There is a moment in life when they stop thanking you for everything you do to, better, congratulate you for achieving it. It occurs in 'The Kominsky Method ', perhaps the last example and the greatest effort to convert into reasoned argument what for years has been more than just a trend. Senescence, now more than ever, matters. Although it is for strict market reasons, the case is that the series, in general, have been refuting the ugly obsession for youth that can do everything for years. If we listen to the WHO (it would have to be done at some point), in the half of the century we are treading, by 2050, 60% of the world population will be over 60 years old. With all that that means in terms of reformulating the life project and even new possibilities of consumption (always it). And, let's admit it, what is now called a story is missing.
Let's say that every decade has been making the imagination of himself and his aspirations. The 50s and 60s gave prominence to the impulse of everything new in a world that was rigorously released and in permanent surplus after the war. The bewilderment of adolescence needed its own comforting tale and its machinery to consume properly. And the cinema, like music and everything else, came to his aid to raise the pop ideal that, before refuting anything, offered the possibility of ignoring such a tricky issue as, for example, death.
After all, death or better her consciousness (which Heidegger would say, forgive me) defines us as a project in time and by definition unfinished, as a possibility, as a desire. In some way, neoliberal society has given up, in the accelerated waste of the immediate, of any meaningful reflection on perhaps the only certainty: all construction of a future falls flat on the face of the evidence of its finitude , of its uselessness perhaps. . It sounds tragic. Maybe cheesy. And it is indeed tragic because it is corny. What follows can be understood as a revolution in progress or as a desperate attempt to make Viagra a religion. Does not matter.
1. 'The Sopranos'.
Everyone has their weaknesses and ours is the almighty mother of the gangster in the David Chase series. Chapter by chapter until his death at the start of the third season, the immense James Gandolfini was literally refuted by the even more outsized Nancy Marchand . Livia, the mother, could handle Tony, the son. And how. Intriguing, possessive, lying, manipulative, and perfectly adorable. No other of the gangster-faced characters that populated the series that invented almost everything could even remotely rival it. If Vito Corleone were a woman, it would be Livia.
2. 'Derek'.
Few series as ruthlessly human as Derek . Ricky Gervais presses all the alarm buttons and makes a disabled person (himself on the brink of all the precipices of the politically correct) the protagonist of a false documentary that takes place in a nursing home. What can go wrong? The result is a delicate savage so unaware of each of the limits that it treads that it ends up being irrefutable, as well as amusingly profound. Or vice versa. Beyond the virtue of the complaint (the series does not hide its bombs against the insane healthcare system that we have given ourselves), Gervais's proposal manages to avoid all melodramatic tenderness by giving the elderly control over their evident abandonment. Loneliness is a matter of a society unaware of its most intimate suicide.
3. 'The Kominsky method'.
Despite the overabundance of prostate jokes, the truth is that the two seasons of the new creation by Chuck Lorre (the same as 'Two and a Half Men ' or ' The Big Bang Theory') succeed in drawing with precision that frightens the great leap between one part of society sick with imposed nostalgia and increasingly attached to an eternal childhood, and the other. Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin embody this group of adults who are aware, with humor and sportsmanship, that this is over. And it is not so bad without being assumed as it should. On the one hand, the excesses of a script that is too dependent on its brilliance, the truth is that you like that facility to knock down each one of our most immature common places.
4. 'Transparent'.
And suddenly the father was the mother? To recover the four seasons of the genius of Jill Soloway with Jeffrey Tambor in command is to realize that, yes, the world deserves a revolution. Radical and now. Beyond the impulse to claim, what counts is the tone. That facility for melancholic laughter without exaggeration makes this title a rarity as far from stereotypes as from uprisings by decree. What is rethought and discussed is everything: from the family to the sexual roles, of course, the precise moment to start anew, which, in plain sight, can be perfectly very close to old age.
5. 'Grace and Frankie'.
The declaration of intent (' Too old for this shit ' or 'Too old for this shit') ends up being much more radical than the very development of a series that is drowning in its impertinent, let's say it, approach. Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have to face the fact that their husbands love each other. The co-creator of the always mythical ' Friends ' Marta Kauffman seconded by Howard J. Morris let the idea live alone and it doesn't always work. What is already irrefutable is the game of distorting mirrors in which you look at sacred names from the last cinema like the one of the two mentioned above next to Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston . Indeed, there is another way of looking at the myths that age and do so facing the camera.
6. 'Ray Donovan'.
The worst thing that can happen to an actor is that he is not seen. One approaches the series starring Liv Schreiber and no matter how much one looks at the only one who can see is a re-aged Jon Voight (forget the verb rejuvenate) in a kind of interpretive anthology of what always was (or wanted to be). Mickey Donovan is evil and he is it by pure experience, for his more than 80 years perfectly fulfilled and better healed.
7. 'Community'.
There are so many reasons to fall in love with this group of disinherited and university students that it is better to hide in the curriculum as characters. And yet, one of them, if only for its stripes of timeless and classic comedian, casts a shadow over everyone: Chevy Chase . Yes, we all hated him once in the 80s, but never now, in his old age. He plays the outdated man who was late for the politically correct class. His specialty, therefore, is to screw up and that of others, to watch closely what his next insane and out of tune comment about women, blacks, gays ... Unbearable. And cool.
8. 'Getting on'.
Each one learned the face of Peter Capaldi at one point in his cinephile or television viewing adventures. But we all agree on 'In the loop', Armando Iannucci's cheeky comedy about the limits of incompetence in modern politics (which are unlimited). Well, it is only fair that the series created by him lived up to his myth. The British 'Getting on' (with its American version on HBO) is a comedy set in a nursing home so absolutely black that it softens. It is not a matter of laughing at the elderly, but of making clear the ridiculousness of a time, ours , unable to understand the meaning of the same time.
9. 'Two meters underground'.
Sex and death. Beginning and end. Years pass, the series rain down on us, but the most exquisite of the corpses remains unchanged. And indeed, the series would not be the same (or simply would not be) without the Frances Conroy (in the character of Ruth Fisher) who would later appear in American Horror Story. Nothing defines life better than the consciousness of death and nothing makes death more conscious than full life. And so.
10. 'The Golden Girls'.
And by the end, the first of all. Almost 30 million viewers gathered on May 9, 1992 to watch the latest episode. Stelle Getty in the skin of Sophie Petrillo redefined the meaning of the word vitriol: "No one has asked for my opinion. But I am old, so I will give it anyway." Well that.
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