A Brief Reflection After Reading The Ringer's 100 Best Episodes of the Century List

I ran this TV blog here for about eight years, ending it in 2017 after the conclusion of Grimm, and then bringing the archive back online solely to write about the 20th anniversary of LOST, for which this blog owes its existence and name. Over the years of TV watching and blogging, one would guess that a TV blogger would know an infinite amount of TV shows and episodes and that any list of the greatest shows in the 2000s or the best episodes of the 2000s would be met with a knowing nod, quibbling, perhaps, with the ranking of The Night Of or Dawson’s Creek, or wondering why Everwood’s “Pilot” failed to make this list. 

I had the opposite experience, aside from the Everwood question, while reading The Ringer’s recently updated Best 100 Episodes of the 2000s list. The Ringer’s list put into perfect perspective how vast and unconquerable the TV medium became and is because of Peak TV and the Streaming Wars. As The Ringer introduction states, “the number of produced scripted shows has plateaued, and consolidation is approaching.” 

Indeed, streamers no longer hand a blank check and a ten episode to order to Hollywood bigwigs because the streaming wars effectively broke the TV industry, if not the entertainment industry. The WGA went on strike during the summer of 2023 to protect their livelihoods and gain fair compensation from streamers. As 2026 nears, the industry is in a precarious place as writers struggle to find work. According to Spectrum1 news, “TV writing jobs fell by 42% in the 2023-24 season, a loss of 1,319 positions across all seniority levels.” Uncertainty pervades the industry, much as it does many other industries in America at the moment. 

I published my TV reviews during the latter half of TV’s Golden Age, four years before Netflix premiered House of Cards, its first original series. Broadcast television was alive and well. HBO produced its prestige dramas and comedies. Cable had its prestige dramas in Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, The Shield, and Battlestar Galatica. I primarily reviewed broadcast TV shows because enough people still watched Arrow, The Vampire Diaries, Grimm, Revenge, and so on, live and would quickly search for a review. 

I used to write and publish fast so that the link would have a chance people seeing it in Twitter search. I was in my mid-twenties, trying my best to build some kind of pop culture writing career through my blog, and I wanted to cover as much television as I could. TV content twelve to fifteen years ago was voluminous, however, and continued to grow in volume like Mr. Creosote, so much so that I accepted my limitations after a few years of writing tedious Fall Preview articles and underwhelming web traffic. This blog dwindled to a niche TV blog, devoted to what I liked, so I only published Everwood, Grimm, and The Vampire Diaries reviews, with occasional essays about Dawson’s Creek or the odd post about LOST and/or Joss Whedon. 

Reading through The Ringer’s The 100 Best Episodes of the Century, again, reminded me of the sheer unconquerable volume of content produced since I stopped writing for this blog in March 2017. The only response to such volume is to find your niche and then your audience. Once in awhile, a Game of Thrones or Severance or Pluribus premieres, and pop culture websites will ride that content wave until the season concludes. Every few years, websites such as The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, and The Ringer publish comprehensive and authoritative list of the best and most important TV in the 21st century--a herculean task in a short-attention-span society, but I assume these lists get the clicks.

As for The Ringer’s list, Vladimir Nabokov used the spine test to measure the quality of literature. If you felt a little shiver between the shoulder blades while reading a book, Nabokov considered it “the highest form of emotion that humanity attained when evolving pure art and pure science.” By that criteria, I’d argue that Fleabag’s series finale, ranked #60, deserved a higher ranking, solely because reading about it, and remembering it, provoked a little shiver between my shoulder blades.

20 Years of Lost: 3 Fun Things About It

Twenty years ago this month, LOST premiered on ABC and soon became a global phenomenon, winning a Best Drama award at the 2005 Emmys, creating a massive and dedicated fandom that speculated and theorized to no end, and launching its showrunners into a rare level of fame, which included skits with The Muppets and multiple appearances on The Jimmy Kimmel Show. LOST used new media, such as an alternative reality game, to enhance the fan experience. ABC created an Official Lost podcast before podcasts became mainstream. There were tie-in novels and websites. 

LOST represents the apotheosis of the shared viewing experience series, which critics and TV aficionados still try to find in this current era of infrequent and shortened TV seasons, because watching, talking, and writing about LOST every week for six years was so much fun, however agonizing the long wait between seasons was. We watched the week’s episode, went to The Fuselage or fan forums, read Billie Doux’s reviews, and then capped off the fun with Jeff Jensen’s epic and creative recaps. 

What about this show created such fervor, dedication, and love? Was it its convoluted plot, or the mystery of the polar bears, or the gorgeous, diverse cast or gorgeous setting that drew people to the series, or its creative storytelling structure, or how it reinvented the TV model? All of those things drew people to the series and inspired devotion, and there are books and podcasts that exhaustively explain and celebrate LOST’s timeless appeal. 

For my own anniversary post about LOST, I’ll share three things that I loved about this show. 

Its Absorbing Characters

Season 1 of LOST is a masterful and elaborate character study, told in 25 captivating episodes. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, believing that the network would cancel the series after thirteen episodes, wanted each episode to resemble a good New Yorker story. Each episode concentrates on a main character, their flaw, and their epiphany or redemptive moment. Each episode’s flashback parallels the island story. Sure, the episodes deepened the story’s mysteries and added suspense, but the series began and ended with its character drama. As the series progressed, plot did overtake characters from time to time, but it ultimately was about its characters and their arcs. Indeed, “The End” lets the mystery be while acting as a love letter for all the characters that we loved. 

Insane Surprises

LOST was insane fun–the good kind of insane fun. The cliffhangers were legendary. I remember running outside of my house after “Two for the Road” ended to collect myself. I would do the same after I read the red wedding chapter in A Storm of Swords. I immediately called my friend Mic and implored him to go home as soon as possible so that he could watch the episode because I wanted to talk to him about it. 

“Raised By Another” had another insanely fun cliffhanger. The episode aired before I went away for a few days on a high school religious retreat. I was breathless from the time Hurley frantically tells Jack about the manifesto and Ethan not being on the plane to Ethan standing before Charlie and Claire in the jungle. How did I make it through Kairos without seeing “All the Best Cowboys Have Daddy Issues”? 

LOST saved the best cliffhangers for its season finales. “Exodus” had Mr. Friendly making a surprise visit to the folks on the raft. Season 3 had the infamous “We have to go back” reveal. Season 5 ended with time possibly being reinvented after Juliet detonated Jughead. Months of agonizing waiting followed these cliffhangers. During these long hiatuses, I used to dream about the show and what could happen when a new season started.

Gorgeous Production

If LOST had unsung heroes, it was the production crew led by Jean Higgins and Jack Bender. They could turn Hawaii into dusty Iraq, snowy London, or create a giant foot for Jacob to live in. Production assistants drove dailies early in the morning to the Los Angeles offices for the showrunners to review. The production crew on site in Hawaii drove all over the island, putting in 12-18 hour days. The LOST on Location features on the LOST DVDs are treasures, highlighting their dedication and expertise.

Happy 20 years, LOST!

Grimm "The End" Review

I figured out “The End” about a one-third of the way through the episode. At a certain point, killing off characters loses the ‘shock and awe’ quality, and one wonders what’s going on. Major characters died every few minutes in “The End”, a fun trend that started at the end of last week’s penultimate episode. Once Renard took Zerstorer’s rod through the heart in defense of his suddenly pro-Zerstorer daughter, I started thinking about where it’d all lead. It didn’t take long for my Eureka moment. The writers made sure to emphasize the fact that two realities exist concurrently; thus, Nick was in the Bad Reality.

David Greenwalt did the whole ‘kill off nearly every major character’ before when he worked for Joss Whedon on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Greenwalt directed episode nine of Buffy’s third season when a wish demon grants Cordelia her wish by making a world in which Buffy never came to Sunnydale. A Sunnydale without Buffy is a bad Sunnydale. One of the iconic scenes in Buffy belongs to the end of “The Wish” when Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Angel die. (When Angel dies, Buffy didn’t even wince, because she and Angel never met nor fell in epic love in this bad wish reality). If Nick hadn’t been in The Other Place, I expected Zerstorer’s Rod to do its thing and resurrect everything.

Anyway, the series finale of Grimm highlighted two major things, both Nick related. Nick, like Buffy Summers, would be nothing without his friends. Losing his friends nearly motivated him to give Zerstorer the stick. Also, the Grimm line is strong, like the line of Slayer blood that united every slayer from the First to Buffy to…well, I won’t give away the ending to Buffy. Zerstorer’s most deadly power wasn’t the Rod, though its power neared ultimate—it was his ability to manipulate reality and to take away the people Nick loved the most, a loss so great he would’ve sacrificed the whole of humanity to bring them back. (And that’s another echo of ANGEL, though Greenwalt wasn’t involved in the fifth season or the specific fifth season episode “A Hole in the World”).

Trubel saved him from himself, and his mother and Aunt Marie provided him strength when he needed it most. Isn’t that what we, too, hope for in our lowest moments: the strength of love, fellowship, and family bonds to help us fight what we think we cannot defeat? I loved the shot of Nick, Kelly, Aunt Marie, and Trubel surrounding Zerstorer in The Other Place. That’s an image for a final Grimm poster—specifically the overhead shot of Zerstorer standing tall as four Grimms surround him (or three. Was Aunt Marie a confirmed Grimm).

A part of me felt bummed during the episode because of the quick deaths to the other major characters, because I wanted more impactful involvement from them. Of course, such a perspective is, ultimately, selfish and skewed. Characters don’t need to be active physical presences in someone’s specific story for them to be impactful. Let us not forget that Grimm was Nick’s story. David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf wanted to finish Nick’s story in “The End”.

Grimm began with Nick on his own (aside from Monroe). No one knew, not Hank, not Wu, not Juliette, and Rosalee wouldn’t enter his and Monroe’s life for another season. Like other supernatural genre shows, Grimm began as a show of discovery. Nick discovered a new life and a new world and began the hero’s journey. Aunt Marie called him to adventure. He refused the call, found a mentor in his Aunt and a guide in Monroe, and then he crossed the threshold when he saved the little girl in the “Pilot” and faced off with his first Wesen as a Grimm. He returned to his home, having changed. The hero’s journey repeated throughout the six seasons until “The End” when it reached its synthesis, and the writers switched from the monomyth to the Hegelian triad where Grimm then spiraled into a new thesis, twenty years later, with Kelly and Diana helping their Mom and Dad fight Wesen alongside the triplets and Monroe and Rosalee.

Now, did Grimm need to tell a trippy fever dream Other Place story over the span of three episodes? Sure. Why not? Grimm was a trippy, weird, crazy, fever dream of a show. This show dropped plotlines and characters without abandon. The writers wrote off major overarching stories with one line. I had no idea where everything in Grimm’s history would lead to in the end. I learned to go along with Grimm’s battiness after awhile. It turned out that Grimm returned to its roots to the end. The end of stories often return to its beginning in some ways. The hero in the monomyth returns home transformed, like Frodo at the end of The Lord of the Rings. Finnegans Wake “brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs” at the end, which is the beginning.

Nick returns to his home where his friends are, all of them, Hank, Monroe, Rosalee, Wu, Eve, Renard, and his lover, Adalind, where he’s stronger with them and because of them. Yes, every series on television resurrects characters now. Death doesn’t mean a thing, but it doesn’t always need to mean finality on television. Sure, it’d be nice if it did, sometimes. We get plenty of death’s finality in our lives, though. I wanted to see Nick and his friends together in the end somehow. I even liked the group hug. So, yeah, I’m a softie.

Grimm is over now. I wrote three weeks ago in my final post for The Vampire Diaries that ending a story is incredibly difficult. It is. A writer, or writers, can’t satisfy every fan in the world. Someone, somewhere, will feel disappointed. That’s unavoidable. It’s often to best to think about the whole of the story you experienced after it ends, whether it’s a book, a TV show, a movie, a podcast, or a music album, and consider whether or not you felt glad you watched and experienced it. Maybe you’ll think of it in terms of worth. Was it worth the time you invested in it? I’m sorry if you thought it wasn’t. I hope it was for you.

Other Thoughts:

-Grimm was the weirdest show I wrote about, I’d say. One wouldn’t think it was weird. It’s a supernatural procedural about fighting creatures from fairy tales, right? Well, it began so simply. Little things about Grimm threw me: the structure of some episodes, for example, or the pacing, or the treatment of exposition, dialogue choices—not to mention some arcs as well as other things I’ve rambled about in past reviews.

-My thanks to Grimm’s delightful cast for great work over the years and to Grimm’s crew, writers, and many directors. Not many folks thought Grimm would make it to thirteen episodes in the late summer and early fall of 2011. I offer my additional thanks to all for giving me something to write about for the last six years. Grimm joins Everwood as the only shows I wrote about in toto.

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-Jim Kouf & David Greenwalt wrote the finale. David Greenwalt directed.

Grimm "Zerstörer Shrugged" Review

I’ve always found writing about the first part of a two part Grimm story difficult because the first part is all set up. The Big Bad wastes time killing nameless extras. The good guys spend time figuring out what’s going on, developing plans of attack and defense, and zeroing in on what the Big Bad really wants.

Two-parters at the end of a season or the end of a series often raise the stakes at the  end of the first part. Buffy stabbed Faith at the end of “Graduation Day, Part 1”. Holtz had Justine kill him to make it look like Angel, Connor’s father, did it in “Benediction”. The episode that comes to my mind, though, is “The Candidate” from LOST’s final season. No, “The Candidate” isn’t the penultimate episode, but “Zerstorer Shrugged” has in common with it a devastating ending, an ending that shows anything can and will happen at the end, and an ending that raises the stakes for “The End”.

“Zerstorer Shrugged” isn’t without challenges, particularly its role in the Grimm universe. The symbols pointed to a fatidic event weeks ago, which was the 24^th of March. Rosalee, Eve, and Monroe consulted a number of books between this episode and last week’s episode. In each book they found new pieces that helped them solve the puzzle of Zerstorer, his rod, and the stick. Their scenes reminded me of Doc Jensen’s LOST recaps in which he found a text relevant to LOST and would then develop a fun, thought-provoking theory/interpretation of that week’s episode, which is essentially what Monroe engages in throughout “Zerstorer Shrugged”. While that type of investigation may provide its inquirer with the broad strokes of a grand plan, it cannot anticipate the details, i.e. who will die and who won’t.

All the books, the research, the symbols, and the history works to make this ending the natural, fatidic ending for Grimm, and to make all Grimm’s disparate parts make sense. The effort is similar to “Inside Out” from ANGEL’s fourth season. “Inside Out” tried telling the audience how everything that happened in the show happened to bring about Jasmine. It’s fun for the audience and the writers to think that it all mattered, but it’s not necessary.

The research of Monroe, Rosalee, and Eve uncovered a vital piece of information when they deduced that the stick belongs to the rod. The Crusaders buried it precisely to keep Zerstorer, aka The Fallen Angel, aka The Devil, from finding it for his rod. Zerstorer’s rod, see, was assembled from pieces scattered across the world. As long as he doesn’t get the last piece, which is the stick, the gang has a chance. And, obviously, if they break his rod, they’ll break him.

So, “Zerstorer Shrugged” hums along as the gang researches more. Adalind and Renard hid with Diana and Kelly in the cabin in the woods where Nick saved a little girl years ago (another instance of Greenwalt and Kouf trying to circle around to beginning at the end. How Viconian.). Nick and Eve couldn’t beat Zerstorer. Diana, because she’s all plot device, without explanation, opened the portal, which Zerstorer used to crossover. Zerstorer became a handsome muscular blonde man on planet Earth, of course, killed some folk, and then he killed Hank and Wu. Son of a gun, Kouf and Greenwalt. The deaths worked spectacularly well, I thought. Losing Wu and Hank hurts, and it shows that no one else is safe in the series finale. I totally didn’t expect to lose both characters in the span of several seconds. Last week’s episode suggested that Eve would die. Characters don’t have honest conversations with each other unless something terrible will happen afterwards. As the returning Trubel followed Zerstorer, I thought that, “Oh, she’s back to die,” but then Hank and Wu died.

Pretty nifty, Grimm.

Other Thoughts:

-I loved Wu and Hank, but they were the most disposable characters. Still, I expected a Buffy ending with our heroes standing together after defeating an ultimate, first evil. Neither character had much of a personal arc throughout the series. Hank was always Nick’s partner for the murder investigations. Hank didn’t learn about Nick or wesen for nearly two years. Maybe it was only a season. Wu didn’t find out for three seasons, was it? Wu had some of the show’s best sub-arcs, though. When the writers found something for Hank besides murder investigations, it was a doomed love affair. Russell Hornsby and Reggie Lee were great. Maybe we’ll see them again in the finale. Many showrunners cannot resist reuniting characters in some kind of afterlife these days. Thanks a lot, Alan Ball.

-You can't a Big Bad named the Destroyer and not have him destroy characters we love.

-Nick, Renard, and Adalind strolled down Nostalgia Lane and remembered the time when Adalind worked for the Royals. She used to be a major badass.

-Trubel told Nick that every Black Claw cell was destroyed. That’s the Grimm I know: ending a major storyline off-screen. Black Claw used to be portrayed as the ultimate challenge for Nick and his friends. Obviously, season six being the last changed things. I have no idea, of course. I’m a lowly blogger.

-Brenna Kouf wrote the episode. Jim Kouf and David Greenwalt got the story credit. Aaron Lipstadt, a veteran Grimm director, directed the episode.

-Be here next week for “The End”!

Grimm "Where The Wild Things Were" Review

Were the wild things in Pylea?

Grimm returned to a favorite old standby in “Where The Wild Things Were”.  You know the one. Characters stand around and tell another character various things that the audience watched happen throughout the season. One could argue that the scenes between the gang and Renard existed this time specifically because of Renard’s past duplicity. Would the gang, as well as the audience, trust him? Could he earn that trust? Renard has been feeble and passive since “Oh Captain My Captain” so he seemed sort of eager to help the gang save Nick and Eve from The Other Place. Plus, his daughter is the destined bride of the devil. That’ll make someone put aside old grudges.

This episode set things up for Grimm’s endgame. Amazingly, Kouf and Greenwalt seem committed to tying this wacky and insane world together via The Other Place, Zerstorer, the stick, the cloth, the symbols, and the keys. The Other Place is clearly The Black Forest circa 1204—the time of the stick, the cloth, and the keys. The world then was full of wesen in their pre-woge nature. Zerstorer, the devil, is a creature the resident humans would like dead. Nick proved his killer aptitude by shooting dead a few Blutbaden. The villagers eagerly pointed Nick in the direction of Zerstorer.

All of “Where The Wild Things Were” anticipates Zerstorer’s appearance in The Other Place. Essentially, nothing much happens besides characters repeating information and plot details that the audience already knows. At Nick’s loft, the other characters imply or suggest things that likely will figure into the next two episodes.

The one significant character scene belonged to Nick and Eve wherein the writing finally addressed the divide between Juliette and Eve. Nick’s history with Juliette motivated his stepping through the looking glass to help her, but Eve emphasized that she’s not Juliette, that Juliette’s gone, while confirming that she remembers and “hates” what Juliette did. That will allow Nick to find a measure of closure about what happened at the end of season four without the writers pulling an about-face and admitting that they created Eve specifically to rehabilitate Juliette. The scene’s notable for clearing away any confusion about Eve’s characterization since season five’s finale yet the thin threads that remains between Juliette and Eve marred the scene.

The writing last season never addressed what happened at the end of season four. Instead, the writers introduced Eve, gave her a wig, had different characters repeat that she was a different character, even though it seemed like an overt attempt to rehab the character by giving her a different identity. Anyway, that’s evidently not the case. Beyond the confusion, messiness, and problems of Eve’s existence, the scene sneaked in a relatable real life thing about two people growing apart and becoming different people in the Nick/Juliette scene. People change throughout a relationship, except in Grimm the change is noticeable. Nick became a Grimm. Juliette became a hexenbiest. Genre shows such as Grimm and that other fairy tale show on ABC, and the many genre shows before both fairy tale shows, used larger-than-life metaphors to tell stories about the everyday. Grimm is such a loose, weird, and discombobulated show at times that one (i.e. me) overlooks how this or that thing in Grimm mythos informs something about a character or a relationship. Of course, Grimm’s writers never seemed to start breaking a story by asking how this or that thing will inform or highlight a character or his or relationship.

Sometimes Grimm got lost in the weeds.

Other Thoughts:

-Nevertheless, I liked seeing Renard interacting with the rest of the cast. The initial reluctance by Monroe, Rosalee, Adalind, Hank, and Wu to share crucial information with Renard quickly disappeared, and everyone freely shared each detail involving The Other Place.

-This episode's quote came from Shakespeare's The Tempest, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. The Tempest and "Where The Wild Things Were" had altering realities in common. Check out the audio dramatization of the play starring Sir Ian McKellen as Prospero if you can.

-Wu had a line about Alice in Wonderland tonight. Did you know Vladimir Nabokov translated that book into Russian in his early 20s? There was a time in 2014 when I drew parallels between Adalind's adventures in Viktor's castle and Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. Ah, memories. Anyway, the obvious 'through the looking glass' metaphor connects Grimm and ANGEL yet again. One of ANGEL's season two Pylean episodes is titled "Through The Looking Glass". 

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-Brenna Kouf wrote the episode. Terrence O’Hara directed.