NYT rates the 20 best shows since "The Sopranos" -- and my response

A while ago, the New York Times ran an interactive article identifying the 20 best shows (in the author's view) to have aired since "The Sopranos" debuted 20 years earlier.

Several of the shows on NYT list are also on my post-"Sopranos" list -- indeed, some of these would even make my all-time favorite TV show list, including:

• "The Shield": Simply brilliant in terms of how it made you root for who would ordinarily be the antagonists of a show. I felt dirty hoping that corrupt cop Vic Mackey would get away with his schemes, which is a testament to the writing and the acting. Yeah, it wasn't as realistic as "The Wire," but it was far more interesting.
• "Battlestar Galactica": The ending didn't make much sense, and it tended to sag in the middle of each season. But it was so dark, gritty, and intense in its peak episodes, with a more or less continuous story lasting 4+ years (counting the mini-series and "Razor" movie). I'm reading the unauthorized oral history of BSG (both incarnations), So Say We All, and I just got to the section about the mini-series.
• "Lost": Another show whose ending (indeed, the entire last season) didn't make sense, but was still captivating throughout its entire run. The framework of mixing present day scenes with flashbacks (and then that mindblowing flashforward!) was subsequently adopted by one of my all-time favorites, "Once Upon a Time." [Strangely, "Once Upon a Time" did not make the NYT list, perhaps because it was too mainstream?]
• "Veronica Mars": A teen noirish mystery that launched Kristen Bell's career. I didn't watch the third/last season, and haven't gotten around to the movie either, but that first season was twisty.

On the "just missed the cut list" of the NYT:

• "Justified": This would also make my all-time list. I used to think Captain Kirk was the coolest character on TV, and Jack Bauer was the most interesting. Kirk has been supplanted by Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, whose misadventures in Harlan County, Kentucky, were laconically intriguing. I loved how Givens' character could be summed up in an eight word sentence he once told a bad guy: "You make me pull, I'll put you down." And of course he would make sure that he was justified in shooting.

But there are also a number of shows on the list that I, while possibly acknowledging their greatness, never watched or tried to watch but never really got hooked on:

• "The Wire": I know that it is a common opinion that this is the best show ever in the history of television. I just found it dull and populated with boring characters. It's not that I don't appreciate characters with shades of gray -- notice that I loved "The Shield," and the main character in that is a bad guy! Pretty much every actor in "The Wire" that I've seen elsewhere has been better elsewhere, from Lance Reddick in anything, to Wendell Pierce in Amazon's "Jack Ryan," to Michael B. Jordan in "Black Panther."
• "Grey's Anatomy": I've never watched this, so it isn't entirely fair for me to question its placement, but another procedural/soap opera didn't sound interesting to me. (It's also weird to me that this made the list but "Scandal" did not. See below for more on that.)
• "The West Wing": This has seemed to me like the left-wing version of "24." Each presents a fantasy world where its proponent's fears are being realized, and stopped only through the proponent's heroism.
• "Breaking Bad": I need to watch this. A major reason I haven't yet is that I'm not ready for my image of the goofy dad from "Malcolm in the Middle" to be overwritten by Walter White/Heisenberg.

And then there are the post-Sopranos shows that are on my list but absent from the NYT:

• "24": Yes, it's more fantasy than "Battlestar Galactica" in a lot of ways, but for sheer adrenaline rush, there's nothing like it. I watched every season as it aired starting halfway through season 2, then watched them all on DVD, and then over the course of several months streamed them all while running on the treadmill. My wife has asked me how I can watch it over and over, and the answer is, I can never get enough of Kiefer Sutherland's intensity as Jack Bauer, yelling, "Tell me where the bomb is!! There's no time!!"
• "Once Upon a Time": I didn't think this would be good, but I TiVo'd the pilot episode to give it a try. Within 10 minutes, I was hooked by the magical look of the Enchanted Forest in the flashbacks, and the puzzle of matching the present day residents of Storybrooke to their fantasy counterparts. And this is a show that featured multiple strong female characters (Emma Swan. Regina/Wicked Witch, Mary-Margaret/Snow White) who easily satisfied the Bechdel test every episode. (I didn't watch the last season, though, which was a soft reboot; the season 6 finale seemed to me to be a very good series finale.)
• "The Last Ship": Military valor, end of the world pandemic, conspiracies -- yeah, I'm a sucker for all of that.
• "Scandal": Another show that was basically fantasy, but it was as addictive as "24" was. I loved it whenever Olivia Pope was in "I'm in control" mode, which was most of the time. I liked it a lot less when she in "I'm moping over President Grant" mode.
• "Star Trek: Discovery": I get that it's controversial. It's a lot darker than the usual Trek series (even "Deep Space Nine"). But I like that. Based on season 1 (I watched the DVDs, so can't watch season 2 yet), it's my second favorite Trek series. It could move up to #1 with more excellent seasons. It would have to get a lot worse to drop to #3.
• "Hawaii 5-0": I don't claim that "Hawaii 5-0" is good in the ways that critics view shows. I find it hilariously entertaining, less so in the mystery of the week than in the character interaction (no show is complete with McGarrett and Dann-o bickering, and without the shrimp truck guy), and it's the only show on TV I can think of that features multiple regular actors who are of Asian descent, which is worth supporting alone for the Asian diversity factor (even if the show ended up making Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park leave because they weren't paid the same as Alex O'Loughlin and Scott Caan).

Female action stars by VAR (Violence Above Replacement level)!

Serious stat-oriented baseball fans know about a concept called "wins above replacement" (WAR), which is roughly an estimated of how many wins over the course of a season that the player is better than freely available talent. In other words, if a star player were to be injured and miss the season, to be replaced by a minor league player, how many fewer wins would the team be expected to get?


WAR is a useful way to quantify the value of baseball players in many different ways. For example, players can be ranked by career WAR, which results in Babe Ruth at the top spot, followed by Cy Young, and then Walter Johnson, Barry Bonds, and Willie Mays to round out the top 5. Or players can be ranked by top WAR in a single season, which results in a bunch of players from the pre-1920s whom I've never heard of (because I'm not that serious of a fan).


While watching Atomic Blonde last night, and marveling at how much violence Charlize Theron's character Lorraine Broughton was inflicting on East German and Russian bad guys, I started re-evaluating my own subjective ranking of female action stars. Until now, I'd considered Lucy Lawless (aka "Xena: Warrior Princess") and Angelina Jolie (Salt, Wanted, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith) to share the top spot, with Michelle Yeoh (numerous Hong Kong flicks as well as Tomorrow Never Dies), Carrie Anne Moss (The Matrix), and Summer Glau (River Tam in "Firefly" and Serenity) to be worthy competitors.


But oh my gosh, Theron is AWESOME in Atomic Blonde. Like John Wick with Keanu Reeves (co-directed by Atomic Blonde's director David Leitch), the movie seems to have been written from a process of imagining the most intense, explosive fight/gun scenes that would showcase using the star and not a stunt double, and then filling in with a story as needed. And hoo boy did the production and choreography team put a lot of imagination into the action set pieces. At 5'10", Theron commands an imposing physical presence on screen, especially when she kicks guys down the stairs.


Still, was Atomic Blonde enough to vault Theron ahead of Lawless and Jolie as an action star? I decided to turn to an equivalent of WAR. Instead of "wins," though, the standard would be "violence," as in VAR.


For me, Jolie is still #1 in VAR. Besides Salt, Wanted, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, she was also in two Lara Croft: Tomb Raider movies, which is a lot of violence! Lawless played Xena for six seasons, which is over 130 episodes. Her kill count has got to be higher even than Jack Bauer's. That makes her career VAR quite high too.


Theron's tenacious performance in Atomic Blonde might well put her at the top of the single movie/episodeVAR. It's definitely a MVP (most violent performer) role. I haven't seen Mad Max: Fury Road, but I've read that she was very good in that action role, too. That's two high VAR performances, but she has a ways to go to catch up to Lawless and Jolie.


In other words, get together with director Leitch and work on Atomic Blonde 2!

States I've gone running in - updated!

Create Your Own Visited States Map

After my short visit to Boulder earlier this week, I got to cross Colorado off my list of states in which I've gone running. It was a short 4 mile easy run around town and parts of the campus. It's actually surprising that it took me so long to mark Colorado, but apparently I haven't visit since before 2011 (other than connecting through DIA).

Saw "Rogue One"; where does it rank in the Star Wars pantheon?

I finally got around to watching "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story" on Blu-ray and liked it a lot. So where does it rank in the Star Wars movie pantheon in my opinion?

For the purposes of this ranking, I'm not including the Clone Wars or Rebels series, only the theatrically released movies - the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, and "The Force Awakens."

[Obviously, spoilers to follow....]

8. (tie) "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones"

I don't think the disregard with which I hold these two entries is unusual. Each offered a pretty intricate lightsabre duel and not much else. I have to confess that I've never watched the entirety of "Attack of the Clones," so I guess it's possible it's worse than "The Phantom Menace," but it's hard to see how that would be possible. And while it's hard to choose who was worse as Anakin, Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christensen.

6. "Revenge of the Sith"

Still pretty bad; Palpatine's seduction of Anakin to the dark side never really made much sense, and too many of the big fight scenes just seemed ridiculous - can you remain that close to hot lava without dying from the heat?!? The big transformation of Anakin into Darth Vader, where he howls "Nooooooo!!!!!" made me laugh out loud. One should not be laughing at Darth Vader....

5. "Return of the Jedi"

I still like the opening Jabba the Hut sequence even though it's objectively silly. The scenes with Luke, Darth Vader, and the Emperor were pretty good, but the movie is marred by the Ewoks. I've ranted about this before - how a bunch of teddy bears defeated armored Stormtroopers boggles the mind. Not to mention that the space attack scenes are just a copy of  "A New Hope." And Luke and Leia as siblings - that could not have been part of the original plan, or else those kisses in "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back" indicate a perverse mindset.

4. "The Force Awakens"

I think this movie benefits from being so much better than the prequel trilogy, but it's really just a mash-up of "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back." It was slickly produced, and John Boyega was quite charming as Finn. Daisy Ridley was perfectly fine as Rey, but flawless in a robotic and boring way. I do like how it shows that it's easy to complain about the Empire (as the Rebels did in the original trilogy), but running the galaxy isn't so easy. I mean, a mere 30 years after the defeat of the Empire, the Rebels did such a bad job that they're once again an insurgent force, while the First Order has amassed the resources to build Starkiller Planet!

3. "A New Hope"

It started everything, it was amazing in 1977, but it hasn't aged all that well. And all the tinkering that George Lucas did with it only made it worse. Need I point to anything beyond Han Solo's dodging a laser blast from point-blank range...?

2. "The Empire Strikes Back"

I still think this is pretty good, but there are cracks in my admiration of it. It annoys me to no end that Darth Vader tells the Emperor "if the son of Skywalker will not join us, he will die," when the natural way of saying that would be "if my son will not join us, he will die." Of course, that would take away the shock value later on, but still, it's a bit of cheating. I can accept the superdense asteroid field (even though in reality, there would have been so many collisions that the asteroids would have been reduced to a ring), but how does a giant space worm live in vacuum? What does it breathe? What does it eat? There can't be that many ships that fly into that particular asteroid.

1. "Rogue One"

I'll admit that I love "Mission Impossible" type stories, so "Rogue One" naturally appeals to me. But compare the tension generated in this mission versus the shield assault in "Return of the Jedi," and you see the difference between sacrifice, competence, and excitement, versus clownish quasi-parody. What's remarkable about "Rogue One" is that we know how it will turn out, and yet it holds attention. The middle was a little slow, but the last third is fantastic. And unlike the other movies, with a couple of exceptions, there's real sacrifice - the rebels more or less know it's a mission that few, if any, of them will survive, and they're right. The moment when the wave of death washes over Jyn and Cassian was exceptionally well-done. And then, there's that Darth Vader scene! Vader is terrifying in this movie, as he should be! Too often in the original trilogy, he was just a bully, coming in after the fighting was over to torture a hapless Rebel soldier, or "firing" incompetent Imperial officers. But that end sequence showed how devastating Vader could be....

Quick thoughts on new fall shows from Fox, CW, and NBC

I blogged about the upcoming new ABC shows that caught my attention here, and the CBS ones here. Fox, CW, and NBC have just enough combined to put together in one post....

NBC

The Brave


 

This looks like another fairly generic military-action drama, possibly indistinguishable from CBS's "Navy SEALs." This one does have Anne Heche as the civilian leader of the unit, and Mike Vogel (last seen in CBS's "Under the Dome") as the team leader. Nothing in particular jumps out, but I'm always up for giving action shows a chance.

Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders



I remember the Menendez brothers! The main reason I'm considering watching this is FX did such a fantastic job with the O.J. Simpson mini-series that maybe this story, which had its share of lurid details, will prove similarly engrossing.


FOX

Boo, "24: Legacy" has been canceled/won't be renewed, though may be (another) reboot down the line. Well, I can't blame Fox. I thought it was okay, but ranked against the other seasons of "24," it would be near the bottom. Anyway, I won't hold it against Fox.

The Gifted

 

Marvel Cinematic Universe, mutant types, okay, I'm in. But try not to be as boring as the first season of "Agents of SHIELD" was, okay?


The Orville


 

This looks kind of funny. I just wonder if there's enough there to last, oh, even a season? I remember this old sci-fi parody called "Quark" that aired in 1978. It was really funny at first, but you can only make fun of "Star Trek" for so long.


CW

Valor



This looks kind of interesting, with a "what happened that night?" mystery to be unfolded over the course of the season. Unfortunately, if I were to bet on shows likely to bomb with the audience, I would pick this one. Dense, serialized mythologies with multiple timelines and viewpoints don't seem to do well. Even ABC's "Quantico," which started off as a strong performer in season 1, had cancellation-worthy ratings in season 2.

Quick thoughts on CBS' new fall shows

I started previewing the new fall pilots that caught my eye with those on ABC, and now it's CBS's turn. I'll say upfront that none of the following shows really excite me, so as far as CBS is concerned, I'm mostly grateful that it's bringing back "Survivor" and "Hawaii 5-0."

SEAL Team

 

I'm a sucker for action-adventure shows, so I'll give this a try. It does remind me very much of the 1990 flick Navy SEALs, which is a good news/bad news sort of comparison. That movie had some decent action set pieces, but it was a commercial and critical flop, and I have a feeling this show will be too. It could also be like "The Unit," which had a decent run (4 seasons) in the previous decade. It's not a good sign that I stopped watching the trailer halfway through, though.

Star Trek: Discovery



I don't have CBS All Access, so I won't be watching this show, but otherwise I'd give it a try. The production values look good (although that's been true ever since "Star Trek: Next Generation" debuted 30 years ago), and of course having an Asian captain is a plus in my view. On the other hand, the last two Star Trek series didn't appeal to me, so I'm probably not missing out on much. (I gather this will also be available on Netflix later on. I don't get Netflix. I don't think this show would spur me to sign up, but if I do subscribe for the Marvel shows, I'd consider this a bonus.)

SWAT


I haven't heard much buzz at all about this show. The trailer highlights the tension between the police department and the inner city community, with a new SWAT commander who's torn between his African-American roots and his profession. I don't know about this one. Fox's Shots Fired tried to mine this kind of community tension storyline this season and did not score good ratings. This looks like it has more action, though.

Quick thoughts on some of the ABC shows coming this fall

TV by the Numbers has a helpful post with embedded trailers for the new pilots that ABC has ordered and put into the fall schedule. I watched the ones that looked interesting to me, and here are my thoughts:

The Inhumans



The trailer doesn't show anything, but I'm a sucker for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Inhumans have been embedded into the story DNA of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for a few seasons now, so I'm already invested.


Ten Days in the Valley



This stars Kyra Sedgewick as a single mom who's a writer for a TV cop show. Her daughter gets kidnapped, and somehow life starts imitating art - as in, the storylines that she's writing. I think I'm going to give this a pass. The trailer - at least, as much as I watched before deciding it's not for me - is pretty grim, and I don't think I want to sign on for a serial where the main storyline is "where's my child?" I mean, I did for the Ashley Judd-vehicle Missing, which turned out to be pretty good, but that ended well because the show lasted only half a season and tied up the main storyline. If Ten Days in the Valley is a hit, it'll get renewed.... I guess it's possible the writers will come up with a new hook for a second season, but it's still a pass.


The Crossing


 

This looks pretty weird. Bodies wash up on the shore, and 47 of them are alive. It appears that they are from the future(?). It kind of reminds of the Sci-Fi Channel series The 4400, which I liked a lot, so I'm willing to give this a try. As with all high-concept serialized dramas from ABC, however, one must factor in the risk of a strong start dragged down by too many out of control storylines - FlashForward is the prime offender in this category, but V, Lost, and others suggest it's a trend.


Deception


 

I'm normally not so much into crime of the week procedurals (Hawaii 5-0 being a notable exception, but that's more for the island scenery and the character banter than the actual mysteries), but this entry in the civilian with special skills helps law enforcement as a special consultant category looks polished. The civilian with special skills is an illusionist, making this sound like Castle with David Copperfield instead of Richard Castle. Well, I like watching magic acts, so I'll give this a try.


For the People



From Shonda Rhimes, this show pits fresh new Assistant U.S. Attorneys against fresh new Federal Public Defenders. Rhimes-produced shows are batting .500 for me - I like Scandal and (the canceled) The Catch, while I've never watched Grey's Anatomy and I quit How to Get Away with Murder after the pilot episode. .500 isn't a bad average for TV shows, but I tend not to like law related shows, especially ones that take themselves too seriously, so I think this is a pass for me.

***

I'll continue to give quick and dirty thoughts on the new pilots for the other networks.