That honor goes to either tonight's season finale of Starz's "Boss" or to the Sundance Channel's presentation of "Appropriate Adult," a film about an infamous British case in which a serial killer developed an unusual bond with the woman assigned to monitor his interrogations.
Both of them, frankly, scared me silly.
For those who haven't been keeping up with the post-sitcom Kelsey Grammer, he's currently the boss of "Boss," a drama about a fictional Chicago mayor struggling to keep his grip on power while concealing a neurological condition that's sooner or later going to take him down for good.
Grammer's Tom Kane has probably never been a good guy, but illness seems to have only made him worse. Tonight's episode is best summed up by the mayor himself, as he warns: "By the time this day ends, every person who has plotted against me will feel the force of my wrath."
Yep, he really talks like that. All the time. Sometimes even to people only he sees.
It's a testament, perhaps, to Mario Van Peebles' direction that the speechifying didn't blunt the impact of all that vengeance, which plays out at on an operatic level that would satisfy all but the most bloodthirsty fans of "The Sopranos."
And it ends with a haunting image that might have made a fitting coda to the show, had Starz not ordered a second season before the first even debuted.
There's not a lot of high-flown language in "Appropriate Adult," a film that was reportedly controversial in Britain, where some felt it exploited an infamous case in a way that could only bring pain to the victims' families.
