Meg's Top Ten TV Programs of 2009

It is hard to believe that during the banner year that offered the television canon such innovative masterpieces as the currently-on-hiatus Cougar Town and Community (featuring the always relevant Chevy Chase, in the role of an elderly college student), that anyone might actually want to stray from standard network television. That being said, I spent a lot of 2009 revisiting past seasons of the shows I missed. Here is my top ten of the year, old and new:

The Inbetweeners
After 1999’s Freaks and Geeks, I found it hard to believe that any show could ever capture the mortification of being a teenager with such honesty and humour. Though I am not sure if any show has done so in the same way, Inbetweeners comes closer than any I have seen. Starring a young, British cast that actually look and talk like real teenagers, Inbetweeners so far consists of two six-episode seasons that pay equal attention to the kinds of incidents from your youth that you never want to forget and the teenage humiliation you wish you didn’t still remember. You know, like mistaking family caravan clubs as being synonymous with swingers, or deciding that it’s a good idea to get vomitously drunk before telling someone you love them.

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Party Down
We may not all know what it is like to return to the minimum-wage work force after starring in a heavily-rotated and often quoted television commercial , but most of us know how it feels to settle for a spirit-crushing job, while we try to pursue what we really want to do with our lives. Party Down follows a group of LA has-beens and wannabes who work as caterers until they get their big break. While the premise does not sound outstanding, cast members like Martin Starr (Bill from Freaks and Geeks), who plays a jerky, aspiring hard-sci-fi writer, make this show unmissable.

The Wanda Sykes Show
Joy Behar can finally die a happy woman: for the first time since Joan Rivers’ short-lived career as host of The Late Show, we finally have a female late-night host! I don’t know what it is about Wanda Sykes, but she seems to get even cooler as she gets older. Her HBO special, I’ma Be Me was hilarious, and even though she is an aging mother of newborn twins, she somehow manages to appear younger and taller-looking every day. While I obviously find her opinions on just about anything to be endlessly interesting, one of my favourite aspects of the show comes from the dynamic between Sykes and her sidekick, Keith Robinson, who is clearly in love with her. FOX Broadcasting Company, this almost makes up for Glenn Beck. Not quite, but almost.

Bored To Death
Although the borderline embarrassing theme song (courtesy of the show’s star, Jason Schwartzman and his vanity music career), made me a little wary of this show, I am pretty sure that Bored to Death is to Ted Danson what Citizen Kane was to Orson Welles. (Don’t even think for a second that I forgot about Getting Even with Dad and Made in America. I really think that this is Ted Danson’s best work.) This show is going to make people forget all about the time Danson went to the Friar’s Club in blackface and told the world that being with Whoopi Goldberg was like “throwing a hotdog down a hallway.”

90210
Who would have thought that the highly dramatic and unrealistic lives of fictional Beverly Hills teenagers would be just as entertaining in the 2000s as it was in the 90s? As a young girl, I watched the original version to learn how teenagers were supposed to behave. Now that I am on the wrong side of twenty-five and I know that shows like this don’t represent anyone’s high school experience and are just made to sell lip gloss and sunglasses, I still get a little bit nostalgic for how exciting this show made being a teenager seem the first time around.

Breaking Bad
As if you needed another reason to back US Healthcare reform.

Mad Men
Everyone was right about Mad Men and it didn’t even take a week for me to watch all three seasons. However, my husband and Mr. Maitland already covered it in their Top Tens.

Summer Heights High
Chris Lilly’s Australian high school mockumentary revolves around a flamboyant high school theatre teacher, a spoiled rich girl and a rebellious Tongan student struggling through a Polynesian Pathways program. Even though it is satirical and each protagonist is played by Chris Lilly, it still manages to ring more true than most TV depictions of high school life (Sorry, 90210!). The poor attempts that the teachers make to reach Polynesian and Indigenous students are laughably bad, and shed light on the ridiculous nature of providing a cultural education created and enacted by people who are completely uneducated about the culture.

Californication
Technically, I do not think that this is one of the best shows of 2009, nor do I even like it. For some reason though, I have a strange compulsion to watch the majority of the ego-driven garbage that David Duchovny continues to release. (This includes the Duchovny-written and directed, House of D. I have a sickness.) While none of the three seasons of Californication are good, the third season becomes particularly awful, when Duchovny’s character, the alt-writer, Hank Moody, is asked to take a job as a “bad boy” writing teacher at the local university. As you can imagine, this leads to all kinds of difficult Threes Company-esque situations, such as juggling secret relationships with his teaching assistant, boss, and student! If I actually had the guts to call in The Best Show on WFMU, this show would definitely be in my hate-pit.

Gossip Girl
OM3. Bravo, Hillary Duff. Bravo.

Special Bonus Show:

Being Human
This show is about some roommates who happen to be a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf. For some reason, I got turned off by the pilot and never watched the series. In hindsight, I am now convinced that I made a horrible mistake and that there is no way that a show about a ghost, a vampire, and a werewolf living together could possibly be bad. Second chance time, Being Human.