Two Recent Books Argue The Passing of Peak TV. Here's Why I Disagree and What Else I Think They Get Wrong

 

 

There is a story about Hollywood and the two figures have differed from telling to telling. Since the point is the anecdote, let’s say that it involves Jack Warner and Billy Wilder.

As the story goes Jack Warner wanted to woo Billy Wilder over to his studio from MGM. The mogul went to see Wilder and made a sales pitch giving a listing of all of the great films and actors who worked at his studio and the greats works of cinema he could make.

Wilder cut him off mid-pitch: “The difference between the two of us, Mr. Warner, is that you are primarily interested in art, whereas I am primarily interested in money.”

After more than a century since Hollywood was founded the industry of criticism – let’s not call it anything but that fact – has basically been founded in total ignorance of that fact. Indeed, whenever they talk about the business of Hollywood they seem insulted by that idea. I’m going to quote a recent New Yorker article that touches on this in a couple of ways:

“The default setting of the industry is crap. Occasionally, the incentives change just enough to allow for a cascade of innovation, but those incentive inevitably shift back to the norm.”

In one sentence the writer acknowledges that Hollywood is industry and in the very next sentence degrades for being just that.  It would take your breath away but it’s the kind of magical thinking that almost every critic I have ever read seems to have decided to forget.

This article is no different. It looks at the era of the 1970s as the age of auteurs – Coppola, Scorsese, Altman – until the brats – hacks like Spielberg  - restored the reign of commerce.  In other words there was shining moment when the moguls who were only interested in money lost their grip, these auteurs – whose films were all immensely profitable got to make art – and then these hacks like Spielberg started making films that were only making money. In other words the studios should have been interested in making money when they should have been making art for the critics and people who like them. The public as we all know has nothing to do with it.  There’s a similar dialogue when it comes to independent films when they were nice little pieces of Hollywood, and then Pulp Fiction made millions of dollars and ruined it for everybody else.

You would think given the recent labor stoppage in Hollywood this past spring and summer that these same critics might have been capable of remembering Hollywood is a business and the people who labor in merely employees. But no, in the New Yorker the critics continue to rain praise only on obscure foreign films, but even the big studio films that are made by directors such as Scorsese and Ridley Scott. One looks at Napoleon and choosing not only to pan the film, but the entire genre of the biopic.

This article is not, however, about film but rather about television. It deals with two different recent books about the subject of Peak TV: Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV by Peter Biskind and Maureen Ryan’s Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call for Change in Hollywood.  (I mentioned the latter in an article I wrote this past year about Ryan’s ‘expose’ of Lost that she published as a teaser for her book.) I think based on the titles alone you know the agendas of both Ryan and Biskind are very clear in the summary of a recent New Yorker piece that argues for a eulogy for prestige TV.  

It’s worth noting that the conclusions of all three writers are biased to their own prejudices and all of them miss the fundamental point what Wilder told Warner.  Critics seem to think Hollywood should be interested in art, when they are entirely interested in money. The New Yorker author comes closest to admitting that but it’s still basically the critic shouted why the people can just like the films and shows they like instead of the ‘crap’ that they all go too. All of them might be willing to acknowledge that Hollywood’s job is to provide a product for people to consume. But none of the three writers – or truly any critic – seems to truly comprehend that the industry only produces what people want to see.  Americans do not want to see four hour African films about farmers, documentaries about obscure politicians, or miniseries based on the novels of James Joyce. Critics might want to see these films, but they are a percentage point of a percentage point of the population. I don’t like it that almost every project out of Hollywood is a superhero film or a Star Wars spinoff, but if millions of people go to see them, clearly the market has spoken. Because no critic can ever blame its readers for being dumb enough to want to see the next Fast and Furious or Mission: Impossible (though trust me, given the contempt in their reviews they clearly are looking down on the people who do) they will blame the industry for it.

Similarly this article tends to blame the decline of Peak TV with the fact that HBO chose not to offer a one-season deal to House of Cards in 2011 and Netflix offer David Fincher $100 million for a two-season deal.  Biskind apparently choosing to blame HBO – and really every other network – for not wanted to take such a big dynamic risk.

House of Cards and Orange is the New Black dropped in 2013, with all thirteen episodes debuting at once. I’ll write a longer article about my problems with binge-watching as an activity and as a business model, but the blame is clear. John Landgraf claimed that “you can’t make art by throwing money at it.” It leaves out the fact that every studio in Hollywood has to make money first.

And I have to tell you at the end of the day all of the people who choose to argue that  the last twenty years have been a golden age of TV have been engaged in selective memory. The year after The Sopranos debuted, TV Guide named the best show of 2000 Survivor, a reality show. We all now know that this show, like so many of the others that have followed, are so manipulated from the inside that they might as well be scripted. But it didn’t matter millions of people tuned into watch, and every industry – even cable and eventually streaming got on board.

And there was a lot of TV that many considered great television that was as much camp as anything else. Desperate Housewives which was a phenomena in 2004, aged badly very quickly, as did much of the work of Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes, both on Network TV and other service. And it was erratic even among the success: for every American Crime Story, you got so much of American Horror Story  and it’s not like Inventing Anna and Ratched are something resembling gold.

The compromise that critics like me have made with myself over the last twenty years is that TV has always been about taking the stuff you like and discarding what you don’t. I myself made these bargains with network TV over the last decade: I accepted that American Idol was the price of 24 becoming the success it was; I dealt with the fact that Survivor existed because that meant I could enjoy shows like Joan Of Arcadia, and I was willing to let The Voice exist so that I could enjoy 30 Rock and Parks & Rec. I was even willing to compromise with fictional shows leading to more artistic ones: I was fine to let Scandal exist on Thursday night if it met there was room for American Crime.  

The reason we seemed to be an era of Peak TV was the same reason it couldn’t last; there were too many shows on the air. Some of them were going to be brilliant and watched by large numbers, some were going to be watched by few, and the reality shows and formulas were always going to be the most successful.  A TV viewer makes compromises to enjoy what they watch.  Biskind and the New Yorker seems to argue that you shouldn’t have to compromise so they can enjoy what they want. Business doesn’t work that way.

Ryan’s work is an ‘expose’ of the industry but its clear from the writing she has the same axe to grind that she has. Though to be clear, she takes it a step further arguing that ‘there was no golden age of TV’  because it just involved heterosexual white dudes doing bad things which is what they’ve been doing forever.

Ryan’s work is about the toxic masculinity and racism that infiltrates Peak TV, which is to be clear, wasn’t new five years ago. She relitigates most of the horror stories we’ve heard ever since, not merely about female writers and writers of color in Hollywood, but how male executives bad behavior is tolerated and female executives are thrown under the bus. In other words, an industry that has been prominently dominated by white males has created a culture of toxic masculinity that still pervades every aspect of it. You could basically fill in the blanks for any industry that’s ever existed.

I don’t think I have to read Ryan’s book to know what it is: based on what I’ve read, it’s another in a long line of horror stories about the entertainment industry shifted to make us hate the shows we’ve spent the past twenty years loving. I imagine that there will be no mention of Frankie Shaw, who Showtime gave a multi-season deal for SMILF in 2017 and then had to cancel the series in 2018 after it was revealed she’d been harassing many of the female actors. Or Sarah Treem, one of the co-runners of The Affair a series that was hailed for its realistic depiction of nudity and which Ruth Wilson unexpectedly resigned from in the midst of Season 4 for unexplained reasons. Later it was revealed she had objected to the nude scenes that the writers – including Treem – kept forcing her to film.  Or that Lena Waithe’s The Chi, a series built on the experiences of young African-Americans in Chicago, had to fire one of her leads after season 2 because he was harassing people on set. Like everyone else, she will ignore those who blemish the portrait she’s painting.

Ryan chooses to look at the industry’s shift to giving more female antihero based series such as Insecure, I May Destroy You, Orange is the New Black, Girls and Transparent as a sign of the entertainment industry shifting to better models and away from the temperamental geniuses. Isn’t it pretty to think so. All that this indicates is the business of Hollywood sees a way to make money in the models of these complicated women, whether white, of color, or LGBTQ+. It leaves out the bigger problem that Hollywood being a business, does not like courting controversy as well as the polarizing nature of the industry.  You can not escape the average site and look at any show that has a female or African-American as a lead once held by a white, straight male as ‘woke’, and therefore automatically isolating an entire group of the fanbase.  Hollywood is a business that has to operate on cost-benefit analysis and it can not make these ‘dream projects’ without being able to avoid financial risk. I honestly think the only reason Hollywood started making strides towards integrating to a large extent in the 1990s was because they were afraid of isolating a demographic. Hollywood was always based on trying to please as many people as possible; in a world where its increasingly hard to please anybody it’s going to be harder to make risks.

Ryan also believes that a more equitable Hollywood and less in thrall to temperamental geniuses will lead to a better era for everybody. I just can’t buy that. Hollywood is a business and it’s a business that is in trouble, something that both Biskind and Ryan seem set on ignoring. Television, like every other business, is risk averse: that’s why you keep seeing so many reboots or spinoffs of earlier projects. It was such in the 1970s; it was such in the age of Prestige TV. Even shows that are as inventive as Fargo are, for all intents purposes, an adaptation of a successful film.

But unlike the writer of this article and Biskind, I don’t believe Peak TV is over, merely evolving.  I do agree with Ryan that the future of Peak TV may be female: some of the best shows of the new decade have been female driven, if not female run. I speak of Yellowjackets, the brilliant anthology Cruel Summer, Hacks, The Gilded Age and Abbott Elementary.  These series come from streaming services, pay channels, an obscure cable network and broadcast TV.  Sure there will be gems that will disappear to quickly and crappy shows that last far too long. That has always been the nature of the beast, and it always will be.

There’s a famous maxim by Theodore Sturgeon that ninety percent of everything is crap.  It’s likely that this was true even in the era of prestige TV, and the reason it seemed that it wasn’t was that the world was so fixated by the ten percent that was gold that we chose to ignore everything else that was airing.  The problem with television these days is the same problem all critics have: they can’t accept that everything they watch isn’t absolutely perfect without a flaw and that so much of what they consider ‘crap’ is beloved by millions.

So maybe look at it this way. Maybe the Golden Age isn’t over because it never truly existed in the first place. That is the power of nostalgia and selective viewing: we tend to look at certain eras more fondly than others. That we chose to believe that in the past twenty years we were in a golden age may have been more likely then before. But the idea that every single show on the air was the level of The Sopranos or The Shield or Homeland would never hold water. It implied that every single network was producing nothing but gems from the moment they got started and we all know that’s impossible. Even while The Sopranos was airing shows like Arliss  were taking up oxygen for six seasons; FX was airing Dirt when The Shield was on the air and Hell on Wheels was airing while Mad Men and Breaking Bad were on the air. Hell, House of Cards wasn’t Netflix’s first show; does anyone even remember LilyHammer? Even if television really was art, that doesn’t mean that every single work of art is a masterpiece. Critics would do well to remember that too.

I’m not going to lie there are many factors that don’t make me feel optimistic about the future of television. But I also don’t think were past the era of Peak TV either because there’s never a single moment when TV is either entirely perfect or entirely horrible. Like everything else in the human experience, it offers great moments and truly horrible ones. It is our job at the viewer to seek out what we enjoy and discard what we do not. And it does not matter to the viewer if it  created because it is done for art or money: if we enjoy it, it holds the same value.

Fargo is Back For Another Gory (And Glorious) Season

 

In the middle of seeing Fargo for the first time in 1996 Gene Siskel turned to Roger Ebert and said: “This is why I love going to the movies.” I have felt the exact same way every time Noah Hawley brings forth another version of the incredible TV adaption of Fargo to FX; blessed that I am able to glory in his genius.

The first three seasons were considered utter masterpieces by critics and audiences. For reasons I have never truly comprehended the fourth season, set in 1950 Kansas City with Chris Rock as the head of a black gang in the midst of an outrageous gang war, was never anywhere near as highly regarded by either group. I didn’t feel that way; I gave it five stars and ranked it as one of my ten  best shows of 2020. It was, as the narration told us, a history lesson not just for the America we were living in (in the summer of 2020 when it was supposed to originally air it was more relevant) but in the nature of the saga that we had spent the previous three seasons learning about. While it might not have had the feel of the previous three seasons, it certainly had the scope of a Coen Brothers film; I’m pretty sure we got references to Miller’s Crossing and The Man Who Wasn’t There and the ‘East/West’ episode ended with a reference right out of A Serious Man. I was immensely disappointed when it went home empty handed not merely from the Emmys, but almost every other awards show (though not the HCA, which was just one of the reason it got on my good side right away.)

Hawley seemed to imply at the end of Season 4 that was all we were going to get, and if it had been that would  have been more than enough for me. But Hawley got inspired in the summer of 2022 and said he was working on a fifth season. Now in the winter of 2023, we have been fortunate enough to get Season 5 and order has been restored to the critical universe. The raves for the fifth season have been universal across the board, not just for the entire cast and crew but because it is close as we have gotten to the original film since Hawley started writing version of it nearly a decade ago. The Easter Eggs were obvious by far in the first two episodes. I’ve only gotten through the first two episodes and what I have seen is magnificent.

The season premiere started with a definition of Minnesota Nice, the term that Hawley has used throughout the first three season and then immediately cut to a brawl in a school board fight. We should not be truly shocked about this; in the most recent chronological season (Season 3) Hawley wrote that we were witnessing the end of Minnesota Nice and the real world had infiltrated it. We don’t truly have to be told that this ‘true story’ is taking place in 2019; every aspect of it is built to remind us that we are in the midst of the previous administration even if we have yet to see anyone wearing a MAGA cap.

We are introduced to Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) being hauled away by a state trooper after tasing one of the teachers. “You don’t want to get between a mama lion and her cub,” she tells the trooper who is Hindi, but Frances McDormand all the same. Dot is booked and handcuffed but released thanks to her husband Steve, a man so much of a milquetoast he makes William H. Macy’s character a he-man by comparison. Yes, he is a car salesman with a rich family (and yes, in the second episode we see him at his dealership complaining about the VIN numbers)

The Lyons all go the mother’s mansion, where she is guarded by security, and has an attorney who has an unexplained eye-patch (Dave Foley!) and where they all they take a Christmas card photo (even though it isn’t even Halloween) carrying AK-47’s.  The mother is played with great relish by Jennifer Jason Leigh, clearly having the time of her life as a woman who looks down on everybody and probably came lots of money to all the Republican Candidates in the election but didn’t bother to vote (too plebian)

The next day, when her husband takes her daughter off to school, two men in masks come to her door. We know this set up, but it definitely doesn’t play the same. Dot’s reaction is to begin to perform as if she were the female Kevin McCallister, incinerating one of them with hairspray and a blowtorch. She manages to elude them but it still captured. Her husband find the house broken into and calls the police, thinking it’s a kidnapping. The mother is bemused by this.

The kidnappers are clearly modeled after Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, though the larger one does speak more and is far more imposing. They are stopped by troopers on the road, but in this scenario Dot manages to escape. One trooper is killed: one wounded. Both Dot and the surviving trooper (Lamone Morris) get to a nearby service station. Dot gets their first, and starts laying traps, in pure Home Alone fashion, one of them is near a commode.  There is a shootout that unfolds, one hood dies, one walks aways. And then Dot runs off saying: “This isn’t my first getaway.”

And then she comes back home and tells her husband that nothing happened. She was just in a mood, and she wants to forget all about it. That’s when we know we’re not in Fargo any more.

We see hints in much of the first episode of who Dot’s terrified of. In the next episode we meet him: Roy, the sheriff of a North Dakota town who says he is the judge of what is right and what is wrong.  He says he has been elected to defend the laws of the Constitution, but by that point we know the only part is uniformly in favor of is the second Amendment and that he’s more fond of the Ten Commandments and probably Old Testament justice. Roy wants Dot back, saying she’s his wife. By this point Roy had remarried and has a son, Gator who is his (this may be the Strangest role Joe Kerry’s played yet) a man who is an incel in the making. You get the feeling watching Roy that he would have no problem with polygamy, considering we see he believes a woman must be dominated by a man in every respect. The problem is, he also thinks because he is the law he does not need to share any details with those beneath him, which is everybody else.  When Wrench (the survivor) returns to after being beaten, he is enraged that he wasn’t given proper information and Roy and Gator feel he is unworthy because a woman disposed of him. Roy clearly equates being the law as being God and he doesn’t seem capable of understanding how people can just escape his wrath, something that Wrench does over four people who try to kill him the first time and then later in the second episode where he does so yet again.

After nearly fifteen years of just playing antiheroes Jon Hamm is clearly relishing getting to play someone who is pure evil incarnate. He doesn’t chew scenery (it’s not something he’s capable of)  but he sure as hell licks it every time he says dialogue.  And he still looks good. “Does my discussing law in nude repose bother you?” he tells a female FBI agent while bathing in a hot tub.  Roy is capable of violence but not rage; I’d love to see how this turns out.

This is another glorious season and among other glories it is the first installment where a female antihero is at the center of the action. We’ve seen great versions throughout the series of course; Jean Smart’s matriarchal crime boss; Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s blackmailer; Jessie Buckley’s poisoner but Juno Temple’s Dot is unlike any we’ve seen before. Dot is clearly a survivor and she’s also a powerhouse hiding behind a soccer mom appearance; she has the perfectly natural Minnesota nice accent but is capable of calling her mother-in-law a bitch when she thinks she’s being threatened. She wants to protect her family, but she wants to keep her secret as long as possible. Right now, Wayne is so clearly in love with her (and so utterly easy to manipulate) that he seems willing to go along with everything she does and says, which can take some real leaps. “Why is there a sledgehammer in our hallway?” he asks justifiably at the end of the last episode and is so easily mowed under by Dot’s explanation.  Dot has already proven herself up to the challenging of escaping from the outlaws; the question is can she from the in-law. Wayne’s mother is rich and powerful and does not trust her (justifiably to be sure) and it’s pretty clear that she’d be willing to sacrifice her son to keep herself safe. (“Slap him,” she tells her attorney over the speakerphone at one point, something he’s more than willing to do and not gently.)

I know Fargo well enough to know that there will be a lot of blood, but there has been already; at last count six people have been killed in two episodes; three by Wrench alone. And like so many episodes of Fargo, good might be able to triumph primarily because evil is dumb; certainly Gator is and it doesn’t look like many of Roy’s deputies are much brighter. They have a lot of firepower and they’re definitely stronger in weaponry and number, but anyone who remembers Sioux Falls knows all that might mean is a lot of people will end up dead along the way. The question is whether the few forces of good, which are right now these two troopers, can prevail or even survive.

I also want to know what the link between this story and the ones we have previously witnessed will be. The final moments of Season 4 revealed that the entire series is not just an anthology but a long interlocking story spread across decades. We’ve already received lots of Easter eggs for the movie; I want to see one for previous seasons.

I actually got better news even before the fifth season of Fargo debuted; Noah Hawley who once thought that the third season would be its last, now says he has idea for several more ‘true stories’ then he did. If any of them are even just a hint as good as this one is proven to be – or indeed any of the previous four – we might be in for years more of travails in Minnesota. Perhaps Hawley and his crew will get their share of Emmy nominations and maybe even some awards this time around. Fargo has not received nearly the love it deserves from the Emmys over the years (though to be fair Seasons 2 and 3 had to go up against People V. O.J. Simpson and Big Little Lies, respectively). It does seem that everybody’s glad that we got another version of it and hopefully ‘out of respect for the dead’, this show can get a lot of love from its fellow organizations in the months to come. In an era of uncertainty for the medium Fargo is why we love television in the first place.

My score: 5 stars.

The Oakland A's of the 1970s, Part 2: 1971 - Baseball in the 1970s and the Stunning Season of Vida Blue

 

Students and fans of the game have argued that in the 1970s, baseball was the best it has ever been. I am not qualified to comment on that. What I can say with confidence is that by far some of the greatest teams ever assembled played in the 1970s and that several of these great teams were in cities that would come as a shock to a fan of the game today. Because many of these teams will be critical to the articles to come, I feel it’s worth discussing them.

The most dominant team in baseball during the decade were Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles.  Their three year tenure of 1969-1971 was by far the pinnacle of Weaver’s tenure as manager but they would be a force throughout the decade, compiling the best record of any team in either league.

After being upset by the Miracle Mets in 1969, the Orioles came back to win 108 games the following year and sweep through both the Minnesota Twins in the Divisional Series, then take the overmatched Cincinnati Reds in five games for their second World Championship in five years.  They would win four more AL East Titles the rest of the decade and two more pennants and would always be at the top of the standings.

The Orioles and the A’s would be fighting against each other for the next four years for AL prominence (we’ll be dealing with those battles in detail in both this article and the ones to come) and the Orioles would always be built on power, defense and pitching.  The Orioles had one of the greatest three-men rotations in the history of baseball: Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar and Jim Palmer. Ironically at the start of the decade Palmer, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, was considered the weak link in the bunch, due to an arm injury that had taken him out of action for the better part of two seasons. In 1970, he had ‘only’ won 20 games which seems minor compared to the work of his teammates who won 24 games apiece.  Cuellar had tied with Denny McClain for the Cy Young award in 1969 and McNally would one year win 23 consecutive games.

At the start of the decade, the Orioles were, of course, known for the Robinsons: Frank, who even at thirty-five was still one of the most dominant hitters in baseballs and Brooks, probably the greatest third baseman in the history of the game, certainly from a defensive perspective.  Mark Belanger, the definition of good-field, absolutely no-hit, was their shortstop and Boog Powell held down first base. Powell had won the AL MVP in 1970.

When Frank was traded in 1971 (we’ll get to that) and Brooks began to decline at the plate, the O’s wouldn’t quite be as dominant.  Rather they would spend the decade fighting it out in the AL East, which would feature superb play from the rebuilding Boston Red Sox, the aging but still talented Tigers and a newly resurgent Yankees. All three of these team would play a critical role in the A’s dynasty in different ways.

In the National League, the dominant player would be Sparky Anderson’s Big Red Machine, which had almost as good a record in baseball as the O’s did, winning six NL West Division Titles, four pennants and two World Championship.  Their offensive lineup is one of the most storied of all time and it would dominate the NL MVP race for the 1970s with four different Reds winning seven MVPs. Two of them, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan are among the greatest to ever play at catcher and second base, both defensively and offensively.  Pete Rose is, of course, the all-time hits leader who was beloved in Cincinnati and would also face the ultimate disgrace. George Foster would be one of the most undervalued offensive players in the decade, hitting 52 home runs in 1977, the only player in the entire decade to hit 50 or more.  The infield was anchored by the incomparable Tony Perez. Their offense, sadly, did not have a comparable pitching staff which led Anderson to earn another nickname, ‘Captain Hook’ for the frequency he substituted pitchers in every game.

For all the Reds dominance they would spend much of the decade in competition with a resurgent Los Angeles Dodgers. The team had collapsed when Sandy Koufax had retired at the end of the 1966 season but by the start of the 1970s they were rebuilding into one of the better teams of the decade.  The Dodgers and Reds would spend the decade fighting for dominance in the NL West, with the Dodgers taking three NL West titles, all of which led to Pennants.  They would slowly build one of the greatest infield of all time led by Ron Cey at third base, Steve Garvey at first and Davy Lopes at second.  While their offense would never quite by the equal of the Reds, they were superior when it came to pitching helped by such stalwarts as Don Sutton, Andy Messersmith and Tommy John and the unparalleled relief work of Mike Marshall.  Both of these teams would be critical to the A’s fortunes over the years.

Often forgotten by the power of these juggernauts was that baseball in the 1970s may have been the greatest time ever to be a fan if you lived in Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Pirates were about to have one of the quietest dynasties of all time, winning six NL East titles during the decade. Anderson himself once considered that the Pirates of that era would one day be remembered alongside the Yankees teams of the 1920s and 1930s and while that was not the case, he wasn’t just speaking in hyperbole.

The Pirates may have been the most balanced team of the decade. They had a superb offense, led at the start of the decade by the peerless Roberto Clemente and Willie Stargell in the outfield. Two of the most underrated players of all time, Al Oliver and Dave Parker would be playing right field and different times. Oliver would win three batting titles and hit .304 lifetime; Parker was a superb defensive outfielder and a great power hitter. Defensively their infield was superb and unlike the Reds, they had consistently good pitching. At the start of the decade, they were led by such capable workhorses as Dock Ellis, Steve Blass and Nelson Briles as well as the solid reliever Dave Giusti.  They got to the World Series twice in the 1970s and both times would defeat the Orioles in seven games.

During the middle of the decade, the Philadelphia Phillies, having spent the 20^th century being the joke of baseball were about to become another undervalued dynasty.  Steve Carlton would become arguably the greatest pitcher of the decade winning four Cy Young Awards after being traded from St. Louis.  They would have a superb double play combo of Dave Cash and Larry Bowa and were about to get a third baseman named Mike Schmidt. By the mid-1970s Phillies fans would be coming to the ballpark to cheer, not boo as the Phillies would manage to win six division titles and two NL Pennants between 1976 and 1983, and in 1980 finally win their first World Championship.

This brings us to the AL West of the 1970s and perhaps one reason the A’s may never have been considered as great as they were.  While in all of the other divisions it was not uncommon for at least one winner every season to win 100 games or more, the A’s were never at the same level.  Indeed, their best season was in 1971 when they won 101 games, the only time they ever won that many as a dynasty. (They wouldn’t win more than that until their 1988 season.) Their records for a dynasty are not particularly strong; indeed in 1974, they won the AL West with just 90 wins.

Many thought the AL West was the weakest of the four divisions and there is something to be said for that.  As we shall see in each of the AL Pennants they won, the second place finisher in each division was the only team to finish over .500 that year.  And while many teams did have many great players, none of them could ever gel the way the A’s did and make it work. This factor, along with the bad publicity that followed Finley and the A’s throughout Oakland and the American League, is at least part of the reason they were never respected at the time. As time went on  the A’s players would wear this as a badge of an honor: it would be the A’s against the world and against Finley – and as we shall see very soon, often against each other.

Two separate factors started the A’s going in 1971.  It is worth noting that by 1971 the A’s were Finley’s team almost literally. Finley was such an absolute horror to work for.  The director his farm system quit his first month working for Finley. Soon after the vice president , traveling secretary, sales manager and much of the scouts would quit or were fired. Not long after, he dispensed with a general manager, taking the role himself. Within just a few years, the A’s front office had exactly seven people. You get the feeling Finley would have just as soon managed the team himself, but he had to know that his players were young enough and strong enough to kill him if they had to deal with him on a daily basis. In 1971, he found a manger capable of dealing with both him and his team: Dick Williams.

Williams had led the Boston Red Sox to their 1967 Impossible Dream his rookie year as a manager. A steely authoritarian who had drilled discipline into a last place team the year before, he was fired halfway through the 1969 season. Williams knew very well what he was getting into when he joined the A’s but he thought he could handle it. It’s worth noting he was the only manager of the A’s who dealt with Finley on his own terms.

From the start of the 1971 season Williams made this rowdy, undiscipline team capable of realizing their full potential, something his team appreciated, even though he was far from pleasant when it came to defeat. Six games into the season, the A’s were 2-4.

Going back to Oakland for their first road trip,  they stopped in Milwaukee.  Before they left the bus, the traveling secretary told Williams that a bullhorn, essential for the safety of the flight, had been stolen. Williams saw this as an offense.

“Gentleman,” he said calmly. “Some of you think you can be pricks. I have news for you. I can be the biggest prick of all.” Then he told they were not leaving until the megaphone was returned. Immediately, it clattered to the pavement outside. No one accepted responsibility. “Gentlemen,” he said again. “I have no small fines. I would suggest you stay in your rooms the entire road trip.”

Williams had dealt with Red Sox players going over his head to owner Tom Yawkey when he was managing their and he knew that Finley knew everything that went on in the ballpark. There were players occasionally ratted to Finley, though no one knew who. Williams made it very clear he knew this: “If you’ve got an f—ing problem, call Charlie. I have five or six phone numbers where you can reach him…some of you have them. But he ain’t here – I am – and you better live with it.”

Every previous manager had to deal with Finley’s utter determination to control exactly what happened on the field. Perhaps Williams got away with what he did because the A’s started to win immediately afterwards. The next day, Rollie Fingers threw a four hitter. Vida Blue followed up with a two-hitter. The A’s won 12 of their next 13, grabbed first place and never let it go.

Of course the real story of 1971 was Vida Blue. Blue had lost Opening Day to the Washington Senators, 8-0. He won his next ten  games. By early May, he was being compared to Sandy Koufax. “Funny,” the 21 year old African-American said. “I don’t look Jewish.” He was pitching like him, however. By July 1971, he was 17-3  and leading both leagues in wins, shutouts, strikeouts and ERA.  He did not seem human.

The 1971 All-Star Game was, naturally, started by Blue. However, it would be remembered for other reasons. Both lineups had a combined thirty-four Hall of Famers. Dock Ellis, the Pirates ace started against Blue, the first time two African-American pitchers had started an All-Star Game. The American League beat the National League 6-4 in a game where every run was accounted for by a home run by a future Hall of Famer.

Blue, who’d pitched two innings and eleven inning shutout four days earlier, was not at his best: he gave up home runs to Johnny Bench and Hank Aaron in his three innings of pitching. But while Ellis got through the first two innings fine, he melted down in the third.

Reggie Jackson pinch hit for Blue with a runner on.  He hit a homerun that went anywhere between 520 and 550 feet before it hit the light tower at Tigers Stadium.  Everyone wondered how far it would  have gone if it hadn’t rocketed off it; Pete Rose remembering it years later said simply: “That ball would have gone out of Yellowstone. “

Frank Robinson hit a two-run homer to follow it up, putting the American League ahead. Harmon Killebrew added to the lead with a  two run blast off Ferguson Jenkins. Roberto Clemente would narrow the gap with a home run off Mickey Lolich but the American League held on to win 6-4. Blue got the win.

Jackson had rebounded in 1971; his 32 home runs were tied for second place in the American League and just one behind Bill Melton of the White Sox.  The A’s were a threat offensively; 7 of the 8 regulars managed double digits in home runs and the one who didn’t Bert Campaneris was a threat on the bases, stealing 34. The A’s were second in the American League in home runs, trailing only the powerful Red Sox and second in pitching only to Baltimore.  However by mid-July Blue began to run out of gas. While many had thought early in the season he could win 30 games, after he managed to get to 20 in August 7, he only managed to win four more the rest of the year.  As a result while Blue’s season was spectacular by today’s standard, he didn’t quite do as well in the American League. Mickey Lolich, one of the workhorses for the Tigers, went 25-14, and led the league in strikeouts with 308 and an incredible 376 innings pitched.

But no one denied who the best pitcher in baseball that year was. In his first full season Blue had gone 24-8, struck out 301, thrown eight shutouts and 24 complete games and had a miniscule 1.82 earned run average.  He became only the third player in major league. In the aftermath of the 1971 season, he would win both the American League Cy Young Award and the MVP, the fifth pitcher to do both. Don Newcombe, Sandy Koufax, Bob Gibson and Denny McClain were the four previous winners of both.

 Almost unnoticed was Catfish Hunter having his own breakout season, going 21-11 with sixteen complete games. The A’s won the AL West by an incredible 16 games over Kansas City.

You would think this would have made Finley happy. It did not. The A’s had become the first team in history to draw a million fans on the road but they didn’t even come close to 900,000 at home. When this became clear, Finley canceled Fan Appreciation Day and banned the team from attending a civic luncheon given in their honor. The A’s fan base reacted with only 2660 attending the final two home games of the season.

The A’s were facing off against the Baltimore Orioles. Ostensibly they should have been evenly matched. Like the A’s the Orioles had won 101 games that year and had the exact same balance of offense and pitching. The problem was while the A’s had two pitching juggernauts; the Orioles had four. In what would be the second and likely last time in baseball history, the O’s had four twenty game winners, not just Cuellar, McNally and Palmer, but also Pat Dobson.  They had also won the last eleven games of their season and had swept Minnesota the previous two division series.

Blue went up against McNally in Game 1 and Blue held a 3-1 lead until the seventh, when a four run rally climaxed by a double by Paul Blair put them ahead 5-3 and gave the first win.

In Game 2, Hunter and Cuellar both pitched complete games. Hunter gave up seven hits, but four of them were home runs, two of them by Boog Powell. That would have been enough as Cuellar only gave up seven.

The A’s were out of pitching by the time they came back to Oakland, with Blue Moon Odom and Chuck Dobson (Pat’s brother) suffering through injuries. Left with journeyman Diego Segui, the A’s had little chance against Jim Palmer. Palmer gave up two home runs to Jackson and one to Bando but threw his third complete game Division series victory to win 5-3.

The A’s played Game 3 with 17,000 empty seats. Strangely enough they had played to half-empty seats in Baltimore as well.  Despite the superb play of the Orioles in the 1970s, they would periodically be among the lowest draws in the American League and play their division games to half empty stadiums.

The A’s mourned their loss, none harder than Jackson who was playing in his first postseason. Still the A’s knew this had been a learning process and that their youth and inexperience was exposed. Even Finley was magnanimous in defeat giving each player five mementos, all inscribed with the logo 1971 A’s World Series.

During the World Series,  which Baltimore lost to Pittsburgh in seven games, an idea Finley had been pitching for over a decade finally unfolded. Game 4 was the first World Series to ever be played at night. Finley had argued strongly that the average man did not have the time to watch the World Series in the afternoon where it had always been played and that this would be a boon to the game.

Bowie Kuhn, by far Finley’s greatest adversary gave in and it would slowly end up being that the entire World Series would be played in prime time. Since that time, sportswriters and purists have decried how much America had lost now that the greatest of all postseasons is now being played at night when the ‘kids’ can’t watch it.  As one such ‘kid’ who grew up as it was becoming a fact of life I think this was a rare case of Major League Baseball having to change to accept reality.   It has always struck me as a flawed idea that millions of children could grow up in America and go home while the greatest of games was being played.  This might have worked in a pre-expansion era, but by the 1960s night baseball was becoming necessary for the game to exist in the modern era, much less thrive. The idea that students would be able to enjoy a game while listening to the radio in schools is charming, but it’s not plausible for the 1970s and 1980s, much less the age of the internet. (I also find it doubtful that so many children were watching baseball in the daytime before.)

Baseball is a game that opposes change, even when it might help it survive in the modern era.  Finley in many ways did see the future of the game and had ideas that were revolutionary. Many of them baseball adopted reluctantly and they helped improve the game. Others were far poorer idea, which Finley insisted on carrying out. We’ll be dealing with some of each in the articles to come.

In the next article we will deal with the 1972 A’s which brought out the best in the team and the worst in Finley. The difference was that horribleness was about to become exposed nationwide.

Better Late Than Never: Shrinking

 

For most of my adult life watching television, I have been in awe of the work of Bill Lawrence, until fairly recently one of the most underappreciated showrunners in the history of TV comedy.

I didn’t know until well after the fact that he was one of the critical forces behind Spin City, the 1990s comedy about New York City staffers trying to stop the Mayor from constantly making a fool of himself. For a series filled with one of the best casts of performers, not just Michael J. Fox, but such talent as Connie Britton, Alan Ruck and Barry Bostwick, it’s sad how rarely it realized its potential. It could be funny – sometimes very funny – but it was never a masterpiece. Lawrence was clearly finding his feet.

He found them in Scrubs, in my opinion the best network comedy of the 2000s, certainly the most undervalued by the Emmys.  Despite the problems so many had with Zach Braff as JD at the time, and despite the way it has fallen under scrutiny today for reasons I will never follow, it was one of the most searingly dark comedies of the 2000s and perhaps as close to MASH as my generation will ever get. Led by some of the most brilliant talents of the decade, including an incredible performance by John C. McGinley as the troubled Dr. Cox, at its peak it was one of the funniest series of all time as well as one of the most tragic: you laughed so much as you did not cry.

Lawrence followed it up with Cougar Town, perhaps the most entertaining series with one of the worst possible names. (Lawrence himself spent much of the run mocking it.) This series was all about the woman, featuring Courtney Cox breaking the Friends curse and a star making performance by Busy Phipps.  Somehow it also got no recognition from the Emmys for either of them.

There followed a series of interesting short-lived series: Ground Floor on TBS, an up-elevator down-elevator comedy series that played closer to traditional sitcom but was still hysterical.  There was the intriguingly gone too soon CW show Life Sentence which featured the brilliant Lucy Hale as a victim of terminal cancer, who learns she’s actually going to live – and finds just how messy life is once you survive. And then of course, at exactly the right time, in 2020 we got Ted Lasso. I admit that while it was an overrated comedy series and received too many awards, it was nevertheless an incredible and delightful run for everybody involved and I loved every minute of it. I’m grateful for the run if only because Lawrence, like the title character, deserved the glory.

Now in the aftermath of Ted Lasso’s departure, Lawrence and Brett Goldstein, one of the more obvious breakout talents of Ted Lasso, have started work on their next collaboration with Apple TV. Unlike Ted Lasso, Shrinking has a cast of talented actors that have reputations big and small. It’s also closer in spirit to Scrubs than anything Lawrence has done in the past twenty years and certainly it’s the darkest thing he’s tries to do since then. And like Scrubs, Shrinking is hysterically, often desperately funny.

Shrinking is a show about Jimmy, a therapist who has spent the last year in mourning of the loss of his wife. By mourning, I mean he spends his nights getting drunk, barely engaging with his colleagues and basically abandoning the raising of his daughter to his next door neighbor, Liz. There is an old line: “physician, heal thyself”. Jimmy’s breakthrough seems to be not doing that and breaking every rule to try and help everybody but himself.

In the midst of a session Jimmy snaps at a traumatized patient (Heidi Gardener from SNL) and tells her to leave her husband because the relationship is emotionally abusive. In his next session with a court appointed patient Sean, who is dealing with trauma from Iraq and has been in multiple barfights, his reaction is to send him to training for MMA so maybe if he learns how to fight he channel his energy positively. For a moment in the pilot this seems to work – Sean avoids getting in a fight and the wife leaves her husband. Jimmy hopes that this can lead to making a connection with his daughter Alice by going to her soccer game. He makes the effort to get there and he has a brief moment where it all works – and then, his professional and personal lives collide disastrously for everybody.

Despite this Jimmy decides that he is not going to deviate from his plans. In the following episode he finally calls his best friend Brian (Michael Urie) who he has been ghosting for the past year.  He only does so because Brian is an attorney and he needs his help. Then he ends up going to a therapy session for Alice where Liz is already there. Again it is clear that he is clueless and isolated, and again he takes his anger out on Liz, who really has been the only person there to fill in the gap. Of course, because he doesn’t like confrontations, he does so in front of his colleagues at his office Gaby and Paul, his mentor.

Gaby and Paul are, to say the least, alarmed at his approach to therapy.  Both care immensely for Jimmy in different ways. Paul, in his seventies and suffering from Parkinson’s, is an old-school therapist but has been trying his hardest to help them both. He has, unaware to Jimmy, been having sessions with Alice in a way to try and help her, and its worth noting he’s doing a far better job than Jimmy’s clumsy efforts.  Gaby is more caring to be sure, but she’s also got her own problems: she was closer to Jimmy’s wife and for reasons I don’t follow (I’ve only seen the first two episodes to this point) doesn’t like that she’s stepping up.

I have withheld the names of the actors even though they are likely known to you to explain why I find this show so rewarding. Jimmy is played by Jason Segel, that gangly, awkward comedic talent who has been striding (awkwardly) through comedy since Freaks and Geeks and spend nearly a decade as Marshall on How I Met Your Mother.  Segel has never been afraid to humiliate himself for a laugh but in this case the humiliation is borne out of pain and grief more than anything else. Jimmy seems broken in a way I’ve never seen any of Segel’s characters before: he seems to be sleepwalking through life a year after his death, and its telling he thinks that by solving other people’s problems he can somehow fix his own. It’s sad that this man who has no problem telling completely strangers how messed up they are can’t be anywhere near as forthright or honest with the people he’s closest to. Segel clearly deserved the Emmy nomination he got this year, and while I doubt he’ll win this year, it’s going to happen eventually.

The rest of the cast also features some of the greatest comic talents of the last decade.  Jessica Williams, who I’ve been in love with since she debuted on The Daily Show nearly a decade ago has been performing but rarely acting. Now as Gaby, the colleague who is the caregiver in this practice and probably the one holding together, she gets a role that is emotionally worthy of her as will brilliantly funny.  Lawrence has always written well for female characters and Williams is yet another in a long line of exceptionally well developed characters – she’s an indirect descendant of Carla from Scrubs or Sarah Niles’ therapist from Ted Lasso.  I was glad to see Williams get an Emmy nomination as well this year, though given the level of talent in this category now and for the foreseeable future, it will take a while for her to break through.

The show also features two of my favorite comic performers. Christa Miller, Mrs. Bill Lawrence, has been a force in his work ever she started stealing scenes on Scrubs as Jordan in her very first episode. Miller was a regular in Cougar Town and she plays Liz in this show. But unlike the previous two series where her characters were strong women to the point of bitchiness, there’s far more of a world-weariness in her work here. She clearly loves Alice but she’s exhausted by the fact that she has to keep picking up the slack. In an early confrontation with Gaby, where Gaby prods her to step back Liz calls her on her bullshit right away as well as the fact that she doesn’t like her. “We all have things to do!” she shouts exasperated at the end of this confrontation. But Liz is overcompensating too much and its clear despite the love of her husband (Ted McGinley steals every scene he’s in) that there’s a gulf here.

Michael Urie, who I remember from four incredible seasons of Ugly Betty, is Jimmy’s best friend who he spent the last year ghosting. Brian clearly wants to help Jimmy but he’s also annoyed with him, understandably given the reason for their dispute.

But of course the reason that so many will want to watch this series is to see Harrison Ford in what is his first recurring television role. Watching him as Paul I realized why the actor associated with two of the most successful franchises in the history of movies has never been appreciated as an actor. It’s simple. He makes it look effortless. It is easy – maybe too easy – to worship the actors who emote and struggle every second they’re on screen.  Ford just makes it look uncomplicated. And we don’t appreciate those kind of actors: it’s why it took us so long to recognize the talent of Jeff Bridges and Ed Harris; why we can’t seem to fully appreciate Amy Adams or Michelle Pfeiffer. It's certainly why we’ve never truly appreciated Ford.

Ford doesn’t steal the show because Harrison Ford has never chewed on scenery in half a century and he has no intention of starting now.  He’s probably having the time of his life being a grumpy old man but we can’t tell that because he seems utterly miserable. So he just does what he always does: effortlessly entertain us by being gruff and unwilling to share with his colleagues and being exactly that kind of person in his private sessions with Liz.

  So when he delivers a line, you laugh hysterically not because its Harrison Ford saying it but because its Paul saying it. When he tears down Jimmy by saying you’re neglecting the most important person in your life, and Jimmy says: “You.” “Your daughter,” he shouts.” And after Jimmy nods, he says in that same deadpan tone. “I come second.” He’s clearly a brilliant therapist because while he shares the same frustration with his patients (Liz is one; Jimmy clearly is though he doesn’t know) he will never think of telling them what to do.  He’s eternally patient in a way his younger colleagues just aren’t and always frustrated in a way we can see.  He is suffering from Parkinson’s, but its clear both Jimmy and Gaby are making a bigger deal of it then he is. It’s also clear that there has been some trauma with his family that he has no intention of sharing, no matter how much they press. (There’s a line he delivers when they ask him about his daughter that is so brilliantly done by Ford, I wouldn’t dream of giving it away.) Many expected Ford to get an Emmy nomination for his work in Season 1, but he did not. That said, it was a crowded category and the odds were unlikely.  Next time, when so many of this year’s nominees are ineligible (including Brett Goldstein himself) he will likely be in the ranks and almost certainly get the competitive award he’s deserved all his life.

Despite my love of Lawrence and despite the early nominations for Shrinking (it got a fair amount of recognition from the HCA as well) it has taken me far too long to get around to watching it.  Perhaps I was waiting for the end of year awards to start recognizing it; perhaps it was out of frustration for the protracting labor stoppage in Hollywood.  Whatever the reason I didn’t not start looking at it until last week. Now that I have I am instantly enthralled and entertained by the glorious combination of writing and acting that makes the core of every great Bill Lawrence show, and how often he and his collaborators will find comedy in the darkest of places. Shrinking may not be the phenomena that Ted Lasso was when it debuted, but it has the potential to be a funnier and perhaps deeper series.

My score: 4.5 stars.

 

Lost Rewatch on VHS: Meet Kevin Johnson

 

When the news came out earlier in 2023 that Lost had been the site of sexist and racist behavior behind the scenes it was both shocking and yet not surprising. For years after the series ended fans had noted that many of the characters who had suffered the most premature deaths after a promising buildup were either women or people of color. This was clear for the Tail Section survivors and though few would mourn for them, Nikki and Paulo.

But the biggest warning light had been flashed while the series was still going on. Harold Perrineau was actually the loudest voice over his character’s treatment on Lost as early as the end of Season Four and given everything Michael Dawson went through during the series run, it’s hard not to think he was the clearest indication of the writer’s cruelty.  Even if we allow what happened to Walt as a necessity forced upon the writer’s when they realized how the show was going to play out late in Season One – and in this case, I actually am inclined to believe them – it does not excuse how they utterly butchered Michael’s character in Season Two. I’ve already gone over my issues with it during my reviews of that season so there’s no need to relitigate them. Now we have to deal with Michael’s return here, which no one can deny the writer’s dropped the ball from beginning to end.

It was revealed at the start of Season Four Harold Perrineau was going to return in some fashion: even if you hadn’t known, the fact his name was back in the opening credits was a giveaway. That in itself fundamentally was a problem when you consider how it was handled. When Ben reveals that he has a man on the freighter, we should all be speculating on who it is and the show spends the next four episodes trying to build up suspense. However, with Perrineau’s name appearing on the credits and no sign of Michael it becomes increasingly obvious that’s who it’s going to be. A smarter move would have been not to reveal it at all or to keep Perrineau’s name off the credits until this episode which would have given suspense.  I know that by the time I heard Kevin’s name mentioned by the doctor I wasn’t surprised.

Yet that’s not even the biggest wrong the writers did to Perrineau. After spending so much time and energy promoting his return Michael’s actual footprint in Season Four is an anticlimax. He only appears in six episodes in the entire season and with the sole exception of the season finale, Meet Kevin Johnson is the only episode where he has any real presence at all.  I’m actually kind of amazed Perrineau held his tongue while the series was still filming.

And even this episode, which basically follows Michael after he comes back to civilization is almost entirely a disappointment because it doesn’t tell you anything you couldn’t foresee.  Yes it does answer the question as to why Michael, who sold everybody out and his soul to save himself and his son would end up working for Ben Linus. But the reason he’s gone on a suicide mission (as he tells us in the teaser) is because he has nothing left to live for.

Maybe we shouldn’t be shocked that Michael couldn’t carry the guilt of the murders of Ana Lucia and Libby.  It’s clear in this episode that Libby, who was an innocent bystander, is haunting him. But his decision to tell Walt about it is one of the worst things the writers ever did to Michael – and that’s saying a lot.  Walt has already been traumatized by what the Others did to him when they took him, and I imagine he must have been upset as to why his friends were still on the dock. But when Michael reveals the nature of his betrayal, the last of Walt’s innocence must have been shattered forever.  Considering that everything Michael did on the island was to protect his son physically, the fact that he chose to do something this horrible emotionally to him is out of context with his character.

It also can’t help that Michael and Walt, for obvious reasons, can’t tell anybody what happened to them or how they came back from a plane that’s disappeared. This would have been nearly impossible under normal circumstances, and as we’re about to see that possibility is about to get shattered.  That neither of them are able to share the burden with anybody no doubt does immense emotional damage to both. (Perhaps that is part of the reason why the Oceanic 6 seem so scattered in their flashforwards; keeping the secret has exerted the same kind of trauma Michael and Walt are dealing with and it is painful to be around each other.) But Michael has nothing left to live for…so the island gives him a fate worse than death.

It is when we learn that the island won’t let you die that we come to another stumbling block.  Tom tells Michael that if you have a higher purpose the island won’t let you kill yourself. There will be later signs that this is true. The problem is, this undercuts everything that Charlie and Desmond went through in Season 3. If the island wasn’t going to let Charlie die until he served his purpose, why did Desmond get flashes telling him that he had to save Charlie? Was this the island working through Desmond because that doesn’t take into context what happened with the rest of his character arc.  Similarly the island has been letting people die left and right through the first three seasons. Does that mean that none of them were important to the island?  Given what will be a critical piece of the final season that doesn’t seem to track either. And when you consider Michael’s final fate at the end of the season, it’s very hard to understand why the island was saving him for that.

And in the context of the season, the reason Michael was put on the freighter makes even less sense. Tom certainly believes that he is recruiting Michael for a suicide mission when he gives him his passport and makes his last call to him. But when Ben learns that Michael actually detonated the bomb, he seems surprised. Michael was doing exactly what Tom told him to do.

Indeed Ben’s entire plan for Michael on the freighter now seems incredibly badly done. He tells everybody in New Otherton that the people on the freighter’s mission is to capture him and when they’re done, kill everyone on the island. Miles confirms this and Ben certainly believes it will happen when he sends Alex, Karl and Rousseau to the Temple, calling it the only safe place left on the island. (We’re not going to see it until the final season and I have to say given what we learn about Widmore later on, I find it hard to believe it would be.) We know by the time Michael plants the bomb that it’s not just idle talk and Ben knows it too.

So why not just do the simple thing and blow up the freighter in the middle of the ocean? Ben’s talk about not injuring innocent people would be complete hogwash even if we didn’t know about the Purge: we’ve already seen countless times in Season Three that he was more than willing to risk the lives of the passengers of Oceanic 815 if it meant achieving his goals and he was perfectly fine trying to shoot Charlotte a few episodes ago. And his idea that somehow disabling communications and the engines will keep the island save is ludicrous particularly considering he never seems to think to ask if they have some kind of alternate transportation which they clearly do and which by now has already infiltrated the island.  We’ve already seen that Ben’s plan can famously fall apart but considering that he knows how dangerous Widmore is this genuinely makes him look stupid.

Maybe that’s the real reason Libby appears to Michael just before he is about to detonate the bomb. Michael clearly interprets her message of ‘don’t do it’ as don’t set off the bomb. Perhaps it meant something far more obvious. “Don’t trust Ben Linus.”  And it should have occurred to Michael even before he answers the radio that is who he is working for.  We know that Ben can not be trustworthy, even among his own people. There’s a good chance he misled Tom about what he had planned for the freighter and he believed this was going to happen.  He knew Michael was desperate for whatever redemption possible and he truly thought death was the only way to get it. In that sense Ben’s actions both with the fake bomb and by using Walt to get him to the radio room are truly actions of a sadist.

Meet Kevin Johnson is by far the weakest episode of Season Four, but there are some parts that resonate very strongly. One of the best is the return of Tom. M.C. Gainey’s work was one of the best recurring character in the series and in it is in his work that here that we get perhaps a fuller picture of Tom then we ever got throughout the series.  Tom spent most of his time as an Other in some form of deception, so in this scene he is by far the most honest he’s ever been.  His reaction when he realizes Michael has told Walt about what he did is genuinely horrific: he clearly never expected Michael to do this to Walt.  And there’s no cruelty in anything he says to Michael in the alley: there’s something that he almost wants to help.

His scene in the hotel is also wonderful. (It also reveals something that had been the subject of speculation: Tom actually is gay.) He’s also open with his flaws, admitting to his companion that he deserving the attack he got and trying to play the good host.  And he also tells Michael exactly what Widmore did and how he did it. He knows this is a hard sell and he’s willing to be honest.  His appeal to Michael is genuinely more about redemption: he knows Michael wants to help his friends. He’s even willing to be sympathetic about the fact that flying isn’t fun. It’s a shame that this is the last time we see Tom in any context: I would have liked another flashback to see his backstory in some way.

We also get some insight into some of the characters on the freighter before they came to the island. Naomi continues to be more of a mystery and Frank is as honest as ever. (It also confirms Frank truly didn’t know what Naomi was planning.) We also get a sight of Miles clearly sure that ‘Kevin’ is lying and as you’d expect, not giving a damn.  It’s odd we don’t see Dan or Charlotte in this episode but given what we later learn about both of them, maybe that’s by design.

The best moments, however, are at the beginning and end of the episode. Locke is trying to find a way forward and reveals what’s happening, though he doesn’t reveal anything about Widmore.  The better scene comes from Miles who is certain that Ben will get him his money because ‘he wants to survive.’ Miles is right about this but in the next episode he is going to completely forget about the money and be focused on trying to survive himself.

Ben senses as much and sends Alex off with Rousseau and Karl. Knowing how much he loves his daughter; it clearly costs him to send them out and stay behind.  He knows that he has a target on his back and he knows the best thing for Alex, despite her hating his guts, is for her to get as far from him as possible. The fact that some of the last words she says to him is to ask if the people on the freighter are: “More dangerous than you?” shows how angry she is at him, so it must cost him for him to admit that these people are worse and to call Rousseau ‘her mother’ someone he has been denying existed until a week ago. Would they have been safer if they stayed at the Barracks? Probably not.

Then there are the scenes when Sayid confronts Michael and demands to know why he’s here and how he got here. We never know just how much he tells them about what happened but its clear Sayid just hears the words Ben Linus and stops listening. Setting aside the obvious irony of who Sayid is working for in the future, the reminder of Michael’s betrayal is still very raw. (It’s clear given Sawyer and Hurley’s reaction they feel the same way.) Honestly if Tom had been on the freighter I think Sayid might have been compelled to keep his secret longer. His decision to expose Michael is completely rational and the barely contained rage in Andrews’ voice as he reveals it to the captain is marvelous.

And then, of course, there’s the final two minutes. I have to say I never believed for a moment that Rousseau hadn’t been killed at the end (Nikki Stafford spent the episode hoping she was knocked unconscious which would be completely going against everything we’d seen the mercenaries do.) But that does not make the deaths of Karl and Rousseau any less shocking. It’s not just that the show kills off two recurring characters, including one who’d been prominent since Season One; it’s that it does so without even giving you a moment to think. The writers might have been trying to parallel the end of Two For The Road, the last time two major characters were shot this quickly. But this is different because the two characters were the most important people in Alex’s life and they are erased in the space of a minute with no sign of anyone who did it. Tania Raymonde does not get enough credit for her work on Lost but the last ninety seconds are incredible work for her. She barely has time to deal with the lost of her boyfriend before the mother she’s just found is killed and the only thing she can think to do is throw herself on the mercy of people who her father have just warned her will kill her without a second thought.

When I saw this episode in March of 2008, I was OMFG.  And I was also overjoyed that the WGA Strike that had begun in October of 2007 had been resolved by the time the third episode of the series had aired. I had spent much of the fall of 2007 horrified to think what would happen if the strike didn’t get resolved before Season Four began. (I predicted that Hollywood would resolve it before the 2008 Oscars and I was dead on in that regard.)

There were, of course, repercussions. It had originally been planned for the final three seasons of Lost to be sixteen episodes apiece. As a result of the strike, the writers only aired thirteen episodes in Season Four. (Though in a way, we still got what amounted to forty-eight episodes: the final two seasons each had sixteen episodes but each amounted to seventeen hours.)

There’s also a good argument that the decision to cut those two hours may have helped the series; given how the final five episodes played out, I’m not sure what the writers were planning that would have fit in to the Season that wouldn’t have seemed like being tacked on. Just as the WGA strike may have helped save Vince Gilligan’s original plans for Breaking Bad’s first season – and by nature the entire series run – the strike might have helped Season Four finish as strongly as it did. And trust me, the final five episodes hit every note possible.

 

VHS NOTES: Speaking of the strike, we get quite a few ads saying that television will be returning to normal. There are ads pitching the return of Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives in a few weeks. And we also see ads for the return of the incredible comedy series Samantha Who? This may have been one of the most remarkable comedies in history. Christina Applegate had the title role, Jean Smart deservedly won her first Emmy and among the actors are Kevin Dunn, Barry Watson, Melissa McCarthy and Jennifer Esposito. This is one series failure you can’t blame on ABC not putting its wait behind, and rather the audience for not following it after its second season.

We also see trailers for the DVD release of the superb romantic drama Atonement for which Saoirse Ronan received her first Oscar nomination and which for some reason Keira Knightley and James McAvoy didn’t.

Overlooked Classic Movies: Judgment at Nuremberg

 

There’s a line attributed to either Sam Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer that basically tells how Hollywood even in its early days reacted to the idea of films they considered preachy: “If you want to deliver a message, use Western Union.’ Many directors got that message early in their careers and Hollywood hasn’t really changed in that perspective.

In my memory there are only three directors of note who basically spent their entire careers in the industry making films completely ignoring that warning and achieved both financial and critical success. Alphabetically, they were Norman Jewison, Stanley Kramer and Sidney Lumet. All three worked their entire careers in the studio system and in almost all their films, never backed away from telling entertaining stories that dealt with riveting social issues. All three had multiple films nominated for Best Picture and were nominated several times for Best Director, though none of them won in competition. But while Jewison and Lumet were fortunate enough to receive the equivalent of lifetime achievement awards when they were still active in the industry Kramer who predated both of them when it came to his career and who had long since stopped making films by the time of his death, never received recognition from the Academy, not even with a tribute segment at the 2001 Academy Awards a month after he had passed away at the age of 87. (He did receive the Irving Thalberg award in 1962, which in a sense was fitting.)

That is in a sense understandable because Kramer’s career was relatively short as a director. From 1955 to 1978, he only directed sixteen films as well as four films for TV. But what films! In the space of ten years, 1958-1967, he directed four movies that received Best Picture nominations. He’d also been in producing for awhile and had produced previous Best Picture nominees High Noon and The Caine Mutiny. And the movies that he made when he was at his peak as a director deserve to be considered some of the best of their era, in large part because he managed to make films that were about something and make money doing it.

These days when directors tend to make picture that are ‘message picture’ they have a habit of disguising it in what are called hyperlink movies (Traffic and Syriana, both written by Stephen Gaghan are the most obvious examples) or trying to do so in ways that are frequently heavy-handed (Adam McKay’s The Big Short and Vice are the most prominent recent examples.) Kramer’s films were always about the issues but no matter how bleak they were (and they could be bleak) he made sure that the audience had a good time. This was true in six of the movies at his peak, each of which took on issues the average filmgoer in the 1950s and late 1960s didn’t want to look at.

He started with The Defiant Ones a film which has one of the most memorable hooks of all time: Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, two escape convicts who hate each other, handcuffed together and running for their freedom. That formula has been copied countless times over the years but none have been able to look at the anger that was in this film which gave Curtis his only Oscar nomination and showed many brilliant character actors including Theodore Bikel and Boris Karloff doing memorable character turns.

He followed that with On The Beach, one of the first major movies to look at the world in the aftermath of a nuclear war.  Set in Australia, the last place on earth where there is any life, the rest of humanity is counting down the weeks and days to their horrible deaths. In both of these films, Kramer does nothing to relent in the darkness of the vision.

Then came his adaption of Inherit The Wind, the roman a clef play about the John Scopes evolution trial.  Spencer Tracy (a favorite of Kramer’s as you’ll see, earned an Oscar nomination for playing Clarence Darrow and the film features sterling performances by Frederic March and one of Gene Kelly’s few turns as a serious actor playing H.L. Mencken.  The film looks at the issue of evolution on every side but also makes it clear that the most important thing in the world is an open mind something that Darrow has at the end but almost no one else does.

Later on came Ship of Fools, an adaptation if a group of passengers boarding a ship bound for Germany just prior to World War II. Adapted from Katherine Anne Porter’s best seller, Kramer looks at early 1930s society from angles that few would expect. The film received eight Oscar nominations, including Best Picture but shockingly Kramer was left out of the Best Director list.

The last film in this list is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a film that is admired by many and demeaned by the same amount as it looks at a middle-class couple who learn that their only daughter has married a black man without telling them. Kramer took huge abuse at the time because the doctor, played by Sidney Poitier, is so good that he does not seem to have a single flaw. Kramer said then and years later that this was a deliberate choice. By making Poitier’s character so utterly perfect, he was forcing the parents played by Tracy and Katherine Hepburn to realize that the only reason they could object was because their new son-in-law was black. He was forcing these good liberal people to confront their racism against their ideals. That it was not understood then or at the time may have been because the film  was too subtle in an era where cinema was increasingly becoming louder and more divisive.

In his list of Great Movies Roger Ebert praises Kramer and considers Inherit the Wind to represent him. While I’ll admit that film is a masterpiece, I truly believe the film that represents just how much of a genius Kramer was is the film that he directed the following year Judgment at Nuremberg. I first rented this film when I was thirteen years old. It is one of those movies that was ‘substantial’ – it clocks in at 3 hours long, which amounted to two VHS tapes. I rented it four times in my early adolescence, watched it all the way through every time and I recognized it for the masterpiece it is.

More than sixty years after it debuted, it still holds up incredibly well and its reputation has not diminished. It currently ranks at #136 on imdb.com which is remarkable for a movie not merely that old but that does not have the reputation that, say,  Citizen Kane or All About Eve or even The Hustler and West Side Story,  both considered landmark films and were both nominated for Best Picture along with Judgment at Nuremberg. The film received twelve Oscar nominations and in a year dominated by West Side Story, it won Best Actor for Maximillian Schell and Best Adapted Screenplay by Abby Mann. Kramer received the Thalberg award at that year’s Oscars, perhaps as a consolation prize; he had won the Directors award from the Golden Globes that year.

The reason for the power of Judgment at Nuremberg is frankly obvious. Kramer chose to deal with the darkest subject of the era: the Holocaust, a subject no filmmaker other than Kramer would have dared touch that close to the end of World War II. These days, when it seems every year a major studio is making a film about the Holocaust in far more graphic ways than we would think, it is almost always about the survivors or the camps. The Nazis are almost always portrayed as unrelentingly evil and there is no room for common ground. These days we are so wrapped in the idea as how can anyone defend a Nazi. Kramer actually made a three hour film about the defense of the Nazis. But he also does so in a clever fashion. Yes the movie is about the Nuremberg trials, but it is not about the general or the Gestapo, all of them are dead and gone by the start of the movie.  The film is about four judges who gave rulings that would send so many of these Jews to camps, to prisons and to sterilize them. It is one thing to pronounce  the people who committed these crimes as irredeemable; how do you make the argument the people who gave the sentences were?  A judge’s job has always been to interpret the law, not to judge whether it is wrong.  Kramer and Mann spend the entire film leaning it to that ambiguity.

The film is centered on a judge from America named Dan Haywood, played by Tracy, who by this time was getting the reputation that Meryl Streep now has of being able to give a good performance in their sleep. Kramer used Tracy in many of his films because by this time he had the ability to give a measured response of cynicism and idealism both of which have tempered by age but are still present. Haywood spends much of his time in the bombed-out husk of Berlin mansion with servants of a former German.

Haywood spends much of the film, hearing over and over the line from many German citizens that they did not know. At one point he says: “As far I can tell, no one in this country knew what was going on.” He remains impartial and indeed mostly silent in the majority of the film, which is the trial itself. Four judges are on trial, but most of the film centers on Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster. Janning was a respected and admired juror through much of his career but he views the entire process almost with detachment and silence. When the judges enter their pleas, he does not speak and his council says he represents him and refuses to enter a plea.  He does not engage with his council for much of the movie and spends much of the time not talking at all.

Much of the back and forth is between the prosecuting attorney and Jannings’ attorney.  Colonel Lawson is played by that brilliant actor Richard Widmark, who is in a sense Kramer’s voice for the rage that he feels against Nazism and the Holocaust. His opening makes it very clear that he shows no remorse for anything that is going on, particularly these judges, all of whom are elderly. “Their minds were not warped at an early age!” he shouts in his opening.  We learn that he takes all of this personally because he was present at the liberation of Dachau.

In a moment that must have stunned the audiences of the time, Lawson himself takes the stand to enter into evidence films of the camps in the aftermath of the liberation. Actual footage of what happened is used during his description. Lawson moderates his tone to what is genuine sadness at what we see – and what we don’t see; at one point he mentions almost casually that a human pelvis has been used as an ashtray.  Widmark is our only voice during this period as he mentions the estimates of the tragedy. “But the actual number of those who died, no one knows” are his closing marks.

Widmark never got the credit he deserved for his work in this film (almost every other major actor was nominated for some award) but I find some brilliant in his performance. Being the voice of the director is not easy and Lawson has to balance the very realness of the horrors with the true problems with America at the time. The film is set in 1948 and the horrors of the Cold War are becoming prominent; the brass is worried about having Germany as an ally against Russia going forward. (The Berlin airlift is discussed  in passing.) Lawson is constantly frustrated at being held in by protocol at having to treat these people he justifiably considers evil incarnate and not punish them.  “We’re fair Americans and true-blue,” he says in a drunken stupor, when it comes to the idea of forgiving the Germans. “There are no Nazis in Germany. The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over.” Considering how many deals we made with Nazi scientists in the aftermath of the war,  this attitude must have resonated with the rank and file as well.

Maximillian Schell dominates the screen every moment he is on it as Hans Rolfe, Jannings’ attorney.  Some might question how he defeated Paul Newman for Newman’s iconic role in The Hustler that year; watch Schell work in this film and its not a difficult question even sixty years later. Rolfe makes it very clear in his opening statement that Germany is on trial, and just as the devil can quote scripture for his purpose, he is just as good at using American proverbs. “My country, right or wrong,’ is the statement of an American patriot” he says in his opening statement. “It is no less true of a German patriot.”

These days we mock the idea of the Nuremberg defense as an excuse. But Rolfe makes it clear that it was not necessarily one that you could shrug off: “Should Ernst Janning have carried out the laws of his country? Or should he have refused to carry them out and become a traitor?”  It may sound easy to not do horrible things when you know in your heart they are wrong, but if by not doing them you end up in the same place as your victims, is it a simple choice? Lawson thinks it is. Rolfe thinks it isn’t. That nature is at the heart of the trial.

It is worth noting that as the defense begins Rolfe increasingly uses ugly methods. But it’s also worth noting they’re not illegal methods. After a doctor who clearly notes the laws were wrong, Rolfe first tells him of a statement involving sterilization made by Oliver Wendell homes. He then reminds this doctor that at one point he and his fellow doctors had the capacity to do something but they did not. This point actually shocks the doctor and angers Lawson, even though he is within the bounds of law.

Then comes some of the more poignant moments in the films.  In order to introduce the policies of sterilizations, Lawson calls a living victim. He is played by Montgomery Clift, in a role that deserved earned him a nomination for Supporting Actor. Clift’s character is frail and broken, but it is also clear he is not particularly bright.  When he begins his cross-examination of him, Rolfe gently points out these problems the man has and humiliates him by taking an intelligence test. Rolfe is clearly disgusted by what he has to do but he needs to make a point.

The critical moment involves a woman named Irene Hoffman, who at sixteen was involved in a case involving an elderly Jewish man who was sentenced to a camp by Janning because he was accused of having an affair with her. She is played by Judy Garland. (The screenplay describes her now as: “It’s impossible to believe she really was sixteen.) Garland was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress (like Clift for the fourth time and last time in her career) and we se watching her how frail and broken she is. (By this point Garland was in the midst of the drinking that would end up leading her to an early death.)

Rolfe calls her as a defense witness and while he is battering her on the stand, Janning speaks for the first time in the courtroom. Angered beyond words, he finally as to make a statement. But it is not one in his defense. In what amounts to a fifteen minute monologue, Janning lays out every aspect of German society in the aftermath of World War I. He explains in no uncertain terms why the country accepted Hitler, and why he and his fellow judges – indeed all the Germans who should have known better – did so. He lays bare the lie of Germany not knowing the truth by saying that they claim not to know what was happening because they did not want to know.

This monologue is followed with another brilliant monologue by Rolfe, in which he lays bare just how guilty the rest of the world was in everything that happened. “It is easy to condemn one man in the dock. It is easy to condemn the German people to speak of the basic flaw in the German character that allowed Hitler to rise to power and at the same time positively ignore the basic flaw in character, that made the Russians sign pacts with him, Winston Churchill praise him (he cites a letter Churchill wrote in 1938) and American industrialist profit by him!” The brilliance of the screenplay is that Kramer not only doesn’t let Germany off the hook for the Holocaust, he doesn’t let anyone off the hook. “Ernst Janning’s guilt is the world’s guilt – no more and no less.” Rolfe concludes. And looking back at history it’s impossible not to think that way.

In retrospect if the film has a flaw, it is the presence of Marlene Dietrich as a German widow who Haywood meets and becomes a potential love interest. I don’t object to Dietrich’s performance it is extremely well mannered and some of her best work. The problem is, she seems to be speaking as a defender of Janning as well as a representative of the good German people. I read in a Billy Wilder biography that Dietrich complained that the message of Kramer’s film was that the Holocaust only happened because of Hitler alone and asked Wilder to rewrite her dialogue so that it expressed her feelings. If he did, it did not help. Many of Dietrich’s lines involves the scornful use of the footage of the Holocaust and she actually blames Hitler and Goebbels for what happened. Thlone for what happened. And it also does a massive discredit to Kramer, if you watch this movie it is very clear that’s the last thing Kramer is doing with this film.

Judgment at Nuremberg is an epic movie unlike almost every other epic I’ve seen in my life. It’s fundamentally claustrophobic; almost the entire film is set indoors.  Unlike most epics, it’s entirely shot in black and white. It’s got an all-star cast but all of them spend their time either sitting down or talking, which doesn’t happen in any epic film. And most of the camerawork is not in long shots but closeups of the defendants or those in the dock, many times utterly stoic.

The last lines of Judgment at Nuremberg are among the most famous in film history. At the end of the day, however, I think the most powerful moments in the film come in Tracy’s summation before he announced the verdict. When I saw this movie in the 2000s, not long after we were learning the truth about the War on Terror, Tracy’s words took on a new resonance. Throughout the film Tracy is being pressured to deal with coming up with a legal reason not to sentence the defendants. “When I first became judge, I knew there were certain people in town, I wasn’t supposed to touch…But how in God’s name do you expect me to look the other way at the murder of six million people?” He then tells the judge who says that the men are not responsible for their acts: “You’re going to have to explain it (to me) very carefully.”

Then in his summation while he excuses Janning he says lines that sum up so well the principles a country should stand by.

“This trial has shown that under the stress of a national crisis men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes and atrocities so vast and heinous as to stagger the imagination…There are those in our country today, too, who speak of the protection of the country. Of survival. The answer to that is ‘survival as what? A country isn’t a rock. It’s what its stands for when standing for something is the most difficult. Before the people of the world – let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: justice, truth…and the value of a single human being!”

This speech has as much resonance in 2023 as it did in 1961 and in 1948. It is horrifying looking at America and the world today who have fundamentally decided to forget that basic principle, not just in government but in every aspect of our lives.

Eventually Kramer stopped making movies. In the 1970s he made a series of TV Movies that dealt with similar trials, involving the Rosenberg’s, William Calley and General Yamashita, all of whom were accused of war crimes. When he died he had not made a movie since 1979.  He may never be considered one of the greatest directors in history and he may not have been. But the films he made dealt with fights and issues that we are still dealing with today and lessons that we just can’t seem to learn.  Sometimes you need to send a message in a way that no one can ignore. Judgment at Nuremberg’s message is one we need to keep hearing.