I love TV memes! I found this one today. First up:

1. A show that never should have been canceled.



This was such a great show. Oh, it wasn't perfect, and there were moments and characters that weren't my fave, but by and large it delivered, week after week. Helmed by an incredibly strong female protagonist, this show wasn't afraid to change up its premise, explore the kinds of storytelling you don't normally see with genre TV, and take characters to darker places than they usually go. It was smart, inventive, fun - awesome, in a word. I still miss it.

The meme in its entirety, which I'm putting here for reference, and also if anyone else wants to do it.

Day 01 - A show that never should have been canceled.
Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching.
Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season).
Day 04 - Your favorite show ever.
Day 05 - A show you hate.
Day 06 - Favorite episode of your favorite TV show.
Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show.
Day 08 - A show everyone should watch.
Day 09 - Best scene ever.
Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving.
Day 11 - A show that disappointed you.
Day 12 - An episode you've watched more than 5 times.
Day 13 - Favorite childhood show.
Day 14 - Favorite male character.
Day 15 - Favorite female character.
Day 16 - Your guilty pleasure show.
Day 17 - Favorite mini series.
Day 18 - Favorite title sequence.
Day 19 - Best TV show cast.
Day 20 - Favorite kiss.
Day 21 - Favorite ship.
Day 22 - Favorite series finale.
Day 23 - Most annoying character.
Day 24 - Best quote.
Day 25 - A show you plan on watching (old or new).
Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale.
Day 27 - Best pilot episode.
Day 28 - First TV show obsession.
Day 29 - Current TV show obsession.
Day 30 - Saddest character death.

This took a lot of time. Not so much with the Photoshop or even with the write-ups, but with finding episode-specific pictures and videos on YouTube, for which I was almost entirely successful (one I couldn't embed, which kind of threw off my overall plan, but it's no big). Here goes!

Favorite Episodes of Television 2009

10. Modern Family - “Run For Your Wife”



I started watching this show because Eric Stonestreet, who plays Cameron, went to my high school, although he graduated six years before I showed up. But it’s a great sitcom all around - I’ve enjoyed it more than Glee (blasphemy!). Funny, entertaining and with characters that - and this is sometimes rare in TV - I actually like. The show was funny before this sixth episode, but this to me felt like when everything really clicked into gear.



9. Star Trek - “Balance of Terror”



In which we first meet the Romulans. The original series is often can be campy, but this episode is deadly serious and tense; I read a review that likened it to a Cold War submarine movie, which is dead-on. Everyone - the actors, the writer, the director - brought their A-game.



8. Deadwood - “Sold Under Sin”



I feel like the appropriate level of praise I could bestow upon Deadwood would be taken as hyperbole, but it’s a fact that the level of quality in every aspect of the show is unlike most else in TV.



7. Big Love - “Come, Ye Saints”



The very large Henrickson family takes a cross-country trip, visiting the most important locations in the history of the Mormon religion as they do so. As one often sees in film, traveling lends an opportunity to strip characters down and allows them self-reflection in a way that can be difficult when trammeled in by their day-to-day lives. A beautiful, heart-breaking episode.



6. Fringe - “Bound”



I didn’t catch Fringe when it started. Then Alyssa wrote an incredibly scathing review of the second episode (scroll down to September 17) and I figured I’d not waste my time. Then, about three months ago, I saw this gif somewhere:



And I was like, I absolutely have to watch this show. So I checked it out from the library, and…this is one of those things where Alyssa and I will just have to disagree, because I love this show. No, the science isn’t real and it doesn’t make any sense, but I love the floating location tags, I love the characters and the actors who play them, I love the mood and the music and the funny. I picked this episode not just because it’s around when the show really started finding its feet - as well as defining its internal mythology - in season one, but also because of what came before it. The episode before ended in a cliffhanger as FBI agent Olivia Dunham was abducted. A lot of shows would have had that female character in peril all hour, finally to be rescued by a man. This show? Olivia rescued her own damn self before the opening credits. Awesome.



5. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles - “Self Made Man”



Cameron is a Terminator assigned to protect John Connor. Terminators don’t sleep. So what does Cameron do every night? That’s the premise of this episode. What I loved about this show was how well it was able to expand from its basic premise, which we all know from the films, to create its own intricate and unique universe. While there were a lot of pure killing machines on the show, Cameron wasn’t the only Terminator to be a character in her own right, and watching her investigate with the dogged determination only a computer mind can bring to bear while being forced to interact with illogical humans made her one of my all-time favorite characters.



4. Dollhouse - “Belonging”



There are a lot of Whedon fans who seem to grudgingly watch this show, out of loyalty it seems, who don’t seem to actually enjoy it. It’s pretty common, when reading message boards or blogs about it, to see more complaints than anything else. Which I don’t get. It started off a little wobbly but don’t most shows? I’m very sad it’s been canceled, especially since the second season has brought us stellar episodes like this one, exploring the ramifications of the Dollhouse and how the dolls ended up there in the first place. Visually, this is one of the most stunning thus far. NB: This episode was directed by Jonathan Frakes.



3. Father Ted - “The Passion of Saint Tibulus”



Bishop Brennan asks Father Ted and Father Dougal, priests who have essentially been exiled because of their incompetence to tiny and remote Craggy Island off the coast of Ireland, to boycott a film that the Church has condemned. A film that no one on the island was planning on watching until the Fathers handcuffed themselves in front of the theater with ridiculous signs. I had to pause this episode three times because I was laughing too hard to live.

Video here - I couldn’t find one with embedding enabled. :(

2. Star Trek: The Next Generation - “Cause and Effect”



It’s a fairly straightforward SF premise, really: the Enterprise gets stuck in a time loop that keeps repeating itself, and must figure out how to get out and save the ship. The structure of the episode could have made it even more boring: each act repeats itself, with slight changes as the crew figures out what’s going on, but the basic action is the same. It’s also a bottle episode, so no big battles or special effects. It ends up being so fantastically fabulous that I have to give a lot of the credit to the director: that’s right, Jonathan Frakes! When you’ve got two episodes in my top ten, you’re doing something right.

I also should point out that I made nine icons from this episode. Nine. That means there was some prime Beverly Crusher action going on in here, and you know how I feel about that.



1. Battlestar Galactica - “The Oath” / “Blood on the Scales”



Okay, two episodes, but how could I really pick one? I’m not sure what I need to say about this two-parter. Action, tension, romance, lots of killing and running and even crawling the length of the ship. Roslin and Balter stuck somewhere together, bitching at each other. Starbuck holding her guns in a stupid, improbable way yet still being badass. The music when everyone joins Adama in the corridor. “I am coming for all of you!” Perfection.

The last three days I've watched eight episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and have one left to go before I'm caught up for the season finale this Friday. I normally don't burn through TV like that, even when it's a show I really like a lot. The only other time I've done that was when I caught up with BSG mid-S2, when I started watching.

I don't necessarily want to compare TSCC too much to BSG because it's not as good a show; what is, though? But in a few ways, there are some similarities. Obviously, they both raise the questions of artificial life, how and when and if it becomes sentient, morality, if a machine can overcome its programming, etc. Both shows could have been Cylon/Terminator Battle of the Week, and for the most part didn't take that easy route. And both shows have flawed protagonists, who don't always make the right choice, who have the entirety of humanity depending on them; the stresses and pressures of that are what generate a lot of the drama, and not techno-whatsits and the like.

I've had a lot of plots and threads I've liked, but I'm going to share with you my single favorite scene from this season; all you need to know is that John Henry is an AI who has been loaded into a deprogrammed Terminator body, and Mr. Ellison has been hired to teach him ethics.



ETA: My number-one favorite Terminator scene, from S1. Cameron, a Terminator, went undercover and took ballet classes, as the teacher's brother had bought a computer system that would go on to create SkyNet. It's driven home in the episode that she isn't a human, she's a machine, her decisions to protect the mission at all costs end up costing human lives. Sarah's VO, which you hear the very end of here, basically says, when the machines learn how to value human life and have souls and all that, they won't need to kill us, they'll be us. (Brian Austin Green, who you see at the end, hates working with "metal" and has tried to convince everyone that she'll eventually end up turning on them, and that she's ultimately evil.) SUMMMMERRRRR.