50. Modern Love (Amazon, Season 1).
Like with any anthology, Modern Love
is less a cohesive series than a collection of hits and misses. Sure, there’s a
vague thematic throughline about the complexities of contemporary romance—whether
between tech-savvy millennials, weary gen-Xers, or dogged boomers—but it doesn’t
add up to much beyond, “Love is complicated.” Still, the series’ economy is
impressive; each episode clocks in at roughly 30 minutes, and each manages to
tell a complete story. It’s also beautifully cast, and when it hits—such as when
it tracks the separate relationships of Catherine Keener and Dev Patel, or when
it spends a wonderful evening in the hospital with Sofia Boutella and John
Gallagher Jr., or when it follows the ups and downs of a bipolar Anne Hathaway—it
plays like gangbusters. That other episodes are less successful feels
appropriate; after all, who gets love right on the first try? Read More
We’re counting down every TV show that we watched in 2019.
If you missed Part I, you can find it here.
Also, a gentle reminder that this list isn’t a bell curve; going forward, I
mostly liked pretty much every show that appears.
75. His Dark
Materials (HBO, Season 1). I get why HBO wants to repeat its Game of Thrones magic, and I get why
they chose to adapt Philip Pullman’s trilogy, a fantasy series that’s loaded
with intrigue and imagination. The resulting series, at least one season in, is
perfectly cast, visually impressive, and maybe just a little bit workmanlike.
Some of that may be a function of Pullman’s first novel, which spends a lot of
time on world-building before really getting to the good stuff in book two.
Still, thus far, His Dark Materials
is missing that spark of creativity, that joie de vivre. To be clear, there’s
plenty of good stuff: Dafne Keen (from Logan)
is terrific as the spunky and inquisitive lead, sparring beautifully with Ruth Wilson’s
conflicted zealot; Lin-Manuel Miranda is aces as a gunslinger; there are
armored bears. But there’s a disappointing caution to the show that’s
restricting its potential. Here’s hoping it takes more chances in Season 2. Read More
Thirty-three different TV shows made my top 10 list this
year.
I mean, not really. Math doesn’t work like that. But if
placement on a top 10 list is a signifier of excellence, then 2019 offered far
too much stellar small-screen programming to be reduced to a mere decade. There
was so much greatness, on so many platforms: great Netflix comedies, great HBO
thrillers, great Hulu dramas, great Amazon whatsits, great FX miniseries. It
was enough to make you both delight and despair—to revel in the extraordinary
vastness of modern television, and also to lament all the shows you couldn’t
find time to watch.
Speaking of which, here’s a partial list of shows I’d
previously consumed but stalled out on this year: The Affair, American Gods,
Arrested Development (good riddance),
Dark, Happy!, Preacher, Riverdale (doh!), A Series of Unfortunate Events, and The Terror. In a less cruel, more generous world, I might have
found time to continue watching all of these series—along with intriguing new
shows like The Boys, David Makes Man, and Too Old to Die Young—but today’s
jam-packed TV landscape forces you to make tough choices.
As for what I did watch: Today’s list is the opening salvo
in our annual weeklong exercise ranking every TV show from the past year that I
watched in its entirety; it’ll wrap up with the top 10 on Friday. There are, to
put it mildly, a lot of shows on this list. There also isn’t everything; I’ve
probably neglected one of your most treasured sitcoms or beloved procedurals. Sue
me. When you watch more than a
hundred TV shows in a single year, then maybe I’ll grant you the right to
complain about the programs that I so grievously ignored. Until then, pipe
down.
Or maybe I’ve just ranked your favorite series far too low. Feel
free to take that personally. All I’ll say is that, setting aside the arbitrary
nature of ranking works of art—an admittedly foolish endeavor which suggests
objective rigidity when the realities of preference and quality are far more
fluid—the problem with TV’s glut of greatness is that it creates a false
impression of relative mediocrity. By which I mean: If I ranked a series as the
53rd best show of the year, how good could it possibly be?
Pretty damn good. I won’t bother trying to encourage you to
watch most of the shows on this list, because I’m confident you have neither
the time nor the discipline to do so. What I will do is stress that the list
isn’t a bell curve; half of the shows included are not below average. The vast
majority are worth watching. The challenge—the existential dilemma that plagues
viewers of our time—is to decide which shows are worthy of your limited time.
I’ll leave that impossible choice to you. For my part,
here’s every show I watched this year, in reverse order of preference: Read More
Two years ago, after 13 nominations without a victory, Roger
Deakins—one of the greatest cinematographers who’s ever lived—won his first
Oscar, for his magnificent work on Blade Runner 2049. I mention this
not because I care about the Academy Awards (I don’t… except
when I do), but because 1917, Sam
Mendes’ bold and brawny and periodically breathtaking new film, seems to have
been engineered specifically to secure Deakins an Oscar. Its technical premise—it
purports to capture its grueling events in a single take—is not wholly novel; a
recent example includes Birdman (which won Emmanuel Lubezki
the second of his three straight trophies), while the conceit stretches back to
Hitchcock and beyond. But in marrying the single-shot concept (or gimmick,
depending on your disposition) to the epic gravity of the war picture, 1917 practically screams to be
recognized for its grandeur. Some movies envelop you with the invisible pull of
their craft; this one pulverizes you with the sheer force of its technique.
The single-take maneuver, though undeniably impressive, is
not without its hazards. The risk of wielding the camera with such fluid
dynamism is that it will distract viewers. It’s a danger of distancing; the more
conscious you are of the stylistic prowess on display, the farther away from
the screen you tend to feel, which in turn prevents you from melting into the
immaculately constructed environments. But while my brain never quite stopped
registering the presence of Deakins’ camera in 1917, that subconscious awareness did little to sabotage my
appreciation of his work. There’s an elegance to his lensing, a grace that
somehow magnetizes you, forcing you to grapple with the lovely brutality of his
images. That distinctly cinematic paradox—the tension between horror and
wonder, between ghastliness and gorgeousness, between death and life—is what
animates 1917, and what makes it such
a fascinating sit. Like most war movies, it traffics heavily in blood, viscera,
terror, and despair. And it depicts this ugliness with what can only be called
beauty. Read More
On the one hand, as a rule, I abhor the “Actor X was
snubbed!” rhetoric. When a category limits itself to five selections, your favorites
invariably find themselves left out; this rarely means that the chosen quintet
is drastically inferior. That’s especially true in this bountiful era—our
Golden Age of Acting—when every year seems to offer up a dozen or more
performances worthy of recognition in each of the four fields. My own ballot in
the acting categories hardly ever aligns with the Academy’s, but that doesn’t
render their choices indefensible; it’s just a natural consequence of mathematics,
the result of a large number being cruelly reduced to a small one. Great
performances are inevitably excluded, not because voters didn’t appreciate them,
but because they simply admired other work more.
Having said all that: Jennifer Lopez was snubbed. Her
performance in Hustlers,
full of fire and sadness and compassion, is the quintessential Oscar-worthy
performance. It is impossible to conceive of a Best Supporting Actress field
without her. The Academy blew it.
But as I discussed yesterday when making my predictions,
one of the functions of the Oscars is to facilitate complaining. Their nominal
purpose is to honor cinema’s best, but they’re more interesting for what they
get wrong, which is what gets people angry (and talking). The only thing worse
than an imperfect slate of nominees is a perfect one.
Speaking of predictions, I hit on 83% of mine this year (57
of 69), a decidedly mediocre number. Same as it ever was. On to some quick
category-specific thoughts: Read More
![[whispers] That's the Mandalorian.](https://moviemanifesto.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/TV-of-2019-Mandalorian-1024x680.jpg)
