Atlantic contributors and staffers pick their favorite moments on Mad Men, Louie, New Girl, and more from the past year in TV.
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Girls: "All Adventurous Women Do"
There was so much groaning over the line from Girls’s pilot episode, in which Lena Dunham’s Hannah says, “I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice of a generation.”
Some thought the warts-and-all approach Dunham used to portray the often ugly lives of four broke post-grads living in New York was refreshing, modern, and, yes, generation-defining. Others thought her to be crass, delusional, and unoriginal. Yet in “All Adventurous Women Do,” Girls comes closest to fulfilling that pilot-episode prophecy. Or, at least, it comes closest to being that Next Great Comedy Series that the month of hype leading up to its premiere promised it would be.
When Hannah discovers she has HPV, it serves as the impetus for all of the show’s women to examine their relationship with sex. Hannah cringe-inducingly Googles “stuff that gets around the sides of condoms,” coming to terms with her own embarrassing ignorance that—despite being a modern, sexual woman in the age of information—she’s still not certain how STDs are transmitted.
Marnie faces her inability to be frank about sex when, instead of being repulsed by a sexually forward colleague, she’s turned on by it. Upon learning that Hannah has HPV, Shoshana is unabashedly jealous because, as a virgin, she’s not exciting enough to have such drama in her life.
Finally, Jessa shrugs at the whole hullabaloo over having a STD: “All adventurous women do.”
There are brilliantly blunt cultural observations here, some exceptional one-liners throughout the episode, and perhaps the clearest window yet into Dunham’s “generation” and how they think. As Hannah stews for minutes, editing and rewriting a tweet, the camera zooms in to reveal her number of Twitter followers: a mere 24.
Where to watch it: HBO Go
—Kevin Fallon, contributor
Mad Men: "Far Away Places"
Mad Men’s fifth season was probably the series' most polarizing, but I’m in the camp that thinks it was the show's all-time best.
That’s due in no small part to rich, satisfying episodes like “Far Away Places.” It divides its time evenly between Peggy, Roger, and Don, as each character spends an eventful day away from the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce office. (Series creator Matt Weiner said that the episode was inspired by “anthologized French films” that tell several disconnected stories.)
Peggy fights with her boyfriend and endures a terrible pitch meeting before bonding with strange new coworker Ginsberg; Roger takes LSD for the first time, which leads him to reevaluate his marriage to Jane; and Don takes Megan on an ill-fated trip to a Howard Johnson’s motel, where a fight over sherbet brings the simmering tensions of their marriage to a boil.
The formal audacity “Far Away Places,” is impressive on its own, and ample credit also belongs to director Scott Hornbacher, who brings an assured touch to potentially tricky scenes like Roger’s LSD trip. But the bulk of the praise belongs to writers Semi Chellas and Matt Weiner, who managed to write three stories that pack enormous emotional punch individually—and become even more powerful when taken together.
Where you can watch: Amazon
—Scott Meslow, contributor
Homeland: "Q&A"
To endure its half-baked plot twists and crimes against plausibility, some viewers have come to watch Homeland as a soap opera: self-consciously overblown, and all about impossible romance.
That works well enough. By midway through the second season, the audience has come to consider the greatest sin committed by Nicholas Brody, a soldier of questionable loyalties and certainly no regard for the law, to be his gas-lighting of CIA agent Carrie Mathison. His deception landed her in electroshock therapy. But she still loves him. Previously, on As the World Turns…
But you can also think of the show as a high-minded, reality-be-damned test of abstract principles taken to their extreme. Trauma transforms people; terrorism is personal; lies require more lies; war is really about innocence—these are the big arguments Homeland wants to make. Even when a character is dispatched on an improbable mission (involving, say, the remote control for a national leader's pacemaker), the shows' guiding ideas stay in the frame long after sanity leaves it.
"Q&A" is a tour de force as seen through both these prisms. Its centerpiece is Mathison's interrogation of Brody, during which Claire Danes and Damien Lewis get a chance to prove their worthiness for best-acting Emmys. We'd seen Danes's mercurial, electrifying vulnerability before, but we'd never seen Lewis melt convincingly from defiant deceiver to abject confessor like this.
More impressive, though, is that the argument Mathison makes in the interrogation room works—not just on Brody, but on us. She says things no one has said to him before: That his personal vendetta won't be solved by violence. That he knows the difference between war and terrorism. That Abu Nazir has screwed up his mind. And that, most of all, it would be nice to just stop lying.
Go ahead and roll your eyes at the other big moments of the episode: Peter Quinn's impulsive black-room move and the two teenagers' hapless nighttime drive. But think about what those events have to do with Mathison's questions to Brody about guilt and innocence, and they become, at least, a little more interesting.
Where to watch it: On Demand or on Showtime Anytime
–Spencer Kornhaber, associate editor
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