How good was 2014 for TV? So good that
there is no critical consensus. Years past saw a relatively small list of
television shows dominate the critical conversation – The Sopranos, The Wire,
Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Deadwood, maybe a sprinkling of Friday Night Lights or
Lost if the critic wants to feel particularly transgressive. Shows written
before 1999 are seen not as genuine predecessors but chicken scratch compared
to the gorgeous calligraphy to come. It remains one of the things I love about
American television – with ample time and a steady hand a relative newcomer can
easily track down and absorb the medium’s accepted canon. A medium in relative
infancy has no room for the gloriously messy and anarchic world of literary
publishing.
And then 2014 happened. With Walter White’s conclusion told with deadened
clarity, critical consensus collapsed. Critics went from arbiters to advocates
– for the single-minded True Detective, the offbeat Fargo, the progressive
Transparent. And I’d like to feel bitter about this shift, but the sheer weight
of great material that aired last year speaks for itself. Even my own list saw
a shake-up. Matthew Weiner’s elegiac Mad Men fell short for the first time in
three years.
This is to no fault of Mad Men, which
offered seven episodes of catharsis - a humbled Don Draper finally making peace
with all of the demons he conjured over the years. Cannot wait to see how
Weiner chose to end one of televisions' last great giants.
Though the networks still offered plenty of
retrograde entertainment, casually progressive shows started to crack through.
Black-ish not only revitalized old sitcom tropes, but also took on hot button
issues with wit and pathos. And although How to Get Away with Murder has badly
stumbled over several structural errors, Viola Davis' performance demonstrates
how so many untapped stories still lay untold. For my money, there was no show
as wonderfully progressive or subversive as Brooklyn Nine Nine - which manages
to consistently deliver crackling comedy without reducing anyone to out of
character histrionics.
Amazon burst into the big leagues with
Transparent. Though Jeffrey Tambor's performance is a revelation, the show's
depiction of casual religion and frictional family tension will stick with me
even more. Proof positive that gender is just a thing we internalize,
Transparent proves that real progress doesn't come when we deify marginalized
groups. It arrives when we treat everyone like real people, with flesh and
blood prejudices and biases and long held grudges and desires. The tenderness
of Tambor's performance stands every bit as memorable as Josh's forlorn quest
to find a female vessel for his insecurity, or Ali's directionless flopping
around, or Sarah's marathon race to lock in long-term love like a business
transaction. It’s a shame how many people will turn their head away from
Transparent, because its on Amazon or because it explicitly seeks to smash
barriers. Though Transparent was not the very best television series of the
year, it may have contained my favorite scene - a Shabbat dinner gone horribly
right, portraying the chaotic clashing of old rituals and new necessities with
a profoundly Jewish pragmatism.
Other shows also gave us plenty to chew on;
FX's The Americans steely precision and fiery performance by Kerri Russell
deserves far more than the single sentence here. HBO's True Detective may have
leaned too heavily on old tropes like the nagging wife, but its sense of
atmosphere and loss were unparalleled. FX's Fargo improbably paid proper homage
to its inspiration and offered a reminder that payoffs don't have to arrive
years later. 24: Live Another Day livened up the summer with a superbly plotted
season that reminded everyone that old relics can be dusted off, polished, and
hold just as much power as our newest infatuations. Game of Thrones continued
its overambitious march towards insanity, a continual high wire act that
redefines what event television can be. The Flash pushed its budget
almost as hard as it pushed the boundaries of network television storytelling,
with incredible institutional memory and densely plotted payoffs conjuring the
spirits of Whedon shows past. Deeply disappointed in the infantile House of
Cards and sanctimonious Newsroom, I went international and found the Danish
import Borgen. Though it finished airing in 2012, my most enduring memory of
2014 may very well be Birgitte Nyborg telling her fellow politicians that “All
of us here have become ever so Professional.”
Everyone I know struggled to keep up with
the avalanche of great television. The second series of Orange is the new Black
and Masters of Sex are first on my list of shows to watch in the new year.
But there was no show that left a deeper
mark than FX's You're The Worst. My eyes glazed over the gaudy promos that
pitched it as yet another nihilistic comedy about terrible people being
terrible. Instead, I found a modern romance, the freshest story about two
people falling in love since Harry Met Sally and subsequently froze the genre
in amber. Well, at least in America.
In Britain, authors took a keen eye to
enduring myths and changing attitudes – shows like Coupling, Gavin and Stacy,
and Spaced took a gleeful axe to their suddenly stodgy American counterparts.
Stephen Falk, creator of You’re The Worst, went into Hollywood pitch meetings
and told them that he wanted to puncture every gaudy and internalized facet of
the American romantic comedy. Gone was the over baked artifice. Instead, we
follow two caustic cynics bonding over their own mutual dislike of other people
– when Gretchen admits to setting her high school on fire to avoid a math test,
Jimmy finds it to be one of the most romantic things he’s ever heard. They
negotiate their kinks – Jimmy’s foot fetish is both a fountain of jokes and a
part of his character. They eat and they drink and they fuck – but mostly, they
just enjoy being around each other’s company.
You're the Worst captures the sensation of
falling in love. It captures that moment when your significant other hears one
of your secret shames and thinks it the coolest thing in the world. It captures
the tug of war that underlines any relationship, correctly treating dating as
something far more messy than a chess match. It captures that moment when you
choose to unburden yourself ever so slightly, right after you've chosen to
shoulder someone else's burdens not because you have to but because you want
to.
Every single traditional show on television
crams in a "romance", whether it’s warranted or not. And so people
fuck like marionettes, or blandly crush on a coworker for a delayed love
triangle, or drearily burp up platitudes. You're The Worst argues against all
of that bullshit, unafraid to show real worry and vulnerability. When Gretchen
gets an offer to spend the weekend with another guy, Jimmy doesn't coyly find a
contrived way to get her to stay. Instead, Gretchen bluntly asks him to tell
her to stay, if he wants to. And so Jimmy looks at her and says, with
devastating earnestness, "Don't go."
It also features a vibrator hooked up to Christmas
lights, too.
For that reason and so many more, You're
The Worst was my show of 2014. Over fifteen years ago, David Chase created The
Sopranos and lit the industry afire. And over a decade, television went from an
also-ran to a true creative fault line. David Simon’s The Wire is the finest
indictment of modern society I may ever witness. Show after show after show
lined up and gently pushed the boundaries of how we use television to tell
stories. There was a queue.
Stories now spin out in new directions,
unafraid to show a man crying, a woman cracking a joke, a biracial kid
tentatively trying to straddle two worlds - these elements no longer notable
for their uniqueness but their ubiquity. And there are those who will want to
return to the safer confines of the well-executed but well-trodden path of
entertainment with clearly identified motifs and white hats and
network-approved Comic Relief Characters. And those products will continue to
exist and serve their audience. But me?
I’ll take this newer path. I want to see where it leads.
STEVEN TIMBERMAN IS AN AMERICAN WRITER WHO SOMETIMES IS KIND ENOUGH TO LET EYEWEAR PUBLISH HIS IDEAS AND THOUGHTS ON POPULAR CULTURE.
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