TV Review: Lucifer

The saying goes that the Devil can assume a pleasing shape.  I guess that may be true because FOX has a new series on called Lucifer and, God help me, I liked it.  Not “liked it” like it’s the new Mad Men, but it breezily passed an hour with enough giggles to justify the cost of the electricity running my TV set.

The show is one of those that a brilliant Hollywood Reporter column dubbed Fox’s “quirky consultants aid law enforcement.” The premise is so obvious it is amazing it hasn’t been done before: the Devil gets bored running Hades and decides to vay-cay in El-Lay, and then starts solving crimes.  As played by British actor Tom Ellis (of course the Devil is British) Beelzebub is a walking pile of smarm who used to revel in sin and debauchery but now finds everything so “been there, had sex with that.”  But then a former . . . customer?  Protégée?  I’m not sure what to call her, but someone he cared about is shot while hugging him, and he decides he wants to find out who is responsible.

He keeps bumping into Detective Chloe Decker, the detective assigned to the case (Lauren German), a former actress famous for doing topless scenes (of course the LAPD hires former soft-core porn stars), to their mutual annoyance.  Of course they team up, bouncing from suspect to suspect until the case is solved 5 minutes before the end.

As has been noted elsewhere, the show is basically Castle with the Prince of Evil, but is that so bad?  Aside from the standard police procedural aspects, and the rather vague theology (D.B. Woodside pops up as a winged angel and makes veiled threats that maybe will be explained in later episodes), I like the surprising way the Devil, who calls himself Lucifer Morningstar (the detective asks is that’s a stage name), connects with several of the mortals he encounters. 

He immediately bonds with Detective Decker’s young daughter, despite his stated aversion to children, and manages to scare the bejeezes out of a bully who was abusing her on the internet.  When a middle-aged, mousy psychiatrist has a key piece of information, Lucifer uses his one supernatural trick—he asks her what she wants most in the world, and she says it’s to have sex with him.  So he cheerfully agrees, but since he and the detective have to follow up on the clue he leaves, but promises to come back saying, “My word is my bond.”  At the end of the episode he does go back, and agrees to fulfill his part of the bargain but asks her for some therapy while they’re at it.  He does have major daddy issues.

I’ve said before: it is hard to evaluate TV shows based solely on pilots.  This could easily become a show with an intriguing premise that is just content to slog through standard police procedural scripts.  I hope they can keep the novelty alive and not settle for being just another “quirky civilian contractor to aid law enforcement” show.  Based on Tom Ellis’ performance and the wit displayed in the pilot, I am willing to give Lucifer another few episodes to prove itself.  The pilot also makes great use of the soundtrack, from “Ain’t no rest for the wicked” to David Bowie’s “Fame.”

Speaking of “quirky civilian contractor to aid law enforcement” shows, the Hollywood Reporter article applied that trope to the seven dramas on Fox and found it fit six of them (all but Empire).  But I find it applies as well to shows on all broadcast networks.  ABC has the aforementioned Castle.  CBS, which has a bunch of actual police procedurals, has Elementary (Sherlock Holmes is the original QCCALE), Scorpion and Limitless.  NBC has Blindspot and Blacklist.  Going back in history, there’s Monk and Psych.  I have rarely found a trope so useful in understanding where TV shows are coming from.  I tip my cap to the author of that blog post.

Flint Michigan teaches us about the parties

So, the collective outrage of millions has been activated and people are shocked, SHOCKED that unelected Republican leaders in Flint, Michigan knowing switched to a toxic water supply in order to save some money.  Who could have forecast that putting Republicans in charge of the health and welfare of 100,000 low income African Americans could have turned out so tragically?

Semantics and philosophy aside, Flint demonstrates the two biggest problems with putting today’s Republican party in charge of any government, local, state or federal.  The first is that Republicans will always grasp at any plan that purports to save taxpayers money, ignoring any tiny details that would lead a logical person to believe the plan was nuts.

Back in the 1980’s the Reagan administration had a plan to save taxpayers millions of dollars: they could fire all those pesky bureaucrats who oversaw the savings and loan industry.  Fewer bureaucrats in Washington; the banking industry free to innovate and make America strong again.  What could go wrong?  Well, anyone with common sense would have pointed out that the savings and loan industry were a bunch of rich yahoo playing with other people’s money, and that they could speculate in any nutty scheme and keep the profits if it paid off while getting bailed out if it failed.  The result of the GOP’s penny-pinching?  The plan to save taxpayers a few million dollars a year ended up costing taxpayers $160 billion.

In Flint, the plan to switch to a different water supply was supposed to save taxpayers $19 million over eight years.  The Michigan governor has proposed that the state will spend $28 million to fix the problem.  Once again the GOP plan to save money is penny-wise and pound foolish and will end up costing taxpayers more.  No doubt the governor will eventually use the “unexpected” cost as an excuse for cutting spending on social services.  Maybe he’ll suggest raising taxes on the rich, but I’m not holding my breath.

The second GOP problem in governing is the ingrained belief that the government CANNOT help people, and any attempt to help people will make them worse off.  In any sane person, the prospect of thousands of people drinking toxic water supplied by the government would have triggered an immediate, “Oh my god, we’ve got to do something!” response.  But these were Republicans, and so instead of bursting into immediate action (as Republican icon Teddy Roosevelt would have done) they dragged their feet, assuring everyone that nothing was wrong and insisting things were fine in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence (*cough*globalwarming*cough*).

The EPA found that the water coming out of Flint taps contained 13,200 parts of lead per billion; the acceptable level was 15.  So it wasn’t really a close call.  Yet the Michigan department of environmental quality contended that the EPA measurement was wrong because the tap they used had a filter, which is a strange claim given that a) the tap was taken off during the test; b) the filter would have reduced contamination, not increased it, and c) presumably the EPA knows a little something about testing water (distrusting all government functionaries is another GOP failing). 

The administration of Dubya was going fine until Katrina hit New Orleans.  It was Bush’s congratulatory “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” to disaster Czar Michael Brown that was the “Emperor has no clothes” reveal for the Dubya administration.  Brownie hadn’t been doing a heck of a job; he’d been doing almost no job at all.  But the Republican administration looked out and saw, not people in need, but a bunch of moochers who wanted government largesse because of some random event.  Brown’s inadequate response, with an inadequate price tag, was just what Dubya and his advisers wanted, not a well-designed, adequate and expensive response to a national catastrophe.

The Democratic and Republican parties can debate back and forth about how the nation should be governed, but the bottom line is that the Republicans don’t want to govern it.  They want the free market to run free, and if Flint’s water is toxic then the free market response is to buy bottled water at the store.  Why should government provide safe water to residents for free anyway? 

All the high-falutin’ philosophy of the two parties is mostly irrelevant.  What matters is which party seeking to govern actually wants to, and which just wants to sit back and let the campaign contributions keep rolling in.  All the punditry in the world is irrelevant when there is a natural disaster, or a man-made one.  If an emergency happens where you live, do you want the director of emergency services to be a Democrat or Republican?  I know who I’d trust more.

TV Review: Second Chance

There are no new ideas.  Okay, there are a few, but in the entertainment industry they are few and far between.  I loved season one of Mr. Robot, but its philosophical connection to Fight Club (not to mention plot similarities) was obvious from the first episode.  It’s a great show, but it’s not completely new.  There is an old saying among writers that there are only 7 plots; if so, imagine how much recycling goes on when who divide 7 plots into 400 scripted television series.

Fox premiered a new show on Wednesday with the bland, boring name Second Chance.  The plot is largely recycled from a previous show on CBS in 1999 called Now and Again.  Both deal with an experiment that essentially puts the brain of an old, out of shape man into a young, healthy, exceptionally strong body.  Only the details are different.

Second Chance was initially called The Frankenstein Code, then Lookinglass, until the suits at Fox settled on Second Chance (which sounds like a sitcom remake of Green Acres).  Phillip Baker Hall plays Ray Pritchard, the 75-year-old father of an FBI agent (Tim DeKay, basically reprising his role from White Collar) who is murdered to cover up a break-in at his son’s home by a gang of jewel thieves.  Because he has a 1-in-10 million marker in his DNA, his body is appropriated by the male half of a pair of brother-and-sister twins who own Lookinglass, a $10 billion social media website, who then puts him in a tank and does something that makes him young and incredibly strong.  The reason, it turns out, is that his twin sister is dying of cancer, and this experimental treatment is the only possibility of saving her life.

Nothing about the pilot is terribly plausible (the science behind Pritchard's transformation is one of the least implausible points).  Pritchard takes very little time to adapt to his new body, even though I would imagine that a 75-year-old man would find being young and incredibly strong disorienting.  The twins, supposedly Indian or Pakistani, have the bland names of Otto and Mary Goodwin.  Otto is supposedly some freakish genius, but all the pilot manages is slightly odd.  Mary’s illness is apparently related to Ali McGraw disease, that rare illness named after the actress from the movie Love Story that causes young women to become more beautiful as the disease progresses.  The plot deals with a vicious gang of jewel thieves who escape for over a year because they are paying off higher ups in the FBI, which doesn’t strike me as a plausible jewel thief MO.

I’ve said before one shouldn’t read too much into pilot episodes.  Sometimes pilots are brilliant but the creator has nowhere to go; other times pilots are rushed into production and it takes time to flesh out the characters and find the right plot points.  The creator of Second Chance is Rand Ravich, who created the series Life that I enjoyed quite a bit.  Based on that pedigree I am willing to give the show a few more episodes to find its footing, but the pilot does not look terribly promising.

The best of times, the worst of times: blockbusters presage the end of movies

News flash—after one weekend, Star Wars: The Force Awakens is already the 136^th highest grossing film of all time, based on worldwide revenues.  I guess the force is with them.

The Force Awakens will no doubt become one of the top ten highest grossing films of all time.  When it does, it will join Avengers: The Age of Ultron, Furious 7, Jurassic World, and Minions as the five releases from 2015 to make the top 11 (it would be top ten but Minions is about $100 million behind Iron Man and unlikely to catch up).  So, obviously, 2015 will go down as the greatest year in box office revenue.

Except that outside those five films, the picture ain’t that rosy.  With a week to go, total grosses for the year ($10.316 billion) are about even with last year, which was 5.5% below 2013.  Total grosses for 2015 could possibly come in below the total gross for 2009 ($10.595 billion), although The Force Awakens might single handedly prevent that.  However, some of that is due to higher prices; more tickets were sold in 1993 (the year of the original Jurassic Park) when tickets cost half as much.

So it is the best of times, and the worst of times.  How to explain this conundrum, with a handful of films succeeding wildly and other not?  It is feast or famine.  Either a film is a blockbuster, or it sinks to ignominious defeat.  The window for making money has narrowed; after opening weekend there isn’t much reason to stay in theaters, better to get the DVDs out and start counting revenues from sales.

An article in Hollywood Reporter recently quoted a movie executive as saying “You can’t cheat opening weekend” anymore.  If a studio served up a turkey, in the past anticipation might draw people to the theaters even if there was some unsettling buzz.  Now with “social media” (as the kids are calling it), once a flop sees the light of day, the word spreads to twitter accounts, via Instagram, on blogs and whatever the latest thing is.  Then the media reports, not on the failure, but on the social network reports of failure.  The next thing you know, before you can say “Sue Storm” the Fantastic Four is looking at a third week gross of $3.7 million. 

The concept is similar to the idea of flash crowds as coined by science fiction writer Larry Niven in 1973.  Niven posited that in a world where teleportation is available and inexpensive, whenever something interesting would happen anywhere in the world, a large group of people would decide to go there.  The more people that were there, the more people wanted to go there.  Films that generate buzz on social media are swarmed with movie goers, while those films not so lucky play to empty houses. The media reports on the swarms, and more people go.

Such a wide variation in box office grosses can only make studio executives more risk averse.  If the difference between a film making $500 million and $50 million is subtle and unknowable, then best to take no chances.  Test screen everything and let market research drive the decisions.  One shudders to think how Raiders of the Lost Ark would have done with test audiences (“One person didn’t like the melting heads; better take them out.  And put in more of the cute monkey!”). 

Maybe we are on a course where fewer and fewer films will go to the expense of opening in theaters.  If studios think they have a clunker, either trash it and take the tax write-off, or sell it to Netflix and let them stream it.  There will be far fewer screens, and only three or four mega releases will be shown at any one time (plus some arty theaters for the crowd who like subtitles). Anything unlikely to gross $20 million on opening weekend will be relegated to TV in one form or another.

The thing is this—I’m not sure this is bad.  Well, it is bad, but not for the obvious reason.  I am still convinced, as I said in a previous blog, that films seen with a traditional projection system at 24 frames per second create a special rapport with the viewer.  Studies indicate that watching celluloid projected films is more interactive and engrossing than watching a digitally projected image.

But digital project is ascendant.  Watching a film with digital projection system is psychologically indistinguishable from watching a big TV set.  So you might as well watch these films on your big TV set at home, instead of in a theater with sticky floors and people who talk. 

Documentaries don’t usually gross a lot, and they have adapted to the new distribution mode like small mammals after a meter strike.  Documentaries are far more available now than ever, and better documentaries are being made as a result.  If your target isn’t a $200 million opening weekend, there is something to be said for DVD distribution.

Maybe films will be like dinosaurs, getting bigger and bigger until the system collapses under its own weight.  Films will become so expensive that an opening weekend of $150 million is a disaster, and each studio goes bankrupt after one Fantastic Four sized failure.  A few theaters will still exist, reducing distribution costs; meanwhile revenues will come primarily from streaming, DVD sales and merchandising. 

Don’t say it can’t happen; nickelodeons used to be the primary method of distrusting films.  When was the last time you paid a nickel to see a movie?

Rajon Rondo's slip of the lip

Lest anyone think that sports are not capable of creating subtle philosophical conundrums, let’s look at the penalties involved for the use of the F word in basketball.

Not “the” F word, but the other F word, the one that is a slang derogatory reference to being a homosexual.  Sacramento Kings player Rajon Rondo was recently suspended for one game for using the F word in referring to a referee.  This has been done before, but the difference here was that the referee was, in fact, gay.

In previous instances of players using the F word, a fine was deemed sufficient penalty.  Rondo was suspended for one game.  Does this reflect the fact that the league is becoming more sensitive to players using homophobic slurs, or is it due to the fact that the application of the insult in this case was literal and not just a schoolyard taunt?

I’ve always been amused when, in the past, a player who used the F word as an insult would always apologize by saying he didn’t mean it literally.  Right, because actually calling someone gay is so odious you would only do it as a joke. 

But now that more people have come out of the closet, there is the increased possibility that a player throwing around the F word will direct it at someone to whom it is, literally, applicable.  Should this result in a greater penalty?  Or should all usages of the word reap the same whirlwind?

One can’t draw a parallel to the N word, as that rarely gets used as an insult to white players.  But you do have circumstances where the race of the person uttering the word changes the context; an African-American using the word may not have the same connotation as a Caucasian player using it.  However, I believe the NFL policy is that any use of the word is forbidden.

I mentioned that I love how players apologize for using the F word; I basically love all apologies drafted by teams of lawyers and management.  Rondo apologized, saying that he did not mean any disrespect to the LGBT community.  Really?  You used a slur describing one member of the LGBT community as an insult against someone who was a member of that group.  How can you respect the community if you use a term to describe someone in the community as an insult?

All Rondo’s apology lacked was heartfelt remorse “if anyone was offended” and apologizing for “what happened” (as opposed to “What I did”).

Rondo further said that his use of the term was the result of frustration.  News flash, Mr. Rondo: you play for the Sacramento Kings; get used to being frustrated.  You play for one of the most dysfunctional franchises in the NBA, one that looks relatively decent only compared to fire sales like Philadelphia and the LA Lakers.  The Kings have their first decent (i.e. experienced) coach in over ten years, and the team’s star player, Demarcus Cousins, hates him.  The owner has said he wants to consider playing 4 on 5 on defense to keep an offensive player in the backcourt.  With the expansive playoff roster in the NBA you can’t rule out a run for the #8 seed in the West (FiveThirtyEight gives them a 24% chance of making the playoffs) but anything past the first round is out of the question.

Hopefully we will all live in a word where the F word is no longer used as an insult (except as South Park said, to refer to people who ride excessively loud motorcycles).  Until then the NBA should consider increasing the penalties for using the word, as a single game seems a small price to play for insulting a large group of people.

TV Review: Childhood's End and The Expanse

You have to give Syfy credit for swinging for the fences.  Several years after their breakout hit Battlestar Galactica (who saw a reboot of a cheesy 1970’s TV show as a critical and commercial success?) Syfy is now looking for the next Big Thing.  They have been biding their time, putting out pleasant science fiction that appeals to their fanbase, but nothing that grabs a wider audience.  First they produced the ambitious Ascension, which starred Battlestar alum Tricia Helfer (and showed off her butt on at least three occasions).  Now they waited for the Holiday programming doldrums to put out two more ambitious shows; the series The Expanse and the mini-series Childhood’s End.  The results are mixed, which is probably not what Syfy was hoping for.

Childhood’s End is based on the seminal science fiction novel by SF megastar Arthur C. Clarke (whose science was so solid that he actually invented the idea of geosynchronous satellites).  The novel, about how aliens come to Earth and prepare mankind for the next phase of their evolution, is a standard bearer of science fiction over 60 years after its release (I read the novel back in the 1970’s; I meant to re-read it before seeing the mini-series but didn’t get around to it).  Syfy’s production is impressive, but the results are less than satisfactory.

Part of that is because the novel is SO influential, some of its concepts have become part of standard SF argot.  Seemingly benevolent aliens come to Earth, but there must be some agenda; mankind’s push for material things is counter-productive.  There are familiar tropes to anyone who has dipped into science fiction in the past 30 years.

After watching all six hours, another thing is that the ending is unremittingly bleak.  What few characters we’ve come to know don’t end up well.  We are told the fate of the human race is for the best, but it looks a lot like extinction.  During the course of the mini-series, almost nothing good happens to anyone we care about, which may be realistic but it is hardly uplifting.  The main character, Ricky Stormgren, is offered interaction with his dead first wife in exchange for cooperating with the aliens, which may seem like a reward but is hardly fair to his new fiancee.

And then there is the Colm Meany character.  Called Wainwright, he is supposed to be some media mogul in the vein of Rupert Murdoch.  He reminded me of what Roger Ebert said about a character in the film Die Hard: he exists solely to be wrong every time he says something.  He asks why the aliens chose a Missouri farmer as their liaison, then says he’s “from a flyover state, he won’t ask the right questions.”  So everyone living more than 50 miles from an ocean is an idiot?  The character might think that way, but he’d be more careful expressing himself.  He then develops a plan to drive the aliens away which involves polluting the planet to the point of uninhabitable-ness.  Does he even listen to the words coming out of his mouth?

The show makes some interesting points about religion, essentially taking the position of Vique’s Law that a man needs religion like a fish needs a bicycle.  It’s a daring position to take with the religious right flexing their political power more than ever, but there could have been some debate without every religious person being portrayed as a nutcase.

The Expanse is based on a series of books that are set in the solar system in the 23^rd century.  Earth is a paradise for the elite; Mars is a warlike (get it?  Mars, God of War?) independent colony, and the asteroid belt is populated by rabble who toil for the resources that make Earth enjoyable.  There are three separate stories that I am sure will interlock eventually.  On Ceres, a detective (Thomas Jane) is tasked with finding a runaway daughter of some elites; on Earth, a UN interrogator (silky-voiced Shohreh Aghdashloo) tries to uncover evidence about a terrorist plot; and near Saturn, a ship that captures ice chunks from the ring system is inexplicably attacked.  Syfy broadcast the first two episodes this week, with the next two episodes available On Demand or at their website.

The Expanse takes the “dump the audience in the middle of everything” approach (after an opening crawl setting up the basics), which some people like but I find lazy.  Establishing characters is hard, and to expect the audience to catch up after starting at full tilt puts the burden on them, not the writers.  I also dislike the whole notion that there are three plots at once and we have to trust the creators that they’ll tie together eventually.  But some progress was made in episode two, so maybe the wait won’t be a long one.

There seems to be an effort to inject some verisimilitude into the segments set on the spacecraft, with g-forces and lack of oxygen treated as realistically as possible.  The special effects are good, although the shot of two people having sex in zero-g looked a little too computer-simulation-y (Syfy’s The Magicians preview did it much better).  The first two episodes establish a broad tableau, so there is definitely room to grow.

Given that they are working from a series of books, the show as the potential to create a realistic fictional universe much as Game of Thrones has.  If they can balance the broad strokes of the plotlines (Earth vs. Mars, poor vs. Elites) and do a slightly better job of developing the characters (ok, we get it, the detective is morally ambiguous but good at heart) The Expanse definitely has a chance to run for a while, although I don’t think it has the breakout potential Battlestar had.  It is better than Syfy’s Killjoys or Dark Matter, which are entertaining in a B-movie sort of way but not as good compared to some more ambitious.  

The Best TV of 2015

It used to be when I had an opinion about the best comedy or best drama of a given TV season, it meant something.  Of course I didn’t watch EVERY television program, because even in a three network universe that was impossible, but I watched most of the major shows, the ones who might get Emmy nominations.  Then it became more and more difficult to keep up.  New networks and weblets arose, pay cable stations made some shows inaccessible, and then the cable landscape exploded.  Now, not only are there shows I haven’t heard of, there are cable channels I have no idea how to find on my system, if they are even there.  There’s even more stuff not to be found on my favorite channels list, as you must subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, or God help us even Yahoo in order to watch.

Also, with the Balkanization of channels, everyone is now a niche provider.  There used to be some common ground where everyone could come together and pronounce LA Law or Picket Fences as the finest example of television available.  But the need to reach a mass audience is over.  You can tailor your show to reach a core audience of around a million, and your fans will find it.  A show like The Sopranos could not have existed on network TV as advertisers would have been too afraid of offending someone, somewhere.  But on cable it could reach a smaller cadre of fans eager to see Italian stereotypes whack each other incessantly.

Technically the last broadcast show to win the Emmy for Best Drama was 24 in 2006, but I think the 2005 winner Lost was the last show that was designed to appeal to a mass audience.  Since then the Best Drama Emmy winners have been cable shows that could not have succeeded in a mass marketplace like network television.

So when I pick a show as the best drama or the best comedy of the year, it means nothing.  I am going by my own ascetic tastes, which now can be catered to by small niche TV shows of no interest to 98% of the viewing population.  But still, it must be done.  Mustn't it?

My pick for the best drama on television in 2015 is USA’s surprise breakout hit, Mr. Robot.  How good was Mr. Robot?  Everyone who ever watched Fight Club, or knew of Fight Club, or who had been told a synopsis of Fight Club by a friend, could see the big twist reveal in the final episode coming, and yet it STILL pack a punch.  I haven’t felt such urgency watching a show since the early days of Lost, when all of America demanded answers to questions like who was in the Hatch, and where did The Others come from?  After each episode of Mr. Robot it was intolerable to wait a week to see what would happen next.

Maybe one reason for Mr. Robot’s success (USA announced its renewal for season two before the first episode of season one had aired) was shock at the prospect that a TV series starring Christian Slater could, you know, not suck.  Yes, Slater did his best work in years, suppressing his “Christian Slater” persona most of the time then letting it out for maximum effect.  But the show was much more than rising above diminished expectations.

What distinguishes Mr. Robot from the (literally) hundreds of other TV shows out there?  Chutzpah.  Like another great show this year, Fargo season 2, Mr. Robot is not afraid to take on outrageous, mind-bending plot twists while still presenting human beings dealing with relatable issues.  Mr. Robot was not timid, announcing the title of the series in HUGE red letters and distinctive font at the start of every episode.  Because they weren’t playing it safe, the audience had no idea what was off limits (spoiler: when dealing with a show about a conspiracy to destroy the world’s economy, the one thing you know won’t happen is the destruction of the world’s economy; except, that’s what happened).

Of course the show benefited greatly from a star making performance by its lead, Rami Malek.  The show’s poster, with Malek’s face, hollow-eyed, staring out from beneath a black hoodie behind the words “Our democracy has been hacked” was a brilliant announcement of everything you needed to know about the series; this was not your usual protagonist but a character on the fringes, controlling the center despite not wanting to engage with society.

My pick for best comedy shares Mr. Robot’s flair for the unconventional.  To coin a phrase, You’re The Worst is the best.  The series’ first season, about two narcissistic, hedonistic jerks who somehow form a “relationship,” (they would roll their eyes at the term) defied everything we’ve come to know about romantic comedies.  It became even more daring in its second season, presenting one of the most accurate depictions of chronic depression ever done on a screen, big or small.  As Gretchen (Aya Cash) increasingly withdrew into herself, her befuddled “boyfriend” Jimmy (Chris Geere) assumed that if she was depressed then the answer was to force her to have fun.  This spectacularly didn’t work, with Gretchen yelling at him that she was broken and he couldn’t fix her.  The show, by making a dysfunctional relationship even more dysfunctional, somehow humanized both its lead characters, creating a “gift of the Magi” like resolution where she pushed him away to spare him having to deal with her mental illness, and he chose to stay with her even though she made it clear his presence wasn’t helping.  But it did help (Gretchen’s plaintive wail, “You stayed!” and the end of the last episode is one of the sweetest things ever filmed).

Oh, did I mention this is one of the funniest comedies on TV?  Aside from Gretchen and Jimmy’s issues, both have a dysfunctional best friend (his has PTSD, hers is just a pampered idiot) and a circle of messed up acquaintances who can always be counted on to do something astonishingly stupid, which will then be mocked by Gretchen and Jimmy.

I have to mention my runner up here, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.  You wouldn’t think that a comedy about the survivor of an underground apocalypse cult would work, but with Ellie Kemper’s infectious performance (how was this woman not even nominated for an Emmy?), an excellent supporting cast (including Emmy-nominated turns by Jane Krakowski  and Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm), and clever writing make the show as sunny as You’re the Worst is dark.  Both are excellent.