Ah, here we are at the final year end list, just as Year End List Time is winding down. It’s a good time for mixing narcissism with nostalgia, so I thought I’d read through a year’s worth of blog postings and see what I still found striking:

Overdoing it:

• Yeesh, so I tried to make up for taking so long to come up with 100 Things I Love About Comic Books by also giving a short reason for each one, making my contribution take even longer.
• I tried to pump up Wonderfalls plenty, didn’t I? (Go buy the DVD, you’ll enjoy it.)
• So, I tried a new way of recapping my San Diego Comic Con experience. Usually, I write a chronological recap that gets a (IMO) a tad tedious but this year I composed nine posts organizing my notes by common themes (plus two reviews) that took me so long to finish that other comics bloggers were already posting their Wizard World Chicago recaps. Yeah, I’m the blogger always talking about last month.
• I’m a big numbers geek.

Whatever happened to…

• Tokyopop’s Manga After Hours initiative? That’s turned out to be the marketing executive’s version of vaporware hasn’t it?
• I’m still waiting for to see animated ads as my BART train whooshes through the Transbay Terminal.
• Did Spell Game ever make it to comic shops? I haven’t seen it.
• Were The Beat’s archives every restored? Because I want to fix my links to Heidi’s April Fools Day jokes.
• Thankfully, that TV adaptation of The Sims has gone nowhere, as well…
• On the other hand, I’m still excited about all these things in comics.

Why I hate…

• The Emmy Awards
• Stupid move studio execs
• Late night talk shows on broadcast networks.
• Fanboys who think The Thing’s revealing costume negates any possible sexism that could be found in Witchblade’s duds.
• Death in superhero comics.
• Sequels that never should have happened in the first place.
• Parents who have no sense of appropriateness.

In the kitchen:

• I finally found a good recipe for Ma Po Tofu.
• Lamb Stew and Guinness Ice Cream for St. Patrick’s Day
• My favorite sweet cocktail, the Pearl Martini.
• I still am surprised that people like my Apple Ice Cream Pie… at least they like it more than I do.

Reviews I continue to like in hindsight:
Adolf
Death Note
Desire
Everybody Hates Chris
The Legion of Super-Heroes
My Name is Earl
Only the Ring Finger Knows
Pet Shop of Horrors
Phoenix
Erica Sakuazawa’s The Rules of Love
Tuxedo Gin
Whistle!

Other highlights:

• I think I got the most Google-hits out of my bit of AdBowl liveblogging.
• Yum! Tasting fine spirits at Hangar One’s distillery in Alameda.
• I recalled my history with manga and anime.
• I reminisced about the diverse stories I was exposed to in my childhood.
• Woo-hoo! The Onion comes to San Francisco!

For Christmas the spouse and I traveled to Vegas to see Avenue Q. I’m hoping to write a full review (short version: funny, funny, crude and very deeply moving show) but I thought I’d share a few quick thoughts that probably would have been cut:

• There’s a surprising amount of cheap laughs there are to be found by mentally adding "for porn" to the end of people’s sentences.
• Along those lines, "George Bush… is only for now" has become one of my mantras lately…
• I never realized what a fine line it is between the voices of Bert and Paul Lynde.
• If the show doesn’t succeed in Vegas, I blame the marketing. It was hard to avoid ads for the show, but the ads’ tagline, "See what the fuzz is about" doesn’t say much to why anyone would want to see the show. I mean, why not use one of the catchphrases used on t-shirts in the theatre gift shop like "More drinks, more fun!",  "The internet is for porn." or "The more you love someone the more you want to kill them." Those give you a feel for what the show is like.
• Worse, the video billboard at the Wynn plays an ad for the show that features testimonials of how great the show is… except that you can only hear sound when you’re close to the billboard (which can be seen from quite a distance away). I don’t think the sight of people moving their lips and smiling while wearing Avenue Q t-shirts is enough to convince people to spend $100 on a ticket.
• The audience that saw the show with us emphasized how poor the show’s marketing has been and made the experience less enjoyable than it should have been. We had humorless folk sitting in front of and on both sides of us; the woman in front of me kept giving that appalled "Who would find this funny?" look backwards at me throughout the show… and yet they came back for the second act.
• Along those lines, I envied the people who sat behind us who were enjoying the show and were sitting behind someone who felt the same (namely, me).

As Year End List Time winds down, I turn to comics I purchased this year to put on the bookshelf.

5. Bite Club: Normally, Howard Chaykin’s work has a "been there" feel for me, but this one had a more to it than the typical Chaykin cliches. With those aspects reined in, Chaykin made for the perfect writer for a mini-series that tries to capture the feel of The Sopranos in sequential art form. Even better, David Hahn’s clean art style (which Shelly Bond perfectly described to me as "Archie with an edge") meshed with the story, adding emphasis to the more shocking moments by the contrast.

4. Cavalcade of Boys: Tim Fish’s fast-paced and fun same-sex romance anthology makes for a great addition to a genre underserved by the American comics industry.

3. Owly: The Road Home: Sweet, serenity-inducing and whimsical, Andy Runton’s wordless, all-ages comic is a delight to read.

2. Death Note: Take the tightly-woven and intricate plots of Profit with a cautionary tone of the best Twilight Zone moments and you’ve got this solid roller coaster ride of brainy characters battling wits.

1. Capote in Kansas: A powerful contemplation of crime & punishment that achieves a strong success measure by making me want to read more about its topic, Truman Capote’s "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood.

Honorable Mentions:

I see plenty of potential in Antique Bakery, but the muddled opening chapters knocks it off of any "best" list. I’m sure it will hit the list next year (if I make one) as the quality becomes more consistent.

With its first trade, Bumperboy Loses His Marbles turned out to be as adorable as the clean art style of Debbie Huey.

Tuxedo Gin was one of the most reliably entertaining series that I’ve been following, especially considering how the kawaii comedy series varies its tone and style.

With volume 3 of Electric Girl, Michael Brennan proves that he’s still got command of the great storytelling style, the humor and the great character dynamics that I’ve come to expect out of the title.

Nooooooo! (I’m warning you, if you click on the link you’re asking for a major spoiler for next episode… who gets cut major.)

Why does it have to be someone I like when there are there are others who’s work bores me like crazy?

Crap, there goes half of my top three prediction (my third prediction was a dark horse who I don’t see coming… I’m hoping it’s fabulous geek girl Diana Eng, though I could see others who could turn out to be surprisingly good). I’m still feeling solid about Nick making the top three, though.

5. Young Avengers: Truthfully, it pains me to praise a title that ties-in to an awful crossover event (representing something that really annoys me as a reader of superhero comics) but Young Avengers is a bloody good superhero comic with engaging young characters, solid use of Marvel franchises and a storytelling style that is very successful with plot points that usually get my eyes rolling.

4. Hellblazer: I’ve read people theorize about how comics aren’t a medium that can depict horror well, but Mike Carey’s run on Hellblazer has defied those theories (much like Junji Ito’s work).

3. Y: The Last Man: Yeah, it doesn’t meet up with the potential promised in the first issue, but this year Y has been a solid action serial. Brian K. Vaughan is well-skilled in writing from one cliffhanger to the next and this year the series has picked up the pace nicely.

2. Sabrina the Teenage Witch: I just adore Tania del Rio’s treatment of the Sabrina franchise. This is one comic that can’t come out soon enough for me. I didn’t think the conservative Archie line (in this case I mean conservative towards allowing their trademark to be changed) would have allowed for their franchise to be tweaked enough to give Sabrina a true manga feel, but this series feels like Sabrina and it feels like a good shoujo manga title all at the same time.

1. The Legion of Super-Heroes: It’s been a long time since the Legion have been the stars of a truly ambitious comic, much less one that I feel has succeeded in its ambitions, but Mark Waid’s take on the futuristic teens is the very rare revamp that turns out to be worthy of the marketing hype.

Honorable mentions:

I’d probably have included Banana Sunday on the list, based on all the praise the series has gotten, if I hadn’t decided that I’d enjoy it more as a collection. I’m really looking forward to this one.

Live Wires, Spellbinders and Gravity were great efforts from Marvel, creating stories that are enriched by their inclusion in the Marvel Universe and not overly complicated by it. I hope Marvel continues to see rewards in catering to broader audiences as they have in these titles. Runaways also deserves kudos for an entertaining year.

If SLG can put out more great Disney tie-in comics like The Haunted Mansion, the line is bound to make next years list (if I make one). For now, however, I have a hard time putting a single issue as a great periodical comic.

Year End List Time continues with my big dissapointments from television this year:

5. The Law Firm/Situation: Comedy (tie): I saw potential in both of these shows’ concepts — particularly the David E. Kelley-produced Law Firm, but both quickly descended into the kind of conflict that represents reality TV at its worst. Law Firm sady demonstrated the old boys club at work, with minority contestants quickly marginalized into positions where they’d make elimination-worthy mistakes by the white, male contestants. More frustrating was Comedy which seemed to answer why the sitcom is a struggling format… too many wimpy executives who want to lead by consensus, even when a firm and direct "No" is required. Comedy seems to be lacking that whole vision thing…

4. Hot Properties: While I’m not surprised that this show was as awful
as it was, I’m still reeling at how the immense talents of Amy Hill,
Nicole Sulivan and Evan Handler were wasted.

3. The Apprentice: Martha Stewart: The show actually had a very strong start but quickly descended into a very sorry state. Product placements went from stretching-it-yet-still appropriate (does anyone believe Martha Stewart would ever pour Wish Bone Salad Dressing on a salad?) to completely nonsencical (what does a Buick or Song Airlines have to do with Marthe Stewart Living Omnimedia?), the series’ most attention-craving player got way too much of what he wanted and even the producers seemed to stop caring about trying to make their fake re-taped or dubbed segmants seem like "reality". There just was too much Apprentice-ness and not enough Martha Stewart-ness to this spin-off.

2. Paranoia Agent: Okay, so it turned out that things were literally what it seemed like? Was this show really from the mind behind such smart mindf*cks like Perfect Blue and Millenium Actress? Paranoia Agent spent 3/4 of its episodes like it were going to have something to say but ended up delivering absolutely nothing save for a glimpse at squandered potential.

1. Betty Applewhite: Sheesh. Alfre Woodward joining the cast of Desperate Housewives should have been magic. Couldn’t they give her a story that requires more than one emotion out of this powerhouse actress?

As Year End List Time continues, I look towards my favorite contributions from TV’s bastard child genre:

5. Beauty and the Geek: Considering its producer, I initially ignored this show, expecting a series of cruel embarrassments. When I was finally convinced to check this one out, however, I was completely charmed — the attitude was more The Breakfast Club than the Punk’d-meets-high-school-cliques that I expected. Beauty and the Geek’s format focused on getting dissimilar people to learn from each other, making for some good escapism.

4. Hell’s Kitchen: There were so many reasons why I shouldn’t have liked this show. The show’s star, Gordon Ramsay, initially struck me as one of those all-loudness-no-depth types that reality TV producers commonly mistake for entertainment and I always cringed whenever the producers would make it look like the contestants were indulging in gleeful schadenfreude. Still, Hell’s Kitchen delivered where it needed to deliver — the love of good food. The final challenge was especially memorable — with the two finalists getting the chance to design their dream restaurant from the design of the dining room to the menu.

3. Kept: Jerry Hall made for a mesmerizing reality competition star in a fun show that was always fun male-objectifying escapism. Kept was a very nicely edited and conceived series (I did enjoy watching all those lessons in high culture) which had — in a rarity for reality competition shows — an actually suspenseful finale and continuous payoff for the audience.

2. Project Runway: Four episodes in and this show has me hooked.
Thankfully, this talent show competition focuses more on the talent
than on conflicts that producers have manipulated the cast into (though the latest episode leaves me wondering if that bit of praise is premature). Project Runway is like a weekly Oscar night with some very compelling design sensibilities to consider.

1. 30 Days: Morgan Spurlock delivered six thought-provoking hours of television last summer, smartly exploring the old saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

The cable channel Trio will be going away at the end of the year, though the Trio brand name will continue as a broadband section of Bravo (where it will quickly be forgotten, I fear).

At its start, Trio was a really interesting network, though much of that buzz faded away. I remember first discovering Trio when I was scanning the cable listings at the then-future spouse’s apartment. I saw Profit listed on the scheduling grids, turned the tuner to the program and (expecting it to be some business program that shared the rather generic name) was surprised to actually hear Adrian Pasdar’s gravely monotone once more. That was when Trio had scheduled its Brilliant… But Canceled month featuring great shows like Action, Now & Again and Profit.

(Trio was also airing music videos in place of commercials and that was how I finally learned Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s name so that I could search out her music in stores.)

Trio smartly followed-up on Brilliant… But Canceled with Brilliant… But Canceled: Pilot Season which featured notable pilots that never got a pickup (most notably the hilarious Lookwell! which starred Adam West as a former TV detective that took his honorary LAPD badge a little too seriously) and …Just Canceled which featured some of pop cultures more memorable flops (including Cop Rock, My Mother the Car and new Coke).

Trio also had weeks where they named Time editor Joel Stein and Quentin Tarrantino guest-programmers. Stein’s schedule was the memorable one, bringing Pink Lady to the network (a show I remember my father watching every week) as well as Good, Clean Porn, a surprisingly entertaining series featuring XXX movies edited down to a G rating.

Additionally, Trio’s pop culture documentaries were always a cut above what other pop culture cable channels produced. I previously mentioned how The Christmas Special Christmas Special explored how the secularization of Christmas was a effort on the behalf of big business that dates back to the ’50s. The Golden Globes: Hollywood’s Dirty Little Secret is also notable for being the first serious examination (that I’ve ever encountered) on why the awards have such a bad reputation.

Trio could have been the smart pop culture cable network. While E! decided to become the Star or National Enquirer of cable, Trio could have been Rolling Stone or Details, something a little smarter, a little more sophisticated but still light escapism.

Somewhere along the way, the network dropped the ball. I would have liked to see the network expand it’s Brilliant… But Canceled line into something that defined the network (truthfully, I’ve been dreaming of a channel that would be 24 hours of Brilliant… But Canceled for over a decade now), picking up more praised but short-lived series, making Trio the channel for those shows that are no longer seen but still get pop culture junkies talking. (In today’s market, I can see such a channel supplementing its income as a DVD reseller.) Unfortunately, Brilliant… But Canceled withered into a handful of series… and only one of those (EZ Streets) had a dedicated audience when it aired. The occasional original documentary was all that Trio could muster. As good as those were, they didn’t stand out sandwiched between Johnny Staccato reruns.

Two events foretold Trio’s eventual fate. One came when DirectTV stopped carrying the network, cutting the majority of its reach. The greater doom, I believe, came when NBC purchased Vivendi/Universal’s cable networks, which included Trio. Since NBC already owned Bravo (which, at the time, had just been rebranded as a pop culture network, slightly smarter than E! but not as brainy as Trio) I figured it was just a matter of time before Trio was regarded as redundant.

For a little while, it looked like Trio could have been the network I have long wished for…  ah, well, it was nice while it lasted. This week, I’ll be filling the DVR with the final airings of some of Trio’s original documentaries, getting a flinal look at the network at its best.

(I suppose this is why I still like the idea of a la carte cable packages. As my cable package is currently set up, I have to support networks like USA and ESPN in order to get the channels I really want like Trio, Fox Classic Movies and BBC America. It would be awfully nice if I could substitute a few of the channels I would never watch with ones I care about… but then I guess the cable companies would hate to miss the opportunity to upsell customers like me to the "digital premiere" line.)

Year End List Time continues with my favorite TV dramas of 2005:

5. Desperate Housewives: One of the challenges of doing a year-end list for TV is that the timeframe stretches back over the last season. While the show has suffered this season (though it is starting to reclaim its voice in recent episodes) the amazingly well-constructed ending to last season still earns this show a place as TV’s bright spots.

4. Boston Legal: David E. Kelly shows usually take a season to develop their voice and that’s certainly been the case with Boston Legal’s second season. Adding Candice Bergen to the cast was a brilliant move and the dynamic between Bergen, William Shatner and Rene Auberjonois makes the show quite riveting.

3. Rome: HBO delivered a truly powerhouse historical drama with Rome, tackling a sensational topic (the decadence of the peaking Roman empire) with an amount of restraint (while the show did have plenty of sex, violence and nudity, it was limited to times when it served the story.) Rome’s cast was completely riveting, particularly Polly Walker’s enthralling, scenery chewing performance as Atia, Kevin McKidd’s quietly powerful Lucius Vorenus or Max Prikis’ surprisingly complicated portrait of Octavius.

2. Lost: After a very weak season’s end — where it seemed like the show was going to be about different ways to tease the audience into thinking a revelation was finally coming, the new season has really picked up and made the show compelling once more. We’ve learned little about the secrets of the island, but it’s felt like plenty has happened — and that’s the secret to good serial storytelling.

1. Battlestar Galactica: Dang. How did they manage to turn a franchise that used to be synonymous with cheesiness into an example of what can be accomplished with science fiction? Galactica is all about what scifi can accomplish when its potential is fully tapped, it takes speculative premises to ponder human nature and to comment on society as it is currently. Galactica is easily the smartest and best assembled show on television.

It’s Year End List Time…as writing lists of favorites seems to be a common OCD right now. Since I fall so easily for what’s in, I’ve got lists to last until the end of the year (or, at least, I do when I outline my plans…)

My favorite TV comedies from 2005:

5. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Think of it as the anti-All in the Family where relevant social issues are discussed by shallow, self-absorbed people or as a live-action South Park with grown-up versions of Kyle, Stan and Cartman facing reality with even more dysfunctional personality traits. Always Sunny is a show that never tried to make it’s characters likable and turned out to be hilarious in its bluntness the way many a truth-telling comedian can be.

4. My Name is Earl: For me the best thing about the new TV season is that we’ve got two comedies that manage to be smart, edgy and very, very sweet. That’s a very difficult combination, but one where Earl is very successful. The themes of karma and redemption give the show a lot of heart, while also taking the time to give a joke a long set-up (though not telling jokes as complicated as Arrested Development).

3. The Colbert Report: A couple weeks back, I was surprised to realize that I’m starting to enjoy The Colbert Report more than I enjoy The Daily Show (without any decline to Daily). That’s surprising considering how this show sounded like such a bad idea (as Mark Evanier noted, the idea sounded like splitting Abbot and Costello to give Costello a solo gig) and yet it works so very well. On his own, Stephen Colbert delivers a far more scathing parody of TV news pundits than in his Daily Show segments and his handling of current events require even more knowledge of the issue at hand than on it’s companion series.

2. The Office: The original version of The Office could get overly-cynical for me, sometimes the characters just seemed so sad and pitiful that the laughter came more from a desire to break the gloom more than actual mirth. While the American version manages to keep the characters’ dysfunctions intact, it also looks for a little more of what drives these people, making this another show that mixes edginess and heart successfully. A comedy about mundanity, this show includes some of the most nuanced performances to be found weekly on broadcast television.

1. Arrested Development: Yeah, after a little while of taking it for granted I’ve started to renew my appreciation for the richness and complexity of this show. There’s a very delicate balancing act in this show, and it very frequently succeeds. It’s quite a feat that Arrested can spend so much time setting up a joke and also be very, very funny in that set-up.

This was a very good year for comedies, so I have some honorable mentions to add:

Everybody Hates Chris: Again, I’m really glad to see shows that manage to be both sweet and smart be amongst the new season’s successes. Chris renews my faith in genres I started thinking just couldn’t appeal to me.

Malcolm in the Middle: As this looks like the show’s final season, it should be noted that this was a series that never lost its edge or its voice… sadly, it seems like people just forgot what a reliably funny show it could be (or perhaps when Fox moved the show to make room for My Big, Fat Obnoxious Boss was the bad idea that was the beginning of the end.) This season has been up to the standard set by previous seasons, most notably the hilarious season premiere, where Malcom’s family decided to take a family vacation at the Burning Man festival.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart: As it was last year, The Daily Show has some of the sharpest commentary on current events, using satire as a powerful weapon. Jon Stewart and crew continue to hilariously point out the hypocrisies and idiocies of politicians and the news media that supposed to keep those politicians responsible to the public.