The Golden Globes Are Back and...Better Than Ever? (At Least As Far As TV Will Be Concerned)

 

Over the past two years there has been a great deal of controversy involving the Golden Globes.  Following the 2021 ceremonies, several actors and writers protested the Hollywood Foreign Press Association based on the racial and sexual makeup of the membership, with Tom Cruise returning the three Golden Globes he had one in an act of protest. NBC announced it was cancelling the broadcast of the 2022 Golden Globes as a result.  Not long after, it came out that countless actors and their publicists had been infuriated for years by the way so many of them had had to fawn over the members of this organization.

The HFPA has – in truth, acted as if has not been particularly humbled by the experience. That October they made it clear that they were going to give nominations and awards even if no one was there to receive them or watch them. Then they attempted to undercut the Broadcast Critics Awards (the awards show that for the past six years has traditionally followed the Golden Globes) by planning their awards for the same night.  This move was undercut by the second wave of the pandemic in the winter of 2021, which caused the Critics Choice to move to March. The Golden Globes nevertheless proceeded to give their awards that January anyway in what has to have been their oddest awards show to date (and this counts the one in 2008 at the height of the WGA and Directors Guild Strike) which was done entirely by a series of tweets. I still don’t if anyone who won an award accepted one.

Despite all of this controversy, the apparent lack of remorse and only the word of the HFPA that they have undergone significant reforms, NBC has announced that they will broadcast the Golden Globes this January anyway.  It remains to be seen what kind of show we will get and indeed who will show up for it.

I am not immune to the criticism of the Golden Globes: I am well aware of the numerous scandals involving bribery and manipulation over the decades. But that is not the subject of this article. As those of you who have read my column over the past several years are well aware, I am a television awards junkie. And in the decade that I have been criticizing television and the more than two decades that I have been observing awards as they pertain to TV in general (an era which more or less overlaps with the beginning of peak TV), I have no choice but to acknowledge that in this period the Golden Globes have general done a superb job honoring the best television has to offer, certainly in comparison with the Emmy during this same period.

I realize the HFPA has been accused of a lack of diversity recently. But if we use the term diversity to mean ‘a larger variety’, then it becomes increasingly difficult to deny that is how the Golden Globes have handled the creativity of television in the new millennium. They were willing to give the Best Drama Prize to The Sopranos and 24 years before the Emmys were willing to do so as well as some the Emmys would never acknowledge (Six Feet Under, The Americans at its peak) or even nominate for Best Drama (The Shield, Nip/Tuck). Their track record in comedy is slightly spottier but they were willing to give prizes to Curb Your Enthusiasm when it was at its peak and groundbreaking shows like Transparent and Atlanta, none of which have ever taken the top prize.  And they have been willing to show recognition to series the Emmys refused to ever acknowledge existed  such as Mozart in the Jungle and The Affair. The Golden Globes aren’t perfect in this regard – it took them until Breaking Bad’s fourth season to acknowledge it existed – but they have shown a far greater regard for variety than the Emmys ever have. The Golden Globes never gave a Best Drama prize to Game of Thrones during the entirety of its run, and they honored six different actresses for Best Actress in a Comedy, none of whom were Julia-Louis Dreyfus during her run on Veep.  I may not have agreed with the selection of Lena Dunham or Laura Dern, but at least they were willing to try. And I can’t help but think that the HPFA’s decision to constantly keep honoring new series and actors every year rather than the Emmys pattern of nominating the same series and actors year after year for increasingly inferior work is preferable.  Did it hurt actors and series like This is Us and Mad Men in the long run? Probably. But there’s something to be said for experimentation rather than knowing that the same six or seven series are going to be nominated every year no matter how exceptional other series are. Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Mr. Robot could never break through the Emmys, but the Globes were willing to give them a chance.  I can’t help but think those were superior choices to Modern Family and Game of Thrones in their respective years and I stand by them.

There have been accusations that in many years the Golden Globes have been little more than dress rehearsal for the Oscars. It is far more difficult to prove a similar correlation between the Globes and the Emmys, and if there is one it has only become prevalent the last few years. Boardwalk Empire never won an Emmy for best drama despite triumphing for Best Drama twice. Grey’s Anatomy has never won an Emmy and likely never will. Glee and Girls never triumphed for Best Comedy. And as for correlation with acting awards Katey Sagal won a Best Actress for Sons of Anarchy. Never nominated. Anna Paquin won for True Blood. Never nominated. Andy Samberg won for Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Never nominated.  I could go on in this regard, but I’ll settle for this. The Emmys never acknowledged the WB existed and have seen similarly fit to disregard its successor the CW. The Golden Globes nominated Sarah Michelle Gellar and Lauren Graham for Best Actress for Buffy and Gilmore Girls respectively, nominated Felicity for Best Drama and gave Keri Russell its Best Actress prize and in consecutive years gave their Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical to Gina Rodriguez for Jane the Virgin and Rachel Bloom for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. None of these shows or actresses ever even received an Emmy nomination. Say what you will about the Globes not being diverse, but until the Critics Choice and the HCA came along, they were willing to acknowledge that there were other broadcast networks other than the major ones.

And now that we’re talking about diversity: how many Emmys have  Rodriguez,  Tracee Ellis Ross, Sandra Oh, Ramy Youssef, or Gael Garcia Bernal won? Zero. Collectively, these actors have earned six. (Oh has won for Grey’s Anatomy and Killing Eve. )  If anything, the Golden Globes have led in television and the Emmys have painfully been unwilling to follow. This would even go so far as to pertain the year where no awards show happened. MJ Rodriguez, who many thought deserved to win an Emmy for her stunning work on Pose, took Best Actress in a Drama. O-Yeong Su took the prize for Supporting Actor for Squid Game. And give the Globes credit for acknowledging Underground Railroad for Best Limited Series when it would have been safe to give the prize to Mare of Easttown or Dopesick.

I would make this argument as a whole for many of the awards they gave this past year. Yes, Succession prevailed for Best Drama but Brian Cox and Sarah Snook ended up going home empty handed at the Emmys.  Jason Sudeikis won Best Actor in a Comedy, but the big winner turned out to be Hacks which took Best Comedy as well. No one who saw their work will deny that Jean Smart or Michael Keaton didn’t deserve their trophies and if the Emmys were following the Golden Globes, they were also following practically every other awards show between then and September.

And because of the eclectic nature of the nominated series, the Golden Globes can not only be nearly impossible to predict but delightful in the end results.  In addition to all of the previous triumphs I’ve mentioned, the Globes also tend to recognize series that should get Emmy nominations but almost never do. Big Love spent five brilliant seasons basically being ignored by the Emmys. But the Golden Globes nominated it for Best Drama twice and in one of my favorite moments in awards show history gave Chloe Sevigny a well-deserved Supporting Actress award that I so wish the Emmys had been willing to reciprocate.

This actually brings me to a piece of news that I consider a victory lap of sorts. For the past decade, every time I have dealt with my reactions to the Golden Globe nominations, I have objected in the strongest possible terms to the Supporting awards. As those of you who follow them may be aware, while all the other awards are divided between Drama, Comedy and Limited Series/Movie, Supporting Actor and Actress have always represented all three categories. I have always considered this a travesty, particularly considering that until fairly recently the Supporting Awards have been dominated by the limited series category. It has been over a decade since the Supporting Actor or Actress in either category went to a nominee from a comedy – Chris Colfer and Jane Lynch for Glee. Winners from dramas have made some victories (the last two years for example) but by and large these categories have been dominated by the increasingly brilliant number of limited series. Every year, I keep advocating for them to increase the number of supporting awards.

This year, my prayers have been answered. Sort of. This year, there will be two sets of Supporting Actor and Actress awards: one for comedy and drama, one for limited series and movie. I cannot help but feel a certain amount of vindication in the HFPA acknowledging that this is a move that was long overdue. Would I have preferred a set of nods for all three categories? Of course. But let’s take nothing away from this decision, considering that the last time the Golden Globes added a category at all was twenty years when they finally acknowledged that they had to recognize Animated Films. Let’s hope that we can separate the dramas and comedies by the end of the decade. (I’m a realist.)

At the end of the day, does this mean I will come back to a ceremony that has so much controversy attached to it and seems to have merely gone through the motions? I’m not going to be overjoyed if I had to deal with the smug face of Ricky Gervais again nor do I particularly want to think how many celebrities will actually acknowledge this is change and bother to show up. (I could see a Golden Globes where the auditorium is half empty…at best.) But even after all the controversy that has been attached to it, when it comes to television, I have been more inclined to trust and appreciate the results of the Golden Globes as being infinitely more realistic than that of the Emmys. If they are willing to give nominations to limited series like Gaslit and The First Lady which I thought were ignored by the Emmys, give a lot of nominations to newcomers like Abbott Elementary and The Gilded Age and finally give Better Call Saul  what it is due (like they finally did for Breaking Bad in its final season), then that will do a lot to atone in my book. I have never been under the illusion that the Golden Globes were perfect. They’re an awards show; by definition they will piss people off no matter who they pick. All I can do is hope they have learned from their mistakes…like nominating Smash.

School's Back In Session: Abbott Elementary Returns for a Second Season

 

 

Some series are born great. Some series achieve greatness. And some series have been created by Quinta Brunson, who in less than a year has gone from a mere internet sensation to one of the most astonishing hyphenates in the history of television – and in the process, gave us the first classic comedy of the decade.

Last December, after seeing the pilot of Abbott Elementary I made the bold decision to DVR the final season of This is Us in favor of watching live this incredible comedy. It should have been a difficult choice – even in the age of streaming I have forsaken many superb series because they were running against other shows I was locked into – but after I saw the pilot of Abbott Elementary, I knew I had to watch every episode the night it aired. Because Quinta Brunson had created a series that television – broadcast TV in particular – desperately needed: a workplace comedy in the mold of The Office and Parks and Rec, but one that looked much more like the world we live in. And this is one of the reasons Abbott Elementary became one of the most critically acclaimed series and surprise hits of 2022. In a world where, now more than ever, the educational system is being questioned on almost every level, we needed a series that demonstrated as clearly possible just what it’s like to work in America’s fractured state of education. And because to look in this mirror for long would be too hard, Brunson did a huge favor by making it one of the funniest comedies in a very long time; certainly, the funniest network series since The Good Place debuted in the fall of 2016.

For those who need to be schooled (sorry) Abbott Elementary refers to the Philadelphia school where Janine (Brunson) and her weary fellow teachers try to help an overcrowded, underfunded school and make more with less. Janine has the bright cheerfulness of an Amy Poehler character, and like Leslie Knope, many of the faculty find her relentless cheerfulness in the face of relentless adversity slightly irksome given the mess their school is always in. None of the co-stars fit neatly in any of the boxes that we relate with so many workplace series; Brunson goes out of her way to shine the light on every member of her ensemble and give them as many layers as possible. Jacob (Chris Perletti) is also enthusiastic, and proud to be an ‘ally’ of so many of the faculty. Seeming initially like he’s trying to hard,  we often see a man who is insecure (we learned of his homosexuality the same time Janine did) but he always puts an extra bit of effort in everything. (During summer break he learned sign language.) Melissa is a working class Italian, who has ‘connections (how did Lisa Ann Walter become the sole member of the cast not to earn an Emmy nomination this time out?) but who often hides much of her personal life (she has an ex-husband) and her actual family (last night we learned her sister works at a charter school) Barbara (if you only knew from her performance at the Emmys ceremony, you didn’t know the layers Sheryl Lee Ralph did to earn her Best Supporting Actress) is the more realistic than cynical teaching lifer, knowing that her school will always have to do more with less. Ava (Janelle James continues to steal every scene she’s in) is the principal who is far more interested in her social media following then doing her job…most of the time. And Gregory (Tyler James Williams) is the former substitute, now full-time teacher, unable to escape his stiff behavior around everybody – including Janine.

Janine, as you’d expect, is the center of the Abbott universe and the series always shines when she is as the center. Janine has a never give up attitude in an institution which is always making people give up. Recent events have dulled her luster slightly (she spent most of the season premiere dealing with the ramifications of her breakup with her boyfriend – and sole sexual partner) but we all know it’s just for a moment. In last night’s episode, when the faculty paid a visit to a charter school across the street, Janine did everything in her power to make it seem like Abbott is just as good – a pretty neat trick considering  last year’s calendar is holding up one of the walls at their school.  Determined to prove that Abbott deserved better, she made an effort to pitch a computer room for Abbott (which meant a room with a computer) and as always was forced to dance before Ava who loves mocking everything she does. (Typically, Ava turned the pitch for grant money into an episode of Shark Tank and pulled another student out of class to fill out the panel.) Janine managed to get the computer she wanted to her enormous surprise…and in typical Abbott fashion had defeat snatched from the jaws of victory when the cafeteria was found to be swarming with mice. Naturally, the money in the budget went to an exterminator and then cleaning supplies. (The students did get something special…but you should see the episode to know what it is.)

But because Brunson knows the talent she has on hand, she makes sure everybody in the cast gets their own moments to be funny and sad at the same time. One of the running gags of last night’s episode came when we learned that Barbara seems to have a feeling that certain white actors and actresses are actually African Americans and each cast member explained what she was getting wrong. (Hey, some people of a certain age naturally mistake Carrie Underwood for Kerry Washington.) Meanwhile Gregory was trying to find a way to break up with Taylor, Barbara’s daughter and went through a debate as to how to do it without hurting her feelings or Barbara’s -which led to Jaco suggesting ‘petering out’.  He was talked out of it while helping Janine and then told Barbara he was going to break up with Taylor – only to learn that Taylor had decided to ‘peter him out’.  As you’d expect the series has Janine and Gregory dancing around each other (I’m assuming they’re the Jim and Pam of this series) but neither has been willing to go to a certain point yet. (I’m betting their first date happens by the season finale.)

Abbott Elementary has already been dominating the awards circuit the last several months, dominating both the TCA and the HCA with Quinta Brunson taking two trophies for writing and acting from each organization and winning Best Comedy for each series. In this sense, their triumphs at last month’s Emmys, while the biggest for any network sitcom since Modern Family were almost a disappointment even though Ralph and Brunson each took home a prize and the series deservedly won an Emmy for Best Casting.  I suppose I am duty bound to mention that this may be the first series I’ve seen on a network show that doesn’t have a single straight white male in any major role, but speaking as a straight white male who already thinks this is one of the best series of 2022, should that really be a factor in your choosing to watch it? Abbott Elementary is the right series for the era we are currently live in, a show I imagine far too many people can relate to even if they’re not a parent or a teacher or think they don’t have any connection to the world that this comedy inhabits.  In a way Brunson is using this show to make a statement about education today, but she is just as determined to make one of the funniest and most heartfelt series imaginable.  The cast and crew of Abbott Elementary will be walking the red carpets of award shows this winter and for years to come.  No matter what you think of the public school system, you will come away from this series with as much respect for teachers as for Brunson and her cast.

My Score: 5 Stars.

The Cleaning Lady is A Breath of Fresh Air for Network TV

 

When I saw the ads for Fox’s The Cleaning Lady last January, I have to admit the idea intrigued me. The idea of a Cambodian immigrant who, while trying to earn money to get her son a kidney transplant, becomes involved with a New Mexico crime family was certainly different from so many of the procedurals and reboots that make up most of network TV today.  But I’d been down this road with Fox before, first with Filthy Rich in 2020 and The Big Leap in 2021. I knew better than to get involved with an interesting sounding Fox network series which had an interesting concept and no audience. So, despite the mostly positive reviews, I left it alone. Then in the summer it was renewed for another season and actually got nominated by the HCA for Best Network Drama. I grant you the field keeps getting slimmer but it’s not like they’ve stirred me wrong on a lot of things. So this week, I decided to start watching and while it will never be mistaken for the antihero led dramas that make up Peak TV, that’s not necessarily a shortcoming.

                The Cleaning Lady is based on an Argentine telenovela. In this version Elodie Yung plays Thony, a doctor in Cambodia who the immigration system, like it has for almost everyone, has failed.  By a series of bad luck, she ends up on the scene of a Latino crime family run by Arman Morales. Desperate to stay alive and to save her son, she agrees to help him avoid the law. In the midst of this she ends up on the radar of the FBI in the person of Agent Garrett (Oliver Hudson is still finding his way through this role.) Walking a tightrope, she managed to reach a position where she was trusted with the Morales family’s crypto in the season finale. Then her estranged husband showed up and angry with what was going on, took her son from her home.

                In the midst of the search for her son in the Season 2 Premiere, she managed to track him and her husband down to a motel. There was an argument involving her and two of her in-laws and her husband was pushed down the stairs and died. Even though it was an accident, Thony knows far too well how the justice systems treats people like her, so she cleaned up the crime scene and staged it as a robbery. This is a major burden for Chris, her nephew who shoved him and is still dealing with the trauma. It does not help matters that her father and mother-in-law have come to America to bury their son, blame her for what happened and seem determined to bring him back to Cambodia.

                The Morales, despite her loyalty, still treat her as little more than help. This is made fundamentally clear when Nadia calls her before the funeral and tells her that she has to deliver a bribe to a judge. “You’re going to do this, so I don’t have to bury my husband,” she says before hanging up. This has led her on the radar of Armond, Nadia’s ex-boyfriend who has secured the loan to pay the bail. Charming in front of his ex-lover, he is utterly ruthless when Thony comes up to get the money forcing her strip not only front of him but in front of a window in his casino. Naveen Andrews is the new highpoint for this series, continuing the run of superb performances that started with The Dropout. I like watching him play what appears to be this series’ Gus Fring.

                There are levels of The Cleaning Lady that work very well and some that don’t. The fact that Thony is essentially able to function invisibly throughout the world of crime (“Nobody looks at the cleaning lady” she says more than once) is perhaps the most subtle and devastating commentary about how America views almost every minority who works in the menial jobs they can get.  The fact that it is far easier for Thony to function in the criminal world than she ever could in the legitimate one is a shining light on just how bad is for the undocumented is the country. At no point do we get the idea that Thony is enjoying being good at this the way that Walter White clearly did – she is doing this strictly to survive and hopefully to come out the other side. (She hopes to open a clinic with the money she makes from the Morales family.) The series also makes it perfectly clear that neither the authorities nor much of the crime world care very much about Thony, save for what she can do to help them which is hardly a ringing endorsement for how investigations work. Thony has been into deep for awhile now; the question is only can she avoid drowning. I also like the series idea to make the lead character an Asian immigrant than the obvious choice of Latino, which is a bell that has been rung far too often. We get a far clearer picture of Asian rituals in a way we really don’t in almost any other media.

                The series works best when it sticks to following Thony, her family and friends and how much deeper they get. Much of the rest of The Cleaning Lady is watered-down Golden Age TV.   How the Morales run their empire, Arman’s struggle to survive in prison (eventually killing his mentor) and how Nadia is as ruthless as her husband is nothing we haven’t seen on series like Breaking Bad and Ozark.  Nor are things radically different from how the FBI runs the case: the investigation involves a corrupt judge and we have learned that Garrett was previously demoted for having an affair with an informant. Also the series doesn’t seem able to use Liza Weill to her potential, which in itself should be a criminal offense.

                I am not yet prepared to go so far as to call The Cleaning Lady great television, but I am willing to give it high marks for the different way it looks at the crime drama. There is precedent for success in this field – I still miss Good Girls, the NBC drama that had an interesting perspective on how three working mothers get in to deep with a crime lord. The fact that Fox was willing to take a chance on it for a second season may say more for the state of broadcast TV rather than the fact that they had faith in the series. For now, I’m going to hope that they continue to demonstrate more in the latter and that we see more series like this on Fox in the foreseeable future. God know, network TV needs them.

My score: 3.75 stars.

Homicide Life on the Street Retrospective: What The Series Said About Race Relations in Baltimore - And America

 

When Homicide debuted in 1993, one of the things that struck many critics and viewers was how many African Americans were regulars. When the series debuted, fully a third of the series nine-person cast were African American actors: Andre Braugher, Clark Johnson and Yaphet Kotto. The members of the cast would shift over time, but the percentage of African Americans as leads never changed; in fact, by the final season half the ten-person cast was now African American: in addition to Johnson and Kotto, Toni Lewis, Giancarlo Esposito and Michael Michelle were regulars. And this equal representation was top down: half of the recurring characters in the police department from the brass to the patrolmen, and a lion’s share of the guest stars were also African American. (Is this a subtle reason the series never achieved the rating heights of other procedurals? Hmm.)

Despite that, throughout Homicide’s run, actors like Braugher and Kotto frequently complained that the series never delved into the subject of race as much as they would have liked. That’s not fair to the writers – Homicide probably dealt with race relations as much as any series in the 1990s – but in retrospect, there are certain truths to that argument.

As pointed out in a book on the series written not long ago, of all the ‘red ball investigations that Homicide dealt with during its seven seasons on the air, only one – the murder of Adena Watson in Season 1 – ever dealt with the murder of a black person. In hindsight, this may have been due to how closely Tom Fontana and his writers were staying to David Simon’s book - the investigation into the murder of Latonya Wallace which inspired the Adena storyline – is the overarching narrative. Going forward, there is a remote possibility that by never having a similar style investigation, the writers were making a subtle point that the lives of African Americans, even children, matter less than white people to the brass and to the citizenry. (Giardello will actually make a point close to this in the second season.) This is born out by the fact that there at least a dozen investigations into the murders of African American children after this, but not one of them merits a red ball. (The only red ball involving a child at all involves a possible kidnapping late in Season Six. The victim is a four-year old white boy.)

You get the feeling throughout the series, usually in subtle ways, that this may be by design. In ‘The True Test’ in Season Five, Bayliss and Lewis are called in to investigate the brutal stabbing of a black freshman at a Baltimore prep school. When the headmaster tells Bayliss that the victim was one of three black students, Bayliss says: “Congratulations. Now you have two.” When the headmaster deflects that there’s no racial motivation, Bayliss follows up with: “How many white students have you had killed recently?”

The prep school does everything possible to hamper the investigation into the student’s death, because they are protecting a senior (Elijah Wood) who is the son of a powerful Baltimore judge (Judge Aandahl played by St. Elsewhere veteran Sagan Lewis was another recurring character.) The investigation eventually plays out with the teenager confessing his responsibility but his mother, who knows how dangerous he is, continues to protect him. Though we never learn how it plays out, the implication is clear: this young black man from modest circumstances life is irrelevant to that of a white teenager.

Unlike Law and Order, where by far the lion’s share of the criminals were white rich people, a fair percentage of the criminals – and the victims – were African Americans and other minorities. This was inevitable given the show’s setting, but it was still something that network TV had never seen before and really hasn’t seen since. Race may not have been referred to directly as much as so many of the cast wanted it to be, but it came up far more often than it has even in series run by African American showrunners. I don’t think its much of an exaggeration that there is more real discussion of what race means to America in the average season of Homicide then in the entirety of Shondaland’s body of work. This may be by design. Olivia Pope and Annelyse Keating are supposed to be strong black women who can make the powerful quake. But that is only a situational basis. When it comes to dealing with the symptomatic problems of race in every aspect of America, they are unequipped to deal with it.

The characters in Homicide aren’t any more equipped either – but they were more than willing to express how inadequate the system was in relation to them and white America. I will illustrate this by discussing three of their most thought provoking – and genuinely unsettling – episodes.

Near the end of Season Three in the episode telling titled ‘Colors’ Pembleton and Bolander are called in to investigate the murder of a Turkish exchange student. He and a friend were going to a party but went to the wrong address and the homeowner shot him. The owner is Jim Bayliss, Tim’s cousin.

The fact that Frank is Tim’s partner does change his investigation one iota. He questions Jim twice, first friendly, the second time far more aggressively. He picks up the discrepancies between Jim’s story, the student’s friend and Jim’s wife. The deeper he digs, the more he thinks there might have been a racial motivation to this crime. That said, there is a real possibility that this investigation would have been quietly disposed of had there not been the possibility of an international incident and the mother’s outrage.

The investigation brings out the worst in Tim. He yells at Frank constantly, and in one of the most memorable moments in series history, pounds on the reflecting glass partition outside the box until it shatters. He degrades everybody, from Mary to Danvers to Gee, and we seriously spend much of the time watching the episode wondering if the gap between the two is irrevocable. He refuses to believe the worst in his cousin, and the viewer wants to believe Jim too. That night, however, he is hosing off the blood of the dead boy on his balcony. “Who’d thought their guts were the same color as are?” Jim says this so casually the impact is almost missed.

The grand jury that follows was something I didn’t process when I first saw the episode – I didn’t realize that everybody on the case, from Danvers to the ME to even Frank – seemed to be trying to deliberately lead the jury not to indict. But I never forgot the end result, because it’s one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen on TV. When the grand jury returns deciding not to indict, the courtroom bursts into applause.

Back in the squad Frank is very clear about what happened: “These good people applauded the death of a child. How many of those people you think would have clapped if it had been a white child who was shot?” And he is just as clear about Jim’s own part in it: “Jim is worse than a Klansman because at least in their white sheets, they’re recognizable. But your cousin’s brand of bigotry is much more frightening because, like still waters, it runs deep. He doesn’t even see it himself.” In this simple statement, Frank may have reached a conclusion that gives a very accurate position of so much of white America, then and now.

 

In the middle of Season Five, Yaphet Kotto wrote the first of three teleplays for Homicide ‘Narcissus’. The episode deals with an investigation into the African Revival Movement, an organization run by a former Baltimore policeman now calling himself Burundi Robinson. Robinson is a community organizer concentrating on improving the lives of African Americans in Baltimore. The police become involved after the murder of Kenya Merchant and the fugitive runs into the ARM. (There is constant police interference in this investigation which I may have gone into a previous article. While it is relevant to the episode, for this piece I will concentrate elsewhere.)

A member of the ARM who has fallen out with Robinson explains why Kenya was murdered: Robinson ordered the killing because Kenya had learned that he was sleeping with most of the female members. “Some of the kids you see walking around there, they’re his.” It is telling that when Giardello hears about this, he is initially reluctant to pursue Robinson, seeing it as another example of bringing down a powerful black man. But as the investigation unfolds and it is increasingly interfered with from on high, Giardello finds himself pursuing it.

When the Baltimore PD comes to arrest Robinson, the residents of the ARM begin throwing rocks and bottles at the cops. Only the intervention of Pembleton stops a full-blown assault on the building. Gee eventually hears there are orders to take Robinson out and ends up going into the building to confront Robinson.

Robinson then tells him why he resigned the department: twenty-five years earlier, he was partnered with now Deputy Commissioner James Harris. They made a drug bust, and when they checked it out of evidence before the trial, it was baking soda. Harris has sold the drugs back to the dealer. With IA circling, Harris convinced Robinson to do ‘damage control’ – that one of them would take the blame and the other would go back to work. Robinson’s fate in the department was determined by a coin toss.

Did this alter Robinson’s point of view: “Where’s our place in the world, Al? We’re either a Michael Jordan or an O.J. Simpson, godhead or pariah…so we have to look after ourselves.” When Gee brings up Kenya Merchant, Robinson says in resignation: ‘My family’s gone.” Not long after that, he sends all of the women and children out of the building and locks the door behind Al.

For hours, the situation is monitored, with the brass itching to take Robinson out. Then QRT says there’s no movement in the building. When the cops raid the building and enter the basement, they find Robinson and every male member of the organization dead in a mass suicide.

The most haunting moment of the episode comes in the last scene. We cut to a white husband and wife watching the story unfold on the news. The husband changes the channel on the TV twice until he finds a nature show. You couldn’t come up with a better metaphor for how little white America cares about the lives and deaths of black America than that last scene.

 

Our nation has been struggling with slavery and its repercussions ever since the Civil War ended. Movies and TV have occasionally dealt with the subject, but I don’t think network TV ever dealt with the affects throughout generations than in the sixth season episode: ‘Sins of the Father.”

Meldrick Lewis (Johnson) and Paul Falsone (Jon Seda) are called in to investigate a hanging death. It becomes clear that the victim, Martin Ridenour a wealthy businessman was hung by somebody else. Furthermore, he was whipped, beaten and force to dress himself. “You know, fifty years ago if this had happened to a young black man in Memphis we’d call it a lynching,” the M.E. says. She’s more right than she knows.

From the start Meldrick, who is known to brush off even the bloodiest murder, is unsettled by this case. It doesn’t help matter that when he meets the victim’s widow, he sees what only can be considered the most openly shared display of Confederate memorabilia – all of whom were Martin’s distant ancestors. Meldrick is so unsettled by this that he insists that he and Falsone visit a Baltimore church that was a transit point on the Underground Railroad.

The investigation eventually leads to a student named Dennis Rigby, whose childhood bedroom reveals a massive display of black power and heritage memorabilia. Meldrick is convinced that there is a link between the two crimes, but Giardello and Pembleton disagree. “The murder takes place in the here and now,” Gee said. But when Pembleton learns the name of the victim, he makes a connection between a story his grandmother told him growing up about a white bounty hunter named Patty Ridenour, Martin’s distant descendant. She was a boogeyman for his grandmother, and she passed down that fear in terrifying stories to Frank growing up. (“Grandmother was something of a sadist,” he acknowledges.

The police file a search warrant for Rigby but can’t find him. Lewis eventually does in a hidden room in the Rigby house – a measure straight out of how freed slaves were hidden before and during the Civil War.

Arrested Rigby freely confessed to his part in Ridenour’s death. But his motive is not rage or jealousy – “it’s history” as Meldrick puts it. Rigby’s great-great-great-grandfather was a free black in Southern Baltimore. He saved $400 in sailor’s wages and bought a huge tract of land. Patty Ridenour – who we learn went out of her way to capture free blacks and sell them into slavery – took Rigby’s ancestor prisoner and did just that. When Rigby learned that Ridenour had just closed a $20 million dollar deal for his investment firm, he was enraged at his success. “Knowing what it was built on,” he tells Meldrick.

Despite the empathy Lewis shows Rigby, Homicide does not argue that the murder was justifiable. What the stories of Rigby and Ridenour clearly invoke is how slavery built up the success of white Americans for generations while crippling African Americans for as long. Ridenour is a millionaire; Rigby lives in poverty. The situation is not directly Ridenour’s fault, but he clearly benefited from the crimes of his ancestor.

The episode ends, like so many do, at the Waterfront, the bar Meldrick owns. But unlike so many other cases, he can not shake this off. Falsone makes several half-hearted efforts to cheer up his partner. “Leave it alone,” is all Meldrick will say.  It’s one of the only times in the series we see Meldrick in despair. He may move on from this case, but it’s never going to go away.

 

In none of these cases, even when the crimes at the center of them are resolved, to the writers of Homicide pretend that the problems they have exposed are. They are, like all the other emotional baggage they carry with every case, the weights they carry. Homicide may never have dealt with race the way some of its cast may have wanted it to but its hard to imagine any series on the air – broadcast, cable or streaming, even involving some of the creators behind the show’s later work -  ever dealing with it as well as this show did. Like with everything else with Homicide, the series never posed easy answers. But you have to give them credit for asking the questions at all.

Constant Reader Book of the Month Club September: The Trailblazing Work of Robert Cormier

 

When I was in sixth grade, I was already an avid reader but my tastes in reading were divided between the assigned reading of middle school, books so detailed I read without comprehension and books that were too young for me. Then that April, I was in the school library, and I found a copy of I am the Cheese by Robert Cormier. I basically devoured over the course of the next week. Then I began to read other books of his and books by similar authors. Cormier was my official introduction into my adulthood reading.

In my opinion, there’s a good argument that Robert Cormier was the first modern YA author. You could argue for Madeline L’Engle or C.S. Lewis but most of their best-known work was in the fantasy genre. (Outside of The Wrinkle of Time series, L’Engle actually stayed closer to modern times but I didn’t learn that it until years later.) Cormier is one of the first writers I’ve ever seen to take on the dark overtones of teenagers in a way that is now the norm is so many of the novels I read. The pessimism that pervades so much of the genre today is no doubt built on the anxiety of the age we live in; when Cormier began doing it in the 1980s, he must have seemed like an upstart challenging the status quo.  And he really went to dark territory in his novels; it’s not that there are no happy endings for any of the characters in his books; it’s that so many of them seem to point out just how dark and futile the path for anybody in his world (mostly rural New England) must face.

And he doesn’t aim for normal settings. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway takes place in a center dealing with terminally ill children. After the First Death involved a hostage situation by terrorists at a military school. And many of his leads have impossible situations – Heroes deals with a soldier who returns from World War II with his face blown off; Tenderness with a young man released from juvenile detention having served time for murdering his mother and stepfather; We All Fall Down opens with four teenage boys invading a home to commit vandalism and then assaulting one of the residents who arrives at home.

The most famous of Cormier’s novels is The Chocolate War, the story of fifteen-year-old Jerry Renault act of rebellion in a Catholic boarding school ruled by a dictatorial priest and controlled by a secret organization of teenagers. This book has been banned in libraries almost since its release, even though there is no overt violence, sex or profanity; the usual reasons for banning books. The more likely reason is because of its depiction of characters who represent the church or perhaps because it argues for the questioning of authority. If the people who banned this book actually read it (something I always question) they might also have terrified by the fact that the most important characters were among the most frightening depictions of evil to that point and have rarely been equaled in their horror since. (I’m actually going to deal with them later on.)

Cormier set the bar for so many of the writers who work in YA today. Why then does he have so literal cultural impact? Almost every ‘classic’ gets turned into movies or TV, but the only film versions of Cormier I know about are I am The Cheese and The Chocolate War, both of which are inferior because they are disorganized and don’t have the bravery to go through with the unhappy endings that Cormier is famous for.

Perhaps it is because so many of his novel are fundamentally center on white teenage boys with almost no female characters who have lead roles greater than love interest. (The sole exception I recall is We All Fall Down.) Perhaps the general pessimism of Cormier is so hard for Hollywood even now to do right that few would dare touch them. But in the age of Peak TV, it might well be time to consider adaptations of his work. So, to give Cormier his due, I’m going to break my own rule and consider three of his novels and why I consider them masterpieces.

I Am the Cheese is one of the most disorienting books for any reader to try and get in to. The central character is Adam Farmer, who is fifteen years old and about to ride his bicycle seventy miles to a facility to find out what happened to his father. We know very little about why he thinks he’ll be there. The novels follow him on his bike through restaurants and apartments and the longer his trip goes on, we begin to wonder what is truly behind this journey.

On a separate track, we follow Adam through a series of taped therapy sessions. He’s clearly been a patient, and he keeps complaining about pills and shots to help him sleep. The therapist’s name is Britt, and he seem nice and polite. Except… when we see dictated version of the recording, the ‘therapist’ is referred to as ‘T’, not B. And the longer the sessions go on, the more is clear that the therapist is trying to lead Adam somewhere. Somewhere he doesn’t want to go.

What we learn through these sessions is that Adam is realize that his life with his parents has been a lie, and that his parents have been deceiving him for reasons that happened when he was just a baby. I won’t tell you what the reasons were, because you should find out for yourself. What I will tell you is the closer we get to the end, the more we realize that both tracts we have been following are fundamentally false and that Adam himself is unaware of it. The last twenty pages are among the most devastating I’ve ever read in YA fiction. (I must confess the first half-dozen times I read them I found a lot of it incomprehensible, especially the last page.) But when you realize the full picture of what Adam has been going through it is heartbreaking, because it is clear Adam doesn’t and never will.

A year after I devoured I Am the Cheese, I was a Cormier nut. At one point I was delighted to find in a bookstore: We All Fall Down and Fade and bought them both. Both novels are exceptional but, in my opinion, Fade is as close to a magnum opus as Cormier ever got, which is odd because it’s the only novel of his that in a nature is as close to genre fiction as he tried.

The novel opens in 1938 and we are hearing the story of a thirteen-year-old boy named Paul in Depression Massachusetts. He is experiencing some of the normal levels of puberty (he erupts to ecstasy at the beauty of a twenty-ish cousin) and stranger things. Eventually he learns from his uncle that he has the ability to ‘fade’ or become invisible. It is something that seems to be passed down from generation to generation. His uncle is dismayed when he learns the truth: “He was looking at me with the saddest eyes I’d ever seen”, Paul says. And at one point, he says he considers it ‘the opposite of a gift’.

Paul very quickly learns what he means. His newfound invisibility shows him the secrets of his neighborhood, except most of them are the kind of things that you don’t want to know. At one point, he does the inevitable and uses the fade to see an attractive older teenager take her clothes off. What follows is one of the most shocking scenes I’ve ever seen in YA fiction or even mainstream fiction. (If this scene ended up getting the book banned, this is one case I can’t blame the parents.) Worse, the more he uses the fade, the more it seems to bring out a psychosis in him and there are consequences beyond even that.

Except…that’s not the whole story. A third of the way through the novel, the book changes perspective to Marie more than half a century later. She is Paul’s twenty-ish niece, and her uncle who became a world-renowned author has been dead for more than twenty years. What we have just read is a manuscript he never published. Marie wonders if there is any truth, and turns to her father, Paul’s brother who was alive during that time. In a twenty-five-page section, her father completely dismissed the novel as anything but fiction. Understandably, he dismisses invisibility on the first page, but he then goes through each character and scenario Paul described in the manuscript and tells us that all of them did not happen as he described. Some examples may be questionable, but it's hard to argue when two different people remember a relative completely differently.

From this point on, we no longer know whose version of the truth is reliable. When Paul’s publisher produces another part of the same manuscript and we spent the majority of the novel reading this, we no longer know if Paul is trustworthy. At another point in the novel, he learns that there is another young boy who has the same ability he does – and in the next section, the narrative which has been entirely first-person switches to third person and eventually keeps jumping between them.

Fade is a masterwork not only of horror, but of young adult fiction. More than any Cormier novel I read; we constantly question something that few people my age would have done for any book at that time. Is the narrator of the novel telling us the truth?  If he isn’t, why would he live and if he is, how do we explain all the discrepancies? We leave the novel as confused as Marie is about the truth and what it might mean if it is. Cormier’s novels traditionally end in despair; this is the only one I know where we are fundamentally questioning which version of despair is more comforting.

All that said, I think my favorite Robert Cormier novel is Beyond the Chocolate War. It is the rare sequel that I actually believe is superior to the original for reasons I couldn’t define at the time but can now do so.  For all the brilliance of The Chocolate War, it follows a traditional path of a heroic youth trying to stand against authority: Jerry’s stand against Brother Leon and the Vigils over the annual chocolate sale. ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?” shows up repeatedly in the novel and at its end, Jerry has decided it’s better not too – a sad ending, but at least its one where we take comfort that he at least fought the good fight.

Beyond the Chocolate War is another animal entirely. Jerry is reduced to a minor character, not even seen for the first part of the book and only occasionally showing up throughout. Rather the novel chooses to focus almost entirely on the Vigils, the power structure within it and the inner rebellion against the assigner Archie Costello.

Brother Leon and Archie Costello are among the most frightening characters in literature because they seem to have no moral center at all. Leon is essentially the dictator of Trinity, using the cloak of religion much in the Calvinist fashion, believing that he must force good into all of the other students and all of them must believe in his power. Anyone, student or teacher, who does anything to threaten his authority is removed as an obstacle and he seems utterly incapable of any kind of inner light. At one point Archie and he have a conversation and Archie has his clearest insight to the man – and how he views the world:

“I love this school, Costello.”

Like a criminal loves his crime, Archie thought. That was the reason for the world’s agony and the reason crime – and sin – would always prevail. Because the criminal loves his crime. That’s why rehabilitation was impossible. You had to get rid of the love, the passion first. And that would never happen.”

Leon views the school as his personal fiefdom and that everyone – students and faculty alike – are his to control. Near the end of the novel, he is attacked by a student he manipulated and helped psychologically destroy and not only does he not call for help, but he also makes sure he’s there for a school’s events activities that night. In a memorial for that student later on, he uses the attack to shame all the students and faculty for his own sins, absolving himself of all responsibility. (The scene ends with the only act of open rebellion to Leon in the novel. It is one of the only signs of optimism in the entire book.)

Brother Leon is frightening in what he represents, but at the very least readers of the time could comprehend him – the figure of authority, gone mad with power would have fit it very well with the post-Vietnam Watergate era. But what could readers have made of Archie Costello, a character who glides through the anarchy and destruction he causes as Trinity with little regard for even the people who are fundamental loyal with him. I don’t know if Archie would have read Machiavelli, but he surely understood the concept that ‘it is better to be feared than loved’. At one point in the novel, he has been forced to take on the role of ‘Fool’, the person who everybody either kicks in the ass or dunks in the water. Not one student dares do either. That is the aura that Archie has.

Terms like ‘sociopath’ or even ‘psychopath’ don’t seem adequate in categorizing Archie. He doesn’t seem entirely human. He likes having the power of giving assignments and creating anarchy, but he rarely is present for the damage he does; only hearing about it secondhand.  He seems surprised that his second-in-command Obie is ‘distracted’ by being in love.  He has a relationship with a girl from another school, but you get the feeling that not only does he not emotionally connect, even the physical part of it is going through the motions. He feels no responsibility for the consequences of any of the actions that take place – even when an assignment he orders leads to an elderly brother’s death or when Obie’s girlfriend is assaulted by a loyal follower acting on what he thought were his orders. At a critical point Obie asks Archie if he hates this school:

Archie registered surprise: “I don’t hate anything or anybody.”

Obie sensed the sincerity in Archie’s reply…Do you love anything or anybody? Or is it just you don’t have any feelings at all?

The thing is, just a few pages earlier, we get our answer. A massive heat wave strikes the area:

Archie loved the heat. He loved it because other people were so uncomfortable…All in all, Archie felt a certain satisfaction with the heat wave.

One other student does feel the heat either. It’s the character who has resolved to kill Brother Leon and then himself. I don’t know if Cormier was essentially linking Archie to a terrorist leader by this comparison, but it’s hard to ignore.

Cormier goes to great lengths in both of the Chocolate War novels to give backstories and establish sympathy for not only minor characters, but even some of the villains. Emil Janza, who everybody considers muscle and nothing else (he beats down Jerry in two separate situations in each novel) clearly has a soul and an intellect that no one in the Vigils want to even know about. As much time as we spend with Archie Costello in both novels, we come away knowing nothing of his backstory, what happened to make him absence the usual human emotions. This must be a deliberate choice by Cormier: we know how the monster thinks but not why.

I have gone to this point in my narration on Beyond the Chocolate War and not given anything resembling a traditional summary of it. I don’t think I will. I will say for those of you who think you need to read The Chocolate War in order to appreciate the sequel, I actually think you don’t. It helps you understand why many of the characters in this book are reacting the way they are – even the Vigils have been severely shaken by the consequences of the first book. But at the end of the day, while it helps to have read the first book, Cormier does a decent job given bare bones as to why it was so important but why, considering everything that happens in the sequel, it was fundamentally irrelevant to the action that follows.

All you basically need to know about Beyond the Chocolate War is that people in the Vigils are beginning to actively hate as well as fear Archie. This leads them to do things they would not think themselves capable of. In a sense these acts of rebellion matter. In another sense they don’t, because you get the feeling that Archie truly is omniscient.

There are two things that occur to me having read this novel. Given all the power Archie has over the Vigils, why has he limited all the assignments to mere disruptions rather than trying to destroy the hold Brother Leon has over this school? Two reasons occur to me, neither comforting. The first is that Archie wanted to have an alibi for when the destruction happened – he implies as much at a critical moment. The other is just as troubling. Archie enjoyed the chaos he caused at Trinity, and now that he’s done with the school, he has no problem or regrets about burning it down.

The second is more interesting: What kind of man did Archie become?  I have some ideas. Maybe he moved to Albuquerque, developed a relationship with a drug cartel and decided to build up a front – a chicken restaurant – so that no one would suspect who he was. (Archie is much closer in his behavior to Gus Fring than Walter White.) Maybe he moved to New Jersey and became involved in waste management. Here’s the most likely – and terrifying scenario: he ran for Congress, well prepared to work behind the scenes and then willing to manipulate anyone to get the highest office in the land. (You have to admit Claire Underwood is perfectly matched with Archie in nature.) Peak TV is filled with shows that have characters who aren’t nearly as frightening as Archie as a teenager.

I think that it is more than time for Cormier to start get some limited series of his own. I’d suggest turning both Chocolate War books into a three season limited series. There are, of course, the problems that most of the characters in the novels are white males, but I don’t think anyone cares that much if color blind casting is involved. As for Brother Leon – Bryan Cranston has nothing to do right now.

These Endlesss Delights Lead to An Endless Mess, Overrated Series: Westworld

 

Endless Delights, But an Endless Mess

The Overrated Series: Westworld

1300^th Column

 

Many of the series that I consider for this column, I consider overrated because of their lack of ambition (Succession, Ozark) or their emphasis of style over substance (Euphoria). However, there are also some series that I don’t want to consider overrated because I badly want them to work but never quite gel. One of the prime examples of this is Westworld, one of the most convoluted and messy series in recent years that when you consider all the talent involved, you truly wonder: how did they get to this point?

Let us concede the obvious: the series is infinitely better than its source material. What was essentially a one-act horror movie in the 1970s, developed by Michael Crichton (who had yet to realize his talent) it’s basic plot was very simple: wealthy patrons went to the title park where they could undergo their most primitive fantasies against human-like automatons (the most famous of which was played by Yul Brynner). You went to the atmosphere and you got to have sex with or kill robots without paying the consequences. Then one of the robots malfunctioned and started attacking the guests. It inspired a couple of sequels in the decade, but the premise just sat there (unless you consider that Crichton considered it on a much grander scale for Jurassic Park.) It was not until more than a decade after Crichton’s death that HBO began to pursue the idea as a series.

And to be clear, the first season mostly worked very well. We spent most of it trying to figure out what was going on and who was actually human. (That Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard was revealed to be one may not only have been the highpoint of the first season but perhaps the entire series.) There were clearly levels of awareness around and brilliant performances from an extraordinary cast, made up almost entirely of actors I have admired for decades. Evan Rachel Wood, playing first the delicate flower we often associated her with as a youth and then realizing violence. Thandiwe Newton, getting to reveal inner deviousness as she tried to figure out the reality of her daughter. Ed Harris, one of my favorite actors of all time, as The Man in Black, someone whose been coming to the park for thirty years and who clearly believes there’s a message in it just for him. (Regardless of my feelings for the series, this is still some of the greatest work he’s ever done.) James Marsden, trying to figure out if his love for Dolores is real. And in a marvelous one season role, Anthony Hopkins as the mastermind behind the park, who spends the entire season trying to come up with a new ‘narrative’ and actually seems proud when that narrative begins with Dolores shooting him in the head. Throw in later appearance by such wondrous talents as Tessa Thompson and Aaron Paul, and you have one of the greatest casts assembled in any Peak TV series.

So what’s the problem with Westworld? Simple. After the first season, it became almost entirely incomprehensible. I watched the first season on and off with admiration, but I abandoned the series halfway through season 2 because the jumps in the timeline, the switches between new characters and fundamentally trying to figure out what the writers were trying to tell us with each successive season keeps becoming harder and harder to fathom. I have dealt with mythology series in my time where the backstory starts fraying at some point and it’s clear the writers have lost the narrative thread.  The larger problem with Westworld is that rather than try and resolve any basic threads with each season, the writers keep expanding the world of the show and putting the characters in it. Which would be fine if it didn’t keep changing the rules with almost every character.

After watching Westworld for long enough, I think the model that it follows the most closely is not a sci-fi show like Battlestar Galactica or The X-Files but rather Millennium. A little history will be in order. In 1996, Chris Carter premiered his follow up series to The X-Files, a show which followed ex-FBI profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen) who has just start consulting with an agency called the Millennium Group, an organization that, at least in the first season, is made up entirely of ex-FBI agents and other law enforcement officers. For much of the first season, it followed a simple model of Frank chasing down brutal serial killers (a precursor of later shows like Criminal Minds and Law and Order’s) Then near the end of the season, one of the recurring characters was murdered by someone identified as the Gehenna Devil, a clear demonic presence.

 From that point on, Millennium became a series that would delve as much into the paranormal as it did the mundane. The problem was it never defined what the show was basically about. This was clear fundamentally in the nature of The Millennium Group. An organization of ex-law enforcement in Season One, in Season Two, it appeared to become a cult centered on Judeo-Christian end-times determined to bring about the apocalypse. In Season Three, it seems to become illuminati like group bent on world domination. Terry O’Quinn played Peter Watts, the groups’ clearest face. In Season One, he was an ally of Frank. In Season Two, he seemed to be the group’s unwilling representative, questioned everything he believed as an apocalypse neared. In Season Three, he became something of a puppet master, trying to lure Frank back to the group. It’s small wonder that as you watch the series, you often see Henriksen struggling to figure out how to make his character shift with the tone of the series. (Adding to the confusion was the fact that each season of the series had a different set of showrunners at its head and the fact that Season 2 seemed to conclude with the apocalypse coming…and Season 3 acting as if it never happened.)

Fans of the show (and while it was never a smash, it did have a cult following) tried to find some kind of underlying plot going on within it. The truth is far simpler: Millennium managed to exist for three seasons without a clear mission statement as to what it was supposed to be about. We had no clearer perspective as to what the show meant at the beginning then we did when it was cancelled. And I think this fundamental disconnect is also apparent in each subsequent season of Westworld.

In Season 2, we get a clearer perspective as to what’s going on in the outside world: that some people are trying to use the hosts as a form of immortality or to defeat death. (Harris’ character is the son of one of the initial patrons.) Throughout Season 2, we learn that workers are also collecting data files on the patrons as much as the hosts. The purpose to this becomes clearer (as much as things do on this show) when we enter the outside world and learn that humanity is being controlled by an artificial intelligence system that is subverting everybody’s free will led primarily by the technology developed by Delos. Season 3 ends with the destruction of the system and the revolt of humanity.

The most recent season involved a new world where the Man in Black (Harris) was working with Thompson’s character to develop a farm of servers. She was created a world where hosts were now in power and spent their time hunting humans.  There were revolts going on by a ‘resistance faction’, characters who we’d seen dead were now alive in some form, there was a virtual world known as ‘The Sublime’ and Maeve’s daughter was leading the resistance searching for her father. It was fascinating – and utterly impossible to follow what the hell was going on from scene to scene, much less episode to episode.  The season ends with Dolores (I know she was killed at the end of Season 3, but let’s not pretend that logic holds a place here) telling us that sentient life on Earth is doomed, unless one final test saves it. And the Season ends with us back yet again in the title park.

Westworld is a series designed not only to isolate the casual viewer but pretty much even the viewer who is loyal for four seasons. This is a tragedy because many of the individual parts of the show are absolutely fascinating. I remember watching a recent episode where Caleb (Paul) tries to escape from his cell, only to realize that there are dozens of hosts in the cell around him. As he escapes, he keeps coming across bodies of himself, each of whom followed this exact path but couldn’t get further. At one point, he finds a dying version of himself in a duct and an impossible jump. The dying Caleb tells him to use his body to survive. Caleb finally makes it to a place to escape and instead broadcasts a message to his daughter. He spends his final moments raving at his captor – and the episode ends with a new Caleb being molded and the questioning about to resume.

And all of the actors are always mesmerizing on the screen, particularly Harris who seems to be relishing playing the destroyer of worlds, human or host. There is a reason that members of the cast keep getting Emmy nominations year after year; the performances are always solid, and that’s remarkable considering that who were watching is often as much a mystery to the actors as it is to the characters as well as the fact that none of them, being human, get to emote much.

Normally I flaunt series that I consider unambitious in their scope. Westworld has the opposite problem: it’s far too ambitious. If it were to try to deal with smaller in scale ideas – had it stuck within the realm of the parks and the Delos Corporation – I think it might have worked better. But the fact that it keeps putting the goal posts further and further away makes it impossible to tell a story – in four seasons we’ve gone through a malfunction at a theme park to the fate of the human race…which apparently will now be determined at that same theme park.

I suspect that the next season for Westworld will be the final one – the phrasing of all the characters in the last episode would seem to indicate as much. Besides, there isn’t much further they can take the series – space exploration anyone?  While the legacy of so many overrated series is that they barely tried to shift the parameters of their formula, the flaw of Westworld is one that shifted far too often and whose reach was ultimately beyond its grasp. I regret the way things turned out for Westworld far more than I did for a show like Ozark – this series had the potential for greatness, but couldn’t move beyond the limits of its hosts.

There May Be Method (Man) To Donald Glover's Madness: Atlanta Returns for its Final Season

 

While I have few complaints about the Emmy nominations for Best Comedy this past year, I was irked that the third season of Atlanta which was more radical, surreal and hysterical than many comedies hope to be was ignored for Best Comedy in favor of the more traditional Curb Your Enthusiasm. That being said, it didn’t surprise me.

The third season of Donald Glover’s magnificent comedy was no doubt more divisive than any comedy season ever and for good reason: four full episodes took place in a world where none of the regular characters even seemed to inhabit, and seemed more fitting Jordan Peele’s recent remake of The Twilight Zone than anything else. While episodes like ‘Three Slaps’ and ‘Trini from the Block’ clearly showed insight into the world that so many African-Americans inhabit today,  their relevance to what was going on in Paperboi’s European tour seemed non-existent. (Until the final moment of the season finale, which made us question everything we’d seen.) And it’s not like that there was a lot of craziness going around the tour: few who saw Alfred take that trip to ‘New Jazz’ will ever forget it and watching Van inhabit the world of ‘Tarrare’ in Paris showed us just how lost she was.  While the HCA was awed in general by what they saw, I’m not surprised the more traditional Emmys couldn’t figure out what to do with it.

Well, the craziness that inhabited Season 3 has been on display to just as great an extent so far in Season 4, but I have a feeling fans will be more forgiving for a very important reason: Glover, Hiro Murai and his team have now put the leads front and center of it. The fourth season opens with Darius entering a store which is clearly being looted, trying to returning a pasta cooker, which utterly stuns the cashier who starts the process before running off with the cash. Darius then leaves the store only to encounter a woman in a motorized wheelchair who most of the people run from and so she focuses on Darius. 

 Darius then returns to Alfred, who has been waiting for him in a traffic jam that has not moved for an hour. Then he sees that same old woman in the motorized scooter. He gets out of the car, and she starts chasing him…and chasing him.

Meanwhile Alfred learns of the death of a rapper he admired who has dropped a new album before he died. He then goes to a restaurant the rapper mentioned, asks for a special…and finds a clue to something. Earn and Van in the meantime are having an increasingly weird time at a shopping mall. Earn encounters an old girlfriend in the parking lot. Then Van sees that someone who waited on her at an Apple store ten years ago. This starts becoming more and more frightening, particularly when they return to the parking lot and find that same woman, who casually tells them she’s been in the mall for more than six years.  The writers find a way to tie all these loose ends together (without explaining all of them) and we get a hint that Season 4 might have more to it than that.

The three episodes I’ve seen so far show Atlanta and Glover in particular on the top of his game. Despite being nominated for Best Actor in a Comedy this July, Glover was far less of a presence in Season 3, appearing in only half the ten episodes. Much of the three episodes have focused on Earn in a way we haven’t seen since early Season 2. In the second episode, we followed Earn as he was going through therapy, first talking about how he had gotten expelled from college because of a false allegation by someone he thought was friend, how he was invited back and refused at first, then how a trip to accept an honorary degree derailed at the airport, while telling us bits and pieces from his childhood. The last therapy session he went through showed Earn deciding to let go of his spite and take a break of therapy for awhile. All of this was intercut with the story of another woman in the middle of trying to sell a children’s book. The connection didn’t become clear until the final scene (and if you haven’t seen this episode, I won’t spoil it) and when it was, we had to look at Earn in a very unfavorable light for perhaps the first time in the entire show.

Last night’s episode split the focus fairly evenly between Earn and Alfred (Bryan Tyree Henry). Alfred found himself being ‘bought’ to help a millionaire’s son becoming a rapper. He met a colleague of his and they went off together, which led to a discussion where the two got high and discussed how to get rich. This let to another surreal sequence where they went to meet a man who discussed the importance of getting an YWA (young white avatar) in order to win Grammys. (In all the years of the series, this is the first time Atlanta has directed addressed the implied racism within the Grammys.) Alfred found himself pursuing one and eventually lands one. We see him at the Grammys – and the rest I will leave you to discover.

Meanwhile, we saw Earn working at his agency wanting desperately to get away from an account where the team was working on how to ‘rebrand’ a white woman who held a gun on an African-American child. Mentioning that he might be able to find ‘D’Angelo’, Earn goes to a gas station where he finds a restroom sign labeled ‘D’Angelo’. He goes in to find a fancy door with a man standing in front of it, reading a magazine. Earn waits…and waits…and waits.  Finally after he protests for awhile, he asks the guard the right question. The guard opens a passage in the wall and Earn goes through it. What he eventually finds I will leave for you to see; all I can say is, even the radical artists have a price.

Atlanta debuted just prior to the 2016 election, and in its way it seems like a perfect mirror to the surreal world that everyone, not just African-Americans, have been inhabiting ever since. Not everyone likes the weirdness that it inhabits – it was one thing to go through it once in a while, like in the landmark episodes ‘B.A.N.’ and ‘Teddy Perkins’, but after awhile one clings to the idea of ‘normality’ as if every episode that we saw in much of the first two seasons was a map of logic.  In a way, you could say that the third season of Atlanta expanded the level of weirdness to the entire world - a ‘traditional’ episode like ‘The Old Man and The Tree’ was only normal because the entire cast was there.  I have a feeling that the haters of so many episodes don’t like the strange in their urban comedies, but Atlanta has spent its entire run avoiding being categorized and it is giving little sign of doing the same in its final season.

What will happen to Paperboi’s career? Will Earn and Van end up together? Will the link between the bottle episodes be explained in the final season? I care about resolution to the first two questions, but not the last. Atlanta has never been a mythology series or one that is interesting in explaining most of what we see.  Donald Glover and Hiro Murai have created one of the most engaging universes in either comedy or drama, and when it comes to an end in a few weeks, I shall be as sad to see it depart as I was This is Us and Better Call Saul earlier this year. They have nothing in common except the unbridled genius at the core of them. Maybe if the cast and crew got some YWAs of their own, they could guarantee they’d dominate the Emmys next year. I hope they don’t need them.

My score: 5 stars.