Nick Bryan

TV

Best Of 2015 – TOP TEN TV

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Time for a blog post I look forward to writing every year – the Top Ten TV shows of 2015. This is the fourth time I’ve done this, so I decided to put the previous three years into a spreadsheet to see if I could spot any trends. Did I succeed? Stay tuned to find out. And if you want to read them yourself for trends, here is 2014 and this is 2013 and (over on The Digital Fix) lastly is 2012.

Caveats? Well, this is my opinion, based entirely on the effect a show had on me rather than any scale of objective critical quality, as shown in last year’s placement of True Detective. (Never even got round to watching season two.) And unlike my other recent top tens, this is going to be entirely shows that aired this year, since I watch enough TV to make that possible.

Lastly, this was fucking hard. Loads of great TV this year and a lot I thought was obvious top ten material ended up being edged out.

Right, let’s get on with it.

#10 – The Walking Dead

When putting together this list, I wondered how dominated by comic book adaptations it would end up, and we’re certainly starting off there – albeit a long-running horror show rather than superheroes. The Walking Dead’s quality has been up and down faster than the sad lives of its characters over the years, but since around season four, it seems to have found a level and stuck to it.

It’s not going any higher than this, as it still sometimes produces rambling episodes where characters talk in boring abstracts about the state of everything, but most of this year’s stuff has been good and exciting, some cool playing around with time and space in the start of season six, and I think it deserves the recognition. Well done, zombies.

Stats Corner: this is the first time The Walking Dead has appeared on this list since the first one in 2012 – took a while  to conclude the run of good stuff wasn’t a fluke. Did namecheck it in the honourable mentions last year though.

#9 – FlArrow (aka Flash & Arrow)

First (but not last) superhero show of the day! And there’s two of them – in order to reduce comics domination, I’m cheating by combining Flash and Arrow into one FlArrow entry. But I’ve always watched these shows in order as a single entity, and the increased cross-continuity between them lately as they set up their next spin off (Legends of Tomorrow, coming in January) only makes that leap easier.

This year saw some fun back-and-forth. Flash launched with a bright, endearing first season that made the concurrent Arrow storylines look a little stodgy, only for the balance to flip back in the latter half of the year. I think current Flash is having a difficult-second-album stumble, just as Arrow recaptures some form.

They’re not perfect, but might be the best effort yet to capture the mainstream superhero comics experience on television, complete with pointless crossovers and increasingly meaningless “death”. Interested to see where they go, hope the third show won’t prove to be one too many.

Stats Corner: again, only a quick honourable mention last time. First superhero show(s) ever to appear on these charts.

#8 – Game of Thrones

A drop for Game of Thrones after riding much higher in previous charts – what happened here? Honestly, I intended to put it somewhere in the top five, but other stuff kept getting ahead of it.

This particular year of Thrones included a lot of memorable storylines, as well as long-awaited hard advancement as Tyrion and Daenerys met up, Arya became proper scary, Cersei finally saw consequences to her actions and Sansa… well, Sansa just kept suffering, you can’t have everything. And Jaime and Bronn went on pointless holiday.

It was well-acted, steady drama, most scenes were watchable. With the notable exception of that lame Jaime/Bronn storyline, it was still among the better things on TV. It just no longer quite felt like one of the very best, to me.

Stats Corner: From #3 to #4 to #8. Sad times. Then again, it didn’t appear at all in 2012 for some reason, so it’s still up on that.

#7 – Daredevil

And back to the superheroes. Daredevil (or Marvel’s Daredevil if you’re #brand #conscious) is the first of Marvel and Netflix’s street-level superhero series, showing they can do something other than the broad Whedon-esque banter-action tone adopted for most of the movies and TV stuff beforehand.

For this first effort, it’s a fairly straight one-man gritty urban vigilante show, starring Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock, a blind lawyer with enhanced senses who fights crime by night. And has no superpowers to directly help him in fights, so he gets beaten up. A lot. Seriously, his superhero alias could  easiy be Bloody Pulp.

It’s straight-faced noir, a little slow-paced, sometimes gets lost in rambling subplots, arguably doesn’t fully kick off until the main baddie appears a few episodes in. But still, as someone who’s been reading mature-reader-superhero-comics for most of his adult life, Daredevil was hard to turn down. Great acting and atmosphere, good show, bravo, well done. Would have been higher on this list if it hadn’t been outshone by its follow-up series, which we’ll get to later.

Stats Corner: Not applicable, really. First ever Marvel show on these lists.

#6 – Orphan Black

You may be pleased to hear we’re now leaving comic-land for a while, with Orphan Black. BBC America’s clone-tastic sci-fi didn’t feature in last year’s Top Ten because season two…. I don’t know, it didn’t resonate as much with me? Felt like it lacked a clear plot, instead just played in the sandbox without much direction. Lots of exciting/heartwarming moments, but also a bit of meander.

This season really worked for me, though. The newfound male Castor clones put the story back into gear, there was a threat and a goal alongside enjoyable depictions of the many clones interacting, with the usual great acting by Tatiana Maslany behind it.

Orphan Black seems like a show that risks falling into gibberish conspiracy land with every season, but this was another year they avoided that pitfall and made an exciting story too. Cool.

Stats Corner: Debuted on #7 in 2013 before taking last year off, so this is its highest placing yet.

#5 – Last Week Tonight

As with Game of Thrones, spent a while trying to place Last Week Tonight. However, unlike its HBO stablemate, the problem was that the first positions didn’t feel high enough. John Oliver’s late-night news-satire show kept its momentum going this year, making even the driest issue seem funny and important.

I can’t mention Last Week Tonight in 2015 without linking to Oliver’s barnstorming report on televangelism, one of the best things I saw this year and probably pushing the show a place or two up the chart by itself. Yes, it’s twenty minutes long, but they’re such good minutes.

It’s sunk a bit from last year, because it’s mostly just consolidated existing success and perhaps run a little low on major internationally relevant topics to cover, but it’s no less slick and hilarious and I couldn’t put it much lower when I look forward to it so much every week.

Stats Corner: One of the first non-fictional shows to appear (last year, alongside Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle which hasn’t yet returned), Last Week Tonight hit #3 in 2014.

#4 – Doctor Who

This is the highest placing Doctor Who has ever managed in this chart. I like this show a lot, but try to sneak some objectivity in too and there’s no way I could pretend all of the last three years deserved to be top five. This time, though, with their ninth series, they cracked it.

This was Peter Capaldi’s second year as the Doctor and whereas last year tried to work the abrasive grimness a bit too hard, series nine was dark without being aggressive, keeping the fun alive along with the angst. Not every episode was a winner (come on, this is Doctor Who), but there are only two or three that weren’t either good or great, and that’s a feat they rarely manage. And the solo-Capaldi episode Heaven Sent is one of the best they’ve done in years, a stone-cold Moffat time-bending classic up there with Blink and Day of the Doctor.

The Christmas special was also a highlight of its type, managing a hard handbrake turn from fun caper to heartbreak with skill. So yeah, I’ve got no problem sticking it up at #4. This has been an impressively polarising run, with reactions going all the way from “Stunning return to form!” to “More utter garbage!” but I’m on the good side. Which is fine by me, reckon I enjoy that more.

Stats Corner: Who is the only show to appear in all four of these charts, stats fans, and its prior positions were #6, #8 and #7. So yeah, big jump this year. Hope they keep it up.

#3 – Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

From one somewhat polarising show to another – Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was a comedy created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Apparently rejected by the US networks before Netflix picked it up and you can kinda see why – this sits in a weird void – not enough clearly signposted jokes to be a sitcom, probably too flat-out silly to be a “comedy-drama”.

But in the new world of streaming TV, it’s gone straight to the viewers and they seem to have embraced it. The breezy charm alongside surprisingly edgy humour (mostly about race and abuse survival, but they hit a range of topics) is a difficult needle to thread and the fact that it mostly works is amazing.

A lot of that is thanks to the acting of Ellie Kemper, who somehow makes Kimmy’s fish-out-of-water forever-happy nature likable rather than insufferable.

There are weak spots (some of the subplots starring Titus are a bit uninspiring), but the finale brought it all together brilliantly. I find it very hard to not like this show, and it’s great to know there’s a second season coming.

Stats Corner: Nothing, really. Yes, Netflix shows are quite well represented on this list.

#2 – Hannibal

For the third year, Hannibal scores highly on this list, but fails to make #1. And this was the final season, so its day will never come. Bummer.

There’s been the usual hopeful gurble about a continuation in some form, but it fell quiet quickly and lead writer Bryan Fuller has moved on to an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, so that might be it. Still, at least they went out on an uncompromising rush of ideas, heading to Europe for some weird experimental storytelling in the first half of the season, then going back into serial killer busting territory for the tail end, adapting the Red Dragon story with Richard Armitage as the titular bastard.

I considered giving the top spot to Hannibal just because it won’t get another chance, but the experimental weird shit at the start got in the way of the storytelling a little. I always applaud trying oddness in mainstream TV, but still, gotta maintain critical standards. Nonetheless, the final half of the season got the balance right again, and the final episode felt like a good and proper ending, so here it sits at #2. Goodbye, Hannibal. I was a big fan(nibal).

Stats Corner: #2 in 2013, 2014 and now 2015. Consistent.

#1 – Jessica Jones

Yeah, maybe you thought we were done with the comics adaptations but here they are again, swiping the #1 spot at the last minute. The second series in the Marvel/Netflix street-superheroes project after the afore-mentioned Daredevil, Jessica Jones is more of a super-powered noir.

Krysten Ritter stars as Jones, a PI struggling with her traumatic past. Said past was inflicted on her by mind-controlling superprick Killgrave (a very creepy David Tennant) and, of course, it’s only a matter of time before she has to confront him again.

Featuring noir tropes, dark humour, often-unsympathetic main characters, an interesting and diverse cast, urban fantastical stuff, a willingness to go full grim when need be, a nuanced handling of difficult topics, glossy-yet-grimy production and a few fun nods to comics continuity, I thought Jessica Jones mostly nailed it.Like a lot of these one-story-stripped-over-13-episodes series, there’s a bit of sag in the middle. They could’ve done a bit more with her detective agency to fill that space, bring in some non-Killgrave cases for some worldbuilding.

Hopefully that’ll happen in season two – admittedly, they haven’t confirmed that’s happening yet. That’s kinda worrying considering Daredevil had a second run confirmed within two weeks of the first being released. But considering the huge amount of good reviews out there, it seems inevitable. Hopefully they’re waiting for the holidays to finish.

So yeah, best show of the year is a comic adaptation. Who’d have thought it? Very excited for at least two more series from this initiative in the next year (Luke Cage and Daredevil s2).

Notable Omission

Since I’ve been talking about continuity from previous lists a lot, I’ll cop to this – last year’s #1, Orange Is The New Black, isn’t here because I didn’t get round to watching the 2015 season yet. Sorry. Do feel a bit bad about this, probably more so than is necessary. I blame the lengthy period of no internet inflicted on me while moving house.

Honourable Mentions

As I said at the start, it’s been a tricky year to narrow down due to the sheer bloody volume of good TV – and that’s without even watching last year’s #1. So this section could get long if I let it, but I’ve tried to restrict myself to a few highlights.

First and foremost, yes, Agent Carter. This came painfully close to getting #10, I’m still a little in two minds about it, but I think I enjoyed The Walking Dead slightly more. Still, a great solid action series, pushed even higher by the greatness of Hayley Atwell as Carter herself. Oh, and its sister show Agents of SHIELD had a decent year too.

I also enjoyed Better Call Saul, the lawyer-focused Breaking Bad spin-off. It never felt essential and iconic in the same way the original did, more like a fun appendix for existing fans to savour, but it’s a very well made one. I’m there for season two.

Lastly, I’m going to throw Once Upon A Time a prize. Yes, there’ve been times when I’ve wondered why I even still watch it, but this year’s episodes – especially the opening half of season five – have been great. The writers finally located an area of the mythology they haven’t yet drilled to death, and explored it in interesting, dramatic ways. Woo.

I’ll make myself stop here – although the BBC adaptation of my #1 book Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell is also well worth your time. But yes, must stop typing, still have to proofread this and ram in some pictures, all before going out tonight.

And this is probably the last blog post of 2015, unless I have some huge productivity spurt, so Happy New Year! Hope it goes well for you.

Belated Veronica Mars Review II – Third Season and a Movie

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A month or so back, I blogged about finally watching the first two seasons of teen-detective drama Veronica Mars and said that I’d be back once I’d seen the final season and film continuation to let you know the whole enterprise stood up.

Well, I’m a man of my word and thought this would be a nice break from the current run of self-promotion on this blog (If you like Veronica Mars, why not try my teen-girl-featuring fun-yet-grim crime books!) so here is the follow-up post. The first two seasons of Veronica Mars were excellent, the first one especially is regarded as some kind of modern classic, how can they top that in the next-one-and-movie?

Be warned, we’re going straight into plot-review territory this time, so beware spoilers.

Season Three – The College Years

The murder weapon here was clearly Photoshop.

This season, Veronica Mars and many of her supporting cast go to university (or college as they confusingly call it in America). Fans of Buffy The Vampire Slayer may have trepidation about this move, as the one season of Buffy where they dealt with her going to uni was… not their finest hour.

The good news is: Veronica Mars manages to engage with higher education without making half the cast feel like hangers-on or engaging in weird season-long storylines about dull robots. Unfortunately, it’s still the weakest of the three seasons.

I’m still very much a fan of the perky, smart-arsed tone of the whole show, the whole crime-beneath-every-surface aesthetic and the immensely likable central cast (especially Kristen Bell, Enrico Colantoni and Percy Daggs III). A lot of the standalone episode mysteries work really well – university gives them a different and wider campus to draw on, whereas by the end of season two they seemed to be slightly struggling to make the high school setting keep working. A few of their attempts to engage with adult issues feel a little hamfisted, but at least that’s in keeping with the theme of teen-to-real-world transition.

There’s also a move towards shorter story arcs instead of the longer ones they’ve previously used, and although I can see the appeal (less padding, less obvious red herrings), they lead off with a Mystery Rapist storyline which never entirely works. None of the suspects seem that well developed, the investigation never feels quite concrete, perhaps because network TV prevents them from really diving into the nitty-gritty of sexual assault.

Also, the dividing of characters into clearly defined tribes, standard fare in the high school setting, starts to feel odd and limiting as they try to venture into less clear-cut subjects. Our supporting cast for the Mystery Rapist plot include cartoonishly boorish frat boys, OTT man-hating feminists and two other people. Spoilers: none of the broadly drawn caricatures dunnit.

Also, the many scenes in which angry feminists are portrayed as a tedious, irrational obstacle to reasonable, sensible Veronica play oddly in the farflung future of 2015 where feminism is more mainstream. Also, while we’re on gender – although the show definitely has a strong, developed female lead, most other female characters are a bit one-note. Mac has her moments but is barely in it for much of the season.

Duncan, come back, I’m sorry I was so mean!

The good news is, the second story arc is a straight-up murder mystery and back in this familiar territory, Veronica Mars shines like the star it was born to be. It’s not their most complex case, but it’s only five or six episodes long and is tidy, well-paced, twisty and good.

After that, the weird trail-off ending of a show that clearly didn’t get much time to prepare for its own death. There are five good if lightweight standalone episodes, including a particularly excellent Paul Rudd guest appearance, and then it just kinda stops.

Said final coda also gets Veronica together with Piz, a boring character. He’s played likably enough by Chris Lowell but lacks any remarkable motivations or backstory and seems like a minor roadblock in the ongoing Veronica/Logan saga. No objection to them trying to wring drama from Veronica’s love life but this attempt felt too half-hearted considering it was the pay-off for a whole season of set-up. God, it’s like Duncan all over again. (Or Riley, if we’re continuing the Buffy-season-4 comparisons.)

And then cancellation! And then (nearly a decade later) the movie! But first!

Season Four – The Alternate Reality FBI Years

I watched the short DVD feature trailing an averted fourth season timeline for Veronica Mars in which they fast-forwarded uni and picked her up as a rookie FBI agent. Well, that’s one way to deal with Kristen Bell increasingly looking older than nineteen.

Sadly, although Bell throws in her usual charm and there are a couple of fun scenes, it skews a bit too standard-FBI-procedural. I imagine I’d have watched if it existed, but didn’t feel like what I want from this show.

So, let’s move on to what they eventually did instead.

Veronica – The Mars-tian Picture

Photoshop allowed out on bail. Don’t leave town.

Back in 2013, a massive Kickstarter happened and Veronica Mars – The Movie was born. Of course, it starts with Logan coming to her and confessing something, because that’s how everything happens on this show. Has anyone counted up how many times Veronica Mars cliffhangered out on Logan starting some admission to her?

But I digress.

The movie drives Veronica into full-on noir territory, opting for the ‘She’s almost outta the game but gets pulled in for one last job!’ structure. There’s some fan-friendly touring of main and supporting cast, along with a nice little mystery and exciting resolution. It’s a sweet but not self-indulgent, exciting, funny send-off to the whole affair and makes up for the non-ending to season three.

Hell, even Piz didn’t annoy me that much, mostly because he was clearly undercut from the start, representing a boring life for Veronica to turn her back on. He was a bit flat still, but played his role just fine.

My continuity nerd aspect is annoyed we didn’t get any token lines to tie up dangling plots. Most specifically: season three ended with Keith and Vinnie running against each other in the sheriff election. Both those characters were in the movie – would it have killed them to throw in a line of dialogue saying what happened? Also, wasn’t Keith facing evidence tampering charges?

Oh well. It was a conclusive, atmospheric, slick ending, I’m glad they got to do it. There’s set-up for a possible continuation too, and if they swung a Veronica Mars revival TV mini-series similar to the X-Files, Heroes and 24 ones we’ve had lately, I’d be well up for that. But if this is the end, at least it was good and fitting.

And another show crossed off my shoulda-seen-that list! Back to slowly making my way through Battlestar Galactica!

Veronica Mars seasons 1 & 2 – Belated TV review time!

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Veronica Mars is a US TV high school crime show from the mid-2000s, in which a teenage girl in the crime-ridden town of Neptune solves a load of mysteries – both smaller ones to help out her classmates and big-time criminal incidents involving gangs, murders and the like. Helpfully, she’s the daughter of a local private investigator, so she knows the business. I’ve long been aware that this is a very well-regarded show, and as a fan of Buffy, I’d probably like it, but only just got round to watching properly.

I’ve now seen the first two seasons – the third will follow, along with the recent Kickstartered film continuation, but considering this are mammoth 22-episode American network TV seasons, I figured I can probably find enough to say about the first 44 eps to fill up a blog post.

So, let’s investigate this detective.

CRIME CRIME EVERYWHERE (ho ho I referenced a poem)

You can practically smell the mid-2000s.

Make no mistake, this is a strange show to get thrown into. The weird combined aesthetic of standard high-school drama and noir crime show leads to some weird disconnects. No, you’re not hallucinating, there really is a random motorcycle gang hanging around, their leader goes to school with Veronica and this is absolutely normal.

Still, the show commits to its dual aesthetic, giving Veronica a wry narration that doubles as a teen-drama diary-style monologue and the grim neo-noir internal thoughts of a PI. After the first ep, the crime keeps bubbling beneath the surface, so much so that you might wonder if there was constant gang activity at your secondary school as well and you were just too wrapped up in yourself to notice.

The dialogue is very much Buffy-esque super-clever-teenager style, with all of them (especially the main character) jabbering at high speed and referencing more pop culture than many TV shows’ entire Wikipedia pages. This conversational style has been used in TV and film for enough years by now that you know if you find it annoying. I love it, and Kristen Bell delivers the shit out of the quicksmart wisecracks.

It’s true that some of the case-of-the-week mysteries get a little formulaic. You can guess whodunnit a lot of the time simply because the regular cast is so large, there’s only room for one or two thinly sketched suspects. Still, they come up with a great range of high-school-based mysteries for Veronica to investigate, all while regular plots jog along in the backdrop.

They also spend a lot of time on the handling of race/class, more than many “adult” shows I’ve seen. Although they do it in a slightly standard high school drama boxing-people-off-into-tribes way, it’s interesting to see. Maybe more so nowadays, considering a lot of the annoyance around pop culture right now that shows and films won’t address these topics to even this degree.

And, yes, although there are a lot of clever tricks and crime show storylines, it’s still a teen drama which means love triangles, kissing, angst, but they usually punctuate it with shock crime twists and killings. Plus there’s some amazing mid-2000s fashion to admire – it’s like a younger Coupling. (In this way and no other.)

If you (like me) have not seen Veronica Mars and think you might like it, you probably will. It really is great for the most part, juggling loads of characters and plot points with aplomb. Very serialised, very ambitious, and I can confirm that the season-long arc storylines pay off well.

That completes the general review. I’m now going to talk about the actual plots and characters a bit more. This will feature spoilers (though I’ll refrain from revealing the major season-long whodunnits). Still, if you are considering watching the show and want to remain surprised, best stop now.

Season One – “Soap monster!”

She does this expression a lot.

The series dives straight into the heavy, soapy mythology, building confident, comprehensive, detailed montages in the very first episode. A lot of shows might’ve found a less personal mega-arc to lead off with and kept this story, which really unravels a lot of the major characters, until the second year.

But Veronica Mars dives right in and I think it pays off, getting us right on the character’s side with the terrifying rape/murder combined mystery and flashbacks to happier times.

I felt like Duncan never came into his own as a major character as a result of this structure, though. We started when he was already estranged from Veronica and the attempts to dive into his personality often felt shallow.

Again, this is a show with a massive cast and you can’t win them all – Logan’s rich-boy-angst was competing for space with Duncan’s and seemed to always win out. But yeah, I never ‘felt’ Duncan. To be truly honest: for some early eps, I struggled to tell him apart from brief love interest Troy.

The first season of Veronica Mars also hit the unavoidable problem of stripping a murder mystery across loads of episodes: seeming big reveals in the mid-to-late-mid-point of the season end up being obvious red herrings due to their placement in the running order, meaning we never cared as much as the characters. The Killing had a similar problem with ‘That can’t be it, there’s still eight episodes left!’ syndrome.

Still, the eventual ending was great and had a lot of impact, even if I did guess a major chunk of it one episode before the end. A lot of drama and charm, and Veronica’s relationship with her dad Keith was always so damn warm and likable.

Season Two – “Political animals!”

Sorry Duncan, but it’s not me, it’s you.

Perhaps to avoid ‘That can’t be it! pacing issues, season 2 attempted a bigger mystery than a mere murder. This was an epic conspiracy, layers upon layers, meaning they could unveil an individual character’s whereabouts or motivations and it could play into the ultimate storyline in a meaningful way rather than always needing to be a lie.

This worked a lot better at keeping the dramatic tension up, although it never felt quite as personal to Veronica. Also, due to the high level of the conspiracy, a lot of the story arc stuff had to be performed by dad Keith while Veronica focused on the high school mystery of the week. Sometimes seemed weird considering she’s meant to be the hero.

Nonetheless, it was a clever story with enough layers and moving parts to fill the space. I also always enjoy a show that obviously likes playing around in the world it’s created, giving bigger roles to pre-existing characters and bringing back old guest stars.

Yes, my lack of connection with Duncan made the chunk of the season when he was main boyfriend uninvolving at times. Still, this is dramatic television and misery/angst/love triangles are inevitable. I just waited it out.

And then the ending came along. They did a good job of selling it, even though I’d kinda spotted the main baddie reveal coming thanks to a number of hints along the way about that character’s true evil nature. Still, I wasn’t prepared for quite how evil they went with him, not to mention how carefully it was planned and woven into the pre-existing mythology. Gave the finale a real kick.

If I were told to pick my favourite out of the first two seasons, I think I’d struggle. The stakes felt higher in s1, the big conspiracy in s2 wasn’t as personal, but I thought they executed the second storyline better. Your mileage may vary. Feel free to vote for your favourite in the comments below.

And that seems a good note to end a blog post on. More on this very topic in… a month or two, probably, once I’ve seen the final season and movie.

Avengers: Age Of Ultron and the serialisation value of superhero movies

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Avengers: Age of Ultron is out now all over the place, and I saw it on the opening Friday. The many solo film stars of the Marvel movies re-unite to take on an evil robot, ruptures form among the team and I’ll refrain from over-describing the film as some people might still be avoiding spoilers.

It was good, though – not as no-reservations excellent as the first Avengers movie, due to Ultron not being quite as memorable as Loki and the sheer volume of characters taking away from focus. Sill, among the upper echelons of Marvel movies and successfully kept me invested in the whole Marvel monolith.

Anyway, this isn’t going to be a straight review of the movie as there are plenty of those on the internet. The release of Avengers II served as a kinda peak point of a few months where I’ve been consuming a load of superhero media. Between DC’s FlArrow shows, Gotham, Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil and Agent Carter, that’s a whole lotta tights and tights-related material.

And that’s without even counting Walking Dead and Constantine.

Point being: I love serialised fiction across all mediums, but it kinda started with comics. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how this stuff translates because… much as I’ve liked many superhero movies, I feel like TV might be the ultimate medium for them.

“It matters that I matter,” said Batman, as he wept.

“I hate being a lizard! I must turn everyone else into one!”

Superhero comics, of course, are serialised within an inch of their lives. A lot of stories exist only to set up other stories, Some are massive huge important parts of the narrative, others just feature the characters going on a little fun outing or having development – point being, some issues do not feature top-level tension or mega-disasters. It’s fun seeing the characters just hanging out or taking on a slightly-less-A-list bad guy, but we rarely get that in the films.

Because movies, especially big expensive action movies, really fucking want to matter. Scale is their heroin and they demand every story seem like the most important thing in the world.

Sometimes this works – in Avengers: Age of Ultron for example. This is the climactic movie of the whole second Marvel phase and the threat is genuinely world-ending, so we are willing to grant the film the importance that it craves and needs.

This need for scale and importance, however, isn’t always so well-suited to the material – particularly pronounced in a lot of the earlier attempts at superhero movies, before sequels became inevitable. In a bid for drama and importance, a lot of those movies needed to have the villain assemble some kind of doomsday device and/or threaten mass destruction, often for little reason other than “Gosh darn it, this is a damned action movie picture and we gotta give the folk their destructo-spectacle!”

Which leads us to such odd denouements as Doctor Octopus and the Lizard building doomsday machines in Spider-Man movies despite just being a bit sad before that. Or the Scarecrow deciding to create a fear-bomb in Batman Begins, despite it feeling really at odds with the rest of the movie. Hell, even Magneto pulling a mutant-making machine out of his caped arse in X-Men seemed sudden to me.

Because in a TV show, you see, they could justify a finale where the hero just whacked the villain in the cock – ideally with complication or greater stakes, but still, a fight. But for many movies, that’s never quite enough and it has to be World In Danger.

This is particularly pronounced with characters like Batman and Spider-Man who generally work at smaller scales, so tone skews weirdly when the apocalypse is wanged in there.

“Steve, are people… invested in the Avengers?” said Iron Man, as he wept.

Plus, let’s be honest, too expensive for TV.

The other problem with forcing serialised narratives into movies, of course, is that it changes the nature of cinema to try and make it work, and not always in comfortable ways. TV shows are expected to leave a few loose ends hanging for the next episode/series/season, and even they eventually reach a grand finale where all threads are tied up.

A lot of this might be a psychological expectation – a TV show, as part of its make-up, is there to pull you through episodes. Films, because they’re sold as a singular experience, are expected to be more self-contained, and if all you get out of a cinema visit is that the studio would quite like you to see their other similar films, it’s understandable you’d be pissed off. This is one reason Guardians of the Galaxy was so good – it bent over backwards to be a standalone movie-style adventure romp, rather than an up-budget TV pilot.

If you flipped the psychology, I suppose, you could take this as incentive to be amazing – there’s no space for a filler episode here, guys – every installment has to brilliant in terms of quality as well as franchise maintenance, otherwise the whole house of cards might fall.

But, as hinted in the previous section, sometimes a quieter episode can build character and make the bigger ones work – honestly, one major problem with Age of Ultron for me? It felt like we were meant to invest in the Avengers as this big substantial organisation that had carved out a role and a dynamic. This would mean Ultron coming along to ruin it was a grand tragedy, striking at the heart of something precious.

Unfortunately, with only one previous Avengers film, it felt like the institution barely existed before it fell. The only chance the movieverse got to show us “a normal day” for the Avengers was the opening scene of the second film. It felt like a story where the main selling point was Smashing The Status Quo, except because we only get one film every three years, the Avengers don’t feel like the reassuring constant required for that to really kick us in the face.

Anyway, that’s just something I’ve been feeling about superheroes for a while, and with all this Ultronitude going down, seemed a good time to talk about this. I will, however, close out positive by saying this: Arrow, Flash, Daredevil, Agent Carter and, yes, even Agents of SHIELD lately, are doing good-to-great jobs of nailing all the stuff I’m talking about. If you like superheroes or serialised adventure in general but have been resisting the TV versions, I recommend giving one or two a chance. They won’t all be everyone’s cup of tea, but they’re all good serialised adventures in their own way.

Since I’ve Found Serenity – Thoughts on first watching Firefly in 2015

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You can’t take the sky from me… *sob*

As mentioned on my Twitter, I’ve recently watched popular Joss Whedon-helmed TV show Firefly and movie follow-up Serenity for the first time ever. I have no real excuse for this – I believe I have lived with copies of the DVD for at least six years now.

For the unacquainted, Firefly is often described as a “space western”. It revolves around the ramshackle spaceship Serenity, whose crew are living under the radar for various reasons, surviving on snatched jobs from various employers. Thanks to this off-the-grid ethos, their missions mostly end up unsavoury – theft, smuggling or worse.

Firefly is perhaps even more famous as a great One That Got Away of the modern TV age – despite massive critical and fan love, it lasted one 14-episode season. Whedon had the movie follow-up Serenity to wrap up at least some major plot threads, but for the most part, it died young, its potential unfulfilled, everyone is very sad.

Anyway, despite its massive popularity, I’ve only just sat down and watched it. I don’t think it’s that significant whether I think Firefly is good (BRIEF REVIEW: it is very good – unless you hate the sci-fi genre or Whedon’s quips-and-sadness writing style, you will probably like it), but I am kinda interested how it looks to a modern TV viewer. Has it informed the landscape? Would it do better nowadays? Other talking points, probably?

And yes, I may mention a few spoilers, but now I’ve finally watched the thing, there’s officially no-one else left to care.

Shiny Shiny Arc Reactors

“22 episodes, we’ve been standing here…”

I watch a lot of genre TV at the moment, and they all have very long storylines. It used to just be the prestigious cable shows like The Wire but right now, I’d say almost every US drama show I follow is mostly focused on a long game, pushing a larger arc forward a few units each week. The case-of-the-week procedural stuff seems fairly out of fashion. Even Once Upon A Time, which ain’t mega-pretentious, definitely focuses on the long game.

This has been the case since around the age of Heroes/24/Lost, I’d say – pace sped up since then, as almost all those shows ended up being somewhat hamstrung by the slowness of their own plot, especially when they have 20+ episode seasons. And when modern genre TV does the Case O’The Week stuff, it generally does it kinda badly. I’ve started watching Arrow, Agents of SHIELD and Person Of Interest lately and all three start off with somewhat stilted attempts to do Case Of The Week.

Firefly arrived before long arcs became quite so standard, especially among 22-episode network shows. Watching in 2015, I was surprised how old-school the plotting was. I kinda expected something aggressively arc driven and ahead of its time, but no, it did a different caper every week and fully committed to it, allowing the subplots to advance in fractional chunks around the side.

Of course, this means when the show got cancelled painfully early, most of the subplots were barely even warmed up, but the individual missions were all fully developed and tense. Even though many episodes didn’t advance the mega-plot much/at all, we felt fully invested in what was happening because the weekly stories revealed new things about the characters.

Individual episodes took place in a connected universe, with characters recurring and stories having ramifications down the line (well, the ones they got the chance to show), but never at the cost of each episode feeling like a complete unit.

Which, in turn, just reminds you the problem with modern shows attempting Case Of The Week: they’ve clearly decided the audience only really cares about the ongoing plots. As a result, the Cases Of The Week are half-arsed and uninteresting, as disposable to the characters as they are to me, the poor viewer.

Choke On The Gorram Comic Timing

Funnier than they look.

It was never established as a plot point that gaseous Comic Timing was regularly pumped through the vents of the spaceship Serenity, but I think we all know the truth. Joss Whedon was a major practitioner of using heavy comedy in your dramatic show to get the people to like your cast (even the evil ones). After his success in both Firefly and Buffy/Angel, along with Aaron Sorkin’s on West Wing, it’s become fairly common.

Still, much like the Case Of The Week plots, there’s a way of doing this stuff well. Yes, everyone on Serenity was suspiciously good at delivering and selling a joke, but all in their own way. Mal’s world-weary captain jokes were never the same as Zoe’s dead-dryness as Jayne’s unaware buffoonery as Wash’s genuinely upbeat quips as… etc.

Thanks to the wide influence, I can’t deny some of the Firefly dialogue felt a little overfamiliar, possibly not through much fault of its own. Between characters like Felicity on Arrow, Whedon’s own work elsewhere and, yes, the way his syntax has influenced the offhand writing style of a whole geek generation, it feels obvious and standard when it probably shouldn’t.

Still, it’s genuinely funny for the most part, and (this is crucial when doing banter) conveys the character relationships, rather than making everyone look like the same brand of chattering arsehole.

The Fireflying Dead

“If I come back on telly, will the season 8 comics stay canon?”

With the modern TV trend of reviving shows from the 90s or early 2000s, part of me wonders how long before someone considers digging Firefly up and inflating its liquefying body. It clearly has some kind of audience, people still talk about it with wild love and passion.

That Con Man fundraiser starring two of the main actors has made more money than most people will earn in a decade. 24, X Files and Heroes are on their way back, clearly executive nostalgia for that era of TV exists. Could it happen?

I suspect the answer is probably no, mainly because all the shows I just mentioned were genuine cultural phenomena on a bigger scale. Making new Firefly would probably be expensive due to the large cast and fancy spaceship set/CGI and without anywhere near as a good a return guarantee. Doesn’t help that the one follow-up they already did (the Serenity movie) apparently didn’t perform that well.

Although if we’re talking Whedon exhumations, in the current climate, wouldn’t be surprised to discover someone is trying to arrange a Buffy revival. Like, an actual return with original cast/writers rather than the rumoured and baffling Buffy-without-Whedon project. I’m sure some kind of conversation may have happened, wouldn’t necessarily stake my family farm on it ever materalising though.

Breaking Mal

Did Firefly influence this maniac?

One last thing Firefly might have been ahead of its time at – the crew of Serenity weren’t necessarily the heroes of the wider story. It sugarcoated that pill for sure, by making them mega-likable (see previous re: humour) and Serenity kinda homely in a tumbledown way, but they were often doing ‘bad’ things and making morally dubious decisions. They may not have been villains, but they were often anti-heroes.

Nowadays, of course, cult TV has been a nest of dickbags for a while. We’ve been all about likeable, sympathetic criminals in Breaking Bad, Dexter and Weeds. Rick of The Walking Dead is only ever one inconvenient testicle itch from decapitating everyone. Even Arrow (of Arrow fame) spent his entire first season slaughtering people in huge numbers before settling into a more gentle Batman-esque position.

It’s reached the extent that the new Flash show seems like it’s doing something weirdly new and groundbreaking just by starring an untortured nice bloke who wants to help people out.

Still, Firefly’s cult status hasn’t brought back spaceship sci-fi or the Westerns onto TV in any meaningful way. One quickly-cancelled show can only do so much.

Anyway, this has gone from a few quick thoughts to something approximately the length of my Philosophy dissertation. If there’s anything to be gained from this, it’s that Firefly is still a fascinating, unique and thought-provoking experience and if you haven’t watched it, it’s worth a go.

Now, maybe time for me to finally give Veronica Mars a shot.

BEST OF 2014 – Top Ten TV

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I used to be an Internet TV Reviewer, you know. Writing blog-length reviews of TV show episodes, expressing my critical thoughts, trying to be funny without tipping into bitchy snark. I eventually burnt out on sheer volume of critiquing, not to mention it wasn’t justifying the time spent neglecting fiction, but still, I never reviewed purely for attention. I did it because I love the work.

So, I haven’t reviewed a TV series weekly since Game of Thrones season 4 finished in April, but I have run down my top ten TV shows every year since 2012 on The Digital Fix and here in 2013, so I see no reason to stop now. Let’s see this year’s list, which includes The First Ever Non-Fictional Shows To Chart.

#10 – The Fall

Relegated to honourable mentions last year, The Fall jumps to the proper chart for series 2. Gillian Anderson’s Stella Gibson closes the net around misogynist serial killer Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan), desperate to stop him before too many innocent women die.

And if that sounds like a lot of other shows, fair enough. The appeal of The Fall is mostly in the execution – the acting (Anderson especially is magnificent, Dornan very strong too), direction and writing are all at a high level, digging into the motivations of everyone involved and making the investigation challenging without the police looking like idiots.

It gives in to a slightly cheap semi-cliffhanger at the end, but The Fall was still amazingly good viewing. And it lets me imagine a final season of Dexter that wasn’t terrible!

#9 – Homeland

At long last, a year or two later than they probably should’ve, Homeland sloughs off Damian Lewis’ Nick Brody and reinvents itself as a spy thriller revolving around Claire Danes as Carrie Matheson. She’s in Islamabad, a new and wholly un-American backdrop, to make her latest morally ambiguous battle with terrorism seem fresher.

Much like the previous season, it starts off slow, but was completely compelling by about halfway through. Claire Danes is still great, but Mandy Patinkin as Saul is what really sold this season for me. His performance during his kidnap plot is gutwrenching, scenestealing work. To be honest, I feel bad not placing this run of Homeland a little higher, but alas, ’twas a competitive year and the final episode was a tad disappointing.

#8 – True Detective

As you may note if you’ve read a lot of these year-end list, most people had True Detective a little higher than I’ve ended up placing it. I’m not saying it wasn’t a fantastic work of technical TV, with Woody Harrelson and the much-praised Matthew McConaughey delivering well-written dialogue pitch-perfectly. Not to mention a considered, atmospheric look and, yes, that astounding unbroken long shot.

But still, this chart is a list of what I enjoyed the most, and although it was well done, there were long stretches when I felt I was admiring True Detective rather than enjoying it. Not to mention, yes, I am one of those people who found the ending a bit of an anti-climax. Still nicely done, but after all the slow, slow build, I was hoping for more actual incident. So here it lies at #8, falling just short of…

#7 – Doctor Who

It’s only climbed one place since last year, but that doesn’t convey the extent to which I feel Doctor Who has improved in its eighth series. It mostly just represents the scale of the competition. So yeah, this was Peter Capaldi’s first series in the part, and I thought probably the best since the first Matt Smith run, restoring a little mystery, fun and drama to the whole affair.

It helped that (perhaps bruised by scathing criticism last year), showrunner Steven Moffat and his writers were clearly determined to retool Jenna Coleman’s Clara into a character with the depth to carry the show. Some said this resulted in a run focused on the assistant to the detriment of the hero, but series seven was more about the Doctor, and it just felt rambling and ungrounded as a result.

This one had some heart, plus a compelling arc around Missy. The Christmas special wasn’t bad either – albeit marred by obvious rewriting at the end after Coleman changed her mind about leaving.

#6 – Brooklyn Nine Nine

Brooklyn Nine Nine coming in here means True Detective isn’t even the highest ranking police-based show on the list. The American mainstream sitcom genre ran a little dry lately, so a new one coming through with the right combination of wacky jokes, character banter and real feelings is always a cause for celebration.

Will we end up hating Brooklyn Nine Nine when it reaches season eleven and we’ve heard all its jokes a thousand times? I’ll be honest, I can’t rule it out, but for now, it’s so nice to have a new, assured, reliably uplifting comedy in town, I’ve given it a generous placing. Captain Holt alone (the amazing Andre Braugher) would probably get this into the list somewhere. Oh, and the first season is just up on UK Netflix.

#5 – Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle

The first ever non-fictional show to appear on this annual list (although not the last one this year) is Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle, a one-man stand-up show featuring the so-called comedian’s comedian talking at extreme length about the topic of the week. After a year or two to get the format right, they’ve found the confidence to just show one man talking for the whole episode, with only a slightly different man to break it up.

Lee’s grim, knowing, deadpan humour is not  to everyone’s taste, obviously, but again, this is my list, and as far as I was concerned, this was one of the most successful TV exercises of the year. Absolutely nailed all its targets, and having Chris Morris as Lee’s main interrogator was the icing on the cake.

#4 – Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones must surely be one of the most successful TV shows in current Western society. The epic saga of Kings fighting Kings to be King, with some Queens and some incest, and god knows what else. This wasn’t actually their best year to date, there was some slack plotting as characters clearly just killed time waiting to get somewhere, and also a confusing rape scene that just made certain character arcs harder to grasp.

Still, here it is at #4, because even when the characters are rambling along, the dialogue, acting and moment-to-moment storytelling is always great. Not to mention, whenever Game of Thrones hit a big set-piece scene (Joffrey’s wedding, the Viper’s big fight, the invasion of the Wall, Tyrion’s trial, the final few scenes of this season), they utterly nailed it. Great show, still one of the most watchable things currently running. I await season five with interest, as we’ve finally finished book three and now, surely, entirely new things gotta happen?

#3 – Last Week Tonight

Not too long after our first ever non-fictional show, here comes the second. Last Week Tonight is HBO’s vehicle for John Oliver, freshly poached from The Daily Show and ready to show us what he’d do if given a desk, some graphics and the chance to be sarcastic about the news.

Well, after a few weeks to find his feet, Oliver has settled on his offering – long-form investigative journalism that takes dry subjects and somehow makes them intriguing, funny and accessible. For sheer cultural impact this year among leftie internet types, Last Week Tonight may be unparalleled in TV terms.

Not to say it’s a flawless venture – in particular, the fun-video segments thrown in to break up long spells at the desk often fall a little flat or overstay their welcome. But when this show works, it really works. And I’d say that even if I didn’t have a lot of affection for John Oliver from The Bugle.

#2 – Hannibal

When I wrote last year’s Top Ten TV, Hannibal landed at #2 and I was confident, with the mighty Breaking Bad gone, it would ascend to the #1 spot in 2014. As you can see, that hasn’t happened. However, Hannibal remains one of the most uniquely stylised, strange, funny, scary, charismatic dramas on TV. It clearly lives about six feet up itself, but it always has a sense of humour about both that and the horrible things it does to its characters.In short – yes, Nick Bryan likes a bloody dark comedy. Surprising.

Still, Hannibal had another great year developing its universe further, making major changes to the show’s set-up but still remaining fundamentally recognisable. Intelligent, self-referential and with a magnetic central performance from Mads Mikkelsen as the cannibal himself. Oh, and it finished off its second season with the other big thing that makes me like a TV show – an absolutely killer cliffhanger that didn’t feel unearnt or cheap. Bravo. Can’t wait for season three.But it still isn’t at the top, thanks to the arrival of…

#1 – Orange Is The New Black

Every so often, a show arrives that works in every way, has a huge and varied cast yet almost no weak spots, good acting across the board, minor characters that are almost as compelling as the supposed lead.

In 2014, Orange Is The New Black was that show. It was the best, most absorbing and affecting thing I saw this year, bar none. Netflix gets a lot of good press for their original content, but even if the rest of it was garbage, the creation of this series would probably justify the entire initiative.

From the writer of Weeds and starring so many good people that I feel bad singling anyone out, Orange Is The New Black is funny, addictive and brilliant. I watched both seasons this year, which may explain why it’s had such a particular impact upon me, but the 2014 season was excellent. Even the mostly-absence of major character Alex (apparently for schedule/contract reasons rather than a desire to quit) didn’t slow them down much, and it seems she’ll be back in a bigger way next season.

I was particularly impressed with the direction of Piper in season 2 – for much of the first one, I thought she’d end up becoming one of those lead characters who was the worst thing in their own show, but they’ve really made her work, simply by allowing her to grow believably, rather than keeping her as a tedious static anchor. They’ve also introduced a new character who is basically Piper from when she first arrived, to hammer home that contrast.

Amazing show. If you have Netflix and haven’t seen it, I recommend rectifying that. If you don’t have Netflix, consider signing up for the free month just to hammer through Orange Is The New Black.

Honourable Mentions

My prime honourable mention this year is Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, definitely #11 in the list. It improved by leaps and bounds after the dull first two-thirds of season 1, and at this point, midway through season 2, is close to becoming the espionage-with-superpowers show we all hoped it would be. The Walking Dead also had a very good year.

Other nearly-almosts were Orphan Black, Sherlock and House Of Cards – I watched both seasons of House Of Cards this year, liked the first one a fair bit, but it just fell apart in season 2 for me. With the exception of a couple of exciting episodes around the beginning and end, there were no interesting characters left and watching it was a chore. Oh, and The Newsroom might’ve crept in with its final season if the second half were as good as the first.

And that, at last, really is that. Wait, one last shout-out for Arrow, which I didn’t include in the list as I’ve barely seen any 2014 episodes, but season 2 especially is just stellar. If you have any affection for superheroes, or action-driven TV in general, check it out. Looking forwarding to starting The Flash soon too.

Okay, I’m finished now. I swear. That was 2014! Let’s all move on with our lives!