Top 12 of TV in 2022

 My annual list:

You can view my 10 Honorable Mentions here and all the editions of this list dating back to 2009 here. And support me on Patreon here

1. White Lotus (HBO) –The second season of White Lotus brings us characters who run the gamut from naive (Albee); to hypocritically judgmental (Harper); to lonely to the point of selfishness (Tanya); to just-plain shallow (Daphne). And then, of course, Cameron has a shade of all seven deadly sins in one package. However, unlike the first season with irredeemable brats Shane and Olivia, writer-director Mike White managed to navigate their fates and give them enough of a tinge of self-awareness so that they’re all ripe for satire in this grand comedy of manners.
   
   The show is set in Sicily and benefits from the lack of identity politics (they’re all White, no need for grand-standing speeches about White privilege). Ironically, the series is still about identity, but about how we see ourselves in our relationships — largely romantic, but also our subordinates (Tonya-Portia, Valentina-Isabella); and superiors (Jack-Quentin, Albee-Dominic) — and what that says about us. The characters with the highest ideals (Harper, Ethan, Albee) get their asses handed to them by fate, while the two resident prostitutes come out the weeks’ big winners for already having the self-awareness at the beginning of the week that relationships are transactional.

This is the kind of multi-layered character study that sparks endless discussion and the kind of pre-emptive murder mystery that provides endless intrigue.

2. Winning Time (HBO) — This docudrama about the beginning of the Magic Johnson era is apparently completely detached from the historical record. At the same time, maybe it’s better in this age of hyper scrutiny to throw documented history out the window and rely more on the “based on a true story” moniker at the start of each episode? The advantage is that it allows producer Adam McKay to tell the most exciting story his imagination can muster, and it’s pretty damn exciting. Watching this show is a reminder of how little of the narrative in the sports world we get through filtered press conferences and surface-level sports writing: The rivalries, the competitive dynamics, and the struggle to trust one another when the stakes are high.

3. Resident Alien (SyFy)- Alan Tudyk hits the right notes of absurdity as an oblivious alien who improbably manages to integrate into a small town in Colorado. The show is endearingly hokey, rich in character, and features a marshmellowshly portrait of small-town life with plenty of scenery porn in the background. The show also features a sizeable Native American cast and delves into those but doesn’t resort to being pedantic. It’s also harder to find a richer group of scene stealers, whether it’s a true alien believer in Deputy Liz Baker (Elizabeth Bowen) or a former Olympian battling the type of true-to-life depression that comes from being past their prime (Alice Wetterlund). Most importantly, the show is never limited by its science fiction roots. It aims to entertain on a deeper level.

4. Yellowjackets (Showtime) — The series — a cheerful group of high schoolers get decidedly less cheerful and more insane over 18 months as they get stranded in the Canadian wilderness — hasn’t yet gone full “Lord of the Flies.” For now, the first season has laid the groundwork with Lost-like levels of multi-layering and the game of foreshadowing was one of the best interactive experiences on TV this season. On top of that, there’s a lot to be said for the diversity of the characters: The avid outcast Misty (Christina Ricci/Samantha Hanratty), the overly driven Taissa (Tawny Cypress/Jasmin Brown), the guilt-ridden Shauna (Melanie Lynskey/Sophie Nelisse), and the rebellious goth Natalie (Juliette Lewis/Sophie Thatcher) all have polar opposites.

5. Acapulco (Apple Plus): A sort of “How I Met Your Mother” with international flavor and ample doses of scenery porn. Eugene Debenez is Maximo: A tech entrepreneur with his own private island and a bank account with several zeros at the end. He narrates to his nephew how he started his rags to riches story working as a pool boy in one of the most high-caliber resorts of Acapulco. Set towards the dawn of a more globalized North American economy, the 80s time capsule is a love letter to a culture where people have big hearts: Towards their crushes, towards their families, towards their friends, and even towards their enemies (how much homoerotic hugging do we have to endure between Hector and his hazes?).

6. Ghosts (CBS): Eight ghosts from different eras (the 60s hippie movement, the Guided Age, Wall Street excess, the Revolutionary War, etc) inhabit an upstate New York mansion with the ability to talk to just one of the home’s two owners. But as anyone can tell you, it’s the delivery that makes the difference. The eight actors (largely unknowns outside of Rebecca Wiscocky) create comically rich characters with rife potential for great comic dynamics (imagine a Victorian Age snoot interacting with a free-wheeling Prohibition Era jazz singer: You get the idea), and the dialogue never fails to exploit these possibilities. The eight ghosts provide the laughs while the couple at the center (Rose McIver and Utkarsh Ambudkar) provide the TGIF-ish heart.

7. The After Party (Apple TV)-Although we like to tell ourselves and our peers that we’re past high school, I suspect the abundance of TV shows about high school with adult audiences is good evidence that we never completely leave those formative years behind. It’s for that part of our identities that “The After Party” hits on the nose so well. Sure, we don’t spend every waking moment thinking about high school by the time we are 15 years out. However, put us in a room with our high school cohorts and I have no doubt that there are always unresolved threads — an unexpressed attraction, a latent inferiority complex, a what-if ticket to stardom, a misbegotten grudge — that is rife for drama fifteen years later. That’s essentially where the show places us. And there’s a murder mystery on top of it, because why not? That the show could function well enough without a murder to solve, bodes well for how solid the show’s comic infrastructure is. It also doesn’t hurt that the cast is a pretty solid blend of random comic talent (Ben Schwartz, Tyia Sinclair, Ilana Glazer, Tiffany Haddish, Ike Barinholtz among others).

8. Central Park (Apple Plus) The third season of this Apple TV show came with the good news that Kristen Bell was returning to a new role as Aunt Abby. Few can deny that Kristen Bell is always a plus and her over-eager aspiring actress didn’t fail to deliver. Not that this show needs any new characters with the hilarious gender-switched due of ultra-rich snoot Bitsy (Stanley Tucci) and her overstressed lackey Helen (Daveed Diggs) providing such great laughs. In the interim, the interracial Tillerman family — Owen (Leslie Odom Jr.), Paige (Kathryn Hahn), Cole (Titus Burgess), and (Molly) Emma Raver Lampman — provides the heart. Just watch the Mother’s Day episode and try not to tear up.

9. Welcome to Flatch (Fox): It’s a key ingredient in small-town comedies that you have to add a healthy dose of quirk but few shows have been able to find the comic sweet spot in those peculiarities as well as this show. The show uses a mockumentary style that might evoke comparisons to Parks and Recreation but the characters are much less universally relatable. The show’s protagonists are a pair of aimless cousins (likely around age 20) who are the product of a lack of parental supervision, a little bit of suppressed cabin fever, and hyper-active imaginations. Joining them is lovelorn small-town newspaper owner Cheryl Petersen (Aya Cash) who came to Flatch from the big city as the significant other to the town pastor (Seann William Scott) but got dumped immediately thereafter. Cheryl, forever upbeat but often frightened at the change to small-town life, is an apt audience surrogate (and on a side note, my hero as a small-town journalism admirer). There’s also an uptight town historian, a perverted blind man, and a love interest for Shrub (one of the cousins) who is emotionally catatonic. Very few character beats are wasted on this show.

10. Killing It (Peacock) — Two broke Floridians, Craig (Craig Robinson) and Jillian (Claudia O’Doherty), team up in a contest to kill an invasive species of snakes. As the season goes on, the plot places its two protagonists within a web of the type of opportunist Floridian characters that originally showed up in Elmore Leonard or Dave Barry novels and have now become meme-worthy. At its best, the series is a modern-day Glengarry Glen Ross for how the gig economy is all too often a never-ending spiral of doom.

11. Ramy (Hulu): The show bungled the ending of last season and its central character badly enough that it’s hard to know where Ramy Yousef could take things next. As Dianne Nguyen suggests to BoJack Horseman whose arc ends in tragedy “or you can just go on living.” Like Robert Altman taught us with his notorious abrupt movie endings, life doesn’t have neatly compartmentalized movie endings; let alone unhappy ones. That’s 2022 Ramy in a nutshell: Still trying to seek enlightenment but fully aware that he’s now a few steps more removed from societal acceptance. While Ramy navigates his new purgatory, the show continues to deliver moments of brilliance with tangents to its side characters. Like some of the middle-of-the-series temporary breakthroughs of BoJack, the season ends with Ramy doing something that’s foolishly stupid and truly honorable.

12. As We See It (Amazon)-The story takes place in the Bay area with three autistic people with wildly different wants of life and situations sharing a house under one roof with the guidance of their ridiculously awesome life coach Mandy. Half the appeal is watching Sosie Bacon be understanding, committed, and loving in ways that I’m not even capable of in the presence of other autistic people, and I’m on the upper end of the spectrum myself. The story progresses well and trisects with the three central autistic characters diverging towards different paths, of which the other two are only marginally aware of at any given time. I do have to give a knock that the romance between the neurotypical person and the disadvantaged guy, which would likely not have been anywhere near as easy in real life.

Ten Honorable Mentions:
Adventure Beast (Netflix) S1, Cobra Kai (Netflix) S4–5, Derry Girls (Netflix) S4, Dicktown (FX) S2, Dropout (Hulu) Miniseries, Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Amazon), Resort (Peacock) S1, Reboot (Hulu) S1, Shantaram (Apple Plus) S1, True Story with Ed and Randall (Peacock) S1

And for reference, everything else I watched this year (write-ups for most of these can be found on my profile):
Abbott Elementary (ABC), Alaska Daily (ABC), Blockbuster (Netflix), The Bear (Hulu) (3 ep), Bumper in Berlin (Peacock), Cat Burglar (Netflix), Disenchanted (Netflix), Dollface (Hulu), God’s Favorite Idiot (Netflix), Hard Cell (BBC →Netflix), House Broken (Hulu), Home Economics (ABC), Human Resources (Netflix) (2 ep), Inside Job (Netflix), Inventing Anna (Netflix) (3 ep), Loot (Apple Plus), Minx (HBO) (1 ep, would have watched more), Mr Mayor (NBC), Mosquito Coast (Apple Plus), My Unorthodox Life (Netflix), Never Have I Ever (Netflix) (2 eps), Orville (Hulu), Our Flag Means Death (HBO), Outlaws (Apple Plus), Pentuverate (Hulu), Quantum Leap (Peacock) (2–3 ep), Righteous Gemstones (HBO), Rutherford Falls (Peacock), Severance (Apple Plus), Shining Faces (Apple Plus) (2 ep), Single Drunk Female (Freeform) (3–4 eps), Solar Opposites (Hulu), Space Force (Netflix), Star Trek: Lower Decks (Paramount), Strung (Freeve), Tommy and Pam (Hulu) (2–3 ep), United States of Al (CBS), Upload (Amazon), We Need to Talk About Cosby (Showtime), What We do in the Shadows (FX), Welcome to Wexhingham (Hulu)

In Old Chicago (1937)

 I saw three classic films. I was going to write a little bit about all of them. The other two were Little Foxes (blah, too melodramatic, but Teresa Wright was good in it) and Lust for Life (the score was overdone and Douglas is at his hammiest here, but I appreciated Vincente Minnelli's work), but I thought I'd write about the third and I ended up writing a full review.

In Old Chicago (1937)-I knew Alice Brady won an Oscar for it, and it was about two brothers torn apart by Chicago politics (which is a pretty intriguing city to explore as opposed to, say, Orlando or Knoxville politics). I don't believe this film is well-remembered today but it certainly was pretty epic in its time. The film was Fox's  response to the MGM film San Francisco in which fictional lives intersect with a major historic event. Because that event is the San Francisco earthquake it's as great an excuse as any to make things go boom and combine a period piece with a psuedo-disaster film.

In this case, the story is the Chicago Fire. I also vaguely knew about Mrs. O'Leary's cow supposedly starting the Chicago Fire (not really true), but I didn't know that the Chicago Fire figured into the story when I was watching the film. I can't speak to whether the film was advertised that way, but I saw that her name was Mrs. O'Leary (Alice Brady) from a sign of her laundromat and she owns a cow, so I did spend quite a bit of time wondering if the pieces will fit

What I later learned from the production notes is that the story was reverse-engineered from the Mrs. O'Leary character. Because there's not a lot of history to draw from, O'Leary is a symbol from which Alice Brady can act her heart out to an Oscar and from which the writers can lay the symbolic groundwork. She represents a certain Yankee ingenuity.  Her establishing character moment is when she reacts to an unpleasant encounter with a snooty socialite by offering to clean her dress for a price.

Her sons represent the dark and lighter sides of that ingenuity, and there are references made to the fact that the O'Learys are a special kind of clan. The older son (Tyrone Power) is a lawyer who leads a life of service. The middle son (Don Ameche, kind of funny because I've only ever seen him as an octeganarian in Cocoon) is a lot more fun but he's a pretty bad guy. He makes his living as a gambler with the capacity for some pretty devious (and clever) schemes for taking power through the city. The younger son does almost nothing except marry a Swedish girl and identify a dead body at the end, which makes me wonder why he was even included in the script. Her her children are pretty much entirely fictionalized anyway, right? Also, I believe it's Andy Divine who's in there somewhere with this uniquely squealy voice. Did anyone inform him this wasn't a comedy?

In a lot of ways, this film reminded me of Gangs of New York right down to one of the shots of two marching armies approaching each other on the street. It's about a city coming of age and characters morally doing the same.

I found it refreshingly devoid of genre trappings. It was about crime but it wasn't a generic gangster film, it was about family dynamics but it wasn't a sappy melodrama.  It was appropriately epic.

Annual Best TV of 2022 List: Honorable Mentions

Adventure Beast (Netflix)-I tuned into this show expecting edu-tainment in the vein of Magic School Bus or Carmen Sandiego, but did not expect such an absurdist R-rated delight. One way that animation can surpass live action comedically is that blood and gore can be used without the squick factor. This is Adventure Beast's bread and butter. The show centers around a kooky zoologist (based autobiographically on star voice over actor Bradley Trevor Greive) who's such an enthusiastic nature lover, that he repeatedly lets himself be mauled in all sorts of entertaining ways just to protect them. Joining him are two sidekicks who couldn't be any more different: Hypochondriac Dietrich and foolhardy Bonnie. Each episode is a different part of the world, a different biome to learn about, and a different close brush with death. 

Cobra Kai (Netflix)-Season 4 was a master class in story logistics and character plotting. Considering this is all based on 80s cheesiness, I was blindsided by how well the show developed so many character arcs and collided them in such ass-kicking combinations. With the richness of Tori and even Hawk, there’s now enough space  in our empathy to root for entirely new and unexpected people to champion in the sport of karate (except Robby: He’s a snooze-fest). Of course, the trauma that define our favorite characters arcs is largely at the expense of different characters who happen to also be our favorite, so it’s a bit of a circular cluster-f*ck at this point. Season 5 showed some pretty strong signs of how the momentum is slowing down with characters so archetypically evil as to be cartoonish. Season 4 was perfect, but factoring in the disappointment of the 5^th season, this falls into honorable mention territory.

Derry Girls (BBC4 -> Netflix)-The seven-episode arc of the show’s final season sees our central quintet continue to work themselves over various minor crises while displaying significant growth in spite of that teenage shallowness. In one of the best episodes of the series, the older generation shows they can be just as prone to Murphy’s law and handle their dilemnas with equal pettiness at a class reunion. Also, newsflash: Two characters kiss (one of them is James and considering the group consists of his cousin, a girl who might be mentally disabled, and a Lesbian, you can guess who)! But, no matter, Michelle wisely intercedes that it would be horrific to have to deal with a short-lived romance, so they wait. Well-played, Michelle! And well-played Lisa McGee and crew for such a wonderful regionally specific show (you almost need subtitles to understand their Irish brogues).

Dicktown (FX)-John Hodgeman and David Rees pitched this show with the concept "What if Encyclopedia Brown never adulted as he grew up?" As the two central characters, John and David are a pair of 40ish detectives who aren't taken seriously by anyone except high schoolers. It would be sad if David weren't self-deluded into thinking his life is going well, and John wasn't so good at what he does. The second season offers some upward progress for the pair, so that's a plus.

Dropout (Hulu)-The limited series docudrama covers the true story of Stanford dropout Elizabeth Holmes who invented a way to diagnose multiple diseases through blood or something like that, and then cut corner after corner to the point where she went from wide-eyed dreamer to over-stressed manager to someone who could unequivocally be classified as the bad guy. Played by Amanda Seyfried in a new career high water mark, Holmes is a figure we can never quite seem to pick apart as she’s not even honest with herself about her transforming personality. The show also has an excellent co-villain in Naveen Andrews as Elizabeth’s subtly threatening lover, and a wonderful All the Presidents’ Men angle with two sleuthing interns  (Dylan Minnette and Camryn Mi-young Kim) coming from contrasting ends of privilege.

 

Marvelous Mrs Maisel (Amazon)-Perhaps, “Marvelous” should be replaced with “Plucky” because Miriam continues to get sidelined but she never stays down for very long. Still, with only one season left, it’s a pretty long road to comic immortality. I’m getting the feel that career advancement in comedy for women or anyone in the 1950s was not a linear progression, which is a pretty good recipe for future tension. This season had two of the show’s best scenes: Miriam breaking the news to her family that she got fired on a Coney Island ferris wheel ride, and the congregation ganging up on Abe during a bar-mitzvah.

 

Reboot (Hulu)-Shows about show business are a tired trope from unimaginative writers, but occasionally something pops through that’s worth fighting against that bias. Created by Steve Levitan (Just Shoot Me, and more recently Modern Family), this show contains some of the more wholesome relics of old-school sitcoms while still maintaining a sharp subversiveness. Three has-been actors (Johnny Knoxville, Judy Greer, and Callum Worthy) and one classically-trained has-been in denial (Keegan Michael-Key) are recruited to revive a multi-camera (AKA old-school, laugh-track) sitcom in a comedic landscape of more advanced comedy. To make matters more complicated, the new executive producer is an avant-garde (Rachel Bloom) who’s only doing the show to get back at her father (Paul Riser) who sorta kinda abandoned her as a child and he refuses to relinquish the rights without getting involved in the day-to-day trappings. Like Levitan’s previous hit, Just Shoot Me, this is a sharp comedy centered around a (forgive me for using such a gooey word) beautiful father-daughter relation.

Resort (Peacock)-Sit in the Mexican tropics, a married couple (Christine Milioti and William Jackson Harper) attempts to cure their rut by taking on a 15-year-old mystery of two teenagers who disappeared on a dark and stormy night (cliché as that sounds). The pair join forces with a kooky local heir who fancies himself a film noir detective. With one of TV’s best sidekicks in tow, the journey of this jaded couple is intercut with the pair of love-drunk teenagers (Skyler Gismodo and Nina Bloomgarten). Filled with needle drops and time jumps upon time jumps, the show is ambitious and even effortlessly shifts genres into the supernatural as it picks up steam.

Shantaram (Apple TV)-Charlie Hunnam stars as an escaped Australian convict who gets caught up in the criminal underworld of Bombay. Only he can’t make a very good criminal because he seems too morally upright. In fact, he got in prison in the first place because he stopped mid-robbery to attempt triage on a cop trying to stop him. Lin’s story to find of finding redemption and do good in a lawless society echoes the narrative arcs of Buddha and Jesus. The symbolism is a bit more obvious when you consider that the title of the series takes its name from what the Hindu villagers give him: "Man of God's peace." But if this is an elaborate religious allegory, it’s a very gritty and sexy one.  Although it was shot in Thailand during COVID, the film is at the production level of a David Lean epic. 

True Story with Ed and Randall (Peacock)-Ed Helms and Randall Park host people with cool stories. They range from the kind of anecdotes that would get picked up by a local paper (One person crashes the Super Bowl locker room), to the personally meaningful (a guy wins a high school state championship in a sport he never tried before to impress his crush), to the bizarre (a man getting caught stopped by the same traffic cop three times in one night in a mad dash effort to satisfy his pregnant wife’s craving). Each story is acted out by known talents like Terry Crews, Marc Evan Jackson, Sharon Woodard, and Lauren Ash that intercut with the storytelling. In addition, Ed and Randall compliment the ordinary Joe storytellers perfectly as enrapt listeners who share in their delight and probe with the right questions. When it comes to unscripted TV, the art is in how you present the material, and this show is a master course.

 

 

Other People’s Money (1991): Capitalism At Its Most Depraved

THIS FILM IS FREE ON YOUTUBE!

Directed by Norman Jewison, Other People’s Money centers around a corporate battle for ownership of a family-owned factory that’s said to be supporting a small town’s employment needs.

Gregory Peck (what a treat that a 1940s screen icon gets such a meaty role in 1991!) plays supposed blue-collar champion Andrew Jorgensen.

His opponent, Larry the Liquidator, is Danny DeVito gleefully playing the same notes of depravity that you see as Frank in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Only he doesn’t live in filth and squalor but in a shamefully extravagant hotel suite with a staff that includes 17 lawyers. While the film is an attempt to live up to the corporate-damning messaging of the 1987 film Wall Street, this film is as much about the singular oddity of Larry that Devito establishes with such a grandiose sense of hedonism. He’s a ruthless ball of lust and greed with no filter.

I’d like to pause to talk about how I first came across this film:

In elementary school, my parents were restrictive about my TV and I used to sneak into my nanny/housekeeper’s bedroom when she went away on the weekends. But she had a broken TV and I only got one or two channels that came in clear. One was a syndicated Paramount channel that had either become or was in the process of becoming rebranded as UPN.

My ideal watching would have been TGIF-type fare or cartoons but by the time I got there, after Sunday School, my only option Paramount at the Movies. I vaguely remember Raising the Titanic, Love Potion Number 9, Arthur, Fitzwilly, The Ref, and Cyrano (the Steve Martin version). Because it was the 90s and I had no streaming options, it was all uninteresting, but I just enjoyed because being in front of the screen for an extra couple hours.

But Other People’s Money got my attention. In an early scene, Danny Devito’s character Larry the Liquidator, invites the opposing side’s corporate attorney (Andrew Jorgensen’s step-daughter, Kate, played by Penelope Ann Miller) for a business dinner and is simultaneously excited about burying her as he is about romancing her. As she gives up and leaves, the following dialogue takes place:

Lawrence: Wait, wait, wait! I got a proposition for you. You come up. We have a nice dinner. We make passionate love the rest of the night loses. The first one who comes first loses.

Kate: Loses what?

Lawrence: The deal.

Kate: [Disgusted] I think you’re serious… How do you propose we write this up?

Lawrence: Delicately. Under the heading of, “Easy Come, Easy Go.”…come on, Shat have you got to lose your virginity. I could lose millions?

Kate: So what happens if we come together?

Lawrence: (pauses) I never thought about that.

Kate: Well, think about it honey.

Lawrence: Don’t go! I haven’t played my violin yet.

I first heard this dialogue when I was around 10 years old and I had little to no idea what sex was. I found these words highly confusing, and a little disturbing.

I wasn’t in full-fledged puberty yet, but I was in the process of realizing that girls weren’t icky and the beautiful Penelope Anne Miller was certainly helping me get there at the time. But it was something to the stylized dialogue that hooked me.

Watching it through adult eyes the other day, I can attest that the film’s uniquely charged dialogue between the two is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

When Larry offers to play the violin for her in the last exchange, for example, he means it. He wakes her up the middle of the night (inapprops!) and serenades her with his (extremely) amateur violin playing.

This is a man who spends the first 20 seconds of the meeting having locker room talk with himself, about how hot the woman in his presence is. At the same time, there’s a romantic side that exists side-by-side with his baseline female objectification. He buys her flowers and makes gestures to the point that it’s believable that underneath all the dirtiness, his heart isn’t set on a one-night stand but on a longer partner.

The only reason that his treatment of Kate isn’t appalling, is that she finds his advances amusing. Although a woman in this era shouldn’t have to endure all this sexism, there’s a very clear indication that she knows how to set boundaries for herself and hit back. In one of the strangest moments of the movie, she reacts to one of his catcalls by ordering him to look down at his penis and lecture it on being respectful to women. Yes, this is a thing that actually happens, and yes I had no idea what it meant as a 10-year-old.

(1) Other People’s Money — “Presence of a Lady” — Penelope Ann Miller x Danny DeVito — YouTube

Although the play from which this film was adapted charted a romance between the two, the casting of Danny DeVito — a balding man at least fifteen years Miller’s senior — had the creators wisely leaving the two somewhere between platonic and up-in-the-air.

Still, this is very much in the mold of a screwball comedy, and there’s definitely flirtatious energy in the air. In their constant battle of one-upmanship, Kate gets downright salacious when she’s got the edge. When she’s calling to deliver the news to him after she’s successfully filed an injunction against him, she looks like she’s on a phone sex line.

And then there’s the battle over the steel mill.

Norman Jewison has a history of socially conscious films like The Hurricane and In the Heat of the Night. He is clearly trying to say something important.

Larry’s characterization borrows from the film’s spiritual cousins Wall Street and Glengarry Glen Ross which all require a great corporate villain to slap us out of our entrenched love affair with capitalism.

The problem here is that Andrew Jorgensen is a dinosaur of an executive whose sense of integrity has little basis in the economic reality of the situation. His narrative arc is one of tragedy, and the eventual survival of his company has nothing to do with him.

In other words, he’s up against an amoral monster, but he’s not the hero of this story either. There’s definitely some thematic muddling going on here if it’s framed as a David v Goliath story considering David is such an idiot. Then again, one might call Kate the David but what’s the point of trying to lionize Jorgensen or even include him?

Perhaps, it’s the big speech at the end, which is one of the few things the film is remembered for.

50 Greatest Film Quotes of All Time | Orrin Konheim on Patreon

Check this out:

LARRY THE LIQUIDATOR I VIDEO — YouTube

The text:
Lawrence Garfield: Amen. And amen. And amen. You have to forgive me. I’m not familiar with the local custom. Where I come from, you always say “Amen” after you hear a prayer. Because that’s what you just heard — a prayer. Where I come from, that particular prayer is called “The Prayer for the Dead.” You just heard The Prayer for the Dead, my fellow stockholders, and you didn’t say, “Amen.” This company is dead. I didn’t kill it. Don’t blame me. It was dead when I got here. It’s too late for prayers. For even if the prayers were answered, and a miracle occurred, and the yen did this, and the dollar did that, and the infrastructure did the other thing, we would still be dead. You know why? Fiber optics. New technologies. Obsolescence. We’re dead alright. We’re just not broke. And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market. Down the tubes. Slow but sure. You know, at one time there must’ve been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I’ll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw. Now how would you have liked to have been a stockholder in that company? You invested in a business and this business is dead. Let’s have the intelligence, let’s have the decency to sign the death certificate, collect the insurance, and invest in something with a future. “Ah, but we can’t,” goes the prayer. “We can’t because we have responsibility, a responsibility to our employees, to our community. What will happen to them?” I got two words for that: Who cares? Care about them? Why? They didn’t care about you. They sucked you dry. You have no responsibility to them. For the last ten years this company bled your money. Did this community ever say, “We know times are tough. We’ll lower taxes, reduce water and sewer.” Check it out: You’re paying twice what you did ten years ago. And our devoted employees, who have taken no increases for the past three years, are still making twice what they made ten years ago; and our stock — one-sixth what it was ten years ago. Who cares? I’ll tell you. Me. I’m not your best friend. I’m your only friend. I don’t make anything? I’m making you money. And lest we forget, that’s the only reason any of you became stockholders in the first place. You want to make money! You don’t care if they manufacture wire and cable, fried chicken, or grow tangerines! You want to make money! I’m the only friend you’ve got. I’m making you money. Take the money. Invest it somewhere else. Maybe, maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll be used productively. And if it is, you’ll create new jobs and provide a service for the economy and, God forbid, even make a few bucks for yourselves. And if anybody asks, tell ’em ya gave at the plant. And by the way, it pleases me that I am called “Larry the Liquidator.” You know why, fellow stockholders? Because at my funeral, you’ll leave with a smile on your face and a few bucks in your pocket. Now that’s a funeral worth having!

Top Ten TV Villains of 2022

 As a staff writer at TV Fanatic, I contributed to the list of 2022’s Villains We Love To Hate — TV Fanatic. Check out that list!

My entries were:

Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), Dropout, Hulu-In this docudrama of the Stanford-educated fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, Sunny is the idle millionaire who initially forms a friendship with Elizabeth as an 18-year-old studying abroad in China. As the relationship veers from age-inappropriate to worthy of many more red lights, Sunny starts to gradually take control of Elizabeth’s better instincts as a CEO. Docudramas are at their best when they frame true stories in novel ways. In this version, Elizabeth Holmes (who, yes, is still responsible for her crimes) as a proverbial Othello to Sunny’s Iago figure. Like all the best villains, there’s a dash of sympathy to the character at the start — he’s lonely; he’s sold his life invention so his best years are behind him — before his crimes start to catch up with him.

Adult Misty (Christina Ricci) Yellowjackets, Showtime-Full disclosure: The show’s inaugural season hasn’t revealed enough to determine whether Misty is the big villain in the present-day. But that’s ok: Misty has done enough bad deeds in the show’s B-plots to qualify her. And holy cow, is she pretty ingenious when it comes to evil doing. In a show as dark as Yellowjackets, Misty is a playful enough personality to balance out the resigned trauma of Shauna or the unsolved anger of Natalie. Without Misty’s presence, it would be a completely different show.

Frederick Gideon (Kevin Durand), Locke and Key, Netflix-I’m having trouble believing, I put this on my Honorable Mentions list last year, because there is a lot of ham and the actors play the level of danger pretty broadly. Kevin Durand, however, must not have gotten the memo when he signed up for the part of back-from-the-dead Revolutionary War general (from the other side) Frederick Gideon. This dude is appropriately dastardly for a man who already hated his American counterparts pre-resurrection; is currently possessed by demons; and has access to modern technology. His presence also comes with small doses of fish-out-of-water humor as he learns about cars and the rules of libraries for the first time.

Lupe (Regina Orozco), Acapulco, Apple Plus: If you’re working at the lavish Las Colinas resort and want a boss who will go easy on you, then you don’t want Lupe. And don’t even think about trying to date her niece! From her tyrannical hold on the lost and found to her low tolerance for fun on the job, Lupe isn’t easy for the laundromat workers under her domain, but she’s a riot for the viewers at home. But she’s full of surprises: She delivers a show-stopping number during the Christmas episode.

Some other entries I would add:
General Eleanor Wright (Linda Hamilton), Resident Alien, Syfy-General Wright is pretty easygoing with torture and various other forms of cruelty in order to meet her goals. On the other hand, she’s pretty consistent the way a diligent civil servant is. So you at least know what you’re getting with her.

Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), Dropout, Hulu-Sure Sunny steals a lot of scenes, but this is Elizabeth’s show. As I said above, a docudrama is about framing a story a certain way. In this eminently watchable version, Holmes is initially portrayed as someone caught in a white lie. “So what if our tech isn’t 100% yet? We’ll figure it out sooner or later,” she assumes. Is it a bad gamble or a malicious act? That’s for the audience to figure out.

Anna Delvy (Julie Garner), Inventing Anna, Netflix-Along with The Dropout, Inventing Anna was another docudrama about a woman with a complex relationship with the truth. But this show wasn’t so much about psychoanalyzing the latest headline-making criminal. Rather, Anna was just a batty meme (exhibit A: Chloe Finneman’s delicious SNL parody) and the story was more about her sly journalist counterpart (Anna Chlumsky) was going to get the story out of her. Though not a dynamic character, Delvy was a pretty entertaining villain. Also, a pretty zeitgeisty one in an era when certain politicians have turned personal narrative into something so plastic.

Quentin (Tom Hollander), White Lotus, HBO-He’s got panache. He’s got refinement. And it’s so nice that he’s just openly gay in contrast to the villains who encoded with effeminate tendencies during the more censored eras of Hollywood. But here’s why I really love him: He’s dumb as a rock as an assassin abettor, and that’s plenty entertaining. Think about it. If not for the fact that Greg entrusted him with such a fool-proof plan and Portia wasn’t so dense, his endless monologuing and extremely direct targeting of Portia would have caught most people off guard pretty instantly.

John Kreese (Martin Kove), Cobra Kai, Netflix-I mean, duh. This guy falls more toward the bottom of the list because he’s quite cartoonish in his motivations. I’m sure there’s a good drinking game to be had for how many times he launches into each of his awful monologues (i.e. “everything I did was to make you stronger blah blah blah”). But on the upside, he actually is pretty scary. Our capacity to care whether the good guys won was significantly lower in Season 6 when Kreese was in prison, so that’s a good indication. It didn’t help that one of the faux sophisticated Terry Silver’s methods of terror was trying to sow seeds of discord by (not making this up) inviting the LaRussos to a fund-raiser and then making Danny look stupid by being nicer to his wife than to him.

Satan (Leslie Bibb), God’s Favorite Idiot, Netflix-In this office comedy set at the potential dawn of the apocalypse, Leslie Bibb plays a Satan with a sexy Halloween costume kind of vibe. Comparable to Elizabeth Hurley in the 2000 Rom-Com flick The Bedazzled, Bibb is practically breaking the fourth wall to telegraph to the audience how much fun she’s having here.