Inessentials

I tried a little experiment this year. I wrote down (okay, typed out) every film I watched this year, the date I watched it, and assigned it a letter grade. Grading films like that is sadly reductive, but it was a first step toward externalizing and therefore crystallizing my reactions. (I filled in some of 2009 from memory and from my Netflix history.) I had hoped to write brief two- or three-sentences responses for each film, but I didn’t succeed there. Perhaps in 2011.

I’ve found the practice to be instructive in many ways, but most of all it has been fun. Now as we leave a movie theater, my wife wants to know what my grade is going to be, and I ask her grade. How dare I give True Grit a B, she tells me, since it was easily an A- at least. (Much like what happened to Kelli Marshall, I was talked into a B+.) One of the joys of watching film is the company of the people we watch it with, and most of my cinema experiences this year have been with my wife, whose taste fortunately overlaps a great deal with mine.

I watched 170 films in 2010, roughly one every two days. And if I counted correctly, I watched over 50 films with a 2010 release date. That means there are still a lot of films, including many critical favorites I didn’t see. No Dogtooth. No I Am Love. No Certified Copy. No Sweetgrass. But you can see grades for all the films I did watch here (sortable by release date).

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I’m really not sure what the best performances on television were in 2010. Did you watch Louie or Terriers on FX? Then you don’t need me to tell you how great Louis C. K. and Donal Logue and Michael Raymond-James were. Perhaps you watched Community‘s ensemble kick everyone’s asses around the comedy block. And there’s an overlap between critical lauds and industry awards for actors like John Hamm and Tina Fey. But I’m more interested in the performances that we just didn’t appreciate enough in 2010. Perhaps they were on shows that don’t get a lot of talk from the critics I follow. Or they may have been overshadowed by bigger, better, or arbitrarily chosen performances on their show. So here is a list of performers that I thought were very good to excellent but didn’t seem to get talked about much in the reviews or tweeters I follow. The usual restrictions apply, in that I haven’t seen many of this year’s much-talked about shows, including Breaking Bad and The Good Wife.

So, here we go with Unheralded Television Performances in 2010, and the performers who may have drawn attention away from these achievements.

Olivia Williams, Dollhouse

The focus: Enver Gjokaj

Gjokaj gave what was probably my favorite performance of 2010, as they only truly believable doll in the Dollhouse. When he became Topher, it instantly became one of the great impressions in the history of television. But in a subtler position, Olivia Williams gave us a cool but never cold, strong but never invincible, tricky but never tricked Adelle DeWitt, head of the Los Angeles dollhouse. Simultaneously, she gave one of the strongest supporting roles of the year in Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. A great year for her.

Ray Romano, Men of a Certain Age

The focus: Andre Braugher

Braugher got the Emmy nomination, and I have no complaints about that. Scott Bakula got a good share of attention for his fine performance here, coming off his guest stint on Chuck. But this little-watched TNT drama, created by Romano, got its emotional center from Romano as the core of this trio of friends. Whether hanging out at their favorite diner, running his party goods store, or contemplating his failures as a father to his nervous preteen son, Romano brought a somewhat slack-jawed but always compelling look at a man struggling to keep his life circling the drain rather than running down it.

Joshua Jackson, Fringe

The focus: John Noble, Anna Torv

There’s a lot of love for John Noble’s performance as Walter Bishop, which has improved since his awful first season. And Anna Torv was asked to do a lot in the front half of the third season, and found a way to pull it off. But it seems that nobody has mentioned the fine job that Jackson has done playing charming but not smarmy, serious yet never self-serious. He manages Noble’s performance as Walter with aplomb and has found a delicate way to convey Peter’s friendship with Olivia.

Andrea Anders, Better Off Ted

The focus: Portia de Rossi, Jonathan Slavin, Malcolm Barrett

I wrote in my Best of 2010 list about de Rossi, Slavin, and Barrett. But let us not forget Anders and her kooky, energetic, and occasionally hilarious performance as love interest to Ted Crisp. Her role was tough because she was asked both to be the grounded, sane one next to de Rossi, Slavin, and Barrett, and the crazy, unhinged one next to Jay Harrington and her mostly anonymous coworkers. And she did it.

Ken Marino, Party Down

The focus: Lizzy Caplan, Adam Scott, Jane Lynch

Caplan was wonderful. Scott was serviceable as the audience’s entry point into Party Down Catering. Lynch got a lot of the kudos for her performance in the first season. But Marino’s lovesick Ron Donald with his Soup R Crackers franchise dream was both more emotionally moving and more hilarious than any of the other three. In a really wicked ensemble that only got better when Megan Mullally joined the cast in season two, Marino stood out with his puppy dog looks and killer comic timing.

Aimee Teegarden, Friday Night Lights

The focus: Connie Britton, Kyle Chandler

Some characters are great because of the actor’s performance. Some characters are written so beautifully, it’s difficult to know how much credit to give the actor. Teegarden falls into this latter category. A little stiff and wooden in the early seasons, she’s now become my favorite authentic representation of teenage life on television over the last ten years. The Taylor family oozes authenticity, and while Britton and Chandler get most of the credit, Teegarden deserves credit for holding her own in scenes with them and finding a way to let the writers develop compelling stories of love, friendship, and learning around her character.

Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation

The focus: Nick Offerman, Chris Pratt, Aziz Ansari

It seemed that NBC was developing P&R as a star vehicle for SNL alumna Poehler. At times the first season felt that way. But the ensemble quickly developed and Offerman, Pratt, and Ansari gave performances so beloved, that Poehler became a little lost in the lovefest. So consider this a mild corrective to that.

Neil Flynn, The Middle & Garrett Dillahunt, Raising Hope

These are two uneven but occasionally hilarious shows that don’t get a lot of attention. Nearly all of Raising Hope‘s best scenes include Dillahunt, who helps elevate so-so material with fabulous line readings. I know him mostly for more dramatic roles (including this year’s excellent film Winter’s Bone), but he’s even better in a comedic role. Flynn takes a nearly opposite approach, toning down every would-be joke until it seems he’s trying to turn The Middle into a low-key family drama. He manages to be a wonderful combination of classic daddy-knows-best sitcom dad and playful yet lackadaisical partner in crime.

1. Community

Is it the funniest show on TV? Most weeks, yes. (But it gets some serious competition from #3 at times.) But it’s also a rich, warm, smart, sophisticated, superbly acted, sharply written show. That’s why it’s number one. Unlike Modern Family, which throws some sentimental goop onto the ends of its shows in the least compelling manner possible, Community has built a cast of characters who genuine like each other and who we can care about, so when it goes for sentimental it succeeds beautifully. It seems the greatest divide among the passionate fans of the show is just which episode is the greatest, which says a lot about how many truly excellent episodes of television it has already given us. Funny, smart, sexy – will you marry me, Community? (I’ve previously written about Community here.)

2. Terriers

Oh, Terriers, how we loved you so. You brought us so much humor, so much intrigue, so much Donal Logue. You will go down as one of the all time great one season wonders. You reminded us that great characters can be funny and tragic, and that the best stories are sometimes the least conclusive. We praised you in life, let us praise you in death. And for those of you have yet to experience the charms of Terriers, let me tell you that it even with some unresolved stories, it is well worth your time to watch all 13 episodes.

3. Parks and Recreation

I’m pretty sure I could sit and watch Leslie Knope recount Friends episodes for hours on end. Sadly, we only got about 90 seconds of that in “Telethon,” one of the many hilarious episodes from the show’s second season. Happily, P&R has created one of the strongest ensembles on television, who take their already solid scripts and find ways to ground them in the absurdities of every day life. (I’ve previously written about Parks and Recreation here.)

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I have very little to say about music in the year 2009. I wasn’t even planning to do a recap or best-of, but then I realized that last.fm shows play counts by album. So here are my most-listened to albums that were released in 2009. And you can always see what’s in my ears at my last.fm page. (I should note that when songs are played back-to-back, it only counts as one play, which hurt albums that I usually listened to sequentially like Bitte Orca. It also is obviously biased toward albums released earlier in the year, like Noble Beast.)

• 154 plays: U2, No Line on the Horizon
• 140 plays: Andrew Bird, Noble Beast
• 118 plays: Neko Case, Middle Cyclone
• 117 plays: Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
• 117 plays: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It’s Blitz!
• 106 plays: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, s/t
• 99 plays: Metric, Fantasies
• 92 plays: Camera Obscura, My Maudlin Career
• 88 plays: Sin Fang Bous, Clangour
• 85 plays: Mos Def, The Ecstatic
• 83 plays: Monsters of Folk, s/t
• 79 plays: Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
• 75 plays: Blind Pilot, 3 Rounds and a Sound
• 69 plays: Passion Pit, Manners
• 69 plays: Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
• 61 plays: Ida Maria, Fortress ‘Round My Heart
• 59 plays: Bishop Allen, Grrr…
• 59 plays: The Avett Brothers, I and Love and You
• 50 plays: God Help the Girl, s/t

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.