TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  “If you want them to connect with it,” he tells his prospective author, “you have to tell them how it felt.”

  Telling its audience how things feel has never been a problem for The Leftovers, an engrossing, devastating meditation on grief that’s enraged some viewers and delighted others but never failed to capture the sense of loss, alienation, existential despair, and even madness pervading its intricately detailed, broken fictional world. In its first season, the series was an overwhelming experience for believers and deniers alike, even as it sometimes struggled to craft stories for each episode that went much beyond “Everyone still feels terrible. The end.” In its second, it became more tonally and narratively diverse, but still tended to make its viewers feel like they were trapped in the post-Departure world.

  Though the series revolves around a supernatural event, it’s hard not to find parallels to 9/11, the Sandy Hook massacre, and so many of the unfathomable catastrophes that have come to define our own lives. Time and again, the show asks, How do you go on? How do you act like everything is still normal? How do you find meaning in a world where terrible things happen without warning or cause or pattern? And it conveys that struggle through characters taking a wide variety of approaches to post-Departure life, played wonderfully by a cast that includes Justin Theroux (a cop who’s either talking to angels or slowly being driven insane by it all); Amy Brenneman (his ex-wife, who for a time joined the show’s chief cult, the Guilty Remnant, whose members wear white, don’t speak, and chain-smoke, all to remind themselves and those around them that the world ended on Departure Day); Carrie Coon (a woman drawing on extraordinary reserves of strength after her husband and two small children vanished in the Departure); Ann Dowd (the smug leader of the local Guilty Remnant chapter, who later becomes an inescapable voice in Theroux’s head); Liv Tyler (Dowd’s spiritual successor, and in some ways an even more frightening villain); Christopher Eccleston (a minister whose personal struggles also blur the lines between divinity and madness); and, starting in the second season, Regina King and Kevin Carroll as a couple living in the one place on earth completely untouched by the Departure.

  Like the members of the Guilty Remnant, the series is uncompromising in its commitment to making its audience uncomfortable. This is a bleak, difficult show to get through, and one with enough unsolved mysteries that it’s hard to blame former Lost fans, or humans in general, for wanting nothing to do with it. But it’s not misery porn, or a wallow; it’s cathartic. There’s genuine thought and artistry behind it all, masterful performances, immersive direction (by Peter Berg, Mimi Leder, and others), and the kind of casual, detailed world-building to which most TV science fiction aspires, but rarely achieves on this level.

  Ultimately, trying to sing the praises of a show whose main character has apparently been to the afterlife and back twice (both times discovering that it’s an upscale hotel with a karaoke bar) is a bit like trying to discuss religion with an atheist: You either believe or you don’t. For those who believe in The Leftovers, few modern TV series have ever struck as powerful a chord week after week.

  —AS

  Mr. Robot (USA, 2015–present)

  “Hello, friend,” Elliot Alderson tells us, before questioning the phrase. “‘Hello, friend’? That’s lame. Maybe I should give you a name. But that’s a slippery slope. You’re only in my head. We have to remember that. Shit. It’s actually happening. I’m talking to an imaginary person.”

  We haven’t seen Elliot at this point. He’s just a disembodied voice, narrating his tale to an audience he has no idea is very real. He continues: “What I’m about to tell you is top secret, a conspiracy bigger than all of us. There’s a powerful group of people out there that are secretly running the world. I’m talking about the guys no one knows about, the guys that are invisible. The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent. The guys that play God without permission.

  “And now I think they’re following me.”

  And with that, the bait is hooked, and Mr. Robot has us in its seductive, insidious clutches. It’s a conspiracy thriller larded with pieces of other conspiracy thrillers, and gleefully mixes in other bits of pop culture iconography (Fight Club in particular is a huge influence) to become something that feels not like a rehash, but engrossingly new. It deploys a variety of devices that have become so overused on TV in recent years—in particular, that voice-over, which Elliot (Rami Malek, haunted, riveting) uses to tell us about his psyche, the world of computer security, his illegal drug regimen, his questionable mental health, his belief that the world’s most powerful corporation is genuinely evil, and his involvement with a group of anarchist hackers called fsociety—that they should seem more played-out. But because Elliot is such an unreliable narrator—and aware of this fact, like the way he begins questioning the reality of the show’s title character (Christian Slater) from the moment they meet—and has such difficulty interacting with others, it works.

  Creator Sam Esmail gets Elliot’s alienation across not only through writing, but directing. The show violates a half dozen rules of cinematic grammar in practically every shot, always finding a way to place Elliot or the other characters in a position too far to an edge of the frame, or too close to the camera, to convey that he and they feel overwhelmed by and disconnected from this great big scary modern world. When Elliot stages a prison break to help out a drug dealer who’s kidnapped his girlfriend, only to discover that she’s been dead for hours, the escaping inmates recede into the distant background, so that all we’re paying attention to—all that matters—is Elliot’s pain and disbelief. We become Elliot’s “friend,” whether we want to be or not.

  —AS

  Orange Is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–present)

  Based on Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir, Orange Is the New Black is a comedy-drama about a clueless Yuppie named Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) who gets sent to a women’s prison in Litchfield, Connecticut, for her long-ago and one-time-only participation in drug smuggling. She learns that her old sense of self means nothing there, if it was even solid to begin with. We meet her on the cusp of her prison stint and learn that she’s a bisexual woman who had an intense postcollege affair with the woman who roped her into drug smuggling (Laura Prepon’s Alex Vause), and that she settled down with a barely employed writer named Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs) and started a small business selling artisanal bath products. There’s also a transgender character, Sophia Burset (played by African American transgender actress Laverne Cox), who enters the story with the eccentric definition of every other character and is never once presented as inherently comical or strange. The prison staff includes Michael Harney, Matt Peters, and Pablo Schreiber; all have been given actual characters to play rather than being reduced to mere foils for the inmates. An early scene involving Harney’s character, a prison counselor named Sam Healy, hints at yet another of the show’s agendas: to give American TV viewers a sense of the surreal inequities in the criminal justice system. “I’ve got a crack dealer who’s doing nine months, and then I’ve got a lady who accidentally backed into a mailman who’s doing four years,” he tells Piper.

  Orange is astute in showing how individuals struggle to maintain their individuality not just in the psychic cauldron of prison but in institutions of all kinds; the show’s quilt of adjacent and interlocking subplots is mostly a bleak comedy with elements of satire, more reminiscent of M*A*S*H than Prison Break or Oz. The cast is packed with lively character actresses. Some could be called “names” (including former Star Trek: Voyager captain Kate Mulgrew as Red Reznikov, a Russian American who battles to control the kitchen), but most are unknowns who’ve landed their first breakthrough role (up-and-comers who’ve never had a recurring role on a series before, and likely wouldn’t fit into an ensemble at a broadcast network, where the bandwidth of acceptable look/sound is much narrower). The series is adamant that the only barrier preventing us from feeling empathy for most strangers is the fact that they’re strangers; even the most eccentric, off
-putting, or scary characters on Orange Is the New Black are illuminated through flashbacks or startling twists of fate, disclosing new layers and drawing us closer than we could have imagined. Uzo Aduba’s Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren seems to skirt the edge of menacing racial stereotype until we learn that she was adopted and raised by white parents and struggles with mental illness; later she becomes an ambitious genre-fiction writer, penning a science-fiction erotica series titled The Time-Hump Chronicles. Taryn Manning’s scheming, transphobic Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett is a redneck—literally a snaggletoothed one at first, owing to the effects of crystal meth use—who killed an abortion clinic nurse who made fun of her for having five abortions; but when Pennsatucky gets raped in season 3 by a prison guard, we feel sympathy for her, too, because nobody deserves that, no matter how ruthless or dishonest they are. (“Men being in charge has never done me any good,” she admits.)

  Many episodes are explorations of difference—black versus white versus brown, straight versus lesbian, male versus female, privileged versus poor—and how it affects whom we decide to befriend, oppose, sleep with, and betray. The inmates, the guards, the administrators, and their families are united by the knowledge that the penal system is broken and its gears grind up all who pass through them. The show’s attention to the daily indignities of institutional life links it not to any other series about prisons or convicts, but to M*A*S*H, another story set in a real-life purgatory where survival is the goal and individuality is constantly being threatened by the demand for conformity or the threat of punishment. “Hey!” a guard shouts at Piper after she angrily pounds on a wall full of pay phones. “That’s federal property.” “You’re federal property!” she replies. And she’s right.

  —MZS

  Rectify (Sundance, 2013–present)

  This series from writer-actor Ray McKinnon (Deadwood, Sons of Anarchy) examines the life of Daniel Holden (Aden Young), a convicted rapist and killer suddenly sprung from prison on a technicality, but it does so in a way that takes advantage of TV’s endless capacity to extend and even pull apart time. Much of the action in the first season took place over six days, and there were many flashbacks and dream sequences; subsequent seasons have been nearly as compact. Any flourishes after that were mainly about pace and tone—slowing things down even more; zeroing in on a detail; lingering on a reaction.

  Not once does the series tell us whether Daniel did or did not commit the crimes of which he was accused. Of course we get the sense that a lot of people believe he’s innocent, especially his loyal sister and staunchest advocate, Amantha (Abigail Spencer, whose ability to project wary, cynical intelligence is unmatched). And we know that other characters can’t be sure but still want to believe the best, such as Tawney Talbot (Adelaide Clemens), the wife of Daniel’s stepbrother Teddy (Clayne Crawford). And there were people in law enforcement and government who either truly believe Daniel did it or convince themselves that they believe it because their careers are invested in that narrative: Sheriff Carl Daggett (J. D. Evermore) and former-prosecutor-turned-senator Roland Foulkes (Michael O’Neill), to name two. The second season’s end brought new revelations (and an act of violence by Daniel) that complicated viewers’ sympathies.

  There’s always a sense of a world beyond what we can see—not merely heaven or hell but an inscrutable clockwork machine somewhere high above that rains blessings and misfortunes on the just and the unjust alike. The characters’ attempts to grasp these forces set Rectify apart from every other TV drama. Its monologues ring out with the cadences of scripture, and its ellipses hum with promise.

  —MZS

  Review (Comedy Central, 2014–present)

  There’s a downside to being any kind of pop culture critic. Movie reviewers have to annually grapple with Adam Sandler’s latest, music critics have to listen to more Nickelback than should be legally allowed, and a TV critic may be ordered to write a Keeping Up with the Kardashians think piece at a moment’s notice.

  Still, we all have it much easier than Review protagonist Forrest MacNeil (Andy Daly), who fancies himself “a reviewer of life,” tasked to experience whatever life events—drug addiction, road rage, participating in an orgy—his viewers assign him, then review them on a five-star scale. (There is no such thing as a zero-star review in Forrest’s mind, so racism gets half a star.)

  It’s a bizarre concept to which Forrest and the show outside the show are spectacularly committed. Though Forrest occasionally wavers in fulfilling his assignments—he understandably tries to avoid eating fifteen pancakes (“an upsetting number of pancakes,” as he puts it) in one sitting, until his malevolent producer Grant (James Urbaniak) compares it to the discovery of penicillin—he ultimately lets the job destroy every last good thing about his life. He gets divorced because a viewer asks him to, burns down his father’s house because the fire extinguisher is too high to reach while he’s reviewing what it’s like to be a little person, starts a cult whose members are ultimately massacred by law enforcement, and winds up in jail after shooting a man while reviewing what it’s like to murder someone.

  Adapted from an Australian series by Daly, Jeffrey Blitz, and other writers, Review could have simply been a collection of goofy sketches that played off of Daly’s innate good cheer: the world’s blandest, least self-aware WASP putting himself through one humiliation after another because it’s his duty. But the way the damage of each review piles on the one before it, both within each episode and across the series, renders it among the darkest shows ever put on television, yet in a way where the biggest laughs come out of the most horrific moments (the death of Forrest’s father-in-law on a brief voyage into space), while the most profound emotion can come from the most ridiculous concepts (Forrest’s imaginary friend Clovers being imaginarily shivved to death in prison).

  Forrest hurts himself time and again by pushing his job past the limits of reason and good taste, but his show—the real one that we get to watch, at least—benefits enormously from always taking things that far.

  —AS

  Scandal (ABC, 2012–present)

  On this electrifying, very busy melodrama, Washington power broker Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) runs a PR operation with warehouse headquarters whose huge windows serve as a makeshift data-display wall. She and her colleagues spit out series creator Shonda Rhimes’s (Grey’s Anatomy) trademark “Aaron Sorkin ain’t got nothin’ on me” patter like machine-gun bullets. But, Olivia’s big secret: She’s had an affair with President Fitzgerald “Fitz” Thomas Grant (Tony Goldwyn). Vestiges of their love connection keep bobbing up and down in the show like rotten apples. It’s an enjoyable, nutty series, set in a two-degrees-removed-from-reality world that might have reminded some viewers of Dallas and Dynasty. Scandal provides entertainment, and ups the ante with its military-industrial-political conspiracy that give the proceedings an unusual feel.

  Still, this is far from a mere time waster. For all its knowingly ludicrous plotting, Scandal is smarter about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and how each of those elements factors into love and work, than almost any series that fancies itself deeper. And yet its gasp-inducing moments—such as Olivia likening her and Fitz’s affair to Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, or the flashbacks pointing out that Fitz is hung up on Olivia partly because she looks out for him in a way that his own parents never did, or the many scenes of the former Black Ops fixer Huck (Guillermo Diaz) enduring 24-level torture and peeping through windows at the family he lost—are never set apart from the show’s one-damned-thing-after-another plotlines. By season 4 the series had become more exhausting than exhilarating, leaving almost no taboo broken and no twist untwisted, but even a bad episode of Scandal is more engrossing than a lot of series with more pretensions.

  —MZS

  Transparent (Amazon, 2014–present)

  “Are you saying you’re going to start dressing up like a lady all the time?” Sarah asks her father, who stands before her in full feminine dress, hair, and
makeup.

  “My whole life, I’ve been dressing up like a man,” her father explains. “This is me!”

  This is the key conversation at the heart of Transparent, a series that couldn’t be more timely in subject matter, form, or distribution. To Sarah Pfefferman (Amy Landecker), this is her father, Mort (Jeffrey Tambor), standing before her in drag; to Maura—as she now prefers to be called—Mort Pfefferman was always the disguise.

  Transparent arrived at a tipping point for social awareness of transgender issues—the Kardashians would tell the show’s creator, Jill Soloway, that they watched it to better understand Caitlyn Jenner’s transition. Soloway had firsthand knowledge of the subject, having witnessed one of her own parents come out as trans late in life, and she had a background as both a cable-drama writer (Six Feet Under, United States of Tara) and independent filmmaker (Afternoon Delight) that made her well-qualified personally and professionally to depict the specific, wildly dysfunctional rhythms of the Pfefferman clan, turning Maura and her adult kids—wealthy stay-at-home mom (and semi-closeted bisexual) Sarah, music industry player Josh (Jay Duplass), and chronic screwup Ali (Gaby Hoffmann)—into three-dimensional characters with a rich shared history that’s conveyed with a few careful brushstrokes. The show is a triumph not only of nuanced writing but of intimate direction, which only became more beautiful over the course of the second season, which included flashbacks to Maura’s mother, grandmother, and trans aunt in 1930s Berlin.