The Good Wife: Season 6 (2014)

Six years is a long time in television, especially at the moment, so it’s inevitable that a show that’s been running as long as The Good Wife should pick up on some trends as it goes, even as it’s managed to incorporate them into one of the most immaculately consistent televisual sensibilities out there. Now in its sixth of seventh projected seasons, it feels very much attuned to a moment at which Orange Is The New Black has made its presence felt among TV fandom, since season 6 is really more of a prison drama than a legal drama, or a legal drama shot from the other side of the bench. Alicia may be trying to keep her firm afloat, and Diane may be trying to get in on the action, but the season actually tends to revolve around Cary, who’s sent to prison at the centre of a conspiracy radiating from the outgoing States Attorney’s office. As always, the same fascination with legal procedure is still on display, but it’s largely confined to sentencing and retrial procedure – culminating with a Brady violation – rather than the more obscurantist and eccentric approach of the previous seasons. That in itself would be enough to make this season feel a little claustrophobic – or at least feel as if it is starting to contract, not an unpleasant or inappropriate sensation for a series that is starting to glimpse the end of its lifespan – but it’s enhanced by what can only be described as the peculiar palette of OITNB, which creeps in to qualify the moody, oaken textures of Robert and Michelle King’s Chicagoland with a more washed-out grey-and-orange ambience. Of course, taking your cues from OITNB also means conceding that whiteness has becoming a minoritarian, fringe position, which brings all the series’ racial tensions to their natural crisis, culminating with an episode shot after the Ferguson shootings but before the Ferguson acquittal. Since The Good Wife has such long seasons, a great deal has happened since then, which the episode addresses through a slightly awkward and anxious set of intertitles before the opening credits - and while they may set the tone for the most uncertain and even clumsiest Good Wife episode to date, it’s an uncertainty that complements and is complemented by what has come before it, not least because of how presciently it anticipates the acquittal that was old news by the time it aired. For, despite all its moral ambiguity when it comes to the application of the law, The Good Wife is quite idealistic when it comes to the law itself, revising it only to revere it, with equal nods at CBS’ procedural heritage and Chicago’s legal-academic heritage. In a very real sense, that idealism is the show’s tone, the calm beneath the chaos, the poise beneath the politics, the whiteness that contours everything and that’s taken about as far as it can go in this season, a season that sees Alicia running for States Attorney but simultaneously a season that has to come to terms with what may be the most systemic, widespread distrust in the American legal system since the Civil Rights era. Against that backdrop, watching season 6 is a bit like watching the series struggle between being itself and turning into something else – or, perhaps more accurately, watching the series struggle to exceed itself, to set things in place for the late style that makes final seasons so strange and compelling in their just-in-timelieness.

Olive Kitteridge: Season 1 (2014)

In some ways, Olive Kitteridge plays as a riposte to the 2005 HBO miniseries Empire Falls. Like Empire Falls, it’s a four-part HBO miniseries set in a small town in Maine. Like Empire Falls, as well, it’s based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel – in this case, Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 collection of stories and vignettes revolving around the life and times of Olive Kitteridge, a high school Maths teacher, played by Frances McDormand, who was so drawn to the role that she optioned it immediately after reading the book. However, where Empire Falls was nostalgic for the lost Wasp world of New England, Olive Kitteridge is more interested in the late Wasp world – a world in which all the eccentricities that were once the hallmark of Waspy charisma have calcified and hardened, just as Olive’s endearing tics and traits feel as if they’ve been weathered over the years into a semi-senile intractability and inflexibility, even when she’s barely middle-aged. Less a sympathetic character than the residues of a sympathetic character, she feels too decentred from even her most charismatic impulses to be accessible to the viewer in a conventional way, which works perfectly with the decentred structure of the series itself - four more or less discontinuous and dissonant vignettes, in keeping with the structure of Strout’s novel, which actually generated some controversy about whether it even qualified as a novel at all, at least in terms of the Pulitzer critieria, just as the adaptation itself sits at an unusual cusp between miniseries, telemovie and cinematic release (all four episodes are directed by Lisa Cholodenko). Across that unusual sprawl, there are some common characters – most notably Olive’s husband, played by Richard Jenkins, as well as a pair of almost-lovers in Peter Mullen and Bill Murray - while Rosemary DeWitt, Zoe Kazan, Martha Wainwright all put in memorable cameos. Nevertheless all the people who come and go over the years finally blur into the background of Oliver’s irreducible, inscrutable isolation, which only seems to be compounded by the fact that she’s more or less single-handedly responsible for it. In the end, it feels as if Olive really does nothing but survive, or practice the art of survival – and yet that’s the art of melodrama as well, which seems even more urgent and necessary in the lingering, late world that haunts this oddball vision.

The Affair: Season 1 (2014)

A collaboration between Hagai Levi and Sarah Treem, his co-writer on In Treatment, The Affair is about the relationship between a married man, Noah Solloway (Dominic West) and a married woman, Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson). Noah is a high school teacher who’s trying to write his second novel while on holiday with his wife (Maura Tierney) at her parents’ mansion in Montauk, where he meets Alison, a retired nurse who’s working as a waitress at a local diner. Both of them are driven to the affair by their own frustrations – Noah hates being dependent on his wealthy father-in-law, a bestselling novelist (played by John Doman, in a nod to Wire fans), while Alison and her husband (Joshua Jackson) are trying to recover from the death of their four-year old son – with the result that each episode is divided into two sections, one detailing Noah’s version of events, and one detailing Alison’s version of events, a divergence which start to take on a forensic significance as a police investigation emerges around the fringes of their recollections. To some extent, the differences between these “male” and “female” versions of the story are fairly forgettable, but they’re sustained by Noah and Alison’s very different apprehensions of Montauk itself – specifically, Noah’s impressions as a tourist, and Alison’s impressions as a local, a member of the service sector. In fact, it’s only through their affair that the town’s legendary atmosphere emerges, since Levi takes care to continually to position their courtship in the contested zone between locals and tourists, haves and have-nots, drawing on the same luminous sense of presence and place that he brought to In Treatment. If Alison is trying to escape Montauk through Noah, then Noah is just as keen to escape to Montauk through Alison, as their affair gathers all the momentum of a town that seems to have set out to market and monopolise atmosphere like nowhere else in the United States. As a kind of flagship for the “Montauk experience,” Alison and Noah become more and more attuned to the emergent atmosphere between them, more and more anxious to calibrate and cultivate it with each new development in their romance, until it feels as if Montauk has really lived up to its nickname of “The End,” oblivious to the continent stretching back behind its insular, fetishistic fixation with its own sense of place. Recent shortform American television has been fixated with exactly this kind of regionalist texture, which Levi's Montauk Project takes to an extreme – it really feels like a single-season show, even though it’s been renewed - looping its looming awareness of The End back into an ever more splendidly isolated sense of its own atmospheric utterances, as if the town itself were in treatment, disclosing its deepest secrets without even realising it.

Death Comes To Pemberley: Season 1 (2013)

Among the many merry appropriations of Jane Austen in the last decade or so, this BBC adaptation of P.D. James’ crime sequel to Pride and Prejudice is singularly sombre. Opening some five years after Elizabeth Bennet has become Elizabeth Darcy, it’s set at her new home of Pemberley, where an unexpected visit from Lydia, Wickham and Denny on the eve of a ball precipitates a murder in the adjoining wood, and sends Darcy’s ancestral property into lockdown mode. Apart from Mr and Mrs Bennet, who arrive slightly earlier and hover around the fringes of the action, these are the only vestiges of the Bennet circle that we really encounter – there’s no Kitty, no Mary, hardly any Jane, no Bingley, no Charlotte Lucas, and not even Mr. Collins (although Lady Catherine de Bourgh does make a memorable appearance). In other words, the series is centred on the characters most touched by Darcy’s relationship with Wickham - and given that’s the closest Austen comes to a Gothic relationship, or at least a Gothic sense of the past, it’s perhaps not surprising that the series mutates Pride and Prejudice into something of a Gothic lifeworld as well. Five years down the track, Lizzie and Georgiana Darcy both seem entrapped by Pemberley – Lizzie, in particular, is pallid and dwarfed, a ghost of her former self – while everything is constrained by a kind of doomy romanticism, closer in spirit to Persuasion than any of Austen’s other novels, but exceeding even that as the iconic 1995 BBC score is revamped and reimagined in a host of minor-key motifs. Of course, that produces a certain claustrophobia, but it also evokes the outdoors in a way that is quite alien to Austen’s literary style, with most of the key scenes taking place outside, either among manicured gardens whose reassuring geometric co-ordinates are totally eviscerated by director Daniel Percival’s billowing Steadicam, or within the sprawling wood at the fringes of Pemberley itself, which feels positively primeval in its looming, unregulated disdain for Regency sightlines, transmuting from a wood to a forest to a jungle with each step away from Darcy’s property line. If the 1995 series transformed Pride and Prejudice into the most life-affirming, feel-good novel in the Western Canon, then Death Comes To Pemberley suggests that it may have taken a considerably mooder, gloomier mindset to produce the novel in the first place, a mindset in which everything outside Austen’s hallowed “two inches of ivory” suddenly feels like a crime scene. As a result, watching it is a bit like like witnessing Austen’s sparkling characters gradually emerge, resplendent, from the murky Gothic-Georgian matrix within which they must have gestated for so many years, in something like a comedy of premarriage, a reckoning of all the frustrations, disappointments and restrictions needed to lay the foundation for this most perfect of literary couples.

Happy Valley: Season 1 (2014)

If anything has characterised the 2013-2014 television season in a global way, it’s been a drive towards exploring new ways to envisage horror as a longform, televisual genre. Along with an unprecedented number of new horror, fantasy and supernatural franchises, well-established series such as American Horror Story have finally been met with significant critical acclaim, while ancillary genres, such as medical melodrama, have aspired to new levels of visceral and gruesome involvement. It’s perhaps not surpising, then, that one of the most successful experiments in televisual horror has come from way outside the horror genre, in the form of a gritty BBC One crime drama about a jaded Yorkshire policewoman, Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lanchashire), who’s forced to face her demons when her daughter’s rapist is released from prison. Set against the same windswept, cavernous landscapes as Sally Wainwright’s previous drama, Last Tango in Halifax, it’s almost unbearably brutal, traumatic and suspenseful, not unlike some of the more shocking moments in Minette Walters’ miniseries’ of the 90s. Virtually all of the violence is directed at women in one way or another, while the sheer amount of ambient, unsatisfied misogyny is almost stifling, gathering around the breathtaking aerial establishing shots like a low pressure system, and centrifuging every sight line until it feels like women can only afford to lock eyes with men over their shoulders, just as Catherine seems to have her greatest epiphanies while glancing in her rear-vision mirrors. Part of the pleasure of procedural television is that it at least envisages the possibility of equality before procedure, but Happy Valley is a series in which sexism is curiously uncontained by the bureaucratic structures surrounding Catherine’s investigation, which gradually spirals out to encompass the abduction of a local industrialist’s daughter, as well as the Yorkshire drug trade. If anything, procedure unleashes bottled-up misogyny like an occult, contagious force, as Wainwright’s narrative pretty much subsists on women being blamed for perceived failures or aberrations of procedure, women forced to take the burden for a procedural system that’s absolutely rotten. Black-eyed and bloodshot for most of the series, Catherine stumbles through that as best she can, but even the slightly staid concluding montage sequence doesn’t really suggest she’s succeeded – like films that end with characters waking up from a bad dream, it merely over-compensates for a series that nails procedural horror so perfectly that it leaves nothing left to process, no safe haven or avenue of escape.