Translated material
TV series for the holidays
38 good short series that are worth watching during the New Year holidays
From January 1 to January 11, 2015, residents of Russia will face a crisis holiday, during which many of them will prefer not to waste money, but to stay at home and engage in more affordable entertainment.
11 days is also enough time to immerse yourself in a series. On this occasion, TJ has selected 38 short TV shows, the full viewing of which can easily be done during the holidays.
Still going
The Leftovers
10 hours and 30 minutes - 57 minutes per day for 11 days
“The Leftovers” can be called one of the most controversial TV series of 2014. To many viewers it will seem chaotic, since it often does not obey the usual laws of drama and mockingly moves away from comfortable cliches, but it is precisely these properties that make it an interesting experience.
The show is based on a novel by writer Tom Perrotta, who serves as screenwriter. The book tells the story of a world in which, for unknown reasons, about two percent of the population instantly disappeared.
Divine ascension? Aliens? The first stage of the end of the world? The series does not answer these questions. As in the best Stephen King novels, the plot here becomes just an assumption that allows the author to poke around with interest in human nature.
The series is helmed by the notorious screenwriter Damon Lindelof, who worked on Lost, so before watching it, you should prepare yourself for an emotional experience that more often raises new questions than answers old ones.
Episodes
13 hours - 71 minutes per day
One of the best cable comedies of recent years, greatly underrated by the general public.
A couple of British screenwriters, who became famous in their homeland for a witty series about a professor and his students, are invited to California to make an American remake. The dream proposal quickly turns into a nightmare: the professor in the new version is replaced by a hockey coach, the channel takes the dim-witted “Friends” star Matt LeBlanc (playing himself) to play his role, and the surrounding “Californication”, meanwhile, begins to quickly corrupt the prim protagonists.
Episodes is the brainchild of Friends co-creator David Crane, and his new show is perhaps the best tribute to the legendary sitcom yet. The series is replete with witty, conversational humor that sometimes veers into typical Showtime vulgarity, and at the same time interestingly shows the inner workings of American television.
The Knick ("Knickerbocker Hospital")
9 hours and 40 minutes - 53 minutes per day
Steven Soderbergh didn't just direct the pilot of The Knick, as famous directors usually do, but personally directed all ten episodes of the first season. This is the author's show of a great master.
The Knick tells about the everyday life of the legendary New York Knickerbocker Hospital at the beginning of the 20th century. Its main character, John Thackery, is in many ways similar to Doctor House. The owner of a brilliant mind, at the forefront of modern medicine, is torn apart by internal demons: obsession with work, love of prostitutes and cocaine.
Like many other films by Soderbergh, The Knick is filled with caustic irony and black humor: by the end of the first season, the author calmly drains all the joy, happiness and hope for the future from the main characters.
The show greets viewers with a creepy surgery scene, but it's worth enduring: the seventh episode of The Knick is perhaps the best that television could produce in the past year.
Silicon Valley
4 hours and 30 minutes - 25 minutes a day
The best new HBO show of the past year. A short but funny and witty series about a startup from Silicon Valley from the creator of Beavis and Butt-head. A must-see for TJ and CPU readers, and for anyone interested in the IT industry or working in it.
The Affair ("Lovers")
10 hours - 55 minutes per day
One of the main dramatic new releases of 2014 is a series about how the summer romance of a married writer and a married waitress destroyed two families.
In addition to deep psychology, the show also boasts an interesting narrative. In each episode, the viewer is first shown the man's version of events, and then the woman's: when their stories intersect, it is easy to notice how one of them is lying, embellishing or exacerbating what happened in his memory.
The story also has a criminal background, which quite predictably explodes loudly in the finale of the first season.
The Strain
9 hours and 19 minutes - 51 minutes per day
The series of a new formation is a cable “bi-movie”. For many years, networks like FX, HBO and Showtime have tried to maintain a “highbrow” status and produce mostly serious dramas about mafiosi, homicidal maniacs and cancer patients, but The Strain effectively breaks this trend.
In the series about the epidemic of the vampire virus in New York, the FX channel climbs into the territory of terrestrial TV and takes all the best from it: scope, ease of storytelling, the absence of a second bottom, the ability to tickle the nerves and the frank relishing of various abominations.
Yes, The Strain has a place on TV3, but in an exceptionally good way: in the way that only director Guillermo del Toro can do. Not only did he direct the pilot for The Strain, but he also co-wrote the book on which the series is based.
Orange is the New Black
26 hours - 142 minutes per day
A dramatic comedy about the difficult fate of a blonde who ends up in a women's prison.
Piper Chapman, a seemingly typical middle-class American woman who is preparing for a wedding, has her own skeletons in her closet: in her youth, the girl was involved in drug trafficking, falling under the influence of Alex, a colorful vamp from the underworld. Having read all kinds of literature on the topic “how to survive in prison,” Piper goes to the colony, but everything there turns out to be completely different from what she imagined.
The series is worthy of attention for many reasons. Firstly, over the course of two seasons, the main character goes through a fascinating path of development: from an optimistic barbie she turns into a strong-willed woman who builds sophisticated plans for revenge, or even simply beats the crap out of her annoying rival.
Secondly, the prison is replete with colorful characters who, interacting with each other, bring special humor to the show. A strange, wild African-American woman nicknamed “Crazy Eyes”, an ardent religious fanatic in a worn-out hoodie, a stern Russian woman with a difficult life, the head of the kitchen, a family of Latinos whose relationships are similar to a Brazilian series - who is not here.
In addition to humor, in such a colorful female society, problems inevitably arise - social, ethnic and even sexual. The result is a good drama with elements of comedy about how you can survive even in hell if you treat each other humanly and hope for the best.
Black Mirror
7 hours and 18 minutes - 40 minutes a day
Black Mirror is perhaps one of the most underrated TV series of our time. Although it can be called a series conditionally: two seasons of three episodes (plus a Christmas special of one and a half hours), and each episode is a separate story in unique futuristic realities, in no way connected with the previous one.
“Black Mirror” is in many ways a prophetic series that allows us to look into the future, although exaggerated, but in some places painfully reminiscent of the world today.
What can too much information lead to? Do we need to know everything about another person, even if we love him? Can technology replace us with those who cannot be returned?
It’s amazing how skillfully the work on each episode is done: worlds, gadgets and technologies thought out to the smallest detail are replaced by rough, overly bright or, conversely, gloomy dystopias.
No tricks, no stupid dialogue in an attempt to fill up the running time with something. Seven great films that we all need to watch when we put our smartphones aside.
Rick and Morty
4 hours and 24 minutes - 24 minutes a day
An animated series for which the word “brilliant” was coined. “Rick and Morty” was created by the author of the cult comedy Community (“Community”) Dan Harmon during the year of his exile from NBC (after an unsuccessful season, the channel asked the controversial person to return).
During this time, Harmon managed to pour all his accumulated creative potential into 11 brilliant episodes of the show about a mad professor and his cowardly grandson Morty. The main characters travel through parallel worlds, plunge into the deepest levels of sleep and destroy all of humanity a couple of times per season, and all this is shown with an unprecedented level of cynicism and wit.
Rick and Morty should not be watched with children: under the colorful animation there is a show for adults - with sex, swearing and the consequences of alcoholism.
Fargo
8 hours and 20 minutes - 46 minutes a day
An example of the perfect adaptation of a cult film for television format. The same American outback, the same atmosphere, the same evil irony and the same manner of making all their heroes complete fools as the Coen brothers.
Moreover, in the middle of the season it turns out that Fargo is not just a series based on it, but a direct continuation of the film of the same name. The Hobbit and Sherlock star Martin Freeman plays his best role in it. The same can be said about Billy Bob Thornton: his soft-spoken hitman with feline grace has become one of the most compelling TV characters of 2014.
Brooklyn Nine-Nine
12 hours and 56 minutes - 71 minutes per day
A sitcom from the creators of “The Office” about a police station in which absolutely everyone, including the chief, was unable to overcome their infantilism. The eminent publication Variety named Brooklyn Nine-Nine one of the best broadcast series of the year, and it did so well deservedly.
The authors of the show used a proven scheme - they endowed each of the characters with pleasant charisma, after which they began to pit them against each other and observe the resulting effect. The result is a sure-fire way to lift your spirits.
Gravity Falls ("Play Falls")
10 hours and 38 minutes - 58 minutes per day
Disney proves by its own example that when creating TV series for children, it is absolutely not necessary to sacrifice an adult audience. Gravity Falls, which is already being called the animated “Twin Peaks,” is not a shame to watch at any age. The amazingly beautiful show manages to make funny jokes without toilet humor and at the same time almost completely avoid the cultural references on which its colleagues parasitize.
The series is about twins Dipper and Mabel, who go to their great-uncle's for summer vacation. While he deceives tourists with cheap horrors and sells souvenirs, taking advantage of the town’s notoriety, the children discover that Gravity Falls hides many real and often life-threatening secrets.
Hannibal ("Hannibal")
18 hours and 38 minutes - 102 minutes per day
The main, albeit not very popular, broadcast series of recent years, which belongs on a cable channel like HBO or FX.
“Hannibal” is based on the novels of Thomas Harris and very loosely follows events that many viewers could see in films starring Anthony Hopkins. In the series, the Dane Mads Mikkelsen brilliantly takes the baton from the master of Hollywood.
The TV version is famous for its phenomenal pictures (almost every frame could be hung on the wall as a piece of art) and the atmosphere that gets under your skin. Despite the low ratings (a series with a linear plot and a viscous atmosphere on broadcast television is suicide), NBC continues to renew the show. For the sake of prestige.
Louie
20 hours and 19 minutes - 111 minutes per day
Once upon a time, the cable channel FX gave the wonderful comedian Louis C.K. more than 20 minutes of airtime a week and complete creative freedom. The result is one of the best TV series of our time, which is almost impossible to put into any framework.
Inside his show, Louis shows fragments of his own performances, short sketches about the life of a divorced man in New York, and serial films starring David Lynch or Jeremy Renner.
There are no rules in Louie, but behind it there is an author who has such a keen sense of human nature that what is shown often begins to resemble a documentary: the characters talk too vividly.
Rectify (“Mistakes of the past”)
12 hours and 11 minutes - 67 minutes per day
The tag “from the creators of Breaking Bad” was given to Rectify for a reason: the series can really, in a sense, be called the heir to the cult drama. The show airs on the abstruse American Sundance Channel and is undeservedly deprived of the attention of both viewers and critics.
Rectify is a drama for advanced viewers who are able to closely follow the smallest events in the lives of the main characters and with patience perceive a calm and even meditative narrative.
By the standards of Breaking Bad or some Game of Thrones, almost nothing happens in two seasons of Rectify, but this only makes the series deeper: it does not chase sharp plot twists, carefully revealing the characters of its characters in a bookish way.
The show's leisurely pace and contemplative nature come from its main character , Daniel Holden. After spending 19 years on death row and preparing for his imminent death, he unexpectedly received a ticket to freedom: a new DNA test showed that he did not rape his 16-year-old girlfriend, which means her real killer is walking free.
Over the course of two seasons, the detective story progresses only slightly: the authors concentrate on how Holden builds a value system for himself from scratch and finds the meaning of life, which he was about to part with. After all, he is actually a teenager in the body of a forty-year-old man, who knows about the world only from the books he read in his cell.
Closed
Awake _
9 hours and 19 minutes - 51 minutes per day
Predecessor to Hannibal: another too-good series that happened to air on NBC. Awake was canceled after the first season, but is a complete story, so it can be safely watched years later.
The series tells about a detective (Jason Isaacs - Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter), whose life after a terrible car accident is split into two realities: in one his wife is still alive, and in the other his son is still alive. Time after time, the protagonist goes to sleep in one world and wakes up in another, not understanding which one is real.
The answer to this question becomes less and less obvious over time: personal psychologists in both universes convincingly prove to the hero that they are real, and meanwhile he begins to notice that this unusual ability is increasingly helping him in investigations.
Smash ("Life is like a show")
22 hours and 56 minutes - 125 minutes per day
The only soap opera in the selection: recommended for female audiences and everyone who is partial to Broadway. The series tells the story of two girls fighting for the role of Marilyn Monroe in a big-budget musical.
Interestingly, most of the tracks were specially written and performed for Smash. It is a real musical extravaganza with rich choreography and scenery.
Well, in the end, where else can you watch Uma Thurman portray a Broadway diva and sing?
How To Make It In America
8 hours - 44 minutes per day
A series that you need to watch without turning off Shazam: there are so many great songs in it.
A simple story about two friends who decided to launch a fashion line in New York, which suddenly ended in its second season.
During a crisis, HTMIIA can have a therapeutic psychological effect: the heroes in it, not without difficulties, but still achieve what they want, enjoying the amazing rhythm of life in New York.
Super popular
- The Newsroom (“News Service”, 27 hours) - TJ has already written about it , so there is no point in repeating it.
- American Horror Story (“American Horror Story”, 36 hours) - the series has already had four seasons (the last one will end in January), but they are not connected by plot, so you can choose any one to watch: about a haunted house, about a mental hospital, about a clan of witches or about the circus of freaks. An extremely unconventional spectacle in which horror film cliches are cleverly intertwined with each other, turning the series into an almost constant parade of shocking scenes.
- House of Cards (“House of Cards”, 26 hours) is the locomotive of the Netflix online cinema, competing with the best HBO series. A mathematically calculated political drama with a potential starring role in the life of Kevin Spacey. Guest directors: David Fincher and Jodie Foster.
- Sherlock (Sherlock, 15 hours) - people who have not watched this series have already become an endangered species. And the finale of the third season only proved once again that the show is worthy of its deafening popularity.
- Luther (“Luther”, 16 hours) is an alternative version of Sherlock. A British series about a smart detective who is friends with a maniac and does not always act according to the law, but still stands for a just cause. The monumental Idris Elba versus the worst maniacs in London.
- True Detective (“True Detective”, 8 hours) is one of the most high-profile premieres of the year. By the end, the dark drama did not fulfill all its promises, but it fully deserved its cult status: just look at Matthew McConaughey’s performance. In 2014, he apparently sold his soul to the devil.
- Band of Brothers and The Pacific (“Brothers in Arms” and “Pacific Ocean”, 12 and 11 hours) - a television version of “Saving Private Ryan” and its ideological continuation about the Pacific front. Projects by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks with phenomenal budgets for television. Visually, they are almost no different from a big war movie.
Also worthy of mention
- Top Of The Lake
- Bad Education
- Utopia ("Utopia")
- Peaky Blinders
- The Fall
- Broad City
- Transparent
- Olive Kitteridge ("What Does Olivia Know?")
- Pushing Daisies
- Portlandia
- Halt and Catch Fire
- Vikings
for her assistance in preparing the material The editors would like to thank Evgenia Markelova .
And this is just the beginning,
Vadim Elistratov,
TJ
#Article #what_to_watch_on_vacation #short_series #Rectify #Louie #The_Leftovers #How_To_Make_It_In_America #Gravity_Falls #Hannibal #Brooklyn_Nine_Nine #Fargo