'A Lot Going On': Critic David Bianculli Picks The Best TV Of 2016

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today, our TV critic David Bianculli is going to talk about the best TV shows of the year. And film critic David Edelstein is going to talk about the best movies. They both have their 10 Best Lists. Later, our linguist Geoff Nunberg will tell us about his choice for the word of the year. Let's start with David Edelstein and the year in movies.

Hi, David. Thank you for bringing your 10 Best list with you again this year. And I'm sure that, like most years, your 10 Best List has more than 10 films on it.

DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: It does. I thought it was an excellent year. And as usual, even though I could only see maybe 400 out of, like, the thousand movies that got released in New York and LA, I had enough to fill a couple of 10 Best Lists. And I have, this year, a dozen best films. So if I may.

GROSS: Yes. You want to start from the bottom to the top?

EDELSTEIN: Well, sure. Coming in at 11 and 12 are two films, the deadpan German comedy "Toni Erdmann," which opens very soon, and Jeff Nichols' "Loving," which is the story of the couple that inspired the abolition of miscegenation laws in many states. Three documentaries - "The Witness," which focuses on the true facts concerning the death of Kitty Genovese in 1964 through the eyes of her brother; "Tower," an animated re-enactment of the random University of Texas at Austin shootings of 1966; and "Zero Days," yet another masterly Alex Gibney documentary and maybe his most urgent since it's about cyberwarfare.

"The Handmaiden" is next. That's Park Chan-wook's Korean transplant of Sarah Waters' lesbian novel "Fingersmith," which is so elegant and so perverse. Coming in at No. 6 is Barry Jenkins' "Moonlight," which is an exploration of racial and sexual identity. It seems almost too delicate to bruise with hype, but it's just lovely. No. 5 is another documentary. It's "O.J.: Made In America," which was also made for TV. But it was shown in enough theaters to qualify. And given the scale of its ambition and its achievement, Ezra Edelman's film would have been hard not to recognize.

No. 4 is the debut of the year, "Krisha." It's Trey Edward Shults' micro-budget Thanksgiving family reunion movie starring members of his own family. And it's a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes. No. 3 is "20th Century Women" by Mike Mills. With Annette Bening giving the performance of her life - I'm not sure praise could be any higher - as an overbearing, single mother in the 1970s.

For me, it was a tough choice between my second and first film. Coming in at No. 2 is "Hell Or High Water," which is a absolutely haunting modern Western with Chris Pine and Ben Foster as bank-robbing brothers and Jeff Bridges as the sheriff on their trail. My No. 1 movie is "La La Land," which is Damien Chazelle's romantic musical with Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in which everything - the movement of the camera, the colors of the set and the costumes, the rhythms of the actors - harmonizes with everything else. And this year, we need us some harmony.

GROSS: I had really loved that movie, "La La Land." And - as somebody who loves musicals, I'm really grateful to have a new musical that pays homage to early musicals but is also firmly a contemporary one. It's just a wonderful film.

EDELSTEIN: I could not agree more. It's got that wonderful fantasy land - well, "La La Land" feel and tempo. But at the same time, it really does get into somewhat grittier, you know, more traumatic kinds of conflicts. It's a beautiful combination of an homage to the past and something entirely new.

You know, I saw Damien Chazelle's first movie, which is called "Guy And Madeline On A Park Bench," some years ago. He seemed like he was just out of college. I saw it at a New Jersey film society. There was a long final solo by the main character, a trumpet player, and it went on and on and on. But I thought I'd never seen a director who dared so much to find access to human emotion through making music. And I just knew - and then "Whiplash" came next, and I knew this guy was going to go places.

GROSS: So who did you think turned in some of the best performances of the year?

EDELSTEIN: Well, I said Annette Bening. She's...

GROSS: She's wonderful in that film.

EDELSTEIN: You know, she's, like, about my favorite actress now. To me, there is just nobody who is more present, who can think on screen, who seems to be - every word that comes out of her mouth seems to be her own. And Mike Mills has given her such a rich part here. It's an extraordinary role. It's an extraordinary performance. There are others in that movie. Greta Gerwig is quite fine and...

GROSS: Elle Fanning, yeah.

EDELSTEIN: ....So is Elle Fanning. And just a wonderful, wonderful film. I - you know, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling are so inhumanly gorgeous. And the fact that they - and they go so well together. And look, you know, they've got - he's got a very thin voice. And - but it's very pleasing somehow all the same. And they're not great dancers, but somehow or other, when you put all the ingredients together and they do it in one take and you have these lovely songs by Justin Hurwitz, the movie is magic. I mean, the parts are great, and the whole movie is even greater than the sum of its parts.

I want to say a word about Sarah Paulson. She's - you know, she's gotten, obviously, a lot of acclaim for her performance as Marcia Clark on television. But there's a small, interesting film called "Blue Jay." It's really a two-person film duet with Mark Duplass, who also wrote the film. And the range of emotions on her face is just so dizzying. I want to mention Ben Foster and Chris Pine in "Hell Or High Water." I want to mention a Chilean actress named Paulina Garcia in Ira Sachs' film "Little Men."

Michael Shannon is a blast in "Nocturnal Animals," the Tom Ford movie about which I'm very ambivalent. But Shannon is just creepy as hell and wonderful and charismatic. Amy Adams gives two wonderful performances in "Nocturnal Animals" and "Arrival." She's a very interesting actress to me because I feel - I kind of intuit something frightened and damaged in her that I feel as if it's, you know, being sort of dragged into the light before your eyes in some of her performances. She's awfully good in these movies.

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, we're talking about the year in film with our film critic David Edelstein.

So David, you ran through your best-of list - some great films on there. And - you know, here's what I'm thinking. So many Americans are so obsessed with politics right now and have been for months - you know, during the primaries, during the election and now in the President-elect Trump era. And the nation very divided - both sides of that divide, I think, are very obsessed with what's going on in politics.

Movies are usually a little slow to register what's going on politically and culturally because it takes so long to get them made and to get the funding to distribute them. So I'm wondering if you've been feeling a disconnect at all between the American obsession and what's actually happening on screen right now.

EDELSTEIN: Absolutely. We're (laughter) - you know, it's funny. Even documentaries, which are so much more of the moment, are lagging behind. And, you know, you can't really expect bloggers and even the best journalists to give us the long view to help us process these things the way, you know, great artists can. You can't think about the year in film in a vacuum. Right now if you look at our screens, there are a lot of smart and humanistic and multicultural movies out there that don't capture at least part of the nation's mood.

GROSS: So the holidays are coming up, leaving more time for moviegoing for a lot of people. So what's opening for the holidays? And I know there's a lot of movies that open in New York and LA for the holidays. But let's broaden that to movies that are opening outside of those cities that other people can see.

EDELSTEIN: Well, a movie that's gotten a lot of critical hate is the sci-fi romance "Passengers" in which Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence are passengers, among 5,000 passengers, on a trip to a distant, hospitable planet. They're supposed to be in suspended animation. It's going to take 120 years to get there. They wake up after 30 years. Oh, my God - they can't go back into suspended animation. What do they do in the meantime?

It's a very kind of floridly romantic film at times. It's a kind of creepily voyeuristic film at times. It has a pretty terrible ending, but I loved most of it (laughter). I thought that - first of all, Jennifer Lawrence is the real thing. And that voice - that wonderful, sort of whiskey voice kind of grounds her. I found it just a terrific and elegant and interesting movie. And I can't quite figure out why it's getting such brickbats.

"Patriots Day" is a very good movie at a very weird time. It's really kind of unapologetic in its endorsement of government video surveillance and the so-called ticking time bomb scenario that generates so much law-and-order rhetoric. The rub is that it's about a real event. It's about the the Boston Marathon bombing. And so you can actually make a very good case that some of these techniques that the movie shows actually did lead to the capture of these two young men before they could do any further damage. Anyway, it's a very exciting movie.

"Fences" is Denzel Washington's adaptation of August Wilson's play. Not to belabor the obvious, but it feels like a play on screen. It's very stagey. There are elements of it that, you know, work very well and in plays by Arthur Miller or Athol Fugard but don't really translate. All the same, you know, this giant, grandstanding, brash performance by Denzel Washington, though it seems a little too worked out for the screen, is - nonetheless, he's a force of nature. And I think it has to be seen.

Martin Scorsese's "Silence" is an extraordinary film that I think is going to generate a lot of controversy if people see it. It centers on these two Portuguese priests who arrive in Japan in the 17th century, where the Japanese - where the shogun is in the process of crucifying priests and torturing and slaughtering Christians and, you know, getting them to abandon their faith on the grounds that it can't possibly take root in Japan.

GROSS: So are there any old films or new restorations of old films that are coming out either, like, streaming or DVD or whatever, that you want us to be aware of?

EDELSTEIN: I couldn't recommend more highly "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," which has just come out, been restored. And it's available from the Criterion Collection. It's Robert Altman's counterculture Western with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and Altman's stock company. Pauline Kael called it a beautiful pipe dream of a movie.

It's actually my second favorite movie, period. Shot in very soft sepias and grays on a very wide screen by Vilmos Zsigmond, it needed a new transfer. It's got it. But what makes it so timely is it also has the best use of existing songs in any film ever. They're "The Stranger Song," "Sisters Of Mercy," "Traveling Lady" (ph) by the, sadly, late Leonard Cohen. It's - you know, listening to that soundtrack and watching the movie is a heartbreaking experience.

GROSS: So the end of a year is the time when critics do their 10 Best Lists and also award season begins and the nominations start coming out. The broadcast critics - the critics' awards were already given. So do you find when you're putting together your list that it usually speaks in any way to what ends up winning, like, the Golden Globes or the Oscars?

EDELSTEIN: Oh, I try not to. I say I'm such a hypocrite because I'm chairman this year - it's a revolving chairmanship of the New York Film Critics Circle - but we have too many damn awards in this country (laughter) and too many awards ceremonies. And it all leads up to the Oscars.

I feel as if I understand the appeal of the Oscars - that it's fun to prognosticate. It's good for artists in that they make a little more money if they win and they have a wider range of opportunities and they know for sure that the first line of their obituaries is going to have the words Academy Award-winning - that's all very comforting. But I hate how, you know, entertainment culture has been has been warped by the Academy Awards in particular.

GROSS: All right. Well, thanks for being with us, David. Happy holidays.

EDELSTEIN: Happy holidays to you, Terry.

GROSS: David Edelstein is FRESH AIR's film critic and film critic for New York Magazine.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our TV critic David Bianculli is here with his 10 best list and a look back at the year in television. David is also the author of the new book "The Platinum Age Of Television." Hi, David. Thank you for bringing your 10 best list with us. Before we talk about some of the larger trends of the year, could you just, like, read through your top 10?

DAVID BIANCULLI, BYLINE: OK. We'll go bottom up - like number 10 and then work our way up because it - I guess it's more dramatic that way. Number 10 is "Veep" on HBO. Number nine is "Horace And Pete" which is not on TV at all, but you can get it on Louis C.K.'s website - louisck.net. Then next is "Game Of Thrones" on HBO. Next is "Shameless" on Showtime. Next is "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver" on HBO. I thought he had a remarkable year. And then a trio of miniseries There's "The Night Manager" on AMC. That was the one with Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. And then the "People V. O.J. Simpson" on FX which I put in a tie with a miniseries nonfiction documentary series on ESPN, "O.J. Made In America." Both of those were so much less exploitive and so much more informative and entertainment than I imagined going in. And then the top three - number three is "The Night Of" on HBO with John Turturro as a sort of down on his luck lawyer. Number two was "Black Mirror" which came back on Netflix, number one - "Better Call Saul" on AMC.

GROSS: Yeah. I love "Better Call Saul." When is it coming back? What happened?

BIANCULLI: It's coming back February, I think.

GROSS: Oh, good.

BIANCULLI: It's coming back in just a couple of months.

GROSS: Oh, OK, very good, very good. Have you brought any clips from any of these you'd like to play for us?

BIANCULLI: Yes, I have. I brought one from "The Night Of" which is a miniseries, and John Turturro stars as a lawyer who's not only down and out and down on his luck, but he's got eczema, I mean, to a seriously debilitating degree. You know, he wears gloves. He can't wear shoes, you know, and he's struggling through. And he's usually dealing with the only sort of clients that would accept him. And here he's got a guy named Naz, and while going through most of the miniseries, not even getting to argue the case, he ends up having to do the closing summation. And it's just very touching.

GROSS: So here's John Turturro.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE NIGHT OF")

JOHN TURTURRO: (As John Stone) What I normally do is plea my clients out because 95 percent of the time, they did what they were charged with. They sold that dope, they solicited that guy, they stole that iPhone. It's clear to me just looking at them, so I tell them don't be stupid. Take the deal.

The first time I saw Naz, he was sitting alone in a holding cell at the 21st precinct. He'd just been arrested. I walked past him, out of the station and then stopped, turned around and went back. Why? Because I didn't see what I see in my other clients. And I still don't after all this time.

GROSS: So that was John Turturro on "The Night Of." So James Gandolfini was initially supposed to play that role, but he died before the series was shot.

BIANCULLI: Yes. Well, actually, the pilot was shot, except that that character is only in it for the very last scene, the scene that was described in the clip that we heard. And so there is that footage somewhere of Gandolfini acting in that one scene. I don't know whether they're going to release it on the DVD or not, but that was why they were able to have Turturro take it over, even though the rest of the pilot had already been shot.

GROSS: I'd like to see that. So this was a good year for the miniseries. Three miniseries are on your top 10 list. So what does that say to you about the miniseries?

BIANCULLI: It says a lot. It says that what's happening to U.S. television is that it's adopting the British model more aggressively and doing shorter things that are self-contained, and the benefits to this are huge. You can get better actors, better writers, better directors that won't commit to a five or seven-year series. For viewers, you can get something that's more self-contained, that has an ending as well as a beginning.

The only downside is that they can be hard to promote because they're just individual entities that show up and then they're gone. But in this way, it's how television began with the Golden Age of TV and the anthology shows. Each week, you didn't know if you were going to get a "Patterns" or "A Requiem For A Heavyweight," but you just trusted.

GROSS: My guest is FRESH AIR's TV critic David Bianculli. We'll talk more about the year in television, and David will offer an insight into how reality TV shows like "The Apprentice" and "Survivor" can help us understand politics today after we take a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with our TV critic David Bianculli. We're looking back on the year in television. So running through your top 10, you mentioned that "The People V. O.J. Simpson" was so much better than you'd thought it would be.

BIANCULLI: Yes.

GROSS: What were you expecting?

BIANCULLI: I was expecting a lot more exploitation, a lot more everything we already knew and sort of like an O.J. Simpson's greatest hits, as grisly as that sounds. Like let's remember this and let's remember this. And let's go just into this part of the testimony and you'll get to Kato Kaelin and you'll get to Mark Fuhrman. But it did so much behind-the-scenes stuff, so much research that it was fascinating.

GROSS: Sarah Paulson's performance was so well received for that.

BIANCULLI: Yes. That was a remarkable performance and quite a revelation in terms of the way she played it and the things that we learned about her. And even the public scenes, where people who followed the case at the time might remember, have so much resonance. I brought a clip where - it's a press conference immediately after the verdict is announced. And as shaken as she is and a lot of people were at the time, she finds a way to make a stronger point.

GROSS: OK. Here's Sarah Paulson.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE PEOPLE V. O.J. SIMPSON: AMERICAN CRIME STORY")

SARAH PAULSON: (As Marcia Clark) I first want to extend my deepest thanks to the families of the victims, to the Goldmans and to the Browns. Their strength, their dignity and their support throughout this trial has been a tremendous source of inspiration and strength to all of us. This case was fought as a battle for victims of domestic violence. We hope this verdict does not discourage the victims who are out there throughout this country from seeking help. I know there are women who are at this very moment living in fear, living in violence. Please, don't let this make you lose faith in our system.

GROSS: That was Sarah Paulson in "The People Versus O.J. Simpson." With me is our TV critic David Bianculli, and we're talking about the best TV of the year.

So one of the things on your 10 Best List, David, "Horace And Pete," is a Louis C.K. series that he did just for his website.

BIANCULLI: I know (laughter).

GROSS: And - what was it? - a 10-part series maybe.

BIANCULLI: I think it was eight. But...

GROSS: But who's counting?

BIANCULLI: Yes, I know. But it...

GROSS: (Laughter) I mean, it was such a big risk for him. I think he put up a lot of his own money.

BIANCULLI: And he dropped it like a Beyonce album. It's like - suddenly, here it is. I loved the ambition of it. And when you watch it, it's like OK. Yes, it's a comedy, but parts of it are very dark. It's like you're watching an O'Neill drama rolling out on a weekly basis. And I just think as much as his TV series "Louie" on FX, which has been gone now for a couple of years, where he was an auteur, he's - you know, in this one, he's one of the co-stars. He's writing it. It really has a vision attached. And even the comic bits have an undercurrent. I was very satisfied with it and then blown away by the delivery system. This is like, you know - hey kids, let's put on a show for real.

GROSS: Well, really dominating this year in television was politics. In so many ways - I mean, the debates, the constant coverage of the campaign and then the post-campaign. And because Donald Trump is from the world of reality television, he's certainly known how to use, like, TV and Twitter. So David, since you've had to watch reality TV as part of your job as a TV critic, let's talk about "The Apprentice" for a moment, which not all of us have seen, even though it's been on a really long time and really popular.

First of all, Donald Trump is going to continue to be executive producer of...

BIANCULLI: Apparently...

GROSS: ...The latest - of the new edition.

BIANCULLI: Apparently, yes, he is - the one that is now going to be hosted by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

GROSS: So what does that mean just in terms of television? Like, leaving the ethics of this aside for a moment, do you have any idea what his role is going to be? And - he works with Mark Burnett...

BIANCULLI: Mark Burnett, who is...

GROSS: ...Right? Describe that whole thing for us.

BIANCULLI: OK. Mark Burnett is the executive producer who hit the holy grail with reality TV with "Survivor." He's got a show I like very much that's on right now with "The Voice." And he did make - you know, he's got all of these other ones all going at the same time. And he went into business early on with Donald Trump on "The Apprentice," and it was successful for NBC for several seasons. And for those who haven't seen it or didn't ever look at it for a long time, as the series went on, you know, there would always be celebrity contestants, semi-celebrity contestants, who-the-hell-are-these-people contestants all put together.

And every week, one of them would get eliminated by Donald Trump whose word and decision were final. And - but he always had one or two people sitting at his right or left that were advising him. And in later seasons, these would include his son and his daughter. So we have seen them in a managerial or advisory capacity already. They would be sent out to check and see how the celebrities were doing building their lemonade stands on Park Avenue or whatever the stunt was for the week. And that would keep going.

But, you know, I go back to "Survivor," the one that really kicked off the reality trend in this century. And what Mark Burnett did there is, to me, very instructive to what happened to us politically and how Donald Trump may have played himself as a candidate because the first "Survivor" had Richard Hatch who was sort of, like, the villain of the piece because he was manipulating the rules as they were laid out in order to win. And he kept winning - outlast, out - you know. The way that he was doing it was because he was more entertaining to people watching, so he was kept on while other people were not.

GROSS: Even though he was breaking the rules.

BIANCULLI: He was either breaking the rules, or he was just being more abrasive. He was not being a team player. He was not the ideal candidate. He was not the person to whom you would want to win the million dollars. But he got all the way to the final. And then when you figure that's when he's going to lose and right is going to triumph, instead, the people who had the vote to decide who the winner was going to be decided that he had worked the rules better than anybody else and he deserved the win.

So Richard Hatch won the first "Survivor." And so if you think of this last election as any sort of reality TV because of one of the candidates coming from there, we got pretty much the same thing. I'm not saying Donald Trump is evil. I'm saying that he got so much media attention early on and throughout because he was more entertaining. The mainstream media gave him so much free press to express his opinions and to stoke the fires of publicity or outrage or anything else that they kept him in the game, even though this wasn't a game.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, I'm talking to our TV critic David Bianculli about the year in television. We're going to take a short break, and we'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF VAMPIRE WEEKEND SONG, "M79")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, I'm with our TV critic David Bianculli. And we're talking about the year in television. So, David, you have a new book out called "The Platinum Age Of Television" which is a kind of genre by genre history of TV. You teach TV history, and, you know, TV has, you know, years ago started to partially become a museum of itself with channels like, you know, Nick at Nite back then and then like other channels now that just show reruns and stuff. So in terms of TV becoming - like opening the door to its past and bringing things out from the vaults and showing those what's happened that was interesting this year.

BIANCULLI: Well, you're right that there's a lot of these, like, cozy TV and retro TV kind of channels...

GROSS: Antenna TV.

BIANCULLI: Yes. But, I mean, they're showing "Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea." This is not what I consider, you know, to be let's redo the best of the best. The most exciting thing that happened in 2016 that I hope carries on and is used as an example - just recently Turner Classic Movies showed "The Glass Menagerie," a production of the Tennessee Williams' play that was televised exactly 50 years prior to when they put it on television on Turner Classic Movies. So it was back in 1966 - Shirley Booth, Hal Holbrook - and they had to find the old camera tapes of this and put them all together like a jigsaw puzzle and then restore it.

And it's a wonderful thing. And I actually brought a piece of it, if you'd like to hear it. This is Hal Holbrook's introduction. And it's also interesting just to hear in 2016 about civil unrest in the '30s as written about in a play in the '60s, so there's a through line here.

GROSS: And is this the introduction that Tennessee Williams wrote for the play...

BIANCULLI: Yes.

GROSS: ...Or is this something new...

BIANCULLI: Yes.

GROSS: ...For television?

BIANCULLI: No. This was for the play.

GROSS: OK.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE GLASS MENAGERIE")

HAL HOLBROOK: (As Her Son) I have tricks in my pocket. I have things up my sleeve, but I'm the opposite of the stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in a pleasant disguise of illusion. I take you back to an alley in St. Louis, the time that quaint period, the '30s, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed them or they had failed their eyes and so they were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet of the dissolving economy. In Spain, there was revolution. Here, there was only shouting and confusion and labor disturbances, sometimes violent, in otherwise peaceful cities such as Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis. That is the social background of the play.

GROSS: So that's Hal Holbrook in "The Glass Menagerie," originally broadcast on TV 50 years ago restored this year by TCM. Well, now that we've looked at television's past...

BIANCULLI: (Laughter).

GROSS: ...Let's look ahead. What are some of the shows you're most looking forward to next year?

BIANCULLI: Oh, there's one.

GROSS: One.

BIANCULLI: And it's looking in TVs past. I'm such - but it is the future. It is - Showtime is doing a revival sequel - whatever they're going to call it - to "Twin Peaks" with David Lynch, with Mark Frost, with the composer Angelo Badalamenti, with most of the characters and actors from the first series. And I don't even know how good it's going to be or how bad it's going to be. But I do know there's nothing else I'm looking forward to as much 'cause the original series back in 1990 still hasn't been matched for audacity and originality.

GROSS: David, part of this year was pretty rough for you because you were in the hospital for a while, you needed surgery. So the germane part of this for our talk today is what did you watch on TV while you were in the hospital?

BIANCULLI: I was in there for a month, and I would have watched - my default station is usually Turner Classic Movies, and it would have been perfect in the hospital, except the hospital at which I stayed didn't have TCM. I'm going to have to check in the emergency room from now on. That's going to be...

GROSS: Call them up.

BIANCULLI: Yeah - one of the questions - it's like, all right. I don't care about MTV. Do you have TCM?

GROSS: So what did you watch?

BIANCULLI: I watched - the show that gave me the most comfort was reruns wherever I could find them of "The Andy Griffith Show" and actually gave me solace when I was in pain.

GROSS: Because that show meant a lot to you when you were a kid...

BIANCULLI: Yeah.

GROSS: ...When you were growing up, and we talked about that the last time you were on.

BIANCULLI: Yeah, and - but there's something about it. It was - it made me happy. And I guess it was the TV equivalent of comfort food, and, otherwise, I just wanted to watch things that would take a long time to be over, so they would distract me. So I watched a lot of baseball, I watched a lot of politics and just kept going.

GROSS: How was watching politics when you weren't feeling well?

BIANCULLI: Well, there was one thing - this is absolutely true. When I was really not feeling well and I was on some substantial pain meds, I called the nurse over to ask her if I was actually seeing what I thought I was seeing during the Republican National Convention because I swore that I saw Chachi up there giving a speech.

GROSS: (Laughter).

BIANCULLI: And I couldn't make any sense out of that except all right, it's got to be the Dilaudid.

GROSS: So you really called over a nurse to see if you were hallucinating or not?

BIANCULLI: Yes. And she said, no, no, that's Chachi. That's Scott Baio. You're seeing it, honey.

GROSS: You mentioned how much you wished your hospital had Turner Classic Movies.

BIANCULLI: Yes.

GROSS: So when my mother-in-law, before she died, was in the hospital and was in kind of a coma - you know how a lot of people say sometimes people in a coma can actually hear what's being said, though they can't acknowledge it? The nurse suggested that when we weren't there with her that we put on Turner Classic Movies, and that a lot of those movies were from, you know, my mother-in-law's era.

BIANCULLI: Wow.

GROSS: And that maybe she'd hear them and enjoy what she was hearing, or just, like, it would reach her in some emotional way and she'd find something to connect to in the actual world. And I thought, what a wise and beautiful idea. So that's what we did.

BIANCULLI: That is a great idea. I mean, hospitals, nursing homes, I hope you're listening.

GROSS: Yeah, really (laughter). So that's the year.

BIANCULLI: That's the year. There's always a lot going on in television. And I remain optimistic. It wasn't a great year for broadcast TV, but, you know, we got such interesting - so much more stuff out of streaming sites. I mean, the things that we're getting out of Amazon and out of Netflix and out of Hulu, it's increasing our options. And they're trying some pretty good stuff.

GROSS: Have you changed your forecast for who gets to survive all of this? Because there's just, like, so many options now between cable and broadcasting and more and more streaming sites, independent web series.

BIANCULLI: I don't know what's going to happen next. I visited my daughter down in Florida and they've cut the cord, so they're just watching Hulu. And so they'll grab network stuff the next day. They wait a day. Her father's a TV critic, and I have to wait a day for TV when I go see her? I take this personally. But I also see it doesn't affect her life at all. So the future may be different than my past was.

GROSS: Well, David, I wish you a great 2017.

BIANCULLI: Oh, thanks. You as well.

GROSS: Thank you very much. It's always fun to talk with you.

BIANCULLI: I love this end-of-year debriefing.

GROSS: David Bianculli is FRESH AIR's TV critic. He teaches TV and film history at Rowan University in New Jersey and is the founder and editor of the website TV Worth Watching. He's also the author of the new book "The Platinum Age Of Television."
TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. Our linguist, Geoff Nunberg, has chosen his word of the year. I'll let Geoff tell you what it is.

GEOFF NUNBERG, BYLINE: It's been an unusual political year, to put it mildly. And you could write most of its story just by tracking its effects on the lexicon, the new words and new uses of old ones - some useful, some that we could do without. I'll come to some of these in a minute. But for my word of the year, I'll go with normal and its sister, normalize. That may seem perverse for a year like this one, but when people are talking a lot about normal, it's a sign that we're living in extraordinary times. Start with the new normal.

Since the beginning of the century, that's how we've announced the events that have forced us to accept new realities. In 2002, the new normal was long airport lines. In 2009, it was kids moving back in with their parents. Then school lockdowns, soaring college debt and safe spaces. But when you search on the phrase now, the results are always political. For some, it's an energized racist fringe. For a writer at Forbes, it's Pizzagate and online vigilantism. For The Washington Post, it's a succession of pre-presidential tweets, dramas and victory tours that swell to fill every corner of the media sphere.

But normal is a tricky word with a Janus-faced meaning that it inherited from its origin as a medical term. It can refer to what's typical or expected, as in normal traffic or normal wear and tear, but it can also mean healthy or acceptable, as in a normal blood count. It varies with context. When Newt Gingrich says that Donald Trump isn't normal, it means he's unconventional. When President Obama says it, it means he's bizarre. It's that meaning that people who are alarmed about the election results are getting at when they say that there's nothing normal about the new normal, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise.

The air has been full of warnings about normalizing all of Donald Trump's remarks and actions or the unsavory factions and ideologies that bubbled to the surface during his campaign. They come not just from Democrats and the left, but also from the never Trump conservatives like Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol. It's a genuinely new note in American politics. People may have challenged the legitimacy of both Bush and Obama, but nobody ever argued that they weren't normal. What people mean by normalize can be vague and open-ended, but one way or another, it usually comes down to a choice of language.

People accuse The New York Times of normalizing Trump's environmental adviser when they described him as a climate contrarian rather than a denialist, implying that his views were within the sphere of legitimate debate. The Times caught still more flak when it slid over Steve Bannon's role in building the site breitbart.com into a platform for the so-called alt-right and described him in a headline as a combative populist, a term that could just as easily fit Bernie Sanders. The press has been particularly uneasy about normalizing that term alt-right, and with good reason. It doesn't really deserve to be a word in the first place.

It was concocted by white nationalists as a rebranding move. It sounds like an indie music genre, as if you can make racism hip by slathering it in irony and squeezing it into a pair of skinny jeans. It embraces a collection of malignant internet trolls, conspiracy theorists and the misogynists of what's called the manosphere - a whole basket of deplorables, to mention another word-of-the-year contender. Some people won't touch alt-right at all. You can get an extension for the Chrome browser that replaces every instance of alt-right with rebranded white nationalism. The mainstream media are wary of it, too. The AP urges reporters to put it in quotes and to make its racist connotations explicit. But it's too late to drive it back into the shadows.

The misgivings about the new normal most often come down to a sense that truth itself is on the ropes. Between Trump and Brexit, there was a lot of talk on both sides of the Atlantic last year about post-truth politics, which led Oxford Dictionaries to make post-truth their word of the year. That term goes back to the early 1990s, but this really feels like a new era with its epic tweet storms, its fake news and its filter bubbles - more contenders for word-of-the-year honors, though they've been around for a while, too. And there's also this sense that people care less about facts than reassuring narratives. As a New York Times editorial pointed out, political figures no longer bother to spin the facts. Now they feel free to ignore them.

The establishment media seem to be sticking to their guns, though their own language is changing in response. It's become routine to see words like baseless and bogus in the headlines over their articles reporting dubious claims and stories. That's the new normal, too. I doubt whether normalize will have legs. As David Axelrod put it, it's already a hackneyed cliche. But the rules have changed for good, and so has the language. While we're ticking off all the new expressions, we might make a place for the ones that have dropped out of sight. It's been a while since I heard anybody talking about politics as usual.

GROSS: Geoff Nunberg is a linguist who teaches at the University of California Berkeley School of Information.

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