Who or what was your MVP of this past week on your tv screens?
A couple of weeks ago we polled Team Experience to share their MVPs from shows they were currently watching. You liked it so we'll attempt to do it weekly or at least bi-weekly. In this new world of infinite screens and schedules, whether you're bingeing, right up-to-date, or on demand surfing, we're all probably on different time tables so please do share yours as well.
If you watch these shows would you pick the same most valuable player?
MVPs of the Week
Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Director
It's taken this show a while to get to a place where it feels confidence in taking artistic risks, but last week’s episode, ‘4,722 Hours’, saw the once meek show taking its most audacious move yet under the helm of director Jesse Bochco. When Simmons (Elizabeth Henstridge) was snatched by the Monolith in season two’s brutal stinger, I never expected that the show would tackle the aftermath in such sober, thoughtful form. Bochco even dares to omit the regular title card, using a simpler, more elegant logo atop a vista of the deep blue planet.
Immediately, then, Bochco marks ‘4,722 Hours’ as a singular artistic endeavour, a quite remarkable thing in a Marvel Studios empire that has continually driven away individualist directors. Alright, so the episode still fits within the show’s larger template and is constructed with tropes familiar from many lone survivor sci-fi tales, but it feels full of personality, submerged in the midnight blue light of eternal night, allowing Henstridge to dig into Simmons’ psychological trauma that the show had presented to us in the previous episodes. It’s an episode full of confidence and trust in both character and audience. Let's hope it’s one that signals an even brighter future for a series going from strength to strength. - David Upton
The Walking Dead's Executive Producer
Thank you, Robert Kirkman, for backing the hell off. [More...]
If you’re not familiar with the minutia of The Walking Dead, allow me to explain that Kirkman is the creator of the comic book series, which he still writes. It’s no secret that TWD is having its best season yet: Writing is tight, pacing is outstanding, and the legitimate complaints that plagued the show, of racism and sexism, are a thing of the past.
Why is TWD so great lately? I’d argue it’s because Kirkman’s fingers are no longer in every pie. He’s preoccupied with the snoozefest that is Fear the Walking Dead, and he’s letting new showrunner Scott Gimple actually run things. This week’s brilliant “Here’s Not Here” episode was written entirely by Gimple. With Kirkman’s juvenile fanboy sensibility no longer in charge, the show finally has the opportunity to be terrific. (We recap The Walking Dead at Basket of Kisses if you like that sort of thing.) - Deborah Lipp
You're the Worst's Extreme Haunted House
In a Halloween-themed episode already bubbling over with inappropriate funnies (Paul dressed as Stephen Hawking!) as well as unresolved relationship tensions (Jimmy determined to “fix” Gretchen’s depression after all), “You’re the Worst” hits a season high once it plunges our anti-heroes into an extreme haunted house that functions as a live-action mash-up of the most gruesome horror movies ever made. Filmed with just enough quick cuts and a pounding metal soundtrack to make the nonstop parade of horrors at once transfixing and weirdly hilarious, it’s the kind of thing you think had to be made up until you discover it’s a real thing.
Somehow, the ordeal forces at least two of our four mains to confront their real demons and take the first step to getting past them, while underscoring how stubbornly the other two refuse to face theirs. Contrived? Yes, yet it works beautifully. Bonus TFE points for the callout to “Silence of the Lambs,” with a Buffalo Bill figure turning into Lindsey’s best life counselor, and the bawdy in-joke about TV, uh, getting the best of movies. - Lynn Lee
Please Like Me's 'Coming Out' Rehearsal
Is anyone watching Please Like Me? I know that it airs on Pivot, a network so deep in the cable line-up you probably don't even know it exists, but please, I beg you, find it. Please Like Me, created by and starring Australian comic Josh Thomas is one of the best shows on TV. Last week, in order to help his anxiety-ridden boyfriend Arnold prepare to come out out to his father (who made him quit school choir lest he seem too queer) Josh makes his own father (currently in need of perking up) role play as Arnold's Dad. But Josh deems their perfunctory improvisation not good enough, and steps into the role of director, telling Arnold to sing to his Dad. And Arnold sings a rendition of Sia's "Chandelier" so simple and sweet and hopeful that for one bright, shining moment, everyone's world stops as Josh's Dad accepts Arnold the way we all hope his actual father - or any father, for that matter - would. If only Arnold's real coming out would go so smoothly. - Dancin' Dan
The Knick's André Holland
Dr. Algernon Edwards, the African American "acting chief surgeon" at the Knickerbocker felt more like a lightning rod concept / conflict generator in Steve Sodebergh's turn of the century hospital drama. They piled everything on to that character. This season, by giving him less, Holland is somehow giving more or at least he's doing it more sympathetically. Like many dramas about difficult brilliant people the show errs continually on the side of 'the protagonist(s) is always right!' but Algernon's dangerous retinal problem and illicit affair with a wealthy socialite woman and the hiding of / confusion around both have humanized him in a way that Dr Thackery's addictions haven't humanized him. Clive Owen's brilliant junkie doctor is increasingly wearing out his welcome in a show built around him so it's good to have such a strong understudy in the wings. - Nathaniel R
P.S. I almost gave this to composer Cliff Martines but I still haven't worked out if his relentlessly modern / electronic underscore is an instantly dating catastrophe or a brilliant anachronistic perversion. I'd love a second pair of ears if you got 'em.