Ghosts: it has Spirits, But No Real Spirit

 

Every once in a while on a series debuts on television that transcends the medium, reshapes the potential of its genre and truly deserves to be called Peak TV.

CBS’ Ghosts is not that kind of show. It’s the kind of series that, frankly, in the bad old days of network television would be marketed as ‘high concept’. “Look Brandon, it’s about this couple that moves into this Gothic mansion and find outs it’s haunted by a bunch of ghosts that only the wife can see!” This is the kind of mindset that would come up with the idea of My Favorite Martian or Gilligan’s Island, not the network that just recently ended The Big Bang Theory and Mom. But in an era where even the best network comedies are surrounding the formulas of family sitcoms, you can’t exactly argue that Ghosts is different material than Home Economics or Bob Hearts Ashiola. Whether this makes it better remains to be seen.

The plot is, basically, not much thicker than the one sentence pitch I just gave. A couple (Jay and Samantha) inherit a mansion from Samantha’s great-grandmother. Their initial idea is those of any New Yorkers – they want to turn into a B&B. The mansion is, of course, haunted by ghosts from just about every era, from a Viking to the yuppie scum. I would say that to this point all of them are one-dimensional, but since they are ghosts that may not be entirely fair. They’ve had eternities to be together, but they just seem to get along, but they do know they don’t want their home to be a hotel. So they try to ‘haunt’ the couple out – which doesn’t work, and as a result Sam falls down the stairs and is in a coma for two weeks. Due to her near-death experience, she can now see all the ghosts in the house – and is implied, everywhere. (One of the funnier scenes is when she goes to a hospital and is diagnosed by a ‘ghost doctor’.) Her husband initially thinks she crazy, but decides to support her, and they try to find a way to coexists with the ghosts.

Now I’ll admit there are some intriguing ideas here, none of which, sadly, deals with most of the ghosts that are regulars. Very few of them can rise above the one joke that pertains to their era and even the more moderns one don’t seem able to have explained everything that’s going on in the time passed. And there’s a real lack of continuity that doesn’t seem to make much sense from episode to episode – the Viking ghost can’t seem to understand technology, but the Native American ghosts seems not only aware of the passage of time, but what his ancestors are responsible for to this day. Its actually the time when the series tries not to be funny that it actually works a little better – in the most recent episode, the Viking ghost’s bones were uncovered and he expressed his wish for a Viking Funeral. It turns out he was abandoned by his shipmates and was left alone to die when searching for food. This sense of abandonment resonates when Sam and Jay try to find a way to sell his bones to make money. It’s a poigniant idea that gets buried in a lot of bad jokes.

Right now, there are two potentials things that stop me from dismissing this series outright. The first is the presence of Rose McIver as Samantha. One of the more intriguing actresses of this era with presence in shows like Masters of Sex and Once Upon a Time (that’s American TV; she’s actually a New Zealand born child actress who was working as far back as Kevin Sorbo’s Hercules) her most delightful role was playing Olivia Moore in the wonderful iZombie, a delightful supernatural police procedural where she plays a zombie who solved crimes by eating the victims brains and taking on their personalities. She’s back to seeing dead people, but she has a wonderful spirit and likability that has always enabled her to carry the weakest of material. You understand why her husband truly loves her, and there are quirks in her personality that are interesting besides this (it seems her sexual role play seems to involve HGTV shows) McIver is always watchable even when the series is plastic.

The other thing is a joke that is at this point, subtler. All the ghost ‘regulars’ walk around the house freely. There are also, however, a group of ghosts basically in shrouds that only live in the basement.  They seem to have died of cholera but we don’t know much more about them except for one thing – all of the other ghosts are really creeped out by them. In one episode, when Sam and Jay go to the basement, they stop following at the stairs. In the last episode Isaac, who wants their support to be named leader, talks to them in supportive terms, but can’t get out of there fast enough when he’s done. Even Sam seems real reluctant to spend time with them? I don’t know if this some bigger statement about classism or some hierarchy among even the dead, but its by far the most intriguing idea this series has.

Bottom line: Should you watch Ghosts?  Well, this is a timeslot where the competition is Law and Order SVU and Grey’s Anatomy, series that have been far too long and whose characters are far less alive than the dead ones here. It’s light and fluffy and it’s at best popcorn television, even among so many of the single cameras on CBS. I’m kind of appalled that its imdb score is higher right now than The Wonder Years.  For me, the jury is still out. But even I’ll admit I’ve had a place in my heart for series that you don’t have to think to hard to enjoy. You definitely don’t have to do much thinking here. As for enjoyment? Maybe this series will live long enough for me to do that.

My score: 2.75 stars.

 

Television After 9/11, Part 5A: Battlestar Galactica and the First Shots in the Pop Culture War

 

 

When the Sci-FI Channel did their reimaging of Battlestar Galactica in 2003, they managed to do something remarkable – take a purely science-fiction project that dealt with robots and turn into as realistic a portrayal of the approach to the War on Terror than any realistic drama in the post 9/11 era has ever done.

And as a reward for that, creators Steven Eick and Roland D. Moore have been viewed with contempt by fans of the original series to this day. The so-called ‘fans’ reactions is actually symptomatic of saying that has become a much larger factor in pop-culture during the post 9/11, especially on racial and gender lines. As would become a catchphrase on the series “All of this has happened before” but only this era did it become so pronounced.

Let’s start with an observation. The 1970s version of Battlestar Galactica isn’t a good series. It’s a Star Wars rip-off with bad production values and lousy costumes. It has big ideas and some pretensions that are just an excuse to show footage of the same space flights over and over again. It barely lasted a season. Now I completely understand why fans obsess over some series – there are people to this day who still want to see a new Firefly.  But most of these series were, you know, influential or very popular for awhile. This wasn’t Kolchak: The Night Stalker or V; it was Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century. I have never understood why the obsession was so great for the original, especially in the pre-DVD streaming era.

What Eick and Moore wanted to do was a variation of something I have suggested many times over the years; take a series with an intriguing concept and flawed production and try to reimagine in a way that the public will embrace. They had worked in the Star Trek would before and knew what worked (DS9) and didn’t (Voyager). Indeed, Moore actually wrote a manifesto that preceded the original script that used the words ‘Taking the Opera out of Space Opera’ in which he said they wanted nothing to do with the stock characters, techno double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics’ that dominated these series. (I’ll go into more detail about this when I get to the series itself). They wanted to try and make the series more relatable to the non sci-fi fan. This manifesto basically convinced the network executives and several actors to sign on.

Where Eick and Moore got into trouble real fast was when they decided to turn Starbuck, the pilot portrayed by Dirk Benedict in the original series into a female character (unforgettably played by Katee Sackhoff in the new version) The reaction from these fans was instantly hostile and pretty much from that moment, many of the people who had been advocated for this reboot were against it. The writers and the cast embraced after awhile, and Eick and Moore think that may have done the new series an enormous favor. But you can pretty much draw a straight line between the reaction from the ‘fans’ of the original and the pop culture world we live in today.

There are millions of people out there who will never embrace sci-fi, fantasy and so much of the pop culture world we live in today. They think (justifiably) that Star Wars ruined the film industry, that movies and TV care more about getting young viewers than their viewership and will shun it on principal. I do think a large number of these people are snobs (and far too many of them are in my chosen profession) but I understand them, sympathize to an extent, and can actually get along with several of them.

The people I have a larger problem with are the people who think that movies like Star Wars are the only things that Hollywood should be producing and that people who dare snipe against it – like Martin Scorsese or Denis Villeneuve – are hacks who should be shunned. And not satisfying with fundamentally being the loudest voice when it comes to pop culture, they think any other voices should be shut out and that any attempt to change any aspect of ‘their’ shows is offensive. They’re the kind of people who attack Brie Larson for being too ‘political’ about Captain Marvel, who think Black Panther  worked best when it wasn’t in Wakanda, who – as Dean Cain said not long ago – think their making Superman too woke when he’s bisexual and in the same breath that he should be attacking Muslim nations. Basically, any franchise that has been known for having a white, straight male as the lead should never be changed. You don’t need a road map to draw a line from the people who were ‘outraged’ that Starbuck was a woman to an all-female Ghostbusters or a female Doctor Who.

Now it’s true that Battlestar Galactica wasn’t the first series where people were outraged about changes to the cast. But I don’t remember people being angry that there were too many black people on Oz or The Wire. No, there are rules for ‘popular franchises’ and then there’s everything else. African-Americans, women, LGBTQ, Asian Americans – the attitude among too many of the Battlestar Galactica type fans is ‘let them have their own shows over there’.  The fact that they’ll then dismiss those series as ‘too political’ is not the point.

And that’s the reason why so many people were really angry about the Battlestar Galactica reboot – they wanted’ the stock characters, techno double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, etc.” that Moore had railed against in his manifesto. Any changes in this kind of work – or indeed any of the franchises in any film or TV series that are ‘theirs’ – is offensive because they want the old stuff. It’s the nostalgia factor that pervades every aspect of our lives and takes up far too much problems that people have with TV. (There’s a longer article to be written her about institutional racism and sexism in television and one day I will write it. Just not today.)

And if you need any further proof that there aren’t political reverberations here, consider this. Many of the people who took to the net to criticize this show would refer to it as ‘Galactica in Name Only” or GINO. The idea that this might actually be a good thing doesn’t matter to them. The part of them that could never see what a lousy series the original Galactica was will prevent them from seeing how good the new version is. And they will stick with that argument all the way through. They’ve won the war, but they’re not going to be satisfied until everyone is a Cylon.

 

That ends the cultural reverberations. I’ll get back to the actual series in the next article.

 

Television After 9/11 Part 4A: Howard Gordon, 24 and What Both Sides Got Wrong About Jack Bauer

 

It is almost impossible to discuss TV after 9/11 and not bring up 24. Perhaps more than any other cultural landmark of the new millennium, it basically became a political talking point on both sides of the aisle. Republicans would frequently refer to Jack Bauer as if he were a real character (John McCain actually made a blink and you’ll miss it cameo) and Democrats argued just as strongly that the narrative of the series gave a green light to the methods of ‘enhanced interrogation’ that would be brought up so often during and after the second Bush Administration.

What makes this interesting is that when the series was created, none of the writers ever imagined how much they would be contributing to political discourse or, indeed, how much of a negative effect they might have on it. And to truly understand the narrative of this show, we must primarily talk about one of the major writers for it, who perhaps not coincidentally, became one of the biggest success stories in the era of Peak TV. Howard Gordon is so far in this century, the only showrunner to have won Best Drama Emmys for two different series. (This may say more about the repetitiveness in their selections than anything else, but that’s an old story.) And in his two successes – both of which ran eight seasons, we got two very different views on how the War on Terror should be waged and the cost it would take on everybody involved.

I will admit that I have a personal bias here: 24 remains one of my all-time favorite series, and I was always personally high on almost every aspect of Homeland. But I believe one can write just as impartially about series you worship as ones you loathe. So here we go.

Like David E. Kelley and Aaron Sorkin, Gordon was a fairly successful writer in the twentieth century. His specialty back then, however, was primarily sci-fi fantasy. The first series that he was a major force behind was the Linda Hamilton-Ron Perlman fantasy love story Beauty and the Beast. One of the more surreal and bizarre dramas of the 1980s, and was nominated for Best Drama quite a few times. (It bares very little resemblance to the CW remake of the 2010s)

The next major series he was a part of was quite a bit more popular: The X-Files. When Chris Carter began assembling a writer’s team to work for the show, the episodes were mostly divided among himself; Glen Morgan and James Wong (who’d been writing together for several years and shows before) and Gordon and Alex Gansa. Gansa would write with Gordon for much of Season 1 of the series before departing; the two would reunite for 24.

As someone who has written extensively on The X-Files, there were two things of particular note about the kind of scripts Gordon turned out throughout the four seasons he would work on the series. First, oddly enough for a show that would become famous for its mythology, Gordon would write almost exclusively episodes that are known fondly as ‘Monsters-of-the-Week. He rarely touched on any aspect of what would rapidly become a backstory that would spiral well beyond the control of its creator. (I like to think that both he and the other extraordinary talent of Peak TV that came from The X-Files ­– Vince Gilligan – learned rather clearly from their tenure what not to do. It certainly was clear in the work they would turn out in the future.)

Secondly, and I say this with all due respect to Gordon, the lion’s share of the scripts he would turn out for The X-Files were among the weakest the series would do of that era. He never seemed to quite have a gift for the supernatural the way so many of the other writers did, or for comedy which would be important later. The strongest scripts he would do were known as ‘supernatural revenge stories’ and the best of them would often focus on the military or law enforcement and how we treat both. Two of his better scripts dealt with Vietnam veterans, the subject of horrible experiments over a quarter century, who would use their powers to try and take vengeance on the ones who wronged them. In what was his most brilliant script ‘Grotesque’, Mulder is tasked by his former mentor from Quantico to look into the claims of a serial killer and finds out the actual killer is his mentor – he’s gotten so deep inside his last profile, he can’t find his way out. Perhaps more than anything this would demonstrate Gordon’s ability to understand that the evil men do is far more horrible than any monster.

Gordon left the series at the end of Season 4. He would dabble in the world of Joss Whedon for awhile, writing for both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, but neither often nor well. Then near the end of his stint on Angel, he would join the staff of what was a high-concept idea for Fox – a series that would cover 24 one hour episodes in a single day.

The series was the brain child of Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow, and I’m fairly certain 24’s setting would have never come to pass without their previous series La Femme Nikita. The series centered on a woman falsely accused of murder who would given the choice to work as an agent for ‘Section One’, a counter-terrorism organization. As was put forth in the opening narration: “Their means are just, but their ends are ruthless.” They weren’t kidding. Episode frequently involved long and elaborate torture sequences, tech support involved missions all over the world, and the nature of it was so dark, agents didn’t retire, they were ‘cancelled’, something that Nikita herself would often long for after going into these missions for a long time. She constantly tried to escape the life, but was often drawn back in due to her love with her handler Michael. By the later seasons, we were constantly questioning whether Section One was doing what it did for ‘the greater good’ and more for world domination by its shadowy bosses the smug Control’ and the icy Madeline (Alberta Watson was unforgettable.) I won’t go into how the series ended (mostly because it did so on a series of twist so unbelievable M. Night Shamalayan wouldn’t have dared use them) but it was true to itself to the bitter end.

La Femme Nikita would’ve been a hard sell to get on the air these days, much less in the 1990s on USA, a network that was best know at the time for bikini-clad police procedurals Silk Stalkings and Pacific Blue. (Indeed, when the CW did its remake in the 2010s, they focused more on the sex appeal of action star Maggie Q and her attempts to take the Section down from minute one.) Yet this series was incredibly popular at the time – so much so that when the creators ended it in 2000, the fans started an online petition –and fundraised – for another season, Gofundme a decade before we heard of the term. (Then again, maybe they didn’t like how it was ended either.) And given all the links that were involved in Section One and what would become CTU, you can’t exactly deny that 24 couldn’t have existed without it.

Considering how much 24 is linked to both Islamphobia and torture, it’s actually kind of odd to watch Day 1 and see that there’s none of the former and practically none of the latter. The major threat behind Day 1 is Serbian nationalists trying to assassinate Democratic Senator David Palmer on the day of California Presidential Primary. And there’s only one real torture scene in the entirety of Day 1 and Jack Bauer practically has to be walked through it by his partner Nina Myers from the safety of CTU. Even then, its involves more talking than actually torture, and when it results in the man’s death, Jack is truly shaken by it – so much so that he has to be pushed by Nina to moved forward.

Indeed, what was far more critical about 24 in Day 1 – and was in fact something that would become second nature to fans of the series throughout its eight seasons on the air – was something that was basically a catchphrase from The X-Files: ‘Trust No One’. What I think fascinated so many viewers throughout the first season was knowing who Jack could trust. We are told very plainly that there is a possibility of a mole in CTU where Jack is working, and from the very episode he is working just as much to try and expose the traitor as he is to stop the assassination of Palmer. This was a deliberate tact by the writers who went out of their way make sure no one on in the cast knew so that they might not give anything away unintentionally to the audience. (Indeed Carlos Bernard, who would memorably portray Tony Almeida for six seasons on the series, would later say that the cast had bets as to who the mole was. None of them were right.)

I believe that this may have been a lesson that Gordon took away from The X-Files and made the staff learn. (I’d also like to say that the writing group for 24 was, in my mind, one of the greatest ever assemble for any series: in addition to Surnow, Cochran and Gordon, Alex Gansa, Chip Johannsen, one of the showrunners of Millennium and Michael Chernuchin one of the greatest writers for Law & Order were on the series roster just for Day 1) Equally important was another lesson: if the story doesn’t affect the main character, it won’t resonate the same way. Which is why what seemed like a casual storyline – Kim Bauer running off with a friend before Jack’s called into work – becomes the backbone of the show. As the search goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that no one can be trusted – not even a distressed parent – and that getting vengeance against Jack is just as important as killing David Palmer.

And that’s why the first day ended with one of the great moments in TV history. Jack had just killed all the bad guys and thwarted the assassination of Palmer. Then he learns what the audience learned just one episode earlier – Nina, his friend and his former lover is the mole. He captures her and holds her at gunpoint, not killing her only out of cries of his boss. He then searches CTU and finds his wife Terri dead, bleeding from a stomach wound. The final images of the episode are him holding his wife’s body in tears, as the ticking clock that the viewers has become used to by now, goes silent as it ticks out the final seconds of the day. The moment was so heartbreaking the writers actually wanted to let Terri live (and included a segment with her alive in the first season DVD) but as gutwrenching as that final scene is, I respect the writers for doing it. Killing characters off would become a feature of Peak TV, but only a few series – and 24 was one of them knew it didn’t mean anything unless you gave a damn about that character and someone else gave a damn.

That was my major takeaway from Kiefer Sutherland’s work as Jack Bauer. Not the images of him torturing a prisoner or shouting ‘Who Do You Work For!?” or scowling at someone he considered inferior. Because Jack wasn’t, no matter what politicians or critics thought, a heartless automaton. He suffered with every death. In a weird way, the pacing of the series actually helped us get it. More often then not Jack would suffer a major loss and then have to move on to the next crisis without even time for proper mourning. There was enough of a gap between each day for us to see the passage of time and it was just years that weighed on Jack, it was the death. Having to inflict and worse, having to live through it, neither without any time to deal.

And the worst part was it cost him everything and everyone he loved. Day 6 was by far the weakest one of the entire run, but there were two memorable moments. At one point Jack is tending to Audrey, the daughter of the Secretary of Defense (William Devane) and a former lover. (I’ll get to the exact details in the next entry. Jack says when the crisis is over; he’ll be there for her. Heller – a man whose life Jack has saved on multiple occasions – looks him dead in the eye and says: “I don’t want you anywhere near her. You’re cursed Jack…Everyone you touch eventually dies.” And as painful as this is, no one – especially not Jack – can deny this truth. Jack Bauer may have saved the world on many occasions, but the price was his soul and everything he loved. Somehow the politicians on either side never got that.

This article will turn into a book if I don’t cut it off. In Part 2 of this, I’ll focus on the political talking points that both sides made and their validity and I’ll start dealing with some of the other characters in the world of 24. Bloop…bloop…bloop…bloop. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.)

The End Of Matt Amodio's Incredible Streak, Or The Story About Jeopardy The Media Should Have Been Covering

 

As I mentioned in an earlier article, so much focus of the past several weeks on Jeopardy has been over the controversy behind the scenes. The firing of Mike Richards, first as host, then as executive producer, the news that Mayim Bialik and Ken Jennings would be replacing him for the remainder of 2021 and the resumption of a search for a permanent host have dominated the entertainment cycle for the beginning of Season 38.

Almost –but not entirely –lost in the midst of this has been the incredible performance of Matt Amodio, who for the final weeks of Season 37 was quietly becoming one of the most dominant players in Jeopardy history. At the end of the season, he had surpassed Jason Zuffaneri, who in Season 35 and 36 had won 19 games and more than $535,000 to become third all time on the list of money-winners in their original run behind two minor players named James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings. When Season 38 started, the question was: how long could Matt keep the streak going?

And the answer was pretty long. On the third day of the season, he moved into third place behind Holzhauer and Jennings for most games won. Though he would take an approach Holzhauer had mastered in his run – starting at the bottom of the board and working his way across it – he followed a strategy closer to Ken Jennings when it came to Daily Doubles when he found them. He would wager big in the Jeopardy round, but if and when he found them and Double Jeopardy, his wagers would tend to be modest – not big enough to cost him the lead if he got them wrong, which sometimes did happen.

This combination would prove to make him one of the most effective players in the show’s history. Though he never came close to touching any of James Holzhauer’s one day records – his biggest payout was $80,000, still more than twenty thousand below one of Holzhauer’s – he almost inevitably in Final Jeopardy had lock games, usually with a lead so big none of his opponents could come within $10,000 of his total. Indeed, in his initial run, there were only five games he played where he didn’t have a runaway going into Final Jeopardy. The end result was a streak of 38 games, the second highest in Jeopardy history and a total of $1,518,601 by that point. In contrast, Jennings by this point in his Jeopardy career had only amassed $1.3 million.

But at some point in every players streak, your luck runs out. That happen yesterday evening against Jessica Stephens and Jonathan Fisher. It didn’t seem that way at first – by the first commercial break, Matt had gotten up to $7400 and while he slowed down a little, he finished the Jeopardy round with $9800 compared to Jessica’s $2400 and Jonathan’s $4000. And then in Double Jeopardy, for the first time in Matt’s run, everything just went wrong. Jessica started out by being particularly dominant in the category MEDICAL ABBREVIATIONS. Then Matt faltered on a clue in RECENT MOVIES and then in the $1600 and $2000 clues in the categories TALK LIKE A FARMER. Then just when it seemed like he was recovering, he bobbled a clue in the category IT DOESN’T MEAN WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE which would enable Jonathan to get two Daily Doubles back to back and pull into the lead. By this point Matt was in a position he’d never been in at any time in Double Jeopardy, third place. And he was still in third place, albeit a close one when Double Jeopardy ended. He had $10,600 to Jessica’s $14,400 and Jonathan’s $14,600.

Final Jeopardy had been something of a problem for Matt even at his most successful. Twice it had cost him huge payouts and on at least one occasion, he could have lost the game had the third place player not been so far behind. Final Jeopardy dealt with COUNTRIES OF THE WORLD: “Nazi Germany annexed this nation and divided it into regions of the Alps and the Danube; the allies later divided it into four sectors.” Matt guessed: “What is Poland?” which was incorrect. He lost $5000. Both Jessica and Jonathan knew the correct answer: “What is Austria?” Jonathan earned the place in the record books as the man who dethroned Matt, winning $29,200.

None of this should take away anything from Matt’s accomplishments: he now has the second longest streak in Jeopardy history and is now only the third man to win more than $1 million in regular play. (He ranks fourth in total winnings behind, Holzhauer, Jennings and all-time money winner Brad Rutter.) And of course, as every follower of the series knows, we will see him in the Tournament of Champions next year when there are enough people to challenge for it. At the same time, this should emphasize just how impressive Jennings’ accomplishments truly are: this is the second time in less than two years that his streak has been challenged and neither challenger could get within half of Ken’s total. I’m actually a little sad Matt’s streak didn’t go on long enough until Jennings was hosting again; I really would have liked to see his reaction if that had happened.

And all of this does prove the point that I’ve been trying to make for the past several months: the game itself is larger than any single host. I guarantee that of the millions who tuned in the first month of Season 38 interest in how Matt did far superseded any interest in the problems behind the scenes. Now that Matt’s streak is over, fans like me will probably be asking: when will the next great Jeopardy emerge?

In the meantime, a small suggestion for when the next super tournament takes place (probably in recognition of Season 40) bring back all the players who have the longest winning streaks ever since the five game rule was abolished in 2003. Throw in Brad Rutter, as many of Tournament of Champions winners as are still alive and some of those who have been memorable in the tournament play. Hell, maybe even do it in prime time this time. Even if Ken Jennings isn’t participating, I guarantee you’ll have an audience.

Oh Those Scenes From This Marriage! A Reflection on a Brilliant Show I Don't Want to See Again

 

Precisely one month I gave a very detailed synopsis of HBO’s remake of Ingmar Bergman’s classic Scenes from a Marriage – what the original was about, how great the actors playing the leads before were in general, and I what believed might come of it. Having now gone through the entire series – and that’s the best term for it ‘gone through’, I can now say with little fear of contradiction that this truly is one of the great accomplishments of 2021. That being said, I think the Emmys are going to have a really hard time giving this series recognition because its not the typical Emmy fare, or even the typical HBO fare.

Everyone knows that HBO can really go into dark, dark territory in its dramas and limited series. One need only mention titles like Sharp Objects, Chernobyl or last year’s Lovecraft Country just to give a few of the most obvious examples in recent years. But usually in these series, you can get some kind of release in watching it – there will be stunning visuals or brilliant visual tricks to distract you from the darkness you are entering. There’s really none of that in Scenes from a Marriage. And I have a feeling that Hagar Levi has done this more or less by design. In my review of the first episode, I said that the story was as much an emphasis on ‘scenes’ as it was ‘marriage’. If anything, all the episodes that followed stayed firmer to that mission statement. The three episodes that followed and almost the entire finale were basically one-act plays between Jonathan and Miri as their marriage unraveled. Considering that there were almost no obvious cuts in the entire series, the viewer couldn’t look away. You spent each episode basically watching every possible bad scenario between the two of them unfold. And because Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain are, as I made clear in my first article, two of the greatest actors working today, you couldn’t look away from them as their performances were as raw as the viewer was.

In the second episode, we witness Miri say that she was leaving Jonathan because she was having an affair with a man named Pauli. As raw as this was, she then told us the scene we’d seen at the end of the first episode was, in fact, an abortion and that as she put it: “What kind of marriage needs an abortion to save it?” Jonathan went through every single attempt to try and convince Miri to stay in the marriage and was left shouting into a phone at the episode’s end.

In the third episode, there had clearly been a passage of time and now Mira was living with Pauli. They had separated and Jonathan seemed to be going therapy which made him feel better. Halfway through the episode, Miri initiated contact and they ended up making love. Jonathan kept trying to tell Miri that he didn’t want to be with her anymore, something she kept denying. The episode ended with one of the harshest moments I’ve ever seen on television: Jonathan playing a voicemail from Pauli telling her that he thinks Miri’s going to come back to him and that he has no problem with it, which threw all of Miri’s actions in the episode into contrast.

Episode 4 was one of the great accomplishments arguably in television history this century. It showed Miri and Jonathan in the final process of getting a divorce and moving out of the home that they’d spent their married lives in. As they went through the process, once again the two ended up making love. When it was over, the realities were even harsher than before: Jonathan basically told her he felt nothing for her at all, even during the sex. Rawer secrets about their lives – Miri had her lost job, Jonathan wanted to have kids and did not want to have one with Miri – came out, and they physically came to blows and were in tears by the end of it. It ended a truly harsh moment with Miri signing the divorce papers.

The final episode was the only other one – outside the premiere – where we saw other characters or indeed even left the house. Jonathan was at the funeral of his father, and driving his mother home, trying to convince her about the awfulness of the marriage that had just ended. (In a brief scene, character actress Tovah Feldsuh makes a memorable impression as the mother) We see Pauli and Miri together for the only time in the show, and it’s clear that while Miri has moved on, Pauli hasn’t and a part of him will always hate Miri for it. It was clear about four years had passed. The rest of the episode took place with Miri and Jonathan meeting up and driving back their old house which is now occasionally rented out as a bed and breakfast. I will not reveal the rest of what unfolded in that episode (because even after its over, I still don’t see quite the point in spoiling it) Suffice to say, it reveals that the love between Jonathan and Miri, despite all the scars we have seen them inflict on each over the years, has never quite gone away and maybe never will, despite all the changes in their lives. There’s a certain ambiguity in the last scene, but for a change for an HBO limited series I don’t think it’s the kind of ambiguity that will necessarily call out for another season. I am reminded, in a way, of the final two episodes of Levi’s The Affair, which involved another complicated marriage scarred by so many wounds and yet tells us that even so, love can not truly be suppressed.

Scenes from a Marriage is a great accomplishment. I seriously doubt anyone who experienced it would be willing to deny that. Unlike so many of the other great HBO productions – or even some of the darker limited series I’ve seen over the past few years – it will not be one I want to revisit even after many years have gone by. For all the beauty and majesty of the production and its performances – its going to be really hard to find a way to deny Isaac and Chastain Emmy nominations, if not the prize itself -  its just ultimately too sad and painful to imagine wanting to go through again. In one of the last reviews of his I ever read, Roger Ebert said of the dark drama Shame that it was one of the most powerful experiences captured on film, but that he couldn’t imagine watching it again. Having seen this limited series, I believe I finally comprehend how you could have that experience with any great work of art.

As to whether a married couple should see it together: A warning. Be very careful if you choose to. This series may raise issues you may never want to consider. No matter what you think of the ending, your problems don’t get solved when the director yells: “Cut!”

Television After 9/11, Part 3B: How to Get Away With Murder and Criminal Law as Soap Opera

 

Had it not been used later, How to Get Away with Murder would have been a perfectly acceptable title for Scandal. Indeed, at one point prior to a Presidential debate, Olivia Pope would break into hysterical laughter when she realized that all three candidates had, in fact, done just that. (I’d say that was the least plausible storyline on the series, but then came the one where the Vice President had Olivia kidnapped to blackmail his President, and…well, I’ve already covered this show.) But in many ways, Murder was even more cynical than Scandal could ever be, and frankly even more implausible.

Now I know that, technically speaking, Shonda Rhimes doesn’t deserve much of the criticism for the series; Murder was more the brainchild of Peter Nowalk. But Nowalk was one of Rhimes’ co-writers in the early days of his career, and anyway at one point, the two series would cross over so it’s really hard to not blame her for much of what transpired on Murder. You could tell from the beginning that this was in Rhimes’ vein.

(I should also note that for its entire run I have always been fundamentally certain that the creators borrowed so heavily from the Glenn Close drama Damages that an accusation of flat-out plagiarism could be made by Todd Kessler and his fellow writers. At one point, I actually intended to use this article to make a point-by-point argument as to this, but considering that both series are now finished, it would be pointless. What I will say to future generations, if you have a choice between binge watching the two series, trust me watch Damages. It is by far the better series (the Emmys actually gave it far more nominations and awards than Murder over what would be a shorter run) and in a way, it’s less cynical and has a better ending.)

Let’s start with the title of the series itself. When we meet Annalyse Keating (Viola Davis) she is teach a criminal law class with this very title. This should have been a warning to viewers right there as to what we were in for. The attorneys on The Practice and Boston Legal may have done exactly what the characters on Murder did, but we saw with every defense that it took a lot psychologically and emotionally out of them with each successive season. They might be willing to do it, but even Alan Shore was humble about it. They wouldn’t advertise it, and they certainly wouldn’t brag about it, which is what Annalyse was doing in the Pilot.

As the series begins Annalyse chooses five students to work with her for what will amount to be the length of the series. They ended up getting involved the defense of a woman accused of murder, and it soon becomes clear that one of the more obvious suspects is Sam, Annalyse’s husband. Of course, this isn’t exactly a shock because the series flashforwards to one of Sam’s murder and eventually the disposal of the body. Whatever suspense we are trying to get is to who ends up being the killer, which ultimately will become irrelevant as the longer each student remains under Annalyse’s influences, the more corrupt and criminal acts they will end up committing.

Annalyse will mourn the death of her husband to an extent, but that’s not the real twist. By the end of the first season, we learn that Sam did not murder Lila; the crime was actually committed by Frank, under Sam’s directive for reason we wouldn’t learn until the next season. (Does it really matter why?) Then in the second season premiere, Bonnie (Liza Weill, who was utterly wasted by this series and Shondaland in general) murdered the main suspect because she thought she had brought all this tragedy on Annalyse.  I’m kind of stunned anybody stuck around after these two revelations. Bobby Donnell and his associates hated their clients, but at least they had the decency not to kill them.

Now I suppose this is the point where I should start making some descriptions about that the Keating 5 came from all races, sexes and sexual orientations, but I just don’t see what difference this mistakes. I’ve already said that what seemed to be the main draw for Scandal was watching these kinds of people get away with the kinds of horrible things that we’d only seen Male White Antiheroes. That’s still not much a reason to watch a series and considering the stakes were considerably lower in Murder than they were in Scandal, I’m not entirely sure it makes it any better here. Season after season, the Keating 5 (then 4, then 3) were linking in horrible crimes basically done at first to payback the people responsible and then…well, one of them would basically just say: “We’re all evil.” Not as an excuse or a defense. As a fact.

And considering how much of the series seemed to be based on the idea of bringing Annalyse and everyone in her justice, its actually kind of astonishing that Nowalk and Rhimes seemed to want us to believe this was wrong. Annalyse was guilty of horrible crimes, knew they were horrible, and yet despite being a top notch criminal attorney didn’t seem to have any moral qualms about letting innocent people pay for their crimes. Hell, in the second season, they would end up framing one of their own clients for a murder that had been committed by one of them.

Now there may have been a message in Murder about how corrupt and unbalanced the criminal justice system was, but no one in seemed capable of telling it. Indeed, during the fourth season Annalyse made a class action lawsuit against the criminal justice system the center of the story. The thing is all of it was an excuse for her to avoid dealing with all the deaths and damage that had come in the third season. And as a result, somehow, the therapist (Jimmy Smits, seriously?) ended up getting drawn in, corrupted, and on his deathbed. That is how toxic a personality Annalyse Keating was, and yet somehow, she kept trying to make people believe that she should be a role model – that you should ‘be here’

And honestly, the series wasn’t even really interested in that story or even the murders. It was, even more than Scandal, all about sex. All of the Keating 5 were sleeping with each other or Frank and Bonnie. Annalyse would have sex with a detective she was basically using to manipulate away from the crimes she was committing and a female lawyer who was an old friend. At one point, I think she and Bonnie kissed, I don’t know if they followed through, and I can’t bring myself to care. Because even more than on Scandal, there wasn’t a good person to be found. Not the regulars, not the clients, not the law and not the family. In what was her last regular role anywhere, the great Cicely Tyson played Annalyse’s mother whose life had left scars that Annalyse couldn’t deal with but who in her own way, tried to look after her daughter.  Tyson was the most nominated actor for this show (after Davis herself) and she gave everything she could to make her character real, especially as she began to slip in dementia. But for all Tyson’s efforts, she just served as yet another reminder as to how damage can pass through generation. It was an old lesson when we learned on Grey’s Anatomy and Murder really had nothing new to say about it.

That’s the thing about far too much of Rhimes’ work: at its core, they’re all basically soap operas. I wouldn’t mind that if Rhimes and her co-writer would just be upfront about it: even in the age of Peak TV, we’re always going to need guilty pleasures. But they refused to acknowledge it all through Scandal and Murder’ s run. I do understand the importance of having African-American actresses as the leads of TV series, and Kerry Washington and Viola Davis are among the greatest ever. I’m just so disappointed that we consider Olivia Pope and Annalyse Keating symbolic of the great roles television can achieve – because they aren’t.

And television knows that. The same year Davis received her Emmy for How to Get Away with Murder, Regina King – another great African-American actress who could never find roles worthy of her on film – received the first of two Supporting Actress Emmys in a Limited Series for her extraordinary performance in American Crime, one of the truly great accomplishment of the 2010s. American Crime made its debut the week after How to Get Away with Murder ended its first season. There was more authenticity in any five minutes of any episode of that series then there was in the entire run of either Scandal or Murder. Yet somehow that series barely survived three seasons, half of Murder’s run.

I will talk more about American Crime at a later date because it is pertinent to this article, but for now I’ll just that its commercial failure compared to that of Shondaland’s success says far too much about how television does business. Crime had bad people doing bad things, too, but it was more the reasons and the consequences. The message of Rhimes – and too much of television in the post-9/11 world – was that, for certain people, there never were any. And we didn’t need Rhimes or anyone else to tell us that.

 

At this point, it would be understandable if you thought I actually thought the point of this article was to discuss how much bad television came as a result of 9-11. This is far from the case, and starting in the next article I’ll discuss some of the greatest shows and moments in TV history that I doubt could have happened in any other era.

 

Television After 9/11, Part 3A: Shonda Rhimes, Scandal, and the Cynicism of Power

 

Well before the terrorist attacks of 2001, cynicism in institutions had begun to permeate the national psyche. Part of this was due to the rise of cable news and part of did involve several television series of the 1990s. The most successful and arguably the one with the greatest roots in this was, of course, The X-Files.

It is doubtful a series like The X-Files could truly have been as successful in any era. After the end of the Cold War, a national paranoia began to feed into the American psyche and The X-Files gave voice to that. The central idea of the series was not so much about the search for alien life or the supernatural, but rather the idea that our institutions, particularly our government was lying to us, and could never be trusted. The list of series inspired indirectly by The X-Files could fill a volume on its own, and I’m going to deal with a quite a few in this series.

After 9/11, this cynicism and utter mistrust in our institutions began to play out in just about every level of television. As I mentioned in an unrelated article, some of this began play out in a new kind of TV that has become practically the go-to move for so many series in the past decade. This has followed a transition from ‘Bad People doing Bad Things’ to ‘Powerful People Doing Bad Things’ In that sense, so many of Shonda Rhimes’ series in the past decade played to this idea.

As regular readers of my column know, I have a vaunted dislike of most things Shondaland and it’s understandable that those same readers might well think this is yet another opportunity to dump on her work. But the fact is, it really is hard to imagine quite a bit of Shondaland – particularly Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, which will be the focus of this article – could really exist at any other time post 9-11. So much of what happened in that era is reflected in both series – the former dealing primarily with political power and terrorism; the latter with criminal justice – that’s its really hard to imagine either existed pre 9/11 or even in the decade prior. And while I do respect Rhimes was trying to do, the fact remains it was done in such a poor way that I think it may have done more damage to television – particularly network television – than it could have ever done any good. So, I’ll try to take a closer look – mainly in general terms – what each show did that was horribly wrong and why the ideas that somehow they were groundbreaking are a complete lie.

Let’s start with Scandal.  One of the biggest problems with Scandal may have been the fundamental concept that Olivia Pope was somehow a groundbreaking character. In the sense, she was – an African-American woman at the center of a broadcast drama was something that hadn’t happened in decades on network television, and frankly still doesn’t happen nearly enough. And I can understand why millions would cotton to here – there is a lot to be said for a perfectly coifed, gorgeous woman walking around powerful men mostly and calling back about situations, saying simply: “It’s handled.” Kerry Washington has always been a superb actress, and I get why people everywhere swooned over her.

The thing is, almost exactly contemporaneously with the series came the development of a series on Showtime that dealt with someone who basically did the exact same thing that Olivia Pope did: Ray Donavan. Now, I’m not going to advocate for one series over the other: as those who’ve read this column, I actually found both equally distasteful and equally unwatchable. But for all that, there is no difference from the kind of work Ray did than the kind Olivia did. And if I had to choose between them, I kind of prefer Ray. Not because he was more likable (on the contrary, his behavior in private was more repugnant than Olivia’s) but because, at his core, Ray was more honest about what he did.

Olivia Pope went through almost the entire run of the series, convinced that by hiding the truth from the public about what powerful people did, she was performing a service not only to her clients but the public because ‘they couldn’t handle it’. Ray never bought into that all: he was never dazzled by Hollywood (or New York politics, which is where the last two seasons were) or any of the people he worked for. It was a job, plain and simple, and he was good at it. There’s something fundamentally more acceptable about that than any of the nonsense that Olivia told her friends and herself. Ray was a monster (more so than Olivia, because he actually got his hands dirty in a way she never did) but he knew he was.

In retrospect, I think that Scandal itself had more in common with The X-Files then I was willing to acknowledge: it dealt with the efforts of people within the government to hide the truth from the world about the evils that went on. But Scandal was far more cynical about what it did, and cared far less about the people it was supposedly hiding the truth from. For all the cynicism and darkness of The X-Files, there’s always something optimistic at its core. Mulder and Scully were never going to succeed at bringing the truth about the government’s plots against America to light, and they would end up paying extremely dear for it (each of them would suffer physically and emotional scars that no one on Scandal could compare with) but that never stopped them from trying. Olivia Pope, by contrast, is just another version of those nameless assassins who worked for the Syndicate. I’m sure that at their core, many of them believed that what they were doing was for the greater good (some actually said as much at times) but it didn’t change the fact that they were deliberately engaging in a process to ‘deceive, inveigle and obfuscate. And that’s basically all Olivia and her ‘gladiators’ ever did.

What actually makes this somehow even worse is that the villains on Scandal didn’t even go through the motions of saying what they were doing was for the greater good. One of the most memorable characters in television history was The X-Files Cigarette-Smoking Man, brilliantly betrayed by William B. Davis. In one of the series greatest moments early in Season 2, Mulder finally confronts the Smoking Man in his apartment. The series always managed to play the card of the banality of evil, and they did so just as clearly here. The Smoking Man is a barely furnished apartment, a full ashtray beside him, watching an old black and white movie. Mulder enters the apartment and puts a gun to his face. The Smoking Man makes vaguely menacing terms at first, but then says something rather sad: “Look at me. No family. A little power. I’m in the game because I believe what I’m doing is right…If people knew what I knew, it would all fall apart.” And for all the evils the Smoking Man was responsible during the series run, there always seemed to be something sad about him. We would eventually learn that the Syndicate engaged in their conspiracy with alien colonists because they were trying to stave off an invasion. The way did it was horrible and misguided – Mulder himself would once refer to it as ‘victory meant the absence of defeat’ – but you tell at their core they believed they were do something right for somebody.

Now compare to this to Rowan Pope, aka ‘Command’ the head of B613, the Syndicate of Scandal. (There are a lot of parallels between the characters played by Joe Morton and Davis, respectively, but I don’t think they’re entirely pertinent here.) Rowan had all the power that the Smoking Man did; he ordered murders to keep the powerful in place, mainly so he could outmaneuver them. But for all the words about ‘preserving the republic’ (a phrase seriously overused), you very quickly understood that Rowan had no respect for anybody, not the public in general, not the people in power, not even his own daughter. Rowan was essentially a cartoon villain, who had no respect for Olivia but just wanted to control everything she did, and wouldn’t even bother to save her life when she was abducted. For all the horrible things the Smoking Man did, there were at least occasional signs that he had a heart: he cared very deeply for Mulder’s mother, and even had her life after she suffered what would surely have been a fatal stroke, and went out of his way to try and find a way for his estranged son to know and respect him. The Smoking Man believed in something and some people. Throughout the series, people with far less scruples than Mulder did were sticking guns in Rowan’s face and no one ever pulled a trigger. I never understood why.

And there was another key element that The X-Files and Scandal had: revelation, or rather the lack of consequences for it. In The X-Files case, this was entirely creator Chris Carter’s fault. Every season, we’d get a mytharc episode that supposedly was going to change the series forever, and not only did that never happen, each revelation would completely contradict much of what we learned before. By the time the series was barely a third of the way through its nine-season run, you could barely make sense of what Mulder and Scully were trying to expose about aliens, and it hardly matter because only they would learn it, and the world around them basically never changed.

Scandal did just as much revelation, albeit at a faster pace. Throughout the second season it particular, it seemed that Rhimes and her cohorts were revealing secrets about the series with every new episode and at the very least, it did change the outside world. There were, however, two major problems with this. The first was the fact that if you pile on a revelation at the end of every episode, even the most devoted viewer will become numb to it. It was one thing to have an assassination, and then in the next episode reveal the assassin, and then in the next episode reveal the election the President had won was rigged. But eventually it started to become a revelation for revelation’s sake, and it’s hard to really have room for much else.

The second, far bigger problem, was that when you have this many earth-shaking events, you run out of new ideas. When you have an election being stolen and then an assassination, then an investigation to that all before Season 2 is even half over, then it really becomes a question of how you follow it up. And Rhimes approach was basically... to keep telling the same story over and over again. In Season 3, the overriding mission of the series was to bring down B613 – they did in the penultimate episode, and that it was revived in the last one. They did the exact same plot in Season 4, which ended with Rowan in prison…, and by the early stages of Season 5, B613 was fully operational again and Rowan was back in charge. It really makes you question why so many people were following this series in the first place: I know many people turn to TV for the familiar, but this was ludicrous.

And for all the flaws of The X-Files mytharc, the writers very quickly turned their attention to the Monster of the Week which very quickly became more ambitious and imaginative than the mytharc ever was. It would be brilliant stylistically, it could be scary and shocking, and most wonderfully, it could often be hysterically funny. And with resident geniuses Vince Gilligan and Darin Morgan at the helm, they would have the capacity to look inward and poke fun at the series stodginess and clichés in a way that featured some of the greatest moments in TV history.

Scandal’s equivalent – Olivia and her gladiators helping powerful officials get out of messes – became pale retreads very quickly. Because so many of them followed the same formula and far more often with more people dying, you really wondered if they were little more than janitors, cleaning up richer people’s messes. And for all their supposed abilities to solve problems, they weren’t really changing anything. This was actually made clear in what was widely considered the series highpoint: ’The Lawn Chair’ where Olivia is called in by the D.C. police to essentially stop a race riot. It was fundamentally a powerful episode, but it exposed the truth that when it comes to institutional racism, there is some things Olivia Pope is powerless to handle.

And that’s the dirty little secret about Scandal – it told us nothing new about stories; it just had minorities – African-Americans, women, gays and lesbians – fundamentally being the ones doing all the evil things and fixing them up. Now I understand why that would be appealing to certain audiences. But that doesn’t make it revolutionary or groundbreaking. It just makes it a different variation on a familiar theme. And a lot of that paled in comparison with what we would find in Shondaland’s most direct follow-up How to Get Away With Murder.