Transparent: Season 1 (2014)

One of the major events of the 2014 television season, Transparent revolves around Mort Pfefferman (Jeffrey Tambor), a retired professor of political science who comes out as transgender to his children Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), Sarah (Amy Landecker) and Josh (Mark Duplass) after commencing hormonal treatment in his mid-sixties. Although it was developed by Jill Soloway, it feels as if it’s set in a very different Los Angeles from Six Feet Under, perhaps because the production of the series was a very different event, or at least anxious to constitute itself as an event in a different kind of way. Aiming to make the set as transfirmative as possible, Soloway hired an unprecedented number of trans cast and crew members, made all bathrooms unisex and took a variety of other measures to ensure that the series commenced from a transambient sense of community and possibility. First and foremost, that makes for an extraordinarily utopian vision of Los Angeles, a slightly more sunkissed series of Todd Solondz tableaux in which everyone feels as if they’re suffering from clinical depression, suffused with an “anxious exhaustion” and a sense of being “overwhelmed all the time,” only to be gradually liberated by realising how universal their feelings actually are, how much they’re all part of the same recognition that “being alive is being sad.” One of the great advantages of releasing a series in one hit like Amazon has chosen to do here is that the creators can really develop an emergent, provisional mood, in this case a gradual awakening from depression, or at least a realisation that everyone else is asleep with you, by way of a restless gender curiosity that seems to touch everyone touched by Mort’s disclosure, as well as the Los Angeles sprawl itself, which in turn comes to feel continguous, nurturing, profoundly knowable, revealing to Mort that there’s really no such thing as men or women – just families - and orienting itself towards family life precisely as it erodes any clear gradations between genders, not as a lesson in visibility, or a dry protest, but as a new and strange species of joy, a capacity for wonder that propels pretty much every actor to put in the best performance of their careers, right down to Melora Hardin, Kathryn Hahn, Carrie Brownstein and Bradley Whitford in support roles. Coming out as transgender might seem to be traumatic precisely because it’s often perceived as one of the most transparent of orientations – there’s nothing left to disclose – but Soloway asks why it’s even necessary to put so much emphasis on coming out when we’re all in the closet together anyway, especially when the closet is as inclusively diasporic as it is in this sublime reminder that even the most secret, shameful recesses of all our pasts were full of other people all along.

The Mysteries Of Laura: Season 1 (2014)

At one level, The Mysteries of Laura is an American adaptation of Los Misterios de Laura, the hit Spanish series about a policewoman trying to balance her career with her responsibilities as a single parent. At the same time, though, it’s an adaptation of Will and Grace, or at least a continuation of Will and Grace, a star vehicle for Debra Messing that plays a bit like Grace ten years down the track, during the time lapse set up by the final episode before she reunited with Will later in life. Nominally a fast-paced Manhattan police procedural, its tone and optic is thoroughly domestic, even suburban, with Laura’s investigations taking her to the suburban fringes of NYC, from Westchester to Rockaway, or revolving around crimes that depend upon the suburbanisation of the urban core, most memorably her investigation of a downtown meth kingpin whose main clients are bored housewives. Nearly every scene is separated by frenetic, hyperactive aerial panoramas – the first few episodes were directed by McG – that collapse establishing shots into commuting shots, the kind of perspectives relayed from traffic helicopters to people on their way home from work, while it never really feels as if Laura lives in the city, or even works in the city, although it’s filled to the brim with familiar New York sights and sounds, as well as a veritable panorama of spaces and places that might once have been considered gritty, dangerous or otherwise “urban.” That creates an unusual tone, since the lack of any properly urban backdrop prevents the police precinct ever really feeling like a place of work, but also makes everything feel so inextricably suburbanised and domesticated that the more sitcommy space of Laura’s home life doesn’t feel distinctive or privileged in any way either. If sitcoms marked the sprawl of suburbia into new and uncharted living rooms and emotional hearths, then The Mysteries of Laura is a sitcom that seems to register that that process is utterly exhausted, refusing to ascribe any originality to itself while not seeking to be original despite itself either, which is quite refreshing for a televisual milieu in which the sitcom seems keener to suburbanise eccentricity than ever before.

The Knick: Season 1 (2014)

Over the last couple of years, we’ve heard a lot about how television is becoming the new cinema, but even auteur-helmed series such as Boardwalk Empire, Falling Skies and Luck have still tended to feel writer-driven, for the simple reason that their respective auteurs have only tended to direct the occasional episode here and there, if at all. The Knick utterly breaks with that mould, offering up a period drama revolving around New York’s legendary Knickerbocker Hospital in which every single episode is directed, shot and edited by Steven Soderbergh. As such, it’s much like watching Soderbergh at his most sublime for ten straight hours. That would be quite a luxurious experience for any director of his standing, but it’s enhanced by the fact that Soderbergh’s peculiar capacity to evoke and capture information flow has a kind of insatiability about it that’s even more apparent and compelling when given the kind of longform treatment that it is here. In his hands, the screenplay moves beyond more familiar medical tropes to become one of experimental insatiability and informational addiction, in the form of Dr. John Thackery’s (Clive Owen) ceaseless, drug-addled efforts to turn the Knick into the centre for medical research and publication in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Most of the period detail tends to revolve around procedure, equipment and technology, all of which are brought to bear on a series of extended surgical sequences that would be unbearably grisly – and perhaps too graphic for even quality television -  were there not such a cool sense of the body as an informational surface, a data threshold for an age in which, as Thackery continually reminds us, more medical progress had been made in five years than in the previous two hundred. Clinical in the most profound way, even the most involved and gruesome surgical tableaux have a kind of post-human detachment to them, as if to capture just how far Thackery’s prophecies for medical intervention and augmentation might have ranged at his most visionary and far-sighted. Like Contagion, which it often recalls – there’s a subplot about Typhoid Mary – the perspectives also tend to be epidemiological rather than experiential, as Soderbergh disaggregates all the body’s discrete sensations and perceptions into a remarkably busy portrait of progressivist New York as a sliding spectrum of humans, micro-organisms and urban infrastructure, not exactly organic, but not exactly inorganic either. Every shot feels viral, on the verge of sentience, while Soderbergh’s style has never seemed so autonomous, so indistinguishable from the unextinguishable flicker of data that sustains it. Soaking up all the hinges between gas and electric light, absorbing all the residual gloom and murk that hasn’t yet been accounted for, his camera feels like the forensic tool or medical breakthrough that everyone’s anxious to patent, perhaps explaining why it’s so attuned to the Knick’s surgical stage, whose whitewashed walls are so bright that they feel backlit, blinding you like a digital tablet shone on a world that’s barely even electric. By the end, medicine and light have more or less converged on a new, proto-digital awareness of data – the electrifiction of the hospital is a crucial and recurring plot point – with the result that you feel Soderbergh’s digital cinematography address your body as never before, distending across your photoreceptors even as it distends over ten whole hours, and leaving a new physiology in its wake, a physiology that suddenly seems to demand the kind of restless medical research that’s so evocatively explored and emulated here.

How To Get Away With Murder: Season 1 (2014)

Poised somewhere between Scandal and The Secret History, Shonda Rhimes’ spectacular new series sets out her mission statement as never before: to write as if quality television never happened. Where quality television – or “more than television” as HBO terms it – is keen to brand and apologise for itself as a totally separate medium from television, How To Get Away With Murder, like Scandal before it, still has that steadfast swagger that television started to accrue towards the end of the 90s – the swagger that comes from the conviction that nothing and nobody can reach as many people as a primetime slot. Flaunting that for all it’s worth, Viola Davis plays Annalise Keating, a Philadelphia criminal lawyer and academic who takes a group of gifted young interns under her wing, only to fall back upon them when murder finds its way into her practice. Like Kerry Washington, Davis’ performance turns on utterly precipitous lurches between steely attitude and histrionic vulnerability that quickly exceed and exhaust your attention or energy span as a viewer, necessitating a montage sequence of reaction shots for even her minor dramatic moments. Mostly they come from her students - especially her protégé Wes (Alfred Enoch), whose blank, earnest face makes him the perfect receptacle for the series – although they’re all hip, cocky and upwardly mobile as only the 90s knew how to make them. If they were in a slasher film, they’d all be contenders for the first one to get killed, just as they all feel like so many crossover MTV hearthrobs waiting to happen, passing time here before they get that inevitable music deal. Rhimes, after all, was the mastermind behind Britney Spears’ Crossroads, the swansong of 90s teen fandom, and none of her series have indulged those roots as much as this one, to the point where it feels like Davis herself has been given the directive to act as melodramatically adolescent as possible, or to emote as if she’s in a high-rotation music video. In the background of it all, there’s a courtroom drama, murder procedural and something that does in fact often approach the campus slasher films of the 90s, but the sheer level of attitude here doesn’t tend to discriminate much between genres – in fact, it makes you realise how scrupulously quality television has returned to the idea of genre. Nor does it discriminate much between different kinds of pleasure or attachment – for all that it’s been acclaimed for frank gay sex, all the characters irradiate a kind of bisexual bloom, available to the audience in pretty much whatever way you want to take them. Less a nostalgic gesture than a kind of wilful oblivion to the canons of good televisual taste that have emerged in recent years, it’s not even interested in liberating you from your straitlaced viewing lifestyle so much as reminding you that you don't really need to be liberated, that quality television is still television.

Halt And Catch Fire: Season 1 (2014)

At the moment, period drama – especially American period drama – is utterly fascinated with the late 70s and 80s. In part, that reflects our need to go back to the origins of our overconnected, digital world and get in touch with how it all began. But it also reflects a will to wonder, a need to recapture the breathless belief in the future that seems to have been lost now that the future has arrived so completely. Set on the eve of the personal computer revolution, AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire is the latest series to position itself at this digital threshold – a threshold that’s all the more evocative for being itself repositioned from Silicon Valley to one of the satellite Silicon Prairies that also started to emerge around this time. This particular Prairie is set on the outskirts of Dallas, where a team of three hotshot scientists (Lee Pace, Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis) come together under fairly insalubrious circumstances to create a new personal computer, although the series isn’t quite as fascinated with period procedural as that might make it sound. For all that it pores over microchips, circuitboards and other quaint paraphernalia, the script reserves most of its energy for the rise of a new kind of IT entrepreneurship, detailing the promotional and motivational origins of a world in which purchasing personal computing and communicating devices has become synonymous with self-realisation. As a result, there aren’t characters per se so much as different species of self-helpmanship, which creates a burlesque attitude and atmosphere that might be a bit surprising to anyone expecting a more placid informational procedural, but also makes it quite rousing at unexpected and incongruous moments. At times, it’s almost as if the series’ period mission is to capture all the most hoary IT cliches just before they gained enough critical mass to become cliches, as well as all the most pervasive IT character types just before they gained enough visibility and traction to become stereotypes. That’s tricky ground, since without the utmost delicacy it can easily slip back into cliches and stereotypes, a sales pitch that hasn’t updated its lingo for thirty years. But when it works it really works, taking you back to the eve of a new era of feeling, a new structure of inspiration and anticipation, a world in which nostalgia seemed like the last thing anybody would ever predict for the future.