How Their Most Recent Broadcasts Tell You Everything You Need To Know About John Oliver and Bill Maher

 

I know, you’re tired of me writing about Bill Maher. So am I. But watching Friday night’s Real Time, combined with other factors, have just given me too much material.

However, I wanted to make sure I could to a reasonable compare-and-contrast with my favorite late night comic, John Oliver, so I waited until last night’s new episode to make sure he wouldn’t let me down. As is almost always the case, he did not. So I think giving you a summary the most recent episodes of Last Week Tonight and Real Time probably will tell you everything you need to know about the kind of comedians both men are, their political philosophies and I why I infinitely prefer Oliver to Maher.

Last night, Oliver gave exactly thirty seconds to the ‘major stories’ of the week – the attack on Paul Pelosi and the midterms, and only as part of a larger source. His opening sequence dealt in great detail with a recurring theme of his: ‘anarchy in the U.K.,” specifically Liz Truss’ recent resignation, which he went into great detail in as short as time a possible about how disastrous it was, the arrival of Rishi Sunak, who is inherited a bigger mess which he is less qualified to deal with and may not be even able to clear the spectacularly low bar Truss set, and just how messy this is going to get. He then devoted his ‘main story’ to bail reform, which is a critical issue in the year’s midterms. He started out by pointing out that the show had dealt with this story seven years earlier on the same night at this year’s Tonys, which had had a musical tribute to Harvey Weinstein. This was a brilliant gag on its own, but he managed to tie into to the overarching narrative he was telling. He related in great detail the unfairness of the cash bail system and that the majority of people in prison are there because they can’t meet bail rather than being actual criminals, how reform has improved immensely in some states (he went out of his way to praise Chris Christie for doing so in New Jersey, which he holds as a model for the nation) and went just as hard at New York and how the police brass have engaged in open deception with the public as to the harm its not doing and how so many other politicians conflate being charged with crime as being guilty of it. And he showed very clearly what the cost of bail can be, in a story that he didn’t include in the 2015 piece for the most gut-wrenching of reasons. That he managed to do all of this and not only make it entertain but often hysterical is proof of how good he is at every aspect of his job.

Bill Maher, by contrast, was Bill Maher. To his credit, he was willing to admit the foreboding signs of the attack on Paul Pelosi, but then he went on his tangent. His reaction to Elon Musk taking over Twitter was that we should lay off on him, because fundamentally he believe it is billionaires like him who can save the planet from climate change. This is simultaneously deeply cynical of politics and humanity in general and incredibly naïve in the idea that corporations and billionaires are humanity’s last, best hope. But what do you expect from a man who doesn’t think that if it came to a choice between giving up TV or saving the planet, no one would give up the remote? (His words, not mine.)

But the piece de resistance came in his final segment – where he decided the most pressing issue of the day was how millennials don’t appreciate Halloween. Seriously, he spent as much time dealing with this as Oliver spent dealing with the situation in the U.K. You need to hear this because you won’t believe me otherwise. Bill Maher  - or more likely one of the staffers whose job it is to do this – tracked down a list on Buzzfeed written about 21 Halloween Costumes You Shouldn’t Wear.

Now because I wanted to give Maher the benefit of the doubt, I tracked down this list. It took some doing because there were dozens of others lists about Scary, Funny, and appropriate Halloween costumes you should wear, but I found it. And yes, it is ridiculous, saying that dressing as the Queen, as Covid, anything related to the Will Smith Oscar slap, anti-vaxxers or the Handmaid’s Tale is inappropriate. Indeed, it is so ridiculous that I actually read some of the comments. Of the fifty I read, almost all of them were of the same nature: “Is this a joke?, “dressing like Covid is funny,’ and ‘this is why no one likes millennials.”

But Bill Maher, who never let nuance or even the facts get in the way of something he believes him, naturally picked this out. This one list appear on a site millennials frequent, therefore is the point of view of this site, therefore every single millennial on this list believes this. Since Maher’s act is now almost entirely centered on how anyone who is younger, a different gender or race then his is stupid, he leaned into this hard. Naturally, he defended even the worst aspects of the lists, including the racism, sexism (he will always defend Playboy) and pedophilia. (No I’m serious. His costume ideas included Kevin Spacey slapping a mariachi band.) Why Maher should care so much about Halloween is another question – he has always been anti-children, and this is their major holiday – but Maher never notices contradiction. And of course, he decided that he would dress up as a millennial, making every single unpleasant reference including against masks and called them wet blankets. I didn’t laugh once during this routine. But that’s okay. Maher laughs enough at his own jokes for everybody.

In the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, one of the new cast members reacted to Colin Jost calling himself a ‘Bill Maher liberal,’ by responding: “So, you’re a Republican.” That got one of the biggest  laughs of the night because at this point as much Bill Maher claims to loathe every aspect of what Republicans stand for, at the end of the day, he basically agrees with every part of the platform expect being against climate change and democracy. (I’ve never understood why Maher cares so much about climate change. He cares about no other aspect of human life and is almost certainly going to be dead when it finally reaches critical mass. This is going to be a problem for the next generation and he’s made a career of attacking them. I digress.)

And the thing is Bill Maher is a specific type of Republican. His politics at their core are closest to Robert Taft, an Ohio Senator from 1938 to 1953 who was actually known as Mr. Republican. Taft was anti-New Deal and the most famous act of legislation he sponsored seriously curtailed unions ability to negotiate with management. He was an isolationist during the lead up to World War II (he even ran a presidential campaign based on it) and well after the fact, arguing against the U.S. involvement in organizations like the U.N. and NATO and signing on to the Marshall Plan. In private, he loathed the demagogues like Joe McCarthy, but never made a stand against them because he thought it politically beneficial. The most you could say in his favor was that he was not a social conservative, but back then that only meant giving lip service to civil rights and most African-Americans were voting Republican anyway.

It doesn’t take much extrapolation to see that this philosophy matches with Maher’s. He has never been favor of government spending during major crisis (he argued against repeatedly during the pandemic) and doesn’t have much to say about labor. Maher fundamentally argues that it is not America’s place to be the world’s policeman (admittedly coming from a stronger place than Taft did at the time) when he talks about international affairs at all. Maher has never been a progressive or civil rights advocate at any time and uses the term ‘woke’ in the same derogatory fashion that so many who argued against the civil rights movement would use the term ‘communism.’ His arguments for people like Musk indicate just how pro-business he truly is. And for all the rants and arguments he has made against right-wing media and Trump in particular, the fact remains he appears on more far-right shows that any other entertainer and has just as many on his show. I’ve heard the interviews. It’s not because he wants to yell at them. And sure, he ranted against Trump as much as any of his fellow late night entertainers, but I remember watching a standup special he did in 2017, in which he said that Trump was like Bernie Sanders in that they were both ‘authentic’ and ‘not typical politicians.’ He is the kind of person who can ridicule Fox News on a Friday and appear on it on a Saturday.

Oliver’s politics, by contrast, most closely resemble that of Hubert Humphrey, a man who began his political career advocating in the strongest possible sense for civil rights (he gave his address at the 1948 Democratic Convention that caused several southern delegations to walk out) and spent  twenty-two of the next thirty years representing Minnesota in the Senate. (There was, of course, an interval as LBJ’s vice president that has permanently dulled the luster of his liberalism.) He spent his entire career advocating for the rights of minorities and for the rights of labor. He was known for memorable, delightful speeches and while he was anti-Communist, he was more than willing to vote to censure Joe McCarthy when his attacks became too prevalent to ignore. He spent much of his later career trying to become president, losing the nomination to JFK in 1960 because he wasn’t glamorous enough, being nominated in 1968 but losing to Nixon because he was viewed as too loyal to his mentor, and trying for the nomination in 1972 but losing to McGovern because by that point he was considered ‘part of the establishment.’

You watch any episode of Jon Oliver, you see a man arguing against the inequities of the system, not just America, but around the world, including his home of England. (He recently did a special on museums that you wouldn’t have thought deserved forty-five minutes, but by the time it was over, you wished it would be a series.) He speaks up for the voiceless, talking for all the problems of the world today, advocating for institutional reform, and frustrated that it is unlikely to happen. And as much as he has been an entertaining, Oliver has achieved reform, almost despite himself. In one of his first shows, he introduced to his viewers the problems facing net neutrality. He galvanized an internet campaign that made the Obama administration do an about face. To show the flaws in television ministries, he created his own church. He exposed the flaws in FIFA before it ended up collapsing. And not only did he make an argument for debt forgiveness, but he also actually put his money where his mouth was and helped forgive some -$15 million worth.

. Bill Maher thinks the world is flawed because no one is listening to what he has to say. There’s a much better argument that more people need to listen to Oliver. He tells us about the flaws in the world we don’t know about but that we need to. Oliver’s act is about self-awareness and self-deprecation. Maher’s is pure self-righteousness.

In his campaign for President in 1968, Bob Kennedy would end his speeches by saying: “Some people see the world for how it is, and ask ‘why?’ I see the world for how it could be and ask, “why not?” (Oliver would know this was a Shaw quote without having be told by the way.) Those two views show how Maher and Oliver see the world. With one major difference. Maher doesn’t ask or even care about why the world is the way it is. He’s actually built his act on it. Oliver is still hoping for the why not, even though he knows better, and that’s what he has built his show around. No matter how grim the outlook, he advocates for change because the status quo isn’t working. Maher believes just as firmly that any change will only make things worse.

 

Thoroughbreds and Two of the Most Terrifying Teenage Girls You'll Ever Meet

 

 

Anya Taylor-Joy has one of the most unsettling stares any actress ever possesses. You just don’t know what she’s thinking. It was clear in her breakout role in what of the most horrifying movies in the 2010s The Witch when you just couldn’t tell if what you were seeing was supernatural – until the last lines. I’m pretty certain it was one of the main reasons that so many people (myself included) were drawn into the Emmy-winning The Queen’s Gambit (where Taylor-Joy took every prize but the Emmy). There was a lot of subtle eroticism is Taylor-Joy’s work  - no mean feat in a limited series entirely about chess – but one of the reasons I loved it so much was that look on her face she got where you never knew what she was thinking at any time. She’s already one of the most impressive actresses working today and she’s only 26.

I mention all of this because I’ve been watching and rewatching over the past several months one of her earliest films Thoroughbreds, and it wasn’t until the sixth or seventh time that it finally registered that Taylor-Joy was in it. I say this because even though her performance is a master class, my attention was always drawn to her co-lead Olivia Cooke.

Cooke, like Taylor-Joy, is another actress who started young and has had many brilliant roles. In Bates Motel, where so much of the action was dominated by the extraordinary work of Freddie Highmore and Vera Farmiga, Cooke often dominated the screen as Emma, a classmate of Norman’s who spent her life tied to an oxygen tank. Every time you saw her, you thought it was a matter of time before she ended up one of Norman’s victims, and I’m still stunned she survived until the end of the series. She has played Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair; she’s already worked with Spielberg and she has a critical role on             House of the Dragon. None of that prepares you for her work as Amanda in Thoroughbreds.

The movie is short (little more than an hour and a half long) and very concise. Writer-director Cory Finley conceived at as a play, and there are few non-stage to screen adaptations that you could see working as one. The movie takes place almost entirely in a Connecticut mansion owned by the family of Lily, a teenage girl in an upper class boarding school. Much of the time  the camera follows the actors around the mansion in a way you just don’t notice happen in any other film but seems necessary rather than showy. The movie itself is divided into four ‘chapters’ and an epilogue, which give it the feel of a traditional Shakespearean play, even though it would be closer to a comedy than any tragedy he would right. And aside from the two female leads, there are very few other characters in the film, and even fewer that register.

Lily and Amanda were friends when they were children. We first meet Amanda when she comes to Lily’s home and the camera follows her around the mansion as she waits for Lily to show up. At one point, Amanda is examining a sword on the wall when Lily finally arrives. Amanda has ostensibly come for SAT tutoring. It’s not more than five minutes into the movie when we realize there’s more to it than that because Amanda is fine telling us.

Amanda, as we will learn, has been in an institution for animal cruelty. Her family had a horse, it broke its leg and she killed it – not humanely. Amanda tells Lilly in a way that is unsettling to everybody but to her is normal that she doesn’t feel anything. Not said, not pain, nothing.  Her psychiatrist is running out of ideas. Her mother has fundamentally asked for this tutoring session to get her daughter out of the house. “She’s paying for a play date,” she says.

I don’t know if there’s ever been a character quite like Amanda in film or television. Dexter Morgan and Norman Bates were disturbed but at least they tried to put up a polite face to society so as not to scare people. Amanda doesn’t even bother with that. When she eventually describes how she killed her horse, she recites the butchery – and that’s what it is, she spares no detail – while distracted moving around the pieces of a life-sized chessboard. At one point, she calmly and simply tells Lily how to fake a crying jag and she doesn’t comprehend the difference. You understand why Lily had no friends. You don’t get why Amanda wants to be hers. Then you get to know her.

Amanda spends much of the first chapter telling Lily that she’s taking a gap year, that she has a prominent internship and that her stepfather is a cruel bastard. We’re inclined to believe the latter very much – we meet him while she and Amanda are watching a movie and he demands that Amanda leave. (Amanda has to tell him her mother’s going through chemotherapy before he reluctantly backs off.) It is not long after this that Amanda almost casually suggests killing him. Lily is horrified as much by the suggestion as the reason she gives: “It would be better for society if he was killed,” Amanda says. Lily demands Amanda leave. In the next chapter, she visits Amanda. (The silent gratitude on her mother’s face speaks volumes.) Lily brings up casually in the second chapter the idea of killing her stepfather again and Amanda only recoils when it is suggested that she do it. It doesn’t take much more persuasion to get her on board.

The thing is, by this point, Amanda and the audience know that Lily is lying. Lily has been kicked out of boarding school because of a plagiarism scandal and is actually angry at her mother for not signed her ‘version’ of events which is unapologetic. When her stepfather insists that she attend Swarthmore she is infuriated because she doesn’t want to leave her home.  And while her stepfather (Paul Sparks) seems very much like a perfect bastard the first two chapters of the movie, there’s a scene near the end of the third where he lays out very plainly just how much of a spoiled brat she is. At the end of it, Lily is pissed that Amanda didn’t kill him. “He has a point,” she tells her. “Empathy isn’t really your strong suit.” Considering the source, that tells you all you really need to know about Lily.

The third major character in the film is the main source of comedy, Tim a local loser drug dealer. This was one of the last films Anton Yelchin completed before his tragic death. Having already shot to stardom as Chekov in the J.J. Abrams rebooting of Star Trek, Yelchin was beginning to take roles that showed more of his range, mainly as lowly types that were trying to punch way above their weight. (He played a similar role in the incredible Green Room.) Tim is such a pathetic criminal that teenagers won’t buy drugs from him.  They openly mock him, saying that he went to prison for statutory rape when he was twenty-five. (“Twenty-three!” he shouts desperately.) He says he grand plans but is selling drugs to teenagers because he’s scared to deal to adults. Lily and Amanda hire him, because they know he’s desperate for money and they’re pretty sure he is so weak that they can blackmail and bully him into doing this. In the third chapter, he is led to their house and just stares at luxury he knows he will never have before they force him to listen to their plan. The one moment he seems like he might be a genuine threat, Amanda clocks him with a lamp. “You can not hesitate,” she says calmly before moving him into the family bathtub. His protests are pathetic all the way through. “How am I going to explain this to my father?” he actually shouts about the wound he’s incurred. Amanda and Lily’s biggest miscalculation is that they each think he has the spine to go through with this crime when they know full well how pathetic he is.

It may be a spoiler to tell you that at the end of the movie the stepfather does in fact die, but since this movie has so many trademarks of noir, it can’t really come as a shock. What I will not reveal is the exact details of who ends up committing  and what they do to make sure they get away with it. What I will say is that most of the final chapter involves a scene where the two girls are sitting and watching a film and then a long period when the murder actually happens where we hear nothing at all.

As to the epilogue, that I will say nothing about, except that when it is over, there will be several troubling questions that occur to you by the end.  Which of the two girls truly got a happy ending when all was said and done? And which of them is truly the most inhuman?

There are movies that are brought up in association with this. Some might thing of Heathers, some American Psycho, some Strangers on a Train. I kept thinking of In Cold Blood, and how in the film we heard that the murders could not have been committing by either of the two men by themselves. I don’t think this is the case in Thoroughbreds;  Lily wanted her stepfather dead no matter what. So the question is: did Lily want Amanda around because she was the only person who could she think of that would give her permission?

This is...Your Jeopardy Tournament of Champions Cheat Sheet!

 

 

The time has come. Is the 2022 Tournament of Champions the most anticipated in the history of Jeopardy? I can’t say. But it almost certainly is the one most by people who have only started watching the show in the last few years.

And given that three of the greatest Jeopardy champions in the show’s history will be at the center of it – Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider, and Mattea Roach, who combined have won 101 games and over $3.5 million – it’s hard to argue why. (Although given how much money all three have won already, is the grand prize of $250,000 that they are playing for simply chump change at this point? Well, James Holzhauer didn’t treat it as such.)

It's also hard to argue that this isn’t one of the most significant Tournaments for other reasons. To state the one that millions have already focused on, this is by far the most LGTBQ+ friendly Jeopardy tournament in history. Amy Schneider is transgender, Mattea Roach is a lesbian and Rowan Ward, one of the winners – and the viral sensation of the just completed Second Chance Tournament – is the first non-binary competitor in history. There have been gay, lesbian and trans players on the show in the past but given the way the world and sadly Jeopardy works that same way, most have been in the closet until well after their appearances. (The very first winner of a Tournament of Champions, Jerry Frankel, was gay and actually suffering from AIDS during his Tournament win in November of 1985. He passed away just two weeks after his shows aired.) I don’t deny this is significant. It also helps matters that Amy and Schneider are two of the greatest players in history and Rowan more than demonstrated that they could be one..

Equally significant is that this particular tournament has the most female participants of any tournament in the history of Jeopardy. Setting aside Rowan, there are eight female champions competing in this tournament. Granted the ratio of male to female champions is still three to two but considering that for almost all of the Jeopardy Tournaments of Champions as well as special tournaments over the years, the ratio of male to female champions is usually two to one at best, this is a huge deal for the show, particularly one that recently had to fire its executive producer for sexist behavior behind the scenes. And make no mistake, all of these female champions are excellent players. (Sure I advocated for four of them not making it due to normal rules, but I’m not going to take a bow for that. They earned it.)

Now I could expend a lot of energy trying to predict whose going to win this tournament. But as I’ve send in countless Jeopardy related blogs in the past several years, that is absolutely the one thing you can never do on this show and not risk looking like an idiot. I’m not even willing to say with certainty that those same three great champions will necessarily be playing in the finals in two weeks. I get it: they have a bye to the semi-finals while the other eighteen players are going to be battling it out. That doesn’t necessarily give them at advantage. Just because you have an edge going into one of these tournaments promises nothing. Ken Jennings himself knows this better than anybody.

Hell, Matt Amodio may be in more trouble than he thinks. Jonathan Fisher, an eleven game champion I’ll be going into detail below on, is playing against him. And both Rowan and the other Second Chance finalist Jessica Stephens are in this tournament because of their performance against Matt. Rowan forced him to a near draw. Jessica defeated him in Final Jeopardy but ended up losing to Jonathan Fisher. So if any of those three make it to a semi-final against him, Matt might be in for more than he bargained for.

Now at this point, if you go to the Jeopardy website or look online, you know the makeup of all six quarterfinal matches. I could just as easily write it down and try to make predictions, but like I said, I don’t want to look like an idiot. So instead, I’m going to focus on the accomplishments of the ‘Elite Eighteen’ (to coin a phrase the show used in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, so you can tell the champions without a scorecard. For the sake of time, I will proceed chronologically, starting with the earliest winner:

Brian Chang: 7 Games Won, $163,904

Analysis: Some players on this list will be remembered for trivial reasons. Brian’s place is more morbid. He is the first player to win five games after Alex Trebek died. He also was the third player in Jeopardy history to win a tie-breaker round (as Jack Weller would eventually benefit from) And his run came to end when he was beaten by…

Zach Newkirk: 6 Wins, $124,871

Analysis: Zach has an even more dubious place in Jeopardy history; he is the first champion whose run was interrupted due to Covid travel restrictions. That may have cost him his chance to participate in the 2021 Tournament of Champions. It has been nearly two years since his last appearance on the show. Hopefully, there won’t be too much rust.

John Focht: 4 Wins, $103,800

Analysis: Full Disclosure; I completely missed John prior to this tournament. That’s particularly unfair, considering he managed $25,000 per win, a better record than quite a few players on this list who won far more games. It doesn’t per se give him a better chance than many of the players on this list; but don’t underestimate him.

Courtney Shah, 7 Wins, $118,558

Analysis: Seven wins is a good number for any Jeopardy champion. Of course, given the way the world works, Courtney will probably be remembered for being the only Jeopardy Tournament of Champions player to have her run under a single guest host: (Sanjay Gupta). And if this helps you remember who she is, well, whatever works.

Jonathan Fisher, 11 Wins, $246,100

Analysis: It says a lot about how Jeopardy is that Jonathan’s place in history will be first ‘the player who defeated Matt Amodio’ rather than managed to win eleven games and nearly a quarter of a million dollars. That he won six games in blowouts and had become what was only the tenth player to win eleven games in that points makes him little more than small potatoes this season. Don’t underestimate him. Matt Amodio did.

Tyler Rhode, 5 Wins - $105,901

Analysis: This is more personal. I remember thinking after Tyler’s fifth game that Season 38 of Jeopardy might be special. We were two months in the season and we had just one player who left after one game. I didn’t know just how close to the truth I was.

Andrew He, 5 Wins - $157,365

Analysis: Similar to Jonathan, Andrew will most likely be remembered as the player who was defeated by Amy Schneider for her first victory. Of course, winning five games this season (even if four of them were blowouts) and ‘only’ $157,365 (even thought that’s more than one seven-game winner and one six-game winner) doesn’t count for much either this year. He was, for the record, ahead of Amy at the start of Final Jeopardy before he lost. I think she’ll remember that.

Sam Buttrey, Professors Tournament Winner - $100,000

Analysis: If this is the official replacement to the Teachers Tournament, Sam is more than up to the challenge. He won his quarterfinal in a runaway, had the only correct answer to win his semi-final and won the final in a runaway.

Jaskaran Singh, National College Champion - $250,000

Analysis: An exceptionally good champion, he won his first game in a rout, had a come from behind victory in his semi-final and was in complete command in the two game final pretty much from the start of Game 1 to the end of Game 2.

 

Christine Whelchel,  4 Wins- $73,602

Analysis: Christine is known as much for being a cancer survivor as a Jeopardy champion (she appeared in her fifth appearance without her wig). She also managed to begin her run on the show by winning a tie-breaker. Her streak was ended by.,.

Margaret Shelton 4 Wins, $79,700

Analysis: Slightly luckier than Christine she managed one major come from behind win and one rout. She was leading in Final Jeopardy for Game 5, and had she just wagered sensibly in Final Jeopardy (her opponent also got the response wrong) her run would have kept going. Instead, she lost everything leading to the run of…

Maureen O’Neill, 4 Wins, $58,200

Analysis: Maureen decided to follow Margaret’s example and bet everything in Final Jeopardy whether she was leading at the end of Double Jeopardy or not. This worked for her for four games but in Game 5, her luck ran out and she finished in the red.

Jackie Kelly, 4 Wins, $115,100

Analysis: Jackie won just $7500 in her first appearance, which meant she basically won $104,000 in three games. That’s pretty impressive no matter how you many games you win.

Ryan Long – 16 WINS, $299,400

Analysis: No mistake that Ryan was one of the luckiest of the multi-game winners this season. He had four absolute runaways and two were basically lock ties, he had three wins where he had to come from behind in Final Jeopardy to prevail and he didn’t have a lot of huge payouts, particularly compared to the other three super champions and even some of the smaller winners on this list. But all that means is that he had to work a lot harder then most of them to get where he needed to. Don’t pretend that doesn’t count for something.

Eric Ahasic -  6 Wins, $160,601

Analysis: Eric Ahasic, of course, will go down in Jeopardy lore as the player who beat Ryan Long. Of course, he then went on to win his next five games in utter routs, averaging $27,000 a win from that point forward. Throughout the sixth game it looked very much like he was going to keep on winning his seventh straight, which is why we give credit to…

Megan Wachspress  6 Wins, $60,603

Analysis: Okay, I can’t exactly pretend Megan is one of the all time greats, especially when I spent so many articles arguing that at least three of the players I mentioned above should be included despite Megan’s accomplishment. And it becomes a lot trickier when you know that really, one player she beat really should have ended her streak at three games. (Sadie Goldberger learned that you write only the last name of the correct answer if nothing else.) But six games and $60,603 is not nothing. A six game winner on Jeopardy is as qualified as anyone else.

Jessica Stephens – Second Chance Finalist, $35,000

Rowan Ward – Second Chance Finalist, $35,000

Analysis: I have nothing further to say about either of these players that it didn’t say in my analysis of the Second Chance Tournament save to repeat, Matt Amodio had better hope neither of them ends up in his semi-final match.

One last thing to take away from this list: how few players in this Tournament won five games or less. That may not count for much in the era of super-champion, but as someone who remembers very clearly how rare it was in so many tournaments to have more than one player who won more than five games (for the record, the 2021 Tournament of Champions had four players who’d won more than five games and five players who’d won four games or less) this shows that multi-game winners are starting to become more common than ever. Considering the higher ratings for Jeopardy in the past year, it’s hard to argue this is a bad development.

All right. You have the list. I’ll be back after the first quarterfinal matches to make more assessments.

 

Final Analysis on The Jeopardy Second Chance Tournament

 

Well, the million to one shot didn’t pay off. But not for lack of trying.

Last night, I basically said that Rowan Ward was on their way to the Tournament of Champions after finishing Game 1 of the Final with $30,000, more than $25,000 than their nearest opponent. Until the very end of Game 2, there was an excellent chance that I was going to have spend this article eating even more crow. Because Jack Weller spent all of that time making it look like the impossible was going to happen.

Rowan did what they had done in Game 1 and got off to a fast start, but unlike in Game 1 their opponents were determined not to go quietly. Jack managed to get to the Daily Double in the Jeopardy round ahead of them – something no one had managed in Game 1. Knowing what he was up against, he bet $1800 in the category FROM THE LATIN:

“This 9-letter word for the sacred writings of the Bible is from the Latin for ‘to write’.

Jack knew it was scripture and doubled his score.  Rowan managed to overtake him late in the Jeopardy round, but unlike last night, when it ended their lead was anything but insurmountable. Rowan had $6800, just $2000 more than James.  Sadie had $2600.

A critical moment came early in Double Jeopardy. On the second clue of the round in MYTH-POURRI, Rowan got a $1600 clue wrong and James got it right. He went back into the lead with $7600 and far more importantly found the first Daily Double on the next clue of the round in that category.  He went big: $7000.

“Allecto, or ‘unceasing in anger’, was one of the 3 vengeance goddesses really living up to this collective name.” Hew knew they were the Furies and widened his lead to $14,600. For the rest of Double Jeopardy Rowan was chasing him but couldn’t catch him. The closest they ever game to narrowing the gap was when Rowan found the other Daily Double in DAYS OF YORE and bet the $6400 that they had:

“In 1429 Charles VII granted nobility, arms and the surname du Lys to her family.”

Rowan knew it was Joan of Arc and went up to $13,600 to Jack’s $18,200. That was as close as Rowan would get to him. Rowan actually got far more correct answers than Jack – 27 to his 18 – but Jack didn’t make a single mistake, and perhaps more importantly five of his correct answers were $2000 clues. By the time Double Jeopardy was over, Jack was in the lead with $29,400 to Rowan’s $20,000. (Sadie had the misfortune of being caught between these two buzzsaws and had only $5000. If Jack could get Final Jeopardy right and Rowan erred, he could very well pull off one of the biggest comebacks in Jeopardy history.

The Final Jeopardy category was the deceptively easy sounding ARTISTS. The clue was very tough: “Sabena Airlines commissioned a painting by this artist, “L’Ouiseau de Ciel”, a bird whose body is filled with clouds in a blue sky.” All three players guessed Picasso, which was the wrong response. The correct one was Rene Magritte. (Sabena is the National Airline of Belgium and Magritte is a famous Belgian surrealist.)  Jack by necessity wagered everything and Rowan ended up betting $12,201 (which would have been enough to beat Jack by one dollar had both of them been correct). As a result, Rowan still emerged the victor but they clearly knew how close they had cut it: Rowan was understandably emotional by the end.

It's hard to argue the Second Chance didn’t provide exactly what Jeopardy looks for in any tournament: great play memorable games and exciting finals, both of which (for completely different reasons) came down to the last moments in Final Jeopardy. There were exciting close games and runaway games. There were fascinating personalities and breakout stars. There were tough Finals and categories which showed immense amounts of humor by the writers, occasionally poking fun at the contestants and the nature of the Tournament. (In the last Double Jeopardy round of tonight’s game, there was a category called ‘SECOND’ CHANCES.) In short, it was everything you hope a Jeopardy tournament will be and if you are lucky, sometimes actually get.

I’m still not a hundred percent sure that this can be the kind of thing that is done every year.  Jeopardy had to go through what amounted to two seasons of games to find these particular eighteen contestants and as I mentioned in an earlier article, they were really stretching the definition of the term. (I grant you a lot of them earned it; it does not change that underlying fact.) And it’s hard to imagine another scenario like this coming up in time for the next Tournament of Champions which the show’s producers still think will happen some time in the next season. But all of that considered, it’s hard to argue that the Second Chance Tournament did not provide exactly what it set out to at the beginning: it gave players who they thought deserved another chance on Jeopardy one, and most of them more than demonstrated that they earned it. You really can’t ask for much more than that.

Tomorrow, I will give you my preview for the 2022 Tournament of Champions which begins Monday.  I’ll refresh your memory on the players, give you the lay out and get you prepared. Spoiler: given the results of this tournament, Matt Amodio in particular might be in for more than he bargained for.

 

Yankees And Sports History, Part 3: The Greatest Manager in New York Hated The Yankees' Guts

 

From the moment the Yankees came to New York, the man who’d helped bring them there wanted nothing but victory. The irony is immediately after he brought them there, he deserted them – and spent the next three decades preaching his win-at-all-cost philosophy to another great New York team.

John McGraw is, even nearly a century after his death, still considered one of the greatest managers who ever lived. And considering that almost every one of his rivals managed for the Yankees at their peak, he still has that aura. His record of ten pennants has never been surpassed in the history of game and considering the amount of effort it takes to reach the postseason these days, it may very well stand forever. He may have that aura based on having managed in New York to be sure but considering that he did so for a team that is now on the other side of the continent and never after he departed did it ever enjoy the success it did when he was in charge, it’s hard to argue that it was the man more than the team.

McGraw was known for two things in his career: brawling and excellence. He started his career with what it considered the very first Greatest Team of All Time, the Baltimore Orioles of the 1890s, which won three consecutive national league pennants. From the start he was a brawler, but that was due as much to the era he played in then anything else, though the ugliness of 19^th Century baseball makes everything that followed look tame by comparison. He was a brilliant third baseman, with a lifetime batting average of .334. But he peaked fairly early and at twenty-eight was practically done as a player. (The roughness of the game led to a lot of short careers.)

The decline of Baltimore as well the National League – in the 1890s, the only League in town – led to an enterprising owner named Ban Johnson to see an opportunity. In 1900 four leagues were dropped from the National League. Johnson grabbed them and the players with them and encircled them in the American League, then known for being more ‘refined’ with less brawling. McGraw went with the Orioles. In 1902, the Orioles would end up moving to New York and becoming the Highlanders. McGraw, however, did not stay with them. His constant berating of umpires became so intense that Johnson suspended him. In an act of pique, McGraw left his team and joined the New York Giants. The Giants had been a mess for more than a decade with an owner going through managers and players so quickly he was once described as George Steinbrenner on Quaaludes. When John Brush bought the Giants, he hired McGraw – the smartest decision he ever made.

No one would mistake McGraw for being an ideal manager to deal with. He berated his opponents, manager, and umpires from the beginning of his career to the end. But in an era before the general manager truly existed, he was as active when it came to seeking out talent as any GM has been. And for his tenure on the Giants, some of the greatest players in the game’s history played for McGraw: from Christy Mathewson, a candidate for the greatest pitcher of all time, with 373 wins in his career, to Bill Terry, the last man in the National League to ever hit .400.

Many of his greatest teams don’t have the same appearance of excellence because of the low level of batting averages that permeating the first two decades of the twentieth century. But in an era where the term ‘on-base percentage’ was unknown, McGraw Giant’s were masters of it. They were also among the fastest teams in the major leagues: two of the three teams with the most stolen bases of all time were McGraw’s Giants: the 1911 team stole a record 341 bases, one that has never been approached by any team that wasn’t led by McGraw. And he pioneered methods that were considering unheard of it: he perfected platooning and was one of the first players to use relief pitching when no one left a game no matter how many innings you pitched.

The result was simple: McGraw’s teams won. A lot. In addition to their ten pennants, McGraw’s team were almost always in the pennant fight, he only finished last once in his thirty year tenure as Giants manager. From 1921 to 1924, his Giants won four consecutive National League Pennants, the first team in either league to achieve that accomplishment and still the only non-Yankee team to ever do so. Some teams would win four pennants in five seasons in the years leading up to division play, but none ever matched the Giant’s record; I feel relatively safe in saying that it will most likely stand forever as well.

McGraw could be unpleasant to play against or sometimes play for. He insisted on having complete control of every aspect of play and disliked it when his players did something different. (There’s a story that he once fined a player for hitting a homerun because he’d ordered him to bunt.) But few of his players ever seemed to object. In the many stories that were told of players who played under him, most respected him and some even said they loved playing for him. That may have been because McGraw went out of his way to make sure his players were paid well for playing for the Giants. And it may also be because even the times of defeat, McGraw might be willing to be more forgive than the national media was – especially when it came to two of the most notorious errors in the history of baseball, both of which worked against the Giants.

In 1908 rookie Fred Merkle, playing in one of his first game, was involved in a baserunning blunder that end up costing the Giants a game against the Cubs and eventually the pennant. (It’s immensely more complicated than that, but entire books have been written about this particular pennant race. Search them out. I mean it.) Everybody in baseball blamed Merkle, and he went the rest of his life with the nickname ‘Bonehead.’ McGraw never publicly blamed, actually saying that we lost a dozen games we should have ‘and you can’t blame Merkle for that.”(Admittedly he blamed everybody else in the League for the rest of his life, but he never choice the scapegoat the media had given.) He went out his way to respect Merkle and take his advice for much of Merkle’s career, one of the few players he gave such credit to.

In 1912, another Giant was given a similar fate. In the final game of the World Series against the Red Sox, with the Giants ahead 2-1 in the bottom of the tenth, a pinch hitter for Boston hit what looked like an easy fly ball to the outfield. Fred Snodgrass in center field called for it ‘and then, well, I dropped the darn thing.” It began a rally that would lead to a World Championship for Boston. After what became known as Snodgrass’ Muff, McGraw was asked what he did to Snodgrass after making that error. “I raised his salary $1,000,” he answered. (The financial bonus never erased the damage: when Snodgrass died at the age of eighty-eight, the opening line on his obituary in the New York Times read: ‘Muffed fly-ball in World Series.” The New York press never forgets.”

The one thing McGraw could not bearing was being upstaged in his own city, which is what happened when Babe Ruth came to the Yankees in 1920. This was galling twice over; first, because at the time, the Yankees were sharing the Polo Grounds with McGraw’s Giants and constantly under-drawing them, and second, because McGraw had wanted to sign Babe Ruth in 1914, but never had gotten the opportunity. Ruth had been playing with the minor league Orioles, but the Red Sox bought him before McGraw could present an offer. This must have been especially galling to McGraw, first watching the Red Sox win three World Series in four years with Babe as their ace pitcher, and then watching him breaking home run and box office records with the Yankees. (That’s the reason Yankee Stadium was built, by the way. McGraw was sick of having to share his park with them.)

From 1921-1923, the Yankees and the Giants faced off in the first ever subway series. The Giants took the first two; the Yankees the third. The only reason the Yankees weren’t in the 1924 World Series was because Walter Johnson helped lead the Washington Senators to their first pennant. Even by this point in history, people were starting to grumble about New York dominating the post-season.

When the Giants lost to Washington in 1924, it marked the end of McGraw’s Giant’s dominance of New York. His Giants would never win another pennant, while the Yankees would eventually win three straight and two World Championships. In June of 1932, with his Giants in last place, McGraw resigned. And for one last time, he took the Yankees out of the headlines. The day he quit; Lou Gehrig became the first man to hit four home runs in a single game.

McGraw would die just two years later, at the relatively youthful age of sixty-one. And when he passed, the mantle of greatness left the Giants entirely and went to the Yankees. Much of the tradition that would lead the Yankees to so much dominance in the 1950s (led by Casey Stengel who had played for three seasons under McGraw in the 1920s) would be used to great effect in the years to come. Platooning and relief pitching would be keys to Yankee victories in their eras of dominance. Other areas were also used by Yankee management, not all of them scrupulous. McGraw had used his influence over the years to trade or buy critical players for his team during the pennant stretch, a practice that the Yankee management would weaponize during the 1950s. Not even McGraw would have gone as far as the Yankee management did, though. In 1955, the Kansas City Athletics would be bought by a real estate man named Arnold Johnson, who knew little about baseball but had friends in real estate that happened to be in Yankee ownership. From 1957 to 1960, when the A’s had a player the Yankees wanted, they would dump used ones on the A’s exchange for it. The A’s never finished above seventh during this period. The Yankees kept winning pennants. The last major trade brought a taciturn outfield named Roger Maris to the Yankees.

But all of this was keeping with the New York tradition of doing whatever it took to win. Except… there was one thing the Yankees wouldn’t do that McGraw had spent his career wishing he could.

During his leadership of the Giants, McGraw had fought hard to sign black talent. He tried deception, he spoke of the talent of Negro Leaguers, he even scouted some of their best teams to learn their methods. This desire never left him. Going through his things after his death, his widow found lists of all the Negro League players he’d wanted to sign over the years.

Decades later, after Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson shattered the racial barrier, a scout for the Yankees wrote a letter to head scout Paul Krichell about the potential talent of an eighteen-year outfielder with the Birmingham Black Barons. A traveling secretary for the Yankees had scouted him and told management that the man ‘couldn’t hit a curve ball and wasn’t a prospect.’ Despite that the New York Giants took a chance and signed him at 19. The outfielder’s name was Willie Mays.

A lot of the rot at the center of Yankees – as it was for much of baseball at the time and still today – had to do with institutional racism. And even though the Yankees didn’t start it, they helped lead the way. To deal with that particular issue – especially important considering the World Series make up this year – I will follow up next week.

 

Report on The Jeopardy Second Chance Tournament, Week 2 Finals, Part 1: A Sensation Rises

 

 

The first week of the Jeopardy Second Chance Tournament demonstrated just how much the first group of players deserved their second chance. The second week has actually given us something that I’m not certain the tournament needed, but absolutely couldn’t hurt – a breakout sensation.

On the last day of Season 37 Matt Amodio faced his first real challenge as a Jeopardy super-champion by Nicole Neulist, who fought him to a near tie before getting Final Jeopardy wrong. (Matt got Final Jeopardy right, so it didn’t make much of a difference.) Nicole used her prize to money to make a change to her life, and Nicole changed a name to reflect a non-binary lifestyle to Rowan Ward. I can not state this with certainty but Rowan may be the first non-binary contestant in Jeopardy’s history.

I would not care about this if Rowan was not a very good player, and that is one thing they definitely have proven to be, as well as exceptionally enthusiastic at their job. In the third and last semi-final match, Rowan utterly dominated fellow contestants Do Park and Nikkee Porcaro from beginning to end, dazzling Ken Jennings with their willingness to go ‘all-in’ on a Daily Double when it served their purpose (even if it seemed it wouldn’t) Rowan walked to the biggest runaway in this entire tournament, and finished with the highest winning total of any semi-final game in this tournament.  I am not inclined to pick favorites but going into tonight’s final Rowan looked like the most obvious contender.

Sadie Goldberger was superb in her semi-final appearance and Jack Weller played very well in what turned out to be a (much closer) runaway game, but I still truly believed going in Rowan had the best chance. And Rowan proved my confidence was not misplaced.

Almost from the beginning of the Jeopardy round, Rowan was in complete command. They got off to a quick start, helped by finding the Daily Double on the sixth clue of the game by which point Rowan already had $3800. They wagered everything on THE ANIMAL KINGDOM: “Males of these mammals engage in bouts called necking to establish a social hierarchy.” Rowan knew it was giraffes and went up to $7600. Neither Jack nor Sadie could make up much ground the rest of the way (Sadie was in the red much of Jeopardy round only working her way to zero on the very last clue) and Rowan had $11,800 by the end of it.

Paradoxically, the person who did the most damage to Rowan in Double Jeopardy was Rowan. They found the first Daily Double on the third clue of the round in THE SECOND CHAPTER. Rowan bet big again - $8000- but it worked against them.

“’Ralph says, “We’ve been on the mountain top and seen water all around.”  Rowan was silent before humorously guessing: “What is James and the Giant Peach?” It was actually Lord of The Flies.” Down they went to $5000.

They made up for it by finding the Daily Double on the very next clue in LAKES AND RIVERS, this time betting the $5000 they had left. “This river that flows 2,300 miles before emptying into the Caspian Sea is Europe’s longest.” Rowan knew it was the Volga and jumped back to $10,000.

From that point on, neither Jack nor Sadie had a chance. Rowan’s performance in both rounds could only be described as ‘utter domination.’ They got thirty-seven correct answers and only five incorrect ones. Those are numbers that even the greatest players of all time – the James Holzhauers, the Matt Amodios and yes, the Ken Jennings’ only occasionally achieve. When the round was over Rowan was at an even $30,000 to Jack’s $6400 and Sadie’s $4400. Sadie and Rowan knew that it was going to be tough to make a comeback, but I’m not sure that affected their wagers in Final Jeopardy,

The category was AMERICAN COMPOSERS: “He turned to opera with the 1903 work ‘Guest of Honor’, likely inspired by Booker T. Washington’s dinner at the White House.” Rowan and Sadie knew the correct response: “Who was Scott Joplin?” Jack thought it was Gershwin and lost the most - $3000. Sadie only bet $400 and Rowan bet nothing at all. Going into Game 2 of the final, Rowan is in control of their destiny with $30,000 to Jack’s $3400 and Sadie’s $4800.

I have to say that this may be the one point where Alex Trebek’s absence is sorely felt.  At points like this in every tournament, no matter how wide the margin between first and third could be: he would say: “The person in a distant third often comes back to win the second game and then the whole tournament.” The long-time viewer knew better (Alex himself knew that as well) but whenever he said it, his gravitas could carry the day. Ken said the same thing too both at the end of the first game of the final this week and last week, but it’s a lot harder to buy coming from him because given his history on the show, we know he know he knows better.  He’s been in too many special tournaments before he retired from playing to know very well just how hard it was for his opponents to come back when he was leading them $40,000 to nothing at the end of Game 1 – or by contrast, when he was trailing that badly to James Holzhauer in a similar situation.

But this is Jeopardy and you never know. We’ll certainly see at the end of tomorrow’s final when I report the results.

Series on Serial Killers, Part 4B: Dexter, The Decline and Why The Ending (s) Didn't Work

 

Before I continue my critique, I’d actually like to deal with an issue that was raised in a critique. A reviewer of this article argued that ‘the kill method (Dexter used in the books) was superior. I don’t normally answer critiques in my reviews, but since Jeff Lindsay himself said that one of the reasons he didn’t like the books was because in his books Dexter’s killings were more brutal, I’m going to do something I almost never do and give what might be my best theory as to why Philips changed the method in the series. (You have your right to your opinion about the series in relation to the books, and I’m not going to try to change them as they are two completely different animals.)

It is my theory that the writers made much of Dexter’s rituals fundamentally more about the hunt – tracking down the criminal, proving their guilt to himself,  snatching him off the street and then confronting him with their crimes – while making the actual murders so ‘banal’. It’s my opinion that this was fundamentally done to make sure we could still relate to Dexter.  The idea of having a show with a serial killer as its ‘hero’ was radical enough for 2006. Had the writers made Dexter’s actual killings as brutal as the monsters he tracked down -  if he had skinned this victims or cut their throats the same way the ones in Season 3 or 4, to use the most prominent examples – it might have very well been a bridge too far that many viewers would have been able to cross. I won’t deny it might very well have been a more interesting series for the viewer’s sensibilities, raising fundamental questions about ourselves. If Dexter truly was as monstrous as the killers he went after, then the viewer would have to raise very deep questions about themselves. Is it all right do kill these people in horrible ways because they deserve everything they get? 24 had become a smash hit by asking these questions about this approach to The War on Terror, and the longer Breaking Bad went on, viewers increasingly found themselves having doubts about how much we were willing to follow Walter White no matter how much of a monster he became.

That said, while that might have made the series more interesting, I’m relatively certain that it would never have enjoyed the critical or commercial success it ended up with if that had been the case. Viewers might be willing to compromise their morals when the man doing it was working with the government or was essentially an everyman. If Dexter had started right out with his first murders being as brutal as they are in the book, I seriously doubt as many viewers as the series ended up having– and I certainly would have been one of them - would have been willing to go on past the pilot.  As I said at the beginning, I think Dexter was created as a response to the monsters that were permeated the Golden Age of Television at the time, and in almost all of those series we were either lured in gradually or decided because of the characters being part of law enforcement that we could justify it. If the first kill we saw in the opening minutes of the Pilot had been as brutal as the murders Dexter commits in the books, I don’t think a viewer in 2006 (and maybe not even today) would have willingly gone along for the ride. It’s just a theory. Take it for what’s it worth.

(Now, back to the show.)

 

After Season 4 ended, Clyde Philips the showrunner who had led the series to greatness, had become exhausted from the demand and resigned. The consensus among fans and critics is that the series never recovered from his leaving and that the quality dropped immediately. I don’t quite hold with that theory, as I’ll explain below. More importantly, the idea that had Philips stayed the series would have remained as good at is had the first four seasons is something I just can’t buy into.

In the first four seasons, what Philips and his writers had done brilliantly was make the threats that Dexter was facing as important as the façade of his normal life. As his relationship with Rita and her children became more genuine and as he finally became a husband and father, the viewer was drawn in to see not so much to see Dexter get away with murder, but to see if he really could have it all. The murder of Rita at the end of Season 4 took out one of the key pillars of that strategy. And when the writers basically ended up writing Astor and Cody out of the series early in Season 5, they took out one of the others. For the second half of the series, Dexter spent much of the time considering how badly damaged his infant son Harrison would be because of being left in the pool of his mother’s blood. And as we have learned from too many other series, making an infant the center of a storyline just doesn’t work because there’s never anyway to measure it. Dexter would spend the remainder of the series essentially the same character he was when we first met him with no real ties. It’s hard to imagine how even Philips could have rectified the situation.

That is one of the reason I still consider Season 5 one of the show’s better ones. Dexter is trying to find a way to work through his grief at the loss of Rita, and then Astor and Cody. When he encounters Lumen (Julia Stiles in a role that earned an Emmy nomination) the victim of a brutal series of rape who was going to be murdered, he finds a way to work through his loss by trying to help Lumen work through hers. She spends the seasons fundamentally damaged, sure that only vengeance against her attackers will make her whole again. Because this is something that Dexter understands far better  -  in a sense, he’s who he is because only killing makes him feel whole –  he uses this as a way to work through his own grief.  When Lumen does not reject him as she sees him work, he actually says: “In her eyes, I’m not a monster.” He was never able to reveal to Rita, so this is the first time he feels like he can share his ’Dark Passenger’ with, and not feel rejected.

It helps matters that the man he is hunted is one of the most terrifying monsters the series ever did. Jordan Chase is the king of a self-actualization brand whose behavior is so frightening, in one of his group sessions Dexter says: “I’ve never felt more normal before. (In the notes for the series the writers call him ‘the head of a cult’ and that’s true twice over.) Jordan is the head of a group for four young men who have been raping, murdering, and leaving girls in barrels for years: Lumen was going to be their fourteenth victim. The level of devotion these young men feel to him is similarly terrifying, as it is when we learn the origin story of this and how one of his original victims still worships him. Johnny Lee Miller is absolutely mesmerizing, particularly because he is the only ‘monster’ we meet who has Dexter’s measure from the beginning, and even more frightening has been the leader of  these rituals without too this point actually taking part in the murders. (When he kills someone in the penultimate episode, he’s actually angry that he had to “do something himself.”) Dexter and Lumen need infinitely more luck to finally pin his connection to the crimes than anyone else Dexter has faced to this point, and even then he almost narrowly gets away.

I truly think if Dexter had ended at the end of Season 5, it would permanently rank as one of the greatest series in history. The ending would have left many dissatisfied – it would be too open – but seeing Dexter at the end of it, facing the real possibility he will spend the rest of his life alone is a more fitting prison for him than any real one. But by that point, Hall had been signed for three more seasons and the show carried on. Then it truly dropped off the cliff.

The series spent the next three seasons walking away from the idea of Dexter as a member of society and focusing far too much on the killers he was chasing. The series would try occasionally to venture into expanding his humanity – there was a storyline in Season Six where he tried to form a friendship with an ex-con who found a God that I found intriguing – but at the end of the day, the series became far too focused on death. And in doing so, they spent the last three seasons utterly destroying every aspect of the co-stars that had made the first five seasons so good.

LaGuerta and Angel’s romance and marriage, a storyline I had found myself enjoying during Seasons Four and Five, ending in divorce when LaGuerta decided to pursue a promotion. They’d spent the last three seasons giving LaGuerta humanity; in the next one they turned her back to the career obsessed bitch she’d been in the first two years.  Joey Quinn (Desmond Harrington) an intriguing character introduced in Season 3, began an affair with Deb in Season 5 that never made much sense, started trying to chase down whether Dexter had killed Rita (which he gave up on because he was falling in love with Deb) and then after Deb turned down his proposal, became a heavy drinker, fell down on the job and spent the last two seasons hopping from bed to bed.  Worst of all was what the series did to Deb. In Season 6, she found herself falling in love with her brother (I knew he was adopted but ew) and at the final moment of the season, walked in on him committing a murder. The weight of his secrets caused her to psychologically and emotionally deteriorating. When LaGuerta finally realized the truth about her brother and tried to arrest him, Deb ended up killing LaGuerta. She then resigned from the force, spent most of the final season in a state of drinking and sexual collapse because of all the guilt she was feeling, and then almost miraculously near the end of the series, seemed to be headed towards a happy ending – until she caught a stray bullet from the last monster Dexter ever caught, ended up on life support and Dexter ended up putting her body in the ocean.

You could make an argument, I suppose, that there were times in the final two seasons that Dexter was trying to reach towards his humanity. His relationship with Hannah McKay, another female killer (Yvonne Strahovski’s performance was one of the few highlights in the last few seasons) did show possibilities for a future. But it was a trope that was increasingly becoming tired. In the final season when Dexter met Evelyn Vogel (Charlotte Rampling) a writer on serial killers who I guess was supposed to be ‘Dexter’s foster mother’ (she’d helped design the ’code’ he’d been following all this time, everybody knew what was coming before it happened. She would help him try and track down the most recent murderer (the Brain Surgeon, which really was a bridge too far), who she thought was one of her patients, they thought they’d got him but it wasn’t him; it was her ‘actual son’ and… I think you know how this ends even if you didn’t see the series. (There was a labor dispute between Showtime and my cable company at the time, so I actually never saw half the episodes. Based on what I ended up seeing, I still have no desire too.)

 In the end, Dexter decided he was too damaged to be around people and rather than run away with Hannah, he faked his own death and we met him in the last minutes of the series as a lumberjack, with nothing left to say to us. The world was horribly disappointed with the final episode (indeed most of Season 8 as a whole) and spent the next several years expressing it.

Nearly eight years later, Dexter: New Blood debuted on Showtime with Hall, the sole regular from the old series (though Jennifer Carpenter showed up as the spirit of Deb and David Zayas made a cameo as Angel.) I had very strong doubts in any kind of continuation of a series at this point (the ninth day of 24 and far too many episodes of both continuations of The X-Files had jaded me to these experiences) so I fundamentally ignored the entire series. And honestly, I don’t think I missed a great deal. Dexter was killing in the snow of New York rather than Miami, there was another monstrous figure to be found, his now teenage son Harrison had tracked him down and big surprise, there’s a monster growing in him too and a lot more people die. And yet again, no one was happy with the ending – though mostly for a different reason.

I don’t know why anyone was truly shocked that Dexter ended up dead at the end of New Blood. The final book in Lindsay’s original series was called Dexter is Dead, after all. And Michael C. Hall had decided he was only going to one season anyway. I think it’s the fact of a letter to TV Guide that sums up the other falsity of those people who said they wanted Dexter to pay for his crimes at the end of the show. “We all want to see Dexter get away with it,” that writer said. The fact that in a sense that’s exactly what he managed to do at the end of the original series doesn’t seemed to have gelled with that part of the fan base. I guess like some humorous said, the viewers really did want Dexter to have a happy ending. And in that sense, they seem to have to have missed the point of Dexter, the killers he chased and basically every serial killer we’ve seen to this point on television.

None of them get to live happily ever after. Whether it’s being shot by police or ending up Dexter’s table, nobody gets a happy ending. Dexter himself as much at the end of the last great season: “Happy endings are just for children.” Apparently the viewers weren’t listening to him, even though he of all people should have known.

Next week, I will give a summation of what the portrayal of serial killers on TV has shown us.

Some Famous Blokes In The U.K. Have Their Knickers in a Twist About the New Season of The Crown

 Note: This article will be written in a slightly different approach than many of my previous articles. Imagine John Oliver or James Corden saying these words, and I think you’ll understand my way.

 

Well, it’s time to deal with the most pressing obstacles facing the U.K right now: the next season of The Crown. Yes, while Great Britain is dealing with the fallout of Brexit, Prime Ministers resigning at a pace as if they were on the Parliament Edition of Big Brother, and basically everything J.K. Rowling says these days, some very prominent British figures are pissed – and not in the way they use the term – about what the next season of Netflix’s The Crown will end up looking like. And their criticisms would be downright hysterical – as they are anyway – even after you consider whose making these remarks.

Dame Judi Dench, who apparently didn’t care what critics when she played Victoria twice, has called the most recent season of The Crown  ‘pretending to be realistic’ and demanding that a disclaimer be put before it so that people know that it is fiction and not a documentary. (Someone’s still ticked that Peter Morgan cast Helen Mirren over her in The Queen.)  To be fair, this is not a truly unreasonable request as there are no doubt some people still questioning how real everything they see on docudramas series are. Some Netflix limited series such as Unbelievable have made sure to have such a disclaimer, and those stories are on a smaller scale. That being said, I do question how much Dench really believes the intellect of the typical Netflix viewer. Does she assume that all of the dialogue and performances that we have seen the previous four season are the result of fly-on-the-wall cameras that have been placed in all the palaces for the past forty years? Does she assume that everything that happens in this series is a reenactment of actual events that happened behind palace walls? More to the point, does she believe the typical Netflix viewer thinks the same? And if such Netflix viewers do exist, I’m actually more frightened as to how far their delusions extend? Do they share these believes for every Netflix series? Are they convinced that there is such a thing as a Squid Game and that there is such a place as the Upside Down? (Of course, Netflix is creating a real-life Squid Game, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole.)

John Major, who is about to make his fictional debut on Netflix this season, has gone out of his way to deny that certain scenes in the series – such as the now King discussing whether his mother should abdicate with him – is denying these conversations are completely fictional. Well, that’s just plain ingratitude. Seriously, John. You’re being played by Johnny Lee Miller. Do you know how much easier it’s going to be for you to get laid from this point on?

“Oh, I’m John Major. I was the Prime Minister once.”

“I hear that every day. Two of them come in every night and try to buy me drinks.”

(Pause) I’m going to be in the next season of The Crown.

(Longer pause) “How close is your place?”

 

And of course, as everything involving the Royals these days, Prince William felt compelled to weigh in, saying that the scenes of his parents fighting were completely fiction because ‘I never saw them fight.’ As if William’s credibility couldn’t get any lower.

First of all, if you really believed your parents had a happy marriage, congratulations, you’ve just proved to the entire world yet again how utterly sheltered your family is from the world. Second of all, even assuming that your parents never fought directly in front of you, everybody in the world knows just how big your homes are. Your parents could have been fighting in a separate wing of one of your palaces and you’d never have heard. And lastly, the breakup of your parent’s marriage was one of the most famous events of the 1990s: the entire world saw it break down, your parents were openly not shy about in the media and your father is currently married to a woman who he had an affair while the marriage was going on. It was the worst kept secret in Britain. All of this fundamentally proves that not only are you so isolated from your family, you seem to be in denial about how things are now. Camilla’s about to be crowned Queen Consort. She didn’t get that title because your mother was fine with it.

In all seriousness (sort of) I’m slightly surprised the British media and Parliament have been so quiet about how the Royal Family has been portrayed on the series until now. Apparently its fine with the Brits to talk about the tragedies of Princess Margaret (who even if this is a fictionalized version has clearly had it far worse than Diana ever did) but it’s not okay to dare infringe upon the memory of  The Queen now that she is no longer alive to say nothing about this as she had the first four seasons of The Crown. Why such outrage now? Part of it may have to do with Elizabeth’s passing (Britain like Hollywood is known for having respect for the dead, but none for the living) but I think there’s a larger issue at play. One that was always in the background throughout the series but that present circumstances are now making much clearer.

For most of the twentieth century, many have questioned the purpose of the monarchy. There have been many factors – the abdication of Edward VIII, the gradual decay of the British Empire, the modernization of the world as a whole – but despite this, many mostly old white men – hold to an institution. In his writing for The Crown Morgan agrees completely with this idea – but he has a definition of what kind of institution.

Morgan says it is the kind of outmoded institution that has held around for centuries not so much because it works but out of habit more than any reason. Institutions can hang around much longer than they should not because they work but because people are afraid what happens if they aren’t any there. Empires were institutions once.

And Morgan makes it clear that for the members of the royal family, it’s an institution as well – such as a prison or an asylum. One that has rules that have been around for so long that they must abide by for fear out of what happens if the rules are violated. One that the wardens follow even if they believe that they are outmoded. And that will destroy the people who are apart of it, even without them knowing it. Like Morgan Freeman famous said in Shawshank Redemption:  ‘I’m an institutional man.” The Crown has made it very clear that this passes on from generation to generation, often without them realizing it.

In Season 1 soon after becoming Queen, Elizabeth (Claire Foy) spends much of the season trying to make changes in the institution to help Philip and Margaret. Men like Churchill in particular find ways to push back against, mostly by finding ways to use The Duke of Windsor against them. As a result, Philip finds himself increasingly restrained and Margaret is unable to marry the man she loves. Margaret is irrevocably damaged by this. For much of the first two seasons, Elizabeth and Philip try their best to push back but increasingly find themselves becoming part of the system.

In Season 3, as the young Charles, who has been raised in this system tries to push back primarily to try and please his family. But at the season goes further, it becomes clear that Charles can do nothing to please his mother or the Queen, whether is ceremonial or trying to marry. By the time the fourth season has begun, it has become increasingly clear that Elizabeth and Philip, who spent their youth pushing back against the boundaries of the institution are fundamentally a part of it and utterly resistant to changing it. I mentioned in a review last year about Thatcher’s tendency to take the royals seriously, but whether it was based in truth or not, I believe she had a point. I think Great Britain could survive the lost of the monarchy; it could not survive the collapse of democracy. In the first seasons they press against their duties as ceremonial; by the fourth season they are pressing them upon Charles and Diana to do them not out of obligation.

I think part of this new agitation against The Crown is about the threat to the institution. As the series has made clear Diana never fit in. I don’t hold to the fringe theories some do that Diana ended up dying because someone in the monarchy had her killed; I am inclined to believe that it was the monarchy that ended up destroying her. As we have seen over and over on the series, that it was the monarchy does. It did it with Margaret, it did major damage to Charles, and it certainly did it to Diana. It chewed her up, forced her to stay and place and was furious that she wouldn’t stand and smile like all the royals. The Crown, like almost all of Morgan’s work, shows us the face of power, warts, and all, and while the British may not care that they have them, they don’t want them pointed out in public.

People argue that the British are famous for being apologetic. If they are, it’s never for the things they should be apologizing for: the British Empire, colonialism, genocide, looting foreign countries, white supremacy writ large for more than half a millennia. The monarchy is the public face of Britain more than anything else, and as long as the Empire existed the monarchy was the face of all of that. As we saw on The Crown, none of the royal family saw any need to apologize for that. Why should they?

Some people – older people – saw Elizabeth as the symbol of Britain’s glorious past. The fact that even when she was crowned the Empire was already decaying and  had been completely destroyed by the middle of her reign was irrelevant. She was a symbol of the glorious past, and America is in no position to judge anyone on glamorizing the past and glossing over the parts we don’t want to tell. And now that monarchy and Britain in itself are facing a future that is already horrible and likely to get worse before it gets better, certain people want to hold fast to the last, real symbol of it. Like I said, respect for the dead, but none for the living.

It's ironic that Morgan and The Crown have more respect for Elizabeth than they think: on the day she died, they suspended filming and flew the Union Jack at half-mast. Which shows that for all his care about revealing his version of the truth, he does respect the institution to an extent. As for Netflix, they have agreed to the disclaimer before every episode of The Crown from this point on and the Brits can rest easy that there’s only one more season left planned – until of course, a few more years and Morgan and his writers begin filming: The Crown: The Next Generation to tell the saga of Charles, Prince William, and Prince Harry. I wonder who they’ll cast as Meghan