David & Dean's 2015 Top 10 (David's version)

Okay. Here is the methodology that I used this year. (As opposed to last year when I used no methodology at all and simply threw some words up on the screen. But don't worry, this year's plan is not much more complicated.)

First, Dean reminded me/asked me if I wanted to put together another end-of-year Top Ten list. And I immediately said yes. So, I turned to my computer and switched over to Blogger and dug out the old logo I used last year. Luckily, I had the foresight NOT to brand it with a year, so it's all ready for reuse.

Then I put the numbers 1-10 on the screen and started listing the titles of my favorite shows for this ending year. And I stopped at ten and wondered . . . what did I forget? So, I typed "Top Ten TV shows 2015" into Google and saw the list of professional critics stories that have already been writtten. But I didn't read them because I wanted my list to be pure and only from me. But luckily, Google's search screen also have a graphic showing new shows broadcast in 2015. So, I double checked that list to see if I had missed a few things and forgotten others. And the answer was yes.

So, I modified my list and let things at the bottom get bumped. I am going to recategorize a few of those at the end of the post. So, more to come on that later.

And then I quit when I got the ten I liked the most and in the ranking that I thought best. Here it is:


1. FARGO!!! The second season of this FX show was TREMENDOUS! So much better than season 1, which was good in its own right. But the acting by Kristen Dunst, Jeffrey Donovan, Bokeem Woodbine, and Jesse Plemons has been so excellent. The tension of each episode leading up the the Sioux Falls Massacre and the confusingly recurring UFO story thread and the creative split screen visualizations combines to make a well-written and well-crafted show into something really special.
[DEAN: Come on man, we’ve talked about this. Top 10 lists go from 10 to 1. This is like reading the last page of a murder mystery right out of the gate. People are in it for the suspense and you’ve killed it. Also I’m a little put off I can’t criticize this ranking because it is definitely correct in most every way.]

2. Limitless This probably surprises you. It's a procedural/crime-of-the-week show on Tuesday night CBS. But, really--this show is clever and well acted and well written and has a very strong visual style and a really committed sense of humor. It has the thankless task of spinning itself off of a forgotten Bradley Cooper movie (of the same name). But it takes the idea of a brain-boosting pill being used by the FBI to solve crimes and has so much more fun with it than it should. (Heck, there was an entire episode riff on Ferris Bueller's Day Off that was some sort of secret gitt people watching the show.) If you realize that the production company is K/O Paper Products, found by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who stretch backwards from Fringe to LOST, then you may not be surprised that I like the style of this show. Please give it a try in 2016.
[DEAN: And you had to spoil things by making your number two show a CBS procedural. What’s next on the list: The Big Bang Theory?]

3. Jessica Jones I just finished up watching this first season on Netflix, and  really, really enjoyed it. It is grim, gritty, and psychologically disturbing. If I wasn't worried about being attacked by #GamerGaters, I'd say this show comes with a definite trigger warning. The best actor in this cast is definitely David Tennant, who plays the villain Killgrave. And yes, this is yet another superhero drama and yes, it does live in the same Hells Kitchen as Netflix's Daredevil. But the story is good. The drama is very good and the acting is good as well.
[DEAN: Hey another show I quite liked! I was a little disappointed by the direction they took Killgrave. By the end he was more pathetic than the super scary villain at the start, but I was still overall satisfied.]

4. The Americans This show has always been quality and well done throughout all phases. But the past season was my favorite one yet. The drama of telling daughter Paige the truth about what Elizabeth and Philip do for a living really amped up the emotions to a new level. And mix into that Philip's season-long effort to win over the daughter of a highly-connected government official? It was a slow burn of a plot line with enough ick factor to make me (and Philip) squeamish. Really well done.
[DEAN: More Paige please.]

5. Better Call Saul While BCS is not as much a meticulous puzzle piece as Breaking Bad was . . . this spinoff takes advantage of Bob Odenkirk's many years of comedy to have fun with Saul Goodman before he became (in)famous and met Walter White. At first, I was watching the show because I missed our nefarious friends in Albuquerque. But now I just enjoy Jimmy (the prenatal Saul) and his friends.
[DEAN: I am irritated that you keep picking good shows. Remember Limitless at number 2? Those were good times.]

6. Daredevil And I flip back over to Netflix for another superhero drama. This show, starring Charlie Cox as the blind lawyer/hero Matt Murdoch was Marvel's first move into the streaming world and it was a strong success. Even if every episode wasn't great (according to some . . . but not necessarily according to me), it was sufficiently different from the ever-expanding MCU to justify the streaming/binge commitment. I guess the biggest example of how much I liked it (and Jessica Jones, mentioned above) is that I am motivated to read some of the more famous storylines of the Daredevil/Alias comic books to learn more about the source history of these season 1 shows.
[DEAN: The pilot for this show was so visually dark that I gave up on it. Just because the protagonist is blind, doesn’t mean that I am. Give me some color and light and I’ll come back.]

7. You're the Worst (True story--I forgot to include one of this year's best shows until Monday night. I wrote the draft of this post over the weekend. Not until I was driving home from work, listening to The Watch podcast, did I realize my error.)

And a good thing too, that I corrected my error because this season of You're the Worst was challengingly good--not because it was as funny as season 1 but because it stretched itself to tell the story of Gretchen's depression. It widened the range of Gretchen and Jimmy--making them less than caricatures of awful people.
(I will admit though, that since the end of the initial season, when the show began committing itself toward the relationship of Gretchen and Jimmy, I worried that the show would deviate too far from the original idea that these people are just awful jerks. And so far, I think that fear is justified. BUT . . . the other side characters are plenty awful enough to deliver that tone which was so strong in season 1,)
[DEAN: Paul is making a huge mistake but hopefully that means more Paul next year. This is also a good show.]

8. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Yes, here is another show on Netflix . . . but it is a far cry from the story and tone of Jessica Jones or Daredevil. Much as I wanted to watch Better Call Saul because I missed Breaking Bad, I started watching Kimmy Schmidt because I missed 30 Rock. This show, a comedy about a young woman who was kidnapped and kept underground for over a decade by a religious cultist won me over quick. It has the same quick-fire joke count as 30 Rock. And Kimmy's me-against-the-world optimism reminded me of Liz Lemon's never-say-die attitude.
[DEAN: John Hamm was the third worst part of this show. Kimmy’s dad was the 2^nd worst. Tina Fey and her co-lawyer were the worst. If Tina Fey is the worst part of something it’s probably pretty good.]

9. black-ish I really look forward to this show each week because it is almost guaranteed to make me laugh and tries (at least a tiny bit) to teach me something too. But really, it is definitely interested in making me laugh. I am worried though . . . that the last episode's plot of saying goodbye to Dre's coworker Charlie might signal something. Because I really liked Charlie. Don't be gone long, please!
[DEAN: My DVR died so I don’t know what this means. But Charlie is great so I too hope he is not gone.]

10. Master of None Speaking of laughter and trying to teach lessons . . . Aziz Ansari's newest creative output was another Netflix standout in the last few months. Ansari's Dev character is an Indian actor who hangs out with his friends, enjoys life in New York, and occasionally confronts racial assumptions. It's a sort of 21st century Seinfeld with more of a conscience.
[DEAN: Argh, I liked this show too! Stop having discerning taste so I can make fun of you. This show was great and this list was good. Nice work.]

Bumped Out of the List:
a. Game of Thrones It was on the list but it kept getting shoved down by other items. It is always a fun show to watch. And I wanted to not ignore it altogether because the series really reinventing itself at the most dreadful point in the book saga plot. The showrunners and writers sidestepped most of the bad plotting, invented new things and new paths to keep things moving and make it interesting.
[DEAN: They sidestepped bad plotting and added more of their own bad plotting. Still a visually arresting show that I like watching.]

b. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend It was also on the initial list, but became a casualty of higher-quality shows. On the face of it, the hook of the show sounds bad--and doomed to be ridiculous. But (for some reason), it works just well enough to be enjoyable.

c. Supergirl Just when you thought I couldn't bring in another superhero show . . . This CBS effort stars Melissa Benoist as our Gal from Krypton. And the show is developed by the same creative team that oversees Arrow and The Flash on The CW (which I also enjoy). I secretly hope they will all team up at some point to battle some spinoff villain that survives the aftermath of the Batman vs. Superman movie. But that would probably get way too bloated and weird. My quibbles with Supergirl are: 1. they refuse to mention Superman by name, but they can't stop talking about him anyway and 2. the first five to six episodes were much too focused on the fact that Kara was female and that was the reason that she screwed up time and again.
[DEAN: I hate Kara and hope her Aunt wins. She was right about Krypton and Kara is wrong about everything and I kind of hate her. Martian Manhunter is cool though.]

Will Watch Someday: The Leftovers, Mr. Robot
[DEAN: I would rather try to read Infinite Jest again than every try to watch The Leftovers. I am sad I watched Humans instead of Mr. Robot. Well I’m sad I watched the first episode of Humans instead of any of Mr. Robot.]
[DAVID: Hey, you stop that. Mr. Robot sounded good and I'm sorry I missed it too. BUT . . . Humans was pretty good as well. Just not top 10 good I guess.]

Dead to Me:
The Walking Dead The creative team insulted the viewers in the way they treated Glen's disappearance and reappearance. I'm officially out on this show.
[DEAN: Now how will I be able to be part of the cultural zeitgeist? I rely on you David. I rely on you.]

Football Counter-Programming 2015: Week 13

The end of the regular football season is almost over for another year. And I've done my best to distract you from the gridiron struggles. But I know that I haven't really succeeded. So, many I've been going about this all wrong?

So, in an effort to be more distracting, I'm going to--this holiday weekend--rely on the two most distracting things I can think of on the Internet. (Sorry Log Lady, but you get the weekend off.)

So . . .

Yeah, that's right!

The unholy alliance of Star Wars and cats! The two things that can break the Internet!

(Calm down Luke, it will be over soon! Just a bit more distractions.)

 

Until next week, remember . . . no one cares if your fieldgoal kicker can bullseye womp rats in his T16 back home. What matters is can he kick a 45-yarder with the wind in his face!?

Football Counter-Programming 2015: Week 12

The football season is slowly winding to a close. (Really, the end is within theoretical sight, I promise.) But it hasn't gone away yet and so the FC-P continues, strong in its mission to distract you from your pigskin-related pursuits for another week. No matter if your team is throwing down against a cupcake opponent (I'm looking at YOU Southeastern Conference) or whether your team is finally facing down against significant opposition that might determine your season. (You know who you are, tOSU.)

But . . . as usual, this is the end of such football talkery for this post. Now, on to the Counter-Programming!

Hit me up Log Lady!

 

 Do you ever write letters anymore? I lived in a time when letter writing was already becoming a thing of the past--and that was even before the overwhelming rise of the Internet and e-mail. I once had a pen pal, but that was pretty short-lived. (I don't even remember now where he lived.)

I wrote some letters when I went to summer camp and when I was in college, I wrote an occasional letter back home. But my main method of communication has always been face-to-face. (As anyone who knows me can tell you, I don't like communicating on the telephone and generally try to avoid that.)

Of course, these days, I communicate a lot in words--but I type them in this blog or on Twitter or on Facebook. And the words are not directed to anyone specific. They are just composed and put out into the world for general consumption. That is nice, because it gives a creative outlet and some (informal, to be sure) practice in the writing process. Does it weaken the overall use of language, however, when I'm not specifically targeting a person?

These days when I write something directly at someone, it is a note of specific goals. Telling Lynda that I've gone for a walk. Or leaving lists of chores for the kids to do when I'm out of the house.

Speaking of that . . . my mom used to write chore lists for me every summer morning. When she was off working and when I was home without school, she would hang a note on the refrigerator door with tasks to accomplish by the time she got home: vacuum the floors, wash and fold laundry, clean my room, wash dishes. What sort of chores did you do as a kid?

And how do you communicate? Do you write letters? When was the last time you received a letter from someone? When was the last time you got something in the mail that wasn't a bill, junk, or an annual Christmas card? Do you think it is a diminishment of our historical record that we don't write anymore? Have you even considered what future historians and anthropologists will use to determine how we lived our lives?

Or maybe it won't be so bad? Will all of our digital records more than suffice? Will it only be paper receipts from Walmart and Best Buy that tells our history? Or will future civilizations judge us by our random blog posts, our DVDs of Breaking Bad and whatever retro-tech they devise to watch our Netflix files of Friends?

(On further reflection . . . that might be our most accurate depiction. It's not all State Department communiques, after all.)

So . . . welcome future archaeologists!

My name is David and I lived in Ohio most of the time. It was a state located in what we called the Midwest. We valued corn, football, butter, and wholesomeness. Our summers were hot and our winters were cold.
We--unlike you--were able to go outside when the weather was nice. But . . . during my adulthood, we chose to stay indoors and entertain ourselves with digital communications and filmed stories on our portable computer devices. (These were the progenitors of our cortical digi-implants.)
We made movies predicting the robot enslavement, but we never took it very seriously.

Sorry about not preparing for that like we should have.

And remember (as you from the future already know) . . . no one cares if your team didn't take that Division I-AA team seriously during the late season cupcake week. A loss is a loss is a loss . . .


. . . unless that loss is actually robot enslavement. Then--well, its a paradigm shift for the whole civilization.

Football Counter-Programming 2015: Week 11

Welp. What do I talk about today?

The events in Paris have already provided plenty of counter-programming to balance against any football-related activity that might be discussed on Facebook today. I even considered not writing anything today, just in case it seemed too false or dumb against the real suffering going on over there.

But, the football games continue today, so I guess I will counter-program as usual.

Here's hoping that the Log Lady has some helpful wisdom today. (But if you are paying attention, you might already guess from the image above that things are stranger than normal this week.)



I've said before in this space that going to extremes is a dangerous path to take. True believers on any side of a two-sided argument are not interested in seeing the viewpoints of their opposite opponent. The world's complex problems are not so simple as to only have two sides. So, I try to steer my stance more to the middle, hoping to accommodate the issues somewhere in the compromise zone.




(I didn't know what else to write . . . and so I went down to the basement to sort through dirty clothes and start some laundry.)




And I am confronted again with how privileged I am in so many ways. It is no surprise that I want to sit in the middle of arguments, because I do not suffer hardships. I am not oppressed or threatened. So, I do not see the conflict from the point of view of the true believers who are willing to go to extremes to achieve their social/political/economic/religious/theoretical goals.

We can't operate exclusively from extremes though. There has to be someone willing to compromise? And I'm not saying it is ME. But there needs to be more people in the middle, trying to understand and carve out a path toward acceptance and cooperation. Otherwise, we live in chaos.



And I think that is it for me today.

Stay safe. Enjoy your time with family and friends. Try to determine what creamed corn has to do with anything other than making good cornbread.

And remember. . .

. . . no one else cares if your team is undefeated and stuck at number 7 in the College Football Playoff rankings.

Football Counter-Programming 2015: Week 10

,
It's week number 10 of trying not to let football control our lives. How has it gone so far for you? Have you realized yet that leaves are changing and that there is an autumnal bite in the air? (Of course you have, because your parking space at the tailgate is near those pretty trees and last Saturday you had to get our the ole alma mater scarf you bought back in '92.)

Clearly, we have more work to do. On to the Log Lady introduction!

Don't you love the Log Lady's directness? Who starts a conversation by asking if you can see through a human's skin?
 
But, I guess it is a good question. We cannot see through people. So we should not assume that we can understand everyone in their fullest sense. We all have pockets of mystery. 

Let's take a look at me, for instance, I use this space every weekend to tell you not to watch football and to not let these allegiances define who you are. And yet, I do spend some time each Saturday watching some football games. 

That makes me hypocritical, sure. But it also makes me complex, you know? 

I use the construct of football to motivate me towards more blogging. But does this admission weaken my points and the things I write about? No. It simply says that people are more complicated than we allow them to be. We want the world simple and easily understood. But the world doesn't work just the way we want it to. 

The Log Lady demonstrates her wisdom in this longer-than-normal Intro. As is often her style, she counsels that the world is complicated and that many things are happening that are not simple to understand at face value. This knowledge that she has comes from her life in the Woods. Living in nature, Log Lady has learned to find a balance in the middle, in between extremes. She finds a median path, much like how she only chews the type of pitch gum that is in the middle, between too soft and too hard. 

In her own strange way, the Log Lady has a bit of Zen about her. 

Now . . . on to other things. 

What sort of gum do you like to chew? These days, I favor basic flavor Dentyne. I chew it at work almost every day, after lunch or when I have consumed too much coffee. It's a breath freshener and a way to convince my mouth that I don't need to buy candy from the vending machine in the mid-afternoon. My friend BS calls this The Gum Method. It works with varying success, I must admit. 

When I was young, I favored either Juicy Fruit gum or Fruit Stripe gum. These days, I find Juicy Fruit waaaaay to sweet for my palate. And I wouldn't chew Fruit Stripe gum on a dare.  Occasionally, I will chew some cinnamon flavored gum, but that is a definite rarity.

What sort of gum do you like the best? Do you chew often or not at all? Surely you have opinions, strongly felt that you need to share? (This is the Internet, after all.) So, go ahead and let it out. Tell me the things that must be said and that you have held inside for far too long. The comments await, at your pleasure. 

And . . . until next week, please remember that no one cares if your coach has brought in the nation's best recruiting class for the last three off-seasons.