Lost Rewatch on VHS: Exodus, Part 1

 

The most famous mythology series prior to Lost was, of course, The X-Files which while one of the greatest series in history was one of the greatest examples of just what happens when a mythology grows out of control on a show.  There were examples of its failing, but they were by far the most obvious in the cliffhangers that ended every season. Pretty much from the start of the series to the end (all of them) seasons would end with what appeared to a revelation that would absolutely change the world of the show forever. And when the show started up the next fall, all that would happen was a few pieces would be moved but the board would be the same.

This was not entirely a flaw of The X-Files but that of how network television worked up to this point and beyond; every cliffhanger of every series, drama or comedy, basically ended up with the status quo reaffirmed. While this began to change to an extent when cable entered the picture, the effect on broadcast television was slower to pick up on. Current hits like ER  and The Practice would not alter their formulas and newer series like The West Wing and CSI would do so for a while, but eventually resume business as usual. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and 24 would reject this formula overall by bringing their stories to an end with the final episode and starting from scratch the next season. Only occasionally (most notably with Alias, which sprang from J.J. Abrams mind) would the creators have the balls to not only change the game with the season ender but commit to it for the entire season and beyond.

All three of the hit series that developed on ABC in 2004-2005 – Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy – cemented the idea of changing the same with the season finale and committing to it the rest of the way. There’s a pretty clear divide between network TV season enders in 2005 and how they did things going forward. Some would be better at it than others, but few would manage to master not just the idea of a season leading to a brilliant climax, but actually following through on it. Lost would do it perfectly, beginning her and following through until the penultimate season.

In a way, all of Lost’s first five seasons would essentially follow the same model: a one hour episode putting everything into motion and then following through with a tremendous season finale. Exodus, Part 1 is the first such example and it does so perfectly in every respect.

Each season finale would feature a variation on the flashbacks that the viewer had gotten familiar with over the season. In a way, the one that we see here (and will be concluded the following week) is both the simplest model and the most complicated. The flashbacks follow every regular in the series just prior to their getting on the plane and illustrating how much they’ve changed since the plane crash. We see Walt and Michael in violent disagreement, we see Jack drinking in a bar in mourning, we see Boone and Shannon bickering (and Shannon turning Sayid in to security out of pique at Boone) we see Kate being taunted and violently attacking the marshal (who it now seems couldn’t have died soon enough) we see how Sawyer ended up on the plane, we see Sun and Jin at a table in an airport café. The contrast to their behavior between then and now is clear, but there are also some interesting details we pick up.

The most obvious comes in Sawyer’s who, not surprisingly, was arrested before he was put on the plane and we learn his real name for the first time. (It does beg the question why Hurley didn’t call him on when he read the manifest, but maybe Sawyer just told him.) In a sense the most interesting comes when we see Jack in the airport bar, flirting with an apparently random woman named Ana Lucia. I think at the time I thought that this was little more than a ploy for ratings with some guest casting that a series like Lost wouldn’t be able to do under other circumstances except in flashbacks. At this point, Michelle Rodriguez was already becoming a breakout star, having just appeared in The Fast and the Furious and SWAT , both box office hits at the time.  I don’t know until that fall any of us knew we’d be seeing her again – or under what circumstances. (It’s possible the writers didn’t either at this point; Ana Lucia in this scene is arguably openly happy for the only time in the entire series.)

One could be forgiven for giving the flashbacks short shrift; from the opening scene on the island, our attention is riveted from the moment Rousseau wanders in to the camp and tells them: “The Others are coming.” Mira Furlan’s performance in this episode is extraordinary; the monologue she delivers in which she reveals what exactly happened to her when she and her team crashed on the island sixteen years ago is mesmerizing, especially when we learn that the Others took Alex one week after she gave birth to him. When she finishes her speech by saying: “You have three choices. Run, hide, or die,” we’re inclined to believe her no matter how crazy she may be. Jack understandably doubts her – until he sees the smoke about which she’s been talking.

Rousseau’s actions essentially force Jack’s hand about the hatch. No one else except Locke is noticeably enthusiastically, and honestly we wouldn’t be shocked if he agreed with anything to get the hatch open. Rousseau then mentions that their explosives in the Black Rock in the Dark Territory. (Hurley’s reaction again is the voice of the audience.)

What follows essentially leads to something that will become critical in every season finale and throughout the series going forward. By the end of this episode, the camp will be split up and will not reunite until nearly a third of the way through Season 2.  The raft has to get in the ocean today and that means the rest of the camp has to get it in there. By the time they do so, the group going out to the Black Rock has set out, and its pretty much what will be called by the fanbase as ‘The A-Team.” Jack, Locke and Kate are not exactly surprises, though at this point we are slightly surprised to see Hurley just deciding to come along. Up until this point, with the exception of his trek to find Rousseau in ‘Numbers’ (and that was originally something he did on his own) Hurley has not particularly wanted to be part of the dangerous treks into the jungle, partly because of his queasiness towards blood. This is the first major excursion where he is fully aware this could get him killed and while many wondered at the time why he did, perhaps it is because he feels he owes to his friends. The other member of the excursion is Arzt, who we met briefly in the previous episode, and is one of the few survivors whose shown up more than once. It’s hard not to get a serious ‘red shirt’ vibe from him. (Does Arzt sense this when he runs away halfway through the trek? One wonders.)

And of course the reason he comes back is because the monster makes a reappearance. Rousseau’s theory that is a ‘security system’ is interesting (though the source will be…questionable) And we finally get to the Black Rock and one of the great set pieces of Lost. The Black Rock is a ship – in the middle of the island. We immediately have more questions but this is one mystery that will not be paid off for a very long time (though the resolution is worth it)

Because this is a time of parting, there are other revelations many of them profoundly moving. Before Jack goes off into the jungle, he gives Sawyer a gun though whether its because he thinks he’ll need it for safety or because he thinks horrible things might happen is never clear. Sawyer, almost certainly because he thinks he might never see Jack again, confides about his meeting with Christian in ‘Outlaws’. It’s perhaps the most selfless action he’s taken so far on the series; you almost wonder if he does it because he thinks he might die on the ocean. Walt, who has been reluctant to leave, gives Vincent to Shannon because he seems to think she will need him. (Some speculated at the time she thought she needed protection; by contrast, Vincent’s presence will lead many to speculate that there’s something dangerous about the dog.) And Jin and Sun have their first conversation since her secret was revealed and their first true connection on the island. The scene between them is one of the most incredibly moving as we learn Jin’s theory as to why this has happened and the first real step the two of them will take towards loving each other again.

The final minutes of the episode are extraordinary: the raft ends up in the ocean, there is a sense of cheering and triumph among everybody on the beach that we have almost never seen in the series before, and will rarely see again. The music from Michael Giacchino, always magnificent in the finales, reaches soaring heights as the raft goes into the ocean, the sail is launches everyone is cheering – and in the last moment, it turns foreboding as we see the smoke rise in the forest. We think we’re prepared for what will come in the finale. As Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof (who will write every season finale) will prove, we couldn’t be more wrong.

Advice For Ryan Coogler's New X-Files

 

For several months there have been hints throughout the net that a new version of The X-Files is in the works. Gillian Anderson made it clear after the last revival she was done with the role of Dana Scully; David Duchovny said he was not entirely opposed to reprising the role of Mulder.

Finally this week Chris Carter gave us the big news. He told us that The X-Files was coming back but that neither Duchovny nor Anderson would be connected with it. It has also been leaked that the creative force behind it will be Ryan Coogler, the visionary mind that brought us the critically acclaimed blockbusters Creed and Black Panther, both of which have earned multiple Academy Awards nominations and wins the last few years.

Let’s get the first part out of the way. For those of you who are automatically saying: “How dare they try to do the X-Files without Mulder and Scully?” It’s worth noting that on at least three separate occasions – twice during the original run; once in the revival – Chris Carter and the creator made concentrated attempts to actually do so and in one key example followed through for two seasons.

In Season 5 just prior to the release of the first X-Files movie, Carter introduced the character of Jeffrey Spender, played by Chris Owens. Owens had made guest appearances the previous season as a younger version of the iconic Cigarette Smoking-Man, so it didn’t come as much of a shock that it was revealed he was his son. Jeffrey Spender quickly became a much loathed character because he hated everything Mulder believed in, though based on what we learned about his character, that’s understandable. After the X-Files began Season 6, Jeffrey Spender and the equally loathed Diana Fowley (Mimi Rogers) were assigned to the X-Files basically as cat’s paws to the Syndicate.  Jeffrey Spender spent most of the sixth season essentially being hated by fans until the critical two-parter when he learned the full truth of his connection to the conspiracy that his father had been a part of for half a century and chose to betray his father. At the end of that two-parter, he told the leadership of the Bureau that they should do everything in their power to get Mulder and Scully back on the X-Files.  But just as his character finally realized it’s potential, Chris Carter decided to have his father kill him off. Well, they didn’t actually kill him off, this was The X-Files, after all, but after this point Owens was no longer a factor in the series.

The more direct attempt at replacement was done out of necessity at the end of Season Seven when David Duchovny’s contract was up and the series decided to continue anyway.  Mulder’s character was abducted by aliens and the man charged with searching him out was John Doggett, exceptionally well played by Robert Patrick.  Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, Doggett’s energy brought something that had been missing from the show for at least two seasons and after he was reassigned to the X-Files his back and forth with Scully, now a reluctant believer, helped keep the series. Halfway through the season, we met Monica Reyes, played by Annabeth Gish. Reyes’ character grated on fans more in Season 8 but with the departure of Duchovny imminent, there was a clear way to move forward.

While Season 9 was basically a disaster that ended up leading to the series cancellation, in retrospect the problems had nothing to do with either Doggett or Reyes. Patrick remained superb throughout and while Gish took awhile to find her groove, she gave several performances. Indeed, you could have seen the series working had the show just continued with its Monster-of-the-Week format with Doggett and Reyes going through the country. The larger problem was that even though Duchovny was gone, the series continued to focus on Mulder even though his character left (there was never a good explanation why) and because Gillian Anderson was still around, Scully’s character suffered immensely by comparison. By far the biggest problem was the fact the series was still stuck on the idea of the mythology which by this point bore no resemblance to anything the series had spent the last eight years dealing with but the show was still insisting was connected to the larger plot. Those factors, along with understandable nostalgia for Mulder and Scully, ended up driving the series towards cancellation.

The last true hint at another set of investigators came in one of the episodes of the revival in 2016. In the episode Babylon Mulder and Scully met agents Miller (Robbie Amell) and Einstein (Lauren Ambrose), two characters who were clearly meant to be younger versions of Mulder and Scully, not only based on the clear resemblance of Amell and Ambrose to the agents, but their behavior (Miller was a believer, Einstein a skeptic) and the way they clashed. Some fans did not like them; I was amused and entertained by both performers and characters. The two characters were important factors in the tenth season finale and I honestly thought they might be the future of the series. But when the show returned in 2018, both characters (along with what we had seen in the season finale) was cast aside.

So there is precedent for a new team of investigators for the new version of The X-Files. And as those reactionaries who will say: “What if they turn out to be, gasp, African-American or other minorities?!” I’d say, why not? There were many problems with the X-Files over the years, and one of the more obvious was the clear lack of minority representation involving all the regulars in what amounted to eleven seasons over 25 years: the only two African-American semi-regulars we had were Steven Williams’ X, who was killed of in the Season 4 premiere, and James Pickens Alvin Kersh, whose only purpose in his entire run was to prove someone everybody should hate mindlessly. All the other female regulars, with the exception of Reyes, were viewed negatively because they were always paired with Mulder, and as we know, the shippers revolted. (It didn’t help the writers purposely made them one-dimensional.)

As an expert of The X-Files (I will continue my series of articles on it later next month) I think I am uniquely qualified to discuss what Coogler and whichever writers he recruits for this venture should definitely do and avoid like the black oil. So here are some hints that I think might make this new revival of the X-Files a better series.

We Can’t Just Have Two Leads: It’s kind of remarkable that for most of the run of the X-Files, the only names in the opening credits were Duchovny and Anderson’s. That was fundamentally more a habit tied to 1980s crime dramas than anything else at the time, most of which had three or four regulars at most. I have to tell you as great as Duchovny and Anderson were during the series, a lot of the time the fact they were the only leads hurt the series credibility. The most obvious example came during Season Four when Scully contracted what was supposedly terminal cancer. As extraordinarily gripping as that storyline was, it required a major suspension of disbelief because the viewer could not accept that one of the two leads would be killed off. (It didn’t help matters that the shooting of the first X-Files film was announced at the end of Season 4.)

So if Coogler wants to separate his X-Files from Carters, it might help if he created a division or department in the Bureau, a la NCIS or Criminal Minds. Not only would this allow the series to have more diversity in the cast, but it would also fit in more with the general milieu of today’s television where no one is safe, something that was never entirely easy to believe as the original X-Files ran on, and Mulder and Scully kept surviving but everyone around them died. It would also get rid one of the bigger problems that no one on the series could ever justify: why Mulder was never killed off if he was ever that much of a threat. In that sense, a regular being killed off in Season 1 (something almost expected in Peak TV today) would actually be fitting with the original’s mood: it would make very clear just how dangerous it was to get to the truth. That being said…

The Mythology Must Be Handled More Carefully: Honestly, it’s hard to imagine Coogler doing a worse job than Carter with the show’s backstory: it probably came as a shock to no one that Carter never had an overarching plan for the series mythology, and essentially was making it up as he went along. Still the fact that the mythology kept seeming like it was going to make sense and every season the writers either moved laterally or kept building an increasingly shaky house of cards pretty much damaged a lot of credibility the series ever had about the mythology: at a certain points most fans loved the show more for its ‘monsters of the week’ episodes and dreaded the mythology.

I’m not necessarily saying that Coogler has to design an X-Files with no mytharc.  Admittedly that might give his series more of a wrinkle these days now that every show that comes out seems to be serialized (and let’s not kid ourselves, fewer people would be disappointed when it didn’t pay off) But if you’re going to do a mytharc, you have to do it better. And here are a couple of suggestions as to how to make it work.

Make the Most Interesting Monsters Human: Among the many problems with the alien mythology (I’ll get to some of the bigger ones below) was that in many ways, aliens are behind it all and they’re coming to take over the world is the most obvious one, which makes it, in the world of The X-Files, the least interesting explanation. While many fans are in disagreement as to exactly when the mythology went off the rails, there is universal agreement as to when they were sure it still might make sense. That was in Season Three when Carter and his writers decided to do one of the most daring things on network television, particularly for a show like The X-Files.

They opened the series making the blatant suggestion that there was no such thing as an alien conspiracy but rather that it was cover for something more banal and worse: that the government had spent half a century using alien abduction to run experiments on human beings.  The men who did this were Axis scientists, both Nazis and Japanese recruited from America after World War II to help win the Cold War.  Indeed, the most satisfying mytharc episodes may be Nisei-731 in which Scully’s abduction has been linked not to aliens but to a Japanese scientist who has abducted a group of women who will eventually all die of cancer. (They tell us as much when we first meet them and the series follows through on this.)  Perhaps the most shocking moment in the entire series comes when we see what a concentration camp in Virginia is basically where the military is executed hundreds, if not thousands of lepers. At one point Scully actually tells Mulder: “There is no such thing as an alien abduction.”

If the series had been willing to follow on this arc, The X-Files would have been a different show but perhaps a more daring, darker and brilliant one. Every so often in the next couple of seasons Carter and his writers would occasionally try to make this argument. But during the third season, Carter introduced the black oil and made it impossible to deny alien existence going forward. He just couldn’t let it go and the series went downhill.

Given what we know about our government these days and keep learning, it honestly might be more interesting for this new X-Files division to track down government conspiracies and find rather than some kind of supernatural monster at the core, something far more evil and sinister at the center: how depraved man can be. In fact, this actually brings me to another point that might help the series:

Let There Be  A Logical Explanation to the Monsters The Division Chases:

As wonderful as the Mulder-Scully dynamic was to watch over seven season, at a certain point the formula of Mulder’s supernatural explanation always being right over Scully’s realistic one became a little tiresome. Not just because Scully generally looked more foolish when she kept sticking to the realistic one week after week, year after year but because it’s kind of dull when you always know that at the end of the day Mulder’s going to be right. Yes we all want monsters to be real, but it might have been nice to occasionally find out that the ghost actually haunting the amusement park was an actual human being?

Indeed that’s where the mythology may have fallen down. For the first three seasons, there was a logical explanation as to why almost everything involving aliens had happened. After the black oil was introduced, it really like seemed like Carter and his writers were doing everything in their power to make sure Scully never saw aliens. (This was particularly blatant when Season 6 began when Scully had been rescued by Mulder from an alien spaceship but refused to verify Mulder’s account of it to an FBI Board. No fan of the series has ever liked that particular turn of events.)

So let the skeptic (whoever it is) be right everything so often. Maybe a third of the time, maybe just a quarter. Honestly it would be more fitting with how TV works these days by going against the formula. I’m not necessarily saying they don’t have to be aliens to be sure, but actually that brings me to what may be a more interesting point.

The New X-Files Needs More Interesting Aliens: For a series that argued that the aliens had begun to colonize, we really didn’t see a lot of them. Part of this was because of the idea that they were all either clones or ‘alien-human hybrids’ or ‘super-soldiers’ (boy I got tired of hearing those last two phrases over and over) but there were never that many. I think at the end of the day, there were maybe two different aliens and one was just called ‘the Alien Bounty Hunter.’  We saw what amounted to ‘faceless rebels’ but I have to tell you they all might as well have been Brian Thompson who played the Bounty Hunter.

I realize that so much of The X-Files was about never get backstories to any of the supernatural, and that was basically fine for the Monsters-of-the-Week. It’s kind of annoying that we essentially never got any for the aliens that were at the center of this colonization and invasion plot  (where the date kept getting pushed back and never eventually happened, but that’s another story) Maybe the writers didn’t think it mattered what planet the aliens came from and maybe it doesn’t. But they should have done better than “aliens coming from planet to planet to colonize’ which by the time we learned that was essentially the plot of Independence Day.

Indeed, if we’re going to have aliens, here’s a novel idea: Make the aliens the good guys who the government is trying to hunt down. There is precedent for this. At the end of Season Three we met Jeremiah Smith, who performed what amounted to a miracle at a mass shooting, seemed to be essential the conspiracy because he ‘no longer believed in the greater purpose’. His character had enormous potential, so naturally he was killed of in the next episode, sort of reappeared four years later and basically had no pertinence having to do with the overarching story. The next alien rebels we met didn’t believe in the greater purpose either, but their solution seemed to be burning everybody, innocent or guilty, alive. The writers dumped that storyline too.

It might actually be more interesting for aliens to be part of The X-Files but not part of any vast government conspiracy.  Hell, maybe some of them could be from different planets and therefore being different in their forms. (Essentially the Bounty Hunter and Jeremiah Smith basically appeared to be variations on the same species.) Maybe some of them know each other; maybe some of them don’t.

And hell, if we’re going to have to whole shape-shifting thing; here’s something that would be fitting in with the entire original story: make one of those aliens part of the investigators. Maybe he’s part of the conspiracy; maybe he’s a double agent, maybe he gets persuaded through the arc of the series. All of these would be far more interesting ideas than the original X-Files ever did with its aliens.

That Said, Remember The Past: A couple of the more interesting X-Files episodes came when we followed the story of Arthur Dales (memorably played by Darren McGavin) who in his own way led Mulder to the X-Files and got a glimpse of the original conspiracy as far back in the days of HUAC. It was originally intended to do more episodes like that but McGavin suffered a stroke in 1999 and could not make any future appearances.

Perhaps we could get sense of the past by doing flashback episodes to the original conspiracy. Maybe see how the original syndicate was founded, show us the relationship between the Mulder family and the Spender family as well as telling us just how all of this came to be. This might have done better to be its own its series, but it might not be the worst idea to visit occasionally. It also might resolve the issue of the absence of Mulder and Scully going forward. (Though who knows: maybe after enough time Anderson and Duchovny can be convinced to make cameos every so often.)

Perhaps Most Important, Get Good Writers: I’ll be honest it was not so much the return of The X-Files that made me tune in to the revival series; it was the return of Darin Morgan to the writer’s room that made me think it was worth it. It also helped that Darin’s brother Glen and his partner James Wong were back for the run.

I’m all for Coogler wanting to make his own path with a new X-Files but it wouldn’t hurt to try and get any of these three talents to come back for an episode or two. Maybe see if you can haul in Frank Spotnitz. (I think there’s a good chance Howard Gordon and Vince Gilligan are just going to be too busy to assist; they justifiably were for each revival of the series. Still you never know.)

Is the X-Files superfluous in an age when conspiracy theories are mainstream? I’d argue it isn’t. If anything I think the world would be a better place if there was another division for the FBI’s Most Unwanted following in the footsteps of Mulder and Scully. The Truth is Still Out There, and we need new people to find it.

Historical Figures Series, The Presidential Campaigns Of George Wallace: The 1968 Third Party Run That Foreshadowed So Much of Today's Politics

 

As has been recorded by countless historians over the more than half a century since, 1968 was one of the most violent years in the century and the frustration with the stalemate in Vietnam and the domestic riots that had been plaguing the streets for the last several years from Watts to Newark to Detroit infested every aspect of the Presidential election.  The Vietnam War was at the center of the protest campaigns of Gene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy’s presidential run and helped propel Richard Nixon’s come back. Just as important was the backlash to both the civil rights movement and the fighting in the streets. Many candidates would run on these issues but few would manage to harness as effectively as George Wallace did.

Term-limited Wallace arranged for his second wife, Lurleen, to run in his place as governor of Alabama. By this point Wallace was perhaps the most public figure in the fight against integration. His behavior towards the marchers  in Selma - where ‘Bloody Sunday’ was the least of his crimes -and  that ultimately would lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 earned him castigation by liberals and African-Americans in the North and the admiration of the South and blue collar workers through the country.  During his last year as governor he signed legislation to nullify desegregation guidelines in Alabama cities and counties. He was denounced by critics for political trickery and the forfeiture of federal funds. Wallace ignored them – he had bigger plans in mind.

In March of 1967 as Lurleen Wallace was being inaugurated, there was a strategy session of some of the most notorious white supremacists and anti-Semitic in the country. This organization led to the foundation of what would become known as the American Independent Party, arguably the most far right party in the history of the United states. Advocated the worst aspects of American-nationalism, anti-communism and most important segregation, George Wallace was quickly nominated to be the presidential nominee.

Wallace never expected to win but his hope was that he could syphon off enough votes in the Electoral college to keep both parties from obtaining a majority. This would send the election to the House of Representatives where he would essentially be a power broker. The end goal was for the Southern states to use their clout to make whoever the winner was end federal efforts at desegregation. It is terrifying to consider just how close he came just to doing just that.

Wallace’s position on Vietnam was significant different from both parties. He said that if within 90 days of taking office The Vietnam War was not winnable, he would immediately withdraw U.S. troops. The more significant part of his platform was the concept of ‘law and order’ a barely veiled reference to the crackdown on the protests on the streets everywhere. His campaign slogan went down in American political history: “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the two major parties.”

Both the Democrats and the Republicans were terrified of Wallace’s campaign. Blue collar union workers in the north – a party of the Democrat coalition since the days of FDR –  were heavily swayed by Wallace: a mid-September internal poll of the AFL-CIO showed that one and three union members supported him. But Richard Nixon was just as terrified of Wallace. Nixon was adopting the Southern strategy that Goldwater had begun to perfect four years earlier, and he knew that Wallace’s appeal could very well split the conservative vote and take much of the South that he was hoping to win.

Events throughout 1968 only seem to add momentum to Wallace, from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy to riots that spread throughout the countries and climaxed at the disastrous Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August. Hubert Humphrey emerged from the battle so damaged that in some public opinion polls after that convention, he trailed Wallace in both the popular vote and states that he would win.

For much of the summer of 1968 Wallace was poling as high as 20% in the public opinion polls and anywhere between seventy and eighty votes in the electoral college. The rhetoric in his campaigns was arguably the most notorious in the twentieth century, some of it with a direct link to some of the political campaigns of today. Most famously: “If any anarchists lie down in front of my automobile, it will be the last automobile they ever lie down in front of. His reactions to the hecklers that were prevalent in his campaign was one more of amusement than outrage – he was known to blow kisses to them at campaign stops. When hippies called him a Nazi, he said: “I was killing fascists when you punks were in diapers.”

  What is perhaps most striking – and indeed relevant – is not only how that the mainstream editorials excoriated him while the south embraced him, but that there were quite a few people on the Left who genuinely were impressed by his rhetoric. Indeed, the editor of the New Left magazine Ramparts said that “Wallace and the black and radical militants…share some common ground…In this year’s election, the only one of the three major candidates who is a true radical is Wallace.” Leftist Jack Newfield  compared him to William Jennings Bryan for his attacks on concentrated wealth in his speeches.. and how the liberal hypocrisy had created so many Wallace voters.
Even the people who hated his opinions thought he was an entertaining campaigner. The links between then and now is crystal clear.

Wallace’s problems began when he had choose a Vice Presidential candidate. Some important names were considered, some for fame (J. Edgar Hoover) some purely for celebrity (John Wayne and Colonel Sanders of KFC fame.) The more serious contenders came down to retired Air Force General Curtis LeMay, former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson (who declined because of his being involved with the Latter Day Saints) and perhaps the most viable options Happy Chandler, former Kentucky Senator and Governor as well as the Commissioner of Baseball.

Chandler was by far Wallace’s best option. They believed he would put him over the top in Tennessee, South Carolina and Florida, and solidify support in Arkansas, Georgia, and North Carolina. Wallace was cautious: as I wrote in an earlier article, Chandler had supporting the integration of baseball and as governor of Kentucky he had been a more liberal southern governor than most.  But it was that exact fact that many of his aides urged him to take him on: as one put it in the blunt terms associated with Wallace himself: “We have all the nuts in the country, we could get some decent people – you working one side of the street and he working the other side.”

However when the deal was leaked, Wallace’s supporters objected, his Kentucky campaign chair resigned, and Nelson Bunker Hunt, a loyal member of the John Birch Society and one of Wallace’s biggest donors demanded he be removed from the ticket.

LeMay ended up reluctantly accepting – he feared being labeled a racist and his job as chairman of the board of an electronics company would be lost if he were to run for vice president. Hunt sent up a million-dollar fund to reimburse him.

Ironically, it was LeMay’s positions on Vietnam, not race, that hurt the campaign. His enthusiasm for nuclear weapons was well known and Wallace aides tried to persuade him to avoid the subject. However, on his first interview: he attempted to dispel ‘America’s phobias on nuclear weapons’ by discussing ‘radioactive land crabs.” Far worse were later suggestion he gave of the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Hubert Humphrey seized on this by dubbing Wallace and LeMay ‘the Bombsey Twins.” LeMay’s campaign appearances were halted but the damage was done, and it also reinforced his gender gap among women voters, particularly in the North.

Near the end of the campaign Wallace hurt his cause when rather than try and focus on winning the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee, Wallace chose to run a ‘national campaign’ and staged rallies in thirty three cities in the North but only one time each in Georgia, Tennessee and North Carolina. While that decision no doubt hurt him in this campaign (and probably cost him the latter two states) the crowds he drew at those rallies no doubt helped his national appeal.

When election day came, Wallace campaign had been a remarkable success for a third party candidate. He won nearly ten million votes and carried five Southern states – Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi – for a total of 45 electoral votes. (A North Carolina elector pledged to Nixon cast his vote for him when the Electoral College met.) His percentage of the vote cast was 13.5 percent, the highest any third party candidate had managed since Robert LaFollette had run for President as a Progressive in 1924. Yet even these impressive numbers for a third party candidate underscore how large an effect Wallace had on the election.

He finished second with more than thirty percent of the vote in both North and South Carolina and received nearly 29 percent of the vote in Florida. He received more than thirty four percent of the vote in Tennessee and over twenty three percent of the vote in Virginia. His enormous strength in the South, combined with the fact that four of the five states he had carried had all gone to Goldwater four years earlier, caused many political observers (but not Richard Nixon) of the truth of LBJ’s observation of how the Civil Rights Act had given the Republicans the South. This truth would not be fully realized until Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980.

But Wallace was not merely a southern phenomenon. He received nearly 400,000 votes apiece in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois,  over 330,000 in Michigan, half a million in California, and almost six hundred thousand in Texas. Five of the biggest electoral prizes in the country had been influenced by Wallace’s presence. Neither side could deny the political power the Wallace vote was nationally.

In the narrowest of sense Wallace run for President was a failure in that he had not managed to achieve his objective. But considering just how close he had come to doing so (there are so many scenarios where if he could have managed to in a stronger campaign in states like Tennessee, North Carolina or Florida he could have done so and that’s just the most obvious one) no one could deny that both Wallace’s message and his personality had an appeal to a certain type of voter that the Democrats had relied on for decades and the Republicans were hoping to win over. Consider that Richard Nixon only defeated Hubert Humphrey by less than one percent of the popular vote and that his electoral total of 301 was just barely over the amount needed to win, no one could pretend that Wallace hadn’t altered the Presidential race immensely or that he would not be a political factor in future ones.

Indeed, other factors were about to make candidates like Wallace’s path forward even easier. After Hubert Humphrey had earned the Democratic nomination without competing in a single political primary, the Democratic Party had in the aftermath of the disastrous Chicago convention had set up a commission to reform and improve the delegation selection process for future conventions starting in 1972. Among their decisions involved an increase in the number of political primaries the Democrats would hold during the next cycle. This would shift the power of nominating process forever from the party chairs and head of state commissions to the voter. And one of those people’s whose fortunes would effect the most was George Wallace.

In the next article, I will deal with George Wallace’s 1972 run in the Democratic primaries from the start of his campaign, the attempt on his life, and how even afterward it affected the general election.

The Movies Of Aaron Sorkin, Our Most Brilliant Screenwriter: The American President

 

Part 1: The American President

Over the years I have written several articles about the television series of Aaron Sorkin and how that while his style was brilliant and some of his series were incredible, the lion’s share of his work has not aged particularly well and after he left The West Wing,  the idealistic tone of his TV has become increasingly out of touch with the darkness and cynicism that makes up the best of the new Golden Age.

However, I don’t hold that opinion with the movies he has made. Of the ten movies to date that he has screenplay credits for, at least seven of them can be considered classics of the screen. He has won one Academy Award for screenwriting and has been nominated three more times and he received many nominations from other critics groups for Charlie Wilson’s War, Molly’s Game and his most recent movie Being The Ricardos, which received multiple acting nominations. His screenwriting debut A Few Good Men was nominated for Best Picture and he received Golden Globe nominations for it and The American President (both of which, I should mention, he wrote before he was ‘Aaron Sorkin’) There are almost no screenwriters with this great  a track record who do not also direct their own movies (something that Sorkin didn’t begin doing until Molly’s Game)/

And with the sole exception of Malice, an Alec Baldwin-Nicole Kidman potboiler, which does have some quotable dialogue (it is a Sorkin film) all of these movies are superb entertainments. It isn’t merely for the great dialogue, it is also because all of them are fundamentally about something, all of the characters are smart and can make even subjects that should be uninteresting incredibly entertaining to watch. Sorkin may not fit in with television any more but he remains one of the greatest screenwriters in history.

While the style of Sorkin’s films are all the same (whip-smart dialogue, brilliant acting, fascinating characters) they all are entertaining in different ways. Some of them have themes that were obvious on first viewing, some of them are far more subtle than you might have picked up even on multiple viewings. I have been wanted to write about Sorkin’s movies for a very long time as much for personal reasons as anything else. So this is the first in what will be a recurring series about Sorkin’s films. And I think it is fitting to start with the one that I have the greatest personal attachment to. It’s probably not his best film; but its by far the most entertaining.

For more than twenty years my family has loved The American President. Whenever one of us found it channel chasing, even by accident we would stop what we were doing and generally all of us would gather in one room to watch it. There were more than a few late family dinners and late nights because we chose to see the movie all the way through no matter what time it was when it started.  It was part of our repertoire for so long I honestly don’t know if we had already fallen in love with it before we knew that Sorkin was the screenwriter. (We’d already collectively been watching The West Wing  but I’m no longer sure when we first saw the film or how long we’d been watching The West Wing by the time we had.)

At this point in history, I imagine that even those who love Aaron Sorkin’s work would be inclined to dismiss it as ‘lesser Sorkin’ (as if there could be such a thing) or merely as an ancestor text for The West Wing. It’s easy to understand the latter reasoning: this is, after all, a film set in D.C. with a President who seems far too good to be true,  Martin Sheen, the future President Bartlett is the Chief of Staff, West Wing alumnus such as Joshua Malina and Anna Deavere Smith have small but critical roles and even the environmental group Annette Bening works for would end up appearing on an episode of The West Wing. There are even a few phrases every so often that would show up on the series: at one point, when decided to attack a building in Libya, Sheen tells Andrew Shepherd, among other things, “it’s a proportional response.” Shephard counters: “One of these days someone will have to tell me the value of proportional response.” This exact exchange would occur in one of the first episodes of the series.

But there is far more value to The American President than that. For one thing the movie is an outlier in almost every other Sorkin movie. It is not only one of only two screenplays he wrote that is a completely original work of fiction (his eight other films are either adaptations or adaptions of actual events) but it’s also the only true comedy not only in his movie repertoire but his entire artistic work. For all of the fast paced banter and witty dialogue that made up his TV shows, all of them were essentially dramas. Even Sports Night, classified as a comedy, never fit easily into the traditions of 1990s comedies, which may have been the main reason it never did particularly well with the Emmys at the time. The American President, for all of the seriousness regarding the subject, may very well be the only work in Sorkin’s resume that can truly be considered a comedy. Many people would later compare Sorkin’s dialogue to screwball comedies from the 30s and 40s; The American President is the only movie he made that basically could have been made by Frank Capra or Howard Hawks if they had made films in the present.

Perhaps even more amazingly its also the only romance in his body of work that is absolutely perfect. I’ve commented on multiple occasions that among Sorkin’s utter flaws, he absolutely could not make any of the romances in any of his series seem plausible: he was great when it came to the flirting, but could never deliver on the romance. (Josh and Donna only managed to hook up after Sorkin was long gone from The West Wing. Sports Night was an exception; the relationship between Natalie and Jeremy was perfect from the start and probably could have been ended well had the show not been prematurely cancelled.) The fact that he chooses what should be the most unbelievable idea for a romance possible – the President of the United States wants to start dating a woman – and not only makes it believable but practically combustible – makes it so frustrating that this would be the only time he ever got it perfect.

In this the movie is helped by the absolute perfect casting of Michael Douglas and Annette Bening as his leads.  Michael Douglas is clearly one of the greatest actors in history, but I’d argue that most of his best work was done in comedies rather than dramas. By this point in his career, he was getting typecast in intense dramas such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct as well as very dark action movies. Douglas was actually far more entertaining – and successful – in his comic films. He’d already given superb performances in three brilliant comedies with Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito, Romancing the Stone, Jewel of the Nile and the wonderful black comedy The War of the Roses.  As great some of his work in dark movies would be later on (The Game and Traffic are some of his best movies) his work in The American President represented a fundamental shift in the work he would do. Much of his best work from this point - his exceptional performance in Wonder Boys, underrated independents such as King of California and Solitary Man and his award-winning work on The Kominsky Method – shows how great a comic performer he is. His work as Hank Pym in Marvel’s Ant-Man movies almost makes them watchable even if you wouldn’t be caught dead in comic book film.

And Douglas is perfect in every scene he’s in. He has enough gravitas to pull of being President Andrew Shephard but he also has enough awkwardness when he’s fumbling around a woman he’s attracted to that he can do variations on slapstick and deliver pitch-perfect Sorkin dialogue at every occasion. (I’m not sure what my favorite line and situation comes to, but it’s probably when he’s trying to convince Sydney that this is perfectly normal, an Air Force helicopter arrives on the White House Lawn and he says nonchalantly: “My ride’s here.) Douglas was the perfect vehicle to deliver the stirring lines of Sorkin’s dialogue, but he’s also the perfect actor to show awkwardness and comedy. (I love the scene after he tells Sydney that they’re going to take it slow – and she walks from behind a curtain wearing only a shirt and he starts to fumble with his dialogue.)

My mother loves Annette Bening and thinks she is one of our greatest actresses, but still thinks her work in The American President is her absolute high point as an actress. That’s a high bar to cross for a woman whose been nominated for four Academy Awards (and still hasn’t one) and has starred in some other truly great movies. The thing is, I’m inclined to agree with her on this point. For all the power in her work in American Beauty, much of her performance is as much a caricature as it is a real person. And while she did do great work in films like Bugsy and The Kids are All Right in both of these films she was always being overshadowed by a brighter sun. Sydney Wade is probably her most perfect role: she is fundamentally love struck by the President early on, but she is a political operative and honestly has a far clearer glimpse of the political landscape that the President does. She is aware fundamentally how perilous this puts her position as the political consultant with the GDC from the beginning (her new boss makes it very clear when he shows her the front page of the two of them at ‘their first date’) and as much as she wants to follow her heart, she is more aware of the dangers of it than he is, which is why she spends the first half of the movie resisting his advances.  She is also very clear on the dangers his political rival Bob Rumson (Richard Dreyfus in a truly brilliant performance) and keeps warning Shephard well after their relationship has advanced. Throughout the movie she is able to keep her professional and personal life separate and the inevitable break in their relationship occurs when she cannot comprehend why Shepherd thinks he can violate the former and still be fine with her and the latter.

I can understand why so many people think The West Wing  no longer holds up in this age of polarization. I think that The American President, though it aired in theaters four years before The West Wing debuted on TV, actually holds up better and almost all of its points are in fact just as valid as they are in the age of cable news and social media. The fact that Andrew Shephard is essentially a single man and yet the Republicans decide to excoriate him because ‘The President’s got a girlfriend’   couldn’t be more pertinent in an era where only a married man is an acceptable model for Commander-In-Chief and ‘family values’ only seem to apply to one side.  Rumson is more than accurate says that “When it comes to a good character debate, the press is a willing accomplice’, something that has only become clearer in thirty years even as it seems to matter less for one side than the other. It may seem slightly unrealistic that Shephard refuses to engage with Rumson until the end of the movie, but that seems to have been a strategy that far too many Democrats adapted to their own detriment over many election cycles. And when Shepherd gives his stirring speech at the end of the movie, the fundamental strategy he says  for what winning elections has become has basically not changed from then and now. (I’ve mentioned it a couple of times myself to some doomcrying leftists at this point.) Indeed, some of the things that Sorkin has his characters say at some point are so blatantly obvious to me (I’m thinking of why Shephard asks why Rumson isn’t a member of the ACLU) that it astonishes me more than thirty years that no politician ever just cribs it wholesale.

In a way the Andrew Shephard White House is the inverse of the Bartlet one. In this White House, it is the President who is the idealists and the staffers who are realists about how America works. Smith, Sheen, David Paymer and Michael J. Fox (in what is arguably his best movie role) are always trying to tell the President that he can not just pretend that dating a woman is something the American people should have no say over.  As the President’s approval numbers continue to slide and the bill they are trying to get passed becomes harder to get votes, they make it very clear that Shephard must do something to either address the issues or attack Rumson.

Fox’s performance is superb because of how it shifts over the film. He is the most easily agitated with the President from the start and as things get more precarious, he increasingly loses patience until a scene when an Oval Office scene where he finally explodes at the President. “Bob Rumson is the only one doing the talking!” he yells and when A.J questions his attitude he says: “I have that right. He’s my President, and in American questioning the government is not only our right but our responsibility.” Then he looks Shepherd in the face and says: “But you already knew that, sir.” He delivers a brilliant speech about leadership which ends with: “People are so desperate for it they’ll go into a desert chasing a mirage and when they can’t find it they drink the sand.” This line, as well as the President’s as to why he believes people do so, is as dark a line Sorkin ever wrote about today’s politics – as well as one of his most accurate.

When it came out in 1995, many critics loved The American President; Roger Ebert put it on its ten best list. But it was a box office bomb even after being nominated for five Golden Globes (along with Sorkin, Bening, Douglas, director Rob Reiner and the film itself all received nominations in the Best Musical or Comedy category.) Americans do not go to political movies in general and while romantic comedies are popular, perhaps they chafed at the idea where the romance is as important as whether a bill involved curtailing global warming gets passed over one involving gun control. (Ah, the nineties.)  And while this movie is idealistic when it comes to its politics, Sorkin does not forget that it is fundamentally a romantic comedy above all else. For all we know after Shephard’s brilliant speech, he ends up losing reelection in a landslide to Bob Rumson regardless. Sorkin knows that’s not idealism triumphing over politics as usual isn’t the happy ending this film deserves: he makes it very clear that it’s about Andrew and Sydney being together no matter what. (Their exchange before they kiss about why they broke up makes it very clear that’s not why he made that speech or why she came back to him.)

Perhaps that is also why even now I find The American President far more resonant now than ever. The people who work for the President are idealists but they are also workaholics who have to be reminded its Christmas. Congressman refuse to vote with the President not because of their corruption but because they fear for their seats. The President’s Chief of Staff may be his best friend but he knows just how much he needs to be pushed. The President is a good man who can get angry and shout an obscenity at his best friend when he reaches his limit. And the people’s opinion, rarely acknowledged as meaningful except as to how it affect the political winds, are discussed in a meaningful context without degrading them. Perhaps Andrew Shepherd’s speech at the end of the movie is not the kind that any President would ever have made at any time in human history.  But that’s because he’s not just speaking to the American public, he’s speaking to the one person in the world whose opinion of him is the only one in the world that has ever mattered.

That may be the reason why this is the only film Sorkin has written that has an unabashedly happy ending because this the only time the real world consequences are irrelevant. In Casablanca, Rick famously told Ilsa: “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” This is the only story in Sorkin’s entire body of work where he argues the opposite, even – and maybe especially - if one of those people is the most powerful man on Earth.

 

Hank May Not Be Lucky But AMC Is: Lucky Hank Review

 

I have made little secret over the last decade and indeed before that how much of an admirer I am of Bob Odenkirk. I have loved him well before he took on his iconic role of Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad, and was actually appalled to learned that he had little choice to do so at the time because his agent told him he was basically broke. (The co-creator of Mr. Show was nearly bankrupt? That’s a crime in itself.)  His work as Jimmy McGill on Better Call Saul was one of the great performances on one of television’s greatest series. I’d be angrier that Odenkirk has never won an Emmy for it, but I remember the field he’s been a part of over the series’ run, and I would have voted for at least four of the actors who ended up winning anyway. (Doesn’t let you off the hook to ignore him this year.)

Given that he suffered a heart attack while filming the final season of the show, we are lucky that he is still around to keep working. Odenkirk himself could be forgiven for taking time off before doing any other projects but less that a year after the finale of Saul aired, here he is on another AMC series playing another title character in the new comedy Lucky Hank.

Now it’s worth noting I would watch Odenkirk in anything he does by this point, and if nothing else Lucky Hank an adaptation of Richard Russo’s novel Straight Man resolves the one thing I was troubled by throughout Saul’s run. For the better part of seven years, Odenkirk had to pretend that he was at least five years younger than when Breaking Bad started when he was already six years older. I credit the makeup artists for doing that (as well as the series for never pushing it that hard) but I’ll admit that part of me has wanted to see Odenkirk play a character at least his own age for the last few years. Watching him play failed author turned head of the English department at an underfunded Pennsylvania college,  I get to see the pleasure of Odenkirk essentially playing the complete opposite of Jimmy McGill/Saul – a late middle-aged, family man, who feels that life is a waste and barely has the effort to go through the motions with it. It also helps Lucky Hank is more or less a comedy as opposed to the dark drama that Odenkirk has been working in (albeit brilliantly) for the last fifteen years now gets to be the curmudgeon who can’t take anything seriously if his job depends on it. (Unlike Saul, his life does not.)

Now I imagine Odenkirk’s presence alone would be enough for some viewers but not for many. I’ll admit one of the reasons that Lucky Hank appeals to me more than some is that I thoroughly enjoy the setting of Lucky Hank  - the English department of a mediocre Pennsylvania college. I kind of fell in love with the show in the first scene where a clearly bored Hank is supervising (one can’t really say teaching) his literature class.  Bartow, the classes prodigy, wants Hank to ‘criticize’ his excerpt, when its very clear he wants to be told how great it is. Hank points out the obvious flaws in the chapter and Bartow, who has pretention written all over him, basically says that Hank isn’t qualified to instruct because ‘his only novel isn’t even sold in the campus bookstore’. Exasperated Hank berates Barton telling him that he’s not a good writer and the reason he knows this is ‘you’re here! I’m not a good enough writer to teach you and the reason I know that because I’m here!” Naturally the student newspaper berates him for calling Rackleton college mediocre and the next day all his teachers are giving him fisheye stares.

The thing is, Hank is absolutely right. Rackleton is the kind of college you go to if your safety school won’t accept you but community college is somehow beneath you. Bartow himself is a prime example of this, as one student says: “Your parents have a building named after them at Notre Dame and they still couldn’t get you in there.” (Bartow says: ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’) The only sports that regularly wins at the athletic level is field hockey. The college has been underfunded for years and there are more budgets cuts looming – for good reasons, when one professors holds a seminar it’s in her office because there are exactly three students in it.

But just because this is such a mediocre college doesn’t make the English teachers any less egomaniacal, back-biting or self-important. Hank’s arch ‘nemesis’ is Gracie DuBois who is angry for being considered mediocre even though she is considered the ‘top scholar in 21^st century feminist poetry’ -  a genre so narrow you think she has to have created herself.  Indeed, her top prize in this came over a decade ago and she hasn’t written anything interesting since. She would be the most unpleasant person in his department except at this point no one’s even bothering to go through the motions. (A rival of her actually says: “I don’t have to be pleasant. I have tenure!”)

The fact is this is such a mediocre college that even the scheming and back-biting is fundamentally lazy. When Emma wants to form a ‘coup’ and take over the English Department, Hank doesn’t even bother to put up a defense because he doesn’t care that much. Neither does the department: the motion carries because three people vote in favor of it, everyone else abstains. The next day Hank expects to be dismissed but is saved by the narcissism that comes from being in higher education: everyone votes for themselves and Finny (by far the most pretentious) accidentally votes for Hank because in his mind ‘that’s abstaining.’

The student body is just as lazy. Bartow camps out at Hank’s desk the next day saying all he wanted to do was write. Then he demands a written apology posted on the website. Hank won’t even go through the motions with it, so Bartow puts a piece of paper in front of his desk that says ’23 days without an apology.” In last night’s episode George Saunders (playing himself) who was an old rival of Hank’s sits in on Hank’s class and basically gives the same criticism of how lousy a writer Bartow is. Bartow’s reaction is that he’s learned more that in class and demands to form a class of ‘excellence’.  (This club has three members, including a sycophant who I suspect in a future story will be revealed to have a crush on him.) The beleaguered dean gives into this just to get Barstow off his back. It’s clear that Bartow didn’t listen take Saunders’ criticism any more seriously than he did Hank’s; all he cares about is a famous writer criticized his work! (Of course just before Saunders gives his lecture, Bartow reveal he’s never even read his work.)

As someone who truly loved the Netflix comedy The Chair, I find Lucky Hank appealing for much the same reasons. This is a whimsical study of what all English departments and indeed so many college faculties are like; you get the feeling the student body doesn’t even have the energy to cancel someone. And Hank, whose entire life has been in this mediocre town, is completely fit for it. He’s always been living under his father’s shadow. His father was a brilliant writer who abandoned him and his mother for a younger woman when he was a child. (In the scenes we see with Hank’s mother, though, you sort of get the sense of why he might have done just that.)  Having spent the last fifteen years seeing Odenkirk playing a character who spent his life punching above his weight, it’s fascinating to see him basically play someone who doesn’t even have the energy to punch any more. He knows he’s not a good teacher, he’s been stuck on his second novel for more than twenty years and he hates the town he lives in but just doesn’t have the energy to leave. His life might be unbearable were it not for his beloved wife Lily (Mireille Enos returns to AMC a decade after The Killing left)

Lily is everything Hank is not, tolerant, compassionate and completely understanding of her husband. She is a capable high school guidance counselor and she has a certain level of ambition, which Hank continuously frustrates. There is also the problem of their daughter Julie who has been living with her boyfriend for awhile but is nowhere near independent. She says she wants to have a meeting with her parents to announce, ‘big news,’ which means they expect she’s pregnant – and it’s a plan to buy a pool and start a business plan on their app. Judging by Hank and Lily’s reaction at the news, they have been down this road many, many times.

I will confess to being charmed and constantly amused by Lucky Hank. Most of the cast is made up comedy veterans who know how to do this well. Oscar Nunez of The Office is constantly put-upon as the dean. Diedrich Bauer (who played a college professor in American Housewife) doesn’t even have to try hard to get laughs (he hasn’t been used nearly enough) And it’s wonderful to watch Cedric Yarborough, a favorite of mine from the gone far-too-soon gem Speechless play an English professor who loves being unpleasant in every aspect. (I love his reaction when he learns his sacred campus parking spot is being taken: “Do you know how many tenured professors had to die for me to get that spot? Four! And the last two really suffered!”) One would expect such humor from the work of Peter Farrelly, but who would have thought that show-runner Aaron Zelman, who I know best for his work on the cutthroat drama Damages would have such a gift for comedy?

Now I admit that, for many fans of Peak TV, a series like this that seems to have so low stakes and so little action in it might not be enough of a reason to watch. (No doubt they would rather watch Succession a show which has so little action but at least the people are you know…well, you tell me.) That being said, I’m glad that Lucky Hank is around and that it’s on AMC. Over the last few years I have despaired at the network that brought us such groundbreaking dramas as Mad Men and Breaking Bad has basically become the home of The Walking Dead and stories relating to witches and vampires.  Lucky Hank is the kind of series that AMC used to do very well but stopped trying because monsters were more profitable. Perhaps Odenkirk was drawn to this project for the same reason Hank Devereaux is still teaching: he can’t leave his home. And in this case, I think the viewer is lucky for it. I’m glad that I’m here.

My score: 4.25 stars.

How Shonda Rhimes Combined With The Rise of Peak TV to Kill The Guilty Pleasure

 

I have made little secret in my years as a columnist how much I truly loathe Shonda Rhimes and all the series that she and her ilk have created over the past two decades. However, it was not until fairly recently that I came into a deeper understanding as to not only why I bare her such disgust but also the real reason why so many other people worship her and her shows. It may surprise you that this is not so much a problem of quality as it is labeling, both by Rhimes and her writers as well as too many critics and fans.

To explain the reasoning one has to go back to the beginning of Rhimes’ success – and then just a few months before that to the fall of 2004. For those of you whose memories of what television was like back then, it’s worth a brief refresher, one that as both a historian and an observer of that period am more than qualified to write about.

Back then what was considered the Golden Age of TV was limited in scope compared to how it would be a few years. HBO was pretty much the only game in town when it came to revolutionary cable shows. FX had exploded on to the scene with The Shield two years earlier but had yet to make much of an impact beyond that; Showtime was dipping its toes in the water but still not much of a success and AMC wasn’t really doing anything at all. Network television was pretty much fighting with HBO for television perfection and at that time, they showed no signs of surrendering though each had taken different approaches.

NBC was unfortunately too invested in the long-running hits such as ER, Law & Order, and the remnants of Must-See TV that would all basically be gone before the decade was over, leaving the cupboards bare when it came to hits (but not inspiration). CBS was already becoming the home for procedurals and little else; by this fall, the third franchise in the CSI series would debut. Fox was more ambitious during this period, and American Idol would eventually help boost struggling shows like 24 and House to huge success. ABC was looking in the worst shape going into 2004; indeed the head of broadcasting Lloyd Braun was on the verge of being fired. Before he was, however, he greenlit a series of shows that would propel ABC into the forefront of being both a critical and ratings success for the rest of the decade. (Indeed, he actually came up with the concept for Lost, whose creation and success are among the most improbable in the history of television.)

But the most important series that ended up debuting that fall appeared on Sundays. I will go on record as saying that I actually wrote a very long editorial column to the producers of ABC expressing my outrage at their decision to postpone one of my favorite shows of the time Alias until the following January. I berated their history at cancelling promising series before (the cancellations of Sports Night and Once and Again were still raw in my memories) and argued that I had no faith at all in their capabilities to produce a successful series (not outside logic at the time). What series, I wrote, could possibly be as worthy of the viewers time more than Alias?

That September, Desperate Housewives debuted in Alias’ old time-slot and became one of the biggest hits in television history. I will confess to being a huge fan from day one. At the time, I was just as likely to watch reruns of soap operas than anything ‘classy’ and the cast of Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross, Felicity Huffman and Nicolette  Sheridan was more than enough to lure me in.

To be clear, then and now, no one could mistake Desperate Housewives for being at the same level of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under or any of the HBO series that were running against it. I certainly didn’t. I also didn’t care. For the next six and half seasons (I only stopped watching because The Good Wife starting running against it in the final season), I spent most of my Sundays on Wisteria Lane trying to figure out the increasingly ridiculous and bizarre mysteries that involved all the title characters. Increasingly Marc Cherry’s vision of a satire of a soap opera became as outrageous as any soap and just as ridiculous.  That never bothered me, any more than its slow decline in quality. What was clear to be then – and what seems to have been lost now – is that as much as Peak TV is smart and gloomy, sometimes when it comes to television, you need to turn your brain off for a while and just watch a show because its fun.  Maybe its just campy, maybe its dumb fun, but its still fun. Desperate Housewives was a water-cooler show in a way that few series have ever been since. We didn’t talk about it because we were trying to solve the puzzles we did every week on Lost or we were reeling over the stunning deaths on 24 or because we were trying to figure out the meaning of what might be happening on Mad Men  each episode. We were watching the show mainly to comment on the absurdities that so many of the characters were getting into every week.

And there were a lot of us – the first season averaged between 20 and 25 million viewers week. Because success can breed success, this helped boost the series that came immediately after Desperate Housewives on Sunday nights, David E. Kelley’s follow-up to The Practice, Boston Legal. To be clear, this series would probably have been a success on its own, though not nearly as massive. James Spader and William Shatner had already won Emmys for playing these characters on The Practice the previous season (and would do so again the coming one) and David E. Kelley’s series had a greater track record to this point. And it’s mainly because Boston Legal’s season ended in March of 2005 that started the rise of Shondaland.

For those who only remember a time when Grey’s Anatomy was around, it’s hard to believe that it originally debuted in March of 2005 as what amounted to a mid-season replacement. Then, as now, midseason series were almost always shows that networks had no faith in to debut at the start of the fall, and indeed  the first season of Grey’s only aired nine episodes. It did not run after Desperate Housewives because ABC thought it was a worthy companion to the show; basically it was there to fill a gap in the schedule until the end of the season. The fact that it might do very well in the ratings was considered a possibility, but it was not one that necessarily guaranteed success going forward: there have been countless shows that start out as successes in the fall or mid-season and collapse when they have to stand on their own.

And unlike the raves that came for Desperate Housewives and Lost, the initial reactions to Grey’s Anatomy was underwhelming, if not downright hostile. Ellen Pompeo’s title character was considered an insipid whiner, utterly unsuited to be the lead of a series. (This opinion lasted well into the show next couple of years.) Many critics, who had been expecting a medical drama, were disappointed at the fact that they were basically seeing a show with a lot of young people getting naked and having sex. And the opening title sequence put off every critic who watched it (it was discarded completely by the middle of Season 2). Some critics did acknowledge the talent of Sandra Oh, Patrick Dempsey and Isaiah Washington, but mainly in the sense of: “What are such good actors like these doing in a show like this?”

Grey’s Anatomy was a success and indeed get renewed for a second season. It received three Emmy nominations that year, including the first of what would be five consecutive Supporting Actress nominations for Sandra Oh. It made enough of an impression that in the 2005-2006 season, it remained on Sunday from the beginning to end. (It did not move to its Thursday night home until the beginning of the 2006-2007.) The fan base did continue to expand, critical reception did overall improve, and ABC eventually did get enough faith in the show to have it follow the 2006 Super Bowl. That, along with the fact that it aired its first real ‘event’ episode’ (‘The End of the World, in which Meredith finds herself dealing with a live round of explosive ammunition in a patient’s chest) almost certainly cemented it as a hit series. (In a way, I believe the two parter is the high point of Grey’s Anatomy creatively and the Emmys agreed, both Kyle Chandler and Christina Ricci received nominations for their appearances.)

But while audiences have loved the show ever since, I think the reason that so many do has more to do with where it was originally scheduled than anything else. Not so much because it followed Desperate Housewives, but because it was, in a very real sense, much the same kind of series. It’s just that fans – and indeed Shonda Rhimes herself – deny it, not only about Grey’s Anatomy¸ but every other series that Shondaland has produced in all the years following.

Because I watched a lot of medical shows before, during and after this period. I spent many years thinking Chicago Hope was superior to ER, though now I realize the latter was as good as people said it was. I discovered House three months before the world did. I was one of the few people who consider Scrubs as close as this millennium will ever get to MASH in terms of both humor and desperation. And around the same time, a satellite channel began to air reruns of St. Elsewhere, a medical drama all others owe a debt too.

And under no circumstances could you accept any of the behavior that any of the doctors or residents do at any time on Grey’s Anatomy as being acceptable on any other medical drama to that point in history and well beyond it. The storyline involving Denny Duquette, in which Izzie Stevens slowly but surely falls in love with him, is something that I’ve never seen any other medical drama even dare to try because it would never be allowed to progress that far. The fact that every other resident knows about it and does nothing was one thing; the fact that the attendings knew about and did nothing is another. And the fact that it eventually ended with Stevens cutting the L-Vat wire on Denny so he could receive a heart that was going to go to another patient goes beyond the standards that any medical advisor would consider permissible. And there were never any consequences, not just for Stevens but for anybody. I believe the only punishment the residents faced was they had to host a prom for the chief of staff’s sick niece, during which Denny died. Stevens confessed her sin and resigned – and early in Season 3 was back in Seattle Grace with no consequences to her career. Two seasons later, the patient who had lost that heart ended up in Seattle Grace, and when the attending learned the truth, she protested to the staff – and there were no consequences then. (The character left the show in the next episode and the whole storyline was forgotten. I guess the guy died. Oh well.)

And during the five seasons I ended up watching the series, there were countless storylines like this that I haven’t the heart to go into. None of them would be accepted as believable on ER or Scrubs or, hell, Chicago Med. Because none of them meet the standard of acceptable hospital behavior. What they do meet the standard of is a soap opera.

And if you consider not only Grey’s Anatomy but every other success Shondaland has had, their mass acceptance makes perfect sense. Scandal  is not a political drama where we watch the backrooms of DC; it’s a show where we’re given insight into the bedrooms of the powerful. How to Get Away with Murder is not a legal drama about a brilliant criminal attorney and the students who she takes under her wing; it’s a potboiler about the bedroom habits of her students and how they screw each other over (and each other generally) at the cost of everyone else. Bridgerton is not a regency romance about relationships between the upper-class; it’s showing that in the 19^th century people were as dirty as they are today. The only Shondaland series that wasn’t a soap opera (in fact, it had practically no sex at all) was the legal drama For The People. This series was a brilliant drama that dealt with relevant issues and blind spots in the justice system on both sides, had a superb cast and was exceptionally well-written. It was cancelled after two seasons and How to Get Away With Murder was renewed for its sixth. The big difference was one legal drama had a lot more sex and ‘revelations.’

Viewed in this lens, all the ridiculous things that have happened on Grey’s Anatomy over the years - having sex with ghosts, ridiculous numbers of traumas happening to the doctors, characters marrying each other, divorcing, then getting back together, completely arbitrary deaths to regulars – make perfect sense.  Back when Melrose Place was on the air, when a character wanted to leave, they generally died in ridiculous fashion. Kristin Davis drunkenly slipped and drowned in the apartment complex swimming pool while people were a few feet away. Laura Leighton’s character was killed in a hit and run by a criminal father of another resident of the complex. Doug Savant’s character actually left alive, but when they need certain secrets revealed the writers killed him off for the sole purpose of everybody getting his diary and learning them.  In that context, the decision to have Lexie Grey’s character not merely die in a plane crash but be eaten by wolves is perfectly logical.

And none of this would bother me so much were it not that critics and Rhimes herself fundamentally deny that her shows are soap operas. They’re shows about female friendship, they’re shows about powerful black women taking down the system, they’re shows about the downtrodden showing how powerful they are – they are anything but show where pretty people screw each other senseless, ridiculous things happen every episode, and people die in bizarre fashion. They’re soap operas in other words.

And I don’t entirely blame Rhimes or even some critics or fans for arguing otherwise. One of the misfortunes of Peak TV is that so many critics and fans seem they have to justify the reason that they are watching shows like Scandal or Bridgerton than say, Yellowjackets or This is Us.  Because there’s too much TV on for anyone to handle, we feel we have to argue why we’re watching dumb comedies or ridiculous soap operas rather than all of the stuff are friends are telling us too. So we try to find reasons that are bigger than they are to watch a show like Nashville or Empire rather than the fact that is just ridiculous fun. We can’t have guilty pleasures in the era of Peak TV, at least not for that reason.

The thing is, we shouldn’t have to. A guilty pleasure is still a pleasure. Even as a TV critic I know there’s a lot of great TV out there that is smart and wonderful watch, but sometimes you just need to turn your brain off and have fun.

In the fall of 2020 a dark time for the world, I found myself watching Filthy Rich, a ridiculous soap opera featuring Kim Cattrall as the matriarch of a televangelist who is the head of a commercial empire. It was one of the most brainless and ridiculous I ever watched, with silly performances and characters. It had no redeeming values at all. I watched every episode and was sad when it ended up being cancelled.

Granted during that same period, there was almost no television at all for anybody to watch, but honestly I probably would have watched it under other circumstances. I wouldn’t pretend to put it in the same terms as The Undoing or the fourth season of Fargo both of which I watched just as loyally at the same time, but I was just as sad when Filthy Rich was done when the other, far more brilliant series were.

What separates Grey’s Anatomy from Filthy Rich is, frankly, pretention. Not merely from that of Rhimes and her fans but the built-in feelings that so many of us seem to have when we get when he defend a show we love. This is something that critics can be as guilty as fans are at times. We want to see values or depth to series we loved when really the only reason we have to love them as because we enjoy them. Perhaps your definition of why you like a series is different than mine. That’s to be expected. Perhaps the reason I consider so many shows ‘overrated’ is because the pretentions that fans of these series seem to be oblivious are crystal clear to me. That’s the reason I dislike them, but it’s not a reason you have too. (Award shows are another matter, but I’ll save that for a different column and a different show.)

I have always thought the world would benefit more from honesty about all things, and I think that applies to TV as anything.  So to critics and fans who say they like a show for a certain reason, just tell us why you really like it. Don’t say you love Succession because it’s a brilliantly crafted series about psychodrama and family dynamics; say you love it because it’s a series where miserable rich people treat each other horribly  and shout ridiculously profane insults at each other. Don’t say you love Euphoria because it’s a deep portrayal of teenage dissatisfaction drug addiction; say you love because it’s a ridiculous over-the-top campy show with a lot of back-fighting and nudity. Don’t say you love Grey’s Anatomy because its one of the most towering medical dramas in the history of television; say you love it because it’s over the top soap opera and you can’t wait to see which character will sleep with who next. You don’t have to lie to us why you enjoy a series and you certainly don’t have to lie to yourself either. Television is essentially a solitary affair, and what you choose to watch in the privacy of your home – and why you watch it – shouldn’t matter to anybody but you.