Veep: Season 1 (2012)

Veep is the third network television coup for Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the only original cast member to well and truly escape the Seinfeld curse. In this incarnation, she’s Vice-President Selina Meyer, and much closer to Elaine than Christine ever was, if only because Selina turns out to be one of the most thwarted, frustrated figures in Vice-Presidential history, tortured at every turn by failures of micro-etiquette, awkward dissonances with the masculine ambience of Washington D.C. That’s the perfect vehicle for Louis-Dreyfus’ edgy angularities, which gather here around a sustained expletive that quickly exhausts every shade of “fuck” in the name of a word we haven’t invented yet, a word so overwhelmed with irritation, incredulity and revulsion that it requires the language of physical comedy to even begin to say it. And, as a physical comedy, it’s one of the best out there, devoting itself to Selina’s convoy, the huddle that only appears to be acting in tandem with her most subliminal directives, shepherding her from one excruciating scenario to the next and impeding her just when it should be escalating her retreat from whatever mess it’s orchestrated. Beyond a certain point, Selina’s job security can only subsist on fleeing this convoy, vanishing down every stairwell and corridor in the Capitol even as she calls back over her shoulder for it to protect her from itself, until D.C. feels as queasily concentric as a spinning top, diverging and collapsing her lines of flight as every move is parried in advance, every play checkmated. If the glass ceilings of female candidature and Vice Presidential office were fractallated and flung out across an entire city, they couldn’t be any more sparkling and sinister as they are here, dazzling all but the most staunch resistance as they disperse. And it just happens to have fallen upon Selina to provide that resistance – she needs to glitter just as ambitiously, which means that Louis-Dreyfus’ facial musculature has to be fitter than ever before, even more convulsively comic than in Seinfeld, sending out shards of itself in all directions.

Sherlock: Season 1 (2010)

It’s been speculated that in the near future we will arrive at Singularity – a state in which neural and digital technology finally converge into a new way of being alive, or being connected. As if in anticipation of that moment, the television crime procedural has undergone something of a change over the last decade, moving towards forensic minds that have mutated in order to to remain one step ahead of the latest informational horizons. Sometimes their mutations are intellectual, sometimes they’re perceptual, but they nearly always fall outside the traditional forensic hierarchy, as if the solitary investigators of yore had given rise to a new breed of consultants, sent back in time from a Singular future to impart some of their gifts to the present. In some ways, Benedict Cumberbatch’s version of Sherlock Holmes is the apex of that process, transforming Doyle’s beloved detective into the last of the great human investigators, the closest we can get to data procedural before we start to become post-human. Where Holmes’ original deductions were titillating because they were only just beyond our reach, it makes about as much sense to keep up with Cumberbatch as it would to try an emulate a computational algorithm, or a Google Search. Even his conclusions, recreations and explanations are largely irrelevant, as the series subsists more on the ebb and flow of data than any specific informational nugget, a thick ambience that spikes and broods around hubs and nodes that are otherwise invisible or imperceptible. Beyond a certain level, this new version of Holmes doesn’t deduct so much as simply intuit and navigate data, which means that the series also takes place in London at its most millennial, the London of the Eye. All that might make it sound like quite an austere experience, not least because the BBC have chosen to structure each season around three-movie length events, precluding the cosy familarity of, say, Elementary, without quite matching the immersive intensity of the cyberpunk film franchise. But what’s unusual is that Sherlock’s very austerity is what allows him to relax a bit when it comes to Dr. John Watson, played by Martin Freeman, along with the other regular characters. Certainly, he still gets impatient with them, but it’s the impatience of one species with another, and so never really lasts that long, always settling into a stranger, more singular kind of warmth than you get in the stories, the affection post-humans might one day be expected to feel for humans, as well as for their own residual or provisional humanity.

Elementary: Series 1 (2012)

Elementary is the “other” Sherlock Holmes adaptation. Set in New York, it features Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as his sidekick, Dr. Joan Watson. In this version, Sherlock’s a recovering heroin addict, and Joan’s his sober companion, allowing Miller to revive the twitchy, manic energy he brought to Trainspotting, even if he doesn’t quite aim for the data procedurals of Sherlock. Where Benedict Cumberbatch’s endless computations and permutations drove Holmes’ casebook into movie-length events, Elementary is more episodic, retaining the short-form narrative that suited Doyle best, while devising completely new crime narratives in the process. As a result, it’s perhaps truer to the spirit and tenor of Doyle’s hero, who valued brevity and efficiency above all else, as well as the structure of Doyle’s stories, which often operate on a truncated three-act basis, taking us rapidly through two false conclusions before settling on a third. In other words, it’s not quite as quirky as it might first appear – if anything, it offers us a classicist Holmes, as least in comparison to the BBC version, as well as the cyberpunk movie franchise. Certainly, the action may have relocated to New York, but that just enhances Holmes’ inextricable brand of Englishness, which could run the risk of seeming ridiculous or old-fashioned set against England itself. And the directors go to some lengths to make New York look like London, or at least look less like itself, drawing upon the familiar iconography of subways, skyscrapers and Central Park so rarely that you start to feel as if early C21st New York might actually offer the best approximation for C20th London, at least in tone and atmosphere. Both cities are vanguards of empires in decline, and in both cities Holmes’ investigations tend to pore and puzzle over just how widely that empire has cast its web, how drastically it might have over-extended itself. In Doyle’s stories, those speculations were often lost in vague, distant, orientalist murk, but here Lucy Liu punctures those soft horizons with a dry, deadpan delivery that makes the American empire suddenly seem undomesticated, uncontainable, totally at odds with suburban Brooklyn, where every establishing shot seems to take place. And as the most anarchic, uncontainable fringe of everything he touches, Holmes is a continual state of perplexity about whether he’s an American as well, until it’s a bit like witnessing naturalisation or nationalisation in slow-motion, England wondering whether it’s too late to even both differentiating itself from America any more.

Up All Night: Season 1 (2011)

Up All Night is a sitcom without any real tension or conflict, and that makes it feel pretty weird. Like so many sitcom leads before them, Christina Applegate and Will Arnett play a couple whose lives feel like they’re going to implode when they have a baby. However, their lives stay right on track, as Applegate gets more flexible hours at work – she manages a talk show host, played by Maya Rudolph – while Arnett is quite content to be a stay-at-home dad. They have occasional minor quibbles, moments when things seem to have changed a bit, but they’re so trivial that they don’t even need to be resolved by the end of the episode. Like an elegantly designed, eminently tasteful kitchen, there’s not a single frictive surface anywhere, not even the least hint of danger. Rudolph perhaps comes closest to providing some point of resistance – she pumps as much sass in as possible – but even she’s absorbed back into the supreme inoffensiveness of it all. For long stretches, you can’t quite figure out where the show is, or whether it’s even a show any more. If anything, it’s like a weird new convergence of sitcom and reality television, or a sitcom made to win over an audience reared on reality domesticity. After all, if sitcoms were originally about settling into the comforting propinquity of an alternative living room, then they’ve really found their fullest expression in reality television, something Up All Night totally embraces. Devoid of even the most rudimentary micro-tensions, it’s more about just basking in the situationless ambience of it all, as well as the residual charisma of the actors. Fortunately, they’re all pretty likeable, especially Rudolph, who’s given a great opportunity to prove just how much she gets from Minnie Ripperton. Still, it's not quite enough to get the comedy going, which is even more remarkable in that sitcoms are one of the most low maintenance genres – give a sitcom family a few itches or irritations and they can spin them out for generations. But Up All Night has a totally different level of self-momentum, making it hard to tell whether it’s strange that it was cancelled, or just irrelevant. In either case, it’s as disinterested in you as Applegate, Arnett and Rudolph would presumably be in real life, so mellow and low-key that it's suddenly your life that becomes the sitcom, if only the sitcom of how and why, exactly, you seek out this one.

The Fall: Season 1 (2013)

Somewhere between a miniseries and a series, The Fall devotes five episodes to a criminal investigation in Northern Ireland that will apparently continue into a second five-episode season, even though it ends on a wonderfully atmospheric and ambiguous note here. On paper, it’s a familiar story – a series of murders occurs, causing disagreement in the local police force about whether the incidents are isolated, or whether they’re the work of a single serial killer. The uncertainty doesn’t last long though, at least on the part of the audience, since the serial killer is one of the main characters (played by Jamie Dornan), while his motivations and modus operandi are one of the series’ main narrative obsessions. In particular, his need to spend time in the houses of his victims before murdering them – his serial attachment to each individual crime scene – creates quite an unusual and interesting sympathy as a viewer, forcing us to think of any space we attach to as the site of some imminent, unimaginable murder, a crime scene in the making. However, it’s undoubtedly Gillian Anderson, as Stella Gibson, the English D.I. called in to investigate the case, who steals the show – she’s always worked best from a certain remoteness, but she’s rarely achieved the glacial austerity she exudes here, collapsing herself into forensic procedure with a coldness that makes Prime Suspect seem positively cosy by comparison. In fact, as far as the series is concerned, she might as well still be in England, or even further afield, since most of the stylistic cues tend to come from the recent wave of Scandinavian crime drama, to the point where Belfast is more or less envisaged as a remote outpost of Sweden or Denmark, suffused with low-lying light and vast administrative wastes that are even more pregnant and brooding in a city with such a storied history. Against that backdrop, we’re closer to Bibi Andersson than Dana Sculley – like so many of Bergman’s faces, Anderson self-alienates, radiates rather than emotes, shrouding herself in an austere halo that imparts icefire to all she touches. And so it perhaps works best as a miniseries, perpetually reminding its audience that we're doomed to remain foreigners, that our attachments here are destined to be finite, even or especially when they seem to be boundless, or when a second season seems just around the corner.