There Was Neither Law Nor Order, Conclusion: The District Attorneys Who Prosecute The Offenders

 

During the first half of the series, the one steadying influence throughout the constant cast changes that were happening every season was Steven Hill’s fine work as DA Adam Schiff. His job on the series, other than providing acerbic wit, seemed to be to try and make sure Ben Stone and Jack McCoy did their jobs without stepping on to many toes.

Schiff was based on Robert Morgenthau, the actual Manhattan District Attorney when the series began (and for almost the show’s entire run). And Schiff always seemed too subtle as to how he handled the crimes laid at his door. Generally, he seemed to have a better relationship with Ben Stone than he had with Jack McCoy, probably because Stone seemed far less inclined to make his life difficult. If anything, Ben sometimes seemed to marvel at Schiff’s approach towards the law. In ‘Night and Fog’, what seemed to be the mercy killing of a survivor of a concentration camp by her husband became even more complicated when it seemed likely that her husband had done because he had been a collaborator with the Nazi. When Poland wanted to extradite her husband to face trial for his crimes, Stone was conflicted. Schiff wasn’t: “A woman was killed in our jurisdiction.” Stone asked whether Poland: “wasn’t entitled to punish him for the greater evil.” Schiff’s response surprised even Stone: “Greater evil? Since when did you get so philosophical?” This approach was typical of Schiff; his duty was to justice and the State of New York. It was as simple as that.

Jack McCoy probably gave him far more ulcers. I’ve already listed Jack’s greatest offenses, so I won’t repeat them here. But it did give him a fair amount of agitation. That didn’t mean that Schiff wasn’t inclined to bend the law a little himself. When a teenager was murdered with marital arts weapons by a bully as his high school, and it became clear his father had been responsible for a lot of his training, Schiff went even further than McCoy was used to and had the father put on trial along with his son for depraved indifference homicide.

 Such extensions of his office were rare. Relatively speaking, Schiff was a moderate. When the death penalty came back to New York in 1995, he was reluctant to initially use it for prosecution. And even when he did, there were certain limits to how far he was willing to go. In ‘Terminal’, a tour guide spread gunfire into a cruise ship for the purpose of trying to stop one of his bankers from cashing a check that would bounce. As a result, two people were killed. The governor wanted the case prosecuted under Murder One as a death penalty case and pressed McCoy to do so. Schiff didn’t think the case merited, and when the governor removed Schiff from the prosecution, Schiff went so far as to take the governor to court for overreach of his power. The judge ruled against his motion, but the ripple effect was present – as a result, the defense attorney entered this argument into evidence and the defendant was convicted of murder two and sentenced to life without parole.

Schiff didn’t always agree with McCoy’s methods of prosecution and would frequently come to verbal blows with him over the larger effect. In ‘DWB’, McCoy went against Schiff’s orders and tried to have an immunity agreement with a policeman who’d murdered a black motorist and covered up his crime. When the court ruled in favor of McCoy, Schiff was not happy and called it “a ridiculous decision. And (McCoy) was a party to it.” But by and large, Adam was willing to tolerate most of what Jack and his fellow ADAs did.

Steven Hill left the series in May of 2000. He was replaced by Nora Lewin (played by Academy Award winner Dianne Wiest). Lewin had been an ethics professor before being named to the DA’s office, and in many ways, her character was the most liberal DA the series ever had. Even more than Adam Schiff, she went out of her way to moderate the approach the DA’s office took. She was even more reluctant to use the death penalty than Schiff was, and agonized immensely when she had the decide whether to use it on a teenager being tried as an adult. During this period, McCoy tried some of his more aggressive cases – once going after a corporation that owned a fast-food company whose lax methods had led to the death of five children; once trying to go after attorneys who had been running a scam to make money on victims of whiplash. Lewin had a lot of trouble going along with many of his prosecutions, and was not afraid to challenge him. And she held strong to her ethics in a way that very few characters on Law and Order were willing to. On DR 1:102, ADA Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm) entered a hostage negotiation with a man who killed two people and managed to get him to surrender by misrepresenting herself as a defense attorney. Serena was subsequently called before the Disciplinary Committee and Jack defended here. Nora was subpoenaed to testify for the prosecution because of her teachings on the subject. Despite her personal relationship, she didn’t flinch from saying that Serena had crossed the line and by the standards, merited disbarment.

In the fall of 2002, Lewin departed and was replaced by Arthur Branch, played by actor and former Senator Fred Dalton Thompson. Branch was a very strict conservative, almost to the point it even unnerved McCoy a little. He didn’t think electronic communications met the same standards of privacy that written ones did, he generally thought corporations were due far more legal protection than Schiff or Lewin did, he was adamantly in favor of the War on Terror at home and abroad (this would come up in more than a few prosecutions in the show’s later years) and he didn’t really believe in much when it came to the rights of the defense. In 2006, after the death penalty had been repealed in New York and one prisoner was still awaiting sentencing – and then killed two people – he tried to get the federal government to put the onus on the jury to sentence him to death anyway. Jack McCoy, the older got would become more and more rigid when it came to his prosecutions and sentencing, but even he would sometimes admit how uncomfortable he was when it came to following his boss’ directives.

The biggest change in the series came in 2008 when Jack McCoy became DA himself. Partly this was due to Thompson’s desire to seek the Republican nomination for the Presidency that year, but it must also be admit that it solved a major problem for the series’ writers.  McCoy was always partnered with younger female ADA for thirteen years, and the older Waterston got, it was getting increasingly creepy seeing him was increasingly younger women as second chair. It must also be admitted that there was a certain relish seeing Jack, who twisted the bounds of his profession on a weekly basis, now have to deal with a younger DA doing exactly the same things he did to his bosses. Indeed, that gave much of the last seasons of the series more pleasure than we’d had one the show in a very long time.

I’m not going to go into detail with Mike Cutter (very well played by Linus Roache) and his approach to prosecuting. Suffice to say that being in charge may have given Jack a perspective that he was lacking before. He often went against Mike when he did so many of the things that he had done in previous cases. He stopped from trying to intervene in a medical procedure that would have done damage to a child. When Mike pointed out this was very close to a precedent Jack had sent, Jack stood firm and withdrew the motion, saying: “I was wrong then and you’re wrong now.” Mike also stood on a very different perspective than Jack on the death penalty, which caused them argue more than once. And when Mike ended up getting involved in an aggressive prosecution that got him sent before the disciplinary committee: Mike: “I got off easy. Jack: “Did you?” Indeed, he butted heads with Mike’s questioning of his authority nearly as much as Jack did to Adam Schiff’s a decade earlier.

That’s not to say Jack wasn’t willing to overstep his bounds from time to time. In the Season 19 episode ‘Rumble’, a brawl in Central Park which left three dead and eighteen injured became a mess for McCoy to prosecute. So he chose to have several of the assailants charged under a domestic terrorism statute. This alarmed even the overeager Cutter, and his heart really wasn’t in the prosecution. After four days of deliberation, in which two jurors were caught in a brawl, he would do something no ADA had ever told his boss. “Are you satisfied now? The whole city is on edge! What if the jury hangs? Or worse, what if they do acquit? You’re going to look like a laughing stock.” When McCoy something had to be done, Mike actually threw back his suspension of habeas corpus that I mentioned earlier back in his face, adding: “Then you had Adam Schiff backing your play. Now you’re out their on your own. Have the decency to realize when you’re doing more harm than good!” Jack actually listened and allowed Mike to cut a series of deals.

And to be clear Jack was more willing to swing for the fences in his final years. He would indict the half the Bush administration for conspiracy to commit murder in a torture based death in the twentieth season premiere and in the series finale, when the head of the teachers union made it harder for his Das to get information, he threatened to indict him with hindering prosecutions and then to resign his office and ‘represent the families of the victims in a class action against you.” (It may just have been the series finale, but that was angriest I ever remember seeing his character get) But he learned moderation. I’m not sure it was a lesson he ever passed down to his prosecutors.

 

When it comes right down to it, what lessons when it came to criminal prosecution did Dick Wolf and his writers pass down to viewers for twenty years? Was that it went it came to justice anything went? That even if you went beyond the boundaries of your profession, it was all right because the consequences were small to those who did it? That the law was to be used as a sword to punish the guilty rather than as a shield to administer justice? That does seem to be the lesson that we now know the criminal justice system teaches. And we all know that television more than often holds a mirror up to the nature.

This is a more subtle lesson than all the police dramas that show white cops beating up on potential criminals. But considering everything we’ve learned about prosecution over the last few years in particular, it seems pretty clear that Law and Order was more than willing to teach that to generations of viewers. And considering that the series has now been in syndication even longer the original series was on the air, it’s going to be a real difficult lesson to unlearn.

 

A Comparison of the Films of Aaron Sorkin and Adam McKay: Conclusion

 

I’ll be honest; I never had much use for McKay’s early films. This is not so much due to his writing as the fact that for the lion’s share of them, his muse was Will Ferrell, a comedian whose work I have never really enjoyed Ferrell’s entire overblown approach to comedy; I realize it appeals to many, but even when he was on Saturday Night Live, I always found it extreme.  I found there were enjoyable moments in Anchorman and Talladega Nights, even a few in The Other Guys, but McKay’s and Ferrell’s over-the-top approach to comedy basically leaves me cold. That may have been the main reason I was initially very favorable the two very different dramedies, one of which followed to a degree, the same approach Sorkin would be successful with.

Like Moneyball, The Big Short in 2015 took what most would probably consider an unfilmable subject – explaining how the housing crisis leads to the great recession of 2008 - and makes it into a fascinating story. When I saw it, I was initially very impressed with everything about the film – the way McKay told a very complicated story involving financial moves that are way above anybody who didn’t get a degree in economics in a way that most viewers could understand, the way he managed to make it surprisingly funny, and some truly masterful performances from Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale, and especially Steve Carell. But in retrospect, I don’t think the film holds up particularly well. It does more or less what Sorkin does in his films, but his approach doesn’t particularly seem to work that well. I mentioned that Sorkin’s films never talk down to their audience. The Big Short doesn’t do that so much as it talks at its audience. Many of the characters break the fourth wall every five minutes, and frankly it becomes irritating after a while. The film is close to a comedy for a very harsh subject, and I think that’s why I liked it at the time – it seemed to be the only way to tell this kind of story. Then a couple of years later I saw a movie from 2011 called Margin Call, and my opinion changed dramatically.

Written and directed by J.C. Chandor, Margin Call is fictional but is far more powerful. The film takes place over a twenty-four hour period in 2008 at a Wall Street firm that has just survived another round of layoffs. Then a very low-level executive sees something and tells his boss. Basically, he sees what’s about to happen. The movie follows the executives as it goes up the food chain to the very top. Then there’s a late night meeting. The owner tells everybody the market is going to crash. Then he asks them to find a way to save the firm through it. The method they come up with is horrific, and it’s gone along with almost no argument. Everyone at the firm has one concern – saving their jobs. Not one person can be considered nice. The fact that the economy is going to crater and possibly destroy the country barely enters into their thinking at all.

In retrospect, I’m not surprised The Big Short did (relatively) well at the box office and almost nobody saw Margin Call.  I think the latter is the superior film, because it tells us in a way The Big Short barely hints at; that the ‘Masters of the Universe’ almost destroyed the world economic and were more interested in what it might mean for their resumes. The film features some truly exceptional performances from a great cast – Kevin Spacey (before the fall) Simon Baker, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore and Stanley Tucci. Jeremy Irons is extraordinary as the head of the firm. He gives a monologue when the horror show is finally beginning in which he defends everything that has happened and what he intends to keep doing in a monologue that is horrifying in the other banality of how he justifies people like himself. Spacey’s characters response, after being put through the ringer vocationally and emotionally is heartbreaking: “I’ll stay on… but not because of that speech. I need the money.” This film doesn’t try to entertain or inform; it just lays out the facts and the behavior in a way that McKay has to overexplain to everybody.

Say what you will, at least The Big Short tries to entertain its audience. The same can not be said for McKay’s follow-up film Vice, a biopic of Dick Cheney.

I don’t know if a ‘traditional’ film about the life of Cheney, arguably the most controversial figure in all of recent politics, could have been made, but I have to see, even that would be far superior to McKay’s approach, which is basically to do the same thing he did in The Big Short. The first problem is it’s unnecessary. American’s probably don’t understand how the housing markets work, but I’m fairly sure they have a decent understand of how our political system works. Instead, McKay not only has a narrator who tells us everything he believes we need to know (and that has problems which I’ll get to itself) that narrator basically spends half the movie lecturing at us. Considering a biopic is at least supposed to be a character study, that’s a flaw in filmmaking.

The second major flaw is he keeps cutting away from the action of the film to show clips ‘explaining’ things to us. Frankly, I think we could live without them. But he does so instead of trying to let his cast – which is frankly one of the best he’s gotten - perform. You get the feeling that most of them are puppets to this frankly unqualified writer-director. Christian Bale is remarkable as Cheney (though we must give full credit to the makeup department here) and Amy Adams gives an incredible performance as Lynne Cheney, but the rest of the cast – particularly Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld, are basically wasted. The rest basically become caricatures. And that’s before you consider all the tricks that he puts in.

Then there’s the fact that the unnamed narrator (Jesse Plemmons) is ‘revealed’ to be the man who ends up donating his heart to Cheney a few years earlier. This is pat and cheap and seems like an utter waste. All of this would be bad enough if the movie came even close to trying to pulling back the veil behind our most secretive Vice President. It doesn’t even try to do that. I’m reminded of a description of Oliver Stone’s Nixon  – ‘it’s a $50 million term paper.” I think that phrase is more accurate to Vice, except even term papers have to follow some rules in telling a story. This film doesn’t even pretend to do that.

In all candor, I think McKay and the movie world as a whole would be better served if he went back to making obnoxious comedies. His political views are so obvious in his last two films that it’s really difficult to even consider them entertainment. The same can clearly not be said for most of Sorkin’s movies. (It should be noted, however, that between Moneyball and Steve Jobs, Sorkin spent the lion’s share of his time writing The Newsroom, in which any attempt at political neutrality or subtlety is thrown out the window in the Pilot and goes downhill from there. I have a feeling McKay would be more in agreement with Sorkin’s politics there.) I don’t know whether or not I agree with McKay’s initial statement about their politics, but when it comes to their making serious subjects entertaining to the masses, Sorkin wins by a landslide. And I’m looking forward more to his next project than McKay’s.

 

A Comparison of the Movies of Aaron Sorkin and Adam McKay, Part 1

 

Last week, while perusing the New York Times Magazine, I saw an interview with TV and filmmaker Adam McKay. ‘Interview’ is actually a loose term; it was a diatribe. (At one point, he interrupted his interviewer.) I won’t go into details, except for one item that really struck me.

McKay was asked about his style of film making and the politics involved. When asked if there was a conservative equivalent of him in Hollywood, he said: “I think my closest equivalent on the right would be Aaron Sorkin.” To quote the great Amber Ruffin, when I saw this: “I was like, whaattt?!”

Aaron Sorkin? The writer who spent the better part of the third and fourth season on The West Wing fully attacking the idiocy of Republicans? The writer whose Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was such a disaster because it spent the lion’s share of its time berating politics? The writer who spent the entirety of Season 1 of The Newsroom explaining to everybody the evils of the Tea Party, the Koch Brothers, and Scott Walker? That guy’s too conservative for you?

Leaving aside the unanswerable question of just how far to the left McKay must be by that standard (I don’t think Bernie or AOC would fit his politics by those measures), I’ve spent much of the week considering a comparison between McKay and Sorkin. And there is a very clear contrast along with some similarities. Both men spent a lot of their early careers in television – McKay wrote for Saturday Night Live from 1995-2001, and we all know where Sorkin spent much of the 2000s working. Both went into films after awhile. But both had gone in radically different directions in their filmmaking; Sorkin’s films were for the most part, apolitical; McKay wrote wild comedies and does some very political films. And I think there is a critical difference in their approach to films over the last decade that drastically represents how they view the world.

So in this article, I’m going to look at the movies both Sorkin and McKay have made over the past decade to given an overarching example of how they view the world and perhaps more importantly, how they view their audience. (Because I haven’t seen Sorkin’s latest film, Trial of the Chicago 7 I’m not going to discuss it.)

Now it’s worth noting that two of Sorkin’s earliest films The American President and Charlie Wilson’s War were very political – you could see The American President as what would be the bible for The West Wing and Charlie Wilson’s War took a very look how at how the Soviets in Afghanistan ended the Cold War, but also very clearly laid out just how badly we, as Wilson himself is quoted in the end titles: “f…ed up the end game.” But in these movies (and in a stark contrast to what we got in The Newsroom) Sorkin never forgot that his principal job was to entertain the audience. There were speeches near the end of both movies that could be considered lectures, but Sorkin would undercut both of them by showing them as entertainment.

For the next three films Sorkin did something that I’m pretty sure any sane critics would’ve consider impossible: he made brilliant, compelling narratives that became critical hits, and in the case of the first two –box office draws – out of stories that most people would’ve consider unfilmable.

The Social Network tells the story of the founding of Facebook; how Mark Zuckerberg, a man with apparently no social skills at all created the most successful social media site in history. The fact that did so without considering the feelings of anybody else, and that he utterly dismissed the only friend he had as just good business, may have been the clearest, and frankly most foreboding insight to the man who became the youngest billionaire in history. Indeed, it’s worth noting that at no point in the entire movie does Sorkin even attempt to make Zuckerberg likable or even relatable. He is an arrogant asshole from start to finish, so we can’t say we weren’t warned. The movie also unfolds in flashbacks from deposition were the other vital characters are suing Zuckerberg for stealing from them and throwing them out of the company. We really should’ve considering that a warning.

I’m not saying that more than a decade later, we can watch The Social Network with innocence (if we ever really did; Sorkin never lets his subjects or the audience off the hook). But it’s hard to deny its power. It takes a story that you’d think was comprehensible and does it at a fast pace, snappy dialogue and genuine wit. Its small wonder Sorkin won an Oscar for it.

If anything Moneyball, Sorkin’s follow-up, should’ve been an even harder film to sell – it’s a baseball movie that deals almost entirely with the front office, rejects athletics for mathematics, and doesn’t even have a happy ending – the A’s have yet to win the championship despite their game changing approach. But Sorkin somehow managed to make this story work, in my mind, even better than The Social Network. It helps immensely that Brad Pitt is in the lead as Billy Beane, A’s executive. This is one of Pitt’s best roles as a man trying to build a winner with no money, following methods that go against everything his scouts and front office think, and with no certainty at the end. It’s a sweeter movie than Social Network with some genuinely cheerful moments that deservedly got Sorkin his second consecutive nomination for Adapted Screenplay.

I’ve never been entirely sure what to make of Sorkin’s biopic of Steve Jobs. I’ll admit it’s a more interesting approach than the Ashton Kutcher version that came out a few years earlier. We see Jobs just prior to introducing three major projects in 1984, 1991 and 1998. But at no point in the entire movie does Jobs come across as sympathetic, likable or even tolerable. Part of the problem may be the work of Michael Fassbender in the title role. He was best known to American audience as playing Magneto, and that level of arrogance and detachment is present throughout the film. He turns on everybody in the entire films; the techs that won’t do what they tell him is impossible, the executives who tell him his ideas are bankrupting Apple, he won’t even acknowledge his own daughter, and is somehow surprised at the end of the movie that she utterly hates him. I’ve never been entirely sure what Sorkin was trying to say in his portrait of Jobs, and it’s telling that perhaps the most pertinent comment comes from Steve Wozniak, after Jobs utterly humiliates him before a major presentation: “It’s not binary, Steve. You can be gifted and decent.” There is no indication in the film that Jobs ever was. Even the last minutes of the movies, where he seems to open himself just the slightest bit to Lisa, the daughter he once said could’ve father by 26 percent of the population, has always seemed to me like just another business opportunity to me. I’m not surprised this movie was a box office disaster; not even Sorkin’s brilliant dialogue can make you feel anything for this man as either an icon or a human being.

Molly’s Game is a different story, probably because it’s far more human. Telling the story of Molly Bloom, a former Olympic athlete who ended up running a high stakes poker games where Hollywood stars and Russian mobsters would end up playing, it is entertaining practically from beginning to end. Molly goes out of her way not to present herself sympathetically, but because of the situation she’s in – facing indictment under a trumped up RICO charge – it’s impossible for us, like her attorney, not to feel for even as we chastise her decisions. The movie has some of the greatest performances in any Sorkin film. Jessica Chastain has made a habit of playing hard to like beauties, and she is perfectly cast in the title role. Idris Elba as Charlie, her unlikely attorney, gives one of the greatest performances of his entire career, including an absolutely incredible monologue near the end of the film that absolutely should have been the center of getting him an Oscar nomination. And Kevin Costner gives a small but utterly exceptional performance as Molly’s perfectionist, seemingly indifferent father. In an incredible scene near the end of the movie, he does something that would be utterly impossible in any other actor’s – or writer’s  - hands and explains to Molly and the audience exactly why she did what she did and that she’s wrong about one of the greatest assumptions that has driven her life. If the movie has a flaw, it’s that we never really understand why, even with her back against the wall, Molly will not turn on her patrons, many of whom we have seen viewed her with other contempt through most of the movie. And I’ve never understood what the last line was trying to tell us. (To be fair to Sorkin, I repeatedly misheard it, and had to use subtitles to know what it was. To be fair to me, I’m still not sure what it means.) But it’s still an utterly joyful and entertaining ride from beginning to end.

If there is a constant theme throughout Sorkin’s writing, it’s that his characters are smart, witting and speak quickly – I’m reminded of Roger Ebert’s reference to Tarantino in that, like him, you’d love his movies if they were books on tape. And for all their complicated subjects, Sorkin’s characters never talk down to their audience. You can’t say the same for McKay’s films which I will discuss in the next half.

There Was Neither Law Nor Order: Part 2, How Jack McCoy Was More Conservative Than Scalia

 

Among the many, many differences between Ben Stone and Jack McCoy was how both looked at the death penalty. When Stone was in the DAs office, New York didn’t have it, but in ‘Vengeance’ in the middle of trying to convict a serial killer with a tricky lawyer, the Connecticut DA – where one of the victims came from – tried to persuade Stone to allow that state prosecute because they had the death penalty. While the argument for changing jurisdiction was pretty shaky, one of the major arguments Stone had for not going along was because he believed the death penalty more an act of revenge than of punishment. No one could say the same of Jack McCoy who from the moment it was returned to law in 1995, began using it at the center of most, if not all, of his prosecutions, either as a threat for a plea or just as a way to exact justice. The only time he ever seemed to regret it was when he witnessed an execution at the end of Season 6, which shook him to his core… for a few months.

Ben Stone didn’t always play fair with the people he prosecuted, but more or less he tried to stay on the straight and narrow even with the vilest of defendants. Jack McCoy seemed to have no problem twisting and contorting the law so he could get the bad guy – this involved only accepting a plea involving a woman who murdered three of her own children if she would accept sterilization as part of it, using ‘larceny by extortion’ to convict a city councilman who had engaged in sexual harassment, and prosecuting a fellow attorney – and a close personal friend – as accessory to murder for bribing a juror in a trial of a mob boss he represented. And that was just in Sam Waterston’s first season.

Jack was absolutely unrelenting in his approach to any defendant. Stone would occasionally have sympathy for them; McCoy never seemed to allow any defendant – no matter how sympathetic – get away with murder – no matter how reprehensible the victim. And no matter how legitimate the defense might be, McCoy was never willing to hear it. During the early seasons of the series, the show would have a recurring character as court psychiatrist – Elizabeth Olivet, memorably played by Carolyn McCormick. Oliver would listen to the defendant or hear a psychological defense and try to present as realistic portrayal of how much it would be a factor at trial. For the most part, Ben was willing to listen and more often than not, take Olivet’s judgment as a mitigating factor. McCoy has less patience, and it’s telling after a few seasons, Olivet would be phased out for Dr. Emil Skoda (J.K. Simmons) a therapist who in his presentation could be a lot harsher in his judgment of the criminals. (In the latter half of the series run, Olivet and Skoda would be used more interchangeably, but as a rule McCoy seemed to prefer Skoda’s arguments to Olivet’s, more often not letting her testify when she presented a picture that disagreed with the prosecution.)

His harsh approach to prosecution would be difficult to defend but often meet the standards of the procedural. What was far harder to defend was Jack’s very tenuous way of how he played with the defense. On more than one occasion, he withheld vital evidence from the prosecution and there was a lot of evidence that he’d been doing it before. In ‘Trophy’, a serial killer who was fitting the pattern of a man McCoy had convicted five years ago was arrested – and confessed to the other two murders. Going back over the case, McCoy learned that his second chair – and former lover – Diana Hawthorne had withheld exculpatory evidence under the understanding that’s what he wanted. He then arranged to have his current lover – Claire Kincaid, who also knew his habits of withholding evidence – to prosecute Hawthorne. At no time during the entire trial did he admit to any wrong doing.

Two years, in ‘Under the Influence’, after a drunk driver killed three people, McCoy did something far more reprehensible. He engaged in a malicious prosecution – in conjunction with a judge with political aspirations – to have the defendant prosecuted for Murder One and the death penalty. The understanding – which McCoy never admitted – was that this was some kind of vengeance for the death of Claire, who had died at the end of Season 6 in a hit and run for a drunk driver who escaped with probation. McCoy withheld evidence that could have proved that their was no malice from the defense, despite the constant berating of co-council Jamie Ross. At the last minute, he allowed a witness who had exculpatory testimony who he’d not bother to make available to the defense, which angered the judge so much he was forced to face the disciplinary committee. He managed to escape unharmed. 

And McCoy’s harsh tactics didn’t end after you served your debt to society. In fact, given his behavior in ‘Mad Dog’, he believed prison was for punishment, not rehabilitation. When a serial rapist came up for parole, McCoy spoke against his release. After he failed and the rapist was paroled, a murder took place in the neighborhood that fit his profile. McCoy focused the entire weight of the Das office in putting him back in prison, though there was insufficient evidence that he was even the culprit. He harassed the parole board; he made it known in the neighborhood and at his place of employment that they had a known sex offender. When he tried to move, he made sure that other states knew of it and wouldn’t take him.  All while keeping the suspect under twenty-four hour surveillance, actions that even made the detectives a little squeamish. (This takes a lot considering what Lennie Briscoe saw over the years.) The episode ended with the parolee being murdered by his own daughter, after he seemed to give in to his impulse. All McCoy would say at the end was: “This isn’t what I wanted.” Maybe not, but he sort of set it up.

I could go on and on with all of McCoy’s contortions of the law in how he went after the people who he thought deserved punishment – from trying to send a ten year old murderer to be institutionalized to sending the public defender of a serial killer to prison as an accomplice to murder for refusing to waive privilege and telling the DA’s office where the rest of his victims’ bodies were. But perhaps the most appalling comparison would come with a case involving the Russian Mob. I already mentioned how Stone dealt with the mob reacted by the murder of a witness. The mob was far more overt in their actions in ‘Refuge’ – the witness, a nine year old boy, had his throat cut, his mother and a fellow ADA were murdered, and the mob had intimidated witnesses and were involved in money laundering. His reaction was extreme even by his own standards. Despite the orders of DA Adam Schiff, he suspended habeas corpus and had the mob arrested without being charged or allowed to see their lawyers. When the judge overruled him, he appealed and kept appealing to the point he was about to go to the Supreme Court and stopped only when Schiff held his job in front of him.

Law and Order would often go out of its way to portray most of the criminals on the series as utterly reprehensible beings that deserved no mercy. But even if you’re willing to allow that, it doesn’t change the fact that Jack McCoy spent the better past of thirteen seasons using the New York DA’s office as a sword to punish not only the criminals, but those who just made his life difficult to the full extent of the law. It was judicial activism, to be sure, but somehow I don’t think it’s the kind that so many on the right would complain about. You have to ask the question: what kind of DA would allow him and his colleagues to get away with these kinds of shenanigans? In the final part of my essay, I’m going to discuss those very district attorneys, their approaches to the law, and how that may have affected the vision how justice should be meted out.

Some People Think The Oscar Nominees Are Too Depressing. Some People Don't Understand Hollywood

 

 

Over the past few weeks, there have been a huge number of complaints about how depressing the Oscar contenders are. Bill Maher said that the nominees made him want to step in a bathtub with a toaster. Maureen Dowd has a similar column in the Times today, showing her problems with the film industry and other critiques.

I don’t normally defend the Oscars; I’ve had many problems with their choices just in the past twenty years. But seeing as a lot of these critiques have people in my profession (and both Maher and Dowd) talking out of both sides of their mouths, I think there are some things that need to be made clear.

Let’s start with the most obvious. The film industry doesn’t, and never has, exist to make art. The fact that it often does is a side effect. Hollywood is, and always be, a business. From the days of the studio system, the men who ran the film industry were interested in one thing and one thing only: putting asses in the seats. The whole reason Louis B. Mayer basically created the Oscars was to get more attention for his films and make more money as a result.

Second of all, as long as I have been alive, there has been a constant nostalgia from people all across the political spectrum and every cultural type for the ‘Golden Age of Hollywood.’ What never seems to be asked is just how happy the filmmakers and actors were when it came to making these classics. The studio heads would constantly be saying their scripts weren’t good enough, the directors were over budget and the actors were chattel. They didn’t want art to be produced, and in many cases when it was, they would say it was too expensive and that B-pictures were cheaper and made more money. And that was before censors came into the picture.

Does anyone seriously still believe that people from 1920 to, say, 1967 never swore, never shed blood and never had sex? The only reason it looks that way is because the government, pressed by religious functions, said that if they dared show anything involving language or sex – particularly the latter – they would boycotts the films and destroy the studio? Back then, these people had even more power then they do today, so Hollywood gave in. They didn’t suddenly allow all these things to be put in movies in the 1960s because they were hippie-dippies, either. By then the audience was younger and the government had less power.  So again, Hollywood followed the money.

And for all the talk that Hollywood has also been a bastion of liberalism, the studios for most of the twentieth century were overwhelming by conservatives. They didn’t care about whether minorities or women had accurate representation; they just didn’t want to put off their viewers who were mostly white. May I remind everyone that the biggest box office film for much of the twentieth century was Gone With the Wind. That epic love letter to the Confederacy that said that slaves preferred slavery and women didn’t mind being raped. The movie that the Klan used for recruiting tactics. The favorite film of our last President. That movie. Hollywood would never cast a minority actor before when a white one would do just as well. Witness The Good Earth and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Year of Living Dangerously. The film that won Linda Hunt an Oscar for playing an Asian male photographer.

And the main reason that Hollywood has changed so much in the last forty years is that the system now realizes it can make more money appealing to one demographic – teenage boys – rather than all of them. That’s the real reason we’re deluged by Star Wars films and comic book movies every summer. That’s the reason so many great directors have been limited to making DC and Marvel movies. You really think Ang Lee would make a Hulk film given his druthers? That Kenneth Brannagh would’ve voluntarily wanted to direct Thor? You go where the money is.

Paradoxically, one of the few things that both sides can agree on is that films are not being made the way they want. This has left Hollywood in a place with no wriggle room at all. The people who want art are sick of comic books that don’t tell real stories. The people who want box office don’t want movies that do anything at all to infringe on the source material. When a black storm trooper and a woman Jedi showed in the last Star Wars trilogy, you’d think that the filmmakers had shown twenty minutes of Darth Vader urinating on the American flag.

And that’s the problem. Minorities now have more than enough clout to be legitimate angry when the lion’s share of studio films barely show any one who likes them. But if you even think of trying altering the gender or race of any comic book hero, the Internet erupts that its PC crap. And don’t try to tell them that there have been black, female or gay characters in comic books; they’ve already sworn off those franchise because that was PC crap. And of course, they won’t go to the kind of movies the original complainers bitch about because it’s not their kind of movie.

But of course, there’s no winning with those people who long for a better Hollywood. Bill Maher, whose comments I mentioned at this article’s beginning and who I’ve railed against constantly in this column, shows no empathy or even consistency. For years, he railed against the amount of comic book movies and TV that Hollywood produces. Then two weeks ago on his show, he blames Hollywood for not producing ‘escapism’. And when Martin Scorsese got torched by the Internet for daring to suggest that Marvel and DC movies weren’t really original, did Maher even bother to agree with him? Of course not. He turned it into a joke that Scorsese was remaking the same kind of films.

So what kind of Hollywood actually make in this world? Escapist movies that tell real stories that feature minority people but not in critical roles that aren’t depressing? Who the hell would make that? If critics all refuse to accept blockbusters as films and teenage boys won’t go to art, what kind of film can anybody expect to make?

I’m just as pissed at the way the blockbuster system works these days and how the Academy Awards more and more resembles the Independent Spirit awards. But Hollywood long ago reached on a variation on Lincoln’s famous phrase. “You can satisfy some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time. But you can’t satisfy all of the people all of the time.” The difference is, right now, the last part is the only part that’s still valid. And of course, everyone would prefer to look to this mythical past instead of trying to create a future that could work.

This may be the real reason that TV has gotten so much better over the last twenty years. Yes, the mass hit is basically gone, but by trying to pitch to a single audience, there has been far better imagination and art produced. That’s the reason so many great film actors are working in cable and streaming. That’s where the great roles and stories are.

Ever since TV became available, the film industry was terrified of it, and for awhile was willing to go in to let more creative people work in it and have a lot more freedom. But around the time films started to getting dumber, TV started getting smarter. When movies stopped trying to be blockbusters and art, TV decided to let some of its best creators work entirely on art. TV is a business too, of course, but over the past twenty years, cable and streaming have been more willing to give that kind of freedom. It’s hurt the business as well – more than one executive has said there’s too many TV shows now – but it’s definitely more creative and imaginative than the biggest blockbuster or the smallest indie film. The same things that have hindered the film industry can be worked around because there are entire networks pitching to one particularly graphic or one network willing to make individual series for different demographics. (It probably helps that the awards shows for TV consider Drama and Comedy equal in the eyes of awards. The Oscars decades ago decided only the former was worthy.)

Films, of course, care more about box office, but it’s worthy how much the last years has forced a certain level of change upon them. I don’t think Netflix and Amazon can save movies the same way they helped TV (they probably did some damage to TV when they were trying to help it), but the one thing everyone can agree on is that the film industry has to change. I’d prefer trying to go back to some kind of films for everybody rather than just for one particular audience, but our culture is so fractured that may no longer be possible. What I do hope those who have been so harsh on the industry for awhile realize is the movies have always been trying to take your money before entertaining you. Don’t say it’s suddenly changed.

What If Jeopardy Promoted From Within, Part 1: Will the show get good Buzz(y)?

 

There’s been a lot of negative press for so many of the celebrities who have been guest hosting Jeopardy ever since Alex Trebek’s final shows aired in January. I myself have been doing more than a little piling on myself in this column.

However, before we judge them too harshly, I think that is worth remembering that anybody, no matter how good or qualified they might be, would no doubt undergo harsh criticism for simply being guilty of not being Alex Trebek. There is a great irony to this because I have no doubt when the new incarnation of Jeopardy premiered in 1984; there were millions of older viewers thinking that no one could replace Art Fleming, the original host of Jeopardy in the sixties of seventies. I have no doubt that it was probably three or four years before the most die-hard fan of the show was willing to grudgingly admit Alex was doing a decent job. How can anybody, no matter how skilled or charming, hope to achieve that kind of record in a mere two weeks? It’s frankly unfair, particularly as I’m relatively sure none of the people guest hosting are considering making the job permanent (especially since most of them have day jobs already.) They are doing because they, like all of us, loved Alex and want to pay tribute to him as the show that he made an institution.

That being said, there might be a way to satisfy even the most rigid of Jeopardy lovers, and in a way, the show will be acknowledging that next month. On May 17, Jeopardy will hold is usually annual Tournament of Champions. It will no doubt be a bittersweet affair, not only because it is the first one since Alex has passed away, but because the last five day champion to qualify before he died, Brayden Smith, who won just under $118,000 in five games died earlier this year. (Even more tragically, he died from complications from surgery at the far too young age of twenty-three.) But guest hosting this event will be someone is very familiar with how the show works from the other side of the podium. And no, it’s not Ken Jennings.

Buzzy Cohen, who won the 2017 Tournament of Champions, is one of the most brilliant and entertaining players in the show’s history. He won $164,600 in 9 games in his original appearance and demonstrated a great deal of knowledge and a great sense of humor. After winning three of his games in runaways, when it came down to Final Jeopardy, he wrote down: “What is you ain’t rid of me yet, Trebek?” a response that if it wasn’t stolen from SNL’s parodies of the show in the late 90s certainly should have been. Looking and dressing a lot like Harold Lloyd (a resemblance Ken Jennings himself would point out); he would eventually engage in a memorable Tournament final with fellow champions Austin Rogers and Alan Lin. (You can catch their antics on YouTube without having to look that hard.)

In February of 2019 Buzzy made a memorable return to Jeopardy in the All-Star Tournament, a unique event that featured 18 of the most memorable Jeopardy players from the past twenty years participating as members of a team. Buzzy served as a team captain and did well in every function, choosing the right teammates and being competitive. (Ken Jennings and Austin Rogers were also captains.) Everything worked well until one critical clue which would cost his team a spot in the finals. But it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of good natured back and forth from a lot of the players, and some good natured dumping on Buzzy. Alan Lin said his goal was ‘to utterly crush Buzzy Cohen.” Brad Rutter, after Buzzy mentioned putting him and Ken ‘out to pasture’, said ‘Buzzy’s a fraud.” Buzzy’s response: “They hate me ‘cause they ain’t me.”

Because of this Buzzy Cohen is definitely qualified to host a Jeopardy Tournament of Champions. Which makes me think, maybe the show shouldn’t be looking without for a replacement host, but rather from within. Jennings is considered a lead contender to host the series when they finally settle on a permanent replacement but despite his presence and history with the series, many consider him too bland for the role. Cohen is not, and one could consider his presence on the tournament an audition.

The fact is there are many Jeopardy winners over the past thirty years who I think are as qualified as some of the guest hosts and certainly have the personality for it. Some of them have worked for game shows; some of them write for them. And some of them have the personality and presence that are as good as Trebek’s, if that is not blasphemy.

In the next few days, I will follow this article up with a list of some of the former champions who I believe could do the show proud if they were just given the chance. I don’t know what the odds are of their being considered or even if they’d want the job (some of them might well want to retain their eligibility for playing in future tournaments). But considering some of the choices we’ve seen over the last few months, it’s hard to imagine them doing a worse job.

Was There Either Law Or Oder: A Multi=Part Look at How The Most Successful Procedural Warped our perspective on Justice

 

Around this time last year, as the protests over George Floyd’s death were beginning to gain steam, there was a lot of discussion among critics as to how much damage the police procedural may have done to our nation’s mindset when it came to policing. I was among one of those critics who tried to take a neutral tone – I pointed out how series like The Closer and many of Dick Wolf’s series have skewed the way look at crime, but argued in favor of many of the series on policing that David Simon and Tom Fontana wrote. And while I admitted that this had stained how I watched the original Law and Order, I mostly gave it a pass. I was now clearly looking through rose-colored glasses.

Part of it was because the approach the series took towards policing – which is what the world was focused on – was relatively neutral. Yes, cops approached suspects aggressively in the interrogation room and were very hostile towards perps, but compared to a lot of the other series on TV, it was fairly mild. (In retrospect, the idea that the series was probably the best propaganda agent for the NYPD is accurate.) Where Law and Order truly may have made a mockery of the justice system was in the courtroom itself, as it showed very clearly how much prosecutors would be willing to manipulate the law in order to get criminals in prison.

There is a dual irony in the fact that for so many conservatives Law and Order was viewed as being a mouthpiece for liberal talking points. It is true that the series would go after cops more often than any police drama as well as doctors, executives, political officials, gun manufacturers, and  on a couple of occasions reality TV makers. But in that sense, the series writers would demonstrate just how far prosecutors are willing to twist the law to put people in prison, which says a lot about how far they would go other criminals. The other irony is that for most of the face of justice on the series was played by Sam Waterston, an actor known for being a bastion of liberal politics. Jack McCoy, by contrast, had an approach to the law that would not have been out of place in the John Ashcroft-Bob Barr era.

So now that the nation is going through a larger reckoning of the entire criminal justice system, I think it would be fair to see how Law & Order viewed the approach to criminal justice and what it may say about prosecutors and Das in particular.

One of the more interesting things when we consider Law and Order’s approach to justice is that its iron-fisted approach to crime was not always the picture it printed. Sam Waterston was on the series for so long that many viewers presume that he was always there. In fact, when the series premiered in 1990, the lead District Attorney was Ben Stone, memorably played by Michael Moriarty for the first four seasons of the series. What was fascinating about Stone was that he was a character we almost never saw on television before and really haven’t since: a prosecutor with a conscience. Indeed, there’s an argument that had Ben Stone ever been on a ballot in 1990s New York, he would have labeled ‘Soft on Crime’

Now, I’m not saying that Ben Stone was a softie. When the criminal had violated the law or the code of his profession, he was more than willing to go after them full force. Indeed, watching him deal with a suspect either in his office or in the witness box could be some of the most thrilling moments in the show’s entire history. My favorite episode of all time: ‘Indifference’, an episode that was so borrowed from the Joel Steinberg case there was a disclaimer at the end. In the final minutes as Stone cross examines the defendant, his normally quiet tone is filled with increasing rage as he berates him for his utter neglect. He buries him with his final question, when his voice drops to its lowest yet/ It was magnificent.

But Stone’s quiet approach was indicative of how he handled the job. He would rarely raise his voice at all, but you could tell when he was angry when he would refer to the accused as ‘sir’ or ‘ma’am’. (When he said those words to a defendant, you knew how much contempt he held them in.) Where he differed from Jack McCoy and most of the people in the DA’s office was that he believed truly that justice should be tempered with mercy. In ‘Starstruck’ a clearly delusional fan assaulted a soap star but he didn’t fit the boundaries of criminal insanity. Stone sent him to jail, but felt remorseful: “He should be in a hospital. We sent him to prison.” In another memorable episode ‘Mother Love’, a junkie is found dead and we learned her mother killed her. When Ben learns the explanation, he doesn’t want to indict; his colleague Paul Robinette (Richard Brooks) has to talk him into it. And in one particular interesting episode,  a children’s author who abducted a young foster child from her abusive mother, it becomes clear that she’s delusional, but rather than offer a plea, her attorney wants a trial to take a look at the flaws of the foster system. Stone calls for a competency hearing for her, because while he believes in her guilt, he doesn’t think she belongs in prison.

Stone’s ever present calm was a deep contrast to the inner torments of the actor who played him. Moriarty had a history of mental illness and in the spring of 1993 began to suffer from the extreme delusion that then Attorney Janet Reno was a fascist and that he alone had to stop her from becoming a dictator. His behavior became so erratic that Wolf had to fire him (or he resigned, it’s never been quite clear.) He then moved to Canada, where for a long time his delusions persisted. He suffered severe drinking problems and announced a run for the presidency of Canada. Eventually, he recovered from his illness (he even won an Emmy for his work in the TV Film James Dean.) But its still one of the strangest stories in the history of Hollywood.

Even though his character’s departure was forced, his final episode seemed utterly in agreement with what he knew of him. In ‘Old Friends’, in order to convict a Russian mobster of murder, he bullies the only person who can testify against the killer into it. Immediately after the verdict, the witness is killed, and he realizes he has gone too far. He resigns from the DA’s office. In comparison to how his replacement would handle the Russian mob a few years later, it reveals just the different universe that Jack McCoy and Ben Stone lived in. I’ll get to that in the next part.

 

This Summer Truly Is Cruel: Freeform's New Mystery With A Shocking Twist

 

I have often used this column to rave about some of the more astonishing series that have come out of the basic cable network Freeform. I have been huge boosters of grown-ish and The Bold Type and though my viewing has been inconsistent, I have been impressed by the nature of The Fosters spinoff Good Trouble and the impressive comedy Everything’s Going to Be Okay.  These series are often superb at portraying the modern world and all of this generation trying to find their place in it. Which is why it was probably the last possible location I would expect for a crime procedural, much less one set in the 1990s.

Yet I’ve just come from watching the first two episodes of Cruel Summer, a show so dark and mesmerizing it doesn’t seem to come from the same planet. And yet there are twists to it that make this series something you definitely wouldn’t expect from network TV or streaming.

The series opens over June 21 in 1993, 1994 and 1995. It’s the birthday of Jeanette Turner. In 1993, she appears to be a fifteen year old nerd with braces and pigtails and very cheerful being greeting by her family. In 1994, all of those are gone and her handsome boyfriend is in her room, kissing her passionately. In 1995, there’s no light and her father orders her to get out of bed. Each time, the scene ends with the words: “Happy birthday, Jeanette Turner” with intonations that reveal layers that we don’t yet comprehend.

In 1993, Jeanette is a typical fifteen year old, singing with her two fellow misfit friends and in awe of Katie Wallis, the most popular girl in school. In 1994, she has somehow taken over Katie’s life – her friends are following her, she’s just lost her virginity to Katie’s boyfriend, and her old friends have been discarded. Katie has disappeared and no one seems to have noticed.

By now, we are so ingrained to the way to procedural works and by the scenes in 1995 indicating something very dark has happened that we expect the pilot to end with the news that Katie was murdered and Jeanette was responsible.  Indeed, when a friend comes in with news about Katie, Jeanette seems to know too much and expects that she’s dead. Only she’s not. She’s alive. And the crime that we find out Jeanette has been accused of seems so much more despicable than just murder.

I’m not sure what I expected from episode 2, but I was stunned by what lay ahead. Cruel Summer now takes a look at the life of Katie from 1993, 1994 and 1995. In 1993, she seems the perfect girl with the perfect family and boyfriend – but her mother seems to be something of an arrogant southern belle. (The series is set in the fictional town of Skylin in Texas.) In 1994, she’s a few days removed from being rescued and seems angry at everyone’s attempt to bring things back to normal. And in 1995, she’s in a traumatic spiral that will not be helped when she learns that Jeanette is suing Katie’s family for defamation. You see, Katie has accused Jeanette of seeing her while she was kidnapped and did nothing.

Cruel Summer is radically different from any mystery story I’ve seen in a very long time mainly because the horror of the crime plays second nature to the interplay between the people, especially the teenagers in Skylin. The crime is horrific – Katie was held prisoner by a man who was the future vice principal of the town high school – but we don’t seem to be quire involved in the details of that as everything else. The shifting between time periods is done so subtly that in often comes in a cut yet you have no problem knowing what year you’re in. And there are so many secrets that both families seem to have that are hinted and become laid bare as time goes by. Perhaps the most horrific is the fact that Jamie, the boyfriend Katie has and Jeanette gets is abusive – in both cases, he has clearly hit people and in the future is utterly unapologetic about it. And the series goes out of its way to make sure that neither victim nor accused is entirely perfect – Jeanette does seem to know too much; Katie does seem to have a cruel aspect. In most procedurals, you want to know who did it. In Cruel Summer, we need to know what happened when. That’s something that far too many of HBO and British procedurals don’t seem interested in at all. Special credit must be given to Chiara Aurelia as Jeanette and Olivia Holt as Kate. Both are utterly believable in whatever time period they inhabit and they have to change moods frequently.

I’m not entirely surprised that Jessica Biel, the lead and executive producer of The Sinner the USA series that focuses on why tragedy happens rather than who caused it, is one of the driving forces behind this series. The Sinner is brilliant when it comes to showing just how much wreckage is left behind in the aftermath of a crime, something most procedurals don’t even try to handle. Cruel Summer actually expands on that theme, showing that the wreckage can spread beyond even the families and friends of those involved. The media has pounced on this story in the way it did the Trial of the Century, only this time it’s harder to tell who the real victims are. This series doesn’t have the cast or draw of Mare of Easttown, but its already far more compelling.

Note: I don’t know if this will draw more viewers or not, but the series is also spot on when it comes to all the images of the 1990s. It opens with the sound of a dial up modem, types its forward on a 80s computer, and everybody is watching old videotapes of the news coverage. The 1990s are now effectively a period piece? Man, I feel old.

My Score: 4.5 stars.

Winslet Shines In Yet Another HBO Procedural: Mare of Easttown Review

 

 

Is Kate Winslet the greatest actress working today? Yes, I’m well aware of Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman and Frances McDormand and Julianne Moore – that’s more contenders than I actually thought I’d start with, but Winslet may be the closest equivalent to Meryl Streep than any other actress there is. Winslet had gotten five Oscar nominations before she was thirty – Streep hadn’t gotten her first by the time she was that old. And Winslet seems to rival any actress there is in her ability to conquer any accent imaginable. I don’t just mean being able to do German or Irish or even American; at this point, she’s actually managed to do state dialects better than so many of others. Of course, anyone can do New York or Boston, but how many would even try to do a Philadelphia accent, one considered so difficult to master not even films made in Philadelphia have their cast try to do it.

But here we are in HBO’s newest limited series, Mare of Easttown with Winslet in the title role doing it so easily that you might have trouble doubting she was from Philly. Mare Sheehan is a detective-sergeant working the poor section of a crappy town. And I think its save to say she hates every aspect of her life. It’s not just the grind of doing day to day work – chasing down a man who stole his sister’s Parkinson’s medicine again, then forcing him to go to a shelter because the gas company turned off the heat in his house. It’s everything in her life. She’s in her forties and already a grandmother and taking care of both her daughter and grandson, who’s autistic and barely able to concentrate on anything. She lives with her mother (Jean Smart, continuing a remarkable late career renaissance) who barely seems able to tolerate her and doesn’t bother to tell her that her ex-husband is remarrying. It’s not just that her daughter cares for her father more; it seems her entire family does – they’d rather attend his engagement party than go to an event honoring her.

To be fair, Mare doesn’t seem to like that any more either. Twenty-five years, she made an impossible basketball shot that won her high school team a championship. Not only has everything in her life been downhill since then, but she actively seems to resent that she did in the first place – it seems to have raised expectations that she never met and doesn’t seem to have wanted to achieve in the first place. Even the few friends she has have a hard time tolerating her, and it’s telling that the only person she seems able to open up to is a stranger’s whose arrived in town: Richard Ryan, an author who has also peaked early – he wrote one great book young and has never been able to write another since. (We shouldn’t be surprised that Guy Pearce and Winslet have chemistry; a decade ago they heated up the screen in HBO’s adaptation of Mildred Pierce.)

You want to believe that Mare of Easttown will be a great series – it certainly has the cast for one (among the already listed talents are such solid TV performers as Evan Peters and Julianne Nicholson) and there are a lot of interesting stories going on. Unfortunately, because Mare is a cop, it is inevitable that there will be a murder, probably a horrific one that shocks the town to its core. And sure enough, at the end of the first episode, a teenager mother who we’ve seen being verbally and sometimes physically abused by her boyfriend, her father and a lot of teenagers’ shows up in a river dead. This whole small town mystery was becoming a trope well before True Detective premiered, and to say it’s getting tired is an understatement. Were it not for the presence of so many great actors, I probably wouldn’t give it the time of day. And I do care about what’s going on in Mare’s life and why everything has gone to hell so quickly. I just wish we didn’t have go down the procedural path that we have so many times before with increasingly diminishing returns.

Ultimately, I think Winslet might be able to carry the day. Everything about Mare makes you disposed to dislike her and yet Winslet plays her with such tenderness that you find yourself caring for her character anyway. She plays someone who has been driven into the ground by life, and yet finds the strength to keep going, something we don’t see as often as we should even in the era of Peak TV.  You want to know more about Mare more than you do about the case and the darkness she will inevitably be drawn into. I hope the writers don’t make that same kind of mistake.

My score: 3.75 stars.

Rebel With A Cause: Katey Sagal Leads A Potentially Great Drama

 

    In a career on TV that is now entering its fifth decade, Katey Sagal has always been one of the great forces driving series. Her work as Peg on Married…With Children was one of the most outstanding comic creations, even if you didn’t realize the satiric genius behind it. For the better part of fourteen years, she voiced Leela, the tough talking one-eyed mail courier at the center of Futurama, the animated series so good it survived cancellation twice. And of course, she played the mother of all mothers Gemma at the center of the cult classic Sons of Anarchy, scheming and utterly fearless until the moment her son killed her.

Sagal has been around for so many years in so many series -  8 Simple Rules, Shameless, Superior Donuts – that it’s actually stunning to learn that she made it to her late sixties and has yet to be the lead on a series of any kind. So in a way, it’s fitting that she has taken on the title character of ABC’s Rebel – the network that brought us Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder in the past decade, and yes, there is a very faint Shonda Rhimes connection here. But Rebel is notably different than so many other series from the Shondaland group.  Annie Rebello is based on the life of Erin Brockovich the crusader who was already causing corporations to weep when Julia Roberts won an Oscar for playing her twenty years ago. Rebel is still trying to bring down the bad guys, but unlike Olivia Pope and Annalyse Keating, who seemed to be hated in public and loved by their disciples, the series gets off to present Annie as someone who is in the opposite – the world loves her, her own family and friends are actually starting to getting tired of her. Her own daughter calls her exhausting and is willing to quit her mother’s quest and work for her father, an attorney who defends the corporations her mother attacks (we’ll get to that in a minute) mainly to earn some kind of freedom.

Nor is she alone in that regard. In the Pilot, husband number three (John Corbett looks ageless) is about to divorce her because he’s tired of coming in second to everything. Her gynecologist son (Kevin Zegers) is basic bullied into starting a study for his mom’s latest case and actually seems annoyed when she learns that his mom is right. He chases down a cardiac surgeon for help in this study who he has forgotten that he went out with, and its suggested by a conversation with his sister that the intimacy issues his mom has been passed down to her children. And she basically spends the first two episodes bullying the head of the law firm into taking on her class action to deal with a company that manufactures a faulty heart valve by playing on the fact his wife, who had the heart valve died. You get the feeling Rebel is so sure of her own righteousness that she now no longer has patience for anyone who disagrees with her, even her own family.

Sagal sinks her teeth into this role like it’s the one she’s been waiting her entire career for and she is truly great at it. She’s also backed up by one of the best supporting casts on network television today. Mary McConnell plays the patient at the center of the class action, a woman so withered with pain that you can barely see the woman she used to be. Dan Bucanitsky who was, frankly, the best thing about Scandal, plays Patient X, a battered down professor who is being bullied by a student he gave bad grades for, and whose snide nature wins us over.

But the biggest draw to Rebel, other than Sagal, is Andy Garcia as Cruz, the lawyer who runs the firm that is at the center of the series. Ever since he burst on to the scene in The Godfather, Part III Garcia has never quite gotten the credit that he has been due, even though he has given several extraordinary performances in many independent films. You’d think that because his wife has died from this valve that he’d be on Rebel’s side, but it’s just the opposite. All these years he’s been unable to deal with his wife’s death, unwilling to look at her autopsy and still talking to her picture. Despite this, he is loyal to Rebel, and takes the defection of her daughter to the enemy very personally. The scenes near the end of last night’s episode were powerful as he first accepted that his wife could have been saved and then gave an impassioned speech on defeating the corporation that did this. One can only imagine how angry he’ll be when he learns Rebel’s daughter now represents that firm.

I’ve spent so long deriding any series that has even the hint of a Shonda Rhimes connection that it might seem strange of me to praise this one. But I was a huge fan of For the People, a legal drama that had all of the strengths of those series and none of the constant bed hopping. This series comes from the creator of Station 19 but doesn’t even bear the Shondaland trademark. I have a feeling ABC promoted it as coming from that creator to try and boost its brand to get more viewers. It doesn’t need it. Rebel is a brilliant, angry drama that has come around at just the right time, when the entire world is getting pissed at how badly corporations are screwing us. The world needs more Rebels, and frankly, network TV needs more series like this.

My score: 4.25 stars.

Shameless To The End: A Final Visit With America's True First Family

 

I’m sure there are those who want to look at the 2010s and say that the TV family represented America were the Dunphy-Pritchett clan at the center of Modern Family. Isn’t it pretty to think so. I think a far more accurate accounting of not only American television families but a closer view of America itself are the Gallaghers, the South Side clan at the center of Shameless; Showtime’s longest running series which came to a close last night.

I say ‘close’. One would like to say there were happy endings, but as the Gallaghers knew better than anyone, happy endings are for rich people.  Long before America started to truly look at the ‘ninety-nine percent’, the Gallaghers were the epitome of them. Trying to live from day to day, a family that stuck together despite the horrible cards that they were dealt, much of which was due to their own flaws and those of genetics. None more epitomized than by Frank Gallagher, played to perfection by William H. Macy.

Frank was never an antihero or even someone you could ever sympathize. He was an alcoholic and an addict who only cared about his family as to how as he could use them to get what he wanted. Near the end of the series, Liam the one child who hadn’t given up on him yet, asked if he was proud of his kids. Frank didn’t even hesitate before saying: “Hell, no.” Frank never cared about anybody. He didn’t have an arc or – as he finally faced his mortality from alcohol based dementia, which was poetic justice in a series that never provided any – a redemptive last couple of minutes. He remained unrepentant.

And much as the Gallagher kin would deny it, they were their father’s children. All of them inherited his self-destructive nature. To try and list all their self-inflicted wounds would take a longer article, so here’s how they described themselves during season 9: Fiona: “Bankrupt with anger issues. Lip: “Recovering alcoholic.” Debbie: “Sexually confused teenage mom.” Carl: “Military psychopath. Ian: (Don’t forget) the arsonist felon.” The only reason Liam was alright so far was because he was only eight. He may be the only one who might survive unscathed – of course, he is black.

The Gallaghers took their triumphs were they could – with the ones they loved. Perhaps that was never more clear with the messy, painful (often literally) and heartwarming love between Ian and Mickey Milkevitch. From the harsh beginnings (affected by Mickey’s denial that he was gay which lasted four seasons) their constant problems with the law (they actually ended up sharing a cell – which wasn’t a happy ending) and their feuding families to finally realize they were soulmates and get married in the tenth season finale. They celebrated their anniversary at the Alibi in the finale.

But all their efforts met with struggle. Lip who had the most potential from the beginning of the series, pissed it away and now spends his days in food delivery. He has a family which may sustain him, but he has always put the most strain on himself. Debbie spent much of the last season dealing with issues of abandonment all season and seemed to have found love – with a felon with a rap sheet so long even Carl knew what it was. Carl and his partner were considering buying the Alibi, the bar which Kevin and V, the backbone of the series for its run, are now selling to move to Kentucky. The fact that they have chosen to leave Illinois itself rather than fight a losing battle against gentrification indicates the Chicago – and the America – the Gallaghers are just not a part off. Maybe Fiona had the best exit. She took the money from the sale of her building two years, and left Chicago family.

And Frank finally met his end, first overdosing and his family meeting with his shrugs. Then dying in a hospital alone, with no idea where he was. I’m not entirely sure I bought in to the sentimentality of his last moments – it didn’t seem to fit in with what we knew about him the last eleven years, and it just seemed a little too reminiscent of the last moments of Mark Greene on ER. (Probably not coincidental; John Wells did produce both series.) And I’m not sure his floating off to heaven was the right end, either; if anybody deserved to go to hell, its Frank Gallagher. I did, however, find certain appropriateness in his final message to his children, where he often sarcastic and backhanded ways of saying everything would be fine, to the last he was unapologetic. And it’s also right that his children will probably never read them – Frannie, his granddaughter, colored over them without knowing what they were. By far, the most moving moment exchange came when Lip asked why everyone was asking him to make decisions. Ian told him: “It’s because you’re as close to a dad as we’ve ever had” in much the same way that Fiona spent much of the series being the mom.

The Gallaghers are America. They knew politics had left behind, even as they best represented it. They kept reaching for the American dream, even though they knew it was a sucker’s game. They spent their lives trying to game the system and get by. I may never have really liked Shameless as a series, but giving the country and the world we live in, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect representative of the American family.