"Skins" and "Friday Night Lights" Top the Ten Best of 2008
By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives
In hindsight, there were so many outstanding scripted series on television during 2008 that it is easy to forget the wide-ranging destruction of the Writers Guild of America strike. Hence the crowded paragraph of runners-up at the end of this list, not to mention the need for last week’s shout out to ten cool alternatives.
Beginning with the best:
Skins(BBC America)
While other critics busily decide whether AMC’s Mad Men, ABC’s Lost, HBO’s The Wire or FX’s The Shield deserve special recognition as the Program of the Year, I’m going to make an end run around them all and bestow the honor on BBC America’s Skins. This consistently profound drama about contemporary British teens, most of them the offspring of utterly ineffective parents, every one of them a complicated product of their environment, is simultaneously heart-warming, bone-chilling, uplifting, depressing, touching and troubling -- and always on-target. Indeed, there has never been a television series that so openly and realistically deals with the issues and experiences teenagers face on a daily basis: academic demands, peer pressure, family conflicts, drug and alcohol abuse, relationships, sexuality, mortality and so much more. At first blush, the characters here would not appear to be all that different from each other – after all, they’re just kids – but they are as meticulously constructed and excitingly brought to life as those in the finest television dramas of recent years, including The Sopranos and Mad Men. Although most of them are very pretty, the outstanding actors on this show always look as real as the young people at your local high school: Blotchy, unkempt, rumpled and not quite comfortable in their own epidermises. Their dialogue is similarly real. The cumulative result makes the teen characters in popular American youth ensemble dramas of the last 20 years -- from Beverly Hills 90210 to Dawson’s Creek to One Tree Hill to Gossip Girl and back to 90210 – look and sound utterly plastic, if not flat-out false. In fairness, those shows were/are all made to comply with American broadcast television standards, while the creators of Skins are allowed to cut loose. Some might compare it to the many Degrassi series from Canada (seen here on The N), but Skins is much more graphic and, therefore, way more realistic. While BBC America allows much of their R-rated realism to come through, uncensored episodes of Skins as they ran in England are often filled with HBO or Showtime-caliber language, nudity and sex. Here’s an interesting fact: Many of the creative folks who produce Skins had never before worked in television. Maybe that’s why they had the balls to write all of the main characters out of their hit show in its Season 2 finale. Will Skins be as rewarding in its third season without Tony, Michelle, Cassie, Maxxie, Chris, Sid, Jal and Anwar? At least we’ll still have Effy.
Friday Night Lights(DirecTV/NBC)
The one exception to my comment above about the unreal qualities that have permeated American youth ensemble dramas of the last 20 years is this terrific series that revolves around a high school football team in a small Texas town. In fact, had BBC America not debuted Skins this year, Friday Night Lights would be my choice for 2008’s Program of the Year. Rescued from near-termination by a unique partnership between DirecTV and NBC, Lights remains the most stirring drama on American television. The secret is in its quiet attention to detail and intimate observations of simple human behavior. Lights has been better than ever in its third season, and Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, as Coach Eric Taylor and his wife Tami (now the high school principal) are still the most realistic and inspiring married couple on television. Should DirecTV and NBC choose to not move forward with this franchise, my hope is that it finds a home on cable, where it might take on some of the uncensored realism of Skins. That would make Lights a different show, but surely no less a profound one.
The remainder of the list, in no particular order:
Mad Men(AMC)
The first show on basic cable to be honored with an Emmy Award as Outstanding Drama Series, Mad Menbravely and boldly went to places in Season 2 that were only hinted at in Season 1, especially where its female characters were concerned.
Lost(ABC)
Television’s most challenging show was far better in Season 4 than in Seasons 2 and 3, flashing back and flashing forward right up to the final moments of its season finale, when Ben the Bad made both islands disappear and Lost’s WTF quotient shot through the stratosphere. It may be that this show’s ever-expanding mythology has finally gone too far, but for now, who cares? The arrival of Season 5 is the most eagerly anticipated television event of the year ahead.
The Shield(FX)
Michael Chiklisand Walton Goggins gave the performances of the year as best friends turned mortal enemies Vic Mackey and Shane Vendrell as FX’s groundbreaking cop drama breathlessly roared through its final season, bringing tragedy to many of its characters and a future filled with misery to the luckier ones. The closing sequence, in which Mackey suffered in silence in a fresh hell of his own making as a paper-pusher in a generic office cubicle, was even more impactful than the ambiguous restaurant scene that closed The Sopranos.
Dexter(Showtime)
The shocks kept coming as Dexter (the astonishing Michael C. Hall) bonded with new Miami ADA Miguel Pardo (played by Jimmy Smits), the brother of a man Dexter accidentally killed, making for a decidedly bumpy bromance.
Torchwood(BBC America)
Not unlike the much-admired Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this super-charged science-fiction adventure can be the funniest comedy television – when it isn’t the medium’s most moving drama or most exciting thrill ride. John Barrowman is a marvel as Captain Jack Harkness, the fearless leader of an elite team charged with monitoring a space/time rift in Cardiff, Wales, and protecting the Earth from alien beings that pass through it. The dashing Harkness is a bi-sexual adventurer whose lust for men and women is outdone only by that of his former lover, the sexually insatiable rogue time agent Captain John Hart (played by recurring guest star James Marsters). Barrowman and his cast mates revealed at Comic-Con that Season 3 will actually be a single episode that stretches over several hours. Can’t wait.
The Wire(HBO)
The final season of HBO’s unforgiving, Baltimore-based drama about the urban decay that went largely ignored by politicians and the media alike during the go-go economy of recent years included the decline of the city’s leading newspaper in its ongoing examination of insurmountable crime and corruption. A formidable bastion of journalistic excellence suddenly brought to the brink, grievously compromised by pressures from without and incompetence from within? Talk about prescience!
Leverage(TNT)
More Ocean’s Eleven than Mission: Impossible, this sleek, sexy, sophisticated action-dramedy is the most entertaining new scripted series of 2008, and timely as hell. As the leader of a team of thieves and grifters who work to bring down corporate malefactors on behalf of their victims, Timothy Hutton has his best role since his Academy Award-winning turn as a suicidal teenager in Ordinary People. Christian Kane, Gina Bellman, Beth Riesgraf and Aldis Hodge round out the show’s endlessly appealing cast.
Summer OIympic Games (NBC)
Okay, NBC’s ground-breaking coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympic Games doesn’t exactly qualify as a series, but it made the dog-days of August the most exciting two weeks of television this year. Despite its ongoing travails in primetime, the Peacock gingerly reminded us that broadcast can still be the mightiest medium of all.
Also worth mentioning as the year draws to a close: TNT’s The Closer and Saving Grace; AMC’s Breaking Bad; Sci Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica; ABC’s Boston Legal, Desperate Housewives and Pushing Daisies; NBC’s 30 Rock; USA Network’s PsychandBurn Notice; Showtime’s Brotherhood and The Tudors; HBO’s John Adams, Generation Kill and True Blood, and CBS’ The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, The Amazing Race, Survivor, Eleventh Hour, Cold Case, The Mentalist and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. How many years have passed since so many CBSshows were included in a Best of the Year review? At a time when broadcast bashing has become a cross-media sport it seems to me that CBS is doing something very right. Long may it continue to unexpectedly kick ass.
Ed Martin
Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…
