Stephen King Writing As Richard Bachman: Rage (1977)

 

We may never know one way or the other but there's an argument that Rage, the first novel King published under his pseudonym may have sold the poorest of any book King ever wrote.

It's not merely because almost no one bought any of 'Bachman's' novels when they were under his name. It's that when the truth came out about Bachman, all of King's books under that label were published first in an omnibus volume and then only in the mid-1990s did they begin to get released individually. And then outside events intervened that lead to the author essentially pulling the book from the shelves voluntarily.

You see Rage is about a high school named Charlie Decker who on a bright May morning has a mental breakdown. It's been a long time coming as he admits. He's called to the office by the principal Mr. Decker, who talks to him about his most recent psychiatric evaluation. Decker tries to be polite about but then Charlie starts to 'get it on' which as we will learn is to mentally dress down an authority figure in the meanest possible terms and with vulgar language. Decker reacts like any principal should and expels him. This is Charlie's reaction:

I went down the staircase whistling. I felt wonderful. Things happen that way sometimes. When everything is as its worst, your mind just throws it all into the wastebasket and goes to Florida for a while. There is a sudden electric what-the-hell glow as you stand there looking back over your shoulder at the bridge you just burned down.

He then goes to his locker, takes out his father's pistol and his bullets. Then he goes back to his classroom and shoots his algebra teacher.

After the shootings at Columbine King voluntarily had Rage pulled from all bookstores which as we all know ended school shootings forever.  The truth is King no doubt this as a preemptive strike. For his entire career even then his novels always were being put on 'banned books' lists because of their violence and language (as they still are basically to this day.) Rage was no more responsible for all of the shootings that had happened before that horrible event then those who would eventually try to blame films such as The Basketball Diaries immediately afterward. But King had to know that this would be something that those on the right (who had less influence over censorship back then but it was still significant) would use as a cudgel to get all of his books off the shelfs and do everything to destroy his career in the future. Besides this was an easy sacrificial lamb compared to others that were far more worthy of it.

So the only way you can get Rage in the 21^st century is either if you find a copy of the book at a used book stores or more likely if you can find the omnibus collection on eBay or other places. Now I've had the latter for decades obviously, so let me tell you some more details.

First Rage is almost certainly the first book King ever wrote. He started  it while still a teenager, either 18 or 19 depending on his telling of the story. "At one point I found it moldering away in the cellar of the house I grew up in – this rediscovery was in 1970 and I finished it in 1971." This book, like The Long Walk, was one of two very early novels he wrote before Carrie ended up being published that he thought was 'pretty good'. In fact under the title Getting It On Doubleday had almost bought it and published it two years before Carrie was sold. So it became the first book he submitted as Bachman in 1977. It was released, like all of the first four Bachman books, without fanfare and sold just as badly.

Now I've read it multiple times over the years. It does not, as King himself referred to it in 'Why I Was Bachman' "suck like an Electrolux" but honestly its not very good King or even very good Bachman. The Long Walk reads far better, is more tightly written and does a better job getting into the head of Ray Garraty, who's the same age as Charlie Decker. Rage, by contrast, is uneven and rambles too much.

Part of the problem is Charlie just isn't that interesting a character. He ends up telling his story to his classmates as part of his 'defense' for what he does but there are times even he acknowledge its not that interesting a story.  The reason he claims to have done everything he did is because of how bad his father was. "My dad has hated me for as long as I can remember'. The thing is we never get a clear reason why because the novel's entirely from Charlie's perspective. He served in World War II and he was clearly proud of doing so and he doesn't seem happy to be a recruiting chief for the Vietnam War. And he is abusive to his son at times but not in a particularly original way.

Honestly Charlie's grievances are so small: his father yells at him and hits him after he breaks the windows of the car, he hates wearing a corduroy suit his mother gives him at 12 and has to wear it to a birthday party (by that point his father doesn't even talk to him, he has a terrible sexual experience at sixteen, finally he takes a pipe wrench to school and finally nearly kills one of his teachers.  'Bachman' really only seems interested in what's happening in the present and not what made Charlie who he was.

When King first wrote the novel he was a teenager in the 1960s when the Vietnam War was going horribly and the generational clash that to this day shapes every aspect of our American experience was going on. Its praiseworthy that he tries to put us in the heads of his fellow teenagers and to do so in an act of violence might be a good way to do it. But Charlie doesn't come across as that interesting a protagonist or an antihero. There's no good reason for Charlie being who he is – he's basically a stick figure.

If Rage had ever been done in any other medium (which it almost certainly never will be) it probably would have worked better as a play.  In the hardcover its barely 125 pages long and it basically unfolds over an hour and a half from the moment Charlie is excused from class to the end of the hostage situation. And since it's also basically set in a high school and the majority of it a classroom, it would almost certainly work dramatically better.  

The main reason that I actually think King was premature in removing Rage from the shelves is that its actually improved with age in many ways. I'm not talking about the shooting in the school, I'm talking about how it gets the core of so many of the problems driving teenagers that are nevertheless true; the loneliness, the desire to conform, the way they all seem frustrated. And that's what actually makes Rage work.

After Charlie shoots his homeroom teenager none of his fellow students react:

Nobody said a word. They sat in utter stunned silence, looking at me attentively, as if I had just announced I was going to tell them how they could all get passes to the Placerville Drive-in this Friday night.

They barely manage dull surprise when Charlie says: "This is known as getting it on.

Nobody said anything for five minutes…They looked at me, and I looked at them. Maybe they still could have bolted and they're still asking me why they didn't. Why didn't they cut and run, Charlie? What did you do to them…I don't answer any questions about what happened in Room 16. But if I told them anything, it would be that they've forgotten what it's like to be a kid, to live cheek-in-jowl with violence…

I'm just telling you that American kinds labor under a huge life of violence, both real and make-believe…I knew they thought they'd be all right. That's part of it. What I wonder about it is this: Were they hoping I'd get somebody else?"

No one can look at so much of what teenagers, both in this country and around the world, are living through and not realize how dead on that statement still is in 2026. That King wrote this thirty years before social media and active shooter drills were become the norm for the average teenager is yet another example where King/Bachman saw the future without meaning to.

The only person who honestly seems to think that something horrible is going on is Ted Jones, the most popular kid in high school. Everyone else seems to almost be having a good time from the start, they're fine if he's smoking, one actually asked if he can do homework.

Charlie acknowledges to one of the students that he's nuts but he can't explain why. "If I knew what was making me do it, I problem wouldn't have to." What Charlie can't explain is why everyone in the room is almost immediately on his side. He's actually shocked when they start to turn on Ted, who's the only one who wants to end the violence.

One of the sequences that is the most powerful in the book comes when Don Grace, the school shrink tries to talk Charlie down. He tells Grace that the next time he asks a question he will shoot someone. This leads to a four page tour de force. Done entirely in short sentence in which Charlie engages in a back and forth that eventually tricks Grace into asking a question by quoting the bible and finally causes him to walk away utterly broken.

What's more frightening is after this the classroom erupts in joy, which he describes as on the outside as something unsettling.

Very early in the novel Charle basically states his thesis about the universe and that he thinks for most part it is sane orderly and logical. But:

The other side says that the universe has all the logic of a little kid in a Halloween cowboy suit with his guts and his trick or treat candy spread all over a mile of Interstate 95. This is the logic of napalm, paranoia, suitcase bombs carried by happy Arabs, random carcinoma. This logic eats itself. It says life is a monkey on  a stick, it says life spins as hysterically and erratically as the penny you flick to see who buys lunch.

No one looks at that side unless they have to, and I can understand that. You look at it if you hitch a ride with a drunk in a GTO who puts up to 110 and starts blubbering about how his wife turned him out ; you look at it if some guy decides to drive across Indiana shooting kids on bicycles; you look at it if your sister says, "I'm going down to the store for a minute, big guy" and then gets killed in a stickup.

It's a roulette wheel, but anyone who says the game is rigged is whining. No matter how many numbers there are, the principal of that little white jittering ball never changes. Don't say its crazy, it's all so cool and sane.

And all that weirdness isn't just going on outside. Its in you too, right now, growing in the dark like magic mushrooms.

I find it impossible to argue with that logic and anyone who thinks otherwise is as crazy as Charlie knows he is.

Charlie uses this statement right after shoots his algebra teacher to make it very clear he knows that he's insane and that by contrast proves his sanity. He can't explain what happens next, how the teenagers with a feud turn on each other and then decide to become friends, how everybody begins to share secrets that even horrify Charlie. Finally he realizes something horrible:

At times I was almost tempted to feel (foolish conceit) that I was holding them by myself by sheer willpower. Now I know, of course, that nothing could have been farther from the truth. I had one real hostage that day and his name was Ted Jones.

The real horror in Rage is not the violence that Charlie invokes upon the faculty but that comes in the real climax of the novel. It is something that is genuinely horrific and can't be explained by such things as Stockholm Syndrome. It's so unsettling that Charlie doesn't describe it himself in the book and almost feels compelled to comfort Ted after its happened. We know in the aftermath of the horrors of that day that Charlie has been institutionalized and all of the teenagers seem to have gotten through their experience completely fine with no signs of trauma. And why should they? Charlie was never the real cause of it.

I'm relatively certain in my lifetime, certainly not King's that Rage will ever be on library shelves or available in a new edition. The thing is, if you realty want to understand just how crazy the world is today, reading 'Bachman's' first novel might give you some insight. It won't explain the nightmare that unfolds with Charlie and his classmates but if we realize that at some basic level those problems with teenagers have always been there, that the craziness of life is just below the surface and that all of us are just one little thing away from exploding then there's an argument we need to read it.

And as we all know there are still Charlie Deckers in our world and our society is no more prepared to understand them now then they were in 1999 or in 1977. The only real difference is that there's a place in the world where they're accepted for who they are. That being said Charlie Decker would have no use for Andrew Tate or those in the manosphere. They'd be too close to Ted Jones for his liking.

 

 

 

 

Coalition of the Sane:The Left Is Not Taking Over Anything, Least of all The Democratic Party

 

 

One of the stories that I've heard so many times this election cycle is the narrative that 'the radical left is taking over the Democratic Party."

Fox News has been using it as a talking point since it was founded of course but now more old school conservatives such as George Will and Bret Stephens – who should know  better – are echoing it in editorials. MSNOW has modified the term radical at times but they'll trumpet it when they have too. There are enough supposedly intelligent commentators on CNN that will say so. And of course the left's spokespeople on social media will never hesitate to trumpet it.

What this demonstrates to me is that a full decade after Trump arrived on the scene, the media still can't find its collective asses with both hands and a flashlight. Anyone who calmly, coolly and objectively looks at the raw data and electoral results would find with a two minute Google search that the left is no closer to taking over the Democratic Party then it was ten years ago.

 I'm not saying that those who aren't alarmed by those loud, vociferous and frequently demagogue like rhetoric have no right to be concerned by their mere presence. I am as well but in the sense that I would be concerned of an itch on my hand. Compared to the many, many other problems in American politics – and make no mistake they are still mostly coming from the other side of the aisle – the left wing's attempts to take over the Democratic Party barely rate the level of a hangnail or blister. It's a nuisance but it can be easily taken care of with the proper treatment. It certainly should be – and I'll actually discuss methods of that later – but its vitally important to recognize the severity of the diagnosis rather then just go to the worst case scenario.

 I've actually reviewed in many other articles the failures of the AOC-Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic multiple times in my columns and in many comments on this blog. I have no doubt I'll have to keep doing it because I know that the political audience and the left in general has no interest in hearing a narrative that doesn't fit their own reality. (Again they have so much in common with their right wing counterparts then they want to believe.) So let's break down the narrative and the reality.

First the narrative which is now being preached by AOC herself is that in 2018 she was almost singlehandedly responsible for the blue wave that cycle. That is simply false and doesn't remotely pass the stink test. As I've mentioned before the Justice Democrats ran in 79 primaries for the Senate, House, Governor and Lt. Governor that year and only four of them managed to win both their primaries and the general: the Squad as they dubbed themselves.

The Democratic Party, having come off the upset of 2016, were still reeling and were no doubt looking for any cudgel they could use to catch the breeze and beat Trump in two years' time. So they decided to play off the fact that Fox News had chosen to weaponize their outrage machine about the radical left on Ohmar, Taib, Presley and AOC to try and use that to their advantage. In retrospect that was clearly a mistake but no one ever accused the Democrats of having great judgment.

And its not like there weren't a lot of other things to celebrate. The Party had won the popular vote by the highest winning percentage on record and had picked up the largest gain of House Seats since 1974. We should have focused on places that were more important to us as a party such as wins in Kansas,  Oklahoma and Utah as well as swing districts like Pennsylvania and New York. All the Justice Democrats had done was change the members of the Democratic Party. Kevin Yoder, Kendra Horn and Ben McAdams helped us increase it.

Still considering we were going into what was going to be a tough fight to take the Senate and the White House back in 2020, it's understandable the Democratic Party chose not to make it focus those seats. At this point any House Democrat was an ally in the fight against MAGA. We had other priorities.

Its understandable given everything that happened in the immediate aftermath of November 2020 but down the ballot it was not a great election for the Democrats. Given Trump's massive unpopularity most expected the Democrats to expand their majority by up to 55 seats.  Instead not a single Republican incumbent was defeated and thirteen incumbent Democrats were ousted.  Considering that several successful Democrats won their race by smaller margins then expected, we were actually lucky to hold the House 222-213 .  This was still by far the smaller majority the Democrats had in the house since 1942.

Make no mistake: we took a pounding in the House. And the Justice Democrats did zero to help. In fact they actually hurt us. To be sure they did win advance Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and Marie Newman. But Georgette Gomez who was competing in the 53^rd district in California and Kara Eastman running in the second district in Nebraska both lost their elections against incumbent Republicans. That was the first clear sign that the Justice Democrats were a liability to the National Party.

We got many more signs during Biden's first two years, the only two we controlled both Congress and the White House. Biden's infrastructure bill was torpedoed in his earliest form because after it passed in the Senate almost everyone in the Squad chose to vote against in its current form. The major argument was that Biden had 'sold out' when he'd compromised with Joe Manchin. At that point it was clear to the Democratic leadership that the Squad was anti-leadership and it didn't matter which party was in charge. Considering the Democrats had spent the last four years running that they were the party of sanity compared to Trump, this made us look incompetent in the eyes of many Americans. But again we basically chose to ignore it because everyone expected there was going to be a red wave in 2022 and democracy would end sometime shortly thereafter.

Except, of course, that didn't happen. The Democrats had their best midterms since 1962 gaining a seat in the Senate and barely losing control of the House with the Republicans getting their smallest majority since 2000.  By that point the Democrats had managed to win seats in Alaska for the first time in 50 years and had even gained seats in Montana and four in Florida. 

The Justice Democrats by contrast had more of the same. They endorsed six newcomers and only two of them Summer Lee and Greg Casar managed to win. When Odessa Kelly ran with the party's blessing in the Tennessee 7^th and lost in a landslide, it marked the last time the Justice Democrats even competed in a seat that was deep red. Combined with the fact that the Democrats were managing to win in districts that Trump has won with representatives like Jared Golden and Mary Peltola, it was now becoming clear the lesson was to win back the center.

In the leadup to 2024 the Democratic Party seemed to have realized that the Justice Democrats were not helping them do what they hoped and win back control of Congress and the Senate consistently. Considering that they were now openly becoming more disruptive then they were helping the Democrat Party did something that it almost never did and openly primaried two of them.

It is true that much of the reason Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their primaries had to do with their positions on Gaza and their anti-Israel rhetoric. But lost in that is the fact that both of them had become by far the most openly activist members of the parties and had gone out of their way to not even bother to make token appearance with the Jewish members of their district. In Bowman's case in particular that was a fatal decision considering that the Jewish vote was a critical part of the base in the New York 16^th and he had gone out of his way to isolate them, not even bothering to make the kinds of outreaches he had years before. Bowman had actually been primaried before in 2022 and he'd barely won it with just over 54 percent of the vote so it would have more politically astute for him to walk a middle path.

Instead like almost every other Justice Democrat he chose to double down and George Latimer humiliated him with Bowman getting just 41 percent of the vote.

In Bush's case a bigger problem was her own personal corruption. Earlier that year she was under investigation by Biden's Justice Department and FEC for alleged misuse of federal security money. She'd also spent tens of thousands on personal security for herself while also saying Democrats should defund the police. And she'd made no efforts leading into the primary campaign to try and doing anything to shore up support, saying that she never returned the calls of people who disagreed with her. In both cases committees like AIPAC were a factor but if the Democrats had wanted to keep them in the party someone in leadership or would have spoken up for them: the fact that they remained silent made it clear they didn't want them around.

It's worth noting even original Squad member Ilhan Ohmar was not immune to these challenges. In 2022 Don Samuels would launch an attempt to primary Ohmar by running to the right of Samuels on crime as well as her support for defunding the police. Ohmar survived by the skin of her teeth, winning by just 2.1 percent. The result was enough for Ohmar to realize the danger and do sufficient spadework for her district so that she could easily win during the cycle. But the fact of the narrowness of her defeat was proof that even in districts as blue as hers, there was only so far left you could go.

After their second straight devastating and somehow still shocking loss to Trump in 2024 the party once again made outreaches to the left, this time because of polls saying 66 percent of Democratic voters said the party should not work with Trump. The party spent much of the next year making efforts to indulge the left flank as much as possible and getting burned whether they went along with them, as when they hired David Hogg as DNC Vice Chair and he made vows to primary incumbent Democrats, when they didn't, as when they voted to keep the government open rather then filibuster Trump's budget bill or when they tried to meet them halfway such as the government shutdown in September of 2025 and when they met damnation when they reopened the government after the November elections.

But by that point the Democratic Party realized that they in a few years' time Trump was going to be gone from the world of politics.  That meant trying to figure out what the party was going to look like in that not-too-distant future. And after the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections, along with all of the overperforming that year, it was very clear that they had to go back to an old standard: the economy, stupid. They reframed as affordability but it was an issue that had done them well in the past.

They also realized because they did have eyes and ears – and more importantly could count votes – that the Justice Democrats were not helping the party in all of its weak parts: white working class voters, rural America, the South and the West. They had not won a single statewide office in four election cycles; they'd stopped even trying to run for those in 2020.  And in four straight election cycles they had not flipped a single Republican district. The only people they could convince were the ones already inclined to agree with them and after eight straight year it was clear to everyone but them, that it was not enough to help their Party win an election.

If they needed any more convincing on the subject the Justice Democrats proved it themselves. In the aftermath of the 2024 election they made a very public announcement that they were heading a recruitment drive to have candidates to run in all 50 states. And by the time 2026 started they had exactly fourteen – one of whom was Cori Bush trying to get her seat back. Meanwhile the DNC and the party was making a major effort to recruit and win seats in all fifty states as both a national and local level, something the Justice Democrats had never tried and they were doing a far better job.

Now I can't speak for them but after the 2024 elections the Justice Democrats had to know that their position in the party was becoming tenuous. They had been tolerated as long as Trump was priority number one and that period was coming to an end. Though they would never admit it (and God knows the media will never call them out) they also knew that their efforts to take over the Democratic Party from the left was running bone dry. They had far too many failures after four election cycles, no policy achievements to speak of in that period and a massive social media following that never led to turnout at the polls. In addition their standard bearer Bernie Sanders had announced this would be his final term and there was no voice big enough on the left to take its place that had a position nearly as big. Warren had failed in her 2020 Presidential run and had never proven as big a draw as Bernie and for all the photogenic nature of the Squad, they had never succeeded beyond the narrow scope of their rallies.

And none of them had endorsement power to win outside their narrow circle. This had been proven when Sanders, Warren and every left wing member of the Squad had joined the establishment to endorse Sara Gideon in 2020 against Susan Collins. When Gideon lost by 8 points despite the polls saying otherwise up until election day, it proved that they couldn't convince voters in New England to come out for a like minded Democrat. What hope did they with the party at large?

So much of 2026 has been spent with the Justice Democrats increasingly sitting this election cycle out. AOC didn't even endorse a single candidate during the primary season and its worth noting Chevalier and Claire Valdez didn't need it to win their primaries. Outside of New York City, its been decidedly hit or miss for the Justice Democrats in the House and that includes those that Sanders or Warren endorse anywhere else.  They had no effect in the Maryland primary to choose Steny Hoyer's replacement and Sanders efforts failed to stop Ben McAdams to win the Democratic primary in Utah to get his old seat back.

It has been even worse throughout the attempts to win Senate races. Jasmine Crockett was blown out of the water by James Talarico in the Texas primary and Warren's endorsement of Zach Wahls resulted in humiliation when Josh Turek beat him by nearly 25 points in Iowa primary. Annie Andrews and Jamie Davis may have the hearts of every progressive nationwide but in South Carolina and Louisiana respectively that counts for almost nothing.  (Lindsay Graham's sudden passing might change the calculus in South Carolina but Andrews's odd of winning that seat in a deep red state are very remote.)

For that reason the decision for almost every major Congressional left wing figure, from Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders on down, to stand by Graham Platner no matter how horrible each new revelation was to both his candidacy and a smear on all Democrats makes a certain practical sense. They might argue that it was important to defeat Susan Collins but that was only a beard.  The left-wing of the party needed to prove to the Democratic establishment that they could flip a statewide, red seat during the midterms. And because they don't like fights they don't have a chance of winning they focused on a state that was Democratic. Sanders and Warren should have known better more than anyone – they had gone down this with Gideon six years earlier and Platner was infinitely less problematic -  but the left has always been more inclined to say the ends justify the means.

It even explains why after the first story of rape allegations came out a week before the primary Sanders, Warren et all chose to stand by Platner when most organizations were getting as far away as possible. They had christened this sinking ship; they had to stay on it even as everyone else was running for the lifeboats. Which made things only worse for them when the second allegation came out last week and the party made it clear it was pulling its funding for Platner.

By that point, even as they withdrew their endorsements and funding the damage had been done and it goes beyond whatever happens in Maine this November. The faithful will almost certainly stand by them but whatever chances they had for influence in this election cycle has been damaged for this cycle and for the foreseeable future.  

We may see it in the Michigan primaries next month where last Sunday the withdrawal of Mallory McMorrow from the Senate primary may shift the balance to Haley Stevens for the Senate Primary. Abdul Al-Sayed was a narrow front-runner in that race though his loud and often violent rhetoric shared much commonalities with Platner's and caused many Democrats to fear a loss if he won the primary. With McMorrow gone and with Al-Sayid being endorsed by many of the same progressive voices that openly backed Platner, many voters are now presented with a choice they never got when he was running. And it is worth noting that in every Democratic for a Senate seat between a progressive and a moderate, the moderate has always won.

And its clear whatever relatively free ride the most left wing candidates have gotten from the mainstream media detonated with Platner's candidacy. Many publications and commentators on the left have publicly admitted their failings when it came to Platner and while that is hypocrisy if they mean it, they will have to ask the same hard questions of left-wingers that they never did of Platner when he was a candidate. They will do so many because their reputation has been torpedoed in the eyes of the right-wing media more than out of a greater good but as long as they do it, I don't mind the reasons and neither should anyone else.

Don't get me wrong: the left wing of the party is going to be a problem after the elections for the Democrats going forward. How big a problem depends on how big the majorities are in Congress and which seats were won. Regardless the Democratic establishment can freely take scalps for what losses take place this fall and the left-wing has much less leverage in the party then it did even a month ago – and that was always more based on perception then reality. Reality, as anyone knows, has never been the left's friend.

I suspect very soon the only people who will still be saying the radical left are taking over America are the same people who always said it. The problem was that the radical left believed their own blurbs on Fox News. And that never helped them win elections in the first place.

Suggestions for a Post-Trump America, Decision 2026: Part 8 - Iowa May Be Headed for A Political Realignment This Fall

 

Like many Democrats when I learned on the eve of the 2024 election the Des Moines Register poll that said Kamala Harris was going to win Iowa my faith in her victory, which had been flagging as her lead over Trump was dropping, found new life. The Register poll had been known for its accuracy for decades as something of a gold standard and despite all previous polls since post-2016 having notoriously undercounted support for Trump at a national and state level, the fact that the poll said Harris was going to win Iowa by 47 percent to Trump's 44 percent led me to believe the impossible.

And it should have been a sign that I'd taken leave of my senses that I thought so. To be sure Iowa had gone for Obama in 2012 and had elected a Democratic Senator as recently as 2006 (we'll get to that). But I knew my history. Iowa was one of the most conservative states in the Union one that, like its neighbor Ohio, had basically been counted in the Republican party column since the party was founded.  Even in Democratic landslides it had a history of being an outlier. In 1940 for example it had gone for Wendell Willkie even though FDR's newly minted Vice President Henry Wallace was a native son of that state. It remained just as Republican in 1944, went for Truman in 1948 and then back to in the Republican column in two FDR's landslides and all three of Nixon's runs for the Presidency.  In 1976 it went for Ford even as Carter won the White House, Reagan carried it in both his landslides and while Dukakis took in 1988 it didn't make much difference in George H.W. Bush's victory.

Even some of the times Democrats did carry it there were extenuating circumstances, usually a third party candidate. That was the case for Wilson in 1912 and Clinton in 1992 and 1996. We all seem to have missed (I know I did) that it went for Gore in 2000 and no one seemed to focus on it went W took it in 2004. The idea of Iowa being a swing state in my lifetime was something I seemed to have ignored despite Obama carrying it both of his runs for the Presidency and I certainly had set it aside in 2024.

I knew that Tom Harkin had been represented it in the Senate for five terms with distinction and that Tom Vilsack had been a superb governor during W's time in Office. (I had no idea he'd been the Secretary of Agriculture under both Obama and Biden.) But after Harkin chose not to run for reelection early in 2013 and Joni Ernst ended up winning election in 2014 I 'd all but given up on Iowa as a hope for Democrat prospects.

This was true, I should add, during the 2020 election when Ernst was running for reelection for the first time. The DNC did target her during that cycle , mainly because of Ernst's low approval ratings and the dropping of her own popularity. In one debate she went viral for not knowing the break-even price for soybeans, a big deal in that state. And yet like so many other seats in 2020 the Democrats absolutely were going to win Ernst won reelection by a fairly comfortable margin over Theresa Greenfield, well over 6 and half percent. Greenfield only carried eight of the state's counties. Trump carried it by a slightly larger margin, beating Biden by nearly nine points while Biden carried just six counties.

All of this should have made me look at the Des Moines Register poll with a veneer of skepticism. And indeed Iowa was one of the earlier states called for Trump by CNN.  He won the state by 13.2 percent by far the largest margin by any Republican since Reagan in 1980 and the largest margin since Nixon in 1972.

Trump famously tried to sue the Register and the poll after winning reelection. Compared to me he was being generous for once: I wanted the pollster to face a firing squad. And yet even in my desolate state in the aftermath of Trump's reelection I found myself (somewhat catatonically) surprised by how the Iowa house races were going. To be sure the Republicans carried all four seats – but I noticed for the first time just how close two of those races were and how long it took them to be called.

The idea of the path to the House going through Iowa in 2024 was not something that would have occurred to me that year. And yet in the first and third districts two incumbent Republicans were going through that.

The most fascinating race was that of Mariannette Miller-Meeks in the 1^st.  That year she was challenged by Christina Bohannan. I wasn't paying attention to House races the same way I did the Senate (its notoriously difficult to get accurate polling in Congressional districts) so I had no idea that so many political experts thought it was in play. And indeed the result was not clear on election night or indeed for weeks after because the race was so close a recount was called for.

Eventually Miller-Meeks won by 799 votes out of over 413,000 cast in that race.  There would be several other races that took days to be called (control of the House wouldn't be determined until the Sunday after election day) but by far this race was the closest and most unexpectedly so.

The third should have had by attention as Zach Nunn had flipped the district the previous cycle with just over 50 percent of the vote. Lannon Baccam, the candidate running to unseat him was endorsed by the Blue Dog Democrats. It took less time to figure out the winner in this race – I believe it was called by Thursday night – but it was still very close: Nunn only managed to beat Baccam by less than four percent.

Almost immediately Miller-Meeks and Nunn were considered targets in 2026. But it took me a long time to get out of my stupor and start caring about that. And even after Joni Ernst announced halfway through 2025 that she wasn't seeking reelection my reaction was still: so what?

And then in August   something happened that changed how I thought about the Democrats prospects in Iowa.

To be clear there had already been many signs throughout 2025 that the Democrats had managed to recover immensely after the 2024 election. They'd been overperforming in elections for congressional vacancies in heavily Republican districts, even as they lost. But at a statehouse level they'd done better then expected, flipping 25 state Senate and House seats that were held by the GOP out of the 119 that were resolved. (The Republicans, by contrast, had not flipped a single Democratic seat.)  They'd made gains in swing states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania and even managed three in Mississippi.

And they flipped two in Iowa which helped break the GOP supermajority in two significantly conservative districts. I'd paid little attention to Mike Zimmer who in January flipped a district by 4 points when Trump had won by 21 points just two months earlier. In August Kaitlin Drey flipped the second seat by ten points. That latter election was a seat that had not gone Republican in nearly forty years. That sent up such alarm bells that the head of the Iowa Republican party said that if this kept happening 'Iowa was going to go blue in 2028." Considering that Trump margin of victory less than a year ago, that was a sign of panic.

With that being said even after that I considered Iowa relatively low as a possibility for the Democrats to flip the open Senate seat. The House was a different story: both the first and the third were among the districts the Democrats had planned to target and that was the right call. But the Senate, as I knew better than most in regard to the Midwest, is always a different story.

So when I began this series of articles back in January I put far down the list of possibilities. Alaska and Ohio always seemed like far better options considering how recently Mary Peltola and Sherrod Brown respectively had held elected office.  Texas I played the wait and see approach – I knew that it was going to depend even more on the Republican nominee then the Democratic one. Hell I was probably going to look at Florida before I even considered Iowa. (Which, as I will write later, may not be as impossible as I  thought.)

I didn't consider the state even as a possibility until I started getting polls that showed the race far closer no matter who the nominee was against Ashley Hinson, the Republican running to replace Joni Ernst.  For the record Ashley Hinson had won election to represent Iowa in the second district the same year that Miller-Meeks had won in the first. The two had been the first Republican women to represent Iowa in the House. She managed to flip incumbent Democrat Abby Finkenauer's district by nearly two percent. The following year she would trade districts with Miller-Meeks in a redrawn map. In 2024 she won reelection by nearly sixteen points.

That September she announced her candidacy for Ernst's seat.  As a representative Hinson was no better or no worse than any House Republican during Biden's administration and when Trump won reelection she was a big supporter of the Big Beautiful Bill Act and voted against the War Powers act multiple times this year. Under the old rules of politics she would have been a good candidate for Senate and could easily win reelection in the fall, despite the President's sinking approval numbers. I had no reason to think otherwise…until this spring.

Then while searching various poll sites I first became aware of quite a few polls taken in Iowa showing three different Democratic candidates polling within the margin of error of defeating Ashley Hinson in the general. By May this had been reduced to two candidates: Zack Wahls and Josh Turek.

Wahls is a member of the Iowa Senate who is the son of two lesbians. In 2011 he addressed the Iowa House Judiciary committee in a public hearing on a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Wahls withdrew from the University of Iowa choosing to focus on writing a book My Two Moms and very quickly became an activist for LGBTQ+ rights. He targeted the Boy Scouts ban on gay and lesbians as scout leaders and launched Scouts for Equality. He would address the 2012 Democratic Convention and would be a delegate for Hilary Clinton at the 2016 Democratic. He would be elected to the Iowa State Senate district 37 in 2018 and by 2021 he would be named Senate minority lead. However less than two years later he would step down following disagreement with Democratic colleagues about firing two long-time Iowa senate Democratic members. He declared his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Senat in June of 2025.

Josh Turek is twelve years older that Wahls. Born with spina bifida he has used a wheelchair since childhood and began playing wheelchair basketball in seventh grade.  He would play the sport at Southwest Minnesota State University and became a four time all-American in that sport. He would play professionally in Europe, in clubs in Italy, France and Spain. In four Paralympic appearances starting in 2004 he would win a bronze and two golds.

In March of 2022 he announced he was running for Iowa's 20^th House of Representative district. After a recount by his opponent it was confirmed he'd won by six votes. He was reelected in 2024 in a district that has voted Republican in every election since 1968. The Iowa legislature's first permanently disabled member, he's advocated for disability related issues, and led efforts to advance bipartisan legislation that sought to remove Medicaid income levels for Iowans with disability. He would also work on agricultural legislation and would co-sponsor a bi-partisan right to repair bill, requiring manufacturers to make equipment for farmers and mechanics available at reasonable cost. That legislation passed the Iowa House earlier this year. He announced his candidacy in August.

Wahls was very much an activist while Turek called himself a 'common-sense moderate' and prairie populist. While he had commonalities with Wahls he was more moderate on Gaza, saying that Israel was a US Ally but there should be limits to it. The biggest difference going into the primary was that Warren was privately backing Wahls in large part because he said if elected to the Senate he would not vote for Chuck Schumer as Senate Leader while Turek said he would. Turek was backed by moderates such as Maggie Hassan and Catherine Cortez Masto. The COOK Political Report described this as which candidate would be more electable: Do you need to energize your base more to get them to turn them out or do you need to win over the middle?

The results were an overwhelming triumph for the latter: Turek would beat Wahls by nearly 25 percent of the vote. And almost immediately the polls have shown the two essentially tied. Hinson still has the advantage but most political sites rank it as a toss-up which is something I didn't believe possible even at the start of 2026.

Nor does is that the end of Democrats potential good news in the Hawkeye State. The last time a Democrat won the governorship in Iowa was in 2006 when Chet Culver did. Culver's father represented Iowa in the Senate for one term before losing to Chuck Grassley – who's still there before losing to Terry Branstad, a once and future governor of Iowa. Running as his Lieutenant Governor was Kim Reynolds who would go on to succeed Branstad when he stepped down to become ambassador to China under Trump.

Reynolds has been such an unpopular governor that even though she could in 2025 she didn't consider running for reelection this year. In the Republican primary Congressman Randy Feenstra was considered the frontrunner after Trump endorsed him late in the game. Even with his popularity at its nadir Trump's endorsement had proven throughout the midterms more than sufficient to prove as kingmaker across the Republican primaries.

But in the Iowa republican primary it proved not to be the case. Zach Lahn managed a narrow win over Feenstra, by less than one percent. Trump has since endorsed Lahn for governor but he faces many problems not the least of which that he has spent most of this time living in Kansas which has already labeled him a 'carpetbagger' by many Iowa publications – and in previous midterms this has proven to be the kiss of death for Republicans far more often than Democrats.

 Rob Sand is the Democratic nominee the current auditor of the state. He considered running against Reynolds in 2022 but opted to run for reelection and was the only Democrat elected to a statewide office in Iowa that year. In 2020 an audit conducted by Sand found that Reynolds misspent $21 million on COVID relief fund, leading them to return the money. Almost as a line of attack the legislature passed a law designed to limit the power of the Iowa state auditor which Sand claimed was done to target the only statewide Democrat left in office.

Sand is running on a policy of 'common sense reform' pointing to the declining economy of the state and the exodus of college educate students. And as of this writing he is a slight favorite to win the governorship with the polls showing him ahead by as an average of 4 points.

For that matter Hinson's decision to run for the Senate has led to a possibility for further Democratic growth. After leaving the second district Joe Mitchell was nominated to run to fill Hinson seats in the November election. Lindsay James became the Democratic nominee. Hinson won this district by 15.6 percent two years ago yet multiple election sites now rank it a tossup something that would have been unthinkable in 2024. So there is possibility – dim but still probable – that in November, Democrats will have won the Governorship, three of the four House Seats and one of the Senate Seats. Shifts of this kind of leadership, particularly in a leftward direction, have been rare in any state government in the 21^st. That it may happen just two years after Trump managed a double digit sweep of the state is something that not even the most die-hard Democrat would have considered possible.

That the media has paid comparatively little attention to the Democratic possibilities in Iowa is understandable. The race to defeat Susan Collins was always a perennial story even before all of the carnage that has befallen the Democrats there and considering the attention the Democrats have focused on Texas is the past decade in particular the battle between James Talarico and Ken Paxton was always going to get more coverage.  And given the sudden passing of Lindsey Graham earlier today attention will justifiably be focused on Annie Andrews in South Carolina, despite the far more remote chance of a Democratic triumph there.

In truth any attention to Iowa will almost certainly only happen after election day and depend on just how successful the Democrats are in that state overall. And even if the Democrats manage that trifecta it may not be clear whether this is part of a general trend or by how big a margin of victory Sand has as governor.  The idea of 'coattails', once prominent in national politics, has become increasingly hard to measure in this era of polarization and it was always trickier in midterm elections then Presidential ones. Combined with the massive unpopularity of the President as of this writing it will remain to be seen if what happens in Iowa is part of a trend for the Democratic Party going forward or an outlier that in a few years is repudiated by the end of the decade.

We shall have to wait and see how things play out. If the Democrats do manage the sweep in Iowa it will overwhelmingly be a triumph for moderation and will almost certainly lead to a path forward in the Midwest and in red states overall.  If they don't the progressive wing of the party will continue to reject it as a strategy and the party itself may yet again shift its tactics.

 And even if it is effective there is no guarantee it will last beyond the moment. As I've written in regards to Ohio the Democrats thought they had a strategy to take the state back for the party after the 2006 midterms and while Obama held it the state itself would reject the progressivism as a state level by the time of the Tea Party movement. The Midwest has always had an uneasy relationship with the Democratic party, tending to go with it when Republican leadership gets too inept or economic times are bad. Both of these factors are certainly in play in Iowa this cycle and while the state has been friendlier to the Democrats in the 21^st century in some ways, there are no guarantees.

Still there is clearly at least a possibility, even a probability, for an unprecedented political realignment in Iowa this cycle. Whether it means long term for success for the Democrats will not be seen long past November. But it might mean that going into 2028 if the Des Moines Register says the Democrats will carry Iowa I'll have more reason to think the pollster knows what they're talking about then I did when it came out four years ago.

 

 

Homicide Rewatch: The Subway

 

This episode requires a bit more of an introduction that is typical for this series and I think it should be more personal.

During the 2000s I was starting to consider whether television criticism was something that I do professionally. I'd been writing articles about it more and more frequently, usually for internet sites that don't exist in the same way they did twenty years ago. I was also reading almost to the point of studying those whose main job was to criticize TV. In those days much of it was still in professional publications such as newspapers and magazines, most notably TV Guide.

I believe it was in 2009 that TV Guide published a fairly in-depth articles about what they considered 'The 100 Greatest Episodes in TV History'. I'd seen articles like this in some magazines, including TV Guide but by this point I was actually looking to see how many of these episodes I'd actually seen in the last decade which by this point was in the middle of the new Golden Age of TV. For the purposes of this articles I'm going to focus on episodes of dramas that were from that first decade.

Many of them are familiar to those who are familiar with TV during this period and I've actually written about a few of them, such as the 'Two Cathedrals' episode of The West Wing. Number 1 in 2009 was the 'College' episode of The Sopranos in which Tony kills someone in what amounts to real time which in 1999 was a big deal. There was also the pilot episode of Lost and the series finale of Six Feet Under which rank as the best in TV history more than twenty years after the fact.

Most of the candidates for the great shows of that period were here, though quite a few of the choices might puzzle even the most devoted fans of the shows involved. In some case it had to do with it being 2009 and many of the great moments of those series were still ahead of them. 'Kennedy/Nixon' of Mad Men and 'ABQ' of Breaking Bad were extraordinary episode but both series had far greater moments ahead of them. Other choices were more eccentric. For Battlestar Galactica we saw 'Blood on The Scales': the final season episode where Gaeta leads an insurrection against the Fleet for embracing the Cylons. For The Wire the season four finale was chosen instead of 'Middle Ground' (which would make a later list) where Stringer Bell met his end. In some cases it was a matter of opinion: Buffy The Vampire Slayer chose the landmark musical episode 'Once More, With Feeling' where as I still believe 'The Body' is the better episode and will die on that ground.

I'm mentioning all of these incredible episodes because I believe by this time the average TV viewer has seen or heard of most of them and knows just how sweeping, dark and often brutal these episodes all were. I've seen all of them too – multiple times in many cases – and I will not argue how magnificent they are in terms of quality at every level.  But with that all said almost none of them had the brutal simplicity and power as what was the choice TV Guide made for Homicide. This episode.

I saw this episode when it first aired in December of 1997. (It was aired out of sequence by NBC but as you'll soon see that did nothing to really make a difference for the course of the episode.) I knew very quickly that this was a great episode, mainly because for once the Emmys was willing to acknowledge it. It would be nominated for Best Writing in a Drama at the 1997-1998 Emmys, the first time since 'Three Men and Adena' Homicide had been nominated in this category. Vincent D'Onofrio would be nominated for Best Guest Actor in A Drama and while I have no idea if Andre Braugher submitted it for consideration (he always had a lot of great episodes to choose from every season) it would shock me if he had. The episode would also be nominated for a WGA award for episodic drama, which I wasn't aware of at the time.

Furthermore this episode turned out to be the focus on PBS's  Frontline one year after it aired which demonstrated every step of its being created from the writing inspiration to the casting to how it actually aired. (The special was called 'Anatomy of a Homicide'.) I don't believe PBS had any idea what a masterpiece they were witnessing being made but they certainly covered just how rhapsodic the critics were when the episode aired. Entertainment Weekly gave it an A+ and Tom Shales of The Washington Post gave it four stars as did USA Today.  Back before the internet was a big deal this was how things went viral.

Whether this episode is the greatest episode of Homicide is a matter of debate: many of the best episodes of television, period are not always per se, the best episodes of the series there a part of. Part of that reason is because 'The Subway' is one of the most radically different episodes in a series that has already broken so many rules of television you barely notice when it breaks its own – and 'The Subway' absolutely does that.

For starters this is the first episode in the entire run that doesn't for a single moment go anywhere near the squad room or the unit. This isn't entirely unprecedented by Homicide's standards: 'Full Moon' basically spent the entire episode at a motel with about five minutes back at the unit. But for the first time we have nothing familiar, no board, no box…nothing to distract us.

Furthermore this episode only features four of the series regulars, which for a show that is basically ensemble is even rarer. Most of our attention is focused on Pembleton, we see some scenes with Bayliss and Falsone and Lewis show up for a handful of scenes. And for the overwhelming majority of the episode we're watching Frank talk to the 'victim'.

The episode also, for what is basically the only time in the show's history – and for that matter something unheard of in 1990s TV -  unfolds in real time. The opening shows us John Lange going into the subway, something happening that gets him stuck between the car and the platform and then the teaser ends. Frank and Tim are called to the unit because the medics have told them a simple story. Lange falls between the opening of two cars and gets pinned. The train is still moving but because of being pinned, his legs are under him dragging three, twisting everything below them 'like a rubber band'. His spinal cord has been severed.

 Lange is positioned in such a way that the moment he is removed from the tracks he will die. They are prepping Lange in order to give 'the poor bastard some hope.' If they don't do anything immediately in somewhere between thirty to forty minute. The second they move him he's dead. There is a paramedic there to give him the idea of a million to one shot.

Because here's the thing. Lange is still conscious and because of the fact that he's paralyzed below the waist because of his injuries, he's in discomfort but not pain. When Pembleton meets him he has no idea what's going to happen to him because the medics were trying to keep him calm. So the job falls to Frank.

All of these things were unprecedented for TV beyond even the scope of what Homicide had tried. We were still a few years away from 24 and the idea of events unfolding in real time but that show was an action thriller in which Jack Bauer could never pause long enough to mourn the people who kept dying around him. Technically you could call this a bottle episode – it almost entirely takes place on the platform -  but you can't comfort yourself with the idea that 'nothing significant is happening in the story'.  Yoshimura, Braugher and D'Onofrio never blink from the horror of it: we're watching in real time the last hour of a man who is the victim  of random violence. By contrast watching Tony Soprano tracking down a rat in New Hampshire then choking him to death in full view of an unprepared audience is a walk in the park.

As I've highlighted ever since 'Bop Gun' Homicide has at least once a season gone into great detail to show the trauma and ramifications of what happens to those who must live in the aftermath of the murders that are a day's work. 'The Subway' takes this to what would seem to be the natural progression: looking at a murder from the point of view of the victim themselves. Furthermore this episode, chronologically speaking, is a foreshadowing of a major theme of Season Six: where we will spend far more time with the 'living dead', whether it comes to seeing the murders take place more often then we ever have before or in fact witnesses many people for whom death is a reality whether it comes at the end of the episode or far sooner than the average citizen.

At the center of this is Vincent D'Onofrio's work as Lange, one of the four or five greatest single one-shot acting performances the series would ever do. D'Onofrio is just a presence in 21^st century TV (there's going to be a lot in Hey, Isn't That) that it will stun you by his work here. So much of his work is built on physical presence and emotional control and none of that is here as Lange. He spends the majority of the episode pinned between the car and the platform so by definition he seems incredibly weak and small. And the moment he finally realizes the horror of what is going to happen to him D'Onofrio gets to run the full gamut of emotion in a way that he almost never got to in the entire decade he spent playing Bobby Goren. I've always believed that this work is the single best performance on TV I ever saw him give and even after nearly three decades of watching him work, it's a hill I'll die on.

For Frank Pembleton this is a situation he is completely unprepared for, as indeed any detective would be.  One of the recurring phrases of this show is that detectives 'speak for the dead'. But when Lange says with all the sarcasm he can muster: "It's not every day you talk to a dead man?"  Frank for once can only shake his head.  Bayliss, for a change, has the easy job: talking through the witnesses and Larry Biedron, the man who ended up getting tangled up with Lange did so deliberately or if it was an accident.  That its quickly found out that Biedron was previously institutionalized for a similar incident doesn't offer the usual relief we get from these episodes, not even for Pembleton. For once figuring out who the killer is offers him no closure because the fact that this was a random act of violence – basically because Lange chose to take the subway today instead of driving – won't solve anything. We'll later see the name written on the board in black but that's not the point of this episode for once.

Much of the drama is about something Falsone and Lewis trying to find Lange's girlfriend who went out jogging at the start of the episode and who Pembleton's trying to get there for a last goodbye. This is futile from the start and Lewis and Falsone know it as much as Pembleton does. But it's the last request of a dying man and they do their best to solve it. The fact that they very nearly do is the great tragedy of this episode – and the way the episode makes it clear in the final seconds is the ultimate kick in the teeth.

Having seen the episode yet again, I've decided to do something unprecedented in these reviews of Homicide as well as with almost every landmark episode review to this point on my blog. I'm not going to tell you any of the specific details. It's not because I want to avoid spoilers because it has been nearly thirty years since the episode aired. And its not because there are any miracles – this is Homicide, after all. Its because the power of this episode can't be put into words. It has to be seen and experienced.

I can't do justice to how Braugher manages to find layers you don't think he's capable of and how in the final minutes when its all over he seems to go back to normal, out of necessity. I can't explain how Bruce MacVittie, who plays Biedron, is one of the most unsettling portrayals of detachment from reality I've seen on TV in all my years – and I've seen many. I can't put into how Gary Fleder directs this episode in such a way to like a story whose outcome we all know is preordained from the start and yet manages to milk every bit of suspense and agony out of it. And thirty years later I still haven't found the words to accurate describe all of the nuances and emotion D'Onofrio puts into Lange every second he's onscreen in a performance that you can never look away from, no matter how much it hurts.

Tod Hoffman writes "More than any other episode 'The Subway' slams home the sometimes forgotten fact that homicide means a person has died." I'd argue that by the time TV Guide listed this episode as one of the 100 greatest of all time in 2009 the average viewer was practically numb to character death and by this point in our viewing experience we expect it so much of a given that even when it’s a character we've been invested in for years like Stringer Bell or Hank Schrader or  Teri Bauer (I've picked just some of the shows that were on the original list) its more for shock and the impact goes away within days of our viewing.

'The Subway' stands apart on television even thirty years later like it did in 1997. I barely got to know John Lange save for the last hour of his life but I felt the loss as much as Frank Pembleton does when he walks out of the station. He puts his game face on because its how he gets through the day but we all know he's not going to easily forget it like so much else. I've seen more than my share of TV characters who died who I had more invested in and whose loss has left an impact on me beyond the run of the show they were part of.  And it says something that Yoshimura and Homicide had the ability to make me feel the same way about a character I only knew for an hour thirty years ago. Not enough television shows have done that as often or as well. And that's the trademark of one of the greatest episodes ever.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

This episode was ranked in a survey by viewers from Court TV 4^th in the fifteen greatest episodes in Homicide's history. And while that may seem like an outlier compared to what I said above, the three above it were Crosetti, Three Men & Adena, and the Pilot.

As we see in Frontline, Yoshimura got the inspiration for the story from an episode of HBO Taxicab Confessions when a driver picks up a subway official in New York and described this exact event using the same dialogue the paramedic does. Frank saying growing up in New York and hearing about this happening from time to time is Yoshimura's subtle reference to this story.

On The Soundtrack: The band playing in the subway in the opening of the episode is Love Riot doing a superb version of 'Killing Time'. Lisa Matthews, the lead singer, is seen interviewed as a witness.

Gary Fleder, who directed this episode, had already directed Things to Do In Denver When Your Dead and the first Alex Cross movie Kiss the Girls in 1997. For film he would end up directing such movies as Runaway Jury and The Express. His record in TV is more impressive, directing episodes of The Shield, October Road, Turn Washington's Spies, The Bold Type and most recently Reacher. He has served as executive producer on many shows such as Beauty and The Beast and Tiny Pretty Things

Hey, Isn't That…Vincent D'Onofrio first came to the attention of the masses as the doomed Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket. He'd follow that up with a turn in Mystic Pizza. He would work for directors such as Oliver Stone in JFK and played the writer Griffin Mill kills in The Player and played Orson Welles in Ed Wood. But it wasn't until he played Edgar, the farmer who a Bug uses as his human host in Men In Black combined with his Emmy nominated work in this film that Hollywood took notice for good. He did a mix of independent films that didn't break out (Abbie Hoffman in Steal This Movie, Carl Stargher in the Cell) before he was cast as Bobby Goren in the Criminal Intent spinoff of Law & Order, a role he would play for the next decade.

Less then four years after that he was cast in an even more iconic role Wilson Fisk in the Netflix version of Daredevil, a role he's played in Hawkeye and Echo as well as Born Again when the series was rebooted on Disney In between he would play Hoskins in Jurassic World, Jack Horne in the Magnificent 7 and The Wizard in the short-lived Emerald City. He's played Jerry Falwell in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. His most significant role other than that is Vincent 'The Chin' Gigante in MGM+ Godfather of Harlem series which he played until the fourth season finale when the character met his real life end. He is scheduled to play the lead role in A FALL From Grace, one of the last project David Lynch worked on before he died.

 

My Adventures With Superman Season 3 Review

 

Two years in what was a love letter to the second season of My Adventures With Superman I made it very clear that while I've mostly been unable to enjoy live-action versions of any comic book movie, DC, Marvel or what have you is because I've always believed that the only medium that comic books can work in is animation.

 I whole-heartedly acknowledge that bias may have come from coming of age in the 1990s when by far the greatest animated adaptations of any comic books were available in Saturday morning cartoons. But I'll also admit my bias may be that once you move the action from animation to live action the comfortable illusion of the comic is forced into a real world where the twain rarely ever meld effectively.  Comics are supposed to be things of joy and wonder. Nearly to a film, every comic book movie I've seen in the 21^st century either tries too hard to be gritty and 'realistic' or leans too far into the world of eccentricity where I don't think I can follow.  It doesn't help that, unless the film has a decent hand at the till – Christopher Nolan is pretty much the only person who can do it well  - there's no room from deviation from the formula and the films all become cookie-cutters of blockbusters with no room for even a spark of originality.

So as this decade has progressed it hasn't shocked me that the comic book movie, either DC or Marvel, is beginning to show increasingly diminishing returns in live action. Yet simultaneously when they follow comics in animated the result always comes up aces. Earlier this decade Into the Spiderverse won Best Animated Movie at the Oscars. X-Men '97, the glorious Disney Plus follow up to the classic 90s cartoon has very quickly become regarded as one of the best animated series of the decade and the just released second season is regarded nearly as highly at the first. (I will review it for my column trust me.) And when the much anticipated third season of My Adventures With Superman debuted last month on Adult Swim it yet again revealed just how flimsy and weak everything with the new version of Superman (which I admired even though it had it flaws) worked wonderfully when it was done in animation.

Full disclosure: I had no desire at any time to see Supergirl in the theaters and essentially ignored all of the controversy around it. That was because I believed – correctly as it turned out – that there was no way Milly Alcock could surpass just how well the show had handled Kara Zor-El's character in Season 2 and how masterfully the show handled her introduction to her cousin, how she had been used by her 'father' Brainiac, and the way she managed to find a way to help save Earth. Now as Season 3 has unfolded (I write this review after the first four episodes) Kara/Supergirl is now happily working with her cousin to defend Metropolis and also trying to find a way to date. In large part this is because Jimmy, who clearly has a crush on her that is definitely reciprocated, has been so empathetic to her needs that she wants her to see the world beyond Metropolis. This would be painful to watch were it not for the fact that Jimmy always seems to throw himself into the most hysterical places imaginable.

Indeed in the third episode he found himself applying for an app involving scientific matchmakes called WORMS (run by two lesbian metahuman scientists) which sets you up with your soulmate. Jimmy, in his first session. ended up being turned into a werewolf and had to be saved first by Clark and then the scientists. This involved the kind of hysterical work that can only be done credibly in a cartoon form, first because of the effects (Jimmy ended up becoming elastic for much of the third episode) and second and more importantly because it has been done for pure humorous purposes. This is very much the sweet spot of My Adventures which has always had an anime flavor to it when it comes to the expressions on the characters faces as well as the spirit of things. So while everything horrible was happening to Jimmy he chose to livestream all of it in real time and that led to hysterical animation and wonderful jokes involving captioning. "I'm a Werewolf Now' is just something you can only get away with in a cartoon.

And because Adventures never takes itself seriously even when the crisis of the week comes you're always laughing even as something thrilling is happening. This is particularly true with the relationship between Lois and Clark, which is now getting to the point where Clark wants to take things to the next level and that absolutely terrifies Lois to the point she will do anything to change the subject, even go to a mall with Kara. This leads to something that James Gunn would never do in any of his films, have Kara and Lois engage in a musical number in which they discuss how wonderful and terrible the future is at the exact same time.

And indeed the future is very much coming right at Clark and Lois. In the most recent episode Clark wanted to take Lois out to brunch where they could have a nice, relaxing pancake breakfast without any 'super-business'. And who should greet them at this brunch? Jon Kent, aka Superboy who has just been sent from the future. This is exactly what Lois has been trying to dodge for the entire season and getting a flesh and blood reminder that she's going to get married and have a super-son leads to wonderful expressions on that animated faces. It doesn't help that Clark is overjoyed to bond with his future son and Kara and Jimmy are overjoyed to hang out with their nephew and go back to the mall. This is a hysterical episode in large part because of Lois's denial. "How do you know he's our son?!" she screams as she and John engage in the exact same method of eating their noodles. She then frantically heads to the Daily Planet to work on her story. Cut to everybody looking over her shoulder as she writes, then as they go outside to have lunch and end up locked on the roof.

But Lois knows that there has to be  a reason Jon showed up and we know it too. John actually came from a dystopian future which is overrun by cyborgs and metahumans. And we've been getting a very big hint of what's going to happen in an underlying storyline. A young Lex Luthor has been working with Slade Wilson to come up with an alternative 'human' superman that he wants to use to combat the Kryptonians. At the start of the season he turns former veteran Hank Henshaw into 'Cyborg Superman'. While Hank was first seen as a hero, he's very quickly become far more bloodthirsty then that and Lex very quickly lost control of him. In the last moments of the fourth episode he freed himself from the programming of Lex and led an assault on Metropolis. As Jon told Kara in the final moments in the future Clark will be killed by Hank – and he came back to stop it.

The main reason I consider My Adventures a masterpiece is all the reasons I said but also something far more simple: its just fun with no agenda other than being entertaining. To be sure there are subtle nods at the modern world when it comes to the races and sexual preferences of many of the characters but its all done with such subtlety that unless you real focused on them you could completely ignore them. It's not trying to reinvent anything for a modern audience and because its animated you don't have to spend any time dealing with logic the way you do with live action. You don't have to turn your brain off to enjoy it – there's actually a lot of intelligence and cleverness in it – but if you  choose to you can and get the same entertainment. This is a show for both fans of the comic books and those of us (like myself) who might know the basics but don't need them in order to be entertained. This is rare for many Ip adaptations but for a comic book series its nearly impossible to find in a theater near you.

My Adventures With Superman makes me happy in the same way that all of those animated cartoons from the 1990s did and the way that so many of them from the animated adaptions do today. I never get the feeling of effort the way I did when I watched Quantum-Mania or The Suicide Squad and that makes it a small gem. I realize that comic book films and TV may be at a crossroads right now. I'm not necessarily saying that they should look to shows like this and X-Men '97 going forward but honestly it's hard to imagine Avengers Doomsday or Matt Reeves next Batman film being as rewarding or as simply fun as these shows are.

My score: 5 stars.