![]() ![]() The season moved crisply and paid off on a lot of the heightened tensions and myriad twists of the previous seasons. Dense and compelling storytelling, fascinating characters and a pull on its fan base unlike anything outside of The Walking Dead - it's a show you have to watch immediately. Fans of the first season will be happy, and a second solid season may convince others to jump in and discover the joys of the Upside Down.Įverybody wants a show like this. Credit the Duffer Brothers with avoiding a sophomore slump and delivering another clutch of fun episodes. More impressively for this second season is that Stranger Things was the odds-on favorite out of almost any overhyped returning series to take a creative tumble. It may have flaws - season one had plenty - but being highly entertaining and compelling can make up for a lot. First and foremost, Stranger Things is super fun to watch. The Leftovers looks at grief and faith like nothing else out there. It stands as a truly creative concept from inception to finish - often surprising, always dark, but cut through with weird humor. In a couple of months, you'll no doubt find this gem on any number of "Best of 2017" lists. What, you thought this was going to drop just because you haven't watched it yet? No chance. The number on the left is the current ranking, the one on the right was its previous ranking. In addition, some series that have completed their seasons can rise (or fall) even farther because of the constant re-evaluation of everything that marks the human condition of a critic.Īll hail the series that can hold the No. ![]() Also, some series are new - or newish - and they will rise or fall with the whims of further viewing. ![]() Of course, lots of dramas won't appear here that I have watched because they're not good enough to crack the list yet, which is the point of the whole thing in the first place. I'm not saying that will happen, but - spoiler alert - somebody has a really firm grasp on the top slot right now.Ī quick reminder: It's impossible to watch every show every week, and there will be some that I just haven't gotten around to watching yet (for example, Top of the Lake: China Girl), so they won't appear here. That's to allow for our Peak TV lifestyles wherein some of you haven't even watched The Wire yet, much less Mindhunter, which just came out on Netflix.Īnd while a full calendar year is a nod to everyone's limited time and the avalanche of incredibly great programming out there, it's also a welcome and fair parameter that could, in theory, allow a show to be No. Just a mental refresher, the main rule for the Power Rankings! is that a show has to have had its last episode within a calendar year of the latest list. ![]() And, as expected, there's been a surge of new content across many platforms. Such a good thing for the Power Rankings! And it's back in a big way as we swing around to the category that kicked off the latest reboot of these lists - essential dramas.Īfter introducing a cluster of various topics for the Power Rankings!, it was time to go back and see which new shows were going to slay the older shows and, conversely, which older shows were not going to give any ground to the newbies. Its forbidding lyric – ‘ I can’t pretend a stranger is a long awaited friend’ – might scream ‘Go away!’ but it’s shot down by the melodic power and beauty of Rush’s first great no-nonsense pop song.Ah, flux. Limelight was the first Rush song to let the world in. We didn’t know that in 1981, because they only existed for two hours on stage or in interviews in Sounds, where they always sounded a bit too serious and suspicious. Thanks to 2010’s peerless documentary, Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage, we now know that Rush are human beings. Like the soundtrack to Top Gear: The Prog Metal Special. ‘ Ruuuun like the wind as excitement shivers up and down my spine,’ trills Lee, while Lifeson recreates the squeal of tyres and the ‘willing engine’s roar. All you need to know about Red Barchetta is that it’s set in a future where motor cars are banned, but where one young rebel borrows his uncle’s ‘old machine’ and gets chased by a bloke in a ‘gleaming alloy air car… two lanes wide’. Where it once took them the whole side of an album (see 2112) to tell the story of a future society where music is outlawed, they’d now got it down to 6:10 minutes. And for all its tricksky fills, there’s that moment of sublime, tuneful beauty at 2:53, when the synth kicks on.īy 1981 Rush had become masters of the dystopian sci-fi rock song. Like La Villa Strangiato, YYZ was built to sate the appetite of bedroom air guitarists/bassists/drummers. The beauty of Moving Pictures is that while Rush were dipping toes in reggae and pop, they were still writing tracks like YYZ: a preposterous instrumental whose opening segment sounds like it was nicked off one of those punishing 70s King Crimson albums nobody actually listens to all the way through. ![]()
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