8. If there was anything on TV this year as lovely as Sam Palladio and Clare Bowen’s acoustic duet near the end of the perfect pilot episode of ABC’s “Nashville,” then I’d sure like to know about it.
9. I detest what Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk have done to their “American Horror Story” (FX) this season. The “Asylum” yarn is a mean-spirited, unfrightening gross-out that quickly ran through all its good ideas. (Anne Frank? Whatever.) So why is the show on this list? Jessica Lange’s Sister Jude, of course. I am rooting for her, maybe because of the way the Vatican and the American bishops have been picking on today’s nuns so much. Don’t mess with the sisters.
Hank Stuever
Hank Stuever is The Washington Post’s TV critic and author of two books, “Tinsel” and “Off Ramp.”
10. Lordy, there are a lot of channels on Dish. Not long after I took up residence in my retreat, I was flipping the clicker and discovered Dish Earth, a 24-hour picture of the planet beamed in every few seconds from Dish’s geosynchronous satellite orbiting 22,300 miles away. (Accompanied by soothing spa music.)
I was transfixed. I watched the planet night and day on my ridiculously huge screen. The Earth shot, far enough away to include the whole blue marble, pointed right at North America. From this vantage point, I watched a hurricane graze the Republican National Convention; I said goodnight to my love in Washington, D.C., as night crossed the East Coast and headed my way. When I couldn’t sleep, I watched our hemisphere slumber in darkness, completely shrouded except for a crescent sliver of reflected sunlight to the west. Dawn would come back around from the east, and as America bickered and fact-checked its way through the awful campaign season, I took solace in the perspective that humbled astronauts.
And then, like most everything I’ve ever loved on television, it got canceled. (Dish decommissioned the camera in October and took the channel down. Conspiracy theorists joked that its last shot was of a bug-eyed creature crawling across the screen.)
Oh, well. While I had it, Earth was one of my favorite shows of the year.
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