The Myths of Peak TV, Part 2: Or Where I Was When The Sopranos Debuted

 

I was beginning two things around January of 1999: my freshman year of college and my initial steps into becoming a TV critic.

It’s worth remembering what the technological world was like in 1999. The internet was still in its formative stages and we weren’t that far removed from dialup. Your average cell phone (which no one in my family owned at that period) was something that took up your entire pocket. DVDs were only starting to come into existence and most people could barely program their VCR’s (I certainly couldn’t) Back then, if you missed an episode of your favorite show you had to hope that the network you watched it on would rerun it sometime that year and if you didn’t see it, you had to pray that the show made it into syndication where if you were lucky, a syndicate channel or a fringe pay cable channel might show it in a rerun at a time you could see it. Maybe.

Most original programming was on network TV. Basic cable had some original programming but most of it was of mediocre quality. There was some original programming on HBO, Cinemax and Showtime but the lion’s share of it was what could politely be called soft-core and that pertained to even the few series that weren’t directly pornographic. HBO had made some waves with shows like Dream On  that was as much known for its sex scenes than any original content. In all honesty Showtime had made more strides in the mid-1990s than HBO was with intriguing comedies such as Rude Awakening and Linc’s and minority based dramas such as Resurrection Blvd and Soul Food. HBO was known for some quality TV movies which were doing well at the Emmys the past few years but no one was willing to argue that it was a groundswell for creative programming. Yes there had been shows such as The Larry Sanders Show and Sex and The City but the network considered them in the same breath as they did Arliss and Tracy Ullman.

I should mention that after a fair amount of wearing my family down, I had convinced them to subscribe to HBO and Showtime as a pay cable service the previous year. I’d seen previews of some of their original programming (this tended to happen around Thanksgiving) but my motives were not, shall we say, leaning in that direction. It was the more, ahem, adult programming and films I was interested in. And to be honest, the average cable subscriber in the 1990s probably thought that was what basically what they were good for. I’d become fascinated by other HBO programs – Mr. Show,  Dennis Miller Live, much of their comedy specials which then as now were remarkable – but the idea of television at the level of network was inconceivable to a nineteen year old.

So I had HBO on Sunday January 10, 1999 and I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing at 9pm when the first episode of The Sopranos debuted.

I was watching The X-Files.

So, according to the Nielsen ratings, were 21.25 million other viewers. The episode was called ‘The Rain King’ and Mulder and Scully were being called into investigate freakish weather phenomena in flyover country. The highlight of the episode was when a tornado lifted up a cow and launched it into the motel room Mulder was staying in.

This was not, I should add, a very good episode of the series: in fact the show was in the process of beginning to fall from its peak quality from 1994 to 1998. I’d like to say this was only clear in hindsight but even at nineteen it was becoming clear that the show I’d watched and love for four and a half years wasn’t’ the same. I wasn’t wild about the tonal shift from scares to comedy which made up much of the next two seasons, any hope I had the mythology was ever going to make sense was essentially falling apart and the series, which had been nominated for Best Drama that last four years, was about to fall out of favor with the Emmys, not being nominated that year.

Nevertheless like most viewers I remained steadfast to the show that brought me and while I knew of The Sopranos existence and due to the way cable worked had multiple occasions to watch it on Sundays at 9 during the show’s first season the only show I cared about at that time was The X-Files. Indeed, the night of ‘College’ the episode now considered one of the most important in all of television history I was watching The X-Files. To be clear that night the series was airing the first part of what the show had publicized as ‘Full Disclosure’ in which they promised to reveal every single detail about the mythology to the viewer after five and a half seasons. Had they actually been willing to wrap up the whole mythology – and end the series the following year, which many thought they would – it might have had a bigger impact among culture than it did. But the fact remains myself and roughly 18.7 million other viewers were watching that episode on February 7th which by the most generous estimate is anywhere from four to five times as many people who were watching that particular ‘landmark moment’ in TV history.

And it’s worth noting that there were many other things going on during the several months that The Sopranos were on the air and indeed until the network season ended in May that were much more significant to the average viewer during that period. Here’s just a sample of some of the events that were going during this crowded era.

Around the same time of ‘College’ the television world was shaken when Doug Ross departed County General in the middle of Season 5 of ER. George Clooney, the heartthrob of the series, had decided to try his luck in movies and many viewers wondered whether he or the hit show he was leaving would regret the decision. As we all know, it worked out just fine for both Clooney and ER: the show was still number 1 in the Nielsen ratings for the next two years.

By the end of Season 6 of NYPD Blue, the series went through a death that was more shocking then that of Jimmy Smits’s Bobby Simone the previous November. Sylvia Costas, the ADA who was Andy Sipowicz’s wife ended up being killed by a stray bullet in the midst of a storyline that had taken up most of the second half of Season 6. This shocked more people than Bobby’s death; people had known Smits’s was departing; no one had been prepared for the fact that Sharon Lawrence was about to leave. (In hindsight, this decision may have been the point where the series jumped the shark.)

Chicago Hope, which had been nominated for Best Drama the first three years it was on the air ended its fifth season with something nearly as shocking. Jeffrey Geiger, played by Mandy Patinkin in the first season before he inexplicably left the cast, returned to the series to fire almost everyone who had been with the show in the four years since he’d left. Many of the actors had been planning to leave at the end of the season – including Peter Berg and Christine Lahti – but this decision still rubbed many fans of the series the wrong way.

And The Practice, the surprise winner of the Emmy for Best Drama in 1998, had since moved to Sunday nights as well and had become one of the biggest hits on TV. It ended a thrilling season with a stabbing of Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams) the ambitious lawyer in the title firm as well as Bobby Donnell’s lover. The show involved the investigation into her assault as well as her struggle to survive. And it ended with a note of joy – Bobby proposing to Lindsay – and an incredible shock: that the man who had likely killed her was George Vogelman, a man whose trial for murder because the severed head of a victim had been found in his medical bag and whose involvement with the firm had hurt its reputation, both criminally and civilly.

There were also several major departures of long-running series from network TV in 1999. The final seasons of the comedies Home Improvement, Mad About You and The Nanny all-aired as did the final episodes of Deep Space Nine,  a show which many consider the inspiration for so much of the serialized television of today. I was more concerned about the cancellation of Homicide which also came to an end that year, though whether it was planned or unexpected remains unclear a quarter of a century later. (I will say that if it wasn’t, the writers really did a very good job of making it seem they were prepared.) And perhaps the more significant debut was Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night a half-hour series that no one could tell if it was a drama or comedy but quickly developed a following big enough to get renewed for a second season.

I as a viewer was aware of many of these events at the time, even if I wasn’t regularly watching any of the series at that point in my viewing career. More importantly,  I can state with confidence that with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine (it was syndicated and viewership of those shows is often hard to learn) every single one of these shows on a weekly basis was watched by a substantial number more people than a single episode of the first season of The Sopranos. That doesn’t mean that many of these people weren’t watching The Sopranos too, of course, or that they weren’t aware of it. But the idea that suddenly in January of 1999, the entire world stopped what it was doing to watch a show on HBO on Sunday Nights, is simply not true. The myth that critics have been using doesn’t correlate with the math.

Speaking for myself I was aware of The Sopranos but I didn’t watch it when it was on the air in its original run: I was watching The X-Files and then I would watch The Practice with my mother. Indeed, it wasn’t until that summer that I watched it at all.

It’s worth reminding viewers that in the pre-streaming, no real DVD world, reruns were as prominent on cable as they were everywhere else in the summer. And because in 1999 no one in their right mind would consider binge-watching a realistic way to view a series, HBO would air its series over the course of thirteen weeks. Furthermore back then, it was their habit to rerun all episodes of previous seasons in a weekly fashion. I had caught up with OZ by this point and I would do so with many of their other series, including The Wire and Big Love down the road. It was in this fashion I ended up watching the entire series over the course of my summer vacation in 1999.

Now I’m not sure whether I was experienced at 20 to quantify greatness. I’d seen a couple of what were then contemporary series I was willing to rank at that level. I was already willing to quantify on Homicide at that level and definitely The X-Files. I thought that Frasier deserved the Emmys it got (though even then I knew that didn’t count for much) and I was quickly coming to consider The Practice a masterpiece. I was slowly, mostly through syndication, becoming won over to the high quality of the original Law & Order.

So I was aware that there much to be impressed by in regard to The Sopranos. The acting impressed me immensely though as much as I loved James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli I was more impressed by the lead actresses. I remember being particularly annoyed that Lorraine Bracco didn’t get nominated for Best Actress that year. I remember being impressed by many of the guest performances, including that of Jerry Adler and the doomed John Heard. And I was willing to acknowledge that there were many storylines I found impressive in the first season, in particular the possibility of Big Pussy being a rat and how Artie Bucco would deal with the fact Tony had blown up his restaurant. I could tell there was a lot of talent on hand and I could see the ability of what David Chase had created.

But for all of that, if you had asked me having seen The Sopranos by the time of the Emmys in September of 1999 if The Sopranos was the most groundbreaking thing I’d seen on television in my brief history of viewing, I would have answered in a heartbeat: no. And while I probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate many of them at the time, in hindsight there is one big reason: by that point I was one of OZ’s biggest fans.

I have been told by at least one major Sopranos fan who criticized by admonishment of both Chase and the series that OZ was nowhere near as groundbreaking as The Sopranos. Well I’d seen the second season finale of OZ which aired months before The Sopranos debuted. Let me give a brief synopsis of events in that episode: I remember not only because I saw the episode multiple times over the years but because one of my first forays into TV criticism was a draft of an episode criticism that I wrote at nineteen but never published.

In the opening minutes two members of the Aryan brotherhood blackmailed the two characters who were essentially the comedy relief on Oz. They’d spent the season digging a tunnel and the Aryans had threatened them. These were the most benign members in Em City and we learned that they had loosened the structures of the tunnel so it was collapse and bury the Aryans alive. When it was exposed, they got away with it because they told the guards that they had done so under the orders of the Aryans and were terrified.

Then a priest who had been recently parole because of sexual abuse asked to return to Oz so he could find a place to sleep until he could get a room. There were moments where it looked like this would be a redemptive storyline – Father Mukada, who’d had issues with him in the previous episode, hired him to work in the chaplain’s office and the man he’d fondled as a boy came to apologize. Then Schillinger, who found the priest offensive, arranged to have him crucified in the gym and we saw every detail of it, including the nails pounded in. (The priest survived but didn’t return to Oz.)

Miguel Alvarez had been ordered to blind a CO or he would be killed by the Latinos. That episode he did just that – and we saw the CO’s empty eye sockets. Alvarez ended up hiding in Mukada’s office and holding him hostage out of desperation and was about to slit his throat with the scalpel he’d use to blind the CO  before the SORT team broke in and beat him severely before throwing him into solitary.. We saw every blow land and Alvarez would essentially be in solitary for the majority of the series going forward.

And perhaps most importantly the Beecher-Schillinger-Keller triangle that would make up the crux of the entire series reached the end of its first phase. Keller had spent most of the second season earning Beecher’s trust, seducing him and his return to solitary had caused Beecher to start drinking again. By the end of this segment, Beecher learned the truth about Keller and Schillinger’s relationship and the two of them broke his arms and legs.

We also saw in that episode Ryan O’Reilly take responsibility for his part in the murder of Dr. Nathan’s husband, Adebisi be framed for murder and be sent to the mental ward of Oswald, alongside one of the people he’d raped earlier in the season and Kareem Said, consider clemency from the Governor and then in what was a dramatic monologue confront him publicly on his sins, and refuse his pardon. It was all things considered, one of the least tumultuous season finales in the seven seasons Oz was on the air.

The thing about OZ that was revolutionary about it was that is always willing to go for the jugular on everything. It was claustrophobic, bloody, pushed the boundaries on what was accepted on television at the time (and in many ways, kept pushing them in ways The Sopranos never would) and nevertheless used that darkness to cover a vast array of subjects, not all of them related merely to crime. I’ve already written how it broke ground on such ideas as faith and consent in ways many series still haven’t even attempted, was even more groundbreaking on the LGBTQ+ front in a way no series had even tried to be before and perhaps most importantly had one of the most racially diverse casts in television to that point in time. There’s an argument that shows like The Wire and Orange is the New Black couldn’t have existed without OZ, and when we first meet David and Keith in Six Feet Under, they’re not just watching the show to plug the series. I can’t imagine Shonda Rhimes being able to do half of what’s she done on network TV if OZ hadn’t existed and there’s an excellent chance so much of Showtime’s programming for the next twenty years – from Queer as Folk to The L Word to Dexter would have been impossible without the ground that OZ forged.

OZ was even revolutionary in its opening credits. Every season, the credits who show in a letterboxed framed individual shots that were going to appear throughout the next eight episodes. Because of both the lighting and the fact that none of the cast members were shown in the frame, the viewer wouldn’t realize the significance until the episodes played out over the course of the season. To use the most memorable example, in the opening credits of Season 3, we saw a man’s hand holding a gun in a cell and checking if it had bullets. It was not until the final minutes of Season 3 that we realized which cell it was, who had the gun and who’d given it to him. And unlike The Sopranos where they would show objects and never have them payoff, the consequences of this gun in OZ would not only be immediate starting in Season 4 but have repercussions for the entire season to come. In all my years of viewing TV, the closest I’ve seen anyone come to trying a trick like that would be Breaking Bad on multiple occasions.

By those standards its perhaps understandable that I had the initial impression that OZ was truly a game changer and that while The Sopranos was a brilliant masterpiece, it didn’t exactly break ground in the same way.  There’s actually an argument that in a weird way The Sopranos was by far the most conventional of the first five dramas of the revolution. (No I’m not crazy: hear me out.)

By the time I had watched a single episode of The Sopranos I was prepared for violence to come at any moment and that death could come for anybody. It’s kind of hard not to be shocked by that when the premiere episode of OZ killed off the character you’ve been led to assume would be the lead by setting him on fire at the end of it. And many of the deaths on The Sopranos were shocking perhaps in their suddenness, but not necessarily in their method. Anyone who was a fan of Six Feet Under knew that every episode would open with a death but it might not be the person you expected and it certainly would be how you expected it. (I don’t think I ever saw a character on The Sopranos die because she saw a bunch of blow-up dolls accidentally released into the air, believed the Rapture was coming and ran outside, only to get hit by a car.) On The Wire you basically got a much more direct lesson than what David Chase was trying to tell us on The Sopranos about how absolutely broken every element of the American system was, and to be clear it took him nearly to the end of the series to acknowledge it wasn’t just the Mafia that was always going to do the easy thing rather than the best thing. I think we got that by the time the first season of The Wire was half over. And the dialogue on The Sopranos had wit and brilliance but it was nothing compared to what the average character said on Deadwood in a single line. (Chase famously loathed both Milch and Aaron Sorkin because he claimed, ‘people didn’t really talk like that’.)

In that sense while The Sopranos didn’t follow a traditional narrative, it was not that different from the basic arc of what we saw on network TV. David Chase was trying to tell everybody who watched that characters do not change and will always choose the path of least resistance, even if that results in violence or death. The thing is, network TV had been thriving on this very system for half a century. You knew that week after week exactly what you were getting from the characters on NYPD Blue or ER or Law & Order. And the viewer learned very quickly what we were going to get week after week on The Sopranos. The only real difference – and I’ll admit it was a huge one – was that Tony Soprano and his family, both real and criminal were never going to change, always engage in selfish and self-centered behavior and that people were going to die on a regular basis as a consequence. That’s a very big variation on the formula of cop shows and medical shows, I grant you, but its still a formula. I don’t deny that was groundbreaking to what critics were used to from television at the time but compared to what Oz had already done and what series such series as 24, The Shield and Lost were going to do very shortly, it’s almost pedestrian.

So why did so many critics and audiences turn to The Sopranos and hail it as the symbol of the revolution and not only did Oz not considered that way, during its original run most critics were mixed towards in it  in  a way they wouldn’t be to so many of the shows going forward? Well, to state the obvious, Oz had one of the most diverse casts in TV history and The Sopranos, charitably, did not.

I’m kind of amazed that neither at the time or even in later loving reconstructions of it from both Alan Sepinwall and Brett Martin, no one picked up on the fact that in an era where such network hits as Friends and Frasier were being attacked for not having any African-American characters even as guest stars The Sopranos went through its entire run with not a single minority cast member and almost no minority regulars at all and this was not only not criticized but ignored. Indeed  in Sepinwall’s book The Revolution was Televised, only two other series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mad Men had nearly as bad a racial disparity. The former would at least have African-American regulars in arcs over its run and the latter justified its decision by claiming it was looking at the 1960s from a strictly silent majority perspective. (It’s worth remembering, however, Matthew Weiner the head showrunner also worked on The Sopranos in its later years.)

And that is perhaps the most fantastic element of The Sopranos. Tony Soprano is the boss of one of the major crime syndicates in New Jersey and yet somehow in six seasons, the only threats to his power are technically internecine. He faces off against rival families or power grabs from within, yet somehow none of the mafia in either New Jersey or New York has any struggles for turf involving any kind of minority gangs. You’re telling me that somehow in the most diverse states in America Tony never ran into the Jersey equivalent of Avon Barksdale or Marlo Stansfield? There wasn’t a single runner or soldier from any African-American gang in all of New Jersey? We would see in Boardwalk Empire that African-Americans were having gang wars in 1920s New Jersey but there were absolutely none in the present? Christopher never bought his dope from any African-American pushers? There were no black convicts in the jails that so many of the gangsters spent much of their time in? It’s one thing for no one in Carmela’s circle or Meadow’s schools to be minorities, though once Meadow went to Columbia that became harder to fathom but I don’t even remember seeing any evidence of Colombians, Mexican or any LatinX gangsters in all of New Jersey.

One of the major strikes against Peak TV has justifiably been that so many of the best series centered on ‘White Male Antiheroes’. But The Sopranos took it to a new level. Tony Soprano was a White Male Antihero, whose entire crew was made up of white male antiheroes and whose only enemies were white male antiheroes. The cynical part of me wonders if that is perhaps one of the major reasons The Sopranos was by far the biggest commercial hit of HBO during its first decade of Peak TV. Considering that The Wire struggled season after season for renewal and Deadwood had more black recurring roles in three seasons then the Sopranos did in seven, then it does make you wonder why this is the show that so many critics consider revolutionary and the greatest ever.

And not to harp on the point, the most watched show on HBO during its first decade peaked at 11 million viewers per season in 2002. These days that would be a huge number for a network show. But in 2002, if any show had this many viewers by their fourth season, it was a sign that the viewership had irrevocably declined and cancellation was around the corner.

The networks must have looked at the numbers of The Sopranos in 1999 and been concerned but if anyone of them had been worried by it, they would have been justifiably laughed out of their jobs. Five to six million viewers was a huge number for HBO but at the end of the 1999 season, Homicide was cancelled because it was only averaging a little more than seven million viewers a week. It took an immense amount of critical drive from TV Guide to Sports Night to get a second season and it was averaging eight million viewers a week. I’m pretty sure, though I can’t prove it with certainty, more viewers were watching the final season of Deep Space Nine then the first season of The Sopranos.

And this disparity between the lens of the critic and what the public was watching during the 2000s is a circle that no chronicler of that era has ever acknowledged. When The Shield debuted in March of 2002, it was the most watched basic cable show in history with 4.8 million viewers. Less than a month later, Once and Again – a critically acclaimed and beloved series which had won multiple Emmys by this point – was cancelled by ABC after three seasons because it was averaging barely 7.5 millions viewers per episode – not enough to justify keeping it on the air. I know that because I barely noticed the premiere of The Shield and I was emotionally devastated when Once & Again was cancelled.

To be very clear I’m not denying the immense quality of so much of the television that was on the air during this period. I watched almost all of it and I agree with the critical assessment. But the myth of Peak TV is that everybody in America was watching these shows to and while that may be true, the numbers of the Nielsen ratings paint a very different picture. And in order to understand the era of Peak TV we have to acknowledge what the cultural milestones of television – many of them simultaneously occurring with the rise of Peak TV  - were because they are critical to understanding not only the reality of what people were watching, but in many cases why there was so much of it.

In my next article in this series I will deal with many of the shows that were debuting while The Sopranos was beginning its run, almost all of them on network TV and all of them vital to both the Zeitgeist and how television existed during the first decade of the 2000s.

 

 

Why We've Gotten Greta Thunberg Wrong From The Start: A More Personal Op-Ed Then Normal

 

A little personal history before I get to the point.

As I’ve mentioned in related articles in my teenage years I was diagnosed as being on the spectrum. There have been many symptoms that I’ve had to battle with over the years, including both obsessions and irrational anger.

As I’ve mentioned in another article, much of that anger was directed at public transportation. There are many legitimate reasons to be frustrated with the New York Public Transportation system (I was reminded of that recently) but my frustration for much of my twenties was with its scheduling. I couldn’t accept that buses never arrived on or even close to the time on their schedules, I couldn’t tolerate that the subways never seemed to correspond with how the trains I needed to take,  and I regarded any deviation from that schedule as a capital offense. Consequently I spent much of my twenties taking out my rage against many employees of that system, including bus drivers, train conductors and other assorted fair conductors. I have never been the quietest person and I’m tall and gangly, so that can easily become frightening to outsiders and even some of my closest friends at times. All of this terrified my parents who thought one day I would say or do something in front of the wrong person and end up being arrested.

It took a long time – longer than I would like to admit – and a lot of therapy for me to realize the error of my ways. I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t irk or frustrate me when these problems occur – and if you are a resident of New York, you know that’s the norm – but I’ve gotten to the point that I accept them as part of how life works.

Now anyone who is under twenty knows that, of course, my parents took the wrong approach. What they should have done is not only acknowledge that my demands were completely righteous but accommodate them in every way possible. I should have not made effort to either find a job or better myself. Rather I should have spent my entire life being taken to visit every single MTA employee and institution in the state of New York to vent my spleen on them. My parents should have sacrificed their livelihood and all of their own lives to drive me around to everyone of these meetings, tell me I was absolutely right at every turn to make this my life’s work and personally promote my efforts not only in the New York media, but around the entire world. I should have been allowed to attend corporate and political meetings in which I was allowed for extended periods to berate and scream at adults for making my life miserable. And of course everyone should have applauded me and hailed me as the voice of a generation.

If you’ve read this past paragraph you will, quite rightfully, think that this attitude is that of a lunatic and an entitled prick. What kind of spoiled brat would think that his opinion about this should be celebrated and saluted by everyone worldwide? I would then ask you to really tell me what the difference is between the scenario I am proposing and what Greta Thunberg has been doing for the last several years.

Now I have been told that there is a very strong possibility Thunberg herself is on the spectrum. I have never more heartily hoped that she isn’t. But even if that were the case, let’s put that aside. Let’s also set aside some of the other stories we’ve heard about her the past year about things in the last year that might have, shall we say, tarnished her halo. I’m telling you that not only is everything Thunberg been doing for the last several years just a variation of what I’ve described, at every level her so called activism is based on so many false pretenses. Let’s deal with what Thunberg has done according to her own Wikipedia page.

Apparently her ‘climate activism began when she persuaded her parents to adopt lifestyle choices that reduced her family’s carbon footprint’. Based on what I’ve seen Thunberg do, I think persuade is a euphemism for ‘screamed at her parents until they decided to listen to her’

She then decided to skip school until after the National election in Sweden in an attempt to influence the outcome. She persuaded other children to skip school to film her. I don’t know what the educational school system in Sweden is like compared to America, but I also know that teenagers don’t need a reason to want to not go to school. She has since gone back to school, so I guess global warming has been solved? Again I’ll get back to that.

I understand she has been leading student climate strike protests Fridays around the world. I’ll get back to that in a minute. She has since convinced her parent to not fly and ‘sail on a carbon free yacht from Plymouth’.

Now I imagine much of us would like to have a carbon free footprint. Not many of us have the resources to afford a yacht nor the time to sail around the world. This would seem to be the definition of white privilege and I guarantee you if either Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or their children took the same approach, millions of leftists would be calling them hypocrites and not believing in their fealty to the cause.

As we all know the only way to get climate action to happen is very complicated and would involve the coordination of basically the entire world. It hasn’t happened since we recognized it as a crisis. All of the best minds of our generation have bene trying to find a way to thread the needle for so long. I recognize the ability of youth to protest but it has to lead to something. The idea of having a teenager being able to address the UN Climate Action Summit is noble, but realistically what did anyone think would happen? The idea that a single person could make a speech that would galvanize millions into doing anything would be too far-fetched for Frank Capra and Disney films would not consider it plausible.

And as all we know Thunberg’s style of speaking is anything but inspirational. She basically scolded the world leaders and shouted: “how dare you?” to their indifference. She was essentially hailed by millions and named the Person of the Year by Time and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for essentially giving the climate change equivalent of what amounts to: “You ruined my life!” when your parents won’t let you go to a party.

Her article makes it clear that her mother had to give up her professional career as an opera singer. When Greta was asked in September of 2021, whether she felt guilty about ended her mother’s career, according to the interviewer she was ‘surprised by the question.” In her own words: “It was her choice. I didn’t make her do anything.” I have no doubt Thunberg might truly believe this.

Now I have suffered from depression and I have had my struggles. I have often struggled with my parents inability to understand my condition. I know that they have made sacrifices for my happiness that must be painful. But the older I get I realize that I appreciate the differences of what they did. I asked them to do what they could to make my life easier. I bitched and moaned a lot – and it must have been hard for them.

But I would never once have demanded of my parents to make the kind of sacrifices that Thunberg has done. And that is because they were never shy about telling me when I was wrong and asking too much. I won’t pretend there weren’t many occasions I didn’t resent them, but I came to realize and even appreciate that they were saying no because they loved me. There’s a standard that the hardest word for a parent to say is ‘no’ and it can be just as hard for their child to hear it. I don’t know what Thunberg’s personal story is but based just on the public persona, it seems clear that her parents never considered saying that word, no matter how much she might have needed to hear it.

It is just as important for parent to do a delicate chance of guiding their children’s path but allow them to make their own choices. This is difficult for any parent and is I can say from my own experience can be excruciating for those who have children with development disabilities. I know far too many painful stories from the experience of myself and my friends and acquaintances all of whom have similar issues to mine.

There is a balance that parents must take between accommodation and indulgence. What I think the difference between the two is  a matter of degree, of doing some things to make the child’s life easier and indulging every single whim regardless whether it is in their best interest. It seems to have become the standard recently – not just for children with disabilities but an entire generation of children – that parenting seems to be entirely about indulgence.

The most recent generation of children seems to have been told by their parents that everything they do is perfect and that they are incapable of failing. Get a poor grade on a test or in a course? Bully the school into changing the grade. The child isn’t making friends with their peers in their grades? Force play dates so the children have to become friends. A child’s team loses a competition? Make sure everyone gets a trophy just for participating. It used to be said that defeat builds character and success was built on the back of failures. The 21^st century seems to have raised a bunch of children who have been taught that their failures are just a different standard of success and that they apparently have been undefeated. It’s one thing for a parent to tell their child that in their eyes they can never fail; it’s another to make sure that they will never fail in anyone’s eyes, even if they do.

Which brings me to the definition of Thunberg as an activist which only works by the definition of what so many people now consider activism. For centuries activism in the world was a means to end. Activists such as Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Mandela spent years of their life demonstrating and leading but that activism was built on the principle of leading to political or legislative change in the nations they lived in. They  won the Nobel Peace Prize because their activism was just the means to a political end and they achieved both. I realize so many winners of the Nobel Peace Prize throughout its history have diminished whatever meaning it might have but I would think that should have to do more to be nominated for it then simply encouraging a bunch of teenagers around the world to skip school and essentially call a bunch of the greatest world leaders assembled monsters and idiots. Yet that is what apparently so many seemingly intelligent people seem to believe merits it. A friend of mine once said that he’s thrown his share of public tantrums and no one ever put him on the cover of Time for it and looking at her entire ‘record as an activist’, I couldn’t put it better myself.

I’m sure I will be sent a lot of angry screeds telling me some variation of ‘How dare you” or “Greta Thunberg’s a hero”. I will respond with the paraphrase of Chris Rock line: “Aquaman’s a hero! He can talk to the fishes! What has Greta ever done?” There’s no evidence that Thunberg has done anything to change the conversation on climate change one iota, not positively. If those same activists who keep telling us that we are coming close to an existential crisis for the planet are telling the truth, then apparently Thunberg’s public demonstrations have not done anything to  stop her future from being stolen. They’ve done a lot to make Thunberg world famous and an ad hoc leader in the climate activist community and that honestly says far more about what this generation considers activism. Thunberg might have lowered her family’s carbon footprint but apparently it came with her social media footprint exploding. And as we all know that’s all that’s what counts as progress among this entire generation. It’s not about changing the world or saving the world, but about how many likes you can get on the internet. And the fact that an entire generation truly believes that this is what is considered the kind of thing that counts as changing the world is more of an existential threat to our society than climate change will ever be. It certainly terrifies me more.

But this is to be expected when this generation has met the current activist movement. There has always been in every major movement, from abolition and woman’s suffrage to organized labors and civil rights, a fringe movement that will never accept anything other than total victory. All of the great successes in these movements, particularly in the first half of the twentieth century, were achieved when the pragmatists realized that they would have to compromise in order to achieve a greater good. In other words they knew that it was better to make accommodations to achieve most of their goals then to indulge the fringe element and risk getting nothing. Then in the 1960s, both the Black Power movement and the anti-war movement either drove out or shouted down all the pragmatists in their movements and began what can only be described as performative activism where the only goal was to express outrage rather than use it to win any major battle. I don’t argue the outrage was warranted – the abuses by the government in the 1960s and 1970s were horrendous  - but none of the movements during that period were organized towards achieving anything. Raising awareness used to be a means to an end in activism; now it was the ends. And for half a century that seems to be the sole goal of every single activist movement on the left. One doesn’t deny their fears and grievances aren’t merited but beyond expressing outrage at the system, all of these movements are largely performative rather than designed towards any goals. They indulge the participants and have no room for accommodation of anyone besides themselves.

The idea that so many people consider Greta Thunberg an ‘environmental activist’ is terrifying but hardly shocking considering how this entire generation seems to have defined ‘activism’. It’s not about changing the world, winning over hearts and minds, or even achieving anything. It’s about shouting at the top of your lungs, regardless whether people listen or even take you seriously, increasing your social media presence and inspiring a generation to do the same. Why should we be shocked that as Thunberg has reached an adult, she has increasingly defied lawful orders to disperse, confrontations with police and being arrested? It’s to be expected by an entire generation of activists who believe confrontation with authority is the point of activism, even if does nothing to further the goals of your movement. Indeed most so called activism has become against things rather than for anything and about deciding all authority deserves no respect even if they’re the only people who can change things. You’d think that her parents, if they care about her as much as mine do, would have urged her not to do what she did because they cared for her well-being and what might happen to her. But apparently they’re fine with it.

And what sickens me more than anything is that even though Thunberg has achieved absolutely nothing to further the goals of the environmental cause, a significant portion of the world has decided to say she is basically a hero and someone to aspire to. They interview her, they give her awards, they call her one of the most influential people in publications. I’ve seen some families of people on the spectrum do things to help their child succeed; almost the entire world has indulged every whim of Thunberg’s and she hasn’t even succeeded at her goals. Her parents should be celebrated in a way; they’ve essentially bought a social movement for their daughter and the  entire media has basically been willing to play along. This would be example of the worst kind of helicopter parenting for any other child, but because Thunberg has made friends with the right people, she’ll be an idol for the rest of her life.

Personally though, as someone who has spent his entire life struggling to just get by with his disorder, who has had to learn harder lessons throughout his life as to what it take for the average person on the spectrum to get by, much less succeed, for someone who understands that our society only works if you meet it halfway and can’t comprehend why so many people believe they are entitled to be indulged, for someone who is much closer to people who have greater struggles than Thunberg and nowhere near the resources that her parents do, I want to be very clear. Speaking not just for myself, but for all the people I know and the countless others who struggle with this disorder, Thunberg not only doesn’t represent us, she is the worst example of what not to do when you have these problems. So to  not only to her, but her parents, her activist colleagues and everybody who genuinely believes she is a hero and someone to be celebrated, I can only use her most famous quote: “How dare you?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Orphan Black Echoes is More Than Just A Pale Imitation of the Original

 

 

In retrospect almost every element of Orphan Black the BBC America series that aired from 2013 to 2017 seemed to be made up of all the worst parts of so many other brilliant sci-fi fantasy series that had come before and a few that came after. The central story of the series involved cloning and if you were a fan of The X-Files you know just how much the series ran that storyline into the ground before they ended it. It involved a child who represented a danger and a new world to a society and that was in a sense one of the most important storylines in the remake of Battlestar Galactica. There were an increasing number of insidious cults that bore the title characters harmed, which describes so much of Lost. There were evil scientific corporations which is at the center of Fringe. And there seemed to be an argument that none of the characters could be taken at face value which is the underlying theme of all of these series. When you throw in the fact that trying to understand the meanings of the episode titles in correlation with the episodes themselves was nearly impossible – something I’ve constantly had issues with shows as varied as Brotherhood and Fargo over -  I should never been able to watch, much less enjoy the series. Yet despite all of that I was riveted by everything that happened week-to-week and felt immensely satisfied by the series finale in a way I haven’t for almost any mythology series I’ve watched in more than a quarter of a century. Why was that?

A large part of it, of course, had to do with the incredible work of Tatiana Maslany as all of the clones that we saw throughout the series five year run. Maslany’s performance was by far one of the great achievements on television in the 2010s and arguably in TV history. Her Emmy win for Best Actress in a Drama in 2016 was one of the most gratifying to me in the last decade and one of the reasons I knew that I was onboard with the Critics Choice TV awards was that Maslany had by that point won two consecutive Best Actress Awards in that same category in 2013 and 2014. Maslany had to play four completely different regular characters at the start of the series and several different variations during the run. Throughout the show Maslany also had to have variations on the character play different variations which led to both great suspense and great humor, often in the same moment. When you throw in the fact that in many of the episodes, several versions of her were onscreen at once – most memorably in a ‘sistras dance party’ in the Season 2 finale -  there’s an argument Maslany had the most demanding role of any performer in the entire 2010s.

There was also the fact that Orphan Black was, from the start, a groundbreaking series when it came to the LGBTQ+ community. This was clear not only for Sarah Manning’s adopted brother Felix (the wonderful Jordan Gervase) but the fact that one clone Cosima was having a lesbian relationship with Daphne, a scientist who was supposed to be monitoring her and who fell in love with her instead. It was because of their relationship that the two began to work together against the corporate overlords that were trying to use the clones. Throw in the fact that at least one clone had transitioned to male by the time we met them and at least one male clone was gay himself, and Orphan Black may have been one of the most inclusive shows for the past generation.

Finally there was the fact that for all the complexities of the mythology Orphan Black was about family more than anything else. Not just the sisterhood of the clones which was deservedly front and center, but the troubled relationship Sarah Manning had with her own toddler daughter Kira and her adopted family, including her surrogate mother. Many mythology shows concentrate far too much on the science and forget the human element.  By the time the show ended in 2017 I cared less about the story making any sense but whether everything would work out for the ‘sistras’ and their family. In that, I was more than rewarded.

Now considering that we live in the age of the spinoff and the reboot, it was a matter of time before we knew we’d be returning to the world of Orphan Black. And indeed in the fall of 2022, AMC+ announced that we would be getting Orphan Black: Echoes. After numerous delays including the strike, it finally premiered on both AMC and BBC America last week. And what strikes me about it after two episodes is that the writers have decided not to – well, it has to be said – clone the original. It would have been easy to do what every other spinoff has been doing for the last decade: either continue the story years with the original characters years older: (see The Connors and …And Just Like That) or take place in the same world a few years later and have holdovers from the original and a whole new cast of characters (see every Walking Dead spin-off). Echoes, however, seems to be striking a different path, one that I have admired and loved in the recently cancelled Quantum Leap and the return of Twin Peaks.

Echoes begins with a woman named Lucy waking up in what appears to be a country cabin. There’s a very nervous scientist in a lab coat who asks her to read a series of words. Lucy begins to panic as she realizes she can’t remember certain things and while the scientist tries to calm her down, Lucy eventually panics. She eventually manages to break the door down – and finds out she’s in a combination lab and warehouse. The nervous scientist comes out and tells her: “This isn’t how I wanted you to find out.” Lucy then sees a tank full of goo and what looks to be someone exactly like her. The scientist tells her that she has been essentially created from a 4D printer. Lucy freaks out and runs outside.

The series then cuts to two years later and tells us the year is 2052. Already this is a step forward from Orphan Black which for all its futuristic trappings was solidly in the present. We are in a brave new world that has vast technological advances which are, by and large, just more advanced versions of the world today.

Lucy is now living as a migrant worker in Massachusetts. (The story takes place in an around Boston.) She has since becomes involving with a former soldier and his young daughter, who happens to be deaf and its clear she has built a life with family and friends. Its clear Lucy has not gotten over what has happened to her but is trying to build a life. That gets shot to sunshine when she is in an accident and is hospitalized. The scientist we’ve met learns about it. That day, a corporate goon comes after Lucy and tries to track down in a way that can be called “by any means necessary”. It becomes violent and Lucy seems doomed – until her surrogate daughter finds out what’s wrong and shoots the goon dead. Rather than go to the police, Lucy tells her new family to go on the run and heads to Boston to get answers.

Her next stop is a rehab house where she came a year ago and she tells him that the people who came after her a year ago are back again. She doesn’t fill in the details but she ends up going to the corporation and running into a girl named Jules (Amanda Fix). Lucy recognizes her in a way that doesn’t make sense to the viewer or us – but we soon realize that she has a mark on her that Lucy and something close to a brand.

By this point we have learned who the scientist was at the start – its Kira Manning, the daughter who was at the center of all the action in the original series. Now played by Keeley Hawes, we get our clearest picture of her when Uncle Felix (Gervase much older, but no less debauched) visits her and says that she’s been out of touch. Kira has grown up to be head of an organization that provides organs to people who need them and has become such a major figure for good that the UN apparently calls upon her regularly. She’s also a mother to a child named Lucas and she does seem close to her family. But it’s clear that there are parts of her that are badly broken. She hasn’t talked to her son in months and its clear its entirely on her part. She hasn’t confided in Felix in a long time and its not clear if she’s talked to her mother in that period. There are numerous pictures of her family, and numerous sistras there but through random conversations we can tell she’s been traumatized. She mentions all of the therapy she had to go through (understandable considering what happened during the series) but she’s clearly uncomfortable beyond that. In a critical conversation at the end of Felix’s visit, she asks him: “What if I’m not really good? What if I’m just selfish?”  By this point we know she’s not only involved with Lucy’s creation but very likely Jules and given how nervous she is about her work, she’s clearly terrified about something that we’re not yet privy too. Considering how much of the original Orphan Black was about the sins of the parents, it would be fitting if a sad irony if Kira was playing those same sins out.

I have not yet mentioned that Lucy is played by that brilliant talent Krysten Ritter. Ritter has been a part of Peak TV almost since it began with roles on Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars but from the moment she appeared as Jane, the landlord who became the first real victim of Walter White during Breaking Bad, you know you’re in for a treat when she shows up on Peak TV. Best known for riveting work in the title role of Jessica Jones, her characters are proud in how much they are determined to survive. It’s clear watching Lucy that she has been able to do that for as long as she existed but there is a softness to her that we rarely get to see in Ritter’s work, particularly with the people she loves. She is paranoia, reckless and incredibly dangerous, but given everything that’s happened to her you really can’t blame her. Like Maslany, Ritter carries this series when it is in danger of not working.

It's worth noting that the series has been available on a streaming service for awhile so many of the secrets are known to those who subscribe to AMC+. I don’t and have only seen the first two episodes. Looking at the cast of performers, I can tell by some of the names that there’s clearly a larger link involved and it’s pretty clear that indeed, what we see is because of Kira’s decision to do something in regard to her family. That said,  I give credit for Echoes for not doing the obvious. It would have been easy to just have Ritter run into incarnations of herself but what we see is that in fact she and Jules are just a younger and older version of the same source. Neither have any past. Jules has been adopted because her birth parents supposedly died in a car crash and she has amnesia ever since. She has a grandfather who fills in details but as we learned in the second episode, he’s an actor. It’s also clear like so many of the sistras, Jules is following in their path of criminality. After she has been abducted and escapes from Lucy, she doesn’t tell her father about it and when her adopted brother asks her why she doesn’t, she makes it clear its because she’s selling drugs. Sarah Manning was originally a con artist. It’s also clear the show is leaning in just as busy leaning into being inclusive as before: Lucy is clearly bi and Jules’s adopted brother is gay. And just as important is the concept of family, not so much the one you are born into but the one you make.

 What Echoes seems to be hinting at is whether or not that will be enough to protect you against the evils of the world. That might actually be a more fitting message for an era where we are repeatedly told that all the norms we have will not hold. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Echoes is set in Massachusetts which has been a reliably blue state for years. There’s also an industrialist named Paul Darros who seems to be at the center of so much of the research that’s going on, a corporate philanthropist with a darker edge. “Listen to what he doesn’t say,” an employee tells a new cohort before meeting him for the first time.

The initial reception to Echoes has, as you might expect, not been as glowing as the original. This is hardly shocking considering that it has been the de facto nature of the internet to argue that any new version of a sacred property – even one that is about cloning – is an offense to God and man. The arguments are that the links to the original are tangential and it doesn’t keep what fans wanted from the new version. Paradoxically that’s exactly why I think Echoes works. Rather than bring back Tatiana Maslany for as many new versions as we could get and just continue the original story, it is determined to stay spiritually true to the original while trying to beat its own path.  As someone who was exhausted by clones of former hit and cult series for the past decade I can’t tell you what a relief it is for a spinoff to try to do something original. I prefer a show that uses its source material as a starting point for a new story rather than just does the same narrative we were used too. If I wanted to watch the original Orphan Black I could watch it on streaming. I prefer a series that is  not afraid to fall flat on its face with something different rather than bring out a variation of the same standard.

I grant you its possible my position on Echoes will change as the series continues. It may very well take on the measure the original did and have an increasingly incomprehensible mythology before too long. But at least the new Orphan Black is trying to be different. Considering that it was a show about cloning, you have to give credit for that.

My score: 4 stars.