Category Archives: Steven Moffat

Listmania ’11! Miscellaneous Movie Observations: Part One

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Here’s my hasty explanation for this gargantuan post: I had originally meant to write quick capsule reviews of a few films that stood out this year, but the words, the words they kept coming, you see, and I couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard I tried. This is why I should blog more often. It’s a boil I should lance, a radiator I should bleed, but instead I just save it all up for the end of the year like an idiot who doesn’t understand his audience. I’m so sorry for using up all of the words. I had to, though, because these two movies prompted a lot of pondering, for good reasons and really really really bad ones. As a result, this part of Listmania, which has been a two-parter in years past, will now be a three-parter. Blame Rod Lurie.

Best Remake: Footloose

It was sad to see Craig Brewer’s Twitter timeline in the weeks before his remake of Footloose was released. For the majority of that period, he just retweeted people aiming baffling levels of rage at him for daring to remake what must, if they were to be believed, have been a modern classic of American cinema on a par with The Godfather and The Last Picture Show. “Another remake?” they asked en masse. “Hollywood has run out of ideas. Fuck this movie.” And yet Mr. Brewer continued to RT these negative opinions, interspersing them with the one or two tweets of praise from folks who saw preview screenings and enjoyed his work.

At this point I still hadn’t seen all of Footloose, but I knew that Chris Penn danced in it, Kevin Bacon looked like a 40-year old high school student, and the final scene in which the teenagers of Bomont danced at their prom was bafflingly directed by Herbert Ross so that you could barely see what was going on. I probably wouldn’t have ever watched it if it wasn’t for a strange confluence of events; namely the presence of Craig Brewer as director and co-writer (SoC is a fan of Mr. Brewer’s previous movies and TV work), and Daisyhellcakes’ enthusiasm for dancing.

The return of So You Think You Can Dance (US, not the miserable UK version) is a cause for celebration in one half of this household, but I’ve started to be pulled into watching it due to the obvious expertise of the contestants and the fair-minded assessments of the judging panel; a rarity in most reality TV, which has less interest in actual talent and a greater focus on spectacle and entertainment. Also a key factor were numerous rewatches of Step Up 3; 25th on last year’s Listmania: Worst Films list and yet I’ve seen it more times than about 90% of the Best Films entries.

So I watched the original Footloose as preparation, and was mostly unimpressed. The cast were game, with special mention to Penn, Dianne Wiest and the simply amazing John Lithgow, but it was flabbily-paced, and the relationship between Lithgow’s preacher and his daughter (Lori Singer) was overblown, not helped by the gulf in acting ability between the two of them. If it wasn’t for the wonderfully empathic work of Lithgow — who often seems to have wandered in from a different, better movie — I don’t think it would have any spark at all, and would only be remembered for the kitsch elements.

Thankfully Brewer gets that. Ross’ movie could have done with some subtlety, as shown by this far superior remake, which manages to amp up the energy of the original while dialling back the melodrama. A lot of its success is down to Brewer’s feel for Southern life, as shown in Hustle and Flow and Black Snake Moan. A New Yorker like Ross would never really be able to understand that kind of life in the bone-deep way that Brewer does, though he makes a good fist of it. Footloose ’11 feels more honest and raw even while it has a glossier sheen, thanks to the vibrant photography of Amelia Vincent.

Brewer’s movie is also raunchier, but then what do you expect from the man who filmed this brazenly filthy musical moment? The preacher character in both versions wants drinking and dancing and general carousing banned in Bomont in order to prevent another tragedy like the car crash that killed his son, but the dancing ban also “prevents” the sexualisation of teenagers so feared by parents. However, in Ross’ version the dancing is so tame and sexless that it makes the argument completely one-sided. When you see nerds frugging ineptly (though admittedly realistically) the message from Rev. Shaw Moore seems out-of-place. When you see Kenny Wormald bumping up against Julianne Hough in the remake, you know Moore is onto something, and that makes the fight to rescind the dancing ban more interesting, and the eventual victory fully earned.

It’s not Brewer trying to amp up the sexuality of the original in order to appeal to a modern palate, though. He gets what made the original work, and keeps those shining moments while fixing the stuff that misfired. In Footloose ’84 Ren (Bacon) relocates with his mother to Bomont to live with his aunt and uncle, who don’t really understand him or treat him well. Brewer changes this subtly; Ren is orphaned after his single mother dies, and finds a happier home with aunt and uncle (a Deadwood reunion for Kim Dickens and Ray McKinnon). Lessening the familial drama here paradoxically makes the rest of the drama work better. The effect of Ren’s rebellion on his now-sympathetic relatives — who find themselves treated as complicit in his campaign — heightens the stakes.

It also serves to create a connection between Ren and Rev. Moore, who have both suffered bereavement. One of the best things about Ross’ movie — and Lithgow’s performance — is that the conflict between the two main characters is so low-key, and the same thing happens here, but this little enhancement by Brewer really makes that muted antagonism, which morphs into respect, so much more affecting. It also makes up for the less compelling performance from Dennis Quaid. No knock on the guy; he’s very good here, and it’s great to see him cast in a real movie instead of guff like Legion and G.I. Joe, but he’s following in some pretty big footsteps.

One dramatic change in the remake paid unexpected dividends that I didn’t fully realise when I first saw it. Footloose ’84 features a scene in which Moore finds out the principal of the local school is burning books that he feels have a corruptive influence. This comes just as his daughter Ariel’s rejection of him reaches its sad zenith. Realising his attempts to protect the children of Bomont have gone too far, Moore’s enthusiasm for his ban is dented, and though Ren’s campaign to change the law’s of Bomont fails, the reverend “blesses” the prom and its dancing.

In the remake the book-burning is removed, and it’s more clearly shown that Moore’s endorsement of the prom is a sign of his recovery from his grief — a moment that is enhanced by Brewer’s choice to show the crash that inspires the ban. Moore’s sadness is a big element of the original, but the catharsis of his final speech doesn’t hit as hard when diluted by the bookburning. Though an atheist such as myself might appreciate a popular movie depicting a rejection of fundamentalism by a moderate preacher, this change is definitely for the best, narratively speaking. Moore grows past his loss, and his acceptance of Ariel is more meaningful.

I could go on listing all of the things Brewer does right. It’s easier just to say this; remakes don’t have to be cynical cash-ins. With the right filmmaker onboard, you can turn something familiar and underpowered into something fresh, something relevant, something that purrs like an engine. By tinkering with the plot, giving the story more focus, adding elements such as the different racial make-up of the new town — thus adding a new source of tension without distorting or overwhelming the plot — and polishing everything else until it really shines, you have a remake that renders the original surplus to requirements.

The leads are terrific, the dancing is thrilling, the music is eclectic but apt, and the cast is filled with dependable character actors and soon-to-be-stars — here I’m thinking of Miles Teller, who takes over from Chris Penn and delivers one of the year’s most entertaining performances. Footloose ’11 seemed to be ignored by most filmgoers, which is a crying shame. Even if you think a remake is an insult to the original, it’s worth giving this hugely entertaining crowdpleaser a try. It’s the definitive Footloose. Sorry, Kevin Bacon.

Worst Remake: Straw Dogs

Sam Peckinpah’s controversial thriller exploring the curse of masculine urges and the darkest consequences of territoriality might be the most profound and disturbing film of his short career. A very recent rewatch confirmed my feelings from my first experience of it, that it gets at the worst things about being a man in a patriarchal society; the relentless one-upmanship, the victimisation and dismissal of women and distrust of femininity in general, the malevolent urge to escalate conflict.

Straw Dogs is one of the very few movies that honestly portrays the cruel consequences of machismo, that distortion of masculine energy that ruins everything, turning normal people into psychopaths. Peckinpah was obviously troubled by his own impulses, if the excellent biography by ST:DS9 / Battlestar Galactica writer David Weddle is anything to go by. Straw Dogs was his best attempt at working through his heart of darkness, and spoke to me more about the effect of Alpha males on their fellow men more than any other work, except maybe Fight Club or A History of Violence.

I feared Rod Lurie’s remake would break completely that, but he keeps more of Peckinpah’s clever original than I thought he would. Co-protagonist David still exercises with an “effeminate” skipping rope, his relationship with wife Amy is still fractious (though less so, and with less childish acting-out by Amy), and the politics of small-town life is still dramatised well. However its the incomplete aping of Peckinpah’s original that sinks the remake as much as the differences, betraying that personal vision and eventually turning it into what the original version was described as by many critics; a celebration of violence as a way to resolve conflict.

Lurie’s version keeps the idea of the wimpy intellectual coming into conflict with the macho Alpha males of a new town, but transposes this to the US, meaning this David (played by SoC favourite James Marsden, and hereby referred to as MarsDavid) is still aware of the customs of the Southern town his wife comes from. The original David (played by Dustin Hoffman; let’s call him DustDavid) is a total stranger in a strange land, which contributes to his unease. MarsDavid doesn’t feel the same disconnect; the strife between a city boy and a country dweller in the modern US doesn’t have the same oomph as DustDavid being in a land as alien to an American as Cornwall in the 70s.

MarsDavid and his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth; BosAmy) are depicted as being in love, with tensions between them growing as the movie progresses. DustDavid and Amy (Susan George; GeorgeAmy) are almost immediately at odds with each other, passive-aggressively sniping at each other in scenes that are sometimes taken word for word from Peckinpah’s movie but with the tetchy subtext removed. That snippiness in Peckinpah’s original is necessary to power GeorgeAmy’s attraction to her former lover Charlie. She’s still drawn to the man even though she loves DustDavid, and her feelings only strengthen as her relationship with DustDavid deteriorates.

This leads to the controversial rape scene, where she is seen to be torn between understandable horror and unexpected acceptance of the act. Charlie is, of course, 100% in the wrong, and it’s obvious that GeorgeAmy is upset by the event, but she is conflicted due to her feelings about the man. It’s a difficult scene to watch, and even more difficult (if not impossible) to defend, but at least in this dreadful moment there is something going on in her head. I’m not sure it counts as agency, but she’s more than a victim, is a complicated human being, until Charlie’s friend Norman appears and takes the scene into even darker territory, which also serves to alter the relationship between the two guilty men.

In the remake, we see BosAmy rejecting Charlie from the very beginning. She doesn’t warm to him at all, which means the fracturing of her relationship with MarsDavid serves no real purpose. When the rape happens it looks as if there will be no ambiguity there, that she is utterly opposed to the violent act, but then Charlie — here depicted as a shirtless buff hottie, bringing new variables about objectification into the equation — asks if she wants him to stop and she hesitates.

With no real set-up or build to that moment, the effect is to be far more offensive than Peckinpah’s original, if that’s possible. Without the obvious chemistry between the two, and no previous shading to the character, BosAmy’s moment of doubt legitimises the “women secretly want to be raped” argument. I just can’t imagine what Lurie thought he was doing. Did he think this choice made the scene less problematic? He then holds back from depicting the second rape in as graphic a way as Peckinpah did, compounding the problem by leaving us a mental image of the earlier, less violent act. It’s a monstrous miscalculation.

The end of the movie shows where Lurie was probably heading. In Peckinpah’s original, GeorgeAmy is traumatised by this act but never tells DustDavid about it. This means the final siege takes on a different meaning. Charlie, Norman, and the rest of the vile gang accidentally shoot the magistrate of the town before attempting to kill our protagonists to get at simpleton Henry, and DustDavid — who has fled America to avoid having to take a moral stand over the Vietnam war — becomes a killing machine to defend his house.

He’s not defending his wife’s honour, and it has been argued that his motivation in protecting Henry is to provoke his tormentors, allowing him to finally strike back. All he wants to do is kill, and there’s no glory in this, no higher purpose. Peckinpah, through his surrogate David, is expressing his fear of losing control, of becoming a murderous agent. It’s a critique of that male impulse for destruction and dominance; Hoffman plays David as a man who has turned a terrible corner, deriving a ghoulish glee from his actions. This is not a celebration of violence, and those who think it is have missed the point.

Lurie instead escalates the threat to MarsDavid and his home in a much shorter time, removing any hope of debate or escape. The gang become dangerous very quickly, with James Woods’ Coach Hadden intentionally killing the Sheriff in front of MarsDavid. This triggers a descent into violent retribution that’s sudden and borne as much out of necessity as male impulse. It might have worked if Lurie had been as interested as Peckinpah in exploring the subject, but the almost comical framing of MarsDavid — small in the frame with his face surrounded by either male torsos, arms, and groins with phallic beer bottles pointing out — is all we get.

Peckinpah’s film was soaked in machismo and commentary on male insecurities. Almost every shot and line strengthens the feeling that DustDavid feels emasculated by the power of the Alpha males, but Lurie has less time for this, and the finale is thus blunted. Even worse, BosAmy is an active participant in the finale, which turns a treatise on male violence into a mere revenge story. Don’t get me wrong, the sight of Kate Bosworth blasting her assailant with a shotgun has some power, some kind of basic balancing of the narrative scale, but for the first time ever in the history of storytelling, giving the female protagonist more to do makes a story less interesting and more conventional than a story in which the female character is sidelined.

The complexity of GeorgeAmy in the original remains until the end, when she calls out to Charlie and not Dust David for help, and later hesitates before saving DustDavid from a final attack. This can be read a number of different ways. BosAmy is just out to kill her attacker; she (and her husband, who then finds out about the rape) has nothing on her mind except revenge. It pains me to say it as I’m thoroughly sick and tired of seeing female characters shortchanged by not being given enough to do; this is a timely point considering the release of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which regrettably depicts the abhorrent rape of Lisbeth Salander, a character otherwise wonderfully pro-active and dynamic) and Steven Moffat’s recent controversial imagining of the character of Irene Adler in Sherlock.

Peckinpah’s critical examination of the crimes of men is something that has very rarely been done with such anger, and to do that he had to give his female characters less to do or to treat them in a dismissive way that gave him room to make his argument that masculinity is a destructive force. It’s regrettable, but in its most vital moments, Straw Dogs ’71 feels like the raging Tasmanian-Devil-whirl of a man flagellating himself, and a consequence of that raging introspection is that women are sidelined or presented as a baffling threat to his masculinity. We may not like it, and for good reason, but Peckinpah is at least honest enough to present that for us to accept or reject as we see fit. Michael Bay — whose female characters are mere lust objects — would never look into himself long enough to realise that he’s part of the problem.

Lurie’s remake goes in a more conventional direction than Peckinpah’s, diluting that story into little more than another I Spit On Your Grave. I’m glad BosAmy gets to exorcise herself of the trauma she endured, but her cathartic destruction of her assailant is nothing we haven’t seen before, and represents another example of that miserable trope Rape And Revenge, where a woman becomes an agent only once she has been horribly violated. This is something that Drew McWeeny was railing against recently, and prompted a discussion about the overuse of this most awful of plots. It’s as if no one can imagine a woman being prompted to take drastic action unless she’s sexually assaulted first; anything less than that and she’s just being “ambitious” and we don’t like that, eh? ::Insert angry emoticon here::

Lurie has removed enough character detail from Peckinpah’s version to make a hollow facsimile, a rote action movie that sees violence as the answer to our problems, not the cause of our psychic pain. I could accept this as the consequence of hesitancy on his part, but I suspect he doesn’t understand the original, and has no interest in giving the story any dimension other than to provide rousing violent moments for us and the characters and then to cheekily pretend that this has damaged their souls in some way.

There are numerous details in the original that enrich or strengthen Peckinpah’s personal vision; his distrust of women is revealed in the fact that GeorgeAmy buys a man-trap for their home (geddit?), whereas in Lurie’s film the trap — now referred to throughout as a bear-trap — is just sitting around to be used as a mere weapon, stripped of its allegorical weight. He might have removed a clumsy and unpleasant metaphor, but he also loses the point of including the trap in the first place. He’s using the iconography of the first without wanting to bring in any themes that would complicate his vision.

And what about MarsDavid’s vocation? DustDavid is a mathematician, someone who lives in the mind and is thus perceived as feminine by the Alpha males, which obviously bothers him to the point that he happily abandons his anger at them when they suggest they go hunting, as it allows him to feel like part of the pack. MarsDavid is a screenwriter from LA who is writing a movie about the WWII battle in Stalingrad, and who is so repulsed by the pack that he resists the call to hunt until he thinks it will allow him to find out if they killed BosAmy’s cat.

Peckinpah’s David is a man of the mind who cannot resist the pull of macho pursuits; a perfect depiction of the war that raged within the filmmaker. Did Lurie make David a screenwriter as an autobiographical touch? If so then the co-opting of Peckinpah’s (and co-writer David Zelag Goodman’s) dialogue, plotting and imagery is especially cheeky. This is not a personal movie for Lurie. He’s living someone else’s life. Of course it might be that Lurie thought that this was a clever way to set up conflict between MarsDavid and the pack, by modernising the intellectual /macho man divide (because apparently there are no mathematicians any more, only Hollywood writers), which is the generous interpretation.

The less generous interpretation is that he thinks he’s making a movie that satirises the violence in modern movies, like he’s suddenly Michael Haneke. If so, the alterations to Peckinpah’s original are doubly stupid, considering the catharsis of the finale. It’s especially galling as he could have made a timely movie about the Red State / Blue State divide in America, which is alluded to in the movie without ever going too far. All he had to do was make David a screenwriter (or playwright, as Daisyhellcakes cleverly pointed out; that’s perceived as being even less masculine a profession than screenwriter) from New York making a movie about the American Civil War.

Instantly the movie is transformed, but Lurie is obviously not interested in making something that works on a number of levels, as Peckinpah did with a movie that used the Vietnam war and the US protests as basis for so much of his movie’s drama. And this is the most damning thing I can say about this misguided remake; this year Kevin Smith managed to make a movie about the Red State / Blue State divide, but Rod Lurie didn’t. Outdone by Kevin Smith. That’s gotta hurt.

Yet more to come. Not about remakes, though. You can relax.

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

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

20: Misfits - Episode 4

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

19: Caprica - Ghosts in the Machine

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

18: Big Love – Sins of the Father

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

17. The Venture Brothers – Pinstripes and Poltergeists

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

16: Dollhouse - The Left Hand

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

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

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

14: Justified - Long In The Tooth

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

13: Sherlock - A Study In Pink

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

12: The Pacific – Okinawa

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

11: Spartacus: Blood and Sand – Whore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

30: The Vampire Diaries – Founder’s Day

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

29: Glee - Theatricality

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

28: Persons Unknown – The Way Through

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

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

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

26: Human Target – Lockdown

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

25. Louie - Bully

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

24. Hung - The Middle East is Complicated

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

23: Doctor Who – The Beast Below

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

22. The IT Crowd – Italian For Beginners

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

*I’ll stop that now.

21. The Office – Niagara

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

More unsettling enthusiasm to come…