2010 Calvin Awards: Best TV Show
February 8, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The 2010 Calvin winner for Best TV Show is Mad Men. We had taken note of the show in 2008, when it finished just outside the top 10. Then, we gave the Matthew Weiner creation a seventh place nod last year before coming together as a group to award it as the best of the year with this vote. The shocking developments and sweeping changes that overwhelmed the staff of Sterling Cooper during Mad Men's third season wowed BOP's writers to the point that it became one of the most hotly debated topics for the staff. By the time the season had ended, the entire ad agency had been destroyed and the ground salted to prevent anything from ever growing there again. Within moments of the end of the season finale, we were left wondering how the show could possibly continue in the already announced season four since...well, lots of people have gone several steps beyond final written warning. I mean, if I have this right, Sterling and Cooper no longer own Sterling Cooper. How is that even possible? And that one person isn't even the name they've said they were the whole time! If we can't trust fictional ad agency employees, who can we trust ever about anything? "I don't believe in nothing no more. I'm going to law school." This is not just a Simpsons quote but also a potential story arc for Mad Men season four. Whatever happens next, we will never accuse the show of being too predictable. That much is certain.
Judging from the last few years of votes in this category, we are an intransigent bunch who are slow to adapt to new programming. That's what makes the performance of our second favorite show for the year all the more remarkable. Modern Family, the hilarious ABC sitcom, aired only 13 episodes during the qualifying period for our voting. In that time frame, it grew from becoming a show with a funny pilot to THE cannot miss comedy on the schedule. Featuring three generations of a family whose patriarch is Ed O'Neill, this is quite possibly the best television cast of the 2000s. You may not know all of the names inasmuch as you'd know some of their other work a la Carol Vessey on Ed, the babe on that show about robbing Mick Jagger, the dude who said the kid's mom freaked him out in Almost Famous et al. Okay, maybe you wouldn't even know them that way, but it's the incidental compositions of their various bodies of work that make all of these people ones whom BOP loved prior to being cast in this show. On this sitcom, they all blend together to offer some of the biggest laughs since the heyday of Must See TV yet they manage to do so in a manner befitting all the complexities of home life in the digital age. I could offer anecdotal acknowledgements of my favorite moments (the magic word is Fizbo), but that would be taking away from some of you. Instead, I will simply encourage you to go to Hulu or Amazon Unbox and immediately catch up on the episodes aired to date. Modern Family is not just our second favorite show of this year but also a likely contender in the category for the foreseeable future.
The third and fourth favorite shows of the year are perennial favorites Lost and Friday Night Lights. While not everyone on staff was a huge fan of the most recent season of Lost, there was zealous support from many of the newest members of our staff. The reverse was true of Friday Night Lights, which might have managed to win if only the longest contributors to our site had voted. It is apparently a show that is difficult for newcomers to embrace since they've missed so much of its history. Those of us who have given our hearts to Coach Eric Taylor, his family and his players as well as the rest of Dillon, Texas (well, the jerks who didn't get Taylor fired from his prior job anyway) continue to be rewarded for our devotion. Both programs have been the recipient of a lot of praise from us the past three years. After debuting in fourth place in 2006, we punished Lost in our 2007 awards (i.e. the tail of the plane season) by not selecting it. In 2008, it finished in fifth place, fell back to sixth place in 2009 and has now risen to its highest placement yet in 2010, third place. Friday Night Lights debuted in third place in 2007, won the category in 2008, fell back to third place in 2009 and slips slightly to fourth place in 2010. Clearly, we are set in our ways and unless a show is as terrible as Lost was in season two, we keep rewarding it for its consistency.
The final selection in the top five this year is a likely one time selection, Better Off Ted. BOP doesn't want to say that ABC has absolutely butchered their handling of this sitcom, but we can't think of a way to finish this sentence that absolves them of blame. Consider that Better Off Ted has had two complete seasons air in the time period since the end of last year's voting. Better Off Ted debuted on March 18, 2009 and has produced 24 episodes since then. The first six episodes shown prior to the scheduling change had between 4 million and 5.6 million viewers, not a large amount but nothing to guarantee cancellation. At this point, ABC meddled with their lineup and Better Off Ted's ratings collapsed 56% in just two episodes. We had written it off as one season run until a surprise announcement that it would get a second chance to become a hit. Oddly, the network reconsidered almost immediately and wound up burning off the entire second season of the sitcom in the TV dead period of December and January, one of the most passive/aggressive programming decisions this side of Conan O'Brien. While all this was ongoing, the only thing that never changed was the quality of Better Off Ted. Along the way, it managed to perfectly satirize all levels of corporate decision making from racial sensitivity to sexual harrassment to horny magicians (the silent cause of the 2008 global economic collapse). What I said with Modern Family applies here as well: go Hulu or Unbox the show. Right. Now.
For the period from 2005-2008, Adam Dunn finished with exactly 40 home runs each season. I find myself thinking about that as I notice that for the third consecutive year, we have chosen Chuck to be the sixth best television program. How random. Apparently, we will only reward the show a certain amount for gratuitous Yvonne Strahovski costuming choices and for being a highly entertaining albeit silly spy comedy. I for one fear that this discourages the show's producers from future reduction of Strahovski's clothing. It's like we're willing throwing away our best hope for world peace. Meanwhile, the seventh place show is last year's winner, 30 Rock, quite possibly the worst voting choice since the Academy Award for Best Picture went to Crash. Now that the arguments have died down and the show's champions are left to watch it on a weekly basis, they've started to be more realistic about its quality. A year too late.
Rounding out the top ten are a couple of standing favorites as well as a new entrant that had been overlooked for too long. Former category winner Battlestar Galactica finished in eighth place last year and it repeated this position again in the final half of its final season. We loved the show and felt it went on a high note, although the staff is divided as to the quality of the follow-up movie, The Plan. Dexter fell from fourth place in 2009 to ninth place this year, perhaps a surprising result given the high praise lavished on the most recent season of the show. Finally, tenth place is claimed by Psych, the adorable USA Network program that offers a type of spirit and whimsy that is sorely missing from network programming as a whole.
Finishing just outside our nominations this year are previously popular The Office, upcoming favorite Glee, recently defunct Dollhouse, silly-sweet Castle, apparently still on-the-air South Park, that vampire show on HBO (not the CW) True Blood, and surprisingly entertaining Scrubs successor Cougar Town. (David Mumpower/BOP)
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Album
Best Breakthrough Performance
Best Cast
Best Director
Best DVD
Best Overlooked Film
Best Picture
Best Scene
Best Screenplay
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best TV Show
Best Use of Music
Best Videogame
Worst Performance
Worst Picture