Television Review - 2018

Because I made an effort to review every show that I watched in 2018, I'm going to be able to structure this year's TV review post a little differently and cram it all into one. In the past, I've broken out reviews of my five favorite viewing experiences of the year into separate installments, but since I don't have all that much new to say, I'll simply rank them and link those reviews here.

Here are all the shows that I've watched during 2018. I completed the most recently concluded season of the show (and only the most recent season of the show) unless otherwise indicated. The crop is a little thinner this year because Cheers and The Americans both took a very long time.

• Everything Sucks! 
• Cheers (Seasons 5-11)
• The Good Place (Seasons 1-2)
• Atypical (Seasons 1-2)
• Barry 
• Ozark (Season One)
• The Americans (Full series, Seasons 1-6)
• The Big Bang Theory
• Jersey Shore Family Vacation (Seasons 1-2)
• BoJack Horseman
• Better Call Saul
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
• South Park
• Top Chef (Okay, I forgot to review this)

Here are the shows I watched last year that have dropped off the list due to no new episodes:

• You're the Worst (returns in January)
• The Sopranos
• Master of None
• High Maintenance
• Rick and Morty

Here are the shows that fell out of the rotation since last year, or that I am 100% sure I will not be continuing, with an explanation:

1. Silicon Valley - We watched an episode or two of this, but rumors of its decline in quality along with the departure of T.J. Miller's Erlich Bachman character from the show stunted our enthusiasm, and we've just sort of stopped watching it.

2. Billions - I can't actually say we stopped watching it -- in fact, we watched the third episode of Season Three after a long hiatus last night. We might complete Season Three next year if that momentum sticks, but I think it's just decent, and the repeated power plays and backstabbing make it feel a little too much like House of Cards and Suits at times. The characters on Billions lie somewhere on the spectrum between the boring, 1-dimensional ones found on House of Cards and the highly entertaining but caricature-like ones on Suits, so it's walking a tight rope.

3. Ozark - I can't stress or repeat myself enough on this point, and it's actually cathartic to say it out loud every so often. The Season One finale episode of Ozark was so unbelievably terrible that I'm dropping the show out of principle, even if it definitely had its moments along the way. There's only a handful of TV episodes I've ever seen that I'd slap an "F" grade on, and adjusting for expectations (Ozark was otherwise decent-to-good), it might be the most disappointing (not to mention repulsive) single installment of a show I've ever seen. It's close between that and the How I Met Your Mother finale.

Finally, here were my Top Five Viewing Experiences of the Year:

5. Barry (Season One) - I'm giving this the slight edge over Season Four of Better Call Saul in a year in which I just happened to watch a lot of great TV. In the end, it's probably because Barry was a completely new experience and toed the line between comedy and drama perfectly.

4. Atypical (Seasons 1-2)- The second season wasn't quite as strong as the first, but overall, but Atypical is rife with strong characters and presents an interesting look at a family whose son (and series main character) is on the autism spectrum.

3. BoJack Horseman (Season Five) - BoJack Horseman might be the best actively-running series on TV and delivered another consistently stellar slate of episodes in 2018. It was something of a bounce-back from Season Four, in which there were a few amazing episodes scattered among weaker (for BoJack) installments.

2. Cheers (Seasons 5-11) - This is the best live-action sitcom I've ever seen and it delivered consistent laughs all the way up until the finale, which is one of the greatest episodes of television of all time.

1. The Americans (Full series, Seasons 1-6) - What a ride. FX's period drama is firmly in the "best of all-time" discussion. When I finished watching the show, my reaction was, "Well, I know The Wire is better, but what else?" As far as other completed dramas are concerned, I know there's Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Mad Men (which I don't love but is critically acclaimed) to reckon with. I'd certainly put The Americans somewhere in that group.

Ozark (Season One)

Disastrous season finale undoes some built-up goodwill, bringing the show's flaws into focus

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I mentioned in my year-end TV review that we dropped Ozark after the first couple episodes, not necessarily because it was bad, but because we sort of ran out of TV time and the early installments of the show didn't build up enough momentum to get us racing to the remote during a busy period of our lives. Eventually, months later, I picked it back up again and finished off the season, leaving me with some mixed feelings on the show.

Ozark is the story of Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman), a financial planner in Chicago (living in Naperville!) whose primary job is to launder money for a Mexican drug cartel. His primary contact with the cartel, Camino Del Rio ("Del", portrayed by Esai Morales) is a frightening man who seems to be highly intelligent, great at reading people, and also ruthlessly violent. In the first episode, a scheme goes wrong thanks to Marty's partner and Marty is forced to repay a debt to Del. He tries to do so by relocating his family to a small town in the Missouri Ozarks, where he must find a means within local businesses to clean a large sum of money for Del. Unfortunately, the locals don't prove to be quite as unassuming and manipulable as he expected, and the town has a dark underbelly of its own that becomes just as much of a threat to Marty and his family as the Mexican cartel.

Shortly after their arrival in town, the Byrdes become entangled with the Langmore family, trailer residents with varying degrees of greed and violent tendencies. Young adult Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner) is probably the show's strongest character in performance and writing (though I could have done without her wearing out the impact of the word "fuck" and its variants by the third episode). She originally steals some of Marty's money, but eventually becomes an ally of Marty's in his laundering scheme, despite continuing to plan to murder him and take all of Del's unwashed cash.

Marty's relationship to his family is tenuous at best, as in the first episode it's revealed that his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) is anything but loyal. Both are somewhat distant from their children due to a lack of being forthright about their business and their reasons for uprooting their lives. A particularly good (and necessary) flashback episode shows how Marty wound up in illegal dealings in the first place, and it's both an argument for and against whether the pair truly deserve the scorn that they get from their children.

The tone of the show is constantly dark with almost no room for humor, and as the latest in the long line of anti-hero dramas that have sprung up since Tony Soprano graced the small screen, that would basically require Ozark to boast a combination of strong characters, great acting, and heart-pounding drama for it to stand out. It doesn't quite complete that trifecta. Generally, both Bateman and Linney leave a lot to be desired from an acting perspective, but fortunately Garner, Morales, and several others in minor roles effectively bring their characters to life. The show does a good job of world-building once you get beyond the first couple introductory episodes and largely keeps the plot riveting throughout (Marty almost constantly has three different entities out to get him, which makes breathing room hard to come by).

Unfortunately, the season finale undermines much of what comes before it, as the show makes three major mistakes in going for misery-porn shock value and having someone make a blunder that's so out-of-character that it not only destroys a season's worth of development, but calls into question whether the show is interested in any of these people beyond their ability to advance the plot. The horrid finale shone a greater light on some of the show's season-long issues, which were forgivable until it lost sight of the things that were working. Suddenly, the relentlessly gloomy mood, the predictability of most plot twists (nearly every ostensibly low-key scene in the show either leads into or blatantly foreshadows something significant that will happen next; Ozark isn't interested in just slowing down and casually hanging out with its characters), and the weakness of the performance from the two leads weren't things that the fast-paced action could allow me to forgive.

The remainder of this post will contain specific spoilers regarding my problems with the finale and is only for people who have seen the show. If you'd like to read it, highlight the text below.

In the sixth episode, Jacob Snell threatens to cut Pastor Young's baby out of his wife's womb if Marty doesn't halt construction of the church. That's a horrific threat, but with a target that doesn't make a great deal of sense when directed at Marty. It's easy to shrug off as something that will never actually come to pass. When Pastor Young falters in keeping up his sermons on the water, preventing Snell's drug distribution operation from continuing, Snell actually follows through on that, and we cut to Pastor Young finding his new baby, which one of Snell's underlings must have actually cut out of his wife's body during or after murdering her. Moving past the fact that Pastor Young's wife didn't actually wrong anyone good or evil during the plot, it's just a universally disgusting thing to do. We didn't need any further evidence that the Snells were dangerous people; we got that from the very first scene they were in and got more of it later in this very episode. Even though nothing graphic was shown, there was absolutely no upside to putting that image in peoples' heads.

That was the least of the episode's three grave sins. The second involved the conclusion of the huge business deal between Del and the Snells. The whole season, Del is portrayed as a careful, calculating man who has a sixth sense for judging character. He's ruthless, but also very smart and generally speaks respectfully to those with whom he is dealing, even if he's about to have them killed. That makes what he does next so infuriating from the perspective of anyone who had already spent almost ten hours watching the show to this point. He turns away with Marty and says -- within clear earshot of the Snells --

"Only Marty Byrde can move to Missouri and somehow convince me to partner with a bunch of rednecks."

Darlene Snell asks him to repeat himself, and he's actually stupid enough to say it again! Only this time, Darlene shoots him dead before he finishes the sentence. The one nice touch is that it ties back to the Snells' earlier strong insistence that they are "hillbillies", not "rednecks", but that doesn't redeem it. To take a character like Del who has been portrayed as cunning and intelligent for the whole season and have him die because of such a foolhardy and unnecessary comment (which contained a slur uncharacteristic of the way he spoke all season long) is simply ridiculous. It seems like they were set on having Del killed off in the finale, but couldn't think of a natural way to do it and landed on this.

Finally, Pastor Young is unhinged after discovering his wife has been murdered. When Marty comes to visit him, he makes the comment,

"Why would I want to keep a baby alive in this world?"

Marty tries to talk him down, but then later in the episode, we see the pastor driving to a lake with the baby that was very recently cut out of his mother's womb. He stands in the lake and sort of violently pushes his infant son under the water and holds him there while the camera focuses on his determined face. The baby is fully submerged in the water for THIRTY SECONDS (I timed it) while the audience is mostly convinced that the pastor is drowning his son. The only possible alternative, of course, is that it's a baptism, and sure enough, the pastor eventually pulls his air-deprived son out of the water and makes the sign of the cross on his forehead. 

This is completely absurd, and involves a character behaving in an unrealistic way to trick and shock the audience. Holding a newborn underwater for thirty seconds is not anyone's definition of baptism; it more closely matches the definitions of "child abuse" or "murder". There is not a branch of religion or a human person stupid enough to do this. It's a completely unbelievable stunt that serves no purpose but to horrify its audience for a half-minute. Mission accomplished, I guess.

Season One Grade: C+

Television Review - 2017 (Part 1)

Welcome to my annual review of television shows I've watched during the year.

For reference, here's a list of shows I've watched this year, in no particular order. Unless otherwise indicated, I'm only considering the episodes released during 2017 (or the most recent season).

Suits (almost all of the most recently-completed season)

BoJack Horseman

Silicon Valley

Top Chef

The Big Bang Theory

Catastrophe (a few Season Three episodes)

You're the Worst

Archer

The Sopranos (Seasons Two through Six)

South Park

Better Call Saul

Master of None

This Is Us (Season One, half of Season Two)

Billions (Seasons One and Two)

High Maintenance (all webisodes and full-length HBO episodes)

Cheers (Seasons One through part of Season Four or so, still in progress)

Ozark (two episodes)

Rick and Morty (Season Three, various Seasons One & Two episodes)

Shows That I've Dropped, and Why

I was particularly aggressive about dropping shows this year. With my first daughter staying up later and my second daughter arriving in the fall, the amount of time I've had to watch TV decreased steadily this year, and as a result, my standards have increased for what shows justify me spending that precious amount of time. So here's a list of all the shows that were on the list last year and no longer appear, or some others that do appear and I have decided to stop watching.

1) Suits. This show was once outstanding, but it's just been on too long and they no longer have an interesting story to tell. Meghan Markle leaving the show to become the Queen of England or whatever probably will only exacerbate that problem

2) Modern Family. Reasons were described last year.

3) Mr. Robot. Ditto

4) Catastrophe. My wife really likes this show and I tried to get into Season Three but I just wound up falling asleep a lot. This is probably the show of highest quality (currently, at least) that I've dropped. I don't know why, but I'm just not that stoked on it.

5) The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Explained last year, but it bears re-mentioning: Lillian is probably one of my least-favorite TV characters of all time.

6) Ballers. The review explains it pretty well. It's just not very good.

7) Archer. This one's been on thin ice with me before and I didn't care for the Dreamland concept. It's time to say good-bye to what was one of my favorite shows a half-decade ago. I haven't actively stopped watching it yet, as I've seen all of the most recent season, but I won't pick it back up in the spring.

8) This Is Us. This one has been a victim of my waning attention span. I don't think the show got that much worse from Season One (though it has been a slight downgrade). Kate and (to a lesser extent) Kevin are still very weak characters and Sterling K. Brown can't carry the present-day portion of the show all by himself. I might jump into it again at some point, but for the time being, I've told my wife to carry on by herself with this one.

9) Ozark. I may pick this up again. I was very interested in the only two episodes that I watched, but this was around when we had our baby. We didn't keep plowing through.

Shows That Didn't Release New Episodes or Are Complete

1) It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia 

2) Louie

I'm spacing this out a little more than I have in past years. Over the course of the next few weeks, I'm going to be rolling out reviews of my favorite five TV viewing experiences of the year. Stay tuned...as a change of pace we'll have some actual content around here in the month to come.