Who Isn't Watching The Watchers: The Watchful Eye Review

 

I have made little secret in this column that I think one of the most undervalued players in television is Freeform, part of the Disney family, essentially on its third rebrand. Ever since it aired the gone-too-soon Bunheads over a decade ago, it has quietly been producing some of the most pleasing programming in years, given voice to diversity in ways so subtle you wouldn’t recognize it. From the wonderful spin-offs Good Trouble and grown-ish to the invaluable The Bold Type and the recent superb comedy Single Drunk Female, Freeform has a way of entertaining you that will sneak up on you while producing extraordinary shows. They have not been rewarded with recognition from awards show yet, but that may be changing: Cruel Summer was recognized by several critics awards shows as one of the best shows in 2021. (It’s return is imminent, and I’ll be writing about it soon enough.

It was, in part, because I’ve been waiting for that show to come back that I recently became aware of the newest series The Watchful Eye which from the trailers looked like it had the same mystery-thriller vibe as Cruel Summer, but possibly a hint of supernatural as well. I decided last night to DVR Quantum Leap and watch the two episode premiere hoping to get a hint of what I got from Cruel Summer. Not only will it do for now, but there’s also the potential for a smash here.

The Watchful Eye begins on Christmas Eve when we see a woman start to write a suicide note and then stand by a window. We then see her crash into the sidewalk in front of the doorman, but we never see whether the decision was of her own volition. Six months later, Elena Santos comes to the Greystone Building to apply for the job of nanny to the son of the recently departed whose death is described by the widow Martin as ‘an accident’.  Martin seems amicable enough but most of the supervision is being done by his sister-in-law Tory (Amy Acker playing a character that doesn’t even bother to have the good behavior of…well, almost every character she’s played on TV over the past twenty years) who clearly would not be satisfied with anyone Martin would hire. Elena managed to finesse the interview.

The pilot tells us from the beginning that Elena is there under false pretenses. We will learn pretty much by the end of the second episode that her entire background is a lie, that she is a con artist whose been guilty of multiple counts of fraud, that her mother has been in prison, and that she is working in consort with a dirty cop (her lover who seems to have arrested her just for this purpose) so that she can find something that they can steal from the building and make a fortune.  By the time we learn this, the viewer has gotten to the point that we don’t trust anything that we have seen or heard that anyone says, and Elena is no different –  the cop himself will not reveal where he got his information about the contraband under Elena’s pressing, and we certainly don’t trust any aspect of the relationship: we think it’s likely that both individuals could very well betray the other when they see a chance to get away with the fortune. Elena is slightly more sympathetic by the end of the second episode, but it has nothing to do with our trust for her (in that sense, she fits right in with everyone else we’ve met at the Greystone) but because she has completely underestimated what she was in for and is already in too deep to get out.

Because the Greystone has a reputation, one that is only slightly better than that of the Overlook before it blew up. Everyone seems to be lying about something, and everyone has a hidden agenda.  Tori doesn’t seem to care one bit about her husband’s infidelities and far more about whose around her brother-in-law’s kid. She and Martin keep getting into heating battles and she fundamentally distrusts everybody (she demands a drug test from Tori than Martin clearly had no idea was about). Bennett and Darcy, two of the local teenagers seem to be more open, but considering that they are part of the Ayres family, we know they have a different kind of secret. Mrs. Ivey (Kelly Bishop essentially being Emily Gilmore, only making her brusqueness present to everybody not just her daughter) is unpleasant and essentially blackmails Maria into spying on her brother-in-law because she believes someone was responsible for her death. Naturally, she is completely disinclined to give any explanation or reasoning for this; she feels she just has too. Even the doorman is keeping secrets from people. When a woman shows up in Elena’s quarters telling her ‘Don’t trust them” it’s almost superfluous by this point, and only more surprising when Elena learns the source.

Is the Greystone haunted? That is no doubt the question that the show’s writers want us to think, though right now they are fundamentally covering their bases in this regard. (The only concrete proof Elena has that theirs something creepy going on is something she saw after smoking a joint, and right now who gave her that joint is another mystery I want unfolded.) What is clear is The Greystone is creepy. Like any old building is it filled with secret passages that lead everywhere (though Elena did know they were there and went in willingly), there are creaky noises (could be the building settling) and Jasper, the seven year old at one point vanishes during hide-and-seek (given Elena’s state of mind, it’s hard to know how seriously to take that). And there’s enough deception going around that so much of the unease Elena is feeling is natural. In the second episode, she has a conversation with two other nannies (the show’s comedy relief; their charge involves caring for three different sets of identical twins) and Kim and Ally tell her that the previous nanny for Jasper just…vanished. And no one wants talk about it, not even the manny who knew her. Kim and Ally, I should add, are among the only people we truly think are trustworthy so far on this show; the others so far are Elliott, an African-American high school student who lives in the building but is more than willing to share his info with Elena, and Ginny, another nanny who has automatically bonded with Elena in ‘nanny solidarity’. All of them have no problem filling Elena in on the horrible things that they have heard about the tenants in the Greystone, as well as the very real possibility that Matthew may have been having an affair with previous nanny and could very well have killed both her and his wife. Right now, Matthew does seem sincere and protective of his child, but for all we know, he’s just better at putting up a front in front of the help.

I don’t know if The Watchful Eye has is capable of sustaining the momentum it put up in the first two episodes: it’s already juggling a lot of balls and it doesn’t seem to be close to finished yet. I don’t know if this has the potential to work over a full season, much less an entire series if indeed it does get renewed. What I do know is that it might be a better example of a new kind of mythology series that some have talked about – something that many complained about X-Files and Lost but that series like Yellowjackets are not. In the latter type of series, the mythology is known to the characters but not the viewers where as both of the former series, for all their virtues, went to the end of their runs with most of the characters not understand what had happened.  I have no problem with either of type of series, to be sure, but I can understand why the latter would be so much more appealing and therefore watchable than those of us who, say, got tired of the fact that Westworld kept building on its house of cards rather than stick with the basic structure it has built in the first season.

It also helps that Watchful Eye is superbly acted, written and directed. With the exception of Acker and Bishop, the cast and writers are unknown to me, though I suspect given their performances they won’t be for long. Mariel Malino is particularly good as Elena, a twenty-two year old who is already a master at psychological manipulation and perfectly capable of spinning a new lie when one is revealed. She is, to be clear, as two-faced and capable of lying as almost everyone we’ve met on this series and is perfectly willing to be used if it suits her purposes. She’s not exactly an antiheroine but I feel more empathy for her and her condition that I have for say, any of the teenagers in Euphoria.  She clearly got more than she bargained for when she took on this job, but its already too late for her to turn back.

I think there’s a chance that Elena will get through the first season of Watchful Eye. As for the rest of them, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a higher body count than Walking Dead or Game of Thrones by the end of Season 1.  In that sense, I’ve made my own decision to be yet another person who’s eyes are on Elena. I hope that other viewers make the same decision.

My score: 4 stars.

Criticizing Critics Series: Anyone Who Complains About Film and TV Has Forgotten Something - And People In My Job Are Partly to Blame

 

Hollywood’s been under attack by so many constituencies these days. Some people claim that it’s not inclusive enough. Just as many claim diversity is destroying Hollywood. Some people complain that there are too many shows and too many places to watch them. Others complain that none of these shows are worth watching. Some people complain that too many films are driven towards superhero movies and action franchises and not really art. Just as many complain that those same superhero and action franchises are what Hollywood should be making – not ‘art films no one sees.’ Some people think that films and TV are too political. Some people think they’re not political enough. Everybody argues that mergers of corporations eliminate creativity and limit the number of series that are made and the kind of people who make them.

All of these arguments miss one of the most fundamental points about Hollywood. To be fair, its one where the industry itself goes out of its way to try and make you forget. That being said, the reason that they are more willing to make the world forget this point is because of people in my job. And for that, I think I owe all of these people both an apology and an explanation.

For the past several months I’ve been writing articles about the fundamental flaws in the way so many critics and cultural historians view of art has misled generations of people throughout history.  This point now has even more clarity these days considering all the problems Hollywood has.  What will make this article different is that I now think the time has come to shift at least some of the responsibility from the critic to the viewer. Because while this illusion has been perpetrated by many in my profession about the nature of art, the fact remains that – particularly when it comes to film and television – some of the responsibility must be shared by the people watching it. To be clear, I include myself in both.

Let’s start with a statement that is basic: Hollywood is a business. Some of the people who are the face of it are more photogenic, many of the talented ones make more money in a few months than the average American will make in a lifetime, but it is a business.

This should come as a shock to no one. We measure film’s success by box office. We measured Broadcast TV success by Nielsen ratings, pay cable by subscribers, streaming by minutes but it all comes down to which show has the most. When first VHS and then DVDs and blu-rays were around, we measure film and TV success by the number sold, we do a variation with digital downloads. Everybody in Hollywood in the creative process – from Actors and Directors on down – belong to unions. Hollywood is business.

And all business are built on  producing a product that creates a profit for the investors. No one who works on a movie or TV show is working for free. Some actors and directors will call projects ‘labors of love’ or ‘pet projects’ but they’re still getting paid for it, as is everybody else behind it.  TV shows have always been made with the intention of making a profit for somebody, be it the network, cable or streaming service.

Now, in recent years, many have fundamentally suggested that most of the numbers that companies are giving us for recent films and television shows are lies, manipulated by the companies involved. I would argue that if they only think that has begun recently they are incredibly naïve. Films and television, in order to make money, need advertising which, like everything else in society, utilizes deception to work. (You don’t like that? I’ll address momentarily.) Some of the exaggerations that network television makes be slightly more grounded in reality than others, but at the end of the day, it is all marketing. Sometimes the best way to make something a real success is to pretend it already is one.

Now to all of you who think that deception and falsehood are the causes of everything that’s wrong in the world, I’d actually make an argument that we need lies to survive. In fact, Ricky Gervais made a film called The Invention of Lying that makes that same argument. It acknowledges upfront that almost every institution in the world – from marriage and religion to yes, advertising and entertainment – is built on deception. But Gervais also argues that without these deceptions, life would be pretty miserable. He might lean more into satire than you would like but I got a glimpse of the world he built. A world built on honesty and nothing else isn’t a lot of fun. All the interactions of day-to-day society are built on it. You think it would be pleasant being told every day that you’re fat and ugly and a failure? You think it would be fun basically knowing that your whole life is just one big wait to meaningless oblivion? Do you think it would be fun if the only distraction from all of this were films about real life because, remember, all fiction is a lie?  That last one is certainly the truth. If everybody wanted to see the true-life stories of history, then documentaries would be the highest grossing movies of all time and PBS and C-SPAN would be the highest rated networks. Lying makes the world go round. We all know this to an extent.

Unfortunately for us all, there are some deceptions that do real harm. And one of them sadly is the one that my fellow critics and so many educators and historians have been spending their careers telling us. That deception is that no one who makes art is doing for the money. That anything designed for popular success is not worthy of being considered art. That art and business have nothing to do with each other and should not be considered when evaluating them. And those who suggest that the latter does have any real effect on what’s being produced are, at best, misinformed.

I can’t help but think that this may have caused irrevocable damage to both the film and television industries when it comes to how the general public has viewed both of them. It has not helped that almost everyone who works in Hollywood is more than willing to play into that deception. This has been done in many ways over the years, from arguing that talented stars and directors are ‘too difficult to work with’ to certain ‘critically acclaimed talents’ derided those who have made money as ‘sell-outs’ . You can’t really blame the latter that much: everyone is naturally jealous of the person to whom success comes easily to while you labor in your field never get the acknowledgement you may well deserve. But in Hollywood, this ‘us or them’ has a ripple effect that critics are more than willing to amplify. In the critical world, when Martin Scorsese demeans the MCU as ‘not true movies’ he is seen as speaking truth to the narrative they want to shape. To younger film-goers, he seems like an out of touch old man who doesn’t appreciate what they like. Both of these perspectives miss the point of made: Hollywood’s a business and businesses need to make money. Is it sad that Scorsese has to make films for streaming services rather than get wide studio release while Marvel films fill every theater? Yes. But rather than argue that is a problem with the business of Hollywood, so many of my fellow critics view it as how Hollywood as how it fits the critics version of Hollywood. That the two are almost certainly not compatible is irrelevant to the critic because in their mind, the business part of it should not even be part of the discussion.

Now to be clear, critics are guilty at a certain level for the way almost all of us view Hollywood and art in general. But for all of this, there is an unindicted co-conspirator when it comes to film and TV. And now I shift my criticism from my fellow critics to…everyone.

Yes, that’s right. Anybody who has ever watched television regularly, everyone who has ever harped about the lack of programming, the way that networks television, then cable, then everything else is the way it is, those of you who blame hit shows for going on while your favorite show has been canceled, everyone who says that politics or diversity or anything other subject they think has ‘ruined’ television or film, I’m talking to you.

Because all of you bear a certain degree of responsibility. It may not be as much as I think, but it’s certainly not nothing.

Business have always operating on what sells. I grant you my fellow critics may have given the illusion that’s not what film and TV should be, but you still go to those movies, you still watch those shows. And in that sense, all of us bare not only a sense of guilt, but in many ways entitlement.

This is particularly true when it comes to TV. It always has. As long as I have been alive, whenever a beloved TV show that is not a hit is cancelled, fans will blame the network and the business. In their mind, a network is supposed to provide them the entertainment they want even though it’s a zero sum game. If they give you the show you want, they’re doing their job. If they cancel it, they don’t know what they’re doing. The viewer does not accept their part in it. How much of this can be laid at the door of the critics is anyone’s guess but to pretend the viewing audience bares no responsibility is idiotic.

So in the era of network television, we blamed the network for scheduling it on a ‘night when no one watched it’ or ‘against a show everybody loved’ or ‘not giving it the publicity it deserved.” To the first, not all shows can go in a slot when everybody can be there to see it. To the second, there are always a limited number of slots, some shows have to draw the short straw. To the third, what you really mean is the publicity you thought it deserved.

Then when cable began to offer more creative freedom to showrunner and actors, millions of Americans abandoned networks for cable. I don’t entirely blame viewers for doing so. But at some point, you have to have expected that networks – which are business – would suffer the way any other business does when a better product comes out. The number of creative people would decrease, the networks would begin to lose money and they’d start trying to win viewers back with new brands of old products. To be fair, critics refused to lay any of the blame on this on the rise of cable, usually lumping under the heading of ‘networks aren’t able to compete creatively.” The fact that they were subject to standards cable and streaming couldn’t match was never acknowledged because that would mean acknowledging networks are business, and critics refuse acknowledge that. None of this, however, prevented the viewer from blaming the networks for their part in this decrease in quality on the shows.

Then streaming came along and did something to up the ante: it offered instant gratification. I have always argued against that binge-watching was not a sustainable business model for Netflix or any other streaming service and their fall does not come a shock to me. But this does not absolve the viewer of responsibility, either. I admit binge watching a series is easier for most people than the average American, and I get the appeal. But this doesn’t absolve the viewer of the consequences of their actions. If rather than watch an entire series over the course of a weekly run, you decide to watch it all at once on a streaming network, then the end result is fewer people end up watching cable or network as a result.  Again there will be repercussions that have become obvious over the last decade: many cable networks have halted production of original series altogether over many years. And with so many people canceling cable subscriptions because they’d rather watch shows on streaming, then cable networks have to find another way to survive, even if that means merging with other networks. Actions have consequences, and just because you don’t like mean doesn’t mean you are entitle to absolve yourself of the responsibility.

And as a result of so many cable and streaming services, there were an excess of shows to watch, almost certainly too many for any real viewer to consider part of their schedules. And when Netflix and other streaming services began to inevitably reach the limits of their growth, of course a lot of series were going to get canceled.  Yes, Netflix overexpanded and spent too much money on developing product.. How does that differ from HBO, after years of being the only place for Peak TV, eventually biting off more than it could chew and other networks beginning to fill the gap? Yes, some streaming services and networks are cancelling shows they’ve already developed full seasons of. How is this different from network cancelling series they’ve committed thirteen episodes too and then cancelling after three because of low ratings? Entertainment is a business and its interested in the bottom-line.

And all of this comes down to the point of view – both the critics and the average viewer – that TV owes you entertainment, but you don’t owe television anything. The best businesses are built on customer loyalty; what did you honestly think would happen when you not only showed none, but were insulted at the idea? Why should I have to watch network television when cable is there? Why should I have to watch cable when streaming is there? Why should I have to buy DVDs or even television when I don’t have too? Why should I even have to bother paying for a subscription to Netflix or any streaming service when I can ‘borrow’ a friend’s?

And just to be clear, I don’t like defending corporations. I don’t like the idea of having to defend monopolies or big business. But let’s be clear: it’s not like there’s ever been a ‘small business’ cable or streaming service. It’s not like HBO and NBC have been putting the ‘mom and pop’ television network out of business. I hear a lot of people complain about big business destroying America; I’ve never heard or seen any column anywhere asking for anti-trust legislation for Showtime or HBO. And honestly, the people who are complaining now are nothing more than the people discussed at the start of this discussion: the people complaining about the cancellation of Westworld by HBO are just a variation on those who bore rage against those who were infuriated by Firefly’s death 20 years earlier.

So in conclusion, I will take responsibility as a critic for my profession’s attitude towards television over the years by viewing it as only an art form rather than part of a business. Over the past few years I’ve increasingly become aware of their responsibility and even though I’ve tried to be even-handed in how I view pop culture, I accept whatever part – however miniscule or large – it might be. The question becomes, will you the viewer do the same? Will you admit that to an extent some part of this is your responsibility? Or will you ignore this article and just bitch and moan about Netflix didn’t have the first clue of what it was doing when it cancelled Warrior Nun? I put the question before you and leave it in your hands.

 

 

 

Apparently Trolling Jeopardy Champions Is Now A Thing

 

I didn’t plan to write this particular article. At first, I just wanted to look at Season 39 100 games in and celebrate the accomplishments of Troy Meyer, who Friday became the most recent contestant to qualify for the Tournament of Champions. Unfortunately, some of the things I have read about him on social media as well as several other things I have read about some of the super-champions in the past two years have forced my hand. So I’ll postpone my celebration until the halfway point of the season (which is in three weeks’ time) and talk about the unfortunate collision between one of my favorite things in the world and something that I think the world could only benefit if it were just to disappear from the face of the earth.

Now to be clear, I’ve never liked social media. I have spent the better part of a decade saying that Twitter was the ruination of mankind, have no use for Instagram or Snapchat, and while I will occasionally post on Facebook to promote some of my own columns or communicate with the occasional friend, I have never extensively used and have been wary of it well before the recent problems with have become front and center. If Twitter were to go bankrupt, I’d lead a parade. If Facebook were to be dissolved by Congress, I’d be irked…for about five minutes. I find no redeeming values in any social media construct that has been developed in this century, well aware of the fact I’m using to post links to this column.

So the fact that there has been backlash against Jeopardy winners on social media this week is not the final straw, or even close to it. Nor am I unaware of the crisis of internet bullying and how savage it can be or entirely shocked that is among Jeopardy. But the last two weeks have revealed the fundamental stupidity and vapidity of those who choose to spend their time ragging on Jeopardy champions.

In a column last week, I wrote a very detailed article about Jeopardy’s troubled history with minority contestants over the show’s history. I had been planning to write this article for at least a year, but it was triggered by commentary I had heard by a recent Jeopardy champion Yogesh Raut, who had posted about the show’s treatment of them. To be clear, I wrote that article before I read the full extent of his commentary – and realized just how utterly misguided and contemptuous Raut was of the show he had just won over $93,000 on in three days.  In it, he berated those who thought Jeopardy was the be-all and end-all of quiz shows, berated the fans who accused him of what he considered hostile behavior, and in the most bizarre part of it, critiqued some of the most valued members of the Jeopardy community, including Amy Schneider and Claire McNeer, who had written the original articles that led to Matt Richards being fired by the show in 2021. The latter’s writing he referred to as ‘anodyne.’

Now I do understand and even sympathize why so many among the Jeopardy community – including James Holzhauer – took to social media to condemn Raut; it’s hard not to look at his attitude as hypocritical. And as a fan of the show, I read enough of his blog to see so much of it as that of a sore loser (I kept asking myself if he hated the show so much why he tried out for it in the first place). Indeed, I admire the show’s tolerance for Raut by saying that they did not take the criticism of Raut personally and would be happy to welcome him back for a Tournament of Champions.  So in this case, there is justification. But when I read commentary on Troy Beyer this weekend, I began to question a lot of what I’d seen.

Troy, for the record, was a good champion. He was charming, funny, and great to watch. By the comparison of so many recent champions, his run was ‘ordinary’ – he ‘only’ won six games and over $210,000 in them, which is a very good record for any player.  Some fans actually seemed amused by his resemblance to Bill Hader, which I imagine Hader would take it good sport. There was nothing to dislike about Troy – you’d think. Then on Saturday, I found out a certain circle of fans were irritated by something that Troy did. What made them so angry?

Troy said ‘Please’ far too often when he made his selections on the board.

There’s so much to unpack here. Start with the fact that for thirty years, I’ve seen at least a third of Jeopardy champions say please when they selected clues on the board. It’s politeness. Then there’s the obvious question: how would like them to ask for clues? The way a character in a Mamet play or Tarantino film would? Hell, would you like them to scream when they get the clue wrong and demand money? Jeopardy contestants, for the record, are given one of the strictest sets of rules as to how to behave on set when they play. Basic politeness has been one of the cornerstones of this.

And of course, there’s the fact that I’m fairly sure that most of these whiners were among the ones who complained that Raut was too arrogant when he had his wins on Jeopardy. Sadly, this part of a pattern that I’ve commented on occasionally but haven’t wanted to dwell on the last few years. However, since they’ve forced my hand…

Ever since the super-champion reign began, there has been a vocal minority who has the habits of variations of complaining of the aspects of so many of the quirks of their performances. When Matt Amodio was in the middle of his run, a lot of people were ‘annoyed’ he began every response with ‘What is…” instead of occasionally saying ‘Who?” Sadly that was the most polite kind of bullying that has happened to so many players. Amy Schneider was attacked by some for her sexuality. Mattea Roach received harsh comments because of her appearance. Ray LaLonde, who has a back condition that makes standing for long periods difficult, was nitpicked by those who found the fact he would sway behind the podium ‘hard to watch.’

Now I have an understanding of so much internet bullying, which in this case really doesn’t differ that much from the stuff we grew up with. It is a variation of the guy we meet in grade school or high school who beats up the kid with glasses for lunch money, who demands to cheat off the person sitting next to him in an algebra quiz,  who cuts class whenever he can and think school is a waste of time. We’ve all known these kinds of people and we all know that they don’t mature when they grow up and these days, social media can turn them into celebrities. What baffles me in this particular case is why these kinds of bullies are even watching Jeopardy as you’d think that by their very nature, this is the kind of show they wouldn’t watch on principle.

Maybe it’s just a variation of all the other kinds of bullying that goes online. These bullies are jealous of these people for making money for being smart, and because they know very well berating them for their accomplishments would get them nowhere, they yell at them for being funny looking or too unpleasant or too polite or anything else they see as a weak spot. Or maybe it’s just the attitude that so many people have towards celebrities in general: doing well on Jeopardy does make you famous for a while, and in that sense, they feel no less guilt in doing so than any other movie star or music sensation or anyone else. (Though to be clear, if they wanted to berate actual celebrities for being idiots, Celebrity Jeopardy is right there for them to watch. And I’d probably be leading the charge there, though I might use nicer words.) Hell, maybe there just the kind of people who like to dump on anything that’s popular  or has been around for a long time. All of these are plausible explanations.

Now neither the show nor the champions need me to protect them from this kind of attitude.  Jeopardy continues to enjoy its highest ratings in years and I know the history of the show well enough to know that these champions don’t mind these kinds of attacks, mostly because they are a percentage point of a percentage point of the people who watch the show. The fans will always love Jeopardy champions. We might love some of them more than others, but everybody has favorites in any fandom, and it doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate the accomplishments of all of them. If Jeopardy was a different kind of show, it might use the trolling that these fans give it to market so many of their champions, casting them as heroes versus villains. But they and the viewer know there are no bad Jeopardy champions or good ones (not even Yogesh Raut) and people will tune in the Tournament of Champions because they want to see their favorite players return. And the champions know it too – hell, my guess is when Troy comes back he’ll probably joke about both looking like Bill Hader and his penchant for saying ‘Please’.

To be clear, my feelings about social media and these kinds of trolls are still no different. But I believe in Voltaire’s famous statement, which every Jeopardy contestant has memorized but which I doubt any of these trolls know of, much less know who Voltaire is. “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I might not go so far to that extreme, but I agree with the sentiment. I wish you’d find another, more worthy show to cast your venom on, but that is your right.

So go ahead, Jeopardy trolls. Do your worst. Say yesterday’s champion is too aggressive and the next is too meek. Say that one player got cheated of a win and that another is beyond stupid for not knowing something that you know. Berate one player for this and cheer another for the same thing. The champions don’t care, the show doesn’t care, the fans don’t care.  All of them are concentrating on Jeopardy to watch people do what they do best. I can’t blame you for wanting to do what you apparently do best – which in this case is yet another example of why social media is the bane of our existence.

Let's Talk About Sex On TV: First in A Series About The Lines Between Sex and Art That Society Can Never Agree On

 

 

I’ve been meaning to write this series for an exceedingly long time. I know that even discussing the ideas I will lay bare in this article and those to come will piss off a lot of people, no matter which side I come down on.

I have thought about variations on it for a while; I have  plans to write a very long article about my opinions towards censorship in general, and for a long time, I once considered writing a mostly tongue-in-cheek series about “Great Films I Found When I Was Looking for…Other Things Late at Night’. But I now realize that if we are to address the problems this country and indeed so much of the world has with sex in the media,  we have to face a lot of our baggage and shame.  As someone who has spent much of his life looking at so much of the reasons for this – sometimes as a critic, sometimes just as a man – I think I have a certain qualification for this that many others do not.  Much of my career I have avoided discussing the subject because it did not make me comfortable. I did not realize that was a virtue and not an impediment.

So strap in, as I start a series about the discussion about sex on TV and in the movies. And let’s start with the most obvious point: that’s what has so many people up in arms when they talk about censorship. Foul language, we don’t like the idea of our kids saying these words, but we know that they can’t avoid them. Violence…don’t make me laugh. We have absolutely no problem having our teenagers see any movie in the theaters where men beat each other senseless, kill each other, blow stuff up and hell, even wipe out half of civilization, and say that’s PG-13. But let there be a single sex scene – hell, even a discussion of sex in an adult fashion – and the R rating comes out without a second thought. Roger Ebert spent the latter half of his career raging about how the ‘R’ rating stopped so many intelligent films that he thought teenagers could see without a shrug and yet somehow society had no problem with them going to Transformers even though there was endless destruction. It’s hard to say he didn’t have a point.

Now I know all the parents out there are raging about how it important it is for children and teenagers not to learn about sex until their ‘old enough to handle it;’ I have certain opinions on that too, but for now, let’s let that go. Let’s move from that to rating movies NC-17 or worse, ‘unrated’. I don’t know in the history of either if its ever been used for a movie of extreme violence. The closest example I know is The Passion of The Christ, and even that the MPAA was ultimately fine with it, and some parents had no problems taking their kids to it. Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher have shown us scenes you’d think would earn an NC-17, but that they never have All the examples I know about for sure – Henry and June; Showgirls;  The Cooler; Lost and Delirious – it’s always because of sex scenes.  All the years I went to Blockbuster, they never put an ‘Unrated’ version for anything Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme did.  Basic Instinct on the other hand… Sex is for the privacy of your own home, and we’re not entirely happy with that idea these days.

What maddens me all the more about all of this comes to several points, particularly when it comes to anything we deem ‘pornographic’: 1, the more we try to ban it, the more people are going to want it and more importantly, 2, the standards for what we deem pornographic and what it ‘artistic’ have always been changing and always subject to review.  These articles will fundamentally deal with the latter part of discussion, and because I specialized mainly in television, let’s start there.

Let’s start with pay cable. If like me, you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, there were three reasons to get HBO, Showtime, or Cinemax . The first was for movies you couldn’t see anywhere else, the second (at least for the two) was boxing matches, and the third was…a different kind of entertainment. Now anyone who knows the nickname for Cinemax knows exactly what I’m talking about, but let’s be more honest.

Some of the first real original programming for all three of the channels was essential soft-core porn TV series.  They were there after midnight, sometimes a little before. I’m pretty sure all three networks would like you to forget that’s the foundation of so much of their early business (I didn’t see any mention of it in Tinderbox; the otherwise superb story on the history of HBO) but it was there. Hell, that’s probably why so many people kept renewing their subscriptions. A running joke was that you read Playboy just for the articles; I imagine many people said that they got Cinemax for the art films.

That’s not something we mention in polite circles and with the exception of Cinemax, almost all cable has been more than willing to get out of that market as fast as they could when making ‘quality’ series could be a better source of revenue. But make no mistake, it was there. David Duchovny may want to convince the world his career began with Twin Peaks, but IMDB.com does not lie and Red Shoe Diaries is there in black and white for all to see. If anything, that series was a ‘higher-class level’ of soft core in that it was essentially story based; other shows on Showtime wouldn’t even bother to deal with the barest minimum of plot (or indeed, clothing) HBO can argue as much as it was that so-much of their late night movies was from their ‘sister station’ Cinemax, but they were neck-deep in a different kind: Real Sex and Taxicab Confessions just showed that at the end of the day, they were just as invested in sex as entertainment – they just didn’t want to pay actors to do it.

And it’s worth noting that even when HBO and Showtime were getting into the original series markets, both were really hedging their bets by staying awfully close to the sex-as-entertainment format. This did not even start with Sex and the City; a full five years before the world met Carrie Bradshaw, the comedy series Dream On debuted, telling the story of editor Martin Tupper (Brian Benben) and his sexual exploits which invariably involved him having affairs with women infinitely more attractive then him. To be clear, I always liked Dream On. It never tried to be anything but a silly comedy and would often transcend the tactics of its set up. Benben is a superb actor, who can do both comedy and drama well and he was supported by a more than able cast including future acting legends Wendie Malick and Michael McKean and an exceptionally good group of guest stars. But there was enough sex going on that you could argue that it was a transition from what so many viewers had been used to from HBO in the past.

Showtime took a bit longer to start migrating towards the original series market, and when it did it generally tried a little harder to stay away from its roots. I’d actually argue that Showtime was trying to be a little more ambitious than HBO up until OZ showed up. Some of their early series such as Rude Awakening and Beggars and Choosers were a lot different than what HBO was doing. Some of their approach to programming set standards that I’d argue most of any service has yet to keep up with; there still aren’t a lot of series like Resurrection Blvd and Soul Food out there. But perhaps because it took longer for Showtime to achieve the same mainstream success that HBO had, they took a lot longer to walk away from the soft-core series that had brought them viewership to begin with – and they stuck with it longer. (I don’t know how long it was before they stopped rerunning Gigolos and I’m not sure I want to know.)

Now to be fair, when the new Golden Age began for HBO with the sole exception of Sex and the City,  the fair-minded critic could say that they were series meant for adults in the un-erotic way. The Sopranos never had many sex scenes, The Wire spent time in strip clubs and in bedrooms but that was never the point, and for all the time we spent in Deadwood in the Gem and the Bella Union, there was very little actual sex and most of it the participants were partially clothed. Six Feet Under was the exception to this rule, which may be the reason it was never appreciated as much. HBO would occasionally dip into this well in the 2000s, but as it usually wasn’t successful – Tell Me That You Love Me was one of their most notorious bombs – they would stay away from sex – until 2008.

I’ve often joked with a friend of mine that the difference between True Blood and pornography is that pornography has less nudity. It was not much of a joke because for the life of me I couldn’t understand why else it was kept on the air. Yes, I know the success of the Sookie Stackhouse novels may have been part of the reason, but True Blood was not what I had come to think of us as HBO Peak TV. (Nor for the record did most award voters; the series was only nominated for Best Drama once in entire run by the Emmys.) Now some would try to argue that there was a larger story going on there; that Alan Ball, the head voice behind Six Feet Under was trying to tell stories about the excluded and the forbidden by telling stories about vampires and werewolves and witches or whatever spiritual creatures inhabited True Blood.  You can make as many arguments as you want about the stories of inclusion that involves so many gay and lesbian characters.

I don’t buy that for a minute. True Blood was about as much sex and nudity as the censors could get away with mixed in a vampire love triangle. It was Twilight for people who wanted to see all the crazy sex they couldn’t get in a PG-13 movie. It was supernatural porn, plain and simple. And for better or worse (mostly worse) it took HBO in the direction that it has basically been traveling for the last fifteen years: where the idea of ‘adult television’ meant basically as much sex and nudity as you could get.

Girls was fundamentally a vanity trip for Lena Dunham. Yes, I know that some of the actress and actors in the series (most notably Allison Williams and Adam Driver) have been more than capable of showing that they were sensations working with horrible material. But when the best description you can have for it is ‘Sex and the City for the 21^st Century” you’re not making an argument for great art, your making it for exploitation. I may never have liked the series and I may never be able to understand whatever appeal Lena Dunham has; I may even be the wrong audience for the series. It does not change the fact that so many people chose to celebrate the series for the nudity that Dunham and her co-stars show.

All of this, of course, pales in comparison to the exploitation on display in Game of Thrones. Now I’m grateful that so many people are now starting to criticize the sexual exploitation that was going on throughout the series in retrospect. As someone who recognized what it was from day one, I have to tell you the level of depravity that was on display there from the Pilot  genuinely makes me wonder what it says about the fandom of this series – and apparently to an extent in House of the Dragon -  that so many people seem to love a series where one of the main reasons for people to have sex is that they’re related. I don’t know what it says about our society as a whole that the most popular show on TV for the 2010s was one that fundamentally found every version of an incestuous relationship and in some cases, there were fandoms for it.

What makes me question this particular ‘fetish’ (to use the kindest euphemism I can) is that so many viewers’ problem with it was subjective. The two best cases of this involved two vastly different Showtime series. In the sixth season of Dexter, Deb was going through intense therapy and came to the realization that she was in love with her foster brother, Dexter. To be clear, they were not related by blood. But even the idea of it grossed many viewers out and it was never followed up on. Not a year after this Showtime was airing another series The Borgias,  based on the notorious Italian family. Now there have been rumors about the incestuous relations between the family for centuries, so in a sense to address the issue between Cesare and Lucrezia was within the series rights. I do however, find it questionable that so many fans were rooting for it to happen – and were indeed thrilled when it did in Season 3. (I’ll say no more.) To be clear, The Borgias was a superbly written and acted series that I’m still mad at Showtime for prematurely cancelling. But the fact that two unrelated siblings attraction was considered horrendous and two very related siblings was considered part of the allure really makes me question the arbitrary nature of fans of these kinds of shows.

That’s not to say I don’t have questions about the ‘artistic’ value of other Showtime series too. I always found it hard to fathom why so many people were drawn to The L Word.. Yes, I’m well aware of the community that it was representing at the time, but let’s be fair Queer as Folk had already broken the mold and boundaries by the time The L Word premiered and even during its run many of the stars and creators truly thought the nudity and sex were part of its appeal. Again, I’m the wrong person to make judgments on this as I’m not the audience in question, but having seen both series in reruns it’s hard to argue that there’s something fundamentally braver about Queer as Folk and exploitive about L Word.

And all of this comes down to the fundamental question I raised at the start of this article: what is the line between pornography and art?  The main one seems to be, I think, that many porn films do not view themselves with pretention. For all you can say about the exploitive nature of pornography (and I will be addressing this issue in future articles, to be sure), the actors involved do seem to know the kind of films they are making. They do not pretend that they are making films that will be viewed at Cannes with high eyes or for awards at TV series. If they decide to satirize Game of Thrones (though again, I think it’s hard to imagine a version of the series that’s more pornographic than the original) they are aware of it.

Now I realize that, at the time, there were many people who were just as determined to get shows like Game of Thrones and True Blood banned from cable or removed from the media as they are against pornography. The main difference seems to be that thirty years ago, had anyone talked about restrictions against shows like Red Shoe Diaries no one would have blinked an eye and there would have been far less public outcry than if anyone did if someone even suggested removing House of the Dragon from HBO Max.  Hell, there’s an argument that the latter is infinitely more exploitive, misogynistic and offensives towards young adults than anything that aired on Cinemax for twenty years ever was. But why will so many rise to defend that? Because some people consider it art and more people consider it entertainment. What this says about society I leave in the judgment to the reader and the viewer. But if we don’t acknowledge the hypocrisy here, there is something flawed about us as a society.

Lost Rewatch On VHS: House of the Rising Sun

 

Before the episode began, there was footage talking about the Red Sox breaking the ‘curse’.  How soon from this point on would it become a plot point?

Lost has already demonstrated that is going to be about many things – mystery, suspense, good and evil, and the utterly strange. This episode is the first that openly discusses what will become one of the most important themes – love. It will do by looking at the two characters we know the least about so far but whose story will be the emotional in the entire series, equal parts tragedy and joy, love and redemption.

Sun and Jin have been separated from everyone else by a language barrier: by design the writers do not translate anything they say to any other character in order to make sure they seem more separate from anyone else. Based on the few times the two have interacted, the viewer would think that their marriage is little more than the typical Asian cliché of dominant husband and subservient wife, and perhaps they have never loved each other. The very first flashback of them will tell a story that is radically different from that.

This flashback is unlike any of the others we will see over the series, not just because it just features two of the characters but because it is a time lapse of a relationship. We witness what would make the plot of any typical romance, forbidden love, marriage, the deterioration of the relationship, violence, and a desperate break. Like many of the other stories these blanks will eventually be filled in over time, and many of the mysteries we see in this episode will be explained by the end of the season. (The same cannot be said for a couple of other ones that will occur in this episode.) One of the few things that is clear is that Sun’s father, still unseen, is a powerful and likely dangerous man. Sun clearly knows something about this when Jin tells her about working for her father in exchange for her hand and it’s pretty clear she has an idea of how dangerous he is when she meets with the designer in the penultimate flashback. We want to believe the best in Sun because of what we see her husband become. However, when Michael – and the audience – learn the secret she’s been keeping from her husband, it throws everything we might think about her into question. Right now, the audience assumes that she is keeping this secret out of fear of her husband, and we have no reason to doubt that based on what we see in the episode’s opening and when he comes home. But this has demonstrated how good Sun is both at lying and keeping secrets, something that we should have kept in mind the more we learn in subsequent flashbacks.

Other forms of love are on display. Jack and Kate spend the opening of the episode ‘verbally copulating’ as Charlie vulgarly but not inaccurately puts it. They are bantering and playful until they get to the caves and even beyond that, and it’s clear by now that everyone else is picking up on it. But we’ve already learned (and the series will sadly drive this point well beyond in to the ground) there are just too many things in their nature that keep driving them apart, far too many of them put up by each other.

In this particular case, however, you can’t exactly blame Kate for her position. In my previous column, I mentioned the key difference between Jack’s and Sayid’s speeches was that Jack’s, for all its unifying qualities, lacked any form of hope.  Sayid makes this very clear when Jack tells him about his plan to move everybody to the caves. Sayid’s blunt declaration: “When exactly did you decide to form your own civilization?” is one of the most direct challenges to Jack’s authority that he will ever get, and because Sayid’s is based on as much logic as Jack’s, it’s not one that he can as easily dismiss as he will Locke’s. (By the way, this is one of the few times that Jack and Locke will agree about anything with no fight at all. I honestly wonder if Locke had made the decision to live here whether Jack would have immediately decided to go to the beach.) The audience is aware at the end of the episode that this is the first fundamental division between all the survivors, but because there will be so much going back and forth between the two camps throughout the season (and by the second season, for other reasons it will be completely abandoned) it does not seem nearly as consequential either in retrospect or at the time. Indeed, many of the people who seem locked into one position right now will end up shifting to the other within one or two episodes.

Charlie is dealing with a different kind of love – or more accurately, desire. His addiction has been getting more obvious, and while we’re somewhat surprised Locke has picked up on it, it’s not that surprising in retrospect. Locke’s reputation as a lone wolf will become more obvious even within this season, but it is worth noting how much he makes the effort to try and reach out to people in need in a way that not even Jack does. And perhaps Charlie does have faith in a way Jack doesn’t, he finds it easier to take him seriously when Locke makes so many of his portentous announcements. Then again, when Locke tells Charlie he’ll find his guitar and he finds it the next minute, you might believe he has been blessed by a higher power.

Of course the deepest mystery at the center of this episode comes when Jack and Kate discover that there have been people on this island long before that transmission was sent. The mystery of ‘Adam and Eve’ will be the longest running one in the entire history of the series, one that the writers wouldn’t reveal the truth about until nearly the very end of the show. I don’t know whether it says more about the writers or the fans that when we learned the truth about it and the writers made sure it was clear, so many of the fans were still incredibly pissed. (Mythology fans are so hard to please.)

By the end of this episode, everybody is settling in their various camps and while I might have complained about the musical interlude before, I can’t exactly complain about how well the writers matched the song with the uncertainty of the mood going forward. The division that happens in this episode will not be as extensive or painful as many of the others to come, but when we look at the faces of Kate and Jack, the writers are telling us a simple lesson that the series will make clear: love hurts. The show will also make an argument that its worth in the end. How you come down on that may ultimately determine how much you think, at the end of the day, Lost ended up working.

The Myths About Our Historical Figures The Kennedy Series, Part 2: Political Dynasties Are Fundamentally American. The Kennedys Are Not A Great One

 

 

There are many myths about American history that we are told as children and that far too many of us cling to when we should well know better. Two are among the most easily disproven: “Anyone can grow up to become President” and “America does not have ruling families the way Europe does.”

The first is very clear with even the most basic understanding of the lives of most of the men who have run for President. The second is obvious to anyone who even takes a cursory look at any of the men or women who have served in political office. I feel fairly confident that a mere glance at the elected officials who have represented any state in the Union in the past fifty years will have their ties to some previous elected official a generation or two generations previous.

Now for those who want to talk how this is fundamentally un-American, I would simply argue our countries obsession with celebrity. How many people have we celebrated in any field-  film, music, fashion, television – whose sole accomplishment was basically having a famous parent? We might condemn, we will talk of them as being of privilege and entitlement, but it is merely a precursor for, well, our entire history across the globe. We might not like but it is a fact of life that only fairly recently we’ve become to condemn. Until say the last twenty years or so (and that’s being generous) America has had little problem with the idea of families of privilege being famous for their last name alone.

Such has been the case in America since the founding of the Republic. Two of our first six presidents were from the Adamses, a family that had been among the first American revolutionaries. Nor did it end with John Quincy: his son Charles Francis ran as Vice President on the Free Soil Party in the 1848 Presidential Election, and was a figure in Republican Politics for decades after, considered at one point a front-runner for the 1872 Liberal Republican nomination for President (another story I may get too someday.)

A political dynasty may not be the ideal subject when it comes to discussing American politics and the Presidents but, as with all great politicians, it is dependent on what they manage to accomplish in their lives. For all of the backlash both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt have received in certain circles in recent years, the fact is they were two of the greatest President history, both of whom had to overcome great physical and personal travails, both of whom were considered traitors to the aristocratic classes they were born into because of their fealty to the common man, and both of whom made huge strides for America at a vital time despite being loathed by many in both political parties. FDR may have gotten the country through two of its greatest crises compared to TR who (much to his chagrin) served in a time of peace, but both were significant political figures.

And in contrast to the Kennedys, blood did not presage party loyalty. Eleanor incurred the wrath of her cousins when she waged a dirty campaign against Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. in his campaign for Governor of New York so that Al Smith could win reelection. And when FDR was running for President in 1932, many who were on Theodore’s side of the family actively campaigned for Hoover. Which was fair because in 1912, when Theodore had run as a Bull Moose, Franklin had stayed loyal to Wilson and his own daughter campaigned for Taft.

This is the fundamental problem when we discuss the Kennedys. So much of their luster is based on mythology and tragedy more than actual accomplishment. They don’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the Roosevelts, and in honesty, the Taft’s and the Rockefellers managed to achieve far more in their time in public office than the Kennedys ever did. If I were to be truly honest, the closest comparison the Kennedys have is truly the Bush family. And there’s actually an argument that the Bushes are superior in terms of actual accomplishment. Before you yell me at for blasphemy, let’s compare both of the families records.

Both the Kennedys and the Bushes came from prominent New England families. Both of the Kennedy and the Bush legacies would not have been possible without the work of the father. Though here, there’s a clear argument that Prescott Bush has a better track record than Joseph Kennedy.

Kennedy Sr, as has been well documented, was connected to organized crime, made much of his family fortune in bootlegging, and while he was a highly involved in Democratic politics, the highest position he ever achieved was Ambassador to England, at which time he argued to FDR against America’s involvement in World War II. Prescott Bush, while not entirely known for his character, did serve with distinction in World War I and served two terms representing Connecticut in the U.S. Senate from 1952 to 1962. Prescott was also very liberal, the first national treasurer for Planned Parenthood, and an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund. And for the record, he was in the Senate the same time as Kennedy but unlike JFK had no problem voting to censure Joe McCarthy.

Now to the qualifications of candidate Jack Kennedy in 1960 and candidate George H.W. Bush in 1980. When it came to qualifications, their records are not comparable. Kennedy had been in the House for six years and the Senate for eight. Bush Senior had been in Congress for two terms, served as head of the RNC from 1973 on, had been Ambassador to China and head of the CIA.

Neither one was the most qualified man in the field of potential candidates when they ran, to be sure, but JFK ranked infinitely lower in his field than Bush Senior did in his. The major opposition was Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Adlai Stevenson (who I will probably discuss in a future article) and Missouri Senator Stuart Symington. Symington, in addition to being a Senator, had been the first Secretary of the Air Force. There’s an argument Kennedy was the least qualified of the group: that was the opinion of many Democratic leaders prior to 1960.

Bush senior was not at the top of his field, either, but it’s worth remembering that his field of candidates were much larger – and more qualified. In addition to Ronald Reagan, his opponents were John Connally, former Governor of Texas, Treasury Secretary under Nixon (and Nixon’s personal choice to succeed him before the Watergate Scandal) Howard Baker, then Senate Minority Leader, known for his role on the Watergate committee, Bob Dole, who at that point had been the head of the RNC during the 1972 campaign and Ford’s running mate in 1976, John Anderson, ten-time Congressman of Illinois, Phil Crane, another Illinois Congressman highly ranked among conservatives and Gerald Ford, who spent most of the 1979 and 1980 campaign considering whether he should jump in. Theodore White, when he ranked these eight candidates, divided them into a ‘big four’ and a ‘little four’. Bush was in the big four, along with Reagan, Connally and Baker – and its worth noting that Bush put up the hardest fight against Reagan all the way through.

And despite his immense disagreement with Reagan on virtually everything (which the conservative wing never trusted him for) Bush still accepted the vice-presidential nomination that summer, even though there’s a very real chance Reagan himself didn’t want him on the ticket. JFK famously came to prominence when he nominated Adlai Stevenson for President at the 1956 Democratic Convention and then tried to become Stevenson’s running mate. Kennedy and his family thought Stevenson was a loser and really didn’t want to run with him that fall, not even going so far as to campaign for him. It was at the end of the day all but about getting set for 1960. Bush was at the end of the day in favor of party loyalty. There’s very little to suggest that the Kennedys were loyal to any cause other than each other, certainly during JFK’s presidential run and the later runs of both of his brothers.

As to individual accomplishment as President (leaving George W. out of it for the moment) George Senior did get a lot done. The Berlin Wall and the Cold War ended on his watch, something that at the end of the day Reagan somehow gets more credit for. For all the ugliness of the Second Gulf War, Bush Senior did end the first quickly and efficiently. And while his legislative achievements are minimal, many of them were completed with an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress. (Bush is one of three Presidents in the 20^th Century to never have his party in control of Congress during his entire term.) After discussion with a fellow historian (I’ll go into more details about who he was and why I trust him in a future article) I have revised my opinion on JFK’s accomplishments while in office and conclude that his legacy was more substantial than I first thought. But I still believe that so much of JFK’s legacy (and arguably the Kennedys as a whole) is based solely on potential. Every other President in history is graded on what he accomplished. JFK is the only president who gets graded more on what he didn’t do – and yet somehow is regarded higher in most historians estimation as a result.

There are other comparisons where the Kennedys are similar and actually worse than the Bushes. The Bushes are known for being ugly campaigners willing to do anything to win. The Kennedys were known for being just as ugly and underhanded in their campaigns (and if we’re being honest, the Bushes never have gone so far to buy voters to come out, something we’re pretty sure the Kennedys did.) The Bushes were loyalty to their family but also to their party. The Kennedys were loyal to family, period. Bush senior had to survive a primary challenge in 1992, but however twisted Pat Buchanan’s point of view, at least he had something passing for a reason. The whole purpose behind Ted Kennedy’s challenge to Jimmy Carter was that he didn’t not seem to like Jimmy Carter – he famously couldn’t even come up with a reason why he wanted to be President on national television. And for all the arguments of the quagmire we got into because of W and Iraq, let’s not try to pretend the Kennedys hands are entirely clean when it comes to their involvement in Vietnam. Oliver Stone and his ilk can argue as much as they want about Kennedy being killed because he was going to get us out, but the Pentagon Papers have made it very clear that the Kennedys were very aware of some of the problems in Vietnam and while they might not have actively made it worse, they didn’t make it better. (I’ll have more to say about this in future entries.)

Oh, and remember how many people that George W. and Jeb only got their jobs because of their father? How do you think Bobby and Ted got their first jobs in government? Bobby was appointed Attorney General by his brother and the two of them essentially spent the next three years running the country and shutting other advisors out. That didn’t seem to bother people in subsequent years; hell, most of them thought it made him qualified. And Ted? The seat he held for seven terms was his brothers. And just to make sure no one else could take it, they had the governor appoint Stephen Smith, a Kennedy ally to hold the seat until Ted was old enough to run for it.

There are very few true separations between the Kennedy family and the Bush family, and far more where the Bushes come out ahead. So why do we repudiate one and celebrate the other? Why did so many people condemn George W.’s run for Presidency as being borne out of privilege and legacy and yet every time Bobby or Ted even hinted at running for President was it not only considered right, but a sacred duty? (I believe the term ‘Restoration’ was used for each of them.) Is it because one was a Democratic family and one was Republican? (Although based on the policies of Prescott and George Senior in particular, you could make your argument there were elements of both men that were far more liberal than Jack and Bobby in their runs for public office.) Is it because one family was more photogenic and had a way with rhetoric and the others were not and mangled the syntax? I grant you the utter horror show that followed of W’s Presidency hasn’t helped the legacy of his family one bit, but that’s another point. Both W and JFK were involved in razor thin elections where there was a lot of controversy involving the victor. W’s presidency was condemned as illegitimate from the beginning and only went downhill from there. After the ugliness in November, Democrats never had anything bad to say about JFK. There’s as much hypocrisy here as in everything else.

Why do so many people celebrate the Kennedys and in the same breath condemn the Bushes despite how close they are in so many ways? Again, it has little to do with their accomplishments and more to do with tragedy. And while none can deny the tragedy of the Kennedy family (which started decades before Jack became President) it’s not a substitute for actual accomplishment. In the weeks to come, I will begin to unfold the complicated legacy of the Kennedy campaigns and how bias has led so many to believe the greatness in the Kennedy name has little to do with reality.

Lost Rewatch on VHS: White Rabbit

 

From the start of the series, one of the fundamental conflicts is that between Locke and Jack. And one of the greatest ironies is that while the two are almost eternally in disagreement about every aspect of life, they have more in common than neither want to accept. This becomes clear in the first flashback we see of Jack in this episode where we learn from an early age: “Don’t tell me what I can’t do’ was a motto that applied as much to Jack as it does to Locke.

There are a couple of codicils to this, one that has become subtly apparent in the early episodes, the other which is made very clear in the next flashback. The first is “no one can tell Jack what he can’t do – but everyone else has to do what he tells them.” This is what Jack spent his time on the island dealing with from the moment he started pulling people out of the wreckage, and it’s part of the contradiction that fills in so many of his problems. The people on this island need someone to tell them what to do and the majority seem to be pushing for Jack to be that someone. But as we have seen in the previous episode, even when he makes decisions for the group, he is immediately challenged on them. Matthew Fox will take a lot of heat for how he portrays Jack for much of the series, for being pig-headed and self-righteous,  utterly unwilling to relinquish his authority, and in the long run, a terrible leader. All of these arguments fail to point out that he never wanted the job in the first place and that he basically only got it by default. Early in the episode Boone shouts: “Who appointed you our savior?” And yet the minute Jack leaves the camp, rather than anyone else trying to step up, Locke asks what’s on everyone’s mind: “Where is the doctor?” Kate and Sayid do their best to step up in Jack’s absence, and Locke is more than willing to do the work when it comes to finding people. But at the climax of the episode when it looks like panic and chaos will win the day, Jack is the one everyone listens too.  Sayid more or less made this exact argument two days ago and was ignored. Jack says it, and its gospel (and what will become basically a running joke for the series going forward)

I’ve heard Jack’s speech dozens of times over many rewatches, but it was not until this last one that I realized what wasn’t in it that was in Sayid’s: hope. Two days ago, Sayid persuaded his small group of people to lie about what was on the transmission. Then he went back to the main group and said: “We’re not giving up hope.” For all of the unifying themes in Jack’s speech, at the end of the day, at no point does he mention rescue. This will be an overriding arc in Jack’s leadership going forward: he is trying to help everyone survive, while several of the others concentrate on rescue. In the next few seasons, viewers will wonder why the castaways make little effort at trying to get themselves rescued. That may be a consequence of how Jack leads. 

The other codicil is that the reason Jack doesn’t accept people telling him what he can’t do is, of course, he’s always had someone telling him he couldn’t do it. It doesn’t help that person was his father and he basically had been telling Jack that from childhood on.

There has been far too much written about Christian Shephard over the years, and I don’t want to add it to now. However, I will say one of the themes of Lost will be the inability to share almost anything, whether it be information, one’s past or ones feelings.  Few have tried to make the connection that part of this reason may be due to the other major theme of this series: parenting issues.  Is it possible that all of the survivors – indeed, almost every character we meet – was bad at the former because of the latter?  It is possible that a lot of the problems between Christian and Jack is because of  fundamental miscommunication, and that Christian was always trying to be a good father. But the problem is, every time he tries to say what he thinks is the right thing, he phrases it in such a way that it comes out as demeaning Jack. In our first flashback, Christian could have said: “Know how to pick your battles” or “Don’t try to win every fight.” Instead he tells Jack that if he tries he will fail “because (Jack) doesn’t have what it takes.” I don’t know how anybody could not take that as putting them down, especially after trying to save his friend from a beating.

On a related note, where is Jack’s mother in all this? This flashback is the one time we see her in Jack’s past and we barely see her thereafter.  She has to know better than Jack the man she married and she has to know all the pressure he’s put him other. But when she tells Jack that her husband has gone, she all but guilts into bringing him back, barely even able to work up a defense of her husband’s actions. “You know he is,” is basically the best she can say of him. Given everything we will learn about Christian as a human being, this strikes us as someone who has essentially spent her life at best ignoring or in a sense enabling everything he has done.  And the guilt trip works: even when Jack is in his father’s hotel in Sydney, with the evidence of his father’s drinking all around, when the concierge points out how drunk he was, he instantly defends him. The hold Christian has on his son will last beyond the grave, a point this episode makes very clear at the end when Jack’s smashes his father’s empty coffin.

Matthew Fox’s performance in this episode is magnificent.  He plays the entire episode as someone who is beginning to fray at the seams emotionally and who thinks (with good reason) he is going crazy. The scene in the jungle where he utters: “Where are you?” over and over, gradually increasing from a whisper to a scream is one of the best in the series. When Locke ends up rescuing Jack and asks: “Are you okay?” he begins to laugh for one of the few times in the entire series – and it is not out of exhaustion, but manic hysteria.

Then of course, there is the conversation between Jack and Locke afterwards, one of the several critical ones they will have during the course of the series, each time becoming more rancorous. It’s not hard to see why: from the start Locke is fundamentally questioning everything Jack believes in, and honestly I think the only reason this conversation isn’t angrier is because Jack is too exhausted to fight back. For the first time Locke brings up something that no one has discussed: “What if all of this was happening for a reason?” as well as the fact that the island is ‘special.’  There is a reason no one wants to discuss this, of course; they’re all struggling to survive and except for Locke, no one has any reason to believe that this place is anything but a hell. (In one of the prime examples of miscommunication, no one ever says this to John directly; perhaps because they think it’s self-explanatory.)

In an interesting twist, the teaser for this episode has John’s famous quote from this episode only in the trailer it ends a different way. “I’ve looked into the eye of the island, and what I saw was…” The trailer ends with the work magic, instead of beautiful. In hindsight, I wonder why this change was made aside from not wanting to spoil the episode. I don’t think it would have made much difference in context – Jack would have dismissed magic outright (Locke says the phrase at another point in their conversation) but he might have been more inclined to find that easier to comprehend based on what he was seeing than the idea that this island was beautiful.

By the end of the episode, order has been restored, both figuratively and literally. Jack has, for better and worse, officially taken over leadership of his group. He will start facing challenges the very next day and the lesser angels of his nature will again overwhelm him. As for the ‘mystery’ of his father appearing in the jungle, the show will drop it for so long that many viewers would very quickly begin to wonder if Lost had any intention of solving the mysteries it put into play. They would eventually resolve it, but by that time I imagine many viewers might very well have given up in the interim for that same reason. (For the record, I eventually theorized what Jack had seen might be in my first attempt at a book on this and the writers would prove I was right.)  Jack might have been the best person who could have kept the group alive. But as we shall see over and over again, he was the wrong person for them to survive here.

Your Honore Needed A Second Season. Unfortunately, the Writing's No Better Than The First.

 

When I first reviewed Your Honor way back in December of 2020, I thought it had the potential for greatness. Bryan Cranston was in the process of giving another performance that would get him multiple award nominations, the cast was one of the best of a Limited Series that Showtime had assembled to that point, and the spiraling plot had the makeup of so many of the great limited series that Peak TV had been treated to for the past several years and continues to enjoy.

My opinion of it dropped dramatically before it was over. None of this had anything to do with the cast: Cranston was magnificent throughout, and the ensemble was extremely good, from Michael Stuhlbarg and Hope Davis, two of the most undervalued character actors of this era, down to the always reliable Isaiah Whitlock, Jr. and Margo Martindale.  But the longer the series went on, it became harder and harder to overlook the gaps in the plot and the coincidences that the viewer was asks to believe.

The set-up we got in the Pilot was a good one: Judge Michael DiSanto learned that his teenage son had been involved in a hit-and-run that left another boy dead. He prepares to turn his son, but then learns that the child he killed was the son of Jimmy Baxter (Stuhlbarg) the most ruthless crime boss in New Orleans. He then does everything in his power to protect his son, which eventually will lead to the corruption of his robe, and a string of murders and horrible violence. Your Honor had the plot and the cast of a great series. But almost from the start there were too many problems.

The biggest of them involved the Baxter family itself. Jimmy Baxter is set up to be this violent monster, capable of great evil. But from the pilot on, he is shown as the model of restraint and patience. That’s not a problem when it comes to the nature of Stuhlbarg as an actor: his entire career is modeled on showing restraint and calm. Where it falls down in the plotting of Your Honor is that from the moment we meet him, Gina (Davis) is shown to be angrier and more controlling one, forcing everybody around her to act as she fits and almost always overriding her husband, including orchestrating the plan for her older son to murder the young man she feels responsible for her son’s murder. It was never believable for a moment that Jimmy Baxter could control a crime family when he could never control his actual one. Even less believable was the fact that his daughter Fia, the quieter more modest child who Jimmy always got along with better than his son or his wife, could somehow be completely oblivious to her family’s criminal activities well past the murder of her brother.  Even in the second season, she is still trying to fundamentally deny everything her father does as ‘rumors’ more than anything else. That at some level she still wants to be a part of the family even after we learn about her makes the character either willfully blind or ridiculously naïve.

I’d actually argue that was the biggest flaw in the first season, but it wasn’t. No, the biggest problem was a plot twist that was not only unworthy of Peak TV but that would barely be acceptable in a 1980s soap. Out of Michael Juniors guilt, he encountered Fia and the two fell in love. Michael Junior never revealed his secret, of course, and kept seeing Fia despite knowing full well how dangerous it was if they ever got a hint of the truth. The entire relationship undermined everything that was going on involving the major action, and it made you question the intelligence of the writers if they really thought the viewers could accept this.

Even that did not sicken me as how it looked like the series was going to end. After Carlo Baxter ended up being found not guilty (entirely due to Michael’s manipulation of the trial) the victim’s brother bought a gun and went out to shoot Carlo at the Baxter hotel. Michael frantically tried to get there to get his son out of there – only to arrive to see him take a bullet that was meant for Carlo and die in his father’s arms. I’ve had problems with the endings of many limited series in the last several years, but I don’t think any have made me fundamentally feel like they had wasted my time the way the last minutes of Your Honor did. Maybe the writers thought that this was supposed to be the ultimate tragic irony.  To me, it just seemed to render everything I had watched for nearly three months pointless. Michael had thrown his entirely career and life away to protect his son – and his son died regardless.

In hindsight, I now consider Your Honor the weakest limited series I saw from the start of their highpoint – probably 2016 with the debut of anthologies like Fargo and American Crime Story as well as more compact series like The Night Of and The Night Manager – to the present day. Unlike too many limited series that have gone one to have second seasons – Big Little Lies and perhaps Nine Perfect Strangers –  there was a far better reason to give Your Honor a second season. Despite the conclusion, there were too many loose ends left unresolved and in that sense, it made sense to bring it back for Season as they finally did this January. Unfortunately, the fundamental problems with the series have not been changed in the interim: the performances are still magnificent, but the writing is at its core, beyond lacking.

Now I do get the reasoning behind the motivation for the action that propels Season 2. But from the get-go, nothing about is any more plausible, realistically or dramatically. In the beginning of Season 2, Michael is now in jail for his part in corruption and has lost all will to live. He has completely rejected his entire support system, refuses psychiatric help and visitors and in the season premiere, seems very determined to kill himself. So the visit of Olivia (Rosie Perez) a federal prosecutor who wants to use him to bring down the Baxter family is handled badly from the start and shows no realization of it.

Olivia makes not even the barest effort to try and show either sympathy or empathy with Michael, approaching him like any other felon. When she meets with the judges determined to prosecute Michael, she has already made up her mind that he’s going to do this even though he hasn’t signed on. To any other agent with a soul or a brain, it would be crystal clear that Michael is the worst possible person to try and recruit for this – he doesn’t care about anything and wants very badly just to die. Yet when Olivia visits him after his near death experience, she actually tries to joke about what happen and then after another refusal, basically blackmails him into making ‘the right choice’.

Olivia can’t even be bothered to show the minimum about of sympathy or even empathy for what Michael is going through or even for his well-being for the danger he’s putting himself in. “Have I given you the impression any of this voluntary?” she tells him at one point. She can barely be bothered to mouth the words assuring him of his safety. Michael is just a tool to her. The fact that he might only be doing this so that he can get killed probably doesn’t bother her as long as she can hang on the Baxter rap sheet at the end. I’ve seen heartless representatives of the law over time, but I’ve rarely seen someone so utterly blind to the consequences of what she’s trying to do.

But that’s to be expected from the writers of Your Honor who are so concerned with the consequences of everything that happens that they don’t even bother to go through what that makes their characters look like as a result. This is particularly true when it comes to Gina, who clearly doesn’t even seem to be a human being. Her daughter has now lost her brother and her boyfriend, and she doesn’t even care one bit about Fia’s grief. In a scene in a hotel room with her daughter, she seems to care about the condition of the room rather than how her daughter is feeling. When her daughter curses at her – something she has no problem Carlo or Jimmy doing – she berates her for her language and slaps her across her the face.  She barely paid any consequence to her husbands actions in Season 1, and when her son does something risky that could have gotten him killed, she is angrier at Jimmy for not acting out in retribution then her son’s own actions. Davis is a great actress, but there’s nothing for her to work with any more than a haranguing banshee.

And that’s true with just about everyone else. No one wants to show anything resembling the bare minimum of a human side. Eugene (Whitlock) whose still reeling from everything that has happened to his godson and best friend, nevertheless, puts his personal feelings above his own ambition. Jimmy is now essentially a figurehead among his own family whose strategies will never be listened to and will never take responsibility for what has happened to his daughter. All the characters in both crime families, including the bosses, have no control over anything that their soldiers do and whose words of wisdom have long since stop mattering.

Cranston alone manages to stand above the material because Michael is the only character in this entire show who has motivations that are completely understandable and sympathetic. He spent half of Season 1 trying to control everything to keep his son safe until the ripples eventually became too much and he lost everything. Now every moment of his time on screen we can tell he is a man who has no motivation to keep going and who may only be doing what he is not for redemption but oblivion. Only at the end of the second episode does their come a revelation (which is barely a surprise) that may give him the slightest bit of daylight at the end of the tunnel and the barest reason to live. You can argue in a way that this is a better performance than his work as Walter White, both because he is infinitely more sympathetic and, frankly, because the writing is so much worse than it was on Breaking Bad.

I don’t know if I have it in me to follow Your Honor to the conclusion the rest of the way. There are a lot of good actors to appreciate, and the direction is absolutely spot on. I just find it very hard to stay committed to a series that has decided to concentrate more on the consequences of actions rather than whether the character’s actions were in themselves realistic. What I can say with certainty is this. If you haven’t watched the first season of Your Honor, don’t. At the end of the day whatever strengths the series might have are ultimately outweighed by its weaknesses. The entire cast is worth seeing, but in basically any other project they’ve done then this one. I’m committed mainly because of my prior investment. There are too many better series in Peak TV for the viewer to watch than to waste time with this one.

My score: 2 stars.