In my younger days, I would manage at least a quick blurb for virtually every series I watched in these year-end posts. I abandoned this practice when I freed myself from the strictures of documenting everything, but I wanted to bring the format back for a specific phenomenon I've been noticing more and more: veteran shows whose initial promise slowly melts away over the years. Could this be a matter of having unreasonable expectations for middlebrow entertainment produced under capitalism? Could I be, gasp, doing the tweet? Perhaps. But the fact that there are still shows that don't succumb to these problems suggests that it is still possible to transcend our conditions and make great art, if only occasionally.
For Only Murders in the Building, the problem remains the same: an over-reliance on weekly developments of that season's mystery and the related need to cram one million guest stars into every season to keep that mystery going. This has crowded out most of the dramatic heft and character development of the main cast that made the early seasons so compelling. Severance first season left me somewhat cold, but the overlapping storylines of the second season pointed towards something more substantial. Would every character's rebellion against Lumon add up to something greater? Or would the corporate behemoth be able to divide (or even capture) the spirit of that rebellion to serve its own ends? The season finale demurs on this larger picture (focusing instead on a peculiar love triangle), which suggests it never really had anything remotely so ambitious in mind. And finally, there is The Bear. After the wonderous second season, I had hoped the third season might draw the story to a similar conclusion, where a successful restaurant launch eventually leads to the characters slowly departing in a sort of mirrored progression. Instead, we are now two seasons into the new normal of a perfectly fine (if not quite funny enough) hangout show, where entire plotlines can (and should) be read as a meta-commentary on the impossibility of making something as good as it exists in your mind. As a great philosopher once said, the best life never leaves your lungs.
Given the constraints of the macabre format of its titular game, it would have been impossible for Squid Game to live up to the legacy of its first season or the promise of its second. Once you've killed off all your characters once, the second run just can't pack quite the same punch. What's more is that very little in the closing run of this season added to the thematic clarity of prior chapters (unless you think having a baby as a contestant is profound in some way). But regardless of the inherent shortcomings of going back to the well once again, Squid Game is still Squid Game. Nothing else on the small screen has ever conveyed the spectacular insignificance of inevitable death quite as well as it did.
Pluribus is, more than anything else, a rich text. What you do with that text is up to you. And more importantly, what Vince Gilligan and company decide to do with that text is yet to be seen. But for now we have one of the most precisely crafted debut seasons in recent memory, the self-assuredness of which is itself enough for greatness. However, if you want to start thinking about how the peculiarity of the show's phenomenology relates to...well, everything, here you go:
#9 - The Righteous Gemstones (HBO)
I've gone back and forth over the years on just how good the latest McBride/Hill joint is when compared with the rest of their oeuvre. Where I've come down on this matter is that Gemstones is something of an inverse of the best of the bunch, Eastbound and Down. While the latter orbits entirely around Kenny Powers (and indeed, draws its strengths from that singular focus), the most interesting character in Gemstones has been dead for the entirety of the show's run. This leads to a situation where the most compelling thematic overlay (how Aimee-Leigh's spirit guides the family in a way that her corporeal form never could) is something that is only acknowledged sporadically. This impossible balancing act between the sacred and the (extremely) profane left Gemstones slightly aimless at times, but the show still managed to harness the promise of its grace and its humor enough to be something special. May we all drift through the summertime air as freely and with as much grace as Uncle Baby Billy's dick.
#8 - The Pitt (HBO Max)
The idea of The Pitt as pure throwback is only half-true. That half—specifically, of the show as a propulsive storytelling machine that makes you want to come back week after week—is indeed as fundamental of a strength to medium as anything, and is the primary reason for the show's success. But it's the sprinkles of modernity that make The Pitt something all to itself. "Prestige TV" did not invent serialization, vulgarity, biting social commentary, or moral ambiguity. But in a loving nod to the way these things have became mainstream to the modern TV landscape, The Pitt manages to pick and choose when to deploy these tendencies in service of its larger appeal to tradition. How delightfully postmodern.
#7 - Task (HBO)
No show has yet to fill the Justified-sized hole in my heart, but Task has come closest. The specificity of place, the tortured souls on all ends of the criminal/lawman spectrum, and the characters who actually seem like they might be real people who exist outside of the show all hearken back to basic cable's finest delivery mechanism for pure, unadulterated pulp. What makes Task work towards these ends is less the snappy Elmore Leonard-esque dialogue of the former, and more a rich visual storytelling that conveys the necessary character beats through more subtle means. This might make it sound like they prestige-ified a type of show that didn't need to be, but rather, I think Task demonstrates that the endless tinkering of post-Golden Age TV will continue to bear fruit for viewers who have the patience to sort through the rubble.
#6 - Common Side Effects (Adult Swim)
Speaking of "endless tinkering," can I interest you in an animated crime caper that slowly morphs from a seeming parody of prestige drama to an earnest appropriation of its best parts? Sure, the silly show about the mushroom faeries ultimately pulls its narrative punches in favor of setting up future seasons, but there is still enough character-building and genuine pathos to put most straightforward dramatic series to shame. And the animation style which may initially seem off-putting is slowly revealed to be the best way to tell this story about a whole spectrum of lovable (?) misfits.
#5 - The Lowdown (FX)
I will be honest that, while I was enjoying my time with Sterlin Harjo's follow-up to Reservation Dogs, it didn't quite hit on a deeper level until the finale. Halfway through that episode, a temporary inversion of power (depicted with an uncanny callback to a previous episode) leaves Ethan Hawke's "truthstorian" with the understanding that the nature of the truth he seeks is more profound than the literal truth he seeks to print in the paper. A wonderful moment of serendipity at the end of a fine but flawed shaggy-dog* story seems like the epitome of what the fifth-best TV show of any given year should be.
*Fun bonus fact: when editing this, I looked up this term in the dictionary to see if actually applied to the show, and I can't imagine a better confirmation than this:
#4 - Pluribus (Apple TV)
Pluribus is, more than anything else, a rich text. What you do with that text is up to you. And more importantly, what Vince Gilligan and company decide to do with that text is yet to be seen. But for now we have one of the most precisely crafted debut seasons in recent memory, the self-assuredness of which is itself enough for greatness. However, if you want to start thinking about how the peculiarity of the show's phenomenology relates to...well, everything, here you go:
#3 - The Chair Company (HBO)
Aside from the obvious, what really tickled me about the latest Robinson/Kanin project is how the "previously on" montage reveals little if any of the show's peculiar humor. That one can regularly summarize The Chair Company as a straightforward dramatic narrative while everything else about the program (including the very titles of the episodes) depicts something far more bizarre is a special kind of alchemy that few other similar shows manage to pull off. While this tendency towards actual drama can be read at least partially as a satire of modern TV, I tend to take a larger, more constructive view that some combination of absurdity and earnestness is the best way to address a modernity that is, after all, equal parts absurd and earnest. The titular business isn't really out to get you, but in a more non-specific and all-encompassing way, it kinda is. What better way to depict that uncanny reality than this?
#2 - Andor (Disney+)
The ultimate in "leave them wanting more," the second and final season of Andor scrapped the original plan for four additional seasons and smushed everything into four three-episode "movies." And somehow got even better! As much as I want to (and easily could) spend several paragraphs raving about the show's characterization and thematic resonance and the like, Andor's achievement in deploying it's formal structure is so remarkable and precise as to render everything else a secondary contribution to its greatness. In contrast to the painstaking detail of the robbery and prison break of the first season, we instead see the development of the resistance in a series of vignettes, which are as remarkable for what they leave out as what they depict. By seeing the sometimes sudden changes in characters and situations in different moments in time, the moments we see are granted heightened importance, while the rest is left for the viewer to impart. This dialectic creates a tension that fundamentally can't be resolved within the text itself, which in turn recasts the relatively straightforward morality play of the original Star Wars trilogy as a story of the eternal nature of struggle. Which makes the series as a whole highly relevant to our time while being fundamentally timeless. What a delight.
#1 - The Rehearsal (HBO)
