jessica jones and the rest of the best

2015 may be one of the best years in television. Though overall weak in comedy, it nevertheless included the final season of Parks and Recreation, which you can either read as standing in for the series' excellence as a whole, or you can admit that the final season had a lot of weaker moments that were made up for with an excellent finale; spectacular second seasons of Review and Broad City; a strong season of Louie; Mindy and Casual on Hulu; Kimmy Schmidt!; Mom transitioning at some point from "the watchable Chuck Lorre show" to "a show that deals sincerely not only with addiction but with loss, dysfunction, and the one thing sitcoms hardly ever touch, consequences"; some fantastic stuff on Peep Show; genuine explorations of depression in Bojack Horseman and You're the Worst; Aziz Ansari's Netflix comedy Master of None, one of the best shows of the year; and new best family sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat.

And that's in the area where 2015 was weakest. Okay, maybe I need to rephrase "weak in comedy" to "weak in network sitcoms."

In drama, you had the final seasons of Mad Men and Justified (and it might well have been the best season of Justified, or at least the best one without Margo Martindale), a season of Rectify that seems to be pushing us toward the end, an especially daring and emotional season of The Americans -- and any one of these shows could be fairly nominated as The Best Show Ever -- and on top of all that, you have Fargo and The Leftovers, the two most exciting and interesting new shows of last year (or two of the three, depending on how you felt about True Detective), managing to produce second seasons that are leaps and bounds ahead of their premiere seasons.

And then. And then! And then you have Jessica Jones.

I've been much less patient with other superhero shows since watching Jessica Jones. Supergirl is light entertainment at best, and burdening a female character with the baggage of the CW-model superhero show somehow feels even more belittling, especially when -- unlike with The Flash -- this is a character who has had her powers for years. The fact that they had an episode in which a plot point revolved around the trouble she was having keeping her powers in check, when she'd been doing that 24/7 for the decade-plus before the pilot, just made no sense. And even The Flash, which has had time to get its sea legs, just feels second-rate now in comparison.

Jessica Jones, as you've already heard, is the first serious superhero show, the first cable-quality superhero show. Daredevil Schmaredevil.

What made me blog about it, though, other than to just mention it in this "best of 2015" context, was a headline that called her the first female version of the cable drama antihero, which spectacularly misses the point. By cable drama antihero, we mean the protagonists of the recent Golden Age of TV -- Don Draper, Tony Soprano, the asshole protagonists. But The Sopranos is a show about how people don't change, maybe can't change -- arguably you can formulate it even more cynically and say it's a show about how people don't improve. And Mad Men certainly isn't heavily invested in reforming Draper.

Jessica Jones isn't about indulging in being an asshole or celebrating the Heisenbergness of Walter White. Jessica Jones is about trauma and responses to trauma. It has more in common with First Blood or Billy Jack -- or noir antecedents like Out of the Past -- than it does with Mad Men. Like those protagonists, Jessica is prickly, just wants to be left alone -- even though she's not genuinely better off left alone -- and you will regret it if you push her. But she gets better. Because this isn't a male "I can kick everybody's ass in this room" fantasy, either. This isn't about the pleasure of being mean. It's about, to some extent, the reasons for becoming mean.

But it's also not just about Jessica. One of the things I like about iZombie is that even in its first season, it took some risks in having there be real consequences to the usual superhero tropes (like Buffy, iZombie isn't a superhero show, but only in the sense that Liv doesn't have a costumed identity or public reputation; the tropes are otherwise all in play). Jessica Jones, which spends less time on case-of-the-week plots, makes those consequences much more central.

I don't want to spoil much. The supporting cast includes Jessica's friend from childhood, Trish Walker (better known as Patsy Walker to comic book fans); bartender and future Netflix show star Luke Cage; and her various neighbors. Jessica's life and choices, which are haunted by her torment a year ago under the influence of the mind-controlling Purple Man, have a real impact on all of these people. (Trish is played by Rachael Taylor, who was on the awful-looking Crisis last year but who struck Caitlin and me as much more intelligent and interesting than you'd guess based on that show when she guested on some late night talk show we were watching -- probably Ferguson -- and she's good enough here that I'd happily watch her in her own spinoff.)

I've talked in other blogs about being a victim of sexual abuse myself, and dealing with that in therapy for years, and while there are key differences between childhood and adulthood trauma -- not to mention the unimaginable trauma of mind control -- many of the experiences of post-event trauma are the same (or at least selected off a shared menu, as it were), and so there was a lot I could relate to here, a lot that made the first few episodes especially -- where it's necessarily to really show where Jessica's headspace is -- hard to get through.

To say that rape and other violence against women is common fodder for TV drama is like saying that many comedy scenes take place in living rooms with only three walls. What is rare, and it is especially shameful and disturbing that it is so rare given just how frequently, how relentlessly, that violence is portrayed, is an actual exploration of the aftermath of that violence.

Not the boyfriend or husband who's motivated by avenging his wife, girlfriend, mother, daughter, or family.

Not the cop who's going to get the son of a bitch who did this, and who maybe keeps thinking about his own wife, girlfriend, mother, or daughter who also died.

Not the advocate or activist or other suit who's like, we gotta do this thing, we gotta fix this thing, we gotta clean up this thing over here, and we gotta do it for Some Lady From Act One! Because That Lady is DEAD!

If you think this isn't important, if you think representation and viewpoint don't matter, if you're fine with every story about violence being about the cop or the boyfriend or the dad who just avenges dead daughters all the time, if you think the young women growing up and sneaking peeks at past-their-bedtime television aren't affected by seeing that the third-hour-of-primetime job they can look forward to when they grow up is Dying And Providing A Serious Man With A Serious Motive, I don't want you to read my blog. I don't have any conversations to have with you. I just checked. I'm all out.

Revenge is not the only way to tell the story of what happens after trauma. It's not even the best way! But letting the woman be the survivor-hero instead of the motive-prop was a fantastic move.

Jessica Jones isn't just about that.

It's also about how exactly one goes about being a crimefighter in a world that has the Avengers but only the movie Avengers -- and the movie Avengers aren't actually superheroes. The movie Avengers are these guys who have come in a couple times to stop weird intergalactic and/or robotic menaces, but they aren't comic book superheroes who actually stop crimes or fight terrorism or ... do superhero shit. They're more like a special special super-special special ops military force. (How are they going to do Civil War when secret identities have been almost completely irrelevant to the franchise thus far? Anyway...)

It's also about the difficulty that a mind-controlling supervillain introduces to the conversation in a world aware that a handful of people like the Hulk and Jessica exist, but not yet jaded to the idea of superpowers (and a world without access to the X-Men intellectual property, so you can't have Professor X come in and testify about mind control either).

It's a show that's able to get into the nuances of a newly superpower-aware world in a way that the movies -- which largely take place thirty stories above the people having these conversations and are full of explosions that drown them out -- never will.

If you're familiar with the comics Jessica Jones is based on, much is changed because much must be. Alias -- no relation to the TV show, how's that for confusing? -- was exactly the kind of comic that you only write, you only publish, because there is a creaky and well-worn Marvel Universe already in place, a universe where you can introduce a character and say "by the way, she used to be an Avenger, and she's good friends with Spider-Woman and Carol Danvers, and some of her cases involve the third Spider-Woman and Speedball and J Jonah Jameson, and also she goes on a date with Ant-Man, the second one," and it all works, and it works even for readers who don't know those characters chapter and verse, because the nature of that particular comics universe is that it doesn't take long to realize it's crowded and it's old. It's like when you start watching General Hospital for the first time, and you don't know anybody or anything, but you don't expect them to slow down and recap it all for you either. You just understand that this density, this dogearedness where you can see the paintings behind the paintings behind the paintings because the canvas has been scraped clean so many times, is part of the show.

The TV show can't do that. It had to lose a lot of what's in the comic. Somehow it lost all that and still got to the heart of what was best about the comic, what was most televisionable about the comic, and then it made that part even better.

Other best things this year! non-television division.

Movie-wise it's sort of pointless to weigh in: most of what will be nominated for the 2015 awards won't play near me either until the new year or ever, after all. I think It Follows and Mad Max were my favorite movies of the year, with an honorable mention for the surprisingly good Unfriended, while Poltergeist and She's Funny That Way were the biggest disappointments. The Visit was well worth seeing in theaters, and Final Girls was very smart. Inside Out lands somewhere in the B minuses as far as Pixar productions go, and seems to cling so closely to their formula that I wonder if they'll ever make another Up or Wall-E, or even another Incredibles.

But like I said: tons of the good stuff, I won't see until next year. The new Kaufman leaps immediately to mind, but I didn't get round to seeing Mistress America yet either.

Musically, the big surprise for me was that Calexico released a new album and it wasn't my favorite album of the year, unlike Algiers and Carried to Dust. But I choose to see that as reflecting how much I liked my actual favorites -- Glen Hansard's new one, Bop English, the Weepies. It was very very nice to see new albums by Robert Forster and the Dave Rawlings Machine, both of which are fantastic, though I wish the Forster were available on fucking CD, for heaven's sake. Beach Slang had the most exciting rock album in a while, and The Soft Moon stood out in the increasingly crowded field of Moods for Moderns nostalgia.

Another seeming disappointment that wasn't actually disappointing was the new Juliana Hatfield Three album -- a terrific album, it's just that a number of the songs are new recordings of tunes she'd previously recorded for her solo albums or the Minor Alps side project. Still, it's a minor quibble for an artist I've loved since the Blake Babies days, and who has only gotten better in the 21st century.

I have a Spotify playlist, more or less ordered, of my favorite 2015 albums.

There are a lot of ways in which Afterlife with Archie and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are the best comics coming out right now ... it's just that they so rarely come out, and I have trouble getting over my frustration with that. Especially when new titles continue to be announced despite the publisher's inability to properly service even these two. Still, on the rare occasion when an issue does surface, it's always fantastic.

Thankfully, Bitch Planet comes out more often and makes me feel a little okay about Kelly Sue DeConnick no longer writing Captain Marvel.

The Marvel line in general is experiencing a creative peak unlike anything I've seen in a long, long time (while, simultaneously, DC has become relentlessly boring apart from the ending of Fables). Dan Slott and Mike Allred's Silver Surfer is my personal favorite, and the just-begun Dr Strange series may equal it, especially if Bachalo remains as artist (other than Sienkiewicz or P Craig Russell, who since Ditko would you rather see doing Dr Strange?), but Ms Marvel, Spider-Woman, and the recently wrapped She-Hulk have all been great, and the Star Wars comics are even good. Even the Black Knight and Red Wolf comics are off to a good start, for heaven's sake.

peep show

There seem to be three main groups of British TV broadcast in the US:

Sci-fi, which means almost entirely Dr Who, with occasional miniseries, Red Dwarf, Hitchhikers, and just enough of a dose of Sapphire and Steel that somebody out there other than me must be a fan

Masterpiece Theater stuff like Downton Abbey

The very mixed bag of sitcoms that run the gamut from Absolutely Fabulous to Are You Being Served to Black Adder to The Office. Maybe the common thread here is that until recent years, the well-known British comedies tended to be very very broad. Looking at you, Mr Bean.

(Why we wind up with the British shows we do, and what relationship this sampling has to the whole of British TV, is something I actually think about a lot and derive a lot of frustration from. It's insane to me that there is a fucking channel called BBC America that shows, like, one or two scripted British shows at a time, plus a couple of talk shows and a lot of cars. Think of how much old British content there is, never aired in the US, that surely could not command all that much money in North American broadcast rights. This is like if the Cartoon Network only showed cartoons on Saturday nights. For that matter, with all this goddamn real estate across the 500-channel programming grid, where are all the other English-language shows that should be relatively easy to acquire, or the foreign-language shows that have already been dubbed or subtitled for other English-speaking markets? Jesus Christ.)

I'm sure it can't be representative, but even apart from that it can be bewildering figuring out why -- beyond rights availability, I guess -- certain shows become unavoidable while others remain obscure. The fact that The Office is so much more well known than Peep Show, for instance, is just nuts. I'm not knocking The Office -- it's just that Peep Show is in some ways the perfect companion piece to it, in its early seasons.

Peep Show's one of those British sitcoms where every season is like six episodes long, so the fact that there are eight seasons shouldn't intimidate you - that's a total viewing time of, what, about the first season of Lost? 

The name refers to the heavy use of point of view shots, especially but not entirely of the two main characters, and if it were an American show, it would probably commit entirely to that gimmick, the way How I Met Your Mother spent ten years getting around to meeting the mother and then stopped. But it isn't, and doesn't. The use of voiceover for the inner thoughts of the two leads serves the same purpose as the interview cutaways in The Office and other faux documentaries, but to different effect, since you don't have to cut away from the scene. 

There's a long tradition of terrible people in comedy, obviously, whether as a single member in the cast (Ralph Kramden's a blowhard who abuses everyone around him, Larry David spends most of Curb trying to find the path that indulges his self-centeredness while mitigating its consequences) or, in the post-Seinfeld world, all of the main characters. Sometimes it's a source of a show's brilliance, like with Arrested Development, where Michael Bluth constantly congratulates himself for being better than the rest of his family but is a mediocre and self-serving negligent father who is only able to feel good about himself because of just how much worse the people surrounding him are; sometimes it makes a show just about unwatchable for me, like with Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, or that spate of 2000s comedies about couples bonding over what terrible parents they were. 

There's a more subtle sort of everyone is awful, too, which both versions of The Office capture. It's a mediocre kind of awfulness -- one the US version didn't dwell on very long, but gave you enough glimpses of to realize (until the final lackluster seasons) that, you know what, Jim is kind of a dick who is so sure that he's better than his mediocre job that he constantly belittles Dwight (who the show makes sure we realize is a genuinely good salesman) in large part because Dwight has the gall to care about the job. 

One of the things that weakens the U.S. Office is that it doesn't really fully admit Jim's dickishness or the general mediocrity of the whole bunch -- in part because it can't, not when it has 100 or more episodes to fill and a once-great network to save, and it needs to be likable. So instead we get these increasingly rosy glasses forced on us as we watch these grey tones play out, and this has a lot to do with why the show started to grate even before Michael left.

Enter Peep Show.

Like Jim, Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) is an office drone at some fucking business that does some fucking thing that we don't need to care about and has no inherent interest (Peep Show never lampoons the meaningless of the business the way The Office does, but that's a whole nother tangent). Like Jim, he has a thing for one of his co-workers, Sophie. Unlike Pam, Sophie isn't taken -- Mark is just timid, anxious, constantly self-questioning (with good reason, admittedly), and has a rival in the form of alpha workmate Jeff.

Everything plays out the way you think ...

... insofar as, you know, Mark and Sophie flirt, and almost get together but don't, and almost get together but don't, and then do get together ...

... and here's the thing. Sophie is fucking awful.

Mark is fucking awful.

They are not fucking awful in ways that are good for or enjoyable to each other. Neither actually likes each other at all by the time they're truly together, which makes for some of the funniest scenes in the series.

I don't mean they're awful like the Always Sunny people, like oh, they've found each other, they can be awful together, I mean they are just really unpleasant to be around, and self-serving and self-absorbed, and each is manipulative but not really all that good at being manipulative so it doesn't come off as being charming or anything, and neither really cares about very much except for Mark's obsession with history (and fascism) and with being respected, and whatever it is that drives Sophie.

And this is all fantastic!

Meanwhile Jeremy (Robert Webb) is Mark's roommate and best friend since college. He's a would-be musician who's been sponging off Mark, but it's clear how badly Mark needs him, and in how many different ways -- the friendship is handled better than in most sitcoms that revolve around A Couple Of Bros, but of course it helps that both of them are absolutely terrible people, that each knows how terrible the other is, that each is accustomed to the other's terribleness, and that they have basically come to terms with this. At one point Jeremy tells himself that he's Mark's "the one," and he's not wrong -- he's the only person Mark can be himself with without being rejected, and vice versa. It's the glue of the series, and what connects many otherwise unrelated plots (though Peep Show has a gift, as with Arrested Development or Seinfeld, for tying disparate elements together, often when one self-serving character sabotages another). 

I've barely scratched the surface of a series that features rampant drug use, each lead's occasional homosexual meanderings, elaborate lies that never work out, etc. It's on both Netflix and Hulu and it's one of the all-time great comedies.

returning tv fall 2015

The season's been going for a bit now and the big shows are back - good time to check in.

Sleepy Hollow and Homeland seem to be dealing with similar problems: redefining, to one degree or another, what the show is about in the wake of previous plots being resolved. In Homeland's case this is something they've been struggling with ever since Damian Lewis left, and in some people's view, ever since the first season ended. You're never going to recapture the magic of "is this guy a terrorist?" And arguably, you shouldn't have tried to.

I don't think there's anyone who would disagree that that first season was the best. At this point my concern is less whether they'll have a season as good as the first one again, and more whether there is a compelling reason for there to still be a Homeland TV show -- especially one with the recognizable elements of Carrie, Saul, and somebody not believing Carrie about something. I realize this show comes to us from the makers of 24, which reran the tape way too many times on a very narrow concept, but ... that's kind of my point. So far, this season hasn't done anything to persuade me that we needed to keep Homeland around.

Sleepy Hollow's situation is a little different, since there's a new showrunner and I have to assume that the change in showrunners was the result of network dissatisfaction with something. But some weird choices have been made. While Katrina's transition to villain last season was clumsy, it's even clumsier to so transparently replace her with one character for each niche she occupied: Betsy Ross as Ichabod-love-interest, Pandora as evil-witch-antagonist. It's just one of those show changes where the seams REALLY show.

On top of that, we've lost John Noble and Orlando Jones, both of whom were under-used in second season but still terrific. Jones was a large part of what made the show great.

So yeah, here too I'm skeptical that this is working. I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm watching because of the first couple seasons, and although season two was all over the place, the first season had hit a very compelling stride with a very specific mix of madness. I don't know if Kurtzman and Orci are still involved or if, like with Fringe, this is a show that is going to sway in very different directions depending on the showrunner at the helm.

Then there are shows that were able to make some minor changes without it throwing everything out of whack. Eddie Huang decided he didn't want to provide voiceovers any longer for Fresh Off the Boat, the sitcom very loosely based on his childhood. At times this makes young Eddie no longer seem like the protagonist in the show, and it would be a shame if they shifted to an ensemble piece. As much as Constance Wu is the best thing about the show -- Emmys, I keep telling you, Emmys -- the show occupies the intersection between two sitcom trends: the look-at-my-childhood sitcom and the look-at-this-family sitcom. Without the focus on Eddie, you lose the focus on 90s hip hop which is the only reason for this show to be a period piece.

The returning shows I was most anticipating this season have all turned out to be interesting:

iZombie may not be a premium-level drama like the other two, but it's one of my favorite network shows, and an interesting show in the Rob Thomas filmog. On the one hand, structurally it's most similar to Veronica Mars, which is maybe also his best show (hard to pick between it and Party Down since they're so different). The lead character solves crimes on an episodic basis, while also having a personal stake in a larger mystery that looms over things. On the other hand, while Veronica wrapped everything up at the end of season one, the supernatural nature of iZombie lets them do something more interesting. Season one ended with Liv coming to a better understanding of why she's a zombie and what's going on (along with other major developments, ho ho), but instead of resolving anything, that just opened things up for further exploration of the mythology in season two.

I don't know that that can be sustained forever -- even dealing with mythology at a greatly slowed rate, the X-Files tangled themselves up pretty famously -- but it makes for a more confident season two than you might otherwise suspect. There have been some inevitable tonal changes thanks to the other developments -- more characters know Liv's secrets now, bad guys are badding it up in different ways, etc. -- but the most noticeable difference has been that the brains Liv eats seem to be affecting her much more than in first season.

This is something I hope they don't give into. The frat boy episode was funny, but it felt like Liv was way more affected by frat boy brains than she had been by computer geek brains, adrenaline junkie brains, etc. I don't remember many episodes where the effects of the brains-of-the-week were so evident in every scene, especially with Liv being so unable to push them down. That could get old. We'll see.

The Leftovers made the unexpected but not at all implausible decision to uproot the main cast and relocate them to a Texas town where no Departures were experienced. So far, in two episodes -- the first told from the perspective of the new cast members native to Jarden, the second covering some of the same ground from that of our Mapleton expats -- there have been more questions raised than anything else, but that's not a complaint. Just when the show feels a little less bleak, we realize Kevin has attempted to kill himself while sleepwalking, and Jarden's secrets are probably going to turn out to be very dark indeed.

But it works. It's not for everyone -- short of Looking, it's probably the most "not for everyone" show on pay cable -- but it is an amazing thing, and the addition of Kevin Carroll and Regina King to this already excellent cast bodes well.

Fargo is in a different boat than any of these other shows. It's essentially an anthology series, although in this case, second season is telling a story involving one of the major supporting characters from first season. It's amazing how confident a single episode feels, even as it seems to throw the kitchen sink at us: a cast of characters already huge before anything has even really happened, a crime scene absolutely worthy of the Coens even before the possibility of aliens is introduced, and a pretty fucking great performance by Kirsten Dunst that somehow stands out despite everything else going on. (The other standout performance in the season premiere: Ann Cusack as the judge.)

You do not have to rewind the clock very far to find a point at which we would not believe this is the kind of show you could get starring Ted Danson, Jean Smart, Brad Garrett, and Kirsten Dunst -- nor, of course, is it starring them in the same sense it would have been at that particular midnight. I have a really good feeling about where things are going, even while I'm kind of thinking I'm not going to have any idea what's going on until the end.

red oaks

Red Oaks is the latest Amazon Prime series, and interesting not only in its own right but because Amazon still hasn't yet developed much of a brand identity. You have the indie movie feel of Transparent and Red Oaks, the serious alternate history drama of the forthcoming Man in the High Castle, and the awful grumpy-cable-man drama of Hand of God, for instance. Right now I guess they're probably just throwing things at the wall and seeing what people watch, without worrying about consistency across the brand.

When I say "indie movie" vis-a-vis Red Oaks, I don't mean to lump it in with Transparent, which is very different in tone. You could call both of them dramedies, but the drama in Red Oaks is very light, as is the comedy. I was expecting something broader -- either something more like Caddyshack or a send-up of 80s movie tropes. But there isn't a hint of satire in the show, even in the "body swap" episode which, true to its title, has two of the characters swap bodies for the day, Freaky Friday style.

Red Oaks is about a college kid, David -- the kid from Richard Ayoade's excellent Submarine -- who's working as a tennis pro at the local country club in the summer of 1985, while putting off registering for classes because he neither wants to continue with the accounting major his father expects him to pursue, nor confront his father and make this clear. Richard Kind (Mad About You/Spin City) and Jennifer Grey play his parents; Paul Reiser, the president of the club. That alone was enough to get me in the door, and they're all great - Reiser is especially convincing as an entitled prick (as is Josh Meyers as the douchey photographer constantly threatening to steal David's girlfriend away).

If I list plot points, or if you watch the pilot to get the lay of the land, it's going to sound flat and predictable and obvious. David and his girlfriend want different things from the next few years of their lives, and spending most of each day apart from each other due to their jobs gives them ample opportunity to be around other people who may be more compatible or more interesting. David's father has had a heart attack that has resulted in underscoring his insistence on making practical choices -- study accounting because if something happens to me you may have to take care of your mother, and accounting is a reliable field, the subtext seems to say. Meanwhile, David's parents are having problems, and his best friend at the club is obsessed with the lifeguard who's dating a jock whose band has a song called "Sex Flu."

But while it's not a masterpiece or anything, the whole is greater than the sum of those parts, perhaps mainly because of tone: because it isn't satire, it doesn't have the challenge of maintaining satire's edge over a sustained period of time, nor of serving the dual and usually conflicting needs of satire and story. Because it isn't a zany comedy, it doesn't get its characters into impossible to resolve situations every episode. It's funny, but with a light touch; it's drama, but not melodrama. It takes place 30 years ago, but it doesn't slam that home with constant shots of pink legwarmers or "Van Halen will never break up" jokes, and you'd be hard-pressed to call it nostalgic in the manner of The Wonder Years (or even The Goldbergs).

The lack of voiceover helps: we have no idea who David has become in 2015, or how he would look back on these events. Does his girlfriend Karen eventually seem like a minor footnote in his love life, or is this the story of how he and his future wife worked their shit out? A voiceover would probably give it away.

Honestly, the show I am most inclined to compare it to is The O.C., and I'm reluctant to make that comparison because a) if you haven't seen The O.C., your impression of what you think I mean is probably very different from what I mean; b) even if you have seen the show, what you and I mean by The O.C. may be two different things depending on how you feel about Marissa Cooper or the final season; c) the comedy of The O.C. was much broader than Red Oaks', and the drama was more melodramatic.

It's ten half-hour episodes that you can watch in a weekend afternoon; they're not urgent but they're pleasant, smarter than most sitcoms, with very little filler or wasted time.

lost

There are not many shows as divisive as Lost, I think.

I started watching partway through the pilot episode -- I was still giving Smallville a shot (was this the season they introduced Lois Lane?), and Lost looked like no big deal, like a scripted version of Survivor. But somebody said hey, you should check this show out.

A lot of other people must have been told the same thing, because the pilot aired again pretty soon - - before the second episode, I think -- and before long I was an evangelist for the show, and watched the first season several times before the second season started, usually watching it with other people I was trying to convert.

That first season, which ended on a double cliffhanger, raised as many question as Twin Peaks and the X-Files put together: what is the island? Why did Oceanic flight 815 crash there? Why was one of the castaways healed of permanent injuries by landing there? Who are the Others and why do they kidnap people? What is the hatch? Why did this corpse come back to life, and if it didn't, where did the body go? What is the monster? Why are there polar bears on this tropical island? Why does this child seem to have a wide array of psychic powers? What is the significance of the numbers? What is the sickness the French lady is afraid of? What did this fugitive from the law do for her to be treated as so dangerous and for a U.S. marshal to track her down to a foreign country?

And so on.

The problems started almost right away, as some of the backstory was fleshed out in the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) operated over the summer -- and then never to rarely mentioned again in the show itself, as though by virtue of a small portion of the audience having learned an answer, the characters (and the world of the show itself) lost interest in the question. This turned out to be a chronic problem on the show:

Lost is a show that constantly raises questions about strange occurrences and supernatural mysteries experienced by characters who have almost no curiosity about them.

Let's get to some details.

fall 2015

I have a long post on Lost I need to do so, since as I write this we're a day or two away from finishing our rewatch of the whole series. But for the moment let's just check in on the fall TV season as it ramps up.

One thing that surprises me is that the returning series I'm most looking forward to are iZombie and The Leftovers. In part this reflects the newly fractured nature of TV seasons -- some of my favorite shows aren't airing this fall -- and the fact that several of my favorite shows ended last season. So a sort of attrition has resulted in my favorite new series becoming, essentially, my favorite series tout court.

Also very happy that the second season of The Returned is coming soon, that Red Oaks finally has a full season coming on Amazon, that Fargo will be back in less than a month, and that I finally got around to watching Mom last season. I ought to blog about that show -- I avoided it because, well, it's fucking Chuck Lorre, but it turns out to have more in common with Roseanne than Two and a Half Men.

One reason I'm surprised at how much I love iZombie is because of how perfectly it fits the description of a TV subgenre I loathe:

Person with special abilities teams up with no-nonsense cop to solve murrrrders.

This is a pretty shitty way of telling stories in the first place -- I have so much disdain for the inability of TV writers to come up with anything other than a murder of the week to fill their hour -- even while it's obviously grounded in the traditional Genius + Sidekick formula of classic detective stories going back to Sherlock Holmes. And even Sleepy Hollow is just a brilliant and deranged twist on that formula.

But one reason the subgenre has been the focus of so much of my ire lately is because it's become even more common among every season's new offerings than "Some Doofus and His Hot Wife Parent Badly."

Limitless and Minority Report both waste the potential of the movies they're adapting (not that Limitless was that hot, but whatever) in order to boil out the impurities and reduce the ideas down to Person with special abilities teams up with cop to solve murrrrrders. Furthermore, in order to make this work, Minority Report has to go the additional step of saying that the whole point of the movie -- that using precognitives to fight "precrime" was horseshit -- was wrong.

That fucking Blindspot show that I'm so sick of the ads for -- and I shouldn't be surprised that it did so well in the ratings, because the things I think look awful so often do -- is another Per w spesh + cop essing ems show, which means we had three of these fuckers leading off the fall season. Jesus Christ.

Even the superhero shows tend to veer toward P-spesh & C S M territory. You've got your superhero and then you've got their Regular Folks support team, partly to personify the process by which the superhero finds crime to fight, partly to give them people to talk to / rescue / act as audience-surrogates. I'm not crazy about this -- the comics aren't structured that way, so right out the gate the stories feel very differently than the properties being adapted -- and it's one of the things I don't like about Arrow, though for some reason it bothers me less in Flash (maybe because of the way Tom Cavanagh's character became involved in the story).

I'm hoping Supergirl, which had the most promising pilot I've seen for shows premiering this season, doesn't go the PSCSM route, though there are many indications that it will. I guess I'll wait to say more about that until the show has aired.

So with the fall season just starting, there's three new shows I tuned in for worth mentioning briefly:

Scream Queens was awful. I mean, I have been watching Ryan Murphy shows since Popular's first season 16 years ago, so I feel like my expectations are properly modulated: every show will start out decent, with clever touches, and quickly climb up its own asshole. Glee went from being a bright, cute show to completely unwatchable in record time, Nip/Tuck became bizarre in ways that sort of predicted the Ryan Murphy of American Horror Story, etc. What I'm saying is, I didn't have super-high expectations, but I did expect the premiere to be good.

It was nearly unwatchable. Everything is on the nose, the performances are wooden, it's somehow not bad or broad enough to be campy (much less intentional camp), it's like watching a talent show at a school assembly. It's really, really awful. I was first startled at how bad it was, and then I was very quickly bored. I have sleep apnea, so I think I'm constitutionally incapable of watching another episode.

Heroes Reborn, on the other hand, was surprisingly all right. I watched maybe two and a half? seasons of Heroes and then caught random reruns on the Sci Fi Channel and G4. It was an uneven show: a first season that turned out to be better than expected, followed by extensive proof that nobody involved had any idea how to keep the story going in a reasonable and natural way. My hope is that no one would revive Heroes unless they had a solid idea of what to do with it -- why bother otherwise? -- and so far they haven't fucked anything up, though working around the absence of Hayden Panettiere is a little awkward.

Then there's The Muppets, of course. It goes without saying that I was and have always been a huge Muppets fan; this is almost inevitable given my age. Though I loved the Jason Segel movie, I thought Muppets Most Wanted was fairly weak, and wasn't sure what to expect here. The faux-documentary format of The Office makes sense -- there are no variety shows these days, after all -- but I wish they hadn't abandoned the genius fan idea that "Muppets canon" consisted of The Muppet Show and the first Muppet Movie, with everything else being something they had created as part of their Rich and Famous contract. Things like using Sam the Eagle as the standards and practices guy, while funny, don't support the idea of him being a performer who also plays a CIA agent in Muppets Most Wanted, etc.

My sister called it "cold," and I think that's right. It doesn't really seem like they had FUN making it, and so far lacks the manic energy that made The Muppet Show -- and all of Henson's pre-Muppet Show Muppets performances -- what it was. I can easily see that being a function of the pilot, though -- wanting to get everything right in an era that doesn't give shows a lot of time to get on their feet. And certainly the Muppets legacy is such that I have trouble imagining a Muppets show I wouldn't watch. I'm just hoping this one becomes more relaxed and comfortable with itself.

might as well dance

I was listening to Kate Kulzick and Erik Adams discussing Bunheads, which given the season finale of Galavant and the fact of Singing in the Rain sitting on my DVR, reminded me of the way my engagement with musicals has changed. It's weird, when you think about it -- and it comes up every time someone launches a Cop Rock or a Viva Laughlin or a Glee -- that the musical is one of the most popular and significant genres in movies (albeit one with a long-gone heyday) and yet has played so little role on television. Or maybe it's not that weird -- maybe it makes sense given television's live origins, the popularity of the variety show during the only period when the existence of television and the prominence of the movie musical overlapped, the additional lead time it takes to write musical episodes, and the cost of licensing existing music as an alternative. But saying it's weird is the done thing.

[NOTE: This blog entry was begun shortly after Galavant's first season ended, but not finished until Caitlin and I binge-watched Bunheads, which required tracking down torrents since it isn't streaming anywhere, nor released on DVD.]

Bunheads wasn't a musical, but as a show about ballet students, it had enough song and dance numbers that it might not have been produced in the pre-Glee world. It was a one-season wonder on ABC Family (albeit one divided by a long mid-season gap, and ordered in two batches) by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, and in many ways came the closest to that show in tone, outlook, vibe, I don't know what you want to call it. Nobody watched it.

(And because nobody watched it, and because I imagine few of the people who did watch it were also Friday Night Lights fans, hardly anyone knows how versatile Stacey Oristano is, who played quirky delight Truly in Bunheads, who quickly steals the show, and stripper-slash-glimpse-of-the-possible-future-for-Tyra Mindy Collette on Friday Night Lights.)



In a lot of ways, Bunheads suffered from the same problem as Friday Night Lights: though it was a show about dancers, it was morethanthat in the same way Friday Night Lights is about football but morethanthat. For one thing, as with Gilmore Girls - or Quirky Place shows from Parks to Green Acres to Newhart - it started to become a show about a place as much as about its main characters, and over time I'm sure Paradise, California, would have become as well-populated and bizarre as Stars Hollow did. But even more than that, the pilot's set-up made this more than just a show about a ballet school. Sutton Foster plays the lead character, Michelle Simms, a talented dancer working as a Las Vegas showgirl when we begin, and reaching the age at which it's increasingly unlikely she'll ever get her Big Break. She impulsively marries Hubbell, a long-time admirer, moves to his hometown with him, and he promptly dies. All in the pilot.

Michelle barely knows her late husband's mother, whose home and ballet school he had supported financially, and Kelly Bishop from Gilmore Girls does a great job playing the mother-in-law as someone who's not quite an antagonist but not welcoming the stranger with open arms either. The cast is rounded out by the aforementioned Truly, who carried a torch for Hubbell, and the high school girls who attend the ballet school.

Like Gilmore Girls, Bunheads combines some fish out of water elements with family-like frictions and a thirtysomething single female lead in an unusual dating circumstance (she's a widow of a one-day marriage: how long does she mourn? how do you process losing someone you were still getting to know?) Michelle isn't a mother-who's-also-a-best-friend, but she's in a mentor position with these teen girls, and so similar conflicts come up. I'm not saying it's at all derivative of Gilmore Girls or fails to feel fresh -- only that Amy Sherman-Palladino is playing to her strengths here.

It differs from Gilmore Girls largely in that it takes longer to find itself. For instance, before the rewatch, I remembered the music-video-like musical numbers being a lot more frequent than they are. While there are partial dance numbers all throughout the show, the use of popular or unexpected music -- like the Sparks song above -- is primarily found in the back half of the show, and even then it's only a handful of times. Meanwhile, supporting characters come and go as though everyone's auditioning to see if they're going to become important -- there's a wealthy guy who's as much an outsider as Michelle who seems like a possible love interest, and he's never mentioned again after an episode that kind of revolves around him; there's another love interest later whose function in hindsight seems to have been only to make Michelle realize that she missed Hubbell and hadn't dealt with his death.

It took a few episodes for the students to really stand out for me - although they were presumably cast for dancing ability rather than acting ability, I think it was more of a writing problem, where it felt like the writers were waiting to get to know the characters (or actors) to differentiate them. For a few hours, they all just kind of blend together. (It didn't help that one of the Bunheads is named Boo and one of the Bunheads is played by Bailey Buntain and these are two different Bunheads.)



It's slower to come together than Gilmore Girls was, and less focused -- Gilmore Girls always has the central Lorelai-Rory, Lorelai-Luke relationships to come back to, and the Friday night dinners for structure, while Bunheads never entirely settles down and finds its center -- but it is nevertheless a great show, and by the end it has developed its central characters enough that their presence on television is really missed. Unfortunately it only seems to be available in paid digital form, no streaming or DVDs.



Galavant, on the other hand, is a full-on musical. Airing Sunday nights while Once Upon a Time was on hiatus, it has a tenuous Disney connection in that Alan Menken is a producer/songwriter/composer, but otherwise has nothing in common with the weird weird mess that is Once Upon a Time. Thank God.

I can't find video of one of my favorite moments, when evil King Richard -- who has been taking lessons to be more funny -- enters the room and interrupts hero Galavant:

Galavant: Where do you think they're keeping your parents:

King Richard: Perhaps they're up your butt.

King Richard: ... you see, because that's the most unlikely place.




 I really should have mentioned Timothy Omundson -- who I previously only really knew from a questionable arc on Xena -- in my Emmys discussion, because as King Richard he gave one of the two or three funniest performances on TV this season. It's a light show -- not quite as silly a spoof as something like When Things Were Rotten, more strongly plot-driven and invested in character relationships than a Monty Python production. Galavant's off to rescue the love of his life, Madalena, from King Richard, only she's pretty happy being the power behind an evil king's throne, and meanwhile there are sparks between Galavant and the princess who's helping him on his quest. Along the way you have frequent songs and guest stars from John Stamos (as "Sir Jean Hamm") to Hugh Bonneville.

If it weren't for Omundson, the show would be just fine. Creator Dan Fogelson has an iffy resume that is more likely to include a guilty pleasure or two (I like Cars because of the character design and use of Route 66) than anyone's favorite movie, but at least Galavant takes more chances than your average network sitcom.

And Omundson ... Omundson is amazing. The other characters are just foils for him to play off of, as far as I'm concerned.

the room smells like guilt and chanel no. 5

Caitlin and I recently binge-watched all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls, from Rory's acceptance to Chilton to the start of her post-college career -- the first watch for her, the second for me. It is comfort food par excellence.

Some general observations:

* If you never got around to the show or dismissed it out of hand (possibly-just-possssibly because you have a penis and the show has "girls" in the title), the core concept is simple: Lorelai Gilmore and her teenage daughter Rory are best friends. Lorelai grew up in a world of privilege and wealth, became pregnant at 16, and left home to get a job as a maid and raise her daughter on her own, rather than be hustled into marriage and have her life continue to be plotted out by her parents. As Rory grows up, Lorelai rises in the ranks of the inn where she works, and is running it when the series begins. The pilot introduces the basic conflict: Rory has been accepted to fictional prep school Chilton, as the first step toward her dream of going to Harvard, but Lorelai can't afford the tuition without her parents' help -- which comes with the requirement that Lorelai reestablish social ties with her family.

* Both Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishop (as her mother Emily) absolutely deserved Emmy nominations for this show. Oh, there are plenty of other great performances, but Graham is perfectly suited to Amy Sherman-Palladino's dialogue and sensibilities, and Bishop brings way more nuance to Emily Gilmore than you would expect from a broadcast television show.

* This is one of those hour-long shows, like Ally McBeal, Northern Exposure, Picket Fences, that puts the lie to the conventional wisdom that half-hour shows are comedies and hour-long shows are dramas. Ally McBeal usually gets the nod for breaking that mold, but the hour-long dramedy has been around since at least St Elsewhere, and ABC experimented with the half-hour dramedy in the form of Steven Bochko's Hooperman only a couple years later.

* I asked Caitlin what she had expected from it before she saw it (she loved it more than she expected), and she said she was afraid it might be precious and cute and quirky. Which it is! But it works. Maybe it's simply because it's quirky and genuine, whereas even Ally McBeal -- a show I liked in its heyday -- seemed unbelievably contrived in its quirkiness, and had to lean hard on the ability of actors like Peter McNichol to sell that quirk. Stars Hollow is a goofy place, but -- especially from second season on -- it's a consistently and predictably goofy place. Lorelai is a little quirky, but she's not random.

* For all that Lorelai and Rory never stop eating, the show does not really care very much about food. I don't just mean that the food isn't fancy -- Sookie's food at the inn is plenty fancy -- but that the show doesn't dwell on the particulars in the way that it might now in this newly slider-obsessed sriracha-driven America. Food is eaten. Lots of it. Pancakes and hamburgers. Never Indian food unless Lorelai isn't home. Little else is said about it.

* Though Amy Sherman-Palladino or her husband Daniel Palladino write most of the episodes, over the course of the series, other credited writers include future Orange is the New Black creator Jenji Kohan, The O.C's Allan Heinberg (also the creator of the Young Avengers comic), Buffy's Jane Espenson, The Big Bang Theory creator Bill Prady, veteran writing team James Berg and Stan Zimmerman (who wrote for my beloved Hooperman, as well as the "lesbian kiss" episode of Roseanne), Freaks and Geeks' Rebecca Rand Kirshner, and Ellen co-creator David S. Rosenthal, among others. After the 6th season, with the move to the CW, the Palladinos couldn't come to terms with the network on the writing budget -- with so many episodes credited to the two of them, the network apparently balked at hiring a full room, but had to do so anyway when the Palladinos called their bluff and left the show. Unfortunately the loss is felt, which I'll talk about below.

* There are some weird artifacts of shows that straddle the line between the Disposable TV and TV Forever eras -- for instance, Sean Gunn plays two different characters (as does Sherilyn Fenn, much more weirdly, though the reasons for the weirdness are spoilers), and that's one thing, but when the second and more permanent character -- Kirk -- shows up, he's initially new to Stars Hollow. By the end of the series, it's established that he grew up there, went to school with Luke, etc.

That's just the tip of a continuity-strangeness iceberg that becomes apparent when you binge-watch the show. The chronology and specifics of various events before the pilot are a little unclear, especially when it comes to Luke's love life, how long Lorelai has known Luke, and how she's been so involved in this town's life for a minimum of a decade but can still be surprised by things everyone else knows (things that have happened while she's been living there, in particular). All the moreso since she's spent that decade living next to Babette, one of the town's most prominent gossips.

It's not really important, and it's nowhere near as big as Mad About You replacing Jamie's parents not just with new stunt-casted actors but completely different characters late in its run. But like I said: when you binge-watch shows produced before binge-watching was possible, you spot some things.

Okay, let's get to spoiler stuff.

somebody made that up

The best show on TV comes back tomorrow night on The Sundance Channel, to start its third season. Almost nobody is watching it.

Rectify was created by Ray McKinnon, best known as a character actor who played the reverend in Deadwood, Holly Hunter's suitor in O Brother Where Art Thou, and a handful of other things. He also won an Academy Award, shared with his late wife Lisa Blount and producing partner Walton Goggins (Boyd Crowder on Justified), for their 2001 short film The Accountant. The Bitter Southerner recently posted a great feature on him and on the southernness of Rectify.

Rectify is full of faces almost as familiar as McKinnon's -- Michael O'Neill from The West Wing, Sean Bridgers from Deadwood, J. Smith-Cameron from a lengthy career on stage and screen, including the excellent Margaret -- though it's not the kind of character actor grab bag that something like The Good Wife is. Everyone feels hand-picked for the part -- like it was just a matter of the right show coming along that would shine a spotlight on them. I have my favorites -- even for an overlooked show, I think it's insane Abigail Spencer doesn't have an Emmy nomination -- but there's no one in the cast who doesn't deliver a masterpiece performance at some point in the show's first two seasons.

At the center of it is Aden Young, who plays Daniel Holden.

In the first episode, Daniel is released from prison, where he's been on death row for 19 years -- half his life -- having been convicted of the rape and murder of his high school girlfriend. DNA evidence has now shown he's not the rapist, and the state has to decide whether or not to try him again or drop their case against him.

Daniel is quiet, thoughtful, deliberate in his movements, and -- especially at first -- easily overwhelmed. His adult life has been spent in confinement under constant surveillance. He's returning to the same small town he grew up in, where his father is dead, his mother is remarried, and he now has a stepbrother positioned to take over the family business and a teenage half-brother to whom he's a stranger. His sister Amantha (Spencer) has devoted her life to fighting for his release, working with (and in a relationship with) the lawyer from Daniel's appeal, an advocate from the Innocence Project.

What is Rectify about, though?

It's not about solving the murder of who killed Hanna. That doesn't mean that question isn't addressed or answered, but that it's not what. the show. is about. It's not structured like the "an innocent man has been released from prison - what happens next?" show that most people and all network execs would be imagining at this point in hearing about Rectify. It's not a mystery.


I'm sure there's a thinkpiece out there that sums things up succinctly, but Rectify is about a lot of things. It's about what happens next. It's about Daniel getting used to being out. It's about what it was like for him being in. It's about his family adjusting to him being out - to not quite knowing him the way they did, not knowing how he fits in with them, and in the case of his half-brother and his step-brother's wife, getting to know him for the first time.

It's about the uncertainty: Daniel doesn't remember what happened, so is he even innocent? It's about how the community reacts to Daniel being released when no alternate suspect has been named, and how that affects the state senator who had been Daniel's prosecutor, the new district attorney, the new sheriff, Hanna's family, and the witnesses who testified that they saw Daniel do it.

It's not a mystery except that of course it is, because anything that deals decently and honestly with its portrayal of people deals in mystery.

It may sound somber or bleak, but it can be surreal, it can be funny, it can be touching, it can be uplifting.

It's not just that it's the best show on TV. It's the only show like it on TV. I can't say "if you like ___, you'll love Rectify," because while Rectify is doing something better than anyone else, most of the toys it plays with have not left the box before. Like The Sopranos or The Wire, it's not doing the TV people have done before. It's doing something else.

You want to start at the beginning, so find it on Netflix or watch one of the marathons.

emmy ballot

There is something about being a fan of a particular medium that makes some of us compulsive list-makers, right? Our desert island discs (Carried to Dust, Everywhere at Once, Challengers, In the Wee Small Hours...) and books (Little Big, House of Leaves, The Talisman, Swamp Thing...), top ten lists every year, and so on. I have to admit, when I first thought of doing this TV blog, one of the things I thought of was Sepinwall's annual "if I had an Emmys ballot" post.

Well, voting for Emmy nominations closed last week. Who would I have nominated?

Comedy

Series

Broad City was the single funniest thing on TV this year. I keep grouping it together with sketch shows in my head, because it's rare that a sitcom not only has such a strong voice, but for that voice to be that of the performers. I mean, Community, Taxi, Arrested Development, those shows have strong voices, but they belong to Harmon, Brooks, and Hurwitz, not anyone on screen. Broad City feels as personal as Key and Peele or Inside Amy Schumer, it just happens to be a sitcom.

Louie is of course the other sitcom for which that's true, though it is even less like a traditional sitcom than Broad City is. This season wasn't as ambitious as last season's multiple multi-episode arcs, but being more low key isn't a bad thing. I really hate the Louie/Pamela relationship, especially at this point in its history, but that doesn't mean it doesn't provide good comedy material.

I might put Transparent here even if all it did was give Judith Light a good role again. But Jill Soloway's show has even more going on than that, and although the transition of Jeffrey Tambor's Maura is the main focus, there's plenty going on in the rest of the family -- all of whom are self-absorbed, obnoxious, and various degrees of broken, which isn't surprising for a show created by a Six Feet Under vet.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt seems more like a network show than any other Netflix show does, but only because the work Tina Fey previously did on 30 Rock changed what network sitcoms can feel like. In a world that hadn't already seen 30 Rock, this show might be almost too weird, and maybe that's why NBC passed on it at the last minute. But it's one of the best things to come along in ages -- it's like Fey and her co-creator have realized that what sitcoms like to do is let their performers really ham it up, so they put something together where (just as in 30 Rock) hamming it up somehow works because of who the characters are (a girl recently escaped from a cult, an out of work actor, a wealthy trophy wife) instead of being yet another grating schlub of a husband rolling his eyes at his grating blonde of a momwife.

There are a lot of animated series that deserve at least consideration here. Rick and Morty didn't air last Emmy season, it turns out -- I didn't discover it until late -- but Adventure Time had a very strong season as it delves deeper and deeper into its own mythos and gets weirder and weirder. Bob's Burgers is of course always great. But I think the best thing in this mini-category this year was Netflix's Bojack Horseman, with Will Arnett as the anthropomorphic horse former star of a TGIF-type 90s sitcom. There are so many great things about this darkly funny and sometimes very bleak show, though my favorite is probably Vincent Adultman.


Lead Actress

Although Britta was underused in some of this year's Community episodes, Gillian Jacobs was still the funniest part of more episodes than not. While everyone on the cast has always seemed thoroughly comfortable in their characters, Jacobs really nailed Britta's combination of physical comedy, intellectual pretensions, and lack of self-awareness, bringing one of my all-time favorite TV characters to new heights of greatness. She's a large part of why this was one of the best seasons (despite the missing cast members, only the first two seasons were better).

Both Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson have to be on here for Broad City. And although I'm not going as far as imaginary nominations for guest stars, I'll reiterate that Kelly Ripa was fantastic, and really emblematic of what the guest star Emmy often represents: an actor working outside their usual boundaries and making something excellent happen there.

I'm not sure this was Amy Poehler's funniest season of Parks and Rec, but it was consistently one of the funniest shows on the air and even her weakest season would put her in the top five performances on TV, no question. Besides, there is something so joyful about Leslie Knope that it's always fun to see good things happen for her.

Ellie Kemper anchored The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and made it look easy, though I realize I'm including her at the expense of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss on Veep, Gaby Hoffmann on Transparent, and Constance Wu on Fresh Off the Boat.

Lead Actor

Jeffrey Tambor has had a hell of a career, hasn't he? He's come a long way since The Ropers, but even if Larry Sanders was the thing he was remembered for, that'd be a pretty great career. But then came Arrested Development, and suddenly he was at the center of two all-time great shows. And now a third with Transparent. Somehow you can always find him right there wherever the most innovative and interesting work is happening, and this time, he's anchoring the whole thing.

Louis CK is never not going to be on this list, not as long as he's making his show.

Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele are consistently funnier than the vast majority of sitcoms out there, and even their goofiest, most ridiculous stuff -- okay, maybe especially that -- always makes me laugh, from "A. A. ron" to "L'Carpetron Dookmarriott" to, well, this.

Did Review actually come out during the just-ended Emmy season, or was it the one before that? Well whatever, I'm going to say Andy Daly here, the lead of Review, a show that might not sound amazing -- fictional TV show host "reviews" real-life experiences like "stealing," "being a racist," and "eating ten pancakes" -- until you see it.


Drama

Series

Mad Men had a fantastic season, albeit one with a rocky start -- I'm still not sold on the necessity of Diane, even as I recognize how she got us from point A to point B (and maybe that's the problem, since who fondly remembers a character as the route from one place in the story to another?) and am ambivalent about a few other aspects. But I think it's probably a show that should leave you feeling that way.

With Mad Men and Breaking Bad done, the best dramas by far are Rectify and The Leftovers, both of which can be slow and thoughtful in novelistic ways, though I recognize that is frustrating for much of the potential audience. It isn't for me. I'd be on board for a Rectify that was twice as slow. These shows are exactly why TV is great these days, because when else would we have a slow-paced show about a man recently released from prison from death row for a murder he isn't sure if he committed or not, or a bleak portrait of families (and communities) gradually falling apart in the wake of a Rapture-like event?

Better Call Saul is way up there, it's just a little harder to call it a drama at times. But that's not a new problem, right? Ally McBeal was nominated for comedy Emmys but felt like apples and oranges against its sitcom competitors, and before that, St Elsewhere got drama awards but was funny at least as often as BCS.

Took me a minute to think of what the fifth nominee should be. The Good Wife had too uneven a season and the nonsense with Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies reached its show-affecting peak. Justified had its strongest season since the Bennetts, but still felt like it was treading water at times. The Americans, on the other hand, dealt with some of its strongest material, though I am still having trouble swallowing some of the plot developments (or the lack of certain plot developments occurring, I suppose) where Clark and Martha are concerned.

Lead Actress

Elisabeth Moss is the best actress on television in the 2010s, period. Okay, Connie Britton could give her a run for her money if Nashville gave her material to work with as strong as Friday Night Lights did, but between Mad Men and Top of the Lake, there is just no one else who has done better than Moss in recent years. The final season of Mad Men includes some of the best Peggy moments, especially the final two episodes. I really hope we don't lose Moss to movies. There is a particular joy in seeing the way an actor develops a character over time, one you can only find in television.

Carrie Coon and Amy Brenneman are the strongest performers on The Leftovers, doing very different work that -- like that of Moss and Christina Hendricks on Mad Men, for instance -- is grounded in their shared world. I knew Brenneman was good, of course, but it's great seeing her have something so meaty to work with, while Coon has been a revelation.

Speaking of revelations, Keri Russell somehow keeps getting better and better. Felicity is a pretty underrated show in the first place -- I think it's too easily summed up by its sort of wincey "girl follows crush to college" premise -- and Mission Impossible aside, she didn't have a lot of high-profile movie work in between series. But holy shit is she good on The Americans. If we weren't in such a golden age of drama, it would be no contest, hers would be the best female performance on TV.

Although Orphan Black hasn't stayed as strong as its first season, that's largely because of the rambling plotting. Tatiana Maslany continues to do heroic work in half a dozen roles -- differentiating them by more than just their hairstyle would be hard enough, but she manages to bring nuance to characters who could easily seem straight out of Central Casting, especially soccer mom Alison.

Lead Actor

Look, lots of guys were great this year, and it's a shame Aden Young hasn't already got an Emmy for Rectify, but he'll have time, as will Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. This year has to be Jon Hamm. There is no close second. It has to be Don Draper. Come on. Teach the world to sing.


Supporting performances

I would nominate everyone on Transparent, Mad Men, and Rectify who doesn't qualify as a lead. Sam Elliott is probably an obvious choice for Justified; same with Michael McKean from Better Call Saul. Speaking of which, I was unfamiliar with Rhea Seehorn before BCS, but she's terrific. The whole Togetherness cast has submitted as supporting actors, and they all deserve nominations. Lorraine Toussaint and Uzo Adaba are the obvious choices from Orange is the New Black. Anybody on The New Girl or Parks is Emmy-worthy -- like a lot of the best sitcoms (Taxi, Mary Tyler Moore, Community, Happy Endings), the strength of those shows is their combinations of characters, much more than any one central performance. Zach Woods and T.J. Miller deserve nods for Silicon Valley, too, as does Kether Dononue for You're the Worst.

summer watching

Every blog post about summer TV starts out by reminiscing over when there wasn't any summer TV, right? When apart from the occasional show being burned off -- David Lynch and Mark Frost's On The Air! the unfinished Stephen King series Golden Years! -- it was when you caught up on the shows you didn't usually watch, because there were no DVRs. Even in the late 90s, summer rerun season was key, letting me catch up on this weird "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" show I had just caught a few episodes of.

So okay, that's out of the way.

Obviously summer has changed, but it's still the weaker season overall. Sure, HBO runs some strong stuff, and Mad Men has aired in the summer, but the networks never put their biggest hits on in the summer, and comedy especially is thin on the ground.

Here's what I've checked out lately:

Game of Thrones is having both one of its best and its most problematic season. Catching up to the books has forced the showrunners' hands in some interesting ways, and while I won't get specific in this post, I will say that I love much of it, but the rape is out of control. There are a lot of things to say about the ways fiction uses rape, and how often rape is used to tell a story framed so that it isn't even the victim's story, and there isn't room to get into all of it here. But GOT has been pretty fucking awful in that respect, and I can't blame the people who have jumped ship.

The Dorne storyline is also a huge flaw this season, both for the critical changes from the way it plays out in the book and the fact that the country itself is portrayed so shoddily -- let me direct you to Neil Miller's excellent (and of course spoiler-ridden) post about it, because I can't think of anything to add.

Veep and Silicon Valley are as good or better (in Silicon Valley's case) as they've been in previous seasons, I just don't know what to say about them beyond that.

Hannibal is a show I came to late. We checked out the first few episodes of the first season and I couldn't get into it. It seemed well-acted and everything, sure, but I am so burned out on serial killers. Enough with all the fucking serial killers.

I still feel that way, but from the end of season one and through season two, the show really transformed -- while, admittedly, still being about serial killers. It's become more weird and imagistic, disturbing without being a gorey rapefest. It's nothing like Bryan Fuller's previous shows, except insofar as it's never lazy.

Halt and Catch Fire has indeed improved in its second season, though two episodes in I am not persuaded that Sepinwall is correct that it's finally a great AMC drama. Cameron is still obnoxious, and although it's not entirely clear to me how much we're supposed to side with her vision, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be impressed by her commitment to online gaming -- even though the company would have to coast on minimal profits for a decade before that would pay off.

This is one of the things I really hate about the difficulty that writers, as a group, have writing about smart people. Taking a character in a period show and demonstrating their genius through their commitment to some idea that we in the present know eventually becomes a big hit is, at best, fucking lazy. It worked when John Astin did it on Brisco County Jr but that's a comedy, for heaven's sake. In a case like this, it just makes everyone look dumb: online gaming isn't a big money idea in the mid-80s and the actual smart people realized that. It would be like launching a company providing services to electric car owners or something now - the market just isn't big enough yet, can't be big enough yet.

Think about Don Draper. How terrible would Mad Men be if a season culminated in him introducing McDonald's Monopoly or if he spent all his time trying to convince people that a television channel devoted to shopping from home was the wave of the future?

That said: increasing Donna's presence has been a tremendous improvement, and Joe has not bothered me at all this year, although at the moment it's sort of hard to see why he's actually on the show. It's a flawed show, but maybe the bleeding has stopped.

I really wanted to like Aquarius but I don't think I could even tell you anything about what happens in the two episodes I've seen. I like David Duchovny but he's made weird choices in his post-X-Files work, and while on paper this show sounds like it has a lot of potential, it's just ... forgettable.

Wayward Pines. A Secret Service agent investigating the disappearance of other agents winds up in a weird town he can't escape from. Based on books I haven't read, and apparently promising answers to the whole thing, this just comes across like a bland retread of The Prisoner - the ultimate "where am I, what is going on, and who is in on it?" show, which gave few answers but managed to be engaging and rewarding in every episode. This show has been a trudge. Somehow The Prisoner never left me wondering, what do all these townspeople do with their days when we're not watching them?, a feat its ripoffs never manage. (I was a big Prisoner fan, right down to the DC comics sequel and the GURPS supplement.)

The Whispers is the more promising Mysterious Shit Going Down show, though I'm not sure by how much. If nothing else, the show is more watchable, because it isn't full of people doing weird stilted acting while they pretend nothing's going on. Lily Rabe is in it, which is great, but so is Milo Ventimiglia. I need more episodes to decide what to think of this one, but unlike most of the other new summer shows, at least I'm interested in seeing those episodes.

UnReal has turned out to be the surprise new show of the summer, from fucking Lifetime of all things. It's a Serious Cable Drama that fits Lifetime the way Mad Men fit AMC: just as AMC's brand was invested in nostalgia, the past, and serious drama, Lifetime's brand is invested in melodrama, both strong female characters and crazy ones, and reality shows like The Bachelor. UnReal revolves around a Bachelor-type show called Everlasting, run by exec producer Constance Zimmer (a longtime favorite of mine since Good Morning Miami), who has brought back field producer Shiri Appleby (Roswell) despite her breakdown in a previous season.

There are so many things this show does right:

First, it attacks its subject matter but doesn't parody it. Hotwives notwithstanding, reality shows are poor material for parody, because they're already so broad and ridiculous.

I don't give a shit about reality shows, so thankfully there are other things it does right too -- but that first one is still very important.

Second, Shiri Appleby is kind of the show's Don Draper, to continue the Mad Men analogy. Not because of a Dick Whitman-like past -- the backstory to her breakdown seems to be pretty straightforward, actually -- but because she is very good at what she does, and what she does isn't very pretty. That's been a subplot playing out through Serious TV for a while -- Walter White discovers he's not just a good drug cook, he's a great drug dealer, for instance -- and even apart from the moral greyness, there's always a joy in seeing a character be convincingly good at something. (Again, this is my problem with Halt and Catch Fire.) Appleby's producer is brought in to manufacture drama, to pit contestants against each other and create the narrative of the show-within-the-show. It's shitty business, but the show understands the skill involved, and understands how to portray it.

Third, she's not a villain. She's clearly conflicted about this shit. That said, this show ... brings to mind all the old Mad Men and Sopranos complaints about nobody on those shows being likable. It's a show about people manipulating women and pitting them against each other -- women who are often pretty awful to begin with, but some of whom may be genuine. (None of them stands out for me so far, but neither did Pete's entourage - Ken, Kinsey, Harry - at this point in Mad Men. There is a tall "southern" contestant whose southern accent is just awful, but that is typical of television, unfortunately.)

I used to say that it was more important for me that characters be real than that they be likable. Then I saw Girls, which certainly seems plenty real and which I can't stand watching more than a couple minutes of. So I don't have a pithy explanation of where I stand on likability, empathy, and sympathy. I loved Breaking Bad even when I didn't want Walt to win, and I love rooting for Saul the sleazy lawyer now, and I loved the Sopranos even though Tony became more and more of an asshole with time. I have a sense for why those things are true, which isn't worth getting into when I'm supposed to be talking about UnReal, but the point is that I can't tell yet how it will all work for this show.

it's not tv, it's... no, it's tv, fucking everything is tv now

So first we had HBO, which after broadcasting a handful of original series over the years -- most of which were standard fare that capitalized on the network's capacity for nudity and swearing -- suddenly landed on The Larry Sanders Show, the first one to garner really serious acclaim. Within a few years it had added Oz and The Sopranos, and suddenly this was a thing: HBO is in the Serious TV game. Keep in mind, even broadcast networks have only ever dallied in the Serious TV game. It's been sort of like the pro bono work that rat bastards do on the side.

But HBO started to turn Serious TV into a large part of its brand identity. Maybe they looked at the shorter and shorter delays between movies' theatrical releases and their showing up on Blockbuster shelves, and maybe they even realized how much shorter those delays would become once DVDs arrived. Maybe they understood that movies couldn't always be the reason to subscribe to the Home Box Office, is what I'm saying. But maybe they just got lucky.

Anyway, Showtime eventually followed, and today it's just assumed that a premium cable channel will have a handful of original series that can hold up to or surpass the quality and budgets of what you find on broadcast television.

Then FX premiered The Shield, during the last years of NYPD Blue, picking up the Serious Cop Show baton. It's a slow burner of a show that only a decade later can seem, if not dated per se, at least ordinary, because the violent antihero has become a drama staple.

Now FX was in the Serious TV game, and AMC followed with Mad Men, and although most other basic cable channels are still pretty early in the Developing Serious TV timeline, they contribute over half of the more than 300 scripted series that air each year. Some networks have forgone the Serious TV game in favor of more commercial programming -- MTV comes to mind here -- but the point is that broadcast's share has been eaten away by basic cable now, not just premium cable.

And then Netflix picked up Orange is the New Black, the House of Cards remake, and Arrested Development, followed by the rapid launch of a real network's worth of shows; Hulu picked up The Mindy Project; Amazon streamed Transparent; Yahoo Screen picked up Community after NBC failed to.

Fucking everything is a TV channel now.

This is the year that really hit home. The third season of House of Cards has aired, and although it's the weakest to date, it's still a sign of the new power of streaming services. The third season of Orange is the New Black starts soon, and God knows I am looking forward to Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer. On top of that -- still just talking about Netflix here -- Bloodline and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have wound up being two of my favorite series of the year.

All of that by way of introducing some quick coverage of the state of streaming TV this year.

Netflix

Like I said, House of Cards was a disappointment. I think Robin Wright is the best thing about the show -- not that Kevin Spacey isn't fun -- but this season just didn't feel very compelling, and that's only part because of the wealth of choices we have to watch these days.

Bloodline, though, features a cast of actors I absolutely love -- Coach, Lindsay Weir, Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek, Jacinda from the Real World for pete's sake! and some guys I wasn't really familiar with before -- in a dark drama by the creators of Damages, a show I haven't watched much of. Yet.

I have a soft spot for Suspenseful Narratives About Families With Secrets, so this definitely hit my target.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, originally developed for NBC which passed on it after the first season was already produced, turned out to be one of the two or three best new shows of the 2014-15 season. I'm sure if you have Netflix you've seen it by now. Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, it has a lot of the sensibility of 30 Rock -- right down to Jane Krakowski in a similarly self-involved role -- but is centered around the optimism and naivete of Kimmy, who has recently been rescued from a cult. It's a hard show to sum up, and interestingly it really feels like a cable/streaming show -- it's a 13 episode season, with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. Titus Burgess is clearly the newcomer of the year, and it's fantastic to have Carol Kane on the air again. Or on the stream. Whatever.

Grace and Frankie is a fairly traditional modern sitcom in most respects, except that the premise -- Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin's husbands, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterhouse, leave their wives for each other, and the women try to get their lives together -- would piss off some of the red states. It's a solid show with well-above average actors.

Amazon

Amazon is a weird one to keep track of, because they launch a crapload of pilots, wait to see which ones are the most popular, greenlight those, and then take forever to get around to launching the series. (Once in a while something goes straight to series, like the as yet untitled Woody Allen series.)

Transparent, which hit the streams last September, is fantastic, and probably the best new show of the 2014-15 season. Jeffrey Tambor plays a man who, having secretly dressed as a woman for years, finally tells his family that he's decided to transition. Jill Soloway, a writer and producer on Six Feet Under, showrunner of The United States of Tara, and director of the disappointing Afternoon Delight, was inspired by her own parent's coming out as transgender. It's a perfect premise for a show because, as Tambor explains everything to his adult kids, he walks the audience through what's going on as well.

Less like a sitcom and more like an indie movie told in small doses, Transparent is fantastic, funny, sometimes frustrating in the good way -- where you're frustrated with the characters, not the narrative -- and probably other F-words. Thank God it was renewed for a second season. Hurry up and air it. Stream it. Whatever.

Yahoo Screen

How are we even talking about Yahoo Screen? What even is Yahoo Screen? Its interface, at least on the Roku, is awful.

Community is how. After NBC failed to renew it for a sixth season, Yahoo said fuck no, "six seasons and a movie, dammit!", and picked it up. Yvette Nicole Brown left for personal reasons, Chevy Chase and Donald Glover had already left, and after filling in for a year, Jonathan Banks left too. Two new cast members joined -- showkiller Paget Brewster and Keith "not David Keith" David.

Let's stop and point out that Keith David was on The Cape, that Abed's obsession with The Cape and his insistence that it would last for "six seasons and a movie" is what led to the phrase "six seasons and a movie" that has become emblematic of Community fans' faith and determination, and that even though a cast member from The Cape is now in the sixth season and presumably a movie, there have been no references to The Cape this season!

Whether because of the cast turnover or a similar creative turnover -- I assume not all the same writers and directors are involved, but I don't know for sure -- Community has felt different this year. There have been a couple of weak episodes, but for the most part I don't mean different in a bad way. It's often just weirder.

"Basic Crisis Room Decorum" is the best example. Both the third episode of the season and the 100th episode of the series, it's one of the ten, maybe even one of the five, best episodes of Community of all time -- not because of the A-plot, in which City College premieres an attack ad because Greendale let a dog graduate, but because of weird jokes that don't translate well to print, like a drunken Britta shitting her pants and later hallucinating a music video by 90s college rock band Natalie Is Freezing.

Sometimes the show seems a little off tonally. Abed especially just seems ... different, maybe simply because Troy isn't around, or maybe because there aren't many new angles from which to approach his meta thing, without it seeming forced. Maybe it's this simple: in contrast with earlier seasons, where all-time-great episodes like "Critical Film Studies" (the "My Dinner with Abed" one) were driven by Abed or by the interplay between Abed and either Jeff or Troy, Abed hasn't been my favorite thing about any episode so far this season. That's not a liability or anything, it's just a change. On the other hand, Gillian Jacobs has been doing Emmy-quality work, which is all the more remarkable given that somehow after six years she's finding new things to do with this character. The introduction of Britta's parents has been terrific too, and if we say fuck the hashtag and storm forward with a season seven, I would love to see them show up more frequently.

(In retrospect, I guess Abed's importance actually peaked as long ago as season two, which included not only "Critical Film Studies" but "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" and "Paradigms of Human Memory.")

Despite the fact that The New Yorker ran an article on its casting, I haven't heard anybody talking about Other Space, Paul Feig's sitcom on Yahoo Screen. The marketing line seems to be "it's The Office, in space," but it's so, so much weirder than that.

It's clearly not a high budget series -- outside of Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu from MST3K (who I mistook for the stars of the show before I saw it), it's a cluster of sorta-kinda familiar faces, like that guy from those phone commercials and that girl from those other phone commercials, But it's funny and weird and does a great job finding the comic potential in familiar space show concepts -- ground you figure has already been well-trod by Red Dwarf, but if there's room for a zillion Star Treks, there's room for a few funny Star Trek parodies.

There are so many other streaming shows and platforms I'm not even talking about, because there's too much to watch. I haven't even watched Powers, for instance, because although I have a Playstation and am a fan of the comic book, I don't have Playstation Plus and don't feel like paying for a TV show when we're already paying for cable and two streaming services (three if you count Amazon Prime).

bang splat equal at dollar underscore

AMC's computer industry period drama Halt and Catch Fire returns tomorrow for its second season, which Alan Sepinwall -- who I think is far and away the most important TV critic -- assures is significantly better than the first season.

In anticipation of that, my brief thoughts on that first season --

The initial premise is that business suit wildcard Joe (the normally great Lee Pace) and computer dude Gordon team up, along with punky college dropout Cameron, to ripoff the IBM PC by reverse engineering it (like Compaq did in real life).

My father has been in the personal computer industry for nearly as long as there's been one, having left his PhD program in the 60s in order to found a computer company with two of his friends. By the early 1980s, when this show takes place, I was around and certainly well aware of computers (my Christmas wishlists included the early "notebook computers" and 300-baud modems). And that's kind of my biggest problem with the show.

It's like when you're watching a western, and somehow none of the white people are ever racist unless they're bad guys. Except in this case, the history of the early personal computer industry is obscure enough that most of the audience isn't going to be tripped up, most of the time. But it's not history for me, you know? I can't help that so much of the show seems unreal to me.

That problem ties in with a less personal problem, which is the characters. Far and away the best is Donna, Gordon's wife, played by Kerry Bishe from the bizarrely well-cast final season of Scrubs (which also included Dave Franco and future comedy legend Eliza Coupe). Donna might be the brightest of the bunch, and one of the show's strengths is that it lets us realize this early on. Gordon and Donna had tried and failed to go into business for themselves, and now he has the more ambitious job so that she has time to tend the kids, though everyone's circumstances have changed -- for the narratively better -- by the end of the season. Perhaps because she is least central to the plot, Donna is also the most fully realized and nuanced character.

See, the other three -- especially Joe and Cameron -- are an unfortunate collection of Serious Cable Drama tics and cliches, without much consistency. Joe is an erratic wildcard. He's a wildcard, man! He might punch you or screw somebody he shouldn't screw! Whoooa. And Cameron, punky punkity punk punk Cameron, she doesn't design computers according to your RULES, man. Computers want to be FREE, man. She's a VISIONARY, man.

Cameron is an absolutely fucking shitty visionary. For most of the first season I can't stand Cameron.

This is the biggest area where my own experience of the computer industry becomes a stumbling block, but it's not Inside Baseball shit that's getting in my way. Anyone who was alive and using computers in the early 80s would have the same problem: Cameron never once sounds like a real computer person from the 20th century.

Joe is always vague about computers. He's realized the growth potential of the industry, but he's not someone who's going to put a system together in his garage. Gordon is practical enough that most of what he says sounds fine to my ear.

But Cameron is meant to be a visionary, and instead of making her sound like actual real-life visionaries from the computer industry, many of whom are still alive today or have written books, they make her sound like a 21st century audience member who is wandering around 1983 and pointing at computers and saying "we shouldn't make computers like this, we should make them do what they do in 2015." Some of the things that she throws tantrums about are features that were absolutely being discussed in the 80s, but in a "someday we'll be able to do this" kind of way, features that would require several technological revolutions to make possible. They aren't things you could just sit down with a couple people in your company and develop. They took the work of hundreds or thousands of people over many years.

That's my other problem. I'm a historian by training, and one of the most irritating fallacies is the idea that the way history turned out was the way it had to turn out -- the idea, in this case, that the computers we have now are an inevitable consequence of the computers of 1983: that there is a single path the development of the personal computer can take, and it will always transpire the same way. If history did work that way, foreseeing the future development of anything would just require being a little bit smart. No big whoop. You just think about something for a little bit, and it will become obvious to you which changes and improvements will be introduced in the future. Perhaps you'll be off on the timing -- there are funding considerations, after all -- but the broad shapes will be obvious.

Right?

No, not fucking right. There's a whole cottage industry of futurists and they're never fucking right. Pick up any issue of Mondo 2000 for heaven's sake, or an early issue of Wired, and tell me where our grape-sized watermelons are, because I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be the hottest new food of 1995. Futurists are awful at what they do because what they do is not a thing that can actually be done well.

That said, Mad Men may very well get a great deal wrong about advertising in the 1960s. Certainly some people have said so. Does it only not matter to me because it's not my personal experience being contradicted, or because the show had enough else to offer?

I genuinely think the latter. Cameron's insistence on the way computers need to be is a huge part of her inconsistently written character. It's not just a tic, and I often get the feeling that we're supposed to be on her side -- or at least recognize her genius. The ads for season two, for instance, have her demanding online gaming. In 1983. I was playing games online in 1993, a full decade after the show takes place, and as far as they had come in that time, they were:

a) nothing a gamer of today would recognize as a video game (they were entirely text-based)

b) apart from the MUDs and MUSHes that only a very small number of people with internet access could play, most of them were turn-based, and were barely more than adaptations of the play-by-mail games that most of you have never heard of.

Looking forward to a future of online gaming in 1983 is one thing, but trying to get a business off the ground that promises to service flying cars when everyone else is saving up for their first Model T doesn't make you a genius or a visionary. And it definitely doesn't help Cameron's case any when the writers so often make her petulant or frustrated at having to deal with how computers actually are in 1983. It just makes her seem like someone who doesn't actually want to work in the computer industry.

Sepinwall says it'll get better. He's right that there was a significant improvement at the end of the season. We'll see.