MagneticMediaFed

I love making end of the year top ten lists. Sometimes I think it’s the only reason I put up with the fifty weeks of mediocre nonsense (but then I take my antidepressants and go back to playing with that shiny piece of foil). The problem with having television as your medium of choice is that the television schedule doesn’t fit nicely into the Gregorian calendar. Typical seasons on the networks run from September to May, while cable tends to stick closer to the actual climatological patterns of the earth. It’s easy to say that first season Friday Night Lights was the best thing of 2007 except for the fact that half of the season landed squarely in 2006. MagneticMediaFed has figured out the solution to all of this: EPISODES. Episodes are what make television TELEVISION. A good episode keeps you glued to the screen for the full hour (or half hour), it tells a complete story while adding significantly to the series as a whole, it shows you something you didn’t think you’d see or makes you laugh in ways you didn’t think were possible.

I’ve spent a good chunk of the past couple weeks culling over the MMF-archives reminding myself of those episodes that I thought really stuck out. I watch a lot of television, though I don’t purport to watch all television (anyone who does should be shunned and bathed — not necessarily in that order). Because of this, my list only includes the shows that I regularly watch and is missing some obvious gems that I simply don’t know/care about (i.e. Battlestar Galactica, A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila). Still, I think most of the bases are covered. If there was a fantastic episode you remember from this past calendar year, please let us know in the comments. The full list, available right after the jump…

#7 (tie)”Women’s Appreciation” and “Money” | The Office #322, 404

I really didn’t want to do “ties” but The Office is such a bipolar show I had to make an exception. “Women’s Appreciation” from last spring was perhaps one of their funniest episodes ever. It had so much going for it, most significantly how it seemed like the episode where the writer’s decided Creed was going to not just be kinda-sorta odd, but creepy and maybe a little insane. This is the episode where Michael takes the women to the mall on a girls-outting, while they’re away the guys start to hang out in the female bathroom back at the office. It had Michael admitting to having something of a deviant sex-life with Jan (safe word “Foliage”). It had Angela telling us that she shops for clothes in children’s sections and sometimes at the American Girl store.

“Money” on the other hand was just so brutally sad. It was the first (and last) episode this fall of hour-long editions of the show and was really the only one that seemed to tell one whole story from beginning to end. I loved the stuff with Michael at the telemarketing company and how his coworkers actually loved him, I loved the Dwight/Angela split and the complete wreck it made him and I especially loved the notion of Michael literally running away from his problems. I’m thankful that The Office is the type of show that can be really funny and the type of show that can be kind of serious and that the really funny episodes have serious elements and the serious one has funny moments but that it never seems like they’re trying to force it on us.

#6 “She Spat At Me” | Damages #106

I really wanted Damages represented on this list, but the series’ best episodes (basically the last five) were great because of what the achieved for the overall season. Individually, while there are some brilliant reveals and performances, they don’t so much work on their own. The web is too complex for one hour to mean anything. That’s why I’ve chosen “She Spat At Me.” It’s an episode more focused on the character of Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson) and his attempt to tell his side of the story (literally, as the episode involves him hiring a ghost-writer to help pen his memoir), than of the legal proceedings in the case against him.

Even without the twists, the episode is rock-solid, and signified the moment when I think everyone who was watching this series (the few of us that there were) had to sit up and say, “God damn! Ted Danson is the man! Why have we been squandering his talents on Becker?!” The best moment in the hour is when a drunk Frobisher shows up uninvited at the ghost writer’s house with a box full of memories. It’s savagely funny as this multibillionaire quickly unhinges, going from sympathetic to obnoxious to abusive. It was one of the best television performances of the year.

#5 “Drive By” | Flight of the Conchords #107

This was a hard one. My mind kept saying “Mugged” (featuring the Rhymnoceros) was their best episode, but as I was rereading some of my old posts I remembered that “Drive By” featured perhaps my favorite gag of 2007: Murray opening an envelope from his mother that contains a sandwich wrapped in foil. I’m sorry, but that is comedy. And speaking of Murray this is also the episode that has the song “Leggy Blond” that he sings about the tech-support worker at the office.

I would also argue that the awesomeness of Flight of the Conchords episodes is directly proportional to the amount of screen time Dave (Arj Barker) gets. Here, he has a brilliant scene where he explains “flipping the bird” as well as why everyone hates New Zealanders — and yes, he hates them too. Love, love, love it.

#4 “Shoot” | Mad Men #109

Mad Men is the smartest show on television not called The Wire. As much as I loved watching it, I felt like the series didn’t really figure out how to entertaining until a little over half way through its first season. Then, it seemed like the individual episodes started to get a little tighter and the art direction began to serve the series as something of an exclamation point to the action. This was never more the case than in “Shoot,” a Betty-centric episode that culminated in my single favorite visual from all of 2007: after losing her dream job as a model for Coca-Cola (a decision imposed by husband, Don) and seemingly about to sink back into a thick suburban malaise, Betty, reacting to a spat with a neighbor, is seen in her bathrobe, with a lit cigarette hanging off her lip, takes a rifel and starts picking the neighbor’s pet birds right out of the sky.

#3 “Mudbowl” | Friday Night Lights #120

It was really hard picking the perfect episode of Friday Night Lights as last spring there were many (I heard it came back this fall. I wonder how things turned out?). Do you go with the one were Seracen and Julie decide to have sex — forty-three minutes of the most excruciatingly awkward teenage shinanagins this side of Freaks and Geeks, or do you stay serious and go with that two-episode arch when the black players decided to quit playing after a racial comment was made by one of the coaches? Maybe the choice isn’t that hard, as “Mudbowl” has a little bit of everything.

It’s the ending though that pushes it over the top. That football game, played in a muddy cow-pasture, was one of the most exciting sports sequences I’ve ever seen, but cut against a scene in which Tyra was almost sexually assaulted it became this odd bipolar climactic build. Of course knowing what we know now about Tyra and that particular assailant (and Landry who showed up too late this first time around to do anything to stop it) perhaps the sequence would play differently, though I suspect not. It’s powerful filmmaking.

And as I recall, the other 35-minutes of that episode were note perfect in detailing the small-town subtlety that only Friday Night Lights can do.

#2 “Kennedy and Heidi” | The Sopranos #616

The easy pick would be to have “Made In America“, the series finale, on this list. That episode was, after all, the most significant popular-culture conversation starter for the year (and rightfully so), but as an episode it was all ending. The other fifty minutes were OK at best. It tied up enough loose threads to keep some of the masses happy, crushed one skull and had A.J. deciding to fly a helicopter… or join the C.I.A…. or something. For my money, “Kennedy and Heidi” was the best complete episode of the season with an ending that, in my humble opinion, was far more abstract than the series ultimate conclusion.

For those who don’t remember from the episode’s seemingly random title, this was the one where Tony and Christopher get in the car wreck resulting in Tony seeing an opportunity, taking it, and killing Christopher. All of this happens about four minutes into the episode, which as far as I’m concerned is one of the best things about it. It’s an episode about the effects, not the actions, which is precisely what The Sopranos is about (contrary to the belief of many who somehow watched six seasons of the show convinced it was always some kind of mindless bloodbath — it never was).

The Sopranos is not the greatest series in the history of television but it is close. However, no other series can hold a candle to it in terms of what it did with character. Television, unlike movies, allows for the development and change of characters over a long period of time (sadly, few shows actually take advantage of this). What I love about “Kennedy and Heidi” as an episode is how we are able to see very familiar characters behave in a way that only we know is contrary to how they actually feel. This is possible because we’ve been with them for so long. We know that Pauly and Christopher had a very strained relationship and we can see the jealousy and rage in his face that even in death the kid got a one-up on him — this time attracting more people to his funeral than to Pauly’s mother/aunt. Those two funeral scenes were fantastic because almost every character is lying to everyone else.

Then there’s the whole Vegas vacation which covers a good chunk of the last 30 minutes, showing Tony boozing, drugging and banging his way through the strip, culminating in that brilliant sequence where he’s tripping on peyote and staring at the sunrise only to see a flash of green light and the sudden realization that he gets it. It was ambiguous and yet logical, and perhaps most impressive because the scene was so removed from the framework of typical Sopranos. One of their best episodes ever… certainly the best of the year.

#1 “Through the Looking Glass” | Lost #322/323 (season finale)

Lost did everything in its power to squander whatever remaining viewers it had in the fall of 2006 with that god-awful seven-episode mini-arch. Then, scrambling to put things back together it took the entire 16-episode run throughout the spring of 2007 to remind us why we liked this show so much in the first place. Frankly, by the time finale came around I was solidly back on the horse but never would have guessed exactly what the show had hidden up its sleeve. The hardest part about delivering a twist-ending is outdoing audience expectations — expectations that have always been unreasonably high. That they pulled this off in addition to having the two-hour finale about as action-packed as any network show (even one with a budget as large as Lost’s) could be.

There were just so many cool things at play here. There was Hurley and the VW bus, a prop whose meaning shifted from whimsy to drama to awesomeness over the course of the season. There were explosions both below the water and on the beach. There was Sayid snapping that guys neck with his legs. There was the death of Charlie which was shocking in its ability to make me feel sorry for a character I vehemently hated for so long. And of course there was the Jack flash… forward, perhaps one of the greatest reveals in television history — a statement that sounds hyperbolic until we think about how it fundamentally shifts the entire framework of a series that has only been halfway completed. Think about it, while St. Elsewhere and Newhart had finales that completely uprooted everything that had come before, the also happened to be the last episodes ever produced. There was no “now what?”. If the entire universe of Lost had been the state of Rhode Island, the season three finale made us realize we’re actually dealing with the entire eastern seaboard. But the exciting part is that we get to go forward from here (assuming the writer’s strike doesn’t kill the show altogether).

And after all of this, after Jack tells Kate — as if quoting River’s Cuomo himself — “I wanna go back!” the Lost titles flash across the screen, we cut to commercial and then it sinks in: THIS SHOW ISN’T COMING BACK UNTIL FEBRUARY! Now that’s how make a cliffhanger.

OTHER 2007 HIGHLIGHTS:

“The Gang Sells Out” — It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia #307
The only thing this episode is missing is “Night Man,” but it does have the waitress and she brings out the absolute worst in every character (making it the most fun to watch).

“Greenzo” — 30 Rock #205
Perhaps the most biting piece of satire in 2007. I love how the show is more than willing to mock the ridiculousness of its own network. Plus, David Schwimmer makes a fantastic jackass in a cape.

“There’s Something About Harry” — Dexter #210
The moment when Dexter realizes that his father was horrified at what he had done the fun and games suddenly screeched to a halt. It also made us complicit in his killings. A fantastic turning of the tables on a shows own audience.

“Pilot” — Pushing Daisies #101
Easily the best pilot of the year and the only new fall show that has continued to bring it each and every week since it launched (well, this and maybe Gossip Girl… but that’s something else altogether).

“X Spots the Mark” — The Riches #108
This show was rock solid all the way through but this episode really highlighted the families con-game as they bilked an ex-ballplayer out of a quarter million dollars.

So. What am I missing? What were some of your favorite episodes? Hit up the comments.

MagneticMediaFed will be back in 2008! See you then!

Tags: AMC, Mad Men

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 2:10 am and is filed under ABC, Damages, FX, Flight of the Conchords, Friday Night Lights, HBO, Lost, NBC, The Office, The Sopranos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.