I can't watch anything that gets sadistic so... Deadwood is right now. Also Dextby Noi Dau Don 09/27/2010, 6:13pm PDT
OTOH I quite liked Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
Some other shows I have liked recently (btw jeep we will never be good TV buddies v_v ):
Magerarenai Onna (j-drama) - tale of woman who refuses to compromise her principles, no matter how good the tradeoff. Whether or not she can ever become a lawyer, or find some sort of romantic happiness, etc. I don't wanna say man I been there but fuck it. Man, I been there. One must deal with j-drama tropes and aesthetics, but I found it impossible not to really feel this show.
The City Hall (k-drama) - lovable dramedy about South Korean bureaucracy and political maneuvering. Fun, funny, surprisingly informative.
K-drama feelin', like j-drama feelin', take a little while to get used to. Only their super high-gloss shows are as brand-name-lifestyle as US shows are. I don't mean that as a dig at our precious white shallow consumerist culture, it's just - these shows are short-run (Magerarenai Onna was only 12 eps for example), so the writers invest it with marketing potential energy by making the show about OMG WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT with characters in a familiar lifestyle, and not with the US expectation of seeing these characters day in, day out, and so tying the familiar character to the high-key lifestyle that should be emulated. It's weird, subtle. You have to get used to it. I'm still surprised every time about how poor a lot of the characters are in azn tv - not cute-poor but like... $50 til next paycheck, spacing out leftovers for several days, staying home with the lights out poor. In lightweight comedy shows! Bad Family shows good-guy characters living in housing in Seoul in an area that doesn't have roads through it - the semi-affluent slums. Bums and malcontents everywhere. Always surprising.
Garth Marenghi's Darkplace - most of you should just drop everything that you're doing and watch this.
I guess this is on Adult Swim now so you have no excuse?
Bihada Ichizoku (animes, deal with it) - the Garth Marenghi's Darkplace of shoujo anime. Played so straight that unless you're well up on the source material, it doesn't even read like a parody. It took me three days to get the joke that the twin sisters who look nothing like each other also have ages several years apart :(
Kuroshitsuji II (animes, deal with it) - u-uguu~ I love Kuroshitsuji. Season II made all the manga purists so mad, but I just wanna be in a Claude/Hannah sammich. Is this so much to ask.
The general upshot: tidy young Victorian noblemen have butlers capable of anything, since the butlers are also demons. Demons who want to drink their souls. Pitched somewhere between Hellsing and Godchild, though not really as gritty as either. LESS STREET THAN GODCHILD, HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE.
Originally a manga, the anime is a Square-Enix/Sony joint venture and has the excessive budget to prove it. A shocking amount of fetish fuel is stuffed into each episode - not really a show for kids, but wayyyyyy too just-as-purandu for an adult show. The audience must be - childish perverts? Gothic lolis? Something like that. The first show in a long time that I breathlessly downloaded each week as soon as it was fansubbed.