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!]

Turning to HBO shows, Game of Thrones (MC-73) remains not among my favorites, but among my guilty pleasures.  It’s absurd but sumptuous, with a wealth of character, location, and bravado.  I don’t believe a minute of it, but can’t stop watching.  Of its Sunday partners, Veep (MC-88) has somewhat worn out its welcome, now that Julia Louis-Dreyfus is Prez, and Armando Iannucci has left the show he created.  I sensed the shark being jumped when Selena had sex with her VP, and the raunch became progressively less funny.  By now, I think Silicon Valley (MC-90) is by far the better show, more humorous and more serious at the same time.  Thomas Middleditch and cohort are reliably sharp and hilarious.

In the vein of half-hour comedies, High Maintenance (MC-81, HBO) successfully negotiated the transition from micro-budget web series to regular HBO feature, with some ups and downs, but a terrific peak in episode 3, seen from the perspective of a dog.  As a drop-in on an assortment of contemporary Brooklyn types, all customers of The Guy, a bike-riding weed-dealer, this show has sociological as well as entertainment value, rolled up in one tasty joint.  HBO GO now has all the web episodes as well as the broadcast.

While one episode was enough to tell me I couldn’t be bothered with Westworld, HBO bracketed the year with two high-quality limited series.  Recently The Night Of (MC-90, NFX, HBO) captured and held my attention.  With Richard Price and Steve Zaillian as writing and directing team, I expected no less.  The level of observation and reportage, wit and characterization, twists of plot and expectation, are all top-notch.  The story and setting are not unique, but seen with depth and breadth.  The police procedural is handled smoothly and acutely, more interested in truth to life than story mechanics, taking time to sustain a mood and probe a situation.  The acting also rises to the occasion, with Riz Ahmed as the Pakistani student from Queens who appropriates his father’s cab for a night of adventure in Manhattan, which goes from dream to nightmare in the blink of an eye.  John Turturro is the sad-sack, bottom-feeding lawyer who rises to his defense.  Michael K. Williams (Omar forever!) is the master con who takes the naïve student under his wing, for survival on Rikers Island.  Bill Camp and Jeannie Berlin also stand out as detective and DA.  This series is as interested in the sociology of crime and justice systems as The Wire.

Speaking of which, I have to take note of David Simon’s latest, Show Me a Hero (MC-85, NFX, HBO), from a while back.  For me David Simon is the gold standard of TV drama.  Everybody says – and in this case “everybody” is right – that The Wire is the best television series ever.  I confirmed that ranking for myself by re-watching its entirety, alongside Breaking Bad, before too many all-time-best superlatives got tossed this way or that.  BrBa is supremely clever entertainment, but The Wire is a good deal more (and by now, Rectify has squeezed in between them).

Simon’s subsequent work never reaches quite that high, but overall forms a Himalayan profile, with the latest as a minor peak that would be major in any other range.  While The Wire was mythic, Generation Kill immersive, and Tremé alternately muckraking and celebratory, Show Me a Hero remains reportorial.  It’s a significant story, clearly told, about a very young mayor of Yonkers, elected in 1987 as an opponent of desegregated public housing, who becomes a reluctant supporter and advocate, while having his life and career consumed by the controversy.  As Mayor Nick Wasicsko, Oscar Isaac is, as usual, compelling, but as with Baltimore or New Orleans, Simon requires a stand-out cast to populate his broad portrait of Yonkers, led by the likes of Catherine Keener and Winona Ryder.  Backed by Bruce Springsteen songs, this is an authentic drama of democratic governance, if not quite the tragedy the title implicitly promises.

There’s definitely a taste of authentic governance (which we all hunger for these days) in All the Way (MC-78, NFX, HBO), about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Bryan Cranston is uncannily evocative as LBJ, a role he perfected on stage before filming, and Anthony Mackie also effective as MLK.  In supporting roles, familiar faces intimately recall other familiar faces, e.g. Bradley Whitford as HHH, and Melissa Leo as Ladybird.  Jay Roach directs his third HBO political drama, from Robert Shenkkan’s adaptation of his own play.

In the same vein, Confirmation (MC-72, NFX, HBO) tells a familiar story about how we got to the unfortunate place we are now, with good if not revelatory performances from Wendell Pierce as Clarence Thomas and Kerry Washington as Anita Hill.

Moving on from HBO, I don’t watch much on Amazon, except for two of my favorite half-hour comedies, and I don’t mean Transparent (MC-90, AMZ), of which I realized I’d seen enough, one or two episodes into its third season.  On the other hand, the second season of Catastrophe (MC-87, AMZ) left me eagerly anticipating the next six episodes, as soon as the writing-acting team of Sharon Horgan and Rob Doherty can turn them out.  They successfully negotiate a big transition to married life in the second season, in a manner that remains raunchy, hilarious, and true to life.  Trust me, if you can handle blue humor, this is the one to watch. 

Taking a similar approach, almost as successfully, is another Amazon import from Britain, Fleabag (MC-88, AMZ), in which Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes and acts out the story of a rather desperate and self-destructive young woman, wringing humor out of troubled relationships and grief, in a way that veers from the disgusting to the poignant.  Stick with its six episodes, and you’ll be rewarded.

[Late addition:  Tig Notaro's One Mississippi (MC-77, AMZ) works in a similar vein of ruefully humorous autobiography, and is nearly as good.  The documentary Tig (MC-89, NFX) is a very welcome accompaniment.  Check out either, and you're likely to get hooked on her droll, deadpan comedy with depth.]

Meanwhile over on Netflix, I haven’t yet run out of patience with The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (MC-82, NFX), largely because of the appeal of Ellie Kemper in the title role, and Tina Fey’s writing and guest appearance as Kimmy’s messed-up therapist.  The nonstop, inconsequential jokiness can wear you out after a half-hour, but as an occasional dip into weirdness, it’s amusing and even occasionally touching.

Netflix also offers some stellar British imports, of which my highest recommendation goes to Black Mirror (MC-82, NFX).  In each discrete episode of Charlie Brooker’s update of The Twilight Zone, current technologies are projected just far enough into the future to become mind-blowing but frighteningly real.  (Did “The Waldo Moment” forecast Trump?)  If you google “black mirror episodes,” you can find dozens of 1 through 13 rankings, all different, or for viewer rankings, see IMDB.  I would suggest that if you want a wake-up slap to the face, start with the very first episode, “The National Anthem,” but if you want a gentler introduction go with “Be Right Back” or “San Junipero.”  No one will think that every episode is top-notch, but good, bad, or indifferent, each is a trip.

Peaky Blinders (IMDB, NFX) is a well-done gangster family saga set in Birmingham in the years after World War I, which owes a lot to The Godfather, but even more to its star Cillian Murphy and his penetrating blue eyes.  Steven Knight’s creation has lots of gritty atmosphere and family drama, violence and romance, and a terrific anachronistic soundtrack of songs by the likes of Nick Cave and P J Harvey, not previously familiar to me but surprisingly effective.  I felt it running out of gas a bit in the eagerly-anticipated third season, but nonetheless it was renewed for two more.  Worth catching up with.

On the other hand, I thought Happy Valley (MC-84, NFX) decidedly improved in its second season.  Created by Sally Wainwright and starring Sarah Lancashire, both coming over from Last Tango in Halifax, it also shares a Yorkshire setting, as it follows a grandmotherly police sergeant in pursuit of creepy rapists and serial killers.  That would usually fall under my boycott on any more such plots, but the brilliance of the second season comes in the pointed dialogue between the world-weary protagonist and her sister, her friend, and her protégé, all authentic female relationships.

Here are two more British historical series I can recommend, if you like that sort of thing.  The Last Kingdom (MC-78, NFX) is rather like GoT without the dragons and magic, and with a more realistic picture of the “Dark Ages,” as Alfred (eventually to be “the Great”) tries to hang on to the Saxon kingdom of Wessex while the Danes are taking over most of England.  I caught up with Desperate Romantics (2009, IMDB, NFX) on the off-chance the Clark might someday have another Pre-Raphaelite exhibition and tie-in this series about the Brotherhood.  Aidan Turner (better known as “Poldark”) plays Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Tom Hollander is John Ruskin, in a rendition that seemed plausible (and entertaining) enough to me, but would probably have art historians tearing their hair and rending their garments.

I’m speaking to Borgen devotees here – who are pining for more of that smart, sexy political drama from Denmark, an answer to West Wing and antidote to House of Cards (though honestly, the latter seems less preposterous by the day) – the rest of you should just go watch that show.  For you confirmed fans of Danish PM Birgitte Nyborg, however, let me call your attention to Occupied (IMDB, NFX), a Norwegian series that makes a fascinating compare-and-contrast exercise, both aesthetically and politically.  Norway elects a Green government that decides to end oil production and concentrate on an innovative energy break-through, but Russia intervenes (with EU complicity) to take over the oil fields and keep them pumping.  It’s an intriguing premise that plays out in complicated ways, with an obvious debt to its Danish predecessor.

One last Netflix series to recommend is Michael Pollan’s Cooked (IMDB, NFX).  Since Botany of Desire, he has been my go-to guy for understanding food.  In the four episodes of this informative and well-made series – Fire, Water, Air, Earth – he demonstrates the ways that cultures old and new have processed food.  In the Air episode, Berkshire Mountain Bakery is featured, and as a consequence I have become a regular customer of their nutritious and delicious breads.

I couldn’t complete my review of the year in tv without mentioning Daily Show alums who now have must-watch shows of their own.  Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal (MC-84) on TBS and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight (IMDB) on HBO do a brilliant job of calling bullshit on politicians and other public figures, mixing humor, rage, and fact-checking in a manner that will become even more essential during the Trump years.  CBS has been more constraining on Late Show with Stephen Colbert (IMDB), forcing him to do more celebrity interviews and cross-promotions than on the smarter and sharper Colbert Report, but he too is now re-finding his voice as critic and satirist of The Donald.  Sam and Stephen I am happy to keep up with through YouTube clips, and you could do the same with John, though he is commercial-free if you get HBO.

So that’s what I’ve been watching in this latest year of Peak TV.  Next up, a similarly long-winded recapitulation of the year in film.