2015 Wrap-Up: Sweet Emotion

As I did last year, I want to take a moment before continuing my dive into the review backlog to look back the new shows that I liked in 2015, and ponder what I found likeable about them.

In 2015, I reviewed roughly 65 shows, most of them hour-long dramas.  Of these, I ended up really liking quite a few of them.  But although I haven’t done the math, I don’t feel like I got attached to as many of them as I usually do.  I don’t think that’s because the year’s new offerings were bad, exactly, but it seems to my recollection that lot of them were gloomy, depressive numbers that didn’t grab my long-term attention.

Here are the ones I ended up really enjoying. (Listed here in order they aired, rather than order of preference.) 

                                                                              

Agent Carter:  ABC.  (Review forthcoming).  1940s spy drama set in the Marvel Universe.

Grantchester:  Masterpiece.  Charming rural mystery procedural.

iZombie:  CW.  Zombie works at morgue, solves crimes.

UnReal:  Lifetime.  A producer wrangles her own personal drama behind the scenes of a reality show.

Dark Matter:  SyFy.  Amnesiac spaceship crew bonds over shared experience.

Killjoys: SyFy.  Space! Bounty! Hunters!

12 Monkeys: SyFy. Compelling reimagining of the 1996 time-travel film.

Humans:  AMC.  A few special androids have real emotions, hopes, and dreams.

Scream:  MTV.  Self-aware high school slasher series.

Limitless:  CBS.  High-concept law enforcement procedural.

The Player:  NBC.  The rich and powerful bet on crime; one man tries to fight it.

The Last Kingdom:  BBCA. In medieval England, a young man is torn between his English blood and Danish upbringing.

Code Black:  CBS.  High-intensity medical drama.

These are not all shows I expected to enjoy.  And some I’m still not entirely sure why I enjoy.  So let’s unpack them.  What do these shows have in common?  Some of them intentionally subvert traditional TV genre.  Agent Carter puts a woman at the forefront of a superhero story.  iZombie changes the dominant personality traits of its lead character every week.  UnReal and Scream are self-aware critiques of the reality-dating and slasher genres, respectively.  Limitless self-consciously centers each episode around a different genre theme.  But not all of them do that—as many are quite traditional renderings of their respective procedural or drama genres.

OK, another theory:  most of the shows on the list have a sense of fun about them.  Even the more serious ones like Grantchester, 12 Monkeys, The Last Kingdom, and even the deeply intellectual Humans exude a certain degree of delight in storytelling.  Even when dealing with serious subject matter, these shows have touches of lightheartedness and humor that demonstrate they know that they’re television shows, and like being television shows.  They optimize the television genre by telling entertaining stories about interesting people, rather than trying to transcend it by being serious “art” or by stooping to lowest-common-denominator formulas. 

But of course the same is true of many shows that didn’t make the list.  So what makes these shows special?  I’m settling on the following conclusion:  it’s that they respect the characters’ emotions.  They give the characters permission to feel what real people would feel, even if those feelings are illogical or unflattering to the characters, and they don’t mock or disrespect the characters for having real emotional reactions and needs.  They don’t frame emotional women as “crazy;” they give men a wider range of emotion than “angry/not angry”; they don’t indulge in the false reason/emotion dichotomy. 

Until now, I hadn’t really focused in on how important that emotional acceptance is—or, for that matter how rare.  In the spirit of television being important, I’m thinking back to the history of shows that give us role models with genuine emotional ranges, and not turning up a whole lot of examples. Perhaps that’s one reason we’ve developed our expectations about what emotions are “appropriate” and what emotions aren’t.  So:  more of these, please.

On the other side, there were really only two new shows I watched and hated in 2015:  Eye Candy and Stitchers.  Both of them feature young women blindly throwing themselves into high-tech danger for ill-conceived reasons.  I'm actually kind of surprised by this short list of "hated it" shows, because in theory one would expect me to like shows about brave female hackers and computer science doctoral candidates, respectively.  But both did the exact opposite of the shows above:  they explicitly divided emotion and rationality, they made their female leads "crazy" and "emotionally vacant," respectively, and they showed absolutely no respect for their characters' emotional states, instead ogling them as weird oddities. So:  no more of these, please.

Coming next:  Back to the backlog! Currently in the backlog queue:  Blindspot, Scream Queens, Rosewood, Quantico, Supergirl, Wicked City, Flesh and Bone, Into the Badlands, The Expanse.