TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  But mixed amid the slapstick and the often surprisingly complex relationships (including Johnny’s late-season hookups with Bailey, and Jennifer and Andy’s ongoing chemistry, which was driven by mutual respect), the show often segued into rather dark drama without breaking a sweat. One powerful episode climaxed with Venus Flytrap, a Vietnam veteran, telling the World War II veteran Mr. Carlson about the atrocities that made him go AWOL. Another responded to the real-life deaths of eleven fans who were crushed to death during a 1980 Who concert at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. Titled “In Concert,” the episode was produced just eleven weeks after the tragedy, which led large venues to ban general admission seating.

  Every episode offered a new tidbit of information about the characters that deepened our view of them or set the stage for another inventive comic set piece, as in season 3’s “Venus and the Man,” which finds Venus, a graduate of a state teacher’s college, convincing a street-tough black teenager not to drop out of school. He explains the atom in two minutes, using the young man’s knowledge of local gangs to draw a “territory map” on a storeroom wall with a Sharpie.

  The show’s use of then-current pop (including Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” and Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded”) was witty, sometimes moving, and always imaginative. Unfortunately, this aspect of the show’s legacy was rendered nearly incomprehensible when WKRP’s syndication run ended and its music licenses expired. When DVDs finally became available for sale three decades after the finale, perfectly chosen songs had been replaced with generic sound-alikes, and accompanying citations of song titles and artists had been deleted from dialogue, in ways that mangled jokes and plot points. The draconian reality of music licensing being what it is, it seems unlikely that the WKRP that ’70s and ’80s viewers loved will be seen and heard again. A similar fate has befallen more series than can be cited in this book; considering the deft way that this gem of a sitcom wove music into the fabric of its comic tapestry, the loss is keenly felt.

  —MZS

  How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 2005–2014) Total score: 70

  In TV, the journey is virtually always more important than the destination. It’s insane to devote dozens of hours to a show over years without deciding if you liked it or not until the very end. A terrible ending can sour how you look back on a series, but it can’t travel through time to erase the enjoyment you felt in the moment.

  I know this to be true because the end of How I Met Your Mother—which killed off the mother in the future so sensitive hero Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) could get back together with ex Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders), even though the show had long since salted the earth on which their romance once stood—angered me as much as any series finale ever has, yet I’d still argue vehemently for its placement here.

  That’s how great HIMYM was at its best: a smart, romantic, funny show that had as many clever ideas about friendship (with the core group also including Neil Patrick Harris as inveterate hound Barney Stinson, and Jason Segel and Alyson Hannigan as giddy soul mates Marshall Eriksen and Lily Aldrin) as it did about relationships, and that used its time-bent structure to play with our perceptions (in flashbacks, smoking pot becomes “eating a sandwich,” or a girlfriend whose name the older Ted can’t recall is referred to as “Blah-Blah”), to terrific comic and even dramatic effect.

  The finale was ultimately one piece of cleverness too many—an idea hatched early in the run that should have been abandoned once the characters had evolved beyond it—but put episodes like “Slap Bet” or “Ten Sessions” in front of me, and I will still laugh, and be touched, and marvel at just how inventive a traditional-looking sitcom can be.

  —AS

  Terriers (FX, 2010) Total score: 70

  There are high-concept shows, where you can explain both the premise and the appeal in a single sentence, like “Federal agent battles terrorist threats in a thriller that takes place in real time.” And there are low-concept shows that are often more about the characters and how they interact than about the premise, setting, or plot.

  Terriers is, if anything, lower than low-concept. There is almost nothing I can tell you about the show that won’t make it sound like something very old and creaky. It’s a private detective show. With two wisecracking partners. Who are perpetually underestimated because of their present circumstance and past history. And they take on the wealthiest, most powerful, most dangerous players in their very SoCal noir community, bantering just to forget how scared they are the whole time.

  You’ve seen all this a thousand times before. But you haven’t seen it with Donal Logue (as alcoholic ex-cop Hank Dolworth) and Michael Raymond-James (as reformed thief Britt Pollack) as the detectives with a level of raw honesty and comic alchemy between them that most TV shows would pray to get at half-strength. You haven’t heard the irresistible rhythms of Ted Griffin’s dialogue, nor seen how Griffin and Shawn Ryan weaved a complex yet comprehensible and satisfying mystery story over their only thirteen episodes.

  Some blamed the death of Terriers on the name, and/or an ad campaign that hid the two stars behind the image of a snarling little dog. But Terriers by any other name would have been just as hard to sell, because the idea of it wasn’t special, even if the execution was. You had to see it to believe in it.

  —AS

  TOP 40: TV’S BEST THEME SONGS EVER

  1. The Twilight Zone

  2. The Rockford Files

  3. The Wire

  4. Hawaii Five-0

  5. The Muppet Show

  6. All in the Family

  7. Cheers

  8. The Simpsons

  9. Star Trek

  10. Miami Vice

  11. The Bob Newhart Show

  12. Mission: Impossible

  13. Peter Gunn

  14. Sanford and Son

  15. Gilligan’s Island

  16. It’s Garry Shandling’s Show

  17. Hill Street Blues

  18. Twin Peaks

  19. The Andy Griffith Show

  20. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

  21. The Brady Bunch

  22. The Beverly Hillbillies

  23. The Jeffersons

  24. Friends

  25. The Dukes of Hazzard

  26. Magnum, P.I.

  27. Law & Order

  28. The X-Files

  29. Sex and the City

  30. The Greatest American Hero

  31. Taxi

  32. Starsky & Hutch

  33. The Mary Tyler Moore Show

  34. Good Times

  35. The Addams Family

  36. The Sopranos

  37. The Wonder Years

  38. Dragnet

  39. M*A*S*H

  40. The Odd Couple

  WORKS IN PROGRESS

  (Current series that could be Pantheon-worthy when all is said and done; all these entries were completed by June 2016, and thus may be missing current developments, including whether certain series concluded after our deadline.)

  Adventure Time (Nickelodeon, 2010–present)

  Lots of animated series could be said to appeal equally to children and adults, but not many appeal to the potential adult in children and the eternal child in grown-ups. Adventure Time, created by Pendleton Ward, is such a show. Set in the postapocalyptic land of Ooo, it’s mainly about the adventures of Finn the Human (Jeremy Shada) and his best friend and adoptive brother, Jake (John DiMaggio, Bender from Futurama), a squat orange dog who can change shape à la Plastic Man. They are joined by Princess Bubblegum (Hynden Walch), the Ice King (Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob), and Marcelline the Vampire Queen (Olivia Olson), a thousand-year-old immortal who loves rock and roll. The gentleness of the series belies its consistently dazzling visuals as well as its sure grasp of dream logic. Drawing on role-playing games, underground comics, anime, and the cartoon fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away), the show has an almost sketch-comedy vibe; episodes run about eleven minutes each and tend to be built around free-associative conversations rathe
r than plot, and the distinctive timbre of the actors’ voice performances at times suggests how adults sound when they’re imitating children without changing the pitch of their voices.

  —MZS

  American Crime (ABC, 2015–present)

  John Ridley’s American Crime is another anthology series in which a recurring cast plays different characters and the unit of measure is the season rather than the episode. But unlike its gridmates True Detective, American Horror Story, and Fargo, it has no easy-to-peg genre hook, unless you consider the kind of storytelling that film scholar David Bordwell dubbed a “network narrative” to be a genre unto itself. Like most cinematic examples of the form, American Crime gives us several ongoing, subtly interlaced but essentially parallel stories in which unsuspecting average citizens’ lives are bound together by a seismic event.

  American Crime is written, directed, and acted in an unadorned, at times punishingly austere style that sometimes lets whole scenes play out in one long take while focusing on a single character and letting others (including some leads) remain out of focus or offscreen. Other times, we might see characters wading into some of the most intense arguments of their lives while the camera observes them from across the street or from the other side of an apartment, until finally it cuts to a tight close-up that lets the heart of the scene play out through an actor’s face or, occasionally, hand gestures. Like Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, American Crime Story) and Noah Hawley (Fargo)—and Orson Welles in his Mercury Theater days—Ridley has put together a formidable repertory company of actors (including Felicity Huffman, Timothy Hutton, Regina King, Elvis Nolasco, and Johnny Ortiz) and slotted them into different lead roles depending on the story.

  Ridley, who adapted the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave and oversees American Crime, has a lot of issues on his mind, but the series never feels entirely issue-driven. Season 1 is about the effects of a rape-murder case on the families of the victims and the accused and the surrounding community. It deals with racism, xenophobia, secular versus religious mind-sets, class bias, the incompetence of the criminal justice system, the socially destructive effects of the War on Drugs, and the ways in which prison tends to breed criminals rather than show them the error of their ways. Season 2 revisits all these issues, plus the tribal mentality that pits, say, Hispanics, blacks, and whites against one another within the same school, or the same community, and the coach of a winning basketball team (Hutton) against the headmistress (Huffman) who’s trying to be sensitive to the pain of a gay teen (Connor Jessup) who says he was sexually assaulted by basketball teammates. The boy’s mother (Lili Taylor) wants justice for her son but keeps slamming against the concrete wall of bureaucratic self-protection.

  Though certainly not the most enjoyable of the new anthology dramas, American Crime might be the most politically and socially relevant; artistically it’s the nerviest, because it insists on doing a lot with a little, making artistic choices and building scenes, episodes, and seasons around them, and sticking with a notion or a theme until every facet of it has been explored.

  —MZS

  The Americans (FX, 2013–present)

  The lesson that many TV creators and executives took from The Sopranos was that the audience was ready for antiheroes. And we got some wonderful shows like The Shield and Breaking Bad out of that. But the lesson that a few smart people took was that you can use a familiar commercial genre as a Trojan horse to smuggle in something more ambitious and thematically complex: Come for the whacking! Stay for the social commentary!

  So The Americans is on paper a spy thriller set in the Cold War’s final decade, following a pair of Soviet sleeper agents posing as all-American couple Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth (Keri Russell) Jennings, performing covert missions for the KGB right in the heart of the Reagan presidency. And it functions perfectly on that level, with a collection of tense and thought-provoking espionage missions that offer a sense of what representatives of the “Evil Empire” were thinking (particularly after Ronald Reagan hung that nickname on them, to their shock and amazement).

  But really, what The Americans is about is marriage: the compromises we make when we decide to permanently join our life with someone else’s, the way the years and the relationship can turn us into completely different people from when we started, the debates about kids and careers and everything else. And it’s extraordinary at that.

  The Jenningses’ “marriage” was designed as mere camouflage by their superiors in Moscow, but when you spend decades sharing a bed, and a life, with someone else, and when you have children together (even if just to help maintain the cover), it’s hard for it to not morph into something resembling the real thing. As the series begins, Philip has begun to have genuine feelings for his fake spouse, and in time Elizabeth learns to reciprocate. They still regularly have sex with assets as part of the job—one of the few times it gives either of them real pause is when Philip is ordered to seduce a CIA section chief’s teenage daughter, who’s not much older than their own Paige (Holly Taylor)—and when they gather in the laundry room to divvy up the weekly chores, the list is as likely to include a honeypot or assassination attempt as it is figuring out the carpool schedule.

  And just as the realities of Tony Soprano’s career in the mob significantly raised the stakes of his relationships with his wife, mother, and uncle, everything that happens in the Jennings house gets filtered through the unforgiving lens of what Mom and Dad really do for a living. On another show, atheist parents discovering that their daughter wants to go to church would create some mild tension; here, Paige’s interest in getting baptized becomes a threat to her parents’ entire way of life, and makes Elizabeth (always the more hard-core Communist of the two) much more willing when the KGB asks them to recruit Paige to be an asset. (Philip, who’s become accustomed to their softer American lives and cares only about protecting his family, is horrified by the request, and does everything he can to fight it.)

  History tells us that Philip and Elizabeth’s side will lose the Cold War, and at times it feels like The Americans has been losing the battle for relevance in the age of Peak TV. Its ratings are low and awards recognition for the staggering work being done by Rhys, Russell, and Noah Emmerich (as the FBI agent who doesn’t realize his neighbors are in the KGB) has been few and far between. But when histories of this era of television are written, all will have to acknowledge that this was one of the very best shows in it.

  —AS

  Better Call Saul (AMC, 2015–present)

  Why?

  Why did we need any kind of Breaking Bad spin-off?

  And if we had to get one, why did it have to be about Saul Goodman, a character who was there predominantly as comic relief, but who was virtually never the funniest person on Breaking Bad? Why not give us The Chicken Man Cometh, about the rise to power of Gustavo Fring? Or why make unflappable fixer Mike Ehrmantraut into a supporting character when it would be so easy to let Jonathan Banks’s world-weary charm carry the whole thing?

  Mainly, though, why? With all due respect to star Bob Odenkirk, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, and Saul Goodman’s own creator, Peter Gould, why mess with perfection to do any kind of prequel, let alone this one?

  Those questions were easy to ask in the run-up to Better Call Saul, which even Gilligan and Gould admitted took much longer to gestate than either had expected. Within a few episodes of the new show, there was only one question worth asking:

  Why the hell not?

  In traveling back in time to roughly six years before Walter White’s cancer diagnosis, Saul is somewhat bound by the facts of the original series, but not a lot. Saul is so far away from the character we met on Breaking Bad that he literally isn’t even Saul Goodman at the start of the new show. Instead, he’s using his real name, Jimmy McGill—better known to con artists and cops alike in his native Cicero as Slippin’ Jimmy for his flair for slip-and-fall hustles, but here doing his best to be an honest lawyer and impress mentally ill older brothe
r Chuck (Michael McKean) and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), a fellow lawyer who gets turned on by participating in Jimmy’s low-level cons, even as she pushes for him to stay clean overall.

  By starting there, Gilligan and Gould turned the conceit of Breaking Bad on its head. Instead of a story about a man everyone thinks is good turning out to be evil, they were telling a story of a man struggling to be good in a universe that has no faith or interest in this version of him. Odenkirk, a wonderful comic actor with a limited dramatic résumé, has been a revelation as Jimmy: endearing and vulnerable and so sympathetic that his inevitable slide down into Saul-dom feels like it’s going to somehow hurt more than when Walt fully embraced his inner Heisenberg.

  While the show also makes excellent use of Banks as a Mike who isn’t quite the superhuman killer he’d be as Gus’s right-hand man, perhaps its most impressive feat is how quickly it silenced all the fan speculation about when and how Walt, Jesse, Gus, or anyone else from the parent series might turn up. Before Better Call Saul debuted, fans looked at it as a way to cling to some vestige of the Breaking Bad universe. Once people actually saw it, the last thing most of them wanted was for Jimmy McGill to turn into the man who could one day be a drug lord’s consigliere.

  —AS

  Black-ish (ABC, 2014–present)

  In the second decade of the twenty-first century, broadcast networks and cable channels rushed to air shows that asked general audiences to look at life through something other than a straight, white, middle-class lens; this yielded such gateway series as Modern Family, Empire, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder (multiracial, plus gay characters) and more focused works like Fresh Off the Boat (Asian American), Jane the Virgin (Latino), The Goldbergs (specifically suburban-Jewish in a way that few sitcoms had dared to be), and Looking (young, gay Yuppies). The most buoyantly confident comedy in this wave is Black-ish, which had the audacity to carry itself like an American institution from its very first week on the air.