SLANT MAGAZINE 2013 25. Treme. David Simon and Eric
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SLANT MAGAZINE 2013 25. Treme. David Simon and Eric Overmeyer's abbreviated fade- out on post-Katrina New Orleans is tattered yet hopeful, perfect in its soulful imperfections. Decisions in the Big Easy are slowed down by good booze and better boogie, and by the time the Big Chief (Clark Peters) bows out, very little about this intoxicating menagerie of musicians and other truth-seekers has been convincingly settled on. Life's not tidy in the Treme and the show's creators let all the bad omens hang out, including the impending birth of Delmond's (Rob Brown) first child and Janette's (Kim Dickens) third restaurant opening. Of course, all the trouble made the music sound all the sweeter, as careers begin to congeal and legacies found (temporary) footing amid the city's riotous buzz. The fat lady is singing for Treme, and she's belting it out loud, if not for long. Cabin 24. Downton Abbey. Downton Abbey jumped the shark in season two by tipping its bowler hat too often to the broad strokes of Charles Dickens's pen. Maybe because its scope was limited to the period of a single year, or because the shrilly over- determined Bates prison subplot was finally resolved, but season three felt like a corrective of sorts, regarding the period-specific dramas that gripped the lives of the Crawleys and their servants with an attention to nuance that felt written with the heart's blood. The tragedies weren't so easily forgotten, and while the incessant scheming remained as delicious as ever, even the most furtive of glances was in service of illuminating a privileged society's reckoning with class difference and identity. Ed Gonzalez 23. Arrested Development. The long-awaited fourth season of Arrested Development offered a rarity in television: genuine beguilement. After seven years of picking over the dense interplay of jokes in the first three seasons, viewers scrambled to understand what the fuck just happened in a deliriously abstracted storyline involving the University of Phoenix, an ostrich farm, and Fakeblock. The sui generis comedic invention of the cast felt revitalized, and by focusing on a single character per episode, the creators manifest feelings of alienation, hysteria, desperation, and profound confusion. In effect, this undervalued return mirrored Hurwitz and company's own deep-seated feelings following one of the most seemingly empty-headed cancellations in the history of the medium. Cabin 22. Orange Is the New Black. Taylor Schilling's Piper Chapman started out as a perceivable necessity: a Caucasian prism through which Jenji Kohan could portray the far more fascinating lives of black, Hispanic, and LGBT inmates at an upstate New York prison. Three episodes in, however, Piper became one with her fellow inmates and Kohan's series matured into a scathing comedy, one that depicts the alarming reality of being a liberated woman in a world run by men. And unlike Weeds, Kohan's latest never feels as if it's straining to attain a sense of diverse community. The ensemble performances rank alongside Mad Men and Treme in their unforced fullness, able to find a touching unity among the disparate histories of the incarcerated. Cabin 21. Luther. Coming face to face with two vigilante killers, Detective John Luther (Idris Elba) also became the focus of a secret investigation into his professional behavior and pliable view of justice in the third season of Luther. In other words, it's soul- searching time for Luther, but the series continues to smartly avoid the dull trappings of police procedurals through its effectively lugubrious atmosphere. Elba's troubled variation on Columbo wanders through a rotting working class, rupturing with societal resentment and repressed madness, and what the series consistently expresses is full knowledge that Luther could be one with his enemies, if not for the necessary remove of his mordant humor and a sickly sense of good. Cabin 20. Enlightened. It's fitting how Enlightened's trajectory serendipitously mirrored the journey of its protagonist, Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern). The little series that could until it couldn't told the story of how one broken woman's quest for personal rehabilitation increasingly involved those around her, jostling them from their comfort zones. Unfortunately, her surrounding environment, akin to the bulk of HBO's regular viewership, apparently wasn't quite as prepared for change as she was. When the second season came to a close, every door was left open for a third, with the show's characters finally feeling as if they were ready to embrace true reformation. Which is a shame, because the TV landscape needs more shows that push dramatic boundaries not with shock tactics, but with quiet, insightful fury. Mike LeChevallier 19. The Venture Bros. It's a testament to the boundless creativity of co-creators Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer how sizable of a cult following The Venture Bros. has generated. When it's at the top of its game (which is quite often), the animated series is one of the best things on TV: a singular tale of a malfunctional family's plight to erase the deep grip of failure from their past, and jam- packed with a mishmash of pop-culture references. Over the course of the show's run (which has been more like a trot, with only five seasons and 63 episodes in 10 years), Publick and Hammer have built a brilliant mythology as complex and varied as the myriad of influences they draw inspiration from. If The Venture Bros. has taught us anything, it's that you can't rush greatness. LeChevallier 18. Bob's Burgers. Bob's Burgers thrives on its impeccably modulated melding of the absurd and the heartfelt. It mines uproarious humor out of seeing children at various states of emotional and sexual development (Gene's relationship with an automatic toilet, the butt-loving Tina caught between two boys with dancing feet, Louise orchestrating a plan to profit from a nude beach), and in two of the greatest episode's of its entire run, "Seaplane!" and "Turkey in a Can," it arrives at profound truths about the nature of trust and the need for belonging by mirroring the paranoia of its characters in giddily digressive flights of storytelling fancy. Gonzalez 17. Rectify. Rectify shrewdly and subtly brought to light the one- of-a-kind experience of returning to the place you once called home to find that everything is different yet somehow, vapidly, the same. Daniel Holden (Aiden Young) is released from a Georgia state penitentiary into a world that isn't quite willing to accept him back. Over the course of its first season's six episodes, each recounting a day in Daniel's post-incarceration existence, creator Ray McKinnon and his stellar ensemble cast paint a tragic picture of how one horrendous act can disrupt the harmony of a small town forever. With its languid visuals and breezy dialogue, Rectify is a modern Southern gothic fable that establishes an unshakable tone that simultaneously emanates dread and misplaced hope while staying grounded in the realm of naturalistic self-discovery. LeChevallier 16. Behind the Candelabra. Ripe with flamboyant melodrama and tinged by the grotesque, Steven Soderbergh's long- gestating Behind the Candelabra serves as a landmark transitional work from one of the great popular visual storytellers of the 21st century. The story of Liberace (Michael Douglas) and his most dutiful lover (Matt Damon) provides a thicketed allegory for Soderbergh's own fears about becoming a copy of himself, of passion curdling into a corrupted need for aesthetic perfection in a malleable yet delicate form. It's fearless self-analysis and, by extension, analysis of the filmmaking process, dressed up in the glittered wardrobe of popular history and biographical storytelling. Cabin 15. Homeland. Season after season, Homeland has asked us to accept one elaborate twist after another, some more dubious than others, and with a hysterical audaciousness that would be insulting if the cons weren't so convincingly brokered by its incredible cast of actors, namely Claire Danes, Damian Lewis, and Mandy Patinkin. Which is to say nothing of the finesse behind the camera, as two of the season's finest episodes were directed by veterans of the screen, Carl Franklin and Keith Gordon, with an uncanny gift for crafting set pieces wherein the needs of government and the needs of the heart are braided together with a corkscrew tension at once riveting and disarming. Gonzalez 14. The Walking Dead. "Too Far Gone," the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead's fourth season, was not just a reflection of the Governor's (David Morrissey) power-hungry temperament. It served just as well as a reflection of the impatient attitude that plagued many fans (present company included) in relation to the show's ambitious new direction. The Governor's final blood- soaked campaign for absolute power changed that right quick. Playing fast and loose with its source material, the ingeniously splintered narrative is remarkable for its refreshing and unpredictable sense of long-form storytelling, genre, and dramatic structure. The show's distinct pacing and attentiveness toward even marginalized characters, though often easy to dismiss, is part and parcel of what makes its vision of weathered hope in a world beyond the brink so damn compelling, finding the humanity in horror that the movies regularly misplace. Cabin 13. American Horror Story: Coven. Exhaustive in its artistic invention, American Horror Story: Coven exudes the force of an epic reckoning. The most Sapphic and chameleonic of television wonders, it delivers unto us week after week a litany of by and large elegantly interlocked plotlines, shot with a heightened sense of audio and visual stimulation that's appropriately nauseating given the show's context and its fixation on the nature of power, from how it's discovered to how it's used to exert control.