Let's see what's been good on the old boob tube lately.
Fuller House: Season 1
Yeah, I bit. What can I say? I watched a lot of syndicated Full House as a kid - always loved Stephanie - and when every member of the cast not named Olsen collectively realized that they had nothing better going on and made this hunk of shit, who was I to refuse a helping? Fuller House is pretty bad. It's probably going to end up being the worst show I watch all year. But I still enjoyed watching it! A lot was cringe-worthy. The entire pilot is bad, bad, bad, and the first ten minutes alone are loaded with exactly the callbacks and catch phrases you know will pop up eventually, but not necessarily in the first ten minutes. The kids are pretty terrible, and the show was at its worst when it had to give them things to do - but that doesn't mean the Tanner sisters and Kimmy Gibbler made for compelling characters. At least Fuller House never pretended to take itself seriously; episodes never ended with little heart-felt hug sessions the way Full House tried to wrap up every half hour with a life lesson, and the show even offered up a handful of decent self-deprecating jokes. (And also some Olsen-deprecating jokes that were weirdly mean-spirited but come on now let's not pretend the Olsens can't endure some mean-spirited ribbing.) Somehow this show was renewed for a second season. Why? The entire draw of this first one was "holy shit, haven't seen the Tanners in a while!" This was supposed to be a one-off Full House reunion, not a full-fledged Full House sequel. And yet... I just might be back. This is perfect low-stakes who-cares background viewing.
The 100: Season 2
I've got nothing more to say about this show than I did last time around. Season 3 is currently airing, but I've got no desire to catch up via On Demand and DVR. Maybe one day. They can't all be winners, folks!
Downton Abbey: Season 6
The big problem with Downton Abbey was always its pacing issues. After zipping through the sinking of the Titanic, the outbreak of World War I, and the Spanish flu pandemic in its first two seasons (1912-1920), the period piece slowed down to a near halt in order to linger in the early '20s for far too long. (Imagine a show about America's rise as a superpower that begins in the Great Depression and makes it all the way through World War II in two seasons only to park its ass in the 1950s. Why?) At any rate, Downton Abbey rebounded and rallied hard in its sixth and final season, providing happy endings for virtually everyone important and also gently suggesting without outright implying that the aristocratic lifestyle we'd been watching for six years would soon phase away entirely. It took too long to get there, but Downton stuck the landing. Good job!
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Season 11
Speaking of shows that just seem to linger on and on, seriously, at what point do we want a curtain call for Always Sunny? When the show premiered in 2005, the cast were all between 28 and 30 years old. Now they're all 40. Danny DeVito is 71. Don't get me wrong - this is still funny, I still enjoy watching it, and I'm sure everyone involved still has fun making it - but rather than being impressed by its lasting power, year after year I find myself more and more apathetic to its existence. That's natural - when things have been around forever, it's easy to take them for granted - but play along with this thought exercise for me briefly. Two realities. In one of them, Always Sunny gets canceled after next season but then gets brought back in 2022 as It's Still Sunny in Philadelphia on Netflix or wherever. In the other reality, the show just stays on FXX churning out ten seasons a year until concluding with its eighteenth season in 2022. Which 2022 version of the show are you more excited for? Absence makes the heart grow fonder...
Man Seeking Woman: Season 2
Rarely does a show "go for it" as hard as Man Seeking Woman does. Every episode consists of one to three high-concept sketches as the show consistently blurs the line between reality and metaphors, bending genres all along the way. As a result, the whole series can be extremely inconsistent and hit-or-miss. One episode might have me laughing harder than I have at anything all week, but the next might completely miss its mark for me. Still, that high-risk high-reward tradeoff is commendable here in our oversaturated era of scripted television shows, and as such I give a lot of credit to Man Seeking Woman even if, on average, it's only an okay show. This second season was an improvement over the first, but that's nothing unique - a show's second season should be an improvement over its first!
Alpha House: Season 2
Speaking of second seasons - sure enough, I liked the second season of Alpha House more than its first. This show suffered in my mind the first time around from a misallocation of hype, when I took a coworker's "the funniest show there is" endorsement at face-value. I described the premise last time - four Republican senators live under one roof in DC and each one represents a different subsection of the GOP. John Goodman's at the moral center of the show and he's a moderate old-school Republican who wonders what's happened to the party he used to know. The other three senators are (left to right, above) a tone-deaf and incompetent religious idiot, a ruthless Bush-Cheney style politician with conniving tactics, and an "up and comer" in the vein of Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio before these last few months. Back when I talked about the first season, I as disappointed by the show's commitment to lampooning the Republican party. I think I used the phrase "low-hanging fruit." But given the way the last few years have actually unfolded - and in particular, this election cycle - I take that back. This show isn't so much mocking political ideologies as it is lampooning the current GOP identity crisis. There's no third season (yet) but honestly the way the current primaries are unfolding I don't think there even needs to be. How do you poke fun at at institution that's turned into full-blown self-parody? This is on Amazon Prime, by the way. Check it out.
Workaholics: Season 6
Take what I said above about It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and it seems to apply to Workaholics after only half as many years on the air. I guess it's just difficult to write meaningfully about ten-episode chunks of low-stakes cable comedy hijinks. Adam, Blake, and Anders are funny guys, but their hijinks seem to be growing more and more routine by the year. Plus there's that whole "time moves on" issue here; when the show began, the characters were barely out of college, and all of their jackassery was understandable, relatable, and laughable. Now they're all pushing thirty yet only getting less mature and more destructive. Yes, this happens on virtually every goofball comedy - "how hasn't this guy been dumped/fired/arrested yet?" - but it's a particularly noteworthy curiosity here. All the same, I'll be back for Season 7, so who am I to feign being above this type of humor?
Baskets: Season 1
Someone at some point described this show as a "slapstick drama" and I've never been able to come up with a more succinct description. Zach Galifianakis stars as a rodeo clown (there's your slapstick) with a green card wife, an overbearing mother, and no real success or path forward in life (there's the drama). One of the biggest trends I've seen on television lately is that the best and deepest tragic stories seem to be coming from ostensible "comedies" - Bojack Horseman, You're the Worst, Togetherness, Transparent, et al. - rather than dramas. And hey, that makes a certain kind of sense - you can mine a lot of pathos from humor. And what's more of a gut punch than sadness in the midst of absurdity? The show's a bit of a slow burn, and it's neither laugh-out-loud hilarious nor instantly emotionally compelling. Two characters were more or less the whole reason to watch this first season. The first was Martha, a sad-sack insurance agent who deals with everything life throws at her in the blandest and most monotone way possible. The season's funniest scene could have been the one where Martha gets bitten by a snake and reacts by sort of yelling and mildly cursing in a complete monotone manner. The other standout character? Mama Baskets, played by none other than Louie Anderson. Yes, Louie Anderson dons a wig and a dress and just straight-plays "Middle American older woman." Mama Baskets is depressingly chipper about the smallest things in the world - her bucket list includes "going down to Pixar to see how they make a Pixar movie" - and she absolutely loves Costco. She's one of the best television characters I've seen in years.
Sherlock: Season 3
I never did come to appreciate Sherlock as much as it seems like everyone else did, but I like it enough to finally check it out live whenever Season 4 rolls around. Apparently there's a Christmas special I still need to see, but who knows when that will happen?
And that's it for March. Hooray!
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