5. The Middleman (2008)
The Middleman: People want to believe reality's normal. The ones who don't are freaks and no one believes them anyway.
The Middleman is what happens when TV execs make a competent, live-action TV adaptation of a comic book property. Poor examples include Blade the Series (2006) and Mutant X (2001-2004). The characters are all interesting, the special effects are good for the network (ABC Family) and the writing is superb.
Wendy Watson (better known to her friends Lucy and Noser as "Dub-Dub") is a struggling artist working a series of unfulfilling temp jobs (just like you or me, amirite?) Her situation at the beginning of the series is that of the nameless receptionist character that always ends up as the casualty of the comic's hero or villain. However, Dub-Dub surprises the hero, The Middleman, with her calm under ludicrous amounts of pressure, her snarky attitude, and her Genre Savvy.
The Middleman is a solid, dependable Silver Age comic book hero. He replaces all his swears with colorful epithets ("Eyes without a face! Polydichloric uthenol, you fool! Do you have any idea what you've done?!"), drinks hearty nutritious milk and tends to think through the dangerous situations he constantly finds himself in rather than shooting first and asking questions later. He's assisted by Ida, a shape shifting android stuck on the cranky school-marm setting, and they work for the Organization Too Secret to Know About. He fights super-crime, from madmen mind controlling apes, to puppet versions of famous vampire warlords. And he's picked Dub-Dub as his new assistant.
This show was just plain fun to watch. However, it does take a little bit of genre savvy on the viewer's part to understand what the characters are referencing, but as long as you've consumed some sort of popular culture in the past 40 years, you should be fine. Unfortunately, like so many of the shows my friend Chris/Sancho/Topher introduced me to, The Middleman didn't make it past its first season. But it's still worth watching the 12 episodes for their blend of delightful (and family friendly) writing and slick production. There are supposedly also a couple of graphic novels out there that the show was based on, but I haven't found any of them. Sad face.
4. Castle (2009-present; OK, so there two of these entries were from this year)
Beckett: We have procedure. Protocol.
Castle: Yeah, and you always come to a complete stop at a red light and you never fudge your taxes. Tell me something: do you ever have any fun? Let your hair down? Drop your top? A little "cops gone wild"?
Beckett: You do know that I'm wearing a gun?
It's "Murder, She Wrote" with Captain Mal Reynolds. The fact that something Nathan Fillion acted in (and that Joss Whedon had no part of) made it past its first season is a testament to the curse befalling Whedonverse productions. This curse can only be broken by more Dr. Horrible. ARE YOU RECIEVING ME, MR. WHEDON?
Anyway, Richard Castle (Fillion) is a thriller-writer who decides to kill off his blockbuster character. He soon finds a new muse when NYPD homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) brings him in to help with a case - someone is playing out murders from Castle's old books. A few calls to the mayor later, and Rick is able to tag along with Beckett, using his storytelling skills and tidbits of info he picked up doing research to help solve cases.
Obviously, Castle can't compete with the CSI's or the Law & Order-style police procedurals, so it spices up the gumbo with amazing chemistry between Fillion and Katic, and a snarky secondary cast (Beckett's other partners Javier Esposito and Kevin Ryan, as well as Castle's daughter Alexis and his live-in mother Martha). I wouldn't recommend watching more than one or two episodes at a time, because you start to be able to predict who's lying to whom and to guess who the real suspects are. As Agatha Christie said in Doctor Who (4x07 - "The Unicorn and the Wasp"): "The thrill is in the chase, never in the catch."
3. Invader Zim (2001-2002)
Dib: You picked the wrong planet to land on, Zim!
Zim: Wait a minute! What planet is this?
Dib: Earth.
Zim: Nope, this is the right planet.
If you like absolutely off the wall humor, you've probably already heard of this wonderful cartoon. My friend Colleen from high school was nuts for Invader Zim - she would sing us "The Doom Song" before our AP Biology tests for good luck - and it took me almost five years to clue myself in.
Zim is an invader (duh) who's sent to Earth because he annoys his society's leaders and because he almost destroyed their civilization once before. Zim sees himself as an underappreciated genius and concocts dozens of outlandish plans to conquer the Earth. He's opposed by his own incompetence, his clinically insane robot helper GIR (arguably the show's breakout hit) and by conspiracy-theorist Earthling Dib. Unsurprisingly, nothing ever goes quite right for Zim.
The thing I really liked about Invader Zim (besides the animation, the imaginative stories and the crazy-awesome opening theme [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-tgGwKZeko]) was the world creator Jhonen Vasquez made. It's a pseudo-cyberpunk dystopia where adults are either bitter crones or mad scientist superheroes and most of the children sport obvious lobotomy scars. The population wanders through their lives in such a stupor that it's questionable they would even notice or care if Zim succeeded in conquering the world.
2. Doctor Who 2009 Specials/Torchwood: Children of Earth
Carmen: No, but you be careful, because your song is ending, sir.
The Doctor: [visibly unnerved] What do you mean?
Carmen: It is returning, it is returning through the dark. And then Doctor... oh, but then... he will knock four times.
Gwen: All those times in history where there was no sign of him... I wanted to know why not. But I don't need to ask anymore. I know the answer now: Sometimes the Doctor must look at this planet and turn away in shame.
This year marked the end of David Tennant's run as the venerable Doctor. It also marked the end of the original run of Torchwood (the made-for-adults spin-off) because they'd have to work pretty hard to make a series out of the characters left alive and on Earth at the conclusion.
The 3-5 Doctor Who specials (depending on if you count the previous year's Christmas Special and if you chop The End of Time in two) saw The Doctor journeying on his own for a lot longer than we've ever seen him. Let's just say the solitude didn't end up agreeing with him very well.
Tennant was the Doctor fans of the modern series knew best, serving from 2006 to 2009. He's the best known Doctor of the modern generation (unless you've seen the show's original run from 1963-1989). It took me a long time to warm up to him, clinging as I was to Christopher Eccleston (The Ninth Doctor). Ten was always a little too shouty for my taste, but I always come around to people when they regularly wear trench coats.
A lot of the fans had trouble with Torchwood: Children of Earth, mostly because of the perceived Executive Meddling (the story goes that BBC 1, on which the specials were airing, objected to the [SPOILER] relationship between Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones, so they decided Ianto should leave the show dramatically. And permanently.) They were also upset by the actions Jack had to take to save the world from the alien menace (Moral Event Horizon). The specials also ended in a way that the Torchwood organization would need to be rebuilt from the ground up, operated by a new cast of characters (SPOILERS: two members were dead before the specials started, another died during Children of Earth, Jack left the planet, and Gwen's pregnant).
If it wasn't for the immense changes both these series went through by the end of their runs, these would be sharing the number 1 spot. All in all, though, they were both very satisfactory TV experiences. The effects were great, as was the writing, and you felt like there was something at stake, as if you weren't watching it on TV. That sort of emotional resonance is really rare today.
1. Spaced (1999-2001)
Daisy: You're up early.
Tim: Oh, I haven't been to bed. Me and Mike met up with these two Scottish guys in the pub and they gave us all this cheap speed.
Daisy: Oh Tim, that's so tacky.
Tim: Yeah I know, but y'know they were so nice... I think if we'd said no they'd have got offended and beaten us to death with a pool cue.
The best piece of TV I watched in 2009 was the two-season run of the British sitcom Spaced. The reason I liked it so much was because the characters are the people of my generation (more or less). Post-college, pre-meaningful career (in fact, fearing they'll ever have a career), I saw my friends' and my futures broadcast 10 years ago on the BBC.
Simon Pegg plays Tim Bisley, an aspiring comic book artist. He and Jessica Hynes' Daisy Steiner (an aspiring journalist) lie to their future landlady, who placed an ad in the paper for a professional married couple's flat. Tim's friend Mike (an aspiring soldier) and Daisy's friend Twist (an aspiring fashionista) and insane/passionate artist Brian round out the cast, with Marsha the landlady popping in and out with a glass (or more frequently, a bottle) of wine in her hand. Their lives are as wacky and surreal as I wish mine was.
Beyond the sociological predictions I saw in the show, what's most interesting is that Pegg, Hynes and Edgar Wright (the director) basically took what would have been a really interesting webcomic idea and turned it into a cult classic TV show. Actually, that might be a way to extend the property's life, since another season is somewhat unlikely. Hmm, let me get Simon Pegg on the phone, I've got an idea for him.....
I hope you enjoyed reading about my favorite TV of 2009. Hopefully, you'll enjoy these shows as much as I have.
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