Inessentials

Here are my picks for the Top 10 films of the 2000s. These lists are always a little silly (will I still like my No. 1 pick in 10 years? how many times must I rewatch a film to be sure I love it? who cares what I think?), so you might be more interested in my list of 5 essential films of the decade that didn’t make my 1o-best list. Those five all reveal something above movies in the last 10 years. Enjoy.

1. Inglourious Basterds (2009) – Quentin Tarantino films generally leave me a little cold. I love the flair, the humor, the knowledge, but his plots are too often thin vengeance flicks that leave you feeling stupid for not catching all his arcane film references. But here, finally, QT has a plot worth loving, a revenge story that says something fascinating about the nature of revenge (forget what others say, this is not wish fulfillment), and a film that you can watch without feeling frustrated at your lack of movie trivia. Devastating, beautiful, terrifying, hilarious, tense, thoughtful. Bravo.
2. Moulin Rouge! (2001) - It takes a bold storyteller to tell you no less than three times how the film will end yet still have that ending leave you moved. Somehow Baz Luhrmann manages to do it, while reinventing the musical, the movie soundtrack, the star vehicle, and the smash cut. The most exhilarating and shamelessly romantic film of the last 10 years. Spectacular. Spectacular.
3. Zodiac (2007) – This is one of the few great films about research. It is simultaneously an obsessive portrayal of obsession and masterful twist on the tired serial killer genre. Subtle use of CGI, and a stellar cast. Like QT at No. 1, this is a film a head and shoulders above the director’s (David Fincher) other work. This film still haunts me.
4. In the Mood for Love (2000) – Perhaps the most beautiful film of the decade.
5. City of God (2002) – An epic that feels intimate.
6. No Country for Old Men (2007) – The best comedic filmmakers are also the best dramatic filmmakers.
7. I (Heart) Huckabees (2004) – I love comedies. I love films about ideas. This is a comedy about ideas.
8. Elephant (2003) – Devastating to watch.
9. Mulholland Dr. (2001) – What begins as a genre pastiche ends with a suggestion that reality is the true horror.
10. Ratatouille (2007) – Everyone has a favorite Pixar film; mine is an ode to creativity and creators.

5 Essential Films of the 2000s

1. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2002, 2003, 2004) – Redefined the blockbuster. The first film feels corny to me now, the second is still thrilling, and the third is still boring. But it brought attention to the possibility of a blockbuster entertainment that is also a smart film, and was one of the first to let fans in to the filmmaking process (and more than a little marketing) by using a thing called the Internet.
2. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2003) – This film defined the goal of distributors of independent films in the 2000s: through slow release and word of mouth, hope a film finds a huge audience. (Idea: why not buy good films, let them find their modest audience, and make a small profit rather than get into bidding wars for films you hope will make a huge profit?)
3. The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) – Along with Wedding Crashers, it showed there is an audience for R-rated comedy. It also launched the Judd Apatow phenomenon.
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2002) – Each time I’ve watched it, I’ve found this film trite, dull, needlessly formal, and on-the-nose. But, like Punch Drunk Love, it has a passionate following among people who watch only a few movies but like to feel like they are very smart movie watchers. It seems like every Sundance picture tries to recapture the alleged magic of this film.
5. Yi Yi (2000) – I have not seen this film. I’ve seen many lists with this as one of the great films of the decade. And since an essential part of film-going (at least for us amateurs who can’t run the festival circuit) is not seeing every great film, I’ll let this stand for all the great films I didn’t see this decade.

Spoilers for Angel (Season 5) and House (Season 4)

My official Best Television of the 2000s list will feature only shows that aired at least three seasons in the 2000s. I am making this restriction because one of the marks of a great show is its ability to sustain its stories and characters over a long period, and three seasons seems as good a cut-off as any. Also, since the traditional television season runs from fall to spring, I’ve decided to include seasons that began in the fall of 1999 and I am ending with seasons that concluded before fall of 2009. That means that shows debuting in fall, 2009, are ineligible (Community, Modern Family), and it also means that on-going shows that debuted in spring, 2009, are ineligible unless they had the bad fortune to be cancelled immediately; that means no Glee, Dollhouse, Parks & Recreation, Castle, or Better Off Ted. Those shows got too late a start to be included in the best of this past decade, as I am arbitrarily determining it. Because of these restrictions on my count-down list, I thought it appropriate to say a little bit about a few shows that didn’t make the three season cut-off, but were spectacular nonetheless. I’m also including three shows that I think managed to pull off one truly great season amidst a number of less spectacular ones, and those are included at the end. Below are the highlights, in alphabetical order.

One Season

Andy Barker, P.I.

Andy Richter and Conan O’Brien teamed up for a Thursday night mystery-comedy hybrid that only aired four episodes before being yanked. (Six were filmed.) Featuring a stellar supporting cast around beat-down everyman Richter, the show exhibited remarkable comic timing over its first few episodes. When Andy Barker, CPA, moves into the office formerly held by a private detective, he finds people mistaking him for a P.I.; he may not know how to handle a gun, but he can handle your taxes when it’s over.

For fans of Chuck, Remington Steele, accounting

Firefly

Perhaps the greatest science fiction show to ever air on television, this series brought a legion of new fans to Joss Whedon. Its fans called themselves “Browncoats,” and turned Firefly into the most essential television show of geek culture in the 2000s. But is it any good? Beyond good, this show’s 13 episodes (shown, as jilted fanboys like to point out, out of order by the evil Fox Network) created a fully realized world from the first episode. The pilot is too slow and too long, but beginning in the second episode, this outer-space A-Team demonstrated that stories about vigilantes fighting against an evil centralized power could somehowstrike a chord with viewers during the Bush administration. Like many great shows, the most essential member of the cast was the location, in this case a creaky old spaceship with more smuggler’s holds than the Millenium Falcon. Wonderfully cast, with a sly sense of humor that combined Whedon’s subversive expressivism with Ben Edlund’s comic exaggeration.

For fans of Battlestar Galactica, The Tick, men in tight pants

Freaks and Geeks

Freaks and Geeks is remembered today as the greatest dramedy, the greatest high school show, the show most like your own life, and the show that launched a thousand careers. This brainchild of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig told the story of high school from those least interested in remembering it. Surprisingly, those of us who had successfully blocked our own experiences found glorious catharsis in watching the failures and (very occasionally) successes of the two bands of outsiders (those intentionally existing outside the system and those too nerdy to fit in comfortably). Essential viewing for people who love television.

For fans of Glee, Friday Night Lights, awkwardness

The Middleman

An unrepentant throw-back to a sillier form of science fiction and fantasy shows, The Middleman proved that sharp writing and smart characters can make great television using the flimsiest of CGI. When a smart young artist (Natalie Morales) working a temp job gets nearly eaten by a mutant science experiment, her unflappability catches the eye of The Middleman (Matt Keeslar) who recruits her as his sidekick. There’s perhaps never been a show in the history of television that required so many repeat viewings with a pen and paper handy to unpack its jokes and references. Often times, an episode would pick a theme (Die Hard, sixties rock band The Zombies) and build as many references as it could into its 44 minutes. This show never achieved the critical mass of devotion it deserved.

For fans of Get Smart, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, meta-humor

Chuck

Chuck has found unexpected life, being renewed for a third season that begins this January. This is the only show on this list still on the air, so catch this bandwagon while its still hot. (Wow, now that is a mixed metaphor.) Chuck Bartowski is a hard-working Buy More employee whose brain, due to unexpected help from his college roommate-turned-nemesis, becomes the living computer that stores all of the US government’s information. This is a fun, funny, sexy, silly blend of action and comedy that really found its stride in its second season. The best thing to happen to Mondays since Memorial Day.

For fans of Alias, Eureka, Adam Baldwin

Flight of the Conchords

Immigration. Unemployment. Bureaucracy. Topics for a gritty documentary somehow became occasions for the musical comedy duo to perform their songs. Each episode is a poorly constructed attempt to cram three pre-established songs into 30 minutes of story. Somehow, despite the obvious problems with this plan, the show managed to create moments of sublime comic awkwardness squeezed between occasionally brilliant, occasionally boring musical set pieces. In its way, it was one of the most ambitious television shows of the decade.

For fans of Dead Like Me, The Ben Stiller Show, Michel Gondry

Life

In its strike-addled first season, Life was a gritty cop drama, light-hearted character study, and on-going mystery in absolutely perfect balance. No procedural has ever managed to so perfectly blend those three elements as well as Life did in that first season. Its second season renewal came with strings attached: bigger (and subsequently less plausible) weekly hooks, less of the on-going story arcs, and Donal Logue as the new police captain. The second season fell to merely an above-average cop show, but was fortunately able to tie up many loose ends in its memorable series finale. The show drew out a nice parallel between generic Eastern religion’s emphasis that everything is connected and the basis of good detective work, which is following connections. Unlike most shows that attempt to make a character religious or philosophical, the writers were fully aware that the form of Zen being practiced by Charlie Crews is a watered-down, pop psychology version of Zen, which kept the show from ever falling into self-parody.

For fans of Castle, Burn Notice, staying out of prison

Pushing Daisies

Abandoned by film, television became the home of screwball dialogue in the 2000s, and not even Gilmore Girls or 30 Rock could manage Pushing Daisies‘ speed. More brilliant color and wacky quirkiness than any show should rightfully be able to manage, Barry Sonnenfeld somehow managed to create an engaging dream world in which a pie maker brings people back from the dead and solves crimes along with the love of his life whom he can’t touch, a crabby detective, and Kristin Chenoweth. Death has never been so funny.

For fans of Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, color

UPDATE: Silly me. I left Kings off the list. Great modern fable.

Long-Running Series with One Great Season

Angel (Season 5)

Angel never discovered what it could do well until its final season, by which point fans’ whiplash was so great from its overhauls each season that no one knew what this show was any more. However, by having Angel go to work for the evil law firm Wolfram & Hart, Joss Whedon and Tim Minear wisely guided the show into complex thematic territory: at what point do you stop protesting the system and find a way to work within it? Mirroring Whedon’s own complex relationship with the Fox Network, Angel and his band of merry men try to be constructive from inside a destructive system. And by bringing Spike over from the now-finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer, shooting for darker, more gothic horror, and achieving more sublime humor, the fifth season became by far the series’s best. Watching Angel is worth it simply for the show’s finale, which is perhaps the finest final episode in the history of television.

The Closer (Season 1)

A weaker knock-off of England’s Prime Suspect, The Closer began its run on TNT as a law & order procedural with the added element of watching an unknown, and therefore untrusted, female cop head LAPD’s Major Crimes division. A breadth of capable acting by the supporting cast grounded Kyra Sedgwick’s head-flailing approach to characterization. In later seasons, the show became unbearable in its explorations of Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson’s inexplicable relationship with her boyfriend Fritz, unnecessary relationship with her adopted cat, and unwatchable relationship with her family. But in that first season, The Closer was a smart woman-in-the-workplace drama with workable stories about how only she could wrangle a confession out of the bad guy.

House (Season 4)

Modeled on Sherlock Holmes, Gregory House, M.D., is a jackass to everyone, including his trusty confidant, his busty boss, and his team of diagnosticians. The writers always knew how to write for House (or Hugh Laurie’s indelible performance at least made it seem that way), but he was always surrounded by thin, unnecessary characters led by Cameron, the whiniest female lead this side of Felicity. So when House fired his staff at the end of Season 3 and began Season 4 by whittling down an auditorium full of candidates, new life was breathed into this occasionally stale medical drama. House was allowed to be his devastatingly truthful and hilariously cruel self and a better cast of supporting characters stepped in. The writer’s strike created some story-telling problems for the back half of the season, but it was still an audacious reinvention that amazingly worked, at least until Season 5 became too enamored with the Foreman-13 story.

My Best of the Decade albums list is yet to come, but I so enjoyed writing about my path into Television in the 2000s, that I thought I would sketch out the highlights of my experience of music over the past decade. This isn’t a list, it’s a story.

On October 2, 2000, alt-rock heroes Radiohead released Kid A, which stands as turning point in the history of popular music. At the time, people focused on the album’s use of “electronica” – a wishy-washy term for a mish-mash of genres that had developed parallel to and largely without interaction with rock and alternative music in the 1990s. Was this the end of rock and roll? The beginning of electronica’s mainstream appeal? The album debuted at number one in the US and went platinum in its first week in the UK. What listeners today focus on is the album’s complex arrangements, and now a proper analysis of the album should really explain its debts to twentieth century avante-garde, classical, and jazz traditions in addition to the various styles of electronic and rock music that were also influences. But for me, this album wasn’t about any of that (well, a little about electronic music). For me, it was the first time I was so overwhelmed listening to an album, that I stopped everything I was doing, turned out the lights, and just listened to the album all the way through. It blew me away. I wasn’t sure that I liked it, but I knew that it was important. I knew that I was hearing something new, something that mattered, something that I should have an opinion about. As the sound flooded my college dorm room through my parents’ thirty-year-old Kenwood stereo system (still the best sounding system I’ve ever owned/borrowed), I was awash in wave after wave of gorgeous sound. Lyrical mimimism and sonic richness would be Radiohead’s calling card in the 2000s, and it began here. Since that first listen, I’ve never forgotten the horn part that first enters 2:40 into “The National Anthem,” which still sounds to me like one of the most crucial tracks in the history of popular music.

In college, I did a little bit of music reviewing and a couple interviews for an online-only publication run by my roommate out of our dorm room, which he had inherited through an internship he had while the publication was print-only. And my first taste of being a real critic came when I got an advance copy of U2′s All That You Can’t Leave Behind. Sure, I got the album the night before it’s October 31, 2000 release date, but still, I got it early. That’s a big deal for a person was then (and still now) a huge U2 fanboy.

That experience was one sort of thrill, but seeing U2 at Madison Square Garden just weeks after September 11 was a different sort of thrill. They were unveiling the giant white banners with the names of the 9/11 victims scrolling down it, which would reach a national audience during their performance at that January’s Superbowl halftime. They honored NYFD by having them join the band on stage during the closing number, “Out of Control,” which they were also celebrating on the 20th anniversary of that single’s release. I’ve previously called attending a U2 concert a spiritual experience, but this reached a level of transcendence I never expect to have repeated in my lifetime. If there’s a heaven, it will be something like that night. Earlier that evening I had met two friends from college who were working with homeless people near the World Trade Center in the months leading up to the attacks, and because they were known to the people there, they were some of the few people allowed to hand out food, water, and coffee to the rescue workers in the days after the collapse of the towers. After sharing a slice of pizza with them, I went to Madison Square Garden for a different kind of tribute with a different kind of beauty.

During that time in graduate school was the peak of my interest in downloading music illegally. Maybe some day I’ll get around to a post on the ethics of downloading illegally (after all, I do teach ethics to college kids). But let me make this one point now, which was then the most important feature for me: Being isolated from people very knowledgeable about the sort of music I was interested in, my only way of finding bands was to test out songs by downloading them through file-sharing websites. (My personal favorite was Audiogalaxy.) Then, if I liked the songs I heard from a band – and this is key – I would legally purchase the entire album. Downloading an entire song was the only way to test a band’s sound before the 30-second samples on iTunes and Amazon MP3. I threw myself into the (legally purchased) collected works of The Velvet Underground, Matthew Sweet, and Stereolab because of what I discovered through Audiogalaxy.

I took some time off from graduate school in the middle of the decade, and during part of that time I worked at a Borders store, where my musical knowledge grew through chatting with my coworkers and playing the most interesting music that wouldn’t offend families looking for You: The Owner’s Manual or The Da Vinci Code. (While working there, I also met Dennis Quaid a week after his wedding. He was buying his son Spiderman 2.)

I then moved to the Twin Cities for a teaching job, where I threw myself into 89.3 The Current, the best radio station I know about, which was then at its peak of DJ-selected variety. (It’s since restricted its playlist and given DJs less power, but I still recommend it for people looking for non-commercial radio.) Twice on The Current I had heard songs by some guy named Sufjan Stevens, and on the basis of those two songs alone I dragged my wife to a late night concert at First Ave. Come on Feel the Illinoise! had just been released, and it had yet to appear at the top of everyone’s Best of 2005 lists. What we experienced that night was pretty remarkable. The band, dressed as University of Illinois cheerleaders performed melodically fascinating songs set to bizarre instrumentation (the banjo player is now playing the trombone!) interspersed with cheerleading routines. It’s hands-down one of the best concert experiences of my life. We would also see Death Cab for Cutie in that same club at about the same time; Plans had just been released and six months later they would return to the Twin Cities at the Target Center arena.

Returning to graduate school in 2007, I sat down one night in the fall and downloaded all the legal and free MP3s I could find at sites like download.com. Shortly thereafter, I subscribed to eMusic, and expanded on those initial findings to begin my complete immersion into the world of indie rock. Breaking away from the recommendations of my more knowledgeable music friends, I began to explore for myself. In that time I discovered The Fiery Furnaces, Kimya Dawson, Mates of State, and I’ve never been quite the same since. I’ve developed new musical passions since then, but I haven’t yet stopped my indie rock obsession. For instance, so far this year I have bought 39 albums released in 2009. (That number would go up considerably if I added albums from other years.) Nearly all of them are artists releasing on independent labels and most have come to me through eMusic, which until this summer was a subscription service devoted solely to independent labels. This would lead us to great shows at Toad’s Place in New Haven and a few in NYC. The best of these, and in many ways the best all-around concert experience I’ve had, was seeing The National perform at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Promoting Boxer during BAM’s year of celebrating the variety and quality of Brooklyn music, the concert was flawless in execution, energetic in performance, perfect in acoustics and line-of-sight, and featured a walk on by Sufjan Stevens to play piano on “Ada,” which he helped arrange on the album.

Ccritical consensus seems to be that this is one of the best decades for popular music since the advent of rock and roll in the 1950s. What I know is that it has been a great decade to explore the fringes of popular music.

I’ve been inspired by at The Television, The Aughts, and I series at Cultural Learnings and the really excellent piece by Emily Nussbaum in New York Magazine called When TV Became Art to go beyond a typical Top 10 Best Shows of the Decade List and write something that is both personal and hopefully illuminates what happened this decade in television. This isn’t to disparage Top 10 lists; in fact you’ll probably see some Best of the Decade posts in the coming weeks on this site. Rather, I want to write about the convergence of technology and art that roughly coincides with the last decade of television, and I how I experienced this change.

My interest in television began in the summer of 2002. I had watched more television than was probably healthy while growing up, but television was an escape, a mindless activity to relieve boredom. I watched Saturday morning cartoons, CHiPs reruns, and other stuff that would interest a kid in the 1980s. A lot of the television I watched as a kid was old RKO and MGM movies on AMC, back when AMC was what TCM is now. In the 1990s, I watched TV Land on Nick at Night, where I learned about how a sit-com works and first encountered the Jewish Comedian Type by watching The Dick Van Dyke Show. I watched NBC’s TGIF line-up, and later its Thursday night block, so I saw ER and Friends from the beginning, but eventually lost interest in each.  Through all of this, I just watched TV for something to do.

When I started graduate school in the fall of 2001, I intentionally did not own a TV. I feared how I would do in graduate school and that such a mindless diversion might keep me further behind my peers. I should be reading novels. Russian novels. Important literature. In my first six months of graduate school, I read Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. I know I read other things as well (I remember getting ideas from the Pulitzer Prize winners list), but the Dostoyevsky stands out. How else would this humble Midwesterner talk to these Ivy League snobs? What if my professor made some obvious reference to some book not in my field but that every educated person should have read?

By my birthday in January, I was ready to accept a television as a gift from my parents. I realized that not having that pressure valve I grew up with wasn’t going to help me any. I had a $30 VCR attached to the 19″ TV (which a friend convinced me was bigger than anyone really needed), and had wires that would connect my laptop to the TV so that I could watch DVDs. I was expanding my film interests via Netflix, then a relatively new service. I also tested it by renting a disc of a show I had heard about but never watched, My So-Called Life. I enjoyed the first disc enough that I decided to purchase my first ever TV on DVD box set. I watched the series through, and found myself interested in this world of a mopey teenage girl, her even mopier love interest, and a sexually confused teenager trying to forge an identity for himself. I was a bit embarrassed to enjoy a show like this, but I understood well enough that this was something more than just pandering to an audience. There was something very beautiful and moving about this portrayal of high school. The topic of the show might be embarrassing, but I didn’t feel embarrassed by what these characters were saying or doing. They were believable, they had lives, and I didn’t feel like the show was praising their self-centeredness as much as lovingly showing that this is how life was for some people. In some ways, it was the flip side to Freaks and Geeks, a show my roommates and I gathered weekly to watch during my senior year of college. We laughed at these geeks because we were these geeks. But here was a show that felt very unlike my own experience of high school, but that I completely believed was somebody’s experience.

That show pales in comparison to the one that I discovered about the same time. Reruns were airing on weekends, and the commercials seemed pretty corny, more or less indistinguishable from Highlander and Xena. But I gave a chance to show called Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. And it turns out, it was pretty funny.

I was friends with a comedy writer at the time; he has written pieces for The Onion and McSweeney’s. He loved a character called the Mayor, and while he wasn’t willing to say he liked the show, he absolutely loved that incongruence between the 1950s TV dad and pure evil. What can I say? He was right about the Mayor. That gave me a little confidence to Netflix the first season of Buffy on DVD. (I’m not sure that we were using “Netflix” as a verb in 2002, but we certainly do so now.) What I discovered was that beneath the cornball exterior was a show that I really enjoyed. Here was a show working in a genre that I knew nothing about – horror – and yet I could understand that they were playing off genre staples, even if I had know real knowledge of those genre tropes. Here was a show that was incredibly witty where many of the best lines went to the most picked-on guy in school. Here was show where the very feature that made someone special and likeable was also what made them unpopular. Here was a show in which good battles against evil, but the lines are murky and the enemy is ever shifting.

Beyond all the elements that I liked about the show, one thing stood out to me then and made me fall in love with television as a medium. With BtVS, I discovered television’s power for serial story-telling. Unlike the sit-coms I enjoyed as a kid, or The Simpsons episodes I watched each day in college, this was a show that trusted the viewer to follow these characters through their lives. We trusted Joss Whedon to helm this story, a trust he earned in the show’s magnificent second season. Whedon trusted his writers ground the supernatural silliness in real human (okay, or vampire) characters, trusted his actors to switch from broad comedy to fear to grief in the coarse of a single episode or even scene, and ultimately trusted his audience to follow him through this world. This was a totally new idea to me in 2002. Here was a show that rewarded dedicated viewing in the proper order. It was a sea change in my thinking, the sort demanded by Alfred Hitchcock when he demanded that theaters allow no late entrants to Psycho.

And this was made possible by two emerging media: Netflix and TV on DVD. I think DVD has done more to help television than it has to help film. Studios may line their pockets with each successive technological improvement in home viewing (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray), but the real change in movie viewing happened when VHS allowed people to watch films in their home on their own schedule. Television never performed well on VHS, so it was with the advent of DVDs that television entered its heydays. Netflix allowed one to sample these expensive box sets before buying them (or instead of buying them), and their contribution should not go unnoticed. But the real change happened with the ability to purchase an entire season of a television show and watch it as quickly as one dared. In the summer of 2002, I was taking an intensive Latin course, which I would rush home from each afternoon to plow through the newly released third season of Buffy on DVD. I didn’t have to wait 30+ weeks to watch the show as it aired; instead I could enter a world’s mythology and live in it for days or weeks at a time. This was unprecedented in the history of television. TV box sets of shows people loved in the ’90s, like Friends, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld were huge money-makers in the early years of this decade, but it was the ability to find more obscure shows that really transformed television.

Many others have told the story of what happens next. A show like Lost works because fans can devote themselves to rewatching it on DVD. A show like Survivor is heralded by the networks for its watch-now (read: no one cares about the DVDs) ratings. (A stunt less successfully attempted by Jay Leno’s move to prime time late in the decade.) A new business model emerges where shows like Family Guy and Futurama return from the grave because of strong DVD sales, shifting the emphasis from initial airings and syndication to initial airings, syndication, and DVD sales. (Later to be supplemented by iTunes rentals, Hulu viewings, and transmedia sales.) HBO can build its audience through fans discovering The Sopranos and Sex and the City on DVD. People can encounter international imports like The Office and Slings and Arrows for the first time. People can continue to be TV snobs, but in a new way. (“I don’t own a TV, but I love The Wire.”) Most importantly in this talk about the impact of TV on DVDs, however, is the thing that first drew me into the idea of television: a really good story told over a 6- or 13- or 22-episode season is a wonderful thing. A film may benefit from being concise and particular, but no film matches what a great television show like The Wire can do over five magnificent seasons. One hundred or more characters, each as focused and real and well acted as any on film, interacting in a complex drama set against the background of a city more real than any non-resident’s idea of the real Baltimore. And it’s not just The Wire. There are a dozen or more shows that have each used television’s unrivaled power of serialized, pictorial story-telling to achieve new levels of artistry. The technology and the shifting media models (let’s not forget the rise of cable) made it possible, but it was the David Simons and Ronald D. Moores and the Amy Sherman-Palladinos who rose to the challenge and gave us all a reason to appreciate what has happened this decade.

At this website, I hope to celebrate inessential things: things that are not necessary for survival, but that make life wonderful nonetheless. And television in the 200os was wonderful indeed.