkeys and plastic pumpkin pies, and only Robert Knepper making an effort. Will Claire drop out of school? Will Noah get laid? Will “Nathan” turn back into Sylar, or is Adrian Pasdar contracted for another episode or two? Is anyone truly sad this thrill-ride got closed down for health and safety violations?

9. The Prisoner – Darling

Much as I love Lost, the terrible legacy it has given us is a rash of TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS sci-fi shows that do their best to hide their secrets behind a veil of unusual events and cryptic clues. Almost all of these shows are at least comprehensible on a surface level, but not AMC/ITV’s remake of Patrick McGoohan’s classic 60s paranoia series. On every level the show is visual, aural, and narrative gibberish, but then the secret at the heart of the show is that it’s technically all a kind of dream anyway. The showrunners take this as a cue to throw out the rulebook and just film whatever they feel like, which means non-sequitur editing, ciphers instead of characters, a soundscape that makes it impossible to follow what is going on, etc. In this disastrous episode, we see Hayley “Rather Pretty” Atwell pass out for no reason in the real world, then appear as a blind woman in the Village because why not? She’s in love with 6 and he’s in love with her, which puts Ruth “Eyebrows” Wilson’s 313 right out. But in the end these ciphers are only in love with each other because dastardly Number 2 (who is dastardly because of Reason X, it turns out) has made them fall in love using some scientific potion involving DNA. Brilliant! Except they’re in a dreamworld and therefore technically have no DNA. Is it a metaphor? A satire on modern dating techniques? Or is it another mildly interesting idea thrown at the screen with no exploration or insight or reason, just to add more TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS MYSTERIOUSNESS to the proceedings? One thing’s for sure: these non-characters are suddenly robbed of even that little bit of personality, reducing them to game pieces in a game with no rulebook. The atmospherics might be interesting, but with no real narrative, who cares?

8. Glee - Theatricality

Yes, this was featured in the Best of the Year poll. No, this is not a typing error. While Theatricality shows the best of Glee, it is also heavily encumbered with the worst as well. Much as I loved the confrontation scene with Kurt’s father and Finn, to get to that point we had to put up with yet more of the excruciating plot with Kurt pining for the lunk-headed football player and trying everything he can to seduce him. In trying to dramatise the confused feelings of a young gay man, they also made him look semi-psychotic: almost certainly unintentional, but still hard to swallow, especially when the showrunners pull their usual trick of selectively forgetting this aspect of Kurt’s personality whenever the “plot” requires. Nevertheless, this was nothing compared to the episode’s most egregious sins: removing Sue Sylvester from the episode in order to fit in a bunch of guff about Lady Gaga; closing the episode with a PSA-style speech from Will that bangs the audience over the head with this week’s themes in a way that is even less subtle than usual, and bringing the hastily-introduced Rachel/Shelby plot to a close with a catastrophically ill-considered piano version of Gaga’s Poker Face. It’s not the first time Glee ruins a moment by using a song that only matches the onscreen events because of a single line in a chorus, but this goes beyond even that. Lea Michele and Idina Menzel are both fine performers and incredible singers, but are here suddenly rendered robotic by overuse of Autotune, and then forced to bring some kind of emotional truth to this moment using a song that simply does not fit with what is going on, and has only been chosen because this episode is meant to pay tribute to a ubiquitous Europop mannequin. Truly the lowpoint of the series.

7. Paradox - Episode 3

As this post progresses, you’ll see a trend developing regarding thriller plots involving super-creepy male predators chasing women. The difference is that while an American show like Dexter will give us nuanced performances from heavy hitters like Michael C. Hall or John Lithgow (who deserved all the praise he got over the last year), we get creepy creepy men in creepy creepy clothes being as obviously evil as possible. We also get no insight into their pathology. While this means at least we don’t hover over the grisly details, it also means there is no context or reason to tell the story. It’s just women-in-peril nonsense, trying to make a too-real concern into the stuff of frivolous entertainment. Not that Paradox counts as entertainment. The BBC’s “homage” to Quantum Leap, Early Edition and Deja Vu shows a bunch of ill-defined and very tense cops who team up with some needlessly bureaucratic government types and a dour and eccentric scientist to decode images from God’s brain (or another universe) and stop catastrophes hours before they occur. The ever-so-slightly more bearable hours of this show play with that format a bit: this one tries to con the audience by introducing three potential rapists (and one handsy “nice guy”) and then having our “heroes” bicker about which is the one to arrest. Cue lots of shouting and running back and forth across Manchester in a desperate attempt to make it seem like something is going on. The director of this abomination — Simon Cellan-Jones — has directed many great hours of TV, including Treme‘s Smoke My Peace Pipe, which was one of my favourites of the year. The existence of this bullshit can be used as proof that right now the BBC doesn’t even know how to utilise its talent anymore. Stay in the States, Simon!

6. Outnumbered - Episode 7

As with many shows, the moment a secret keeper – ignored by critics and audiences – is finally recognised as something worth watching is when the wheels come off. The third season had wonderful moments, but the seventh episode was unforgivable. Angela returns to pester her sister Sue once more, this time with a boorish American husband, improbably named Brick and played with galumphing broad strokes by the usually dependable Douglas Hodge. Poking fun at Angela’s New Age dribblings had provided some amusing moments in the past, especially when her original middle-class programming comes crashing unexpectedly to the forefront, but all we have here are tired “jokes” about how Americans are all so confident and brash and stupid. With the kids sidelined, much of the show’s trademark improvisation is removed in favour of unconvincing histrionics and the snobbery of this offensive stereotypical depiction sucking the energy from everything around it, and when we do get some input from the kids, it’s awfully vanilla. Only the bleak final scene with Sue and Pete lying to their son Jake about the state of their marriage saves it from being a total failure, and even that achievement is dimmed by the fact that the main arc of the season (Pete’s “infidelity”) is so trivial compared to previous ones (domestic violence, Alzheimers) that the torrent of drama it unleashes stretches credibility.

5. V – John May

Mid-season fixes are a normal consequence of showrunners realising there are elements in their new shows that just don’t work. Vampire Diaries got rid of a cast member in memorable style after only a few episodes, killing one of the leads off and then wiping the memory of the one person who cared about her so it wouldn’t get in the way until later. FlashForward tinkered with tone and made slight improvements, but nothing too drastic. If you had hoped that V, which had opened with one of the worst and stupidest pilots in recent years, would make big changes, you were mistaken. The only real differences between early and late episodes were the removal of GeorgiePorgy, who had seemed terribly out of place from the first time he had burst onto set like a slightly more butch Bert Viola, and the introduction of action man and anti-hero Kyle Hobbes, who is approximately 0.0003523% as cool as Michael Ironside’s iconic Übermensch Ham Tyler from the original series. Neither change mattered: it was, from beginning to end, a truly catastrophic show, the worst sci-fi TV series since the Sci-Fi Channel’s Flash Gordon, except even more unimaginative. This episode saw the death of GeorgiePorgy after being tortured with robot insects or something equally complicated (just shut his hand in a door! God!), and the first sighting of resistance leader John May, who was, years before, hunted by Ryan Nichols, member of the elite cadre of badass resistance fighters whose fighting tactic is to stand in a circle and yell at each other. We also see Ryan’s conversion to the Fifth Column by John May, who seems to win him over by boring him into submission. Luckily, the viewer is made of stronger stuff, and can utilise the option of rebelling against the stupidity with the use of channel-changing technology.

4. Defying Gravity – Threshold

I’ll be honest. One of the main reasons I took against Defying Gravity was that even if it ended up cancelled after one short season, it at least managed to hang on longer than potential classic Virtuality, which wasn’t even picked up for a second episode. Even with that bitterness in mind, the third episode of ABC’s cross between Mission To Mars and Grey’s Anatomy was excruciating to watch. With a soundtrack of plinky-plonky “It’s Comedy!” music setting the tone, we flashback to the Antares crew’s training years at the time they are given their “HALO” libido-suppressing tech. This leads to a reverse of Seinfeld’s “Master-of-my-Domain” plot, with the stupid men betting against the giggling women who reckon they can’t get an erection despite all the boner-killing juice flowing through their bodies. This leads them to a stripclub where there is much chatter about gender equality, exploitation of women, manipulation of potential partners, etc. That’s on the female astronauts’ side of the room. The men are, of course, whooping and hollering about the boob-parade. Throughout this we also get to hear lots of agonising from Zoe about the abortion she had to have in order to qualify as an astronaut, because of course she’s just a baby-crazy woman and choosing her career couldn’t possibly fulfill her like that baby could have. What else can you expect from a show that introduces a happy promiscuous woman with the intention of revealing she was born intersexed, was male-dominant but made female by her parents, and would have been turned into a man by an alien deus-ex-machina in later episodes? Get in those gender boxes, ladies and gents, that’s what they’re there for!

3. Luther - Episode Three

Oh how I laughed at Luther. Oh how I obsessed about Luther! I’ll happily admit that once it revealed that it was actually one big crazy story in five parts instead of an episodic tale of combustible Loofah catchin’ crims an’ killahs on the mean streets of Lahhndan, I fell in love with it a little bit more. The last two episodes of this short season weren’t good TV, but by Jove they were fun. The finale out-NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO’d Revenge of the Sith ten times over. No mean feat. Nevertheless, as I stressed in this post earlier this year, it doesn’t excuse this unpalatable hour. The usual showy but ugly compositions were in full effect, as was Ruth “Yes, She Still Has Amazing Eyebrows” Wilson hamming it up as the anti-Loofah, the introduction of DSU Martin Schenk (who appears to have been possessed by the ghost of late-career Donald Pleasance), and the great man himself, DJ Big Driis, goin’ all maverick in order to collah the hysterically overwrought and demonic serial killah — Paul Rhys, showing off all of the tricks he learned at the Sir Anthony Hopkins School of Serial Killer Tics. All very amusing, except that it also featured a victim who is generously given one or two lines of normal dialogue right at the start of the episode before spending the next 40 minutes whimpering in terror and then dying offscreen. After that? Her corpse just a prop for Loofah to nail ‘is man by bendin’ the law. So I suppose her last few hours, filmed in extreme lascivious close-up, served some purpose, other than to be very gritty indeed. A thoroughly nasty episode, one that does the BBC’s drama department no favours. Being edgy only really works when it serves a purpose other than titillation, and the feeble, surface-level exploration of “morality” here is not reason enough.

2: Dexter - Blinded By The Light

Speaking of “edgy” shows “exploring” humanity’s darker nature, four seasons in, Dexter is still asking the same questions about its protagonist: can an emotionally compromised “good” serial killer find a way to reconcile his urge to kill and his growing need to connect with society? Whether this internal battle is worth dramatising at such length is something only the viewer can answer. Fans are transfixed as Michael C. Hall does his usual great work in making a murderer seem charming, while skeptics writhe in eternal agony as the show crawls towards a point over what feels like a million episodes loaded with clunky voiceovers, time-filling sub-plots involving ineptly sketched and poorly performed characters, and lascivious “adult” content including gratuitous boob shots or gore. Of course, we mustn’t forget the moral quandaries that don’t make any sense — either emotionally or logically — but are provided to give the illusion of depth to the tawdry proceedings. It’s CSI: Miami with a light dusting of faux-complexity and dollops of “adult content”. Whenever the Caruso Awards has to pick a worst episode, the problem is that the show exists as a continuum of overrated fail, so which one to choose? Blinded By The Light wins out for the sub-plot with a guy, recently laid-off and grieving for his dead wife, going around Dexter’s neighbourhood vandalising the property of the rich folk. Because that’s what people do when they’re unemployed: go off the rails and spout angry speeches about “making them pay”. That extra layer of insulting “topical” ignorance pushes this episode below the rest. God, I really hate serial killer stories.

1. Modern Family – Come Fly With Me

As mentioned before, Shades of Caruso will stick with shows long after they have annoyed, and so it was that we ignored our instant dislike of the pilot and watched this excruciating half-hour of weak punchlines and oleaginous sentimentality. Buffoonish omega-male Phil attempts to bond with macho father-in-law Jay, who is obsessing over the model plane he bought for his step-son Manny. The accident that occurs is sign-posted so heavily it goes past obviousness, past comedically-obvious obviousness, into anti-comedic clanging predictability. Even worse, the upshot of it all is the resolution — a difference-healing group hug between the dopey guys while the sensible ladies look on with simpering grins. Even worse than that is the sub-plot with Cameron teaching Mitchell the joys of Costco’s low prices and wide range of products. A bit of product placement is one thing: e.g. 30 Rock has skated close to the fire but makes sure to wink at the camera: it doesn’t excuse it, but it makes it palatable, at least. Here we get a laugh-free series of shots of Mitchell expressing shock at the INCREDIBLE BARGAINS. If it were a smarter show I’d think it was satirising product placement, but there’s no flip to the joke. We find out that Costco has a lot of bargains, and Mitchell loves it. End of sub-plot.

EVEN WORSE THAN EVEN THAT EVEN is Alex’s plot. She’s a young brainy girl who resists wearing dresses — a conflict that looks like it might be resolved in an interesting manner — before her hot and sexy step-aunt convinces her to love dresses because that’s how you make the boys like you. Somewhere Betty Friedan — who gets name-checked at one point, seemingly only to make a point that this show is post-stupid-old-feminism — is spinning in her grave. The difference in awfulness between this episode and the episode of Dexter at number two is an exponential curve on top of another exponential curve on top of a turd souffle. Nth power awfulness. No earthly measurement system can chart its evil. Someone drive a stake through its bastard heart and save our souls!

I intend to hand out more awards — both good and bad — though my initial plans to be done by the end of the week might not happen now. It’s taken longer to get done than I had feared, as you can tell from the gargantuan nature of all this ranting. Bear with me: I’ll shout for regular readers on Twitter and Facebook, and brace myself for accidental pagehits from Dexter and Modern Family fans, who may want to stab me for my heresy.

The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: The 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.

He’s Nitroglycerin!

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To all of those who have been experiencing withdrawal symptoms while the BBC tries to figure out what to do with their boneheaded SF-action comedy Torchwood, I have good news. You can satisfy the craving by watching BBC1′s galactically stupid Luther, or — as we’ve taken to calling it — Loofah. The first episode of the six part series featured the usual BBC drama gaffes (overdirection, rampant cliches, clumsy storytelling), but as soon as our maverick hero destroyed a balsa-wood door in a fit of thespian rage, we were hooked. To our delight, it has become even more unhinged and bizarre as the weeks have progressed, though there are concerns that our joy will be short-lived. I’ll get to that later…

Big Driis, or Idris Elba as he is sometimes known, is talked about in hushed tones whenever the topic turns to The Wire, though I find the tones are a lot less hushed when you watch him in tripe like The Reaping or Obsessed. Luther is another example: he’s doing a LOT of acting, but I’m not sure whether it’s actually any good. There are so many tics and bizarre choices that I’m beginning to wonder if Driis can inherit the mantle of UK’s David Caruso. He’s just as compelling a visual presence, and almost as entertaining.

The show itself is just as mannered as CSI: Miami, pitched at the same hysterical level of dramatic overkill, almost to the level of parody (in fact I am now sure that CSI: Miami really is meant to be a parody: the bear attack in a recent episode convinced me). It’s also an exercise in attention-seeking style over substance. Instead of day-glo orange filters and characters being filmed through about 20 panes of slowly shifting glass, Luther is filmed in shades of grey to match its “gritty” and “edgy” atmosphere. I can imagine someone on the showrunning team saying that restricted palette represents the shades of moral ambiguity in the show. Take it from me, this is no justification for the obnoxious off-kilter compositions: an aesthetic choice whose only merits are that they distract you from the muddled storytelling.

Much as it would be nice to credit Luther with asking big questions about morality, it is merely replicating the dramatic beats of better stories without understanding how they illuminate the human condition. Like a child re-enacting his/her favourite film, Luther pretends to be a peek into the dark heart of someone whose moral compass is going awry. Regrettably it’s a long way from the genuinely involving questions thrown up by The Shield (a show that played with audience expectations of its protagonists better than anything else I’ve ever seen). It’s closer to the kind of storytelling sophistication that thinks it’s okay to have the mustache-twirling villain say, “We’re not that different, you and I.” In fact, there’s a recurring character that is there just to make this point every 20 minutes: evil physicist Alice Morgan, played as a hilarious Anthony Hopkins/Lauren Bacall hybrid by Ruth Wilson.

It’s also a primer in how to write drama for  British TV. The latest episode featured these important lessons:

How not to describe a terribly “edgy” murder using grown-up words:

Ripley: She was found on the banks of a canal in Birmingham. Exsanuated [sic] and genitally mutilated.

How to establish character in one line:

Luther: Benny, appreciate you coming in.

Benny: It’s okay, I was just immersed in a world of King Crimson and World of Warcraft. (We would have also accepted, “I was just watching Wrath of Khan while working on my biography of Holger Czukay,” “I was just in a Halo 3 multiplayer match with my friends MalReynolds2828 and ValisIsTheTruth,” or “It’s okay, my 9/11 Truth bookclub got cancelled when one of our group got a call about a UFO sighting in Caversham.”)

How not to react to the aftermath of a brutal beating:

Luther: [sigh] …Oh dear. (This is insufficiently “edgy”, Loofah.)

How to explain to someone why you had a gang of female hoodies happy-slap them:

Alice Morgan: Why, I couldn’t help myself.

Mark North: I don’t believe that. See, I don’t think you of all people ever do anything unless you decide to do it.

Alice Morgan: No it’s true. I’m a bit like that. Bit random. Certainly… kooky.

Mark North: Kooky…

Alice Morgan: Absolutely…

How to establish that you are not afraid of appearing like the creepiest bastard ever during a conversation in your weird serial killer shop:

Luther: Five-’ahndred quid, for a poem ‘and-illustrated by the Yorkshire Rippah. 750 quid for a lettah from the Rippah to a female correspondent. Wow.

Lucien Burgess: That includes a small self-portrait. Sutcliffe. Snuggling up to a woman. Large breasted.

How to threaten a bent coppah with the threat of imprisonment:

Internal affairs-type cop Schenk (the fifth member of the Three Stooges troupe): I didn’t want to come for you, John, but they sent me to do a job. And if they send for me again, I will come again, and I will take you down, even if it means that I won’t be able look myself in the eye afterwards.

There’s this brilliant exchange at the start of this clip. The rest is a woeful attempt at creating a webisode to flesh out the story, featuring Schenk really enjoying his drink:

It all makes the risible, overrated Dexter look like Michael Mann’s glacially perfect Manhunter. Even worse, in the latest episode we see another hammy super-genius villain, the improbably named Lucian Burgess — a blood-drinking, Aleister-Crowley-worshipping mad man who kidnaps women, drains their blood, drinks it, and then freezes them to death. He also licks faces, giggles manically, and has hissy fits whenever he is thwarted by our hero. That’s all quite amusing, except for the vile, leering shots of his terrified victim, a woman with absolutely no agency, who spends the first half of the episode cowering in terror and screaming, before turning up dead in the final half.

It’s certainly “edgy”, and I’m sure the showrunning team were pleased with themselves for their narrative daring, but what about the fact that her death is nothing more than a device to ask even more shallow questions about Loofah’s corrupted sense of morality as he frames Burgess for the crime due to the lack of evidence? The victim, whose terror has been documented in even more shots than there are slow pans across the London skyline (i.e. a lot), is nothing more than a prop, a corpse in a box in the corner, ignored by our hero and his nemesis as they bicker about justice and the evil that men do. It doesn’t so much leave a nasty taste in the mouth as it does piss in it with arrogant disdain while quoting from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

This is a pretty big factor in whether or not Luther inherits the Torchwood crown as worst drama on UK TV, and not the title of most odious: whether it can dial back the humourless, unpleasant tone and just deliver the requisite poor storytelling and over-eager filmmaking of our favourite Welsh SF show. Torchwood was gloriously awful but strangely lovable. Right now, Luther is on the verge of being unwatchably nasty, and a catastrophic mistake by the BBC. Let’s hope they pull it back from the brink in the latter half of the season.