Community
Glee
Modern Family
Parks and Recreation
United States of Tara
Somehow, it feels like a show that was rescued in part by people eating sandwiches shouldn't be this good. Chuck's writers seem to keep daring themselves to ratchet up the show's stakes, and then keep hitting their mark. Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak have never let something as negligible as potentially impending cancellation stop them from going totally balls-out on their show, and the audience benefits every step of the way. I also feel obliged to commend the show for deciding to stop pussyfooting around their Unresolved Sexual Tension and moving on - it should serve as an example to shows with similar dynamics at play.
While Modern Family and Parks & Rec also have great ensembles, I think Community has the clearest sense of how each cast member functions as a part of the whole and thus does the best job of mixing and matching pairings in different storylines. They also showed an admirable degree of flexibility in acknowledging that Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs' chemistry wasn't exactly setting the screen on fire and turning that around to use it to their advantage. While Community often goes above and beyond in the name of pop culture homage, it somehow never feels too absurd to be real.
In future seasons, I won't let Glee skate on its relative novelty, but it presented something so dramatically different from everything else on TV that I couldn't leave it off of the list. It was frequently uneven, but the moments where everything clicked - when narrative threads were followed from episode to episode, when the episode's theme wasn't too strained, when a performance spoke to a deeper emotional truth - were transcendent.
Conversely, Modern Family succeeds primarily because it's so familiar - the family-focused sitcom is nothing new, but ModFam manages to introduce freshness into the form while retaining a bit of old-school sentimentality. The show's writers have a firm command of how relatives approach one another and interact with varying degrees of love and frustration in both nuclear and extended families. It is how they exploit those relationships that makes Modern Family unique among the comedies of the 09-10 season.
Parks and Recreation truly distinguished itself from The Office and gained a sense of focus in its second season, introducing us to more of Pawnee's citizens and government employees and developing and deepening the show's universe. Changing Leslie from a more Michael Scott-esque clueless character to more of an idealist fighting from within a cynical bureaucracy both clarified the show's path and enabled the rest of the cast to up their game and give more definition to their characters, all to great effect.
United States of Tara has been good from its onset, but its second season saw its writers doing what truly great writing staffs do - taking a buzzy concept and mining it for all its emotional potential. They could have rested on Toni Collette's amazing lead performance and let Tara's identities remain gimmicky, but instead ditched the explicit costuming of the first season and focused on the underlying interpersonal relationships. John Corbett, Rosemarie DeWitt and Keir Gilchrist all delivered great supporting performances that took Tara deeper and made a good show great.
Honorable Mentions: 10 Things I Hate About You, Cougar Town, Nurse Jackie, Party Down
No comments:
Post a Comment