For The Defense: How the Portrayal Of Defense Attorneys on TV May Have Skewed Our Views on Criminal Justice. Part 1: Origin Story

 

I was going to follow up on my treatise on Homicide when the wind was knocked out of me last night when I read article about how many of the detective that are mentioned in Simon’s novel (and became the inspiration for characters in so much of his TV work) have become involved in cases that had been served as miscarriages of justice. I will return to Homicide eventually because I still think there’s more of value to right about, but I’m going to shift first and deal with yet another issue that may have led to our perception of justice on television.

It’s an almost universal truth whenever the police procedural moves into the courtroom that the detectives utterly loathe putting their cases in the hands of a jury. (Frank Pembleton makes this case clear in the Pilot of Homicide when Bayliss confronts him about denying a suspect right to counsel before eliciting a confession.) This comes very clear in Homicide the handful of times we meet defense attorneys who are absolutely determined to represent any client and manipulate every technicality in the law in order to get their client off. (Indeed, in the finale a serial killer is set free because his defense attorney says he has been held 181 days without trial. This is how Simon and Fontana end up justifying Bayliss’ murder of him.) This is carried on to an extent in The Wire where every major drug dealer is represented by Levy, who Omar memorably cuts down in court when Levy dares accuses him ‘of praying off the innocents’ (“I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game.” And as anyone who watches Law and Order, Jack McCoy is forever being set upon by defense attorneys who represent either wealthy clients or are misguided idealists representing criminals. In the final season, Mike Cutter actually dares to accuse a representative of The Innocence Project of manipulating a case for a guilty client. In a larger sense, the attorneys on Law and Order can be viewed as ‘originalists’ believing the law has to be interpreted exactly as it was at the writing of the Constitution, while the defense generally looks for ways for it to evolve. The defense is invariably portrayed as the villain.

Why does television view the defense attorney as part of the problem with crime rather than an equal partner in the justice system? It’s a complicated question and part of it may go back further than television itself.

During the era of Hollywood movies, there was a very strict system of justice: the criminal must always be guilty and they must always be punished. Almost inevitably that meant that they died before the final fadeout or if they went to jail, it was to the electric chair or the gas chamber.  This was true during the era of film noir as well; you never see Mary Astor in court for her crimes in The Maltese Falcon and none of Humphrey Bogart’s characters ever testify against the criminal; they generally shoot them dead. I’m relatively certain that there were very few courtroom dramas in the 1930s and 1940s where the criminal was allowed to be found innocent in a court of law. In The Postman Rings Twice, Lana Turner and John Garfield are acquitted of the murder they commit, but by the end of the movie Turner’s dead in an auto crash and Garfield is going to be executed for her murder even though he is innocent of it. That’s how justice works.

In the 1950s we slowly see a progression towards the justice system being flawed. In 12 Angry Men (which was a TV play before it was a movie) Juror Number 8 does make it clear that the man representing the accused is a public defender who has nothing to gain from getting this man set free. I’m relatively sure he is surprised as anybody when the jury comes back with a not guilty verdict. Witness for the Prosecution shows Charles Laughton’s character agreeing to take an apparently guilty man’s case because he believes he is innocent, only to learn after the man is acquitted that he has been manipulated by both his client and the accused wife.

No representative of the courtroom drama would be complete without To Kill a Mockingbird. Everybody considers Gregory Peck’s portrayal of Atticus Finch one of the most heroic ones of all time and The Good Wife actually has a couple of its characters say they decided to become lawyers after seeing it. That said, I’ve never been entirely convinced Atticus was ever as heroic as we portray him .To be sure, he does represent an African-American man accused of rape, a case no one else will touch and one he is sure to lose. It’s how he defends his client that I find questionable. If you read the book, Atticus defends him by accusing the women in question of seducing the accused – in other words, he’s blaming the victim. The fact that the woman in question very well might be lying is beside the point; I have a hard time thinking Atticus would get past the #MeToo movement. A lot of people were upset when Harper Lee wrote Go Tell a Watchmen and portrayed Atticus as a lot more cynical and less heroic than he has been in the book and film. Was it possible she had realized the world was more complicated, was trying to paint a more accurate picture, and the millions of people who wanted to see Atticus as a pure hero didn’t like it?

My personal favorite film version of a defense attorney from the era is James Stewart’s performance as Paul Biegler in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder. In a way Stewart’s character is the prototype of so many defense attorneys we would see in film and TV to come. He isn’t in this for some noble cause, and he doesn’t particularly like his client: but he needs the money and publicity the case will bring him.  He explains to his client (Ben Gazzara) the ways he usually gets his clients off, eliminates three of them, and settles on the defense that the killing was excusable. The client, a veteran of the Korean War just learned his wife was raped and shot the accused five times in the chest. The defense he uses (and its clear Stewart barely believes it) is a form of temporary insanity and Stewart’s character tries to use his wife rape as the cause. (These days we would call it nullification.) In the courtroom Stewart is charming and very funny and uses that humor to frustrate the uptight prosecutor. (He has less luck with his second chair, played by a then unknown George C. Scott.) Stewart’s character is in my opinion more realistic than Atticus Finch because he’s not idealistic or heroic: he’s just doing a job.  He drinks heavily, he’s strapped and he knows it, and even if he doesn’t like his client, he’ll give him a real defense. That’s admirable in a realistic way.

So considering that, let’s start looking at the defense attorney on television. From the early days of television the discussion can’t be made without Perry Mason. Mason’s enduring popularity (particularly Raymond Burr’s version) lasting well beyond the length of the series; throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s there were countless TV movies with Burr still getting his clients out of false murder charges. Generations of TV fans probably thought Mason was the model for a defense attorney, even though his clients were always innocent and he never lost a case. His job, assisted by Della Street and Paul Drake, was to prove that the cops were wrong and getting the guilty party to confess on the stands. Now there’s an argument to be made that Mason was a precursor of so many lawyers who would later exonerate guilty clients and help fix a broken justice system. I wouldn’t make that argument though; Burr’s Mason was essentially a private eye without a badge. Maybe millions of people became defense attorneys because of Perry Mason; they were in for a rude awakening when they found out what the real justice system was.

(For the record I think HBO’s remake of Perry Mason set in Depression-era, showing a corrupt justice system at pretty much every level and Mason being as cynical of the justice system then anyone else, is a much better version. And who knows? Maybe every era gets the Perry Mason it needs. 1950s America needed Raymond Burr’s earnest one: this era requires Matthew Rhys’ bitterly contemptuous one.)

Coming to the present moment, the most famous defense attorney on television t now is Saul Goodman, indelibly portrayed by Bob Odenkirk for more than a decade starting on Breaking Bad. Saul is loud, flashy, perfectly able to work the system between the margins, willing to do anything for money, and pretty much a great criminal. He also clearly has a moral compass, is utterly out of his league when it comes to dealing with drug lords like Gus Fring and cold killers like Mike Ehrmantraut, and the further along Walter White becomes on his quest towards Heisenberg, the more rational (and frantic) his advice becomes and the more it is disregarded. Eventually to flee the police, he has to completely change his identity and the last time we see him on Breaking Bad Walter is still ignoring his rational advice.

Saul Goodman story is tragic on Breaking Bad. When we learn his origins on Better Call Saul the extraordinary prequel series, it becomes absolutely heartbreaking. Saul is actually Jimmy McGill, and we’re not entirely surprised to learn he was a criminal con man before we met him. What is shocking is that there was a good man there once. You see it in his interactions with his soulmate Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) who loves him despite – maybe even because – of his flaws. You see in the way he treats his brother Chuck (the incredible Michael McKean) a legendary attorney who has a mental breakdown which he disguises as an allergy to electricity. And throughout the first three seasons, you keep seeing the good man that he is trying to break through. But ultimately that man is buried – because of what Chuck really thinks of him. Jimmy became an attorney to try and earn his brother’s respect and thought that the man who ran his law firm Howard Hanlon (Patrick Fabian) decided not to hire him. At the end of Season 1, we learn that it has been Chuck the whole time who has never respected his brother choice of career and that the worst thing he can think of is “Slipping Jimmy with a law degree!”

(I’ve only recently learn that creator Vince Gilligan had decided at the beginning of the series to have Chuck be Jimmy’s better angel and Howard be his heavy, only to decide halfway through Season 1 that it made more sense for their roles to be reversed. In my opinion, this is almost as brilliant a decision as Gilligan’s one in Season 1 of Breaking Bad not to kill off Jesse Pinkman at the end of that year. Not only does it make Jimmy actions seem practically justified, it makes Howard much more sympathetic not only when his efforts to mend fences with Jimmy are rebuffed, but makes him feel more like someone who has been oppressed by Chuck his entire career and is now unhappy he can’t make things right.)

Saul Goodman’s story will come to an end relatively soon. (AMC says later this year but given the pandemic, Odenkirk’s health issues and Gilligan’s way of ending series, I’m less sure.) But I honestly feel more empathy for him than I have far too many protagonists in the era of Peak TV. Unlike so many bad men, and indeed so many defense attorneys in television, he had a sense of right and wrong and that’s the kind of attorney and character we need.

So now we’ve seen the extremes of the defense attorney from one Golden Age to another. Is there a line that explains how we got there? I think there is, and in the next article I’ll tell you who drew it.

Did We Have Joss Whedon Wrong From The Start?

 

Talking with some people I respect a great deal about pop culture, I mentioned my respect for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They told them they’d recently rewatched it and it didn’t hold up nearly as well.  Now, they’d given different reactions to the series fairly recently so I thought that this may have been more a case of buyer’s remorse.

Yesterday I read an article about Whedon and how he may have had a negative affect on pop culture and that so much of what we considered great about Whedon at the time and until recently wasn’t as great as we thought. This has led me down a train of thought of my own about some reasonable questions I have had about Whedon and his series over the past couple of years as the record of his sexist and racist behavior towards actors on his set over the past decades has become more and more public. And in turn, it has led me to question whether all of the things I once considered exceptional about Whedon’s series – particularly Buffy and Angel – were actually illustrations of the kind of man he is and the narrowness of his creative abilities.

Now to be clear, I still that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is still one of the greatest shows of all time. Regardless of all the problems associated with Whedon the incredible performance of the cast – from Sarah Michelle Gellar all the way down to James Marsters and Julie Benz – were incredible. All of these actors were brilliant, and many of them went on to prove their talent in other ventures. And the overall creativity of so many of the episodes such as the silent movie ‘Hush’, the surreal ‘Restless’, the powerful ‘The Body’ and the unforgettable musical episode ‘Once More With Feeling’ – all written by Whedon – were works of that art that can not and should not be erased from the canon of great television. That said I think there’s an excellent chance we misjudged Whedon’s creativity from the get-go in quite a few ways.

Now as anyone who loved Buffy knows, Whedon said he came up with the idea for the movie that the series was based on by wanting to subvert the horror movie cliché of a teenage girl being stalked and killed by a supernatural creature. He said he wanted to create a world where the girl killed the monster. That’s where Buffy Summers came from, and from that world we got a bevy of strong female characters capable of fighting for themselves, standing up in the face of evil and being bad-asses. Perhaps that’s where we got the now clichéd term ‘strong female protagonist’. It’s certainly the reason that Whedon was considered a ‘male feminist’ and was given an award by Meryl Streep as an ally.

But even if you set aside everything we now know about Whedon as a creative force, how he had affairs with many of the actresses working for him and how he treating Charisma Carpenter when she announced her pregnancy to him just prior to Season 4 of Angel, when takes a look – not even a close one; it’s pretty obvious just by a glance – at so many of the female characters in Buffy so many of their arcs dealt with them suffering. And I don’t just mean the traditional arcs of how lousy it is to be a teenager. I mean, they went through the kinds of traumas that, if they were viewed on say, one of the other teen shows that were airing on the WB at the time, we would consider them overwrought.

Let’s start with Buffy in Season 5. Her mother Joyce goes through multiple hospitalizations, and is diagnosed with a brain tumor. It is removed, she begins to recover, and then Buffy comes home to find her dead. She then has to begin becoming the legal guardian of her younger sister Dawn (Michelle Trachtenberg) because her father has more or less abandoned them. (He doesn’t even come to their mother’s funeral.) Her ‘normal’ boyfriend Riley leaves her because she doesn’t seem to love him the way she did Angel. In the midst of all of this she is fighting a hell goddess named Glory who wants to find ‘The Key’ (Dawn) and go home, which will destroy the universe.  Despite her best efforts Dawn is abducted and she goes into a fugue state after all the trauma she’s gone through. She is told the only way to stop Glory is to kill Dawn, which she refuses to do. In the process of saving her sister the dimensions are opened and Dawn wants to sacrifice herself to close them. Buffy instead jumps into the portal and dies. At the time, it is considered an act of bravery. I always considered an overwhelmed Buffy committing suicide rather than face reality. (We’ll avoid her resurrection and everything else in Season 6 partly because it’s hated by even the most loyal fans of the series and partly because I’ll be dealing with it soon enough.)

And it wasn’t limited to Buffy. During Season 6 Willow (Allyson Hannigan) slowly becomes more and more addicted to magic. Her girlfriend Tara (Amber Benson) breaks up with her and she sinks deeper into addiction before she seems to come out of it. Just after they reconcile Tara is hit with a stray bullet and dies in Willow’s arms. As a result, Willow goes ‘dark’ , literally skins the man who did it, and becomes so obsessed with revenge that she eventually turns on all of her friends and tries to destroy the world herself. Anya (Emma Caulfield) an ex-vengeance demon who has become Xander’s fiancée is dumped at the altar and becomes a demon again. She has an affair with Spike that is seen by everybody on a video cam. Dawn begins to spiral due to Buffy’s absence and essentially becomes a thief and kleptomaniac.

And less those still dyed-in-the-wool Buffy fans shout out: “But it was Season 6!” these patterns hold up pretty much throughout the entire series. Faith (Eliza Dushku) spends much of Season 3 as being the ‘dark vampire slayer’ and disregarded by ‘The Scoobies’ She eventually works for The Mayor that seasons ‘Big Bad’ and Buffy ends up stabbing her nearly mortally. She comes back and is so filled with self-loathing that she switches bodies with Buffy before she eventually does become redeemed. Harmony, a side character, was such a bitchy teenage girl that doesn’t become a better person until she’s killed and turned into a vampire. (Even then, it takes more than four years.) Perhaps the most obvious case of this is Amy Madison. In one of the earliest episodes of the series, her mother uses witchcraft to switch bodies with her and relive her teenage glory days.  The next time we see Amy; she not only has learned nothing from the experience but has become a full-fledged witch herself. (The writers thought it would be funny to have her turn herself into a rat and keep her in a cage for three years.)

I realize that is part of the nature of television series to have the characters go through traumatic arcs as part of the plot – drama wouldn’t exist without. And to be fair, there were quite a few male characters that went through similar plots in Whedon’s shows – Angel wouldn’t have existed without it. But there seems to be a substantial disconnect between Whedon being a feminist ally and the untold amounts of suffering he inflicted on the women characters in his series. To be clear this wasn’t just Whedon – the entire writing staff was part of the effort and there were quite a few women writers on the show willing to make the characters suffer.

(Incidentally anybody watch UnReal? You know the Lifetime drama that takes place behind the scenes of a reality show where the producers, mostly female, go out of their way to make the contestants on the show suffer for ratings and are given bonuses for it? One of the creators was Marni Noxon. She wrote for Whedon for both Buffy and Angel and wrote some less than subtle scripts about females being abused. Just saying.)

Now I suppose some people could make the argument that so many of the traumas that these character had to go through in their lives was suppose to serve as a counter-balance to the bigger goals of saving the world, which the casts of both series had to do every season. This actually gets me to my second point – I don’t think Whedon ever considered the world worth saving.

In Angel’s Season 2 episode ‘Reprise’ Angel, who’s been in a spiral for weeks, finally decides to go on a mission to the ‘home office’ of Wolfram & Hart, the demonic law firm that was basically the source of all evil. Angel gets on an elevator (I do love the Muzak that plays all the way down) with Holland Manners, an executive Angel left to be murdered in an earlier episode. (“I’m quite dead. Unfortunately my contract lasts well beyond that.” Manners constantly baits Angel as to what he intends to do when he meets the ‘senior partners’. He tells them they’ve always existed in some form and name checks the Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge. Finally, they arrive – and Angel is right back where he started in LA. And he notices all the horrors that are going on that everyone else ignores. The definition is clear: We’ve been in Hell the whole time.

This is one of the darkest visions that any television writer has ever written about mankind – the next show that went this dark was True Detective.  And it almost got completely ignored. Whedon actually would double down on the idea nearly two seasons later. After an epic battle that nearly ended with everybody in the world being a slave, the spirit of Lilah, another Wolfram and Hart employee, comes into Angel’s headquarters… to congratulate them for ‘ending world peace.’ As the senior partners see it – and its pretty clear by now this is Whedon’s vision to – mankind can not survive as an entity unless they completely give over their free will to a completely superior being. (Sound familiar? That’s Loki’s vision for humanity in The Avengers.) In other words all the fighting, all the bloodshed that they have undergone is something that the evil forces of the world wanted were hoping for. As a result Angel and his team are offered ownership of the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart, the entity that they’ve been fighting this whole time. Do they refuse? Are they horrified? Nope, they accept. They all have their reasons, but they accept. They say they’re doing it to try and beat the system from the inside, but by the middle of the final season, they are fundamentally corrupted by being there.

You look very closely at this, and it really makes you wonder what Angel and his friends – and by association, Buffy and the Scoobies – have been fighting for this whole time. (Indeed the fact that one of the things Angel is given is a weapon to help Buffy defeat the great evil she’s been fighting all season drives the point home: the senior partners want the world saved because they want business as usual to continue.) Whedon keeps driving home the fact ‘the fight is all that matters’ – it’s the theme of the final episode. But you get the feeling, as he leads the characters into a battle they will inevitably be killed in, that he doesn’t really believe that.

That’s the thing about Whedon’s work: saving the world is counterproductive. You can actually see in the three major projects he worked on afterward:

Firefly: Takes place nearly five hundred years in the future in outer space. We hear over and over about ‘Earth-That-Was’. Pretty sure that doesn’t mean anything good has happened if they had ever found it.

Dollhouse: A company is erasing the minds of people in order to slowly but surely take over the world. When the series ended abruptly after two seasons, the apocalypse had happened. I’m pretty sure Eliza Dushku didn’t save the world this time.

Cabin in the Woods: Five clichés have to be killed to appease the elder gods or the world ends. One of the ‘victims’ – who has people who love him – decides not to die, because he thinks its time the world be destroyed. The last shot of the movie is of that beginning.

Looking at all of this Whedon looks less like a creative genius and more like a nerd who just wants to write apocalypse fanfic. Now I get why he’d do this – dystopian series are kind of a big deal these days – and I’d honestly rather listen to the dialogue from Buffy then any of the characters on The Walking Dead. But the thing is, at least some of the series involving a dystopia are about our society to an extent. I may loathe The Handmaid’s Tale but I can’t exactly argue that isn’t about themes that don’t exist now. Whedon’s characters may have clever things to say, but all of its about pop culture. There’s nothing deeper to his dialogue than that.

So what’s Whedon’s legacy? I think Buffy gives an idea. In the middle of Season 4, there’s an episode called ‘Superstar’. In this universe, a minor character named Jonathan Levenson (Danny Strong) has somehow become the most important person on Earth. He’s the guy the Scoobies turn to the fight baddies, he’s a movie star, he’s a political a figure – all the women (including lesbians) want to date him and all the men (especially Xander) want to be him. Now this is funny when you learn Jonathan started in The Matrix and invented the Internet, but it’s far less funny when you consider where Buffy herself is.

Detail: Jonathan was a fringe character. His most important moments in Season 3 were ‘Earshot’ where after years of bullying by everybody he’s decided to kill himself before Buffy saves him, and ‘The Prom’ where in one of the great moment in the entire history of the series representing the class, he gives Buffy the award of ‘Class Protector’. In ‘Superstar’, it’s almost casually mentioned that Jonathan has pretty much done everything Buffy did to this point in the series – and that she gave him the Class Protector.  In other words, a nerdy white male has superseded all the heroine’s achievements.

Naturally, there’s a spell involved and when it’s reserved Jonathan goes back to normal and Buffy gently chides about what he did and why everybody was angry at him. Lesson learned, right? The next time we see Jonathan, it’s Season 6 and he and two other far less balance nerds have decided, for no real reason, to take over Sunnydale and destroy Buffy. That Jonathan ultimately repents when he learns he’s in too deep is irrelevant. He’s lived in Sunnydale, he knows how dangerous these things are, and he’s decided nevertheless it’s better to be a ‘Big Bad’.

This may be Whedon’s legacy in pop culture. So many of the actors in the series – including Gellar – never did as well again while Whedon despite flop after flop, directed one of the biggest box office hits of all time and conquered medium after medium. All of his flaws – which people like Charisma Carpenter knew about – were either buried or ignored until recently. But unfortunately, the world is now full of showrunners who are still trying to be Joss Whedon. I’d like to think that Peak TV is strictly about The Americans and Atlanta, but it’s just as much about Game of Thrones and The Boys.  It’s more about sounding clever than actually being clever, pretending to deal with deep issues rather than actually dealing with them. And if that truly is what television becomes as a result of Whedon, well, to paraphrase a remark he had Giles make at the beginning and end of Buffy, ‘Peak TV is doomed.”

Homicide Reflections, Part 3A: What Is A Bad Cop?

What’s a bad cop?

Ever since the police procedural became part of the TV landscape, writers have been trying to define that question. The easy answer in recent years would be Michael Chiklis’ Vic Mackey on The Shield, the cop who had no problem beating up on suspects – and was given too much latitude by the LAPD to do it – and who had no problem taking drug dealer’s contraband to finance his retirement fund. But again, that’s corrupt. It’s not what I mean by bad.

Viewers from an earlier era would look upon the portrayal of Andy Sipcowicz portrayed by Dennis Franz for more than a decade on NYPD Blue as the cliché version of it. He is bigoted, even towards his African-American boss, also has no problem beating a suspect up if he has too and is cynical beyond nature towards how prosecutors work. That’s closer to what I mean, but we’re still not there. Creator David Milch went so far out of his way to make it seem like a man who could be a bigot and still likable that he might be able to have certain redeeming qualities. (He would also hedge his bets by having Sipcowicz’s character go through so many tragedies in his life that by the time he Milch left the series, Job would feel sorry for Andy.)

What I consider a ‘bad’ cop is basically the kind of cop who puts in the minimum amount of effort at his job, barely considers the murders he investigates worth solving, and is often far more concerned with his life outside of it that he can’t even be bothered to hide it. And those kinds of cops showed up quite a bit on Homicide.

Now to be clear, none of the detectives on Homicide were saints. Frank Pembleton was a brilliant cop, but his arrogance and pride made it hard for most of his fellow detectives to work with him. John Munch (the incomparable Richard Belzer) spent his entire career at the Baltimore P.D. constantly being berated by his partners as to how lazy and slipshod he could be with procedural. And quite a few of the other detectives had their own prejudices to fellow detectives as well as the suspects they investigating that would become obvious over the run of the series. I’m thinking particularly of Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson) who had a petty streak towards many of the people he worked with over the years and was loathe to admit his own failings.

But some of the major characters on the series were the kind of detectives that you probably wouldn’t have found on any procedural before or since. They were the kind of cops who were petty towards everybody – their fellow detectives, their bosses, even the families of the victims whose murders they were investigating – and could hardly be bothered to do their jobs without showing how unpleasant they could be. I’m thinking of two particular characters whose tenures on the series didn’t quite overlap, but who the writers managed to have integral to the other – which was fitting because in a way, they were spiritual heirs.

The first was Beau Felton, in would be Daniel Baldwin’s greatest triumph as an actor. From the moment we meet Felton in the Pilot, he doesn’t want to answer the phone because he’s afraid that another unsolved case will end up weighing down his clearance rate. He makes aggressive remarks about Frank Pembleton before we even meet him and its understandable that Pembleton doesn’t want to work with him. In one of the funniest sequences the series would ever air, Pembleton has forgotten what keys will open the car they need to drive out of the Baltimore PD parking lot and rather than go upstairs and get another car, he methodically goes through every single car there.

Pembleton and Felton would often clash on race; Pembleton thinking Felton was a racist; Felton just as insistent he wasn’t. In an early episode, the two detectives go on search through a repo parking lot, trying to not find a potential suspects car to break up his alibi. Pembleton is determined to go through with it; Felton is lazy at every step of the way, even at one point making an offer on one of the cars in the lot. After searching three lots with no results, Pembleton insists on going to a lot that is miles out of their way. Felton says basically that they should just arrest the guy at now and that Pembleton is just doing this to prove Bayliss, the primary, wrong.

Pembleton’s response is one of the coldest and angriest he ever gave: “All night long, I’ve listened to you philosophize and criticize. I don’t care about Bayliss or you…All I care about is finding the monster who raped and murdered an eleven year old girl. If you can’t be bothered with that, go home.” Shamed Felton drives with him to the next lot, and eventually they do find the car.

It’s a rare moment of humility for Felton, and it doesn’t make him a better cop. In one of the more remarkable episodes of the series ‘Bop Gun’ Felton is named lead investigator on the murder of a tourist near Camden Yards.  After interviewing the husband the other detectives are seen laughing at his inept ability to come up with an accurate description of the perps, Felton concludes his mockery by saying: “I’m going to rack up the overtime on this one.” The husband (one of Robin Williams’ greatest performances) witnesses this, and still in the clothes that have the blood stains of his wife on them, publicly berates Felton and demands to speak with Gee. Giardello manages to assuage the husband’s not by saying that Felton’s a good cop (he refuses to lie)

Felton was married with three children, and his marriage was never stable. In Season 3 it collapsed. First his wife Beth threw him out of the house and he began an affair with the new shift lieutenant Megan Russert. (When Kay Howard his partner confronted him, he just said: ‘My old man always said you don’t jump ship without a life preserver.) He would end the affair – which might have been a healthier relationship – and go back to Beth. Three episodes later, he returned home to find his wife and family gone, along with all his furniture. Written on the mirror in lipstick was simply: ‘Goodbye.’ Felton would crawl into the bottle and basically never come out. He spent much of the first half of the season searching for his kids and could barely be bother to the job when he was there – losing vital evidence on one case, and writing the name of a stone cold whodunit in the column of a fellow detective so he didn’t have to be bothered wasting his time.

I mentioned in a previous article that Felton would be part of a shooting involving two other detectives. His wounds were minor but in his eagerness to get out of the squad, he would go out to a crime scene, vomit in the total and when Gee confronted him, in one of his worst moves he through a cup at him. Giardello had never had much patience for Felton, but in a move of pure rage tore him a new one:

“I’m sick of covering for you…Your marriage has been falling apart as long as anybody can remember. You come to work looking as if you’ve crawled through every bar in Baltimore.” When Felton puts up the excuse of being shot, Gee levels him: “You weren’t up to the job before you were shot. That’s the truth. It’s time someone told you.”

That’s Felton’s career in a nutshell.

Whether his character would’ve ever changed is a moot point. In May of 1995 with Homicide’s renewal still up in the air Baldwin announced he was leaving the show. Rather than have another shooting, he and Stanley Bolander (Ned Beatty, who also wanted to leave) were written out when they attending a convention in New York, got drunk and ran wild. Felton was there, as Munch gleefully related, “wearing nothing but his holster.” He was suspended from the force for twenty-two weeks (the writer’s injoke about the length of a TV season.) Sadly it seems very much keeping in character with what we knew about Beau Felton on the show.

That would be the end of Baldwin’s role on the series. Felton’s character, however, would not entirely be finished with. Indeed, there is a direct link between his fate and the second ‘bad cop’ Homicide would illustrate. I will go into detail on him next.

 

I've Decided To Rewatch House Of Cards And See What Separates The Artist From Pop Culture

 

 

Late last year in an article I wrote on Chris Noth, I raised some questions about how much the scandal behind certain actors and directors have affected our ability to consider their art. This year I have decided, in a way, to try and answer that question.

When Netflix premiered House of Cards back in 2013, they put themselves on the map as a force for original programming as well as effectively creating the model for binge-watching. I was a huge fan of the series the first three years it was on the air – and then in the spring of 2016, I just stopped watching it.  It was one of those shows that I always meant get back to but the preponderance of other must-watch series that deluged the market (in large part because of House of Cards) I never quite got around to looking at again.

Now of course the world would like to pretend it never happened. You can find this when you look on Netflix’s website. There are all kinds of original series that are easy to find on the first page – Orange is the New Black prominent among them – but you have to work to find House of Cards.  Considering the importance of the series, one could compare it to doing a course on the history of important American cinema and omitting The Birth of A Nation entirely from the discussion. You can understand why it would be done, but the omission is glaring.

And we all know why. When various claims of sexual allegation hit series star Kevin Spacey in the fall of 2017 Netflix ended up going into damage control. They fired Spacey, announced that Season 6 would be the last one, had his character killed off and wrote him out of the scenes he’d already shot for the first two episodes. They then tried to do a shortened sixth season with Spacey’s character gone.

Now for all the talk of Cancel Culture that has gone on over the past several years, it needs to be made perfectly clear: Kevin Spacey may be gone but he is not forgotten. I have movie channels that show L.A. Confidential, Seven and The Usual Suspects; American Beauty appears on some channel every cycle (though for the record, I wouldn’t mind if that movie were cancelled) and I have a satellite channel that every few weeks cycles through the episodes of the groundbreaking crime drama Wiseguy. Certain episodes are omitted from that run: Spacey’s breakthrough performance as Mel Proffitt aren’t among them. And we all know by now how the cycle of Hollywood works; there will be a period of exile for Spacey, and he’ll start getting cast in movies again. (I’ve already ranted against this part of it, so I won’t repeat myself.)

Now considering that I argued heavily against watching series that heavily feature so many of these actors accused (and most likely) guilty of assaults, the obvious question is: why would I choose to do just that? Well in part as a psychological exercise/social experiment. If you know that one of the forces behind an art you enjoy is a horrible and truly hideous person, can you still enjoy the work of the art they do? Considering that Spacey is the star of House of Cards and that I enjoyed the series in large part because of his performance, the question is valid in this case.

More to the point, the series was never entirely about Frank Underwood. It was just as much about Claire, memorably portrayed by Robin Wright for six seasons. The moment I saw her I realized that Wright, an actress who had spent much of her previous quarter of a century in Hollywood constantly being miscast, had found the perfect role for her. In many ways Claire was as ruthless, cold-blooded and ambitious as her husband, if not more so. I stopped watching the series just before her character began the more relentless march to power that would make her, by the final season, President. Wright was as vital to the series as Spacey and deserved to win a Golden Globe as much as he did for his role in the series.

And let’s be clear, a lot of great stars in film and television launched their careers in House of Cards. Rachel Brosnahan, Mahershala Ali,  Kate Mara and Corey Stoll all got their big breaks on House of Cards with the first three getting Emmy nominations for their roles. The series also pushed the forefront several actors and actress who’d been working for awhile and hadn’t been getting their due such as Molly Parker, Elizabeth Marvel and the late great Reg E. Cathey as Freddie, the only actor in the entire series to actually win an Emmy for his performance on the series. But if I’m being honest, the character who drew me in for the entirety of the series wasn’t either of the Underwoods but rather Doug Stamper memorably portrayed by Michael Kelly.

 Doug was utterly devoted to Frank, just as ruthless as he was and often less sympathetic, but due to Kelly’s remarkable work, I couldn’t look away from him. He rarely even raised his voice, was never angry and seemed patient despite everything. When it seemed likely that his character had been murdered by Rachel Brosnahan’s character, the escort with whom his obsession would lead to their near mutual destruction, I was in agony at the end of Season more than I was for any character that seemed on the verge of death then perhaps at any time during the 2010s. When I learned that he was actually alive at the beginning of Season 3, I was overjoyed. One of my biggest regrets about leaving the series after Season 3 is that I never saw what happened to him. (Yes I do know what he ended up doing and his ultimate fate, but part of me wants to see how he got there. And I’ll be honest, that may have been due to desperation on the part of the writer’s following Spacey’s forced departure.)

Now aside from everything else associated with the series, there were a couple of charges against House of Cards that repeatedly come to play. The first is that over time, the characters who died, often at the hands of the Underwoods, were out of context with the nature of the series. I find this charge laughable, particularly given that many of those same people had no problem with the much higher and often more ludicrous deaths that occurred on a series that was House of Cards’ near contemporary Scandal.  There’s also the way that certain members of the media have spent tearing down the policies of Netflix and the show’s writers for allowing Spacey to work there despite the rumors. This has a level of hypocrisy I think Frank Underwood would approve of. Anyone who watches even an episode of the series knows how many pundits and reporters from the media were more than willing to make cameos on the series over its six years on the air. (And for the record, this is one of the occasions where ‘people on both sides’ has merit; Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow appeared in the same episode.)

So I have decided to something that I have the habit of doing anyway every year. I’m going to rewatch House of Cards and this time go through the entire series, warts and all. Every time I get through a season, I will post an update on my blog of my impressions of that particular season, whether it held up well, the highlights and nadirs of it and when (or if) it becomes something of a slog. Because I think we, as an audience, need to decide where we stand when it comes to television and far too many fallen idols.

Because whether or not the artists are pariahs, the art isn’t disappearing. No one had stopped listening to Michael Jackson more than a decade after his death. Woody Allen may not be able to make any more movies, but they haven’t been taken down from any streaming service or cable channel that I’m aware of. And Netflix may not want to admit that House of Cards was their first big success, but they haven’t taken it down. It’s neither gone nor forgotten. So I’ve decided whether or not I still like the series even given everything I know to be true about Kevin Spacey. Does that make me a hypocrite too? Well, to quote Frank Underwood: “You might very well say that; I could not possibly comment.”

(One last thing before I go: Ian Richardson always delivered that line better.)

 

I Look At This Year's SAG Nominations in TV - And Explain Why I've Mostly Ignored Them Until Now

 

As those of you who have followed my blog for the last several years, you are aware how much of an awards show junkie I tend to be in regards to television. Similarly, if you’ve been following my blog you might have noticed that there’s one major awards show I’ve pretty much ignored almost from the beginning of my criticism. That would be the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

I should mention up front that I generally have no problem with the awards show itself. It has been generally one of the more entertaining awards shows over the past quarter century as well as one of the most succinct – usually it doesn’t need more than two hours to get through giving its awards. It has never really needed a host to be entertaining (only in the past couple of years has it actually bothered to have one), generally the speeches are engaging (I vividly remember how in 2008 Daniel Day-Lewis used his speech after winning Best Actor in a Film to pay tribute to the recently deceased Heath Ledger) and frequently the presenters that give the award can have a certain level of power. I vividly remember the ovation that happened when all the living members of The Mary Tyler Moore Show came out on the stage to give the award for Best Comedic Ensemble and how profoundly moved Steve Carell was when he accepted the award on behalf of the cast of The Office. Throw in the fact that the lion’s share of the awards have to deal with television and you would think that by ignoring them I have been derelict in my duties.

Well to be honest while I’ve generally approved of many of the nominees and the awards during the era of Peak TV, I have a fair amount of problems as to how and what awards SAG gives for television.

To state the most obvious problem, there’s the fact that there is absolutely no differentiation by the SAG awards between Lead and Supporting Performances in the television categories. I’ve always found this bizarre considering they’re more than willing to give Supporting Awards for Films. I’ve never understood the logic here and probably never will.

I have less of an understanding as to why, while they’ll give Lead Actor and Actress Awards for TV Movies and Limited Series, the SAGs have never, to my knowledge, given an award for Best Ensemble for either. This frankly makes less sense than the Supporting Awards, particularly given how Limited Series have deluged the market the past decade.

And lastly for much of time watching their ceremonies, there has been a distinct repetition in the winners in to many of the categories. I take particular offense at Alec Baldwin winning at least five or six consecutive Best Actor in a Comedy Series (I honestly lost count) for 30 Rock – the last when the series after the series had ended the previous February and had barely qualified for eligibility. There has been a similar lack of originality when it comes to cast awards – I know that many people loved Orange is the New Black and that it was ignored by almost every other major awards group, but I still thought the three consecutive Best Ensemble in a Comedy awards it won at least one too many.

But I’ll confess my thinking has changed a bit over the past three or four years. It helped after the  2017 win for Stranger Things (and David Harbour rousing call to the barricades) and the back to back wins for This is Us in 2018 and 2019. The comedy awards have also taken on a new light – I approved immensely of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’s wins over the past couple of years (and I actually agree with them that Fleabag should’ve won in 2020) and it’s hard not to approve a group that is willing to go big on a series like The Crown and basically ignore The Handmaid’s Tale for most of its run. I’ll also acknowledge I’ve generally liked a lot of the speeches recently, from Bryan Cranston’s memorable acceptance speech for All the Way in 2017 as well as Alexander Skarsgard’s humility at winning Best Actor for Big Little Lies over Robert DeNiro in particular.

So while I still believe the SAG awards do need to indulge in some major splits when it comes to actual nominations they give for television awards, I’ll admit I’m becoming more and more impressed with the awards themselves. To that end, I have decided this year to start going through the SAG awards for television and decide what I think of the nominations overall. I may comment a little more when it comes to the nominees, but that’s for another day.

So here we go. As always, I’ll start with Drama

 

OUTSTANDING DRAMATIC ENSEMBLE

Maybe I spoke too soon.

I expected Succession here, and I’m not entirely surprised to see Squid Game here. Maybe I have to start seriously watching The Morning Show at this point. And it is impressive that Yellowstone which has been fighting for awards recognition for years finally got somewhere.

But seriously: The Handmaid’s Tale? Not Pose? Not This is Us? Not In Treatment? The Emmys eight acting nominations for the series last year were considered overkill and basically every other award show between them has agreed. You’re not making yourselves looking too good.

 

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR

And you actually did worse here. Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, kind of expected. I suppose there will be people who will be thrilled about Kieran Culkin. I guess I have to push Squid Game to the forefront now.

Billy Crudup for The Morning Show? Again. No Billy Porter. No Sterling Brown. You are not making yourselves look good here.

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR

Maybe I’ll skip the Drama awards entirely this year.

Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon I don’t mind. Sarah Snook makes sense and again, need to see Squid Game. But Elisabeth Moss? No MJ Rodriguez? No Uzo Aduba, who owned these awards for awhile? You’re almost asking for them to start saying #SAGsoWhite (though I admit the Asian community would protest that part)

 

OUTSTANDING ENSEMBLE IN A COMEDY

Now you’re cooking

Hacks, The Kominsky Method, Only murders in the Building and Ted Lasso are among the best comedies in the past year. And I’m going to have to get caught up on The Great at this point. It’s a given. I’ll acknowledge wanting to see Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist or Pen15 here, but those are my preferences. But the fans of Insecure are going to be upset

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR

Brett Goldstein is probably thinking to himself: “What the f—am I doing here?” Trust me Brett, you are as worthy as Jason Sudeikis, Steve Martin and Martin Short, and Michael Douglas. I’m honestly not certain who else should be here with the exception, maybe, of Anthony Anderson for black-ish.

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS

Jean Smart, keep on rolling. Ditto Juno Temple and Hannah Waddingham for Ted Lasso.. I’m overjoyed Sandra Oh is here for The Chair and after just one episode I think I see what’s so Great about Elle Fanning. Would have liked to see Issa Rae here no question.

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A MALE ACTOR IN A TV MOVIE OR LIMITED SERIES

Thrilled to see Murray Bartlett here for The White Lotus. Equally thrilled to see Oscar Isaac here for Scenes from a Marriage. I will get to Dopesick but given the Golden Globe, I’m inclined to think Michael Keaton is qualified. Evan Peters got an Emmy, so he should be here.

I don’t see the logic behind Ewan McGregor for Halston. I’d much rather see Clive Owen for Impeachment or Michael Shannon for Nine Perfect Strangers.

 

OUTSTANDING PERFORMANCE BY A FEMALE ACTOR IN A TELEVISION MOVIE OR LIMITED SERIES

No one will question Margaret Qualley or Kate Winslet belonging here. And I can see the logic in putting Jennifer Coolidge and Jean Smart in this category too. I can sort of see the reasoning behind Cynthia Erivo for Genius: Aretha, but in all honesty Jessica Chastain for Scenes from a Marriage or any of the exceptional actresses in Impeachment would be better choices. (Then again, Chastain was nominated for The Eyes of Tammy Faye and they also nominated Nicole Kidman for Being the Ricardos, so I guess they won’t mind that much.)

 

As for Stunt Ensemble, I won’t go into detail here; save that I am a little surprised Mare of Easttown qualified. This may go to Squid Game by default though.

I don’t know if I’ll try to predict the winners of the SAGs the same way I do for the Critics Choice awards and (usually) the Golden Globes. They’ve become increasingly difficult to handicap over the years and quite often the winners are as surprised as the critics. I’ll make up my mind by the end of February. Till then, stay tuned.

The Golden Globes Shouldn't Have Happened. They Did. Why Do I Feel Bad I Couldn't See Them?

 

As I said when the Golden Globe nominations came out last month, I really didn’t have any plan to cover the results. Despite my belief that the selections that they have made for television during the era of Peak TV is far often superior to the Emmys, I was upset that they decided that even after being banished from NBC this past year and put in disgrace by Hollywood in general, they were going to go through an awards ceremony anyway.

Even after the Critics Choice nominations were postponed from last night to some time in Late February (I hope), I still had no intention of having anything to do with the Golden Globes. They may have decided to perform what amounted to an awards show in exile (there were no stars or audience presence last night which still may not be the weirdest ceremony they’ve ever given) but that didn’t mean I had to pay any attention to them.

Then I saw the list of winners. And I became depressed all over again.

Because here’s the thing: despite all the controversy they’ve endured the last year, all of the nasty discussion that’s come up over the history of Hollywood Foreign Press, the associations vow to change their practices and then the arrogant to go along with business as usual, the absolutely crappy decision to schedule their awards the same night as the Broadcast Critics, their ultimate decision to go through with an awards ceremony in the middle of a pandemic – the quality of the winners on the television side of the Golden Globes was still of the relatively high level they have maintained over the past two decades. If I had observed these awards last night at a ‘normal’ ceremony, I’d be relatively impressed with the caliber of the choices.

I’ve already admitted I don’t like Succession and I’m not going to pretend I’m thrilled that it was chosen for Best Drama, but I’d be pissed if any awards show did so. I can understand why the HFPA decided to pick it. I am glad they chose Jeremy Strong over Brian Cox (who they picked back in the distant era of 2020) because it shows they don’t do as many repeats. And I’ll admit despite my problems with the series, none of them are with Sarah Snook, who took Best Supporting Actress. Would I have preferred Billy Porter or Jennifer Coolidge? Sure. But the Supporting Actress category was a mess long before the Globes got together. And to say I was thrilled when MJ Rodriguez took the Best Actress prize is a genuine triumph for basically the transgender community in particular and for all fans of great television.  I imagine there are some people who are probably thrilled that O Yeong-Su won for Squid Game which I now have to get around too.

The Best Comedy choices were generally very good ones as well.  Even without having seen Season 2 of Ted Lasso, I would still have likely picked Hacks for Best Comedy (see my previous years top ten list). I have no problem with Jean Smart taking another trophy and as much as I love Only Murders in the Building, I have no problem with Jason Sudeikis repeating.

And the Movie/Limited Series were also a good mix of last year and this one. The Underground Railroad is one of those series that so many people wished had done better at the Emmys then it did. If its fans want to see as a blatant pandering to the problems the HFPA has had with minority picks, they can do so but the fact remains, it was still a good choice. No one would fault the pick of Kate Winslet for Best Actress; if anything the level of competition here was as good, if not better than the Emmys picks. And Michael Keaton’s win for Dopesick does give a sign that he is going to be a prominent contender for this year’s Emmys.

Indeed now that the awards have been given, I’m feeling the first shades of genuine regret that they didn’t hold a ceremony. I would have loved to hear MJ Rodriguez’s acceptance speech and see if it was as good as the HCA’s. I would’ve been delighted to see another standing ovation for Jean Smart and the cheers for Hacks in general. I’d have loved to try and see just how Yeong-Su reacted to his surprise win and what he’d say. And as a fan of everything Michael Keaton does in general, I would have given anything to hear what he said about Dopesick and the opoid crisis in particular. Before the awards were given, I could’ve cared less. Now they seem like a genuine wasted opportunity.

I don’t know what kind of future the Golden Globes has. I don’t know if this ceremony frittered away any potential goodwill they might have earned, and given the charges against them, I’d be stunned if anybody would have thought they had. I don’t know if NBC will genuinely put some conditions before they allow them to broadcast again, or (more likely) if they’ll just shrug their shoulders, say ‘all is forgiven’ and let them back in. Hollywood has a short memory after all. The question is will anyone give a damn one way or another about winning a Golden Globe this year? Will any of the winners, in TV or Movies, actually accept the prize? Will it have the same resonance one way or the other with television or movie awards going forward in 2022? (it was accused fairly heavily of being a bias for the former last year). I don’t have any answer to these questions. All I know for sure is that Golden Globes choices for television this year were as good as I could have hoped for in a normal year and that I would have like to see the winners. (Of course, as long as Ricky Gervais isn’t let anywhere near it.)

As for me, I’ll just keep on following the track. Later this week, I’ll take a look at the SAG nominations for TV which come out tomorrow. I have to say that in the past few years, the nominees and winners have been getting quite a bit more interesting. Let’s just hope the ceremony actually takes place.

Those who watch Euphoria Won't Experience It: The Ultimate Symptom of Peak TV's Teenager Problem

 

There are a lot of series on TV these days that I consider overrated, but there are very few that I actively dislike: The Handmaid’s Tale basically lost whatever narrative thread it had early on, and I can’t understand what people see in Ozark (that’s going to be in the Overrated Series soon, believe me) But by far, one of the my biggest dislikes is HBO’s Euphoria. I was appalled when Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon of Big Little Lies were passed over for Emmy nominations for Zendaya and infuriated beyond any measure when she beat out such qualified contenders as Olivia Colman and Jodie Comer. I think the only real bad choice the HCA made when it gave out its inaugural awards was when they chose to pick Colman Domingo for Best Actor in A Limited Series or Special over among others, Chris Rock for Fargo and Hugh Grant for The Undoing.

I’ve watched only a handful of episodes (including the Season 2 premiere) but I’m truly appalled that anybody in their right mind would watch the series or be enthralled by it. Especially because it is the prime example of everything that Peak TV does wrong when it writes series about teenagers. To explain what I mean, I will imitate Zendaya and give you a brief back story.

The rise of the great teen drama doesn’t quite correlate with the Golden Age of TV but its close. Buffy The Vampire Slayer made its debut on the WB months before Oz would start the revolution proper but for all the stories we hear about creator Joss Whedon recently, it doesn’t change the fact that it was one of the greatest series of all time, certainly at least an equal to anything in the first wave of HBO’s series. What Buffy did that the Golden Age didn’t quite manage was to create a pantheon of extraordinary teenager based dramas that lasted well into the first decade of the New Millennium. The WB was first and foremost the prime source (to the point that Mad TV would do a skit calling the network show ‘Pretty White Kids With Problems’) and it did produce some masterpieces, most notably Gilmore Girls and Felicity.

Peak TV never quite produced the same level of great teen dramas that it did for adults (Friday Night Lights is a notable exception to the rule) but it did produce more than its share of brilliant teenage characters, from Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Robert Iler’s work as the Soprano children to RJ Mitre’s exceptional job as Walter White Jr. and there were countless ones in between, from any of the great teenage performances we got in The Wire’s fourth season to the incomparable Kieran Shipka’s work as Sally Draper on Mad Men. They weren’t all perfect – Kim Bauer, anyone? – but throughout the Golden Age, teen characters had nearly as good roles as adults did.

Sometime in the 2010s, the picture shifted. There were many networks that would make their entire focus being on teenage comedies and dramas and often do them brilliantly. Before MTV got out of the original series business, we got two of the greatest teenage comedies in history in Awkward. and Faking It.  Freeform was – and still is – one of the great sources of material when it comes to telling stories about young adults, some of which are in the first spin-off (Good Trouble emerged from The Fosters and grown-ish, a series that was originally slated for HBO is a great series in its own right.) Generally network and basic cable have done a very good job when it comes to portrayals of teenagers. Not everyone may have loved Glee but it did set the bar pretty high for dealing with gay teenagers, a bar that series like Shameless managed to match and sometimes surpass.

Pay cable and streaming, however, have been stumbling the past decade. It’s hard to know where it started exactly – perhaps with Megan Brody and Bridget Donovan on Homeland and Ray Donavan respectively. But over the past several years seeing well developed teenage characters on networks like HBO and Showtime or streaming generally have become harder to find and when you do find them, they’re almost entirely unsympathetic or unlikable. There have been exceptions to the rule – The Americans did a good job and Julia Garner is one of the only really good things about Ozark - but far more often they’re basically used as jokes – Selina’s daughter on Veep was a literal prop for everybody else – or they get written out because the writers can’t do anything with them. (Remember Ray Donovan’s son?) A well drawn teenage character seems beyond the ken of so many showrunners these days, and certainly not a likable one.

Which brings me at last to Euphoria. Now I am willing to admit that the life of a high school student growing up in an era with the oppressiveness of school shooting drills, racial profiling and the likelihood of climate disaster when you’re in college could make one bleak and cynical about your future and make you self-destructive. But dear God, did creator Sam Levenson just take every possible negative trope about life in the new millennium and mix and match with every single person instead of giving them actual character development? People may ask about the threadbare nature of the Trauma Plot; Levenson (who writes and directs every episode) has all his characters seek out their own traumas.

In an episode I saw last night focused on Nick, who as a child found his father’s porn videos and watched them. As a result of this he became a jock, star of the football team, and currently worships a girl named Mandy – so much so that when another man has consensual sex with her, he tracks him down and beats him to a pulp. I’m told that at the end of Season 1 she finally broke with him, probably not for that reason. There was another character – a pudgy girl named Kat who found out their was a sex tape of her online and she demanded the kid who put it there take it down – until she saw all the followers she got and how much they worshipped her. So she starts ‘camming’. These are "Pretty Kids With Problems’ except they seem to search out and want these problems.  What does it say about the characters on Euphoria that a drug dealer seems to be the only one with a moral compass?’ And honestly having seen the season premiere, learned Fuz’s backstory and seen him action in it, he comes across as practically the only character that seems committed to change. When he commits the episode’s most horrific action, your sympathy is with him. What does that say about the nature of the rest of the characters?

Which brings me to Zendaya. I think Zendaya is a good singer and actress. I actually liked her work in the recent Spider-Man movies. I don’t see how anybody who watches five minutes of this series and want to spend anytime walking through her character’s shoes. She starts out by getting out of rehab and saying she has no plans to stay sober. To paraphrase the late great Nancy Marchand: “Oh, poor Rue!” Do you know how lucky you are? Half the characters on The Wire would kill for a bed in rehab and the caring parent you piss on. Hell, first you bribe your NA counselor and then blackmail him for agreeing to your bribe. You scream entitled bitch! You’re the least sympathetic drug addict I’ve ever met, and I watched House for almost its whole run. And seriously, when she relapsed and is confronted with her habits, she doesn’t seem committed to change or really learning anything.

To be clear I don’t blame Zendaya or anybody in this mostly good cast for what happened. No, all of this falls on Sam Levenson who writes and directs every episode. Now I’ll admit he’s a decent director – the series is filled with truly remarkable camerawork and some truly memorable images. (I’ll get to one recurring one in particular) But there doesn’t seem to a coherent character arc, decent dialogue or realistic plot in the entire show. The kids in Rue’s high school are dealing with issues the cast of Gossip Girl would find too much.

And seriously? One of the taglines for Euphoria should be: “You give us two minutes; we’ll give you a penis.” Now graphic shots of men’s genitals are nothing new for HBO. I was a teenager when they started ‘popping up’ on Oz. But at least there was a point – prison has no privacy so everyone has to live with it. And I’ll admit there’s still some power in it in moderation. But to do it like this – particularly with teenagers – smacks far too much of kiddy porn to make me wonder why no one cries foul. Is it supposed to be a sign that nothing shocks us any more? Believe me, there are far too many other images like that in Euphoria already.

And none of this bothers me as much as the fact that Euphoria has nothing to say about anything. Its all style and pretention. It’s actually what so many critics complained True Detective for being. And honestly, I really wonder if the fans of this show don’t see the hypocrisy in this. When a white, cis, male makes broad statements about the bleakness of the universe and the idiocy of the world, its sexist drivel. When a multiracial, bicurious teenage girl says that, she’s a font of wisdom.  

I’ll admit there are at least one or two intriguing characters in the series – Fuz the drug dealer is interesting and Maude Apatow as Lexie actually seems significantly less damaged and therefore more interesting. (Like her father, Maude is a writer-director; part of me wonders if Levenson allowed to her make some edits to her dialogue which has a crispness that the rest of the characters lack.) But honestly the more you see of Euphoria the less you realize is there.

Which honestly makes me wonder: just who is the demographic for Euphoria? I can’t imagine teenagers wanting to see this series; none of them would find the characters relatable or even recognizable. Millennials would find it pretentious and Gen Z too woke. No one over thirty would understand most of the references, and no one under thirty would want to spend time with these people. The more I try to think of the ideal audience for this series, I keep going to creepy places.

I’ll close my article with a commentary that the best way to criticize a series is to make another series. In this case one already exists grown-ish. All of the characters are roughly the same age and class as the characters in Euphoria and given their racial and sexual makeup, they don’t have anywhere near the options that these characters do. Yet they generally are most optimistic, committed to each other despite their mistakes, and more fun to be around. And while Zoey Johnson is in some ways more shallow than Rue, she would no doubt – and be justified in doing so – look down on her for coming from greater privilege, frittering it away, and using the state of the world to justify it.

My score: 1.75 stars.