10. Breaking Bad, “Fifty-One”
The first half of Breaking Bad‘s final season demolished the last
of Walter White’s rationalizations for his drug career: that he was
doing it all for the love of family. If that was ever true, it’s not
anymore; rather than give up his throne of blue crystal — even when he
could easily afford it — he allowed himself to be estranged from his
children. And as this episode shows with quiet brutality, he has
poisoned his marriage. He forces Skyler to stay in a sham marriage in
the belief that in the end, he will win, just as he has in his drug
career. But in the depths of her powerlessness, she finds a way to
strike at him. She can’t deny him a joyless 51st birthday party,
cooperation in his drug business or even sex. What she can do, she says,
is “wait … for the cancer to come back.” Breaking Bad is known for its spectacular visuals and violence, but sometimes the most chilling thing it does is quietly smolder.
9. Awake, Pilot
Michael Britten (Jason Isaacs) never sleeps. Or he does, rather, but
each time he does, this police detective, who just survived a car crash
with his family, wakes to a different reality: one in which his wife
died in the crash, and one in which his son did. Coupled with the crime
cases he solves in each “reality” is an overarching, internal detective
story in which a different psychiatrist in each waking world tries to
explore why his psyche has created the other reality. It’s an emotional
story, thanks to Isaacs’ smoky intensity, but not the downer it may
sound like. Instead, the premise offers a way to explore the mourning
process without having to definitively kill off either of Michael’s
loved ones. This twisty series didn’t make it past its first season, but
this hour was a lovely introduction to a dream.
8. The Good Wife, “Another Ham Sandwich”
The reason The Good Wife stands above every other major-network
drama right now is not so much that it’s smart as that it recognizes
that you are smart enough to watch it. This pivotal episode — which
resolves an ongoing ethics investigation against law partner Will
Gardner — is this year’s prime example. Here, the series gets Will off
the charge without exactly saying he is innocent; instead, it suggests
that for all the good work they do, the members of Lockhart Gardner,
even heroine Alicia Florrick, skate close to a moral line. The ethics
charge against Will uses the very premise of a TV legal drama to ask,
Does Lockhart Gardner really win so many difficult cases through talent
alone? What makes this a great legal drama is that it simply presents
the evidence and says, You be the judge.
7. Mad Men, “At the Codfish Ball”
It was a season full of bravura episodes, from the surreal (“Far Away
Places”) to the shocking (“The Other Woman”). But the one that sticks
with me above all is this straightforward, minor-key episode about some
of the things that make Mad Men great: disappointment and regret,
as experienced by fabulously dressed people. Focusing on a supposed
triumph, with Don Draper (Jon Hamm) attending an awards gala, the
episode takes him and his guests through a series of rude awakenings. He
learns that his anti-tobacco statement has made him celebrated but, to
big companies, unhirable; his new wife Megan confronts the failure of
her parents’ marriage; her father realizes his academic career is at a
dead end; and daughter Sally ends her night of glamor by catching
Megan’s mother and Sally’s “date” Roger Sterling in a compromising
position. The evening ends with a tableau of the characters sitting at
the banquet, each in a private world of gloom — but, this being Mad Men, it’s a gorgeous gloom indeed.
6. Parks and Recreation, “The Comeback Kid”
Sometimes a best episode of the year amounts to a best scene of the
year, and that certainly influenced my thinking here. There are maybe a
half-dozen Parks and Rec episodes I might have put on this list
(“The Debate,” “Win, Lose or Draw” and “Halloween Surprise,” to name a
few). But when I think of the show’s past year, I can’t not think of the
image of Leslie Knope and her campaign team, at the nadir of her
city-council run, walking slowwwly across an ice-skating rink to the
tune of Gloria Estefan’s “Get on Your Feet.” It’s a slapstick moment
worthy of I Love Lucy, but the image — Leslie supported by her
hapless but loving crew, including Ron Swanson, bearing an incontinent
three-legged dog — also gets at the heart of the show: friends who will
bear any indignity to help, because they believe in one another.
5. Girls, “The Return”
One of Lena Dunham’s stated influences in this coming-of-age series was Paul Feig and Judd Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks,
and this episode makes clear that it wasn’t something she said just to
be polite to her co-producer Apatow. He co-wrote “The Return,” and the
episode shares the setting of Michigan — where Dunham’s Hannah Horvath
brings her personal baggage (and laundry) for a fraught visit home —
guest star Becky Ann Baker (as Hannah’s mom) and, above all, a rare
sense for the bittersweet feeling of realizing you’ve outgrown your
childhood. Influences aside, “The Return” is also pure Dunham. She can
be unsparing about Hannah’s self-absorption (as a confidence builder
before going out, Hannah tells herself, “You are from New York,
therefore you are just naturally interesting”). Yet as Hannah comes to
terms with the idea that her parents are getting older too, she shows a
new maturity. Sometimes, “The Return” tells us, growing up is something
that happens while you’re standing in front of your mom and dad’s
fridge.
4. Homeland, “Q&A”
It says something about the intensity of this episode that the most
wrenching scene is not the one where a guy gets stabbed through the
hand. Coming on top of a shocker about-face, in which Congressman Nick
Brody (Damian Lewis) is revealed as a terrorist sleeper agent, this
hour-long interrogation involves a man already broken by imprisonment
and brainwashing and takes him apart again. Brody’s pursuer and onetime
lover Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) pries off his protective layer of
lies, brutally and tenderly. At the end, Brody is curled up on the floor
like an infant, and this viewer felt like joining him. Brody’s
terrorist captor, Carrie says, pulled him apart “until there was nothing
left but pain.” The lingering question: Is there still a Brody left in
there to rebuild?
3. Game of Thrones, “Blackwater”
For a fantasy saga about kings and dragons, Game of Thrones is
very intimate, choosing conversations and verbal sparring over effects
spectacles and battle scenes. But it gets epic with a capital E
in this high-water (and flaming-water) mark when it pares down its usual
sweep across story lines and continents to focus on the fight for
capital King’s Landing in the series’ central civil war. Even in pitched
battle, some of the episode’s hardest blows are psychological as it
depicts the darkest moments within the besieged castle, with royals and
subjects huddling with candles and poison. It delivers on a grand scale
when sympathetic antihero Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) executes a
brilliant tactical defense on behalf of his thankless and undeserving
royal relatives. “Those are brave men knocking at our door,” he exhorts
his men before battle. “Let’s go kill them.” For this spectacular hour, Game of Thrones killed it.
2. Community, “Digital Estate Planning”
At its warmest, Community takes apart its misfit-toy characters —
adult learners at the nation’s worst community college — to see what
makes them hurt and what makes them tick. At its weirdest, it takes
apart the very form of TV comedy, experimenting with new ways to tell
funny stories in a half-hour. And at its best, it does both at the same
time. Here, crotchety Pierce (Chevy Chase) has to confront the legacy of
his controlling, racist father by competing with the rest of the crew
in a Nintendo-style virtual-reality video game to earn his inheritance.
That the episode could make an emotional connection with its characters
mostly drawn as 8-bit avatars is a testament to how well imagined the
show’s world has become. At the end of Season 3, Community‘s mad-genius creator was forced off the show by NBC, but this late episode may have been the series’ best ever.
1. Louie, “Daddy’s Girlfriend, Parts 1 and 2″
Louis CK’s comedy/short-story collection paints New York City in
particular, and the world in general, as a place of surreal, disturbing
wonders. And this two-parter distills that beautifully when Louie asks
out bookstore clerk Liz (Parker Posey) and goes on what is less a date
than a crash course in life experience. As they take a weird,
adventurous after-hours tour of the city — fitting Louie in women’s
clothes, helping a homeless man get medicine, scarfing cured fish at
Russ and Daughters — Liz spills out a story that includes a childhood
near-death experience and hints of a mentally troubled adulthood. But
though the evening ends on a minor-key note, “Daddy’s Girlfriend” is far
from a downer. It is, like the show in general, a full-throated
endorsement of being open to life’s weirdness and surprises at any age —
and truly a night to remember.
