The Best Performers of the 2010s Part 6

Ted Danson and Kirsten Bell

Forking Incredible In Everything They Do

The Good Place is one of the great triumphs of the decade, an extraordinary comedy that deals with ethical issues that few other series, comedy or drama, would dare tackle. And much of the reason for its incredible success is due to the work of its two major stars, Ted Danson as Michael, a demon who undergoes some of the most remarkable evolution possible, and Bell as Eleanor, a horrible human being in life who ultimately has become the force for righteousness in the afterlife. If it were just for the work they did in this series alone, they would deserve mention. But both have done more.

One of the nicer dividends of the New Golden Age has been watching Danson, who spent the better part of fifteen years in comedy series playing off his affability in Cheers, completely shift his career in directions you wouldn’t have thought possible from the lead in Becker. There was his extraordinary work as Arthur Frobisher, the cuthrouat industrialist at the center of the first three seasons of Damages, one of the underwatched greatest series of all times. He did a marvelous comic turn in the droll detective parody Bored to Death. And as Hank Larrson, one of the few genuine forces for pure good in the second season of Fargo, he was a dry force of stability in a world of chaos. I’m even willing to forgive his by-the-numbers work in the later seasons of CSI – doing all that creative work, he had to find some way to pay the bills.

Bell hasn’t been quite as active, but what she has done has often been golden. She was one of the few really enjoyable things about another dirty, messy Showtime ‘comedy’ – Jeannie, the ruthless/love interest at the center of House of Lies. In a series that was frequently inconsistent in tone and writing, her steady hand was one of the few good things about it. Then while working in The Good Place, she returned to the role which put her map in one of the most beloved canceled series of all time – Veronica Mars, when it returned for a fourth season earlier this year. This role may have given her the most joy of any series, and I’m sure if Hulu can find a way to continue it, she will sign back up.

Is The Good Place one of the greatest shows of all time? We’ll have to wait to see how it ends in January. But its pretty clear that the work Danson and Bell have put in is magnificent.

Felicity Huffman

Yes, She Is a Criminal, But….

This is not an article to defend Felicity Huffman for her role in the college scandals. I realize her illegal activity has put a black mark by her – a lot of people no doubt thought she is the epitome of celebrity privilege.  But the fact is, despite her crimes, I can’t deny she’s been one of the strongest actress of this decade – hell, she was one of the greatest actresses the medium has ever seen.

In the final seasons of Desperate Housewives, Lynette may have been the one solid thing the series had going for it as it descended into the soap opera it had originally been imagined to satirize. But she more than redeemed herself in her extraordinary performances in American Crime. From the racist mother who tried to blame anybody but herself for her son’s murder, to the entrenched dean trying to deal with a homosexual rape that spirals out of control to the daughter trying to break free of a farm that relies on illegal slave labor, Huffman was consistently and frequently exceptional. Only the fact that the competition in the Best Actress/Limited Series may have the greatest it’s ever been stopped her from receiving at least one more Emmy.

And her work as Linda Fairstein, the NYPD detective who leads the ever to torture confessions out of the Central Park Five – and then, when their innocence is a certainty, deny that it is real – was among the most frightening work I’ve seen this year. Let’s face it, the college scandal put any onus on her getting a deserved nomination.

I don’t pretend that Huffman is a saint. (And considering how much I admired her as an actress before the scandal, this truly is painful to admit it.) But even if she never gets another acting job again (unlikely, this is Hollywood) she should still be remembered for who she was: one of the greatest thespians in TV history.

The Former Doctor Whos

These are The Good Doctors

No matter what your opinion of the current incarnation of Doctor Who (and really there are as many opinions of that as there have been regenerations) the men who played the Doctor so well in the first decade have some extraordinary work this past decade.

Christopher Eccleston upset a lot of people when he departed the current incarnation after its first season. Especially since he spent much of the next decade doing TV series and movies – mostly in Britain – that were far below his ability. Then in 2014, he took on the role of Matt Jamison in The Leftovers and touched greatness. A minister mentioned barely in passing in the original book, he became a character trying to find God in a post-apocalyptic world. In the final season, he found God – and found that he was just as lost as he’d ever been. It was an extraordinary performance that the Emmys, like they did with the entire series, felt fit to deny. While Eccleston was working in this brave world, he also worked in The A Word as a drunken Scottish grandfather of a family dealing with an autistic child. Here we got to see the comic side we rarely did.

David Tennant may be the greatest Doctor in history, and has spent his career since playing characters that go vehemently against the cheerful Doctor we once knew. The uncomfortable, prickly DI Alec Hardy in Broadchurch, the villainous Killgrave who haunted the title character in Jessica Jones even after he was well and truly dead, Crowley, the demon who helps misplace the Antichrist in Good Omens… all twisted characters where Tennant’s charisma made you appreciate their problems. And of course, those of us who had doubts about the new incarnation of Ducktales were immediately relieved when we heard who was voicing Scrooge.

And of course, Matt Smith spent the first half of the decade playing the Eleventh Doctor in such a way that its hard to associate him as anything else – until he took on Prince Philip in The Crown and put life into the stodgy old man we see beside the Queen. He earned the Emmy nomination he got.

They made an impact as the Doctors, one can’t deny it. What we can’t deny is just how great they are as actors of their own merits.

The Best Performers of the 2010s: Part 5

Carrie Coon

Nothing Limited About Her Work

Considering that she is so much a part of the medium, it’s rather astonishing to realize that Coon’s entire career in acting pretty much spans this decade. It’s even more astonishing, given her body of work, that she only has one Emmy nomination for her entire career.

Coon burst on to the scene as Nora, essentially the female lead of The Leftovers. As a woman trying to somehow go on while her entire family has disappeared, Coon was by far the guts of the series. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the Broadcast Critics Awards, she grabbed three nominations and one Best Actress trophy for her work. And while her body of work was astonishing, it basically coalesced in one of the great moments of television in the final episode. Nora steps into a machine that will supposedly reveal to her what happened to everybody. Just as the machine is filling up, we cut to the Australian outback more than twenty years later – and spend almost the entirety of the episode on Nora as a recluse. The final ten minutes are essentially a monologue where Nora tells what happened and what she saw. Considering how badly Damon Lindelof’s series faltered in the finale, the only way this would work was if Coon was perfect. And she was.

Her next job came in the incredible third season of Fargo, where she played Gloria Burgle, the Minneapolis sheriff called to investigate a murder while her job is being phased out and its becoming hard to tell if she actually exists. The one force of goodness in a very bleak universe, the season’s final scene – where she finally confronted Varga, the epitome of evil was so astonishing that it never even occurred to me that writer Noah Hawley ended the season with no clear picture as to whether she triumphed or Varga did.

And last year, in what is rapidly becoming one of USA’s finest accomplishments, Coon played the head of a cult that was at the center of the murder of two adults by a child in The Sinner. Watching her go about ‘the work’, and try to lead an organization that was in no less chaos than the real world they were trying to shut out – was remarkable. She might have been the villain, but I’m certain she never saw herself that way.

Coon’s been migrated into high level films recently, but I really hope another great mind will put her at the center of another show, because she’s clearly demonstrated that she is one of the great actresses of the era.

Joshua Jackson

I Don’t Want to Wait For His Next Brilliant Turn

He hasn’t gotten anywhere near the Oscar buzz that his Dawson’s Creek co-star Michelle Williams has, or achieved the celebrity of Katie Holmes, but Jackson has demonstrated far and away that he is one of the most brilliant talents on television.

The decade began with his work as Peter Bishop, the con artist who was literally at the center of a war between two universes on Fringe. While much of that series’ success was understandably because of the work of Anna Torv and Joshua Noble (both of whose lack of nominations by the Academy was one of the Emmys greatest blunders this decade), Jackson’s ability to be the steadying force as apocalypses and alien invasions loomed was really astonishing, and allowed that series to be one of the few mythology shows that worked all the way through.

Jackson then moved on to the role of Cole, the betrayed husband of Alison at the center of The Affair. While much of the attention (and awards) went to Ruth Wilson and Maura Tierney, Jackson’s stoicism and steadying hand were brilliant. Considering all of the trauma that Cole went through in the four seasons he was on the show, it would’ve been easy to go into the level of melodrama that so often plagued the series. Jackson managed to make it work, and I’m actually sorry he decided to leave before the series ended. He’s been ever since, having a critical role as one of the attorneys in When they See Us. And I can hardly wait for his career to take its next step

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman

They Reinvented Holmes and Watson… And So Much More.

It’s not exactly like these two were unknown before the decade began – Freeman had become a superstar in the UK version of The Office, Cumberbatch had been at the center of such films as Amazing Grace and Atonement, but in 2010 Steven Moffat chose to reinvent Sherlock Holmes for the New Millennium in Sherlock. The rest, as they say, is elementary.

Sherlock Holmes and John Watson are probably the most recreated fictional characters in history, so when Cumberbatch and Freeman reinvented them in a way that no one had really tried before, certainly not in television (this was two years before Elementary) it’s hard to explain just how radical it was. These weren’t stodgy Victorian interpretation – this was an attempt to make Sherlock, a real human being, not a thinking machine, and John, an actual character, not someone Holmes just bounced ideas off of. And it was so alive with energy that the fact that we only got three episodes every two seasons made all us Baker Street Irregulars really irritated. Because it was joyous, and both men more than deserved the Emmys they got.

Cumberbatch since has been launched into the stratosphere, playing such cultural icons as Khan and Dr. Strange, and indelible legend like Alan Turing and Julian Assange. But he has time for the medium that launched. His best work came in the mini-series The Hollow Crown, particularly as Richard III, and in my opinion, another iconic Brit, Patrick Melrose. In a mini-series that was more flawed than brilliant, seeing Cumberbatch unplugged was a true joy.

Freeman has been more pressed for time – he was, after all, Bilbo Baggins and is in the middle of Marvel universe himself, but he found time to create another indelible character of his own, as Lester, the worn down salesman, whose encounter with Lorne Malvo leads to his become a sociopath of his own in the incredible first installment of Fargo.. Freeman was nominated for Best Actor in a Limited Series that year. He lost to Cumberbatch, which I’m sure he was fine with.

Both men have become incredibly busy for the last five years, demonstrating to the rest of the world what we saw in Sherlock. And I have no doubt they’ll come back to TV at some point. So, even though it really seems like you wrapped things up in The Final Problem, is it possible we could get another three episodes? Doyle did have to resurrect Holmes himself, you know.

Ray Donovan is Beyond Fixing

When one does an assessment of television in the 2010s, I am drawn to the conclusion that one of the bigger surprises came when Showtime managed to surpass HBO in pure creativity. From its biggest hits Dexter and Homeland to its radically daring comedies such as The Big C and Episodes, Showtime has more than come out of the shadows from HBO.

But the greatest flaws of the network have been its consistent embracing of shows that have a filthy approach not just in characters, but in its approach to entertainment in general. I’m thinking primarily of Don Cheadle’s led series House of Lies and Black Monday, and the overriding disgusting work of Shameless. (I’ve since reassessed my opinion of the latter, but I still feel it’s been on the air far too long.) But in my mind, the series that most represents what can be wrong with Showtime – and in a larger sense, many of aspirants to the Golden Age – is Ray Donovan, a series that almost since its inception in 2013 has been one of most critically attacked series on TV, even as its title character has somehow become part of the lexicon.

There are so many problems with this series that it’s hard to comprehensively list them all, but I’ll focus on what I consider the major ones, and most of them have to do with both Liev Schreiber as the lead, the title character in particular, and the issues surrounding the Donovans in general.

First of all, Schreiber is a great actor. His portrayal of Orson Welles nearly two decades ago in RKO 281 held a great movie together. Given a character with meat on its bones, as he has been able to demonstrate in such astonishing films as The Hurricane, The Manchurian Candidate and Spotlight, he can do great things. And he has a very expressive voice, as his work in two very different animated movies last year Isle of Dogs and Into the Spider-Verse more than demonstrated. So I can’t for the life of me see why he would have signed on for a series where he has to play a character so stone-faced and unemotional that not even the phrase ‘a range from A to B’ applies. Yes, I realize his character is deeply traumatized, but I can count the time he’s expressed genuine emotion in more than six seasons on one hand – and I wouldn’t have to use all the fingers. Maybe that is part of his draw as a ‘fixer’ – he does things coolly and calmly, but I seriously long for the days of Dexter Morgan, who at least was willing to put up a façade.

And make no mistake; Ray is a truly horrible human being. I’m not just saying that because of the work he does or the violence he unleashed – though that is a huge part of the problem – but for someone who says over and over, he’s doing this for his family, he treats them like shit. He cheated on his wife multiple times during the series – including when she was dying of cancer. He treats his brothers, who are, if anything, worse off than he is, with fairly less humanity. His son joined the military to escape him, and his daughter has been abducted multiple times because of his actions. And yet whenever they suffer as a result of his actions – which is also nearly every episode – he barely has to decency to apologize for what he’s put them through. And when things are going badly, he will lie right to their faces. Abby, the one truly empathetic character in this entire series, clearly didn’t want to suffer from the disease any more in Season 5. And rather than acknowledge her wishes or even spend time with his wife, he decided to go bang a woman next door, and poison someone who was in line for clinical treatment. I honestly think Abby killed herself because it was the only way she could escape his toxicity.

Which brings me to another critical point – Ray is terrible at his job. For someone who’s the person you call when you have a problem you can’t solve, he tends to not only create more problems than he ‘fixes’ but will throw over his client at the drop of a hat to help his family. He’s had affairs with clients, he’s betrayed them, and he’s killed more than a couple. I don’t know why anybody would hire him at this juncture. He almost makes me yearn for the simplicity of Olivia Pope. Say what you will about the horrible things she did; at least she protected her clients and had a moral compass, however skewed.  Ray just lurches from job to job, more looking to beat people up and break things than out of any desire to make things ‘better’.

When you’ve got a lead this unbearable, you really need some good supporting characters, and this is the other major problems. There isn’t a single sympathetic character in the bunch. Which is even more remarkable because there should be. Bunchy was abused by a priest as a child, and has clearly some level of disability. Terry was a fighter who took one too many punches and now has Parkinson’s. Bridget, Ray’s daughter has been broken by her father’s problems, and is clearly the most self-aware of the whole bunch. Yet season after season they do undeniably stupid things. Bunchy keeps his nearly $1 million settlement in a box by his bed, and gets robbed of it at a Subway. Terry underwent a procedure to have his Parkinson’s treated, and last season got in an underground fight club and had it broken. Bridget romantically pursued her high school teacher even after his repeated denials of her advances, and as a result he lost his job and got beat up by her father for his trouble.

I haven’t even mention Mickey (Jon Voight), the loose cannon ex-con who seems to do everything in his power to screw his family’s lives up. He surpassed his value as a character at least three years ago, and for some reason the writers won’t get rid of him. Almost all the problems the Donovan family has are related to him, and yet every time he ends up in jail, they decide either to bail him out or arrange things to let him go.

Even whatever comedy there is this show is unpleasant, and usually has to do with another characters messy philosophy, non sequiteurs, or just some kind of stupid fight. There isn’t any relief from the toxicity of Donovan’s and their horrible attitudes.

So how has this series made it to Season 7? I’m honestly not sure who’s watching it or why they’re watching it in the first place. If it’s hoping that Ray will have some kind of epiphany, I just don’t think that’s ever gonna happen. He’s been through some kind of therapy twice. In Season 4, he stopped drinking for six months (in addition to all his other sins, he’s clearly an alcoholic) and went to therapy for abused people. He gave up both of those by the end of the first episode to help a ‘friend’. In Season 5, after assaulting his family in reaction to his wife’s euthanasia, he went to court order anger management for the entire season, and basically slept through it. In Season 6, after trying to kill himself after seeing a hallucination of his wife, and later suffering several panic attacks, he called his boss in order to get out of being committed. Now, he finally seems to have agreed to some kind of psychotherapy with guest actor Alan Alda. TV Guide, apparently with a straight face, compared it to Tony Soprano. And we all know how much good that helped Tony. The message – and the series hasn’t even tried to be subtle with it – is that the only person Ray can’t fix is himself. Thanks, but I got that by the end of Season 1.

Jeopardy James and The Tournament of Champions

Jeopardy’s Tournament of Champions have always been something I would block off two weeks in my calendar for, no matter what else is going on. In the past year, I have mentioned just how important Jeopardy has been in my life, and in many ways, their nearly annual Tournament has always been a source of intellectual exercise and good fun.

But the 2019 Tournament was significant for two reasons. First, there was an unspoken fact that Alex Trebek, who has struggled with pancreatic cancer all year, might not be around for future ones. There was also a visual reminder – the winner of the Teacher Tournament Larry Martin had also passed away from the disease shortly after winning. All the competitors wore purple ribbons in memoriam. There was also an undercurrent of affection for Trebek that is not always present in these tournaments – one contestant, out of the running in Final Jeopardy wrote down ‘We Love You, Alex!” and Trebek’s voice broke at the acknowledgement of it. That’s not to say the matches haven’t been fun – one category poked fun at an ongoing Conan O’Brien gag of Trebek’s pronouncement of ‘genre’, and at one point when the word came up in another category, he leaned into it, and got a huge laugh.

The more interesting reason was the fact that James Holzhauer, the Vegas gambler who had come within inches of beating Ken Jennings’ all time record for money won in normal play during a 33 game winning streak, was competing in it. When he made to the finals (something that should’ve surprised no one), Alex pointed out that if he won, he would win $250,000 for four days work. He had averaged more than $70,000 per win in his initial appearance, so Alex naturally asked how it felt to come back for a pay cut. Holzhauer remarked that he was a gambler, and he ‘played to win even in penny-ante games.

Much of the focus was on Holzhauer during the quarter and semi-final games, and as a result, the traditional approaches – starting at the top of a category and working your way down – didn’t apply. Not just for Holzhauer, but for every else. Everybody was starting at the bottom and leaping around the board, looking for those Daily Doubles. This worked against Holzhauer in his first two games – he only managed to find two Daily Doubles – but it was also clear he was taking a somewhat different approach then before. He was still looking at the bottom of the board, but when he found the Daily Doubles, he bet a bit more conservatively than he usually did. (He even made fun of it, saying once: “Let’s make it a truly disappointing $1109.” He got it right, though.)

As should surprise no one, Holzhauer made it to the finals. There were, however, two x-factors. First, his incorrect response in Final Jeopardy in his semi-final match caused him to play in the second dais instead of the first where he had been so dominant for so long. (Alex even referred to him as James Holzhauer ‘is our champion’ during the interview segment. Old habits die hard even for him.) Second, the only contestant to ever beat him in a game, Emma Boettcher had managed to qualify for the TOC as well. She proved she was still as good as ever, and was competing in the Finals as well.’ Filling out the slot was Francis Barcomb, winner of another Teachers Tournament, who had earned his spot by being fortunate enough to have a science question be the subject of his Final Jeopardy. Barcomb is an eleventh-grade physics teacher.

In Game 1, James got off to a fast start, but when he hit a Daily Double and went all in, he failed to answer a question about Oscar Wilde correctly. (Not to brag, but I knew the answer to that question. Happens to best of us some time.) This only momentarily slowed him down, though, and by the end of Double Jeopardy, he had amassed $37,412. Emma was a distant second with $13,200.

Final Jeopardy had to do with Old Testament Books. ‘By Hebrew word count, this longest book of the Old Testament bears this name that led to a word for a long complaint or rant” The correct response: “What is Jeremiah?” from which we get the word, jeremiad. Francis was incorrect. Emma got it right, and wagered everything. Holzhauer got it right as well. Boetticher had $26,400, which was still more than $20,000 behind James’ first game total.

Alex brought up almost casually his discussion with James before the final game, saying that James had built up a cushion because ‘he knew he would need it… against Francis and Emma.’ Truer words were never spoken. Once again, James got off to a fast start in the Jeopardy Round, but his lead over Emma was never quite as large as it could’ve been. Then, in Double Jeopardy, things got interesting.

Emma managed to find the Daily Double in Female Firsts, With the score $16,000 to $8600, she went ‘all in’ on a clue that asked for what film Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director. (The Hurt Locker) For the first time in the entire tournament, someone was ahead of James. James regained momentum, and hit the Daily Double in the category ‘R’ Chitecture and wagering $8,615. He then got it wrong by failing to remember one of the most elementary rules of Jeopardy! – when something’s in quotation marks, it will be at the start of the clue. 

James couldn’t recover, and entered Final Jeopardy trailing Emma by just under $4000. I could do math quickly, and for the briefest of moments, the unthinkable seemed possible – Emma could upset James if she wagered enough, responded correctly, and if James got an incorrect answer in ‘International Disputes’.

The Final Jeopardy answer was involved ‘A dispute over Etorofu, Habomai, Kunashiri and Shikotan has kept these two countries from ever signing a World War II Peace Treaty.’ I won’t keep you in suspense: “What is Russia & Japan?” All three of them knew it. And James wagered more than enough to come away a quarter of a million dollars richer.

Francis spent most of the tournament no doubt feeling like so many people who had to go up against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, numbers 1 and 2 in all time money wins. James still comes away from this as merely the third greatest Jeopardy player of all time, though it must be noted he has done something that the latter never has done – won a championship tournament. As for Emma, for nearly achieving the impossible, she deserves not only the $100,000 she got for second place, but surely to be considered among the greatest Jeopardy champions of all time, something I might not have been willing to attribute to her before this tournament.

One final suggestion for the producers of Jeopardy! I realize the Jeopardy All-Star Games were earlier this year, but given the events of the past few months, perhaps another super-tournament might be in order in the next year or so. Maybe one could limit to all living Tournament of Champion winners and everyone else who has managed to win more than five games since the rule change. People would no doubt like any excuse to see Austin Rogers and Julia Collins again, and it would be nice to see 18 Game winner Jason Zuffernetti prior to his Tournament of Champions appearance. James Holzhauer has already proven himself as one of the greatest. Now he should have to compete against the other GOAT. I know I’d watch, if for no other reason that this Tournament has proven once again that sometimes the impossible can be made possible – at least on Jeopardy!

The Best Actors of the 2010s: Part 4

Michael K. Williams

May Not Be The King, But He’s Still One of the Best

Williams so inhabited the role of Omar, the stickup man with a code on The Wire that it’s hard to imagine what he could possibly do to make us forget it. If he hasn’t quite accomplished that, in the past decade he has demonstrated the ability he had to create some of the most memorable characters ever assembled.

He began the decade as ‘Chalky’ White, the African-American labor/crime boss who commanded respect even from Nucky Thompson on Boardwalk Empire,  despite his own illiteracy and what would eventually be his own moral undoing. He took on the role of Leonard in Sundance’s undervalued Hap & Leonard series. A gay, black Republican who loved his Nilla Wafers, Leonard was the moral center of two friends who were constantly involved in chaos on either side of the criminal world. In the limited series, The Night of, he created a memorable, literate con who protected Naz in prison, and eventually became as much a burden as his own crime – a role that finally earned him his first Emmy nomination. He earned another this past year, playing Bobby McCray, the ex-con stepfather of Anton, whose experience with the police make him persuade his stepson to plead guilty, and whose lack of response both before and after his trial leads to the biggest guilt.

Williams has already created some of the most indelible character portrayals even among a medium and era that has been better than it ever has for African-American actors, something that probably wouldn’t have happened without Omar. I can’t wait to see what come next for him. I’m hoping an Emmy finally comes, but as Omar would put it, ‘the game is the game’.

Regina King

Started the Decade A Cop, Ended It A Superhero

Regina King was a good actress in her early years, who couldn’t find roles worthy of her. So, like so many other great African-American actresses would – Taraj P. Henson, Kerry Washington, and Viola Davis – she went to TV. And she’s never had to look for work for long since.

She began the decade as an LA detective on the critically acclaimed series Southland, a show that NBC dumped and TNT picked up for four seasons afterward. But network TV would launch her to her greatest heights. In the incredible limited series American Crime, the anthology series that was the closest thing network TV ever had to The Wire, she was by far its biggest star. Whether as the Muslim sister of an accused murderer, the middle-class parent of a teenage star accused of a homosexual rape, or a social worker trying to rescued young people from human trafficking, she made every role her own, and infused them with a humanity that could not be suppressed. She deservedly won two Supporting Actress Emmys for her work on that series

Her next work was on Seven Seconds, a Netflix original series about a racially charged police shooting and the aftermath. The series was cancelled after one season, but her work didn’t go unnoticed: she won another Emmy, this time for Best Actress in a Limited Series..

While she was working on American Crime, she took on the role of a troubled mother of a disappeared family living in a small town that wasn’t affected by the Departure on The Leftovers. Her part was small, but it was indelible to Damon Lindelof, who has cast her as Angela, the cop/superhero at the center of Watchmen. And in between, she finally won an Oscar.

King is one of the great actresses I’ve ever seen in any medium. She has a vitality and a sexuality that doesn’t seem to have left her even as she enters her fifties. I already know there’s nothing she can’t play. And even if Watchmen is, as Lindelof has suggested, a one season series, I know that won’t stop this actress, who is definitely more powerful than a locomotive.

Katie Stevens

Normally They’re Not This Great, This Soon

It may seem a little soon to call an actress who hasn’t even reached 27 yet one of the greatest of this decade, even though this is one that has been kind to a lot of younger and talented actors. But Stevens in particular has already revealed that she may be in a once in a generation talent.

In 2014, the world became aware of her on the incredible MTV series Faking It. An astonishing piece of work, Stevens and Rita Volk played Karma and Amy, a pair of bestie teenagers in Austin who find themselves impersonating lesbians in order to try and become popular in their high school run by outsiders. Though the entire cast was outstanding, Stevens’ work as Karma, a girl who found herself in a bizarre triangle between her, Karma and Leon was fascinating because she was always at the center of it. Alas, the series’ premature cancellation after three seasons left everything unresolved, and a gaping hole in my heart.

But Stevens landed on her feet, on an even more brilliant series, Freeform’s The Bold Type. Playing Jane, the journalist at the fashion magazine Scarlet, she has gone through some of the deeper struggle of any of the characters, having to deal with a health issue that could damage any chance of being a mother. Again, all of the characters – especially the two other female leads – are outstanding, and it is credit to Stevens that she has landed on the series that Sex and the City and Girls tried to be, but never came close to pulling off.

Stevens is a hell of a find, and since it looks like The Bold Type could run for a while, there’s no chance she’ll be out of work soon. But I can’t wait to see where she lands next.

Mini I'd Like To... Binge: Mrs. Fletcher Review

Kathryn Hahn has always been one of the hardest actresses to quantify. Beautiful without being conventionally sexy, tall and with a brash voice, she has thrived best within the new Golden Age, particularly considering her gift (which anyone who saw the Bad Moms franchise well know) to be brash enough for a laugh. I particularly admired her work as Raquel, the perpetually put upon rabbi at the center of Transparent, the constantly beleaguered political consultant in Parks and Recreation, and the obsessed lover at the center of the gone-too-soon I Love Dick. Now, for what seems to be the first time, she is the lead at the center of one of the most remarkable limited series of the year, Mrs. Fletcher.

The series is at the center of a best-selling Tom Perotta novel, a writer who may been the source of some truly brilliant adaptations. Alexander Payne’s Election is regarded as a classic, and I’ve always found his Little Children one of the more undervalued films ever made. Nor he is a stranger to bringing his own work to TV: The Leftovers was one of the most incredible accomplishments of the last few years.  So it makes sense that he should choose to bring another, smaller yet no less detailed work to TV.  Hahn plays the title role, a woman who spends her days work at an elder care center, whose husband left her and is raising an autistic child with his new wife, and who seems to have a real blindspot about her son Brendan (Jackson White), a student who seems to have cruised through high school, who clearly has a streak as a bully, and given his talk when having sex, is a misogynist in the making. He really seems unequipped to handle even the most lack state college (his meeting with his adviser shows he has little imagination) and doesn’t seem to care much about leaving his own mother.

Much of the first episodes are about Eve’s inability to fill her empty nest. She tries to go to a continuing education class where she seems unable to express her fears, and his reluctant to go on a date. But her real problems begin when she Googles  the word ‘MILF’ and begins to enter a bizarre and hysterical obsession with a very particular kind of internet porn that very quickly begins to infiltrate her deal with her life.

Mrs. Fletcher is a limited series unlike many of the Golden Age. Whereas most of them try to pack so much information into what seems to be nine or ten hours, Perotta and his staff have taken the term more literally and are satisfied with seven half-hour segments. Yet there is very little terseness or lack of detail. We see Hahn dealing with an issue of an elderly patient constantly caught masturbating in public (Bill Raymond, one of the more undervalued actors in TV) and the lack of sympathy his son seems to have to what he has done compared to Eve’s genuine pain at having to release him. We see her eventual date going badly because she sees all the fellow travelers that she doesn’t want to be a part of.

Unlike so many literary adaptations on TV, I actually read the novel well before an adaptation is in the works and therefore have an idea where it’s going. I know that Brendan is going to have increasing difficulties adjusting to his new world, and its going to lead to something he is not equipped to deal with. I know that Julian (Owen Teague) a young man we see him bully in the premiere has been traumatized so badly he had to go on medication, is going to get to a relationship of his own with Eve. I know that there will be an increased relationship with Margo, the head of the class is Eve is taken. I even know how it ends.

All of this makes for a very awkward comedy, but it’s the kind of work that Hahn has been working in and towards her whole life. It may be an exaggeration to say that for her this is a role she was born to play, but there have been scenes in the past two episodes that I can’t imagine anyone other than Hahn being able to pull off. Perotta has no plans so far to turn Mrs. Fletcher into a regular series, but then again, there’s no one more familiar than he is than taking your source material and bringing it into groundbreaking territory. For now, though, I’ll just revel in the bizarre laughs that come from the world Mrs. Fletcher – the series and the actress – live in.

My score: 4.25 stars.