Week-to-Week: No TV show is perfect, which is why TV is great
Plus a new show—and contributor!—for Episodic Medium's summer coverage lineup
If you’re a person who discusses television on Twitter, then it’s likely this tweet came across your feed yesterday. By the end of the day, numerous TV shows were trending purely on account of their being cited by people responding to this prompt, as everyone loves an opportunity to stump for their favorite TV shows.
However, I rejected the premise of this tweet as soon as I saw it. And no, it wasn’t because I saw people citing shows that I don’t believe are perfect—despite the inherently objective nature of the word’s meaning, it’s of course rooted in subjectivity, which Nicki implicitly acknowledges by putting it in quotation marks in the tweet. My issue is the idea that perfection is a productive metric for evaluating television, particularly in the context of teaching young writers how to work creatively within this medium.
Put simply, I would argue that no television show is perfect, because television as a medium is designed with a strong connection to risk, for better or for worse. On an episode-by-episode basis, writers of television are given space to explore new ideas, introduce new characters, and try new storytelling approaches that may or may not end up working in the context of the show as a whole. Truly great shows often have terrible episodes, or characters that don’t work out, or storylines that fizzle out, because television is designed in a way to give writers space to bounce back from those episodes—Lost’s “Exposé” is a perfect example of Lindelof and Cuse realizing that introducing new random castaways was a bad idea, and spinning it off into a great episode of television that only exists because of an acknowledgment of their own mistake.
Of course, some missteps come out of being forced to avoid risk. Writers are often led down unproductive paths by “network notes” in a commercial context where distributors—and in the case of ad-supported contexts the companies paying to shill their products—control their fate, meaning that television shows are forced into corners in order to survive. Friday Night Lights’ second season is an absolute mess, network noted to death in order to generate more thrilling storylines to the point that Landry outright murders a man. It’s a complete violation of what the show was, but television is still designed in a way to course correct: when Season 3 debuted on DirecTV, the second season was effectively erased, because the flow from episode-to-episode and season-to-season can always be adjusted.
Now, the fact that I’ve used two mid-2000s broadcast dramas as my example here is not a coincidence, and I must acknowledge that the notion of a show being “perfect” shifts when considering limited series or single-season runs where there isn’t the same push-and-pull of long-form episodic storytelling. It’s also true that in an era of streaming, shows on platforms like Netflix or Apple TV+ are less subject to the same kind of network notes that curtailed creativity in a network context, even if Netflix’s recent activity has punctured the notion that they offered an environment free of the pressures facing ad-supported television. Plus, with episode runs getting shorter and shorter, we see fewer examples of shows stretching their premise to make 22 episodes a year, resulting in duds like Buffy’s “Beer Bad” or Battlestar Galactica’s “Black Market.” As such, there’s now a greater chance that a television show will be produced in a way that seemingly separates it from all the excuses for bad storylines.
Now, I’m being pedantic—what, moi?—by suggesting that a single bad episode makes a show less than perfect, but it’s why I think the word is simply unproductive in this context. The best thing about Television Without Pity’s weekly response model to television extending to formal television criticism over the course of the 2000s was how it acknowledged the fluctuation of critical reactions to a given series. We saw in real time as critics grappled with the risks taken by a show like Lost or Friday Night Lights, and within their analysis came nuanced opinions that were harder to capture in trying to evaluate an entire season (often based on only a few episodes). For All Mankind was the show I ranked first when I submitted my ballot for The A.V. Club’s “Best of TV” in 2021, but if I’d been writing about it weekly—as I am this season here at Episodic Medium—I would have complained endlessly about an adultery subplot that never worked. By the end of the season, that didn’t stop the show from reaching its transcendent heights, but that’s exactly why expecting or aspiring to perfection seems at odds with the nature of how TV is made and how we experience it as viewers.
I won’t pretend that my frustration with the notion of “perfection” doesn’t come from over a decade of assigning grades to episodes of TV and being attacked by people who claimed that having high standards for a show somehow precludes me from enjoying it, or thinking it’s great. The thing about episodic criticism is that it does often lean into exploring what’s not working as opposed to what is, because the latter is often an accepted strength of a given show. Writing about the latter seasons of The Office—which are far from perfect—was in my mind most useful as a catalog of the struggles the show had to transition out of the Michael Scott era, since we had already spent years acknowledging the basic pleasures of the show. But there were some commenters—and writers—who just presumed I hated the show, that couldn’t square exploring its faults with thinking it was great. And while there were others who were mad I wasn’t giving every episode an F, it was those who seemed to believe the show was above criticism—that it was “perfect”—that seemed the most restrictive to the very process of critical analysis.
Hence my semantic rejection of the premise of this tweet. No TV show is perfect. Most TV shows that achieve something approximating perfection—whether in an episode, or an ending, or a moment—do so based on mistakes made earlier in their run, learning and growing as a show progresses because that’s what the medium is designed to do. To go into writing a television series expecting it to be perfect is both naive and, I would argue, unproductive—some of the best TV is made because of risk-taking that might not have happened if they were worried about “perfection.” And even if something feels perfect in our minds as viewers, the most productive way to study it is to dig deep into how it achieves this, which inevitably will reveal the small imperfections that are part of how it works as well as it does, as opposed to separate from them.
This is why I’m such a strong proponent of episodic criticism, and why I’m working to build a space for it here at Episodic Medium. And this is why I’m thrilled to say that in addition to the return of Donna Bowman’s reviews of Better Call Saul’s final season, next week will also bring a new addition to our coverage lineup as fellow A.V. Club alum Noel Murray will be covering the fourth season of FX’s What We Do In The Shadows starting on Tuesday July 12. Noel has already been a tremendous supporter of our mission across his social channels (and as a subscriber), but I knew he had to become an official part of the team eventually, and I’m thrilled to have him onboard starting next week to explore the greatness and imperfections of one of television’s most critically-acclaimed comedies that I swear I’ll probably catch up on one day.
Which means this is the schedule for the month ahead:
Episodic Observations
As an American Vandal evangelist, I was excited to dig into the creators’ mockumentary followup Players, which I watched two episodes of last night using my Paramount+ trial. It doesn’t have the same meta-elements that made Vandal so compelling, but it’s a well-realized take on e-sports, even if I’m a bit distracted by casting an actor who appeared in Vandal in a minor role because that’s just the person that I am. Curious to dig into it more this week.
I also finished the second season of The Flight Attendant and…woof. The show had some momentum early on, but the ending was really deflating, and just didn’t seem like it worked on any level. I should have presumed this based on the fact I completely stalled out at the end of the penultimate episode and didn’t come back for weeks, but I was shocked by how disinterested I was.
I convinced someone to watch The Other Two, and part of the trade is that I now need to watch at least the pilot of The Expanse, which I’m open to but also don’t really have time to binge anytime soon. So feel free to update me on what to expect on that front.
I also struggled with the perfect TV show prompt because I find my favorite shows are never the shows I think of as perfect. Like I really enjoyed Bones which had plenty of bad episodes but was pure pleasure to watch. Whereas I don’t see myself revisiting the shows most view as great. Once is enough viewing Breaking Bad, for example. Friday Night Lights is a great example as a favorite show with an unfortunate second season. I think your point on the messiness of TV being a feature, not a bug, is apt.
Very much looking forward to the recaps of What We Do in the Shadows! I also am slowly catching up on other shows being recapped here. That brings me to a question: is there any way to create an index of all the shows receiving reviews on this Substack? I started a show and couldn’t remember if it was being reviewed here, and I just sort of had to go through every post title. Which as time goes by, is going to become a more difficult task.
As a giant fan of the Expanse books I loved the TV show, but the 1st season is my least favorite. It’s an extremely faithful adaptation with the book authors on staff as producers and script writers, but where the first book is a thrill-ride adventure they decided to slow it down and add a bunch of world building and characters who only appeared in later books. It pays off later in the show, but it also pushes the book 1 climax halfway into season 2 (they later get back to 1 book per season but it’s a bit squishy early on).
The pilot at least moves along at a decent clip and introduces the people and the concepts fairly well, it’s not one of those “wait until episode x” shows. You’ll know at the end if you want to keep going. I do absolutely love For All Mankind but I also have to tell everyone I’ve forced to watch it to keep going through episode 3 before stopping 😂