BEST OF 2018 - BIG MOUTH IS NASTY AND NICE

4.  BIG MOUTH (NETFLIX)

Big Mouth is dirty. Like, really dirty. As in, the filthiest show on TV by a substantial margin. But it is also an object lesson in how dirty does not have to mean heartless.  Big Mouth is also perhaps the most empathetic show on TV.  By externalizing all of the characters’ worst impulses into various monsters and spirits and talking pubes constantly hissing and grunting terrible advice into their ears, it keeps them sympathetic no matter how filthy or selfish their actions become. This year saw the Ghost of Duke Ellington phased out, probably as much because of Jordan Peele’s limited availability as because he turned out to be rather superfluous as a source of bad suggestions with the all the hormone monsters running around.

But in his place, we got the Shame Wizard, which was a perfect addition and counterpoint to the perpetual grunting and shrieking encouragement of the hormone monsters. David Thewlis is the perfect voice for the embodiment of shame and self-doubt, at once oily and horribly, British-ly logical, but also nailing the exasperated and wounded notes when called for. Also perfect: the autographed photo of Septa Unella on the wall of his office in the Department Of Puberty. Less perfect is John Gemberling’s intentionally but utterly insufferable and stunted hormone monster, but even he has his moments.

All these spirits and horny devils on the kids’ shoulders are not just raunchy joke machines, though Lord knows they produce those at a firehouse clip. They also demonstrate a more sophisticated examination of sex in the #MeToo era than you would expect from a joke-a-minute dirty cartoon. That’s an incredibly positive movement, don’t get me wrong, but at its most zealous and clumsiest points it can engender a feeling that sex or desire itself has been criminalized. And what Big Mouth and its monsters say is not just that everyone gets horny, and so anything goes. The characters are always, ultimately, accountable for how they behave, but the monsters literalize the idea that even fundamentally good people are only able to be “good” in constant defiance of their own natures.  It’s a compassionate perspective that goes deeper than boners, as the monsters voice not just the horniness, but all the shame, jealousy, fear, and selfishness the characters have no choice but to feel as they sheepishly shuffle toward adulthood. Because those monsters, even the seemingly-villainous Shame Wizard, are not presented as Bad Guys to be defeated.  They are just facts of life, fellow passengers that may be bad influences, but it's not until the kids act on that advice that any talk of good/bad guys and girls starts entering into it.

But to get back to the filth, whoooo boy is it filthy. Much of it explicitly, but it also constantly proves Patton Oswalt’s point that you can be gross without using swearwords. If I never hear a more disturbing euphemism for sex than “make thick in her warm”, that’s probably for the best.

Watch It For: Maya Rudolph’s incredible cadences as Connie the Hormone Monstress. If the Emmy’s gave awards for single line deliveries, as they should, she would win them all just for how she bounces out the syllables of “bubble bath”. To say nothing of “pharmacy”, which comes out as something like fuh-wyarm-azz-zee

BEST OF 2018 - BETTER CALL SAUL IS THE TORTOISE THAT BEATS THE HARE

5.  BETTER CALL SAUL (AMC)

Gustavo Fring sits at the hospital bedside of a fallen enemy, unspooling a Bond Villain monologue about how the enemy has more suffering in store before he will be granted permission to die. It ends with him declaring “I believe you will wake up, Hector,” and the most of us who have seen Breaking Bad know that he is correct and exactly how this continued torment will play out for the both of them. As he leaves, the camera pans down to the comatose hand, and the finger that will ring the trademark bell that introduced us to the character so distinctively. And we wait for it to twitch, as we know it will. As it has to. But it doesn’t. The medical machines continue their indifferent beeping and the hand stays still. We know what is coming, and the show knows we know, and that it doesn’t have to hurry to remind us. Like Gus Fring himself, it is both extremely purposeful and extremely restrained.

So it goes for the slow descent of elder-care advocate Jimmy McGill into the shucking and jiving Saul Goodman, the primary narrative of Better Call Saul. This lack of hurry is the most important trait that Saul inherited from its parent show; the ability to move its plot forward deceptively fast while crafting individual scenes and sequences that take their time and luxuriate in performances and stylish visual storytelling. These flourishes can risk coming off as indulgent; I look to Sam Esmail’s work on Mr. Robot and Homecoming as a handy contemporary comparison for just how easily such bravura style can drown out the substance of a story if the balance isn’t maintained with the scrupulous precision of a Mike Ehrmantraut. But the stylistics of BCS are anything but empty; each lengthy monologue or showy montage moves the narrative and emotional ball forward. Like BB (once it got its feet under it), it churns through a lot of plot while never seeming to be in a rush.

This is a truly rare feat amongst modern day TV shows. Most strive for the feeling of constant movement, even as they try to kick their narrative cans endlessly down the road of serialization. And they don’t seem to realize that a lack of movement is actually preferable to pointless movement. Audiences, even the majority of those who are unable and/or simply disinterested in articulating exactly how a show pleases and displeases them, have an intuitive understanding of what actually matters to a story, and recognize when they are being sold a bill of goods. Lately, Netflix has been the worst offender in this arena, with its dramas (particularly within its Marvel brand) acquiring a reputation for sputtering in the middle of seasons as wheels are spun to pad out season lengths. In the most egregious cases, there are entire episodes that feel like they could be skipped entirely without having much effect on the finale.  Perhaps Netflix is making a knowing calculation that quantity of content is more important than quality to their business model.  But maybe their producers just need to watch Saul, to learn that it's better to walk with a purpose than sprint in circles.

Or maybe too much of what makes Saul work is not reproducible.  It's been 4 years now and I’m still amazed this show doesn’t suck. Because on paper, it still looks like it makes a ton of bad decisions. As this year opened with sudden vacuums in the dramatic ecosystems of both main storylines left by the sudden removal of Chuck McGill and Hector Salamanca, I didn’t know exactly where it should go next. But if you had asked me what it should definitely not do, I could have made a quick list. Spending a whole year with Jimmy running out the clock on his suspension from the legal profession. Continuing to sideline Michael Mando’s already-marginalized Nacho, in favor of bringing Gus Fring, the character whose development is shackled thickest and heaviest by the prequel of it all, more directly to the center of the plot. Devoting an entire season to building (half) the Superlab, which still sounds like a horrendous waste of time in the abstract, even after I’ve seen how the show was able to make it all sing.

The keys to making it work are the eloquent visual filmmaking, and the performances. Not just from Odenkirk and workhouses like Jonathan Banks and Giancarlo Esposito, but utility players like Mando and Patrick Fabian, and most especially Rhea Seehorn. The role of Kim is vital to make us feel the weight of Jimmy’s transition, as the character is the least shackled by the prequel of it all, so the threats to her future feel the most acute even compared to the characters that have constant threats to their lives. And Seehorn makes her immensely relatable, seeming entirely natural while threading a needle that makes Kim neither a saint nor a dummy nor a harpy. More than any other character, she mirrors what attracts and repels the audience about our protagonist, so we follow her reactions instinctively. When she explodes into a fiery monologue of protectiveness of Jimmy, we are right there with her. And when she recoils silently from the birth of Saul Goodman, we are there too. She is the lynchpin of the cast, giving arguably the best performance on TV, and while I am still unconvinced that this (or any) prequel really needed to exist, introducing her to the Breaking Bad-verse has to be one of the biggest feathers in its cap.

Watch It For: The best schemes and heists of the year whether it is a rocky Hubbel figurine robbery, a fraught gangland assassination attempt, or an elaborate legal grift involving fabricating an entire Louisiana church and congregation of accents to match.

BEST OF 2018 - BROCKMIRE MAKES HIMSELF AT HOME IN THE BIG EASY

6.  BROCKMIRE (IFC)

Brockmire was my favorite surprise of last year.  What seemed like a one-note premise (Hank Azaria says dirty things in a cornpone baseball announcer voice) turned out to be much deeper than expected in every way.  Comedically, the show found a surprisingly clever and wryly philosophically voice, and made the lead’s hedonism grounded enough to be believable while still absurd enough to be hysterical.  Dramatically, it grounded his various addictions in actual humanity and created a surprisingly sincere, adult love story with a near-equal of a trainwreck.  And cinematically, it developed a quietly pretty sepia look that was understated but distinct from any other comedy out there. 

The second season was a slight step down from the first, if only because Amanda Peet was missed so much as a regular presence (not that she didn’t make her limited appearances count). Focusing on the relationship between Brockmire and his young handler/business partner was the next best available thing, but it could never match the poignancy of the romance he never expected to find as a has-been drunk in a has-been town shifting its primary industry from steel to meth production.  But credit where it’s due for the show committing to such a major change in the status quo.  And for picking New Orleans as the new locale, which is an even better setting for a devotedly debauched character who affectionately refers to it as “where the Devil goes to get his dick sucked”. 

This season took Brockmire to some impressive and depressing new lows, but always remained true to the character and consistently hilarious.  In spite of some very stiff competition, this was the show that had the best “bitter eulogy for a difficult parent” scene of the year – while lacking the structural grandstanding of Bojack’s standout episode, Jim’s is more directly to the point and the lapsed Catholic in me delights at the gumption to just tell a minister to his face that “no offense, but that was some straight up, zero-calorie baby food you were spooning out up there.” And despite the existence of every episode of Big Mouth, it had the funniest masturbation scene of the year, with its very different kind of pitcher’s duel.

If I have any real reservation about the season, it’s that it seems like they actually progressed the character too far, particularly in the far-reaching finale.  It feels like a wholly appropriate ending for Brockmire, but I’m not sure there what the show looks like with Jim getting sober. It's actually one of two comedies on this list which ended with its self-destructive protagonist taking similarly positive steps that would seem to endanger the basic comedic appeal of those characters.  But creator Joel Church-Cooper professes to have a plan for the next two seasons that IFC has ordered, and I haven’t got very far doubting this show so far. 

See It For:  Brockmire’s savage, never-really-explained feud with a minor league crawfish mascot, probably my single favorite recurring gag of the year.

BEST OF 2018 - THE EXPANSE GETS WEIRDER AND BETTER AS IT EXPANDS

7.  THE EXPANSE (SYFY)

For as wide and deep as our streaming and cable options have gotten over the last decade, quality hard sci-fi offerings have been few and far between. I love the stuff, and yet I’ve been starved for a proper gritty space opera since Battlestar Galactica went off the air 10 years ago. Given that, I shouldn’t have drug my feet so long on checking out The Expanse. But drag I did, because while the first season impressed me with the level of thoughtful world-building necessary to create a plausible intrastellar society functioning without the benefit of faster-than-light travel options that most sci-fi takes as given, it also took its sweet time setting up its multiple narrative strands. I didn’t start feeling the need to catch all the way up until they started weaving them together at the end of the season. Once the plots and characters did start intersecting, though, things go much more interesting and exciting. Mixing up the character combinations turned out to be especially vital, since the show definitely suffers from the common genre show malady where the tangential members of the ensemble are much more interesting than the main protagonists; give me any scene with Amos or Drummer or Bobbie over Holden and Naomi any day.

It wasn't quite Game Of Thrones in space, but the second season edged closer to earning that title, and the third closer still as it finally pulled all its most interesting characters together and a proper star war finally boiled over.  It doesn’t have quite the same narrative sprawl as GOT, but does have a similar knack for dramatizing its fictional politics, the intricate plotting that maintains a sense of purpose thanks to working from literary source material, the resistance to simple good guy/bad guy labeling, unpredictable pacing and overarching mythological mysteries that generally take a backseat to the political scheming.  Most especially, it also has the flavor that comes from grounding its milieu in a grittier sense of realism than the genre is known for. This year put that realism to the test, as it cranked the conflicts up to truly cosmic levels, and the more outlandish elements were confronted head on. But even as it took us into weirder and weirder territory, the show felt surprisingly safe from drowning in these sci-fi conceits, still grounding them in the brutal realities of space travel and the characters’ reactions in plausible political and emotional convictions.

It’s still space opera, which is absolutely my jam. bBt there is no other series of that type where when a spaceship takes off, a carelessly unlocked drawer can be as much of a threat as an unkillable alien stowaway, and either can be the basis of a major setpiece where the characters fight for their lives. Mutinies are a bigger threat than evil space wizard overlords, you don't have to fire a photon torpedo into the reactor core to destroy a space station when some incidental shrapnel damage is enough to cause its delicate life support systems to collapse, and the season’s Big Bad is ultimately revealed to be rapid deceleration. It’s crazy how well all this esoterica works as drama, and given the cliffhanger it ended on, and Amazon’s timely intervention to save it from SyFy’s cancellation, the craziest parts appear to be still to come.

Watch It For: The uncanny disconnect when you hear Cara Gee speak like a normal Socal girl after getting so accustomed to the basso Belter patois she affects on the show.

BEST OF 2018 - CORPORATE IS NOT TOPICAL, BUT VERY TIMELY

8.  CORPORATE (COMEDY CENTRAL)

You’re never going to find a darker sitcom than this, which is like if you took the absurdist workplace comedy of 30 Rock (or for a deeper cut, the brilliant-but-cancelled Better Off Ted) and set it in Edward Norton’s soul-sucking office from Fight Club. There is of course no shortage of dark comedies on TV these days, not to mention this list. But most are dark in the sense that they basically want to be dramas. Corporate is dark because it is thoroughly and deeply nihilistic, and all its stories and jokes flow from that.

Nihilism is a tricky foundation for comedy, as it could easily lend itself to the haughtiness or stridency of a newly-minted atheist sophomore.  And if the show felt like it had something to prove about this darkness, it would quickly become insufferable.  But it strikes a matter-of-fact tone that treats the fundamental meaninglessness of existence as a bedrock assumption rather than a thesis to be argued, which is a shrewd tonal posture.  It's bracing material, but the show at least respects the audience's intelligence enough not to pretend that it is telling us anything we don't already know about the acute inhumanity of corporate culture.  It knows that we, and its characters, have seen plenty of Fight Clubs and Office Spaces, and we/they still chose to accept the machine instead of raging against it, since we'd "rather be miserable in a one-bedroom apartment than chase my dreams in a studio."  If the show has any truth bombs to drop in regards to this life, it's only that this the "real" world isn't much less full of shit or rewarding than the cubicle, so that sort of calculation is actually distressingly sensible.

Again, this could be completely acidic stuff, but Corporate cuts the darkness with plentiful absurdity that combines with that cold-blooded tone to make the jokes to hit harder and avoids that fatal sense of self-seriousness.   And the combination of silliness and pessimism also makes it weirdly timely for 2018. While the show was presumably in development for several years, the droll, hungover vibe could not have felt more appropriate for a year that basically started from the assumption that God was clearly dead and if anything had ever mattered, it clearly hadn’t for a good long while now.

I’m not making any of this sound very appealing, I know. But it’s such a funny show, and its utter commitment to its cold comic logic becomes oddly charming. I was certain that logic was too offputting to find a wide audience, but I was recently surprised first to see promos indicating that it would return for a second season next month, and then at how much I was actually looking forward to revisiting Hampton Deville. It is an underlit moral wasteland, where the best (like Aparna Nancherla’s acerbic HR rep) lack all conviction and the worst (Lance Reddick’s terrifying CEO and his fawning junior executives) are full of passionate corporate intensity. But it makes me laugh a lot. That’s all I have. That and the folder on my work computer labeled “Porn For When I’m Angry”.


See It For: Premeditated Swan Murder

 

BEST OF 2018 - AMERICAN VANDAL IS THE SH*T

9. AMERICAN VANDAL (NETFLIX)

The first season of American Vandal was the definitive parody of the True Crime genre to this point. And that was a genre that cried out for parody, both because of its requisite deadly-serious tone and because of just how suddenly it rose to rival the other pillars of the 20teens entertainment landscape, such as superhero movies, Tiffany Haddish, and watching racists play videogames you could just play yourself.

That first season succeeded at more than making murder-porn funny, which it did by shifting the backdrop from macabre to puerile. It also tapped into both eternal truths about high school and emerging truths about growing up on social media to craft a compelling, even tragic, mystery in its own right, and won a Peabody Award in the process. So the second season had a lot to live up it, before you even get to the immutable facts that comedy sequels are hard to pull off (just ask Ghostbusters, Caddyshack, Zoolander or Super Troopers), and parody sequels especially so (as any number of Scary Movies can attest). Plus, AV was tied so tightly to such a hyper-specific premise that reprising it would seem to require some sort of tortuous nonsense that would seem to be impossible to justify within the disarmingly realistic world it created.

But the AV team thread all these needles rather flawlessly. The second season premiere quickly establishes that within the world of the show, the original season had begun life as a scrappier, lo-fi project that caught enough viral attention for Netflix to buy the rights and polish it up. This provides a quick and clean justification for both the incongruously high production values of the supposedly-DIY project and how the teen documentarians could find themselves embroiled in such a similarly elaborate scatological-prank-with-surprisingly-dark-undertones-at-a-high-school scenario. With the network hungry for more content and fans submitting pranks by the dozens for the follow-up, the guys got to cherry-pick the best one to fit their fledgling brand, and they could not have picked much better.

The new crime is definitely in the same wheelhouse where you can mine humor from how seriously the investigators are forced to take their spot-checks of intricate theories of potential motives against the immutable postulate that “poop is funny”. And the scale is such that it can both seem like a huge deal within the affected community and also scan as “harmless” enough that it could have been pulled off by some dumb kid(s). But it changes just enough to maintain the very specific character of the show without repetition rendering things immediately stale. Having the prank revolve around poop provides for a similar vein of juvenile humor without repeating the exact same dick jokes, while switching from a public school to a tony Catholic academy shifts the focus to the other end of the high school spectrum. And with it, we get a similar shift in the primary suspect. Where the first season focused on a kid the entire school system had pre-emptively written off as a loss, such that he could be railroaded with hardly a second thought, this year flips the script by examining a student whose success is so pre-ordained that the entire community is invested in keeping it from derailing. The two crimes, and accused, are very different, but in both cases the unwillingness of their teachers and peers to challenge the story of who those guys are supposed to be obscures a more serious crime.

I don’t want to give away too much about the mystery, which is as sneakily well-conceived and clever in its twists as the first. But it managed to surprise me at several points despite going in with more expectations and a lookout for upcoming twists. At the outset, I was fairly sure that the friendly girl who brought the guys in to the story was going to turn out to be a deranged fangirl who staged the whole thing to try to hijack some of the AV spotlight. Later on, when the show started hinting at the possibility of a secret puppetmaster framing or coercing multiple suspects into being poopcomplices to the crimes, I convinced myself that it would be Dylan Maxwell, having gone full supervillain embracing the label that the first season had thrust upon him. I’m glad to report that I was wrong, the show was smarter than me at all times, and the final resolution is as resonant and nuanced as the first's ending, while being wise enough not to try to recreate the exact sort of ambiguity that worked so well the first time.

Netflix declined to pick up American Vandal for a third season, to the chagrin of many fans and critics. But I honestly don’t mind; they have mined the premise for more than I ever thought possible.  It got to go out at the height of its powers, a peerless and shockingly deep example of parody that fully earns the label of satire.


Watch It For: The way that truly dumb jokes can sneak up on you when don’t realize that you’ve spent the last 10 minutes fully engrossed in untangling the timelines and potential motives surrounding someone filling a T-shirt cannon with cat poo.

BEST OF 2018 - DETROITERS IS A DELIGHTFUL BIT OF NONSENSE

10.  DETROITERS  (COMEDY CENTRAL)

Detroit does not exactly have a reputation as the most inviting of cities, but Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson’s version of it is a different, and very strange, story. It’s a grubby but oddly delightful funhouse that seems to exist in the same skewed comedic universe as Broad City. The leads are certainly as devoted to each other as those gals, and their lives of blithe codependence (as business partners, brothers-in-law and next door neighbors) would make JD and Turk from Scrubs envious. The guys are comically delusional idiots, which is a common enough basis for a sitcom, but theirs is a childish delusion, rather than the douchey or cringey stupidity that populate shows in the mold of Always Sunny or The Office, respectively.  Their camaraderie is so silly and infectious that even when they randomly lapse into unmotivated, juvenile belligerence for the sake of a throwaway joke, or when they separately take it upon themselves to corner a pastor at a gravesite to make sure he knows that getting laughs in church is playing in the minor league of jokes, it doesn’t make them less likable.

The premise is that the guys run an ad agency, but premises and plots are beside the point. I’m not sure what the point is, really. I couldn’t tell you if they are cartoonishly bad at their work, or sneaky savants, or which is the straight man and who is the wild card, because the show will switch it up from episode to episode and even scene to scene and none of it matters. All that matters is that the local celebrities that come into the office are always game, the ads they commission ingeniously sophomoric, and the comic chemistry between the leads is honed to a uniquely fine point. To the extent that Detroiters has a signature style of joke, it’s the way the two guys will immediately spout two versions of the exact same off-kilter response to an innocuous comment.

 

It’s a difficult show to describe, honestly, which may have something to do with why it never attracted enough buzz for Comedy Central to renew it for a third season. There’s hardly anything in the way of continuity or ongoing plots, but its scenes are a little too connected to gain virality as a quasi-sketch show. It doesn’t really have any subtext to unpack, or consistent enough characters to analyze. It’s sort of a hangout show, but there’s no sense that you could actually have a beer with these weirdos. Even the best jokes are too dependent on oddball energy and precise editing to even try to describe in print.

So I guess just know that Detroit is a silly place, that Sam Richardson is one of our most valuable comedic resources, and that you should feel bad for not supporting this show before Comedy Central cancelled it.

Watch It For: The demented cameos by real-life broadcaster/Ron Burgundy inspiration Mort Crim, cruelly ruling the airwaves by wielding his “Chump Of The Week” brand as a cudgel, and publicly offering to hand America over to ISIS, if they can defeat him in a mano-a-mano duel.