The Best of Television 2014, pt. 1: The Newcomers and the Dearly Departed

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were amazing in "True Detective"

I wrote last year about how strange the whole concept of year-end Best Of lists is to me, but I like discussing television, especially good television, so I’m back again this year to talk about the shows I think were the best in 2014.  I said last year that "television has never been this deep, broad, and good" and I feel the same about this year.  For that reason it feels unfair to limit my list to only ten selections.  So, as with last year, I’m not going to hold myself to naming only ten shows but will instead lead into my year-end Top Ten with a pair of pieces looking at the also-rans, which this year numbered fifteen on top of my ten favorite shows.  Today, I’ll be looking at my “Next Best” shows that either debuted this year or that ended their runs in 2014.

The Newcomers –

Carrie Coon gave one of the most emotionally raw performances of the year in "The Leftovers"

The Leftovers (HBO) –

I don’t know that any show on television this year was more divisive than HBO’s The Leftovers.  It was an exceedingly gloomy and dire affair and yet was filled with magnetic performances that kept me glued to the screen even as the characters went through every trial and tribulation imaginable.  Maybe that’s the way a show needs to play out a depressed world in which two percent of the Earth’s population has mysteriously vanished, but it made for an incredibly difficult piece of television to view.

The only thing keeping The Leftovers off my Top Ten list is the fact that it was a bit uneven.  Had every episode been as compelling as “Two Boats and a Helicopter,” in which Christopher Eccleston’s Reverend Jamison attempts to save his church only to fail in a sucker punch of a closing scene, or “Guest,” which mostly follows standout star Carrie Coon’s Nora to a conference in New York City, it would have been a shoo-in for a top spot as those were two of my very favorite episodes of television this year.  But when the show tried to spread itself out in service of the multitude of disparate storylines that only vaguely came together in the end, it suffered.  The Leftovers is apparently retooling for its second season, including a change of scenery and a trimming of the supporting cast, so maybe that will help alleviate the problems I had with the show.

The Leftovers is available on HBOGo and has been renewed for a second season likely to air in 2015.

The Flash (CW) –

While Marvel has taken the film world by storm, its principle competitor DC Comics has been making its best inroads on television.  Arrow will find its way onto one of these lists later on (spoiler alert), while Gotham has quickly become Fox’s highest-rated series.  Constantine may not be coming back for a second season, but Supergirl, Justice League, and Teen Titans shows are all in development right now.

Frankly, though, the most impressive of all of these series might be the CW’s freshman The Flash.  Most superhero shows take time to find their legs, but The Flash came out of the gates running.  It also largely eschewed my least favorite superhero cliché, which is the secret identity.  Unlike the CW's first superhero series Smallville, which felt the need to keep Clark Kent’s powers a secret for far too long, well beyond the point of credibility, The Flash almost immediately integrated nearly the entire cast into the “Scooby Gang,” so that only one main character remains out of the loop as to The Flash’s real identity. 

The Flash has also figured out how to properly balance the serialized elements that any comic book story has with the needs of producing a weekly television show.  It’s not a perfect show yet, and it’s a little disconcerting that the best episodes have been Arrow crossovers, indicating that it might not yet be able to entirely stand on its own, but The Flash was the second-best new series of the 2014 fall season and fits in nicely in the DC television universe.

The Flash is currently airing its first season on Tuesday nights on the CW.  The most recent five episodes are available for streaming on Hulu+

The Knick (Cinemax) –

A couple of years ago, Cinemax broke in to the scripted original game with a pair of better-than-expected, testosterone-fueled action series in Strike Back and Banshee.  In 2014, the former was sidelined due to an injury to star Sullivan Stapleton while the latter took a step forward and finally showed an interest in being something better than a pulpy action series.

More surprising, however, than Banshee's marked improvement was the network’s announcement that it was partnering with Oscar-winning director Steven Soderbergh and Oscar-nominated actor Clive Owen to produce The Knick, a series about a drug-addled surgeon set at the turn of the century.  While I didn’t enjoy The Knick a great deal (and had issues with the lack of depth provided to some of the supporting characters), the deft hand Soderbergh shows behind the camera in every episode makes the entire season feel of a single piece.  And Clive Owen and André Holland give remarkable performances that should earn them a great number of awards nominations.  The show, at times, was a bit of a slog for me, as I’ve moved out of my white, male, anti-hero phase, but it was filled with great work both in front of, and behind the camera.

The Knick is currently available for streaming on MaxGo, Cinemax’s streaming app.  It has been renewed for a second season, to be aired at an as yet undetermined date, likely in 2015.

Manhattan (WGN America) –

No show surprised me more this year than WGN America’s Manhattan.  For the last few years, the network has been trying to distance itself from its Chicago roots and transition to a national cable network, much like TBS did a decade or so ago.  Manhattan was their second attempt at original programming, following the far less interesting genre piece Salem and it ends up on this list, as so many new shows do, by being far better than it has any reason to be.

On its surface, it’s fairly easy to explain the appeal of Manhattan.  It’s a period piece, set in World War II, covering the exploits of a team of scientists as they work to develop what we are led to believe will be a failed alternative to the nuclear bomb that will eventually be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But beyond that, this is a drama filled with fascinating characters, including John Benjamin Hickey’s old stalwart Frank Winter, the leader of the project and the man around whom most of the drama unfolds, Ashley Zukerman’s young upstart Charlie Isaacs, whom everybody thinks the world of, but whom might actually be a fraud, and their wives, Liza Winter (Olivia Williams), a brilliant scientist in her own right forced to subjugate her professional desires to the needs of her husband and the nation, and Abby Isaacs (Rachel Brosnahan), who is the audience's entry point into the world of the military wives who keep Los Alamos running, and who is harboring her own secrets.

Ultimately, Manhattan didn’t hit the highs that The Leftovers or The Knick (or the two following shows for that matter) hit, but it was a solid drama that ended up being far better than I ever expected and deserves a much larger audience than the 300,000-400,000 viewers it normally averages.

The first season of Manhattan is currently available on Hulu+ and the second will air some time in 2015.

True Detective (HBO) –

If you had asked me for my Top Ten list in March, True Detective would have been very near the top.  That it now finds itself on my “also receiving votes” list is not an indictment of the show itself but a remarkable statement on the quality of television today.  For the most part, True Detective was a great show.  The writing was tight, the directing was top-notch, even outside of the much-discussed tracking shot, and the acting was among the best television saw in 2014.

Maybe I’m being unfair, then, to hold True Detective to a higher standard than I might Banshee or Manhattan, but the fact that it did so many things so well only made the weak moments seem that much worse.  For example, the show has a serious problem with its treatment of women, who mostly exist either to sleep with or berate the male main characters.  Like I said, it might be unfair, but the last two years or so have seen such a marked increase in diversity on television, with male-driven shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad giving way to great shows featuring male and female leads like The Americans, The Bridge, and Masters of Sex, that True Detective feels almost like a throwback to the television of five or ten years ago.  Even some of the overly masculine shows on television today (I’m thinking specifically of Hannibal and Banshee) manage to have well-developed female characters.  That True Detective couldn’t figure that out ends up being enough of a mark against it to drop the show out of my Top Ten.  But it was still very good television, nonetheless.

True Detective is currently available on HBOGo.  A second season has been ordered and cast, though an air date has not yet been set and I wouldn’t expect to see it until late 2015 or early 2016.

The Dearly Departed –

"The Bridge" ended well, if just too soon.

The Bridge (FX) –

I had The Bridge on my favorite newcomers list last year so it is with a heavy heart that I must discuss it as dearly departed in 2014 because the truth is that it was a much better show this year, having largely eschewed the serial killer storyline that so plagued its first season.  Yes, the plot came back here and there but, for the most part, the second season of The Bridge was simply the story of two detectives and their increasingly quixotic quest to control crime along the US-Mexico border.

In the show’s second season, Demián Bichir gets to do a lot of the heavy lifting as his character develops an increasingly close relationship with cartel leader Fausto Galvan, but it is his co-lead Diane Kruger who rather surprisingly becomes the emotional center of the show, despite her character’s suggested Asperger’s symptoms creating a distinct separation from most of the other characters on the show.  I would like to think that, had the show’s writers known they wouldn’t be getting a third season (ratings were down about 40-50 percent from the first season to the second), they would have crafted a more definitive ending but, in truth, the closing scene of the finale is absolutely gorgeous and works to close out the series about as well as anything else could have.

The first season of The Bridge is currently available on Hulu+, though the second is not yet available.

Those are my picks for the best new shows and canceled shows of 2014 to not make my Top Ten list.  Coming next, the (almost) best continuing series of 2014.

Tyler Williams is a professional librarian and an amateur television critic.  You can reach him at TyTalksTV AT gmail DOT com or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.