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.
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