The best casts of previous tv season : Enlightened,Rectify,Girls

It is hard to choose among many great casts of the previous tv season,there were endearing comebacks like Kevin Bacon,fantastic ensembles as in "Game of thrones",some daring choices like James Purefoy and some fantastic new faces.But among those my absolute favourites are two completely different shows.

"Enlightened" was probably the most surprising tv comedy  ever seen on tv.The audacity of the idea,the finesse,the masterful building of atmosphere,all of that and much more make it one of the best tv projects in tv history,in my humble opinion.But what really made that show so brilliant was the perfect cast

Laura Dern was definitely her best ever.You just couldn't take your eyes of her,her face,her wardrobe,the infinite lightness of her becoming that outrageously irritating character.And yet in all of the mess she created around her there was always affection for her weaknesses and hope,hope that in the end at least something will come out right for her.She is a great actress but never before did I believe her character so completely.

And that is the fine line that divides good and great acting.Great actors are simply the character they play and You believe them unconditionally.Every time.Some average actors can also have an episode or two of complete authenticity but it happens mainly when get to play a role close to their own nature.Unlike them,the true masters can take You anywhere they want and You never waste a second about questioning their realities.

But the real heroes of Enlightened were Mike White, who created the series with Dern, and Tim Sharp.Their faces were vaguely familiar but I never saw them before in something so compelling.I still can't decide whom I prefer since they were both fantastic.White so precise and weird,Sharp full of irritating energy,his crazy eyes and hair flying around and yet nothing was superfluous about his Dougie.

The rest of the cast was also perfect with a wonderful guest starring of Dern's mother,Diane Ladd.

It was pure joy watching them, even if it was only two short seasons.




"Rectify" is something completely different.A dark and haunting tv drama about a man whose murder conviction is questioned after 19 years of serving on a death row.He comes back to his parents house and just tries to survive.Everything about Rectify is mesmerizing.The stiffening atmosphere of troubled South,the painfully slow development of all that could go wrong for this strange creature that is Daniel Holden.

And in the middle of that storm there is Holden,depicted by brilliantly efficient Aden Young .His physique is perfect, his eyes burning with all the frustration and despair and yet his gestures are sparse and methodical.Everything he does seems vitally important,from the way he sits in his room to the violence he keeps in himself.He is a mystery,a painful mystery that never loosens its grip on the spectators.No one knows for sure what he did and what he will do next and in all that tension there is palpable fear,we are all afraid of him and for him.

He never ever loses the depth of his emotion,he is tragic without being pathetic,in one word he is perfect.
The rest of the cast plays beautifully at his side,and as in Enlightened and every other great tv series, You just enter a different world and become one of them,a participant instead of just a spectator.

And then there were "Girls", and there is a different quality that I appreciate in their cast or more precisely in their creator Lena Dunham and it is the imagination in putting together characters so diverse and original.She is a force behind it all and one must admire her ability to find  guys  like Adam Driver or Alex Karpovsky.On their own they are just eccentric creatures nobody likes very much but all of them put together in the narcissistic symphony that Girls is,they become irresistibly unbearable.

The worst cast of tv season:Red widow

I watch every feature show on tv,at least 15 minutes of every pilot and my criteria is not very harsh,i just need the show to pull me in .There were excellent ,average,good and adorable tv series this previous season.And then of course some very very bad.Since my point of interest are actors, I was thinking about best and worst casts of the previous season and in a very strong competition of awful casts,here are my favorites.

1."Red widow": there is a specific reason I was watching this really bad ABC project,the concentration of Eastern European actors that I know well was very high and I kept watching it even after the hilarious pilot.The show is awful,really awful but I am not a tv critic,merely an actor's whisperer so let's dissect the cast. I won't get into describing their roles since they were so boring and even though the story could have been intriguing,the horrible directing and acting ruined it at the beginning.

Radha Mitchell/Martha,a decent looking woman,whose face was vaguely familiar,had a nice opportunity  landing a leading role that could have been complex.

Could have been but with no good guidance and relying only on her mediocre talent,her performance is appalling. She has two facial expressions: happy and everything else.Her voice is continuously the same,she has no emotions,no sex appeal,no strength and definitely no chemistry with her main partner.She is at her best with her kids who were absolutely far better than the adult actors,especially young Boris.I was shocked when I saw how much work she has done over the years,I really don't understand it.

Goran Visnjic/Schiller,Croatian actor who is trying to build a decent career in Hollywood for to many years,obviously loved the role of dangerous Romanian criminal,Schiller.Hi tried and tried,but his facial spasm that I remember so well from ER is still there.He is a good looking man but his old fashioned masculine looks are in great contrast with his shy nature.He never knows what to do with his body,especially in rare sex scenes that he has to endure so the supposed sexual tension between Mitchell and him was non-existent.He was a bit better than her,showed a glimpse of emotion but all in all he seemed like a paper doll Ken.For years I thought he had a great agent because she managed to get him some good roles in spite of his mediocrity but now,after letting him getting humiliated in ultimate disaster that was  a movie K-11, I think it's time for a change.

The worst of the lot is a Croatian star,Rade Serbedzija/Petrov,an actor who keeps landing idiotic roles of Russian mobsters and fakes them so obviously that it hurts.Unlike Visnjic,Serbedzija could do whatever he wanted with any role he got,if he only gave a damn.But his lack of respect for the work he does outside of his country is so offensive that he deserves to be unemployed for the rest of his career.Great actors are far more responsible for doing awful work than the mediocre talents like Visnjic and Mitchell and that is something that American producers and directors are tolerating to often with phonies like Serbedzija.

Branka Katic/Alexandra, who is also a big name in her native Serbia,and definitely a very good actress, was following Serbedzija's example.Her talent was tested already in Entourage and Big love but in Red widow she has hit rock bottom.Predictable,boring,with to many grimaces,she rewarded us with an awful presumably wild sex scene with  Visnjic.No imagination and certainly no effort was put in any of her scenes.

Unlike the indolent Eastern Europeans,the rest of American cast at least tried.Wil Traval and Jamie Ray Newman as Serbedzija's children were decent,especially Traval.

I sincerely hope there will be no second season of this amateurish display of a possibly interesting entourage of Eastern European mobsters.

My whisper is this time for casting directors:

- people,what the hell were You doing??????????????