Horace and Pete, complete series
Nobody knew what it was, or what it would be, when Louis C.K. launched “Episode 1” of a new project called Horace and Pete on his own website, back in January. Attuned to the current political climate and rich with great actors, it was a delightful surprise that seemed likely to stop there, as a fascinating experiment. (Read my in-depth review of the first episode here.)
In the end, however, Horace and Pete proved itself as a top-notch, ten-episode, closed-ended dramatic series, elevated by some devastating thematic underpinnings and wrenching performances. C.K., who had emerged as a great visual artist with the formally experimental Louie, shot Horace in multi-camera – a cost-cutting measure that was likely what allowed the series to get produced in the first place – but, in the later episodes particularly, he found a way to convey some hauntingly evocative visual language. The Brooklyn bar (which takes the series’ name) was where the vast majority of action took place, and episode-by-episode the location carried greater significance: the comfort it provided to generations of local people, the horrors it presented to excluded minorities and abused women, the traditions that persevered despite their increasing ludicrousness with the times. That invocation of timelessness clashed violently, and sometimes ineffectively, with barroom banter centered on current events – Horace and Pete, both ideologically and creatively, was steeped in the tension between legacy and modernity, right down to its antiquated televisual format.
The series’ highlight was certainly its third episode, a showcase for Laurie Metcalf as Horace’s (C.K.) ex-wife, who was fresh off of making a terrible mistake. (Her opening monologue was as perfectly-written as it was astonishingly delivered.) But the show evolved, placing Horace and Pete’s (Steve Buscemi) sister Sylvia (played with icy brilliance by Edie Falco) at the brittle center of the story, and the theme of family trauma at the unsettling focal point of the narrative. Horace and Pete was rarely funny, even when it wanted to be – save for the vulgar Uncle Pete, of course, played with seething intensity by a never-better Alan Alda – but I vastly underestimated its dramatic power. You couldn’t help but shoulder the show’s harrowing weight, and particularly the fates of the tragic sibling trio of Horace, Pete and Sylvia. In fact, Horace and Pete’s final act twist may have been a tad too bleak, sacrificing emotion for bloodshed – though I can hardly blame Louis C.K. for so forcefully putting a pin in a story that never once shedded its initial coat of mystique. B+
Broad City, season 3
Is this the best out-and-out comedy on television right now? Broad City can be a difficult show to review on an ongoing basis, simply because it’s such a consistent, thorough sitcom, unafraid to ever be anything other than itself. The duo of Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glatzer is, at this point, among the finest in comedy around – to best understand why, watch them raucously adopt each other’s personas in the second episode of the currently-airing third season – and their New York adventures never cease to amaze. Each episode feels loose and polished in completion, but the architecture of their comic structures – from banter to scenes to entire episodic plot-lines – is actually quite complex. What this show continually pulls off is far more impressive than it gets credit for.
Among them: a contemporaneous and, often, flat-out thrilling depiction of friendship that’s staggeringly conflict-averse; a take on an over-explored city that feels fresh, unique and vibrant; and a stream of nastiness and vulgarity that’s rendered compact, elegant even, through careful, character-specific writing. After a first season that evened itself out over the transfer from web to television – Broad City began as an online series – and a second that perfected Jacobson and Glatzer’s comic pitch, this third season is plumbing new depths, taking its characters and their flaws a hair more seriously without any sacrifice whatsoever of their comedic energy. The show’s most recent episode, “Burning Bridges,” worked as a sincere meditation on the characters’ dynamics while simultaneously pulling off an inspired Mrs. Doubtfire homage. That’s no easy feat, but it’s part of what makes this show so easy to love: as Broad City grows up, it’s turning more irresistible than ever. A
Empire, season 2
Empire has lost so much of itself over this second season, and to such a degree, that it’s difficult to see what's left to recover. The characters and their relationships are incoherently drawn; by killing off villains Mimi (Marisa Tomei) and Camilla (Naomi Campbell) just an episode after their rise to power, the show once more proved unable to stick with a storyline, or a dynamic, without blowing it up and starting from scratch. That’s hardly a workable formula for what is, fundamentally, a family drama. This season has been so stop-and-start – remember power corrupting Jamal? Luscious in prison? – with character allegiances so chronically redefined, that nothing feels honest anymore, emotionally or otherwise.
This is always the trick of a primetime soap: Empire has long been over-the-top, not to mention impatient with storylines of more than a few episodes in length. But its mandate to continually raise the stakes and push the envelope has backfired, dramatically – from its depictions of the music industry to gay culture to family, Empire in no way exists in a believable reality anymore, let alone one that I’m interested in visiting on a weekly basis. Its takes on social issues are less groundbreaking – as they once felt – than muddled and ineffective. Its “twists” are so numbingly frequent that nothing manages to legitimately surprise. Indeed, Empire’s nauseating Pepsi product-placement arc from late last year, so grossly commercial and inauthentic, has turned into an apt metaphor for the show itself: content with a few #OMG moments per episode, and a lack of stability as a primary plot device, Empire has abandoned its artistic integrity. Sad as it is to bid adieu to the great Taraji P. Henson and those occasional moments of musical excellence and emotional resonance, I’ve officially reached my limit. C-