Criticizing Criticism: That 70s (Movie) Edition

 

For the last twenty to thirty years film critics and Hollywood has begun to appreciate the movies of the 1970s.

That they are starting to do so is yet another example of the nostalgia factor that critics have because while the decade was going on, most contemporary critics thought the movies of the 1970s were mediocre at best. During 1975 one critic, looking at the choices of movies for the Oscars said: “It wasn’t a bad year for movies; it was a terrible year.” That year the nominees for Best Picture were Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. All of these films were considered among the greatest ever made within a ten year period; Roger Ebert eventually put all five among the greatest movie ever made before he passed.  But it tells us how for many contemporary  critics the grass is always greener in the past.

I digress. The narrative about the 70s has always followed a certain format. The breakdown of the studio system near the end of the 1960s let some of the more iconic filmmakers in history to make some of the greatest films of all time that broke all existing rules of what movies were capable of. These geniuses – Scorsese, Coppola and Altman are by far the most prominent names  - ruled the industry and were changing the face of what movies could look like. And then those upstart hacks named Spielberg and Lucas started making their kinds of movies and Hollywood followed the money and the Golden Age was over for good.

It's a great story. It also has no connection to reality.

Now I’m not going to say that the films that were made in the 1970s weren’t masterpieces; I’ve seen many of them and they more than live up to the hype. I’m also not going to pretend that these movies couldn’t have been made if the studio system hadn’t begun to completely break down by the end of the 1960s; by 1970 only one of the remaining guard of Hollywood studio heads was still in power, Daryl F. Zanuck of 20^th Century Fox. He’d be gone by the end of 1971. And it is hard to imagine, given the kind of hold the dictator like hold these men held over Hollywood even in the 1960s, that men like Altman or Terence Malick could have been given control of film and do things the way they wanted. These men had the power to break careers for forty years and they would never have allowed these kinds of things to happen.

But where I draw the line is the idea that somehow money had absolutely nothing to do with how these films were made or that the directors themselves did not care about it. I imagine that might be true for some of them -  Malick and Stanley Kubrick in particular but Malick only made two movies in the entire decade and Kubrick was beginning to take long pauses between his films by this point. (A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon were the only two movies he made in the entire decade.)  And the reason they were given these free reign to begin with was because the films by their similarly artistic colleagues were making huge amounts of money as well.

I can dismiss the idea that these great directors were making these movies purely out of a need for artistic glory on a conversation that took place in the summer 1972. Peter Bogdanovich was having a conversation with William Friedkin. Bogdanovich bragged that The Last Picture Show, his first movie, had been nominated for Best Picture and he had been nominated for Best Director. Friedkin countered that The French Connection had beaten won Best Picture and he’d won Best Director. Then Francis Ford Coppola walked by and said that my first movie The Godfather was breaking all box office records.

The story may be apocryphal, but all three men swore it happened. I believe in its authenticity because much of the filmmaking that took place during the 1970s was as much a competition as anything else. These directors were all ambitious and they wanted to each one-up each other and the best way to do that was to be talked about in Hollywood. The two ways to do that were awards and box office. Don’t tell me these ‘great artists’ were doing it just for the sake of art.

And for all the talk of them beating the system, they had to do it. If The Godfather had been a disaster – which many of the studio heads feared it would be the bigger it got – Coppola’s career would have been over before it started. Furthermore studio heads weren’t shouting for ‘the next Godfather’ because they wanted critics raving about it or even shiny gold statues. The Godfather had broken all box office records when it came out in 1972, shattering Gone With The Wind’s thirty three year mark. All of the directors got to make their masterpieces the same way they always have – at the largesse of the studios.

This somehow gets left out of so much of the  discussion of the 1970s films. Yes they may have all been for adults but the main reason all these films got made and these directors were allowed to keep making them was the same reason as always: the movies were making money. They might not have made the huge profits of The Godfather but movies like Chinatown, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon were profitable. Some of the artistic masterpieces that were box office successes surprised even the studios: many were stunned when All The President’s Men became a box office smash. It’s not much of an exaggeration then many other filmmakers of the time – I think mainly of Altman and Hal Ashby, whose films almost never had huge profits – got to make the films they did because these other movies were successful at all.

This gets to the next point. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have always been considered lesser filmmakers then men like Scorsese because, in the minds of film critics, the fact that there movies were huge box office successes changed how Hollywood worked. This leaves out the critical fact that Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese were all friends in Hollywood, along with Coppola and Brian De Palma. Spielberg said as much in his self-titled 2017 documentary and it’s always been true. Conservations with all five have indicated that these giants of filmmaking spent as much time watching each other’s film, trying to outdo the other and also offering criticisms.

In fact these four men were the first people to see the first cut of Star Wars. After Lucas showed it to them they told him the movie had potential but was a mess. It was the idea of Brian De Palma for the famous upward scrolling prologue which narrated the story and perhaps more than anything gave it a path forward. So if you want to blame anyone for Star Wars, you need to blame him.

Now to be clear none of them knew this would happen and it’s not like any of these men weren’t trying to make money with their own movies. For all the critical success of Taxi Driver, it was the fact that it managed to do decently at the box office was one of the reasons Scorsese got to make his next film. That the movie was New York, New York a ‘lesser’ Scorsese was still the sacrifice he knew he had to make if he wanted to make Raging Bull. De Palma similarly could only make films based on box office success and it helped that in 1976 he made the horror classic Carrie.

Finally there’s the argument that once Star Wars became a box office smash, Hollywood no longer had any interest in making ‘adult movies’. This isn’t the case. I have little doubt that there might have been an audience for it and it was clear for movies such as Heaven Can Wait, Coming Home and Kramer Vs. Kramer in the next few years. The problem once that two of those same artistic directors themselves help kill it.

Francis Ford Coppola’s production of Apocalypse Now is as famously tumultuous as the film itself. In fact a documentary about it Heart of Darkness makes it very clear just what a horror show it was for everybody. Few would deny the film was a masterpiece and it managed to make enough money to justify the expense. But the horror show of the production was a red flag as to just how much it could hurt a studio if you gave a director all the creative freedom in the world.

The nail in the coffin was, of course, Heaven’s Gate. Michael Cimino, coming off multiple Oscar wins for The Deer Hunter, had been given free reign to tell a movie set in 1890 Wyoming about the Johnson Country War in 1890 Wyoming. The movie kept getting longer and longer (the official running time was 3 hours and 40 minutes) and there were horror stories from beginning to end involving animal abuses and just how much horror there was on the set. The initial reviews were cruel beyond words – Roger Ebert gave it ½ of one star and called it laughably bad – but more importantly it was a box office disaster. It had cost $44 million to make and it barely made $3.5 million at the box office.

Later reviews have looked more kindly on the film and said that while it is not a masterpiece, it is not nearly as bad as was perceived at the time. But the premiere engagement was so disastrous that it had to be cut by more than eighty minutes for studio release. By this point the studio were finally beginning to lose patience with directors having all the creative freedom and leading their businesses into financial disaster. A lot of the producers who were allowing these films to be made were getting fired as a result because of these fiascos. Cimino’s career which had barely started was over before it began.

There’s also the fact, frequently left out of the discussion of the 1970s that the film industry was just as committed to cheese as it was before: disaster films like Poseidon Adventure, Airport and Towering Inferno were huge hits (the latter two were nominated for Best Picture) as well as movies that had their fair level of sap (Love Story was the biggest box office hit of 1970 and it was nominated for Best Picture along side MASH). This is true of every major decade of filmmaking no matter how much critics want to argue it was better than other this was the decade of Lost Horizon as much as Cabaret, Blacula as much as Sounder. Even the great artists were making as many terrible films as they were great ones: Coppola made The Great Gatsby the same year he made The Conversation and Bogdanavich’s Daisy Miller did much to crater a film career that had started with such enormous potential. All of them had the latitude to make their movies based on their previous successes. That’s the way all businesses work; I don’t know why one has to remind them that Hollywood is one and it operates on the same function.

What critics don’t seem to get about Hollywood is that it has always been ruled by the free market. What they consider art is a business model for them, designed on how many people would go to see it. Spielberg’s movies made money and he was allowed to make more of them and the studies decided to follow his model going forward. Heaven’s Gate was a financial disaster and the studios decided that his model would lead them to ruin. Is it fair as far as how art is viewed? Of course not. But as critics always seem to forget, the movies they see aren’t made for them alone.

Do We Need An Origin Story for Sexy Beast? Yes! Yes! YES!

 

 

I was not much of a connoisseur of movies at the age of 23, but when I first saw Sexy Beast the incredible British gangster classic I realized it was one of the critically acclaimed films of 2001 that (in my opinion at the time) more than lived up to the hype. Led by those two master craftsmen of British character acting Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley (who deservedly received a nomination for Best Supporting Actor), the movie was one of the most cinematic example of a kind of film I was just getting used to. I vividly remember the final paragraph of Roger Ebert’s rave review of the characters in the film: “These are hard men. They could eat the Sopranos, vomit them back up, and them again.”   I had been a fan of the show for three seasons but after seeing Sexy Beast, I fully concurred with Ebert’s assessment.

So when it was announced that we were getting what was essentially a Gal and Don origin story on Paramount Plus last year, I was curious. When, after the merger of Showtime with Paramount Plus,  certain series on the streaming service which I had missed began airing on Showtime (including Mayor of Kingston and Halo) I realized I may get an opportunity to at least look at a series on a service that I have never subscribed to and subsequently ignored. (Yes. I’ve never seen an episode of Yellowstone. Don’t hold that against me.) So last night when Showtime debuted the first three episodes of the series I decided it was going to be worth at least looking at. It very quickly became clear it was.

It was clear in the movie just how tough Gal was even though he’d gone straight at the start of the film and just how crazy Don Logan was and why you did  not say no to him. Sexy Beast begins ten years before the film is set which shows them significant younger but even then its clear their roles are defined. It’s clear from the opening which mirrors the famous start: Gal is sunbathing and listening to a music (this time it’s a boombox), only now when we pan back he’s on the roof of a rundown tenement and he only has a kiddie pool. Don then breaks the door open with a shotgun, points in Gal’s face and then laughs. Don then picks up a bucket, throws it in the air, shoots it and laughs at the man it hits.

What is different between the two men when the series starts is that Gal (James McArdle) is the ostensible leader of the team running smash and grab jobs in London. Don (Emun Eliott, who really does look like a young Kingsley) is exactly like the gangster who we meet ten years later, but at this point it’s not clear how he’ll rise to a leadership role. He flies off the handle at any opportunity and is even more impatient when anything is delayed. There’s a hysterical sequence early in the first episode where Don and Gal are in a diner and Don is starting to boil that his milkshake has taken longer to get to him then Don’s tea. (“It’s just vanilla!” he screams.) When the milkshake finally gets to him Gal asked how it is and Don shrugs.

At this point Gal is still pretending that his life of crime is a front. He’s regularly visits his parents, is engaged to a local woman named Marjorie, and looks after his sister who may be on drugs and is pining after someone in his gang. Don, by contrast, is a kinetic ball of anger and impatience, never willing to stand still, never willing to take no for an answer. (For the record, in the first episode we actually hear the iconic catchphrase: “Yes, yes, yes! This time, it’s calm.)

It was always a question throughout the original film why Gal was ever friends with Don in the first place, and the question keeps getting asked throughout the first two episodes. Here we get something closer to an answer: Don has spent his childhood growing up under the thumb of a father who molested him and an older sister who killed their father once. Cecilia Logan (played by Tamsin Greig in a rage I never suspected on Episodes) is the one person Don can not say no. She has been basically pushing him towards a life of crime. She owns a gambling parlor, bullies him and degrades the idea of him having a girlfriend. It’s all but spelled out in the first two episodes that their relationship is incestuous: it’s certainly toxic. In the middle of a night out with Gal, Don can’t stop thinking about how his sister told him she was ‘paying for the date with his dirty cow’, which is not the kind of healthy attitude to have. Don’s reaction is, like everything else he does, ridiculously out of control and inexcusable, but it’s at least an explanation as to why Gal has stuck with him to this point.

Gal wants to be independent and keep doing his own job which is why when the local crime lord Teddy Bass (Stephen Moyer, more monstrous than he ever was on True Blood ) makes them an offer to work for him. Gal refuses the first time and has troubled accepting even at a glorious party held by Teddy. It is only when he encounters Deedee (Sarah Greene) a woman he previously flirted with a nightclub at that same party, that he begins to think he can dream bigger.

Deedee is an adult film star whose company has just been taken over by ‘new ownership’. Deedee is ambitious in the same way Gal is, but she is an industry and a world that loves to stamp down on the helpless. She spends the first two episodes trying to strike out for her independence and ignoring the warnings of her agent about her new bosses – and then at the end of the second episode, she gets the message loud and clear.

If you remember the original movie, you know that things are going to work out for Gal and Deedee. You also know that Teddy Bass (played by Ian McShane before he entered the world of American pop culture) was still around ten years later. In a sense the prequel is as much an origin story for everything else, including Teddy Bass’ war with another British gangster that he’s decided to target in a very deliberate way. Unlike Gal and Don, who are still rough around the edges, Moyer’s Bass is just as refined but even more ruthless. He has a way of knowing things that they can’t. When their first job leaves a witness behind, Bass orders them to take care of it. Don and Gal both go to do so and they end up pointing guns at each other over what will happen to him. That night in the midst of celebration, Bass congratulates them – and shoots one of the gang in the forehead. Then he smiles and starts planning the next job. Moyer is terrifying throughout the first two episodes, particularly in one where he goes to the nightclub owned by one of the lieutenants of his rival. The two men square off neither flinching for a moment. We know something horrible is going to happen – the episode comes with a trigger warning – but I have to say it was still the most shocking thing I’ve seen on a series that’s already been filled with so much violence, even though no one dies.

Because this is an origin story and because fans hate to have their precious things destroyed, the ranking of it on imdb.com was 5.6 before an episode aired. Usually this kind of review bombing is reserved for remakes like Wonder Years or Quantum Leap where the fans think the show has been rendered ‘woke’. In this case, it must have been done by those internet guardians of culture who somehow think, even though this show is clearly a prequel, that is another one of those properties that is an ‘heirloom’. The early reviews of episodes on line show that viewers have changed their minds upon seeing it (the last two episodes are in the 8 to 8.5 range) I’m actually impressed that they think that highly of it; this isn’t Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, the usual kind of franchise this lot get their knickers in a twist about.

 Whether Sexy Beast the series will have a future is a subject of debate: the show is debuting at a time when both Paramount and Showtime are in something resembling flux and I don’t know if there’s enough of a fan base to make this show a hit. In the last two years, promising versions of American Gigolo and Let The Right One In got killed after just one season. But for now, I’m more than prepared to enjoy the ride, and maybe it’s time. It’s been 25 years since The Sopranos debuted and the organized crime drama hasn’t had a hit in a while. Why not revive it with some of the original gangsters before they became the kind of men who could eat them raw?

My Score: 4 stars.

Election 2024: What A Classic West Wing Episode Tells Us About What Most Americans REALLY Think About During Campaigns - A Lesson DC Still Hasn't Learned

 

 

Some of my pieces about the election will also involve pop culture and as has been my method throughout many of my political pieces, The West Wing will be involved. A little background before we get stated.

As you can imagine when you look online, The West Wing has its share of threads, some of them about the episodes, some about the characters. Because this is the internet, rankings are inevitable and I’ve seen rankings of the characters, sometimes by subjects such as likability or how frustrating they were. I have my opinions on both and I may share some of them in this article but let’s shift the paradigm. I’ve never seen a ranking of the most lovable characters on The West Wing and in my opinion that’s because it’s a wasted exercise because since the series first year that decision was made in a landslide victory and that character is still the undisputed champion. I speak, of course, of Donatella Moss played wonderfully by Janel Moloney for seven seasons.

I’m pretty sure at the start of the series Aaron Sorkin had no intention of doing much with Dona: her few scenes in the pilot show her as remarkably frail, as if a weak breeze could knock her down. At most she seemed destined to be part of the secretaries on the show. That would have been fine on its own: one of the joy’s of the era of Sorkin’s tenure was how much the secretarial staff not only gave substantial contributions but how many of them became interesting personalities. (I may write about  that in a different article.)

But Sorkin clearly saw something in Moloney very quickly. By the third episode, she had begun to develop a personality. By the sixth episode, the world loved her. And by the time the first season was over, everybody wanted Josh to realize what an idiot he was for not realizes how great Dona was. The decision to make her a series regular by the second season was one of the smartest choices the producers ever made.

Dona’s clear attraction for Josh was apparent very quickly and it would have been too easy to just make her part of the show the ‘will they-won’t they’ one of the series. Sorkin had something far cleverer in mind. Dona Moss very quickly became the voice of the audience on the show, someone who asked the questions of these powerful people with no filter, someone who could read the mood far easier than anyone else, someone who would blurt out what the audience was thinking should be said but everyone else was too diplomatic to say. Dona very quickly stopped being merely an adjunct of Josh and became a personality in her own right, and many of my favorite moments on the series come from her interactions with the other characters. Some of them were funny (her timidly raising her hand in the White House and Leo saying: “We don’t typically do that) and some of them were comforting (there’s a scene between Sam and Donna when Sam is dealing with a betrayal in his life and she’s the one who talks sense into him.)

Because Dona was both an insider and an outsider on the show, she was far closer to the world that the staff on the show was governing over and worry about how they’d vote but not really thinking much of.  This was clear in what was one of Moloney’s finest hours on the entire series: the fourth season premiere ’20 Hours in America’.”

Now I have to give some context. Season 3 and the first third of Season 4 deal with President Bartlet’s reelection campaign. Halfway through Season Three, the Republican opponent that Bartlett will be facing is Robert Ritchie, the governor of Florida. Clearly modeled after George W. Bush, Ritchie is a lightweight who clearly doesn’t have the intellectual bandwidth of Bartlet. The problem is Ritchie clearly has the appeal of the South and the team knows that Texas and Florida are going to go for the gop that November. (This is discussed at length in ‘Stirred’ when Josh and Toby discuss that because of this, they should consider dropping the Vice President, who helped deliver the South last time, from the ticket.)

Josh (Bradley Whitford)  and Toby are both handling the campaign and both men have a different approach to how to handle Ritchie, and in both cases it shows the differences between their approaches. Toby (Richard Schiff) who is frequently condescending to people he thinks are beneath him (which is honestly most people), thinks that Ritchie is a lightweight and is not only offended that he is going to be the nominee but that people like this man in the first place. In an episode that takes place during the New Hampshire primary, he makes it very clear to the President that he wants Bartlet to win because he is smarter than Ritchie. (“Make this about smart and not,” he tells Bartlet over chess.) There are many times it can be difficult to like Toby and this is one such occasion: in his character you see the all too frequent attitude of Democrats and the left to look down on their opposition as intellectually lacking. He also has an all too common extremist habit of being angry at anyone who does not meet his impossibly high standards: he gets into more arguments with  the President than almost any other regular.

Josh’s approach is more practical that Toby’s; as deputy chief of staff he has to be more pragmatic when it comes to legislation or winning campaigns. He has a similar level of arrogance to Toby but he has enough sense to usually keep in check. He has many of the same feelings Toby does towards Ritchie but he also has the common sense to know that part of winning is building a coalition. Josh also knows that winning the election is different from winning the argument – in fact, he tried to make that point clear in a fight with Amy that led to them breaking up in the third season finale.

This leads to the fourth season premiere. The Bartlet campaign is campaigning in Indiana. At the start of the episode Toby is openly complaining about this to anyone who’ll listen saying they already lost Indiana, so what are they doing here? At a critical point in the opening, a teenage girl who is on a farm that is struggling starts talking to Toby asking for guidance and wanting to tell her story. Toby cuts her off by saying: “We already lost Indiana.” The woman tries to withhold how cutting this remark by telling them not to give up on small farms  but Toby, in what will increasingly become a trend in the episode, isn’t paying attention. Eventually Josh, Toby and Donna realize something horrible is happening – the presidential motorcade has left them behind.

20 Hours in America is a two hour premiere and much of the comedy surrounds the frantic efforts of these three people to get back to DC. Everything that can possibly go wrong in this episode to stop this does so – the comedy highpoint comes when they get on a train that their young guide has assured them will lead them to where they need to go  - and then starts heading in the opposite direction of where he’s pointing.

But there’s an underlying message here that may not strike the viewer on first, or even fifth viewing.  It didn’t occur to me even though the President actually says it when he learns that two ‘critical members of the administration have been left behind. Indeed, another big joke in the episode is that when they back to DC, everything just keeps puttering along without them and CJ is amused to learn that they have been left behind than anything. Sam spends the episode briefing the President, which he isn’t qualified to do (he’s the deputy director of communications) and he seems to do a decent job, along with writing a critical speech for a dinner in the motorcade. (“Freak” the campaign manager says in admiration when he learns this.)

Bartlet is himself amused that these two smart people will be helpless away from DC and says, “They’re lucky Donna is with them.” Indeed Dona is the one who spends the entire episode doing everything in her power to get the two of them back to DC, and they spend most of the episode either mocking her failures or ignoring her entirely. I don’t think this is deliberate; both Toby and Josh are understandably concerned about getting back to DC and things just keep getting progressively worse. But there is a deeper message.

See the 20 hours in America are spent almost entirely in the Midwest. This is the area of America that Democrats and the left traditionally either look down or pay little attention to (as true then and it was in 2002) and it’s clear that they can’t wait to get back to DC where ‘things matter’. There’s a running joke that after a bet Josh got Toby to end every speech with: “I work at the White House.” And its being done not only to humiliate Toby but to also show how important the two of them think they are compared to the average voter. It’s also telling that, in the midst of a campaign for reelection given the opportunity to talk with the average voter, neither of these men can even be bothered to do so and tend to talk down to them every chance they get – and always about the election. Not about problems that might matter to them, not about what is going in their lives. The election.

And every time Toby and Josh are alone together, they are chewing on each other about their issues on the campaign. Josh keeps saying that he’s doing everything in his power to get Bartlet reelected but Toby clearly doesn’t think that’s good enough. He spends the entire episode calling Ritchie not just an idiot, but anti-Semitic, a racist and mocking every phrase he uses. But he’s actually angrier than whenever Ritchie says something that he thinks is stupid, people applaud it.

What we see is the fundamental difference between so much of the left and the Democratic establishment: it is not enough for you to win and your opponent to lose but to mock and deride not only him but the people who are stupid enough to vote for him. It’s not much of a reach to go from Toby’s remarks here to Hilary referring to Trump voters as ‘a basket of deplorables’. Toby clearly thinks as much. The fact that he and Josh are among them is clearly what chafes them the most, and it may be the reason that Sorkin had the campaign swing take place in Indiana rather than on either of the coasts. There they could at least be talking among people who are in their intellectual equal rather than these ‘yokels’.

Finally they get to Virginia and they are still going at it. And it is here that Janel Moloney has one of her finest moments in the entire run of The West Wing. Dona is shy and diplomatic. When she says what she really thinks it’s almost always inadvertent and usually she’s apologetic when she does so. She’s a voice of calm and reason. And maybe it has to do with her feeling unappreciated for what’s she been doing all day, maybe it’s exhaustion or maybe she’s just tired of the conversation. Whatever the reason, for maybe the only time in the entire series  (certainly during Sorkin’s tenure) she snaps:

“I have such an impulse to knock your heads together. I can’t remember the last time I heard you two talk about anything other than how a campaign was playing in Washington. Cathy (the woman Toby was talking to in the opening) needed to take a second job so her dad could be covered by her insurance. She tried to tell you how bad things were for family farmers. You told her we already lost Indiana. You make fun of the fair (Josh read a local newspaper) but you didn’t see they have livestock exhibitions and give prizes for the biggest tomato and the best heirloom apple. They’re proud of what they grow. Eight modes of transportation, the kindness of six strangers, random conversations with twelve more and nobody brought up Bartlet versus Ritchie but you two.”

Moloney never raises her voice during the speech but you can feel her anger and frustration. And Toby and Josh, these two erudite intellectual figures, are left speechless. They walk away from the table into the bar.

They are getting a drink while another stranger, a man in his forties talks to them. He says he’s touring colleges with his daughter, doesn’t make a good living and is terrified about what happens if he drops dead of a heart attack. He says he wants is what’s best for his family. He introduces himself. So does Josh. Toby starts but Josh indicates silently he doesn’t have to make the joke. Then Toby does say: “I work at the White House. And we’d like to talk to you.” For the first time all day, they are listening to the people.

It would be petty to say The West Wing was lacking for recognition from the Emmys. After all, the series won Best Drama four consecutive times and I have to say it probably didn’t deserve at least one of them. I admit to being slightly disappointed that Moloney was only nominated twice during the series seven years on the air but even at the time I was savvy enough to know she was lucky to be getting that many nominations. Peak TV was after all just beginning to truly flourish and The West Wing was competing against The Sopranos almost every year it was on the air and Six Feet Under and 24 even when it wasn’t. Furthermore with nominations basically capped at five nominees in every category (they branched out to six occasionally in the 2000s) it was going to be difficult to get in anyway. To try and break in against a field that including Alison Janney and Stockard Channing from her own series (Janney won twice before being promoted to Actress; Channing won the year after she vacated the category) Lauren Ambrose and Rachel Griffiths, Aida Turturro, Lorraine Bracco and Tyne Daly for Judging Amy (she was nominated three times and won once during the 2000s) would be incredibly difficult for anyone. Furthermore Moloney was the definition of a ‘supporting player’ in the same way Dule Hill (also underrecognized) was they were never flashy and often they did such a good job making their co-stars look good, you didn’t recognize how good they were.

But the speech Moloney gave in ’20 Hours in America’ is one that should resonate not only with viewers of television drama but with all political observers and pundits. The people who live and work in the political-industrial complex, not just those in the Bartlet administration but the political media, spend so much time eating and drinking politics that they genuinely believe that everyone else should and looking down on the people who don’t. I wrote in an article last year that an MSNBC commentator bemoaned that the average American spends less than five minutes over the course of a month thinking about politics. Those reporters – and really anyone who deals with politics today – really needs to look at this episode and take the lesson from it, as well as the speech that Sorkin has Dona give. In a show that was entirely from the perspective of the Washington insider and in the heat of a campaign that was critical to everyone’s futures, Sorkin had an episode that showed that not everybody lives politics all the time and that we don’t listen to people outside of that.

For all that so many of today’s viewers might say about the dated idealism of The West Wing, Dona Moss has not dated one bit. Politics might be better if there were more Jed Bartlet and more people who worked in his administration but the world would be better if we remembered the Dona Mosses. Sometimes we need those kinds of people, if only to prick their bubbles and tell them to listen to America instead of unilaterally deciding we know what’s best for them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Woman In The Wall: Ruth Wilson Excels in A Mystery With Historical Trauma At Its Center

 

 

By now the constant television watcher knows that whenever you see a character played by Ruth Wilson, you can take anything she tells you at face value. It was true as early as her appearance in AMC’s failed remake of The Prisoner but after  made her very first appearance as the psychopathic Alice Morgan in Luther, the world knew it. It takes a great actress to be able to go head to head with Idris Elba and stay dead even; the fact that she managed to steal every scene she was in with him made you realize what a genius she was.

American audiences officially got welcomed to her in The Affair, one of the most underrecognized series by the Emmys in the 2010s. Both she and Wilson won Golden Globes for it in its first and best season, which is yet another reason I could never fully dismiss them. For all the flaws the show had during its run (and even the most devoted fans will admit they added up) Wilson’s performance as Alison Bailey, the married Montauk waitress who starts an affair with a married man based on a sense of loss, was a steadying force throughout. The nature of the series made it clear that you could never take any version of events as the whole story and that was always true with Alison. Even when her character was murdered, in one of the show’s greatest and most controversial episodes, you could not tell why it had happened.

Wilson’s next major role was the mysterious Mrs. Coulter on HBO’s adaptation of His Dark Materials. The estranged mother of Lyra, who spent her life showing one face while being another, no one could fully trust her throughout the books or the series.

Earlier this year Wilson took on the role of Lorna Brady in the BBC series The Woman in the Wall. Like many British series over the past several years (We Hunt Together and Back to Life are the most recent) it has begun its run on Showtime (now Paramount + on Showtime) the past few weeks. In it Wilson puts another twist on the kinds of unreliable narrators she plays because not even she can say with certainty about some of the things she’s done.

The series opens with Lorna awakening in her nightgown on a road by a cow. The first words out of her mouth are: “Oh that’s not good.” She gets back to her home – which is several miles from where she woke up and finds that there is a knife firmly embedded in a portrait of her lord and savior. “Sorry Jesus,” she says as she makes a concerted effort to pull it out.

Lorna suffers from extreme bouts of sleepwalking, and they have been going on for years. She’s already having a bad day when she goes to a pub, has an argument with someone who claims to know her and passes out. She regains consciousness the next day – and finds a dead woman in her home.

We are all familiar with the setup of the innocent person being wrongly accused, and only they knowing that they are innocent of the crime, even as the evidence piles up against them. The Woman in the Wall  puts a twist on this because the person accused isn’t sure she is innocent. As we see by the end of the first episode, Lorna gets up without knowing it, tears through things in her closet until she finds what she’s looking for, walks down the entire town with an axe in her head, chops open a stable that is holding a car, pours petrol on it and only wakes up and realizes what happened when the car explodes. By the start of the next episode she has scrawled STAY AWAKE in huge letters on one of her walls. We all know there’s only so long a person can do this without going mad – and watching her throughout the first two episodes, that’s not a far drop.

Parallel with this is an investigation in Dublin of a parish priest named Father Percy by Detective Colman Akande (Daryl McCormack, most recently seen in Bad Sisters) The murder hits home because he actually knew this priest. When the priest’s car turns up off the side of the road not far from where Lorna lives, it’s an inevitability their lives will intersect – particularly because the dead woman and the priest have more in common than their location.

The murdered priest helped Colman as a foster youth and helped him get him on the right path. He takes the killing personally and his shocked when he learns not only was the priest known to the townspeople but there were many citizens who would love to see him dead beforehand. The father was one of the clergy involved in a particularly shameful path in the Irish Catholic Church’s history: the Magdalene Laundries. (The series takes place in 2015.) Many of the survivors are in the town, and it should come as little shock that Laura was one of them.

These women who were ‘troublemakers’ (read they got pregnant at a young age) were ‘taken in’ by the church and forced to work in their laundries for no wages and were subject to horrific abuse. Flashbacks show the physical and psychological torture these girls were put through. In many cases, they were promised they would be reunited with their babies and had that promise constantly taken away because they didn’t ‘Show Thyself a Mother’. When Colman meets one of the mother superiors involved she remains utterly unrepentant both in what happened and whether these girls deserved to be mothers in the first place.

We eventually learn the murdered woman was a former sister at the laundry who could not accept the practices and left the parish. She got married to a man and they were heading to Lorna’s town. It is possible that Aoife murdered the priest (its still not clear yet) but Aoife was planning to see Lorna with news on what happened to her child. The question is, how did Aoife’s die and did Lorna kill her?

Wilson plays a character unlike most of the ones she is famous for playing. Usually her characters, while emotionally damaged, have managed a façade of toughness however false. In Lorna’s case the trauma she has undergone has damaged her so badly that even before she wakes up with a body in her home, she barely seems able to function in her small town. It’s not much of an exaggeration that she seems more energetic when she’s sleepwalking: she certainly seems to have a sense of purpose and determination that is absent in her when she’s awake.

It's also clear that her behavior has isolated her even among her fellow survivors: at an early meeting she is reluctant to even be there, and when she comes to a later one (fishing for information) it’s clear that she is resented by them. In part this is due to a betrayal felt by a friend of hers in the laundry Clemence, who if anything is more damaged then her. It’s clear that this was never her fault: both girls had been lied to horribly by the sisters – but the emotional scars are, if anything, deeper than the physical ones. Clemence makes a promise during the second episode to tell Lorna what happened to her baby; she commits suicide that night.

The Woman in the Wall is about shame and trauma. Not even Colman is exempt from it. Chasing after Lorna during the episode, he flashes back to his childhood and later on has a panic attack in the car with the local sergeant. It’s clear there’s a deeper trauma going on that the series hasn’t touched on yet. There’s also the shame the village is clearly going through that Colman touches on when he demands to know how this could have happened and no one knew. “There’s knowing and then there’s knowing’” is the answer that he gets. It is both a denial and part of a universal truth that we all go through when things like the scandals here are exposed.

You have your choice of mysteries to watch on Sundays and Woman In The Wall is running against True Detective: Night Country, another mystery with a brilliant actress at its center. It’s clear after two episodes (honestly it was clear after fifteen minutes) that Woman in the Wall is better written, performed, and has a far more interesting subject at its center than what we see in Ennis. Make no mistake there’s also a supernatural element to it too – the episode deals with a local legend and the rhyme about her, narrated by Wilson, is the first things we here in the episode.  But there’s no pretense that banshees are involved in the murders that happened – just the kind of trauma that can last for decades if it is not solved. I felt more deeply for Lorna Brady than I did for either Danvers or Navarro in True Detective, All of these women are looking for answers to a murder that has its origins in the past but Lorna’s the only one who is out of her depth from the start, and where finding out why the murder took place won’t begin to solve the problems she has. Lorna already knows that even if you ask the right question, the answer may never make you whole.

My score: 4.25 stars.

Masters of the Air Review: Spielberg and Hanks Bring Us Back To World War II

 

Steven Spielberg would no doubt be comfortable if he directed a limited series – TV movies, including the classic Duel, are where he made his bones. But he has spent the last quarter century making cinematic masterpiece after masterpiece which is where we need him.

In a sense that’s probably for the best – Spielberg has not only been one of our greatest filmmakers but one of the most optimistic ones: I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of films he’s made that don’t have some kind of uplifting or optimistic message at their core. In another sense, he has been exactly where we need him – being at the center of producing along with his comrade-in-arms Tom Hankes some of the greatest limited series of the past quarter of century, the lion’s share of them for HBO.

When limited series were still mini-series, they were essentially the province of HBO and Spielberg and Hanks collaborated not merely some of the very best but the most unique of the era of Peak TV. From the Earth to The Moon, Band of Brothers, John Adams and The Pacific are outliers from so much what has made the Golden Age of television what it is not merely because they are stories of history but because they have a sense of idealism that almost all of the television of the era has lacked. It’s not that the men of Easy Company or the Founding Fathers are not cynical or pessimistic; it’s that there a sense of unity and camaraderie that is absent from almost every major work on TV that has been highlighted in the era of Peak TV. There is an irony that in the decade of the peak production of these series HBO was leading the revolution with such cynical shows about the death of the American Dream such as The Sopranos and The Wire and the bloodiness that we see in Deadwood. It’s only in the latter series that we see the idea of unifying towards a common goal against overwhelming forces.

Now if you were a cynical person, like much of the Gen Z or the Internet is, you could argue that so much of the work of Spielberg and Hanks on HBO is about promoting the idea of American exceptionalism, which is nonsense. The Continental Congress, the soldiers in World War II and the astronauts of the Apollo missions are not the least interested in some idea of patriotism or the idea of Americanism. They are only interested in the men next to them and trying to survive until the next day. They don’t have the benefit of knowing they’re living through history, and they don’t care how they’ll be judged. They just want to live to see tomorrow and if they’re lucky, the next day.

Considering the amount of lavish praise that was deservedly lauded to Band of Brothers and The Pacific, Masters of the Air their latest collaboration was going to be one of the most anticipated series of 2024. Wanting to get in on the ground floor of something (I did not see either of the previous series when they first aired on HBO) I decided to watch the first two episodes when they dropped on Apple TV this weekend. Based on them, it’s clear the hype and praise is more than merited.

The first two sagas looked at World War II from the perspective of the men on the ground: Band of Brothers involved the march across Europe; the Pacific the war against Asia. Masters of the Air, which is in a sense completing a trilogy, looks at it from the perspective of the bombing pilots of the 8^th Air Force which led B-19s (‘Flying Fortresses’ as they were known) on the first ever precision bombing raids. The squadron we follow is called the ‘Bloody Hundredth’, not for the carnage they inflict on the Nazis but because of the high casualty rate they undergo. It’s clear from the opening teaser just how dangerous these missions are – and that’s assuming you can get off the ground in the first place, something that is never a done deal.

Indeed many of the most suspenseful scenes in the first two episodes involve the process of just getting off the ground. When you see all of the steps that they have to go through just before they can take off – including manually pumping their engines to start them – you will count your lucky stars every time you flight across county managed to take off with a ten minute delay. The members of the squadron are very aware that they are risking death every time they take off. They also know that the daylight bombing that they are carrying out – as opposed to the nighttime bombing that the RAF is doing and openly brags to the Americans as superior – is suicidal. It’s not just that if you miss your target by a few degrees you could end up in the middle of a dogfight – which is exactly what we see happen in the first episode. It’s that every aspect of the flight seems more dangerous even if things go absolutely perfectly and as any soldier can tell you, battle plans go FUBAR the moment you enter enemy airspace. There’s a reason that every time the pilots every time they have their heavy breakfast call their meals ‘the Last Supper.” They know all too well for some of them it will be.

The two leads of Masters of the Air are two friends from flight school: John ‘Bucky’ Egan (Callum Turner) and Gale ‘Buck’ Claven (Austin Butler). (There’s a story behind this but it’s irrelevant.) Buck gets to combat first and is told  by his CO not to tell the new recruits what will happen. “They’ll find out for themselves.” Bucky, when he gets to war, does find out very quickly in a bombing mission that ends up being scrubbed because of fog. This unsuccessful mission ends up with three planes being shot down and we see all three of them go down in spectacular gore.

Bucky is the cocky one of the group going into the battle but when he comes back he demands to know why his friend didn’t tell him. The next day he is so dismayed that he gets drunk and numbed that he orders a bewildered lieutenant to punch him so he can feel something. When he has a meeting with new CO he’s asked if he’s hungover. “That’ll happen later today,” he says before he’s demoted.

Though we spend much of the first two episode following the two friends, the narrator of the story is Harry Crosby (Anthony Boyle) a navigator who is airsick on an almost regular basis. Crosby has a self-deprecating humor to him, particularly when his own vomit leads him to think he’s been hit by a bullet. He ends up getting promoted to navigator on a critical mission when the lead falls horribly ill.

As good as the acting is (Butler and Turner have clearly modeled their performances off such matinee idols of the era), Masters of the Air is, like the first two series in the trilogy, more about the cast as an ensemble then the whole. That would not normally be ideal for a limited series but in these works (and similarly From the Earth to the Moon ) it works in the show’s favor because these series are not about the individual but the common goal. I don’t agree with the label that was placed on those of this era as The Greatest Generation (a label that came, as we all know, in part because of the massive success of Saving Private Ryan) but a part of me can not help but admire the men who in Masters of the Air with a certainty that my generation and certainly not this one could do anything like the things we see them do in the first two episodes. I don’t just mean risk their lives in airplanes that are so often held together with little more than glue and prayers; I mean agree to work togethers towards a common goal. So much of the last half century has been built more on the idea of individualism and against any kind of community that the idea of working together on anything seems laughable.

I acknowledge that they are all white men and the hypocrisy of this fact of fighting racism abroad while ignoring it at home, but that is not the fault of the soldiers but the generals and the Commander-in-Chief. Does that make their fighting and their deaths – which the series goes to great lengths to show how painful and agonizing they could be – any less significant? During the second episode Bucky tells his friend that he wants to take on the job of writing the letters of the men who die in his squadron. “It’ll mean something more coming from someone who served with them,” he tells Buck. Now we have entire generations who look on not only the soldiers but the families left behind as little more than tools in the partisan culture war, with their lives being little more than tools in the battle of the military industrial complex. These days the Second World War itself is being shown by people on both sides as just another sign of American hypocrisy by people whose idea of getting together for a cause is liking a hashtag.

I imagine there will be some who look at Master of the Air as a glorification of combat, the same way that Truffaut once said it was impossible to make a true anti-war movie because all movies make war look glorious. That was certainly not true of Saving Private Ryan, it wasn’t true of Band of Brothers or The Pacific, and it sure isn’t of the first two episodes of Masters of the Air. What these series remind us is of the quotes of William Sherman who proceeded his famous three word quote with the following: “War is cruelty and you can not refine it. Its glories are all moonshine.” He also realized something that the members of the Bloody Hundredth know all too well. “The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” As the series begins Buck knows this when he realizes that this war is going to be a long, hard road. For whatever reason these men joined up, they very quickly find out they are not fighting for the Stars and Stripes, mom and Apple Pie, or to spread democracy. They are fighting for the men flying alongside them, who may be gone when they go into battle and the longer it goes on, they probably will be. They’re doing it so they don’t have to write as many letters to the ones left behind.

I realize I may have strayed from the point of the overall quality of Masters of the Air and ranged somewhat into pontificating. But that’s the thing about the kind of work that Spielberg has always done and is true even when he is merely producing. When you see the work you marvel at the splendor of the technical aspects, the level of the performances and the quality of the work as a whole. When you’re done, you begin to ask yourself questions about what you’ve seen and the lessons that can be learned from the past today. Peak TV does that at its best, and that’s why there’s a place for series like this as much as there is for Succession. Sometimes you need idealism in your Peak TV too.

My score: 4.75 stars.

The Jeopardy Writers Are Back At Work! A Celebration Of What Makes Them So Good, Part 1: The Theme Board

 

Try not to judge me for this but I know almost nothing about Taylor Swift, either the performer or her music. I know all too well what a force of nature she is and how she’s taken over the world, but that doesn’t mean I would recognize her songs or her voice. So that is why I did not make the immediate connection when I saw the category’s for the Jeopardy round this past Wednesday.

LOVE STORY, OUR SONG, BAD BLOOD, SHAKE IT OFF, WE ARE NEVER EVER GETTING BACK TOGETHER and finally THE ERRORS TOUR. Even the fact that one of clues in OUR SONG deliberately referred to Taylor Swift did not cause it to register with me. It was not until I looked online and I saw how overjoyed ‘Swifties’ were about Wednesday that I finally made the connection.

As a fan of Jeopardy I was glad to learn of this for a reason independent of any feelings I have for Taylor Swift: this board confirms that the Jeopardy writers are back at work. I knew that, given how taping of the show works, that after the WGA strike officially ended in late September, that there would be a delay before we knew for sure that there would be new clues. There have been signs of it over the last couple of weeks – one category was actually titled: THE WRITER’S STRIKE. (It had to do with writers who had written on strikes.) But Wednesday’s Jeopardy round demonstrates officially the return of the writers.

One of Alex Trebek’s many frequent comments over the years whenever a certain set of categories that had a theme came up was: “Oh, the writers are having fun.”  You get this frequently watching any game of Jeopardy because of how the clues are presented. The writers have to hide the response they want in plain sight and they have endlessly creative ways of doing so. And in order to make it not seem like a dry recitation of facts,  they also know they have to entertain the audience as well. Since I have been spending much of this season essentially very annoyed at the producers of Jeopardy,  I think it is worth spending some time celebrating the writers of Jeopardy.

I should have probably done this before because I know that as much of a presence as Alex Trebek was over his tenure over the show, a major factor in the show’s success involved the writers. It is a difficult job to recite sixty clues in the course of thirty minutes; it’s just as difficult to come up with that many. So the writers need to have fun when these clues are read out and the audience needs to be entertained by them. Sometimes it’s more obvious than others – when they laugh at certain clues when they are delivered – but just as often it comes as to presentation.

Over the last thirty years, I have noticed two critical ways as to how the writers have made the show work, beyond the vast array of trivia they demonstrate. One has been the theme boards which they have done almost since the show began, and the other is how they bring out certain very tricky categories in certain tournaments to, how shall I put it, torture the players who come back. In this part of the celebration, I will deal with the theme board.

Now as any long term fan of the show knows, the writers did not make the theme of Wednesday’s board based on Taylor Swift because they are all Taylor Swift fans. (They might be but that’s not relevant.) They did it because the theme board on Jeopardy is frequently built on pop culture. Over the past decade they have done boards that have categories relating to Game Of  Thrones, the 100 greatest Movie Quotes according to AFI, 1990s Rock & Roll Hits, Oscar Nominated Films (usually based on the year) and even The Brady Bunch. (Sort of: GRIEG, PETER, BOBBY SIN.D JAN. and MARTIANS!MARTIANS! MARTIANS.) 

The thing is to just decide to create a board with a theme is easy enough. You then have to come up with clues that fit it. And that is the show’s genius. I could give countless examples of this but I think the best example has been in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005.

For one thing, that tournament involved 76 games and was one of the longest special tournaments in the show’s history. Just as important was the fact that, since all of the contestants were going to be returning champions, the writer’s had to make them more difficult than they might end up being for an average contestant. In both cases, they succeeded admirably.

The first one occurred in the Jeopardy of the fifth quarterfinal match: ROCK GROUPS, THE MAMAS AND THE PAPAS, KANSAS, THE STONES, GUNS N’ROSES and U2. U2, it’s worth noting had come up before; it meant 2 U’s were in each correct response.

GUNS N’ROSES showed the writers versatility; a clue about the Gatling Gun was followed by one referred to Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. And some of the clues managed to crack up not only the audience but Alex. The best one came in ROCK GROUPS:

“Bon Scott of this hard rock group was rejected by the Australian army as ‘socially maladjusted.” (What is AC/DC?) I’m not sure whether Alex was amused about who it reflected more on: Bon Scott or the Australian Army.

A little more than a week later, the next theme board came up in the Double Jeopardy round: DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, WITHOUT A TRACE, CSI, ACCORDING TO JIM, ‘COLD’ CASE and HIT TV. In CSI, they went through some of the methods that CSIs use in real life. In WITHOUT A TRACE, they talked about some famous people who just vanished off the face of the Earth, as you’d expect Jimmy Hoffa was one of them. And the DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES category had more to do with housewife being desperate for more benign reasons than the soap opera; answers has to do with the Microwave oven, Avon and Weight Watchers.

Two weeks we got a different kind of theme board in DOUBLE JEOPARDY, one that might have been hinting at the difficulties of the tournament: PARTICLE PHYSICS, LET’S VISIT PALAU, JAMIE FOXX ROLES, AFRICAN CUISINE, LATIN LEGAL TERMS & ONE LAST ‘EZ’ CATEGORY. The writers were no doubt tweaking the contestants for this tournament as to just how much they’d studied and whether they’d studied these categories. (For the record, the three contestants were only stumped by two of these clues.)

The following week, the theme in the Jeopardy round was obvious. THE NEWSPAPER, THE SPORTS PAGE, THE BOOK REVIEW, THE FOOD SECTION, THE PERSONALS, and THE ‘C’ROSSWORD PUZZLE. The last category was a rewording of a common category CROSSWORD CLUES ‘C’.

About a week and a half later they got even more focused in Double Jeopardy: THE ORCHESTRA, AROUND THE HORN, SYMBOLS, THE VIOLENCES, PLAYING THE BUFFOON and ‘P AN ‘O’s. In the latter category, you needed a two word response, the first word starting with P, the second with O. The AROUND THE HORN category dealt with Cape Horn in Africa, and it was almost verbatim repeated earlier this year. Some of these clues were very tricky; Tom Nichols and Chacko George, two of the players each made four mistakes. Here are a few:

THE ORCHESTRA $2000: “A gold ‘concert grand pedal’ one of these instruments from Lyon and Healy costs $42,000.” Chacko thought it was a piano, Tom knew it was a harp.

SYMBOLS for $800: ‘The long symbolic history of the pentacle includes representing Jesus’ five of these.” When Tom said nails, he was ruled incorrect. They wanted wounds or stigmata.

THE VIOLENCE, $1600: “In World War II he headed the Gestapo in Lyons, France; in January 1983, he was arrested in South America.” Chacko thought it was Goebbels, Tom knew it was Klaus Barbie.

I mention this because at the time I was a skilled Jeopardy watcher and I didn’t know any of these three clues.

Three days later we got a different kind of theme board which really showed the Jeopardy writers being inventive: FOUND IN SPACE, CANADIAN IDOL ‘MISSION’ POSSIBLE, WILL & DISGRACE, THAT’S CREDIBLE and WISCONSIN 3-0.

WILL & DISGRACE had to due with some of the truly awful behavior that we can Shakespeare was capable of, ending in violence or death. The Daily Double will prove that:

“Demetrius & Charon rape and mutilate Lavinia; this general, her dad, bakes them in a pie that he serves their mom.” This clue refers to the very early tragedy Titus Andronicus.

And in what might have coincidence, the last theme board of the first round also dealt with the Bard and showed just how far the writers could go:

SHAKESPEAREAN WORDPLAY, THE MERCHANT OF TENNIS, AS YOU ‘IKE’ IT, THE COMEDY OF ERAS, McHENRY THE FORT, PART I and ALL’S WHALE THAT ENDS WHALE. Is it possible Jeopardy invented the dad joke? Maybe not: all of these are way too smart.

Most of these categories are self-explanatory but COMEDY OF ERAS, you had to name the comedian. An example you might know: 1990s “You might be a redneck if your family tree does not fork.” Who is Jeff Foxworthy?

In the second round the gameplay got more serious, but the theme boards didn’t go away. In the Jeopardy round of the fifth game we had a clear theme: CHICAGO, CAB ARRAY, MOO-VIN’ OUT, FAN TOM, AVENUE ‘Q’ and WE’RE TALKING BROADWAY.

FAN TOM, for those who might not guess, dealt with famous Tom or Thomases and things or people they were fans of. $800: “This Jude The Obscure author admired Browning but was said to be too shy to meet him” Who is Thomas Hardy?”

Two games later we got another, slightly more obscure theme board: THE BIG BAND ERA, STARDUST, TUXEDO JUNCTION, SOUTH OF THE BORDER, DEEP PURPLE and TAKE THE ‘A’ TRAIN. Sean Ryan, who selected the first clue, clearly got the references: ‘I’m an Ellington sucker. TAKE THE ‘A’ TRAIN.

This involved a lot of creativity. TUXEDO JUNCTION involved places involved formal dress. SOUTH OF THE BORDER meant they gave you a country and named the neighbor on its southernmost border. STARDUST actually came up a few months ago basically repeated verbatim and Sean, who found it, had no more luck getting in than the contestant nearly eighteen years earlier:

“A faint constellation in the northern sky, Camelopardalis represents this animal.” It was not until Ken revealed that the combination of camel and leopard was meant to refer to a giraffe, something that had puzzled me for nearly eighteen years.

There was only one theme board in the quarterfinal match and in this case, it was a throwback. Anyone who remembers Cheers remembers when Cliff Clavin appeared on the show. Pam Mueller, Phil Yellman and Brian Moore were the ones who finally got to deal with the categories in Double Jeopardy:

CIVIL SERVANTS, STAMPS AROUND THE WORLD, MOTHERS & SONS, BEER, ‘BAR’ TRIVIA and CELIBACY.

Now I’m guessing the Jeopardy fan wants to know how the show handled the last category. In fact it was how that category played out that was critical to how Double Jeopardy.

It had been a close game much of the round and Pam found the last Daily Double with it almost over. At the time she had $12,800 when she found it in CELIBACY:

“This 20^th Century leader wrote, “For me the observance of…Brahmacharya has been full of difficulties.” She knew it was Gandhi and went up to $14,800” which gave her the lead.

Her opponents then made costly errors in that same category.

“These 12^th century councils named for a Roman palace declared priestly marriages invalid.” Phil thought they were the Councils of Trent and lost $2000. It was the Lateran Councils. (I hadn’t heard of them either.)

“This adjective for one celibate type of life comes for the Greek for ‘alone’

Phil thought it was solipsistic. Brian thought it was ascetic. It was actually monastic. It cost each of them $800. I guess these guys didn’t know enough about celibacy.

Pam would eventually win the game and her performance in the semi-finals has made her a feature in every anniversary tournament since.

The final theme board of the tournament came up in the Jeopardy round of the first game of the final where Ken Jennings had been waiting for Jerome Vered and Brad Rutter. The board was set up in honor to them as Alex said:

THE SMART SET, EGGHEADS, SHEER GENIUS, SHREW-ED. HIGH INTELLIGENCE and ‘BRIL’-LIANT.

For those of you who are curious, EGGHEADS dealt with famous TV and Movie geniuses (Doctor Who was among them) HIGH INTELLIGENCE had to do with intelligence gathering and THE SMART SET was about an influential literary magazine that H.L Mencken edited from 1915 to 1922. It’s worth noting that’s where the Daily Double was and appropriately Ken found it:

“This ex-sailor published early sea plays in the magazine, including The Long Voyage Home”. Ken knew it was Eugene O’Neill.

A theme board by the Jeopardy writers showcases their creativity as well as challenges both the viewer and the contestant. But as someone who has watched many tournaments over the years, I have noticed that every time some of these tournaments come along the writers decided to have a different sort of fun – the kind the champions might not appreciate but by this point should have come to expect.

I will deal with that in the second part of this article.

 

How The Progressive Party Presidential Campaigns Showed Failings They Still Have Today, Part 1: 1912 and Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Run

 

 

I feel that often the best way to tell much about our political future is from the past. Therefore many of my articles having to do with this year’s elections will showcase Presidential campaign of the past, many of which will deal with the twentieth century.

And since so much of today’s politics has to do with the progressive, I feel it’s best to start with the three Presidential elections in which one of the parties running bore the name ‘Progressive’.

I was going to do some variation on it as some point because I know all too well how leftists have loved to rewrite history so it fits their narrative. I also know that while they cling to the label of progressive with fierceness, they will go out of their way to deny its origin because of their binary attitude towards politics – which only qualify for the last half a century at most. They also will do everything in their power to deny the existence of the three different parties they had with the label ‘Progressive’ because they are, each in their own, proof of the biggest truth about their label – that no matter how much they want to admit, they can not stand without the help of a coalition and that goes against the model of purity that has been the cause of their undoing time after time after time.

So in this brief series I will deal with each of the three campaigns that deal with Progressive Parties and how they turned out. Each time there was a lesson to be learned by Progressives – and each time, they chose to ignore it.

I’ll start with the most famous one.

Because the left had decided that all Republicans de facto are evil and always have been, they have decided that must apply to all Presidents who have borne that title. So naturally over the last several years they have turned their venom onto Theodore Roosevelt.

In an earlier article I demonstrated just how this proves how willing the left is to cut their nose off to spite their face because not only was Teddy Roosevelt one of the greatest Presidents in history, by any measure he was also the most progressive President to that point in time.

T.R. never fit easily into either major political party now or then. The Roosevelt family came from the millionaire class and Roosevelt became a loyal Republican from the moment he entered politics. But at the same time, the old guard of the GOP, which was firmly conservative, was visibly afraid of the kind of Republicanism he practiced. The Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s, was present in both party but it was always stronger in the GOP and that terrified the party bosses such as Tom Platt, who controlled New York politics and looked at Roosevelt’s rise – which climaxed with him becoming governor in 1898  - with horror.

The national party, led by Mark Hanna, felt the same way when they heard that Roosevelt, as early as 1899, that Roosevelt was a ‘presidential probability’ in 1904. When William McKinley’s Vice President, Garrett Hobart, died in late 1899, the bosses figured the best way to rid themselves of their headache was to make TR McKinley’s running mate in 1900. The Vice Presidency had been the funeral for any political career since Martin Van Buren had been elected in his own right, and that was in 1836.

When TR took the job (despite Hanna’s screams: “Don’t you know there’s only one life between that damn cowboy and the White House!”) he knew it very well. When McKinley was reelected, he told reporters that ‘this was the end of his political life.’ And he truly believed that….until September 6, 1901 when Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley. Eight days later, McKinley died and that cowboy was President.

TR was always  immensely popular with the American public and the voter than he ever was with the Republican Party. Indeed, leading up the 1904 election the GOP bosses were setting up Mark Hanna to become the nominee instead of TR – which was thwarted when Hanna died in 1903. TR spent as much more time in the White House fighting with the Republicans in Congress then he ever did with the Democrats. Nearly thirty-five years of mediocre or conservative Presidents had given Congress far more control of the policy of the country than they had before and TR upset that relationship.

He did so, it’s worth recalling, for a list of achievements that most of today’s progressives are still leaning on: he constantly fought with the one percent in order to bring about rights for the working man. In 1903, he promised The Square Deal in which he became the first President to engage in an idea of that for any of the working class. He established the Food and Drug Administration, was the first President to have a policy involving conservation and laid the groundworks for the National Park system. He was known among Americans for his willingness to go against trusts and monopolies, which Progressives have been leaning towards for a century. And he negotiated a successful treaty to end the Russo-Japanese War, which eventually made him the first President to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Many of his decisions during that time were controversial in retrospect – causing a revolution in Colombia in order to let the Panama Canal be built, his treatment of a unit of African-American soldiers in the aftermath of an attack at Brownsville – but that is true of every President. And his decision to have Booker T. Washington dine at the White House was so controversial, it damaged his reputation among many Americans. That today African Americans have chosen to turn on Washington in general says more about imposing the values of today to turn of the century of America.

TR is a personal hero of mine, and I consider him one of the five or six greatest Presidents in American history. And I believe given the foresight he had in foreign affairs, had he been in the White House during the 1910s, he might very well have been able to either to prevent World War I or certainly help it end quicker and with far fewer long term consequences for the world.

But that does not mean that I am unaware of the flaws of his character and they became very apparent once he left the White House in 1909. Indeed, there are quite a few parallels between TR’s behavior and so much of the campaign that we are facing today in the Republican Party.

With TR’s case the parallels are both similar and different. After his reelection, he had announced that, even though he was both immensely popular and there was nothing in the Constitution at the time to prevent it, he would not seek a third term. He quickly regretted that decision but stuck to it and in 1908 convinced his Secretary of War William Howard Taft to run for the Presidency. Taft did so and won election in a near landslide.

Much has been written and discussed about the feud between Taft and TR over the years and I won’t add to the discussion on policy. Always part of the discussion is the fact that Roosevelt probably would have difficulty with anyone being his successor. There was also the factor of his youth (he had only been fifty when he left the Whit House) and his ambitious spirit. Taft’s administration was progressive, but he wasn’t Roosevelt. To the old guard that was a strength. To the progressive wing of the party, as it has always been, it was a fatal flaw.

One of the many ironies among this is that had Roosevelt just sat on his hands and done nothing, he almost certainly would have been the Republican nominee for President in 1916. There was also a very good chance that Taft, left to his own devices, might have decided not to run for reelection anyone. But Roosevelt could never stand still and the next decade would begin to reveal an unpleasant part of his personality – an egocentric desire that only he could be the one to lead the country and his willingness to publicly demean and denounce any of his opposition.

To be fair TR had the knowledge the public was still with him. In what would be the first Presidential primary campaign in history, TR would enter 10 GOP primaries and beat Taft in nine of them, including Taft’s home state of Ohio. (I’ll discuss the man who won the remaining two in the next article.) But he could also argue, validly, that the game was ‘rigged’ – the Old Guard controlled all the state delegations and they made sure that all of them endorsed Taft at the convention. So the will of the people had been ‘subverted’.

The problem came at the convention where TR fundamentally made the campaign that followed ‘all about him’. Asked by a reporter if he would compromise he said: “I will recommend a compromise candidate. It will be me. I will name a compromise platform. It will be our platform.” Reporters could justifiably argue that TR was dividing the party and making the campaign issue him – something that the press, which had been loyal to TR throughout his administration, was beginning to seize on.

Taft was nominated for President on the first ballot at Chicago. The progressive wing of the party was justifiably concerned  - the cause had always been bigger than Roosevelt and now it was clear that it was in Jeopardy. They persuaded TR to run on a third party ticket. Out of his fury at being snubbed, he agreed to do so.

The Progressive Party – soon to be known as the Bull Moose Party – had the furor of a religious revival. During his acceptance speech Roosevelt famously said: “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.” ‘Onward Christian Soldiers was played after his speech.

The Progressive platform was the most radical one to date for any major party. It was the first party to endorse woman suffrage, direct election of senator’s, primary elections, national health service, limits on campaign contributions, social insurance, an eight hour work day, worker’s compensation and easier amending of the Constitution. It also argued for direct democracy, recalls, referendums, initiative and judicial recall. It also argued for a strong foreign policy.

From the start the campaign was structurally defective. Because it ran complete tickets against Republicans in most states, Republican politicians on the ballot would have to abandon the party to endorse Roosevelt. Only five of the fifteen most progressive Republicans senators joined the party and across the board few Republican legislators did. Even fewer Democrats ever joined. Roosevelt’s own son-in-law, Nicholas Longworth, who would one day become Speaker of the House, supported Taft. His wife Alice, her father’s most energetic cheerleader, split with her husband on the campaign. Their marriage never recovered.

Roosevelt also insisted on excluding the few African American Republican supporters from the South and then alienated White Southern supporters on the eve of election day when he publicly dined with black people in a Rhode Island hotel. And most fatally because the campaign centered on Roosevelt’s election to the White House, the Progressive campaign undercut most of the 200 candidates running for office under the Progressive banner.

The split in the Republican ticket all but assured Woodrow Wilson’s election, something that Taft and TR knew from the start. Wilson won the election with 42% of the popular vote – the lowest percentage of a winning candidate since Lincoln had managed to win election in 1860 with just over 40 % of the vote. TR had managed to with 27 percent of the popular vote to Taft’s 23 % and won 88 electoral votes to Taft’s 8. But he only carried six states to Wilson’s 40 along with 435 electoral votes. Wilson would never have become President without TR’s help

At a legislative level, the Progressive party did horribly. Most of their candidates were in New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Massachusetts. They carried California, only because Hiram Johnson (governor and TR’s running mate) controlled the party apparatus. No Progressives became governor and only nine got to the House. 250 Progressives were elected to local offices. Across the country they would average between 10 to 30 percent of the vote, but again the Democrats would benefit from the split across the board.

The biggest blow after the 1912 election was to the progressive wing of the GOP. Few of the candidates who lost stayed with the movement afterward; some went back to the GOP and others changed parties and joined ranks with Wilson. But after this election the conservative wing of the GOP was in control and, with some exceptions in the 1940s and 1950s, never let go.

TR himself showed little gratitude for the party that had done so much for him. In 1914, he did some campaigning for the Progressive Party during the midterms but by then he was positioning himself to become the GOP nominee for President in 1916. For the next two years his goal was to get both the Republican and Progressive nominations for President so he could defeat Wilson, a man he had quickly come to despise.

During the 1916 convention the Progressives proposed reunification with the Republicans. After the Republicans nominated Hughes for President, the Progressives suggested to Roosevelt that he be their nominee. TR proposed his friend Henry Cabot Lodge as an alternative. They immediately nominated TR. TR refused to accept the nomination. The party promptly disintegrated with most of the ones who were left reverting to the Republicans. Harold Ickes of Chicago was so upset he campaigned for Wilson. (We’ll be seeing him again.)

Many of the progressive reforms ended up getting passed over the next decade under the administration of Wilson. But well before that TR had more or less abandoned the progressive banner and spent that period campaigning for involvement in World War I, a position that would put a wedge between him and many of his supporters, particularly the suffragists. It is worth noting the last decade of Roosevelt’s time in the public culture show an increasingly bitter man towards the men who defeated him. He called Taft a ‘fathead’, referred to Hughes as ‘the bearded iceberg’ even after he was the nominee and spent the last six years of his life hurtling abuse on Woodrow Wilson. His campaign speeches in the last three campaigns he was a part had little to do with his party’s agenda and almost entirely his own: in campaign speeches for Hughes, he barely mentioned his name. His behavior on the campaign trail could often be filled with bloody rhetoric and some journalists questioned his sanity. At one point, he sued one of them for libel.

I believe Theodore Roosevelt was a great man and that he sincerely believed in many of the progressive causes he campaigned for. But one cannot ignore how much his ego would dominate politics in the 1910s to the point that it would do damage to the Republican Party at a national level. That the Progressives chose to embrace him as their standard bearer also shows a willingness to embrace a cult of personality rather than to try and find a middle ground that would allow victory to their goals long term. It would not be the first time they would do that.

In the next article I will deal with Robert LaFollette, a Senator who deservedly bore the term Progressive, perhaps even better than Roosevelt did, and his two failed campaigns for the White House.