Stan's TV Dump: December 2016

Last one of the year! Not a lot of seasons ended in December this year, which is weird, since there are usually so many that do so - but I still saw plenty this month, particularly as I tried to finish a number of shows within the calendar year. Gotta make sure those "Best of 2016" lists are as accurate as they can be, you know?

High Maintenance: Season 1

It took me a little while to get into this six-episode HBO comedy, but by the third episode - which takes place entirely from the point of view of a dog - I was hooked. I'll back up. Like Broad City before it, High Maintenance was a long-running web series before it was picked up by TV executives and given a new life. And like Broad City and Girls and countless other shows, it takes place in Brooklyn, and Brooklyn itself is a "central character." But what sets High Maintenance apart is that it's a bit of an anthology comedy. Each episode features a "story of the week" - usually two, actually - with different characters in different circumstances. The main character is a weed dealer known simply as "the guy," and episodes focus on his various clients and customers. Give it a shot, maybe. I never watched any of the web episodes and I was fine jumping right in. Just understand that the format might be a bit off-putting at first; you're not meeting any recurring characters, so just enjoy the vignettes for what they are.

Search Party: Season 1

This one snuck up on me; continuing their trend of experimenting with contemporary TV-viewing habits, TBS decided to drop these ten episodes across the five nights that comprised Thanksgiving week. Their logic was something like, "millennials might not have cable anymore, but their parents do, and they'll be staying with their parents for the week, bored out of their minds and full of turkey, so why not watch this fun little show?" I have no idea if this was a sound strategy, and haven't checked on the ratings for this, because in today's TV landscape nothing ever gets canceled due to low ratings anymore if it has any level of critical acclaim or fanbase, and Search Party was good! It starts out a bit slow, and feels like a basic cable version of Girls - millennials being vapid and shitty people in the city, their relationships superficial, their goals questionable or nonexistent. But by the end of the ten-episode run, I actually came to like all of the characters. That's growth, folks! Development! The story here involves a girl who goes missing and a group of friends who remember her from college and decide to investigate what happened to her. It's pretty funny, but at turns it's also dark and devastating. And it all works its way toward an enjoyable and kind of horrifying finale. Will there be a second season? Organically, I'm not sure how there could be - the mystery is solved - but I hope so all the same!

Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV: Season 1

Even considering the decade-plus of less-than-fantastic offerings, I am still a dedicated and slavish fanboy for Square's long-running JRPG franchise multiverse, and any new (numbered, non-MMO) Final Fantasy title is an automatic must-play. I'll offer my thoughts on the new game, in depth, later on - for now, I've only played it for three hours - but so far the game's biggest strength seems to be the bond between the four protagonists: a prince and his entourage, basically. This five-episode anime serves as a prequel to the game and it outlines the group's history - how did they come to be these four bros-fo-life, exactly? The series is 50 minutes long in total and you can find it on YouTube if you're so inclined. I'm no anime expert, and obviously this was already catering to a niche interest of mine, but you know what? This wasn't bad.

Westworld: Season 1

I have plenty of thoughts - not so much on Westworld itself, but on its very unique strengths and weaknesses as a prestige drama in 2016. Instead of writing a paragraphs-long thoughtpiece - the umpteenth one on the series this month - here are a few thoughts with no cohesive flow. One, thanks to A) Twitter and online discussion boards and B) the rise of streaming and bingeing, you can no longer release anything in weekly installments and expect to surprise anyone. A few people on Reddit and Twitter figured out every twist on Westworld about three episodes before it was revealed, and since everyone loves collaborative speculation, everyone knew what was coming - and still got to feel "smart" when those twists were revealed. (See also: Mr. Robot.) Compare this to a streaming show like Stranger Things where everything comes out at once and people avoid discussions like the plague for fear of being spoiled. Imagine bingeing Westworld. That's a totally different experience, right? And probably a better one? Two, when you set your story in an indeterminable time and place and allow most of your characters to have an immortality of sorts - either an outright immunity to bullets or an eternal resurrection capability - you surrender a very basic and natural source of tension. You need to make me care about your stakes if "death" isn't one of them. Why does finding the center of the maze matter so much? Who stands to lose or gain anything if the robot hosts become sentient? For so much of this show, I just felt "along for the ride" with plenty of questions in my mind that I didn't actually care about the answers to.

Bloodline: Season 2

Marissa and I watched the first season of Bloodline a few months ago and thought it was decent, but slow - like so much other prestige TV from the decade. The second season was less decent and, although shorter, perhaps even slower. The third season of Bloodline will be the last, but is that a compelling enough reason to keep watching? Time will tell.

The Get Down: Season 1

Another Marissa pick. She's all about that Baz, and as such, she desperately wanted to like this. And she might even claim that she did like it. But folks - I know better. This was only six episodes long and it took us three months to get through. We stopped watching it in order to watch Bloodline - and I just finished saying exactly how thrilling we found Bloodline to be.

Martha & Snoop's Potluck Dinner: Season 1

This is perfect trash television, and whoever came up with the idea to pair Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg for half an hour every Monday deserves a raise. I'm not sure what the ratings were - and for something like this, who cares? Its existence almost seems to transcend its need for an audience. We'll be back for Season 2 in 2017. Or maybe it'll be the second half of Season 1. Hard to say.

Peep Show: Season 2

Years and years ago, like way back in the early parts of high school, everyone's favorite anglophobe Paul ("Peej") would occasionally invite a group of us over to his place in order to binge a season of one British comedy or another, likely on imported DVDs. It was there that I first saw The Office - yeah, before it was cool [feigns brushing dirt from shoulders] - and there that I saw the first season of Peep Show, an oddity whose primary gimmick was setting every shot from someone's point of view. It was unique and weird, but hilarious - at least in 2004 - and for years afterward I sought out ensuing seasons on DVD. Alas, nothing after the first season came to the U.S., and I never got to see them. But we live in the future now! Last year, when talking to Sweeney about TV as I often tend to do, I learned that he'd been watching the entire series on Netflix. And that there were nine seasons! Imagine that! At any rate, here's the second. Not quite as great as I recall the first one being - but then, what's as funny to anyone at 28 as it was to them at 16? I'll likely stick around for a while and poke in and out of future seasons of Peep Show; with six-episode seasons, it's such an easy and low commitment "binge."

South Park: Season 20

For years - and maybe since its very inception - South Park has been hit-or-miss. Due to its unique production schedule - "six days to air" - its writers can truly rip stories from the headlines as quickly as something like Last Week Tonight and can spoof celebrity mishaps and political gaffes with the speed of Saturday Night Live. For a few years now, though, South Park has taken a serialized approach to its seasons, allowing its characters to spend multiple episodes progressing through the same stories. I think this worked pretty well at first, but there's no denying that it blew up horribly this year, bogging characters down in various go-nowhere stories about the election, Internet trolling, a battle of the sexes based mostly on whether or not women can be funny, a nationwide obsession with nostalgia, and Elon Musk's goal to fly something to Mars. It was, frankly, a disaster - one likely made worse by the shocking results of the election; Matt and Trey seemed to be building the whole battle of the sexes arc toward a Clinton presidency only to scramble in the final three episodes to an "everybody wants to move to Mars now" gimmick. There were plenty of sporadic highlights this year, as there always are, even in the worst years of South Park. But after this latest ten episode stretch of the longest-running show I watch... man, I really hope they bail on this format next year.

Fuller House: Season 2

I hate this show, and I think it is a bad show, and for no compelling reason at all I just watched thirteen more episodes of it. But I don't quite hate-watch it. At least I don't think I do. No, I put it on while doing something else - anything else - because it's so, so easy to watch. (And hate! It's easy to hate, believe me!) But even after two full seasons, there's still something alluring about this piece of shit - "Memba Full House? I memba Full House!" - and I can't even promise that I'm done with it.  It's a throwback not just to Full House, which I never even watched outside of syndication as a kid, but also to all the hallmarks of '80s and '90s family sitcoms. It revels in trope-heavy plots, terrible catchphrases, and a studio audience that overreacts to literally every line of dialogue. Ugh, Netflix knew exactly what I wanted from this, even if I didn't. I hate myself.

The 100: Season 3
I actually liked this season a little better than the second one, but I'm shocked I made it this far, let alone past the first few episodes. This YA dystopian shit is just not for me - decidedly so - and in fact it seems like its not even for half of its own fans anymore after killing off a beloved LGBT character.

Steven Universe: Season 1
Trev already professed his love for this show earlier this season, and now I too have drank the Kool-Aid. There's something so uniquely appealing about a PG-rated cartoon that gets by not on catch phrases or crudeness but on quality and heart. The first season is fifty episodes long, but fear not! This is a very easy show to slide into; those episodes are just ten minutes long each, and the first twenty or thirty build the world of Steven Universe so gradually and easily that all you'll want is more information and stake-escalation. I'm a fan! I mean I wouldn't call this the second-best show on television or anything, by a longshot, but I like it nonetheless. Season 2 is in progress.

Horace and Pete: Season 1
I'm glad Louis C.K.'s new show found its way to Hulu before the year ended, because I wasn't going to shell out $31 for a single season of streaming television no matter how much buzz it was getting. Horace and Pete was, even among a diverse TV landscape, wholly unique. Episodes varied in length from thirty-something minutes to over an hour, and although it was made by a comedian it was almost as tragic in tone as it was funny. The whole show took place across two sets - Horace and Pete's bar downstairs, and their apartment upstairs. The show felt very much like a stage play or a multi-camera family-workplace drama. I think the median actor's age in it was over fifty. In a year full of great new shows from women, people of color, and younger voices, Louis C.K. showed that even an over the hill straight white guy could make something totally unique and original. It was intermittently okay and fantastic - so pretty good, all things considered - and I'd welcome a second season, or at least more of this kind of content (a show full of musings in a dive bar) from Louis C.K. and company.

The Night Manager: Season 1
If what you want from prestige TV is Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie glaring at each other for six hours while passive-aggressively trading barbs in decadent British accents, well, have I got the show for you! This was fine, but it was yet another instance of an AMC show where the production value far exceeds the writing, the story, the acting, the very content it serves to enhance. And there's nothing wrong with that! But in an ever-more-crowded TV landscape, hey, maybe don't worry so much if you missed out on this one in 2016. (But it's streaming on Amazon Prime if you're so inclined.)

Insecure: Season 1
As far as "semi-autobiographical half-hour shows created by female comedians that debuted in 2016" are concerned, this was well below One Mississippi and Lady Dynamite and more on par with Take My Wife and Better Things and Fleabag. Look, it was a tough year to stand out, is all.

The X-Files: Season 3
Earlier this year, Fox rebooted The X-Files and by all accounts five of the six episodes completely sucked. But can I be honest for a minute here? I think The X-Files has always sucked. I think that back in 1990-whatever when there was nothing else on TV but laugh track sitcoms and police, courtroom, and medical procedurals, a long-running show about paranormal activity and aliens and FBI conspiracies was bound to get a devoted following, regardless of quality. Here's every episode of The X-Files:

[Weird violence happens.]
Mulder: This was aliens.
Scully: Mulder - I'm just not sure!
[It was aliens.]

No, seriously. Tell me I'm wrong! Point me to a decent run of, oh, three consecutive episodes of The X-Files - a show that has produced over two hundred hours of content, mind you. Go ahead and do it! I'll wait. And until then, I won't watch any more of The X-Files. Good riddance!

3%: Season 1
Hey, it's another dystopian YA show about a bunch of - yes - young adults in a Brazilian future that is - yes - dystopian in nature! In this hypothetical world, three percent of the population gets to go live offshore in an enlightened utopian paradise of sorts, while the remaining 97% have to stay on the overcrowded and slummy mainland. Look, you better believe I lost the narrative thread on this one after three or four episodes, but fuck it - this gives me eighty shows watched in 2016, which is sort of impressive and pathetic and impressively pathetic all at once. Grad school, am I right?

Brain Games: Season 2
You know, I dug the first season of this thing enough to check out the second, but a twelve-episode second was a bit much. Things got repetitive in a hurry. The optical illusions were cool, but with entire episodes devoted to questions like "which sex has better spatial awareness and which one is better at seeing colors," it's clear that this show is aiming a little lower and broader than something I'd be interested in keeping up with. Oh well!

Adam Ruins Everything: Season 1

Somehow every episode to date of Adam Ruins Everything - a show that debuted in 2015, went away for most of 2016, and came back this fall for thirteen more episodes - is considered part of the first season. Fine! It was a long and informative and sometimes tiring season. I learned a lot from Adam Conover, but not as much as I learned from John Oliver's weekly segments, on average; Conover's show seems more focused on mixing up the episode sketch structures and lesson delivery styles - which is important, sure - than on cramming as much information as possible into the twenty-odd minutes available. But hey, it's good enough for me, and I'll be back for Season 2 in 2017.

And that was 2016. Onto the next one!