I Got My First Piece of Hate Mail As A Critic Today!

 

 

A few years ago when I wrote a piece in my blog where I was vague critical of a certain person on Jeopardy I received a personal explicit and fairly impressive email from that subject.  My reaction might puzzle some but would be familiar to any critic: it meant I'd officially arrived. I printed the email out and saved it as a badge of honor.

If you're a critic by definition you have to have a thicker skin then most which may be part of the reason I've been able to increasingly laugh off so many hate-filled comments I've received whenever I say something vaguely centrist over the last few years. So I was first shocked, then puzzled, then overjoyed when someone who was the subject of one of my TV reviews chose to post a comment on them.

The part that puzzled me was who it was. I've never been shy about certain writers and shows that I feel a withering, visceral contempt for and if Shonda Rhimes or Sam Levenson – two of my more frequent targets – had chosen to comment I would have expected it more.  What makes this all the odder is that the comment came from someone who is associated with a show that I've been writing about for about a year and a half personally and nearly three years in general terms well before that in some of the most overwhelmingly positive tones possible.

Those of you who've read my blog are aware of how big a fan I am of NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street,  a drama I would be more than willing to say was the best of the entire 1990s and certainly one of the greatest TV shows of all time. This is a consensus held both by contemporary critics and those decades later. In the fall of 2024, right around the time Peacock and Amazon began streaming it, I began to do a rewatch of it for my blog going episode by episode. These columns while not as overwhelming popular as some of the others I write about still do get a significant readership which I find impressive considering that this is a show that aired 30 years ago.

Now because I'm not the kind of writer who will kiss and tell  when people disagree with me and even write offensive things I'm going to be speak generally from this point forward. I'm not going to name the episode in question nor anything else associated with it.  What I will tell you is a few months back I reviewed an episode in less then favorable terms. It wasn't a pan and I didn't excoriate it the way I have been known to do Shondaland shows, series like Succession or Ray Donovan or the way I did Adolescence last year. All I said was that this particular episode wasn't at the usual high quality of most episodes, particularly given the caliber that I was used to from this writer. This opinion, I need to be clear, doesn't originate with me: other critics who've written about the show such as Tod Hoffman have spoken negatively about it and in far stronger terms. I posted it and I moved on.

Now earlier this morning I got a post in regard to this episode. Now if I am to believe what I see – and the profile of the individual gives me no information to confirm or contradict this – the poster in question wrote the episode I'm talking about. For the purposes of this article I'm simply going to call him X.  Roughly three hours ago in response to it he wrote:

Go f--- yourself. You have no idea what you're writing about.

Not Shakespeare but his point was made.

My first thought was: "My God! One of the writers of this show reads my blog!" Second reaction: "Thirty years later and he's still sensitive about criticism? From a guy whose only got up 1000 readers a  month ago?"

The third reaction, I'll be honest, was: "Did he not read all of the other articles I've written about Homicide for the last two years – many of which praise his ability as a writer to great extent? Or is he the type whose so sensitive to criticism that he ignores the raves and only acknowledges the pans?"

To be clear I said that this episode was weak only in comparison to some of X's other writing on the show both prior to this episode and well after it. I consider X's work on this show some of the greatest writing in TV history no question. And I thought I made it clear that the episode in question wasn't even that bad.  There were quite a few parts of it I found incredibly impressive and registered very powerfully with me.

And more to the point its not like every single piece of work a writer does on TV is gold a hundred percent of the time. This is true for many of the writers on Homicide both on the show and in later work. (I won't name them because I don't want to reveal who my secret admirer was even by process of elimination. To be clear his name's on the site himself but I'm not going to highlight it.) And to a larger point its true of every writer: David E. Kelley had his share of stinkers on The Practice and Ally McBeal; Howard Gordon had some lousy episodes on The X-Files before he wrote for 24 and Homeland and he had some bad ones there too and Aaron Sorkin is a genius but shows like The Newsroom were almost unwatchable. I don't expect perfection from every writer on every show; that's too high a standard even if they can, occasionally, meet it.

Again this episode wasn't a terrible one. Even a mediocre episode of Homicide was still better than 75 percent of what was on television in the 1990s. And even if it was a stinker – which it was not –  writers are allowed to have episodes of shows that don't work. I assume that it is through failure you find a way to improve on your next episode and this writer absolutely did in the episodes that he did that followed. Hell I'm going to be raving about X's work on Homicide in a few weeks' time, so its not like he didn't improve.

To be clear I'm not offended in any way, shape or form by X's comment. If anything I'm impressed that he found me writing on my column and cared enough to send a meaningless, irrelevant in the grand schemes of this website a post of such vitriol. It may just have been eleven words long, but in a weird way it means more to me than any long rave from anyone else could. (Although if you feel that way about my writing and some of you have made it clear you do, by all means send long meaningful raves. I welcome them.) Someone connected with something I love read my reviews and cared enough to tell me that I was a clueless idiot who had no idea what he was writing about. That's practically a love letter for a critic.

To be clear my opinion of X's work or Homicide has not altered one bit because of this note. It is still a great show and X is still a great writer. I will continue to write reviews of this show with the hope of earning praise from X or perhaps even more visceral condemnation of how clueless I am. Hey people called me horrible names when I suggested that Natalie Portman and George Clooney didn't know anything about politics. Compared to that X's comment was barely a glancing blow.

But this is a bigger badge of honor then almost anything else I've received as praise in nearly a decade of writing. To be clear it doesn't mean quite as much as the fact that at this point over a thousand people are reading my blog regularly but it matters in a different way. Its good when people appreciate what you write and if you're a critic like me, you're going to get comments like this. It's taken a while, but I've arrived. Let the hate mail begin in earnest. (That's a joke, but one that critics will understand.)

Coalition For the Sane: I'll Believe in Your Theory Only if It Works in Practice

 

I am a very scholarly person but I'm also a very pragmatic one.  I believe in what I see in the real world rather then what is discussed in so many academic circles. In order for me to accept a way of thinking you can't just make the argument that our current system is broken beyond repair and we need to throw it out completely and start all over.

First of all most of these 'thinkers' never have any direct proof that a system like capitalism is broken beyond repair. Their argument, for the loud bellowing and some statistics is basically: "the rich people have too much money and there are too many more people, therefore we have to get rid of capitalism."

To be clear every system of economic theory all has rich people and poor people.  That was just as true with every communist country and every socialist one. The argument that countries like China or Cuba or Venezuela is that they're not 'real communist or socialist countries'.  This is denying the evidence of your eyes as well as demonstrating that you prefer the academic bubble of theory to the real world. Anyone who thinks that way is an idiot, no matter how many degrees they have in front of them.

And for the record just because you are a very intelligent person doesn't mean you aren't capable of believing in dumb things. During the first part of the 20^th century a lot of smart people believed in the very racist theory of eugenics including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Margaret Sanger and John Muir. Does this negate all of the good they did in the real world? Not to most people. To many current smart people, it puts all of their works in a shadow of doubt to the point that they believe we should disregard them from our studies all together or make sure that the historical portrait features 'a fuller picture'.

That is the believe of the leftist historians ranging from Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky all the way down to Nikole Hannah-Jones. They operate in a theory known as 'deconstruction'. Their academic writings are ostensibly to pain a fuller picture of our society so that we 'question authority'. All of this is popular among academics and almost no one else, particularly conservatives and Republican politicians.

They use these arguments to make the political point that the  left hates America and is trying to make school children not have respect for their country. These academics argue that because the Republicans are trying to suppress their work, they must therefore being telling the correct version of events and therefore it must be true.

But unlike in the academic world or the political one, two things can be true at once. Having read so many of these books, the only point of them seems to be to argue that America or the Western world is empirically flawed to the point that no citizen should have any reason to respect it.  The fact Republicans are using it to score points with their base doesn't negate that truth.

 

And I'm fully aware the right has more then its share of ridiculous academic theories that do not work in practice. The one that we've seen the biggest effect of is 'trickle down economics'. Stripped away of the scholarly or political thinking it doesn't work from the standpoint of human nature.

If I were to have a million dollars, this theory states, I should be allowed by tax laws to keep as much of it as possible because I would spent it and the money would eventually reach other people through what I buy. But I know in practice that if were to happen I would keep as much of it for myself in a bank and buy very few luxuries with it, if at all.

Its own value was political: it was a way to convince the wealthy to support Republican politicians in order for them to keep more of their money. Viewed that way, it had real world value. As economic  policy it had none.

There's truth to that with so many of the other scholarly theories of the right, such as originalist doctrine for judiciary and the grand unitary theory of the executive. At their core, they're just fig leaves for the conservatives to hold on power. They are junk theories, completely. But the thing is I'm pretty sure most of the scholars know that and are using them for the practical application of Republicans and conservatives to hold power.  So in a very, very twisted way, you can say these theories have real world applications. I have yet to see that in so many of the theories on the left side of the aisle.

I haven't really discussed critical race theory in my articles for a simple reason: I have no idea what its about. I think at its core its just a wedge issue for conservative politicians to try and rile up its base which they basically do at every election. So I decided to try and separate it from the political arguments – very difficult – and just look at a dictionary definition of it on Wikipedia. I'm aware that being a cis, white male I will likely be considered racist if I don't give universal approval of it but at this point it basically comes with the territory.

The thing is just looking at a basic description it really does seem as much junk theory as so much of the academic writing that I've seen from originalist opinions by Scalia and Roberts over the years. More to the point its one of those theories that exists in such big terms that not only is there no way to prove it, there's no way to disprove it. If someone argues as critical race theory does, that racism is systemic in laws and rules rather than just individual prejudice, the burden is on those to prove that it's not. Everything about critical race theory seems to argue everything about it is so subtle that the scholar can prove any example to fit its version of events.

And its worth noting that even before Republicans began attacking it, many academics were arguing against it. They said it was based far less on events and reason and based more on academic storytelling, rejected concepts like truth and merit, and most importantly undervalued liberalism. Indeed much of it involves revisionist interpretations of the Civil Rights act itself, arguing that because its political interest undervalued any good it did. This is part of so much left-wing theory which argues any good that is done must be done purely for an altruistic reason rather than a political one and if it doesn't it count. In other words if Lincoln believed preservation of the Union was more important then freeing the slaves, the passage of the 13^th Amendment should not be considered a good of his administration.

Critical Race Theory once had to do with law, which is the only practical application it would have. Now its basically moved on to analyze power structures in society no matter what laws are in effect.  Its only purpose seems to be to argue that 'equality is impossible and illusory in the US." In other words America is a racist society.

What it has essentially been for half a century is an academic series of studies that seem design to make this the point rather than any way to make America less racist. So I guess my real problem with critical race theory is that it doesn't seem to have any real word applications beyond so many of the academic deconstruction ones.

To be clear multiple academics were attacking well before conservative politicians got on board. The Encyclopedia Britanica have called it 'postmodernist inspired skepticism of objectivity and truth' and has a tendency to 'interpret any racial inequality or imbalance as proof of institutional racism and as grounds for directly imposing racially equitable outcomes in those realms."

In a 1997 book law professors Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry criticized CRT for basing it claims on personal narrative and for its lack of testable hypotheses and measurable data. The scholars then accused this criticism of representing 'dominant modes within social science which exclude people of color.' In other words anyone who criticizes critical race theory proves that it exists.

More importantly Farber and Sherry argued that the anti-meritocratic tenets in CRT, critical  feminism and critical legal studies, may unintentionally lead to antisemitic and anti-Asian implications, arguing that the success of Jews and Asians within what critical race theorists posit to be a structurally unfair system may lend itself to allegations of cheating and advantage taking. Bluntly, it might cause racism. The scholars argued in response that there's a difference between criticizing an unfair system and criticizing individuals who perform well inside that system. Which is a nice way of say: "If people read our work and reach the conclusion that certain people are breaking the system, that's not our fault, its there's."

Because of the conservative attacks, particularly by so many increasingly right-wing politician and speakers it has become far easier for proponents of CRT to argue that anyone who disagrees with it is a racist themselves. But they've been doing this even when academics who work within the system criticize them, even well-meaningly. This is typically within the way left works overall: as early as the 1960s students were accusing anyone who was an opponent of their beliefs as racist.

My basic problem with CRT is simple: what's the real world application of it? Even a cursory look at some of the writings basically seem to have it no different then so much other leftist writings. It makes vague discussion of things that can be done and spends ninety percent of its time reaching pre-ordained conclusions. I acknowledge racism exists in our society and I'd like a plan to try and rectify it. CRT essentially seems to argue that there's nothing anyone can do, and if you even suggest there is, you yourself are part of the problem.

I'm all for having curriculums that discuss a more realistic portrayal of race in our society and some of the bigger problems. But I'm a realist. I have no illusions that if high school students or college students are taught this forty minutes a day five days a week, it will end the problem. I don't think there's anything wrong with them learning about the flaws in our society; I do think that being told in the reductive language of the left that your country is irrevocably broken is the best way to fix them.

 And I also don't believe that just because you're not being taught something in a classroom means that knowledge is somehow erased from existence or that the world is engaged in a conspiracy to keep you from 'learning the truth'. No its still there. You just have to work a little harder to find it. I find it insulting that so many smart people believe the only reason problems in our society exist is because it isn't part of a course in grade school or high school.  Trust me, even before the internet was on every phone, ninety percent of the student body only cared about whether it would be on the exam.

I think my biggest problem with Critical Race Theory is that its labeled a 'theory'. Most theories are put into real world application and then put in practice. This isn't a theory in the way that trickle down or originalist or any scientific theory or hell, communism. There's no way to prove it, no way to test in a real word setting, no way to figure out how we move forward. I agree racism exists in America and its never going to ever truly go away. But not because laws or the system is racist but because it involves people and you will never be able to complete eradicate it from the human mind, much as we might want to. It's not a pleasant truth to acknowledge but its one we have to face.

CRT seems to use a lot of words and fancy terms to tell you that racism will always exist in our society. I could have told you that in thirty seconds. Where I disagree with our proponents is that I believe its incumbent on all of us, of all races, to do as much as we can to try to make it less so. Not eradicate it, we'll never do that, just less. That's this cis, white male's opinion. You want to call me racist for saying that? Well, the proponents do that anyway.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Celebrity Jeopardy Basically Proves Why No One Should Take Hollywood As An Authority On Anything (Jeopardy Champions, On The Other Hand…)

 

 

If you came of age in the 1990s and perhaps even if you didn't you are doubtless aware of one of the most hysterical recurring sketches on Saturday Night Live during that period. I'm speaking of the hysterical Celebrity Jeopardy parodies in which Will Ferrell played an Alex Trebek who couldn't even bother to hide how exhausting it was to have Burt Reynolds, Sean Connery and anyone from Minnie Driver to Phil Donahue to Adam Sandler proving just how incredibly dumb they were when it came to answering the easiest Jeopardy questions imaginable.

By the 1990s I was regularly watching Saturday Night Live and I found all of these sketches examples of what might have been called cringe comedy. And that was because I was a Jeopardy fan by this point and I was painfully aware then the average SNL viewer that, if anything, the writers were being generous to how incompetent celebrities were when they appeared on Jeopardy.

I've written about this before a few years back but I may have left out the personal aspect of it. And I have to tell you during this period when I was a teenager every time Celebrity Jeopardy took place it became painful for me to watch each year. Think how embarrassing it must be to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years old and watching celebrities you have seen on TV and admire immensely demonstrating over and over and over again that they are incapable of answering questions that you know very well.

I'll admit part of my problem was that they didn't seem to be taking the show that seriously. Even at a young age I took Jeopardy as almost a ritual and watching them clown around on stage, delaying answering clues and then constantly faulting each other and themselves on their inadequacy seemed very close to heresy. It tells you something that in thirty plus years of watching Jeopardy it is only the celebrity contestants who never take the show with any seriousness. I've seen middle schoolers on Back to School Week who took the show with a greater level of maturity then so many famous people in their fifties and sixties.

Now I'll grant you it might have to do with the fact everyone else was playing for actual money and the celebrities were just playing for charity.  That falls apart when one looks at the Jeopardy Masters and see James Holzhauers and Mattea Roach's of the world knowing that they will be playing for charitable donations as well as everything else and they take it with a competitiveness and respect that it deserves.

More to the point there is the fact that it was clear early on – I think by the time of 1994 at least – that the writers realized that the average celebrity did not, to put it charitably, know as much as the average Jeopardy contestant. That essentially meant them bending the rules until they broke. Ed Begley or Brett Butler finish in the negative at the end of Double Jeopardy? Give them money so they can compete in Final Jeopardy. The questions keep getting easier and easier and with few exceptions they keep getting them wrong. Guarantee them a $10,000 minimum if they finish Final Jeopardy with less than that – or for that matter, no money at all. (That happened a lot during the 1990s and beyond.)

Perhaps that's the reason I appreciated Will Ferrell's work as Trebek during those sketches in a way I didn't always like or enjoy much of his comedy on SNL during that period. He wasn't even trying to imitate Trebek or his cadences but as someone who wondered what had to be going through Alex's head during each of these weeks I thought Ferrell might actually be saying the quiet part out loud.  Alex was always a trooper no matter who the contestants were and I've often wondered how much effort it kept for him to keep that poker face. So I took a certain pleasure every time Ferrell would say some of the clearly dumbed down categories like "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Word That Rhymes With Star' or told Minnie Driver "Are you English or just retarded?" As someone who watched these tournaments during this period there are so many times I had similar thoughts.

Now I'm not saying every celebrity who appears was a raving moron who couldn't tell the difference between Rutgers and Princeton and thought that a great tennis player was Andrew Agassi. There were some very intelligent Celebrity Jeopardy players who did the stage proud. Many of them, I should mention, were former SNL alum such as Jane Curtin or Michael McKean or sketch comedy veterans such as Cheech Marin. The cast of Law & Order was very capable at answering questions involving Ghastly Operatic Demises. Levar Burton and Kareen Abdul-Jabar proved their mettle multiple times. And obviously Ike Barinholtz has become something of a gold standard from this point forward.

But there's a reason that by the early 2000s I'd stopped watching all celebrity tournaments on Jeopardy. It was becoming exhausting watching some actors I admired – whether it was Steve Harris or Camryn Manheim on The Practice, Wendie Malick or Joseph Gordon Levitt, embarrass themselves. They say never meet your heroes; I'd say seeing Thomas Haden Church or Lynn Redgrave play horribly on your favorite game show counts.

I should argue this applies just as much to many political figures. During the 1990s and up until 2016 (perhaps for good reason) Jeopardy would invite many figures of note in the world of cable news or even politics at a certain level to appear on Jeopardy, usually in DC. If anything, they were more embarrassing then so many TV actors. And this was true no matter what side of the political spectrum you were on. Chris Matthews and Al Franken, Tucker Carlson and Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper and Bob Woodward, they all performed so ludicrously badly – often, I should add, on historical and political questions – that they made me wonder if any of them actually knew anything that wasn't on a teleprompter.

 The polarization of today's politics pretty much stopped these weeks from happening because Jeopardy has always been the kind of show that doesn't actively seek out controversy. We make the argument that the tribal nature of politics has gotten rid of rational debate; these weeks make me wonder in hindsight if many of these people were ever capable of it to begin with.

All of which brings me to the title of my article as you might expect. Earlier this year around the time of the Golden Globes Ricky Gervais reposted made a joke about how celebrities are not authorities on anything. "You know less then Greta Thunberg." (After awards season he added the comment: "They didn't listen."

Now I've made multiple arguments as to why celebrities should stay in their own lane for years. It didn't occur to me until recently that well before Hollywood felt it was their moral duty to talk about all things political, I actually had videotape evidence of how little they knew about anything.

Am I saying that all of the celebrities who make dumb comments today were incapable of answering trivia questions on Jeopardy? Well the first year I saw it Rosie O'Donnell and Ed Begley, Jr two of the most left wing celebrities then or now played. Begley finished at -$1100 and O'Donnell finished in the lead with $2000. Along with Robert Gulliame they combined for 33 correct answers and 18 incorrect ones. 17 clues were left uncovered in both rounds. That night I missed the first three minutes. I still cleaned their clocks. I was thirteen.

Throughout my teenage years I regular defeated in combat Larry King, Kelsey Grammer, Dean Cain, Elayne Boosler, Sandra Bernhard, Eartha Kitt, Buzz Aldrin, Keith Olberman (he was with ESPN then) and Meredith Viera. To be fair I didn't do as well as Kareen-Abdul Jabbar, Jon Stewart or Cheech Marin and Alicia Witt got Final Jeopardy right on me once.

You'll notice that quite a few of these celebrities are still loud voices and some of them, such as Cain, Grammer and Rob Schneider are fairly regular on conservative talk shows these days. As a teenager I could beat them at Jeopardy. I'm not saying I could do it today but their track record on certain subjects makes me question why I should listen to any of them when they claim to talk with authority about the Middle East, economic inequality, racism in America or really anything that doesn't have to do with Hollywood. And since some of them can't seem to answer questions that directly refer to them and their field I'm not sure how much we can trust them on anything. (Bob Woodward missed a clue on Jeopardy that had to do with the film All The President's Men. All I'm saying.)

There may be those who argue that how an actor performs on a quiz show shouldn't be the sole measure of their intellect. I'd argue what measure do you want me to use that would be fair? Speaking as someone who has the greatest respect not only for Jeopardy but for all of the great players, super-champions or five day ones, who have walked on the Alex Trebek stage for the past four decades and continue to dazzle millions of viewers with their breadth of knowledge to this day. Are you telling me an actor should be held to a different standard then teachers, attorneys, students, accountants, bartenders, journalists and the average person Hollywood claims they either speak for or know better then?

In 1999 Eddie Timanus a man who was totally blind won five games on Jeopardy and his total of $69,700 was the most of any player in the 2000 Tournament of Champions. He was a semi-finalist in the 2000 Tournament of Champions and has been invited back three times to compete in Jeopardy 'Postseason tournaments before there was a postseason. The only thing accommodation he ever needed in his original run was that at the start of every round they handed him a card with the categories in Braille. The rest was up to him and he was pretty good at it.

In every single game in the Celebrity Jeopardy tournament that followed a few months later with the exception of Andy Richter played with a far better score then anything of them. For the record Rosie O'Donnell was invited back that year; she finished in a distant third and actually did worse then the previous invitation six years earlier. Eddie was, needless to say, answering questions much more difficult then any of the celebrities invited for that year's tournament.

I'm not saying that de facto makes Eddie smarter more than O'Donnell or more accomplished. I am saying that should Eddie Timanus choose to say something about the state of the country (which as far I know, he has not) I'd be more inclined to treat his opinion with respect and admiration then I have anything O'Donnell has ever said.

That brings me to a related point. After his incredible run on Jeopardy concluded a few weeks back Jamie Ding has been in the national spotlight the way that many Jeopardy champions tend to be when they do well for an extended period. He's spoken how important he considers his job as a state employee and how significant his accomplishments mean as a child of immigrants and a person of color.

I'd argue that Jamie Ding has earned his right to speak on certain subjects in a way that no one in Hollywood has. Because unlike them he is an average American who has had the spotlight thrust upon him.  So much of our society is built on so many people claiming to be speaking to the average citizen but we rarely do and most of them will never get a platform to talk about what they think. That is worth paying attention to in a way that all of the actors and athletes and celebrities really don't.

So if Amy Schneider or Mattea Roach were to talk about the issues that members of the LGBTQ+ community face (and both have) I'm fine with it in a way that I chafe when Asia Kate Dillon talks about how important gender neutral awards are. And if Jamie wants to talk of what it means to be a person of color in America he's earned it in a way that John Leguizamo's demands for representation in his industry don't land with me.  They're less insulated from what happens in this country then the bubble that surrounds Hollywood and I think we should hear their opinion.

As my writing has indicated I have a respect for Jeopardy champions in a way I hold for very few other people. I admire what they have accomplished in a way that's more relatable for me in a way that for all my respect for the craft of Hollywood and TV I don't think most people can. As someone who still wants to be on Jeopardy some day (I keep meaning to take the anytime test but never get around to it) I genuinely admire their intelligence, grace under pressure and humor in a way that I frequently find lacking in so many actors especially now. They are the average person who has to earn their fame in a way that the majority of those in Hollywood have long forgotten. When I talk about the Masters or the Invitational as 'the real Celebrity Jeopardy' for me there's a real truth to it that I think every fan of the show has.

Maybe the only way I could respect a celebrity would be if they were to appear on regular Jeopardy. I felt that way for Ike Barinholtz and even though they didn't do nearly as well, I respected the efforts of Lisa Ann Walter and Kamau Bell. If you're willing to be onstage with the average Jeopardy champion and risk a certain humiliation that does make you more human in a real way to me. I'm not saying that for me to take the Mark Ruffalo's or Hannah Einbinder's more seriously they'd have to appear on Jeopardy against the Jamie Dings and Harrison Whitaker's of the world, but it would earn my respect in a way their loud pronouncements from social media just don't. Most of you will go on SNL. You're halfway there already.

 

How The Landslide Defeats of Goldwater And McGovern Explain Both Parties Today, Part 1:Goldwater's Failed Strategy and How It Showed Success Four Years Later

 

 

In 1964 Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater became the Republican nominee for President, largely because of a grass roots effort by conservatives to take the party out of the hands of the moderates who'd controlled for half a century. The result was an electoral disaster as LBJ would win in November with more than 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes to Goldwater's 37 percent and 52 electoral votes respectively.

Eight years later George McGovern managed to win the Democratic nomination for President backed by a similar organization of the coalition of the New Left whose strategy in the primaries had taken the nomination out of the hands of the bosses. The results were just as disastrous: Nixon would win reelection with nearly 60.8 percent of the popular vote and 49 of 50 states while McGovern would carry just Massachusetts and DC in what was the biggest defeat a Democratic candidate had ever had in electoral history to that point.

For much of the 21^st century academics have been trying to argue that there are complicated, deep-seated explanation as to why the conservative revolution which began just four years after LBJ's landslide and dominated politics ever since took place. In truth the explanation has always been ridiculously, almost ludicrously simple if viewed a certain way and it shows the clear difference between the conservative movement and the liberal one immediately after that period.

For the Republicans they viewed the world as so many right-wingers do: purely in a matter of political power absent any true moral consideration. They saw a way to get a hold on a geographic base of electoral votes in their column and took it. Everything they have done since then has made it easier for them to win elections and it began to pay off almost immediately after doing so.

The Democrats would spend much of the time since then playing catch up, particularly in trying to win back this group of voters while trying to keep their coalition of new voters together, something that became clear after McGovern's incredible electoral defeat. They spent the rest of the 20^th century on a patchwork strategy that gave them some success, suffered a momentary loss after 2000,  found a way to recover from it and then inexplicably chose to reject that strategy in the aftermath of a single  election that they chose to tie in with the McGovern disaster that seemed a solution only in hindsight and that was never part of McGovern's original strategy to begin with.  Their embrace of that strategy was perhaps the most illogical and counterintuitive the party has made in a long history of poor decisions and its not clear if they can change course even if they were to acknowledge how much its fallen apart in the last election in particular.

If there is any hope for the Democrats to try and become a national party once Trump leaves office in 2028 they need to stop listening to the ridiculous complex arguments of an increasingly left-wing branch that views the world strictly in a moral lens and look at it from a purely political one. That involves making the kinds of detached decisions the left has made it clear it will not tolerate and trying to win back the middle that they continue to argue is too conservative for their tastes.

So in this series I'll look at why both campaigns failed, the lessons that each party took away from them and how the Republicans learned how to turn their failure into success almost immediately and the Democrats tried to learn from their failure until the losing side framed it – bizarrely – as a formula for a success.

 

One of the more interesting thing about these two diametrically opposed Senators was how much they had in common. Theodore White, describing Goldwater in Making of the President: 1964 said: "He preaches: he does not direct. He arouses emotion. He does not harness it."

So much of the Goldwater campaign was based on immense organization within young conservative groups such as the Young Republicans and little to do with Goldwater himself. So much of the campaign was done as early as 1961 with no real push from Goldwater himself, he repeatedly rejected them on their first meeting and future ones. Goldwater had no real belief he could win the Presidency at any time. The most he ever believed was that if he ran against Kennedy he might be able to come within five percent of beating him. Anything else would be a disaster for the conservative cause. By November of 1963 many believed that magic 45 percent number could be reached.

When Kennedy was assassinated Goldwater lost all heart for it. He respected Kennedy and he detested LBJ. He wanted the campaign dismantled because he had assumed – correctly – that a shattered electorate wouldn't be able to stand three different Presidents in the course of a year. When he finally decided to do so in January of 1964 he did so out of a sense of obligation to the cause more than any sense he could win.

The Goldwater campaign was based fundamentally on the issue of race. One had been one Goldwater and his followers had put forth four years earlier; one became more evident as 1964 unfolded.

Four years earlier in Chicago Goldwater had tried to persuade Richard Nixon for a more moderate platform on civil rights then ended up being part of it. The argument was basically one that Theodore White, a liberal himself put forth:

If they adopt a civil rights program only moderately more restrained then the Democrats, the South can be there's for the taking, and with the South, if it comes permanently to Republican control could come such electoral power as would make the Republicans, as they were for half a century, the majority power of the nation and the semi-permanent steward of the executive branch. Furthermore, since the Northern Negro now votes habitually for the Democratic Party by overwhelming margins, why seek to outbid the Democratic Party where they can not be outbid? Their philosophy should be considered one of trade: let us give the Northern Negro for the Democratic Party and we shall take the Old South for ourselves.

Goldwater would try to persuade Nixon of this approach and part of the reason his campaign likely failed was that he couldn't decide if he wanted Northern or Southern electoral votes more.

For Goldwater and his acolytes it was simpler. Goldwater would frame it as "Let's go hunting where the ducks are." As the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 made its way through first Congress and then the Senate, LBJ and Northern Democrats would lean as hard as possible on Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen to whip Republicans to vote for it. Only seven chose not to and one of those seven was Barry Goldwater.

Whether Goldwater was racist or genuinely believed that the Civil Rights Act was constitutional overreach depends on who tells the tale. Johnson knew all too well what the consequences were when he signed it to the law. "I think we just handed the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come," he said. The 1964 election was the first example.

The other hope Goldwater had was a consequence of the battle for civil rights and it was unfolding in the North. During the summer of 1964 a series of race riots began in the North in New York City, New Jersey, Chicago and Pennsylvania. In these Goldwater hoped to capitalize on a new movement in politics "backlash"

There had been signs of it even before the riots in the insurgent primary campaign of Alabama Governor George Wallace. Wallace, as White makes clear, "wanted to see whether racism could magnetize votes in the North as well as the South." The answer was, for a stunning number of people, it could.

In Wisconsin, Wallace got 34 percent of the vote. In Indiana, 30 percent. And in Maryland he scared the hell out of Johnson's campaign by getting 43 percent.  This vote illustrated as White put it "the fear white working class voters have for the Negro."

Goldwater hoped to utilize this tactic to win voters in the North as well as the South. But because his campaign had already isolated the majority of the Republican voters in primaries as well as the moderate leaders, because his rhetoric was so outlandish it scared so many voters (especially after they heard his acceptance speech at the Cow Palace that summer) and most importantly because LBJ was able to argue both for prosperity and equality in his campaign – while engaging in horrible negative advertising as well – Goldwater never had a chance and he knew it almost from the start.

Goldwater would only carry Arizona and five Southern States – Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Georgia. The only other states he came close to carrying were Florida (where he got 48.9 percent of the vote) and Idaho) where he got 49.1 percent. Goldwater had been humiliated everywhere.

But the fact that Goldwater had made a dent in Dixie in a way that no Republican ever had – no Republican had ever carried Georgia, not even during Reconstruction – was an ominous sign. And as White pointed out Wallace's campaign, even more than Goldwater, shows somber implications for Democratic leaders.

For years – ever since the days of FDR – the Democratic power base in the big cities has been an alliance of the workingmen in their unions, the minority ethnic community and the Negroes. Backlash implied that this power base could be dissolved at the polls if the working man were examined realistically.

It was a warning sign for those who paid attention. And Republicans paid more than Democrats.

 

There's an argument as early as 1968 the Republicans had found their winning formula and it came at the hands of Richard Nixon.

Nixon was many things – the majority of them horrible – but the one thing you couldn't say was that he didn't learn from his mistakes and those of others. In 1960 he had tried to balance Northern black votes and Southern white votes and he'd narrowly lost to JFK. So in 1968 he decided to only concentrate on Southern white votes.

After the 1960 census offered 162 electoral votes in the South.  Goldwater had managed to get 45 in 1964. The problem for Nixon was that Wallace was running as a third party candidate. So Nixon spent much of the leadup to the 1968 convention wooing Southern leaders like Strom Thurmond with a plan to try and split as much of the South with Wallace as he could going into the fall campaign.

The other part of his strategy relied on the 'backlash' movement, which was now all the bigger because of the riots that plagued the nations whether they were race riots or on college campuses in regard to the Vietnam War. The fissure in the Democratic party, first with the McCarthy candidacy and the series of events that led to the riots in Chicago, all made clear the liberal coalition that had led to a landslide for LBJ was splintered hopelessly.

Nixon's strategy involved winning as many states as he had carried in the 1960 election as possible, being able to split off votes from the South and that the blue collar voters from Northern states would defect from the Democrats and go to Nixon rather than Wallace. That strategy was based on dog whistles, lies and chicanery. But it worked because dissatisfaction over the war had pushed an enormous number of regularly Democratic voters across the country out of the party for that election and in many cases for good.

White noted just how much a change this was in his Making of the President series for 1968. In 1964 LBJ had carried 61 percent of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes. Just 4 years later Hubert Humphrey would get just 42. 7 percent of the popular vote and carried out of just 14 states and 191 electoral votes.

The only reason the results appeared to be  close as they were was because Wallace carried 5 Southern states with 45 electoral votes. Nixon's electoral vote total was 302, barely enough to stop the election from going into the House of Representatives. Furthermore the Democrats maintained control of both houses of Congress, the first time in 120 years a President had been elected with both houses of Congress in control of the opposing party.  As a result many Democrats and liberals were able to engage in a kind of magical thinking that it was only history and circumstances that led to Humphrey's defeat.

But the message could not have been clearer. Combined Nixon and Wallace had gotten 57 percent of the popular vote. LBJ had gotten 43 million votes in 1964; Humphrey had got 31 million votes for years later. The liberal coalition of the Democratic Party had cracked and America had made it clear that they were moving more to the right. One could argue that Nixon was lying about having a plan to end the war in Vietnam but he sure as hell had one to win the Presidency and he maximized it.

The fact that the war kept going anyway and the protests kept going and that America was about to enter a period of economic decline might very well have given the Democrats an opening. Unfortunately for them the wrong man stepped in.

In the next article I will look at how McGovern's campaign was disastrous from start to finish and if there was a path to victory from it, it was only one seen with a bizarre hindsight marked with a ridiculous number of asterisks.

Constant Reader May 2026 (YA) White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson

 

 

This is Maple Street…on the last calm and reflective moment…before the monsters came.

Last year I became aware of Tiffany D. Jackson in spectacular fashion with The Weight Of Blood, the most accurate retelling Stephen King's Carrie in the half a century since it hit the best seller list. Mike Flanagan would be lucky to do half as well with the limited series he is scheduled to create of that novel as Jackson does in her version.

In typical fashion I spent the next several months looking for Jackson's previous and future novels: the superb nostalgic riff on the 1990s rap scene in Let Me Hear A Rhyme and her latest novel venture into the world of cults in The Scammer. Then this past month I managed to find White Smoke written in 2021 and what the author considered her first real attempt into the horror genre.

In hindsight maybe I shouldn't have been shocked that she managed to do so well with her version of Carrie; in her first horror novel she decided to pay tribute to arguably the first great horror TV show in history The Twilight Zone. At the center of it is one of the great episodes Rod Serling ever wrote, arguably one of the greatest episode of TV in all time.

'The Monsters are Due on Maple Street' was not the first great episode of Twilight Zone but it was by far one of the darkest Serling ever wrote. It deals when after a mysterious crash all of the power and phones go out in Maple Street. One of the kids mentions reading a comic book in which he saw aliens invade and that they looked like human. The panic starts to spread when one of the cars begins to work at random, and the neighbors start accusing each other. One of them gets shot by accident, the panic spreads and eventually they turn on each other and start burning the houses down. The final twist is one you should find later on but it delivers one of the most famous lines in TV to that point, one that could stand for both the Cold War paranoia of Serling's time and so much of 21^st century America today:

"They pick the most dangerous enemy they can find and its themselves."

That episode Jackson tells us in the afterword is the book's iron spine. I might not have known for sure had Jackson not revealed it. The thing is when you look at White Smoke in its entirety you get the sense that Jackson is almost certainly putting Easter eggs in that she might not be aware of – and perhaps her intended audience might not be – but make this novel all the richer.

White Smoke is told from the perspective of Marigold Anderson, an African American teenager who has just had to leave rehab because of a mental breakdown and for circumstances Jackson's doesn't reveal until the end of the novel. Her mother is a writer who's divorced amicably from her architect father and remarried a white man named Alec. They've become a blended family: Mari has a younger brother named Sammy; Alec a ten year old named Piper.

Mari considers Piper something of a spoiled brat even though Piper's trying to get over a far darker trauma then Mari. A couple of years ago she came home to find her grandmother was dead and had to wait with her until her family came home. Piper's grandmother was the only friend the young girl had but Mari and Sammy are not warm to her – perhaps because of the color of her skin.

Mari suffers from a trauma that has to do with a fear of bedbugs that infected her house several years ago and caused her to suffer from anxiety attacks. The only think that truly alleviated them was marijuana but for reasons we won't learn until the end of the novel, her family has never wanted her to smoke again even though it’s the only thing that has any calming effect. Mari has been trying to make her way through her life on  the back of a self-help mantra "Change is good. Change is necessary. Change is needed."

At this point the Wilson family is moving from their sunny California town to a small town in an unnamed Midwest state called simply Cedarville. Her mother has decided to take a job with an organization called simply The Foundation, and as part of being an artist in residence they get a free house. The free house is wooden, decrepit, with no real furnace and barely any wi-fi signal It's almost a palace compared to the rest of the houses in this section of town which reminds Mari of the opening scenes of The Walking Dead. She barely notices the sign that says Maple Street because its barely been paid attention to.  There's no indication she's seen The Twilight Zone but she sure as hell noticed the signpost up ahead that tells them they've crossed over into a weird place.

Even the welcoming committee admits that this is a decrepit section of Cedarville but that the Foundation plans to make it better. Its only after the neighbors show up that Mari realizes that this is the prominently African-American section of the town with more black people then she's seen in her life. Mari thinks this will be a plus; she doesn't know just how bad it will be – and that's before strange things start happening in her home.

Almost from the start its clear why this house is free: there's a stench coming from it that no one can find and that everyone but Mari is willing to ignore.  Random things begin to go missing and then food starts to go missing. Mari gets a sense that there's mysterious figures around. Buddy, the family dog, begins to bark mysteriously at random. Mari starts having dreams where she's either paralyzed or unable to move or that random figures are in her room. One of the neighbor, Mr. Watson, tells them that there were three different contract companies in four months that had to work the house but never tells anybody why.

One wonders if Jackson is writing so much of White Smoke as a tongue-in-cheek rebuke to Eddie Murphy's famous routine about why you'd never see a black family in a horror movie. "You white folks see blood in the toilet; you go get Ajax."  The difference is the Wilson family isn't entirely staying out of blindness; they cleaned out their savings to put Mari through rehab and a free house is something they can't sneeze at. Of course, there's the added joke that Alec, the white man in the family, thinks that everything is normal which is pretty much keeping with it.

The reference to Mari that might remind fans of Twilight Zone is another classic 'Nightmare at 20,000 Feet' where William Shatner plays a man who suffered a mental breakdown while flying on a plane and is now on a flight for the first time since then when he sees a gremlin on the wing that no one else does. He spends the entire episode first wrestling with his sanity and when he realizes no one will listen to him because of his mental condition, manages to steal a gun and shoots the gremlin off. At the end of the episode he's being assured he'll be all right and he tells his wife: "I know. But I'm the only one who knows…right now." When the final shot reveals the damaged wing, we realize that there is a double triumph: when the aircraft looks at the plane they'll realize that something was on the wing and that Shatner's character wasn't insane.

Mari's condition mirrors that episode, not just because of how her anxiety is triggered by panic attacks – which we finally see happen in horrible detail in the middle of the book – but also because of her former addiction. On multiple occasions her mother feels that it's necessary to do a drug test on her, and we know all of this is conditional on if the relationship doesn't work, she's willing to live with her father again. Furthermore Mari is hampered by her own guilt over what she believes she's caused her family to do, particularly with her younger brother and that she doesn't deserve to be happy. Mari has come to Cedarville because she wants a fresh start and for that reason it takes her a little longer to realize the weirdness.

To be clear some of it comes immediately when Mr. Sterling (Serling with a T!) shows up at their home in the kind of smiling reassuring attitude that would not be uncommon with the representatives of the devil that kept showing up in a lot of Twilight Zone episodes. When they are invited to the introductory gala of The Sterling Foundation the first thing Mari and Sammy notice is that their family is basically the only people of color among all the suits and ties. They also notice that Cedarville's plans for a brand new community go right through where their new home is. Mari wonders how the hell they're going to rebuild where an entire neighborhood is.

When she gets to high school things are even odder. For one thing, there are almost a dozen girls to every boy and the population is almost entirely African-American. The only two people she makes connections with are Yussef, one of the few teenagers who lives in her neighborhood and Erika, one of the only people who has access to weed. The entire high school treats her coldly but Mari attributes it to being the new girl.

Eventually Mari learns about some of the stranger things about this town. How Sterling's brother used to be governor and enacted the Sterling Laws who thought 'drugs were the devil's work as gave mandatory minimums of 20 years for weed. As Erica tells it:

 "He convinced white folks that weed would turn people into addicts who would rob, loot and kill…He dedicated the entire city's budget to 'cleaning the streets. Police were riding around like an army, walking into houses, offices, restaurants, schools, hospitals with no warrants. After the first wave, they started getting greedy, planting drugs on folks."

The prison population grew 900 percent, schools and hospitals started shutting down, folks to the street. And that was the first match that lit up the last riots."

All of this would be familiar to Serling, who lived through the McCarthy era, tried to tell the narrative of Emmett Till in two TV movies that the censors cut to bits and who always argued for civil rights throughout his show – which ended right around the time the riots were starting in Ghettos like Newark and Watts. He would often write about dystopian societies where the state has too much power, most notably in 'The Obsolete Man' where all books and religion is banned. Serling knew that it doesn't take much to build the kind of world Jackson does and he would appreciate her prose.

As White Smoke progresses Jackson tells us of greater sins that deal with Cedarville's past included why the town doesn't celebrate Halloween, the connections the families in power have to run this town and the great generational and original sin that Maple Street is suffering from that dates back decades. It explains much of what has happened in all of Cedarville and why so many in this neighborhood act the way they do; it's not so much a racial one as one of a witch hunt that may have been orchestrated by greater forces. It makes clear that this is a parallel for what Mari is living through right now; she believes she has to punish herself the way this entire neighborhood thinks it has to.

I'm reminded of other Easter eggs throughout the show: most notably how there's a televangelist who always seems to be on quoting the Bible, selling snake oil (or false seeds) and telling everyone to repent. This reminds me of 'Eye of The Beholder', where in a hospital in some unknown place, a leader is preaching conformity while a young woman waits to see if a surgery that will remedy her horrible deformity has worked. Serling never gave an explanation as to where and when that world was; Jackson gives a very real why this preacher is and that he has a very real purpose.

Jackson says that in the afterward that while she is making an entry into the horror genre she believes she's keeping a toe in the psychological thriller space. That is true but only in the sense that The Twilight Zone managed to do both effectively. So much of what she puts into this novel –  powerful forces manipulating small people behind the scenes, the rich and powerful taking from those with less, the use of authority to clamp down on any signs of resistance and using their ability to placate the mob – are very much themes that Serling and his crew of writers would freely make use of in their body of work.

And she demonstrates the ability which I have seen in her later works to emulate Hitchcock when he said he wanted to play the audience like a piano. She does so in so many exceptional sequences that will scare anyone with a pulse. My personal favorite (?) involves the alarms that Mari has set on her phone to remind her of her schedule. One morning she wakes up early to reminder that she doesn't remember setting and in quick succession they become almost omniscient and terrifying with each new reminder.

 And she frequently undercuts with jet black comedy, most of it coming from Alec who is the typical white man who really believes there's an explanation for everything no matter how bad things get. The closest emulation to 'Maple Street' comes when the power goes out in the Anderson home and then the entire street goes black. Eventually the light comes on in their home but no one else's and the entire neighborhood comes ready to raise a mob. Jackson makes it clear just how scary and hysterical this scene is at the same time when everything Alec says pisses everybody else off even when makes no sense:

Oh I see, so you think having power in your fancy new home makes you better than us?

"Fancy?" Alec chuckles. "Have you seen this block.

Someone gasps; the outrage visceral.

"So the Wood ain't good enough for you?" a man yells.

What should be terrifying almost seems to be absurd when they accuse one of the sons of suspicious behavior "because he's walking that dog around." When everything resolves itself the mob disperses and doesn't even apologize even though they completely overreacted.

Though much of Jackson's writing is aimed at white privilege, the even-handedness towards race is clear in this book. Yes the people in Maplewood have a right to be upset but they have spent the entire period taking their aggression out on the wrong people rather than those in power.  She sees very clearly that manipulation has never been a one-way street.

I've been relatively vague on what so much of this book is really about, being content to describe it more on mood then anything else. I believe that's the right approach when you're talking about a horror novel more than most genres. So I'm going to conclude this review with a brief discussion of The Twilight Zone.

There have been multiple attempts to revive it like clockwork almost every twenty years and whether the writers are Harlan Ellison or Jordan Peele, it never lasts as long and is rarely as high in quality. I believe that the problem is that they have tried to copy the mood of the stories but not Serling's approach. Serling would have worn the label social justice warrior proudly had it existed and he did his best to walk the walk when running The Twilight Zone. He did stories which had African-Americans at the lead at times and even hired female directors to work for the show when few would consider it done. More importantly that attitude was reflecting in the stories he told where he used the mask of sci-fi and horror to tell stories where the wicked were punished and the good rewarded. Almost none of the stories in the revivals were willing to do that.

Would Serling look at the world today and be disappointed? Actually I think, like the liberals of the time, he'd be more understanding and say that things only seem worse now then they were when he was first making The Twilight Zone. The idea of an African-American being the creative force behind a revival would have been inconceivable to him when he died too young in 1975. Now such things happen regularly. The world is not a utopia but Serling knew first hand that utopias are dull when you write about them in fiction and almost certainly less fun to live in then they appear. There's no arc of the universe, just an arrow steadily moving. It may move slower then some people want, faster than others, but it keeps moving regardless despite the efforts of those who want to hold it back or push it backwards.

That may be reflected in the ending of White Smoke. For all its very real bleakness, Jackson ends her story in a place more optimistic than Serling would for his Maple Street even if it may not be apparent to Mari or even the reader. Survival is its own victory and she has made a journey that would have been unthinkable at the start of the novel. By the end of the book she has changed her maxim:

"Change is good. Change is not always necessary. But the right change is most definitely needed. "

Serling said something similar in the end narration of another episode:

"…No matter what the future brings, man's capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any changes made by his society, for which three cheers and a unanimous decision rendered from the Twilight Zone.

Jackson's character believe in Serling's philosophy and that's to be applauded as much as anything. That shouldn't be confined to the Twilight Zone either and Jackson's characters believe it.

 

 

Homicide Rewatch: Double Blind

 

Written by Lee Blessing & Joanne Blacke ; story by Tom Fontana & James Shimurara

Directed by Uli Edel

 

It's important to know the difference between what Homicide did that was truly revolutionary and what it just did extraordinarily well. So much of what happens in 'Double Blind' falls in the latter category.

What might seem the most revolutionary part -  revisiting the story of Chris Thormann, a  character we met briefly in Season 1 – isn't that different from what other TV shows had done in the past. Fontana himself had done it more than a few times on St. Elsewhere and even then it was territory that the two other shows that it was frequently company with in the Emmys year in and year out, Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law would do throughout their run, revisiting minor characters and certain storylines sometimes multiple times over the course of their run. By the time 'Double Blind' aired almost every network TV drama was doing so in a course of their long runs: NYPD Blue, ER and Chicago Hope had already done so: the former with cop and criminals, the latter with doctors, patients and even friends of the staff. The show used the passage of time effectively to show how so much of the minor characters had been radically effected by their time on the show while the series regulars frequently barely remembered with the passage of time.

In the case of Chris Thormann it is more personal for Meldrick Lewis. Thormann is one of the last living connections to Steve Crosetti and he played a vital role in the arrest and conviction of Charlie Flavin. So the news that Flavin is being given early parole stuns him more than if this were to come up with another case. It's worth noting that this is the first time in Homicide's run that it has dealt with a parole hearing in regard to a former felon: the series has dealt with old cases and revisited the men they've sent to prison but its never dealt with what happens when they get a chance at freedom. (Fontana had actually visited this scenario  with St. Elsewhere but in a far more melodramatic context for its character and ending.) Lewis is infuriated when he learns Flavin is up for parole after just four years, which would be upsetting enough were it not for the detached matter of the board. They don't even know Crosetti's dead, which infuriates him further. The fact that Flavin has gotten special circumstances – there was a riot and he carried one of the guards to  save a guard and then went back to negotiate the lives of the other hostages  – astonishes Meldrick when he learns the truth.

For all that Homicide chooses to spend the episode looking at it not through the affect it has on Meldrick but rather Chris and Eva. The show is more daring, showing us for the first time the circumstances that led to Chris' shooting and how he ended up blind. We saw Chris through the period of his physical recovery, watched him after his son was born and a lesser show would have him be able to move on. Homicide has never been one of those show and in a season which has been looking both at the pasts of the regulars and the traumas of so many recurring characters, its only fitting 'Double Blind' chooses to do so with one of its first.

Tergesen and Falco were very early in their careers as actors when they were cast in Homicide back in 1993 and both of them have gained a lot in the four years since. Tergesen shows it in that scene where he tells Meldrick just what his life has become like since his world went black and how he's felt impotent in a way that he never has now that he's working in medical answering phones. Falco has a remarkable scene as well when she tells Meldrick just how exhausted it is that her husband has never been able to let going of being a cop and how 'he has to let go of the jazz'.

He gets some encouraging works from Mike, who seems to be trying to rebuild after everything that happened. When he sees Lewis in a brown study and tells him about what's going on with Flavin Meldrick confesses that's he taking on the responsibility of Crosetti and he doesn't know if he can do it. Kellerman assures him that he knows the right words at times and Lewis takes it better then last time. Mike assures him to go help his friend. Meldrick does so by talking through as well as cheering him up by saying that in addition to Gee and Howard, everybody from the Commissioner to Ray Charles wrote a statement is support of Thormann. The officer who Thormann saved is at the parole hearing and what should be an awkward scene shows a kind of unity between those who wear the badge.

But the most powerful moment comes when Chris sets aside his victim impact statement and speaks from his heart and says this isn't about that:

"If this is about whether Charlie Flavin is ready for a new future then I don't know. I'm still working on a future. It might take a year, it might take 20, it might take a lifetime. But I'm gonna get there. And when I do, I promise to let you all know. And then maybe we can talk about Charlie Flavin."

It's a powerful moment, all the more so because Lewis never learns what it is he said. Only Chris and Eva know and neither tell. It works because Flavin's parole is denied

As if that were not enough we see Bayliss and Pembleton officially get back on the horse: "Together again," Bayliss says. "For the first time," Frank gets the last word. Their first official murder will not be a pretty one. In a way we saw the set up for it in the teaser when a young woman came to the squad screaming about how her father beat her mother and that he was going to kill her. We see just how badly the process failed her – and Gee does too – and we see what is the inevitable consequence. It takes a while for the show to get that point when we learn about the murder of Franz Rader, a man shot three times. Cox tells them that its clear the bullets were on a downward trajectory. Brodie has been around long enough to know what this means: "The victim was on his knees." Even Bayliss is impressed.

We learn Franz Rader has beat his wife Lucille multiple times but the battered woman has never chosen to call the police once. After the most recent horrible beating it becomes clear Billie, the daughter, who we saw in the teaser took her mother to the hospital after he nearly beat her to death. Even more shocking is just how willing Lucille is to apologize for Franz's actions and how almost immediately afterward she's willing to testify against her daughter.

This infuriates Frank in  a way we haven't seen in a long time. Some of it may have to do with the breakup of his marriage – he may be projecting Mary's decision to leave onto Lucille's decision to stay – but it more likely has to do with the fact that two hours after her husband died she's willing to sell her daughter out,  Bayliss, for once, is the logical one: he knows two hours later Lucille is still in shock.

At work Rader's partner is fully aware of the kind of man he was with his wife and that he could never discuss it with him. One of his chefs thinks the world of him, thinks he walked on water. This subtle dissonance shows how effectively an abuser can separate his work life from his home life. It's only when his colleagues mentions how horrible his childhood was that Bayliss listens, particularly when he says: "You can't just go back into his childhood and fix it, can you?"

While trying to find the girl Frank and Tim do something we haven't seen them do: try to debate the punishment. In a reversal Frank argues for manslaughter, justifiable homicide while Bayliss is arguing for second degree murder. Both agree that the victim was a bastard but on who the victim is: Bayliss thinks the mother was; Frank thinks Billie was. It doesn't help when they learn that two of the bullets came when he was on his knees and the third when he was flat on his back, a threat to no one.

Billie Rader seems to be doing everything she can to put herself in for the most severe punishment: she's willing to confess when she's finally arrested and when Frank tries to tiptoe around, to find a way for Billie to admit to a lesser charge, she refuses to do it. She seems incredibly angry even when she's confessing to the beatings her mother took, almost as if she blames her mother for taking the abuse instead of her.  No one in the squad feels happy about what they have to do: Bayliss is by far the bluntest and angriest about it, but he's just saying what everyone knows is necessary. "A bottom-feeding, wife-beating member of the tribe," Bayliss admits. Pembleton can only laugh at the irony. "You're the sensitive one, right?"

Monica Kenna's work in this episode is astonishing: we see her powered by desperation in the teaser, anger and indignation in when she's arrested, pride when she shouts about it and finally she starts to cry when she relates her father was begging her not to shoot with his last words. There's never a moment where our sympathy is with Billie even if she would deny that sympathy for herself.

Afterwards Lucille tells the detectives that Franz attacked Billie first and that she only fired in self-defense. This is what Howard predicted would happen and Bayliss is still angry. Pembleton finally calls him on it: "Lucille Rader suffered. She took every beating as if it were her due. Billie, on the other hand…she took all the power and for one moment at least, she won. They were the same. The sin was not their own." Pause. "The sin is not your own."

 That night he goes back to his old district and is greeting by his old commander. He tells Meldrick he'll always miss this and that someday Flavin will make parole. Both of them know this. Chris seems to be willing to let go.

The same is not true in the final scene. Bayliss is at a decrepit home, where his Uncle George, drunken, slovenly and unable to take care of himself is there. He barely recognizes his nephew. "What am I supposed to with my hate?" he asks him. We're a little terrified – but the answer will be somewhat shocking to everybody.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes From The Board

From Simon's Book: The scene where Thormann returns to the Eastern District is taken out of where his counterpart Cassidy returns to the Eastern. In real life Cassidy recovered much quicker than he did on TV.

Its Baltimore: Meldrick and Munch share their mutual outrage over the Orioles decision to move Ripken from shortstop to third base at the start of the 1997 season. (And we'll be talking more about the Orioles and how their year went in just a few months' time.) "Blasphemy!" Munch says. When Lewis dares argue "Ol Cal's lost a step", Munch refers to him as the 'blasphemer to my immediate right."

"Detective Munch" Munch's reaction to Cal Ripken being moved off shortstop. "What's next? Blue crabs with drawn butter and the Union Jack being flown over Fort McHenry?"

One of the best ways that Homicide proves its not your father's cop show is that after talking to a witness Frank says, "Don't leave town." He then assures the pilot he's kidding. When Bayliss remarks on this Frank says with a smile: "I've always wanted to say that."

Not long before this episode was shot Tom Fontana would cast Tergesen and Falco for roles in OZ the prison drama he was working on with HBO. Tergesen would play Tobias Beecher, an attorney who was sent to Oswald as an example by a judge and Falco would play Diane Wittelsey, a female prison guard in Em City.

Hey, Isn't That…Monica Keena, who plays Billie Rader seemed to start her career like gangbusters when she played Oksana Baiul at fifteen in a TV movies. She then appeared in a series of well received independent films including Ripe, Snow White; A Tale of Terror before appearing on Homicide (she used the name Monica Kenna) She then reached a level of coolness by playing the doomed Abby Morgan on the second season of Dawson Creek, before starring in First Daughter and Orange County. Her biggest role was in Judd Apatow's Undeclared, which while not as cult as Freaks and Geeks was nearly as good. She later played Kristen in the 2004 and 2005 seasons of Entourage. After that her career began to slow though she would appear in Private Practice and do voice work in Beavis and Butthead. She's acted only sporadically since then but is currently making something of a return with four projects in development in the years to come.