Best of 2009: TV

2009 was a great year for TV, with some long running shows having their best season yet, and a lot of great shows staying strong. It’s a wealth of riches on the list here, let’s check it out…

10. True Blood
Best Episode: ‘Timebomb’

The show improved on its first season by refining its campy appeal and upping the stakes. The season peaked early, at the end of the Fellowship of the Sun arc, and kind of petered out at the end, but the peak was great. I think there’s still room for some more real emotion in the show, but they know that it’s supposed to be fun and the show is able to poke enough fun at itself to make it work. I wish Alan Ball was doing something better than this, but if it’s a show like this or another ponderous film like “Towelhead,” let’s stick with this.

9. Bored to Death
Best Episode: ‘The Case of the Beautiful Blackmailer’

This show was ostensibly a comedy and was never particularly funny, nor was it dramatic, but it was charming throughout. I loved the New York locations, and the three leads were all a lot of fun to watch. The show struck a tricky balance, and as it went on, it just got better and better. I love the quirky world they’ve built, and hopefully it’ll continue to grow in interesting directions in season two.

8. Parks and Recreation
Best Episode: ‘Greg Pikitis’

I’m one of the few people who actually really liked the show in its first season, so I was even more excited when it took a major quality leap in year two. The show has one of the deepest comedy casts of any series, and the characters are developed in ways that make sense, and over the course of the series so far, they’ve developed the kind of depth and emotional engagement that make for a long running sitcom. There’s been some very sweet moments, like the relationship between Dave and Leslie, or April’s fliration with Andy, but throughout it all, they keep things funny and snappy. It’s the best comedy on TV right now, and a few more seasons at this level could make it one of the best sitcoms all time.

7. Big Love
Best Episode: ‘On Trial’

I liked the first two season of Big Love, but the show made a quantum leap in quality in the third season. The big emotional hook for me was Nikki’s work at the D.A’s office, and the way that her flirtation with her boss opened up a window to a new world for her. But pretty much every element of the season worked, and it had a hyped up, every episode’s a season finale level of intensity that made the whole season riveting to watch. It’s always nice to see a show realize its full potential, and that’s what Big Love did this year.

6. Battlestar Galactica
Best Episode: ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’

The controversial final season of Battlestar worked for me on most levels, but had some key missteps that stopped it from hitting the series’ highest heights. The much beloved military coup arc did nothing for me, and the resolution to the final five storyline was extremely convoluted and didn’t really hold together in terms of making sense. But, I love a lot of the ideas throughout, and thought the final episode was haunting and epic. Visually, the show was on its game, and certain moments, like the appearance of the final five on the flight deck, were haunting and burned in my memory. Like the show as a whole, it had moments of brilliance mixed with ideas that didn’t quite come together. Still, to see such an ambitious and mostly successful work reach a satisfying conclusion was merit enough.

5. Doctor Who
Best Episode: ‘The End of Time: Part II’

I was holding off on writing the list until the last of Tennant era Who had aired. Technically, End of Time II aired in 2010, but I’m grouping it with ’09 for list making purposes. This year’s Who started off with a dud, but the last three episodes were all fantastic. The intense ‘Water of Mars’ ominously set the stage for an epic finale that didn’t quite come together on a plot level, but was so satisfying emotionally, I’ve got to include it here. I felt emotionally fulfilled at the end, but like the Doctor said, I didn’t want him to go. I wasn’t sure what the specials could add to the epic finale of ‘The Stolen Earth,’ what they gave us was a Doctor coming to terms with his own mortality, an extended meditation on the inevitability of death, and a call to do the most we can with the time we have.

4. Torchwood
Best Episode: ‘Children of Earth, Day Five’

More than any other show this year, Torchwood made a massive jump in quality. The first two series were very hit and miss, but this intense, character focused miniseries was intense brilliance from start to finish. The characters were all the same, the scenarios were the same, but the focus was so much tighter, and over the course of the series’ five episodes, it crescendoed to higher and higher intensity, culminating in a final episode that featured devastating scenes of the UK giving in to alien demands and Jack sacrificing his ties to humanity to save them. It’s a series that forced the characters to make tough choices and never backed down from putting the audience through the ringer. Not since Buffy season one to Buffy season two have I seen a series make such a giant quality leap between seasons.

3. Friday Night Lights
Best Episode: ‘Tomorrow Blues’

Speaking of shows that made a giant leap, after the disastrous second season, Friday Night Lights bounced back with a fantastic third season and is now working on an even stronger fourth year. It’s very rare that a show can as successfully reinvent themselves as FNL has, but the East Dillon setting has reinvigorated the series and changed its narrative. I’m always frustrated by shows like Alias and Battlestar Galactica that hinted at big change then retreated from it. By shifting its basic status quo, FNL has become a much more exciting show, and this most recent year may top even its brilliant first season. Seamlessly introduced new characters and consistent brilliance from Chandler and Britton keep this one of the best hours on TV, and that’s not even bringing it the series’ unparalleled cinematography.

2. Mad Men
Best Episode: ‘Seven Twenty Three’

In its third season, Mad Men continued to be the most challenging and artistically ambitious series currently on the air, and perhaps ever. The complexity of the stories increased, and the end of the season opened up some amazing new directions for future plotlines. I don’t think this year quite matched the second season, but the consistency of its ambition only adds to its reputation. The fact that nine year old Sally Draper is more complex and well developed than the vast majority of adult lead characters is a testmanet to the show’s greatness.

1. Lost
Best Episode: The Incident

Lost’s great problem since the start has been its inconsistency, so it was surprising and exciting to see it finally produce a season that was just outright great from start to finish. The series attempted an ambitious time travel storyline and nailed it throughout, giving us great timeloop moments, like Locke coming across himself in the past, but the primary joy was seeing our lead characters in the 70s, and getting an insight into what the Dharma Initiative was like back then. Those episodes were just so much fun and built such a great world, I would have loved to stay there for much longer. And, one scene in the season finale totally changed the game looking forward, opening up a myriad of interesting new storytelling possibilities. It was all anchored by great character work on Locke, Ben, and in particular the series’ heart, Sawyer and Juliet. If the last season is as good as this one, it’ll go down as one of the all time great series.

Big Love: 3x01-3x04

Big Love is a show I’ve always had mixed feelings about. That cast is full of actors I love, and the premise raises a lot of potentially interesting issues. In its first two seasons, the show had some really strong episodes, but never made the jump to great TV. The ‘Golden Age’ HBO series, like The Sopranos or The Wire or even Six Feet Under, all did things that you didn’t see anywhere else. They were full of incredibly rich characters and explored huge issues within their continous, novelistic plots.

In short, those shows justified the “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” tagline because they are like virtually nothing else in the history of TV. When I see people call Showtime the new HBO, I cringe because all the Showtime shows I’ve seen are essentially edgier versions of classic network shows, and like a lot of FX shows, they’re more interested in being edgy for edginess’s sake than in building compelling stories and world. Weeds is a particular offender in this respect, but Dexter also suffers from the fact that at its core, it’s a CBS style procedural. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being like a TV show, Buffy is very much a TV show in style and presentation, but the writing kept the characters evolving and that’s what made it such a great series.

In the post Sopranos era, there’s a lot of highly serialized shows, but there’s very few shows that enact real change in their universes. Shows like Rescue Me, 24 or Alias are full of ongoing plots that make them seemingly incomprehensible to new viewers, but really what they’re doing is variations on a theme. 24 will always spin back to the mole, the nuclear bomb, Jack going rogue, just as Alias perpetually wound its way back to Sydney working for Sloane. Rescue Me has extended stories, but after the stories resolve themselves, the characters are essentially the same as they were before. The problem with this is that you wind up with a merry go round of couplings and scenarios such that by the fifth or sixth season, everyone has fucked everyone, and there’s nowhere left to go.

But, the best shows only get better as time goes on. To some extent, The Sopranos repeated itself narratively. The structural plot of all the middle seasons can be summed up as a new family member comes into town and causes problems for Tony until he crosses the line and has to be whacked at the end of the season. It happens to Richie, Jackie, Ralphie, Tony B, and to some extent, Vito. But, within the repetition, there’s an evolution of Tony’s character, and a deepening of our understanding of his world and what’s going on around him. The weight of what’s happened weighs on the character in believable ways. You can’t honestly believe that Jack Bauer has been through all he’s been through on the series, but Tony’s continuity seems plausible.

All of this is a way of saying that what separates good shows from great shows is the capacity for real change, to deepen and expand the universe as time passes. Big Love’s third season is doing just that, telling its best stories yet in a really focused, intense opening run.

Part of what makes the season work so far is the way that Roman’s trial has served as a structural centerpiece for the whole show. One of the things that’s hurt the show in the past is that the stakes are smaller than we’re used to on TV. At their core, The Sopranos and Six Feet Under are just about a family and their struggles to deal with the world, but the backdrop of the mob and the gravty of the funeral home helped make those shows feel deeper and more significant. In the case of Big Love, the stories at home can sometimes feel frivolous or soapy without that sort of heavy grounding. I hate to say that on some level, because that sort of if it’s not life or death, it doesn’t matter logic is what contributes to our glut of doctor and lawyer shows, but that’s the way it feels.

But, the presence of Roman’s trial as this looming threat for the family makes it easier to appreciate the less dramatic b plots. It also alleviates the disconnect between the compound and Bill’s family that has caused problems for the show in the past. The family’s courtship of Ana is a great story, but is it a strong enough centerpiece to unite all the show’s disparate characters? Perhaps not, but now it doesn’t have to carry that load, it was able to simmer in the background, amidst a variety of other stories.

That’s not to say that the Roman trial was even the most compelling story on the show. What’s interesting is how it’s forced the other characters in to different and challenging positions. Nikki in particular has gotten stronger material this year than ever before. I find it a little implausible that Roman Grant’s daughter could so easily infiltrate the D.A’s office under an assumed name, but once you get past that, her story there is great. For one, it’s always interesting to see her drop the Compound style and try to fit in with regular society. But, it also forces her to explicitly confront the outside world’s view of the compound without being able to instantly snap back with her usual defenses. The condemnation simmers there, and by the end, she’s forced to confront the fact that she is a victim of the abuse that Roman is being tried for, and no matter how much she may love him, her father is guilty of the crime. And, her own feelings about the marriage she was forced in to prevent her from spouting the party line defense.

The high point of this is her tearful collapse on to the D.A’s shoulder after she sees the photos of her in the Joy Book. But, her loyalty to her family is such that she still assists in sabotaging the case. I like the way the arc played out, the way her inevitable assistance to Roman is juxtaposed against our desire for her to speak out against him. I want her to move into our world more and leave those old values behind, but she can’t do that so easily. The Sopranos was brilliant at juxtaposing our hopes for what would happen against the characters’ inevitable moral weakness and this story pulls off something similar. And, Sevigny thankfully gets to explore new dimensions of the character as time passes. The revelation that she was married once before is the perfect retcon, something that adds new depth to a character without contradicting anything that’s come before. In act, it goes a good way to explaining why she’d be willing to move off the compound in the first place.

Our moral alignment with respect to the various characters is one of the most complex things about the series. Watching it, I can’t relate at all to Bill and his family’s belief that the reason they’re on the Earth is to churn out kids and have more and more wives. The revelation that Nikki’s on birth control made her even more sympathetic to me because I think it’s perfectly understandable that she would want to have more control over her own life. Her work at the D.A’s office may have began as espionage, but I think by the end she legitimately enjoys it.

So, the question arises, are we supposed to believe in what Bill and his family are trying to achieve? Because they’re the main characters of the series, ostensibly we’re behind them in their quest to woo Ana. Certainly it was tough to watch Nikki and Margene squabbling during their “date” with Ana because I wanted Ana to like them. And yet, at the same time, the values of their world are so distorted and incompatible with how I see things that my attachment and general positive feelings towards the characters are juxtaposed with this dislike of their value system.

That’s why I like that the show has confronted this head on, both with Sarah’s total rejection of her parents’ lifestyle, and with Nancy and Lois’s shock at Bill’s plan to take on a fourth wife. Sarah is one of the most interesting characters in this season, clearly just biding her time before she can get out and move on. She started out growing up in a ‘normal’ family, how would she feel when all of a sudden she winds up in a zoo of children and a messy hierarchy of three “mothers” looking out for her? What control does she have when they seek to add another wife. She’s got none, and that makes her want to get as far away from that world as possible.

Throughout the series, I’ve found the kids’ storylines among the most interesting, and the addition of the bizarre compound people gone wild flophouse adds another layer. Frankie and his fellow Compounders seem to have a kind of “what happens outside the compound stays outside the compound” mentality and are living it up. I’m not sure how that jives with one of the girls chastising Sarah for dressing in a way that pleases Satan, but I suppose that’s the bizarre moral world they live in.

The central question of the season seems to be how much can you compromise on the road to salvation? Roman and his crew use coercion, threats of violence and bribery to ensure that he goes free. Bill’s entire casino business is a way to preserve his lifestyle and protect him from risk. But, is he morally compromising the very sanctity he’s hoping to preserve? If he sacrifices those morals, does that mean he’s just a guy with a bunch of wives because he can? That’s the question raised by Nancy in the last episode, the idea that he’s dabbling in this and is adding another wife because he can.

There’s no easy answers there, but this season’s first four episodes have been stronger than any in the show’s prior history. I’m hoping they can keep that up without Roman’s trial around to act as a structuring element. At least there’s a bunch of other interesting plots in development that will be able to pick up the slack.

Big Love (1x01-1x02)

At this point, HBO's got such a good track history that I'll at least sample anything they put on. Combine that with an intriuging premise and a great cast, and Big Love was a must sample show for me.

The first thing that's striking about the show is the opening credits sequence. It's a great looking sequence that does a nice job of setting up the show's basic plot, all set to one of the greatest songs ever, "God Only Knows." However, I'm a bit uneasy about the choice of theme song. Obviously it's a great song, but I feel like it's a song you have to earn. Watch Boogie Nights and you see two and a half hours of growth for the characters, and by the end of that journey, they've earned the right to use "God Only Knows." To have it as your opening credits feels wrong somehow.

But, looking at the names in the credits took my mind off that. We've got Bill Paxton, a pretty big caliber actor for a TV show, but what got my attention was two Twin Peaks veterans, Grace Zabriskie and Harry Dean Stanton. On top of that, there's PT Anderson regular Melora Walters, who created one of my favorite film characters with Magnolia's Claudia. And then there's Chloe Sevigny, who's been great in countless indie films. On top of that, we've got Lily Kane and Mac from Veronica Mars. So, that's a nice bunch right there.

The show itself has an odd feeling, largely because the world it's depicting is so close to ours, but at the same time off. The two best HBO shows, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, used this same basic idea, an ordinary family but with a twist. However, in the case of Big Love, the family isn't ordinary. The sort of conflicts they've got aren't common things, and I think that's the biggest issue with the show. They have problems that are really specific to the world of polygamy, and it's hard to empathize with their issues.

The genius of SFU and The Sopranos was that its setting, either the mob or the funeral home, raises the stakes on ordinary problems. So, trouble at work for Tony could mean coming home dead, but here there's no large stakes, it's all very small scale, petty problems. The biggest issue is the jealousy between the wives, all competing for Bill's attention. The problem with this is that so far we've got no sense of who Bill is. All he does is have sex with his wives. The life he leads seems to be almost hellish, constantly being asked for stuff, walking around a zoo of kids that he seems to have no relationship with.

It's always a problem to have too many kids on a show, and here we've got a whole bunch who seem to be there just because, and that takes away from the sense of any core family. Everyone's so busy running around doing their stuff that we never get the sense that these people actually like each other. And the way the show plays, it's like this is a co-operative family, and other than Barbara, his wives come off more as his children than as spouses.

I think that's partially a problem of just dumping us into the story with no real background. We get a sense of Bill and Barbara having a real, loving marriage, and the other wives seems superfluous. It's implied that when Barbara couldn't have any more kids, she allowed him to take Nikki as a wife, but I'd like to explore those issues more, how did they come to live this life? I can understand the desire to get right into the action, but I think that's such an essential part of their lives that we need to know it.

There was an episode of Six Feet Under with Daddy, a guy with a polygamist family, and there you got the sense of them as a functioning cooperative, you could understand why someone would choose to live that way. You don't get that here, it just seems like a really awful arrangement. That's because the show doesn't give anyone a moment of downtime, a moment to show why they're living this life in the first place.

In films, there's a big emphasis on characters acheiving their goals. For a movie, this is usually a fairly concrete goal, like beating the bad guy or winning a game. In a TV show, you need a more extistential goal, something that can carry your character through the whole series. So, for Buffy, the goal is to have the opportunity to live a normal life and not be a slayer. That's the thing that keeps the narrative moving forward, that all the character development is in reaction to.

For Six Feet Under, it's Nate's search for meaning in life that makes the show more than just a soap opera. There's something deeper underlying Nate's decisions than just the fact that another episode had to happen. My favorite arcs on that show are Nate's, Brenda's and Claire's, because all three characters have a deep struggle to find meaning for themselves that overwhelms any of the personal conflict they go through along the way. Compare that to David who has much more limited aspirations, and by extension, the most consistently soap operatic plot lines.

The problem with Big Love is that no one seems to have any ultimate goals. The issues with the compound provide some conflict, but I get no sense of an ultimate direction for the series. Implicitly there's the question of whether the family can survive, but that's not really the sort of thing that can make for a fulfilling series in the long term. So, without this overall goal, the series can fall prey to the worst of soap opera, decisions that come out of a need to just do another episode rather than out of logical character development.

The one character who does have a lot of interesting issues is Barbara. She's clearly very ambivalent about being in this family. She loves Bill, but doesn't seem to want to play mother to not just her family, but also the two other wives. She's not as into the doctrine as the others, and if Bill views her as his real wife, would everything collapse if she were to leave the family unit?

The other interesting arc is the story with Sarah and her Mormon friend at the restaurant. She's another person who's in an ambiguous position with regards to the family, and there's a lot of potential in further exploring her feelings about the way she lives.

I think one of the problems is that the show has such a big cast, and with three wives to handle, it's tough to develop people. In the long term, this is probably good, but most shows usually start with a small core for a reason.

So, I'm going to give it a few more episodes, but so far I haven't been that impressed with the show. I need a better idea of what it's going to do on a week to week basis to get an idea of its overall quality.