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).
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