The best of the year: Mikhail Idov advises several excellent TV series
2015 IS FITTING THE END. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the year turned out to be saturated, including culturally. To dot the “and” and make sure that nothing important had passed by, we asked experts in various fields to tell about the brightest books, films, albums and other cultural events. In the twelfth episode, screenwriter, writer and journalist Mikhail Idov recommends several excellent series - because it’s impossible to confine to one.
Mikhail Idov
screenwriter
It was an interesting year for TV shows as an art form. - the Mad Men finally ended, the last of the bison of the generation that came with the Clan of the Sopranos, and the silver age really began. Instead of a monoculture of several TV shows that “are obliged to watch everything” (and between which there was, as you can see, a mass of the total, not least the fact that they were all created by white middle-aged men), there are a lot of cool things that are not enter for anybody in the mandatory program. Do you like the "obvious"? Fucking awesome, but to me, "Nutty ex." The fetishization of individual channels (or even Netflix) under the conditions of new pluralism is also cranky.
Two of my favorite TV shows this year were released on channels, the existence of which I learned along with the premieres of the TV shows themselves (what is WGN? And FXX?), One on the site where I used to buy pans, another one (“Catastrophe”) stupidly do not remember. The dictatorship of the “great” (the term in which we subconsciously invest universality) has replaced the incredible mass of variegated beauty with flaws. That kind of TV wabi-sabi. In any of the best TV series of the year - "Fargo", "Man in High Castle", "Nikerboker Hospital" - there is nothing to complain about, but I do not want to, because the bar is no longer lifted to the height of the "great Russian romance." Not because it is weak, but because the "romance" series for the foreseeable future have been welded enough.
The second season of “The Real Detective” looked so ridiculous precisely because Pizzolato was guided by the ambitions and techniques of that golden age, which helped finish the first season. New rules of the game: a complete story, God forbid more than ten episodes, the timing doesn’t matter at all, the genre can float anywhere. Two of the most powerful statements about clinical depression this year belong to the romky "You are the embodiment of vice" and the cartoon about the talking horse "Horse BoJack". Judging by them (and Aziz Ansari, the beautiful "Not All-Purpose Master"), the most influential comedy of the decade is backdated "Louis". By the way, from the Russian TV series for me the main thing with a huge margin was "Concerned", which somehow also falls into the genre of sadcom; why it was looked at times fewer people than the same "Treason" on the same TNT, a mystery to me.
Well, only the series, which I cannot even call a good conscience with a clear conscience, - “Mr. Robot”, paradoxically claims to be “great” in the vintage sense this year. In the scenario, insolent and at times ridiculous cutting from obvious sources, in directing terrible problems with the tempo of the story, the main female role is monstrous miscasting - and yet he grasps something important about 2015, about all his reasonable paranoia, about all our inconspicuous deals with conscience at every turn and about the fluctuation of the world status quo, examples of which we see, alas, almost weekly.