The Best* Shows
*that not enough people are watching
I'm not going to waste your time talking about stuff like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Fargo and Masters of Sex, because everyone knows about them and their brilliance is well-documented. Instead, I want to cover three shows that, according to the ratings and award-consideration, very few people are watching, but deserve just as much attention as the aforementioned group.
The Americans (FX)
The Americans is both a gripping spy thriller and engaging family drama. The show follows the Jennings, a pair of Soviet spies living near Washington DC trying to balance their job of counter-intelligence with their cover as a happy suburban American family. Very often, television shows will attempt to split their dynamic like this, with one aspect of the story that is thrilling and fun to watch (in this case, the spycraft) with the other half often becoming overly melodramatic in a way that drags down the overall quality (in this case, the family drama). This is not the case with The Americans. The scenes of the family dealing with the rebellious daughter as just as engaging as those of the spies infiltrating an American military base. The two leads (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) are electric, and with strong secondary players the cast knocks it out of the park. I want to give a special mention to young unknown Holly Taylor, who plays the Jennings' daughter and was the standout role in the second season.
I can't heap enough praise onto this show, and I have no trouble proclaiming the second season of The Americans the best individual season of the June 2013 through May 2014 television season. Yes, even above the seventh season of Mad Men, the first season of Masters of Sex and the final season of Breaking Bad. The show is just that good.
Orphan Black (BBC America)
A show that has rightfully blown up due to Tatiana Maslany's continued absence at the Emmy awards, Orphan Black is about a conspiracy involving a human cloning program. The plot is intriguing and the pacing is crisp, but the real draw here is Maslany. She juggles multiple roles with ease, slipping back and forth between the different clones effortlessly, very often making the audience forget that one actress plays six (plus) different characters. She is assisted by a mostly-competent cast, highlighted by Jordan Gavaris as her eclectic and hilarious foster brother. Occasionally, the show stumbles with some weak sci-fi tropes or the occasional mid-season drag, but overall package is solid and Maslany elevates it to a completely different level.
Hannibal (NBC)
Totally unexpected coming from notorious failure broadcast network NBC, Hannibal rivals many of the best basic and premium cable dramas in its production values, cinematography and directing. Hannibal follows the story of well-known fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter (played brilliantly by Mads Mikkelsen), adapting and massively expanding on his story as found in the Thomas Harris novels. Unlike the films and books, the show begins the story long before Hannibal dons the famous facemask and even before he is incarcerated, during his time as a psychologist consultant with the FBI. He is paired with unstable profiler Will Graham (a stand-out performance from Hugh Dancy) and together they investigate especially gruesome and unique murders.
I know that sounds like a standard shitty police procedural, and while Hannibal starts out with a procedural bent, the story quickly becomes so much more than that as the relationship between Hannibal and Will begins to develop. Even when it steers back into procedural territory, the atmosphere is unparalleled, combining beautifully shot scenes with amazing prosthetic and SFX work and a haunting score. The artistry present in the show is unmatched, which is no surprise coming from creator Bryan Fuller, best known for his work on Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies. The world of Hannibal is almost dreamlike in its presentation, and thus one needs to suspend their disbelief in some of the more.... exotic kills.
The Worst* Shows
*only counting shows of which I have seen at least half a season's worth of episodes
It's not worth it to talk about shows that everyone knows is bad, but I'd like to shine the light on a few shows that people seem to hold in high regard that are in fact completely awful.
Scandal (ABC)
I don't even know where to start with Scandal. The cinematography and editing are some of the worst in television, with an extreme overuse of weird transitions that (I assume) are supposed to be imitating a camera shutter. A single or infrequent use of this technique would be fine, but it's used for nearly every scene transition and is hugely distracting. The cinematography is also frustrating, as the scenes are often composed with large objects set in the extreme foreground, partially obscuring elements of the shot (example, shooting through a 6-panel glass door to the conversation taking place inside, but taking up a quarter of the shot with the wood framing between the glass). I get it, Scandal directors, you're trying to convey a sense of voyeurism and eavesdropping, but could you possibly do it in a more amateurish and hackneyed way? Ugh.
The writing is terrible as well, relying on the most convoluted conspiracy plots ever to heighten the drama of every scene. Every single scene has to be as dramatic as possible, and it comes off as an overproduced soap opera. If you ever tried to describe the plot of a single episode to someone unfamiliar with the show, they would probably look at you like you were a crazy person.
Despite this awful, awful writing, I have to say that the acting is generally pretty good. Tony Goldwyn is great as a skeezy POTUS, and Bellamy Young does admirably as his forever-embroiled-in-drama wife. Most of the White House staff is well cast and does a competent job with the material, but on the other side of the coin is the crisis management firm, which is populated by the biggest bunch of overactors this side of a Mel Brooks film. Scott Foley is the best of the bunch, but the crap he is given doesn't allow for much to shine through. The worst of the bunch, however, is lead Kerry Washington. She is atrocious, exclusively ping-ponging between a grand total of two emotional states: devastatingly upset and confident speechifying. There is no other way to describe the complete lack of range and nuance to her performance. Every other lead actress who was snubbed should be downright offended that such garbage was rewarded with an Emmy nomination.
Once Upon A Time (ABC)
Less bad than the others on my list, mostly because it doesn't take itself too seriously, but still bad, Once Upon a Time combines a bunch of fairy tales in really lame ways to cough out the most basic and boring, but at the same time ridiculously convoluted and insane plots to fill each season. The show makes no sense, makes up its own rules as it goes along (a big no-no for the fantasy genre), writes itself out of plot holes less effectively than JK Rowling, and tries its best to tie up every bit of insanity at the end of each season. The cast sucks (aside from Robert Carlyle, who singlehandedly makes the show bearable) and the dialogue is downright painful. I said before that the show doesn't take itself too seriously, but sometimes it does and every single one of those times ends up failing miserably.
I'm going to end with an actual, real line that was spoken during a very climactic battle scene that was going to decide the fate of a bunch of major characters: “Our mother taught me one thing. Never bring your heart to a witch fight. Something you’d know if she hadn’t abandoned you.”
If I hadn't started laughing uncontrollably, my brain probably would have collapsed from stupid.
Homeland (Showtime)
If Homeland had been on season, consisting of the first 11 episodes of season 1 and the final 2 episodes of season 2, it would have gone down as an uneven but ballsy and engaging show about terrorism. Instead, we got an awful knock-off Romeo and Juliet story with some awful acting and even worse writing. Don't get me wrong, Claire Danes is a great actress and she did some amazing things with her material in season 1, but everything that followed was an awful retread of the worst parts of the first season and it made me question the entire quality of her performance.
The three biggest themes of the show seem to be family, terrorism and mental health, and yet it somehow manages to say nearly nothing about any of those things. The high production values and the slick advertising campaign and mostly good first season have tricked us all into suffering through some terrible television that tries to pass itself off as high art.
Under The Dome (CBS)
The worst show on TV, no question about it. Not only is it a terrible adaptation of an excellent and thrilling novel, it's a terrible show in its own right. The writing is reminiscent of Lost if Lost were written by high school freshman, the acting is wooden and stiff, yet overdone and hammy at the same time, the visual style is bland, the SFX are a joke, the characters change completely from one episode to another, the story picks up and drops plot points almost at random, I could go on and on. I can't believe this show gets higher ratings than anything in my "best shows" list above. What a pile of trash.
The Walking Dead (AMC)
The Walking Dead is a show I want to like, but the show tries as hard as possible to make sure I can't enjoy it. It's uneven as all hell and vacillates wildly between watchable popcorn fun and poorly written awful character-drama and never once manages to find a solid footing, even after 4 seasons. Luckily, the show has transcended the normal-badness of shows like Scandal, Homeland and Under the Dome and into hilarious badness. Watching TWD with friends and making fun of it MST3K style is highly enjoyable, and makes a unique unbearable show into something worth watching.
Do not for a second think that I mean it's actually worth watching, because it's not. It's an awful mess with no direction and it can't even get the special effects right. It's a goddamn zombie show with awesome make-up but still uses terrible mid-90s CGI on almost everything.
It's so bad that it is hard to articulate how bad it actually is.
