Spring 2014 Review: Killer Women

12 Feb

Killer Woman

The show is called Killer Women, plural. It’s unclear the multiple women are, but the key woman is Molly Parker, played by Battlestar Galactica’s Tricia Helfer (of course Molly Parker is the name of another TV actress now seen in House of Cards). Helfer is one of the only two female Texas Rangers, and the other law officers are still clearly unaccustomed to having to respect women as officers. She’s a law officer fighting a lack of respect in a man’s world, reminiscent of the better but failed Prime Suspect with Maria Bello a few years back. She’ll do anything it seems to fight her way towards the truth, and she’s got good instincts which help her read situations and determine whether people are telling the truth or lying.

Parker has had recent personal troubles as well. She’s getting out of an abusive marriage where her husband, a local political power player, from whom she’s separated, refuses to sign the divorce papers (sidenote: in 2014, how is having to get your partner to sign a paper to get divorced still a thing? How is this not insane?). The other main cast members surround Karker – her brother, with whom she’s now living, is played by former fellow BSG alum Michael Trucco (Samuel Anders, who was a professional at whatever that stupid sport was from BSG, which I won’t dignify with a name) and her DEA agent love interest is played by Marc Blucas (Riley from Buffy –not a name I thought I’d necessarily ever hear again).

Who are the other Killer Women I wonder? In the pilot, a woman (My Name is Earl’s Nadine Velazquez) kills a man at the behest of a drug cartel, but she seems like a single episode character, but maybe not. The other possibility is that the killer is every episode is a woman but that could also get predictable.

Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty boring. She’s a no-nonsense doesn’t play by the rules Texas Ranger, and she breaks a bunch of rules, and in fact kills a few people (though it’s in Mexico, and they’re drug cartel employees, so it doesn’t really count) so that by the end of the episode she finds out the truth and on top of that gets a valuable witness to testify for the DEA. Win win, except for the rules broken, or maybe win win win because of the rules broken, because that’s how police TV works.

I literally just wrote in my last new show review of Intelligence about my desire for cops who at least more or less play within the rules, and well, that extends here. The show is oddly cavalier here in particular about just how fair the chances were of her or her DEA agent friend getting murdered when they went down to Mexico without authorization to rescue a couple of people kidnapped by a drug cartel. It’s great and all that they were able to do it, and since it was successful, in hindsight it looks great, but there’s pretty little discussion of risks not just to them but to their entire departments if they’re caught or killed in Mexico abusing police weaponry without authorization.

There really is an interesting show to be made revolving around border culture and the drug cartels and painting a really interesting, complicated and nuanced picture of the situation. This, to be fair, doesn’t particularly try to do that, so it wouldn’t be fair to call Killer Women out on it, but it just reminds me of the opportunity missed. (The Bridge could still be that show, but I’m not sold yet; we’ll see how its second season goes).

All in all, it’s an average-at-best police procedural. It was watchable enough but it certainly didn’t command any attention; I could have been reading a book and still followed along.

Will I watch it again? No. There’s just not much for me here. It wasn’t awful just uninspired. Good for broadcast TV for throwing in a female action hero; bad on them for not making it in a better show.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 8-5

10 Feb

Three dramas and an 11 minute comedy, one of the dramas a debut, and the other two a couple of veterans of the top of these rankings. 8-5 coming up.

8. The Americans

They're really Soviet!

The incredibly strong freshman drama crop of spring 2013 strikes again on this list. The Americans was a revelation, a show that was a must watch almost right out of the gate. The way Hannibal belied my tiredness of cop-genius shows, The Americans belied my tiredness of shows set in the past. Two deep cover Soviet spies conduct missions while living a life as an ordinary family with kids who know nothing of who their parents really are. Their neighbor is an FBI agent working to expose Soviet deep cover spies with no idea that a pair of spies live next door. There’s so many layers of subterfuge, both literally and figuratively; it almost seems like it could be too much and too on the nose, but it works. There are great and sometimes funny action spy set pieces which bring you in but underneath it’s a show about identity and relationships and truth and lies and the wide ground between. Get on the bandwagon now.

7. Mad Men

Don Draper, Rainy Day

This was probably the weakest season for Mad Men, at least in a while, but that being said, it’s still Mad Men, and it’s still pretty great. The weakness was largely the fault of Don’s plotlines, which felt repetitive, treading ground we’ve tread before, but slightly worse, and Matt Weiner seemed hell-bent on sending him lower than he had ever been before, which would be fine if it wasn’t simply not particularly gripping. Luckily, everyone else’s plots were there to pick us up. Peggy had a fantastic season, Betty actually became a real, interesting character, rather than a caricature, and Sally continued to develop, and had a couple of really powerful moments to shine in the second half of the sesaon. Likewise Roger and Pete, who I felt bad for for the fist time in the series, which is an impressive achievement. New characters Ted and Jim were welcome additions. An absolutely surreal episode broke up the season, and while I’m not sure how I feel about it overall it contained a Ken Cosgrove tap dance which made the episode worthwhile in and of itself. I say it again. Even non-vintage Mad Men is very excellent TV.

6. Eagleheart

Marhsal Chris Monsanto

The weirdest and almost certainly least watched show on my list, Eagleheart is a show I’ve desperately tried to convince every single person I run into to watch. Like Venture Bros., it’s absolutely not for everyone, but anyone who has any taste for absurdist humor should get on board immediately. Eagleheart is far an away the most absurd non-animated show on TV, making something like Childrens Hospital seem like The Wire in terms of reality in comparison. Chris Elliott plays US Marshal Chris Monsanto, and well, it’s just nuts, trying to attempt to explain any of the best episodes might take more than the 11 minutes the episodes take to watch. The best Eagleheart episodes change plots three or four times per episode. While normally Eagleheart episodes are disconnected, the third season was loosely strung together in an arc called Paradise Rising. The first two seasons were great, but this may be the best yet. My favorite episode Spatz, is mind-bogglingly ridiculous and equally wonderful and hilarious.

5. Justified

Raylan Givens

If it’s not already obvious, we’re getting to the crème de la crème here. Justified warmed up in its first season, hit some serious heights in its second, suffered a small comedown with its third season and followed that with an absolutely exemplary fourth season. Everything that makes Justfied work was present in the season; Timothy Olyphant’s suburb portrayal of Marshal Raylan Givens, a character that could easily become an anti-hero caricature if not played and written exactly right. The season features fantastic Elmore Leonard-inspired settings and crackling dialogue; Justified is a funny show, and a hit parade of idiot criminals and witty retorts by the more competent among them keep it crackling. The season long plot was compelling and fascinating and guest stars were spot on, including dramatic turns for comedians, which Justified does better than anyone, including Patton Oswalt and Mike O’Malley and stellar work from underrated character actor Jim Beaver. That fourth season for me elevated Justified to a near-certain TV hall of famer in my mind.

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Spring 2014 Review: Intelligence

7 Feb

Intelligence?

It would be easy to make some wordplay based on the title Intelligence (and the show’s lack there of, etc.). I’ll abstain however, as the show was only relatively insipid, rather than incredibly so. That’s a mild back-handed compliment but I hope the show enjoys it because it’s just about the last it will get.

Here’s how I see the making of Intelligence. Someone had a genuinely gimmicky but not terrible idea for a show premise. Once that premise moved forward into the making of an actual show, well the rest was pretty much put together by the numbers, and probably could have been done by a machine when fed as inputs every other CBS procedural from the past decade.

Here is the premise. The hottest new piece of US technology to fight the war on, well, anything, is a man, a former super top notch military man, with a microchip implant. This microchip allows the power of computers to somehow fuse with his brain, which means he can instantly access and scroll through any piece of information available on the internet or other electronic system, and more than that, he can reconstruct entire scenes, Source Code-like, combining the facts he gets from his computer with the intelligent connections and leaps of reasoning from his brain. There’s not a half-bad idea here, if someone really worked on it; the battle between man and machine has been hit upon many times before (Fox’s Almost Human, and of course the recently remade RoboCop), but that’s partly because there’s a lot to mine. Besides being cool, it’s genuinely interesting in a world where more and more human roles are being usurped by technology to figure out where the lines are.

That’s about the last interesting part of the show, sadly. The soldier is Gabriel, played by Josh Holloway, best known to TV viewers as Lost’s Sawyer, and he’s a charming but rough-around-the-edges ex-Delta Force operative who doesn’t play by the rules. The show hangs the lampshade by asking why the government would implant this one single unique chip into a guy who may kind of not always follow their orders, but then they don’t really explain why they do it.

Our way into the story is through a secret service agent named Riley assigned to protect Gabriel. In 40 minutes, she goes from thinking this new assignment is not worth her time to agreeing to undertake Gabriel’s pet project, a search for his wife, who, reports say, turned on the US, and is dead, but which he doesn’t believe.

There’s a watchable but fairly unremarkable episodic storyline that involves its share of action scenes, Riley and Gabriel bonding, and a betrayal by a government agent which doesn’t mean a lot to us since we’ve known him for about five minutes.

The characters just aren’t that interesting, nor is the dialogue. I say it over again but I say it again here; there’s a limit to how much you can tell in the first episode of a show but you can, especially in a drama, tell a certain difference between dramas that, even if they don’t ultimately work, have a certain amount of care put into them, and ones that just seem like they were produced without any real passion. This is of the later variety. There’s nothing that elevates it above a standard procedural at absolute best.

A quick shout out before we go to Riley and Gabriel’s boss, played by CSI’s Marg Helgenberger, who’s clearly moved up the government ranks since her days in Las Vegas.

Will I watch it again? No. It’s not terrible as far as procedurals go, it’s just not even trying. It doesn’t seem like anybody put a lot of thought or caring or passion into this show and it shows.

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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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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 16-13

31 Jan

Three comedies, two of which air back to back, and one seven episode miniseries that has just about as much lack of humor to counter act all three comedies combined. 16 through 13 below.

16. Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Andy Samburg and the gang

The best new comedy of last year, Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn’t perfect but it is far ahead of the curve for where most good sitcoms are at this point in their runs. Created by Parks and Rec veterans, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is the work of writers who know what it’s like to start slow and build from there with the great Parks & Rec, and many of the errors from that show’s first season and a half aren’t present here. There’s still building and character establishing to do; it be nearly impossible for there not to be with a first year sitcom. But the elements are there, the jokes are fresh and funny, and the actors are good. Andre Braugher as I continue to shout to the world, is a national treasure whose presence should be, well, treasured wherever it is.

15. Top of the Lake

Top of the Lake to you, Elizabeth Moss

This is a seven episode miniseries, but that already means it’s longer than the 2013 output of some other recurring series on here so I’m including it. This is definitely a series that when I finished it, it both made me want to watch it again instantly because it was dense, confusing, and complicated, and never again because it was shocking and disturbing. Elizabeth Moss gives a bravura performance, as does Peter Mullan. If New Zealand is really like this, it’s a far scarier place than I had ever imagined. The mood is eerie, and it just feels like there’s something off with every character and every series of events, and I don’t mean off in a bad way, I mean rather like they’re not quite kosher. There’s seediness lurking everywhere, and Moss can’t rest for a second without risking someone turning on her, whether it be someone she knows or someone she does. It’s creepily meditative; before there was True Detective’s Rust Cohle, there was Holly Hunter’s GJ, spouting quasi-philosophical possible nonsense. All writing this makes me realize is that I really do need to see it again.

14. Bob’s Burgers

The Belchers

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Bob’s Burgers makes me smile. That’s about all there is to it. Don’t get me wrong, it also makes me laugh. In particular though, what makes Bob’s Burgers stand out amongst my favorite comedies is that there’s no show I’d rather watch before bed after a tough, stressful, or depressing day (or even a happy day, but there’s more leeway than). There’s no way that has the ability to change my bad mood and put me on the road towards pleasant dreams. I like dark humor, and I like cutting humor, and I like uncomfortable humor in different extents when done well. Sometimes though it’s nice to watch a comedy like Bob’s Burgers  that dispenses with any of those; that’s fun and zany and light, even when our favorite family is losing and Jimmy Pesto is putting it to Bob once again. The show has ramped up over the years, and the formula shows no signs yet of slowing down. I’m only sorry I didn’t jump on this bandwagon earlier, but I’m glad that the show keeps getting renewed without much stress.

13. New Girl

It's Jess! And friends

It’s been an interesting run for New Girl. The second half of the second season last spring featured a mind-bogglingly killer run of episodes that, had I been ranking right then, would have almost certainly put New Girl in the catbird seat for the highest ranking comedy, as it was last year (the second season was just really good overall). The third however, has had a higher share of fits and starts as the show tries to figure out how it’s going to handle Nick and Jess romance and deal with Schmidt and his relationship missteps. It’s still a first tier comedy, and almost all episode have laughs, but it’s seemed a little more inconsistent episode to episode. I’m still hopeful. It’s a good show with good actors by good people; they’ll probably figure it out. But a yearly review couldn’t be written without mention of its occasional third season struggles.

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Spring 2014 Review: Rake

29 Jan

Greg "Rake" Kinnear

First things first. Rake is not named Rake. Well, there is no Rake. The main character, Greg Kinnear’s Keegan Deane is not even nicknamed Rake, nor is it his middle name. This, first and foremost doomed the show in my eyes, but I tried my best to give it a fair shake from then on.

Keegan Deane is a talented lawyer who doesn’t have his life together. He’s also a charismatic cad. The most critical of his faults, which appear to be many, is gambling. His gambling problems have put him in debt to a very serious man, an employee of whom threatens to hurt Rake (I’m calling him that from now on; it’ll be easier on everyone even if not technically true) if he doesn’t pay up and fast. Right after that conversation, Rake hooks up with an attractive woman and brings her back with him to some sort of outdoor club with drinks, and then leaves her to herself after he gets hooked in a card game. He then brings her back to his best buddy’s place, who has a family and kids. Rake is staying there because he’s broke and homeless at the moment. Although this buddy goes back a ways with Rake, he’s getting tired of having Rake live with him, passing out all over the house and bringing back women. The woman Rake brings back, mind you, still wants to continue seeing Rake, and tries to relay her phone number after she’s being kicked out and told to jump the fence, because Rake and friend need to get her out before friend’s wife sees her. Rake’s more of a one-night stand kind of guy though.

I’m not going to break down the whole episode in that level of detail, or I’d just be rewriting the script of Rake, but you probably get the idea. His talent and charisma endears him to others while his attitude and vices drive people away. Seen this on TV anywhere lately? (Everywhere is the answer, but particularly I’ve been calling Rake lawyer House for weeks before it appeared, and though there are certainly noteworthy differences in the details, it’s more or less spot on).

Rake, the character, and in some ways the show is like a middle school boy who thinks the way to get someone to like him is to be mean and make you not like him first before winning you over. Rake’s a jerk, yes, that’s pretty much the premise, but well, he really cares deep down and he’s a good lawyer, so we should care about him anyway and cut him a wide swath to do kind of lousy things to his friends and associates.

There are some shows that seem to authentically not care whether or not you like the main character or characters, and that’s something else entirely, but it’s not Rake. Rake desperately wants us to like him; to grow frustrated with him, but ultimately to come around to his side. There’s hope for Rake yet. Optimally, even more than like him, you’re supposed to want to go out on this adventure with him, and while there are certainly characters who make up for their negative qualities with wit and charm, the balance is off here.

The point of all this, which I haven’t said outright but which you might guess is just well, I don’t care. I find it hard to care about Rake, and hard to root for him. He’s kind of a jerk. I’ve always had a problem with jerk main characters, but sometimes they’re redeeming and sometimes it’s okay that they’re jerks; Don Draper is a huge asshole, but that’s okay; the show doesn’t try to pretend otherwise.

Other than that, well, there’s not a lot to say. And that’s really also the story. Rake isn’t bad as so much as it’s mediocre; it’s a story and characters you’ve seen before. I thought House got tired, but House was better. There’s no element of Rake that puts it above average or makes it worth cutting out time in your busy schedule to watch. Some shows you just can’t read after one episode; they could be disasters but there’s a small chance of brilliance. Here, well, for better or worse you know exactly what you’re getting just about right from the first scene.

Will I watch it again? I think I’ve had my fill of Rake; I knew it ever since he wasn’t named Rake. It’s not awful, but it’s more of a same that’s been a little rammed into the ground of late, and there’s nothing about it to make it stand above the fray.

 

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 20-17

27 Jan

It seems like we’ve just started but we’re more than halfway there. Two hour longs, and then two half hour comedies in this edition, 20-17.

20. Orphan Black

Orphan Black

There’s a lot to like about Orphan Black, but there’s really one thing first and foremost. That’s actress Tatiana Maslany, who owns the show in a way few other lead actors and actresses can own the television shows they star in, largely because she plays not just the main character, but several other characters, ranging from major characters to fairly small roles. She is fantastically wonderful and makes the show work in a way that very few actors or actresses could. She’s so expert at her portrayal of different people that when watching, I, just for a moment, questioned whether it really was the same actress, so different were the looks, voices, and expressions, of each character. So beyond that, Orphan Black is a sci-fi show about a crazy conspiracy involving secret clones; it’s the kind of storyline that makes a little less sense the more you think about it, but in this case, just don’t, and you’re bound to enjoy the roller coaster ride – unlike say, a Lost, Orphan Black doesn’t feel bloated with the weight of its own pretension. It’s just fun.

19. Orange is the New Black

Orange;New Black

The secret is out by now: While House of Cards initially draw attention to Netflix original series, and not without reason, Orange is the New Black is sneakily the better show.  No show features more pathos for people typically overlooked in television. In most of the TV and movies we’ve watched, the people in jail are the bad guys, or they’re actually innocent and there unjustly; Orange is the New Black attempts to demonstrate that they may be there for a reason, but that doesn’t make them the bad guys (well, girls, but bad girls conjures up a whole set of images) at all. The backbome of the success of Orange is the New Black is the perfect combination of humor and drama; without the humor, the drama would feel overbearing and occasionally too on the nose, while the drama contextualizes the humor and adds heft making Orange is the New Black more than just a wacky prison show. Orange is the New Black loves its characters (well, except the guards, one of my few major complaints) and it comes through in a big way, making us love its characters as well.

18. Archer

Archer

It’s a strong time for animated half hour programs, and Archer is one of the strongest. The members of a freelance secret agency Isis, Archer, the best secret agent they have, is a giant asshole, and son of the agency head who is a drunken asshole herself, who also happens to be occasionally cavorting with the head of the KGB. Of course, everyone in this show is an asshole, and half of the characters are idiots, and while that would probably not be a successful formula for a particularly enjoyable drama, it makes for great comedy. Layered within Archer by last year’s fourth season are a dense array of repeated inside jokes – so much so that every Archer fan has a particular favorite, mine is probably Archer’s yelling of “phrasing” every time someone says something that could be interpreted in a more awkward and innuendo-filled way. All said, this wasn’t its strongest season, and was weaker than the genius season three, which is why its dropped a little bit lower than last year. Archer sometimes runs the risk of going over the same schtick too many times, and while it hasn’t gone over it so many times it’s tired, it did last season just enough to make it a little bit inferior to the season before. Still, it’s one of the best comedies on TV and last year featured strong episodes as well; the condemnation is merely relative.

17. Arrested Development

The Bluths and co.

Insane hype and eager anticipation for the long-awaited Arrested Development reunion quickly turned to polarization as many of the uber-fans of the original came away disappointed with the new product. I may have been in that camp to start, but by the time I finished, I was firmly a champion of the fourth season. Those expecting a repeat of the first three seasons are bound to be disappointed, and I understand why; that was great, and this isn’t that. What this is though, is something no comedy, and really no television show has managed to do before, something literally unprecedented which is incredibly rare in TV even with all the great shows on now. The season is 15 episodes meant to be taken as a whole; rather than simply serial they’re overlapping, returning to the same events over and over again through different characters, with later renditions of similar events adding layers of humorous meaning. It’s for this reason precisely that I beg viewers of the fourth season not to grow discouraged in the first couple of episodes, the meanings deepen, and jokes come back again three and four times in new ways, meaning the last few episodes are funnier than the first few, but the groundwork laid early was essential for the show to work late. It’s not perfect by any means, but that’s sometimes the price of great ambition. There’s something to be said for dreaming lower and reaching that ceiling, but there are few shows that dreamed as big as Arrested Development’s fourth season, and for getting astonishing close to reaching that ambition even if it fell short, it should be applauded.

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Spring 2014 Review: Looking

24 Jan

Looking indeed

Looking is a show about three gay friends in San Francisco and their quest to find love, sex, and just, you know, life. It’s a show that seems to be largely engulfed in realism and I think that’s an admirable pursuit; there aren’t enough TV shows that aspire to realism these days, and it can be really enriching to watch people’s lives that feel real rather than mythological or epic or far-removed from reality.

They hang out, they date, they look for love. One of the main characters, Patrick, played by Glee actor Jonathan Groff, gets a botched handjob in a park at the beginning of the episode, but that turns out to be a bit of a false flag; that’s more salacious than the show actually is and aspires to be. All he really wants is to find someone he really likes to get along with; the centerpiece of his episode storyline is an incredibly awkward date with a pretentious doctor, in which he deals with the consequences of a failed attempt at escaping loneliness. The upshot is he meets a less well-credentialed, but gentle bouncer on the way home on the subway, and after quickly bailing and calling it a night, he decides to go to the party the guy mentioned and take a chance. It’s an optimistic ending to a show that seems to have a well-meaning bent.

His two friends, Agustin and Dom have their own dating issues. Agustin decides to move in with his boyfriend Frank, and Dom is frustrated at the restaurant where he works, and considers attempting to hook up with an ex.

I don’t really have strong feelings about the first episode. I think there were some good things; but there was nothing compelling; nothing that made me instantly want to tune in again for a second episode. Admittedly, that’s a serious danger of a show that’s just about, you know, life – there’s no big hook of a murder or large science-fiction conspiracy to keep you glued, and it’s not a comedy so while there’s some humor, there aren’t whole lot of jokes or enough laughs for that to be the sole reason to watch.

It was well-produced and acted and it’s obviously a competent show. I’m just not sure it’s a must watch either. Although I admire and do want to reward Looking for its promising realism, I wasn’t hooked, and I feel relatively ambivalent going forward. It’s a show that could easily be rewarding by season’s end, but it’s hard to get a sense of how rewarding it might be from the first episode in and of itself; it doesn’t make any sort of grand statement about the direction of the show, and while that may be the point, and a valid one, it also makes it feel less like immediate required viewing.

Will I watch it again? Not right now. In baseball there used to be something called a draft-and-follow, where you could draft a player and then wait and see how they do before you decide whether you want to sign them.. I’m not so invested after one episode that I’m going to keep watching week to week, but I’ll wait and see how the buzz comes around, and then watch them later on if I hear good things.

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 24-21

22 Jan

Four more shows, one comedy on its way out, one underlooked comedy that keeps on producing successful seasons, and two hour longs. Keep it going, below.

24. Happy Endings

Happy Endings

File Happy Endings away as a show that I didn’t appreciate enough until it was gone.  Well, not quite. I appreciated it not when it was gone but when, in the third season, it seemed as if its chances were grim. I savored each of the last few episodes, apologizing to my television for only really loving the show once it was already out of my grasp. It took me a while to really enjoy Happy Endings, because superficially it has markers of sitcoms I don’t particularly like, particularly Friends in its set up. When it comes down to it though, it was a consistently funny show with a fantastic cast with great chemistry that really seems like they’re enjoying themselves. The writing was sharp to begin with, but the cast made jokes work that some other combinations of actors wouldn’t have, through their timing and physical reactions. Not every episode was a gem, but by the end I was far sorrier to see it go than I had ever realized was possible when I started watching. Happy Endings with its no frills simple style, would have been a perfect fit on a cable network which makes its cancellation a particular shame.

23. Broadchurch

Broachchurch

A local boy is a small English seaside vacation town is murdered and a couple of detectives, one local, one Scottish, have to solve it. It’s a simple enough premise, but Broadchurch delivers on with surprisingly solid execution. The ending, which matters a lot for shows like this, satisfies; it’s heartbreaking and surprising but manages to not feel completely out of nowhere or too ridiculous. Broadchurch is only eight episodes long and the British desire to keep it short plays a large role in its success, preventing it from straying too far off the course with loads of red herrings and keeping a relatively tight focus. It’s not an all-time must watch but it’s surprisingly good and it’s a great eight episode pot boilder for weekend marathon viewing. Like with a good mystery novel, once I was halfway through I couldn’t stop until I got to the finish.

22. Masters of Sex

Mastes of Sex

Lizzie Kaplan and Michael Sheen play revolutionary sex researchers Masters and Johnson in this Showtime series set in 1950s St. Louis. Rather than feel just like another drama set in the past (which seem to be a possibly Mad Men-inspired cottage industry these days), Masters of Sex feels fresh and if anything is too ambitious; sometimes it summons ideas without having any plan what to do with them. Overall, though the ambition is admirable, and a surprisingly high percentage of Masters of Sex’s efforts work, more in the second half of the season than the first. The show discusses love, sex, and gender roles in an engaging way and features an assortment of well-built characters that stand to be enriched in future seasons; hopefully Alison Janey and Beau Bridges, who played recurring characters who star in bad CBS sitcoms, will be back. The future looks bright and this is a show that I think has no reason not to be even better next season.

21. Childrens Hospital

Childrens Hospital

I’ve been a long-time backer of Childrens Hospital and the fact that its this low says, as I find myself repeating a lot during this list, more about how much good television there is now, than anything about the lower quality of Childrens Hospital itself. That said, this probably wasn’t its best season yet, but there were definitely some classics. “Country Weekend,” a locked room mystery written by David Wain was a highlight, as well as “My Friend Falcon,” posed as a documentary with David Wain interviewing Childrens Hospital cast member Just Falcon, as played by Ken Marino. It’s the silliest and gentlest of the Adult Swim live action parody shows (basically, this, NTSF, and Eagleheart), and the most well-meaning – its satire is always in good fun rather than cutting. I honestly have no idea why Childrens Hospital has never caught on with a bigger cult audience and I recommend it frequently, as it’s usually safe to assume that people who I speak to about television, haven’t watched it. Give it a shot today, if you haven’t.

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