Samurai Jack, about a stoic swordsman battling creatures, robots, and an ancient demon in a postapocalyptic future, also owes a large debt to Frank Miller’s purely action-driven comics, particularly Ronin and 300; the Lone Wolf and Cub series; the paintings of Katsushika Hokusai; and the schlocky 1980s Saturday-morning adventure Thundarr the Barbarian. Clone Wars envisions the events that transpired between the second and third Star Wars prequels, but concentrates on military history: wins, losses, and quagmires for the republic that would later sour and become an empire. But both series ultimately manage to fold and refold their influences with the concentration of a sword-maker hammering a katana in a forge, until they become as pure of mind as their heroes (respectively, a young Japanese prince and the Jedi Knights).
Both series feature borderless backdrops and characters drawn in a barely representational style reminiscent of ancient woodcuts or figurines, but they are photographed (or maybe we should say “shown”) in the manner of an epic live-action movie. Every clash feels genuinely mythic—and not just the relentless showdowns between Jack and armies of mechanical spiders, or the large-scale military engagements pitting the Jedi and their stormtrooper underlings against armored columns on a desolate plain or snipers and urban infantry in a bombed-out city reminiscent of Hue in Full Metal Jacket; the more intimate contests—between, say, Jack and a doppelgängerlike swordsman who can merge with shadows, or the Sith assassin Asajj Ventress and Anakin Skywalker for possession of his soul—are no less tense, because Tartakovsky always makes sure that every act of violence and moment of hesitation has dramatic significance as well as a clear tactical purpose (one that we always understand eventually, if not in the moment).
These two series often attain a hypnotic power comparable to the final battle in The Seven Samurai, the mountaintop climax of The Last of the Mohicans, and the closing acts of The Wild Bunch and Akira: They are lethal dance routines composed with a painter’s eye. Neither series offers much in the way of traditional storytelling pleasures (thus their absence from the Pantheon, where they’d score poorly in most major categories). They merit a citation here because they are unique among both TV series generally and animation specifically, and their finest segments rank with the greatest action cinema ever produced.
—MZS
Sons of Anarchy season 2 (FX, 2009)
Another outlier second season like Chuck, where everything came together perfectly for a year, suggesting a show that had taken a permanent leap up in class before things kept moving inexorably downward.
Conceived by writer Kurt Sutter as a kind of Hells Angels version of Hamlet, Sons of Anarchy followed Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam), crown prince of a violent California motorcycle club unsure whether to support the gunrunning status quo or tear the whole thing down for desecrating the vision his late father had for the group.
After working out a few kinks in the first season, Sutter nailed everything in season 2, pitting the Sons against a gang of white supremacists looking to take over their territory and willing to do horrific things—like kidnap and rape Gemma (Katey Sagal), mother of Jax and wife of club president Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman)—to ensure victory. It was a great enemy, the best possible showcase for Sagal, and a story arc that kept twisting and turning, but always staying true to who the characters were and what they would do.
The show increasingly fell victim to its own excesses in later years, as more became less: so much gore (much of it visited on a character Sutter himself played, who at one point bit out his own tongue to avoid testifying against the club) that it became desensitizing, stories that became so knotty that the characters seemed to be acting less out of their own motivations than the Rube Goldberg needs of the plot, and eventually episodes that began running longer and longer to their own detriment, because who were the FX executives to say no to more of their biggest hit ever?
Sutter would defend the later seasons by insisting that Sons had no aspirations toward being an important drama for our times, describing it as “an adrenalized soap opera” and “bloody pulp fiction with highly complex characters.”
He was selling the show short. For that one year, at least, Sons comfortably belonged in company with TV’s most celebrated and thoughtful dramas.
—AS
Star Trek: The Next Generation (Syndicated, 1987–1994)
Patrick Stewart starred as Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the refurbished Starship Enterprise, in this reimagining of Gene Roddenberry’s beloved science-fiction adventure series. The early seasons suffered somewhat from chintzy production values (including computer graphics that were crude even by late 1980s standards), as well as a tendency to fragment the original’s all-purpose-outsider character, Mr. Spock, into a variety of somewhat similar types (including Brent Spiner’s android Data, Marina Sirtis’s empath Deanna Troi, LeVar Burton’s blind helmsman Geordi La Forge, and Michael Dorn’s Klingon junior officer Worf). But it soon found its own voice and became more expansive and ambitious by the season, mixing ferocious space battles with stories that tested the integrity and humanity of all the major characters. It also introduced a new adversary that eventually supplanted the old series’ Klingons and Romulans as a fount of pure menace: the Borg, a race of cyborgs that obeys orders from a hive-mind and is bent on subjugating and absorbing all other sentient life. The series continued the original’s legacy while deepening its multicultural vision and fleshing out every character with a novelistic attention to detail. The result was a milestone in televised science fiction.
—MZS
Tanner ’88 (HBO, 1988) & Tanner on Tanner (Sundance, 2004)
Robert Altman (Nashville, The Player) teamed up with cartoonist Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury) to create Tanner ’88, a stylistically unique political satire about an idealistic, blunt-talking, somewhat reticent Michigan congressman (Michael Murphy) who tries to win the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. In the manner of some of Altman’s early films, as well as novels like Ragtime, it blends fictional characters with real personages (making cameos as “themselves”). The entire thing is shot in what was described at the time as a documentary style by people who had never seen a Robert Altman movie: The camera zooms in and out and pans and glides, picking out individual characters in a panorama and then showing you the panorama again. The larger panorama depicts the American political process in all its hypocrisy and promise. Tanner, his campaign manager (Pamela Reed), his statistician (Jim Fyfe), and his political ad-maker (Matt Malloy) struggle to capture Tanner’s passion and authenticity without going so far as to “sell” him, a prospect that gives Tanner hives. The cameo players included Kansas senator and future presidential candidate Bob Dole; Kitty Dukakis, wife of 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis; 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson; and conservative evangelist Pat Robertson. All interacted seamlessly with Altman and Trudeau’s characters, and the direction is brilliant, particularly in a scene where Kevin J. O’Connor’s cameraman surreptitiously captures an impromptu Tanner rant that becomes a campaign commercial.
A long-delayed follow-up, 2004’s Tanner on Tanner, reunited much of the core cast in a story centered on Tanner’s documentary filmmaker daughter Alexandra (Cynthia Nixon), whose illness was the reason Tanner originally left politics, as she made a nonfiction movie about her father, struggling with representatives of Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry over whether to excise footage that was critical of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The result was an alternately poignant and acidic look at how much more shallow and image-driven politics had become since 1988 (not a year for idealists in the first place). A number of subsequent programs have drawn on either or both Tanners, including The West Wing, Veep, K Street, and Trudeau’s own Amazon series Alphas.
—MZS
Tremé (HBO, 2010–2013)
David Simon’s follow-up to his critically acclaimed but low-rated The Wire was as perversely uncommercial as it was intellectually rigorous and heartfelt: a racially diverse ensemble drama abou
t a group of New Orleans residents struggling to rebuild their city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation. Season 1, set just three months after the flood, showed citizens of different social classes lifting one another up even as their personal lives collapsed into chaos and despair; season 2, which was set a year later, was considerably darker, showing how civic and police corruption, institutional failure, corporate greed, and national amnesia made nearly every character’s life worse; season 3 and the truncated season 4 showed the characters starting to rebuild, or at least move on, even as they remembered loved ones who died of natural and unnatural causes (including suicide and murder).
Many of the players were familiar from past Simon productions, including Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire. As envisioned by Simon and his cocreator, Eric Overmyer, Tremé was notable for its ferociously democratic storytelling style, which insisted on giving nearly all of the major characters equal screen time in a given episode no matter what they were going through, and for the way that it wove detailed explanations of New Orleans civic life (including the politics of the local jazz and restaurant scenes and the traditions of Mardis Gras Indians and pedestrian funeral processions) into almost every subplot. The core cast included a police officer (David Morse’s anticorruption crusader); a civil rights lawyer (Melissa Leo) and her blustering college professor husband (John Goodman); a drug-addicted piano player (Michiel Huisman) and his vastly more talented fiddle-playing girlfriend (Lucia Micarelli); a worldly-wise singer-songwriter (Steve Earle); a brilliant chef (Kim Dickens) and her sometime boyfriend (Steve Zahn), a community radio host who dreamed of becoming both a record industry bigwig and the mayor; a bar owner (Khandi Alexander) and her trombonist and band teacher ex-husband (Wendell Pierce); a Mardis Gras Indian chief (Clarke Peters); and his semifamous jazz trumpeter son (Rob Brown). Most of these characters were based on real people.
The show’s key creative inspirations were Robert Altman’s sprawling, anecdotally driven movies (Nashville and Short Cuts especially) and the epic documentaries of Frederick Wiseman (High School, Jackson Heights, et al.), both of which savored basic human interactions in real time, and weren’t afraid to linger for a few minutes on a musical number. The Mardis Gras episodes were consistent highlights, drawing all of the disparate characters together in an organic way that made coincidental meetings seem inevitable rather than contrived. Simon and Overmyer’s deliberately fragmented and decentralized storytelling was off-putting to viewers who were accustomed to more goal-directed, plot-driven series, and the mix of professional and nonprofessional actors didn’t always work, but even at its least assured, Tremé’s mix of righteous anger and tenderhearted journalistic observation set it apart from every other series on the air at that time. And if you watch the whole thing again, you realize that, as in jazz, aspects that seemed to have been conjured on the fly were the product of considerable foresight and a lifetime of experience.
—MZS
Trilogy of Terror (ABC, 1975)
The one, the only Trilogy of Terror was directed by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis from three stories by Richard Matheson, starring Karen Black as the heroine of all three tales. The first two segments, “Julie” and “Millicent and Therese,” are quite good (the former is about a college professor exacting brutal revenge on a student who spikes her drink and rapes her; the latter stars Black as twin sisters, one repressed, the other monstrous). But everybody remembers the final segment, “Amelia.” That’s the one with the Zuni fetish doll that chases the title character around the apartment with a miniature spear, shrieking a hideous, high-pitched “YI YI YI YI YI!” At one point, Amelia locks herself in her bathroom, screaming in mortal fear, and you can see the doll’s tiny blade going snicker-snick! under the door. The entire segment has a pile-driving relentlessness that’s still nerve-racking; the fact that the doll is clearly just a marionette with pointy teeth (essentially an evil Muppet) only adds to the creep factor. It’s the scariest half hour in the history of US television; even Pennywise the Clown might think twice before watching it after dark.
—MZS
True Detective season 1 (HBO, 2014)
The line from the first season of True Detective most often quoted by viewers is “Time is a flat circle.” It’s not originally spoken by the show’s philosophizing hero Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), but by a criminal he’s in the process of arresting, and even that man is only paraphrasing Nietzsche. But Cohle incorporates the phrase into his own running monologue about time, death, string theory, alternate dimensions, and the painful, repetitive uselessness of human existence. As Cohle talks and talks and talks, the dazzling performance by McConaughey and the sheer tonnage of slippery words and phrases and concepts by writer Nic Pizzolatto are each so impressive in their own way that it’s easy to ignore the reality of the show’s signature phrase:
All circles are, by definition, flat.
But that was True Detective in a nutshell: compulsively watchable, mashing up strains of many different philosophies and TV shows and literary works, and seemingly laden with meaning, but not always as profound as it seemed at first glance.
Created by Pizzolatto, a novelist with minimal TV experience, True Detective was part of the new wave of anthology miniseries led by American Horror Story. With the short time commitment, Pizzolatto was able to land McConaughey and Woody Harrelson to play his Louisiana state cop heroes: Cohle, a hollowed-out wreck of a man who refers to his oft-tragic life as “a circle of violence and degradation,” believes human consciousness to be a “misstep in evolution,” and has an unsurprising knack for being able to think like the monsters he chases; and Harrelson’s Marty Hart, who presents himself as a normal guy who has all of life’s answers but is really a walking hard-on, barely able to control either his temper or his libido, both of which ultimately bring an end to his marriage.
Longtime friends McConaughey and Harrelson brought the characters to such crackling life, and were so hauntingly shot by director Cary Joji Fukunaga (who, in a rarity for TV drama, directed the entire season himself), that the triteness of their personal dilemmas (Hart’s in particular) and their investigation (into TV’s umpteenth serial killer of young women) scarcely mattered at times. Pizzolatto piled layer upon layer onto the story, which took place across seventeen years and was frequently narrated by older versions of Rust and Marty (whose accounts to two younger detectives didn’t always match what we were seeing), with liberal quoting (in both snippets of dialogue and in casting of minor roles) from past HBO dramas like The Wire and Deadwood, and allusions to not only all of Rust’s favorite philosophers but the Robert W. Chambers story collection The King in Yellow, which led many viewers to assume the killer was somehow supernatural in origin. Instead, the finale involves our heroes, now middle-aged ex-cops, pursuing a very earthbound bogeyman through a house whose haunting was only the figurative kind.
It was a story about the way we tell stories, and thus more interesting the more different ways that Pizzolatto and Fukunaga had to tell the story. (The season lost a bit of its spark, for instance, once the elder versions of Rust and Marty were part of the action, rather than commenting on it.) And it was aiming to do so many things, and alluding to so many more, that it was all but destined to disappoint some viewers—many of whom had experienced those performances, those haunting visuals, and the Möbius strip narrative structure and, for a few weeks, decided it was not only the next great thing but already the greatest drama ever. It was neither, particularly as the second season—done without Fukunaga or the original stars—tried too hard to correct for some of the first season’s flaws (not enough well-defined characters, not enough interest in women), and in the process only cast a spotlight on more of them.
But even with its many borrowed parts, its weak spots and occasional bouts of overpromising, the original True Detective installment was riveting television. If it had been a traditional miniseries rather than the anthology kind, I expect we’d look back on it even more kindly.
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—AS
The Westerner (NBC, 1960)
American viewers had never seen anything like the half-hour drama The Westerner, and after it was gone, it would be a long time before they saw its ilk again. Created by Sam Peckinpah, the series took the then-new tradition of the “adult Western”—exemplified by the likes of Gunsmoke and The Rifleman—to a new level of sensitivity and maturity, without stinting on the frontier brutality that genre fans expected. The pilot, which aired as part of the anthology series Zane Grey Theater, is a thirty-minute mini-movie that sends hero Dave Blassingame (Brian Keith) on a mission to “rescue” a former flame—a woman known as “Jeff” (Diana Millay). Problem is, she doesn’t really want to be saved. She’s a frontier barmaid who’s a virtual slave to a bullying saloon owner and onetime bare-knuckles brawler from England, and although she recognizes the awfulness of her existence, it’s the only life she knows. From the pilot’s opening moments—which establish the saloon’s grubby regulars (including future Peckinpah MVP Warren Oates as a drunk) and show Dave arriving in town and being greeted by a wild-eyed, probably deranged woman trying to sell him a Bible—Peckinpah makes it clear that he isn’t interested in cartoon Western heroics. The hero wins the battle but loses the war. (Jeff can’t bring herself to leave her captor, who says he’ll fall apart without her—a typical abusive male strategy.) “Why should I worry about you?” Dave tells Jeff tenderly as he prepares to leave town, untying a ribbon from her hair. Peckinpah leaves us with a bittersweet message written on the saloon wall: “Tonight a soul is lost / He wanders the wide earth / But he finds only emptiness.”
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