“In a year that many have found bleak and depressing, Mirror Mirror II managed to channel this energy into one of the most riveting visual experiences of the year….the best horror comics anthology available.” —Phillippe Leblanc

“This book should win all the design awards for 2017. It’s as magnificent as the contents are (purposely) horrific.” —Heidi MacDonald

I’m honored to that Mirror Mirror II made the Beat’s Best Comics of 2017 list twice over, once courtesy of Phillippe Leblan and again via Heidi MacDonald. Perpetually grateful and glad so see this book reaching people. Buy it here.

Best TV Series, Drama
The Crown
Game of Thrones
The Handmaid’s Tale
Stranger Things
This Is Us

WILL WIN: To paraphrase Bruce Wayne, Globes voters are a superstitious, cowardly lot. After anointing The Crown over worthy competition last year as a nod to our collective norms, expect voters to join the #Resistance and crown The Handmaid’s Tale this time around.

SHOULD WIN: As usual, Game of Thrones aimed highest and hit hardest.

ROBBED: Where to begin? The Americans, Better Call Saul, Halt and Catch Fire and, most flagrantly, The Leftovers are all all-time-great series that the Globes have seen fit to circumnavigate.

Best TV Series, Musical or Comedy
Black-ish
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
Master of None
SMILF
Will & Grace

WILL WIN: This is wild: The only series reappearing from last year’s suite of nominees is Black-ish. Your guess is as good as ours, but this certainly seems like a sign it’s a favorite.

SHOULD WIN: Go Black-ish, the most thematically ambitious of the bunch.

ROBBED: The final season of Girls, critical darling The Good Place, Better Things, Broad City, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Silicon Valley, Insecure, Veep … seriously, it’s easier to list the shows that weren’t nominated than the ones that were.

Best TV Limited Series or Movie
Big Little Lies
Fargo
Feud: Bette and Joan
The Sinner
Top of the Lake: China Girl

WILL WIN: Big Little Lies has the star power and the critical acclaim in the most perplexing Globes category of them all.

SHOULD WIN: Fargo, hands down. It’s a season of television that speaks directly to our current predicament without ever lecturing us about it.

ROBBED: Never in the history of television award ceremonies have shows been as badly neglected as Twin Peaks: The Return and The Young Pope. The latter is a contender for the all-time surreal greats right out of the gate; the former was crowned as “the most groundbreaking TV series ever” by this very publication. Ignoring these shows makes the Globes a goofy joke, to be honest, though we’re happy to laugh along as long as we can.

Despite not caring about awards, I’ve come to both enjoy and be pretty good at predicting them. Go figure! I wrote up my predictions — as well as should-wins and snubs — for the massive, crazy Golden Globes slate for Rolling Stone.

Call it the Lilyhammer of the Gods.

In February 2012, Netflix established its creative model right out of the gate. Its first original show, Lilyhammer, starred “Little” Steven Van Zant, fresh from playing a mobster on The Sopranos…as a mobster, albeit one who’s relocated to Norway for witness-protection purposes.

The road from Lilyhammer‘s quirky Sopranos rehash to Stranger Things‘ unabashed theft from ’80s pop-culture staples is not a particularly long one. All that changed was the company’s self-identification as a creator of original content rather than an online video store, and its subsequent accumulation of user data and development of a predictive algorithm to deliver the goods.

Many of the network’s original series —”original” being a relative term— speak to this desire to please the crowd with things that have already pleased them. Why have only one off-beat comedy about the mildly crazy lives of young people set in New York (Master of None), for example, when you can also have one in Chicago (Easy) and Los Angeles (Love) as well? It’s too bad Donald Glover titled his show Atlanta and took it to FX, or else I’m sure Netflix would have something on the docket for that youth-culture mecca as well. In a more traditional move, reboots are common, from the campy (Fuller House) to the acclaimed (One Day at a Time). And that little row of Netflix Original rectangles contains enough grim-visaged cops, crooks, and killers to look like a photo array you’d use to identify suspects in the world’s most focus-grouped crime.

Which is what makes shows like Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra: Blood on Rome stand out. From the outside, these 2017 debuts seem like status-quo programming. But each veered of the course they could have cruised down effortlessly, taking creative risks that yielded entertaining and provocative results.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action: Over at Decider I wrote about the possibility that Dark, The Punisher, and Suburra represent a creative turning point for Netflix, in which the sheer volume of material the network puts out is now enabling some shows to complicate and interrogate their genre elements rather than serving them up straight.

15. On Cinema at the Cinema / The Electric Sun 20 Trial

14. The Punisher

13. Girls

12. Dark

11. The Affair

10. Billions

9. Suburra: Blood on Rome

8. The Americans

7. Better Call Saul

6. Fargo

5. Game of Thrones

4. The Leftovers

3. The Young Pope

2. Halt and Catch Fire

1. Twin Peaks

I’m a TV critic, and to my astonishment I realized that this year I watched and reviewed every single episode of twenty-three different shows in addition to whatever else I watched for fun or edification. (Which to be honest was not a whole lot, considering the amount of time the paying gigs ate up!) I’ve always preferred tailoring my career to that kind of episode-by-episode writing (the term of art is “recaps” but thats a preposterously inadequate term for what anyone worth reading does) because it keeps the focus on the work itself instead of the conversation surrounding the work. The art is what goes on the screen and how it affects you, not what’s being said about it in tweets and thinkpieces. That sounds condescending, and I guess maybe it is, but I’ve preferred this approach ever since I was primarily a comics critic, reviewing three books a week every week for a couple of years, and tons on either side of that too. My pal Matthew Perpetua always took that approach to music with his Fluxblog — that’s how we became friends — and over time maintaining that outlook has been a real sanity saver. It doesn’t hurt that this makes my precarious full-time freelance existence a lot more predictable in terms of workflow, scheduling, and income than it would be if it were dependent on pitching new essays every week.

Anyway! It was an absolutely marvelous year for television, which is funny to reflect on given the wave of “prestige drama is over” pieces that crested during The Young Pope and just a couple of weeks before Twin fuckin’ Peaks. (I have strong, pretentious, goth feelings about why many of my peers prefer adorkable comedies to drama, and overreact to novelty over quality within the drama category too, that I’ll keep to myself.)

If you look at that top 15 list, I’d say the top 7 are genuine for-the-ages seasons of TV, an extraordinary amount of great work compared to almost any other time even in the New Golden Age. Twin Peaks aired the best season of any show ever, imo, and I’m not sure it’s even close; it was the best work of David Lynch’s career, and I love David Lynch’s career. (The blu-ray box set used a quote from one of my pieces as the pullquote on the back of the box, which I imagine Lynch voicing his approval of in Gordon Cole’s voice.) Halt and Catch Fire‘s last few episodes were so fucking warm and humane without ever getting sappy or feel-good that it skyrocketed straight to my all-time list. The Young Pope did, too, right out of the gate; I laughed with pure delight and admiration a whole lot during that show. With the exception of the animated sequence that ripped off that World of Tomorrow guy, which is very much not my thing, I thought Fargo Season 3 was unfairly maligned compared to its predecessors (and especially compared to Legion — there’s that novelty bit I mentioned); Thewlis, Coon, Stuhlbarg, Winstead, and Wise all crushed it, and McGregor caught up by the end too, and V.M. Varga is the villain for our time if you go for that sort of thing.

There were some surprises too. Like a lot of people I felt like this season of The Americans was impeccable on an episode by episode basis but didn’t add up the way past seasons did. To my shock, Billions became one of the most entertaining and meticulously constructed shows on TV, and all of the cast additions this year were a ton of fun. Netflix went from having aired close to zero shows I really give a shit about to three that I adore in what felt like overnight: Suburra, an intensely emotional Italian crime drama about three extremely handsome young criminals; The Punisher, a show that was much better and more moral than it could have easily gotten away with being when you see Blue Lives Matter-branded Punisher skulls everywhere you look; and Dark, a horror-tinged sci-fi story that is actually a ruthless character drama.

I don’t care for very many sitcoms and find it hard to compare comedies to dramas no matter what, since the main responsibility for characters in a comedy is to be joke delivery mechanisms and thus you can’t really evaluate them on a human-emotions basis. (Or at least you shouldn’t!) But Girls is basically a very funny drama, like Mad Men, or a very mean comedy, like Curb Your Enthusiasm, so I’ve always enjoyed it, and the On Cinema Universe is like freebasing Tim Heidecker.

The big letdown for me this year was Mr. Robot. I loved Season 2, and while I could see that Season 3 was a deliberate move back toward the more straightforward rhythm of Season 1 I was right there with it because it’s so good at portraying how bleak contemporary existence can be — until the big second act climax, after which I thought it lost its way. Oh well!

One thing I love about my job is that without it, I would never have watched Dark, Suburra, or Billions at all, and wouldn’t have stuck with Billions, The Leftovers, The Americans, or Halt and Catch Fire past their first seasons, or even just a few episodes into their first seasons. So that’s nice!

I also watch cartoons with my kids sometimes. Nearly every kids’ cartoon on Netflix is insufferable, but they love Gumball and Uncle Grandpa on Cartoon Network and so do I. Those are shows that really are for kids and are totally hilarious to them but are also totally hilarious to me, and not in a “here’s a joke about mortgages, Dad” or “now let’s get serious about our feelings, neurotic millennial who is also watching this children’s show” kind of way — they’re just funny, like Ren & Stimpy used to be.

I’m looking forward to doing more writing about television this year and doing it the only way I know how to do it. I’m excited to be off twitter for the process, too. If you need me, you know how to find me.

MIRROR MIRROR II edited by Sean T. Collins & Julia Gfrörer

Darkness is as intimate as a caress and as distant as history in this chilling anthology of horror comics….This collection doesn’t just feel haunting; it feels corrosive.

Mirror Mirror II, the comics and art anthology I co-edited with my partner Julia Gfrörer ( @doopliss ), was named one of the 10 Best Comics of the Year by The Verge. As always, I’m so pleased to learn how this book has reached people.

2017: The Year in Review

BLAH takes a look back at the year that was in our long-related return! On this episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour, Sean & Stefan discuss 2017’s most memorable books, films, and TV — from Twin Peaks to Dunkirk and beyond. The state of superheroes and prestige TV get a good going-over too. You’ll also hear about stuff from past years that helped keep us afloat during a year when the world went adrift. Plus! A candid discussion of the illness that kept us from recording for the past month. This is just the first of three episodes we’ll be rolling out this month to thank you for your patience and faith in us, so listen up and stay tuned!

DOWNLOAD EPISODE 68

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When 2017 lies dead and buried in the ground, “Separate the art from the artist” will be chiseled on its tombstone. But what will we find in the grave?

If it’s the idea that creators are shielded from scrutiny by the strength of their creations, then goodbye and good riddance. For too long, sexual predators in entertainment and media triple-axled their way across the thin ice of “open secrets,” their safety ensured by power. (Why, one of these men even became president!) The crack, the splash and the final desperate glug-glug-glugs were long overdue.

If we’re lucky, though, this year of revelation and reckoning will force a deeper reexamination of our desire to see artists and their art as identical, because that dull blade of interpretation cuts both ways. Like a bizarro Louis C.K., whose professional accolades protected his personal reputation, Lena Dunham is a multi-hyphenate auteur whose detractors see her history of poor attempts to address urgent issues offscreen and take it that her art is similarly inept. The best way to argue against this clumsy conflation is by example – and “American Bitch” is as good an example as it gets. The third episode of Girls‘ sixth and final season, what’s arguably the series’ finest (half-)hour attacks the creator/creation dichotomy with funny, frightening ferocity. This parable about abusive artists doubles as case for its own artist’s singular skill as an observer of moral failure … including her own.

I wrote an essay about Girls’ “American Bitch” for Rolling Stone. This is just the first in a series of deep dives by the usual murderers’ row of RS writers. Stay tuned!