September was a rough month. These 5 TV shows got me through it.

Oh how irony always comes back to bite us. Here is something I tweeted on the morning of September 1:

The thing they don't tell you when you're a kid is that once you're an adult, September is the best month.

— Brendan Noel (@BrendanDNoel) September 1, 2016

Naturally, September 2016 turned out to be a pretty astoundingly shitty month for me. The short version is that I watched my job completely burn to ashes in the span of about three weeks, which is remarkable considering I spent ten months there thinking it was a pretty great place to work - until suddenly it wasn't. It was uncomfortable to work there knowing I was pretty close to escaping, and then unbearably uncomfortable after I gave my notice.

To be honest, if I hadn't had the distraction of fall TV premiere week and all of the rest of September's new TV offerings, I'm not exactly sure what I would have done with myself. Curled into the fetal position and cried maybe? Anyway, here are five TV shows that got me through a pretty brutal 30 day stretch.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ended a year ago today. It's time we all moved on.

      Jon Stewart back behind a desk on The Late Show with Stephen
      Colbert on Thursday, July 21, 2016.
      Photo Credit: CBS

It was a year ago tonight, on August 6, 2015, that Comedy Central aired the final episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I watched the broadcast from a Winnipeg hotel room feeling a profound sense of sadness and loss. It's now exactly one year later, and to be brutally honest, I kind of hope Jon Stewart never appears on television ever again.

My hypothetical 2016 Emmy ballot

In a stunning display of competency, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences actually managed to correct a long-standing error last year by finally awarding Jon Hamm with the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for his work on Mad Men. Dare I allow myself to believe they're capable of recognizing more overshadowed greatness this year and nominate some real dark horses instead of giving the same people a fifth or sixth trophy? Nonetheless, today I get to have my say in what shows, performances, scripts, and what have you should be held up as television's best. The correct list of nominees, with some picks that no doubt were entirely ignored during the last two weeks of voting, after the jump. (Look, I love ya Mark McKinney, but there's just no way.)

Mediocre "Letterkenny" headlines a frustrating experience with Crave TV

The cast of the new Crave TV comedy "Letterkenny".
Photo Credit: Bell Media

(A caveat: I feel the need to preface this anytime I write about a Canadian series, particularly one about which I have a negative opinion : I do not begrudge any Canadian television show for being made; in fact its existence in at least one aspect makes me happy. More Canadian television needs to be produced outside of the CBC. I don't care right now if the programming is not top notch. I'm just happy someone is putting in the time, money, and resources to make it exist at all. More please, and stat.)

It was around last Christmas when my brother asked me something to the effect of, "so I guess Shomi is the new Rogers thing now?" I really had no idea what he was talking about - somehow I had missed being inundated with television commercials for Rogers and Shaw's joint streaming video venture that had launched a month prior. It didn't help that my mother seemed convinced that Shomi was actually a rebrand of the Rogers On Demand service (it isn't, though Rogers sure did a good job of burying their VOD platform in service of Shomi).

Before long though, commercials for Shomi and it's competitor, the Bell-owned Crave TV, popped up everywhere and it became all too easy for me to compare and contrast the services even without actually subscribing to them. Crave offered a deeper program catalogue even before signing deals for the HBO and Showtime libraries, for less than half the cost of Shomi, whose commercials seemed to always feature the same five popular series in every single commercial (i.e., the only ones they had streaming rights to). Neither service seemed "necessary," even as I recognized that I was basically spouting the Canadian version of, "but I already have Netflix, why do I need to subscribe to Amazon?". But they seemed harmless, and if the existing daily schedules of Bell's network and cable channels was deemed insufficient as an on-demand "Big Bang Theory" delivery system, Canadians were welcome to pay $4 a month for their hit.

My hypothetical 2015 Emmy ballot

If you recall last August, I was furious - legitimately furious - with the results of the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards, in which there were almost no original or inspired winners, and more statues were thrown at the overrated likes of Jim Parsons and Ty Burrell. I felt so hurt and betrayed I didn't even bother to dignify the telecast with any kind of writeup or even a review of my predictions afterward (it actually was slightly higher than normal, simply because of the repetitive voting patterns).

And yet here I am again, with the 2015 Emmy ballots released online, pretending the Emmys are worth giving a damn about. But the reason I'm so excited about this post is because this is my chance each year to list my dream Emmy nominations and winners - the names that would be read out on the morning of Thursday, July 16 in a just world where enough Emmy voters were aware that "The Americans" is a weekly program created for television and broadcast over the airwaves for consumption by a mass viewership. I swear, it is. It's on every Wednesday night. On the television. This is an actual television program, hand to God. I'm not just making it up.

So until the actual garbage nominations are released, allow me to put my fingers in my ears and say "la-la-la I can't hear you, here is the correct television". Join me after the break, won't you?

Year End 2014: Started from the bottom now we're here

The last two years in which I've written a TV top ten list (i.e., the only times I've ever done it), I ended the post with a question, or even a dare. The first one was "Whattaya got, 2013?" and holy shit, 2013 responded with perhaps the best year of television drama the small screen has ever seen. And then last year, I closed my top ten post with the suggestion, "Top that, 2014. I dare you." And dare I say that...2014 might have done just that. It's easier than ever to find quality shows with so many new outlets for programming, and that only makes it more difficult to parse down my ten to twenty favourite TV shows of the entire calendar year. But I've carefully selected the ten shows I feel represent the best in television for 2014. And those shows will appear to you by clicking the "read more" button below!

Year End 2014: Close, but no cigar

The annual best of the year series continues with a look at my "second ten" for the year in television. Much like with last year's second ten, almost all of these shows would be top ten worthy in a lesser year of quality programming, but given how many outlets we now get "small screen content" from, it seems unlikely we'll ever get another slow year. But hey, no complaining from me! (Just ignore any time I tweet about how hard it is to keep up with everything currently airing, like the two or three episodes of "Scandal" and "How to Get Away with Murder" currently sitting on my DVR which will be lucky to be watched even before they both return at the end of January).

To the list!

Year End 2014: My favourite TV episodes of the year

Do not adjust your picture, this is indeed a new entry over here on the ol' Blogspot! I continue a grand holiday tradition here at the blog (shut up, three years can be long enough for tradition) by kicking off  my year end series for 2014 with a list of my favourite episodes of television from this calendar year.

The list is extensive but still probably by no means definitive (I definitely slacked on keeping good tabs on it in the fall), but is still a reflection of some of the small's screen specific highlights over the last twelve months.


The full list after the break!

2014 Emmy nominations post-mortem: Ugh, Emmys, go wait in the car until we're done TV-ing

     Mindy Kaling of "The Mindy Project" and Carson Daly of
     "The Voice" announce the nominations for The 66th
     Primetime Emmy Awards in North Hollywood on Thursday
     (July 10) morning.

The most wonderful time of the year in television is that special Thursday morning in July when reporters and critics on the TV beat (at least the ones located on the west coast, where most television is produced) are awoken at 5 o'clock in the morning to hear two semi-famous television people read off most of the major nominations for the Primetime Emmy Awards. Some of these nominations are downright infuriating. Some of them are completely unexpected and pleasant delights. And the rest are somewhere in between, the recognition you'd expect to see but aren't jumping up and down about (partly because you're so tired).

But after about an hour, you start to realize that those three categories don't really exist simultaneously - rather, they are the sort of "Five Stages of Emmy Grief" that one goes through when they are forced to process a prestigious voting body showering recognition on works of art they feel passionate about on a very limited amount of sleep. On Thursday I found myself turning into Comic Book Guy from "The Simpsons" and tweeting things like "Worst. Nominations. Ever." and "Really Emmys? Really," but with time to really take it all in I've realized that the nominations this year aren't really any worse than other years, nor should I continue to react with such haste in future years. The Emmys are at best a compromise, often paying dues to the quality programs that are simultaneously popular while tragically ignoring the ones that are not. Such is life. The process for nominating and organizing categories is so very, very broken, but this is not the place to suggest alternatives, nor am I the person to suggest them. What I am the person for is being annoyed and complaining or using too many exclamation points when I like things. Oh, and of course, what I hope is at least a vaguely knowledgable sense of the history, voting patterns, and other weird tics of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

So if you're down with that, let's go category by category for opinions, predictions, and other crap. And if you missed my hypothetical ballot from Wednesday, click here.

My hypothetical 2014 Emmy ballot

It's time for me to once again fill out a hypothetical Emmy ballot for the 2013-14 TV season! I always have fun doing these, but they can also create such a challenge in years where there's just so much good television (and these last two TV seasons have in no way been lacking for quality). So let's see where my preferences lie this year!

Of course, you'll notice that when the actual Emmy nominations are announced tomorrow, they will look nothing like the nominations I've listed below. That's because the Emmys are BAD and WRONG, but such is life. Also, something odd happened this year in terms of categorization - two of my favourite shows, Netflix's "Orange is the New Black" and Showtime's "Shameless," have submitted themselves in the comedy categories after seasons in which both were unequivocally dramas. Initially I worried this would affect how many nominations I would give each, but I think instead I'm just going to ask you to disregard the "comedy" and "drama" split below entirely. After all, it is and always has been (for example) "Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series," not "Funniest Supporting Actor".

Recognition ho!

Upfronts 2014: BREAKING: Shows renewed, others canceled; some move time slots

     The cast of "The Good Wife" at CBS's upfront presentation
     on Wednesday, May 14, 2014. I've already forgotten what
     exactly Alan Cumming sang and danced to, but no doubt it
     was amusing.

Time for my annual long-winded, overly complicated, and of course very late blog post in which I outline the 2014 upfront presentations, in which all the major television networks (and The CW) present their new fall schedules in front of advertisers in New York City. Below, I'll be breaking down the new network schedules, occasionally including unfair gut reactions to non-representative cutdowns of not-for-air pilots or hypothesizing as to the success or failure of a lineup. And as usual, wherever possible, I'll be hyperlinking to a trailer for new shows whenever they are listed (and when their YouTube trailers are not geofiltered).

Let's do this.

Hey, where'd you go?

Of my four or five dedicated readers, I'm guessing at least one of them has been wondering, "hey, didn't this blog used to be updated regularly or something?" The answer to that questions is: yes, kinda.

And it still will be! But now, probably even less often. I'll still likely be posting Emmy predictions/analysis or whatever here, and my year end lists, and anything else I deem should be filed under "old man yells at cloud" rather than actually published somewhere where people could accidentally see it. But I'm also focusing on some writing ventures elsewhere at the moment. For the past six weeks, I've been covering a really fun reality competition show on TBS called "King of the Nerds" for Rob Has a Website. Here are the links to the blogs I've written:

- Episode 3: "King of the Nerds": 5 Reasons Why Zack Belongs in the Reality Villain Hall of Fame
- Episode 4: The 5 Poison Numbers of "King of the Nerds"
- Episode 5: A Debatably Low-Key Week on "King of the Nerds"
- Episode 6: Titanic Missteps in the "King of the Nerds" Penalty Box
- Episode 7: Pay Your Respects at the "King of the Nerds" Memorial Service
- Episode 8: "King of the Nerds" Sprints to the Finish - And Faceplants (Again)

And in the meantime, I'll be blogging periodically about TV over at the new Post Show Recaps. Come check us out!

A(nother) rant against Global, and my frustration with the current landscape of Canadian television

     The stars arrive Sunday (January 19) night for "Global
     Presents The 20th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards
     Live Asterisk".

If you happened to have stumbled across these parts this time last year, you might remember me laying in to Global TV, truly a perfect shining example of Canadian television, for absolutely shitting the bed with regards to their telecast of the 19th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. For viewers like myself watching on the east coast, the first 40 minutes of the broadcast (or roughly one third of the show) were spent watching a rerun of an ancient home renovation show called "From the Ground Up with Debbie Travis" while Global flashed a crawl on the screen telling us the SAG Awards would start soon*

(*Just as soon as the network frantically tries to figure out why they were not getting a signal of the show into the country).

Well this year, in a horrifying feat of spectacular trainwreckery, Global managed to outdo themselves.   Now credit where credit is due, they did manage to air the entire show this year (or so I am led to believe), which might make those two hours the most successful broadcast in the network's history. But this year they decided to air the show on a delay of 24 hours - the awards were presented, and aired on American cable channels TBS and TNT, last Saturday (January 18) night, while Global opted to air the telecast on Sunday (January 19) night.

Leaving aside the fact that, as someone pointed out to me on Twitter, E! carried a live red carpet pre-show on the Saturday night anyway (someone high up in an office at a Canadian broadcaster really did just decide at some point that we're all stupid and everyone else has run with that idea for years if not decades), the decision to delay the show by a day is really baffling to me. The idea was tossed around that Global didn't want to compete with CBC's broadcast of "Hockey Night in Canada," but to me that's a much preferable form of ratings competition than CTV's Sunday night broadcast of the NFC championship game. Global said in a statement that they were delaying the SAG Awards to air them on a night that was more convenient for their audience - which either means they felt it was more convenient to ensure their audience they would see the entire show this year (not a good reason in any way to delay the telecast), or decided that because we as idiots are used to seeing such an event on a Sunday night (or that there are more of us around to mindlessly gawk at them), we won't mind that the winners will have been known for 22 hours beforehand.

Global's continued butchering of the SAG Awards is just one symptom of a larger problem for Canadian TV nerds like myself, and it's this: yes, we get all (or at least most) of the programming we know and love - but we have no way of watching it in a non-bastardized form.

The thrilling conclusion to "My 25 Favourite Episodes of TV"

Look, regardless of how rough some of these posts have been (and some of them are rough), I'm not gonna pretend I'm not at least happy with myself that this project I started six months ago has actually reached its completion. It took longer than expected, as evidenced by this post's publication on New Year's Eve, but it's finished. 30,000+ words on 25 shows across all six major networks, a few more cable channels, and even spanning two continents. And at least in terms of the show I picked for this final entry, I think I've saved the best for last.

After the break: We will all learn the reason for compensation.

Year End 2013: Cream of the crop in a big harvest

Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

That's my reaction to the year in television. There were so many good new and returning shows that cutting down my list of favourites into hard lists of 10 and 20 was so much more difficult than I could have imagined. I mean, it's one thing for there to be just so much great stuff on. It's completely another to consider that I have a show in my top 10 that isn't in English. If you had told me that would be the case on January 1, I never would have believed you in a million years. But I guess that's a good sign that I'm expanding my horizons to at least try and keep track of it all.

I closed my top 10 of 2012 post by asking "Whattaya got, 2013?" Well here's what they got. And it's incredible. My top ten shows of the year after the break.

Year End 2013: A great year for TV still has some black marks

Year end caveat: I watch TV. Some shows I like. Some shows I don't. You might disagree. That's okay. Some good shows I don't watch or haven't caught up on. They won't be on my top 20 list. Some shows are too bad for me to even bother with. They won't be on my worst of list. Some shows I love ("30 Rock") didn't air long enough in the calendar year for me seriously consider giving them a spot in a very, very good year for television. I hope I'm not offending you. We cool? Cool.

I think last year I got a little carried away with my "worst of" list, so this year I've made a conscious effort to cut down what I think were the 10 worst/most disappointing shows I watched (even if only briefly, but left a lasting bad impression). The list is unranked, presented only in alphabetical order, because even someone as cynical as I feels no need to spend any more time determining which of these shows is worse than any others.

Snark after the break...

Year End 2013: What just missed the cut, or, the 10 best shows of basically any other year

Year end caveat: I watch TV. Some shows I like. Some shows I don't. You might disagree. That's okay. Some good shows I don't watch or haven't caught up on. They won't be on my top 20 list. Some shows are too bad for me to even bother with. They won't be on my worst of list. Some shows I love ("30 Rock") didn't air long enough in the calendar year for me seriously consider giving them a spot in a very, very good year for television. I hope I'm not offending you. We cool? Cool.

I feel better knowing that actual paid critics had just as tough a time cutting down top 10 and 20 lists as I did this year, since it leads me to believe a) I didn't miss very much, and b) this was such a phenomenal year for the small screen that all the shows in today's "second ten" list would absolutely be top 10 shows in a year that lacked for more quality shows. Good thing the outstanding freshman class of 2013 was properly recognized by yesterday's Screen Actors Guild Awards nominations, right guys?

My 20 through 11 positions for 2013 after the break. For comparison's sake, here's my second ten of 2012.

Year End 2013: My favourite episodes of the year

Year end caveat: I watch TV. Some shows I like. Some shows I don't. You might disagree. That's okay. Some good shows I don't watch or haven't caught up on. They won't be on my top 20 list. Some shows are too bad for me to even bother with. They won't be on my worst of list. Some shows I love ("30 Rock") didn't air long enough in the calendar year for me seriously consider giving them a spot in a very, very good year for television. I hope I'm not offending you. We cool? Cool.

Well I was all ready to enjoy a nice, relaxing February when I looked at my calendar and saw it was December. Good lord, I feel like I just did year end lists, and now it's time for them again.

Last year, I broke down my year end stuff into four categories over four weeks: favourite episodes on December 10, my second ten shows that didn't make the cut for my top 10 list on December 17, my list of worst shows of the year on Christmas Eve, and finally my top 10 on the final day of 2012. This year, I'm going to be doing the same but likely without sticking to those dates. My second ten list is already finished and I will probably post that tomorrow rather than dragging it out a week for no reason.

So first up, here are my favourite TV episodes of 2013!

"The Walking Dead" tosses aside its crutches, but it's still not ready to bear weight

     If someone could please cast David Morrissey in something
     good again to wash out the taste of The Governor, that'd be
     great. Paul Abbott, are you still sure you don't want to do
     another season of "State of Play"?

For a long time, I've been trying to figure out how exactly the writers of "The Walking Dead" realize that title is a metaphor for the characters who inhabit its world. Aside from its literal reference to the zombies, you get the sense showrunner Scott Gimple and the team he oversees writing the biggest, baddest show on mighty, prestigious AMC think it's enough to ride the idea that the show's main characters might as well be walking corpses as well. In reality, I think a lot of people (myself included) have realized the title is a lot more meta than they realize, considering how much of tonight's mid-season finale "Too Far Gone" I spent trying to remember anyone - and I mean, literally just one person - on this show I care about in any way.

"The Walking Dead" was a show I really, really enjoyed in its first season, even if I was able to recognize it was a show I enjoyed only as a guilty pleasure. These were just some people trying to stave off the weekly zombie attack. Did I know their names? Nope, but that was largely because no one really ever said them. In life after zombies, your name didn't matter, and I was on board for that. Excluding the legitimately good pilot episode, "The Walking Dead" as it was back then never felt to me like a show that wanted to be more than people running around shooting and stabbing the undead. It was a show largely void of any ambitions and while in theory that made it an outlier on what was at the time a quality-driven AMC, it never really surprised me that the show was easily their most popular.

Sometimes I think more shows should settle. And even though that makes me feel weird, I'm gonna continue to say it. For reasons I can't really explain, I watched the entire first season of the Cinemax drama "Banshee" last spring, and the faster I realized it was only gonna be a show about a guy who solves his problems through punching, the more I was able to enjoy it. "Banshee" wasn't trying to be one of the best shows on TV. I don't think it was even trying to be the best show on Cinemax, the similarly punch-heavy "Strike Back". Similarly, there are parts of "Boardwalk Empire" I really enjoy, but too much of the show felt like clutter I didn't really care about for me to stick with it into the second season. And one of the things I read about that show that really stuck with me was the idea that "Boardwalk," and its creator Terence Winter, wouldn't be satisfied until it was the best show on television.

All of which is to say I find it kind of confusing that after a first season whose ratings more than doubled that of AMC's second most watched series "Mad Men," "The Walking Dead" became a lot more ambitious without realizing that this new kind of audience the channel had acquired outside of their boutique shows didn't really care about that. And through now three and a half seasons, unable to develop a group of characters that never felt designed to develop, it has only become laughable that Gimple and co. expect me to care about anyone on this show simply because the events of tonight's episode happened to them. Even the ones we've known the longest, like Rick and Corral. Just as blood and explosions don't automatically equal drama, time spent with a person doesn't automatically equal love and appreciation.

Take good ol' Brian "Don't Call Me The Governor" whatshisface, finally extinguished at least eight episodes too late, and after wasting the last three of them for a deceptive "redemption arc" that now certainly doesn't mean anything going forward. For reasons unknown, he survived last season's abysmal finale, the conclusion to a 16-episode story that was set up very well in the fall 2012 episodes, stumbled along in its spring 2013 episodes, then concluded much like the alternate ending to "Casablanca" shown on "The Simpsons". The question mark leaves the door open for a sequel, and as we've all been discussing recently regarding the idea of a sequel to "It's a Wonderful Life," things will always be better if they just keep going.

Then there's baby Judith, seemingly killed tonight as everyone raced to escape the prison. We saw her bloody, empty car seat, and so did Rick and Corral, breaking down at the continued dwindling of their already tragically decimated family. But I suppose we didn't see the body, and it's possible she's still alive somewhere. And my God, that makes me want to put my hand through the TV. Sure, when it comes time to quickly escape the prison, maybe carrying the baby in the heavy car seat is impractical, though certainly not more impractical than taking the time to remove her from it at all. And if it turns out Beth or whoever did do that for no good reason just so this show could manipulate us into feeling sad about a dead baby, seriously, fuck these people (if I needed any confirmation that this show is absolutely not for me and my quitting on it was long overdue, it's that internet commenters are less concerned with the disgusting consequences of Judith possibly being alive than they are with being right about predicting that she's alive, or at the very least, claiming they were not duped by the show if it does happen).

And yet of all the terrible, stupid things that happened on tonight's mid-season finale (which included the little girls abandoning the baby in the first place just because Carol once told them shooting guns at stuff is important, and the absolutely horrible performance from Andrew Lincoln overemphasizing every beat of what could have been a non-terrible, understated monologue about coexistence), perhaps the thing that infuriated me the most was that I walked away from tonight's episode believing that it was Maggie who had delivered the final blow to the Governor. Why is that? Well for one, the overwhelming nihilism of the show wouldn't give me any reason to believe that Maggie hasn't reached a point where she would kill the man who beheaded her father. But it was also because the actress they cast to play Lilly, the woman who became the Governor's love interest in the last two episodes, looks so much like Lauren Cohan and apparently no one noticed or cared about this at all. It's one thing to try to get me to care about people and fail. It's totally another to spend episode after episode desperately trying, then to suddenly stop trying to distinguish your boring characters in any way and just ride an attitude of "zombies, fuck it".

In watching "Too Far Gone," I accepted fairly quickly that whatever was coming wouldn't satisfy me. Either the prison was going to win or the Governor was, and neither one of those outcomes was going to knock the show out of inertia like it desperately needs. Both crutches were ultimately eliminated, but what remains problematic is that "The Walking Dead" still hasn't proven itself a series that's ready to bear weight on its broken legs. For a show with this many characters, this much action, and so much "happening," "The Walking Dead" might be TV's least interesting show right now.

The penultimate edition of "My 25 Favourite Episodes of TV"

Two left to go and I've run out of preamble. To the writeup!

After the break: A long awaited sequel is finally unearthed!