Atlanta Just Keeps On Amazing: An Analysis and Explanation (?) of 'The Big Payback'

It is very rare of me to review an episode of a series that I already went into extensive detail on in the same season. It’s even rarer that I do so having just raved about the same show by doing a similar deep analysis just two weeks earlier. But while I was watching ‘The Big Payback’, the most recent episode of the extraordinary – comedy? – series Atlanta I knew that I was going to have to do another deep dive into an episode that had nothing at all to do with the adventures of Earn and Paper Boi in Europe, but is just as quintessentially Atlanta.

When I watched the season premiere ‘Three Slaps’, I was left in utter wonder at its brilliance in its darkness and comedy even though it had only the most tangential connection to anything that happened in the series (and even that depends entirely how you view the last minute of the episode. ‘The Big Payback’ doesn’t even bother with that remote connection and doesn’t seem to have anything to do with anything that has happened previously or will again. I imagine there will be a lot of controversy and discussion about it in the weeks and months to come. But as a level of quality, it was as brilliant as ‘Three Slaps’ or almost any other of the great moments of the show (and there’ve been a lot of them already)

The series, in what is clearly an outlier for Atlanta, follows entirely a white man, Marshall Johnson played by Justin Bartha, who I know from his work on The Good Fight. He has a normal job at his company, and he is separated from his wife, trying to reconcile with her and be a good father to his son. There’s an odd scene in the moment when he’s at a coffee shop, and walks away to find cookies in his pocket. A car starts following him before the title of the episode. And he keeps receiving calls from an Unknown caller. Everything seems normal…we don’t know how quickly we’re going to go deep-diving.

In the elevator, Marshall hears a conversation about certain litigation. We hear about upcoming layoffs about certain lawsuits. A woman gets frantic. Then we start hearing rumors. “They can start going after you personally,” a woman says. “Start doing ancestry searches.” Marshall ignores it, and then looks at some African-American co-workers. Then Marshall leaves work and sees a bunch of African-Americans talking exuberantly in front of a gas station – in luxury cars. Then his daughter asks him: “Are you a racist?” followed by “Did we own slaves?” A light goes off in the viewer’s head. Marshall tries to brush it off, saying lamely: “We’re Austro-Hungarian. We were enslaved by the Byzantine Empire.”

It’s when he’s making dinner for his daughter that we finally realize we're in an alternate universe.  He is greeting at the door by Shanequa Johnson, who tells him very simply: “My great-great-grandfather was owned by your great-great-grandfather.  You owe me $3 million. “ She bursts into his house, live streaming the whole thing. He threatens to call the police. She says she’s already called them. She leaves admiring ‘her house’. Marshall tries to go back to making dinner.

The next day things get worse. Almost all the African-American workers at Marshall’s job have quit. He tries to explain to this co-worker what’s happening, and she brags that her family is Ashkenazi Jews. “We were slaves too!”  She doesn’t buy his Austro-Hungarian line. Shanequa is now at his workplace with a megaphone shouting out Marshall’s sins for the world to hear. He tries to have a conversation with one of the few African-American workers left as to what to do. He tells her about his experience with black women and that he should just give in. Cut to him talking to his white co-workers telling him to sue. That night, he goes to his wife’s house to see his daughter and his wife tells him about being visited by Shanequa.  She starts saying she can’t be associated with him, and when he tries to press her she says: “My family’s from Peru!” “You were white yesterday!” he shouts. She tells him she can’t have anything happen to her finances so the divorce must be finalized. Marshall drives back to his home, and finds Shanequa there with an entire crowd of her friends. One chases after him ominously and he drives away in fear.

The next scene shows him at a cheap motel, utterly at a loss.  He breaks down in tears and then goes to the bar to have a drink. A man his own age senses what is wrong and tells him a similar story. “My grandfather said he built himself up on his own. That wasn’t true.” He launches into a monologue about the realities of slavery and what they are between white people and African Americans, ending it saying he will be okay. Then he’s outside by the pool…and the rest I will leave you to find out, only to say in the context of the episode, it makes perfect sense.

The last scene of the episode shows how far Marshall has fallen and the kind of world he will live in, probably for the rest of his life. I won’t reveal the rest, save that it seems far more optimistic an ending than we got for Three Slaps.

All that said, what is the viewer supposed to make of ‘The Big Payback’ in the context of Atlanta? It clearly doesn’t take place in the same reality as anything we’ve seen and it honestly plays more like the kind of episode you’d expect from a Jordan Peele movie than anything else. (The episode even ends with the same music that ended his brilliant horror film Us) Why did Donald Glover and Hiro Murai choose to make this episode which clearly didn’t have a connection to the previous two episodes? What makes me thing there might be some larger context is the one line of summary I got going in on the guide to the episode: “I was legit scared watching this.” Is this another piece of fiction that we have gotten from Glover and his colleagues; another piece of extraordinary satire like we got from the first season classic ‘B.A.N.’ I still don’t know.

What I am certain of is that Glover, Murai and everybody connected with Atlanta has decided to go into Season 3 and 4 guns blazing, breaking down the few creative boundaries they set up going in the first two seasons. In a way this episode is a mirror to the contour we got of white privilege in last weeks episode: ‘The Old Man and the Tree’, which was more ‘traditional’ but no less hysterical and fascinating. You may have your doubts about the surrealism, but the viewer knows with absolute certainty that there’s nothing like it on television – even compared to other episodes of Atlanta.

My Score: 5 stars.

 

A Tribute to Bruce Willis Concluded: Some of His Biggest Bombs That Probably Affected His Career Trajectory

Like so many actors after Willis had the smash hit Die Hard, he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and not be so wed to the label ‘action star’. There were some signs that his talent in Moonlighting was not a fluke: in 1989, he received solid reviews for his role as Vietnam veteran back home in Norman Jewison’s In Country. In 1990, he seemed prepared to show he could dominate every field. He starred in Die Hard 2, a solid sequel (and one that in some ways I actually prefer to the original). That Christmas, he was one of the leads in a film that looked from the outside like a sure thing for Oscars. Unfortunately by the time of its release, there was a stench of death around it. That film was Bonfire of the Vanities.

I won’t go into the mess that Bonfire turned out to be (there have literally been entire books written about the subject) except to say the movie was one of the weirdest disasters in the history of box office bombs. Usually a film with such a horrible reputation (Ishtar or Heaven’s Gate to mention two of the most cited examples) ends up completely wrecking somebody’s career. Elaine May never directed a movie after Ishtar and in the case of Heaven’s Gate, it more or less led to the end of director’s having complete reign during the studio system. But Bonfire of the Vanities didn’t wreck Brian DePalma’s career: he continues to make films and has actually box office and critical successes afterwards. Nor did it torpedo or even slow down the career paths of most of the leads, Willis, Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, Kim Catrall and Morgan Freeman have done just fine after the film. (Then again, Freeman has his named removed from the credits but its not like people didn’t recognize him.) And it didn’t even slow down the process of film adaptations of incredibly complicated best selling novels: Silence of the Lambs and Prince of Tides did just fine with the critics and the box office the very next year. It basically stands alone as a cinematic lemon, one of those disastrous movies that were a complete waste of all the talent involved. It’s not like that’s stopped after the movie ending.

And really, it’s hard to blame Willis for any part in the movie’s failure. Yes, his character Peter Fallow was British and he didn’t even try and do an accent, but the fact of Willis’ miscasting was hardly the greatest failure of the movie. I don’t recall his even being held out for particular scorn in most of the reviews: most of that is blamed rightly on the adaptation more than any performances. What was actually worse for him was the following year when he appeared in four films, none of which were particularly good (Mortal Thoughts was essentially a vehicle that he did with then-wife Demi Moore) and one which would have destroyed a lesser career.

In retrospect, it’s hard to figure out exactly what was wrong with Hudson Hawk, the caper comedy that really did a number on Willis’ career. It may be a little too whimsical but there’s very little difference in tone from the Steven Soderbergh version of Ocean’s 11 and that has basically become a franchise.  I will grant you aside from Willis, there’s none of the star power that comes with Ocean’s but there are some fairly decent character actors which also made the Ocean’s films a success: Hawk featured Danny Aiello, James Coburn, Richard E. Grant and the incredibly young future TV stars  David Caruso and Lorraine Toussaint. Was Andie MacDowell miscast as the romantic lead? Perhaps, but MacDowell spent far too much of her career in the 1990s coasting on her perceived charm.  And in a way, you might argue Hudson Hawk was ahead of its time – Willis’ having to steal a  Da Vinci work of art in order to plot world domination is more or less the story behind so much of Dan Brown’s work, only not even pretending to take itself seriously. Was it simply too clever for its own good? You do get that feeling from a lot of jokes in the movie, which do have a lot of the feel of the too-clever TV comedies of the next decade. Whatever the reason, the film sunk like a stone on Memorial Day in 1991 and it did close off at least one part of Willis’ career. It is the only movie he ever had a screenwriting credit for. He never tried that again.

The next year his major feature was another attempt at satire: Death Becomes Her. He plays Dr. Ernest Melville, a skilled surgeon who early in his life gets caught between two women who are in a rivalry to the death…and beyond that. Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn play two women who spend decades trying to outdo each other, and Willis plays a schlub, whose only job is use the makeup he puts on cadavers on the women who control him. He spends almost the entire movie in a drunken daze, and as the plot takes on a very supernatural tone, he seems unable to react appropriately. (Seeing Streep’s character with a broken neck after she fell down the stairs, he can only cry out: “It’s a miracle!”)

 Poor Ernest soon realizes that not even death is going to free him from these women, and shows himself to be basically the only character in the film that develops a backbone and courage. In the most critical scene in the film, Streep and Hawn implore him to drink the motion so he can survive a fall that will surely kill him. Initially pleading, when he hesitated, their tones become caws. About to drink, he pours the potion out and simply says: “Sorry girls. You’re on your own,” and then plunges to what he presumes will be his death. The fact that he ends of surviving isn’t a cheat; the movie ends at his funeral decades in the future and we learn that effectively he actually got the eternal life and youth the girls were seeking, just without any of the consequences that must face.

I will admit that Death Becomes Her is no masterpiece and it never makes up its mind whether it wants to be a screwball comedy or a dark satire. But parts of it do work very well, and most of them are the parts that Willis is in. Even then Willis was known for playing dynamic characters; Ernest is a schlub for most of the movie who spends it basically being led by the nose.  Willis plays things for a laugh by speaking in a far more agitated tone than we’re used to  -usually his characters are calm in the face of crisis; Ernest is always in a state of panic and it works. He would try this level of franticness occasionally in his career – most notably in the cult film 12 Monkeys a few years later – but he rarely tried to go this outside of his comfort zone when it came to comedy for the rest of his career.

1994 showed two of the high points of Willis’ career (I listed them in the previous entry) and two of his absolute worst. You can’t really blame him for everything that went wrong in North because that film should have never gotten past the screenplay stage and frankly, Willis’ role was the least embarrassing part in it. (That tells you how horrible it is.)  I actually think the film that I truly wonder why Willis chose that same year, Color of Night, an excruciating waste of time, an erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling.

The only excuse for this film being made was the desire to match the box office success of Basic Instinct. This led to a series of unwatchable films, but this is the one that you really what anybody was thinking. The so called femme fatale is Jane March, who’d made her debut in the ‘art house film’ The Lover at the age of eighteen, a film where she basically appears in it naked half the time in scenes with a man twice her age.

March has never been a good actress and while some might be able to justify quality in The Lover as an ‘art’ film, it doesn’t change the fact that is not much further up from kiddie porn. It’s actually worse in Color of Night because Willis was forty and she was barely twenty one. The best thing you can say about the sex scenes is they are consensual; the worst is they leave you feeling disgusted that you’ve tuned into this movie on late night cable. (Yes that’s when I saw it. I’m not proud.)

For all the exploitation in Basic Instinct and most of its rip-off, at least the women were of age.  There is a point in this movie where all the members of a group therapy that Willis is leading, admit they’ve had sex with March’s character without knowing it was the same girl. That is the level of intellect this movie has, when it’s trying at all. I can’t imagine what Willis thinks when he considers 1994, when he had a supporting role in one of the greatest movies of all time, and in two of cinema’s greatest disasters.

Willis spent the lion’s share of the remainder of his career,  breaking between some movies that were ambitious as his earlier work – the sly comedy Bandits, the well-filmed Sin City series) and some genuine horrible box office hits (Armageddon) but would spent far too much of the 21^st Century playing off his tough guy images. Some of them were very good films – RED, a self-describe AARP action movie is one of personal favorites – but with few exception he would rarely try anything as ambitious as much of his work in the 1990s was.  Even before his diagnosis the lion’s share of his films had increasingly become by-the-numbers action movies that didn’t show any of the flexing that some of his contemporaries in that same period (Schwarzenegger in quite a few horror films; Stallone in the Creed series). I can’t help but feel that this was less about trying to stay close to this brand and more being gun-shy (there’s a term I never thought I’d use in conjunction with Willis) from the failures in the first half of the 1990s when he tried to show his range.

To be clear, even if Willis had managed to try to get out of his comfort zone, I don’t think he’d ever be considered at the same level as Hanks or Penn, some of the better actors he actually worked with. But I do think his career might mirror that of, say, Charlton Heston an action star throughout his career who starred in some of the biggest critical hits of all time (to be fair, he did win an Oscar for Ben-Hur)  but found himself spending much of his second half going through the motions in far too many action and sci-fi rip-offs when later work (I think of his performance as The Player King in Kenneth Brannagh’s Hamlet) showed that he had talent he was rarely given an opportunity to show. Willis was so much more than the action star we knew him to be, and those who know him only for Die Hard should really know about the times he reached for the horizon and sometimes touched it.

 

 

 

A Tribute To Bruce Willis, Part 1: His Work TV and Iconic Films

One of the sadder notes to come out of Hollywood last week was that Bruce Willis was ending his movie career because of his diagnosis of aphasia, a disease that affects the brain’s ability to speak and use the right words usually associated with the after effects of strokes.

This mark’s the end of one of the most successful careers in Hollywood. Willis’ has been considered the quintessential action hero for his work in the Die Hard franchise that it is easy to forget his career not only shown far more range than that, it also began in television. In fact, there’s an argument TV showed Willis’ best range as an actor – he certainly got more recognition for it. So in this series of articles I’m going to pay tribute to Willis: his career in TV, his work in certain films that showed a wider range than most people gave him credit for and the failures in his career that may have curtailed him from getting the true recognition he deserved.

Willis’ is associated with movies that it’s easy to forget that, like so many movie stars of the 1980s and 1990s; he began his work in television. I was actually astonished   watching an episode of the 1980s reimagining of The Twilight Zone to see playing the lead role in Harlan Ellison’s adaptation of his own short story ‘Shatterday.’ Willis plays two versions of Peter, a milquetoast who can’t do anything right and a more direct version who, over the course of a week, takes over his life. Most of their interactions come through phone conversations between the two Peters, with subtle differences as one asserts control and indeed most of the episode focuses entire on Willis. It’s rather remarkable seeing how fine the control of his emotions.

Willis then became the star of one of the great series of the 1980s one that really pushed the boundaries of broadcast television and is almost completely forgotten, save for the controversies around it: Moonlighting. Willis played David Addison, part of a detective agency along with Maddie Hayes (Cybil Shephard) More remembered for the behind the scenes conflicts involving Shephard more than anything, it was one of the boldest and imaginative series of the time. Frequently breaking the fourth wall, it went beyond a procedural to try thing few TV series have done before or since: they did one legendary episode entirely in the style of Shakespearean blank verse. And all the actors involved received high praise: Willis won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his work over the years. But because of all the struggles that happened, and how the series jumped the shark after its lead characters gave in to the sexual tension between them, the show collapsed nearly as quickly as it rose.  And it is more talked about it then it is seen: like so many other shows from that decade, like China Beach and L.A. Law, it was never released into streaming, hasn’t been in syndication for decades, and while released on DVD twenty years ago, they are almost impossible to find anywhere. I’m still trying to track down a set on Ebay.

Willis actually bookended that Emmy with another one for Best Guest Actor in a Comedy in 2000, when he guest starred on Friends. He was not alone on the list of huge movie stars who appeared on the series over its run – Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon and of course Brad Pitt all made cameos, but he stayed longer than most and used far more of his abilities.

Willis plays the father of a student that Ross has started to date. In Willis’ first appearance, Ross (David Schwimmer) is clearly utterly intimidated not just because he’s dating his daughter but because, well, he’s Bruce Willis. Willis’ says very few lines in their first meeting, but he doesn’t have to because his sheer presence forcing Ross to make an utter fool of himself no matter what he says. One exchange I remember as Ross tries to make a joy:

Ross: “There are these two guys. One of them is Irish.

Willis: “I’m Irish.”

Ross: “And the Irish guy wins the joke!”

 

Because this is Friends Willis eventually starts dating Rachel. Should we be creeped by this? It’s Bruce Willis, you can’t blame her.

Friends did something it hadn’t done for Willis for a very long time: it allowed him to just be silly. There’s a wonderful sequence in his arc where Willis, who is preparing to have sex with Rachel, stands before a full-sized mirror and starts singing ‘Love Machine’ and dancing ridiculously.  This is one of the few segments of Friends I truly remember liking at the time and even more than two decades later, and it’s really all because of Willis.

 

Willis was such a big box office draw and appeared in so many action movies over his career that it would be easy – too easy, in fact – to just dismiss him as a one note wonder.  But as so many of us forget, Willis actually did start in two Best Picture nominees that have since been deservedly ranked among the greatest films in history: Pulp Fiction in 1994 and The Sixth Sense in 1999. There were actually two films close to both of these classics that I also value highly and will discuss as they add to Willis’ range as an actor.

Willis never gets the credit that so many of the other actors in Pulp Fiction do for making it part of the Zeitgeist. Most of the glory is given, understandably, to John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and actors with smaller roles like Eric Stoltz and Harvey Keitel. I believe this is primarily because unlike almost every other character in the film – and indeed, pretty much all of Tarantino’s work, his character has very little dialogue. And because Tarantino’s films are all about the dialogue, Willis’ work gets lost.  But it is worth noting that some of the best scenes in the film work entirely just by what he does and what little he says.

Consider the scene where Butch is sneaking into his apartment to find his father’s watch. There’s a long tracking shot which follows Willis from his car, through the yard, up the staircase and into the apartment. He finds his watch, pauses, puts a toaster pastry in the toaster, and then he sees the machine gun. We hear the toilet flush. Willis takes the gun and points it at his bathroom door.  Vincent steps out. The two just look at each other for a long moment, and the audience remembers the other encounter they had where Vincent called Butch ‘a palooka’. The pastry pops up. At that instant, Butch squeezes the trigger. He goes into the bathroom to assure himself Vincent is dead. The smoke detector goes off. He puts the gun down, pauses, wipes off the butt, and walks back out through the window.  It is not until he is back in his car, driving away with the radio on that he finally speaks: “That’s how you’re gonna beat ‘em, Butch. They’ll keep on underestimating you.”

The entire passage takes place over nearly five minutes – the longest stretch in the movie with no dialogue. The scene tends to get ignored because of what follows…less than a minute later, Butch encounters Marcellus Wallace in the street, coming back with coffee and doughnuts. The scenes that follow are such part of cinema lore – the man in uniforms, the Gimp and the unthinkable thing that Wallace undergoes – that we tend to forget that Butch ran Wallace over, and very nearly killed him. His subsequent escape and decision to save Marcellus from his fate – another scene that is done with no dialogue – is also remarkable because there’s no reason for him to change his mind.  Could another actor have done this as well? Possibly. But there are few who could have expressed so much without having to say anything.

That same year Willis started in another small film, Nobody’s Fool. The film centers on Paul Newman in one of his greatest performances as Sully, a sixty year old repairman with no luck in his life, who has family he never sees and who lives in the house with his grade school teacher (Jessica Tandy’s final role). A superb and gentle comedy, the movie featured several other good actors in small roles including Melanie Griffith (I’ll get back to her in a minute) Philip Seymour Hoffman in an early role, and fine character actors like Pruitt Taylor Vince and Philip Bosco. Once again, Willis’ work was underestimated.

Willis plays Sully’s major rival in this small town, a man who he is engaged in a back and forth pissing contest over the possession of a truck and, somewhat less significantly, Willis’ wife Toby (Griffith) who Willis doesn’t seem to care about and who Sully has been flirting with for years. (Would a thirty-ish woman really be attracted to a sixty year old man? If he’s Paul Newman, yes.) You get the feeling that these two men can only express their feelings for each other by ripping on the other. There are some friendships like that. At the climax of the movie, Toby finally announcing she’s leaving Willis’ character and going to Florida and asks Sully to come with her. Willis’ character is hostile and the two leave at gunpoint. Sully takes her to her car and as she goes in, he stops. He tells her until a few days he could, and in a line of dialogue I’ve never forgotten: “I’ve just found out I’m somebody’s father. I’m somebody’s grandfather. And maybe, I’m somebody’s friend.” We’ve seen in most of the movie how the first two relationships have played out, but it is the third that is the most revealing – Sully has finally recognizes a certain part of himself. Newman’s work in the movie was deservedly nominated for an Academy Award (and I still believe he should have won) but it’s hard to imagine that part of the movie working without Willis’ amicability being directed this way.

For all his action films over the years, I still believe the director who served Willis the best in his career was M. Night Shamaylan and I’m certain that he brought out the best in Shamaylan as a creative force. The Sixth Sense was one of those movies that still works as well as it does even if you know the twist ending because you find yourself looking for the clues all the way through.  And as we all know, even though the Academy was willing to give nominations for Haley Joel Osment as Cole and Toni Collette as mother, the performance that is critical to the movie is Willis’ as Malcolm.

In order for everything about the movie to work, Malcolm must seem to be a presence in every scene he’s in, but in such a way that he seems almost invisible. To that end, Willis even at his most restrained a very dynamic actor, toned down his personality until it was almost muted. Willis had done that in other films – such as The Siege - and the results had been almost painful to watch. In The Sixth Sense it works perfectly. The movie is about Cole, but in order to hide it twist, it is told from Malcolm’s point of view. Because Malcolm seems so restrained in his approach to Cole – and because he might well be going through an estrangement with his wife – the audience has no reason to doubt that what we are seeing is anything but the truth. When the final revelation comes, it must come as a shock to Malcolm as much as the audience, and it is because it does that the final moment not only blindside you, but they are incredibly moving.

I also found Shamaylan’s follow-up  Unbreakable one of the better movies in Willis’ repertoire. By this point the entire world had accepted Willis as John McLane the quintessential action hero, which at the time was far more acceptable than a superhero. So when we meet David Dunn being not only the sole survivor of a train crash, but not having a scratch on him, this would be something the audience would accept from most Bruce Willis movies, but not this one. Willis must come to the realization that he is a superhero and he spends almost the entire movie fighting against Elijah Price’s prodding and more importantly, that of his own son. There is a memorable scene when his son points a gun at David with the utter assurance that if he shoots him, nothing will happen. David talks to his son not under the idea that he is delusional, but that if he does so the bullet will bounce off him and hit his mother. It is a scene full of the emotion lacking in the lion’s share of Shymalan’s other films (Signs and Split are to date the sole exceptions) and it carries almost entirely due to Willis.  When David finally accepts his destiny, it is the more significant moment. Whatever problems the audience might have with the ending of Unbreakable (I didn’t have any) it works more because we believe in David’s reaction to the horrors that have unfolded and that a man he considered a friend was responsible.

(I’ll even confess that I don’t hate the conclusion of the trilogy of these movies Glass the huge disappointment so many of my contemporaries do. I admit its kind of messy and there are far too many twist ending in the last fifteen minutes, but the power of the three central performances-  MacAvoy’s frantic energy, Jackson’s sly villainy and Willis’ tired determination – do carry the movie for much of its run.)

So it’s clear that much of Willis’ career showed a great deal of range when he was allowed to express it. Why did he then so often embrace the action movie trope, even though he must have gotten tired of it as he got older? Well, as anyone who knows Willis history’, in the early 1990s there were a series of disastrous movie that didn’t so much curtail his career as his ambitions as an actor. In the conclusion to this series, I’ll deal with four of these films, some unfairly maligned, some truly disastrous, that for better or worse, shaped his career path for most of the way.

 

 

The Hypocrisy of Will Smith Resigning From The Academy Membership

As the world knows by now, Friday Will Smith tearfully resigned from the membership of the Motion Picture Academy as a consequence of his attack Chris Rock at last Sunday night’s ceremony. I have no doubt this was a difficult decision, but the only option Smith had. His actions on Sunday completely and totally desecrated the high standards that the Academy Awards have expected of their membership for the last century…and I can’t even be bothered to keep a straight face any more.

I so badly want to be Seth Meyers or Amy Poehler and shout ‘Really!” at the Academy membership. “Really?! This is where you draw the line in the sand. This decision about how shameful this is to the Academy? This is more embarrassing than James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosting? Really!”

Now I realize that the lion’s share of my readers and probably the general public isn’t aware of the long history the Academy has of shameful moments. So I’m going to give you a brief rundown of some the most shameful things that members of the Academy did during the Oscars and were never even asked to consider resigning.

It’s worth noting that, for an organization that says that its Awards are the highest achievement of their membership, for much of the twentieth century some of the greatest actors and actresses in Hollywood couldn’t even be bothered to show up. Katharine Hepburn was nominated twelve times and won four Oscars for Best Actress. She never showed up to accept any of them. Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton held the record for most nominations without winning until O’Toole passed it. For the lion’s share of their nominations, neither showed up. Some of Britain’s greatest thespians – Charles Laughton, Alec Guinness, Albert Finney, Glenda Jackson and Maggie Smith – treated them similarly (save for Smith who showed up to collect one of her Oscars.) Lest you think this is strictly the British holding their noses, Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro spent the 1970s basically not even bothering to show up for any of their nominations. (DeNiro didn’t show up for his Supporting Actor Oscar for Godfather II and Martin Scorsese practically had to beg him to show up for Raging Bull.) Dustin Hoffman spent the first half of his career openly considering the Oscars obscene. (Given his rambling, lengthy acceptance speeches and what we now know of his personal behaviors towards female co-stars, the Oscars might well wish he never showed up when he did win.) Paul Newman, who was a good guy, just didn’t think them worth his time, though he was a good sport and showed up when his wife was nominated.

Now admittedly absenteeism is not really the worst of sins and sometimes nominees are too busy.  What about George C. Scott and Marlon Brando? In 1970, Scott made it clear he wasn’t going to accept the Oscar if he won for Patton. Brando made similar noises when he was nominated for The Godfather. In the latter case, when a Native American named Sacheen Littlefeather went up to accept the prize, she basically echoed Brando’s thoughts on how useless the award was, and by her account, felt lucky to get out of there alive. Were either Brando or Scott asked to leave the Academy for declaring their Oscars worthless? No. Both were nominated again for Best Actor the very next year (Scott for The Hospital; Brando for Last Tango in Paris)

Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave were two of the most politically polarizing actresses in the 1970s. When Redgrave took the Best Supporting Actress for Julia, she made one of the most politically alienating speeches arguing for Palestine and mentioning ‘Zionist hoodlums’ threatening her.” The crowd booed her and she took a lot of grief, but they never asked her to leave. Indeed, she got two more Oscar nominations. Fonda was more decorous in her acceptance speeches for Klute and Coming Home, but in the latter case, she caused a major imbroglio when she criticized The Deer Hunter and started a campaign urging the membership not to vote for it for Best Picture. (It didn’t work.) She hasn’t been thrown out either.

Up to this point, some of you are still saying: That may be biting the hand that feeds you, but it’s not criminal. Mel Gibson? Drunken anti-Semitic rant, nominated for Best Director of Hacksaw Ridge in 2016. Roman Polanski, convicted of statutory rape, fled the country won Best Director in 2002. Casey Affleck, assault charges right around the time he was winning every major critics prize for Manchester by the Sea. They may not have had him present Best Actress the following year, but he’s still a member. By the way, has the Academy done anything about Kevin Spacey yet or are they hoping Ridley Scott will edit him out of every major film he’s done?

And all of this pales to the trifecta of the most nominated person in Academy history Woody Allen. The Academy kept nominating him even though he has yet to show up for a single one of his nominated films. They kept nominating him after he left his long-time girlfriend for his adopted daughter. And when Ronan Farrow publicly tweeted about his sexual assault on his sister Dylan for which he was never convicted during his receiving a lifetime achievement award for the Golden Globes, not only did they not kick him out they mounted a defense of him. Now that the charges are public, Hollywood’s backing away from him, but he’s still making movies and they haven’t kicked him out of the Academy.

So when you add all of this up, were Will Smith’s actions worse than any of this? And before you say: “he assaulted Rock because he made a joke about his wife,” let’s not pretend that if at the Governor’s Ball, Smith and Rock walked away and Rock showed up with a black eye the next day, the Academy would have reacted as harshly or as quickly. (Fun fact: the night Lana Turner was nominated for Peyton Place, she went home and before she could take off her dress, her boyfriend Johnny Stompanato yelled at her for not taking him and beat her to a pulp. But you know, he wasn’t in Hollywood.)

No Smith is under fire because by attacking Rock while the cameras were rolling, he forced them to make a decision. Smith was going to get the Oscar, the votes had been cast, his name was in the envelope, and they don’t take away your Oscar for bad behavior even if it happens the hour before you get it. If they asked him to leave, they would be forced to figure out what to do when Smith won. And people from the Oscars say they planned to call the police. I don’t believe it. The Academy has been relying on policing its own for years. They’ve done a crappy job, no question, but they don’t let in outsiders.

And that’s the real reason they are asking Smith to resign. Left to their own devices, they rather sweep this under the rug. But unfortunately, I have no doubt that quite a significant bulk of membership – mostly old white men who because they once had a drink with Jack Warner think they know more about the film business than critics and who can’t possibly be racist because they voted for Denzel (once…and they can’t remember which film) – threw a shit fit about Smith and Rock where I’m certain the most polite phrase used was ‘those people’ and the most printable adjective was ‘uppity’. These are people who at their core who think the most people of color should have to do with the Oscars is host it occasionally and maybe choreograph it. They’ve been fighting all the rules changes every step of the way and in their minds, this incident proved them right. They’re thrilled the ratings went up, of course, but now they have to give in to their demons and get rid of the man they think caused the problem. They’ll never invite Rock back, either, by the way even though he got hit. I have no doubt those same old men considered them basically mouthy. (Hell, I’m willing to bet some of them couldn’t tell who hit who.)

So yes Smith resigned. And he’s starting to lose movie deals. Meanwhile Mel Gibson will be in the next Lethal Weapon movie and Kevin Spacey will slowly begin making movies again and James Franco and Casey Affleck will make a buddy comedy soon enough. The whole situation would scream out for a joke that Chris Rock himself might make…and to be clear, he actually has to far friendlier audiences.

 

 

My Rewatch of House OF Cards Season 1: pART 1B, Four of the Biggest Film and TV Stars Broke Big

 

 

There were countless great performances throughout the run of House of Cards, many of them from veteran actors who got one of their major roles here. Michel Gill, who played President Walker, was superb in the small excerpts we saw of him, Constance Zimmer, would have one of her finest roles as Janine Skorsky, before she burst into the stratosphere on UnReal in 2015, and Nathan Darrow delivered several subtle moments as Edward Meechum, the capital policeman who wins the Underwoods trust – and at one point, so much more. But some of the greatest performances would come from actors who broke on to the scene in this series and whose star has yet to dim.

Corey Stoll had been acting for awhile before his being cast as Peter Russo, the deeply flawed Congressman who is used most harshly in the early stages. But it was in his role he demonstrated the range he was truly capable of. Unlike almost every character on this series, he is both human and broken in a way that no one else is. The fundamental flaw in his character is exposed in the Pilot, and he becomes a tool of Underwood and Stamper for the first half of the season, perhaps most cruelly when he must not defend a shipyard that is vital to his district in a manipulation that he never truly understands. He is wholly beaten by this, and when he confronts Frank in an alcoholic rage, we honestly don’t know if he’s going to kill himself when Frank hands him the razor blade and puts him in the tub.

Underwood and Stamper clearly underestimate Peter as they build him up. In an episode with him on the campaign trail, he shows a command of himself that we have never seen in public or private, particularly when he finally confronts the Vice President on his behavior on the road. It clearly impresses him, and it does build him to the level that when Frank tries to push against him, Peter has built up enough confidence that he’s genuinely unafraid of him. It makes his fall all the more tragic, especially because unlike almost everyone else on the series, Peter openly cares for other people, particularly his chief aide/lover Christina and his children. Frank’s decision to arrange things so Peter dies is one of the most powerful moments in the series, because it is an action that clearly shakes Frank – and Claire – to their core. Frank is disturbed by his actions in a way he rarely demonstrates for the remainder of the show. Stoll’s humanity and toughness clearly showed a brilliant actor and he was talked of for a Supporting Actor Emmy nomination. (The fact that he was passed over in favor of Bobby Cannavale, the eventual winner for Boardwalk Empire, is a travesty I’m still not over.)

One of the other vital characters in Season 1 is Zoe Barnes. Like her older sister Rooney, Kate Mara had been acting from a young age and wasn’t an unknown either: in 2011 she had starred in the first season of American Horror Story. But this was clearly the role she broke big and its very easy to see why watching her work. She has a subtle sexual quality that so many actresses don’t and she demonstrates repeatedly her ability to share the stage with some great actors on a level playing field. Every time she’s in a scene with Spacey, you get the feeling that he thinks he has all the power in this relationship and she thinks just the same. He’s clearly shocked near the back of the season when she starts to demonstrate a will of her own and it clearly floors him when he dares to walk into the Underwood residence, goes to their bedroom and put on Claire’s clothes. Frank is still reeling from Claire’s departure, and Zoe from Claire’s confrontation of her in her apartment, but in this scene it’s clear Zoe has the advantage.

There are quite a few people who then, and now, were somewhat disgusted by the sexual relationship that Zoe and Frank engaged in. What they may not be aware of is the fact that this is canon. In the original series, Urquhart used a reporter named Mattie for his political gain and as a sexual object. I should also mention that in the British series, it’s actually creepier than the Netflix version, partly because Richardson appeared to be much older than Mattie and also because Mattie seemed to have a father fixation on Urquhart to the point she called him ‘Daddy’ sometimes even during intercourse. The sexual relationship is a little creepy here, but you do get the idea that Zoe goes into with her eyes wide open. (And for those who think the subsequent murder of Zoe is where the series started going downhill, I should tell you that is canon as well. If anything, it’s creepier there because unlike with Underwood’s actions, it seems pre-planned.)

More to the point, Zoe realize the errors of her ways far earlier than Mattie does, and I have to say he has a greater self-awareness than a lot of other characters. Zoe’s apartment, charitably, is a slum and she knows it. You really wonder why a reporter like her would tolerate living in such a place, but she doesn’t seem to mind…until a vital scene in the series. Claire confronts Zoe after she reveals to Frank about the betrayal I mentioned in the previous article. Zoe is somewhat shocked to know that Frank told Claire about the affair, and she clearly unnerved, but she never backs down. To a degree, it actually impresses Claire a little. Zoe is shaken more by Claire’s arrival than anything, and after she leaves, she does something we never seen her do: look at the squalor in which she lives.  Clearly she sees it as a mirror for what she’s become and she doesn’t like it. Not only does she start trying to rectify her mistakes, she starts revealing an honesty to her colleagues (one of which is her lover Lucas)  and to herself. It’s a revealing moment.

Perhaps the character that seems the most likely to be a throwaway was the prostitute who gets caught with Peter when his car is pulled over. Doug pays her off quietly and we think we won’t be dealing with her. Honestly, we don’t even look at her that much. Then about halfway through the series, she reaches out to Doug again, and she looks like she’s been beaten to a pulp. She’s trying to appear tough but now we see how fragile she is.

This is the first real look that the world would get at Rachel Brosnahan. And for those of us who know her as the ballsy-take no prisoners Midge on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, it’s kind of startling. Rachel is essentially fragile throughout the entire season, which makes a lot of sense when we begin to learn about her character. She is an escort, she has walked the streets, and as we will learn in the Season 1 finale, she was abused by her father and never told anyone. Rachel basically seems like someone who will always need someone’s support, which may be why she is drawn to Doug for help.

But in arguably the most important scene in Season 1 that didn’t involve the Underwoods, Rachel has been called on to seduce and destroy Peter Russo. Throughout the scenes she goes about her mission as if it is a job like any other. But near the end of it, she almost casually asks Peter if she looks familiar. And the drunken and utterly wasted Peter can’t remember the woman who was his ruination. There’s a moment – blink and you’ll miss it – when you tell just how hurt by this Rachel is. A minute later, she opens the windows to reveal daylight, sending Peter on what neither of them yet know will be his death-march. When Peter turns up dead a few days later, she is broken in a way she will spend months recovering from, and it is one of those moments that made you realize what a star Brosnahan would become. Not long after this she would be cast as the wife of a physicist in WGN’s Manhattan (the series filming would still allow to appear on House of Cards) and she would start demonstrating to the world her depths, though it took her another three years for her career to reach maximum velocity.

Mahershala Ali has been such a great actor in so many roles the past decade you might well assume he’d only gotten started in House of Cards. In actuality he’d been around in a lot of television before that in semi-regular roles as diverse as Crossing Jordan, 4400 (the USA version) and Treme. But the reason Ali clearly finally managed to break out of the character actor notch was his work as lobbyist Remy Danton. Remy was one of Frank’s aide before he left for the private sector. Frank spends the entire first season utterly dismissing him because he chose money over power. This is one of Frank’s biggest blunders, because throughout the first season Remy is by far is most successful adversary. Remy has enough knowledge of the Underwood inner circle to try and woo Claire privately. He tolerates one dismissal of help, but when Claire comes to him, he knows that he has enough leverage to get her to act against her husband. Frank keeps trying to manipulate him –especially to bring down Russo – but by the end of the season, he is in a position that even he admits he needs him to the audience. And its worth noting that even though Frank gets what he needs from Tusk, Remy has gotten far more – and in the process, managed to play Frank.

Ali is a big imposing figure, but throughout the entire season he never loses his cool, even in the face of Frank’s hostility. In one of the best scenes in the series, certainly for him, he walks into Frank’s living room at a vital moment and is utterly calm and triumphant in Frank’s dismissal of him. “Eight years I worked for you, you never invited me for a cup of coffee,” he says matter-of-factly. “Now I’m standing in your living room.” Clearly this makes an impression on Frank, which may lead to the real reason he comes back into the fold – for awhile –in Season 3.

It is rare for any series to have a level of actors break into the mainstream because of one season, which is just another reason House of Cards first season was a masterpiece. It would have problems going forward, of course, but they will be addressed the further along in the rewatch I get.

My Rewatch Of House Of Cards, Part 1A: Season 1 Worked As Well As I Remember

Earlier this year I wrote an article announcing that I was planning on watching Netflix’s House of Cards again to see whether it was as good as I remembered it and more importantly, whether I could still watch and enjoy the series considering everything I know about Kevin Spacey. Yesterday, I finished Season 1. And at least as far as that particular season goes, the answer to both questions are: yes and yes.

Indeed, there’s a very strong argument to be made that the series wouldn’t have worked with anyone but Kevin Spacey in role of Frank Underwood. Because I have to make this point crystal clear: Spacey may be a horrible human being but he was an extraordinary actor. Those two qualities have never been mutually exclusive and they still aren’t; the main difference is now we know more about everybody’s private lives than we want too. But all through Season 1, I never once felt the disconnect that I have watching Woody Allen movies or some of D.W. Griffith’s early work. I found myself, just as before, under the grip of Spacey’s work as Underwood, always feeling connected when he broke the fourth wall and let us in. Hell, part of me still found myself liking Frank even as did the horrible things he did.

I saw the original British series with Ian Richardson and Francis Urquhart as he climbed up the ladder to 10 Downing Street and because I was such a huge fan of that series as Richardson, I didn’t believe the show had a chance when it Netflix made it for American TV back in 2013.  A large part of was because the British political system is so radically different from ours. (This is the main reason the series ended up on Netflix in the first place by the way. HBO was offered the series before them, but Beau Willimon wanted a two season commitment because the writers knew they’d need that much time to show Underwood’s rise to power. Even with Spacey and Robin Wright’s involvement, HBO refused to take the risk and Netflix. HBO also had the first bid on Orange is the New Black and The Crown, by the way. So it could be argued that they are as instrumental in streaming becoming a dominant force as any original programming Netflix did).

But more to the point, I can’t think of any actor who could let us in the same way to Frank Underwood’s character, then or now, other than Spacey.  The role requires someone who you know better than trust but who you are charmed despite, maybe even because of, his attitude. In other words, you would need Keyser Soze trying to convince the world he’s actually Verbal Kent. I still don’t know anyone who could have done the job Spacey did who was appropriate for the role. The closest equivalent might be Bob Odenkirk, but he was still on Breaking Bad, and even then, not even the most loyal Saul Goodman fan knew the depths he was capable of.

And make no mistake, certainly throughout Season 1, Frank Underwood convinces you of his humanity to levels that he certainly wouldn’t throughout the rest of the series.  The clearest example of this comes when he returns to South Carolina and the military school he grew up. Frank puts up the front of a politician that he is…and then the Riflemen, his old running buddies show up. The mask that he puts up to the world, and even to the audience drops in a way it almost never does on the series. We see a man whose eyes are always looking towards the future looking at the road not taken…particularly when it comes to his sexuality.

I thought given what we now know about Spacey’s crimes these scenes would either ring false or seem offensive. They don’t because its one of the few times in the entire series that Frank Underwood is completely honest with himself. He doesn’t have to break the fourth wall to show his feelings; his heart is on his sleeve. And that feeling is clearly still with him when he gives his commemoration speech the next day. It’s never referred to for the rest of the series, but the moment is still powerful.

And for those of who see Frank as the all-powerful orchestrator of events, the fact is for much of Season 1 he knows that he has no control them. This becomes clear after Peter Russo turns on him near his run for governor, when Peter disappears in a drunken haze before he can control the narrative and particularly in the last two episodes when it appears that all his efforts will be reduced to nothing when the President seems about to tap Raymond Tusk for Vice President. For much of the penultimate episode, he is forced into a situation with a man he can not read clearly and who it turns is more than capable of reading the events that Frank has spent a season setting into motion. (Gerald McRaney is quite brilliant as Tusk, continuing a streak of brilliant Peak TV acting that began in the final season of Deadwood where he played the real-life billionaire George Hearst. Hearst grew up in Missouri; were the writers making a nod to this by having Frank fly to St. Louis to meet him?) Frank knows that while he can outmaneuver politicians and corporate lobbyists, he can’t ‘make 40 billion dollars disappear’ and indeed for almost the entire last episode, it looks like his effort has failed.  When he finally gets the job he has been planning all season to get, we can’t read the expression face well enough to know whether he’s putting on an act or is surprised that he’s finally gotten what he tried so hard for.

As great an actor as Spacey is, House of Cards didn’t work only because of him. The two actors who lasted the length of the series were just as brilliant as him, and both cases put on a more consistent display of brilliance: Robin Wright as Claire Underwood, and Michael Kelly as Doug Stamper, his chief of staff and his greatest ally.

Wright’s work in the series was by far the biggest shock at the time. Wright had worked in Hollywood constantly for a quarter-century but had never quite lived up to her potential. Considering that Urquhart’s wife was basically window dressing in the British series, I honestly wondered if she’d been cast more for her name. It took very little time to see otherwise.

We don’t get a clear picture of what Claire’s long term plan is for much of the first two seasons, but what becomes crystal clear is that she is just as ruthless as her husband, if not more so. In the first two episodes, she has a loyal assistant fire most of the staff she wants to get rid off, and then has her be the last one out the door because she disagrees with her methods. She hires another woman who she thinks will be more at tune with her sensibilities but in the last two episodes when Gillian, who is more idealistic to her approaches than Claire is, also disagrees and Claire fires her. Gillian is prepared to go at her hard, claiming that Claire is firing her because of her pregnancy, which is a lie. When Claire confronts her at the end of the season, Gillian is fully prepared to do anything to destroy a woman that she now feels is a villain… a sensibility that you almost think Claire would sympathize with. Gillian doesn’t realize just how far Claire will go to destroy her enemies, a mistake that more than a few people will make over the course of the series.

Including Frank. The clearest betrayal of Frank comes halfway through the series, when after spending capital and effort to get a piece of legislation passed that will benefit Frank’s long terms plans, Claire uses her influence to kill it to advance an agenda of her own. Their marriage has a model of stability through the series so far, but when Frank learns the truth about it the Underwoods have their first real argument. Frank tells her that her needs matter less than his when it comes to the big picture, and when Claire strikes back just as harshly; he misjudges her and asks if this is because of the menopause she’s going through. Claire actually leaves D.C. after this for two whole episodes.

It is in those episodes we get a picture of what Claire’s life might have been without Frank. Throughout the season, she’s been engaged in a flirtation with a photographer named Adam (Ben Daniels), who it’s clear she’s had an on and off affair with over the years. (We already know the Underwoods have a very pragmatic relationship, which I’ll get to in a later article.) This seems to be the first time she really is considering her options in a way that truly unsettles Adam. We get a feeling there is affection and respect in a way there just isn’t with Frank, and given a chance to deal with it, neither can face the alternative. When a crisis comes, Claire runs back to Frank, and not just because of the potential realization of their long term goals.

Both Spacey and Wright are extraordinary, but the most fascinating character on the series (at least during the three whole seasons I watched it) was Doug.  There’s no real equivalent to him in the original series so the writers would show their gifts in creating him. Doug is by far the most icily calm character in the series; he’s been a loyalist for so long, he clearly gets Frank’s moods. He knows what questions to ask and when to stay quiet. Halfway through the series, when a crisis is unfolding, Frank senses it and asks: “Do I want to know about it?” Doug says: “I don’t think you do.” There’s no one Frank trusts as deeply as that, at least in Season 1.

Doug is so calm and imposing with just a few words that would have been easy for him to appear inhuman at times. So the writer’s masterstroke was to make him a recovering alcoholic. It may have seemed like just something to do as a plot point (Peter Russo is going through recovery and the writers didn’t want to create a sponsor out of whole cloth). But both the writers and Kelly go out of their way to show it isn’t. Doug shares at a meeting about his job and the number that ‘scares the shit out of him’ because he knows just one drink could ‘get it down to zero.’  He is utterly pragmatic and honest at the same time in a way he almost never is the rest of the series.  And he truly takes his sobriety seriously in the conversations he has with Peter.

And it is because he is such a great actor than in the most critical scene we have no capability of reading him. Doug has spent the episode setting up Peter to relapse and than self-destruct on national television. (We’ll actually get to that in the next article.) But in all his exchanges with Peter, from the call before the interview, his meeting with Peter and after the collapse, he genuinely sounds like he’s trying to talk Peter out of it. When he tells him ‘it’s my fault’ after everything goes to hell, he seems so sincere that we practically forget that he orchestrated it. He never talks about Peter’s fate the same way Frank and Claire doing going forward. Is it possible he feels regret? Is that why he feels such a necessity to handle Rachel?

If it were only for the extraordinary acting of the three leads, the first season of House of Cards would stand as one of the masterworks of Peak TV. But as those of us who watched the series know, several actors who would be vital to the world of television and film would shoot to superstardom in large part to their roles in this series. In the next article, I will deal with the four major talents who broke big here.

 

 

Is The Current Season of Jeopardy The Year of the Woman?

 

At the beginning of last night’s Jeopardy Mayim Bialik commented that the month of March was ending as it had begun with a female four-day champion –in this case, Jackie Kelly – attempting to qualify for the Tournament of Champions with her fifth win. (I’ll get to the results in a moment.) She also mentioned that in this month, there had been four female champions who each had won four games – Christine Whelchel, who won $73,602; Margaret Shelton who won $79,700 and Maureen O’Neil, who won $58,200. Jackie was by far the most successful, winning $115,100 in just four days.

Jackie’s run, sadly, ended last night when she was unable to come up with a correct response for Final Jeopardy and she was defeated by Evan Roberts. None of this, however, should take away from a feat that I’m certain almost nobody except even the most devoted fans of Jeopardy – and probably not even most of them – were aware of. March was the first month in Jeopardy’s 38 year history where four women all qualified for the Tournament of Champions. (There’s an asterisk to that, which I will get to in a minute.) It’s also the first time in the entire history that three consecutive female champions who had each one at least four games succeeded each other.

As long as I have been watching Jeopardy, there has been an underlying question as to why the male to female champion ratio has always been so disparate. Alex Trebek and Merv Griffin constantly had to come up with answers as to why, until 1994, all the Tournament of Champions winners had been male. Things have been improved since the turn of the century, but minutely: in the entire history of the Tournament of Champions, only three women – Rachael Schwartz in 1994; Robin Carroll in 2000, and Celeste DiNucci in 2007 – have ever won the Tournament of Champions. That’s actually kind of remarkable because in the entire history of the tournament of Champions, only twice have as many two female champions gotten to the finals: 1993 and last year. And in neither case did that result in one of the women winning: it went to Tom Nosek in 1993 and Sam Kavanaugh in 2021.

To be clear, those two years were outliers. I’ve been watching Jeopardy for nearly thirty years and it was only in 1993 that there was anything resembling gender parity among the players who qualified for the Tournament of Champions: eight male contestants and seven female ones. In almost every Tournament of Champions I have watched ever since, it is often an outlier when there is even one female contestant that makes it to the finals. You can pretty much this to a standard for basically any of the other tournaments that Jeopardy has held since they returned to the airwaves in 1984: College Tournaments, Teachers Tournaments and Professor Tournaments: you can count the number of female winners in each pretty much on one hand. Hell, the only time I’ve even seen a final with three female contestants is in the Teen Tournaments and that’s only happened three times. That level of female dominance doesn’t get them very far, though; since 2000, Jeopardy would change it rules so that Teen Tournament winners don’t participate in the Tournament of Champions. (I have issues with that, but I’ll save that complaint for a different article.)

Given the scandals that surrounded Mike Richards’ departure as executive producer last year, it is easy to assume that their might be some sexism existing behind the scenes. That argument falls apart when you consider that these problems have been going on with Jeopardy since the series debuted. And no, I know damn well that men are not smarter than women, I’ve seen far too many brilliant female champions over the years give male champions a trouncing to fall into that bias.

The simplest explanation is probably the most likely one. It’s very hard for anybody to win five or more games on Jeopardy. And the fact that there have always been a disproportionate number of male competitors to female ones (for reasons that basically apply to every other aspect of life in America) has simply meant that there were more opportunities for male players than there were female ones.

Over the past decade, I have sensed a slow but gradual turn in the tide. The ratio of male to female contestants still slightly favors the former, but more and more women have been making their mark on Jeopardy. In 2014 Julia Collins would set the second place mark for most wins by any contestant to Ken Jennings with 20 wins. (As we have all seen, that record was shattered by Amy Schneider just this year.) In all but one of the last seven Tournament of Champions, there has been at least one female finalist and while no woman has won any of them, the last two years second place has gone to a female contestant: Emma Boettcher, who had already earned a place in Jeopardy history by defeating James Holzhauer (she came in second to him that year) and Jennifer Quail, who was one of three female champions who had won eight games the previous year. These may seem like minor accomplishment, but considering that seven of the first eight Tournaments of Champions combined had only one female finalist, it’s hard not to look at this as anything but progress.

And female contestants will make themselves known in November’s Tournament of Champions. Along with the four women who I listed above and Amy Schneider, the upcoming Tournament will feature Courtney Shah, who last year managed to win seven games and just under $120,000. At the current moment, the ratio of male to female champions qualified for the Tournament is 9 to 6, which reduced to 3:2. I realize that doesn’t quite seem like parity, but as someone who has been watching Tournaments of Champions for over thirty years, it’s a good year when there’s one female champion for every two males.

Now all of this comes with a codifier. The rules of Jeopardy state that automatic qualification for the Tournament of Champions only comes if you win five games. In my experience there have been countless years where there have been as many players who have won less than five games than there are who have won more, and it is conceivable there has been a rule change in the interim. That said if another player should win five games or more, the rules would dictate that the low scorer among the four day winners – in this Maureen O’Neill – would be dropped from being allowed to participate. And as we all know, it is only April. For all we know, three or four male contestants could win a lot of games in the next few months.

I think there have been some rules changes for qualifications the past few years, more relating to when a champion wins their games. So it is conceivable that Jeopardy, after Jackie’s win last night, will consider the roster for November’s Tournament locked and every subsequent winner will qualify for the next Tournament of Champions. This is one of those areas about the series that I’m unfamiliar with.

None of this should change the fact that it looks more and more like Season 38 of Jeopardy is going to be the Year of the Woman. Amy Schneider has set records on Jeopardy that are remarkable, more female champions are winning that pretty much at any time in the show’s history, and Mayim Bialik continues to impress every time she walks onstage. (Will she take the job permanently? I keep hoping.) And with nearly ten million viewers an episode, it is clear that the passing of Alex Trebek and all the backstage scandals no longer cast a shadow over the show. And tonight’s show ended with Nell Klugman thoroughly trouncing Evan. Who knows? Maybe she’ll be the next contestant to take a run at Ken Jennings. After all, ‘’This…is…Jeopardy!”