Inessentials

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.)

Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Psych returns for its fifth season on USA, a network that has solidified a place as the most-watched cable network by developing original content branded around a helpfully loose “Characters welcome” theme. (See a good discussion of its branding and the role of genre at In Media Res.) Critical reaction to this show is some mixture of ignoring it and reviling it. And frankly, I’m not sure I disagree with a lot of the criticisms of the show: the writing is too on-the-nose, the acting is too mugging, the humor is too broad, the mysteries are too predictable, the lead character is too irritating (to other characters and to us), and… well, you get the idea. Even the score gets trashed.

Despite all of these (and in some of these cases, because of them), I dearly love Psych. There’s probably no show I enjoy watching more than Psych, none that makes me laugh more, and none that gets watched as quickly after the DVR records it. And it really comes down to one simple thing: Psych is funny.

Funny makes up for a multitude of sins. I’ll watch and rewatch a funny show far more quickly and more regularly than an otherwise superior drama. So when Psych‘s fourth season gets released tomorrow, it will soon make it into the DVD player for a second viewing, and probably a third viewing within a year.

There are some things to be said in favor of Psych. The supporting cast is stronger than Monk, a show that is viewed more positively by critics and Emmy voters. They’re about equal on the quirk-o-meter, for whatever that is worth, and both can attract some solid guest stars. But for me, the show works for one main reason: Dulé Hill.

Critics (and, I suspect, many fans) claim that the show lives or dies by the James Roday’s performance at the center of the show. Shawn Spencer is the fake psychic, after all, and he gets the most lines and the most story arcs. I can’t disagree that the show rests a lots on his shoulders. But what makes Roday’s mugging and irritation to others watchable is Hill’s Burton “Gus” Guster.

Gus fits into a particular subgenre of the bromance that I think of as the Male Black Best Friend. There are Lenny and Carl on The Simpsons, Phil and Lemm on Better Off Ted, Shawn and Gus on Psych, and (the fullest realization of this subgenre) J.D. and Turk on Scrubs. In each case, there is a pair of male best friends, one Caucasian and one African-American, who view each other as equals and are viewed by outsiders as inseparable. (The second half of Community‘s first season saw them pairing Abed with Troy, interestingly putting a twist on the formula by putting a character of Palestinian-Polish descent in the role of the white friend.)

With Phil and Lemm, the idea was that these are codependent coworkers who need each other to be successful. Lenny and Carl began as background figures, drinking buddies to Homer, but The Simpsons has generated a lot of humor out of their pairing. Scrubs pushed the bromance aspect farther than any show or film has yet done, but what interests me the most about it was that it gave Turk more stories and a greater depth of characterization than any other Male Black Best Friend, Guster included. Turk not only supported J.D. through residency and beyond, but he had an interesting and complicated relationship to Carla and had meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast. Gus has far less of that characterization and almost no relationships that aren’t mediated or interrupted by Shawn, and thus he suffers as a character. But he surpasses the others in the central role of the Male Black Best Friend: alleviating the white best friend’s perceived dorkiness by being equally dorky.

The joy of watching Psych for me is watching Hill’s performance as the Male Black Best Friend to a character that is built out of hamming it up and irritating others (including his father and those who sign his paycheck). Hill finds a nice balance between joining in with Roday’s antics and giving a look of sharp displeasure or an annoyed tone of voice that serves as a helpful counterpoint. Psych never passes up a joke, a reference to an ’80s film, an antic, or a farcical conclusion,(except in a handful of darker episodes near the end of the last two seasons). And there is simply too much silliness in the show for one character to carry without the show self-destructing. Many are annoyed at Tony Shaloub being nominated for his portrayal of Monk yet again, but that show is nothing without his performance. Roday’s take on Shawn is too thin to do the work of carrying the show single-handedly. So we have Burton Guster to carry us through, to take the weight off Shawn, to serve as a bridge to the somewhat more realistic characters on the show, and to ground Shawn.

This ancillary nature of the MBFF is disturbing insofar as it suggests that a television show can’t survive with a black lead or further contributes to racial tokenism. And there is probably something significant in the fact that Hill’s most famous role was on The West Wing, where he was a late addition to the cast, forced by NBC to address complaints about its whitewashed primetime lineup. To their benefit, USA has always promoted Psych as a two-lead comedy, but unfortunately that’s not how the show actually works in terms of stories or characterization. Gus is no more than the MBFF.

But I return to Psych because it is funny and because of Hill’s performance. In one of the show’s few (mostly) serious episodes, Shawn is tracking a serial killer and finds he can’t work under the stress, so he asks Gus to be his surrogate and lighten the mood. Rather than aim for mimicry, Hill delivers a performance as Gus that takes Shawn’s levity into absurdly literal territory and thus makes a joke of the very idea that Gus could be funny. But the real joke is that Gus is the funny one. Shawn is the class clown, the big-joke guy who can’t take anything seriously. Gus is the classic straight man who gets more laughs with an exasperated look than the wildly gesticulating man beside him.

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.

The situation-comedy is about as old as television itself. It suffered an agonizing near-death experience in the early 2000s with the rise of the news magazine and the explosion of reality television. Mid-decade critical favorites Arrested Development and 30 Rock have never been commercial hits, and The Office and How I Met Your Mother (the other two highly respected sit-coms of the last few years) haven’t fared all that much better in the ratings.

So what a pleasant surprise 2009 has turned out to be. This year’s critical favorites are Modern Family and Community, and both seem to be getting enough viewers to keep them around for a while. Last spring were the pleasant surprises of Parks and Recreation and Better Off Ted. Reaching back to early 2009, we have Party Down on the Starz! network, which was fairly successful comedically and commercially. Some people found love for Nurse Jackie. Amazingly, even the pilot of Cougar Town wasn’t as terrible as its title suggests.

Why is 2009 the year of the sit-com? I really don’t know, but I think there are a few things that have contributed to all of these successes.

1. The ensemble

Each of these shows (I’m excepting Nurse Jackie, which I haven’t seen) chooses to provide, from the outset, at least five or six characters who we can immediately recognize, but get strengthened quickly in the run. Better Off Ted has the fewest at five regular characters, and even the “Lenny and Carl from The Simpsons, only they’re scientists!” pencil sketches become adorably personal through the superior acting of Jonathan Slavin and Malcolm Barrett. The smart writers at Community have paired off different characters each week in what has become the most colorful merry-g0-round on NBC’s killer Thursday nights. Parks and Rec took a while to find its sea legs, but this fall it has turned out some of the best 22-minute runs of any show this year by writing to the diverse strengths of its cast. Being able to immediately present an entire family in all its disfunction, as Modern Family does from episode one, or work mates, as Party Down did consistently, from the earliest stages is a pretty remarkable feat, but it has been done repeatedly in 2009.



2. Single-camera directing

For all its innovation in story telling, How I Met Your Mother is a very traditional sit-com in its friends-as -family format and three-camera direction. A three-camera show, like Friends, Cheers, or The Cosby Show takes a stage, filmed from only one side, with two additional camera for close-ups. You never see how McLaren’s looks from the doorway, or the Cosby house from the stairwell. A single-camera show, on the other hand, follows its characters through a full 360-degree, three-dimensional world. Each of the new shows uses this format. Some have an even more particular mockumentary style, clearly inspired by the two iterations of The Office. Parks and Recreation even takes some of The Office‘s regular writers and their knowledge of the format. Single-camera directing in general, and the mockumentary format in particular (with its talking head cut-aways), are hallmarks of this year’s crop. This contributes to presenting a more fully realized world, and adds to the feeling that these characters are grounded in real life, even if when a show like Better Off Ted goes for the extreme wackiness of 30 Rock.



3. Balance of one-liners, sight gags, character humor

Each of these shows is willing to write toward humor that works because the characters work and willing to leave that aside when there’s a really great throwaway gag to be had. This combination of characters that we can track through multiple seasons and gags that have walked right out of a sketch comedy show makes for some great comedy. Some critics fault 30 Rock and The Office for these rapid changes in tone, but I find that makes them more endearing. And that makes for another part of their legacy. Community best exhibits the throwaway gag mixed in with character humor, but each of these sit-coms has it.

4. Corporate satire

The final legacy of 30 Rock and The Office on the current crop of sit-coms is the satirizing of corporate culture. Party Down chronicles the attempts of disenchanted workers to make their work less dull. Better Off Ted, particularly in its fake Veridian Dynamics commercials and the hilarious “Racial Sensitivity” episode, shows top-down corporate stupidity better than any show ever, including 30 Rock‘s continual body blows to NBC/GE/Universal/Sheinhardt Wig(/Comcast?). Parks and Recreation adds local governance to the workplace formula. Modern Family isn’t interested so far in the working world; it takes on the social institution that is the family, but rather than focus on the familiar foibles of family life (a la Everybody Loves Raymond or King of Queens), it treats the family as an unlikely bonding of mutually incompatible personalities – the same philosophy that underlies workplace sit-coms.

It’s heartening to see so many great sit-coms on television right now. For all the serialized glory of Mad Men and challenging nonsense of Lost, that television still has room for making people laugh without a Jaywalking segment is cause for celebrating.