Top Shows of the Decade

So, in the past couple weeks, there have been a few “top tv shows of the decade” lists released. The most notable lists include The Hollywood Reporter, Paste Magazine, and The A.V. Club. Basically, here’s how the lists top tens shake down:

Hollywood Reporter:           Paste:                                                A.V. Club:

10. Modern Family              10. Mad Men                          10. The Shield

9. Lost                                9. Buffy the Vampire Slayer     9. Deadwood

8. 24                                  8. Battlestar Galactica             8. Lost

7. 30 Rock                            7. Lost                                  7. The Office (U.K.)

6. Mad Men                         6. The Sopranos                     6. Breaking Bad

5. Damages                          5. The Office (U.K. and U.S.)  5. Mad Men

4. The Shield                        4. The Daily Show                 4. Freaks and Geeks

3. Curb Your Enthusiasm    3. The West Wing                   3. Arrested Development

2. The West Wing                2. The Wire                              2. The Sopranos

1. The Sopranos                   1. Arrested Development         1. The Wire

As always, I’m gonna have to side with the ol’ AV Club on this one. Even more than I like their list, though, I hate the Hollywood Reporter’s. No Wire? No Arrested? No Breaking Bad? Modern Family after half a season? Pretty rough. So this got me thinking, and even though I haven’t seen as many shows as these critics (my most notable unwatched items are probably Mad Men and The West Wing), I threw together my list:

10. Lost: ABC

Guilty pleasure doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel about Lost. The writers cheat, trick you, and jerk you around, but damn it’s fun to watch.

9. 30 Rock: NBC

The show wasn’t really on my radar for a while, until I started seeing episodes after watching The Office. Now I’m lucky to cast the end of Jim and Pam’s happy adventures before turning into NBC’s funniest show since Seinfeld.

8. Curb Your Enthusiasm: HBO

Just saw the end of the most recent season. It was pretty funny, but still a bit disappointing after last season’s ending. Having said that, seasons 3 and 6 were about as funny as TV gets.

7. South Park: Comedy Central

This show was always funny, and at times downright brilliant for so many years. It’s a shame that Parker seems to be phoning it in over the past two or three seasons.

6. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia: FX

All the aforementioned lists love Damages and The Shield, but I’ve picked another FX show. Two years ago, Sunny would have been in the top 3, but a couple of lackluster seasons have lowered it in my eyes.

5. The Sopranos: HBO

The show was groundbreaking and provided some truly great drama, but I still have a lot of bad things to say about this “masterpiece.” It is certainly the best acting and cinematography I have ever seen on the tube, but the writing miffed me at times, and the ending was terrible in my eyes (not specifically the infamous final scene, but the entire second leg of the final season).

4. Frisky Dingo: Cartoon Network

Stop the Presses! What?!? Most of you have probably never heard of the short-lived, serialized superhero spoof from Adult Swim, but find someone who has, and they’ll probably quote your ear off.

3. Breaking Bad: AMC

While the rest of the world watches Mad Men, I’m eagerly awaiting the next sneak peek of BB. Bryan Cranston’s acting is more than deserving of his two Emmys, and the character arcs over two seasons have left fans drooling for more.

2. Arrested Development: Fox

What more is there to say? This was the funniest, most clever comedy I have ever seen. I’m still finding jokes I’ve never noticed on fourth and fifth viewings. AD was the perfect combo of subtle humor and slapstick. It was brilliantly written, acted, directed, and damn near everything else (marketing comes to mind as a flaw). Quite frankly, this is the show that made me realize TV could be as funny as the movies…

1. The Wire: HBO

… still, I didn’t have much faith in dramas. Then I saw the Wire.

Nuff said.

Sons of Anarchy: Service

Sons of Anarchy has come a long way in two years. Don’t get me wrong, the first season was good, but its focus was incredibly narrow, and the plot line was fairly simple. Last night’s episode, “Service,” however, has as much going on in one hour of television as any episode since The Wire ended. It would be hard to address everything without breaking it down story by story, so here goes:

Jax Going Nomad: Nope. This was sewn up pretty quickly, as was to be expected after Gemma revealed her secret to her family. Jax tells Clay in the first scene of “Service” that he isn’t going anywhere. Just when we begin to wonder if their beef is truly over, though, Jax starts talking hostile takeover with Opie, which leads me to believe that the feud will continue once this matter is resolved.

Revenge for Gemma’s rape: We get a great scene in the beginning where Jax – while holding his infant son – explains his plan for Zobelle’s crew: Kill ‘em all. Unfortunately, with so many eyes on SAMCRO, a bloodbath isn’t exactly plausible. They decide that they need to find a weakness to exploit. In a plot turn that seemed a little rushed, Jax spies Zobelle working with the Mayans without Westin’s knowledge. The Sons decide the best way to split up LOAN may be to inform the hard core separatists of their leader’s dealings with other races.

Gemma: Gemma really sinks into some self-loathing after telling the boys about her incident. She tells Tara her fear that Clay won’t want her anymore. She makes an almost successful pass at a drunken Tig. She chats up a cigarette-bumming priest outside of a support group meeting. She works away her sorrows in the office of the body shop, until the final scene when Clay, on the advice of  (a still drunken?) Tig, comes to take her home. She refuses, saying she has work to do. Clay says “fine,” and heads for the door. Just when all seems lost, he slams the door, staying inside, sweeps the desk clean and props her up on it. “I want my wife.”

Tig: What a great Tig episode. Who would have ever thought the guy who talked about fucking corpses in the first few episodes would be such a great character? First, he is driven to drink by the news of Gemma’s rape. When he goes to collect the guns from her house, she makes a pass at him, and they go at it in the hallway. He starts to notice the family photos that they have broken, and calls it off. Driven by booze and guilt, he confesses to Opie that he murdered Donna. This was bound to happen. In TV, the other shoe always drops, but rarely does it happen so suddenly. Tig understandably tried to pass the buck to Agent Stahl, but still took a savage beating from Ope. In the end, he gives Clay the best advice he could possibly give regarding Gemma, saying: “The thing that hurts her the most is thinking you don’t want her anymore.”

Opie: Is there any doubt left that Opie is the moral standout of SAMCRO? He handles the news of Donna’s murder by Tig and Clay with more poise than Jax did. He gives Stahl a fucking earful at gunpoint, but lets her live. “The Outlaw had mercy.” He remains in the club, even doing Clay a favor by requesting that nobody else learn the truth. As if this isn’t enough, he mends fences after the Piney situation, which I’ll explain later. I wonder about possible character shifts now that Opie has read John Teller’s manifesto. One thing’s for sure; if Jax takes over SAMCRO and becomes the flip-side of Clay, Opie will be the flip side of Tig – his unofficial right hand.

Piney: This was a bit odd. Piney has known for a while that Clay was responsible for Donna’s death, so why did he wait until Opie found out to take a shot at the Prez? Was he trying to save face with his son? Did seeing Ope’s reaction set him off? I’m not sure. I even thought he was on a suicide path until they showed him outside of the club during the last meeting. Good thing he’s a terrible shot, or shot would have really hit the fan. He walks out of the clubhouse telling Clay to let him know how things will be handled. Clay says “don’t ever come in this clubhouse,” then pauses for what seemed like forever. On second viewing, though, there is no pause at all, just “… without your cut.” Piney: “It won’t happen again.”

Chibs: The Chibs-the-rat story-line took one episode to materialize, and one to dissipate. Hopefully they can put this on the back-burner for a while, as the season’s final two episodes are shaping up to be pretty busy.

Scenes from the next episode: Holy hell, shit’s going down! SAMCRO appears to be teaming up with the Niners and the Asians to battle the League. Should be pretty damn good, as the second-to-last episodes usually have the climaxes of the seasons.

Sons: B+

Michael Richards…too soon?

So I caught the tail end of Curb last night, and, though it was pretty funny (Larry ends the episode explaining to a doctor that he may have contracted a rash from the pussy of the nine-year-old he’s been seeing, I’ll let you guess the rest), I have to commend the writers and Michael Richards for their ballsy move of addressing his racist tirade.
When Leon is tasked to pretend to be a survivor of the disease that Richards has, he shows up at the actor’s door dressed like a member of the Nation of Islam. Richards answers the door “Oh, God. It’s been three years. I made a mistake. Please don’t hurt me!” Funny stuff. When Leon’s charade is exposed, though, we get this beautiful scene, which just might be Richards’ redemption.

Or it might just be a bit too soon. You decide.

Best Character Deaths, 5-1

Here we go, as promised, the top five character deaths in TV dramas over the past decade.

#5. Anthony Cooper/The Real Sawyer/Locke’s Dad – Lost. Maybe the most cathartic death in TV history, the death of the con men who ruined the early lives of Lost’s two richest characters was perhaps the best ever killing of a character who the audience really wanted to see die. The build up was quick from the point where we knew who he really was to his death, but it still felt good to see Sawyer notch a “victory.”

#4. Jane – Breaking Bad. This one was definitely about Walt, the man who – if he didn’t kill her – certainly let Jane die. Walt stood idle as she choked on her own vomit while using heroin, and her death devastated Jesse. Apparently, the show received a lot of criticism saying that this would make Walt no longer relatable to the audience, but, as showrunner Vince Gilligan pointed out, he was already pretty evil. If people still sympathized with him at that point, that’s a tremendous credit to the show.

#3. Omar – The Wire: Omar was a mythic figure on The Wire. He was the only character on the show not enslaved by an institution, and he was the only man who seemed invincible. He seemed on top of the world after season four, but he had the handicap of having loved ones (Butchie, Reynaldo), and it drew him back to Baltimore and ultimately got him killed. The phrase “not with a bang,  but with a whimper” does not even begin to describe Omar’s passing, which goes to prove that the game is out there, waiting, no matter who you are.

Fucking Kenard…

#2. Ralph Cifaretto – The Sopranos. Raplhie was only around for two seasons, but damn he made them count. Joe Pantoliano was downright brilliant in the role, and he played the man-we-love-to-hate perfectly. He was fucked up, and some fucked up stuff happened to him, but damn, was it interesting. Then there;s the death itself, the most brutal, physical death I’ve ever seen on television:

#1. Bodie – The Wire. You can say a lot of great things about Calvin “Bodie” Broadus’ death: J.D. Williams acting was as brilliant as he ever was. The scene was shot immaculately. The build up to it was perfectly paced. It was the perfect cap to perhaps the best season of television ever (the only real contender being the the previous season of the show). All that aside, the difference between the way I felt about Bodie after he killed Wallace in season one and the way I felt about him when he died a few years later is still the most astonishing feat I’ve ever seen a show accomplish. What’s more amazing is that they did so without changing Bodie a bit, they simply changed our perception of him by showing more and more of how this environment works. True genius:

Sons of Anarchy – Going Nomad?

So this is the first episode of Sons that I have watched in real time, and I’m so glad I caught up. I called this development a mile away, but it was still amazing to watch.

After an hour of tonight’s episode, I was commenting on how weird it was. Then I remembered that it was a 90-minute episode, and the last thirty minutes definitely redeemed it.
For a few weeks, I had been predicting that Clay and Jax would continue to drift apart until they reached a breaking point. Gemma would be forced to reveal the secret of her rape in order to keep them together, and that’s exactly what happened. Still, it was amazing to see the two men’s reactions, and I can’t wait to see next week’s episode.

Also, it was nice to see Opie and the porn star finally get together officially.

I can’t wait for next week’s episode, “Service.”

Sons: A-

List – Greatest Character Deaths

So I’ve been a way for a while, and none of the shows this week particularly moved me (though 30 Rock and Sunny each had their moments). I’ll be filling the time with the first of a series of lists that I’ll be doing to bridge the gap over the holidays. This list will cover the best TV drama character deaths since 2000 (the only period of Drama with which I am very familiar).

SPOILER ALERT – many of these characters had limited runs because they were killed off, details will follow.

#10. Agent Kohn – Sons of Anarchy – The guy was crazy, we hardly knew him, but we knew he was crazy. This was definitely a death more about the killer than the killed. Jax Teller, until then portrayed as a kinder breed of biker, pulled the trigger, committing a (probably just) murder, and shattering any illusion of innocence that he had left with Tara.

#9. Alex – Lost – Another death that wasn’t so much about the person dying. This one focuses on her father, Ben Linus, who attempts to call the bluff of a man with a gun to her head, saying “I stole her from as a baby from an insane woman…she means nothing to me.” He’s lying, and his gamble fails.

#8. Richie Aprile – The Sopranos – Richie Aprile was always a thorn in Tony Soprano’s side, and just when it got to the point where Tony had to whack him and create a giant rift with his sister/Richie’s fiance, Janice gives him a pleasant surprise.

7. Wild Bill Hickock – Deadwood – True, we never really knew Wild Bill very well. And we never even knew his killer, Jack McCall, very well. But Deadwood’s first four episodes set up Wild Bill Hickock to be a major character; an invincible dude who fought for good in the camp. Then they killed him, proving nobody is invincible in Deadwood. Well done.

6. Wallace – The Wire – Wallace was a good kid. He did what he was told by his bosses, and he suffered the consequence of guilt. Then he did what he was told by the police, and had his entire life taken away from him. Then his best friends did this:

Coming soon: #s 5-1 (expect more from The Wire)

Secret Girlfriend’s absolute awfulness

Not too long ago, The Onion had an article announcing that the nadir of Western civilization was upon us. I laughed at the humorous take on consumer culture in America, but still shrugged it off. After seeing Comedy Central’s new show Secret Girlfriend, though, I’m starting to believe that the story was less of a farce, and more of a prophecy.
Comedy Central built up a certain amount of capital with things like Chappelle’s Show and the once brilliant South Park, but they’ve used of it up pumping out crap like Mind of Mencia, The Jeff Dunham Show, and Chocolate News. These shows, however, are masterpieces compared to Secret Girlfriend.
Here is (from what I can tell) the premise of the show. It’s a show about you. It’s shot from your point of view, but you never speak, affect the plot, or interact with anyone or anything in any meaningful way. Excited yet?
You just dumped your crazy, and crazy-hot ex, and now you have a new (secret?) fling. Your two inexplicably moronic friends lead you around on their “adventures.” These are basically going around to clubs and beaches so that your POV can get a good look at some T&A. This makes up about 75% of the show.
I’m told that the first person aspect of the show is viewed by some as the next frontier of television. It could be perhaps, if it actually changed the show in some way or provided some form of interaction. Instead, it merely serves as a cheap gimmick to reel in those dumb enough to think that this is what a show about them would be like.
The show basically attempts to be a comedy-porn hybrid, but winds up being to comedy and porn what a candy-shotgun hybrid would be to candy and shotguns. The comedy isn’t good enough to laugh at, and the porn isn’t good enough to, well…

Now I’m certainly no prude. I loved the Curb ending last night where Larry held on for dear life on a woman’s love handles. I love Sunny and South Park and many other shows that deal with deplorable subject matter, but there’s an important distinction here: Those shows are funny and creative, while SG works under the assumption that hot girls and dick jokes are all you need.

In summation, the sooner this insufferable suckfest is cancelled, the sooner human life can finally begin its slow upswing back toward respectability.

Curb – Wendy Wheelchair

Finally, an episode that makes me excited to post. The midway point of this season of Curb was hands down their funniest effort this year, and ranks among the best episodes in the show’s history.
Basically, Larry inadvertently asks out a handicapped woman named Denise. They don’t hit it off at first, but Larry comes around once he sees the perks of having a handi-capable friend. Unfortunately, he loses her number, and while searching for her, he meets another disabled woman and winds up bringing her to the private concert to which he had already invited Denise. Hilarity ensues.
Oodles of physical comedy aside, what made this episode stand out was that it was hilarious from start to finish, a rarity for Curb. Fans didn’t get to see the return of the Seinfeld cast, but they got something arguably better: More Leon.
Too much to cover in a little ol’ blog post, but some highlights include:
- Larry’s acrobatic attempts to make out with Denise in her chair.
- The expressions on the faces of Larry’s friends when they notice he’s dating a disabled woman.
- Jeff’s advice to Larry on what to do when both women show up at the concert: “Enjoy!”

Best episode of TV this fall: A+

Show Round-Up: 10/15-10/16

Here’s a brief rundown of the shows from the past two days, from best to worst.

1. 30 Rock.
The season premier was well worth waiting a few extra weeks. From the moment Alec Baldwin welcomed us to season 4 (turns out it was Jack Donaghy welcoming us to the new restaurant “Season Four”), this episode was some mighty fine TV. Liz and Pete’s lame attempts at covering up their search for a new cast member, everyone’s total ignorance of Josh, and Steve Buscemi’s guest appearance as the worst PI in history made for a great starts to the year.

2. Always Sunny – It’s been a year of predictable endings for Sunny, and the streak continued. Did anyone really not know that the box would have a big H on it? Still, the guys filling out Charlie’s dating profile was classic. “What are your hobbies?” “Magnets!”

3. Modern Family: Another strong effort from the gang of Modern Family. Shelley Long was great as the long lost mom. Phil Dunphy restraining Gloria was a great lost in the shuffle gag. Ed O’Neil’s phony outrage over Mitchell’s plan was another high point. I’m glad the show is still using the interview clips a lot.

4-5: South Park/The Office
Not particularly bad offerings from either, but it’s becoming clearer and clearer that they are each past their prime. The undercover cop as a prostitute was a gross-out joke simply beaten to death, even for South Park.

Checking In

Well, another pretty uneventful week, here. Jim and Pam got married, blah blah blah. Sunny had some pretty good physical comedy (Frank gargling beer), and Gail the Snail had to be the highlight of the week.

Mostly, though, I wanted to say how thoroughly dissapointed I was by Curb this week. No Seinfeld cast. No Cheryl. But at least we get… Christian Slater? Av Club like it, but I don’t even think it would be fair to say that this episode had its moments. It had its moment. Singular. Larry yelling “shut the fuck up” to Sammie from his bed made me laugh. Other than that, the doctor story line fell flat, as did the old flame bit. Also, NO SEINFELD CAST!

Enough said.

30 rock returns this week.

yay.