Category Archives: V

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

10. John Pope – Falling Skies

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

9. Lumen Pierce – Dexter

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

8. Sophia – The Event

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

7. Ilsa Pucci – Human Target

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

6. Odin Sinclair – Caprica

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

5. Stephanie Powell – No Ordinary Family

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

4. King Arthur – Camelot

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

3. Nelson Hidalgo – Treme

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

2. Maggie Young – Rubicon

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

1. Oswald Danes – Torchwood: Miracle Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by

Yesterday I announced the commencement of the Caruso TV Awards for the period between September 2010 and the beginning of October 2011, with a temporary lifting of my usual rule about not judging shows that haven’t finished their run by then. Thanks for starting Breaking Bad so late in the year, AMC. In that post I said I was going to go easy on shows I didn’t like, and the response was surprising. Turns out many think that’s a cop-out, or a disappointment. @Daisyhellcakes passionately argued that I should have the courage of my convictions. Friend-of-the-blog and excellent fellow @cockbongo was more direct.

Well, these Lessons posts are long and filled with all sorts of vitriolic complaining, so rejoice, those who thought I was going to be too nice! The difference here is that with a bit more room to explain myself, I can hopefully avoid the charge of just being a guy throwing stinkbombs at TV shows. I mean, yeah, I still am, I guess. But I also go on and on for literally thousands of words, and those thousands of words are a buffer between me and the possibility of coming off like the guy on the bottom half of the Internet who trolls for kicks. So, with no further ado, I finally deactivate my Caveat-O-Matic 3000 and just get on with it.

Be careful not to write your characters as idiots for the sake of convenience

One of the best lessons imparted by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan in recent interviews (e.g. this one), shows how his magnificent creation manages to keep the audience on the edge of its seat, and how it finds new ways to jeopardise its protagonists each week; he intentionally forces his characters into a corner, and then makes them escape their fates using any means necessary. It helps that he has two main characters — Walt and Jesse — who are among the finest in fiction. They’re complex, relatable and — despite their awful flaws and multiple moral failings — sympathetic, simply because we can see through their eyes and understand what needs to be done to survive.

On a lesser show such as Dexter, our cuddly serial killer hero is painted into the same corner each season — his secret is about to be revealed, and the only way he can survive is to kill an innocent or a loved one — and is saved each year by pure fluke, deus ex machina, or the superior, unambiguous and often horribly overplayed evil of others. What’s more annoying is that the only way to get him into trouble is to temporarily make him stupid; a crime considering the show has been running for five years and makes a point of how professional and methodical he is.

The fifth season deserves some credit for coming up with new ways to dumb him down (giving him a crazed “partner”, the death of his wife messing with his head), but there are still a handful of moments where he conveniently drops 50 IQ points just to generate false drama. Also connected to this is the way Rita’s children are conveniently written out of the show early on just to ensure Dexter can get it on with Lumen. Bringing his step-daughter Astor back for one episode was actually the highlight of the season, precisely because it generated real complication and, in its resolution, real growth for Dexter.

Perhaps the worst offender for creating intentionally dumb characters is TNT’s militia-vs-alien drama Falling Skies. Note the incredible stupidity of the freedom-fighting 2nd Mass, who have in their ranks a young boy who has been rescued from the alien invaders who have taken control of Earth. On his back is a Harness; a creepy biomech thingy (designed by the remarkable Rob McCallum) that has attached itself to his spine so that he can be controlled by the aliens. Even after it is removed he continues to act as if he’s under the aliens’ control, talking in a monotone and referring to humans as “Them”. This zombie-like behaviour, with ominous staring and plodding footsteps, goes on for five episodes before anyone twigs that he’s not to be trusted.

Even better is when they capture an alien weapon and promptly dismantle it instead of using it. Pope — the Ham Tyler of the show — seems proud of this, and never thinks the weapon might be useful. It takes a child to suggest using it against the alien invaders. It takes about three episodes for this kid to drop some wisdom on the idiot freedom fighters. The show is littered with conveniently dense characters, as this was the only way to drag three episodes’ worth of story out to ten. See also Torchwood: Miracle Day, V, Camelot, No Ordinary Family (in which, at one point, a villain kills off her powerful mind-controlling minion in order to clear the way for some guy with claws, because claws beats mind-control every time, apparently), etc.

Don’t waste our time by retelling the same stories or using the same tricks each week

Oh, The Killing. If only we could have captured the negative energy you created with THAT finale. Goodbye oil, goodbye gas, goodbye windfarms and solar energy and biodiesel. Hello limitless energy, with the only waste product the occasional expression of dismay from our exhausts; roads lined with cars belching out, “worst red herrings ever,” “relentless one-note tone,” “bog-standard police procedural with delusions of grandeur,” ”Michelle Forbes was quite good though.”

There isn’t much more that can be said about Veena Sud’s remake of Forbrydelsen; SoC was as frustrated as almost everyone else with the season’s open ending, though its reliance on red herrings was the absolute worst things about this first season. The moment when Rosie Larsen’s best friend Sterling Fitch reveals that a nosebleed was responsible for turning the school’s basement into what looked like an abattoir was when the show fell into a hole, never to be recovered. The Muslim “kidnap room” and the presence of paint stripper in poor Bennet Ahmed’s house were further insults. Even the hope that a plot about the disappearance of a Muslim girl might allow the show to touch on racism in the media and the police force was foolish; it was another red herring. This was not a bold new storytelling experience. It was a merry-go-round covered in crimson fish guts.

The anger is still fresh for those of us who got burned, but it’s not the only show wasting our time with dead-ends. Dexter has been telling the same story every year with almost no change. Killing Rita off at the end of season 4 is the boldest thing the show has done, but by the end of the fifth he’s still the same guy; a serial killer trying to come to terms with his feelings about the people around him while hiding his true nature and delivering endless voiceovers that give away everything about his inner life. It’s Groundhog Day for people who read those tacky inserts about Fred West in Sunday tabloids.

Doctor Who‘s long-arc game has also alienated me, but this is partially a fault of mine. After watching it for so long, the endless running, the gabbled dialogue and that cacophonous, distracting soundtrack have worn my patience thin. The last four episodes of the season sat unwatched on my PVR until yesterday; after years of enthusiasm I suddenly had no real urge to put myself through yet more unattractive pouting from Amy, or dopey-faced clowning from Rory. Matt Smith’s Doctor is delightful, but everything else has worn me down.

Part of that is the feeling of deja vu wafting from it. Whenever Steven Moffat’s name is on the script the show becomes a riot of imagination, with a brightness to the dialogue that makes it feel like nothing else. The rest of the time (or at least a lot of the time) there’s just more dialogue, as if the cumulative braininess of Moffat’s less frenetic interactions can only be matched with ten times as many lines, each with a lower individual IQ. As Moffat can’t write everything, the show falls into a rut with the Doctor rattling off comments as if he’s having an argument with himself, while Amy and Rory stand there looking frozen.

What’s worse is that despite the enormous blank canvas offered by the show (taking into account budgetary concerns, of course), too many plots or plot elements are recycled. Two episodes in the recent half-season featured characters miniaturised and sucked into a hostile environment; what’s worse, those two episodes aired back-to-back. Too often now the Monster-Of-The-Week is actually some poor pitiful creature who is misunderstood and needs the Doctor’s help. Fair enough, it’s a kid’s show, and you can’t have truly vicious enemies in it, but with The Silence’s motivations kept mysterious, the show now lacks menace; creepy, over-directed atmospherics are not a suitable substitute.

As I said, much of it is still fine. The finales of this split season were enormous fun, and some episodes did a great job of dramatising the Doctor’s increasingly depressed state. For example, Toby Whithouse’s The God Complex did a much better job of showing the Doctor’s growing sense of unease with his effect on the ones he loves than Moffat’s A Good Man Goes To War with all of its nonsense about the Doctor being a bad man. Nevertheless, the show has begun to lose its appeal, at least for this viewer, simply because it seems to have used a number of lovely, distracting enhancements to make it look like the show has a number of tricks up its sleeve when in fact it only has that handkerchief illusion and a dog-eared Ace of Diamonds.

Even if you’ve got a good finale, the show still needs some meat in the weeks before that

This is a problem that has taxed the patience of SoC for many a year, but this year it started to affect good shows as well as bad. V, Heroes and FlashForward are perfect examples of shows that plotted for a finale, meaning there were weeks where nothing happened; a week of potentially diverting drama sacrificed to protect the sanctity of the blowout finale. Of course there are bound to be slow weeks in any drama; even the best show on TV – Breaking Bad – has episodes that “merely” move pieces into place, set the tone for the season, or resolve the events of a previous episode. There’s also Treme, a show which makes a show of doing as little as possible for an entire season, but as it places a premium on mood instead of plot, that’s forgivable.

Network shows are particularly bad for treading water, but this year even SoC favourites like Sons of Anarchy, or highly anticipated prestige shows such as Boardwalk Empire or The Killing, misjudged their pacing. Sons was particularly disappointing. The first two seasons moved like freight trains, but showrunner Kurt Sutter’s experiment with a slow pace ended up alienating many fans, all of whom he then called very bad names. Do you realise the risk SoC is taking by daring to criticise his show? We really liked the finale, Mr. Sutter sir! Please don’t call me a douchehole.

Anyway, that was still preferable to Boardwalk Empire‘s amble toward a finale that underwhelmed, with only the occasional surprise to enliven a journey which seemed to be mostly made up of simmering resentment between couples and glowering from Michaels Shannon and K. Williams. When the show woke up it was riveting, but too much of it was spent reiterating the show’s theme as explained by Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson – “We all have to decide how much sin we can live with”. That was a point that could have been made definitively and then abandoned halfway through the season, but the games played between Nucky and Margaret Shroeder covered this ground until the grass was tramped flat and the soil turned to mud.

The Killing was the worst of all. To keep the show going for thirteen weeks it had to employ tricks to deceive the audience; red herrings and deceptions of such transparent stupidity that the viewers rose in furious anger and smited showrunner Veena Sud with anonymous complaints on the internet. Unfortunately no one realised that this form of attack, which is potent against normal showrunners, is actually some form of psychic sustenance for Sud, who reacted with remarkable confidence considering everyone who saw that FUCKING finale thought it was the worst thing in the world since people dancing in Star Trek movies.

Compare those shows to some of the best examples of season-arc pacing of the year. The Good Wife and The Vampire Diaries both split their long seasons up with smaller arcs, allowing them to rattle through plot at a clip while never losing momentum or running out of things to say. Their last episodes were as good as the ones at the start; that consistency is a marvel worthy of emulation. Nevertheless, even that kind of construction can go wrong. Doctor Who‘s split season led to a deflation of what little pace had built up when the show wasn’t dicking about with pirates and suchlike.

Build your seasons with multiple pay-offs, is what I’m saying. Be prepared to race through the plots quickly; there’s a good chance the complexity this creates will give you even more dramatic opportunities. Look at Breaking Bad (again). In season three the Big Bads (The Cousins) were originally meant to last all season, but Vince Gilligan realised it was probably a good idea not to waste time by keeping them out of the action for too long just to create a contrived final showdown. The result was the best season of TV between 2009-2010, and arguably the best season of TV in history.

Okay, thanks for reading this far. More to come as the week progresses.

The 2010-2011 Caruso Awards: Why I Won’t Name Individual Worst Episodes This Year

Posted on by

For the last few years, the Caruso Awards have been presented with great pomp and fanfare to not only the best episodes of the TV year, but also the worst, which has been bad news for Torchwood, Heroes and Dexter. These awards have been given in a spirit of annoyance at wasted opportunities, laziness, or simple bone-headed stupidity. At the point of writing, I would feel a horrible, cathartic pleasure in having a dig at shows I thought deserved little pity, kicking them with hob-nailed boots of condensed supermeanness. As has been said in the past, rave reviews are difficult to write, but drubbings are fun.

This year will have to be different. A crisis of conscience has come over me, mostly because of the humanising nature of Twitter. Conversations with creators have made me question whether it’s fair to call out shows for being terrible when it has become clear to me that they are often initially realised with the best of intentions, but are compromised on the way to the screen. It’s a rare British writer who doesn’t have some horror story about how they had written something with one intent only to see it mangled and altered by interfering hands by the time it has reached the screen, usually by adding needless exposition, or the musical equivalent of seventeen soundtracks played simultaneously.

Other times a show can be aimed at a demographic that I am never going to be able to empathise with; I may have found No Ordinary Family a poorly-plotted padding-heavy waste of time for the most part (with some caveats), but it’s not really meant for me. It might be about superheroes, but it’s aimed at family audiences. It’s intentionally light and silly and undemanding. Hating it for those reasons is pointless (though hating it for being very often dull and filled with desperate nerd-pandering cameos is fine, I reckon).

Even worse when something I genuinely think is appalling on every level – i.e. Torchwood: Miracle Day – features one of my all-time writing heroes as an executive producer and writer. Jane Espenson has long been one of my idols, with credits on some of the best episodes of my favourite shows. Just this year she scripted a very satisfying episode of Game of Thrones (The Golden Crown), and was also credited on the delayed finale of Caprica. As ever, her work is entertaining, smart, unpredictable, and tight as a drum. It’s a joy to watch almost anything she has worked on.

And yet Torchwood: Miracle Day is arguably the low-point of the TV season. As much as I would love to jump on a single episode and see why I think it failed, I’m conflicted about directing any blame at Ms. Espenson. Her efforts to livetweet the UK broadcast of the show, while being bombarded with negative, aggressive tweets insulting her for “ruining” the show (impossible, as it has always been wretched), have made me respect her even more. Even this paragraph, noting my longstanding dislike of the programme, makes me feel bad. Why would I want to pile on her when she’s already had to put up with a ton of abuse?

My urge to snipe has been affected by other factors. Earlier this year a friend of the blog — a writer I consider to be a bit of a genius — wrote a funny article about British TV shows for A Newspaper that prompted the creator of one of those shows to react in an incredibly hostile and petty manner on Twitter. I won’t name names, as I don’t know if there was anything else going on there. Perhaps there was some DM conversation; for all I know, the feud has been laid to rest, and I don’t want to stir anything up.

Nevertheless, a show connected to this angry creator was a definite candidate for inclusion on my now-aborted list. After seeing his behaviour, the thought of sitting through that show’s entire run nauseated me; as far as I’m concerned, the output of that person’s production company is now and forever boycotted by me. I will have no truck with bullying, no matter how aggrieved the bully feels they are. How can I ever watch these shows with an open mind? I’m only ever going to be looking for flaws, which doesn’t help anyone.

More importantly — and I say this with a very heavy heart — I will regretfully admit I didn’t want to incur his considerable wrath, just in case he comes across this blog thanks to the joys of Google Alerts and/or Twitter Search (a function that led to my unfortunate run-in with a writer/actor earlier this year). Cowardly? You betcha. Even worse, another screenwriter I recently began to follow tweeted that anyone who ever wants to get into TV should never ever blog about the subject because that’s their career opportunities up in smoke.

A debate between writers ensued; some saying that constructive or detailed criticism is valid, while anyone engaged in negative whining with no content other than “this sucks” was doomed. Do I want to write for TV? Shit, I want to write for everything. I still hope that one day I’ll get to finish the Altered States musical/opera I’m always joking about. I want to write. That is the dream, be it writing novels, comics, screenplays, teleplays, radio plays, critiques for newspapers or magazines, an opera in which I try to rhyme “ischemic attack” with “monkey on my back”, even.

Should I really narrow down my options now, just to garner page hits that might or might not further my career? I’m not getting paid for this, after all. I use the blog as a way to work out my thoughts about what constitutes good and bad writing and directing. Trying to understand why V is terrible but Caprica is stimulating, or why Alphas was a pleasant surprise and Boardwalk Empire was such a disappointment, is all done in aid of my own work. Everything I’ve written off-blog since starting the Shades of Caruso Project has been informed by the observations I’ve made.

And so my customary Worst Episodes list will not happen this year, for all the reasons listed above. However, I’ve spent a lot of time this year watching some pretty crummy stuff, and engaging with even this dreck has taught me some lessons about storytelling, and how the audience relates to it. And so, to justify all of those hours watching Glee and the AMC remake of The Killing (for example), over the next few days I plan on writing about some of the things I think I’ve learned from watching bad TV this year.

Many of the lessons will appear obvious to most; some of them will seem awfully petty. Nevertheless, at some point in the past year these are the things that have informed my own writing, and my own theories about effective storytelling. I just hope I can do it without picking on individuals; my criticism is directed more at general misguided ideas that might have seemed right initially, but turned out to have been wrong in the long run. To any creators I diss during the next few days, it’s nothing personal.

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

Posted on by

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 New Characters of the Year

Posted on by

Even the best show can be hamstrung by the introduction of a poorly realised character. Most showrunners will realise the folly of their ways and kill them off as quickly as possible: look at how speedily Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof got rid of Nikki and Paolo in Lost. Some characters can improve over time as they become more shaded: last year we railed against Dollhouse‘s Topher Brink, who was at first an unwatchably annoying creep who tried so hard to be cute and funny while just setting our teeth on edge. This year he became our favourite character on the show, just by dialling down the eccentricity and playing up his loneliness and fear. Kudos to Fran Kranz and the Dollhouse team for fixing what had been the most annoying thing about an otherwise exemplary show.

Other characters can be a puzzling mixture of good and bad. Damon from The Vampire Diaries is, at his worst, a smug prick who wishes he was Spike from Buffy, not helped by Ian Somerhalder’s questionable performance and habit of pulling in his chin whenever he’s trying to deliver a “witty” bon-mot. However, at his best he’s almost complicated. The late season revelation that he was once a more honourable man than his Angel-Puppet-lookalike brother Stefan makes him far more interesting, and when Somerhalder plays up his vulnerability and sad rage he becomes the best thing about the show by far. It’s enough to make me glad I hung around long enough to see his transformation into a compelling character, though he still fails to be funny whenever he tries.

Nevertheless, some characters are just wretched in conception and execution, and nothing can fix them. Here are the worst characters of the season, and if the defensive creator of the most heinous character doesn’t like my decision, he can kiss my arse.

10. Merritt Grieves – Happy Town

ABC’s feeble Twin Peaks pastiche had one thing going for it: an interesting cast. M.C. Gainey, Frances Conroy, Steven Weber, Amy Acker and Stephen McHattie showed up from time to time, usually struggling to make something of the strained dialogue. No one suffered more than Sam Neill, a capable actor here transformed into a sleazy English shop owner with a TERRIBLY MYSTERIOUS history. Watching him attempt to breathe life into the bag of “weird” characteristics that was Grieves — sadly with only a wispy fraction of his usual twinkly-eyed charm — was a depressing and distracting experience. He needn’t have bothered. As with all of the other loosely sketched townsfolk, there was no meat to the character: he was just a collection of quirky character elements that were shuffled together in a writers room that must have stunk of desperation, and only becomes interesting in the final episode of the truncated series. Nevertheless, even the shocking last minute revelations that OMG he actually wears a leather jacket in his spare time! don’t make him any more compelling. Some questions really don’t need to be answered.

9. Jim Moriarty – Sherlock

Running through the mini-series was the knowledge that this new, terrifically entertaining Sherlock was going to face off against a re-envisioned Moriarty, the archetypal supervillain dolled up for the new age with the same care and thought that Moffat, Gatiss and McGuigan had lavished on Holmes and Watson. The final five minutes of the series were charged with even more expectation than the rest of the series, and so what do we get? Heath Ledger’s Joker? Terence Stamp’s Zod? Hell, did we even get Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor, a villain who is largely played for laughs but has a cold, cold heart underneath? No. We got Jim Carrey’s Riddler who sings half of his dialogue as if he were the lovechild of Bruno and Dame Edna. While the concept of “Jim” Moriarty remains solid (a villain for hire: nice idea), the execution was appalling. Hammier than John Simm’s Master, this Moriarty did the deadliest thing imaginable: in five minutes he stole from the best new BBC drama in years all the tension it had worked hard to generate. Maybe it can be salvaged in the next series, but for now, our enthusiasm has been put back to Defcon One.

8. Maddux Donner – Defying Gravity

Though showrunner James Parriott denies creating Defying Gravity as a Grey’s Anatomy analogue, Maddux Donner still feels like a McDreamy substitute, with his will-they-won’t-they relationship with Zoe and his friends-with-benefits partnership with Nadia. At some point in the development of the series it must have seemed like there was potential for a longrunning love triangle plot, enhanced by Donner’s tragic past and the complications of his previous dalliance with Zoe — which of course led to her having the abortion that defines her personality as a woman who regrets that decision to the exclusion of all other emotions or motivations. How sad, then, that instead of Patrick “Oilslick” Dempsey the showrunners cast Ron “Doughball” Livingstone, possibly the least alluring and mysterious actor on the planet. What might have been intense and sexy was instead petulant and grumpy, a sour centre for this sugary show. His pouty affect and grouchy demeanour is so potent no one else on the show has enough charisma to contend with it. There’s a lot wrong with this show, but Donner is the puffy millstone around its neck.

7. D.S. Ben Holt – Paradox

The highpoint of BBC’s dour sci-fi procedural came during the second episode, as the unexplained image-downloading force from the nether realms of the multiverse (or maybe it was GOD ZOMG) sent our dreary heroes another set of puzzle pieces which would help them prevent a tragedy of some kind. The last image, one held back from the depressed band of detectives, showed D.S. Ben Holt dead on the ground, with one eye pointing off in the wrong direction. To anyone who was as sick of his relentless, aimless fury as SoC was, we could only assume it was because a rage embolism had made his brain pop as if it contained a bomb like in Mission Impossible 3. The answer was more mundane (fate intended for him to be electrocuted), but worse was that the character survived, which meant three more episodes with him being inexplicably VERY ANGRY about everything. And that’s all. How do you write about someone that one-dimensional? He’s an angry cop. He has kids, I think. He shags Tamzin Outhwaite twice. But mostly he’s just very, very, VERY angry. It barely even qualifies as screenwriting.

6. Tyler Evans – V

Major network shows, the potential tentpoles, are bound to have all of their edges smoothed down in order to appeal to the most viewers, and the big-budget remake of V was no exception. None of the characters showed any hint of life, something that even the not-that-great original managed. Of all the poorly realised mannequins in the main cast, the most awful has to be Tyler Evans, another pouty teenager in a season that had already tortured us with whiny Jeremy Gilbert from The Vampire Diaries. Tyler is entitled and belligerent, but his worst crime is to restrict Elizabeth Mitchell’s range to little more than repetitious motherly concern. His histrionic bitching and one-note obsession with the V’s are extreme enough that he comes off as more unhinged than passionate, which might account for the hints that he might have a more complicated parentage than originally thought – anything to make him more interesting. The show would be more fun if the showrunners just killed the little creep off, but sadly there seems to be some kind of arc playing out here. All we can do is stick our fingers in our ears and wait it out.

5. Steve Fleming MP - The Thick Of It

A hero needs a good villain, and a great anti-hero/villain needs a great monster. Malcolm Tucker has butted heads with some repellent arseholes before, but it’s telling that his greatest threat prior to the third season of The Thick of It was himself, as seen in the specials. Maybe Armando Iannucci and his writers should be commended for inventing someone who is able to stop Tucker in his tracks, but to do so they had to inflict upon the viewer someone so repellent that it’s almost impossible to watch without cringing. Fleming is an unhinged bag of tics, unpredictable and ruthless enough to finally ruin Tucker’s career and terrify the assorted chumps of DoSAC, but pitched at such a weird level of energy that he no longer resembles a human being. The main cast might be heightened to a level of hysteria, but they’re recognisably human. Fleming’s stylised mania represents the first failure of the Thick Of It team. The casting of cuddly sitcom favourite David Haig doesn’t help. Luckily, in the final moments of the season we’re introduced to Tom Hollander’s Cal Richards, a Satanically evil, non-irritating antagonist. More please!

4. Every character that isn’t Sue Sylvester, Principal Figgins, or Kurt – Glee

Sue Sylvester’s hatred of the Glee club is entertaining enough that it’s worth keeping them around simply so she has something to bellow at. Other than that? There is no reason for any of them, except for the hilarious Principal Figgins, Kurt (when he’s not being a sociopath), and maybe Brittany when she doesn’t garble her lines. Everyone else cannot even be considered a character: they’re more like plot-enablers, or song delivery systems. No one else has a consistent personality, sometimes changing in the middle of an episode for no reason than that there is another song coming along that they need to be able to sing as if it conveys their inner thoughts. As the showrunners only bothered to come up with three plotlines for the show — oh no, Glee club is in trouble: I love you but you don’t love me: no one really understands me — these get swapped between the characters to make the show seem more versatile. Don’t be fooled. They’re hollow shells. The disdainful laziness of the showrunners is even more of an insult than the distressing number of harridan women and victimised men polluting the show.

3. Amy Pond – Doctor Who

Sometimes you can see the kernel of a good idea in a bad character, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when they quickly become intolerable and wreck every scene they are in because of that good thing gone bad. Amy Pond was designed to be an alternative to the doe-eyed simpering groupies that had previously accompanied the Doctor, but while the concept of “Strong-willed Independent Woman” sounds fantastic on the page, in execution we just got a sulky teenager bellowing her charming catchphrase, “SHUT UP!” every few minutes. Lacking a sense of wonder for the most part, you have to wonder why the Doctor bothered with her. That question looms over the entire season. Is there something more to Amy? Is there a secret even she doesn’t know she’s keeping? The major arc of the season seems to be leading to a big reveal, but no, she’s just someone who lost her memory and can magic the Doctor back from oblivion by shrieking “SHUT UP DOCKTORRRR!” at the cosmos. For all the hints and nudges, she turns out to be little more than the Time Traveller’s Fishwife, making her the least interesting companion in years.

2. Claire Dunphy – Modern Family

Of all the grotesque caricatures infesting this rancid comedic corpse, Julie Bowen’s Claire Dunphy is perhaps the worst of them all. A joy-vacuum that sits and snipes at all around her, her role as the nagging, sensible wife of dopey Phil would already make her eligible for this list, just for being a particularly unpleasant stereotype before we even get to the fact that she’s not that funny and Bowen’s comic timing is non-existent. Maybe that’s not her fault: it’s not like there are any really memorable jokes to work with here anyway, other than to stare at her silly husband with what often appears to be genuine loathing. No, the worst thing about Claire Dunphy is a simple one. Just as you don’t give the same name to two characters in a narrative, you shouldn’t give two characters the same nervous, disapproving, square personality when they don’t illuminate different aspects of that personality. Her brother Mitchell has exactly the same role in the broad canvas of the show, and the same role in his relationship with Cam: to be a huge downer. Jesse Tyler Ferguson is better at keeping the energy up during his scenes, and so avoids my wrath, which I instead aim at Claire with both barrels.

1. Sonny – Treme

Perhaps the most unsurprising inclusion on this list, feckless wastrel Sonny (performed with excellent self-absorbed petulance by Michiel Huisman) is universally despised by Treme fans. In this interview with Alan Sepinwall, David Simon gets defensive about the criticism of Sonny, maintaining that he’s not interested in making all of his characters likeable. Here’s some news for the great creator: audiences aren’t interested in that either. There’s room for awful characters in all fiction, but Sonny is a particularly wretched example, a whiny jerk who wrecks lives with no sense of having hidden depths that would explain why he is the way he is. What’s the worst thing about him? Not his paranoid narcissism, or his pathological self-destructiveness, or his mojo-absorbing treatment of poor blameless Annie, which reduces her to a needy loser who eventually finds her inner strength more for plot convenience than any sense of character revelation. It’s in the finale flashback, where we see him walking down the pre-hurricane streets of New Orleans wearing FUCKING CAPRI PANTS! Truly unforgivable. Let’s hope he either finds his inner-Thelonious in season two, or falls into a pothole, never to be seen or heard from again.

I’d like to say I’m finished, but I’m still not done. In the next post, best new show and pilot! Worst new show and pilot! And maybe some other stuff if the Internet will let me.

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

Posted on by

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.