There are a hella lot of October surprises on the tube, and they aren't just the new shows debuting this month. The Democratic debate earned CNN its second-highest rating ever, and it was the highest-rated Democratic debate ever. More than 15 million people tuned in to the network to watch what Jimmy Kimmel called "Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and three high school principals" have the antithesis of the GOP food fight on Oct. 13.
It had some awesome moments you may have missed, and also those gay moderators, Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon. CNN has got to get a lesbian in there. And at press time, three different Republican members of the House Benghazi committee had admitted that the focus of the questioning was to drive Hillary Clinton out of the presidential race. More on that later, because the election is not going away, much as we'd like to disappear some of the more egregious aspects. We're looking at you, Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Mike Huckabee.
Between volleys, there's some really fine TV on, and we don't want you to miss it. The shows everyone is watching right now are, in order of excitement and ratings, according to the people that tab that stuff, are Empire, Scandal, The Walking Dead, Blindspot, How to Get Away with Murder, Quantico and Limitless. With only one exception, Limitless, we told you so. We would add the following shows returning this month: The Good Wife, Madam Secretary, Homeland, The Leftovers, iZombie and The Affair .
All the shows on the first list are stellar, must-see TV, except for Limitless, which we just can't get into, but that doesn't mean you won't want to take a pill and be a genius. We have a good friend who thinks HTGAWM and Scandal are "unwatchable." We're still friends, but.
When iZombie returned last week opposite Scream Queens, we were reminded of what a great Buffy-esque show that is and how we're not nearly as fond of SQ as we expected to be. We keep watching because of Jamie Lee Curtis, Emma Watson and Niecy Nash, who is genius on that show. But there really isn't anything else like iZombie out there with the possible exception of Sleepy Hollow, also back for another season and still really good.
That brings us to The Leftovers. Wow, is this show good. When networks wait just a little too long between seasons (season 1 of this HBO series ended in Sept. 2014), one assumes the show isn't coming back. We'd pretty much forgotten about The Leftovers. We'd read the book by Tom Perotta, series co-creator. We'd cried through it. We cried through season 1 of The Leftovers. Its premise is strange: one Oct. 14, 140 million people disappeared off the face of the earth in something called The Sudden Departure. Disturbing, but also engaging and raising questions. Survivors' loss, guilt, and rage at not being among the chosen. But the loss part: it was like revisiting the days after 9/11 on a weekly basis. You started to ask yourself why were you putting yourself through this. But we had faith (no pun intended) that this strange meditation on how we humans deal with crushing loss would give us answers eventually if it ever came back.
So now here we are in season 2, and everything has been up-ended. We've passed through the plot of the book, so the writers can do a Lost thing here, which they kind of have. We are not in Mapleton, NY any more. Instead we are in Texas. In a small town dubbed Miracle because no one disappeared there. It has become a kind of Mecca or Lourdes or both. The tiny town sees a mini-Haaj every day. Some of the sights that go with that are a bit barbaric.
Starring in Miracle is the brilliant Regina King, fresh off her Emmy win for American Crime. She plays Erika Murphy, matriarch of the Murphy clan. Erika is deaf. This town is markedly black, and the opener has a kind of parallel story to season 1, except with black people. The Murphys seem to be a much calmer, happier family than the Garveys. Seem to be.
The show still features characters from season 1, notably Justin Theroux as Kevin Garvey, Amy Brenneman as Laurie Garvey and the amazing Carrie Coon as Nora Durst. Bits and pieces of families from season 1 come together to create new families in season 2. This is such a queer thing, this piecing together of one's own fam from survivors like yourselves. But in Miracle, some gifts don't come without strings attached. Nothing is quite as it seems. There's a touch too much gratitude. What else is going on?
'Wife' & 'Madam'
The Good Wife has re-imagined itself yet again. Now Peter (Chris Noth, aging in an old-Hollywood kind of way) is running a new campaign, this time sort of for President, but really to be "Hillary's vice president." Plus, this season Eli Gold (Alan Cumming) is front-burner and taking no prisoners. Peter cut him loose, he went to Alicia (Julianna Margulies), and now, hell hath no fury like a gay man scorned.
Meanwhile, Madam Secretary is giving us a preview of just how dramatic it is to be Secretary of State. This is an exceptional show in much the same way West Wing was 15 years ago. It's telling us a story about power, about how the sausages of democratic government get made, about the compromises just short of compromising. T�a Leoni is so good as Bess McCord, Secretary of State and former CIA operative, that we believe she is SoS. She's dealing with much more domestic intrigue at the State Department this season.
Parallel to these two shows about politics is Scandal, doing a tidy job of playing shadow White House. On the Oct. 15 episode (spoiler alert), we saw a reprise of both the Clinton and the Obama years in a mashable state that had Fitz dealing with possible impeachment for his affair with Olivia (prompting Cyrus to say, "Impeachment? For an affair?") and trying to get his signature gun control legislation passed.
But it was when Olivia (Kerry Washington) started getting online harassment that it got ultra-real. Her admission that she's having an affair with the president has her life hell. Fitz calls to check on her, and she tells him there are porn parodies of the two of them.
Then Olivia explains, "A lot of anonymous Internet people, cowards who won't use their names, apparently want to have me killed. Also raped. How come whenever a woman does something that people don't like, the only way these men on the Internet know how to express themselves is by threatening rape?"
Fitz tells her to get off the computer. Olivia continues, "I have at least a thousand threats of rape here. Just on this one site from guys who are mad that I had the audacity to be born female. And black. Do you think if I told them I own a gun and that I've shot someone, they'd threaten to rape me? Do you think if I told them I've survived being kidnapped and tortured they would get that their weak little misspellings barely make me blink? That I would welcome the chance to take out a little bit of PTSD on the next man who put his hands on me?"
Steven Soderbergh said he was giving up movies to do TV, but that wasn't entirely true. He sort of combined the two. His Emmy-winning Beyond the Candelabra may have whet his appetite for the small screen, but The Knick, which returned for season two on Oct. 16, is big-screen stuff with film actors made to fit the small screen. Clive Owen is truly at his best. And we love a hospital drama (not enough to be drawn into CBS' B-level Code Black, but we're still loving the always topical, always gay Grey's Anatomy).
The Knick is short for Knickerbocker Hospital, an NYC medical center that is doing its utmost to be innovative and not kill people. Which isn't easy in 1900, when mortality rates were ginormous and antibiotics had yet to be invented. Incredible when you think that Alexander Fleming only invented penicillin in 1928 and Gerhard Domagk invented sulfa drugs four years later. Be grateful you live in the 21st century. At the Knick, people die. A lot. But Dr. John Thackery (based on Dr. William Stewart Halsted, played by Owen), head of surgery, is intent on being the best and brightest and making medical history. He has a few problems, like cocaine and opium addictions, but he's determined.
Dr. Algernon Edwards (Andre Holland), a Harvard-educated, European-trained black surgeon (likely based on Daniel Hale Williams), has different issues, notably racism. The Knick is an all-white hospital, and New York is a racial powder keg. At night, when Thackery is in Chinatown in an opium den, Edwards is in the hospital basement running a rogue clinic for the disenfranchised. Another intriguing character is Sister Harriet (Cara Seymour), a nun and midwife who tends to the sick and performs covert abortions.
The Knick has a lot going on, one of the best period dramas on the tube at a time when stellar period dramas are the norm. The topicality of the show, even as it's set more than a century ago, is riveting. It has strong performances, solid writing, amazing sets, compelling historicity. Find a way to see it if you don't have Cinemax.
Fargo is also back. The second season of the riveting FX drama premiered Oct. 12, and is, as they say in Fargo, a doozy. Fargo is an anthology series, so anything is possible. Season one was set in 2006. Season two is set in 1979. The quirky, crime-drama-with-a-hint-of-dark-humor series plays on the seamy underbelly of contented middle America. This season of Fargo opened with a triple murder at a waffle house. Hold the syrup.
FX describes the new season: "In 1979, beautician Peggy Blomquist (Kirsten Dunst) and her husband, butcher Ed (Jesse Plemons) of Luverne, Minnesota, cover up the hit-and-run and murder of the son of Floyd Gerhardt (Jean Smart), matriarch of the Gerhardt crime family in Fargo, North Dakota. Meanwhile, State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson), a recently returned Vietnam vet, and Sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson) investigate a triple homicide at a local diner connected to the murdered Gerhardt son, as well as protecting Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan during his campaign stop in Fargo."
Fargo does a lot with these film actors it's borrowed for the small screen. Dunst is perfect. Jean Smart has come quite a ways from her Designing Women days. Danson is doing double cop duty these days. He's also on CSI: Cyber with Patricia Arquette. He's good there, he's better here.
The third and likely final season of the Netflix original series Hemlock Grove premieres Oct. 23 and will be streaming in its entirety, like other Netflix series. If you haven't seen the previous two seasons, you can binge-watch those then jump into the new season. Hemlock Grove is a fictional town in Pennsylvania. Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgard) is heir to the town's wealthiest family. His mother, Olivia (Famke Janssen), is the matriarch. Roman becomes friends with a newcomer, Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron). As the two work to discover who has committed a series of brutal murders in the little town, they are also keeping secrets. Are they ever.
With Halloween looming, many shows are prepping their Halloween episodes, including most of the sitcoms, especially our faves, Modern Family, Brooklyn 99, blackish, and as is tradition, The Simpsons. Halloween is big on the tube. In addition to dramas like Scream Queens and American Horror Story where it's Halloween all the time, SyFy is running its eighth annual scarefest. The network is featuring a couple of original films, They Found Hell and The Hollow. ABC Family is also doing 13 days of horror. On Halloween, FXX will run all of The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror episodes. And on Oct. 30, Grimm returns to NBC.
Finally, we were going to talk about the Democratic debate, but what is there to say? The strangest moments were Lincoln Chafee saying he shouldn't be held accountable for his vote to overturn Glass-Steagall because his father had just died and he wasn't sure what he was voting for, which had Anderson Cooper incredulous. Yet not as incredulous as when Jim Webb said he killed a man, like that was a good credential for running for president.
We were appalled that CNN decided to outsource the race questions to the black guy, but that was the only reason Don Lemon was on the show, from a remote location. You know, like he was being kept in the kitchen. Do better, people.
The media agreed for once about who won the debate, Clinton, hands down. We're pretty sure at least two of those four guys will be off the stage by the next Dem debate. The next debate is the Republicans again on Oct. 28, but both Donald Trump and Ben Carson are threatening to boycott if the time isn't limited to two hours. Carly Fiorina said she could debate for the third hour by herself. There you have it, folks: the jokes just write themselves. So for election madness, period dramas and things that go bump in the night, you know you really must stay tuned.