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!