As we watch the media concentration tighten, with either Netflix or Paramount about to own Warner Bros. with its extensive film and television catalogue, this is a good time to reflect on what the last TV season has wrought. I watched 89 series this year and valued about one-third of them, though I am selective and often won’t go near series I know I will not be attracted to. Although there was much to like, the Worsts were more shocking in their betrayal of any standard of decency—though many were praised for maintaining it (can you say Adolescence?)— while the best at times hardly stood out.
Here is why: Streaming television is everywhere, a middle-class phenomenon in terms of its makers, though not in terms of its extremely rich owners (David Ellison-Paramount+, Jeff Bezos-Amazon Prime and MGM+, Ted Sarandos-Netflix). The Western and, in some cases, global middle class is mired in an ever-deepening imbroglio due to the crimes of its leaders (genocide in Gaza, proxy war in Ukraine, blowing up Nord Stream and releasing the world’s largest methane cloud, to say nothing of the movement before our eyes with Trump and Zelensky from an oligarchy to an open kleptocracy). That class needs to reconcile its tentative support for, or at least not violent objection to, these crimes by “seeing both sides.” All this makes for weaker television where there are no villains or exploiters, only well-meaning but misunderstood individuals, and everyone has their reasons. Never mind that some people’s, or characters’, “reasons” are illegal and cause great harm.
Some examples: the Spanish series Two Graves, which lionizes a crazed, murderous granny and in the end makes everyone share her guilt and, similarly, The Danish Woman which makes the sadistic antics of an ex-Danish intelligence agent in Iceland “cute”; The Task, by the writer of the far superior Mare of Eastwick, which here narrows the focus on a cop and a criminal, equalized in the crosscutting and losing the focus on the entire working class milieu that made the former series so successful. Finally, this phenomenon broaches parts of a series far superior to the other three, The Abandons, which equally keeps crosscutting between two matriarchs, one the vicious head of a silver mining enterprise whose actions unleash violence and bloodshed on the town she claims to love, and the other, defending her land and the group of misfits she has gathered around her.
The problem again with the last is that the two keep being equalized to divide and confuse our sympathies, when in fact they are not, just as mainstream media often pretends to be confused over the antics of the corporate oligarchy who, in the same breath, it both criticizes and adores. Bad politics and bad television.
Top 10 Series
Matlock—A masterful series that managed in the first season to be both political and personal. Maddie’s (Kathy Bates) ongoing quest to hold the drug company Wellbrexa liable for the overdose death of her daughter also had her championing down-on-their-luck clients each week. The bonus was that this series was also a powerful examination of the triumphs and tribulations facing seniors, appropriate because its network CBS, has a largely geriatric audience. The second season was a disappointment and illustrates that the show should have ended after one glorious season, but that doesn’t happen in network or streaming TV, where a profitable series must go on until the audience deserts it.
American Primeval/ The Abandons—The first, by far the superior of these two Netflix series, charted American savagery with the Mormons as equivalent to our modern fundamentalists, Christian and Zionist, prattling on about “the promised land,” and behaving, in their violent eradication of anyone who stands in their way, like today’s settler-colonialists. The second had The X-Files’ Gillian Anderson and Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey squaring off against each other in a tale about silver mining in the state of Washington in the 19th century, with the silver baron not above fueling a tribal war to secure the property rights to the mineral lode. Episode two, about the shifting loyalties of a priest, stood out above the rest.
Prime Target—From the opening ATM explosion in Baghdad duplicating the Israeli beeper attack on Lebanon, to the nefarious darkness shrouding and linking Cambridge tech to a group of Brit intelligence, American NSA and financial interests, this Apple TV+ series stood out, not only for its take on the interconnections in this linkage but also for its ability to make mathematics sexy, focusing on the power of prime numbers, here harnessed to Western power. Its Cambridge grad student who bucks the security state, aided by an NSA agent who must overcome her own allegiance to her intelligence godmother, which she does in an elegant statement when accused of betraying a plot that involves assassination and global domination: “I don’t want your forgiveness; I don’t need it.”
Common Side Effects—Mike Judge in satirical Silicon Valley mode in this HBO Max biting anime of drug companies as ruthlessly pursuing an Asian homeopathic specialist who has discovered a cure for the world’s diseases using a type of mushroom. That cannot be allowed to stand because it exposes the companies not as purveyors of wellness but as profiting from the perpetuation of sickness. Episode two has a company exec taking an assistant to lunch, complaining about all the lawsuits because of the “common side effects” of its drugs, and when asked if the company has accomplished anything, shrugging and saying, “We stopped some arthritis.” The innovative look of the show is somewhere between Miyazaki-type Japanese manga and Bob’s Big Boy, with a hearty dose of the laid-back quality of the lead characters of Beavis and Butthead.
A Thousand Blows—Steven Knight continues his recounting of the savagery of British capitalism (Peaky Blinders, A Christmas Carol, Taboo) in this Disney+ series which recounts a partially true story of a Jamaican boxer, Hezekiah Moskow, and his relationship with Mary Carr, the “queen” of a gang of all-female thieves in London’s working-class melting pot, the East End in the 1880s. The “savagery” of the East End is constantly contrasted to the “civilized” West End, where the profits of 19th-century British mercantile and factory capitalism, wage slavery at home, and actual slavery abroad have accrued. In detailing a Black man’s rise through the ring, and the actual and enduring antagonism that surrounds that rise, Knight is providing an alternative to fairy tales like Bridgerton.
The White Lotus—Season 3 of this HBO Max series, set in Thailand, largely abandons the focus on the colonial aspect of Club Med-type luxury vacation resorts but amps up the violence and fraud that the American tourists bring with them when “at leisure.” The group consists of one killer, one swindler who contemplates doing in himself and his family because his corrupt business practices have been exposed at home, a sexually incompetent son who covers his incompetence with aggression, and a masterful turn by Parker Posey as a pill-popping matriarch oblivious to it all. This is to say nothing of a female threesome whose supposed renewal of their friendship consists mainly of backbiting and betrayal. Nice example of how the sins of the American home front accompany Americans abroad, as series creator Mike Young continues his tour de force.
The Long Bright River—(Peacock) Oscar winner Amanda Seyfried shedding her blonde trophy wife Marion Davies image (from Mank) and instead embracing a role as a working-class Philadelphia cop who, on her beat in Baltimore’s Kensington, due to her empathy for the street women because of her sister being a victim of the streets, is able to spot a serial killer who the rest of the force simply ignores. Series, in the Mare of Eastwick mode, has a street worker’s eloquent denouncement of the real perils of her surroundings: “We don’t need protection from each other; we need protection from the police.”
Dark Winds—The third season of this Lakota crime series on AMC+ has Officer Lighthorn (Zahn McLarnon) pursued by Jena Elfman’s FBI agent for last season’s dumping in the desert of the rancher who killed his son, while he tracks two missing boys. In the stronger plot, Jessica Matten’s border agent uncovers a trafficking outfit tied to a prominent rancher while taking up with a fellow agent who may not even be half of what he seems. Ingenious linking of the two plots, as all roads lead back to the reservation.
Nautilus—Politically astute reimagining of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues with the British East India Company, described as 19th century Nazis, the villains, and the heroes, a group of multi-culti misfits escaped from a company prison in Bombay. The series restores the original anti-imperialist thrust of Verne’s novel and its sequel, The Mysterious Island, with Nemo as an Indian prince whose village was sacked by the company. Disney cancelled and then sold the series in a company retrenchment and we have AMC+ to thank for it seeing the light of day.
Rainmaker—This series, based on a John Grisham novel that was first a film, is a welcome return to liberal values now abandoned by most contemporary liberals. A smart young lawyer takes on a corporate law firm in a case involving the death of an African American woman’s son, reinvigorating the old liberal alliance between a white enlightened middle class and a Black working class, an alliance which has since Grisham’s novel all but been shattered as white elites campaign for war not social justice under the guise of “human rights.” Lana Parilla (Snow White’s evil queen in Once Upon A Time) as the young lawyer’s vivacious, hard-bitten, but ultimately ethical boss is spectacular and contrasts nicely with the cruel efficiency of the head of the corporate firm. Streaming on Amazon Prime.
Worst of the Worst
The Ridge—A piece of Sky TV nastiness that begins as a typical and enervating woman returning to New Zealand from Scotland to find her sister’s killer, but then morphs into the opposite with the Scottish anesthesiologist revealed as a serial killer, going in the blink of an eye from Florence Nightingale to Jeffrey Dahmer and with whom we are supposed to sympathize.
Adolescence—Long take, real-time Netflix series highly praised for its “understanding” of Britain’s youth. The problem is that, in Keir Starmer’s elitist, neo-liberal England, the source of the violence that is unleashed in the series is working-class men and the boys they raise, while the assigned role of its mostly passive and victimized women is to socialize this violence, neatly letting out that the violence is fostered by Starmer’s austerity. 
Daredevil: Born Again/Robin Hood—The first Disney+ entry takes cross-cutting to an idiotic extreme as it compares Matt Murdoch’s blind attorney, given to righteous anger, to Vincent Onofrio’s murderous Kingpin. The creators think this pretentious lunacy is a “complex high concept,” which it was in Clint Eastwood’s Tightrope, comparing a cop with homicidal tendencies to a serial killer. Here its just ludicrous. Please retire Onofrio’s insufferable portrayal, chewing the scenery to the point that there is no scenery left. Worse yet, in the mythic hero mode was Amazon-owned MGM+’s Robin Hood, which reduced the legend to a tiff between Norman and Saxon lords, pretty much like the Republican and Democrat and Liberal and Conservative often fake debates with both sides making sure that no modern Robin Hood emerges to tax the wealthy to give to the poor. After Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, the blacklistees’ Adventures of Robin Hood, we now have, in the oligarchic age, Jeff Bezos’ Robin Hood.
Black Rabbit—Noir version of The Bear with a New York resto owner and his ne’er-do-well brother at odds. Romanticizes the biz, as all workers, blissfully unaware they are being exploited, rally around the owner’s cause. Tell that to the Starbucks employees struggling to unionize.
Imminent Threat—Israeli series about a terrorist threat in France, combated by an Israeli army official, where the threat posed by taking over electronic devices, rather than being from an outside source, hues closer to the Israeli terrorists’ use of pagers to devastate Lebanese doctors and nurses. The air of menace, as the series cuts back and forth from Israel to France, reveals the heartbeat of one society perpetually at war and another on the brink of embracing perpetual war. (TF1+)
Bonus Worst: The Chair Company (HBO)—Stars Ron Trosper, perhaps the least funny actor on television, whose literal fall from grace in front of his employees occasions his obsession with the company that made the chair. Humorless in the true sense of the word, that is, Trosper’s leaden performance is utterly without humor. Who on earth thought this was a good idea?
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
