Top 5:

1. Homeland - From the first episode, no show had me more engaged and entertained this year. It’s not perfect, but it is compelling, and the acting by Lewis, Danes and Patinkin is the best on TV.

2. Boardwalk Empire - A close second. Early in the season I was pretty on the fence about the series and was considering dropping it, but it really rallied midway through, and the last four or five episodes were hypnotic in their beauty and tragedy.

3. Dexter - Definitely not in the class of the first two shows on this list, but Michael C. Hall’s performance always get me through the rough patches. My biggest disappointment this year relates to the major reveal about the season’s Big Bad. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say that the guest star I was most excited about was pretty well squandered in the name of a shocking revelation that, by the time it happened, shocked no one. So, the season could have been better. That said, I was anxious to see every episode, week-in and week-out, and the final scene of the season finale is a moment I’ve been waiting a long time for. I hope it moves things forward a little next season between the two lead characters, who may not enjoy each other in real life, but who on this show are dynamite to watch on-screen.

4. Fringe - It took too long for Peter to make an appearance, but as has always been the case, when this show is at its best it’s irresistible. The Stephen Root time machine episode should generate Emmy awards for all involved.

5. Louie - Louis C.K. writes, directs and edits this masterful comedy/drama in a way that seems like watching a master artist do his thing right before your eyes. He is the smartest comedian alive right now, and very possibly the most talented. It seems like a gift to have this series, however long it lasts.

Biggest disappointments:

1. Terra Nova - The pilot suggested a mind-blowing sci-fi series I very much wanted to watch. By halfway through the second episode, I was out already. Boring beyond belief.

2. Walking Dead - Talk, talk, talk. Keep talking, assholes. Meanwhile, I’ll slip out the back while you folks discuss all your BORING BORING BORING. Out.

3. Whitney/2 Broke Girls - Both produced by Whitney Houston (right?), both feel like the product of a desperate girl writing for hot boys she wants to fuck. This hot boy is not impressed, and also is not hot.

4. Breaking Bad - Just fuckin’ with ya. I tried it, but it’s too bleak for me to stomach. Don’t bother trying to convince me otherwise, just be disappointed in me.

I really wanted to like this new Sarah Michelle Gellar vehicle, but barely made it to the end of the first episode. Spoilers ahead, in case you plan to give it a go.

Everything about this debut effort annoyed, from the splitscreen allowing SMG’s twin characters Bridget and Siobhan to interact, to the acting by almost every lead on the show. Gellar and Ioan “Mr. Fantastic” Gruffudd (here using what I presume is his real accent, at least) both felt like they were phoning it in to get the Pilot payday and hoping it doesn’t go to series and occupy the next seven years of their life. SMG really only seems believable as Bridget, an ex-stripper in witness protection, while twin sister Siobhan, ice-cold and two-dimensional, seems to be Emma Frost by way of Jackie O’s sunglasses. Only Nestor Carbonell, who you may remember as immortal eyeliner guy Richard from Lost, seemed committed to his character, enough so that he seemed familiar, and then near the end I went, “Oh, he’s that guy from Lost.” But at least I bought into his character’s existence and dedication to his job. The actor playing Henry, the guy sleeping with Siobhan, Mr. Fantastic’s wife, is so insubtantial as to barely be there. One is hardly convinced a wealthy woman, even one as eeeeevil as Siobhan, would compromise her marriage for such a vacuous twit. 

Watched this with my son, who was convinced that Siobhan was dead after the boat incident (featuring the lousiest bluescreen/splitscreen effects of the episode) that allows Bridget to assume Siobhan’s identity. I told him “You don’t hire SMG to play identical twins and kill one off for real in the first episode. Just like we’re going to see that gun go off, we’re going to see Bridget’s sister again.” Would have thought they’d saved it for a week or two, though, not for the profoundly cliche-ridden final scene of the pilot.

Ringer wants very much to be this season’s Dollhouse — stylish, chilly, with untapped depths of mystery and cool, and obviously descending from Buffy, not to mention the alt.rock girl-and-guitar music montage featuring a bizarre cover of Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4 — but it’s just Lifetime movie-of-the-week-level awful. 

“Where No Man Has Gone Before” - Star Trek. The essential introduction to James T. Kirk. So very different from everything that follows, and yet the very essence of Roddenberry’s Trek; thoughtful, exciting, out there. 

“Many Happy Returns” - The Prisoner. Not the first or last mind-fuck of this series, but the best. 

“Pilot” - Twin Peaks. A moment in my life, preserved in amber, with that dreamy theme carrying me back to the night I watched the most perfect episode of the most promising series ever on network television. If only…

“The Stake-Out” - Seinfeld. It’s rough, but it makes me laugh every time. “All right, he’s an importer/exporter!”

“Flip” - The Larry Sanders Show. The ideal ending for the highest-quality sitcom ever created. It makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it makes you want more, but there is no more. I cherish every one of these episodes, but this one? This one I would take a bullet for.

Celebrating 20 years since the debut of one of the best TV series of all time.

AMC’s The Prisoner Mini-Series — Here’s a remake I’ve been waiting most of my life for. I started watching Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner when it was running in late night on, I think, CBS back in the 1970s. Its rich mix of science fiction, espionage and paranoia wrapped around questions of power, control and identity made it probably my all-time favourite TV series, and a show I think is still ahead of its time some 40 years after it was first broadcast.

It’s been vastly influential, echoing in forgotten series like Nowhere Man, popular ones like Lost, and probably a dozen more I could list if I thought about it for a couple of minutes.

There was simply nothing like it on TV before, and nothing ever reached its dizzying heights after; not every episode was perfect, but most were at least very good, all were interesting, and a few were transcendent in the way they involved the viewer in Number 6’s struggle for individuality and freedom.

And now it’s been remade as a six-episode mini-series for basic cable channel AMC. Starring Jim Caviezel as Six (the “Number” prefix has been dropped in all cases here) and Ian McKellen as Two, the mini-series is inspired by the original but does not seem to be a direct sequel or a by-the-numbers remake. New explanations for the existence of The Village are hinted at, and new shadings are added to the psychological mix, including issues of sexual identity that actually make for a thoughtful addition to the heady brew of social and political issues that the original tackled. Weird new post-Lost elements are added, some compelling (the holes that seem to be appearing in reality) and some not so much (the pigs that are touted as the solution to the holes — yeah, you definitely have to see it to believe it).

There are some really first-rate performances here, especially from McKellen as Two (and especially Un-Two, a Leo McKern-worthy performance) and Jamie Campbell-Bower as his son, 11-22. There is a mountain of subtext in the relationship between the two, and that aspect is probably the most vital of the series.

Unfortunately, the entire endeavour is hobbled utterly by a lifeless and nuance-free lead actor in Caviezel as Six. McGoohan brought anger, passion and purpose to the original Number Six, but Caviezel brings absolutely nothing to the lead role here. He is very good at playing stunned and confused, as in when he first awakes on the edge of The Village, but I felt nothing at all for his character as he confronted Two and his schemes and conspiracies. One episode features Six recruited by Two to teach surveillance at a school in The Village, but I never felt sucked into his deals with Two in the same way one understood why Number Six would go along with Number Two’s plots in the original. At no time in the entire series did I root for Six, an essential element of McGoohan’s series — one never necessarily felt his Number Six was a nice guy or even a hero, but he was always sympathetic and one always wanted to know how he was going to try to get out of whatever dilemma Number Two had thrown him into in any given episode.

The elements that comprise AMC’s Prisoner remake are so close to perfect that I truly am sad that it falls so short of the mark. The cinematography is intriguing and occasionally beautiful. McKellen and Campbell-Bower give all they have to their roles. The music is fantastic. But time and again, watching all six episodes, as I continued to feel a gnawing ambivalence for the entire affair, I kept coming back to the weakness of Caviezel’s performance, and also the fatal error of spending a good deal of every episode in flashbacks (or possibly forwards? The Lost influence is fairly powerful) to Six’s life outside The Village. These sequences spend a lot of time on Six’s alternate life as Michael, but really tell us nothing about him as a person, or why we should care that he is trapped in The Village.

Like the original, the final episode ends in metaphysics and scenes open to multiple interpretation. Unlike the original series finale, though, it is torpid and vague and lifeless and will not prompt viewers to ponder the meaning of the mythology for decades to come. Finishing the six episodes, I said to my wife “I don’t know how to review this thing, other than to tell people to watch the original.” Patrick McGoohan created a timeless epic that still feels fresh, unusual and relevant to our lives. AMC’s remake feels like a faint echo of something meaningful, a well-intentioned effort that fails to escape the powerful shadow of its far superior inspiration.

A copy of The Prisoner was provided by the network for the purposes of review.