Archive | February, 2014

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 12-9

5 Feb

Three comedies and a drama. Two of the comedies are a lot alike, one is very different, and like Top of the Lake in a previous entry, the drama is humorless enough to suck the funny out of all three comedies combined. 12-9 await below.

12. The Venture Bros.

Ventures and friends

Enjoy this spot, because Venture won’t be back next year. The Terrence Malick of television series, Venture Bros has aired five seasons and 63 episodes over an 11 year period. Season five consisted of a mere eight episodes airing over two and a half years after the previous season ended. Hardcore fans, which is pretty much everyone who watches Venture Bros. was salivating for anything, hoping to dig deeper into the complex mythology built for nerds and obsessives. It wasn’t a perfect season, and there’s always frustratingly little to dig through in a mere eight episodes, especially when a few are very peripheral, but there was plenty to like, and lots that hit upon what Venture Bros. does best, deliver on the humorous mismatch between the superhero/supervillain fantasy world and the ordinary. Bot Seeks Bot this season may have executed on this best, featuring a robot date at a villain’s nightclub, and hitting up many more hilarious villain names, a recurring gag which succeeds almost every time. This show is admittedly not for everyone, but if you’ve got any love for comics and superheros and complicated fictional universes, I highly recommend Venture Bros. a shot.

11. Parks and Recreation

Parks and Recreation Dept.

I sometimes feel like people out there are always looking to nail the exact point when a show peaks and then hits a downward slope, however gentle, while a show is on the air, as if there’s a prize for not missing it as it happens. Yes, Parks & Recreation may not be in its absolutely best days. Seasons three and four will have good shots at the TV comedy hall of fame when all is said and done, and admittedly, season 6 may not hit those magical heights, or at least not as much of the time. Still, if Parks and Recreation is on a downward slope (and I hate the absolute inevitability that gets attributed to the first up and the down of TV series, particularly comedies, which 30 Rock, for example showed up, with a killer final season), it’s one of the gentlest I’ve ever seen. While let’s certainly note the show’s misses, let’s also stop dwelling too much are how Parks and Recreation season 6 may not be season 3 and let’s instead celebrate what will probably be the final couple of seasons of one of the best comedies of the past decade. We can get nostalgic about the best and worst seasons when it’s done.

10. 30 Rock

Jack and Liz

Admittedly, this spot is kind of a cheat. 30 Rock only aired the final five episodes of its seven season run in 2013, so evaluating its yearly performance is difficult compared to shows that aired full seasons. What I wanted to celebrate here however is how good that final season was and how good the finale was. 30 Rock ,a show that I’ve knocked as overrated during its first peak in early seasons, made a sneaky comeback in its final season, putting out some of the best stretches of episodes in its run. Additionally, it came as a bit of a surprise, and gave me a chance to credit 30 Rock for what I love about it rather than unfairly knocking it based on what I had thought was too much hype compared to some other comedies years ago. The Jack and Liz relationship is the best platonic male female relationship in our era, and I loved how 30 Rock’s consistent refusal to ever even pretend to the possibility of pairing the two led to a great series of love interests for both, a totally earned feeling of happiness and fit when Liz finally marries Criss. In the last few episodes, the writers really used dug deep and used up every joke left in their, well, whatever type of container carries jokes, and because of the ending, I have mentally carried nothing but extremely positive feeling for the show in the last year.

9. Hannibal

Will and Hannibal

Hannibal competes with True Detective for darkest television show currently airing, and somehow it’s on a broadcast network (NBC) which just makes absolutely no sense for a show that seems much better positioned on a cable network (I’m thinking Showtime ideally). The premise to Hannibal didn’t sound that attractive to me, both because I didn’t think there was much new to wring out of the Hannibal Lecter storyline, and because I’m not exactly excited for another cop drama with a super brilliant cop at its center (FBI agents admittedly may not technically be cops, but close enough). I was quickly proven wrong though. Creator Bryan Fuller showed that there’s plenty of juice left in this old chestnut and that a crime drama can be much more than that, a story of mind vs. mind, about reading people, about obsession, about sanity (there really is some serious overlap with True Detective). The acting is sharp, and the cinematography may be the best on television, turning ritualized murder into act that’s disturbingly beautiful and horrific at the same time. If there’s any downside to Hannibal, it’s that I’ll now associate all sorts of food with murder, but based on how delicious both look in Hannibal, that may not be such a bad thing.

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Spring 2014 Review: Chicago PD

3 Feb

Members of the PD

I need to start by saying what an awful name for a show Chicago PD is. It’s a spin-off of Chicago Fire, a name that had two meanings – the Chicago Fire Department, which the show is about, and the Chicago Fire of 1871, which wiped out much of the central city. I’m fairly confident with absolutely no evidence that that’s why the show is set in Chicago. Chicago PD, well, is about the Chicago PD. That’s it. There’s no other meaning. I suppose it’s accurate, so there’s some small credit for that, but still; try harder.

Based on my knowledge of the show and the people involved, I was expecting a mediocre show in the vein of my experience with the pilot of Chicago Fire.  Instead I got a pretty awful show that was significantly worse than my single Chicago Fire viewing.

Like Chicago Fire, Chicago PD is not a procedural as such, in which there’s a single case an episode that the whole team works on. Rather, it’s a show that has single episode elements, but features multiple-episode arcs, A and B plots, and gets to know the personal lives of its characters.

It was the opening that set me in the direction of disliking the show right from the get go. A man is in the back of a car, forcing the car’s driver to pull over in a shady part of town out of view of anyone else. Now, I’m thinking, as the show’s writers must realize, that the guy in the back of the car is a criminal and he’s going to do something bad to the driver. Nope, that’s not the case at all. The backseat driver is our main character cop, Sergeant Voight, and he threatens the driver, a drug dealer, beats him up, and puts a gun to his head to get the name of another drug dealer. He then exhorts the dealer to stay out of Chicago, literally using the words, “Stay out of my city.” If I didn’t hate this character from the insane extralegal actions he took which were ridiculously unethical and uncalled for, and could endanger any convictions he later hopes to get from the information the driver reveals, I would have hated him just for the “Stay out of my city” line.

There are other aspects I didn’t like about the show but this is the biggest problem in a nutshell. I absolutely despised this primary protagonist, Voight, who is the sergeant for our primary team and is supposed to be some sort unorthodox, renegade hero; you know the kind, who doesn’t play by the rules but gets things done.  Please, television, enough with that character and more cops that, like real cops, largely play by the actual rules so they can get actual convictions that don’t get laughed out of court. Beyond just that though, he came off as an aggressive, violent asshole.

Chicago PD is emotionally maniupuliative, or it wants to be, but it’s not even good at it. There’s two major moments at the end of the first episode that are supposed to be heart-wrenching but didn’t work, and more so than just because it’s the first episode and it’s hard to feel anything for characters during a first episode.

Voight shows the soft interior under his gruff self when he helps an inner city black youth who is too deep in the drug trade and wants out when he realizes how dangerous it is. In exchange for Voight’s kindness, the boy gives up a crucial piece of info about another drug dealer after convincing himself out loud to Voight that what he’s doing isn’t snitching, so it’s okay. It’s certainly not for me to say what’s realistic and what isn’t, but it seems ham-handed and it definitely seems, if not racist (which I don’t think it is) than, well, an awkward simplistic scene where this kind white authority figure is simply helping out this poor black youth, and everything’s now okay.

People who write Chicago PD, please watch The Wire. Everything that’s wrong with your show can be found in the differences between the two. Now, obviously very little is going to match up to The Wire, and not every cop show has to follow everything The Wire does well to be good. Still, in every way that The Wire largely rings true, doesn’t feel like television, is complex, and interesting, and well-written, is everything Chicago PD is not. It’s simple TV that just feels crazily obsolete in a post-Wire universe. Even the bureaucratic battles between two units which features prominently in the first episode of Chicago PD feels trumped up, unnecessarily loud, and false. There are heroes and villains, and really nothing in between, and yes, it’s not entirely fair to base characterization generalizations on one episode, but everything I saw about the way Sergeant Voight’s bad behavior seemed to be treated by the show and by the other characters told me more than I needed to know.

Will I watch it again? No.  I think there are too many cop shows as it is, so cop shows have to be even better than my normal bar to draw me in. This one not only doesn’t come close, it’s insulting and vaguely offensive.

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