Better Late Than Never: Sirens

 

At the end of the 2010s one of my favorite small joys of TV was Freeform's The Bold Type, a gentle drama of sisterhood at a fictional women's magazine that featured three of the most fullest rounded female characters I'd seen to that point during the decade. It lasted five seasons, which was just long enough for it not to get stale and like all great series I've taken an interest in the performers who were part of the cast.

By far the most successful actress in terms of the kind of roles she's gotten since the show ended in the summer of 2021 was Meghann Fahy. Her next major role was in Season 2 of The White Lotus and I was gratified for the fact that in the opening teaser they made it clear she was going to make it through the show alive. Yes her character, like almost every guest had no redeeming characteristics, but my heart would have cracked just a little if her character had been murdered by 'the gays' rather then Jennifer Coolidge. While I did think the Emmys went overboard with recognition in both supporting acting categories for the show in Season 2, I won't deny I was still happy Fahy got nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress.

After the strike ended she's been even busier having major supporting roles in two different Netflix series. In The Perfect Couple she ended up dying at a Nantucket wedding (she couldn't escape it this time) at the hands of Dakota Fanning. Then this past April she was one of the three female leads at the center of Sirens an even more limited series that received some acclaim but was not considered as highly in some circles as Disclaimer or Dying for Sex. Indeed many thought that if any of the three leads had a chance of a nomination it would be Julianne Moore. So Fahy's nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series earlier this month was arguably the biggest shock in the Limited Series category this year.

Just as last time I was happy for Fahy but I wasn't sure if I was going to watch Sirens – it was only nominated for four other Emmys and was not nominated for Best Limited Series. Still I had some time free earlier this week and when I saw that there were only five hour long episodes in the entire show, I figured what the hell. That's only one episode longer than Adolescence; worse case scenario I can get it done in a week and I'll basically be covered for all major limited series nomination in a few weeks' time.

So now after having watched the first two episodes I have some thoughts. First, the Emmys were clearly right when it came to not nominated Sirens for Outstanding Limited Series. It is not nearly at the level of Netflix's major nominees in this category Monsters and Adolescence (though I have reason to like it more than the latter which I'll get too) and it doesn't even come close to The Penguin or Dying for Sex. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have virtues to it, even though you could be forgiven for seeing some elements of the familiar in it.

Fahy plays Devin, a twenty-something who lives in Buffalo and who is clearly struggling to survive. We first meet her when she has been bailed out of lock-up for what we will later learn to be a DUI. She is also a very sexual woman, willing to give oral sex to a ferry man when she can't smoke and hooks up with a man at a bar at the end of the first episode. But she's also facing some very painful struggles. Her father (Bill Camp, very different from his Emmy nominated performance in Presumed Innocent) is suffering from dementia and needs long-term care. Devin has been trying to talk with her younger sister Simone for months when it comes to making hard decision about his well-being. (It doesn't help that even in his dementia her father still clearly favors Simone more.) Then getting home from jail, she finds an edible arrangement from her sister on her doorstep. It is the last straw and she finds the address card on and takes the fruit basket back to it with the purpose of finding Simone.

Simone (Milly Alcock, unrecognizable from their nominated work in House of The Dragon) has reinvented herself on the far edge of upstate as the personal assistant of Michaella Kells. She's been having a summer romance with one of her husband's friends, a man considerably older than her and who we will soon learn has a habit of doing this. She essentially has made herself Michella's second in command running the entire household with complete authority and disregarding the entire help's demands. The help has no respect for her and has a text chain where they privately mock every bit of her and then deny to her faces that they're doing. Simone has so reinvented herself that when Devin shows up on her doorstep she does everything in her power to hide her from Michella and makes it very clear she has no interest in her life. We learn very quickly that she's told countless lies to get this job, including that her sister existed. She also has no interest in helping Devin or listening to her problems about her father.

Devin very quickly realizes something is wrong with her sister. We learn she dropped out of school for her to get into Yale and that Simone has essentially refused to follow through. Simone very clearly has psychological issues; in the second episode Devin asks her sister if she['s been taking her meds and even before Devin finds a cache of full pill bottles in a drawer in Simone's room, we know she's been off them for a while.

It's clear from the moment Michella and Devin interact that the relationship is far more than assistant/employer Devin is clearly sexually attracted to Michaelle and when events traumatize Michella Simone is more than willing to share her bed with her. It's not clear after two episodes of Michaella is aware of this or is actively leading Simone on. Indeed two episodes in we're still not sure about the mistress of the house.

Michaella, as you might have guessed, is played by Moore who continues to add to her growing resume of brilliant female roles in limited series, moving on from last year's Mary and George. This role is quite a contrast from Mary Villiers, watching Michaella you get a sense that this is just another one of those frail millionaires who is using her wealth for charitable purposes as a mirror to one's self. The Cliff House is ostensibly a wildlife refuge for raptors but it's obvious almost immediately how cult like it is, with Kella leading a chant at the end of every meeting 'hey hey' which everyone echoes. And the fact that the most recent peregrine falcon she raises kills itself against the glass of her room is a metaphor in itself. All that said, you spend much of the first episode thinking Michaella is less a leader of said cult then a member – until you start to think of certain stories which I will not reveal.

Michaella's husband is Peter (Kevin Bacon) who seems to just tolerate his wife's frantic behavior around the house rather than be a member. He thinks she and Simone are too close, he doesn't like having to go through all the theatrics of the publicity shots for her work, and it's not clear if he's happy in this marriage any more. He also is the only person in the house who actually treats the staff with respect and dignity, something neither woman is willing to do. He has two grown children who are out of the house these days  - and Michaella is his second wife. But what happened to the first Mrs. Kell? No one is saying.

All of this, as I said before, is familiar: in fact it's pretty close to the exact formula of The Perfect Couple. But what makes this by far a more watchable and enjoyable series is that where Perfect was only about the wealthy and the bubble they put up, Sirens is far more about the staff and workers then we ever saw in the latter. Fahy played an outsider in both shows but in Sirens she plays someone who looks at this world and sees it not as something to aspire too but as something that is very much as something to be rescued from. She knows Simone isn't all right despite all of her arguments to the contrary and she needs to help her, if only to save her from herself.

Of the three lead actresses having watched the first two episodes I'm convinced the Emmys were correct when they nominated Fahy. Her work is far closer to what we once saw of her in The Bold Type, only this time she's even further down the food chain and is no closer to getting out. She's proud of the messy clothes she wears and has no problem testing the limits of the 'generosity' of the Kells. And when Devin agrees to clean up and look better for the purposes of the estate, every step of the way she says: 'Fuck you, Michaela'. She may clean up nice but she's still the same woman.

It's a measure of how at this point Fahy is such a great actress that in what is her first major confrontation with Michaela one on one in the second episode, she manages to draw all your attention. Michaela truly thinks because she is wealthy and privileged she has all the cards but Devin is steadfast and is willing to risk prison for her sister. Moore has the same strength in all of her characters in Michaella to be sure but to this point Devin is the only person who isn't willing to kowtow to her and it clearly unnerves her.

I have to say that of the three female leads the one I think the Emmys overlooked is Alcock for her work as Simone. Every moment watching her, you see someone who has clearly invented a version of herself and what matters to her most is how she is seen by it. It's telling that when we meet her she cares more about disappointing her boss than her sister and that what finally causes her façade to crack is when a secret she has spent the last several months doing everything to hide is revealed to the Kells. She spends most of the second episode hiding in a fetal position and it isn't until Devin is brought to her that we see the real Simone -  and the much more caring side of Devin.

Now to be clear Sirens is far from perfect. Apparently it's based on a play rather than a book or a film and you can tell the way that Nicole Kissell and her writers have been trying to expand it that there are elements that are clearly stretched beyond believability. Its set during basically one weekend and I suspect that in the original it was entirely set on the Cliff House. That's why as good as some of the acting is, you can't escape the fact that so much of it is based on conversations on a single set.

Also tonally its very erratic, shifting from satire to farce to dark drama so rapidly you can get a case of vertigo. I'm not yet sure whether this is an eat-the-rich versus working class story, a murder mystery in waiting or a Stepford Wives like satire and it seems to be trying to be all three in the same episode which is very hard to maintain.

Still I have to say at the end of the day I prefer Sirens to Adolescence at the same point in their runs. I know that this will be considered heresy and I'm not saying the latter didn't deserved the recognition it got. But as I said in both my reviews of the latter series I think Adolescence was more about being the kind of show that was pretentious in so many ways but the subject matter was so topical that many of my fellow critics tended to overlook that it didn't have anything original to say about it. By contrast Sirens never forgets to be entertaining and interesting even when it has odd tonal shifts, and because it's not really about anything, it can just be fun which is, frankly, something so many dramas and limited series don't allow themselves to be any more. For all I know Sirens may turn out to be nothing more than a guilty pleasure when its all over. But you can't have that without 'pleasure' and this show is.

My score: 3.75 stars.

Homicide Rewatch Season 4 Prologue: The Show Becomes Mainstream - Sort Of

 

 

I may have mentioned this is in an earlier post on Medium but for the purposes of this series I'll restate it. Season 4 was when I became what was referred to online as a 'Homicidal  maniac'. I'd watched a few random episodes before but the show was up against Picket Fences which I was devoted to. Sometime in 1995 – I'm not sure when exactly – CBS made the decision to move the series to another time slot and I began to follow Homicide more closely. (I'll note the exact episode later in these reviews.) During the spring of 1996 and summer I would end up watching not only most of Season 4 but quite a few of the reruns from previous seasons. (NBC wisely was airing repeats of the show during the spring and summer of that year, right up until the Summer Olympics.) By the following fall I was locked in and would not miss another episode for the remainder of its time in its original run.

It was something of a miracle  that Homicide was picked up for a fourth season. As I mentioned at the prologue of Season 3, during this period Homicide's ratings were still dismal, particularly in comparison to the rest of NBC which had officially become the number one network after several years of trailing badly in the ratings. And while Homicide had indirectly been responsible for it, viewers still weren't watching the show in great numbers. The Season 3 finale had been watched by barely 8 million people, barely half those that had tuned in for the season premiere.

But rather than cut bait with a show that wasn't drawing in immense numbers Warren Littlefield now had the freedom to give a show he was still a booster of room to grow. So he gave it a full renewal of 22 episodes. That renewal, however, came with strings: the show had to start drawing in viewers or it wouldn't get a reprieve.

So as a result Season 4 was radically different from any of the previous seasons. First came the major cast change. Ned Beatty and Daniel Baldwin, still the biggest names associated with the show when it original premiered, had made it clear while the show had been in hiatus that they were done. At the start of Season 4 the show would deal with it – but not in the most even-handed way possible. (I'll deal with that when we get to it.) In order to reach a younger demographic the show would end up introducing the first new detective the show had since the series premiere.

With the official hiring of Reed Diamond, it could no longer be said that Homicide was a series that catered only to ugly people the way it had been said at the start. More objectional to some was the way it alters its format. The serialized stories would more or less be completely gone in Season 4 and replaced with a new series of storytelling: two part investigations. This followed a more traditional format and would usually follow the format of 'red balls'. There would be three of them in Season 4 and nine during the remaining four seasons of the show. And rather then red balls dealing with a single important murder, they would frequently deal with more sensationalized killings by a single individual. This troubled many of the purists and it must be said some of the remaining cast members and writers.

From a personal standpoint having rewatched the series several times over the years I never noticed much of a decline in quality. Perhaps it was because those 'sensationalized' stories were what drew me in as a viewer in the first place. And considering that the ratings during Season 4 were by far the highest during the show's run, it would appear that viewers agreed with me.

More to the point I never saw much of an overall decline in quality from this point on then in previous seasons. To be sure usually around sweeps month we would get a sensationalized story to draw in ratings but frequently that would be balanced by several episodes that were closer to 'old school' Homicide. Indeed several of the episodes during this season show the writers more than willing to use the format to tell the kind of banal stories we were used to before, only with sensationalized trappings.

And it's worth noting that in the 1990s, TV shows that had two part episodes were still relative rare on broadcast television. We were still a few years away from serialized storylines on a regular basis and at this point the only shows that were doing two part episodes at this frequent a basis were Homicide and The X-Files. (Most serialized stories during this period were still nighttime soap operas such as Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210.) So even this part of it was hardly radical.

In hindsight the biggest problem with Season Four was part of a missed opportunity. With Baldwin and Beatty now gone from the show, this should have been an opportunity for other cast members to move in to the limelight. Instead Bayliss and Pembleton were put more front and center and some of the older cast members began to fade further into the background. The show would make attempts to influence the dynamic with two of the regulars and in both cases it didn't work very well. While this continued the show began to try and world build a little, introducing a recurring character early in the season that would become a series regular the following year and another character who would appear to be a one-off but play a vital role in the final two seasons.

Perhaps the most significant event was being planned in the early stages of 1995. That May Tom Fontana was having drinks with two of his old friends: Ed Sherin and Dick Wolf, the producers of Law & Order. By this point the latter show was starting to become the phenomena it is today with the ratings going up steadily to match the critical acclaim. Littlefield wanted to discuss the possibility of a crossover event. All of the producers were mixed about the idea but Littlefield eventually persuaded them and by February of 1996 the first Law & Order: Homicide crossover debuted. That partnership would not only become a yearly event but more or less lead to the greatest legacy Homicide would leave on the pop culture Zeitgeist. We'll talk about it – both episodes – down the road.

The X-Files and Consent, Conclusion: Scully's First Child (You Can Be Forgiven For Forgetting)

 

 

Dana Scully is one of the most dynamic TV characters ever created and one of the biggest parts of it was how much Chris Carter and his writers decided to deviate from the biggest norms of series television to that point and in a way to this day. She would never be defined by traditional gender roles.

There's a reason that even though Mulder is essentially the hero of The X-Files everyone considered Scully the more iconic character. It wasn't just that Gillian Anderson essentially nailed Scully from day one while it took David Duchovny practically until the second season to figure out how Mulder worked; it was that Scully was never going to be defined by the rules of society and television: she was never going to be defined by a man. Chris Carter made it very clear from day one of The X-Files that Scully and Mulder were never, ever going to hook up: that wasn't what the show was about. This truly irritated the internet as season after season Carter stood by that promise as stubbornly as Scully denied her belief in the paranormal. Even as the series entered its seventh season, which everyone expected to be the end of the road Carter absolutely refused to allow the inevitable happen, though every so often he would give a kiss here or there to indicate it was possible.

Dana Scully was an outlier in female characters that we wouldn't see on television until the 2000s when slowly cable and broadcast television would allow women to be more than just romantic attachments to male counterparts. She went toe to toe with Mulder and all the other men who looked down on her on the job, was able to autopsy a body on a moment's notice and was a better shot then her partner. Mulder had to rescue his partner from jeopardy quite a few times but Scully returned the favor just as often over the years – which in the 1990s was unheard of. In other words, Scully was a bad-ass.

Perhaps that's why I never leaned in as heavily to the idea that the series should end with Mulder and Scully finally hooking up. It mattered more to me that the mythology could end with a rational explanation than any romantic clinches between the two. Chris Carter would refer to it as a kind of courtly love absence romance and for what were the first seven seasons he held to that definition. I could never picture Scully enjoying domestic bliss as either a spouse or a mother.

And as anyone who endured the final two seasons knows all too well, we were right to want that. Much of the fanbase's trouble with the last two seasons in particular was that it took this strong independent woman and slowly but surely turned her into something close to a simpering female who forsook the basement for becoming a single mom and spent the rest of her time bemoaning the loss of Mulder. Of all the many, many flaws of the ninth season it was that Scully's character was sidelined only to show up whining after either the fate of Mulder (who was no longer a regular character) her baby and how she could now only see the fate of the world through the lens of those two things. What makes this even more frustrating from the perspective of continuity was that the show spent the two seasons dealing with Scully's mysterious pregnancy and child and completely ignored the fact that William Mulder wasn't the first Scully child.

One of the best episodes of Season 5 is 'A Christmas Carol'. Dana has gone to San Diego to spend the holidays with her mother, her brother Bill and her very pregnant sister-in-law. You'd think having only recently gotten over cancer Dana would have welcomed the occasion to relax and recuperate. It's a measure of just how much her life has changed after four years on The X-Files that she's no longer that kind of person. Nevertheless you spend the episode really wishing she could just be happier.

Not long after entering the house, the phone rings. There's a voice on the other end saying, "Dana she needs you." Scully traces the call to a home to find a domestic disturbance. A woman named Roberta Sim has committed suicide. When Bill asks Dana what this is about, Dana tells her brother that the voice on the other end was Melissa – their dead sister.

We don't get an answer as to how Melissa managed to reach out and touch her younger sibling but we do get an idea who needed her. The Sims had an adopted daughter, just over three years old. There are many pictures of her in the household, all of them with her alone and nobody else. Emily Sim is a child with special needs, and in this case it's a horrible medical condition. Scully can't let it go.

Later on Scully tells her family that because of the cancer she suffered from she is now unable to conceive a child. Her family is sympathetic but that starts to erode when Dana starts taking a very deep interest in the Sim household. First she thinks Roberta Sim was murdered rather than killed herself, then when her husband confesses to it she thinks that's a coverup -especially when the husband kills himself in his jail cell that same night. And she keeps feeling a connection with Emily.

She comes to believe that Emily is Melissa's daughter who she gave birth too not long before being killed at the start of Season 3. Her behavior first irritates, then begins to inflame her brother and her mother for reasons that should be obvious to the usually perceptive Dana – but humanize her by illustrating how, in the absence of Mulder, how much she's really changed.

It should be mentioned that the writers (Vince Gilligan, Frank Spotnitz and John Shiban) go out of their way to make it clear that Scully is unsuited for motherhood. They have an adoption worker refuse her request to become guardian for the purpose of making it clear to her – and the audience – why.

"You're a single woman, who's never been married or had a long term relationship. You're in a high-stress, time intensive and dangerous occupation. One that I sense you're committed to and one which would overnight become a secondary priority to the care and well-being of this child. I'm not sure that's a sacrifice you're prepared to make."

(It's not one a hit TV series would make of its lead character at this point, either."

Even when Scully makes an emotional plea, saying that she thinks she's been given a  second chance, the worker than points the other side of it. Emily has a medical condition that has required constant medical care since birth that is incurable. "The good news is you have first-hand experience of grave illness. The bad news is, you'd have to relive it through the eyes of a child."

The experience leaves Scully emotionally drained but the viewer has no reason to believe this alone would change anyone's minds. Scully is no doubt hoping the DNA tests will reveal the child is Melissa's and that will give her help. And that leads us to the revelation of the final minute.

Emily Sim is not Melissa's daughter. She's Dana's.

This episode is one of the masterpieces of the series for many reasons. Because Mulder is absent from the story (Duchovny was filming another movie, causing the story to be written in the first place) Gillian Anderson carries the show and we see it through a series of flashbacks of Scully's childhood and young adulthood through flashbacks, all of them set at this childhood house. Scully has to act as Mulder in this world but she does it more effectively, mainly because all she's trying to do is prove that there's a coverup not that aliens or the supernatural are involved. She is partnered with Detective Kresge, played by that skilled character actor John Pyper Ferguson, who for all intents and purposes takes on Scully's role and does it very well. (As has been pointed out, this could be seen as a dry run for the character John Doggett in Season Eight,)

Most of all, it hides the obvious answer as to who Emily's mother is in plain sight during the episode: the obvious answer is she's Dana's daughter but because Melissa makes the ghostly call, it seems more plausible (?) that she called her sister to protect her own child. That in her way she is being the big sister and trying to help her daughter from beyond the grave might be the clearer explanation – though that mystery is never resolved.

Unfortunately this episode is a two-parter, which means when Emily debuted the next week we are basically back in familiar territory. Mulder shows up, which means the conspiracy is involved, which means visits to medical facilities and a government operation. And what weakens all of this is the other overarching problem with Season 5. Mulder is going through a period where he thinks that aliens don't exist which makes the fact that so much of what involves Emily fitting exactly into the previous mythology all the more awkward because he won't make the connection.

There's also the fact that the moment Mulder shows up on scene he starts treating Emily not as what she means to Scully but what she might mean to the government. This is ham-handed given the circumstances. It doesn't help that Scully only called Mulder to be a witness for her at a hearing for Scully's adoption. Mulder makes it clear he would have refused under other circumstances.

It only when he testifies and tells Scully about how Emily could have come into the world – something he has withheld from her to this point – in front of a hearing that we realize two things. First, even when Mulder gives a more toned down version of the truth (he says that she was experimented on by the government not abducted by aliens) no one will ever believe a word he says. And two, he has the incredible ability for bad timing. He says he thought he was protecting her and that he never expected this. It doesn't change the fact that yet again he has withheld vital information from his partner.

The show is distracted by the fact Emily's condition is worsening, in large part because she clearly is an alien experiment. (Her blood is green and burns those who try to draw it.) The bigger problem is that now Emily Sim is being considered medical property of a Dr. Calderon who was treating her. Calderon works at Transgen Pharmaceuticals, clearly a front for the conspiracy.

Mulder goes to visit Calderon in order to try and persuade him to treat Emily. Calderon says he has to protect the company from litigation and financial research. Mulder takes this in and what follows is basically the high point of the episode – and makes very clear what has happened to Scully.

Mulder beats Calderon to a pulp and starts shouting at him:

"Why don't you tell me what your company is really in the business of? Huh? Abducting women and stealing their unborn children! Medical rapists, all you are. And now you're going to let that little girl die? She's just a lab rat to you!"

Then Mulder takes out his gun and puts it in Calderon's face. "Why don't you tell me whose life is worth saving – yours or hers?"

 This is a return to what happened to Scully and everyone who died at the hands of their experiments from MUFON over the years. And for a show that danced around the consequences of supernatural rape for comic purposes in so many storylines, it's almost completely made up for when Mulder essentially does call the conspirators rapists in all but name.

And it's very hard not to see a less-then-subtle commentary on the pro-life movement in how the conspiracy sees the test subjects in this context. We've already seen through Scully that they essentially have been hollowing out women and leaving them for dead when they're done with them, and by using Emily as a living, breathing example of that –  a child the conspiracy only sees value in based as a human guinea pig – they have rarely been as bold politically as they are here. (I'm almost astonished there weren't censorship questions at the time or now.)

It falls back to the more of the traditional mythology of course; Calderon is an alien and is dispatching with the stiletto by two shape-shifters who assume his form. But the show enters a gray area when it seems that Emily's parents were killed because they wanted to stop the tests on their daughter. Now they are coming to treat her because they seem to need her for those tests.

We get another sense of the perversity of this when Mulder goes to where Calderon led him and finds Anna Fugazzi. At the time Mulder thought she didn't exist and was a red herring – Fugazzi is Italian for fake. But she exists and she's 71. Mulder finds out that the conspiracy has been using a group of geriatric women as incubators for their tests. All of them have been giving estrogen and progesterone in huge amounts. They then go into hibernation where they find green cylinders, which contain human fetuses.

All of this, I should mention, is dropped as a storyline immediately after this point in favor of 'the alien rebels' in the next two mythology episodes that carry on until Season 6 when the Syndicate goes up in flames. Alien pregnancies do come up again in Season's 8 and 9 but by this point Carter has abandoned the whole-shapeshifter mythology in favor of super-soldiers and has forgotten all of this – as well as Scully's first child.

And by this time Scully has been going through her own anguish watching what is happening to Emily. And she's made the decision to let Emily die of the horrible disease that's been killing her. At the end of the episode Mulder and Scully attend Emily's funeral and while they are there Tara walks by with Matthew, her new nephew. (In keeping with so many two partners during the series, almost everything that was important to the first part of the episode is cast aside in part 2 for shiny, new stuff.) As always the conspiracy has cleaned up after itself and there's no proof of what those men did – not even Emily. The Syndicate has gotten to the funeral home and replaced Emily's body with sandbags. (Though for some reason they've left Scully's cross that she gave to Emily among the sand so she can put it back on her neck for the next episode. How thoughtful of them.)

Emily is never mentioned on The X-Files ever again in the context of the mythology and in regard to Scully only once more (during the Season 5 episode All Souls) When the show came to an end in 2002 and Emily wasn't even mentioned during The Truth when they were talking about everything involving the mytharc and connecting it, I found this very troublesome. More than twenty years later, it troubles me for reasons that are beyond even the show itself.

First there's the obvious laziness of the writing involved. Carter was always known for cherry-picking whatever elements of the mythology he wanted to try and fit them together in the always expanding house of cards it became season after season. That's not really forgivable when it involves black oil or bees, but when one of your main characters is pregnant and then has an infant and you never mention the other child she had and their importance to the conspiracy you're failing both as a writer and one of your actors. Not once in the final season or indeed in either revival season did Emily's name ever come up but they never missed an opportunity to mention William.

Second, there's what I mentioned in the course of mythology and the sea-change it meant going forward. The mytharc managed to keep going forward through the first four seasons far less because of trying to make sense of it but because we were drawn in by how it related to Mulder and Scully. How did Samantha relate to the conspiracy? Who killed Melissa and Scully's father? How did Scully get her cancer? We were willing to put up with the ever-expanding mytharc because Mulder and Scully were invested emotionally in it because of what they'd lost. You can see how Emily would fit into this as another brick in the wall: Scully is clearly emotionally devastated and Mulder enraged by what happened.

Instead, as I mentioned, the next step in the myth arc is to move towards the war between the resistance and the colonists and keep Mulder and Scully increasingly less central to it. That's clearly a mistake as big as the fraying plot lines. One could argue Scully's pregnancy and her son are an attempt to reboot the series in this direction but as I mentioned by this point Scully has essentially become more passive in her fate.

The third is something that I think is unforgivable from a cultural standpoint. By erasing Emily from the mythology – and critically, from Scully from this point forward – Carter and her writers are doing something that is uglier. Obviously there was no way Scully could have taken care of Emily from a plot standpoint so from that limited perspective I get why she had to die. But to then erase her entire character causally from the show as if she just another of those victims of the monsters of the week that we see has troubling implications. It's as if Emily only meant something based on what she meant to Scully and even as a cis white male, I find that horrifying. In Monster she is described as 'a cipher, a child more interesting for what she represents than who she is" and that's true.

(I don't agree with the comparison that the writer argues about so many children on Peak TV because all of them are already either adolescents or teenagers. There's a difference between Meadow Soprano or Dana Brody then a toddler.)

And strictly from a creative standpoint this storyline deals with powerful issues that go beyond the scope of The X-Files or science fiction. It was brave for a show to use lines like medical rapists but to discuss biological testing on three years old and a decision for a right to die in that context. I understand the desire of Carter and his writers to go back to more conventional storylines after this but to have no ramifications for what Scully went through emotionally going forward is appalling. (Hell, a month later she's on vacation in Maine worried about being interrupted by Mulder about an X-File. You sure got over that loss quick!) If you don't have the courage to follow through, then honestly, you shouldn't bother doing so at all.

Maybe that's why, when I learned that Scully gave up William for adoption in the final weeks of Season 9, I really couldn't find it in myself to moan about how in order to protect her son, she was giving him up to the strangers. Given what she did to her last child, that was practically kind-hearted. At least she didn't let him die horribly in a hospital. So…progress?

Scott Riccardi's Final Ranking Among Jeopardy's Super-champions

 

Those of you who have read my columns on Jeopardy over the last few years – and according to this site, there are a lot of you – know that ever since Ryan Long completed his 16 game winning streak in the summer of 2022, I have a tradition of comparing those ranked by the show as 'super-champions' in their place on the annals of previous Jeopardy greats.

You also know that I wrote two separate columns about Scott Riccardi in the final weeks of this season about how he compared to those great players on Jeopardy, the latter after he won his eleventh game. I had every intention of doing the same when Scott's streak finally ended. But because it ended on the final day of the season and because I wanted to give credit not just to Scott but to all the other Jeopardy champions of Season 42 I didn't really give him the respect he deserved. And since we're now in the hiatus between seasons, now's as good a time as any to do so.

As Ken Jennings himself mentioned in the final days of his run, Scott's is now officially in the top ten of both standards for super-champions: total games won and money won in one's original run. In the former he is tied with Ryan Long in tenth with sixteen wins, trailing only David Madden, Jason Zuffranieri, Julia Collins, Cris Panullo, Mattea Roach, James Holzhauer, Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider and Jennings himself. In the latter, he ranks in eighth place with $455,000. There he trails Mattea, Jason, Cris, Matt, Amy, James and Ken.

Now in both cases he's actually quite a bit better than some of the people he's ranked below in many ways, particularly when you consider money won. Here's how he compares to all of the players who are ahead of him or tied with in games won after they won  their first 16 games (I'll exclude Holzhauer for reasons that should be obvious by now)

Ken Jennings: $512,959

David Madden: $378,700

Julia Collins: $337, 700

Jason Zuffranieri: $472,000

Matt Amodio: $505,200

Amy Schneider: $631,400

Mattea Roach: $368,991

Ryan Long: $299,400

Cris Panullo: $566, 344

Scott Riccardi: $455,000

As Ken pointed out David and Julia never got as high as Scott even though they won more games than him and Mattea needed 19 wins to get as much money as Scott won in sixteen. This shouldn't come as a shock to many players.

But of course Scott wasn't quite the same type of player as many of the players on this list. In their original runs Mattea, Ryan and Julia tended to start at the top of the category and work their way down. Amy favored the same approach and so did Ken himself. Matt, James and Cris tended to start at the bottom of each category and go from left to right hunting for the Daily Double. David did the same thing but he usually started at the $800 clue.

Scott's approach to the board was more similar to Jason: he tended to start in  the middle of the category and work his way down, usually in the $600 clue. His approach to Daily Doubles in the Jeopardy round was closer to the biggest money winners: bet everything you have.

The difference between Scott and so many of the other champions on this list was that he had many issues getting to where he did. Let's look at how many games Scott ran away with during his original run and compare it to the other names on this list after 16 games (and this time I will include James Holzhauer):

Ken Jennings: 13

David Madden: 10

Julia Collins: 9

James Holzhauer: 15

Jason Zuffranieri: 11

Matt Amodio: 13

Amy Schneider: 13

Mattea Roach: 10

Ryan Long: 7

Cris Panullo: 14

Scott Riccardi: 10

This shouldn't come as a shock to those of us who remember just how much work Scott had to do just to win five games. He had to come from behind to win his first, barely eked out a victory in his second, trailing badly in the Double Jeopardy round of his fourth and was  behind in his sixth win. That particular one must have been a cautionary tale: he found all three Daily Doubles and got them all wrong and it was only because he wagered conservatively in Final Jeopardy that he managed to keep going. He was lucky to survive his seventh win as well and again could have just as easily lost his ninth game.

So when he started to find Daily Doubles during the second half of his run he bet cautiously even when he was ahead by a comfortable margin. Once you've been bitten as badly as Scott had been you have to be careful and in four of his runaways he didn't have a lot of room to work with going into Final Jeopardy. He also had more than his share of bad luck in two of them: in the penultimate week of the season he would be one of just two players in Final Jeopardy and the possibility for a huge payday. In both cases he bet very big and it both cases the finals were stumpers that cost him just as big.

That's one of the scarier things about Scott's final total: it could have been significantly higher then it was. Had he gotten either or both Final Jeopardy's correctly he could have crossed the half-million mark by the time of his sixteenth win. As it was he managed to win $50,400 twice in his run: once in a runaway victory and once in his second game where he definitely had to earn it.

Scott's overall average per win for his original appearance was just over $29,000, which is obviously impressive. The reason his average is so high is, paradoxically, less because of the games where he was so dominant but the ones he wasn't even close to being. That's also why even though Scott looks very good against some players who won more games then him compared to some further down, he doesn't look quite as good. Let's compare him to three men who managed to win 12 games and him at that exact same point:

 

Austin Rogers: $411,000

Matt Jackson: $390,411

Ray Lalonde: $354,300

Scott Riccardi: $312, 501

In the case of Matt and Austin, the two of them were among the most dominant players in the last decade: Matt one $50,000 or more four different times during his run and Austin won over $60,000 twice. In Ray's case he was in a similar position to Scott, he played in more competitive games and therefore his total payouts over his run were much higher.

Make no mistake, though: Scott was as dominant as those players among the super-champions when he needed to be. When you give 39 correct answers in one game and give thirty more in three others, you are clearly one of the all time greats. And this was matched by a great ability to give as few wrong answers as possible. In his last appearance he gave 29 correct responses and not a single incorrect one. Jonathan Hugendubler knew how lucky he had been to get past him on the season finale.

Like so many of the players I mentioned on this list I expect Scott will be a familiar face on Jeopardy in the years to come. It remains to be seen if he will have the record that gets him far in the Tournament of Champions this year, but there's no question that he's already a Jeopardy Master.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I Preferred The Fake Stephen Colbert to the Real One

 

I think I watched every episode of The Colbert Report between the spring of 2006 and when it came to an end in the spring of 2014. And I also think I laughed hysterical through every moment of it, from The Word to Cheating Death to Yahweh or No Way, there was no moment that I didn't find hysterical or coming from a place of comedic truth. I had never seen nor ever would an episode of Bill O'Reilly but I didn't need to in order to get what Colbert was satirizing on his show.

And a big part of the reason the show was so hysterically funny was because even though Colbert was satirizing right-wing media he was still following the cardinal rule of late-night comedy: every public figure is subject to being made fun of. He did so with W when he was in power, went after McCain and Obama with the same fervor, satirized Hilary and Mitt Romney, went after everybody in politics with the same satiric edge. And just as importantly he gave both sides an audience to make fun of them equally.

One bit of Colbert was 'Better Know a District' where he would interview members of Congress and talk to them with the same behavior. He did so with Democrats and Republicans though after a while leadership of the GOP started limited access to him. He also interviewed lobbyists, campaign strategists for both Republicans and Democrats, talked to Republican justices and Democratic ones and had both Republican and Democratic candidates for President on his show. Both Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich appeared on his show multiple times and he attempted to give both 'The Colbert bump'.

In this Colbert was following in the footsteps of his mentor Jon Stewart, where he had been a correspondent on The Daily Show from 1999 to 2005. Stewart essentially spent his first tenure of The Daily Show making fun of both political parties and all parts of cable news with the dark satiric lens it deserved. He saved his harshest rhetoric for Fox News to be sure but he made it very clear that in their own ways CNN and MSNBC were just as guilty of the roles they played in destroying the political landscape. He satirized Republicans as fundamentally corrupt and purely hypocritical – but just as importantly he made it clear Democrats great flaw was their incompetence and their frequently self-congratulatory behavior when it came to their political idols. Stewart, like Colbert, was a liberal in his politics but he was not blind to the flaws in his own party and never hesitating to call them on their bullshit.

Similarly he was just as willing to give Republicans an audience even after he spent weeks or months making fun of them. The most famous example I remember was when The Daily Show spent nearly a year satirizing the new head of the RNC Michael Steele. They satirized his behavior by having a Muppet version of him come on the show to be the real Michael Steele and lampooned the Muppet Steele until he was forced to resign. Then not long after Steele agreed to be interviewed by Stewart and before he came out, the Muppet version of Steele came out first. Steele responded to it in good humor.

Colbert and Stewart understood the rules of late-night comedy during that period simply: everyone in power is given a chance to be an idiot and you are entitled to make fun of that. I say that period but those had been the rules of late night since it began. It's only in the last decade its changed forever.

 

I was reminded of this when I saw a headline by the Post where they took a dark pleasure in Colbert's cancellation. Normally I would be inclined to view this as just gloating and for good reason: Fox News has been the target of late night for nearly twenty years and Colbert has been doing so since 2005 at least. It was the subhead of the headline that attracted me:

"Since 2022 Colbert has had 174 Democrats as guests and only one Republican."

Now I've never considered the New York Post the bastion of integrity or fact checking. But the reason I'm inclined to give to take it seriously is I'm actually shocked Colbert has had one Republican in the last three and a half years. Because that is in large part one of the reasons I was so disappointed by The Late Show when Colbert took over. Colbert knew what had worked for him when he was on Comedy Central and he knew what the rules had been better than anyone who was given a late night job during the period the medium was in transition. So while I might be willing to give Fallon or Meyers or Trevor Noah the benefit of the doubt I can't give it to Colbert.

He knew what the rules were better than anyone. And he knew by them in 2021 it was his job to start making fun of the Biden administration and the Democrats. It's not like there was a shortage of material. Long before we knew the truth of Biden's mental condition, both he and his administration were plagued by the same kinds of problems Trump had dealt with. Indeed Biden's popularity throughout his entire administration was never much better than Trump's. For that matter, he always had a poorer rating among Democrats then Trump ever did with Republicans, spending most of the first three years of his term at not much higher than 40 percent. Only in comparison to Trump did he fare better – and not by much.

Nor were the Democrats much better. The administration had few legislative accomplishments to call its own and Pelosi and Schumer were no better heads of their caucus than the Republicans. It's worth noting during this period the complaints about the 'geritocracy' became manifest and even if you excluded Biden, this could apply to the leadership of the Democrats across the board.

All of these were things Colbert could and should have asked the Democrats he invited on his show but as far as I saw he only brought them on to ask how things were dealing with the Republicans. Like every other late night talk show host, his material acted as if Trump and the GOP were still in power and controlled both houses of Congress which was never true at any point during Biden's Presidency. It wasn't just like they treated them with kid gloves; by comparison MSNBC and progressive newsletters were treating them like Tucker Carlson. The most negative thing I heard any late night show say about the Democrats was "for all their flaws, they're trying to govern."

Now I have no doubt the progressives are going to argue that Colbert and his colleagues were doing their moral good by telling their audiences the existential threat Trump and the GOP were to America and that they should never come near power again. Even if I allow that as a moral good, I'd say there's a time and place for everything. Late night's job was to make me laugh. I fail to see how telling me about how the Dominion voting machine suit revealed the truth of Fox News's attitude towards Trump was supposed to fill that void.

But perhaps the biggest sign of the blind spot when it came to Democrats during this period didn't involve the White House but something that was happening in so many late night's hosts backyard. I'm talking about how during 2021 Andrew Cuomo's governorship was starting to come undone and that by the end of the year, he would be forced to resign.

To put it simply this is the kind of story that a decade earlier late night would have feasted on for weeks. In fact during Obama's first term there were two such stories. Eliot Spitzer being forced to resign as Governor of New York for soliciting prostitutes and more on point, Anthony Weiner being caught in a sexting scandal and being forced to resign from Congress in 2011. In both cases Stewart, Colbert and everyone on late night spent a lot of time tearing them apart and again when they attempted comebacks in 2013.

And when it comes to being impartial Jon Stewart and Anthony Weiner had been roommates in college. When Stewart first heard the story, a part of him genuinely didn't want to do anything even though he admitted the punchline was too good. But he got over it pretty quickly and started to mock him (even literally shedding blood for his art) And when Weiner attempted to run for mayor in 2013 – and Stewart was out of the country during the summer – he mentioned to John Oliver in a virtual segment how much he wished he was there to mock him. It was Oliver who got to use everything involving Carlos Danger and Stewart was only there for the last few weeks.

Now setting aside the issues of sexual harassment charges against Cuomo the material practically wrote itself. Among the charges was that Cuomo has misappropriated federal funds reserved for Covid to write a memoir about beating it when it still hadn't happened in New York state. And it's not like Andrew Cuomo had ever been admired or even respected in New York even among those liberals such as Stewart or anyone else. But during 2021, every late night host from Colbert to Meyers to Noah, basically spent all their time focusing on Trump and the Republicans. This was the thing that should have at least made for one joke segment on A Closer Look on Seth Meyers. The only person who dealt with it was John Oliver and to be clear, he did so mainly because he never liked Cuomo – or indeed any Democrats – in the first place.

Now I have to tell you I don't know if The Late Show or indeed any late night comedians have dealt with the New York City mayor's race in any capacity during the last several months. There's certainly a lot of material in that race, among them the fact that two of the candidates Cuomo and Eric Adams, have both been the subject of Justice Department investigations. And there's still several months left before the election: maybe late night will deal with it. But the realist in me tends to doubt it and not just because everyone in late night is focusing their outrage on the fact of Colbert's cancellation and the fact that they believe Trump is the source of all of it.

No it's because Stephen Colbert has had 174 Democrats on his show in three years and their attitude toward Colbert has basically become that of the same way Trump once famous described Putin. He says nice things about them; they say nice things about him. Another comedian – the Colbert on the Report for one,  might say something like: "The Democrats have found a sure strategy to win back rural America in the midterms: Spend time and energy focused on why a white New York millionaire lost his job!" This is another one of those things that cries out for satire but as we all know – and the Late Show Colbert knows it in particular – it's only funny if it happens to Republicans.

All of this is the kind of thing that deserves to be satirized and made fun of for weeks if not months on end. That the Democrats and progressives have now been mobilizing and calling Colbert's cancellation as bad, if not worse, then everything else that the Republicans are actually doing. Seriously I've received a dozen emails from left-leaning websites demanding a Congressional investigation into Colbert's cancellation in the past week – they've found a way to turn this decision by CBS into a Democratic fundraising technique. That's the kind of thing the Colbert Report would have seen a lot of humor in as well as the fact the left is taking it with their usual humorless intensity. Maybe that's the real reason that late night doesn't make as much fun of Democrats and progressives. They don't like being fun of any more than the right does, and they're just as terrified of isolating the base.

 

A Tale of Two Senators And A Warning to The Left Heading to the 2026 Elections And Beyond

 

In 1944 Wayne Morse was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican representing the state of Oregon. Morse had represented himself as more right-wing as he was in order to win over the conservative wing of Oregon Republicans and would later admit he had voted for FDR over the Republican candidate Thomas Dewey that year.

Morse spent much of his early career in the Senate arguing for the election of Liberal Republicans to counter the conservative wing of the party led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft. He supported the policy of Truman, voting for the Marshall Plan the U.S joining NATO and endorsed Truman in foreign policy. He famously supported Margaret Chase Smith's Declaration of Conscience in 1950 and was an early critic of Joseph McCarthy. When Eisenhower chose Nixon as his running mate in 1952, Morse left the Republican Party that year, initially serving as an Independent. In 1953 he engaged in a 22 hour filibuster protesting the Submerged Land Act, then the longer filibuster in U.S History. He officially switched to the Democratic Party in 1955.

Claire Boothe Luce, a former Republican Congresswoman, gave Morse a backhanded compliment in his decision. "When any Republican becomes a Democrat, it increases the intelligence of both parties."

Two years later first term Senator Strom Thurmond broke Morse's record for the filibuster when he spoke against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The two men would be linked again seven years later.

That year, as many left-wing and Democratic websites will tell you in protest of LBJ's signing the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 Thurmond switched from Democrat to Republican and would campaign for Barry Goldwater for President against LBJ. Goldwater had been one of seven Republicans to vote against passage of the Civil Rights Act, against the protests of his colleagues in the Senate including majority leader Everett Dirksen. They were afraid that this position would permanently damage any chance the Republican Party had of winning the African-American vote in future elections. This had been a reality under Eisenhower who had managed to win between 35 and 40 percent of the African-American votes in both his runs for President while Nixon had won just under a third.

But Goldwater was more interesting in the possibilities of winning votes in the South, particularly the segregationists who had been loyally Democrat for years but were also virulently opposed to civil rights. As he famously put it: "Let's go hunting where the ducks are." Thurmond, who was able to read the political winds and who had campaigned for Eisenhower and Nixon in the last two elections, could see where it was going as well.

The left will excoriate Thurmond and the Republicans for what they did saying that it appealed to the worst impulses of humanity, particularly in the South. Left out of the conversation, of course, is how effective a tactic it has been for the GOP ever since. I'll get to that in a minute but I'd like to go to the other major political event in 1964: the Gulf of Tonkin.

I won't relitigate the deception LBJ engaged in that gave him carte blanche to start the Vietnam War: what I want to discuss is the actual vote on the resolution. In both houses of Congress, there were only two negative votes and one of them was Wayne Morse. The other was Ernest Gruening of Alaska.

As we all know Thurmond would be reelected to the Senate six more times and would serve until he was over 100. Morse, however, would lose reelection to the Senate the next time he came up for reelection in 1968. By that point, everyone knew how horrible the war was going but it didn't help Morse one bit with Oregon's voters who replaced him with Bob Packwood that year. Gruening would lose his primary in 1968 to Mike Gravel and when he tried to run as an Independent that same year, he lost as well.

 

Ever since the Vietnam War began in earnest the far left has basically rejected both political parties for the crime of being insufficiently left. This has hurt the Democrats far more than it has the Republicans ever since the election of Richard Nixon and it's hard to argue that the repercussion have hurt the vision of America that the left has spent so much of that time since believing in.

But they remain convinced that the future of America is to the left. Indeed they believe that anyone who moves to the center in a political campaign or when elected, is in fact going to the right. Leaving aside that this seems to make them unable to under stand how directions work, it seems to acknowledge that this is where the voters are – but then argues that the voters are wrong for thinking that. In other words, progressives think the voters have to move to the left to increase their own intelligence.

They ignore a fact about Morse at their peril: ever since he switched to the Democratic party in 1955, only one Senator has switched from Republican to Democrat ever since. (I'll get to him believe me). By contrast many Democrats have moved to the right either to the GOP (such as Richard Shelby of Alabama and Ben Nighthorse Campbell in 1994) or becoming independent (in 1970 Harry Byrd, another segregationist, shifted from Democratic to Independent while no longer caucusing with Democrats) In the last few years we've seen Democrats such as Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin move from Democrat to Independent after years of being excoriated by the left as being Democrat in name only.

Let's look at Manchin in particular. Manchin is from West Virginia, always a conservative state which nevertheless had remained loyally Democrat during the 20^th century and in both seats of the Senate throughout the 2010s. Manchin was elected to fill the seat of Robert Byrd when he died in 2009.

Manchin had been a Democrat for twenty years before that. In 2004 he had won the gubernatorial election of that sate by a large margin and reelection by a larger margin in 2008. In 2012, he was elected to a full term with nearly 61 percent of the vote. In all the elections he ran in, he would drastically outperform Democratic Presidential nominees in the state, from Obama to Hilary Clinton.

But the crime he committed, starting in 2020, was that he was not sufficiently progressive. That he represented the most Republican leaning constituency of any Democrat or independent in either house of Congress didn't matter to the left. It certainly didn't matter to Paula Jean Swearengin.

Swearengin, as I've written in other articles, was one of the first Justice Democrats to run for office in 2018. She was one of four women to run for the Senate in a Democratic primary. She declared in May of 2017. She supported a progressive platform of Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, spoke out against the pharmaceutical companies in the opioid crisis and legalization of marijuana in any form. In the primary she barley got thirty percent of the vote. Manchin narrowly won reelection.

Undaunted by this failure, one year later Swearengin ran in the Democratic primary for the other Senate seat in West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito. She narrowly managed to win the primary and faced off against Capiton in November. This time she got only 27 percent of the vote as Capito romped to reelection.

Most people would realize that at the very least, the brand of progressivism Swearengin preached wasn't going to sell in West Virginia and that it might be a good approach to moderate going forward. Instead one year later Capito resigned from the Democratic Party altogether saying: "I can't support racism or them ignoring Appalachian children dying & suffering." In other words, you can't fire me, I quit.

Swearingin would later join the Movement for a People's Party that year and left it in 2022. Manchin, of course, stepped down from reelection last year and also left the Democratic Party albeit. Manchin thinks the party is now too far to the left. Swearingin argues it isn't far left enough. Manchin was a Democrat for forty years and won elected office every time he ran from 1982 to 2018. Swearingin lost one Democratic primary, another general election and one primary. Manchin got 290,510 votes in the last general election he ran in and won. Swearingin got 210,309 votes and lost. I don't know what most people's standard is for being a Democrat but the only one that matters to me is winning elections. By that standard Manchin is definitely a DINO.

The Justice Democrats as I've mentioned was founded by veterans of Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign for the Democratic nomination. Sanders, as I repeatedly mentioned, is a Socialist who caucuses with the Democrats but is not a Democrat. He got his seat, I should mention from Jim Jeffords.

Jeffords was always a moderate-to-liberal Republican for his entire career in the Senate. He'd voted for the Brady Bill, an end to the ban on gays in the military and was the only prominent Republican to support Clinton's attempt to establish a national health care plan. However even after his shift he remained fundamentally in line with the GOP on economic matters and continued to vote with them on many issues, often going against moderate members of his party included McCain.

When the 2000 elections left the Senate in a 50-50 tie, the Democrats had sought out a Republican to defect from the Republican caucus to give the Democrats control of the Senate. Democrat whip Harry Reid would court Lincoln Chaffee, John McCain and Jeffords. Jeffords agreed to do so after being promised chairmanship of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Bernie Sanders won reelection to the Senate in 2018. So did Jim Scott, the Republican governor. Despite the fact that Vermont has gone Democrat in every Presidential elections since 1988, it has been purple in the state and federal offices it has elected during that period.

The same, I should add, is true for much of New England where so many progressive politicians seem to have lived. Massachusetts has been going steadily Democratic on the Presidential map but Republicans have won in the governor's race repeatedly. Charlie Baker was elected governor in 2018 the same year Elizabeth Warren won reelection. Kelly Ayotte is the Republican governor of New Hampshire. Before that she served in the Senate where she was narrowly beaten by Maggie Hassan, the current Democratic incumbent. Sounds like New England is more purple then today's progressives want to admit.

This is key because one of the key targets in the upcoming midterms is Susan Collins, a bete noire of the left for over a decade. They think because this is a reliably blue state that they can take her out this time. But the last Democrat to be elected Senator in Maine was George Mitchell in 1994. Angus King, who was elected in 2012, is an independent who caucuses with the Democrats. And Jared Golden is a  Democrat who's won twice in a district Trump carried. Sara Gideon who ran against her was one of the most progressive candidates and was highly favored – but she lost by nearly nine points to Collins. The Democrats went hard to the left to go against a very vulnerable senator – and were trounced. There's no evidence that this method will work again.

If I haven't made my point clear yet, remember that one Senator I mentioned who switched from Republican to Democrat since Wayne Morse?

 Arlen Specter, who had been a Republican for nearly half a century, chose to change parties in 2009 but he had always been a centrist. Nevertheless progressive Joe Sestak chose to run against Specter in the Democratic primary. His major argument: not sufficiently progressive.

 Sestak was opposed by almost the entire Democratic establishment and chose to run against him. Sestak managed to destroy Specter's reputation when he argued that the move was made of 'self-interest'. The fact that Specter had managed to defeat the likely Republican candidate Pat Toomey in 2004 in the primary and would likely do so in the general was irrelevant as was Specter's long history in Congress. Sestak defeated Specter and then narrowly lost to Toomey in the general. That seat has been Republican ever since.

The left's failing as a political force – on the rare occasions they deem to run for political office rather than vaguely insisting no one's sufficiently progressive – is that they seem unwilling to accept certain realities of political parties. Politics has always been about going where the ducks are and the left refuses to do so. And as for trying to reach the voters by moderating their votes, screw that. In their minds, they're good enough, they're smart enough and if the voters don't like that, they brought it on themselves.

They are convinced that progressive policies are universally popular, no matter how many candidates lose trying to win with them as their platform. They point to the most progressive politicians as their icons, ignoring that they live in states that are always purple. And they denounce the ones who try to win voters by going to the center as DINOs even though in most cases they've won more elections then they ever have.

The division in the Democratic Party right now is between the establishment who at least comprehends that they have to have a big tent and the left wing of the party who is convinced that if the tent is moved more to the left, the voters will just show up. That there is recently and historically no evidence of that fact – that on the contrary the historical record shows the opposite is true – is unlikely to change their minds.

While I'm not sure what the Democrats will do I know what I wish they would do. If the left thinks that voters are out there waiting for them and they threaten to leave if they're not listened to…let them.

If they're so sure of themselves and millions of progressives are out there, let them form their own party made up entirely of sufficiently leftist politicians. I'm serious.. They say both parties are the same. Then let them put their money where their very big mouths are and form their own. Let them form their own organization, get their own candidates and most importantly fund them without any help from a Super Pac or campaign.

I mean, if the masses of progressive voters are out there throughout the country as they say they are, well, they shouldn't need such things as a campaign structure or a vetting process or even mass amounts of money. If the ideas are as overwhelmingly popular as they say, let them stand on their own two feet and I'm sure they will be swept into power.

Meanwhile the corrupt and overburdened Democrats can concentrate on those that are too far to the right – you know the ones in the center that are too good for progressives. Make an agenda appropriate for every state you campaign in. Free from the leftist standard you might be able to find voters in West Virginia and South Carolina that the progressives haven't so far. Hell, maybe Joe Manchin and Krystin Sinema will come back.

And don't worry about the progressives. Remember what Claire Boothe Luce said. It will increase the intelligence of both parties and it definitely will do it for the Democrats.