Best television of 2007: You've got to get cable

By Eric Deggans, Times TV and Media Critic
Published December 21, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT [Showtime] Michael C. Hall as Miami police department blood analyst Dexter.

If this year's TV season were a football team, it would be fumbling on the goal line. Repeatedly.

That's how badly things went this year. Old favorites Heroes, Ugly Betty and Friday Night Lights came apart at the seams, undone by sophomore slumps and fallout from the Hollywood writers strike.

New shows fared so poorly that Christina Applegate is the new queen of comedy and the ABC sitcom ripped off from a Geico insurance ad is still on the air.

That said, 2007 still offered enough highlights to fill a Top 10 list, mostly thanks to the exploding world of cable TV just two of my picks this year aired on network television. Ouch!.

10. Planet Earth (Discovery Channel): Filmed over five years, this 11-episode documentary series is a lush, high-definition TV love letter to the diversity of the world's ecosystems. Packed with so many seemingly impossible-to-film, caught-in-nature moments, the producers could fill another series with stories on how they pulled it off.

9. Californication (Showtime): He may be a hedonistic, egotistical, self-destructive jerk paralyzed by his past success, but failing novelist Hank Moody is also surprisingly likable, thanks to cynically glib star David Duchovny. Struggling to cope with writer's block and the marriage of his muse to another man, the aptly named Moody is on the verge of a total breakdown. Who knew The X-Files' dour conspiracy theorist could make that so entertaining?

8. Pushing Daisies (ABC): The best pilot of the new TV season has blossomed into an absurdist fantasy packed with eye-popping visuals and enough crack dialogue to fill three Marx Brothers movies. Saying this is a show about a piemaker who can raise the dead is like saying The Shining is a book about a spooky hotel.

7. Battlestar Galactica (Sci Fi): Filled with allegories to Vietnam, the Bible and the Iraq War, this amazing update remains the Best Series You're Not Watching. Even last month's two-hour movie, which recounted how another Battlestar committed atrocities against humans to survive the onslaught of murderous machines the Cylons, was landmark science fiction TV.

6. 30 Rock (NBC): Star/producer Tina Fey has made this behind-the-scenes showbiz comedy more consistent by showcasing genius co-star Alec Baldwin and learning from the demise of Studio 60 to focus on the personalities and downplay the actual showbiz. Guest stars including Edie Falco, Paul Reubens and Jerry Seinfeld haven't hurt.

5. Burn Notice (USA): Part MacGyver, part Mission: Impossible, with a dash of Get Smart, this playful series turns Miami into a textured playground for a sardonic spy stuck in the Magic City by an unknown opponent who cuts all his intelligence ties.

4. Mad Men (AMC): Set in the early days of modern advertising, it's really about America's bumpy transition from '50s conservatism to a more modern perspective. It's mostly seen through the eyes of Don Draper, a calculating exec who escaped a mundane life by stealing a dead Army buddy's identity.

3. Working Man's Reality TV: Most reality TV shows focus on outsider oddballs or middle-class dysfunctionals. So series such as Discovery's Deadliest Catch and Dirty Jobs and the History Channel'sIce Road Truckers shine even brighter, throwing a spotlight on mostly noble Average Joes with the ickiest, most dangerous professions around.

2. The Closer (TNT): Start with Kyra Sedgwick's flawless take on steel magnolia Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson. Beyond that, this series is built on a magnetic family of entertaining characters, from J.K. Simmons' exasperated assistant police chief to Police Academy star G.W. Bailey's bumbling yet wise veteran Detective Lt. Sal Provenza. Setting the family against each other this season was inspired.

1. Dexter (Showtime): Michael C. Hall's spot-on portrayal of a blood analyst for the Miami police department who also is a serial killer of murderers is just the beginning. Producers nailed Dexter's playfully macabre inner voice in a flurry of ambitious plot lines. Will Dexter kill a cop to keep his secret? Or leave his girlfriend for a lover with her own murderous past? Never has watching someone get away with murder felt so good.

Eric Deggans can be reached at deggans@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8521. See his blog at blogs.tampabay.com/media.

[Last modified December 20, 2007, 23:35:49]