Paul's favourite TV series of 2010-2011
Honourable mention: Wilfred: Season 1
I don’t think Wilfred has had a really great episode yet. I don’t know if it’s possible for this show to have a great episode. Rather, it’s a show that succeeds based on its premise: a man befriends a dog that he sees as a guy in a dog suit, but everyone else sees as a normal dog. The Australian original treated this premise nonchalantly, quickly turning it into a normal buddy comedy. But this US remake gets a lot of mileage by giving the premise the space it needs to breathe. By treating the premise as the surreal concept it is, the show is given leeway to explore the complex issues and contradictions inherent in it. Most importantly-and this is carried over from the original-it never outright states why Ryan sees Wilfred the way he does, choosing instead to supply differing interpretations for their relationship in every episode. Sometimes Wilfred serves as a conscience for Ryan, or an ear for Ryan to articulate his problems to. Sometimes Wilfred is an unrestrained id, and sometimes he’s an agent of chaos, causing destruction for no particular reason. Sometimes Wilfred is just a dog. And sometimes, as in the late episode “Doubt,” Wilfred is painted as a malevolent force, destroying people’s lives from the inside. But no matter what the show assumes him to be (and no matter what kind of episode is built around that assumption), Jason Gann plays Wilfred with a contagious joy, and is refreshingly unhinged compared to his stoic portrayal in the Australian original. Elijah Wood is similarly great as Ryan, and Wilfred always makes their central relationship entertaining. If they can one day make all its parts add up to something great, that’ll be even better.
10. Childrens Hospital: Season 3
I like a certain continuity to my sitcoms. I like characters to develop realistically and plots to unfold logically. And for the most part, I like any jokes to be organic to the show, being rooted in the characters, setting and tone. Childrens Hospital does none of that, and when it does, it’s only to facilitate more jokes. And that’s wonderful. This is a show whose only goal is to pack as many jokes into eleven minutes as possible, and it’s probably the most consistently funny show on the air right now. It started off as a mostly straightforward parody of self-serious medical dramas, but starting in its second season it became more ambitious, and mixed in with those silly plotlines were a behind-the-scenes mockumentary episode that gave the show some sort of lopsided backstory, a parody of Do the Right Thing that ended with an out-of-nowhere but note-perfect dance sequence, and a fake live finale that went completely off the rails halfway through. While the third season never made an episode as perfect as “The Sultan’s Finger: Live,” it hit similar highs, with an episode set in the ’70s, a truly bizarre three-act play barely related to the show’s premise, and an oddly satisfying thirty-second-long Party Down reunion. The show has built its anything-for-a-laugh premise into a comic universe all its own: it even shot an episode in Rio de Janeiro just to validate the ridiculous running gag that the hospital is in Brazil, despite the fact that the show is obviously shot in L.A. Childrens Hospital has assembled one of the best casts of any sitcom on the air, and the fact that they’re all in a show this knowingly silly is just that much better.
9. Bob’s Burgers: Season 1
It’s a really great experience to watch a show figure out what works and what doesn’t over the course of its first season. Bob’s Burgers started off as an occasionally funny animated series with a pretty inconsistent tone, and it took it a few episodes to work out the show it really wanted to be. But what a joy it was when everything finally came together. “Art Crawl,” the show’s eighth episode, wasn’t only the show’s best episode, but it might have been the funniest half hour of any show this season. It’s deliriously profane, doing anything for a joke, and succeeding at every turn. It included a parody of the Dumbo dream sequence centering on animal anuses. Yes it did. But while “Art Crawl” was never quite matched in the back half of the season, Bob’s Burgers managed to carve out a wonderful little niche for itself regardless. The key to the show is its voice cast. An unusually playful H. Jon Benjamin leads as Bob, but it’s his three children, all played by stand-up comics, who really knock the show out of the park. Dan Mintz doesn’t stretch out too much to play the low-key Tina, but he manages a lot of subtly hilarious lines. Eugene Mirman plays completely against type as the always-enthusiastic Gene, and almost everything that comes out of his mouth is perfect. But the real winner here is Kristen Schaal as Louise. It didn’t seem like it initially, but she’s been given the role of a lifetime in this controlling little girl. She screams, whispers, coos, and threatens at the drop of a hat, and does so with such conviction that it’s almost shocking. Louise is even given something of an emotional arc in “Spaghetti Western & Meatballs,” and Schaal pulls it off wonderfully. If she devoted the rest of her life to diving deeper and deeper into this ridiculous character, it may just be time well spent. And if the show continues its trend of constantly trying to better itself, it may have something magical on its hands.
8. Outnumbered: Series 3
Outnumbered constantly threatens to plunge headlong into irredeemably broad comedy, but it’s somehow managed to perpetually be only on the edge of that void for three series. I wouldn’t say this one is its best yet, but it has certainly had the best, most subtle plotting of the show so far, and the kind of comfort a show can have with its characters by its third series is doing it a lot of favours. It starts off with a questionable field trip to a war memorial site, but quickly returns home to deal with the usual problems the Brockmans face. In this series, Sue is attempting to sell the house and Pete has to hide and eventually deal with the repercussions of a minor infidelity. But for the first time, we’re not clumsily reminded of these plots at the start of each episode, and they’re all resolved with a flourish in the finale, where Karen gets injured and Pete and Sue talk things out at the hospital. The actors are all perfectly comfortable in their roles at this point, and somehow the show’s improv-into-clever-deadpan hasn’t yet worn out its welcome (not even a little). It’s just a wonderful little show, and I’m hoping it can successfully toe the line between subtlety and broadness for as long as it’s on the air.
7. Louie: Season 2
Louie’s second season improved on the first in almost every way, managing not only a great season for the show, but also one of the greatest, most singular seasons of a sitcom ever. But somewhere along the line, it lost me. Its first season was a joy to watch because everything Louis C.K. was doing was brand new, and you never knew exactly what he would turn out that week. There was a sense there of discovering something exciting, even when the season, in retrospect, was uneven and sometimes pretty bad. C.K. has coalesced all of his winning elements into a remarkably consistent set of episodes here, and sometimes hits the high notes he did in his first season. “Pregnant,” in particular, was possibly the best episode yet for the show, and positioning it as the season premiere was incredibly gutsy. But in chasing the successes achieved by the first season, Louie has veered away from the comedy/drama mix of that season into straight drama here. And though he does handle dramatic elements very well, comedy’s presence in Louie (and I’m talking here of actual situation comedy, not just snippets of his stand-up) helps you sympathize with Louie the character, and sometimes Louis the creator. C.K.’s brand of storytelling (and often his stand-up) can frequently be quite preachy, even though the lessons he’s imparting are perfectly valid. And in his stand-up, he builds up to those messages very well with dick-and-fart jokes, leaving them as a payoff after a lot of lesson-free comedy. But this aspect is now missing from the show, and without getting the audience on his side by building things up with humour, the dramatic elements are left stranded. “Pregnant” inverted the formula by having a lot of dramatic storytelling leading up to a cathartic comedic payoff, and was in that way unexpected and deeply satisfying. But starting with episode two, “Bummer/Blueberries,” I found myself getting bored with the show’s machinations. Not to say that I no longer like the show. I still love watching it every week, and frequently find it as great as I did in season one, as in weird, wonderful episodes like “Subway/Pamela” and “Duckling.” I’m just not sure if my detachment from the show is its fault or my own. Objectively, the show is better than it’s ever been and maybe one of the best shows on TV right now. But I’m not as big a fan of it as I used to be.
6. Cougar Town: Season 2
Scrubs, for all its faults, had a certain way with running gags that was never as praised as it should’ve been. Especially in its earlier seasons, characters and jokes would be brought back repeatedly, always in the funniest possible way and (at least initially) never outstaying their welcome. When Bill Lawrence moved on to Cougar Town, he took that quality with him. And more than that, he ran with it right into the most insane possible territory. The show has this gleeful love of ridiculous running gags, so much so that its humour has become almost entirely insular in its second season. These are seven characters who love shaking up their lives with meaningless games and jokes almost as much as they love each other’s company. So yes, Cougar Town is anchored by the usual Lawrence hugging and learning, of course, but without the hospital setting of Scrubs, it comes off a bit less cloying. The show’s premise of friends as family is little more than a jumping-off point for silliness, really, but it does serve as a way to make the characters sympathetic despite their often misanthropic nature. These characters make it a joy to spend half an hour a week being a part of their strange little world. And the cast playing them makes it even easier. Courteney Cox makes a great hub for them all, but it’s the unhinged Brian Van Holt, the finally-found-a-use-for his-talent Ian Gomez, and especially the revelatory Busy Philipps who make the show what it is. It’s not striving to create anything really important the way Scrubs did, but it’s great fun to watch and really makes you feel like you’re part of this loving sort of extended family. And yes, though they finally owned it this year, they will be changing the name.
5. Archer: Season 2
If Bob’s Burgers is a talent showcase for Kristen Schaal, then Archer is the same for H. Jon Benjamin. He’s a prolific voice actor, and brings a great presence to any role he’s given, but Archer really allows him to actually act, instead of just bantering. Here, Sterling Archer is a cocky, immature secret agent who frequently explodes into fits of either rage or ecstasy, and Benjamin plays him with all the required pathos. Archer is also a very, very funny show, probably one of the most joke-filled shows on the air. Not all of them hit, but it’s such a fast-paced style of humour that that doesn’t really matter. It’s not exactly my sense of humour, and the show’s first season was more hit or miss for me, but the second season has really pulled it all together in the name of-of all things-character. The show had developed an impressive roster of main characters over the course of the first season, and this season’s goal was to dive deep into their histories and psyches. More remarkably, it achieved that goal without resorting to any sort of dramatic element. I mean jeez, it had the main character get diagnosed with cancer and played it for laughs. It frequently isolated characters from one another in an effort to delve into their motivations and backstories. There were a handful of less interesting spy parodies along the way, but we got some really great episodes like “The Double Deuce” and “El Secuestro” to show for it. Archer sacrificed none of its comedy in the name of character development, making for a truly hilarious, oddly satisfying, and often very strange season.
4. Community: Season 2
I talked about my love/hate relationship with Community halfway through its second season, and not much has changed since then. This season has been one of the greats in sitcom history, but it has often left me more frustrated than impressed. It can be a show with too much ambition for its own good: I love watching it stretch out and try completely new things for a sitcom, but I can never tell what those experiments will lead to. Sometimes they work, like in “Critical Film Studies,” which was pitched as a Pulp Fiction parody but instead centred on an almost five-minute monologue and ended with a montage set to “Gymnopédie No. 1”; sometimes they don’t, like in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” a truly bizarre episode of television that expertly pulled off everything it wanted to do yet somehow left me feeling hollow and disappointed. For every “Paradigms of Human Memory” that makes a case for one of the funniest episodes of any show this season, there’s an “Applied Anthropology and Culinary Arts” that rubs me completely the wrong way and makes me actively turn against the show. Despite its schizophrenic nature, however, the show is guided by a unique, singular vision from Dan Harmon, and you can easily see that throughline episode to episode. And of course, when a show is built on complex themes like the way communities (sorry) form in the service of a greater good and how these communities can often be both the very best and worst thing for an individual, it’s bound to be uneven. But when it hits, it hits hard. “Mixology Certification” was without a doubt my favourite episode of television this season. It explored notions of independence, maturity, and friendship in a raw fashion that’s completely out of the ordinary for a sitcom, and in that way really resonated with me. It delved deep into each character’s goals and fears, making their faults plain and almost daring us to still find them sympathetic. The last act, taking place almost entirely inside a car, spent its entire time developing Troy, a character who more often than not served as comic relief; his conversation with Annie outside her apartment may be my favourite scene the show’s done. The episode paid off everything we’ve learned about these characters through our time with them, and though it was heavy on dramatic moments, it was still a very funny episode. I think Community is probably the best sitcom on the air right now. It can certainly deliver something magical when it tries. But as much as I would love to, I just can’t get behind everything it does. And somehow, that’s part of its charm.
3. Terriers: Season 1
Terriers was hardly revolutionary, but it seemed oddly unique when it went on the air last fall. It skewed away from the standard cable TV fare-serialized, dark, edgy-towards something a bit more traditional. Its main characters weren’t anti-heroes; they were regular dudes just trying to do good and earn a living, even if they were doing it as scruffy private eyes. The show’s since been cancelled, but it left behind a very enjoyable, very well-made season, one that stands strong on its own. Its thirteen episodes were deftly paced; despite having a pretty serialized plot, the show never spent too much time on the season-long arc, but it still attacked it from a new angle whenever it did come back to it. Even episodes that focused on the corrupt land developer arc told self-contained stories, like the heist/murder farce “Fustercluck” or the claustrophobic “Asunder.” But in the end, though it was compelling, the arc was just an excuse to hang out with Hank and Britt as they bantered with each other while working cases. Great late-season episodes like “Agua Caliente” and “Sins of the Past” focused on their relationship, but we never needed that much explanation. It’s all there from the first scene of the pilot. They’re parked outside someone’s house, waiting for them to get home. Hank, thumbing through a magazine, asks Britt to lend him a thousand dollars to buy new towels. Britt, trying to sleep, mumbles, “Do you want to be a dryer person?” And that’s it. They’re comfortable with each other, they enjoy each other’s company, and they’re in it together through bad and good. It would’ve been great to be able to watch more of their adventures. But these thirteen episodes already told us everything we needed to know.
2. Breaking Bad: Season 4
As I’m writing this, Breaking Bad is a bit over halfway done its fourth season, so take everything I say here with a grain of salt; with most shows you can tell where a season is going by its halfway point, but it’s still anyone’s guess where this one will end up. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I really admire the way Breaking Bad handles television’s seasonal structure. Its story is completely, unerringly serialized, with the plot moving slowly forward with every episode. But it still manages to give each of its seasons its own narrative arc, and, more importantly, its own style of storytelling. Season 1 was mostly about introductions: who is this man, how did he get this way, and what is he capable of? In answering those questions, the show set up boundaries for itself regarding its storytelling (many of which it would later break). Season 2 was about long-term planning: events were foreshadowed all season, and the finale ended with a moment that tied together everything that had been hinted at before. Season 3 was about creating a narrative in miniature: every event, no matter how small, built logically off another, and large setpieces were reached organically. And through every storytelling style, Breaking Bad managed to subvert the audience’s expectations constantly, with almost no plot point seeming predictable. Season 4 is similarly different from all the others: it’s overwhelmingly reactive. The show had built up such a dense narrative, with so many monumental events and slowly percolating tensions, that it had to let the characters catch up. So this season, then, is about the previous seasons. And yes, that means that it’s a bit less forward-moving than the others. But it’s doing something the show needs to do at this point. It’s showing, more clearly than ever before, just how everyone Walt knows has been affected by his decision to start cooking meth at the beginning of the series. It paints him as an agent of decay, making the lives of everyone around him rot out from the inside. And it does so, despite my worries about encroaching plot developments, mostly through small, low-key character moments. It’s been very disconcerting so far; I get the feeling that the season itself will work marvellously as a whole, but the individual episodes seem a bit empty. That said, Breaking Bad is still the best show on television. The season’s ruminating theme was an ingenious goal, and the show is doing as good a job as it can fulfilling it. But with such an unfortunate place in the series’ overall structure, serving seemingly as the story’s denouement, it’s bound to feel less impressive than it really is.
1. Parks & Recreation: Season 3
When The Simpsons finished its second season, no one really expected it to get any better. It laid out just about everything it wanted to do in that season, from pop culture parodies to outlandish yet character-rooted stories, so there seemed to be no real room for improvement. And somehow, when season 3 came along, the show got that much better, and somehow not by doing anything differently. The show’s producers simply got that much better at creating the show. And that’s what happened with Parks & Recreation. It added some new elements from the get-go, like two new regular characters and a more serialized plotline to add momentum to the first few episodes, but it was pretty much the same show it was in season 2. It mostly just continued what it was doing then, only better. It kept developing the characters’ interactions with each other, leading to “Media Blitz,” the funniest episode of the show so far; it kept expanding the town of Pawnee, paying off in “Li’l Sebastian,” which made the town feel more real than it ever has; and most importantly, it kept being the most positive show on television, culminating in “Fancy Party,” which was without a doubt the most overwhelmingly joyful episode of television this season. Parks’ third season wasn’t perfect. It leaned a bit too heavily on romantic plotlines in its second half, and the finale’s flurry of cliffhangers left me bewildered. But over the course of sixteen episodes, none of which was worse than great, the show cemented itself as one of my favourite sitcoms of all time. It fired on all cylinders this year, continuing a streak that started about halfway through its second season but somehow improving on it. It has the best cast of any sitcom on the air, and writing to match. No other show gives me this much sheer joy from watching it. And hey, it’s coming back in just a few weeks.