When I wrote about Parks and Recreation, what was most striking to me was how nice everyone was, that the characters on that showed seemed like actual friends. That contrasts sharply with Parks & Rec’s sister show, The Office. For a comedy, The Office is downright mean. The characters on The Office, for the most part, do not like each other. At all. Though they do grow closer as the show progresses, for the most part the feeling is one of forced toleration, with little affection. Other than some specific relationships, if these characters could never see each other again, they would be perfectly happy. Aside from that, the show puts the characters in awful situations and forces the viewer to watch every uncomfortable, painful moment. That meanness is what makes the show great. One of the big changes from the US version of The Office compared to the British originator is that is it a nicer take. After The Office stopped aping the original and found its own tone, it really came into its own. It became a more pleasant, hopeful experience but didn’t abandon its cruelty entirely.

The bulk of the shows meanness was directed at boss Michael. He was also the source of a lot of the meanness. Even after they sanded off many of his worse qualities, he is still socially awkward and deluded. He is just more pathetic than cruel. His complete lack of self-awareness made many seemingly ordinary situations exceedingly uncomfortable. Especially when it came to his relationship with Jan. It was such a terrible pairing, one deluded man desperate for love and one woman going through some kind of midlife crisis. At first it was just Michael’s overestimating the meaningfulness of their relationship. He thought it was true love; she viewed it as a cathartic, ill-advised fling. As the show went on, events forced Jan and Michael closer together, right up until we got the two of the meanest episodes on the show. The first is the House Party. Michael was constantly inviting Jim and Pam to have dinner with him and Jan. Jim, wisely, constantly put him off. Until Michael forced his hand, leading to the worst dinner party ever. While Jim and Pam plot an escape, Michael and Jan argue and display their wholly dysfunctional relationship. Jan has two of the bedrooms converted into an office and a workspace. Michael sleeps on a bench at the foot of the bed. It is just so awful. While Michael brought this on himself by forcing the issue, both with Jim about the party and Jan with the relationship, you still feel bad for how terrible the whole situation is. The situation is not helped by Dwight crashing the party with his former babysitter as a date. Then there is The Deposition. There Michael is called to testify in Jan’s wrongful termination suit against Dunder Mifflin. There he is forced to sit and watch as the woman he loves and the company he loves both show how little they think of him. Jan reads his diary for the record; they bring up his employee evaluations. For a large portion of the episode the viewer just watches as all that Michael loves is torn down around him.

The true nadir of cruelty in The Office is the episode Scott’s Tots. Long ago, Michael promised to pay for college for a class of students if they graduated high school. Now, on the eve of their graduation, he has to go back to the school and tell them that he doesn’t have the money to pay for anything. Instead of just coming out and saying it, it puts it off as long as possible. The situation gets steadily more uncomfortable as Michael watches them celebrate the contribution that he knows he can’t make. It is a perfectly miserable half hour. The show does dole that cruelty out in smaller doses as the show goes on, but it is almost always forcing the characters to face their worst fears. Upright, conservative Christian Angela ends up married to a closeted gay man. Ryan makes a meteoric rise in the company, but makes horrifically bad choices.

The show does bog down in the later seasons, with Season 7 rushing around to deal with the impending loss Michael and Season 8 dealing with the albatross of Robert California. Really, I love James Spader, but Robert California is a terrible character that takes up too much screen time. But Season 9 rights the ship, so the show goes out on a high note. It largely brings back the tone of Seasons 2 & 3. While by and large the characters are finally allowed to become friends, there is still a lot of genuinely earned drama. Jim and Pan experience relationship troubles when he helps start a business in Philadelphia. Unlike when most TV shows put strain on a couple, this feels truly earned. Jim and Pan argue while staying true to the characters as they had been established for the previous 8 seasons. It is great TV. It also has a maturing Dwight and the disintegration of Angela’s entire life, two solid B plots.

The only fly in the ointment is Andy Bernard. Andy went out on a high note in Season 8, having been broken down as Regional Manager after risking everything for his love Erin before saving the company, and his job, by going to previous CFO David Wallace and getting him to buy Dunder Mifflin. Season 9 throws all of that out the window. Andy quickly abandons the job and girl he fought for the previous season. (I know Ed Helms had to leave to film a movie, but they could have written him out in a better way) He comes back arrogant and vindictive. Andy was always a malleable character, but never this awful. It is hard to watch a character that had been largely sympathetic turn into a villain. It is that cruelty that made the show, but this time the situations feel a little more forced than usual.

The cruelty that had been the shows hallmark makes Finale so memorable, because it lacks it entirely. It is pure saccharine, right down to Erin finding her birth parents. The show always had those moments, the times when joy would surpass the mundane drudgery that makes up the bulk of the show. The best example is the last bit of season 3, when Pam cries to the camera congratulating Jim on his probably promotion only to have him walk in and ask her out on a date. While the cruelty made the show funny, those moments made it memorable. Finale tries to make a 50 minute episode that is just those moments. It nearly succeeds. Suddenly the cast becomes the viewers; their sadness at leaving the office is our sadness at saying goodbye to The Office. It also has one of the best lines in the series with Andy’s “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” That last episode is about saying goodbye to the good old days, and it leaves you feeling satisfied in a way that few shows do. While The Office was never as nice as something like Parks & Rec, in the end it turns out it wasn’t that cruel either.

I watched the first season of Arrow on Netflix over the last couple of weeks. I had been told it was quite good, but forgive me if I didn’t believe. People also told me that Smallville was good, and that show, while occasionally enjoyable, was never actually any good. Plus, the team behind it was also the team behind the Green Lantern movie, which was at best a disappointment. On top of that, Green Arrow is generally a tough sell for me. It’s not that I don’t like him, but often comes off as an off-brand Batman. Finally, a genuinely trusted source, my brother, told that the show was excellent, so I gave it a shot. He and that anonymous “they” were right.

It does take a couple of episodes to really get up to speed. Part of that has to do with Oliver’s struggle with what his mask is going to be. He doesn’t know whether to be the disapproving older brother, to be tortured and brooding over his years lost on the island or to be the carefree party boy. From episode to episode he vacillates though these various personas while getting his act together as a bow-toting vigilante. The rest of the cast also takes a while to find their place. That is not unusual for a TV show. The pilot is generally shot apart from the rest of the show, often resulting in a slightly different tone than the rest. And I’m sure there is feedback that is taken into account with subsequent adjustments.

By the fifth episode, most of the show has fallen into place and Arrow starts to be a lot of fun. One big change that keeps complaints about Green Arrow being a Batman clone is the prominence of his family. Batman is famously an orphan. In Arrow, Oliver Queen has a mother, sister and a step-father. It makes it more difficult for him to keep his secret identity secret. Not that he is very good at that, though his failures in that area make the show all the more believable. Outside of his family, he has a handful of other allies. There is Diggle, hired to be his bodyguard and eventually becomes Ollie’s partner in his quest to clean up Starling City. Eventually they are joined by Felicity, a computer expert that works at Oliver’s family’s company. He also has is former girlfriend Laurel Lance and best friend Tom Merlyn, who have started a relationship in his absence.

Honestly, there is a good show here without Ollie’s actions as a vigilante. His struggle to find his place after five years away is a good enough hook to keep things interesting. How does he tell his sister to stop her partying when she is acting no different than he did before he was lost? And she actually has the excuse of suddenly losing her father and brother to a tragic accident. By the middle of the season, the Green Arrow stuff does come to the fore. At that point, the show starts to bring in more elements from the comics. The villains stop being generic corrupt business men; they start to become comic villains. His flashbacks back to the island stop being about just survival and start to be about adventures there with Shado and Deathstroke.

What the show does effectively is show that while Ollie may have matured on the island, that he had been fundamentally changed by his experiences, he is still not a hero when the series starts. He undoubtedly does good, but he kills a lot of people doing it. This turns Detective Lance, Laurel’s father, against him. It keeps Diggle from wanting to work with him and distances him from Tom when he finds out. It also adds a layer of hypocrisy to the whole endeavor. When he meets up with Helena Bertinelli, Huntress from the comics, he tries to teach her that she doesn’t have to kill. While he is right that her goal is vengeance, not justice, it also shows that his quest isn’t quite right. Later, Det. Lance tells Roy Harper, another comic expat, that no one man has the right to mete out lethal justice, he is right. What gives Oliver the right to just kill whoever he determines is a bad guy? Getting that lesson across to Oliver is a journey that lasts all season.

Arrow is pretty much exactly a superhero TV show should hope to be. Yes, it is some low level soap opera, but that is a big part of the superhero formula. And a powerless guy like Green Arrow is a perfect fit for TV because he doesn’t need extensive special effects to do his thing. Every episode has a villain of the week “A” story, but that is augmented by long running subplots. Just like comics, when they are working right. It is often cheesy, occasionally dumb but largely an enjoyable hour. Those same people that told me the first season was good also told me that the 2^nd season was better, so hopefully I’ll get a chance to see for myself soon.

One more thing of note, I would guess that whoever is responsible for casting this show is a fan of Dr. Who. Casting John Barrowman is simply a smart move; the man is always entertaining. But while he is around for most of the season, later on Alex Kingston, best known (by me at least) for playing River Song, shows up as Laurel’s Mom it starts to look like it’s not just a coincidence. Again, I can’t fault the casting choices. I, too, like Dr. Who.

Last year Comedy Central aired the last, at least for now, episode of Futurama. It is not the first time Futurama has ended. Or the second. For a show as consistently excellent and intelligent as Futurama, it seems to get cancelled a lot. Unlike when it was dumped by Fox or the uncertainty after the movies, this time I think I am ready to let it go. It feels like time. Very rare is the show that runs exactly as long as it should. Too often great shows are cancelled early, like Firefly, but just as frequent are great shows that run until they aren’t great anymore, like Scrubs or The Office. Futurama was once the first and by ending now keeps itself from being the second.

Many say that the new Futurama was not as good as the old, and I am sympathetic to this line of thought. There is something different about the Comedy Central episodes. They seem freer, in both good and bad ways. The Fox episodes felt more constrained in what they were allowed to do, especially in regards to sexual references. That constraint in gone. But the episodes also felt more tightly written, as though being told that they couldn’t do what they at first wanted to meant that they had come up with something better. There is looseness in the new episodes. Of course, maybe I feel that way thanks to the much looser animation. That looseness made the quality of the individual episodes more variable. If I were to rank all the episodes from best to worst (an endeavor I attempted just before the show started back up) I am sure than most of the bottom 10 would be from the new stuff. However, I also suspect many new ones would be near the top. The middle of the road episodes are all old Futurama.

The thing is, I don’t think the show was slipping. This wasn’t Family Guy coming back as a shambling homunculus of a once hilarious show. The Futurama writers were near the top of their game. The worst of the new stuff were the first few episodes right at start. They felt like an ace throwing warm up pitches. There is greatness there, plenty of movement on the fastball but the velocity isn’t quite there. Soon, though, they found their groove. The last ten episodes or so were largely great.

Still, there were hitting a point where they were largely retreading old ground. How many times can Fry learn that maybe his family did care about him? How many times can he or Bender make a deal with the Robot Devil? To be fair, nearly every time they went back to an old place they brought something new with them. The show wasn’t running out of ideas, but their world was becoming increasingly filled in. Which I why I am okay with seeing it go. What happens now is that characters are twisted into terrible parodies of themselves. That process was already happening to Amy and Hermes. It happened to Zoidberg long ago. While it is likely not their choice, this is a good chance for Futurama, after a nice long run, to go out with some dignity.

Futurama is one of the best shows to air ever on American Television. It was a show that wasn’t afraid to be nerdy; to be actually truly smart. It is the only show with jokes about mathematical concepts and references to science fiction beyond the standard Star Wars/Trek general knowledge. It also wasn’t above being stupid. Philip J Fry may just be the dumbest lead character ever. It was the melding of those two elements that helped make the show great. All good things must come to an end and now is that time for Futurama.

“Space. It seems to go on forever. Then you get to the end and the gorilla starts throwin’ barrels at you.”

I’m not really the biggest anime fan. At one point, back in high school, I was, but I also hadn’t actually seen much of it. Sure, I had caught the occasional episode of Dragon Ball Z or Sailor Moon over the years while watching cartoons in the morning, but normally a late riser and those were on ridiculously early so I didn’t see much. My biggest experience had probably come from playing video games, RPGs like Lunar, Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy, that used that art style.

When I spent a summer sometime around 00 or 01 with some relatives is when I first really got to watch some, and I fell in love. I was mostly watching the Adult Swim anime block as I went to sleep, and I saw stuff like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun and Lupin the III. I went from a vague awareness that it existed to trying to stay up as late as possible to watch it. Unfortunately, my first experience left me with false impressions. I saw some of the best stuff first. Cowboy Bebop is to this day one of my favorite TV shows of any kind, and I still like Trigun and Lupin. Since all of the shows I watched were good (even Inuyasha was fairly entertaining despite its quickly tired formula) I expected everything else to be along the same lines.

So when I finally went away to college and lived somewhere with both cable and high speed internet, my misconceptions were quickly and painfully corrected. There was still good stuff on Adult Swim. The shows I’d liked were still in the rotation, and new stuff like Samurai Champloo and Case Closed were pretty entertaining. But the more I watched, especially my own illegal internet forays, the more I realized the most anime is crap. That really isn’t a strong condemnation, most TV in general is crap. My experience is what it would be like to have your only experience with American TV be Arrested Development, Firefly and Community; everything you’ve seen is so great, there is no reason to not expect similar quality from other shows. So when you turn on something like My Name is Earl (which I like a lot, especially the first 2 seasons), it suddenly becomes the worst show you’ve ever seen. For about a year, every anime I watched was the worst anime I had seen. I soon got tired of wading through the crap and watched other things. Like Arrested Development, the best TV show.

In the last few months, though, I’ve started watching some anime again. Mostly because my brothers were using my Netflix account to watch Fullmetal Alchemist and Gurren Laggan. (Quick digression: I find it really weird to share my Netflix account, because I am self-conscious about my viewing choices. Sometimes I watch weird crap because it is weird crap. Don’t you judge me!) On a friend’s recommendation, I … acquired and watched Vision of Escaflowne. I liked it quite a bit. It fuses mecha action stuff with sappy relationship junk in a way that is largely entertaining. I think maybe enough time has passed that I am willing to waste some time watching crap shows again with the hope that I’ll occasionally discover a gem. Plus, I now have more friends and acquaintances with knowledge of anime to help direct me, rather than blindly stumbling through.

So I guess the point is that I used to like anime, then I didn’t, now I kind of do again. I could easily decide it’s not worth my time again soon and go back to watching Dr. Who and Columbo when I use Netflix, but I hope not. Also, I am very open to suggestions for good shows that are available on whatever internet streaming service. So tell me some good stuff to watch. I like action shows and old stuff