Best TV of 2010

Best series television of 2010 (in alphabetical order):
Breaking Bad (AMC): The best pure drama. Dark stories. Bleak sense of humor. Well written, well acted.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central): At its best, the most essential show on television. It deconstructs the news with insight and humor.
Fringe (Fox): The best science fiction show on television. What started as an X-Files retread has found its own way. One improvement on the original: it has story arcs that actually go somewhere.
The Pacific (HBO miniseries): A bookend to the Band of Brothers miniseries. Harrowing and very human.
Sherlock (BBC via PBS) An update of Sherlock Holmes set in the modern day. Surprisingly successful. Stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a creditable Holmes.
Treme (HBO): The most satisfying new series of the year. Excellent ensemble acting. Filled with the music, sights and sounds of New Orleans.
United States of Tara (Showtime): A surprisingly uplifting portrayal of a family whose mother has dissociative identity disorder. Toni Collette plays the title character and all of her alter egos. A tour de force.
30 Rock (NBC): Funny and rapid fire. Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin are unstable comedic dynamite.

Next best:  
Being Human (BBC America): Appealing actors playing a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost. Stories are uneven in quality.
Boardwalk Empire (HBO): Well-crafted and a visual treat. Stories are a bit predictable.
Friday Night Lights (NBC): Perhaps the best family drama on TV.  It has a weakness for the sentimental.
Justified (FX): An adaptation of Elmore Leonard.  The main character is well-played by Timothy Olyphant.  Sometimes the lawman stories feel routine.
Louie (FX): A wicked sense of humor. If only he was a little less self-satisfied.
Rescue Me (FX): Reveals a lot about male bonding and male humor. Self-indulgent by definition.
Rubicon (AMC): Fascinating look inside the intelligence industrial complex. Filled with paranoia and betrayal. The story went flat toward the end.

Disappointing:  
These are genre-related shows (fantasy, science fiction, horror) that I wanted to like. Alas.
The Walking Dead (AMC): Started strong, then the cracks started showing: bad acting, weak stories, and uneven pacing.
Caprica (Syfy): The story went from too slow the first season to over-condensed this season.  It had several story-threads with potential. By the end I found it hard to care about any of them.
True Blood (HBO): The amped up sex and violence seems to have replaced interesting stories.
Lost (ABC): Went from puzzling and entertaining to silly and embarrassing.

The trend for series to become shorter continued. A season of 10 episodes is becoming common on cable and broadcast TV. Seasons of six or eight episodes are not unusual. The Sherlock series had only three episodes, although that is a BBC import. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Too many long seasons are padded out with endless filler, making shows unwatchable.  In many ways I believe the miniseries, with enough time to tell a novel-length story, along with a beginning, middle, and end, is the ideal form for television.

There was the usual turnover. Rubicon arrived and departed. Lost overstayed its welcome and is gone. Caprica was canceled and the remaining unaired episodes were burned off in a marathon January 4. New shows were Justified, Louie, Sherlock, Treme, and The Walking Dead, with Treme the best of these.

Lost: A Look Back

Lost represented the triumph of appealing characters and fine acting over an incoherent story. What kept me coming back for six seasons certainly wasn't the multitude of never-explained mysteries or the numerous plot-lines that were dropped by the writers like hot potatoes. If this had been a written work, rather than television, I would have abandoned it long ago, and I suspect most of the audience would have done likewise. As a visual medium, it revolved around the people. Lost had a large cast of well-chosen actors and they sold this unhinged, rudderless story. Long after I had given up hope that the writers knew what they were doing, or that the story would make a lick of sense, I kept watching. As the end of the series approached the question became: how bad would this train-wreck be?

Lost should be a case study in why a room full of writers should not be asked to produce long-form narrative. If Lost had been episodic, with discrete hour-long stories, no problem. Whoever had the initial vision for the show -- J.J. Abrams presumably -- apparently left the writers on their own sometime during the first season ("See ya, losers!"), and the writers were left to tread water ever since. Lost is what happens when a story is written by committee.

Compare other television series: Twin Peaks or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which represented the singular vision of their creators. Love them or hate them, those two shows are examples of originality and strong creative leadership. Lost had no such integrity, no guiding vision.

The final season was especially disappointing, focused as it was on the simplistic good versus evil story of Jacob and the smoke monster, yin versus yang, light versus dark, weighed down with heavy amounts of Christian imagery. After seasons with more interesting conflicts, to end up where the story did was both trite and dull. Where were the days when Jack and Locke argued about the guiding principles of faith and science? When was Ben, easily the most compelling antagonist the show had to offer, last actually a factor in the story? As a substitute for Ben, the smoke monster was not nearly as interesting. When were the mysteries of the island last intriguing and dangerous? When did the show last have a sense of humor? Not during the last season.

The self-indulgent final episode had its entertaining moments and its howlers. This wasn't an ending to a six-season show, this was a six-year cast reunion. The number of tearfully reunited friends and romantic couples was taken to such an extreme that it became self-parody. In the end it was a series that overstayed its welcome, undercutting what was once enjoyable about the show and diminishing the series as a whole.

Related post: Lost in the Writers' Room

Lost in the Writers’ Room

The television show Lost has -- through the course of several seasons -- gone from promising, to mangled and confusing, to just plain ridiculous. Sometime around the end of the first season I started calling the show “Lost in the Writers’ Room.” If the show’s writers ever drew a map of the story at the outset -- based on the evidence I doubt there was any such advanced planning -- I picture that map up on the wall in the writers’ room, and the writers are blindfolded and given pins, as if in playing out a demented game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Each week, whatever plot points the writers stick pins into is what they have to write about for the next episode in this misshapen donkey of a tale.

The Gashlycrumb Losties

Many will know Edward Gorey, especially his not-at-all-for-kids send-up of a children’s alphabet book, Gashlycrumb Tinies: "A is for Amy who fell down the stairs. B is for Basil assaulted by bears. C is for Clara who wasted away. D is for Desmond thrown out of a sleigh." Every line accompanied by a macabre, Victorian-era illustration of each child’s mishap. (Gashlycrumb Tinies at Amazon.)

Jason Henninger at Tor.com brings us a wonderful crossover, The Gashlycrumb Losties: “A is for Arzt who was blown up sky high, B is for Boone who bled out through his thigh, C is for Charlie, courageously drowned, D is for Danielle, left dead on the ground …” It finds humor in the outrageous body-count of the show, and its stunning disregard for story continuity (“Q is for Questions left dead in the plot”). Read the whole poem at Tor.com.

Oh, by the way, I can’t wait to watch the upcoming final episode. My expectation is that it will be embarrassingly, hilariously bad.


Related post: Lost: A Look Back