Catastrophe: Season 1 (2015)

Over the last couple of years, it feels as if queerness has increasingly become the subject of both mainstream and “quality” television, as increasingly flexible, provisional and promiscuous modes of distribution have opened up the possibility of a perpetual “transitioning” that has become an end and object in itself. Some series, such as Transparent, Orange is the New Black and I Am Cait, have responded with a radical flux between and amongst queer and heterosexual identites, a flux that often finds its best spokesperson in transgender or genderqueer orientations. Other series are more interested in envisaging queers and heterosexuals simply co-existing, although they might tap into the genderqueer flux in other, more deflected ways, often at the point where stand-up, sitcom and sketch comedy collide, as in Louie and Inside Amy Schumer, or where the digital-urban sprawl plays a major role, as in Togetherness and Hello Ladies. In both cases, however, there is a utopian, collective yearning that sets them apart from a third brand of series, which seems more interested in trying to somewhat competitively convince us that heterosexuality itself is the queerest orientation possible, often by way of a roundabout return to the insular nuclear couple. Although shows like Up All Night and You’re the Worst fall into that category – which also hung around the later seasons of The Office and Parks and Recreation - it’s arguably reached critical mass with Catastrophe, already slated to be one of the most acclaimed comedies of 2015. Set in London, Catastrophe stars real life friends Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney as Sharon and Rob, an Irish school teacher and American advertising consultant who have a one-week stand, only to find out that Sharon has become pregnant, at which point Rob decides to relocate to England, marry her and help raise the child. As might be expected, various comic and not so comic crises ensue - Rob dealing with his residency, Sharon breaking the news to her friends and family - but what's unusual about the series is that despite the fact that this couple meet and develop in the most provisional, promiscuous and precarious of ways – in a country that neither of them really thinks of as home – they quickly feel like an utterly conventional and even conservative couple, even or especially as they continually remind each other how different they supposedly are. Like being around a couple who are continually anxious to remind you that their relationship doesn’t exclude you, their endless assumption of difference from the heterosexual norm actually becomes more suffocating than a less self-conscious heterosexual couple, not least because virtually every other character in the series is somewhat moronic or abject, an opportunity for raised eyebrows or incredulous reaction shots, in what often feels like an anti-ensemble cast, an ensemble that exists only to reiterate the suffocatingly self-aware isolation of the central couple. What’s even odder is that most members of this anti-ensemble cast have some kind of queer quirk – a taste for man-dates, an addiction to rectal massages – and yet even that doesn’t breed any kind of inclusive queerness but just reiterates the self-conscious originality of the central couple, their unwillingness to really – genuinely – depend on any wider community or collectivity, as if they had absorbed or harvested queerness rather than truly communing or collaborating with it. Of course, there are very funny moments – and poignant moments – not least because of Horgan and Delaney’s friendship, which you can glimpse through and within the characters they play. Still, that often makes it feel more insular too, more of an inside joke – unlike, say, the exquisitely relaxed, blissed-out vibe of Doll and Em – as they long to be something other than a heterosexual nuclear couple, but can’t envisage anything other than a heterosexual nuclear couple either, in what finally feels a bit like a capitalist realist romantic sitcom, an alternative-styled television series in which there are really no alternatives. 

Wolf Hall: Season 1 (2015)

Wolf Hall is an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s pair of Booker Prize winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, which detail the rise of Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) in the mid sixteenth-century, from his attachment to Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce) to his role as chief minister to Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), where he arranges both the ascent and execution of Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy). It’s a beautiful, mercurial series, shot almost exclusively on location, with natural light, but also employing quite delicate, mobile cinematography to create a mood and atmosphere of radical promiscuity, appropriate to a period in which the very future and identity of England was shaped by the shifting zones between betrothal, marriage, consummation and procreation, and the ways the King chose to inhabit them. In another adaptation, that might make for a study of Henry himself, who somehow remains both married and unmarried – nearly always almost married – for the duration of the series, but, like Mantel, screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky seem more interested in this promiscuous, provisional space as a condition and experience of everyday life, or at least everyday aristocratic life. Certainly, Henry’s relationships with Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and his various mistresses drive the broad strokes of the narrative, but for the most part all the relationships in the series have an element of courtship, even or especially when they’re not erotic or romantic in any immediately discernible way, with at least as much time spent on the approach to conversation as conversation itself. Similarly, every space partakes of the fluid zone around the King, no matter how remote from his actual Court, which feels increasingly mobile and amorphous anyway, as Straughan and Kosminsky beautifully capture the eddying currents of favour and disfavour, the strange and circuitous routes that need to be taken to gain and hold Henry’s regard. In that sense, Rylance is the perfect actor to play Cromwell, the perfect character to seize hold of this period of radical historical and libidinal flux and make it his own – his face is inscrutable but also highly expressive, exuding a privacy and irreducible individuality that often makes him feel like the forefront of the English Renaissance and Reformation more than Henry himself, especially when he’s set up against Anton Lesser’s wonderfully splenetic, astringent depiction of Thomas More. Between them sit the kinds of silences that shape history, convulsive and meditative in the same moment, although it’s Cromwell’s capacity for plainness that always wins out – a plainness of speech, gesture and gaze that’s more mysterious, in the end, than More’s taste for martyred ceremony, let alone the Catholic operatics of a series like The Tudors. For Cromwell, as for most of the characters, interrogation, imprisonment and execution might be just around the corner, but he's uniquely able to claim and occupy the present moment in all its mutability, much like the adaptation itself, which often feels closer to a six-hour film than a miniseries.  

Grace and Frankie: Season 1 (2015)

Has gay marriage rehabilitated traditional marriage or ushered in a more emergent concept of marriage? That’s the question that seems to be on everybody’s lips at the moment – a question that Grace and Frankie, the first Netflix sitcom, sets out to answer, crafting a comedy of remarriage for what increasingly feels like a post-marriage era, even or especially as marriage rights are extended to more and more parties. Set in San Diego, it’s about a pair of frenemies – Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) – whose lives are turned upside down when their husbands – Robert (Martin Sheen) and Sol (Sam Waterston) – announce that they’ve been in love for twenty years and have finally decided to move in with each other and get married. What ensues is a compellingly awkward melange of 90s style, multi-cam sitcom, 00s-style, single-cam sitcom and, of course, the Netflix model itself, which creates a quite unusual and somewhat incoherent sense of space – highly fluid at times, yet often constrained to just one or two rooms or zones per episode, as if still thinking in terms of sets rather than the live locations opened up by this more flexible filming style, trying to recover sitcom co-ordinates from a post-sitcom world. As Robert and Sol move into Grace’s house, and Grace and Frankie move into Frankie’s beach house, the comedy partakes of a similar dissonance, sometimes feeling totally independent of canned laughter and sometimes feeling painfully denuded and diminished without it, as strange voids and lapses in the comic momentum make it quite difficult, at moments, to locate yourself as a viewer, or to decide whether to consider yourself part of some putative or hypothetical studio audience. The thing is, that works incredibly well to evoke the sense of displaced fantasy that drives the foursome to find new ways of knowing each other – a displacement that is, in some sense, the main joke, the main manifesto for a truly Netflix sitcom – as they’re forced to reconfigure themselves around Robert and Sol’s upcoming nuptials, which is perhaps why the series feels quite experimental, even if its experimentation lies in splicing and selecting quite traditional ingredients for a new era and a more syncretic, flexible audience than ever before. Like most experiments, it is somewhat provisional and open in its tone, moving between a kind of apology for gay marriage, a reminder that gay couples are just like every other couple, and a more roving, restless, rambunctious queerness that finds a quite unstereotypical flamboyance in the vicissitudes and variables of late life romance. In most cases, it’s Frankie, played by Tomlin, who feels like the queer kernel of the series – the only character, pointedly, who remains unattached this season – but that’s not to discount Robert and Sol as well, who frequently provide a quite lovely vision of growing gay and old without ever falling into complacency, while not having much to prove either, even or especially as their revamped lifestyle starts to seem more and more precarious. And of course, Grace – and Fonda herself – is the energy that keeps it all going and circulating, as the odd, hyperreal backdrops – part set, part live location – starts to resemble her fitness video backdrops more and more, which is perhaps why the series finally feels so oddly aspirational and motivating as well, willing itself to sink deeper and deeper into the strange and sometimes startling comic voice of this opening season.

Silicon Valley: Season 2 (2015)

If recent seasons of Orange is the New Black and Silicon Valley are anything to go by, there’s a bit of a change taking place in workplace comedies at the moment. Whereas the previous generation – the generation of The Office and Parks and Recreation – was about rescuing some sense of community from an increasingly bleak workplace, shows like OITNB and Silicon Valley seem to have left the idea of community behind altogether. Instead, they’re more interested in collectivity, the ways that people can work together and learn to act on behalf of each other even when community tends to be expropriated by corporate interests. While that expropriation is certainly there in OITNB, it’s especially striking in Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley, where community only really seems to exist in the pro bono arms of large IT corporations, or in the multifarious “communal” apps that form the latest wave in venture capitalism and technological innovation. As a result, the Pied Piper trio – Richard (Thomas Middleditch), Erlich (T.J. Miller), Gilfoyle (Martin Starr), Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Jared (Zach Dunn) – feel defined, above all, by their comic inability to form a community, or to foster genuine communal feeling and regard. Time and again, they try to retreat into the bromantic rapport that may have defined their office forbears, but it feels even less convincing or available in the second season, as they set out to maintain their compression algorithm as a viable investment before it’s either stolen or overtaken by their competitors at Hooli, led by Gavin Belson (Matt Ross). That makes for a much tighter, more claustrophic focus, with most of the action taking place in Erlich’s incubator pad rather than the expansive corporate parks of the first season, as the team settle into what often feels like a new, emergent home office – distinct from the postmodern post-offices of the Valley but also from the mythical garages of earlier startups – where they spend most of this season trying to maintain their intellectual property as intellectual property. On paper, that might sound somewhat dry as a premise, but it makes for some of the most unbearably suspenseful television released this year – even or especially at its most comic – partly because notions of property, theft and transaction are peculiarly slippery when we enter the IT realm, but also because this particular intellectual property only really exists as a collective effort – a collective property, with equal  contributions from each member – such that the only way for the team to weather the resultant precarity is to weather it collectively, to form a collective even or especially when there’s very little communal affiliation between them. As might be expected, that creates a collective sense of suspense and precarity that’s extraordinarily contagious, passing from character to character and then to viewer, until the series feels like it is compressing and decompressing more than developing in a conventional sense – a wonderful way to actually make you feel the incredible import of this otherwise inaccessible, theoretical, abstracted algorithm. Of course, there are still aspirational, inspirational moments, but what’s so powerful about the show is that even these don’t quite generate community either – instead, they remind us that precarity always exists in the midst or privilege, when upward mobility seems just around the next corner, but never quite available, which is the case of most Americans today. And perhaps the most daring thing about the show is the way it closes the gap between Office Space and Silicon Valley itself, which no longer feels exceptional, visionary or mythical, but simply business as usual, light years from the legendary communities upon which its reputation was founded. 

Orange Is the New Black: Season 3 (2015)

As OITNB evolves with each season, it becomes more of an ensemble drama, with Piper blending further into the prison community and even the apparently minor or peripheral characters given interesting backstories and subplots. Admittedly, in season 2, the Vee subplot prevented that ensemble expanding quite as much as it might have, but season 3 announces its intent by opening with a series of more or less ambient episodes revolving around prison-wide events – a visiting day for inmates’ daughters, a bed bug infestation – that allow Jenji Kohan to fully sink us back into what often feels like the most fully realised lifeworld in the last decade of television, big enough to contain every other series. Of course, a couple of season-long arcs do gradually emerge, several involving Piper, but this season still really feels like the definitive moment at which Piper ceases to be the main character, partly because her home life also starts to recede further and further into the background, creating a kind of reverse culture shock on the one occasion when her family come to visit (Jason Biggs isn’t even in it any more). As a result, the other inmates don’t feel positioned or defined relative to Piper any more, but more relative to the prison itself, and in particular with respect to their workspaces, which means that this often feels like a workplace drama more than a prison drama. It feels right, then, that the major plot events are all driven by the corporatisation of the prison, which leads, among other things, to the inmates being given new work duties in a makeshift sweatshop, and the prison employees being forced to give up their benefits and submit to part-time labour even while they’re required to supervise – there’s no money in the budget for proper training – a new batch of incompetent  part-time employees. As their sense of entrapment starts to converge, it gradually feels as if the guards and prisoners are more or less inhabiting the prison in the same way, which is perhaps why the prison feels both more constrained and more expansive than in previous seasons, more dystopian in some ways but also more ripe for a utopian solidarity between prisoners and guards that concludes with the most incredible and rousing sequence in the series to date, something like a vision of how the last day of neoliberalism might look and feel. It also makes for a season that’s particularly preoccupied with conversion and changes of heart, as the employees’ efforts to unionise mirror the inmates’ competing efforts to create a legitimate, formally recognised religious institution and then recruit other inmates to their cause. In both cases, you sense that each character has the interests of the group at heart in a new way, which creates an incredible sense of synergy, an assemblage drama more than an ensemble drama, driven by profoundly comic acts of generosity that often emerge at the most unexpected moments and junctures. And the great satire of the season is the way in which the corporate representative – the perky, “accessible” Director of Human Resources – tries and fails to tap into that synergistic energy, as the prisoners and guards create a kind of anti-corporation that leaves him delightfully baffled, if not defeated, paving the way for what promises to be an even darker and funnier fourth season.