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Bloodline (Netflix; 2015-2017)

A sweltering, slow-flickering burn of a family-secrets noir set evocatively in the Florida Keys, Bloodline has very much going for it. Anchored by fine performances, strongly directed, summoning emotionally honest moments and occasional political resonances, and above all a wonderfully atmospheric location, Bloodline has all the pieces in places for something special. Despite all of this, the series is marked above all by its consistently frustrating ability, over a foreshortened three-season run (its creators, Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler, and Daniel Zelman, originally intended the series to run for around twice that number of seasons), to fail to bring its strongest elements together to make the great show that is clearly lurking somewhere in these storylines, locations, themes, and performances.

Bloodline focuses on the Rayburn family, prominent citizens of Islamorada, Florida in the tropical, sea-threatened Keys (there’s a political undercurrent of the threat posed to this place by climate change as a reflection of the Rayburns’ past trangressions coming home to roost, but it stays mostly an undercurrent). Esteemed patriarch Robert (Sam Shepard) and matriarch Sally (Sissy Spacek) run a popular vacationers’ inn, and their adult children have met with varied degrees of success in their professional and personal lives in the shadow of the family legacy. Favourite son John (Kyle Chandler) is a detective with the local sheriff’s department, happily married to Diana (Jacinda Barrett) with two high-school-age children. Intelligent daughter Meg (Linda Cardellini) is a lawyer in a committed relationship with John’s partner, Marco Diaz (Enrique Murciano). Youngest son Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) is a bit more impulsive and wayward, running a financially-troubled local marina and in an on-again, off-again relationship with Belle (Katie Finneran).

But the real wild card among the Rayburn children is eldest son Danny (Ben Mendelsohn). Behaviourally unpredictable and emotionally manipulative, black sheep Danny is perpetually in need of money, involved with a litany of troubled women and crime-connected men, and is a generally destabilizing force in the family dynamic. His return to the family orbit in the Keys at the series’ opening precipitates a spiraling crisis that brings past tragedies and lies to the surface and threatens to tear this prominent clan to shreds.

Mendelsohn’s mood-swinging Danny, wavering between chaotic menace and wounded empathy, is Bloodline‘s secret weapon to such a dizzying extent that the series’ writers seem to immediately regret writing him out of the narrative after a strong first campaign largely focused on him and his volatile relationship with his siblings, especially Chandler’s John. Danny quite literally haunts the show as a ghost in the second and third seasons, and an attempt to substitute in his cynical lost son (Owen Teague) after he departs the scene is only fitfully successful and eventually abandoned. John is the central figure thereafter, and his stubborn attempts to keep the Rayburns’ history of violence under wraps threaten his marriage, his family relationships, and his prospects of career advancement when he runs for sheriff in an election against his superior Aguirre (an underutilized David Zayas). As good as Chandler is at suggesting the weight of consequence and John’s struggles with his position and his choices, his role as the series’ lead actor begins to increasingly reflect his character’s archetypal role as the series wears on: the dutiful son left to carry the weight of not only his own mistakes and sins but of those around him as well.

Despite its dense incident and thematic doom-stalking feeling of approaching, dreadful judgement for all of the sins of the characters, Bloodline remains doggedly watchable but never quite absorbing or entirely impressive. Its third season in particular quite literally loses the plot, stabbing about in the aftermath of the second-season cliffhanger, diving into a mid-season courtroom drama arc, and even indulging a baffling alternate-realities episode when it should be tying up loose ends at the series conclusion. Bloodline is extremely far from a bad show, and always provides reasons to keep watching, but it never fulfills its early promise either.

Letterkenny: Seasons 2 & 3 (CraveTV; 2016-Present)

Speaking of early promise, Canadian media giant Bell Media’s CraveTV streaming-platform smash hit Letterkenny had oodles of it. Built on a near-sublime appreciation of the foul-mouthed but ever-inventive language of groups of buddies in a rural setting (be they hick farmers, underground-culture skids, or cocky hockey players), creator/writer/star Jared Keeso’s blisteringly funny comedy series made a considerable impression in its first six-episode run early in 2016.

It would not be precisely true to say that Letterkenny‘s subsequent second and third seasons (as well as a one-off St. Patrick’s Day special released in between them) failed to fulfill that promise. They continued and extended the show’s involved colloquial riffing while introducing sharply funny parodies of Canadian politics (an ad for the election of the president of the local Agricultural Society lampoons the Conservatives’ harshly dismissive “He’s Just Not Ready” attacks ads targetting Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau in the 2015 Canadian federal election, which look especially shoddy now that he’s a generally popular Prime Minister) and popular culture (funds inherited from a deceased uncle spark a Dragon’s Den-style presentation competition to determine how they are to be invested).

Letterkenny remains funny in the ways that it was always funny, but nearly too often in precisely those ways. Characters mostly reside in their comedy stock archetypes, without considerable variance. Those riffs of comic dialogue, brilliant as they can be, often carry such a consistent structure that they risk becoming stale: there’s a recurring pass-to-the-next-guy bit with the teammates of hockey players Reilly and Jonesy in Seasons Two and Three that does overstay its welcome, although it is varied a touch with a subtext of raw male insecurity made blatant text. Repeated phrases and bits that began onscreen life as amusingly original utterances become mere catchphrases. The frequent motifs of slow-motion fight scenes or sexy-lady struts scored by aggressive Canadian indie-rock pop up again and again. These tendencies become particularly egregious in the “St. Perfect’s Day” special, which reduces the Letterkenny formula to an uninspired cartoon.

But good luck pumping the brakes on Letterkenny. Even as its structuring and comic arcs become more familiar, the dialogue is still so unpredictable and inspired, the timing and delivery of the performers so exquisite, the sociological verve of its setting so self-renewing, that it’s always worth watching. Keeso and co-writer and series director Jacob Tierney are quite smart about how to tweak their self-established formulas, and the instances in which they do so (in dialogue, performance, and visuals) are among the funniest moments in the show’s last two seasons.