Scots Taffer on 12/8/2008 at 10:04

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I am Scots, hear me recommend!

Six Feet Under: starts off as an emotionally complex dark comedy set in a funeral home run by the Fishers, a dysfunctional family of five, moves swiftly into dark melodrama and further into bleakness from there. It falters once or twice through the course of five seasons, but mostly with excellent characterisation, decent plotlines and great scripts that really plumb the depths of humanity, testing people's sense of morality, religion, life, death, sex, everything. I love this show and it has the best finale ever.

Twin Peaks: quirky whodunnit set in remote US/Canada border town where a young girl called Sarah Palmer is murdered, Agent Dale Cooper is brought in, played to brilliant comic effect by Kyle MacLachlan, but all is not what it seems in sleepy Twin Peaks and hidden alliances, betrayals, murder and evil come bubbling up. Excellent first season with a meandery but still pretty competent second season with a caveat of a bastard of an ending (though I reckon it makes perfect sense). Has the added benefit of a decent horror prequel too in Fire Walk With Me, a movie.

Arrested Development: probably the funniest show on television, if you're quick-witted and have a great recall, this show has a form of compounding referential humour that gets funnier as the three seasons progress. Unjustly cut down, brilliantly written and acted, the plot is all over the place but that's fine, just letting these guys in the same room as each other reading the lines written by the sharpest guys in Hollywood is enough for me. A comedy that the yanks finally got right in tone from start to finish... of course, it got cancelled.

The Sopranos: it's so referenced now that it's practically part of the cultural lexicon it apes in the early seasons (Goodfellas-era Scorcese and a lot of the family-tension undercurrents of The Godfather trilogy), but whenever it hits its stride this show was the best thing on television. It went on too long and as a result had quite a few lows scattered in through the mix, one or two seasons in particular just don't work that well, or feel like tired rehashes of similar scenarios with familiar resolutions. Still, I don't regret a single hour watched... well, except a few, but well worth the investment of time and money. Tony Soprano is an utter bastard that you love to hate and the controversial ending... well, you bring your own baggage to that particular dinner table.

Also just as excellent but my hands are getting sore are:

Deadwood: the third season ends kind of anticlimactically given that it, again another gem, got cancelled) but it's fucking amazing, Al Swearengen as protrayed by fucking Lovejoy is the best character in television history.

Rome: the first season is like dense like a novel, amazingly written, but sadly the second season just got fucked around in production and comes off half baked.

Dexter: one of the leads from SFU brings a touch of class to a cop show that verges on parody while it sorts of flips the genre on its head by giving you a protagonist that's a murderer as well as an investigator. As long as you take the plot twists and flashbacks with the tongue placed firmly in cheek, this show is a great lark - real "tv popcorn" entertainment.

I can only echo recommendations for Oz and The Wire, both shows seemed excellent for the few episodes I've seen of them but I either lost the time or energy to pursue them, not at the fault of the shows themselves. Though it must be said both seem particularly dense and intimately character driven, not light viewing.

Other shows I've heard talked up that I trust to recommend are Carnivale (another cancelled show) and Entourage. Also, for all the justly bad reputation the movie gets, I enjoyed a fair amount of the braindead Sex in the City TV series, plus it helps learn a little about some women out there.

There are others too, but that's enough for now.

Oh, FYI, I'm nearly finished rewatching Arrested Development and then I have Generation Kill downloaded.

Scots Taffer on 12/8/2008 at 10:12

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I prefer the appellation: collosal cock.

Muzman on 12/8/2008 at 12:12

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I draw a parallel with Donnie Darko hype; It's not that it was that great an example of its genre (although quite good), if you like, but it was the first one of that sort of thing for a whole mess of people who normally wouldn't go near it.
Heroes somehow made cheesy comic book fare primetime drama viewing. It was well timed; lots of comic movies, primetime drama getting ever more fanciful for years in the wake of the X-Files, suddenly everyone in the media seems to have been into comics when they were a kid etc.
I didn't think that much of it either. It was fairly amusing though. The only plotline I really cared about was the cheerleader; her quest for one friend (and being determined to remake the friendship once Gay John Conner's mind gets blanked) was the most interesting thing in it. And the character I cared about the most was Nuclear Guy! He impressed me that bloke. His character was a glorified plot device and he was all I wanted to watch whenever he was around.

Anyway, good shows, slightly older.
Check out Edge of Darkness if you can. Cold war espionage/ eco-terrorism tale from the eighties.
Also The Singing Detective. Pulp detective fiction author Philip Marlowe is in hospital with a debilitating illness. Trapped in a semi delerium his life, work and fantasies intemingle in his fevered imagination.
A bit more recently, Cracker (the English one only). Probably the best criminal profiler type series. Dr Edward 'Fitz' Fitzgerald is a drunken disaster area of a psychologist who discovers a purpose for himself by butting into Manchester police murder investigations. He's an arch cynic who doesn't suffer fools gladly (before House) and has something of a gift for the darker side of human nature, which helps people put up with his erratic and self destructive behaviour (again, before House). Unlike House he's got an ex-wife, family and girlfriend.
It's sort of a series of mini-series, with each case being only two or three 60m+ episodes long. Before The Wire I probably would have put this in my 'best show evarr' spot, at least while Jimmy McGovern was writing it

DaBeast on 12/8/2008 at 12:21

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The first couple of series of Oz where pretty cool, after that it just felt like they were coming up with any excuse to get the actors to wave their balls around and the plots became so silly.

mrle01 on 12/8/2008 at 12:35

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If you're into English detective series, check out Dalziel and Pascoe, Midsomer Murders, A Touch of Frost, Cracker (as Muzman already suggested), The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Foyle's War, Dr. Tony Hill. If you're into sitcoms look for Red Dwarf, Blackadder, Only Fools and Horses, Fawlty Towers, The New Statesman, Jeeves and Wooster etc.