I’m watching Orange Is the New Black for an assignment, and being impressed again by how the new era of television drama seems to rely on basically overrating every single thing on the tube. With the exception of the Wire and the first season of Twin Peaks, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a television drama that managed to get past sporadically entertaining and onto “good”.
Anyway, the most overrated thing I’ve seen is probably “Breaking Bad,” which is supposed to be one of the great artistic triumphs of our time but to me (in the first season at least) seemed mired in all too familiar television cliches and lazy dramatic devices. Outside of drama, there are shows I love — the Batman TV show for example, or Warner Bros cartoons, and so forth. But I don’t know that any of them are underrated exactly.
I also thought Breaking Bad was kinda blah and making a big splash mostly by being gorier than most other TV. Then again I didn’t watch too much of it. I made it further into Mad Men, but think it another good candidate for overrated. The opening credits and the show in general are very, very pretty, but beyond that there isn’t much there.
I only watched one episode of Mad Men because it just seemed like LA Law with better production values. And I didn’t hate LA Law, but I don’t really ever need to see it again.
I agree about Breaking Bad–everybody thinks it’s SO GOOD, the best show on television, but I couldn’t make it past episode one–found it kind of cliched and boring. Thought maybe I should watch more to see what all the fuss was about, but I just can’t see watching something I’m not enjoying or getting anything out of. Feel the same way about Mad Men and Orange is the New Black (although I did see a couple episodes of that). And there are shows I like–The Blacklist, Scandal. I’m definitely not snobby about being above tv (like some people I know–one of my acquaintances said that now that the Olympics is over, he can go back to not watching tv for another two years).
Underrated? Nothing comes to mind.
Quick answers. For overrated — in sheer distance between critical celebration and what I saw on the screen — I’ll go with “Orange Is the New Black.”
Underrated is harder, in part because of the long tradition of unwatched critics’ darlings. And it’s especially hard for dramas. So I’ll stretch back and say “The Fugitive” or maybe “Dragnet” (although my love for that show is really just spillover love for the brilliant radio version).
I probably don’t watch — and definitely don’t re-watch — enough t.v. to make this call. I recall being knocked out at the time by the first season of “Homicide” and how important “Good Times” was to a younger me. But I can’t bring myself to go back and verify.
I think it is impossible to judge Breaking Bad on the first season alone. While I would not go as far to say it overrated because it was quite good, I do think a lot people were willing to ignore its problems, which is true for a lot of shows.
I think sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother and Big Bang Theory are overrated, but then again I think just watching them for longer than 5 minutes would be rating them higher than they are worth.
I’d suggest King of the Hill as an underrated show; despite winning a number of Emmy Awards and running for over ten seasons, I don’t recall it ever getting the level of attention or analysis that say, Seinfeld got, despite being (IMO) far more intelligent and thought-provoking.
Big bang theory drives me nuts. I cant believe its still on television.
I don’t know what its critical reception has been like though.
Its unbelievable to me that shows can still have laugh tracks.
I once had a animation professor who spent like half a class picking apart a king of the hill episode to demonstrate what bad framing looks like.
I like the show though
Mad Men is a really long, slow build…I wouldn’t say anyone needs to watch it if the more immediate pleasures don’t work for them, but there’s a real accumulation of behavior, patterns, echoes, observations, and failures that grows with each season. It took me most of season one to like the show at all, but now I’m a bit in awe of what it has built over time, in a way very subtly, as most people pay attention to the pretty aspects, or the Forrest Gump “this moment in history” bits, which are the least interesting to me…
Most overrated, I’ll go with Breaking Bad, sure, but I could also say The Sopranos, Lost, the House of Cards remake, True Detective, Game of Thrones, the Battlestar Galactica remake…I find a lot of this new “golden age of television” to be overinflated. And as much as I enjoy it, The West Wing is a horrifically flawed show, even those first seasons…Sorkin has so many blind spots and middlebrow prejudices/assumptions that makes the show a minefield of absurdities and discomforts. An entertaining show, but not the masterpiece people still hold it up to be. Everything wrong with Studio 60 and The Newsroom is present in West Wing, just not always so pronounced.
Most underrated…that is a tough one. As with Mad Men, I think people pay attention to and praise/critique the “wrong” aspects of a lot of shows. So for my money most television is rated “wrong”, but “under” and “over” doesn’t really seem to cover it.
I would say that, overall, soap operas and anything that smacks of soap opera are pretty unfairly dismissed. The term “soap opera” is even used more often than not as a pejorative (“Downton Abbey isn’t anything special, it’s just a soap opera” – a bunch of people). That seems to me to be a pretty big gap, and a pretty obviously gendered one as well. Similarly, “Sex and the City”, though well reviewed when it aired, seems to have settled into a new role as a punch line in this post-Breaking Bad world…the sentiment seems to be “Oh, we thought this was good television but now that Bryan Cranston has killed a bunch of people, we finally understand what good television actually is, so now all those women should go back to being embarrassed of their taste.” Of course, two awful movies hasn’t helped that show’s legacy much either…
“Roseanne” is maybe a candidate for underrated. It certainly has its share of praise, but it never seems like people recognize just how truly great that show was at its peak. I still hear a lot of people talk as if John Goodman was the show’s sole strength, which…I mean, yeah, Goodman is a titan, but he was an integral part of a great show, not a standout in a mediocre one. (Again, can’t help but notice a gender issue there since the vast majority of the regular cast other than Goodman was female. Lori Metcalfe was on TV for nine years supported by great gags! Why is that not a bigger deal…?!?)
Recently, I thought the BBC show “The Shadow Line” was a faster, meaner, more dense, and better version of the whole True Detectives Who Break Bad Scandals overheated crime-drama thing…didn’t seem like anybody but a handful of American nerds even watched that one. Chiwetel Ejiofor starred in that one, and there’s gotta be something about the Shadow Line/True Detective – 12 Years a Slave/Dallas Buyers Club dichotomy. Maybe our entertainment industries are building to a final battle, Ejiofor as the incomparably compelling force of good against McConaughey as the irredeemably charming force of evil. I would watch that movie 12 times…2 hours of McConaughey in Joker makeup, trying to start parties everywhere while Ejiofor chases him down and eventually beats him to death while delivering Lear’s Act II monologue. Best of all worlds, that movie.
(P.S., Scandal doesn’t really belong in there with those other shows, the name just made the joke funnier. There are elements of that genre in Scandal, but that show had other things going on, too…I can’t say I enjoy that show, but it’s not uninteresting…)
I didn’t think I actually had this much to say about television.
Sorry for triple posting :(
My vote for most underrated is The Venture Bros.
It’s critically acclaimed but it has a very small following and I think it deserves a great deal more.
I’ve never seen Roseanne, believe it or not. I probably should, though; it sounds interesting. I’d rather make a go of that than Mad Men for sure.
Most overrated: without a doubt, The Wire. Speech after speech after speech, just in case you didn’t pick up the message being drilled in by the stories.
And if I didn’t believe that people really know how awful the ending to True Detective truly is, and will come around to acknowledge how it fucked the entire show, I’d say it’s a good choice for being one of the most overrated. What a betrayal — spiritualist propaganda using the tactics of Lost and Battlestar Galactica.
Most underrated: Green Acres was doing stuff that Larry David wouldn’t rediscover for another 20 years. King of the Hill is a good call, though. One of the best depictions of life in Texas I’ve ever seen in popular media.
Yeah, I didn’t fully appreciate King of the Hill until I started making and visiting friends in Texas, at which point I realized that it is essentially a documentary.
I wouldn’t argue the point that the animation on King of the Hill wasn’t always that great, but I think that has more to do with the nature of television animation in the age of outsourcing. But I always thought that the character designs and voice work were top-notch. The late Brittany Murphy did a spectacular job with Luanne Platter, but also did surprisingly well with the voice of the pre-pubescent version of Joseph Gribble. There was one episode where Joseph and Bobby Hill (voiced by Pamela Adlon) get trapped in a cave with Khan Junior (Lauren Tom); upon being rescued, Joseph and Bobby have a short, funny exchange that really captures (IMO) the vibe of a couple of boys having a casual conversation, busting each others’ chops, etc. The episode where Luanne performs a Christian puppet show under the name The Manger Babies is easily in my top-ten funniest TV episodes of all time with a huge part of its appeal coming from Brittany Murphy’s tour-de-force voice performance.
Thinking of Lauren Tom of course brings us to Futurama (where she was cast as both mother and daughter as she was on KotH), which I would call a seriously overrated show. Again, the voice work was fantastic, and the animation was generally good, but I was always incredibly frustrated by its reliance on ultra-geeky in-jokes and references and put off by its almost completely uninteresting and unappealing characters. Most frustrating of all for me was the fact that there was a handful of genuinely good episodes that took on some standard SF tropes (time travel, parallel universes) and did cool things with them. But most of the time I found it incredibly annoying, despite really wanting to like it.
This overrated/underrated series is a neat game, but I wish people were getting out of the box here. Like, of course Breaking Bad / Mad Men are overrated. They are so hugely hyped in the first place. I’m not sure how satisfying it is to repeatedly confirm that they are probably a little worse than people make them out to be. As soon as this post was made, someone was going to immediately list them. Which is boring.
Why not make a case against shows that are generally insidious, backward, nasty or limited, rather than just ‘overrated.’ Like Game of Thrones. What I’ve seen of the first season is ridiculously racist, where the only non-white characters are stereotyped as a clan of barbarians. When I speak to people about this, they’re like, “Oh, but see, they are actually awesome, and they have this sort of manly honor code, even if there is the raping/pillaging thing.” Even worse.
I’d like someone to make a case that Breaking Bad is also racist– I haven’t seen it past season one, but so far I’m hearing a very similar “Oh, but the Mexican drug lords are awesome…” defense from its fans.
Also– Orange is the New Black is a critical darling, but falls short of being a collective event in the way that House of Cards is. Which makes me want to stick up for a show whose cast of, and focus on, women of color is a breath of fresh air. Especially because it isn’t jerking off to its own sense of self-importance, opening with montages of drugs and depression set against Frank Sinatra songs.
I wish Orange is the New Black was the thing I had to hear about at every party, because everyone’s gaga over House of Cards is driving me insane.
I would gladly kick Game of Thrones…except it looks awful, so I’ve never watched it. (Tried to read the novels, got three pages in and realized that I’d already read enough boilerplate sword and sorcery in my adolescence, and really didn’t ever need to read any more.)
Similarly, House of Cards looks ludicrously horrible; pompous improbable DC mythologizing, barf. But I don’t want to watch it to analyze exactly why it’s horrible.
The thing about television is that just about everything seems to be overhyped. I’m not sure why that is. As Jason says, the new era of serialized drama just doesn’t seem exponentially better than the old era of serialized drama, which was solidly mediocre. Maybe television was considered so bad for so long that there had to be a turnaround? I don’t know; in terms of ambition, writing, vision, etc., it seems like film still really regularly kicks television’s ass. And it’s not like film is all that great either.
Oh…and for the reasons you state, I really wish Orange Is the New Black were actually good, rather than just kind of mediocre with moments of interest.
There are some great moments, mostly involving interactions among the women of color. But then you’re back to white middle class Piper and her sad/innocent/goofy tour through the world of the other. Bleah.
Maybe the key is to look for shows that once were overhyped, and then were demonized… like Sex in the City.
Emily Nussbaum recently became my favorite critic of the New Yorker masthead. She’s a great lampooner of the gangster-gravitas, and a balanced champion to things you never really hear hyped, like WB Family comedies. I paraphrased a line of hers above: “Jaunty oldies play over montages of corruption, a TV cliché that should be outlawed.”
Her review of OitNB and Ray Donovan, the latter being a great smack-down on the uber seriousness of current TV
Her reflection on Sex and the City
I know, I hate Piper. I think its an interesting subversion of Jekyll and Hyde, because they aren’t using the usual signifiers for “Now she’s normal, now she’s crazy!” But still found her off-putting.
But good news– allegedly is no longer the main character by next season…
I can definitely get on board with KotH being the best American Sitcom. It’s only direct competition, for me, is Frasier.
Under rated:
Xavier: Renegade Angel
Texhnolyze
Now and Then, Here and There.
Mononoke (has somehow evaded English release)
Paranoia Agent (even though people openly like it)
The Smoking Room
Overrated:
The Office (either version, but mostly the British)
Fawlty Towers.
The current enthusiasm for (American) TV Dramas in general makes me feel like most adults have not ever seen actual movies. It’s the cultural equivalent of a public erection.
Along those lines, The relaunched Dr. Who is a sadness.
I feel like I forgot something good with robots.
Another vote for house of cards as most overrated…and one for hawaii five o as underrated.
Also Yo Gabba Gabba and Wonderfall as underrated.
Overrated: As someone who enjoys musicals, I really want to like GLEE. In fact, I DO like the musical numbers, but it’s non-musical parts in between those numbers that fails me. I find the comedy boring, and the stories unengaging. Not a particularly revealing look at adolescence.
Underrated: I agree with the person who said GREEN ACRES. Great absurdist comedy, but because of it’s rural setting, critics tended to lump it in with HEE HAW.
The British sitcom DAD’S ARMY. I find it just as funny as FAWLTY TOWERS.
Is this limited to fiction shows? I have fond memories of TOMORROW with Tom Snyder. Don’t know what happened to his 1990s comeback, the program he had after Letterman. Just wasn’t the same.
That should be “its rural setting”–no apostrophe.
So, attempting for a few more underrated…though honestly, I’m not sure how well rated these shows actually are, but I like them and don’t hear them mentioned all that often, so…
Max Headroom – one of the best science fiction shows I’ve ever seen, real thought going into the aesthetics (inexpensive as they were) as well as the writing. Good cast.
Home Movies – people are starting to get behind Bob’s Burgers, but I still like Home Movies way better…everything about it works for me, including non-content decisions like ending at 52 episodes so they could have one for every week in a year. I really think this is one of the best shows to have ever aired on television.
Upright Citizens Brigade – best post-Python sketch comedy show. Better than any portion of SNL, better than the admittedly-great Kids in the Hall…I wish that Amy Poehler being a national treasure now meant that the third season would finally be released on DVD.
The Critic – Okay, yes, this failed attempt to make another Simpsons is not actually a very good show, but for some reason I just really love the dumb jokes this show was built on. And every episode, there’s usually one absolutely superb gag that I laugh at harder than I laugh at good shows.
“I think it is impossible to judge Breaking Bad on the first season alone”
Maybe it’s just me, but I think that if your show is crappy for the first, what, seven or eight hours — you’re doing something wrong. Later seasons would have to cure cancer to make up for that mediocre first season.
Underrated — Homicide definitely didn’t get enough love at the time of airing. Wonder Showzen is a critical darling but too little-known as the most avant garde cable show ever. And the genius of golden-age Simpsons will be harder to appreciate in the future, given how much of its style was adopted by everything else.
As someone who doesn’t much care for Breaking agar, I will say that it does get “better” in that from later seasons it’s clear that there I’d more complex thought going in the first season than it initially appears. That said, I don’t think it ever got better than, say, Burn Notice, it just operated in a more self-serious audience-flattering idiom.
“Agar” is a weird ipad spell-correct for whatever keys I hit when trying to type “Bad”…what I get for rushing through mobile typing without a proper proofread.
I just want to chime in here and say that OiTNB’s 1st season, when taken as a whole, has a pretty clear journey that it takes the viewer on w/r/t Piper so that by the end it’s a subversion of the middle class white girl wandering in a forest of otherness tropes. It assumes that the viewer will view Piper as a surrogate and uses this to cunning effect. Piper is overtly shown to be a monster by the end, and that monstrosity is meant to be back-read into the series as a whole. it’s kind of like how with GIRLS the pilot makes you think you’re supposed to have a certain level of sympathy for Hannah, but that’s just the show’s entry point, you have a completely different understanding of her by the end of the first season. The lost little middle class white girl schtick is part of Piper’s monstrousness. It helps if you keep in mind that her entire life pre prison is a lie, it’s a performance that she’s bought into, but because the show starts with that performance, it takes a while to develop the aspects of her that don’t fit into it (that this comes with developing the non-middle-class non-white and non-hetereosexual characters is no coincidence). The show is very much about lies (including delusions) performance and identity. And it performs as a fish out of water dramedy for the first half for a reason.
Part of what makes OITNB exciting is that it takes its viewer on this kind of arc which is– assuming you start with sympathy for Piper, as many clearly did– meant to be at least somewhat indicting of the audience. The Lost Middle Class White Girl schtick is revealed as a schtick by the end of season one, as part of Piper’s monstrosity, much as Hannah’s narcissism makes her a monster. Both shows go to some lengths to point this out by the end of their first seasons.
This is very different from The Sopranos and Mad Men (Both shows I like, to be clear) which start from a position of smug disapproval of their lead characters and never let up. Tony and Don may at times progress in those shows, but our opinion of them (And ourselves) never does.
For overrated, I’ll go with Dr. Who, Orphan Black and The IT Crowd. The first is just fan service, the second is just plot and the third is just The Big Bang Theory with talented actors.
I have very little idea how shows are rated, but in the interest of some positive slant, two of my favorites are Firefly and Community. The first three seasons of Community, particularly 2 and 3, were brilliant. After that it went precipitously down hill. Firefly may be the best thing Joss Whedon has done, though the best bits of Buffy are certainly in contention. In any case, both of these shows are infinitely better than almost any of the hour long cable dramas that everyone is constantly gushing over…
I really like Isaac’s reading of Piper there. It was what I was vaguely calling Jekyll and Hyde. I was impressed by the show’s ability to make this a twist, to make the audience really buy into the ‘fish out of water’ narrative, so as not to expect the reveal that she’s a deeply brutal person. Still, this is handled clumsily in many places, especially her trajectory with Pensatucky.
What I managed to see of Home Movies was indeed pretty inspired.
I don’t think Orange is the New Black presents Piper as a monster, but yeah, it’s definitely part of the antihero trend on t.v. It’s hard to disagree completely with Crazy Eyes when she tells Piper, “You’re not a nice person.” The boyfriend subplot is also critical of upper-middle-class white liberal types (like me) who see acceptance by The New York Times or NPR as the ultimate success. I agree that the show is overrated, as it often comes off as a cheesy sitcom in the main narrative and as a cheesy melodrama in the flashbacks, but I still enjoyed it. I felt the same way about Breaking Bad–overrated but still good.
I don’t know if it’s underrated, but I recently looked as some list (maybe by T.V. Guide?) of the all-time greatest shows, and the American version of The Office wasn’t even in the top 50. To me, it’s #2, right after The Simpsons.
I’m almost all the way through the first season of OITNB, and I really don’t buy the reading of Piper-as-monster. Piper as self-satisfied rich girl, okay, maybe.
Also, worth pointing out that Piper’s deception/corruption is linked pretty emphatically to her bisexuality and lesbianism. To the extent that she’s not what she appears and is a liar, it’s because she’s gay. I don’t necessarily find that especially subversive or clever, nor does it push against women in prison tropes, I don’t think.
Though I don’t know; maybe the last couple of episodes change everything. Probably watch them this evening, so I’ll report back.
I also think there’s an issue throughout OITNB where discovering that Piper fits in is part of the narrative about prisoners being different, right? She says at several points that she belongs there, or that she’s just like everyone else, rather than that they’re just like her, or just like the people outside. There’s almost no politicized critique of the drug war or really of prison in general. So the big reveal is that even the most seemingly unstereotypical prisoners deserve their punishment and are brutal? Again, I’m just not super impressed.
The bits sneering at Ira Glass were great though. And of course I have to support the skewering of middle-class Jewish journalists writing about the marginalized.
The Walking Dead is HUGELY overrated. Slow as molasses and poorly written characters that I couldn’t give a fig about. I think it’s only popular because it’s the only zombie show around. If someone came along and did it slightly better, they’d blow TWD out of the water. So sick of that show….
I don’t keep up with a lot of TV, but a lot of the recent stuff has been unwhelmingly “meh” and yet so much recieves such accolades. Hannibal, while having some interesting enough cinematography, plods. Same with Walking Dead, and I wish I could eject Supernatural and Doctor Who out an airlock for their stunning mediocrity compared to their hyped-up followers.
What shows do I like? West Wing and Parks and Rec, but neither of those are really “underrated”. Oh! I really love Pie in the Sky (starring the late Richard Griffiths)and the new Ms. Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, both of which deserve more attention, and I was very fond of Life on Mars/Ashes To Ashes and Doc Martin. Not so hot on the BBC Sherlock except for the first season.
I’m really not big on the antihero trend. So much of it is uncritically reveling in People Behaving Badly, and I’m just not interested in that.
Just to be clear, I love This American Life. I’ve been listening almost since its inception, and I think they’ve done some incredibly riveting journalism. I think David Sedaris, the late David Rakoff, et al. are pretty funny, too. But Ira Glass can be irritating, and there’s certainly a lot to satirize about the show.
Right before Orange is the New Black was released on Netflix, I heard the real Piper Kerman tell a story about her prison experience on The Moth, NPR’s somewhat This American Life-ish “storytelling” show. The Moth has featured some good stuff, too, but there is something irritatingly self-satisfied about the storytellers describing their traumas and epiphanies and then basking in the audience’s applause.
I’m not sure where it falls on the over/under spectrum, but “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia” seasons 2-4 (those are the ones I’ve seen) are great… much smarter than what passes for great television. I also thought the British three part mini series “Red Riding” was excellent. It got some buzz, but not nearly as much as it should have.
Oh yeah, there was a conversation a while back on the “Mindless Ones” blog about American television, and a lot of the comments were in line with what I’m reading here, IIRC.
I didn’t care for the Ira Glass mockery on OitNB because it felt wide of the mark; I don’t believe the fiancé’s dull hearsay-riddled monologue would have made it onto This American Life, except as a jumping off point for an attempt to find and interview the prisoners for their side of the story.
I seem to be the only person I know who both
A. is familiar with Firefly
and
B. Doesn’t like Firefly.
Half the time it seems like an advertisement for its own adorableness. Whedon seems to be a multitalented storyteller, but I need insulin after every encounter with his work.
I love Six Feet Under, but I worry that a lot of that is identity politics on my part.
Arrested Development was amazing for a while, but it got bound up in its self-referential convolutions by Season 3. What I saw of Season Netflix was awful… It seemed that shooting around the cast’s scheduling issues prevented the ensemble stories that marked the show at its best.
And House of Cards suuuuuuuuux. I say this as a fan of Spacey, Fincher, and Washington intrigue drama. I think it might work as a kind of BDSM fantasy, though. Each episode ends with him telling the latest victim/sub “Ah strangled that hooka ma self, but the press and police ah gonna think yew dunnit” and then the sub obligingly gives it all up to him, because no one else in Washington knows how to fight dirty, apparently. Compare this to Boardwalk Empire, which is far from great, but if Nuckie tried that kind of gambit the other guy would say “Is this a joke? I strangle a hooker with my breakfast each morning. You think I don’t know how to launder my linens? You just started a war, Nuck. And I win wars; it’s what I fuckin’ do!” I know which pulp I’d rather watch.
Also, re OITNB, the fact that the major antagonist is the stupid religious hillbilly is pretty awful. It’s like the only oppressed groups liberals are allowed to mock and sneer at are poor people from Appalachia. Barf.
My vote for most overrated series is Downton Abbey. A show that was mediocre to begin with and has only gotten worse each season.
Though Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones definitely round out the top five.
I’m likely not the best judge of what is over/underrated, but based on generally perceived hype, I would second the vote for Community-in spite of always being on the verge of cancellation it manages to get it right fairly often (especially early seasons). I would also add Portlandia for comedy, and Foyle’s War (BBC) for drama.
OK, I’m intrigued. How does Mad Men remind you of LA Law?? Aside from so much being in an office, the tone feels so different to me, but I only have hazy childhood memories of LA Law (I thought it sorta started the “whimsical” David E Kelly style I hate so much…)
My vote for most overrated goes to Seinfeld which is praised unceasingly and which I almost never find funny.
Isaac: “… it’s kind of like how with GIRLS the pilot makes you think you’re supposed to have a certain level of sympathy for Hannah”
Except that in GIRLS, Hannah is shown to be unsympathetic, spoilt, and idiotic right from episode one.
I agree about Pennsyltucky, although there’s a nice moment when she returns from solitary to the cafeteria and her best friend silently hugs her.
I watched several episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and absolutely despised it. It seemed to be by and for people who think that disgusting behavior is actually cute. I guess they were trying to extend the premise of Seinfeld, but there’s a big difference between the hijinx of shallow neurotics and the hijinx of brain-dead, reprehensible assholes.
Okay, finished watching OITNB. I have to say, while Isaac’s “she’s a monster” reading would be nice, I just can’t see it even a little bit. She is threatened repeatedly by someone who is clearly insane and then experiences multiple traumatic and devastating emotional reversals. In the final scene, she is the one who is attacked; she is wounded, she calls for help (rather than fighting back) and the guard deliberately ignores her. When she lashes out, it is brutal, it’s true, but you’re totally sympathetic to her right to the end, and the show goes out of its way and then beyond out of its way to show you that she’s been pushed to the brink and is responding to a real threat. The final trigger is Pensatucky telling her she isn’t worthy of love — but Christ, the two loves of her life both just dumped her in sequence. I just see no reason to read it as “she’s a brutal person,” rather than as, “she’s someone who is for the most part nonviolent, just as she looks, but has been pushed to the edge of her endurance by a plot that pretty relentlessly works to push her to the edge of her endurance in the name of a big finish.”
I mean, Piper’s roommate also attacks someone, and with much less provocation. Plus she’s actually murdered someone before. But we’re not supposed to see her as a brutal person, but rather as someone who can be pushed to violence in the right situation. I don’t see any difference in the way Piper is treated.
I guess it’s true that both Alex and Larry repeatedly say she’s an awful person and manipulative and self-centered, and maybe she is those things to some degree, but the truth is neither Alex nor Larry is particularly trustworthy or admirable. Is she supposed to be a monster because she’s slept with multiple people? Because she’s bisexual? It just doesn’t map to me.
______
Suat, good call on Seinfeld; that show is crap. Same for Friends, which is also often presented as if has some modicum of worth.
Eric, it’s been a long time since I saw LA Law, and as I said I only saw one episode of Mad Men, so I don’t know that I’m really in a position to defend the off-the-cuff comparison, alas.
While I think a lot of tv, especially recently, seems to be overrated, I admit that some critical darlings (Six Feet Under, My So-Called Life) are shows that, at least when they aired, meant an awful lot to me. It’s hard to compare TV with film especially after just watching a few episodes, since the entire strength of any series (but especially a serialized one) is about the fact that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. (I think I used that oft misused expression correctly :P ) But, I mean for example I enjoyed watching Looking this season more than any gay-themed indie movie I saw this year.
This is a nice piece about the ways OITNB gets race/class issues right:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2013/09/03/orange-is-the-new-black-and-how-we-talk-about-race-and-identity/
Concur with Seinfeld for overrated. It had some great, funny commentary on nonsensical aspects of our society — its attack on the absurdity of rental car “reservations” may have been what fixed the system for all of us — but most episode plots could be reduced to “Someone lied — probably George. The gang tries to cover it up. Hijinks ensue.”
I lost respect and affection for the characters and abandoned the show. Of course, I returned to watch the final episode, wherein the writers reward my judgmental curmudgeonliness by sending the lead characters to prison for all their bad behavior. That didn’t make me want to go back and watch what I missed, but it was a nice touch.
Concur with Homicide for underrated. Great show. Firefly is my favorite, but it’s gotten it’s due, and it died before it had a chance to go bad. I used to love Justified, but it’s lost it’s humor, and its characters have lost their charm.
I apologize for the inconsistent use of “its” in that post. I was all over the map. Apple “helped.”
TV is just as silly as it’s ever been, but they’ve adopted mannerisms that make people take it more seriously now. The signifiers are mostly things like “men talking with a deep voice”, taken to a ridiculous extreme in series such as True Detective.
But it seems like just about everybody has accepted that we’re living in “the golden age of quality TV” now. Even seemingly intelligent critics take pap like Breaking Bad seriously. So I think we’ll probably due for a backlash, and people will stop talking about House of Cards around the water cooler with a strange sense of pride, and go back to talking about Dallas (or the next equivalent) with a slight sense of embarrassment.
As they should.
First off, Noah, you’re forgetting Crazy Eyes scene with her after the interview airs. Crazy Eyes, like the viewer, sees Piper as a certain kind of person sans much evidence other than her being thin, blonde, white and pretty at the beginning of the show, and comes to have a different, much harsher understanding of her by the end. It’s one of the ways that her eyes are crazy, but they’re not just her eyes, they’re our eyes too.
Piper’s growing monstrosity surfaces pretty early in the show when she sells out the woman with a cell phone, who looms like the ghost of shitty deeds past over the solitary confinement episode. She’s also shot literally like a monster in the final scene, with the camera below her looking up at her, making her appear to loom over the viewer, her eyes wild, her face starkly lit.
It has little to do with her sexuality, and more to do with the fact that she uses people. That’s what she’s not willing to admit, and why Alex, for all her flaws, becomes the more sympathetic character.r Alex knows what she is and admits it. Piper constantly performs this good girl schtick when she was a willing accomplice to Alex, and uses everyone in her life to get what she wants while continuing to convince herself that she’s “the good girl.” And yet the show continues having sympathy for her, or at least trying to understand her, which I think is pretty fascinating and complex. As you say, we understand why she loses it at Pensatucky, but the show shoots her the way it does anyway.
I really think it’s one of the most complicated and intelligent shows on TV. I believe they’ve also announced that Piper isn’t really the main character next season and it will be more of ensemble show, which seems like a move in the right direction.
Can a TV show really be underrated? Even the least successful gets a level of promotion and exposure that most writers or musicians never see in their lives. Or overrated; there’s hardly such a thing as a TV “canon”, outside very narrow limits of space and time, as I think this thread demonstrates – nearly all the shows mentioned are American and still running, or recent.
That said…
American Horror Story: disgusting and boring.
Farscape: a likeable cast, but every episode degenerated into a lot of unintelligible shouting and running around the ship.
And, on the other hand…
It’s Dark Outside: British, ran two series in 1964-5, totally forgotten until Network DVD released the surviving episodes last year. A gem.
I still don’t see it, Isaac. She sells out the person with the cell phone in order to get the track opened for another prisoner — and she refuses to give the person’s name. Suzanne does say she’s not a nice person, and I think we’re supposed to agree with that to some degree — though, you know, it’s really Larry who’s not nice there. Piper complained about Suzanne to Larry when Suzanne *was stalking her*, and peed on her floor. Are we really supposed to think Piper’s actions were completely crazy or out of line? She’s so horrible that she goes from, possibly not nice, to actually a monster? And as for Alex…she’s just not that sympathetic. She’s hardly honest with Piper or herself, I’d say. She’s totally manipulative and cruel.
The show just is not that smart. It suggests Piper is not an ideal middle-class helpless saint, but it does that mostly by playing on tropes of bisexuality (she’s deceptive, she’s self-centered, she’s untrustworthy), and having her be corrupted or pushed to the edge by what’s going on in prison. She’s not presented as evil or a psychopath. The worst thing she does is to defend herself violently. On a pulp television show, you need to really work a lot harder than the show does to present self-defense as an illegitimate option.
I don’t think you can claim she’s inhuman or a monster without questioning the humanity of other folks in prison, honestly. She reacts badly to really contrived bad situations. That’s not brilliant and subversive. It’s just television.
I mean, I don’t want to say it’s especially stupid for television. There are class and racial critiques, and Piper is not a completely sympathetic character in part as a result. But I don’t think she ever actually becomes an anti-hero, and the show never manages to cast off its quite heavy baggage of contrivance and stereotype.
And I don’t think she’s shot like a monster at the end. It grabs onto horror film tropes to some degree, but it’s also using stalker/final girl reversals. We see her bloody and freaking out and the Deliverance extra coming after her, and then she fights back. I just don’t think that’s undermining anyone’s paradigm.
I imagine the TV “Canon” at least in America is reflected by the U.S. writers guild top 101 best written tv show list, voted on by writers guild members:
http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=4925
Although in theory that’s just a list of best written TV shows I can’t imagine you’d get a much different list if the question was just “best” tv.
I guess my vote for overrated would be Doctor Who. It’s supposed to be a story of imagination, about a character who can go anywhere in space and time. In practice though, it’s mostly just a dude running around in a rock quarry, or actors desperately stretching out a 150 minute serial through small talk, or more recently, a lame ass attempt at doing an American action movie but with less narrative coherence.
Most underrated? I’m rather fond of Daria, which is amusing, and pretty unique.
Dang, I was really hoping someone else would want to talk about The Venture Bros. as the most underrated (or overrated) show on television. It’s not as “big” as a lot of the shows that have been discussed but its equally worthy of analysis in my humble opinion.
TV canon lists like the one linked to by Pallas never fail to impress me with how shitty American TV has been/is. Possibly even worse than the American comics canon which is saying something.
While I’d agree that The Wire (the first four seasons anyway) and the first season of Twin Peaks are the best dramas that have ever been on TV, if those are the only two dramas that surpass the bar for “good”, then pretty much everything else is going to be overrated, no matter how faintly it’s praised.
If shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, True Detective, Boardwalk Empire and some of the lesser lights like Sons of Anarchy and The Shield, were books, they’d be considered competent middlebrow genre fiction. It’s not a coincidence that competent middlebrow genre fiction writers like Pelecanos, Lehane and Price end up writing for those shows.
Compared to what TV dramas were prior to 1999? It’s like night and day. I think it was Tom Spurgeon who made the point that Magnum PI would not have been out of place on a list of the top 10 TV dramas of all time that had been drawn up in 1995. Maybe the “Golden Age” shows aren’t good, but they’re a damn sight better than what came before.
King of the Hill and large portions of Roseanne are both great and capture lower middle class suburbia as well as anything I’ve encountered.
There are only so many hours in the day, but I’d disagree with the notion that any show that doesn’t have its act together in the first season isn’t worth watching. Roseanne is a perfect example of this. There is a lot of wheel spinning in the first season while they figured out what worked and what didn’t.
I also think that a lot of shows overstay their welcome. The Sopranos spun its wheels by repeating the same basic arc (new gun in town, 12 episodes later, Tony removes the threat) for 3 seasons because HBO kept throwing money to keep adding seasons.
Finally, while disagreeing with Charles gives me pause, I didn’t mind the ending of True Detective. It went against my expectation (three fresh corpses in Carcosa), and I like to be surprised.
To break away from the “overrated/underrated” thing a bit, which I think can be a bit limiting, and talk a bit more about TV as a medium: I think much of the gap between TV and film that Noah remarks on simply stems from the fact that TV is a much younger medium – not just in absolute terms, but in terms of being taken seriously, both by its producers and its consumers. It’s only been within the last decade and a half that we’ve seen relatively high production values go into TV shows, for example, such that things like the direction and editing of individual television episodes became a major priority, giving new shows the kind of sheen that older shows, typically cranked out as quickly and cheaply as possible, never had. These slicker productions have become possible in part because of changes in technology (it’s now cheaper to make them) and changes in the entertainment industry as a whole (it’s now more possible and more acceptable for “name” actors to work in TV as opposed to, or even alongside, working in film).
All of this means that television has acquired a lot of prestige in a relatively short period of time, through things like higher production values, better casts, better-paced schedules that allow for less-rushed writing and episode production, etc. And all of this is wowing critics and viewers on at least a superficial level – after all, “it’s not TV, it’s HBO” is basically the promise that you’re going to be seeing movie-level production values on your television.
But where this typically breaks down is in the actual storytelling. TV has its own hoary cliches and well-worn tropes, and most of these critically-lauded dramas come stuffed to the gills with them. (Tellingly, critics kept expecting that Breaking Bad was going to subvert the cliche of the male anti-hero revenge fantasy simply because it kept pushing it so much.) And the storytelling element that’s unique to television as a visual medium – episodic serialization – is one that seems rich with promise – discrete storytelling units that can stand apart, but add up to a complete whole – but one that has rarely been used that effectively outside of The Wire.
I think we’re still in the relatively early stages of the maturation of television as a medium, and that we’ll see better series and less hyperbolic criticism over time (after all, there can only be so many “best shows on television ever” before people start to notice that “best” has started to lose some of its value).
As an aside, and since Home Movies has been mentioned here a few times, I wanted to note that I think animation on television really has seen an amazing wealth of fascinating, excellent and creative stuff produced in the last decade-plus, whereas the state of American animated feature films is pretty dire.
Christopher, that all sounds right, including the point about animated features. I guess I’m not entirely sure your optimism is warranted — if critics and fans love utter dreck like House of Cards, where’s the incentive for improvement? But perhaps I’m just overly crotchety. I certainly hope you’re right.
Re: The Venture Bros., what I’ve seen of it has been very hit-or-miss. I’ve laughed out loud, but its obsessive pop culture references leave me cold. In all honesty, it seems a bit too below the radar to be overrated or underrated. In this way it seems very much along the lines of Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. In the Adult Swim/stoner block, the only true classic (IMO) was The Brak Show, though it would be difficult for me to articulate exactly why, but I have to say that the episode where Brak and his buddies have a rap contest and manage to essentially encapsulate the entire history of the genre in about 5 minutes took things to a whole other level.
Way, way too optimistic. Esp. this:
“I think we’re still in the relatively early stages of the maturation of television as a medium, and that we’ll see better series and less hyperbolic criticism over time…”
This is almost as good as it gets. If you want to see TV slightly less hindered by commercial demands, then maybe look at the BBC model – a scattering of bright lights here and there at most.
Asking for American TV to get better is like asking McDonald’s to produce better food. That’s not the business model and not expected by their customers. But they do make good french fries and apple pie. Just consider the dumbed down science programming underwritten with a hefty check now on Fox – Cosmos. And expecting *mainstream* TV criticism to get better – it hasn’t even in film crit!
The long term serialized demands (and hence financial cost) of TV will only make things worse, not better. Consider a project like Person of Interest which took nearly 2 seasons before it started becoming more settled and above average – that has everything to do with the ratings game.
And Noah can rest assured that Breaking Bad doesn’t get better. It will probably get worse from his point of view (my prediction based on reading his criticism of season 1). And I’ve watched every single episode and actually don’t mind it. It’s just not the earth shattering masterpiece people want it to be.
I disagree with lumping venture bros in with harvey birdman, but I have to concede that it is too acclaimed to be underrated and also too unknown to be considered overrated. What really blew me away about the Venture Bros. was how it talked about pedophilia (among other touchy issues), which was as far as I know, no one else had ever tried to talk about seriously on a tv show.
I’ll gladly stand up for Game of Thrones. First, calling some bit of pop culture racist or misogynist is hardly daring. It’s par for the (internet dis)course these days. Noah supplies another example above of doing just that. Basically, you choose some show, comic or book that has ambiguity, focus on only part of the ambiguity, and watch people argue. Second, relatedly, the charge of racism is old news with Martin’s series and the TV adaptation. The next step is to say it supports violence against women (again, reduce the ambiguities).
Anyway, the charge of racism regarding the “savages,” the Dothraki: I’m not completely happy with the way they’re portrayed on the show, since I always pictured them as Comanche types. Evidently, Martin says he based them in his own mind on the Mongols with Native American coloring. Regardless, he obviously read about the way horse-based, roaming cultures operate, because that’s how the Dothraki behave. If that’s insultingly barbaric to a reader or viewer, I’d question his or her own biases. In the end, Martin’s ideological point (at least one of them) is made pretty clear: the savages are no more savage than the Eurocentric cultures of Westeros. They still do some pretty savage stuff, though. But so did the Comanche (whoboy, did they). The key is that Martin treats them with a good deal of respect as characters (they’re portrayal is no more insulting than the cultures of Westeros). I have a hard time seeing that as racist.
Also, there are a good deal of cultures with varying ethnicities and colors in the books, even if Martin is cagey about giving away any sort of 1-to-1 relations with the realworld. And none of these groups are “barbarians.”
Finally, I find the series’ approach to politics and ideological struggles of various sorts to compare quite favorably to fantasy authors I’ve read who are respected for such things, like Le Guin and Delaney. In fact, in terms of dealing with such issues in terms of well rounded characters interacting with each other, Martin is a good deal better at it. Naturally, the TV show is going to reduce a lot the complexity, and it’s sort of difficult for me to separate what I’ve gleaned from the books versus the show, so I’m not quite sure how I’d rank the show if I hadn’t read the books first.
“calling some bit of pop culture racist or misogynist is hardly daring.”
I think she was saying that criticizing Game of Thrones would be somewhat daring, since hardly anybody does that.
Also…it’s true that race and gender are often discussed in pop culture conversations now. You still get a lot of backlash though; people continue to get really pissed off, in ways that can be fairly abusive.
The way I was taught it in a class way back when was that American dramatic tv writers upped their game in the 80s with Shows like St. Elsewhere and Hill Street blues. Apparently pre 80s sitcoms hold up a lot better than pre 80s dramatic television shows.
I think there’s something to the idea that TV has gotten- if not “smart” necessarily, at least more narratively complex. Probably less corny, maybe more narratively sophisticated, at least in the better dramatic shows.
Of course before cable there just wasn’t much tv content being produced, comparatively speaking, so one would expect more good shows on average today just because there’s more people trying their hand at it.
Just pointing out this may be as good as it gets but its arguably a bit better than it was.
Nah, Game of Thrones TV gets its fair share of criticism. It’s hasn’t received anywhere near the adulation heaped on the first half of True Detective for example. I think people do take GoT seriously but only slightly above the level of something like Star Wars. It’ s pretty tasty popcorn as TV shows go. If only all TV shows reached this basic level of competency.
I guess I’ve never seen any coverage that was less than adulatory…but since I’m not watching, I’m not looking that hard for reviews and such, admittedly.
I havnt heard a single negative comment about Game of Thrones outside of this website. Everything I hear is about how absolutely amazing it is.
I could take it or leave it personally.
I haven’t looked for reviews or anything either I’m just going off what my friends and family say.
I have mixed feelings about Game of Thrones, but it certainly has gotten a lot of bad reviews–particularly before it caught into the cultural zeitgeist when critics seemed to not think it would be a hit and felt more comfortable knocking it. However, the negative reviews seemed to be more of the “well no man with a social life or any woman would even find this entertaining,” and not to go much deeper than that. This has changed–and fairly drastically as the series took off. Nussbaum gave one of the earlier mainstream reviews that, while she had problem with all the (almost completely female) extras during the “sexposition” scenes the show seems to have created, she also made a strong case for how very good much of the show is.
One thing about the current “golden age of TV” vs movies is even cable tv is, almost exclusively still made for a wider audience than the majority of the more interesting (ie not mainstream Hollywood) films. So it seems in some ways not fair to compare them with some of the more interesting under-the-radar films. I will say I enjoyed a lot of tv more this year than I did most of the Oscar nominated best films.
Community has a small, rabid set of fans, but it’s been consistently ignored by the awards committees and has always been on the brink of cancellation. At its best, it is genuinely weird and actually tries to get at emotions. It takes a lot of chances and often fails, but when it gets it right, it gets it right.
Venture Bros went from a pop culture-obsessed name-checking show in season one to something far more complex, dark and ambiguous as the seasons have unraveled. It also has a rabid fanbase and is a critical darling, only it rarely gets awards recognition.
I’d also mention the Adam Reed trio of shows: Sealab 2021, Frisky Dingo and Archer. Archer is the most conventional of the three shows by far, yet it’s still far stranger than most anything else on TV. It also generates more laughs than anything else I watch on TV.
Overrated: Northern Exposure. The word “twee” is such a perfect match for this show’s content that I just want to write it over and over again.
“I’d also mention the Adam Reed trio of shows: Sealab 2021, Frisky Dingo and Archer. ”
Aren’t these all extremely derivative of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, (Okay mainly familiar with Sea Lab) and as such, not much to write home about?
Dean — show me the middlebrow novel with dialogue as good as Deadwood’s. The plotting’s loose, and the show often meanders, but that dialogue, holy shit
Archer bothers me because it seems like they write about a half dozen jokes per season and then repeat them ad nauseam. It was funny for a couple seasons just because no one has ever written a show in that style but now that it has failed to evolve over five seasons its seriously wearing out its welcome.
It’s probably my vote for most overrated show actually.
Jones –
I love Deadwood’s dialog (I didn’t mean to give the wrong impression, I love middlebrow genre fiction, particularly when it’s done well).
I don’t know about dialog necessarily, but James Ellroy comes to mind as someone whose narration would come close.
The Reed shows have nothing to do with Space Ghost Coast To Coast. Sealab drew some comparison only because it repurposed old animation, but the format was completely different from SG:C2C. Frisky Dingo and Archer have brand new animation, and none of the three shows had the same kind of non sequitur style of humor as SG:C2C. The only show that’s ever really tried to imitate it is the TV version of Comedy Bang! Bang!
Archer completely reinvented its premise this season, reacting in part to that sensation of starting to tread the same ground.
In that list of 101 best shows I counted six that weren’t American, and they were all British. I think that kind of proves the point. Evidently no TV exists outside the English-speaking world.
Archer is a guilty pleasure. It’s wall-to-wall People Behaving Badly, always offensive and sometimes disgusting. The new premise makes the characters even more reprehensible. But it’s gorgeously animated. Every episode, there are one one or two breathtaking scenes that make you drop your jaw and press the pause button. One was a shot of Tangiers that I’d hang on the wall. And somehow, the lack of live actors makes all the misbehavior more tolerable. Plus, it’s smart. Each segment introduces random information from the real world that shows off the writers’ education. The title character excels at pithy exposition.
Bad behavior brings a hypothesis to mind. Are we overappreciative of decent scripted drama because we spent years in the golden age of reality television? I would certainly prefer a bad episode of The Sopranos or even The Waltons to an episode of Real Housewives.
If i ever hear some one talking about Family Guy ever again…
Someone up there mentioned Paranoia Agent earlier for most underrated, I would second that. That show is phenomenal, shame no-one takes animation seriously.
Love Paranoia Agent (at least mostly loved it–it fell apart for me near the end, but not in the same way as earlier animes like Evangelion.)
As for the list being nearly entirely American with a few UK exceptions–that’s standard for most such lists, be it for movies, theatre or (to a slightly lesser degree) novels. A few of the really famous “world cinema” classics will be listed out of obligation, or non-English novels, but… Foreign tv shows–aside from PBS Brit imports–being even available for viewing in North America is a very recent thing, and one that seems difficult to avoid with lists like that. I just wish they’d point that out at the start.
Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show are largely forgotten, but they were two of my favorites. The latter had one of the best theme songs ever.
Agreed re: It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and especially wrt the theme song, especially this version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdy9CjZ6B8
Dean: “I didn’t mind the ending of True Detective. It went against my expectation (three fresh corpses in Carcosa), and I like to be surprised.”
But, after a decimating critique of optimism through Rust’s arguments for pessimism and the destruction of Marty’s self-mythology, the show ends with a religious conversion during a cut following the hokey “while possibly dead, one hero surprises the audience by just getting to his gun in time to shoot the bad guy before he kills the other hero.” No existential analysis, just thriller cliches serving as our salvation. Now, some of my friends said my reaction was due to my own metaphysical depressive disposition and general dismissal of religion, but I don’t really mind narratives of religious conversions or even hope, but the writer has to earn it. It takes a little more than an elliptical yaddayaddayadda to provide the Confessions of St. Augustine. And that last line goes down as the worst I’ve ever encountered on TV: “the lights are winning.” Jesus, that turned my disappointment to anger. (BTW, someone told me it was an Alan Moore quote.)
Noah: “Also…it’s true that race and gender are often discussed in pop culture conversations now. You still get a lot of backlash though; people continue to get really pissed off, in ways that can be fairly abusive.”
Well, the criticism is probably going to be considered abusive by the creators and fans of the designata, so you’ll likely get a response in kind. If you don’t consider your work racist, and someone calls it racist, then that’s going to feel abusive, you know? And much of this kind of criticism on the web functions as a way to shut up discourse, rather than encourage it — what might be called passive-aggressive abuse. (None of this applies to discussions with white power advocates, of course.)
By “abusive” I mean that women especially who make these kinds of criticisms can and do get rape and death threats. I think that’s an exponential escalation from saying, “this piece of art is racist”, or even from saying, “you are racist for creating this.”
Threats of physical violence tend to be more abusive than descriptions, yes.
The Singing Detective is pretty terrific. It’s a miniseries; presumably a 26 episode season of it would have devolved pretty far, pretty fast.
“If shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, True Detective, Boardwalk Empire and some of the lesser lights like Sons of Anarchy and The Shield, were books, they’d be considered competent middlebrow genre fiction.”
I agree with the sentiment, but I’d remove Deadwood from that list. It does things with pacing, language, and performance that set it apart from most other television shows. If the new era of HBO has created any real piece of art, Deadwood is it. I’d put it over The Wire which, for all its intelligence (and I do love The Wire), falls just short of the aesthetic greatness that Deadwood achieves.
Charles: “True Detective…but I don’t really mind narratives of religious conversions or even hope, but the writer has to earn it. It takes a little more than an elliptical yaddayaddayadda to provide the Confessions of St. Augustine.”
I agree – it was thoroughly unmoving and unremarkable. The Alan Moore homage is supposed to be from Top 10 which sort of figures. I’m pretty sure that the idea that the “lights are winning” is not religious but derives from optimistic humanism.
I’d have to nominate Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace as an underrated show. Probably one of the funniest and weirdest send ups of pulp media and one of the only purposefully ‘so bad it’s good’ pieces of work to actually pull that off.
Orange is the New Black is great. Please don’t underrate it for making a thing out of Piper’s bisexuality… of course her fiance disapproves and sees it as part of her duplicity, but you know what, having a secret that you feel you have to hide (whether or not it ‘should’ have to be hidden) *does* make you good at living a double life and misleading other people!!!
The conservative mom is the key here, more than the bisexuality itself – obviously Piper’s background values keeping up appearances over getting in touch with your own true desires, leading to that “Who even are you???” effect not just for other people but also for Piper herself.
Personally I think the show is very smart about these kinds of psychological touches – including the way it suggests that Piper must be a very emotional and somewhat manipulative personal – but even if it weren’t, the acting is really really really good, and that counts for a lot.
I even give the sudden turns into TV-drama land (chicken episode, Pensaultalky arc) a pass, because they’re done in a surreal and over the top way that I quite enjoy.
Underrated… Adventure Time? I don’t think it’s actually underrated, though. That show sucks you into a kind of weird mental state if you watch too many episodes in a row, there’s a lot of sadness in it.
The acting is mostly pretty good, I’ll agree. It flounders at times because of mediocre writing, though. (Red’s a character that seems kind of adrift in the melodrama, for instance; Suzanne as whacky wise moral center is kind of nauseating, though the actor is very charismatic; Pensatucky does the best she can with her part, but it’s a horrible role.)
I don’t really feel ready to give it a pass on the way it deals with gayness either, unfortunately. There could be a discussion of the problems of passing and what that means, if they wanted there to be. Instead, as Isaac points out, the show makes a big deal of condemning Piper for being manipulative and awful, and ties that to her sexual double life. Gayness just isn’t politicized at all, except for Healy, who gets used as a convenient repository for the awfulness of homophobia so that the show can distance itself from it without really having to acknowledge its own prurience or ambivalence. And why are all the gay women white? Except for Suzanne, who is figured as crazy?
The lack of politicization in general is pretty striking. Even the nun who is in prison for political reasons doesn’t seem to articulate any sort of ideological discomfort with the criminal justice system. Janet Mock’s character runs for election in order to try to get better health care, but that’s presented as basically selfish, rather than based on any kind of principle. I think the black inmates make fun of political organizing as a white thing — as if somehow black people weren’t responsible for the single most important grass roots political movement of the last 150 years. It’s especially interesting because 70s exploitation women in prison films often *were* very politicized and engaged with feminism. So much for progress.
Yeah, I can see that, Suat, but I think it has more of a spiritual tinge due to the whole bit about meeting his daughter and father that came before the line. Spiritualist humanism, I guess.
It’s obvious that no one on hooded utilitarian knows shit about tv shows because otherwise they’d be recommending Enlightened as one of the most underrated tv shows ever.
It’s the only show that has done the female anti-hero right, starts like Orange is the New Black and builds to an explicitly political conclusion.
I *love* Enlightened. I can barely believe it was by Mike White–I find him talented but his films a chore to get through (I kinda liked his very short lived, subversive soap Pasadena on Fox ten or more years back.) Too bad it simply never caught on–HBO even gave it a second season after remarkably dismal numbers the first year, but they continued to fall.
I still see the tone of Noah’s original piece, especially when it comes to TV in general, as reactionary against all of the “We are in the Golden Age of TV/TV is better than film right now” bla bla stuff we’ve been getting for almost a decade now (and I don’t see it ending anytime soon.) And I get that sentiment. I personally also feel that the shows that critics really hold in high esteem seem to be these uber (white, straight) “masculine” shows — some of which I’ve liked and loved, many of which just seem rote by now. But, I personally still feel there’s some truth to the overall quality of American TV now as compared to 25 years back, if taken as a whole. And I also do appreciate that people have become so passionate about serialized programming — which really is the only way TV can rival movies. As pretentious as it may be to compare it to novels, I do understand why many make the comparison (and it’s not a new one–the exec producer of one of the first primetime serials, Peyton Place insisted his show was not just a night time version of a soap opera, but rather a serialized novel for tv, in the style of the Victorian writers — which is a show that incidentally actually holds up fairly well to any better praised drama of its time in terms of acting, directing and dialogue–
I have read the critique you’re looking for. Sorry I can’t point you to it but it is out there.
Thank you, Lastworthy, for mentioning _The Smoking Room_! God it’s a great show and American viewers have no opportunity to see it unless you caught it one of the few times they showed it on BBC America. The simplicity of the structure, the satire of office and social life, the jokes! Such recognizable and unlikable characters. Sheeeeit. If there were a region-1 DVD available I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Another unseen gem is Steve Coogan’s _Saxondale_ but I only recommend the first series. The second series felt like a completely different show, and not one worth watching. In the first series, the jokes always seemed to be on the people who were being cruel, and in the second, the opposite.
Hey Charles,
I see your point. But…
For me, after the ending, I was willing to look back (without rewatching it) and see Cohle’s espoused philosophy was essentially him lying to himself the whole time. Between his undercover work and his interview in 2012, it’s clear he has a rare talent for lying.
I’d need to go back and rehear his arguments for why he didn’t just smoke his sidearm, but it seems to me, that for him to remain a cop, after going through what he’d been through, and then coming back after 10 years away to try to close the case is some sort of optimism at work in Cohle, no matter how much he would deny it.
Granted, I didn’t think any of this until I saw the ending, so it was definitely a swerve, but it’s one I can live with.
As for the ending, at this point the Mexican standoff that leaves everyone a corpse is just as hackneyed as the guy thought dead jumps up and kills the bad guy ending. It’s certainly what I expected to happen.
The Moore swipe didn’t bother me. But I’m pretty much a sucker for Hollywood sentimentality. And it’s a nice sentiment. Plus Cohle’s brain has to be pretty much cooked by that point anyway, years of chemical abuse, severe blood loss, general anesthetic and whatever pain killers he was currently on, he’s not going to come up with much beyond what any college kid on his first acid trip would say while looking up at the starts.
Now, the cynic in me was thinking “now there can be a sequel”, and sure enough Nic Pizzolatto discussed the possibility of Hart/Cohle novels at some point.
I’ve never understood how comics fans hold far higher standards for tv and films than comics. I love Oz, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, Deadwood and Game Of Thrones; even though most of them have very significant faults, they still offer a quality of writing, characterization/acting that I’ve never seen in comics (even a lot of they best comic artists can only manage wooden or overreacting that would embarrass a show or film).
I really think that some of the harsher critics would be standing in circles buzzing all over comics that had even the quality of a b or c-list show.
I watched the first season of Adventure Time recently and although it has some great ideas, I didn’t think it was funny often enough and Finn’s tone of voice gets really grating.
Paranoia Agent has some serious problems. The animation really weakens and it gets really drawn out and repetitive.
This kindle won’t let me swear and its changing words. But I meant over acting where it says overreacting
I would say that the average quality on television is higher than the average quality of comics. That’s not really praise for television though.
Speaking of the t.v./comics comparison–I think the show Louie has some similarities with Peter Bagge’s Hate. Has anyone else seen Louie? There are some bad episodes, but a few of them–like “The Bully,” “Dad’s Girlfriend Part II,” the three-part Letterman sequence, and the one about Louie’s suicidal friend–were pretty amazing. On the surface, Hate has more in common with Girls, but Louis C.K.’s character reminds me of Buddy Bradley, despite the fact that the former is older, divorced, etc. I guess I think Hate is somewhat better than Louie, though. By the way, Bagge did a subplot about suburban crystal meth manufacturing about a decade before Breaking Bad.
Kindle wouldn’t let me say “jizzing” and changed it to “buzzing”.
Yes, they’d be standing in circles stroking their chins really fast and jizzing over comics of a quality they would scoff at in tv shows.
I’m not even talking average quality of comics vs tv. I think the average comic is far better than the average tv show (I’d pick an average mainstream comic over an average drama or sitcom any day).
I’m saying that the quality of the main “Golden Age” shows is superior to what are generally considered the best comics. The main thing comics have in their favour is the images. A charismatic art style goes a very very long way but it cant hide the overall quality of a poor comic.
I have no problem with people not liking these tv shows but years ago on the TCJ forum people were talking about The Wire and Mad Men like “it’s good…for TV’s very low standards” and then praise comics that don’t even come close to those standards. That really annoyed me that people who are supposedly very serious about comics would have so little respect for them that they’d give them a free pass for so many flaws you’d never get away with on tv.
I mentioned Oz above and I’m always sad that it never got the same praise as the other top shows. A lot of people acknowledge it as a pre-cursor to The Wire (it had a lot of the same people involved) but I think it needs to be re-run more so it finally gets the recognition it deserves.
Yes Jack, some Louie episodes are great.
Huh…I think the average comic is really kind of amazingly bad. I just read a mainstream comic that I kind of couldn’t believe how lousy it was. Television seems like it generally has a bare minimum level of professional competence, at least.
On the other hand, I think the best comics are pretty solidly better than the best television shows. I don’t think there’s a television show better than Peanuts or Little Nemo or Watchmen, really.
I’d say Little Nemo is a classic case of uneven qualities. Great drawings and ideas but still a very tedious read.
I don’t exactly agree with that. The writing is weird and sort of broken, but I rather like that about it. And…it’s definitely set up so you don’t need to, and aren’t really supposed to have to, read every word.
It’s hard sometimes to say which qualities are worse but I find even the most incompetent superhero comics(and I’m not really much of a superhero fan) better than so many nauseating sitcoms and light dramas.
Even though I’ll fully admit to laughing at 15% of the jokes in Friends and Big Bang Theory, they still overpower me with all the qualities I dislike.
I have some affection for Big Bang Theory; can’t watch friends for more than like 15 seconds. But…for both of them, they’re competent delivery systems. I can see what people get out of them, more or less. With comics, I often literally cannot figure out why people would read them, they’re so incompetently done.
I think you could argue that incompetence is kind of charming in comparison to something like Friends…and that might be true. So maybe I’d have to reconsider….
I think sometimes really incompetent artists and writers can still present interesting fantasies. Some can barely write and draw but they manage well enough to let you into their passions, so they can communicate to some degree.
I look at loads of poorly written/drawn porn comics and always wonder why I come back to them. I guess they manage to articulate their fantasies just well enough. I guess that can be true of poor drawings of imaginary worlds too.
I think also that comics have some elements that many comic fans don’t think about enough that a new reader might take offense to: use of panels, gutters/borders, speech bubbles, lettering, sound effects and even colour. Too often these things get treated as if they don’t really matter. I think a lot of art styles just don’t work very well with speech bubbles and sound effects, and that sometimes white borders/gutters leech from artwork.
So I agree with you in this way: I think that even a lot of really poor screen directors do think about technical things in their own field that comic people don’t think about when they create.
One of the things I dislike about Big Bang Theory is that even though it makes fun of fanboys, it still makes the behaviour seem ultimately acceptable. Recently in a comic shop I overheard some people bragging “oh I’m such a geek!”; nothing new, huh? But the manner that they were doing it in seemed different and almost aspirational in a way it didn’t use to be. I’m not blaming that show specifically but it certainly has been a part of presenting fanboyism as a valid/cool way of life.
AVClub did, in their series on one season shows and if they were good, intriguing or just bad, one for My So-Called Life. Now I know I have a hard time being objective about the show, and it does (now) routinely make many top tv show lists. It was the first show, when I was 12, that I saw a gay teen on (–well second, I think I had seen some of Ryan Philippe’s One Life to Live story arch a year or two before,) and it was one of the first shows I remember, as a rather pretentious 12 year old, I could have conversations about with my parents, who both started watching, something they never did with most shows us kids watched, and other kids my age. (I also was a part of the messy Save MSCL campaign, something that has convinced me never to both doing the same for any show ever again.)
ANYWAY–AVClub’s was great because it pointed out some things people usually don’t mention about MSCL–like how strong the adult acting and writing was, and the directing led by Scott Winant. Yeah, some of it now seems oh so 90s, and to me, embarrassing, but that also feels oddly right. But one interesting thing they did mention was how in the late 80s-early 90s ABC was the network that was willing to take risks with shows, for better and rose. Not just with Twin Peaks but, like them or not, with thirtysomething (MSCL’s more adult prototype,) Moonlighting, etc. It’s an interesting read and has the interesting idea that ABC’s roster of shows (including Roseanne) at the time eventually led to cable programming which actually has been less diverse (not that you could call ABC back then diverse, exactly.) http://www.avclub.com/article/my-socalled-life-set-the-path-all-teen-shows-would-107274
“Huh…I think the average comic is really kind of amazingly bad. I just read a mainstream comic that I kind of couldn’t believe how lousy it was. Television seems like it generally has a bare minimum level of professional competence, at least.”
That necessitates seeing “bare minimum professional competence” as a virtue, even a small one. I prefer looking at incompetent but weird material versus competent, workmanlike hack work.
Most superhero comics aren’t particularly weird though. Just incompetent.
Right; it can be incompetent hackwork rather than competent. Not clear that’s an improvement.
Yeah, _Louie_ is astoundingly uneven. It seems to get so much critical acclaim no matter what, I would put it in the overrated pile. I wouldn’t even say the show has great episodes, more great moments…
**** SPOILERS AHEAD ****
There is some really insightful stuff on Louie, like the examination of the word faggot in comedy…and I’m surprised I haven’t heard more people talking about the episode where Louie got raped. The one with the pregnant sister was fantastic. Slices-of-life like that are the sort of thing the show can do very well. It paints a very recognizable portrait of New York City, and I enjoy the little moments of surreality altho I know they bother some people. There are also some great what-the-fuck moments like when Louie air drummed throughout the entirety of “Who Are You”. Some of it leaves me shaking my head though, like the episode where Louie stalked a black woman or the epic abuse of a loud comedy club patron. Then there was the by-the-numbers manic pixie dream girl narrative featuring Parker Posey, which really disappointed me…all the more because the story faked me into thinking it was going to be about the daughter’s emotions around growing up, but it wasn’t at all. Often I think the show doesn’t take stories/subjects far enough. It’s frustrating because I see those moments of greatness shine thru. But whatever else you say about it, it is hilarious more often than not.
My vote for most underrated is SCTV. Brilliant comedic use of the medium that went way beyond the SNL sketch format, and an amazingly talented cast.
I thought the Parker Posey episode played with the magic pixie dream girl trope in a pretty interesting way. Louie perceived her as his carefree spirit guide through the playful, adventurous side of life, but the audience knew she was an alcoholic, and by the end, it became clear that she was suicidal. It’s actually one of my favorite episodes.
I found the rape episode disturbing, since Louie C.K.’s attitude seemed to be that it’s totally okay and even funny as long as it’s female-on-male. If he’d done that story with the genders reversed, people would be calling for his head.
I’d nominate the episode about Louie’s mom being a lesbian as the all-time worst.
I’ll have to rewatch it.
I’m talking about “part 2,” where they go on a date. In the first part, he just meets her in the bookstore.
**** STILL WITH THE LOUIE SPOILERS ****
There is a common perception of female-on-male rape as funny and not a big deal. I found myself examining my reaction to it and how it would be different if the genders were reversed. I thought it took what is probably a very common situation in terms of male-on-female rape, but by flipping the genders and surprising the audience, it made them (me at least) think more deeply about it.
“how the new era of television drama seems to rely on basically overrating every single thing on the tube”
I can’t really argue.
There are shows I really like, which I think have a lot of good episodes.
These shows, the ones currently on the air, have people raving about how great the *bad* episodes are.
:perplexed:
This is something about the current cultural reaction to TV, not the TV itself.
I think Christopher nailed it:
“All of this means that television has acquired a lot of prestige in a relatively short period of time,”
Back in the 1980s? The average standard of storytelling on TV… probably about the same. There were a few good shows on at any given time, and a good show means one where half the episodes are good and the other half are “meh”. But TV didn’t have as much *prestige*, so people weren’t raving about these shows, they were talking them down instead.
_”On the other hand, I think the best comics are pretty solidly better than the best television shows. I don’t think there’s a television show better than Peanuts or Little Nemo or Watchmen, really.”_
The Simpsons is as good as Peanuts. As for Watchmen, I wouldn’t say it’s all that good.
In the cases of both comics and television, almost all the best work seems to be either comedy or unpretentious pulp (that achieves depth without claiming to be deep). That may simply be the nature of the media.
That said, I can think of a few great serious comics – Harvey Pekar, Jaime Hernandez – but not any really great serious television.
The Simpsons is good. It’s not anywhere near as good as Peanuts, though.
Wow! I was 99% certain that comment was too late to do anything except languish unread by anybody ever.
Since that’s not so, I’ll take this opportunity to say thank you for writing the initial article here. There’s only so many headlines you can scroll past about the profundity of Breaking Bad, True Detective, Girls, etc before you start feeling like Cassandra as they wheel the wooden horse in and get to hoping that Clytemnestra will make it quick when the time comes.
breaking bad and game of thrones are the DEFINITION of overrated godawful crap
Monty Python’s Flying Circus is probably still the greatest television show of all time. But maybe it’s regarded as such? If so, “properly rated.” If not, “underrated.”
I agree that the first two seasons of Breaking Bad are overrated…BUT…they’re just good enough to get you into the last three seasons, which really are a masterpiece. If you have the time, you might thank yourself for powering through to the end, I think the payoff’s worth it.
Oddly, I have the opposite reaction to the Sopranos. The first season was extraordinary, I mean historically good, but it fell off really quickly and each passing season became more of a chore to watch. A big part of that decline was nobody’s fault, but losing Lydia as the central villain robbed the show of its most pivotal character. After her, with very few exceptions, the characters are just ignorant brutes without much depth or complexity, perhaps realistic for the culture they’re in, but not anybody I want to spend time with on television. And Jennifer Melfi must be one of the worst therapists I’ve ever seen in the media. Frankly, watching the show just makes me feel embarrassed for most of the characters, which is odd, because I hear they aren’t real people. By the end I just didn’t care and literally wanted all of them dead.
Gonna second Isaac’s call-out of Orphan Black as well. The supporting characters are really poorly written, the cops especially give you the impression that all the writers know about police is from watching TV. Yes, Tatiana Maslany has to do some virtuoso work, but that’s just not enough (see: The United States of Tara.)
My biggest problem with Orphan Black is that I’m totally hooked on the plot. I can’t stop watching, even though every other scene makes me cringe for how cliched and amateurish the writing is. People have compared it to Joss Whedon’s work, which is totally fair, because they have some of the same strengths and weaknesses. Both can pull off a concept and a plot super well and some of the characters and dialogue you want to fall in love with. But over and over something slips and takes you out of the show. In a way, I wish the show were worse, because you wouldn’t have the jarring juxtaposition of really appealing elements and massive blind spots.
I’m new to this blog, and was mostly drawn here by your analyses of various comics and manga, which are quite thoughtful and well-written. This article just caught my eye as I scrolled by.
I say this because, for whatever it’s worth, I seldom take anyone who attaches any significant weight to the word “overrated” seriously, and I don’t think anyone else should, either. In most cases (including, I think, this one) it’s just used as a lazy catch-all for “I didn’t like this as much as other people and I need a special word to denote that my position is the intellectual high ground.” It basically implies that everyone who liked the thing that you don’t like has made some sort of grave error in judgment. It’s prematurely dismissive of both the people who might hold the opposite opinion and, worse, the work in question. I understand that this is just a quick blurb, and not representative of the same level of analysis that many of your posts reach, but, for whatever it’s worth, if this had been the first post I’d read on your blog, I would have left immediately and never came back. Which also doesn’t reflect too well on me, I suppose, but it’s just a thought I had. Luckily the first thing I read here was your wonderful piece “Criticizing the Critics: Moto Hagio’s A Drunken Dream,” so I know you’re generally more articulate and have better intentions than I personally think you are/have here.
For whatever it’s worth, I found Breaking Bad to be a fantastic series with top-notch characterization, plotting, cinematography, direction, and all that. I read your other article (the one linked in your post) looking for a reason why you dislike the show, but it seemed more like you were positing a rebuttal to some common thoughts about the show’s moral underpinnings rather than explaining why the show isn’t good. Which is fine, I understand that that is the goal of that particular article, I just don’t see why you linked it here when it doesn’t really prove your point.
Of course, I also wouldn’t blame you for not wanting to write a lengthy treatise about what’s wrong with Breaking Bad. But, if you did, I’d read it, and I think it’d be at least partially necessary if you really want articles of this nature to reach anyone other than people who already agree with you.
…sorry if some of that came out sounding like I have the pitchfork raised. I can’t stress enough that I really like your writing, it’s just this article in particular that rubs me the wrong way.
I wrote a piece about why I didn’t like the first season of Breaking Bad a bit back. It’s here.
I’ve got a piece about why hate is worthwhile too (which I think addresses some of your points above. That’s here.
As far as Canadian SF shows are concerned, Continuum is better than Orphan Black. Certainly better plotted but with a very low budget (probably less than the special effects budget on CSI).
Orphan Black dropped off a cliff after the pilot episode. Continuum got better with Season 2 and has one of the more complex plots as far as TV SF is concerned (this isn’t saying much of course).
Definitely Game of Thrones and Breaking bad are most overrated. Too much hype about both of these two shows. Most underrated, Boss a great political show in my opinion much better than House of Cards and Awake, a psychological drama-sci fi, which was too complex for an average viewer
twin peaks = the most fucking overrated tv show of all time.
fuck the fans. they are so fucking stupid.
Ouch. I really like Twin Peaks. But different strokes and all that.
I really do not understand why people have to be so critical of everything. If you don’t like something that is fine but it seems like you people can’t enjoy anything because you have this urge to pick out every flaw that you find. Nobody thinks you are special for not liking a popular tv show. Consider learning how to enjoy things and be less critical. Perhaps then we can put a stop to foolish articles like this one.
This article is free; why not enjoy it? Why do you need to be so critical of everything?
You are missing the point.
I get the point. You hate negativity, and don’t recognize that as a contradiction. Common malady.
Whatever you say man.
My Most Overrated TV Shows are:
-Family Guy = It became really stupid & dumb after Season 6
-Friends = Not as groundbreaking as the fanboys made it out to be, but I fairly liked this show though
-Seinfeld = Never understood the hype for this show, I could never get into it, I don’t think Jerry Seinfeld is a good actor
-The Walking Dead = I can’t last no more than 15 minutes of this show, I find it to be boring, uninteresting, and cliched
-How I Met Your Mother = It’s Friends with even worse characters and writing, I’m so glad CBS ended this awful show last year
-Mike & Molly = Boring & Unfunny, plus I don’t think Melissa McCarthy is a good actress
Just dropped by to say that most of you are off your rocker. Breaking Bad is simply one of the best shows ever conceived. Most of you commenting otherwise haven’t even made it past the first season. Most of the people in this thread seem to overlook all the various elements of television shows that end up being part of the whole. You’re looking strictly at the plot points, it seems, as I’ve seen many of you calling the show “predictable” or “cliche”. Which, by the way, it certainly is not (not that any of you would know, since you all didn’t even give the show a proper viewing).
Building tension, cinematography, acting, fully realized character arcs, sound direction, meaningful set design and that’s just off the top of my head. From top to bottom, the show is a masterpiece. Not entirely void of problems, but there isn’t a show out there that doesn’t have issues.
Twin Peaks, while good (I’m halfway through season 2 at the moment of writing this) is wrought with frequent pacing issues, an overly soapy approach, and is rife with “character development” that ends up at dead ends, or just turns out to be an annoying distraction added to draw out the mystery that compels the viewers. While I can certainly understand where much of the praise comes from, I feel as though it has only received such because it is a show that’s the first of it’s kind.
In short, Twin Peaks received it’s acclaim based on innovation. Not quality. This isn’t to say that the show is of low quality, by the way. There are many things that it’s done on more subtle levels that I find excellent. But then there are moments that drag on far too long, most of them being one of the various romances that plague the show. So far, a lot of this series could have been left on the cutting room floor. A lot of it needed to.
In Breaking Bad, however, damn near every scene is essential. Especially in comparison to Twin Peaks. Romance plotlines also flow organically, never really reaching the point where the show is slamming you over the head with it (“OH I LOVE YOU SO MUCH JAMES”, “OH I LOVED LAURA SO MUCH”, “MY HUSBAND IS GETTING OUT ON PAROLE SOON SO OUR AFFAIR CAN’T CONTINUE”).