There was a lot of great TV this year. Among the stand-outs were Better Call Saul, Future Man, Barry, Glow, The Americans, Ozark, The Good Place, Santa Clarita Diet, Preacher, Ash vs The Evil Dead, Agents of SHIELD, Bojack Horseman, Big Mouth and the documentary mini-series Wild, Wild Country. There was also a lot of good, but not great, TV this year: Orange is the New Black, iZombie, The X-Files, Star Trek Discovery, The Man in the High Castle, Fear the Walking Dead and Westworld among them. There was also a lot of missed TV this year, owing to a seemingly endless explosion of new shows.
There’s so much TV, on so many channels, across so many platforms, and always more and more and more, year upon year – much of it of a high pedigree – that to miss even a month of watch-time would be to find yourself a year or more behind the zeitgeist. Or so it starts to feel. Even when a great show reaches the end of its natural life, potentially freeing up a space in your schedule, another six – of equal or comparative quality – rise to take its place. As a consequence, I haven’t yet had a chance to watch The Haunting of Hill House, a single episode of This is Us or Atlanta, Sharp Objects, The Bodyguard, Castle Rock, Save Me, Killing Eve, The Sinner, the latest seasons of The Affair and The Deuce, season 3 of The Expanse, season 3 of Daredevil. The list goes on…
(I have, however, managed to binge my way through Vikings and Outlander. I’m enjoying both enormously. You can read my Outlander Binge Diary from the beginning HERE)
What I’m trying to say is that this list of ‘Striking Moments’ is in no way supposed to be exhaustive or scientific. Just in case you all start clamouring to say things like, ‘But what about this moment, or what about that moment?’ Or ‘This whole list falls apart without the inclusion of this, that or the other moment’. I’ve got two kids, a partner and a day job, asshole. I can’t just sit around watching TV all day, just to make YOU happy. In saying that, I hope that some small part of this list does make you happy, because it’s Christmas and I’m a nice guy.
Without any further ado, then, and in no particular order:
Vikings – Floki’s utopia
OK, so this is technically cheating, because the following moments/episode technically premiered in late 2017, but because the half-season spilled over into 2018, I’m including it here.
The battle to avenge Ragnar’s brutal death predictably led to further battles, bloodshed, and renewed divisions. Floki’s arc, running in tandem with and parallel to the journeys undertaken by the vengeful sons of Ragnar, also came to a tragic and bloody end, with his wife, Helga, being murdered by the half-kidnapped/half-rescued Muslim girl she’d brought back from the Mediterranean with her as her adopted daughter. Floki’s soul went into free-fall. He declared himself an empty vessel, and put himself at the mercy of fate, spending weeks in his small boat drifting aimlessly upon the tumultuous seas, letting himself be carried by the winds of fate and the hands of the Gods, wherever they saw fit to take him.
They took him to the country we know as Iceland, though he mistook it for Asgard, the home of the Gods themselves. The sequences wherein Floki wanders the empty, rugged landscape of fire and ice are beautiful and breath-taking. One minute the air fills with the rush and thunder of water, like a God’s roar breaking above him, the next silence – the silence of death; the sound of an empty world at the universe’s end. Angry waves break on beaches untrammelled by human feet, and in the distance a plume of primordial smoke slithers into the freezing air, a reminder of the violence sleeping just below the surface of this whisperingly empty world.
In the end this new world – this blank canvas of peace and promises – is corrupted, as worlds always are, by mankind. But that comes later. When Floki, a lone prophet in the ethereal wilderness, casts his widened eyes on the raw magnificence of a pre-human Iceland, we too can feel the island’s ancient power, and imagine a little of what it must have been like to walk the line of awe and terror in a world that was foreign to us in every way.
Soul-stirring.
And a great advert for the Icelandic tourist board.
The Man in the High Castle – Lady Liberty up in smoke
From the beginning, The Man in the High Castle’s world-building has been exquisitely rich and detailed. The Japanese Pacific States, the Neutral Zone and the Greater German Reich all look and feel lived-in and eerily authentic. This nightmarishly plausible landscape of a world where World War II’s winners and losers were reversed is so immersive – so grimly fascinating to spend time in – that the show was able to get away with moving at a slower pace during its first season, taking time to revel in the shadows of its mysteries.
Season three saw the show leaning into its sci-fi multiverse concept harder than ever before, plus piling on the tragedies and agonies of its deeply conflicted characters. Smith and his wife were put through the wringer (I feel I can get away with using archaic metaphors when I’m writing about a show that’s set in an alternate 1960s America), Frank struggled to find somewhere to belong, and the Nazis were gearing up to invade other universes.
The season’s most iconic, though, moment came in the finale, when a ranting Himmler presided over the destruction of the Statue of Liberty. Seeing flames and spinning debris exploding from that great monument to liberty and freedom, as people whooped and cheered, was as captivating as it was horrifying. Himmler had declared war on history and truth, and the people loved him for it.
All told, a timely and powerful reminder that nothing, not even Lady Liberty, is set in stone, and everything – even reality itself – can be undone and remade.
Fake news is in the eye of the beholder.
Or sometimes the bomb-holder.
Ozark – Drop me a line sometime
I really liked Ozark’s second season, but do you know what I really, really liked? Witnessing a character in a TV show sending a text message, and the typing and sending of that text message taking the actual length of time it would take to send that message in real life. I almost wept with joy. I know reality occasionally has to be suspended or sacrificed in order to keep a story flowing, but Christ, I didn’t realise how much TV’s two-second text messages had been getting me down. Thank you, Ozark. Thank you so bloody much.
Plus, kudos to Ruth Langmore’s line, which I vow to use often in 2019: “I don’t know shit about fuck.”
Walking Dead – Rexit Means Rexit
Andrew Lincoln was leaving The Walking Dead. Fans were bound to find out. It wasn’t a particularly large leap from that revelation to the reality of a hard Rexit. However, Rick wouldn’t be leaving in the traditional, tried-and-tested manner of every other character who’d left the series since its inception, i.e. either living dead or dead dead, but moving over into a movie-based Walking Dead pocket-universe, where fans would get to see him Rick-xercise his authority one last time. AMC certainly didn’t want anybody to know that. At least, not yet.
AMC obviously couldn’t stop news of Lincoln’s departure from leaking out – after all, we live in an age of information in an intimately, interconnected world – but the network could use the news to its advantage, and with a little creative sleight-of-hand throw the audience off the scent of Rick’s true destination. What better way to blind-side the audience than by coming at them head-on, not only peeping and shouting about Rick’s departure, but making it the lynch-pin of AMC’s marketing strategy? The network very cleverly – or infuriatingly, depending upon how you look at it – hinted at Rick’s death and told the whole truth about his fate at the same time, and using the same words.
It’s a shame that Andrew Lincoln had to bail out just as The Walking Dead was getting good again, and it’s an even bigger shame that Rick’s exit episode threw the season’s momentum into reverse. Thankfully, it recovered again, and the mid-season ended strongly, but Rick’s goodbye could just as easily have dynamited the whole show. Whatever you think of the execution (and you can find out what I thought about it by clicking HERE), there’s no denying that it was a bold gambit, and – for better or ill – AMC definitely created a piece of event television.
House of Cards – Claire stacks the deck
House of Cards’ sixth and final season – sans Spacey – started strongly, faltered at the half-way mark, and then limped through a landscape littered with more bodies and serial implausabilities than it had ever before managed to muster, before collapsing in a messy, bloody heap on the floor of the Oval Office.
Robin Wright was exceptional (as always) as the lizard-like Claire Underwood, and it was interesting to see how her grip on, and relationship, to power differed from that of the freshly-dead Francis. It might have been an exceptional swansong season had Kevin Spacey’s disgrace not forced the creative team to improvise and engineer an ending instead of letting the end-game unfold as per the original plan.
Season six did, however, have one tremendously powerful image, that will stick with me for a long time: the unveiling of Claire’s new all-female cabinet. This wasn’t a sudden burst of ultra-feminism from Claire, or some bold idelogical statement, but rather another example of Claire using her power and cunning for strategic gain, fashioning the cabinet into a people-shaped ‘fuck you’ directed out at the world, and into the face of her equally lizard-like enemy, Annette Shepherd (Diane Lane).
The stunned look on Annette’s face as the silent table of women stared out at her from the cabinet room, before Claire shut the door in her face, was absolutely delicious.
Bravo, Claire. And bravo House of Cards.
Westworld – Ooh, Heaven is a place on earth
The best episode of Westworld’s second season, and also one of the best TV episodes of 2018, was it’s eighth, Kiksuya, which took Akecheta of the Ghost Nation on a journey through sorrow and sacrifice on the bitter road to sentience. It was a beautiful paean to love and identity, viewed through the haunting prism of loss.
But as striking and memorable moments go, it’s hard to beat the image of a caravan of hopeful, frightened and confused Westworldians trudging, marching and fleeing to the top of a rugged hill, as chaos and death erupts at their backs, towards an image of heaven itself: a doorway to a new world, the promise of new and eternal life, a perfect life in a perfect world; one that uploads their ‘souls’ and ‘essences’ into the heart of the matrix at the same time as it sends their broken, empty bodies to the bottom of the unseen and unseeable cliff just beyond the portal. I’ve seldom seen such a powerful conflation of faith, hope, horror and happiness.
Final proof, if further proof was needed, that the ‘synthetics’ are just as fallibly, desperately ‘human’ as we are.
Who is America – Welcome to the party, sphincter
Sacha Baron Cohen’s fresh dose of satirical punk-nacity never lived up to the promise of its mostly very funny first episode, losing focus and drifting into disjointed and uninspired puerility as the series progressed – and I say that as a life-long fan of the man’s work. However, one new character, former Mossad agent and anti-terrorism specialist, Erran Morad, never failed to elicit laughs, and featured in what was quite possibly one of the funniest sequences Baron Cohen has ever committed to screen.
I’m talking about the third episode’s Quinceanera skit, where Morad took three, real-life, Trump-salutin’ motherfuckers under his wing to teach them how to defend themselves against the greatest evils of our age: Muslim and Mexican immigrants. The ignorance, prejudice and empty-headed racism of the three men made them perfect conduits for Cohen’s devilish brand of justice-based pranksterism. Within minutes they were smearing their faces with KY jelly, and slipping on ‘pussy panties’ and fake boobs.
But the best was yet to come. The piece de resistance, the segment that had me howling until I couldn’t breathe, was the staging of a fake Quinceanera party, loaded with drugs and drink, at which one of the dolts was dressed as a 15-year-old Mexican girl, complete with fake pussy, and another crouched inside a pinata with a hidden video camera, waiting to bust the gaggle of Mexican rapists and drug-addicts who would surely swarm to their bait after reading the giant sign Morad had erected by the road-side, which read: QUINCEANERA 5pm – FREE DRUGS! YOUNG GIRLS! YOUNG PUSSY! The moment where not Mexicans, but police officers, arrived on the scene, demanding an explanation, almost killed me.
American Horror Story: Apocalypse – It’s the end of the world as we know it
AHS is an odd beast, an absurdist collection of horror tropes all wrapped up in a slick package with sex, songs and sadism. Given that its an anthology series that renews its setting, themes and characters each year (sometimes it returns to old haunts), most of its seasons take a few episodes to find their feet; to assemble all of their many weird little pieces into something resembling a coherent story (some seasons don’t manage it at all). I really like it. Even in its weaker seasons and moments it usually manages to rustle up a great episode, or a stand-out scene or sequence.
This time around, I really admired the first few minutes of the premiere, which did a brilliant job of conveying the fear, urgency, horror and panic of the impending apocalypse. I really felt the dread, tension, helplessness and savagery of the dying world as its people scrabbled to survive at any cost.
Striking stuff.
Better Call Saul – The mask slips
This whole series is one long, unbroken striking moment, and if you aren’t already watching it, then it’s my duty to tell you that you’re missing out on one of the most immaculately-crafted, pain-stakingly plotted, perfectly-acted, richly cinematic, emotionally resonant and funny shows of recent years, wildly different from but just as powerful in its own way as its parent-show Breaking Bad. Rhea Seehorn and Bob Odenkirk in particular smash it out the park in almost every episde.
So watch it.
I could’ve chosen so many moments as this year’s best – from Mike assassinating German faux-Walter in the desert beneath the cold glare of the moon; to the ‘Something Stupid’ montage that showed the steady breakdown of Kim and Jimmy’s relationship, but I’m going to plump for the exact moment at which Kim realises that the good but complicated man she’s loved and championed for so long may in fact have be the dark, irredeemable creature his brother, Chuck, always accused him of being. Maybe he’s become it, maybe he’s always been it. But there can be no doubt: the mask has slipped. Slippin’ Jimmy McGill is now Saul Goodman.
Preacher – Did I get your order reich?
At the end of Preacher’s first season, Jesse Custer accidentally sent poor Eugene Root to Hell, courtesy of a slip-of-the-tongue that was tragically literalised and amplified by the Godly power of Genesis. Eugene spent season two adjusting to Hell – imagined as a grimy, cyber-punk, dystopian space prison – and striking up a warm and fuzzy friendship with none other than Hitler himself.
Although there have been almost as many fictionalised Hitlers committed to the small screen as Santas, Preacher at least attempts to do something novel with its version of the Fuhrer: it tries to redeem him. It’s a strange feeling to find yourself empathising with perhaps the most vicious mass-killer of the twentieth century as he’s being bullied by his peers and struggling to make friends.
Thankfully, as soon as old Adolph escapes to the earthly plane he reverts to type, rushing off into the world with a renewed sense of cowardice, hatred and zest for mass-death, and we can cancel our membership card for ‘Team Hitler’.
All of this leads to one of Season 3’s funniest and most enduring moments – among a multitude of others in this gloriously ghoulish and mirth-tastically mental show – the sight of Hitler working in a low-tier fast-food restaurant. Although he still has the trademark hair-do, moustache and accent, he’s gone to great lengths to disguise his identity, evident by the name-tag he wears on his lapel, that says ‘HILTER’.
Watching Hilter/Hitler try to whip up enthusiasm for a fascist uprising, even resorting to screaming in German, while he enjoys some sandwiches with his bored work colleagues behind the bins at the back of the restaurant, is bizarre, unsettling and hilarious, much like the rest of the series.
Roseanne – Roseain’t
When Roseanne returned to our screens earlier this year after a break of twenty-one years, the eponymous matriarch cackled back into a landscape that was radically different to the one she’d left. Last time around she was a blue-collar mother raising a family in Clinton’s America (give or take a hint of Bush); this time around she was a grandmother scrabbling to survive in Trumpland, paying lip-service to the orange one’s policies while at the same time suffering under them. I say ‘was’, because Roseanne is now no more. Not the show – which dropped both the star and her name to continue on as ‘The Conners’ – but the character, who is now dead and buried, finished off by an accidental over-dose of pain-killers that she’d become addicted to because she couldn’t afford a knee operation.
In reality, though, Roseanne was killed by Roseanne Barr herself, who ended both her character’s life and her own career with one ill-advised, seemingly racist tweet, attacking a former staffer of President Obama (strange behaviour from Roseanne, who I always thought of as a former working-class hero, a champion of gay rights, and a person who always stood up for the little guy – I guess fame and pills can do that to you).
Trump tweets with impunity; his supporters and apologists, it seems, do not. I guess it’s easier to get people booted off TV than it is to get them booted out of the Oval Office. Still, if Roseanne can be re-imagined without Roseanne, then perhaps there’s hope that one day, America can be re-imagined without Donald Trump.
Whatever you think of a Roseanne-less Roseanne, or the events that led up to it, the image of Dan Conner (John Goodman) lying alone in his Roseanne-less bed, was strange, sad, powerful and affecting, and definitely one for the ages.
RIP Roseanne. Long live The Conners.
Doctor Who – Old Mother Time
I wasn’t terribly enamoured with the idea of the Doctor changing sex when it was first announced. Some of that was down to Jodie Whittaker, who somehow didn’t feel quite doctor-y enough. If you’re going to go down that road, why not Olivia Coleman, Tilda Swinton or Caitriona Balfe?
But, yes, I also didn’t like it because I felt that the change was both unnecessary, and undertaken in a confrontational spirit. I feared that the big move would be framed in ideological rather than creative terms. These were concerns that the show’s pre-air promos did nothing to assuage. Certainly my worst fears were confirmed when I saw Jodie Whittaker standing beneath an actual glass ceiling as it shattered into pieces, as the words ‘IT’S ABOUT TIME’ flashed up on screen. I had no idea that the Doctor, a geeky icon to generations of children, had been working all these years as a repressive agent of the patriarchy.
Now, before we continue, let me just take a moment to assert my credentials as a card-carrying non-misogynist, lest you condemn me as some sort of fundamentalist, knife-wielding incel for my opposition.
I’m a man who was raised in a matriarchal household, with an older sister who served as something akin to a second mother. I’m pro-choice, pro-breast-feeding, and pro-equality, even though arguably all of these things should be a person’s default position. Most of my educators have been women, certainly one hundred per cent of my nursery and primary teachers. Most of my bosses throughout my working career have been women. What I’m trying to say is, em, ‘All of my best friends are women!’ Christ, I know how that sounds. Stick with me.
I believe that while there can be biological, physical and psychological differences between men and women, there should be no differences in the rights afforded to them to control their own lives, bodies and destinies. Men and women should have equal capacity to succeed and prosper. Women can rule countries and perform brain surgery, men can be nurses and nursery teachers. Many of the gender stereotypes we’ve clung to over the centuries, decades and millennia have been harmful, regressive and nonsensical.
So, I’m pro-woman. Or just pro-human, if you prefer.
I was prepared to have my fears laid to rest. I was prepared to be proved wrong,
But they weren’t. And I wasn’t.
Picture shows: The Doctor (JODIE WHITTAKER)
Ultimately, season 11 didn’t fail because the doctor was a woman – or at least not only because of this – but because the lead actor was miscast; because the scripts were dull, corny and vapid; because the episodes were boring; because the characters were so poorly defined (including the Doctor, and with the exception of Graham, but I suspect that had more to do with Bradley Walsh’s performance and inherent charisma than any difference in how the character was written); because of weak villains; because of messages being hammered home at the expense of plot and character; and, most crucially, because it no longer felt either like sci-fi or Doctor Who any more.
So, ‘New’ New Doctor Who?
A striking moment in TV history – but for all the wrong reasons.
Thanks for reading. See y’all next year, TV fans.
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2019 was another bumper year for TV. Each and every January I shake my head and think to myself, ‘That year must have been an outlier. The revolution ends here. We’re going to go back to mid-90s dreck again, I can feel it, and I’ll be able to concentrate on movies again, like I did when I was younger.’ But, no. Come every following December I’m totting up my watch-list and thinking to myself, ‘God damn and yee-haw, we’re living in a never-ending, televisual gold rush.’ Here’s my pick for the best show of the year, and the worst show of the year. More lists and effusive (and occasionally furious) analysis to follow over the next week.
Stranger Things made a stonking return to form in its third season, escalating and amplifying everything that was good about its maiden outing and erasing the missteps of its sophomore year. The Affair and The Deuce both bowed out with strong seasons, capped off with almost immaculate finales. The Expanse had a phenomenal fourth season in its new home at Amazon, a tense, trauma-filled exploration of new worlds and the new political paradigm ushered in by the ring gates. Barry continued to impress with its slick mix of feeling and farce, comedy and tragedy, and death-dealing dilettantes. Fleabag’s triumphantly funny second – and we suppose final – season was rightly showered with acclaim and awards. Game of Thrones, em… happened. And, of course, there were of terrific new shows like Watchmen, The Mandalorian, Undone and Russian Doll.
But it was Mr Robot, a show that rarely gets the attention and acclaim it deserves, that impressed from start to finish, turning in a master-class of twists, pathos, danger, tension, excitement, hope and heartache, showing real heart amid the source code. The show – endlessly inventive, potent, powerful and poignant – concluded its very human story of loss, love, tragedy, trauma, the lies we tell ourselves, the people we think we are and the people we want to be with a haunting final twist that served as both satisfying ending, and brand new beginning.
Every character got a chance to shine – from the world’s unluckiest FBI agent, Dom; to the damaged yet heroic Darlene; to the suddenly humanised yet still sinister and shadowy Whiterose – but it was Elliot who burned the hottest and brightest. That Rami Malek has managed to do so much to engender our sympathies and pluck our heart-strings with a character of such shallow affect is a testament to his skill and presence as a performer, the work of his magnificent co-stars (Christian Slater in particular) and the series’ consistently exquisite writing. All three of these winning elements came together with stunning, jaw-dropping effect in the season’s seventh episode, ‘Proxy Authentication Required’, undoubtedly the best episode of the season, and a strong contender for single best TV episode of the year. More on that later.
No contest. Fear the Walking Dead’s fifth season is an exercise in sado-masochism, for creators and audience alike, I’m sure. It’s an unrewarding slog, a penance, a drag, an artistic atrocity, an amorphous grey void of suffering and boredom. The show has risen and fallen more times than a rutting beast in Hell’s bordello, but this time it’s down and out, and incontrovertibly dead, it’s ugly, twisted corpse face down on the bed, putrefying in the fetid stink of its own spent juices.
On paper, the narrative ingredients of the season look like they’d make for a delicious meal. There’s an plane crash; a nuclear power plant going into meltdown; irradiated zombies; hot-air balloon peril; a race to fix a broken plane; a daring escape from the blast zone; the return of Daniel; the arrival of Dwight from The Walking Dead; gunfights; dwindling resources; a zombie-killing Rabbi; a Wild West town; an evil cowgirl. It sounds more like a season of Z Nation than The Walking Dead, and I mean that as a compliment. When Z Nation went balls out, as it frequently did, it was a frenetic, bat-shit crazy delight.
But worst – the VERY worst – of all is the season’s handling of Morgan, a character that’s long been in decline, but now, it seems, terminally so. Morgan used to be one of my favourite characters in the franchise, but his zen shtick – and his stick-shtick – has worn so thin that when he lay bleeding on a stoop at the close of the season, on the brink of death from a gunshot wound to the stomach, with baying zombies advancing upon him, I struggled to give even the faintest scintilla of a shit. I didn’t want a cliff-hanger. I was keen to watch my former favourite cast member being torn to shreds. Just to see if I could feel something about this show again.
