I Had Fun With Last Night's SAG Awards - And Not Just Because I Was Mostly Right in My Predictions

 

For all my issues with how the Screen Actors Guild gives its awards for television, not separating Supporting Performers from Leads in its, still not given an award for Best Limited Series or TV movies and leaning until recently towards repetition, I can’t deny the fact that it has also been the most consistently entertaining awards show for more than twenty years. (The Critics Choice is gaining ground, but it’s only been a decade and they’re still working out the kinks in presentation. Given another five years, I expect they’ll take over the prize.) They are funny and self-deprecating without being pretentious, they never seem that serious even when they’re being serious (it helps that they’ve gone almost the entirety of their run without a host) and they always manage to honor the best in TV in Film in two hours, give or take. That’s a fairly neat accomplishment for any awards show.

This year’s SAG awards were no exception. There was a somber tone in the air as the war in Ukraine was at the back of everybody thoughts and was mentioned in quite a few acceptance speeches. (I’m actually going to go into detail on that.) But there were also incredible moments of pure joy. Martin Short and Selena Gomez delighted everybody with their presentation of Best Supporting Actress in a Film with just about every line. Here are some of the highlights:

 

Short: “Welcome to the SHAG Awards where we honor the best in adult films.”

Gomez: “No Marty, this is the SAG awards.

Short: “Well, that makes much more sense. I wondered why Streep was here.”

(Cut to Meryl Streep looking shame faced while laughing hysterically.)

Gomez: And we’re sorry Steve isn’t here because the three of us are like a family. In that we often eat meals together in total silence.

 

Find this segment on YouTube; it’s already a classic. I’m just sad Steve Martin was still in New York for this week’s SNL. He always makes awards shows fun.

Equally wonderful was seeing Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow presented an award, dressed and acting almost entirely like Romy and Michelle and their most recent high school reunion. Their banter was wonderful: Mira’s line about great ensembles and presenting awards for great ensemble was even funnier when Lisa realized it – and if we didn’t already need another reason for a Romy and Michelle sequel, I’m sure their presentation will pretty much start another on-line petition.

Now on to the awards, which were close to what I predicted on Friday with two very big exceptions which I’ll get to in a minute.  As I expected Jason Sudeikis and Ted Lasso took their prizes in Best Actor in a Comedy and Best Ensemble in a Comedy. Unfortunately almost all of them were in London filming Season 3, so we didn’t get to see them all pile on stage. Fortunately, they were all in the same room (with one exception) which led to some absolutely priceless moments, starting with when Sudeikis tried in vain to stop his cast mates from hugging him after he won and the wonderful reaction of Hannah Waddingham accepting for her cast, including a delighted shot out to Juno Temple, her comrade his arms who was in LA. (I’m not sure why she was there and they weren’t, but).And it was wonderful watching Jean Smart continue her march towards an awards sweeps as she took another prize for Hacks. She received a much deserved standing ovation and was both funny in her speech (“We really are the world’s oldest profession…Some people think we’re the actual oldest profession) and called out to her children with devotion.

And I was pleased and kind of amazed that while the one percent took the big prize for Succession (I’ll get to that) the uglier side of capitalism ended up the big winner for TV for the night. Squid Game managed to take three prizes, including the biggest shocks: Best Actor going to Lee-Jung-Jae and Best Actress to Hoyeon. Both were clearly floored by their wins, even through the interpreter and the broken English (in Hoyeon’s case) but it was clearly a sign that the momentum for Squid Game is strong (rest assured I will watch and review it when I find the time) and that the frontrunner status for Succession is less solid than I thought. The Critics Choice awards may tell a more accurate story for now (and that’s before the arrival of the final seasons of Killing Eve, Ozark and Better Call Saul, not to mention The Gilded Age, will clearly lead to upheaval among this year’s Emmy nominations).

But even Succession winning the grand prize didn’t bother me as much as I thought it would, mainly because the trophy was accepted by Brian Cox, an actor I truly admire. He made a grand entrance wearing a Covid mask saying Team Logan and F---Off! (his catchphrase) and made arguably the best speech of the night. After thanking the cast and writers, he sent a shout out to Ukraine, particularly the President (who is a former actor) but just as importantly the performers and writers in Russia, who as he pointed out ‘are forbidden under penalty of treason to say anything detrimental to the state and we should support them as well.” This is something that I can’t imagine anyone thinking of, and given the recent level of disruption in Russia about the invasion of Ukraine, it’s clear that there is a sign that way of thought may be in danger.

The most powerful speech of the night came with the last award for television. (Kate Winslet won for Best Actress, but was not present though she did give a taped tribute to Helen Mirren who was awarded with the Lifetime Achievement Award.) Michael Keaton, as expected, took the Best Actor prize for Dopesick. He talked about the joys of being an actor and how he gets to deal with situations like inequity and the kind of problems that led to the opoid crisis that Dopesick focuses on. “I can feel the eye rolls being made. Shut up and Dribble; Shut Up and Act. The acting I will give up; the shutting up, never.”  He gave a shout out to the people in Ukraine, and then nearly broke down at the end as he accepted the awards in the names of his late sister and nephew, both of whom had died of overdoses. I was looking forward to Keaton’s victory before last night, now I’m overwhelming by his triumph and his dignity.

I’m not sure how effect that Screen Actors Guild winners will have on the upcoming Best Picture race (as joyful to my soul as it was to see CODA take the Best Ensemble prize, it doesn’t change the fact that most of the major Oscar nominees – West Side Story, Licorice Pizza and especially Power of the Dog weren’t nominated for Best Ensemble yet somehow House of Gucci was.) Similarly, it’s always difficult to tell if the TV awards will have any affect on the Emmy nominations at all. And with the lack of supporting awards it’s going to be very hard to tell if any of the winners will end up prevailing at the Emmys or indeed even being nominated. (Orange is the New Black won the top prize for Comedy Ensemble three years running, but never took the grand prize and indeed was only nominated once.) But it’s always a fun and compact awards show that really you wish more awards shows took the lesson to heart in – one that celebrate actors but never takes itself seriously. Indeed Martin Short said as much at one point last night: “Now to something vitally important to society. Giving an actor another award.” Well, at least this awards show is fun and gets done on time. So to paraphrase the phrase that opens the show each year: “My name is David, and I love these Actors.”

Rich White Male Antiheroes: How The One Percent Are Invading Peak TV

Tomorrow Showtime premieres Super Pumped: The Rise of Uber. The series features the always remarkable Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Travis Gallanick, the man who launched Uber and his rise. It has the makings of the kind of series that traditionally brings award nominations (the cast includes Kyle Chandler and Uma Thurman as Arianna Huffington) and the series has preemptively been renewed for a second season, which will cover the rise of Mark Zuckeberg and Facebook. It is timely and sounds like the sort of thing I should watch. So why am I suddenly so loathe seeing it?

I think a large part of is due to the recent trend in television these days – the drama behind the rich and powerful. There have been many rants these days against series that center on White Male Antiheroes, but I don’t see a lot of people of color on Succession and I’m pretty sure that Shiv does even more horrible things before breakfast than Skyler White and Carmela Soprano were trolled for online. I’ve already dealt with this trend before, but with the arrival of Super Pumped and the next couple of weeks worth of awards that will almost certainly delivered a large number of trophies to Succession, I think it’s actually worth talking about again.

I’ve already focused on all of the things I loathe about Succession so I won’t repeat them all here. Instead, I’m going to focus on something that a lot of viewers did talk about as of the season 3 finale: how the Roy siblings tried to pull off a coup against Logan, how Tom most likely betrayed them, and who the ‘loser’ of the season – and indeed the series is.

First of all, about the fact that the Roy children finally managed to unify themselves after three seasons of conflict: let’s not pretend that it was a personal triumph.  They were motivated by the only thing that ever motivates them: the possibility of losing the company. We all know, however momentary the alliance was, even if it had worked they’d have turned on each other as soon as one could see an advantage. For better or worse, they’re Logan’s children. They’re just not nearly as good as him.

Second, yes it looks likely that Tom betrayed his own wife to his father-in-law in a move for wealth and power of his own. How is this a triumph of any kind? Now I grant you, with the exception of Cousin Greg, the Roys have always treated him as an interloper and when your wife tells you on your wedding night she doesn’t believe in monogamy you have every right to feel no loyalty. But all that Tom’s maneuver has done has shown that an upper-middle class man can, when the chips are down, be as cutthroat and bloodthirsty as his monstrous father-in-law is. (I’m actually going to come back to that point in a minute). I don’t believe for a second that Logan will give Tom a reward anywhere near the fiscal value of what his betrayal has cost him ethically (unlike everyone else on the series, he at least started the show with a soul) and we all know that considering the nature of Succession, he’ll be thrown under the bus when its convenient for someone more powerful. He already has been this season.

Finally let’s get to the core of it. Who eventually ends up ‘winning’ on Succession – and at this point in the series, can you honestly say any of these characters deserve to run Waystar – and get down who the loser is: America and probably the human race. The writers of Succession don’t embrace the political as much as they do considering this is a series about a cable news network, but they’ve made it fairly clear that at this juncture the Roys basically are conservative, they make and create Presidents, and the one they have waiting in the wings is to all intents and purposes a fascist. There were comparisons to Caligula throughout Season 3; it’s more than apparent to me that the Roys are all variations of Nero – fiddling while Rome burns.  They will never pay for the horrible crimes they’ve committed – the power move Jeremy Strong’s character did at the end of Season 2 ultimately resulted in no consequences, much less jail for anyone involved –  and even if nobody gets the company, they all have their own private jets. Unless the series ends with the Roy family being torn apart by a mob, there is nothing that could happen to any of them that is reciprocal with what they’ve done to the world.

Since I’ve spent so much time attacking a series I already hate, I will now turn my attention to one that I loved: Billions. I think the main reason I fell out of love with after four seasons may be due to the fact that I just got tired of seeing no one ever pay for the consequences of their actions. The five year struggle of Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades finally ended with Bobby losing – and still escaping punishment. Now that season 6 has begun and Mike Prince (Corey Stoll) has taken over Axe Capital, he has promised a new approach to doing business in a more ethical fashion. I’ve seen a couple of episodes and I know that nothing fundamentally has changed. Indeed, the characters seem only to have gotten more corrupt over time which is actually disheartening.

I particular mourn over the non-binary Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon) who started out as one of the most fascinating characters because of their unemotional approach to business which has now become purely a mask for being as coldblooded and ruthless as Bobby was.  I don’t actually blame them; we knew by the end of Season 3 how they got this way. Wendy (Maggie Siff) tried to convince not to form his own shop by telling him that you had to view the business as a family. Taylor looked at her and said: “No. It’s all about money. You taught me that.” And now it is too late to save him.

What has become painfully clear – and honestly needlessly repetitive at this point – is how money corrupts. This point was made clear two episodes ago when Sacker (Condola Rashad) the ADA who was Chuck’s most loyal soldier was poached by Mike Prince. Her switching sides wasn’t a shock; she’d betrayed Chuck at the end of Season 3 and justified it by saying she ‘was a political animal’ and had no problem going back to him the next season when the waters started running hot. What was shocking was how quickly she was willing to throw away her moral compass. Early in the episode she had a conversation with Wendy about how you manage to stay on the straight and narrow when you see everybody do the wrong thing. Wendy gave her moral advice and yet by the end of the episode, Sacker had no problem throwing away her ethics to help Taylor made a blatantly illegal trade. Chuck had cautioned Wendy about not ruining Sacker; it’s kind of sad it took less than episode for that to happen.

And indeed that’s kind of the monotony that has plagued Billions for far too long; for all that it has advertised itself as a clash of titans, the brutal truth is nearly six seasons in Chuck has almost no victories to show for all his struggles against the billionaire class. He has lost his wife; one of his top initial allies is now in jail and another now working for the enemy. Paul Giamatti is a great actor and it’s always glorious to watch him work, but any realistic politician (particularly one who worked in New York) would have either gone into private practice by now or at the very least shifted his targets. No matter how many times he changes his plan of attack, Axelrod and now Prince always seem to outmaneuver him. If it wasn’t painfully obvious to the viewer by now that money will always triumph over idealism, it sure as hell should be obvious to Rhodes. The one universal with every season of Billions has been even when Chuck wins, he loses. I have no doubt that’s how the battle against Mike Prince will end this year.

And as painful as it has been to watch the rich and powerful get away with murder, that’s been an ongoing theme this past year in TV. The White Lotus, for all its very real joys is fundamentally about a bunch of the elite doing horrible things to each other and not paying the price even when they’re on vacation. Recent streaming series like The Dropout and Inventing Anna seem to take more delight in true stories about real-life con-artists who duped the industries and people that trusted them out of billions. Even though they can be enjoyable, it’s hard to note the cynical underpinning.

I should admit I have become a huge fan of HBO’s The Gilded Age Julian Fellowes series about the struggles in 19^th Century New York that I already consider one of the best shows of 2022. However, I do think there’s a certain key difference between The Gilded Age and Succession (aside from the obvious fact that in the former series every character is capable of dressing down someone else without saying ‘F---- Off!) and that is the show is not so much about wealth as it is about caste and gender.

The Gilded Age actually shows that none of the series about wealth tend too – the caste difference. At the center of the series are Agnes Van Ryan (Christine Baranski) and Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon). Bertha Russell is the wife of a railroad tycoon who has significantly more money than most of the families on the famous list kept by Mrs. Astor. But she is viewed with utter disdain by people like Agnes because it’s not the right kind of money. This is felt throughout the city. Her husband is offered a chance to build a railroad station the city desperately needs and offers a chance to the investors to make fortunes. They have no problem taking his advice but their wives refuse to entertain Bertha for any major society events. She may have a big and ostentatious house built by the best architect in New York, but they’re just not willing to let her even host a charity event at her house for free even if the next available venue is more expensive. And this becomes painfully clear at all levels. When it is announced that a new group of billionaires are forming an Academy of Music, the names are rattled off disdainfully “Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller”. When Agnes’ niece what’s wrong with their money, the woman just say ‘she’ll have to be educated.”

This is something that is never truly looked at in any part of our society: how the old money will always disdainfully view the new. This has continued throughout the twentieth century: the Lords of Baseball were impressed with the millions of Ted Turner, but found his approach to the sport ‘undignified.” And I have no doubt that the Warren Buffett’s and Steve Forbes looked at disdain at the Silicon Valley billionaires even to this day. I have a feeling that is a larger part of so much of Number 45’s attitude towards the world, he might be wealthy, but the old breed looked down him – and we all had to pay for it.

The second thing that makes The Gilded Age different is that is fundamentally dominated by women. None of the women, rich or poor, black or white, have anywhere near the rights of even the butlers and servants they employ. Bertha reacts by determining to chart a path for herself by standing behind her husband. Agnes pushes against the changing times by remaining stuck firmly the old way.

 The irony is that in so many ways the women are alike, especially when it comes to the happiness of the young girls in their house. Bertha maintains an iron-like grip on her daughter’s movements and will not have her even talk with a man she feels is unworthy. She fires a maid who has dared to let her have the taste of freedom. Agnes is slightly less dictatorial in handling Marian, but she is subtle in manipulating Peggy, the African-American girl who she has hired as her secretary – and who she treats with more compassion then her own flesh and blood, Both want the ‘best’ for the women in the charge. The fact that the women themselves have no say in their own destinies is utterly irrelevant to both of them. I can only look forward to when Baranski and Coon are finally in the same room together, something the two have gone out of their way to avoid to this point in the series.

There’s also the fact that, unlike Succession, The Gilded Age makes having wealth and privilege look like fun. The Roys always look so suppressed by their wealth and are always miserable looking even in exotic locales.  It is possible that The Gilded Age is merely an example of style compared to substance, but since I don’t really see much substance (or character) in Succession, I’ll settle for the style. There’s also the fact that we’ve seen more of the ninety nine percent in five episodes of The Gilded Age than in Succession and there are actually characters in this series with ambitions beyond attending the right parties (though I’ll admit there’s a bit of that here)

So at the end of the day, what are we to make of all of these series that deal with the games that rich are playing among themselves? It basically comes down to which version you prefer. Maybe the reason I prefer The Gilded Age to Succession (and Billions to an extent) for the same reason critics viewed Deadwood as a more optimistic series than the other two HBO dramas that launched the Golden Age of Television: The Sopranos and The Wire.  The latter two series basically show the death of the American dream, while Deadwood despite taking place in a far darker and uglier setting, is about to the birth of it, about horrible and violent people unifying towards a common good. The Gilded Age is about that idea too: the changing of the times that would lead towards the Progressive era and improvements for almost all of the characters (the women in particular). It’s hard not to find more joy and pleasure in that then in anything that happens in Succession, a series which shows that the people who’ve effectively killed the American Dream for the rest of us can’t even get any pleasure out of the fruits of gains they haven’t done a thing to earn.

 

 

Here Goes Nothing: I Try To Predict This Year's SAG Winners for Television

 

In early January I wrote a long article about the Screen Actors Guild Awards, specifically in regards to television. I expressed how much I generally enjoyed the ceremony often more than the actual awards, the reasons that I have never tried to pick the winners for them over the years and given my mixed reactions to the current crop of nominees. I ended my saying I was uncertain whether I would try to do end up picking my favorites like I do with practically every other awards show and that I’d make up my mind in February when the awards were imminent.

Well, the SAG awards are Sunday and maybe it’s because I’m still feeling deprived of not being able to choose my winners for the Golden Globes this year. But even considering all my doubts about the awards – and seriously SAG members, I really do think you should consider doing Supporting awards for all of the TV categories, you’re a relatively short ceremony even when you run long – I’ve decided to throw caution to the wind (and my disgust with some of the nominees) and try to guess what I think will end up winning.

Considering that the SAG Awards have in recent years stopped their early habits of picking the same actors and shows year after year and adding to that the fact that there is more variety to the choices this year, I think repetition will play less of a theme. That said this is the group that gave Alec Baldwin six consecutive Best Actors for 30 Rock so you can never be sure. There might be some repetition anyway, but that may be due more to quality than habit.

So here we go.

 

OUTSTANDING DRAMATIC ENSEMBLE

The easiest choice of the night.  Barring a huge amount of momentum for Squid Game (which I can’t rule out; the SAG awards have been extremely friendly to Netflix the past decade) you go with the series with the most nominations. That series is Succession which has the benefit of never having been nominated at all by the Screen Actors Guild much less one. I don’t even really have a favorite for this category because…well, I need not repeat myself.

Should Win/Will Win: Succession

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A DRAMA

Really at this point it’s a question of which actor from Succession ends up taking the grand prize. Supporting Actors do not traditionally do well in this category (the only one I remember is John Lithgow for The Crown) so I think this rules out Kieran Culkin. It comes down to Brian Cox or Jeremy Strong, and considering that Strong prevailed in the Golden Globes this January, I give him the narrowest of edges. (Now remind me again why Billy Porter wasn’t nominated)

Should Win: Cox/Strong.

Will Win: Strong.

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A DRAMA

Could Squid Game pull off an upset here? Considering that the majority of nominations have gone to the male cast members, I’m doubtful. Could Sarah Snook duplicate her triumph at the Golden Globes? It’s possible, but she is a Supporting Actress and really it’s been awhile since a Supporting Actress won here. (The last true Supporting win was for Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey back in 2014.) Snook did give a good performance, but I think they’ll go a little further back and give the Actor to Jennifer Aniston. (Now why aren’t MJ Rodriguez and Uzo Aduba nominated? As you can see the Drama categories leave a lot to be desired in my opinion.)

Should Win: Snook.

Will Win: Aniston.

 

OUTSTANDING COMEDIC ENSEMBLE

This is tougher than it looks. It is likely the prize will end up going to Ted Lasso, but Hacks did win the Golden Globe and I really think there’s a lot of forward momentum for Only Murders in the Building which has a cast full of actors that the Guild likes to honor. And this is the category where upsets can happen – two years ago even the cast of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel told everybody upon accepting that they’d all voted for Fleabag. I think Ted Lasso still has the edge, but don’t rule out Murders prevailing.

Should Win: Only Murders in the Building.

Will Win: Ted Lasso.

 

OUTSTANDING ACTOR IN A COMEDY

Even tougher to predict. Will the presence of Brett Goldstein divert votes away from Jason Sudeikis, who did win last year? Will voters split between Martin Short and Steve Martin, stopping either from winning? Could all this vote-splitting lead to Michael Douglas’ triumph? All I know is that all five of these nominees more than deserve to win. So on this occasion, I’m going to go with my heart and someone who deserves an award: Steve Martin. It’s likely, given the Golden Globes, that Sudeikis will triumph again, but I think both he – and Ted Lasso himself – would be fine with losing to this legend.

Should Win: Martin.

Will Win: Sudeikis (but there are no bad choices here.)

 

OUTSTANDING ACTRESS IN A COMEDY

Much as a part of me would love to see Hannah Waddingham or Sandra Oh win, I think we all know who this is going to. Jean Smart is on a tear for her incredible work in Hacks, and right now the question is will she become one of only four actors to win all four major awards for television? She’s already halfway there and I’m almost certain she’ll win at a show that celebrates acting. The Broadcast Critics – I’ll get back to you in two weeks.

Should Win/Will Win: Smart

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A TV MOVIE OR LIMITED SERIES

Much as I have a personal preference for Murray Bartlett (who is a dark horse for The White Lotus) and the fact that Evan Peters did win an Emmy for Mare of Easttown., I think right now the momentum is going to Michael Keaton for Dopesick. He won the Golden Globe in this category and more than that, considering his remarkable career and his recent comeback, he is due an award. (I’m still bitter he didn’t win for Birdman.) This is the right marriage of prize and actor, so I think he’ll win. As for Bartlett, that’s why there are Supporting categories.

Should Win: Bartlett.

Will Win: Keaton.

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A TV MOVIE OR LIMITED SERIES

I will admit a preference for both Margaret Qualley, whose breakout role in Maid is the kind of performance awards show get and I loved Jennifer Coolidge for her incredible work in The White Lotus, I think it likely that Kate Winslet shall continue her streak for the title role in Mare of Easttown. Smart’s going to win for Hacks, Coolidge’s role, glorious as it is, is supporting and Qualley is probably going to be in the top contenders for next year’s Emmys.

Should Win: Qualley/Coolidge.

Will Win: Winslet.

 

As for Stunts, I haven’t seen most of the contenders. That said, given the amount of attention and praise given to it over the last few months, I expect this is the one award Squid Game has locked up.

I’ll be back Monday with my reactions to the winners. Regardless to how it turns out, I expect to have fun.

 

 

 

Are We In The Golden Age of Jeopardy? The Answer is...

 

Last week I saw an ad for a podcast come up on Apple that asked in its headline if we were in the Golden Age of Jeopardy. As someone who has been watching the show for more than three decades by now and who has studied it rigorously for the past decade, I have considered the question myself quite as Season 38 has unfolded. Now that the halfway point of the current season has been reached, I think a serious look at the issue should be considered.

First let’s look at the obvious. Even the most biased of Alex Trebek partisans has to admit this is a damn good time to be the watching the show. In the space of less than four months, two of the greatest champions in the history of Jeopardy – hell, in all of game show history – have been on the series. Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider each completed a run that is practically unparalleled in the show’s history and seems unthinkable that they would happen within a month of each other. When two players win roughly 1.5 million dollars and a ridiculous number of runaway games in those incredible streaks its hard to think of a time when you’ve witnessed such great play. Throw in the fact that in the interim Jonathan Fisher managed to win eleven games and just under $300,000 – a total that in almost any other season would be enough to lead the pack – and it’s hard to think that there ever was a period of such sustained extraordinary game play.

To answer an all too obvious question, no, there are no real parallels to this in the entire history of Jeopardy. So we can’t use this as a contour for whether this is the true Golden Age. If we widen the parameters, however, there are some interesting comparisons that I think fans of the show would recognize.

First we have to acknowledge that, as great as dozens of champions were in the pre-Ken Jennings era, it is unlikely, if not impossible to compare any of that season at that level. With apologies to some of the all time greats – I/m thinking primarily of Chuck Forrest, Frank Spangenberg and Jerome Vered -  we really can’t make such comparisons comparing five time champions against each other with so many of the players in the post double dollar figures and unlimited winning streaks era. Having seen many of them perform, I realize this does almost all of them a huge disservice and I am reluctant to just dismiss them, but since we are trying to compare eras rather than champions, I believe I must do so.

So, are there periods in the post Jennings era that could be favorably compared? I think there are a few seasons that do merit comparison:

Season 21:  This season was dominated by the back half of Ken Jennings original winning streak and would end with what for nearly a decade would be the beginning of the player who won the second most games, David Madden (he won 19). The season also featured the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, the most elaborate (to date)  tournament in the series history, featuring 144 players competing over a nearly four month period to face off against Ken Jennings for a $2 million prize. It would end in late May with Brad Rutter eventually defeating Jennings and Jerome Vered. The season also included the 2004 Tournament of Champions, a hard fought battle eventually won by Russ Schumacher.

Season 30: At the center of the season was the Battle of The Decades, a tournament that featured fifteen players from each ten year period in the series history (labeled as the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s) competing to win a $1 million cash prize. The tournament featured every single Tournament of Champions winner save for two (one had passed away, one was unavailable) and several other players who had achieved series milestones. In my opinion, it is the best super tournament the series has done in his thirty year history. Several superb champions also played over the course of the season, including Julia Collins, whose twenty wins and $428,100 were high-water marks for a female contestant until Amy Schneider came along and Arthur Chu, who despite being arguably the most controversial contestant in Jeopardy history for his post show behavior nevertheless managed to win eleven games and nearly $300,000 in his initial appearance.

Season 35: Until recently this was pretty close to the gold standard, and part of the reason TV Guide actually put the show on the top ten shows of 2019. It is remembered most for James Holzhauer’s incredible run of 32 wins in which he won just over $2,460,000, coming within a hair of overturning Ken Jennings all time record for money won, as well as the revelation of Alex Trebek being diagnosed with the pancreatic cancer that would kill him a little less than two years after his announcement of it. But there was a lot else to make the season memorable. The Jeopardy All-Star Game, an anniversary tournament that featured eighteen players competing as members of a team, featured some of the all time great Jeopardy players, including Austin Rogers and Buzzy Cohen two of the most recent of the all time greats. There were also a number of superb champions throughout the season, and indeed the season ended with the arrival of another Jeopardy champion who must be ranked among the greatest of all time: Jason Zuffranieri who would eventually win nineteen games and over half a million dollars, both among the top ten in Jeopardy records.

So considering all this how does the current season, not even halfway done, rank in comparison when we consider it to be the Golden Age of Jeopardy? This is a very tough needle to thread, but as a historian of the show I will do my best to answer it. First, let’s consider the pros and cons of each season:

Season 21: Pros: If you love Ken Jennings this was the season for you. Adding up the thirty six wins he had to start the seasons and his appearance in the Final of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, Jennings was in a little less than 20% of the games. Watching him breaking the $2 million mark and set records in games won and money won that, despite the best efforts of so many, have never been threatened was remarkable. And the first appearance against Brad Rutter, who he would spend the next fifteen years dueling with for the position of Greatest of all time, is a crossroads in game show history.

The Ultimate Tournament itself was the most ambitious tournament the show has done to date and featured some truly remarkable play as well as some incredible upsets in the history of Jeopardy, as many Tournament of Champions winners would never make it past the first or second round. This led to the rise of some truly memorable players included Jerome Vered (who would eventually face off against Brad and Ken in the finals) and Pam Mueller, whose incredible play against champions decades older than her ranks her among the greatest of all time. And for those of us who miss the days of the Seniors Tournament, many of these matches would be satisfying to those of us who believe that players in their fifties and sixties are as good as the much younger ones. Add to this the beginning of David Madden’s remarkable run to cap the season and this had some of the most remarkable play as well as some of the toughest Final Jeopardy clues of all time.

Con: As much as I loved the Ultimate Tournament of Champions (I taped it when it was on the air in 2005 and rewatch it religiously every year) I must admit it was a very unwieldy affair. Selections for the participants were somewhat arbitrary (you had to have won five games and a certain amount of money in your original run), it had a way too big male to female ratio (there were four male competitors for every woman) and the selections for nine seeded players to get byes to the second round had odd qualifications and, considering that most of those seeded players ended up getting defeated in Round 2, didn’t seem to be much of an advantage. Granted there were a lot of excellent games in the first two rounds and it did show some of the greatest players to their advantage, but I’m not sure whether a tournament that took up nearly a third of the season and actually ending in something of an anticlimax was worth the time. (To their credit, the show learned from this and made modification in tournaments to come.)

 

Season 30: Pros: The thirtieth season centered on the Battle of the Decades and would feature fourteen players from each decade – the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s, plus a fan favorite from a selection of five players that the fans would vote for online. Unlike the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, this tournament was a much more organized affair and was parceled out rather than lumped together. Round 1 for the 1980s took place in February, the 1990s in March, and the 2000s in April, with the two week championship being played out in a regular Jeopardy format for almost every other Tournament of Champions in May.

In my opinion the Battle of the Decades is the best super tournament Jeopardy has ever had. Featuring all but one of the living Tournament of Champions winners (Bob Blake, who won the 1990 Tournament was touring and could not participate) as well as several players who made several ambitious marks in their original run (eight of the players from the 1980s and 1990s had, among other accomplishments, participated in the Million Dollar Masters in 2002). Even some of the contenders I considered questionable at the time are, in retrospect, some of the finest ever assembled. (David Madden, for the record, was invited to this tournament, but because of ethical considerations thought he shouldn’t compete.) Of the forty five players, there were only two whose presence I thought was questionable and one of those was a fan choice that I didn’t agree with, so that may be a personal prejudice on my part.

The quality of play in this tournament was superb from beginning to end. In the initial fifteen qualifying games, only two were runaways and one of those only became one on the last correct response. Thirteen of the winners were Tournament of Champions winners, one was Ken Jennings, and the last Pam Mueller continued her streak of being one of the best players in Jeopardy history. I wasn’t entirely happy without they arranged the quarterfinals as they seemed to favor the younger players more than the old, but most of those matches were exciting as well. And the two game final – which in addition to featuring Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, also featured Roger Craig who had broken Ken Jennings one day record of $75,000 in his original run – was thrilling, heartbreaking and though Brad ended up winning, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion until Final Jeopardy on Game 2.

 The regular seasons also featured several good champions – it started out with a seven game run by Jared Hall who won nearly $181,000 and as I said featured superb play by Arthur Chu and Julia Collins, both who deserve extra credit for being able to manage so many wins while dealing with extended hiatuses because of the Battle of the Decades.

Con: The fact that Arthur Chu, who may be considered the most unpopular player in entire history of Jeopardy, had his run here may color ones opinion of this season. Still that’s a minor caveat in the season that, in addition to the Battle of the Decades featured nine players who would qualify for the Tournament of Champions.

 

Season 35: There are a lot of reasons to favor Season 35, but the biggest arguments in its favor are, as I said, the All-Star Tournament and James Holzhauer’s original run. The All-Star did feature some of the greatest players of that era, had moments of genuine drama and excitement and ended on a thrilling moment. James Holzhauer’s run is one of the most towering achievements in game show history and the game in which he was dethroned by Emma Boettcher was one of the greatest in Jeopardy history – there was only one incorrect response and one clue left uncovered And Season 35 ended with three champions having runs within succession of each other – Ryan Bilger, who won four games and just over $100,000, Sam Kavanaugh (who ended up winning the 2021 Tournament of Champions) who won $156,202 and Jason Zuffranieri who closed it out beginning his nineteen game run which would eventually land him in third place in money won in their original run. Any other year, those three players would be considered among the greatest.

Cons: I had doubts about the All-Star Tournament from its inception. It wasn’t just the idea of team play (an unwieldy concept which I later learned even Alex Trebek had doubts about). It was the fact that the eighteen players only represented the previous twenty years of the show and indeed the lion’s share were from the past decade, with only a handful from the Battle of the Decades being chosen to compete. Granted I had no problem with almost all of those players – most of them had either won the Tournament of Champions or set remarkable streaks in their initial run – and I certainly had no problem with Austin Rogers, Buzzy Cohen and Julia Collins being ranked in the same breath with Ken Jennings, Brad Rutter and even Colby Burnett. But I had serious doubts about the qualifications of three of the players who were selected to compete (though to be fair, in the actual Tournament all three more than acquitted themselves when it came to game play.)

As for the actual play, once you got used to the set up most of the games were fairly exciting (and indeed Brad Rutter, who had been undefeated in his entire Jeopardy career came as close as he ever had to losing a game in the first match.) Still for all the buildup and thrills as well as really tough clues, the fact remains it pretty much ended the same way as the Ultimate Tournament had – Brad (well, his team) trouncing the opposition in the final. I loved the Tournament; I just think they could have used a better format.

As for James Holzhauer, well, much of the time watching him I felt the same kind of fatigue that so many people felt this year when Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider were in the middle of their runs. It was historic to watch it, but not a lot of fun, especially if you were playing along at home. Still you can’t exactly deny that he is one of the greatest of all time – the show did as much the very next year.

 

Bearing all that in mind, how does the current season rank up? We’ve already had two of the greatest players of all time, along with an eleven game winner and we’ve also had two other players qualify for the Tournament of Champions before the season is halfway over.  The main argument that doesn’t make me automatically qualify is the fact that we haven’t had any special anniversary Tournaments and it is unlikely the Tournament of Champions, almost always the high point of any Jeopardy season, will be played this season. That said, we have had some new and interesting tournaments in the interim

There was the Professors Tournament, a variation on annual Teachers Tournament that focused on college professors. I must admit that the game play was more competitive than I’d expected and a lot of the Final Jeopardy questions far more difficult then I’m used to for many of these tournaments. The winner Sam Buttrey was impressive in his performance and more than earned the title.

I had my doubts the National College Championship which just finished airing yesterday. I’ve enjoyed the College Tournaments Jeopardy has had for as long as I’ve been watching the show and wasn’t entirely convinced that the changes to the format – 36 players instead of fifteen, eventually coming down to four semi-final matches to come up with three winners –  seemed more designed for prime-time TV than real competition. However, having watched the entire tournament I confess I have changed my mind. While I found a lot of the quarterfinal matches disappointing in their quality, I thought many of the winners impressive and the semi-final matches themselves were beyond thrilling. (One of them was so tightly played we had the rarity of an actual tiebreaker to determine the ultimate winner.) The finals were slightly anticlimactic, but that is the case of so many tournaments. The question remains will the winner ending up going to compete in this year’s Tournament of Champions? I’m actually not sure. I look forward to finding out.

And considering the controversy that this year started with, there’s an argument that this season it is a great triumph for the show. Within a matter of days true fans have been able to put behind all of controversy over arguments with the hosting and producing and focus on two players who now go on the short list for the greatest of all time. It has been delightful watching Matt and Amy play and comparing their runs to the other greats. It’s also been interesting watching Jennings himself be impressed by Amy’s run when he came into to resume hosting the show. Both he and Bialik have done a superb job and while there’s no clear idea who will get full-time duties, both have more than shown themselves worthy of the job.

Final thought: is this the true Golden Age of Jeopardy? I may need to wait until the end of the season to know for sure. Is this a great time to be watching Jeopardy? Absolutely.  The best time will no doubt be when the current ranks of the great come to face each other sometime in the near future. Then we’ll revisit the question – or should I say the answer.

The Final Anlysis of In Treatment, The Rare Reboot That Worked

 

In yesterday’s column I announced my joy that one of the best series of the past decade, Fargo, was surprisingly returning for a fifth season. Today I will discuss a series that I’ve recently learned will not be coming back for another season, despite the fact that I’ve advocated for it strongly in this column for much of 2021.

In Treatment, which I ranked Number 7 on my list of the best television of 2021 has recently been canceled for the second time by HBO. I’ll admit that in neither occasion did it come as an immense shock - this was never the kind of series that HBO was able to handle either now or in its original run starting in 2008. And while it was well ahead of its time in the late 2000s, it was slightly behind the curve when it debuted last May. But in both incarnations, In Treatment was one of the most radically different series that HBO has ever done. And despite its cancellation in its new incarnation, it showed just how much we needed, if not more.

In Treatment was billed as Season 4 of the series that premiered back in 2010 but for all intents and purposes, it truly was a reboot. The therapist at the center of the series, Dr. Brooke Taylor (the always magnificent Uzo Aduba) was supposedly linked to the previous series by being a colleague of Dr. Paul Weston, the therapist played by Gabriel Byrne in the original series. (Like Aduba, Byrne was nominated for an Emmy for the series, and actually won a Golden Globe for his performance in 2009.

The format was more or less the same as it had been for the original series: each half-hour was a session with a patient that Dr. Taylor was seeing during the week, each a different case. Eladio (Anthony Ramos, who inexplicably was nominated for an Emmy for Hamilton and not this series) was a caregiver for a rich teenager suffering from cerebral palsy and who only was getting to see Brooke because the patient’s family was willing to pay for the sessions. Colin (the always exceptional John Benjamin Hickey) was a tech billionaire sent to a minimum security prison for fraud and was seeing Brooke as a condition of early release. Laila (Quintessa Swindell) was brought to therapy by her grandmother because she had caught her having sex with another girl, and seemed to go out of her way to shock Taylor with each session. The series followed on half hour session with them over a period of six weeks, with a fourth half-hour devoted to Brooke herself. (I’ll get to that in a minute.)

All of the action was essentially lengthy dialogues between Brooke and her patient, which essentially made each episode a half-hour play. Just as in the original incarnation, I imagine this put off millions of viewers: what drama can we see simply by having thirty minutes of two people talking to each other? Well, if you love the theater (or indeed have been intense analysis) you know how dramatic this can be.  Each successive week we got a deeper hint of the secrets the patients were hiding, as well as the barriers they put up that gave Brooke too much trouble to reach them. Eladio’s emotional intensity and problems with his mother had led to extreme difficulties with affection that would over time force him to shift his affection to Brooke. Colin claimed to love therapy but as Brooke slowly found out, he was a compulsive liar and a narcissistic personality that with each new session made you wonder if you could trust anything coming out of his mouth. Leila was a storyteller whose initial determination to shock Brooke masked deep anxiety about her future, combined with the already layered tension of being black in America. With Leila in particular, you really wondered in later weeks if she’d even come back the next week.

In the original incarnation the last episode of the week would deal with Paul’s own therapy, first in sessions with his mentor played by Dianne Wiest (who won an Emmy for her work) then in the third season with a therapist his own age, played by the always wonderful Amy Ryan. In those sessions we would see the tension that having to be a therapist forced on Paul – his marriage would eventually break up by the end of Season 1, and the reason he changed therapists by the end of season 2 was that he would have a major falling out with Wiest’s character.

In the sessions dealing with Brooke, she didn’t go to therapy but we saw the repercussions were far worse. Brooke had been a recovering alcoholic, but by the end of the first week we had seen her drinking again. Most of the first four weeks dealt with Brooke and her relationship with her AA sponsor Rita, who kept picking at the levels of her sobriety and all of her justifications which were more intense. Her father, a legendary in the California community, had recently passed away and she was dealing with the loss. As a teenager, she’d had a child that she’d given up for adoption. She told Rita she was trying to make contact with him now and he made clear he wanted nothing to do with her. And a college boyfriend who had been one of the constant forces behind her drinking in the first place (Joel Kinnaman, who would appear throughout the series) was back in her life, and despite the warning signs she still wanted to be with him.

All of this climaxed in the fifth week of the season when after Paul, who had promised to visit her, didn’t show up at her house. Brooke then proceeded to have the most intense therapy session yet – with herself.  Dr. Brooke Taylor put Brooke under the microscope and forced her to deal with all of the issues about her life and her childhood that she’d been denying her entire life, including the fragility of her mother whom she’d to this point never mentioned. It should have been a pure gimmick but in the sure hands of the writers and Aduba the episode was, in my opinion, one of the great ones of 2021.

How exactly Brooke’s patients and indeed Brooke herself resolved their issues I will leave for the viewer to discover on their own. And I also know that In Treatment was far more capable of dealing with real drama then Succession ever has been and far more qualified to deal with the problems facing so many of today’s youth and addiction than Euphoria was.  But just as in its original incarnation, In Treatment’s numbers were never that high and the only member of the cast to receive any awards nomination at all was Aduba who was nominated for Best Actress in a Drama by the Emmys, the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice. (I blame The Handmaid’s Tale in particular for taking so many supporting acting possibilities out of the hands of the incredible cast of In Treatment.) While Aduba’s work really had no chance against the extraordinary work of Olivia Colman in The Crown (who she lost the Emmy too) and MJ Rodriguez for Pose (who took the Golden Globe and is likely to win the Critics Choice) it was quietly as good as the rest of them.

There are two reasons why I don’t think In Treatment was a success in either incarnation. The first is scheduling. In none of the rollouts HBO did could they find a way conducive to work for viewers. In the first season, they aired one episode every day of the week. In the second, they aired three episodes on Monday and two on Tuesday. In the third and fourth season, they tried airing two episodes on two consecutive days. None of their attempts ended up getting viewers.

The other problem is the intensity of the subject. Many of HBO’s dramas are incredibly intense but they have the benefit of having action elsewhere to ease the tension. If The Sopranos had focused its entire first season just in Tony and Melfi’s sessions, it would never have become a cultural phenomenon. In Treatment put you right in there between the therapist and their patient. It’s both too private and public at the same time. Throw in the fact that it’s a half-hour drama – a combination that exists almost nowhere else on any medium, and it’s easy to figure out why it’s never been a big hit. For the longest time HBO’s slogan was: “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.” And for all the groundbreaking series that have premiered on it in the last quarter century, there’s an argument that In Treatment is the best example of being true the first part of that phrase.

Was there ever a way that the show could have been successful anywhere? Could it have worked on a service like Netflix or Amazon, dropping all its episodes at once so you could pick and choose the patient you wanted to follow and then see every episode? Perhaps, but that might have involved too much and odd a commitment. Would it have worked on a service like Hulu or even HBO Max that dropped several episodes a week at a time without giving the whole thing away? I honestly have no idea. Maybe this series really was too experimental, in both format and drama, to ever really work.

All I know was that it took a great deal of courage for the programmers of HBO to try and reboot In Treatment. More than any other reinvention of so many series that are filling the airwaves, it completely justified its existence by its quality, certainly more than the new seasons of Dexter and CSI we would get in 2021. The fact that it didn’t end up a popular success does not negate the worthiness of the effort. We needed In Treatment just as much in 2021 as we did in 2008 –  given the twisted psyche of the world these days, maybe more now than then. And while in a sense it didn’t work, in the final analysis it wasn’t a waste of time.

 

Fargo Comes Back for Another Season of Blood And Snow

 

 

Among the many more important disruptions Covid has caused, one of the less consequential ones have been the scheduling of the next seasons of so many of the great series of the last several years. As 2022 began, several series that deserve to be considered among the greatest of all time were already scheduled to air their final season. This is Us is in the midst of its end run and Better Call Saul’s final season (divided, as its parent series Breaking Bad was, into two parts) will air this year. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Stranger Things, two of the biggest streaming phenomena of the 2010s both announced that they will be ending after five seasons, though since neither has finished airing their fourth, when that will happen remains a question. And two of the bigger critical comedies in recent years – FX’s Better Things and Atlanta – are set to depart the airwaves this year as well; the former starting next week; the latter after its fourth season which will premiere this fall after the third has premiered at the end of March.

With all of these departures being announced on the heels of each other in the last week, perhaps one of the biggest joys from the announcement of the return of a series that I honestly thought was not going to when its fourth season finished airing as the end of 2020. But some time this year, those devoted fans of Midwest noir will be rewarded as Fargo returns for Season 5.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m overjoyed the anthology series that I considered the fourth best TV series of the last decade is returning for a fifth season. It’s just that watching the scene that aired after the credits of Season 4, I honestly thought that Noah Hawley, the genius who has created one of the true masterpieces of television, had wrapped up his saga in a bow. I will not spoil it for those of you who have yet to see Season 4 (and given that so many thought it was somehow inferior to the previous three, there’s a good chance that many people still haven’t seen it). Suffice to say that I thought the last minute of Fargo did what I am told is a major trend of FX other major franchise American Horror Story and had linked all the previous seasons into one giant saga lasting nearly sixty years and showing every possible aspect of crime and law enforcement imaginable. Throw in the fact that it seemed that the announcers for FX had referred to the last episode of Season 4 as the ‘series finale’ and I think viewers could have been forgiven for thinking Hawley was done with his storytelling.

But Hawley has always been one of the most brilliant talents of television. He has said on multiple occasions that before he begins every season he tries to come up with a single image or idea and write that season from that point on.

In Season 1, he pondered what would happen if a normal man and a savage man had a random meeting, the savage decided to resolve the normal mans problems and how would the normal man react. From that he creator the characters of Lorne Malvo and Lester Nygaard, unforgettably played by Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman and went from there. In Season 2, he had the idea of an ordinary housewife running into a man in an accident, driving home, and serving her husband dinner while the victim was still in the windshield of her car. From there he created Hank and Peggy Blomquist, played by real life husband and wife Jesse Plemmons and Kristen Dunst (in two of their greatest roles, recent Oscar nomination notwithstanding) and went even further. In Season 3, he came up with the idea of two brothers receiving an inheritance, the younger one a car and the older one a stamp. The younger one convinced the older one to swap and would build an empire from it, while the older ones entire life would downhill. Enter Ewan McGregor as both Stussy brothers.  I don’t know for certain what image inspired Season 4, but based on what I saw it’s something along the lines of: What if, in order to end a bloody crime war, the leaders of two crime families exchanged one of their children? And even though it would end in blood, that trend kept going on? Enter Chris Rock, Jason Schwartzman and so many other great actors.

Up until this point Hawley and his writers have kept Fargo in the not too distant past, going from the 1950s to the Great Recession of 2008. While the details of Season 5 remain vague (perhaps even to Hawley at this point) he has revealed it will take place near the present ‘2019’ involve a kidnapping and ‘when is your wife not really your wife?” I know nothing more than that, and honestly I don’t wish to know anything more. The joy in watching Fargo over its four seasons and six year run has been watching how events start from the seeds of Hawley’s ideas and then spiral out of the control of those who have unleashed the evil often without meaning too. Both the idea of both the butterfly effect and the domino theory end up with enormous repercussion in Hawley’s Fargo and the only thing you know for certain at the beginning of every season is that there will be an enormous amount of blood spilled by the end; some by the good guys, most by the bad guys, but it is credit to the writers that at that point you’ve grown to care for both sides equally.

What has become especially maddening during the incredible run of Fargo (and is in part due to the incredible array of talent in Limited Series in particular these past five years) is that it has been maddeningly under-recognized by the Emmys. It managed to win Best Limited Series in 2014 but the entire cast and writers were shut out by Sherlock (ironically Benedict Cumberbatch defeated Martin Freeman for Best Actor and Freeman would triumph for supporting for Sherlock and defeat Colin Hanks for Fargo). It appeared to be the early favorite by the end of 2015, but in 2016 the incredible The People V. O.J. Simpson premiered and deservedly dominated the Emmys.  In 2017 Fargo, along with almost every other brilliant Limited Series was destroyed (admittedly deservedly) by Big Little Lies.  Despite in my opinion (and many others) being just as brilliant in Season 4, the series was essentially ignored by the Emmys (and with the exception of the newly found HCA) for nominations in every major category. (To be clear, most of the Limited Series were as good or superior, but it’s really hard to justify most of the cast being ignored for, among others, the original Broadway cast of Hamilton for nominations.) Honestly Jessie Buckley’s surprise Oscar nomination doesn’t make up for her being snubbed by the Emmys for her incredibly portrayal of what amounts to a 1950s Karen.

I don’t think Hawley does his work for awards. He’s gotten his share of them over the years (Golden Globes and Critics Choice in particular). And he never officially said one way or the other that Season 4 would be the final season of Fargo. I genuinely believe inspiration wormed its way into his head and he found another new story to tell. Am I grateful to see the new season and find out how it fits into the mythology he has spent the better part of eight years weaving? Of course. Would I love to see him and whatever wonderful actors he invites into the saga to get the awards they deserve? You betcha.

This Year's Olympics Are Over. Maybe We Should Consider Ending Them For Good.

 

 

It hasn’t exactly been a banner Olympics for 2022. Overall ratings have been down by nearly half since 2018. There was controversy in the weeks leading up to them, from the conditions in Beijing, to the idea of hosting them during a pandemic, to all of the concerns about human rights that the IOC paid lip service too but did nothing about. There have been at least half a dozen medals retracted because of doping scandals. The biggest controversy of all involved the Russian figure skating team. Most prominent among them was Kamila Valieva who tested positive for a performance enhancing drug but was allowed to perform anyway, much to the criticism of the entire world media and indeed the commentators. When her solo performance finally occurred Thursday and she performed miserably, the world watched in disgust and horror as her coach ignored her viewed with even more hostility as the eventual gold and silver medalists ignored her later. All in all, there has been precious little joy and almost no brotherhood in Beijing this winter.

With each successive Games, the Olympics seem to becoming more and more a ritual that fewer and fewer countries want to host. Ever since the games in Athens ended up help devastate the already fragile Greek economy in 2004, the Olympics have become more and more hosted by countries that are bordering on totalitarian states. This is unlikely to change as many European countries are actually putting on their ballot referendums that they will never host the Olympics again. And those that do, one wonders about their motivation. When Tokyo ended up hosted the Olympics in 2020, it was meant to serve as a celebration of a country that had recovered from the horrors of Fukishima Province in 2011. But as Real Sports on HBO reported, many of the locations for arenas had levels of radiation that were still fairly dangerous, facts the Japanese government denied robustly and that the IOC ignored. (Admittedly, they would soon have far greater concerns to handle.)

Recently on Politico I read an article about the nature of the IOC Boards makeup and that it was beginning to resemble something of a fascist state itself, which is why it was seen as being a straw man for the continued human rights violations in China and refusing to crack down seriously on Russia’s repeated violations of the anti-doping laws. In my opinion, this is giving the Olympics far too much credit as an organization to begin with. It makes the broad assumption that the IOC has ever cared about human rights, sportsmanship or even the well-being of its own athletes, in or outside the Games.

This has been clear very close to the start of the modern Olympics. It’s become a part of pop culture as much as athletic culture the incredible blunder holding the Summer Olympics in Hitler’s Germany in 1936.  It basically gave the Third Reich an audience before the whole world of the Nazi regime. And as much as the Olympics no doubt try to focus on Jesse Owens’ triumphs in track and field, it did nothing more for civil rights in 1930s America than Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar win for Gone with the Wind did.  I hardly blame Muhammad Ali for throwing the gold medal he won for boxing in 1960 in Lake Michigan; it’s not like it made him viewed any less of a threat in the South.

I’m honestly not sure whether I find holding the Olympics in Berlin less offensive than what happened in Munich in 1972. We’ve all seen Spielberg’s film about the hostage situation involved the Israeli team; we’ve all seen the footage of Jim McKay saying: “They’re all dead.” What is generally forgotten is that the IOC did suspend competition during the hostage situation – for a few hours. Then they went back to the games while athletes they’d invited were being murdered just a few blocks away. Their attitude was basically: “Yes, people are dying but we rented the space. We can’t not use it.”

I think that attitude basically sums up how the IOC views the athletes that participate in their games every four years. They don’t view them as a commodity, as most professional sports do. As any professional sports fan knows, football and baseball players have value. Is it outrageous that they are traded like they are little more than memorabilia? Sort of. But as we all know, these athletes are very well compensated for their troubles.

Olympic athletes have it much worse. They spend their lives training and focusing their attention on their craft to the omission of all else. It is bad enough that, for many of them, the sports they compete in are viewed as punch lines and trivia questions at best by much of the rest of the world, certainly here in the U.S.  Seriously, how much money does a professional curling team or pole vaulter make?  You show up for two weeks every four years, you’re given a few minutes of attention on television and then you’re done. If you’re lucky – extremely lucky – you might get a parade in your hometown and your face on a box of cereal. Maybe Jimmy Fallon or Stephen Colbert will interview you.  Then you’re done. And the IOC really doesn’t have much use for you until the next Olympics. There’s no pension, no speaking tour, no compensation. And usually by the next Olympics, there’s someone younger to take your place. That’s if you’re an American. In some other countries, like Russia, you’re disposed of (figuratively) for the next athlete in the next games. All of this, of course, only happens if you medal. If you don’t finish on the podium, nobody has any time for you.

I think the key to how the Olympics view its athletes is what they focus all their energy on: athletes marching in the opening ceremony, waving to the crowd like beauty pageant contestants (another anachronistic ritual that needs to be disposed of). Your job if you’re an athlete is to smile and wave in the opening, and stand silently on the podium when your national anthem is played during the medal ceremony.  You are not to speak about social issues or the fact that your competitors are using performance enhancing drugs or that its unfair one of your fellow athletes was banned for smoking marijuana or how you feel about playing in a country that oppresses its people or for a country that oppresses your people or really anything except being proud to be an athlete. You step out of line; they have no problem cutting you dead. A recent documentary about how Tommie Smith and Carlos Leon, American medalists in 1968 who wore black gloves and did a Black Power salute, shows just how devastating the consequences can be. (I think it worth noting that this is not strictly an African-American or even an American problem. Australian sprinter Peter Norman, who won the silver in their event, also protested by wearing a badge from the Olympic Project for Human Rights on the dais. It wasn’t noted by the rest of viewing audience, but the IOC noticed and, like Smith and Leon, Norman was blackballed from future games and was ostracized by his fellow athletes and his home country for the rest of his life.)

So the Olympics are not about sportsmanship, the athletes that compete in it, or even the sports. What are they about? What every athletic organization is about: money. This should, of course, come as a shock to no one. Why did the IOC change its format from so they’d have a game every two years instead of two games every four years? Why did they allow themselves to go through such an outrageous process called the Triplecast in the 1992 Seoul Games, in those days before hundreds of cable channels? It is about money. The major difference between this and every other professional sports organization is that in almost all of them, the athletes get a decent cut. (We’ll set aside college sports because that’s a whole other headache.) The Olympics are all about the amateur spirit – in you know the sense of not getting paid; since 1988 professional athletes have been competing at every level.

It’s about money and messaging, even if they never work out like the campaign plans.  In the lead up to the Summer Olympics of 1992, the airwaves were deluged by ads for Nike involving two track athletes known simply as Dan and Dave. We didn’t even know what events they were competing or even that neither had even qualified yet for the Olympics. All that mattered was that they were white, male and photogenic.  The fact that at Seoul Dan just bronzed and Dave didn’t even qualify was irrelevant. They’d made their money for Nike; just the same way Bo Jackson did for accomplishing even less at two professional sports. 

That’s what America regards athletes as: entertainers. The fact that they’ve trained their entire lives for a few seconds of glory doesn’t matter to us. I almost wish the IOC would regard athletes as entertainers, but as I said, they regard them more beauty contestants than anything else.  Is it any wonder that so many Olympics after the games end up dealing with substance abuse, mental health issues, and even kill themselves? (Michael Phelps HBO Documentary The Weight of Gold really explains the price of being an Olympic athlete.)

Several years ago I read an article that once suggested the Academy Awards had a real possibility of going the way of the Miss America Pageant, being regarded to the backlog of basic cable rather than a major prime time network ratings grabber. I still don’t believe the Oscars will ever drop to that level but with each subsequent Olympics I find it more and more likely it may happen for the games. For all the effort NBC tries to push into its narrative every two years, like almost every other major sporting events ratings have been dropping steadily over the last decade. And the American sporting events carry far less baggage than the Olympics seem to getting every year on almost every front, political, commercial and social. The fact that the athletics themselves become increasingly controversial is practically a non-factor; the viewer accepts it almost as a given.

Indeed, I think there is a high degree of likelihood that within my lifetime, the Olympics may cease to exist. The writing seems to be on the wall considering the lack of countries even willing to bid for the games for 2028. I imagine this will be a hard blow for the hundreds of thousands of young athletes out there who spend their lives training for the possibility to stand at a podium and receive a medal. But the more and more we learn about the huge costs that this takes on athletes across the globe, the way so many of their countries view them as commodities, the way America barely gives them a minute of notice if they medal and no attention if they don’t, part of me just can’t help but think maybe that it would be better for humanity in a way the Olympics have said they are but never really have stood for.

Lost And Delirious 20 Years Later: A Heartbreaking Love Story That Launched The Careers Of Three Remarkable Actresses

 

 Introduction: I don’t normally do film reviews unless I can find a link to my TV criticism. The film I’m about to discuss actually has a very direct link to it, and I’ve been meaning to post an article about it for a few months. There’s also a somewhat seriocomic link which I’ll get to within.

 

There are no doubt too many within the LGBTQ+ community unsatisfied with the lack of representation on screen in film or television, even though the most recent GLAAD diversity report listed the highest onscreen representation on television. Progress is slow for everybody, and as someone who remembers just how truly hard it could be getting a gay/lesbian love story made twenty years ago, I know how far the industry has come.

When I was in college, gay/lesbian stories of any merit were entirely found in either in other countries or in the independent film market. Any attempt to try and put it into the mainstream media was often badly done. I fondly remembered Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy when it was released in 1997, and looking back it doesn’t hold up well at all – so much of the ambition very clearly looks now like the model for conversion camps that still exist to day.  The films that were successful were probably much so for other reasons – as astonishingly brilliant as Bound was in 1996 and today, I have no doubt what the real reason was so many people wanted to see that moving, and it wasn’t to be enraptured by the incredible talent of the then Wachowski brothers. I know that’s not the reason I rented it - frequently - from Blockbuster at age eighteen.

I never got a clear picture as to what the gay and lesbian community thought of Lost and Delirious which was released more than two decades ago. It barely made a critical blip and it certainly was never a box office draw – it made less than $400,000 worldwide. What is clear is that it was a launching pad for three exceptional actresses who have, in their own way, dominated the television landscape in various ways throughout the last twenty years. And looking at the film again recently, it is very easy to see why. None of the three actresses were complete unknowns at the time but all of their work is revelatory in its own way.  And that’s critical in a film that, while flawed, is still is a searing and haunting love story and tragedy.

The film takes place in a New England boarding school for girls. Boarding schools were not, even then, nearly as in fashion as they were for the twentieth century but writer-director Lea Pool’s was no doubt a necessity: it was a major cliché of lesbian stories in particular that you ‘experimented’ in boarding school before you ended up getting married. Pool goes out of her way to show as to what its real like.

The film is narrated by Mary, who has always had the nickname Mouse. Her mother has died from cancer three years earlier, her father has remarried and her stepmother has been instrumental in moving her to this school. Mary is timid and shy (hence the reason for her nickname) but more tragically she’s starting to forget what her mother looks like.

She meets her two roommates in a very specific order. The first is Victoria or Tori, who is the most obviously sexual of the three. She dominates the conversation all the way up to their room. “They don’t like us having the room to ourselves,” she says almost as a throwaway line. She says that they are the ‘Lost Girls’, no doubt meant to invoke Peter Pan. Unlike him, these Lost Girls will have to grow up – sooner then any of them wants too.

Mary goes downstairs to hide and Paulie, in what we will soon recognize in her bold fashion, jumps out at her with a cigarette in her hand. There’s a polite party that seems to be going on – the kind of thing we would call a society event. Paulie takes out a flask, spikes the punch, and starts a boom box playing hard rock. In the first ten minutes of the film, we have a very clear picture of the three female protagonists. We also get a hint of what’s going on below the surface. Later that night, Mouse goes to her window and sees Paulie and Tori kissing. “It sounds stupid, I know, but at the time I thought they were practicing for boys.” I have a feeling there were a lot of teenagers – and parents – who were in similar denial about many teens that way.

It is important to know that, from the beginning, neither Paulie nor Tori truly view themselves as lesbians. Indeed, there’s a scene early in the film where Paulie berates one of the teachers derogatorily for being a lesbian and having a crush on ‘Paulie. (There are two middle-aged women who are the only instructors we see at this school; it is never entirely clear what their relationship is.) What is clear is that the two girls are in love. There is a graphic sex scene in the film, one that almost certainly forced it to be released ‘unrated’ in the U.S., and that the relationship has been going on for awhile. Both speak of plans for a future when they graduate the following year.

The problem isn’t just about their love or the relatively conservative era they live in. It is that there affair seems to fully work best within the confines of the room they share with Mouse. They can’t seem to work out a plausible explanation when Mouse wakes up and sees the two in bed together and Mouse doesn’t press them on it. Indeed, the part of her that quietly loves both girls for who they are seems fine with it. The rest of the world doesn’t.

When Tori and Paulie are found in a compromising position halfway through the film, Tori starts doing damage control. She is the only one whose mother is still a part of her life, and she doesn’t want her to ‘freak out’. Tori’s mom is taking her to Italy for summer break, and that matters to her.  She immediately hooks on to a boy she earlier labeled as ‘disgusting’. Paulie, who is the boldest and most romantic of the three, takes offense and starts doing things that are truly shocking, all the while still denying her true nature. There are scenes in this film – one near the end where Paulie shows up in fencing gear and demands ‘a duel’ with her male rival – that could seem funny. They never do, because of the other seriousness with which Paulie takes her love and the world she lives in.

The critical reaction to Lost and Delirious when it came out was mostly mixed with one critical exception. Roger Ebert, who had a habit of recognizing truly brilliant movies when they came out, raved about it and gave it three and a half stars and raved about every element. He said it reminded him of his youth, Thomas Wolfe, and shouting at the moon. He said that the unrated rating was a travesty that this movie was perfect for mature teenagers. I believed then, as I do now, that he was right.

The reason the film works as well it does was the absolute perfection of the casting of the three leads. Piper Perabo was incredible as Paulie. The moment I saw her dancing in the gazebo in the first scenes of the film, I knew I was looking at a potential superstar. She would have moments of success in far lesser movies (such as Coyote Ugly and a different kind of lesbian love story Imagine Me and You) before gravitating to television. She would star in the USA spy drama Covert Affairs for six seasons and has worked steadily in TV ever since – in the past year alone she was a regular on the ballet drama The Big Leap and recurring roles on the hit shows Yellowstone and Billions.

Jessica Pare plays Tori, who had a more direct climb to stardom. Seen first as a regular on the one season sensation Jack and Bobby, she received the superstardom she deserved for her work as Megan, the secretary who becomes Don Draper’s second wife at the end of Season 4 and for the next few years accomplishes the nearly impossible -  makes him happy before wanting her own ambitions. The scene where she sang Zou Bissou Bissou in the Season 5 premiere is a TV classic. She has starred on Seal Team for six seasons.

Mischa Barton, the youngest of the three leads (she was only fifteen when the movie came out) had the sad misfortune of becoming a superstar too soon. Not long after Lost and Delirious came out, she landed the role of Marissa Cooper on the Fox cultural and ratings hit The O.C. unfortunately, her character quickly became one of the most despised on the series. Her characters death at the end of the third season was even more controversial and the show never recovered its popularity, something that Barton would end up also being blamed for. She has never worked steadily since or had anywhere near the level of success her costars have had recently.  This is a shame because while Pare and Perabo are both exceptional in Lost, you can’t imagine it working without Barton. She has to appear shy and timid, but eventually become worthy of the name ‘Brave’ that Paulie bestows on her in a critical sequence in the film and by the end of the movie she does.

Is Lost and Delirious a lesbian love story? I can imagine that even now viewers would question is, even argue whether any of the characters see it that way. What I do know is that it is one of the most realistic portrayals of being a teenager I’ve ever seen in a film, one of most earnest and ultimately the most tragic. The film comes to an end at a moment that is so shocking that Pool chooses not to show the full aftereffect of it – even more than twenty years later, the final image haunts me. But I don’t see any of the three women as tragic figures, merely flawed and broken in their own way. The main difference – and why I find the movie inspiring in a sense – is that at least one character has learned the lessons from the mistakes that the other two have made and she is almost certain to be able to move on and perhaps even find love in her own fashion.