Writers' revenge -- tops in TV

In this survey I’ll be commenting on the recent Emmy nominees for Outstanding Drama Series, work through some other quality television, and wind up with a strong recommendation for one series not nominated but certainly as good as any that were. 

Hollywood has a fabled history of scorn for the screenwriter, and his role in filmmaking.  (Forgive the pronoun, but gender disparity requires it.)  Not just the stories of writers like Faulkner and Fitzgerald being chewed up and spit out by the studio system, but look at the corpses of screenwriters that litter the landscape from Sunset Boulevard to The Player.  No more – that worm has turned.

The thematic thread running through my comments -- the rise to cultural prominence of the limited tv series, as a medium dominated by writers as showrunners – is derived partially from two books I’ve read recently: The Revolution Was Televised by Alan Sepinwall, and Difficult Men by Brett Martin, both of which cover the ground from The Sopranos to Breaking Bad.  Sepinwall is more reporter and critic, more comprehensive, while Martin is more writer himself, more impressionistic and given to storytelling.  Both are as readable as the series they discuss are watchable.  

I don’t object to Downton Abbey (MC-83, NFX) as a cultural phenomenon, but I don’t believe it’s a very good show, just posh Anglophilic soap opera.  I’m not very posh myself, but with an English mother I am as Anglophile as the next man, and I appreciate the appeal of soap opera as the engine that drives all the series I’m about to discuss -- coming to know characters through time, to see the changes they go through, and the changes they ring on a basic personality we know so well.  Nonetheless, this program illustrates my point -- Julian Fellowes was the screenwriter for Robert Altman’s Gosford Park, but now he runs the whole show and gets to call on all that BBC talent in heritage productions.  He’s skilled but opportunistic, without much of a coherent worldview beyond a hazy nostalgia for aristocratic living, and the series reflects that, however many people add their own skills to the production.

The BBC/PBS series I much prefer is Call the Midwife (MC-80, NFX), which derives an authentic authorial voice from the memoir on which it’s based (narration read by Vanessa Redgrave).  It’s about a group of nurses and nuns operating a childbirth clinic and outpatient services in the East End of London in the Fifties, sort of the flipside to Mike Leigh’s great film Vera Drake.  The show has an appealing cast of diverse women, and grapples with significant social and personal issues episode by episode.  It’s funny and moving by turns, and flavors its sentimentality with grit, never sacrificing believability.  The same cannot be said of another British import about a group of women at work in the same period, The Bletchley Circle (MC-73, NFX) – these women worked in codebreaking during WWII, but are now thwarted housewives and the like.  They band together to catch a serial killer of other women, and over three hour-long episodes, drag out every woman-in-jeopardy trope available, hang all plausibility.

The better recent evocation of the Downton Abbey era and setting was HBO’s adaptation of the Ford Madox Ford novel, Parade’s End (MC-73, NFX), which makes little concession to viewers’ desires or understanding, but does stand as a literary monument to the passing of a certain aristocratic style in the crucible of WWI.  Benedict Cumberbatch is an upper class civil servant who goes to the front, while his wife Rebecca Hall gallivants around, and he pines for the sweet suffragette Adelaide Clemens (a perfect cross between Michelle Williams and Carey Mulligan).  The whole seems authentic even when it remains unintelligible.  In some ways this is to Downton what The Wire was to Law & Order -- it’s work to watch.  This one lacks the ultimate payoff for sticking with it, but still, the acting and the production design make it worth looking at for its duration.

To return to the Emmy nominees, I have to say that Homeland (MC-96, NFX) is out of consideration for me, having sacrificed all believability in the course of its second season, revealing its DNA from 24 and leading me to take a rather violent turn against the show.  I still think Claire Danes and Damien Lewis are terrific, and even Mandy Patinkin, but if the writers don’t care about the integrity of their characters, why should I?  They’re just puppets being moved around a storyboard to provide dramatic beats.  I really don’t care what happens next, and that’s quite a fall for a show that riveted my attention for a season and a half.

The Netflix-produced House of Cards (MC-76, NFX) almost reached the same point, when a venal, power-greedy politician turned to hands-on murder, but somehow I weathered that blow to credibility and wound up impressed with the series overall.  If you thought Congress’s approval rating could go no lower than its current 9% or whatever, wait till you meet these denizens of the Beltway.  No heroes here, but at least the villains have multiple layers.  Kevin Spacey is denied his rightful spot in the victorious administration, so he uses his position in Congress to manipulate matters behind the scenes.  As his wife, the ever-amazing Robin Wright is just as hungry for power as the head of an environmental NGO.  It takes two great actors to give this power couple a complexity beyond mendacity.  Betokening a shift in primacy both from film to television, and from networks to new content providers -- in this case Netflix --Beau Willimon’s adaptation of a British series enlisted David Fincher to direct the first episodes.  The production was impeccable, and the instantaneous release of all 13 episodes completed the evolution of tv series that can be read in the manner of a novel.  I’d definitely watch a second season, but now we turn to three serious contenders for the title of best current series.

Though the showrunners (David Benioff and D.B. Weiss) are hardly household names, HBO’s Game of Thrones (MC-90, NFX) does celebrate the primacy of writers in its devotion to the George R. R. Martin novels on which it’s based, and they do an excellent job of balancing multiple storylines from his immense series of books.  Don’t let an aversion to sword & sorcery, dungeons & dragons, and other medieval fantasies steer you away from this show, if you are at all susceptible to the lure of soap opera, or even to opera without the soap.  Whether it’s a carefully nurtured attachment to characters, or grand and lurid spectacle, you will find here a bounty on which to feast your eyes.  You may never sort out the Lannisters and Starks, Tyrells and Targaryens, but you’ll come to recognize a colorful and absorbing swirl of characters vying for the Iron Throne.  Whether in Washington or Westeros, the lust for power never gets old, nor the power of lust.  But I have to say, this must be one of the worst series to drop into at random.  Commit to it, or pass it by.  Some episodes are better than others, but the whole is overpowering.

Mad Men (MC-87, NFX) has even greater variation between episodes that make me say “Wow!” and episodes that make me say “Huh?”   But on balance I am determined to keep watching Matthew Weiner unfold his vision of the Sixties, from the perspective of Madison Avenue and its denizens.  Again with the characters – Don, Peggy, Roger, Joan, Pete, Sally, et al. – you just want to know what they will do next.  Again with the stylish design, and evocation of another period and place.  The setting in an era I lived through, with reference points that I shared, adds to the appeal.  Matt Weiner and his Don Draper are archetypal “difficult men,” in direct descent from David Chase and his Tony Soprano -- all men impossible to deal with, but necessary to pay attention to.

The same applies to Walter White in Breaking Bad (MC-99, NFX), though apparently not to his creator, Vince Gilligan, reputed to run the happiest writers room in Hollywood.  I will have more to say after the series-concluding episodes, which begin to air August 11 on AMC.  If that date is not already marked on your calendar, you ought to go back and catch up with the 54 prior episodes, now streaming on Netflix.  I’m working my way through all of them a second time to prepare for the story’s climax, of the meek chemistry teacher turned power-mad drug overlord – Mr. Chips to Scarface, in the off-cited pitch phrase -- and finding it a surprisingly rewarding experience to watch with foreknowledge of how everything will unfold.  That really enhances one’s appreciation for what Vince and his writers bring to the table, in terms of both imagination and a deep collective understanding of the characters and their histories.  There’s potent acting across the board and a great setting in Albuquerque, rendered with thrilling visual effects, along with phenomenal, fearless, and funny storytelling.  Breaking Bad is better than good – it’s superbad.

On the topic of new platforms for original programming, the Sundance Channel aired a couple of well-regarded series this year.  In another interesting move from film to television, Jane Campion directed Top of the Lake (MC-86, NFX), a police procedural with a fantastically picturesque setting in New Zealand.  Elizabeth Moss plays the lead detective, in an interesting departure from Mad Men’s Peggy.  Peter Mullan is thrillingly intense as the patriarch of a criminal clan.  It’s all very moody and atmospheric, but didn’t repay me enough for seven hours of investigating yet more violence against young women.  I just don’t need to see any more progeny of Twin Peaks.

Rectify (MC-81, NFX), however, struck me as something quite different.  Ray McKinnon’s series, set to come back for a second season, follows a man who returns from the dead -- or at least from 19 years on death row, exonerated by DNA testing for the murder of his high school sweetheart -- and tries to fit back into his family and his small hometown in Georgia, where his guilt is still generally accepted.  Returned to a life where everything is disorienting, circumstances familiar but utterly transformed, the central character is played with stunned, unfiltered receptivity by Aden Young.  Very slow-paced but meaningfully so, with great visual acuity, and a profound appreciation of the protagonist’s viewpoint, back in a world he never expected to see again, back to his teenage self in a weird sort of time travel, transformed by two decades of reading in solitary confinement.  The show is well-populated with convincing actors, but two stand out, Abigail Spencer as the steadfast sister, and Adelaide Clemens (again) as a very sympathetic sister-in-law.   If you’ve got the patience for these six episodes, it will be repaid.

In comedy categories, Arrested Development on Netflix (MC-71, NFX) and Veep on HBO (MC-75, NFX) got some Emmy recognition, but I want to point your attention in a different direction.  I looked forward to the revival of Arrested Development for a fourth season after a decade’s delay, since I had belatedly become a fan of the first three, but I watched several episodes without getting involved at all.  Veep I like okay, but not nearly as much as the British series on which it’s based.  So I point to yet another platform for viewing, Hulu-Plus, which has exclusive US rights to The Thick of It (MC-90, Hulu).  The show has an hilarious ensemble of political types, in a British cabinet office, but becomes transcendent in the foul-mouthed director of communications played by Peter Capaldi, who takes invective and insult to levels not heard since Shakespeare.  Hulu also had an exclusive on the latest season of The Peep Show (NFX, Hulu), which certainly came up to the level of the previous seasons, which are available on Netflix.  I urge you to give it a try – you’ll quickly find it either quite annoying or just about the funniest show you’ve ever seen.

And now I kick my recommendation engine into overdrive, and bend your ear about the best show you might never have heard of.  Justified (MC-90, NFX) garnered no Emmy nominations for the FX channel, but I would rank it right at the top of the heap, alongside Breaking Bad.  Indeed, I was motivated to give BrBa another run-through because I found the experience of re-watching the first three seasons of Justified so compelling, as it has remained through the fourth.  The whole is very much of a piece, the product of a singular voice and vision, which are owed to the original source material in Elmore Leonard and to the “What would Elmore do?” showrunning of Graham Yost.  Leonard has had his books turned into any number of crime films or westerns, but this show is a perfect summation of his long career -- humorously demotic and tersely poetic, an elevation of low-lifes into figures worthy of classical comedy or tragedy.  Leading an attractive cast consistently superb in character development and timing of delivery, Timothy Olyphant plays Raylan Givens, a U.S. Marshal exiled back to his home in Harlan County for being quick and deadly on the trigger, though always with some justification.  Walton Goggins is transfixing as his nemesis and doppelganger; they came up through the coal mines together, both scions of Harlan crime families.  The whole series revolves around issues of clan and brotherhood, and Oedipal conflicts between fathers and sons.  (Or in the especially memorable second season, mother and sons, as the story centers on Margo Martindale as the legendary Mags Bennett).  In a nifty back and forth, Elmore Leonard reclaimed his characters by writing a book called Raylan, and I relished that as well as the tv series.  Besides Olyphant and a number of other actors, this show also owes a good deal in tone and complexity to David Milch’s Deadwood, a very powerful line of descent.  If you don’t enjoy Justified, then never take my word about another show.  As with Breaking Bad, if you can handle the gore, the wit will keep you coming back.

(P.S. – between writing and posting this, I got the news of Elmore Leonard’s death in Detroit at the age of 87.  What a legacy of literary wit he left!  He will be missed.  Here’s the New York Times obituary and a subsequent appreciation, of which there will be many more in coming days.)