What were the best shows of the summer? What was the worst? What disappointed? And what under-the-radar gems are now too good to ignore? Read on below for the lessons learned during the very eventful (and hot) summer 2015.
Masters of Sex: Nearly Off the DVR
For two years now, I’ve strained to give Masters of Sex the benefit of the doubt.
In its first season, the show was unimpeachably great – one of the very best things on TV at the time. Its sophomore run sprinted out of the gate, from fascinating developments in the story's progression to the magnificent contained domestic episode “Fight.” But creator Michelle Ashford started writing in a million directions at once, tracking the lives of groundbreaking sex researchers William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan) with decreasing focus. The frequent time jumps – necessary, considering her intent to capture their decades-long partnership – and loss of key cast members like Allison Janney and Nicholas D’Agosto only pressed on the sore spot. It felt erratic and in desperate need of cohesion.
Even so, several arcs from last year landed with potency, including Betsy Brandt’s great guest work as a troubled patient and the ever-rich dynamic between Bill and Virginia (and Sheen and Caplan). And as season 3 began, it seemed Ashford & company had reigned their beast in: with a massive time jump in-between seasons, the show introduced itself rebooted and re-energized.
But quickly, Masters has fallen into familiar traps. Its first season was narratively and tonally concerned with discovery – precisely why its dizzying opening credits sequence felt fitting then, and feels misplaced now – and that sense of excitement engrossingly pulled its many disparate threads together. At this point, conversely, it’s unclear what Masters’ function is. Everything, from the exploration of Virginia’s teenager daughter, Tessa (the great Isabelle Fuhrman), to the ongoing, bizarre travails of Bill’s wife, Libby (Caitlin Fitzgerald), feels half-baked. Most of it works, to a degree; increasingly, there’s a loud absence of momentum. It’s nice to see Josh Charles as the cast’s new addition, but there’s no steam to his character’s potential affair with Virginia. Bill’s inability to parent, meanwhile, is conveyed with curious indifference.
Last week, the show descended into some strange, parodied version of itself. Bill and Virginia spend the episode – terribly titled “Monkey Business” – trying to reignite the sexuality of an ape. (Yes.) They speak of the ape as if he’s human, and it’s played so straight you aren’t quite sure if Ashford and the writers have lost their minds. Then, in the episode’s climactic scene, you turn certain of it: Virginia stands opposite the gorilla’s cage, and begins to undress with the intent of getting him off. And, breasts exposed, she does it! – but at what cost? I’m not sure if the greater sin here is the obviousness or the ridiculousness with which this inquiry is posed. But I’m pretty sure that neither issue would have even been on the table two seasons ago.
Review coming soon.
UnREAL and Mr. Robot: The Must-See New Dramas
They fit rather perfectly into the current age of TV we’re in – the one where outlets both new and old are carving out niches and seeking out different voices to stand out. UnREAL, as a morally-minded and punishingly dark foray into reality television, is frequently positioned as a direct rebuttal to Lifetime’s steadfastly apolitical programming slate. Mr. Robot replaces the blue skies and procedural mysteries of traditional USA fare with a dystopian nightmare and an anarchist bent.
The mere existence of these series makes for great conversation; that they’re both excellent is the cherry on top of the sundae. As I’ll write in my review next week, Mr. Robot is the best-directed series on television. It’s one of the best-directed TV shows I’ve ever seen. In fact, I can’t think of many films of the past decade that were stylized so immersively, intensely, provocatively, unconventionally, beautifully. Frame by frame, it’s a stunner. And while the aggressively-serialized story has hit a few bumps – the balance between Elliot (Rami Malek), its lead character, and the supporting cast has been an ongoing negotiation – it still boasts a propulsive vitality. It’s bold and strange and oh-so-prescient, audaciously cynical and strikingly modern.
And UnREAL just got better and better. As a behind-the-scenes look at a Bachelor-like reality show, the series initially miscalculated its stakes and its relationship to realism. But as it came to embrace the melodrama, increasingly fashioning itself as a thoughtfully trashy and exploitative opera, UnREAL soared and soared. Its character work was complex but humane, while the writing itself posed consistently inspired questions. I’m not sure of the shelf life for this one, but for now, it stands with Mr. Robot as one of the freshest and most promising shows on TV.
Read my review of UnREAL here.
True Detective: Skip It
I’ve written on this plenty. Despite a pretty spectacular season for summer dramas, True Detective’s second season ate up a lot of the conversation space. Most of it, by the way, out of critics' joyful disdain.
In this climate, it’s impossible to watch everything. And while I’m all about giving stuff a chance, the fact is that True Detective’s lofty promises proved undeliverable by the end of its second hour. (I’m being generous.) Tone-deaf, overly-plotted and thin on dynamic, well-written characters, the season ended up with very little to recommend. I don’t regret watching it, exactly, but I’m still wrestling with the feeling of lost time.
A few years ago, I’d never tell someone to outright avoid a TV show – especially one with this level of ambition and talent attached. But in 2015, if it might come at the expense of Rectify, Mr. Robot, UnREAL or even something as uneven as Masters of Sex, I’d have to firmly say: skip True Detective.
Read my review here.
Catastrophe: Just Watch It, Already
It’s six episodes. It’s fun, and funny, and twistedly romantic. There are few better ways to spend a humid night in.
Read my review here.
Rectify: The Best Show of the Summer
With the summer’s best new dramas (mentioned above), you get a faint either/or scenario. Mr. Robot is cinematically astonishing and narratively competent. UnREAL’s scripts are remarkably assured, but you’re not sticking around for its cinematography.
If there’s one show that marries gorgeous imagery with dense and lyrical writing better than any other, it’s Rectify. As I wrote in my review last week, it deals in the poetic, the cinematic and the literary with nuance and confidence. It plays with media to create something wholly original, as could only exist on the small-screen. And, independent of such superlatives, it’s a powerfully existential contention with family and morality. If you haven’t caught up by now, the first two seasons of this underrated gem are on Netflix.
Read my review here.
Review: Give It a Second Chance
Review is a tough show to recommend, mainly because the better it gets, the more disturbing and despairing it gets. It’s about a man whose job is to “review” life: he works on a reality show in which Americans ask him about both the minutiae and the extraordinary in the everyday. What’s it like to join a cult? What’s it like to eat 20 pancakes? What’s it like to be falsely accused??
You might think, on such a premise, the show would devolve into inessential slapstick. In the first episode or two, it might be hard to know better: its creator and star, Eastbound & Down’s Andy Daly, is too enigmatic to popular culture to convince us otherwise. But stick with it – please. Review isn’t just the most unexpectedly perfect companion piece to UnREAL, dissecting reality culture and exploitation through a bleakly satirical lens, but it’s a morbidly hilarious comedy in its own right.
As Daly’s Forrest McNeill continues his reviews, he begins to realize the toll the job takes on his actual life – in shorter terms, he begins unwittingly destroying it. He’s called to do horrible things, and ultimately is left to choose between a sense of humanity and decency and the job itself. His devotion to the latter is brilliantly inexplicable, and it drives the show forward. The first season’s still-unmatched highlight calls for him to eat a bunch of pancakes and get divorced in sequence, a startling, terrifying and finally raucous blend of the devastating with the banal. But this second season is only taking it further, tackling social topics such as gay conversion therapy with scintillating commitment. It’s still airing on Comedy Central – if you gave up on this one already, I don’t blame you, but I urge you to dig back into its boisterous, black heart.
Review coming soon.
BoJack Horseman: Binge It All
I’ll admit: it initially felt like a combination of mediocre Adult Swim cartoon and tepid Hollywood satire. BoJack Horseman snuck onto Netflix around the same time as Orange Is the New Black’s second season, with mixed reviews and little buzz accompanying its launch. Based on what I’d heard, I decided to pass on the animated series – as always, there seemed to be too much out there already.
Its small but vocal group of ardent fans brought me in as its second season debuted earlier this summer. And what an enlightening ride it’s been – a lesson that televisual storytelling can take virtually any form and still surprise you. BoJack Horseman presents itself as a radically different kind of animated series: its comedy is spare, while as drama it’s unexpectedly poignant. It’s the kind of show where, in order to fully embrace it, expectations need to be adjusted. It doesn’t conform to our notion of the animated comedy; it doesn’t play to the form’s biases, either. Rather, BoJack Horseman uses its quirky cartoon aesthetic to breathe bracing life into a familiar story of aging and loneliness. As a binge, it’s both easy and worthwhile.
Read my review here.
Halt and Catch Fire: I Should Watch This, Too
No, not even I can watch everything. As other critics wrap up the summer, AMC’s 80s tech drama Halt and Catch Fire is popping up on a lot of “Best Of” lists, and several pieces on the show have me eager to check it out. I haven’t caught even an episode yet; the first season wasn’t viewed too positively by critics, and ratings were distressingly low. A third season looks unlikely, but I hope to give this one a look, regardless – and anyone reading this probably should, too.
Orange Is the New Black: The Faded Phenomenon
It’s hard to believe that Orange Is the New Black kicked off our summer. Discussion around the third season of Netflix’s flagship came and went so fast I nearly forgot I’d already devoured all 13 episodes.
The critical consensus is that OITNB is coming off of its weakest season, and I agree with the sentiment – it lacked centrality and churned out some especially weak episodes early in the run. But the show is still strong. In dialogue and in pitch, Jenji Kohan is writing stories and characters like nobody else in the business, to both artistic and political success. Plus, the ending of the season – one of the show’s real high points, a cathartically-realized thematic and narrative conclusion – indicates there’s still plenty left in the tank for this one.
What surprised me more about OITNB this year is, again, how rapidly it came and went. Once upon a time, there didn’t seem to be a cultural phenomenon to top it. I don’t doubt the show’s entrenched popularity; in fact, its continued success renders its quick disappearance all the more intriguing. While it helped to kick off the era of binging that’s now so embedded in series-viewing culture, OITNB is now – as a third-year show – falling victim to its weaknesses. With so much out there all the time, it’s harder to center commentary and conversation on a single show, especially one released all-at-once that’s neither new nor in its prime.
This seems like a fitting place to end this article, then. This summer yielded great programs to spare – I didn’t even get into HBO’s tremendous miniseries Show Me a Hero (since I used August 1 as a premiere cutoff date) – but none, with the definite exception of Mr. Robot, were popular, let alone zeitgeist-capturing.
UnREAL and Rectify have been renewed despite anemic ratings; BoJack Horseman, Review and Catastrophe skated by with effusive praise from critics but a limited fanbase. The small-screen economy has splintered rapidly. It’s making it more difficult for quality programming to stand out. But on the other side of that coin is a group of shows that’s bolder, weirder and more diverse than we’ve had any reason to expect from TV in the past. Orange Is the New Black embodies this new potential. And its steep descent from the top of the mountain indicates its potential drawbacks.
Read my review here.