ESQUIRE's HBO List: All That's Wrong

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I like making “best of” and “worst of” lists. I think all critics do and, of all of my writing gigs, I have been paid the most for reviewing films and television series. I got kind of tickled when a March article from Esquire was being shared recently on social media, ranking the top series of HBO, the overall front-runner of the best television in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The list, on the other hand, is a hot mess. Compiled by Justin Kirkland, Adrienne Westenfield, and Josh Rosenberg, there is so much wrong with it, I had to voice my concerns. I know the list is the opinion of three people and not much to be worked up about, but it’s 2025—we’re all worked up about something.

The criteria for the list is absurd, mixing anthology series, mini-series, and full series together. A big mistake because The Jinx (number 41 on the list) would be number one on a list of documentary series. Actually, it shouldn’t be 41 on any list. There is also a bevvy of shows still on the air that appear, which is another absurdity as how can one know they are great series when we have no idea how they were resolved. An ending is as important as a beginning, even a controversial one like The Sopranos’. Oh, and by the way, Sopranos is number two. So, believe me, you can’t trust Esquire on this one. Here are some observations from their “list.”

Right from the beginning, HBO has been much more successful at dramas than comedies. While they are a premium cable network and can get away with more edgy comedy, the results are not always endearing. Number 50 on the list is Entourage, 39 is Ballers, you get the idea. Yeah, Arliss is not on the list, but those shows were just as grating. While it is appropriate they are low on the list, they do not belong on the list at all. Fifty is the wrong number. If brought to 25, Esquire would have had something. That being said, the best comedies—Silicon Valley, Flight of the Concords, and Curb Your Enthusiasm—are appropriately closer to the top, but Silicon deserved a higher status than 36.

Then, there are just downright terrible shows. True Blood is 49, Westworld is 42, The Newsroom at 26, Boardwalk Empire is 22. There are dozens of things wrong with these shows—three are pretentious (an appropriate designation for many of HBO’s shows, unfortunately—including the number 15 slot, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver) and the other, True Blood, is Alan Ball’s worst work. His greatest work, the series Six Feet Under appears at number 17—a travesty as it is one of the most remarkable narrative series ever created.

Then, there are the miniseries. The authors of the article wish you to believe number 38, The Night Of, is some lost classic. It is not. Like all prison shows and movies, once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Prison life is dull and restrictive and fairly planned out. Not much excitement there. Up from that, at number 37, are the atrocious series The Young Pope and The New Pope, both of which make Conclave look like a masterpiece. Chernobyl and Band of Brothers are at the top of the miniseries on the list, but I still think it’s unfair to lump these in with the dramatic series of three seasons or more.

I have already discussed Euphoria once on the blog. The writers of the list apparently think it is today’s answer to Kids or Skins, but that film and series, respectively, are alive and vibrant, horrifying and gripping. Euphoria gives us the horrifying alone. And that does not a great series make.

I have other quibbles. True Detective ranks at 13 and that’s probably deserved, since it never lived up to its phenomenal first season; so, it deserves a slot, but the fact that it’s only a hair higher on the list than The White Lotus, a niche anthology series without a thought in its head, is a shame. Game of Thrones, another work that started out well and then crashed and burned, lands at number nine. So, let’s talk about “the best.”

It was probably always assumed The Wire and The Sopranos would vie for the top spot. In these overly political times, The Wire received number one. A remarkable show in its first seasons, it petered out in the last one in spectacular fashion, ruining everything that had come before. But, it’s a take on politics (for the most part) and so it gets the top spot in this day and age. It doesn’t take a genius to know it should have gone to The Sopranos, bested only by Twin Peaks and Six Feet Under as the greatest masterpieces of television.

But, even then, where’s Big Love? What’s wrong with Esquire? Do you agree or disagree? Comment below!

Throwback: The Theatre and the Blues

This essay, collected in Everyone Else is Wrong (And You Know It), reflected a kind of artistic manifesto for myself circa the mid-2000s I find it interesting to read periodically as I contine to navigate my writing life. Happy reading!

Theatre has a lot in common with blues music. That is because both forms come out of one singular human endeavor. They may be nothing like each other, but they are oddly and inextricably linked. I shall explain this, but first—think about the blues for a second. Why would anyone on earth want to dress up, pay a cover fee, go out in public and sit with other people to listen to music called "the blues?" Similarly, I suppose, one could ask why we pay money, dress up, and go to the theatre to see plays that will bum us out?

The reason we do this is because both forms come out of the human impetus to share the experience of humanity with other humans. Blues musicians and the great playwrights understand as well as any other human the pangs of joy, hope, and faith that can occasionally permeate this world. But, in the end, their art forms do not let them deny the experience of pain, loss, and death from which the world is also made. These thoughts do not depress them because they face them continually. I suppose, in this regard, I do not put Sophokles and Shakespeare on any different plain than John Lee Hooker. All these great men and women understood why their art forms existed.

News of the workshop production of one of my most recent plays had reached the ears of a casual acquaintance—someone whom I had met briefly through a friend. My friend had explained to this person that my play was a tragedy. This word is very frightening to people nowadays. Some are frightened by its connotation, others are frightened because if you say you've written a tragedy, you're obviously pretentious. This acquaintance, with fatuous heirs and a slick smile, told me to make sure I threw a little hope in there—no one likes to go to a play and be upset at the end of it. I thought about this for a long time. When he told me this, I simply smiled and moved on. Later, it made me angry. Someone who obviously has no idea about how hard one works to create human drama had just told me my business and had done so in a way that stepped on the integrity of what I've worked half my life trying to do. Even later, it depressed me. This person obviously had no idea why my art form even exists.

I suppose he was right, though. This is a world, after all, in which everyone is obsessed with happy endings—works that explore peace, joy, harmony, hope, etc. In doing that, though, we've lost sight of one of the most fundamental reasons why drama exists. Drama is not, as people might have you believe, there to make you smile or give you hope. We live in a world where you can carry around a iPod that will blast "Walking on Sunshine" in your ear or show you last week's episode of Ugly Betty as you're doing the nominal things of the day. Music and the dramatic form can be experienced anywhere, at any time and, more than likely, you're not going to carry around Requiem for a Dream on your portable player.

But, theatre, music—the great art forms—understand we share all the experiences of human life. Not just the good times, but the bum times as well. Drama, in fact, came out of the need to confront the gods. It came out of the need to make sense of this world. It is no different now. We are essentially very lonely people walking around a very confusing planet. And we are trying to make sense of it. We have false senses of ourselves, hopes, ambitions, faux confidence. We keep trying variations of ourselves on other people. Most often, they don't work. And we keep on changing, rearranging. Through this experience, there are many stories. Stories of love and hope, yes. Also, stories of family, children, death. It is from this impetus that we gather together to represent life in an arena and share close contact with people who will watch us. Together, we hope this will uplift us all by the fact that we've gotten together and explored an issue, told a story, shared an experience. This experience can be the joy of love in the face of hardship in Much Ado About Nothing. Or it can be the experience of Waiting for Godot watching Estragon and Vladimir as they have only each other. Suddenly, we look around and we realize we (the audience) also have only each other. A connection is made. An experience shared.

Onstage, a blues musician tells an old, old story. A story of someone who had a wife and lost her. The pained expression on his face, the strains of the weeping guitar go to our very souls and make us ache. We've all been there—in some way. The experience of life is often having something and then having had it taken away. Does the song leave you with a smile? No, it leaves you with something better. The knowledge that there are other people who've been through exactly what you've been through.

Tragedy is similar. Do you think the Greeks had any more interest in getting together and getting upset watching a story as we do now? Of course not. But they knew they would learn when they did this. They were not afraid—as Shakespeare's generation was not afraid—to face the realities of our existence, to let the poet speak for our hardships and troubles as well as our peace.

I recently got into an argument with a very passionate, very religious person who simply did not see in any hope or holiness in my most recent play—The Summer Bobby(ie) Lee Turner Loved Me—the one that experienced a little-seen workshop production this last March. He felt like having something to do with my play impeded upon his Christian integrity because I had not allowed for any hope to shine through at the end of the work. I stood up for myself. I had to. I'll admit—the play is challenging. It is bleak. And no, there is not a clearly defined hope inherent in the script. I explained to him my purposes behind the writing of it. I explained to him that I felt the hope was that, through the allegory of my main character's consistent mistakes and ultimate demise, that it would challenge the audience to search within themselves to find the hope. After all, when you've hit rock-bottom, there is nowhere to look but up. I told him he was right—there was not hope in the text. The hope is that people come, listen to mine and the actors' words, open themselves up to the experience of human sharing—the truth, the honesty of the event. And the hope is, when they leave, they will be left to investigate themselves as deeply as I have had to. And as we all must.

I explained to him I was sympathetic to his religious conundrum. I've been there before. I have, at other times in my life, experienced not wanting to do something for spiritual reasons. And had I believed my friend was right in his decision to excise himself from my work, I would have continued with this sympathy. But I told him the real tragedy was that his integrity as an artist and as a human being was the thing being tarnished by him denying himself the experience of something that is truthful. I do not say this because I think my work is all that great. My work is what it is. You can take it or leave it. I said this because I'm sure I was right.

I asked him what he thought the purpose of theatre is. He answered that it was to show God. While this has its place, one can’t fully agree. The experience of theatre came out of, again, us being able to try and make sense out of this cockeyed existence that God has given us. That is the beauty of what we do. That is the hope. That is the purpose of living—as an artist or otherwise. And I can't tell you how much we must stand up for this. I suppose my friend must've thought my work was harming him. I can't tell you how much his words harmed me. And I will make sure I spend my life fighting for the right to tell the truth, to share this experience. Because, without you people, who I lean on and who read my work and listen, there is no me. There are no stories without each other. And without each other to lean on, there is no story.

DANGER THEATRE

In the beginning, there were three television channels and, when I came around, we were all still pretending there were. Even though I grew up with nearly one hundred channels in the days of basic cable, one always went back to NBC, CBS, and ABC for the real entertainment.

In the early 1990s, sitcoms were still prominent and 24-hour news was just beginning to be taken seriously (mostly due to the first Gulf War), so those three acronyms were taken much more seriously than there are now.

Also, in the early ‘90s, there was a fourth, Dupont-style television channel which tried, without much success, to compete. FOX offered late-night talk shows, sitcoms, and the like. They just weren’t very good. But, because the network was starving for ideas, I would be lying if some of the shows that came out of that period weren’t a lot of fun and, sometimes, remarkable.

FOX greenlit (and abruptly cancelled) the outstanding hour-long thriller Profit, one of the first shows to reflect Twin Peaks’ call for more engaging television. A cross between American Psycho and a procedural, Profit was so ahead of its time, it barely got seen before it was released on DVD many years later. FOX also took over for the second season of Al Jean and Mike Reiss’ (then reviled, now beloved) The Critic. These were relatively classy shows. The one I’m writing about today was downright stupid—and that was the point.

In the summer of 1993, FOX flung a comedy anthology series against the wall to see if it would stick. It lasted seven episodes, but it was stuck in my mind forever until I rediscovered it on Youtube nearly a decade later.

The show was called Danger Theatre, a slapstick comedy, Airplane!-style, that was presented by Robert Vaughn (best known for The Towering Inferno). Created by Penelope Spheeris, Danger Theatre featured three “series”—Tropical Punch, a parody of Hawaii Five-O with Adam West, 357 Marina del Rey, a parody of Surfside Six with Todd Field and, most famously, The Searcher, a Renegade parody featuring Diedrich Bader. The Searcher was clearly the “hit” of the cult show, beginning every episode and eventually taking over full half hours itself. Bader’s deadpan style, deep sonorous voice, and comic timing were (and are) perection. The humor of the show was clearly aimed at boys under eleven and I was—and I loved it.

The SEARCHER!

Spheeris originally came to prominence with her series of documentaries on punk rock, The Decline of Western Civilization. With her narrative film, career, however, she specialized almost exclusively on goofy comedy, most famously Wayne’s World and film versions of The Little Rascals and The Beverly Hillbillies. Danger Theatre was an outgrowth of this kind of humor—juvenile and sophomoric, yes, but also a self-aware show that made fun of its own network, its lack of a budget, and exposed the inherent banality of the era of Knight Rider and Miami Vice.

The Searcher was created by Robert Wolterstorff (who, with Mike Scott and Pheeris) also “created” the other two segments, 357 Marina del Rey being a last-minute replacement for Tropical Punch, which is endearing now because of West, but was never as funny as The Searcher. Each episode began with the Searcher riding into town on his hog, solving crimes and being beat up more than Super Dave Osborne.

Watching these shows again, which were a hit when they were aired in the United Kingdom, I realized they were also full of sexual innuendo completely lost on me as a child. So much the better. Like other shows of the ‘90s, Animaniacs coming to mind most strongly, the combination of something for the older ones and something for the younger ones was prominent and appreciated.

Today, Danger Theatre would be a late-night animated show on Adult Swim. The humor would probably have been sharper, but I doubt it would be as fun. The entire series can be watched on Youtube.

Watch it before it's gone. And it's gone.