Sopranos – College
“College” isn’t just one of The Sopranos’ finest episodes: it may also be the vital pivot in the flowering of modern American TV. In the episode, early in the Sopranos’ first season, Tony takes his daughter Meadow on a tour of New England colleges. While he’s there, he spots a mob rat. He drops Meadow off, finds the rat, and murders him. Then he goes back to his daughter. He’s not a redeemable rogue any more, but a certifiable monster. We love him anyway.
Happy Valley - Series one, episode four
Happy Valley’s brilliance is so uniform that it’s hard to pick a best episode. Let’s go with the one where Sergeant Catherine Cawood finds the kidnapped Ann in the clutches of the despicable Tommy Lee Royce. You’re off your sofa with relief as Ann is freed - but as ever with Happy Valley, it’s a qualified sort of catharsis, as Catherine is beaten to a pulp in the process. Her bloodied face as she passes out in the street with Ann safe is an unforgettable image of her heroism.
The West Wing - Two Cathedrals
The more of Aaron Sorkin’s work you have seen, the more you notice the taste of his saccharine nostalgia in even the best of it. But watch the West Wing again and Two Cathedrals endures. As everyone remembers, President Bartlet shouts at God, in Latin, in his grief over the death of his beloved secretary Mrs Landingham; but it’s the cuts to Bartlet’s adolescence, and his first meetings with Mrs Landingham, that give the episode its moral and emotional weight.
The Wire - Middle Ground
You could pick any one of a dozen episodes - but the end of Stringer Bell’s tragic arc has the ambition and subtlety to represent them all. The whole of the third season has been about bringing Stringer to this point. Betrayed by his closest friend, he faces his death standing in the condominium complex that he thought could bring him the legitimacy he craved. “Get on with it, motherf-” he tells Omar and Brother Mouzone, as they aim at him - and even if George Pelecanos’ script doesn’t let him finish, the grandeur of his plight is unmistakable.
Black Mirror – 15 Million Merits
No prime-ministerial-pig-bothering in this episode of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian set of one-off dramas, but it’s a far more powerful hour of television. The talent shows targeted here, in an alternate universe whose heroes cycle grimly away on exercise bikes in the hopes of accumulating enough credits to appear on TV, are commonplace enough targets, but when the world in which they feature is so thoroughly imagined and the doomed romance at the heart of it so deftly drawn, the barbs become almost secondary. Jessica Brown-Findlay’s rendition of Anyone Who Knows What Love Is will stay with you.
Breaking Bad - Fly
There’s a certain kind of self-contained, unconventional episode that seems written with lists like this in mind. Fly merits its inclusion nonetheless. Walter White becomes infuriated at a fly that he fears will pollute his meth production process, and enlists his colleague Jesse in an attempt to catch it. Nothing else happens. But in its unhinged camerawork, its relentless focus, and its fearless, nihilistic attention to the question that is at the heart of our interest in Walt – how did you get here? – it is unforgettable. “There must exist certain words in a certain specific order that would explain all this”, Walt says. What if there aren’t?
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