TOM FRANCIS
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Some TV That Was Mostly Shown Last Year In Some Places

Last one of these – I won’t do a music one because I didn’t really get into much last year, and everyone’s heard Florence and the Machine. The Music Downloads tag has everything I liked enough to share.

Is this list in order? If you care, no. If you don’t, yes.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

There are far more episodes of this than I will ever have the constitution to watch, but this last series was well worth catching for the Seinfeld reunion. The actual episode of Seinfeld produced within the show isn’t shown in full, but the real payoff is better: having Larry and Jerry in the same show. You can immediately see why Seinfeld itself turned out so well: Larry’s darker, but funnier with a more positive presence to play off. And Jerry’s funnier when he has someone to take him to more absurd and surreal places. Best of all, the verite style of Curb lets them honestly laugh at each other’s stuff, which somehow makes all of it funnier.

Dollhouse

It took a long time to build enough on to its unconvincing premise – brainwashable prostitutes – to convince anyone it was worthwhile, but this second season has really picked up pace. It’s started to show a surprising commitment to progressing the plot in drastic ways with each episode, and even the one-offs have cleared up major backstory mysteries. Perhaps it was a series that knew it would die soon, or perhaps there’s a huge masterplan we’ll ever see. Either way, I don’t feel like we’re losing masses of unexplored potential by ending the series now, but I’m enjoying the impressive rate it’s burning through what it’s got left.

Man-doll Victor’s been the other treat of this season – previously stuck in some pretty dull roles, he’s since been given three or four chances to mimic other characters when ‘imprinted’ with their personality. Each time, the performance has been creepily good. When trying to tot up how many times it had happened just now, it took me a while to remember that he’d ever impersonated Topher – I just filed that whole sequence as ‘the bit with two Tophers’.

Update: just saw the latest. Whaaaaaat.

Castle

I gave this a chance solely because it had Nathan Fillion – Firefly’s Captain Reynolds – in it, and happened to do so on the episode where his character dresses as Mal Reynolds for Halloween. “Didn’t you wear that like five years ago?” His daughter comments. “Don’t you think you should move on?”

It couldn’t pick a more worn-smooth formula if it consciously tried: a police procedural starring a non-cop ‘consultant’ who helps the department solve crimes by a) having some special insight into the criminal mind and b) projecting an aura that prevents ordinary cops from grasping rudimentary logic until it’s phrased to them in allegorical form. The flavour this time is that he’s a best-selling crime writer. And that it’s brilliant.

The twists are small but effective: Lady Cop’s disapproving relationship with him is complicated by the fact that she’s always been a fan of his trashy work, and there’s something almost cute about her determination to give him a harder time to compensate. Castle himself is a rockstar in the literary world, but a powerless underling in law enforcement – Fillion manages to be charming, funny and pathetic as both. And his profession gives him a boyish excitement for working with the police rather than the sneering smugness the genius character usually has.

His daughter, whose inclusion initially triggers a Pavlovian sense that this is where it’s about to jump the shark, isn’t used as a source of whiny teenage tension. Instead she’s just a bedrock for the character, convincing, likable and sweet. It’s so rare to see a father/daughter relationship on screen where they just seem to be friends, and neither of them is being an asshole – the highest compliment I can pay is that it reminds me of Veronica and Keith Mars. It’s only because all this stuff works that she serves the purpose most irritating daughter characters are trying to: she humanises a man who seems otherwise ghoulish in his enthusiasm for murder.

Dexter

Speaking of men ghoulish in their enthusiasm for murder – yes! Link! – wow, Dexter was incredible last year. Seasons two and three both ultimately vindicated themselves, but each had a wholly annoying, dangerously predominant character who forever threatened to ruin it. Season four’s non-annoying equivalent is 3rd Rock From The Sun’s John Lithgow, and the wrinkly sociopath he chillingly portrays is one of the most compelling screen murderers I can remember.

Funnily enough, despite an exciting escalation from the worst Thanksgiving ever to an extraordinarily grim finale, the episode that stuck with me was an early one-off. A sleep-deprived Dexter completely loses track of where he’s stashed a body, and consistently one-ups himself by avoiding all the places even he would think to look. I think the core appeal of Dexter is that, whether or not we’ve killed anyone, we all remember how it feels to have done something bad. Even if it was as a kid, the consuming fear of getting caught is scarier than any monster or murderer, because no-one’s going to be on your side.

Flight of the Conchords

Loretta broke my heart in a letter
She told me she was leaving and her life would be better
Joan broke it off over the phone
After the tone she left me alone

Jen said she’d never ever see me again
When I saw her again, she said it again
Jan met another man
Leeza got amnesia just forgot who I am

Felicity, said there was no electricity
Emily, no chemistry
Fran ran, Bruce turned out to be a man
Flo had to go; I couldn’t go with the flow

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

(He doesn’t cook or clean; he’s not good boyfriend material)
Ooh we can eat cereal!
(You’ll lose interest fast, his relationships never last)
Shut up girlfriends from the past
(He says he’ll do one thing and then he goes and does another thing)
Ooh, who organised all my ex girlfriends into a choir and got them to sing?
Who? Who? Mmm, shut up
Shut up girlfriends from the past

Mimi will no longer see me
Britney, Britney hit me
Paula, Persephone, Stella and Stephanie
There must be 50 ways that lovers have left me

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town

Love is a delicate thing it could just float away on the breeze
(He said the same thing to me)
How can we ever know we’ve found the right person in this world
(He means he looks at other girls)
Love is a mystery, it does not follow a rule
(This guy is a fool)
(He will always be a boy; he’s a man who never grew up)
I thought I told you to shut u-u-up?

Mona, you told me you were in a coma
Tiffany, you said that you had an epiphany
Mmm, would you like a little cereal?
Who organised this choir of my ex girlfriends?
Was it you, Carol Brown? Was it you, Carol Brown?

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

Special Mention: State of Play

Not even remotely last year, but holy shit this was exciting. When I watch something this good, I sometimes get a completely inappropriate twinge of envy – why aren’t I this good a TV writer? Wait, I’m not a TV writer. Still, damn you Paul Abbott.

It’s the story of two murders, a mysterious death, an MP and the journalists investigating their connection. S. It gets complicated at a rate of knots, but never arbitrarily, and making sense of those complications becomes a compulsion. It’s a single six episode series, and if you can make them last more than a week you’re a stronger person than I.

I tried to watch the more recent film adaptation on a plane, but in trying to cram six hours of fast-paced developments into two, they’ve somehow managed to make it slower, less exciting and insufferably preachy. If you can watch the whole thing after seeing the series, you’re a more patient person than I.

Note: Glee

I don’t know if it was in my top ten or anything, but this series about the rivalry between a glee club and a cheerleading squad – two concepts completely foreign to me – starts on E4 in the UK tomorrow. It’s sort of hypnotic: glossy and mawkish, but aware of it and happy to throw a slushie in its own smug face every now and then. It was the Journey cover they do at the end of the first episode that convinced me that songs could actually work in something like this, so catch that if you catch nothing else. It’s worth sticking with for the surprising Sue Sylvester episode, and the irritating aspects of the plot’s main conflicts do get resolved.