Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Television

The Sundae TV Awards 2022

What a weirdly fantastic and fantastically weird year of television we’ve had. We said goodbye to previous award winners Better Call Saul, Better Things and Derry Girls, all of whom represented one of the two dominant themes of the year: good shows staying good. It’s Always Sunny? Still good. Taskmaster? Still good. Ted Lasso? Still good.

But Ted Lasso also represents the other theme: our extreme uncertainty about how to classify many shows as dramas or comedies this year. Some of it was new shows like Peacemaker, or new to us shows like Doom Patrol and Succession, that straddled the divide. But we also had favourites like Ted Lasso that seemed to shift from one to the other. While we put thought into our process and considered qualities like a show’s structure as much as or more than its tone, some of our decisions are likely to feel arbitrary or even absurd to you, reader. All we can say is: deal with it, because we are not explaining or justifying that shit every time.

And with that little bit of housekeeping out of the way, please enjoy as we pass judgement on the last TV season (June 2021 – May 2022). As well as the classic drama and comedy awards, we also have two awards for reality, variety and documentary television, including game shows, professional wrestling and whatever Eric Andre is doing at any given minute. We picked our winners by consensus, so only shows we both watched were eligible to win, but we each picked a runner-up, regardless of whether the other has seen it.

You can find each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of the post. We recommend checking them out if you’re looking for recommendations.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Television

The Sundae TV Awards 2019

We can’t really claim these are what we think should have been nominated at the Emmys, or should win, since there’s an impossible amount of television to watch in the world. But if we were the only two members of the Television Academy and we could nominate any TV that aired in the most recent television season (from June 2018 to May 2019), and we only cared about the seven major awards in drama and comedy, this is what you’d get.

We didn’t distinguish between limited series and other drama series, since supposed miniseries get second seasons if they’re popular enough (see: Big Little Lies), and regular drama series get rebranded as miniseries when they get prematurely cancelled (see: Dig), while modern anthologies are just regular series that replace narrative continuity with thematic continuity (and some don’t even shed their narrative continuity completely, e.g. American Horror Story, Fargo, Black Mirror). Each of us filled out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only came from shows we’d both nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each gave a Special Achievement Award for something not covered in the major categories – Ciara gave the award for Drama, and Dean gave the award for Comedy.

You can see each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of the post.

Continue reading “The Sundae TV Awards 2019” →

Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Film, Television

The Best of The Sundae #2

It’s been over a year since we first took a look back at our work and picked the best of it for your easy reading pleasure. A lot has happened since then. We’ve gone through two whole Oscar and Emmy cycles. We each had an essay published in Bright Wall/Dark Room – Dean on Blade Runner and Ciara on Weekend at Bernie’s II. Marvel fired James Gunn due to an alt-right smear campaign and now he’s writing Suicide Squad 2. We were shortlisted for an Irish Blog Award. Jonathan Chait got BOFA’d.

But, most importantly, we kept writing and publishing, and now we have even more stuff to choose from for our second best-of round-up. So, if you’re a long-time reader, here’s an invitation to revisit the classics. If you’re a recent reader, catch up on some stuff you might not have read. And if you’re a brand new reader, take a crash course in what we’re all about.

Here’s the best of The Sundae so far. Again.

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Ciara Moloney Television

A Mid-Life Crisis in North Dakota

Dennis Reynolds is a bad man. All the characters on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are awful people – it’s kind of the premise of the show – but Dennis still stands apart. Like the rest of the Gang, he’s all narcissism, bigotry, and rage, ready to explode at any moment at anyone he perceives to have crossed him. Once, when a guy called him a narc, Dennis’s revenge was getting the guy to chain himself to a tree overnight during a storm while Dennis slept with his girlfriend, and that’s pretty mild when you’re grading on the Dennis curve of bad behaviour. He’s a prolific rapist, and he might be a serial killer.

He’s also one of the best characters in the history of TV.

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Ciara Moloney and Dean Buckley Television

The Sundae TV Awards 2017

We can’t really claim these are what we think should have been nominated at the Emmys, or should win, since there’s an impossible amount of television to watch in the world. But if we were the only two members of the Television Academy and we could nominate any TV that aired in the most recent television season (from June 2016 to May 2017 — which is why Twin Peaks didn’t sweep), and we only cared about the seven major awards in drama and comedy, this is what you’d get.

We didn’t distinguish between limited series and other drama series, since supposed miniseries get second seasons if they’re popular enough, and regular drama series turn out to be miniseries when they get prematurely cancelled, while modern anthologies are just regular series that replace narrative continuity with thematic continuity (and some don’t even shed their narrative continuity completely, e.g. American Horror Story, Fargo and Black Mirror). Each of us filled out our personal nominees and then selected the winner by consensus, so the winners only came from shows we’d both nominated, but we’ve each picked a personal runner-up regardless of whether the other has seen or nominated it. We also each gave a Special Achievement Award for something not covered in the major categories – Dean gave the award for Drama, and Ciara gave the award for Comedy.

You can see each of our full slates of nominees at the bottom of the post.

Continue reading “The Sundae TV Awards 2017” →

Dean Buckley Television

The Last Slapstick Artist

If you know Kaitlin Olson at all, you know her as barmaid and failed actress Dee Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the best show on television. The only comedy actress on television in the same league as Kaitlin Olson is Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld and Veep, and in a better world, their rivalry would be the Emmy story of the past six years. We’d all hold our breaths right as they announce who’s won Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series – is this Julia’s year or Kaitlin’s? Everyone would politely clap for Lena Dunham and Edie Falco and the other nominees, but we’d know it came down to Julia or Kaitlin, and if anyone else won, it would be the biggest upset of the night, like when Jeff Daniels won Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series for The Newsroom, a show that I like way more than the average person and which I would definitely never give an Emmy for anything.

Instead, we’ve had five years of Julia Louis-Dreyfus waltzing away with the award because her one true rival wasn’t there to challenge her.

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Mac MacDonald, Charlie Kelly, Dee Reynolds and Dennis Reynolds drinking in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Ciara Moloney Television

The Gang Fights Neoliberalism

American politics, for the past couple of decades up until just recently, has operated on a binary: liberal/conservative. A lot of the time, this leads to weird semantic problems – calling Bernie Sanders “very liberal” when he’s not a liberal at all, calling Donald Trump a conservative when his ideology has very little to do with conservatism  – but the way we talk about ideas informs what ideas become. If you only see things in terms of liberal and conservative, you can deeply misunderstand things happening in front of you. Worse, when you lose the words to describe them, the possibility of other distinct political philosophies can disappear.

South Park is a libertarian show. It’s always been a libertarian show. I find it hard to imagine a show more upfront with its ideology than South Park. Yet there are countless posts and articles debating whether South Park is secretly liberal or secretly conservative, as if it’s secretly anything. Even more bizarre is the common idea that South Park has no ideology at all. Interviews with titles like “Matt Stone & Trey Parker Are Not Your Political Allies (No Matter What You Believe).” Academic articles with titles like “Pseudo-Satire and Evasion of Ideological Meaning in South Park.” If an ideology does not fit within either of the boxes I have in front of me, it must not exist at all.

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