The Reasons Jamal Bowman Lost His Seat In Congress - And What Lesson We Can - And Should Take Away From IT: Introduction

 

As my readers are aware I’ve been a New York resident for more than thirty years. I’ve written quite a few articles about various aspects of elected officials in New York, both historical and contemporary. As anyone who knows the path forward for the majority in the House in 2024, it will almost certainly run for my home state. Many of the most critical members of the House, both in leadership and its more progressive members, represent New York. These include Hakeem Jeffries. Current House minority leader who will become Speaker if the Democrats win control, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the founding member of ‘The Squad’ and Jamaal Bowman, currently representative of the sixteenth district.

I say currently because as of this writing Bowman has been projected by CNN  to lose his primary. There have been countless polls showing him trailing his challenger by double digits but the reason I’m almost certain Bowman is going to lose is because an article published – hours before the votes were cast -  in Daily Kos is acknowledging as much.

Now if you know anything about progressives, you know how good they are at spinning a narrative. So in the article they are labeling it ‘Bowman’s base eats itself’. The closest they come to acknowledge that Bowman has been a deeply flawed candidate and representative is by saying that he is in a ‘competitive primary, which requires a deft hand and sharp political instincts – both things Bowman seems to lack.’ In progressive speak, this is as close to saying this man is incompetent as they ever say.

They defend his decision to vote against the Build Back Better Act as the right move because ‘Biden and the Democratic leadership caved and compromised with Joe Manchin.” They acknowledge the vote failed to pass, but rather than argue it as a defeat for Biden, they decide to argue the much reduced version of it did pass and Bowman voted for it.

They try to blame Bowman’s failing on the political system where people think screaming and threatening is an effective way to influence politics. This is entirely the progressive way of course, but they don’t mention that. They say Bowman has courted the far-left which has little interest in engaging electorally. (As opposed to the Daily Kos which is a far-left that has a slight interest in engaging electorally – as long as the right result is guaranteed. )

They try to deflect Bowman’s position on Palestine as not being the reason for his loss (in a district that is significantly Jewish, something they fail to mention) and instead try to blame it on AIPAC, which they don’t even pretend to hide as being Right wing. They admit fully that Bowman’s rhetoric against Israel is combustible and they acknowledge  that Pro-Palestinian protestors are saying the same thing. But rather than acknowledge the two might be a turn-off to voters in his district, they say that it’s the protestors fault for protesting the event rather than being quiet and raising money for Bowman. To be clear, they’re less upset about the violence of the rhetoric of these protestors then the fact that they’re not raising money for Bowman instead. The next line in the article is: “Can people possibly be more absurd?” And it shows something about the left’s lack of total self-awareness that the author could write this with a straight face.

They also acknowledge this would happily enable Trump’s reelection in November and while they acknowledge this would be ‘catastrophic for Gaza’, they immediately remind their loyal readers that Netanyahu is rooting for Trump’s victory. But don’t worry, they’re Anti-Zionist, not Anti-Semitic.

Now they acknowledge that Bowman is cut from the same cloth as them, acknowledge that his rhetoric is inflammatory and that the best thing to do this is to gain public support and advocate to build public support. They acknowledge that pro-Palestinian activists don’t have public support, so the votes won’t be there but then they turn around and say the thing they should have done is do advocacy work to influence public opinion. If you know the leftist, you know that public support has always been incidental to the righteousness of their position and their unwillingness to compromise that position. I’ve seen so many examples of this in Daily Kos on everything else; this very entry even argues that Biden’s decision to compromise was a justification for Bowman’s decision to vote against the Build Back Better Bill.

Naturally they then do what they do best and turn it around on the right, acknowledging that they are as guilty of performative politics as the left. They try to avoid the ‘both sides’ argument – admitting that they don’t have the power of their counterparts on the right – but even this is written with a clear tinge of envy. So much of the left’s activity is performance rather then grass roots political action, and I know this article would bless it if it was actually working for Bowman. It is only because he seems doomed to electoral defeat that they are admonishing it – and in the most limp-wristed way possible because they are terrified of isolating their readers who believe that’s all politics should be.

Now they acknowledge that the 16^th District ‘seems set to remind Democrats that they value pragmatic results over performative rhetoric’. This is true, and it is immediately undermined by the very next sentence: “Too bad that lesson will be lost thanks to AIPAC’s flood of cash.”  In a sense these references really do render the valid points of the article moot, they are essentially saying to their most loyal advocates “we know who’s really to blame for this, nod, nod, wink, wink.”

I’ve read enough articles at this site and far too many others to know that in the history of politics, no leftist candidate has ever lost a free and fair election. How could they? Their positions are popular and they are by far the correct ones. No, we are not at fault.

So the left has its laundry list of suspects, all of which you’ve heard countless times: gerrymandering, corporate interests, the system, racism, white supremacy, red state ideology, Fox News and that all time classic: there’s no difference between the two parties, really. They have yet to outright blame the average voter as being a complete and utter idiot, sheep and unworthy of suffrage, but honestly with most progressives, I think that’s understood. To paraphrase, of all people Ann Coulter, the left truly believes that if everyone – not just Republicans or Democrats but every single person who isn’t them – they would naturally be progressive.

This has been the history of the left since practically the beginning of the American system. We see it with abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, progressives like Bob LaFollette, much of the suffragist movement,  all the way down to the Black Power movement and so many of the antiwar protestors in Vietnam. Their views are historically correct but they have never been proportionately popular with the American public. So much of the history of the progressive movements in our society make it all too clear that by far their greatest enemy has been themselves. The things that are essential in a democratic society – patience, compromise and willing to win over the general public – are all ideals that the left rejects in favor of their own moral certainty. It is why so many brilliantly radical politicians, from Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens to LaFollette and George McGovern, could either never advance to higher office while our greatest Presidents – Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and FDR – managed to achieve those ideals by being willing to do the dirty work – i.e., compromise -  necessary to get their landmark legislation passed.

Jamaal Bowman was, like so many of the leftists he was aligned with, an active successor in that style of politician,  far more about performance rather than actual legislation, rejecting pragmatism in the name of ideals that the majority of Americans – including members of his own party – were never onboard with. His primary defeat is going to send shockwaves throughout the 2024 election season. But when it happens, it is important that the media, the Democratic Party – and indeed so many of us who care about democracy – do not take the wrong lessons from it. The article in Daily Kos might say one thing in their eulogy of Bowman, but what they say in literally every other article they write about politics this cycle will belie the true lessons of it.

So in this series,  I intend to dive into the story of Jamaal Bowman, the circumstances that led to his election in 2020, the real reasons behind his defeat and what the victory of the man who defeated him can show a lesson for the rest of the country to follow going forward. I don’t expect this to be a popular series – I expect to get my share of screeds from certain people on the left – but as someone who truly believes in the American system, I truly feel it is in the best interest to write it, especially now.

My Predictions (And Hopes) For the 2024 Emmy Nominations, Week 3, Part 2: Outstanding Lead Actor in A Limited Series/TV Movie

 

OUTSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A LIMITED SERIES/TV MOVIE

I’m not sure how many actors will be nominated in this category. I’m told the limits five but I know that was last year and I’m inclined to think given the level of candidates they might go as high as six. So that’s how high I’m going to go. The first five are not going to come as a shock to anybody, the sixth might be able to get in on the boom for a TV movie. I’ll explain why when I get there.

 

Matt Bomer, Fellow Travelers

Matt Bomer has been one of the great actors of Peak TV for more than twenty years, as good in light roles such as White Collar and heavier fare such as The Sinner. But his work in Fellow Travelers is at an entirely different level and has been acknowledged as much since the awards season began: Bomer has been nominated for a Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award and a SAG award in this category and it has been one of the top performances in all of 2023.

In his work as Hawk, a closeted gay man working in McCarthy era DC, Bomer’s performance was described as that of a ‘gay Don Draper’. And that was dead on. (Interesting that he will almost certainly be competing against the real Don Draper as we will see below.) Hawk was in a sexual predator, hiding in the shadows, constantly having clandestine affairs (albeit with men) and always proud to be the alpha male. The affair he had with Tim was clearly one he considering more for his benefits than Tim’s but as the show continued it was clearly much deeper. Hawk spent his entire life in the shadows, marrying, fathering children and is a grandfather when the series begins. He believes in the front so much he thinks it fools everybody but by the end of the series, it’s clear that the only person he fooled was himself. At the end of the series when he stands by the patch on the AIDS quilt that has Tim’s name on it and says to his daughter: “This was the man I loved” it is a moment of great sorrow and triumph.

Almost all of the favorites in this category are either openly gay or spend the show dealing with their sexuality. Bomer’s arc is by far the most tragic and always the more life-affirming.

Richard Gadd, Baby Reindeer

Gadd bares a heavier burden than almost everyone in this category: not only did he write the story that this series is based on, he lived a version of every detail of it. I can’t begin to think how painful this must have been for him to tell his story for all to see, but based solely what we see from Donny in this series it must have been horrible.

In a sense Gadd is playing himself, or at least a version of it, in Baby Reindeer and while you’d think this would be too easy, it’s clear every moment onscreen and every detail he reveals to us both in dialogue and narration how absolutely hard this was for him. We watch every detail of Donny’s life unfold so painfully that the viewer forgets (and given certain aspects that have happened afterward) how traumatic this must have been for him to go through. This is clear as the sequences with Martha unfold, but it takes on a new level when we learn what happened to him with Foley. By the time he unravels in the monologue he delivers as a comedy special in the penultimate episode, the viewer has forgotten he’ll emerge from this alive, if not unscathed: he believes so thoroughly in what will happen next that we do too.

Gadd has been rising in the odds for this category since Baby Reindeer debuted and he may very well end up the winner. In a category filled with some of the strongest performance of the entire season, that is a tribute to his work.

Jon Hamm, Fargo

Mad Men ended in 2015 but Jon Hamm has never really gone away from television: we’ve seen him play critical roles in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, he keeps reappearing on SNL and Curb Your Enthusiasm and he showed up on Good Omens. But in 2023 he made a spectacular return. He is a heavy favorite for a Supporting Actor nomination for his work in The Morning Show and has basically been the frontrunner for his work in Season 5 of Fargo since it debuted this past November.

His work as Roy Tillman is in a sense the greatest performance we’ve seen him give: his entire career in Peak TV has been playing characters who are morally ambiguous at best but he’s never gotten a chance to play a character so unequivocally evil as Roy Tillman. This would have been a chance for Hamm to chew the scenery  (many of the best performances on Fargo from Billy Bob Thornton to Timothy Olyphant have done so) but if anything Hamm chooses to underplay his character’s evil with a subtlety in his dialogue which is so quiet that when he reacts in violence (as he frequently does) it comes with such shock as to totally unnerve the most hardened viewer of the show after nearly a decade of watching in.

Considering the series was set as close to the present day as we have seen it, we could see so much of the MAGA movement in every aspect of Tillman’s character: his believe in what is right and what is wrong, as opposed to legal and illegal, the right of the Biblical and family governing his doctrine, control of a militia. The fact that all of this was taking place during his run for reelection could have been a bridge too far but it wasn’t. And like so many characters in Fargo there was no justice meted out for his character at the end: he’ll pay for his crimes but not the way we hope.

All of the nominees more than deserve to win in this category and it’s hard to justifiably pick Hamm over any of the others. I may change my mind by the time the nominations come out, but I would be fine if he ended up taking another Emmy.

 

Tom Hollander, Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans

Tom Hollander played perhaps the only major character in all of the second season of The White Lotus who didn’t get an Emmy nomination last year. (Despite being the main reason ‘the gays were going to murder Jennifer Coolidge’) It would be easy to draw a line between his character there and Truman Capote in the second installment of Feud – indeed, most of the action follows based on the idea he ‘murdered’ one of the Swans he wrote about and at one point he is told that it is his job to finish Answered Prayers to finish off destroying the world his Swans lived in.

But of course that would undersell everything Hollander does as Capote, one of the most famous writers and characters in history. He’s been portrayed on film numerous times, most famously by Philip Seymour Hoffman in the role that won him his Academy Award so you would think there’s be nothing to say about him or new to be learned. It is a tribute to Hollander that we find ourselves constantly in a state of contradiction. In the first half of the series, we consider him the villain of the story, the deceiver, the drunkard, the manipulator of all that happens around him. And then in the second half, our sympathies are reversed as we see another side of Capote, the failed writer, the aging man in a changing society and most of all a gay man in a world that doesn’t welcome him. We see Capote die twice in this series, and each time we are reminded of horrible it is. Hollander is the center of one of the best shows of 2024 and fully deserves a nomination.

Andrew Scott, Ripley

Scott, if anything, is stepping into bigger shoes than Hollander is the character of Tom Ripley has been played by some of the greatest actors in history, including John Malkovich and most famously Matt Damon. Considering all we know about the roles Scott played in his past and his own connection to it, many (including myself) thought he was born to play one of the first villains to head his own series of mystery novels as well as one who has a clear homosexual undertone.

To be clear Scott’s work is magnificent particularly as he has chosen to play it in a way unlike previous portrayers have and the way we have come to know Scott’s best work. So much of Tom is done is silence, studying himself, trying to imitate behavior, acting in self-restrain, always watching everything he does and around him. Like the entire series, it is a triumph in minimalism, not usually the kind of thing the Emmys recognize but in the case of Scott, it is absolutely impossible to look away from.

Kiefer Sutherland, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial

I didn’t delve into the TV Movie category because it’s not one I generally do. It is likely that The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial will be among the contenders, along with Mr. Monks Last Case and The Great Lillian Hall. However with the coming of Peak Limited Series the TV movie has increasingly become less important in the nominations for acting and it is likely that it will happen here.

Sutherland may very well prove the exception to the rule: he was nominated for Best Actor in this category by the Critics Choice Awards and his previous history with the Emmys due to his work as Jack Bauer might be enough to get him invited. But watching his work in a role that has been played most famously by Humphrey Bogart (though not in the same context) I was reminded of how brilliant a performer Sutherland is. He has taken one of the most iconic roles in Hollywood history played by perhaps its most iconic actor and turned it into something entirely new. Like so much about the adaptation, Sutherland’s work has nuances and layers that have been lost in so many versions over the years and in what is a filmed stage play Sutherland finds a way to command so much action as he did on 24.

I don’t know what the chances are of Caine Mutiny winning this award or even being nominated. But Sutherland deserves a nomination, I kid you not.

 

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Sam Neill, Apples Never Fall

There are many names I could have chosen for this – Ho Xaunde for The Sympathizer and Clive Owen for Monsieur Spade were major contenders – but I settled on Sam Neill for many reasons (and just to be clear, the state of his health is not one of them)

Neill’s work as Stan Delaney, the patriarch of the clan who becomes the chief suspect in the disappearance of his wife, is one of the more difficult roles I saw in one of the more brilliant series I saw all last year. He had to play a character whose public perception was one thing, a different thing to each of his children and someone whose behavior could be ambiguous enough to be guilty in the eyes of the viewer but still leave room for the doubt. By the penultimate episode of the show, even having read the book and known the truth about it, I will still not certain of Stan’s guilt. Part of that may have been because I wasn’t sure what changes the writers had in mind, but much of that was due to the work of Neill. He has always been one of our most underappreciated actors despite being in some of our most famous films and he deserves recognition here.

 

Tomorrow I’ll handle Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series/TV Movie. There might be a slight deviation from the likely nominees here.

 

 

My Predictions (And Hopes) For the 2024 Emmy Nominations, Week 3, Part 1: Outstanding Limited Series

 

I’d say if this year doesn’t convince the Emmys that they need to expand the number of nominees in this category up from five, nothing will but I’ve felt this way for at least the last four years and they don’t seem inclined to make any changes. I’m going to save that argument for other articles, especially after the nominations come out and most of the viewing public is justifiably pissed that their favorite Limited Series was excluded.

I need to make it very clear I’m aware that Night Country is going to be nominated in this category. I can’t in good conscience do so. I have advocated for True Detective in years past in numerous categories but I’m now beginning to think I was wrong then. I’ve seen many incredible limited series in the past year: Night Country wouldn’t make the top seven or even eight.

So here are my choices for what I want to see nominated:

 

Baby Reindeer (Netflix)

This series has taken off in this category since Shogun moved into the Best Drama category and few would argue that its incredible story has not resonated with millions – unfortunately, not always in the right way. But when it comes to a measure of quality, few can argue that this show is one of the great accomplishments of 2024.

Richard Gadd’s story of how he was stalked by a woman named Martha became a reflection on both a person’s abject loneliness in this world, the difficulties of male sexuality, issues when it comes to grooming and consent, and all the messes involves sexuality in today’s America. By coincidence or fate, most of the best contenders for Limited Series this year deal in some form with the LGBTQ+ community and Baby Reindeer takes by far the darkest view at it. It is powerful, at times darkly comic, and unflinching when it comes to the loneliness of today’s society. I have doubts at the end of this series whether Donny can move on from everything that happened. I’m not sure the nominations or awards the show gets can do anything to put a band-aid on a bullet hole. But I can’t deny it deserves all the recognition gets.

Fargo (FX)

Some argued that the fifth season of Fargo was a incredible return to form after the fourth season. Considering that I thought the fourth season was on my top ten list, I didn’t agree with that premise but that didn’t mean I didn’t think Season 5 wasn’t magnificent and everything that we love about this incredible anthology.

As we watched the saga of Dot (Juno Temple in an extraordinary role) a Minnesota housewife become ground zero of a fight between her billionaire mother-in-law (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and a North Dakota sheriff (Jon Hamm) we came as close to a throwback to the source material as we’ve ever seen. This show had everything fans have come to expect from Fargo and somehow even more – a fifteenth century soul eater, a battle on Halloween night that involved Nightmare before Christmas, a puppet show that told the story of how Dot was groomed and a breakfast where pancakes resolved the crisis of a century. It made no sense and perfect sense, like everything we’ve come to expect from Noah Hawley and his band for ten years.

I thought that Season 4 would be Hawley’s last word on the subject , so I was overjoyed to see Season 5. Hawley has now revealed he has ideas for more versions of Fargo, though considering his schedule I don’t know how he’ll find the time. But whenever he does I’ll look forward to it. And I hope that the Emmys give this show as much recognition and love as it deserves. The show has been dominating the Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominations at the end of 2023. It will do so here.

Feud: Capote Vs. The Swans (FX)

I had to wait seven long years between the first season of Ryan Murphy’s anthology and the second. It was worth it because we got a story that was at its core more than worth the wait of any viewer.

Using the narrative of  Truman Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers Jon Robert Baitz took us on a journey through New York society during the 1960s to the early 80s to show a story of the wealthy women that made up the coastal elite, how Capote was allowed into the circle, and how his perceived betrayal led to his personal destruction. The series showed some of the best television of the year so far (the episode of Capote’s black and white ball is on my short list for the ten best episodes of 2024) as well as some of the most incredible performances of the year, from Tom Hollander’s brilliant work as Capote to the incredible array of female talent who played the Swans, from Naomi Watts as Babe Paley to Diane Lane and Chole Sevigny on down. The episode also served as a fitting eulogy for the late Treat Williams’s whose brilliant work as Bill Paley will most likely earn him a Supporting Actor Emmy nomination.

Baitz used this to hold a mirror up to so many of the problems that still affect us, particularly both how women are treated horribly by society – and just as vividly how they can treat everyone else – including each other – with equal viciousness. Capote was punished by his Swans, the series makes clear, not because he libeled them but because he showed the truth and they didn’t want to hear it. It was a hard lesson that we still don’t want to learn but we need too.

Lessons in Chemistry (Apple TV)

Ever since the Golden Globes of 2023, Lessons has been one of the biggest award contenders among Limited Series and while it has lost the lion’s share of them (understandably) to Beef, it has been a major nominee in every one since. It received four nominations from the Critics Choice awards, nominations from every guild awards and won quite a bit. There is a good reason, this is one of the best pieces of works of the entire year.

Lessons tells us the story of Elizabeth Zott, a chemistry doctoral candidate in 1940s American who is the victim of institutional sexism from the entire world except for Calvin her intellectual and emotional soul mate who respects all of her ideas and loves her in a way that no one can. When he is taken from her in a savage way, Elizabeth is destroyed emotionally and punished from it due to the sexism of the time, that her female colleagues share just as adamantly as men. Lessons shows how she finds a way to carry on, through the unlikely allies she finds and finding a way to make cooking part of her life.

The show features standout performances by Brie Larson, Lewis Pullman and Aja Naomi King, all formidable contenders for Emmys this year in their respective categories. It tells a story that we never thought we could like from perspectives we couldn’t imagine: one episode is memorably narrating perspective of the family dog. And it shows how far our country has come and how it hasn’t. I don’t know how many prizes this show will get but it deserves them,

 

Ripley  (Netflix)

There are other limited series with homosexual leads at their center that deserve discussion among the Emmy ranks (I’m actually going to deal with one that’s likely to be overlooked in the last entry) but Ripley is one of those that has a power that goes far beyond the ambiguous sexuality of its hero.

Unlike almost every nominee in this category Ripley is extraordinary not so much for what its characters say but they what they don’t say. I’ve seen many brilliant limited series in the last several years; I don’t remember one where dialogue had so little do with what made it great. It’s not just the breathtaking visuals or the long closeups or pauses between dialogue. It’s that the show really leans in tot the idea of ‘show, don’t tell’. In the critical third episode there is no dialogue at all for twenty minutes as we watch Tom complete the crime that will define him, do everything to make sure he gets away with it and see everything not happen. It’s one of the greatest sequences I’ve seen this entire decade on any medium.

Andrew Scott gives a performance unlike those who have come to worship him as Jim Moriarty or Hot Priest. In both those roles he was brilliant for being unrestrained; as Tom Ripley he spends much of his time quietly pensive, considering his words carefully or in his own head. Even when he does criminal actions, we can’t tell what he’s thinking. Johnny Flynn is brilliant as the abrasive Dickie Greenleaf and Dakota Fanning takes Marge into territory not even Gwynneth Paltrow could do.

It's conceivable, given how many novels Highsmith wrote, there might be more seasons of Ripley to come. I actually hope there are. But no one can believe (sorry) this show doesn’t deserve all the nominations and awards it gets.

 

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION

Fellow Travelers (Showtime)

It is the limitations of nominees that make me have to choose this series because in a world with six nominees this show wouldn’t have to beg for recognition. Fellow Travelers received multiple Golden Globes, Critics Choice and SAG award nominations, was short listed for a Peabody and was on my top ten list of 2023. Had they given the nominations a month ago, we wouldn’t be having this discussion and I could advocate for Apples Never Fall or the second installment of Cruel Summer.

So I fully blame the stupidity of the Academy for this possibility that Fellow Travelers will be ignored in this category the same way Maid was in 2022 and Love and Death was in 2023. But I’ll save that for a later article.

Fellow Travelers shown light on an era of gay history that even the gay performers were themselves unaware of: the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. Focusing on the forbidden love story of two Washington workers at the height of the Red Scare, one of whom works in Joe McCarthy’s office, the other chief aide to his biggest rival in the Senate, we bore witness to so much of the trauma that not even todays LGBTQ+ community knew or even imagined existed, not merely for whites but those gay and trans African-Americans who were dealing with so many conflicts as to which part of their identities to answer first.

Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey gave two of the standout performances of 2023 and showed two men whose thirty year journey was one of conflict: Bomer determining to stay in the closet and use a cover, Bailey increasingly embracing every aspect of his homosexuality. We saw aspects of American queer history today’s world would not know of, the saga of Roy Cohn and David Schine, the world of Fire Island, San Francisco after Harvey Milk’s death, and ending in the AIDS crisis. This was one of the great love stories I’ve ever seen, and one of the most profound.

I could have advocated for this show being the nominee instead of Capote and in truth both series deserve to be nominated. Indeed, it is my fear that the presence of Night Country will push both out of the running in this category entirely. And that I would find particularly unfair. Both these limited series do what the best docudramas do: tell a story that needs to be told for an audience that would never know it. That both might be excluded for an inferior installment of True Detective is a crime far worse than anything that happened in Night Country.

Tomorrow I deal with Best Lead Actor in a Limited Series. There probably won’t be any surprises.

Constant Reader June 2024 YA Edition: Let's Call It A Doomsday by Katie Henry

 

 

At this point dystopian fiction has basically become so common that you might very well expect that when the world does come to the end the people who will be the most upset will be all of the writers because they’ll be out of jobs. I imagine those who look at the cover of Let’s Call It A Doomsday will no doubt think its more of the same and either ignore it as being too depressing or read it and quickly become disappointed it’s not say, the next Hunger Games or Divergent.

I didn’t believe either because I  recognized the author. Katie Henry’s first novel was Heretics Anonymous, a hysterical novel about an young atheist who is sent to a strict Catholic school and becomes friends with a young girl who wants to become a priest. She introduces him to a ban of outcasts, who among other things, including a Jewish gay man and a pagan, who form a society intent on exposing the school’s hypocrisies. The book is both hysterical and reminds me of a description of such movies as Life of Brian and Dogma: it’s heretical, but it’s not blasphemous, because many of the characters actually do have faith.

Let’s Call It A Doomsday centers on a teenage girl named Ellis Kimball. Ellis’s family are part of the Mormon faith, and I know up front that may make you think the worst about Ellis without meeting her. You don’t learn this until you’re into the second chapter and by that point Henry has got you so devoted to Ellis that it’s no longer a dealbreaker even if she was a strict fundamentalist. (She’s not, but I’ll get to that.)

Ellis Kimball deals with the kind of crippling anxiety that has invaded every aspect of her life. Every time she even considers making a decision she’s hears a voice in her head telling every conceivable way it could possibly go wrong. We first meet her in the process of failing her driver’s test for the third time because she can’t work up the will to even start the car.

Ellis tells us she’s a Mormon and we’re surprised because by now we know she lived not only in California, but Berkeley. A religion we consider among the most restrictive and a ridiculous free-spirited communion would not seem to be two tastes that could ever go together. And while Ellis does have most of her family in Utah, they have found a church which Ellis acknowledges missionaries from Idaho and Utah would ‘think we’re all a bunch of heathens with our oddball congregation and our liberal-as-Mormons can get vibe’. Indeed there are several chapters spent in Ellis’s church and Ellis clearly is a devout Mormon. She doesn’t swear, she doesn’t pollute her body, and she loves being in church. She loves the ceremony and everything about it – and she also loves it because in it, the voice in her head becomes quieter, possibly nowhere else. As she puts it:

“I come here because when we sing all is well, all is well. I believe it, if only for a moment.”

If for no other reason Doomsday is invaluable because it will give young readers insight into a faith that almost none of them will either know about or dismiss as restrictive. Ellis is fully aware of the flaws in the dogma of her church – she elucidates quite a few of them in the narration – but you can sense reading it that it gives her peace she hasn’t felt anywhere else in her life. And to be very clear, until the narrative begins in earnest, her life would be considered hell if Mormons truly believed in it.

The voice in Ellis’s head is so present that it is basically its own character: it almost speaks more than anyone else in the book. It has crippled Ellis to such an extent that everyone in her family, especially her mother, has gotten frustrated to the point that almost no one, save for her father, can speak easily to her. Ellis and her mother have such an antagonistic relationship that she genuinely believes her mother never loved her and it fills every interaction they have. Ellis’s father clearly favors her but one can only imagine how exhausting it is to constantly play the role of peacemaker. Ellis’s sister Em is usually silent about her sister’s issues but its clear she’s beginning to run out of patience. At one point in the novel she snaps and tells Ellis: “You make it worse! Why do you always make it worse?”

Ellis has regular meetings with a therapist named Martha who she’s been seeing for two years. She’s been seeing a succession of therapists since the age of eight and as we’ve seen she has spent all that time not talking about what her real problems. There are only two things she likes talking about: etymology, the origin of every single word in existence and all the possible ways the world could end.

Now you’d think her obsession with the end of the world is what causes her anxiety but that’s not entirely true. In a weird way Ellis is looking forward to the apocalypse. She has spent so much of her life as a ‘prepper’, someone who is prepared at a moment’s notice for the apocalypse, who has all the supplies that you would need in case of every possible way the world could end, all of which she has a ridiculous amount of knowledge of. It’s one of the few things she actually proud of when she discusses it with us. And while you might think her faith is part of the reason she’s certain the world will end, it’s actually not the reason – that’s not revealed until the novel is nearly over, so I won’t go into it here.

Ellis basically thinks her therapy sessions are useless until while she’s leaving she meets a girl her age named Hannah Marks in the waiting room. Hannah is wearing ragged clothes and meditating and the moment she opens her eyes, she gives a beatific smile and says: “You don’t know me. Not yet.” Ellis’ first reaction is that this is how a serial killer show starts and then she’s intrigued. Since every other interaction with another human being throws her into paralysis, this is something she actually wants to follow up on.

Then when Ellis goes to her school – a school so liberal she tells us the only rules seem to be ‘no murder, no arson, no water guns’ – she goes to the library where she spends all her time basically her entire lunch hour, hiding. Hannah is there and then gives a cryptic invitation to lunch, followed by “We’re supposed to be friends.” Ellis is so shocked by this she tells her exactly why they shouldn’t be friends – her crippling anxiety – and Hannah seems supportive. Still Ellis might have ignored it had she not mentioned her fear of the apocalypse and Hannah tells her that her obsession is ‘awesome’. After more cryptic dialogue Hannah insists their meeting is fate because she knows exactly how the world is going to end.

Reluctantly Ellis decides to follow up on this and ends up following the bread crumbs to a group of stoners in the yard. (This would be the circumstances for discipline in any other school but Ellis’s; not only is it ignored but the teachers seem to be doing more than the students.) Ellis meets three boys engaged in a deep literary and philosophical discussion and finds that Hannah is meditating in the tree. When they do the natural thing and offer her a joint, she is about to tell them that she is a Mormon – but one of the boys beats them to it.

That boy is Talmage. We will learn very quickly that he was part of Hannah’s church but was eventually kicked out because of his bi-sexuality. Ellis’s family tells her this and its clear how upset they are that even their most liberal of Mormon churches can’t bend on this rule. Ellis can relate to this more than she wants to admit. It’s clear as the novel begins – but not to Ellis herself – that she is attracted to a female member of her congregation. A lesser author would use this to say that the dogma of the Mormon church has restrained Ellis; Henry makes it very clear that Ellis is worried about so many other things in her life that dating anyone – never mind of which gender – has not even occurred to her.

Hannah tells Ellis that she has had dreams that give ideas as to details of what will happen when the world will end. They take on natures of a prophecy some of which Ellis can recognize. Hannah tells her from the start that the person who can help them untangle this is a man named Prophet Dan. She tells Ellis that he is homeless and lives among the community and finding him will reveal all.

Ellis engages in this quest with a fervor she hasn’t taken to anything in her life. As you can expect, this becomes the kind of thing her family – especially her mother – become inflamed about. There are constant arguments between the two of them in the novel and Ellis spends it increasingly sure that her mother never loved her: it is one of many things she is wrong about.

Ellis spends a lot of time with Hannah’s friends, playing a wonderful game called ‘Five-Word Books’, becoming closer to Tal in particular and spending far more time with Hannah trying to warn people of the apocalypse. But the more she presses Hannah to take action, the less Hannah actually wants to do anything about it. This increasingly frustrates Ellis and eventually she learns more and more about her. Hannah’s last girlfriend tells her that she is increasingly taking on the lifestyle of a hermit, giving away her clothes and gifts to her friends and increasingly isolating herself from anyone. The circle she’s with right now are essentially the only people who still talk to her and even they are aware how fractured she is.

Eventually we learn the dark truth behind Hannah’s search for Prophet Dan. How it pertains the narrative is a secret I will not reveal here but it shows that Hannah is just as broken as Ellis is. What is critical it has made Hannah more cynical to the point that she and Ellis eventually get into an argument as to why she wants to tell so many people about the end of the world, and that she has every reason to think it might not be the worst thing. Tal eventually asks her a variation on the same question, asking her what her goals are. All Ellis can say is “to survive.”  Tal then tells her very clearly that there’s a difference between survival and living and that Ellis needs to find a better reason to survive. This leads to the breakthrough Ellis needs to deal with when it comes to the voice in her head and why she is so desperate to be prepared for the end of the world.

It's possible I’ve made this book sound grim. So it might shock you to know that Doomsday is by far one of the funniest books I’ve reviewed for this column. Much of the humor actually comes in the way Ellis is determined to warn everybody about the apocalypse, the way she takes to it cheerfully when it comes to ordering things online and that she ultimately uses it as what amounts to a chat-up line to the girl she’s been attracted to all this time. There’s also the understandable fact that most of the people she and Ellis try to warn about naturally think that they are crazy. And there’s a lot of hysteria about the school they attend: Homecoming is called Rally Day, which Ellis describes as ‘Mardi Gras for teenagers’ (What’s our rival?” one of Hannah’s friends asks. “Sobriety.”)  At what would normally be the climatic portion of the novel Ellis decides to warn the entire school and there is no one to stop her when she walks into the unguarded PA room. (Ellis’s attempt makes her the most hysterically funny Cassandra I’ve ever encountered.)

It's also, refreshingly, one of the most devout books I’ve ever read, either for children or adults. Ellis’s faith is one of the few things in her life she has no doubts about. It has caused her immense pain in some areas (I won’t say how) but much of that has more to do with her personal doctrine than anything in the LDS. She is so convinced of the church’s sanctity that she’s actually horrified to learn that some of the most sacred rituals of Mormonism are available on YouTube. Every part of the church rituals – including the part involving testimony – gives her a comfort that few things do. In a world where so many of the young consider religion a hoax and in a region of the country where this is doubly so, there’s something endearing about how Ellis and her family have not lost their faith in God.

Stories that involve both religious faith and the apocalypse generally seem to have only two types of endings: one where the prophet is proven a false one and another where the rapture happens. What I find most profound about Doomsday is that this novel manages to find a middle ground. No the world doesn’t end at the end of the novel, but neither is Hannah revealed to be a false prophet. Certain truths are revealed that neither girl thought possible at the start of the novel and both are proven simultaneously right and wrong about everything they believed.

The last line of the novel includes the phrase: “There are so many ways a world can begin.” I won’t reveal the context and I will say that the end of the novel does have ambiguity to it. But is the nature of Ellis’s journey that for the first time in her entire life she is seeing that ambiguity can be something to be hoped for and not feared. That is the nature of both faith and grace, two virtues Ellis has never lost along that journey.

 

 

 

 

The Myths of Peak TV, A Personal Retrospective: Part 1: Introduction and What Everyone Gets Wrong About 'Content'

 

At this point the world knows the story of the Golden Age of TV to the point its practically gospel.

For almost the entirety of TV’s existence, with the exception of a patch in the 1950s and the mid70s and 1980s, television was in truth a vast wasteland, the destroyer of intellect, the corrupter of art. Then in 1999 The Sopranos debuted on HBO and television magically became a world of greatness, where every TV show was a work of art, where you could be proud to be discussing TV with your colleagues instead of ashamed of it, where creativity reigned and economics were not a factor. Now it has passed and television is heading into a darkness far greater than before, where creativity will be rare if it ever comes again.

That is what I’ve been hearing from critics and fans and so many other educated people for more than twenty years. And for a long time I believed it myself. But events of the last few years along with my own observations over more than twenty years of critically watching television and personally writing about it for more than a decade have made me aware of so many of the flaws in the construct of this argument.

Now I agree with much of the fundamental argument about The Sopranos, the vast array of art fans like myself have been a part of for twenty five years and that there has been perhaps a greater amount of artistic television in the first two decades of the 21^st century then perhaps all of the 20^th century. But where I now fundamentally disagree with my fellow critics and indeed so many of the people who work in television over this period and are now doomcrying are several realities that were very apparent to me when I was watching TV entirely as a fan and were still clear when I was reviewing it for my blog. And perhaps the biggest flaw in this argument is the one that has dogged all critics in every medium perhaps since the beginning of criticism.

 And that’s that money has nothing to do with the work that is produced. It was just as true during the era of Peak TV as it was before and as it is now. That somehow for the last twenty-five years television just stopped being a business and was only about producing art for the critics and the masses wouldn’t hold up to close scrutiny or even what was happening at the time. Yet that is the gospel that critics have been preaching for as long as I’ve been reading about television and are now bemoaning as the cause of its downfall.

What I intend to try to do in this series is make an argument that so much of what writers have been telling you about Peak TV is a one-sided story, one that focuses entirely on the artistic side and had nothing to do with the dollars and cents. I don’t entirely blame critics for this; they’re not economists. But it’s now more than obvious that for more than twenty years that even the best TV critics have, like every other critic, been only talking about the artistic merits of what they watch and never considering the economic realities of it.

So in this series I intend to use my experience as both a critic, an observer and a fan of television to puncture holes in the stories we’ve been told about the myths of Peak TV over the past twenty years: why it suddenly appeared that television has become a purveyor of art, where that art fit into the reality of the public consciousness and why critics frequently celebrated the art of the fracturing landscape while ignoring the possibility of how and why it might lead to problems.

Let’s start with a word you’ve been hearing a lot by so many artists and critics the last few years: content.  I’ve seen this word used in a derogatory fashion both by critics and creators more than half a dozen times over the past few months. It’s usually used in reference to the streaming services, sometimes its extended to cable. But it’s always used in  a variation of the same way: “The studios used to care about art; now all they care about is content.”

Everyone who tells you this is, to be as euphemistic as possible, is disingenuous. All studios, all networks, all cable channels, all streaming services, only care about content. And much as the artists and critics want to have you believe otherwise, the bosses and producers have always and only been interesting in creating content. If art gets created that’s just a coincidence.

You’d think the writers, directors and actors could at least acknowledge the reality of this fact and occasionally a Gus Van Sant or David Chase will acknowledge they did a project only for the money. But as I’ve argued repeatedly  Hollywood is a business first. It’s about getting asses in seats and eyeballs on the screens. The artists might argue that the bosses are grinding them down into producing crap rather than what they want to produce. They never acknowledge everyone in Hollywood is following the market. If everybody was watching documentaries about Mongolian sheepherders,  every studio would be doing one. Hard as it may be for the average critic to believe, I think there are some executives really tired of having to keep making different superhero movies or action franchise or version of Star Wars. But they’re slaves to the dollar as much as the artist is. Hollywood doesn’t lead, it follows, and it only follows the dollar. At some level, everyone knows this but no one can say it out loud.

Critics by contrast have never accepted that. I’ve read so many film reviews over the past twenty years essentially arguing that the only movies that should be released are the ones that the critics like even if the audience hates them. There’s always been something of a contrarian in so many of the critics I’ve read over the years: if something is loved by the masses, it must de facto have no artistic value. And because critics are at least self-aware enough to know that they can’t blame the masses for this, they choose to blame the messenger – or in this case, the creators.

One of my favorite lines about society came from Chris Rock. “In a class of thirty-five students, you’ve got five A’s, five F’s and the rest of us are in the middle. B and C students.” I’ve always thought that this is a much fairer assessment of television than Sturgeon’s dictum that ninety percent of everything is crap. And for the sake of this piece, I’d like to use the argument of what was until The Sopranos debuted in 1999, what was the standard of television until that point: the fall season.

Usually you’d get somewhere between 30 and 35 shows at the start of September. Basically five of them would be A’s,, five of them would be F’s and the rest were in the middle: B’s and C’s. Every year a critic would watch pilots of all these shows, tell you which were A’s, B’s and so on. In the world of the TV critic, the viewer would watch only the A’s, the F’s would flunk out of side on their own, and the B’s and C’s would either disappear or only exist to make the A’s look good by comparison. The critics job, after all, is not unlike a teacher: he has favorite shows that he wants people to see, shows he loathes with every fiber of his being, and other shows he has no problem with but doesn’t really care about.

The problem is television is a business and a business grades on a different scale then a critic. In the eyes of a business, the A student is the one that is watched by more people and the F student is the one that no one watches. More often then not in the era of network television, what the critic considered an F – or to be more honest, the B or C – would be popular beyond anyone’s dreams and the A student  - like so many are in real life – would be unloved and eventually flunk out – or in other words, be cancelled by the network. The network executive might secretly think the A student is better entertainment than the B and C student but he has a different obligation then that of the critic.

That may be the reason so many critics bemoaned television when it was just the business of the three networks: what they and the viewer considered quality almost never aligned. And because they couldn’t say that the average viewer was a moron or an ingrate, they did the next best thing and blamed the networks, the executives and the producers. And because the creative talent always hates being put out of work, they were more than willing to tell the critics that they were right, share all the horror stories of behind the scenes battles with the producers and censors and make it seem like television stifled if not stomped out creativity.

Let me use two dramas that debuted in the 1992-1993 season as an example of how the dichotomy between the critical perception of television and the audience perception was. I should mention upfront I viewed both shows constantly in my early years, both when they were on the air and in syndication.

In the fall of 1992 Fox debuted what was a spin-off of Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place. Both shows were the creation of Aaron Spelling and Darren Star and the early episodes of Melrose linked to 90210. The series was originally closer to a more grown-up version of 90210 but the ratings were not very good. Halfway through the first season, the show introduced Heather Locklear as Amanda Woodward, a new character and the show moved drastically away from reality into pure and utter soap opera. The show became a huge ratings hit and was one of the major factors in Fox moving from something of a joke of network television to effectively a powerhouse in its own right.

In January of 1993 NBC gave the new series Homicide: Life on The Street the slot after that year’s Super Bowl, then a decision given to new programming the network wanted to link. Written by Tom Fontana and inspired  by the true crime book of David Simon, the series looked at the Homicide unit of the Baltimore Police force. Shot in dim lighting with constant camera motion, and with a cast that was more minority heavy then almost any network show to date, the series quickly became one of the most critically acclaimed shows of 1993. That year the show would win two Emmys and receive a nomination for a Peabody.

Melrose Place and Homicide were contemporaries, debuting within months of each other and ending after seven years, practically within a week of each other. When it comes to which was an A student and which was, at best, a C-, in the eyes of critics there’s no argument as to which was which and having watching every episode of both shows (don’t judge) I won’t debate it. Homicide was a series of urban decay and darkness; Melrose Place took place in a Los Angeles without a single African-American person. The dialogue and direction on Homicide crackled; the writing on Melrose Place was so cheesy camp would be too good for it. Melrose Place killed off more of its regulars in a season than Homicide did in its lifetime, in car crashes, building explosion and in one case, a drunken woman slipping and drowning in the building swimming pool while nobody watched. No one pretended Melrose Place took place in the real world. Homicide was so real it hurt.

But while Melrose Place at its peak averaged 20 to 25 million viewers a year on a network that was still struggling for respectability, Homicide could barely get nine to ten million viewers an episode on the number one network everywhere else. On more than one occasion TV Guide labeled Homicide ‘The Best Show You’re Not Watching’. I’m not sure Melrose Place would even enter the ‘so bad its good’ level of the discussion. Melrose Place waltzed to a renewal every year it was up for it and I’m sure when it came to an end, there were executives who were pulling for another season. With the exception of a two-year renewal at the end of the 1995-1996 season, Homicide had to fight for its life every year it was on the air and no one was left to fight for it by the end .

Melrose Place, it’s worth noting, inspired countless imitators when it was on the air, as well as a short-lived spinoff Models Inc which testified to the popularity it had on the landscape. While Homicide would serve as the foundation of the careers of so many forcing working in Peak Tv to this  day, including Fontana and Simon, no one has even tried anything close to a network show like that, either while it was on the air or all the years after.

As someone who began his career writing about Homicide, who was stunned every year that it never got the requisite amount of love it deserved from the Emmys, who was infuriated  by its cancellation and is overjoyed its finally appearing on streaming, this frustrated me immensely at the time and still does. I was taking the view of both a critic and  a fan. But even the books I read about the show at the time made it very clear how real the struggles for Homicide’s survival were at the time.

Homicide’s survival of seven seasons in the 1990s is nothing short of miraculous. It didn’t survive the way so many critically acclaimed shows do now, because of a loyal fan base or a lot of awards. It’s survival was in part twofold: there were executives who believed in it and were willing to let it survive, and just as importantly during the 1990s NBC was entering its era of ‘Must See TV’. Seinfeld and Frasier were dominating the ratings, ER and Law & Order were critical and ratings hits and the network was number one for seven straight years. Because of this the network was willing to indulge a creative success like Homicide even if it wasn’t drawing in ratings.

And the fact that millions of Americans, most of them young, were watching Melrose Place and almost no one was watching Homicide must have dug in the craw of every single TV critic during the decade. I don’t remember anyone saying akin to it during the period (I wasn’t reading TV journals at the time) but it must have been the fact that these kind of trashy soaps were drawing in millions of viewers and quality shows like Homicide were being ignored must have enraged so many critics of the era. In their minds the smart A student was being overshadowed by a more attractive but shallow C- student. And because they couldn’t blame the fact that millions of people preferred the company of the C- to the A, they decided to blame the system that allowed it to happen.

There has always been a divide between the viewer and critic of television and the business model. In the mind of the former, their preferences should drive the narrative even if the shows they are watching are not profitable or popular. This came up over and over when I was growing up and its still a subject of immense derision more than thirty years later. What network executive in their right mind could cancel such quality shows as My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks; what idiots kept shows like According to Jim and so many other brainless sitcoms on instead? And from a creative standpoint and the standpoint of the fans, it was a moronic decision. But network presidents and executives have to make decisions on a financial level. There was a devoted fanbase for each of the former shows, but it wasn’t a large enough fanbase to keep it on the air. Creatively, it was stupid. Economically, it was logical.

This is the fundamental divide between creativity, critics and the people who provide the funding. For the critics, money should never be a consideration for art. For the executives it’s the only decision that matters. The creative forces are willing to play both sides; they’re more than willing to say their purveyors of a fine art – until they think they’re being cheated by the bosses, in which case they’re all about being exploited by management. That became very clear during the strike this summer.

I think the arrival of The Sopranos on HBO was something that mattered more to critics than anyone else – not fans of TV, not the people behind it, not even HBO. The most important thing The Sopranos did in the eyes of critics was redefine what a popular hit was. And once you can redefine the metric for what a hit is, then its easy to redefine the narrative of everything that follows.

In the next entry in this series, I’m going to deal with what I as a viewer was watching when the first season of The Sopranos premiered in January of 1999. The answer speaks volumes to what television was like back then and why it matters now.

 

Harlan Ellison, An Extraordinary Talent, An Even More Contempuous Human Being

 

There’s a short story in Harlan Ellison’s collection Shatterday – time has led me to forget the title but the plot is very clear. (If you are a fan and you know the story please remind me.)

A famous celebrity and writer is about to have his will read. Five people have been invited to it including the narrator, who was his closest friend. The friend was a writer of some note himself but who never had the same level of fame his friend did and was jealous of it.

The executor of the estate says that the will is a video will, which strikes the friend as appropriate: this was a guy who always got the last word, and why should death stop this? As he relates how his estate is to be divided, the friend remember times they were together which now seem to show the worst part of his life then the better ones. It’s clear as the celebrity relates how his estate will be divided that he’s enjoying lording it over everyone there, and it becomes increasingly uncomfortable for everyone. Of particular note is the man’s ex-wife who he has spent years bemoaning and calling a bitch. Everyone wonders why she’s there and it turns out that he has used his video will to humiliate her one last time: he calls her a monster, a ghoul and every name he can think of, and he makes it clear he left her nothing. In other words the only reason he mentioned her as part of the will was so that he could humiliate her one last time.

The last person he mentions is the narrator. In it he tells him that he has left him to be the sole caretaker of all his material, everything he has written in his long career. This blow strikes the narrator as a worse one than the humiliation the celebrity left on his wife because it means whatever career he ever hoped to have now that he was out of his famous friend’s shadow in life will never be a reality. For the rest of his life he will only be associated with his famous friend.

I could not help but be reminded of this story in a recent article involving J. Michael Straczynski as he discussed that he was now the man responsible for Harlan Ellison’s legacy.

Harlan Ellison to be blunt was one of the most prolific writers of all time. In his nearly seventy year career, he published more than 1700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, teleplays, essays and criticism. He wrote under more than ten different pen names, the most famous of which was Cordwainer Bird. He was an editor  and anthologist for the groundbreaking Dangerous Visions series, which took up two volumes. (A third was planned but never got published.) He was by far one of the most influential writers in science fiction and every field. He was influential to say the least.

Straczynski, as anyone who is a fan of genre fiction knows, has been more productive than Elison was in Hollywood. He is held in awe for his creation of Babylon 5 which Ellison helped him create. He has also written such undervalued series as Jeremiah and Sense8. He has written for countless Marvel and DC comics has worked in animation and met Ellison during the 1988 writers’ strike.

Their most direct connection was the 1980s remake of The Twilight Zone. Ellison was one of the executive producers and writers for the show on CBS in its first season, writing many of its best shows, among them ‘Shatterday’ and ‘Paladin of the Lost Hour’. He resigned before the second season began because of controversy over a story he planned. When the producers needed new shows to create more episodes so that the now cancelled series could air in syndication, they hired Straczynski as executive story editor. Straczynski not only wrote ten scripts he persuaded Ellison to write the episode “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich’

I can understand why Straczynski took it upon himself to be the executor of Ellison’s estate. Someone had to put order into the chaos of the thousands of works Ellison published, never mind the countless others he must have written over the decades. But part of me wonders how long it will take for Straczynski to feel like a character in Ellison’s stories. And if you’ve read any of Ellison’s stories, you know that misery is so common that the happiest endings for any of them is oblivion.

I’m not going to deny that Ellison isn’t a great writer, maybe one of the greatest of all time. I’ve read dozens, if not hundreds of his short stories and quite a substantial bit of his non-fiction since the age of sixteen. He is incredibly funny even (or sometimes especially) when he is being grim and dark, he has a wonderful gift for language and plot and his personality is evident in every bit of his work. He also marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War and was a prominent supporter of the ERA.

 All of that no doubt makes you want to forgive the fact that all evidence seems to be that he was a horrible human being, something he seemed to relish in throughout his career. His reputation was that of being aggressive and abrasive, and one of his own dust jackets described him as ‘possibly the most contentious person on Earth.” In a piece written a year before his death, he was referred to as ‘Sci-Fi’s Most Controversial Figure’ and he would now doubt have sued because he hated being considered a sci-fi writer. (I’ll get to that.)

When he attended a convention at Texas A & M, he referred to the university’s corps as ‘the next generation of Nazis, despite the fact that the university was no longer a military program. He allegedly publicly assaulted Charles Platt at the 1985 Nebula Awards banquet. Platt chose not pursue legal action, mainly because of a non-aggression pact promising never to discuss the incident again, and Ellison (according to Platt) spent much of his time boasting about the incident. When he was attending the 2006 Hugo awards and the female presenter who gave him a special award asked, probably with all seriousness: “Are you going to be good?” he first placed the microphone in his mouth, and then during an embrace of the presenter groped her. He then subsequently claimed he never accepted his apology. He filed constant lawsuits and copyright suits throughout his career and once send a dead gopher to a publisher.

The third volume of the Dangerous Visions series was announced for publication in 1973. As of 2022 it has yet to be published. Christopher Priest wrote a long editorial in which he documented half a dozen unfulfilled promises to publish the book. When Ellison learned this he threatened him publicly. The book is scheduled to be published this September but at this point many of the writers have now died. Priest himself claimed that Ellison’s attitude was to act like a dick, and that does sound like Ellison.

And that pales with the people who loved him. When Ellison’s older sister died, she had not spoken to him since their mother’s funeral. He was expelled from Ohio State because he hit a professor who he claimed denigrated his writing ability. For the next twenty years he sent that professor a copy of every story that he published: which given Ellison prolificness showed just how much he was determined to show he’d won. He was married five times in his life, and except for the last, they all lasted only a few years and in some cases only a few weeks. Once he had a relationship with an actress, but according to her he ending when he caught her smoking dope in his house. Ellison almost never took responsibility for his part in the end of his marriage, and in fact called his first marriage so horrible that he frequently referred to it in his non-fiction writing and sometimes even in his fiction writing.

Ellison spent several years in Hollywood and was apparently a beast to everyone who worked there. He is the author of ‘The City on the Edge of Forever’, considered the greatest episode of Star Trek ever written but after producer Gene Roddenbery rewrote it he repeatedly criticized it, later called it a fatally inept treatment. He eventually resigned from Star Trek and spent a lot of time an energy basically shitting on the show. He never let go of this and in March of 2009, sued CBS seeking payments of receipts from merchandising and publishing, naming the WGA for acting on his behalf. He used the pseudonym Cordwainer Bird to alert the public to situations in which he felt his creative contribution to a project had been mangled by others.

That may be in part while so many of Ellison contemporaries, including Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Robert Block, enjoyed vast success in Hollywood equivalent to literary success, Ellison has had to date only a single one of his story was ever adapted into a film. In large part this is due to his own constant and unfiltered contempt for Hollywood which he showed in almost every element of his non-fiction writing. He famously wrote a column called ‘The Glass Teat’ in which he regularly wrote negatively on television and published a film criticism article for awhile which was similarly dismissive of most films. He also showed a very great hatred for fiction itself. In a story called ‘The New York Review of Bird’, his nom de plume Cordwainer Bird looks at the New York Review of Books – all of which have books that are significantly more profitable and read then his own – and uncovers the darker secret of the New York literary establishment before slaughtering all of those same writers.

 This is, at best, an amount of petty jealousy for a man unable to accept the fact that his books were not as popular as other. At worst, it shows a man who every chance he got, hated every time his books were classified in science fiction. I have several copies of his books when they were reissued in the Edgeworks collections at the turn of the century. Many of them have on their dust jackets blatant calls that I have little doubt Ellison authored arguing that if you found these books in the Sci-Fi section, you should berate the bookstore owner who did so or commit violence against whoever did. This is a strange attitude for a man who was friends with so many writers in science fiction and was more than willing to publish their works. But so much of Ellison’s attitude in all his writing is “what is good for thee is not good for me.” Considering that Ellison won so many awards for writing science fiction, you’d think it would be a point of hypocrisy to take awards for his work but not want them to share space with other winners of the prizes. But not surprisingly, Ellison never admitted the contradiction.

Reading all of Ellison’s work – the fiction and non-fiction – you see a loathsome man. I’ve read dozens of his short stories; I can’t remember one with anything resembling a happy ending. For Ellison, dystopian was too good a word for his writing: there’s an argument he was the very first doom-porn writer. Every single word he ever wrote was telling his reader just how shitty the world was. It didn’t matter if he was writing in the present, in the future or on an alien world, whether he was talking about individual people, a group of people or society. In his mind, nuclear annihilation or destruction from an alien race – something that happened quite a bit - was too good for us.

And it’s not like he held any higher regard for other civilizations: I remember his story ‘The Region Between’ in which he makes it clear all alien civilizations are, in the heart as horrible as man, that the gods are insane and monstrous and he ends the story destroying the entire universe – something he did at least twice more in his fiction. It’s kind of impressive that so many people loved his work, considering how much of it was just the same version of story over and over.

It would be simple – too simple – to call Ellison a leftist and be done with it. He was binary in his thinking when it came to politics. In one of his stories, one of his characters has to target seven political figures, including Richard Daley, LBJ and George Wallace, who have targeted by an alien civilization to destroy Earth. Taking place during the 1968 election, he essentially has his hero say it makes no difference if Humphrey or Nixon wins – something that, like all leftists, he never took back.

But for all his problems with how society was now, there was also an overwhelming nostalgia factor in his work. In one of his most famous stories Jeffy is Five, the protagonist has a friend who has been stuck as five years old while everyone else has grown older. One day he goes to see him and finds out that his friend has the ability to hear new episodes of radio shows that ended decades ago, gets prizes from cereal boxes that stopped giving them, and can take him to films that stopped existing long ago. When Jeffy ends up dying at the end of the story, the protagonist is heartbroken not so much by the death of his friend, but that he can’t get access to his past anymore.

Ellison spent a lot of his non-fiction raging against corporate America but he was also blindly against the rise of the New Hollywood. He famously loathed not only the work of Brian DePalma, causing a scene and walking out on such films as Dressed to Kill but also famously hating The Omen. He showed a similar contempt for such movies as Back to the Future and was also looking more to the past culture such as certain comic strips rather than finding inspiration in the present.

I think that is, in large part, why so many critics and peers revered Ellison and he doesn’t have the same popularity as so many of his contemporaries. Ellison knew very well how the game was played by everyone else, he saw how everyone else was doing it and knew that if he bent just a little, he could have that too. Instead he spent his entire career being utterly inflexible and blaming literally everyone in the world for his problems other than himself. There are many creative forces who have this attitude – Alan Moore and David Chase are vastly similar in temperament towards Hollywood – and they are revered in a certain circle because of their refusal to compromise in the face of society. That this is seen by these people not as a weakness but something for all people to aspire is not surprising, but it shows the contradiction. They may think that they are producing art and that means they should have final say over those who make money off it. That they are ignoring the fact that they are ostensibly making money off themselves – in Ellison’s case, suing over it – is a contradiction that never occurs to so many critics, who see it only as art and not content.

Ellison has been dead and gone for more than five years. Like so many writers, his reputation will fade and only his work remain. At least that would have happened at an earlier time, I don’t know for sure now. But to ensure his legacy, I have a suggestion to Straczynski:

I believe there needs to be a Harlan Ellison oral history project. For Ellison’s entire career we heard only his version of events and we were told that he was the final arbiter. While those who are still alive and who remember him, you need to interview them. You need to go to every convention he attended and said something horrible to the masses. You need to get people to pore over every single lawsuit he filed over his long and litigious life. You need to go to Ohio and track down whatever childhood friends of Ellison and his family were and get their side of the story. You need to track down the families and friends of all the women he married and find out if the failures of his marriages were entirely on him. You need to track down his former publishers and find out all of the horrible things that were involved in it. You need to track down the families of his editors, his collaborators, anyone who worked with him in Hollywood.

Once you have completed that,, you need to offer it to anyone who read Ellison’s work. Offer it at a discount price. Then once they’ve all read it, see if there are any people who still want to be buy Ellison’s fiction.

And as to his non-fiction, put in an archive at his estate. I’ve read a lot of it over the years; it is, kindly, some of the most grievance filled screeds I’ve read in my entire life. I don’t think anyone should be forced to read it, and the estate shouldn’t make a dime off it.

Oh and one more thing. Every single collection of Ellison’s work, from now until eternity, will only be listed under sci-fit, regardless of whether it is or not. And all of the proceeds will go to two charities: The Daughters of St. Crispin and The Audubon Society. The former is a society for shoemakers (which is what a cordwainer is) and we all know what the Audubon society is for. Ellison might hate that, but it’s the kind of punishment he’d admire if it was done to others.