Archive for the ‘glee’ tag
Top 10 Television Shows of 2010
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.)
Community: Street-Smarts Ahead
Community has a well-earned reputation for mixing in lots of meta-humor into its character humor and one-off jokes. A lot of the humor comes from seeing how the writers play off sit-com clichés. When done properly, it adds a layer of sophistication to the show that I find very compelling. A show won’t survive long just doing that; it still needs characters we are interested in or stories we find compelling. In its first season, Community has done this remarkably well, incorporating nearly every kind of joke you could ever want in a sit-com.
We can appreciate those jokes about television (directed at itself, at other sit-coms, or recently at Glee), and it can lead to us thinking of Community as a smart show, one that it takes attention, background knowledge, and intelligence to watch. But I want to highlight a different way that Community‘s creators express and expect intelligence in their show. Here’s an exchange from last week’s “Modern Warfare,” an extended parody of action films.
The dialogue I want to draw your attention to is not the characters’ awareness of clichés and how they see themselves against those clichés. It’s the following.
Britta: “You’re right, you know. I am a phony. I try to act compassionate because I’m afraid that I’m not.”
Jeff: “Oh, please. I invented phony.You care about people. I accuse you of faking to convince myself that I’m not such a jerk.”
Britta: “Jeff, you help people more than I do and you don’t even want to. You’re not a jerk; you’re fine.”
There is a sophistication to this exchange that I really appreciate. Britta expresses a profound insight about herself: that what looks like compassion is actually rooted in a fear of being uncompassionate rather than a true benevolence. Jeff dismisses her worry because, as a phony, he recognizes what phoniness is and can see it in other people. Those are two really insightful observations for characters to make, and it takes an awareness by the writers of who these characters are and an ability to verbalize it without sounding pompous or distracting from the mood of the show. That is really smart writing.
But then it gets better. Britta recognizes a distinction between a person who has positive character traits (e.g., a compassionate person who wants to do go for others) and a person who produces positive consequences (e.g., a jerk who actually does good for others). Britta recognizes that the character traits, intentions, and desires that make a person a good person are not always correlated with actually doing good. On the other hand, there are people who are able to do a great deal of good that don’t have a great character. For example, Richard Nixon has done more good than most people who lived in the 20th century. It doesn’t follow that he had a morally praiseworthy character; he probably didn’t. It also doesn’t follow that he didn’t do a great deal bad, as well. He certainly did. Jeff, through elements of his personality and his position in the group, is able to do a lot more good for the study group (and the community college) than the person who is dedicating her life to doing good. That doesn’t make Jeff the better person, just the more powerful one.
One thing that Community has done a great job of this season is tracking Jeff’s reluctant immersion into the group. Positioning himself as an outsider who in the pilot claimed that he was a moral relativist who doesn’t care about other people to a group-member willing to make sacrifices (that he doesn’t fully understand) for the sake of others. This can only be achieved when you create really complex characters, and the writers have a really firm grasp on them and the intelligence to draw out of those characters compelling stories and sensible dialogue. What makes Community the smartest show on television isn’t (just) all the self-referential humor, it’s also the ability to articulate very finely the social interactions of these complex characters while exploiting the backdrop of a community college to draw out interesting ethical and socio-psychological insights.
And it’s funny.
Best Television of the 2000s: One- and Two-Season Wonders
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 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
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 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
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 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
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
Glee: What You Want and What You’ve Got
Spoilers for Glee through 1.6 (October 7)
One of the most strident criticisms of Glee by those who like the show but don’t love it or consider it to be uneven at best is that Terri Schuster, the wife of Glee coach Will Schuster, is so shrewish. She is shrill, conniving, ditzy, and altogether unlikeable. She schemes to keep her husband from wandering by failing to tell him that she is not pregnant as she originally thought. She bullies and manipulates a teenage girl into carrying a baby to term so that she can pass it off as her own. She is the nagging, conniving wife, a role played for maximum shrillness by Jessalyn Gilsig. By making her so unsympathetic, some critics (like Todd VanDerWerff and Alan Sepinwall) have complained that we are not conflicted about the choice that Will must make between his wife Terri and the neurotic but lovable counselor (or as Sue Sylvester, played by the always welcome Jane Lynch, calls her “a mentally ill, ginger pygmy with eyes like a bush baby”). Since we are given no reason to like Terri the wife, we can’t be emotionally invested in Will’s choice between the wife he fell for in high school and the woman he is falling for now. There’s just no competition.
As a general rule, this criticism brings out an important point about characterization (both in writing and in acting). Unless you find something human to associate yourself with a character, that character will always seem like a prop rather than a human being. Good writing requires good characterization, and television – which relies on a weekly commitment over years to the lives of certain characters – requires even greater investment in these people. And this is where Glee is said to fail.
But I think Ryan Murphy and the rest of the Glee writers are doing something more interesting that a mere battle for one character’s heart. Glee deals with one overriding idea: going for what you want. What makes this show interesting is the creators’ desire to explore the consequences of going for what you want, and in particular the social structures that curtail achieving that desire. It might be upsetting the social hierarchy of a high school by making yourself stand out, it might be committing to coach glee club for no money and extra time, it might be trying to make it out of a small town when everything is pulling you back in. Whatever it is, following your passion means sacrificing your pride, your comfort, your sense of self, and most importantly your function in society and facing the consequences of that decision.
So when we look again at Will’s choice, we see that the structuring idea of the show pushes the creators away from dealing with a choice between two women and towards the choice between what one wants (the other woman) and the social structures working against it (a marriage). The more sympathetic the wife becomes in this scenario, the less the choice is between what one wants and the social forces preventing it. Perhaps following out this idea leads to sacrificing something in the way of sympathy for a recurring character and turns off some viewers, but I find that it actually creates a richer viewing experience because it generates another interesting nuance to the question of what social pressures exist to keep one from going after what one wants. Is it always best to go for your dream? Is it always best to make your dreams less ambitious? Glee is about the choices that must be made every day in working toward a life of passionate ambition and the social pressures (external and internalized) that keep us from achieving those amibitions.
And that’s why I’m okay with keeping Will’s wife as a broad, penciled-in caricature. (That, and she says things like “Oh, please, Will, it’s a public school.”)
(And for die-hard Glee fans, you might be interested to know that the cast’s scheduled appearance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade was cancelled because NBC didn’t want to promote another network’s show, leading to yet more bad press for NBC.)
A Complete List of Television Shows the Titles of Which Also Describe How I Feel About Them
1. Glee
2. Lost
September Preview
September is the launch of the yearly television cycle, the start of the Oscar-baiting films, and the chance to release books and music in time for the holidays. Here’s a quick summary of what I am most looking forward to this fall.
Television
Glee, Wednesdays
Glee is the story of a band of high school outcasts joining together to make a name for themselves by doing the very thing that made them outcasts. When Fox showed the pilot last fall after the finale to American Idol, it was a risky bet to build moment for a show that wouldn’t get aired for another three months. It may have paid off as an estimated 25 million people have now seen the pilot, and the second episode attracted a healthy 7 million watchers, many in the all-important 18-49 demo. This may be one of the few critically adored shows of the last few years to find a broad audience. Even if it doesn’t, Fox is hoping all the promotional tie-ins (cast albums, for instance) will keep this financially lucrative. But why should you watch it? Combining the rigid social hierarchies of high school and the accompanying desires to both fit in and stand out for the right reasons gives you all the drama and comedy you need to make a successful musical. The pilot was one of the strongest in years, deftly reimagining stock characters (the pot-smoking gym teacher, the closeted drama nerd, the bitchy cheerleader) and zipping along at a pleasing pace (helped along by a wonderful vocal score).
Film
The Informant!, Friday, September 18
Steven Soderbergh reunites with Matt Damon in a retelling of a whistle-blower who worked at ADM. But rather than play up the most Grishamesque aspects of the piece, Soderbergh goes for a comic character study of a person who becomes enraptured with his James Bond self-importance. Soderbergh has long achieved a quality I’ve admired in a director, which is the ability to work both inside and outside the studio system. He can make stylish diversions like the Ocean’s Eleven films or gritty indie dramas. Based on Kurt Eichenwald’s book, and with a pudgy, mustachioed Damon, I’m hoping for a really strong comedy with just a hint of social commentary.
Music
Monsters of Folk, Tuesday, September 22
Monsters of Folk is M. Ward, Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), Yim Yames (My Morning Jacket), and Mike Mogis. The “get a bunch of folks together to do fun music” has worked well for Beck’s Record Club and it sounds promising here. Traces of Drive-By Truckers and The Jayhawks should shape the sound of this indie-roots supergroup.
Web Video
The Guild
The only regular web video series I’ve found worth staying up on, The Guild is the show that launched writer/producer/star Felicia Day to the pinnacle of nerd stardom (and Twitter). The show centers on online companions who try interacting offline, with very mixed results. You’ll get more of the jokes if you have some familiarity with World of Warcraft and lonelygirl15. If you prefer your television on television, wait until September 29 when seasons one and two are released on DVD.
