Favorite TV Guest Stars of 2011

TV series have gone into overdrive with star cameos in recent years, particularly during ratings sweeps periods. Here are some of our favorite guest appearances of 2011:

Matt Dillon on "Modern Family": Bringing back classic TV actors to play parents on contemporary sitcoms has become something of an art, and "Modern Family" nailed it  when the series cast former "Cheers" star Shelley Long as DeDe, Claire's and Mitchell's mom. Even better, DeDe arrived with Matt Dillon as Claire's creepy ex-boyfriend, whose visit caused havoc during little Lily's princess-themed birthday party. He's not exactly competition for Phil, though. “The truth is, I am rich," Dillon boasts. "But not with money. I’ve got my abs, I’ve got my hair, and I’ve got a super sweet job ridin’ that limo outside.”

Steve Buscemi on "Portlandia": The sketches on IFC's cult comedy may be built around the talent and charm of its two cult stars, musician Carrie Brownstein and "SNL" star Fred Armisen, but the series quickly proved that it can throw in a low-key guest star when it cast Kyle McLachlan (who did his time as a northwestern character in "Twin Peaks") in the role of the whimsical faux-mayor of Portland. Even funnier is the use of Steve Buscemi, dropping his "Boardwalk Empire" period garb to play a regular guy who foolishly attempts to use the bathroom in the local feminist bookstore, Women & Women First. Word is that Season 2 will feature even more cameos, from the likes of Eddie Vedder, Kristen Wiig, the Smiths' Johnny Marr and several "Battlestar Galactica" cast members.

 

 

Parker Posey on "Parks and Recreation": If you've ever wondered why Parker Posey doesn't have a quirky yet sweet NBC comedy of her own, the actress' hilariously snooty appearance as Amy Poehler's best-friend-turned-archnemesis Lindsay Carlisle Shay probably soothed the pain slightly.

 

 Honorable mention: Posey gets extra points for her sharp turn on "The Good Wife" as Alan Cumming's ex, a presidential campaign worker who offers to do him a favor — in exchange for something she needs, of course.

 

Condoleeza Rice on "30 Rock": Jack Donaghy has had plenty of famous lady friends (played by Edie Falco, Isabella Rossellini, Salma Hayek, Julianne Moore), but the former secretary of state is the most unlikely. Rice was game to play silly, defending her love of "Mars Attacks!" and agreeing to help rescue Jack's wife from the clutches of Kim Jong Il.

Which brings us to honorable mention Margaret Cho, who impersonated that now-deceased North Korean dictator on that very same "30 Rock" episode.

 

Michael J. Fox on "Curb Your Enthusiasm": Larry David knows how to put a guest star to work. Past seasons have featured stars such as Ben Stiller and Jerry Seinfeld, and this season Ricky Gervais, Rosie O'Donnell, Mayor Mike Bloomberg and ballplayer Bill Buckner showed up to great effect. But Fox closed the season with a self-deprecating wink, leaving Larry convinced that the actor's shaky behavior isn't related to his Parkinson's disease — it's just rude.

 

Sarah Silverman on "Bored to Death": Silverman plays it straight as a rather unorthodox "friendship therapist" trying to help Jonathan (Jason Schwartzman) and his mentor George (Ted Danson) mend their relationship. By massaging her feet.

 

Josh Holloway on "Community": No list of clever and wacky cameos would be complete without "Community," which brings referential comedy to a new level.This fall featured an amusing appearance by Luis Guzman as a graduate of the community college returned to make a promotional video for the school, but the Season 2 finale wins the prize by bringing in Josh Holloway — a.k.a. Sawyer, lost to us since "Lost" — who swaggers in like a gunslinger in a spaghetti western. Sure, the guns are loaded with paintballs, but still, he darkens Greendale's halls with hints of a giant conspiracy all around them. “Sweetie, this thing is so much bigger than you can imagine," he mutters, before dashing out to catch a Coldplay concert.

What great guest appearances did I miss? Let me know below in the comments.

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twitter/joypress

Photo: Julie Bowen, left, Shelley Long and Matt Dillon in "Modern Family." Credit: ABC.

Year in Review: Mary McNamara's top TV of 2011

For all the shows that premiered this fall, it was not a stellar season. Fortunately, the television landscape has many datelines, so, taken overall, it was a very good year. And here’s why:

“Game of Thrones”: HBO proved that nothing beats epic fantasy when it’s rooted in good story and great performances, which this show most definitely is. No doubt the dragons will be fun too, but with Peter Dinklage’s Tyrion and Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys, even dragons are just icing.

Margo Martindale on “Justified”: FX’s lyrical, Elmore Leonard-inspired drama about a U.S. marshal returning to his hometown to clean up a few messes took on epic and revolutionary proportions when creator Graham Yost introduced Mags Bennett (Martindale), a back-country mob boss the likes of which have never been seen. Martindale rightly won an Emmy for her astonishing performance, but it would have been better if she had won another season — for reasons that confound me, Yost chose to kill off Mags in the season finale. I may forgive him; I haven’t yet.

“Downton Abbey”: Julian Fellowes crossed “Upstairs, Downstairs” with his own “Gosford Park” to herald a new and glorious age of PBS period drama.

“Homeland”: Wrangling Claire Danes and Damian Lewis as two of the most complicated characters on television (not to mention the ever-mercurial Mandy Patinkin), Howard Gordon and some of his “24” team turned an Israeli hit into the first show to successfully mirror midwar America.

Al Jazeera: During this year’s rebellions in the Mideast, Americans found themselves glued to their laptops to watch on-the-ground coverage from Al Jazeera English. For a time, many lobbied to find it a permanent American home, which would be a very good thing.

Ted Danson in “Bored to Death” and “CSI”: It’s difficult to imagine another actor who could juggle the quaint-ish HBO comedy and the CBS behemoth at all, let alone with such agility. I am not a huge fan of either show but watch both for the pleasure of seeing a man so utterly in control of his craft.

AMC and “The Killing”: Veena Sud’s murder-mystery stumbled as it soared, and outraged fans and nonfans alike with its non-finale season finale. But around here, we give points for trying, and AMC continues to do just that, accepting its failures (“The Prisoner”) as down payment for its successes (“The Walking Dead”). Sud took on TV’s most popular and predictable genre and, for better and worse, made it her own. Also Mireille Enos is now officially a star, and that has to count for something.

“Parks and Recreation” and “The Middle”: Two wonderful shows that have been living in the shadows of “The Office” and “Modern Family,” respectively, finally seem to be getting the recognition they deserve.

“Louie”: Louie C.K.’s angsty, semiautobiographical FX comedy defines adult comedy — outrageous, sentimental, big-hearted, brave and true. And that duckling-in-Afghanistan episode just about killed me.

The not-so-best

Having recently endured, through circumstances beyond my control, back-to-back viewings of “Jack and Jill” and the latest “Twilight” movie, I cannot bring myself to use the word “worst” in connection with anything I have seen on television this year. But here are a few of the biggest disappointments (none of which, I am happy to add, involved Al Pacino).

OWN: I’m not certain what I expected from the new Oprah Winfrey Network, but I know it was more than a bunch of whiny reality series. When Rosie O’Donnell is your biggest draw, things are not up to the Oprah standard.

And the cable networks’ coverage of the jumpy Dow. Look, here we all are, alive and well, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse nowhere in sight, despite all the rumors to the contrary during that horrible week in August when the Dow bounced around and all the business pundits seriously lost their minds. Did none of you ever hear about Orson Welles and his “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast?

For more, here's an essay on TV in 2011.

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— Mary McNamara

Photo: Jason Momoa and Emilia Clarke in "Game of Thrones. Credit: Helen Sloan/HBO.

Q&A: 'Bored to Death' creator Jonathan Ames

Episode 6 of the eight-episode third season of "Bored to Death,"HBO's delightful, Brooklyn-set, cross-generationally bromantic, nothing-human-is-foreign-to-me stoner detective comedy, premieres Monday night. It stars Jason Schwartzman as Jonathan Ames, a novelist-cum-unlicensed private eye who shares a name with his creator, the novelist Jonathan Ames; Zach Galifianakis as Jonathan's comic-book-artist friend Ray; and Ted Danson as George, formerly a magazine editor and now a restaurateur.

It has been a busy season that has seen, among other things, Jonathan and George in "friendship counseling" (with Sarah Silverman), George's daughter dating a man in his own age and income bracket, Ray in an affair with a senior citizen (Olympia Dukakis), George sleeping with his singing teacher (Danson's own wife, Mary Steenburgen) and Jonathan celebrating the arrival of his second novel, framed for murder, confronting his doppelgänger, hanging like Harold Lloyd from the clock of the Williamsburg Savings Bank and interviewed by Dick Cavett. Ray has met the baby born from his sold-than-stolen sperm, and Jonathan, who has learned that he himself is a sperm-bank baby, is searching for his biological father.

A little before the season started, I talked with Ames for a Times feature; here are some outtakes from that interview. We began at the beginning, with the short story that led to the series.

Jonathan Ames:At the time I had been reading a lot of David Goodis, most well known for "Shoot the Piano Player," which Truffaut turned into a film. There was this real rush to his stories and I wanted to write something like that, something of a thriller, and maybe something a little bit darker than I had previously. And I named the character after myself, as I've said before, because often when I wrote fiction people would say, "C'mon why don't you just call that a memoir," and when I wrote nonfiction they said, "You made that up, didn't you? You exaggerated that. That didn't happen." I couldn't win. So I thought that I'd write a piece of fiction almost initially in the tone of one of my essays to kind of lure my half-dozen readers in — maybe I have a dozen readers. And after I finished it I thought, "This could make a movie."

Was that a thought you had had before?

JA: I had adapted two of my books into script form, trying to get them made; it wasn't really happening. I had written a TV pilot for Showtime called "What's Not to Love?" based on my essay collections — that was how I got my foot in the door out here a little bit, 'cause a guy heard me give a reading in Los Feliz at Skylight Books and said, "I think there's a TV show in your essays." So I pitched something with him to Showtime and they green-lit the pilot. I played myself, I played Jonathan Ames; I had done a fair amount of performing, doing monologues sort of like Spalding Gray. I pitched it at the time as a poor man's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" — literally a poor man, because I was a struggling writer, and the show would be be about this guy in Hollywood. And we shot it, and it came out all right, but it didn't become a series. But to be frank I had kind of given up on all that in 2007 when I wrote this short story.

New DGA survey highlights TV's continuing struggle with diversity

 

The continuing lack of diversity in prime-time television was highlighted with the release of a Directors Guild of America survey that cites a troubling trend in the hiring of minority and female directors.

The survey conducted by the DGA of more than 2,600 episodes of 170 scripted series on broadcast and cable during the 2010-11 season found that white males directed 77% of all episodes, and white females directed 11% of all episodes. Minority males directed 11% of all episodes, and minority females directed 1% of all episodes. 

Leaders of the guild, which has traditionally pushed for more inclusion of women and minorities, expressed disappointment with the findings,  which show little change from a similar survey of the 2009-2010 season.

As Company Town notes, Nine shows singled out by the DGA as shutting out minority and female directors include HBO's "Bored to Death," Showtime's "Weeds" and FX's "Justified." Sixteen other shows hired women and minorities for fewer than 15% percent of episodes.

The survey comes a few weeks after the revelation of claims by advocates who say there are indications that NBCUniversal, which pledged to increase diversity in front of and behind the camera, has fallen short of those pledges that were made during the process of merging NBCUniversal and Comcast.

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Photo: Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman in HBO's "Bored To Death," one of the series cited by the Directors Guild of America as hiring no minority or female directors. Credit: Paul Schiraldi

 

Q&A: Jason Schwartzman continues 'Bored to Death,' excitedly

"I hope I can can get three or four or five seasons," Jason Schwartzman told me in September, just before the start of the second season of "Bored to Death," in which he stars with Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis as a version of its creator, novelist Jonathan Ames. His desire will be at least partly gratified: A third season has just been ordered by HBO, and in celebration of this glad tiding — the story of a struggling writer cum unlicensed private eye, it's one of my favorite shows on television — I present the outtakes from our earlier interview.

Schwartzman, known on the big screen for films including "Rushmore," "The Darjeeling Limited" and "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World," is also the artist known as Coconut Records, under which name he has recorded two fine albums of living-room pop, and that dual pursuit is part of the conversation here. (He was previously the drummer in the band Phantom Planet.) For purposes of understanding the following, it should be also pointed out that he's the son of actress Talia Shire, the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola and the cousin of Sofia Coppola.

The sixth episode of the current season, "The Case of the Grievous Clerical Error," premieres at 10 Sunday night on HBO.