‘X was the best show of the year’ is a contentious statement at best and an outright lie at worst. There has never been more original programming and greater ease of access than the current state of television – imports, streaming and increasingly-open archives mean that, for possibly the first time, “there’s nothing on TV” is a goddamn lie. This all but scuttles the standard dialogue of most television criticism. The ‘best show of 2014’ now comes with a thousand caveats about genre, tone, network, budget, whatever. 2014 gave us Breaking Bad’s “Ozymandias”, True Detective’s “The Secret Fate of All”, Game of Thrones’ “The Viper and the Mountain”, and even The Legend of Korra’s “Into the Void” – which is all fine if your required categories for Best Of The Year is Action/Thriller, but that’s a very narrow perspective to taken given the bacchanalistic excess of contemporary TV. Shouldn’t Parks and Recreation’s “Moving Up” feature somewhere on these lists? What about Orange is the New Black’s “You Also Have A Pizza”? We can go wider still to Selfie’s “Follow Through“, which brought (the very tiny slice of the world that was watching) the wonder of the Jazz Meeting, and Comedy Bang Bang’s “Lizzy Caplan Wears All Black and Powder Blue Espadrilles” which, you know, had Lizzy Caplan in it. I’m sure someone would argue for RuPaul’s Drag Race winning Best of the Year with “Snatch Game”. The ultimate point of a Best of the Year list is never to truly sing the praises of some great piece of Pop Culture, it is to justify what those who loved it loved, and to sell that thing to those who haven’t seen it. If the audience grows, the show stays on, and the critic’s work continues, so they might plug it more. Here’s what I’m selling, in the more accepted parlance:
“Looking for the Future”, the fifth episode of Andrew Haigh’s slice of life gay drama Looking, is the single best episode of TV this year.
Looking is a fairly divisive show. This is fair enough – it’s the slowest show on television, bar none, and opens with a very calculated whimper. There’s plenty of criticism to throw at it too; Looking is about thin white gay problems (just like most queer TV), Looking is an un-funny comedy, Looking just doesn’t do anything to keep you interested. The last two of these criticisms are very important to the make-up of Looking’s DNA, and far more reasoned than it might seem. In a time of generic TV1, Andrew Haigh’s Looking steals the makeup of a thousand shows that came before it, a thousand twee indie movies about people who listen to sad music while lying on their bed, a thousand aching choruses to a million songs, and lays them out as the tapestry of reality that they are. Culture isn’t an assemblage of pieces that looms before us, culture is the framework in which we live – and no matter what anyone is trying to sell you, Pop Culture is just Capital C Culture before we have enough emotional distance to forget that people lived through it.
Looking’s ultimate point of contention is that it’s the best-scripted reality show, a slice of life that takes pains in the detail to the point of frustration, and never is this more evident in “Looking For The Future”, an episode of television that masterfully resists the drive of action. It feels at times like a distillation of Haigh’s Weekend, a film in which less happens (but this time, in Nottingham). Compared to parent network HBO’s other fare, in which people’s heads explode and serial killers apparently cut time into a flat circle2, “Looking for the Future” dares you to do nothing. Here’s a brief synopsis of the episode, for those that haven’t seen it3:
Patrick spends the day with his new boyfriend Richie.
If you’re not tuckered out from reading that lengthy plot description, consider any other episode of television you’ve seen that would distill so beautifully into a single sentence and not leave out any glaring omissions. Sure, other elements might threaten to intrude (they visit a fortune teller at one point, but beyond becoming a story they tell while out drinking, it never threatens to be monumental). “Looking for the Future” is instead a pure 25 minutes of character study. Patrick has all the self-loathing of a 30 year old middle-class gay man, Richie has all the self-assured swagger of a working-class Hispanic man (the kind who picks up and effortlessly plays the bass guitar as a last ditch-effort to make his boyfriend come back to bed). Looking’s fifth episode is all about inconsequential moments, little reminders that neither Patrick or Richie’s lives will change all that dramatically just by virtue of spending time together.
Community’s Dan Harmon is fond of the story circle – the idea that (at least in television) good stories should be circular. A hero is in a place of stasis, but they want something. They go out into the world, seeking it, they get what they want, they lose something in the process, and return to a place of stasis having changed. “Looking for the Future” is one of the tightest examples of Harmon’s story circle, and a masterpiece of invisible construction. Patrick wants for nothing, and loses nothing in return. That is, perhaps, an oversimplification – he wants to spend the day with Richie, and loses nothing only his ignorance of his partner. Even that sounds monumental – Patrick learns about Scapula and bottoming, about Richie’s first time, he offers the same information in turn, and the pair walk the edge of the story circle together. They walk San Francisco endlessly talking, a new relationship curling neatly around them, and share the unending wave of new information that comes with it. Nothing monumental happens. Patrick is too nervous to visit the fortune teller. 25 minutes ends with a sense that nothing has happened. “Looking for the Future” could easily be cut, but neither of its featured players (Patrick and Richie, the only members of Looking’s cast to make it into the episode at all) would be the same. The change is quiet, almost inessential. Patrick and Richie spend time together and learn small facts about each other. They wake up, walk around, go to bed.
Ultimately, the joy of “Looking for the Future” is that it serves as an exercise in reality. No Kardashian nor Bachelor ever felt so real. Looking is scripted TV drama’s best attempt at Reality TV, and absolutely deserves your time, even if you finish it feeling bored. Augustin’s decline isn’t for everyone. Dom is almost insufferable. Patrick giggles like a school girl and makes a few bad decisions. It has its indulgences of narrative, and its contrivances of coincidence, and yes, it’s about Thin White Gay Man Problems, but “Looking for the Future” is an essential exercise in stasis, a simple mirror into which two characters look and stare outwards once again having changed.
If it takes brazenly declaring it 2014’s Best Show to get you to give it a try, then Looking is unquestionably the Best Show of 2014.
The second season of Looking is currently airing. Further nonsense from Jon D Arthur can be found .
1 In that TV is more genre-locked than ever, even if these genres have been merged and cut and exploded outwards in multitudes (I dare you to find a scripted show that doesn’t fit Drama, Dramedy, Comedy, Reality or Documentary).
2 So I never actually saw True Detective, but this is what I’ve gotten from the dialogue around it.
3 The number of people who have seen it was just enough for a second season, so you might be understanding that first paragraph about now.
