Trophy Wife: Season 1 (2013)

The short-lived Trophy Wife undoubtedly takes its cues from Modern Family – in some ways, it’s like what Modern Family would look like if it was condensed to a single family. Apart from a few regular side characters, it revolves around Kate (Malin Akerman) who marries Pete (Bradley Whitford), only to discover that he has two previous wives, Jackie (Jane Seymour) and Diane (Marcia Gay Harden), as well as three children. The children, in particular, aren’t that far removed from the precocious eccentricity of Modern Family, but that and the show’s general premise are where the similarities end, since Trophy Wife is far more assured about being a sitcom, or at least less anxious to continually prove that it’s more than a sitcom. In part, that’s because it’s populated with such a charismatic cast – one of the joys of the recent Golden Age of Television is the opportunity to experience the domestic, televisual intimacy with big-screen, big-budget actors that characterised television in the 1960s and 1970s. And Trophy Wife feels like a paean to Marcia Gay Harden – Diane’s icy distance is never quite punctured or domesticated enough to allow us to get over the frisson of seeing Harden in such a quotidian vehicle, just as Kate never quite gets used to seeing Diane around her house, or in a domestic context. By the same token, the film draws heavily on Akerman’s indie and frathouse pedigree – she’s always had a fantastic comic presence that seemed to exceed whatever film it was placed in, and here she is given a chance to really spread her wings as a comic actress; her timing is immaculate, almost subliminal, and holds the show in a kind of uneasy, queasy comic tension that makes everything feel a little bit provisional. Like most great comic actors, her face never feels quite comfortable, or quite still, just as Kate’s never quite at home in her new life as a third wife – and the series as a whole is driven by every character’s discomfort with the premise; nobody can quite get used to it, which is perhaps why it feels natural that it would end after a single season. Sitcoms often put the propinquity back into domesticity, the contingency back into intimacy, but rarely with as much joy and conviction as Trophy Wife – unlike Modern Family, this family never feels complete, never curbs its sprawl into other, weirder ways of being together.

The Millers: Season 1 (2013)

Over the late Golden Age of Television, some new genres have been founded, while others have been revived. For the most part, though, the classic sitcom has floundered, with most critically-acclaimed comedies anxious to prove that they are more than a mere sitcom. Still, there are great sitcoms being made in the classic mould out there, and The Millers is one of the most memorable. From the unfussy title and the polaroid credit sequence, it’s clear that this is a sitcom in the 80s model, but there’s no sense of nostalgia or revisionism per se – it’s more like an actual 80s sitcom were revived two generation later, with the same actors playing older roles and a younger cast brought in to play the characters who were little kids the first time around. For that reason, it’s perhaps unique among recent comedies, sitcoms or otherwise, in being largely driven by older people – for all that Will Arnett is top-billed as Nathan Miller, it’s undoubtedly Margo Martindale and Beau Bridges, as his parents Carol and Tom, who are the main characters; you feel immediately as if you have known  them for twenty years. After they separate in the first episode, Carol moves in with Nathan and Tom moves in with his sister, Debbie, meaning the action alternates between Nathan and Debbie’s houses, although quite a bit of it’s also shot outdoors, on location, in Leesburg, Virginia -  Nathan’s a local reporter and spends quite a bit of time covering stories in the neighborhood, with his cameraman sidekick, played by J.B. Smoove. That opens up the sets a bit, gives them a bit of room to breathe, while never divesting them of their cosiness or homeliness, while Nathan’s reportage cements it as a series driven by enunciation – all these actors are great at delivering their lines in exactly the right way, with exactly the right emphasis. And it’s often emphasis and inflection rather than the script itself that drives the comedy, especially with Beau Bridges, who can make pretty much anything sound ludicrous or absurd. Modest in its ambitions, it’s very much a comic backwater, but that can be a relief at a time when comedy is so anxious to display its eccentric credentials, so anxious to be the next cutting-edge – it’s highs and lows may be small, but they’re also abiding.

True Detective: Series 1 (2014)

Almost before it was released, True Detective was hailed as the future of intellectual, auteurist television. Set in the Deep South, it’s written in its entirety by novelist Nick Pizzolatto, and centres on a ritualistic murder that preoccupies two detectives, played by Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaghey, over multiple timelines, from the mid-1990s to the present day. The rapport between Harrelson and McConaghey works brilliantly, not just because of how well their interactions are scripted, but because they occupy a similar cinematic niche, which creates an odd identification and interplay that adds fuel to the series’ fire. However, great segments of the series are not really dialogue-driven – instead, Pizzolatto devotes quite a bit of time to McConaghey’s philosophical musings, especially in the present-day timeline, which takes the form of a series of police interviews. That creates quite an aphoristic tone, which sometimes feels a bit like a screenwriter experimenting with all the great one-liners he can think of, albeit without the coffee-table camp of, say, House of Cards, which also revels in aphoristic quotability. Yet it’s also what allows director Cary Fukugawa to craft such an incredible style, since the series is as distinctive for having a single director as a single writer, although that hasn’t been as much of a selling-point. And Fukugawa seems to have taken Pizzolatto’s style as a cue for visual aphorism, painstakingly crafting single shots that stand apart from the narrative, even in the midst of it, to demand appreciation and contemplation on their own terms. For the most part, they’re establishing shots, or perhaps disestablishing shots, since they seem to dissociate themselves from the narrative in the same breath that they frame it, hovering above each scene like the series’ dream of itself. In that sense, it perhaps makes most sense as ornamental television – it needs to be hung on a wall, enshrined on a widescreen - or even occult television, since clues here are more like talismans than procedural tools, repositories of dark wonder that ritualise your attention into the rapture that’s flooded a new wave of fan forums. And, as in Twin Peaks, you remember the clues more than the case itself, which just gets slower and slower, freezes over, as if yearning to congeal and glaciate into a single, irreducible, incredible image. 

Revenge: Series 1 (2011)

Cut from the same aristocratic-gothic cloth as Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars, this camp extravaganza follows Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) to the Hamptons, as she plots revenge against the evil couple that framed her father for participating in a terrorist attack some twenty years before. While Conrad Grayson (Henry Czerny) was responsible for orchestrating the set-up, it’s his wife, Victoria (Madeleine Stowe), who’s the real object of Emily’s revenge, partly because she was having an affair with her father, and had a very real opportunity to save him. And Stowe pretty much steals the show with her glacial performance, turning it into a series of sublime stare-offs in which people seem to go for minutes without altering their facial expressions, so still that you start to see the micro-movements that aren’t usually visible, magical twitches from the deep past that normally pass without notice. While it might seem silly to mention The Great Gatsby in the same sentence as Revenge, that doesn’t mean it’s not an influence either, as the series positively fetishises all the cavernously romantic vistas that draw Emily and Victoria’s houses into a single sightline, panoramas wide enough to incorporate the very past into their purview, as they glide and swell around the impossibly long jetty that partitions the properties. In fact, it’s not hard to see this millennial version of West Egg in Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation, just as it’s not hard to see wider millennial anxieties at play either – although Emily’s revenge plan dates from 2002, she yearns for 1995, just before the terrorist attack happened, dovetailing pre-9/11 nostalgia with 90s nostalgia, as if to imagine how that fateful day might have looked interpolated into the lush mid-90s instead of the frenzied early-00s. So while digital glitch abounds - Emily’s often a hactivist as much as an avenger - it’s swathed in a kind of amalgam of mid-90s textures, poised at the limpid moment when the erotic thriller devolved into the slasher revival. Far from the trash-Hamptons that we’ve come to know from reality television, we’re presented here with something more like the luminosity of the I Know What You Did Last Summer cycle – there’s the same airbrushed palette oversaturating everything with vespertine porosity, irradiating every space with a bisexual bloom. And since time’s measured so seasonally in the Hamptons, there are constant references to last summer, the summer before and, always, the summer that started the story, dreamily morbid as this gorgeous, wilting rose of a series.

Fargo: Season 1 (2014)

One of several recent series to take their cues from a cult film classic, Fargo picks up the story of the suitcase some fifteen years later. Once again, we’re in the Scandinavian Midwest, and once again we’re presented with a complicated conspiracy of criminals and complicit bystanders – so complicated, in fact, that characters seem to slip in and out of main, supporting and guest status quite subliminally. For perhaps that reason, it’s populated by a host of fringe film actors, actors who never quite made it to the big screen, or are a little past their big-screen primacy, including Billy Bob Thornton, Colin Hanks, Oliver Platt, Martin Freeman and Bob Odenkirk, along with up-and-coming actress Alison Tolman in a career-making performance as a Bemidji police officer who doesn’t know her place. They all play it pretty broad, to the point where it sometimes feels a little like a caricature of the original film, which itself verged on self-caricature at key moments, if always reining it in with elegance and style. Still, the broadness isn’t just a matter of comedy – it’s what gravitates the series from thriller to horror, often approaching the tone and register of No Country For Old Men more than Fargo. That makes it feel quite timely – one of the recent trends in the late Golden Age of television has been to consider how horror might work as a longform genre, how suspense might be maintained over an entire season. In Fargo’s case, the answer is to make pretty much every encounter in the show feel longform – there’s at least a beat between every line, while characters will often freeze a facial expression for several seconds at a time. Given that most of the dialogue is bathetic, that makes for quite a disjunctive, unsettling tone that is suspenseful almost despite itself – like the characters themselves, so much of our experience of this Midwestern wasteland is spent micro-waiting that the actual set-piece and suspenseful climaxes raise waiting to a quite horrifying pitch. Even the end-point of the series is nebulous – it feels as if it could equally be an anthology series or a recurring narrative, overlaying everything with a kind of indefinite expectation of things coming to an end that creates quite a unique atmosphere of doom and dread, even or especially at its funniest and most light-hearted moments.