Getting On: Season 2 (2014)

In some ways, not much has changed for the second season of Getting On – and that’s very much in keeping with the mood of the show, which tends to absorb and normalise crises into the destructive-creative routines that keep the Billy Barnes Extended Care Unit (almost) going. Head doctor Jenna James (Laurie Metcalfe) is still doing research on the sly while trying in vain to work on her people skills, head nurse Dawn Forchette (Alex Borstein) is still trying to figure out her relationship with supervising nurse Patsy De La Serda (Mel Rodriguez), and return-to-work nurse Didi Ortley (Niecy Nash) is still trying to stay out of the crossfire and just do her job properly. As a result, the season doesn’t develop so much as intensify the constrictions of the previous season, although that also means intensifying the flexible, provisional, improvisational arrangements that the Unit Staff adopt to elude them. In fact, the season is driven by an economic intensification more than anything, as Mount Palms Hospital starts to rationalise and downsize with greater and greater aggression, forcing the cast through a series of administrative and logistical loopholes that finally sees them breaking the surface in the final episode, coming to air in a beautiful rooftop scene that provides us with the first glimpse of Los Angeles so far, only to sink just as rapidly back into the thick of it for a harrowing conclusion. In the process, gender and sexual orientation, in particular, becomes more and more resilient in its fluidity, as Jenna’s urogenital experiments leads her to postulate that the body may naturally move towards transexuality as it ages; Jenna’s own doctor (a wonderful cameo from Mary Kay Place) develops an interest in her that might be lesbian but just as equally might not be; and Dawn and Patsy’s relationship moves further and further away from the straight-woman/repressed-gay-man archetype of, say, Arrested Development, towards something that often feels like a new sexual orientation altogether. Countering precarity with promiscuity, this emergent genderqueer lifeworld moves across the faces of the central cast with a roaming, contortive curiosity, until it feels as if everyone is continually, compulsively scanning the horizon for the next crisis, if only for the strange and unexpected liberations it might bring. Perhaps that’s why the ward feels both larger and smaller than it actually is, and the series itself feel both more agoraphobic and claustrophobic than its suite of six thirty-minute episodes. At moments it’s like watching fragments of a single movie, at other moments individual scenes have the comic or dramatic intensity of a single movie, but most of the time it’s a series that proceeds by generating its own sense of crisis-time - no longer governed by day or night, work or rest, on-shift or off-shift, but for that very reason peculiarly open to the flexible, provisional, improvisational pleasures of how, where and at what pace you watch it, as well as the particular crises you choose to bring to it.

Getting On: Season 1 (2012)

The U.S. adaptation of Getting On started airing roughly a decade after the U.S. adaptation of The Office, and it’s an interesting indication of how things have changed in the interim. As in The Office, the setting is a bleak workplace – in this case, the Billy Barnes Extended Care Unit, part of a struggling hospital in Long Beach, California. In charge of the unit is recently demoted Dr. Jenna James (Laurie Metcalfe), who deals with her downward mobility by devoting her time to research, most of which revolves around experimental urogenital procedures. Directly beneath her are head nurse Dawn Forchette (Alex Borstein) and two recent employees – nurse Didi Ortley (Niecy Nash) and supervising nurse Patsy de la Serda (Mel Rodriguez). As in The Office, the series is driven by the rhythm and flow of the workplace, and the way it consumes and absorbs the lives of its employees and residents. However, given that what we’re dealing with is only ever a step away from Palliative Care – a step that Dr. James tries to narrow with a dubious hospice get-rich-quick scheme – it’s an even more bleak and unforgiving rhythm than to be found in The Office, especially since we never leave the premises of Billy Barnes, at least in Season 1, a narrative challenge that series creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer approach with the same ingenuity to be found in the British original. At the same time, though, Getting On seems less phased by that than The Office, since, some ten years down the track, this doesn’t really feel that surprising, unexpected or even alienating any more, just a quotidian neoliberal lifeworld that everyone’s learned to adapt to in order to survive. As a result, there’s a much more robust sense of solidarity and community than in The Office, even as the backdrop has become more dire, a robustness that comes, in part, from a cast that’s almost entirely composed of women (the Extended Care Unit is a female facility), and in which gender feels more and more provisional at every turn. Trapped in a world in which day and night simply seemed to have been absorbed into work time, the series seems to suggest that women and sexual minorities have become so well versed in what it takes to merely survive that they’re the best equipped to lead us through the precarity that seems to increase with every episode, but which also always seems to be dodged and eluded at the last minute by the kinds of profoundly comic solidarities that have started to spring up in so much ensemble television of late. In particular, it feels of a piece with the nu-L.A. of Transparent and Togetherness, as the Extended Care Unit becomes something of pressure point for the invisible urban sprawl that stretches out all directions. L.A. ensemble dramas often yearn for a still point, a mythical centre, but that’s all in the past for these television series, which go in the opposite direction, elasticising and manipulating the sprawl until it feels something like a home, something like the willingness to recover and rediscover family that Olsen and Scheffer brought to Big Love. 

Better Call Saul: Season 1 (2015)

Over the last year or two, a certain kind of television narrative has started to fade away. Where The Sopranos ushered in a wave of solitary, tortured, male antiheroes – a trend that culminated with Breaking Bad – we’ve started to move towards looser, more flexible ensemble casts, often centred on women or queer communities. In many ways, the first season of Better Call Saul is one of the most poetic and poignant instances of that transition. A prequel to Breaking Bad, it inevitably recalls the trajectory of that great series – once again, we’re confronted with a man down on his luck, a man staring precarity in the face, a man prepared to do just about anything. This time around, it’s Jimmy McGill – soon to be Saul Goodman – instead of Walter White, but the backdrop, supporting cast and visual style – immediately and distinctively Gilligan – can’t help but recall Walt’s struggles from the very first frame. So it’s even more striking to be reminded that Jimmy is no Walt, and that his struggles aren’t going to reach the same sublime depths of despair, depravity and disillusionment. That’s not to say that his struggles aren’t real – as in the final season of Breaking Bad we open in New Hampshire (one of many touches that make this feel like a sequel proper rather than a prequel), where a washed-out, black-and-white palette introduces us to Jimmy in a state of utter desperation. It could be some time before the events of Breaking Bad, it could be some time after – it’s not clear – but it creates a sense of existential dread and despair that cuts across the day-glo palette of the series that follows. And yet what Gilligan does with that despair is very different this time around. Although there are incredibly suspenseful moments in pretty much every episode, the ratcheted-up, unbearable intensity of Breaking Bad is utterly gone, replaced with a more provisional, peripatetic vibe that gives Jimmy a bit of a journeyman feel, as he tries to co-ordinate his relationship with his brother (Michael McKean) and sometime-girlfriend (Rhea Seehorn), as well as a couple of characters from Breaking Bad who start to become integrated into the narrative, most notably Mike (Jonathan Banks), who’s even better here than in the original series. As a result, Gilligan seems more willing to leave Albuquerque, but also more attuned to Albuquerque as a character when we’re in it, taking the lush, fluorescent, 80s mise-en-scenes of Breaking Bad to their logical conclusion, culminating with a John Hughes tribute in the final episode. Where Odenkirk often functioned as comic relief against the high-octane backdrop of Breaking Bad, against this more modulated backdrop he’s more fleshed out and utterly wonderful – charismatic in his resilience and melancholy in his resignation, he never quite manages to commit to either, which drives the series into a deep, soulful groove from the very first episode. Although it’s framed as a prequel, then, it very much feels like a sequel, a character cast in the shadow of the last great man, and series shot in the wake of what’s been described as the most unbeatable series of all time. Still, both the man and the series manage to get by in that situation - and this time around, it's very much about just getting by, rather than any kind of Heisenbergian victory over the future - with all the provisional, off-the-cuff ingenuity that Saul does best.

The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015)

In an era in which every second television series aspires to be Twin Peaks, perhaps the most unlikely successor to Lynch’s throne comes in the form of The Jinx, a study in demonic Americana that stretches from Westchester to Los Angeles to Galveston and revolves around the many near-convictions of billionaire Robert Durst. Moving between the death and dismemberment of Morris Black, the execution-style shooting of Susan Berman and the still-unsolved disappearance of Katherine Durst, it fleshes out one of America’s favourite true crime sagas with a host of incredible interviews, powerfully curated footage and a new piece of evidence that makes for what must be one of the most chilling endings ever committed to film. At the heart of it all is Andrew Jarecki’s ongoing conversation with Durst, which scrupulously respects his psychological privacy while probing the veracity of his testimony in this more informal setting, inducing Durst in turn to relax into his recollections with such eccentric ease that it leaves you wondering whether he was unbelievably lucky, unbelievably intelligent or simply fortunate enough to be backed and protected by one of the oldest and wealthiest real estate companies in the country. As the series is very much anchored in Durst’s recollections, it’s inevitable that it should sometimes recall Errol Morris, in something like a cross between The Thin Red Line and First Person, but Durst’s presence is too mercurial for it to ever fully feel like a talking heads approach, just as Jarecki tends to refrain more and more from Morris’ ironic distance and lush recreations as the series proceeds. In part, that’s because it’s impossible to discern when Durst is experiencing empathy – and so impossible to discern if he’s empathetic – as the series grows ever more undecided about him than the facts of the various cases might seem to suggest, even or especially once Jarecki seems to uncover definitive proof of his guilt. In the process, you start to feel as if Durst might have been a totally different person at each crime scene, or at each point in his massive real estate empire, turning him into something of an embodiment of American regionalism, a ventriloquist for whatever place he happens to be inhabiting, which has the unsettling effect of making the interview room itself feel like just another space that he’s in the process of co-opting and controlling, whether because it’s already somehow a part of his family’s all-perasive New York property empire, or because he’s already started to contemplate how he might transform it into his next crime scene. A liquidity crisis that continues to elude accountability against all odds, he’s the perfect psychopath for an era in which precarity and property are peculiarly fused, haunting the interview room with his presence long after he’s finally left it.

Togetherness: Season 1 (2015)

Over the past couple of years in television, there’s been a movement away from dark, brooding, solitary protagonists towards more collective, provisional and flexible ways of surviving, and being close to other people. Like Transparent, Togetherness fixes upon the Los Angeles sprawl as the right backdrop for that moment, unfolding an extended family drama that may not be quite as diasporic as Transparent, but is even more ambient and dispersed in other ways. Written and directed by Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass and Steve Zissis – with a guest directorial spot by Nicole Holofcener, who channels the late romcom L.A. of Enough Said – it’s about a couple who are starting to disperse, played by Mark Duplass and Melanie Lynskey, and a couple who are starting to emerge, played by Steve Zissis and Amanda Peet (Jay Duplass doesn’t appear, although his performance in Transparent feels very much part of the same world). Although there are narrative hooks and concrete conflicts, a great deal of the series involves these two couples trying to put the right brand of ambience between them – Duplass plays a Foley artist – with the result that their interactions are often absorbed into the emergent ambience of the city in quite evocative and cinematic ways. On top of that, as the series progresses, each episode feels more and more dissociated from what has come before, if never completely separate, putting us in the weird, fluid zone between serial and anthology attachment that seems to characterise so much television at the moment. At one level, that makes for something like a series of perfect, twenty-minute mumblecore films, not least because there was always something vaguely serial about the mumblecore movement, a sense that you’d seen all these characters and situations before, if only because the community of actors involved was so small-scale, and so continuous with the characters they played. By the same token, there was always an impulse to self-annihilation, or at least endless minorisation, at the heart of mumblecore, which actually makes it feel as if a twenty-minute slot is the ideal time for a mumblecore outing. Yet at the same time there’s a fragile, upbeat sense of solidarity and community to Togetherness that’s quite distinct from the depressive, downbeat slump of mumblecore as well, a sense of curious, collective possibility that’s very much of its televisual moment. Perhaps the real loneliness of mumblecore films was their inability to commune with each other as provisionally and flexibly as they seem to here, or perhaps they were waiting for this new and strangely optimistic L.A. to emerge – but for whatever reason, Togetherness feels like one of the few artifacts that can genuinely be called post-mumblecore, a touching and unexpected successor to a movement that seemed determined to leave no trace of survival whatsoever.