David Foster notes the strengths of the series and the mini-series versus the feature film and names five recent favorites:
Once an Eagle, based on the novel of the same name, traces the careers and personal lives of two American army officers–men of very different characters–through both world wars. Sam Elliot stars as the courageous and compassionate Sam Damon; Cliff Potts is the manipulative careerist Courtney Massengale. The series was originally televised in 1976 and has only recently been made available in DVD format.
The Awakening Land, a 1978 mini-series adapted from Conrad Richter’s trilogy (The Trees–The Fields–The Town) tells the story of a backwoods family from Pennsylvania which moves to what was then the wild and unsettled territory of Ohio. Elizabeth Montgomery is the uneducated but intelligent Sayward Luckett; Hal Holbrook is Portius Wheeler, the iconoclastic lawyer she marries. This series was also made in the late 1970s.
Dresden, released originally for German television as a two-part mini-series, centers around a love affair in the doomed city. I reviewed this film here. Felicitas Woll is Anna Mauth, a nurse in a Dresden hospital; John Light is Robert Newman, a pilot with RAF Bomber Command.
The Wire, broadcast from 2002-2008, begins as a cops-versus-drug-dealers story set in Baltimore, but soon expands to encompass the Port of Baltimore and the relevant labor union, city politicians, the media, and the public schools. Some critics have called this the greatest television series ever made. Many great performances, including Michael Williams as Omar Little, who specializes in the dangerous trade of robbing drug dealers, Chris Bauer as union leader Frank Sobotka, and Aiden Gillen as the ambitious politician Tommy Carcetti.
Friday Night Lights is about a high-school football coach, his family, the players and other students, and their football-loving Texas town. Absolutely outstanding; I just finished it and was sorry to see it end. We’ve previously discussed on this blog the shortage of novels and films dealing realistically with work–this series is very much about work, both the coach’s job and that of his wife, a school counselor and principal. And while coach Eric Taylor’s job is all about football, the difficulties and rewards of his work will resonate with anyone involved in education or in management.
Erin O’Connor, while agreeing that the show is great on work, notes that “It’s also wonderful on what it is to actually be an adult — and on the constant challenge of making responsible decisions. We really don’t see that dramatized much at all, preferring to watch the fascinations of dysfunction in our TV dramas (The Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men, etc.). I also love the portrait of the Taylors’ marriage, and the way the show takes adolescence so seriously. There is something so searching about the show, and yet it never gets bogged down.”
I’ve been meaning to watch The Wire, past the first season, for a long time.
Naturally I currently recommend HBO’s Game of Thrones.
This was a frustrating post, since it’s hard to find the older series.
I think The Wire is over-rated (season 3 is fantastic, 1 is great, the rest are not). I loved Friday Night Lights too.
Most of the HBO series are worth watching.
It may be time to spring for a Netflix subscription.
The wife and I are watching True Blood right now — about half-way through season 3. The first season was mediocre, but showed promise. It’s gotten better as it has gone along, and I’d have to say that season 3 is pretty compelling.
HBO prematurely axed my two favorite of their series — Deadwood and Carnivale. Bastards. The Wire I’ll get to someday, and maybe The Sopranos. Maybe. I’m interested in Game of Thrones — I really, really wish I could buy a subscription to just HBO and watch their stuff over the internets, because I don’t want to pay $70 a month to watch a couple movies and shows on one channel.
AMC had a really good series last Fall, The Walking Dead. It’ll be back for season 2 next fall.
That does raise an interesting question: Just how badly do HBO and AMC need the cable companies?
I imagine rather a lot. If either AMC or HBO — or any cable network doing original programming — started offering their stuff on the internet, I imagine that the cable companies would make their lives, um, interesting. And there’s no way in the short term that HBO could get as much green from people like me to make up for a loss of income from the cable companies.
Longer term, I don’t think it can be too much longer before the cable companies get disintermediated. But then, who’d a thunk that we’d still be paying for text messaging after all this time. (Someone once calculated that it would cost $5,991.88 to download a song via SMS.)
Comcast is in the process of acquiring a controlling interest in NBC Universal; surely a primary reason for this is that they want to be a content creator/owner rather than just a distributor of same.