The month of May, with sweeps and upfront presentations, marks the end of the traditional television season. As the networks look forward to the fall 2011 season, Warming Glow looks back on the best episodes of the 2010 season. On the pages that follow, editor Matt Ufford and frequent WG contributors Josh Kurp and Danger Guerrero pick their ten favorite TV episodes — plus a few honorable mentions — that aired between September 1st, 2010 and now (excluding shows with spring premieres).
Before you praise their impeccable taste (or lambaste their horrible decisions) in the comments, we ask that you pay attention to the restraints: critically adored shows like “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones” fall outside the parameters here.
HONORABLE MENTION: “Community” — “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” (December 9)
MATT: “Community” gets a lot of attention for its “event” episodes, but they’re not just stunts that showrunner Dan Harmon pulls to garner attention — they always advance ongoing story lines or delve into deeper characterization of Greendale’s students. “Abed’s Christmas” was a ballsy gamble that tapped into the sentiment of Rankin Christmas specials like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” while taking a deeper look into what makes Abed (the incredible Danny Pudi) rely on pop culture to view the world. The episode’s final act walked a difficult tightrope: a climactic song typical of stop-motion specials that stayed within the framework of the characters’ inclinations. Some critics felt that the premise was stretched too thin, but those complaints felt like hifalutin nit-picking meant to punish inventive television.
HONORABLE MENTION: “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” — “Charlie Kelly: King of the Rats” (November 18)
JOSH: “It’s Always Sunny” had an unspectacular sixth season—too often it felt like the show was trying to top itself, rather than telling an original plot. But “King of the Rats” focused on the show’s best character, Charlie, and its funniest joke, Charlie’s life. After having killed at least 200 rats, Charlie is tired, both physically and mentally, so the rest of the gang comes up with a solution to make him feel better: celebrate his birthday, which involves Cutty from “The Wire” and gifts from Charlie’s dream journal, including a denim chicken, a worm hat, and a bird with teeth. “King of the Rats” is “It’s Always Sunny” at its weirdest and finest.
HONORABLE MENTION: “Justified” — “Cottonmouth” (March 9)
MATT: The most-lauded episode of “Justified’s” brilliant second season was “Brother’s Keeper” (we’ll get to that), but my favorite episode of the season was “Cottonmouth,” in which Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins) finally gives up on living an honest life by pulling off a combination robbery/double-cross that displays his ingenuity for criminal activity. Of course, I’m biased: I really just like explosions, tasers to the balls, and mothers shattering their sons’ hands with ballpeen hammers.
HONORABLE MENTION: “Conan” — “Episode 1” (November 8)
DANGER: It’s not that Conan’s debut on TBS was my favorite episode he’s ever done ever (not that I’d even know how to pick a single), but it was event television at a time when a frillion channels and high-speed Internet make that rare. I can’t remember being that excited for a TV show maybe ever, and seeing Conan walk through the curtain after months off the air was 12 kinds of awesome.
HONORABLE MENTION: “Community” — “Mixology Certification” (December 2)
DANGER: As a pop culture dork, I obviously love the meta, reference-heavy nature of “Community”. But what I love most is that the show is so nimble and malleable that it can give you a weird “ZOMG everyone’s a zombie!” episode one week, then turn around and out-genuine most others shows on television the next. This episode — centered around Troy’s 21st birthday — was funny, sad, and showed real emotional investment in the characters, more so than a lot of dramas.
#10. “Friday Night Lights” — “Always” (February 9)
JOSH: “The Wire” ended with Baltimore just as f*cked as it’s ever been; “Lost” concluded with a cheap and largely-hated finale; and “The Sopranos” ended with Tony Soprano…well, you know. It’s been awhile since a GREAT drama that aired during the current Golden Age of Television had a finale as loved and, let’s face it, as pleasant as the final episode of “Friday Night Lights,” which aired on DirecTV’s Channel 101. The characters on the show had gone through years of hard luck together, particularly Tim Riggins, and they deserved a break. They all finally found one (particularly the “can’t lose” state champion East Dillon Lions), and though I’ll admit my eyes weren’t exactly clear during the end-of-the-episode montage, my heart was full.
#9. “Boardwalk Empire” — “Boardwalk Empire” (September 19)
DANGER: Yes, there were probably other episodes of the show that were better written, or better acted, or advanced the overarching theme of the season in a better way, but none of them could compete with the sheer scale of the pilot. In fairness, neither could anything else on television last year. HBO invested a reported $20 million into the first episode and tapped Martin Scorsese to direct it, and all of that ended up on the screen. It was probably the most cinematic hour of television I can remember seeing. Although, given the crazy amount of resources HBO pumped into it, it would have been a huge disappointment if it hadn’t been.
#8. “Archer” — “Placebo Effect” (March 24)
MATT: From a critical standpoint, “Stage Two” (the episode that precedes “Placebo Effect”) may be a better episode (and arguably the show’s best): it hilariously tackles the serious issue of cancer while gleefully turning decades-old tropes of “very special episodes” on their heads. But I prefer “Placebo Effect,” in which Sterling Archer learns that the Irish mafia has swapped out his cancer drugs with sugar pills and Zima:
Krieger: You didn’t think it was weird your chemo drugs were chewable?
Archer: No! Little kids get cancer.
Krieger (suddenly sad): Awww, they do…
Archer then goes on a vengeful chemo rampage that includes the single funniest TV scene this year — a “Family Feud”-inspired interrogation — that ultimately ends in an extended homage to “Magnum P.I.” Just a terrific, hilarious episode.
#7. “Terriers” — “Fustercluck” (September 29)
DANGER: I struggled with choosing a “Terriers” episode for two reasons: 1) It made me super-sad to look through and remember there wouldn’t be a second season of the critically acclaimed, but little watched show, and: 2) So many of them were so good. I settled on the season’s fourth episode, “Fustercluck,” because I distinctly remember it as being the first episode where I thought, “Holy sh*t, this is a good show” afterward. It was when the show started moving away from being just a darkly funny, crime-of-the-week procedural, towards one where characters really started facing the consequences of the decisions they made. It continued this trajectory all the way through to the excellent finale. I still want to know what Hank and Britt decided at that traffic light. So, yeah, if anyone needs me, I’ll be whistling the “Terriers” theme all day and getting sad all over again. This list sucks.
#6. “Parks and Recreation” — “Flu Season” (January 27)
DANGER: The third season of “Parks and Recreation” has established some of the best Characters (with a capital C) on television. What can be really hard in a show with that many big, shiny, moving parts is incorporating them all into one episode without pissing all over the story. “Parks & Rec” does this as well as any show since the heyday of “The Simpsons.” “The Flu” gives us Ron and Andy forming the yinniest-yangiest bond imaginable, powerhouse Leslie continuing trying to hold the world on her shoulders despite being ill, and Rob Lowe’s Chris, whose body is “like a microchip,” catching the flu and delivering one of my favorite lines of the 2010-2011 TV season (“Stop. Pooping.”). It does all this while continuing to lay the groundwork for the climactic Harvest Festival. The show has a high degree of difficulty, and this episode definitely stuck the landing…after which it was presumably carried to the medal stand by Bela Karolyi.
#5. “Sons of Anarchy” — “NS” (November 30)
MATT: Throughout its third season, “Sons of Anarchy” toiled in the shadow of its masterful Season 2: not only in viewers’ raised expectations, but in the plodding plot machinations that stemmed from the previous season’s cliffhanger finale (SAMCRO took for-goddamn-ever to get to Ireland and steal Jax’s baby back). But in the vengeful and cathartic Season 3 finale, showrunner Kurt Sutter delivered a blindsiding plot twist that provided resolution to long-standing conflicts while setting the table for a return to greatness in Season 4.
Bonus points awarded for Chibs’s Jameson juicebox:
#4. “Community” — “Paradigms of Human Memory” (November 18)
JOSH: I had a hard time choosing between this episode, “Critical Film Studies,” or “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design.” All are perfect examples of the “event” episodes that “Community” does so well: “Critical Film Studies” was supposedly the Pulp Fiction Episode, but ended up being an extended homage to My Dinner with Andre instead, while “Conspiracy Theories” was the Mystery Episode, where Jeff and Annie tracked Professor Professorson and found out things about Greendale they never should have known. But “Paradigms,” the Fake Clip Show Episode, is the one I keep re-watching, the one that I keep laughing at, the one I keep finding new things to laugh at. The reason “Community” can get away with an episode like “Paradigms” is because they’ve developed the characters so well that we can accept an episode without a plot, of a series of unrelated jokes in never-happened stories. I hope Seth MacFarlane was watching—he could have learned a thing or two.
#3. “The Walking Dead” — “Days Gone Bye” (October 31)
JOSH: Frank Darabont wrote the screenplays for The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (the best film in the Nightmare series), so it wasn’t a surprise that the pilot episode of “The Walking Dead” would be downright cinematic. But it was a shock that the whole thing was so goddamn beautiful, albeit in a sick sort of way; the show’s first scene ends with Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) blasting the brains out of an eight-year-old girl (it’s OK, she’s a zombie). The rest of the six-episode season couldn’t quite live up to the premiere, but “Days Gone Bye” instantly made “The Walking Dead” a must-watch, making it a perfect pilot.
MATT: While the zombie genre has been beaten to death in film, no one ever had the audacity to bring that level of gore and horror to the small screen until AMC adapted Robert Kirkman’s acclaimed comic. And while the season that followed was uneven, the 90-minute pilot that aired on Halloween was as gripping and terrifying as television can be. The bright sunlight of Georgia gave the pilot an unsettling sense of realism, and the episode’s few scenes in darkness — particularly when Grimes tries to light a match in a stairwell — made the viewer long for daylight, regardless of the horrors that might be revealed.
#2. “Justified” — “Brother’s Keeper” (April 6)
DANGER: Have you ever watched a really good boxer go through a training session? You see him work the speed bag and the heavy bag, jump rope, practice his footwork. At each step, you think, “Wow, that’s pretty impressive. That dude’s a really good athlete.” Then you see him get into the ring and actually tie all the training together, taking it to a completely different level. That’s what “Brother’s Keeper” is. Throughout the season, the show introduced viewers to the Bennett crime family, Boyd Crowder’s struggle to stay on the straight and narrow, the impending Black Pike Deal, and how all these things interacted with main character Raylan Givens. In one hour of television, these all came to a crescendo and set the stage for the final four episodes. It was tightly written, well-acted, suspenseful, and badass as all holy hell.
JOSH: When it comes to serialized dramas, the season finale is often the episode that receives the most attention; the characters and the stories we’ve been following for months all collide together, either solving the mystery of an entire season or leaving us with a cliffhanger for the show’s next season. “Brother’s Keeper,” on the other hand, feels like both an ending, to the first half of the season, and a new beginning, leading towards the also-excellent finale, “Bloody Harlan.” It’s the stirring intermission to an extra long movie, where we’ve seen the characters reveal their true objective—like Mags making a deal with Black Pike, and Loretta finding out what Coover and Dickie did to her father—but it’s thrilling that we don’t know what’s going to happen. Plus, someone gets murdered, which is always a good thing.
#1. “Mad Men” — “The Suitcase” (September 5)
JOSH: I’m thankful the cut-off line for episodes was the beginning of September, because otherwise, this list wouldn’t be complete without the best episode of the television season, and the best episode of one of TV’s greatest shows. While the rest of While the rest of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce is off at the Ali vs. Liston fight, birthday girl Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) and Don (Jon Hamm) are stuck in the office, working on an advertising campaign for Samsonite. And that’s really about it. It’s essentially a bottle episode (in more than one way, considering all the booze that gets downed), where two co-workers learn intimate details about the other (and future author Roger Sterling, too), like Peggy’s affair with Duck, who drunkenly visits the office, and more information about her baby. It’s an evolution of a relationship, in a single night. Even if Peggy can’t tell the difference between “something that’s good and something that’s awful,” we can: “The Suitcase” is about as good as TV can get (unless “Breaking Bad” is on, of course).
DANGER: “Mad Men” often has a lot of things going on at once between Don’s home life (or lives), his work, and the general backdrop of upheaval in the 1960s. But at its heart, it’s a show about a dude on an island. Because of the decisions he’s made throughout his life, Don really only has two people who “know” him, and everyone else is kept at arm’s length, via vicious stiff-arm. So when one of those people leaves him, and he is more or less tethered to the other one over the course of an all-nighter, it makes for powerful television. “The Suitcase” featured the show’s two central characters confiding in each other and stripped bare of the fronts they each put on to just about everyone else in their lives. And just so we’re clear on something here, Jon Hamm and Elizabeth Moss can act a little bit. Also, it featured a drunken Duck Phillips trying to poop on the floor, and that was some surrious ELL OH ELLS.
MATT: About a year ago, there was an immense amount of critical praise for “Breaking Bad’s” heralded bottle episode, “Fly.” “The Suitcase,” though not a true bottle episode, is strikingly similar: it sequestered the show’s two main characters with a problem they couldn’t conquer and let the lead actors turn in the kind of performances that make TV not just a medium, but an art form. It was an emotional release three and a half years in the making, and the centerpiece to what made “Mad Men” the best show on TV last year.
