Telly treats

epic episodes 2016

San Junipero — Black Mirror
The recurring theme of Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology is the entanglement of digital and emotional life.

As the series’s foreboding title hints, it rarely goes well, but San Junipero is a delightful exception. A virtual-reality technology that allows people to inhabit the past brings together two women (Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) in a 1987 of the mind, where they make a connection that survives death. There’s a bittersweet theme about nostalgia as an opiate, but for once this ingeniously dark series ends on a note of cyberhope.

hope — black-ish
This half-hour, in the spirit of the issue comedy of the Norman Lear 1970s, directly addressed the Black Lives Matter protests. The extended Johnson family watches a very familiar police-brutality case play out on the news, coming at the topic from multiple angles and drawing broad connections. As Andre (Anthony Anderson) remembers his pride and terror in seeing the newly elected Barack Obama leave his bulletproof limousine, he gives this comedy one of the finest dramatic moments of the year.

Game Over — Broad City
Leave it to Ilana on Broad City to accidentally wear a dog hoodie to work — and to “solve” that by simply colouring in her exposed midriff with a red marker to match the hoodie. Also leave it to her to sing while sitting on the toilet, accompanying herself with an egg shaker. Abbi’s rabid competitive spirit at a work outing makes for a good B-story for the episode, but the crowning moment of the episode (and maybe the season) comes from Ilana’s co-workers, celebrating her firing. They lip-sync the ‘Joyful, Joyful’ choir performance from Sister Act II, and then Whoopi Goldberg shows up in a full habit.

april — Occupied
This Norwegian political thriller had a great premise: When a Green Party prime minister announces that Norway is ending its oil production, the European Union backs a Russian occupation of the country (in the guise of industrial assistance). April, the premiere, detailed the complicated scenario and set the smart, twisty plot in motion in just 45 minutes of nonstop tension. Keep your eyes on the helicopter.

Fish Out of Water — BoJack Horseman’
A celebrity horse and his personal demons go underwater and find new depths. In this episode set — naturally — at a film festival at the bottom of the ocean, the self-absorbed BoJack (Will Arnett) gets lost in a city and finds himself caring for a newborn seahorse separated from its father. Gorgeously surreal and almost entirely without dialogue, this tour de force marries Lost in Translation with Looney Tunes to haunting, slapstick effect.