2011: The year in TV dramas
The 2011 fall season had a few misses, a few head-scratchers and some decent but not great comedies, but most of all, it will be remembered for the richness and variety of dramatic shows.
From the first-class offerings such as "Homeland" on Showtime, "The Hour" on BBC America, "Person of Interest" on CBS and "Boss" on Starz to the fine batch of well-made, addictively watchable second-tier series – "Revenge," "Pan Am," "Once Upon a Time, " "Unforgettable " and, from time to time, "Grimm" – drama has ruled the fall.
Standing back from the season's dramatic shows, we can track the thematic spoor with relative ease: Two of the best dramas successfully tapped into the pervasive, post-9/11 culture of paranoia to keep viewers on the edges of their seats.
"Homeland" and "Person of Interest" build on the ever-present, naked transparency of 21st century living under constant surveillance and monitoring by a variety of devices, from gizmos that track our credit card purchases, to closed-circuit TV cameras posted on virtually every urban street corner, to spyware looking over our shoulders every time we click on a new computer site.
In the last century, now-dead authors foretold the future with the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg watching over the ash heaps in "The Great Gatsby" and Big Brother keeping an ever-present lookout on things in "1984."
But now that the future is here, we not only take our transparency in stride these days, we all but celebrate it, filling the air with manically mundane tweets signifying less than nothing, texting our every step, hope and disappointment, sexting our every quivering desire.
The respective creators and writers of "Homeland" and "Person of Interest" have targeted the concept of taking our societal nakedness for granted and turned it back on us, forcing us to cop to the itch of being watched 24/7.
But those shows aren't the only ones to capitalize on the theme of being watched.
The first great new series of the fall, "The Hour" on BBC America, took us back to a moment in history when the BBC itself squirmed out from under the censoring thumb of the British government in the mid-1950s.
The eight-episode series, which will be back next year, had twin story lines, one involving an illicit romance between two major characters and the other focusing on how ambitious young journalists during the infancy of television news struggled to report fully and accurately what was going on behind the scenes of the Suez Crisis. Intrigue and wariness informed both fundamental plot elements which, in turn, mirrored each other, and prying eyes were always watching.
Second-tier shows
Even second-tier shows got in on the intrigue action.
ABC's deliciously addictive "Revenge," which has more moral twists and turns than even Showtime's "The Borgias," gleefully feasts on characters spying on each other within the close quarters of the Hamptons.
And while "queen" Victoria Grayson (Madeleine Stowe) keeps a wary eye on her son's vengeful girlfriend from the clapboard turret of her castle-like beach mansion, other characters use spycams to get the goods on who is sleeping with whom and even who is trying to kill whom.
But perhaps the ultimate use of transparency is to be found in "Unforgettable," the CBS show about a cop (Poppy Montgomery) who has a real condition known as hyperthymesia that affects only a handful of people in the world, among them the actress Marilu Henner.
It's not just a photographic memory, but, in fact, complete, detailed autobiographical memory of every moment in your life. Montgomery's Carrie Wells routinely solves crimes by reliving her own past, watching herself the first time she approaches a crime scene and taking in every detail of the setting. In the case of "Unforgettable," it's Carrie's life that becomes completely transparent.
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