One of TV's Greatest Monsters Is Back With Some New Blood. Will This Fix Anything or Just Leave Another Mess?

 

It’s Halloween. All the monsters are walking the streets. And one of television’s greatest monsters – at least according to his own definition – is about to return to the halls of television.

We are a week away from the return of Dexter, the somehow lovable serial killer indelibly portrayed by Michael C. Hall from 2006 to 2013. Next Sunday New Blood premieres on Showtime, supposedly to wrap up the story in a much more satisfactory manner than the viewers got in the final episode eight years ago.

‘Supposedly’ because I don’t believe for a moment that if the limited series is a critical or ratings hit for Showtime, the network will allow it to be the last word. And also because I’m not a hundred percent convinced that the man they have brought back to do the job can resolve it. But backstory is everything, so let’s start at the beginning.

Dexter was one of the most brilliant series in the history of television the first four years it was on the air – that’s the one thing fans and critics universally agree. And as great as the cast was, much of the credit must go to the head writer Clyde Philips who did run the series like a Swiss watch for four seasons. Then at the end of Season 4, citing exhaustion Philips departed the series and according to the fan base and critics, the series collapsed.

I actually hold a minority opinion on this. I hold the fifth season – which featured superb performances from Johnny Lee Miller and Julia Stiles – was the show’s last great one. I consider Season 7, which was messy in a lot of ways, extremely well crafted and featuring two of the best characters in the series’ cannon, Isaac Serko (Ray Stevenson) a Russian mobster whose killing face is as much a front as Dexter’s and Hannah (Yvonne Strahovski) Dexter’s true soul mate. I was even willing to defend Season 6 up to a point. But I am willing to concede there were major problems with the series going forward after Season 4 – which is why I question the wisdom of bringing Philips back, because he’s the one who basically caused it.

Refresher course: For the first half of the series, Dexter was involved with Rita (Julie Benz in one of her best performances) a domestic assault victim with two children. Initially a false front, Dexter found himself almost against his will falling in love.  During Season 3 Rita became pregnant and Dexter married her. Much of what made Season 4 the series finest hour wasn’t just the fact the show had its best serial killer Trinity, AKA Arthur Mitchell (John Lithgow in an Emmy winning performance) it was watching Dexter trying to balance being a husband and father with being a serial killer. That is the reason he follow Mitchell so closely hoping to learn from him… and that led to the series and one of television’s finest hours.

Dexter returns home having dispatched Trinity and has a vision of future with Rita and the kids, Then he walks into the bathroom and finds Rita in the bathtub with her throat cut and his baby son Harry in a pool of his mother’s blood, just like his father had found him when he was born.

I’m not going to deny this was a masterstroke – I put it on my first list of TV’s 50 greatest episodes in 2010 and again eight years later. But in retrospect, you can see the series’ action start to fall from this very moment. Two episodes into Season 5, Astor and Cody Rita’s children depart from the scene to live with their grandparents and are almost never seen again for the remainder of the series’ run. And Harry, for everything he represents to Dexter, is regulated to little more than a prop for the rest of the show. The remainder of the series' run consisted far more of coming up with more intriguing killers for Dexter to chase rather than have him try to put up his front. Now you can blame this on the staff for not being able to continue where Philips left off, but I’d argue that this is as much Philips’ responsibility as it is everybody else. He made the mess that the writers spent the next four years trying to clean up. Do you really trust him to fix it?

And the thing that bothers me more is how New Blood is being depicted. It’s more than a decade after the end of Season 8 where Dexter faked his death and has been living in the woods. He’s still living there in the start of the series and apparently hasn’t killed anybody since the series finale. Now a new killer has started and it looks like Dexter is going to unsheathe his knives again.

Problem 1: Aside from Hall, there’s only one holdover from the series that’s going to be appearing. (I’ll get to that in a minute because that’s another problem.) The thing is, as much as the world would like you to believe that Hall was the only reason fans tuned in week after week, it wasn’t at least for me. I liked watching Dexter stalk killers sure, but I also liked watching the work of David Zayas as the complicated Angel Batista, the brilliantly foul-mouthed Vince Masuka, as impressive with his bloodwork as he was with his vocabulary and the brilliant foul-mouthed work of Jennifer Carpenter as Deb, Dexter’s adopted sister. The writers apparently want us to believe that it’s enough to see (and of course hear) Hall as he goes through life. I’m not sure that would be enough.

Problem 2: Deb is back…as a ghost. Now we all know Dexter spent the last six seasons of the series listening to the voice of Harry, his adopted cop father who gave him the ‘code’ he famously followed. So I get Dexter, just as Hall’s David Fisher did on Six Feet Under, sees dead people. The problem is they seem to be using Deb as his conscience. I don’t buy that. I understand that Deb’s character was fundamentally destroyed by her involvement with her brother – and the viewers (but apparently not the writers) were outraged that the series ended with her dying. This version of her, however, doesn’t seem real.

If Dexter were to be haunted by his past, there are plenty of innocent people who died because of him. There’s Rita, of course and Doakes, the foul-mouthed sergeant who died a villain because he made the mistake of figuring out who Dexter really was. And of course, there’s LaGuerta (Lauren Velez) who found out the truth as well and ended up a victim of both Morgans as a result. So why bring back Deb as his conscience? It honestly seems more like an apology to the fans for killing Deb off.

Which bring me to the third and final problem: New Blood is supposed to be a way to bring closure to everything that went wrong in the final season of Dexter. But the thing is…we know how television works. If the writers were to end this limited series with Dexter ending up in jail or dead, then yes the series would come to an end. But in my heart of hearts, I just don’t think that’ll happen. It is the nature of television – especially in the age of the reboot and continuation of series – to always leave the door open for another season. We saw it with 24, we saw it with The X-Files, and I honestly think given the way Twin Peaks: The Return ended, Showtime would welcome a second season. (A lot of the cast died in the interim, but when that’s stopped Hollywood?) Hell, for all we know the series might involve Dexter teaching his ‘code’ to someone new – maybe even Harry, who the trailers have already revealed will make an appearance in the limited series – and find a way to continue the show that way. Would there be any logic to continuing a series without the central character? No, but that’s didn’t stop 24: Legacy.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going to watch New Blood. I’ve got a lot on my plate TV wise and there are still a lot of more interesting series going on that I want to either catch up on or actually see. (Showtime’s Yellow Jackets premiering the week after New Blood is one such show.) And I’ve been down this road far too many times with basically diminishing returns. I’ve missed Dexter, I’ll admit – rewatching the first two seasons during quarantine made me realize just how much. But that doesn’t necessarily mean I just want to see Dexter on his own. As Showtime – in its tradition – reruns much of the old show in marathons, I’ll take a look and see if I that tickles my fancy with a bone-saw. But honestly, I’m not sure blood in the snow and Michael C. Hall is enough to make me be caught in the woods with him again.

 

I Think I Finally Figured Out Bill Maher...Really this time

Over the last years I have sporadically returned to the nature of Bill Maher, the acerbic and bitter host of HBO’s Real Time. I was going to do what I do with subjects that become more and more tedious and ignore him except for the fact over the last week I’ve had an insight about it from watching his last episode – one that I think that might have a greater understanding of what Maher is. Not so much politically, but philosophically and psychologically.

I watched Real Time fairly regularly the first five years he was on the air, and one thing that I’ve noticed over time is that fewer people show up for his series. In the first couple of seasons after his monologue, he would talk with a guest (either in the studio or via satellite) then go on to his panel of three people. In the early years he would often have another comedian (usually Paul F. Tompkins) give a monologue of their own, then add another guest to the panel before finishing up with New Rules. He got rid of the comic early, which I’m willing to allow was something more about working out the kinks of a new series rather than personal problems, but the fundamental format was the same for much of the first decade. And he was very broad about the guests he allowed – there were as many conservatives as liberal and he would often go into debates with people he was radicalized opposed to. (I vividly remember the back and forth he would have with Christopher Hitchens over the Iraq War.) Even after I stopped watching regularly, it was always clear that Maher really cared about having people with opposing points of view.

This has changed dramatically over the past few years. The guest near the end of the episode has more or less disappeared. The interviews with his in studio guest tend to go on longer, and the panels have shrunk from three people to two. Does this mean that Maher is having more trouble getting people to appear on his show as his views have become more rigid? Is it because he has less patience for people who disagree with him? Or is he becoming more and more in love with his own voice? If I’m being candid, I honestly think it’s more of the last one. There are more unfunny bits to his audience and the New Rules monologues are becoming more rants than anything else. And the guest do seem to be more and more conservative, but I think its less due to the fact he wants to debate them as he wants to berate them. As I’ve mentioned at least once, I think a part of him is truly envious of how so many of the conservative pundits do business: they can say whatever they want, no matter how odious and there are no consequences. I think they are Maher’s kind of people more than liberalism he claims he embraces.

But it wasn’t until his last show that I truly got my clearest insight into Maher. As some of you may be aware Maher tested positive for Covid a few months ago. He got through the virus and seemed fine. Last night, he had an argument with Chris Coons about ‘natural immunity’. “I had Covid…Why should I keep having to be tested for it?” Coons was flummoxed for a moment and I don’t blame him. He just a got look at Maher’s soul and its terrifying.

As we’ve been told for the past two years, the testing process isn’t just for the people who have it; it’s to track the virus so it doesn’t spread to other people. You would think a man whose entire career is based on performing before an audience might at least care a little about passing it on to someone who comes into his studio. Then you remember this was a man who went back to performing before a live audience months before his colleagues in the late night game did so. And a fundamental truth is realized: Maher doesn’t care about his audience except for what they do for him. I’ve no doubt that Seth Meyers hating performing in his attic and John Oliver in a void, but they did because they value their audience’s health more than hearing their laughter. Maher clearly doesn’t.

I’ve often thought that Maher has no empathy at all. He has, after all, made a career of mocking the sensitivities of so many people and not only the ones he has contempt for. Anyone who is offended by anything, no matter how serious, is somehow weak in his eyes. He’ll say in his act that this kind of sensitivity that affects so many people and turns them to vote for Republicans, but he really doesn’t care about what Democrats do either. He made that painfully obvious in a monologue where he openly praised Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema for not allowed the economic bill to go forward – hell, he said they have the right idea. Now I’ve known for years that only reason Maher claims to be a Democrat is because he supposedly hates conservatives. But everything in his act is that of the basic conservative – America was better before, people are too sensitive these days, and everybody who isn’t a white male, should stop whining.

And this actually may tell us about what Maher really is: He basically holds the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the most pessimistic of the Enlightenment Philosophers. To basically explain what one is like: think basically about the behavior of Gregory House and Matthew McCounaghey’s character on True Detective and you’ll have a pretty good encapsulation of what they are.  Maher thinks people are fundamentally bad by nature and that there is no afterlife waiting for them and anything to do to try and make themselves get through life – be it therapy or religion or marriage or even popular entertainment – is basically an evil that is at best a distraction or making everything worse.

And this basically explains a lot about Maher. The only joy he seems to get out of live is performing before an audience. That’s the only thing he seems to do outside of host Real Time. He has no wife and his relationships have not ended well. He has no interest in fathering children. He thinks that comic books have destroyed mankind and he thinks the kinds of films that win Oscars are too depressing. He has no interest in television (he said he’d never seen Breaking Bad) and he doesn’t seem to have a lot of friends, even among his fellow comics. Many comedians will advocate for social causes. Maher actually seems to mock those who do. His sole interests seem to be the legalization of marijuana and telling anybody who disagrees with him that there an idiot. I honestly think Maher wants the end of the world to come, for the sole purpose of telling people: “I told you so.”  Maher may not agree with the fundamental statement of Leviathan – at least for himself – but he doesn’t exactly do much give an argument why it should be better.

I’m sure there are out there Maher apologists who say we shouldn’t let the same standards apply to him because he is a groundbreaking comedian. Except…he never was. Not in the way Carlin or Pryor or Tomlin were before him. Not in the way Chris Rock and Jon Stewart and yes, Dave Chapelle were after him. Even among his contemporaries Maher barely registers as revolutionary – not compared to Seinfeld, but paling to such now forgotten greats as the late Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks.

Maher just had the good fortune to be on Comedy Central when it was starting out. As someone who remembers that era, I should add Maher’s work on Politically Incorrect was not significantly better than Marc Maron or Stephen Colbert who had multiple series around the same time. His series just happened to be slightly more accessible. Maher is basically a comedian who has been trading off his legacy for the last twenty years – or to use a metaphor once applied to George H.W. Bush ‘born on third base and thought he hit a triple.”  For that reason, he has no use for the ones who have come after him and have had to struggle to find their niche exploring tropes he doesn’t have the nerve too. It also explains why so many of the comedians who’ve come after him have little use for him as well.

In a way, I actually think this makes Maher worse than so many of the billionaire evangelists or right-wing pundits he berates a weekly basis. As misguided and horrible these people are to the public discourse, they at least offer some kind of balm to their millions of followers. Maher’s fellow late night comic at least try to offer a modicum of some hope in their monologues about the world, some level of humanity for their viewers to hold on to. Maher basically tells his audience that everything is shit and nothing will get better. And since he fundamentally doesn’t care about their well-being or what they think except for what they do for him, then he’s a bigger hypocrite than the people he berates.

HBO renewed Real Time for another three seasons recently. Honestly, I wonder why. The trope of the aging white male late night host has become increasingly stale over the last few years and the ones who are still involved have made a major effort to keep their acts fresh over the last few years. I do get that Maher does occasionally have a moment where he does seem to speak a certain truth, but it doesn’t take a great deal of insight to do that any more. New Rule: When you rail against conservatives longing for the past and for your next joke, feel nostalgia for how hard it was to find porn when you were growing up…everyone knows who the real joke is.

 

Television After 9/11, Part 5B: Homeland, Quinn, Dar Adal and Fatigue and Reality in the War On terror

In the middle of Homeland’s second season, immediately after a task force was formed to get Brody to try and trap Abu Nazir, two characters were probably the most critical to Homeland’s long term success were introduced, both connected to the other. One was Peter Quinn, played by Rupert Friend; the other was his mentor and an agency stalwart known as Dar Adal, played by Oscar-winning character actor F. Murray Abraham. Both gave brilliant performances (Friend was nominated for an Emmy; Abraham for two) both had very different views on how the War on Terror should be waged, and each would be vital to the arc of the series going forward.

We meet Peter Quinn early in Season 2, as someone a higher-up has brought in for the task force. Given that by this point the viewer is aware of a mole in the agency (a storyline that would carry on for awhile and never be resolved in a satisfying manner) we are inclined to suspect Quinn, especially after a raid on a side ends with almost every dead but him. But quickly we will learn Quinn has something that almost everyone else – including Carrie - really doesn’t: an ethical code. Eventually, we’ll learn that his original assignment on the task force was to keep an eye on Brody and when the job was over, terminate him. In the finale of Season 2, not only does he not do sure he actually goes to the man who sent him and tells him that if he wants the job done, to do it himself. This moral compass will have him constantly clashing with almost everybody in the agency: including and especially Carrie.

We’re never entirely sure how long Quinn has been in the CIA – he’s around Carrie’s age, but based on what backstory we get, there’s a very good possibility he was recruited younger than her. For that reason, in addition to his ethical compass, as early as Season 3 he constantly represents a fatigue with the agency and a desire to leave – something that is clearly frowned upon. This makes up a contradiction of Quinn that is so fascinating. Season after season we will see that he’s a textbook brilliant agent in a way that not even Carrie is, but seeing what has to be done not only by him but everything around him sickens him. In Season 4 which is mostly set in Afghanistan. Carrie has disappeared from the grid at a critical moment to negotiate a young asset connected to a major Taliban figure. This is code for seducing a boy barely old enough to vote in America. When Quinn learns of this, his contempt for Carrie is withering as he delivers one of the most memorable lines in the series: “Is there no f-king line with you?” And in that moment, he basically encapsulates Carrie’s character better than anyone, even Saul, will ever do.

Dar Adal is, if anything, a more shadowy character then Quinn. In the middle of Season 2 Saul figures out that Quinn is working for Dar and from that point on, Dar becomes a critical part of the series. Dar is a walking contradiction. He is more loyal to the company than anyone else, but he’s also just as much an outsider.  His name has a vaguely Arabic origin, so there’s always a certain level of distrust there. It becomes clear later in the series that’s he a homosexual, which doesn’t add to his popularity. (Adal recruited Quinn, and the implication – made direct in Season 6 – is that the two were initially lovers, something Quinn now looks upon with disdain.) Adal is one of Saul’s strongest supporters in the Agency and after the bombing that decimates the CIA leaves Saul as interim director, Dar becomes his biggest booster. As much as he clearly disagrees with Saul on approach, he is loyal to his friends – and this will continue even to a point you wouldn’t think possible.

Carrie and Brody are lovers in the early stages of Homeland and when Brody dies, she is pregnant with his daughter. Carrie is ill-suited to motherhood, to say the least, and after Brody’s death becomes the Section Chief in Islamabad – known only partly in jest, as ‘The Drone Queen’.  In the opening of Season 4, one of her missions leads to the slaughter of a wedding party, and rather than go back home and be with her child, she decides to go back to the Embassy to bring down the Taliban leader responsible. She convinces an even more reluctant Quinn, who is even sicker of the Agency now and questions Carrie, every step of the way.

In this season we get what is by far the most direct anti-Islam slurs in the series – we eventually learn that one of the women manipulating everything is a woman high up in the Pakistani government who is determined to help the Taliban erase every aspect of America from Afghanistan. This starts out as subtly as manipulate a mole in the embassy – who turns out to be the husband of the ambassador – and eventually leads to withholding troops on an invasion of the agency by the Taliban even though her second-in-command protests adamantly. If ever Gordon and the writers were indicating just how anti-American Islamic governments seem to be, it is Season 4. It’s also a very telling commentary on just how badly the war in Afghanistan has been waged – a criticism that actually presages a line we will learn came from military documents years later.

Outraged by the actions of the Taliban, Quinn goes rogue after the U.S. breaks off diplomatic relationship with Afghanistan. His sole intent is to assassinate the man responsible for the attacks. Carrie catches up with him and intends to follow through… until she sees Adal in the car with the leader. It’s never been clear the nature of the deal they strike, but not long after that Saul, who had been fired from the agency is let back in and the status quo with Afghanistan is reestablished. Both Carrie and Quinn make a break of the agency, and for the briefest of moments they seem to acknowledge the chemistry between them and seem about to genuinely start something. But something happens in the blink of an eye and Peter goes on a mission in Iraq. This is the final straw for Carrie and she resigns from the CIA. As we all know, that’s not the end of the story for anybody.

Season 5 was filmed entirely in Berlin, and the flavor of the Cold War will overlay the second half of the series – though the threat of Islam extremists is fairly highly throughout the remainder of the show, from this point on, Homeland recognizes the major threat in the series as Russia.

Carrie has moved to Berlin and is working with a billionaire charity.  She has essentially broken off all relationships with the CIA and is trying as hard as she can to cleanse her hands of the sins she committed. This becomes more difficult when Quinn resurfaces, telling her name is now on a kill list.

One of the clearest cases of an agency mole has surfaced in Season 5 Allison Carr (Miranda Otto) one of the section chiefs in Berlin, and as we learn Saul’s lover. (His marriage which was momentarily saved after the bombing at the agency, finally collapsed after Season 4.) Recruited by the Russians after being trapped in a ‘honeypot’ years earlier, Allison has been the direct line to their government, exposing all of the Agency’s assets behind the curtain, manipulating their interest in Berlin, and framing Saul when people begin to look her way. Dar learns about this and despite their history clearly becomes suspicious – at one point, preparing to take him into custody before he is ‘saved’ by the Israelis’.

Quinn has since become far more jaded then he was in the interim and more determined with his mission. And that will eventually lead to a bad fate. Trying to stop an attack on Berlin, he is caught and exposed to sarin gas. He is saved by Carrie and brought back for treatment. They risk his life to wake him to see if he can help them. What happens may be the clearest definition of the difference between 24 and Homeland. When a situation like this occurred on Day 2, the victim was able to give critical information to CTU before dying. Here, nothing is gained, and Peter’s condition only worsens.

Even though the threat is stopped and Allison is exposed, the end for Season 5 is even sadder than usual. Carrie has no desire to return to the agency and spends the final minutes over Peter’s bed. There she reads a letter that Dar had been holding for him, something he asked him to give her if a scenario like this occurred. It is as close to a declaration of love as a show like Homeland will ever allow. And it seems that they will surely serve as an epitaph, because the last seconds of the season show Carrie drawing the shades of Peter’s hospital room and walking towards the machines keeping him alive.

But as we would learn, this was not to be the final act for Peter Quinn. When I wrap up my article on Homeland, I will discuss the final three seasons of the show, how politics became vital to the story and how in its final seasons, the show served as both mirror and oracle to the world around us.

 

I'm Completely The Wrong Audience for Queens - But I'm Falling In Love With It Anyway

 

There is nothing in my biological makeup or TV history that makes me the right audience for ABC’s Queens.  It has four beautiful female leads with a nostalgia factor – which makes me think of Desperate Housewives right away. They’re all African-American which gives me a Shonda Rhimes vibe and we all know how much I loathe those. Hell, there are already constant flashbacks and flashforwards, which give me a distinct How to Get Away with Murder feel. It’s an ABC drama which involves women in music, which makes me think of Nashville a series I found interesting, then quickly ridiculous. And it involves hip-hop, a genre of music that I have never found accessible. Hell, I never even liked Moesha when I was growing up. Every single element about the show makes it seem like I should run away as fast as I can. So why was so I quickly absorbed that not only did I watch the Pilot, I put Impeachment on DVR for the rest of its run in order to watch it?

The series centers on a hip-hop group that was big at the turn of the century and then kind of collapsed. We meet them at their peak and in the present: Brianna (Eve), ‘Professor Sex’ then, a mother of five now. Jill (Naturi Naughton) big and bold then, now a church going woman in Montana, whose been hiding that she’s a lesbian her whole life, Valeria (Nadine Velazquez) the only one of the group who was able to parlay her time into any kind of success, and Naomi (Brandy) still trying to make it on her own after twenty years, barely speaking to her own daughter. The group is pulled back together when a YouTube star begins playing their biggest hit and they are brought back together to perform. Three of them are happy about it – the minute Naomi sees Valeria they go for each other’s throats. There was a meltdown ‘in San Diego’ that we don’t know the whole deal on yet, but a lot of the problems were always there. The group was originally just Brianna, Naomi and Jill until Valeria invaded. Most of the money they got on advances was spent before they could get it, and everybody still shows hostility towards Valeria for become a smash. (Nine shows out of ten would ignore the fact that Valeria had the greatest success because she’s lighter-skinned then the other three. Queens admits it outright, and actually makes it part of the plot.)

There are all kinds of twists just in the Pilot that would, for the record, be a lot even for Rhimes to handle. Brianna spots her husband cheating in the first five minutes with one of his student, and then learns later that episode he has a brain tumor. Jill finally manages to come out of the closet, first to her friends and then to the world. Naomi ends up telling us that she doesn’t know who the father of her child is, but we know better than that, and she’s still trying to make it on her own. And Valeria does feel guilty for what’s happening but is also trying to recover from a power grab at her morning show which she just lost. Throw in a love triangle with the band’s manager and the fact that the singer who comes with them nearly ODs before the gig and it’s really hard to argue that this isn’t a series that isn’t either trying to be a full-fledged soap or, like Empire, trying to be both significant and camp.

All of that being said – and I haven’t even gotten to the flashforward yet – I can’t deny that I really like Queens so far. There’s a realness and authenticity to all of the performances (I shouldn’t have to mention that three of the leads were hip-hop stars for much of the nineties) that registers in a way that the performances in Empire never really did. It also helps immensely that there’s clearly a bond between the four women that they have never been able to deny and can’t seem to shake even twenty years later. That’s what seems real even in the middle of the soap – that these women are the kind of people who can still give each other the business even after nearly two decades apart. (When Jill announces how upset that the church she went to for her whole life is now rejecting her and she feels like a spotlight’s on her, Valeria says: “You’re a black woman in Montana, and you’re only noticing this now?”)  They hold on to grudges like people who’ve known each other all their lives do, but there’s a real love there and that’s purer than a lot of the other shows I’ve seen that I mentioned earlier.

Oh, I’m aware that, if Queens does become a success, there’s a very good chance it’ll become a soap opera. As I said, the warning signs are there for me to see. But at least the series is acknowledging them going in a way that Scandal and Nashville never did. And I have to admit the series has a solid sense of humor that those series never did and a sense of earnestness that didn’t have. And if there isn’t room on network television for a series almost entirely populated by African-American women by now, there’s a question if it ever will be. I may sound like the whitest man in America if I say this, but I will anyway: Queens is really dope.

My score: 4.25 stars.

Television After 9/11, Part 5A: Homeland, The Rise of the Anti-Heroine, and A New Look On Fighting the War on Terror

 

Many critics and viewers looked at Homeland pretty much from beginning to end as Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa – the series’ showrunners who had been at the center of 24 and recruited many of that series writers – as an apologia for every Jack Bauer and CTU had done during the past decade. Gordon and Gansa fervently denied it and I can understand why because pretty much from the beginning it was clear that the series had completely different approaches and attitudes. 24 was basically an expanded action series; Homeland was essentially a thriller. 24 did everything in service of immediate action; Homeland was all about the long game. The characters on 24 saw things almost entirely in black and white; Homeland was entirely about the grey areas. And never was this clearer then with their choice of lead character.

It’s easy to consider Carrie Matheson, who would be magnificently be played by Claire Danes for eight seasons,  the first real example of what I and other critics have called the ‘anti-heroine’ This is an exaggeration. I’ve already made it clear that Damages featured the struggle between two such characters, and simultaneously TNT developed the series Saving Grace, a show centered on an Oklahoma City detective (one of Holly Hunter’s greatest performances) with much of the same flawed moral compass and hard living behavior that Carrie Matheson would demonstrate a few years later. Nor were even these characters the first examples – Showtime would develop a series of dramedies featuring female characters whose behavior ranked from hard-to-handle (United States of Tara, The Big C) to downright criminal (Weeds, Nurse Jackie). And the critics and audiences were favorable to most of them – Glenn Close and Holly Hunter would dominate the Best Actress Emmy nominations with Close winning two awards, and all four Showtime series would earn multiple nominations for the lead actresses (Toni Collette, Edie Falco and Laura Linney would end up each winning a Golden Globe and an Emmy for their work in their series, while Mary-Louise Parker would end up taking a Golden Globe for Weeds) What makes Carrie the most radical of the bunch is that pretty much from the beginning of Homeland to its end is that she is willing to do whatever takes to get what she wants, no matter how much of an outcast it makes her among her peers.

Carrie is convinced in the beginning of Season 1 that Nick Brody (Damian Lewis) an American prisoner of war retrieved in Afghanistan is working for a terrorist leader named Abu Nazir. She almost immediately begins an illegal surveillance of him, despite the open hostility all of her higher-ups at the CIA believe. The only person who supports her is her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) and even he doesn’t believe in what she is doing much of the first season. For most of the season we have every reason to think Carrie doesn’t know what the hell she’s doing and for good reason: Carrie is a hard drinking, sexually promiscuous woman who has already ruined her immediate superior’s marriage by having an affair with him. There’s also the fact that she’s bipolar and is very reluctant to take her medication – a fact she has gone to great trouble to keep the Agency unaware of.

Her obsession with Brody becomes more and more reckless as the season unfolds eventually lead to her having encounters with Brody, which finally becomes a full on affair. The writers are very smart and don’t tip to their hand for more than half the season – Brody’s erratic behavior can be explained by his trauma and trying to fit into a world that has painfully moved on without him. His wife has been having an affair with his best friend for the past three years (they’re actually in a middle of a tryst when she finds out he has been rescued), his children are strangers to him (indeed, the son barely remembers him) and while he denies knowing Abu Nazir and what happened to a fellow prisoner Tom Walker, we know he’s lying – because we saw that he beat Tom to death in the Pilot. Brody can’t connect with the real world and finds it easier to connect with Carrie.

This leads to what I consider Homeland’s greatest moment: ‘The Weekend’ (I ranked it as one of the fifty greatest episodes of the new millennium a few years back). Carrie and Brody are off the grid in a cabin, in the glow of a sexual affair, and Carrie reveals inadvertently about the surveillance. Brody is incredulous, especially when he learns that it is Carrie, not the government that thinks he working for Al-Qaida. They detail every one of his ticks and he seems to have a plausible answer for all of them. But it ends with Carrie no more satisfied than the viewer – until there’s one more revelation.

This actually leads me to the character I actually found far more intriguing. Saul is the most jaded character who knows everything and who no one seems willing to listen to, neither his superiors nor his inferiors. But it’s clear from the beginning he’s the wisest member of the cast, and the series’ greatest decision was to make the crux of the series the relationship between Saul and Carrie.

While Carrie and Brody are having their encounter, Eileen Faisel, an American woman who was radicalized and is central to the plot is captured trying to escape. Saul persuades his boss to go down to Texas to pick her up and question her. Deliberately he chooses to drive which he knows will take nearly two days. He spend much of the next episode trying to establish a rapport with Eileen, not interrogating her, not even asking her question, just talking. Halfway through the trip, he stops at a school in Ohio where he group – where he was raised an Orthodox Jew and couldn’t even acknowledge his fellow student or play ball. He mentions his marriage to an Indian woman, which is clearly on the verge of collapse. At this point Eileen – who has said barely two words – asks him about his marriage. Saul is honest with her. Finally, he asked her what her radicalization is about: “If this is geopolitical, if this is religious, I can’t help you…But if this about a girl who fell in love with a man with dark skin, maybe I understand.” 

In the next scene, Saul calls his boss with the simple statement: “We have a deal in place.” Saul, in essence has cracked the plot, and revealed that an American prisoner of war was turned – Tom Walker, the man believed dead. In what will become a standard for him, he somehow manages to arrange things so that Carrie gets the credit for it.

In Homeland’s first season, the show would win Emmys in every major category, including Best Actor and Actress for Lewis and Danes respectively. Yet though Patinkin would receive five nominations for his work on Homeland he would never win an Emmy. Considering Homeland’s overall record with the Emmys and the fact that Patinkin had won years earlier for his brilliant work on Chicago Hope, it may be a bit touchy of me to still be a little pissed by this. But for this episode at least, Patinkin certainly deserved a prize.

As for the Brody storyline as a whole, perhaps it would have been better for the show had the writers decided not to make Brody a terrorist as well. That said they did a superb job showing the level of manipulation that everybody was always putting him through. Abu Nazir and his followers were trying to use Brody for their own ends, but the show made it perfectly clear that everybody in the government – from the powerbrokers to the Vice President (a man whose career and behavior was clearly modeled on George H.W. Bush) was using him for the exact same things. And in what was the clearest example of this, the series made it clear that Nazir had become more amplified in his attacks on America after one that killed his son as will as innocent civilians… an attack the Vice President had advertised as being a model strike for the War on Terror. It was a bit heavy-handed, but I don’t know any other series that would have bothered to try and make the point at all.

While I thought the second season was far better than many critics thought, I will acknowledge there were way too many heavy handed moments. Most of them involved Dana, Nick’s teenage daughter in storylines that made it seem that not only had Gordon and Gansa learned nothing from Kim Bauer, but were doubling down on the worst aspects of Day 2. And the plot which ended up with Walden being killed was pretty ludicrous. But the larger storyline – that Brody was serving so many masters that he was no longer sure he could handle it – was still very powerful. And the overarching plot of Walden trying to use Brody for his own political gains much the same way as Abu Nazir was was particularly intriguing.

Still, I think it’s safe to say that every fan of Homeland was relieved when Brody was killed off in the season 3 finale. Thanks to the decision to end this arc, the show was able to go in directions that no one would’ve thought possible, certainly not me. In order to explain these arcs and why they worked so well, in the next article I will discuss the two characters who, with the exception of Carrie and Saul, lasted the longest on Homeland and what their characters brought to the stories that would follow.

 

 

Television After 9/11, Part 4D: 24 Ends...And Ends...And Ends

 

After the glory of Day 5, it was inevitable that the following season would be a disappointment. I don’t think any fan of the series would realize how much of a disaster it would end up being. In contrast to the previous season where everything had been done right, everything in Day 6 was done wrong. There are far too many examples to go into, so I’ll settle for what was the most blatant. Within the first few hours of Day 5, it became clear that one of the masterminds behind the current plot was Graem, the man who’d led the cabal behind Charles Logan. The problem was the writers did so by telling us that Graem was, in reality, Jack’s estranged brother. As bad as this twist was – which honestly was almost the level of the appearance of the cougar in Day 2 – it actually got worse as we learned that Jack’s father, Philip, was behind so much of it. (Supposedly this role was offered to Kiefer’s father, the great actor Donald Sutherland who had to that point never shared the screen with his son. In an example of great judgment, Donald turned it down, leaving poor James Cromwell to do his best.) The plot got so bad I actually thought the writer’s realized their error and discarded it halfway, through. They didn’t, and I’ll spare you the remainder of details.

Redemption came in Day 7, which was on the right track in that it changed the setting of the series from LA to Washington, DC. (I guess by this time even the writers had realized that Jack could only save LA from a nuclear bomb so many times before it became ludicrous.) It wasn’t so much the change of setting that helped the series; it was the change of attitude. Due to the writer’s strike of 2007, Day 7 was postponed until early 2009 by which time not only the Bush administration was over but much of the detail of the War on Terror had become public. Rather than pretend this was business is usual, the writers made the sound decision to make it part of the plot.

Day 7 opens with CTU having been disbanded and Jack Bauer being called before Congress to testify before a subcommittee about basically all the extra-legal activities he had done in the six seasons prior. Jack’s initial attitudes toward Congress seemed openly unapologetic:

“Am I above the law?” Jack said in a contemptuous statement. “No sir. I am more than willing to be judged by the people you claim to represent…But please do not sit there with that smart look on your face and expect me to regret the decision I have made. Because, sir, the truth is, I don’t.”

You could read this as 24 thumbing its nose at the culture that now existed or directly implicated the fact that so many elected officials were willing to look the other way about what was going on in the name of national defense until it became politically expedient to condemn it. Either way, it would have been a brave stand. But the writers were willing to go further. Jack is called away from Congress by the FBI and an idealistic agent named Renee Walker to deal with a threat that they think only Jack can solve. (Lessening the machination is the fact this threat deals with the return of Tony Almeida, who seems to have gone rogue after faking his death and whose exact link to what’s going on are not clear until the very end of the day.)  Renee finds Jack’s methods repellent, but as the day progresses finds herself slowly becoming more inclined to his methodology – much to the horror of her fellow agents.

There are many brilliant segments throughout Day 7 – including extraordinary performance by veteran actors Cherry Jones and Jon Voight as new President Alison Taylor and Jonas Hodges, the billionaire industrialist behind much of the terrorists’ plots, respectively. (Jones deservedly won an Emmy and Voight should’ve at least been nominated for one.) We suffer the sacrifice of a truly noble character and witness the welcome return of Aaron Pierce, who retired from the Secret Service after Logan’s exposure, but has returned to aid Jack. And we watch in horror and sadness as Tony, one of the series most beloved characters betrays everyone and everything he ever believed in – on both sides- to get revenge on the man who was responsible for Michelle being murdered. It’s a heartbreaking moment because it’s probably the most understandable motivation for betrayal any character on either side has ever done.

But the reason Day 7 resonates the most is how it ends. Jack is poisoned by a chemical agent one of the terrorists is using and ends the series on what he is sure is his deathbed. In the final moments of the day, Renee asks Jack if she should torture the mastermind of the day’s events to assure his conviction and the arrest of his co-conspirators. In what is his most heartfelt confession, Jack says he will do anything, break any law to save the lies of fifteen strangers on a bus. He says he doesn’t regret his actions that day, but he doesn’t work for the FBI:

“You took an oath. You made a promise to uphold the law. You cross that line; it always starts off with a small step. Before you know it, you’re running as fast as you can in the wrong direction, just to justify what you started in the first place. These laws were written by men much smarter than me, and in the end, I know those laws have to be more important than those fifteen people on the bus. In my mind, I know that’s right. I just don’t think my heart could have lived with that. I guess the only advice I can give you is ‘Try to make decisions that you can live with."

Then Jack, who has never truly been a spiritual person, spends what he believes will be his final minutes with an imam he racially profiled earlier that day. He has made his choice. When Renee decides to torture the mastermind regardless, the series has framed it as the wrong decision.

Jack ended up being saved for Day 8 (Kim reunited with him and despite her father’s wishes) but I have always wished that Day 7 had been the series final statement. Would it have been dark and depressing for the series to end on Jack’s death? Maybe, but I have a feeling the fans would’ve been able to take it. And there would’ve been certain nobility to the idea of Jack dying for his sins – and by implication, the nations – that we certainly didn’t get at the end of Day 8 or the sequel to the series four years later.

More to the point, it would have ended 24 on a high note. Day 8 always struck me as a waste of time (pun not intended). It wasn’t just that there wasn’t anything new to the plot or that the series final episodes ended with Jack becoming the soulless killing machine the casual viewer thought he had been for the entire series. It was that the show had nothing original left to say. There was not a single story line or character within the entire day that had anything interesting or novel to it. The final hours are far darker than anything the series had done before not just for Jack but for everybody involved, but it just seemed like it was a series trying to play with all the switches before the power is killed. When we see Jack for the last time (we think) he is forced to go on the run for his actions over the last few hours and will never see freedom. This doesn’t seem fitting; it seems like a series that has run out of ways to handle its hero any more.

Many people were excited to see Jack and the show return for ‘Live Another Day’ in 2014, but for all my love of the series I truly wasn’t. A lot of it had to do with the fact that the series was 12 parts. As someone who recorded every episode and refused to watch the DVDs because I thought without commercial breaks you might as well call the series ‘18’, this struck me as betrayal from minute one. And while there were some decent moments throughout – Jack’s reunion with Audrey, now recovered from her trauma and remarried, some brilliant scenes with James Heller, now President and suffering from Alzheimer’s and just generally great acting from the always Yvonne Strahovski and Tate Donavan as new characters – by and large, the series left me cold. And the final statement it gave for Jack – being flown to a Russian prison to pay for the crimes he committed at the end of Day 8 – was really no more satisfying than the end of the series proper.  Live Another Day was basically little more than any sequel to an old franchise is these days, an attempt to get more ratings for an established property without having any respect for what made the original great in the first place.

A new ‘day’ (yet another 12 hour series) this time without any Jack Bauer at all aired in 2017 and it seems likely that another revival will come in the future. Even if Kiefer Sutherland is attached to the project (and seriously, shouldn’t Jack Bauer be the well-kept member of AARP by now) I see no reason to give it the time of day (again pun not intended)

 In truth, I think the moment for 24 has passed. It’s not that the series no longer fits the era; it’s that the era no longer fits the series.  24 was one of the last truly great series before the era of binge-watching truly began and in a world where everyone demands instant gratification, there’s no patience for a series that demanded you wait an entire week to see what happened at CTU next. The fact that the last two incarnations of the show were only twelve episodes indicates another problem – no one is willing to commit to the twenty-plus episodes it would take for a series any more, not even a series whose entire foundation was based on this premise. 24’s approach of slow revelation doesn’t work in a world designed by shows like The Blacklist or Scandal where the viewers expect – nay, demand – a game changing revelation every ten minutes. The sad truth is there is no place for Jack Bauer any more, in the world of politics or television in general.

And it’s probably not a coincidence that when the series ‘ended’ in 2010, the next wave of new and complicated antiheroes were beginning to fill this void. And to explore this world of realpolitik, Howard Gordon and many of 24’s writers would change their approach entirely. In the next article in this series, I will explore Homeland and how it looked at the War on Terror

The Reason So Many People Watch Succession. And Its Not Because Its Extraordinary

In the last two years, millions of Americans and critics around the country have celebrated HBO’s Succession, the drama series about the battle between the Roy family to take over the communications company Waystar, run by eighty year old Logan Roy (Brian Cox). While I will admit to a certain fascination by the brilliance of the performers, I have never understood why so people are enraptured by a group of truly horrible and unlikable characters behaving badly. Indeed, millions of fans seem to actually love the series because of those very reasons as a recent New Yorker article detailed. And I’ve been baffled why so many awards shows seem determined to give recognition to these performers and writers rather than series such as The Crown, This is Us and Better Call Saul – which also have complicated characters, but generally have far fewer choices than the Roy family have – and will acknowledge it over more brilliant series that are better written and directed. (I was particularly irked in 2020 when the show knocked out series like Big Little Lies and Mr. Robot which were infinitely better written and performed.)

I was planning to write a more complicated article about what Succession about the nature of America that it claims to repudiate the rich and powerful yet basically hangs on every word of the Roys, who are basically everything that people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have spent the last decade raging against. Then it occurred to me that reason so many people love this series is actually simpler and more basic than that.

Consider: Succession is a series about a very wealthy family and all their associates who spend every minutes of every day trying to manipulate each other to positions where they will have more wealth and powers than the others and creating brilliantly creative insults as they do. Does this sound familiar to any of the older viewers in the audience? Anyone?  Fine, here’s the answer class: this is the fundamental setup for any of the popular 1980s broadcast hits: Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, and Knots Landing…you name it.

Wait a minute, the Succession fan is saying. But this is a far more cultured series, dealing with issues about how utterly out of touch and clueless the rich and powerful are! Isn’t it pretty to think so. I admit the writers do occasionally bring in some more relevant issues, but let’s not consider them for anything more than what they are: plot devices. That’s all what the climax of Season 2 really was: an excuse for Kendall to betray his father instead of fall on his sword. It may have seemed more elaborate than sleeping with your sister’s husband or whatever else  the Ewings and Carringtons were up to, but a betrayal is a betrayal no matter how well-scripted or acted.

But the critics love this show, the fan would say. Not entirely true; I vividly remember an Entertainment Weekly review panning the series more than halfway through the season, and I would remind you a lot of fans hated it for much of the same reasons they now claim to love it. As for the awards show recognizing it, do I even have to explain how so many of them follow rather than lead.

And honestly, what’s the difference between Succession and Dallas or Dynasty? Basically, the fact that insults delivered by the former series have more obscenities. It’s basically a series where a bunch of rich white people insult each other and struggle for power. Actually, I’d argue that makes Succession look worse in context; so many of the 1980s series were admonished for having next to no minority characters. The fact that an HBO series – particularly from the network that brought us The Wire, Insecure and Lovecraft Country  - clearly looks like a step backwards for the.

So if all of this is obvious at first glance – and second, and third – why hasn’t anybody picked up on it? For the same reason so many men in their youth (like me) hid the real reason we watched Cinemax late at night and the same reason so many women for decades were afraid to admit they liked soap operas: guilt and shame.

Reader, a confession: when I was teenager I never missed an episode of Melrose Place. I knew at the time it was utterly unrealistic even by the weak standards of ‘90s soaps and was so ludicrous in its plotting that one my very first attempts at writing criticism was about how sloppily it was written. None of this stopped me from watching it all the way end and reruns for more than a decade after it was written. At some level, I found the pure trashiness of it fascinating and dare I say, enjoyable. Even as my tastes have improved, a part of me has always had a place in my heart for trashy TV – hell last year I actually advocated for Fox’s Filthy Rich, a series with absolutely no redeeming values. Because I feel that there has to be a place for guilty pleasures in this world.

The thing is, in the era of Peak TV, so many viewers can’t bring themselves to admit that like TV for its pure soap opera qualities. If we did, we’d have to explain why we were spending so much time watching Scandal instead of The Americans. So for that reason, too many creators try to put value and meanings behind series that clearly have none.  There are reasons people want to watch a series like Empire or Bridgerton – they’re just not the reasons the creators want to admit. So their creators will say that the show is talking about some kind of deeper values or more historical ones rather than the simple fact: it’s a soap opera, pure or simple. Or that The Mandalorian has some deep story values; no it’s a live action Star Wars video game.  Or that Outlander is a rich, lyrical story about history and love; pfft, its high class porn.

And I don’t blame these creators or viewers for wanting to have a higher purpose. I’ll confess that I’ve fallen victim to it myself over the years. I spend an unforgivable amount of time trying to justify my fascination with Desperate Housewives when it was really just Melrose Place not even bothering to take it self seriously. There’s no reason to be ashamed for liking trashy TV. And some trashy TV actually is good enough to merit awards – hell Desperate Housewives got a lot of them before the Emmys felt guilty about what it was doing and stopped nominating everybody involved.

All that I ask from everybody who loves series like Succession – stop pretending there’s some more elevated reason for liking the show. It’s a glorified soap opera – that’s fine. I don’t judge. But stop pretending that series like these – and Bridgerton and far too many others – are works of art. It’s acceptable even in a world where there’s too many great series to keep track of to want to watch something where you can just turn your brain off.  Hell I’ve spent my life loathing Shonda Rhimes but I loved Private Practice even though it was hated by pretty much everyone. Sometimes you do just want to watch actors you like even if it’s in subpar projects. Just don’t confuse it for art, and don’t try to convince the rest of us it is.

 

Author’s Note: For those Succession fans out there convinced I’m deluded, watch Season 3 of The Crown and the most recent season of Better Call Saul. Then take as many words as you want to explain exactly why Brian Cox and Matthew MacFayden deserved Emmy nominations over Josh O’Connor and Bob Odenkirk for Best Actor and Jonathan Banks  and Tobias Menzies for Best Supporting Actor, respectively. Then watch Season 4 of This is Us and make a similar argument for Justin Hartley and Chrissy Metz over MacFayden and Snook. I hold grudges longer than the Roys.

 

When You're In Big Sky Country, You're In For Great Television

 

In a messy broadcast season, the best series to premiere in 2020 was Big Sky. Featuring two of the most brilliant female leads I’ve seen at any network drama in years, PIs Cassie Dewell and Jenny Hoyt (Kylie Bunbury and Katheryn Winnick) became meshed in a kidnapping that quickly unfolded into a corkscrew mystery that featured some of the greatest villains I’ve seen in years. When it ended in a climax with Ronald (Brian Geraghty) on the run, Jenny taking a bullet in the chest and Cassie hot on his trail, you really wondered what was happened next.

In typical David E. Kelley fashion, the story has jumped ahead six months with no sign of Ronald or the equally twisted woman he fell in love with, Scarlett. Cassie can’t bring it on herself to let it go, but Jenny is trying, in her own way, to move on. She has left the PI field and taken up the badge again at the Montana PD. Given how this series works, it’s inevitable that the two worlds were start aligning. And they do in the opening minutes of the Season 2 premiere. Four teenage children (including a girl who babysits Cassie’s young son) witness a car crash with one man dead and another dying. They find drugs and money and take them both – moments before a cop shows up and shoots the survivor dead. They decide not to tell anyone and one decides to keep the money. Even if you don’t your mysteries you know this won’t end well, especially we met the babysitter first and her boyfriend is a piece of work who is just this shy of abusive. We know there’s no way this ends well before one goes to the cops and recognizes the man who was there, and two visitors fly in from out of state.

The world may have forgotten Ronald, but the show hasn’t. Somehow, he has ended up in the possession of Big Rick’s twin brother, Wolf. John Carroll Lynch was quite magnificent as Big Rick last season, but he’s even more remarkable as Wolf, a man who is completely opposite in his brother’s behavior than Rick was. He is kind, generous and does everything he can to offer Ronald a hand up. Ronald, of course, has no interest in it and continues to act just like the monster we know him to be. Where are Ronald and Scarlett? Will Cassie and her team find out where Wolf is? And most importantly, how much of the Legarsky meanness is in Wolf, despite his certainty that his brother was a monster?

If it were just for all of the great performances, writing and direction Big Sky would be one of the greatest procedurals anywhere since Justified. It is based on a series of novels by C.J. Box and a lot of the characters do have a certain Elmore Leonard feel to them – there’s definitely the same feel of the Wild West (where we actually are) there’s US Marshalls involved and PIs getting in the way of law enforcement and there are always the colorful characters. We just ran into Ren, an out of state drug dealer who clearly has panache for sex and death that the bets villains do. Its stylish has great action, and whip-snap dialogue.

But what really makes Big Sky sing - and honestly makes it among my candidates for one of the best series of 2021 -   is that unlike almost every procedural I’ve seen in my years of watching TV, it’s all about the women. Yes, there have been countless procedurals with women in charge and female leads – The Closer and Major Crimes are among the most popular – but I don’t recall in my years of viewing a series which has so many female characters simultaneously kicking ass and taking names and fighting for respect simultaneously. Cassie and Jenny are bad-ass women who can beat men up and handle a gun, but they keep fighting for respect against a world that will never respect them – and they want to have casual sex just as much as the male protagonists at the center of so many of these dramas.. And it says a lot that after the clichéd opening of the two of them beating each other to a pulp in the Pilot, there’s a real friendship in her that’s born in blood and real respect.

And it’s not just them. There are remarkable women all around. The most impressive is Jerrie Kennedy (played by breakout talent Jessie James Keitel), who started out as a prostitute kidnapped by Ronald way back in the Pilot and through her experience and relationship with Cassie and Jenny has become a force in her own right. She now seems to be a woman in charge of her own destiny and someone that Mark, a U.S. Marshal helping them (and sweet on Cassie) can talk with mutual respect. I don’t think there’s been a character like that in any series in the last twenty years. Indeed, you can make an argument that almost every story involves women trying to take control of their own destiny. One of the girls in the storyline at the center of this season clearly has doubts about their activities, but she wants to help her mother and is clearly in love with one of the other girls.  It might be an exaggeration to call Big Sky something of a feminist procedural, but none of the characters – heroes or villain – fall under the archetype of ‘strong female protagonist’ that lead so many women-lead series (including the Shonda Rhimes series like Grey’s Anatomy that Big Sky follows)

This actually brings to me the one character that may be holding the show back. Ronald has never for a moment struck me as the kind of character who could blend in anywhere. You just spend a minute with him and its makes your skin crawl. Maybe there’s a message that the writers are trying to say with Ronald’s character – he’s one of those angry white men who makes up so much of the horror we deal with today and that it’s the job of women like Cassie and Jenny to bring him down.

It’s not too fine a point, though, and it will not get a way of your loving this series. When the HCA gave its first awards for Best Network Drama, Big Sky was deservedly one of its first nominees. As awards seasons begin again, I hope that they start recognizing all of the remarkable performers at the center of the show, especially John Carroll Lynch, who deserves a nomination yet again. I hope the Shondaland bump that helps series at 10 O’clock works here, because Big Sky deserves it. I have a feeling we’re looking at one of TV’s true masterpieces.

My score: 5 stars.

i'm Still Wild About Harry: The Sinner Is Back With A New Twisted Mystery

 

You always knew that after following Harry Ambrose, the grizzled psychologically worn down detective at the center of USA’s incredible mysteries The Sinner for his last three cases, that there was going to come a time that the darkness of the job would become to much for him. And after the tragic conclusion of Season 3 – where he was forced to kill the disturbed Jamie and then had to watch him die – Harry took the advice of his fellow cops and has handed in his papers. He’s following his new love (Jessica Hecht) the troubled artist he encountered in Season 3 to an island in the Bay to try and relax.

But we know Harry too well. From the beginning of Season 4 we know he’s in bad shape. He’s not taking anti-depressants any more. He has insomnia. And given the sex scene we see early in the first episode, he’s not in a good mental place.  We know things are going to go wrong for him and that’s before he sees a young girl he briefly met – Percy Muldoon jump off a cliff.

Before you start getting the idea of Cabot Cove and Jessica Fletcher, this is a different kind of story, even different than the ones were used to for The Sinner. For starters, the police drag the river but can’t find a body. And soon afterwards, Harry begins to doubt the evidence of his own eyes. It’s inevitable, of course, that Harry will be drawn into the case by local law enforcement and that there’s more to Percy that what we seen. There’s the possibility of some kind of bizarre behavior of the missing girl and maybe some kind of cult involved. But the fact that there’s a chance that Percy’s alive is the biggest twist and arguably the most welcome one – after starting every season so far with a death and a suspect in custody, its intriguing for there to be a mystery where they’re actually might be someone for Harry to save – other than himself.

For its clear that Harry is lost, and that he can no more retire from police work then the families in this town leave fishing behind. As Sonya notes very clearly in the first episode: “I haven’t seen you this energized in awhile.” We know from past experience this is not a good thing. Harry can not escaped the demons in his head any more than any of the people he tries to help – this time, the series makes it literal by having Percy literally appear to him in his head. It’s not a gimmick, we know this is just as much a sign that Harry may be losing his faculties not just to age but to all the demons he’s amassed over the years.

Much in the same way that Bryan Cranston was born to play Walter White and James Gandolfini Tony Soprano, this is Bill Pullman’s role of a lifetime. For decades, he was basically Hollywood’s everyman actor, usually supporting, sometimes the lead, but always fading into the background. Pullman is Harry Ambrose in every fiber of his being – grizzled, troubled, weary, wanting not to believe the worst in people and inevitably disappointed. There are a lot of good actors around in the current season of The Sinner ­– I’m particularly riveted by character actress Frances Fisher playing the missing girls mother, a matriarch of the community – and there’s clearly an interesting subtext between the Muldoon family and the Lams, a rival Chinese family that wears the stain of outsider and whose son loved Percy once and is still drawn to her. But the eye can not be drawn away from Pullman as Harry. It’s no coincidence that this season has the victim appearing to Harry – once someone gets in his head, he can’t let it go until the truth comes out, no matter how much damage is does to him. You wish that Harry could somehow find peace, but you know too well it’s just not going to happen. As long as the series has Pullman and Harry, I’m along for the ride.

My score: 4 stars.

Television After 9/11, 24: Part 4C: The Best And Worst Presidents in TV History

 

As important as the story of Jack Bauer was to 24, it’s worth noting that it would have been nothing without the political dynamics. More than any other series in the post-9/11 world, this series gave some of the most memorable and gripping portrayals of Presidential politics in the 21^st Century.

Of course how many Presidents served during the course of 24 is a question not even the series can answer with accuracy. Perhaps the reason America knows so much about the 25^th Amendment is because of how 24 used it throughout its run – frankly, to the point of excess. The first time it was used in Day 2, it was an extremely powerful moment; by the time it was used three separate times in Day 6, even the most die hard fan of the series was thinking the framers of the amendment had never thought it could be a tired plot device. As a result, its possible as many eight Presidents served during the show’s run – and that’s not counting Die Another Day. But for the focus of this article, I will center it on what I’m relatively certain fans agree are the most memorable ones. One ranks as one of the greatest Presidents in pop culture history; the other is almost certainly one of the worst, but for sheer drama, both gave the series – and TV as a whole – its finest moments.

The focus of Day 1 was the assassination attempt on David Palmer. Before we get there, a little backstory on Dennis Haysbert who is probably more unfortunately known these days as the face – and voice – of Allstate.Haysbert was an exceptional actor well before he got cast on 24. It’s hard to imagine this is the same actor who played Pedro Serrano in the brilliant comedy Major League when he was much younger.  And I actually knew who he was even before 24 aired. One of my favorite one season series was CBS’ Now & Again, a sci-fi- action -comedy series that was impossible to describe – the Pilot begins with John Goodman getting pushed off a subway platform in a slow-mo choreographed scene and wakes up in the next ten minutes in Eric Close’s body and it just gets weirder from there. Haysbert played the NSA scientist-handler of Close’s character and actually demonstrated a fair amount of wit and sarcasm that he almost never got to use on 24.  It was a brilliant series, and one that I’ve never really gotten over it being cancelled. (Though considering how much success both Haysbert and Close would enjoy afterwards in television because of the cancellation, one can hardly say it didn’t work out.)

David Palmer spends most of Day 1 dealing with a story that is about to come out about a story that’s about to be published about his son murdering the man who raped his sister several years ago. The series takes place on Super Tuesday, so it’s pretty clear this will end his political career. In the midst of this, he finds himself attacked on every front, most notably the fact that he is a target for an assassination that seems to be done by Jack Bauer.

There are two key elements to the day that have to be discussed to truly understand David Palmer’s character. The first comes when, after learning Jack’s role it becomes clear he knows the name – two years earlier Jack led an operation to kill a Serbian warlord that led to the death of his entire team. He then goes to CTU where Jack is being held for everything he’s already done and pretty much cuts through the red tape to see him. For the first time, Palmer and Jack are in the same room and its one of the great scenes in the series’ history as they very quickly realize that both of them are on somebody’s list. They make the connections they need to, and Palmer gets Jack reinstated for the rest of the day. This is the foundation of a friendship that will last until Palmer’s death – and beyond. The key moment comes when Palmer says: “I misjudged you,” and offers his hand to Jack. The two shake.

And of course, you can’t discuss David Palmer without bringing up his wife, Sherry, masterfully played by Penny Johnson Jerald. They appear to have the perfect marriage, but as the scandal begins to unfold Sherry makes it very clear it is more important they get to the White House then the truth be told. It’s actually something of a stretch to believe that a marriage could implode over the course of a day, but the longer we observe Sherry, we get the very clear picture that the roots have been there all along – David was just too blind to see it.

David ultimately does tell the truth about the cover-up and it ends up with him sweeping Super Tuesday, but perhaps the most meaningful moment comes when David decides in the final episode of Day 1 to divorce Sherry despite all the potential fallout. And there will be a lot of that.

I suppose this should be the part of the story where I have to mention that David Palmer was an African-American and therefore you might see the roots between Hays Bert’s portrayal and the election Barack Obama six years later. While I’ll admit that it may have played a role in people being able to accept the idea of a black President, I don’t think this is a case of correlation equaling causation. The main reason is, the series never made as much a point of this. In fact, Palmer says so directly when he learns the nature of the plot: “This has nothing to do with me running for President…or me being black.” That being said, the overall brilliant ethics and morals of Palmer and how he was willing to put the good of the country well before that of his own makes him a model portrayal. And I think the reason he resonates with me more than Jed Bartlet in The West Wing is that Palmer mixed his idealism with realpolitik in a way I just can’t ever say Bartlet doing.

During Season 2, David Palmer is suspicious of the Head of The NSA hiding intelligence of him on a terrorist plot. He goes to one of his Secret Service agents who have experience with ‘enhanced interrogation’. He tells him very clear that what he’s about to do falls outside his charge and tells him he wants him to question Stanton. The agent asks: “If he resists, how far am I permitted to go?” Palmer essentially tells him to do what is necessary. Without hesitation. For the next hour, the agent tortures this government head. At one point Palmer walks in and asks him for information. When the man is still resistant, he turns to agent with one word: “Continue.” Immediately afterwards, the man breaks and provides details vital to every aspect of the plot.

The stories of David’s family would become less evident during his ‘term’ (Seasons 2 and 3 were spaced out so then when the third day took place, Palmer was running for reelection) but it was clear throughout the series about the loyalty of the friendships he had. Two in particular stand out: his friendship with Mike Novick, who ran his campaign and would become his chief of staff in Day 2. Mike was completely loyal to David throughout Day 1 and stayed faithful through much of Day 2 – which is why, when the Vice President had doubts about Palmer’s leadership and decided to invoke the 25^th Amendment, Mike’s betrayal no doubt hurt the fans (especially me) immensely. Palmer didn’t hesitate at the end of Day 2; he would forgive his Vice President and Cabinet, but demands Mike resign. (The two would one day work it out; I’ll get to that later.)

The other and, in my opinion one of the great friendships in any TV show was that of Palmer and the head of his Secret Service detail Aaron Pierce. Glenn Morshower has had many brilliant roles throughout his career, but this is his crowning achievement. Pierce started out determined to protect the President more than anything (and he would actually form a friendship with Jack as well) but as the series went on, it was clear that the two men respected each other in a way beyond the most powerful man in the world and his bodyguard. No matter how small the role Pierce had in Day 2 and Day 3 whenever he and Palmer were in the same room, you could tell there was mutual respect in a way that I’d rarely seen on TV before or since.

Eventually Palmer’s character would face an ethical challenge he could not bring himself to overcome and choose not to stand for reelection. But as we would see, just because David Palmer was gone, his shadow would linger over the series for a very long time.

The representative of the worst we see in executive power on television – at least until the rise of the Underwoods on House of Cards almost a decade later – came slowly and wasn’t apparent at first.

As I mentioned in an earlier article in reference to Day 4, Air Force One ended up getting shot down. The President was left comatose and unable to fulfill his duties. (In one of those cases of ambiguity the series often left, we were never sure whether he died.) Vice President Charles Logan, played by long time character actor Gregory Itzin assumed command. And it was clear from minute one, that he was unsuited for it.

Throughout the remainder of Day 4, Logan came across as an incredibly weak, easily cowed man – not unlike so many of the Vice Presidents we’ve had over the years. Forced into the kinds of decisions that his predecessors were capable of making, he waffled and when they were defied, he went against common sense. As a result, the mastermind of the conspiracy escaped. Broken by this, David Palmer was called into act as a proxy for him – which unfortunately led to Jack invading the Chinese embassy and murdering their council. This would lead to a nemesis that would stalk Jack for a remainder of the series. At the end of Day 4, the Chinese demanded Jack is handed over. Because of Logan’s weakness, his chief advisor Walt Cummings told him that they should kill Jack before that happened. This led to Jack faking his own death and walking off into the sunset at the end of Day 4.

Day 5, in my opinion one of the great achievements in TV history (the Emmys for a change agreed with me, giving it 5 wins including Best Drama and a Best Actor prize for Sutherland) started with one of the biggest shocks in TV history. David Palmer, the man who had been the foundation of the series as much as Jack Bauer the first four seasons was assassinated in the first five minutes. Less then ten minutes later, Michelle and Tony now out of CTU were involved in a car bomb. Michelle would die instantly; Tony would be seriously wounded and linger. (He would eventually be ‘killed’ halfway through, but in a rarity for series that didn’t do fake deaths, he would come back in Day 7. Were the writers playing fair with us? I will say they used the word ‘allegedly’ in a lot of publications the next year.) This led to Jack being drawn back in.

Day 5 took place involving the signing of a peace treaty with the new Russian President and Logan seemed fixed on it. But it was clear that even after more than a year; Logan was still the fundamentally weak man he was when he was a scared Vice-President. He refused to back away from his treaty even when hostages were taken, he seemed cowed when his chief advisor was recognized behind the plot, and in one of the most memorable scenes the series would ever do, he allows an attack on the motorcade of the Russian President going back to the airport – even after his wife, who knows what’s coming, decides to accompany them back. Throughout the first half of the day, Logan was inevitably compared to Nixon (Itzin’s resemblance to the President is striking) and the series even had a direct reference when a fraught President asked Mike Novick (Novick has since become his chief of staff) to pray with him. Logan seemed a man who was incapable of making a decision no matter how great the pressure – indeed, when his Vice President Harold Gardener came in the second half, he seemed to walk all over him. (I really wish the series had decided to make more use of Ray Wise, because you could smell the sulfur coming off him. Would’ve been better than who ended up serving in Day 6…but I digress.)

This actually brings me to another of the major highlights of Season 5 – Martha Logan. 24 always made superb casting decisions, but whoever it was that decided Jean Smart was the perfect choice to play Martha deserved a promotion. It’s not that Smart isn’t a great actress – the last year alone has demonstrated as much – its that at the time she was known almost entirely as a comic one. So whoever decided that she was perfect for this role was a genius.

We’re told that before the day began Martha’s mentally unstable and we are inclined to believe them pretty much from the moment she decides ‘I look like a wedding cake’ and ‘touches up her makeup’. We see her as a burden that her husband and the world have to bear. Slowly, however, it becomes clear that her paranoid delusions are actually accurate and Charles slowly begins to trust her again. Much of the brilliance of Day 5 is watching Martha and Charles slowly try to rebuild their relationship and you can see very quickly that the asset she might’ve been going forward.

And then, we get the day’s biggest twist. We learn that someone has set this plot in motion, and eventually we find out – it’s the President. What makes this twist believable is Logan does not turn into a Machiavellian genius but as a man whose clearly being manipulated even now, mainly by the man doing the work Christopher Henderson (Peter Weller) and in one of the series better twists, a group of men backing his campaign, led by the mysterious Graem (Paul McCrane finally got to play a proper villain instead of a power-mad egomaniac like he did on ER for more than seven years) All the way through the conspiracy, he’s trying to talk his way out of it. At one point, Graem to shoot down a passenger plane that has evidence that will implicate him and he tries all the way to back out of it despite the fact he will go to jail for treason and murder if he is caught. When the evidence seems insurmountable, he decides to take the coward’s way out and shoot himself. Before he does so, he asks Martha (who has since learned the details of his involvement) for forgiveness and she has nothing but contempt for him. Moments before he is about stick a gun in his mouth, an aide from CTU intervenes…but his problems are not over.

There were so many great moments in Day 5 that I can’t even begin to list them all. But one of my favorites is one that had no right to happen. Aaron Pierce, still with the Secret Service plays a vital part in Day 5, doing his duty for the President and protecting Martha. Late in the day, he becomes aware of the conspiracy and Logan’s guilt. Martha asks him what’s going on and he agrees to meet her. When she goes out to the meeting point, she finds only Aaron’s phone. I automatically assumed that Aaron was dead, after all, the series had been killing off regulars left and right all day, and there was no reason what was basically a third-string character should be spared. And indeed, Aaron was supposed to be killed.

Morshower read about this, and was heartbroken. He wrote an impassioned letter to Gordon pleading to let his character live. And wonder of wonders, it worked. Aaron is found late in the day having been tortured. Logan tries to be polite and offers to reinstate him and asks what do you have to say. Aaron is completely restrained, but for the first time ever on the series, you can sense contempt in his voice:

“There’s nothing to say. You’re a traitor to this county, and a disgrace to your office. It’s my duty to see that you’re punished for what you’ve done. Is there anything else, Charles?”

For a man who has put duty above country above all else, it is a stunning moment. To be honest, as brilliant as the last three hours of the series are – Jack foils another terrorist attack, kills Henderson out of revenge, and finally works together with CTU and his allies – which include Mike, Aaron and most memorably Martha herself – to bring Logan down – everything else from this point is somewhat anticlimactic.  Still the final moments of the day are sad, because even though CTU has prevailed and the plot exposed, no one feels any joy that they are bringing down the President. The fact that Logan will basically end up trading the office in order to get clemency makes no one any happier. It is a truly powerful moment that, for all of the show’s glories in the next three years, it would never equal again.

 

I’ve written a lot and I’m still not done. I think I’ll need one more piece to wrap it up – the 24 section, at least.