STRANGER THINGS
2016 had a lot of good stuff to offer on TV online, but the most exciting new thing was Netflix's Stranger Things. The Duffer Brothers' homage to Spielberg (there's a little bit of E.T. in there, a little bit of Poltergeist and a lot of The Goonies) is a passionate love letter to the 1980s in general, but it's more than just nostalgia. In its own right, it has terrific acting and writing, and it's atmospheric and brilliantly paced, with an excellent synthesizer soundtrack and perfect characters. When a boy in Indiana goes missing after coming across a monster, his three friends hop on their bikes to go out and search for him, and cross paths with a mysterious girl with supernatural abilities who is hunted by secret agents. Meanwhile, the boy's anxious mother begins to imagine that she's communicating with him through the lights in their house. These eight fantastic episodes were the absolute highlight of the year in television entertainment, and although a second season is already on the way, I hope they have the good taste to let the show end before it goes on for too long. Some things are better when they come in smaller doses.
WESTWORLD
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's update of an old sci-fi film penned by Michael Crichton was one of the most talked about new shows in 2016. But the hype was justified. HBO's new flagship is really smart, quite complex, thereby inviting repeated viewing, and so much more than just the sex and violence that HBO is otherwise most known for. In this Western-themed amusement park, staffed with incredibly lifelike androids, in the far off future, some strange things are beginning to happen and the robots seem to become self-aware. As viewers, we are not introduced to this world in any way, we're simply thrown into it headfirst. And our first meeting is not with the guests, i.e. people, but with the "hosts," which is what the robots are called, so it's clear where our sympathies are supposed to lie. The incredible thing about Westworld is that every avenue that this concept has to offer is explored, every possible angle is covered. Another great thing is that the show is confident, on the verge of being arrogant, because it knows it's quality, it knows it's good and sexy and intelligent and luxurious. But it also makes you think about things, like what it means to be human and what consciousness is, and it also addresses some real moral dilemmas when it comes to artificial intelligence, issues that I am so grateful I will never personally have to deal with in my life.
PREACHER
Another much talked about newcomer was based on a cult comic book, which I must confess I had never read and had only heard spoken of in awed and excited terms. So there will be very little comment on the TV version's faithfulness to the source material, other than to say that the original graphic novels were created by Irish guys I believe, which kind of explains the weirdness of it, the almost sacrilegious content and humor and the unusual view of the US, the southern states at least. The preacher is Jesse Custer, a reformed bank robber now tending his late father's flock who, after becoming possessed by an invisible and very powerful entity which is both angelic and demonic at the same time, goes on a quest to find God, literally. With him on his quest are his two best friends, an angry and crazy Irishman (who just happens to be a vampire) called Cassidy and his on-again, off-again girlfriend, the badass Tulip O'Hare. That is just the tip of the iceberg of this bizarre, violent and very funny show, brought to us courtesy of Sam Catlin, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen. Having seen This Is The End and Sausage Party before this, I'm now quite convinced that Seth Rogen's forte is religious satire. Also, huge applause for one of the greatest first season finales I've ever seen.
LUKE CAGE
So after the very successful and popular Netflix and Marvel collaborations Daredevil and Jessica Jones, it was no surprise that the third addition to the Marvel TV universe, Luke Cage, would be the subject of some pretty high expectations. Luckily, it is every bit as good as its brother and sister shows, and manages to maintain the dark and serious tone of those two while having a flavor all of its own. Done very tastefully like an homage to blaxploitation, which is of course fitting and feels entirely natural to the show and not at all like a thing they've done to appeal to a black audience (although, who am I to say?). The bullet and fire proof Luke Cage is a very charming and likeable hero, and the villains Cottonmouth, Diamondback and Black Mariah, are all first rate characters with their own believable motivations and personalities. So far, it looks like Netflix and Marvel are able to maintain the same level of quality throughout, which is a good sign for the upcoming series Iron Fist and later the crossover series The Defenders.
THE NIGHT MANAGER
You can't really go wrong with a John le Carré story, they pretty much always translate into top notch entertainment. This time, it's Academy Award-winning Danish director Susanne Bier who've turned over a BBC miniseries in which le Carré's story has been updated from Central America in the early 1990s, to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa after the Arab Spring of 2011. Tom Hiddleston plays the hotel concierge, secretly an ex-soldier with some high ideals, who becomes involved in an international multi-billion dollar weapons trade conspiracy between the governments of the world and a very suave and evil British gentleman called Richard Roper, played with greedy delight by Hugh Laurie. These six intense and thrilling episodes deliver everything you need for your spy fiction.
WAR & PEACE
Miniseries are not usually included here, because they are sort of one-off things, not made to last for very long, but this year had a couple that were just too good to overlook. Another one from the BBC was this new adaptation of Tolstoy's legendary epic saga of love and death during the Napoleonic war in Russia, early 1800s. This version of War & Peace does not have the big budget grandiosity of Bondarchuk's classic four-part cinema adaptation from the 1960s, and naturally the long story has been shortened to fit into six episodes. But as it is written by Andrew Davies, easily the best at adapting 19th century literature for television (take his Pride & Prejudice, Bleak House, Middlemarch and Little Dorrit, just to name a few), this turned out to be one of the best adaptations of the novel ever made, if not the most faithful. Which is also down to the mostly excellent casting, particularly Paul Dano as Pierre, that can really do justice to the fine screenplay and some lush BBC production values. Although, like I said, this version has had to remove a lot of the over one thousand pages of the original material, for instance many of the war scenes that make up a third or so of the novel, this is interestingly the first adaptation that features Pierre's controversial conversion to the Freemasons.
HORACE AND PETE
Well, it has always been said that there is a fine line between comedy and tragedy. Or that the difference between comedy and tragedy is time. That said, Louis C.K.'s new show, which he made and released in secret, completely independently from any television network and only available via his own website, is a tragedy interspersed with moments of darkest comedy. Who knew there was a fully-fledged playwright inside that stand-up comedian? Louis C.K. had a productive year, co-producing Zach Galifinakis' brilliant clown show Baskets and Pamela Adlon's Better Things on FX (which also broadcasts his own show Louie). But this was something new. Unique, you might say. Filmed as if it were a sitcom, Horace and Pete is a really depressing play, taking place almost entirely in and around a Brooklyn bar, which has been passed down from generation to generation for a hundred years, always run by a guy called Horace and a guy called Pete. The ten-part show has more in common with Becket, or Tennessee Williams, or Ibsen, than say, Cheers, and ranges from totally embarrassing to very sad, although it is sometimes quite hilarious, but that is always just by the bye. Don't say we didn't warn you.
OUTCAST
There were times in Robert Kirkman's Cinemax adaptation of his own comic book Outcast, that I almost gave up on it. But then something totally unexpected happened, the drama took a completely different turn from where I thought it was going, that I couldn't help returning to it again. Thinking back on it now, six months later, it stands out as an excellent horror drama about demonic possessions in a small town. It is dark and depressing, partly because it touches on real tragic themes like rape, childhood abuse and grief, and therein lies its strength. Without those serious subject matters, it would just be demons taking over with a secret agenda that remains unanswered at the end of ten slowly simmering episodes. All we know for certain is that there is one guy in this small town in West Virginia that seems to have a natural born ability to stop the demons, and where the show will go from here is anybody's guess. Wherever it is, I for one will be waiting to catch up with it once more of it comes around.
THE X FILES
This six-part revival of one of the most classic TV shows ever made may not have been very strong in content, but the nostalgia factor of seeing our favorite FBI agents Scully and Mulder together again on screen after fourteen years was so unbelievably high that it sustained my interest at least for the short time it aired. There's not much to be said of the miniseries in itself, which technically speaking is the tenth season of The X Files, because most of the episodes, apart from the first two and the last, were quite neglectable. But sometimes a TV show's value is not in the content, but the fact that it's even happening at all. So, despite the bad reviews, I still hope there'll be more, and if we're lucky enough to get that, I hope it's better as well. Just a little better would be enough. We all know it could be, there's enough quality on television today to warrant that hope. So, in other words, "I Still Believe"...
HAP AND LEONARD
If you're a fan of Cormac McCarthy, or the Coen brothers, you'll probably like Joe R. Lansdale as well, a writer who likes to mix absurd comedy with hard-boiled crime and violence. He has also written a story in which Elvis is still alive and in a retirement home which becomes haunted by an ancient Egyptian mummy. But that's a story for another time. In Hap and Leonard, one of the nicest surprises of the year in television, political agitators in Texas during hard unemployment times in Reagan's America enter a dangerous world full of psychos and gangsters when they try to sell drugs in order to fund their anarchic protest plans. Unluckily, best friends Hap and Leonard (played with delightful chemistry by James Purefoy and Michael Kenneth Williams) manage to get mixed up in the drama thanks to Hap's ex-wife Trudy (Christina Hendricks). Made by the same director and writer who adapted Lansdale's story Cold in July into a movie back in 2014, which I also strongly recommend.
