TV shows have grown
in importance in my life over the last few years and despite or perhaps because
of having very little time for either, 2014 arguably saw the medium finally
surpass books in my life personally. So instead of providing a chronological
list of the things i read (a pitiful (but, hey, better than last year's!) 23
books, not including non-finishers (which – i tell myself optimistically –
would triple the number)) in 2014, here’s a ranked listing of things i watched.
10. Black
Mirror. Black Mirror’s 2nd series was a black mirror to the
first; White Christmas is a black mirror to Black
Mirror. This show could just as easily be #1 on this list, but i drop it
here somewhat arbitrarily because i watched the first 2 seasons in 2012 &
2013, respectively, & this year’s White Christmas – while
no slouch – isn’t the show’s best.
9. Elementary.
Despite being The Better Sherlock With The Best Watson (& Actual
Characters), Elementary has never been a very strong contender
for ‘best of year’ lists, hampered mainly by what i assume is a CBS requirement
for a familiar (i.e. comforting, for the network), restrictive (for the show)
murder-of-the-week format aggravated by a full American season length. However,
the 1st half of the 3rd season finally saw the show ALMOST making a strength of
this weakness, w/ the writers clearly taking great pains to make the case involving
each murder-of-the-week more interesting than they otherwise would be, & beyond
just being your basic how/whydunnits working harder to use each case to
duplicate/multiply/resonate the show’s stronger, more character-based thematic
explorations.
8. Homeland.
Yes, the show delivered its best season of television in 2014 albeit w/ a much
critically & popularly (so Twitter) derided finale, but i would not have
included Homeland if not for said finale. By jetisonning most
of its Brody baggage (leaving only its ghost – conjured up in what might be the
show’s fanbaitiest/trolliest moment ever), the writers were able to deliver a
crowdpleasingly taut 24 For Liberals thriller. But it wasn’t
really Homeland until Meredith Stiehm’s ‘Long Time Coming’
brought the show & its characters literally & figuratively home. A
bold, suprisingly quiet episode w/ a resonant & powerful climax (by w/c i
mean Saul, NOT That Kiss), & entirely earned (&, yes (begrudgingly), i
mean That Kiss, too).
7. Hannibal,
The Americans. i’m probably rating The Americans much
lower than it deserves, but on the other hand one could argue that i see
potential that a great show just isn’t working hard enough to achieve. S02 was
an efficient, effective season of TV, & while the results were occasionally
quite breathtaking, they weren’t as thrilling as they would have been if there
was any sense of the show pushing itself to be better than it already is. It
aired in the same TV season as Hannibal the Second (or anyway
i watched them around the same time), & the 2 shows to my mind provide
interesting book ends to the gamut/spectrum of that thing called ‘Modern
Television’ – w/ Hannibal on the effete, batshit end standing
opposite The Americans’s quiet military efficiency.
6. Fargo.
Less efficient than The Americans & not as aesthetically
bold as Hannibal (though nonetheless pretty tight where it
matters & gorgeously shot, nuanced, & textured both visually &
aurally), 2 things elevate Fargo over either show to my mind:
(1) its grave but genuinely funny (in the Russian sense, cf. one of the
highlights of 2012 & 2013, A Young Doctor’s Notebook) humor
rooted in basic uncommon (for TV Land these days) human decency (& but also
basic less uncommon – but still relatively unusual in how compelling it manages
to be in this case – human indecency) w/c rather than detracts from
actually enhances sharpens its more biblical dark Malvovolent aspects; (2) its
convergent chaotic abrupt structure that to my mind more credibly simulates the
messy narrativity of anecdotal ‘real life’, thus consolidating its
self-proclaimed status as ‘true crime’ better than any other fictional drama
that makes similar pronouncements i’ve seen. Was the finale a little too neat?
could be. But it’s ‘neat’ in the sloppy abrupt way life can tend to execute its
various ostensible ‘closures’. Better than any other show in the genre that
i’ve seen, Fargo negotiates a narrative space credibly located
somewhere between real life as we experience (&, crucially: report)
it outside of & the genreic realities inside of
TV Land – overlaid w/ a distinctly Cohenesque sense of morality.
5. Manhattan.
People should’ve watched this show when it aired over the summer, &, yeah,
me included; as it stands, i’m only just now catching up, otherwise this show
might feature higher on this list (i’m rating it conservatively on the off
chance that the remaining eps i haven’t seen are Most Butt). But, for the
record, on the basis of all i've seen so far, so-called pop culture center-type
outlets such as the AV Club REALLY dropped the ball by not covering this show.
Among other things: It convincingly uses the nuances of life lived in Los
Alamos under the shadow of 2 World Wars & the Manhattan Project as a
metaphor for the modern human condition in general, contemporary America in
particular, touching on everything from academia & plagiarism to capitalism
& gender to the War on Terror & torture & all that topical shit.
The brilliant, restrained but powerful soundtrack by Jónsi & Alex – my fave
TV score of the year embedded in some stand-out brilliant sound design from a
year that includes some of Hannibal’s Brian Reitzell’s most
evocative work & the carefully subtle stunning-when-it-hits-you use of
diegetic (occasionally merging w/ Jeff Russo's nondiegetic score) sound in Fargo –
certainly don’t hurt it none.
4. Broad
City, Transparent. Despite a consciously heavily gender political slant to
my personal TV viewing choices in 2014, i feel entirely unqualified to talk
about the most important reasons that both Broad City & Transparent are
great – or why i feel placing them in parallel by ranking them together is
meaningful. But anyway: was there a more joyously irreverent subversively
hilarious hilariously subversive show than Broad City this
year? a more poignant but also often tragically hilarious hilariously tragic,
human humane examination of what it’s like to be ‘outside’ than Transparent?
If so, i missed (or forgot) them. Also, Transparent’s ‘Four out of
five Pfeffermans prefer pussy’ is the single most perfect line spoken on TV
this year.
3. Rectify.
In many ways even better than S01, the show visibly struggled w/ the extended
season order (10 eps vs. S01's 6), & it was interesting (& thematically
appropriate) if a bit awkward to watch the show flounder a bit w/ having more
time & room to breathe. But when it finally settled into itself &
learned to use that additional narrative space Rectify was as
transcendent an experience of television as it’s ever been. i was initially
relieved that Sundance TV ordered 6 eps instead of 10 for the S03, but now w/
distance i kinda regret the show surrendering that space.
2. Babylon.
This show has all the depth & dimensionality the lack of which your average
so-called ‘prestige’ TV show tries to conceal w/ grimdark pretension but none
of the latter, replacing that now cliché grimdark with the more naturally
propulsive energy of its frequently hilarious Ianucciesque black humor. The
show’s simmering energy mounts to & foments in a suitably
tense-yet-restrained climax in the final ep, culminating in a perfectly judged
(if somewhat predictable, but in a way that to this viewer at least led to
pumping fists in the air rather than rolling eyeballs) final shot of Brit
Marling. i probably say this enough to render it meaningless, but in this case
i stick by it & Really Mean It This Time: Not since Terriers have i seen
such a perfectly crafted single series/season of TV. On some level Babylon presents
itself as a culture war in a bottle a la Manhattan &, say, Mad
Men – the middle section in particular leans heavily on the show being
ostensibly about women rising through/subverting the world of men – but then
transcends its own topicality to be a Story About People &, despite being
essentially satirical, not representatives/symbols of/stand-ins for ideas. i’d
reserve the word ‘sublime’ for something like Rectify, but for what
it is – i.e. a grittily human satire – Babylon comes pretty
darned close.
1. Selfie.
A whole different set of superlatives than any other show on this list. Offbeat
& subversive but in ways that also manage to be entertaining & fun in
familiar conventional ways. That doesn’t sound like a recommendation, certainly
not a statement that would reasonably put it critically speaking over the likes
of Babylon or Manhattan as i’ve done here,
but when you see it you’re either on board or you’re not. It isn’t
unproblematic, but it grows meaningfully against (if not completely out of)
those problems & is in any case elevated by exceptional performances from
all the leads (Karen Gillan & John Cho, of course – whose fiery chemistry
surpasses to my mind the high watermark of Maddy & David – though i’d call
David Harewood the show’s MVP) & a solid supporting cast – all of whom are,
i should add, treated w/ unusual for TV Land kindness by the show. The
mere fact of the show’s joyous (rather than, say, Broad City’s
kinda snarky) lack of cynicism allows it stand above (albeit mounted on the
least impressive white horse of the stable) the densely populated backdrop of
TV Land. Also, Henry’s ‘Next time, I’ll be ready,’ in context is the single
most perfect final final line spoken to end a TV show this year – w/c, as Brandon
Nowalk over at the AVClub put it, is ‘beautiful and textured and harks back
to all the tomorrow endings like Calvin & Hobbes (“Lets go exploring”)’.
i’m all for some network nutting up to #saveSelfie, but the unintended finale
managed to be a pretty perfect cap to the respective journeys of Eliza Dooley
& Henry Higgs. Whether or not it is somehow resurrected a la Community,
the 13 episodes of the show's aborted S01 (or at least the latter 10 episodes,
the 1st 3 encapsulating the show's most problematic aspects, albeit in a fun
& interesting way) deserve to be remembered & rewatched & loved as
obsessively as the likes of Moonlighting, M*A*S*H, Seinfeld, & Friends.
Honorable mentions:
The Frye &
Mendez Show. i need to
catch up on FX’s version of The Bridge, but the only reason i feel
compelled to do so at all are the characters played by Matthew Lillard &
Emily Rios. i don’t even really care what they’re doing on the show, they’re
just a pleasure to watch together. Sadly, the show itself seems to have lost -
among other things - the sense of place that more than justified the S01’s
existence as an import remake, losing itself in standard ‘prestige drama’
ultraviolent grimdark plottiness.
Utopia. W/ S01, Utopia proved a
worthy replacement for UK’s Channel 4’s Misfits, captializing on
the relatively newfound ‘legitimacy’ of comic books to craft both a mystery
plot & a visual aesthetic around a graphic novel serving as metaphor for
the shifting realities experienced by the show’s protagonists (& by
extension the viewers) w/o recourse to alternate worlds/magic – somewhat
comparable to the reality shift presented in China Mieville’s The City
& the City. But unlike Misfits, Utopia was
a serious show that was every bit as heavily reliant on a striking visual
aesthetic as - but that was, in its reliance on benign colors & images,
even more unusual than - Hannibal. Sadly, despite a brilliant
flashback 1st ep (& i’m no fan of flashback eps) that again mined pop
culture but this time to jettison the now obsolete (so the plot) comic book
aesthetic in favor of that of 70s political/conspiracy thriller, S02 failed to
transcend its adopted pop culture visual mode the way S01 did. The rest of S02
looked like S01 w/ the edges shorn off but told a standard (if ultraviolent)
political/conspiracy thriller albeit w/ a topical environmental
humanist-vs-antihumanist message.
Ascension. Remarkable for being SyFy’s most
convincing attempt to date to create a good SF TV show, but otherwise not
really that convincing as far as such attempts go.
