Back to the Island: The Myth of the Others As Explained By Juliet Burke

 

 

Anyone who watched Lost knows that one of the most important moments in its run came in Solitary. In it Sayid encounters Danielle Rousseau, the Frenchwoman who recorded the transmission that had been playing in a continuous loop for sixteen years. Danielle has been living on her own ever since then and is clearly mentally disturbed by her solitude. Throughout her ‘interrogation’ of Sayid she keeps saying that “are you one of them?” When Sayid finally asks who she just says: ‘The Others’.

Eventually we will learn that there is a population who have been living on the island long before Oceanic 815 crashed. The show will spend a lot of time talking about them and in Season 3 actually look at them in depth. But even when we see behind the curtain there’s a lot we never know for sure about them.

For one: what do they call themselves? The Others is the term Rousseau uses and the Oceanics more or less adopt it for the remainder of the series. More often the survivors – and later on the Tailies who have been pillaged by them – just use terms like ‘them’ and ‘they’. We later learn the Dharma Initiative referred to them as ‘the Hostiles’ and given how they behave towards everybody else, it seems the most fitting term they’re ever given.  Ben will refer to them as the native population but we’ll learn later on that most of them have been brought to the island.

Nikki Stafford will eventually write that the Others aren’t really that different from the survivors and that’s more accurate then she might have suspected at the time. One of the major criticisms about the early seasons was how few questions the survivors of the crash asked about each other or the island. The longer the show goes on, it becomes very clear that the Others themselves don’t ask many questions once they come to the island either. The clearest difference between them and the Losties is that they believe they are there to protect the island from invaders and yet paradoxically keep them from ever leaving. This is a contradiction that none of the Others we meet, even among the hierarchy, ever see fit to answer.

And they are always defensive about the horrible things they do to the survivors. Throughout the entire series they will attack, abduct and even kill members of the Oceanic survivors and each time they are called on it, they will essentially use ‘what-about you guys?” on the survivors. The fact that we see at the opening of Season 3 Ben send spies to a plane that has exploded to invade the groups, gather intelligence and ‘don’t get involved’  never seems to matter. The idea of diplomacy never occurs to them – and as we will learn when the island starts skipping through time in Season 5 that has been the way of them for decades if not centuries.

There is no way to look at the Others at any point and not think of them as something akin to a religious cult. Indeed they even have a deity that they served blindly named Jacob. None of them have ever seen him except for Richard, who asks as his mouthpiece but his mere name is enough to shock them into obedience. We will learn that they’ve been receiving ‘lists’ from him for decades and have all been blindly following those orders for years, never even actually having to meet him. During Season 3 it is implied that Ben has been talking to Jacob all this time but we’ll eventually learn that this is a lie. It is the one that is clearly the basis for Ben’s leadership – which by the time we finally meet him is becoming shaky – and its worth noting that Richard is part of the group at the time but he never contradicts Ben.

Eventually by the time we finally learn Richard’s backstory in Ab Aeterno we will learn that Jacob has been bringing people to the island for centuries for a larger purpose. However over that period they have all died, whether at the hands of themselves or the Smoke monster. Richard asks Jacob why he doesn’t step in and Jacob says simply if he gets involved, it’s pointless. When Richard points out the obvious, Jacob offers Richard a job – to be his representative on the island to deliver messages between him and the people he brings. He grants Richard immorality but he never tells him at any point in the next 140 years why he’s been bringing people to the island in the first place. He has been assuring Richard that he has a plan, one which he has a part into play in and at a point in the future he will reveal it. Richard agrees to go along with this, right up until the point he lets Ben and ‘Locke’ to see Jacob and as a result Jacob is killed. A new group of people, represented by Ilana, have been told about this for years and have come to the island along with the Oceanics for their own purpose but we learn that Jacob has withheld critical information from them  - including about what happened to John Locke. Therefore by the time they get to Jacob’s sanctuary with this information it is too late to do anything about it.

I’ve always had more than my share of questions about the Others and they’ve only deepened with each rewatch. But it wasn’t until I read Back to the Island that someone was raised to me that even after twenty years had never occurred to me: Did the Others have any real purpose at all?

Noel Murray asks this question quite a few times in the episodes he reviews for episodes in Season 5 and 6. His most succinct summation comes in the penultimate episode ‘Follow The Leader’:

“What were the Others actually doing on the island? Aside from the ageless Richard, the folks we see camped out on the plains or usurping Dharma structures don’t seem to have much of an agenda outside of protecting the island. They have a temple, but we don’t see much worship. They have a hierarchy, but no one seems very happy about it.”

And it’s clear that none of them were ever considered as a replacement for Jacob either; not Ben, not Widmore, not even Richard. So much of the fighting during Season 4 seems to be about whether Ben or Widmore, both former leaders of the Others get to run it. Both end up getting exiled from it as a result and both spend years trying to return to it. But in the past we see that they both answer to Richard to some extent, so what is that leadership really worth?

There are many ways to look at this particular perspective and later on I’m going to look at their history. But I think to start it’s worth starting with the Other who based on what we see of Lost is the character who we get our first glimpse of Season 3 through and who more than anyone else gives us a window into the Others: Juliet Burke, played exceptionally for three seasons by Elizabeth Mitchell.

If you’ll forgive some gushing (and if I can’t do it here, where can I?) I always felt that Mitchell’s work on Lost was at least the equal of Michael Emerson’s as Ben and on certain occasion, even better. I’m not diminishing Emerson’s work – his work was one of the great performances in the history of television and in a future article I will elucidate on it. But the fact remains Emerson had a burden that Mitchell didn’t. His character was from his first appearance and well into the second half of the series essentially the antagonist of Lost, if not the outright villain. His great gift which he used to extraordinary skill was not just his ability to lie but to make the people who knew he was lying and that he was untrustworthy doubt him long enough to tell another web of lies.

Juliet didn’t have that burden because we knew her from the start. The opening of Season 3 shows us Juliet playing Petula Clark’s Downtown (a song chosen, like most of Lost’s, for dramatic irony), straightening up her home, cooking muffins which get burnt, and preparing furniture for book club. It’s clear she’s trying to lead a normal life; it’s also clear she’s very unhappy. The mood at book club is unpleasant – one of her guests says that Carrie which she makes clear is her favorite book, is one Ben wouldn’t read in the toilet. She takes this more personally then you think and then a moment later the house starts shaking. Not long after that everyone runs outside to see Oceanic 815 breaking apart in mid-air.

This not only establishes that we’re going to be spending time with the Others but it really tells us a lot about Juliet: she may be part of the Others community but it’s clear she’s not exactly thrilled to be here. A lot of what worked during the segments on Hydra Island in the six episodes that opened the season was watching the scenes with Mitchell establish Juliet.

And what was clear was that she was very different from the Others we’d met during the first two seasons on Lost. Everyone we’d met seemed determined to treat the survivors as an invading force who they could mistreat, kidnap and abuse with impunity. Juliet was clearly willing to go along with these manipulations – we saw her tase Sawyer and hold a gun on Kate when he stepped out of line – but she was the first Other we’d met (with one exception) who seemed to less committed to this cruelty than everyone else.

And while it was clear that nobody was exactly happy that Ben was the leader of the Others Juliet never bothered to hide it during those first six episodes. We saw her constantly flaunting Ben’s authority in private and critically in public. When a fellow Other was shot and Juliet was called in to save her – this was the first time we knew she was a doctor – she realized she was in over her head and broke protocol, calling Jack into scrub in. This clearly angered Ben and even her husband but to Juliet saving a life trumped Ben’s rules. When Colleen died it clearly broke her a little and even Jack was willing to console her.

So even before the first episode centered on her the viewer was on Juliet’s side despite the fact she was clearly ‘one of them’. When we learned that Not In Portland was going to give the first flashback of an Other that Lost had ever given everybody was thrilled. No doubt we thought we’d learn what Juliet had been doing as part of the Others. And the opening minutes of the teaser seemed to play into that. We saw Juliet on a beach crying. She walks into a building with flickering lights and Ethan, the first Other we met says hello. She goes into the room and there’s a woman sleeping and a record skipping and Juliet turns it off. The woman stirs, it’s clear she’s ill and Juliet gives her some treatment. We’re on the island.

But no. We’re actually in Miami and Juliet opens the window and we see a plane fly by! The writers have tricked us again. (I don’t know why we’re shocked that they can still pull this off.) We’re going to learn how Juliet ended up coming to the island. And that just makes her story even sadder. You see even by now we’ve begun to suspect that everyone who got on the plane was being drawn by the island. Juliet is the first person we meet who is brought not by the island’s needs but by The Others. And more importantly she is the first person we meet who has clearly been brought by false pretenses (it’s not until the end of the flashback that she learns that the company she’s signed up to join is ‘not in Portland’) and has been essentially held against her will. In the present she tells Jack she’s been on this island nearly three and a half years (she was promised she would only be there six months) and she wants the same thing that Jack has been promised. She wants to go home.

Based on the flashbacks in the episodes centered on her, the interactions she has with her fellow Others on Hydra Island and the discussions she has about her time with them, there’s a very strong possibility that Juliet was one of the last people that Ben Linus recruited to be one of his people. And based on the conversations she has about them over her three seasons as a regular it’s pretty clear that Juliet was neither fully accepted by them. Perhaps it might have something to do with seniority but it’s just as likely her own attitude towards the island didn’t help.

That’s understandable because Juliet was recruited to resolve a fertility issue with the women on the island: pregnancy was a death sentence if you conceived on the island. During her three years nine women died under her care and no matter how much she made it clear she couldn’t solve the problem on the island Ben refused to let her leave until she did. She was essentially held hostage by Ben who told her that her sister’s cancer (which had gone into remission before she left) had returned and that if she stayed on the island Jacob would cure it.

But by that point we know how manipulative Ben is and that he is more than willing to lie to his own people to serve his needs. It is far more likely that Juliet’s sister’s cancer never came back and Ben spent the next two years using it as something to hold over her. When she found a tumor on his spine she accused him of lying to her about her sister’s cancer being cured. He showed her Rachel in Miami playing with her two year old son Julian and claimed her cancer went into complete remission. But he needed to keep Juliet on his side and he probably just used that as emotional blackmail too. At one point during Jack’s captivity she tries to persuade him to do the surgery by saying if Jack were to let him die, no one would mind. This turned out to be a fabrication on her part but its still completely understandable: by that point Juliet probably wouldn’t have minded if he died under the knife.

Juliet clearly never committed to the dream that Ben had been telling his people about Jacob. in a flashback when the two of them are having dinner Juliet asks why they took Zach and Emma, two children from the tail section. Ben says almost absently: “Jacob wanted them.” Juliet changes the subject, not because Jacob’s name has the same effect on her as everyone else but because she’s been on the island long enough to know that there’s point arguing when Jacob’s name is mentioned. Tellingly in all of her conversations with the rest of the survivors once she joins their camp she will tell many secrets about her time with them but she never mentions Jacob at all. During the final season Sawyer learns about Jacob for the first time which means Juliet never shared that with him. She clearly thought it was a lie that Ben had spun.

The reason that I always trusted Juliet, even during the second half of Season 3 when Jack brought her back to the camp, was that while she engaged in some of the what about-ism when she was challenged by the Oceanics she remained fundamentally honest. When Sayid demanded she tell him what they did, she looked him right in the eye and said: “If I told you, you would kill me.” She didn’t deny how horrible her people were or pretend that the rest of the survivors were as bad. She knew how horrible her people were and she didn’t hide it. It is true that she had her own agenda and was engaged in deception with Ben but even when she talked about it with him in the final flashback, we could see she clearly hated herself for doing it.

Juliet was there to find out if any of the survivors of the crash were pregnant, something we already knew. When Sun confronted her on this in D.O.C. she was clearly shocked and immediately told her what would happen to her. She took Sun to the Staff station to find out if Sun had conceived on the island (I’ll deal with that in a different story) and when she did she left a message to Ben about her progress. But after she turned the tape off she said: ‘I hate you.”  Not long after that she confided in Jack she was a double agent and told him that the Others were going to come to the camp to abduct Sun and all the pregnant women. Three years of losing patients and the prospect of another woman dying was too much for her. From that point on, she was firmly on team Oceanic.

We already know that during this period Ben’s grip on the leadership of the Others is beginning to loosen, in large part because he has a tumor on his spine on an island where no one gets sick. While this is going on Richard has begun to look towards Locke as ‘special’ and its clear the moment John shows up in the camp that the rest of Ben’s people think so too. Ben is clearly using Juliet as a last-ditch attempt to hold on to his power. When she betrays him at the end of the season  - an event that leads to ten of his people being killed on the beach – it’s a blow he can never recover from, and one of my few disappointments of Lost is that the two never interact again. (Well, in the present.)

But perhaps the most telling thing that makes it clear Juliet was never truly an Other comes in Season 5 when she has become part of the Dharma Initiative. She knows that a thirteen year old Ben is part of the Initiative (boy I’d have loved to see that meeting) but she seems to have dealt with it – until Sayid shoots Ben and leaves him for dead. The only doctor available at the time she does everything in her power to save the life of the young Ben, including helping Kate had him over to the Others to save his life. It’s not until they’re on their way to the hostiles that Sawyer asks the question why they would save the boy who when he grows up will do everything in his power to make their lives miserable, Juliet most of all. According to Sawyer she tells him: “It’s wrong to let a kid die, no matter who he grows up to be.” By that point we get our final confirmation on something we’ve known for a long time; despite what Ben said about her Juliet was never truly “one of us.”

That is the clearest perspective of what the Others was from the last person we know was a follower of any kind. In the next article I’m going to deal with the leaders of the Others and how they may have never led much of anything.

Jeopardy Invitational Tournament 2025 Recap, Part 2: The Semifinals

 

A lot already had happened in the quarterfinals of the 2025 Invitational Tournament and there were more potential going into the semifinals. Three of Jeopardys all-time greats had qualified as had two former College Champions and one runner-up in that same College Championship. There were far fewer women then in last year’s Invitational but it was more diverse with three players of color facing off. The impossible had happened before. Could it happen again?

 

Game 1

Roger Craig Vs. Jaskaran Singh vs Shane Whitlock

Note: Roger and Shane had previous competed in the Battle of the Decades though as I’ve mentioned Shane was eliminated in the first round while Roger made it all the way to the finals.

In his quarterfinal match Roger found all three Daily Double and they helped win. In the semi-final he didn’t find a single Daily Double – and that probably helped him win as well. Confused?

It was a close fight in the Jeopardy round from start to finish. Jaskaran got to the Daily Double when he was in third in SOCIAL TYPES. He bet the $1800 he had:

“Random House says this 2-word term for one who travels a lot for business was suggested by a Mad Max film title.” He knew it was a road warrior and moved into second place. At the end of the round he and Shane were tied at $5000 apiece, with Roger just $600 behind.

Early in Double Jeopardy Jaskaran got off to an early lead and was at $9400 when he found the first Daily Double in THE COUNTY LINE. He wagered $4000:

“Cross this county’s border & you’re in one of the ‘collar counties’: Lake, McHenry, DuPage, Kane and Will.” Jaskaran struggled before guessing: “What is Baltimore?” He was in the wrong state. It was Cook County. He dropped back to $5400. Immediately afterwards there was a $2000 swing in that same category that put Roger in the lead. He managed to hold it and was at $11,600 when Shane found the other Daily Double in PERIOD ENTERTAINMENT. At that moment Shane had $5800, exactly half Roger’s total. It made sense to bet it all:

“The Night That Goldman Spoke in Union Square’ is a song from this musical named for a music style that defined an era.” Shane struggled before guessing: “What is the Jazz Age?” He had the right idea but it was Ragtime and he dropped to zero.

Despite the best efforts of Jaskaran he couldn’t close the gap between him and Roger. At the end of Double Jeopardy Roger still led with $14,400 to Jaskaran’s $12,600 and Shane’s $3200. Once again it came down to Final Jeopardy.

The category was FAMOUS NAMES. (“Not so specific” as Ken said.) “As a young reporter in Appleton, Wisconsin Edna Ferber interviewed this hometown celebrity originally from Hungary.”

Shane’s response was revealed first: “Who is Houdini?” That was correct. (I knew Houdini was raised in that town.) Shane doubled his score to $6400. Next came Jaskaran. He also wrote down Houdini. He came very close to doubling his score and he was at $25,198.

Then we came as Ken put it: “to the Sphinx like face of Roger Craig.” There was laughter but it did give nothing away. He’d written down Houdini. It came down to the wager: $10,801. He went to $25,201. Fans of great Jeopardy tournaments could rejoice: Roger Craig was going to the finals.

 

Game 2

Matt Amodio vs Luigi De Guzman vs Emily Sands

Once again Matt spent the Jeopardy round struggling, this time against two very gifted champions. Luigi went into the lead early, Emily got to the Daily Double ahead of him and he spent most of the round in a distant third. By the time it was over Luigi had a big lead with $8800 to Emily’s $5400 and Matt’s $2200.

Matt picked first in Double Jeopardy and found the first Daily Double IN YE OLDE 18^TH CENTURY BOOKSHOPPE. He knew what he had to do and he did it:

“Of the Division of labour’ kicks off Chapter One in ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of’ the rest of this 1776 Title. The academic knew the answer: “What is the Wealth of Nations?” He doubled his score to $4400.

Luigi held his lead for awhile but then both he and Emily got a $1600 clue wrong in FACTS ABOUT FACTS and then Matt got the $1200 clue correct. He found the other Daily Double on the very next clue in CURRENCIES. With $8000 in front of him, yet again he bet everything:

“Dinar is served in many countries including this small oil-rich one; in the ‘90s the Iraqi dinar briefly replaced its own dinar.” He figured out it was Kuwait and went into the lead with $16,000.

Neither Luigi nor Emily refused to concede defeat. All three players were brilliant in Double Jeopardy and all finished with impressive five figure scores: Matt led with $22,800, Luigi was next with $16,400, Emily had exactly half Matt’s total with $11,400.

It came down to Final Jeopardy again. The category was CABINET MEMBERS. And it was murder: “In order of fame, the first cabinet was Jefferson (later Prez), Hamilton (‘my shot’ guy), Knox (of Fort fame), this attorney general’. Matt wrote down his response very quickly and it was the same as mine, though I have to say I wasn’t nearly as sure as he seemed to be.

Emily was first. She wrote down: “Who is Marbury?” (no doubt thinking of the Supreme Court case.) She was wrong. It cost her just $300.

Next came Luigi. He wrote down: “Who is Jay?” He was closer than her but still no cigar. It cost him everything but a dollar.

Finally came Matt. He wrote down: “What is Randolph?” And that was the correct response: Edmund Randolph, another Virginian who would eventually go on to succeed Jefferson as Secretary of State. Matt’s wager was irrelevant at this point but he had bet $10,001 to give him his second straight hard earned victory and putting him into the finals.

 

Game 3

Raymond Goslow vs Juveria Zaheer vs Ray Lalonde

Almost from the start this was a dogfight between Raymond and Juveria. Raymond got off to a quick start in the Jeopardy round and had $3200 when he found the Daily Double in OLD MAN  (OR WOMAN) RIVER. He bet everything:

“Quinbequin to the natives, it was called the Massachusetts by explorers, then renamed in 1614 for a then-prince.” Raymond thought before guessing: “What is Edward?” It referred to the Charles river. He dropped to zero. He rebuilt and the end of the round he and Juveria were tied at $5200 apiece, with Ray trailing at $1400.

The battle resumed in Double Jeopardy with a back and forth. Raymond had just moved into the lead with $12,800 when he found the first Daily Double in ON TOUR. He wagered $5000:

“This 16-year-old’s diary entry for October 18, 2006: “Oh my god I am on the Rascal Flatts tour…I’m opening up for the last nine dates.” He knew it was Taylor Swift and widened his lead to $17,800.

Juveria than managed to close the gap by getting three straight $2000 clues correct and then found the last Daily Double in 5-LETTER ANTONYMS. By that point Ken noted she’d swept all of the $2000 clues and the last Daily was in that clue. She wagered $4000:

“Harmless: relating to a trio of destiny-based goddesses?” She thought before guessing: “What ar4e muses?” I knew it was the fates but I didn’t know the adjective was fatal and she dropped to $12,800. At the end of the round Raymond had an impressive $21,000, Juveria was next with $14,400, Ray trailed with $4200. The 13 game winner had no chance against these two: Raymond got 26 correct answers, Juveria 22. He still had a slight chance, though.

It came down to Final Jeopardy. The category was HISTORIC SCIENTISTS: “A pair of discoveries by him in 1787 are named for stage characters, a new practice in his field.” I figured it out based on the date.

Ray’s response was revealed first. “Who is Herschel?” That was correct. I knew that he had discovered Uranus and that the two moons he had discovered were named for Titania and Oberon, characters from Shakespeare. (Before that, apparently, moons were named for mythical characters.) Ray did what he had to do and bet everything. He was at $8400.

Next came Juveria. She knew it was Herschel as well. But she bet nothing. She still had $14,400.

It came down to Raymond. His response was: “What is IDK?” The wager was now all important. He bet $7801. This dropped him to $13,199 and Juveria had come from behind to win the third and last spot in the finals.

So starting tomorrow two of the greatest players in Jeopardy history will face off against the most successful Second Chance player in Jeopardy history. Juveria’s already beaten a twelve game and a thirteen game winner to get here and we all remember how last year’s Invitational played out for Victoria Groce. Can she do the same against two of the greatest players in history?

The finals begin tomorrow with a spot in the Jeopardy Masters on the line. I’ll be watching with bated breath as will all my fellow fans. I’ll be back with the results when it’s over.

Better Late Than Never: A Good Girl's Guide To Murder

 

 

Around the end of 2024 I heard about a series on Netflix called A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. The reviews had been decent but not exceptional and considering the plethora of ‘good’ streaming shows I still need to follow I would likely have ignored it altogether. However in January on a trip to the local library I happened to see Holly Jackson’s book of the same name and I took out on a whim.

I will confess that it wasn’t until I was nearly through the book (the first in a trilogy) that it even occurred to me to look on Netflix and see if they shared the same material. When I learned the truth I decided to do something I rarely do and that’s check out the limited series adaptation of a novel after having read the book. It took me a couple of minutes to learn something I don’t think I’d processed in my reviews: while Jackson’s trilogy is set in a small town in Connecticut Poppy Cogan had adapted it to a small town in England.

Did this deter me from watching the series? On the contrary I now wanted to see it more than ever. Jackson’s novel is a cracking good read, well set with a more than likable heroine and a lot of twists along the way. I now intend to read the other two novels in the trilogy. But honestly I approve of moving Good Girl’s from New England to England for multiple reasons.

First of all, reciprocity: America at this point has adapted so many of the British dramas in so many forms and as far as I know they’ve adapted so few of ours in return (aside from Law & Order) that turnabout is fair play. (And honestly, after what we did to Broadchurch I’d say we owe them a debt.) Secondly, there’s my belief that the British have this gift for making everything better with their accents (I mentioned that in Perfect Couple.) And lastly, it actually makes the bulk of Pip’s decision to solve a murder that took place in her small town more logical than it does here. A teenage girl decided to do what amounts to her senior thesis trying to prove that the young man accused of killing a woman five years ago? In America, you’d think that girl was strange. In Britain, I’m honestly amazed it isn’t an option for college recommendations given how many unexplained murders have been taking place in rustic villages for the last  century and a half.

The setup for those who haven’t read the book is essentially the same. Pip Fitz-Amobi (Emma Myers) is a young schoolgirl on the verge of going to college. She is, to put it mildly, something of a geek. She’s thinking of doing her college project on Jane Eyre and her friends joke that her great love is Nicholas Tesla. She is the daughter of a barrister (black in this version) and an overprotective mother who want her to get out more. She has a brother that she adores and a dog she loves very much. (I have to tell you that last part bothers me because I’ve read the book.) When she was in middle school she knew Andie Bell and Sal Singh. Sal was nice to her and she’s never been able to believe that he killed Andie and then committed suicide. There’s a part of her who suspects that the rush to judgment is because Sal was not only her boyfriend but Hindi and the fact that his ‘confession’ and suicide seems a little strange.

As in the book she goes out of her way to try and meet Ravi (Zain Iqbal) who initially is very dismissive. Nevertheless Pip goes out of her way to form a murder board, starts to deep dive into Andie’s history and starts tracking down her friends. This becomes awkward because one of them Naomi is the big sister of her best friend Cara and Cara doesn’t want her to dredge this up. Nevertheless she decides to start talking to Andie’s friends and within a short time knows she’s on the right track.

So far in the first two episodes Cogan is basically following the brunt of Jackson’s novel, albeit with some appropriate British twists. When Pip decides to go get information on Max Hastings she decides to serve drinks at a party which is honoring “Stars of the Silver Screen.” She doesn’t know until she takes the job she’s going to have to dress as a star which appalls Naomi who she’s roped in. She encounters Max Hastings and gets answer when she decides to take shots for each question she asks – leading her to get drunk for the first time in her life. Immediately after that she gets into a row with Naomi and ends up walking off her buzz by going to the Singh house. (Ravi’s mother answers the door and when Pip says she came a while to get her says dryly: “From a galaxy far, far away?)

Not long after they go on a camping trip and they discuss things in a British tone. In this case they play the British equivalent of an Ouija Board, which involves a pencil moving towards yes or no. They attempt to summon the ghost of Andie Bell. That night the girls need to go to the bathroom outdoors and Pip sees something in the darkness. She tries to shake it off but when she gets back to her sleeping bag there’s a warning note telling her to ‘Back Off’. Pip doesn’t tell anyone about this, a decision she will come to regret.

When Pip and Ravi go on a stakeout involving catfishing, they are eating crisps and not chips. They discuss the kind of food you should bring on a stakeout. Ravi still refers to her as ‘Sarge’ because “you haven’t made Detective Inspector yet’. Pip is also organized in a different way: unlike the novel where she records and types down most of her thoughts in a journal we see her form a murder board which takes most of the original book to get to.

There are certain twists that I’ve already seen and others I know are coming. We already know that Andie is not the girl next door we expect: she’s having an affair with ‘secret older guy’, has sent nudes to one of her best friends and has been dealing drugs at calamity parties. I’m pretty sure what will come next having read the original book but I also know that adaptations aren’t necessarily cast in stone. What I do know is that Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is far more than I expected it to be from the somewhat tepid reviews online and it does have a certain level of spark and fun that we don’t always associate from the cozy mysteries we’ve come to love and find on BritBox and Acorn.

I’m not stunned Netflix renewed it for another season, as there are two more books of material already written by Jackson about Pip’s adventures after this novel ends. Honestly I’ll be fine making my way through the rest of the series as it unfolds. I don’t expect it to contend for awards any time soon or have a huge following beyond the YA crowd. But that’s fine with me. It’s more than good enough for me – and honestly, I’d recommend seeing this adaptation before The Perfect Couple. Your expectations will be higher for the former and will go unrewarded. In this case, it’s better to be Good than Perfect.

My score: 3.75 stars.

Back To The Island: How Love Made Lost A Masterpiece - And An Outlier Among the Great Dramas of the Era

 

Note: For the purposes of this article and all other articles in this series I intend to only refer to the dramas that were on television during the period Lost was first on the air: from September 2004 to May of 2010.

“Have you ever known a spectacular, consciousness-altering love?”

This incredible line of dialogue is spoken very close to the end of the final season of Lost. (Who says it and to whom I will not reveal here because that would  give away much of the final season.) It’s a brilliant line of dialogue for many reasons because well before that line was ever spoken many fans were beginning to think that was what Lost was truly all about.

No one can deny that so many of the dramas during the first decade of the 21^st century are among the greatest in the history of the medium; having seen almost all of them I would heartily concur. But anyone who watched even a handful of the dramas that were on when Lost was on the air and were competing against it for Best Drama year in and year out would be forced to concede that they are also among the bleakest series in history. That’s not a flaw or a reason not to watch them; it’s a statement of fact.

Of the four great HBO dramas that kicked off the revolution (all of which were in their prime when Lost debuted) only Six Feet Under  could be considered the kind of show were love and romance were treated with anything close to respect and sincerity. They were essentially meaningless to the stories that David Simon was trying to tell on The Wire; The Sopranos made it clear that while it might be about family, fidelity was not part of the things it held dear and Deadwood was cancelled before it got a chance to show that it might have started to deal with love being important. As for Mad Men everyone at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would spent their lunch hours in hotels with their mistresses and then go home to their families; Breaking Bad almost never touched upon love and Jack Bauer was too busy saving the world on 24 to have time for love and most romantic relationships ended up collapsing in CTU. Really the only  Golden Age drama that considered love a genuinely earnest and real emotion and treated it with respect was Friday Night Lights.

If we were to broaden our scope the series that were being nominated for Best Drama while Lost was on the air, the picture doesn’t get much brighter. Dexter fundamentally argued that its title character’s Dark Passenger would destroy any human contact around it and by the end of the fourth season Dexter’s wife Rita would become the series great victim of it. Damages was a different kind of story but Patty Hewes did destroy all in her path and for Ellen to emerge from it she had to abandon Patty entirely to find fulfillment. House argued that the title character was only happy alone and for all of the ways Grey’s Anatomy broke ground, when Derek Shepherd died it argued that you could get over your great all-consuming love with enough time and energy. (And that I would remind fans is the most long-lasting of all the relationships the show dealt with.)

It's not as though the love story was completely killed among the great dramas of this era; one found it in unlikely places. Big Love argued that polygamy didn’t necessarily destroy the idea of the family or the romance. Boston Legal showed the bond between Denny Crane and Alan Shore was deeper and more real than so many real romances during this period. Before Lost left the air Parenthood would debut and show almost every kind of love story and show and that marriage wasn’t necessarily the end of it but that it could deepen over time. And while J.J. Abrams had no real connection with Lost after the Pilot, his body of work on television whether it was Alias or Fringe argued that love could survive all obstacles against it, whether it be medieval prophecy or an alternate universe.

And I’m not about to argue that Lost couldn’t be when it chose as dark or cynical as any of these other great dramas during the era. It also had the added burden of being a mythology series which almost by design are puzzle boxes where everyone is trying to unravel the web of mysteries that the writers are giving us each week. But there’s a reason that Lost was one of the greatest shows in the history of television and that all of the imitations that came around trying to capitalize on its success while it was still on the air either lasted less than a season or in the rare case when they kept going (Heroes is the most obvious example) very quickly became shells of their former selves.

And that reason is because all of those imitations trying to capture the brain of Lost rather than what it really made it last – the heart. That may seem corny and maudlin but anyone who stuck with the show during its entire run and still rewatches it to this day (your author is glad to be guilty of both) knows that it is the gospel truth. To be sure I kept watching because I wanted to know what was in the hatch or who the Others were or what the Dharma Initiative was or how the Black Rock ended up in the middle of the island. I wanted answers as badly as everyone else.

But underneath it was something deeper, something that I don’t think I realized other shows weren’t giving me no matter how extraordinary they were or how riveting every aspect was until years after the fact. I loved 24 and The Wire and Mad Men and Dexter and Damages when they were on the air and I waited every week to eagerly devour another episode. And later on I would find the same brilliance in such masterpieces as Deadwood and Breaking Bad and see what was in them. All of them were masterpieces with some of the greatest writers working for them and some of the greatest actors giving some of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen. And on a strictly qualitative level the cast and writers of Lost could rank with any of the great shows of that era even though some are clearly superior on either a season-by-season basis or as a work of art.

But even at the time I knew Lost worked on a level that none of these series, extraordinary as they are, ever tapped or even really tried to. Again that’s not a strike against any of these dramas; it’s just why Lost was different. And any fan of the series knows that one of the things that makes us worship it was how central love was to what was going on as much as everything else on the island.

And this is coming, I should make clear, from someone who, both at the time and well after Lost came to an end, never considered ‘shipping’ critical to enjoying a great TV series. Whether Mulder and Scully ever hooked up had never been critical to my loving The X-Files, I was neither Team Angel or Team Spike at any point in my appreciation of Buffy and even before the disastrous final season of Gilmore Girls I’d never thought any of the men in Rory’s life were worthy of her. (Lorelai is a different story of course.) I could appreciate a well done romance  - I was as thrilled as anyone when Carol went off to Seattle to live with Doug as anyone – but it was never critical to my loving a drama. (Comedy’s another story but that has nothing to do with Lost.)

But Lost was the exception that proved the rule and what made the show a work of art was that it had almost every kind of love story imaginable. This is something Emily St. James points out very clearly in Back to the Island:

“Sun and Jin are in a failing marriage until crashing on the island reminds them of why they fell in love in the first place. Charlie and Claire had a classic meet-cute rom-com deal, with the faded rock star also having to step up and be a surrogate father. Sawyer, Jack and Kate have a good old-fashioned love triangle, the type TV has long thrived on. Rose and Bernard have a good marriage and have the comfort level of two people who have been through everything and keep finding their way back to each other. Not every love story on the show works but the vast majority of them do, something that’s surprising not just for sci-fi TV but for TV in general.”

St. James is absolutely right. (Well, there’s one minor detail which I’ll get to in a minute.) As a viewer I was invested in the love stories on Lost in a way I don’t think I’ve ever truly been with any show in my entire viewership. And when I think the most powerful moments watching Lost just as many involve the love stories as they do the parts that involved my brain being twisted in impossible directions.

I became invested in the Sun-Jin relationship very quickly as I said before. And one of the greatest moments in the series (highlighted by Stafford in her first book) comes at the end of ‘Collision’ in the middle of Season 2. Ever since the raft was blown up and the currents drifted Michael, Jin and Sawyer back to the island we have been waiting for the moment Sun and Jin are reunited. The episode adds to that at the end of Everybody Hates Hugo when we learn that one of the few remaining survivors from the tail section is Bernard. Now ever since we met Rose in the Pilot she has been convinced her husband Bernard is still alive with the kind of faith that only Locke seems to have. In her case that seems more deluded than Locke’s because we don’t know more about her backstory. But when we Michael and Sawyer meet Bernard and he asks about Rose, the characters are as stunned as the viewer was.

So when the worlds collided (disastrously as fans know) the writers drew all the suspense out of it they could. And the last minute of the episode when Bernard and Rose reunite, followed immediately afterwards by Sun and Jin is one of the most moving moments in the entire series. No matter how many times I rewatch it I’m moved to tears.

I’ve written about how the love triangle Lost did was one of the more rewarding parts of the entire series. It was starting to get rusty by Season 3 but the presence of Juliet completely reinvigorated it. All four actors involved could frequently do their best work in the complicated web, often in moments of remarkable subtlety. Matthew Fox’s best work in Season 3 is when he chooses to sacrifice his freedom for Kate and Sawyer’s and the moment at the end of Not in Portland when he tells her never to come back is a great one for him, as well as when he shuts the walkie-talkie off when Kate is in tears. (It’s a great moment for Evangeline Lilly as well.) One of my favorite quiet moments of Through the Looking Glass comes when Jack finally tells Kate that he loves her and that breaks me each time I rewatch the series because I know that it will end in ashes.

Josh Holloway was best at showing Sawyer’s softer side in the first half of the series entirely during his scenes with Kate: he was unwilling to let his guard down with any other character until at least the end of Season 3. During Season 4 Sawyer undergoes a radical transformation when Kate ends up at the barracks and he finally says what the viewer has been wondering for three seasons: the only thing waiting for Kate off of the island is a pair of handcuffs. (By this point, of course, we know otherwise but we still don’t know how Kate escaped prison yet.) The next episode he tries to play house with Kate but when she chooses to go back to the jungle he finally explodes at her at how frustrated he is as to why Kate keeps going back and forth between him and Jack. When Kate reacts with hostility we’re now on Sawyer’s side and you get the feeling from this point on he has decided to stop chasing after her. For the rest of the series their relationship loses almost any romantic edge it has.

And the best part of it was the work of Elizabeth Mitchell as Juliet. That’s true for so much of her work during her three full seasons on Lost but one of the greatest strengths of the writers when it came to her is that while her character was as great as everyone else at putting up a front, over and over we saw that it was front and that Juliet may have had the biggest heart of the entire cast. Because she started out as an Other some of the fans never liked her but I was never one of them and she always had my sympathy. I could have seen her ending up with Jack as easily as Sawyer –  Jack in Season 3; Sawyer during the fifth season – but I always had a feel she was the one who was going to end up the most broken by it. And as was the case for so many characters, she got the worst of both worlds. In Season 4, she made it clear to Kate that she knew Jack loved her, apparently while he was unconscious – but then made it clear she knew Jack had been listening the whole time. Then she ended up finding the happiness she’d wanted all her life in the Dharma Initiative with ‘LaFleur’ and the moment the Oceanics returned to 1977, she knew even before Sawyer did that any happiness she had was over. Juliet’s death hit me harder than arguably any character since Charlie at the end of Season 3, mainly because her heart had been broken before the rest of her body had been. (And as any fan who saw how that happened, that part was just as wrenching too.)

But as great as these love stories were any fan of Lost knows what the greatest one was. It is the easiest question of any fan whose ever watched the show; it’s even clear for those of us who don’t like great love stories. It is the saga of Desmond and Penny, a story that only seemed to be dealing to fill in the blanks of a character who wasn’t even a regular when we first met him and ended up transcending even the nature of Lost itself, maybe even television.

I should mention that the citation from Back to the Island comes from her section on ‘The Constant’. She argues it is the most celebrated episode of the series and according to imdb.com she’s dead on, it is the highest rated episode of Lost by imdb.com. When a prominent website ranked the 100 best episodes of the 21^st century in 2018 The Constant topped it and almost no one quibbled. (I suspect those who did were fans of Breaking Bad’s ‘Ozymandias’ which is a masterpiece but is completely opposite when it comes to tone.) It was always on the lists of the greatest episodes of Lost from prominent fans, many of whom would pair it with ‘Flashes Before Your Eyes’ the other great Desmond/Penny episode in Lost and its intellectual and romantic soul mate.

Now I don’t argue that this is one of the greatest episodes of the 21^st century. That doesn’t mean I consider it the single greatest episode of Lost and this isn’t just me being contrary. But I am of the opinion that some of the greatest episodes in television history are not necessarily the greatest episodes of the series. I’ll explain and I will tie it to my subject.

Often the episodes we considers the greatest single episodes of a TV series aren’t the most representative of what makes that series great. ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose’ has been making the short list of the greatest episodes in television history almost since it debuted 30 years ago but I’ve always thought the episode that shows The X-Files at its best is ‘One Breath’. ‘Once More, With Feeling’ regularly makes the list of the greatest episodes in TV history but I’d argue Buffy’s finest hour was ‘Hush’ which shows Joss Whedon’s capacity for genius in a different way. ‘The Suitcase’ is considered one of the greatest episodes of all time but the episode that in my mind shows the greatest ability of Mad Men is ‘Kennedy/Nixon.”

With Lost I’ve always considered great episodes fall in two different categories: those that leave your mind reeling and those that leave your heartbreaking. The former would include such works of art as ‘Walkabout’ in Season 1, The Man Behind the Curtain in Season 3 and The Life and Death of Jeremy Bentham in Season 5. Those that leave your heart in a puddle would be Not In Portland for Season 3, LaFleur in Season 5 and Ab Aeterno in Season 6. (Trust me at some point I’ll be dealing with more than a few of them in this series.) However any true fan of Lost knows that the rules don’t apply to episodes centered on particular character and that character is Desmond. And that’s because his episodes – and here I’ll quote Stafford’s  writing on ‘The Constant’ – ‘alternately make my brain and my heart ache”

A summary of the episode which St. James gives us probably explains why both are true:

“On paper ‘The Constant’ sounds incredibly complicated, the sort of thing you can’t believe works. It involves a Desmond who has become completely unstuck in time, thanks to flying through the electromagnetic interference around the island. His consciousness keeps flashing between 1996 and Christmas Eve 2004. As the episode continues, he tries to use the flashes to his advantage, to find a way to re-stick himself in time by consulting the past version of Daniel Faraday. He starts to get nosebleeds, and as the episode continues, they get worse and worse. His brain won’t be able to handle flashing through time much longer. He must either find a way to solve his predicament or die.

The answer involves the power of true love. Of course.”

In this article St. James praises Lindelof’s ability to tell great love stories which is true not only in Lost but in the series he’s done afterwards such as The Leftovers and to a degree Watchmen. And the thing is this is such a simple love story. Des and Penny fall in love, break up, then realize how much they love each other when Desmond become stuck on the island. Penny spends the series trying to find Desmond. Desmond wants to go home and find Penny. As St. James puts it: “It’s so simple that it shouldn’t be able to spawn multiple seasons worth of stories. Yet it does.”

Flashes made it clear how important Desmond and Penny’s love story was to the plot. The Constant makes it everything. That’s because Penny herself is the constant, the one thing is Desmond’s life he lives for. She’s the only thing he knows that is important to him as in 2004 as in 1996; we can see it in his eyes every time he mentions her in this episode – and really every episode he does.

And that’s why the phone call between the two of them has to go on the short list not only of iconic Lost scenes but is why it is one of the greatest episodes in TV history, even apart from Lost. Desmond might only have one chance to save his life and that is to call Penny on December 24, 2004. He told her when he last saw her in 1996 to expect that call and on that date, but the two have just endured a brutal breakup. He has no reason to expect Penny will answer the phone. Now the viewer knows by now that Penny has been scouring the world looking for him but critically Desmond himself has forgotten this (wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey) and more to the point we have no idea if Penny is even in London or if she is that the cell patch will last long enough for the call to go through. And to this point Lost has already been relentless in killing off beloved characters and there’s no reason Desmond should be any different. Love stories often end tragically as Lost has already proven: just a few episodes ago Charlie died and Claire never got his final gift to her.

So the writers drag out the wait as long as possible – and then she answers. Henry Ian Cusick was a great actor in a way that he rarely got credit for, perhaps because unlike so many cast members his work was the most emotional of the entire ensemble. Often that came in the work of his voice but just as often it was his face and the way he suddenly smiles the moment he hears the voice of Penny is the kind of thing that should have earned him an Emmy nomination. There are many moving scenes on Lost but very few that make you weep out of joy: the wonderful moment between the two of them as they try to say everything they’ve wanted to say to each other for years in just two minutes will reduce the most stone-faced observer (myself included) to tears. And the smile on Desmond’s face when its over has nothing to do with him being restored to his place in time or even his life being saved; his hope has been restored.

It’s here I must weigh in on the nit St. James picks about Lost which comes down to her sexual identity. She says Lost is a desperately straight show and as a queer woman it bothered her there was no such romance on Lost. There are many things I can say this – many of them unpleasant – but I’ll go back to where I began this article and gently remind her that the show premiered on network TV in the fall of 2004. And in that era the networks were still justifiably skittish about portrayal homosexual relationships the same way they did heterosexual ones. There had been attempts at it over the 2000s – most notably on Buffy and Dawson’s Creek  - but they had been very skittish even on what was a low-rated network.

It's also worth noting that the three showrunners who would be the greatest pioneers in this for network TV were Ryan Murphy, Greg Berlanti and Shonda Rhimes. Rhimes would not truly allow one to take place among her regulars on Grey’s Anatomy until Season 5; Berlanti didn’t get his first official network series until Brothers & Sisters in 2006 and Murphy didn’t officially become part of network television until Glee in 2009. LGBTQ+ romances were basically non-starters until late in the 2000s on network television. Lindelof and Cuse were already pushing the boundaries of network television pretty hard almost from the start of the series when it came to diversity among its cast and however badly things may have been behind the scenes, it was hard enough to get the networks to sign off, particularly with is genre-stretching show as Lost; I suspect even the idea of one of the Others being gay might have been too much for them to explore.

Television has been great during the 21^st century in large part because it embraced its darkest and most cynical aspects of our nature and I wouldn’t trade the time I spent in the world of Jack Bauer or Walter White or Al Swearengen for anything. But sometimes we need to deal with the simple and earnest joy of romantic love, the purity of it. Lost was an outlier among shows of this era because amongst its ability to deal with deep issue and deep ideas it was always about the human touch and the idea that old cliché that love can conquer all. It might not seem like the kind of thing that should provide for great television because of that and if you breathe on it the wrong way, you risk losing the viewer. It may be easier to be dark and cynical and stay away from it. Lost, more than any other show of its era – and even more so today – stands apart because it demonstrated that when done well, like love itself, it’s worth the risk.

To paraphrase Penny herself, sometimes all we really need is a show that can tell a great love story and we have that in Lost. Always.

 

 

Tonight I Want to Talk About John Oliver, Part 1: The Shift in Late Night As Trump Rose

 

 

In the summer of 2013 Jon Stewart took a hiatus from hosting The Daily Show to make his directorial debut in Rosewater. While he was gone he entrusted John Oliver with hosting the show in his absence. Oliver had been a correspondent on the show for more than seven years to that point and while there were other cast members such as Aasif Mandvi and Jason Jones, Oliver got the job.

During that summer the show did a piece when Donald Trump, possibly for the first time, hinted he was going to run for President. Oliver whole-heartedly endorsed him, if not outright urged him to do so. This was not the first time The Daily Show had made that argument: Lewis Black had urged for it in 2011 and Jon Stewart had actually hoped for it to happen that December. No one was taking it seriously, certainly not Oliver.

In February of 2016 now the host of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver did his first segment on Donald Trump. It was two days before Super Tuesday and Trump had already won the New Hampshire and South Carolina Republican primaries. He gave a twenty-five minute segment in which he made it clear to his audience how dangerous Donald Trump would be if he received the Republican nomination. He went out of his way to argue about the false narrative of Trump as a successful businessman, his argument for Obama’s being born in Kenya and the already dangerous statements he made well before announcing for the Presidency. All of these, I should mention, were public knowledge to Oliver when he had ‘endorsed’ Trump in 2013 but he didn’t mention that or indeed any of The Daily Show’s other ‘endorsements’ of him in the past. He concluded it by using the argument that Trump had changed his name from Donald Drumpf and argued that he had done so because ‘Drumpf’ was the name of a fraud. He then ended his episode arguing that potential voters should consider this before voting for Trump. Whether Last Week Tonight was actually being watched by Republican primary voters is an open question considering even by that point in last Week’s run Oliver had got out of his way to castigate not only Republican officials but conservative agendas. Needless to say, the attempt failed.

It is an understatement of epic proportions to say the world has changed immensely in the decade since Donald Trump became synonymous with the Republican Party. One of the smaller but notable ways it has changed is that late night television, which has been part of the medium almost since its creation is facing what may very well be a crisis point. When James Corden left CBS for the first time in thirty years the network didn’t have a traditional late night host and it is unlikely one will return. Jimmy Fallon, the last network late night host to have a full week of episodes, cut back to four episodes this fall. Ratings have dropped dramatically for every network late night show and it is an open question if they will continue past the time their current hosts are still on the air.

The world of television has been undergoing immense changes since the rise of cable and streaming the last decade but while I believe much of the fictional programing will evolve and survive this period, I think there is a strong possibility that late night television might die out not only in my lifetime but perhaps by the end of the decade. And while correlation doesn’t always equal causation I find a very strong possibility being the fact that ever since the rise of Donald Trump to a host, late night comedians across the board have decided that it is their solemn duty to make it very clear in a way that their predecessors went out of their way to avoid doing, that they have taken a side and it is against Donald Trump.

And as a direct result late night television may very well become a casualty. What’s more considering Trump has just begun his second term, it’s impossible to see what any of these hosts think they have accomplished by taking positions that are guaranteed to isolate at least half the country which includes potential viewers. And considering the precarious position of television in general during the last decade across the board, one wonders the wisdom of so many network and cable heads to take a position that would undermine their livelihood and the jobs of so many others at these industries.  Yet there is no sign even in the aftermath of Trump’s reelection that any of these late-night hosts have decided to back down from their positions. They are pot-committed even though their hand has long since proven to be a losing one for the values they claim to argue for and the business they work in.

So in this article I’m going to use both John Oliver’s methods and him as an example to explain how late night TV reached this precarious state. And let’s start with something that should be obvious from the example I used above: political insiders have an excuse for underestimating Trump and not knowing who he was. Hollywood has absolutely none.

Because for more than a quarter of a century before Trump deciding to run for President for good, Donald Trump was very much a part of the Hollywood scene. They have spent an immense amount of energy in the last decade going out of their way to tell everybody that they knew Trump was weird from the start. In the case of Mark Burnett, he later went out of his to express contrition for creating The Apprentice around him and leading him as a benchmark to power. Yet it can’t be denied that for all that period Hollywood was absolutely fine with Donald Trump being allowed to be part of their circle. They were fine with him having cameos in TV shows and movies, they were fine with him hosting SNL and singing on the Emmys. And they did so for one simple reason: they looked down on him.

I have no idea if the coastal elites in New York or Hollywood knew all of the horrible things Trump was doing as a landlord or a real estate developer; I find it impossible to believe that someone like John Oliver wouldn’t because he spent a decade in New York. But that’s not what they found distasteful about him or deserving of contempt. No, they didn’t think he had class. They thought he was a pretender, someone who had all the wealth and privilege they did but who didn’t have class.  The cartoon version of someone rich and famous, not someone actually rich and famous like them. The left has spent a lot of time arguing that Trump says the quiet part out loud when it comes to the views of Republicans. That’s also the reason they judge him so harshly even though I’m pretty sure many of them privately think and feel the same things he does about such things as immigration.

Part of the legend of why Trump ran for President is because he was angry about Obama choosing to make fun of his at a White House Correspondents Dinner. That’s ridiculous because Donald Trump has been a subject of far less subtle lampooning from late night comic  for more than thirty years before he chose to run for President. Phil Hartman was imitating Trump on SNL in the 1980s and everyone from Johnny Carson to Conan O’Brien had been joking about him as long as I’ve been alive. I suspect this is a legend comedians themselves have created over time because it plays into their own narrative about Trump being thin-skinned – a narrative that they never miss an opportunity to play on as long as he’s been part of the political landscape. All through his first run for the Presidency every late night host from Stephen Colbert to Jimmy Kimmel to Trevor Noah have read out loud his tweets on the air with the kind of contempt a bully would use on a third grader. They mock his tone, they mock his spelling, they mock his run-on sentences. They have no problem calling Trump a bully when he picks on everyone else. When Trump does it, it is the sign of monstrous behavior. But when they mock Trump -  often just saying word for word what he does – it’s speaking truth to power.

All of this goes against the major rule of late night that their predecessors followed: you make fun of everybody equally. The most popular comics have always been those who tried to speak to a universal audience and that meant making fun of Clinton as much as one would George W. Bush or Obama. There has always been a divide between comedians about being popular or ‘selling out’ – it’s why many of them feel Jay Leno gave a way ‘his edge’ when he became host of The Tonight Show. The fact that he had the highest rating for over a decade over the ‘edgier’ Letterman and Arsenio Hall did nothing to change that opinion as did the fact that during the 2000s and into the 2010s this was the pattern following not only by those comedians but also Jimmy Fallon and Jon Stewart himself.

When Stewart retired from The Daily Show in 2015 – a week after Trump entered the race for the Presidency -  the last of those kinds of late-night hosts were gone. And late night comedy entered what can only be considered a very nasty tone – that somehow never went with the Democrats the way it did the Republicans, particularly Trump. For all the very real sins of Hilary Clinton late night basically treated her with the harshness they did the GOP: Hilary’s sins were that of being an ineffectual candidate as well as an inevitable President. Everyone in late night believed everything the establishment did: Hilary Clinton was going to be the next President. And during this period late night became in truth what the far right had always accused of being: in the tank for the Democrats. They will say they treated both sides the same when it came to their taunts but as someone who watched The Daily Show during that period I know it’s not true. Trevor Noah never ran a bit saying “Don’t Forget Hilary Wants to Bang Her Daughter’ the same way he did disgustingly about Trump during that period.

During this period John Oliver managed to escape the same lens, partly because it was a weekly series hut also because he was mostly ignoring electoral politics. To his immense credit John Oliver has spent the majority of his show not dealing with American politics or even America but other subjects that late night didn’t even try. The vast majority of it, then as now, dealt with corporations though not so much in America but other issues. One of his earliest shows dealt with the corruption of FIFA, the organization behind professional soccer – and his episode caused such a stir that not long after the commissioner was forced to resign. Indeed much of Oliver’s work in the first two years seemed to show a late-night host determined to change the system – and amazingly, it seemed it was possible.

In the first years he ran an episode about net neutrality and why it was important and asks for his viewers to lead an online campaign for the Obama administration to support it. The outpouring was so enormous that the administration followed through. Not long after came the special on FIFA. In 2015 he ran a segment on tobacco’s spending in African nations and started an online campaign for putting ‘Jeff the Diseased Lung’ on ads in foreign countries. This sparked an online campaign that was successful. Later he did a special on debt in America, argued that the best way forward was to forgive it – and then bought up what amounted to 12 million dollars in debt and erased it on his broadcast.

But by that time it was also becoming clear that there were limits to Oliver’s reach. During the 2016 season he ran a show not long before the vote on Brexit in which he went into great detail on the flaws of the campaign and why it was so important to remain in the EU. However, for the first time we got a sense of Oliver’s true political leanings as it made it very clear that his attitude was that he thought remain was ‘the lesser of two evils’. This was true in the song he composed and had sung: “F--- you European Union” which ended with the chorus “but for all that, we really need you.” It was hardly the most whole-hearted endorsement for Remain.

The week after that episode aired Britain voted to leave the EU, something that clearly shook Oliver to his core. By that time Trump had clinched the Republican nomination for President. During this period another difference became clear between Oliver and his fellow hosts. Most of them were able to work up some enthusiasm for Hilary Clinton. Oliver’s shows particularly during the fall were entire against Donald Trump. This was clear when he ran a separate show as to why voters should not vote for either Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. He made it clear he understood their frustration with both candidates but that it was more important that Trump not become President. Again, this was hardly a glowing endorsement either for the Democratic Party or Hilary Clinton.

Even at this point in Last Week Tonight’s run it was becoming increasingly hard to figure out if John Oliver was for anything: while he felt the Republicans and Fox News were evil incarnate it never translated to a whole-hearted endorsement of the Democratic party. Even now he was beginning to acknowledge his show could be something of a lecture more than an entertainment: it was clear that his show was about finding humor in all the broken things in our society rather than arguing for a way to fix it. Much of that would be lost in the tumult that followed Trump’s upset victory that November. The real reveal of his politics would be to come.

In the next article in this series I will concentrate on Oliver’s shows primarily during the Biden administration as that demonstrated even more clearly his politics then the four years that came before.

Television, Movies and The Presidency: A New Series - Frost/Nixon (2008)

 

 

Introduction

During most of the 20^th century almost every major artistic medium whether it was Broadway, film or television went out of its way to either never deal with the Presidency or when it did to frame in the so called ‘great man’ theory. None of the leaders of our nation whether they were FDR, Wilson or Lincoln were shown as anything but saints incarnate with no hints of the kind of flawed individuals they were.

This remained a sad truth almost to the end of the 20^th century. Even when it came to such monsters as Richard Nixon, there were a few who tried to show them as human being if not saints. This was sadly the judgment of almost every historical drama that America or Europe would produce: there was almost no nuance and the leaders of the country were always the good guy with no nuance. However when cable channels like HBO and Showtime began to enter the TV movie industry they slowly but surely began to paint more complete pictures of the occupants of the White House. This almost always led to immense pushback from historians and those who were survivors of that period and it has led to controversy on many of those projects but I believe it was the best thing.

During the 21^st century with the rise of Peak TV and the work of a few brave filmmakers and playwrights we began to get more rounded pictures of many of the Presidents that we had long considered either great or even just mediocre. Movies have improved a bit in the last two decades and some filmmakers will attempt the rounded package. Mostly, however, that burden has fallen to cable and streaming to tell the kind of layered complex stories about our chief executives.

Now as anyone who has read my column for the last few years you know all of these three of these things – film, American history and criticism – are all my sweet spots. And for a while I’ve wanted to do a long-term project looking at how film and television have been portrayal the men who have occupied the White House, both on an artistic level and for historical accuracy. The former has always been easy to judge for me; the latter more difficult. But I now feel more than qualified to do both.

This series will deal with the films and limited series that had covered our Presidents. Because many filmmakers cover the same ground I expect multiple entries on the same Presidents. I’m also relatively certain that there will only be a certain number of Presidents who get covered in these columns: it’s not like anyone’s ever done a biopic on Millard Filmore and I suspect no one will do a limited series on the Harrison dynasty any time soon. And because this is going to be a historical series I’m going to follow the same guideline I did when it came to ranking the Presidents last year: I’m stopping at the end of the 20^th century. There is quite a bit of material on W, Obama, Trump and even some on Biden in the cinematic and TV archives but for reasons that should be obvious I’m not going to look at them in this series. (Maybe in ten years, but not now.)

What I hope to illustrate is how these storytellers have used our past to illustrate our present. In the majority of these cases they are objective – more so than I could be, I should mention. In all of them they use some exceptional actors and writing to illuminate historical figures in scenarios we are very familiar with and some we know too little about. Almost none try to use the ‘great man theory’ of politics – though in some cases, I need to be clear they do let the bias show. I hope that readers all along the ideological spectrum will find these films and TV shows and look for them with an unbiased eye. Now more than ever we need to learn from history in  order to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes.

 

Frost/Nixon (2008)

Written by Peter Morgan

Directed by Ron Howard

 

“It is not enough for me to win. My opponent must also lose.”

 

This piece deserves a bit more of an introduction then some of the others will get. And like all the pieces in this series I won’t hide my personal opinions on the figures involved.

As my readers might be aware I live in New York, which means that every so often I see a play on Broadway. Sometime in 2007, not long before its limited run was about to end, my family and I went to see Frost/Nixon. At this point I had barely embarked on my writing career and was nowhere near as knowledgeable about Hollywood as I would be when I started writing for medium in 2016. I only knew who Peter Morgan was for his screenplay The Queen, which I had seen and loved the previous year. That was also the first time I had any experience with Michael Sheen who even at that juncture was one of Morgan’s favorite actors and had played Tony Blair for him on HBO quite a few times. I knew who Frank Langella was, mainly from a few movies but not the kind of actor he could be. And  I knew nothing about the David Frost interviews of Nixon or why anyone would consider them worth writing a play about.

The play ran with no intermission and it was absolutely riveting from beginning to end. Langella, who would win the Tony for his work, was extraordinary as Nixon and Sheen, who had played Blair with tact and subtlety, showed a certain edge of the smarminess that I associated with David Frost from what little I knew about him. (Much of that, I should point out, was through that many of the members of Monty Python had worked for him at one point and based on Eric Idle’s portrayals of him, they seemed to hold him in contempt.) It was an extraordinary experience.

Later that year Ron Howard bought the film rights and while several big name actors wanted to play the title roles (I heard that Jack Nicholson and DeNiro had wanted to play Nixon) Howard insisted on having Langella and Sheen recreate their work on the silver screen. Howard cast many great character actors in several key roles. Sam Rockwell took on the role of James Reston, Kevin Bacon played Jack Brennan, Oliver Platt played Bob Zelnick. Most of the rest of the cast was unknown to me in 2008. I had no idea who Matthew MacFayden (John Birt) or Toby Jones (he did a brief role as Swifty Lazar) were and the only reason I’d heard of Rebecca Hall was that she also appeared in Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona that same year. There was Oscar talk almost from the moment the film was announced.

However when it debuted in theaters that November I was reluctant to see it in the theater because I’d seen it on Broadway. I was already fond of filmed versions of plays to be sure but that didn’t include wanting to see one of a play I’d just seen live. I was going to see it but when it ended up on video or cable. I had to be talked into seeing by two friends. And within twenty minutes I was as riveted as I had been watching the same story on stage.

Now I need to make my historical opinion known. In his four star rave for the film Ebert admitted how horrible Nixon was but asked “I would infinitely prefer him in the White House now than its current occupant.” Now I’ll grant you how utterly dreadful W had been during his term (and we had yet to feel the full effects of the financial crisis that happened on his watch) but I never agreed with Ebert on that and I can only justify the usually saintly and foresighted critic of having to deal with Bush fatigue.

Nixon has always struck me as the most dangerous man to ever occupy the Presidency. I don’t deny all of his aspirants to that title ever since for their levels of monstrosity, especially the current occupant of the White House, but in addition to all of his other bad qualities Nixon was cunning in a way that I really don’t think Reagan, Bush 43 and probably not even Trump really were. Nixon wasn’t just evil; he understood the corridors of power because he had already spent the better part of 20 years working them well before he won the White House in 1968. All his successors were underestimated by the media because they were judged as incompetent and intellectually lightweight – “what kind of moron would vote for W?” is the attitude I remember. No one thought Nixon was dumb. The reason they thought no one would ever elect him President was because America had countless opportunities to see how monstrous he was and they believed America would follow the better angels of its nature. Nixon understood better than any politician to that point how to manipulate the worst parts of the body politic and turn into the will of the people.

I also think (and may make it clear in a separate article) that America was extremely lucky that the true nature of Nixon’s evil were laid out in such a way that even his greatest defenders couldn’t refute and that it was clear before every branch of our system that he had no choice but to be forced out. Nixon only became President because so many things happened in the 1960s; he only lost the Presidency because of a similar chain of events. The former he was able to manipulate enough to win the White House in 1968; the latter he could not.

What the opening moments of Frost/Nixon make very clear is that a similar divide is being formed even as Nixon resigns on August 8^th 1974. In it James Reston says that watching Nixon resign rather than feel joy he felt incomplete. “There was no admission of guilt. No apology.” Morgan will show the way the liberal establishment felt about Nixon his entire career but it also illustrates the kind of polarizing opinions that Nixon always inspired – and in a sense has come to illustrate so much of the media ever since when it comes to who they love and who they hate. In that sense, the quote that started this review (attributed to as many sources to Kissinger or Vince Lombardi) could apply to the researchers attitude when it comes to the interviews.

Nixon’s political life is over but for Reston and Zelnick, even more than Frost, is a desire for blood. Reston and Zelnick want America to see the Richard Nixon they have hated all these years. They want to hold him accountable in the eyes of the public for the monster that he was in the White House. At one point Reston says: “I want to give Richard Nixon the trial he never had.” It’s a noble statement but in 1977 America, except for his most die-hard defenders (such as Brennan) already are convinced as to Nixon’s guilt. Howard emphasizes this by having footage shown of America’s hostile reaction to Ford’s pardon of Nixon and the angry letters received by the White House. (“FDR had his New Deal. Truman had his Fair Deal. Ford had his Crooked Deal.”)

It’s worth remembering Ford’s actions were done in order for the country to move past everything Nixon had done and he suffered the political consequences, very likely losing election to the White House in his own right as a result. The reaction of the masses to it was judged hostilely at the time, bravely decades later and in recent years as a historical blunder given our current political situation. The latter opinion, I should add, is held by the same kind of liberal media that always judged Nixon so harshly when he was in office and which men like Reston and Zelnick would be a part of today. I’ve argued in a different article that I don’t believe a fair trial of Nixon would have been possible in 1974 or even years later and that even if it had ended in a guilty verdict (which again, I’m not convinced could have happened) how would our country handle the logistics of putting a former President in prison? Upon discussing this with a historian of the era (who still can’t decide if Nixon should have been tried) he admits even if the verdict was guilty Nixon would almost certainly still have to be pardoned, in which case what would the point of a trial be?

These questions likely never occurred to Morgan (and may not have even been considered at the time) The play is after all about David Frost as much as it is Nixon. To his immense credit Morgan makes it clear that the interviews mean something far different to him than what his researchers and likely the people he represents want. Of course Frost is British and has the benefit of detachment from the situation that America does. He sees the millions of people watching the Senate Subcommittee Hearings and all the people who watched Nixon resign and sees the possibility for a media event.

For him there’s a different context: Frost had an American late night show in the 1970s that like so many during the era couldn’t survive the juggernaut that was Johnny Carson. He’s a success in Britain and has shows in other parts of the world but having had a taste of success in New York, he is hungering for it again. Unlike his researchers -  but critically, like Richard Nixon – he understands the power of the medium and what it represents to America. Like the song says, if he can make it here, he can make it anywhere and he wants to get back.

Frost is in Australia when Nixon resigns and comes to John Birt initially with the idea of the project. Birt is incredulous: “Last night you interviewed the Bee Gees!”  “Weren’t they great?” Frost responds. Initially he fails at his attempt to get Nixon who suffers an attack of phlebitis. Not long afterwards he’s writing his memoirs and has hired Lazar –  arguably the most famous agent in the 20^th century – to try and sell it. He pitches Frost and it’s clear that Lazar may have the best handle on how to manipulate men like him. He calls him in the middle of the night and Frost makes an offer half a million. “Do you think you could get $550,000? Nixon asks. “I got six.” Lazar brags.

While flying to LA Frost meets and picks up Caroline Cushing (Hall) who comes with him to San Clemente for the two’s first meeting. Frost gives him a check for $200,000 which Nixon knows it not only likely out of his own pocket but possibly the only money he’ll get. We see Frost fighting with the networks for airtime and after they all turn him down, he decides to syndicate it himself. He ends up hiring Zelnick (Platt) who is the ABC correspondent for DC and Reston who at this point has already written four books about him. Reston is combative from the start, particularly considering Zelnick went to bat for him, making it clear that he already thinks this project is beneath him. When Frost learns that Mike Wallace has already run a story about the project diminishing him in particular, it clearly stings but he allows Reston to stay.

Morgan goes out of his way to show that in the years leading up to the interview both men are doing things that are far beneath their dignity: we see Frost giving an interview for an escape artist in Australia and Nixon giving a talk to the Houston Society of Orthodontists. Frost has to essentially raise all the money from his friends and we see him battling for sponsorship even up to the initial taping.

What’s striking watching the days leading up to the taping is how little regard even in rehearsal Zelnick and Reston show not only the subject but in a way the man who’s working on the project. Zelnick plays Nixon in the interview segments and it’s very clear in the way he responds to questions that he has no respect for the man. Tellingly both he and Reston mention that Kennedy and LBJ started the Vietnam War and immediately brush past it; we see very clear that they are examples of the liberal media who Brennan talks about on the day of Nixon’s resignation. This is a more than valid historical point, one that generations have basically chosen to ignore in their vilification of ‘their boogeyman’. And they show contempt for Frost right up not only before the taping but as it goes on. It’s clear they do think of him as a talk show host and a performer – someone who is beneath their dignity.

Even more interesting is Reston’s reaction when the interviews begin. He says that this is the first time he’s met him and he’s upset that the former President is not only taller than he expected but not ravaged with guilt. Zelnick asks if he’s going to shake Nixon’s hand and Reston insists he won’t. The moment Nixon offers it, he does so after barely a beat – something Zelnick rags him immediately afterwards. This is likely a subtle commentary by Morgan on how academics live in a separate world from the one they write about: later they attend Frost’s birthday party and are starstruck to see that Neil Diamond is singing.

Also notable is how both sides view the interviews. I find it interesting that Reston views it as a trial and Nixon’s team views it as a battle or duel. This is very much how the far left and far right seem to view politics and much of society in a microcosm: Reston sees this as the rule of law, Brennan as a blood sport. If you ever needed a reason why the Republicans have done so much better in electoral politics to this day, there’s clearly a metaphor as to this.

Both Langella and Sheen do everything that they did in the performance I saw but the camera does help in a way it might not on the stage. Langella gets to play a side of Nixon that had never truly been shown on screen, even by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s film. Nixon is trying to find a way to rehabilitate his image and sees the Frost interviews as that possibility. We see a bit of the elder statesman in his behavior when Frost appears, genuine amicability among Brennan who clearly is a die-hard supporter and then a sense of the manipulator in the sessions before the taping starts. He manages to manipulate Frost so subtly in the first sessions the viewer might not be aware of it the first time and then when Frost has been briefed, he waits seconds before the cameras roll to say: “Do any fornicating last night?”  At no point does Langella attempt to do a Nixon impersonation; that would be beneath the skills of his legendary actor. What he tries to give to do is give a portrayal of the public face of Nixon while allowing for a look at what lies beneath with a glance. Small wonder Langella received a Best Actor nomination for his work.

Sheen, as is his lot in life, has a harder job. He has to play someone who has a well-known public persona, who is openly charming and who is not particularly well respected in public life – and do so acting like he knows all of this but is putting up his on-camera persona at all time. And unlike Nixon who has the office of the Presidency which offers some respect David Frost doesn’t even have that among his own team. Only John Birt respects him and will say in private what Frost won’t. It’s only after the third taping when Reston actually calls him a talk show host that Frost comes close not only to snapping but finally shows his misery at how bad things are going for him.

The highlight of the film, as with the play, comes with what almost certainly a fictionalized late-night conversation. A drunk Nixon calls Frost late at night when Frost is at his nadir of despair and Nixon should be at his zenith. He tells him he’s read Frost’s file and talks about their tragedy:

No matter how many awards or column inches are written about you, or how high the elected office is, it’s still not enough. We still feel like the little man. The loser. They told us a hundred times, the smart asses in college, the high-ups, the well-born. The people who’s respect we really wanted. Really craved. And isn’t that why we work so hard now, why we fight for every inch…Isn’t that why we’re here? Now the two of us. Looking for a way back into the sun, into the limelight. Back to the winner’s podium…We were headed both of us for the dirt. The place the snobs always told us we’d end up. Face in the dust, humiliated all the more for having tried. So pitifully hard. Well, to hell with that! We’re not going to let that happen, either of us. We’re going to show those bums; we’re going to make ‘em choke on our continued success.”

When it’s over Frost acknowledges that: “But only one of us can win.”

When this piece played out on stage and Langella hung up, I remember the audience spontaneously bursting into applause, which rarely happens in a traditional play. Langella brings that same power into this monologue as well and it is magnificent. Morgan uses this fictional conversation as Frost’s motivation to double down his work in the leadup to the final taping session which fills up much of the last third of the film. Historical scholars and those who saw the interviews no doubt remember why that was such a critical moment, but it is not my place to reveal it  here.

Morgan goes out of his way to argue this was a victory for David Frost and the power of the medium. It points out that Nixon was never able to publicly rehabilitate his reputation when he was alive. Death and future Republican Presidents have no doubt managed to accomplish that as Ebert’s own review made clear and I suspect future viewers might come away with the same impression.

What may be the most significant moment in Frost/Nixon is one that I doubt was in the play and is almost ignored in the film. One of the members of Nixon’s team is a very young Diane Sawyer. Her character has no real dialogue  but I’m always reminded of when both teams go into different rooms when the taping begins and Zelnick seems to be always looking daggers at Sawyer who just meets his stare evenly. Sawyer of course has gone on to be one of the most respected broadcast journalists in television history but I have little doubt that there have always been those like Zelnick who viewed her with suspicion for ‘working with the enemy’. Sawyer has long been part of that ‘liberal media’ that Nixon famously chastises and I suspect that those who worked for Roger Ailes and the cable news networks that followed never forgave her for betraying her ‘conservative roots’.

Were the Frost interviews of Nixon a stepping stone to the era of polarizing of cable news that we see today? Roger Ailes did cut his teeth interviewing Nixon after all and he famously worked with Lee Atwater in Reagan and George H.W. Bush’s political campaigns in 1984 and 1988. I have no doubt he watched these interviews with great interest and perhaps started thinking of a way that future Republicans could find more comfortable settings where the questions would be more fair and balanced. He certainly understood the power of television as well as David Frost did.