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Top TV Tableaus of 2007
Give in! I realize some, if not most, of you are soulless money-grubbing bureaucrats with the aesthetic sense of lab rats, but I have hope. Surely some of you became TV Studio Honchos or the Yes-Men Who Empower Them because you love TV. You love good stories or maybe gorgeous sets. You love it when the actor nails some great dialogue. Surely a few of you realize that network TV is turning out more wonderfully idiosyncratic entertainment than it has in ... well, in my TV-watching life, at least. And surely a few of you have realized that you have the writers to thank for all this brilliant and woolly greatness. So give in. I’m not your usual target audience, I know. When you think about people in my demographic (that would be fat mid-30s guys with liberal arts degrees and a tendency to write drivel for web-based pop culture journals [you know who you are]), you think we’re entertainment snobs, and you’ve shown your contempt for us in the past by airing way too many sitcoms starring Jim Belushi and Ray Romano and other boring MOR stand-up guys bitching about their wives and kids and comfortable middle-class lives. When you’ve somehow greenlit a show that’s worth a damn, you’ve screwed with the schedule just to make it hard for fans to find the show, and then you’ve abruptly canceled it, claiming that no one is watching it. I had pretty much resigned myself to a future where shows I love only last 3 or 4 episodes. But something — was it Lost? — convinced you, Mr. Network TV Guy, that shows can be weird and they can have real emotions and real progression and despite these faults, people will still watch them. Wow, you thought, maybe the average guy out there isn’t as dumb as I thought! Maybe that idea terrified you, and when the writers came to you asking for fair compensation for their work, maybe you retreated to your American Gladiators comfort zone. This sucks, TV Honcho and/or Yes-Man. Give in. It’s the right thing to do, not just for the writers (who you should be paying MORE), but for the audience, because we hate it when you show your contempt. With a sliver of hope, Hayden Childs P.S. Just so we’re clear on the concept, here’s my ten favorite TV shows from 2007. Do more like these, please. 1. Pushing Daisies Pushing Daisies is a Bride of Frankenshow, made of fairytales, black humor, detective procedurals, sweet romance, Hitchcock homages, and then, starting with the third episode, musical interludes. It’s also funny as hell. Bryan Fuller previously made Wonderfalls, another weird and compelling show cancelled before its prime. Go watch Pushing Daisies and then go check out the Wonderfalls DVDs. If you were responsible for the cancellation of Wonderfalls, feel shame. The thoroughly awesome Olive (Kristen Chenowith) breaks into song. Delightful repartee, featuring, as usual, Emerson (Chi McBride). If I’d found any of the Hitchcock homages online, they’d be here. 2. Friday Night Lights This is a football show that’s more about culture than football. Well, it’s a little about football. Season One started in 2006, but I was slow to the show, so I didn’t catch up until this year, and Season Two has been mostly fantastic. There was a subplot fans found controversial because it seemed so lurid in the face of the show’s typical hyperreality, but I didn’t mind it as much as some. Unfortunately, very few of the great moments from the show are available online. As a side note to fans who post homemade videos that pair scenes from a TV show with some popular ballad: this will embarrass you in five years. Anyone encouraging you to continue making these is not your real friend. Season Two Credits, with spacey Explosions in the Sky music. 3. 30 Rock Man, everything about this show is brilliant. Season One was sharp, yes, but Season Two has been so great it seems impossible. The cast has been an ensemble so close to perfection that SNL is surely jealous, the writing pitch-perfect, and the guest stars pluperfect. Who knew David Schwimmer could be funny? Heck, who knew Tracy Morgan could be so funny? Edie Falco as a liberal, hippy-dippy mama. It’s a shame her Lifetime movie wasn’t available. 4. Flight of the Conchords It sounds like Tenacious D on paper. Struggling band, goofy songs, a couple of clueless doofuses. However, Flight of the Conchords is better for two reasons: 1. the guys parody music that is not metal or prog; and 2. the Conchords’ songs are full of love for the source material. Consider: Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros Foux Da Fa Fa Bowie’s In Space 5. The Sopranos OK, HBO still has a lien on my TV-watching heart, obviously. I liked the half- to three-quarter-season the Sopranos offered and had no problem at all with the calamitous fade to black. There were plenty of great Sopranos moments, from the fight to the gang war to Tony snuffing Chris like he snuffs his own soul. “Don’t Stop” is clearly a sign that the cub scout with the merit badge in deep-sea fishing is possessed by Big Pussy’s ghost and will shank Tony in the next 20 seconds. Hey, how you like that decision to give Adriana up to this guy now, huh? 6. Battlestar Galactica Yes, it went batshit insane at the end. I don’t know if this is good-insane or bad-insane, but it says a lot about the show that I want to find out. Seriously, batshit crazy. 7. The Office This season of the American Office (as it shall always be known in my house) has been the most haphazard since the first, but it had some great moments. Jim became Michael, Michael tried to become a hobo before he became even more of a shell of a man on even more of a budget, and Dwight became bereft. Take a Chance on Me 8. Veronica Mars Actually, the part of Veronica Mars that aired in 2007 sorta sucked. Lots of Season Three sorta sucked, to be honest. The show was great at times, but uneven at its best, and the mishaps are hard to forgive: screwing up the point of the Stanford Prison Experiment, inverting the point of Twelve Angry Men (but that was Season Two, right?), having a women’s group fake a rape while a real serial rapist was on the loose, or the stupid-ass terrorism plot. Kristen Bell, on the other hand, was always good. In fact, most of the cast was good. The writing, although awfully misguided at times, was occasionally stellar, and that was why I watched the show. Let’s end in misery, shall we? 9. John From Cincinnati I didn’t love this show, but I respect it. Like most anyone with a brain, I would rather have had Season Four of Deadwood. However, that’s not going to happen. So, here we are. Anyway, I think the required bibliography for this show would include Heidegger, Levinas, Niels Bohr, a history of the philosophy and mathematics of Gottfried Leibniz, A Brief History of Time, The Dancing Wu Li Masters, the Chuang Tzu, and any number of other texts on quantum mechanics, German phenomenology, and 20th century ontology. That’s a heady chunk of symbolism for such a silly show. 10. Heroes Yeah, I watched it. The best thing I can say about it is that the show-runner has acknowledged how lousy Season Two has been so far and promised to do better. That’s promising. |
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Dear TV Studio Honchos and Yes-Men, 