The Leftovers: Season 1 (2014)

One of the challenges faced by recent apocalyptic television has been to envisage an event that’s sufficiently catastrophic to change perceptions of late capitalism as it now stands, but not decimating enough to destroy the world in the process. Where cinema lends itself to endless spectacles of death and destruction, television has started to come to terms with an even more elusive, powerful, apocalyptic prospect – a change of mindset in the midst of all the the infrastructure, character types and quotidian detail that still surrounds us. Longform television, in particular, is quite attuned to this prospect of an apocalypse played out in the present – and The Leftovers feels like one of the first series to try and turn this niche into a vehicle for “quality” television. Based on the bestselling novel by Tom Perrotta, it takes place in a near-future – or near-present – in which 2% of the world’s population has suddenly and mysteriously vanished. There’s no gore, bloodshed or spectacle – just an absence – while Perrotta and co-creator Damon Lindelof have made it clear that the reasons for the vanishing will never be explained. Instead, the series plays out as an ensemble study in characters coming to terms with a gradual, systemic lack of confidence in the world surrounding them (the series opens three years after the vanishing, once it’s become part of everyday life), as well as a kind of ideological or motivational void where they hadn’t even registered ideology or motivation operating before. As might be expected, that produces quite a fractured, atonal palette – at some level, the point is that there’s nothing left to ensemble or assemble around – as well as a kind of high point in recent horror television, or at least recent uncanny television, insofar as our most familiar assumptions and patterns of identification are somewhat defamiliarised and estranged. If it’s sometimes – or always - sententious, sophomoric and self-serious, then that’s because that’s the only reflex or register these characters really have for dealing with a catastrophe that seems to have displaced their normal patterns of identification as well, forcing them to become audiences to their own lives, debilitating their ability to even engage or convince each other for any great length of time.

The Honourable Woman: Season 1 (2014)

It’s hard to describe what The Honourable Woman is about, since it seems to set out to convey the near-impossibility, if not the total impossibility, of telling a story about the Middle East. In easily the densest sprawl since The Wire, writer, director and producer Hugo Blick unfurls a global vision that is too complex, convoluted and opaque to recount or summarise – rather, it takes precisely the eight hours of the series to efficiently summarise it - although two of its most memorable flashpoints are Nessa Stein (Maggie Gyllenhaal), an Israeli-English businesswoman, and Sir Hugh Hayden-Hoyle (Stephen Rea), a MI6 Middle Eastern expert, both of whom find themselves enmeshed in a conspiracy that revolves around fibreoptic traffic in and out of the West Bank. More a communication thriller than an information thriller, its sheer quantity of spatial, temporal and cyberspatial complexity is a riposte to any outsider who presumes to pronounce anything about the Middle East - not so much because they’re outsiders, but because there are no outsiders, no possibility of extricating or isolating anything from the Middle East once you start to talk about it. That might sound like hard work to watch, but the enormity of Blick’s endeavour, the sheer perceptual overload, means that there are moments when it all collapses into post-perceptual aporia, strangely soothing interludes when the camera itself seems to crumple under the sheer weight of its communicative and historical burden into so many silences, absences and vacuums. During those moments of respite, Nessa Stein becomes something of a protagonist – or at least the face of the series, since Gyllenhaal manages to give her a kind of resting crying face, a face that feels as if the moment just before crumpling into grief is the position it naturally adopts under total relaxation and repose. Anything else is an effort, any normal interaction speaks volumes of tears being held back, while her few moments of genuine relaxation and happiness – especially her smiles – seem, by their very definition, on the very verge of turning in on themselves, convulsive as cellophane. In its to and fro with Rea’s micro-expressions, it’s the face of someone who’s been an audience to historical traumas that exceed their individual perception, exceed their very sense of themselves as individuals. And that forces the audience, in turn, to face history, and Middle Eastern history in particular, as the real perceptual horizon of this extraordinary data convocation, the one thing we’re still trying to grasp as a totality, but can’t.

The Comeback: Season 1 (2005)

Some time around the mid-00s, reality television started to overtake sitcoms and soap operas as the vanguard of virtual, vicarious domesticity. Insofar as sitcoms and soaps were reality television in filigree, they were at least as interested in documenting actors whose lives subsisted on the same sets and scenarios year after year as in the fictional worlds those sets and scenarios supported. As a result, reality programs were – and continue to be – fascinated with characters who are forced or coerced into treating their own life as a soap or sitcom, forced to face the fact that they’re living in one giant set, that their domestic life has become virtual and vicarious even to them. No television series captured this juncture as beautifully and effortlessly as The Comeback, a collaboration between Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow that sees Kudrow as Valerie Cherish, a fading sitcom star from the early 90s desperate to kickstart her career in the mid-00s. Luck comes her way when she’s offered a role on an up-and-coming sitcom, Room and Bored, but there’s a catch – she can only get the role if she agrees to have her entire life filmed for a reality program called The Comeback that follows her efforts to get back into the industry. What we’re presented with is the raw footage for The Comeback, which effectively plays as a fictional reality program about making a fictional sitcom, with all the tensions and contradictions that entails. If it were any less pitch perfect it mightn’t work, but Kudrow and King’s vertiginous oscillations between tragedy and comedy, reality and sitcom, are so poised that the series somehow manages to convulse for thirteen whole episodes without ever quite losing control, or precipitating Cherish into the breakdown that always seems to be one episode away. In part, that’s down to Kudrow’s extraordinary face, which has never been as plastically visceral as it is here – squirming between sitcom and soap spotlights, it’s less a face per se than a kind of thought-experiment about what happens to the face when bombarded with everything reality television has to offer. At the same time, King’s sense of camp has never been so exquisite, so refined – it makes Sex and the City feel like a rough draft – nor so universal in its sweep and scope, its attention to the heightened camp of everyday life in a reality media economy. Elegantly, almost invisibly merciless in its satire of the television industry, it’s perhaps not hard to see why it received such lukewarm reviews, nor why its stature has grown so much over time, since it’s ahead of its time in the strangest, uncanniest way - the kind of series that would have to wait a full decade for a second season, an entire lifetime in soap, sitcom and reality terms.

The Sopranos: Season 1 (1999)

It’s hard now to look back on The Sopranos, let alone the first season of The Sopranos, with any kind of objectivity. More than any of the other series that ushered in the recent resurgence of television, it’s become mythical, more prophetic than it could possibly know. What’s perhaps most unusual about returning to the first season after all this time, then, is how quiet and assuming it all is, so elegant and efficient in its ambition that it feels positively modest compared to everything that followed. In part, that’s because the first two seasons are much more suburban than the last four, more entranced and incredulous at the peculiar hush of Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s chambers, or at the sheer fact of suburbia concealing anything as mysterious as a psychiatric practice. That hush radiates out into Tony’s home, and from there into his New Jersey backdrop, creating a loose, drifting sense of introspection that makes the transitions between waking and dreaming life feel particularly porous, and the dream sequences themselves more convincing than in the later seasons. Where they seasons had a mission and a clear trajectory, here everything is suffused with a kind of inquisitive, playful curiosity, caught up in the delicate game of transference and counter-transference, as if poised at those first few seconds on the therapist’s threshold, when you know that you’re leaving something behind, but might also discover something you can’t even conceptualise yet. Add to that the fact that there’s a lighter palette than the rest of the series, more bright skies and clear days than seasons four to six combined, and the tone is almost wistful, a kind of swansong for the nostalgic gangster films of the 90s. For all their revisionism, those films were old-fashioned male melodramas at heart, macho weepies that seemed more and more willing to embrace that emotional kernel as the decade progressed. Certainly, they continued to do so after The Sopranos started to air, but David Chase nevertheless managed to gather a lot of their melodramatic momentum, distilling it into a gangster whose main gripe was an excess of emotion, an affective affliction that left him continually on the verge of panic attacks, haunted every time he felt himself feeling something. A few years later, 9/11 would leave a whole new wound culture in its wake, but Tony was already there, somehow dealing with its legacy before it happened, coming to terms with being the first great television character of the twenty-first century.

Game of Thrones: Season 1 (2011)

It was only a matter of time before nu-television fixed its attention on a novel or novel saga so serial and sprawling that it hadn’t been completed yet. Based on George R.R. Martin’s unfinished fantasy cycle A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones fits that niche perfectly, so perfectly that it’s often like witnessing a standoff between novel and television for a new kind of serial and spectacular primacy, a battlefield between two competing modes of artistic production, both of which are already fairly antiquated and desperate in themselves. That gives Martin’s peculiar brand of historical fantasy an extraordinarily propulsive kick, a taste for power struggles that makes the very future of the franchise feel at stake whenever any of its characters clash or collide. Watching it, you can’t help but feel that the most natural thing would be for Martin to finish his story cycle as a teleplay rather than a novel, not just because he started out as a screenwriter, but because the series doesn’t adapt his novels so much as conquer them, absorbing and displacing their vast purview with all the ennobled entitlement of a new monarchy. Brief plot descriptions don’t do justice to such a multifaceted, contested narrative architecture, more ambitious in terms of sheer logistics than pretty much anything else produced in the last decade. Suffice to say that it all revolves around the fictional realm of Westeros and the power struggles between its various kingdoms and principalities. Of course, it’s all couched in fantasy, but the fantasy often seems less about escaping than emphasising just how fantastic our own world has become on the eve of all the flexible, transnational brutalities that have sustained or at least supported Westeros since its devolution from a single nation-state into the collection of conglomerates and corporate oligarchies we’re presented with here. And against that backdrop the series is brutal indeed, an anatomy of atrocity that gets more ingenious and inventive as it proceeds, filling out the exploitative fringes of the cable empire so sleekly and seductively that it’s almost a crossover between prime-time and late-night timeslots, destined to reach the most unlikely devotees, determined to redefine highbrow as HBO.