Tag Archives: Veep

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2014 Edition: 19-16

4 Mar

We’re halfway there. Four more. Young series all. Two debuts, a second year, and a third year, three comedies, and a drama. Let’s go.

Intro here and 43-40 here and 39-36 here and 35-32 here and 31-28 here and 27-24 here and 23-20 here.

19. Brooklyn Nine-Nine – 2013: 16

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Co-created by Parks and Recreation creator Michael Schur and writer Dan Goor, Brooklyn Nine-Nine was more fully formed out of the box than Parks and Rec. While Paks and Rec modeled itself after the Office, Brooklyn Nine-Nine modeled itself after Parks and Rec. Parks and Rec took itself from a shaky at best first season to an excellent second season, and while Brooklyn Nine-Nine started higher, and has remained up to first season standards, it hasn’t quite made that jump. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is, no matter what else, a very solid, funny, and enjoyable show, and I look forward to watching it every week. Andre Braugher is a national treasure who should be kept in a museum when not filming the show for preservation purposes. I mean it as a sign of my high expectations for the show rather than an insult to say that Brooklyn Nine-Niane, while continuing to be good, hasn’t quite become transcendent the way recent similar network comedies The Office, 30 Rock, and Parks & Recreation did at points relatively early in their run. Brooklyn Nine-Nine always has some laughs, but it can be a little inconsistent, it hasn’t always found its own tone, and most of the characters are still working towards really being fully formed. Parks didn’t really hits its heights until the third season though, so I haven’t lost hope for this jump yet, and I’ll continue to laugh away in the meantime.

18. Silicon Valley – 2013: Not Eligible

Silicon ValleyA new entrant on this list, Silicon Valley is a spot on satire of the tech sector and is laugh-out-loud funny to boot. Only in actually watching Silicon Valley did I realize how shocking it was that there hasn’t been a well-regarded satirical take on such an easily parodied industry that has played such an important role in the American cultural landscape for nearly two decades. Silicon Valley takes advantage of this lapse and mines the industry for all its worth. It seems (from external sources including my brother who worked there) that there is lots of truth to Silicon Valley’s portrayal, even if gets some details wrong or exaggerates for comedic purposes. The show definitely has a bit of a woman problem; and while some of that is endemic to the premise of the show (it would be more dishonest realistically to have a group of programmers as split evenly between male and female), dragging the one female character into a romance with the protagonist that doesn’t really fit on screen is forced at best. The characters can on occasion be a little cartoonishly nerd-like, and though the touch is gentle and loving, the nerds-can’t-function-in-society button is hit one too many times. Still, Silicon Valley delivered an extremely promising and funny first season, which gives me great anticipation for the second. Lastly, a moment for the late Christopher Evan Welch who may well have been the break out performer if he wasn’t tragically felled by lung cancer; his venture capitalist Peter Gregory was a delightful weirdo.

17. Fargo – 2013: Not Eligible

Fargo

Fargo began from an unusual idea; creator Noah Hawley didn’t want to remake, or make a sequel or prequel to the much-lauded 1996 Coen brothers movie Fargo. Rather, he wanted to set a similar story in the world of Fargo, keeping the tone and atmosphere that make that film so successful. It was an unusual idea and a bold one (the closest I can think of offhand is Ron Moore’s BattleStar Galactica remake – but that was almost the reverse – the new show appropriated characters and concepts, but changed the tone completely). For the very most part, it worked, and was one of the best new shows of the year. The show deftly married dark humor and riveting drama, created similar analogues to the movie’s characters that were different enough to stand up to the rigor of a TV season where characters have to develop and grow. The four major characters were each entertaining and brought something different to the show, and many of the secondary characters were treats as well, as Fargo made good use of playing comedic actors in more dramatic roles. A couple of plotlines seemed out of nowhere, weaving in and out with no real purpose or resolution, and a couple of the characters felt oddly used, sometimes under, and sometimes over. Still, overall, Fargo brought the most important ingredient to its success consistently; its tone; dark, comedic, with an underlying small town warmth.

16. Veep – 2013: 27

Veep

Veep has been a steady climber in these rankings. I watched its first season, finding it amusing enough to keep up with, but not to make it a must watch immediately – it frequently got pushed below the hoard of other Sunday shows, and was eventually viewed later in the week. The second season was better. All of a sudden, I made more of an effort to watch sooner. The dialogue crackled a little more. The cast seemed to be more familiar with one another’s timing and comic beats – the chemistry between nearly every two-person pair was sparkling. The third season ramped it up another level. It’s easy to see why Veep, a modest comedy which doesn’t go for the loud humor of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the high-concepts of Community, or the emotional depths of Parks and Recreation, hides under the radar, but it’s snuck its way to being one of the best comedies on television. Veep simply put together a season of being consistently minute-by-minute funny.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 28-25

17 Jan

Here we go – first, a drama, that like Sons of Anarchy, has been consistently good but not great and had a comeback season this year. Next a couple of comedies that aired back to back but don’t have too much else in common, and finally a show that was impossible to figure out where to place because it debuted with three episodes. Here we go.

28. Boardwalk Empire

Nuckie and Omar

I spoke about this most recent season of Boardwalk Empire at length, which you can read here and then here if so interested. Basically, I think the fourth season was a big step up from the rather one-dimensional third season. Boardwalk still sometimes struggles with figuring out what makes it stand out from the other major dramatic anti-hero shows that have dominated the TV landscape in the past decade and in bringing more of its side characters into more fully realized form, and sometimes it spreads its wings too wide in terms of including more characters and locations rather than focusing more time on fewer great ones. Still, this paragraph should be more about praise than condemnation; this was the second best season of the series, and very close to the second season, the other contender. I didn’t love the Chicago plots, but other non-Nuckie characters stepped in a big way, as the writers created situations more interesting than everyone-against-Nuckie. As always, the filming technique and direction in Boardwalk is gorgeous. Scenes are lovingly rendered and fantastic angles and shots and drama and pathos no matter the characters, plot, or dialogue.

27. Veep

Selena and Staff

Veep’s second season was a noticeable if not revolutionary improvement over the first. It went from a show I watched but was hesitant to recommend after the first season to one I proudly throw out as ideal for relatively quick viewing after the second. Everything is tighter, the characters are surer in who they are, and because of that, the actors know how to better play each of their roles. The first season was defined by one large scale joke – that life for the Vice President, the second highest office in America, was as boring, mundane, and pointless as the lives of so many other cubicle-inhabiting Americans. The second season let the show breathe and allowed that one joke to merge more fully for the show’s love of Curb Your Enthusiasm-like situational awkwardness and miscommunication. Every one of the characters gets a couple of chances to shine, along with recurring guests Gary Cole, Kevin Dunn, and Dan Bakkedahl.

26.Girls

Four Girls

Girls second season was by and large a huge improvement over its first. Toned down was the fervor, both the extremely positive and negative levels that accompanied the first season, which may have been in the show’s best interest. In its place emerged a more fully formed show, that dealt with the characters in more mature and interesting ways. All four primary characters are caricatures to some extent; but they’re not that far from real people and their battles and conflicts often feel authentic (which I complimented in my article about Treme as a place that’s surprisingly hard to reach). I didn’t like the last episode which featured a couple of sappy, forced happy endings which felt like a flash-forward from what the show dissected so powerfully in the second season’s middle episodes, but I still remain quite hopeful for the third season.

25. Rick and Morty

Morty and Rick

Many times during this list I had no idea where I wanted to place shows; this basically refers to numbers maybe 6 through 39. Still, this may have been the trickiest, primarily because it’s hard to figure out how high to rate a show that has aired only three episodes not only in the year, but ever, and not three hour and a half Sherlock episodes, but three 20 minute episodes. So here it is; I probably have liked what I’ve seen enough to have it higher, but I was hesitant on how high to put a show with three episodes. Now on to why you should watch this show if you’ve never heard of it before. Rick and Morty is an animated Adult Swim show about the science fiction adventures of grandfather Rick and grandson Morty, who have a perverse Doc Brown and Marty McFly-esque relationship. Rick is an alcoholic mad genius, and Morty is a loving kid who is a awkward and not the smartest chip on the block. Rick drags Morty throughout space time on all sorts of wacky adventures, while their family, Morty’s parents and sister, occupy often equally hilarious b stories.  It’s funny and it’s short and you don’t have to watch the episodes in order, but you might as well because there aren’t that many of them and they’re good. If you start with just one of the first three though, make it Anatomy Park which combines Jurassic Park, Fantastic Voyage, and John Oliver. Oh, on top of that it’s co-created by Community once-and-future head honcho Dan Harmon.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2012 edition: 30-28

4 Feb

Moving along.  Check out the intro for the details of what qualifies for the list.  30, 29, and 28 below.

30.  The League

TheLeague

The show can be so one-note and stupid to sometimes be painful, but at its best, there are actual laugh out loud moments which make the ridiculous and often predictable plotting and poor character development worthwhile.  My friend has recently advised me to view The League through the Family Guy lens, which means don’t even worry about the characters or the plot, and realize that a bunch of the jokes won’t work, but focus on the few solid jokes that The League brings in almost every episode.  I haven’t tried watching yet with that new attitude, but hopefully that will address my issues, or at least put them to the side.  The League falls into a lot of plotting traps, trying to outsmart itself and be Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm in terms of plots that weave together, and sometimes it goes for way too far over the top ridiculousness in its attempt at humor.  Honestly, though, systematically, I’m not sure there’s a guaranteed way to filter what works and what doesn’t; I think often a lot of the ideas seem very similar on the page, and while I could pick out a few losers right away, some just click, and some don’t.  I think the show has definitely lost a little bit of freshness since the first season, but there’s no serious serial elements or narrowing of subject matter that would lead to the show naturally getting tired quickly.  I think this is just what The League is; you watch it, you get some funny here and there, and try to just not worry about the rest.

29. Dexter

Bloodwork

A few more shows left in my ambivalent tier.  Dexter was pretty great in its early seasons, and even when it was great I wasn’t quite as big a fan as many, though I certainly wholeheartedly recommended the show to others.  This period ended with its excellent fourth season.  The fifth season was a notable step down, and the sixth season was out and out bad; if I had assembled this ranking early in 2012, Dexter would be even lower.  The seventh season was a comeback, but a relative one; Dexter may not be out and out done yet but it will never be the show it once was.  Many people think the seventh season was better than the fifth, but I disagree.  The season actually started out fairly well, and credit to Dexter’s writers for finally changing the status quo with a major storyline change at the very end of the sixth season which leads to change the dynamic for some of the characters.  That said, the season had a tremendous focus issue, a problem Dexter usually doesn’t have, since he’s usually paired against a major antagonist for the length of each season.  The most intriguing outside character was  strangely eliminated from the season just over halfway through, and took away a lot of the momentum the season had been building.  The other major developments were interesting but somewhat ham-handed in the way they were handled, and I’m just not as emotionally invested in the show for the big moments to mean as much as they would have to me, seasons ago.  All in all, I’m going to finish it out, but it’s a show that’s not on its A game, and really hoping to just finish out with its B-game.

28.  Veep

TV's Joe Biden

After I watched the first episode of Veep, I wasn’t sure I was going to continue.  After I watched the second episode, I wasn’t sure, nor after the third episode, either, until the fourth, when I pretty much decided it I was in for the season.  That wasn’t just because I had already gone almost halfway through the season, though that played a part, but it was also because the episodes did improve in quality as they went on and as the relationships between the characters and their banter seemed to build.  I”ve watched most of The Thick of It, Veep creator Armando Ianucci’s similar BBC show about the British government instead of the American one, and Veep is very similar in style.  The only downside is that Veep doesn’t have a proper equivalent to The Thick of It’s best character, the foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker.  While the schtick is more or less a version of similar incompetence and inappropriate language amongst our high-ranking political officials every episode, it was still frequently funny, though not as often and not as laugh out loud as I’d like a show of this tenor to be. It’s enjoyable enough to watch but I think there’s room for it to be a little bit better with all the same basic ideas in place with simply tighter writing and just knowing the cast’s strengths better after watching them for a year.

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Spring 2012 Review: Veep

3 May

Elaine Benes is the Veep

Some shows have forms of comedy that are very difficult to explain the concepts behind, while some shows have types of comedy that are far easier to describe.  The basic ideas behind Veep, I think are the latter.  Here’s the idea.  Veep is a half hour comedy about Vice President Selena Meyer, portrayed by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, and her work life, her professional comings and goings (it’s basically an office sitcom).  Veep is designed to be good of course, but it’s designed to make you laugh, not to speak to all manner of generational issues like Girls, or to keep up with dramatic soapy storylines like Entourage.  Curb Your Enthusiasm might be the closest modern HBO comedy parallel, though Veep exists in a much more realistic world, relative to Curb.

While the president is in theory competently working on important matters of state with a huge entourage while meeting influential leaders, the Veep is borderline incompetently toiling away at stupid things that don’t really matter with a shoddy cast of incapables (why has there never been a movie called “The Incapables”  I call it, I just need to come up with a premise).  First and foremost, that’s the grand joke of the series.  Take something highly serious seeming like WashingtonD.C., and politics, and the vice presidential office and make it a combination of mundane and ridiculous.  Show that this allegedly rarefied area is occupied by people who waste their time just like people in any boring office job.

Meyer’s staff includes her Chief of Staff, Amy (Anna Chlumsky, the titular girl in My Girl) who seems to be the responsible one, her body man, Gary (Arrested Development’s Toby Hale), who seems a little slow of mind and exists solely to help Meyer, even when he’s not really helping, and press secretary Mike (Matt Walsh – former Daily Show correspondent) who doesn’t always seem to be on the ball either.  In the pilot, she welcomes new hire, ambitious tool Dan, who all of her fellow employees decry as a little shit, but whom she hires because she feels that’s exactly what she needs.  Other characters include her executive assistant, Sue, and the white house liason, Jonah.  The joke with Jonah is that he’s not only super annoying, but that he exchanges maybe five words with the president in a week, but he’s still in charge or ordering around the vice president’s office from the president.

Wacky side character alert:  Sadly, no one stands out – everyone’s a little bit wacky – there’s no true straight man/woman, but no one is so far wackier than everyone else. Gary is probably the strangest, but it’s incompetence within reason, rather than impossible to believe.

Will I watch it again?  Yeah, I probably will.  It seems fairly episodic so I feel like I can just tune into one or two more without worrying for better or worse about getting sucked into a season-long plot.  As goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, the success of a show like this depends largely on its writing and the comedic timing of the actors;  I don’t know much else from the writers, but the actors certainly have it within them, so there’s reason to be hopeful for a successful show if not perhaps an all-time classic.

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Spring 2012 Preview and Predictions: HBO

5 Jan

(In order to meld the spirit of futile sports predictions with the high stakes world of the who-will-be-cancelled-first fall (now spring!) television season, I’ve set up a very simple system of predictions for how long new shows will last.  Each day, I’ll (I’m aware I switched between we and I) lay out a network’s new shows scheduled to debut in the fall (reality shows not included – I’m already going to fail miserably on scripted shows, I don’t need to tackle a whole other animal) with my prediction of which of three categories it will fall into.

These categories are:

1.  Renewal – show gets renewed

2.  13+ – the show gets thirteen or more episodes, but not renewed

3.  12- – the show is cancelled before 13

Spring note:  It’s a lot harder to analyze midseason shows as there’s no collective marketing campaigns going on at one time, as many of the shows start dates are spread (or are even unannounced for some)  Still, we’ll take partially educated guesses.  Also, they’re a lot less likely to get partial pick ups, so maybe that trade off will make it easier)

HBO will get its own edition this season.  HBO debuted only one show in the fall, but has five coming out at different points over the spring, one drama, and four comedies, two which are co-produced with foreign networks.

Luck – 1/29

 

Big guns are on board for this show.  It’s created by HBO regular David Milch, who was behind the three season Deadwood, and co-created one season failure John from Cincinnati.  He also co-created NYPD Blue almost twenty years ago.  Michael Mann directed the first episode.  Luck is about the niche world of horse racing and stars Dustin Hoffman as degenerate gambler Chester“Ace” Bernstein.  Dennis Farina, Nick Nolte, Jill Hennessey and Michael Gambon also star.

Verdict:  Renewal – I really hope it’s good.  I haven’t watched all of Deadwood, but I’ve liked what I’ve seen, and while a show about such a strange insular world sounds risky it also sounds interesting.

Life’s Too Short

Life’s Too Short is a show written and directed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and created by the two of them and famous dwarf actor Warwick Davis, star of Willow and Ewok Wicket from Return of the Jedi.  The show is a mockumentary, following an exaggerated version of Warwick Davis playing himself, as a dwarf who acts and runs a talent agency for small people.  Merchant and Gervais also appear as themselves.  A camera crew follows Davis around, promising classic Gervais and Merchant awkward comedy.

Verdict:  Renewal – cheating!  It’s a co-production with the BBC, where it aired this fall and it’s already been renewed for a second season airing in 2013.

Girls – sometime in April

I have an extremely limited amount of information about this series at my disposal.  Girls will be executively produced by Judd Apatow and is created by 25 year old Lena Durham who apparently made minor waves with film Tiny Furniture in 2010.  It’s about four girls in their twenties, and I read it billed, on one site, as the anti-Sex and the City.  Not in the constantly talking about sex way, as there’ll be lots of that.  More in the, instead of eating at fancy restaurants and buying expensive purses, they’ll be near broke.

Verdict: 12-  Honestly, I have no fucking clue.  HBO shows are far more likely to get second seasons than broadcast shows, but something’s got to get cancelled.

Angry Boys – 1/1

Co-produced by HBO and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Angry Boys is another mockumentary series, this time created by mockumentary veteran Australian Chris Lillies who has produced two mockumentary series before this one.  Lillies himself plays most of the important characters, including an American rapper (is blackface cool by now?), a champion surfer, a guard at a juvenile prison, and a Japanese mother.

Verdict:  Renewal – another cheat!  This was released in Australia nearly a year ago and is very popular there.  I can’t find anything about renewal, but unless they don’t want to continue or it’s a lot more expensive to film than it seems to be, international popularity may keep it afloat regardless of how it does in the US of A.

Veep – unscheduled

To refill their comedy stock after the comedy mass execution of ’11, HBO is throwing out a few options this spring.  In Veep, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss plays the Vice President of the US and it turns out the job isn’t quite as glamorous as it sounds.  Louis-Dreyfuss struggles with the day to day monotony of a post without much power.  Tony Hale (Buster of Arrested Development) and Anna Chlumsky (the titular girl in My Girl) co-star.

Verdict:  Renewal – Louis-Dreyfuss is talented enough and HBO will probably give her a better vehicle here than The New Adventures of Old Christine.  Plus, HBO needs the comedies.

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