Constant Reader Book of the Month Club May: Apples Must Fall and Lianne Moriarty's Look on Mothers

 

There are three different factors that have led me to choose Apples Must Fall for May: the fact that it’s Mother’s Day, the fact that I am one of Lianne Moriarty’s biggest fans and the recent attention - Will Smith notwithstanding – of King Richard.

Let’s take the last reason first. What if you were the parents of not just two tennis crazy siblings but four? What if both parents had been tennis mad when they were young but never made it big? And what if your children never quite had what it took the go all the way? What would you do with all that energy – and how much would it affect your relationship with her children and your family? That is one of the major questions at the center of Lianne Moriarty’s most recent novel Apples Must Fall.

Now anyone who has been following my blog from the beginning knows that I am a huge Moriarty fan. Full disclosure: that didn’t begin until Big Little Lies debuted on HBO back in 2017, though I was able to hold off reading the book until after the miniseries concluded. In typical fashion, I became obsessed with the work of Moriarty and have read every novel she has written to date. I can appreciate the fundamental differences between her version of Big Little Lies and David E. Kelley’s adaptation and could similarly approve of the adaptation he had done to Nine Perfect Strangers last year for Hulu. I’ve also read everything in between and can heartily recommend books that are less like to be adapted such as The Hypnotist’s Daughter and What She Forgot. Like Kelley’s previous adaptations, I could see a world where Apples Must Fall could be Americanized for a limited series (though I’m not sure if there would be a role for Nicole Kidman in this one) Many of the themes in this book are very critical to the American psyche – the drive to be the best, what makes a good marriage, the relationships between siblings and how the scars of ones parents can be passed down to their children, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Before that happens though, let’s look at how Apples fits in with the Australian mindset.

Apples Must Fall centers on the Delaneys. The father is Stan, the mother is Joy. When the novel begins they have been married for half a century. They were once aspiring tennis players, but neither could make it professionally. So they became coaches. They had four children: Amy, Roger, Troy and Brooke. All of them were gifted players too, all trained hard as children, but none of them could make it all the way either. All have grown up, but none have moved on.

Stan and Joy were considered a happy couple and a bulwark of the small Australian town they grew up. Everyone loved them and admired them – most of them love watching them play doubles together for decades. Now they’ve sold the school and are easing into retirement. Well, maybe not ‘easing’. They don’t seem to enjoy traveling as much and Joy in particular is finding trouble filling the days – she’s taking a memoir writing class as the novel begins, and having an immense amount of time filling the pages. Like so many mothers, she keeps hoping for the day she’ll become a grandmother – something that keeps seeming increasingly unlikely as the novel begins.

All of the Delaney children are deeply flawed. A large part of it is no doubt that that none of them have been able to properly fill the void that did with tennis.  Amy is the oldest, but has spent most of her adult life suffering from crippling anxiety that has hindered professionally and relationship-wise – she’s the oldest sibling, but everyone treats her as the baby. Roger is a college instructor who doesn’t seem content in his job. He’s been in a relationship for five years with India, which is petering out as the novel begins. Troy is the most successful career-wise, but no one in the family can understand the nature of his job. He’s always been the most impulsive of the group; indeed his marriage ended when he chose to have a one night stand and then told his wife about it. He is facing a major decision with his ex-wife when the novel begins. Brooke has suffered her entire adult life from crippling migraines, and while she has a relatively successful practice as a chiropractor, her own marriage is breaking up as the novel starts.

Underlying all of this is news that is trouble to the Delaney clan. Harry Haddad, a tennis legend who the Delaneys once coached until an undisclosed incident led to him changing coaches when he was still a teenager, is mounting a professional comeback. He’s about to play at Wimbledon and he’s also in the process of writing a memoir. All of the Delaneys are nervous about that, though none of them for quite the same reason.

Into Stan and Joy’s life one night comes Savannah, a thirtyish woman who claims to have taken a cab and knocked on their doors because her boyfriend beat her that night. Joy and Stan welcome her in for the night…and then she becomes a more or less permanent resident, cooking for Stan and Joy every night. Both are happy with the state of affairs, Joy in particular, and when the children all show up for Father’s Day understandably suspicious she seems more annoyed with them than having any doubt in Joy.

Now I have to tell you that Apples Must Fall unfolds on two timelines. One of them describes more or less the actions that I have described. The other takes a few months in the future when Joy Delaney has been reporting missing by the Delaney children. We meet one more character that is critical to the story: Detective Inspector Christina Khoury. Christina, like many police, is suspicious by nature. She spends most of the novel thinking she is Sherlock Holmes, where it becomes increasingly clear the longer Apples continues that she’s actually Lestrade or one of the countless Scotland Yard Inspectors that Holmes would show up at the beginning of the story to save them from themselves.

Have I given away too much? Not really. Because while Apples is about what happened to Joy in a sense, it’s also to a greater extent about the Delaney children and so many of the illusions that they have spent their lives living under. None of them want to believe that their mother is dead, but the longer she is missing the more likely it appears. None of them want to even consider what becomes a possibility the longer the novel goes on – that Stan may have killed his wife.

Apples is listed on the book jacket as the story of a match between the Delaney children and their views of their parents.  In actuality much like Big Little Lies, it shows the story of what a happy marriage looks like and what it actually is. The Delaneys perfect, like so many others, had cracks under the surface. And the appearance of Savannah, who as the children are right to suspect, causes them to fragment and then blow up.

There will be some readers who will no doubt look at the relationship between Savannah and Joy and find Joy hopelessly naïve when it comes to Savannah, especially when the web of lies that Savannah is spinning become revealed and she nevertheless stays loyal to her. I actually found that this was logical when you consider the character of Joy. Joy has spent her entire life taking care of people, her children, her students and her husband. We learn that she never had the best maternal influence. There is a very real possibility that Savannah is the first person in her entire life that has ever taken care of her without question. Even when Savannah tells her at a critical juncture: “I’m not a nice person”, Joy refuses to accept it even though she should know better by now.

Perhaps that is why I chose Apples Must Fall as my novel for May. We spend a lot of time giving lip service to the jobs mothers must do without really understanding the sacrifices they’ve made over the years and decades. (I think the fact that Moriarty chose to have a critical dinner happen at Father’s Day and not deal with Mother’s Day at all was deliberate.) Joy Delaney has spent her life relentlessly, sacrificing everything for her children, and at one critical point in the novel, chose them over her husband. She desperately tries to keep that charade going even when its clear things are falling apart in her family. But that’s the thing. A child would much rather believe the illusion rather than the reality. This becomes critically clear in the novel’s final pages when we learn the true nature of the characters and how that character’s experience with Joy may have changed them for the better, even if they’re still using it for their own ends.

One last thing. It is not my place to tell you the fate of Joy Delaney in this review. (Though honestly if you’ve read enough of Moriarty’s work, you’ll know that she’s never been much for doom and gloom, Big Little Lies being a key exception.) But I will say one thing for all the senior citizens out there. If you don’t own a cell phone, reading Apples Must Fall will absolutely convince you how essential it is. And don’t buy a flip phone. Go for an iPhone with all the settings – especially an enhanced keyboard. Your kids will thank you for it.

  

For Mattea Roach on Jeopardy It Was 23...And Then, Not Me

 

 

On Thursday night, it looked like Mattea Roach’s had finally run out on Jeopardy. She spent almost the entire game in second place behind Sarah Snider and was in a distant second when Final Jeopardy happened. When she wrote down her response for Final Jeopardy, she added in parentheses: “If this is it, thanks for the fun!) But the fun didn’t end as inexplicably Sarah didn’t know the answer to a seemingly easy reference to Citizen Kane and in shock, Mattea’s streak continued.

But perhaps the writing was on the wall. It didn’t seem that way for much of the Jeopardy round when she held a considerable lead. Then near the end Danielle Mauer risked everything on a Daily Double in INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER GLOSSARY and made it work for her. She closed the gap considerably. Mattea did what she did so often in Double Jeopardy; she built a commanding lead early. But late in Double Jeopardy Danielle, in a distant second bet $5000 on a Daily Double in 4 ‘N’ and at the last possible second came up with a correct response to a clue referring to the Annunciation, taking a potential runaway game away from Mattea. When Double Jeopardy ended: Mattea led with $19,200 to Danielle’s $11,400: a large but not insurmountable lead.

The Final Jeopardy category was a very broad one: USA and the clue was not an easy one: “These 2 mayors gave their names to a facility built on the site of an old race track owned by Coca-Cola magnate Asa Candler. Danielle is a resident of Peachtree Corners, Georgia: The correct response was, which she knew, was “Who are Hartsfield and Jackson?” (the namesakes of the Atlanta airport.) As Ken would say: “For a Georgia native, maybe not so hard, but remember these clues are written months in advance and assigned randomly (without knowing who the contestants are). Mattea knew that better than most contestants. Just three days earlier, the Toronto native had done very well on a clue that happened to refer to ‘O Canada!” But Final Jeopardy giveth as much as takes away. Mattea didn’t know the correct response. Her guess was: “What are Churchill and Downs?” (idk). She wagered $3601, which brought her down to $15,599, exactly one dollar less that Danielle’s total after Final Jeopardy. Danielle could not stop laughing as she won $15,600 and more importantly became known as the Jeopardy champion who had dethroned Mattea Roach, the winner of the past 23 games and $560,983.

It is a testament to the quality of play in the thirty-eighth season of Jeopardy that both of these totals were only the third highest number achieved by a Jeopardy champion this season. Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider had won 38 and 40 games respectively with both winning within the $1.5 million range. And while Mattea Roach may be the fifth winningest player in Jeopardy history in terms of both games won and money won, compared to the four players ahead of her, Mattea doesn’t even come close to them in comparison to those four ahead of her. A simple chart will suffice:

AT 23 GAMES

Matt Amodio: $825,401

Amy Schneider: $855,600

James Holzhauer: $1, 780,237

Ken Jennings:  $755,360

 

(On a side note, I was rather stunned to see that the three players directly behind Jennings in games won all were winning money at a much higher rate then him. Jennings was far more conservative in his wagers in Final Jeopardy and he did get quite a few wrong along the way.)

Mattea’s score while impressive is far more a factor of her betting conservatively on Daily Doubles and not having nearly as big a lead when Final Jeopardy came. In her 23 games, Mattea managed to runaway with thirteen of them. That’s an impressive number by anyone, including most Jeopardy players. But compare that to the four players ahead of her on the list by this point in their runs:

 

Ken Jennings: 18 Runaways

James Holzhauer: 21 Runaways

Matt Amodio: 19 Runaways

Amy Schneider: 18 Runaways

 

Now I’m not trying to diminish Mattea’s accomplishment by any measure – she is clearly one of the greatest Jeopardy players in history. But as anyone who has spent a long time watching the show, it is clear that her level of greatness is more in line with many of the players she just surpassed earlier this week. I mentioned in an article about this being peak Jeopardy that Mattea does compare much more favorably with the other two players who won nineteen games, David Madden in 2005 and Jason Zuffranieri in 2019 and Julia Collins who won 20 games in 2014. Another chart will show how well she compares with that group in terms of money won and games won by runaway:

 

 

Mattea Roach: $460,184 – 13 Runaways

David Madden: $430,400 – 11 Runaways

Julia Collins: $428,100 – 13 Runaways

Jason Zuffranieri: $532. 496 – 14 runaways

 

All things considered, this isn’t bad company to be a part of. And to be listed among the ten winningest Jeopardy players of all time (Matt Jackson and Austin Rogers each won thirteen games and just over $410,000 for both of them) its impressive company to be in by any measure.

Now comes the obvious question: whither the Tournament of Champions? As someone who has spent his life watching these tournaments, I can tell you firsthand that just because you win the most money in a season doesn’t mean you necessarily win that Tournament, and that’s before you consider that two of Mattea’s fellow competitors are going to be Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider. What I’m relatively sure of that Mattea, much like the show itself, has a great future of her ahead in Jeopardy. At only 23, she has a lot of tournaments to look forward to (given the show’s history, it is more than likely that there will be one for the fortieth anniversary of Jeopardy less than two years down the road. And given how entertaining a personality she is to watch behind the podium even before she plays the game, she’s already become one of the most popular players of all time. I can’t wait to see what she accomplishes in the years to come.

Why The Reboot of The Wonder Years Deserves A Second Season

 

We are coming to the end of the 2021-2022 broadcast season. There was a time I used to dedicate this period in my blog to advocate for network series that were ‘on the bubble’. I’ve done it less frequently as the quality of so many network offerings have diminished to the point that most of them either aren’t worth saving or get cancelled before they get a chance. But there are still some broadcast series worth saving and this column will argue for one of them.

It’s not really a surprise that the series airs on ABC; this is, after all, a network with a long and storied history of developing extremely brilliant series and just as quickly cancelling them. This is the network that has decided to let Station 19 and The Good Doctor keep on going, while letting far more exceptional shows like American Crime and For the People die just as arbitrarily. I suppose this is where the constant reader of this blog expects me to advocate of A Million Little Things or Big Sky, two exceptional dramas that I keep insisting the Emmys should nominating for awards and never happens. Both series are, like they have been in past years, on the bubble and may very well meet their end in a few weeks. Instead, I’m going to do something none of you who read this blog would expect me to do: advocate in the strongest possible terms for a reboot to be renewed.

There has rarely been such hostility towards the revival of a series before it even aired the way that so many people reacted when ABC announced that they would be rebooting The Wonder Years under Lee Daniels’ province with an African-American family.  How dare they make a ‘woke’ series of one of the most beloved shows in TV history? How dare they give it they ‘ruin’ the same way the networks have done with The Equalizer and Walker, Texas Ranger? The fact that the original The Wonder Years was looked on with harsh criticism in the 1980s for daring to look at the 1960s in the same way and was never a ratings bonanza is, of course, lost on so many people. The fact that so many of these critics who have been ranting about the damage to America since the 1960s – a decade primarily about racial struggles – would not see the double standard is just as lost on them. The series is currently ranked with a 5.9 rating on imdb.com, even though the lions share of the reviews for individual episodes ranks between a seven and eight range. It’s clear that just the idea of it caused so much resentment in closed minded people who have obviously never even watched the series that they have heavily weighted their rankings in advance.

I was more than willing to be fair to the series and it more than justified my faith. It’s extremely well written and acted from EJ Williams and Dule Hill down, and is just as comic and entertaining as the original series. I had no problem putting it on my top ten list for 2021. Watching the series over the past several months, I am struck by a couple of things that may shock some people: 1) how it is not a ‘woke’ series at all, and is in fact only slightly more political in its views than the original, and 2) that it fundamentally looks at the issues of family and friendship in a deeper way that the original series.

Much of the original Wonder Years focused less on the relationship between Kevin and his family then with his friends and growing up. The new Wonder Years is far more focused on the idea of family and how it affects you. Dean has a tricky relationship with his sister Kim, who does believe, casually, in the idea of black militancy. She’s also just as determined to find a place for herself in the world, which includes working at a diner. During one episode, we saw Kim’s relationship with her friends from high school who found Dean ‘cute’, but were actually pumping him for information about her ex-boyfriend. Simultaneously Kim was engaged in a troubled relationship with one of her fellow waitresses, a slightly older white girl. The white girl is a racist, right? Wrong. In actuality, the white girl has been in a situation like Kim’s and it ended up leaving her a single mother. The two end up becoming closer and the episode ends with Kim babysitting her son.

The reboot also demonstrates that generational differences didn’t start with the 1960s. In ‘Country Dean’, the Williams family visits Dean’s grandparents and it becomes clear almost from the moment Lillian sets foot in the door that she and her mother never got along. Lillian is a very skilled professional – we saw in an early episode that she practically runs the accounting office she works in – but none of that seems to make a difference to her mother, who is set her ways and utterly refuses to accept her daughters help in a land dispute, even as it becomes increasingly clear that her parents need the help. The episode actually ends with Lillian and her mother helping birth a calf and Dean sees a side of his mother he never knew, and learns from a neighbor that her mother can’t stop bragging about her daughter when she’s not there.

We’ve gotten a closer look at Bill’s father over the last few episodes, most recently in ‘Goose Grease’ where Dean tries to bond with his father in a hunting trip and ends up exposing three generations of Williams’s men to chicken pox.  Grandpa Cisby refuses to rely on going to a doctor even as Dean worsens, and there’s a very clear reason other than stubbornness. He tells his son that “one of his friends was treating at Tuskegee and he keeps getting worse.” (Don Cheadle, the narrator says, quietly: “That’s the part of history they still don’t teach enough in school.) It does illustrate a greater fear that so many African-Americans have always had of medical professionals and when they are forced to go to the hospital (Dean develops blood poisoning) it’s telling that its Grandpa Cisby who decides to be brave and get his blood drawn for his grandson.

But the best episode to date has been ‘Love and War’. We’ve heard in bits and pieces that Bruce, the oldest Williams child, has been fighting in Vietnam, and at the end of Goose Grease, the Williams’ learn that he was wounded in action. Bruce is recovering a VA hospital when the Williams’ meet his much older girlfriend (she’s about seven years older than him). They’re not inclined to like her, and even less when they learn she’s divorced and has a young son. Dean sees the child as a rival for his brother’s affection and wants him to suffer. The episode is very funny in this regard, particularly as the Williams’ get to like his girlfriend despite that, and when the Williams parents try to thwart Bruce’s efforts to move in with his new girlfriend, Kim says: “You don’t want to hear this, but you probably drove him to doing just what you want him not to.” It actually gets funnier when they learn he proposed and she says: “I told you so.”

But the show reaches a serious tone when Bruce, who has spent the episode refusing to discuss how he got wounded or why he’s ashamed of his Bronze Star, tells the family of his combat experience and how his injury came at the cost of one his closest friends, Brian.  He feels the same guilt that so many soldiers who came home have always felt, that his fallen comrades will never get to have a wife and family, and that he didn’t deserve the medal. Bill gently tells his son: “They didn’t give (the medal) for who you were during the war; they gave it to you for who you were before.” And you get a sense that there’s a stronger ties between the Williams’ parents and the oldest child then their ever was between the Arnolds and their oldest child.

ABC actually provided a link between this version of The Wonder Years and the original in the last minute by showing Dean and Bruce looking at the picture of Brian and his kid sister.  Dean asks her name: “Gwendolyn. But he called her Winnie.” And those of who remember the original will recall Winnie Cooper learned her brother died in Vietnam in the Pilot of the original. Some will no doubt scoff at this as a throw in to the fans. To them I’d say two things: first, a lot of soldiers died in Vietnam, and two, barring some really radically anti-aging computer graphics does anyone really think we’re going to see Danica McKellar, especially after this series has gone out of its way to ignore any real link to the original until now? Both versions may be set at the same time; they’re not filmed there.

The Wonder Years more than deserves to be renewed and ABC has given it more confidence that some of their other series, giving it a full season renewal rather than cancelling it early. But you’d think given its quality that they’d be willing to show the same level of confidence they were willing to give Abbott Elementary, another high quality comedy series that also deserves to be talked about for Emmy consideration. Considering the fact black-ish ended its run last month, ABC needs all the great comedy series it can get right now. And seriously, if they’re willing to give The Goldbergs a tenth seasons after all the crap it’s going through with Jeff Garlin, this should be a no-brainer.  On a personal level, I really want to see how the future unfolds for the Williams clans. The 1960s and 70s were different were very different for them and the Arnolds, but the fact that its willing to show that many of the same problems did affect them is a note of optimism we need in television – broadcast in particular – right now.

 

 

Police Procedural Problems, Interrogation Edition Part 2: How Major Crimes Took the Same Cast and Writers And Solved Most of the First Show's Problems

In the opening minutes of Major Crimes, Detective Andy Flynn (Tony Denison) is about to interrogate a suspect after a robbery-homicide. He tells the audience his method: he’s going to soften the suspect out, and then when he asks for a lawyer, one of his fellow detectives will impersonate one. He spends a couple of minutes talking to the suspect, and just as he goes out to ask for an ‘attorney’, a shot rings out at the suspect is killed. Though no one could have known at the time, this murder in the Pilot fundamentally changed how the writers of The Closer were going to approach policing in the continuation of their arc.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, one of the more important recurring characters in the back half of The Closer was Sharon Rayder, brilliant played by Mary McConnell. As the representative of the Force Investigation Unit (the LAPD’s equivalent of Internal Affairs) Rayder may have been introduced to serve as the clichéd nemesis to Brenda Johnson. Almost from the beginning of the procedural, the kind of cop that police that police are always presented as the heavies. You know the type: the cops who prevent ‘real policework’ from being done, even if that policework should involving shooting an unarmed man in cold blood or even worse, trying to convince that same cops’ partner that the shooting was not justified. And given her early appearances, which involved police involved shootings, it would have been hard not to view Captain Rayder the same way.

But one of the better developments of the last season was showing Rayder as a character who was the opposite of the coin that Chief Johnson represented: someone who believed in justice for all, but who didn’t want to violate the rights of the accused to do it. During the ‘Shootin’ Newton investigation and lawsuit, Rayder took on the harder job of trying to find the information leak in the department that Brenda stubbornly insisted wasn’t there. And even though it might have been in the department’s interest to for the suit to be settled, Rayder gently nudged Brenda away from doing so, out of a sense of compassion that perhaps no one else in the department had.

That didn’t mean Rayder hadn’t built up a huge amount of animosity within the rank and file in Brenda’s squad: when it was announced that Rayder was taking over the leadership in the Pilot of Major Crimes, there was a lot of hostility, particularly from Louie Provenza (G.W. Bailey) who had never much cared for her. But Rayder managed to generally earn the respect as the first season wore on.

One of the most significant changes in Major Crimes was the approach to interrogation. In almost every interrogation that took place on The Closer, Chief Johnson was always leading it, lying at every opportunity to the suspects. Rayder was occasionally in the room with the witnesses and suspects, but was far more inclined that Johnson ever was to delegate authority. Deception was allowed on occasion, but more often it was done in subtler ways – bringing in the family or friends of the victim without telling them the reason why they were doing so initially to gauge their reaction to the news. And the lion’s share of the interrogations involved far less deception even when the killer’s identity was known to the police. Perhaps this was less because confessions was no longer the goal the way it was with The Closer – it was getting pleas that wouldn’t take up trial dates. Indeed, representatives of the district attorney’s office who had almost non-existent in The Closer were in almost every episode of Major Crimes, almost certainly there to make sure the detectives did not step out of bounds.

And the investigation into the murders – which were less rigorous than they should have been on The Closer – actually made up the body of Major Crimes. Because all of the cops were required to do policework as opposed to just make Kyra Sedgwick look good, every character on the series’ IQ went up at least twenty point and they were allowed to have far more of a personality. Provenza and Flynn remained used for comic relief, but they were also allowed to let their years of experience count for something when it came to investigations. Sgt. Tao, mainly used for tech support on The Closer, was allowed to show how his technology expertise proved a person’s alibi. Detective Sanchez (Raymond Cruz) who mostly seemed inclined to yell at suspects was still angry but he was allowed to let his knowledge of expertise of gangs of LA and the low-class neighborhoods are relevant to crimes. And all of them were giving intriguing backstories in the way no one other than Brenda was on the series – Provenza, whose ex-wives had basically been used for comedy in the series, was allowed the awkward process of wooing an ER nurse who genuinely seemed to care about him and love him because of his flaws.

Because of the way that cops were more inclined to follow procedure in their investigations, even the stories that involved comedy seemed to give many characters more dimension. A prime example of this involved the Season 3 story ‘Frozen Assets’. Flynn and Provenza are called into an investigation by a security they knew from The Closer. In that episode ‘Richard Tracy’ (think about it) impersonate a cop, stole evidence from the unwitting police, and then spent the next several hours getting ahead of the investigators until Flynn and Provenza caught him. Brenda was utterly unable to break the personality of someone who was mentally ill, and it took some sweet-talking by Chief Pope to get him to go along with the investigation.

In ‘Frozen Assets’, ‘Tracy’ has clearly undergone psychiatric help, is on medication and is working as a security guard for a millionaire’s dog. He has called Flynn and Provenza for assistance because the dog has been poisoned and he thinks the ‘killer’ was also the one who killed the dog’s owner.  This is still a comic episode to be sure, but it’s remarkable how the comedy involving ‘Tracy’ is allowed to develop from a more ‘rational’ point of view. At one point when everybody suspects he’s a conspirator, he goes in front of them and says: “I’m the culprit? That’s insane, and trust me: I know something about insanity.” Then he goes through a five point plan as to just how wrong they are…and all of his points are perfectly logical. And this time, he actually ends up solving the investigation. There is a comic ending that demonstrates he’s still not quite there, but in the context of the episode it’s hard to argue he hasn’t earned it.

Perhaps the clearest demonstration of how far Major Crimes moved away from the type of policework that The Closer and so many other shows justified was in the fourth season story arc ‘Hindsight’. (Starting in Season 4, Major Crimes shifted more towards multi-episode investigations rather than individual ones; the final season would only feature the former.) The squad is called into investigate new evidence in the decade-old murder of a cop and a district attorney. One of the detectives goes to see a disgraced ex-detective Mark Hickman who investigated the crime and perjured himself on the stand (Jason Gedrick, who’s had experience in short-lived acclaimed procedurals like E-Z Streets and Boomtown.) His character was Tao’s former partner and he has never forgiven him for not backing up the lie he told.

Hickman represents every aspect of the bad, racist cop that you used to find in so many procedurals (NYPD Blue comes to mind as a prime example) In an early encounter with Amy Sykes, he insults her indirectly by saying: “The white man’s time is over.” Sykes retort of: “They had a good run’ is ignored. Hickman is rarely sober and utterly controlled by rage: in one episode, he goes into the residence of the dealer he was sure was guilty of the murder and points a gun to his head, demanding he confess. He comes into the office, drunk, insults everybody including his former partner, for ‘not having his back’. Tao, usually even-tempered, takes out his badge and gun, puts them on his desk, and walks out into the hall to beat him up, something that is only stopped by Rayder’s arrival on the scene. It is revealed that Hickman was having an affair with the ADA killed and eventually that the man he lost his job over was not responsible at all. And even at the end of the arc, he refuses to accept any responsibility for his actions or that his approach was wrong. “They’ll be a time when you need cops like me,” he says in one of his last lines to Sykes. But Major Crimes has made it more than clear that the kind of policing he – and the show he represented – is past.

Major Crimes was not a perfect series by any means, as I’ve illustrated in previous articles. But when it came to representing how the interrogation process and more importantly, the investigation process for the police drama should proceed, the series far outweighed the process we saw on The Closer. In that sense, Major Crimes may also be that rarest of things: a spinoff that was actually superior to the original.

 

 

Ozark May Be Over, But It's Still Overrated

 

I would have been just fine if my article classifying Netflix’s Ozark as part of my Overrated series had been the last word I ever had to write about that series. But I knew in the end it wouldn’t be. I’ve already expressed fundamentally that Ozark is the definition of an Emmy bait series and that trend will no doubt continue into the Emmy nominations just a few months away. I may spend immense time pretending it isn’t going to be there, but I’ll have to talk about it by July at the very latest.

To be clear, I’d gotten more than my fair share of Ozark by the time I’d finished Season 1 and I have absolutely no intention of ever watching the remainder of it. So I did the ‘easiest’ thing I could, I went online and got details on how the final season had played out, and who lived and who died. (For those of you who care, there will be spoilers for the fourth season ahead.) And honestly, the more I read about the episode summaries of Ozark I got a much clearer picture of why so many people loathe the series and so many critics love it.

Ozark is the dictionary definition of Peak TV. It is centered around an ordinary family who finds themselves at the center of a criminal enterprise (like Breaking Bad) it shows the loss of innocence, one by one, of each member of the family (The Americans comes to mind as a far superior example of this) and it shows as the families tries to get out of their situation, the body count on both sides of the law as well as innocent civilians gets higher and higher (Sons of Anarchy a series genuinely beloved by some comes to mind.) And it has a lot of great actors and actress – Jason Bateman, Laura Linney, Julia Garner and so many others among its cast – (I’m reminded in a sense of Damages). It has all of the ingredients of series that are generally given awards.

The thing is what Ozark has always lacked fundamentally, and became clearer throughout the final season (though to be clear, I gather that only from reading about it) were any huge penalties for the Byrde family. They moved to the Ozarks in the first season to get out from under the thumb of a cartel. In order to do so, they involved innocents, criminal families (particularly the Langmores) and multiple law enforcements agencies, local and federal. But with one major exception, they didn’t really pay for it at the end. Walter White died at the end of Breaking Bad, but his family will spend the rest of their lives living under the shadow of Heisenberg. Philip and Elizabeth escaped prison, but they will live their lives in Russia without their children.  And all the deaths of Sons of Anarchy in the final season were basically of the people in the family of SAMCRO.

The Byrdes by contrast got away with all of their crimes, survived every attempt of the crime families and syndicates to murder them, and will live the rest of their lives in Witness Protection; with the last person who might be able to stop them being killed in the final seconds by Jonah, the Byrde son. Now you can argue as much as you want about the loss of innocence of the Byrdes children and that the sins will be passed down to them, but the fact is in the final episodes Wendy maneuvered a way to subvert her children’s last attempt to get out of from under them so that she ‘could take care of them’. Considering that every action Marty Byrde did was under the guise of protecting his family, they were doomed by the end of the first season at the most.

Defenders of Ozark – whoever they are – will no doubt try to show the arc of the series in comparison of The Sopranos. (By the way, the cut to black before the shot was fired wasn’t homage to the infamous final episode; it was a rip-off.) But The Sopranos was about the decline of the American Dream and how most it has corroded so that the average American not just criminals will always make the choice that hurts them the least if it involves violence.  Ozark basically showed that no matter what choices you make in the world of crime, it always results in death and violence – except to everyone involved. At least Carmela managed not to directly have anyone killed during the run of the series; Laura Linney’s Wendy seemed to have just as high a body count as her husband by the end, and seemed just as determined not to get out clean. Which she did – even the car crash that could have killed her in the final episode, she walked away from unhurt.

I don’t want to try and draw a parallel between the rise of Ozark and the problems that Netflix as a service is facing, but let’s consider  what the four series offered that were nominated for Best Drama by the Emmys before Ozark debuted in 2017. (I include Orange is the New Black as a drama for this purpose.  House of Cards, before it essentially became a soap opera, told the story of the behind the scenes machinations in contemporary DC and how one couple could manipulate them for their own benefit. Orange is the New Black went behind the scenes of the American penal system to look at justice, race and sexuality through that lens. Stranger Things, among its other virtues, tells the story of the power of family and friendship and how even the outcasts among youth can bond against unimaginable evil. And The Crown looks at the story of the decline of the British monarchy and how its stultifying rules have drastically damaged the lives of the ruling family even as they increasingly become mere figureheads.

Ozark, by contrast, is a blunt and cynical story that basically seems to say that if you’re a white family who has control of money and power, you can get away with murder and bloodshed and walk away clean – a story that we didn’t need Jason Bateman or the writers to tell us.

That’s not to say that none of the other shows I just mentioned aren’t just as cynical about power and the corruption of human nature: House Of Cards and The Crown emphasize this to a great extent. What makes Ozark far weaker a series by comparison is how heartless it is about all of its central characters. The Underwoods may have ruthless when it came to climbing over anyone that got in their way, but the series went out of its way to humanize Frank and Claire, particularly when it came to their marriage and the traumas they had gone through growing up. They were haunted by the death of Peter Russo, at the very least. Similarly, watching Elizabeth try to strain against the monarchy’s rules in the first season and then bring them down on her own children in Seasons 3 or 4 plays not so much as bad writing but as the genuine cost of being part of a system that was anachronistic long before she became heir to it.

By contrast, neither Marty nor Wendy seems to have an ounce of compassion towards anyone from the Pilot on. Marty doesn’t show any regret or remorse for the situation he has put his family in, and any sympathy we might have for his situation is lost by the fact he went in with his eyes open. Wendy is initially more sympathetic, but in later seasons as she arranges to have her bipolar brother be killed to protect her children and tries to save her children against her wishes show that she doesn’t even seem to have any compassion for her family.  And for all her efforts to show regret when the Byrdes realize that Ruth – their closest ally and the woman whose family they destroyed in their climb to protect their own – is going to be murdered, she still does nothing about it. What’s one more body to protect foundations?

And I think this has had an effect on how many people view Netflix. People had reasons to keep watching House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, even after it became a slog in some case. By contrast, many people had a reason to stop watching Ozark and start complaining about it in a way that many viewers hadn’t about so many Peak TV series. Series like The Crown and Stranger Things were reasons to get Netflix; Ozark was a good reason to start watching Hulu or Amazon.

Ozark will probably end up getting Emmy nominations for Best Drama as well as acting nominations for Bateman, Linney and Julia Garner. The fact that there are far better dramas on their air that have more imagination and verve – I’m thinking particularly of series like Evil and The Good Fight, far more well acted and written dramas that are among the most likely to be overlooked – is irrelevant. Ozark is, as I mentioned in my Overrated Series, an Emmy bait show. The fact that, like almost all Emmy bait shows it may have the cast and writers that merit awards while the product doesn’t, is irrelevant at this point. The Emmys have given this series all the money and power. And as the Byrdes have taught us, once you have that, it doesn’t matter what bad things you end up doing to get there. At least this will be the last time we have to deal with Ozark. There are other series that I will get too that are just as overrated that we will be dealing with for awhile.

 

Barry Has Returned, And He's Truly Lost

 

It’s been almost three years since we left the carnage of the finale of Season 2 of Barry from the massacre that Barry started that killed off everybody but his targets of former mentor Monroe Fuchs, the performance that Sally Reed threw her past away in order to get the deal of her dream and when Barry’s acting instructor Gene Cousineau learned his detective girlfriend was dead and that Barry had killed her. I haven’t been breathless with anticipation quite as long as I was for Atlanta, but I really wanted to see where the series could possibly go from here. If the first two episodes are any indication, even darker territory lies ahead.

It’s been six months since Season 2 ended, and Barry is truly lost.  He’s now taking hit jobs for hire on the Dark Web’s version of Craig’s List, and he can’t even carry them out well.  Everywhere he goes he sees the faces of his loved ones with bullet holes in the forehead. In desperation, he goes to the home of Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan), the Chechynan hit man whose troops he slaughtered in the Season 2 finale, begging for work and demanding forgiveness. ‘Forgiveness has to be earned,” Hank tells him, before misquoting The Shawshank Redemption about what to do next. Barry then finally manages to track down Gene, who has been in a similar tailspin. He meets with Barry with every intention of killing him, but at the critical moment his gun falls apart. Barry then plans to kill Gene, and then tries to come up to earn forgiveness.

Last night, he ended up spending the bulk of the episode driving around with Gene in his trunk, trying to get a job for him. This episode more than anything showed how beyond lost Barry is. He went to visit Sally at her show, begging him to find work for Gene, and when she told him it was impossible, he did everything but scream at her. When one of the stars of her show tried to report it to HR, it was a subtle message of just how broken the system for abusive women is. Barry tried to get a part with the woman held him an audition, and ended up with a reading for himself. Then he tried to get Gene to accept his forgiveness, telling him it’s either this ‘or I kill you.’ He managed to get the part he needed and one for Gene, only to find that Gene managed to escape the trunk of his car. Gene managed to get back hope and was about to tell his son to call the police…only to find Barry on the couch with his grandson. The last minute was one of the most truly frightening things on TV all year as Barry told Gene that he was going to take the part and accept everything that comes with it ‘or this one (his son) and this one (his grandson) go away.” In a closing that terrifying and pathetic, Barry asked Gene to say he loved him. After Gene managed to get it out, Barry asked him to say it again.

In my early reviews of Barry in Season 2, I wrote that I had failed to consider Bill Hader as one of the great comic actors of his era. Watching the first two episodes of Season 3, its clear Hader is one of the best actors on television, period. Watching Barry stumble from hits in the desert to talking with his girlfriend to potential auditions, Hader demonstrates that Barry has finally lost the thread of his life.  There’s no path for him as a killer and he doesn’t seem to have it in him to be an actor.  Even the lines he uses to persuade other people of his value are hijacked from his friends. In the previous two seasons, the monster was there, but Barry seemed to control it. Now he doesn’t want to make the effort any more. Hader more than deserved the two consecutive Best Actor Emmys he got in the first two seasons; his work so far in Season 3 leaps him well into contention for his third.

Now in case you’re wonder if Hader’s darkness has drained out all the fun of Barry, I assure you it hasn’t. Anthony Carrigan remains utterly perfect as Hank, now having an affair with the Colombian boss he tried to kill of just the previous season. When he’s called in for his first interrogation, he preens himself before he goes in, and seems to enjoy leading the police down a wrong path. Sarah Goldberg’s work as Sally is just as fascinating as hysterical, mainly as she tried to negotiate to ridiculous level of stardom she hasn’t earned and is trying to maneuver around – clueless executives and a ridiculous agent who just boosts everything even if it hurts her client. (Welcome back, D’Arcy Carden!) And for all the horrors that Gene has been through already, Henry Winkler continues to demonstrate his ability to find comedy through everything. When Barry tells him his plan is to keep him in his trunk until he finds Gene work, he just says: “That could take years!” When he manages to somehow escape, he finds himself running through the yard of a lesbian couple who are breaking up because one keeps too many dogs --- all of which are currently mauling Gene. When he tries to explain this to a bored pizza woman, his relating the story – and her utter lack of emotion – is hysterical. Winkler deserves another Emmy just for that scene alone. I actually kind of was upset when all five season regulars, including Stephen Root, received Emmy nominations back in 2019. Boy was I an idiot. It’s been two years, but I hope the Emmys have enough long term memory to give all of them nomination. (I know we’ve only seen Root in two scenes in the first episode so far. Tell me he hasn’t earned a nomination for a scene where he takes breakfast cereal out into a desolate plain and starts milking a goat.)

Barry is clearly one of the great achievements in television history; the rare mix of drama and comedy that has not yet gone over the top in one direction the way so many series like Weeds and Nurse Jackie did to stop to being funny.  Most of the characters are just as lost and doomed as Nancy Botwin and Jackie Peyton were, but for a change that’s actually the reason to watch the series, not a drawback. I can see this being the kind of comedy series where the ending would matter just as much the prestige shows like Breaking Bad and The Americans were, and I can see it being just as hysterically funny as it was in the first season. Barry Berkman may be as irredeemable as Walter White or Tony Soprano were, but at this stage in the proceedings, it is more than clear that Barry will not be.

My score: 5 stars.

 

A Look At Politics From The Female Perspective, Part 2: Gaslit, How All The President's Men Tried To Discredit A 'Dangerous' Woman

 

 

As a student of American history and politics in general, there are certain areas that I often think I have exhausted all my knowledge of. Pre and post Civil War politics. Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era. Every aspect of the Kennedys. And to an extent, I thought I knew every conceivable detail about the Nixon administration and Watergate. As Gaslit will no doubt demonstrate, that is because I left out the point of view one very specific woman.

Martha Mitchell was the wife of John Mitchell, Nixon’s attorney general and until fairly recently one of the most controversial men to ever hold the office. During the Administration, Martha was known in Georgetown and to the nation as ‘eccentric’ that euphemism that we often use when we don’t want to call a person crazy.  (When a summation of Nixon gets you recognized as ‘the sanest one of the bunch’, that honestly seemed to be saying less about Martha than the men in the White House.) But in this case, eccentric was probably more a euphemism for someone who did something that wasn’t thought of highly in the 1970s for a woman, particularly the wife of someone who worked for Nixon. She spoke her mind, and when she did, it was often against the administration’s policies.  She was one of the harshest critics of the Vietnam War, which understandably was never going to make her popular. And because of her marriage and more importantly her relationship with James McCord, one of the Plumbers G. Gordon Liddy hustled into burgling the Watergate, the administration and John Mitchell himself was very concerned with what Martha knew and when did she know it. So the same geniuses who cooked up invading the DNC decided to launch a scheme to discredit her, whatever it took.

Considering in the half-century since Watergate brought down the Presidency we seem to have heard the story of every single person even tangentially attached to the Nixon White house or the scandal, its kind of astonishing that it’s taken this long for anyone to tell the story of Martha. It’s slightly less astounding that the story is being told under the auspices of Sam Esmail, one of the greatest creative forces of the last decade, who brought us the astounding Mr. Robot and the remarkable Homecoming.  It is that latter series that no doubt led to the casting of Julia Roberts as Martha Mitchell.

Roberts is perfectly on point as Martha, a woman who is completely independent in thought and as politically savvy (if not more so) then her husband. In the second episode, she and John make a trip to California where after John fails to convince a Reagan backer to endorse Nixon, Martha challenges him to a game of pool and lays out plainly why Nixon succeeded at the 1968 convention where Reagan failed, justifying it by saying that the South looks at Nixon’s granting their promises as if he were Christ. When the backer numbly asks if Martha is seriously comparing Jesus to Nixon, Martha says: “Of course not. Jesus couldn’t survive a Republican primary. (A fact truer now than then,)

The Mitchells marriage is stormy, to say the least. In the middle of a DC party, John tears Martha aside to berate for her horrid behavior and they have a knock down drag out argument that leads to an actual fight. After John slaps Martha, she actually berates her husband harder saying: “My mother hit me harder than that.”  (The side of the youngest Mitchell daughter, hiding in a coat rack with a cigarette in her mouth is one of the saddest things I’ve seen, particularly as it shows one of the few absolute innocents in this entire story.) Could the Mitchells, seen in happiness have walked away from this if things had gone their normal course? Well that night the break-in happened, so the odds are no.

Everything that we see involving every aspect of the Watergate unfolds as if it were being played out by the Marx Brothers. Gordon Liddy (magnificently portrayed by Shea Whigham in yet another masterful character portrayal) comes across as someone who should never have been taken seriously by anyone in government, least of all the lead council to the President. He presents one of the most elaborate eleven point presentations as to dirty tricks that everyone tries to gently suggest is beyond ridiculous. When he requests Cubans for a far smaller operation and Jeb Magruder (Hamish Linklater) laughs in his face, he puts him in a chokehold. When the initial bugging goes south and he orders another one, the Cuban he’s hired publicly mock the group as amateurs. The actual break-in involves so many blunder, pratfalls, ridiculous code names and God help us, a discussion between the difference between a windbreaker and a parka. This is the rare case where history played out first as farce, then as tragedy.

Martha’s involvement in all this would have been tangential at best if not for the fact that one of her bodyguards was McCord, a man she actually seems to like and respect. John Mitchell seems to dismiss this at first, but the day afterwards when Martha discovers him gone, there’s a strange man in her room and he looks genuinely threatening to Martha and the audience.

Roberts is brilliant as Mitchell, obviously taking cues in her accent and behavior from the conservative socialite she played so well in Charlie Wilson’s War, one of her most undervalued performances. But the entire cast is just as good. You may know that Sean Penn is playing John Mitchell from the ads, but even after two episodes the viewer may very well think their leg is being pulled. It’s not just the padding and makeup that makes him invisible, it’s the fact that Penn utterly disappears into the portrayal of Mitchell. This could have been another chance for histrionics disguised by makeup, much the way Christian Bale’s performance as Dick Cheney in Vice was. Not so. Penn utterly disappears into Mitchell and makes the role his own.

Surrounding the two big movie stars are several of the greatest actors in television. I’ve already mentioned Whigham and Linklater and Chris Bauer are quite memorable as McCord, basically a decent man who gets in far over his head in command of greater forces. But the soul of Gaslit perhaps more than anything is Dan Stevens as John Dean, the man who essentially ended up breaking the Watergate conspiracy open before the Senate.  Gaslit does everything possible to make Dean seem like a wimp, always being browbeaten and bullied by everyone above him. Halderman and Ehrlichman don’t know who he is when he meets them. In his first White House meeting, Rosemary Woods doesn’t get his name right and he is forced to reschedule when a meeting with Strom Thurmond runs long. He attempts to resign in the first episode, until he sees his name on a memo on John Mitchell’s desk and takes a letter opener with the seal of the President on it. When the meeting is postponed three months, he tries futilely to break it by stabbing into his desk. Dean wants to be a member of the President’s Men, and is desperate to be accepted as one by Maureen (Betty Gilpin) even though she tries to get him to believe in his better nature. You get the fundamental feeling that Dean is a good man (when he encounters Mitchell’s daughter in the coat rack, he actually seems human for the first time, even offering to represent her for legal emancipation)  But Dean wanted to be in the club even though they never considered him a member. I’ve never had use for Stevens, either on Downton Abbey or the ultra bizarre Legion but here he more than demonstrates his value as an actor.

The most remarkable thing about Watergate is why it happened. Over and over in the first two episodes you keep hearing that Nixon will be reelected in a landslide and that the entire mission of bugging the DNC was a big of waste of people who knew the fact. You got the feeling that everyone was doing this to protect the ego of Nixon rather than any real belief in him. (Nixon himself has never stepped on stage so far, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see him.) The fact that the true monstrosities of everything he did only came to light because of an unnecessary farce is astounding – if Nixon had just been satisfied with his landslide, he would have a full second term, retired to Yorba Linda as an elder statesman quietly hated by everybody. Gaslit makes all this clear in its story as well as showing in subtle ways how badly we treat the people who do the right thing. (After discovering the burglary at the Watergate, security guard Frank Willis is rewarded with a raise – of $2.50 a week.)

This is where I should add by saying Gaslit can be found on Starz, a channel that I have spent the better part of my life not having as part of my cable package until relatively recently.  I’ve had no real use for Outlander, it’s most famous offering, but I have regretting never watching Power or any of the two spinoffs that came afterward. Starz has produced some interesting television series in its history – the intriguing Kelsey Grammer series Boss and the 1960s gangster drama Magic City – but has yet to ever truly present an offering into major contention for Emmys. Gaslit looks a lot like it could be its breakthrough series. I admit it’s going to be a tough field to break into, especially in an already overcrowded Best Actress category, but Roberts’ being shutout by the Emmys for Homecoming after dominating so many previous awards show with drama nominations was one of the Emmys biggest blunders in the past decade. But like so many of the other series that will likely be considered, Gaslit is a period piece that is more relevant now than you would think. Malevolent political forces were once in the executive branch and were conquered by their own incompetence. If it were to happen again, would the Martha Mitchells and John Deans be able to save us this time?

My score: 4.5 stars.