Top Ten Shows: Redux

10. Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job!

“I knew I didn’t start that fire.” This is what a woman doing the advertised E-Trial and being found innocent for what one assumes to be an actual court trial, in the show Tim and Eric, says, while one watches and ponders the horrible alternative to this janky, 90s-looking computer game finding you innocent. Tim and Eric is like Black Mirror, but instead of long-form episodes (or, at least, I think episodes around the length of two or three of the Tim and Eric ones), it hits you with ten-minute bursts (the Adult Swim lineup’s smaller time slot, for shows like this and another one you’ll find down here, on the list) of incredible, black-pilled horror played by regular people doing regular things. And if you get on its wavelength, it’s monstrously funny. If you don’t, and I’ve been on both places, the latter being earlier, for example, once, in a room with a splitting headache from drinking at a small party and still at that small party, and just suffering along to this bizarre, unpleasant show that I was just silently hoping they would turn off. And, yet, it’s here, on this list. Because it’s one of the greatest shows ever made, and it had me laughing so hard in college, my friend turned to me and said, “Matt, you’re shouting.” Literally. It’s so good, and it Is that good.

9. Aqua Teen (Etc.)

Okay, here we are. Whereas I am not including the seasons all bunched together for shows like True Detective and Fargo where they change cast and storyline, each season, or at least to something of the extent of either of those two (both will be on this list, in one form, or Another), I am looking forward to bunching all of the seasons of this show together, which start being given different show titles. But unlike Twin Peaks: The Return, while these are presented as different series, they come off, as far as I’ve watched them, like the same series, but with just . . . a different name, really. Is there anything different about them, even from a somewhat tonal or structural perspective in the writing, or is it actually just sort of a postmodern changing of the title with the show staying exactly the same? I don’t know. But this show, ten- or eleven-minute segments of just pure insanity, with a milkshake, a meatball, and fries living next to a trash-talking New Jersey boomer (I feel unfortunate using that term, but Carl is the prototypical example of it, here) who just wants them to leave him alone and instead has these magical food items hanging out around his house, using his pool, and attracting killer monsters there, to it. And the results, in the show’s surreal, adult-rated way, are often deadly for him as well as not too infrequently for everyone else, too. It’s a weird, wild comic blast.

8. Rectify

This show, which stars an incredible Aden Young playing like a more wounded Andy Dufresne from The Shawshank Redemption, concerns a prisoner who has been released from jail but is deeply wounded by it. Thinking back on it after watching so much of his stuff, it looks like they basically took the story of Damien Echols and rerouted it into something . . . well, similar, but just made to be a TV show instead of a real-life now-high-selling magick practitioner, with instructions for everyone else, if they’re looking for them, and he’s pretty effing legit, or at least, he’s pretty powerful. (He potentially, seemingly one would presume used the power of magickal practices to get himself off of death row. Pretty incredible stuff, there.) I loved this show, and the way it zooms out from Daniel to show the fully formed characters of basically everyone around him, i. e., his mother, his sister, the lawyer that helped them (or currently does), his stepbrother, who just shines in the sort of Pete Campbell (see below, in Mad Men) role of sort of approaching Daniel with all the grace of a guy approaching a scarecrow in a field and shaking him as hard as he can, expecting him not to fall apart, except he finds trouble with every shake, in terms of basically playing the normie man’s man trying to interact with the weird kid, except it’s his older stepbrother, in Daniel, who’s just gotten out of jail and now is not only sort of living out the rest of the life as a teenager that he had missed but is just spotty from jail, in general, and the way they interact throughout the series is just painful but good. As goes for the rest of the series, which of course throws in some darker, sort of more plotty content about the people really responsible for the murders he was convicted of, etc., but manages to play this off in a really atmospheric, Inquisitive way like the rest of the stuff it does, it’s just a brief, intense story of a guy who gets out of a bad situation and then finds himself teetering on the edge of where he is now. Incredible, deep, Inquisitive stuff.

7. Horace and Pete

Louie C. K.’s stage play on camera (literally, with sets and everything, or at least, with the camera inside what appears to be a wraparound set, thus making it not technically perhaps any different from a TV show normally, but tonally and I think in some way in the physical construction of it, clearly a stage play) feels like the sour beer under the fridge that you pull out and drink from the can and just tastes rancid, except while you’re in the bathroom throwing up, you’re appreciating every second of the sour, biting liquid and chunks in your mouth as you’ve realized an experience this exquisite doesn’t come along very often. The story, two guys running a bar that was sort of passed down—actually, explicitly passed down to them by way of a tradition of each of the titular characters being a part-owner of the establishment, which is contested by a female relative (I am being vague originally out of sloth but now out of not going too far into describing who’s related to whom how, as that constitutes part of the story, of this ten-episode drive)—finds them sort of hanging off the end of their stems and dying in their own little ways, except they are still alive, and the reality is more horrifying. Nothing particularly extreme, except the strength of Alan Alda’s guest performance as an older man, the older Pete, in their lives, and of course that of Louie, who looks a little uncomfortable, but kind of fits that into his character, and Steve fricking Buscemi, whom let’s not forget is just an incredible presence when he’s on fire, which he is here, and probably more despondent and pitiful than you’ve ever seen him, before. But, actually . . . well, their circumstances are extreme, but in little, unsightly ways that don’t feel dramatic so much as tragic, and just Real.

6. Fargo: Season One

Oh, man. Season two is a good one, but this season just really takes it, when I sort of step back and feel how I felt about each of them. Whereas season two has the revelatory Bokeem Woodbine playing a sort of leader to two seemingly mute Amish twins who intimidate like two trees standing there threateningly right in front of you, and himself seeming like he’s come literally from outer space, this show has, instead, a less exciting (truly, although it Sounds funny to say) but more famous Billy Bob Thornton playing the most wolflike man you’ll ever see, trailing through a small town in the winters and just stirring up trouble like a bowl of soup he’s going to watch you drink whole. Like a thunderstorm. Like a piece of your medicine in a cup of water that still won’t go down smoothly.

5. Cowboy Bebop

Yes, this show earns everything That it gets. While some episodes are just flat-out masterpieces. Well, while many are, it is filled with its share of episodes that feel more like, “What’s the space bounty hunter gang up to, this week, and whom are they following?” But I can point to about a season’s worth of episodes (in the AMC/HBO format of closer to ten or twelve episodes) where the show is just a hallucinogen on Anime. Where the characters are walking around in a surreal world, often one on spaceships but also often just in old churchyards and people’s rooms, smoking or just sitting there, in the rain, while heavy jazz music plays in the background and they talk about morose things.

4. Breaking Bad

This show deserves all, or at least most (minus a fifth season that sort of feels a liTtle thin), of the credit that it gets. No one is giving you better angles, more toxic lens temperatures, or more sparking ends of telephone wires as performances, each one seeming dangerous.

3. Neon Genesis Evangelion

What’s with all the anime, Matt, and the fucking cartoon shows? Jeez, I know. But this one is special. If Cowboy Bebop was special, this one is extra special. And I don’t think I would have thought that before I watched an anime series that impressed me more than Cowboy Bebop did. But, it does. It’s a really, really good series, that’s really incredible. From the city sirens of the first episode, alarming main character Shinji and his adult escort (not in that sense, although there is some weird sexual tension, there, between her and the teen boy she is charged with taking care of) Misato, no comma before that because it seems like everyone is Shinji’s adult escort, in some sense, in a Certain sense

2. Better Call Saul

Yeah, this is higher than Breaking Bad. I know. And I know that this is the imagination hour with Matt, right now, given how much originality I’m putting into these selections, but at the same time, these are intensely good shows, and Better Call Saul is just . . . well, let’s just say I think I saw up until the very beginning, or perhaps just through the end of the one before it, the fourth season, and I’m quickly working my way back to that point on a rewatch, and on this rewatch, I’m realizing that the things they do with this show, if not quite the summation of its parts, are so exceptional that they take this show to the level that it would probably be able to get to before falling off the cliff, because my number one choice is so good. This show is at points a talkie in the sense of a Tarantino movie, with the characters just having savage, subtle, and reference-filled jousts with each other verbally and through the landscape of the law and of conscience and everything else that one might navigate through, and then at other points, it’s the closest thing to No Country for Old Men I’ve ever seen, on Television, with the character Mike literally spending minutes on screen just silently tracking people and following them around, and investigating stuff, and doing little, odd (evil) jobs, for people. The way I described it here is just one example of what you get on pretty much every episode. Still one of my favorite little Allusions: When Jimmy, who later apparently becomes the character known as Saul (which, by the way, is a reversal of the Biblical redemption story of Saul into Paul, in name, or at least it can be), is doing a bingo game with the retirement home to help sell or maintain his clientele there as someone who focuses on elder law and goes on to sue someone big on something big, maybe with some of their help, He keeps saying words that start with the bingo letter he pulls out, in a fun sort of off-the-cuff game, and he keeps picking up B bingo balls, to the point where he gets visibly upset at the recurring letter (which seems like something nagging at, and niggling, into Part of his very life . . .), and one of the words he uses as he gets more upset is “Belize,” which is the place that Walter White, in Breaking Bad, the badass science teacher turned drug dealer, says (as a new, little euphemism that became popular at least I think in the online community of people writing about the show) someone took a trip to when they in fact actually DIed.

1. Mad Men

Yeah, here it is. The story of the coolest man in the world, whom I recently realized, in something that I’m likely going to put up on YouTube as part of my Matt’s Book Corner channel, is shown in a possible truth drop to be reading pretty frequently, and also is the most mythical character I can think I Can point to living among mortal men—he basically is presented as a God, come down to Earth—thus, perhaps indicating that, as Mark Passio said in his great presentation and elsewhere, reading is how you attain freedom, or at least it can be synonymous with that, thus showing why the word for book in Latin is very close to the word for Freedom. So when Don is reading Meditations in an Emergency, Portnoy’s Complaint, or The Godfather, on the show, he is showing you how to become him. Because how many people, Really, fucking read? Anyway, You get a lot of lessons in Mad Men, but you also just get a lot of sort of prose poems of television to wonder over. Don walking up to an elevator door in his office, in a particularly dark period for him, and it opens up and the elevator isn’t There, just an empty shaft. Peter, in a funnier one but perhaps also meaningful, shouting “Draperrr!” like a mad captain and then immediately falling down the stairs that he’s on, humiliating himself, similar to the scene where Don has a liquid lunch with his partner (or, not technically partner, although close friend, anyway, at the office) Roger Sterling, only to have to walk up the stairs with him and then find that Roger vomits right in front of Business Associates, when they get to the top. As sort of a punishment/humiliation ritual, or Thing, cosmically and also as planned out by a certain Character, who stopped the elevators. Or the moment where Pete is hosting a dinner for the rivals and superiors at the office, or at least one superior (and then another who reveals himself to be a superior as well in his selling a short story to a magazine, thus leaving Pete feeling very much the most little man), and their wives, with his Wife, and then he has a leak in the sink, or under it, and Don, like the superman that he is (and I think someone refers to him as that, in this Scene), fixes it, saying that the fix Pete did before, that we saw him do, in the middle of the Night, was just a coincidence in its working and that it didn’t really Fix the problem. This is a show of Titanic egos, battling it Out. And it’s also a show of great poetry, like when Pete growls, “My mother can go to hell! Ted Chaough can fly her there.” again having been bested by another man in the office, this one another (Slight) superior, who can fly and has a Fucking plane, or when a bunch of sophomoric, really frat–like guys are hanging out in Don’s office, and he says, “Suicide,” in a congenial, drawing-out kind of way, referring to the lead they had gotten About how to advertise the cigarettes. Something about the way he smilingly says that carries a certain dark humor that, verges into poetry. That they were told about the “Death Wish,” the idea that people actually, secretly want to die, in the research for their ad campaign for Lucky Strikes. It’s Just a really pure show.

Honorable Mention: True Detective, Season Two

Yes, season one is a masterpiece, but it’s just . . . something about season two, as I referred to in my Old site, makes it stand out. There’s something, as a coworker said back when it was airing, that feels kind of Lynchian and/or Kubrickian, about it.