MovieManifesto

Per annual tradition, we at MovieManifesto are ranking every TV show we watched in 2022. If you missed prior installments, you can find them at the following links:

#s 110-96
#s 95-81

80. Made for Love (HBO, Season 2; last year: 36 of 108). I’ll never forget the very first shot of Made for Love: a damp and bedraggled Cristin Milioti, clad in an emerald dress, emerging from a portal in the middle of nowhere. It was the kind of image that announced the arrival of a show with its very own, very odd agenda. So it’s a bit disappointing that the second (and final) season of the series is more functional than memorable. Milioti still does strong work, and there are some intriguing ideas about the intersection of technological empires and patriarchal dominance. But the sense of pure discovery has vanished. It isn’t as though the show became timid; hell, there’s a subplot in which an undercover FBI agent falls in love with a genetically enhanced dolphin. It just doesn’t add up to much that’s new. I’m sad Made for Love got cancelled; I’m also sad it didn’t give me more. Read More

We’re ranking every TV show of 2022. If you missed the first episode (har har), you can find it here.

95. Los Espookys (HBO, Season 2; 2019 rank: 72 of 101). I feel bad about not enjoying this show. It’s commendably offbeat, and its premise—four friends run a guerrilla business where they use their amateur talents to manufacture supernatural happenings as suits the bizarre needs of their eclectic clientele—is a triumph of bizarre imagination. But the execution is spotty, and some of the oddities are so random that they verge on perverse. (Also, I know he’s a co-creator, but Fred Armisen is absolutely dreadful.) I admire the concept of Los Espookys, because in an artistic landscape glutted with the same old stuff—true-crime dramas, ensemble sitcoms, world-building fantasies—we need more unclassifiable programs. I just need them to be better. Read More

We all know there’s too much TV. But what if TV is under existential threat? One of the programs you won’t find in the upcoming series of posts—which, per annual tradition, will count down every TV show I watched in the prior calendar year, concluding with the top 10 on Friday—is the second season of Raised by Wolves. It’s not that I didn’t want to watch the series; it’s that I couldn’t. To be more precise, I saw the first six episodes of HBO’s weird off-world thriller last February before losing interest, promising myself I’d finish it when I had more time. But last week, when I resolved to power through the rest of the show at long last, I discovered that HBO Max had removed it from its library entirely.

As first-world problems go, this one would seem to be relatively insignificant. But it’s indicative of the broader, troubling trend in which streaming services banish existing programs—some of which have already been produced yet never actually aired—to avoid paying residuals and other associated, incomprehensible costs. This is new, and it’s bad. The utopian conception of the #PeakTV era was a glutted marketplace where viewers had infinite choices, and their only problem was deciding which shows to pluck from the sprawling meadow of lush entertainment. Now that meadow is morphing into a weedy garden, and providers are less interested in planting new seeds than in pruning moldy shrubs which don’t earn their keep. TV shows used to last forever; now, some of them die before they’re born. Read More