20 'Wolf Hall' (PBS)
BBC
The brilliance of this adaptation of Hilary Mantel's historical bestsellers is that it's strictly for the hardcore — Wolf Hall concedes absolutely nothing to people who don't get instant nipple-wood for BBC-spawned costume psychodramas. If you don't already have fierce opinions about the court politics of King Henry VIII, don't even bother — honey pie, you're not safe here. Mark Rylance lives it up in the dirty 1530s as Sir Thomas Cromwell, the self-invented game-of-thrones schemer who pulls the strings in King Henry's England. But Claire Foy steals the show as Anne Boleyn, the treacherously seductive Joan to Sir Thomas' Don Draper
19 'This Week Tonight With John Oliver' (HBO)
Eric Liebowitz/HBO
Week after week, atrocity after atrocity, Oliver continues to bring it, proving that when it comes to noticing really fucking obvious truths about America, it helps to not be American. As a rumpled Brit outsider, he can get away with being brutally honest in a way that most of our commentators can't match, just because it's trickier for us not to lose our tempers over these things. Oliver never crosses the line into moral hectoring, which is a harder feat than it looks, even when he's schmoozing with Edward Snowden or mocking the internet as a misogyny superhighway. Preach on: "If you're thinking, 'Well, come on, that doesn't seem like that big a problem' — well, congratulations on your white penis. Because if you have one of those, you probably have a very different experience of the internet."
18'Other Space' (Yahoo)
Yahoo/Sony
Paul Feig's first TV show since Freaks and Geeks, except it's on a much lower moral plane, with a starship of American idiots lost in the cosmos. Other Space takes place in 2105, after the devastating war between the U.S. and Switzerland. The Cruiser's crew is on a mission to map the universe, or something, though the only food that's survived the journey is a year's supply of fudge and nobody wants to be there: "I've spent 90 per cent of my life in a mucus pod, but this still feels like a waste of my time." I love how cheap and grubby it is — oddly evocative of the long-lost 1970s sitcom flop Quark, starring Richard Benjamin as an interstellar garbage collector. Best find: Conor Leslie as the ship's computer Natasha. Best gag: the alien who can only communicate with humans via Matthew McConaughey quotes.
17 'Archer' (FX)
Archer had it all this season: jet-set espionage adventures to family dysfunction; the best "sister's wedding" episode of all time to the best "everybody gets stuck in an elevator" bottle episode of all time; and Christian Slater, an extremely welcome boomerang from last year's "Archer Vice" experiment. (It foreshadows his excellent new Mr. Robot as well as the fact that he gave the only half-decent performance in Hot Tub Time Machine 2. The McConaugh-ssaince was fun — now bring on the Slater-ssaince!) "How, either in this universe or any of its infinite parallels, could I possibly embarrass you?" "By dressing like a maitre d' on a dinner cruise for gay Republicans?" "That's a thing?"16 'Daredevil' (Netflix)
Barry Wetcher/Netflix
The most film noir of the Marvel superheroes finally gets a screen treatment worthy of his legend. By day, he's Matt Murdock, idealistic (and blind) defense attorney in Hell's Kitchen; by night, he fights crime as the hooded Man Without Fear. Daredevil pulls off the elusive achievement of appealing to both hardcore fans and total dilettantes. As Daredevil, Charlie Cox remains opaque behind his shades, banishing Affleck-in-spandex memories for good, with help from Deborah Ann Woll and Rosario Dawson. And has Vincent D'Onofrio ever been more terrifying? Doubt it.
15 'The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' (Netflix)
Eric Liebowitz/Netflix
At first it was easy to mistrust the instant binge appeal of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, since the new Tina Fey/Robert Carlock creation naturally fed the world's massive 30 Rock craving — it's the TV equivalent of buying a Stewart Copeland solo album because you're sad the Police broke up. But it really holds up over time, like Kimmy herself. Ellie Kemper is touchingly vulnerable as a refugee from Indiana just beginning her adult life after 15 years locked in an underground bunker, by an insane preacher who (brilliantly) turns out to be Jon Hamm. (Why exactly did anyone think a sitcom premise this out-there would fly on NBC?) She steps into the real world with "very distinct scream lines" and curiosity about what Hanson have been up to lately. And she gets crazy lucky with her ace support system — Tituss Burgess, Jane Krakowski and Carol Freaking Kane.
14 'Louie' (FX)
KC Bailey/FX
Louie specializes in momentary flare-ups — the motorcycle crash, the Parker Posey romance, the Miami bromance — although every Louis C.K. fan would pick a different flare-up as his peak. (My money's on Miami, which isn't as famous as some of the other Louie storylines, but for me remains the one that lives up to every ambition the man has ever claimed.) Last season was his post-funny experiment, ditching any kind of comedy for quizzical introspective mini-dramas. So this is his post-post-funny season, not so much going back to laughs as anxiously tiptoeing around them. When that twentysomething in the kitchenware store informs Louie how obsolete he is in the new world — "We're the future and you don't belong in it, because we're beyond you" — all he can do is agree.
13 'Big Time in Hollywood, FL' (Comedy Central)
Jesse Grant
This sorely underrated loser-core comedy finds the spiritual link between Wayne's World and Breaking Bad — which I'm not sure anyone else was really looking for. Alex Anfanger and Lenny Jacobson are two twenty-something slob brothers who live in their mom's basement in Florida, making their crummy YouTube videos, dreaming that they're the next Quentin Tarantinos. But when their parents start charging rent, the dudes stumble into a crime spree that turns into their hilariously awful action flick Monkey Largo, starring Rico the killer chimp. The best use of Ben Stiller sinceZoolander. The best use of Cuba Gooding Jr. since his Oscar speech. The best use of Michael Madsen since Vengeance Unlimited.
12 'Game of Thrones' (HBO)
HBO
I have no idea who's dead at this point, and there's no purpose even guessing, since you can't trust Game of Thrones not to move the goalposts. (Fact: If you throw someone off the roof and they die, then you jump off the same roof but you don't die, that is cheating. Ask Galileo.) This season was a mixed bag — it had its moments, almost all involving Tyrion, Daenerys or Arya, but it got bogged down in pompous subplots and ineptly dramatized misogyny. (Regardless of whether you think GoT's creative team should be depicting sexual violence, they've repeatedly demonstrated that they're incompetent at it.) It got to the point where I actively enjoyed the dippy lust-in-the-dust Dorne scenes because at least they were camp — I'll take "You want a good girl, but you need a bad pussy" over "The dwarf lives until we find a cock merchant" any day. Save us, Arya
1'Silicon Valley' (HBO)
Frank Masi/HBO
A huge leap forward for an already excellent comedy: "I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world where somebody else makes the world a better place better than we do." The tech-geek world's start-up culture has been satirized mercilessly ever since it began — some of the jokes here could come right from the Nineties Mr. Show sketch where David Cross plays the mogul who invented the delete button. ("That's a lot of mistakes, or as I like to call them, ‘opportunity-stakes.'") But Silicon Valley feels fresh because it's about a timeless vibe of twenty-something desperation, where mannish boys veer between total arrogance ("We're walking in there with three-foot cocks covered in Elvis dust!") and humiliating defeat — the kind when you go begging for favors from people you've called a "shit-ridden anal wasteland" or a "choad-gargling fuck toilet."
No comments:
Post a Comment