Hey y’all,
It’s that time of the year again: the time for lists. Here’s mine for the year in television. Here’s to hoping 2017 doesn’t swallow us all whole like so much anemic movie candy. Love you all, happy holidays and thanks for the readership.
Nick.
10. Lady Dynamite. It’s about damn time Maria Bamford got a show of her own. The Midwestern-born comedienne has been a favorite among stage comics for some time now, and she’s made memorable small screen appearances in everything from “Louie” to Comedy Central’s “Kroll Show”. Netflix’s loving, bizarre and brilliant “Lady Dynamite” is the first time that Bamford has had the spotlight on her exclusively, and watching her play a fictionalized version of herself dealing with mental health issues, modern-day sexism in the entertainment industry and the pitfalls of her dysfunctional family life was, somehow, a complete joy to watch. Tonally, “Lady Dynamite” (produced by “South Park’s” Pam Brady and “Arrested Development’s” Mitch Hurwitz and often penned by Bamford herself) is not that dissimilar from “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” which also takes the vantage point of an emotionally unstable female protagonist and uses her unpredictable flights of mental fancy to inform the story, usually through fleet musical digressions and increasingly absurd non-sequiturs. “Dynamite,” though, is a more barbed, bitter show than “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”: it confronts the darkness that the CW program mostly skirts over and brings it to the forefront. That’s not to suggest that the show is a wallow. In fact, most of the time, “Lady Dynamite” is surprisingly sweet, and admirably nonjudgmental in its depiction of a rather serious neurological condition. Special mention should go to the wonderful Fred Melamed, who plays Bamford’s clueless but well-meaning manager, and Ana Gasteyer, who embodies a kind of foul-mouthed, borderline-insufferable Hollywood insider with such accuracy that you may actually feel your skin crawl every time she appears onscreen. Trust me, it’s a good thing.
9. Baskets. Damnit, there’s just something about “Baskets,” isn’t there? It’s too genuinely sad to be a quote-unquote comedy, and yet its detours into surrealism are too knowingly absurd to classify it as a drama. The show commits to batshit-crazy ideas — like casting stand-up comic Louie Anderson as a cloying, obese stay-at-home mom, or having an entire episode take place in Paris — and yet executes them with the utmost sincerity. Like some warped love spawn of Louis C.K.’s huggable misanthropy (not surprisingly, C.K. is listed as a producer here) and the comedy of bottoming-out that’s been mastered by Todd Solondz, “Baskets” is a conspicuously sour brew that nevertheless lingers in the mind like a kind of pleasurable nightmare. It’s the story of Chip Baskets: a small-minded man whose dreams of becoming a professional clown have led him from a prestigious clowning school in France back to the doldrums of the ruddy patch of Central California earth that he calls home. The show’s portrait of blue-collar life is occasionally risible (Arby’s jokes are so 2013), but the show is also thoughtfully written — laced with subtle bits that pay off in ways you’d never imagine — and acted with a kind of warm, welcome gravitas. Galifinakis does clueless desperation better than just about anyone, and as his turn in Innaritu’s “Birdman” showed us, he’s been hiding his dramatic chops from us as well… until now. As for Louie Anderson, he turns a character that might be an easy punchline on a less sympathetic show and transforms Mama Baskets into a flawed, somehow lovable human being. Call it crazy, call it offensive, call it whatever the hell you want. I’ve got another word for it: magic.
8. Game of Thrones. By now, the arguments against “Game of Thrones” are familiar to the show’s many fans and its vocal legion of detractors. It’s (occasionally) portentous. It often relies on rape and brutal violence as plot devices without considering their larger cultural implications. Some of the acting is… well, not great. In the interest of playing devil’s advocate, I’d like to propose what some might consider a radical theory: if “Game of Thrones” sustains the brilliant quality of its best seasons, I believe that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’s epic fantasy drama has the chance to join the ranks of the all-time great HBO programs. Blasphemy? Just watch “Battle of the Bastards” from this last season: perhaps the most awe-inspiring and formally impressive depiction of large-scale combat ever to be seen on any television program, ever. Or observe how showrunners slyly dialed back on the borderline-misogynist sexual violence of season five to give us commanding female protagonists with real agency (Daenerys Targaryen subverting the authority of the men who attempt to repeal her power, Sansa Stark finally enacting glorious, cathartic revenge on the sniveling predator Ramsay Bolton). In addition, “Game of Thrones’” sixth season offered audiences more of the elements that drew so many of the show’s fans to it in the first place (gorgeously written dialogue, strong central performances, a scope of unimaginable immensity). At this point, a lot of what needs to be said about “Game of Thrones” has been said — that’s what happens when a show this ubiquitous gets dissected and picked apart the day after an episode airs. But very few shows have attempted to do what “Game of Thrones” effectively does — consistently compelling epic fantasy that also weaves prescient, troubling themes about today’s world into its narrative — and almost none have done it with such dazzling panache.
7. Fleabag. “Fleabag” is one of those shows that doesn’t quite hit you with its cumulative emotional impact until you’ve absorbed all six brittle, bitter and brilliant episodes of it. Once it does hit you, though, the shit is like a cold slap of water to the face after a weeklong Whiskey bender. Phoebe Waller Bridge’s pitilessly funny comic tragedy does for feminists-behaving-badly comedy what “The Foot Fist Way” did for the man-child farce: namely, exposing its nasty underbelly, whilst operating in the intersection of cringe comedy and true hurt. There’s nothing endearing about the promiscuous and self-destructive behavior of “Fleabag’s” title character, and one of the show’s bravest moves is to acknowledge the emotional collateral damage often wrought by these kinds of freewheeling, self-absorbed personalities right out of the gate. And yet the show also has a surplus of soul, which becomes apparent in episodes like the one where Fleabag joins her sister on a silent spiritual retreat, or in the devastating finale, where our main character finds herself confronted with the full weight of her thoughtless actions. It’s becoming more and more common for television comedies to treat clinical depression as their principal subject (see: “Bojack Horseman” and “Horace and Pete,” both also on this list), but there’s something about the tart prickliness of “Fleabag” that is addictive in its anguish. Like its eponymous heroine, you really shouldn’t like “Fleabag” but you probably really, really will.
6. Vice Principals. Like a spitball lobbed at the polite sensibilities of HBO viewers for whom the tepid “Divorce” constitutes something genuinely edgy, Jody Hill and Danny McBride’s rough-and-tumble comedy “Vice Principals” isn’t here to make friends. Like all of Hill and McBride’s collaborations, including their brilliant redneck tragedy “Eastbound and Down,” “Vice Principals” is a serrated critique of toxic masculinity that’s more designed to make you wince than, you know, laugh or anything like that. To be sure, there’s a lot of behavior on this show — swearing at children, vandalism and assault played for queasy laughs, dosing a high school football team with acid — that’s so appalling that you might hate yourself for giggling even once. And any other year, “Vice Principals” would just be another brutally funny, mean-spirited black comedy about two delusional assholes whose respective personal implosions threaten to destroy everything good around them. But in this dark year — the year of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, the rise of Trump and the alt-right — “Vice Principals” feels gloomily prophetic. The fact that the show’s creators toggle recklessly between begrudging respect for their antiheroes give-no-fucks abandon and understandable human scorn for their base hatred puts “Vice Principals” in the same category as Jody Hill’s brilliant and underseen “Observe and Report,” another sad-funny, downward-spiraling examination of unchecked male aggression in small-town America. If nothing else, watch the show for Walton Goggins’ inspired and seriously unhinged turn as a mincing schemer who plays sinuous second fiddle to McBride’s typically oblivious macho dickhead.
5. Horace and Pete. I never got around to doing a formal write-up for “Horace and Pete”. Part of the reason for that is because I’m not sure that I could label “Horace and Pete” as a “television show” and feel good about himself later. In 2010, Louis C.K. changed the landscape of half-hour comedy with the revolutionary “Louie,” without which “Girls,” “Better Things” and countless more shows simply would not exist. Six years later, and T.V. itself has changed a great deal. Thankfully, so has Louis C.K. “Horace and Pete” is the farthest thing from a “Louie” rehash that you could imagine: it’s a kind of downbeat, gorgeous experimental filmed theater piece that marries the rawness of a Eugene O’ Neill play with the old-school artifice and biting postwar satire of something like Norman Lear’s “All In the Family”. It’s a show with a defiantly analog sensibility that nevertheless listens to its characters kvetch about the issues of our day (Trump, Clinton, gay marriage and the 21st-century dating ritual all get a verbal workout here). Whereas “Louie” was generally amorphous in its nature, changing countless times in tone and timbre over the course of five excellent seasons, “Horace and Pete” is comparatively traditional in its execution, and unsurprisingly morose if you’re familiar with C.K.’s view of the world. The show operates more comfortably as an outright melodrama than it does as a comedy, but C.K.’s thrilling marriage of the two elements nevertheless resulted in some of the most genuinely poignant T.V. moments of the year. The show also features some of the year’s best standalone acting, in either film or television. Whether it was Edie Falco’s unloved wife chopping limes behind the bar, Alan Alda’s hilariously hateful Uncle Pete waxing poetic about the downside of cunnilingus or young Pete (Steve Buscemi) finally accepting his ghastly fate in what is perhaps the most heartbreaking individual television scene of the year, we ultimately came know this ragtag, flawed group of people all too well — as intimately as we’d come to know the barflies at our local watering hole.
4. Bojack Horseman. For how much longer can we safely consider “Bojack Horseman” a comedy? Sure, the show is still one of the small screen’s most devastatingly funny experiences, filled with venom-laced cherry bombs aimed at egomaniacal actors, callow showbiz hanger-ons and the whole delusion-fueled rat race of Hollywood (sorry, Hollywoo) itself. And yet, increasingly over the show’s three-season run, the show has put funny on the backburner and settled for simply devastating. Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s animated satire is, among other things, a lacerating examination of how depression can cripple an otherwise healthy and productive life cycle. The penultimate episode of “Bojack’s” newest and best season, “That’s Too Much, Man!” depicts a disturbing, drug-fueled bender that culminates in an unexpected death that is all the more shattering for being so understated. And yes, all of this sorrow and self-loathing would be pretty hard to take if the show wasn’t so colorful, funny and inventive at every turn. Whether it’s depicting Bojack acting as a father to an abandoned seahorse while attending the underwater premiere of a new movie in an episode that’s staged entirely without dialogue, or the unflappable Yellow Lab Mr. Peanut Butter saving the citizens of Hollywoo from a “pasta catastrophe,” “Bojack Horseman” is, in its third season, still taking borderline-reckless chances with form and structure in a way that most comparatively “innovative” dramas (looking at you, “Westworld”) wouldn’t dare. God bless the addictive melancholia of “Bojack Horseman,” and all the Tinseltown takedowns and superlative animal jokes that come with it.
3. Transparent. Every year that “Transparent” airs, we as a collective television-watching audience get a little bit closer to the undeniably flawed and resoundingly human Pfefferman clan, the semi-functional family that serves as the nucleus of Jill Soloway’s instant-classic Amazon series. Many have complained that the Pfeffermans aren’t exactly easy company — narcissism and self-regard and passive-aggressive tendencies and all — and some question why Soloway would want us to invest another five hours in their various exploits? The answer is simple: no other show on television goes as psychologically deep as “Transparent”. No other show marries black-and-blue humor with real pathos to such stunning effect. No other show is as generous to its unreasonably talented cast, all of whom are continuing to fine-tune their performances, all but inhabiting their Pfefferman personas like a second skin. And no other show of 2016 — not even the two I’ve listed at numbers 1 and 2 on this list, respectively — can you teach you as much about yourself as this show can. Like the kvetching, fretting, endlessly lovable Pfeffermans, this is a show you have to be patient with. You have to acclimate yourself to its emotionally rocky passages, its scenes of humiliation and ecstasy and discovery. It’s a show you have to surrender yourself to. The backlash will surely come now that “Transparent” has proven itself to be an Awards season heavyweight, along with fellow Amazon comedy “Mozart in the Jungle”. And yet, like the family that exists at its center, while this isn’t necessarily a show that’s easy to love… once you open yourself up to it, there’s just nothing quite like it.
2. Atlanta. It’s rare to come across something in the television landscape that feels genuinely new. Even highly enjoyable urban sadcoms like “Master of None” get their basic DNA from Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” while Louis C.K.’s flagship FX show — probably the last great paradigm shift in half-hour comedy that I can think of — remains the brilliant prototype that spawned at least a half a dozen sad-funny imitators. Donald Glover’s beautiful, ridiculous and haunting “Atlanta” is genuinely new. It feels like a different, thrilling chapter in the ongoing saga of behavior-based comedy: a left-field detour into pure weirdness that nevertheless doubles as a culturally relevant and light-footed commentary on being young and black in today’s America. The series follows the loose exploits of three principal characters — Glover’s put-upon protagonist Earn, a prideful A-town MC named Paper Boi and Keith Stanfield’s indispensable Darius, perhaps the most intriguing supporting character of any show this year — as they hatch get-rich-quick-schemes, smoke herb and get into trouble in Atlanta’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. And yet where an individual episode will go is anyone’s guess. “B.A.N.” envisions the African-American equivalent of a Charlie Rose talk show, but interspersed with bugged-out cereal commercials that sneak in commentary on police brutality and systemic racism. “Nobody Beats the Biebs” portrays Justin Bieber as a petulant, peacocking narcissist whose public profile shifts because, in the show… well, he’s black. The villains of the third episode, “Go for Broke,” happen to be none other than Atlanta’s hottest trap group, Migos. I’m not sure how “Atlanta” managed to be baffling, brilliant and almost futuristic in its hyper-modern Afrocentric perspective all at once. All I know is I’m glad it exists and season two can’t come soon enough.
- The Night Of. I’m not gonna beat around the bush: HBO’s had a fucked-up year. “Togetherness,” one of the network’s best shows in a while, was cancelled, while “Vinyl” turned out to be the year’s most expensive flop. “Westworld” has, for the moment anyway, picked up the hour-long drama slot that “Vinyl” had vacated, and it’s certainly gotten better in the second half of its season, even as it continues in its apparent quest to transform HBO into the small-screen equivalent of the Marvel Comics Universe. However, none of these admittedly worthwhile shows that I’ve just mentioned hold a candle to “The Night Of,” which deserves mention alongside HBO classics like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “Deadwood”. It is a show that earns those lofty comparisons; whose sense of place is so pungent, whose psychological portraiture is so vivid that it provokes an almost physical visceral reaction on a week-to-week basis. Richard Price, author of gritty, panoramic neo-noirs like “Lush Life” and “The Whites,” brings his formidable knowledge of the streets and gutter argot to the chilling tale of Nazir Kahn: a Pakistani kid whose fateful rendezvous with a dark-haired beauty sees him standing trial for murder and awaiting his sentence in the modern-day purgatory that is Riker’s Island Correctional Facility. With career-best turns from John Turturro as the achingly human, eczema-plagued lawyer Jack Stone and Michael K. Williams as Naz’s cutthroat prison protector, “The Night Of” would still be a crackling, note-perfect crime drama in any other year. But in the year of atrocities like the cases of Freddie Gray and Dylan Roof, “The Night Of” also stands a righteously damning indictment of our broken criminal justice system: those who enable and benefit from its fallacies, those who fall victim to its machinations and those who, like Stone, are fighting a losing battle in the name of human decency.
Runner Ups: “Marvel’s Luke Cage” was probably the most interesting and fleshed-out of Marvel’s Netflix efforts to date, though the show lost me after they killed of Mahershala Ali’s mesmerizing bad guy Cottonmouth. “Easy” saw independent filmmaker Joe Swanberg ably flexing his creative muscles in the form of a laid-back anthology comedy about love and sex in Chicago, while “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” continues to make the case for the insane comic gifts of lead actress Rachel Bloom (also, how about those song and dance numbers?). “Togetherness,” I will miss dearly for its clear-eyed humanism and the outstanding quality of its acting and writing, and I think I’m one of the few critics who genuinely liked the raucous, boneheaded rawk epic “Vinyl,” in spite of its many problems. “Stranger Things” was a fun piece of warmed-up 80’s cheese, even though the nearly unanimous idolatrous praise that the series was met with is still somewhat baffling. “Black Mirror’s” terrifying third season was its best yet and Tig Notaro’s “One Mississippi” was a heartfelt elaboration of the stand-up comic’s uniquely empathetic, off-kilter worldview. “Mozart in the Jungle’s” third season was a fun, frothy romp that was a clear improvement over its first two seasons, while “Better Things” with Pamela Adlon recalled a gentler, kinder, undeniably more feminine “Louie”. The dark, gripping “Rectify” continues to be one of the more underrated dramas on television while “Goliath,” in spite of its many familiar elements, featured one of Billy Bob Thornton’s best performances in years. “Mr. Robot’s” second season got off to a promising start before torpedoing into laughable self-seriousness and incomprehensible plotting, while “South Park’s” serialized take on the rise of Donald Trump and internet troll culture was only slightly more ridiculous than the reality it was supposed to be lampooning. “Documentary Now!” on IFC perfectly imitates the suffocating self-seriousness of independent documentary culture with wit and goofball energy to spare, while Issa Rae’s “Insecure” emerged as one of the most appealing and dramatically engaging additions to the 2016 comedy lineup. “Silicon Valley” is still a well-oiled machine, though its third season ultimately didn’t live up to the delirious highs of season two, while “Late Night Tonight With John Oliver” managed to help make sense of the flaming dumpster fire that has been the 2016 year in review.
Worst Show of The Year: “The Bastard Executioner”.
Call me crazy, but I was always kind of a fan of Kurt Sutter’s “Macbeth”-on-Harleys macho crime drama “Sons of Anarchy”, even when the show was clearly spinning its wheels (see what I did there?). Sure, “Sons” was dumb as all get out, and the violence and sadism were cranked up to such cartoonish levels in the last three seasons that it seemed as though showrunner Kurt Sutter was in a one-man race to out-gross-out himself. But the show knew what it was, and it featured fine acting from Katey Segall, Ron Perlman and yes, even Charlie Hunnam. With all that said, I was fully ready to enjoy his proper follow-up to “Sons”, which turned out to be a sluggish, deadly-dull attempt at a “Game of Thrones”-style fantasy turkey called “The Bastard Executioner”. “Game of Thrones,” for all its problematic elements (most of which are tied to the fanboy culture, which prioritizes theorizing, trivia and witless displays of sex and violence above all else) is still a show that is grounded in recognizable human emotions, even if those emotions generally happen to be fear, lust and righteous glory. “The Bastard Executioner” didn’t even get those three basic tenants right. The show’s many sex scenes felt like tepid Skinemax outtakes, the violence was truly repulsive when it wasn’t outright boring (anyone who remembered a human head floating in a vat of chili in one of “Son’s” better episodes is going to be disappointed by the mock carnage that this show offers) and the whole miserable enterprise was acted at the amateurish level of a middle-school theater production. In spite of “Bastard’s” resounding failure at FX, Sutter still has another show in the network’s pipeline: one which will examine the hardcore Latino biker culture in the form of the Mayans Motorcycle Club from “Sons”. If “The Bastard Executioner” is any indication, Sutter should stick to what he’s proven to be good at.
And like Porky Pig says, “that’s all, folks!” See ya in 2017.
