The Strange World of Thomas P. Coombe

The Best TV Shows of 2010

It was a pretty good year for TV, but for me, a bad year for TV watching. I spent the second half of 2010 buried in work, which meant I didn't have much time for this blog. But with the year winding down, it's worth remembering the cream of this year's TV crop, whether I wrote about them or not.

1. AMC -- At least one of this network's program's -- Breaking Bad -- was an obvious contender for the top spot before the year was halfway over. Then came Mad Men's fourth -- and best -- season, followed by Rubicon and The Walking Dead, and by the time November arrived, it became clear AMC was TV's new king of quality TV shows.

No network has had a year like this since 2005, when The Wire, The Sopranos and Deadwood (not to mention Rome, Carnivale, Six Feet Under and Curb Your Enthusiasm) were all part of HBO's line-up.

The Walking Dead proved to be the network's biggest hit so far, a comic book-inspired horror/drama that managed to transcend its roots by the time its six-episode season was over. 

 Rubicon's low ratings, slow pace and complicated storyline pretty much doomed it early on, but it was still fascinating to watch, and heartening to see AMC take this kind of risk, even for just a season. In the end, the show's conspiracy plotline wound up being less interesting than its characters -- the fascinating, funny villain Truxton Spangler justly inspired a fake Twitter feed -- and it's those people, rather than the answers we did/didn't get, that makes me sorry Rubicon won't be returning.

I'd been a little underwhelmed by Mad Men's second and third season, but its fourth was brilliant, taking us deeper into the mind and soul of protagonist Don Draper while also giving us a compelling look at an ad agency struggling to keep its head above water. But put all that aside, and Mad Men rises above most of its contemporaries on the strength of "The Suitcase" episode alone.

The king of the AMC mountain this year, however, was Breaking Bad. In three seasons, it's gone from "interesting" to "must-watch" to "comparisons to the Coen Brothers are not unwarranted."  

In the article I linked to above, TIME's James Poniewozik ties Coen movies like No Country For Old Men and Fargo to some of Breaking Bad's larger themes. It's an apt comparison, but I'll take the connection in a different direction: just as the Coens can jump from No Country to Burn After Reading to True Grit, Breaking Bad can be a different kind of show every episode. One week it's the most tense thriller you've ever seen, another it's a tragic-comedic "bottle show." And it does all of those things well, helped along by a brilliant cast and the most beautiful cinematography on TV. The finest show in production now.

As for the rest...

The Walking Dead: Up on the Roof

"There's us and the dead." -- Rick Grimes

 If only it were that simple. Rick's commitment to maintaining order and togetherness is noble, but even three episodes in, we can tell that it's a little naive. If I were him, I'd be a lot more worried about the wife-beating Ed, Merle and Daryl (and their other brother Daryl?), or even the increasingly isolated Shane.

 Eventually, the zombies on this show are going to have fade into the background, the way they have in the comic. I'm not saying that with any inside knowledge, or arguing that this series needs to be a direct adaptation. (In fact, I think it's worked as well as it has so far by branching out.)

 But zombies will get kind of exhausting after, say, 2 hours or so. (In other words, the pilot and the second episode.) Give us some human antagonists though, and things get a little more interesting. That's why I think the third episode was the best one so far: it eased back a bit and gave us a chance to get to know a lot more of the cast, yet it never felt all that slow.

 Then again, a show that begins with a desperate, crazed man handcuffed to a roof and ends with said man's severed hand is never going to be accused of being slow. Also, nice job by Frank Darabont and Michael Rooker in making us -- or me anyway -- care about Merle in that opening scene.

 I'm told there was a line in the previous hour explaining that the hacksaw wouldn't cut through the handcuffs, but I don't remember hearing it. At any rate, assuming Merle survived his self-amputation, I doubt he'll be all that happy to see his rescuers.

 Other thoughts:

•  Is it too soon to dub Glenn the Hurley of The Walking Dead?
• "Go back to On Golden Pond." Not bad, Daryl.
• Another good moment: Rick's breakdown when he sees Carl. 
• Interesting that Shane told Lori that Rick had died. The show is doing a better job in establishing the tension between these characters than the comic did, but then again, it has more time to work with. 
• Another comic/TV show difference: this version of Andrea is quite a bit older than the comic's version, not that it's a big deal. Plus Laurie Holden shared the screen with Michael Chiklis in one of the The Shield's best scenes ever, so I'll overlook a lot when it comes to her.

  Tom Coombe

 

The Walking Dead: Dig In

Part of me likes the way The Walking Dead (the TV series) isn't sticking plot point-by-plot point to The Walking Dead (the comic book). It's nice not being able to predict everything that's going to happen, and it allows writer Frank Darabont to give us scenes like the one in last night's episode where Rick gives a little eulogy for the corpse he's about to use to throw the walkers off. (Andrew Lincoln is really good in this role, by the way.)

 At the same time, I think "Guts" might have worked a little bit better had it not introduced a bunch of characters that don't appear in the comic and probably won't be around very long. (This isn't based on any foresight into what's coming; it's just that the cast only has so many names in it, and other than Glen and Andrea, none of the other folks Rick meets in Atlanta are on it.)

 So rather than spending time with all these bland, disposal characters, I would have rather spent the whole episode with just Rick and Glen, or -- better still -- learn a bit more about the folks Shane, Lori and Carl are traveling with. This show can't just be Man Vs. Zombie every week. The drama will eventually have to come mostly from the characters, so it would be nice to start getting to know some of them.

 Other thoughts:

 

•  I guess the acid bath from season one of Breaking Bad no longer holds the title of "grossest scene on an AMC drama."
• Hey, it's Michael Rooker playing a hateful southerner. Maybe Zeljko Ivanek can show up next week to play a creepy white collar guy.
• I really, really want to stop making comic-to-show comparisons, but like I said last week, this is the first non-superhero comic series that I like to be successfully adapted for TV. As such, it has me thinking a lot about how -- again, this assumes they don't deviate from the comic at all -- Darabont and co. will handle the book's overwhelming bleakness. Let's hope they're watching Zombieland and Shaun of the Dead as much as they are Romero movies.

 

 Tom Coombe

The Walking Dead Premiere: Page-to-Screen

When the world of comic books mostly meant superheroes with a long history – the the X-Men and Batmen of the world – it was OK to turn their stories into feature length movies. 

 You could introduce the characters, tell a fairly complete story, and if all went well, return with a sequel. There would be no definitive way to handle, say, Spiderman. 

 But in the last few decades, comics began to change, with more and more creators introducing characters with finite stories, the type of stories that – when adapted – need to be told in a longer form.

 These are comics – titles like Brian K. Vaughn’s epic, brilliant Y: The Last Man, or the Luna Brothers excellent miniseries Girls and The Sword – that make you think “This would make a great TV show.”

 Which brings us to The Walking Dead. It's too early to tell whether it will make a great TV show, although Sunday night's premiere was certainly a great pilot. It was tense, moving and scary, and I'd argue that it did a much better job in fleshing out protagonist Rick Grimes than the comic had at this point. Andrew Lincoln -- a British actor effectively hiding his accent -- seems like a good choice to play Rick, a character for whom (assuming we stick to the comic) things are going to get much, much worse from here on out.

 At the same time, I'm itching to get past this initial man vs. zombie stuff and move into what makes the comic so compelling: how the human characters relate to each other, and the idea that other people are a far greater threat than the undead.

 Tom Coombe