Back To The Island: Why Jack Vs. Locke Worked Better In Theory Than Execution

 

In the Season 5 volume of Finding Lost, Nikki Stafford identified the three major character conflicts that at various points she thinks define the show: Jack versus Locke, Ben Linus versus Charles Widmore and Jacob versus The Man In Black.

These conflicts seem to have grown more out of necessity than planning on the part of the writers. They figured out early in the series run that a character named Jacob was ultimately going to be responsible for everyone being brought to the island but they wouldn’t mention his name until Season 3 and we wouldn’t see him in the flesh until the finale of Season 5, at which point we also saw the Man in Black. Lost never explained the nature of that conflict until the final season when Jacob was dead.

All things considered all three conflicts worked more as a philosophical construct then what we saw on the screen and it didn’t help that the writers had a habit of abandoned one in favor of another when it suited them. Jack versus Locke essentially played out during much of the first two seasons and then was moved to the background in Season 3 (the two characters only share three minutes of screen time during the whole season, all in two episodes.) Both Ben and Widmore are introduced in Season 2, but Widmore’s relationship to the island isn’t revealed in Season 4 and much of what we see plays in flashbacks in Season 5 at which point the series had moved on to Jacob versus the Man in Black.

I will deal with the flaws of all three conflicts as well as their strengths during the shows run and I think the best place to start is with Jack versus Locke. I also feel compelled to add my personal commentary as a viewer, which after multiple rewatches I feel confident to talk about.

And from my perspective the Jack vs. Locke conflict was one of the weakest stories the show tried to do. I understand the rationale for it: Jack is set up as the Man of Science and Locke as the Man of Faith. That works as an ideological construct and from a philosophical standpoint its one almost every genre show tries during its run. (In Lindelof’s follow-up series The Leftovers, it was executed far better by having Matt, a priest trying to deal with faith in the world after an apocalypse and eventually ending up bottoming out and somehow finding redemption.)

In practice Darlton dropped the ball on this early on in many ways. The biggest one was one of the most maddening problems with the entire series: the unwillingness of any of the characters to share their backstories with their fellow survivors. Because of the flashback structure the viewer knew all of the secrets of the characters on Lost. But the survivors spent basically the entire series never telling their backstories to each other on the island or possibly even after they left. Even the most devoted fan of Lost became frustrated by why the character never chose to share information until it was absolutely necessary – not just about themselves but the island.

The series also failed because it was clear from the start why Locke became the island’s disciple from day one. ‘Walkabout’ ranks as one of the great episodes not only of Lost (both Terry O’Quinn and the episode itself were nominated for Emmys) but of television and that is because of the revelation of the final two minutes. For much of the first two seasons of Lost we completely get Locke’s behavior even when it seems irrational. Unlike everyone else who lost something in this crash, Locke has been given something back: the ability to walk. The viewer now gets confirmation that there is something incredible about this island and even when we have issues with some of the things Locke does early on, it’s completely understandable.

Jack, by contrast, suffers from the start for other reasons. Because he’s the first character we meet, we make the assumption that he will be the lead. Lost is truly an ensemble show far more than so many other shows of this period (save The Wire) but because it’s a network drama in 2004 Jack has that added pressure of being the lead character.

And immediately after the Pilot the writers do everything they can to make him difficult to like. Jack is self-righteous, holds unreasonable grudges, takes responsibility for things that really aren’t his fault, and holds everyone to a standard he doesn’t have to meet. He doesn’t want to be the leader (and the show will go out of its way to illustrate from the start how horrible he is at the job) but once he gets the position, he tends to take on the mantle of an authoritarian. Whenever he’s given rational advice – not just from Locke, but anybody – he ignores it and does what he intends to do.

This problem also is overly present in the flashback structure for the first three seasons for both characters: Locke’s are always more interesting and Jack’s very quickly become tiresome and many of them are considered the creative low points of Lost. (Stranger in a Strange Land was so horrible that its only purpose seemed to convince ABC that the writers needed to concentrate on ending the series.) Both Locke and Jack have a horrible father figure in their lives but where Anthony Cooper is a monster with no soul, Christian’s only crime seems during this period was that he couldn’t tell his son he loved him when they were together (something he had no problem doing to other characters) The flashbacks explain why Locke is so desperate for the island to be his salvation as well as why he’s so easily manipulated by other people and reveal aspects of his backstory that the viewer needs to understand. All Jack’s flashbacks ever do is show the kind of scenes that wouldn’t be out of place on another medical drama. Locke is clearly different in each flashback as compared to the island; Jack is pretty much unchanged.

This isn’t entirely fair to Matthew Fox who in the second half of Lost would up his game considerably and demonstrate incredible talent as the show progressed. But the fact remains trying to set up the Jack and Locke conflict as a vital one to the series was never going to work because almost from the start Jack had the attitude of a wet blanket while Locke seemed to have the attitude of the explorer. And the idea of trying to form a central conflict was also a failure because even when it was at its peak during the first two seasons, all of the survivors were mostly on Jack’s side when it came to approaching the island – they all essentially took a pragmatic view rather than try to embrace the wonder.

To be clear many of the characters had their own issues on the ideology whether it was destiny or free will. Most of the characters who believed in destiny were characters where religion or spirituality was important to them. These included Charlie, Claire  and Rose in Season 1, Desmond and Eko in Season 2 and in a different sense Daniel Faraday starting in Season 4. (Interestingly Sayid, despite being a devout Muslim even on the island, comes down more on the side of free will for reasons I’ll explore in a separate article.) Characters who were believed in free will included Kate, Ana Lucia, Juliet, Michael, Bernard and Sayid. Hurley and Sawyer end up spending most of the series on either side of the divide and Jin and Sun seem to have faith in each other more than anything else.

But when it comes to the action on the island almost everybody ends up following Jack. In large part this is because they are interesting in surviving and he is the rational choice for the first half of the series. But the other side is during his entire tenure on the island, Locke is fundamentally on his own as his character. During the first two seasons he is a part of the leadership and is considered essential. When Jack, along with Kate and Sawyer, end up being captured by the Others at the end of Season 2, he takes up a role of leadership for the first half of Season 3. But by and large, he seems more interested in his own agenda then being part of the group and as a result with each season fewer and fewer people trust him.

In Season 4, the biggest divide on Lost yet ends up when half the survivors go with Jack in order to be rescued and half go with Locke because he says they’re a threat. But Locke’s really not interested in protecting anyone who comes with him rather then trying to figure out how to protect the island, and by this point has become so single-minded in that focus that he doesn’t bother to hide that his leadership isn’t democratic to those who came with him. He’s still making the same mistakes, trusting the wrong people, and as a result of his leadership almost everyone who comes with him ends up dead.

Those who defend Locke – and they’re still in the majority even now – will argue that at the end of the day John was right about everything about the island. And to be sure every big decision about the island – the button in Season 2, whether the people on the freighter were to be trusted in Season 3, leaving the island in Season 4 – Locke was right and Jack was wrong. But what that proves to me is that this is a flaw of the breakdown between Jack and Locke’s relationship and that was entirely on Jack’s part.

The moment when Jack and Locke’s relationship is broken beyond repair comes in Do No Harm. At this point Boone has been injured in a horrible fall and Locke brings him to Jack to work on him. He then walks away back to the hatch. Jack spends the next twelve hours trying to save Boone’s life, even though it’s clear to all the observers that this is impossible. During this period it becomes clear that Locke lied about how Boone was injured and Jack argues that this led to him using the wrong form of treatment. By that argument Locke murdered Boone.

But after twenty-four hours Jack seems more interested in finding Locke rather then resting or even burying Boone. Jack holds Boone’s death against Locke and the fact that John later calls Boone ‘the sacrifice the island demanded’ basically permanently puts them at loggerheads for the rest of their time on the island. It’s a rational response; Locke does sound like the leader of a cult in so much of his conversation with Jack as they’re about to open the hatch.

The real problem is not so much the death of Boone but the fact that Jack seems more determined to spend Season 2 belittling John at every opportunity. From the moment he enters the hatch he seems absolutely determined to prove that Locke is wrong about everything and that he’s a complete idiot for believing in something. Season 2 is where most of their conflict plays out and it grows tiresome almost from the start.

Again the reason why is more on Jack than Locke. Locke spends the entire season going through what amounts to a crisis of his faith. He’s spent all of Season 1 trying to get the hatch open because he believed his destiny was inside. His narrow vision on that hatch was so great that he didn’t even bother to look for a front door, which the moment Kate asks about it Desmond immediately shows a very big one.

In a way this sums up Locke’s behavior on the island better than anything else that happens during the series: he almost literally can’t see the forest for the trees. He was more concerned about what the hatch meant to him than what would be inside it (his only answer when asked was “Hope.”) When he gets inside and finds what seems to be a 1970s bachelor pad with a computer and a button that needs to be pressed every 108 minutes, he immediately shouts to heavens: “What am I supposed to do?!”

Jack chooses to berate both Locke and Desmond. Desmond’s appearance is actually more notable because the two of them met briefly when Jack was still a doctor. (I will deal with this but in a later article.) Jack recognizes Desmond but he tries to hide it from Locke. When he runs after Desmond, it’s not to get him to explain but to berate him for believing in something he considers nonsense. When Desmond tells Jack he remembers him, Jack tries to deny it and it breaks him in a way we haven’t seen. Perhaps Jack spends so much of the next season scoffing at the hatch is because he’s trying to ignore what it means that Desmond is on the island and has been for years.

Locke spends much of Season 2 with his faith ebbing and Jack seems to delight in it. It becomes a lot harder to like Jack during the middle of Season 2 as he seems to spend every scene in the hatch demeaning and bullying John. Much of Locke’s attitude is rational and practical but Jack remains obstinate as ever even though he is clearly proceeding without a plan. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated when ‘Henry Gale’ shows up.

Jack takes the position that the fact that they have an Other in the hatch must remain a secret from the other survivors. This means that no one else but he and Locke can guard him. This is a plan that can’t work long-term and when Locke rationally points this out Jack says: “Well, we don’t have a long-term plan for the button, but we still keep pushing it.” This is not an answer and Jack knows it; he just wants to push John’s sore spot. And it works because John immediately shuts down – and starts taking the side of Henry. It’s only due to the actions of outside parties that the truth comes out at all.

I can understand why so many people hated Jack’s character during the first half of the series; particularly in Season 2 he shows again his worst parts of his nature and lashes out at anyone who defies him. When he goes chasing after Michael in Season 2, he tells Kate not to come and when she gets caught he holds it against her for his stubbornness. Sawyer sees his weak spot and uses it to steal the guns from him. When Henry shows up, he objects to Sayid torturing him because he thinks he’s innocent and then spends the next few episodes convinced he’s a threat. And by the end of the season when Michael shows up and spins a story about the Others he wants to get them so badly he doesn’t bother to stop and think – and ends up getting his friends into a trap.

I do understand why the Jack and Locke dynamic was set-up: the idea of a Man of Science versus Man of Faith was necessary for Lost to work. But in execution we only saw the worst parts of it when it came to Jack and Locke. Locke spent the entire series believing that his faith in the island was the right one and that meant ignoring everyone else’s wishes around him. Jack believed just as strongly in a rational approach but time and again that rational approach meant ignoring the evidence of what he knew and being guided by his own thinking. This played out most obviously when the island disappeared at the end of Season 4 and Jack refused to acknowledge that Locke had moved it – even though he saw it happen.

And if the end result is just as disastrous and bloody no matter what side you followed, I’m not sure using them as an argument played out well. Both of them were, at the end of the day, completely unqualified for their roles as leadership but their belief systems refused to let them try to coexist. And as a result of that, many people suffered and died while this conflict was at its core. I won’t deny it ended up making its point in the second half of the series but by that point Locke himself was dead and Jack had spent a horrible journey getting to where he should have been.

I do think if the show had only been about the Jack vs. Locke dynamic it would have never lasted as long as it did. Fortunately by the time the third season began it had introduced another player and he would make Lost sing.

In the next article in this series I’ll deal with Ben versus Locke, one of the great joys in the history of both Lost and television.

Everything Peak TV Told Us In the 2000s About Today's America (But We Didn't Notice) A New Series

 

 

In recent years some of the creators of the greatest TV shows in this century, such as Howard Gordon and Vince Gilligan, have been doing as much apologizing for the series they’ve created as they have writing new series. They believe that the works of art they created well before the MAGA movement began may have been one of the major causes of the country and world we live in today.

In this writer’s opinion they give themselves too much credit. Television, like all art, is there to be both a reflection of the world we live and show a mirror up to certain aspects of our society. Once they’ve created their shows how the viewer chooses to interpret it is out of their hands and the lessons they take away from it left to the individual. And as has been the case of art well before television was even created, audiences are notoriously bad at learning the wrong lessons from it and interpreting it the way they see fit.

Furthermore as someone who had a front row seat to so much of this television then and rewatches many of those series today it is now clear with the benefit of both age and distance that many, if not the majority, of the dramas that we’re at the center of the first part of the Golden Age of television, were doing everything in their power to educate the audiences in subtle ways about the America we were living in and in their own way can illuminate so much of the country we live in now. It is because the writers, directors and actors were so extraordinary at providing us with some of the best entertainment of all time that we understandably didn’t learn the lessons that so many of them were trying to tell us. That’s not their fault, either: the major purpose of television is entertainment and escapism. Analysis is for the critics.

And as I have the unique experience of being both, I think I can best illustrate some of the lessons that while they weren’t obvious in the 2000s or even in the early 2010s should have served as warning signs from these writers of the crises we as a country were going to face very soon. I think the best way to move forward is try and learn what lessons they were trying to tell us but that even the critics never made clear. That’s not their fault, either; they didn’t create social policy.

What this occasional series will do is take a look at all of the great dramas that aired during the first decade of the 21^st century and see the lessons that so many of these great shows tried to teach us but we basically chose not to learn. Some of them, I’ll admit, were almost certainly unintentional on the part of the writers – they couldn’t see the future any more than we could. But being aware of them now is almost certainly the only way forward in what is clearly a bleak time for America.

I should also acknowledge that I refuse to give in to the attitude of so many that we are past the point of no return for this country. It is an understandable one but it is only when we give in that it is truly over. Perhaps these shows, however far in the past they are, can give us something to understand and learn from. I need to believe that they do.

 

Part 1: What Two Different Storylines

On The West Wing and The Wire

Tell Us  About The Rise of the GOP in the 2010s

 

One of the universal truths of the dramas of the 2000s was that your friends can be more dangerous to you then your enemies. It didn’t matter if you were chilling at the Bada Bing, working at CTU, stranded on an island in the Pacific or were the crew of the Battlestar Galactica: we learned over and over the people we should trust the most are more dangerous than an outward threat.

And this lesson was frequently on display on The West Wing, particularly during the years Aaron Sorkin was at the helm. Perhaps one of the reasons that there has been so much backlash from progressives about this series a quarter of a century after it debuted was because everyone in the Bartlet White House was very aware of this as a political reality. Everyone from the President done to the secretarial staff knew this at some level. Indeed the President once mentioned ‘the criticism of the Christian right and the Hollywood left’ with the same furor.

That is the thing that so many people on either side of the aisle have never accepted but elected officials have too. In a way your enemies are simpler to deal with because you know automatically who they are. For all Sorkin’s effort to make many Republicans rational over his tenure, he never forgot that this was a Democratic administration and that the Republicans were the opposition, if not always the enemy. And in politics you know what your enemy wants to do: get you out of office and they will do anything necessary.

But the people who are supposed to be your friends – the various interest groups and coalitions that got you into office – represent a different kind of danger. And Sorkin was a genius when he showed that the various parts of the Democratic coalition – environmentalists, the Congressional black caucus, certain parts of Hollywood –   have their own agendas that don’t change no matter what party is in power. Indeed, because they aren’t burdened with the idea of governing they feel free to box the administration in and then expect blanket support because they feel they are entitled to it. This is more true with activists then politicians. The West Wing dealt with this many times but the example for this article will focus on the episode ‘Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail.”

In the course of the episode, a group of anti-capitalist demonstrators, mostly students,  have essentially taken over DC to protest the World Trade Organization. The administration is more annoyed that they’re blocking traffic then that they might be dangerous and they treat them with the seriousness they deserve. (Sorkin makes it clear there is no rhyme nor reason to where this group protests: one of the places they are blockading is the National Geographic Society)

Toby has no use for these modern-day protesters: “Cops know when and where they’re gonna be and what’s gonna happen by logging in to their website.” This is an example of the often performative nature of protest movements which even by 2001 had become the norm. Leo has assigned Toby to meet with them, mainly out of necessity: he wants it known that the administration took them seriously and that means meeting with them. It’s clear that the administrators are amateurs: to get this agreement, the head of the movement agreed not to have any cameras present. When Toby hears this he is overjoyed, something that carries him as he gets there and makes no pretense of hiding from either the security guard assigned or the ostensible head of the protestors. Because he gave away the cameras, Toby can now just sit there for three hours and then the administration can say they met with them – and there will be nothing on CNN showing a White House official getting taunted by students on stage, which would be a gift to the Republicans heading into an election year.

Indeed things play out pretty much as Toby thinks. There is no real order and people just start shouting obscenities while Toby smokes a cigar. Later in the episode he takes a break and has a conversation with the security guard who asks him what this is about and Toby has no problem telling her how stupid he finds these protestors.

He tells her the World Trade Organization is not bringing about the downfall of capitalism as these protestors are very sure it is but is a group of 140 countries who agree to specific trade policies. The benefits include cheaper food, clothes, car and phone services. It lowers prices and raises incomes. And best of all, it stops wars. All of these are things, he doesn’t say, that benefit the students who are yelling against this at the top of their lungs. What he does say about the students is more telling:

They claim to speak for the underprivileged but here in the blackest city in America, I’m looking at a room with no black faces, no Asians, no Hispanics. Where’s the hell’s the Third World they claim to represent?

 

Because Sorkin Is Sorkin he has the security guard immediately undercut Toby: “Lot of Third-Worlders in the cabinet room today, were there?” But it speaks to a larger truth about the protest movement which hadn’t changed much since the Vietnam War and it truth hasn’t changed much today: so much of it is led by well-off college students, the overwhelming majority are white. This has always undercut so much of the very legitimate goals of so many of these movements, especially those who argue against capitalism. The students here are amateurs, essentially playing protest on spring break. When this is over they can go back to their campus and claim they’ve done part for equality. They’re not really suffering.

Now for a different perspective we’re going to a completely different show and even though it takes place just a couple of hours away from Bartlet’s DC and 2 years after this episode, might as well be in a different universe. I’m talking about The Wire’s second season in which so many of the characters in the story are facing the effects of this globalization but don’t have the time or money to go to DC and protest it.

I’m not sure that when I first saw the second season of The Wire at age 24 I truly understood the nuances of the story that David Simon was trying to tell when he focused the show on the docks of Baltimore. The first and second time I saw it I was riveting by a thrilling investigation involving the murders of fourteen sex workers, a story of how drugs got into Baltimore and the spiral that the writers are extraordinary at creating. The third time I rewatched it nearly a decade later I finally understood what Simon was trying to tell the viewers and the deeper tragedy underneath it.

As fans of The Wire know the second season is center primarily on Frank Sobotka, played exceptionally by Chris Bauer. Frank is one of the most tragic and sympathetic characters in the entire series and not just because his character ends up being killed by the penultimate episode. Many of the criminals on The Wire are victims of the system but whereas many of them will be bloodthirsty and monstrous (during this season Stringer Bell orders the death of D’Angelo Barksdale because of the threat he might be to the organization down the line) Frank is one of the rare ones who has never hurt a soul physically in his actions. He has been taking money and allowing a smuggling operation to go on for years on his docks but he hasn’t spent any of it on himself, only his union and only a few select members know it, not the rank and file.

Frank is dealing with the consequences of globalization and industrialization. The former affects him the most directly because with manufacturing and jobs being sent overseas his dock and his union of stevedores have been drying up for years. His members rarely work and those who are in the know are taking the money to survive and make ends meet. Frank is spending every dime he gets to keep what few members he has left in the union (its under 100 by the time the season begins) and the rest of it to a lobbyist friend on a vain mission to get ‘the canal dredged’. Everything he is doing is trying to win political capital. He has donated a huge amount of money to a local church so he can get ‘face time with the Senator’ (at the time Barbara Milkulski, like Sobotka a fellow Catholic and Polish American)

The latter is the bigger problem as he sees in a meeting. Mechanization is taking away most of the jobs for manual labor and in one meeting he sees very clearly that this is the real death knell for what he’s trying to do. It is in a meeting with his lobbyist friend that he tells a story of how one summer a container of Tang was dropped and he and his friends drank it all summer because it was what astronauts drank and “we all wanted to be astronauts. “You know what I became? A stevedore!”

And that’s the darker tragedy for the series. We spent season 1 seeing how drugs had destroyed much of the African-American community and policing. Season 2 makes it clear that the white working class is facing a similar crisis that is even darker: the blue-collar jobs that were the backbone of America for so long are drying up and there is nothing to replace them for those to come. Ziggy Sobotka, Frank’s son who he has neglected in favor of his union, spends much of the season as a loser but there’s nowhere else in the world he’d fit. He’s a real victim of the globalization that the students are protesting on The West Wing but those students would dismiss him as a loser  at first glance without being bother to talk to him.

Frank has been doing this for years and likely would have gotten away with even without the containers of fourteen dead girls had it not been for personal issues. At the start of the series Stan Valchek, one of the Commissioners in Baltimore, is angered because a stained-glass window representing the dock workers, financed by Sobotka, has a prominent place at the church instead of Valchek’s police officer one. He wonders where his colleague got the money and says he thinks he’s corrupt, causing the task force that leads the investigation. But there’s no reason to believe there’s anything there: Sobotka’s the target because Valchek ‘hates his guts…which in the Southwestern is good enough for probable cause.” Prez (his son-in-law) makes clear.

And when the investigation turns out to be bigger and broader than Valchek could have hoped for, he’s more upset that the investigation has moved beyond Sobotka. There are far worse criminals in his orbit as we’ve long seen by the time this happens but Sobotka’s real crime was hurting Valchek’s ego. He doesn’t even care why Sobotka’s doing this or what he’s doing; he just wants to publicly humiliate him.

Not long before he meets his untimely end Sobotka confides in his lobbyist friend what is essentially the central thesis of Season 2:

“You know what the trouble is, Brucie? We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.”

Both of these series show the reaction to the forces of global capitalism but they couldn’t be more opposed: it’s impossible to see any of the student protestors knowing someone who works on the docks in Baltimore, much less be sympathetic to them as victims. They are upset at what the WTO is doing on a global scale and even that’s only academic to them. None of them likely have to deal with the grinding poverty and uncertain economic future that the workers on the dock will have to deal with very soon, and likely couldn’t see the connection.

Similarly if Frank, or indeed any of the characters on The Wire, saw the protestors (unlikely as the show makes it clear how limited their scope is) they would consider them spoiled brats unsuited to deal with the real world. (McNulty actually makes this point very clear to a political consultant he tries to date in Season 3, showing the difference between the world of DC and Baltimore.) Even if there was a movement like this in Baltimore, it’s unlikely the two worlds would ever cross and indeed we see this in the opening scene of the season where McNulty, assigned to the harbor patrolled, has to tow a water taxi filled with the rich past those very docks and find it all charming.

Now I wanted you to look at what a blue collar worker, with his options increasingly becoming limited during this period and after the recession that would make things far worse? Because two different movements formed not long after. The former, Occupy Wall Street, was built very much on the ideas of the protests at the WTO but rejected political influence and was organized by amateurs at an even greater level. (Sorkin would follow up on this idea with The Newsroom.) The latter, the so-called Tea Party, told its audience that your jobs have been taken not by the capitalists and billionaires, but immigrants and that only by voting for them do you have a chance at salvation.

Based on the second season of The Wire the movement of blue collar workers towards the GOP and eventually being seized by MAGA, makes a certain amount of sense. Yes it is in part built in racism but it is also offering a solution that the marchers in Sorkin’s DC don’t have anything resembling. If you’re a coalminer in West Virginia or a steel-worker in Ohio or a dockworker in Maryland and that’s all you and your family have ever known, you don’t have the kinds of options that all of these college kids protesting free trade do. Nor is likely you have the means or methods to work your way up to survive in a service based economy as the country seems to be moving towards.

Now consider your choices from 2016 on. You have the choice of a Democrats who on her worst day considers you part of a ‘basket of deplorables’ and on her best goes out of her way to avoid the states and small towns you frequent. And on the other is a man who tells you exactly who’s to blame for your lot, goes out of his way to berate all of the people who have done nothing to help you for years, and tells you if you vote for him, he will bring jobs back to you and your community.

You might in your heart know that this man is a liar but you are also desperate and you don’t see any other options. To paraphrase The Wire, you decide to fight on that lie. And none of the actions of so many of the left – many of whom are even more fixed in their thinking then the protestors in Sorkin’s narrative and honestly never much liked you to begin with –  are willing to feel sympathy for you even now.

It is hard to find hope in this narrative but it is worth going back to The West Wing. After his conversation with the security guard – who is very much of the working class – she says to him: “You make good points. Wouldn’t it be great if someone from government was here to tell these things to these kids?” Not long after Josh shows up to pick Toby up and he tells him. “I hate these people with the heat of a nova, but they deserve to be heard.” He turns around and goes inside to talk with the people he’s lambasted.

There’s no sign it goes well – at the end of the episode Josh says he was hit with a potato while he was there – and its highly unlikely that any of those students came away with their minds changed as a result of Toby talking to them. But that is not the point of the story.

The point is, Toby tried. These were people he absolutely loathed and who he thought were ridiculous but after contemplation he decided to make the effort. That was one of the larger points of Sorkin’s narrative that he made clear as early as The American President. At our core we have to be pragmatic idealists and both are of equal value. That means being pragmatic in how we try to do policy but idealistic in the idea that it can still be realized. To the cynics who seem to grow daily  that may feel like a lie. But some lies are worth fighting on, and it is still one I would gladly do so.

 

 

This is Jeopardy, Future JIT Invitees Prospectus, Part 3: Battle of the Decades Concluded

 

 

Now that we’re at the beginning of Jeopardy in so many ways we now confront the reality of the passage of time in a way we can’t in the previous two articles. Two of the participants in the 1980s Tom Nosek and India Cooper have passed away in the last few years. How many of the others may still be capable of performing at peak level is an open question but given what we saw of Sam Buttrey perhaps I’m overstating it. That said, I’m going to try and play relatively fairly.

Chuck Forrest, who goes back to 1986, was in the first Invitational Tournament. Four of the participants – Leslie Frates, Frank Spangenberg, Jerome Vered and Bob Verini – will appear in different articles down the road.

One who I consider a question mark was Richard Cordry. Richard was a five day champion in and a semi-finalist in the 1987 Tournament of Champions. His track record in both was average but he was invited to participate in the Battle of The Decades, perhaps because of his celebrity. At the time he was head of the CFPB and he may have been invited back for political reasons. Because of that he didn’t receive any money though he paid his own way. Besides that his play was not particularly inspiring for a former Jeopardy champion; he was actually in the negative late in Double Jeopardy. He wasn’t a good choice then and I’m not sure he’s a good one now.

That leaves us with seven very reasonable possibilities and with only one exception I don’t think age would be a contributing factor. Furthermore given their performances in their original appearance and in the postseason all of them would be more than good choices to come back for perhaps one last hurrah.

As with the 1990s, the same rules apply when it comes to consideration.

 

TOM CUBBAGE

Tom is a historic player in many ways. He won the first ever College Championship in 1989. Less than six months later he won the Tournament of Champions still the only player in Jeopardy history to win both. At 22 he’s still the youngest player in history to win a Tournament of Champions (Brad Rutter was 23 when he won) and he is one of only two players in the history of Jeopardy to win a special Tournament and then go on to win the Tournament of Champions. Colby Burnett was the other one and he has been invited back multiple times since then.

His track record in Super Tournaments is solid as well. He participated In Super Jeopardy, the first experiment at prime time Jeopardy in 1990. He played well and was in second when time ran out in Double Jeopardy but that wasn’t good enough for him to move on. He still won $5000. He had a chance to be picked for the 10^th Anniversary Tournament in 1993 but lost due to random chance.

When he was invited back to the UTC he led throughout the Jeopardy and much of Double Jeopardy before Bob Harris went ahead of him in the final moments. All three players responded correctly to Final Jeopardy and as a result Bob advanced and Tom went home with $5000.

His best performance was in the Battle of the Decades. He came from behind to defeat Bob Verini in his first round appearance. Then he had the misfortune of having to face both Ken Jennings in the quarterfinal appearance and Brad Rutter in the semi-final. Needless to say both thrashed him. Against Ken he managed to get in due to the wild card spot. With Brad, there was nothing he could do. He left with $25,000 and a moral victory: he responded correctly on all three Final Jeopardy clues, more than Ken or Brad did in the 5 Final Jeopardys they played in.

I’d like to see Tom return for many reasons, if for no other reason than to point out that he has a better track record in Final Jeopardy then Ken did before he retired. (No I’m not making that up; on the thirteen Final Jeopardys that Tom has participated in, he has only gotten one incorrect. )

 

PHOEBE JUEL

I’ve written about Phoebe a couple of times before in this space but to refresh your memory she was one of the first winners of a College Championship I’ve ever seen in my years of watching the show. She was a junior representing Grinnell when she won the 1993 Tournament of Champions which at that point consisted of $28,000, a trophy and a Dodge convertible.

The reason I think highly of her is she was the first College Champion I’d seen do well in the Tournament of Champions. (I had no idea who Tom Cubbage was at that point.)In her quarterfinal match she went head to head with Ed Schiffer and Linda Sheppard and at the time I remember thinking that Ed, who’d win $65,903 just a few months earlier, would make mincemeat of her. Instead from the beginning to the end of the game she played just as well as he did, finding all three  Daily Doubles and responding correctly on all of them. Ed only took the lead back on the penultimate clue of Double Jeopardy and an aggressive wager put him in the finals. Phoebe got in with a wild card.

She played just as well in the Jeopardy round of her quarterfinal match and it was only because of the great play of Tom Nosek and a stumble by one of her opponents that Tom managed to lock up the game before Final Jeopardy. That turned out to be a landmark moment in Jeopardy history.

The category was MONEY. “On July 27, 1971 Richard Nixon gave her the first of the new U.S. dollar coins.” Phoebe was the only one with the correct response: “Who is Mamie Eisenhower?” (For a time Dwight Eisenhower was on a dollar coin.) Tom thought it was Susan B. Anthony.  Because of that Tom advanced to the finals – and won the Tournament of Champions. Furthermore he ended up earning an advance to the 10^th Anniversary Tournament that followed and ended up coming in second.  The show’s history might have been changed forever had Phoebe made one fewer incorrect responses. Instead she left with $5000.

I doubt Phoebe spent much time in the immediate aftermath of her elimination dwelling on her loss: she was no doubt concentrating on graduating college and eventually becoming an attorney. But she has returned almost like clockwork every ten years since, for the UTC in 2005 and the Battle of the Decades in 2014. The former she was dispatched auspiciously by Stever Berman and left with $5000. The second time, against Mark Lowenthal and Frank Spangenberg was a different story and a little more heartbreaking.

Starting in Double Jeopardy Phoebe put on a phenomenal performance taking the lead from Mark early in the round and building from that point on. She found both Daily Doubles and responded correctly on each and though she didn’t give a single correct response after the last one she still finished the round in the lead with $17,100.

Then came Final Jeopardy. The category was a very broad one: COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD. The clue was even tougher: “Once a poor British protectorate, in 2012 this peninsular country ranked as the world’s richest per capita.  Not one player could come up with a correct response. Phoebe’s was: “What is Singapore?” The correct response was Qatar. (For the record I thought it was Brunei which while very rich isn’t even a country.) Phoebe wagered the most of all three players and as a result ended up losing to Mark, for reasons I’ll list below. She left with $5000.

I also wouldn’t object to another Teen or College Reunion that brought these players back, this time going back further than just four years.

 

MARK LOWENTHAL

Mark Lowenthal is the only player on this list I’m not sure would be able to qualify. He was in his early 40s when he first appeared on Jeopardy and won the 1988 Tournament of Champions. Like many Jeopardy fans I knew who he was more because of the book he wrote with Chuck Forest Secrets of the Jeopardy Champions which still has a prominent place on my bookshelf.

My first look at him came during the 2005 Ultimate Tournament of Champions and it was both quick and unflattering. Playing against Erik Larsen and Michael Rooney he was only able to ring in with 5 correct answers and just one of them was in all of Double Jeopardy. He also could find no redemption in Final Jeopardy and went home very quickly. Of all the living TOC winners I saw in that Tournament his performance was by far the worst and when he returned for the Battle of the Decades I expected even less against Frank Spangenberg and Phoebe Juel.

But Mark surprised me, getting off to a fast start in the Jeopardy round and maintaining his lead throughout. He tapered off in Double Jeopardy but he still finished a respectable third with $10,400. Then came Final Jeopardy which I listed above. Mark risked the least of the three players and as a result ended up as a quarterfinalist.

He would face off against Brad Rutter and Dan Pawson in the quarterfinals and during the Jeopardy round he held his own even though he was in third by the end of it. Then in Double Jeopardy Brad caught fire and Mark and Dan were left in the dust. Brad ran away with the game as was his want and Mark left with $10,000.

Considering that Brad and Dan have both come back as well as his co-author Chuck Forrest there’s an argument for Mark to come back as well. He might have the capacity to be as good as Sam Buttrey was.

 

 

LESZEK PAWLOWICZ

Leszek will always have a special place in my heart as a viewer. The 1992 Tournament of Champions was the first one I ever watched so I will always have a fondness for him that I don’t necessarily feel for some of the other Tournament of Champions winners that came after, exceptional though many of them were. My admiration for him as a player grew significantly during research for a book I was once doing on Jeopardy that is likely never to see print. The roster of talent of the 1992 Tournament of Champions was arguably the greatest prior to the elimination of the five-game limit in 2003 and the doubling of the dollar figures in 2001. Leszek was one of four players in that tournament who won more than $72,800, Chuck Forrest’s original five day record and two of the competitors John Kelly and Jerome Vered would rank among the five highest money winners in Jeopardy history before the dollar figures were doubled in 2001. India Cooper would go on to be a semi-finalist in the Million Dollar Masters and play brilliantly in both the UTC and the first round of the Battle of the Decades. For reasons I’ll reveal later three more of these players would have an impressive record in the UTC. The fact that Leszek ended up winning against them is an argument for him being one of the all-time greats prior to the arrival of Ken Jennings.

I didn’t see Leszek’s original appearance on Jeopardy in October of 1991 and if I’m being honest when I was watching what would be my first ever Tournament of Champions in 1992 (yes, I’m ancient) I’m pretty sure he wasn’t one of the players I was rooting for the most. My first out-and-out favorite (who I will discuss in the next article in this series) was Jerome Vered and I was rooting for him that whole tournament. Even when Leszek made it to the finals I still thought Jerome was going to pull if off. Leszek had a small lead going into Game 2 (I’ll get to that) but he spent most of Game 2 trailing. In fact he actually finished in second behind Bruce Simmons at the end of Double Jeopardy.

It came down to Final Jeopardy which was PRESIDENT’S HOMES. “The exterior of the governor’s mansion in Florida is modeled after the home of this President.” Leszek was the only player who knew the correct response: “Who is Andrew Jackson?” (In 1821 Jackson was a provisional governor of Florida.) Leszek won the Tournament of Champions and $100,000.

Leszek didn’t reappear on Jeopardy until 2005, during which he was apparently on so many game shows that he was once called ‘The Michael Jordan of Game Shows’. When he appeared in Round 1 of the Ultimate Tournament of Champions against Tad Carithers and Al Lin I was relatively sure he’d advance. He only gave one incorrect response the whole game – but that was the one that cost him.

He was ahead with $17,200 when he gave an incorrect response in SONGS FROM MUSICALS that cost him $1600 and put him into second. Tad got the last clue correct and he went into the lead with $17,200 to Leszek’s $15,600. That was critical going into Final Jeopardy.

The category was one that has become notorious in Jeopardy history: WOOD. The clue was an interesting one: “The remarkable elasticity of yew led to this new weapon that made history at a 1346 battle.” Leszek knew the correct weapon: the longbow. (As Alex said: “The English longbow at the battle of Crecy.” So did Tad and he won, sending Leszek home with $5000.

Nine years Leszek returned for the Battle of the Decades and things went much better for him. In Round 1 he led throughout the game against Leslie Frates and Andrew Westney. At the end of the round he had $26,000 to Andrew’s $13,600 and Leslie’s $13,800.

The Final Jeopardy category was 20^TH CENTURY WOMEN AUTHORS. It ranks as one of the creepiest clues of all time. “Readers’ letters to this author about her 1948 short story asked where the title event was held & if they could go and watch.” Leszek knew it was Shirley Jackson and advanced to the quarterfinals.

His opponents in the first game were two other landmark Tournament of Champions winners: Robin Carroll and Roger Craig, both of whom we’ve seen this past year (and in Roger’s case will see again very soon.) Leszek got off to a fast start in the Jeopardy round and held the lead until the end of it. Then Roger as is his want got cooking in Double Jeopardy moved into the lead by the end. Leszek couldn’t come up with a response in Final Jeopardy but didn’t wager anything and got in via a wild card spot.

Unfortunately he ran into Brad Rutter in the semi-finals and as I mentioned in Tom Cubbage’s entry we all know how that tends to go. He finished in a distant third and was actually in the red for much of Double Jeopardy. He left with $25,000.

Leszek has since appeared on Who Wants to Be A Millionaire and collectively may have won more money on other game shows by this point than he did in all his years on Jeopardy. He hasn’t shown up on the Chase or met Ken Jennings, so that’s another reason to bring him back.

 

 

JIM SCOTT

I missed both Jim Scott’s original run on Jeopardy and his appearance on the November 1991 Tournament of Champions by roughly a month. (I didn’t start watching the show proper until early 1992.) But in a sense we’ve all been watching Jim Scott on Jeopardy even if we haven’t seen it.

Remember that moment in Groundhog Day when Bill Murray is getting every answer on Jeopardy correctly? Well as Alex Trebek reminded Jim when he came back in the Battle of the Decades that’s a game in the 1991 Tournament of Champions that Jim Scott was playing in. (Which means Bill must have absolutely had no correct responses the first time around.) Jim’s original run was in September of 1990 when he won $49,300. Winning the 1991 TOC was far from a picnic. He only got to the semi-finals on a wild card berth and in that game you’ve seen again…and again…and again, Jim only managed to win because everyone responded incorrectly on Final Jeopardy and he ended up with just enough to win. In the first game of the final, he got off to an enormous lead and in Game 2 he was in a distant third at the end of Double Jeopardy. No one responded correctly on Final Jeopardy but because he wagered the least his big lead was enough to keep him ahead.

Jim’s luck in his two returns to Jeopardy has not been great. When he came back in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions he ran into the force of nature that was Jerome Vered, who ended up facing Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings in the final. (We’ll get to him, trust me.) Jim left with $5000. In the Battle of the Decades, he faced off against Chuck Forrest and India Cooper and at the end of Double Jeopardy was in a distant third. Chuck went on to win and he left with another $5000.

Jim, like Tom Cubbage, is one of the youngest winners of a Tournament of Champions from the first decade of Jeopardy. Honestly I would have preferred that he’d been invited back instead of a few people from the last Invitational Tournament, among them Doug Molitor. He certainly had a bigger claim to pop culture fame than some of the others and I think it’s well past time we see him. (And then, we can see him again…and again…and again.)

 

 

 

LESLIE SHANNON

Leslie Shannon is one of the earliest Jeopardy champions I have a memory of in my viewing experience. I remember her run in October of 1992 mainly because she was one of the first female champions I ever saw win five games. (At the time she was known as Leslie Miller.) Her total of $64,300 was a more than solid total in the 1990s and was basically the highwater mark for any participant in the 1993 Tournament of Champions, give or take a thousand dollars in either direction. She ended up becoming a semi-finalist in the Tournament of Champions via wildcard and ended up losing a close semi-final to Marilyn Kneeland that year’s Seniors Tournament winner.

She was extended an invitation to the Million Dollar Masters in 2002 and while she was blown out of the water by Bob Verini, she managed to qualify for the semi-finals via wildcard. Unfortunately she happened to run across Eric Newhouse on what would be his greatest day of play in his Jeopardy career and went home with $25,000.

Her absence from the Ultimate Tournament of Champions in 2005 was the most striking of those who didn’t return. Perhaps to atone for it she was extended an invite to the Battle of The Decades where she ended up playing against Tom Nosek and Richard Cordry in what was the most poorly played game of the entire tournament. Leslie managed to give sixteen correct response but also six incorrect responses. Perhaps most embarrassing, in a category called ‘80s BABIES she twice responded with “Who is Baby Jessica?” and both times she was incorrect. (In fairness no one else could respond to them either.) She was also the only player to respond incorrectly to Final Jeopardy though it wasn’t an easy one.

The category was THE PERIODIC TABLE. “Of the element symbols that don’t match the element’s English name, this element’s symbol is alphabetically first.” She seemed to be mock sobbing and Alex said he hoped she hadn’t written down Jessica. She’d written down: “What is iron?” Both Richard and Tom knew the correct response: “What is silver (AG) Leslie went home with $5000.

Leslie is also one of Jeopardy’s biggest success stories. Due to her appearance on Jeopardy she received a dozen job offers and she took one. From that point she has been a world traveler, residing in Sydney in the Million Dollar Masters in 2002 and Finland in 2014. Considering her bubbly personality whenever she plays the game I think its time Leslie was invited back.

 

 

ANDREW WESTNEY

I have a complicated relationship with Andrew more than any other player on this list in regard to the Battle of the Decades.

When the Battle of the Decades was created fourteen players were invited back to participate in it and a fan favorite was selected to be voted on out of five previous Jeopardy greats. Of those five I had only seen one of them – Diane Siegel – in her original appearance in 1993. However I remembered all five from their appearance in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions and I ranked them based on their performance in the UTC. I may end up dealing with the other three choices in later entries; all you need to know is that of the five listed Andrew would have been the fifth I would have picked – and yet Andrew was voted on by the fans.

Going by the name Andy Westney in February of 1991 he won that year’s Teen Tournament. He was trounced by Mark Pestronk in the quarter-finals and went home with $1000. Back then he’d won a total of $26,000.

His first round appearance in the UTC was in the exact middle game of the first round. He did play well against Steve Newman and David Siegel in a thrilling game. But he lost and went home with $5000.

To be clear he wasn’t a bad Jeopardy player he just wasn’t my first choice to come back. That being said going up against Leslie Frates and Leszek Pawlowicz he played quite magnificently. He trailed Leszek by only a hair at the end of Jeopardy and his third place total of $13,600 was impressive. And since we are now at the stage of inviting former Teen Tournament winners from the fairly recently past I think it’s time we did so from the distant past as well. I’ll be emphasizing that very strongly in my next series.

 

In conclusion all of these players have a special place in the hearts of long-time Jeopardy fans of which as we all know I am prominent among them. I hope that they will someday return to the Alex Trebek stage – in large part to share their memories of him as well.

The next article about invitees will be significant for more reasons than one. Look for it soon.

 

 

Michelle Williams Is Dying For Sex (I Know)

 

 

A  convincing argument could be made that the era of Peak TV owes as much to the WB as it does to HBO. That small network barely managed to last a decade but we are still rejoicing in the world of great television it created.

I don’t just mean with series from Buffy to Felicity, Smallville to Gilmore Girls, that are deservedly part of the pop culture landscape but how it has been a wellspring for all the talent that has been part of television ever since. For such geniuses as J.J. Abrams, Ryan Murphy, Greg Berlanti and Alexis Sherman-Palladino the CW was their finishing school from which they have been blessing us with great works of television to this day. And just as important were the young actors and actresses who came out of it who even now continue to make impacts on television nearly twenty years after they left their original shows. From Alexis Bleidel to Sarah Michelle Gellar, from Chris Pratt and Joshua Jackson they have never left the world of that gave birth to them, though it has taken more than a few enough time to get the awards they should have gotten from their work on the WB.

But even among these towering talents Michelle Williams has been in a class by herself.  Unlike so many of the actors and actresses who spent much of their time in television Williams has by far had the most success in the film industry. Less than two years after Dawson’s Creek came to an end she received her first Academy Award nomination for her stunning work in Brokeback Mountain. Since then she has received a total of five Oscar nominations, though she has yet to win the grand prize once. (It will happen.) She has spent the majority of her career as the grand dame of the independent film industry best known (though little rewarded) for her collaborations with Lucy Reichardt  for whom she is as much Reichardt’s muse as Jennifer Lawrence has been David O. Russell’s during the early 2010s.  Four of her five nominations for Oscars have come from playing wives who suffer from the fallout of a disastrous relationship, from the failing marriage of Blue Valentine to the disastrous one of Manchester by the Sea to the mother of young Sammy in The Fabelmans.  There is a more direct connection to her most famous return to television when she played half of the title roles in Fosse/Verdon where she played a genius Broadway actress who is quickly overshadowed by her more successful husband before he flames out. She deservedly won an Emmy for that incredible performance.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that if you had described the plot of Dying For Sex to me, I would have to think about watching the fictionalized versi0n of a true story of a forty-ish women who has  recurrence of cancer that is terminal and decides that she would like to spend what time she has left having as much sex as possible. However, if you then told me that Michelle Williams was playing the role of Molly, my response would be: when and where?

Dying For Sex debuted just a few weeks ago on FX on Hulu and I have just this past weekend watching the first two episodes. One of the reasons I chose to make this my next Emmy watch series to catch up rather than, say, Disclaimer or Adolescence (I will get to both trust me) is the fact that not only are there are only eight episodes but they have the added benefit of all being relatively short, all within the half-hour range. Most limited series episodes are always an hour or so long, if not longer but Baby Reindeer set the tone by saying, yes, you can tell great stories in limited series in episodes that can be shorter than certain episodes of The Bear.  That comparison in particular is worth noting because I probably laughed more in two episodes of Dying for Sex then half the episodes of Season 2 of that show and considering that Dying For Sex makes it clear from the start that its material will be even darker then what we see hanging out with Carmy’s family that may be the best argument as to why that show might be more content to be in the drama category. (Not me, I still think it’s a comedy but one dark series at a time.)

And to be clear Dying for Sex is hysterical in almost every minute of it. I think a large part of this is due to Williams talent as a performer and her work with Reichardt in particular. So much of Reichardt’s work deals with women trying to work through the aggravations of every day life, such as her most recent collaboration Showing Up where she plays an avant-garde sculptor who at one point ends up digging a hole in her backyard. So many of Williams’s role are women who are deeply restrained in public with a yearning beneath the surface. It’s not much of a reach to see Molly Koohan as much different from those women, trying to remember a sexual encounter while going to couples counseling with her husband. Molly is dealing with the issue that she and her husband haven’t had sex since she went to remission and Steve (Jay Duplass at his most nebbish-like) tries to explain how much of this is not his fault. Then she learns that her cancer’s back from her doctor and immediately walks out of therapy and to the bodega. Her first reaction is to by a liter of terrible diet soda.

After that she immediately meets her best friend Nikki. Nikki is played by that whirling dervish of a talent Jenny Slate who has spent twenty years almost always playing someone who has the emotionally maturity of a child. This is something that Slate, who is a hyphenate has really leaned into and it’s always been wonderful to watch her playing a woman who never grew up. (Slate and Williams first met when they were starring the complete opposite of everything they work in: Venom.

Nikki isn’t much different from the character Slate always plays which is basically a hot mess. This is a good thing to have in a friend and support, it’s not necessarily the best thing for a caregiver. We see just how badly this will go when Nikki comes with Molly and her doctor (David Rasche) and is gently told she’ll have to take notes. She then goes into her bag, which Molly will later describe as a black hole, before finding her laptop. Then she asks the doctor to keep slowing down as she types.

I’m not yet clear on the origin of Molly and Nikki’s friendship yet but you do get why the two have been friends all this time: for all her messy attributes Nikki is extremely, ridiculous devoted to Molly. She will shout at bodega owners from her car, yell at people in wheelchairs and support her best friend in these final days whether it is by yelling at hospital staff or gazing approvingly at dick pics from a dating site.

Because Molly is determined not to go gentle into that good night but her desire is far less selfish and destructive then most television characters diagnosed with cancer. She accepts that she’s dying and what she tells her palliative care giver is that she wants to have an orgasm with another person. It’s clear from the start that Steve represents the worst aspects of a spouse in every way; he has basically seen Molly only through her disease and seems to be seizing on it as a chance to be supportive. When Molly decides that what she wants is to perform oral sex on him, he collapses into tears before she finishes which is not the ideal reaction.

So Molly decides to go on her journey and she is hysterically bad at ai in the first episodes. She sets up an online encounter which she backs away from, tries to pick up a stranger in an elevator and failing at that, makes a $200 charge at a sex toy workshop. She then spends the next six hours pleasuring herself in some of the weirdest ways possible, to Keanu Reeves talking to Sandra Bullock in Speed, pictures of tropical wildlife, online with an online personality who she then discusses cancer treatment. This ends up leading to ransomware when he gets pictures of her pleasuring herself which ends hysterically.

What mere descriptions can’t tell you is how funny and light-hearted these two episodes are. To be clear Dying for Sex is upfront about what is going to happen to Molly and everyone around her is perfectly aware about it. Yet I can’t help be reminded of that exceptional dramedy The Big C in which Laura Linney spent all of Season 1 dealing with a cancer diagnosis determined to enjoy every moment of her life and how funny it was right up to the end even when it dealt with the real life horrors. Linney is just as capable an actress as Williams and I do see the wonderful parallels in their work.

And it helps immensely that the showrunner is Elizabeth Merriweather, who first brought us the adorable New Girl and then in her FX limited series threw us in the deep end with The Dropout.  Her follow up project is closer in formula to her comedy series but it has the same level of darkness at its center (though it has yet reach that). Williams has always worked best with women creative forces and there’s a confidence to both her and Slate’s work that they know they will never be led wrong. All three women are likely to be making rounds of awards circles in the months to come.

Because Dying for Sex is based on a real life person we know how the story will end before we tune in. And I realize that having so much discussion of the two great taboos – death and sex – in such a light-hearted fashion may seem in bad taste for some viewers even now.  I’d argue that’s all the more reason to watch it.  Considering how dark the world seems to be in all the big ways, we might as well not take seriously the two things we all have to deal with in our personal lives. As the series finale itself is titled: “It’s Not That Serious”  And if Molly can say that given everything she’s facing, who are we not to do the same?

My score: 4.75 stars.

 

Did The 26TH Amendment Fail: Looking At America And Trying to Answer The Question, Part 1

 

Last year I published for this site a series of articles asking the question as to whether the 26^th Amendment – the one which granted suffrage to 18-21 years olds – had failed. While doing research for that article I wrote the following passage which I will quote here:

“There was compared to other voting rights acts relatively little opposition. Emmanuel Celler, one of the biggest forces behind the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, insisted that youth lacked the ‘good judgment’ essential to good citizenship. Some academics argued that the ‘exaggerated reliance on higher education as well equated technological savvy with responsibility to intelligence were being used as an argument for voting. Tellingly he argued that common sense and the capacity to understand the political system grounded voting age restrictions.”

Using Celler’s argument was, for this writer, looking at the entire world with new eyes because it fundamentally explained so much about activist movements from the Vietnam War right up until the campus protests this past year with crystal clarity. It also explained why, despite being on the morally right side of so many causes for social justice, these activist movements have never led to overwhelming political success and in fact have been an underlying factor in the conservative movements dominance of political power ever since the election of Nixon.

Long before the establishment of Fox News as a cable channel, the Republican Party has been supremely skilled at utilizing ‘the backlash movement’ in getting the white working class voter, Democratic since FDR’s first election, to move increasingly towards the Republicans. This movement has been routinely categorized by the leftist publications as a move of pure bigotry and while that is true, from a cold-blooded political perspective it has worked wonders for the GOP ever since then. They have mastered framing the Democratic Party as being the full-throated supporters of the loudest and angriest voices of the movement for justice and equality on every single demographic issue and as a threat to the white working-class voter. And because the Democrats have needed to essentially hold on to every single part of the identity groups from African-Americans to LatinX to the LGBTQ+ community in order to merely be competitive in national elections they have had to walk a delicate balance when it comes to admonishing these coalitions who have rarely chosen to listen anyway, increasingly argue that dissent is tantamount to throwing in with the bigots and feel that any person who is NOT a member of their immediate circle – including age-wise – is not worthy of being considered anyway.

The consequences of that behavior were very clear in the aftermath of the 2024 election. Harris carried just over a third of the white working class voter – the lowest percentage in history for a Democratic candidate – and just over 8 percent of rural America. It doesn’t take much intelligence to know what the Democrats have to do if they have a hope of a short and long term future in a post-Trump electoral world.

But  to the left, and particularly those young people who will be entering the electorate soon, they don’t see things that way. In their mind the failure is, as always, a version of the same tune: the Democrats refused to go sufficiently to the left. The idea that the voters are simply not where they are at any level – a conclusion that would seem obvious by the results – is a reality they continue to deny. And it may very well lead to a schism in the Democratic Party.

In  order to try and analyze this approach – and more importantly, explain the flaw in the thinking – I have begun a new series that will look at the basic flaws underlying the way that this new generation seems to view the world of politics and why it is critical that all institutions – not limited to simply political ones  - realize how wrong-headed it is. And the place start, appropriately enough is with a battle that’s going on right now in the DNC itself.

 

Part 1:

Why David Hogg Has No Idea What He’s Doing

 

There are many people – mostly his contemporaries and certain segments of the media – who consider David Hogg the voice of the future of America. I am not one of those people and I find it somewhat ridiculous that so many do.

I don’t deny the reality of the trauma he underwent at Parkland or the nobility of the cause he fights for. The fact remains he represents by far the worst aspect of what I’ve previously referred to as performative activism. It is not about trying to pass legislation, win votes or anything that could solve the problem. It barely falls under the nature of ‘raising awareness’ and even that is under the metric of ‘no publicity is bad publicity’ – a term that Gen Z in particularly doesn’t agree with. For Hogg and so many of his colleagues the point is about creating viral moments or trending on social media. In that Hogg is an absolute wonder. By any other standard he is a complete failure.

David Hogg’s most famous work has been openly criticizing Florida Senator Marco Rubio for alleging the Senator world not meet with him. He famously tweeted the Rubio voted against a bipartisan gun safety bill and took millions from the NRA. He later retracted that tweet after it went viral. I’m sure that for Hogg that was speaking truth to power. It didn’t hurt Rubio’s reelection one bit: he romped to victory with 57 percent of the vote over gun control candidate Val Demings.

Nor has Hogg made much of a ripple in Florida politics over the course of his advocacy. In both 2020 and 2024 Trump carried Florida by an increasingly larger margin, Ron Desantis romped to reelection in 2022 and Rick Scott trounced Debbie Mucarsel-Powell last year. There are only eight Democrats representing Florida in the House and the legislative bodies of both houses of Florida’s government have overwhelming Republican majorities. Considering how incredibly conservative Florida has become since Hogg became part of the political activism there, it’s very difficult to see what he and his colleagues have accomplished aside from being admired in certain circles in liberal media.

Considering the results of the 2024 election, which led to the biggest margin of victory for a Republican Presidential candidate in 20 years, the idea that someone who has no experience in any major political campaigns who has no success in getting a candidate elected anywhere as one of their Vice Chairs seems an idea of stupidity. Yet that is what Ken Martin did. Perhaps it was part of LBJ’s idea that “I’d rather have him pissing inside the tent then outside and pissing on it.”  And yet Hogg has demonstrated the immense gift of doing both.

Just this month the DNC began clashing with Hogg over his support of primary challengers to Democrats who according to him “had been asleep at the wheel.” He has raised a PAC trying to challenge Democratic candidates at the primary level.

Ken Martin announced, understandably, that he would propose changes to the DNC rules that would mandate its officers to remain neutral in all Democratic primaries, not such Presidential ones. Hogg responded that he would fight to remain in his position, even though he’d be willing to lose his leadership position through the process. This is the equivalent of throwing a tantrum and saying: “You don’t get to break up with me. I will break up with you.”

It's worth noting the idea of Hogg has been to challenge contenders in the bluest districts of Democratic Representatives. How this squares with his focus on winning back young voters who have drifted from the Democratic party to the Republicans, which was the thesis of his campaign for Vice Chair in the first place, is not something he has clarified on.

When James Carville, with more diplomacy then I would have shown, mentioned sarcastically that he thought that the idea was to focus on Republicans as the enemy, Hogg’s reply was that the only election Carville had won was thirty years ago: the equivalent of saying ‘OK, Boomer.” This is bold talk against a man who managed to get a Democrat elected President after twelve years of Republican rule from a man who has not only not been part of a single winning political campaign even at a Congressional level but who lambasted Mary Petola and said ‘good riddance’ after she lost her election.

 Petola is from Alaska where to put it mildly people have a different view on gun control and the average voter is not as progressive as Hogg is. That he chose a Democrat being replaced by a Republican even as he was about to run for a position of power in the DNC should have been a bigger warning sign that he cares more about a candidate being right than winning elected office.

Even as an activist Hogg’s success is mixed. His demand for a boycott of Laura Ingraham on Fox News cost her advertisers but ended up increasing her viewership. He has called out far right conservatives such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Andy Biggs for their policies and all of them repeatedly have been returned to Congress by increasing margins. The idea that he can get young people to return to the Democratic party is by any context laughable seeing as he seems very good at getting more and more people to vote Republican anywhere else.

Even Hogg’s approach is ridiculous because it is, for all intents and purposes, what the Tea Party managed to do in 2010 to the GOP. There seems to be a movement by some, including AOC and Chris Murphy, that the future of the Democrats must be to reject neoliberalism and become a left-wing populist party to counter the right-wing movement that has taken over the GOP. But the left wing ideology has always been counter to the right wing ideology and has historically had a much smaller reach then that of right wing movements. Kamala Harris went out of her way to go as much to the left as a National candidate has tried in nearly half a century and the results were horrific for the Democrats at every single level. The Democrats have been losing for years because they have been losing the moderates and rural America – all of which the progressive wing of the party has always been hostile to and sees as irrevocably tainted by Republicans. The Democrats need to expand their base and move outward; Hogg and his followers are trying to change from within.

It’s not just that Hogg and his colleagues have tried this approach repeatedly in the last three election cycles and it has failed; it’s that historically it has never worked for left-wing movements in America. The Democrats have not gone more to the center to punish the left but because as a national party they are obligated to go where the voters are. Hogg and his activist colleagues are convinced, with no evidence, that the voters would come out of the woodwork in Democrats went more to the left. Their conviction is based on the fact on little more than the idea that everyone they know is on their side. That people outside their circle might have a different view of issues – that voters in Alaska might have a different view on things than those in New York or Massachusetts – is not something that they can accept. That’s a bad view for an activist; for a politician it’s fatal.

And Hogg himself may soon learn that. Hogg turned 25 this past month and has promised he will run for the House of Representatives when he became eligible to do so. Theoretically he could have chosen to run for either of the open Florida seats this past month and chosen to wait until he came of age to accept the office but because they were deep-red districts he had enough ‘common sense’ not to waste it there.

As I said there are only eight Democratic seats in the Florida delegation. If Hogg is sincere about it he will put his money where his mouth is and primary one of those sitting Democrats. That he has not done so already and seems to be financing those who would, might cause some to question where he is backing away from this idea but let’s give him something that he gives no one else: the benefit of the doubt.

If – I’m sorry – when he chooses to run he will have to raise money and he will have to see if his brand of politics will work against established Democrats. The DNC might think otherwise, given his attitude towards them, so he might very well use his established PAC. That is no guarantee of success as Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush found out just last year, when the DNC targeted them for defeat. Perhaps he can get them and the rest of the Squad to campaign for him. Granted they failed to lift their colleagues to a primary win last year but I’m sure Hogg can prevail.

If he does he will bear the full weight of a GOP that can’t wait to tear him and his ilk down no matter where he runs. Even in blue districts Florida is turning conservative and he hasn’t exactly built a lot of goodwill in that state. If he wins the primary he will receive support from the DNC who wants to win the majority and damn the consequences later. That helped put them in this position, but they have to think short term as well as long-term.

Either way, he will be a problematic candidate and like so many of the Justice Democrats will no doubt bring a lot of self-inflicted wounds on his own head with the kinds of statements he makes on a regular basis. There is a different between an activist and a politician and it rarely works out that well.

And even allowing for a victory he will quickly find it is harder to be an elected official than an activist. He’s already become polarizing before he chose to become part of the DNC; it will be infinitely worse as a candidate or an elected official. He clearly would belong to the Justice Democrats and the Squad but that would basically be meaningless in a Republican administration and more problematic in a Democratic one. Either way, he will quickly learn that it is easier to shout for change outside then it is to make it possible inside.

And there is still no guarantee that the movement he is a part of will last. This very day an op-ed in a Minnesota by a fellow member of Gen Z has openly accused him of not representing her generation and that the anointment of him by the DNC is a huge blunder. “He hasn’t built coalitions, he built a brand,” this op-ed writes and that is completely accurate. There’s nothing new in this, of course, even before the age of social media there have been left-wing candidates such as Bella Abzug and Ronald Dellums who managed to make a name for themselves as far left representatives in deep blue districts and were known as firebrands more than any real accomplishments. Hogg no doubt has never heard of them but he fits into their model exactly. They didn’t achieve anything but they have been portrayed in movies and TV shows and as we all know, that’s the kind of person that Hogg would rather be than have any legislation named for him.

The fault is, of course, for those in the DNC who still believe that the ability to be technologically savvy is the key to gaining the support of the youth vote even though they consistently lack any common sense. Hogg represents the worst parts of this generation and he is not the solution to the Democratic Party’s ills, rather another part of the problem.