My Emmy Ballot: Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy

Andy Daly brought a fresh new voice to TV and ate a lot of pancakes in "Review"

Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy is a category that tends to vary little from year to year and which seems to keep awarding the same people.  Note, for example, that Alec Baldwin was nominated for all seven seasons of 30 Rock.  Jim Parsons has been nominated five years in a row.  Matt LeBlanc, Louis CK, and Don Cheadle have all been nominated for every season in which they’ve been eligible.  Even the biggest outliers of the last few years, Jon Cryer and Johnny Galecki, make sense when you consider that Cryer already had six nominations and a win for playing the same part in a supporting role and that Galecki was on a well-received series and had already earned a Golden Globe nomination that year.  This category doesn’t see much change, so with two actors exiting this year due to their shows ending, it will be interesting to see who steps in to take their places.

A couple of caveats before we start.  First, I’m working from the actual Emmy Performer Ballot, so I can’t put leads who submitted as supporting (Amy Schumer) or supporting actors who submitted as leads (Rob Lowe) in their proper category, nor can I put shows that probably should be in drama (Orange Is the New Black) or comedy (Key & Peele) into their appropriate categories, nor can I nominate somebody who didn’t submit themselves (like anybody on Enlisted not named Parker Young).  Also, I’m only including actors from shows I watch regularly, so if your favorites from The Middle, Nurse Jackie, Veep, or Raising Hope aren’t here, that’s why.

My 2013 Choices:

Alec Baldwin (30 Rock)

Louis CK (Louie)

Jake Johnson (New Girl)

Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory)

Adam Scott (Parks and Recreation)

Joel McHale (Community)

Actual 2013 Nominees:

Alec Baldwin (30 Rock)

Jason Bateman (Arrested Development)

Don Cheadle (House of Lies)

Louis CK (Louie)

Matt LeBlanc (Episodes)

Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory) – 2013 Emmy Winner

As I’ve said before, my nominations aren’t meant to be predictive, just my opinion of those actors who I feel are most deserving of awards recognition.  That said, my comedy lead nominations tend to be closest to the actual Emmy nominees for two main reasons: First, many more comedy actors and actresses submit themselves as supporting when they could easily be considered leads.  Consider, most obviously, Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele.  They could easily submit as co-leads (the show is called Key & Peele after all).  But they submit as supporting instead.  Likewise, is Nick Offerman’s role on Parks and Recreation so much smaller than Adam Scott’s that he becomes a supporting actor while Scott is a lead? 

Second, the pool of “Emmy-worthy” comedies tends to be much smaller than the pool of “Emmy-worthy” dramas.  I can pretty much tell you right now that the six Outstanding Comedy Series nominees are going to come from a pool of Modern Family, Girls, Louis, Parks and Recreation, Orange Is the New Black, Veep, The Big Bang Theory, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Mom.  It’s extremely likely that six of those nine shows are going to be nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series and the odds of anybody else breaking through are slim.

When you combine a small pool of potential shows with a pool of actors that has been artificially reduced by category shenanigans, the potential for my choices to match up with the actual nominees increases significantly.  And, really, two of the three I missed out on last year came from a show I don’t watch (Episodes) and a show I gave up on (House of Lies).  I don’t know that my choices will match as well this year since, as I said before, the comedy pool has opened up significantly in 2014, but these are still the areas where it’s most likely to happen. 

As for where potential new nominees can find their way onto the ballot, Lead Actor in a Comedy sees two attrition spots this year with both Baldwin and Bateman ineligible.  It feels like Don Cheadle’s “movie star going to television” shine should have worn off by now, but maybe that’s just my growing distaste for House of Lies, which I finally bailed on this year after waiting several months to finish season two.  Louie and Episodes both took extended hiatuses (18 and 16 months respectively), but because of the timing of their seasons, Louis CK and Matt LeBlanc will be eligible once again and it’d be surprising if they weren’t both return nominees.  Looking to fill those empty spots will be former winners Jon Cryer and Michael J Fox, former nominee Johnny Galecki, Golden Globe winner Andy Samberg, and Bradley Whitford who, despite airing on Trophy Wife, a show that received little attention outside of certain critical circles, is still the owner of three Emmy nominations and a win for his performance on The West Wing. 

No show on television is more the result of a singular viewpoint than Louie and no actor could pull off the titular role, but Louis CK.  Some people might criticize CK for merely playing a heightened version of himself, but it should be clear by now that the Louie we see in the show is not the Louis who’s making millions selling stand-up specials.  This year saw CK experimenting even more than usual, with a six-part story in which Louie falls in love with, and tries to date, a woman who doesn’t speak English, and an extended-length two-part episode that barely even stars CK, but which is a flashback to his “troubled” youth.  Louie isn’t always a funny show, but every time I watch, I can’t help feeling like this is the exact series its creator wants me to see and I love it all the more for that.

The biggest comedic surprise for me this year was Review from Comedy Central.  I will talk much more about why this series is great in my Outstanding Comedy Series post (SPOILER ALERT!), but for our purposes here it should suffice to say that Review would not have been remotely as good as it turned out to be had it not been for Andy Daly.  Daly has the unenviable task of trying to straddle the line between being a complete cartoon as he takes on one request after another of people basically daring him to delve into the worst and most insane experiences of life and being a sympathetic human being for whom we’re supposed to root as he tries to piece his life back together when his antics for the show destroy it.  It’s a very difficult role and is critical to the success of the show, and Daly pulls it off.

Jim Parsons has five Emmy nominations and three wins for the role of Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory and as the show progresses into its middle and later years, it’s becoming clearer that his isn’t just a one-note performance.  The Big Bang Theory is a series that has greatly benefited by opening up the universe and nowhere is that more obvious than in the relationship between Sheldon and Amy.  It’s a slow progression, as is befitting the character and sitcoms in general, but watching Sheldon open up to new experiences has given Parsons the chance to show a range he didn’t need for the first few seasons.  I don’t know what the future holds for him, or if he’ll be typecast in this role for a while,* but if he wins a fourth Emmy this year, I won’t be complaining.  Sheldon Cooper is a pantheon comedy character and Parsons has elevated it far beyond where it began seven years ago.

* His appearance on Saturday Night Live certainly didn’t give me much confidence, but that could have been as much due to the writing as to his performance.  And SNL is a unique beast that has consumed its fair share of actors.

When Andy Samberg was nominated for a Golden Globe for Brooklyn Nine-Nine I was surprised.  When he won I was stunned.  It’s not that I didn’t like Nine-Nine, it’s just that the show was all of eleven episodes old at that point and hadn’t really found a consistent voice, something very common of freshman network sitcoms.  Morever, Samberg’s character, Jake, often strayed too far into caricature.   By the time it wrapped its first season, however, the show had found a groove and Samberg was consistently one of the funniest men on television.  After a full first season, I have no qualms about nominating him here.

I truly believe that Adam Scott has one of the toughest jobs on television.  He is very often required to be the straight man to the antics of Leslie, Ron, Tom, or Andy.  But he also has to be able to play zany, like whenever Cones of Dunshire comes out.  It’s a difficult balancing act and one that will only get more difficult now that he has triplets in tow (though the show’s wise decision to jump forward three years spares us the craziest parts of that storyline).  Scott’s biggest strength is his versatility; ask him for anything and he’ll do it well.

I’m going back to the Trophy Wife well not just because it was my favorite comedy this year and not just because Bradley Whitford gave a great leading performance, but also because, of anybody on the cast, he has the best shot at actually earning a nomination.  As I mentioned above, Whitford earned three nominations and one win during his tenure on The West Wing and, as with Allison Janney, that might be enough to earn a nomination.  And he deserves it.  Like Adam Scott, Whitford had to balance the straight man, funny man line and, as with the rest of the cast, he was able to play off of everybody in the cast with equal verve.

Others meriting consideration: Ricky Gervais, Chris Messina

Previously: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy, Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama, Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama

So those are my Emmy choices.  Agree?  Disagree?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

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.

My Emmy Ballot: Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama

Anna Gunn left it all on the field in the final season of "Breaking Bad"

Supporting Actress in a Drama is not a category that has been particularly deep for me in recent years simply because a lot of the best performances are coming from shows I don’t watch – namely, The Good Wife and Parenthood.  But this year I feel like the nominations pool is stacked.  Not only did a pair of dramas make The Leap in their sophomore seasons (The Americans and Hannibal), but two Game of Thrones actresses finally submitted themselves after sitting out last year, and two other dramas with great supporting female performances made their debuts (Masters of Sex and True Detective).  While not quite as deep as the Supporting Actor pool, there are a lot of great actresses worthy of consideration here.

A couple of caveats before we start.  First, I’m working from the actual Emmy Performer Ballot, so I can’t move somebody from lead to supporting (Woody Harrelson), nor can I call True Detective a miniseries or Orange Is the New Black a drama, nor can I nominate somebody who didn’t submit themselves (like Alan Cumming in The Good Wife).  Also, I’m only including actors from shows I watch regularly, so if your favorites from House of Cards, Parenthood, The Good Wife, or Scandal aren’t here, that’s why.

My 2013 Choices:

Jennifer Carpenter (Dexter)

Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones)

Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad)

January Jones (Mad Men)

Kelly MacDonald (Boardwalk Empire)

Olivia Munn (The Newsroom)

Actual 2013 Nominees:

Morena Baccarin (Homeland)

Christine Baranski (The Good Wife)

Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones)

Anna Gunn (Breaking Bad) – 2013 Emmy Winner

Christina Hendricks (Mad Men)

Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey)

Not to spoil anything, but there will be only one actress carrying over from my 2013 nominees to this year.  It’s hard to blame the actresses, though.  For starters, four of my 2014 nominees weren’t eligible last year and would likely have taken a few spots if they were.  Secondly, several of them kind of got hosed by their shows.  Dexter took a nosedive in its final season, completely ruining all of the good things they’d done with Jennifer Carpenter’s character in season seven.  January Jones was in all of three episodes of Mad Men’s truncated season.  And Kelly MacDonald was similarly slighted by Boardwalk.  With less to do and a number of strong challengers entering the ring, there just isn’t the room for good actresses on bad shows or good actresses in nothing parts.

As for the actresses who were nominated last year, it’s difficult to see Baccarin coming back because a) she was barely in this past season and b) it was kind of terrible.  I feel like Maggie Smith has kind of run her course as the Dowager Countess and it will be interesting to see if Mad Men still has any voter affection or if people are just done with it.  Anna Gunn will return for certain and there’s no reason why Clark and Baranski wouldn’t as well.  This feels like the most wide open race, however, because with the exception of Anna Gunn, I could see a number of actresses filling the other three spots.

Hannibal was one of several dramas to take huge leaps in their second seasons this spring and a big beneficiary of that leap was Caroline Dhavernas.  She didn’t always get the best storylines (the whole Hannibal/Will/Alana pseudo-love triangle was iffy at best), but she was a strong presence throughout the season.  It’s never easy playing the dupe and the last one to know, but Dhavernas never made Alana stupid.  She was hoodwinked, yes, like everybody was by Lecter, but she was still a powerful woman capable of carrying herself among powerful men.

Speaking of powerful women, one of my favorite shows this fall was one in which the men mostly played second fiddle: Masters of Sex.  And while she wasn’t always the most powerful, Caitlin Fitzgerald’s Libby Masters was perhaps the most complex.  Playing the wife of a male lead in a drama like this can be a difficult task, as Anna Gunn, Edie Falco, and a host of other women can attest.  It’s easy for some viewers to see her as the shrill wife who is trying to prevent her hero (or anti-hero) husband from accomplishing his goals.  But Fitzgerald brings such life to Libby that it’s difficult not to root for her even when she’s not acting like the perfect wife.

Last year’s winner Anna Gunn is the front-runner to win again this year and it’s easy to see why.  In Breaking Bad’s final episodes, Skyler is finally forced to reckon with the devastation that Walter’s operation has caused and in which she, at times, was a reluctant participant.  It’s a difficult piece to watch as everything collapses and Skyler desperately tries to hold her family together, and Gunn plays it perfectly.  The character of Skyler received a great deal of criticism from certain segments of the Bad fanbase (mainly young, male viewers who just wanted to see Walter kick ass), but Gunn remained stalwart through it all.  I would be stunned to see anybody else take home the trophy this year.

It is true that True Detective didn’t care nearly as much about its female characters as it did about its male leads Rust Cohle and Marty Hart and if Michelle Monaghan had submitted herself as a lead, I don’t think she would have done enough to earn a nomination.  But as a supporting actress, she certainly left her mark on the show.  I could argue for a nomination for her solely based on the scene in which Maggie seduces Rust but throughout the series’ short run, she was phenomenal.  There’s something of a trend with the last three actresses I’ve discussed (and really one more on this list), in which they could easily be seen as the overbearing wives of their stories’ heroes.  But because these actresses are so good at what they do, they manage to bring depth and heart to what could otherwise be thankless roles.

Maisie Williams would have earned a nomination from me last year for her work as Arya Stark on Game of Thrones had she submitted herself in the first place.  Unfortunately she didn’t, but she’s in the running this year and might have an even better case for season four than she did for the third.  The symbiotic yet antagonistic relationship between Arya and The Hound as they continued to search for both her family and somebody to pay him often brought levity to an otherwise dark show.  But even beyond the humor, the relationship those two developed was one of the deepest, most thoughtful and considered on the entire show, and it was sad to see it end.  Even if we won’t have Arya and The Hound together anymore, we’ll always have Arya’s laugh at the utter absurdity of her life.

I had Natalie Dormer in this final spot for the longest time,* but ultimately realized that I was giving it to her more out of wanting to have recognized her work in the third season of Game of Thrones than for what she did this season.  So after a long deliberation I decided to go with Katheryn Winnick instead.  I nominated Winnick in the Lead Actress category last year, but she stepped down to Supporting Actress for 2014, which makes sense given her decreased screen time.  But even as her character essentially became the Betty Draper of Vikings, Winnick continued to show why Lagertha could never be a kept woman.  Constantly surrounded by men who underestimate her capabilities, Winnick imbues Lagertha with a quiet strength that always keeps her a part of the action, even when her character is sidelined from the main story for much of the season.

*Figuratively speaking, anyway.  Literally speaking, this list is alphabetical, not ordered by personal preference. 

Others meriting consideration: Betsy Brandt, Emilia Clarke, Christina Hendricks, Annet Mahendru, Ivana Milicevic, Olivia Munn, Emily Bett Rickards, Holly Taylor

Previously: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy, Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama

So those are my Emmy choices.  Agree?  Disagree?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

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.

My Emmy Ballot: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama

Peter Dinklage is a strong candidate to take home his second Emmy for "Game of Thrones"

Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama is perennially the deepest category at the Emmys.  It’s often possible for me to make a list of my second six choices and have even that be a perfectly acceptable group of nominees.  This year, I easily could have made three lists: My actual selections for nominations, six more actors entirely deserving of recognition who have never been nominated before, and six more actors deserving of recognition who have been nominated in the last three years.  It’s actually a bit disheartening how deep this category is year after year because it shows how many great supporting roles there are for men in television dramas compared to the relatively smaller number of similar roles for women.  But for these purposes, we can only work with what we have, so the following represents my attempts to whittle a list of dozens of amazing actors down to six.

A couple of caveats before we start.  First, I’m working from the actual Emmy Performer Ballot, so I can’t move somebody from lead to supporting (Woody Harrelson), nor can I call True Detective a miniseries or Orange Is the New Black a drama, nor can I nominate somebody who didn’t submit themselves (like Alan Cumming in The Good Wife).  Also, I’m only including actors from shows I watch regularly, so if your favorites from House of Cards, Parenthood, The Good Wife, or Scandal aren’t here, that’s why.

My 2013 Choices:

Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad)

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones)

Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones)

Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal)

Mandy Patinkin (Homeland)

Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad)

Actual 2013 Emmy Nominees:

Jonathan Banks (Breaking Bad)

Bobby Cannavale (Boardwalk Empire) – 2013 Emmy Winner

Jim Carter (Downton Abbey)

Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones)

Mandy Patinkin (Homeland)

Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad)

This will be an awfully difficult category for anybody to break into this year.  Jonathan Banks and Bobby Cannavale won’t be eligible, but just as Banks took the Breaking Bad spot vacated by Giancarlo Esposito, so too will Dean Norris likely take Banks’s spot.  I feel like this should be the end of the road for Carter and Patinkin who, even while still delivering fine performances, have seen their shows lose significant footing both culturally and critically in the past couple of years.  When it comes to the Emmys, however, you’re always better off betting on somebody to overstay their welcome than to depart too early. 

If there is only one available spot, then, there is a strong race to fill it.  Will one of the handful of recent nominees (Brendan Coyle, Josh Charles, Walton Goggins, and John Slattery) return?  Will it be Boardwalk Empire’s Jeffrey Wright or Michael Kenneth Williams just filling in the slot held by Cannavale last year?  Will it be Charles Dance, finally submitting himself for Game of Thrones?  Or can The Americans finally break through and earn a nomination for Noah Emmerich?  It’s impossible to know and it could end up being somebody else entirely.

My list, too, has a lot of great returning actors.  Banks leaves and Mads Mikkelsen moved up to Lead Actor this year, which opens up a pair of slots, but the other four men all gave performances ranging  from very good to amazing.  I wouldn’t be disappointed to have any of them back, but there were a bunch of other great performances this year as well.  So let’s see how it shakes out.

Game of Thrones is my favorite show on television right now.  I don’t know that it’s the best, but it’s definitely my favorite.  It’s the one show that I most look forward to each week and it’s the one series that leaves my wanting more every week.  It should be no surprise, then, that as with last year, two Thrones actors grace this list:  Peter Dinklage and Charles Dance.  Dinklage has been the emotional anchor for the show for the past two seasons and this year was no different, as Tyrion Lannister spent much of the season on trial or awaiting trial for murder.  You could even make an argument that his passionate speech in his own defense was the high point of the series to date.  Todd Vanderwerff of the AV Club has criticized Game of Thrones for becoming a show remembered for little but its big moments.  In a sense that’s true.  But even if the show is just a series of amazing moments, Dinklage is very often at the center of them.  Dance could have found himself in this space last year had he submitted himself.  Either way, though, it’s nice that he did so this year, because Tywin had his most prominent role yet and Dance was more than up to the task.  It’s a difficult job: playing the noble villain.  But Dance gives Tywin so much humanity that you appreciate his efforts to protect his family and his legacy even as he plots against the entirety of the Seven Kingdoms.

This was not a particularly good season of Justified.  In fact, the show seems more and more to be following the Sons of Anarchy path with a stellar sophomore season followed by an inexorable decline afterward.  Thankfully, Justified hasn’t fallen nearly as far as Sons did and one of the big reasons for that is the stellar performances by the cast, including Walton Goggins’s Boyd Crowder.  Justified has struggled in the past to figure out what to do with Crowder, especially when he’s not allowed to be a straight antagonist to Raylan, but this season gave him some of his most fruitful work as Boyd tried to rebuild his drug network while balancing alliances with the Crowes, the Detroit mob, and the Mexican cartels.  Goggins has now spent a dozen years playing two great drama supporting characters (Crowder and The Shield’s Shane Vendrell) and has all of one Emmy nomination to show for it. That just doesn’t seem right, though it does point to the perennial strength of this category.

Breaking Bad has had a pair of men crack this category in each of the past two years and I don’t see any reason why 2014 would be different as Aaron Paul should nab his fifth nomination while Dean Norris should get his first.  Paul has been absolutely amazing through all five (or six depending on how you count it) seasons of Breaking Bad and in the final eight episodes of the season he was at the top of his game.  The only thing potentially holding him back is that Jesse is sidelined for much of the season (especially the series’s final few, climactic episodes), but if he can score a nomination, “Rabid Dog” would be as good a submission episode as anybody in this category has.  As for Norris, while I wasn’t a fan of AMC’s decision to split the final season in two (especially since it resulted in the far less wise decision to split Mad Men in two as well), if it means that he can finally get some awards recognition from this series, it will have been worth it.  Norris had his finest moments of the entire series in these final eight episodes as Hank faces off with Walt not once, not twice, but three times and tries to play the father figure in order to flip Jesse against Walt.  Hank is finally an immensely strong presence, finished playing the dupe, and Norris sells it phenomenally. 

I have a problem with Boardwalk Empire.  It’s my problem, I’m pretty sure, but Boardwalk is a series that I need to binge.  I know I’ve written recently about my crusade against binging some shows, but for me Boardwalk is a show that gets much better when I only have to wait a day or two in between episodes.  I did not, however, have to binge watch this past season to realize how amazing Jeffrey Wright was.  His villainous character was a bit of a mustache twirler, but Wright managed to successfully straddle the fine line between menace and cartoon.  I’ve been a fan of Wright’s for a while and it would be nice to see him stay in television, especially if he keeps giving performances like this. 

Others meriting consideration:  Jere Burns, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Noah Emmerich, Jordan Gavaris, Vincent Kartheiser, Allen Leech, Matthew Lillard, Donal Logue, Bob Odenkirk, Mandy Patinkin, John Slattery, Michael Kenneth Williams, Thomas M. Wright

Previously: Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy, Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy

So those are my Emmy choices.  As you can see by the “others” list, this was an incredibly deep category even without guys like Josh Charles who are on shows that I haven’t seen.  Agree?  Disagree?  Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @TyTalksTV.

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.

Under the Dome Season Premiere Review: "Heads Will Roll" - Plot Versus Character

That noose has way too much slack in "Under the Dome"

On Sunday, HBO debuted a new series based on Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers.  The series is set three years after the unexplained disappearance of two percent of the world’s population but the show is utterly unconcerned with the whys and hows of what happened.  It just happened, and nobody – not science, not religion, not anybody – knows why.  Rather, the show is about the characters and how they are moving on (or failing to move on) in the wake of this disaster.  It is essentially a show about grieving and loss, in which “the crazy thing that happens,” is merely the impetus for exploring characters, rather than the story itself.

Under the Dome, through much of season one but especially in “Heads Will Roll,” takes the exact opposite tactic.  This show cares about nothing but the dome and the effects it has on the citizens of Chester’s Mill.  There is so much emphasis on plot and making the dome not just the focus of the story, but the driving force behind the plot, that the characters are just pieces moving on a game board.  They have no agency.  They don’t progress.  They just take on the traits and make the decisions that the dome and the show want them to whenever it’s convenient.

I thought last season’s finale (and the cliffhanger in particular) was pretty much a disaster, and the season premiere – penned by Stephen King, himself – did little to boost my confidence except that everything was largely reset by the end, giving the show a relatively clear path forward.  For all that happened in this episode, very little of it had any consequence and was largely gibberish meant to counter the gibberish from the finale.  And so much of it was so dumb.  The dome starts “groaning” and knocking people unconscious.  On a better show, this is an idea that would be used to create an immense sense of dread as townspeople start collapsing progressively throughout the episode.  But here, the first wave of fainting serves mostly to rid the episode of extras as the only people who survive are the named cast members and the three new characters we need to be introduced to.*  And by the second time people collapse, the problem has basically been fixed and the only remaining drama is whether or not Julia can keep Big Jim from killing himself (which, why?).

* Yes, it’s only the second season and Under the Dome is already pulling a Nikki and Paulo.

Or take the scene at Norrie’s house with the kids (who were shockingly my favorite part of the first season).  It’s an incredibly tense piece of action, with pots, pans, and knives flying all over the place as Joe, Angie, and Norrie try to rescue an unconscious Carolyn.  And yet, its tension is significantly undercut because Joe manages to have a nail injected into his hand have it GO THROUGH HIS ENTIRE HAND WITHOUT SCREAMING IN PAIN!  Seriously?  He has a nail shoot into his hand and then tear its way through and he doesn’t give more than an initial yelp. 

Speaking of pain, it’s awfully remarkable that Julia can manage to swim out into the middle of the lake to rescue a girl and help Barbie move a giant kitchen cupboard less than 24 hours after being shot.  Selective amnesia is a recurring problem in this episode as everybody has apparently decided to collectively forget that Junior imprisoned Angie for an extended period of time not too long ago.  Forgotten, too, is basically all talk of the Monarch as apparently nobody really cares to ask why the dome went from clear to black to white.  That’s not to say that talk of the Monarch or its importance won’t return in the future but in “Heads Will Roll” all continuity and serialization is swept aside for plot.

This is a problem that Under the Dome has had for a while now.  Its “Mishap of the Week” stories tend to overwhelm everything else.  I understand that television shows need weekly structure, but they also need characters that progress, and change, and make decisions based on their past decisions and current desires.  These characters don’t do any of that.  They make decisions and change based on the demands of the current story and nothing else.  The show needs Junior to be a more sympathetic character, so he finally decides to turn against his father, despite there being no new information presented that would make him change his mind, and everybody decides to forget about the whole “imprisoning Angie” thing.  Likewise, the show needs Julia to be the hero, so she saves the day multiple times despite being injured and even talks Big Jim out of killing himself despite knowing full well that he’s killed before and will likely kill again.  It’s all well and noble to say that the dome “wants us to end the killing,” but it doesn’t seem like that sentiment would apply to the town’s worst murderer.  Under the Dome does not have character development.  It has plot points that dictate the characters.

Despite all of these major, major problems, I still can’t help but feel like there’s potential here.  While they were introduced in incredibly clumsy fashion, I really liked the two new characters who were introduced last night.  I don’t buy for a second that Big Jim wouldn’t have sought out his brother-in-law (or Junior his uncle) at some point before now, but Eddie Cahill did a fine job as the enigmatic Sam.  I likewise found ridiculous the idea that there’s a science teacher who has been studying the dome all this time but not telling anybody about it, especially since Joe and his buddy made such a big deal last year about mapping the dome.  But Karla Crome came in, aptly uploaded some exposition, and seems like she’ll be a good addition to the cast. 

I also liked that we finally got to see outside the dome.  Granted it was with one of those classic Lost-esque answers that only raise more questions, but it’s nice to get a glimpse of what the world is saying about Chester’s Mill.  I don’t know that I would have said that at the beginning of last season, but given how little sense the goings on under the dome make these days, I welcome any opportunity to bring in characters who are actually characters and not just plot devices. 

To bring it back to my comparison with The Leftovers, I can’t help but feel like Under the Dome would be incredibly well-served by a time jump.  The Leftovers realized that this part, the Mishap of the Week period of the show, is the boring part.  It’s just one maguffin after another, sucking up all the running time in plot without allowing for any story or character development.  Despite all of Dome’s problems, I do still really like some of these characters and would like to see how they develop when they don’t have to deal with some random problem each week.  Under the Dome will not do this.  But “Heads Will Roll” provides enough of a reset point that I hope they start leaning more towards character and less on plot.

A couple of spare thoughts –

So Sheriff Linda dies in the most “our actor wants off the show and we have to write her out immediately” way possible.  The effects work with all of the metal objects in town being drawn magnetically to the wall was great, but this is yet another example of the show killing characters just to kill them which, at some point, loses its power.

Speaking of death, I guess Angie is dead.  The blood spatter would certainly seem to indicate such but I really hope not.  I like Angie when she’s not stuck in a bomb shelter and Britt Robertson is giving one of the better performances on the show.

In the opening monologue Barbie says “We will never stop fighting to find a way out,” which makes me wonder when they ever started.

Despite Stephen King penning this episode, the dialogue felt awfully on point at times.  “Do it now!” “I’m afraid.” “I think the dome is trying to tell us something.”  “The dome didn’t want us to kill you.  It wants to end the killing.”

Next week’s review will likely be late(r) owing to my vacation this coming weekend, but I'm hoping to get it posted on Wednesday or Thursday. 

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.