orange is the new black

The best TV series of 2014

UncategorizedDecember 19, 2014December 19, 2014

The last several years, this one included, the new fall TV season has been underwhelming at best and just plain bad at worst. It’s not like there aren’t any interesting new shows on in the fall anymore, it’s just that there are so few of them. If the fall season is so blargh, then lately the winter, spring and summer TV seasons have been a true joy. In fact, you won’t find a single series here that started in the fall. Each and every one was a non-fall show.

The methods I use to determine my “best of” lists changes every year. Sometimes I try to rank the shows best to worst throughout the year and sometimes it’s simply based on my mood when compiling the list at the end of the year. That being said, this year I did things a bit differently. The list this year is mostly based on how much I wanted to watch a season of a show again after having finished it. And the show that kept coming to the top of my list when thinking about this was The Americans on FX.

The Americans

Phillip Jennings: “The KGB is everywhere.”

The "normal" Jennings family — The “normal” Jennings family

The Americans is the rare series that’s actually about something. The first season of the show was about what it’s like to be a married couple in the US in the guise of a 1980s period spy drama of USSR vs USA and this season was about what it takes to get someone to betray their ideals in pursuit of a greater cause.

Here, characters Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) are KGB agents posing as a normal married American couple in early 1980s Washington DC but they’re really Soviet sleeper agents out to bring down the red white and blue. In this most recent season, Philip and Elizabeth are trying to uncover the secrets of new stealth technology while at the same time hunting the killer of another KGB family that was a mirror of the Jennings’.

What was really interesting with The Americans this season were the places series creators were willing to go. Be it with the murder of an entire family, Elizabeth mentoring an young idealist agent who shares the same ideals whom Elizabeth must sacrifice for the greater good to Phillip and Elizabeth learning that while mother Russia might want Phillip and Elizabeth to make sacrifices for “the cause,” that’s nothing compared to what they have in store for their children.

Halt and Catch Fire

Joe MacMillan: “I’m not talking about money, I’m talking about legacy.”
Cameron Howe: “You’re not the future, you’re a footnote.

MV5BMTQxMTMzNzU5M15BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMjM3MDk3MTE@._V1_SX640_SY720_ — Mackenzie Davis in Halt and Catch Fire

I’m not sure how or why, but I seem to be the only critic out there who liked Halt and Catch Fire, let alone loved it. Some have complained that Halt is too much like Mad Men with it taking place in the corporate world, having a young woman as an up and coming employee with a strong male with a self destructive streak in the lead. As if only Mad Men were allowed to do this or even that Mad Men is far from the first series to play out this way.

Regardless, I was enamored where Halt went with certain characters being plowed under by the stress of trying to create a new PC in the early 1980s and others rising to the challenge. And not to spoil the ending of the first season too much, but if every other show out there is about people building something great and successful, Halt was about building something that turned out to be, at best, average. I’m not sure any show has ever done that before.

Hannibal

Hannibal Lecter: “Occasionally I drop a teacup to shatter on the floor. On purpose. I’m not satisfied when it doesn’t gather itself up again. Someday, perhaps a cup will come together.”

If the first season of Hannibal was about FBI detective Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) trying to track down a serial killer who they don’t realize is Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen), then the second season is about the FBI trying to catch Lecter in a trap and jail him for the murders. Except the one guy you don’t try and trap is the guy who’s going to be ahead of you every step of the way setting traps of his own.

True Detective

If Hannibal was head-trippy then True Detective was acid-trippy. It’s a show that seems to divide up my friends nicely. Some of whom loved it and character Rust Cohle’s (Matthew McConaughey) ramblings about the intricacies of good and evil in an uncaring universe while others hated the show and found the series to over the top and boring.

Community

In its fifth season Community returned with series creator Dan Harmon back at the helm after an absence of a year and returned a sheen of greatness to a series that had faltered in recent years.

Sherlock

Even if micro-series Sherlock is only three episodes long, they’re some of the best hours you’ll spend in front of the television. If there’s anything I’m worried about with Sherlock is that while there are two season’s of the show left, Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch is now on the verge of uber-stardom with recently being cast as Doctor Strange in a Marvel movie and I can’t see him wanting to stick with Sherlock any longer than he’s contractually obligated to do so.

Game of Thrones

I find it humorous when people binge-watch past seasons of something like Game of Thrones in a few days or weeks. They have absolutely no idea of the excruciating wait between new seasons that makes viewer’s wait nearly 10 months between the end of a season and the start of the next agonizing. I’m not complaining, though. When it’s on Game of Thrones is the best thing on TV. I do wonder if it had aired in the fall rather than spring if Game of Thrones wouldn’t have made an appearance much higher on this list?

While Orange is the New Black did start off a bit slow this season and focused on more characters than Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) as in the first — the sure sign that someone is trying to stretch out a show into multiple seasons — I thought the back half of Orange was just as good as the first season of the show.

Veep

Another great year for a great comedy almost no one’s talking about. Here’s to President Meyer!

The Knick

Writer/Director Steven Soderbergh returned to TV with The Knick, a series about a hospital at the turn of the 20th century New York City. In The Knick, medicine is taking leaps and bounds forward like never before. Even if it means that most people who go into the hospital end up dying there or that having a doctor like John W. Thackery (Clive Owen) hooked on cocaine is not only legal, it’s normal.

Orange is the New Black: Would the real Piper Chapman please stand up?

UncategorizedJune 6, 2014May 25, 2014

Piper Chapman is having an identity crisis.

Chapman (Taylor Schilling), the main character of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, is a middle-aged upper-class woman who’s just gotten engaged to the man of her dreams. But is this the real Chapman? Or is the real Chapman the wild lesbian from a decade ago who fell in love with drug dealer Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) and once smuggled money internationally for her? Or maybe the really-real Chapman is an inmate at a women’s correctional facility who’s been removed from everything she knows and loves and placed in a situation where she’s totally out of control and has no idea how things function behind bars?

Which version of ourselves are we? Do we change over time, or do we just act different in different situations around different people? And identity is just one of the major themes of Orange which is one of the best things on TV even if you don’t need a TV to watch it.

In Orange, Chapman is tried and found guilty of her smuggling a decade ago and is sentenced to 15 months behind bars at a women’s correctional facility. There, Chapman must come to terms with her past decisions affecting her current situation as well as navigate little prisoner fiefdoms and cliques while also trying to maintain her sanity as shes separated from everything she knows and everyone she loves.

A sort of anti-series to the HBO jail series Oz, the prison life in Orange isn’t gory or brutal or even all that dangerous. Prison life for Chapman is everyday degradation that comes from being locked up behind bars and less stabbings in the cells. And while everyone from Chapman to her fiance played by Jason Biggs to the judicial system agrees that if anyone doesn’t deserve to be in prison, it’s Chapman who’s spent the last decade turning her life around, none of this really matters in the maze of bureaucracy that is the US prison system.

Chapman’s life inside prison becomes infinitely more complex when her ex-lover Vause is sentenced to serve time alongside her in the same prison. The question for Chapman becomes can she stay true to her identity on the outside with a loving fiance waiting for her once she’s released or will she turn back to her old, wild days and find comfort with Vause on the inside?

While a lot of other series have tried to work flashbacks into their storylines, Orange is also the first series since Lost to actually do flashbacks right. Here, character backstories are sketched out as we get to see exactly what landed some of the ladies behind bars. Some of the inmates are inside for making bad decisions or following the wrong people. But as Orange progresses and we see more and more of the character backstories it soon becomes apparent no one is who we think they are. Be it the seemingly gruff cook Red, played by the wonderful Kate Mulgrew, or the misunderstood to downright dangerous ‘Pennsatucky’ Doggett (Taryn Manning).

All this is very heavy territory to cover in a genera previously known for being a exploitation fodder used as an excuse to show soapy nude women in showers and catfights between said women in said showers.

Orange is the opposite of all that. It delves deeper into the lives of the inmates and shows that they’re all real people, with real lives and problems. With each just wanting to get out of prison, even if in reality some who try the hardest to get out won’t be getting out to good situations and will be back inside withing a matter of months.

The entire first and second seasons of Orange is the New Black are available on Netflix. The book of the same name the series is based on is also available.

Orange is the New Black season 2 teaser

UncategorizedFebruary 15, 2014

The Online TV Revolution

UncategorizedOctober 4, 2013October 2, 2013

When I first started writing this column nearly a decade ago, legally watching TV shows online wasn’t possible. Slowly, over the years, that started to change and TV series that had already aired on traditional channels became available on iTunes and then Netflix and Amazon in a kind of online syndicated format.

But this year Netflix and Amazon* started something new; they debuted new series on their platforms that skipped the traditional networks altogether. While there’s nothing new about original content online, what’s different here is the amount of money being invested in these series, the quality of the shows and the names involved with them.

Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright in House of Cards

Debuting last February on Netflix was House of Cards. Starring Kevin Spacey, Robin Wright and Kate Mara and co-produced by David Fincher, Netflix reportedly spent $100 million+ to acquire two seasons of this series. In Cards, Spacey plays U.S. Representative Frank Underwood who craves political power and will stop at nothing as he claws his way towards a future in the oval office. Wright plays his wife Claire and Mara an up and coming reporter whom Frank doles out information to, helping his cause and helping her career.

After a long absence from TV, in May the fourth season of Arrested Development became available on Netflix. Bridging the seven year gap since Arrested last aired on Fox, the new Arrested presented the Bluth family in a new light and in a new decade. While they once were a family in charge of a successful and profitable construction company, the Bluth Company collapsed in the great recession leaving the family in disarray.

I’m a huge fan of Arrested and though some thought the Netflix series wasn’t as good as when it was on Fox since they were formatted differently — the fourth season played out like one long story with episodes leading into one and other, referencing other episodes, overlapping at points — I liked it a lot.

In July one of my favorite shows of the year Orange is the New Black premiered also on Netflix. Created by Jenji Kohan (Weeds), this series follows character Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a woman sentenced to 15 months in prison for carrying a suitcase full of drug money through an airport a decade before the start of the show. Things go from bad to worse for Chapman as she has to kisses her upper-middle class existence goodbye and experiences a culture-shock at the prison gates. Inside, she must deal with all sorts of different types of people in her new surroundings and finds out that her ex-lesbian lover (Laura Prepon) who got her into the drug trade is also serving time there too.

It’s the series with the most heart of just about any show I’ve ever seen and is unlike anything else out there. And I can’t think of another series that has a mostly female cast and is a drama rather than a soap opera.

While these new Netflix shows do have all the trappings of traditional TV — they run either 30 minutes or an hour depending on the format, all have opening and closing credits and run 13-15 episodes, about the same as traditional TV — there is one important difference here. All episodes of Netflix shows are available on the premiere date. Meaning that while some viewers will watch all of the fourth season of Arrested in a single weekend others, read me, spent more than a week working my way through it. And with a series like Orange I decided to watch no more than two episodes a week, meaning that it took me a few months to get through it.

ht_house_of_cards_nt_130211_wg

Along with these series both Netflix and Amazon have more series from dramas to comedies and even animated series in the works too from creators like Chris Carter of The X-Files and the Worchowski siblings of The Matrix.

My one question to Netflix on all this is how long can they keep paying creators like Spacey and Fincher hundreds of millions of bucks for series and still charge a flat rate of just $8 per month for all you can stream to its subscribers? It’ll be interesting if this cost rises sooner…or later. Visit me online at DangerousUniverse.com.

*So far, Amazon has aired a few pilot episodes for series, but hasn’t yet debuted a full-fledged series on their platform, though several are scheduled.

Orange is the New Black is quite good

UncategorizedJuly 15, 2013July 15, 2013

Orange-is-the-New-Black Two episodes in and I’m digging the new Netflix series Orange is the New Black. Taken from a memoir of the same name by Piper Kerman, Orange is the New Black follows boutique soap and cosmetic maker Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) who is sent to prison after being convicted of transporting money for a drug dealer a decade ago. Piper goes from one day being worried about things like locally sourced organic foods to the next living with all sorts of different people, all criminals Piper included, who all know how to live and work the system she’s now a part of.

The way the story is told is interesting. It’s the first show since Lost to use Lost style flashbacks to good effect. And the actors, from Schilling to Jason Biggs to Kate Mulgrew to Natasha Lyonne are all doing great work here. Orange is the New Black isn’t as heavy as a series like Oz and has light moments mixed with the drama.

Netflix really seems to have its stuff together when it comes to original series. I’ve been very happy with House of Games, Arrested Development and now Orange is the New Black too.

Tag: orange is the new black