Homicide: Life on The Street Retrospective, Part 3B: The Definition of a Truly Bad Cop

 

Note: I have delayed writing my followup piece to this article because of troubling revelations that have recently come to light about many of the detectives featured in David Simon’s original book and were the inspiration for so many of the characters in his TV series. That said, I now think this article is more relevant than when I was going to write because of what it says about policing in general.

 

Near the end of Season 4, in the episode ‘Scene of the Crime’, we meet for the first time Officer Stu Gharty, played by character actor Peter Gerety. Our introduction to him is when he is called in a Baltimore high rise where shots our being fired. He drives on to the scene, hears the shots and then runs back to his car.

Munch, working with Detective Megan Russert (I’ll come back to her character in a bit) are called out to the scene. Two African-American teenagers are dead, and it’s clear they shot and killed each other. “How often do you have a murder that solves itself?” Gharty asked almost casually as he shows them the bodies. Munch wants to write this up as ‘case closed’ as soon as possible, but Russert pushes forward, and learns that the mothers of the boys heard the shots, called 911 and no one responded for half an hour , even though the 911 call shows Gharty was on the scene..

Russert than goes to talk to Gharty, who goes as far as he can to obfuscate the situation. Munch keeps trying to give him an out saying he called for backup, but Gharty refuses to take it. Russert is more accusatory and says she could have stopped them. Gharty’s response is telling: “Stopped them how? Just me and my 9mm, I might as well go in waving a white flag….What are my options? I step inside that building. They shoot me, then finish each other off. Or worse. I kill a kid. He’s black, I’m white. His mother points the finger. The whole neighborhood’s raging against me, my face is on the front page, my family’s dragged through hell. Why should I take the risk?”

It’s worth noting how one of the quintessential books on the series Homicide: Life on the Screen, written in 1998 views both Gharty and Russert’s actions. They almost entirely empathize with the former.  It’s actually stated directly: “How much bravery have we purchased for $35,000 a year plus benefits?” Then it looks at Russert, a character that the author considers ill-conceived at best as being weak because she forces Gharty to go before a board of inquiry for dereliction of duty. The fact that Giardello, a character that the series clearly admires, not only backs Russert’s play but completely defends her actions, is unmentioned in the book. For daring to take the position that a cop’s behavior is never one hundred percent defendable (in an earlier episode she testifies against Pembleton in a civil suit by a serial killer who accuses the city of violating her civil rights) she is considered wishy-washy or worse a bad cop. I’m not entirely certain if such an attitude was taken because Russert was a woman in the department, but when Gee takes a similar attitude with his detectives, he’s considered almost noble.

In any case, despite the fact that Gharty will eventually admit to Russert in private that he never called for backup, Gharty is acquitted by the board of inquiry.  Gharty goes right back to work, and then things start getting harder to defend.

When we next see Gharty again, it’s the end of Season 5 and he is now a detective working at the Baltimore equivalent of Internal Affairs. Beau Felton, who I mentioned in the previous article about Homicide, has been found murder in his house, and it is eventually that he has been working undercover with Internal to discover a leak in an auto theft ring that the department has been trying to bring down. Gharty has essentially sent Felton into a more dangerous situation then he was ever willing to face himself, and there is a strong implication as the investigation concludes, that his misjudgment of someone in the ring who was already a department informant may have led to Felton’s murder.

No one in the squad thinks much of Gharty. Russert, who has since left the squad and has returned upon hearing of Felton’s death, remembers very well what he’s done and Pembleton is openly hostile because of his behavior in that situation. Gharty ‘seems’ to redeem himself in the eyes of the squad when he tells Frank that he puts himself in a jackpot situation – he got beat up by gangbangers and was hospitalized – and that has made him feel like a ‘real cop’.

The next season (due to a plotline based on a real-life decision the Baltimore Police Department) many of the detectives have been rotated from squad to squad on a three month basis. Pembleton and Bayliss return to the squad to learn that the new rising stars on none other than Gharty and his new partner Laura Ballard (Callie Thorne).

What becomes clear very quickly in the last two seasons of the series (Gerety was a regular for them) is that Gharty is more openly bigoted than perhaps any cop we would ever see on the series. In an opening three-part arc, a Haitian domestic who working for a high-class African American family, the Wilsons (patriarch Felix was played by James Earl Jones, the son and ultimate murderer was played by soon to be brilliant character Jeffrey Wright) is found dead in a hotel bathroom. The normally ruthless Pembleton is reluctant to investigate the Wilson clan with his usual ardor and Giardello, usually unafraid to break down barrier to solve a murder, seems more willing to defend them. Gharty is openly hostile to their approach and says as much to Ballard: “They’re covering Wilson’s ass because it’s the same color as theirs.”

Examples of his bigotry are not limited solely to African-Americans. In one Season 6 story he goes after a woman with AIDS who he believes killed the man who infected her with it far more aggressively than Ballard does. In another, when a drug dealer is killed by white drug killers, he contemptuously calls them ‘city goats’ and even though he’s the primary, he really doesn’t like the idea of spending weeks chasing them around Baltimore. Investigating the murders of two priests, his relationship to being Catholic comes into play, but in the final stages of the investigation he is removed from the case when he starts beating on a witness.

Indeed, Gharty is constantly in conflict with more members of the squad than any other detective. He constantly picks fights with Pembleton in Season 6 and he and Munch end up nearly coming to blows on two separate occasions. In a late season arc when Bayliss starts exploring his sexuality, he is vaguely bigoted towards it and is actually offended when Ballard goes out on a date with him. It is also worth noting that he is not a particularly good detective either – freeze frames of the board throughout the time on the series constantly show him with a clearance rate between 50 and 60 percent. While in the later seasons, clearance rates for every detective are shown as lower – a subtle acknowledgement of similar trends throughout Baltimore  in general – he never comes across as a particularly rugged investigator the same way so many of the characters on the series, including his own partner, do.

Which is why perhaps the most subtly disquieting thing about Homicide: the Movie is where we find Gharty’s character in it. Giardello has left the department to run for mayor and Gharty has taken over as shift commander, supervising many of the detectives he once worked with. (Pembleton makes a very clear point about the job he’s doing when he looks at the board. ‘All these open cases.”)

 When all the detectives end up showing up at the squad to help find who shot Giardello, Gharty doesn’t show clear leadership skills. Early in the movie, when Bayliss and Pembleton walk into the interrogation room, they see a rookie detective (played by Jason Priestley of all people) threatening to beat the witness down if he doesn’t cooperate. Gharty says: “This doesn’t represent how I run my squad.” Sure. After the detective nearly gets beat up by the witness, Pembleton and Bayliss come in and get the answers they need, and the detective is pushed aside by Gharty to get coffee. No matter how you look at it, Gharty handles this badly.

At every level of the investigation Gharty is shown at his worst. When Captain Gaffney, the scourge of Homicide shows up in the squad room to berate him for pulling the detective from the interrogation, Gharty not only wilts but apologizes to him. Then he ‘gets his lunch handed to him’ and Pembleton is exiled from the investigation. (He gets a measure of revenge by assigning that same detective to work ‘the tip line’.)  But his methods of delegating in action are worse than his behavior in private. He sends Detectives Lewis and Rene Shepherd (two light skinned African Americans) to interrogate the head of an Aryan nation radio station and Munch and Bolander (two doughy middle aged white men) to interview the head of a militant African-American movement. When Munch gently suggest it might be more effective for the two teams to switch roles, rather than listen to a more experienced detective, Gharty snarls at him (no doubt let personal feelings cloud his judgment.) It is only near the end of the movie when Pembleton and Bayliss present Gharty with evidence of the possible killer and the lieutenant is reluctant to let them go that Gharty admits: “I had to get off the street. I’m a stooge. I know it.” Pembleton raises the specter of Gee’s belief in him to convince them to go forward and Gharty gives in.

 But the message is a lot clearer by the end of the movie. The kind of cop that Pembleton represented and the lieutenant that Giardello was are no long part of this Baltimore PD.  The unit is now led by a weak-willed, bigoted middle-aged man who will instantly roll over and not listen to the advice of people who might know better. And it is likely that all of the prejudices and approaches that Gharty has shown throughout his career in the department will influence everything the squad does from now. This may be a more haunting ending for the series than the fact that Giardello ends up dying of his wounds at the film.  

This is, in fact, the main reason I think David Simon is wrong when he says that The Wire is far more realistic in its approach to policing that Homicide ever was. There’s actually more truth to that when you look at the bosses, which I’ll do when I come back to this series.

 

 

The Mythology Series May Be Coming to an End -- And Why That's Probably Best for Television

 

Earlier this week, in the constant of an article on the Showtime Yellowjackets the writer fundamentally said that we may be coming to an era where the ‘mystery box’ series – what we know as the mythology series – is fundamentally dead. This writer know of where she speaks: she coauthored what should be considered the quintessential guide to The X-Files, Monster of the Week.

The nature of the article is simple: she argues that the mystery box series is on its way out and that fundamentally it is a good thing for television. I think its demise isn’t quite a foregone conclusion yet – the fact that there was demand for a series like Manifest to get a final season speaks volumes, and as long as shows like Westworld and The Blacklist keep their fanbase interest, they’ll keep going – but there are fewer of them there they’re were even a few years ago.

So I agree with her that the ‘mythology’ show is probably on its downward trajectory and that it’s a good thing for TV as a medium. Where our conclusions differ, however, is how exactly we managed to get to this point and why I think it’s a good thing. So in this article, I will present my reasoning for these self-same conclusions.

The writer seems to think that it was the result of so many disappointing mythology series – and yes, Lost is the prime example of such – that finally pushed so many fans over the edge.  I beg to differ. What ultimately is killing the mythology series is the same thing that pushed it to its peak: the Internet.

Way back when the Internet was barely a factor in anyone’s lives, the first real chatrooms that dealt with fandom surrounded the extraordinary cult series Twin Peaks.  Its moment in the sun was brief, but it was never truly forgotten and the power of its fandom in a pre-DVD world really did involve the internet. That same fandom was becoming a major source when The X-Files premiered a few years later, and I’m relatively certain it would never gotten beyond a cult phenomena had it not been for the online fandom (and of course, the constant frustration that we all ended up expressing on so many levels.)

When Lost premiered in 2004, it was the perfect melding of two mediums. Creators Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse embraced the way of communicating with the fans of the series that the creators of The X-Files fundamentally ignored and audiences were more than willing to play along. The speculation for everything regarded Lost was always enormous beyond the Internet – I vividly remember how publications like USA Today and Entertainment Weekly were more than willing to do weekly analysis on every episode from the characters that linked the crash survivors to the details of every Dharma filmstrip.  It was a watercooler show, and the world seemed willing to be part of it – to the point that the fans often made connections about the series seasons before Darlton was willing to reveal them.

It wasn’t the ending of Lost, however, that cut the faith in viewers of mythology series. I think that it had more to do with the rise of Netflix and how streaming services in general changed how we watched TV. As long as we had a week for the next episode, there was a period for intense speculation among the fans and a sense of community among them as we tried to figure out the mysteries that the writers were giving us and the new questions that we had to ask. The second that Netflix decided that it would premiere every episode of shows like House of Cards all at once; a lot of the reason for speculation was gone. I’ve made repeated arguments against the whole concept of binge-watching but one of the biggest arguments is its draw.  If all the answers for a single season are revealed at the same time, then you have nothing to talk about for weeks at a time. As much as we may celebrate series like Stranger Things and The Handmaid’s Tale, the idea of the cliffhanger episode no longer has any meaning if you just watch the next one a minute later. That loss of community is a real blow to television watching that I think has done far more harm than good.

And networks and cable have no good answer for it. Shonda Rhimes no down piled on so many revelations for shows like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder in an attempt to try and build that sense of community. It worked short term but the sense of constant revelations was so much that the fan became numb to it. There have other mythology based shows in this interim – Fox would manage some success with series like Fringe and Sleepy Hollow – but the fanbase would never be as big and it usually didn’t work for long.

So, to paraphrase the Buggles in the first MTV broadcast: “Streaming Killed the Mythology Show.” But while I do mourn the loss of community that came from bonding over speculating over Mulder and Scully’s adventures and what exactly was going to happen next on the island, I don’t particular mind the death of the mythology series as a whole. Because we have to face a very fundamental fact: mythology shows have never worked

X-Files and Lost were both extraordinary series – I will defend to the death that they were among the greatest accomplishments in TV history – but they were great despite the mythology, not because of them. For each series, there was a different reason.

In her article, the writer says she can explain the reason the X-Files mythology worked but halfway through, her audiences eyes will glaze over. She’s being far too generous – I watched the entire series and gave up on the mythology ever making at least halfway during the run. (I think in her heart of heart she knows this; that’s why the book is titled Monster of the Week and not Endless Scenes of Old Men Walking and Saying Unspeakable Dialogue.)

I now have a network that reruns episodes of The X-Files late at night and I will watch every so often. But I’m very particularly. If it’s an episode written by Vince Gilligan or Darin Morgan, the geniuses of the series, whether it’s the comic masterwork Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose or a brilliant thriller like Pusher, I’ll tune it. If it’s a monster of the week with style like ‘Post-Modern Prometheus’ or ‘Squeeze’, not a problem. I’ll even watch a darkly centered conspiracy adjacent episode like ‘One Breath’ or ‘Memento Mori’.  But if its an episode where Mulder is chasing an alien bounty hunter or a UFO, or Scully is denying her abduction experiences even to abductees who remember her, or if its one where the phrase ‘alien-human hybrid’ or worse, ‘supersoldier’ is used, then I’ll take my chances with a cable movie.

Because it’s clear pretty much from – let’s be generous and say early Season 3 – that the mythology didn’t make sense and that Chris Carter and his merry band were more interesting in prolonging the backstory as long as they could rather than giving a real conclusion. Mulder and Scully spent decades searching for the truth, and it was never going to be revealed. I don’t know why the writers never acknowledged that simple fact until after the series was over. (Chris Carter actually said as much when asked about Lost, ironically.)

Lost is a different story. I have religiously rewatched Lost every two years almost like clockwork even though, like so many people, the ending remains a disappointment. But I don’t regard Lost as a failure either. Every time I rewatch it, I am swept away by everything in it – the brilliance of the cinematography and editing, the extraordinary score by Michael Giacchino, the exceptional ability of the writers to get us invested in every single characters, helped immensely by the magnificent talent of the cast. Every time, I am awed by the actors, especially Terry O’Quinn, Michael Emerson and Evangeline Lilly and each time I see different nuance to the work of performers like Elizabeth Mitchell, Josh Holloway and Naveen Andrews. I never cared about the gaps that the writers left in the story; I was always swept up in the relationships between the characters – Sun and Jin’s gentle romance, Desmond and Penny’s sweeping one, Ben’s utter destruction at the lost of his daughter, Richard Alpert’s magnificent saga of how he came to the island, what it cost him and the moment of joy at the end. A writer I respect immensely said Lost makes ‘your brain and your heart ache’. It still does more than a decade later.

On the X-Files, the sum of its parts was greater than the whole. On Lost, more often, it was the other way around. But the reason they failed as mythology series was fundamentally the same reason every mythology series doesn’t really work: the speculation over the answer is never as good as the reality. And trying to please the fans is something that can never be done. I’ll give an example for each series of this.

For almost the entirety of Lost’s run, fans were trying to figure out what the whispers that we heard every so often in the jungle was from. Near the end of the last season, we finally learned that they were the voices of the dead – ‘the ones who couldn’t move on.’ The internet lambasted this conclusion, not because it wasn’t logical, but because the fans wanted something ‘bigger’. What exactly that could have been, I don’t know (I was fine with it) but the vast majority of fans were angry about it. That same episode a character named Ilana, who the writers had spent nearly two seasons building up as vital to the endgame, literally blew up in front of our eyes. It says a lot about the fanbase that they were more pissed about the revelations about the whispers not being ‘explosive’ enough,

The X-Files, as is it way, needs more of an explanation. At the end of Season 7, in what many at the time thought would be the series finale; we learned that Scully, who’d been rendered barren from her abduction years ago, was pregnant. Everything about that storyline rubbed me, and millions of fans, the wrong way. From the writers basically ignoring it for half of Season 8, to spending the remainder saying their was something ‘alien about it’, to the season finale implying it was a normal child, to Season 9 saying it not only wasn’t’ but might also be the savior of mankind, to the fact that Scully gave it up near the very end in what was supposed to be a moment of high drama, but really seemed like the writers were trying to wrap up a storyline they had no business starting.

In the midst of all of these confounding explanations for the pregnancy, a major fan theory develop that the Cigarette Smoking Man was responsible for it.  Most of the theory came down to the seventh season episode ‘En Ami’ when the Smoking Man stands over an exhausting Scully…and the next time we see them, she’s in pajamas and there’s no real explanation.  I never bought into this theory, mainly because William B. Davis (the actor who played CSM) had written the episode himself and at the time, it was unclear if he or the series was going to come back.

Cut to 2018, and Season 11. Among everything else that happened in the interim, Carter and his writers are well aware of how Lost ended and the prospective problems with its shortcomings. In ‘My Struggle III’, the Smoking Man reveals to Skinner that not only did he help impregnate Scully in that episode (footage was shown in case we’d forgotten) but he’d used his DNA. So William was both his son and grandson. (Yes the writers had finally decided Smoking Man really was Mulder’s father, and I’m not much happier about that revelation either.)

I felt betrayed by this. I don’t know if fans were satisfied by this revelation or not, but if they were it’s because Carter had decided to take what was no doubt lots of fanfiction and make it canon. Rather than come up with an original explanation for William’s birth on his own (something by the way, he’d had more than fifteen years to think of) he gave in to the fans.

And it is both these cases that are at the core of any mythology series. It is the complete negation of famous phrase by Lincoln: “You can’t satisfy any of the people any of the time.” The explanation will either be seen as to simple or giving in to the fandom; either way people will be unhappy with it.

It is for that reason that I think the mythology series is either going out of existence, or as the author of the original article said, evolving. There are still series like Yellowjackets which have mysteries, but they are mysteries that are known to the characters. Perhaps the most obvious example of a show like that is This is Us. All of the mysteries that the fans of the show want to learn – how Jack Pearson died, what led to the split between Randall and Kevin, why everybody was gathered at Rebecca’s bedside – are unknown to the audience, but not the characters. This kind of mythology is more satisfying because it’s not really playing tricks with the audience the way, say; Westworld constantly is with everybody involved in the process. When we get angry with series like Westworld for changing the game every episode, it’s because they constantly upset our expectations. When viewers got upset when we didn’t learn the cause of Jack’s death at the end of Season 1, it was because the timetable had been slowed down. When the revelation did come on ‘Super Bowl Sunday’, no one would claim they weren’t satisfied – and then the series could move on to different stories, which it has.

So maybe that’s how the mythology series has to go on – only with a change in the mission statement put forth by The X-Files nearly thirty years ago,  The show famously told us ‘The Truth Is Out There’ – but Mulder and Scully never knew for certain what it really was. In the new mythology series, the truth is still out there – and the characters already know it. It is just for the audience to discover, and to trust the characters to tell us.

Ray Donovan: The Movie Almost Fixed The Series: A Mea Culpa of Sorts

 

In this article, I’m going to do something that I almost never do in this column and that is admitting that I made a mistake. Earlier this month in my Overrated series I railed against Showtime’s Ray Donovan. I said that it was one of the most overblown series in the 2010s, that it may have done damage to Showtime as a brand, and that I didn’t think the movie that was coming up later that month could successfully wrap up the series or salvage what had been in my mind a failed concept.

Well, I still think it was tremendously overrated and Showtime clearly is in trouble (though its unrelated to Ray Donovan; they’ve just gone through a flurry of cancellations including that of Black Monday another acclaimed series I didn’t like.) But last night I ended up seeing Ray Donovan: The Movie and it managed to not only successfully conclude the series but pretty much salvage both the title character and the concept itself.

It may have helped matters that the film was co-written by Liev Schreiber himself, who may have had a clearer picture when the idea for the movie was announced last year as how to he thought the series should have ended. And having seen his vision for it, I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the series as a whole would have been better off with more input from Schreiber.

The film took place not long after the actions of the final season. Most of the film takes the form of a bloody Ray in a motel room to his therapist for the last two seasons, played by Alan Alda. The season ended with Mickey (Jon Voight) stealing a fortune from a rival family of the Donovans’ and in the process of the theft, his granddaughter Bridget’s (Kerris Dorsey) young husband was killed by a stray bullet. Ray was unable to intervene because simultaneously he learned why his sister had committed suicide and murdered the man he held responsible – who just happened to be the father of the woman he had been having an affair with in Season 7, Molly.

In the middle of the mourning, Ray did what he did so often when it came to dealing with dark situations and abandoned his family to find Mickey. His brothers knew very clearly what this was about – “he’s gonna kill Mickey.” Ray followed Mickey to Boston and chased down his father and after a spur of violence, which left him badly hurt he pointed a gun and his father and pulled the trigger…but there were no bullets left.

That’s the climatic moment that so many series lead up to in their final seasons – I was reminded of Walter and Skyler struggling for the knife in what is arguably the climactic moment of Breaking Bad and FBI Agent Stan confronting the Jennings’ in a garage in the final episode of The Americans. It didn’t really matter that Ray didn’t kill Mickey; the fact that he finally did it was what the series was leading up to.

By this point Bunch and Bridget had learned of Ray’s actions and had driven up to Boston. Bridget was quiet almost the entire ride, until she asked one question: “Do you think some people are just bad?” Bunchy paused for a long time, and then said: “Yeah I do.” At a stop at a convenience store, Bridge jacked the car, the phone that was tracking Mick and the gun.

Even in his current condition, badly wounded, Ray clearly was a man on a mission. Despite calls from both his brother and Bridge, he had no intention of stopping. When Molly called him and told him that Mick was planning to visit him to sell his money back, Ray drove to the Sullivan house. He found Mick was gone and Molly was there… with what looked to be millions of dollars. Mick had left it for his sons.

Ray did what he did when he just couldn’t deal – he started to leave. Molly begged him to know what had happened to her father. Ray did what he did so many times – he answered without answering. Then he started to leave – and Molly shot him in the stomach. For a man who has spent his entire life with a stoic expression glued to his face, the look of shock on Ray’s face was stunning.

Ray kept trying to soldier on but crashed his car…and his father came upon…and tried to take care of his son.

At this point I should mention the present action was only part of the film. We spent just as much of it in Ray’s childhood in South Boston. Throughout Season 7 we had been getting a picture of the Donovans youth and how Ray and his family grew up. Now we got the rest of the picture, and it was stunning. Because while it was still clear that Mickey Donovan was a ne’er do well, a con man and a criminal, it became increasingly clear that he was never as horrible as Ray had been telling us since the pilot. A large part of this was because of the molestation that he suffered through in his youth and we saw a scene that told us a lot about how traumatized he’d been. We were at his sister’s funeral and the priest who spent years abusing him had told him he was being transferred to another parish (this was the Boston archdiocese after all) and what a good boy he was to his family. Mickey then showed up to the funeral drunk and announced his hatred for ‘letting that fairy touch my daughter’. Ray responded: “At least he was there,” and then got into his fight with his father.

We always knew that Ray hated his father and how that affected all his actions. Now after more than a decade, we finally learned the truth about what caused everything that happened and it was a genuine shock. As we had learned Mickey had been cast as a ‘technical adviser’ on a major Hollywood movie about being a southie.  He’d become drinking buddies with the star of the film, and one night an executive a young Ezra Goldman (the man who would bring Ray to LA and be his surrogate father) asked him to follow Sean and Mickey. It was a late night, there was a lot of drinking and coke, and a high movie star starting playing with a gun…and accidentally shot a woman. In the face of panic, the young Ray became the man we knew, coldly got Sean out of the bar…and then framed his unconscious father for the murder. The crime and sentence that had been responsible for pretty much all of the action in the series was entirely Ray’s doing.

The final minutes of Ray Donovan were among the most heartbreaking – yes, you read that right – I’ve seen on television in awhile, and actually proved that my idea of the only way the series could end was wrong. Mickey told his son that the money he got really was for him – his reward for taking care of all of them for so long. Ray did something that I would’ve thought was unthinkable in the last season – he accepted responsibility for what he had done to Mick. ‘You didn’t deserve that,” he whispered. And even as Mick tried to get his son to a hospital, Ray mentioned one of the only positive memories he had of his father – and Mick remembered. Mick did one of the antic performances we saw him do so often on the series – and for what may be the first time on the show, Ray smiled and laughed.

And then a shot rang on. Mickey fell down…to reveal Bridget standing over him with a gun. She had done what Ray never could, and Ray looked appalled: “Why?” he asked. “Because it has to stop,” she said. And considering everything that both father and grandfather had put her through her entire life, we understood.

Then she burst into tears. Bunchy showed up a moment later. Ray said the same thing he’d said to so many people over the years. “I’ll take care of this.” The final moments showed Ray thanking the doctor for trying to help him and in a sense admitted what we knew all along – the one person Ray could never fix was himself. Then he told him where he was, and we knew very clearly what was going to happen. Ray was to take the fall for his father’s death, and in the last seconds of the movie  we saw him wheeled off into an ambulance, perhaps in his dying moments; otherwise to prison, but finally finding some kind of peace.

What made Ray Donovan: The Movie serve as a fitting ending to this show was that it wrapped up all the loose ends for the characters but didn’t offer the falsity of a happy ending. Mickey is dead and Ray almost certainly. Bridget will have to spend of her life knowing she killed her grandfather and that her father took the blame for it.  Darryl (Pooch Hall), who killed a man in the final episode, will manage to get away (one last fix by Ray’s friends) but he will never see his family again.  Given Terry’s condition (the Parkinson’s that he’s been suffering from since before the series started is worsening) he probably won’t live much longer. Only Bunchy, who finally managed to reach out to the mother of his child, has the possibility of a happy ending, and even then it is at best a ‘maybe’.

Now I stand by my earlier statement that Ray Donovan was a vastly overrated series. Despite ending as well as Breaking Bad or The Americans’ did, it never deserves to be spoken of them in the same breath when it comes to great television. But like them, and unlike similar series in the listing of Peak TV (especially Mad Men and The Good Wife) it managed to deliver an ending that was satisfying, true to its series, and altogether exceptional. And unlike Dexter: New Blood it justified its existence by bringing closure and an ending that its fans – and even people like me who didn’t like it – can be proud of.

 

 

 

The Real Reason Fans Are Upset With the Ending Of Dexter New Blood: Turns Out Peak TV Has A Dark Passenger of Its Own

 

 

As I mentioned just prior to the premiere of Dexter: New Blood, I made it very clear that I had no intention of watching this new season. I was still angry nearly a decade after the fact at how the writers had ended the original series, and I didn’t think there was a way for them to end the show successfully after the fact.

Well, reading this week’s TV Guide I found out exactly how the series ended – and surprise, surprise, fans are just as pissed at it as they were when the original series did. And it was through that letter where it became painfully clear why fans were really upset with how Dexter ended the first time, and what that really says about how so many viewers of Peak TV really think about the series they watch.

(Spoilers for New Blood below.)

In the last episode of New Blood, Dexter Morgan who has spent this new series returning to being the monster he once was and trying to raise his now teenage son, Harrison (who found him in the premiere and, big surprise, the apple had not fallen far from the tree) I didn’t actually watch the series so I can’t speak as to the actually details of what triggered the new killing spree and what it finally involved. All that really matters is how it ended.

In the finale, Dexter finally seemed to go a step too far and killed an innocent cop. (He’s actually killed quite a few innocent people throughout the original series, but let’s let that pass. All the fans of the show have.) As a reaction to this, and no doubt following ‘the code’ that he had been taught, Harrison killed his father.

Now before we get to the letter, let’s deal with the obvious. One of the major arguments that so many fans made about the original ending of the series was that they were upset Dexter ran away instead of never facing justice for his crimes. It was always going to be unlikely that Michael C. Hall was going to sign on for another incarnation of this series even if, as was the case with New Blood, the series was a huge hit for Showtime.  And the book series that the show was based on (even if the series completely diverted from its path halfway through the first one) ended with Dexter dying. Keeping all that mind, guess what the writer said in the letter:

“Why bring this beloved character back only to kill him off? Don’t they know Dexter fans watch the show to root for Dexter?” (The italics are mine.)

That letter, who no doubt spoke for many fans, basically made clear the real reason so many people were upset with the original ending. It had nothing do with Deb dying or even Dexter killing her. It didn’t have anything to do with Dexter being in exile as a lumberjack. It was because everybody wanted to see Dexter ride off into the sunset (with fellow serial killer Hannah) and raise Harry together. They wanted this monster to get a happy ending. And I have no doubt that’s what those same people wanted from this reboot. They didn’t Dexter to pay for his crimes; they wanted him to ride off into the cold, and have a new series where Dexter trains his son to kill just like his father trained him. Isn’t that sweet. The fact that it was complete against everything the series writers stood for is irrelevant.

I wish I could say I was shocked by this, but I’m not. A couple of months before the new version premiered, I was reading a list of the most ‘annoying characters on television series’ and on the list was Debra Morgan. You know the good daughter who wanted her father’s approval but never got it because Harry was always busy with Dexter. The good cop who tried to get to the bottom of all the serial killings that her brother was behind. The woman’s whose life was fundamentally destroyed when she learned who her brother was – her façade crumbled quickly, she ended up killing LaGuerta, she left the force and spent the last season struggling with drinking, and just as it seemed she might dig out of it, she became the last victim of Dexter, first because he didn’t want to kill any more and then because of his guilt.

Jennifer Carpenter’s portrayal of Debra was unquestionably one of the breakout stars of the series, but I’m unsurprised that there are those on the Internet who view her with the same disgust that they felt for Anna Gunn’s character on Breaking Bad, January Jones’ on Mad Men and at times Edie Falco on The Sopranos.  In addition to showing the horrible chauvinism that surfaces far too often on the net about TV series,  Deb is essentially playing the female figure that is getting in the way of the ‘White Male Antihero’ being horrible. (I should probably add that prior to her shocking death at the end of Season 4 there was just as many people who disliked Julie Benz’s Rita, Dexter’s wife and Harrison’s mother.) And just as so many people loathed Skyler for trying to protect her family, as many people hated Deb, even though for most of the series it was her job to help bring the person behind these crimes to justice before Dexter could.

Throughout Dexter (and New Blood) we repeatedly heard reference to ‘The Dark Passenger’, the force that has essentially turned Dexter into the monster that he is. It is now fairly safe to say that a similar passenger exists in the spirit of so many viewers of series like Dexter and Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. We may not actually be committing the heinous acts that these horrible men are doing, but this ‘passenger’ is satisfied vicariously by not only seeing them do so, but watching them get away with it week after week. This may be the real reason so many Peak TV dramas have these ‘White Male Antiheroes’ and why so many viewers are openly hostile to the characters (mostly female) who have to suffer through these protagonists actions or even try to stop them.  There is something in the subconscious (and I can’t exactly pretend I’m different from any of them) that gets a perverse satisfaction from it.

And this is almost certainly the reason why series like Ray Donovan and Ozark and (probably) House of Cards have been so popular. We may say it’s more of the same and that television keeps going back to the same formulas, but there’s a part of the Peak TV audience that really likes that formula. It’s the same reason that millions probably didn’t cotton to Damages the way I did and so many had an unfavorable reaction to series like Weeds and Nurse Jackie. We may claim we want females to be as horrible as men on television, but the same stigmas that view characters like Skyler White and Debra Morgan as annoying will not allow us to accept female characters doing the even slightly less horrible things that Walter White and Dexter did.

Now the story of Dexter is over for good. He finally paid for his sins, and people are still unhappy. Will this serve as a cautionary tale to networks wanting to bringing back series with these kinds of antiheroes? Well, we got the Ray Donavan Movie, FX is planning another series featuring Raylan Givens of Justified (okay, I’ll admit I’m looking forward to that) and there are rumblings of yet another reboot of 24 from Fox. Hell, at this point it would not stun me if Fox said they were planning to reboot House at some juncture, and he didn’t do anything nearly as horrible as this bunch.  It is things like that this that make me really regret that at no point in the entirety of Dexter, Michael C. Hall never had on his table one of the true sources of evil in this world: network executives. Well, maybe after Harrison grows up and the inevitable Dexter: The Next Generation comes along, he’ll do that.

Peak TV Has A Bunch of Bad Mothers (Shut Your Mouth)...I'm Not Talking About Maid!

 

It is rare that I write a column directed at someone in particular, but in this case I’m going to do so. I saw a letter written in the New York Times Magazine about a month ago and the rank ignorance it portrays about one recent Netflix series and Peak TV in general was so astonishing that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since.  So to that woman – and whatever demographic she represents – this is for you.

Now I don’t know what inspired this particular letter – maybe it had something to do with the way the world views motherhood in general and how it affects our society. That I can get behind without a problem. It’s the example this woman used that galls me.

She mentions the recent Netflix series Maid – a series I have already raved about in this column and that is already a top contender for Emmy nominations this year. The series deals with a young mother named Alex (played brilliantly by Margaret Qualley) who leaves an abusive relationship with her toddler daughter and finds herself thrust into a situation of what its like to be poor in America. The main comments this woman said was that she ‘thought it would have been more realistic if Alex had resented her daughter.

Let me give you the scope of how utterly stupid that sounds. From the moment Alex drives off into the middle of the night, she has no support system. Everything in the world is against her. It takes her an episode just to admit that she’s an abused woman because her boyfriend never physically hurt. She moves from a battered woman’s shelter into a homeless shelter that is infested with mold. She has to survive on government assistance. Her boyfriend, who is an alcoholic, initially sues for full custody. Her employers and many of her fellow maids are unsympathetic to her needs. She doesn’t want to even see her born again father initially and that’s before she remembers how abusive he was to her mother. Her mother (who Alex spends most of the time calling Paula) is a bipolar artist who barely remembers her daughter on a good day and hates her the rest of the time. In the last episode I saw, her mother disappeared off the grid for nearly two days. When Alex came to the trailer park looking for her with sympathy for her for the first time the entire series, Paula told her she had been at Joshua Tree with no cell service and had spent the last two days getting married. Paula on more than one occasion clearly has resented Alex if she thinks of her at all.

So given all of the immense amount of suffering that Alex is going through just to survive, this letter-writer seems to think it would be more realistic if Alex resented her baby. The only person she feels nothing but unconditional love for. Alex is clearly trying to break the cycle that Paula forced her to live in her whole childhood (we’ve gotten more than a few hints that so much of Alex’s misery because of Paula’s nomadic lifestyle and utter unconcern for her daughter’s future) . But that’s not part of the discussion. In order for this situation to be more realistic – and let’s be clear, I fully believe every bit of Alex’s nightmare is real- she also has to hate her daughter. Would this writer have been happier if Job had blamed his children for dying on him while he was suffering?

So the specific example that this writer uses is specious at best. What makes it sound somehow worse is the implication that television is currently full of nothing but examples of Claire Huxtables and June Cleavers. And that ignorance really makes me what to scream at this woman. Was Maid the only series on television since Murphy Brown ended in 1998? Because if you look at basically almost every female Emmy Winner for Drama (and quite a few in the comedy categories) you see pretty much nothing but mothers where resenting their own children may be the least horrible behavior they demonstrate towards them.

Remember how the revolution began? Livia Soprano (Nancy Marchand) the woman who behind so much of Tony’s inner angst.  In the first season he did everything he could to take care of her and as he put it “she acts like she’s an Eskimo I’m putting out on an ice floe.” She put a hit out on her own son and seemed to have a stroke in self-defense. Then there was D’Angelo Barksdale’s mother, who to protect her family’s earnings forced her son to take twenty year sentence for murder rather than a deal that would given him his freedom. Her son was murdered in prison. When she asked McNulty about why she had bothered to tell her his suspicions in Season 3 he was blunt in a way he normally served only for his bosses: “I wanted to tell someone who’d care…You were the one who made him take the years.”

Those are extremes, of course, but the lion’s share of the mothers in Peak TV were little better. Betty Draper, memorably portrayed by January Jones on Mad Men, spent almost the entire series scolding and berating all of her children, wearing them down one by one. Only in the last episodes, dying of cancer, did she express her true feelings to Sally (and rather than say it face to face, she wrote in a letter.)  Patty Hewes of Damages, who Glenn Close indelibly played for five seasons, spent nearly as much time jousting with her son as she did with corporate titans. (In her defense, Michael was something of a sociopath; the grenade he mailed to her office in Season 1 was just the start of the battle we saw them go through.) And Carrie on Homeland initially so resented her infant daughter so much, she took a station post in Kabul so she wouldn’t have to be in the same country as him.

Now admittedly these are mostly dramas but there have more than a few comedy series out there where mothers treat their children despicably. Weeds had Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) start selling pot to support her children after her husband’s death. By the time the series was half over, she was admitting to her husband that she ‘f---ed up her kids and it was pretty clear by the end of it that even her youngest was beyond repair. Edie Falco on Nurse Jackie spent much of the first half of the series denying at work she was even married and her kids got more and more dysfunctional that by the fifth season one of them was on drugs herself. Hell on Veep Julia-Louis Dreyfus on her best day regarded her daughter as a political prop and we learned early on she never really felt anything for her; in a flashback, immediately after holding her for the first time, she said: “I think I’ll get into politics.”

And this isn’t something limited to cable or streaming. Remember the Pilot of Desperate Housewives where mother of four Lynette lied to a friend she met in the supermarket about the joys of motherhood. Or Grey’s Anatomy where Meredith’s care for her mother with early onset Alzheimer’s did nothing to hide how much Ellis clearly resented her as her child. (The last lucid exchange they had was Ellis telling Meredith how disappointed she was her.) Almost every character on Lost had problems to ‘daddy issues’ as one fan admitted, but more than a handful (I’m thinking Kate and Daniel in particular) had horrible mothers.  Hell, a lot of fans of the series were hostile when we learned near the end that almost all the actions that had taken place in the series were due to a crazy woman, killing a mother after she gave birth, adopting the twins as her own and arranging things so that one would want to spend his existence wanting to destroy the island and the other being forced to spend just as long protecting it.

And it’s not like so many of these mothers are rewarding for trying to be good parents. Skyler White on Breaking Bad is by far the most prominent example. She learned of her husband’s drug dealing at the end of Season 2, tried to leave him, was more or less forced to stay to keep her children safe, got dragged over and over into her husband’s horrific behavior, and in the final season was estranged from her sister, loathed by her son and left without her dignity or support. She should have received sympathy from the beginning. Anna Gunn received death threats mainly because she was seen as the obstacle to Walter being allowed to be a monster. Somehow I don’t think the two Supporting Actress Emmys she received are enough of a consolation for that.

I could keep going like this for awhile, but I haven’t the heart. The point is there are almost no really good mothers on TV more. I can count on the fingers of both hands the number of series in the past twenty years that I’ve seen with truly good and pure mothers and I think that half of them were played by Lauren Graham and Connie Britton. There are a lot of great roles for actresses in television these days – which is why so many are coming from movies – but the lion’s share of them seem to dictate that if you take them you must be as mean and soulless as the men. Now if you choose to view this as Peak TV taking a real look at how horrible motherhood can be, you are free too but don’t complain that there television doesn’t show life with mothers resenting these children. Those are basically all you do find on TV – and to be clear almost all of them come from infinitely better situations, social and economic, than the one that Alex faces in Maid.

And may I speak as someone who has witnessed so many of these ‘Bad Moms’ in action? After awhile, it truly becomes exhausting and depressing seeing so many great actresses being forced to play mothers who don’t just resent, but in several cases openly dislike their children. To be clear, I have as much of a problem with all the ‘white male antiheroes’ in TV who do horrible things to protect their families. But I don’t particularly feel much sympathy for characters like the one Ellen Barkin played on Animal Kingdom who ‘loves’ her children by controlling every aspect of their criminal careers and forced them to shoot her dead rather than die of cancer.

Perhaps that is the reason I obsess so much about the fate of a series like Big Little Lies to constantly hoping we’ll get a third season some day. Yes, it’s well written and acted, funny and sharp, but it centers on five mothers who will do anything for their children. None of them are anywhere close to perfect, but they want the best for their children. Reese Witherspoon’s Madeline wants her oldest daughter to have a better life than her. Nicole Kidman’s Celeste wants her twins to get out of the wreckage of her abusive father and mother-in-law. Laura Dern’s Renata wants to protect her daughter from threats, even if she’s extreme in her methods. And there’s Shailene Woodley’s Jane, whose Ziggy was the result of a sexual assault and who she spends so much of the first season thinking might be as monstrous as her assaulter, but will protect him despite being much lower on the caste system than everyone else on Monterrey. None of these women are perfect mothers, but all will do anything for their children.

So to the writer of the letter that inspired this article, if you want to watch a series where mothers resent their children, stop watching Maid and look at just about any of the other series I’ve mentioned here, most of which you can also find on Netflix. There are just as many out there I haven’t even mentioned. You may think the world deifies motherhood, but Peak TV sure as hell doesn’t. Believe me, after you’ve spent maybe two or three days looking through some of these series, you will be begging to binge watch Gilmore Girls and Friday Night Lights just as a tonic.

After 40 Days and 40 Nights, Amy Schneider's Remarkable Jeopardy Streak Comes to an End

If you’re a Jeopardy fan you know all the connotations of the number 40 - forty days of Noah’s Ark, the Muddy Waters song involving 40 Days and 40 Nights, the 40 Acres and a Mule associated with the Homestead Act and Spike Lee, the 40 Days of Musa Dagh – and those are just the obvious ones. Now there’s a very specific reason to associate Jeopardy with the number 40 – the 40 days that Amy Schneider has spent as Jeopardy champion.

Barely a month after Matt Amodio completed a thirty eight streak that set the second place mark for most consecutive games won by a Jeopardy champion, Amy Schneider made her debut on Jeopardy, unseating five time champion Andrew Hi. No one could have suspected it would be the beginning of what on almost any other year would be the most impressive run in game show history but would only be the second so far in Season 38.

Slowly but surely Amy began to surpass other prominent records in Jeopardy history. On her eleventh game she surpassed Julia Collins for the most money won by a female contestant in her original run. On her seventeenth win, she surpassed Larissa Kelly as the all-time winningest female contestant. (Larissa congratulated her on her victory in a tweet. Four days later, she surpassed Julia again for most games won by a female contestant and fourth all time behind James Holzhauer, Amodio and the current host of Jeopardy Ken Jennings. And the answer was very far indeed.

She passed James Holzhauer’s 32 game mark this January 13^th and on Monday passed Matt Amodio for second place all time. She was not winning anywhere near the same rate as Holzhauer had (she was a more conservative player on Daily Doubles and her approach to the game board in general) but she was as consistent as Amodio and Jennings. By game 38 she was slightly behind Matt’s total at that point, but basically dead even with Ken Jennings. Indeed on her fortieth win, she was slightly ahead of him at that point (Her total was $1,382,800; Ken’s was at $1,353, 461.)

But over the past two weeks of her run, a decided flaw was becoming obvious in her armor: Final Jeopardy. It had not been obvious to all but the closest observers, but she gotten eight of her last eleven Final Jeopardy’s incorrect.  Because she was so dominant in all of those matches (she was averaging 40 correct responses a game for much of her run) she had runaway with every game by Final Jeopardy. The only cost has come to her final total, and while those wagers were huge - $20,000 to $25,000 was not an uncommon sum – as long as she continued to win, it was irrelevant. While in this ‘funk’ she had managed two paydays of $71,000 and just yesterday $63,000. But all of this served to underscore just how vital it was she needed to win in a walk.

And today, that Achilles heel came for her. It didn’t seem that way immediately as she faced off against Rhone Talsma and Janice Hawthorne Timm, though she did get off to a slightly slower start than usual. She finished the Jeopardy round with $7200. Both Rhone and Janice were competitive – Rhone had $3400, Janice $2000 – but in so many of Amy’s previous wins, she had come on to utterly dominate in Double Jeopardy.

And indeed Double Jeopardy did seem initially that it would be more of the same for the majority of the round. With Double Jeopardy nearly over Amy had $24,000 to Rhone, her nearest opponent’s $7800. Then he found the Daily Double in the category OMG! He saw the score, and knowing what he was up against made it a true Daily Double: “The Greek goddesses of vengeance are called the Eumenides, better known as these, a word from Latin.” Rhone knew it was: “What are the Furies?” and the game was changed. When Double Jeopardy ended not long after, Rhone had $17,600 to Amy’s $27,600, the first time in nearly two weeks that she didn’t have a runaway.

The Final Jeopardy category was COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD. “The only nation in the world whose name in English ends in an H, it’s also one of the 10 most populous.” Rhone was the only contestant who could come up with an answer at all, and it was the correct one: “What is Bangladesh?” He added $12,000 to his total.  Amy had no guess at all, and it cost her $8000 and ending – for the second time this season – one of the most impressive runs in Jeopardy history.

Will Rhone put up an impressive run of his own? It’s not entirely impossible that he will. When Matt Amodio was dethroned this past October, the man who defeated him Jonathan Fisher had a fairly remarkable run of 11 wins and just over a quarter of a million dollars. Small in comparison to Matt and Amy, to be sure, but still a figure that to this point only fourteen other players in Jeopardy history had managed to get that far.

Barely six months removed from a scandal that looked like it might well turn Jeopardy into a laughingstock, Season 38 is turning into one of the greatest ones in the show’s entire history. Not even at the hundred game mark, there has only been a single week so far that there has not been a champion who would win at least five games. Two of the greatest players in game show history have competed, each winning well over a million dollars. Six players have already qualified for this years Tournaments Champions (Amodio, Schneider, Fisher, Hi, Tyler Rhode who won five games and Sam Buttrey, the winner of the first ever Professors Tournament) At this point in Season 38, more people have qualified for this year’s Tournament of Champions then did in the entirety of Season 37 and that is before the College Championship (scheduled for this February) and the Teachers Tournament have even taken place. To say that the upcoming Tournament of Champions, whenever it happens, will be eagerly anticipated by fans is a humungous understatement.

And its clear enthusiasm for the series is at least as high as it was in the Alex Trebek era. The overall ratings for the series the past several months are listed as up six percent compared to this time last year. As I have said on repeated occasions fans of Jeopardy care more about the game than who ends up hosting. These figures would seem to validate that opinion.

I should also that Jennings and Mayim Bialik are both doing a superb job as guest hosts of the show. I was particularly impressed by Jennings’ modesty and deference to Amy throughout her remarkable run. I will confess, if I were in the position he was in with a player approaching a record that Alex Trebek has said on multiple occasion would stand forever, I don’t know if I could have managed the modesty and professionalism that Jennings managed throughout her entire run.  I can imagine this was interesting chance of déjà vu for him during his original run with Alex Trebek. During that same period Alex said he had gotten into a position that he felt he could read Ken’s mind. Now Jennings’ know what it looks like from the other side of the mirror. And he was just as measured and polite as he was as a winner. (That said when there is another super-tournament in a few years – and it now seems certain there will be – maybe reconsider going up against them to defend your title? Pretty please?)

When everything hit the fan with Mike Richards after last season, the question everyone was asking was: Could Jeopardy survive? I think it’s pretty clear now the answer is a resounding yes.  In what will be its first full season with no Alex Trebek at all, Jeopardy has more than proven that it is just engaging, fun and thrilling as it has ever been. The studio where Jeopardy is shot was named for Alex Trebek before the year began, and right now the show, the hosts and the contestants have more than proven worthy of it. I’ve rarely been so proud to be a Jeopardy fan.

P.S. I knew tonight’s Final Jeopardy answer too.

 

 

 

Overrated Series: Ozark and the Exhibit A of the Emmy Bait Drama

 

At the time of this reason the first part of what will be the final season of Netflix’s Ozark has started streaming. Ever since the premiered back in 2017, there has been a slow but steady barrage of hostility towards from quite a few TV critics and viewers in a general. Some of them have even posted at this very site, saying things such as Ozark is the last series with a ‘white male antihero that I can tolerate or that this is where we learned that Peak TV has reached critical mass.  It is rare for a truly overrated series to have so many people openly dislike: the series I have dealt with so far in this column generally have a loyal fanbase. Ozark by contrast seems to have just as many people who hate it, and I completely see where they’re coming from.

There is, however, one group that truly seems to love Ozark far more than warranting: groups that give awards. It has been fairly dominant among the Emmy nominations and awards the three seasons it has been on the air, two of which were when Game of Thrones was still in competition. It also has done well among the Golden Globes, the SAG awards and (for shame) the Critics Choice – at least as far as nominations go.  It didn’t seem anywhere near reasonable to me that in 2020 Ozark dominated the nominations and This is Us wasn’t able to get a Best Drama nod that year. And I’m very pissed that Jason Bateman and Julia Garner were nominated and Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn (who were infinitely more deserving for Better Call Saul) were ignored that same year.

Now there are many series I loathe that tend to dominate the awards year after year – if it’s not Game of Thrones, it’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But at least with those nominations it could be justified that the Emmys were still following a loyal fan base. Ozark doesn’t have anywhere near that kind of following. So why does Ozark get nominated and other, more deserving series get ignored? I have a theory which I’ll get too in a bit, but for now I’m going to start by dealing why I find this series fundamentally flawed and why I think so many people feel the same.

Unlike so many of the other series I detest, I actually made a concerted to watch Ozark.  I actually made my way through the entire first season before giving up in disgust. And it’s clear pretty much from the get-go why people might think it was quality and why many others might recognize it as tosh.

Let’s start with the ‘white male antihero’ Marty Byrde. Marty is a criminal when we first meet him – a money launderer for a drug cartel. Within the first fifteen minutes of the Pilot, he learns his partners have been embezzling from the cartel, he witnesses them being executed and in order to save him and his family, he talks about a scheme one of them has to go to the Ozarks where there’s no law enforcement and clean $500 million for the cartel in the matter of months. The boss, who is clearly more amused by the idea, then thinking its possible agrees to let Marty and family to go to do this. And Marty without any real explanation to his family at all takes them from Chicago to Missouri in the dead of night.

Stop right there. Walter White never dreamed of that kind of money. To try and save his family he thought they could survive on seven hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars. He didn’t start beginning to dream of a multi-million dollar empire (which, for the record got so big that Skyler thought it could never be laundered) until the series was almost over. $500 million might as well be a zillion kajillion for all the reality. No matter how smart Marty think he is, it seems like an impossible goal. The fact that he seizes on to it as a realistic possibility rather than say, a chance to run, is impossible to buy as a series premise right there.

It doesn’t help at all that Marty starts out as an overbearing asshole. At least going in you could be willing to buy that Walter White was basically Mr. Chips. Marty isn’t Mr. Chips or Scarface; he has neither the stomach for the violence that needs to take place nor the brilliance to outthink any of the people he has to deal with. Yet not only does he not even bother to explain to his own family for most of Season 1 why he’s even done this,  he berates his own children for every action they take. (We’ll get to Wendy in a minute.) And even though the only ability he has is to launder money, he arrogantly thinks that ability gives him the right to boss the criminals he meets in the mountains around as if he were above them. Now the Langmores may appear to be hayseeds, but it’s clear from day one that Ruth has the measure of adults, and pretty much can outthink Marty at times. More to the point, they are just as capable of violence as the cartel. But initially he barely thinks they need to be dealt with. And he completely underestimates Jacob Snell from the get-go and it isn’t until the climax of Season 1 when he thinks his plan has outsmarted them that he realizes he’s underestimated them again and its cost him even more. Walter White may not have been the best judge of character, but at least he had the brains to come up with ways to outmaneuver and destroy his enemies. Marty has already found out in the Pilot how dangerous the cartel  was(and as we learn in a flashback episode in Season 1, he knew going in how deadly they good be and still compartmentalized it) and still thinks he had can outwit everybody long enough to stay alive. He’s a cocaine addict who keeps thinking if he keeps on going, he’ll be back on top despite the odds.

Now I give credit to Jason Bateman. He is really cast against type here. He’s played his entire career being likable and in Arrested Development in particular, the only sane choice among a family of lunatics. But unlike so many of the antiheroes in this early, he starts out being an arrogant monster and never gives us a chance or really a reason to like him. Hell, when a dying man kills an assassin he admonishes the shooter for making things worse. I get why so many people our convinced this is their last series with a white male antihero. This would put me off most of them.

And this series has a great cast: Laura Linney, one of the greatest actresses in history.  Brilliant character actors like Peter Mullan and Janet McTeer have been killed on it (and honestly they should be grateful they can move on to other projects now) And by far Julia Garner’s work as Ruth Langmore is a triumph and I’m actually glad she got one of the Emmys she did. (Last time though, it should have gone to Helena Bonham-Carter or Meryl Streep.) But all of the actors are playing utterly loathsome characters even if they aren’t outright criminals. This isn’t like Succession where some fans love the series even though everybody’s loathsome. We’re supposed to like Bateman and Linney’s characters. Hell, they should have bonded in a horrible in a situation. They’re at each other throats from day one and I really don’t get why Wendy didn’t run when she had the chance of Season 1. Why the hell did she listen to her kids?

And maybe this is a minor squabble compared to everything else: Why is every episode so long? Other hour-long Netflix series like The Crown and Stranger Things are traditionally shorter than the hour they take up. This is generally a good idea in my opinion: it makes you want more. Episodes of Ozark often run longer than an hour and seem even more interminable. Why would you want spend more time with these people than you have too?

So given all of that, and the fact that so many people aren’t exactly fans of that, why those awards groups keep giving it nominations? There’s actually a good reason for that. Ozark was designed for just that.

 

If I were to ask the average filmgoer what an Oscar bait movie is, you probably wouldn’t have to think twice. It’s Merchant-Ivory, it’s an adaptation of a very complicated novel, it’s a film where a foreign actor uses an American accent or an American actor uses a foreign one. At its most cynical it’s the fundamental difference between the Steven Spielberg movies that came out in the summers of 1993, 1997 and 2005 (Jurassic Park, The Lost World and War of the Worlds, respectively) and those exact same years in December (Schindler’s List, Amistad, Munich, ditto).

If one were just as cynical, you might consider any period piece series the same kind of thing for the Emmys. The problem is that argument doesn’t generally hold up. One could say that for Downton Abbey and the lion’s share of Masterpiece Theater, but HBO, pretty much the only source for great television for much of the 2000s, produced Deadwood and Rome in that era, and while both were infinitely better than so many PBS’ oeuvre, they didn’t dominate the Emmys the same way Sopranos did. This generally holds true for the lion’s share of other recent period pieces, even the ones that you’d think would dominate the Emmys. Showtime’s Masters of Sex had all the trademarks of an Emmy bait series – and was infinitely better than so many of the shows that were nominated during its run –but never received a single Best Drama nod. (I know, Mad Men. I’ll get to that.)

Now I need to make this clear up front: I don’t object to Emmy bait series as long as they provide entertainment. This is the fundamental makeup of almost every limited series that has aired on TV for pretty much the past decade – from True Detective to Fargo, from Big Little Lies to American Crime Story – all of these series gather big name casts and big name writers to lure in an audience and also awards. You look over my top ten lists at this column over the years, I’m relatively certain there are at least three or four Emmy bait series on them. And that is generally because in small doses, they can almost always provide brilliant and often surprising drama. I’ve no doubt when ABC debuted American Crime they were considering it more for its awards potential more than ratings – the fact that it was one of the most brilliant series I’ve seen in the past decade was surely incidental.

The thing is that it can be hard to know you have a series that will dominate awards shows. Did the creators of MASH or Hill Street Blues or Cheers know there series would be dominating the Emmys for years to come when they created them? Almost certainly not. They might have thought they would with Frasier or 24 but it’s doubtful. And I know for certain that nobody thought The Sopranos or The West Wing would get there. Almost every major series that wins awards gets them by luck. You can’t build them. The problem is, just as with movies, network executives try to do just that and the results aren’t just not Emmy worthy; they’re often unwatchable.

An Emmy bait series, far more often, is a show that combines an amazing cast with a great writer or idea and then the nominations theoretically start rolling in. I say, theoretically, because far too often the series themselves are disasters. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was the definition of one – it was created by Aaron Sorkin and featured an all-star cast headed by Bradley Whitford, Matthew Perry, Steven Weber, Amanda Peet and D.L. Hughley. In its cast were future winners Merritt Weyer and Sarah Paulson. Everybody expected it to be one – and it crashed and burned very quickly. (Indeed, NBC ran promo ads for 30 Rock where Alec Baldwin thought he was joining that show about a sketch comedy. Little did he or the network know that this would be the big award getter for the network for seven years.)

NBC didn’t learn that lesson and in 2012 tried to launch another clear Emmy bait series Smash – a musical based series with Tony winning writers, heading by Oscar-winner Anjelica Huston and Emmy winner Debra Messing. They gave it the lead after the Monday night premiere of The Voice in 2012. The series may have managed to at least run two seasons, but that spoke more about where NBC was as a network at the time; if anything it was a bigger disaster than Studio 60 with even fewer rewards.  (That same year ABC tried something similar with Nashville, a female led music drama led by Connie Britton and Hayden Pattiere, with co-stars such as Eric Close and Powers Boothe. This series would be more successfully critically and have a longer run, but only after it threw all aspirations for quality away and became a pure soap.)

If there’s a clear example of an Emmy bait show on TV today, its Apple TV’s The Morning Show. It has an entire cast of actors that make up awards shows, from Reese Witherspoon to Jennifer Aniston to indie film gurus Billy Crudup and Mark Duplass. And it has managed to get the award nominations and have the success that so many of these series don’t. The problem is the lion’s share of critics do not like it and even those who do think it’s closer to camp than actual drama.  It is considered a success, more because of where it comes from than actual quality; I have a feeling if The Morning Show ran on HBO or Showtime, or even Amazon or Hulu, critics wouldn’t think as highly of it.

This is in effect why I don’t think anyone should consider Mad Men an Emmy bait series. Yes, it’s a period piece but 1) the cast was made almost entirely of complete unknowns when it premiered, 2) the period was one that up to then wasn’t really explored the same way before and 3) most importantly, it was the first drama ever to debut on AMC. Had it premiered on HBO – which considering Matthew Weiner had offered it to the networks was a real possibility – it could have been considered an Emmy bait series, much like all of the limited series and movie they make. Because it premiered on a network that until then had only done one mostly forgotten original series, it was clearly a revelation.

In that sense, this is how Netflix became the behemoth for original series it does today. Just as with Mad Men, HBO was offered House of Cards first, but despite the talent associated passed on it because they weren’t willing to agree to a two season commitment. House of Cards might only have been viewed as another HBO drama, even with Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright attached as leads and David Fincher as producer. The fact that Netflix took that risk - and that it paid off – is pretty much the reason for their success. (HBO was also offered Orange is the New Black and The Crown before Netflix took them. Whoever chose those series and went to bat for The Newsroom and Here and Now – critical messes that were also clearly Emmy bait shows – should have been fired.)

This brings us back to Ozark. When the series premiered back in 2017, it was essentially the kind of Emmy bait series that so many networks have designed and failed. It has an all-star cast, the kind of dark plot that filled so much of Peak TV particularly in the 2010s and centered on a ‘White Male Antihero’. But Ozark is nothing like any of the other Netflix dramas that have gotten Emmy nods for Best Drama for the past decade. It has none of the sly wit and intrigue that House of Cards had (at least initially), nor any of the looks into race, gender, sexuality or social issues that Orange is the New Black did, nor a real look behind English history with humanity that The Crown does, nor the sense of wonder and joyful youth that Stranger Things has.

Hell, there was actually a better Netflix crime drama that aired before Ozark that under lesser hands would be considered Emmy bait. Bloodline had an all-star cast (Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini, Sissy Spacek and Ben Mendelsohn) playing a family getting deeper and deeper into the mire of their brother’s criminal behavior. It was designed the writers behind Damages (a series which had the cast of an Emmy bait drama but an entirely different style that made it unique) It received several nominations (none for Best Drama, sad to say) and Ben Mendelsohn took a deserved Supporting Actor prize in its final year. So why do so many critics consider Mendelsohn’s prize a disappointment and the ones that Julia Garner has won a triumph? I’m still puzzling this five years after the fact. But almost no one gave a damn about Bloodline.  A lot of critics (and quite a few people I respect) really give a damn about Ozark. Yet Bloodline was a radically different series, better written, directed and acted. Ozark is basically what everybody says it is – another dark drama with a white male antihero.

And to be clear, it’s not even particularly better than some contemporary dramas with ‘white male antiheroes’ Mr. Robot was infinitely more imaginative, creative and enthralling than Ozark ever was. After its first season, it basically disappeared from the Emmy ballots and the last two years it aired, it got nothing and Ozark dominated. Better Call Saul is so much more than Ozark ever will be, but the last season both shows were eligible Ozark dominated and Better Call Saul was left behind. (But I repeat myself.) I don’t pretend to know what Emmy voters think half the time, but I can’t comprehend their love for a show that is so clearly inferior than so many of the dramas that it competes against.

I can take some comfort, however cold, that Ozark will soon be over. Maybe we’ll stop seeing shows that are clearly designed to get Emmys dominated the category. Of course, I’ve already complained about Succession and there are signs that Morning Show will continue to dominate those categories for awhile. And as we speak, the creator of Downton Abbey has just debuted his follow-up series for HBO. The more things change…