BEST OF 2017: BROCKMIRE

 2.  BROCKMIRE

If you're like me and laugh your ass off at Danny McBride characters’ raunchy shenanigans on Eastbound And Down or Vice Principals, but can’t find it in you to care about whatever scrap of personal growth they have allegedly found at the end of the season, then Brockmire is the show for you.  Hank Azaria’s washed up baseball announcer is similarly depraved, but his antics mainly serve to hurt himself rather than constantly sprawling out to devastate everyone around him.  Which makes it much easier to invest in the emotional underpinnings of his meager redemption story and surprisingly sincere romance with Amanda Peet’s minor league team/bar owner. 

Peet has spent the last few years quietly developing into the most underrated actress on the small screen.  Her Jules is a tricky role, initially appearing to be merely the straightwoman to ground Brockmire’s more cartoonish aspects and a rote romantic interest.  But the writing quickly, unfussily moves her past that, and Peet’s razor sharp comedic chops and a natural, playful intelligence makes her as interesting and fun to spend time with as her dulcet beau. And while I was initially wary of the romance angle, the show surprised me by skipping the will-they-won’t-they or Sam-and-Diane combative shenanigans and diving directly into a quite sincere, adult love story between a couple of unabashed, uninhibited drunks. 

One of the best things about that relationship, and by extension the show, is the attitude toward sex. It reminds me of another Schwartzblog favorite (and near-miss for this list) You’re the Worst.  Both shows manage to be non-judgmental and sneakily mature about sex, in a way that involves acknowledging its puerile absurdity, but also just how fun and integral to a relationship it can be.  There is a simple truth about romance that most cinematic love stories either ignore or just don’t get, but Brockmire (and YTW) do: when you’re with someone who still likes you at your most absurdly puerile, that’s when shit just might be real. 

I could go on in more high falutin' terms, about, say, the cinematography, which is not as flashy as that of Legion or Handmaid’s Tale, but it is distinctive and quite pretty in its own muted, sepia way.  But mainly the pleasures of Brockmire are as basic as that of getting a light buzz on at the ballpark on a hot afternoon.  It is not "redefining what a half hour comedy can do" or built to provoke hot takes on the social issue du jour.  It's a comedy that has a heart, a pair of great performances, and is really, really funny and even a little wise. Jim Brockmire may be a degenerate fuck-up, but he did teach me about the fundamental differences between the three types of people ("Rich People are just Poor People with money, the only truly worthwhile thing is being Famous!") and knowledge and assumptions ("like Loggins and Messina - they seem similar, but time reveals one to be completely worthless.")  It didn't look like much, but it turned out to be the nicest surprise of 2017.

Watch It For:  It's all in just the quality of the performances and joke-writing.  Transcribing it here won’t do it justice, but Brockmire’s exchange with a Japanese translator about an unfortunate, offscreen child resulted in the  hardest laugh and longest corresponding DVR pause I had all year.  With his ill-advised attempt to "pre-game" an abortion a close second.

BEST OF 2017: THE HANDMAID'S TALE

3.   THE HANDMAID'S TALE (HULU)

Schwartzblog is generally big on plotting and forward momentum, but The Handmaid’s Tale is compelling despite never really attempting real propulsiveness.  The world of Gilead is as bleak as the darkest corners of Westeros, but where Game Of Thrones (like most dark and dystopian fiction) aims to keep you invested via a narrative knife at your throat, Handmaid’s measured gait and claustrophobic focus creates a threat more akin to narrative asphyxia.  I prefer a rapid pace as a rule, but nonetheless have to respect how defiantly not-bingeworthy the show makes its vision of a misogynistic theocracy.  The ultimate goal of most streaming shows is to keep you glued to the couch, but when I finished an episode, I needed to get up and take a walk, have a drink, do pretty much anything except turn on the next episode. 

But the show seemed utterly indifferent to "hooking" me, moving instead like its heroine on one of her highly supervised trips to the grocery: carefully, quietly, intently focused on the woman hidden within the distinctive bonnet that allows only the occasional furtive glimpse at the horrors of her surroundings.  But in those glimpses, Margaret Atwood’s dystopia is brought to painterly, horrifyingly vivid life.  And when the tight focus is on a powerhouse performance from Elizabeth Moss (not that we expect anything less of her at this point), it justifies the confidence to move deliberately and avoid leaning into the more YA-friendly aspects of the material in favor of an atmosphere more terrifying than any horror movie I saw last year. 

At the same time, I’ve also started to wonder, is it possible for something to feel bleak and quaint at the same time?  As 2017 wore on, issues of misogyny and rape culture came to dominate more and more of the national conversation.  But while Gilead as the fevered fantasy on Mike Pence’s vision board seemed highly topical in January, the continuing ineptitude and cartoonish venality of the Trump administration have made it increasingly clear that they are more apt to bring about the moronic hellscape of Idiocracy than anything as formidable, or remotely competent, as the show’s religious junta.  And the wave of firings, disgrace, and resignations that followed the outing of Harvey Weinstein as a rapacious monster have brought different, more subtle forms of sexual abuse to the fore of our collective consciousness.  This rot is sunk deep and wide across all strata of society, and removing it will not be as relatively simple as opposing a uniformed, expressly fascist regime.  It will be interesting to see if when it returns next year, the show will have a specific take on how it’s not just the men with guns that pose a danger to women.  Even if it doesn’t touch that angle, it is likely to remain the most effective horror story, built around one of the best performances, of the year.

Watch It For:  Alexis Bledel’s harrowing spotlight episode, an object lesson in brutal understatement which resulted in one of those rare Emmy wins that was completely justified.

BEST OF 2017: RICK AND MORTY

4. RICK AND MORTY (ADULT SWIM)

It’s unfortunate that the narrative around Rick and Morty’s long-delayed third season has revolved to such a degree around how some of its most devoted fans are mean-spirited, entitled morons, because the show itself had its best year yet.  To think that you are some sort of intellectual ubermensch because you learned the proper way to interact with the world from a farcical cartoon is rather pathetic to start with.  And that is only compounded by the gross misunderstanding of the text required to view it as a straightforward endorsement of Rick’s misanthropy.

But leaving the fanbase aside, this season was wildly original and relentlessly, riotously, scabrously funny from top to bottom.  There are jokes that Rick and Morty does that only Rick and Morty could do, which is one of the things I appreciate most in a comedy.  Maybe some other Adult Swim show could wring its biggest laughs from a child accidentally murdering his sister, or the heroes’ hyperviolent pissing match with the POTUS.  But I can’t think of another that could build some of its most affecting emotional moments from its hero turning himself into a brutally homicidal pickle to avoid family therapy, or an imaginary land ruled over by a deranged refugee cannibal that sustains himself by impregnating the wildlife to produce his own incestuous livestock.  And there damn sure isn’t any that could even attempt the insane nesting doll of the Citadel Of Ricks spotlight episode, which layers a Stand By Me coming-of-age parody into a Dog Day Afternoon hostage standoff into a Training Day gritty cop drama into a Face In The Crowd political allegory, with the entire cast consisting of only two characters, but not the versions of those characters we actually "know".  That all that comes out mildly coherent is stunning.  That it is top-to-bottom hilarious is just incredible.  And that it is actually somewhat thoughtful about the attendant sociopolitical underpinnings of all the tropes it is subverting is just phenomenal. 

And that may not even be the best episode of the season, not with the surprising pathos of “Pickle Rick” and the loopy clip-show that revealed added layers to the central relationship even as it sprayed out insane and hilarious gags at a Gatling gun pace.  For as much as the ugly fringe of the fanbase might wax egotistical about the philosophy and conceptual fuckery as the source of the show's brilliance, they have it twisted.  It brings to mind an aside in the "Vindicators" episode where Morty is justifiably angry at Rick's drunken pettiness getting several of the titular heroes killed, and Rick uses the fact that he saved the universe the day before as a deflection.  Morty insists that isn't the issue, to which Rick shrugs "eh, would've been if I hadn't."

I hope you're proud of yourself.
Uh, I kind of am.
I saved the God damn universe.
That's not the issue, Rick! Ahh, it would've been if I hadn't! 

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=rick-and-morty-2013&episode=s03e04

I hope you're proud of yourself.
Uh, I kind of am.
I saved the God damn universe.
That's not the issue, Rick! Ahh, it would've been if I hadn't! 

Read more: https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=rick-and-morty-2013&episode=s03e04

The sci-fi in a sci-fi comedy is not the issue.  If the jokes aren't working, none of the rest matters. And the this season had at least three episodes that could stack up competitively with any other half hour of comedy you could find as the funniest ever on a minute-per-minute, joke-for-joke basis.

Watch It For:  Pickle Rick.  The promos had me thinking it might be where I jumped off the series for good, but it may be the best episode of the entire run.

BEST OF 2017: LEGION AND FARGO

5/6.  LEGION/FARGO

I am bundling these two together, as you can look to the dropdown menus on the right to find my reviews of each individual episode of the season.  Suffice to say that while I understand those that preferred the languid sensuality of American Gods, or the auteur-certified dreamscape of Twin Peaks, Legion was my preferred stop for hyper-stylized mindfuckery this year.  When it comes to alternate dimensions, give me Jermaine Clement dancing around in a leisure suit over a giant tea kettle standing in for David Bowie.  And definitely give me Aubrey Plaza’s off the wall, tour de force performance over any other villain on TV.  Probably anything else, actually.

Meanwhile, Fargo’s third season suffered from a growing familiarity with its eccentricities and a slower start than the last two years.  But time is showing it to be the most directly resonant, and perhaps the best fictional accounting of the Trump Era, despite mostly predating it in terms of writing and production.  While plenty of shows – from Broad City to Saturday Night Live to Mr. Robot – contented themselves with flipping the bird at the buffoon in chief, Fargo was the only one that seemed to immediately cotton on to the fundamental trauma his rise represents.  What creator Noah Hawley calls “the mental violence of finding out the world is not what you thought.”     

The full-bore attack on reality and facts has only intensified in the year since his electoral victory (which in itself represented a repudiation of the raw vote totals).  And as we have learned more about the methods and motives of the trolls and bots that helped astroturf his rise to power, this has still proved frustratingly ineffective at combating them.  Last June, the finale left us with an unresolved duel between a worldview that said the rule of law still reigned in our great American experiment and a more nihilistic view that all the terms are set by moneyed and inveterate liars.  Six months later, the country is still waiting to see if it will be a Robert Mueller that walks through that door to drop the hammer, or a Mitch McConnell to tell us all that all this evidence of high crimes staring us in the face was a big misunderstanding and really nothing of interest at all even happened here.

Watch It For:  When Hawley really goes for broke, dropping without warning into a silent horror film or a purgatorial bowling alley.

BEST OF 2017: BETTER CALL SAUL

7.  BETTER CALL SAUL (AMC)

For its third straight year, Better Call Saul continued its “How To Do A Prequel That Isn’t A Huge, Disappointing Waste Of Everyone’s Time While Also Somehow Diminishing The Original Thing Even Though That Shouldn’t Technically Be Possible Since The Thing Still Exists In Precisely The Same Form” clinic.  It even managed to work in a significant appearance by Gus Fring, which perfectly exemplifies the tightrope it walks with such practiced ease. It’s a decision which seems at once like a no-brainer (what kind of prequel is not going to take the opportunity have the original's most iconic villain reappear?) but is also nearly impossible to pull off organically (because that villain was defined entirely by being too much of a professional to expose himself to a cheap grifter like Saul Goodman).  And the show had the patience to withhold it for the entirety of its first 2 years, essentially only dipping into that well after it had established for good and all that it didn’t need to, not really.

 

The self-control required to pull that off demonstrates an enormous degree of confidence, the type that usually only comes paired with a stultifying sense of self-importance.  But part of what made Breaking Bad so special was that even when it was playing with Big Ideas and Dark Turns, it always maintained its wicked sense of humor, and never betrayed a feeling that it was too good for its genre roots.  To that end, Saul's ethos is split between that of its two diametrically opposite leads.  In presentation, it is Jimmy McGill, who recognizes the value of a flashy visual to hook people (just look at those suits) and does not so much think of himself above an honest day’s work as he is pathologically unable to resist gilding every lily with as much showman’s flair as it can possibly bear.  But under the hood, its storytelling is all Mike Ehrmantraut: patient, precise, never seeming to move above a tortoise’s pace but somehow leaving all of us hares perpetually struggling to keep up.  

Saul has, from the start, had the confidence to devote more time to the slow destruction of Jimmy’s relationships with his (hitherto unseen) brother and love interest than to building up his connections to the cartel, despite all the flash and fan-service associated with the latter.  But it also has the willingness to indulge in suspense sequences as intense as anything its predecessor produced, without ever feeling like it is placing itself into direct competition with it.  If Jimmy McGill could have managed living in his elder sibling's shadow with half as much aplomb, his career, his relationships, and even his name would be very different.   

But that's not how this story goes. We know that, and it is apparent that this is a show that knows where it’s going, how to get there, and how to make every step count.  Most prequels only know one of those things.    

Watch It For:  “Chicanery”, which is such a dramatic, directorial and performance powerhouse that I can totally forgive the central conceit that somehow an ethics panel convened specifically to review Jimmy’s honesty and integrity would be swayed in his favor by a stunt involving his secretly hiring a pickpocket to tamper with an opposing witness's person, in the courthouse, during the proceedings.  That’s like my wife accusing me of cheating with her sister and my deciding to have my actual mistress call to vouch for me.  

BEST OF 2017: THE GOOD PLACE

8. THE GOOD PLACE (NBC)

          I’ve talked in various reviews, including the first entry on this list, about my distrust of the Big Twist as a narrative device.  That such reliance on the Big Twist could wind up being a liability to the hacker conspiracy thriller, and also the greatest asset to a goofy sitcom feels like a twist unto itself.  But the first season of Mike Schur’s theological sitcom kicked off the year with a pull-the-rug moment that would have made Lost or Battlestar Galactica jealous, recontextualizing what had already been an enjoyably goofy riff on the afterlife and creating the opportunity to create a second season that was wildly different from the first. There was no guarantee that being different would make it good, though, and it wasn’t until late in the year that we found out that it was actually better than what came before.  Now that the audience can see behind the curtain of the attempts to create a “paradise” that will make its inhabitants miserable, very different types of jokes and performances are possible.   And it has opened up a vein of unobtrusive metacommentary, as head fiend Michael has to corral the increasingly diva-ish demands of his fellow demons for plum roles and pointless accents, while trying desperately to stay one step ahead of the “audience” of narcissists and dirtbags he is in charge of tormenting.

But even before the twist, it was already something of a miracle that the show was good at all.  It had a super-high concept that would seem to require constant reexplaining, while also sealing it off from most guest stars and current events, and perhaps most troublingly, feeling inherently pretentious (a deadly but increasingly common trait for comedies).  “Sitcom as ethics lecture” seems like a tough sell, but if you are going to try to climb a hill that steep, it helps to have professionals like Parks and Rec/Brooklyn 99 vet Schur, TV’s fun uncle Ted Danson, Veronica Mars herself, shameless scene-thief Darcy Carden, and pun-crafter extraordinare Megan Amram on board.  These people seem to understand that a sitcom based on the teachings of Kierkegaard and Kant all but demands an enthusiastic sense of absurdism to avoid feeling like homework.  And so the digressions on the nature of morality and free will are leavened by the oddest gags you’ll find on a network show, such as Carden’s perkily omniscient helper-bot designing herself a boyfriend with wind chimes for genitals.

The second season is only halfway over, but it has already burned through several seasons worth of potential plots already, zigging a half dozen times for each zag I thought I had puzzled out.  Nothing about this show should work, and yet it is consistently one of the strangest, funniest and genuinely surprising half hours on TV, and left this year on a cliffhanger that I am more curious to revisit than Westworld’s.  It may not be my absolute favorite show, but it is absolutely forking amazing nonetheless.   

Watch It For:  The restaurant puns.  Knish From A Rose!  Biscotti Pippin!  A Little Bit Chowder Now!