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| Olivia Colman and David Tennant in "Broadchurch |
As I mentioned last week, there’s just too much good
television today. So apart from my Top
Ten list, which should post next week, I figured I would highlight the other shows
that, while not at the top of the medium, are nonetheless worthy of
praise. Today, I’ll be looking at shows
that debuted in 2013 as well as those shows that finished their runs this past year.
The Newcomers –
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| Malin Akerman is great and so is "Trophy Wife" |
Banshee (Cinemax) –
Cinemax has a rather lurid programming history, but in 2011
the network decided to rebrand itself as something of an R-rated Spike TV, with
original programming focused on action and sex, targeting men in the 18-49
demographic. Their first two series, Strike Back and Hunted, were British co-productions. But last January they launched their first
home-grown original series, Banshee,
starring Anthony Starr as an ex-con who steals the identity of a small-town
sheriff in order to hide from his former employer.
The setup sounds ridiculous, but the execution is fantastic
in a ridiculous, pulpy, over the top way.
The action is brutally violent with fight scenes occasionally extending
for several minutes and even over multiple acts. And the season-long storyline, which involves
a local mob, the Amish community, and a drug kingpin straddling both, is tight
and twisty, putting Starr’s Lucas Hood in constant danger while creating
inventive ways to get him out of trouble.
Banshee isn’t going to win
many Emmys (though the pilot won for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a
Supporting Role this year), but it’s a fun show that knows what it wants to do
and does it well.
Season one of Banshee
is available on Max Go, Cinemax’s
streaming service. The show has been
renewed for a second season, which will debut on Cinemax on January 10, 2014.
Broadchurch (BBC
America) -
I’ve been holding off on publishing my Best of 2013 articles
because I wanted to get through BBC America’s Broadchurch. Well, I’ve made
it through seven of the eight first season episodes and I feel comfortable
saying that, while the show is a gripping, emotional drama, it’s not quite good
enough to crack my ten. It is, however,
more than good enough for me to include in a list of the best new shows of
2013.
Imported from Britain, Broadchurch is a crime drama set in a gorgeous seaside town in south England. David Tennant and Olivia Colman spend the series investigating the murder of a young boy, Danny. But the actual crime is often the least interesting part of the show as Broadchurch delves into the lives of the townspeople and the wake left behind by Danny’s death. This isn’t a whodunit mystery, so much as a complex character piece that is framed by the investigation. The acting is phenomenal, as you would expect from leads with the pedigree of Tennant and Colman, but Jodie Whittaker is the real star here as Danny’s grieving mother. The rest of the town is populated by a who’s who of British character actors, most prominently Arthur Darvill as the town Priest and David Bradley as a local shop owner, each with a complicated, mysterious past of their own.
Like I said, I haven’t yet seen the final episode and so I
don’t know who the killer actually is.
But, really, it seems almost beside the point because the journey thus
far has been so wonderful.
Broadchurch is
currently available through BBC America On Demand. The show has been renewed for a second series which should air in 2014, though it may not air in the United States until 2015. Additionally, Fox is developing an American
version also starring David Tennant scheduled to air during the 2014-15 season.
The Bridge (FX) –
It’s possible to interpret The Bridge as an experiment in meta-textual storytelling. Like its characters, whose lives straddle the
US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez, The Bridge is a show living in two worlds. The first is a police procedural focusing on
a string of heinous murders that force officers from each country to
collaborate. The second is a psychological
thriller in which an aggrieved father commits a string of heinous murders in an
elaborate attempt to enact revenge on the police officers whom he blames for the
deaths of his wife and child.
That first show is amazing.
Diane Kruger and Demián Bichir play the mismatched detectives with great
dexterity. They could make even a
standard CBS procedural interesting. But
here, given the ability to flesh out juicy back stories and family lives,
Kruger and Bichir shine. Unfortunately,
the show’s season-long storyline was too over-the-top, representing perhaps the
nadir of what Alyssa Rosenberg called “TV’s mastermind problem.” Still, despite the problems that story
caused, the rest of the show was amazing and I’m really looking forward to
seeing what it’s capable of now that it’s able to get out from under its Danish
inspiration’s story.
Season one of The
Bridge is currently not available to
stream, though it has been renewed for a second season likely to air in the
summer of 2014.
Derek (Netflix) –
Derek is by no
means a perfect show. I think it wants
to be warm-hearted and feel-good television but doesn’t really know how to make
us like its characters. It also has to
straddle a dangerous line to create comedic situations with a mentally
handicapped lead and a background full of elderly people without making the
audience laugh at those
characters. Unfortunately, it doesn’t
always land on the right side of that line.
Ricky Gervais is an abrasive comic known for his ability to offend and,
while he manages to mostly bury his more offensive instincts here, he’s not
always completely successful.
But sometimes the right show will hit you in the right
emotional spot at the right time and Derek
did that to me. I watched the season
finale (in which Gervais’s Derek reunites with his estranged father) not too
long after my own father’s passing and it just wrecked me. I’ve never cried that hard at any piece of
media, television or film. Granted, most
of the tears were borne of grief, but isn’t that the point of television: to
reach us emotionally? Well that’s
exactly what Derek did for me, which
is why it was one of my favorite new shows of the year.
Season one of Derek is available on Netflix. The show has been renewed for a second season
and will likely be available some time in 2014.
Sleepy Hollow (Fox) –
Sleepy Hollow
shouldn’t be good. The story is
ludicrous. I mean, Ichabod Crane worked
for George Washington during the Revolutionary War before killing, and being
killed by, the Headless Horseman, who is also Death, one of the Four Horsemen. He then awakens in 2013, where the Headless
Horseman is riding again, with myriad monsters joining him.
Just reading that makes me laugh at the craziness at it
all. But Sleepy Hollow figured something out that more genre shows, and
television shows in general, could stand to learn: if you get your characters
right, viewers will forgive a lot of craziness.
And this show gets its characters right.
Tom Mison and Nicole Beharie play Crane and his police officer companion
Abbie Mills. They have amazing, platonic
chemistry that allows them each to recite absolutely ridiculous dialogue but to
sell it to each other in a way that helps the viewer buy in as well.
And while the overall story is crazy, the individual plot
elements progress logically and the show doesn’t feel the need to hold back on
plot or draw things out. There’s no way
of knowing if Sleepy Hollow will be
able to keep the crazy train on track, but for now it’s a hell of a ride.
The last eight
episodes of Sleepy Hollow (all but
the first two) are currently available to stream on Hulu+. A new episode will air on Fox on January 13th,
prior to the two-hour season finale on January 20th.
Trophy Wife (ABC) –
I was very favorable toward Trophy Wife in my review of the pilot back in September and the
show has only improved from there. It’s
no longer a Malin Ackerman star vehicle, instead falling into a nice routine of
crazy family hijinks comedy, much like the first couple seasons of Modern Family. Where the show really shines is in its
ability to mix and match its cast to tell different stories. Putting Kate and Bert together makes for
comedic gold, but Warren and his mom Diane make for delightfully neurotic
pairing as well. And for as funny as the
kids on Trophy Wife are, the show may
have been at its best in its Christmas episode when they were largely sidelined
as the adults tried to reconstruct the events of their alcohol and
absinthe-fueled Christmas party.
Trophy Wife isn’t
perfect by any means. The show still
struggles to integrate Natalie Morales’s character Meg. But everything involving the extended family
is just great, and it’s a shame that the show hasn’t garnered a bigger
audience. I would highly suggest you hop
on board now because, unless ABC changes its tune soon and decides to air Trophy Wife after mega-hit Modern Family (the show’s seemingly
natural pairing), it likely won’t be renewed for next season.
All ten episodes of Trophy
Wife are currently available on
Hulu+. New episodes will air beginning
January 7th.
Vikings (History) -
I wasn’t sure what to make of Vikings when it first premiered last spring. I wasn’t extremely intrigued by the pilot or
even the second episode, but one thing kept me coming back and that was the
performances of Travis Fimmel and Katheryn Winnick as the main character Ragnar
and his wife Lagertha. I even went so
far as to nominate Winnick for an Emmy in my dream ballot. It’s a difficult thing to portray a
fully-developed, meaningful relationship between two characters who spend a
good chunk of their time apart, but these two pull it off, while also
delivering some bad-ass fight scenes to boot.
The other bit that impressed me about Vikings was that, like Sleepy Hollow, it’s not a show that
hesitates to burn through plot points when the story demands it. You’ll often see, especially on network
television, shows hesitate to kill a character or introduce a story because
they know they need to fill out what Christine Becker has called “the indefinite middle,”
wherein a network show is forced to stall their storylines to fill out a
never-ending run of 22 episode seasons.
Hell, the most prominent example is actually a cable show, Sons of Anarchy, which refused to kill
off one of its main characters long after he reached the point of no return on
the show, instead introducing multiple deus
ex machina to keep him alive, until most viewers no longer cared when he
actually did die. Vikings suffers from no such faults. Characters die when the story says they
should die and plot points are introduced and retired as the story
demands. And the show is all the better
for it.
Season one of Vikings is available to stream through Amazon
Prime. Season two debuts in February
2014.
The Dearly Departed –
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| Elisha Cuthbert was amazing in "Happy Endings" |
30 Rock (NBC) –
I spent a great deal of time debating whether or not 30 Rock would earn a spot on my overall
Top Ten. After all, every episode the
show aired in 2013 was a legitimately great episode and it culminated in what
was, to me, perhaps the most satisfying series finale in recent history. Yes, Breaking
Bad included. But, ultimately, I
decided that I couldn’t include it because 30
Rock only aired five episodes this year out of its 13 episode final
season. Maybe that’s not fair,
especially given that two of the shows on my final list aired eight and seven
episodes respectively, but I felt that I couldn’t properly evaluate the 2013
portions of 30 Rock apart from the episodes
that aired in 2012.
But that doesn’t mean the final season, final episodes, and
even the entirety of 30 Rock weren’t
great television. They were. For seven years the show was a joke machine,
cranking out punch line after punch line.
They may have had an occasional down period now and then, especially
during the fifth and sixth seasons, but it’s no accident that the show was
nominated for an Outstanding Comedy Emmy for each of its seven seasons and walked away with three
of them. I don’t know that 30 Rock ever infiltrated the cultural
consciousness the way The Office or The Big Bang Theory did, but it stayed
far funnier for far longer than either and, had it aired more than five
episodes in 2013, would easily have ended up in my Top Ten.
All seven seasons of 30
Rock are available on Netflix.
Bunheads (ABC Family)
–
On paper, I shouldn’t have like Bunheads. I’m not a fan of
ballet. I don’t particularly care for
stories focused on teenaged girls. And
while the show had a fine pedigree (creator and executive producer Amy
Sherman-Palladino), I hadn’t really watched her best-known work, Gilmore Girls. I also thought the title was stupid. But my wife wanted to see it and it got a
reasonable recommendation from a handful of television critics whom I trust, so
I gave it a shot.
And here’s the thing: I loved it. Bunheads
was a legitimately good family comedy.
It was funny when it needed to be funny.
It was dramatic when it needed to be dramatic. It was heartfelt and touching when it needed
to be heartfelt and touching. It was a
versatile show that could really do everything well, accompanied by the
characteristic patter that Sherman-Palladino has made her trademark. What surprised me, given that the show aired
on ABC Family, was how little it focused on the girls, instead making Sutton
Foster’s Michelle the focus of the story with recurring star Kelly Bishop’s
fanny as her regular antagonist.
But when Bunheads
came back in January to air the second half of its first and only season, the
girls came into focus and really began to establish themselves as the co-leads
of the show. Sasha had to work through
her parents’ divorce while Boo and Ginny explored the world of dating and
presented one of the most honest looks at virginity that I’ve seen on
television recently. Bunheads only got better throughout its
first season as it found its feet and its characters. Unfortunately, it never found an audience, so
these 16 episodes are all we’ll ever get.
Bunheads is currently
available to stream on Amazon Prime.
Happy Endings (ABC) –
I want to say that ABC’s scheduling killed Happy Endings. I really do. In the fall of 2012, the network delayed the
show’s premiere into October and aired two episodes before taking a week off
for the Election Night. They then aired
two more episodes before taking a week off for Thanksgiving. Then, after airing three episodes in
December, the show took off two weeks for the holidays. Not satisfied with those scheduling
shenanigans, ABC decided to start doubling up by airing episodes at 9:00 on
Sunday nights during January before finally shuffling the show off to die on
Fridays.
The fact is, though, that Happy Endings got to spend a year airing after ABC’s top show, Modern Family, and for whatever reason,
just never caught on. And it’s really a
shame because Happy Endings was one of the
funniest comedies on television during its three year run. It managed to perfectly blend the
joke-a-minute pace of shows like 30 Rock
with the sitcom setups of a Modern Family
while still showing a little heart like Parks
and Recreation. This show also
introduced us to the delightful comedic timing of Elisha Cuthbert, who I wouldhave nominated for an Emmy in 2013.
While Happy Endings’s
final season may not have been as funny as its second, the back-loaded schedule
still gave us 16 great episodes in 2013 including a food truck war, “Black
Plague: A Love Story,” and Max blowing up his limo in the glorious climax of a
prank war. Like Bunheads, Happy Endings
was taken from us too soon.
Happy Endings is not
currently available for streaming, but expect it to pop up somewhere soon.
So those are my picks for the best new shows of 2013 (to not
make my Top Ten) and the best shows to end their runs. Coming soon, the (almost) best returning
shows of 2013.
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