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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment