Best TV of 2017

'Bojack Horseman' (season 4)

Who would have thought this concept wouldn’t get stale? That we couldn’t possibly delve deeper into the fuckupedness that is our titular anti-protaganist’s psyche? Well, it turns out that mental illness and narcissistic neurosis is complex, multi-faceted, rooted in broken familial and social histories, and watchable. It also happens to be fertile ground for absurdist comedy. Now in it’s fourth season, we’ve come to expect Bojack’s new lows (this time helping find out who his daughter's mother is, while battling demons with his own), Todd’s zany antics, Mr. Peanutbutter’s zanier antics (and Diane’s willingness to indulge them) and Princess Caroline’s latest career turn, dating nightmare, and life crisis. We’ve also come to expect -usually mid-season - there will be a 30 minute episode that will somehow manage to be epic in scope, saturated with social commentary, and rife with so many references and throw away one liners that it will demand immediate re-watch. This season’s version of that comes in the form of a sunken home during a celebrity-filled political fundraiser, where the candidate’s support for fracking comes back to deliver on full irony. Satire is not on short supply in these politically troubled times, but Bojack rips into issues like gun control, feminism, media, and political fickle-ism like a surgeon who might actually be a sturgeon. This season even manages to get darker, with flashbacks into Bojack’s family history that that may or may not destroy you as it has you in the good kind of tears as well. Best.

'The Deuce'

For those of you who were not enthralled by David Simon’s follow-ups to The Wire, in the form of slow character and jazz-infused burn Treme or true-life housing saga Show Me a Hero, The Deuce is the sequel you have been waiting for. Wire fans will squeal with delight as almost ALL of their heroes are paraded on screen in the first few episodes to play minor variants of the characters they were on your beloved. It’s actually quite distracting at first: Oh, hey there’s Cheese, being a tiny bit less obnoxious, Slim Charles is cool and cold, Sobotka is almost exactly Sobotka (and somehow looks younger and in better shape?), but oh, now D’angelo is a cop, yet he still knows the game. Oh hey, is that Chris now, but in pimp form?

Yeah, but it’s so damn good anyways. When it’s not the stellar performances (especially from Maggie Gyllenhal and James Franco, not to mention the above referenced retro cast), it’s the absolutely stunning job they did of recreating the trash strewn grit and tawdryness that was Times Square in the early 70s. It’s also the explication of a sex business that operated much like the drug trade in The Wire: a negotiable matter of fact that was more or less regulated rather than outright prevented. It’s a world that is shown with fully realized people who work the streets as community, all interlocked. And it’s about a developing industry that literally dominates the internet today. The Deuce is as much American history as Lincoln or Saving Private Ryan is, and deals with a time and a place that, like it or not, very much informs a large part of what we consume today: sex, and sex as business as usual. And the sex, of which there is plenty, is well, never really sexualized, if that is at all possible. This is a job, as Gyllenahal’s Candy explains to her teenage client, and sometimes the job means getting beat up, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes it means long hours, mundane details, and above all else, numbers. Simon’s sex trade workers are diverse and dynamic, all with their own motivations, and so are their employers (or as Richie the communist pimp puts it, the one’s who don’t control the means of production). Maybe best of all is James Franco’s startling performance as a set of twins, where his true talents shine past a small difference in facial hair.

The Deuce, much like the comedy Atlanta last year, is about a world and the people in it, but more exclusively here about how it functions as an illicitly capitalist community. It doesn’t exotify or mystify, it only invites you to come live in it for a ten splendid hours.

'Better Call Saul' (season three)

What a downright treat it has been to have seasons six, seven, and eight of Breaking Bad, with characters just as compelling, plot lines just as involved, and photography just as evocative. Moreover, what a surprise it has been in seeing just how nuanced the transformation of one of its characters from relatively good to what we know will become delightfully reprehensible. Through five seasons we watched Walter White sink lower and lower, and now we see the same with Jimmy McGill, though it may be even more poignant here, as where Walt’s morphing seemed slightly out of necessity (he was dying), Jimmy’s is done in part due to his own nature, and we see those he cares about the most suffer because of him, but also due to their own very real flaws.

Yes, Jimmy’s love centers around two people in the lawyering community, and yes very tragic things happen to both of them this season, both of which contribute to Jimmy’s eventual transformation. But here it’s not necessarily about what happens, but how it happens, and more importantly, how Jimmy is a catalyst for those events. And of course there is the fun of watching Jimmy be Jimmy, conning and conniving his way through the negotiation that is life, dealing with the elderly people that he loves and yet is willing to manipulate terribly for his own means.

On the Mike / Nacho side of things, we are blessed with the return of Gus Fring, and get more of the BB crime side of stuff and watch these characters lives be pulled in closer to the era of WW and JP. Best of this is the careful and methodical direction of the processes all of these criminals go through to out smart one another, and BCS is Hemingway in scope in what it does without any dialogue, whether it’s Mike taking apart a car piece by piece to find a tracking device, or Chuck taking apart his home piece by piece to serve his own mental illness, the latter of which is some of the most painful unspoken action you’ll see on TV this year.

So yeah, cool show, yo.

'The Leftovers' (season three)

The Leftovers is the closest a TV show has ever come to being a classical and tragic painting for me. When I started recommending this show to a few people, they did watch it and did not like it. Well, specifically a certain type of person didn’t like it, and a certain type did. The ones that did not then became convinced that something was very wrong with me, that the only reason I could relate to these deeply disturbed characters was because I carried some primordial angst within me and that I desperately needed to relate it to other people. Then I thought, hm, that may be true, but so be it. Season two still stands as one of the best seasons of television I have ever seen, and the episode "International Assassin" as one of the best episodes of TV of all time. But ratings be ratings (and actually, story be story here) and this year was to be the last season of Leftovers, and yes, I think it should have been, from a story telling POV. There’s only so much time you can spend with characters who are perpetually lost, miserable, or dealing with the mental fallout and anguish of having lost a chunk of the world’s population with no explanation.

And about that. A lot of the complaints about The Leftovers had to do with wanting to know what happened, without conceding that the show is not about what happened, but what would happen to people if. To that I answer, as Roger Ebert used to say, it’s not what a story is about, it’s about how it’s about it. And how it is all about what The Leftovers is about. Here, eight episodes is probably enough to bring our beloved sufferers arcs to a close, shot with crisp, colourful portraits of the Australian outback and infused with that heart-wrenching score. The Leftovers bleeds with emotion, and yes, viewers may find a catharsis in it that they might not be having in real life. The wounds here are fresh and open, but there are some howl-inducing moments of humour as ideas of science, religion, alienation, and orgy-ism collide across an international landscape, including a magnificent cameo from both an actor and a theme song from a beloved 90s sitcom.

Saying this is one of the best shows of all time is no hyperbole. It carries us through soul, wit, compassion, and most important, illustrates and explores an existential sadness and disaffection that marks our society, ‘Sudden Departure’ or not, with emotional intelligence and empathetic poetics. That, plus outstanding acting (particularly by its leads Justin Theroux and Carrie Coon, but also by its outstanding supporting cast), careful camera, on the nose soundtrack, and the subtle (or not so subtle, re: place your penis on the ID reader) winks of humour deliver top quality art on screen.

'The Handmaid's Tale'

Continuing with the perpetual misery, for those of you who are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s instant classic and masterpiece, yes, The Handmaid’s Tale is bleak and despairing. It also gripping, beautifully shot, extremely well acted, and has a surprisingly fun soundtrack. But I’m always a sucker for dysotopia and societal critique (Children of Men is my shit, yo), and THT offers this in generous doses. So yes, it’s set in a future where a fundamentalist Christian regime (Gilead) has come to power in a polluted and increasingly infertile America, and now controls women’s bodies and assigns them status within it’s social hierarchy. There are Wives (green), Aunts (brown), Marthas (grey-blue), and Handmaids (red). Wives are the upper crust, betrothed to the power figures in Gilead, Marthas are domestic servants, and Handmaids are fertile servants who’s only function is to provide children for the families of leading society members. Fun. The Aunts (the only class of women allowed to read) ‘train’ Handmaids and prepare them for their function. Cattle prods and maiming are employed. There are also men known as Angels, Guardians, Eyes, and Commanders. I’ll spare you their details, or how the ceremonies of conception and birth function (rest assured, they are creepy).

At the center is Offred, (Elizabeth Moss, lock winner this year for every best actress award for TV that they have) or “Of Fred,” (her dry humping master), who guides us through her past and present with a haunting whisper of a voiceover. The tone of this narrative is key, for it gives us the sense that she suspects that they are not only monitoring her every move, but also her thoughts. As the plot unfolds, we learn of all of the deliciously elicit things that occur in this society (as of course they would), and get glimpses of how it all fell down, but more delicious are the things that occur within Offred’s household and how she tests and negotiates her power in a society that attempts to strip all of it away. Through all this there are hushed, subversive conversations among the Handmaids and increasingly complicated relationships between Offred, the household wife Serena Joy, Commander Fred, and the mysterious and handsome driver, Nick (aren’t we all mysterious and handsome though), which imbues the whole affair with a dreadful and much more rapey Downton Abbey type dynamic. Most reviews will tell you that it is too hard to binge watch THT, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

'GLOW'

GLOW (Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) is one of those precious sleeper gem comedies that are immensely watchable and relatable. With an all 80s style, soundtrack, and general feeling of Reagan era malaise, a group of struggling women come together under the tutelage of a burned out coke head older man (played with startling authenticity by Mark Maron) to form what would become a short lived phenomenon, the above mentioned organization.

Leading the cast is probably the best comedic actor on television right now, Alison Brie, who deserves an Emmy for her collective performances on Community, Bojack Horseman (as Diane), and now this. There’s no shortage of 80s nostaligia on TV, but GLOW manages to capture the gritty streets filled with giant old beater cars with no power steering (cranking the wheel endlessly around and around) and sports a non-cliched period soundtrack. The stars are of course the women (glows), and yes there is a OITNB type diverse cast, each with their own realized background. Standouts other than Brie include ‘Cherry Bang’ and Brie’s nemesis (both in the ring and out), Debbie. Joyous all the way, the script has fun with 80s cold war and terrorist stereotypes (as much as the WWF did at the time), and plays the dynamics of it’s characters off each other with authentic poignancy. Probably the most fun you’ll get from a pure comedy this year, closely seconded by…

Neat trick they did here, simultaneously delivering a Making a Murderer satire-mockumentary and a prescient social critique of the pressure and expectations we thrust upon young people. As the story of who drew 27 dicks on 27 teacher’s cars in the school parking lot unfolds (I’m smiling as I write this), we come to actually care about the characters involved, with usual cast of snobby princess, jock douche, girl next door, try-hard teacher, prude teacher, and especially perpetual dipshit and stoner Dylan, our main suspect. More surprising though is how engrossing a mystery it is while capturing all of the hilarity and angst that is teenage life, all of it now documented on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook (which prove invaluable to the filmmakers as they work to get to the bottom of the mystery of the dicks). By the end, you may have bust a gut laughing in your bed with the computer propped up on your belly, but you’ll probably also marvel at just how thoughtful and observant that last seven hours was.

'Godless'

Finally a new Western series. While it may not be Deadwood (one of the Holy Trinity that are the best shows of all time) in that it sports a more conventional good guy vs. bad guy high noon style story, and lacks the grit and moral ambiguity of its characters, Godless manages to score with a ensemble cast of frontier women who run a town that is on its last legs, while a blind male sheriff wanders off on the hunt for the region’s local baddy (another good turn for Jeff Daniels) and a mysterious stranger rides in to lend a hand to one of said strong frontier women. Where it does succeed where Deadwood didn’t is in the pure majesty of its cinematography (Deadwood only ventured out of its dark, menacing interiors and the apparently costly set that was the main thoroughfare of the town a handful of times), and has those kind of wide open grandiose country shots that make you wonder how there is still that much open space in America in these times. Sold as a feminist Western, critics and audiences complained how it still centered on a conflict between two men, so if that is a failing, the success is in the charisma of the performances that those two give, and the collective stalwartness and complexity of the women as they battle to run their town in the midst of the coming showdown. Perfect storytelling it is not (as we find the set up of a whole community of black people a major let down in the story), but as a good Big Sky country Western shoot ‘em up with some bad ass men and women, I’ll take it.

'Big Little Lies'

My final entry was almost an afterthought (I decided I needed to binge it for this list after all of the critical hype it received this year), and even as I reached the second to last episode, I was sure it would not appear here. That is until I came to the devastating finale that simultaneously answered the big ‘whodunnit’ question of a murder in a mostly white, rich community centered on housewives and their children, while also supplying me with one of the most satisfactory and pleasantly surprising twists of the year. And the twist here is not in what happened, but how it happened, and how it’s characters act intelligently, thoughtfully, and very much the opposite of how this demographic has been portrayed on screen both small and large for like, ever. Nicole Kidman may have won the Emmy for her performance as a victim of domestic abuse (and kudos to the script for not making it a cartoony monster sort of abuse, but rather servicing the more complex and ugly aspects that violence can manifest in a marriage), but the real star here is Reese Witherspoon, who commands every scene pitching battles and nudging her way through everyone to get what she needs, while displaying true heartfelt vulnerability in private moments. The story involves the aftermath of a murder in the opening shot that is not revealed until one of the very last shots, and maybe too cleverly interviews all of the gossipy community while cutting it with the events of five or six women (and their children) that leads up to said violence.

On the way, we meet all of the parents and their children, a new to the neighbourhood single mom with a shitty past, an seemingly perfect ex-lawyer with a seemingly perfect husband who actually beats her, a controlling divorcee struggling with her kids growing up while her ex husband flaunts his beautiful young wife in front of her, and not to be outdone, Laura Dern as a career driven ‘bitch on wheels’ kinda sort. Battle lines are drawn between the mothers on the first day of school with an incident involving two children, and as the conflict escalates the possible targets and motivations for murder are aplenty. But more than what happens is how these characters communicate their agendas and work towards solving (or a exacerbating) their problems with one another. And as stated above, while I was in and the performances were fun to watch, I was wholly convinced that I would not be moved by the dilemmas of rich white wives until I found myself in tears in the closing shots.