Random Acts of Flyness

In the first episode of his Afrofuturist-ish HBO sketch show, creator, director, and star Terence Nance says Random Acts of Flyness is “about the beauty and ugliness of contemporary American life.” That broad frame allows Nance to download a multiverse of thoughts and ideas, from pointed observations about casual misogyny to a satiric skewering of “white thoughts.” Building on his work in films like An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Nance invents his own kaleidoscopic audiovisual language. Images switch frequently between realistic and surrealistic live action, obscure archival footage, and various styles of animation. Words blossom in myriad forms: as near-subliminal messages, as text exchanges that break into the action to comment on it, as fast-talking monologues or probing conversations.

The Terror

Based on the true story of a failed British expedition to find the Northwest Passage in the mid-19th century, The Terror explores the toxic combination of arrogance and bravery that fuels the exploratory missions launched by great colonial powers. After getting stuck for a year and a half in Artic ice, the men, weakened by lead poisoning and fighting the elements, set off on foot in search of salvation. The Terror brings those awful facts vividly alive—and then goes further, creating a full-blown horror story by introducing a monster called the Tuunbaq, which looks something like a giant polar bear with a human face. The men divide into two factions, battling one another as well as the monster while dying in increasingly baroque ways.

Fauda

Unlike Homeland, which is based on another Israeli TV series, Fauda makes no attempt to cover the political debates or social context behind its constant action. Instead, like its main characters, it keeps its head down and its focus tight. The series follows the fictional members of an elite undercover unit of the Israeli army and whichever Palestinian freedom fighter/terrorist that Doron (Lior Raz), a rogue member of the unit, is obsessed with that season, while occasionally checking in with a handful of other Israelis and Palestinians—-family members, lovers, or commanding officers—-who either affect or are affected by the main characters’ actions. Fauda (Arabic for “chaos”) is particularly good at showing how war, especially one with no end in sight, poisons the lives of everyone—-even civilians.

Pose

This soulful soap operatic drama pays tribute to New York City’s ball culture of the 1980s. Painting in broad, dramatic strokes, the script highlights the factors—racism, homophobia, transphobia, AIDS, and the wealth gap—that inspired these men and women to create their own world and faux families, where they could show one another the love and respect that they couldn’t find anywhere else.

Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, Season 4

Daily Show alum John Oliver has surpassed his former boss as the nation’s premier journalist/advocate disguised as a comedian. Jon Stewart’s near-nightly monologues sometimes skittered along the surface of a subject or fell into step with the rest of the stampeding media herd, but Oliver dives deep every week into a single topic, and he always chooses subjects whose bones have not been picked dry by cable news or other late-night commentators. Whether he’s discussing the true face of coal mining, the threat to local news posed by Sinclair Broadcast Group, or the many dubious products peddled by Alex Jones, he lays out facts with deadly precision, nailing what is being done and why it matters while pointing out underlying motivations and patterns. In his final show of the season, which summarized the first year since Trump’s election, he identified the three methods the president is using to undermine our democracy: delegitimizing the media, “what about-ism,” and trolling. Perhaps most impressively, he makes it fun to learn all these dry and/or depressing facts. His research and analysis may be solidly journalistic, but his delivery is acerbically comic, combining explosively expressive profanity and cheerful self-mockery with a classically British mix of verbal adroitness, instinctive distrust of authority, and an outraged contempt for hypocrisy. Written for Slant Magazine

The Good Place, Season 2

The Good Place is to a lot of its fans what its resident philosopher, Chidi (William Jackson Harper), is to bad-girl-trying-to-make-good Eleanor (Kristen Bell). At first, Eleanor’s afterlife adventure felt like a familiar enough twist on standard sitcom tropes that we took it a bit for granted even as we started falling for the series’ heart, its smarts, and how good it always left us feeling—not to mention that brilliant twist at the end of season one. Then this season tossed all our assumptions about the characters, the relationships between them, and the world they live in into the air like so many mylar balloons, and there was no denying it any more: We are in love. An exploration of what it means to be a good person, The Good Place is so buoyantly silly that you might be surprised it earns the approval of a Fordham bioethicist. And, like Brooklyn Nine Nine and Parks and Recreation, two other shows by writer-producer Michael Schur, it has a generosity of spirit and a belief in the power of community that feels particularly necessary these days. Written for Slant Magazine

Master of None, Season 2

The first season of Master of None focused mainly on food-obsessed metrosexual Dev’s (Aziz Ansari) prototypically millennial attempts to attain a solid footing in his love and work lives, though his attempts to make it in show biz were sometimes complicated by his Indian-American ethnicity. This season, Dev’s career and love life more often retreated into the background to make room for other issues—and other points of view. “New York City, I Love You” shifted between a series of characters, like doormen and cab drivers, who generally appear only in passing in Dev’s travels through the city, and Dev was just a supporting character in “Thanksgiving,” a delicately told tale of how his friend Denise (Lena Waithe) came out as gay, first to him and then to her mother and grandmother. Those two standout episodes, plus bits in others like Dev’s decision to out himself as a pork eater to his Muslim parents, transformed Master of None from a very good rom-com about late adolescence in urban America to a rallying cry for the soul of the nation. Written for Slant Magazine

One Mississippi, Season Two

Tig Notaro’s traumedy is a dryly comic, deeply moving reimagining of the time in her life when she moved back home to Biloxi while recovering from two profoundly challenging events: the death of her mother and her own breast cancer diagnosis. Season 2 maintains the first season’s fine-tuned sensitivity to the characters’ feelings and relationships while upping the moral and emotional antes.

Tig and her brother (Noah Harpster) grapple with the guilt and trauma they carry as a result of the sexual abuse that she suffered and he witnessed when they were children. That memory surfaces after Kate (Notaro’s real-life wife, Stephanie Allynne), the producer of Tig’s conversational/confessional radio show, is sexually assaulted by a colleague. And falling for an African-American colleague forces Tig’s socially awkward stepfather (John Rothman) to come to terms with the legacy of racism in America in general, and in the South in particular. 

Meanwhile Tig and Kate finally become a couple after a long, one-sided courtship during which Kate, who thinks of herself as straight, sorts out her feelings for Tig. Their love feels authentic and hard won, like everything else in this show—which is beginning to feel as much like a chronicle of present-day America as it is of Notaro’s recent past. Written for Slant Magazine

Chewing Gum, Season 2

An extravagant beauty who delights in playing the fool, Michaela Coel plays Chewing Gum’s main character, Tracey, with a near-irresistible combination of wide-eyed gusto and coltish naivete. Add in a hormonal young woman’s determination to escape the Puritanical constraints of her fundamentalist upbringing by having as much sex as possible and you have the perfect heroine for a surprisingly wholesome and endearing comedy about sex and other stupid human tricks—but mostly sex—in and around a British public housing project. This season, which Coel has said is the series’ last, makes excellent use of the actress’ gift for physical comedy, her elastic face, and her ability to telegraph buoyant vulnerability. Swiping on clownish makeup in a botched attempt to impress an ex or striking exaggeratedly alluring poses at a sex club only to face repeated rejection, Tracey is laughable and loveable, a glorious, openhearted self-directed experiment.

Making a Murderer

The fact that Making a Murderer was the most engrossing true crime story of 2015 no doubt helped build its enormous buzz, the need to know what happens next pulling viewers through marathon binge-watching sessions. But the show’s true greatness lies in its anatomizing of one infuriating example of the abuse of power and scapegoating of the poor that often happens in our legal system but is rarely reported in such detail. After spending months embedded in Steven Avery’s community and years researching his tortured journey through the legal and penitentiary systems, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi tell the story of Avery’s first, 17-year imprisonment for a crime he never committed and his second trial and conviction for another that he may well have been framed for as well. With the help of footage of his second trial, interviews with family, friends, and lawyers, the filmmakers elucidate various aspects of the story, from widespread contempt of Avery as “white trash” to arcane legal arguments raised by the trial, with admirable clarity. And, as the police and prosecutors of Manitowoc County keep trying to prove Avery guilty of some heinous crime, the series finds them guilty of gross miscarriages of justice. Written for Slant Magazine

The Crown

Once again, The Queen’s Peter Morgan combines extensive research with a highly empathetic understanding of human nature to create a fascinating exploration of the capabilities and limitations of Britain’s monarchy in the 20th century, the enormous personal sacrifices that monarchy required of Elizabeth II, and the strains it exerted on her family. The Crown opens with Elizabeth’s (Claire Foy) beloved father, king George (Jared Harris), another reluctant monarch who inherited the role only after his older brother renounced it. It then follows the young queen as, forced to give up her cherished private life after her father’s demise, she grows into the role of queen—and into a form of greatness distinguished by genuine humility and common-sense values. A feminist tale of a patronized, undereducated, and perpetually underestimated young woman who learns to rely on her native intelligence and good sense to help lead a besieged country through perilous times, The Crown makes the case that the best rulers may be those who never wanted the role.

Lady Dynamite

Her endearing eagerness to please, extreme social awkwardness, and hopeless inability to camouflage her feelings makes the semi-fictionalized version of her bipolar self that actor-writer-comedian Maria Bamford plays in Lady Dynamite a kind of human emoji factory, her unguarded face expressing a kaleidoscope of comically intense emotions. Her bafflement and improvised solutions to uncomfortable situations make things we have all struggled with, like dating, feel as freshly and insightfully witnessed as her wide-eyed adventures in Hollywood. Though she’s anything but a stone face, Bamford has more than a little Buster Keaton in her, her cosmic befuddlement and heroic efforts to navigate even the simplest situation highlighting the absurdity in just about everything. Written for Slant Magazine

The 20 Best Original Netflix Shows

Read our list of the 20 best shows created for Netflix so far--including my write-ups of Lady Dynamite, The Crown, Making a Murderer and Ozark--on Slant Magazine.

Girls Season 6

The rest of television has caught up so fast with Girls that it's hard to remember how refreshingly truthful and new the show felt when it premiered, to great success and much backlash, in 2012. Lena Dunham's observant series, the first to be both by and about young women navigating that awkward stage between the end of college and the beginning of adulthood, paved the way for other auteur-driven TV programs—like Donald Glover's Atlanta, Issa Rae's Insecure, and Rachel Bloom's Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—that provide a deep-dive view of a small cohort of people and the subculture they inhabit.

Top 10 TV Shows of 2016

TV (including serial shows on platforms like Netflix and Hulu and Amazon) has been nipping at the heels of theatrical feature films for a while now, but this year it surpassed them. It's always hard to come up with just 10 movies for my top-10 year-end list, but it was way harder this year to come up with the top 10 TV shows. Thank goodness for honorable mentions.

My Top 10:

1. The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story
2. Atlanta
3. Bojack Horseman
4. The Americans
5. Jane the Virgin
6. Happy Valley 
7. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
8. Narcos
9. Transparent
10. One Mississippi

My honorable mentions:
Fleabag, Girls, Insecure, Lady Dynamite, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Orange is the New Black, Silicon Valley, Togetherness, High Maintenance, Westworld, Black Mirror, The Middle, black-ish, The Crown, The Good Place

And here's Slant's list, which I contributed to.

The Americans Season 4

It's telling that several scenes from the fourth season of The Americans begin with Elizabeth (Keri Russell) or Philip (Matthew Rhys), married Soviet spies, waking up from a nightmare. These dreams are pungent metaphors for the couple's growing desperation, as they agonize over how to protect their children from a life they feel increasingly trapped within.

Mad Men

Cool tomcat and longtime shape-shifter Don Draper (Jon Hamm) may have found yet another way to adapt in the final scene of this elegant series, but he spent most of the last season sidelined as people he once eclipsed without even trying—like his long-suffering colleagues Peggy (Elizabeth Moss) and Joan (Christina Hendricks), and his freethinking wife, Megan (Jessica Paré)—began to come into their own. As the series completed the arc it had been slowly building for eight years, Mad Men left us with an indelible portrait of the root-deep changes that shook up American culture in the 1950s and ‘60s, both for better, as in the emergence of feminism and civil rights, and worse, as exemplified by the increasing cynicism and sophistication of the pitches the gang at Sterling Cooper developed to sell America to itself. Written for Slant Magazine 

Blackish

A sitcom about the magnetic push-pull of messy, sticky familial love, Blackish includes some of the most thoroughly fleshed-out kids on television. Ironically, those kids are much more comfortable in their skins than the father who’s so worried about molding them. The series centers around volatile marketing exec Andre “Dre” Johnson’s (Anthony Anderson) obsessive attempts—which often involve facing off against his sweetly conciliatory, biracial, raised-by-hippies wife, Bow (Tracee Ellis Ross)—to ensure that his children experience various aspects of being African American in exactly the same way he has.

Gotham Season Two

What's bad for the city of Gotham is good for the viewers of Gotham, as bullied nerds, budding bad girls, and psycho killers who promise to develop into the supervillains of DC's Batman franchise loom into ascendancy. The villains have always provided most of the pathos in this prequel: The show's ostensible main character, future police commissioner Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) as a youngish and stubbornly honest cop, feels like a minor character in his own story, while charismatic criminals like Penguin-in-the-making Oswald Copperpot (Robin Lord Taylor) and his former boss turned nemesis Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith) dream, scheme, and commit outrageous acts. 

Episodes Season 4

Television veterans and real-life couple David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik do all the heavy lifting on Episodes, writing every word and directing and producing each episode. Klarik says he writes for revenge, and one can feel the sting of anger in sequences like the montage in the second episode of the show's fourth season. Grotesquely cheery insincerity reaches monumental heights as network executives shower the show's main characters, husband-wife writers Beverly (Tamsin Greig) and Sean (Stephen Mangan) Lincoln, with compliments on the new TV series the pair are pitching, then promptly suggest changes that would undo its very essence.