Big Little Lies Retrospective Conclusion: Why I Don't Think the Second Season Was A Mistake, and Why I Think (and Hope) There Should Someday Be A Third

 

You can’t discuss the second season of Big Little Lies without discussing the one big cast addition: Meryl Streep. If the only reason Kelley and his cast decided to do another season to work with her, I have no complaints. Incredibly, this was the first time Streep had been on screen with any of the five exceptional actresses of the stars (she had co-starred with Kidman in The Hours, the film that won the latter her Oscar, but because of the timelines, the two had never appeared in the same scene).

It’s a credit to yet another of the greatest actresses of all time that Streep spends so much of the seasons looking diminished and speaking mildly; she shows almost no emotion at all throughout the season. But by the first episode, we know that Mary Louise, the mother of Perry, is just as much a monster as her son is. The major difference is that while Perry expressed his rage towards others with physical violence, Mary Louise does so with emotionally so. Very quickly, we know that everything she says has a hidden meaning and is design to wound anyone she encounters. Most of them are the Monterrey Five (the term that now surrounds the five leads because of their actions surrounding Perry’s death), as she psychologically using every cutting phrase with the veneer of civility so that not even the characters that are being attacked know the danger.

I have many grudges against the Emmys for the 2019-2020 season (and I’m going to go through quite a few of them here) and among the biggest is that Streep lost the Best Supporting Actress prize to Julia Garner for Ozark. It’s not so much that I mind Garner winning (she is by far the best thing about a series I utterly loathe) as that she defeated Streep who gave, in my opinion, one of her best performances of her work in the past decade. (It’s far superior to the work she did in The Iron Lady which won her another Academy Award, to state the most obvious example.). Streep has played many difficult women over the years, as well as quite a few outright heavies, but she has rarely played a character so ruthless and single-minded in her approach to her goals as well as utterly determined not to ever change her views. When she learned of Perry’s rape of Jane, she attacks Celeste as a reason for knowing ‘he was unfaithful to you’. She initially denies that Ziggy is Perry’s son and keeps saying that Jane did something to lead him on all the way through the season. When she decides to seek out custody of Celeste’s sons, I have always gotten the feeling that it had nothing to do with the safety of them as it was taking possession of what she considered her property – there was nothing in her interactions with her attorney where she showed any sign of warmth or affection towards them; it was ‘what’s best for the boys.’ And in the season finale, when Celeste finally managed to turn the tables on Mary Louise after posturing and revealed the brutal truths about her son – and by extension, her own – behavior – there is absolutely no sign in her last two scenes that she still believes she is wrong, either about her son or her own judgments. Celeste spends much of the season talking with the detective in charge of the case about Perry’s death, but she’s not interested in justice – she was revenge.

I ranked the second season at the time as one of the ten best series of 2019, and while I fundamentally acknowledge that it is nowhere near the caliber of the first season, the truth is, how many shows are after a great first one? And I fundamentally believe that Kelley, working in concert with Moriarty on the scripts for that season, did a very good at showing the after effects of all the chaos surrounding the leads. All of Madeline’s chickens come home to roost in the second season, when both the fact that she withheld knowledge of Ziggy’s parentage and the affair she had with the theater director, are learned by Ed through her children. We learn that she is responsible for putting forth the real ‘lie’ at the center of Season 2 – that Perry tripped and convinced everybody to cover it up – and this starts the slow steady erosion of the relationship between the five women, as well as the near breakup of her marriage. Ed, who showed hostility towards Madeline and Nathan throughout the first season, now becomes angry towards everybody, especially Madeline; when he sees her break down in a school assembly, he barely hangs around in the aftermath long enough to insult her friends. Adam Scott’s work was ignored by Emmy voters for both season, and it’s certainly superior to many of the nominated performer in the Supporting Actor category, certainly those from Succession. And the fact Reese Witherspoon was in three projects that received Emmy nominations for other cast members (The Morning Show and Little Fires Everywhere were the others) but was ignored for all of them, is one of the biggest robberies in the history of the Academy.

Laura Dern’s work is somewhat separate from the major leads, but of course, her arc has some of the best parts of Season 2. (She certainly got some of the very best lines, only one of which I can quote: “I will not not be rich!) A lot of what happened to Renata in Season 2 actually is canon: her husband Gordon was involved in a financial scheme, did have an affair with the nanny, and eventually she did leave him. Watching everything Renata spent the first season being proud of disappear out from under her is utterly devastating; the fact that she has to deal with it on top of covering up the lie is horrifying.

Watching Jane trying to recover from the revelation of Perry as her rapist also shows brilliant work from her. When Ziggy learns the truth about his birth in the worst possible way, she is forced to confront the horror she had hoped to protect her son from. Throughout the season we see her trying to build a relationship with a co-worker, and she begins to tell the truth about her own life. We also see her physically recoil at times from his touch, and we realize she’s still dealing with the fallout from the fact the assault. (It’s implied, though Kelley and Moriarty never state it directly, that this is the first time Jane has tried to have sex since Perry’s assault.). In a series filled with so many dark moments, one of the few genuine pleasures was watching Jane finally have sex with him for the first time in the final minutes; of the Monterey Five, only she and Madeline have a future ahead of them that looks relatively positive.

But of course the revelation of the second season is Zoe Kravitz as Bonnie. A much reduced role compared to the four bigger names in Season 1, Kravitz takes the lead and shows how brilliant a performer it is. Many critics harped on the fact that so much of Bonnie’s backstory, particularly the presence of her memorably flaky mother (Crystal Fox) was baggage the season didn’t need. The thing is much of what we learn about Bonnie in Season 2 is also in the book. Bonnie was in abusive family situation throughout her formative years (she spent much of her childhood in foster care), and the fact that she pushed Perry at the climax of the book was because she was reacting to so much of what happened to her in her childhood, much as Bonnie tells her comatose mother in the next to last episode of the season. And a lot of the greatest work in Season 2 was watching Bonnie sleepwalk from place to place, avoiding her husband, refusing to talk to the other women and then beginning to place blame on Madeline, and making trips every few days to the police station, preparing to confess her crime. In the book it is far clearer than Perry’s death is an accident, and that the only crime was not covering it up. In the series, it becomes murkier in the fact that Bonnie was acting out a sense of rage that has been a part of her life pretty much since childhood.

I still hold, fundamentally, that the second season of Big Little Lies deserved to be nominated for Best Drama that year. It was far superior to Westworld, the machinations that allowed The Handmaid’s Tale to be nominated two straight years for the same season have always struck me as unfair, and The Mandalorian shouldn’t be talked about in the same sentence. (The same argument, for the record, goes for This is Us.) And I think much of the hostility I bear Zendaya in particular and Euphoria in general originates from the fact that she was nominated – and eventually won the Best Actress Emmy – for a series that is even further from reality than The Mandalorian is. The fact that Euphoria only had its original success because it benefitted from Big Little Lies as its lead-in has done nothing to alleviate that feeling after three years. Nothing about her work, then or now, holds a candle to the performances that Kidman or Witherspoon gave in the second season and that is a grudge I will take to my grave.

 

To explain why I think there still could be a third season, I think I need to get more personal. My mother and I watched every episode of both seasons of Big Little Lies together. Her tastes are more discriminating than mine, but she’s always been a huge David E. Kelley fan and the cast was too good for her to resist (even before Streep got involved). By the second season, we managed to lure my father in to the mystery and he can be even pickier.

When the second season finished, my mother and I disagreed whether there would ever be a third season. She thought the story was finally wrapped up with the image of Bonnie walking into the police station, surrounding by the other women. And to be sure, it’s hard to argue that there isn’t symmetry to it.

The thing is I still believe there are still stories to be told about these women. Perhaps they could be told after whatever punishment Bonnie ends up facing for her crimes. (For those who didn’t read the book, Bonnie does eventually do what we see in the series and faces minimal punishment and sentence; given the circumstances of the crime, it’s likely that would happen in real life as well.) Perhaps the story could tell us what is like for Bonnie when she leaves prison and has the face the community after her sentence. Perhaps we could see what the stigma around the Monterey Five, just whispers before, happen once a society that buries its truths has to face the fact some of their most prominent citizens were a part of it.

What would the marriage of Madeline and Ed be like now that he knows the truth about the biggest lie of all? What is the fate of Renata, now bankrupt and on the verge of leaving her husband? What stigmas will surround Jane when it becomes public that a member of the community raped her? What stigmas will surround Celeste now that she’s known as being part of an abused marriage? And how will all of these children – who spent much of the first season as proxies for the wars their mothers were waging – deal with these problems as they grow old enough to understand them?

Right now, the fate of Big Little Lies remains unknown. HBO has never renewed it for a third season, but they haven’t officially cancelled it either. Given the factors I listed at the beginning of the article about the cast and writers, it becomes more and more unlikely with each passing year that a third season will ever happen. Yet the actors have never ruled it out either.

Maybe the real reason I want there to be a third season despite all the odds is the simple fact I consider it comfort TV. I realize how absurd that sounds given the darkness of the material, but anyone who watched the show knows that it was also extremely funny at times. But more than that there is something about it that just makes me feel warm. Sometimes just hearing the opening music, watching the close-ups of the leads driving down the highway with their children, seeing them dressed as various incarnations of Audrey Hepburn, can make me feel warm after a hard day. There is something about watching the work of these extraordinary women looking like they have it all – which as we now know is the biggest little lie of all – that makes me glad that I’ve chosen my profession as a TV critic. I look at this series and I know, perhaps more than with even shows that are more complicated, what the medium is capable of. And like the characters at a critical point, I find myself wanting to shout: “I want more!” I think we all do.

 

Big Little Lies Five Years Later, Part 1: The Original Limited Series That Still Tears Me Apart

 

 

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know that every five or six reviews I seem to put in a plug for yet another season of Big Little Lies even though with each passing year it becomes more and more unlikely. Reese Witherspoon and Adam Scott are now leads on other series (both were nominated for Emmys this year for them), Nicole Kidman seems to be engaged in another season for Nine Perfect Strangers, Ian Armitage is playing the young version of Sheldon Cooper, David E. Kelley is busier than he’s ever been (mostly designing projects for Nicole Kidman) and Jean Marc-Vallee, the man who directed all of Season 1 has recently passed away.

So why I do I constantly push for a third season for this series, particularly considering that I’m in the decided minority that the second was worth watching, if not as brilliant as the first? Well, I just finished rewatching both seasons of the series to try and see just why I loved it so much, and why I think that there are more stories to tell about the Monterey Five.  And in order to this, I think I have to tell this story in two parts: first about the explosive phenomena that the original limited series was, and why I still think the second season was brilliant television, and how that leads to my overall conclusion that there are more stories to tell.

First of all, a fundamental review: when Big Little Lies exploded on to the scene in February and March of 2017 its greatness was realized by audiences and awards shows everywhere. That said, as someone who has studied the Emmys for more than twenty years, I think we’ve forgotten by now just how remarkable its success at the 2017 Emmys was. Because the competition that year was among the very best in among the ones that the Emmys have given for Limited Series.

Among the major nominated series were The Night Of an exceptional crime thriller which shot Riz Ahmed to stardom and featured great work by John Turturro and the late Michael K. William, the third season of Fargo which showed Ewan McGregor doing some of his best work as brothers engaged in a fight to the death – and beyond, and Feud: Bette And Joan (which itself was supposed to be the start of a new anthology series by Ryan Murphy) that featured two Academy Awards actresses playing two Academy Award-winning actresses (Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, in case you’ve forgotten.). All three of these series would have dominated the Emmys in other years, and all of them dominated categories that the cast of Big Little Lies was in: Lange, Sarandon and Carrie Coon were competing against Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman for Best Actress; Williams and Camp from The Night of, Stanley Tucci and Alfred Molina from Feud, and David Thewlis from Fargo were up against Alexander Skarsgard; and Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern were facing off against Judy Davis and Jackie Hoffman from Feud. Throw in the fact that Felicity Huffman and Regina King were competing in the Actress and Supporting Actress categories for the third season of American Crime - King had won the last two years in that category – and two facts become clear: the nominees in all the acting categories were among the best in recent Emmy history, if not all time, and how astounding it was that Big Little Lies utterly dominated Emmy night in almost every category.

So why did Emmy voters fall in love with Lies so much?  Skipping the level of plot, which by now you have to have to know (and if you don’t I have no intention of spoiling it – yet) look at the cast. Five of the greatest actresses in history were at the center of it. Kidman, Witherspoon and Dern had already been established as such (though Dern’s Oscar was still two years in the future, she’d already won two Emmys), Kravitz would show she was their equal (though admittedly not until Season 2) and Woodley had already proven it. Anyone who had seen her in The Descendants knew it, and she had a successful career as a child actress behind her. (Then again, so did all four of her co-stars. Hmm.)

Now consider that the man who adapted the series was David E. Kelley.  Kelley had been one of the most dominant TV showrunners of the 1980s and 1990s but by the middle of the 2000s had gotten a reputation of going through the motions. Boston Legal was increasingly ham-fisted by the end of Season 2, and Harry’s Law while successful initially was basically cut and paste from any of the previous dramas. By the middle of the 2010s, Kelley was considered a relic not at all fitting to the era of Peak TV.  I still don’t know what specifically drew Kelley to Big Little Lies – there’s nothing in it that fit his repertoire of a ripped from the headline legal series he spent his career in. There was one thing about that Kelley was good at: it was dominated by strong female characters. Going as far back as L.A. Law, that had always been Kelley’s stock-in-trade, whether it was for twentyish women like on Ally McBeal, or women of a certain age, like Candice Bergen’s  and Kathy Bates’ characters on Boston Legal and Harry’s Law, respectively.

And he adapted the hell out of it. Lianne Moriarty’s novel is a work of art, no one will deny that, but having seen the series, can you imagine it being set anywhere but Monterey? It wasn’t just the practically castles that all these women seemed to live in, or the level of wealth they seemed to traffic in; there’s no way you see this novel work in any place other than California. Reading the novel after the fact (I didn’t want to know in advance any spoilers) I acknowledge how great it is as a foundation and how well Moriarty handled the characters. But if this novel had been adapted for Australian or British Television (and I can imagine that happening) it would never have registered on anyone’s radar, certainly not the Emmys.

Perhaps the best parts of the limited series are how he managed to expand so much of what I just don’t think could have worked if had been taken more literal. In the novel Ed, Madeline’s husband is a bald, almost milquetoast accountant who barely gets out from his wife’s shadow. Played by Adam Scott (who never got the credit he deserved for his work – what else is new?) he came across as someone who felt neutered by so much of Madeline’s craziness, and who was more than willing to punch back against how she seemed to be bitter than Nathan got it all. I particularly liked the way he decided that Nathan and he went at each other throughout the season; Nathan thinking Ed was a wimp, and Ed thinking Nathan was a jerk. (If there is a flaw in the book and series, it’s that Nathan never comes across as much of a real character, not someone that Madeline should have desired and certainly not someone Bonnie would end up with.)

 The best decision was to greatly expand the character of Renata. In the book, she is mainly source of antagonism to Madeline, but gets few scenes of her own. In the series, both Kelley and Vallee decide to flesh Renata out a lot. I imagine most of this was due to Dern’s presence as the character – you don’t take one of the greatest actresses ever and give her no dimensions. But it would have been easy to take all of the flashpoints that Renata has throughout the series – and let’s face it, they are some of the highpoints – and just let that be all of her. Instead, Kelley makes us see that Renata is as much a real, worried mom as Jane, Madeline and Celeste are; more so, because she knows that if she’s wrong about her assumptions of Ziggy, then someone is abusing her daughter and there’s nothing she can do to help her. By going further and making Renata the only one of the mothers who has a full time job at the start, she makes the division between Celeste, who’s given up her career, and Madeline, who is essentially living through her children, more real. There’s a scene in the fourth episode where Celeste, having won a legal victory for Madeline, breaks down in her car and says that being a mother is not enough. By showing Renata’s struggles to balance work and family, Kelley shows that working and being a mother isn’t all it’s cracked to be either. I’m kind of stunned that in my official picks for the Emmys that years, I thought that King and Woodley deserved it more than Dern did; in hindsight, she was the obvious choice almost from day one.

But for all the credit that we give the leads in this series – and they deserve a lot, to be sure – we don’t give nearly enough for the work that all of the young actors did. Iain Armitage shot to superstardom within months of this as the lead for Young Sheldon, and deservedly so, considering how well he has the nuances of Jim Parsons down.  But his work in Big Little Lies was one of the high points of the series. We learn the secret of Ziggy’s existence in the third episode, and it’s absolutely horrifying. Once we do, then we know both why Jane is so determined to believe in public her son isn’t capable of violence and yet so uncertain in private that he might be. Armitage plays him as someone who does shout out at inappropriate times just long enough to make you think there might be something wrong with him, and someone who has lived his entire life not knowing the secrets the mother has about his birth. When he reveals at the end of the first season, the secret he’s been keeping since he enrolled in the school, there’s a genuine sense of guilt because he fundamentally feels that he has an obligation to protect certain people.

And as good as Armitage is, all the other children particularly Darby Camp and the Caronvetti twins as the Wrights children are as good. If I have a complaint about the second season, it’s that much of the focus of it went away from the children except Ziggy, Nicholas and Alex. I would like to have spent more time with them in second grade (given the few scenes I saw, they were dealing with their own challenges)

I have spent much of the review dealing with the hidden pleasure of the series because I think everything else that is superb about it – the work of Witherspoon, Kidman and Skarsgard, the latter two who deservedly won Emmys; the brilliance of the direction particularly on Trivia Night itself; the secrets that are revealed in the last ten minutes about who got killed and who killed that person – were discussed to death at the time and really don’t need to be analyzed any further.  All in all, it was one of the best adaptations of a novel into a limited series arguably of all time, and even though the series basically stopped fifty pages before the book really ended, I thought its ending was perfect. And obviously when I heard that where was going to be a second season of Big Little Lies, my first reaction was: what the hell is going on? Why mess with perfection?

In tomorrow’s article, I’ll explain just why I came to change my mind very quickly on the second season, and why even now, I still think that are more stories to tell in Monterrey.

 

Not With A Bang, Just Another New Champions: Jeopardy's 38th Season Wraps Up

 

 

Season 38 of Jeopardy did not end the same way the previous season did – with a super champion continuing a remarkable string.  Indeed, in the six weeks since my latest article on Jeopardy, there have been no super-champions – Megan Wachspress’ six game streak was the last significant one for this season full of them.

This might come as something of an anticlimax in one of the most extraordinary seasons in Jeopardy history. However, more than all the remarkable streaks, this month and a half of very short runs of champions is as good a sign for the show as all of the amazing winners we’ve had.  There have been so many remarkable champions succeeding remarkable champions that it would be easy to think this to be the norm rather than an aberration. As any long-time fan of Jeopardy knows, it is far more common for periods of weeks, if not months, to go by before one player manages to win as many as five games.  If you are a true fan of the show, you have to be willing to accept the periods of one and two day champions as well as those who win five or six games in succession. 

In a way, much of Season 38 has been one of the biggest outliers in the show’s long history. More than half of the season had a returning champion with a streak of at least five games (and there were also four four-game winners). This is a string practically unprecedented in Jeopardy history. Indeed, when the Tournament of Champions takes place next fall, it may be the first Tournament in the entire history of the show where every competitor has won at least five games (with the exceptions of the College Champion and Professors’ Tournament winner). It is far more common for a tournament to have quite a few four, if not even three game winners. I almost hope that whatever new fans Jeopardy has gained over the season (and considering the immense rise in ratings, there are some of them) come to accept that the streaks of Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider are the exception and not the norm.

Just as this has been the year of the extended winning streak, it truly has been the year of the woman. Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach both had remarkable winning streaks this year: Schneider’s win 40 wins and nearly 1.5 million dollars; Roach, 23 wins and over half a million. Compared to her, Megan Wachspress’ six games and just under $61,000 barely raised a blip for this season. With four women winning four games (who at this point are unlikely to be seen in the Tournament of Champions), 105 games this year were won by a female contestant, which is as close to gender parity as Jeopardy has managed to accomplish in its storied history.

The decision for Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik to continue splitting the duties of hosting in Season 39 is actually not as disappointing as some might say. In my opinion, both have done a superb job in their times in charge, both doing very well each time they had to deal with a super-champion. (I’m particularly impressed by Jennings’ at this, as I can’t imagine what it would be like to be on the other side of the lectern as players try to eradicate your record.)  Both have their own quirks and charms – Bialik is slightly more humorous than Jennings’ in her quips than he is – and both do take the duties of hosting with the gravitas it deserves. Neither will ever be Alex Trebek, to be sure, but no one ever could. And perhaps this is the best strategy going forward – both have done such a fine job, it seems rather petty to give one the permanent position over the other.

Perhaps the best thing Season 38 has done is that with all of the concentration on the contestants, it managed to do what I hoped would happen at the beginning of the season – remove the controversy behind the scandals that involved Matt Richards’ becoming host, then being forced to resign permanently.  For the first few weeks of the season, more people were talking about the scandals surrounding Jeopardy than what Matt Amodio was doing. By the end of 2021, the focus had shifted to the remarkable accomplishments of Amy Schneider. I’m not saying that by the time Ryan Long was in the middle of his streak, the average person was saying: “Who was Matt Richards?” But considering that almost of the coverage in 2022 was about the Jeopardy champions far more than all the hosting imbroglios, it’s hard to deny that Jeopardy is about the players and not the host. Throw in the fact that it won a Daytime Emmy and is now averaging nearly ten million viewers an episode, and it’s now clear that Jeopardy has survived the loss of Alex Trebek and the scandals that could have destroyed it.

There will, of course, still be more written about Jeopardy in the years to come, but I have a feeling that for the next few years we will be hearing more about the players and the upcoming tournaments. Anticipation for next year’s Tournament of Champions will be very high, and I already expect that long time fans are looking forward to 2023 when Jeopardy will no doubt begin the formalization of plans for the 40^th Anniversary Tournament. (I’ve written about this before and will give some more suggestions during the upcoming weeks.) Jeopardy is in a better place that it was as last year, and almost certainly one that no one would have expected it could be when Alex Trebek passed away in November 2020.  I think Alex hi would be proud not only to have the studio he played on being named for him, but that so many great players are still distinguishing themselves on it. That is the legacy he would have been proudest of. There’s no question about that.

 

Participants in the 2022 Tournament of Champions (for those of you keeping score) in order of appearance

 

Brian Chang,  Chicago, Illinois: 7 Wins - $163.904  (January of 2021)

 

Zack Newkirk, Alexandria, VA: 6 wins spread over 2020/2021 (Return Delayed Because of COVID Restrictions) $124,871

 

Courtney Shah, Portland, OR: 7 wins - $118,558

 

Matt Amodio, New Haven, CT: 38 Wins (third all time): $1,518,601 (3^rd all time)

 

Jonathan Fisher, Coral Gables, FL: 11 Wins - $246,100

 

Tyler Rhode, New York, NY: 5 Wins, $105,901

 

Andrew He, San Francisco, CA: 5 wins, $157,365

 

Amy Schneider, Oakland, CA: 40 wins (2^nd all time), $1,382,800 (4^th all time)

 

Sam Buttrey Winner of Professors Tournament, Monterey, CA: $100,000

 

Jaskaran Singh, Winner National College Championship: $250,000

 

Mattea Roach,  Toronto, Ontario: 23 Wins (4^th all time) $560,983 (5^th all time)

 

Ryan Long, Philadelphia, PA: 16 Wins, $299,500

 

Eric Ahasic, Minneapolis, MN: 6 wins, $160,601

 

Megan Wachspress, Berkley, CA: 6 wins, $60,603

 

Currently holder of 15^th Spot:

 

Jackie Kelly, Cary, NC: 4 wins, $115, 100

Just What Was Going On With Elizabeth Holmes? The Dropout Tells You Everything That Happened At Theranos - But That

 

 

In the third episode of The Dropout ‘Green Juice’, everything that Elizabeth Holmes has spent the last few years building is about to collapse. Her boyfriend Sunny visits the lab and sees that they have no workable products, the tests are still in a failed stage, her board is about to give a vote of no confidence to her, and her entire group of workers quit. In the midst of this, her iPhone breaks and she goes to the Apple store to get it replaced. Seeing the apparent downfall of her dream, she tries to express to the poor service person working for her what it must be like ‘to not have dreams’. When the phone isn’t working, she starts weeping and apologizing.

Immediately after this, Elizabeth goes before her board – and with variations on the phrases, mirrors the tech workers breakdown. She convinces the board that she is too young and that she does need supervision.  She convinces them to hire Sunny to be COO and to infuse cash into Theranos. For the rest of the series, she never shows emotion at all, whether remorse or anger or anything. She comes across as nothing more than a pure sociopath.

The reason I raise this issue is that prior to all of this we have seen that Elizabeth was a human being. Yes, she was ultra-focused on becoming a mogul, but she shows happiness around Sunni, joy when it came to talking to her mentor Channing about the plans for Theranos, warmth when talking to Ian Gibbons (Stephen Fry) the chemist whose ideas were at the inspiration for the company, and when a real result came in for her product, genuine happiness. When she came to Venice for a backers meeting and the product didn’t work, there was genuine despair and frustration. And when her company went public, she screamed: “I’m a millionaire!” to the celebrating city.

 Amanda Seyfried goes to such levels to make Holmes seem human in the first two episodes that I was genuinely floored by her one-eighty in the rest of the series.  Holmes never shows as much as a sign of humanity the rest of the way. You can argue that she’s trying her best to compete with the boys’ club that is the business world, but the longer we follow her, the less human she becomes – and I mean in terms of her vocal delivery and her refusal to speak in anything other than clichés. In the first two episodes, you could see that Elizabeth Holmes was a real person once. By the end of the series, not even her own parents recognize her any more.

The thing is, even given the utter misery she wreaks upon peoples’ lives with her company, the thousands of people she defrauded, the countless number of powerful men she utterly fooled, the relationships she laid to waste as a result – the relationship between George Shultz and his grandson is the most obvious, but it’s just an archetype for the series – and her utter disconnect from reality the longer the series goes on, I still feel something resembling empathy for Holmes’ or at the very least, Seyfried’s portrayal of her.

Yes, it is clear that Elizabeth Holmes was a narcissist of the upmost category – I don’t think anybody will forget her birthday party where all the guests wore paper masks of her, where she forced Tyler to play a song celebrating her twice, and when she finished up the night dancing with Sunny, who was also wearing a paper mask of her (and that’s a psych case right there). But even as things continue to get worse for her the bigger a success Theranos becomes, you get the feeling Elizabeth is empty and a fraud because she has nothing in her life to fill it. At one point during her uncle’s funeral, she tells her mother she’s thinking about quitting the company, and her mother basically dismisses the idea: “What else would you do?” she asked. Elizabeth also asks her mother if she had hobbies growing up, and the fact that she has to remember them now indicates her company is all she has. This becomes equally clear when she’s shooting an ad for Theranos, and she has no idea how to act like a normal person. “Act like you’re talking to your best friend,” he says casually. “I don’t have one,” she says.

And she doesn’t. Her brother is part of the company but she barely acknowledges him throughout the rest of the series. The only real relationship she has of any sustenance during the length of the series is with Sunny, and she has been the entirety of The Dropout pretending that it wasn’t romantic. When she thinks it is in her best interest to drop him from the company in the finale, she does it as coldly as she has with everybody else.  Whether or not the relationship between Sunny and Elizabeth was abusive in real life is impossible to say – it is at least possible there was a certain amount of grooming involved, at least in the early stages.  What becomes clear throughout The Dropout is that Elizabeth has spent the entirety of the series prioritizing the success of Theranos above all else. She can not separate the success of the company from her personality.

It is impossible not to look at how much of The Dropout unfolds and not be reminded of Citizen Kane. Elizabeth Holmes is essentially a woman who wanted the world, got it and then lost it. She didn’t want love on her own terms, she wanted respect and adoration – and when she got it from her peers; she thought it was the real thing. We see in the early episodes there’s a real person behind Elizabeth Holmes, but the longer the series go on, the more she separates from the cover of the magazines she graces, the boards she’s a part of, the former and future presidents who interview her. She is so focus on being some kind of representative for women that she no longer seems to notice that her humanity has left her, and in a critical scene near the end, she is incapable either in public or private admitting any wrongdoing.  How much of this is real and how much of this is pure denial is impossible to say. But when the end credits roll at the end of the series, I find it completely plausible that Elizabeth was capable of going to Burning Man with her new boyfriend while her company was being dismantled.

Perhaps I have made The Dropout seem relentlessly dark. It’s not. There are segments, indeed, entire episodes that are hysterical. The fourth episode of the show, when Elizabeth and Sunny basically con Walgreen’s into signing a pharmaceutical deal without ever letting them see the test results, is hilarious from beginning to end. We know the lies that are going on behind the scenes, and everyone in Walgreen’s wants to back away. But the man in charge of tech (Alan Ruck, actually giving a performance worth nominating) keeps trying to convince his bosses that “every tech has flaws’ and “they’ll work it out.” He sells him on the very idea just as the company is about to drive off the lot, because he wants to seem hip. (He thinks by listening to Katy Perry every days as inspirations he’s ‘with it’, which is just so out of date.)

And William H. Macy’s performance (which was worthy of an Emmy nomination) as the old family friend who basically helps bring down Theranos more or less out of pique than any real desire to the right thing (at least at first) was a work of comic genius. For much of the first few appearances, he seems like a complete and utter egomaniacal loser, desperate to cash in on his successful friend’s bonus. He also seems petty as he repeatedly says the only reason Holmes gets in the front door is ‘because she’s pretty and blonde,” an argument which, sad to say, honestly does sound at least partially due to Theranos’ success. But eventually he manages to get the man who gives the basics for The Wall Street Journal article because of the fact that he’s a doctor and both men took the Hippocratic Oath. “First do no harm,” is said at one point, and it’s very clear that Elizabeth Holmes never even heard of that oath, dismissed it because Yoda didn’t say it.

Seyfried may have been the only cast member to receive an Emmy nomination, but all of them were brilliant. In addition to everyone I’ve mentioned in previous reviews Sam Waterston’s work as George Shultz was blindingly good, as a great political mind that was blinded to the reality because of Elizabeth’s flair, and it cost him his family. (Sadly, we learned he died never having spoken to his grandson again.) Laurie Metcalf was brilliant as Phyllis, the only person who had Holmes’ number from the beginning. Kurtwood Smith does a brilliant stint as Theranos’ attorney who learns far too late just how deep the water is, and Michaela Watkins has a serio-comic role as Linda, the corporate lawyer who keeps putting out fires right to the end, and ends up going down with the ship.

The Dropout lays out detail by detail every method of how Elizabeth Holmes created a company that was supposed to be a symbol of everything good about Silicon Valley and ended up being one of the biggest frauds in history. What it did not do was explain just what happened while Theranos grew to turn Elizabeth Holmes from a relatively normal, even empathetic human, to a soulless monster who even at the end could not admit she’d done anything wrong. But maybe that’s not something we can ever understand. The more robotic Holmes became, the more I was reminded of the cold dispassionate work of Michael Stuhlbarg as Richard Sackler in Dopesick, who calmly and efficient created the opoid crisis for the sole purpose of making his already billionaire family even richer or Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s work as Travis Kalanick in Super-Pumped who built up one of the most successful companies in history, proud of his anger and rage all the way down – though of course, all that happened to him was that he lost his company.  Does immense wealth make you inhuman or do you have to be inhuman to be a Master of the Universe? We need to answer these questions, and shows like The Dropout have to keep asking them.

My score: 5 stars.

Gene Doesn't Exactly Get Clean, Better Call Saul Final Episodes Guide: Nippy

 

In my review of last week’s episode, I posed the question what would happen in the black and white flashforwards that had opened every season of Better Call Saul until the last one. I also asked how ‘Gene’ would handle the situation now that his identity was known. I wondered if that meant he would finally ‘break bad’

In ‘Nippy’, we got an answer to some of those questions, and the writers did so in a way that we had never seen in the Breaking Bad verse before – an episode entire set in one of those same flashforwards. (For those who have been paying close attention to some of the dates and times in these flashforwards – I confess I haven’t been – we actually got an exact estimate as to when these flashforwards have been taking place relative to the Breaking Bad calendar. I’ll deal with that a little later on.)

In one of those perfect moments of casting you never thought even Vince Gilligan could get away with, one of the central characters to ‘Nippy’ was played by Carol Burnett, who I can only assume appeared in this episode to cross it off her bucket list. She played Miriam, a perfectly average senior citizen (the kind that Jimmy had a lot of success charming in the series) who Gene just ‘happened to ‘run into’ when he was posted signs for his lost dog ‘Nippy’. Naturally, being an upstanding citizen Gene helped her push her wheelchair out of the snow, they had a nice conversation and Miriam invited Gene home for dinner. Of course, Miriam happens to be the mother of Eddie, the cab driver who recognized ‘Gene’ two flashforwards ago.

Understandably Eddie was stunned to see Gene in his house. And I was similarly shocked to see how Gene intending to solve the problem – he was going to teach Eddie how to run a con. “One time and then we’re done.” Eddie bought into it.

The next fifteen minutes were unlike anything we’d ever seen in the history of the series. Gene took some of his Cinnabon back to the security guards to thank Steve, the guard who’d rescued him from being locked up back in Season 2. (Steve was not happy considering Gene had warned a shoplifter to ‘get a lawyer’.) Gene then met with the other security guard. In another piece of perfect casting, this guard was played by Parks and Recreation’s most memorable idiot Jim O’Heir, once again cast as the sucker. We also got a reference to another flashforward from one of the promotional ads for the final episodes: this guard is the man we’ve seen eating his cinnamon bun with a fork and knife.  Gene engages in discussion about University of Nebraska football as a partially distraction, while he sets the timer on his watch to see how long it takes before the guard finishes he sweep and they check the camera.

In a montage straight out of Hollywood, we see variations of these scenes play out over what seems to be a period of weeks. Gene follows the routine every day, the guards become increasingly friendly too him, and Gene continues to brush up on Cornhusker football so he can engage fully in conversation with the man. We know there’s a con in play, but we don’t know the details until the sequence is over.

Then we see Gene walking through the mall that he has spent the department stores in the mall he has spent several months working it, quietly counting his footsteps. He declines help, and is taking notes on a pad. Cut to the driven snow in Omaha where he, Ed and one of his friends are mapping out what seems to be the blueprint of the layout of the store.

The con is now clear: in the three minutes that it will take the security guard to show up on the camera and for Gene’s mark to turn around and check the camera, Ed will run the length of the mall, grab three each of the most expensive properties at certain locations, and then return to the exit. They will then sell the goods on the black market.

At this point, now seeing the ‘work’ he’s going to have to do, Ed starts to balk at it. Gene than rebukes him for not having faith. Then he promotes his skills like so:

“A middle-aged chemistry teacher showed up in my office; couldn’t pay his medical bills. Less than a year later, he had a pile of cash the size of Volkswagen.”

Marvel at everything that the writers in those two sentences. First, revel in the fact that we’re nearly at the end of the prequel, and this is the first direct mention of Walter White and everything that happened in the first five and a half seasons of Breaking Bad.  And I thought the writers of Angel could be succinct in summing up some of the more complicated plots of Buffy.

Second, look how Saul has crafted things. Not only has he taken full credit for everything Walter White managed to accomplish in his rise to power (credit by the way, that Walter never deemed to show anyone, certainly not Saul) he has meted out a certain measure of revenge in basically dismissing everything Walter ‘achieved’ in less than two sentences as something he would have been hopeless at doing without his help. Does ‘Gene’ know what has happened to Walter yet? (The timetable suggests it, and we know Gene reads the paper, but how much coverage would have gotten in Omaha?) I don’t think it’s relevant. Saul understandably blames Walter for destroying everything he managed to build in Albuquerque (and given what we’ve seen to this point, you can’t blame him) and always had a better sense of reality than Walter ever did. Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul may appear in the last few episodes, but that’s almost unnecessary at this point; it’s hard to imagine either being used as perfectly as the writers do in this scene.

And all of this, by the way, is a way of one more con: convincing Ed to go through with the scam, and it works. Gene tries to call it off, and Ed naturally starts running the track again.

In the next scene, we get the buildup Ed’s friend, pretending to be a delivery man, leaves a crate at the back of the department store. The head of the clothing store is angry; she demands he take it back. She calls his boss – which is Gene. Using a model that Slipping Jimmy must have used endless variations on, he pretends to be a kindly supervisor, making up a story about rotten mackerel that needs to be picked up, then offering to drive four hours from Detroit to pick it up that night. As David Mamet said in House of Games, he gives this woman his confidence.  And it works perfectly. She suggests that they leave the crate outside overnight as long as someone comes to pick it up the next morning.

That night, we see Gene do everything he’s done a couple of dozen times before: he closes up shop, he throws out his garbage, he takes his cinnamon buns to the guards (who by now buzz him in without thinking twice); he gets coffee, he hands them their baked goods, he starts talking about the most recent game (for those playing along at home; the flashforwards are apparently taking place in October of 2010), and he sits down to enjoy conversation. The moment he sits down, he types GO into his pager.

Ed breaks out of the box and starts running, counting off every time he makes his grab: “Two! Air Jordan Shoes for You!” Gene and the guard talk about that week’s game, the upcoming star, while Gene in perfect position watches as Ed makes his grab.

Then, of course, something goes wrong. Ed has been moving too fast and carrying too much. He collapses. Gene starts doing his best Saul and BS-ing about football doing everything he can not to make the guard turn around, praying for Ed to get up.

And then it happens. Gene starts getting maudlin to keep his eyes on him. Only to do so, he lays his soul bare. “My parents are dead. So is my brother. My wife is gone, no kids. If I died tonight, it would take three hours to pack up my stuff at home. They’d assign someone to manage the Cinnabon. I’m a ghost.”

Now this is a callback to Walt’s breakdown in Hank’s office in ‘Dead Freight’ where he despaired about the state of his marriage to place a bug in the DEA head’s phone. But Walt was completely faking his emotions. There’s a note of brutal honesty in Gene’s tone that we haven’t seen before in any of his incarnations. It’s as close to him baring his soul as we’ve ever seen. He manages to back off it, when Ed manages to get to his feet and run off, and gets a promise to the guard not to say anything about it. If there’s any justice in this world, this will be the scene that finally gets Bob Odenkirk the Emmy he’s been owed at least since Better Call Saul premiered (if not before).

In the aftermath, back at Ed’s place while they’re all looking at the stolen goods, Gene brings a harsh dose of reality as he calmly and clearly lays out the crimes they’ve committed and the prison time they’ll be facing even they decide to turn him in: “It’s called Mutually Assured Destruction’,” he tells them in as cold a voice as we’ve ever heard him use in nearly a decade. He finally gets the promise he’s been looking for since he started this: “We’re done.”

But of course, Miriam is still around. There’s a horrible moment when we think she’s going to power over and see all this, and who knows what would happen. But by the time the garage door goes up, all three men are standing around the hood of the car and she takes it for granted. Of course, Gene has to stay for dinner, and they have one last conversation (though Miriam doesn’t know, going on about what a ‘good influence Gene has been’) Then she asks him about Nippy, who Gene has almost forgotten. But he remembers that the dog had been with a family this whole time and got him back. “After all this, a happy ending,” he says.

But that’s not the last scene of the show. We see Gene walking through the department store again. He looks at a Kansas City Royals bag (Kim’s old team) and then he looks at a tie that must be particularly garish and put it next to what must be a flashy jacket. A look of nostalgia comes into his eyes. Then one of the women asks him if he needs anything, and he returns to the reality just as dark as the tones of the flashforward he’s been in. He says: “No thank you,” looks at the suit another moment, and then walks away, leaving it behind.

There are many critics who thought it would have been perfect if Breaking Bad had ended its run with ‘Ozymandias’, or indeed any of the last four episodes. There will no doubt be arguments just as valid in the weeks to come that Better Call Saul could just as easily have ended with ‘Nippy’, a story that has connected the threads of all of the flashforwards that have opened every season of the series and brought them to a very satisfying conclusion. And maybe it is, at least as far as the story of Gene Tarkovic is, and to an extent Saul Goodman’s.

But even though ‘Nippy’ is a masterpiece, I still believe there’s an even better ending out there.  ‘Ozymandias’ may be one of the greatest episodes in TV history, but ‘Felina’ was the perfect finale for Breaking Bad.  And given Gilligan and his crew’s history and the amount of time they’ve had to do this, I think it’s very likely that the final episode of Better Call Saul could be still better and finally bring closure to the life of Jimmy McGill. We know that according to the calendar, Walter White has died several months prior to the first flashforward of the series.  So the question is what does Jimmy/Saul/Gene do now that the immediate threat has passed? One reviewer of this episode asks: “What does (Gene) have to live for any more?” We got a hint of it in this episode. I’m not saying that this could be a back door pilot for yet another spinoff (“Gene the Machine?).

What I’m saying is that while this episode answered many question, it still hasn’t answered the one that’s been ‘gliding over all’ since the series began. Why did Saul Goodman insist on going to Omaha?

 

You're in the Game Whether You're Playing or Not: Better Late Than Never: Squid Game

 

 

“The ultimate game show would be one where the losing contestant was killed.”

Chuck Barris

 

Half a century ago, writing under his pen name of Richard Bachman, Stephen King saw the future – or at the very least, the one Squid Game takes place in. King will never be accused of being a Pollyanna, but the novels he wrote under his pseudonym made him look like Dr. Seuss. And in two in particular he foresaw the world that Squid Game took place.

You’ve probably seen The Running Man, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-Richard Dawson action film ‘loosely’ based on the Bachman novel. If you haven’t, you haven’t missed anything, and if you have you didn’t get anywhere near the picture of the book. Bachman’s novel takes place in a dystopian future and it does center on a man named Ben Richards who participates in a deadly game show. Everything else is made up. Richards tries out for a game show because his daughter is suffering from a serious illness. During his tryout, he becomes a contestant on The Running Man, which is nothing like the game show you saw in the movie. (Killian is the producer, not the host and he’s an African American. Ah Hollywood.) In the title game show, the contestants have to run and hide across the nation from the hunters who are scouring the country for them for thirty days. If you should survive the whole thirty, you receive a prize of one billion dollars. No one ever has; the record is eight days. And no one is rooting for you to survive; indeed the audience is rewarded if they phone in and say they spot the contestant. I won’t go any more into details; suffice to say this dystopian future is far bleaker than the one in the movie, and while the hero triumphs (in a way) there’s nothing resembling a happy ended.

The other novel is The Long Walk. Set in a future not that far removed from The Running Man (maybe it’s just a different part of it) one hundred teenage boys walk from the Canada/U.S. Border to Boston and must maintain a pace of exactly four miles per hour the entire time.  If they drop below four miles per hour, they are warned. You are allowed to be warned three times. The fourth time, you are shot. The survivor of the walk gets a prize and a wish. We never learn what makes up this world, all we know is that it is led by a mythical figure known as The Major, and that based on the final page, it is unlikely the ‘winner’ lives much longer than the losers. (Bachman/King quotes many game shows of the 1970s; the quote above is from that book.)

As Squid Game became an international sensation last December and became a critical hit that dominated American award shows (something that is at best done for British series; certainly not South Korean ones) I was very reluctant to watch it.  Part of it had to do with the level of violence that I heard was associated with it, part of it was, I admit, I am loathe to watch any series with subtitles, but mostly I was afraid to watch another dystopian TV show. I couldn’t tolerate Handmaid’s Tale; how could a Korean series about a violent game show be any better? So I kept putting it off. But with the Emmys nearly upon us I knew I would have to prepare to have my gorge tested. So last week, I became the last person in the world to watch the first two episodes of Squid Game. And while it is as gruesome and horrific as the chatter has proven, I can’t deny that it is also riveting and mesmerizing to watch.

I shall limit my review to the first two episodes, but there will be spoilers.

In the first episode we see a man who seems an utter reprobate (Lee Jung-Jae). He steals his mothers ATM card, loots her money so he can gamble, wins big, and then we see him run from loan sharks. His pocket is picked and he is force to sign away ‘his body rights’.  Seeing his daughter that night (he’s divorced and his wife has remarried) he presents her with a ‘gift’ he won in a crane game.  Going to work, he runs into a ‘man’ who offers to have him play a game (I don’t know the name but it involves throwing envelopes at one on the floor.) He has no money, so if he loses he agrees to be slapped in the face. Countless times he loses, finally he wins and is about to slap the man he sees until he remembers the cash. He reluctantly takes and is given a card with symbols on it.

Later that night he learns that his wife and daughter are moving to America with his mother urging him to sue for parental rights, he agrees to play the game. He goes to a pick up site, and is gassed. He wakes up in an unknown area along with 455 other players. (I’ll discuss some of them in a bit). A group of…people, all wearing masks come in and tell several of their players their situation: It’s simple actually. All of them are hopelessly in debt. If they play six rounds of this game, they will be rewarded.

The first game is ‘Red Light, Green Light’. If you’ve seen the first episode, or if you’ve read the first part of my review, you know or can guess what happens to the contestants who are caught. I won’t deny the final ten minutes of the episode aren’t fascinating in a gruesome way – the contestants running for cover as they realize the consequences, their desperate efforts to get to the finish line in time, the surreal nature of the toy girl, a man in a mask watching this to ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, and enough blood to make Sam Peckinpah blush. That said if I had seen only the pilot with no other knowledge of what Squid Game would become, I almost certainly would have never watched another episode. But because of the Emmy nomination I felt I had an obligation to go a little further. So I watched the second episode, appropriately called ‘Hell’. That episode establishes it as a masterpiece.

The stunned contestants are recovering from what they have seen and demand to be released. There’s a rule that says after every round if a majority vote to cease the game, the game will end. Before it does, the loser’s share nearly 2 billion won (you’ll have to look online for the currency exchange) is deposited. The surviving 201 vote.

By a margin of one vote, they agree to end the game.  The survivors are returned to ‘the real world’.

In a longer review about TV at Politico, a writer said Squid Game was a searing indictment of capitalism. I thought a lot about that review was crap, but having seen this episode, I can’t agree more. Because it’s not just how far these people are willing to go even after seeing hundreds of their fellow contestants die to play for their share of what is literally blood money; it’s the fact that the world they live in has put them in this situation. And unlike the lead who seemed to get in over his head, almost all the other contestants ended up playing the game because of a system that was just as violent as the one they signed up for. (I’m going to refer to them by number for my own sake; the credits didn’t reveal easily the cast names.)

199 an Indian immigrant (Annupam Tripathi) has been owed money for six months and the company he works for is out of money. 67, the pickpocket we met earlier (SAG winner Jung Ho-Yeon) spent all her savings trying to get her parents out of China, only to lose everything when the broker proved to be corrupt. 218 (Park Hae-Soo) is an embezzler in futures who is wanted by the police. 001 (Ooh Yung-Soo) has a ‘lump’ in his head and nothing to live for. Even the reasons of 456 become more empathetic when he learns his mother has diabetes and might need her feet amputated. All of these players are given another card, offering to let them return to the game. And we see that this is as much hell as the world they just escaped. They don’t have a life to come back too. Compared to what these people are facing, you can see any of them could have become the Korean equivalent of Walter White if circumstances permitted. Of course, they have far fewer options than he does.

 I know there will be far more to Squid Game then just what I’ve seen – there’s a crime boss who’s in debt up to his eyeballs and a detective who is trying to find out what happened to his missing brother who got a card like everyone else did. And maybe there isn’t much more to it than could be together in a fairly decent episode of the Twilight Zone. (Jordan Peele could have made it work as much as Rod Serling did; there are quite a few elements that do remind me of Peele’s work as a filmmaker.) All I know is that, from what I see so far, Squid Game is worthy of all the praise and awards it has gotten to this point. And in a way, I can see why this show was mentioned in an article with Succession: if there was an actual Squid Game out there, you know one of the Roy siblings would be signing up the international rights for Waystar and even Logan would see the potential in franchising it.  In a way, Squid Game takes place in a completely different universe from Succession. In another, they’re right next door.

(Note: I have learned that Netflix is planning to have a real-life version of Squid Game air some time in 2023 around the same time Season 2 of the fictional one does. Considering the financial troubles the site has been going through the past year, do you think they’ll try to boost the ratings by adding a new meaning to the term ‘a contestant has been eliminated?)

My rating: 4.75 stars.

The Underrated Series, Once And Again: Part 1, Origin Story or How Herskovitz and Zwick spent a Decade Creating Extraordinary Series About Ordinary People

 

How many dramas have there ever been about family life? I don’t mean a family of cops or criminals but a family of normal people going through the struggles of normal life? Even in the era of Peak TV, these series have been few and far between. A lot of them have been on some variation of what is now Freeform, series like The Secret Life of the American Teenager and The Fosters, and there’s a pretty good argument that Shameless gave a far more accurate portrayal of the American family, warts and all.

But if you know the history of television, it might not come as a shock to learn that almost all of the great television dramas about family – certainly on network TV over the past thirty years – can be linked to two men: Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick. For the better part of fifteen years, they produced some of the most distinctive series on TV, which is remarkable because not one of them was a procedural or a comedy.  To explain the one that is my personal favorite, you have to go through their repertoire.

In 1987, a series unlike anything that had ever aired on network television debuted on ABC.  It wasn’t radical in format the way Moonlighting had been earlier or challenged the boundaries of what TV could do like Twin Peaks would. No what made it difference was that it was a drama that didn’t have cops or lawyers or doctors at its center. The series was called thirty-something.

For a show that seemed to celebrate so much in the life of the typical 1980s family, it took a lot of flak at its premiere and throughout its run. Critics mocked it with phrases like ‘yuppie porn’ or ‘self-promoting’ perhaps because it was a series that hadn’t been seen on TV before. (I even remember an episode of Tiny Toons satirizing it, which just shows how much it become part of the Zeitgeist.) But having watched the series on DVD decades after the fact, you really can’t deny that thirtysomething was one of the more remarkable achievements in television history, simply by the way it took a look at the lifestyle of the upwardly mobile completely normally. It also had one of the greatest casts of actors who would dominate the medium for decades to come: Ken Olin, Mel Harris, Timothy Busfield, Melanie Mayron, Patricia Wettig and Patricia Kalember.  (Wettig and Olin would marry during the series run and are still married today.)

The series was daring for its time in how it looked at aspects of the world most shows hadn’t tried before: other series would deal with marriages breaking up; few tried to deal with reconciliation. Nancy Weston’s (Wettig) struggles with breast cancer would be one of the most remarkable storylines in the history of television to that time, taking up most of an entire season. (The episode where she survived but friend Gary (Peter Horton) died in a hit and run ranked among TV Guides 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time in 2009.) And the series broke ground by being the first broadcast series to show two gay people in bed, a boundary that it would take TV nearly six more years to push further on.

The series was never a huge ratings hit but it was a major critical one: during the five year stretch between 1987-1991 thirtysomething would be the only series to defeat L.A. Law for Best Drama (in 1988). Mayron, Busfield and Wettig all won Emmys as well and the series remained a touchstone even after it was cancelled.

Herskovitz and Zwick would aim younger in their next two series. In 1994, they created what may very well be the most famous series that only ran a single season. If you were a teenager in the 1990s (or younger) you knew about My So-Called Life.  Nearly thirty years after it aired, people are still bitter that ABC killed it after only one season. (They continued to show similar poor judgment for other series such as Murder One, Sports Night, and frankly far too many other series to mention.) Claire Danes shot to superstardom for her role as Angela, the teen at the center of the drama, and it is something of a travesty that she lost the Emmy to Kathy Baker that year. (The last ten years the Emmys have more than made up for it.) Delayed superstardom would eventually come to co-stars Jared Leto, who played Angela’s main crush and Wilson Vasquez, who became an idol to millions for playing the first gay teenager to have a regular role on a TV series of any kind. There have always been rumors that because Danes’ shot to stardom so quickly that she was considering leaving after the first season to pursue a movie career (which she did to middling results anyway) and that the creators unwilling to continue the series without her was as much responsible as the middling ratings the series got for ABC cancelling it in the spring of 1995.

Undaunted, Herskovitz and Zwick tried another series less than two years later called Relativity which may have been the closest in spirit to Once and Again. The series centers on two twenty-ish strangers who meet and fall in love on a trip to Italy (Kimberly Williams and David Conrad) and try to make the romance last when they return despite the opinions of their friends and families. This series was filled with future TV stars, including Jane Adams, Lisa Edelstein, Poppy Montgomery, Adam Goldberg and Richard Schiff. The series was known for pushing the boundaries of eroticism – which series like NYPD Blue had already fragmented – beyond the average.  Some scenes, however, were a bridge too far. At one point halfway through the season, the writers wanted to show the two leads in the middle of a sex scene where Conrad proposed and Williams’ accepted – at the moment of orgasm. If the rumors are to be true, ABC was fine with showing the sex, but not the proposal, and the scene never aired. Relativity was cancelled after one season – the ratings were even lower than My So-Called Life and the reviews far less glowing. But all of the central characteristics of the series were in place for Once and Again.

In the summer of 1999 the networks were stunned by the success and the Emmy nominations for HBO’s The Sopranos. In hindsight, I have looked at their collective approach to the fall season as a declaration of war. They didn’t try to come up with a Sopranos knock-off (network TV wouldn’t be willing to go that far for at least another decade) but I think they viewed as a creative to try and blitz HBO out of existence with as many quality series as they could come up with, proving it to be a fluke. Whether it would’ve been possible to this is unlikely but the networks seemed to treat it as such, and as a result the 1999-2000 season featured some of the biggest hits and most critically acclaimed shows in TV history.

NBC came the closest to driving The Sopranos into a corner. The West Wing debuted that September, and for the next seven years the two series would battle to the death for almost every major Emmy. They also developed Law and Order: SVU – for better or worse the longest running drama in history – and Freaks and Geeks, a series nearly as beloved as My So-Called Life with, if anything, an even bigger cast and crew of future stars. Fox tried its hand at comedy with some very radical angry shows that would enjoy success. Their biggest smash would be Malcolm in the Middle, one of the most hysterical and dirtiest broadcast comedies to that point, and lesser success like Titus, a comedy series about one of the most dysfunctional families I’ve ever seen. CBS didn’t have as much success, but they tried with the brilliant sci-fi/comedy mashup Now and Again, a series whose cancellation I consider as mystifying as Freaks and Geeks. Even the relatively new WB got in the game with two of the most successful series in its history: Angel, the brilliant Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff, and Roswell, the teenager-alien series that had such a brilliant start that not even its monumental collapse among critics dimmed its glow among fans when it died two years later.

By contrast what would be ABC’s major contribution seemed more of a stopgap than anything else: its debut in September was initially meant to run for six weeks until NYPD Blue returned for its seventh season in late October. And really ABC had no reason to think Once and Again would be a ratings hit; none of Herskowitz and Zwick’s series had been one, and there was no big hook to drag viewers in.

Once and Again’s premise was deceptively simple: it was the story of Lily Manning (Sela Ward), a woman separated from her husband after his infidelity six months ago and Rick Sammler (Billy Campbell) a father of two, divorced after three years. Each of their children attends the same high school: they meet each other at a school function, and Rick asked Lily out.

The first season is about trying to find love when you’re forty and your kids are fundamentally blocking you. Before her first date with Rick, one of Lily’s children says: “Just don’t have sex with him” and she lets out a scream. The attraction is palpable between the two immediately, as well as the reality of their situation.  At one point during dinner, Lily says to Rick: “I can’t imagine staying with someone who doesn’t love you,” and he says sadly: “ I can.” The kiss at the end of the meal is electric, and they go out the next day. They end of the couch in Lily’s house, and Grace catches them in a state of undress and is more mortified then her mother is.

The two of them continue to muddle through the relationship. In the final ten minutes of the second episode, they have sex for the first time in what is one of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever seen on television, certainly on broadcast TV. It’s not just the actual nakedness of the leads; it’s the emotional nakedness as the two of them deal with their insecurities. For all of the sexuality of broadcast television in the age of Shonda Rhimes, very few series – certainly none on broadcast television – have ever dealt with the real consequences of romanticism in this sense.

The trickiness of Lily and Rick’s relationship is complicated in every possible way. It’s not just the fact of the children on all sides; it’s the fact that for both of them the spouses are still in the picture. This is another work of genius by the two. It would have been too easy to make Jake just another womanizing rogue who thinks he can win his wife back with enough patience and Karen, a whiny harridan who has no use for her husband. Neither would be the case on Once and Again.

 Jake (Jeffrey Nordling) is a womanizer, but he’s also a good father who truly loves his daughter and spends much of the first season, genuinely thinking he can win Lily back because he has been a good provider. (He manages her father’s restaurant, and there’s an underlying tension in the fact that her parents seem to prefer Jake’s judgment over Lily’s on most matters.)  And Karen (Susanna Thompson) is difficult, but she has never been a bad mother or unpleasant in the aspects of her children. She’s not thrilled that her ex is seriously dating, but she accepts as part of moving on with life.

All four of the young actors playing the children were extraordinary in their word. Eli and Jesse, Rick’s children, were played by future television superstars Shane West and Evan Rachel Wood, both of whom gave extraordinary examples of the great work that was to come. But if I had a favorite of all of them at the time, it was Julia Whelan as Grace, the troubled eldest of Lily’s, who now finds herself dealing with the breakup of her parents marriage and the fact that she’s going to high school with  he ‘future stepfathers’ son, who she had a crush on. Whelan’s work was some of the best I’ve ever seen a teenage performer give on a TV series, and I’m sad that she’s rarely acted after the show ended in 2002; she had the potential to be as great as Wood or West.

Indeed, even the peripheral characters were future celebrities: Judy, Lily’s younger sister who didn’t approve of the relationship at all, was played by Marin Hinkle who has dominated television for the last twenty years, finally landing another role of similar caliber on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.  Todd Field, a future Oscar nominated director and writer, played Rick’s partner on the first two seasons. (Field left the series in 2001 to direct In the Bedroom.) And the series would all bring back to light actors who had fallen out of the limelight: Patrick Dempsey had his first major role in a while as the emotionally disturbed brother of the Manning family, who spent much of his early life in an institution.

Once and Again success shocked everybody; it certainly caught ABC by surprise. It averaged more than fifteen million viewers in NYPD Blue’s time slot, leading them to push the latter’s premier to the winter of 2000. The ratings would remain high throughout the first season, even after it was moved to Mondays at 10 in January of 2000. And while it never received the recognition from award shows that The West Wing did, it was pretty competitive in its first season: it received three Golden Globe nominations (Campbell, Ward and the show itself) and Ward shocked many when she upset Edie Falco for Best Actress in a Drama in 2000.

I suppose this is the part where I discuss how it ended up collapsing, but the thing is that’s not quite what happened. Nor have I gone into full detail some of the reasons it was so outstanding for its entire run, and why it never has truly gone away. That I will do so in a follow-up to this piece later this week.