More time than usual spent indoors meant more time to catch up on some of the most acclaimed shows on telly. These were my favourite TV shows of the year.
The Good Place – “You’ve Changed, Man”/“Whenever You’re Ready”
Copyright: NBC
The start of the year saw two of the best comedies of the last decade bow out with emotional finales that highlighted the importance of self-improvement. One of them had to answer a very tough question: how do you end a series set in an infinite afterlife?
And yet, The Good Place found a satisfying way to say goodbye to the fantastic foursome it followed for four seasons on a wildly-unpredictable journey through the Great Beyond, putting an emphatic and emotional full-stop on their potentially-endless experiences.
The show maintained its unusual mix of hangout comedy, twist-heavy serialised storytelling and philosophical musings on humanity and morality right to the very end, even provoking a few tears as each character found a zen-like inner peace.
Though initially focusing on how Eleanor (Kristen Bell) could bluff her way into staying in the titular realm despite not deserving to be there, The Good Place evolved and changed several times over the years, often at dizzying speed.
It championed kindness and teamwork and compassion without ever feeling cheesy or preachy, puzzled over big existential questions without ever forgetting that it is first and foremost a goofy sitcom, and critiqued the merit-based system of good and evil that sorted souls into their forever homes of heaven or hell without ever mocking any particular religion.
Eleanor was a selfish, amoral mess of a person when she died, but her character developed a lot over the last four years, as did anxious and booksmart soulmate Chidi (William Jackson Harper), namedropping self-obsessed socialite Tahani (Jameela Jameel) and empty-headed sports bro Jason (Manny Jacinto). Even non-corporeal guides Michael (Ted Danson) and Janet (D’Arcy Carden) were profoundly affected by their bond to this group.
Just how much they had grown as people and non-people was made heartwarmingly clear in the finale, which saw our heroes confront a terrifying concept, one that everyone has thought about and struggled with at some point, with acceptance and grace. The series stopped short of saying ‘The real Good Place was the friends we made along the way’ but its final message wasn’t too far off that.
It was also, to be absolutely clear, still hilarious, even when these characters parted ways for the last time.
FROM THE ARCHIVES: This post has been dug out of the drafts because, despite being unfinished (I wanted to do more in-depth write-ups about Succession season two and His Dark Materials series one but struggled to find the right words), the sections that are complete were worth publishing because they feature a few turns of phrase I’m particularly proud of and highlight great shows that I rarely, if ever, talk about in the real world.
The ever-growing flood of new TV programmes that fill our screens every year has allowed for all manner of series with high-concept premises full of potentially-alienating oddities to find a small audience or even become a critically-acclaimed hit.
Visionary showrunners have been given more leniency than ever to take huge creative risks and set their ambitions sky-high in a bid to bring something truly original and new to viewers, or to put their own spin on well-known tropes and make them feel fresh and exciting.
These are some of my favourites from the past year.
Mr Robot – “Unauthorised”/”Method Not Allowed”/ “Proxy Authentication Required/”Conflict”
Copyright: USA Network
There is an immense sense of relief felt when an unpredictable, ambitious and often-experimental TV series manages, despite the pile of questions to answer and storylines to wrap up in an increasingly narrow time-frame looming large and causing much concern, to stick the landing.
This was especially true in the case of Mr Robot, which, in its final season, revealed something so enormous that it shifted the viewer’s entire understanding of the show and cast the rest of the series in a completely new light. Twice.
Creator/writer/director Sam Esmail originally envisioned this psychological conspiracy thriller as a film and had planned out the ending from the start, so he’s been able to deploy such surprises regularly over 40-odd episodes, though he saved the best and biggest for last. More impressively, they seem to come out of nowhere yet make a satisfying amount of sense once the shock has worn off.
It’s always been hard to predict exactly what the final episode of Mr Robot would even involve or look like. The series began as a topical commentary on our growing unease with capitalism and mistrust of the wealthy, as cyber-security engineer Elliot Alderson (Oscar-winning actor Rami Malek, playing an absolute blinder in his breakout role) is recruited by the titular character into an anarchist group of hackers that want to erase everyone’s debt by breaking into the bank accounts of a global mega-corporation.
The first season, which was a critical and commercial hit, focused on this monumental task before it became very clear that Esmail was far more interested in exploring the effect that the huge stress and strain of carrying this hack out was having on Elliot and other F Society members than the hack itself.
For half of season two, the thriller aspect disappeared entirely and episodes became introspective, slow and confusing, cloaked in an atmosphere of suffocating paranoia and dread as the drama delved deeper inside Elliot’s mind while expanding the show’s scope and spending more time with characters that had been sidelined during the hack preparations.
The pace eventually sped up again, though not quickly enough to stop a lot of viewers switching off, then Mr Robot found an ideal balance of its psychological strangeness, far-reaching conspiratorial plot and mercilessly-tense high-stakes drama as it entered season three and achieved a level of all-time-greatness which it managed to maintain right to the final shot.
Answers arrived with pleasing regularity, the ever-changing dynamic between Mr Robot and Elliot found new ways to entertain and intrigue, the playful experimentation of the series found higher and higher peaks to reach, and the setup for the grand finale fell into place.
So, yeah, it’s been quite a journey – and even as the end was in sight, it was never entirely clear how this would all conclude. No-one could have predicted that the last batch of episodes would be inspired by that classic British TV tradition of the Christmas special.
In the fourth season, Elliot and pals prepare for a final reckoning then suffer an exhausting and almost implausibly-eventful Christmas Day over a mid-season stretch of five draining, exciting, and revelatory episodes which put them and us through the emotional wringer before reaching a sort of bittersweet catharsis.
Even the steady tying up of loose ends that follows this climactic high point leads to a few last-minute swerves before the series bows out with an unexpected but perfect finale.
After going through so much with these characters, it’s hard to say goodbye, especially to Elliot, who has confided in us as we’ve accompanied him during a time of tremendous upheaval in his life. Rami Malek’s exceptional performance combined with consistently stellar direction, brilliant writing and ingenious storytelling has helped us feel everything he felt on every step of his journey.
Shows like Mr Robot are why I watch TV. Endlessly unpredictable, hugely empathetic, gleefully audacious, visually striking and cinematic, universally well-acted and profoundly moving. I can now recommend it to everyone without hesitation – and any rewatches will feel like an entirely new experience.
Watchmen – “She Was Killed By Space Junk”/”This Extraordinary Being”/”A God Walks Into A Bar”
Copyright: HBO
Something about Watchmen wasn’t grabbing me and I couldn’t figure out what.
Every aspect of it was done with an exceptional level of polish and skill, from the amazing direction to the pulsing music to the remarkable acting to the eye-popping style and colour to the careful construction of its weird alternate world that follows on 30 years from the end of the acclaimed graphic novel.
And yet, I wasn’t loving it. I watched the first two episodes with much admiration, a lot of curiosity and a whole lot more confusion but it wasn’t quite working even though it should be right up my street.
Thank goodness, then, for Jean Smart, As FBI agent Laurie Blake, she interrupts a police investigation of a murder believed to be committed by a group of white supremacists who have turned diaries left by pattern-masked anti-hero Rorschach into their Bible.
Before she arrives, retired police officer Angela Abar (Regina King) is struggling to come to terms with a sprawling mystery opened up by the victim’s death – and doling out plenty of close-quarters vigilante justice as her costumed alter-ego Sister Knight.
Everyone wears masks in Watchmen – even the police, because the Rorschach-masked racists targeted cops in a series of brutal killings, so officers’ identities are now top-secret. Racism is the hot-button issue causing much of the conflict in the series, in place of the Cold War concerns that its source material commented on, and it is explored with sensitivity and horror.
This makes the whole show sound very serious, which it sort of is, and po-faced, which it absolutely is not.
The creative team behind the show, including LOST‘s Damon Lindelof, gleefully introduces bizarre moments, out-there ideas and sudden tonal shifts into each episode as the writers tell a fairly simple story in a roundabout, meandering way which intrigues as much as it baffles. Interludes focusing on an eccentric, elderly English gentleman played by Jeremy Irons are weird and inexplicable even when compared with the rest of the show.
Initially, this quirkiness frustrated more than it entertained, but the third episode’s introduction of Laurie is when everything started to fit together.
Acting as a concrete link between the show and the graphic novel, offering a new perspective on what we’d been shown so far as well as providing a welcome way for the series to explain, at least partly, what the hell is going on, she anchored a cleverly-structured and hugely-enjoyable episode that led to an odd-couple team up between her and Angela.
From then on, I was all-in.
The way the season’s self-contained story plays out is akin to someone chucking all the pieces of a jigsaw on the floor at once before slowly assembling them in a scattershot fashion which prevents the entire picture from being made clear until the very end.
Along the way, there are fantastic flashback-heavy episodes which each focus on a different character and further our understanding of the Watchmen world in exciting and unexpected ways, with moments that make disparate elements of the plot click together neatly.
The paranoia and trauma that Looking Glass (Tim Blake-Nelson) keeps hidden with a mirror mask and laconic southern drawl is delved into while we get the first good glimpse of the villainous Seventh Cavalry’s plans, a dizzying black-and-white trip into the past showing the hidden history of an early vigilante is one of the most impressive hours of TV in the entire year, and Angela’s time in Vietnam yields plenty of revelations before becoming the focus of an episode that is strongly reminiscent of LOST‘s best.
So, despite a tepid reaction at the start, Watchmen won me over and I’m glad I stuck with it.
The OA – “SYZYGY”/”Mirror, Mirror”/”Overview”
Copyright: Netflix
Similarly, the gap between my opinion of The OA after its first episode and its last is enormous, going from indifference to adoration.
This genre-hopping tale began with the return of missing blind woman Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling), who is now able to see perfectly and unwilling to talk about what happened to anyone – except for a group of students and a teacher from the nearby high school that she brings together, asking them to believe her no matter how odd her story may sound.
The time she spent missing in action, held captive with five other people under the menacing eye of (hello to) Jason Isaacs, was the focus for much of the first season, which floated along with the dreamy atmosphere of a vaguely-spiritual low-key indie movie spiked throughout with scenes of horror before culminating in a final scene which put the high school group’s belief in Prairie to the ultimate test and potentially pushed the viewer’s own suspension of disbelief to breaking point.
The meditative and quiet feel of the first season was abandoned almost entirely in the second for a refreshing change of pace, location and mood, a stronger sense of fun and playfulness, and even a different main character, with a plot that seemed more straight-forward at first but turned out to actually be quite the opposite.
The OA calmly and confidently built an intriguing premise while introducing strands of an obtuse but fascinating mythology which was developed in bewildering scenes of jaw-dropping weirdness that lingered long in the memory.
These eyebrow-raising moments were grounded with a cast of characters that could be hard to care about at first but soon became fully-rounded realistic human beings, and it was hard not to be invested in their plight as they went on intense metaphorical and literal journeys.
If this all sounds a bit vague, well, that’s because it’s best to know as little about the series as possible before pressing play.
This show was, like Mr Robot and Watchmen, the impressive result of a bold and singular vision being fully realised and brought to the screen. Plus, it was truly unlike anything else on television and unlikely to be repeated.
It’s really good, basically, but any recommendation must come with the unfortunate caveat that it has no ending or resolution, because Netflix cancelled The OA right after it concluded its second season with what must surely be the most audacious out-of-left-field premise-upending cliffhanger ever aired, only just past the halfway mark of Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij’s five-season plan.
Even though I can only imagine what might have been, I don’t regret watching it and would say that it’s worth a look if anything in the previous paragraphs piqued your curiosity.
Russian Doll – “Nothing In This World Is Easy”/”Ariadne”
Copyright: Netflix.
This smart little series is like Groundhog Day for the 21st century, as Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) dies on the night of her 39th birthday party and suddenly, somehow, resets the clock, staring into the bathroom mirror earlier that night confused, wild-eyed and very much alive.
And so begins a dark comedy of errors following Nadia as she stumbles her way towards figuring out what’s happening to her, one death at a time. Whenever the loops begin to feel dull and overly-repetitive, the show breaks away into something different or introduces a new complication, so the series flies by.
Nadia herself is thoroughly entertaining, enlivened no end by Natasha Lyonne’s energetic performance, and watching her try to cope with the existential mind-fuck she’s unwillingly become part of is hilarious and endearing. The show thoroughly enjoys playing with the possibilities of its premise and with the viewer’s expectations.
Though most of the deaths are slapstick pratfalls played for laughs, the series gets unexpectedly grim and unnerving at times, and even rather touching.
The ending is conclusive enough for these eight episodes to work well as a self-contained miniseries but there are still plenty of questions about the strange, vaguely-metaphorical time-loop Nadia’s stuck in which could be explored in a second season.
Legion – “Chapter 23″/”Chapter 27”
Copyright: FX
Earlier this year, I pondered at length about whether Legion and, to a lesser extent, WestWorld could “recover from their sophomore slumps, fix their flaws, and soar to new heights in the future”.
It turned out that answer, for Legion at least, was a resounding ‘sort of’.
With an end in sight and fewer episodes to play around in, the psychedelic superhero series made an effort to cut down on the number of confounding tangents it went on and tried to tell an actual cohesive story.
Beginning with the introduction of time-travelling mutant Switch (Lauren Tsai) gave the series a new focus and an excellent way to re-join David Haller (Dan Stevens), now leading a cult after escaping Division 3 and doing his best to avoid being re-captured.
This was the only show on television where introducing time travel to the plot actually made everything less complicated. Switch provided a much-needed impartial viewpoint of a cast of characters that were all unreliable in their own ways and, as unlikely as it sounds, she stabilised a series that was going increasingly off-the-rails, and provided the basis for some of the season’s finest moments.
Her powers became a desperate last hope for David, who hoped to use her to go back and stop the mind of his younger self from becoming infected by The Shadow King. But, as any Doctor Who fan will tell you, trying to change history can have horrible consequences. In Legion, repeated journeys through time disturbed the slumber of blurry, nightmarish demons that feed on minutes and hours, as demonstrated in an amazing episode-long battle against the little blue blighters where reality begins to crumble and random moments are suddenly cut sh
The welcome and long-awaited additions of Stephanie Corneliussen and Harry Lloyd as David’s parents allowed the series to show the mega-powerful mutant’s origin story as well as that of his greatest enemy.
Meanwhile, Syd (Rachel Keller) worked with the charming but monstrous all-powerful mutant Amal Farouk (Navid Negahban) aboard a zeppelin piloted by a robotic clone of her dead friend and a group of moustachioed robots to track down her reality-bending lover after his misguided attempt to save her by messing with her mind backfired.
Standard stuff, really.
Legion’s characters-as-chess-pieces issue still reared its head on occasion, with some only being reintroduced just to advance the plot with little fanfare or depth before being literally shoved into a box or jettisoned before the final showdown.
Overall, though, these final eight episodes brought the series to a satisfying and suitably surreal close.
There was a brief and wonderful period in late spring of this year where four top-tier miniseries all aired around the same time.
Though none of these could be considered an easy watch by any stretch of the imagination, they each showed in different ways the benefits of giving visionary writers and directors a few hours each to explore tough and complex issues through very human and hard-hitting stories.
Then, towards the end of the year, an entertaining globe-spanning crime drama provided some much-needed light relief.
Chernobyl. Copyright: Sky/HBO.
Chernobyl
This HBO-Sky co-production is a perfectly-realised and expertly-told dramatised account of the Chernobyl explosion, its aftermath and its causes (in that order) with stellar performances from the entire main cast – even the dad from Friday Night Dinner.
Chernobyl shows us authoritative figures so infuriatingly stubborn that they will not listen to reason or evidence of disaster even when it is staring them in the face. It then explores the horrific cost that this dangerous combination of ineptitude and ignorance can have on innocent people who have been kept in the dark about the danger they’re in or threatened if they dare to even think about disobeying orders.
After a forensic minute-by-minute big-budget recreation of the explosion itself, the show follows nuclear scientist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris) who has been brought in by the Soviet higher-ups to offer advice about the clean-up operation even though they fully intend to disregard everything he says.
Luckily, Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard) is slowly convinced by Legasov’s panicked protests about the severity of the incident and convinces his bosses to reluctantly listen to the expert.
Meanwhile, Lyudmilla Ignatenko (Jessie Buckley) fears for the safety of her firefighter husband who was right at the forefront of the radioactive inferno and is now deteriorating rapidly in intensive care.
The show’s creators prided themselves on factual accuracy, using well-researched books and records of first-hand accounts along with new information that has only recently come to light. Sticklers for detail would enjoy the accompanying podcast where they explain which moments are fact, when they decided to use dramatic licence (and why), and which bits were slightly toned down because the full truth would have been less believable.
There is a grim glamour to many cinematic scenes, like the ash falling over residents watching the aflame plant from what is now known as the Bridge of Death, the gas-masked clean-up crew hosing down the evacuated city streets, and the helicopters flying dangerously near to the gaping abyss where the reactor used to be.
It is fascinating, compelling, deeply moving television that brings the full horror of the unprecedented nuclear catastrophe to life and vividly illustrates the old saying ‘Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it’. It is a timely warning for viewers to beware attempts by people in power to cover up or deny man-made environmental disasters.
When They See Us. Copyright: Netflix.
When They See Us
Another true-life tale told with immense empathy and skill, When They See Us follows five innocent boys who each spend several years in prison after being coerced into confessing to horrific crimes that they did not commit.
A jogger is raped and beaten in Central Park on the same night that Kevin Richardson (Asante Blackk), Antron McCray (Caleel Harris), Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse), Raymond Santana (Marquis Rodriguez) and Korey Wise (Jharrel Jerome) are running through a different part of the park with other kids causing minor mayhem.
The NYPD arrest them and spend days trying their hardest to mentally break down these children who just want to go home in scenes that are blood-boiling and gruelling to watch.
The young actors do an astonishingly-good job at expressing the confusion and desperation that their real-life counterparts felt in the police station and in the trial that followed, then the actors playing their adult selves (Justin Cunningham, Jovan Adepo, Chris Chalk, Ato Blankson-Wood) do equally-fine work showing how they struggled to adapt to life on the outside after being locked up for so long.
Again, we see authority figures ignoring reality to suit their own awful agendas and the traumatic consequences this has on innocent lives. Writer/director Ava DuVernay shines a spotlight on an enormous racially-motivated miscarriage of justice that is symptomatic of a much wider problem and tells the story of the so-called Central Park Five with care, sensitivity and fury.
It is an incredible and important achievement that deservedly became a big hit for Netflix and, judging by the online reactions, shocked, outraged and upset everyone who watched it.
When They See Us packed its biggest punch in the last of its four episodes, which focuses on poor Korey Wise, who ended up suffering the most due to wrongly being tried as an adult. Jharrel Jerome, the only actor to play the child and grown-up version of his role, is – well, every word I can think of putting here would sound like hyperbole but isn’t.
Korey’s horrendous journey – bouncing from prison to prison, recovering from unprovoked attacks and spending months in solitary confinement where all he can do is relive the moments that brought him there and daydream about the people he loves – is gut-wrenchingly powerful and vivid. Jharrel is the main reason why this hour-and-a-half set a new personal record for ‘most frequently moved to tears by an episode of TV’.
The When They See Us Now special of Oprah Winfrey interviewing the cast and the actual people who experienced this nightmare acts as a fitting coda. It gives a glimpse of the process that brought this story to the screen and, most importantly, shows the lasting impact it has had on the men who are doing what they can to find happiness after having their youth and innocence stolen from them.
The Virtues. Copyright: Channel 4
The Virtues
“Fucking hell” – a phrase uttered many times while watching The Virtues in varying tones of shock, disgust, horror and awe.
Here’s why.
Joe (Stephen Graham) is struggling to cope after his ex and her new partner decide to move to Australia with his son, so he heads home to Ireland to reunite with his sister Anna (Helen Behan), meet his sister-in-law Dinah (Niamh Alger) and face the source of some traumatic memories which are flickering into his head more and more often, while Dinah struggles with issues of her own.
These jumbled fragments of Joe’s past, shown in grainy camcorder home video-style footage, relate to his time in the care system before he ran away to Liverpool, and are similar to writer-director Shane Meadows’ own traumas which he himself has spent years uncovering. Here, he pours that intense pain into his work, creating a masterpiece that slowly builds to a final act which causes a visceral reaction.
Heart rates will rise, stomachs will be full of butterflies, mouths will hang agape and breathing will be completely forgotten – based on my own experience, anyway. This comes at the end of a series of lengthy and moving scenes of Joe talking to his son before he leaves, of Joe on a self-destructive night out, of Joe and Anna catching up after so much time apart, of… well, you get the idea.
However, it is not a humourless four-hour dirge – there are a few pockets of warmth to balance the unpleasantness, mainly from Anna’s barbed insults and her family’s gentle home life which plays out on-screen in a way that seems relatably genuine.
In fact, it all feels very real. The high calibre of acting, script, improvisation and direction mix together to make this feel more like peeking into a window than like watching TV, so absorbing and convincing and lacking any feeling of artifice that the arrival of an ad break felt like being slapped awake mid-dream.
Special mention must go to Stephen Graham, who puts himself through the wringer to give a raw performance that goes to such emotional extremes that it’s difficult to imagine it as acting at all, and to Niamh Alger, who doesn’t appear until the miniseries’ halfway point but quickly becomes just as heart-rendingly vital to the drama as Joe.
The Virtues may well be the best British drama of the year.
Years and Years. Copyright: BBC.
Years and Years
It says a lot about 2019’s TV offerings that a drama which focuses on a family in the near future coping with all manner of far-reaching political, environmental and sociological catastrophes is one of the more light-hearted entries on this list.
In clumsier hands, Years and Years could have ended up feeling merely like a box-ticking exercise of every big issue we currently face – global warming! Donald Trump! The banks! Refugees! China! Populist right- wing politicians gaining power! Robots replacing human jobs! Et cetera!
However, Russell T Davies is instead more concerned with the mundane and everyday but no-less-important issues facing the Lyons clan – marriage, parenting, jobseeking, birthdays, new year celebrations – than the international crises which are pushed into the background until they directly affect this tight-knit family.
Such a small-scale focus keeps things grounded while the world of the show becomes increasingly futuristic and chaotic, and it allows the drama to play with sci-fi concepts without turning into an absurdist dystopia. Indeed, the most worrying thing about Years and Years is that the dystopia it depicts feels all-too-probable.
The sprawling storyline starts with Rosie Lyons (Ruth Madeley) giving birth to the newest member of the Lyons family around the same time as the first public appearance of politician Vivienne Rook (Emma Thompson), whose populist I’m-just-like-you attitude prompts a surge of support from people including Rosie that could see her become the next Prime Minister – but her motivations may be more sinister than they first appear.
Meanwhile, Danny (Russell Tovey) finds a soulmate during a time of great upheaval, Edith (Jessica Hynes) refuses to slow down her activism efforts after ending up on the front line of a disaster, Celeste (T’Nia Miller) and Stephen (Rory Kinnear) are caught off-guard by their teenage daughter’s announcement about her true self, and grandmother Muriel (Anne Reid) just wants everyone to get along and visit her occasionally.
There is a slightly cheesy but giddily-enjoyable moment every episode where a character turns to stare into the middle distance and say something like “Ooh, bloomin’ ‘eck, if it’s like this now, what’s it gonna be like next year? Can you imagine???” and the camera slowly zooms in and the Murray Gold score that makes his work on Doctor Who seem subdued by comparison builds and builds and builds and off we go, flying through a montage of news footage and snippets of family life that covers 12 months in two minutes.
The same score plays over such dramatic episode-ending moments like the threat of nuclear armageddon, panic in the streets over the onset of another global financial crisis, and, er, Rory Kinnear angrily driving over a bike. It works better on the screen than in writing, honest.
Giri/Haji. Copyright: BBC.
Giri/Haji (Duty/Shame)
If all of the above sounds a bit bleak and hard-going, there are eight hours of pure entertainment waiting on iPlayer for all to see.
The BBC’s drama department was on a roll this year, with a string of compelling one-offs like The Victim and The Capture, but Giri/Haji may have been the best of the bunch – it was certainly the most enjoyable.
This smartly-written crime drama follows Kenzo Mori (Takehiro Hira) as he leaves his Tokyo family for an undercover mission in London, where he must stop a gang war kicking off back home by tracking down his brother Yuto (Yôsuke Kubozuka). The long-lost sibling was missing and presumed dead until a Yakuza gangster’s nephew was found with a samurai sword through his stomach and Yuto suddenly became the main suspect.
Kenzo’s investigation into the British capital’s criminal underworld collides with the lives of Sarah (the reliably-excellent Kelly McDonald) and Rodney (scene-stealer Will Sharpe) who are dealing with their own personal troubles which add plenty of unpredictability into the mix.
It’s surprising, daring, fast-paced and, most of all, a hell of a lot of fun to watch, switching between moods and genres with impressive ease and always eager to add stylistic flourishes to its storytelling that delight and never feel pretentious.
Underneath all the bursts of violence, flurry of sarcastic quips and offbeat moments of extravagance lies a big, beating heart. The writers’ subtle sentimentality and empathy for their characters prompts more than a few gentle tugs at the heartstrings by the end of the series. This motley crew could have easily turned into exaggerated caricatures but instead they feel like real people that are worth caring about and are missed after the credits roll for the last time.
Well, most of them feel like real people. The Cockney gangster boss (Charlie Creed-Miles) is just a shouty, sweary, scenery-chewing ham who acts like he’s still in Peaky Blinders – and we should all be very thankful for that.
After their first seasons premiered to rave reviews, two of my favourite TV shows of the decade received a far more muted and mixed reception when they returned last year.
New episodes of Westworld and Legion contained all of their best qualities but also intensified the flaws which had been easier to forgive back when the series were new and exciting.
This led many viewers and reviewers, including myself, to consider abandoning them, and even briefly ponder whether either had ever been top-quality TV or if their complex narratives and pretty visuals had been masking a lack of substance and depth all along.
The following ramble is an attempt to examine where both went wrong and whether it’s worth giving them the benefit of the doubt when they come back.
WestWorld is a ludicrously-expensive sci-fi Western about the robotic hosts of a futuristic theme park becoming sentient and rebelling against their human masters, and Legion is an introspective and psychedelic superhero drama about a mega-powerful mutant’s attempts to control his abilities and his sanity while attempting to save the world.
They both expanded in scope and ambition last year, with WestWorld branching out of its wild west theme park to show the full impact of the AI rebellion while Legion changed its central question from ‘Has David gone mad?’ to ‘Has the whole world gone mad?’
Both seemed so buoyed by the praise and success showered upon their first batches of episodes that they went from confident to cocky, and this arrogance was their downfall.
WestWorld used a clever bit of narrative trickery in its first season that made the episodes slightly hard to follow but ingeniously disguised a major twist. It then made the ill-advised decision to replace this storytelling device in season two with a different one that made the episodes just as hard to follow but served no purpose other than to wrong-foot anyone trying to come up with theories about how the plot would play out.
Tellingly, two of the best new episodes were ones that told a single, self-contained story – one about the founder of the company that created the park and the other about a Native American host discovering that the life he’s lived has been a manufactured lie.
Meanwhile, the first episode of Legion is one of the most head-spinningly disorienting viewing experiences ever broadcast and after watching it, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that making sense of the show would be a fool’s errand and that the series could never cohere into something understandable.
And yet, during the seven episodes that follow, things do begin to make sense, there are plenty of eureka moments and, as the season concludes the viewer feels, just like the show’s protagonist, that they finally have a clear sense of what’s what, to the point where the entire season could be easily summarised in a couple of succinct sentences.
It feels like being pushed into the deep end of a swimming pool before being pulled slowly back up to the surface…. but then, just as you’re getting your bearings on dry land, season two comes along, ties rocks to your feet and shoves you back in.
Introducing a time-skip, a warning from the future that may not even be reliable, a new setting, a new framing device, and new characters who often seem to be weird-for-the-sake-of-weird all at once adds a lot of hazardous new balls for the writers to juggle, and, while it’s certainly impressive that the show managed to recapture that initial feeling of dizzying uncertainty, it was far less successful at tying everything together in a satisfying way the second time around.
In fact, it does the opposite, frequently bumbling along on bizarre tangents and adamantly refusing to progress the plot and explain itself in simple terms.
Near the end of the first season, a sensible and clear-headed character gives a straightforward summary of what exactly has happened to David, which felt like giving a flask of cool, clean water to a man dying of thirst. Something similar happens near the end of season two, though this explanation is far less helpful because it’s being provided by a character who is bonkers and unreliable, so this time it feels like a man dying of thirst gratefully drinking from a flask that’s actually full of gravel.
When watching something which so clearly prides itself on confounding the audience, there is a very fine line between exhilaration and exasperation – Legion and WestWorld crossed that line repeatedly during their sophomore efforts.
However, despite all this, there were plenty of moments which showed off all the reasons why these shows gained such enormous critical acclaim in the first place.
WestWorld fulfilled every promise set up by its brilliant first season finale – namely, more theme parks, a look at the outside world, and a step-by-step guide to how the robots fight back against their creators – while revealing intriguing new details about the park’s past and again concluding with a finale that brought the show’s storyline to an exciting close-of-chapter and opened up many exciting possibilities for the show’s future.
Two of Legion‘s best episodes ignored its obtuse plot entirely to explore its two central characters in a way that was insightful, moving, and executed with the surreal visual flair and unusual storytelling that makes the show stand out from anything else on TV, and its final episode included a showdown for the ages with an ending that flips the entire series on its head.
Its aforementioned framing device – a series of short, offbeat lectures examining the concept of delusions, how they are formed, how they spread, and how difficult they are to counter – illustrated the season’s themes well, examined the psychology of the show’s characters intensely, and even performed a subtle psychological experiment on the viewer themselves which made these sequences linger in the memory long after the episodes ended.
Speaking of themes, WestWorld’s pseudo-philosophical monologues on humanity and the nature of the soul were back with a vengeance, but when Sir Anthony Hopkins isn’t around to deliver them with just the right amount of gravitas and menace, they sound a bit daft and, dare I say, pretentious.
Some of the surprises in WestWorld began to ring hollow – one ‘this human character is actually – *gasp* – a host?!!!1′ twist was unpredictable, exceptionally well-done and opened up many exciting possibilities for the show’s story, while another reveal of that same twist with another character in the very same episode was equally unexpected but seemed entirely random and perfunctory, making no discernible difference to… well, anything.
Both series struggle with two-dimensional characters. In WestWorld, Dolores became much less interesting when she went on the warpath, and Maeve’s single-minded goal to find her daughter alternated between thrilling and boring.
In Legion, every character other than David or Syd feels more like a chess piece than a person, only used to advance the plot and then quickly forgotten about until they’re needed again, which makes it difficult to care about them. Big life-changing things happen to Cary/Kerry, Ptonomy and Melanie which are then either ignored or hastily-resolved, and the show’s ADHD tendency to wander off to something else when it becomes bored of an idea makes it unclear if these things will ever be revisited.
Re-watching a TV show can be fun to relive its best moments and notice details that were missed the first time round but it shouldn’t be mandatory, and it is arguably insulting and unfair to ask the viewer to invest another 10 to 11 hours of their time just to figure out what the hell is going on.
As you can probably tell, it’s the flaws which really stick out when I’m reminiscing about these shows, which is a real shame because their numerous good points shouldn’t be overlooked or dismissed.
This experience is not new to me. Mr Robot, another of my newest favourite shows, dialled up the confusion and frustration throughout its second season before concluding on a note that left many things unanswered, but then came back with a stunning third season that built on everything that had come before, provided sorely-needed answers and clarity, and recaptured the thrills of its first episodes while bettering them in astonishing and unexpected ways.
So, there is hope – a naive, perhaps overly-optimistic hope – that WestWorld and Legion will follow in Mr Robot‘s footsteps, recover from their sophomore slumps, fix their flaws, and soar to new heights in the future.
Fingers crossed…
Best episodes: WestWorld – “The Riddle of the Sphinx”/”Les Écorchés“/”The Passenger”, Legion – “Chapter 12″/”Chapter 15″/”Chapter 19”
(Note: This post was originally written in late 2018 but left to lounge in the drafts folder unfinished. As Legion‘s third and final season is about to air in the UK, now seemed like a good time to tidy this up a bit and release it into the world. The third season is getting good reviews so Past Me’s ‘naive, perhaps overly-optimistic hope’ may well be coming true.)
This is a slick, smooth and tense thriller with excellent performances and a straightforward plot masked by layers of obfuscation that get slowly and carefully peeled away.
Julia Roberts plays Heidi, a therapist at the Homecoming facility, which is designed to ease soldiers returning from combat back into civilian life and help them deal with their newly-gained traumas – but there may be (read: definitely is) more to the facility than that…
Our view of Heidi’s time at the facility with new patient Walter Cruz (Stephan James, charismatic) and incessant phone calls from her boss Colin (Bobby Cannavale, excellent at playing a dickhead) is interrupted by jumps to her life in the future, where she works as a waitress and a government official is about to begin an investigation into her former employer.
What happened between then and now forms the bulk of the show’s mystery and gives its movie-star headliner the chance to display pretty much every possible emotion in her performance of a confident but concerned therapist who becomes a confused nervous wreck.
The old-fashioned official (Shea Wigham) and his quest to uncover the truth despite intimidation and opposition gives us a sympathetic and fundamentally-decent hero to root for, and brings the two timelines together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place.
He also looks like he belongs in a thriller from 50 years ago, which fits with the show’s overall aesthetic, and that is helped no end by the musical score that’s made up entirely of pieces from classic films.
Direction from Sam Esmail, who put his other show Mr Robot on the back-burner for a year while its star pretended to be Freddie Mercury, ensures that every shot looks striking and he manages to maintain intrigue and suspense throughout the series, which kept me engaged all the way up to its satisfying ending.
The 30-minute-per-episode running time helped, too. Streaming sites, particularly Netflix, like to dump new dramas on their service every other week that have episodes which stretch up to the hour-long mark and beyond, often padding them with so much filler that interest can drift, attention spans wane, and viewers start to wonder whether they’re worth the daunting time commitment.
This Amazon Video exclusive avoids that by trimming all ounces of fat so that each episode glides swiftly to an ending that makes watching the next one feel absolutely vital.
The Haunting of Hill House -“The Bent-Neck Lady”/Two Storms”/”Silence Lay Steadily”
Copyright: Netflix.
This horror series offers more substance than the usual scary story as it’s more of a meditation on grief and a compelling family drama which, occasionally, has a ghost pop up to go ‘Boo!’
The Crains have had a nightmarish childhood which has left them with deep-seated traumas which they’re still struggling to come to terms with in their adult lives.
The titular haunted house is responsible for their scars and scares, many of which will be inflicted on the viewers themselves. Rather than relying on made-you-jump shocks (though there are a few of those, deployed to maximum effect), it uses an array of awful methods to get under the skin, from subtle blink-and-you-miss them background spooks, unsettlingly-tense slow-burn shivers, or brief contortions of disgusting body-horror.
The well-written family members at the heart of the drama are brought to life by a cast of convincing actors and their story is told in a way which glides smoothly between past and present and back again, often returning to the same scenes from different perspectives to reveal clever sleights-of-hand which would make rewatches rewarding.
The series focuses on one sibling per episode until it brings them all together for an astonishing combination of impressive acting and film-making in “Two Storms”, where family tensions which have been suppressed for decades come bubbling up just as the siblings prepare to bury one of their own.
An exception to the ‘hour-long dramas on streaming sites are full of filler’ rule mentioned above, each scene in the series moves the story along or provides an insight into the characters’ psyches, and though it is occasionally slow, it is never dull.
I tend to avoid horrors like this one, but good reviews and housemate recommendations convinced me to give it a try, and I’m glad I did.
Killing Eve – “Nice Face”/”I Have a Thing About Bathrooms”
Copyright: BBC.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge brings the fun, filth and surprising emotional depth of her Fleabag miniseries to this country-crossing tale of espionage, murder and twisted female relationships.
In what is probably the most moment-to-moment enjoyable show of the year, KillingEve upends genre conventions and typical twists with flair and mischief, sending stressed-out agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh) and childlike assassin Villainelle (Jodie Comer) on a collision course that takes several truly-unexpected turns.
Both leads perform their tricky roles perfectly and they’re supported by a strong cast who are all adept at delivering the darkly-funny one-liners that fill the scripts and playing characters which are full of personality while walking a fine line between grounded everyman/woman and spy-thriller caricature.
It remains to be seen whether the series can continue this balancing act into a second season after seemingly taking the story as far as it can possibly go, but I’ve got my fingers crossed.
This show took up more newspaper column inches and website articles than any other new series of 2018, so there’s not much more to add here than what’s already been said.
Better Call Saul – “Breathe/Wiedersehen/Winner”
Copyright: AMC/Netflix.
Better Call Saul has spent years showing the changing circumstances and pressures which gradually push a lawyer with a talent for showmanship and sweet-talking into a sleazy criminal who helps murderers escape the police’s clutches.
Like Walter White becoming Heisenberg in its predecessor, this seismic change doesn’t happen overnight but over a series of incidents that lead to Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) crossing bigger and bigger lines and behaving worse and worse, until the character we saw in the first season seems like a completely different person.
Though this metaphorical journey has been less edge-of-your-seat intense than Breaking Bad, as bad behaviour for Jimmy means dodging around a bit of legalese and lying to his clients when for Walt it meant dissolving corpses in acid and poisoning a child, it’s been no less engaging, emotional and impactful.
The fourth season saw Jimmy reeling from a personal tragedy and struggling to pass the time while unable to practice law, while the lives of Mike (Jonathan Banks), Gus (Giancarlo Esposito) and Nacho (Michael Mando) played out in what might as well be an entirely-separate show about the violent and gruesome drug cartel conflicts that will eventually play a big part in Breaking Bad.
Apart from a brief face-to-face conversation, Mike and Jimmy don’t interact at all – though, to be fair, both have a lot on their plates right now. Mike’s time in his new job as Gus’ henchman eventually pushes him past a moral point of no return, while Jimmy slips into an unexpected new role of criminal accomplice with remarkable ease and consistently lies to those closest to him.
As if to put an emphatic full-stop to Jimmy’s transformation, there is a moment during the closing seconds of the season where he briefly slips into the gestures and mannerisms of Saul Goodman to shout the title of this show at his astonished and long-suffering partner Kim (Rhea Seehorn, playing the best female character on TV), and the camera lingers on her as he swaggers away and she realises that he’s no longer the person she thought he was.
It doesn’t sound like much when written down, but after four seasons of nuance and careful character development, this bluntness felt like a jolt of electricity and it clearly signifies that the show is heading into its final stretch of episodes.
Doctor Who – “Rosa”/”Kerblam!”/”It Takes You Away”
Copyright: BBC.
(WARNING: Long.)
Jettisoning the complex storylines and self-referential in-jokes proved to be a winning strategy for the long-running sci-fi show as up to 13 million people tuned in to see what Jodie Whittaker would be like as the Doctor.
As it turns out, she’s like a far less arrogant version of Ten(nant), amiable and goofy but more than willing to share the spotlight with others and not interested in boasting about being clever and powerful.
This has lead to her being surprisingly passive in some of the stories, but she’s fiercely protective of her newfound gang of friends Ryan (Tosin Cole, playing a likeable fool with family issues that provide the closest thing this series has to a story arc), Yaz (Mandip Gill, cheery and enthusiastic but sorely under-used) and Graham (Bradley bloomin’ Walsh, a highlight of every episode).
A few criticisms of the new series prompted sighs and eye-rolls, like the suggestion that including episodes about racism in America and partition-era India, casting diverse actors in the companion roles and, of course, making the Doctor a woman, indicated that the show was becoming too politically-correct (the most meaningless phrase in the English language).
However, there were some serious issues with the series and, unfortunately, they all related to the new showrunner. Chris Chibnall can write a perfectly-decent and entertaining episode of Doctor Who, but by trying to write five in one year, he seems to have over-stretched himself.
It’s as if he spent so much time ensuring that the first episode and its introduction to the new Doctor and Team Tardis was just right, which it had to be and it fortunately was, that the other four episodes on his plate ended up under-cooked, poorly-thought-out, and at least a couple of drafts away from their best version.
Most of his episodes played out at a surprisingly-languid pace with little-to-no-sense of imminent peril – even the grand finale, during which nothing notable happened for the first half hour – and despite the extended episode length offering more time to play with, the endings were rushed and abrupt, and interesting ideas were rarely fully-explored.
(2019 EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: Despite this, the New Year’s Day special was actually excellent.)
His greatest strength has been picking picking great guest writers – each of their episodes were energetic, exciting, impressively-creative and often unpredictable adventures that varied wildly in tone.
‘Rosa’ explored, with alarming and necessary bluntness, the cruel attitudes of 1950s America and the woman who helped change everything. Usually when the Doctor visits a racially-insensitive era of history with a non-white character, the issue gets brushed aside with a line of dialogue and ignored for the rest of the spisode. Not this time – poor Ryan gets threatened with lynching and called almost every slur under the sun, and the climactic scene uses the show’s oft-deployed ‘fixed moment in time’ plot device to devastating effect. Still, the episode doesn’t belabour its point, and doesn’t forget that it is family entertainment after all – moments of genuine warmth and light silliness are peppered throughout its running time.
Then, ‘Demons of the Punjab’ successfully fits monstrous-looking aliens into a sombre and emotional exploration of how politics can divide families, ‘Kerblam!’ is a rollickingly-fun caper which follows the Doctor’s investigation of a distress call from space-Amazon, ‘The Witchfinders’ is the only episode that makes her new gender important to the story and includes a hilariously-camp scenery-chewing turn from Alan Cumming as King James I, and finally ‘It Takes You Away’… well, it’s one of the weirdest episodes of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen – and I do not say that lightly, considering all that’s come before it.
It’s hard to believe that episodes like ‘Rosa’, ‘Kerblam!’ and ‘It Takes You Away’ are in the same show, let alone the same 10-episode run, which is what makes Doctor Who so enjoyable. The show’s new Sunday night timeslot also added an extra layer of enjoyment. Imagining some unsuspecting viewer leaving the telly on after Countryfile and catching a glimpse of a bounty hunter that embeds the teeth of its victims in its face, or an alien man giving birth while a spaceship-hospital is attacked by an adorable metal-eater, or any moment in the second half of ‘It Takes You Away’, was immensely-amusing.
The promise to avoid any old monsters this year became a double-edged sword – though it was refreshing to have something other than Daleks and Cybermen appearing yet again, most of the new baddies were rather forgettable.
The next series could easily build on this one’s successes – Jodie’s performance, the great guest writers – while fixing the flaws – make Yaz more of a character, pick up the pace a bit, add even a hint of an ongoing story. Roll on 2020.
Honourable Mentions: Hannah Gadsby – “Nanette”, Queer Eye – “You Can’t Fix Ugly”, Bojack Horseman – “Free Churro”/”INT. SUB”, The Good Place – “Jeremy Bearemy”/”Janet(s)”, Inside Number 9 – “Dead Line”, Black Mirror – “Bandersnatch”.
Sometimes, the prospect of starting a new long-running series with dozens of episodes to sit through just doesn’t seem like an attractive prospect, no matter how much praise and prestige it may have attracted, as there isn’t as much free time available to me as there used to be.
Luckily, this year offered a bountiful crop of short, succinct and satisfying dramas which arrived, amazed, and au-revoired before they could outstay their welcome..
Here are my favourite three.
Sharp Objects
Copyright: HBO.
A reporter from St Louis returns to her rural home-town after being told by her editor to cover an ongoing investigation into the murder of a young girl. Her boss thinks that going back to Wind Gap and dealing with her long-festering issues head-on will help her finally achieve some closure and do her no end of good. Well…
For Camille Preaker (Amy Adams, in what might be a career-best performance), confronting her past ends up being more traumatic than the crimes she’s supposed to be writing about, as Wind Gap’s suffocating atmosphere, gossipy locals and, worst of all, her nasty, overbearing mother Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson, impressively unpleasant in a difficult role) make her unconventional homecoming a living nightmare.
Then the police find another body.
Discovering who’s behind these murders becomes secondary to a claustrophobic character study of Camille and the toxic community in which she grew up.
However, this doesn’t mean that the crime plot is disappointing – when the killer is finally revealed, it’s shocking but satisfying and, like all the best crime drama whodunnits, seems incredibly, head-slappingly obvious in hindsight.
The show is lethargically paced, but anyone tempted to start staring at their phones would miss crucial details that flicker on-screen and disappear without making a sound. These can be jumbled memories from Camille’s past which her return has brought bubbling up to the surface, or subtly-hidden words that appear on objects around her to indicate how she’s feeling.
They are director Jean-Marc Vallée’s ingenious tricks which he uses to get us inside her head without the need for exposition or a voice-over narration. These confusing glimpses of her history and did-I-really-just-see-that tweaks to the environment contribute to the show’s slightly off-kilter atmosphere that make every encounter feel uneasy and sinister.
The eight-episode miniseries is adapted from a book by Gone Girl writer Gillian Flynn, which may give you some idea of what to expect.
From the first episode’s dreamlike opening scene to the finale’s final post-credits shot, it’s a truly haunting, transfixing, disturbing, and thoroughly, thoroughly uncomfortable watch. Anyone looking for a feel-good binge, or who has suffered similar issues to Camille, should probably look elsewhere.
Maniac
Copyright: Netflix.
Amy Adams is far from the only Hollywood A-lister to star in a TV drama this year. Emma Stone and Jonah Hill headlined Netflix’s sci-fi comedy-drama Maniac, with Jonah playing against type as a depressed schizophrenic who takes part in an experimental trial for a drug that apparently cures all trauma, and Emma playing a grieving junkie who cheats her way onto the same trial just to get her next fix.
Each test subject is supposed to get an individually-tailored dreamlike experience that brings all their deepest fears bubbling up to the surface so that they can confront and overcome them while inside their own minds.
However, after emotions run high amongst the scientists in charge of administering the tests, a glitch causes Owen (Jonah) and Annie (Emma) to become mentally interlinked, leading to all sorts of surreal havoc when the tests begin.
This is the main hook of Maniac – it’s a playful, Inception-style jaunt through a series of different settings and genres that freewheel from 80s heist to mafia drama to fantasy epic and spy thriller, amongst others, that gives its leads plenty of chances to play different variations of their characters.
Before getting to the tests, the series takes its time to introduce us to its grey, slightly-dystopian near-future world and show why Annie and Ollie were drawn to the drug trial in the first place. The background details and minor characters in those first episodes reappear during the trials in surprising and often bewildering ways.
The show’s sense of humour can take a while to get used to, but once it all clicks it’s frequently laugh-out-loud funny, especially whenever Dr Mantleray (Justin Theroux) is on-screen, and it’s directed with eye-popping visual flair by Cary Fukunaga (who also did the good season of True Detective and will direct the next James Bond movie).
It’s not all goofy quirks and knockabout silliness, either – the central relationship between Owen and Annie is convincing and touching, and their attempts to grapple with their inner demons and connect with each other provide moments of genuine emotion amongst the high-concept daftness.
Patrick Melrose
Copyright: Showtime/Sky Atlantic.
Benedict Cumberbatch is very good at acting.
This is a well-established fact, one so obvious that merely mentioning it feels redundant, yet when watching Patrick Melrose, it feels revelatory.
A few years ago, he publicly expressed interest in playing Patrick Melrose – at which point, presumably, a TV executive suddenly saw dollar signs and awards statues appear before his very eyes and immediately got to work assembling this stellar adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s acclaimed semi-autobiographical novels.
As the titular character, Benedict grabs the viewer’s attention and refuses to let go, commanding the screen throughout the series and giving an awards-worthy performance without a hint of self-consciousness or vanity, pulling out all the stops to bring this complex person to life.
Cumberbatch’s astonishing portrayal of Patrick Melrose, a vice-ridden self-loathing Brit from a wealthy background who uses withering put downs and exaggerated bravado to hide his emotional scars, makes him as sympathetic as he is unpleasant, as hilarious as he is heartbreaking, often performing with such realistic vulnerability that the camera almost feels like a hovering intruder.
Over five episodes, each adapting a different book, we see him go on a three-day bender to grapple with the death of his dad (Hugo Weaving, monstrous), remember days from his seemingly-idyllic childhood which traumatised him for life (Sebastian Maltz impresses as young Patrick), become a father, attend a royal function at his old home, and perhaps, at last, achieve some sort of closure at the funeral of his mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh, fragile and narcissistic).
Tonally, the series flits from a dark comedy of errors to a harrowing drama about abuse to a savage satire of upper-class callousness, which in the wrong hands could be a disastrous mess. Careful, insightful writing from David Nicholls, who knows when to hammer home the horror and when to slip in an acerbic one-liner, is matched with top-notch performances from all involved to make it work wonderfully well.
Without being in-your-face stylish (unlike, say, Maniac), it has a rather over-saturated look which suits Patrick’s often-addled perspective, and the lavish finery of the classy restaurants and mansions in which the drama plays out are shot beautifully.
Patrick Melrose is a masterpiece, and Benedict Cumberbatch has never been better.
Honourable Mentions: Bodyguard, A Very English Scandal.
After writing at length about how much I enjoyed American Gods, here’s the usual round-up of the rest of my favourite shows of the year,
The Good Place – “Dance Dance Resolution”/”The Trolley Problem”
Copyright: NBC/Netflix.
After mining comedy gold from offices in The Office (US), local governments in Parks and Recreation, and police stations in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Michael Schur has tackled a more ambitious environment in his newest series – the afterlife.
The Good Place follows Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) from the moment she’s told some very good and very bad news: the bad news is, well, she’s dead, but the good news is she’s now in the Good Place, a version of heaven where all of humanity’s best and brightest live out eternity in a blissful wonderland paired up with their soulmate as a reward for all the good they did during their time on Earth.
However, Eleanor didn’t do much good while she was alive, quite the opposite in fact, and feels that she must have ended up here by mistake.
American sitcoms don’t usually concern themselves too much with plot, as they’re often content to just act as a comfortable half-hour hangout where characters deal with their day-to-day lives at a leisurely pace while getting involved in increasingly-daft misadventures.
This show is different.
It delights in constantly surprising us with different aspects of its surreal setting and new information about Eleanor and her neighbours, then ending every episode in a cliffhanger that leaves us dying to see what happens next.
The plot is so chock-full of big reveals that talking about the second season without spoiling anything is actually a very difficult task.
What I can say is it’s absolutely brilliant, hilarious, and endlessly-inventive.
Highlights so far include ‘Dance Dance Resolution’, which doesn’t stop to take a breath as it zips through several seasons of potential storylines in one dizzying episode, and ‘The Trolley Problem’, where Eleanor and her friends try to explain human concepts of morality to a higher being through an ethics lesson that spirals out of control.
Following Eleanor’s experiences with her ethics professor ‘soulmate’ Chidi (William Jackson Harper), the posh British socialite next door (Jameela Jamil), all-knowing AI assistant Janet (D’Arcy Carden), and the neighbourhood’s supernatural architect and guardian Michael (Ted Danson, clearly having a great time in the role) is great fun and I can’t wait to see what future episodes have in store for them.
(The Good Place is on Netflix)
Mr Robot – “Runtime Error’/’Kill Process’
Copyright: USA/Amazon.
Picking up immediately after the ending of its divisive second season, Mr Robot quickly tackles the criticisms of that season by clearing up much of the confusion over character motivations and filling in gaps in the narrative which were infuriatingly teased but left unexplained throughout 2016’s episodes.
The psychological conspiracy thriller puts the emphasis firmly back on ‘thriller’ with a fast-paced rollercoaster of a season which focuses on a newly-motivated Elliot (Rami Malek) attempting to undo some of the damage his well-intentioned revolution has caused.
This goal puts him in direct conflict with powerful forces that have mysterious motives while his nearest and dearest hide devastating secrets from him.
Meanwhile, the show’s continued exploration of the rise of digital currency, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of privacy in the digital age makes it as timely as ever.
To call it a return to form would be a bit of an insult to season two, which I quite liked despite its issues – and its emphasis on character and backstory made a great foundation for this season to build on – but these new episodes are astoundingly good.
They’re full of memorable moments, shocking twists and astoundingly cool and clever tricks, and they maintain the show’s signature atmosphere of dread and disorientation.
‘Runtime Error’ follows Elliot and Angela (Portia Doubleday) in real time as he has a bad day at work and she struggles to follow instructions, tracking them in a way that makes the whole episode look like one long uninterrupted shot.
Far from being just a gimmick, this is an impressive and immersive way of building tension during a crucial day in the life of these characters – it’s thrillingly-executed, ambitious and just a hell of a lot of fun, even as the tension keeps relentlessly building over 45 long minutes.
Then ‘Kill Process’ sustains this tension by constantly cutting between several characters as Elliot tries to avert disaster and the FBI closes in on its targets until the suspense is almost unbearable, with a few gags and unexpected moments of slapstick comedy included to give viewers a bit of a breather.
The aftermath of these episodes dominates the rest of the season, as Elliot and Angela struggle to deal with what they’ve played a part in causing and the show flirts with the possibility of introducing sci-fi elements before quickly grounding itself firmly back in reality.
The cast still deliver brilliant performances, the direction is as stylish as ever, the writing is on point, the soundtrack is eclectic and Mac Quayle’s electronic score complements the action perfectly.
Most remarkable of all is that, three seasons in, it’s still very difficult to tell how this show will end, but I’m on board for whatever the future has in store.
(Mr Robot is on Amazon Prime Video)
Legion – “Chapter 7”
Copyright: FX.
Legion is like watching an eight-episode psychedelic fever-dream.
The series sticks the viewer firmly inside the head of David Haller (Dan Stevens), who begins to suspect that the voices and visions he hears and sees, the same voices and visions that have lead to him being sent to a psychiatric hospital, may actually be real.
He might not be insane, but he may be insanely powerful.
David starts a relationship with another patient (Rachel Keller) just before he is caught up in a battle between a sinister government agency who wants to experiment on him and a misfit band of rebellious mutants who want to help him control his powers.
Film and TV are saturated with stories about superheroes these days, but Legion is unique.
It’s bursting with style, creativity, and confidence, flicking between reality, memories, nightmares and something else altogether at such a dizzying pace that it is, at first, a bit difficult to keep track of what’s what.
Thankfully, this is not a show that obfuscates and confuses just for the sake of it.
Things settle down slightly as David gets a better grasp of his abilities and the plot, which is fairly straightforward when all the visual pyrotechnics and unreliable narration are stripped away, reveals itself.
Each episode has an audacious showstopper of a sequence designed to leave jaws on the floor and minds well and truly boggled, and the main cast all give excellent performances.
It is, quite simply, one of the most impressive shows on TV right now.
(Legion is on DVD, Bluray, and NOW TV)
Doctor Who – “World Enough and Time”/”The Doctor Falls”
Copyright: BBC.
Taking a year off has done the show a world of good, as it returned reinvigorated with new companion Bill (Pearl Mackie) and a fantastic-as-ever performance from Peter Capaldi.
Through Bill, the familiar tropes of the show seemed fresh and exciting again, as the writers managed to find plenty of inventive ways to introduce the Doctor’s new travelling partner to his time machine, his alien features and his complex morality.
I immensely disliked Matt Lucas’ character Nardole when he was first introduced two Christmas specials ago and the news that he would become a regular was met with a loud sigh, but he proved to be a fine addition to the TARDIS team.
He’s a well-written and likeable robot-human thing who is in the unusual position of being the Doctor’s travelling partner, his intellectual equal and, occasionally, his boss.
This season was intended to be a soft reboot, a good jumping-on point for new viewers, like Matt Smith’s first season was, and it does a wonderful job of showing how diverse and ambitious this show can be, enticing new viewers and reminding old ones why they like it so much.
Its first half features a string of great episodes that show Bill struggling to get used to the implausible sights and sounds she’s experiencing with this eccentric, wild-haired old Scottish man.
Even the episodes with plots that sound God-awful on paper (killer puddles, deadly emoji robots, etc) are surprisingly decent, and a few of the rest are the best in recent memory.
Victorian caper ‘Thin Ice’ is a perfect example of what a stand-alone Doctor Who episode should be, with a cool and unusual setting, a mysterious monster, good jokes, and well-performed character drama caused by a conflict between the differing perspectives of the Doctor and his companion, while space-zombie chiller ‘Oxygen’ has an intriguing premise, good twists, and – gasp – actual lasting consequences for the Doctor.
But these episodes, as good as they are, aren’t the ones mentioned at the top of this entry. With ‘World Enough and Time’ and ‘The Doctor Falls’, Stephen Moffat, in his final year as showrunner, has managed to outdo himself.
His tenure has been far from perfect and he’s written some cringe-worthy dreck over the years, but these two episodes show off everything he’s best at: cleverly-constructed out-of-sequence storytelling, impressive quotable speeches that show a keen understanding of the Doctor’s character, and well-devised concepts that are not just ‘scary for kids’ but scary full-stop.
‘World Enough and Time’ starts amusingly enough, with Moffat cramming in a few more self-referential ‘Doctor Who?’ gags while he still can, then it abruptly turns into a nightmare that gets darker and grimmer and bleaker as the minutes tick by before ending on an iconic final shot and a heartbreaking cliffhanger.
‘The Doctor Falls’ is about as cheery as its title suggests, putting the Doctor and Bill in a situation where it seems actually impossible for them to succeed and there’s an inescapable feeling of inevitable death over the whole episode because both writer and viewer know full well that Capaldi’s incarnation of the Doctor is on the way out.
All this doom and gloom is occasionally interrupted by one baddie merrily chewing the scenery and some touching moments from a surprising source.
Capaldi’s time as the Doctor has seemed oddly brief compared to his immediate predecessors, despite having as many full seasons as Tennant and Smith, but it’s great that he’s going out on such a high.
(Doctor Who is on DVD and Bluray)
Better Call Saul – “Chicanery”/”Fall”/”Lantern”
Copyright: Netflix.
Another year, another stellar season of Saul. After opening with a couple of episodes that seemed like they were intentionally trying to frustrate those who complain that BCS is far too slow, the show ramped up to a long-awaited mid-season showdown between the brothers McGill.
The rest of the season explored the aftermath of that courtroom battle, which saw the first proper manifestation of Jimmy’s ‘Saul Goodman’ persona.
This was also the year that Better Call Saul became more like the Breaking Bad spin-off it was expected to be when it was first announced, with more characters from the original show popping up and playing key roles – the most notable one being Gus Fring.
I sometimes wonder whether this series would work for someone who’s never seen Breaking Bad.
Better Call Saul still does because it manages to skilfully introduce more explicit ties to its predecessor without letting them take over the show and steal the spotlight from Jimmy.
Though Mike’s meetings with Gus and Nacho’s dealings with the Salamancas are gripping and also work as fanservice that doesn’t feel gratuitous, Jimmy’s slow transformation into Saul is still very much the focus.
In “Fall”, Jimmy is finally the amoral asshole he was always going to become, using his persuasive charm to manipulate and deceive one of his clients as the audience watches, stunned at his complete lack of empathy or remorse and finding themselves suddenly starting to hate this lovable wise-guy they’ve followed for three seasons.
This episode and the finale, “Lantern”, are a rough one-two punch that act as a dramatic reminder that, despite its slower, low-key feel, Better Call Saul can be just as shocking, upsetting and devastating as Breaking Bad when it really wants to be.
(Better Call Saul is on Netflix)
Fargo – “Aporia”/”Somebody to Love”
Copyright: FX.
While it was good to have Fargo back, something just wasn’t clicking at first.
The characters were the sort of motley crew that wouldn’t feel out of place in either of the previous seasons, there was the requisite moment of shocking violence to kick off the plot, and the performances were all top-notch, especially Ewan McGregor playing the dual roles of Emmit and Ray Stussy.
During the slow early episodes, there was a well-executed episode-long diversion to another city that was like a short story tangentially-related to the tale the rest of the season was telling, which seemed like the sort of cheeky, vaguely-experimental creative decision I’d be going gaga over in previous years.
But not this year. I was appreciative but distant, not fully engaged in the story this time around for reasons I couldn’t explain.
Then, around the half-way mark, something changed. The stakes were suddenly raised, dots were joined, ill-thought-out actions were having horrible consequences and I suddenly found myself caring immensely about characters I had previously thought of as quirky but fairly flat.
At the same time, the theme of the season was being hammered home with little-to-no subtlety but at least now I had a better understanding of what the show was trying to say, and it was saying it through the snaggle-toothed, bleeding-gummed mouth of the villainous V.M. Varga.
David Thewlis’ deliciously disgusting scene-stealing performance as this human ooze is a sight to behold.
His larger-than-life loan shark rambles about irrelevant trivia to sound clever and disarm his victims before telling lies so effortlessly that they became accepted truth through the sheer conviction of his slimy delivery.
Truth is the theme of the season, as the show confronts the lie it inherited from the film it’s based on which has appeared at the start of every single episode: “This is a true story.”
It examines how easily the truth can be distorted, moulded and transfigured for the malicious ends of the powerful and the greedy (no real-world subtext here, no sir), and how, sometimes, the truth is knowingly disregarded and deemed unnecessary when the lie is more convenient.
This analysis is wrapped in the riotously-entertaining second half of the season which features more of those cheeky, vaguely-experimental creative decisions that I normally go gaga for – and this time I did.
Back on the top TV list you go, Fargo.
(Fargo is on DVD, Bluray, and Netflix)
Honourable mentions: Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events – “The Miserable Mill” (both parts), Blue Planet 2 – “The Deep”, Marvel’s The Defenders – “Royal Dragon”, Game of Thrones – “The Spoils of War”, Bojack Horseman – “Thoughts and Prayers”, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – “Josh’s Ex-Girlfriend is Crazy.”
This genre-defying series based on a Neil Gaiman novel follows a convict (Ricky Whittle) who is released from prison early after his wife dies.
That tragedy soon becomes the least of his worries when he meets a mysterious stranger (Ian McShane) on the flight home who offers him a job as a bodyguard.
Shadow Moon (yes, that’s the convict’s actual name but bear with me) is then drawn into a world he doesn’t understand, a world where old gods that came to America centuries ago, brought into the country by immigrants who believed in them, now wander around lost and bored and far from the height of their powers.
In the meantime, humanity has channelled its belief into man-made concepts like media, technology and globalisation, creating new gods that are quickly becoming unstoppable.
The show explores old myths from foreign lands and creates new ones right in the middle of 21st-century America: a fateful game of checkers against the god of war, a meeting between a salesman and a djinn that gives both of them new purpose, and a mortal’s chance encounter with a love goddess which ends with her swallowing him whole.
Before working on this, the series’ co-creator Bryan Fuller had just finished turning a crime thriller about a cannibal into a grandiose, mythical confrontation between good and evil and now he’s turned his eye towards adapting a book about an epic confrontation between actual, honest-to-god Gods, which is the sort of subject matter that fits perfectly with his love of the melodramatic, stylish and surreal. Everything is turned up to 12, because 11 just isn’t enough.
Despite having a rock-solid suspension of disbelief that has withstood all sorts of high-concept nonsense over the years and remained intact – six increasingly-insane seasons of Lost, dozens of dumb Doctor Who storylines, the arty-farty third season of Hannibal – I found it difficult to get on board with American Gods at first. As the credits rolled on episode one, I stared at the screen speechless and baffled, but not in a good way.
It was the two mid-season episodes “A Head Full of Snow” and “Git Gone” which fully sold me on it.
The former went from a touching exploration of death to a rooftop conversation that’s filmed like a fairytale to a tense high-stakes rematch to an unexpected love story between two strangers to a comical heist to a moment of pure wonder, all without skipping a beat. It was a seriously impressive and seamless series of scenes that fully displayed the show’s high ambitions and abilities.
Then “Git Gone” resolved the moment from episode one that had caused my previously-mentioned bafflement in a way that was unexpected, satisfying, and absolutely hilarious.
There are a lot of things about American Gods that viewers may find difficult to accept, but belief is a central theme of the show and this disbelief, if anything, helps us relate to the show’s protagonist, who is just as bewildered and overwhelmed by what he’s witnessing as we are.
He is the stoic centre around which the crazy and colourful cast of characters revolve and though he’s perhaps the least interesting character, he is the most important.
Shadow’s endless road trip around America with his eccentric employer makes up the fairly-thin plot of the show, which often prefers to leave the pair entirely and show us little unconnected vignettes about the old gods’ journeys to the country and what they’re getting up to these days.
This is why, after eight lengthy episodes, it still feels like the story’s barely getting started and we’ve only gone a few chapters into the 600-page book that the show’s based on, but it’s hard to complain when the performances are this good and it’s so easy to be enchanted by American Gods‘ dreamlike visuals.
It’s happy to leave us wanting more, and I’m happy to wait as long as Michael Green and Bryan Fuller don’t stretch this out for too long – oh, they’ve left the show.
Yes, as 2017 began to draw to a close, the pair abruptly exited after creative differences with the show’s network. Apparently, the budget was ballooning into the tens of millions without attracting the audience that would make that expenditure worthwhile
It remains to be seen how this will affect the show – most of season two’s scripts have already been written and it still has the same talented cast and crew, but it won’t quite be the same without Green and Fuller’s style and sensibilities.
I regret to inform you that Netflix has made the baffling decision to turn A Series of Unfortunate Events into a different sort of series. The books, in which Lemony Snicket selflessly chronicled the tragic true tale of the Baudelaire orphans, have sold millions of copies and people all over the world have disgracefully delighted in the sorrowful story of these poor children. There is a great deal of misery contained within these volumes yet the books were sold as children’s literature, probably due to a malicious marketing mix-up.
Why anyone would think that a show involving a deadly house fire, an enormous serpent, killer leeches, dangerous lumber mill machinery, and terrible disguises would be suitable family entertainment is beyond me. It would have been far wiser and more commercially viable to make an 8-episode adaptation of the charming animated film The Littlest Elf instead.
A comic actor played the wretched villain Count Olaf in a film of the Series that plagued cinemas nationwide in 2004 but his repeated attempts to steal the Baudelaires’ fortune are no laughing matter and I daresay that, in their attempt to profit from the orphans’ misfortune, Paramount have something in common with the despicable count.
Now, another misguided attempt at adapting this miserable material has been made and Netflix has gone to great lengths to replicate the tone of the film. They even managed to clone Emily Browning and cast her as Violet again under the name of ‘Malina Weissman’.
The film attempted to condense the plot of the first three books into 90 minutes but the series is stretching this sorry affair into three seasons, prolonging the suffering of these brave, intelligent children. And casting a real baby as Sunny and thus forcing her to be part of this unpleasant production surely counts as some form of child abuse.
There are no photos of the elusive Mr Snicket that aren’t blurry or taken with a long-zoom lens from a great distance but casting Patrick Warburton as Lemony was an ingenious move by the show’s creators since he looks and sounds the exact opposite of how readers pictured Snicket in their heads, which will confound the many police officers and government officials looking for him.
A lot of care has clearly gone into this adaptation, with its storybook-style set design, very fine direction from Barry Sonnenfeld, perfectly acceptable performances, and high amounts of of whimsy – a word which here means ‘silliness and humour added in order to make the cruelty of this whole saga less upsetting’ – but nevertheless, anyone who decides to give this show a try should take its theme song’s advice and look away.
As a wannabe TV critic with nothing better to do, I have a self-imposed duty to sit helpless and watch every minute of these unfortunate events unfold in front of me but there is nothing forcing you to do the same. Be wary and be watchful, but do not watch this. There are plenty of other Netflix Originals available to view that would be more wholesome and worthwhile than this one, like the cartoon with the talking vegetables or the one about the snail that goes fast.
Do not be fooled into thinking that this is all some elaborate attempt at reverse psychology and binge it anyway or you will soon be surely dismayed to discover that A Series of Unfortunate Events contains exactly what it says on the tin.
Square-Eyed 