The power, the glory, the grief and the kitchen chaos

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This article was published 28/12/2023 (978 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The best and worst of TV? Isn’t it all good?

I even have love for the worst shows (Succession fans, fight me). So, looking back on the year that was, I offer five categories of TV that left the biggest impression on me. (A note, while most of the following shows, or their latest seasons, were brand new in 2023, one was new to me on the laudable Winnipeg Public Library-linked free video app Hoopla, and has been included here because with so much choice, “Recommended for you” is often the only time many of us ever hear of a worthwhile show.)

What doesn’t kill you (makes important TV)

When Pete Davidson’s name came up after his brilliant return as host of Saturday Night Live I asked my friends if they had seen Bupkis, the Showcase/StackTV comedy series that barely fictionalizes his life as a fishbowl-famous comedian, voracious addict and son of a firefighter who died on 9/11.

No, they had not, despite also being fans. Too real. I get it. Watching the fictional Davidson go from one Jackass-level bad decision to the next and then ping-ponging around to regret/rehab and naked anguish, I wondered if this — unlike his 2020 sanitized biopic King of Staten Island — was a stylish, celebrity-studded cry for help from the real Davidson. But watch this sca rringly violent, ridiculously funny portrait for the stunning flirtations with pain and tenderness. OK, it’s no after-school special. But it is special.

Honorable mention goes to the restaurant dramedy The Bear (Disney+), specifically Season 2, Episode 6 Fishes, which flashes back to a Berzatto family Christmas feast. An unrecognizable Jamie Lee Curtis tears it all up as the devil mother of Jeremy Allen White’s Carmy. It took me three sitdowns to get through its harrowing 66-minute run time but left me with an even greater appreciation for the family created in the show’s central kitchen. Worth every flinch.

 

Especially in the quietest moments

I am so glad Succession (Crave) is over. The fearless first season introduced a family of jackals audaciously and gluttonously eating each other and themselves alive with viperous words and deeds. Despite excellent performances throughout, every season and scene that followed was a harsh hammering on alliance and betrayal, two piano keys rendered painfully out of tune by overuse.

But one moment in the finale repaid my suffering through all four seasons — one wordless moment: Shiv (Sarah Snook) and Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) are alone in the limo, facing forward, pointedly not looking at each other, when he offers his hand, palm up, on the console between them. After 38 episodes of slithering cowardice and treachery, Shiv meets her fate with a combo side-eye and glare and takes the hand. Gorgeous(ly sad and grim) and all the more powerful for its restraint in a series that excessively gave in to excess.

 

You talkin’ to me?

In theatrical terms, the audience is the fourth wall that completes the narrative box. Mostly, we watch unacknowledged. And mostly we don’t even think about that until a character slips us a direct look, as in the faux documentaries of The Office (Netflix) and Abbott Elementary (Disney+); or the stylishly British series Fleabag (Prime Video) and Gentleman Jack (Crave).

But PBS’s Nordic-Scottish crime drama Annika leaves them all in the dust when the series kicked off in 2021 with Nicola Walker (Unforgotten, River) staring straight into our screens with, “Call me Annika.” Not only does DI Annika Strandhed take us into her confidence, lacing her chats with literary allusions, she shares personal details unknown to her detectives, her father and daughter.

Soon we love her, but can we trust her? And what’s to be done when, early in the 2023 second season, she takes a hard left turn on a personal issue and looks, hangdog, into the camera with self-disgust before dashing off? All we can do is wait for Season 3 and be thankful that what might have been just a good detective series has been elevated to a front-seat view of the lush life of a riveting, complex character.

 

Sleight of handiwork

The Disney+ darling Reservation Dogs and the BBC sleeper Mum (new to me on Hoopla and Prime Video) are both sharp comedies. Rez Dogs started out in 2021 as the promise of a roadtrip by a handful of teens planning to leave their Oklahoma reservation for fame and adventure in the big city.

Along its three-season run, which wrapped this fall, it blended mild community clashes, family tension and the regular appearance of ghost spirits who were as likely to offer inscrutable advice as seek bloody revenge. There were, indeed, some road trips, but they rarely turned out as hoped and always led back home. Because as much as Rez Dogs is a comedy with brilliant new stars, a fierce and funny commentary on reconciliation and a collection of wonderful cameos, the bedrock is the simplest of stories: there’s no place like home.

To get to the bare bones of Mum, which stars The Crown’s Lesley Manville, we are treated to a cringe comedy of good and bad intentions as Cathy and family friend Michael (Payback and Westworld’s Peter Mullan) deal with the death of her husband. Round and round go the petty and crude and innocently scalding scenes of an aging woman’s life — scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny and accomplishment enough. But under it all, playing smartly against the expectation of “getting over it” or “moving on,” is grief’s plainspoken beauty, of just putting one foot in front of the other. Bravo to both.

 

Not ready to say goodbye, but if we must

Jason Sudeikis’s masterpiece of a sports comedy, Ted Lasso (Apple TV+), ended May 31 despite persistent flickers of hope around the world that it would go on (and on). Call Me Kat (Fox), on the other hand, ended because “the audience response to it was not as strong as we had hoped,” according to a statement in May cancelling the three-season sitcom set in a cat cafe.

Both finales were deeply unsatisfying; one for being overhyped (Ted Lasso) and the other unexpected (Call Me Kat). Fortunately, each series graced us with moments that make the absence a little easier to take. In Ted Lasso’s Season 3 Episode 6 Sunflowers, the team goes to Amsterdam and along the way, not only does Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) fall into some of the psychic’s predictions and shed the last of her cynicism, but she has one of the most romantic onscreen dates I have ever seen. For his part, Ted goofs his way back to confidence and authority. Seeing these two taken care of while the rest gamboled around the beautiful city was closure enough for me.

Over on Call Me Kat, the real goodbye came, for me, after the unexpected death of actor Leslie Jordan from a medical emergency while driving to set in October 2022. As Phil, the ebullient baker, he was a heart among the goofy, joyful hearts of the cast led by Mayim Bialik. They sent the character off, in the Jan. 5 episode Call Me Philliam, to a bakery in Tahiti with his new sweetie Jalen (John Griffin).

“We found a way for him to live forever,” Bialek told Entertainment Weekly. That — and sharing their grief, with a song by Dolly Parton no less, was a true gift to fans.

May I wish you many wonderful episodes in 2024.

 

denise.duguay@winnipegfreepress.com