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Escobarbarian posted:Which way is thinking Archer could possibly deserve a place in the list this year As opposed to brilliant things like Steven Universe?
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Dec 21, 2015 12:46
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Ohhhhh this is gonna turn dire fast Let's stop this line of convo right now and all-pro that's not anywhere near a valid list so you're gonna need to submit a valid one if you want to be counted
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Dec 21, 2015 15:09
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Honourable Mentions: Please Like Me – Cute coming of age show, but the characters are sometimes hard work. Kimmy Schmidt - Lovely show, but too much time spent on her time displacement and love triangle. Difficult People – So much potential. I see far too much of myself in the main characters….. The Strain – God, I can’t stop watching this trainwreck. The show needs to concentrate more on the gross vampires attacking people and less on the AWFUL CHILD CHARACTER. Gogglebox Australia – A show about people watching tv. Surprisingly entertaining! Worth a watch! Daredevil – Great show, but Matt just needed to use his words more. Felt a bit Sin City lite at times. Walking Dead – Dragging out this season is KILLING me. Christ, hurry up it up people! 10 – The Muppets  As much as everyone hates this, it had a few wobbly episodes, but it has found its footing. Your favourites are still the same, but supporting characters we’ve barely seen for decades ( Sam, Electric Mayhem and Uncle Deadly) are given their own chance to shine. If you’ve ever liked them, give this a chance. 9 – Agent Carter  See the image above for what the show is about. A fantastic retro experience for Peggy Carter. 8 - How to Get Away With Murder  Dreadfully entertaining soap/murder mystery/legal drama/softcore porn. 7 – Fear The Walking Dead  The first episode was TERRIBLE, but apart from that I really enjoyed getting to know our family as they began to face the Zombie apocalypse. Plus, we got to visit a variety of locales. Next season looks like it’s fun at the beach! 6 – Parks & Recreation  The 2017 future setting for P&R led to some hilarious predictions. A nice victory lap of a season. The only thing I HATED was how boring Johnny Karate’s episode was. Now, the ADS in Johnny Karate’s episode – gold. I’ll miss Pawnee. 3rd in Obesity, 1st in Friendship. 5 – Gravity Falls  A show as brilliant as its scheduling is terrible. With only 1 episode left (WITH NO AIRDATE) go and watch this 2 season gem of a program. 4 –Agents of SHIELD  The end of Season 2 was brilliant and better than goddamn Ant Man or Ultron. This show is now on all cylinders and firing away. The only misstep of S3 so far? Killing off Constance Zimmer’s character. A must-watch for anyone who enjoys spy/comic stuff. 3 – unreal  ‘Sluts get cut.’ The manipulation of a Bachelor-esque television show by the producers is disgusting but compelling. Rachel had a melt-down and is forced back into a spider’s web of glittering lies. 2 – Jessica Jones  Possibly the most grounded Marvel production yet. No aliens or infinity stones, just one dude with a very convincing voice who destroys lives. The ONLY misstep of this series? The shrill twin sister. Do yourself a favour and watch it. 1 – American Horror story – Hotel  Okay, so it hasn’t finished airing yet, but after the sheer CRAP Coven & FreakShow brought, Hotel is a return to form. Lady Gaga, vampires, cursed hotel… It’s gayer than Looking (RIP) If you enjoyed the first 2 seasons you’d like Hotel. Check in.
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Dec 23, 2015 16:51
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honorable mentions: 12 Monkeys, Elementary, Jessica Jones, Kimmy Schmidt, parks and recreation, better call saul, The 100, iZombie. Also The expanse - this might belong in top 10 just too early to tell. Other shows I really enjoyed were narcos, killjoys, humans and agent carter On reviewing the year its amazing how much good TV is on right now. Any of these shows could have been in my top 10 in a down year. Top 10: 10. Forever - just snuck into my top 10 list. Slow start to the season but by midseason was one of my favorite shows of the year. Very unfortunate that it was cancelled as I thought the cast had fantastic chemistry. At least it had a somewhat decent ending to the main story arcs. I'm also a sucker for police procedurals with a twist. 9. MR Robot. I didn't like it quite as much as some people did and thought it was a bit uneven especially mid season, however the last 3rd of the season or so was totally gripping. The scene when elliot meets joanna was the most weirdly unnerving scene of TV I can think of. 8. Brooklyn 99. I didn't expect to like this show initially since I don't care for samberg that much however the show/cast just works. also i have a huge crush on melissa fumero. 7. Limitless. When I heard they were making a show based on an "ok" movie I was completely meh on the idea. holy cow most unexpected surprise show of the year. 6. person of interest - one of my favorites over the past few years, is starting to show its age I think so I hope they can wrap it up in a satisfying final season. 5. agents of shield - can't believe how far this show has come from the mediocre season 1. the cast chemistry has really grown, fast paced story lines, and yeah, the S2 finale was far better than age of ultron. 4. Daredevil - fantastic adaptation and I personally loved their take on kingpin. can't wait for season 2. I loved JJ as well but I think that one just missed out on my top 10. 3. game of thrones. i admit, im a fanboy, and ive been reading the books since 1996. The low points of this past season certainly brought it down a notch (ugh dorne) but this is still the ONLY show I actually watch live. The above list was quite hard to order, and honestly could be swapped around quite a bit. the final 2 I felt easy to set. 2. The Leftovers. I had a late start to this since I had previously a negative impression of theroux and hadnt heard good things about season 1. I binged season 1 recently and just finished watching season 2. It may rank high since its the show I most recently completed, but S2 was just flat out an amazing series and I can't wait to see where it goes next season. 1. Sense8 - this show is so hard to describe. Slow start to the series, and the more plot/mythology oriented parts of the show aren't quite as strong. However the show is just beautiful and I just grew to love all of the characters. I think this and leftovers had the best character studies of any shows I watched this year but the more positive tone of sense8 is what put it on top for me. karrethuun fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 23, 2015 21:19
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Here is my Top 10 10 Review- I love it not only because its great, but because it reminds of that year when the Onion released a bunch of shows like Sex House and Porking Across America 9 Agent Carter- Just a fun show with great chemistry between the leads and as you'll figure out I am a sucker for the MCU 8 Rick and Morty- Really great Sophomore season, can't wait for season 3 7 Gravity Falls- I'm glad that this show is going to end on hopefully a high note and thankfully end on their own terms after all the scheduling bullshit that Disney pulled with them 6 Lucha Underground- As a wrestling fan it was really refreshing to see this take on a pro wrestling show, god bless the El Rey channel and their love of kung fu, lucha, and exploitation films 5 WWE NXT- Able to make an hour of worthwhile wrestling every week and build to awesome 2 hr specials, this show is basically HHH's vanity super indy to prove to investors that he is to be trusted in owning the WWE when Vince dies/retires, but goddamnit the product is good anyway so who cares about the motivation. 4 Daredevil- I'll just say what everyone has said, great action scenes, Kingpin is incredible, and the pace for the show is really. 3 Jessica Jones This is pretty much recency bias, but I think despite the show dragging a little too long it was better than Daredevil, I think David Tennant's Kilgrave put it over the top for me, just the evilest character I have seen on TV. 2 Better Call Saul- I have never watched Breaking Bad (much like the Dark Knight) and so I didn't have the fear of disappointment/high expectations and also at the time I just got into watching all of Mr. Show so I was really game to see more Bob Odenkirk and that's what I got along with one of the best TV shows I have ever watched. 1 Agents of SHIELD- I'm the world's biggest mark for this series I think, I have stuck with it from the beginning and have grown to love it, Brett Dalton has now become one of my favorite actors solely for his portrayal of Agent Ward, and the chemistry of the actors is just off the charts. I was really pissed that I was not able to live watch the show with you guys because I was in a tent in Utah every Tuesday for 3 months.
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Dec 23, 2015 23:15
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10. Silicon Valley Maybe if this had aired closer to the end of the year, it would be ranked higher, or maybe I've slowly been tiring of the schadenfreude from Richard's endless obstacles and fuckups. Nah, it can't be that second one. Barely edges out another half hour comedy Faking It (consider this an honorable mention). 9. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend I don't know what made me give this a try, but I'm glad I did. It was one of the highlights of my week this fall. "Settle For Me" is my jam. Galavant almost could have taken this spot, but Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is just better somehow (consider this my second and last honorable mention). 8. Better Call Saul Chuck's completely justified betrayal of Jimmy is one of my favorite Vince Gilligan people just talking scenes. As far as complaints, I wish we got more from Nacho, whose actor kept getting credited and not actually appearing. 7. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia Still top dog for me as far as half hour comedies go. Some of the recent seasons have been a little more lukewarm, but this one had some new classics like The Gang Beats Boggs and Charlie Work. 6. The Flash The second half of season 1 was phenomenal, and start of season 2 has mostly kept that up. I don't think I placed Flash above Arrow last year I'm still not this year, though it was a tougher decision. I can't explain it but… 5. Arrow ...I just like Arrow more than Flash. If I had to call out one reason why, it would be that episode that Bam Bam directed, which gave us the only good Laurel fight scene ever after 20 odd episodes and two different mentors. 4. Battlebots Stupid fighting robot poo poo came back and it had a literal Goon gooning poo poo up with his complete inability to read rules. 3. The 100 I saw this showing up on other lists and since half my list was already CW shows, I binged through it before writing this up. It was really fun stuff and I can't wait to see who Genghis Clarke murders next. 2. Fargo I didn't watch the first season when it aired, but people saying that it was better than True Detective and True Detective season 2 sucking made me give it a try. Milligan was no Malvo, but the season was amazing. 1. iZombie Like some have said, actually the best comic book show on air. Every episode does a perfect balancing job of character development, plot progression, and ridiculous brain personalities. It was my favorite show of this Fall and will probably be my favorite in Spring.
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Dec 24, 2015 04:42
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This years poll is pretty weird. No clear forerunners and out of 47ish votes we have nominated 24 different no.1:s. We're truly unique snowflakes...
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Dec 24, 2015 05:21
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adhuin posted:This years poll is pretty weird. Peak TV
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Dec 24, 2015 05:29
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I mostly watch shows once they get around to netflix or amazon so I'm behind on a bunch. My favorite show I've watched this year is an early chunk of Cheers, which probably isn't eligible for the poll. I'm a bit weird in that shows click for me best when they have a good opening and ending or music that otherwise sticks with me. For instance I loved Dexter even into the later seasons but when a recording cut off and I missed the ending music I realized I didn't really like the show anymore just that ending theme and quit watching. 10 Supergirl Lumping this in with Arrow, Flash and Agents of Shield, they are fun to watch and usually a good time. They have their flaws but the enthusiastic cast (especially Benoist) make the shows a highlight that I usually binge watch. Supergirl is one of the few I make a point to watch new on the channel website, ads and all. I'm a sucker for scenes with the epic manipulative music like this even though that should have been a season ender type scene rather than one with a random badly costumed mook in episode 6... drat that actress can look angry. Edited this down to just Supergirl to make the list valid since I haven't seen the current seasons of Flash or Arrow, and Agents of Shield is probably #11 on my list. 9 Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt First half was better than the second half but this show was great. Helped fill the void in good comedy shows after happy endings and don't trust the b got cancelled. 8 Constantine The other show I made a point to watch in their ad laden channel website, guess my vote didn't help this one. I liked its style and the characters were a little rough but were interesting. Sorry its gone and looking forward to seeing him pop up on Arrow when I watch this season next year. 7 Orphan Black Maslany is awesome as usual and they fit more clone fun into this season after a slower last season. The various new clones have mostly whiffed but its always great seeing the season 1 clones interact with each other. 6 The 100 Full of surprises, I try selling this one to my friends who love fallout and battlestar galactica and they just aren't interested. I wouldn't have watched this show without the word of mouth here. It might even move a little too fast, but I like the imagination and how much ground they are covering. Great opening theme for season 2. 5 Sense8 This was a very strange show at times but I loved the style, the music, and the characters. It made me like 4 non blondes again after burning out on that song in the 90s. They could have used a little less reliance on the martial arts character. Looking forward to season 2. 4 Rick and Morty throw Farscape, Community and Back to the Future in a blender, then dump in Justin Roiland? Laughed way too much at this show. It wasn't perfect but it hit more than it missed and had some good songs to go with the laughs. 3 Daredevil My favorite of the superhero shows. Great action, mood and visual style. Kingpin and Matt Murdock both nailed it. Great opening credits for getting in the mood. Honorable mention to jessica jones, but I'd seen don't trust the b too recently and didn't like tennant in dr who, so seeing him in JJ was distracting. 2 Survivor second chances Not a really great show but I started watching this weekly with my grandfather during season 1 after he broke his leg and lost my grandma in the same month, and we haven't missed a season since. Filling in with the mole, big brother, duck dynasty and various yard sale picker type shows during the off season. It can still have some great contestants and awesome moments (everything involving Wentworth and her immunity idols this season for instance) but its this high on the list because its cant miss tv for us for the last decade. I'm duck dynastied out so I'm gonna see if grandpa likes The Joe Schmo Show during this winter break. 1 Mr Robot Had to rate this higher because it was amazing. Great look, great opening sequences and music, love the unreliable narration and the style with which they pull off surprises as well as the expected. Mixes the sometimes building dread and suspense and awkward main characters with the hacker sci fi of person of interest (which is an honorable mention show for me and could be lumped in with the arrow/flash/supergirl set above). Other honorable mentions: Vikings (only seen season 1 so far), Fargo (ditto), Game of Thrones as it moves beyond the books, and Parks and Rec season 7 which inexplicably isn't on netflix until January. Blacklist because Spader and its the office water cooler show this year... not as good as previous water cooler shows like Lost and Buffy, but still fun enough to keep up with. Alternate honorable mention to Life is Strange and Tales from the Borderlands, two video games which were basically tv shows that let you minorly tweak the lines and scenes. I enjoyed them more than most of the above. bagrada fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 06:00
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bagrada posted:
You gotta pick one or they're going to invalidate your whole list btw
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Dec 24, 2015 06:01
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Regy Rusty posted:You gotta pick one or they're going to invalidate your whole list btw Updated, thanks, hope that works. Tired but will check back on it tomorrow and read the rest of the thread, just wanted to get my list up while I was thinking about it before I could second guess myself. bagrada fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 24, 2015 06:06
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Warning:  incoming.  10. Last Week Tonight (HBO) “Janice in accounting don't give a gently caress!” - John Oliver Last Week Tonight is not journalism. Let's get that out of the way quickly. You shouldn't be getting your news from John Oliver and he probably wouldn't want you to either. Now here's some things that Last Week Tonight is: thought-provoking, inventive, bold, reliable and hilarious. With an established formula now in place, the strengths of the show are when it dares to break away from that formula. I'm talking about moments like buying airtime on Trinidadian television to slate a corrupt FIFA official, attacking television preachers with Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption, making a deal to drink a Bud Light Lime if Sepp Blatter gets suspended and following through and getting Jeff the Diseased Lung onto T-shirts in Togo. But even without any of those Last Week Tonight would still make my list for one of the ballsiest moments in entertainment I've ever seen. Over the summer, John Oliver beat out actual news networks by getting a face to face interview with Edward Snowden. You might expect that Oliver would use this opportunity for a comedic, sycophantic ego-boost to Snowden but you'd be very, very wrong. Oliver challenges Snowden at every step by presenting a realistic appraisal of America's (lack of) interest in Snowden's actions. When Oliver plays Snowden clips of people not having any clue who Snowden is or what he did it's a crushing moment. And then he turns it around, relating the issue to the average American through the medium of dick pics. All in all, it's fascinating viewing that shows exactly why Last Week Tonight is necessary television.  9. iZombie (CW) “I literally got screwed into becoming a zombie hooker” - Natalie On paper, iZombie is a tricky sell. A promising doctor turns into a zombie, transfers to a police morgue so she can eat brains that give her the victim's personality and visions of their life that she then uses to solve their murders. It's even more complicated in the comic. But through the combination of the writing and acting, this mash up of Tru Calling and the Walking Dead works. In particular, iZombie's biggest strength is the way it mixes procedural cases with serial elements. Each week Liv investigates a murder and while doing so the victim's personality inevitably drives on the overall mytharc that digs into the roots of the zombie outbreak. But while it's Rose McIver's deft personality switches that deserve the majority of the acting credit, the true highlight of iZombie is the Fall and Further Fall of Major Lilywhite. Originally presented as Liv's bland ex-fiancée, Major is broadened out by his interest in looking after disadvantaged and displaced teens, a goal that soon brings him into contact with the zombie mafia's (yes, it's a thing) underground brain service line. From there things only get worse as Major goes on a path that sees him lose his job, get arrested, go to a mental asylum, blow up a meat shop, learn the truth about zombies, become a zombie, be cured of being a zombie, be hired as a zombie-targeting hitman, become a drug addict, bang his ex-fiancée's evil roommate and get dumped by his now ex-ex-fiancée. Yes, the writers turned Major from a vanilla love interest into a blind puppy that just keeps getting kicked and it's the best thing they ever could have done. Oh, and did I mention? That zombie cure? Yeah, that's temporary. Poor Major.  8. Survivor (CBS) “After the last twenty four hours, Tasha, Jeremy and I aren't good with splitting the vote.” - Spencer Bledsoe Thirty one seasons in and you might have thought that Survivor had run out of tricks. Well, you'd think wrong. Forget about Worlds Apart, a terrible season of terrible doing being terrible to each other terribly. This year Survivor makes my list on the strength of Second Chances, a season which I can say without an inch of hyperbole is the best season of Survivor ever. Things looked promising right from the start, where America voted in their pick of twenty previous one-time contestants from a wide array of choices and the casting is top notch with nary a dud pick. Joe, Chaos Kass, Savage, Ciera, the cast is like a wishlist. On top of this, the show's theme implied an automatic narrative of player's working to fix their previous mistakes that provided the show with a number of easy to follow arcs. And then there was the game itself. In Second Chances the game was played with an intensity and speed that has never been seen before. Players took strategy to a whole new level as we saw the introduction of voting blocks over alliances and shields over goats. Producers responded in kind with new twists such as stolen votes and immunity idols placed at challenges, the latter of which led to some incredibly tense television. There was even a tribal council that resulted in no votes cast for anyone and a situation so complicated Jeff Probst had to take a whiteboard in a John Madden-esque moment to explain the eventual result. All of this culminated in the most satisfying final four in the show's existence. There was Wentworth, a tenacious fighter who played from the bottom and redeemed Kellys the world over. There was Tasha who had reversed a 4-2 minority and literal hell on Angkor. There was Jeremy, the dependable glue that kept his team together. And there was Spencer, no longer the gamebot of old but a player that combined strategic foresight with genuine emotion. In the end, it didn't matter who won, any of them would have been deserving. For that's what Second Chances was from start to finish: constantly satisfying, constantly thrilling and constantly brilliant.  7. Faking It (MTV) Last Year: 10 ”I can't keep getting back on track! The track is just a loop that runs straight through my heart!” - Amy Raudenfield This is the first time Faking It is going to appear in a top 10 list and you know what? You should all be very, very ashamed of yourselves. Yes, it's on MTV and sure, it's a high school comedy but put those reservations aside because Faking It is the best show on television that nobody is watching. Last year I praised the show for the way it focused on secrets, on the hidden pains that we refuse to share because we can't admit to feeling them. This year Faking It took that conceit and doubled down, layering on lie after lie until they tumbled down like a house of cards. Ironically, for a show about secrets no show is better at showing raw, brutal truth as it veers from one painful conversation to another. But at the same time there is catharsis. There are moments of joy and triumph such as Lauren accepting herself by accepting the acceptance of others or Amy releasing her father so that her mother can feel free. And then there's THAT kiss, the less said about which the better. All of this is wrapped up in a wickedly smart show that takes no prisoners whether its targeting liberal tree-hugging or corporate conservatism. Yes, Faking It is still a comedy but at the same time it's so much more. This is comedy with heart and truth.  6. The Genius (tvN) Last Year: 7 “The dog will defeat its master” - Kyunghoon 'It's not the end,' they said. 'Just an all stars season,' they said. But now it seems that's not so much and this is the last time the Genius will appear in my list of the year. Well, if it was going to go out then this was the way to do so, with the best season the show has seen. In running a season cast with previous competitors the show was able to bring back fan favourites such as Kyungran, Hyunmin and the Mentality King, all of whom remain adored by the fanbase. But that's not all, the Genius went all out with its all-star season and brought back every single winner for a true battle of the titans. Which is just as well seeing as Jinho, Sangmin and Dongmin were respectively the most exciting part of their seasons. The games remain as intricate and intriguing as ever while the editing is constantly smart to provide a number of Extreme Ways moments. But none of this matters, the Genius Grand Final is really the story of one man, a man who rose from the title of Titty God to Titty King. Yes, for some reason Grand Final chose to bring back Kyunghoon, an early season 3 elimination who later yelled at critics on the internet. At first, Kyunghoon seemed as inept as ever, barely scraping through the games while ruining the chances for his allies as well. But slowly, ever so slowly, something started to change. It began with his shocking death match victory over our beloved Sangmin. 'Total fluke!' we said. 'Season sucks!' we said. Nobody recognised the expertise with which Kyunghoon had bluffed his way to the win. And then somehow, some way, Kyunghoon just kept on winning and his fan base kept on growing until he was the favourite of the season. And in this way the Titty King made his way all the way to the final showdown. Could he overcome his final challenge and become a triple king slayer? Well, there's a reason we don't call him Titty Emperor. But even so, the Genius Grand Final manages to tell an arc to a quality rarely seen in reality TV.  5. Agents of Shield (ABC) Last Year: 2 “Science, biatch.” - Leo Fitz I only have one regret from last year's list. I didn't make Agents of Shield my #1. On reflection, I really should have because it's quality was top notch but in the back of my head I was thinking 'there's always next year'. Since then, Agents of Shield has only got better. So simple choice, right? Any other year, it certainly would be. But not this year. Not 2015. Not in the era of peak TV. The truth is that my top 5 was always locked in place but the order of the top 5 was in constant flux. Any previous year, any of these shows would have topped my list but in 2015 they must compete for my points. And so it's with a heavy heart that I proclaim Agents of Shield my #5 show because it's been fantastic all year and it deserves better. Anyway, enough self-indulgent babble, on with the important stuff. Watching Agents of Shield in 2015 has been a constant roller-coaster of excitement, following a plot that never threatens to stall. In the space of one year we've had Skye turning into Daisy Johnson, the real SHIELD, Jaiying's Inhuman sanctuary, the redemption of Cal, Ward and Kara's “epic” love, the guy who kills Gordon, Simmons on an alien planet, Constance Zimmer, May's ex-husband turning into a serial killer and everything all wrapping up right where it started in a big HYDRA conspiracy. But honestly? None of that really matters. At the end of the day I would be happy to watch these characters just sit around drinking beer. That's the true strength of Agents of Shield. For a show that began as mere extension of the MCU where the only thrill was waiting to spot a reference, the writers have done great work in turning these people into living, breathing, loving characters for whom I feel far more affection than any of the movie big names. How can you not love Hunter, the cocky rascal who's always in over his head? How can you not love Daisy, a girl who was handed a gun by her psycho stalker and immediately shot him in the back? And then there's Fitz, a.k.a. the single most awesomest guy on the planet. This is a guy who immediately stood by his friend when she got super powers and everyone wanted to lock her up, a guy who upon finding out his crush fell in love on an alien planet immediately starts researching ways to bring her beloved back, a guy who jumped through a literal hole in the frigging universe. Twice. I love all these characters, I love the cast and that's what makes Agents of Shield the best part of the MCU. ...Hang on a minute. gently caress.  4. Mr. Robot (USA) ”Please tell me you're seeing this too.” - Elliot Alderson The first time I became aware of Mr. Robot was in the general chat thread in TVIV. 'Mr. Robot?' I thought to myself, 'That's a dumb name.' I skimmed over any chatter from then on, which is why for a long time I thought it was some kind of cartoon sketch show (I'm guessing I was comparing it to Robot Chicken). It's not as I was eventually happy to learn. Instead, it's one of the smartest, most well crafted pieces of television I've seen in a long time. The show is centred around Elliot, an IT security tech by day and vigilante hacker by night but while the show might seem like a techno-thriller at a cursory glance it's true interest lies in capturing mental health issues. Rami Malek's performance is award-worthy, beautifully capturing a man struggling against depression, autism, anxiety, drug addiction and paranoid schizophrenia. All of this is enhanced by the cinematography, music, sound and writing as Elliot's mental health spirals further and further out of control presenting a narrative where nothing can be taken for granted and everything we see must be second guessed. And of course, there's the twist. It would be remiss to talk about Mr. Robot without talking about the twist. Even me, even while thinking it was still some bizarre chicken sketch comedy, I'd heard about the twist. Christian Slater. Was he real? Was he Tyler Durden? It was a discussion that dominated the chat thread over the summer. But at the end of the day, it didn't matter whether he was real or not. All that mattered was Elliot perceived him as real. More than any other show on this I am fascinated to see where Mr. Robot goes next year. Without the question of the twist to anchor the show will the quality be able to remain high? Judging from what I've seen so far I have every faith that it will.  3. Daredevil (Netflix) ”Be careful of the Murdock boys, they got the devil in 'em.” - Matt Murdock No show in 2015 had a higher anticipation level for me than Daredevil. It's Marvel, a world-dominating brand with a proven track record. It's Netflix, an online network focused on pushing outstanding content. It's Daredevil, one of Marvel's darkest characters with a long history and a number of gripping storylines to pull from. It's Charlie Cox, an actor who I've loved since Stardust and missed since Boardwalk Empire. My hype levels were off the charts. Yet somehow Daredevil managed to not just meet those levels but exceed them. There are so many great aspects to this show to talk about but any discussion of Daredevil has to start with the fight scenes. The action on Daredevil is like nothing else on television. The stunt work is insane with high level martial arts mixed with flips Roy from Arrow can only dream of doing. But it's more than just that, it's also how much the action hurts. Matt Murdock is not invincible. Most times in fights he ends up getting more beat up than his opponent. However, he just keeps on coming like a relentless force until he wins. Just look at the corridor fight or the fight with Nobu, two outstanding pieces of action work that deliver on every level. Action aside, what works about Daredevil is that it assumes the viewer is smart, this is The Wire of superhero shows. Scenes are given room to breathe, characters don't explain their whole personalities in their first appearance, even the origin of Matt's powers is revealed slowly. It would be remiss to talk about Daredevil without talking about its villain. Vincent D'Onoforio puts in sterling work as Wilson Fisk (known to us comic fans as the Kingpin), exuding menace and tenderness in equal measure. His work is matched throughout the cast although particular mention must go to Elden Henson as Matt's best friend and business partner, Foggy. Putting down a grounded performance, Elden's Foggy is the stable base that reminds us why Matt keeps fighting. That is until the best episode of the season, Nelson vs Murdock, wherein Foggy finds out about his friend's secret life and their friendship is rent apart in an emotionally raw conversation that is lengthy, draining and impeccably acted. But that's what Daredevil is all about, whether its in its fight scenes or in its emotional scenes its about leaving everything on the table and that's what makes Daredevil the best part of the MCU. ...Hold up. Oh come on!  2. Sense8 (Netflix) ”The violence I realised was unforgivable was the violence we do to ourselves when we're too afraid to be who we really are.” - Nomi Marks This summer addition to Netflix's lineup comes from the Wachowski Siblings, so long known for self-indulgent turds of cinema that ruin the legacy of the original Matrix movie. Telling the story of eight disparate characters who realise they can share senses, feelings and skills, Sense8 seemed like it would only add to that legacy. That is, right up until the moment it dropped on Netflix. In actuality Sense8 is television of the highest calibre: stunning, moving and sometimes even haunting. The first thing that stands out is the sheer beauty of the visuals. Bringing their film experience to the small screens allows the Wachowskis to make their set pieces pop with vibrancy and with the show filmed across nine international locations there's a wide variety of them to choose from. An LGBT pride march in San Francisco bursts with all the colour of the rainbow. An underground kick-boxing arena in Seoul is oppressive yet electric. An icy blizzard in Reykjavik is desolate and isolating. In the early episodes when the story is still gathering pace the visuals alone are enough to carry the show. But the visuals are nothing compared to the show's true attraction: the characters. There are eight sensates and while some will always be more interesting than others there's not a dud in the bunch. There's Riley, an Icelandic DJ trying to bury a traumatic past; Will, a Chicago cop who doesn't know when to walk away; Nomi, a transsexual hacker where the fact she's transsexual is the least interesting thing about her; Kala, an Indian woman struggling to accept her arranged marriage; Wolfgang, a German safecracker trying to be less of a monster; Capheus, an African bus driver obsessed with Jean Claude Van Damme; Sun, a Korean businesswoman who can barely contain her constant rage and Lito, a Mexican actor trying to keep his public and private personas separate. Each sensate has their own storyline, some are big in drama and scope and some are small but all are treated equal and the show jumps between them with a deft touch. However, as great as these individual stories are, nothing compares to the moments where the sensates come together in shared experience. Make no mistake about it, Sense8 is a slow burn and if you need your television to be constantly moving forward then it is not the show for you. But if you're prepared to sit back and take in the sights and sounds and feelings then you'll be heavily rewarded because more than any other television show going, Sense8 is art.  1. Jessica Jones (Netflix) ”He's always in here.” - Jessica Jones On Friday 20th November at 8am GMT I sat down to begin the first episode of Jessica Jones. On Friday 20th November at about 8:20pm GMT I finished the series. I immediately ran to my nearest shop and bought a bottle of wine, a packet of cigarettes and a big tub of ice cream. I then spent the rest of the evening drinking, smoking and staring at a wall. This is why Jessica Jones is my favourite TV show of 2015. Not because it's the best written show out there (it's not), not because it's the best acted show out there (it's very good, but still not) but because Jessica Jones took me to an emotional place that no other TV show has ever reached. The titular Jessica is an anti-superhero. Sure she has superpowers but she barely uses them, she doesn't try to save others because she can barely save herself. Instead she spends her time drinking, screwing, swearing, working as a private investigator, avoiding the world and stalking a really hot bartender. It turns out this all stems back to the one time she did try to be a hero where she drew the attention of a man called Kilgrave, a man with the power to make anyone want to do exactly what to he tells them to. The details are exactly as dark as you'd expect them to be and that's where Jessica Jones's strength lies, it delves into a layer of bleakness unlike anything seen on television. Jessica's abuse has left her suffering from PTSD and survivor's guilt and the show doesn't shy away from those themes. Indeed in Jessica's vivid flashbacks and constant paranoia the show perfectly captures the effects of PTSD, ably aided by Krysten Ritter who is fantastic in capturing the disparity between Jessica's public front and private pain. But where there is darkness there is also light and amidst all this pain and hurt Jessica still shines. She's not a hero because she beat a bad guy or because she saved the world. She's a hero because she survives, and sometimes that's enough. Created by Melissa Rosenberg and using predominantly women for crew members, Jessica Jones puts forward a feminist perspective unlike any other show on television. Beyond Jessica herself there's her best friend, Trish; her fellow abuse survivor, Hope and her work contact, Jeri, all of whom have their own stories and arcs. The friendship between Jessica and Trish is the driving force of the show and the crux around which its conclusion is based. Meanwhile, Jeri has her own storyline involving her ex-wife and her new lover. Yes, this is a show focused on what it means to be a woman. Against this viewpoint stands Kilgrave, the purest distillation of male entitlement. Here is a man who has literally always been given everything he's ever wanted. Unable to accept responsibility for his actions, Kilgrave blames everyone else and in turn accuses them or being complicit in their abuse. David Tennant takes every mistake he made playing the Tenth Doctor and turns it into a skin-crawling performance that justifiably sets hairs on edge. Then there's Simpson, the noble white knight who will save women from their abuser and in doing so strip them of their agency. Even when Simpson has good intentions he still belittles Jessica and Trish, refusing to believe they have the strength to fight their own battles and always thinking that he knows better. From there things only get worse as Simpson descends into full blown Men's Rights Activist, munching down on a red pill (hello Reddit!) to find the strength to make sure those pesky women know their place. Where Kilgrave is an overt dig at the patriarchy, Simpson is much more subtle. That's not to say that Jessica Jones hates men. Ok, sure, there's the one white rich guy who compares his pain over losing a jacket to Kilgrave as equal to Jessica's rape but on the whole the struggles men face in society are given equal weight. Even Simpson is to be empathised with having suffered his own abuse at the hands of Kilgrave. But where Jessica is allowed to feel the weight of hers, Simpson is a man and therefore must not show weakness which leads to his reckless behaviour and aggressive outbursts. In Simpson we see that traditional gender stereotypes can be just as damaging and restrictive to men as women. And then there's Malcolm, Jessica's neighbour who ignores the path of violence to instead travel to a place of understanding and acceptance. It's no surprise that in embracing his own empathy Malcolm is held up as one of the biggest heroes on the show. And you don't need to be a woman to do that. I realise that I have written a hell of a lot of words about Jessica Jones but it's a show that demands such attention. There is so much going on in there to unpack, so much that can be read into it. I haven't even mentioned Luke Cage or that this is another Marvel output! But when it comes down to it these are the reasons Jessica Jones is my favourite show of year, probably the decade and maybe of all time. Never before have I felt so connected to a show, like a show understood and represented my viewpoint and my experience. I mean, the climax of the show is a pointed blast at men who tell women 'Cheer up, give us a smile!' I cannot tell you how many times me and my friends have complained to each other about that very topic. I can't put it any clearer than this: Jessica Jones is essential viewing. And the best part of the MCU. ...Wait a second. Yeah, there we go.
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Dec 24, 2015 12:08
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Wrong. Look at #9 on my list. 
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Dec 24, 2015 12:12
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Senerio posted:Wrong. Look at #9 on my list. I realised that while tallying my own points 
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Dec 24, 2015 12:16
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Rarity posted:I realised that while tallying my own points As penance, watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I think it's right up your alley, as it hits all the notes that made us both watch glee without going full Ryan Murphy.
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Dec 24, 2015 12:21
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You are totally doing tv wrong.
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Dec 24, 2015 12:23
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Rarity posted:This is the first time Faking It is going to appear in a top 10 list and you know what? You should all be very, very ashamed of yourselves. Yes, it's on MTV and sure, it's a high school comedy but put those reservations aside yeah sorry nope
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Dec 24, 2015 12:25
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Senerio posted:As penance, watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I think it's right up your alley, as it hits all the notes that made us both watch glee without going full Ryan Murphy. I watched the first couple of episodes, the musical numbers were great but not worth sitting through the rest of the episode for. Illinois Smith posted:yeah sorry nope Your loss
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Dec 24, 2015 12:38
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I liked the first season of Faking It when the creators were all excited to bring us a gay girl on TV. I mean I had a few reservations because gay men who write gay women always seem to ruin the poo poo out of it (mostly Ryan Murphy). Then they had Amy do her drunk hookup and admit she still liked men on occasion. Would Carter Covington ever let that poo poo happen with his Gary Stu, Shane? No. Not. Ever. I, and quite a few other gay women I know, really felt betrayed by the show and what they pulled with Amy. And it was kind of a big deal because gay women are criminally underrepresented on networks compared to gay men, even moreso when Faking It was launching. Theres an epidemic of women who spend some time with a single woman and then go back to men, often permanently and mostly for ratings. The representation for men who partner up with other men is not like that, they tend to be gay and stay gay (and that is in its own way criminal, robbing men of bisexuality). So there is distrust there. Now I watch to laugh when Karma is made up to the nines every time she rolls out of bed, observe Liam consistently be the worst and cheer for HBIC Lauren. The actual best thing about the show is reading episode recaps on Autostraddle (if you're into that sort of thing).
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Dec 24, 2015 15:12
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JUICY HAMBUGAR posted:gay women are criminally underrepresented on networks compared to gay men, even moreso when Faking It was launching. but what about the l worahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahaahahahahahaahahahahahahahahaahahaha hahahahahahahahahhahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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Dec 24, 2015 16:18
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I know this goes against the rules of the thread but can someone who spent years freaking out about goddamn Orphan Black and still puts AoS in their top 5 really do the whole "you should all be ashamed of yourself for not watching this blah blah" thing? Can they really be allowed? (to be more serious I quite like the list, it's nice to see detailed reasons as to why JJ can be truly meaningful to someone even though I personally can't get over the [many] flaws)
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Dec 24, 2015 16:29
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Rarity posted:Survivor
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Dec 24, 2015 16:39
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MrBuddyLee posted:Might want to spoiler those spoilers? A lot of people use these lists to pick out awesome new tv to watch. This is a spoiler tag free zone Toxxupation posted:Obviously, discussing what you loved about a season of a show requires discussion of that season, and that means spoilers, and I don't want to wade through a CIA document so feel free to spoiler all you want. Obviously, this also means WARNING: YOU CAN AND WILL BE SPOILED ABOUT ANY SHOW THAT'S AIRED IN 2015. PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK.
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Dec 24, 2015 16:43
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I know, but..  Also, thank you for your reviews, they were fantastic.
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Dec 24, 2015 16:47
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Escobarbarian posted:I know this goes against the rules of the thread but can someone who spent years freaking out about goddamn Orphan Black and still puts AoS in their top 5 really do the whole "you should all be ashamed of yourself for not watching this blah blah" thing? Can they really be allowed? You should all be ashamed you're not watching Z Nation.
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Dec 24, 2015 17:01
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JUICY HAMBUGAR posted:I liked the first season of Faking It when the creators were all excited to bring us a gay girl on TV. I mean I had a few reservations because gay men who write gay women always seem to ruin the poo poo out of it (mostly Ryan Murphy). I'm in absolutely no position to tell gay women (or gay men) how they should feel about they way they're treated in media as a whole. Regardless of the strides they've made in recent years, they've got a long way to go before they hit parity, and I can't wait for them to get there; the stories being told will only get more interesting as they come along. (And I ABSOLUTELY agree that gay men are underrepresented compared to gay women.) But my dumb white hetero cis male brain can't help but want to defend a show I love, so I hope you'll excuse any presumptuousness as I do so. Doesn't the context of said drunken hookup kinda set it apart from the historical precedent? This wasn't about Amy suddenly deciding she was attracted to Liam; this was about her feeling wounded and angry in a moment where she was deeply insecure about her sexuality. After all, she had just confessed her feelings to Karma, it didn't go the way she wanted it to, and given the circumstances that led to this realization, it wouldn't be surprising for a part of her to think "if this was all a lie, then maybe my feelings are a lie too." She's a teenager; if she had her sexuality on lock like Shane did, that would be great for her, but she's allowed to still be figuring poo poo out through trial and error. That's what her flirtation with Felix was about -- here's someone who, in theory, is everything she ever wanted in a partner -- and it worked out the only way it could have because she's just not into him. She might have an idea that she's gay, but she's a thoughtful, deeply introspective person (the beta to Karma's alpha, you might say), and that opens her up to all sorts of ideas and insecurities. The road to figuring out her sexuality was never going to be a straight line. In fact, I'll take it a step further and point out that this show's stance is that sexuality isn't always as simple as "gay" or "straight" -- hell, that's pretty much Karma's whole journey -- and that's a brave stance to take considering how bisexuality is treated even in some LGBTQ circles. They got into this a little bit with Reagan (she had an ex who cheated on her with a guy, and she's been distrustful of bisexuals ever since) but I've heard my share of anecdotes. People get jealous, read too deeply into innocent gestures. One friend of mine had a date straight-up throw a drink in her face after she told her she was bi. Again, God knows I'm one to talk, but strictly from what I've heard, a fair amount of people don't seem to "get" how bisexuality works. So given the way that the show promotes bisexuality in a healthy way, poo poo like Amy's drunken hookup with Liam takes on a slightly different light compared to other shows that play the "lesbian sleeps with a man" or "straight woman has a brief fling with a chick" cards. One more thing. Even if the notion of Mary Sues/Gary Stus haven't been twisted into a lazy impeachment of attempts to write positive portrayals of underrepresented minorities, suggesting that Shane is a Gary Stu is laughable considering how often Shane gets called out as a loving idiot.
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Dec 24, 2015 18:05
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Toxxupation posted:but what about the l worahahaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahaahahahahahaahahahahahahahahaahahaha Now this is an Occ post I can get behind.
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Dec 24, 2015 18:13
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Escobarbarian posted:I know this goes against the rules of the thread but can someone who spent years freaking out about goddamn Orphan Black and still puts AoS in their top 5 really do the whole "you should all be ashamed of yourself for not watching this blah blah" thing? Can they really be allowed? Orphan Black and Agents of Shield are good shows liked by lots of people
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Dec 24, 2015 18:39
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adhuin posted:This years poll is pretty weird.
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Dec 24, 2015 20:22
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Almost everyone who has seen The Leftovers s2 loves it but a lot of people struggled heavily with s1 (including myself) so it doesn't surprise me that a lot of people have missed it. It's a shame though cause it's one of the biggest improvements in TV history
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Dec 24, 2015 20:55
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JUICY HAMBUGAR posted:I liked the first season of Faking It when the creators were all excited to bring us a gay girl on TV. I mean I had a few reservations because gay men who write gay women always seem to ruin the poo poo out of it (mostly Ryan Murphy). I completely disagree with this criticism. Yes, in the past we have seen women go gay for sweeps before settling back into a long term relationship with a man but this is so clearly not a situation like that. What Amy is going through is a very common thing that gay girls (I'm one of those too, for the record) experience even after their first crush on a girl. We all know that being a lesbian doesn't mean gaining an automatic revulsion to naked boys and Amy is wondering whether not being revolted means she can be with a guy, and of course that's ignoring the fact that sexual attraction can be separate from romantic attraction. What we've seen on the show is that she had a drunken emotionless hookup with Liam and then a minor flirtation with Felix, the latter of which has never been portrayed as being on the same level as Amy's interest in Karma or even Reagan. Lesbian representation has come a long way with shows like Orange is the New Black, Sense8 and Jessica Jones and I believe there is space in the TV landscape for a show to cater to a storyline that will connect very closely with a section of MTV's prime demographic of teenage girls. If Amy ends up marrying and settling down with a guy would that retroactively ruin the series? Definitely. Is there any chance of that happening? Definitely not. People keep freaking out about this possibility even though they're ignoring all of the context that the show has laid down.
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Dec 24, 2015 22:17
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Remember when this wasn't really a justification and debate thread... those were the days.
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Dec 25, 2015 02:39
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Rocksicles posted:Remember when this wasn't really a justification and debate thread... those were the days. I'm still supremely ticked about the Survivor policy Occ put forth if we're airing festivus grievances.
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Dec 25, 2015 04:01
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I'm angry at my list, it's not right and i can't fix it.
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Dec 25, 2015 04:09
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Rocksicles posted:I'm angry at my list, it's not right and i can't fix it. Let me help you with that: Add Crazy ex-girlfriend, that show about lesbian teenagers and the other one about you being worst or something. But honestly, thinning the list for just the top 10 is pretty brutal. I could have easily submitted a top 20 + 10 honorable mentions.
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Dec 25, 2015 04:14
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Rocksicles posted:I'm angry at my list, it's not right and i can't fix it. you're free to edit your list at any point between now and january 1
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Dec 25, 2015 04:22
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adhuin posted:Let me help you with that: There is no way on earth a musical is in my top 10 list. Toxxupation posted:you're free to edit your list at any point between now and january 1 I'd rather distance myself from it at this point... irreconcilable differences I have list envy... i forgot Daredevil even aired.
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Dec 25, 2015 04:44
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Rocksicles posted:I have list envy... i forgot Daredevil even aired. Tell me about it. I'm currently pretending that Community didn't air this year, so I don't have to edit any more shows out to make room.
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Dec 25, 2015 04:57
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All right time to show you bozos how a Top Ten list is fuckin done 10. Mr. Robot https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jr5Z7yaapo I have a...complicated relationship with Mr. Robot. I remember that back when the show premiered and was airing, the critical buzz surrounding it in TVIV got increasingly fevered and pointed until, one day, it passed my personal saturation point where I felt inclined to check it out. I was initially hesitant because the show sounded incredibly dull and, quite frankly, I was extremely skeptical such a show could even air on the network it does unmolested. No disrespect to USA, but they've made no secret of their "Blue Sky Initiative". They're brazenly, honestly, unapologetically centered around, if not lowest common, then certainly airless and formulaic television that's meant to appeal on a merely surface level. Their brand is literally style over substance, easy appeal to get ratings. How could an anti-capitalist, pro-99%-and-Occupy-movement tv show with Anonymous as a main character, one that repeatedly and angrily decries modern society air on such a network? It's sturm und drang, oil and water. So I gave the show a watch. And, it was...exactly what everyone on TVIV said it was. Note that that's explicitly not a compliment; it was an angry, depressed, and rebellious TV show on a network that otherwise exists to brazenly sell itself. It was a good show, and Sam Esmail's criticism of modern society and the mega-corporations that run it, through the avatar of protagonist Elliot, felt sincere. Unfortunately, its very existence felt like dark irony. How does capitalism win against principled dissent? By commodifying it as well, which is exactly what Mr. Robot does. On a more personal note, I also felt like I had seen every available "trick" that Mr. Robot had - it was a specifically and intentionally dark and "realistic" show on a network that does neither. It felt like, at times, the goth teenager stamping its feet and wearing black eyeliner specifically because her parents didn't, not for any actual reason. Its acclaim, in my mind, was more because of what it contrasted to than any specific merit it had. It was good, but as weightless and formulaic as Burn Notice and Psych. The only difference was that it made the viewer frown over smile. Therefore, I abandoned it, for a couple of months. Mid-episode, even. I liked it, it was enjoyable, great performances and good writing but to me I had seen everything it had already wanted to say and didn't care any more. The inherent hypocrisy of its existence pulled me away from being truly invested in the narrative. I came back solely because of this thread, deciding to knock out the fourish episodes I never watched just to determine if it should be on the list. What I found was a show that actually did have something it wanted to say beyond the background table dressing of its premise. From episode 8 and its Mr. Robot reveal on, the show pulls back, further and further, and turns the lens inward. It stops being a show that exposes the hypocrisy of everyone around it and starts being a show that examines its own. It embraces the hypocrisy of its existence by becoming more and more meta-narrative, makes the viewers into explicit, literal characters within its own story. It points out how everyone deludes themselves with narratives, that believing in the triumph of Anonymous or the futile pointlessness of our money-obsessed society is not materially different than glory in the Almighty Dollar. All that's different is the perspective you take and how that perspective allows you to struggle your way through every day. Essentially, Mr. Robot stops being a story about anarchy taking down The Man (on cable TV, one hour a week, with eighteen minutes of commercials) and reveals itself to, ultimately, be a story about stories, in a way that feels earned and natural over pretentious as gently caress. And that reveal is what elevates the show to greatness, and why it makes number 10 on my list. 9. Halt and Catch Fire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY8NO8R4AI8 Halt and Catch Fire is interesting, because it's the only entry that's on my list purely based on merit. Season one was a huge mess, to be honest. It was cluttered and unfocused, ostensibly a period piece dramatizing the lives of those who enabled the personal computer revolution that was, instead, a third-rate Mad Men clone about a fourth-rate Christian Bale from American Psycho in Lee Pace's Joe MacMillan. It was a confusing, murky show, Halt and Catch Fire season 1. It eventually realized that Joe worked better as part of an ensemble than the focus of the show, and its discovery of the standout Kerry Bishé as Donna Clark and her specific, nuanced character portrayal improved HaCF dramatically nearing the end of its first season. It was a show that had already begun to figure itself out by the end of its first season. Season two came along and completed the revolution. Donna and Cameron's developing, confused professional-into-personal relationship was a highlight of season one, so having them both leave Cardiff behind entirely to go into business together only paid dividends as this season progressed. This was a season that learned, heavily, from its own mistakes, turning Joe from a borderline sociopathic businessbot into a man desperately - but, ultimately, futilely - attempting to escape that very perception. It was a season that diversified its focus, moving from having the entire cast centered in and around Cardiff and instead had Donna and Cameron desperately dealing with all the Mutiny problems as Gordon realizes and addresses his own mental health issues as Joe tries to save his failing marriage while attempting to modernize his father-in-law's company. And that doesn't even deal with the more secondary plots like Bosworth's post-felony career and his grappling with his own imminent obsolescence. Tech is all about rapid expansion, so it just makes sense that the focus scales so widely from a relatively contained freshman season. It gives season two a sense of urgency that even the most desperate "WE HAVE TO GET THIS COMPUTER DONE NOW" episodes of season one lacked - since the main cast is so scattered, multiple crises can develop at once and feel natural. When you see, say, Joe and Gordon interacting it's a treat over an expected outcome, due to how heavily both characters had been segmented off from each other beforehand. Such plot sophistication and technical elegance also comes hand-in-hand with a progression in the show's technology - perhaps this is my bias talking but I find the history of online gaming and social networking to be more inherently interesting concepts than how the personal computing revolution occurred. If one's ever read Masters of Doom or seen The Social Network, then they'd realize that the history of gaming and social networking has a rebellious, almost anarchistic perspective that personal computing just flatly lacked, and HaCF season two realizes that tonal shift by giving its second season, the Mutiny set especially, a snappier and more fluid feel. It's not a bunch of white-collar, horn-rimmed glasses thirtysomething white men sweating over capacitors, gaming was popularized and populated by a much more comparatively diverse and younger group of people. HaCF season two was, simply put, actualized. It knew what it wanted to accomplish and what it had to change about itself to accomplish it, and simply went out and effortlessly did so. Rarely have I seen a season so cohesively, so confidently put together. The acting, plotting, dialog, camerawork- on virtually every technical level HaCF season two was flawless. And yet it's with all that said that Halt and Catch Fire ends up a measly number nine on my top ten list. This is partially due to the strength of this year in television - Peak TV, indeed - but also the mere fact that although I realize its objective accomplishments are legendary, very little of this season of HaCF connected with me emotionally. This is not and has never been a show I have personal investment in. HaCF is something I'm more than content to bingewatch months after the latest season ends. Even as I'm watching it, Halt and Catch Fire is "Brain" TV over "Heart" TV, where I simply put on my television critic hat as each episode begins and tally up its objective merits in a removed, passive style. And that, ultimately, is why this show gets the placement it does on my list - it's a show I have no real passion or zeal for. It's great TV, obviously and clearly among the best of the year, but not anything I have any personal stakes in, either positive or negative. 8. Fargo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDIV3beggKY God, Fargo season two was frustrating television. Season one is up there with the greatest single seasons of all time. Easily in the pantheon inhabited by such greats as Boardwalk Empire season two, Breaking Bad season three, the final season of Six Feet Under, The Wire season four. The intertwining narrative of Lester Nygaard, Lorne Malvo, and Molly Solverson was flat-out fantastic from beginning to end. Fargo season two had to perform the unenviable task of following up on this legacy. Of meeting the impossible standard set by the previous season. The problem with season two isn't that it's not as good as the previous season. It's that it's almost as good. Indeed, sometimes - quite often, in fact - season two echoes its previous greatness in episodes like "The Loplop" (episode 208), which was a start-to-finish brilliant episode that had the perfect balance of deathly serious drama and pitch-perfect dark comedy that perfectly encapsulates Fargo. The Dodd/Peggy scene in that episode might be the single funniest sequence I've seen all year, comedy or not. The thing about Fargo season two is that such narrative or cinematic peaks are everywhere. You can count up the flat-out amazing and impressive sequences in season two till the cows come home - the police station standoff, the payoff to the running UFO storyline, the Ronald Reagan/Lou confrontation in the bathroom...the list literally just goes on and on and on. There are so many times in season two that Fargo echoes or even exceeds the greatness established by season one, where it near-effortlessly recaptures that same, specifically Fargo surreality and absurdity that defines this universe. But, oftentimes immediately afterwards, the myriad problems with season two rear their heads, dissipating any good feelings established up to that point. Season 2 of Fargo is just rotten with slipshod storytelling and general plotting. The show constantly loses track of its own internal chronology, so it'll do things like end an episode with a shootout, then begin the next with a montage that implies multiple days-to-weeks have passed, only to have the next scene outright state that the shootout had just occurred the previous day. The show relies on coincidence and near godlike serendipity for the plot to move forward, most notably in the penultimate episode of the season, "The Castle", which orchestrates a series of unfortunate events so that Lou is the only one who realizes that the motel bait is an imminent bloodbath while being near-powerless to stop it. Such heavy authorization of a story makes the show feel flimsy and constructed, less experiencing a narrative than being told one. Those are just examples, by the way. Individually speaking the plot issues that Fargo season two has are insignificant, easily ignorable - but it's the sheer totality and frequency of the narrative niggles that make them infuriating. It riddles the story full of tiny holes that weakens the very structure of the season as a result. But, ultimately, plot always comes secondary to character in fiction, so the fact that the story of season two is flawed - even critically so - as a narrative piece is not as important as how the show presents its characters. Here, though, the second and much uglier endemic problem with Fargo's sophomore showing presents itself. The increased plot focus of season two causes a blowback effect on the characters who star within it. Fargo views them as so many chess pieces, manuevering them around the story ruthlessly to get them into whatever position the script demands. As a result, previously-competent, smart, wise, or clever characters temporarily get turned into bumbling buffoons on a regular basis, and totally inept idiots suddenly become absolute masterminds. The consistency of the season is all out of whack - Ed's somehow able to outrun two cops, in a cop car, who verbally acknowledge exactly where he's going (which, incidentally, is exactly where one of them just came from), because the plot demands that Ed and Peggy are able to escape the police or else the final third of the season doesn't happen. Mike is able to orchestrate a backstab on the Gerhardt family ending with the in-cold-blood murder of its patriarch, then inexplicably leaves both Floyd and Simone alive for no explainable reason. Lou is somehow unable to convince a cop to do his job investigating a crime scene while literally standing fifty feet away from a murdered corpse. Hank gets knocked unconscious explicitly because he's defending Peggy's life, wakes up, and immediately leaves the house he was guarding...just because? All these problems created a situation where Fargo's success or failure was totally reliant on how well the season finale stuck the landing. Its increasing focus on its narrative to the point of crippling its cast's believability and competence to service it meant that the storytelling payoff had to be massive in order to make the effort and sacrifices feel worth it. In Fargo's case, its finale was a mixed bag at best. It had some of the best scenes of the season and maybe the show in general; Mike's ironic "promotion", Ed's death, the car scene between Peggy and Lou after she's arrested. At the same time, it had some of its worst and most dire plot points; basically, everything having to do with Hanzee was terrible at best, and that overlong, downright insulting monologue from Hank as the show hammers in its own themes with all the subtlety of a mallet to the skull- we get it, Fargo, season two is about how miscommunication causes sometimes-lethal problems. It's not a difficult concept to grasp, I don't need Sam from Cheers to patronizingly overexplain it to me and the rest of the viewing audience, as if Fargo were Barney and Ted Danson is impressing upon us the Big Moral of the season. To be clear, much of the problems that Fargo season two has are problems that Fargo, the TV show, has always had. Fargo season one was no better in many respects - season one's conflict only exists because nobody in authority is willing to listen to Gus or especially Molly, no matter how self-evidently right the latter two are or how insignificant or marginal a sacrifice it would be to listen to them. Lorne Malvo is only able to operate with impunity in season one because the police departments both Gus and Molly work for are the Keystonest of the Keystone Kops. If everyone just did the bare minimum of their job the first season would be like three episodes long, if that. But the thing is, in Fargo season one, that was the point. The theme of the first season is proving the oft-quoted Edmund Burke line, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." cirrect. Lorne Malvo isn't really the antagonist of the season; the pride, laziness, selfishness, and outright stupidity of the people who should ostensibly be stopping him is the true villain. And this is what makes such narrative laziness acceptable; instead of a shortcoming, it becomes central to the lessons it's trying to teach, the morality it's attempting to impart. Season two's theme deals, as Hank annoyingly overimpresses in the finale, with communication and communication failures, so the plot and especially character shortcomings have nowhere to hide, no justification for their existence. This combined with the show's increasing focus on the narrative above all else just puts in starker and starker relief how shoddily constructed a season Fargo season two was. Fargo season two should have been the unequivocal best television that aired this year. And, oftentimes, it is. At the same time, the season has a veritable smorgasbord of tiny issues that, as a collective whole, taint it. As a result, Fargo plummets from last year's ranking, barely etching out an 8 on this list. 7. Manhattan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fV5WNudPPU Halt and Catch Fire, Fargo, and finally Manhattan all represent a neat trio of shows on their second seasons. What's most interesting is that all three took similar reactionary approaches in that they all looked back on and had a direct dialog with the strengths and failures of their first seasons. HaCF internalized its own problems and neatly, effortlessly fixed them; of the three, Halt had the objective "best" second season, a perfect - as in, lacking flaws - second season that accomplished its thematic aims completely with no real missteps. On the other end of the scale, Fargo went from a near-perfect first season and doubled down on the plot and characterization issues going into its second season, with an undercooked disappointment of a finale capping off an extraordinarily uneven season. And, somewhere in between both ends of the spectrum, we have Manhattan season two. Showrunner Sam Shaw clearly digested and reflected on the criticisms of its first season - namely that the show was at its most fascinating when conflict arose directly related to the Manhattan project. On the other hand, Manhattan was at its weakest - and genuinely, sincerely bad television - when addressing conflict related to the main cast's personal lives. Manhattan's strength as a drama was in illustrating a side of WWII that had never been dramatized before then, combined with its impressive command of tone allowing for stuff like people endlessly checking their math and scribbling on chalkboards to feel tenser than the most action-heavy episode of Homeland. When it retreated to the home life stories, Manhattan resorted to being a third-rate Mad Men clone, all pointless drama with none of the symbolism or introspection to anchor it. It didn't help that the home-life plotlines in season one were cliched to the point of ludicrousness - remember that Mexican nanny that Frank inexplicably has an affair with? Remember that forced and totally unearned romance between the Winters' daughter and Private Dunlavey? No, you don't, because they were stupid and pointless and season two elects to forget all of it as soon as possible. Season two doubles down on the work plotlines, such that all the main cast's storylines throughout the season deal directly with the Manhattan project. It both helps centralize the show's focus - it's about the bomb and the people who work on it, not their sex lives - and also means that good characters like Liza and Abby aren't stuck in going-nowhere plots like "She's totally useless and hates her life" (for the former) and "She has a weird lesbian affair and is also a terrible, terrible mother" (for the latter. Man, season one of Manhattan was weird.) Season two is, overall, a vast improvement from season one. John Benjamin Hickey is lights-out fantastic as Frank, just like in season one, but his imprisonment/escape/redrafting storyline pushes him to the periphery, such that Manhattan's deep bench of fantastic character actors get their chance to shine. Chief among them Harry Lloyd as Paul Crosley, who has a really effective and genuinely moving arc this year. Manhattan season one's primary question was mechanical: How will the atomic bomb be made? The setbacks the cast encountered deal mostly with being on the forefront of a science that hadn't even been invented yet, trying to both follow and write the rulebook as they went along. Season two goes broader, more philosophical: How will the atomic bomb be used? Who will it be used on? Should it even be used in the first place? Season two deliberates on issues of faith and country and obligation, bringing in such things as the cliffhanger reveal in season one that Meeks was the spy and addressing it, giving the show a bit of self-reflection as it illustrates how dangerous it must've felt for countries not named the United States to watch the atomic race from the sidelines, realizing that man was on the precipice of unlocking the ability to make itself permanently extinct. There's a sense of dark inevitability, a cloud that hangs over all of season two. We, the audience, know due to the benefit of hindsight that the bomb is made, and dropped, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing over a quarter million noncombatants. It gives the project's advancement combined with the show's liberal use of timeskips into a sort of damned, quixotic march, a way to avert a global catastrophe by causing an even larger one. It gives all of Frank's warnings about the irresponsibility of unchallenged, ungated nuclear power even greater weight, since history ends up validating him completely, and we the viewing audience know that. Of course, it's not all roses for Manhattan season two. Its reliance on unfocused, time-displaced storytelling creates an issue where the chronology of the show is a confused mess. Season one was strictly linear, and dealt with a clear progression in the building of the bomb, a season-long arc that was able to very easily provide marker points for where the season was at. With the struggles of season two being more philosophical, combined with its own willingness to skip over long sections of time, it's hard to figure out when things happened, and how under pressure our heroes actually are. This is especially problematic with a show that deals with time as such a dominant, omnipresent enemy; everyone on the show, as they are tirelessly reminded, are trying to end a world war. Every milestone they hit or miss is, ostensibly, a literal life or death situation. It's just hard to figure out how where everyone is actually at, due to its scattered and attention-deficit approach to linear storytelling. This is Manhattan season two's largest problem, but not its only one. Characters, with their attendant arcs, are dropped with little to no fanfare. Most notably Abby's son, a character who literally does not exist until the plot demands he does. There's also the typical, run-of-the-mill logic and character plotholes endemic to most shows, crystallized in the finale when Crosley drops Frank off to deal with the discovered-as-traitorous Meeks...and then just loving disappears. Dude! They're about to test the atomic bomb and you just learned that Meeks was a Soviet spy! Aren't you going to help him out? No? Well, uh...okay, then. But it's hard to really throw Manhattan under the bus for its goofiness, because it feels almost part and parcel of its appeal. Manhattan has always been a show where its reach exceeded its grasp, and here in Season 2 it gets so much right and corrects so many of its past mistakes that I'm willing to give it a pass for the problems that still exist. Manhattan season two gets the backhanded compliment of being the "Most Improved" show on this list, turning from a frustrating waste of potential to a genuinely great show in its sophomore season. A brilliant, moving finale - especially its final shot, as cliched as it might have been - cements its status as number seven on my top ten list for 2015. 6. The Jinx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAST6SgLmQg It's hard to write about The Jinx properly, to grade it as a drama in relation to all the other dramas on this list since, well, it isn't one. It's a documentary miniseries, and there's something cruel and downright ruthless about praising its storytelling prowess when, ultimately, people died. But, well...yeah. With the unpleasant reality that I'd much prefer that the events that caused the documentary to be made in the first place never happened, The Jinx demands your attention from the first episode to its sixth and final one. Its central character, eccentric and reclusive heir Robert Durst, makes for fascinating television. There's something immensely unnerving yet magnetic about his personality, where he simultaneously repulses and draws in the viewer. He's reptilian, slimy skin and darting eyes. He's a fascinating lead for a miniseries to document even without the murder accusations. It's hard not to compare The Jinx to Serial, especially when the latter ended literally weeks before the former began. I was very high on Serial....until The Jinx premiered, and blew it out of the water. Part of it is the depressing reality that the people who experience stories, whether fiction or fact, want endings. Serial was brilliant podcast material, but the unfortunate reality of it was that it ended with nothing having realistically changed. Adnan was still imprisoned, found guilty on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence for a crime he might not have committed in the first place. There was no ending to the Serial story, nowhere for it to go, no revelation to be made. And that's nobody's fault, but the downright boring and navel-gazing finale episode, where an unfocused Sarah Koenig wanderingly chattered about this and that before flaccidly going "He shouldn't be in jail, but I think he did it, maybe?" was the exact wrong note for the podcast to end on. In contrast, Andrew Jarecki's perspective and appproach to The Jinx is one of constant questioning and criticism. He might like Durst - and, at times, he admits that he does - but it doesn't seem to cloud his judgement or perspective as much as it did Sarah's. Jarecki's incisive, constantly-critical direction and coverage makes the penultimate and final episodes' dual revelations of the "anonymous" letter and the very final, open mic "confession" feel narratively earned in a way that nothing on Serial was able to. Criticisms of Jarecki's obligations to notify the police aside, he crafted a true-crime narrative that was at turns exciting, horrifying, and intensely, intensely watchable. If I were to be honest, it's the most outright "perfect" season of all the shows on this list, never really faltering at any step of the way, with an absolutely jaw-dropping final scene. Man, was The Jinx some brilliant, brilliant television. 5. The Americans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9Ejy9sNrOo The Americans season two was inarguably one of the best shows of 2014. The Americans season three continues that campaign of excellence, with a dark and focused third season that was able to keep the numerous balls it constantly juggles in the air without fumbling. The show's central genius is in making the two leads understandable and even relatable while still pointing out how they're both, ultimately, very bad people. They might be principled (well, at least Elizabeth; Phillip seems too cynically realistic to actually believe in the glory of The Great Soviet Motherland any more), but that might be the scariest alternative of all. Nothing's more dangerous than a skilled zealot. The Americans has always succeeded on all fronts, whether it be acting or dialog or casting or characters or plotting or cinematography or pacing. Its chief among equals strength has always been its ability to juxtapose the mundane home life narratives that Phillip, Elizabeth, and even Stan - who, at this point, is essentially the third lead - live between the gunplay and high-stakes action that characterize their lives as KGB operatives/ an FBI agent. It gives the work they are doing practical meaning, as it allows the audience to understand and further empathize with why they make the sacrifices they make. When the finale, "March 8, 1983", has a blotchy, grainy Ronald Reagan ranting against the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, in the most infamous speech of his presidency, the fact that we are so intimately connected to Phillip and Elizabeth proves his words false. So much of the Cold War was founded on an us versus them mentality, on both sides, but The Americans has always viewed the world in shades of grey. Everyone in the show's universe is some degree of understandable, relatable but still flawed. There's, essentially, absolutely nothing this show doesn't do right, and most things it does it does exceptionally well. I mean, directly compare this season to Homeland - the centerpiece of this season was about Paige, and Holly Taylor as Paige, struggling with matters of faith and her increasing conflict with her parents eventually leading to her discovery of their status as double agents. Homeland season two tried for a similar anchor plot with their teen daughter character, and it was a horrid albatross around an inconsistent-at-best season's neck. Here, Holly Taylor both acts her heart out and receives some of the best material of her career to craft a wondrous seasonal arc for her character that feels completely earned when the final shot of the season is her tearfully confessing to her pastor about her parents. Basically, The Americans knows itself, knows what it wants to be, and is able to execute on its vision effortlessly. There's really no way the show can be better than it already is, and I couldn't be more pumped to see how it ends going into its final season. A must-watch season of television, for sure. 4. Rick and Morty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW5z-ZjfpxM It says something that in a year of wondrous television drama and great comedy (although, on the whole, pound for pound, I would say that that the latter was notably weaker than the former) Rick and Morty, an animated sitcom airing late nights on [adult swim] ends up the only comedy on my list. RaM's sophomore outing was as strong if not stronger than its first season, able to be both simultaneously laugh-out-loud hilarious and soul-crushingly depressing. The universe of RaM is one of earned fatalism, where an alcoholic (and, revealed in this season, outright suicidal) grampa who can bend time and space to his very will struggles with the very concept of meaning as he lives a life of hedonism and utter selfishness. Much of Rick and Morty deliberates on what being able to understand the very secrets of the universe would do to the psyche. Why bother being nice or helping others when one empirically knows, for a fact, how utterly pointless existence is? Isn't it better to be a drunk poo poo who, with both hands eagerly grasping, pursues everything and anything that catches your eye, no matter who it hurts or what consequences it will cause? Could you even argue that there even are consequences, since morality is an invention of the ignorant to make sense of an unknowable and uncaring universe? One could even argue that altruism is deeply dangerous. I mean, just look at Birdperson, gunned down by his wife on his wedding day because he dared to be stupid enough to share his heart with somebody else. The irony, of course, is that deep, deep in its heart, Rick and Morty is, ultimately, an optimistic program. It may put Morty, Beth, Summer, and Jerry through the emotional, physical, and probably literal wringer due to Rick's horrific shenanigans, but the first and last episodes of the season are both resolved by Rick performing a truly selfless act when he was forced to. "I'm okay with this," Rick says as he floats in the vastness of space to his certain death, and on some level, I bet he was okay with it when he turned himself in and got imprisoned in whatever galactic super-jail they put him in at the end of the season. And if you thought those last two paragraphs were pretentious bullshit over-analyzing an animated tv show, well, good news: Rick and Morty is still absolutely fantastic because it's one of the funniest loving shows currently airing. Just ask Roy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szzVlQ653as 3. Better Call Saul https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybobdx-H_Jc Unlike most everyone else who has BCS on their list, at no point before its premiere was I ever worried that Better Call Saul would be bad. I mean, it's Vince Gilligan. He's my favorite showrunner of all time for a reason. I was confident that Gilligan would be able to avoid the narrative pitfalls that many prequel shows fall into: The inability to distinguish itself from its source material combined with an overreliance on increasingly awkward call-forwards to the same. Essentially, "Remember This?", the TV show. But even according to my (very high) expectations, Better Call Saul exceeded them. It immediately sets a totally different tone than Breaking Bad. Saul Goodman, née Jimmy McGill, is not and never will be Walter White. Better Call Saul understands this, and the mood of BCS is both lighter and more serious. Walt on BB was a person operating on a timer, having been diagnosed with terminal, inoperable cancer in the first episode. That sort of encroaching finality made Breaking Bad into a pressure cooker of a show, one in which anyone could, well, break bad at any moment. There was the constant fear of everything collapsing all at once. In contrast, not only is Better Call Saul a prequel set almost a decade before the events of Breaking Bad, but it's a prequel starring a character who unambiguously makes it out alive in the base material. Jimmy McGill is going to be fine, one way or the other, so instead of the stakes being literally life-or-death BCS goes full character study, examining the absurdity and genuine pathos that defines the person who would eventually be Saul Goodman. The tension is subtler, the conflict mostly consisting of verbal confrontations over physical ones. There's literally no risk of the main character dying, so most of the "big moments" happen in boardrooms, in houses. That's not to say that it's any less incredible TV in its own right. Episode 106. "Five-O", is one of the finest episodes in either BCS' or BB's runs. Even within the mere ten episodes we received this year, Vince Gilligan made it emphatically clear that he is no one-hit wonder. 2. Mad Men https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcRr-Fb5xQo Ohhhhhhhhhhhh, Mad Men. This show has always been one that I've had excruciatingly mixed feelings over. On paper, I love every single part of Mad Men; I love slow-paced character studies, I love mood pieces, I love television that works in shades of subtlety. I love period pieces, especially when the period of the piece is central to the grander thematic ambitions of the work. Essentially, Mad Men should be extremely my poo poo. Every part of it - the acting, the dialog, the plotting, the cinematography, the costumes, down to such granular things as set design - is so well done as to be unparalleled in its field. But I always found, in the watching, that although I love Mad Men I don't much like it. Its slow pacing is downright glacial; Mad Men is the worst show ever to binge-watch, because every episode feels several hours long and is physically exhausting to experience. It's very easy to get behind, and stay behind, on Mad Men since catching up feels just as demanding as running a marathon. With cinderblocks tied to your legs. Something about the show just didn't really work on me. I had seasons and episodes I appreciated, even loved, but my appreciation always felt cerebral, one borne just as much from obligation to the zeitgeist surrounding the program as its objective value as an artistic work. Often, watching MM, or catching up to it, felt like homework, or something I was forced to do just to keep up with the contemporary feelings of TVIV vis a vis "prestige" television. I wouldn't say it "all changed" in season seven, but there was certainly a sharpening of opinion this half-season. It helped that I had mixed feelings, at best, about season seven part one - to me, it came across as a unfocused, depressing mess of a half-season that dwelled too often and too severely on the misery of its characters. Mad Men has always been a dark show, one could argue even an extended tragedy, but to me season seven part one crossed the line to melodramatic. At every turn, everyone lost while only the ignorant, evil, and irredeemably awful people "won". Season seven part two, however... Maybe it was the fact that the show was ending, but the final seven episodes of Mad Men contained an energy and focus the show never seemed to have before. The characters all seem to be aware on some metaphysical level that the show is ending; the show, therefore, feels intent on providing some sense of closure for every single one of them, and does so more-or-less with perfect aplomb. Along the way, it still manages to knock it out of the park as televised drama - there's moments like Peggy and Roger interacting (a pairing that had literally never happened on the show before the antepenultimate episode) in the barren halls of the former SC&P that feels completely natural and earned. Special note must be made for the second-to-last episode of Mad Men, "The Milk and Honey Route". That episode is up there with my favorite single hours of television of all time, and what makes it all the more impressive is how contained it all is; it's literally the penultimate episode of the program, the one meant to set up the series finale, but works completely on its own as an encapsulation (and subsequent payoff) of the themes of identity, guilt, obligation, and generational differences that Mad Men had commiserated on endlessly beforehand. If there's one episode of Mad Men that everyone should see, it should be that one, especially considering how little it has to do with the serialized narrative. But, yeah, Mad Men's final season was able to change how I regarded it, where now I consider it one of the best and, more importantly, one of my favorite shows I've ever seen. A supremely accomplished ending to a supremely accomplished show. 1. The Leftovers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLSH-81yT7s The Leftovers. It claimed my number one last year, but even as I was awarding it the top slot on my personal top ten I made stringent note that it was a divisive program at best, one that appealed to me specifically because it was this confrontational, singular, confused, and overall messy season. The Leftovers season two...not so much. Easily one of the best single seasons I've ever seen, ever. Possibly the best. A, start to finish, enthralling and explosive season that aimed for so many different things at once, and, somehow, ended up nailing all of them. It's literally astounding television. It's interesting, because The Leftovers ended up turning so many people off in its first season that the few people who have placed The Leftovers season two on their top ten list this year can't adequately articulate why they did beyond "it's better this year". I think I can explain why. Damon Lindelof, showrunner and co-creator of The Leftovers, has been open about the fact that as he was writing season one he was struggling with deep-seated depression. This reflects on the tempo and attitude of the season as a whole; Leftovers season one is an angry, rebellious show in open conflict with its audience. It's why I loved it, because as I noted last year I saw "purely and without compromise" the intentions of Lindelof, Perrotta, and the rest of the writing staff. But it's also why so many hated it; it's bathes in and glories in the misery and depression of its setting and characters. The only wins that are scratched out in season one are tiny, but they are hugely meaningful as a result; the rest of the time, we're watching Nora paying dominatrices to shoot her in the chest, or having her freak out when the GR place lifelike dolls of her departed family in the kitchen. We're watching Kevin fruitlessly attempt to tame a feral dog, or wonder if he slept with his daughter's best friend in a moment of weakness. We're watching Matt try desperately to keep his church open while caring for his comatose wife. Season one is a show about nihilism, and the pointless attempts of those who have suffered major grief to move past it. It has one bright spot, and that's the final minutes of the season finale as Nora finds the abandoned baby on her doorstep. Season two of The Leftovers is not a materially different show than season one. Both seasons share almost everything in common. The difference, and it makes all the difference in the world, between them is in attitude. Season one was written by a depressed person and reflects that worldview; although both seasons deal chiefly with grief and how people are able to deal with grief, season one is the immediate aftermath and reaction to a horrific event. Although set ostensibly two years after The Sudden Departure, the emotions of everyone involved are still very raw. As a result, season one deals in that immediacy; people are depressed and angry and miserable at all times, unsure of how to function after a major loss has been handed to them. Season two deals with loss and grief as well, but from the perspective of some time removed. Reaction has given way to reason, or at least understanding. Characters smile more (or, well, smile at all), and are able to move past, begin healing and internalizing the horrors they encountered. The mood, while not necessarily lighter, is more tempered. The drama is more focused, as opposed to the sea of misery that was season one. Season two picks exactly when, where, and how it wants to be emotionally affecting and strikes with pinpoint precision. The easiest way to explain how seasons one and two are different is by examining their intros. Season one's intro is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PTNHQND6MA Note the supposed beatific but actually horrified faces of the people departing. Season one was a season of dark, angry irony, as represented by the concept of a "beautiful" chapel painting essentially depicting a genocide. It was in your face, confrontational, meant to instill on the people watching the show the horrors of what happened to the world on October 14, 2011. In contrast, look at the season two intro, linked at the start of this entry. It displays still images of people in repose, enjoying themselves, as one or more people within the photo has been greenscreened out, replaced with images of the environment within which the photo is set or shots of the cosmos. It's meant to be disorienting, and a bit horrifying (especially shots of parents holding departed babies), but if you look at the faces of the people still extant...they're still happy, or enjoying themselves. The loss still is painful, but it doesn't diminish the happiness of the memories of the participants. People can move on from loss, and recentralize. As Iris DeMent aptly explains in the backing vocals, "Everybody's wonderin' what and where They all came from Everybody's worryin' 'bout where they're gonna go When the whole thing's done But no one knows for certain and so it's all the same to me I think I'll just let the mystery be." Emphasis mine. People are realizing, coming to grips with the concept that sometimes momentously horrible things happen, things that can never ever be explained. And, slowly, they're okay with that. They're letting the mystery be. I love Season two for all the obvious reasons: it's extraordinarily well acted, with nearly everyone on the main cast turning in Emmy-caliber performances. I mean, the show introduces three new main characters in the Murphy family, and all of them feel immediately organic and an essential part of the Leftovers universe. Regina King and Kevin Carroll, in particular, put in the performances of their careers this season. The writing, too, is absolutely top-notch. Able to shift focus with an almost effortless ease, the writing for season two of The Leftovers was so good it was able to service ten main characters with their attendant arcs and four separate serial throughlines that are all tied together in the season finale. And that's not even mentioning the tonal changes. A ten-minute non sequitur about a pregnant cavewoman. A surrealistic mindfuck of a cerebral action-thriller. A religious parable of the struggles of one man in the process of arriving at his destination. That such wildly disparate ideas can not only feel congruent but necessary to the story told in season two is one more point in The Leftovers' favor. Never before have I seen a show try for as many different things as The Leftovers season two did, much less nail all of them so thoroughly. Yes, on an "objective" level The Leftovers had an unparalleled season when it came to writing, directing, acting, storytelling, pacing, worldbuilding...all the individual "things" that one can total up on a sheet that equals "great television", The Leftovers season two had in spades. But what makes it my show of the year, in this era of peak TV, is its commitment. When The Leftovers wanted to make me laugh, I broke out into uproarious guffaws (Kevin's "Motherfucker!" when he wakes up in the hotel again in the finale might be my line of the year, it was so loving pitch-perfect). When The Leftovers wanted to make me uncomfortable, nothing this year came even slightly close to Nora and Erika's shouting match at the end of "Lens", or Matt's tunnel journey with his comatose wife ending with her almost drowning. When The Leftovers wanted to make me sad, wanted to make me happy or angry or depressed or wistful or or or. It did so. Effortlessly. That's not to say The Leftovers was bombastic. When it went subtle. it did so with a command no other show this season even attempted. The final shot of the season - a simple, wordless pan over the extended Garvey family - was the ultimate payoff to a season of deliberation over whether or not Kevin actually "loved" his family, or simply felt obligated to them, or even worse was too scared to leave. Even if the moral the final pan was attempting to impress - Family, capital F, isn't who you're blood related to, but the people who can tolerate your dumb fuckin' face without throttling you, that you likewise can also somehow stand - was obvious, it came off as an immensely powerful payoff to both seventy minutes of putting Kevin through the wringer (including killing him. Twice.) and nine hours of confusion. The final shot was wordless because nothing more needed to be said, everything had already been perfectly articulated before. All we, the audience, needed was the shot, the central affirmation that no matter how bad things get, no matter how overrun the city gets, no matter how hollow and ironic a city named "Miracle" actually is...the Garveys are there, to support each other. And that's good enough. If there's one thing you should take away from my top ten list after reading it, let it be this: Watch The loving Leftovers. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Dec 25, 2015 |
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Dec 25, 2015 22:30
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Okay everyone up to me should be on the second post, make sure to check to see if your name is on there and if it isn't, i either messed up or your entry is somehow invalid
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Dec 25, 2015 22:51
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