TV Year in Review, Sort Of

I’ll say it again. I watch too many TV shows. I was showing my TV show database to my daughter, with its precise, up-to-date information and nifty color-coding, and she remarked, “You need help. Really. You can never again claim you don’t have enough time in the day.” Ah, the young, so judgmental. You see, I watch 52 TV programs. In my defense, they’re not all on at one time, what with the advent of year-round cable programming that’s turned the TV landscape into a never-ending sushi conveyer belt. And I have a DVR, so I can schedule my addiction.

But you know what? I work all the time. Whether it’s writing or editing or reading or keeping a household running for 5 other people who sometimes seem to have the average psychological age of your typical 6-year-old (and only one of them is actually a 6-year-old). I can barely read for pleasure anymore: I’m too busy picking things apart and editing them in my head. Just the other day I was reading some short stories by an author I’ve always enjoyed and I finally threw it down in frustration. (Fucking commas, how do they work?) Whoever edited him should be beaten with a blunt object and forced to copy several style books in longhand on an endless, hellish blackboard like something out of an old Far Side cartoon.

So I need an escape valve and mine happens to come with a remote control. Now I’ll grant you, not everything I watch is high art. Some of it is definitely the equivalent of comfort food or a nice cup of tea. But I’ll never understand the people who are so proud to say, “I don’t even own a TV!” Really, that’s just as bad as saying: “I never even open a book!” or “I’d never be caught dead in an art museum!” Because it is art. Some of it terrible art, but some of it quite brilliant. And life without art, people, is a sad, sad thing.

With the end of the year just passed, talk around my dinner table turned to “best of” conversations: what movies or books or TV shows or what-have-you we thought were particularly memorable last year. And that got me to looking at my little obsessive database and dissecting it out: what was I still watching and why?

First of all, there’s hardly any reality shows. (Only The Amazing Race and Face Off) Secondly, there’s few 30 –minute sitcoms, only 8 in total. Meaning the rest are drama or spec fic or the dreaded and ill-defined hour-long “dramedy.”

Several things I had high hopes for ending up being duds, at least for me, particularly Terra Nova and Grimm. Neither kept my interest past three episodes and fell off the grid. My favorite show, Terriers, was cancelled after its inaugural season. Some things are past their sell-by date, but I still continue to watch: Bones, Glee, Burn Notice. They’re tired, but just entertaining enough that I don’t hate them. Yet. And in my defense yet again, seven shows are new and yet to debut (including the much-anticipated Alcatraz), so they may be still be clunkers that are immediately forgotten.

A pleasant surprise, I found two shows that I had neglected to watch that turned out to be absolute gems, and luckily could quickly catch up on the missed seasons: Justified and Sons of Anarchy. And then there are the guilty pleasures, shows that really aren’t that spectacular but that I find entertaining nevertheless. (Hello, American Horror Story, with your myriad ginormous and insanely maddening plot holes, deus ex machinas, and unlikeable main characters who I’m now glad are dead, dead, dead.)

So, excising the comfort food and the guilty pleasures and the watching-from-a-sense-of-past-loyalty, here are the 10 best shows of last year, chosen by my subjective criteria, in my perceived order of quality, and excluding any shows I don’t get because I’m too cheap for premium channels. (I figure that’s enough qualifiers.)

1.      Justified – FX Network, Third Season debuts January 17

2.      Luther – BBC America, Third Season TBA

3.      Doctor Who – BBC America, 11^th Doctor Returns TBA

4.      Being Human – BBC America, Fourth Season TBA

5.      The Hour – BBC America, Second Season TBA

6.      Suits – USA Network, Second Season This Summer

7.      Sons of Anarchy – FX Network, Fifth Season This Fall

8.      Suburgatory – ABC, Currently Airing First Season

9.      The Walking Dead – AMC, Second Season Continues February 12

10.  The New Girl – FOX, Currently Airing First Season

You mileage may vary, but these are consistently brilliantly written and acted, the production values are high, and they’re all immensely enjoyable. (Although one final caveat re: The Walking Dead: Lori and Shane and Andrea cannot be eaten by zombies quickly enough. Or maybe not-dream Merle can come back and dispatch them all. With a machete. Or a tank. Or a Gatling gun. Or any combination thereof. Oh, and more Daryl, please.)

Summer of Our Semi-Discontent - Tales from the DVR

I'm in the formatting stages for Darker By Degree and Director's Cut, having just realized the in my format-stripping ministrations, I have lost all my italics. Since it's mystery series featuring an movie-buff actress as the first person protagonist, there are A LOT of italics for movie and TV series titles. Grrr. At least rereading everything again, I'm sure I'll find more pointless stupid errors, even though each book just came back from two rounds of proofreading. And did I mention they'll be published by the end of next week? Woot!

As stress relief, I'm trying to keep up with the DVR.

The Glades is back on A&E, and apparently between season one and season two, they replaced the writers with monkeys. The actors -- Matt Passmore, Kiele Sanchez, and Carlos Gomez -- are great, but the plot of the second episode was so strained and contrived that midway through I was tempted to dash off a strongly-worded letter outlining the shortcomings of the plot, and the absolutely nonsensical character "motivations." (My strongly-worded letters are devastating.) Hopefully it will get back on track and be as watchable as it was last season. (The Mentalist went through a period where the scripts appeared to be just random sentences strung together and it got better, so there is hope.)

Outcasts on BBC America:  A human outpost on the planet Carpathia is searching for the remnants of a flotilla of escape ships that left shortly before/during the destruction of Earth. (Random fact for the day: the Carpathia was the first ship to reach the debris of the Titanic and start pulling survivors out of the brine.) Starring Hermione Norris (Wire in the Blood) and Liam Cunningham (Dog Soldiers), it has possibilities. I'll hold back until I've watched episode two. I was disappointed that they dispatched the eye candy (Jamie Bamber) so early. And I will predict that Eric Mabius will be evil, because when is Erik Mabius not evil?

I have not watched TNT's Falling Skies, simply because it's two hours long, and I feel guilty staying still for that long at one time. It's on the DVR for the weekend.

Watched USA's Suits as an antidote to the other law show on TNT, Franklin & Bash. I will say that I enjoyed it roughly a hundred thousand times more. I think a large measure of my goodwill stem from the fact that the lead actors don't make me want to run them over with a bus and bury them in an umarked grave. Gabriel Macht (channeling Adrian Pasdar in Profit) and Patrick J. Adams are actually quite interesting, with none of the forced "look at me, I'm weirdly, charmingly eccentric" mania of that other show. And as a bonus, Gina Torres. (Hi, Zoe!)

Also Burn Notice is back, Leverage starts on Sunday, and in a couple of weeks the return of The Closer, Rizzoli and Isles, Eureka, Warehouse 13, and Haven, plus the premier of SyFy's Alphas. The DVR is holding steady about 50 hours, but I fear that won't last....sigh.

The Midseason Doldrums - Tales from the DVR

Used to be, TV series rolled out on a predictable schedule. Fall premieres, the occasional mid-season replacement, and the burn-off of the unwanted during the summer, when decent people weren't inside watching TV, but rather out catching fireflies or having ice cream socials or some such.

No more. Now TV is like one of those endless sushi conveyor belts. And while what you get is mostly the same old Spicy Tuna or California Roll, you keep looking in the hopes that something fresh and exciting is just around the bend. 

My DVR is hovering at that 50% level (about 100 hours), the level where I start to get nervous, so I figured it was time to start clearing it out. (Not all of that is mine - the S/O has like 20 hours of old newsreels and the entire America: the Story of Us miniseries that he may never get around to watching. And quite a bit of it is stuff we watch together -- the full season of Mad Men, the full season of Castle, among others -- because a hot date night around here usually consists of dozing off in the middle of an episode of White Collar.)

First off: Unfinished and Finished Business.



Fringe - I am so glad Fringe is back. In it's third season, it's really hit its stride, and good Friday numbers (Shock!) mean that it's moved from the cancellation heap to the maybe-not-cancellation heap. Hope springs eternal.

The whole Fauxlivia storyline was nerve-wracking (in a good way) and the aftermath is just heartbreaking. Yeah, I don't know if I could get over finding out the man I love was sleeping with the fake evil me from an alternate universe and didn't even realize it either.

Best line? Peter asks Walter if he's all right and Walter responds, "If by all right you mean despondent, then yes." Did I mention how much I love Walter?

Medium - Medium has been a dependably good show, a happy little workhorse. I always found it worth watching. Joe and Allison Dubois (played by Jake Webber and Patricia Arquette) were hands-down the best TV couple: real, messy, devoted. I was terribly fond of them. So I faced the series finale with some trepidation. Would it do justice to the seven years that preceded it?

Er, no. In fact, if I had a time machine and could go back and not have watched the finale, I would. I want to find Glenn Gordon Caron and kick him repeatedly in the shins. And I LIKE Glenn Gordon Caron (Moonlighting and the criminally canceled Now and Again).

But this was just, well, a mess, and a mean-spirited mess at that. Like a pie made completely of "Fuck you, viewers." The last two minutes were nice, and it was sweet that everybody got to wave goodbye at the end, but that didn't make up for the preceding 58 minutes of crap. Me, I'm going to pretend it didn't happen and write my own ending, and like Allison, I'll have woken up and it will only have been a dream.

Now onto the new shows....

The Cape -- Reviewed it once, and the second episode didn't change my opinion much. I say just give Keith David his own show and do away with all the sappy earnestness. Verdict? Off the DVR.

Harry's Law -- The previews for this looked cute and I like Kathy Bates. I look at David E. Kelley with a jaundiced eye, because the last show if his I actually liked was Picket Fences. Since then it seems like everything he done as been a sackful of quirks in search of substance.

How to best describe Harry's Law? It's like an update of the White Shadow, but with a grumpy old lawyer instead of a grumpy old basketball coach. And not in a good way. I had the uncomfortable feeling that it was written by old white liberals who tell you, "But I have black friends!" It was creepily paternalistic and hackneyed. It wasn't horrible, but I felt a little embarrassed watching it.

Add to that, it was, again, a sackful of quirks (it's a law office and shoe store!) and a huge lack of character development (why was Nate Corddry hot to work there again?) and so many old TV tropes you'd need a passel of sticks to wallop them with. Verdict? Off the DVR.

Off the Map - Do not want. Didn't watch. From the people who brought you Grey's Anatomy, of which I saw an episode once, I think the one where Kyle Chandler exploded. It was enough to make me swear off things of this ilk, much like I quit doing tequila shooters once I got to college. Here's a sample of an episode blurb:

"Lily and Ben help a wildlife photographer who is being attacked by an anaconda; Tommy learns a cultural lesson." Er, what?

Verdict: Never on the DVR.

Fairly Legal - this one surprised me, as I'm naturally distrustful of "law" shows since Perry Mason went off the air.  I'm looking at you, David E. Kelley.

But this was pretty delightful. First off Sarah Shahi is adorable, kind of like a Mary Tyler Moore for the new millennium. It was sharp, interesting, witty, the characters did not seem like they'd been invented by throwing darts at the big ol' wheel of personality traits. Oh, and San Francisco is lovely. If I ever get back there again, you're going to have drag me out kicking and screaming.

One question, do women really enjoy wearing the fuck-me heels? Really? I guess I just don't get the whole shoe thing. Although I did once have a pair of Acme roping boots that I wore so much I had them resoled three time before they finally fell apart. Somehow I think that's not the same thing. Verdict? On the DVR.

Being Human (American version) - I sat down with an open mind. Really. I'm biased against Yank remakes of Brit shows (there must be a good one somewhere, but I can't think of one off the top of my head), but I wanted to give this an honest shot.

So, is it any good? I don't know. You're going to have to ask somebody else. I got through maybe the first 20 minutes and was so distracted by the fact that it wasn't the original that I found I couldn't watch it. Again, doesn't mean it's bad, it just seemed...unnecessary.

I was a bit leery of the original at first, I mean, a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost all share a flat? What kind of adolescent Twilight-lite is that? But it works, and occasionally it works splendidly. It's engaging and funny and tense and moving. Russell Tovey is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant as George the werewolf, trying desperately to live a human life. Lorena Crichlow as Annie the ghost is lovely and alternately vulnerable and kick-ass. Aidan Turner as Mitchell the vampire it at once vaguely dangerous and utterly hapless. Seriously, the worst leader of the vampires ever, where every decision he makes seems to turn out in the worst possible way.  I find that weirdly endearing. Oh, and Adrian Lester as Herrick is a grinning jack-o-lantern of a villain. If I ever happened upon Adrian Lester walking down the street, I'd instinctively run the other way.

The Americans playing their versions of these roles seem like ghosts themselves to me, shadows of what they're supposed to be. Add that to the fact that the plot lines are going to be fairly similar, and there are no surprises to look forward to. So no thanks, I'll stick with the original. And if you get the chance, you should check it out. It's really surprisingly good. And, yay, it's been renewed for a third season and will premiere on February 19th on BBC America. Huzzah!