This was good. It was an HBO limited series that ran for the past seven Sunday nights and frankly it's the first drama of the year for me that I'd consider appointment viewing. There've been so many shows already this year that just seem to drag and falter as the weeks wear on, but Big Little Lies was entertaining and interesting week after week. A little soapy and ultimately predictable, sure, but there was something endlessly enjoyable about watching Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Adam Scott, Alexander Skaarsgard, Laura Dern, Zoe Kravitz, and the rest of them get all uptight and bitchy with each other in beautiful Monterey over everything from helicopter parenting to ex-spouse jealousy to domestic abuse to having your rapist's child. All of it while, oh yeah, there's a future murder investigation being teased that hangs over everything.
Real talk, do you know how much I liked this? I would even accept and embrace a second season of this show. that's how much I liked this. (Although I'm pretty sure the whole thing truly ended last night - not that you can count anything out these days. Still, this cast? Good luck reuniting it.)
It wasn't perfect, and it'll probably end up being a footnote at best when we start to look back at the decade of Peak TV in a couple of years, but it was such an easy watch - often funny, never dull - and that's just such a rarity for me at this point when it comes to these hour-long dramas.
Side note! Every December I end up ranking all the TV I watched in the preceding calendar year. And sometimes the biggest struggle is dealing with a recency bias in one direction or the other. It's very easy to finish watching something, to have a strong reaction to it, and then to let that reaction fade away and blend in with a more critical consensus over time. Things I really loved when I watched them can end up fading as I've got more and more to recall, while things I ended up disliking may be less abrasive after several months go by. So my long-winded idea here is, hey, it's early April, and most of the year's early premieres have finished their seasons by now - why not give a preliminary ranking of everything I've seen so far?
In the interest of sparing a lot of "pending" and "on track for" and such, I'll only consider the shows that have either finished their runs for the year (I mean, I can't rank the final season of Girls until I see how it all ends, right?) or that have run long enough and are episodic enough for the season finales not to matter very much (like, say, New Girl). Cool? Cool.
DRAMAS:
1. Big Little Lies - See above.
2. Sneaky Pete - Just a lot of fun. There's a chance I've overrated this, but I'm excited for the next season which is more than I can say for anything else on this list.
3. Victoria - Take it or leave it comfort food. Doesn't demand very much of my attention, pretty to look at and to listen to, strikes the right mix of mostly lighthearted fun with occasional melodrama. Which, holy cow, is good enough for the third-best drama of the year so far. Good thing the big guns are coming in April.
4. The Young Pope - Really 4A to the next show's 4B. Both were wacky and fun on a superficial level, both had individual scenes and moments I'll always remember, but both left me feeling like, ultimately, so what? That this was renewed for a second season shouldn't hurt it's case, but I think it kind of does. I mean what does the finale even mean, now?
5. Legion - Just wrote about this one, like, last week. Cool premise didn't do enough to offset my "but who cares?" reaction to the story, the characters, the world. Call it Westworld syndrome.
6. This Is Us - Tough to place this one. My head says "no, even lower," but my heart says "eh, this is fine." Fills a unique hole in the TV landscape - a big-hearted, fairly cheesy network drama with something for everyone - but is it a good show? It is decidedly not, IMO. Plus no matter how easy a watch it was, I still felt my attention wandering in the back half of Season 1, like, kind of a lot.
7. Humans - Speaking of wandering attention... Yeah, what I said about this one still holds - it could be more like Westworld, and Westworld could be more like it, and somewhere between them there's a great show. But it's not this show.
8. The Affair - Still haven't seen the finale, but I've heard it didn't do much to fix the messy second half of this third season. I think I used to like this show much more than the average person, and then it all kind of came crashing down for me here in 2017 in the span of a few episodes. At this point I have no idea what purpose it serves, what itch it scratches, what need it fills. I'm probably underrating it, and maybe seeing that finale will give me the chance to pop this back up the rankings a few notches. But I'm just in no rush to do so.
9. Sherlock - Never understood the hype for the first three seasons, and the fact that everyone hated this one allows me to bring out the knives with glee. What a mess!
COMEDIES:
1. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia - Huge comeback season from a show that had gone stagnant a while back for me. Of the ten episodes, only two or three felt disposable to me, and several were instant classics. That's a great season.
2. Review - Went out on top and nailed the finale, but at only three episodes I can't nudge it above the full season of Sunny. There's a quantitative threshold, at some point.
3. Man Seeking Woman - Hit or miss on the laughs, as usual, but bonus points for the high concept (as always) and what's likely the final season going out strong
4. The Good Place - Another high concept show that went out strong. Would be above Man Seeking Woman if not for only airing like four episodes this year. (We'll see when it returns - this fall or next winter?)
5. New Girl - Hit a real groove for a while there and returned to being one of the funniest shows I watch. Problem is, six seasons in, that well is running awfully dry. Let's hope for a good seventh season and call it a career, ah?
6. Love - Nothing hilarious here, but it's well-made Apatow-style slow-burn stuff.
7. Baskets - Covered this recently, but a disappointing second season was saved by a late surge in heart, sadness, etc.
8. Bob's Burgers - I'm enjoying this more than I have in recent years. Still occasionally entirely disposable, though.
9. Santa Clarita Diet - It's just too dumb to really love. Very easy watch, though.
10. Superstore - Sophomore year NBC comedy can't hit the highs of The Office or Parks and Rec at all, but it's in that vein, at least. Feel-good filler, nothing more.
11. Workaholics - Painfully bad for years now. And still, somehow, I'll miss it...
12. Schitt's Creek - Probably "deserves" to end up at 9 or 10 on this list, but a hard series binge brought me to the end of Season 3 running on fumes. Maybe the nine months between now and year's end will let this float a little better.
OTHER:
1. Last Week Tonight - Still easy to watch this every week, although it's gotten a bit one-note and depressing in the Age of Trump. Every week's the same - a pretty funny opening ten minutes followed by a deep dive that's anywhere from moderately interesting to mind-numbing.
2. Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner Party - The novelty's all gone, and sure enough, there's no other reason to watch.
How about all of you? Any great or even good TV I'm not watching that you are? Anything here you disagree with, and would suggest I might reconsider?
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