James Poniewozik

Beyond the usual boozy fun, it was a night of outspokenness and messages. But is Hollywood really Charlie Hebdo, or does it just play it on TV?

Like a lot of marriage-and-relationship stories, you've heard this one before. But this coming-of-middle-age dramedy retells it well.

Midway through Togetherness‘ first season, Brett (Mark Duplass) and Michelle Pierson (Melanie Lynskey) find themselves with some unexpected free time on their hands. What, she asks him, would he do with the afternoon if he could do anything? “Barnes and Noble,” he says. “Third floor. Green leather chair. I’d get a peppermint tea and an original copy of Dune, and nobody would know where to find me. I’d be all by myself.”

There’s a pause. “Your dream,” Michelle says, “is to go to Barnes and Noble by yourself.”

You can understand her pique (the two, it turns out, have just come out of couples’ therapy). But you can also understand his desire. Alone time is a rare thing for the Piersons right now. They have a preschooler and a new baby and, now, two long-term houseguests: Michelle’s single older sister Tina (Amanda Peet), a transplant from Texas trying to get her life together, and Brett’s high-school friend Alex (Steve Zissis), an actor on the verge of leaving L.A. after getting perma-typecast as the “chubby best friend.”

The kind-of-comedy Togetherness (HBO, Sundays)–from Duplass and his filmmaking partner and brother Jay (Transparent), with Zissis as co-creator–gives us four characters at the testing point of middle age’s threshold. Separately, each has to decide whether they want to commit to something (marriage, career, art) or cut and run. Collectively, they need to figure out they’re a mutual support or a burden–if togetherness is better for them than the alternative. (A recurring element is “beach day,” the family’s weekend trip to the beach that, with kids, is just less an ordeal than the Normandy landing–but provides just enough fleeting, transcendent moments to keep them coming back.)

None of this is groundbreaking, and that’s Togetherness‘ biggest weakness. (Well, that and the question of how a couple with this much freely available babysitting can have troubles.) TV lately has had more exhausted, stress-full and sex-free new parents than at a Yo Gabba Gabba Live! concert (e.g., FX’s Married, NBC’s Up All Night). We’ve seen the husband mourning his pre-kids, pre-responsibility life, the wife exhausted, sour and stewing. The opening scene, with Brett trying to wake a sleep-deprived Michelle for sex, is straight out of the playbook.

And if you guessed that Alex would develop a crush on Tina–a staple, after all, of the chubby-best-friend genre–you guessed right. The Duplasses have an indie-film sensibility, but the setups and story beats here are familiar from sitcoms, romcoms and bromances. (In episode 3, Brett and Alex bond by air-drumming to Rush’s Tom Sawyer; it’s a lovely moment, nicely choreographed, but also reminiscent of the Tom Sawyer male-bonding sequence in I Love You, Man.)

But Togetherness improves as it goes, on its excellent performances, well-observed writing and–a strength of all HBO’s best shows–specificity, both of setting (quasi-suburban Eagle Rock) and of personality. It turns out that it’s not only Brett who’s sexually frustrated–Michelle, for reasons she can’t quite name, feels bored and out of sync with him, and as she pours her energy into a drive to found a local charter school, she finds herself drawn to the divorced dad (John Ortiz) leading the group. She’s not—in the language of cable TV—Skyler White, fretting over her husband’s restlessness; she’s Walter White, wanting to feel alive again. (One striking thing here is how his-and-hers this marital crisis is.)

Brett’s midlife crisis, meanwhile, is not the sports-car-and-trophy-wife kind. He’s a bit of an oddball and socially awkward–he works as a movie sound designer, which requires long solitary walks to “collect” noises–and seems to be working out whether marriage with Michelle, or anyone, works for him. Late in the season, he strikes up a friendship with a New Ager (Mary Steenburgen) whose consciousness-quest he finds strangely compelling. It’s neither a physical affair or an emotional one, but it is a kind of spiritual one. Brett and Michelle’s struggles are sometimes funny and sometimes heartbreaking, in part because Togetherness so deftly avoids blame and diagnosis: they know they have something worth saving, they’re trying, and it simply may not be enough.

Lynskey is particularly engaging in what could be a cliché role; she somehow manages to show both how Michelle resents being stuck in her life and how she resents and resists becoming that woman. And though Alex and Tina’s friendship-turned-awkward is the weaker story, Peet and especially Zissis are excellent. Zissis has great screen presence; Alex doesn’t see himself as a second banana, and by taking his character seriously Zissis makes him somehow more funny as well as more sympathetic. (He also has good rapport with Duplass, who may surprise fans of his from The League with the un-bro-ishness of his character.)

Peet, meanwhile, gives a mature performance as a woman who’s been rewarded for being shallow and flirty, trying to decide if she can grow into a self-sufficient adult, and if it’s worth doing so. (Peter Gallagher has an appealing supporting role as a movie producer and potential sugar daddy to Tina who also strikes a professional connection with Alex.) Everyone in this show is a type. What distinguishes them is that they know they’re types, can feel themselves becoming types, and need to decide whether and how to avoid it.

Togetherness is a comedy, though like many of its HBO siblings it becomes more dramatic–even uncomfortable–as the season goes on. (Only in the spring, with Silicon Valley and Veep, does HBO indulge itself with comedies that are flat-out funny.)

But dramedy feels age-appropriate here. In the language of TV, relationships are comedy in your 20s and 30s, drama in your 40s and beyond, and Togetherness is right on the cusp. It forms a kind of natural progression with its returning partners, Girls (about single twentysomethings in Brooklyn) and Looking (about gay men in San Francisco, averaging in their thirties of varying degrees of sexual freedom). Togetherness is about getting older, realizing that you have some opportunities left but you don’t have every opportunity anymore. You still have dreams. But some of them are about Barnes and Noble.

This is an old story, no getting around it, and Togetherness doesn’t always transcend that. But at its best, the series shows that–as with marriage, parenthood, friendship and all those other eternal, hackneyed tales–if you put your head down and just commit, it can still work.

The challenge for this histrionic hip-hopera will be to give us just enough of too much.

Primetime TV has had many variations on the genre, widely defined, of soap opera: oil-biz operas, law operas, cop operas, glee-club operas. With Fox’s Empire (debuting Jan. 7), from director Lee Daniels, it now has a hip-hopera. And while the busy first hour scarcely has time to set a premise and lay down a beat, it promises all the glitter and heightened emotion its genre mashup implies, if it can keep its pathos from sliding into parody.

Empire‘s base story is older than soaps: rapper-turned-recording mogul Lucious Lyon (Terrence Howard) is diagnosed with ALS, forcing him to consider which of his three sons will inherit his business, Empire Entertainment. “We King Lear now?” asks middle child Jamal (Jussie Smollett), proving that he has an ear for literary references as well as music, but Lucious has always dismissed his most artistically gifted son because Jamal is gay. His eye is on his youngest, Hakeem (Bryshere Gray), whom Lucious is so determined to see as a young version of himself that he’s blind to his limitations. There’s also the eldest, André (Trai Byers), who has a mind for business but, Lucious fears, lacks the soul for this business.

Into this charged setup walks–nay, swaggers, nay, steamrolls–Lucious’ ex-wife Cookie (Taraji P. Henson), fresh out of jail for a crime that launched Lucious’ career 17 years ago and demanding a piece of the company. Lucious doesn’t have a piece to give–his stake has been diluted and the company is about to go public. So instead she takes management of Jamal, promising to “show you a faggot really can run this company.” With that, the exes begin to circle each other, Lyon vs. lioness, and Henson signals with immediate fierceness that this Cookie will not so easily crumble.

Maybe the best example of Empire‘s dual missions of hip-hop authenticity and primetime-serial melodrama is the music itself. The original songs performed by characters, written by top producer Timbaland, are good, but more important, they’re convincing–they’re credible examples of commercial genres from R&B ballads to rap to singer-songwriter soul, which goes a long way toward Empire‘s world-building. The incidental score, on the other hand, is so luridly dramatic it sounds like it was lifted from an ’80s soap; I half expect the ghost of Larry Hagman to walk on-screen.

No doubt Daniels and writer Danny Strong, who collaborated on The Butler, want us to know they’re serving up high-proof melodrama. But the soundtrack doesn’t need to triple-underline that when it’s obvious enough from performances like Henson’s gleeful star turn–and sometimes it undercuts them, making Howard’s low-key calculation and hubris sometimes play like ’30s-movie-matinée villainy.

Set in the business of excess, Empire flirts with being too much–we haven’t even gotten to the histrionic flashbacks, the blackmail or the gunshots. But the first hour can be most interesting when it holds back, especially with the relationships among the three brothers, who rather than being pulled into their parents’ acrimony have a kind of survivors’ bond.

Their story gives ballast to the High-Dynasty conflict between Cookie and Lucious, and that may help the show strike a better balance than its country cousin Nashville, which has lurched from earnest to outlandish. Empire has an entertaining future ahead, if it can hold its balance atop Cookie’s high heels, simultaneously keeping it real and keeping it just unreal enough.

Unlike ABC's last Marvel spinoff, this show knows what it is from the beginning, and that's a good start.

The first mission of Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD was to figure out why, exactly, the agents of SHIELD had their own show. By its second season, it’s made progress in that investigation, but it was rough going. The problem wasn’t that the series lacked superheroes; it was that it lacked apparent purpose. It assumed we’d love the brand, and in time we’d learn to love the characters and the story, once it figured them out.

Marvel’s Agent Carter (ABC, Tuesdays) has things in common with its big sib (the movie antecedents, that clunky “Marvel’s“), but it has an advantage off the bat. It has a protagonist–Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) of the Captain America films–with voice, personality, conflicts and a mission. And it turns out that, not an invulnerable shield, is all you need to make a fun hour of TV.

You don’t need to have seen the movies to follow Agent Carter; a businesslike trailer at the beginning of the pilot takes care of that. But to debrief you: after her comrade/lover the Cap’n crashed into the Arctic in The First Avenger, the British agent finds herself in reduced circumstances. It’s 1946, WWII is over and–like women in offices and factories across the U.S.–she finds herself demoted in favor of returning GIs, pushing papers for condescending male agents at the Strategic Scientific Reserve. But she ends up back in the field, surreptitiously, after old colleague munitions maker Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) finds his deadliest weapons turning up in the hands of bad guys.

That’s it. No grand mythology. No tie-ins to a movie release. Just one mission that will drive the show’s eight-episode season–and one focal character, whom Atwell brings electrically alive. Like a ’40s movie idol, Atwell’s Carter is more woman than girl, in her bearing, history and confidence. She’s as convincing wielding a crisp insult as an improvised blade, conveying the control and deftness Carter requires to run a covert operation under the patronizing gaze of her inferior superiors in the SSR boys’ club. (The second episode makes a wry comment on how women like Carter were written out of war history, as she listens to a “Captain America Adventure Hour” radio serial that recasts her as a Betty-Boop-voiced nurse: “You lousy Krauts are in big trouble once Captain America gets here!”)

The single story arc gives the first two episodes time to focus on character, and it helps that Carter has character conflicts to invest in–not just workplace sexism, but dealing with her personal loss and finding a postwar sense of purpose. (And the show’s superhero-less world requires no suspension of disbelief, since the Captain is on ice for the decades until the present-day of The Winter Soldier.)

Agent Carter‘s writing early on isn’t at the level of the best Marvel films, or even The CW’s new The Flash–too many cartoon-bubble lines like, “It’s technology that could give the A-bomb a run for its money!” But Atwell and the producers (including Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters of the late, clever Reaper) have made something entertaining and engaging enough that you don’t miss the superpowers and spandex. Their Agent Carter doesn’t need to be super to be a heroine.

Let's hear it for the almost-greats and the interesting failures! Here are five shows from 2014 that didn't quite live up to their ambitions... yet.

In 2009 I invented a new kind of TV award, or perhaps “award.” Like a lot of critics, I always list the best shows of the year, and often the worst. But that inevitably leaves out a certain, often more interesting, group of shows: not mediocre ones, but shows that have ambitions that, for various reasons, they don’t manage to quite meet.

I named these awards The Cincies, for HBO’s 2007 drama John from Cincinnati, which was in some ways an inscrutable mess, but had moments of astonishing brilliance. If it was a failure, it was an interesting one, which is often a better thing to be than an unremarkable success.

A Cincy can be a commercial failure or a success. It can be a show that tried hard and just failed at greatness, or a show with the potential for greatness if it tried harder. Appearing on this list is not an insult; as I wrote in the awards’ first installment: “The Cincies, to me, represent one of my most important principles as a critic: that consistency and competence are less important than originality and ambition, and that sometimes, failure makes a greater contribution than success. There is too much programming on TV, and too little time in life, to spend that time with just-reliably-OK TV shows. The Cincies remind us that greatness and awfulness have more in common with each other than with adequacy and mediocrity.”

On that note, I give you… the 2014 Cincy Awards:

The Affair. The pilot of Showtime’s adultery Rashomon series was striking: perceptive, unsettling, and offering the promise of an intense emotional-psychological thriller. As it went on, though, its most central parts–the title affair between Alison and Noah, the police investigation that threaded everything together–became the least interesting. But much of the peripheral stuff was fascinating and well-observed (especially spouses Cole and Helen, who should just maybe have their own fling in season two).

Halt and Catch Fire. Like The Affair, this was one of those shows where the sides were better than the main course: protagonist Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) was a beige-box Don Draper clone. But when it spent time with its supporting characters (Kerry Bishé was a standout as Donna), it made its unlikely setting–the gold rush of the early personal-computing era–truly electric.

The Leftovers. This show is not only a textbook Cincy, it is arguably the show most in the spirit of the Cincies’ namesake–the confounding, gorgeous spiritual mystery John from Cincinnati–since that show went off the air. Its best episodes were some of the best on TV this year, period, but for much of its run, this mournful serial was so focused on not being about the Rapture that it wasn’t clear what it was about. Still, in those peak moments–like the phenomenal Carrie Coon showcase, “Guest”–there was enough power to hope that season two, which will leave behind the Tom Perrotta source novel, will come into its own.

Married. Pro: Nat Faxon and Judy Greer. Con: Terrible pilot. Pro: Much better subsequent episodes. What started out as a mean-spirited half-hour about a schmuck trying to slip the old ball-and-chain has the potential to grow into a generous but warts-and-all comedy about the long haul of marriage and mortgages.

Mulaney. Often, The Cincies offer hope that a series can reach its potential in a second season. Mulaney will not likely get one. And it was not a good sitcom to begin with–it was an odd, dissonant ’90s throwback. But here and there it had the glimpses of a strong, distinctive comedy built on the premises of John Mulaney’s standup, which plays on the tension between being repressed and rebellious, the clean-cut pleaser with a dark turn of mind. Here’s hoping he gets another show some day, and that that show gets him.