Though I gave up DirecTV satellite service many months ago, I have been keeping up with some favorite shows through various providers, watching some with my daughter who still has cable with premium channels, some streaming on Netflix and some on Hulu. It’s a truism that a sizable number of the best films being made today are television series, and they continue to make up a large portion of my viewing time and pleasure. Looking back over the past several months, here are the standouts.
AMC continues to set the pace, with the fifth season of Mad Men (MC-88, NFX) living up to expectation, and the first half of the fifth and final season of Breaking Bad (MC-99, NFX) exceeding even high expectations. By now you know whether you like to get into a retro groove with Mad Men, whether you buy into its premise of Sixties style, but the fifth season delivers its typical entertainment, with some highs and lows, but generally very good. Breaking Bad, however, just keeps getting better and better, and it will be difficult to wait a year for its conclusion, which cannot help but be devastating. Vince Gilligan has over the years delivered brilliantly on his premise of “turning Mr. Chips into Scarface,” while delivering single episodes that are imaginatively brilliant and emotionally powerful. You ought to watch, and must watch from the beginning, not in random episodes.
HBO has definitely ceded the crown for best tv miniseries overall, but still has Game of Thrones (MC-88, NFX) on a pedestal in its second season. Who knew sword and sorcery stuff could be so telling, faux-medieval dynastic struggle so compelling? Balancing multiple storylines and a huge cast of characters with amplitude and intelligibility, against the mammoth backdrop of George R. R. Martin’s immense series of novels, this super soap opera delivers empathy and horror, familiarity and shock, through topnotch acting and production values. Again, start at the beginning and immerse yourself in a world at first strange and alien, but ultimately revealing of hidden depths.
For me, Boardwalk Empire reveals no hidden depths, and I will watch the beginning of its new season on sufferance, willing to be drawn in by Steve Buscemi and Kelly MacDonald, but likely to tune out. As I did to The Newsroom, which had a pretty good cast and some moments that conveyed the excitement of the news business, but in which the balance of good and bad in Aaron Sorkin tipped decisively toward the bad in his depiction of women. (Speaking of bailing out on shows that I once enjoyed, I gave up on The Big C in the middle of its third season; I still like Laura Linney, but the show lurched toward the preposterous once she went into remission.)
I did watch two new HBO half-hour comedies through their first seasons. I remain ambivalent about Girls (MC-87, NFX), liking Lena Dunham both as actress and defining sensibility, but finding the other three girls less than captivating and the whole Sex and the City update a little bit squirm-inducing. I liked Veep (MC-72, NFX) and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the title role, but prefer to go back to the source, Armando Ianucci’s original British series, The Thick of It (see below).
Sure to put HBO back in my good graces, the third season of David Simon’s Treme (MC-87, NFX) starts this month, though it is liable to be overshadowed by Showtime’s second season of Homeland (MC-91, NFX), which comes back with a Presidential endorsement as Obama’s favorite show. If you have the nerves for it, you should catch up with the first season, now out on DVD, and marvel at the performances of Claire Danes as a combustible CIA agent, and Damien Lewis as an American soldier turned Islamic infiltrator.
The trail of Damien Lewis led me to the 2002 BBC adaptation of The Forsyte Saga (NFX), in which he continues to keep his emotions enigmatic and under wraps as Soames Forsyte, the man of property who wants to control all he surveys, starting with his trophy wife, played by Gina McKee. Rupert Graves is the nicer Forsyte cousin, Corin Redgrave is his father, and Ioan Gruffudd is the dashing young architect with designs on Soames’ property. A second season carries the saga into the next generation, but remains integral to the central story. Well done, old chap, I must say.
Always a sucker for British heritage productions, I found it eminently worthwhile to re-watch on a good-looking dvd the ne plus ultra of Jane Austen adaptations, the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice (IMDB, NFX) with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth heading an impeccable cast. This I think is the series that raised Masterpiece Theater to more film-like production values, and it’s really worthwhile to see it on a newer, bigger tv to appreciate the detailed depth of field. It’s a lot more than theater on video, and truer to the book and the period than any other adaptation, with the brightest of Elizabeths and the hunkiest of Darcys pitting their pride and their prejudice against each other.
I knew just enough about the English Civil War to follow, but not enough to quibble with The Devil’s Whore (released on these primmer shores as The Devil’s Mistress, 2008, NFX), a bodice-ripper for sure but one with a rare respect for history, and really an amazing cast, with Dominic West (McNulty of The Wire) as Cromwell and Peter Capaldi (Malcolm Tucker of The Thick of It) as King Charles I, plus Michael Fassbender as a Leveller leader and Andrea Riseborough as his fictional wife, calumniated in the title. John Simms stands out as a mercenary with a heart of gold, who turns against the men he fought with when they usurp power.
Another British tv series that belatedly became a favorite is Doc Martin (2004-to date, NFX), in which Martin Clunes plays a high-powered London surgeon who develops a phobia about blood and winds up as a GP in a beautiful seaside village in Cornwall, a brilliant and committed doctor with no people skills at all. With hilarious consistency, he fails to notice what people are saying or feeling, while monitoring their symptoms. There’s a comic romance, all sorts of familial complications, and a range of townsfolk to keep the proceedings sprightly through 37 episodes so far.
Netflix temporarily lost streaming rights to Doc Martin while we were right in the middle of watching, so we had to sign up for Hulu to continue, and that turned out to be worth the eight bucks a month. First off, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert play better on the tv than on the computer. Then we were able catch up with the fourth season of Parks and Recreation, still one of the sweetest and sharpest of sitcoms, but moreover, Hulu has an exclusive on Armando Iannucci’s unexpurgated foul-mouthed political classic, The Thick of It (2005 to date, MC-90, Hulu). This British political series takes cursing way beyond Shakespeare, primarily in the fearsome communications director played by Peter Capaldi. But really the whole cast is great in this antithesis of The West Wing, where the political players talk just as fast, but instead of making coherent policy points, they break new ground in the art of insult and intimidation, much of it so breathtaking and Scots-inflected that you will need to back up and listen to it again. Once I went through the first three seasons, I went back and re-watched the movie spin-off, In the Loop (2009, NFX), and liked it much more, now that the characters are so familiar. A fourth season is now underway, exclusively on Hulu though linkable through IMDB, with our old Labor friends out, and the new coalition in power.
Hulu also scores point for its original programming with Up to Speed (2012, IMDB), an offbeat travel program centered around quirky tour guide Speed Levitch. It happens to be co-produced by Richard Linklater and Alex Lipschultz, my daughter’s boyfriend, so give it a try if you have the chance (I’d start with the last episode of the first six.) Hulu’s other great resource is movies from The Criterion Collection, including many titles not on DVD.
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