Oh, Oh, Oh, it's Magic!

I'm taking a break from the backlog to observe that there are a few magic shows on TV right now (most of them on SyFy and a couple on the CW).  And I’m happy about this.  I love performance magic.  I enjoy the feeling of almost being able to figure something out.  I’m particularly impressed by close-up magic involving cardistry or legerdemain, which require an enormous amount of skill, dexterity, and just plain practice to make effective and convincing.  I could watch Ricky Jay or Helder Guimaraes all day.  I also love the debunking mentalism of artists like Derren Brown, which shouldn’t be nearly as foolproof as it is.  I find it similarly thought-provoking. Stage magic is cool too, and I’m impressed when someone can effectively pull off a large-scale trick, but I have to say that the personal element of close-up magic really gets me even more.  So I’m thrilled that magic is back in the TV zeitgeist, even if it’s mostly on one channel.

But I’m noticing a commonality about the latest group of magic shows that I don’t love.  This isn’t a new aspect of performance magic by any stretch, and maybe I’m just noticing it more in these shows because I’ve been attuned to such things lately.  But…the performance magic on TV right now seems to be largely focused on making women uncomfortable.  In various ways.  In stage magic, the magician is much more often a man than a woman.  He either (a) calls a pretty lady on stage, preferably one who’s beautiful and has some demure humility, and embarrasses her a bit with flirty advances, tricks her, and sends her back to her seat blushing—or (b) takes all the credit for a trick whose hard part is actually performed by a very skilled, scantily clad contortionist with no speaking part.  In street magic, the magician (again, almost invariably a man) most often tricks women, and his tricks frequently involve flirting with and then tricking a woman who doesn’t seem entirely like she wants to be there.  I’m not saying it’s always this way with street magic—some of the tricks are directed at men—but when they are, they don’t have that uncomfortable flirting element that requires the woman to curl back in on herself demurely.  The men, in other words, can just sit back and enjoy being tricked.  The women, all too often, have to cringe through the whole experience.

So how does the most recent crop fare?

Wizard Wars (SyFy; season 1.5 began 1/29/2015. Performance/competition).

Watched:  season

Premise:  Iron Chef, but with magic.

Promise:  Two two-person teams of magicians who haven’t worked together before compete to build a show incorporating an assigned set of everyday objects; the winners compete with a new set of objects against the show’s better-known magician “wizards” for the title.  Penn & Teller are among the judges.  How enjoyable each episode is depends heavily on the teams’ abilities to create an entertaining show with what they’re given.  There’s a good bit of filler, especially the almost-surely-staged chunks of show where we watch the teams figure out what to do with their objects.  I’ve learned to fast forward through that, but I’d rather it were cut entirely, which would either make the show a half hour or give them time to add more teams or more tricks from the judges.  Setting that aside, the shows themselves are often very entertaining, and we get to see more female stage magicians than the other shows.  (Including one of the wizards—they’ve had two women so far.)  I enjoy seeing that the judges can get impressed when they—who know so very much about magic—see something they don’t expect.  It has much the same appeal of improv comedy:  it’s not always as funny as practiced comedy, but it’s impressive to see what skilled people can do on the relative fly.

Verdict:  The entertaining parts are entertaining, and I can fast forward through the rest.

Troy: Street Magic (SyFy, UK show, new to US.  Reality/performance)

Watched: Episodes 2 and 3

Premise:  25-year-old magician Troy Von Schiebner fools Londoners with sleight of hand, mentalism, and large-scale tricks.

Promise:  Troy is a great magician, with a lot of range.  But there are a few things about this show that I don’t enjoy so much.  First, the whole thing is tied together by Troy’s narration, which sounds both canned and smug.  Second, and more importantly, a lot of it is based on him tricking unsuspecting Londoners in hidden-camera situations.  I love the “wanna see some magic?” approach to finding marks, but hidden camera work makes me feel uncomfortable—these people didn’t sign up for being tricked, and I imagine myself in their shoes as some weirdo comes up to me and starts performing a show without my consent.  I don’t like “candid camera” prank shows either, for precisely this reason; it’s humiliating for the marks and voyeuristic for the viewer.   Troy’s marks seem to enjoy it—he’s not torturing them—but I still feel uncomfortable watching it.  Not to mention that he far more frequently tricks women than men, with that whole weird flirty vibe I mentioned in the intro.  Like many magicians, he comes across as a slightly awkward kid with enough studied suaveness to make performing work, so when he’s tricking flirtable women—even though they seem to end up enjoying it—it feels just a little creepy to me.  My final critique is that his tricks often end with him wandering off leaving the mark stranded (with their watch inside a casino game or their locker key inside the window of their shoe, to mention a couple).  I want to see those things resolved in a way that doesn’t involve playing the casino game for hours or destroying a shoe to get the things out.  Otherwise I feel even sorrier for the marks than I did before, when they were merely embarrassed.

Verdict:  He’s skilled, but I don’t enjoy watching it that much.

Close Up Kings (SyFy, new.  Reality/performance)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Three magician friends travel to new cities to perform street magic, with each episode culminating in a large-scale trick inspired by the city.

Promise:  All three are close-up magicians (hence the name of the show), although their work often incorporates elements of mentalism and escapology.  This show has a similar canned-voiceover (and canned-patter) problem as Troy, but even worse, the weird flirt dynamic is cranked up to 11 on this one, because one of the magicians (“Loki”) is a self-professed ladies’ man.  But even if those weren’t problems, there’s a weakness in the premise of the show.  Although it’s great to have them visiting different cities and finding what’s unique about the magic of each, the gimmick overpowers the show, and it forces them to do something they’re not as good at as their big final number.  I’d rather just watch them do sleght-of-hand with each other all day (as they did in a really nice cheaters’ poker segment in the pilot).

Verdict: Not bad, exactly, but close up magic and Tony Bourdain travelogue are two great tastes that I guess don’t taste as good together as I’d hoped.

Masters of Illusion (CW, revived 2014 after a 5-year hiatus.  Performance.)

Watched:  several episodes

Premise:  Vegas-style stage magic, largely wordless.  Each performer does one big trick.  Dean Cain hosts in a minimalist way.

Promise:  This is a half-hour show, and that’s about right.  It features the sort of magic that often relies on big devices and beautiful assistants, with synthesizer music and cape flourishes.  It doesn’t try to be hip or stylish—it knows exactly what it is.  Dean Cain’s little intros and outros give you thoughts to ponder throughout the show, but otherwise it’s not about talking or thinking.  It’s about visual spectacle.  This isn’t as much my sort of stuff as the other shows, but provides nice bite-size chunks of “how’d they do that,” and that’s exactly what it sets out to do.  So it’s a success by that measure.  But—perhaps because it’s so bite-size and themeless, it also doesn’t feel compelling.  

Verdict:  A “watch it when I have room on the DVR” show…but not a “watch it every week” show. 

Penn & Teller: Fool Us (CW, UK show, new-to-US; canceled in UK but revived for US first-air In 2015.  Performance/competition).

Watched:  several episodes

Premise:  hopeful magicians perform a trick for Penn & Teller; if Penn & Teller can’t figure out out how their trick was done, they win an opportunity to open for Penn & Teller’s Vegas show.

Promise:  This show is a lot of fun.  It never felt like appointment television, but it requires the performers to be at their best and most creative, and allows Penn & Teller to be funny and entertaining in their own rights.  Of course the enjoyability of each episode depends largely on the competitors themselves, they are well chosen to be funny and often audacious, in the Penn & Teller style.   But because we don't get to know each performer very well –each gets an intro, but only performs a single trick—there isn't much to grab onto emotionally.  No through-line to carry us from show to show the way there is in elimination-tournament shows like So You Think You Can Dance, Face Off, or Last Comic Standing.  If there were, I probably would tune in more reliably.  Jonathan Ross was the emcee of the UK version; it remains to be seen whether the U.S. version will work the same without Ross at the helm, but I expect that it would not be hard to replicate the tone if the CW wants to.

Verdict:  Fun, but I wish it had more of a continuing thread.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  too many to count, really.

Super Human

The first of my 2014-backlog-tackling topics is superhero shows.  This is going to be a very long post, because quite a few superhero shows debuted in Fall 2014, and I mostly watched them in binges as the fall season wound down.

Many people have tried to define “superhero”–I’d be shocked if there weren’t more than a few doctoral theses exploring the topic—but I think I define the term more broadly than many.  By my definition, a superhero is someone capable of doing things that regular people can’t, who uses that superior capability to help others.  Other definitions don’t quite work for me.  Requiring superheroes to be able to break the laws of nature excludes Batman, who is unquestionably a superhero but one who relies on technology and wealth rather than unnatural physical prowess to accomplish his super-human feats.  Requiring superheroes to wear costumes is just as problematic, as it excludes, among others, one of the greatest superheroes in TV history, Buffy.  So I include non-costumed, and I include non-nature-defying. That means I end up including a whole class of everyday professional superheroes like Cal Lightman (Lie to Me) and Alison DuBois (Medium).  I’ve had serious conversations about whether the Criminal Minds team are superheroes.  (My conclusion is yes, partly because, as a friend put it, “they solve crimes but they never have suspects. And they have their own airplane.”)  Sherlock Holmes is a superhero.  The Leverage gang are superheroes (in addition to being, as I may discuss in a future post, an Adventuring Party.)

For some reason, there are a lot of superhero shows on the air right now.  Maybe it’s that the world craves competence porn as much as I do—I really can’t get enough of watching people do what they’re good at, and do it well.  Maybe that’s in the zeitgeist because there are so many powerful forces in the world that we don’t trust, and we want to watch things we know are trustworthy.  Maybe we feel powerless and want to live vicariously through those who have the power to make this difficult world a better place.  Maybe we want to watch the privileged make the right decision for once.  Or maybe we just like the adventure of it all.

One of the most fascinating moments in superheroes’ development is the moment when they decide to use their powers for good.  Spider-Man’s is perhaps the most classic of these:  “With great power comes great responsibility.” Each of these shows gives us some of that origin story, demonstrating what makes each superhuman cross that line into superhero. The differences between what drives those choices, in large part, define the differences between the shows’ tones.  But all of the shows also implicitly point out something we may know instinctively, but may not focus on:  how uncommon a decision to be heroic really is.  There are more supervillains than superheroes in these worlds.  From a showrunning perspective, It makes a lot of sense, of course: we have one superhero (or team), and they need something different to fight every week.  And perhaps it’s human nature—we are human, after all, super or otherwise, and when presented with the ability to be superior to everyone else at something, it probably isn’t surprising that the more common instinct is to feather one’s own nest.  In the real world, those with privilege seldom put it to its full good-doing potential.

TV is like that:  it has incredible power to teach and reflect.  It can use that power for good, or it can use it in any number of evil or banal ways—boring viewers, reinforcing stereotypes, disseminating misinformation…and frankly, for a bunch of superhero shows, I expect better from many in this crowd.

The Flash (CW, new.  Superhero drama.)

Watched: season so far

Premise:  After being zapped by fortuitous lightning, a forensic scientist becomes the “fastest man alive” and teams up with a group of scientists and police (and a shady billionaire) to help make his city a better, safer place.

Promise:  This show is so full of sheer enthusiasm and glee that it’s hard not to love it.  It’s the fuzzy puppy of superhero shows.  The characters all realize that being a superhero is fun.  They also, of course, realize that it’s dangerous and inconvenient and full of secrets and social challenges.  In tone it reminds me of Lois & Clark.  The show has its sinister aspects—one can’t have a superhero show without bad guys and shady conspiracies—but at the heart of the show, they’re having a good time, and it’s contagious.  It’s organized well:  the bad guys are mostly one-offs and the shady conspiracy is a long, slow arc-plot that will drive the show’s multi-season trajectory.  There’s a comfortable team dynamic, and I really enjoy the fact that despite being about someone with physical power, the show is as much a proponent of solving problems with brain as with brawn.

The only real odd part about this show is how young it feels.  Over and over again, adults act like teens.  This is particularly true in the romantic storylines, which are often tiresome and drive more of the plot than I’d like.  The main characters’ decisions, relationships with their parents, and demeanors so often seem so young that I then find myself surprised when they do more grown-up things, like drinking in bars or traveling without their parents’ permission.   I don’t need or want more grit in the show.  But it could do with more maturity.

 Verdict:  Fun and likeable.  And considering how much of the the cast has pedigree in musical theater, whenever they decide to do a musical episode it’ll be great.

Gotham (Fox, new.  Law enforcement/gangster drama.)

Watched: season so far

Premise:  The interrelated back-stories of Batman, Charles Gordon, and their antagonists (such as The Riddler, Penguin, Poison Ivy, Catwoman, Joker, and the rest).

Promise:  This isn’t really a superhero show, but it belongs in the category because it set in, and very deeply steeped in, the DC superhero  universe.  It aims for a spot somewhere between Dick Tracy, SouthLAnd, and Dragnet, and ends up being a sort of pulpy law enforcement/gangster drama.  It’s got a “flip phones and fedoras” timelessness about it, set in an alternative universe of the modern day with a studiously noir aesthetic.  It should surprise exactly no one that Donal Logue is fantastic in his supporting role; in fact, most of the cast is excellent.  But at this point, the show is still one big easter egg for DC aficionados.  It does that very well, but for a casual viewer, it’s too hung up on its in-jokes and its cast of thousands to be independently enjoyable.  The show has to be interesting in its own right, and it’s not quite there yet.  Bruce Wayne probably wouldn’t be more than a peripheral character in the story if he weren’t someday going to become Batman. I don’t mean to say it can’t become interesting—it’s got quite a cast of gangsters and (often corrupt) cops and it can paint quite a picture with them.  But it’s got to unmoor itself more from its source material to make that work.

One other critique, and that’s about the show’s treatment of female emotions sexuality.  I can’t think of a female recurring character on this show—and that includes the young girls—who doesn’t at one point or another use sex to manipulate the men around her.  (Well, possibly the precinct lieutenant, but she’s not on screen much.)  Not to mention that a potentially great example of a ex-lesbian relationship rapidly morphs into “women are crazy” territory.  I’m not saying that the men on the show look so great—aside from our heroes, they’re mostly greedy and corrupt—but at least they have variety.  Is it too much to ask for a show that doesn’t assume all women and girls are emotionally rash and sexually manipulative?

Verdict:  meh.

Forever (ABC, new.  Law enforcement procedural.)

Watched: season so far

Premise:  Immortal doctor works as a New York City medical examiner and teams up with a police detective to solve crimes with vaguely Holmesian flair.

Promise:  It’s hard to avoid comparing this to NewAmsterdam—after all, they have nearly identical premises.  Seriously.  Identical.  In so many ways and details that it’s impossible to list them.  But they differ in tone.  While New Amsterdam was a procedural that frequently explored romance and emotions (driven by the character’s need to find his “true love” to end his curse), Forever is a procedural that focuses mostly on being a procedural, with occasional digressions into the existence of a shady and mysterious villain.  The chief difference is that Forever’s Henry Morgan doesn’t know why he’s cursed with immortality, but is on a mission to figure it out, while Amsterdam knew exactly why he was cursed, and just wanted to fix it.  As subtle a difference as it is, the shows end up worlds apart—not only in tone, but also in the way they treat women.  While love (rather than sex) was the prime objective, Amsterdam’s women were means to an end.   Morgan’s women are friends, partners, true loves.  He’s had lifetimes to learn to appreciate and respect the women in his life, and—for the most part—he lives that appreciation and respect.

Setting aside the comparison, it’s a very serviceable (if often fanciful) procedural, with a good central mystery.  The friendships between Morgan and  his police partner (Alana de la Garza) and adopted son (Judd Hirsch) are warm and realistic.  Morgan’s know-it-all tendency to lecture can become annoying, but the show knows it and often hangs a lantern on it.  In fact, the whole thing comes of feeling a little like Sherlock Holmes.  It makes a good market replacement for the ending Mentalist. 

Verdict:  Good procedural.

Scorpion (CBS, new.  National-security procedural.)

Watched:  first three episodes

Premise: so-called “geniuses” are the last line of defense against terrorist-type disasters.

Promise:  This is going to go on a bit, so I hope you can indulge me.  Decades on, I’m still a die-hard MacGyver fan.  I love brain-based heroes.  I love the team dynamic of chosen family.  I love procedurals.  So you’d think I’d love this show about a close-knit team of geniuses who fill each others’ shortcomings to make a complete hero package, solving problems with their brains rather than their brawn.  But WOW I didn’t.  I fought my way through three episodes, trying to give it a real chance, gritting my teeth the whole way.  I was relieved to drop it.  Why?  It mostly has to do with the show’s bizarre and offensive equation of the concepts “genius,” “neuroatypical,” and “rude.”  To elaborate, here’s the lineup:  (a) a leader who’s likely on the spectrum, but inconsistently so; (b) a math expert with OCD; (c) a mechanical engineer with anger management/impulse control problems; (d) a behaviorist who’s a compulsive gambler; and (e) a diner waitress with a high EQ (commensurate with the rest of the team’s high IQs) who despite her unusual talent in this area isn’t a “genius”—apparently because she can communicate with people, and “geniuses” can’t. 

I don’t doubt that the show’s geniuses are actually geniuses, but I take issue with the idea that it’s their genius that makes them unable to function in the world—it’s their disorders.  And lest you think this is just someone complaining that “not all geniuses are socially inept,” that’s not the issue.  Well, it’s an issue.  Genius and emotional disorder are really different things, and the show equates them.  But the real issue is that the show, at every opportunity, conflates genius and neuroatypicality, and equates all neuroatypicalities with each other.  It feels ridiculous to have to say it out loud, but OCD is not the same thing as Asperger’s Syndrome.  Nor—again, it goes without saying—is either the same thing as gambling addiction or poor anger management.  And it’s ridiculous to think that any of these things is what makes a genius different from anyone else.  I get the idea that being smarter than everyone else might make it difficult to relate to them.  But the idea that all “geniuses” are somehow unable to relate to “normal” people but are able to relate to each other merely because they’re all “geniuses” is as ridiculous as the idea that OCD is the same thing as Asperger’s.

You know what else is weird?  How the men on the show are all get a complete pass on being rude because it’s part of their “genius,” but the two women are (a) the one whose “problem” is poor emotional regulation and (b) the one whose core skill is understanding others’ emotions. I try to imagine it flipped around, and it doesn’t work as well: it’s easier to sympathize with an angry woman than an angry man, and having the group’s emotional lifeline be male (perhaps a male diner waiter?) would be cool, it doesn’t conform as easily to the audience’s expectations.  It just highlights for me how much our society associates “emotional” with “female.” 

…but ok, /rant.  Even if you could get past that, which I can’t, it’s still a terrible procedural.  The solutions are so completely wacky that they’re insulting the intelligence of the viewer to think that we won’t notice the gaping lacunas in their logic.  I’m not saying I’d give the show a pass if it were a good procedural.  But it would be easier to make excuses for the show if it were.

Verdict:  Both disappointing and bad.

Librarians (TNT, new.  Action/Adventure)

Watched: season

Premise:  A team of smart, adventurous types investigate magical mysteries and protect the world from rogue magic.

Promise:  The series is built on the Librarian made-for-tv movies.  The show is very much in the same vein, but it’s more charming than its source material because it has the family-like dynamic of a team show rather than focusing on a single swashbuckling hero.  It’s as if Indiana Jones were a team.  The comparison to Warehouse 13 is inevitable, but the shows actually occupy rather different territory.  Like New Amsterdam and Forever above, here the similarities are in setup rather than tone.  (A few historical notes: the Librarian movie actually came first.  W13 certainly made the formula work in the series format, but neither originated the smart-people-and-rogue-artifacts genre, even on tv.  I’ll always have a soft spot for Friday the 13^th The Series, which I watched religiously during my insomniac days.  And of course they all owe a debt to Indiana Jones.  But back to the topic at hand.)  In tone, The Librarians finds itself somewhere between Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, and Psych, with a soupcon of Leverage (with whom it shares a production team and some cast).  Wonder and whimsy predominate over danger and drama, and the mythology is firmly grounded in fantasy.  The team is definitely an Adventuring Party, and uses a combination of brains and brawn (often more brains) to solve problems. 

So it’s fun.  It’s also cool that the ass-kicker and the STEM type are both women.  (Although I wish that the STEM character were treated more like a grownup, more often.)  My only complaint is a relatively subtle one having to do with the show’s romance dynamic.  To start, the show sets up a romance that it doesn’t earn.  I know there was a lot to set up in the two-hour pilot, and I appreciate the show’s decision to set up a long-distance romance rather than tease us with will-they-wont-they—but the romance felt so sudden and foundationless that I don’t quite believe it.  Second—and here’s the subtle part—it implies that the otherwise-stoic female lead falls instantly in love with Noah Wylie’s brainy adventurer.  She simply can’t resist his charismatic charms.  But wouldn’t vice-versa be different and fun? It evens out; as the season progresses, it’s clear that the relationship is a reciprocal one—but I was brought up short by the “the woman always falls for the hero” assumption that went into that first move.  All told, though, it’s more quibble than complaint.  The show does exactly what it sets out to do—to have a good time with capers, quips, and cons—and has a good heart while it does so.

Verdict:  Good silly fun.  Sometimes even great silly fun.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  From 2014:  Tyrant, Manhattan, The Knick, Red Band Society, The Mysteries of Laura,  Madam Secretary, Survivor’s Remorse, The Missing, State of Affairs, Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce.  From 2015:  Galavant, Agent Carter, Empire, Babylon, Eye Candy, 12 Monkeys.

Curiouser and Curiouser

I’m back, after a little holiday hiatus and a bout with the flu.  (I enjoyed the former and appear to be winning the latter, hooray!)

Before I jump back into the review backlog, which is mighty, a reflection on 2014’s new shows:  This blog featured reviews of roughly 65 shows, mostly hour-long dramas, but also the occasional comedy or reality show sprinkled in.  Of these, I ended up enjoying quite a few.  As an exercise as much for myself as anything, I thought I’d sit down and identify my favorite new shows of 2014 here, along with brief reasoning for each, in the hope of finding some trends.  I count as a “favorite” anything I watched the whole season (or season-so-far) of and could still say “I enjoyed that” by the end.  I say “favorite” as distinct from “best,” because this is purely a measure of whether I enjoyed watching them and followed them through their entire seasons.  In fact, I suspect many of the ones I really enjoyed are far from the “best” of the year by any rubric other than my own enjoyment.  It's also incomplete, inasmuch as it doesn't consider many miniseries or limited series, some of which would likely have been worth reviewing if I'd thought to include them. In any case, I list my favorites here in the order they originally aired (as opposed, say, to order of preference).

Helix:  reasonably twisty horror/suspense—with intriguing people and an interesting meditation on the nature of immortality thrown in.  

Cosmos:  Brilliant mix of science, history, and wonder.

Resurrection:  Doesn’t come anywhere close to living to its source material, but as the story gets wider-ranging, it doesn’t lose focus on its very human people.

Review:  Andy Daly throws himself into this absurd premise brilliantly and creates a surprisingly heartfelt story.

Fargo:  I’m deeply drawn to the one sane person in a world gone mad, and this story is all about that.  Beautifully paced, beautifully acted, beautifully crafted—misanthropy at its most dryly humorous.

Last Week Tonight:  The News Hour of news satire shows.

Extant & The Lottery:  stood as interesting counterpoints to each other in a season of shows heavy on “compelled motherhood” stories.

Intruders:  Showed great potential for an exploration of immortality and self (and an interesting counterpoint to Helix) despite its murky premise.

Legends:  Not a great show.  But the mystery of selfhood that propelled it kept me interested nonetheless.

Transporter: The Series:  I have no excuse for liking this.  But chase scenes and fight scenes are fun.

Forever (review forthcoming):  The best of the year’s new procedurals.

The Flash (review forthcoming):  The glee of superheroism.

State of Affairs (review forthcoming):  Good combination of spy procedural and arcy conspiracy.

The Librarians (review forthcoming): Good silly fun (and the smart people are the heroes).

(I note here that I haven’t watched enough of Manhattan to know how I feel about it yet, but I believe it’s likely to fit into the pattern I see below.)

What do they have in common?  I think, mainly, it’s that they’re curious shows about curious people.  Their characters are on a mission to explain something difficult, possibly even inexplicable, about the world around them, and the show wants us to care about the answer.  Every one of these shows, with the exception of Transporter (whose main character claims to be uncurious, but then gets curious at nearly every opportunity), is about people who want to find answers and are willing to look for them even if they are hard to find, or may never be found.  And that’s a pretty compelling connection between them.  In fact, it’s reinforced by the fact that my chief complaint about the show I’m most on the fence about for the year—Outlander—is that its lead is too often uncurious, willing to exist without explanation in a situation that makes no sense. 

Also—and this is just a fascinating observation about the zeitgeist right now—a critical mass of them are about some form of immortality.  (Helix, Resurrection, Extant, Intruders, Forever).  In fact, among the biggest themes of the year's new shows were immortality (those shows plus Penny Dreadful, The Strain…), motherhood (Extant, The Lottery, Finding Carter, Intruders, Jane the Virgin …), and the nature of selfhood in an increasingly technologically-defined world (Intelligence, Legends, Intruders, Extant…).  Are we perhaps concerned about humanity’s legacy in light of its darker natures (Killer Women, True Detective, Those who Kill, Star-Crossed, Salem, Fargo, The Divide, How to Get Away with Murder, Gracepoint, Tyrant, The Knick, Stalker) and susceptibility to often-self-made, or at least self-perpetuated, disaster?  (Cosmos, Crisis, Penny Dreadful, The 100, The Last Ship, Extant, The Strain, The Lottery, The Leftovers, Dominion, Z Nation, Constantine, Manhattan)?

There were also a few serious duds—offensive and/or terrible new shows whose very existence made me ranty—in 2014.  Salem, Rush, The Leftovers, How to Get Away with Murder, Stalker.  My most uniform complaint about those is that they’re misogynist.  But interestingly, they’re pretty much all deeply uncurious as well.  Hmm.  Food for thought.

Coming next:  back to the backlog!