TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  Episodes dealt with juvenile delinquency (“I Before E, Except After C”); the struggle to raise an adult son with Down syndrome (“No Wings at All”); housing discrimination in the suburbs (“No Hiding Place”); the role of child abuse in creating runaways (“The Street”); discrimination against sex workers (“The Sinner”); and the contradictions in statutory rape laws from state to state (“Age of Consent”). Carroll O’Connor, aka Archie Bunker, starred in that last episode as a widowed police officer who accuses his teenage daughter’s boyfriend of rape to stop her from marrying the boy and leaving him all by his lonesome. A subplot in that same hour saw Brock going on a public affairs show (hosted by none other than David Susskind) to speak about liberal versus conservative values and the obstacles to true social reform.

  In “Who Do You Kill?” an African American couple’s baby suffers a rat bite after months of their complaining to their white landlord about the building’s conditions. (Michael Mann’s Crime Story would pay homage to it with an episode a few decades later.) The episode asks whether racism is best met with nonviolent or violent resistance: civil rights marches, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X were all constantly in the news at that point. James Earl Jones plays the father, an unemployed man so fed up with the conditions that trapped his family in poverty that he finds phony white liberal expressions of sympathy nearly as noxious as racism itself. “The white man stick a knife in my back,” he tells Brock and Cynthia, who have tried to find work for him. “Another white pull it out and stick on a bandage! You think I’m gonna kiss his hand?” The line anticipates a statement made by Malcolm X in a TV interview four months later: “If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t even pulled the knife out, much less healed the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”

  Network notes urged the show’s producers to stir in more humor, avoid an “over-grim documentary feel,” and resist the urge to blame characters’ problems on the failure of institutions. Susskind orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to try to save the show, to no avail. The last episode, “Here Today,” is one of the bitterest finales in TV history: Brock writes a series of articles about urban problems but no paper will publish it; he finally finds one that will run it, then learns that the paper is about to be absorbed by a rival publication that doesn’t run those kinds of pieces.

  —MZS

  MOST AWESOME AND/OR RIDICULOUS NAMES

  1.(tie) Bob Loblaw, Tobias Fünke, Maeby Fünke, GOB (George Oscar Bluth), George Michael Bluth, Ann Veal, Barry Zuckerkorn, J. Walter Weatherman, Gene Parmesan, Stan Sitwell, Larry Middleman, Cindi Lightballoon, Hel-Loh Bluth, Arrested Development

  2.Truxton Spangler, Rubicon

  3.Dr. Leo Spaceman, 30 Rock

  4.Mike Ehrmantraut, Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul

  5.Julia Sugarbaker, Designing Women

  6.Furio Giunta, The Sopranos

  7.Dr. Beardface (pronounced “Beard-FUH-say”), Scrubs

  8.Luanne Platter, King of the Hill (certainly the only regular sitcom character named for a menu item at Luby’s Cafeteria)

  9.Chandler Bing, Friends

  10.Sonny Crockett, Miami Vice

  11.Vic Hitler (the narcoleptic comic), Hill Street Blues

  12.Bailey Quarters, WKRP in Cincinnati

  13.Daenerys Targaryen, Game of Thrones

  14.Ronald Ulysses Swanson, Parks and Recreation

  15.Snidely Whiplash, The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

  16.Thurston Howell III and Lovey Howell, Gilligan’s Island

  17.Emma Pillsbury, Glee

  18.Maynard G. Krebs, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

  19.Festus Haggen, Gunsmoke

  20.Mr. Eko, Lost

  21.Rustin Cohle, True Detective

  22.Jordan Catalano, My So-Called Life

  23.Krystle Carrington, Dynasty

  24.Mr. Peanutbutter, BoJack Horseman

  25.Veronica Mars, Veronica Mars

  Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015) Total score: 86

  Bryan Fuller’s riff on the world of novelist Thomas Harris, the father of Hannibal Lecter, was one of the great TV shows of the twenty-first century, and one of the least likely candidates for greatness. By the time the creator of Wonderfalls and Pushing Daisies offered his take on the patient-devouring psychiatrist and all ancillary characters in his bloody universe, the good doctor had been the subject of four novels and five films, not to mention innumerable imitative books, movies, and shows built around puppet masters who killed bushels of people and inspired others to kill, all while staying a step ahead of FBI profilers who were all modeled on Harris’s other innovative pulp archetype, Will Graham. On top of all that, Lecter had previously been portrayed by two actors whose work was so strong that partisans still argue over whose interpretation is greater: Brian Cox’s ice-cold Lecter in Manhunter, or Anthony Hopkins’s wicked hambone in The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon.

  As Lecter, Mads Mikkelsen offered a new interpretation of the character. He was even more brazenly a fantasy-identification figure than his predecessors—as much the hero of this sprawling nightmare as Satan was the hero of Paradise Lost or Tom Ripley the hero of Patricia Highsmith’s fiction. Mikkelsen was arguably the first performer to successfully incarnate every preposterous assertion made about Lecter in Harris’s books. He was believable as a therapist with superior listening skills and a strategic capacity for warmth, capable of fooling the world into thinking he was treating patients rather than grooming them as victims or apprentice killers, and helping the FBI solve a seemingly unending parade of murders without tipping them off to the fact that he was the mastermind. Mikkelsen was also credible as an elegant lover who unwound by shampooing his lover’s hair, an action hero who could go toe-to-toe with Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne), and a polymath aesthete who could play Carnegie Hall–quality sonatas on piano or harpsichord, cook five-star meals from meats of questionable origin, and (in the season 3 premiere) land a professorship at a university in Florence by revealing a heretofore unknown capacity for speaking fluent Italian. (The chair was open, of course, because Lecter had created the vacancy.)

  By all rights, Hannibal should have been both too silly and too violent to sustain itself for more than a few weeks. But it got richer, more assured, and more audacious as it went along, always taking the most surprising, at times circuitous route toward a destination. The show ran just three seasons but took such great strides that by the end of season 3, viewers might have felt as if they’d been watching the serial-killer equivalent of one of those evolutionary charts that starts with a razor-toothed fish and ends with a man in a suit carrying a briefcase. Fuller’s tour of Harris land jettisoned the occasionally dreamlike approach of earlier features in favor of a full-on nightmare, unbound by real-world logic or plausibility, that got weirder, more ostentatiously sensual, and more impenetrable as it went along.

  The first season has an anthology or “case of the week” feel: Lecter manipulates patients into killing or allowing themselves to be killed (or mutilated) while simultaneously advising the FBI on how to catch those same killers. Woven through all the freak-show excursions is an ongoing story about Lecter’s seduction of Will Graham. The profiler is played by Hugh Dancy as a tortured empath—a dog-loving sweetheart so sensitive that while visiting crime scenes, he appears to be struck by waves of horror until he quivers like a tuning fork. The show might have continued in this vein, but instead it changed and kept changing, not unlike a Thomas Harris serial killer obsessed by the act of becoming. Near the end of season 1, Lecter frames Will for murdering Abigail Hobbs (Kacey Rohl), daughter and apprentice of serial killer Garret Jacob Hobbs (Vladimir Jon Cubrt), and gets him locked away in prison. Season 2 starts with a brutal fight between Lecter and Jack but withholds its outcome until the finale, a rain-drenched massacre in a house that spills almost a
s much blood as the prom scene in Carrie. Sandwiched in between is an increasingly baroque narrative mixing case-of-the-week elements; an extended subplot about the drawling, born-again billionaire Mason Verger, played by Boardwalk Empire’s Michael Pitt; a sexual relationship between Lecter and former student turned FBI behavioral researcher Alana Bloom (Caroline Dhavernas), who ends up bearing Verger’s child; and a physically unconsummated love story between Lecter and Will so intense and psychologically rich (albeit twisted) that it inspired some of the most heartfelt slash fiction and artwork in the history of fandom. Season 3 feels almost like two mini-seasons. The first half follows the fugitive Lecter to Florence and watches Graham, Crawford, and local Italian cops try to catch him. The back half replays the plot of Manhunter, with its villain, Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy, portrayed by Richard Armitage; it also features a return engagement by Mason Verger (Joe Anderson this time), who was horribly disfigured in season 2 after Lecter mesmerized him into slicing off pieces of his face and feeding them to Will’s dogs. The final three episodes of Hannibal’s last season rank with the most extravagantly visceral storytelling ever seen on network television. The last ten minutes of the finale—a two-on-one battle royale at a house perched on a cliff overlooking a Byronic sea—is such an orgiastic display of sensory overload that it should have ended with Fuller’s hands reaching through the screen and personally handing every viewer a cigarette and a towel.

  Throughout, there are few grounding signifiers of “realism,” just a series of set pieces, scenes, and moments, linked more by images, sounds, sensations, and tonal commonalities than by prosaic plot or character elements. You don’t so much watch season 3 of Hannibal as allow yourself to be absorbed by it, like water filling every available air pocket in a sponge. Fuller and his formidable roster of directors (including David Slade, Michael Rymer, Guillermo S. Navarro, and Vincenzo Natali) cribbed bits from some of the most aggressively visual filmmakers in film history, starting with German Expressionists (such as the original dream-filmmaker, F. W. Murnau, whose The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu are recurring touchstones) and continuing through Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau, Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma, Dario Argento, and the three Davids (Lynch, Cronenberg, and Fincher). The cinematography and production design prize emotional truth over common sense. Lecter’s sessions with his patients (and with his own therapist and future lover, Bedelia Du Maurier, played by X-Files costar Gillian Anderson—a casting masterstroke) occur in rooms as murky-dark as an aquarium.

  More so than any previous serial-killer tale, Hannibal presents the relationship between the FBI, Lecter, and his patients/pupils in terms of artistic metaphor, with the G-men as critics or art history students scrutinizing the handiwork of lesser “artists” striving to imitate, please, or outdo their idol or teacher. Bodies are hacked, torn, re-formed, or fused to make collages, multimedia presentations, gallery installations, and outdoor sculptures. Hannibal is pictured in dreams as a buck-demon with glowing eyes and antlers. Sex scenes give way to abstraction, with faces and torsos and limbs seeming to merge, and literal two-way trysts becoming (via fantasy) three-ways, then finally kaleidoscopes. Fuller gets around the visual tedium of epistolary or phone relationships by letting characters who’ve been geographically separated from Hannibal meet him in his “palace of dreams,” and sit for a therapy session or light candles in a Florence church even when one party is languishing in a prison cell and the other wandering the Eastern Seaboard.

  The whole series is a palace of dreams. Many are so peculiar, revolting, perverse, and altogether bizarre that the very notion of Hannibal’s airing on a traditional broadcast network (even with major funding from the French studio Gaumont) seems laughable in retrospect. How could something like this happen? How was it allowed to continue for three lurid, gorgeous years? And how soon can it happen again?

  —MZS

  ER (NBC, 1994–2009) Total score: 85

  The doctors at ER’s County General faced blizzards, plane crashes, and shoot-outs. One was stabbed to death by a patient. Another died when the Turkish mob blew up his ambulance only a few years after he was nearly killed by a road rage–fueled motorist. Still another was killed by a falling helicopter, but only after a different helicopter was responsible for the loss of his arm the year before.

  Through fifteen seasons, they weren’t so much doctors as they were action heroes. Which made sense, because ER was less a hospital drama than an action show.

  Before ER, all medical dramas—all TV dramas, period—had the leisurely pace of a routine visit to your general practitioner’s office, and they were often more concerned with the stories of the patients than they were with the doctors. ER put the formula on fast-forward, borrowing its pace and production values from summer blockbusters. (Steven Spielberg had at one point intended to make a movie out of the Michael Crichton script that became the series’ pilot episode.) Though the show in later years would occasionally employ very special guest stars as patients, in the early going, the bodies that came into and out of the ER may as well have been played by mannequins; they were there to demonstrate the heroic skills of the doctors and then be transferred to another part of the hospital (including, at times, the morgue) while we moved rapidly to a new case. The show rarely stopped to explain any of the medical jargon or procedures we were witnessing because the show trusted the audience to keep up, and to recognize the urgency of a given situation even if they didn’t know what a peritoneal lavage was.

  To pull that off, you need first-rate direction and production, which ER had throughout its run; even the most ridiculous disasters (like poor Rocket Romano’s repeat bad luck with helicopters) looked and sounded sensational. (One of the more ill-advised experiments the show ever tried was a live episode that stripped away the quick editing, the pulse-pounding score, and the other effects; it was like watching the ER cast perform a community theater version of an episode.)

  You also need doctors and nurses the audience will invest in so that they’ll want to keep watching long after the novelty of the pacing wears off. Again, ER had those in abundance. It was the series that turned former show-killer George Clooney into a giant star with his role as maverick pediatrician Doug Ross. It had Anthony Edwards as the sane, wise ER chief Mark Greene, even if it prolonged Mark’s death from brain cancer far too long; had Noah Wyle growing compellingly from boy to man (with a lot of help from Eriq La Salle’s gruff Peter Benton) as point-of-view character John Carter; and passed the baton neatly from Julianna Margulies to Maura Tierney to Linda Cardellini as the lead nurse and unofficial heart of the ER.

  In time, other dramas began moving even faster, and other hospital shows like Grey’s Anatomy grew even more indiscriminate about killing off their characters. But even in the final years of ER, when the show was on its third-generation cast, the framework and craftsmanship remained so sturdy that when I would stumble onto an episode featuring the kind of disaster they’d done five times already, I’d laugh at first, and then quickly feel my pulse quickening in that same way it had back in the days of Carter, Benton, and company.

  —AS

  Parks and Recreation (NBC, 2009–2015) Total score: 85

  Say hello to Leslie Knope. She is bright, enthusiastic, and completely delusional about the merits and power of her position as deputy director of the parks department of Pawnee, Indiana. Her coworkers mock her behind her back, she has no friends, and when she compares herself to Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, it sounds pathetic.

  Now say good-bye to Leslie Knope. She has run her own office of the National Park Service, been governor of Indiana, married a future congressman, wound up (depending on how you interpret a scene in the finale) either president of the United States or First Lady, raised triplets, has an army of devoted friends (many of them national political powerhouses), and accomplished almost everything she wanted in life.

  How does the first Leslie become the second? She does it in the same way that Parks and Recreation grew from an
uneven, quickly dismissed first season into one of TV’s all-time-best, and most underrated, comedies.

  Conceived very early on as an Office spin-off, it had evolved into something else by the time Amy Poehler came on board to play Leslie. But the DNA was somehow still there, with Leslie’s can-do spirit in the face of constant adversity and humiliation meant to seem admirable but instead coming across as second cousin to Michael Scott’s mortifying, pitiable lack of self-awareness.

  But just as Parks cocreator Greg Daniels had figured out how to write better for Steve Carell between the first two Office seasons, he and Mike Schur quickly tweaked how other characters reacted to Leslie—now intimidated rather than scornful—and also allowed Leslie to seem vulnerable and recognizably human from time to time when she wasn’t amped up on sugar and waffles and making seventeen scrapbooks to commemorate adventures with her new best friend Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones). And to further help viewers appreciate Leslie’s relentless positivity, they turned the city of Pawnee into a live-action version of Springfield on The Simpsons (where Daniels once worked), where the locals were all crazy and backward-thinking and anything could plausibly happen, like a city council election being covered with the intensity of a presidential race.

  At the start, the show inadvertently mocked Leslie’s fundamental goodness and belief in government’s ability to help, but Parks rapidly became a celebration of both her and the dazzling collection of supporting characters around her. Leslie saw the best in people, and Parks brought it out of them.

  Leslie’s boss, Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), was a mustachioed Libertarian misanthrope who took a civil service job to prevent the government from accomplishing anything, but rather than a caricature, he became an exemplar: Leslie’s ideological antithesis, but also her most trusted ally, and someone whose love of strong women and supreme competence at woodworking, hunting, and the consumption of bacon proved far more bountiful a source of humor than if he’d been the butt of the joke. As Andy Dwyer, Ann’s dumb musician ex-boyfriend, future action hero Chris Pratt was playing a familiar type, but he invested him with so much goofy energy, and improvised so many brilliant jokes—trying to diagnose an ill Leslie, he tells her, “I typed your symptoms into the thing up here, and it says you could have ‘network connectivity problems’”—that it felt like the archetype needed to be retired for all future shows.