The Overrated Series: Why Fans and Critics Love Certain Shows and What That Says About TV: Succession, Part 1

 

 

As someone who has watched television with a critical eye for nearly twenty years, I have a gotten a clear sense about series that are regarded far too highly by critics, audiences and the awards industry. I’ve written about this phenomenon before, most notably with Game of Thrones and The Handmaid’s Tale. So I figure it’s time to make it a recurring feature. Just because we are in the era of Peak TV doesn’t necessarily make all shows great ones.

I’m going to start with a show I’ve gone into considerable detail about over the past couple of months: Succession. It’s hard to argue that it’s starting to transcend the medium: highbrow magazines like The New Yorker have been writing about it frequently and Politico just did a longer spread on it. What has always been strange about the series is that people seem to love the series even though they agree all the characters are horrendous people. Indeed, the most recent issue of TV Guide actually Jeered the series saying that it was a brilliant show but that the characters were reprehensible. The Politico article actually said that this was partly by design at the level of producers and as a message – that the creators want to make to make it fundamentally that the Roy family, who has wealth we can’t comprehend, is somehow more miserable than the rest of us and indeed that’s the main reason for the series popularity – the world hates the rich so much we think seeing that they’re so miserable makes us feel better than a class revolt.

Leaving aside the political ramifications of this, I’m going to center this article on why this doesn’t make Succession great television, why it is a fundamental step backwards for Peak TV in general and HBO in particular, and why this trend is actually troubling for television.

Let’s start with the basic tenet that even the fans of the series agree on: there is nobody to root for Succession. This isn’t necessarily a flaw in the age of the Antihero which has basically formed the Golden Age. There is, however, a very big difference between the great series of the Golden Age and Succession: all of the characters in the best Dramas – from the killers and rapists of Oz and The Sopranos, to the people caught in the broken justice system of Baltimore in The Wire, to the Rockefeller Republicans at the center of the Age of Aquarius in Mad Men – are at the most middle class and in most of the cases struggling to survive. You may not like most of the characters in these series, but at your core you can understand the misery that follows them; they are trapped in a fundamentally broken system that symbolized the end of the American Dream. Now consider everybody in Succession – not just the Roy family, but everybody around them. They are literally the Masters of the Universe: they control the media, they will dodge the justice system, and we’ve seen in various episodes that they are controlling democracy. They run the world, and they’re even more miserable that Tony Soprano and Don Draper ever were. Now maybe that’s cathartic to so many of us unlucky poor, but it sure as hell isn’t entertaining. And honestly, it’s more depressing. If you can’t be happy if you can afford private jets for every member of the family, what is going to make you happy?

Now I know that so many of the dramas in Peak TV are dark and depressing, but they’re not oppressive in their darkness. There’s a lot of different examples to focus on in Peak TV as counters, but in this part I’m going to focus on the great three dramas of HBO as they are the most relevant: The Sopranos, The Wire, and in particular, Deadwood.

The Sopranos was a dark and violent series that showed people at their core would always rather do the easy thing rather than change – in this series, the easy thing was always violence. (This is in part why I was so resistant to it in the series’ original run.) But the series was always willing to shake up the format in a certain way, and it always made clear just how low at the bottom food chain the characters were. The clearest pictures of this came when he viewed Christopher’s attempts to break into Hollywood and he saw just how gluttonous actor’s lives were compared to mob bosses.

The Wire believed at its core America was broken at every level: the criminal justice system, blue collar work, politics, education and the media itself. But as bleak as the message was, it never stopped being entertaining: there’s always been a dark comic backdrop that otherwise would have made the series unbearable. Succession has a sense of humor to, but always layered at someone else’s misfortune. And it’s worse because it’s inevitably family that it’s directed at.

Deadwood actually has the most direct link to Succession, one in casting choices, one in roles. As anyone who watched the series remembers, the major villain throughout the series was capitalism in the face of George Hearst. This was made clear slowly in Season 2 when Hearst’s representative, the geologist Francis Wolcott appeared on scene as Hearst’s acolyte. (Creator David Milch says the character appeared so that he could prep himself to write Hearst in Season 3.) Wolcott is a man of privilege and a greater threat to the series than civilization, not simply because he is a psychopath (in the middle of Season 2 he murders three prostitutes) but because of whom he represents. He knows he is untouchable and therefore considers all life disposable. The characters know this: at one point when they are deciding what to do about Wolcott, Cy Tolliver a monster who thought he could control Wolcott simply says: “No one who works for George Hearst can spend a night in jail.” When Hearst does arrive on the scene in Season 2 finale, he is appalled by Wolcott’s crime not because of their nature, but because of what the implication may be for him. Wolcott knows this and in the final minutes of the episode commits suicide to spare his lord – a sacrificial lamb in a far more direct manner than Succession is willing to do.

Season 3 is dominated by the actions of Hearst, played magnificent by Gerald McRaney. Compared to him Wolcott is a minor figure; Hearst wants to bend everybody in town to his will, ostensibly because he wants to control the gold claim of Alma Garrett but mostly because it’s the only thing that makes him feel alive. Hearst sees himself above all humanity: he is introduced as ‘Boy-The-Earth-Talks-Too’ and he only seems to care from gold, not because of the monetary value but it makes him feel bigger than the mere humans he has to interact with. He makes it clear none of the people in this camp are worth his time and therefore little more than figures he can decide who lives or dies. This is true even to people he professes to care about: the only person he shows any affection to is Aunt Lou, his African-American cook, but when her son tries to hustle him and she begs for his life, he has absolutely no problem not only having her son killed, but berated her for thinking she had the right ask for mercy.

Brian Cox had a starring role in the third season of Deadwood as impresario of the new theater company Jack Langrishe and indeed had many scenes in which he either had interaction with Hearst or helped plot with his friend Al Swearengen on how to outmaneuver him.

 

 (Near the end of the season when the action is approaching a climax – or as those of us who remember it, anticlimax – Al and Jack have a memorable exchange:

AL: “If the bastard didn’t have shareholders, you could murder him in his sleep.”

JACK: “Serpent’s teeth, shareholders. Ten thousand would rise to take his place.”

It’s hard not to think of the action of the recent of Succession where the Roys are wondering about a corporate takeover, and not remember that quote.)

 

It is likely that Cox took many of his cues on how to play Logan Roy from his time on Deadwood with McRaney. That being said I still prefer Hearst’s portrayal in general because he is far blunter and more direct about how big a monster he is and how separated from the reality we mere mortals inhabit. Indeed, the series was actually direct about it both in dialogue and the director’s cut.

When he has finished taking possession of Alma Garret’s claim (after murdering her husband) and listens to Seth’s calling him a bully, Hearst says: “I am listening to a conversation you can not here.” In the commentary, Milch says: “This is what Rupert Murdoch says every morning.” The link is actually made direct in the dialogue when Hearst, having received what he considers ‘unfair’ treatment in the local paper says that he’ll have his people ‘make another one to lie the other way.” In essence, he has created the Hearst media empire out of pure spite. It doesn’t take a genius to see the direct links to Logan Roy and Waystar in these comments.

So basically the only difference between George Hearst in 1877 and Logan Roy a century and a half later is one lives in a more beautiful place. Given what we know about how George treating his wife and son, he probably wasn’t a better father either. So there is nothing new of different between the two. Except Deadwood made the very deliberate choice to show that as horrible as characters like Tolliver and Swearengen were, they were also minor villains compared to Hearst – and its hard to argue they weren’t more clear-sighted and at least in Swearengen’s case, inspired more loyalty.

And maybe I’m being biased because I’ve written about the series extensively, the dialogue was far better. It was, if anything more profane than Succession is, but it was infinitely more poetic and even the insults could be used more affectionately than Succession ever has. There may be more imagination in the putdowns in Succession, but I’ve rarely laughed at them as much as I did watching Wu, the Celestial who only seems to know three words in English  – two of which were ‘Swearengen’ and ‘cocksucker’.

So putting all of this into consideration there is nothing new or groundbreaking about Succession in comparison to its groundbreaking dramas of the past. And as I will make clear in the next part of this article, there is a much better drama about a billionaire and his corporation that has, until recently, had it all over Succession in the present.

30th Anniversary of The Silence of The Lambs, Part 2: Why It Could Never Have Won The Oscars Before - And Why It Could Never Happen Again

As someone who has studied the Academy Awards even longer than he has studied television, I’m fairly certain that Silence of the Lambs probably couldn’t have won Best Picture in any other year.

Let’s start with something I feel will not be debated: 1991 was a very dark year for motion pictures. Some people say films in the 1970s were even darker, and there has been debate that the nominated films in 2020 would make you want to cut your throat. Some of the contenders this year actually could have done that, and I’m not only talking about Hannibal Lecter and Buffalo Bill.

During the summer, some of the major hits were The Fisher King Terry Gilliam’s most successful film that begins with a massacre being cause by the influence of a shock jock (Jeff Bridges) and features that the jock ‘redeeming’ himself by helping a lunatic (Robin Williams) search for the Holy Grail. There was Fried Green Tomatoes, the movie whose charming narration by Jessica Tandy covered up a story that involved a lesbian love affair, spousal abuse leading to the death of husband and his body being served as barbecue to the law enforcement. I don’t think I have to remind anybody about the impact of Thelma & Louise. And these, by the way, were considered comedies that year. (There was, of course, a major exception to this rule which I will get to in a moment.)

By the end of the year the major contenders for Oscars, along with Silence of the Lambs and Thelma and Louise were:

 Bugsy: Barry Levenson’s biopic which the story of how Bugsy Siegel (Warren Beatty) basically helped invent Las Vegas and how it ended up leading to the mob killing him. Best known today for the beginning of Beatty and Annette Bening’s affair and eventual marriage, it is actually a well shot, directed and superbly acted film.

The Prince of Tides: Barbara Streisand’s adaptation of Pat Conroy’s best-selling novel, it tells the story of how Tom Wingo (Nick Nolte) helps explain to a psychiatrist (Streisand) the history of his troubled family which has led to his sister’s suicide attempt. A dark film which deals fundamentally with a father who regularly beats his family, the films centers on a trauma when three criminal invade a house and rape the mother, the daughter…and Tom.

JFK: So much has been said about Oliver Stone’s historical film (I’ve said a lot in a couple of pieces) that its simpler to say that this may arguably be the single most controversial film the Academy would ever consider for Best Picture.

 

The critics’ awards did little to clarify the front runner and the Golden Globes, which were slowly beginning to take on the role of serving as a precursor for how the Oscars might actually go, did absolutely nothing to clarify things. Indeed, their approach in 1991 was much like that of Alice in Wonderland; that nobody should lose, that all should have a prize. Bugsy took Best Drama, Oliver Stone took Best Director, Nick Nolte won Best Actor, Jodie Foster took Best Actress and Best Screenplay went to Callie Khouri for Thelma & Louise. The big winner was on the Best Musical or Comedy prize – and it was a huge shock: Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The studio’s first nomination of any kind of Best Picture, it not only took Best Musical or Comedy, but also Best Score and Best Song. But even then I don’t think anybody seriously thought it had a chance of beating out Thelma and Louise or The Fisher King for a Best Picture spot because it was a Disney cartoon, and even worse it was rated G.

There were a lot of surprises when the Oscar nominations were announced in February, both when it came to who was nominated and who wasn’t. People were upset because Streisand, for her second major prestige film, was not nominated for Best Director. People were stunned when Beauty and the Beast defied the odds and became the first animated feature to get a Best Picture nomination. And perhaps because of these twin shocks, no one was able to work out amazement that The Silence of the Lambs – which had been released the previous February – was contending for every major award.

Ever since people have been saying that Best Pictures can be released in February. But the fact is, it didn’t happen that often in the modern era – it was an oddity when a movie released as far back as the summer got a Best Picture nod – and it really shouldn’t have happened that year. It is my belief that the studio wanted to release the film to contend for Oscars in the winter of 1990, but the field was so crowded (and so likely to go to Dances with Wolves) that they chose to release in February.  That the critics had such a long memory says more to their mindset – even then, the majority of serious movies began to fill theatres in September.

And even then there was a factor that I’m not sure anyone considered – Anthony Hopkins listed as Best Actor. As I mentioned in my previous article the role of Hannibal Lecter takes up little more than twenty minutes of screen time. It’s a supporting role, and indeed Hopkins did take a couple of Supporting Actor critics’ prizes. But he insisted on being listed as Best Actor for the Golden Globes – being listed for Supporting Actor, he would say later, would have been like saying: “Please give me an Oscar.” So he was nominated in the lead category. It would be the first in a series of battles during the decade defining what kind of role was a lead and what was supporting – films like Pulp Fiction and Fargo would be among the major combatant later on.

The Silence of the Lambs got eight Oscar nominations, third behind Bugsy and JFK. Historically, the film that gets the most nominations usually wins. But I think the reason The Silence of the Lambs did as well as it did wasn’t as much due to its quality as to the other contenders.

Beauty and the Beast is as much a classic as The Silence of the Lambs and compared to the darkness at the heart of the four other nominated films, it was a real tonic. But the fact is the Academy has never felt that an animated feature deserves to be considered Best Picture, a fact that spelled out when they created the Best Animated Film category a decade later. Even then, it was clearly a putdown to say that films like The Lion King or Shrek or Toy Story just didn’t deserve to be considered in the same breath as Braveheart or Life is Beautiful or Gladiator, films that I frankly consider among the worse choices for nominations or awards the Academy’s made.

JFK was a brilliantly made film, but it was far too controversial. And since the Academy goes out of its way to avoid controversy at every opportunity (unless of course they create it themselves) they were never going to give the film Best Picture. The fact that they gave it so many nominations at all is a tribute to just how brilliant the technical level of the filmmaking and the brilliance of the acting were. (It’s definitely not because of historical accuracy because even the people who love it admit it’s more of a diatribe than a coherent story.)

The Prince of Tides had the problem that its director wasn’t nominated and that has always been a problem with Best Picture nominations that don’t get one. Never mind that Driving Miss Daisy, a far more questionable choice, had won Best Picture with no corresponding directors nod, had won two years earlier or that within the next twenty years films would be winning Best Picture without a Best Director nomination being a factor. The Academy was still stuck on these manners.

In all candor Bugsy should have won Best Picture. It had taken the Golden Globe for Best Drama, the story of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening’s romance had become as much as a part of the film’s saga as anything and it had gotten the most nominations of any movie – ten. Furthermore, compared the other live action nominees, it was far more typical of the kind of the movie the Academy tends to love. It was a period piece that featured some of the best actors and actresses working (it still comes as a shock that his role as Mickey Cohen was the only time Harvey Keitel has ever gotten a Oscar nomination for anything) and compared to Silence of the Lambs it was actually lighter in tone. I’m still kind of shocked, thirty years after the fact, that Lambs was able to beat it, much less manage to sweep all five major categories – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Actress and Screenplay – something that had only been done twice before with It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

And I’m certain The Silence of the Lambs’ success story could not be repeated now. In 1992 a relatively new company called Miramax would make history with one of the most unforgettable sleeper hits The Crying Game. Harvey Weinstein deserved all the disgust and loathing that he did for his sexual history, but just as repugnant would become his approach to winning an Oscar and the subsequent destruction of Hollywood filmmaking. Weinstein would pioneer the trend of making the race for Oscars all about the campaign rather than the movie. I don’t deny that many of the movies that Miramax would make were classics – it’s hard to argue about The Piano or Pulp Fiction or The English Patient. But merit, if it had ever counted for something when it came to the Oscars, would be utterly buried in ad campaigns and interviews and endless mailing lists. The Silence of the Lambs in that sense represents the end of an era which is a far darker legacy than any of the horror we saw onscreen.

 

There's a Giant In The Sky: A Tribute to Stephen Sondheim

 

I am reluctant to write this column because it falls well outside the purview of writing on television and barely touches on writing on film. But the news of Friday, though it was less of a surprise, hit me and no doubt millions of others incredibly hard – even harder than the loss of Alex Trebek around this time last year. So I feel obligated that I must write this column.

Stephen Sondheim, one of the greatest composers in the history of music, passed away Friday night. Words seem utterly inadequate to describe him – legend, genius, and icon: they all seem woefully inadequate. Ironically the man who would probably be able to come up with the word has left us. Everybody knows the lists of Sondheim’s accomplishment when it comes to Broadway, music, and culture. So I’ll just describe his effect on me.

Growing up in my house there was always music playing in the background. Most of it was classical and instrumental but there was a fair amount of Broadway. I remember growing up with the scores of Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Fiddler on the Roof, and yes, West Side Story in the background. But to be the honest, the first Broadway show that ever really connected with me was Into the Woods. Part of this is due to the reason it gets played in schools all over the country: it’s one of the most accessible musicals ever composed. And I’ll admit part of it is because it is the very first show on Broadway my parents ever took me to – I can’t remember if I was eight or nine at the time. But part of it was because, even at this very youthful age, the power of words and music being combined was becoming something that I could embrace and realize the genius of.

And I don’t even have to strain my mind to think that hard where I really knew just how brilliant that combination could be. It’s in the opening scene of Into the Woods when the Witch is describing to the Baker and his Wife what his father was doing in his garden that night:

 

“He was robbing me, raping me

Rooting through my rutabaga, raiding my arugula

Raiding my rampion, my champion, my favorite!”

 

That combination has stuck in my head for decades and not merely because my father made us repeat every so often at dinner. I don’t really have to say why. I am a good writer and on my best day, I don’t even have a millionth of the ability that Sondheim did when he came up with that combination of phrasing.

Into the Woods was, effectively, my gateway drug into Broadway. I would see a lot of imaginings of musicals from Hollywood’s golden age (the movie musical was, save for Disney, essentially dead for most of my childhood and well into my adulthood). And slowly, most through cast recordings and the occasionally PBS broadcast of a live performance, my impressions of the Sondheim show would slowly be formed. After reading countless books about Sondheim over the years, a fundamental pattern would be formed: extraordinary scores, mediocre books and more often than not, financial failure. Most of this is due to the fact that Sondheim was almost always writing about dark and depressing subject matter – considering the world we live in you might say he was of his time. Company: a dissection of the institution of marriage. Follies: the reunion of an old girls dance corps where two failed relationships is forced to reunite. Pacific Overtures: a Kabuki style story of the Japanese view of America’s ‘invasion’ of Japan.  Even his successes are depressing: Sweeney Todd, the story of a barber seeking revenge and the baker of pies who finds a use for the corpses he makes. Into the Woods: the second act features many of the characters dying due to the collective actions of the first act. Don’t even get me started on shows like Assassins.

It’s not that these shows weren’t critically successful – three of them won Tonys for Best Musical and Sondheim himself won six Tonys. He is to date the only composer to win three consecutive Tonys for Best Score: Company, Follies and A Little Night Music.  But with few exceptions, most of his shows were either box office failures, if not complete disasters. I have a feeling that’s why so many people focus on collecting the cast albums of his shows where all ‘the good stuff’ really is. But as someone who has seen, in some form, all but two of his musicals, it’s not like these were terrible shows. (Well, Road Show was, but that’s mainly because there was no story there.)  The biggest crime in my opinion, mostly in television but also pertaining to the movies and the theater, is complete lack of ambition or originality. Sondheim’s shows are many things, but the one thing you can’t accuse them of being is not ambitious or trying to rip something of.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to focus on the show that has one of my favorite scores: Pacific Overtures. What Sondheim, producer Hal Prince and writer John Weidman tried to do was tell a story of the Japan in 1853 before and immediately after the arrival of Commodore Perry. They tried to tell this story by doing entirely in Kabuki style and casting it entirely with Asian actors. This would’ve been hard to do today: in the 1970s, it was nearly impossible. Casting alone was a nightmare, it took them nearly two years to find enough actors to play all of the roles and that was with an endless amount of duplication. When they finally did get it cast, out of town tryouts were disastrous, there were actually bomb threats and when they finally got it on Broadway, it received mixed reviews and barely ran six months.

Multiple times over the decades, various producers tried to revive by making alterations. One production had it done with an all-Caucasian cast. One production did it with all the dialogue and songs translated it into Japanese. One production tried it with no scenery at all. I saw three of these production and I can tell you why all of them failed: There’s no there there. There are no real characters. There’s barely a plot. The biggest role is the Reciter (Narrator) and he doesn’t work at all.  I respect what Sondheim and his team tried to do: it’s admirable and especially today, it’s the kind of show we need in theory. But in practice, it’s basically blank.

And I consider that a tragedy because in my opinion, it contains some of the greatest songs and lyrics that Sondheim would ever write. There’s ‘Please Hello’ a show where ambassador from new nations come to ‘request’ trade with a Japanese lord, each singing in a different style of music, but each ending with an increasingly louder cannon. There’s ‘Someone in a Tree’, in which several Japanese men try to describe from various points of view what happened the day of negotiations. There’s ‘A Bowler Hat’ where we witness through lyric the gradually Westernization of a minor Japanese lord over a period of ten years. But in my opinion, one of the greatest songs Sondheim ever wrote is Chrysanthemum Tea, a song in which the Mother of the shogun tells him about how they might want to deal with the arrival of the Westerners. Some of my favorite Sondheim lyrics of all time are in this song:

 

“It’s the Day of the Rat, my Lord

There’s but four days remaining

And although you’re entertaining

It is time for a chat, my lord.”

 

“There are ships in the bay in contemptuous array.”

 

“Have some tea, my Lord, some chrysanthemum tea

It’s an herb that’s superb

For disturbances at sea.”

 

And one of the funniest lyrics he ever did:

 

“It’s a tangled situation as your father would agree,

And it mightn’t be so tangled

If you hadn’t had him strangled.”

 

Forget ‘I Feel Pretty’, forget ‘Send in the Clowns’, forget ‘Comedy Tonight’ In my opinion, that lyric sums up all that is great about Sondheim – and the show that its in, everything that was wrong with the production around them. (Personal note: the last production of Pacific Overtures didn’t have Chrysanthemum Tea. Had I not been with my family at the time, I would’ve walked out right then.)

Like all of the great composers, there is no chance of Sondheim disappearing. His shows will always get remade and reinvented. We have the images of so many televised recordings of his musicals and there are some decent films out there. (I will also be grateful that I heard Anna Kendrick play Cinderella in the flawed but spirited filmed version on Into the Woods.)  But it’s hard not to feel Sondheim’s loss and not paraphrase Billy Wilder when a movie legend died: “No more Sondheim.”  “Worse. No more Sondheim shows.” And yes, I know we hadn’t had one for more than a decade and that one was a mess. But at least we had the possibility of ‘one show more’ (sorry, wrong composers). Now it’s gone forever.

It will be a long time before theater produces a second Sondheim. Then it’ll be just that: a second Sondheim. We’ve heard the first…and only. Maybe the musicals that follow will be more cheerful but Sondheim’s gift was that he made you enjoy the world of the darkness. So to those of you who decide to go to Steven Spielberg’s new version of West Side Story think of it not just as going to see a great musical by a great director, but to see the origin story of a true legend. It may not be as impressive as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but trust me that you are seeing something more remarkable: how a young twenty-seven year old managed to find his voice and become a true hero to millions, not because he could fly or walk on walls but because he did something even harder: create a world with words.

30 Years Ago, The Lambs Starting Screaming, and They Never Stopped: Reflection on Silence of The Lambs, Part 1

 

 

As those of you who read this column are aware, I tend to focus primarily on television. But as films are so frequently adapted to series, I felt it might be worth every so often looking at the way certain films have impacted television in particular.

Thirty years ago The Silence of the Lambs debuted in theaters. Pop culture has never been the same. There have three subsequent sequels to the movie, at least two series that have direct links to the film and God knows how many series about profiling, the FBI and serial killers. And those are just the obvious links: as anyone who is a casual fan of The X-Files knows, one of the major influences for the character of Dana Scully was Jodie Foster’s portrayal of Clarice Starling. (The series made several indirect references to it over the years, finally admitting the direct link in the series finale.) Because of the creation of the iconic characters of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, it’s kind of surprising that there are certain things that we’ve forgotten about the film’s origins and just why it resonated so much with the popular culture. So in this article, I’m going to look at The Silence of the Lambs; why it was such a huge critical and financial success and why none of the subsequent movies – and few of the direct television linked to it – have gotten it right since then.

Let’s start with something everybody knows and yet has forgotten at the same time: Silence of the Lambs wasn’t the first book – or movie – to have Hannibal Lecter as a character. We all know that Thomas Harris first dip into that water was Red Dragon which was the story of profiler Will Graham being lured out of seclusion after several years having survived an attack by Hannibal Lecter to track another serial killer. What so many people have forgotten is that Red Dragon was made into a movie twice - the first time in 1986 as Manhunter by one of the most iconic directors of all time, Michael Mann.

There are some who consider Manhunter the best of the Hannibal Lecter movies, which is debatable. What is crystal clear even now is that Manhunter has it all over its remake Red Dragon and the comparison isn’t even close. Red Dragon may have a more famous cast, but comparing performance to performance as a whole, Manhunter is clearly superior. William Petersen, still going through a period of trying to be a leading man in movies (something that never quite gelled) is superb as Will Graham, looking haunted from first scene to last. Edward Norton never had a prayer in comparison. A then basically unknown Joan Allen is quite remarkable as the woman who befriends Francis Dollarhyde, not knowing the secrets he keeps. And with all due respect to Ralph Fiennes, who is truly one of the great actors of our time, he can’t hold a candle to Tom Noonan as the Tooth Fairy. Noonan is one of the greatest character actors in the history, a man who seems to exude creepiness in every fiber of his being, even when the characters he plays are sympathetic. He embodies a man who is not comfortable in his own skin and who you know even before his violent action can’t be trusted.

What Manhunter did right was essentially keep Hannibal Lecter caged with the entire movie. Red Dragon’s entire purpose – hell, the marketing strategy was based on it – was to ‘introduce’ the viewer to Hannibal. As a result Lecter, who is basically just a supporting role in the book and original movie, is basically at the center of Red Dragon.  This is a flawed concept, mainly because Anthony Hopkins despite being one of the greatest actors in history was in his early sixties and had to play a much younger version on Lecter, something that he just couldn’t pull off.

I will not commit heresy and say that Brian Cox, who plays Lecter in Manhunter, is the superior Hannibal. But if you consider it without the baggage that so many viewers do, it is an interesting study in comparison to the version we got in Red Dragon. It helps that Cox was only forty at the time and didn’t seem inclined to going to the histrionics that we’ve come to associate with Hannibal over the years: the performance is exactly subtle, but it’s not over the top either.

It is conceivable that when The Silence of the Lambs was being made, the producers did consider it a sequel to Manhunter. (There are even two cast members from the original film in the movie. I’ll leave it to fans to pick them out.) The movies were basically made for the same amount of money (Manhunter cost $15 million; Silence cost $19 million) Jonathan Demme was probably given the job because, like Mann, he had a history in TV more than movies. And indeed the film – stripped to its bones – does have closer a feel to Manhunter than any Hannibal Lecter project that has come since.

And what is absolutely key to that idea is, just as in Manhunter, the most notorious character barely shows his face on screen. We have come to associate Anthony Hopkins in the same breath with this character, I have a feeling it would stun fans of the franchise to know that Hannibal is on screen for little more than twenty minutes of the films two hour run time. (This has actually been clocked by critics.)

I have a feeling this is not only the reason that Silence of the Lambs is not only the most successful film of all time, but why so many critics regard as a horror film. It’s hard to consider why one would do so – it doesn’t fit the category of The Exorcist or Jaws, or other horror films with human monsters such as Psycho.  But when Clarice goes down into the ward where Lecter is being kept, Demme gives you the distinct feeling that she is descending into one of the lower circles of Hell, which Lecter the absolute worst monster of all at the bottom. Miggs’ act when she is in the process of leaving is shocking not so much because its so clearly depraved – certainly for theater audiences in the early nineties – but because the suspense has been tuned so finely, its more stunning than one with a knife.

And in my opinion what makes Silence of the Lambs work is Jodie Foster’s performance as Clarice. It’s probably also the reason that it was regarded much more highly than Manhunter. Petersen’s performance is superb because he appears completely haunted and about to break at any time. By comparison Clarice is a relative innocent – we know this going in and so does everybody in the film, including and especially Lecter.  Foster had already won an Academy Award in The Accused for playing a rape victim and had been in the business so long that she’d gotten a reputation for being jaded. So it’s particular remarkable to see just how innocent she appears as Clarice, someone who must deal with a world of monsters and is utterly unprepared to dive into the abyss. We’ve seen so many versions over the past thirty years that’s its remarkable to remember just how novel this was when we saw Foster do it.

Where the film fundamentally falls down is, paradoxically, the portrayal of Buffalo Bill. Given all the shouts of ‘cancel culture’ in the past few years, I am genuinely shocked no one has aimed their guns as this film and Ted Levine’s portrayal of Bill. The idea of a gay man killing women so he can become one was a horribly offensive idea when Harris wrote the concept. There have been a lot of gay men as serial killers over the decades, and consider how many stereotypes needed to be shattered over the years, I can’t help but think how much this film set back gay rights, never mind trans-rights. And considering how little the actual killer seems to matter in the story of the film – the center of it is fundamentally the relationship between Clarice and Lecter – you can’t help but wonder why none of the censors cried foul.

Despite that, The Silence of the Lambs remains one of the most brilliant films of all time. And given how Hollywood tends to ignore exactly those kinds of films for Oscars, it’s actually even more amazing how it managed to do so well at them. In the follow-up to this, I’ll hypothesize why this happened, why it probably couldn’t happen again, and why none of the other projects dealing with Hannibal Lecter have ever resonated the same way.

 

There Will Be More Law And Order, and The Shocking Twist Ending to Its Shocking Ending

 

I don’t think there’s a viewer in the past two generations of television that can remember a period where Dick Wolf’s Law & Order was not on the air. It’s not just that it ran for 20 seasons. Or that it spawned, at last count, seven spinoffs. (Two barely lasted a season, and one of them was cancelled in the womb.) It’s that because of syndication, it has always been on the air. There are some channels that seem to run nothing but Law & Order reruns. Everything about the series – the opening narration, the ripped from the headlines feel, almost every major star that the series made or the actor who found their role of a lifetime in it, and of course, that sound which has actually entered the consciousness even though we just can’t tell what instruments are making - has become a collective part not of every part of pop culture

Law and Order has just been there, even a decade after its cancellation. There’s an excellent possibility that, even though the series aired nearly five hundred episodes that by this point in time there are viewers – and I count myself among them – who have seen every single episode so many times that may now be able to identify them just by the opening two minutes: certainly by the time whichever two detectives working the beat are called on to the scene. Hell, I’m willing to bet there are some of us who could tune in mid-episode and still know which one it was within thirty seconds. That’s how much it’s permeated the landscape.

And everybody has their favorite characters. There are those who never got over Chris Noth’s Mike Logan being exiled to Staten Island, though it worked out great for Noth in the end. There are those who are so familiar with Jerry Orbach witticisms that it might come as a shock to remember he wasn’t the first – or even the second – elder statesman detective on the series. And we all have our favorite young female ADA assisting Sam Waterston. (For my father it will always be Jill Hennessy’s Claire Kincaid.)

So perhaps, given the way that the every network in the world has rebooted some franchise series and considering how key Dick Wolf has been to NBC for going on thirty years, it was perhaps inevitable that NBC announced a revival of the original Law and Order earlier this year. And I have no doubt that there were the usual sighs and groans about why on earth NBC keeps rebooting or continuing old series rather than bringing back fresher ones. (Of course when you consider the dozens of cast changes by my calculations the writers ‘rebooted’ the show at least three times.) But in a weird there’s a bizarre kind of logic in bringing back Law and Order, considering Wolf and company never got a chance to properly end it.

I suspect you can hear the strings going up like they did at a major plot twist when you wrote that last sentence. “Wait a minute!” you’re saying to yourself. “But the series ran for twenty years. Surely it ended because the writers were done with it!” That’s the thing. They didn’t. I realize it can be hard to tell when you see the final episode ‘Rubber Room’. The episode ends at a going away party for Lt. Van Buren (S. Epatha Merekson, the actress who lasted the longest in the series original run – seventeen years) as the cast gathers around to celebrate her retirement. The case has been solved and there’s a celebratory air that seems to be setting the stage for a goodbye.

The thing is it only seemed like a final episode. The very nature of the procedural emphasizing plot over character had a way of making all season finales seem like just another story. Occasionally the series would direct reference the departure of a major character – see the fourth season finale where Michael Moriarty’s Ben Stone exited or the ninth season finale where Benjamin Bratt’s Rey Curtis left – but a lot of the time you wouldn’t know a character had left the series until the next season premiered and new characters just showed up.  This happened more times than I can count, so I won’t be specific.  The finale of Season 20 only would seem like a last episode to someone who had never watched the series before.

And indeed, it caught a lot of people by surprise when the series was not on NBC’s fall lineup for the 2010-2011 season. (30 Rock actually had Alec Baldwin’s character make a joke about how little sense this made when he heard about it – and his character was an executive at NBC.) Admittedly Wolf had mentioned that he wanted Law and Order to make it to twenty seasons so it could officially tie Gunsmoke for the prime-time series with the longest run on the air, but he’d never given any indication that he’d necessarily wanted to end the show after it reached that mark. (The fact that SVU has gone into season 23 shows that he was never wed to that spinoff lasting longer then the original either.) The ratings had dropped quite a bit over the last few years of its run, but the reviews had improved and the ratings were still solid – certainly by the standards of a network that was at the time, tottering on fourth place.

So if Law and Order wasn’t going to end, why was it cancelled? There was a lot of terrible decision made by the executives running NBC at this time much of which was leading to the networks near collapse. (Just two years NBC would cancel Harry’s Law, a Kathy Bates led courtroom drama that had solid reviews and very good ratings for reasons that are inexplicable even to this day.) Wolf, who has always been a good soldier for NBC, never public complained about it to the network and has remained to this day a willing partner with so many of his programs. (Hell, two nights of prime time are basically his territory for the network.) But maybe in the age of the revival – and given that NBC’s numbers are starting to teeter yet again -  one or the other agreed to bring the flagship show back.

Now the more pressing question: should there be more Law and Order? It’s not exactly like millions of viewers have been wondering what these characters have been doing for the last decade: I’m willing to be all but the most devoted fan can even remember who played the cast in the final season of Law and Order. It’s not like we need more Law and Order episodes; I’m willing to be even after the past decades, there are just as many viewers who still haven’t gotten through the original series.  Considering every other series on network television is a procedural – and given the immense amount of scrutiny the procedural has undergone the last few years – it’s not like there’s a need for the return of another one. Right now, the only people might really need a Law and Order reboot are the hundreds of professional New York actors who haven’t had much work since Broadway was locked down at the height of the pandemic.

Besides, considering the series ripped from the headlines feel, what kind of storylines would we get? Police involved shooting by racist cops. The series covered that multiple times. Governor is guilty of sexual misconduct? A major storyline of Seasons 18 and 19.  And those are just the least controversial ones? Does anyone really want to see murder’s being done during quarantine, BLM demonstrations and God forbid an investigation into a former president’s misconduct? (Believe it or not, we actually got a variation of that in Season 16.)

So yes, NBC is going to revive Law and Order and it may end up being a success. I really can’t bring myself to care one way or another. Besides, it really doesn’t matter whether I end up watching it live or not – one way or another, it’ll end up in syndication and we’ll all end up seeing what happens. That is the story.

 

Why I Still Love A Million Little Things

 

 

There are some series you really wonder why they are, to quote Arthur Miller, ‘liked, but they’re not well liked.” I think about that every time I watch an episode of one of ABC’s greatest creations A Million Little Things. I will admit this is a dark series to watch – last season alone dealt with paralysis, drug addiction, racism in too many forms grooming, sexual molestation and an assault – and that’s without counting how the effects of 2020 laid waste to some of the lead characters greatest dreams just by being 2020.

So yes, A Million Little Things is not a cheerful series. But when you get right down to it, neither is This is Us and it is worshiped by critics and audiences alike. Why does one series get loved by fans and awards shows and this show basically get ignored by both?” Even after nearly a decade of doing this professionally, I can’t say for sure. My best guess is that because Million is set firmly in the present – or at least it has been since the end of Season 1 – we don’t have the same playing around with timelines that we do on This is Us. We therefore don’t have all the puzzles that we have to work out, or the knowledge that whatever traumas the Pearson will deal with, they’ll be all right as a family in the future.

By being set firmly in the here and now – and for the record the series portrayal of 2020 was one of the most wrenching and quietly brilliantly works of television of the entire season – the viewer has no escape from the often terrible things that are going on. We have to witness Eddie go through his rage at being unfairly paralyzed, watch his new addiction to pills destroy him and his marriage to Karen that we have been rooting for two and a half seasons then we have to see him prove he’s going to be a good father, then we see him learn who finally put him in the wheelchair. We have to see Rome and Regina, because of the pandemic, lost the things they have been working for the most – Rome, the film he spent all of season 2 getting written; Regina losing the restaurant she spent her whole career trying to find. And perhaps hardest of all was the storyline in which we saw Sophie finally reveal the way her trusted music teacher had spent weeks molesting her, Gary’s incredible rage when he learned about it that he could not subdue which continues after the potential investigation collapse and caused him to lash out at Delilah, Sophie’s mother in a horrifying scene, topped only by Gary’s assault on him in the third season finale. The consequences have played out even more disastrously in Season 4 as Gary has lost the woman he loved and the possibility to be a father because of his actions.

It’s small wonder that many viewers don’t love this series; the tension can be unbearable. But the reason I love it so much – to the point that I consider it one of the best shows on television today – is because A Million Little Things is primarily about healing after tragedy in a way that few other series truly are. Those of us who’ve been there from the beginning remember the series with the suicide of a friend bringing about realizations about adultery, depression and recovery from cancer.  This series deals with how you really deal with the traumas from your past even when you sometimes forget the lesson. It was hard watching Eddie go down the road he did, but its also been rewarding watching his arc this season as he finally finds a way to accept that what happened to him was an accident, that he will be in the wheelchair probably for the rest of his life, and possibly finding a way to move forward in a career and maybe even in a relationship.

Rome and Regina, the couple who have stuck together through hard times throughout the series, are going through their own journeys: Rome is dealing with the reality of being a black filmmaker in America as well as a black man. When he finally gets a documentary about the black experience sold to a streaming service it should be a triumph – until he learns the company wants to use it as prestige and bury the public from seeing it. He tries to get his movie seen in smaller showings, and is sued by the company. When he ‘wins’ he loses the money and the agent whose been with him but prefers to protect its relationship with the company rather than its client. Regina is trying to find a way forward working as a chef, first in a horrible chain restaurant then as a caterer for a film crew. Now its beginning to seem like the relationship may fracture.

Then there are the two characters at the heart of this series – Gary (James Roday Rodriguez in a performance that no one who saw Psych would recognize) and Maggie (Allison Miller) Their relationship started with sex in a cancer support group bathroom and has evolved into one of the funniest – and sweetest – friendships in all of television. For two years, they tried to make their relationship work but Maggie finally had to move on. Gary found happiness with a physical therapist and Gulf War veteran and genuinely seemed on the verge of committing to happiness. But when she found out about his lies, the relationship was torched. Even worse, his relationship with Sophie, a girl he has been a second father too, especially here has apparently been completely scuttled when she learned what he did and she was infuriated. He thought he was helping her, but she made it clear all he’d done was made her trauma all about him. In a perfect world Roday would have been nominated for a Best Supporting Actor last year.

As I said A Million Little Things is not for the faint of heart, which is all the more reason why it should be watched. How many series, let alone network series, are willing to center not on action or procedural but rather trauma and the process of getting better from it? This is Us is about the perfect family that has so many traumas beneath the surface. It’s about an ideal that none of us will ever have. A Million Little Things is about making a family with the people you love and trying to rebuild from everything life can throw at you. And as we’ve seen just this last year, it can throw a lot at you even if you’re perfect.

I don’t entire think the series is perfect. I’m still not a hundred percent sure where the new storyline involving Karen (Grace Park remains note perfect by the way) trying to explore her sexuality after a divorce is entirely workable. And I’ll admit the six month flashforward we got two episodes ago did seem to leave a lot of details out. But I’m willing to continue on this journey with these people who I’ve come to love because of their flaws and problems, not despite them. A Million Little Things is the kind of series they literally almost don’t make any more. I think you owe it to yourself to see it more than watching Chicago PD.

My score: 4.75 stars.

Streaming Is Watched by Millions...Or Is It?

 

Yesterday USA announced that the fourth season of the Bill Pullman slow-burn mystery drama The Sinner will be its last one. There will be time to consider whether it deserved to keep going another season, but this isn’t that article.

What is far more important is what the cancellation of The Sinner represents – as of right now USA only has one remaining original program on its docket: Chucky, the Child’s Play reimagining. Right now, the series is a huge success and has already been greenlit for a second season. That said there is a very real possibility that USA – the network that brought such brilliant series as Burn Notice, Psych and the multiple Emmy winner Mr. Robot will very soon be out of the original series business.

As I mentioned in an earlier article, over the past few years more and more of the basic cable networks are getting out of the original series market. Lifetime and A&E abandoned it before and its looking like TNT and Comedy Central may not be far behind. In a sense you can’t entirely blame them – cable networks are all about the bottom line and with fewer and fewer people watching series on TV in general, there’s less money in putting original series on the air.  An FX executive once argued that there were too many original series out there. It seems that quite a few networks have realized this, and are getting out of the business – and leaning more towards streaming services. They are, after all, where all the viewers are…or are they?

I fully understand why so many people are gravitating towards services like Netflix and Amazon for their television needs – no one has time to sit down and watch a series when it airs and these services allow watching them whenever and wherever you want. Where the reasoning has always fallen down has been a simple problem: how many people are watching these original shows on streaming services? This has been a question that every single service has been maddeningly refusing to answer ever since they got in the business. For the past decade, Netflix has been high to announce that certain series are the most watched shows on their service, but they’ve never told us how many viewers there were or how they reached those numbers? The media and the fans have been asked to take it on faith that Orange is the New Black, or Stranger Things, or Squid Game is being watched by tens of millions of viewers. And you can trust Netflix – why would the company that brought you Ozark and Peaky Blinders lie to you about this?

I’ve never fully trusted this method. I’ve always doubts about how the Nielsen ratings worked – I thought they were always a flawed example of viewership to begin with and they’ve done nothing to improve them over the years – but I’ve been inclined to trust the Nielsen’s announcements more than the broadcast networks. I can buy that eight million people are watching every episode of The Wonder Years with less incredulity than ABC’s announcing that 40 million viewers are. Similarly, I’m inclined to trust the numbers that come out of cable – if HBO was going to lie about the number of viewers that watched the Season 3 premiere of Succession, you’d think they’d be more inclined to say it was greater than 2 million. But the idea that somehow fifty million viewers watching every season of Orange is the New Black always struck me as unbelievable. We can’t get that many people to vote in a midterm for a single party, but somehow that many people were watching the Upside Down? I never bought it.

And I had good reason not too. Late last year, it was announced that the rubric for how Netflix determines how many people view a given program is based almost entirely on how many people watch the first ten seconds. Which means whether you chose to binge watch the first season of House of Cards or tuned out after the first moment saw Kevin Spacey, your viewership counted the same.

In my mind this is a far bigger scandal than anything Dave Chapelle said in any of his comedy specials and honestly should be regarded as such. It shouldn’t come as a shock either: we don’t trust multi-billion dollar corporations on their hiring practices or their carbon footprint. Why should we have believed their report of what their viewers are?

And fundamentally, this level of distrust should hold with every major streaming service. We don’t believe anything Jeff Bezos says about working conditions in his warehouses; why should we believe Amazon about the number of people who watch Goliath? Hulu’s original advertising campaign was that they were aliens bent on turning our brains to mush; somehow we were supposed to believe they were telling us the truth about how people watched Shrill?  Sure Disney tells us that twenty million people are watching every new episode of The Mandalorian, but how much do we want to trust the company that owns the rights to Star Wars? If that’s not a conflict of interest, I don’t know what is. If the only people telling us how good their product is are the manufacturers, then why should we trust them?

Now to be fair, I have very little problem with many of the shows from all of these services – I’ve spent the last several years advocating that some of the greatest shows of that time came from these services. And I also acknowledge that just because you’re a multi-billion dollar corporation doesn’t necessarily mean you can have a successful streaming service – anyone remember Yahoo TV? Of course you don’t – it was there and gone in less than a year.

The problem is the overall effect streaming has had over television as a whole. Streaming makes every convenient for everybody – except for its competition. I’ve spent too much time explaining how streaming and cable have hurt the ability of network television to compete, and now it’s clear it’s causing the same damage to cable. I’m kind of shocked that all the people who are demanding anti-trust legislation for just about every other monopoly in this country aren’t doing the same for the way streaming companies are undermining television programming. Everyone wants to dismantle Amazon, but not for the fact it’s taking viewers from CBS. And yes I know almost every major broadcast or cable network is a monopoly of half a dozen other broadcasting networks. It might not be the worst idea to use the same legislation there either.

In fact, that brings me to my final point. One of USA’s main owners is NBC. I think there’s a good chance a lot of writers have been going to NBC’s cable networks like USA and SyFy with original programming ideas over the years. In 2020 NBC started its own streaming service Peacock which already has quite a few series airing on it now, including Girls5eva and Rutherford Falls. You can pretty much see where this is going – those with great ideas will go to Peacock, and having learned the lesson from Netflix, they’ll go on to say that the reboot of Battlestar Galactica – headed by Sam Esmail, the creator of Mr. Robot ­­– is watched by more viewers than any other show on its service. Will this be the truth? We will have no way of knowing. All it will mean is that a series that was originally one of the cables – and Peak TV’s - great success stories will end up on streaming. How long will the continuation of this process lead to the cliché that people said for decades about cable being true – 500 channels and still nothing on?

Television After 9/11: Homeland Concluded, The Last three seasons and how the series mirrored - and predicted - American politics

 

 

For the most part during the first half of the series Homeland had dealt with terrorism while mostly not dealing with Presidential politics. However in the final three seasons the show began to look directly into this world in ways that may have seemed fictional but now smack of prescience.

In Season 6 Carrie is living in New York running a charity that helps those unfairly targeted by the government. She is also caring for Peter Quinn – who in what was by far the biggest shock of Season 6 was still alive. Friend’s performance in Season 6 was one of the greatest ones in the entire series. He’s clearly a shell of his former self, brain damaged and not at all grateful for Carrie saving his life. He’s a step behind everybody else and he knows it.

Carrie is also serving as an unofficial aid to the President-elect Keane (Elizabeth Marvel) the first woman president who lost her son to Iraq. Her views on retracting troops in the Middle greatly trouble the men in intelligence like Dar Adal, who says in the first episode: “She’s a menace.” I don’t think anybody could have foreseen what came next.

Gradually as Season 6 unfolded, it becomes clear that the military and intelligence community – in conjunction with conservative media, voiced by Brent O’Keefe (Jake Weber) are trying to undermine the President with the purpose of removing her from office. The further along the season progresses – and this was written in 2016 – it’s kind of stunning how on point the writers would be on future events. The intelligence community is manipulating social media to make it look like American disapproves far more than it does; the right-wing media is increasingly vituperative of everything Keane does, and loud and increasingly violent crowds assemble around the hotel where Keane is living prior to the inauguration.

Throughout the season Quinn plays a key role – Dar abducts him in order to keep him safe without knowledge Quinn has been marked for assassination. He uses resourceful means to escape and get back to Carrie and finds out that an assassination team has been dispatched to New York. The final episode is arguably the most shattering of the entire series – Dar, who was never behind the idea of assassination, warns Carrie of what is happening moments before the President’s immediate entourage is blown up. Quinn and Carrie help get the President to a vehicle ahead of a gauntlet. Then knowing full what is awaiting Quinn says: “Hold on” and drives Carrie and Keane to safety while taking seven bullets to the chest. In the aftermath, Keane says: “That man just saved our lives. What was his name?” Still in shock, Carrie says simply: “Peter Quinn.”

The denouement to the episode is even more shocking than the climax.  Carrie has a meeting with intelligence about a series of high-profile arrests and tries to assure them things will be normal. Saul visits Adal in prison and asks him why he participated. “I don’t know,” he says. “There just seems to be something dangerous about her.” Then at home, Carrie receives a call from Saul – who is in the process of being arrested himself along with 200 other high ranking intelligence officers. Carrie runs to the White House and knocks on the door to the Oval Office. We freeze on Keane’s face utterly immobile.

Season 7 begin three months later, and both the country and Carrie are in utter upheaval. Carrie is now living back in DC with her sister and her mental condition, which has been stable the last few seasons, has worsened. The medication she takes for her bipolar condition is no longer effective which makes her wonder whether her own stability makes her the right person to handle being an insider to a key Senator Intelligence Committee (memorably portrayed by Dylan Baker)

Keane herself seems to be spinning out. Angry at the lack of justice by the military, her new chief of staff David Wellington (Linus Roache in one of his best roles) is trying to help guide her presidency back from the brink. He arranges the release of ‘the 200’ and has Saul named National Security Adviser. No sooner does Saul take the office than he has to deal with a domestic crisis – Brent O’Keefe has been in flight and is hiding out in rural Virginia. (In one of the better digs at media, Keefe is basically all talk and no action: he has to be shown how to shoot a gun.) The standoff ends in a shootout that leaves many dead and eventually Saul comes to realize that this is a maneuver by the Russians particularly by a man named Gromov (Costa Ronin)

Much of the last two seasons – Season 7 in particular – deals primarily with the role of Russia in its desire to undermine America and how little work it really has to do in that effect. It is clear that the new guard has no patience for any of the old Cold War rules that so many believed in, and as the series makes clear over and over, the Russians are not entirely wrong for being so bitter at us for not only destroying their way of life but for the propaganda we put out that we were the good guys. It points out just how easy is to manipulate not just social media but so many of the Americans in the political system. In the middle of Season 7 Sam Paley (Baker) learns of the Russian plot and that he is a part of it, coded as a ‘Useful Idiot’ Not only does he not back away from his challenges to Keane, when the Vice President (Beau Bridges) ends up taking power in part because of his manipulations, he goes out of his way to try and undermine the mission against Russia, purely out of his own spite for a President he does not like. It’s hard to look at the actions of Paley now and not see it mirrored in far too many elected official these days.

The seventh season ends with Carrie managing to extract the Russian mole responsible for so much of the plot but at the cost of her own freedom. This is far from the biggest shock of the episode though.  In the final minutes Keane makes one of the most profound and shocking speeches of the entire series in which she deplores the fall of democracy around the world as well as her own:

“Right now, half of you don’t believe a word I say. At midnight tonight, I shall resign the office of the Presidency. Some will say I’m doing this because I’m weak. I’m not. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been. Some will say it’s because I’m a woman. Well, if it takes a woman to shock the system, then I’ll do it. A new president takes office tonight. Pray for him.” Marvel should have earned an Emmy nomination for this episode just as Friend should’ve gotten one for the previous season.

The final minute of the episode involves Carrie finally being released back to Saul after months in Russian custody. She has been off her meds for months and seems a shell of her former self. No one trusts her any more, which will be critical in the final season.

In Season 8, the series dealt with the possibility of peace in Afghanistan. Saul, still acting as National Security Adviser, now finds himself negotiating with the Pakistani leader who was responsible for so much chaos and death in Season 4 and trying to find the head of the Taliban – the same man who held Saul prisoner for days that season. Strangely enough and perhaps combined with the weariness of war, the Taliban leader is willing to listen to reason and because of their time together Saul now feels he can talk to him.

Carrie ends up back in Afghanistan trying to help Saul because of her prior relationship with his second in command. However she seems to have no clear memory of the months in captivity and is now viewed with complete distrust from everybody except Saul. This doesn’t improve one bit when Gromov shows up in Kabul and claims to have a prior relationship with Carrie.

There’s a lot going on in Season 8 – the central action deals with the Presidents of Afghanistan and the United States helicopter going down after mentioning peace talks – but what may be the biggest takeaway from the series is that America would much rather have war than make peace. Before his death, we learn that the new President has reached across the aisle for a Vice President who may have eyes for his job. When the Vice President sees the President make his declaration of peace, rather than support him, he thinks it simply something he’s trying to do for reelection. When Hayes becomes President, it is obviously from beginning to end he is unfit for the job and is willing to take advice from absolutely the worst people. These include the new President of Afghanistan, who flatters him despite having been a Taliban supporter and John Zabel, an adviser from a Republican administration. (He’s played by Hugh Darcy, Claire Danes’ real-life husband. Ironically, they’re never once in the same scene). Zabel is clearly one of the architects of the Iraq war and is constantly urging force over any ideas Wellington or Saul may have. The possibility that this peace could lead to a full blown nuclear conflict doesn’t bother him.

Perhaps the clearest statement of how Gordon’s America views foreign policy comes in the final episode. Saul comes to Zabel and tells him the truth – there was no grand conspiracy by the Taliban to bring down the helicopter; it was just a faulty turbine. Zabel is momentarily perplexed, and asks for proof. Saul doesn’t have any, but you get the feeling even if he did Zabel would try to work around it. Saul finally says: “Do you want to be responsible for starting another war in the Middle East under false pretenses?” Zabel gives a mini-justification, which he closes by saying: “And it was worth it to take out Saddam.”

In the world of Homeland, the machines of war and the military are all that matter to America. They have driven everybody actions for eight seasons. Carrie even acknowledges as much in the middle of Season 8 when while traveling with Gromov she finds herself in the wreckage of the village she accidentally destroyed back in Season 4. She asks if this is a joke, and Gromov tells the truth: that he had no idea – that going back to the sites of America’s greatest errors is how Russia – and practically everyone else - drives recruiting. Carrie finally admits something she’s been hiding for years that while she initially considered quitting, she did what she always did in the company ;she doubled down and focused on ‘fixing’ the problem. This is how Gordon sees the War on Terror: never admitting mistakes, always trying to clean up a mess you’ve already made by making it worse.

When I saw the final episode of Homeland I was initially unsatisfied by how Gordon and Gansa had wrapped him things up. In retrospect, I actually think they did a far better job than I was willing to admit at the time. Carrie has spent the entire run of the series doing everything she can to change America – using the system, fighting from outside, trying to fix it from within. And every aspect of it demonstrates that it doesn’t want to change, that the old ways of doing things are the only way to do anything. Even Saul, for all his wisdom, is part of this system. The series calls back to Brody’s tape in which he says: “I love my country and swore to protect it from enemies foreign and domestic.” And we’ve known almost since Season 1 just how many people within the system are damaging America abroad.

So in that sense the final flashforward where Carrie has spent the last year and a half abroad in Russia basically giving up all of the flaws in America’s intelligence system – which as the world knows too well are too far reaching and vastly unsupervised – to the public, it does seems like the end to Carrie Matheson’s arc. This is probably the only way she can truly protect the country she took an oath to defend. And as we learn in the final minutes – when she reveals that she has taken the place of Saul’s previous asset in Russia, the one she needed to expose in order to stop war from breaking out – that she has not given on trying to help her country from without as well. The dedication to the book she has written reads: “For my daughter, in the hope that some day she understands.” Based on her actions both covert and overt, the writers clearly think that Carrie is in the end someone we can be proud of.

 

I’ve been busy with other things for awhile. In my next article in this series, I will return to my discussion of Battlestar Galactica and how this reimagining of a camp sci-fi series may have been Peak TV’s best depiction of a post 9/11 world.