Set in the leafy Los Angeles suburbs, and cocreated by Kenya Barris, Black-ish is a laugh track–free, heavily narrated sitcom about an upper-middle-class African American family whose patriarch Andre “Dre” Johnson (Anthony Anderson) worries that they’re moving up in the world at the expense of their cultural identity. By turns evoking The Wonder Years, Malcolm in the Middle, The Cosby Show, and The Honeymooners (the latter due mainly to Anderson’s hair-trigger, Jackie Gleason–esque physicality), the show’s observations often circle back to issues of race, class, religion, and tradition. The scripts are specifically and unapologetically black in a way that very few network sitcoms had previously been allowed to be. Even the socially aware Norman Lear sitcoms of the 1970s (many of which are discussed in this book) felt it necessary to frame every story in terms that a hypothetical white viewer could understand. But here the attitude is always warm, embracing, and familiar: not, “Let me be a cultural ambassador and tell you about my people, white viewers,” but rather, “Don’t you hate it when…” and “Have you ever noticed that…” This holds true whether a given episode is about gun control, the rituals of street “authenticity,” distress over racially motivated police brutality, racist micro-aggressions in the workplace, the politics of black hair and hair care, Dre’s panic over interracial dating, or the fascination with the Harlem renaissance (memorably depicted in a season 1 memory/fantasy).
The peerless cast includes Yara Shahidi as Dre’s eye-rolling daughter, Zoey; Marcus Scribner as his teenage son Andre Jr., who begins the show by asking if he can be bar mitzvahed; Miles Brown and Marsai Martin as the precious youngest Johnsons, Jack and Diane; Tracee Ellis Ross as Dre’s biracial wife, Rainbow, a beautiful kook in a Diane Keaton vein (“If I’m not ‘really’ black, could somebody please tell my hair and my ass?” she says); co–executive producer Laurence Fishburne as Dre’s old-school father, Pops; and Jenifer Lewis as Pops’s ex-wife and sometimes hookup Ruby, aka Rosy, a deeply religious firebrand of a woman.
At the core of every story is fear of change, followed by grudging acceptance that change is inevitable, and that as long as you have the love of friends and family, things will be fine. When Dre says he wants his kids to be “black, not black-ish,” he’s trying to get at something very culturally specific, and yet—and this is the beautiful part—as soon as he names exactly what’s eating him, he (and we) realizes that it’s not as specific as he thinks, and that, in fact, he’s on a quixotic quest. How much of Dre’s anxiety comes from race and culture, and how much is midlife crisis in disguise? We wonder, and Black-ish seems to wonder along with us. In its own sweet way, this is a landmark show, finding the universal in the specific and vice versa.
—MZS
BoJack Horseman (Netflix, 2014–present)
A nearly perfect merger of high and low humor, this series from Raphael Bob-Waksberg would be totally uncategorizable even if it were a straight-up live-action Hollywood satire, rather than what it is: an animated series in which humans and anthropomorphized animals (led by the titular ex–sitcom star, a fiftyish half-horse voiced by Will Arnett) coexist. It’s very funny and yet somehow not funny at all; the reserves of loneliness and misery that these characters tap into have few equivalents on current or recent TV, though if you imagine something along the lines of an early Albert Brooks film, or maybe The Larry Sanders Show, you’d be in the ballpark. BoJack dictates a tell-all autobiography to his ghostwriter, Diane Nguyen (Alison Brie), while the publishing house (headed by Patton Oswalt’s emperor penguin Pinky) frets over its commerciality. He squabbles with his agent and girlfriend Princess Carolyn (Amy Sedaris), and competes with his chief professional rival, the narcissistic and passive-aggressive golden retriever Mr. Peanutbutter (Paul F. Tompkins). He tries to land a career-reinvigorating part in a great movie but has to settle for crap. And like most of the characters, he stumbles through life, making nearly catastrophic professional and personal mistakes, alienating and winning back allies, and (in the magnificent second season) getting involved with an ex-girlfriend’s daughter. The filmmaking veers into flights of fancy, dreams and drug trips, and picaresque journeys through American panoramas that would make lovely velvet paintings. If Mad Men were populated by animals, this is what it might have felt like; though, of course, you’d have had to cut ear-holes into BoJack’s fedora.
—MZS
Broad City (Comedy Central, 2014–present)
One of the most exciting things about the current TV landscape isn’t just the ever-expanding number of outlets in need of original series but the ever-expanding number of ways for talent to be discovered.
Once upon a time, Broad City creators and stars Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson would have had to spend years paying their dues at Second City, then either get lucky in an SNL audition or else land a minor role on someone else’s sitcom as the heroine’s weird best friend, and good luck convincing anyone that they wanted to make a show where they were the heroines.
Instead, after stagnating at the lower levels of Upright Citizens Brigade, they just made Broad City—a stoner comedy about two best friends in a city that’s simultaneously the most exciting and scariest in the world—on their own, as a series of YouTube shorts, honing their craft and building up a passionate fan base that eventually included Amy Poehler, who invited them to bring the show, largely as-is, to television.
That kind of journey wouldn’t have been impossible in the good old days, but it would have been very hard. And where there are plenty of YouTube comedy stars today who can’t sustain any story that lasts longer than five minutes, Glazer and Jacobson had spent their time on the Broad City web series fine-tuning their craft as storytellers so that the Comedy Central version arrived fully formed: surreal, sexually frank in unexpected ways, and with a wicked flair for slapstick. At a time when many of TV’s most acclaimed “comedies” are really half-hour art films, it’s balls-out funny, and clearly made by women who are much more focused and driven in real life than the characters they play.
—AS
Fargo (FX, 2014–present)
It had no business working.
None.
Its very existence should have been considered a joke.
Who in his right mind would think to take the Coen brothers’ Fargo—the most acclaimed movie by two of the most idiosyncratic filmmakers in a generation—and turn it into a TV show? It had already been tried in the late ’90s with a pre-Sopranos Edie Falco as Marge in a straightforward adaptation of the film; it was terrible, and CBS never aired it.
Writer Noah Hawley saw that approach as folly, and found a way to create a series that exists in the movie’s universe, with a familiar tone—along with frequent nods to other Coen projects—and even a brief intersection between the two plots (where a character on the show discovers the satchel of money that Steve Buscemi buried in the snow in the film), but tells its own stories with its own characters in the same anthology miniseries format popularized by American Horror Story and True Detective. The show isn’t a Coen brothers cover band but a tribute act whose original material not only evokes the original but frequently lives up to it.
The first season weaved in and out of Fargo archetypes, giving us Martin Freeman as a far more loathsome take on the hapless salesman who gets mixed up in crime, and Allison Tolman as a cop with an uncanny knack for piecing together an impossible puzzle. To that, it added Billy Bob Thornton as a remorseless, seemingly unstoppable hit man with his own moral code—like Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, but with more curiosity about people—Colin Hanks as another cop looking for redemption after a moment of cowardice, Oliver Platt as a businessman with tangible proof that God is real, and too many other colorful characters to list here. It captured the film’s chilly look, and the humor that ensues when upper-Midwestern politeness comes up against multiple homicides, and even managed to work in the Coens’ love of parables, as cops, crooks, and innocent bystanders shared folk tales that had powerful bearing on all the carnage being laid out before us
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It was a delight, and season 2 proved it to be no fluke, boogying back to 1979 to show us the full version of a mob-war story that season 1 had only hinted at. This time around, Patrick Wilson was our hero as a younger version of Tolman’s father, and played the role as if it were a rebuttal to Tony Soprano’s frequent questions about whatever happened to Gary Cooper. Around him, Hawley placed a dazzling array of vivid characters, played spectacularly by, among many others, Bokeem Woodbine (a loquacious gangster), Zahn McClarnon (a Native American killer with his own agenda and a lifetime of pain behind it), Jean Smart (the cold matriarch of the Fargo syndicate), Ted Danson (Wilson’s father-in-law, himself a quietly brave cop), Nick Offerman (a conspiracy-obsessed local lawyer), Bruce Campbell (Ronald Reagan, campaigning for the presidency), and Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons (the mismatched civilian couple who inadvertently become the center of all the violence).
The Coen references became more frequent and varied, with bits of Miller’s Crossing, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and even Raising Arizona intermingling with the riffs on the original Fargo, yet the show somehow felt more like its own thing than ever before. At this point, the series could plausibly run for years, bouncing around different corners of the upper Midwest, without feeling like it’s just repeating itself or what the Coens have done before.
So, you betcha, Fargo had no business working. But then it did.
—AS
Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–present)
If The Sopranos and Mad Men were The Godfather and Mean Streets of early twenty-first-century TV drama—deeply personal works that elevated what was artistically possible in the medium, without initial worry about commerce—then perhaps Game of Thrones is the Jaws: a thrilling blockbuster that’s often on creative par with its predecessors but successful on such a scale that it makes what came before seem like quaint little boutique hits. (That probably makes The Walking Dead the Star Wars of this analogy, though more in terms of its enormous popularity than its uneven quality.)
Game of Thrones is first and foremost a triumph of logistics. Writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have somehow managed to adapt ten hours of television per season from George R. R. Martin’s increasingly long (and increasingly late) series of fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, featuring dozens of significant characters—like the Hydra of myth, if you cut off the head of one key player, three more will pop up to take his place—spread out across thousands of miles over a parallel world where a version of the War of the Roses now involves dragons, zombies, and other forms of magic. The production spans a large swath of Europe, including Northern Ireland, Croatia, Spain, and Iceland, with the crew filming in blocks based on location, so that all the scenes of a particular episode may take five months or more to film, compared to a couple of weeks at most for any other TV drama.
And when filming’s done, somehow all these patchwork pieces of story and production come together to form a bracing mosaic about power and the terrible things men (and sometimes women) do to either get or keep it. The series vividly brings to life many of Martin’s creations: noble, doomed Ned Stark (Sean Bean); verbally dextrous imp Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage); Tyrion’s smugly cruel sister, Cersei (Lena Headey); and far too many more to list, especially since the series has a nasty habit of killing off the characters we like the most, while rewarding the most despicable with longer lives and reigns.
The series can suffer from Martin’s nihilist streak, which also manifests itself in the frequency, creativity, and duration of the physical torture depicted. And though it has a few strong female characters, it also relies too much on rape for shock value, and too often pairs monologues with shots of naked women. (Media scholar Myles McNutt dubbed the practice “sexposition.”) But at its best—whether mounting an epic battle between zombies and humans in a frozen wasteland, or letting Tyrion match wits with the Mother of Dragons herself, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke)—Game of Thrones does for fantasy what many of its HBO predecessors did for similarly disreputable genre fiction.
—AS
Girls (HBO, 2012–present)
The season 2 premiere of Girls opens with the show’s heroine, Hannah (creator-star Lena Dunham), waking up in the narrow bed that she shares with her ex-boyfriend Elijah (Andrew Rannells), who realized he was gay after breaking up with her. “I’m sorry I have a boner,” he says. “It’s not for you.” Then they laugh at the awkwardness of sharing a cramped and cluttered apartment. It’s a funny, honest scene. But it might also remind the viewer that your twenties seem a lot less fun once you’ve moved beyond them.
The twenty-something, college-educated, white American urbanite’s blissful unawareness of how little he and she actually know, including what a drag being young can sometimes be, has always been the main subject of Girls. Dunham, a young independent filmmaker raised among gallery artists, had no idea what a hornet’s nest she would stir by having the audacity to put a sexually frank, often aggressively discomfiting comedy (or more often “comedy”) on pay cable, give it an all-encompassing title, and skewer the girls’ arrogance and cluelessness at every turn while also insisting that they and their often equally insufferable friends, lovers, and relatives were still worthy of empathy. And the sex. The sex! It’s Sex and the City sex, raw but awkward and often deliberately mortifying.
Hannah starts out close friends with the blandly ambitious wannabe singer Marnie (Allison Williams), the acidic but free-spirited Brit Jessa (Jemima Kirke), and the initially meek but soon spirited Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), then drifts apart from them. She bounces from one nonjob to another before landing a magazine internship and then going off to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, even though for long stretches of the show she seems to be more interested in telling people she’s a writer than in perfecting her craft. She tries to keep a relationship going with her (maybe) soul mate Adam (Adam Driver), a muscular actor and recovering alcoholic who comes on like the gene-spliced offspring of Marlon Brando and Dustin Hoffman, but they seem to have nothing in common but sex and conversation, and in the long haul, that’s not enough. Actor-filmmaker Alex Karpovsky’s character, Ray, flits around the margins of the show, managing the coffee shop where Hannah briefly works, pining for Shoshanna, and becoming a neighborhood organizer. His mix of exasperation, incredulity, and disdain makes him the closest thing to an audience surrogate on Girls. There are times when he seems disgusted with himself for caring so much about people he considers basically trivial.
Every now and then there’s a lyrical moment, like Hannah eating a slice of cake on the Coney Island beach at dawn, or a formal experiment, like the parenthetical episode where Hannah hooks up with a married doctor (Patrick Wilson) in his brownstone and experiences the ups and downs of a long-term relationship in eighteen hours. The very specific milieu—pasty Williamsburg and Greenpoint, Brooklyn; Ground Zero for US hipster culture—is so spot-on that it’s no wonder the residents tend to despise the show. It seems unlikely that Girls can sustain itself for much longer, because it’s getting harder to believe that these characters would still want to keep tabs on one another now that their lives are so different. But it was—well, perhaps not fun while it lasted, but real. Sometimes beautiful.
—MZS
Jessica Jones (Netflix, 2015–present)
Jessica Jones is a pretty faithful adaptation (by writer Melissa Rosenberg) of Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’s early ’00s comic series Alias, which was part of Marvel’s new imprint for adult readers. It’s set in a world with its own distinctive aesthetic, gathering tropes from film noir, hardboiled detective fiction, and David Cronenberg–style psychological horror, and uniting them beneath a jagged modern feminist sensibility.
Krysten Ritter (Breaking Bad, Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23) stars and narrates as Jessica, owner and sole employee of the Alias detective agency, who is hired by a Nebraska couple to find their missing daughter. Employing a storytelling style driven by submerged flashbacks and obliquely remembered incidents, it plunge
s the heroine into a Chinatown-deep conspiracy tale, fleshing out a past that was lost to Jessica after suffering a psychically invasive trauma at the hands of a serial abuser of women (David Tennant’s Kilgrave) who’s still wandering free. Her experience is analogous to rape even though the show is never so blatant as to hang a simple label on it. Jessica’s cool-tender affair with bartender and super-badass Luke Cage (Mike Colter) highlights cultural differences, frank sexuality, and a love of solitude rather than prurience and exoticism. (The camera worships Luke; this is a rare series that could be said to have a female gaze.)
Few superhero adaptations have tried harder to build a modern, multicultural, woman-centered universe not chained to dude nostalgia for burly men saving the world. One of Jessica’s clients, Carrie-Ann Moss’s attorney Jeri Hogarth (who was a man in the comics), is a lesbian, and the series does her the favor of treating her sexuality as different from but equal to all the other flavors of love and lust showcased on the series.
—MZS
The Leftovers (HBO, 2014–present)
In a second-season episode of Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s drama set three years after an event known as the Sudden Departure, where 2 percent of the world’s population suddenly disappeared without rhyme or reason as to who vanished and who didn’t, a character tries to sell a memoir about her own troubled post-Departure life to a big publishing house. The publisher acknowledges that the material—involving families being torn apart, the many religious cults that sprang up in the wake of a cosmic tragedy that defied both scientific explanation and everything traditional religion had to say on the subject of the Rapture, death, destruction, and more—is inherently powerful, but complains that the writing is too dry.
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