I'll do my list later on, but in the mean time let's do some awards categories. I'd love alternate award winners for any of these categories.
Best Revival of a Previously Cancelled Show: Whose Line is it Anyway? Although the CW brand-aware down-aging and cameos from forgettable hunks and stars of the week gets in the way of the show, and Aisha Tyler doesn't participate quite as much as Drew Carey did, the cast and games do a good job of making this feel like a worthy continuation of the original US series.
Fastest Time from Pilot Start to Turning Off: Eli Roth's Hemlock Grove, ~7 minutes. Turd.
The Walking Dead Award for a TV Series that you would expect to be popular but HOLY SHIT it's that Popular!?: Duck Dynasty. I was just out Christmas shopping and half the Hallmark store is Duck Dynasty cards. And there was a gaggle of people standard around them. I think some of them had audio. I see Duck Dynasty T-shirts everywhere. What the hell is going on?! I know the show has been on for a while but it broke out in a big way this year.
Worst Spinoff I didn't even know was a Spinoff: Primeval: New World. Sexy Time Traveling Dot Com Billionaire Dinosaur Hunters in Space Vancouver! All the worst of Canadian television.
Blandest USA Pilot: All of Them. Graceland! I remember good looking people who I think were cops or customs agents or FBI or lawyers or doctors or something getting into mildly tense situations. Yep, it's a USA show!
Worst Show I'm Still Watching: For the second year in a row, The Newsroom. I don't particularly think the second season was an improvement. The show is absolutely positively not operating in reality. The performances are almost roundly poor and mostly consist of good actors screaming. The central plot of the year was heavily mis-placed. Alison Pill's character continues to be the worst on television. They went for more romance instead of less. The tender moments beat you over the fucking head with a bag of feelings. ... and yet I await season 3.
Import of the Year: I haven't watched Borgen yet so I'm going to give it to The Returned. I'm still a few episodes behind and I understand that the show's plot conclusion has not been well received although I've avoided reading exactly what goes wrong. Watching in French, I think the performances are quite good, especially Yara Pilartz as Camille, who ages very rapidly in the course of the series and plays the Lolita "old soul" manipulator role exceedingly well. Also I can't help but wonder if the show was designed for international syndication, because the dialogue is very short and plain and the actors typically speak slowly. The very sparse soundtrack provided by Mogwai is a great mood setter. The show feels like it's filmed in a sort of Vancouver-Washington type forested area, and it's the perfect place to set a mystery show like this.
Best Long-Take in a TV Show: 19-2's 15 minute school shooting long take has gotta take the crown here. There's a real trick to doing long takes, and that's that everything directly outside the camera's cone of vision is scrambling to be read for turns, getting extras in position, reading cues. Action scenes have to be designed so that any action that happens is 100% repeatable. Every glance counts, and no one can mess up. It's always an achievement when a film does a long take, whether it's a 10 minute winding city sequence in Before Sunset, a 10-ish minute choreographed fight scene in Hanna, or an entire film shot in one take like Russian Ark. But doing a lingering shot in TV is unusual because of production constraints and also because of act lengths--TV audiences are trained not to focus on long uninterrupted sequences of any kind. So to see this get pulled off, even with some of the obvious puppet-strings, is really impressive.
The CJ's Dad/Picard's Flute/Blink award for best TV episode that takes place in a different area with mostly different characters: Enlightened - Higher Power. I actually like Luke Wilson in general and I thought his character in this show was not explored as well as it could have been. But this episode I think captured the essence of his character, provided beautiful scenery, expanded the show's universe, and also did a fairly good job of capturing what I imagine the struggles and temptations of addiction are. Also, and I know this is kind of weird, but meeting new characters at the rehab center gave me that "summer camp" feeling of sort of fast friends fast forgotten. (Runner Up: House of Cards - Episode 8 - Frank goes to his alma mater)
Most Screwed TV Network: NBC, duh.
Most Original Variety Program: @Midnight. I don't think @Midnight is amazing or hilarious and I don't think the format quite works yet. Several segments are clearly not live and the comedians pre-write material. That being said, the idea of a show that focuses on the kind of ephemeral tech-age internet pop culture is a really good one, and Hardwick is clearly the right person to host it.
Humanitas Prize: Orange is the New Black - Lesbian Request Denied.
I wrote more about the episode here. The entire show I think conducts itself with dignity and compassion.
Best Use of Music in a TV Series: The Americans, opening shot, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk. Tusk is a sort of bizarre song to begin with. The weird muttering vocals, voices popping in from random places, the odd tribal percussion, the big band swells, the western twang on the guitar, the extended introduction before the bass kicks in, the weird part with everything goes out mid-lyric and the drums go crazy for a few seconds. The tuba or bassoon or whatever it is that's barely audible. It's always been a song that's fascinated me, I remember the first time I heard it. It's a killer track. And these characteristics for the extended, almost agonizingly long introduction sequence to the Americans. The intro itself really exemplifies the almost animalistic qualities of the song. I ... haven't finished the full season of the show yet, but talk about hooking the audience from the first second with a sexy, interesting open.
The Skrillex Award for Tone Problems in a TV Show: Save Me. Great concept, some good actors, but I never felt like it had a clue what it was going for. It's too sharp to be a sort of mass-audience laffer, it's not soapy enough to have that kind of intriguing hook, they dispense with the husband-wife plot far too quickly, it's not spiritual enough to be religious, it doesn't delve into the mechanisms of what's going on enough to be sci-fi or fantasy. I'm really really surprised that they didn't reshoot or retool after the pilot.
