Top TV of 2024: Grand Jury Prize

 

 

Every year I give what I call the grand jury prize, honoring series and actors that fall just beneath my qualifications for the top ten. These include certain promising new genre and sources of original programming that might fall under the radar.

 

 

Most Surprising Source of Brilliance This Past Year: Starz

Starz has been the redheaded stepchild of pay cable for most of its existence, often present exceptional programming that gets recognition in some quarters for excellence (Outlander, Power, Gaslit) but rarely receives immense credit. This year they took it to a new level with three radically different adaptations.

In the spring viewers saw Julianne Moore and Nicholas Gallizet play Mary & George, the mother and son of the Villers clan who became favorites of the gay king James of Scotland, only to self-destruct by their own desires. The fall brought us the long-delayed (and formerly Showtime) limited series Three Women in which Shailene Woodley told the story of three very different women in 2010s America who wanted more out of their lives. One of the most boldly erotic (as opposed to pornographic) series in recent years, it featured brilliant performances by all four leads, especially Betty Gilpin in a performance that has already received consideration for Awards this year. And we rang out the year with Sweetpea the very black comedy that featured Ella Purnell as Rhiannon, a twentyish woman who has spent her entire life not being noticed – and then decides to come out of the shadows as an avenger – or so she thinks.

Starz has been showing a remarkable upgrade in television in this decade. I look forward to 2025 when I meet The Couple Next Door.

 

Best Revived Genre: The Workplace Comedy

Coming off the incredible success of Abbott Elementary the workplace comedy has seen a remarkable revival, sometimes in places you wouldn’t expect. This fall has brought the arrival of two very different kinds of comedy series in that atmosphere.

The English Teacher rang in the fall season with Brian Jordan Alvarez playing the title role, a gay teacher at an Austin high school trying to deal with an increasingly fragmented America and not nearly as good a person or enlightened as he thinks he is. He was helped by a brilliant supporting cast, including Stephanie Koening (Alvarez’s co-creator) and Enrico Motolani in some of his best work in nearly a decade as the ultra-harassed principal.

November brought to NBC the exceptional St. Denis Medical,  which features some of the greatest comic performers in what could be described as Scrubs meets Parks and Rec. Alison Tolman, Wendi-McLendon Covey and David Alan Grier are all superb as more cynical caregivers in a hysterical world.

Both of these series were nominated for Best Comedy by the Critics Choice Awards and while neither have yet received a second season renewal, both are more than worthy. I’ve argued The Bear is a workplace comedy above all else but if you insist it is, these are definitely funnier and more consistent.

 

Brilliant Reimaginings

I didn’t much like the idea of Amazon’s remake of Mr. & Mrs. Smith mainly because I didn’t think the original movie deserved to be remade in the first place. After just a few episodes Donald Glover proved me wrong. Glover and Maya Erskine are both brilliant comic performers and hyphenates but both showed a darker side to their characters that led to a kind of drama and comedy mesh that became increasingly unsettling as they worked for a mysterious boss that sent them on mission that they didn’t understand and never knew why they were trying. Visited by arguably the best field of Guest performers of any series this year (the show received five Emmy nominations in that category) the series was exceptional from beginning to end. It is not clear if either lead will be back next season but given the nature of what we learned in the 1st season finale, there’s certainly a lot to explore.

Presumed Innocent was a more likely candidate for a superb drama treatment and we got just that from David E. Kelley’s adaptation of it for Apple. Putting Scott Turow’s legal thriller into contemporary settings with all of the racial and sexual mores involved never once seemed awkward. Jake Gyllenhaal was exceptional throughout as Rusty, a man who as the series progresses the viewer becomes more convinced of his guilt and harder to like with each episode. Peter Sarsgaard delivers an extraordinary performance as Tommy Molto, the ADA who has both a persecution complex and a narcissistic complex that seems to be the defense’s best advantage – until the trial begins and we see just what made him perfect for the job. And the additions to the cast, including Elizabeth Marvel and Lily Rabe as well as making Carolyn more of a presence in the show than she was in earlier versions were all brilliant decision and made the twist of the ending – a critical change from the original – devastating.

 

Actresses of the Year

Actresses I would never want to kill: Ella Purnell. Purnell was a scene stealing bad girl in the first season of Yellowjackets and had such an impact she hung around as a ghost in Season 2. She apparently spent much of 2023 working in everything known to man because she came away the female lead of two radically different series.

In Amazon’s Emmy nominated Fallout,  she played Lucy trying to find a way to walk through an apocalyptic world with only a Ghoul as her aide. Then in the fall she played Rhiannon, the avenging angel (or so she thinks) of Sweetpea another and equally brilliant adaptation. Somehow between this she also did voiceover work for Star Trek: Prodigy and Arcane. And its good thing both those series have ended because both her live action ones have been renewed.

Allison Janney never seems to take time off either because she was in two very different Emmy nominated series this year. In February she played Evelyn Rollins, a palm beach socialite who was Kristin Wiig’s biggest obstacle in joining society and was a lot of fun being obnoxious to everybody (except as we saw, a beached whale) Then this past October she dropped in as Grace Penn, the current vice president (whose job Keri Russell is being quietly vetted for) who has a bigger role behind an international crisis than we thought – and who may be headed for higher office very quickly. Both of these roles tied into the two roles that Janney won six of her seven Emmys for and give every indication more may very well be in her future.

 

 

Actors of the Year

            You’d think having just spent four years playing Mike November on Amazon’s Jack Ryan Kelly would want a break from television or at least morally ambiguous characters. You’d be wrong. During 2024 he took on the role of Johnny Vitti, the second in command in the Falcone family who tries to maintain order in the death of the leadership and ends up being the final victim of Sofia’s hostile takeover. Then he returned to his role as Byron Westfield, the CIA director trying to increasingly maintain order in a dangerous political setting and facing flak from both below (Zoe Saldana) and above (the White House)

There is no ambiguity to be found in Michael Emerson’s work: he’s just Evil. I don’t just mean his work as Leland, the acolyte of demons, the babysitter to the Antichrist and the force that has brought so much malevolence to the world today. I also mean his work doing voiceover as Brainiac, the AI of Krypton who has manipulated Supergirl all her life and chooses to do the same to Superman in the incredible second season of My Adventures With Superman. His character was destroyed but we all know how much that lasts in comic books. By the time he was playing the corrupt (murderous) judge at the end of Elsbeth this past year, it was clear how much fun he was having. As we always are watching him.

 

Series I Will Miss The Most (That Left on Its Own Terms)

Adieu Somebody Somewhere. Your cancellation may have been abrupt and you may have had some loose ends to wrap up. But in what was your series finale, you left us feeling the way we always: hopeful, warm and with a song in our heart and one that Bridget Everett had just sung. Now maybe the Emmys can honor you for an encore.

 

Series Whose Cancellation Cut Me To The Quick

There were more than a few this past year I’m sorry are gone but the one I think I’ll mourn the most is the exceptional So Help Me Todd. It seemed to be bringing back the revival of the network drama and I thought it’s cancellation meant a body blow to it. Fortunately, this new season which has already brought us the reboot of Matlock and the exceptional High Potential shows it’s not going anywhere.

 

HBO Procedural We All Should Have Watched Instead of True Detective

Get Millie Black was everything Night Country wasn’t and I don’t just mean the Jamaican setting instead of the Alaskan one. It featured a female lead who seemed to be more driven and morally upright than either Navarro and Danvers but revealed her to be a force far more destructive, more determined to throw everything away, and more comfortable with saving strangers than being close to her own friends and family. By choosing her through the perspective of everyone around her Marlon James showed that Millie eventually destroyed everything she touched and had such tunnel vision about her job that she never cared about anything around her. I don’t know if there can be a second season (the finale was very definitive) but I wouldn’t mind getting Millie Black again.

And to wrap this up….

 

Reality Show Star of the Year (Not a Typo)

Jeopardy champions had come from odd places before but I never once thought one could come from Survivor. Nevertheless Drew Basile demonstrated those skills, not only when he managed to flatted fifteen game winner Adriana Harmeyer but when he went on a seven game winning streak of his own that netted him just under $130,000. He certainly demonstrated the ability to Outsmart and Outwit his fellow contestants and by surviving the sixth tie-breaker in Jeopardy history, he proved he could outlast it. In his last appearance he rang in to deliver the clue: “the tribe has spoken” and Ken asked if it exorcised bad memories for him. We will see him attempting to do all three of those in next year’s Tournament of Champions, and just as Ike Barinholtz managed to convince me of the intelligence of winners of Celebrity Jeopardy earlier this year, Drew has made me consider that of reality show stars. (I’m still not gonna watch Survivor looking for future contestants, that’s a bridge too far.)

 

And that is my last column for 2024. My readers will next see this kind of work in regard to the Golden Globes later this week; Jeopardy fans for my reviews of the Second Chance Tournament soon enough. My continued thanks for all of you who are following and commenting on my blogs – even those of you who have made it very clear that I am wrong about what I think.

See You in 2025.

Top Ten TV of 2024, Part 2: The Five Best Shows of 2024

 

Those of you who are looking at my five best shows of 2024 will notice, shall we say, a certain correlation with the Emmys and other end of years awards shows. What can I say? The Emmys got it right this year.

 

5. Abbott Elementary (ABC)

In its three full years on the air Abbott Elementary has never been lower than fifth place on my top ten list. And it would take a lot of work for it to drop out of the top ten altogether. Like all of us I spent much of 2024 waiting for Quinta Brunson’s incredible network comedy to come back this year (something the show nodded and winked to in its first scene back) and basically picked up where it left off: being one of the funniest series of the decade and arguably the most consistently brilliant series of any genre so far.

At this point I keep thinking this show will run out of ways to dazzle me each season and each season it keeps proving me wrong. The Halloween episode alone was one of the most delightful I’ve seen with Ava deciding to be Blade and completely pulling it off, and the show paying tribute to it in the final scene of the episode in the best way possible. (If they don’t give Janelle James an Emmy soon…)

The show continues to dive deep in so many ways, particularly with relationships. The series is now diving somewhat more into the families of the surrounding characters other than Janine this past season: we’ve met Jacob’s younger brother who seemed to have a problematic relationship with but who Jacob has spent his time misreading; we met Barbra’s family on Mother’s Day and have been revisiting them; we met the Shamanski family at Christmas in all of its ugly glory that rivaled the ‘Fishes’ episode of The Bear for its level of dysfunction (though it was a lot funnier) and we finally met, indirectly, Ava’s father played in a cameo by Keith David that ensures we’ll be seeing him again soon.

Throw in that the show is dealing with the possibility of gentrification along with apparently its first ever white student as well as the realization of the Gregory-Ava relationship that remains as adorkable as it was while they were flirting, and there is no sign that Abbott is going to become any less of a cultural phenomena any time soon. The fact that they are planning a crossover with another iconic blue collar series – It’s Only Sunny in Philadelphia – makes me all the more joyful. We need laughs more than ever this year and Abbott faculty keep delivering them.,

 

4. Baby Reindeer (Netflix)

Aside from my issues with Night Country this year’s Emmys had an incredibly strong selection with the fifth season of Fargo, Lessons in Chemistry and Ripley being formidable contenders. So it is a credit to the Emmys that they absolutely made the right call when they chose to recognize Richard Gadd’s extraordinary series for the majority of its awards.

I have written about the show extensively for my blog as well as with my personal connection with it on many levels. So for now I want to give credit to Gadd for reinventing the format in a way that goes against how many limited series have been. It is serio-comic in its tone when the majority of limited series have always been dramatic, sometimes to the point of being heavy-handed. Each episode was around the half-hour mark and almost never went over it, as opposed to the lion’s share of most limited series which tend to have hour long episodes and many will be longer than that. It is more of a roman a clef than that as Gadd, who wrote every episode as well as starred in the role of Donny, lived through this experience. And while a crime is involved, it is far more about a personal journey than anything else.

Gadd dominates every moment of the screen he is on it and deserved all of the awards he got: for writing, directing and acting. You can see the pain Donny is suffering when he tells every detail of his story and of the journey he has been on: how his experiences in the past led him to look at Martha as harmless – and even afterwards, being unable to fully let her go. He makes it clear that he and Martha are two sides of the same coin and that the failures of the system hurt her as much as him.

Jessica Gunning delivered a performance that was deservedly star-making and deserved the Emmy she received over a strong field. This included the work of Nava Mau, who plays a transgender woman who becomes someone who Donny sees initially as his salvation but who ends up being collateral damage for his own journey. The fact that at the end of the series Donny seems more lost than he was at the start is tragic as well: it’s not clear if he’s able to connect. The fact that Gadd has managed to do so is a triumph.

Sadly, many people eventually tracked down the real ‘Martha’ and have been harassing her as well as the real Floyd. Those people have clearly missed the point of Gadd’s vision though maybe that’s not a surprise either. In the world we live in, everything is seen in a moral lens as black and white. Gadd’s vision sees the world in the shades of grey we often refuse to. I look forward to seeing what comes next from it.

 

3. The Penguin (HBO)

If HBO hadn’t moved this series from MAX to the parent company this year I probably wouldn’t have watched it until at least December no matter how enormous the raves were almost from the moment the series debuted. I’ve always had issues with IP shows, particularly comic book bases ones and no matter how much I love Colin Farrell, if it had been streaming I’d have waited. But HBO chose to air it live. God bless them.

From the opening moments Colin Farrell chose to turn Oz Cobb into a character we’ve been seeing throughout the era of Prestige TV but comic books have basically not let us. He was channeling from start to finish James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano and the writers never let up from that image from the beginning. This was a fat, balding man with a New York accent who had a relationship with his mother so complicated it would have stunned Dr. Melfi when she  - and the viewer – learned the horrors of it. Diedre O’Connell was astonishing throughout as Mrs. Cobb, the one person he cared for the most in the world suffering from a dementia that had rotted her mind. For most of the series she seemed to be the link to his humanity. In the final episodes we learned that she had known the monster she had given birth to – and had let him loose into the world.

The Penguin took place in a Gotham seldom seen in the movies or the animated series: the dirty underbelly of it, rotting from within, the world that Batman never seems to bother with most nights because he’s decided to beat up the Joker. That was a clear decision by the writers to show in many ways Oz is the other side of the coin when it comes to Bruce Wayne, using his own traumas and upbringing to build his version of himself, one where he is the hero of his story even though he is willing to throw anyone aside in order to obtain his vision. Like Bruce Wayne he thinks human connection is a weakness and in the final moments we show just how much he’s willing to do to cut it off.

Of course the breakout performance of The Penguin and one of the great performances of 2024 was that of Cristin Milioti as Sofia Falcone. Milioti was a revelation unlike any performance this past year, someone who had been put in a box by her family and colleagues, framed for a horrible crime that had put her in Arkham and spent much of the season trying to find her own path, making alliances that worked against her, losing everything she had in a search for revenge. Her story is the tragedy of The Penguin because she alone clearly knew the sickening hold Gotham has on its residence and the only solution – and it was thrust away from her out of Oz’s climb to the cop. She doesn’t die at the end of the series but her fate is far worse.

The Penguin is the third extraordinary limited series in the last five years with Watchmen and Wandavision that has shown the ability to use the formula of a comic book to tell deeper and more fascinating stories than the subject matter. Watchmen dealt with racism, Wandavision grief and The Penguin told the story of family: both criminal, biological and adopted. As the comic book film has been increasingly entering a decline in both critical response and box office The Penguin is an argument that the best versions of these stories may be in the limited series. The writers have said that they might tell more stories in this universe, though they would not make a sequel to The Penguin. If they send up that particular Bat-Signal, I’d gladly show up.

 

2. Hacks (HBO Max)

Like everybody watching the Emmys this years I was stunned when Hacks ended up upsetting The Bear, which had already won eleven Emmys leading up to the award for Best Comedy. But I wasn’t surprised. Just as with Deb Vance, the hard to pin down comedian at the center of this incredible show, I knew that its hour would come sooner than anyone might think.

In its first two seasons I ranked Hacks 3^rd on my ten best list and the fact that it is number 2 this year has nothing to do with either the Emmy or because it became any better than it had in previous years. Watching the incredible byplay of Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder has become one of the greatest pleasures of my life the past few years and justified my subscription to Max. It is the only show that I started watching almost immediately after it dropped this year because the world created by those incredible talents of Jen Stasky, Lucia Aniello and Paul W. Downs is one that I would gladly spend more time in if I had too.

As we watched Deb try to seize the opportunity that she had come this close to getting – becoming the first woman in late night  - we saw the unlikely love story between Deb and Ava reach its next face. When Deb (Jean Smart in her third consecutive Emmy winning role dumped Ava (Hannah Einbinder was robbed, I agree with your mother) to find her own path, Ava has spent the last several months finding success but having to go through immense therapy. She still follows her at the cost of everything and its clear the more the two of them are together the more they are clearly soul mates. Deb would never say as much but she’s become a better person because of Ava – which made her betrayal in the season finale all the more wrenching for the viewer.

Much of the story was spent watching Jimmy (Downs finally got the Emmy nomination he deserved) and nepo baby Kayla (Megan Stalter, stealing everything that’s not pinned down) try to find a future for Deb in TV.  This led them to unlikely paths (we learned that Diedre Hall is Jimmy’s mom!) and saw them willing to sacrifice the holidays to help them (a wonderful cameo by Christopher Lloyd that was both hysterical and heartwarming). If there’s a spin-off for these two I’d watch.

But we also saw much of Deb’s actual family: DJ managed to find her own voice in roast of her mother (where does Kaitlin Olson find the time to keep showing up?) and we finally met the sister who Deb has been blaming for the end of her marriage (J. Smith Cameron knows how to deal with family dynamics by now). The characters continue to show their range in all sorts of ways and I could see so many different brilliant comedies for all of them.

I’m not going to relitigate whether The Bear is a comedy or not, although I’m pretty sure that’s a conversation Ava would be having with Deb at some point on the show. What I do know is that Hacks has always been funnier, deeper and more enjoyable to watch even in its darkest moments. Christmas at the Vance home was just as tense as Carmy’s but it was far more fun and optimistic. I can’t wait for Season 4.

 

1. Shogun (FX)

It might seem anticlimactic to name the best series of 2024 the same show that broke Game of Thrones record for most Emmys in a single season. And some (myself included) do question whether the show can survive with two more seasons. But none of that changes the fact that this reimagining of Shogun was by far the most radical and daring project on television not just in 2024 but perhaps so far this decade.

To compare this series to the 1980s Richard Chamberlain one is a disservice: this Shogun restores epic to the miniseries in a way that has been missing even as limited series themselves have become increasingly magnificent over the last decade. And that’s before you consider the risks that every aspect of the showrunners took with their interpretation. Nearly all of the dialogue on Shogun was subtitled: going against the cardinal rule of television that no one likes to read the action. Perhaps it was forgiven because so much of what we saw on the screen was epic in a scope that the Game of Thrones comparison began almost immediately. That also does it a disservice considering the politics and dynamics in play were as much about inner conflict and strategizing as violence  and honor.

Led by the incredible work of Hiroyuki Sanada who was more responsible than anyone for this show seeing the light of day, we saw a struggle between feudal lords over Japan become a battle by a man who claimed not to want power but was doing everything in his power to play a part. We spent much of the series thinking Toranaga was a reluctant man to complete any action, left cold by the politics and possibly the best man for the job because he didn’t want power. By the end we realized he was just as cruel, monstrous and uncaring as everyone else: he just did a better job of hiding.

The entire cast was filled with incredible and mostly unknown Japanese actors but the star of the show was Anna Sawai as Mariko, the disgraced daughter of a feudal lord who had spent most of her decade wanting to die but couldn’t understand why Toranaga refused to let her. Sawai was the quiet wind of Shogun someone who would by far have made the best ruler but was constrained by the roles of her gender and era. In her final episode we saw a woman who was determined to play a part Toranaga had given her but was determined to find her own independence in her final act. Her actions strike me as the boldest of the show and rival Cristin Milioti’s work for the best dramatic performance of 2024.

I had little doubt the writers could return to the work of James Clavell: he had written six books in his Asia saga, all of them the kind of bricks that Shogun had been. Indeed they had their eye on King Rat before the show was unexpectedly given a two season renewal. When Season 2 will comes remains to be seen; whether it can come close to matching the majesty of this year is highly unlikely at best. But in its triumph it did for FX what twenty years of groundbreaking dramas, from The Shield to Damages, from Justified to The Americans, could not accomplish: give them a triumph at the Emmys in this category. That is a restoration of honor to an network worthy of it.

 

In the conclusion I will deal with the Grand Jury prize, acknowledging some of the other great performers and networks in TV this year.

Top Ten TV of 2024, Part 1: 10-6

  

I can’t tell you how many times the past year I heard that TV was dead. Not broadcast TV, not cable TV, not Peak TV. The entire industry.

I heard it so many times from so many critics, writers and former members of the industry that I really wonder if the studios themselves should have used it as a bargaining tactic during last year’s labor stoppage. “Don’t you know the industry you’re trying to earn money no longer has value? David Chase said so. You should all go home, sell your screens and try to write the Great American Novel instead.”

I have chosen to take these criticism with a grain of salt the size of the Hollywood sign because I’ve hearing this obituary written at least three previous times in the last decade and I expect to keep hearing it, mainly because I’m pretty sure all of those critics have spent that same period of time detached from the reality of what great television is. But that’s a story for another day.

All I know is that in a year when I, like most people, needed more distractions then ever and was starting to have doubts about the health of the industry after last year’s stoppage that all forms of television – cable, streaming and even broadcast – were more than willing to provide it for me the same way that they have always done. The fact that the majority of so many of what may be the next generation of great television  was on hiatus for 2024 gave me a welcome opportunity to find different and more engaging pleasures as well as to find that at least certain parts of the industry are still firing on all cylinders.

What follows is a list of the ten series that I considered the best of 2024 based solely on what saw this year. Certain shows that I have become fans of – Slow Horses and The Diplomat  - are absent because I remain behind on the current season while other series that might otherwise do so – Day of the Jackal in particular – I have yet to finish. As always when I am done, expect a grand jury prize of certain other sources of enjoyment throughout this year that are excluded for reasons that need not be mentioned here.

Here are shows 10-6 on that list

 

10. Accused (FOX)

When this show debuted last January I listed it among the jury prize shows of 2023 saying that it was the kind of show that gave me hope for network TV and the industry in general. Howard Gordon’s exception anthology series which used hot-button issues of the day to tell larger character pieces was a standout in 2023 but I felt that in its thirteen episode first season there were a few episodes that kept it off the list altogether.

In Season 2 Accused was shortened to an eight episode run and this trimming of the fan ensured a constant level of excellence throughout its run while dropping none of things that had made its best episodes shine. I didn’t see a single episode this season that didn’t have its own level of brilliance and all of them featured standout performances that would rank among Emmy contenders next year if the series can figure out where it stands.

The highpoint of Season 2 – and one of the best episodes of the series overall was April’s Story, a tour de force for Taylor Schilling as an overstressed mom who ends up engaged in a battle of road rage with a hostile driver. Arguably not since Duel has there been a more stirring directed episode that dealt with the level of rage between two drivers and Schilling was masterful every step of the way.

Not all episodes were of that mastery but all of them were engaging and had that same level of brilliance. From Felicity Huffman’s work as a psychic whose insight into a missing child brings her and the family she tries to help nothing but pain to Michael Chiklis gut-wrenching work as a wrestling coach whose desperate attempt to get a teenager from his dying Pennsylvania town out lead to tragedy to a surprisingly great dramatic turn by Ken Jeong as a recovering alcoholic whose efforts to be there for his wife end in him losing everything Accused reached a level of highpoints in acting that I have not seen in years.

Not since the incredible American Crime debuted in 2015 has there been a network TV show more determined to redefine the concepts of the anthology series and use it to its advantage. This series is not yet its level but if Fox will give it another season I think there is a chance it can be.

 

 

9. Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans (FX)

I suspect the obsession with Night Country and the limitations of the number of nominees for Limited Series that led to the return of this incredible anthology series being excluded from the nominees this past year. Considering the Emmys were willing to nominate it for twelve other awards, that remains the only explanation.

After waiting seven year Jon Robert Baitz took over the mantle of Ryan Murphy’s Feud to tell a different and equally fascinating story. Truman Capote  (played brilliantly by Tom Hollander) was shown as a member of the society wives of 1960s New York who trusted them with their deepest darkest secrets only for him to seemingly betray them with an excerpt from Answered Prayers that was published in 1977 and was supposed to be Capote’s last book.  Led by Slim Keith (Diane Lane) they chose to starve Truman of oxygen from society because of this betrayal which is seen to be a major factor in the acceleration of his decline and death from alcoholism.

Baitz is brilliant in his work. In the first five episodes he goes out of his way to make Capote to seem a traitor and a manipulator, abusing the Swan’s confidences, manipulated them for his own benefit. Then in the second half of the series Baitz’s shows us the Swans true ugliness and argues that Truman did the worst thing possible – he showed the world who they were really were and they didn’t like it. By balancing the story between the friendship of Babe Paley (the incredible Naomi Watts) and Truman it brings a human layer to a tragic story where there were no villains, only victims.

There was not a single aspect of this series that was not incredible: from the brilliant performances across the board (the cast included among others Chloe Sevigny, Calista Flockhart and in his last performance before his passing Treat Williams) exceptional technical work (the portrayal of the infamous black and white ball Capote held was another high point of 2024) and every single attention to detail paid.

And though no one could have known it when the series was being made, Capote Vs. The Swans showed not only the divide between classes but the kind of sexism that goes on within it. I can’t help but think that these women might have been on the surface for Kamala but would have voted for Trump in private. After all,  a woman’s place was behind the scenes not in front of the camera. In the finale Truman is told he helped destroy the way of life he tried to show in Answered Prayers. Having seen it I’m not sure that he truly succeeded in that or if he had it would have been a bad thing.

 

8.  Will Trent (ABC)

Will Trent showed no signs of the sophomore slump when it returned this February. If anything it seemed more secure in its mission statement then it was the previous year. It showed Will coming to grips with the revelations of last year’s finale when he learned the truth about who his mother was and who he was.

Ramon Rodriguez was masterful throughout the season showing a man coming to grips with his heritage and his family while also deal with a trauma that he had spent his adult life burying. The fact that he faced a reckoning during this season was keeping with the second season overall, which showed every cast member dealing with their past.

Amanda (the incomparable Sonja Sohn) came in the form of a man who she’d falsely put in prison twenty years ago that flew in the face of everything that her colleagues had come to know and respect about her. Faith was dealing with a new love in her life and a new future but kept being reminded that her past was never going to go away. Ormewood dealt with his wife leaving him at the start of the season and rediscovering the bonds with his children – only for his wife to return and not only demand a divorce but full custody.

And most wrenching Angie Pulaski, played extraordinarily by Erika Christensen, spent all of Season 2 recovering from her abduction and beating last year and coming close to healing not only with her past but with Will. They seemed to be on the verge of making that final connection – and then in the season finale the biggest mistake Angie made last year came back to bite her and all of Atlanta in a way that no one – certainly not Will could ignore. The final minutes of the episode were excruciating for every fan of the show and make us wonder what will happen next.

Will Trent has been the clearest sign of the revival of the broadcast drama the last two years and shows just how exceptional the formula can be when its done well. I don’t know what will happen in Season 3 (the show has always been a very loose adaptation of Karin Slaughter’s source material) but I can’t wait to find out.

 

7.  Elsbeth (CBS)

It was never a question at the end of the 2023-2024 season whether or not Elsbeth was going to be on the top ten list this year. I have been one of the biggest boosters of the work of Robert and Michelle King ever since The Good Wife debuted fifteen years ago and the fact that one of my favorite recurring characters – one of whom I’d wanted to have her own series since at least 2013 – was front and center almost guaranteed it.

Some might argue that Elsbeth compared to the King’s other brilliant work such as The Good Fight and the recently cancelled Evil is pedestrian compared to their earlier work. Much of Season 2 has more than demonstrated that the Kings have decided to use the show to start to do what they have always done so brilliant and that’s start taking pokes at the formula they’ve built. Never was this more clear in the winter finale where Elsbeth and the NYPD found themselves investigating a murder at a long-running network procedural which in its teaser ripped off exactly what the season-long conflict of Elsbeth had been if it were done by Dick Wolf. The show spent the entire episode tearing down every aspect of the foundation it had built the last year with the writers of this fictional series saying that their show was too traditional and Elsbeth openly saying she liked shows where the good guys always won. William Finklestein, a longtime showrunner himself, was the victim, Laurie Metcalf played the heroine of the series who was an actress with a high-minded opinion of herself and no real perception and the plot was modeled after the plan of an obsessive fan who’d been shipping the relationship between the two leads and wanted fruition. You could see just how much fun the writers were having with this formula and it made it clear that just as with all their other work, there is no cow to sacred for them to poke fun at.

Carrie Preston remains the national treasure she has been since she took on the role of Elsbeth fourteen years ago and has clearly not changed that much. To knock her slightly out of complacency the show has had her past come back to bite her, her trying to fight her attraction to firefighters who clearly are attracted to her and have her come face to face with her archnemesis, who as you might expect is portrayed by her own husband Michael Emerson. Wendell Pierce continues to be delightfully grump as her boss as well as someone who is trying to be a better boss and Kiara Patterson is wonderful as Elsbeth’s own bestie whose trying to find a life of her own but has her own secrets. And the series continues to produce a wonderful array of guest actors to appear as the killers who are not nearly as clever as they think and who only Elsbeth seems to be sorry about putting in prison. (She’s so nice about it that many of the people she sends to jail express admiration before they go away.)

I love this series. It may not be as heavy minded as some of their other dramas that get celebrated at Emmys but doggone it, sometimes you just need to have fun. And like every series the Kings have made for fifteen years Elsbeth more than provides it. For their follow up maybe we can get to see what’s happened to Eli during this time?

 

6. Ripley (Netflix)

In a sense Andrew Scott has been working towards playing Tom Ripley his entire career: ever since he broke on to the scene in his extraordinary version of Jim Moriarty in Sherlock  you’ve known that there’s always going to be something beneath the surface of every character he plays. What was fascinating about this brilliant reimaging of Patricia Highsmith’s novel was that the actor known for overacting when he needs to spent basically the entire series keeping a complete poker face and giving nothing away.

That was in large part the brilliance of Steven Zaillian’s incredible reimaging of the first novel in this series. Shot in glorious black and white, this may have been the best directed show of 2024. (Zaillian deservedly won the Emmy for that this past year.) Unlike previous versions including Anthony Minghella film, both the title character and the show were always shrouded in shadow with the character saying and doing as little as possible, keeping to himself. Both of the murders Tom commits in the series concentrate far less on the act and the part that almost every show ignores – the cleanup. In both of those episode the camera engaged in stretches that went on nearly half an hour of no dialogue at all or in some cases as little as possible. The latter, which involved an elevator that didn’t work properly, created tension we wouldn’t have thought possible as Tom’s getaway plan was linked to it. And there were so many cutaway sequences to a cat during that period that you thought Zaillian was just building up tension – until the last shot when he made it pay off in spades.

Scott delivered a masterclass unlike anything he’s done before in a role that has deservedly gotten him his first Emmy nomination and nominations for every other award in between. Tom’s sexuality has always been a matter of debate for viewers – in some interpretations he’s gay, in others heterosexual – but like everything else in this show it remains open to interpretation. Tom himself may not know or care that much about his sexuality: whatever interest he has in Dickie is far about his lifestyle and nothing more.

The other successors to their roles more than live up to the standards in Minghella’s masterpiece. Johnny Flynn is, if anything, more loathsome than Jude Law was. Dakote Fanning is somehow more clueless and more tragic than Gwynneth Paltrow’s version. And in their brief but memorable turn Eliot Summer demonstrated the capacity for stealing scenes that the late Philip Seymour Hoffman perfected in his work as Freddie Miles.

The future of Ripley is unclear. It was intended as a limited series but as anyone who is a fan of the novels knows Highsmith wrote four other books about this villain. The closing minutes certainly leave open the possibility for another season. And I would be more than willing to believe it (sorry) if Netflix chooses to greenlight another season. I’d certainly watch.

Tomorrow I will deal with the five best shows of 2024

Homicide Rewatch: Three Men & Adena

 

Written by Tom Fontana

Directed by Martin Campbell

 

I think one of the  key reasons that television officially entered its Golden Age not long after Homicide debuted is, paradoxically, one of the reasons that some of the most devoted admirers had such frustration with the series they committed years too. No one denies that shows like The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Lost or Mad Men are among the greatest series of all time but they will end up on lists of the most polarizing series as well online.

And that’s not merely because of the final episode but because throughout their runs the writers refused, over and over, to bring resolution to so many of the stories that took place during their runs. This frustrated even the people who worked on these shows; David Chase’s colleagues on The Sopranos hated how he left storylines dangling with no resolution well before the ending and people are still pissed as to what happened to Kara Thrace even before the series finale.

I won’t pretend to be any different in nearly thirty years of watching TV: I was never happy with how Chris Carter never chose to give a real answer as to what happened to Samantha Mulder, I ran out of patience with David Chase well before ‘Made in America’ and I’m still pissed at Robert and Michelle King with how they ended The Good Wife nearly a decade later. But I’ve always had more patience with how shows over the last quarter of a century tend to leave stories open ended and that endings are frequently ambiguous. And I have to say watching Homicide has to have prepared me for that quite a bit.

Consider the rules of the police procedural. Whenever a heinous crime is committed, the killer is identified, charged and arrested by the end of the episode. Law and Order never deviated from that formula, nor did any of its counterparts nor did such shows as the CSI franchise. There would be villains who would repeatedly get away with murder over and over but they would be brought to justice by the end of the season in many cases (as with the Miniature Killer on CSI) or perhaps the closer one got to the end of the run of the show (3TK on Castle is the most obvious recent example). Other shows like Bones or NCIS have basically stuck to this formula during their long runs.

Nor should I add has this fundamentally changed even among the best series of Peak TV, even among the creators of this series. When David Simon moved onto The Wire a decade later he changed many things about how we viewed the mystery but the one thing he didn’t make ambiguous was who the killers were. The viewer could grief over the death of Wallace or Stringer Bell but because of their deaths not because there was any ambiguity about who killed them. They might never be brought to justice but there was no mystery as to the killer.

Nor does any other show deal with this kind of ambiguity: it didn’t matter if the protagonist was Dexter Morgan or Raylan Givens who killed people without due process; the viewer knew they were guilty and that brought us closure. Those of us who are disappointed by each season of True Detective are disappointed because we seemed to be promised a supernatural solution and the killer turned out to be all too human. Television has evolved brilliantly in many ways and it can be ambiguous as to how justice is carried out but we never doubt that the killer deserves what they get.

It is for that reason that Homicide may be the most radical procedural in the history of television and may also explain why it was never a ratings grabber during its original run. At least once, usually multiple times over the course of a season, Homicide would have cases with no closure. Sometimes the viewer would know for certain who didn’t but the killer would never be arrested or see the inside of the courtroom. Sometimes we never learned who the killer was at all. And perhaps most maddening of all there would be times when it seemed like we knew who the guilty party was but the writers never tipped their hand to imply one way or the other that our suspicions were correct.

Never was this illustrated more brilliantly in an episode that is considered by many  the quintessential Homicide Three Men & Adena. In it the Adena Watson investigation ends but unlike any I’ve ever seen any TV show do before and I don’t think I’ve seen since. (If a reader can tell me of one such occasion, I welcome enlightenment.)

Ever since the investigation began we’ve been hearing the word ‘Araber’ over and over. The viewer of contemporary or even 1990s TV would no doubt have no idea what it is and it’s defined during this episode. It’s a man who goes with a horse with produce going from street to street in Baltimore, plying his wares. They’re considered little more than vagrants but they are also a proud Baltimore tradition. It’s clear given what we’ve heard that they are also viewed as trouble.

Bayliss has kept coming back to the idea that the Araber is responsible for Adena’s murder and Pembleton has been no less adamant that this has been a dead end. Even as the two of them ready themselves to go into the interrogation room Pembleton is still not fully convinced of his guilt. Bayliss is absolutely certain that he raped and butchered Adena. It is only at the end of the teaser that we finally see this man and learn his name: Risley Tucker. We also understand why Pembleton has held that he is harmless: Tucker is wearing a ragged coat, is clearly in his sixties and unkempt and seems to be being dragged by Felton to the box.

The late Moses Gunn takes an interesting approach to the Araber that anyone who watches crime dramas would be unnerved by. For the majority of his time onscreen Tucker has a dead look in his eyes. Not like a sociopath or a monster but very close to an old man who is tired of being harassed. By the time of this episode, this would be a believable perception. As Giardello tells us this is the third time he’s been brought in for questioning and he’s been interviewed on ten occasions altogether. The department is getting worried about the possibility of a civil suit. This is going to be the last bite Bayliss gets at the man he clearly believes killed Adena Watson.

Pembleton makes it clear what the rules of engagement are, and for an audience who wasn’t aware of them he is very clear. They have twelve hours to get a confession. If they stray one moment over that the court will throw it out. Advocates for the justice system can argue how this has played out in reality and there is evidence that the Baltimore PD would be less than loyal to it in real life. But for television in the 1990s this was revelatory. It was one thing not to obtain a confession just by this kind of verbal attack, but to be told there was so far you could go and no further was something that was unheard of (and I’m pretty sure later shows like The Shield and Law  & Order: SVU basically threw out the window in the following decade)

Almost the entire episode, saving for the teaser, a few minutes at the end and the rare scene of the remaining detectives seeing how well its not going, is set in ‘the box’. For all intents and purposes this episode could be staged as a play and very little of its drama would be lost. The title accurately sums the episode up: we spend it with Bayliss, Pembleton and Tucker – and Adena is clearly hanging over the episode to the point you could swear she was.

In a contrast to many of the interrogations that would follow Pembleton spends the majority of it as ‘the good cop’. He is polite to Tucker, asking about his background, the history of the Araber, initially maneuvering the questions away with the murder back towards Tucker. It’s clear that is a tactical maneuver in the second half of the episode but fans who are used to the aggressive questioning of ‘the almighty Pembleton’  might look at this episode and be surprised at how studious - to the point of unctuousness Frank is for most of the episode, even going so far as to bring all of them their food.

It's not shocking, given how he’s talked about him to this point that Bayliss is the aggressor, interrupting for information, insisting that Tucker is lying, pointing out the contradictions in his story, demanding he answer for his actions. Neither detective crosses any lines in this interrogation though it is worth noting that Bayliss comes very close more than once to crossing the boundaries of violence. It’s clear that Bayliss is letting out weeks of frustration against the Araber – really everything that has gone wrong with the investigation since it started – out on the suspect and there are times that he sounds very close to desperate in the early stages, far more than Pembleton who maintains his calm throughout.

At the halfway point of the episode with time running out Pembleton tries to use all of the goodwill he thinks he’s amassed with Tucker. Bayliss is out of the room and he tries to be polite to him. He tries to show that he is Tucker’s friend, that he will hear him out. Here Pembleton tries to be father confessor, trying to get Tucker to repent of his sins. (We don’t know anything about Pembleton’s religious beliefs yet but there’s a possibility Fontana may be laying the seeds of the idea here.) He mirrors Bayliss’s approach by sitting near Tucker, but where Bayliss clearly did it as aggression Pembleton tries to be an ally. It almost like it will work: for the briefest of moments Tucker seems about to reveal something.

And then the mask goes back up. Perhaps the most brilliant thing about the episode is that during its entirety Tucker’s actions can be read with total ambiguity. Tucker keeps saying two lines over and over: “I didn’t kill her” and more often “I don’t remember.”  No matter how many times Bayliss or Pembleton point out the contradictions in his story he will invariably go back to one line or the other. There’s no sense of guile in his answers, much of the time it is in monotone and though he does express his emotions near the end of the interrogation he never says anything that could be construed one way or the other as an admission about anything. The viewer could just as easily read it as a man tired of being harassed by the police or that of a pure sociopath who will not reveal his crimes to these detectives.

In the final act of the episode Tucker does lash out but it’s very clear it is out of pure frustration rather than anything like taunting. Regardless of how you view Tucker’s guilt he’s clearly just as infuriated by the questioning of the detectives and he takes his venom out on both of them. And he’s clearly got a good read on both Pembleton and Bayliss based on what we know of them so far. He has picked up Pembleton’s arrogance and how he looks down on people like him, maybe not so much of his education but how he looks down criminals in a majority African-American city. And he can tell by now how desperate Bayliss is to prove himself based on how many times he’s been brought in. He has heard almost all of this before multiple times and when he calls Bayliss an ‘amateur’  it may not be so much bait as how Bayliss himself feels about handling the case.

The interrogation ends with neither a bang or a whimper but a simple clock running out. Regardless of how he, or indeed the viewer feels, the Watson investigation is over. Bayliss has to go back into the rotation after this and he has to move on from his first case. He does the former – he has to – but when he is packing up the evidence to be sent into storage, he takes out a picture of Adena Watson and puts it on his desk. This is symbolic in more ways than one. Every time the show will cut to Bayliss’s desk from now until the end of the series, Adena’s picture is there even if the camera doesn’t dwell on it. There will be multiple occasions during the series run where Bayliss will try to rid himself of the ghost of Adena, some times more bluntly then others, but neither he nor the show will ever let him forget it.

And the show never gives us a hint one way or another whether Tucker actually did kill Adena. The exchange between Pembleton and Bayliss at the end of the episode when the case is done is very critical in that sense. Pembleton has come in to offer words of encouragement and he tells Bayliss that he was right all along. Pembleton comes away from the interrogation certain that Tucker killed Adena. Bayliss, however, tells Frank he’s not sure anymore. And throughout the series Homicide shows Bayliss on either side of it. He will never be able to get right with what happened: it will haunt his dreams.

And critically Fontana gives us no picture one way or another at the end of the interrogation. You come away from it convinced of many things about the Araber – that he is a drunk, a pedophile and that he harbored horrible thoughts about Adena Watson that he himself may never come to terms with. But he himself never gives anything way about killing her. The evidence that Bayliss has painstakingly spent weeks gathering is all circumstantial and there is nothing can tie Tucker to Watson’s death definitively. They needed him to confess and he gave nothing away.

This is why Homicide was groundbreaking. No one was going to throw a man in jail for murder based on a gut feeling or the ‘enhanced interrogations’ that we would later see take place on NYPD Blue and other crime dramas. As we are told early on  the holy trinity is ‘witness, evidence and a confession’. There are no witnesses in the Watson killing, the evidence is entirely circumstantial and the suspect never comes close to breaking. So whether Bayliss likes it or not, Risley Tucker gets to walk out of the squad a free man.

Even the final shot of Tucker changing channels on the squad TV is subject to interpretation. Those who believe in Tucker’s guilt might think he is a cold-blooded sociopath who was left unaffected by the episode and wants to use the unit’s TV to entertain himself before he walks away from murder scot-free. Or you could argue that Tucker has just been through a horrible stressful experience and wants to show some free will by changing the channel on the TV for a few minutes before he goes home and can put this horrible nightmare behind him once and for all. The detectives have one point of view; the viewer has their own and the writer has no intention of telling us which is more valid. Perhaps that more than any other reason is why this is the ‘quintessential Homicide’.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

In a fan survey by Court TV, this episode was ranked Number 2 all time.

Tom Fontana won the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama in 1993 for this episode. Though the show would receive three more nominations in this category, Three Men and Adena was the only time it won.

Imdb.com ranks this episode as the second highest ranked in Homicide’s entire history.

Ned Beatty does not appear in this episode.

 

Moses Gunn was a character actor who had been working in film and television since 1964, starring in such iconic movies as The Great White Hope and Shaft. He appeared in such iconic series as Roots and The Jeffersons and played the role of Moses Gage on Father Murphy for two seasons. He was in poor health at the time of the filming of this episode and it would mark his final role as an actor. He died on December 16, 1993, little more than ten months after this episode aired.

 

 

 

As We Ready For the 2025 Tournament of Champions How Laura Faddah's Record Shows How BRUTAL The Jeopardy Writers Have Become This Year

 

 

As 2024 comes to an end Jeopardy viewers gird themselves for the postseason that will lead to the Tournament of Champions in just a few months. Friday night marked the last game of regular Jeopardy we will be seeing for awhile as on Monday the first of the Second Chance Tournaments begin.

As Ken Jennings told us at the start of December contestants this past month are now playing to compete in the 2026 Tournament of Champions. And as of this writing two contestants have made those requirements though only one has the blessing of a “guarantee”. Ashley Chan has won four games and $67,400. And over the past week Jeopardy fans have seen the rise of potentially the next super-champion in Laura Faddah who over seven games has won $87,400. Laura is the first player to win that many games since Isaach Hirsch won nine games last July.

Now in past years I have commented on how certain Jeopardy contestants have won relatively little money compared to the number of games won. Indeed my readers will note that I might have been fairly harshly on Megan Wachspress during Season 39 and Suresh Krishnan in Season 39, each of whom won six games but comparatively little money. And considering that Suresh won $96,595 than Laura has to this point my readers might be expecting a similar chiding of Laura as a player.

However at this point in Season 41 I find myself being unable to throw stones at this particular glass house. As I’ve mentioned in my writing about the season to date I have hinted more than once at how I have been having an immense amount of difficulty playing along at home. And now that we are readying ourselves for the postseason (which we have been assured will be less endless than last year) I think it’s time we talk about it.

Part of me is starting to think that the show’s writers are taking a secret kind of vengeance on the contestants, the producers and the viewers this season giving the enormous difficulty that the contestants and myself are having with so many of the clues this season, particularly when it comes to Final Jeopardy. Scores through the majority of the games played have been much lower than usual and players have been having immense difficulty with Final Jeopardy. And I include myself.

I don’t keep an official record anymore of how many Final Jeopardys I get right during the course of a season but I estimate that for roughly the last decade in regular play (not the postseason) I get somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of all Final Jeopardys correct. In this past month I’m essentially fifty/fifty – and I’m not nearly as sure about many of them as I usually am. Let’s look at the first six games of Laura’s run as an example (I’ll leave out tonight to avoid spoilers.)

On her first game Laura was in the lead at the end of Double Jeopardy, narrowly, with $13,600 to Eric’s $10,000 and Neal’s $9800. The Final Jeopardy category was SUPER BOWL HISTOR. For the record I liked this category as little as Laura did:

“It’s the only team to play in the Super Bowl before Neil Armstrong’s Moon walk that has not been back to the big game since.” No one was close to it and I’m not sure I would have known either even though I live in the state that houses them. I knew the Jets had won Super Bowl III but I had thought that it took place in 1970, not January of 1969. (It’s been a rough fifty-five years as Ken put it.) Laura bet the least and won with $11,200.

Laura’s first defense of her title was even closer than her first win and she actually ended Double Jeopardy in second place, albeit $400 behind challenger Maria Lauro. The scores were incredibly close with just $1800 separated third place from first. The category for Final Jeopardy was a strange one as well: MOVIES & THE LAW:

“Drafters…have to have a little fun sometimes,” said the author of this law when asked if he was inspired by 1931’s Little Caesar.” No one was close to this one either and I don’t blame them: the only reason I ended up coming up with the correct answer was because I knew the film.

You see I remember the famous line Edward G. Robinson utters at one point: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?”  The RICO act, which anyone who watched The Sopranos or other mob-related films knows, stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. (No I didn’t know the acronym either but I knew the term.) It was a leap I can’t blame either the contestants or the viewer at home for not getting; this is how tough these clues can be. Laura, as in the previous day, was conservative in her betting and finished with $5800, enough to win her second game.

Monday everything went Laura’s way and didn’t go her opponents, which sometimes happens and she managed to runaway with it by the end of Double Jeopardy. The Final Jeopardy category was WORLD LEADERS. Sometimes this is easy; this time it wasn’t.

“In 2009 this leader gave Barack Obama the book ‘Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.” I figured it was a South American leader but I wasn’t sure of the correct answer: ‘Who is Hugo Chavez?” Laura put down: “Who is Fujimori?” the former socialist leader of Peru which wasn’t a bad guess. She had now accomplished the somewhat dubious distinction of having won three consecutive games and not having gotten a single Final Jeopardy correct – though to be fair none of her opponents had either.

On Christmas Eve I was relatively sure that Laura’s number was up. Challenger Jenna Hayes dominated the game pretty much from start to finish and fellow challenger Harry Jarin was just as good. At the end of Double Jeopardy Jenna had a big lead with $18,200, Harry was next with $13,200 and Laura was in a distant third with $5200. I didn’t think she had a chance going into Final Jeopardy, particularly considering the nature of the category: GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC AWARENESS:

“As individuals, only Santa Claus and this public service ad icon introduced in 1944 have their own ZIP Codes.”

Laura wrote down what I was pretty sure was the correct answer: “Who is Smokey the Bear?” (Apparently he used to get a lot of mail from children.) Laura bet $5000. Harry wrote down a good guess: “Who is Uncle Sam?” It cost him everything  but a dollar. Jenna had written down Rosie the Riveter (who was created during World War II as well) She lost $9000 and Laura had her own Christmas miracle.

On Christmas Day Laura started out very strong and her two challengers Mathiew Farhoud-Dionne and Amber Gamrat did very poorly; in fact Mathieu was at minus $1200 at the end of the Jeopardy round. But he came back swinging in Double Jeopardy and a mistake by Laura on the last clue before the end of round buzzer rang gave him the lead with $13,400 to her $13,200.

The Final Jeopardy category was U.S. PLACE NAMES. “A trio including Andrew Jackson founded this city with a name that evokes a great city of ancient world.” In a stroke of fate that some times blesses Jeopardy contestants Laura comes from Memphis, Tennessee, which was the correct response. No one else knew it and she managed to win $18,00 officially clinching her spot in the 2026 Tournament of Champions.

Yesterday’s game was much closer but Laura pulled ahead to a big lead halfway through Double Jeopardy and on the penultimate clue of that round, clinched a runaway with $20,400. The Final Jeopardy category was MOVIES & THEIR SOUNDTRACKS.

“’Catch It’ was a tagline for this 1970s film whose iconic soundtrack became one of the bestselling albums of all time.” I like all three contestants knew the correct response: “What is Saturday Night Fever?” I mention this because it’s the first time in Laura’s run that all three players got Final Jeopardy correct. Nor is that an anomaly to this month or  this season: Final Jeopardys have been tough all this period  - and I should ad the few times everyone’s gotten Final Jeopardy correct, just as often I’ve gotten in wrong.

Indeed it was seen in Ashley Chan’s fourth victory. The Final Jeopardy category was FICTIONAL CHARACTERS – usually an easy one for me. “Dressed in white in her first scene, this play character says her name means ‘white woods’. “ I must not have seen Streetcar Named Desire in a long time because somehow I’d forgotten – but all three players knew – that this refers to Blanche DuBois.

I’m still trying to figure out what’s up with the writers. Does it still stick in their craw how Season 40 took place with the producers bragging about using ‘replacement clues?” Have they decided that there have been too many super-champions in recent years and have taken it upon themselves to restore equilibrium? Did winning their first prime-time Emmy give them a new sense of being reinvigorated? Or are they just being pricks?

I have no answer to that quandary (nor will I attempt to alter my phrasing) but as someone who has spent much of the last decade trying to wonder if the clues are getting easier or I’m simply getting smarter, it’s clear to me at this point in Season 41 the clues are definitely getting tougher across the board. I’m not saying this is a bad thing; the last thing Jeopardy needs to be accused of complacency and it’s probably better for the show long-term if the show remains challenging to the viewers as well as the contestants. What will that mean for what is to come in the postseason?

Next week we start finding out. On New Year’s Day I will begin my coverage of the Second Chance Tournament which, for a change, I’m looking forward to this year.

 

Did The 26th Amendment Fail? Part 2; George McGovern's Doomed 1972 Presidential Run

 

In a sense George McGovern had been running for the 1972 Democratic Nomination from the moment Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated. He had agreed to take up the doomed mantle of his campaign at the disastrous 1968 Convention in Chicago and the narrow victory of Richard Nixon and the continued fighting in Vietnam had been pushing him forward ever since.

He had been the leading figure of Theodore White called the Movement of the New Left, the head of a commission to make presidential primaries fairer and more accurate in the lead up to the 1972 race for the nomination. The commission had decided to make rules that blacks be included in the process – and essentially this came to include all minority groups, including women and youth. As White points out at the time women were more than half the population and youth was a transitional biological state that is difficult to define. Nevertheless the commission came back with the recommendation to ‘encourage…representation of minority groups on national convention delegates in reasonable relationship to the groups presence in the population of the states.” There was no definition of what ‘reasonable’ meant and at the time, many believed this could do more damage to the party then benefit.

White argues that this convention representing a redefinition of what ‘liberal meant and how this may have become one of the biggest obstacle the Democrats have faced for the last half century:

“No man must be locked into or hammered into a category from which he has no opportunity to escape. He must not be locked in by the color of his skin or his racial genes; he must not be locked in by lack of educational opportunity; he must not be locked in by birth, or parentage, or age or poverty.

The quota idea was a wrench from this position. It set up stark categories within the political process; and the voters must,, whether they will or not, confirm those categories in selecting representatives. By setting up such categories and ignoring other categories, it inevitably excluded as well as included.

In an indirect fashion the 1972 election may have led to launch of what is now called identity politics. It also argued how liberalism had shifted towards morality and statistics and represented the time they went from the academic world, leaving matters to pragmatic politicians turning their values into programs of action into arguing these programs themselves had values. As a result critical elements of the Democratic coalition since the Great Depression – particularly labor and was ignoring how cities, the beneficiaries of so many moral programs, were suffering urban decay.

McGovern had been considering announcing for the Presidency earlier than he did and White met with him in 1970. McGovern spent the majority of his meeting talking about his plans to run, who he would face and how he intended to get the nomination. White had no recollection of any  themes of the larger campaign; it was essentially earn the nomination first; then move to issues. McGovern’s campaign decided early on that ‘they would have to consolidate the left wing’ which meant seizing control of the movement and not for a moment questioning any single one of his premises.

By 1970 it was becoming clear what the movement was capable of leading to victory – and what they would do if they were crossed. They were capable of taking over organizations but almost from the start they had no electoral power. They tried to primary long time conservative Democrat Senator Henry Jackson in Washington; he beat their candidate 7-to-1. Democratic peace candidates constantly underperformed in heavily Democratic districts: the initial victories of Ronald Dellums in Berkeley and Bella Abzug in New York ran as much as twenty points behind traditional Democrats. A pattern was becoming clear: the movement could win primaries but when they ran in general elections they underperformed. This lesson was ignored by the Movement in 1970 and continued to be ignored in McGovern’s campaign.

Political scholars would attempt to redeem McGovern’s disastrous run for the White House by arguing he had laid the groundwork for the coalition that Barack Obama would win the White House in 2008. In reality McGovern’s campaign, certainly at the primary level, bares a far closer resemblance to the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2016. Both campaigns did far better in caucus states rather than primaries; both did better in smaller states than the larger urban ones that were key to winning elections and both were supported primarily by a similar coalition, critically college educated and given the nature of the wins in the caucuses, primarily white. The fact that McGovern managed to win the Democratic nomination and Sanders failed to do so speaks less to McGovern’s ability as a campaigner – and far more to the limited number of primaries there were.

McGovern’s first ‘victory’ was in New Hampshire where he outperformed expectations against Edmund Muskie the favorite for the nomination. He didn’t win a primary until Wisconsin when he managed to get 30 percent of the vote and as a result 54 delegates. On April 20^th he had a sweeping victories in the Massachusetts primary – the only state he carried in the general election.

There were troubling patterns for McGovern’s run throughout the primary campaign. The first which McGovern and his acolytes chose to ignore was his horrible performance in the South. By and large he bypassed those primaries and left them to George Wallace to sweep, which he did, taking Tennessee, North Carolina and Maryland as well as trouncing the competition in Florida.

The second and far more troubling one was how poorly the McGovern campaign performed in the larger states. McGovern got less than six percent in Florida, stayed out of Illinois (which Muskie swept), finished a distant third in Pennsylvania behind Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, narrowly lost Ohio to Humphrey and was utterly flatten in Michigan by George Wallace. The McGovern campaign would only narrowly prevail in California and only took New York because they were unopposed.

Tellingly it was not until he obtained front-runner status in the media’s eyes after his victory in Wisconsin that they began to consider what their platform was. It is worth noting that McGovern had attended Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party Convention in 1948 and in a way that heavy left-wing ideology never left him. He had recruited much of his army from the young of college campuses as well as the most extreme parts of the left. He knew this values were not believed by the majority of Americans and in fact he didn’t hold with them much himself. But because of the tactics of his campaign he believed he had to pursue them.

This methodology led to McGovern becoming immensely popular with the anti-war movement and the young who might well have considered them the only politician who shared their values. That he was not, in fact, the candidate of the ‘three A’s’ – amnesty, abortion and acid was something that his young followers chose to nevertheless assume he was. “On the college campuses,” White wrote, “within the circle of his faithful, he might be cheered as the voice of the future; in the tormented cities of America, however, after a decade of similar high-minded proposals, he sounded like the voice of the pass.” Indeed White was reminded far more of Barry Goldwater than Bobby Kennedy in McGovern’s rhetoric.

This rhetoric, it should be mentioned, didn’t play with the vast majority of Democratic primary voters: McGovern earned a total of slightly more than 4 million votes, a quarter of all those cast – and actually fewer than Hubert Humphrey’s failed run. Where the McGovern campaign, like Goldwater’s in 1964, was superior was at grass roots organizing. By May 16^th he was running a distant third behind not only Humphrey but George Wallace in votes cast. But his campaigners were far better at organizing than any other Democratic running. The day Wallace was eliminated because of attempt on his life, he had accumulated over 3.3 million votes and yet only 321 delegates. McGovern at that same point had accumulate 2.1 million votes but had 560 delegates. The bosses might not want McGovern to be their nominee and there was a considerable argument that the Democratic primary voter didn’t feel that way but his campaign had made sure McGovern was going to be the nominee and anyone who didn’t like it could out of the way.

With the insurgency completed at the Miami Convention, McGovern’s campaign did what all revolutionaries do: execute the old guard and replace them with loyalists. That those same people were the ones the campaign was going to need to win in November seemed never to cross the McGovernites mind: there never seemed to be a question that the voters in the states that had rejected them in places like Michigan or Florida in the primary wouldn’t come out for them in the general. And they made sure to have the winners have the best seats at the convention even though the people watching at home might well be wondering where the people they had voted for in other elections across the country were and who all these young strangers were.  The fact that they chose to spend the period nominating Archie Bunker and Mao for Vice President before agreeing on Thomas Eagleton might not have been a great look either. And tellingly they made sure that the man they had gone out of their way to be the face of their movement couldn’t give the address introducing him to the nation and making clear of his own views until 3:00 AM when most of America was asleep. The nomination of McGovern was their night, not the candidate’s.

And the McGovern campaign was never able to parent the children that were the critical part of the family. The establishment was trying to stop McGovern campaign even at Miami and while the grownups were trying to handle it, the children in the delegations screamed: “Why aren’t you listening to us!?”  This played out in a seating delegation at South Carolina which the McGovernites planned to lose in order to make sure the vote to ensure they controlled the California delegation was won, This was a necessary and morally right decision for the McGovern campaign, who no doubt fought they would lose this battle but win the war which would help women long term. The Women’s Caucus, however, saw this as the equivalent of a sign of moral bankruptcy and considered this a reason McGovern was this greatest of sins “just another politician”

McGovern himself was the perfect parent for this generation: basically absent from the decision making process and too generous to tell his children how ridiculous their thinking was and how it would hurt his own chances in November. The platform was the most left-wing in Democratic Party history to that point and many Democrats, never mind the American people, thought it was out of touch. But in what has essentially become a tradition for all identity politics going forward, the McGovernites decided what was best for them was best for the nation. The disastrous decision to nominate Thomas Eagleton for Vice President and everything that unfolded afterward are considered the nail in the coffin of McGovern’s hopes for the Presidency; in truth they were likely dead and buried before his nomination occurred.

The Dallas rally that began the McGovern campaign was symbolic of what was to come. McGovern knew that in order to win the general he had to ‘de-radicalize’ his image. The crowd at the rally – one of the most favorable witnessed by White -  however was the same group as before – “young people…with the look, many of them, of students. But there were no blacks in this group and there were few Latin-Americans.” Neither were any major Democrats from Texas at the state of local level.”

This was the pattern throughout McGovern’s fall campaign: the only people who really seemed enthusiastic about McGovern were the people who’d already voted for him. Unions, a major Democratic stronghold since the New Deal, was not happy with his platform: they had little use for amnesty or the various ideas for welfare. McGovern’s campaign strategy was incoherent, and the strategy of the candidate was completely out of touch with those of his campaign headquarters. It was run with no clear leader and eventually the headquarters themselves became filthy, staffed by insulting volunteers who saw no shame in using obscenities towards Democratic state officials. They had no knowledge of how the Democratic Party worked and looked at allies of JFK as ‘one of those 1960 Freaks.” It was a campaign run by McGovernites and among them there were almost no African-Americans and no women. And the command was guilty of the kind of delusion that has plagued leftists for the next fifty years: they mistook their victories in the primary for the general and never made any attempt to win over those who had voted for their opponents – especially the working-class voter that was increasingly moving to the right. “It became a campaign,” one McGovernite said later on. “which couldn’t understand its own votes.

And the Democratic Party, almost to a man, decided to do the only thing possible: concentrate on saving themselves at a national and state level and let the McGovern campaign go down to a disastrous defeat. Which is exactly what happened. Richard Nixon won reelection by the largest mandate in political history to that point, getting more than sixty percent of the popular vote and carrying every state in the Union except for Massachusetts and DC.

By contrast while the Democrats suffered some losses in the House, they maintained their majority by a significant margin and actually gained two seats in the Senate. This included flipping seats in such Republican strongholds as Maine and South Dakota where such longtime Republicans as Margaret Chase Smith and Karl Mundt were defeated  as well as narrow victories in states like Delaware where two term incumbent Caleb Boggs lost to a twenty-nine year old named Joe Biden. While Nixon’s largest electoral victories by far were in the South by and large the states with his biggest margins including Arkansas, Alabama and Georgia, saw no changes in their makeup. Nixon would carry states such as Illinois and Texas by huge numbers but in both states Democratic governors held on to power. Nixon’s landslide was one of the emptiest in electoral history on almost every level. The McGovernites had managed to defeat the establishment by nominating their candidate and across the board Democrats were find with the establishment and McGovern was the problem.

For all the arguments of the kind of coalition McGovern had built that would later come to be critical for Obama – the Latino vote, the working women and what was called the gay vote at the time – one contingency he didn’t carry was the newly enfranchised 18-21 year olds less than half of those newly enfranchised by the 26^th amendment and the anecdotal evidence is that they fundamentally split their vote evenly between Nixon and McGovern. Sadly this figure represents the high-water mark for that demographic. By and large for the rest of the century it was all downhill from there.

In the next article in this series I will look as to how this particular demographic as well as the left in general reacted to Nixon’s resignation and how their relative electoral inactivity might well be sited as a major factor in the conservative movement that began its own rise ever since.