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.
