Best of 2011: TV

Once again folks we are looking back on the wonderful Year of 2011. It's fairly predictable what the Best Shows of 2011 were and Norwegian Morning Wood probably isn't going to give you any surprises. That said, we have a few superlatives here to get into.

Best New Drama: It's incredible that HBO keeps doing this, but Game of Thrones delivers everything you could ask for - a compelling, intriguing plot, intense visuals, strongly fleshed out characters and a taste of a richly developed universe.
Best Episode: "Baelor"

Best New Comedy: Somehow the most refreshing new series and one of the more enjoyable shows of the year has been FOX's New Girl, starring the ever-loveable Zooey Deschanel with an otherwise gang of generally traditional sitcom characters, but with a good amount of heart and genuine laughs.
Best Episode: "Bells"

Best Returning Drama: Walter White has risen to new heights in this year's Breaking Bad, a show that seems to be outlasting its contemporaries like Dexter and Mad Men in creative flow. The whole series is a strikingly deep and addicting character study performed by an actor in Bryan Cranston who is suddenly getting noticed.
Best Episode: "Crawl Space"

Best Returning Comedy: While shows like Louie, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Community had incredibly strong seasons this year, Parks and Recreation takes the cake as the smalltown, feel-good show of the year. It's emerged from both the shadow of The Office and 30 Rock to become the best NBC has to offer, regardless of who is paying attention to it.
Best Episode: "Fancy Party"

Best Show to Return after a Ridiculous Amount of Years: No, not Charlie's Angels. Beavis and Butt-head finally came back to us, with almost no change at all to its characters or structure. It's also been one of the more consistently hilarious shows on MTV or any station and somehow these metal-loving dudes seem more relevant than ever. Somehow.
Best Episode: "The Rat"

Best SNL Host: There are always struggles, but Jason Segel and Florence + The Machine were a Muppet-filled delight this year. It's rare that a host is this game for masturbating on a Temper Pedic or getting the best laughs by impersonating Andre the Giant. It also starred a live talking frog.

Weirdest: F/X is really plunging into the original series territory and with American Horror Story they've put up a bizarre show that has somehow sustained itself for at least one season (It helps that main characters can die and come back as ghosts without others noticing), but it's a unique concept show that struggles finding the right tone.
Best Episode: "Smoldering Children"

Most Disappointing: The second season of The Walking Dead, while it had its moments seemed to spin its wheels more than anything, although the resolution to the entire season's storyline has tremendous ramifications for its cast of increasingly unlikeable characters. The aforementioned Dexter has also seemed to have collapsed and while The Office still pulls some funny moments, it needs to die pretty soon.
Best Episode: "Save the Last One"
Well, that Turned out OK: One of the biggest storylines of 2011 was Charlie Sheen's very public departure from Two and a Half Men. It seemed like an insane choice to replace him with Ashton Kutcher but as it would seem, the Kutch brought both a refreshing stride to the show and some of the best ratings in its history. Way to go, Kelso.
Best Episode: "Nice to Meet You, Walden Schmidt"

Most Underrated: I think that amidst CBS shows the style, heart, and character-driven insanity of How I Met Your Mother needs to be recognized. It's a solid show that has somehow flown under the radar for years and is now entering syndication. It is a very digestible show and has the potential to just be on in the background for years to come. That said, Ted just needs to find his wife already. This season was exceptional, though.
Best Episode: "A Change of Heart"

Best New Animated Show: I can't get enough of the absurd, angry and educationally nerdy China, IL on Adult Swim. Brad Neely's mind has been successfully transferred to a freeflowing visual medium with catchy songs, insane predicaments and an impressively deep voice cast that includes Hulk Hogan and Jason Alexander.
Best Episode: "Prom Face/Off"

Best Returning Animated Show:  Also on Cartoon Network, Adventure Time is the single great Children's show of our age. It lacks the snark or meta-obsession of its contemporaries. It's also full of loveable characters, earnest fun and some wonderfully silly animation. It ran with its premise thoroughly in its second season, developing relationships and storylines while always putting silliness first.
Best Episode: "Memory of a Memory"

Best Episode of the Year: Although Parks and Recreation has been NBC's more consistent show this year, Community's "Remedial Chaos Theory" was the best twenty-minutes of television put on screen this year. Read this over at the A.V. Club for a much more in-depth review, but it pulled off an unprecedented 7-timeline splintering of a relatively simple narrative allowing its characters to organically play off each other, sometimes for very homely results, other times unleashing a Dark Universe that just has to return before Community's inevitable cancellation next fall.

Well that's all of 2011's Television. There was also Jersey Shore, J. Lo on American Idol, Kelsey Grammar in Boss, every musician with a good career this year on The Voice, and finally, finally Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) on basic cable television. The world needed this. Here's to 2012!

Because it was on TV: The Strange Sitcom Reality of Two and a Half Men

I never watch Two and a Half Men. It mostly features simplistic joke and plot structure that fits into Sitcom Tropes far too easily and a general lack of depth or insight into character or story development. Naturally though my interest was peaked last Monday when the star of such landmark films as Valentine's Day (2009) and No Strings Attached (2011), Ashton Kutcher was set to debut in place of the Great Charlie Sheen.

I've been interested in Fictional Realities before but watching this show really got me thinking about the show's Real World. I don't mean to judge what would happen if shows took place in real life (That's for Robot Chicken to sort out), but I am intrigued by how things operate within the confines of a specific Reality. For example, in Superman's Reality, people can fly and giant monsters arrive once a week to attack the same city. That's a very distinct example but the reality of Sitcoms are more subtle. Actually if any of you watched the Emmy Awards this Sunday (apparently none of you did), the Opening Jane Lynch Musical Number touched on this concept. Around 2:18 she walks into a Sitcom full of its own Reality (more specifically a CBS Sitcom Reality, that is). So what defines this and why the hell should we be talking about it?

Unbelievably, his most lasting legacy
is those shirts

What struck me about Two and a Half Men was its opening scene. Charle Harper (Sheen) is dead and it's mostly played for laughs. Now, many Sitcoms equally as cringe-worthy as this have had characters pass on and treated it with much more respect. This happens more often than not when the actor actually dies, as was the case of John Ritter on 8 Simple Rules or Phil Hartman on News Radio. Even on Sheen's old show, Spin City when Michael J. Fox departed to deal with his worsening Parkinson's Disease his character was given a strong, heartfelt goodbye. As recently as last season's The Office which featured Steve Carrell's leave had some very sentimental moments. So why was Charlie Harper's death so simultaneously ridiculous, hysterical and quickly forgotten?

1) The Nature of Charlie Sheen's Departure. This wasn't a long time coming, or a sudden, sympathetic leave. Charlie Sheen, in his own words, told his boss to "fuck off" and was kicked off the show after being the Highest-paid Television Actor Ever. Not only that, after his pink slip he went on a glorious tour both through New Media and live Stand-Up stops so in case anyone was out there still believing that he wasn't crazy they could come around. There's no sympathy here, no reason to give Sheen's Character any decent burial or long afterthought. Ashton is rushed in as soon as possible (literally immediately after some kind words by Alan Harper (Jon Cryer) Ashton appears and startles him, causing him to spill Charlie's ashes everywhere, unceremoniously. He is later sucked into a dustbuster and not mentioned again - true symbolism of Ashton's supplanting Sheen).

Anyone else hope this is all just an
elaborate Punk'D on Charle Sheen?

2) The Nature of the Show's Reality. More to the point of this article, Two and a Half Men just isn't a place for these kinds of intimate moments. There's room for Real Drama on The Office or even How I Met Your Mother, but not here. Those shows have a foot in reality much further than Two and a Half Men does. Even its former lead-in program, Everybody Loves Raymond had room for real emotion, anger and character development in each episode. Two and a Half Men is far more concerned with goofiness, a floating, humming reality of irreverence and stupidity. It's not to say it's not funny, there were certainly some laugh out loud moments Monday Night, but that's all it strives to be. No character within the Reality of the show has any actual feelings or sentiment. Even at death there are jokes to be made. A Funeral like Charlie Harper's exists comfortably within the preceding confines of the show because of its reality. If Steve Carrell had left The Office like Charlie Sheen left Two and a Half Men and the writers decided that Michael Scott had been hit by a train and exploded (like a "balloon full of meat") the Funeral would have a drastically different tone, which is based on that Show's Fictional Reality. Two and a Half Men gets away with it because the characters within the reality accept the absurd as such.

So what's next? Charlie Sheen is off to bigger and worse things, if his last six months are any indication. As for Two and a Half Men, that reality works. It had one of the biggest premieres in recent memory and surely isn't worried about leaving anytime soon, even if they eventually need to change the title to just Three Men, which is really the most basic title for a show ever.