Top Tier Series

I have no close memory —and certainly not from this year (2019)— of experiencing a constant feeling of admiration as the minutes go by on a screen, of knowing that you are facing a work that simply corresponds to another order of quality. The narrative level that The Wire executes is exceptional; It has an epic volume, it is a forest of realities converging in the total circumstance: life in Baltimore, the life of all. Striving to be substantially tangible, The Wire develops with dazzling caution, not afraid to grow too big and push everything too high, but makes it its attempt. Life on this trivial planet is necessarily complex and diverse to make us unaware of it; the realities are so many, that whoever is not pushed by his own circumstance will be in an inevitable ignorance of the real human struggle. The Wire features everyday cards in an apparently random episode, to play the hand and synthesize the plot two seasons later; The Wire shows you a man constantly wanting to redeem himself and failing, taking minute steps in the passage of the days, weeks, months, stumbling and turning four steps back, suffering from being unable to be more, and returning not much beyond where he ever managed to get in his whole life, to teach you that this is how also redemption looks, that this is a story of a man who seeks to grow: that this is Bubbles.
How a daily eventuality causes the concretion of a whole political plot; how a negligent former detective and a former drug addict cross their ransom in a school, now as a teacher and a tutor; how a letter waits patiently for stations to enter the game, how the background of an old and forgotten friend McNulty feels so organic and plausible, how death and crime and drug trafficking and corruption and kindness and empathy and indifference and love are still truly present, making everything significant to the extent that those who live want to be. It's like this, life is like that, not big closing acts, not dramatic twists, not total answers; life is all the big and small Baltimore stories, life is everyone's constant trivial battle: life is The Wire.
That is the premise that at this point I can not shunned to confirm, that since the end of season three I began to suspect as indisputable: The Wire is the best television series ever made. The Wire is the cuspid of audiovisual narrative, yesterday and today.

Ode to existence - Maximum art
There are works that achieve a utopian reach, that cross their genre and constitute themselves as maxims of art

It is not strange to see it associated in the beginning as what could be a mecha anime with depressive characters, reductively, since this "existential depressiveness" is the medium to develop the narrative that it presents, not the narrative itself. The center of Evangelion is existence and its circularity, and the conception of identity exclusively from being the fragment of an absolute. What Evangelion proposes, is that as a species (and as everything) we are transition, the ephemeral part of which initially was a whole that seeks the return to the uniqueness, and that in that search (which is eventually inevitable), the identity will be sacrificed in a unitary collective (that is, the representation of the universe itself): so, to chart that transition, or step, Hideaki Anno uses a depressive character with existential conflicts, thus he'll be able to go through all the layers of the narrative argument.
Over this conceptual core, he builds a narrative based on the most elementary pillars of humanity: religion, history, psychology, culture; its biology, its whole notion of life: in short, its anthropology. Life, for man, is a binary system; there is a father and a mother; and from this paradigm comes the universe itself. God, intangible, has originated existence, and in it life. The fruit of Adam and Eve must finally be emancipated, and defend, before the angels, their patrimony in the universe.

That's what the series is about, and it treats it in a careful, subtle, deeply beautiful way.
Evangelion has also the immense attribute of having a filmic "cinematography"; its shots, angles, light, frame pacing and movement elevates it above the anime genre, with a photography and narrative tone that belongs to pure cinema. Its animation, even thirty years later, continues to be a masterclass to the craft.

Its philosophical theme can be also seen similarly developed in other works: such as Alighieri's Paradiso, Nietzsche's Zarathustra, Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York", the Space Odyssey of Kubrick, or even in a much closer way, with absolutely "normal" characters , "Rayuela" from Cortázar. The characters and circumstances are only the medium of the attempt, the medium of the purpose, which is sometimes confused when there is insufficient or superficial understanding of it.
To experience the work in its entirety, it is necessary to see "The End of Evangelion", which together with the series constitute the total attempt of Anno.

Here we are before a pillar, is the Greece of the television narrative, a series that dared to deepen in front of a spectator who was used to something else, to just entertainment. It is the first to bring high-quality cinema to television —perhaps with excpetions in Europe (Dekalog)—, to empathize with a criminal born and bred, with a criminal who is inevitably also a human, swimming in a vertiginous world and script. The Sopranos is the show to which all current television owes something.

Some guy once said that The Sopranos was basically HBO's Evangelion. And beyond the fact that this is an evidently memeized synthesis, it isn't a mistake to recognize that it is born from a founded convergence.
There are several individuals who have noticed and manifested this sort of correlation, some even portraying it in a meme-list of elements that make up the core of both stories:
«Freudian Psychology; Exploration of the Subconscious; Mommy Issues; Daddy Issues; About "Soldiers" and "War"; Vague Spiritual Aspects; Ending initially hated; then loved (and still hated by pea-brains); AND, of course, Depressive Characters».
Although these manifestations are born from a medium that plays between joke and message, we must not neglect that they also seek to reveal a truth:
Its protagonist, installed in a pronounced borderline circumstance, dragged to act in it under the force of the river of destiny, the game that was assigned to him, the childhood, the last name, the family, the life in which he simply appeared, must live an inner epic to face, as he can, this Homeric task in which everyone has delegated him as the chosen. Tony often dreams of, in a beautiful and hilarious paradox, an insignificant life, with being a man so normal that people don't even remember his name, with loneliness, with having a miserable, miserable and full of peace job.
Rarely does a screen manage to evoke such effusiveness, viscerity, a vulgarly noisy and vertiginous life, and that among all that violence, moments of silence as deep as it is beauty come to touch.

It's the closest thing to an absolute story, to a Russian novel; those that aim to condense the very experience of knowing oneself alive, and knowing oneself dying.
It's a tale that strives to portray life and in it man wandering for meaning; our constant struggle into existence. Six Feet Under is probably the closest thing to Tolstoy or Dostoevsky that television has achieved.

I think that what exactly grabs you is what, ultimately, is the essence of the series: uncertainty. Today man is almost drunk in a pandemic of certainties, in a state of absolute responses that are believed as guaranteed, in the pragmatic mechanics that dominates the world. This, as it naturally manifests in the practical areas of life, it also ends up doing in the abstract ones, unleashing a narrative torrent inheriting its foundations; narrative at the service of the market and consensus convictions, resulting in a reduction of reach and forms of storytelling.
The Leftovers advances by taking a step back, by taking its head out of this bucket full of illusory convictions, of pseudo-absolute, to put it again in the face of the endless unknown, the inevitable state of uncertainty that will always accompany the nature of man: nothing it's guaranteed, and it's time to remember.
We are an animal devoid of answers that must question and search, inexhaustibly to grow and perhaps one day ...

Breaking Bad is probably the final catalyst of all the preceding years of television and film narrative. Developed with a domain and brilliant balance of all factors, it is capable of delivering beautiful photography in a precarious and close environment, tragic and comic, vertiginous and everyday. But what is more important, leaves aside the cliché of good and evil, and states that perhaps what separates an oppressed and humble teacher and father of family, with a "criminal", is nothing more than a decision taken out every day based on the morality that everyone agreed. It portrays in this way the true personal discovery, that which few can reach, so that it is complete, it must also be known in the depths of life.

How much of me can I really let others see?
It's the question that has haunted Don his entire life, or at least his second life. Reborn by himself in the lie, in a world of artificialities, of aspects over substance, of industrialization of needs that are not, the infinite statue of pamphlets that he has built of himself, hitherto unreachable for others, is harassed by the depth with which his past blows, making him also unreachable for those he wants next to him.

S1: If True Detective were exclusively its first season, we could be talking about the best series in history.
Pizzolato with Fukunaga bring us the best of the genre at the hands of Sartre embodied (and it could not be otherwise) in a man broken by his past. They transform the thriller into more than a crossroads assisted by a psychological layer; they make it existential, deep and challenging, questioning for the viewer. Here simply everything is well done: the script is another perfection more than given life by the performances of Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson achieves its absolute form. The photography in those extensive aerial shots following the duo down the road of the undaunted Louisiana, in a search that seems fruitless, burns in memory like a tattoo. This season is simply an essential work.

S2: Unlike what many people think, the second season of True Detective has taken a massive criticism in an undeserved way, partly because of the brilliance with which it still dazzles the first, and partly because it presents a less explicit plot with a development a little more isolated and dispersed, which ends up exhausting the patience of the average spectator. In any case, its characters, its whole script are transcendently complex enough to merit being seen, enjoyed and praised.

S3:The third season is an attempt to rescue the soul of the series, the core proposed in the first season, but although the well-intentioned attempt is appreciated, it does not achieve the intellectual and artistic reach it sought.

S4: And about season four, it's hard to talk. The main writer and director tries to camouflage, and confuses, depth with supernatural; not understanding that the glimmers of uncertainty and philosophical disquisitions in previous seasons appear from the lack of answers itself, from the constant echo of God's silence resonating in the souls of lost characters, wandering for responses. But Issa López naively tries to emulate this metaphysical atmosphere by engaging into superstition. Still, there are some good things about this attempt; among these Jodie Foster, who, as always, elevates what she inhabits. And overall S4 is still a somewhat correctly constructed police story. But unfortunately the season fails on its fundamentals.

I'm deeply glad to have waited until now to see The Knick (August 2019), cause I simply did not expect a proposal of such a high narrative composition. Not enough to be a period series, with an extraordinarily achieved production, it owns an exquisitely subtle and complete plot and execution. The arches develop in such an organic and plausible way that you can almost feel the circumstances of the characters, which end up being what they are, and what they will try to be: a portrait faithful to the human being, with its lights, crosses, fears, qualities, with all its flaws, but that above all tries to transcend clinging to its ties in the attempt. There are no absolute catastrophes, unbeatable good, incurable bad, dream happiness or pandemic sadness, there are no happy endings or completely tragic endings, there is life, there is genuineness, there is reality. Thackery condenses and seals the series in an absolute scene with a phrase that portrays everything that it is with human fidelity, flesh and delirium, and that in no way could be improved; the perfect title of the chapter and goodbye: This Is All We Are.

Of course: Lost is absurd, corny, full of cliches, with ridiculous plot detonating and resolutions, with overdramatic performances, with a narrative almost as redundant as all its filling; but it is so significant in the closure that any aesthetic or technical value becomes irrelevant. The last minutes must be the best recorded in television history, full of profound humanity. A last blink that is worth everything.

If you're a writer and looking for a true narrative architecture, a place where structure, form, and substance are perfectly calibrated; where the sophistication of what is going to be told is achieved effectively, watch this.

Probably my most personal convergence.