Homicide Rewatch: Requiem For Adena

 

Written by Julie Martin

Directed by Lee Bonner

 

Ever since the first season the ghost of Adena Watson has hovered around Tim Bayliss. Her murder has been mentioned at least once a season by Bayliss and just two episodes ago we heard him mention that he was considering quitting the unit in large part because the Araber passed away and now he must deal with the fact the case will forever be open.

Now for the first time both Bayliss and Homicide confront the spectre of Adena Watson in the most direct fashion they have to date with the murder of yet another African-American preadolescent girl. In a daring but typical move Homicide gives no closure to Tim at any level, either with Adena's murder or even his ability to let her go.

Its worth another reminder that Homicide was for all intents and purposes a contemporary series to The X-Files. While I never drew the parallel directly at the time, it's worth noting that Bayliss does have a clear parallel to Fox Mulder: both men are irrevocably changed by their experience with an adolescent girl; in Fox's case, it's the abduction of his sister is Samantha. (There are other parallels which I'll go into detail in later reviews.) This is perhaps made the most clear in Requiem for Adena where Bayliss is clearly trying to find a link that while finally bring him closure with Adena's killer.  We see a self-destructive aspect to him in this episode that we really haven't seen him demonstrate in a while. His relationship with Frank is stormy at best but in this episode they come the most to verbal blows then they have at any time since Frank insisted on going after Tim's cousin for murder at the end of Season 3.  And as is usually the case Pembleton is absolutely right but Tim won't admit it even at the end of the episode.

The main reason that I'm bringing up Fox Mulder is that eventually the series will attempt to give Mulder closure (if you read my reviews on The X-Files you know how ham-fisted I thought that was). Requiem for Adena is more realistic not just because it's a cop drama rather than  sci-fi but because it resists the idea that closure can be found so simply. This is a conclusion, paradoxically, one got with the majority of stories on The X-Files; cases might be explained but they were rarely resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Homicide tends to deal with the reverse: the detectives job is not to come up with the why just the who, what and how. This has never been good enough for Bayliss with cases he closes; it's never going to work with his first case.

Janelle Parsons's death immediately reminds Tim of Adena Watson's murder and its clear Frank knows that. He spends most of the episode splitting between determined to solve the case his way and trying in a ham-handed way not to tell Tim that. Of course because he is Frank Pembleton he makes it all about him, though again he's absolutely right.

The murder and possible sexual assault of a twelve year old girl gives Giardello agita, with good reason: he was in this exact situation four years ago and he knows just how badly things went with the Watson murder.  So when Frank tells him he wants complete control of this investigation – no extra shifts, no bosses everywhere, no red ball – he's willing to listen. When he adds that he wants to work alone – immediately after Tim says he wants to see if there's a connection between Parsons and Adena Watson's murder –  it seems like he's stepping on an open wound. For Frank he's remarkably delicate about not bringing Adena into the mess and won't even acknowledges whatever mistakes were made in the original investigation. He says, for now, he's dealing with a fresh crime.  But Bayliss, as always, takes it personally.

As Frank goes on his track Bayliss goes on his own. Al is willing to hear Bayliss out with more compassion then he did the first time around: "Go with your gut but watch your step."  He's just been through the ringer with the bosses defending Frank's process and then Pembleton has made clear he's not available. He wants to cover all the bases. The problem is Bayliss turns out to be a bull in a China shop, determined to make the case about him.

The episode makes the most clear when Bayliss goes to talk with Mrs. Watson and we see a searing flashback of the unforgettable moment when he informed her of her daughter's death. While initially civil Mrs. Watson quickly turns harsh. It's clear she believes the Araber was the killer. We see photographs of Adena on her mantle and a beautiful drawing, all of which Bayliss looks at and we're yet again reminded of the picture of her on his desk. She tells him in no uncertain terms that she has been able to move on from her daughter's death in a way that Tim has never been able to. In other shows this would be a clear sign of just how unhealthy Bayliss's fixation is and he might be able to let go of it, at least of the end of the episode. Instead he just keeps moving forward – or in circles.

Bayliss seems determined to find a connection where there isn't one throughout the investigation. When Frank comes in after a hard day of getting nowhere Bayliss takes it as proof that he is right when he isn't. Right about then Munch comes in with information of an anonymous tip about a Lorena Lester seen running from the crime. Munch knows this is a joke but Bayliss takes it seriously. Pembleton tries to instruct him about how to get a confession and yet again Bayliss makes it all about him. Again Frank walks away.

Then Bayliss gets drunk at the Waterfront and he confides in Munch that after four years he's actually starting to hate Adena a little. Right then the local reporter walks in and Tim tries to chat her up. She walks him to his car…cut to Pembleton screaming "Bayliss!" Tim has officially said the killer is a mastermind to a reporter for the Sun.

Not long after this sex crimes reports to Frank and they get the break. A twelve-year old girl was sexually assaulted with a serrated edge knife. And the attacker was her mother's current boyfriend Carter Dooley.

Dooley is a repeat sex offender who just got out of Jessup four months ago. "So much for the reforming power of the Maryland Penal System", Munch comments. The dots connect so they prepare to raid Dooley's home. That's when Bayliss shows up.

We've seen Frank disagree with Bayliss before but usually he keeps their arguments relative within the confines of the squad. This time he's clearly outraged beyond belief and he orders Bayliss to stay behind. "You have jeopardized this investigation once already!" he says as he physically shoves him.

Now is where I tell you that Dooley is portrayed by a very young Chris Rock. (See Hey, Isn't That…to see just how young.) I mentioned in earlier articles that Homicide has a superb track record of getting actors known for their comic roles and getting searing dramatic turns out of them. Rock's performance as Dooley is not one of them. In fact Rock actually changes his comic persona to the point is unrecognizable even to those who knew him at the time. Gone is the smart talker with lots of clever things to say and it is his place is 'the dimmest bulb I've ever seen," according to Munch.

This is perfectly in keeping with how so many of the criminals in Homicide are ridiculous stupid. But Dooley's a special case as he's so incredibly dim that Pembleton is clearly losing patience very quickly. As Munch says: "He doesn't know whether to laugh or take a swing at him." He spends time denying that the knife they found under his mattress is his, only after there are fingerprints on it says that he lent it to a friend (who didn't tell him what he was going to do with it, of course) says if he tells the friend will hurt him and then when asked says he only knows his street name. "He's not that good a friend," he assures Pembleton.

Eventually Bayliss goes in and for a time he manages to manipulate Carver into admitting certain things. He gets him to admit his complicity in raping his girlfriend's daughter and admits to knowing Parsons. But then Bayliss decides to make it about Adena Watson and Carver completely backtracks. Again the episode cuts between the box here and in Three Men and Adena. Finally Pembleton hauls Bayliss out and all but throws him into the locker room.

The scene between Kyle Secor and Andre Braugher is another one of their masterpieces. Both of them are magnificent in this episode (this is arguably Secor's best performance of Season 4) but in this episode they talk about Adena Watson in a way they really haven't since the Araber walked out of the box three years ago. Bayliss makes it clear that he needs to get another chance, that he's never gotten over his first case never being closed. Pembleton makes it very clear that the Watson case was over the moment Risley Tucker walked out of the box and that Tim has never accepted it. "You are a liability to this case because you are a liability to yourself," he makes it clear. He tells Bayliss this is about Janelle Parsons, not Adena Watson and not about Tim Bayliss. And it is in that sense that Tim allows him to get the confession.

The episode features a conversation between Bayliss and Giardello which starts with him asking how he sleeps. Bayliss admits he sleeps lousy mainly because of nightmares. Giardello seems fine with this: "Do you know anybody who gets a good night sleep?" Considering the job Bayliss admits the point. He tells him that it is only when you can't separate the nightmares from reality that you're no good to yourself (foreshadowing accidentally or on purpose how Tim's arc will progress and eventually end on Homicide.) Then Tim asks the real question: "How do you know when to stop caring?" And its telling that Giardello, who has been a cop a long time, can't give an answer to that question.

This episode features magnificent performances across the board. I speak not just of Secor and Braugher but for the superb work of Yaphet Kotto who remains remarkably patient for this. An added bonus is the work of Belzer who gets the show his range in  a way we too rarely see. We don't just see the comic part of Munch but also a fairly dedicated investigator. For once he is an asset by working from the sidelines, doing research, finding the knife and offering moral support. And as Dooley is interrogating we actually see a sign that he cares about certain things. When Dooley starts being disruptive he actually throws the interrogation room door and tells Dooley that if he doesn't shut up he'd take a swing at him. And its telling that when Bayliss thinks that Dooley might have killed Adena Watson he considers Tim's facilitating just as bad, threatening to swing at him too. This is not the easy going Munch we saw laughing at the start of the episode.

What little humor there is comes from the subplot where we learn Brodie has a crush on Howard. Munch overhears it, he tells it to Kellerman and Kellerman passes it on to Howard. When Kay meets Brodie and tries to gently let him down, Brodie tells her its work related. Howard then turns on him and thinks he's be engaging in locker room talk, something that brakes poor Brodie's heart.

The episode ends with Frank turning on the mobile in the crib he's prepared for his new child and we watch Bayliss in the office, taking out the carnation he's been wearing all week (to hide the smell of death) and putting Adena's picture in a manilla envelope. He seals it, considers putting it in his desk, then gets up and throws in the trash. On another show this would be an act of closure. As we shall see in future seasons, all he really did was throw away a physical reminder. The mental stuff is harder to get rid of.

Perhaps in the last moments we really do see the difference between Frank and Tim. He's looking through the slats of the crib, something that Bayliss mentioned at the start of the episode when Mary comes in and tells him dinner's ready. Frank gets up and walks out not a second thought. We don't know how Frank sleeps at night but we know he'll wake up next to someone in the morning.  He may claim he doesn't need a partner at work but he has one at home. (Of course…no, I'm not going to spoil anything just yet.

 

NOTES FROM THE BOARD

The plot for the murder of Janelle Parsons is taken directly from an investigation in David Simon's book with almost no details changed. The case involved the murder of a Jennifer Savage, was investigated by Harry Edgerton (the inspiration for Pembleton) and was indeed handled entirely by him as a 'one-man red ball'. Much of how it was handled and indeed the dialogue of some of the witnesses and even the suspect are basically word for word from the case. The only difference is the investigation took place within months of the Latonya Wallace murder (the inspiration for Adena Watson) instead of the four years difference and at no point did either Edgerton or any other detective look for connections between Savage's murder and Wallace's.

"Detective Munch" In addition to both the serious investigator and the angry cop we see on display we get a sense of Munch's wit when he learns of Howard's crush on Brodie. It's clear he finds the idea of Howard as hot puzzling and when Kellerman says the same thing, he actually seems offended by the idea. "She's a woman," Kellerman says as he walks off. "She's a sergeant!" Munch says in exasperation.

Claude Vetter's blasé confession and his lack of remorse may just seem like a typical Homicide storyline. In fact, we'll be dealing with this again in Season Five.

Hey, Isn't That… Believe it or not at this point in Chris Rock's career he was relatively unknown. To be sure he'd appeared on Saturday Night Live for three seasons and a few episodes of In Living Color right before it was canceled. He'd also had roles in New Jack City, Boomerang, and CB4. But he was still mostly known for his standup to the average (white) viewer. Then in 1996 came his first HBO comedy special Bring The Pain. The following year he won two Emmys for it. The rest, as they say, is history. For the purposes of this article I'm going to concentrate solely on Rock's work for television which is a lot.

Not long after this HBO gave him his combination Variety/Sketch Comedy Show The Chris Rock Show. In the four years it was on the air, he would win one Emmy as part of the writing staff and be nominated for both that and Outstanding Variety or Music Comedy every year it was on the air. He received Emmy nominations for each of his four follow-up HBO specials, Bigger and Blacker, Never Scared and Kill The Messenger, winning the Emmy for writing the last one. In 2016 he would be nominated for writing both the 2016 Academy Awards and directing Amy Schumer: Live at the Apollo.  He was also nominated for his most recent standup special Selective Outrage. (He would also win two Grammy for the Comedy Album for Never Scared and Bigger and Blacker.

In 2005 he would create and do the voiceover work for the UPN/CW comedy series Everybody Loves Chris based on his life growing up. He appeared on Louie multiple times (Louis C.K. was a co-writer on the Chris Rock show, Empire, and the Jim Gaffigan show. His most recent live action appearance was a complete change of pace as Loy Cannon in Season Four of Fargo, for which he received a Golden Globe nomination and a Critics Choice Award nomination for Best Actor in a Limited Series in 2021. He recently produced an animated follow-up to Everybody Hates Chris called Everybody Still Hates Chris where he continued to do the adult voice. He is currently in pre-production for a TV series known as Kara.

I Finally Got Around to Seeing Candy This Week - And You Should See Love & Death (Or Really Anything Else) Instead

 

Way back in April of 2023 I ended up watching HBO Max's Love & Death. At the time I was trying to get ahead of potential Emmy contenders for the 2022-2023 season (I didn't know that the labor stoppage that was about to occur was going to last as long as it did) and the fact that it was a David E. Kelley limited series for HBO seemed like a sign it would be.

I loved the show and while I didn't put it on my ten best list for 2023 I still preferred it far more than many of the series that did get nominated for Best Limited Series such as Fleishman is in Trouble and Obi Wan-Kenobi. The end of year awards in 2024 would rectify this partially with the Golden Globe and Critics Choice nominated  both the series the best performers for awards even though there were still no wins.

I was reluctant to do so initially because, as I wrote at the time:

Hulu’s Candy, with Jessica Biel in the title role, had been one of many limited series that had received early Emmy buzz from the streaming service. Dopesick and The Dropout were the ones I ended up following, I refused to watch Pam and Tommy and I’ve only recently starting to look at Under the Banner in Heaven.  Indeed Elizabeth Olsen who plays Montgomery here learned about Biel’s adaptation two months before Love and Death started told her that HBO Max was planning its own adaptation. Biel thanked her and continued to make her version.

Now during the strike of 2023 I did start something I do occasionally and watch streaming series that have aired one and occasionally two or three years back and review them for my blog. I did so with Under the Bridge earlier this year. And while I was waiting for the end-of-year nominations from the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards to come out so I could start making informed decisions about which new dramas, comedies and limited series' on streaming to review for my blog in the weeks and months to come (as well as the recurring favorites I want to get back to) I found myself with some free time this week.  At the same time I saw an article about Hulu's most critically acclaimed shows. I decided I'd pick a streaming series I'd miss from that service in previous years, watch it and review it for my blog.

I considered more recent shows such as Say Nothing and the most recent season of Nine Perfect Strangers (and I may get back to both later on) but I decided to do Candy for a couple of reasons. First it was only five episodes compared to the seven or eight of some of the others and second, because it gave me an opportunity to do something I've never done in all my years of TV criticism: compare and contrast two versions of the same story. I found the idea appealing.

Well having seen both my initial glib reaction would be: if you only see one streaming limited series about Candy Montgomery's affair, murder and the trial that followed see Love & Death. But even though that's completely accurate it's worth going into more detail and making clear what Kelley's version of the story nails in every respect to make it sing and the version that Jessica Biel adapted does with the exact same narrative than, even though it's two episodes shorter then the one we got on HBO Max, it actually seems a lot longer and far less fun.

Warning: Spoilers for Candy and Love & Death follow.

First of all there's tone. As is the case with every limited series that he's done during the past decade Kelley takes his lead character and the subject seriously. He treats Candace Montgomery as a figure of empathy and compassion at the start, makes her affair with Allan seem planned and everything that follows reasonably, deals with the murder and its aftermath and the psychological havoc it wreaks on everyone from Candy to her husband and especially to her attorney Don with the seriousness it deserves.

Candy almost from the start plays like the Lifetime Movie version of the exact same story and it actually gets more tonally off the further in you get. This is true, I should add when it comes to the depiction of sex and profanity which Kelley didn't shy away from in his version. Every sex scene is the series is done with dim lighting and we usually come around in the aftermath of the sex when we see it.  There's very little profanity that could have been heard on a cable network at the time. And that's before you consider the dialogue which almost sounds like Biel and her writers only experience with the 1980s Texas was seeing movies made  during that period. 

We also have a ridiculous amount of long pauses with ominous music that don't seem to have anything to do with the subject and characters repeatedly saying things that would be out of place in a 1990s rom-com. Kelley treated all the characters with respect and dignity from the start. The first time Candy goes to see Don in his legal office he's doing push-up shirtless and the next time its in a tanning bed. When she talks to him about an interview he seems so clueless you get to feeling Saul Goodman would wonder where he got his law degree.

Then there's the difference in how both Love & Death and Candy tell their stories.  Kelley follows a linear path, beginning with the Montgomery household at the start, her decision to have an affair with Allan (which has a different context then in Candy) then moves to its progression and end in the second episode, then moves to the events of the murder in the third and its aftermath. The leadup to the case and to the trial itself takes up the final three episodes of the series and we see the entire two the same way. There are some flash forwards but by and large Kelley keeps to this pattern.

Candy begins on the night before the murder and has the murder occur in the first episode. We then spend the next two episodes flashing back both to the Montgomery household and the Gore household spending time with Candy and Betty pretty much equally in each episode. This is not necessarily a flaw except the writers excessively use captions to tell us how much time has passed after every commercial break and even while the episodes are still airing. During the first episode we see four different captions in the space of fifteen minutes telling us how many hours have passed. 24 was subtler with its ticking clock than Candy is.  By the time we get to the fourth episode the writers are reminding us it's the day Betty died, the day after she died as if they have as little faith in the intellect of the audience as they do in their characters.

This also undercuts any arc the characters can have during the course of the series. In Love and Death Olsen portrayed Candy at the start with a  kind of ethereal beauty and an open stare. The perm and the glasses that she becomes known for at the time of the media circus only happen by the trial and by that point she is so medicated and withdrawn from reality that we don't recognize her from the spirited woman we saw at the start. It gave Olsen a great ability to show enormous range.

Biel by contrast has her wig and perm from the start of the series and is wearing in the flashback. Any sign of the ethereal nature we got from Olsen's version is never present and because of the start at the murder Biel plays Candy as if she were aware of the crime she's committed. That would be acceptable except there are no difference between Biel's version in the past then there are in the present. She always seems harsh and unpleasant, with none of the wondering we frequently see in Olsen.

Biel, frankly, looks like she's trying the 'glam down' approach that so many actresses have done in films in order to earn nominations and awards rather than be a natural actress. Considering how superb a performer she can be in other roles (most notably the first season of The Sinner) this is a bizarre choice for her as an actress and it's not subtle at all. But compared to the other actors in this cast she might as well be Meryl Streep.

Hard as it is not to compare the cast of Candy unfavorably to their counterparts in Love & Death I can't help but thing the major problem is the script. That's particularly true with all the male roles. Paolo Schreiber is at least as a good an actor as Jesse Plemons (who received an Emmy nomination for his work as Allan Gore) but where as Plemons' managed to play his opaqueness into a kind of sympathy Schreiber seems clueless from the start. He keeps telling everybody he calls in the pilot "This is Allan Gore" to the point you almost wonder if he's forgotten his own name half the time.

Patrick Fugit's role as Pat Montgomery was not particularly memorable compared to his fellow actors but he played with a solid straight forwardness. By contrast from the start Timothy Simons seems completely miscast as if he think this is a comedy and he's basically just playing another version of Jonah. There are times he manages to get the kindly father right but the way he's shown as a clueless idiot around his wife, it almost seems like the writers are saying: "She has to have an affair! Her husband's a moron!" Even in the aftermath of the murder when we all know what happened Simons's seems ridiculous out of touch saying he needs to protect his family from an intruder, finding out about her affair and buying her a card and flowers and at the end of the episode trying to swing an axe forty-one times and after being exhausted going back to bed and snuggling with his wife.

But the worst betrayal is the character of Don Crowder. In Love & Death Kelley went to great pains to put Don's character front and center, showed just how seriously he took his case and the toll it took on him. Tom Pelphrey was magnificent from start to finish and by making the trial the center it did wonders for it. Raul Esparza is a superb actor but from the start the show undercuts him by having only glimpses of the trial during the first few episodes giving Don very little to do in the first three episode and by the time he shows up for a full appearance in the penultimate episode he genuinely seems as clueless as everyone else. When he learns his client is guilty he seems to be salivated about the idea of a trial rather than nervous about what's to come. The trial seems almost less important than the crime and that's barely talked about.

The only actress who comes off better in Candy then in Love & Death is Melanie Lynskey's work as Betty. She's just as shrill at times as Lily Rabe but its clear the writers have more compassion for her. When they try to show her as the other side of the coin as Candy they mostly succeed. (Lynskey did receive a Supporting Actress nomination from both the Critics Choice and the Astras for her work.) Yet even then much of the time Lynskey is working against the script which never makes her sympathetic at home in the second episode and shows her as something of a fool in the third.

And if you're looking for so many of the other memorable characters who appeared throughout Love & Death you won't find them in Candy and when they appear, it's basically as stick figures. Much of the action in Love & Death had a lot to do with the struggle over the change in leadership over the church: Jackie, whose divorce led her to leave the parish and Reverend Ron, whose lack of authority it is implied led to a gap in both Candy's life and the town.  Elizabeth Marvel and Keir Gilchrist respectively gave a lot of force in their roles. In Candy both the characters and the role of the church in the community is minimized to theater for the wives and husbands and much of it plays out like farce rather than drama.

And that's true across the board. The children, particularly Candy's daughter had a real presence in Love & Death; here they're given nothing. Bruce McGill was magnificent as an autocratic judge in Love & Death; here he's not even really there. Don's wife was shown to see how much the trial cost him, here she only shows up at church. And considering that the writers have the time and energy to give Jason Ritter and Justin Timberlake (Lynskey and Biel's husbands) cameos as the dumbest and most sexist deputies possible this seems like a case of missing the forest for the trees.

By the time we get to the trial which takes 2 episodes Love & Death and only one in Candy it's clear what the purpose of Biel's story is as opposed to Kelley. Kelley wants to tell a detailed nuanced story in which he explains the full version of the saga of Wylie, the circumstances which led to the murder and all of the repercussions afterwards. Biel clearly believes that Candy Montgomery was guilty of what happened and the only reason she got away with it was because the town of Wylie was full of yokels who were shined on by a flashy attorney.

And as if to drive the point home in the climatic summation Betty is in the courtroom for Candy's testimony making it very clear that she (and by extension the writers) thinks that not only is lying but that's she's also a whore. The townspeople basically take on the role of a Greek chorus of idiots who completely believe everything Candy and Crowder are telling them. That was not the case in the version Kelley told and he made it clear in his version. He also makes Crowder seem like a showboat attorney who is a publicity hound who doesn't care about anything. This isn't the case in Love & Death where Pelphrey's Crowder cares very much about Candy and we see the burden of it.

Just as tellingly the only bit of the cross-examination we see is when the D.A. asks if Montgomery had another affair at the end of this. There was a lot more to the cross-examination but the point of Biel is clear: she was a loose woman who is a completely unreliable narrator. In Kelley's version he goes in a linear fashion and by showing the circumstances of the crime makes it clear that he's more interested in telling Candy's story. Biel doesn't really care about how things played out in real life; she has her own version to tell and it's where Candy doesn't just get away with murder, she's clueless at the end.

And that's telling when it comes to the epilogue. In Kelley's version he goes into great detail about what happened to everybody in the aftermath of the trial and shows the entire  story for all of the major players. In Biel's version, not only does she only tell three bits of it she omits a lot. She acknowledges that Allan got remarried not long after the trial, but omits the fact there was a divorce a few years later. Biel points out Crowder ran for governor of Texas afterwards and omits not only that he lost but that he committed suicide – by implication because he couldn't let go of the baggage of the case.

Worst of all she acknowledges that Candy did divorce Pat changed her name and now works as a mental health counselor but in her mind it’s a toxic joke: Candy not only got away with murder but its another sign that an insane woman is guiding the sane.

Hell even the sense of setting is off. Kelley's went to a great deal of trouble to put the music and choices of television in context. Here all we get is a recording of David Soul and the entire town seems more interested in discussing what's going on during Dallas as well as other 1970s TV shows thrown in as reference.

I know why Kelley was drawn to the story of Candy Montgomery: he saw the chance to tell a true life story of a woman who was trapped in the world that had few options for her, saw her try to reach out and was forced into a series of choices no one should make. He used Love & Death to fill out that narrative and with his usual touchstones made it sing and tell a deep and measured limited series like he usually does.

In Candy I think Biel saw the exact same story and thought of a chance to talk about the worst aspects of American society in a cookie cutter version. We see her contempt for the small town and its values in every scene of the episode, particularly when it comes to the town focusing around the church. She sees the models of middle America basically just being hypocrisy for the worst kinds of adultery. She sees all the people in the town as uneducated yokels where the men are all ignorant and the women high-strung and whoring around. And she clearly sees Candy Montgomery's trial as just another metaphor for how flawed the jury system and how people can be fooled by flashy lawyers. There isn't a single person in Candy that Biel has any respect for except Betty and critically it's only after she's dead and can serve as a voice for the narrator that she has any purpose.

Godard famously once said that the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. We see a version of this with Love & Death which was still being filmed by the time Candy debuted on Hulu in May of 2022. I'm pretty sure that Kelley didn't see this version until after he finished making Love & Death and if he did he no doubt is gracious enough to keep his opinions to himself. I'm not bound by those parameters and I'll be blunt.

I have seen some bad limited series over my career watching television, some are just pretentions (the most recent season of True Detective fits that parameter) some have no real quality (The Regime is the most recent example of this) and some are badly done to begin with (Under the Bridge) Candy, however, is laughably ludicrously awful and a complete waste of all the talent assembled in front of the screen. This isn't just a case of it paling in comparison to Love & Death, on its own merits Candy utterly and completely stinks. It would rise to the level of camp were I not certain that Biel and her writings were approaching the subject with at least some seriousness. It's the kind of show that actually gets worse with each new episode. I would have abandoned it had I not made a commitment to get through the whole thing and were it not merely five relatively short episodes. By the time I got to the last one I was almost walking out of the room during much of it because it was so unwatchable.

I have been lucky that I've seen so few missteps in my career of criticism for television and I'm definitely fortunate to have seen Love & Death without watching Candy.  Not just because the former was a near masterpiece and this is so terrible but because of the contrast. Love & Death was one of those shows that made me glad I'd subscribed to HBO Max. Candy is the kind of product that makes you want to cancel streaming subscriptions altogether.

In the words of Roger Ebert, I hated, hated, hated, hated Candy. If you haven't seen Love & Death yet, it will be playing on Netflix this month and I urge you to seek it out. I'm grateful that Lynskey and Simons moved on to projects more worthy of them and the same goes for Jason Ritter.  As for Jessica Biel, she didn't do anything for the next three years and only this past spring has she done another project: The Better Sister. I may look at it down the road but only because I want to see how Janel Moloney and Matthew Modine look.

I'm not even going to rate Candy mainly because I don't think zero stars would be too many to dignify it with. All I'll say is if you turn on Hulu and your algorithm shows it immediately type in something that doesn't start with C.  You're welcome.

Why Is Six Feet Under Rarely Considered In The Same Breath as HBO's Other Masterpieces?

 

 

As someone who has read more than his share of books on the Golden Age of TV and HBO one of the things that strikes me are series that were considered masterpieces at the time but never seemed to be given the same reverence as so many of their contemporaries even now. The best example of this was in Alan Sepinwall's book on the era The Revolution Was Televised.

While Sepinwall does a masterful job dealing with all of the series that are among the greatest made during the first phase – from the debut of OZ in 1997 to Mad Men and Breaking Bad in 2007 – there are quite a few series that he for whatever reason chose to ignore discussing. I've mentioned a couple of them in my columns over the years but in hindsight the most glaring omission is Six Feet Under.

Now it's not like Six Feet Under was exactly underrated when it came out. It was nominated for Best Drama three of the four years it was eligible (for whatever reason the first two aired during the same year of eligibility 2001-2002) and it won both the Golden Globe and SAG Award for Best Drama during its run as well as numerous other awards. It's currently ranked 93^rd of the 250 greatest TV shows of all time, slightly ahead of Deadwood and basically tied with OZ.  And of course its series finale will no doubt rank as arguably the greatest one that any drama has ever had in the era of Peak TV, right up their with Breaking Bad.

Yet somehow whenever discussion of the dramas that started the revolution for HBO are discussed, one always talks about The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood as the three unquestioned masterpieces of that period. It's one thing not to give OZ its due but for a series that was nominated for Best Drama more times then the latter two shows combined? That earned 23 Emmy nominations its first year which at the time was more than any other HBO series had ever managed in a single season? (That record would stand until Game of Thrones came along.) That was, in many ways, far more inclusive and daring in those shows when it came to dealing with gay and lesbian representation (which in 2001 when it started was nearly unheard of even among cable TV)? A show that launched the careers of so many actors in its cast to a level of celebrity that 20 years after it ended has not even come close to dying down?

I may be overreacting but for me it is somewhat more personal. For whatever reason of all of the shows that were considered part of the revolution Six Feet Under was the first HBO drama I came in at the start and was there at the end. All the other HBO dramas (and indeed many of the comedies) that have followed I either came in the second season and then caught up or in the case of some ignored all together. (I have a much better track record with network dramas, Showtime and basically every other cable network.)

And I'll admit while I liked the show very much at the time, I found it odd compared to what I'd already seen and much of what was to come. But it wasn't until earlier this morning when I saw the Pilot for the first time in years that I began to get an idea as to why so many of my critics might well love Six Feet Under but not feel as comfortable calling it an all-time great as those done by the holy Trinity of Davids. For the purposes of this article I'm going to deal only with the Pilot but considering how accurately it set the tone of what was to come during the rest of the five seasons I think it applies overall.

 

 

Six Feet Under is by far the funniest of all of the HBO dramas and indeed almost all of the dramas that were to come during this decade.

Alan Ball sets the tone early by having Nathaniel Fisher, the paterfamilias of the Fisher Clan lighting his cigarette in the family hearse and being hit by a bus to the music of "I'll Be Home for Christmas". We then see Nate (Peter Krause) talking with his seatmate whose last name he doesn't know yet (Rachel Griffiths) about how little they're looking forward to the holidays and then hooking up in an airport closet. David (Michael C. Hall looks so youthful!) then gets the news and has to hold it together while doing another viewing. Claire (Lauren Ambrose) gets the news about her father's death while she's high on crystal meth.

When Nate gets to the morgue and goes in he sees the spectre of Nathaniel and the two have a perfectly civil conversation. Then Nate forgets to bring the body home because Claire is driving too fast. All of this is punctuated by commercial for mortuary products as if they were the kinds of ads for breakfast cereals.

Its worth remembering that Six Feet Under is by far the most personal and autobiographical of any series we got in the first decade of the 2000s. Ball did grow up in a funeral home, his father did die in a similar fashion, he was on drugs when he was notified and he was deeply closeted throughout his childhood. Yet at no point does Ball really take any part of this: the death, the funeral, every member of the Fisher family's reaction seriously. He acknowledges they're all dealing with a very real trauma but he makes it clear that they were dealing with their own shit. And the way all of these bizarre flashbacks involving Nathaniel in the mortuary with the Fisher children, and the way everybody casually is having conversations with the father even though he's gone is taken naturally and lightly. Which may be another reason this show is realized the same way:

 

The Fishers are by far the most normal characters we will ever see in the world of HBO dramas.

The Fishers are the average American family, married, 2.5 children (Claire is much younger then her siblings) working class Americans who just happen to have their house on top of a funeral parlor where they do their work. The secrets they keep (especially compared to The Sopranos which immediately preceded them) are fairly banal. David has been hiding he's gay from his family his whole life when it fact they've pretty much always known. Ruth has been having an affair with a hairdresser the last two years of the marriage. Claire is a rebellious teenager with no direction.

There will be some secrets that emerge in later secrets but none of them are the kinds of horrible destructive ones we will get used to in later shows. On the contrary what sets the Fishers apart from almost everyone else I've seen is that these crises are ways for them to come together as a family unit more often then they do internalize and fragment. Unlike what we saw from the actual Soprano family and what we got with the Drapers and the Whites, there are almost no crises that the Fishers don't find a way to deal with. They do so poorly and often badly but that's the same as every family really.

 

Death on Six Feet Under is treated less seriously and more everyday than on every other drama we've gotten since.

Six Feet Under famously starts every episode with at least one death. Some will be more tragic then others: there will be victims of shootings, crib deaths and deaths of loved ones after agonizing illnesses. But just as often the deaths are ludicrous: the laborer who's cut to pieces in a pretzel maker, the woman celebrated her divorce who sticks her head out a limo in joy and is flattened by a traffic light, a woman who is hit by a golf ball struck by someone we believe is an adversary. And that's just the first season.

We got used to recurring characters dying on a regular basis during the 21^st century and HBO would play the main role in making us used to that. But I almost wonder if Ball was being tongue in cheek with so many of the ridiculous and surprising deaths that took place over the years as comparison to his fellow showrunners. The three Davids all took the many character deaths on their shows with both utter seriousness and a fact of life to the point that in the later seasons the viewer was basically numb to it. The lives didn't matter to the characters on these shows and in many cases they didn't even get mourned.

Ball basically turns this idea on its head by arguing that death is a part of life. Fisher and Sons takes the loss of life far more seriously then those in the world of any of the other shows on HBO really did. Considering that the first season would premiere while The Sopranos was on hiatus, this is a stark contrast. To Tony Big Pussy's life didn't matter after he knew he was a rat and the fact that he left a family behind was irrelevant. To Nate and David Fisher, it's the only important thing mainly because it's how they earn their living.  The gangbanger who is killed gets the same treatment as the eight-year old who accidentally shoots himself when he finds his brothers gun. A loss of life matters to those left behind in a way it just doesn't to anyone else even if it’s a business expense.

 

There's no real antagonist or struggle on Six Feet Under the entire series.

This may be part of the reason the show isn't considered a masterpiece. Ball will make an effort in the first season to put up a threat to the Fisher family with Kroner, the corporation putting small homes like the Fishers out of business with a man named Galardi trying to buy them out in the Pilot and continuing for the rest of the season. Eventually he's fired and the corporate head spends much of Season 2 trying an indirect way to buy them out.

But even before Season 2 ends Kroner files for bankruptcy and while the funeral home facies financial difficulties they're never as serious as so many others. There's no existential threat facing the Fishers the way of the dying way of life in The Sopranos or The Wire or the encroaching rise of Hearst in Deadwood.

To be sure mortality is more prominent here as a threat to many of the characters but because Ball treats it as something that is everyday, it's basically invisible.

 

Six Feet Under isn't quite as serialized as the other shows of this era.

In a sense you could miss an episode or two of Six Feet Under during an average season and not really worry you'd miss something important. The serialized story that would be essential to the other HBO dramas and indeed most of what was to follow doesn't really apply here. There are guest arcs for certain new characters during the course of the season and there are some stories where it helps to know what happened immediately before. But it was never as intense as any of the other dramas during this period.

And because characters had a tendency to fall in and out of the Fisher clan with some regularity you didn't need to know the backstory the way you would with other shows. Sometimes they would have a longer memory. Once Nate would put some kind of drug in coffee and a few days later going camping Ruth would have a hallucinatory experience. Then when we'd forgotten about it, at the start of Season 2 Nate would have that same drug and go on a different trip.

 

Unlike any other cable show during this era Six Feet Under involves the characters improving with each season.

This may be the biggest difference between Six Feet Under and all the other HBO dramas to this point in their history. Almost every other drama from the era argued that change was hard and that the system was so broken that the individual would be ground down, whether it was the dysfunctional criminal justice system for OZ, everyone in Baltimore on The Wire and everyone in The Sopranos in some way.

Six Feet Under is far more optimistic about humanity then all of these other shows and indeed much of the ones that were to come. It believes in the power of the human spirit and the bonds we share in a less cynical way then any other drama and much of the comedy I watched during the first two decades of this century. It's not just in the funerals where they come together, but weddings, family dinners, parties, celebrations, really everything.

Perhaps its because it knows at the end of the day death waits for us all but everything before that incredible final ten minute sequence – and indeed much of what happens in it – is about the bonds the Fishers have made over the period. How their family has grown, how they have children and loved ones, how they are able to move on, how they bond in weddings and careers and with so many other people. And even in the deaths themselves there's a sense that they're finally being united with their loved ones.

And perhaps that may be the real reason Six Feet Under doesn't quite get the respect the way its other HBO dramas do even though it's just as good as them and in many ways more revolutionary. At the end of the day all of these shows have a very dark view of humanity bordering on the Hobbesian, that it is violent and solitary, that people are cruel and dumb, capable of being manipulated by an endless series of white male antiheroes.

Six Feet Under resists that definition. To be sure the Fisher family is white (though they spend a lot of time with members of their own Rainbow coalition over the years) but the sons are no better or worse then their mother or sister and they're certainly not antiheroes. They're all just trying to get through the day, hug their loved ones and try to deal with the banal ugliness of everyday life in America. They have a home and a community that they try to build and they have a sense of togetherness that it sorely lacking in so many of  even the best shows of this period. That was admirable then: these days its practically miraculous.

And maybe they have the best attitude towards so much of the conflict that all of their brethren were going through in HBO dramas and across TV. Like the old joke says: "Don't take life so seriously. You'll never get out of it alive." And the Fisher family knows all too well where you end up afterwards – with a mortician stuffing your ass with formaldehyde cloth so you don't leak.

 

X-Files Retrospective: Why Won't The Smoking Man Just DIE Already?

 

In the 21^st century the first rule any TV watcher knows of drama is don't get too attached to anybody. Not the recurring characters, not series regulars, not even the leads. This is true of drama, limited series and even some comedies. Peak TV will kill your darlings.

I'd like to say that viewing The X-Files as a teenager helped prepare for the carnage that was to come in the last twenty five years. That would be as perfidious a lie as any the Syndicate tried to fob off on you. And looking back on it one of the major weaknesses Chris Carter seemed to build into his series pretty early on was that he just couldn't let his characters so, whether they were good, evil or in that grey area.

I could argue that part of this was the fact that he had only two series leads: Mulder and Scully for the first seven seasons of the show and therefore any real threat to them, whether by shape-shifting alien, liver eating mutant or the evils of the Syndicate was almost certainly a false one.  But for all the rules X-Files broke at the time it was still a network show that aired in the 1990s and Carter was going to play by them. Characters were only killed off when they wanted to be written out and even then it was often the sole property of shows like Melrose Place. When George Clooney wanted to leave ER, Dr. Ross was suspended and moved across the country. (Cook County would only start to get a higher mortality count AFTER The Sopranos debuted.)Law and Order only occasionally killed off character throughout its entire run (and when it did it was offscreen). It wasn't until the decade was nearly over that two of the three major Davids (Milch and Kelley) began the practice of killing off series regulars and both of them had much larger casts to work with than Carter did.

So while the cliffhangers that put one or both of our series regulars in jeopardy at the season finale became monotonous because you knew the show had been renewed for another season, it was something you accepted. And you could live with it because everyone in proximity to Mulder and Scully had a ticking clock next to him and Carter and his writers showed no mercy with them.

This was true in the very first season finale when Deep Throat (Jerry Hardin) was executed in order to save Mulder's life. From that point on, we knew that once you were in Mulder and Scully's orbit you were on borrowed time. However this created its own problems which when combined with the fact that we couldn't trust anyone we met made the showrunners have a lot of trouble making these recurring characters multi-dimensional. In truth after Season Two, once we met Mulder's new informant X and Alex Krycek most of the recurring characters we met became increasingly one-dimensional and were seen as either potential obstacles or outright villains. At a certain point when they were being killed off, most viewers were less shocked and probably saying: "Well, how is Carter going to bring them back this time?"

Because that was the other problem. Carter kept finding ways to bring his recently departed regulars back in some form. It was one thing to bring them back in flashbacks or some kind of limbo as the characters were between life and death; this was The X-Files. And you didn't mind if an alien would shape shift into one. The bigger problem was that Carter seemed unwilling to just let his villains go after they used up their dramatic value.

Take Krycek for example. When he came back in Piper Maru after having escaped the assassination attempt of the Syndicate it was a genuine shock to find him in Japan. When he was then taken over by the black oil and became a vessel for it as it moved across the country to the silo where an alien ship was being kept it worked well and the final image of Apocrypha where Krycek is banging against a locked door with no food or water and no means of escape is one of the most powerful images in the entire run of the series. And if Carter had let that be the final word on Krycek it would have resonated.

But then in Season 4 Tunguska he turns up having given Mulder and Scully details on a domestic terrorist threat. When he tells us he was liberated by those terrorists and that they were amateurs our credibility hasn't entirely been stretched. The problem is by the time the series gets to the title location in Russia Carter completely rewrites who Krycek has been for the last two seasons. He's been a Russian double agent the entire time, which somehow escaped the Syndicate's notice and despite being not much older than Mulder, he's apparently as high up in the Russian syndicate as some of the much older men in America. Oh and by the way the terrorists never actually liberated him from the silo.

After that Krycek just pops up when Carter needs him as a ready villain and he switches sides on a whim. He betrays the Russians to try and get material for the Syndicate so he can be the only game in town, when it backfired the Syndicate takes him as one of their own without a second thought.  He managed to survive the conflagrations that kill it off and by that point the show has no idea what to do with him. By the time he's finally executed at the end of Season 8 his death has no dramatic power because the show ran out of ideas what to do with him years ago. All things considered it would have better off to leave him to die.

But at least with Krycek and some of the other characters who were given nine lives, Carter basically played fair. We never saw them actually dead and in the cases of those who were killed off, he only used their returns in flashbacks or dream sequences. This can not be said about his truly original sin: the Cigarette Smoking Man and how he just couldn't let him die. And by that I mean the first time, not all the others.

During the first four seasons of The X-Files Carter and his writers had done a superb job building up the Smoking Man as their ultimate villain. He'd barely had a word of dialogue in the first season; we only saw him lurking with shadowy figures during the second and it wasn't until 'One Breath' that Mulder finally confronted him in a magnificent face off.  During the next two seasons he went from being the face of evil to a group of conspirators and it was never clear where exactly he ranked in the hierarchy.

By Season 4 the relationship became more personal as we now learned that Smoking Man had an affair with Teena Mulder (in addition to arranging for having her husband killed). When Scully was diagnosed with cancer that season Mulder considered selling his soul to save her life but Skinner decided to do so. In Zero Sum we saw the price he had to pay but there was no sign Smoking Man would give in. Critically that was William B. Davis's last appearance in Season 4 and during the season finale when we were led to believe Mulder had killed himself, he didn't appear.

During Redux we got the first signs that making Smoking Man wasn't as in touch with the conspiracy as he thought. He was unaware of the fact Mulder's apartment had been under surveillance and he refused to accept that Mulder had killed himself. When he made an attempt to infiltrate the DOD, Smoking Man allowed him to escape.

In Redux II Smoking Man showed up at Scully's hospital bed. At that point Mulder's faith in everything he ever believed about aliens was shattered and he was facing the fact Scully was about to die. At that moment, like the Devil he was, Smoking Man offered him everything he could have wanted.

He showed her a chip that was the implant that could very well reverse Scully's cancer. She'd had an implant removed back in Season 3 and it was made clear directly in Nisei that doing so would lead to her death from it. This was hope. Then he offered Mulder the one thing he'd looked his whole life for: Samantha.

Like almost everything else about this part of the show it makes no sense either at the time or in retrospect. The Samantha we meet looks exactly like the clone of her we met back in Season 2 but there's no reason to assume that was from Samantha Mulder. This Samantha tells Mulder that Smoking Man has raised her as his own child and that she's avoided Fox her whole live because she reminds her of her greatest trauma again. Then she disappears into the night.

Like Darth Vader CSM offers Mulder the chance to quit the FBI and work for him. At the time Mulder is suspected for murder and other criminal charges Mulder considers the deal during a long dark night but eventually decides not to.

During this period one of the Elders has had an assassin trailing both Mulder and Smoking Man. At the climax of the episode we have a magnificent scene in which Mulder is testifying before the FBI about the horrors done to both him and Scully, while Scully is being read her last rites. We follow Smoking Man to Mulder's apartment. Just as Mulder identifies the mole in the Syndicate for the FBI subcommittee, a shot rings out and Smoking Man takes a bullet in the chest. We see an image of him on the floor of Mulder's apartment, reaching for a picture of Fox and Samantha.

It's a magnificent scene, that emulates The Godfather and much of the work of Scorsese. And it was the perfect way to wrap things up for the Smoking Man…if Carter had stuck to it. But one minute later he completely undid it and in  a very real sense set up the circumstances that, for me at least, caused me never to trust The X-Files completely again when it came to the mythology.

And I was far from alone. In his review of the episode in Wanting to Believe Sherman makes it clear just how badly Carter failed.

"It's a measure at this stage of how little we can trust the series that when it tells us something it may even itself believe to be the truth, we know it will only reverse it later if it needs to spin out the story still further. If this episode really did show the Cigarette-Smoking Man's demise all well and good…But we're now so conditioned to disbelieve any statement on the show the moment is rid of all power – and, true to form, no body is found so we know he'll show up again sooner or later. In which case, why bother with a subplot in the first place? By the end of Season Five, the Cigarette Smoking Man will be back working for the Syndicate as if nothing has taken place, so (it) looks like a substantial waste of time in retrospect."

And indeed it is. We've already seen the Syndicate be more than willing to kill of people in considers traitors and stick to it and we'll actually see it happen quite a few more times before the Syndicate meets its demise.  But Carter didn't even bother with a reason for doing so.  There's no real difference in how the Syndicate functions in the episodes we see without him during Season Five then there have been before and honestly not much of a difference when he starts to run it again.

When it's finally revealed he's alive and living in a mountain cabin somewhere at nineteen I was completely nonplussed. When the season finale they brought Krycek back in not to assassinate him but to bring him out of the cold with no more explanation then they had for killing him off. The scene when he returned was almost embarrassing – it was like these old men were acting as if he'd been on vacation in Bermuda for the last six months rather than the fact they'd try to kill him. Even this would have been forgivable had Carter been willing to have this episode be the final season and then go into movies but of course Fox wanted to have it both ways. Kind of like how Carter seemed inclined to do things with the Smoking Man come to think of it.

There were a lot of other reason I lost faith in the mythology after that (not that it was ever strong to begin with) and indeed The X-Files began its creative decline not long after.  (That's not a direct correlation with the mythology but that's a story for another article.) The biggest problem was I think viewers had essentially undone the only other character since the Pilot after four seasons of making him grow. Before Redux II, William B. Davis had done much to make Smoking Man both a figure of evil but human in many ways – his relationship to the Mulder family, his struggles in the pecking order, the fact that for all his apparent villainy he was ordinary. Once he came back from the dead, he was no different than Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees or even the monsters of the week they thought every time they weren't trying to uncover government conspiracies. He was a symbol of evil and if you're a symbol then you stop being a character.

And sure enough they made sure that he managed to walk away from his fellow Syndicate just before the aliens set them all on fire. Then he was given a terminal diagnosis from brain surgery. Then in what we thought was the series finale in 2000 he was in a wheelchair, smoking through his neck and then pushed down a flight of stairs.

Even by that point the mythology had moved so far past what it had been that Smoking Man himself was an anachronism. But nevertheless Carter kept bringing him back and killing him off over and over, never bothering to explain how he kept surviving cancer, being pushed down a flight of stairs with cancer and then being blown to smithereens in what we thought was the series finale in 2002.

Fortunately by that time I was a huge fan of Buffy and Angel which were more than willing to kill of its characters (living or undead) and commit to it. (Mostly.) It did help matters that we were dealing with vampires and ghosts and that dreams would bring us visions of the dead on a regular basis.  Joss Whedon basically stuck by his own rules in a way Carter never did.

And during the 21^st century all dramas, and especially supernatural shows, basically play fair with us. If a character came back from the dead in Lost it was because of a flashback or some image of the island and when it seemed John Locke had come back from the dead, it scared the hell out of the people on the island because none of them had seen it happen before. (Spoiler: they were right to be.) For all the body counts of Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, rare was the occasion in either show that a character who was killed off came back to the land of the living. (I never watched either so maybe I'm wrong on some of these.) Cylons could resurrect on Battlestar Galactica when a member of the fleet was killed they stayed dead and it hurt all the more.

As to the other side when it comes to thrillers involving paranoia TV shows have played that fair.  With the exception of Tony Almeida none of the people who died during Jack Bauer's very bad days ever came back on the next one and it made them hurt all the more when they happened.  When a regular died on Homeland or The Americans it was always done and  often so quickly it shocked those left behind. And into Season 5 of Slow Horses none of the characters who die in Slough House or the threats they fight have returned for a second round.

There is still talk of bringing another version of The X-Files back with Ryan Coogler attached but it's been two years since I heard of that. If it happens I have a bit of advice going forward. If you create an evil organization and you kill off the villain, keep them dead.  And maybe have them visit Smoking Man's grave. Hopefully he died of lung cancer by now like he should have thirty years ago.  (By the way, that's canon too.)

 

Harrison Whitaker Goes To 11 - And Confirms The Return Of Peak Jeopardy

 

Now is as good time to write this article as any. During most of the last years I was reaching the conclusion that the era of what I have referred to as Peak Jeopardy had, you know, peaked. This didn't so much as disappoint me as something I considered inevitable.

During the first two full seasons of the post Alex Trebek era Jeopardy was played with some of the greatest champions to ever play the game. It was not just the rise of no less than seven super-champions in the space of little more than a year and a half – nearly as many as had been around since the elimination of the five game limit at the start of Season 20 – but how many other just as memorable champions we were getting who didn't quite meet the metric but were at their level. I speak of Andrew He and Sam Buttrey during the 2021-2022 season, Troy Meyer and Ben Chan during the 2022-2023 season and at least half a dozen others I could name. 

However at a certain point I knew the good times had to end. Some would argue that may have happened during the endless postseason of Season 40 but as bad as that was much of that was due to circumstances that weren't entirely the producers to control. The bigger problem was that I knew how rare super-champions were and that at a certain point they were going to become less frequent and possibly disappear, perhaps for a couple of more years, maybe longer.

When Adriana Harmeyer had her 15 game run in June of 2024 it seemed my fears were unwarranted but during Season 41 they seemed to be confirmed. In large part this was because Jeopardy was basically being the show long-time fans remember and love it for being: difficult Final Jeopardys that were triple stumpers, much lower paydays, and more competitive matches throughout the season. For those who might have only started watching Jeopardy when Matt Amodio or Amy Schneider came along, this had to be a huge letdown. For those of us who can trace our memory back to when dollar figures were once $100-$500 in the Jeopardy round and $200-$1000 in Double Jeopardy (of which I'm one and I imagine there are many others) it's how the show works. It was always difficult to win five games; it's far harder to win 15 or 20 no matter how easier James Holzhauer and Cris Panullo made it look the past few years.

And indeed as Season 41 progressed I had every reason to believe Peak Jeopardy was over and that Jeopardy had resumed equilibrium. Much of my writing during the last season might sound like I was trying to defend the lack of big payouts and super-champions when they were just trying to get so many contemporary viewers to accept that this was how the show usually played. It didn't help that so much of last season really did seem to be doing must to test the patience of even long time fans with increasingly difficult clues that led to lower payouts for even the best players, the most successful player for much of the upcoming champions setting a dubious record (sorry Laura Faddah) and of course that endless period last June when the show broke a record it didn't know it had of most consecutive one-day champions. Even I found that one exhausting to live through. I wasn't sure how much goodwill Jeopardy had frittered away by last July.

Now I think there's an excellent chance that the show has gotten it all back. Because just before the Fourth Of July Scott Riccardi won the first of sixteen consecutive games to end Season 41 on a glorious note. When Jonathan Hugendubler defeated him on the final day of last season surprising viewers – and himself –  it made sure that the 2026 Tournament of Champions would have a super-champion in it for the tenth straight time since 2014.

Paolo Pasco's impressive 7-game streak showed us that Jeopardy was back on track as well as so many huge paydays going into November. And now as the eligibility period for the 2027 Tournament of Champions begins, we have the first super-champion who will be part of it in Harrison Whitaker who today managed to officially reach elite status when he won his eleventh consecutive game.

As I wrote his first victory came when he defeated Allegra Kuney exactly two weeks ago who we will see in just a few months' time (and is no doubt counting her blessings that she won't be facing Harrison among her opposition) Today he became the nineteenth player in Jeopardy history to win his eleventh game, the tenth to do so since Matt Amodio in the last four years.

As has been my pattern for since Cris Panullo ended his run back at the end of 2022 it is now time to look and see just where Harrison ranks among this particular squad of elites when they 'went to eleven' leaving out as always James Holzhauer for obvious reasons. Keep in mind that Arthur and Jonathan's run ended the following day.

 

Ken Jennings: $376,158

David Madden: $269,101

Arthur Chu, $297,200

Julia Collins: $231,310

Matt Jackson: $339,411

Seth Wilson: $245,002

Austin Rogers: $394,700

Jason Zuffranieri: $332,243

Matt Amodio: $368,600

Jonathan Fisher: $246,100

Amy Schneider: $421,200

Mattea Roach: $244,882

Ryan Long: $209,300

Cris Panullo: $356,702

Ray Lalonde:  $311,500

Adriana Harmeyer: $258,700

Scott Riccardi: $281, 299

Harrison Whitaker: $309,000

 

So after eleven games Harrison is clearly better than the last two super-champions at this point in their run, far better than Mattea Roach and Ryan Long were at a similar point and definitely much better than Julia Collins. It's not quite as fair to compare them to Jonathan Fisher and Seth Wilson but he's basically running dead even with Ray Lalonde and  slightly ahead of Arthur Chu (even though his streak ended the next day). He's also a bit better than David Madden. In fact as of this writing he's running better than Ryan Long did in his entire run. That's impressive even though he still has a long way to go to catch so many of those on the list when it comes to total wins.

But compared to many during Alex Trebek's run he's not at their level. I speak not just of the hallowed names of Jennings and Panullo but Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider.  And while he's doing relatively well compared to Matt Jackson and Jason Zuffranieri, both of them did much better in the games that followed. The same, I should say, is true of Scott and Mattea going forward as well: Scott managed a $50,000 and a $40,000 payday in his 14^th and 15^th wins and Mattea had some bigger paydays in their future.

To be sure Harrison has managed to get eight of his eleven victories so far in runaway victories which is impressive. But after managing to get his first six Final Jeopardys correct he's gotten four out of the last five final Jeopardys incorrect. Indeed in what turned out to be his eighth win he genuinely thought his run was over and said farewell in Final Jeopardy. (It turned out to be another triple stumper.) And last night it was a good thing he had a runaway victory because his nearest competitor got Final Jeopardy correct and he didn't. (The same was true today but his lead was far bigger than yesterday so it was irrelevant). The first six wins of his run were incredible but his dominance has been slipping during the last week and there's been more luck involved as much as skill in the last five games.

He's also been starting to struggle on Daily Doubles, another sign of problems. In his tenth win he got both Daily Doubles in Double Jeopardy incorrect and only a late run gave him a runaway. Today he did better but his last Daily Double cost him $6000 and again he was only safe by a huge lead in Final Jeopardy. That's worked for him so far but that may be another problem down the road.

A critical difference between him and Scott and Adriana so far. In none of his wins to this point has he needed to come from behind. Adriana had to do that quite a few times in her original run and Scott needed to do that in one of his early victories. Harrison's  had some close games to be sure – his victory over Allegra Kuney was the prime example -  but he hasn't been nearly as dominant as many of the super-champions ahead of him (Holzhauer obviously included) or even some of the players he's passed in wins so far. Ben Chan was far more dominant in all nine of his victories than Harrison has been in most of his and it took him until his ninth victory to win as much money as Larissa Kelly and Roger Craig did in six.

Make no mistake; Harrison Whitaker is an exceptional player,  same as everyone else on the list above. But I'm not convinced that he'll be able to make it to the top ten in consecutive wins on this list. That takes a lot more skill and luck and at this point the luck part is playing a slightly bigger role then skill (which he's got, no question.)

What is more important I think is that with Harrison's run coming so soon after another super-champion and with another excellent player sandwiched between them that Jeopardy is back in the groove it had between 2021 to the summer of 2023. How long Harrison's run will continue remains to be seen but his presence will be more than enough to keep viewers riveted until the postseason begins in just a few weeks. It's one thing to count the days until the Tournament of Champions as we did so much of the last two years; players like Harrison remind us why we anticipate the Tournament of Champions in the first place.