Homeland Finale: The End Never Justified The Means

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by so many brilliant series ending exceptionally over the past  couple of years, starting with The Americans and following through with Jane the Virgin and Mr. Robot in the past few months. But I walked away from the last minutes of Homeland mainly dissatisfied with what I saw.

Most of the back half of the final season has dealt with the suspicious crash of a helicopter carrying the U.S. and Afghani Presidents after a tentative peace deal. Both Carrie and Saul spent most of the time after that trying to stop the over-his President Hayes from not only going to war in Afghanistan, but starting a nuclear conflict in the Middle East. The difference was approach: Saul spent most of the back half trying to bend a President who was increasingly listening to an ultra-conservative advisor (Hugh Darcy in full oily mode) and Carrie formed an alliance with Gromov, the Russian spy who had been allied with her and spent it trying to make her defect to the Russians – which she did in the last two episodes.

Of course, when Russia obtained the black box – which revealed the crash was completely accidental – Hayes refused to do anything to obtain the box, and the Russians refused to hand it over because they wanted something in exchange – Saul’s contact in the Russian hierarchy. Carrie did everything in her power to obtain the information rationally, but due to the fact the only way she could get it was through Saul’s death, she was forced in the finale to put an op in effect to kill Saul.

The problem with this storyline is that it’s plain not believable. The only constant through this entire series has been the relationship between Saul and Carrie. It’s been filled with tension, there have been multiple betrayals, but after everything that happens, the two share a bond that goes far beyond mere mentor and student. The idea that Carrie would allow her blind devotion to protecting her country – and the way they tried to tie this into Brody’s mission in Season 1 wasn’t close to subtle – would lead to her decision to attack the man she basically loved like a father – is completely and utterly impossible to me.

Equally inexplicable is Saul’s behavior. Considering that he spent all of his efforts trying to avoid a war in the Middle East – was willing to make deals with the head of the Taliban and a Pakistani prime minister who tried to have him killed several years earlier – it is utterly ludicrous that he wouldn’t do anything possible to prevent a nuclear exchange. The explanation he gave to Carrie in their final confrontation was even more surreal. He first said that his contact was the only Russian one they had since Allison Carr – the Russian mole and Saul’s lover in Season 5 – betrayed all of their assets – which is sort of sensible. But for him to argue that the costs of tens of thousands of soldiers lives in the Middle East was a) a regional conflict compared to the greater threat in Russia, and b) the cost of doing business, didn’t sound like something Saul would say. David Estes or Dar Adal, definitely; Saul Berenson, who has been the voice of reason, and more importantly of compassion for the entire series? No, it doesn’t work.

So Carrie went through with her plan, and tried to have Saul killed. The fact that she didn’t follow through didn’t make it any less sickening. So she goes to her backup plan, which meant going to see Saul’s sister in Israel, saying that Saul had died. The Russian asset was exposed, and killed herself. War was averted. And Carrie was now burned in the U.S. Her reaction: “Saul loved me, he trusted me, and now that is gone!” and Gromov’s reaction that this was: “The cost of doing business.” Basically the reaction was that espionage guts everything.

The epilogue two years later didn’t exactly warm me up either. It was revealed that Carrie had basically spent the last two years writing a book called ‘Tyranny of Secrets’ in which she exposed all the Agency’s and government secrets in her time there. Saul was retiring from the agency, when he got a call from one of his old contacts. In it was a copy of Carrie’s book, and buried in it was microfilm revealing a key Russian secret.

 I expect that the fact Carrie has still remained loyal to her country and has renewed her relationship with Saul is supposed to be a happy ending, but I can’t bring myself to see it that way. The dedication of her book: ‘For my daughter, in the hope that one day she understands”, just sets up ‘the cost of doing business’ as being too high. Carrie has turned her back on every single connection she had in the U.S., burned bridges she can never restore, lost her family, and somehow the idea that somehow she’s ‘doing what’s she great at.” In The Americans’ ending, Elizabeth and Philip lost everything that they had as agents to, but at least after all the horror they still had each other to hold on too. Carrie has a relationship with Gromov (Costa Ronin was much more effective playing a doubtful KGB agent in The Americans, by the way) which is just based on a lie. Her daughter will be raised to think of her as a traitor. And maybe Saul knows the truth (and the shot of his face near the end shows he did understand) but the odds are he’ll never see her again. There’s just no joy to be found in any of it.

Homeland was a far more erratic series than so many others of the Golden Age, but it could be frequently and often brilliant too. But like Mad Men and The Good Wife, it couldn’t stick the landing. Maybe it would have had more relevance if we weren’t living in the era of a pandemic – compared to what we’re going through now, nuclear annihilation seems positively tame – but I have a feeling even if had aired last fall, it would still seem out of touch. It doesn’t quite lay to waste everything that came before – this didn’t play like Lost or Dexter -  but I have a feeling it will not make rewatching it easy. Homeland, in its way, was the perfect series for the post 9-11 world, but like 24 Gordon’s other masterpiece, it badly blunted itself near the end. I really hope Claire Danes and Mandy Patinkin don’t come back in six years with Homeland: Enemies Foreign and Domestic. I think it might even be more out of touch than the final incarnation of 24 we got or the finale here.

Retrospective on Homeland, Part 2: Presidential Politics on the series

When one discusses politics in Homeland, one can’t help but notice the clear demarcations between it and 24. After the first season, every subsequent day on 24 made the focus on the White  House as critical as what was happening to Jack Bauer. This was often a great strength of the series (David Palmer was one of the greatest President in TV history and the storyline involving Charles Logan helped make Season arguably the series best one) but it could also be a great weakness. When the 25^th amendment was invoked in Day 2, it was a powerful moment. When it came up again under different circumstances in Day 6, it really seemed like the series was running on fumes.

For most of Homeland’s run, however, the Presidency remained unknown. In fact, we never actually saw a President until Season 6. Before we go into detail there, however, it’s worth looking at the first two seasons.

The major terrorist plot at the center of Season 1 involved Brody and Tom Walker, both of whom had been turned by Abu Nazir, to coordinate an attack that would kill much of the Washington hierarchy, including Vice-President Walden, who was about to launch a run for the White House. Walden had been head of the CIA several years earlier, and had unleashed a drone attack that killed dozens of civilians, including Nazir’s youngest son which would result in an escalation on Nazir’s attacks and cement Brody’s decision to become a terrorist. When Brody faltered at the last moment – implored by the words of his daughter – he tried to use the fact that he now had the ear of the future President as a task going forward. Had this actually played out, I believe the series could have permanently been recognized as one of the greatest in history. Instead, much of the political intrigue led to some truly huge blunders.

Rather than focus on Brody and Walden’s relationship, Gordon and company spent much of Season 2 dealing with the relation between Dana and the Vice President’s son, apparently not having learned the lessons of Kim Bauer in 24. Even this would have been excusable had the storyline gone anywhere. But after seeming to reach a critical moment, the writers dumped the story in the middle of the season. Worse, they carried with a storyline where Brody was called upon to give the code to the Vice President’s pacemaker so that Nazir could hack and murder the man – which still didn’t seem to be his endgame.  Perhaps because the entire storyline was so messy, the writers chose to abandon American politics entirely for the next three seasons. This may have helped immensely because when they dove into it during Season 6, they came in guns blazing.

Throughout most of Season 6, it was shown that Carrie was an unofficial advisor to then President-Elect Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel, doing superb work). Throughout the season, public and private attempts of both the army and the intelligence agencies were done to undermine the President, including a coordinated effort by right-wing talk show Brett O’Keefe (Jake Weber) to public undercut her and to hack servers to artificially build a following. By the end of the season, as I mentioned in the previous article, it was clear the agency was planning a coup and assassinated much of the President’s inner circle, including her chief of staff.

Even after the coup was thwarted, O’Keefe continued to act as though the people were the offended party. Several military and intelligence official were imprisoned, but Carrie was still trying to play peacemaker with those that were still standing. Then in the last minutes of the final, 200 intelligence personnel were arrested and held without trial. The last minutes of Season 6 showed Carrie shouting to Keane through a closed door, while she sat in the Oval Office, pokerfaced.

Season 7 began with Carrie back in D.C., trying to undermine the woman she spent all of Season 6 trying to save. The President seemed to be on the verge of becoming the monster the intelligence agency had painted her as, barely taking advice from new Chief of Staff David Wellington (Linus Roache). Yet part of us still sympathized with her. When Wellington tried to explain the military’s code to her, she blasted out: “The last time they tried to overthrow the government was never!”  Wellington spent the early episodes trying to make things smoother, arranging for ‘the 200’ to be released and Saul became her National Security Adviser. But while all of this was going on, there was a new threat: the Russians, embodied by Gromov  (Costa Ronin), who spent all of Season 7 manipulating people to undermine Keane’s presidency. 

And the way it was done more than illustrates just how partisan politics have made our democratic society as susceptible as it is. Carrie spent much of Season 7, trying to convince Senator Sam Paley (Dylan Baker) that Keane was the enemy. When the depth of the Russian plot was reveal, we learned that Paley was part of it – under the name ‘Useful Idiot’. And even learning the true depths of the plot, Paley spent much of the second half of the season, doing exactly what the Russians would’ve wanted. Setting up a plan to impeach the President, and trying to convince the Vice President (Beau Bridges) to assume command from a leader he just didn’t trust. (Whether this is a message about sexism or partisan politics was never made clear; it’s worth noting that even when the climatic mission to Russia was going on; Paley was urging the Vice President not to back it up.)

And perhaps it is clear that this happened during the final moments of the seventh season, appropriately titled: “Paean to the People.” Keane has been restored to the Presidency, and is about to give a speech about sanctions on Russia. Then she tells Wellington that she’s ‘just going to wing it.” In a speech that should’ve put Marvel at the front of the Emmy speech, she spoke impassionedly, not about the crisis and threat, but ‘how easy it is. Right now, it seems democracy dies when we’re not looking… Right now, half of you don’t believe a word, I say. Effective midnight tonight, I shall resign the Presidency of the United States. Some will say I’m doing this because I’m weak. I’m not. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. Some will say it’s because I’m a woman. Well, if it takes a woman to shock the system, then I’ll do it. A new president takes office tonight. Pray for him.”

But if there has been a consistency to Homeland the last few years, it’s just how fragile the body politic is. President Warner (Beau Bridges), in an effort to try and restore unity, reached across the aisle and picked a Republican to serve as his Vice President. Unfortunately Hayes was an ambitious politician utterly unprepared for higher office, wanting greater responsibility, but unable to handle it. We still don’t know how the final season will end, but one can’t help but think of Saul’s haunting words to Carrie late this season: ‘The truth isn’t much good if no one will listen.” One can only hope those words won’t serve as a death knell for Homeland’s America – or our own.

A Different Look At Homeland: Part 1 Two Critical Characters

A lot has been written about Homeland over the past decade – in many ways, it has been a perspective on terrorism in this decade in a far more nuanced way than 24 ever was. However, so much has been written about Carrie Matheson, Saul Berenson and Nick Brody – the central triumvirate that made up the first three seasons of the show – that less attention has been paid to two major characters that were on the series far long than Brody, but never got quite their due when it came to awards. I’m talking of Dar Adal, the company man and close friend of Saul, played memorably by F. Murray Abraham, and Peter Quinn, his loyal and ultimately doomed soldier, played with even more depth by Rupert Friend. (Admittedly, they weren’t completely ignored: both received nominations for Best Guest Actor in a drama, twice and once respectively.)

We met both Quinn and Adal in the middle of the second season of Homeland, in the midst of the operation to try and bring down Abu Nazi, the terrorist at the center of the first two seasons. Peter’s initial role seemed to be that of a red herring – brought on to the task force by the higher-up’s; our natural suspicion was that he was untrustworthy and possibly the mole in the CIA. (One of the biggest gaps in the entire series is that there was clearly an information leak in D.C. for Nazi, and though we found many others in later season, this one was never revealed.)  Eventually, Saul would recognize him as reported to Dar Adal, someone Saul, who had very few friends anywhere seemed to trust implicitly for the first half of the series.  

Peter Quinn in particular became a real outlier for much of Homeland. He seemed to have a real clear perspective on right and wrong. Ordered by David Estes to kill Brody after Abu Nazi was killed, he refused outright to do it. And while he was willing to follow orders throughout the subsequent two seasons, it became very clear that he had a lot of problems with the agency’s method of doing business, and was constantly threatening to resign. He was the only person would stand up to Carrie, particularly during their stint together in Kabul during Season 4. After a drone strike went horribly wrong, which led to a slaughter of a wedding party, he went back and tried to resign. Carrie basically bullied him into rejoining Kabul to try and bring down a key Taliban agent (a character that would be crucial to the final season), a period of deception which led to her having an affair with that man’s teenage nephew. At one point, Quinn actually said to her: “Is their no f…in line you won’t cross?!”   And the end result was in turn disastrous, leading to Saul’s abduction by the Taliban and the eventual attack of the embassy.

That may have led to some kind of internal struggle for Peter, because he abandoned his post to go on a suicide mission to try and kill this leader. “There’s a Taliban flag hanging over my head, and I can not let that stand.” Carrie went on a mission to pull him back, yet nearly followed through with the assassination herself.

Unspoken throughout their relationship in Season 4 was a clear attraction. In the final of Season 4, when both of them seemed about to leave the company, they seemed on the verge of acting on it. Then, due to some misunderstanding, Quinn volunteered to go back to Iraq. The combination of this as Adal’s manipulations (which I will refer to momentarily) led to Carrie resigning from the CIA at the end of the season, and her efforts in subsequent years to try and atone for what she did.

Something fundamental changed in Peter in the gap between Season 4 and 5, because when we meet him again, he’s basically a train killer, and Saul and Adal’s most loyal soldier.  When he learns Carrie is on a kill list in Berlin, he risks his life to save her. He then spends much of Season 5 trying to bring down a cell, actions that lead to him being exposed to sarin gas and landing him in a coma. (There’s a scene where Dar and Carrie try to rouse him from consciousness to try and learn about the plot that spells out the true difference between 24 and this show. In that show under similar circumstances, they receive key information, but the character involved dies. In Homeland, they don’t get that, and Peter worsens anyway.)

At the end of Season 5, it seems certain Peter will die. Dar tells Carrie that Peter had named her executor of his estate, something she didn’t know. He gives her a letter that Peter wrote, and leaves. The last moments of the season have a voiceover in which Peter expresses what he never could to her in real life – that she was his great missed opportunity. Carrie is seen closing the windows, and nearing the ventilator keeping Peter breathing. The assumption I’m certain everybody (myself included) made was that she was about to end her friend’s suffering. For whatever reason, Gordon and company chose not to kill him off – and gave Quinn and Friend a truly glorious exit.

Dar Adal was a different type of character – a lifer who seemed to be on the outside. His name would imply that their was a Middle Eastern background, which was never explained, and he was certainly gay. (In Season 6, it was confirmed by both Quinn and Adal that when the latter recruited Peter, there was something sexual involved. Peter referred to him derivatively as ‘a dirty old man.) Adal was loyal to Saul, but that did not stop him from being loyal to the company. When Saul was named interim chief of the CIA after the bombing in Season 2, Dar was by far his most loyal soldier. When Andrew Lockhart, Saul’s replacement was trying to wield influence, Dar negotiated around him to help his friend. After the Taliban kidnapped Saul in Season 4, Dar leveraged a deal with Afghani people to somehow bring Saul back to the company. It was this negotiation that led to Carrie’s initial break with Saul.

But Dar’s loyalty was always more with the company. During Season 5, when it appeared that Saul was a hostile agent, he reluctantly led the investigation into his friend. He didn’t want to believe, but he knew that anything was possible. At the same time, he managed to negotiate his relationship with Peter into something much firmer; it was much stronger by then.

All of these manipulations climaxed in Season 6. Peter had survived his brush with death, but it was clear he was not the same back. His balance was permanently altered, he clearly was brain damaged, and there was some part of him that clearly wished he had died in Berlin. He was under Carrie’s supervision, and it was clear that he didn’t feel grateful for whatever she had done. Friend had always been good in his stint on Homeland, but in his final season he was magnificent, playing a man who was not even a shell of himself, and yet still had the residuals of what had made him so deadly.

By the end of Season 5, Saul and Dar had reconciled and were now dealing with a new President – President-Elect Keane. (I’ll deal with the Presidential politics in my next article) Keane was clearly a dovish force – she believed in pulling out of the Middle East, and wanted to scale back the agencies. Adal and others in the intelligence community didn’t trust her – “She’s a menace, Saul,” Dar said early on. This led to the major ploy of Season 6 – the CIA’s determination to pull off a coup. How deeply involved in this Dar was has never been made clear – he was definitely in the midst of the planning stages and tried to remove a major player in Iran. But when he learned just how far his colleagues were going to go, his reaction was one of loyalty not to the company, but to his country. One of his last major actions as a free man was to warn Carrie about the military strike on the Presidential motorcade.

Peter Quinn spent the second half of Season 6 out of play, removed by Dar out of affection. When the company tried to remove him, he found the traces of his old skills, and moved heaven and earth to be reunited with Carrie and learn just what one of his old teams was up to. In his final episode, he realized just how dangerous what was coming – and sacrificed himself to save the President-Elect. “That man just saved our lives. Who was he?” “Peter Quinn.” Carrie and the President’s last exchange was one of the most haunting in television history.

In the aftermath, when asked by Saul when he had gone along with something so horrific, Dar could only say: “I don’t know…There’s something about her that struck me as dangerous.” In a larger sense, he was right… but that’s for the next article.

Maybe Don't RUN to see This Show

I’ve never been wild about the high-concept comedy series. It’s hard enough to try and pull these kinds of ideas off as drama; to try and maintain such an idea for laughs has always struck me as a balancing act that’s rarely worth the effort. And historically, there hasn’t been a huge pay-off for them; for every Russian Doll, we get a Black Monday or a Camping.

So for a comedy series to work, it really needs to fire on all cylinders from the first moment. And so far Run, which has been buzzed about for weeks by critics and HBO as the next big thing, really doesn’t seem to be worthy of it. And it doesn’t help matters that the concept is really far-fetched to begin with.

Ruby seems to be stuck in a boring life. She has a husband and a family, and she just seems stuck with the mundane. Then in the opening minutes of the Pilot, she receives the text RUN. She texts RUN back, gets out of her car, buys a plane ticket, runs to a train station and gets on a train. A little after that, this red-haired man named Billy shows up and sits next to her. They start having a conversation and it becomes clear that they were friends in college, and fifteen years ago, they designed ‘an escape plan’ that if life ever got too much for them, they would text RUN to each other.

That seems to be the whole plot. And I’ll be honest with you, this barely seems to be enough to fill up a eighty minute independent film, much less an eight episode TV series. Now maybe if we got some kind of insight as to why they would after fifteen years do something this crazy, I might be more willing to buy into it. But Run seems to focus on them recapturing some kind of youthful nostalgia rather than give an explanation as to why they’d do it in the first place. And given their antics – which I would find sophomoric and childish if they were still in  college – I really wonder why either of them would want to abandon their careers and lives. There’s also the fact that within an hour of being back together, it becomes really clear that they can barely tolerate each other. When they try to have sex in a train compartment in the last episode, it’s messy and chaotic and doesn’t come off, and just leads to a stunt where they try to get a total stranger to have sex with Ruby. He doesn’t buy any of their antics for a second, and I don’t blame him.

This whole idea for a story seems labored, and worst of all not funny, which is heartbreaking because of the talent involved. And I think the big problem is the casting. Merritt Weyer has spent her career on television – from Nurse Jackie to Godless to Unbelievable – playing steadfast, grounded people. They may start out being flighty, but they have gravity. I don’t believe for a second she would torch a marriage and two kids simply because she got a text message – she’s the kind of woman someone impulsively might run away from, not the other way around. Domhnall Gleason is, if anything, worse, because he’s annoying from the moment you meet him. And there are so many good actors attached to this project who I haven’t even seen yet  – Archie Panjabi, Rich Sommer, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge as a producer – that you really question their agents judgment in bringing them this project to begin with.

Now, I can understand the need for escapist fare right now, but on top of everything else RUN seems badly timed. In a world where everybody is stuck in their houses for who knows how long, why on Earth have a comedy about two people who ignore every rule we live by, and impulsively run off together? This may be meant too be light-hearted, but everything about comes off as irritating, irksome, and worst of all, not funny. Pairing this series with Insecure is like putting a Renoir next to a Pearls Before Swine panel. (And really, that’s demeaning to Pearls Before Swine.) There are lots of things I wish I could run to right now. This show, I just want to avoid.

My score: 1.25 stars.

Brightest Stars In Late Night: Staying up Late with Desus & Mero

When the ads for Desus & Mero began running on Showtime early in 2019, I had no idea who they were. But almost immediately, I liked their nerve and flair: They introduced themselves as ‘Ray Donavan’ and ‘Billions’ respectively, which just goes to show how fond they would be of biting the hands that fed them. When they made their official debut last February, I decided to give them a chance. I have never regretted it.

Desus Nice and Kid Mero have an approach to late night, which borders on the revolutionary. For one thing, well, there are two of them. No straight man and comic, no lead and sidekick; Desus and Mero are equals on their stage. There’s the fact that their both African-Americans, but that works very much in their favor. There’s also the fact that they seem never to take anything seriously, which if you’ve watched all of the network comedies and most of the cable ones is refreshing in it’s own light. And I think the biggest part of what makes them so light-hearted is the fact that they may be the only late night show on the air anywhere that doesn’t put politics front and center. There are no arguments about mass shootings, no arguments about #metoo, and when race comes into it – and they don’t shy way from that part at all, believe me – they are more intent to focus on what is going on in entertainment rather than politics. On their very first show, they made the argument that Green Book, just a few days from winning Best Picture, was a variation on the ‘white savior’ that has pervaded the culture since at least Driving Miss Daisy. They cheered for Spike Lee – but I think more because he’s from Brooklyn than anything else – they prefer Beyonce over Taylor, and they have segments where they try to identify white actors from TV series that they freely admit they don’t watch.

So what to do with their half-hour? A lot of it is internet stuff, and not necessarily the stuff that the average person would hunt down. To try and even describe most of what they find is to utterly fail to do it justice – one might as well try to paint a symphony. The majority of what they focus on is local news or the kinds of stories that would make up color for background. One of my favorite stories came when they dealt with a story about a woman who seemed to be struggle because she was born with the name ‘Marijuana Pepsi Van Dyck.” They discussed whether this was a ‘struggle’, how exactly you pronounce Van Dyck, (Desus was certain it was Van Dick), and how it felt to be the third child and have your name called.

They do a fair amount of interviews, but a lot of them aren’t the same kind of people you’d expect or the usual approach. They’ll invite Jordan Peele to do an introduction for the next Twilight Zone; they’ll have a beer with Anthony Anderson, or go shopping with Anna Kendrick. A lot of their own byplay is with the off-camera people, who deserve special credits of her own. They’ll caption her responses, and they always seem to take seriously – to a point. Of course, nothing on this show is really serious – both men have beer in front of them from which they drink freely, and there may be an argument for getting drunk in front of the camera if these are the results. Their reactions are always entertaining – both deliver ‘Woooow’ in a way that must be heard to be believed, and when Mero starts laughing, he will often fall of his chair doing so. Considering that almost every late night host goes out of their way to not react to anything, it’s refreshing to see people so enjoying their material.

I’ve mentioned that they weren’t political. That’s not entirely true. Like every late night show host, they’ve had almost every candidate for President on their show. But Desus and Mero don’t engage in policy talk – that’s not their thing. Kristen Gilibrand made them dinner, they had a meal with Pete Buttigeg, they shot hoops with Cory Booker, and tried to see of Elizabeth Warren could plan them out of an escape room. They had a recent interview with Joe Biden, and it basically ended where Mero asked him if he was support the blue flavored Gatorade. (Biden preferred orange.) And their first guest was AOC, but she’s from the Bronx; I really think it was more geographical than political. And they go after local politicians with the bets of them – when De Blasio was running for President, they took special joy in noting how empty his rallies were and that he was polling at 0%. They are more likely to show local news than cable news – they’ve got a thing for one of the broadcasters at a New York 4 affiliate. They didn’t deal with the impeachment or the collusion scandal at all, and will sometimes go for weeks without mentioning the President. For a late-night world where it seems everything must focus on whatever tweets come out of the White House, its actually exhilarating to see people who are still hung up on the Kardashians.

The true sign of their arrival came in their second season premiere where they interviewed David Letterman. They were properly respectful for him (though they did seem to approve more of his beard then anything else) and he gave them his official blessing in which he said: “When I first saw your show, I thought this is something I can get behind.” The social distancing has not really slowed them down, if anything they seemed to have adapted far better than anyone other than John Oliver, and can be very creative. (They once did an entire interview segment which was entirely animated.)

 For those of us who were raised on Leno and Kimmel, this is a revelation as to how late night should be operating these days. Does it help that they only do two episodes a week? Probably. It’s actually a balance that I would be grateful if more late night shows tried. But more than they are vibrant, vital, and can cut through the bullshit in a way that puts a lot of the stodgy white man on late night to shame – and I’m not just talking about the comics. If Desus and Mero are the future of late night, I will gladly take them over any flying car.

My score: 5 stars.

Issa is as Rae-diant as Ever: Insecure is Back for Season 4

I have spent the last twelve years looking for the anti-Shonda Rhimes, someone who embodies the strong African-American female showrunner but is, you know, entertaining. Two major candidates have surfaced in the past few years. The one who by far gives me the most joy is Issa Rae, the extraordinary talent behind HBO’s remarkable comedy series Insecure.  It has therefore been excruciating, not just for me, hut for all her fans out there, that while Rae has been breaking big on the silver screen, we’ve had to wait nearly eighteen months for Season 4 of Insecure. It has well been worth the wait.

As we left her in the last season, Issa is in the middle of trying to organize a block party in her neighborhood to bring awareness to her neighborhood and the black community in L.A.  To do so, she has been helped immensely by her knew powerful friend Condola. However, she has just learned from a mutual friend that Condola is hooking up with Lawrence (Jay Ellis). Yes, her Lawrence. Needless, this makes the season premiere’s  sponsoring session extremely awkward as Issa can’t seem to be within six feet of the woman’s whose help she needs.

There is also a sense that Issa and Molly (Yvonne Orji) who have been best friends since the premiere, may be facing a major separation. Part of it has to do with Issa’s relationship with Condola, which stirs envy in Molly, and some of it has to do with Molly’s own problems with her relationship with Andrew, she started hooking up with late last season. But there are grimmer portents ahead. In a rare flashforward for this show, we saw Issa at home talking with somebody, saying “I’m done with Molly.” Based on the timing, it probably has something to do with the upcoming block party.

For those who might worry about Insecure getting dark, it’s still really funny. Part of it has to do with, surprisingly, the sex in the show. This series has always had a surprising amount of toe-tingling eroticism for a comedy, but what separates it from Rhimes’ territory is that is it a) always plot-related, and b) often hysterical funny. Witness the scene in the season premier where Issa is hooking up with an overweight booty call, and they can’t seem to find the right position. Afterwards, when Issa is making comments on how good missionary is, her hookup said: “Momma always said church is the solution is everything.” And then there were the sexual fantasies Issa imagined between Lawrence and Condola, as they hooked up and discussed every small reason why Issa was inferior. (There was a line about clothing that needs to be heard to be fully appreciated.)

And Rae seems very aware of the pop culture era she lives in, as there always seems to be some black series in the background that speech to the era. This year, it appears to be a Lifetime type series involving the disappearance of a black woman and trying to unearth what happened to her. These kinds of snippets are the kind of thing I only thought Robert & Michelle King could do as well, but for all I know Rae is taking her cues from them.

Rae’s rise to public notoriety has been one of the great joys. And it appears, much like Donald Glover for Atlanta, she has not lost of the magic that makes her work sing. I am fully aware that I completely the opposite of Insecure’s ideal demographic, but just as in the case of Atlanta, the show’s appeal is nearly as universal. If you’re looking for something to tide you over while Glover turns out Season 3 of Atlanta (which wasn’t going to come out till next year before the outbreak0 this is more than a satisfying substitute. In it’s own way, it’s just as much a part of the Zeitgeist. And if it isn’t, it really should be.

My score: 4.5 stars.

Al Pacino Hunts Nazis Through an Eerily Prescient Past: Hunters Review

That Al Pacino is one of the greatest actors who ever lived is basically uncontested by this point. But while he has been duly celebrated for his work in movies, not enough attention has been paid to the impressive list of credits he has amassed on TV. From his extraordinary Emmy winning performance as Roy Cohn in the masterwork Angels in America, he has combined a remarkable body of work with HBO alone, earning nominations and Emmys for playing just unique figures as Jack Kevorkian, Phil Spector and Joe Paterno.

Now, as he enters his sixth decade as a performer, like so many actors of his age, found that the most appealing roles are in television. And he has begun his first work in a series as Meyer Offerman in Amazon’s astounding new series Hunters.

Anyone who says Pacino has been over the top in so much of his work in the past twenty years has clearly been concentrating on his work in film, and not on TV. As Meyer, a billionaire concentration camp survivor in 1970s New York, he is exceptionable subtle and mannered in just about every aspect of his performance, whether it is gently comforting Jonah, a twentyish man dealing with the lost of his grandmother, or strangling a Nazi he has been hunting for thirty years, Pacino is a model of restraint and subtle humor in every aspect of his performance. And that’s a good thing, because every other aspect of this series is delightfully over-the-top.

The main story centers around Jonah (Logan Lerman) a wunderkind who learns after his beloved safta’s murder, that she was hunting Nazis who live in this series’ America, and who are planning their comeback in an America filled with malaise. Meyer has assembled a team of Hunters,  from tech wizards like the Markowitz’s (Saul Rubinek and Carol Kane) to an MI6 agent dressed as a nun (Kate Mulvany) to a seventies film star (Josh Radnor finally gets to out-Barney Neil Patrick Harris).

There is a level of exploitation here that Quentin Tarentino might consider to over the top, but in a way that makes so much of this bearable. The era of Buchenwald and Auschwitz is very fresh in everybody’s minds, particular Meyer’s. When he reveals the horrors the particular atrocities that these monsters have committed, everything goes into shades of black and gray and the horror of all these becomes very clear. And its all the more appalling when we see just how brazen these new Aryans are in their approach. In the very first moments of the Pilot, we met ‘Biff Simpson’ (Dylan Baker getting to chew the scenery in a way he rarely does) an undersecretary of state willing to slaughter his entire family to protect his cover. There’s a character known as the Colonel (Lena Olin, refreshing the villainy she mastered so well on Alias), willing to manipulate elected officials with little patience for the new breed, trying to bring about the ‘Fourth Reich’. And by far the most terrifying character known only as Tobias, the most efficient and terrifying assassin I’ve seen on the small screen since the days of Justified, a man who so calmly and coolly threatens and kills anything that obstructs his boss’ way with no questions asked. You can just seem handing out tiki torches.

And the series does not forget just how blunt the death is. All throughout the Pilot everyone is saying that Jonah should just let this go and go back to his normal life. Jonah insists over and over he can handle, and over and over we see he can’t. He wants vengeance for his grandmother, but its very clear he’s not equipped for it.

Hunters is far from a perfect series. The episodes, if anything, seem a little to overextended, and it can’t seem to decide whether it was revel in the exploitation or live in the horror, so tonally, its very uneven. But the cast is more than up for it, and Pacino is a steady hand for this series. Those who (like me) are frustrated that the next installment of Fargo has been delayed will find this show a more than fitting substitute.

My score: 3.75 stars (of David of course).

It's Time to Get Real: Bill Maher Should Retire

In my years of writing about television, there have been a few areas that I have not written about even though they are among my regular viewing habits. But now that I, like so many of us, have time on my hands, I figure now is the occasion for me to look at those areas. And one of them happens to be late night TV, which I sporadically but occasionally enjoy.

This is the beginning of a series on late night television: those who I’ve enjoyed, and those I think really are past their prime. I begin this series with one of the latter:

Earlier this year, I came to the conclusion that it’s time for Bill Maher to retire. He’s had a good run – bordering on thirty years – but I think even the most rigorous fan of his would have to admit he has passed his expiration date.

To explain why, I have go back to his early days: when he was one of the biggest voices on a fledgling network called Comedy Central.

At the time, Comedy Central was still little more than every other cable network that starts out; it relied on nostalgia from the seventies and eighties. Most of its highlights were reruns of SCTV, Saturday Night Live and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Occasionally, it would venture into something imaginative – Mystery Science Theater 3000 was one of the great accomplishments in TV history – but it basically relied on reruns, stand-up comics, and clip shows. (One of their major accomplishments Short Attention Span Theater was best known for helping launch an unknown comic named Marc Maron.)

I don’t know if it’s entirely accurate to say that the arrival of Bill Maher’s changed the network’s fate, but as someone who watched Comedy Central almost from its inception as a network, there is definitely an argument to be made for that. When Maher launched Politically Incorrect in the summer of 1993, it was really something that hadn’t been seen before. It was a panel show played for laughs in a world that hadn’t even considered it before. Maher was very good at making a good mix – he would have Patty Hearst and Robert Townsend appear on the same show; have G. Gordon Liddy and Harvey Fierstein discuss the State of the Union, and put Chris Rock a comedian who had mostly been wasted on Saturday Night Live doing his real great material. It was something that hadn’t been seen before, and despite many networks attempts to recreate the format, would rarely gel the same way again.

It may just be the haziness of my memory, but Maher seemed to have a measure of cynicism without being completely depressing. He truly seemed to be enjoying what he had put together, and he rarely made himself the center of the show. And that level of behavior was maintained when the inevitable call up to network television came in the winter of 1997.

Many comedians have changed their basic behavior when they move from cable to network – I’m still not entirely used to how Stephen Colbert has shifted formats.  Maher stayed true to himself. Part of that no doubt had to do with being a little later (ABC was still devoted to having Nightline at 11:30pm, so Politically Incorrect came on after midnight), but most of it was due to Maher’s nature. His personality did change much and his cynicism (particularly at the hypocrisy of the Clinton impeachment, which was the high point of his series) at the political process remained undiminished. But despite that, he always seemed to view things through a steady view. And he might well have managed to maintain that viewpoint had outside events not intervened.

The remarks Maher made and the fallout from them have been told and retold so many times that it is hardly worth repeating them. So I’ll just say this: What happened to Maher in the media and in the country was an absolute kangaroo court and an utter travesty of the 1^st Amendment. When Aaron Sorkin and David E. Kelley write about just how badly the media has pilloried you, you’ve reached a level of unfairness that can not be made right. The show was called Politically Incorrect, for God’s sake! Did our desire of irreverence go out the window after 9/11? Or were we supposed to only joke about the subway in New York?

One can’t imagine that this would’ve had on Maher as a person after that or indeed as a comedian. But having seen a lot of the specials he did on HBO before and after his firing, his general irreverence can be seen as taking a far darker tone. Maybe what happened to him left a bitterness that has never gone away; maybe he was always this dark and being free of a network (particularly one such as HBO whose attitude in groundbreaking comedy pre-dated its original programming by at least a decade). Whatever it was, Maher’s comedy was never the same, and there’s an argument to make that he’s never been anywhere near as entertaining since.

Last week in the New York Times, a reviewer of Woody Allen’s autobiography called him ‘a 20^th Century man in a 21^st Century world.” I can not think of a more fitting epitaph for Bill Maher, albeit in a completely different context. I realize that Maher’s show may have been title Politically Incorrect, but his entire lifestyle has been raging against so many of the people he thinks have been destroying our safety – families. I remember him saying in a 2002 routine: ‘Safety is more important than fun” and ‘Children are more important than people”, something that still makes no sense to me. It’s worth that noting that Maher has never seriously dated or even been involved with any woman, even in his sixties, and I can’t help think that some part of his comedy has always been trying to justify his own lifestyle. Everyone knows how much of an atheist he’s been, even before his documentary Religulous came out in 2008, but the longer he’s been on the air, it’s harder to find if he supports anything – aside, of course, from the legalization of marijuana.

Maher claims to be a libertarian and a Democrat, but I think he only supports Democrats when Republicans were in power. He may have hated George W. Bush from the beginning (that’s understandable given what happened to his career) but it’s worth noting that he advocated for Ralph Nader in 2000, and was lukewarm towards John Kerry throughout the 2004 campaign. (I’m relatively sure at one point he advocated for W’s reelection so ‘he could clean up his mess.’ The fact that he argued the week before that W’s reelection was based on running ‘on a mistake’ apparently didn’t seem to bother him.) And sure, he was in favor of Obama in principle during his Presidency, but throughout the entire Obama administration, he continuously railed against the Democrats in power, at one point actually saying: ‘Democrats are the new Republicans’.

Some people have occasionally referred to Maher as a misogynist. I really think he’s more of a misanthrope as much as a reactionary as so many of the Fox News broadcasters he will constantly rail against. The fact that he’s nothing more than an old white man who doesn’t like the way the country’s going doesn’t help his cause that much. In that sense, I think the humorist he resembles the most is H.L. Mencken, who believed the people in general were reactionary, but had huge problems with the Progressives who dominated much of the political era he wrote in. This was, after all, a man who believed in Harding and Landon, and whose last political campaign was spent advocated for Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.

All of this I could forgive Maher’s political views if he were at least funny. And that is perhaps the biggest problem I’ve had with Maher ever since he went to HBO and Real Time. He hasn’t been. All that allowing him to be unchained and uncensored has just made him meaner and more unpleasant.  And his railing against all of the problems that plague America hasn’t been the least been entertaining. Some have admired his openness in an age of everybody being in the bubble in continuing invite political figures who disagree with him virulently. Ann Coulter has been a frequent guest, as have Geraldo Rivera and many Republican leaders. And while I admire his willingness to at least hear out the opposition, in a sense his continuing to pillory them and smear them in his nightly monologue and ‘New Rules’, just basically tells you more about his guests than it does about him.

I do give him credit for recognizing Donald Trump’s rise before everyone else, but you know what they say about a broken clock. And if anything, he’s become more unpleasant to anybody who dares contradict him since Trump took office. In that sense, he’s a little like so many of the newsletters who’ve rail against everything Trump does (except ironically, they’re often so woke they don’t appreciate him either).

And what bothers me the most about Maher is how negative he is. Now that’s nothing new in the age where its getting harder to find optimism, but at least Seth Meyers and John Oliver offer some hope occasionally. Maher just keeps saying things are going to get worse, and no institution will ever work any more, and worst of all he’s not even trying to be funny or entertaining while he does it. He sounds so much like a tired, bitter old man that in an age where there are so many of them dominating the air waves, one wonders why we need another one on HBO.

He doesn’t seem to care about his own contradictions. For years, he’s been railing against the superhero films and TV that dominate every aspect of entertainment, at one point, even saying that they helped lead to the rise of Trump. But he never had much use for entertainment when it wasn’t all blockbuster base. He denounced the Oscars more than once as ‘the awards show for movies nobody watches.’ I don’t think he watches much television outside of the political world he lives, or perhaps even the comedians he performs wits, and he doesn’t seem to have much use for the people in the world, outside his own studio or audiences. In a monologue fairly recently, he argued that ‘fatshaming’ should come back to get rid of the obesity epidemic – something that was so harsh, the normally placid James Corden had a monologue on his own Late Night show to call him on it. My guess is, if the Democrats win the 2020 election even by landslide margins, he’ll still be railed against whatever Republicans are left. He needs someone to rage against as much as any pundit does.

I don’t deny Maher was a great talent once. Unfortunately, that period was the Clinton era, and he doesn’t seem to care that it’s never coming back. We’ve got enough good comic performers in late night these days; I think the last thing we need these days is another white man; especially one who doesn’t even try to care for his own audience. Maher needs to hang it up. Sooner rather than later. Maybe give a regular show to Two Dope Queens or Black Lady SKETCH Show. There would be an irony that I could really get behind.