What was your favourite and least favourite TV drama or comedy of 2011? Donal O’Donoghue bags his brace.
The Best?
There were a number of contenders for the year’s best TV drama.
Those with long enough memories rated Love/Hate as the greatest RTÉ drama since Strumpet City. Certainly the second season was a little cracker: a brilliantly staged ensemble piece that nodded towards HBO (The Sopranos, The Wire and so on) as it chronicled the nefarious doings and undoings of Dublin gangsters.
The other home-grown crime drama that impressed was the gritty TG4 thriller, corp+anam, about a maverick journalist (a superb performance by Diarmaid de Faoite) who sticks his nose into some very nasty cases. It was trumpeted as a HBO show as gaeilge and in truth that was not far off the mark.
The BBC’s Luther had Idris Elba as a superhuman cop chasing a deranged killer (suspend disbelief and you were OK) and there was the slick and stylish US spin-off of the quirky and substantial Danish drama, The Killing. On other side of the wardrobe was the phenomenally popular Downton Abbey. The thing is I gave up on period drama when Hudson left Upstairs, Downstairs. And anyway viewers she married him so where’s the thrill in that?
For me the drama of 2011 came from a much earlier era – when costumes were just as fancy – but table manners were rather rougher.
Game of Thrones was billed as Lord of the Rings for grown-ups. And I loved it. Bloody, brutal and believable (trickier than you might think as anyone who has watched The Tudors will know), this epic fantasy drama was based on the best-selling novels of George R R Martin (also one of the show’s three screenwriters).
It had a starry cast (Sean Bean, Mark Addy, Aidan Gillen, Peter Dinklage) but unlike say, Mad Dogs (Philip Glenister, Hohn Simm etc), there was substance here to back up the wattage. The script was mean and lean and the scheming would knock the aforementioned Henry Tudor into the ha’penny place: you daren’t turn your back on Game of Thrones or you just might become a pin cushion.
Bean played the grizzled and weary Ned Stark, Lord of Winterfell and the King’s Hand (or lieutenant) while Addy portrayed the portly and Rabelasian King Robert: a one-time warrior now gone to seed. Now we're facing enemies from without and within as the seven families of the land of Westeros vied for ultimate control of the lands.
It’s all hokum but done with style and savvy and played by a superb cast including Dinklage as a little man but a born survivor; and Aidan Gillen (who played the ganglord John Boy in Love/Hate is even better here as a cunning and corrupt courtier).
Over ten irresistible episodes in which the closing sequence left you salivating for the next instalment, you are dropped into a world of savagery where good men battled bad. But beyond their cut and thrust something even more deadly is stirring in the frozen north: a nightmare from which no one might awake.
The good news is that season two – again shot on location in Northern Ireland and Malta - is due in early 2012.
The Worst?
For a guy who began the year with a career high (The Golden Globes), Ricky Gervais wrapped up 2011 with the first turkey of his career, the ironically-titled Life’s Too Short. Maybe it was not the worst drama of 2011 but it was easily the most disappointing. After The Office and Extras we expected something special: or at least on a par. Instead we got a self-indulgent car crash.
The skinny plot was the by now familiar Gervais-Stephen Merchant mockumentary schtick: a social comedy about a ego (Warwick Davis, the little man who played an Ewok in Return of the Jedi) and his encounters with famous people (oh look there’s Johnny Depp, Liam Neeson, Sting and so on). We’d seen it all before with the star-studded Extras but that show poked a sharp stick at Hollywood celebrity and was smart and funny. This was smug and excruciating - and not in the way that Merchant or Gervais would have intended: and the only pointing it did was at itself.
The first episode had one genuine laugh – that was when Liam Neeson popped into Gervais’s office to make a pitch for himself as a comic actor. After that the laughs got even thinner! The episode with Johnny Depp, whom Gervais had brilliantly ripped into celebrity confetti at the Golden Globes, was as painful and pointless as Warwick Davis’ knowing looks at the camera
The penultimate episode in which a slack-jawed Cat Deeley imitated a wall-flower at a party was the nadir. I still don’t know whether she was acting or just stunned by the whole shebang. The audience voted with their remotes as the ratings crashed during its seven week run. Worryingly though Gervais was tweeting before Christmas about a second series.
C’mon Ricky life’s too short.
