Television, the Drug of the Nation

First and foremost, Legion, a Marvel property in the general X-Men universe, is unmistakably something different in the current Comicsphere, which is really in and of itself something we haven’t seen in a long time. This in and of itself is an impressive achievement. Marvel movies have become remarkably formulaic. They’re generally some form of heroes journeys – a man, a white man (not that that’s different in Legion, but moving on) is having is own existential crisis, gains some power, has to fight a bunch of obstacles along the way, learns how to be a hero, and defeats the baddies. The movies are generally well enough made, and some are better than others but there is a sameness that can start to feel somewhat deadening. Legion absolutely still has some of these elements, but it feels, due to its method of storytelling, legitimately new and interesting in the wake of all the previous marvel products.

Now, there’s a distinct difference between different and good, and Legion thankfully is good also. Legion is not heavy on narrative, but it’s trippy method of storytelling combined with its intensely internalized story are its breakthrough; the best parts of the show take place entirely within the mind of the protagonist David Haller (where other characters are trapped as well; the surreality of Haller’s reality-shifting powers allow this). Legion explores the serious trappings of mental illness, which Haller has suffered with his whole life, using comic book magic strictures as a way to literally explore his mind. There’s also just some batshit insane comic book style action sequences and journeys inside his brain which are beautiful and compelling of their own accord. The best episodes, the third and second to last (“Chapter 6” and “Chapter 7” respectively) feature the team, Haller, and his colleagues Syd, Melanie, Cary, and Kerry, coming together to clear out his brain from the powerful mutant Shadow King, saving both him and themselves in the process, and getting to the bottom of what is making Haller tick. The scenes are both confusing and exciting in their sense of constantly shifting dream logic; the surrealist possibilities seem to make their own sort of sense.

There are two primary antagonists in the first season of Legion. The Shadow King, a powerful mutant which has holed up in Haller’s mind since childhood after being defeated by Haller’s father, and made a home there, coming angrily to the fore when he learns how to maximize his powers just in time to take over Haller’s brain. Secondly, there’s the mysterious governmental or quasi-governmental organization Division 3, which is looking to round up people like Haller for the danger they potentially pose to us powerless humans.

Legion is less strong when dealing with Division 3, which in contrast to the groundbreaking fight within his mind against the Shadow King, seems like a carbon copy of the type of sketchy evil quasi-governmental organisations that have appeared throughout comic book properties from the start.  There’s a potential sympathetic angle to be used here; as normal humans ourselves, surely we can understand the potential dangers these mutants could cause unchecked to us, and our difficulties with stopping them could create the need for an organization to at least monitor these individuals. However, Legion doesn’t really play on this; the organization is pretty much one-dimensional – an object for the mutants to fear, and for them to work against. The Eye, the initial primary antagonist, a mutant who betrays his kind to work for Division 3 is uncomplicated pure villainy, and ends up just being built up to show the power of the Shadow King who kills him with ease in the penultimate episode. In the final episode, which feels somewhat anticlimactic after the tour de force of the penultimate episode, the opening sequence tries to engender sympathy for the other primary government employee, Clark, who interrogated Haller in the first episode, but it came as too little too late to do much for me.

The supporting characters also never really get a ton of attention. They’re interesting on the surface, but the show doesn’t get much deeper; it’s Haller’s show, at least in the first season, through and through.

The journey through the mind provides a pioneering vision of how to take the concept of humans with powers into new and exciting new directions. Some of the season felt like a work in progress, and the deep dive into Haller’s mind sometimes dominated the show to a degree in its eight episodes that cut short other potentially successful show elements, like developing the supporting characters. Still, in a field as stale as superheroes, I’ll gladly take a ambitious and new approach that does something very well over the safe same and I very much look forward to what the second season has to offer.

Contrary to the age-old proverb, sometimes absence doesn’t make the heart grow fonder. There are many times when two years between seasons of a TV show, a practice which is becoming more and more common, would cause me if not to lose interest in a show, than to at least somewhat forget about a show, and thus lower some of my enthusiasm for the upcoming season, not because of loss of quality but because of loss of momentum. Sometimes that additional time feels just about right though; a needed break to recharge, and even if you forgot exactly how much you liked a show, or had let it sip from your mind for some months, within the first few minutes you remember exactly why you loved it what you loved about it. So was the case with Master of None.

Master of None, while a clever title on its face actually misleading. Jack of All Trades, Master of None the saying goes; a show that fit that model would be a solid but not spectacular show that could be counted on to reach that set level of quality every episode. Master of None, while a better show overall than the aphorism might suggest,  is in fact a master of some while being not quite as masterful with others. The most gimmicky episodes of this season are TV at its very best while the episodes that focus on the continuing storyline are certainly more than decent but don’t quite reach the same peaks.

Master of None is from the Louie school of comedies. The show is a showcase for ideas, short stories, and vignettes that Aziz wants to tell, in whatever form, using the existing characters in whatever way necessary to get these ideas across. This formula has plenty of benefits, but what it isn’t, because it does choose to jump around so much, is a place for well developed characters and story arcs. When Master of Show brings the boldest and most interesting thoughts from Aziz’s head, it succeed wildly, when it attempts to focus on its characters it’s not bad but it’s certainly on shakier footing.

Two absolute standout episodes were “New York I Love You” and “First Date.” “New York, I Love You” which barely even contains Aziz or any of the regular characters spotlights three vignettes of regular blue collar New Yorkers; managing to in a a very short time tell full and realized stories and add the type of little character details that absolutely maximizes the very short amount of time spent with the three primary characters. “First Date” features interspersed footage of the same first date with Dev and several different women, some successes, some disasters, some in between. This is the best of Aziz’s continuing attempts to get at a modern internet-age millennial rom com. It’s funny and true to the experience; I’ve never seen a better realized example of the experience of going on first dates with people you’ve never met before.

With its ongoing season-long plot, primarily about Dev’s experiences with an engaged Italian woman, Francesca, with which he’s smitten, Master of None isn’t quite playing to its strong suit. Dev isn’t a particularly well-developed character; part of us feeling like we know him relies on our fleshed out sense of knowing Aziz Ansari’s comic persona outside of the show. The often substandard acting on Master of None doesn’t quite work as well in this setting also. While the real people play well in some episodes like “Religion” – when the show enters more traditional rom com territory, the commitment and performances are everything .

The last two episodes (“Amarsi Un Po” and “Buona Notte”) are by no means without merit;  the make up a relatively well-crafted hour and a half movie about ill-timed love and how one deal with it. However, it both hued to convention more than Master of None generally does, and more than that wasn’t even the best example of those conventions –it wasn’t the funniest, or the most heartfelt.

I appreciate Aziz’s willingness to be drawn to whatever’s on his mind, and I’d gladly take 10 more episodes of whatever he’s thinking, even if that means the ten won’t necessarily be equally brilliant, but it was a little disappointing to leave on a moment that didn’t express the very best of what Master of None has to offer.

Well, Girls, is over, and without a bang but with a whimper, one of, if not the, most polarizing series of the last decade slides to a pretty placid end. Girls went from being the most buzzed about series before its first episode to, well, just being more or less a TV show during the era of Peak TV by the end, for both better and worse but certainly for the more accurate, because that’s what it was, and that’s how it deserves to be evaluated.

Girls wasn’t a vehicle for some Lena Dunham agenda designed to sew controversy wherever it went. It was a TV show, with characters, and plotlines, and dialogue. On the whole, it was a good one. It was at many times an excellent one, with moments that reached the best of what TV has to offer, but was a little too inconsistent to be considered among that echelon for the entirety of its run.  Just like the meanderings of the protagonists, the show meandered over the course of the six seasons, winding its way back and forth, picking up and dropping stray storylines, raising and lowering in importance the and screen time and value of its non-Hannah characters.

This lack of commitment to a more unified story led to trade off of some absolutely brilliant one off episodes for the occasional lack of focus or clarity or plan that occasionally turned the show down some dead ends. These moments of brilliance include particularly episodes with Hannah, such as season three’s “One Man’s Trash,” in which she spends a weekend with Patrick Wilson, and when Hannah and Jessa visit Jessa’s father upstate (“Video Games”) but also Charlie and Marnie’s reunion in the fifth season (“The Panic in Central Park).

The show tended to recover well from those dead ends; the series never jumped a shark, pulling out of sticky situations and less satisfying storylines to always bring the characters back to interesting places.   The lack of focus, however, caused Girls to have the opposite problem that many 22-episode network programs with more time than material have – with only 10 half hour episodes available, characters and arcs inevitably felt underserved and that was particularly evident in the final season.

The final season was a particularly powerful encapsulation of this trend over the course of the series. This trend was exacerbated in the final seasons for two reasons – the core group of four titular girls that were only tenuously good friends to begin with, were less and less friends as the show went on and they naturally drifted apart, making it harder to give everyone screen time since they were rarely together. At the same time, the universe of characters expanded to the point where Ray and Adam and Eljiah were full-fledged characters who had their own arcs. While this was a testament to what solid characters they became, it then felt like they needed their share of screen time as well.

It’s hard to fit fulfilling stories for all those characters, especially when you want to have more narrowly-focused episodes in just ten half hours. There’s a reason that similar shows with similar episode amounts and run times – Atlanta and Insecure, for example, have kept up, at least so far, with a smaller cast of major characters.

There’s something to be said for being loose and flexible, and diving down those strange rabbit holes – but in that exchange, there has to be enough time left over to cover the amount of story that feels like it needs covering and Girls couldn’t quite get there this season.

It’s worth checking in at least briefly character by character, on the seven who are worth caring about to see where they started and where they ended.

Hannah was the show; Hannah was far more important than any other character, Hannah was the best and most constructed character, and Hannah was the best example of a character who  learned everything and learned nothing over the course of six seasons, which was one of Girls’ greatest gifts; Hannah managed to feel as if she grew as a character while still being in most ways the same person she was at the beginning and that’s impressive and interesting. She has a baby at the end but she’s basically still figuring it out; she manages to keep the baby alive and healthy so far but doesn’t feel far from another minibreakdown at any given minute. Her career evolution was her more traditional arc, and it was never the show’s strongest work. While much of the show felt real, the show’s jump from job to job for Hannah never quite did; everyone complimenting her work so much and so easily sometimes felt cheap. But in terms of personal growth – she’s every bit as needy, as self-centered, but by the end it still feels like she’s come a long way in our six years with us even if that isn’t entirely manifested in her behavior. She’s a mess but she’s somewhere.

Marnie is probably the character who has potentially moved backwards during our time with her. She’s hopefully broken up for Desi for good, but after half a dozen different moments which shouted at her the need to get her shit together; from her reunion with Charlie, to her and Hannah’s trip upstate with Desi, to her being dumped by Ray, it’s hard to imagine what could get through to her.She’s a narcissistic who is so self-involved she doesn’t notice what’s going on with others, be it Charlie or Desi’s drug problems, and can’t conceive of the possibly that Ray would break up with her. She’s the only other girl to make it into the finale; and her love-hate relationship with Hannah seemed to occasionally pop in and out. Often it felt as if their friendship existed only because he had for so long, and sometimes because they had no one else who wanted to listen to them and they mutually used each other. When Hannah’s mom asks what’s next in the finale, she doesn’t really know, and it’s hard to imagine what it could finally take for Marnie to take stock in herself and how she treats others.

Jessa always seemed to have the most functional friendship of all the Girls with Hannah, and while the last season didn’t accomplish everything, it at least gave us a much needed reconciliation between Hannah and Jessa in the penultimate episode. Jessa’s also made strides while being fundamentally the same destructive force she was to start the show; she embarrasses Shoshanna and takes over her networking event for no reason. Still, her heartbreaking relationship with Adam which was cemented and dissolved this season showed a much needed side to Jessa and made me both root for her going forwards and believe she has adopted enough – kicking substance abuse, at the very least, to find a path forwards.

Shoshanna was always the odd Girl out. She had no initial connection to Hannah, and has the least in common with the other girls. And when tensions frayed, and conflicts happened, it became harder and harder to find room for her plots, to pair her with anyone on the show except Ray, and she, more than anyone else, got the short shrift in the final season. The penultimate episode, which was more of a traditional series finale than the actual finale, which served as more of a coda, seemed like a meta-joke on how the show had forgotten about and run out of room for Shosh. All of a sudden, apropos of nothing, she’s gotten engaged to someone we’ve never met. She, in the final scene with all four girls, in the bathroom at her party, tells the other girls, they should call it – she doesn’t want anything to do with them going forwards, and she never had much in common with them before. The sad lesson for Shoshanna seems to be that the other three girls were simply a maelstrom which kept her off the life plan she always wanted.

Elijah gets the most traditional arc in the final season, which was somewhat welcome with the other characters swirling all around him zig zagging left and right. He attempts a return to his old love of theater and is pretty successful against some odds. It would have grown tired if everyone’s story followed this path, but it was definitely a nice moment for Elijah who had become a better and more important character with good reason over the course of the show.

Ray had some heartwarming moments as well but got shafted on his ending; appearing for the last time in the third to last time sharing a kiss with Shosh’s old boss Abigail. The pairing doesn’t really make sense, as Abigail had been nothing but obnoxious in our previous interaction and it seemed as if they were trying to force a quick warm relatively happy ending for Ray by having him share a moment with a character we’ve at least seen before. His arc up to that point, turning over a new leaf upon Hermie’s untimely death and ultimately dumping Marnie was inspired; it would have been nice if he could have gotten the sendoff he deserved (particularly how was he not at Shosh’s party as the only character that’s actually friends with Shosh?).

Adam got shafted even more than Ray when his ending boiled down to marginalizing him in terms of his relationship with Hannah, rather than the fuller character he become over the seasons. His last scene was poignant in and of itself as a realization that both him and Hannah’s yearning for their halcyon days could never be. But he deserved a scene more dedicated to his individual journey, rather than merely his part on Hannah’s.

The last two episodes were fine in and of themselves; all that was disappointing was the lack of story for the non-Hannah characters that got them there. I did like having the second to last be the more traditional finale as a nice change of pace, to relieve the pressure from the finale, and to be one of the smaller episodes that Girls has always done best.

“I’m into hard sci-fi. Fantasy is bullshit,” Roman DeBeers declaims in Party Down. My feelings certainly don’t run nearly that strong and I’m as big a fan of Game of Thrones as anyone, but there is a thirst for hard sci-fi that really can’t be quenched by anything else.

There’s plenty of sci-fi on TV these days – Westworld, Black Mirror, and Stranger Things for example, which is great for us and great for the genre. But what I (and hopefully Roman) means by hard sci-fi is more than just sci-fi. It’s sci-fi with planets, with space stations, with arcane political configurations, conflicts, and alliances. It’s filled with absolutely nonsensical explanations for technology that still has to be explained and rapid fire series of shouted commands from ship captain to crew that mean nothing in modern English.

And it’s this niche that The Expanse, while never quite expanding too far beyond, satisfies. As a non-science fiction junkie, merely satisfying that niche is not at all a low bar; I won’t watch a sci-fi show simply because I love the genre and I haven’t regularly watched a show on Syfy since Battlestar Galactica. (I haven’t tried the Magicians yet, but that’s not even science fiction anyway and I watched one season of Helix, but I don’t like to talk about that).

As the most successful in the genre this century, BSG is the precedent that every modern hard sci-fi show looks towards. And while I could write a few thousand words on BSG, which I’ve seen all of and have a complicated relationship with, merely chronicling the similarities and differences between The Expanse and BSG should suffice for this moment.

BSG desperately wanted to be important; more than a genre show in both a popularity sense and in a sense of being imbued with more and deeper literary layers of meaning. The Expanse wants that in some degree; it’s almost impossible to make a hard sci-fi show without feeling like it wants to say something about politics and humanity and the future. But The Expanse doesn’t nearly have the pretensions that BSG had. There’s nothing inherently wrong with BSG’s huge ambitions; if you meet them, it’s admirable and incredibly impressive. But BSG’s quest for importance didn’t really hold together on its own, while admittedly, asking some legitimately interesting questions about humanity on the way. More importantly, though, the process of trying to satisfy those ambitious likely exacerbated BSG’s difficulties with some of the more rudimentary pieces of building a successful TV shows, like having developed characters and episode-to-episode consistency.

The Expanse’s plot has, so far, at least, less unnecessary stops and starts as BSG. While the very best BSG may have topped anything in The Expanse, The Expanse has never had an episode anywhere near the worst BSG episodes. The plot moves, and there’s a good sense of forward momentum which would make The Expanse an excellent show for binging. In general, the less pressure to be important, makes The Expanse a relatively less heavy and easier to enjoy show. While The Expanse is hardly light fare, it wouldn’t have to go far to not suffer under the weight of BSG, and merely meeting that burden makes it a more watchable show.

The Expanse does share some of BSG’s flaws. Particularly, choosing plot over character, which is sadly typical of the sci-fi genre. The characters tend to be mere passengers for a wide-ranging plot. Even after two seasons, we know almost nothing about most of the characters with the exception of Shoreh Aghdashloo’s Chrisjen Avasarala, an important diplomat for earth. There’s an utter lack of comic relief as well; like salt, even just a few more grains of humor would go a long way towards making The Expanse even more enjoyable.

Overall though, if you like sci-fi but don’t love it, like me, but want that piece of your diet filled, The Expanse is the place to go like nowhere else right now. It’s not a mystery show, or a dystopian show, or a post apocalyptic show, or a conspiracy show – it’s about complicated interspace politics, and it’s a fun view.

Big Little Lies blurred the line largely but not entirely successfully between melodramatic pulp and very serious prestige television, producing a miniseries that was quite good but not quite great. Ultimately, Big Little Lies will be remembered best for its performances more than for its characters, and for its characters more than its story which was riveting enough from episode to episode but not quite up to the memorable standards of the canonical HBO shows of the past. The show was not helped by the gimmicks and storytelling methods utilized which served some purpose early on but which also led to a sense of misleading tension in the second half of the series which felt somewhat unfulfilled and took up valuable time that could have been used to spend more time with a couple of less developed characters.

It’s impossible to talk about the series without talking about two storytelling gimmicks which are used throughout the series and which may have initially served a smart and interesting subversive purpose but which through their continued use over the entire course of the series, felt distracting and a waste of screen time.

First, right from the very beginning, there’s the posing of the story as a murder mystery, by way of flash forwards showing two detectives investigating a murder. The detectives reveal only that there’s been a murder, but not of or by whom. Having seen this type of set up on many shows (Damages comes to mind), and not knowing much about the source material, for the first couple of minutes I though Big Little Lies was a murder mystery in which I would speculate who would be killed and by whom and that the case would slowly unfold over the course of the series, leading up to a climax where the case is solved or the murderer confesses in the last episode. It’s not and it doesn’t.

Second, the series is dotted from the start with the inter-splicing of several talking heads. Other moms, dads, and school officials from around Monterey, California, outside of the primary nine moms and dads exchange trashy rumors and gossip about those nine in the context of each being interviewed by the police after the murder, dishing on why each and every one of the major characters might be involved in the murder. This led me to believe Big Little Lies would be a Mean Girls for moms (“Mean Moms”), about the uber competitive nature of rich white moms in a chichi lefty California beach town. This was also a feint; it’s not what the show is about at all, and much like the murder mystery red herring, this feels like a little trick to deceive the viewer. Big Little Lies is certainly somewhat trashy, but more serious and character-driven than these gimmicks would have you believe.

The only purpose I can see for both of these story-telling gimmicks is to subvert our expectations into what kind of show Big Little Lies is, and in that purpose they are successful. Still, these two devices appear over and over throughout the entire run of the show and I can’t help but feel like the subversion, which revealed itself by the third episode at the latest, is not worth the use of all this valuable storytelling and character building time. Time which could be used to flesh out, say, Bonnie, who plays a pivotal role in the final moments despite never being afforded the character depths of Madeline, Celeste, or Jane. If absolutely necessary, having a flash forward for maybe five minutes at the beginning of the first episode would still have been a little strange and distracting but would have more than sufficed as the requisite red herring.

What Big Little Lies does have is excellent actors at its heart, especially the three core actresses, Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, and Shailene Woodley who play the biggest and best characters Madeline, Celeste, and Jane respectively.  All three of their storylines are moving, well-acted and play off each other very well. Jane’s struggles with her past rape play off of Kidman’s current difficulties coping with her abusive husband, even while no one else within the show knows about Celeste’s husband’s monstrous behavior. Everyone in the town sees Celeste as the bad-ass drop-dead gorgeous corporate lawyer with the perfect marriage who make the sacrifice of giving up her career to raise her kids entirely of her own volition. Madeline, who never got the education or career she wishes she had, is envious of the careers Celeste and Laura Dern’s Renata made for themselves, as well as frustrated that her ex, who was admittedly immature and unready for children when they were married, has put it all together just in time to marry a beautiful younger woman. She struggles for purpose, digging in to fights with her children, with her husband, and with Renata as outlets to channel her frustration. Jane is still dealing with her rape, which she never disclosed to anyone, with her raising a child on her own, and with the possibility, no matter how small, that her kid might not the sweet little harmless child she has presumed his entire life. The conflicts between non-character kids allow the actual character parents to fight amongst themselves in realistic ways without any one of them being completely at fault.

Big Little Lies more than anything gives these these actresses a showcase for their talents and puts them in roles that are juicy but which allow them to outshine the roles; without the layered portrayals, these roles simply wouldn’t work. We have to believe Madeline really feels conflicted about her affair; that she wants to remain with her husband but she also can’t seem to help but look elsewhere and that her having both of these opposing feelings is consistent with her character.  She knows what she did was stupid, but she wanted it in during the moment. Not that it’s necessary by any means to root for a character for it to be a good character, but Witherspoon makes us want to root for Madeline in spite of her shitty behavior towards her husband and erratic behavior towards her kids. She manages to portray Madeline as spiraling somewhat out of control without ever making her comical or campy.

Nicole Kidman manages to make us really understand what’s going through Celeste’s mind in a role where she’s far more reticent than Witherspoon’s Madeline. On the journey Celeste makings from thinking her marriages has problems but is salvageable to realizing she has to leave her husband, Kidman makes us understand viscerally and emotionally why she, a brilliant woman, doesn’t want to leave, and doesn’t want anyone else to know, and that why, as a lawyer, even though on some layer she understands what’s happening, she still feels like she can’t, doesn’t want to, or shouldn’t do anything about it. When Celeste eventually leaves, we know the exact proximate factor is her son becoming a bully, but to fully convince, we have to feel Celeste has turned a corner over the course of the show and is ready to leave, and because of Kidman we do.

Shailene Woodley has a slightly easier job than Kidman or Witherspoon, but she still executes it to perfection as Jane, the new, poor, mom in town trying to fit in to a town in which she doesn’t really belong. Madeline’s introduction to Jane is the first sign that Big Little Lies isn’t the type of show it tries to pass itself off as initially. Instead of hostile and alienating, type A mom Madeline is overly welcoming to Jane, no matter how different she is, and perhaps partly because of it, and though Jane struggles with fish-out-of-water situation, it’s much less an important theme to her character that one would think based on the on-paper description.

Big Little Lies couldn’t quite make it all the way to the difficult task of having all this believable character conflict with no actual villain. In order to make just about every other character on the show three-dimensional and at least somewhat easy to root for, the show stuffed all of the antagonism deep within Alexander Scarsgard’s Perry, making him one truly evil dude.  Jane is worried over the course of the show that her abuser’s innate evil somehow seeped down into her child, which it didn’t, but Perry’s behavior did influence his children, as the slow building reveal is that Renata’s daughter’s abuser was not in fact Jane’s child, but Celeste and Perry’s. When Celeste realizes that her kids are actually suffering from Perry’s abuse towards her, she decides to leave, and that sets off the final actions leaving to Perry’s death. So Perry is not only responsible for beating Celeste, but is actually responsible for the bullying between children that leads to Renata and Madeline’s fight that dominates the first half of the show.

The general build to the ending is largely well-executed, particularly the changing relationships between the moms. The ending is somewhat anticlimactic. The murder feels out of place for the story being told, and by the time it happens, it’s fairly easy to guess who is going to get murdered, if not who actually commits the murder which really doesn’t seem to be all that important in the context of the show anyway.

There are two final issues with the ending. First, Perry being Jane’s rapist comes absolutely out of nowhere and feels so out of place and unnecessary. Yes, technically there’s no reason he couldn’t be, but it’s beyond random, and only foreshadowed in that he’s the only character it could be if it had to be a character we know on the show. Everything was set up for her actual rapist to be unseen; and the groundwork was so well laid for her to be able to empathize with Celeste simply through their shared experiences, rather than needing to have suffered the abuse at the hands of the same person.

Secondly, all the women banding together to lie to the police makes sense for the literary purpose of sealing their bond as a group, but doesn’t make a whole ton of practical sense at the moment. The homicide was very obviously accidentally and in self-defense and was perfectly and pretty clearly justifiable and keeping their stories straight would be much more difficult than the alternative. This is much less of an issue than the previous, and I’m nitpicking a little bit, but it felt like their lying was forced to give them all this secret, rather than what they would these characters would actually do.

Big Little Lies is definitely an overall win and a nice little miniseries delivered at the beginning of a year. It was extremely bingable; I watched it over the course of a couple days, and it’s very digestible. It’s not going to be remembered as an all-time classic, or an absolute must-watch. But for a weekend in, it hits the spot.

With New Girl having possibly aired its series finale (its ongoing fate is undetermined as of yet), it’s an excellent opportunity to take stock and analyze where the series, six seasons deep, stands as a whole.

Modern  half hour television shows can very, very broadly be divided into three categories. First, on one end, there are shows that aim for pure laughs. These shows tend to be less serial, and for these shows to succeed on their own terms, it’s unimportant whether you care about or relate to the characters or not. There’s a very simple barometer of success for these shows; if you’re laughing, the show works. Bedrock examples of these shows include Curb Your Enthusiasm and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

On the other end are the dramadies, which aren’t particularly concerned with being laugh-out-loud funny. Owing to their half hour heritage, they are generally either light-hearted or filled with humorous moments and situations –  you won’t find a humorless hour-long like AMC’s The Walking Dead or Boardwalk Empire in half hour format. Because these shows are less funny, it’s pretty much essential that viewers become invested in and care about, though not necessarily relate to, the characters. These shows tend to be extremely serial. Examples include Girls and Transparent.

In the middle stands the class of sitcoms which bear the greatest resemblance to the classic sitcoms of old; Cheers in particular is often cited as a major influence for creators. These sitcoms care very much about making us laugh; they’re filled not just with the humorous situations of the second category, but with the jokes and punchlines of the first. They also care, however, passionately, about giving us the feels. They want us emotionally invested in the characters, and unlike many second category shows, they want us not just to care about but to like and root for the characters. They want us to emotionally react to the characters’ personal and professional ups and downs and tend to dot their seasons with episodes that feature major emotional touchstones – new jobs, breakups, weddings, pregnancies. How I Met Your Mother and Parks and Recreation are two perfect examples of this genre.

New Girl fits snugly within the third category; it has aimed, over its six season run, for a combination of laughs and emotions.  It’s been largely successful in pursuit of the former, while being only partly effective in terms of the latter.

New Girl has been, in the whole, quite funny. There have been ups and downs, within episodes  and seasons, and over time, but six seasons in, which is a long time in 20+ episode seasons, for the most part, episodes are still pretty consistently funny. New Girl is funny because the jokes are well-written and smart and it’s funny because the actors who read those jokes are excellent individually as well as having excellent chemistry with one another. The characters, evolved over time, are funny characters and all have developed over time generally consistent personalities which serve as platforms for humorous retorts and interactions. Nick’s luddite conspiracy-minded kookiness, Schmidt’s OCD  and fastidiousness, Winston’s confident silliness, for example, have all built a strong foundation for humorous situations.

More specific recurring quirks and gags can get old quickly, especially when they’re too specific and exaggerated (see, for example, Boyle’s slavish devotion to Jake in Brooklyn Nine-Nine) but the quirks in New Girl have for the most part remained funny and true to character and have, through generally judicious use, avoided being played out. Winston’s love of pranks, forever, could easily have been overused and was briefly before it was tempered and only surfaced occasionally to positive effect. Likewise with Nick’s Pepperwood Chronicles, of which just the right amount of detail and excerpts, but no more, have been provided.

Now, however, we come to the second half of the equation of these types of sitcoms. New Girl wants us very much to care about its characters. It wants us not just to care about its characters but to like its characters, and not just to like its characters but to become emotionally invested in its characters, so that when they have big moments, both high and low, we feel  along with them.

Like many of this category of shows, especially series that focus on people in their twenties and thirties, most episodes contain a couple of self-contained plots filled with hijinks, but also serve as little pieces in a long personal journey for each of the characters as they grow as people, with the outward markers being their changing positions in relationships and careers.

While I very much like and root for the New Girl characters generaly, all five of them, I just don’t feel passionately about their individual story arcs, and in particularly have not been able to invest in the likely single biggest story arc and central relationship of the show – the romance between Nick and Jess. From the way the relationship is treated within the show, particularly within the most recent few episode and the very final scene of the sixth season finale, the writers seem to believe or at least hope that I’d be extremely excited about the final long-awaited reunion of these two star-crossed but destined soulmates. Unfortunately, I remained unmoved. I mostly just felt disappointed that the episode had focused on the sentimental at the expense of the funny.

I sorry that I was unmoved. I like Nick and I like Jess as characters, and it’s less that I hate the two of them together as much as I’m completely uninterested in it, especially after their earlier season-long romance and inextricable break up. Coming in perhaps the worst season of the show, the breakup, which should have been fairly easy to write – there are plenty of well-established reasons why Nick and Jess wouldn’t be right for each – felt unnecessarily forced, considering the investment the show had put in the relationship. But from the moment they broke up, there was a stark inevitability they would get together by the end of the show, and that made every other relationship the two experienced in the intervening seasons feel pointless. And while it’s extremely irritating when a show keeps two characters apart for seasons who have no within show reasons not for being together outside of creating tension, that didn’t seem to be the case for Nick and Jess.

As was evident when they dated the first time, there were plenty of fundamental differences that would easily have explained why they would be long-term incompatible; their relationship never felt fated to me the way it seemed like the show wanted it to feel. It felt like they had to get together, because, well, it’s TV, and that’s what happens. There was language used in the most recent episodes from all of the characters, particularly within conversations between Schmidt and Cece that presented the Nick-Jess relationship as so obvious and so destined but because the relationship didn’t feel that way to me watching the show, and the overemphasis on the they-were-meant-to-be-together aspect felt like forced sentimentality.  I don’t want characters I like not to get together just to punish them, but It would have been more interesting if they didn’t get back together, simply because it would have been different and unexpected in this type of show. No matter how many shows do it again and again, sitcom incest comes home to roost.

My least favorite moments were when New Girl tried to impart How I Met Your Mother-like cheeky lessons about relationships and life. For example, in the latest season, it was apparently a sign that Robbie was too similar to Jess because he liked the same parts of trail mix, while Nick likes the parts of trail mix that Jess hates, so somehow that makes them a good match (we’re just ignoring the whole Jess is related to Robbie part which is just something else entirely). Huh? Apparently New Girl had just told us the revelatory lesson that in relationships, opposites attract. Winston and Ali don’t really seem like opposites though, but I guess that’s beside the fact.

Throughout all of that, New Girl was by and large funny, but less funny when it chose to focus on those very special episodes with big emotional moments. In particular the sixth season finale, which was centered around two emotional bombshells, Cece’s pregnancy and Jess and Nick’s reunion seemed somewhat devoid of jokes, which, well, it’s a comedy.

For New Girl to work at the highest level, it would have to have me fully on board with the sentimental as well as the humor, and it never could quite get there. But New Girl, which has, over the years of Peak TV, gotten buried under more ambitious shows, shouldn’t be. It created memorable characters that deserve to be well-remembered, one of the most important parts of its kind of sitcoms, and enough recurring bits and repeatable jokes and lines to be worthy a place within shouting distance of the canon if not within it.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia entered its 12th season this January, and the first two episodes were absolute classic It’s Always Sunny; laugh-out loud, taking-it-almost-too-far humor about five truly terrible idiotic friends who hang out at a largely unpatronized bar they own in Philadelphia. To be this deep in and remain funny and fresh fairly often is a Herculean task which should not go unnoticed.

This seeming It’s Always Sunny renaissance was not always obvious. The first half of last season was a disappointment that was discouraging and unexciting; it seemed as if perhaps It’s Always Sunny had fallen into all the traps of a show well on its years, and had run out of ideas. The show improved in its second half, though, and by this year, the show feels revitalized. Away from the spotlight, on its own network FXX, where it (along with Simpsons reruns) is the flagship show, It’s Always Sunny has managed to largely find the right bag of tricks to keep a show funny this many seasons in. Here’s how they do it.

Don’t be particularly serial –Shows that have serial stories tend to have built in expiration dates. It’s simply hard to tell a coherent long-form story over so many years without running into a wall. When there’s a need for emotion, when there’s need have a build in tension, well, it’s hard to keep successfully doing these over and over with becoming boring and predictable. Shows like It’s Always Sunny, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Louie, which aren’t particularly plotty, are better suited to last this long in style. There are a very small number of recurring elements, particularly when previous schemes are referenced by the gang, but for the most part each episode stands completely on its own. Additionally, because of this, nothing the show could do, no matter how cringe-inducing could retroactively ruin earlier seasons for me. Even ending with a couple of awful seasons would not in any way lessen my enjoyment any of earlier episodes.

Don’t be afraid to make a dud – this sounds counter-intuitive; if they kept making duds, this show wouldn’t be worth watching anymore. But at this point, on this show, the episodes can be very gimmicky. The self-awareness of being willing to take a chance on a gimmick or premise that really, on paper, might not work at all, opens up the freedom to be a little more daring. The season premiere this year where the gang turns black could easily have been a huge misfire, but it wasn’t. For It’s Always Sunny, with all its many episodes and its lack of seriality, a dud here and there won’t hurt the show’s legacy, and the threat of a dud is worthwhile if that risk-taking produces gems.

Remember what’s funny about the characters – the beauty of  It’s Always Sunny’s characters is that they’re somewhat fungible but also well drawn. There’s a lot of dumb stuff that just about any of the characters could do, but over the years, the show has built up specific personality traits for each of them that so that depending on the plot or scheme, it’s easy to imagine which character fits (if this sounds like simply writing characters, it is, but truth be told, the characters on Sunny are much more similar than the characters on most shows due to the nature of the humor). Dennis is the creepiest and most vain, Frank the most shrewd but the most vulgar, Charlie the most genuine but the most dumb. Mac is a special combination of Dennis’s vanity and Charlie’s idiocy; it’s overconfidence more than narcissism in his case, and Dee shares Dennis’ narcissism, but while Dennis’ charm actually works occasionally, Dee’s never does.

Be meta but not too meta – It’s Always Sunny has been very smart about how much to reference. The creators know that we’re watching, and that we’ve been watching for years, and that we pretty much know how an episode of Always Sunny is going to go. Over the years, they’ve brought that aspect into the show, bringing back gimmicks a couple times, but generally not too often, making meta references about the gang and how their plot works enough to be funny and let us know their in on the joke, but not overdoing it like Abed did in the last season of Community.

Write good jokes – I’m kind of burying the lead here, obviously.It’s not rocket science, but it’s still not easy. Of course, writing good jokes is still the most important aspect, and without them, even if all the other categories are checked off, any given episode will land with a thud. Those other qualifiers are designed to make this step going off as easily as possible.

Rarely does the final episode of any season of television, let alone of a comedy, force you to reevaluate the events of the entire season in its wake. Even rarer is that a plus rather than a minus, because the events have been immaculately enough crafted that the season makes a lot more sense under the new narrative, rather than less, and the entire show is richer for the change, sparking interest in revisiting old episodes to view certain bits in a new light.

That is, however, what NBC’s The Good Place pulled off in its finale. The Good Place had been an enjoyable sitcom in its short time, improving, like good comedies do, as it went forward, working out the relationships and chemistry between its leads, particuarly, developing strong rapport between Eleanor and her alleged soulmate Chidi and between Eleanor and her frenemy Tahani. More plotty than most sitcoms, the strictures of The Good Place’s universe helped keep it interesting and afloat while the comedy slowly improved.

And there were questions that formed, that seemed potentially if not quite plotholes, than strange decisions based on what we had known. Eleanor and Jason were obviously not supposed to be in the Good Place, that much was clear. The backstories and alleged rules of the Good Place, however, shed suspicion on Tahani and Chidi, who, while obviously way ahead of Jason and Eleanor, had their own issues which would led to them have been unlikely to enter the extremely choosy Good Place. We’re given to believe the motivation behind a person’s actions may be important in his or her final tally, and Tahani’s is purely to prevent being upstaged by her acclaimed artist sister. Chidi’s motivation is undeniably pure, but due to his crippling indecisiveness, he never really does all that much actual good in his life.

These developments were glazed over at the time, and were not quite notable enough to burst a hole in the premise, but enough to consider on momentarily. To Michael Schur and co., however, those developments were not peripheral, as it turned out. They were part of an artfully crafted set up designed to stun us when in the final episode we learn that what we, and our protagonists, believe is the Good Place, has actually been the Bad Place the whole time.

Schur consulted Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof while plotting the first season, an expert on both plotty science fiction television, and the fan pressure for answers and satisfying conclusions and clearly Schur was able to take something from the advice on either what to or what not to do.

The reveal itself is handled with aplomb, especially as the episode is cross-cut with Michael’s backstory, telling the story of his wanting to design his first neighborhood in a new and different way. Only after the reveal does it become clear that rather than take part in a new version of the Good Place, Michael’s constructed what he thinks is a gleeful and fun new way to torture bad humans.

And all of a sudden, with one change, the entire show is transformed, both past, and future. I was honestly unsure on how Schur prepared to continue on if The Good Place was renewed, and in the season finale we’re sent on a brilliant feint designed to leave us with just that question in mind, trying to think what could happen and who could be sent to the Bad Place if the show continued next season. By placing our fixation on that, Schur was able to distract us until Eleanor, of all people, figures out Michael’s secret.

When a twist comes as a complete, out-of-nowhere, surprise, that’s usually a bad sign that there was no foreshadowing and no possible way to foresee it. These types of twists can feel lazy or make viewers feel like they wasted their time watching an entire show when the whole world they invested in is changed radically post-twist. This twist avoids these dangers by being clearly well-planned and laid out over the course of the show, even though the fact The Good Place is a comedy, and the general disorientation provided by the unique premise kept viewers more off-balance then they would be if this was a prestige drama. No one on the internet was devoting weekly threads to fan theories, like they were for Westworld. This made surprising us both relatively easy and more worthwhile. This twist enhanced the replay value of the earlier episodes rather than diminish it, as the change makes earlier events relevant in a new way.

Next season, then, we’ll get a new look at this season, through a new perspective, as Eleanor, matched up with a new soulmate struggles to remember why she wrote that note. In one fell swoop, Schur took The Good Place from a show with a nice first season that got better as it went into a season to truly remember.

There are a narrow band of celebrities out there who I simply can’t believe can possibly not be thirty yet. As a young-ish man in his early-to-md 30s, I take affront at these singers, actors, and athletes who somehow defy my sense of chronological time. This purely subjective list of people who fit this criteria largely fall into one of two categories: They started really young and have been wildly successful since, and thus it’s hard to imagine they could have crammed in all that success before they reached 30, or they started out with a notable bang when they were quite young, and even though they have faded either permanently or for a few years, their early success seems so long ago that it is astonishing they haven’t hit that milestone yet.

Rihanna – the first of the two quintessential examples which inspired this list. She was truly young when she started out, even by pop standards, at 16 years of age with “Pon de Replay,” but unlike many who start that young; her sound was already mature, several genre changes, notwithstanding; it was never kiddie or youthful. And even though she was that young, it was still a fucking long time ago, back in 2005, when George W. Bush was still in office.

Emma Stone – the second of the two inspirations for the list. Emma Stone doesn’t look all that much different then when she costarred in Superbad as Jules, and her dance card has been full since them, appearing in movies left and right, becoming everyone’s darling, winning one Oscar nomination and about to win another. I counted 21 movies she appeared in during the almost decade since Superbad in 2007, and while some of them were cameos, most were major roles. She simply seems like she’s been in way too many movies to not have accrued 10 years of age since Superbad.

Lionel Messi – athletes are difficult to put in this category because largely you kind of know they’re young; that’s in the very nature of athletics. But Lionel Messi has been playing since I started caring about a soccer even a little, debuting for Barcelona, his only team, at 16, in 2003. He’s already regarded as one of the very best ever, having won five Ballon d’Or trophies, more than anyone else in the 60 year history of the award, winning his first in 2009 at the ripe old age of 22.  (Cristiano Ronaldo, who has won the other four Ballon d’Ors not won by Messi since ’08 just misses this list at 31).

Jennifer Lawrence – At 26, she’s probably the biggest stretch on this list, but if, in this case, the surprise is perhaps not that she’s not 30 but that she’s only 26, it’s still remarkable for how much life she’s led already. Winter’s Bone, which was the first time many people, myself included, ever heard the name Jennifer Lawrence, arrived only seven years ago, in 2010. Since then, she’s won an Oscar, become the youngest person to ever receive four Oscar nominations and has done nothing less than become the biggest actor, male, or female, in the world, largely through headlining the blockbuster Hunger Games series.

Sidney Crosby – I’m not the biggest hockey fan, but even I had heard the name Sidney Crosby for years before he was finally drafted #1 overall in 2005 by the Penguins. He won his first MVP in just his second year in the league at age 19, becoming in the process, the only teenager to ever win a scoring title. He has accrued points, titles, and silverware since then, having his career feel even longer due to the interminable and tragic series of ongoing concussion troubles which threatens his career. Tragic that is, they would be, if they ended his career; instead he’s back on track. Last season, he was a mere third in points, but led his Penguins to a Stanley Cup title, his second.

Evan Rachel Wood – Unlike the first group, the next couple haven’t been consistently famous for the last decade or so, but were first famous so long ago and so notably that it still seems stunning that enough years haven’t passed since their first appearances in the public eye.  Wood first gained widespread exposure in the movie Thirteen in 2003 (she played Billy Campbell’s daughter in Once in Again previously, but who knew?). And while yes, it was obviously she that was supposed to be 13 in Thirteen, and thus Evan Rachel Wood must have been pretty young then (she was 16), it still feels bizarre watching her now on Westworld after learning she’s only 29.

Hilary Duff – Like Wood, Duff’s initial fame came very memorably when she was quite young – a teen in Lizzie Maguire, starting in 2001. But like with Wood, because that was simply so long ago – 16 years ago it started, it just feels that enough time has passed that she should have be 30 by now by all known rules of math. After an up and down acting and recording career, Duff is now co-starring on Younger with Sutton Foster.

Ellen Page and Michael Cera – I’m giving this pair a group entry because the primary reason as a duo that it’s so hard to believe that they’re not thirty yet is that they  co-starred in Juno a whole decade ago. Of course, Cera was well-known before then for his role as George Michael in Arrested Development, and basically had a huge career as a movie star and then totally lost it, all by the time he was 29. Page has appeared in many films as well, albeit never quite becoming the star Cera was briefly, but has also engaged in activism as an LGBTQ icon, hosting the show Gaycation on Viceland.

Hayley Williams – Again, I knew Hayley Williams was really young when Paramore first hit. Still, their breakthrough album Riot! arrived almost ten years ago in summer 2007 with singles “Misery Business and Crushcruscrush.” Williams was a mere 17 at the time and it wasn’t even the band’s first album. She’s still only 28, and hasn’t even come out with an album since she was 24.

Maria Sharapova – I remember where I was when I first really took note of Sharapova, and it was where most of tennis-liking America (granted not a huge population) took notice, in the 2004 Wimbleton final, when she stunned the world and world #1 Serena Williams to win a major at 17. She’s had three or four tennis lifetimes since then, fading in and out of relevance often through injuries, but coming back to win five majors, securing a career Grand Slam with the French Open in 2012, a title that is nearly five years old at this point. She currently sits suspended  for doping.

The Young Pope takes us on a ride back to the first dozen years of the 21st century, when prestige TV was dominated by a white middle-aged male antihero struggling to maintain total control over his world as forces beyond his own begin to creep towards him. This model is by no means inherently bad (for any given show); three of the all time best TV dramas came out of it: The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. Along with those however, came a horde of lesser shows from the solid to the mediocre to the downright bad, and many, myself include began to tire of this incredibly limiting format which seemed to really focus on a single perspective and seemed to dominate TV way out of proportion to the amount of white middle age males in existence.

Thankfully, although it took a while, television responded in kind. With the ends of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, the decline of this type of show is more or less complete; all of the most acclaimed and prestigious shows currently follow different, and thankfully, varied models. Even the shows that come closest have important differences. Rectify’s Daniel Holden is an almost middle aged white man, but his suffering and troubling behavior are due to a likely wrong done to him, rather than his doing wrong to the world. The white male half of the two leads in The Americans, Philip  Jennings, may have committed worse crimes than any of the male antihero protagonists discussed above, but in how he deals with those closest to him, he’s the warmest and most loving. Vinyl resurrected the moody middle-aged male antihero of the previous decade, and flopped like little else has on HBO.

And then, well, there’s Young Pope. It’s not as obvious a rehash of the formula as Vinyl, and because of that it’s probably at least somewhat more successful, but those distasteful elements permeate the show. Jude Law, as Pope Pius XIII, is, from what we know in the first episode, a surprise choice as Pope, unprecedentedly young and American, picked because some of the most Machiavellian power brokers in the papacy believe he would be easily controlled. He isn’t, of course, or this would probably be a less interesting show; but he’s, well, kind of a dick.  He’s mercurial, conflicted, treats important men like servants, treats servants like, well, worse servants, partly to send a message and also partly because it just seems like he likes it. He’s unflinchingly masculine, in the old school way that was premised on nice guys finishing last and the show maybe seems to want to convince us that this is the way he has to be to be effective. He makes everyone uncomfortable, and not just the people he should.

Just about everyone else in the show is male, as might be expected in a show about the inner workings of the papacy; after all women can’t rise to the highest rungs of power in the Catholic church. The primary and really only female character is Diane Keaton’s Sister Mary, whose role is mother figure to Pius; he brings her along with him because she helped raise him as an orphan. Whatever power she has is merely derived from him as long as she’s in his good graces.

Watching the show feels like we’re supposed to be compelled, or at least fascinated by Pius’ s unorthodox attempt to shake a complacent Catholic church from the top down, making the cardinals and priests used to a comfortable existence remember what it really means to be holy men. I didn’t feel that way though, and, I don’t think it was because I don’t care about Catholicism, but rather because he both rubs me the wrong way and I don’t particularly care about any of the characters.

The Young Pope is not without merit. The artiness with which it’s filmed feels occasionally pretentious but also occasionally persuasive and imposing; even as a secular Jew, the decadence of Catholic institutions and dress carry impressive weight. The intrigues of papal politics are definitely potentially fruitful and underneath the posturing is room for some interesting battles of substance and style which are very vaguely glimpsed at.

There is craft here, there is strong acting (outside of some of Jude Law’s shoddy New York accent). There’s enough that maybe over the course of the series, the first impressions of the premiere are misleading and there is more substance underneath. But for a show so hyped, with such pretentious and such ambition, it’s a disappointing first look.

Will I watch it again? There’s a good chance I wouldn’t by myself, but since I watched it with a couple of other people, I probably will again, and I’ll hope it gets better from here.