crazy ex-girlfriend

I feel like at least once an episode, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend wins me over again.

And maybe it's like, because it feels like it needs to, because of the title and the premise: after running into her junior high summer camp boyfriend (a relationship she's never gotten over), Rebecca impulsively quits her job in New York to move to his small hometown in California in the hopes of reconnecting with him ("it's a lot more nuanced than that," the title song insists), before realizing that a) he's in a serious relationship and b) this is a crazy plan. P.S. like Galavant, this is a musical comedy.

But for instance, in the latest episode, the inciting incident is Rebecca accidentally sending a text ABOUT Josh (the junior high summer camp boyfriend) TO Josh instead of Paula, her new best friend / co-worker at the small law firm in town. We've seen this basic premise a million times, long before text messages, and so the show immediately skips over one of the usual beats -- instead of a lot of dancing around during the important business meeting when this happens, Paula calls a halt to the meeting, tells everyone what happened, and they drop everything to brainstorm the best solution.

"Tell him it's opposite day!"

"We could say you were hacked."

etc.

Naturally they all break into song.

She winds up with a police escort on her way to get to his phone before either he or his girlfriend (who knows Rebecca's into him but can't get Josh to believe her) can see the text.

That's exactly what I mean. A lot of the situations in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are familiar, but the show and creator-star Rachel Bloom play with that familiarity. Just as Galavant pokes fun at the tropes of its genre, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend pokes at the tropes of romantic comedies and modern dating -- though I'm going to stop comparing the two there.

The second time in this particular episode when I was won over again? Paula's explaining Rebecca's whole deal to her husband, Scott, and their conversation happens to be the lyrics to the show's theme song. It's goofy, but it works, which is kind of the show in a nutshell.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend isn't exactly about a crazy ex-girlfriend, not least because Rebecca and Josh "dated" at summer camp when they were kids. Furthermore, it's clear that Rebecca's unhappiness in the pilot went deeper than relationship issues. She hasn't worked out why she's been dissatisfied, but despite her professional success, the last time she can remember being happy is when she was at summer camp dating Josh. On some level, the show is more about Rebecca dealing with the fact that she has been living an unhappy life, and dealing with the consequences of the fact that she finally took radical action to improve that life -- action that is hard to explain to anyone else, and hard for anyone to interpret as anything other than stalking Josh.

On the other hand, Rebecca refuses to give up on her infatuation with Josh, spending the first half of the season denying it to anyone who asks and finally confessing to Paula that yes, she really is obsessed with him. Even though Josh's girlfriend is pretty terrible, it's sort of hard to root for Josh and Paula getting together -- not just because Josh has a good friend who briefly dates Rebecca and is a better match for her, but because Rebecca can't speak for more than thirty seconds without saying something that Josh needs explained. Maybe they were on the same level when they were 14, but they're not dealing from the same deck of cards today.

The show does not sum up well, and there are people who will just never get past the title or premise, but it's increasingly remarkable, a show with a real voice. Rachel Bloom is a genuine talent, and I don't know what this show looks like in its third or fourth season, but I hope it gets there.

midwinter check-in

I mentioned Galavant earlier; this winter, early spring, whatever this season is in this post-season realm of post-television television, it became the comedy I most looked forward to. I'm not sure if second season is necessarily better than the first -- they're hard to compare -- so much as that more of a spotlight is given to my favorite character, Timothy Omundson's King Richard. While Karen David's Isabella was essentially the deuteragonist of the first season, her role was somewhat reduced in second season -- my only complaint -- with Richard assuming that role, and Galavant and Richard's quest often taking the form of a buddy comedy in the same way that Galavant and Isabella's  in first season followed the trope of the guy who falls for his platonic female friend while trying to impress/win back/rescue his putative love interest.

Even apart from the music itself, it's a very smart and clever show, very playful and sometimes arch, right down to Kylie Minogue playing the Queen of the Enchanted Forest, which turns out to be a gay bar. Please let that be a recurring role.

But as good as everyone else is, Richard is the highlight. Richard is amazing. Richard is one of my favorite characters in TV comedy.

Speaking of which -- the other show I find myself looking forward to every week is New Girl, which I would not have believed when it premiered. I openly scorned this show in its first season, having absolutely hated the pilot. When Jake Johnson started showing up in movies I liked, it pissed me off that he was stuck in a shitty show like New Girl. But I would catch pieces of episodes because we didn't have a DVR yet and it was paired with some other show I watched -- Mindy Project, maybe? -- and in time I started watching for Max Greenfield's Schmidt. And before long I was just watching, period, and tolerating Zooey Deschanel's Jess. And since then, either Jess has become less of an obnoxiously precious pixie or I've become used to her, I don't know. Greenfield and Johnson were my main reasons to watch, but, video-game style, the writers have unlocked the secrets to the comedy of everybody else over time, and my favorite scenes are often classic Winston and Cece mess-arounds. It was never that Lamorne Morris and Hannah Simone weren't funny, just that the writers couldn't figure out how to write Winston consistently -- and then sort of made that the point -- and Cece's role as Jess's best friend or Schmidt's crush sometimes made her more plot device than character. Those problems seem to be in the past.

It's not on the level of Happy Endings, Community, or Parks and Rec, don't get me wrong -- nothing at that level seems to be on the schedule right now. Although as far as shows that have the potential to get there, The Grinder turned out to be a hell of a lot funnier than I expected it to be. I don't really understand the Arrested Development comparisons I've seen some people make -- I think you need to rewatch Arrested Development if you think any show can be compared to it -- but:

a) the cast is so fucking solid, and it says a lot about Mary Elizabeth Ellis (the Waitress on Always Sunny) and Natalie Morales (The Middleman, Trophy Wife) that they fit in fine with veterans like Rob Lowe, Fred Savage (who is doing really great work here), and William Devane. Timothy Olyphant's recurring role as himself contributes so much both to the show and to Rob Lowe's character that part of me kind of hopes Tim-O doesn't get his own show and becomes a regular here? I knew he could be funny, but he is perfectly cast here.

b) the show is just meta enough without being a parody, a satire, a send-up, whatever. Actor who played lawyer on not-at-all believable TV show moves back home after his show ends, joins the family law firm in non-lawyer capacity, overshadows his hard-working brother by treating every case like one of his episodes. It's like ... what that Disney movie Bolt was supposed to be. And of course, every episode starts with the family watching an episode of the show-within-a-show.

Everyone is good, and the writing is solid, but the show is absolutely dependent on Rob Lowe's ability to sell his character, and he pulls it off. The Emmys ignored him on Parks, but maybe this will change things.

Meanwhile, off in superhero-world, Supergirl continues to improve, although it also continues to borrow more and more elements from Superman -- having already made Jimmy (James) Olsen part of the cast, they've now had a Toyman episode, introduced Bizarro (and it's Bizarro Supergirl, not Bizarro Superman), and written Max Lord as just a Lex Luthor who hits on Kara's sister instead of on Lois Lane.

Legends of Tomorrow has a boring name but a fun premise -- superheroes and supervillains culled from the Flash and Arrow shows are gathered by Rip Hunter to bounce around in time trying to stop immortal bad dude Vandal Savage. Wentworth Miller's Captain Cold and Caity Lotz's Canary are the standouts here, though I love that Rory from Dr Who is playing a Time Lord now -- but man, the fatal flaw of the show is that the guy playing Vandal Savage is just not good!

I've just looked him up, he's a Danish actor, and maybe in his native language he's a better actor, but here he's a) too campy to take seriously and b) this may be like ... voic-ist or something ... but his voice is simply too high-pitched for him to be a compelling evil immortal mastermind. It's a comic book show. There are conventions to be followed. Maybe if he were a better actor he could pull it off or if the writing were great it wouldn't matter, but in the show as it stands, it matters. Dude is just not convincing me that he's a threat to a box of kittens, much less to this time machine full of superfolks.

In other dramas, I really hope this turns out to be the final season of The Good Wife. As you may have heard, the showrunner-creators are leaving one way or the other (remaining as uninvolved producers) but CBS wants to sally forth if they can get the actors to stay. Between Peter's bid for the presidency, Alicia's solo venture, Eli telling Alicia about that thing that time ... this feels like a proper final season. This feels like time. I love the show, I love Eli Gold, I love Diane Lockhart, I think they did a great job adding the improbably named Cush Jumbo to the cast, and I love all these crazy judges and opposing attorneys, but it's time to either move on or make a spinoff starring the fantastic Carrie Preston.

I've been altogether deeply disappointed by Sleepy Hollow, a show I vocally championed in its first two seasons, this year. It simply doesn't feel like the same show, and I let it languish on the DVR until it feels like we have to watch it.

American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. is only one episode in, but it seems like it might be ... really good? Caitlin had to convince me this would be worth watching, but she was right. Maybe it helps that the show actually originated outside of Ry-Murpland and was brought into the fold after development had begun, I don't know. I guess it explains why Evan Peters isn't playing Kato Kaelin, anyway.

The Sci-Fi Channel, which I think is now called Syfy or SyFy or sYfY or essWHYeffWHY or some fucking thing, has adapted Lev Grossman's Magicians series, which is an interesting thing. I had some issues with the books, and I have some issues with the show, but it turns out they are not even the same issues!

Nevermind the issues with the books, by and large -- the biggest one was that I didn't like the main character, Quentin, very much. So far that is mitigated somewhat in the show by rearranging the presentation of the story a bit so that we get Julia's story at the same time as Quentin's instead of hearing about it later in flashback.

The Magicians is like an adult version of Harry Potter meets Narnia: magic is real but, as in those books, hardly anyone realizes it, and as in the Potterverse, its proper use is taught at special schools. The first book begins with Quentin finding out about and attending Brakebills, one such school -- unlike Harry Potter, this is a college, not a boarding school for berobed tots, so you have drunken sorcery and whatnot going on. Which is great! It's fun!

And that's my main issue with the show right there: it moves FAST. In the books, the "meets Narnia" part doesn't happen right away, but the show introduces the Narnia analogue of Fillory immediately and is rushing toward it. It seems to me that if you have the television rights to "the grown-up version of a Harry Potter type school for college kids, where they drink and screw and stuff," and there are only three books in the series, the most marketable thing to do is to linger at the school for as long as possible. Spend at least a season showing us what normal life at a college learning magic is like, because surely that is fascinating and challenging and dramatic on its own, right?

But the show doesn't seem interested in doing that, and it feels like dramatic potential squandered.

It's doing a decent job of what it is interested in -- calling it the best Sci Fi Channel show since Battlestar Galactica is faint praise, but nevertheless -- with the other key problem being that the most interesting female role, Alice, has been either underwritten, badly miscast, or both. I think it's a little of both, because I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read the books watching this and thinking of her as the most interesting of these women. Again, it's a shame -- squandered potential, because the book version is a great character, and this is only slightly made up for by the fact that they are doing better by Julia (so far).

thirtysomething and othersomethings

I recently binge-watched the entirety of Thirtysomething on Hulu, shortly after being disappointed by Casual and the second season of Transparent -- both of which I think I can fairly call its descendants.

I'd seen some of Thirtysomething when it first aired in the late 80s and early 90s, and again when it reaired on basic cable in the mid-90s, but that means it'd been a minimum of 20 years since I'd seen any of it, and that particular 20 years is a lot of television history. A lot of television history that the show had a pretty deep impact on, as it turns out. Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere (especially after its first couple seasons), and Thirtysomething -- those were the shows that over the course of the 1980s first started leaning heavily on viewer attention span. While Wiseguy was strongly serialized, it basically functioned like a series of miniseries with an occasional standalone episode as a palate cleanser. These other three shows were different -- any given episode might have a couple self-contained plots as well as serving ongoing plots that might be leftover from the previous episode, might take three or four episodes to resolve, might play out over the course of the whole season.

Hill Street Blues was a cop show. There had been plenty of cop shows before, which doesn't diminish Hill Street's importance any: it's a mammoth show, and without it or something else doing its work, there'd be no NYPD Blue, no Wire, no Shield. It created the modern police drama.

St Elsewhere was a hospital show. There had been plenty of hospital shows before.

But Thirtysomething ... Thirtysomething wasn't a workplace show, it wasn't a comedy, it wasn't a soap opera. The closest predecessor I'm familiar with is Family, the 1970s drama both Aaron Spelling and Mike Nichols worked on, but Family had more in common with its immediate successors like Eight is Enough -- and later watered-down (though I suppose, objectively more successful) versions like 7th Heaven -- in that the focus was, like with many sitcoms, primarily on a single family household, with the innovation being to tell their story as an hour-long show rather than a 25-minute sitcom.

The difference between Thirtysomething and Family is all in the name. Family is about a family. Thirtysomething is about, well, thirtysomethings (a term the series popularized) -- two couples, each of whom have young kids who are never old enough to be characters in their own right, and three friends who are single when the series begins.

Thirtysomething's strength is exactly what its detractors didn't like about it: it's a show about young grown-ups whose challenges are not particularly unusual. That is, it's not one of the workplace genres -- it's not a cop, lawyer, doctor, or detective show -- and it's not a soap opera. Over the course of the whole four seasons, there are some deaths and break-ups and betrayals, but fewer than in any handful of episodes of Dynasty. Even a recent show like Parenthood stretched credulity, both with things like Kristina's ill-advised and unlikely run for office and in terms of "how many dramatic events can occur in the same family over the course of a few years?", compared to Thirtysomething's commitment to realism.

And there's the rub: if you don't have murders to solve or lives to save, if you don't at least have the heavy workplace drama of Mad Men week in and week out, what do you do to fill your time, without making your show either soap opera -- evil twins, everyone cheating on everyone with everyone else, unlikely plot developments at every turn -- or melodrama (by which I mean, in this case, over the top emotional hand-wringing over everything in order to make the small seem large)?

Well, the show was accused of being melodramatic more than once, but that just meant people weren't paying attention. That time was filled the same way it's filled in real life: sometimes characters complain about things that are small. They aren't small to them. They aren't small to us when they happen to us. But they're small by television standards. Michael has forgotten to put his laundry in the hamper for days on end and Hope is tired of reminding him. They have a young child and he has a busy job and they're both distracted, but Hope is tired of being the one to pick up the slack just by virtue of being the one who stays at home. It's an argument about a small thing, eventually an argument about many small things, one they acknowledge is about small things, but it's also an argument about lifestyle choices -- Michael's decision to open a small firm with his friend Elliott, which means working longer and less predictable hours instead of having a dependable 9-5 schedule the way he could if he had remained a cog in the machine at a larger company; Hope and Michael's decision to have a baby at this particular time in their lives; the minor inconveniences of the fixer-upper of a house they bought, and the fact that Michael's income is right at that level where they can afford to fix those inconveniences, but not all at once, and not without being more careful with their spending than they thought they'd have to be at this point in their lives and careers.

The show has time to unspool all of this because this isn't a subplot about two people in a lawyer show or a Cylon show. It's not just there to add some color so you can keep track of which CSI is which. It's what the show is actually about. It's a show about regular people.

It's definitely a show about regular people who are predominantly white and upper middle class, although I'm not sure it's any worse in those respects than most of television in the late 80s -- or now, for that matter.

You can't talk about Thirtysomething separately from its era, of course. One reason it was interesting rewatching it is because I was younger than the characters when it first aired, and older now -- though they were younger than my parents. That's another important signal in the title. Thirtysomethings in the late 80s were the tail end of the Baby Boom, whereas my parents were born at the very beginning of the Boom. My father's childhood was represented on Leave it to Beaver, not the Wonder Years, and while my parents missed out on the hippies and the Summer of Love because they were married, employed, college graduates starting a family by then, the Thirtysomething characters missed out because they were still kids. They started college in the 70s, not the 60s, and although they were still peace activists, I suspect it's important to these characters' struggles with individual and group identity that their activism took place later -- that the 80s was very invested in celebrating the activism of the 60s, of Steven and Elyse Keaton, while forgetting about the decade in between.

I think I want to talk about everything else character by character, or anyway group by group, rather than season by season.

Michael and Hope Steadman.

It blew my mind finding out that Ken Olin (Michael) is married to Patricia Wettig, who plays not Hope (Mel Harris) but Nancy, his business partner's wife. And they've been married since years before the show!

Anyway, Michael and Hope are the central couple of the show, with a baby daughter. He's in advertising -- running his own agency with Elliot at the start of the show -- she's a stay at home mom with mixed feelings about putting her writing career on hold. They have their arguments, but they're also the most stable part of the show, the show's center.

Consistently one of the most intriguing parts of the show for me is the fact that, although the show is, yes, overwhelmingly white, it's also one of the few TV shows to prominently feature an interfaith couple where the difference in religion is not just a part of the backstory that has been resolved at some unstated point in the past, but continues to be a source of friction and confusion. Michael is Jewish, Hope is Presbyterian, and there's so much more to it than that: Hope has deep sentimental attachment to her Christmas rituals, while Michael has always been ambivalent about his Jewishness, at least the spiritual and religious aspects of it, so historically, in the years of their relationship before the series begins, he has given in to her on everything. They celebrate Christmas together, they eat ham and other pork, and Hope has basically just gotten used to the idea that Michael's Jewishness is only a label on a family tree, something that has no impact on her or her children. She's never had to be the one to make adjustments, though she probably doesn't see it that way, and so every time she's asked to make adjustments now, it feels unfair to her -- where was this five years ago, ten years ago? Why now, all of a sudden?

But now that Michael has a child and is planning more, he's thinking more about his faith and his identity. It starts with his reservations over Christmas -- now that he has a house and a family, when Hope puts up Christmas decorations, it's his family celebrating Christmas, not him celebrating Christmas with Hope's family the way he had thought of it in the past. He's not a visitor to the holiday anymore. This is a very different thing. Hope isn't especially understanding about this -- though to be fair, thoughout the series Michael has a lot of difficulty articulating his feelings about why these things bother him.

It becomes a much bigger deal later, when they have a son and the issue of circumcision comes up -- not exactly unusual for Presbyterians in America, but Hope's not crazy about the idea, especially the idea of a bris, and pushes Michael to explain to her why it's so important. What the show doesn't explicitly address, but implicitly makes clear, is that Hope has adopted the attitude of many Americans: that mainline Protestant denominations like Presbyterianism are "normal," default, unmarked American religion, and it's deviation from that path -- like Michael's Jewishness -- that has to be justified. Celebrating Christmas is "normal" -- it's being uncomfortable with Christmas that requires an explanation.

I'm making her sound bitchier than she is, in part because I'm talking about multiple stories over the course of four years as though it's all one conversation. A lot of it has to do with her response to the fact that Michael is so silent or inarticulate on these things -- but (in this viewer's opinion) she should see that he's struggling and should try harder to help him with that instead of taking advantage of it to preserve her own family's way of doing things.

It's a shame that Mel Harris hasn't had a high-profile career since Something So Right, the post-Thirtysomething blended family sitcom she did with Jere Burns. Mind you, this is something I can say about everybody on the show. It's a phenomenal cast, especially for the 80s -- the kind of cast you'd expect on a cable show today.

Elliot and Nancy Weston

Elliot (Timothy Busfield) is Michael's business partner. Nancy's an artist and stay at home mom to their two kids, both of whom are older than Michael and Hope's daughter -- I think Elliot and Nancy may be a couple years older than Michael and Hope, which would fit one of the ongoing subplots in the show of Michael having always been slightly more successful, or successful earlier, than Elliot. While the first episode establishes the Steadmans as our stable center, it also immediately establishes the Westons as falling apart -- Elliot confides in Michael that he's had an affair in the past, and it seems to come up because he wants to have more (that is, he's not in love with any specific woman apart from his wife, he just wants to fool around in general), and the most difficult part of watching the first season is the slow pace at which the Weston marriage falls apart. This is old school network drama, remember: twenty-something episodes, not cable's 10 to 13. And pre-DVRs, pre-DVD, etc., major plot points like Elliot and Nancy considering a separation, going to counseling, and so on had to be hit again and again -- because it isn't a subplot the way it would be on a cop show, it can't just be mentioned in dialogue, so their unhappiness has to be demonstrated for us over and over.

Again, that's often how it happens in real life, and it's not as repetitive as it sounds, actually. There's a Rashomon-ish episode in which an uncomfortable dinner with the Steadmans and the Westons is replayed from multiple perspectives, leaving us unsure who said what in which tone of voice, which is exactly the kind of approach to television that seems so anachronistic in something from 30 years ago, because it requires you to sit your butt and actually watch it.

But one reason I opened this blog post with talking about Thirtysomething heirs like Casual and Transparent -- and I'd add Togetherness, I think, among current shows -- is that they all share that common goal of realism, and of depicting "real people" rather than people (however ordinary) in unusually interesting lines of work (at least as depicted on television) like murder-solving and trial-lawyering. Each of the modern shows, in contrast with Thirtysomething, uses an inciting incident to either bring the cast together or as an excuse to introduce them -- Maura's coming out to her family in Transparent's case, a break-up in the case of Casual and Togetherness.

And each tends to regularly dwell on everyone being unbelievably shitty to each other.

In Transparent's case I put up with how awful most of the characters are for a couple of reasons -- because of how interesting Maura's story is (and though it may be unfair to wonder this given that the family is at least partly based on Jill Soloway's, I wondered if part of the point was that before realizing who she needed to be to be happy, Maura wasn't able to properly parent her children, so they all turned out shitty), partly because hooray Judith Light being back on TV, partly because I have so much love for the actors themselves. Season two was less focused, made Maura less the center, and I found myself actually resenting the fact that otherwise interesting plot premises that I would have welcomed on some other show were being wasted on characters I had grown to loathe. (Transparent has quickly become guilty of the Parenthood problem of "how much of this drama can happen in the same nuclear family?" as well.)

In Casual's case, I would have been much happier with a show in which we saw fewer, or no, scenes without Michaela Watkins in them -- don't give her daughter and brother their own independent plots, make them supporting characters in her story. I can't stand her daughter, I'm indifferent at best to her brother, and as much as I love Eliza Coupe, she was part of the show's dumbest plotline. Which, again, involved everyone being terrible to each other.

Togetherness is the best of these three, I think, and I don't know how much of that is my preexisting affection for not only the Duplass brothers but all of the cast members -- it's a show tailor-made for me in a lot of ways. But it still has a lot of moments that frustrate me and that feel like they're there principally because having the characters mistreat each other is the easiest way to generate believable drama.

This is a significant storytelling challenge: staying realistic, staying focused on life outside of the "typical TV show jobs" (cop, lawyer, etc) and workplace scenarios, holding interest over a long period of time, and making the characters likeable without making them unrelatable. Above, we've already talked about avoiding the soap opera tropes. When you think these things through, there's a reason why television drama tends to fall into the genres it does -- and even when you go outside those genres, there's a reason it tends to fall into specific dramatic patterns of People Who Do Jobs That Involve Solving a Puzzle While The Clock Is Ticking and People Whose Jobs Involve Unpredictable Dangers That Test Their Mettle and so on. When something shakes things up even a little -- Breaking Bad and Mad Men are two great examples, the former because the status quo of the series changes so often and so radically, the latter because it is so hard to classify in the terms I've been using -- it really stands out. And there are plenty of very good shows that don't shake it up.

So, Thirtysomething does fall victim to the Modern Bickering Family problem, but primarily with Elliot and Nancy -- which means it's not central in most episodes, and not present in all episodes or all seasons. Most of the time, like I said, the fights are about smaller things, and no one's being awful about it, which is where the accusations of whining come from.

I don't mean to imply there is nothing good to say about Elliot and Nancy, either! Nancy has a great arc over time about her return to work as an artist, first teaching and later illustrating. She's also a great foil in a lot of important scenes involving the other women, precisely because she doesn't have the close relationships with them that they have with each other, so every conversation doesn't become a rehash of something that happened in high school.

Melissa, Gary, Ellyn

Melissa, played by the fantastic Melanie Mayron, is Michael's cousin, a freelance photographer. She's the quirky Bohemian artist type, a single woman whose singleness is at first portrayed mainly in terms of how hung up she is on Michael's best friend Gary. They dated and broke up a few years before the series begins but it's made clear neither got over the other, and implied that Gary's fear of commitment was the only real reason they broke up. Eventually (whether or not we can ever say she moves on), her singleness is the source for more plots than just moping about Gary -- maybe the writers were originally planning on having Mel and Gary get together, and gave up on that, I don't know -- and Melanie Mayron herself has described Melissa as a precursor to Ally McBeal, which I think is about right. A more grounded and self-aware Ally McBeal, but it's there.

It's hard to describe Melissa, in part because she's not as central to the show as the couples are, so she goes through a number of different situations over the course of the series, and in part because words like "quirky" convey so little. She's idiosyncratic, she's funny but often deeply sad, she's insecure because of her experiences with Gary and the age at which she's still single (she and Ellyn have a conversation at one point in which they bluntly discuss the fact that single women their age are expected to occasionally date married men because there aren't enough age-appropriate single men available, and that it's just how things go, being a single woman of a certain age).

I'm not doing her justice, really - she's one of my favorite characters in TV. There's a great episode late in the series (with Brooke Adams and Colleen Camp) where Melissa goes to Hollywood to shadow a sitcom actress on set and take photos of her for an accompanying article, and the actress is playing a tough young single lady, so keeps stealing mannerisms and clothing items from Melissa to try to "make it real." The deconstruction of Melissa's outward character -- who, meanwhile, winds up hired to rewrite some of the dialogue toward the same end -- just reinforces that she's more than this system of tics, even if that's how so much of the world responds to her.

Gary Shepherd (Peter Horton and his long hair) is Michael's old college roommate, now an English professor who picks women up in hardware stores and on campus. For Melissa and Ellyn, singleness is a burden, something society judges them for, a sacrifice Ellyn has made for their career. For Gary, it's a lifestyle choice -- dating younger women with few expectations, avoiding the commitments of more serious relationships in the same way that he's using an academic career to avoid the 9-5 grind of a corporate one. He does grow up over the course of the series, though I don't know what message it sends that he also goes from being happy all the time to becoming more ponderous and distracted.

Ellyn is Hope's best friend from childhood (when we get flashbacks to them as kids, it's eerie what a good job they do casting teens who look and sound so much like them, enough so that if it were a modern show I would suspect they were just processing the adult actresses' voices), played by Polly Draper. Yet another terrific actress, whom you may have seen recently in Obvious Child, and if not, you ought to go rent it. Or stream it, I guess. That's how it is now. Go stream it.

At first, Ellyn and Gary seem to serve similar purposes in that each shows how different one of the Steadmans is from their closest friend. Michael is the former activist turned advertiser -- and not just advertiser, but running his own shop -- and family man, while Gary is the unattached prof who bicycles everywhere and still has the long hair he had in college. Hope is the homemaker dealing with the insane amount of attention a baby needs, while Ellyn is the career woman who, when the series opens, barely has the patience to have lunch with Hope because she's not crazy about being around the baby and is kind of pissed that Hope is spending all of her time with it instead of just hiring a babysitter so that they can go have their girls' lunches like always.

But both grow out of their roles. Hope needs someone to talk to who knows her as often as she needs someone to talk to who doesn't know her well (Nancy), and Ellyn gets fleshed out in those scenes simply because that's what good writing does, and it's interesting to see over time that even though she and Melissa both have similar self-deprecating senses of humor about their singleness, they're otherwise immensely different (though of course we wind up with a story about them both interested in the same man). On the one hand, Ellyn is more selfish than Melissa; on the other she's also more willing to settle, whereas Melissa sometimes seems like she'd spend her life alone rather than with the wrong guy (this may be because Melissa has a Gary in her past, and Ellyn doesn't).

Miles Drentell

Although there are a lot of important secondary characters -- I am leaving out Susannah, for instance, and not even mentioning key appearances over the years by pre-Murphy Brown Faith Ford, pre-Raymond Patricia Heaton, pre-Law and Order Mariska Hargitay, Lynne Thigpen, Terry Kinney, Kellie Martin, Stanley Tucci, Barbara Barrie, Shirley Knight, Paul Dooley, Talia Balsam, Dana Delany, Richard Masur, Charles Rocket, Patricia Arquette, a teenage Brad Pitt! -- Miles deserves special mention.

Eventually Michael and Elliot's agency can't stay afloat. Miles is a legend in the industry, and they first meet him while trying to get him to farm work out to them; he doesn't bite. In a subsequent season they end up working for his agency, where Miles grooms Michael to be his possible replacement, while barely concealing his disdain for Elliot.

It's a character who is introduced at an unbelievably slow pace. Maybe they weren't even intending to use him the way they did, but just loved the performance in his early appearances and so tailored the later seasons accordingly. Where most of the series is about home life, once Miles is introduced, we have our first melodramatic elements -- solely in the workplace, as Miles represents the high-powered corporate world, with its hostile takeovers, corporate espionage, and professional manipulators reading Sun Tzu.

It probably sounds like it shouldn't work, especially in this show, but the show is never centered in the workplace (though the Michael plots become more work-focused later in the series, this is balanced out by some heavy family-centric episodes) and certainly isn't a full-fledged Mad Men predecessor, in terms of showing us the ins and outs of an advertising agency and how ruthless the business can be, or simultaneously how meaningful the work -- though it takes a step in that direction.

Miles is almost a shamanic figure -- he's fascinated by Michael to a degree that is hard to explain without Miles knowing that Michael is the protagonist, but it works because David Clennon sells the idea that Miles can just sniff out talent and character.

In Sum

We owe much to cable television and HBO, of course. HBO's ability to rerun episodes all the time, to marathon previous seasons in anticipation of upcoming seasons, that was key to its ability to launch shows like Oz, The Sopranos, and The Wire. Those shows in turn demonstrated a desire on the public's part for more serious drama, and a willingness to sit through a season without needing everything resolved at the end of each episode -- and for that matter, a willingness to see a season end without having all of its loose ends tied up. But The Sopranos launched at about the same time TiVo did, and DVDs came not long after, and so that particular stretch of the path to the Golden Age was paved by the promise of rewatchability.

More than a decade earlier, when 2 out of 5 American households didn't even have a VCR, Thirtysomething offered serious dramatic television that required just as much of the viewer, with more than twice as many episodes per season as any HBO show -- and unlike HBO, they had sponsors and affiliates to answer to. They somehow enlisted amazing actors in an age when there was no prestige attached to doing television projects and a very real divide between television acting and movie acting. Episodes were directed by Claudia Weill (the documentarian and director of Girlfriends and It's My Turn), future action movie director Rob Cohen, Gary Sinise, and most of the cast members (Ken Olin, Peter Horton, Timothy Busfield, Melanie Mayron, and Mel Harris all directed multiple episodes), among others. The creators, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, went on to create Once and Again (which brought back Miles Drentell) and, perhaps most famously for my generation, produced My So-Called Life, created by Thirtysomething staff writer Winnie Holzman.

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.