the score: 2014

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.