TV picks from past year

Before this blog gets away from me altogether (see here and here and here for others that have gotten more of my attention lately), I want to catch up with a few categories of viewing, starting with television series.  Guided by Metacritic’s compilation of critics’ top ten lists, I survey my favorite tv series, since my last round-up.

I may be getting obnoxious here, but I have to insist – if you take the medium seriously at all, you need to watch Rectify (MC-99, NFX, SUND)!  Never mind that the recent series finale moved Rectify into the #2 spot on my list of all-time favorite tv series, right behind The Wire and edging out Breaking Bad; no, that’s just my opinion (and that of the few others who have actually watched it – check the Metacritic score), but what I know for certain is that any viewer who watches this show with open eyes, open ears, and an open heart will come away in possession of an enhanced capacity for human understanding and empathy.  And if you can embrace its skeptical spirituality, or spiritual skepticism, its commitment to uncertainty, with the possibility of hope, well then, you’ll be able to face the future with some of the “cautious optimism” that show creator Ray McKinnon preaches.

Okay, sure, the show is slow and sad, lingering lugubriously over troubled relationships and the minutiae of everyday life.  But it’s beautiful and true, a moody minor-key masterpiece of melodrama.  Profoundly somber, it’s just as profoundly humorous.  The show’s generosity of spirit extends to a wide range of characters, authentically placed in a small Georgia town. 

The ensemble acting is outstanding across the board, above all Aden Young in the lead role, a young man released on DNA evidence after 19 years on death row, for the murder of his teenage girlfriend.  So there’s a murder mystery buried here, but if that’s what you’re after, you’re going to be sorely disappointed.  The real mystery is in the minds and hearts of all the characters:  J. Smith-Cameron as his mother, Abigail Spencer as his sister, Clayne Crawford as his stepbrother, Adelaide Clemens as his sister-in-law, Luke Kirby as his lawyer.  And that’s just the inner circle; the whole town seems to be drawn into the story, with every character seen in the round, given dimension and depth rather than caricatured or categorized.

Meditative and melancholy, this show might seem off-putting at first glance, but trust me (and nearly every tv critic), it’s ultimately very funny and uplifting, all at the same time.  Maureen Ryan of Variety gave the show an impassioned send-off, but since that piece would come across as the ultimate spoiler for the uninitiated, I will just appropriate some her well-chosen words for the attributes of Rectify:  perfect control of tone, luminosity, quiet gravity, complexity, subtlety, delicacy, tenderness.

I want to enter the strongest possible recommendation that you watch the first three seasons, now available on Netflix streaming.  That’s actually a better experience that watching the latest episodes on Sundance; even if you are able to FF through commercials, it disrupts the signal virtue of Rectify, the constancy of its mood and tone, and its total immersion in the mindset of its protagonist, along with the place he lives and the people he lives with.  Ray McKinnon is a genius, and I will avidly follow whatever he does next.

In my view, The Crown (MC-81, NFX) is by far the best original programming to come from Netflix so far, the perfect antithesis to House of Cards.  Though I confess to hereditary Anglophilia, I’m far from a royalist -- but Peter Morgan certainly knows how to make Queen Elizabeth II interesting.  He did it with Helen Mirren in The Queen, and here he does it with Claire Foy as Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign.  Ms. Foy was positively Dickensian as Little Dorrit and royally imperious (until headless) as Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall, but surpasses herself in combining both meek maiden and willful sovereign into the character of Elizabeth Windsor, mainly through speaking silences.  Though the production values of this series are impeccable, the most amazing thing about the cooperation of The Crown with The Crown was not the astonishing location access, but the Palace’s seeming lack of interference with the content, which puts a very human face on the royal family indeed.  The realism of setting enhances the prevailing realism of character and emotion.  John Lithgow is appropriately impressive and many-sided as Churchill, and a host of familiar faces from BBC prestige productions inhabit every role convincingly.  The stories deal with real history in a way that is both informative and compelling.  The sense of genuine politics going on (painfully absent from our own recent election) is so palpable that my best comparison is to the Danish TV series Borgen, with Sidse Babett Knudson dazzling as the female PM (in fact, I strongly advise watching either series for those wistful for female governance).  This is a vast elaboration of Morgan’s play, The Audience, which dealt with the Queen’s private weekly audience with PMs up through Margaret Thatcher and beyond, so we can look forward to five more seasons of this sumptuous but sensible spectacle.

One underlying theme of this round-up will be the surprising emergence of FX as the most consistently creative station on your TV dial (do any TVs still have a dial?).  Justified was the first FX show that I really committed to, but by now it’s no surprise that the network’s Emmy haul rivals HBO’s, or that it has become my most watched network, and that’s even while taking a pass on some of their best regarded shows, such as The Americans.

Exhibit A is The People v. O.J. Simpson (MC-90, NFX, FX).  Now at the time, the Simpson trial was an unfortunate media sensation that I tried to block out of my consciousness as much as the recent presidential election, so I’m surprised how much of my attention it commanded two decades later, not just with this brilliantly acted, written, and directed docudrama, but with the equally brilliant and ramified documentary series O.J.: Made in America (MC-96, NFX, ESPN), so much wider and deeper than you would expect from a sports station.  Both series succeeded in making the trial and the social context, and the various characters, more emblematic of wider concerns than I could have imagined going in.  Both were less about Simpson’s guilt or innocence than the vexed issues of race in America, especially the relationship between the police and black lives, and thus absolutely relevant to today.  Both series come, astonishingly, with my highest recommendation, well worth the sixteen hours spent to watch both.

I bailed on season one of Fargo (MC-96, NFX, FX) almost as quickly as on The Americans, but over-the-top reviews led me to give season two – with a different cast, timeframe, and story – a second chance, and I’m glad I did.  It was violent as hell, but so very well done, with terrific humor, brilliant acting, and a real sense of style.  With the same askance viewpoint as the Coen brothers’ original film, the second season of the tv series leaps back to 1979.  Here Patrick Wilson is the decent and smarter-than-he-seems state trooper, and Ted Danson is the sheriff, his father-in-law.  A delightful Kirsten Dunst and befuddled Jesse Plemons are a young couple that somehow get tied up in a triple-murder at a Waffle Hut in Minnesota, which involves a Fargo crime family led by Jean Smart, and gunmen from the KC mob.  If you can take the blood, the laughs and characters will certainly keep you coming back.

FX is also home to two innovative and excellent half-hour comedies that debuted in Fall 2016.  Atlanta (MC-90, FX) got the most attention, deservedly so as Donald Glover’s offbeat look into Southern hiphop culture fearlessly went off in many unexpected directions.  It was a lesson in unfamiliar settings, characters, and approaches, making a virtue out of never letting us know where it was actually going next.  I appreciated its strangeness, but actually preferred the more familiar Better Things (MC-79, FX), with Louis C.K. pitching in with Pamela Adlon to tell the story of her working single-mom relationship with her three growing daughters, each of whom is amusingly yet realistically portrayed.  The series was acidulous yet charming, with hugs exchanged and lessons learned, but genuine conflicts expressed.

In its second season, Better Call Saul (MC-85, NFX, AMC) definitively emerged from the shadow of Breaking Bad, from which it was spun off.  Vince Gilligan’s new series is decidedly its own thing, and we’re in no hurry to see Slippin’ Jimmy morph into Saul Goodman, and meet up with Walter White.  Bob Odenkirk is terrifically good/bad as the charming scoundrel, and Rhea Seehorn steps up admirably as Kim, his fellow lawyer and love interest.  Jonathan Banks remains stolid and solid as the imperturbable fixer Mike.  The show is admirably layered with humor, nuance, feeling, and observation, and remains among my favorites.

AMC seems to be a network that displays some patience in letting shows develop depth and build an audience.  At first glance Halt and Catch Fire (MC-69/83, NFX, AMC) seems as reverse-engineered as the IBM PC clone whose development the first season follows, with parts appropriated from Mad Men and Breaking Bad in a kludgy mix.  Recent critical momentum for its third season led me to its first two on Netflix.  There was supposedly a big jump in quality in the second season, so I started there and was gradually drawn in enough to go back and watch the first, because I wanted to know where these characters came from, as well as where they’re going.  By focusing on the tech industry in the 80s, Halt makes a dramatic bookend with Silicon Valley.  Lee Pace is the Don-Draper-ish leading man, mysterious, driven, and charismatic.  Scoot McNairy is the brilliant but messed-up computer engineer exploited by the Jobs-like super-salesman.  Kerry Bishé is his wife, equally brilliant in tech but consigned to cleaning up other people’s messes, including those of punk prodigy Mackenzie Davis, a coding genius with dubious people skills.  Characters to care about, if not exactly to like.  The framework of the first season reminded me of Tracy Kidder’s book Soul of a New Machine, from the same era; the second delved into the development of online gaming and chat, among other things; in the third, I gather, everyone moves from Dallas to San Francisco; there will be a fourth, despite low ratings, in the hopes that the whole series will eventually find an informed audience. Without hammering it home, the show constantly generates moments of recognition, pointing to the differences (and continuities) in tech over the span of thirty years.  (BTW, of techie type series, I didn’t get more than an episode or two into the second season of Mr. Robot, after being prodded through the first.)

[Lots more after the break!]

Coming to the Clark

Don't think I've abandoned this blog -- I have extensive round-ups of the past year in movies and tv in process, and will post here soon.  I regret that it seems unlikely that the Cinema Salon film club will ever return to the Clark, but I will continue to offer advice and comment to the cinematically curious through this blog.  So if you're an avid and adventurous film viewer, return here for recommendations.  Meanwhile, don't miss this film series at the Clark, which may turn out to be my "last picture show":

“Colors of Japan: Cinematic Impressions”

Come revel in the colorful beauty of Japan, in cinematography as well as printmaking, in this film series presented by the Clark on Sunday afternoons in its newly-renovated auditorium, in conjunction with “Japanese Impressions,” the concurrent exhibition of color woodblock prints.  (All films in Japanese with English subtitles.)

Sunday, January 22, 1:30 pm:  The Makioka Sisters (1983, 140 min.).  Kon Ichikawa’s lyrical adaptation of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel follows four sisters through the cycle of seasons in the late 1930s.  The elder two are married, but the passionate youngest must wait for the reluctant third to wed.  Their family is in the kimono business, but war is on the horizon, and tradition is about to give way to modernity.  This graceful study of changing times and fading customs is rendered in vivid and evocative color.

Sunday, January 29, 1:30 pm:  Gate of Hell (1953, 89 min.)  Teinosuke Kinugasa directs one of the first color films from Japan, winner of Academy Awards for best foreign film and best costume design.  This feast for the eyes, set amidst dynastic conflict in twelfth-century Japan, portrays the passion of an imperial warrior for a married lady-in-waiting.  The acting will seem stylized to Western eyes, but the lavish pageantry sweeps the viewer along, and the colors are a wonder to behold.

Sunday, February 5, 1:30 pm:  Kwaidan (1965, 183 min.)  Masaki Kobayashi adapts four ghost stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn in the 19^th century, with a fine eye for the colors and themes of that era’s printmaking masters.  From the credit sequence images of ink in solution throughout the surreal settings of four separate period folktales, Kobayashi delivers a rapturous immersion in the colors of the Floating World.  This version restores one of the haunting stories cut from the initial American release.

Sunday, February 26, 1:30 pm:  Equinox Flower (1958, 118 min.)  Late in his career, the superlative Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu turns to color for the first time, and creates a film in which color -- red in particular -- is a prime character in its own right.  As always with Ozu, the story is about a father dealing with the marriage of his daughter, and of the confrontation of family and tradition with a changing society, which as always yields to the profound and humorous harmony of the director’s vision.