Critiquing Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz's Top 100 TV Shows of All Time

As someone who's written listicles, I know it's annoying to
have people on the comment section going "what about this?" but my
hope is to explain theories for the context of choices, suggest alternatives,
and entertain. I also hope to make history as the first person to critique
their work while bubble bathing.

I tried very hard to get it under 20 minutes before
giving up but you have my permission to click around as I count down from 100.
Around 2:00 is when I get to the inherent challenges of a TV canon and I
actually start the list at 4:48.

Alan and Matt's book is:

TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time.

The authors of this book and I would likely agree that there isn't as established of a TV canon as there is in moviedom because most of the writing about television has generally been by TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly and it has been narrowed around "What to Watch This Week" until the past decade or so. In contrast, film has been seriously analyzed and different decades and auteurs have been matched up against each other since the days of Pauline Kael and the French New Wave.

One downside to this is that TV best-of lists have a lot less variation (everyone loves MASH, I Love Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore Show, Cosby Show, etc) and a lot more reliance on ratings to establish what has been the canon (this book's list of shows matches up very closely to how well those shows dominated over their rivals in their ratings).

Another funny thing about a TV best-of list is that to get anything resembling a popular consensus, you need the public to have had some sort of accessibility to the list and entire generations have gone without seeing some of the classics of this list. I for one have never seen All in the Family or Moonlighting because it wasn't on in syndication when I was growing up (I'm generally in the school of thought that good art has to find its way to you and not the other way around).

Even then the socio-economic factors that make a show popular is more pronounced in this meeting because a lot of these shows weren't designed to appeal to broad audiences in the present and film (a director-driven medium) is somewhat more aimed at timelessness. Others might disagree but I'd argue that many shows like Roseanne, Family Ties, and Golden Girls don't particularly age well when watching them in the present day. The clips I've seen of All in the Family seem like a show about a very whiny and shrill family.

My suggestions for classic work that should be considered are: Looney Tunes, Threes Company, Get Smart and Beverly Hillbillies

Contemporary Shows which could have been interesting choices include: Homeland, Better off Ted, Party Down, The Good Wife, Modern Family, Orange is the New Black, Cougar Town, Scandal, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Man in High Castle, American Horror Story, and Empire

Lastly, shows that took off after the book was released that could be worthy include: Lodge 49, BoJack Horseman, The Americans, Black Mirror, Lady Dynamite, Crashing, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Last Man on Earth, The Good Place, Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Derry Girls, Glow, Silicon Valley, and Review

My Week in TV: The Mick, Man in High Castle, The Mayor, Fresh Off the Boat, Ingobernable

The Mick-The Divorce:
From the creators of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” this show engages in the same kind of duality of lovable yet deeply offensive characters as its sister show. As the year closes, this has been one of my highlights and will likely place in my top 12 this year. This week (or rather, 2 weeks ago), Chip discovers his birth dad and tries to get close to him in a way that goes haywire, as should be expected in sitcom land here. Anyone familiar with my writing or the views I tend to espouse on Disqus knows I’m not generally one to overuse feminist arguments or analysis, but man, does Chip really cry out for it. White male privilege, masculine anger, toxic masculinity all seem to describe this misguided adolescent. Perhaps his only saving graces are his sheer cluelessness and loyalty to his family and the former is certainly emphasized here. To watch Chip undergo all the sexual frustration of an adolescent times ten, it’s nice that he finally got kissed on screen but the incest is still gross, and most importantly he might have blown his chance at a father-figure. Oh well, there’s always next week.
In other news, Alma, Ben, Sabrina, Mickey and Jimmy probably did stuff too though I can’t remember what.

The Man in the High Castle-The end of Season 2:
Keeping up with Peak TV is exhausting. My recommended strategy: 1) Make sure you’re not wasting your time on frivolousness 2) Watch a mix of stuff that challenges you and stuff you like 3) Watch some of the mainstream stuff so you can enter into a conversation or two 4) Don’t worry about the rest. Still, there’s  LOT of TV and it’s fairly easy to start something with the intention of finishing it and burning out in the middle. Sometimes the more complex shows can throw you off during season breaks (but those season breaks are necessary at the same time to stave off exhaustion so it’s “chicken and the egg”). Shut Eye (Hulu) was in my top 12 last year and when I tried to get back through the season premiere, I kept scratching my head so much, that it really wasn’t worth it. I’m proud to say I made it to the end of this series. Maybe this isn’t like I climbed Mount Everest, but I definitely feel like I climbed a bunny slope or two.

"Man in the High Castle"—Set in an alternate version of the early 1960’s where the Axis powers won the war and the US has been divvied up between Japan and Germany -- is one of many, many shows that would have dominated water cooler talk (or the vaping corner to update it to 2010’s terminology) ten years ago but it has since been squeezed out of here-and-now relevance as a consequence of peak TV. It’s not too far in quality from “The Americans” though when it comes to historical spy thriller and has a lot going for it. It’s produced by Ridley Scott’s production company and it might possibly be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on TV and it lays out a tremendous amount of world building. If you’re a history aficionado who loves the “What if?” scenarios, this is your thing, but it’s good enough to transcend most of that because it’s rooted in so much of our everyday American experience and self-image.

The first and second seasons are both at their most entrancing towards the end with double and triple cliffhangers prefacing the season finale. The rest of the time, it’s been a pretty solid ride as a sprawling story is told out with several characters and locations. The second season involved significantly more of an “alternative universe” which I desperately wanted to discard (If I was ever tempted to fast-forward through anything it was this stuff) until it worked its way back through the plot but I still hated. Still not sure the how or the why of why it’s here, but it’s A-OK with me.

The Mayor-Here Comes the Governor-This show has been well-received but, to me at least, there’s a lack of star charisma that’s keeping this from becoming must-see. Lea Michelle and Yvette Nicole Brown have never done it for me and Brandon Michael Hall is uninspiring though I appreciate throwing in a lot of tension among his entourage with the bickering sidekicks (raise your hand if you can tell them apart. I can’t either). My proposed solution? Throw in better stunt casting a la Parks and Recration. Where would the show be without Ben Schwartz, Jenny Slate, Allison Becker, Patton Oswalt and the rest of that gang. Maybe they’ll even find a Chris Pratt equivalent here.

In this week’s episode, Courtney gets a visit from the state’s governor and the two engage in some serious politicking between rounds of golf and shvitzing. Structurally, this was a solid episode involving Courtney growing as a politician and playing the game. It was even laced with some insightful political commentary. The show is still not notable on the comedic end, however. It’s been a few days since I watched this, so if anyone remembers any laugh-out-loud moments please share.

Fresh off the Boat-Side Effect

Another dependable favorite of mine, this show is very much in the mold of family sitcom with the bonds between family members meant to be inspirational to the rest of us who might not be as appreciative of our parents, siblings, etc and might not spend enough time with them. It plays off our perceptions (possibly true, possibly false, verifying the accuracy is above my pay grade) that families from East Asia tend to uniformly have tight-knit families with children who overachieve to please their parents. Oldest child Eddie is the main character of the series, however, and as he is in adolescence, he’s a bit of the loose cannon of the family at this point. Does he still get A’s like his siblings?

This episode highlights Eddie’s downward slope as the apotheosis of adolescence. It’s a family-sitcom in the mold of the 90’s so Eddie is always programmed to do the right thing at the end, but he’s capable of sliding off quite a bit before the end. Eddie shows no loyalty to his friends and ditches them in a bridge-burning fashion for the second time this season. To be fair, they have developed some weird hobbies, but still. Part of Eddie’s character is he’s written as sociological commentary of the 1990s from the perspective of exactly two decades in hindsight. Eddie’s penchant for gangsta rap gives him a veneer of toughness.

Ingobernable-Season 4-Another candidate for my top 12, this is a Homeland-style thriller that’s also part steamy Mexican soap opera. The basic plot is the President of Mexico is murdered, the first lady is the prime suspect, and she has to figure out what’s happening as she’s on the rise.

This episode works in a stand-alone fashion. Emilia (the above-mentioned first lady) is kidnapped for ransom to extract some money out of her rich father. Then, big twist, one of the kidnappers re-kidnaps her (or perhaps the word is double-kidnap?) because he wants to make her pay for the death of her sister. He’s not so much evil with a twirly mustache but just a product of the lawless culture. Meanwhile, a sharp-looking woman is invited by the interim president to conduct an impartial investigation and she looks like she’s got things under control when she aces her introductory interview (choice nugget: There are no truths, only accounts). Oh, and the late president and security chief had lots of gratuitous hot sex.

The Man in the High Castle: Season 1

“Man in High Castle” examines the ins and outs of a hypothetical 1960’s world in which the Axis Powers won the war and U.S. is partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany with the Rockies acting as a lawless neutral zone of sorts. It’s filled with the kinds of hypotheticals and conjecture that history buffs will eat up with a lot of intrigue for the rest of us.

At the center of it all is a couple in San Francisco trying to keep their noses down in this Orwellian world. Frank Fink works in what looks (from our American middle-class 20^th century perspective audience) like a dreary job at a factory for souvenir relics which contrasts well with girlfriend Juliana Crain who doesn’t yet have a job but seems like a woman who’s destined for great things. Perhaps it’s the male gaze of the camera but Crain has the poise and glamor that looks like she owns the screen. This is fitting because the re-appearance of Juliana’s sister moments before being gunned down puts her on a Hithcockian journey (complete with her own MaGuffin in the form of a film from the titular Man in The High Castle) in the mold of Cary Grant (“North by Northwest), Robert Cummings (“Sabetour”) or Robert Donat (“39 Steps”).

It’s a welcome inversion to see a female heroine in the ordinary-man-called-to-be-a-hero mold but it’s hard to ignore that she seems to have a knack for making the wrong decisions. On no less than three occasions, she makes an impulsive decision and leaves trusted comrades out to dry for an enigmatic character, Joe Blake, who functions as the film’s third protagonist but takes too long to develop into something interesting enough to warrant his screen time. Blake is allied with the resistance but also secretly reports to the Third Reich and the actor plays him as too much of a blank slate to really care. There's supposedly supposed to be sexual tension but there are too many reasons that a Bluniana Union would never be remotely feasible and the lack of chemistry between the two leaves us little reason to believe otherwise.

For his part, Frank Fink is a trusty peon of the Japanese Pacific States until three of his family members get murdered. In some ways, his actions in the heat of the moment mirror the impulsive Juliana but his erring on the side of caution posits him as a character defined by a passivity that's repressed inside him until he occasionally explodes. Frank's loyalty to his friends and gradual turning to the side of the good guys makes him a pretty noble figure. His passivity is also a form of thoughtfulness, which is kind of ironic (and even darkly humorous in its over-the-topness) that he has no qualms whatsoever about repeatedly blackmailing and doing whatever the hell he wants to an antiques dealer named Mr Childan who identifies as a "man of culture." Aside from Childan's effeminate manner (it's possible he's supposed to read as closeted gay) that contrasts with Frank's gruff masculinity, there's also the issue of Childan displaying an exaggerated form of Frank's subservience that must get under his skin and add to a hypocrisy of sorts.

Like Childan, the series revolves around a number of characters connected to the three protagonists at various levels of power. It’s pretty rare to find a serialized story so deep that nearly every character on screen has back story that gets interesting the more they’re on. For example, Obengrubberfuhrer (if I lived in this world, I’d be shot pretty quickly for giggling at these German titles) John Smith (Joe Blake’s contact) is an American family man with a strong allegiance to the Third Reich that’s pretty much played straight: He’s a man of his circumstances. It’s interesting, on the surface that he has a general sense of through-the-looking-glass decency in a Nazi uniform, but it’s also interesting that he generally embodies the type of 50s family patriarch who’s commanding, unilateral, and a little emotionally distant from his kids even as he’s doing things in his best interest. His bad guy status highlights both worlds.

Similarly, a lot of the Japanese characters are even more fascinating for someone who has seen very few on-screen portrayals of Japanese power structures (does “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” count?) whether in an official or underworld capacity. It’s hard to find anyone to admire more than Nokosube Tagomi.

Because it’s such a complex world it takes at least five or six episodes to unwind and its only towards the very end of the season that it starts to get addictive. The plus is that there’s a wide world to delve into but the downside is that it’s a slow burn. When a particularly menacing character, Inspector Kiddo (it seems like many of the Japanese characters were cast on ability to menacing scowl and this guy takes the cake), started making an impression on me late in the season, it took me a minute to remember that this man was a guy I should have hated and feared all along since he was responsible for locking up Frank and killing his family.

I’m not sure the degree of Ridley Scott’s involvement but there is a lot of dystopic beauty here that’s similar to “Blade Runner.” This is a world filled with a lot of beautiful shades of gray. It's a world of bleak situations, secrets and traces of honor and hope. It's worth sticking around for.