Welcomes, farewells for 2011

This past year brought better shows than it lost, which augurs well for 2012. If networks are willing to take a chance on quirky, imaginative shows, maybe we’ll have more “Once Upon a Times” and fewer midseason Kutchers.

Yes, an honorable farewell to “Two and a Half Men,” because for one thing, Angus Jones is 18 now so they’re all technically men – although with the arrested development on such obnoxious display it’s more like “Three Juveniles and a Catty Producer.”

Show-runner Chuck Lorre’s claws have been out in the writing of this production ever since Charlie Sheen’s breakdown and it’s been truly ugly. More to the point, this laugh-track infused nonsense should’ve been shoved out an airlock years ago and the absurdity of limping along with the Ashton Kutcher replacement in a completely outlandish dynamic is just part of what no one seems to understand regarding the concept “going out on top.”

The following are my top favorite shows that opened in 2011, and a few significant departures.

Welcomes

The Nine Lives of Chloe King, ABC Family

I’ll open with one of the better teen productions I saw, in that it actually makes both lists. “The Nine Lives of Chloe King” only managed one season before getting canceled, but all the same it was one of the better new productions I saw in the somewhat over-explored realm of teen dramas.

Chloe King is a young woman who discovers on the eve of her 16th birthday that she has superpowers. She and her friends are drawn into a hidden world divided among a race of cat-people called the Mai at war with an ancient following called The Order, and Chloe is identified as The Chosen One, meant to bring balance to the factions.

Chloe falls in love with Brian, the son of a high-ranking member of The Order, so there’s that whole wonderful star-crossed lovers thing going on, but with an even deeper twist – she can never kiss him, or he will die.

The show had its problems – the mythology was never especially well defined, and the Mai seemed obsessed with a sort of internal power struggle quite apart from the assassins targeting them for death, which made it hard for the story to take shape especially well. And Chloe herself had people on all sides of her telling her what to do, while at the same time trying to reach out to her estranged father.

The writers crammed a lot of development into the first season, but it wasn’t especially focused, which hurt the show. And by the time they brought in Mere Smith (“Angel”) as an executive producer, too much of the damage was already done.

Welcome – and farewell – Chloe King.

Happy Endings, ABC

Also among my picks for best new shows this past year was “Happy Endings,” a show that opened with a runaway bride and continues with six friends in Chicago all dealing with life as single, coupled, married, dating, broken up and generally there for each other.

It’s a sitcom. A lot of the dialogue is stilted and artificial and situations that would resolve themselves sensibly under normal circumstances are strung out for laughs. But in that I’ve just described every situation comedy ever, this one was one of the better ones.

The Killing, AMC

The summer mystery series “The Killing” explored the heck out of an investigation into the murder of Rosie Larsen.

Set in Seattle, a missing teen turns up dead in the trunk of a car used by the campaign of a young, idealistic politician running against what he calls entrenched corruption.

But there are too many suspects – the girl’s estranged boyfriend, a too-involved teacher, the teens who assaulted her sexually the night of her murder and even potentially johns from her secret life as a hooker at a casino up the road.

Add a grieving family seeking to take justice into their own hands and a deeply intuitive homicide detective paired with a morally challenged former narcotics investigator who fabricates evidence and some reasonably well-paced – if somewhat lackadaisically-placed – clues and reveals and you’ve got the makings of a pretty good show.

Hell on Wheels, AMC

Easily one of the most stylish and solidly entertaining productions straight out the gate, Cullen Bohanan is a former plantation owner whose wife is assaulted and killed in a skirmish with northern soldiers and he vows vengeance, even to the point of tracking one her attackers to a church confessional and putting a bullet in his brain, unshriven.

He tracks others to the rolling town of Hell on Wheels, which follows the building of the transcontinental railroad across the Great Plains. He encounters an interesting collection of characters, all at crossroads in their lives, but while he hires on to help serve the interests of the railroad, he can’t leave behind his mission of revenge, even in the midst of his own grief, making him a deeply interesting antihero unto himself.

American Horror Story, FX

My top pick for best new show of 2011 is Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s “American Horror Story,” starring Dylan McDermott as Ben Harmon, the haunted patriarch of a broken home. His wife, Vivien, is in freefall after a miscarriage and discovering his affair with a student not significantly older than their depressed teenage daughter, Violet. They decide to get out of Boston to make a fresh start in Los Angeles and something about this older home is drawing them onward.

Well, the house is stuffed to the rafters with weird and twisted ghosts and all of their weird and twisted ghost stories. The house is a kind of ghost magnet and if you die there you can’t escape. Also, there is a pronounced sexual component to the haunting with possessed fetish gear left by former occupants and an aggressively seductive maid in the mix, threatening Ben’s resolve to reconnect with his wife and rebuild their marriage.

In terms of pacing and storytelling the show was perfect. Along with all the ghosts manifesting their own needs and desires, there are new attacks and assaults, and discoveries are made that shed new light on the weirdness they encounter in the house itself and their creepy neighbors.

The show is slated to return in the fall of 2012 and I for one am very much looking forward to it.

Farewells

The Chicago Code, FOX

One of the most uneven entries in 2011 was “The Chicago Code,” Shawn Ryan of “The Shield’s” highly politicized crime drama on FOX. The show celebrated law and order while being nominally opposed to corruption, particularly when a charismatic black Chicago politician like alderman Ronin Gibbons is at the center of the corruption, targeting accountants for murder by union thugs when they uncover his shenanigans, giving free televisions and video games to gang members he wants on his side. And the fiery new police superintendent Teresa Colvin and her trusty sidekick Det. Jared Wysocki are bent on targeting and rooting out that very corruption.

The show was packed to the gills with conservative dogwhistles, anti-union sentiments, even complaints about federal grants and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. And while the show was theoretically opposed to corruption, it didn’t mind the cops themselves cutting all kinds of corners to accomplish whatever they felt like doing.

This one was absolutely in the “good riddance” category.

Brothers & Sisters, ABC

Showing up in the “finally” category, ABC’s “Brothers and Sisters” overstayed its welcome by several squabbling dinner parties. Reeling in the wake of patriarch William Walker’s death, the Walkers encounter scandal after scandal as first William’s mistress and then her daughter – but daughter by another man so she can still date Justin, because that’s not awkward – are discovered. They get involved in the family’s life in complicated ways. There’s a power struggle among the siblings – Sarah, Kitty, Tommy, Kevin, Justin – as to who’s taking over the Ojai Foods family business, they squabble about expanding into vineyards and now the company is broke and now it’s wildly successful and every time the show begins stalling out a new long-lost sibling is discovered. Sally Field as matriarch Nora is always just at the end of her rope, but everything can always be resolved with a quiet conversation over a glass of wine between exactly the people who need to be having it, and everything’s all right again.

The whole show was playing out as this cloying soap opera even before they had a drunk-driving kerfuffle in the fourth season finale (who’s dead? who survived? whose contract isn’t being renewed?) and seriously ... it was about time.

The Event, NBC

Never making an especially compelling case for itself was “The Event,” a show about long-lived and well-preserved aliens who crash-landed on Earth during World War II. They were held in a secret military prison in Alaska. They can manipulate time and space, create portals for aircraft and buses with their minds, in fact, bringing their entire dead homeworld through a wormhole to threaten all life on Earth as well as Earth itself ...

... this show was basically ridiculous. It never made any sense at all, and it’s just as well that it ended. And if “The Event” was that bad, ask yourself how bad “V” must have gotten by the end not even to have made this list?

Pretty bad, that’s how bad. Peee-yeeewww!

Lights Out, FX

These last two, however, I felt represented some of the better storytelling we saw.

In the boxing-themed “Lights Out,” Holt McCallany as former heavyweight champ Patrick “Lights” Leary is training for a rematch against a rival. The training puts him in touch with some interesting characters, including his estranged mother, a fighter suffering pugilist’s dementia, a confrontational reporter, a charismatic if self-involved fight promoter, a trainer who got so involved training his last heavyweight fighter he attempted suicide, and then there was his opponent himself. Not to mention shenanigans with his brother-slash-agent, training with his own father, pep talks with his sister and his wife and daughters’ nuanced reactions to his pursuing the championship again.

But Leary’s focused on it to keep his family from losing everything. He takes on whatever jobs he can to keep his head above water but ultimately a prize fight would be his only option to ensure his family’s security. These were the kinds of competing forces swirling around the central figure in “Lights Out,” a show that went well beyond the ring and presented some solidly developed characters.

Rescue Me, FX

Finally, Denis Leary’s firefighter as anti-hero production “Rescue Me” wrapped up its final season with a brilliant story arc that allowed his character, New York City firefighter Tommy Gavin, to thoroughly examine his life and loss post-Sept. 11, post-drugs and alcohol, recommit and reconnect with his wife and family and renew his focus on the job, while at the same time putting a few things in stark perspective with the loss of his best friend, fellow firefighter Ken Shea.

The show highlighted the difficulties and challenges faced by the city’s firefighters and police officers in the wake of the Attacks – not least of which the health challenges faced by first responders – and dug deeply into the character development of a truly entertaining group of guys while presenting some of the grittiest guy-comedy on the box.

With Angela Roth as Tommy’s long-suffering wife and Callie Thorne as his long-standing mistress (and widow to his best friend and cousin Jimmy), there was some fire at the center of this very entertaining story, and I thought the series finale brought it to the best possible conclusion.

Well done, gentlemen. Very well done.