I Hope Marcia and Skylar Help Todd Become a Success: So Help Me Todd Review

 

            For more than a quarter of a century I have been one of Marcia Gay Harden’s greatest admirers. One of the great character actresses of our time, she’s had far more success than far too many of them in her craft. In a rarity for the Oscars, they absolutely made the right call when she won Best Supporting Actress for Ed Harris minor masterpiece Pollock. In what would be the first film in Clint Eastwood’s late career renaissance Mystic River, she was just as brilliant as Tim Robbins’ incredibly strained wife who suspects her husband might be capable of murder.  Like so many actresses, she has migrated to television not long after, every so often touching the brilliance she shows film and stage. In the second season of Damages, she very nearly stole the show from Glenn Close and Rose Byrne as Claire Maddox, a lawyer for an energy company just as skilled as Patty and Ellen, and far more sexual. I’ve never forgotten how well she wore a garter belt.  She was one of the few genuinely solid performers in Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom and was superb in the cancelled too-soon ABC sitcom Trophy Wife.  I may not like The Morning Show, but I was glad to see her get an Emmy nomination for it this year.

            I haven’t admired Skyler Astin for nearly as long as Harden, but my respect for him runs just as deep. His breaking on to the scene in the Pitch Perfect franchise was wonderful and he has made wonderful performances in two of the greatest unwatched series of the past decade: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. In the former, he was recast as a fan favorite and made us forget how great Santino Fontana was; freed from a similar inhibition in the latter, he made us root for him and Zoey to get together from the start and our hearts were as broken when he lost her.  Obviously, he has one of the greatest singing voices I’ve heard in years, but he also has the innate ability to make himself instantly likable.

            It was a personal joy of mine to see two of my favorite actors of this century working together in CBS’ new drama-comedy-legal mix, So Help Me Todd. It troubled me quite a bit while, watching the pilot, the creators had decided to go out of their comfort zones by casting Harden and Astin, too truly likable people, as characters who do every in their power to rub the audience – and each other – the wrong way. Harden is Anne Brightman, a major partner at a Portland firm. Astin is her son Todd – big surprise – a former private investigator who lost his license before the series began, has been freelancing – for an insurance agency – has moved back in with his sister – who is not happy to have him in her basement  - ever since. He and his mother have spent the last two years going out of their way not to talk each other: she has lived her life playing by the rules, and  he goes out of his way to break them every chance he gets. There is also a larger problem that they don’t want to admit; they’ve had a lot of trouble speaking to each other since his father died, and she remarried. It therefore makes things very awkward when Anne’s second husband – who has Parkinson’s - disappears while they are moving into a new apartment and Todd must help her. The search for her ex-husband ends with Todd confronting him on a place to Iceland and he makes it very clear that he does not want the time he has left – with Anne. This conversation, in typical broadcast TV fashion, also makes it clear that Todd’s mother broke her code in fighting for her son to keep her license, something he never knew about.

            I won’t like to you; So Help Me Todd is, at least in its first two episodes, something of a mess. It’s still not sure how serious a drama it wants to be, how much it wants to lean into the comedy that’s occasionally funny, and how much awkwardness it wants to deal with. I respect both Harden and Astin for taking roles that go out of their comfort zones; it doesn’t make them any less grating. At this point, it’s a question which personality trait viewers will find more grating: Harden’s anal-retentive streak or Astin’s insistence of narrating into his watch like he’s the hero of his own film noir.  Most of the other regulars on the series we’ve met – apart from Todd’s sister, who is constantly being pulled between the two – aren’t much more fully drawn and in several cases, just as irksome. (I loathe Leonard, the investigator for Anne’s firm. Every sentence out of his mouth makes my skin crawl.)

            There are also some pleasures to be found; the most interesting of which is that for all Todd and Anne’s utter differences, the paths they seem devoted to taking have not brought them the rewards they thought. We already know this whenever we see Todd approach anything, but in the second episode we saw how obvious it is for Anne. Anne has spent more than thirty years at her firm and has been cultivating a relationship with the Mayor of Portland that she thinks will finally get her name on the letterhead. However, before she can meet with him, one of the partners takes over the case, reduces her to second chair, demeans her for hiring Todd, and sends her out to get food. It’s clear from the moment we meet this man that Anne has propping him and other partners for years and has gotten to the point where she’s used to her being diminished by them. When the case is successfully resolved at the end of the episode, that same partner gives half-hearted praise to Anne, and vaguely offers the possibility of senior partner, but lavishes praises on Todd without crediting her for hiring him. Even Todd knows how unfair this is.

            We’re all used to the oil and water partnerships of series, but credit where it’s due: I don’t remember the last time seeing a mother and son team anywhere. It helps matters that both Harden and Astin are gifted at playing both drama and comedy equally well and their delivery of the dialogue, especially in their scenes together, is usually the highlight of this series. And So Help Me Todd makes it very clear, though they will no doubt go to their respective graves denying it, just how alike they are. In my favorite sequences to date, both go to the hospital where Alice gives the same advice to her brother and her mother, and both utterly misconstrue the exact same way. (Alice actually tries to point this out, but neither listen to her: you get the feeling she’s used to this by now.)

            I also want to give credit to the fact that So Help Me Todd is appearing on CBS. This is the first drama I’ve seen on the network since Evil (which ended up migrating to Paramount Plus) that isn’t a procedural or an action series of some kind. Given how CBS tends to treat this kind of series, I can’t help but wonder how long So Help Me Todd is for this network before they replace it with yet another spinoff of NCIS or FBI.  Don’t get me wrong; it’s nowhere near as polished as Evil was fresh out of the gate, but there is potential and a certain level of variety that you don’t see on, well, almost any broadcast network these days, and are likely to see fewer of in the years to come. That’s the real help that Todd will need going forward, particularly as its airing against Law and Order: SVU and Grey’s Anatomy, two series that need to be put down but aren’t go anywhere. I hope viewers choose something different, even if a show like Todd is the opposite of the comfort its competition offers.

          My score: 3.75 stars.  

First Look At Season 39 Of Jeopardy: What's Happened So Far And What's To Come

 

 

            We are officially one month into Season 39 of Jeopardy and while we have yet to see a super-extended winning streak like Matt Amodio was continuing at this point last season, we have seen several smaller, skilled champions that show their own level of potential.

            The season began with Luigi De Guzman, who won the last game of the season continuing his streak until he had won five games and $140,700 before being defeated by Emmett Stanton. Emmett in turn won three games before being beaten by Martha Bath. Martha made a different kind of history when she revealed that exactly half a century earlier, she had appeared on the 1970s version of Jeopardy, winning $40 and a set of encyclopedias. She won considerably more when she defeated Emmet: $30,800.

            Three days later, another rarity appeared on Jeopardy: David Sibley, an Episcopal priest began a four-game winning streak that ended up netting just over $78,000. It is exceedingly rare for a member of any clergy to appear on Jeopardy, much less do this well. But in David’s attempt become a five-day champion, he was unseated by a higher power – or to be more accurate, a far superior player. Cris Panullo, computer operations engineer routed David and began a streak that has been impressive so far: four consecutive runaway victories, eight consecutive correct Daily Doubles and to this point, $136,459. His fifth win officially qualifies him for the Tournament of Champions and given how well he is playing, he has the potential to be as good as the three super champions of last season, Amadio, Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach. (At this point, he is slightly ahead of Amadio and Roach after five games.)

            Cris and Luigi have officially qualified for the 2023 Tournament of Champions. It is possible David will also be participating; it is still far too early to tell. But in the next month, two new Jeopardy Tournaments will unfold; one a perennial; the other brand new. The Second Chance Tournament  will feature eighteen Jeopardy players some of whom have come close to defeating many of the super champions last year. It will feature two sets of semi-final matches, which will lead two finals which will have two players earning $100,000 and a chance to compete in the Tournament of Champions. I will have more details about this tournament before it begins on October 17^th, including a breakdown of all eighteen contestants and why they are in this tournament.

            The Tournament of Champions is typically the most anticipated event of the Jeopardy season. (There has not always been a season-to-season correspondence; occasionally other tournaments or a lack of the required minimum of champions have caused it the series to skip a year. There was, for obvious reasons, no Tournament in 2020.) But there is an excellent chance that the November Tournament may be the most anticipated one in the history of Jeopardy. With five champions who have won eleven games or more, and three players who have won over half a million dollars to this point in their runs, there is an excellent chance that the 2022 Tournament of Champions could break ratings records for the show. Added to this is the fact that for the first time since it was created in 1985, the producers of the show have changed the format.

            Normally, the Tournament features fifteen players. There are five quarterfinal matches that lead to five winners and four wildcards (the highest scores among non-winners. This then proceeds to three semi-finals and a two-day final with the winner taking the prize ($100,000 until 2001, $250,000 ever since.) This year, almost certainly due to the substantial number of champions, Jeopardy is radically altering the format. It will feature twenty-one participants (17 champions and the winners of the Professors Tournament, The College Challenge and the two finalists for the Second Chance Tournament) will play. There will be six semi-final matches, leaving us of six winners. In the semi-finals, two semi-finalists will go on to face Amodio, Schneider, and Roach, each of whom have earned byes into the second round. From then on, things will proceed as normal.

            I am of two opinions of this change. Given the circumstances of the past year and a half, I give credit to the producers for decided both that the large number of ‘typical’ champions (if you can go so far as to call Ryan Long and Jonathan Fisher’s accomplishments ‘average’) combined with conditions of the pandemic and the problems with hosts before Ken Jennings and Mayim Bialik took over, no doubt have called for some radical variations to the typical format. As someone who argued very strongly for four-day champions such as Margaret Shelton and Maureen O’Neill, who would have excluded under the typical format to be allowed to participate, this is more than fair.

            On the other hand, the closest equivalent to this came in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions which I have discussed in passing on a few occasions. Nine great players from Jeopardy history were given byes into the second round: including Brad Rutter, who had won the million masters,  Robin Carroll, at one point the biggest money winner in Jeopardy history and Chuck Forrest, the first legendary champion. Of the nine players, only two went on to win their round two match against two undefeated players (Rutter and Frank Spangenberg, who held the record for most money won in five games for over a decade.) The other seven would lose, and often lost badly. Considering how well players like Forest and Carroll played in their next tournament, The Battle of the Decades, it is possible that many of the players who got a bye were disadvantaged without that first game under their belt. Could it happen here? Well… Brad did go on to win the whole tournament, and beat Ken Jennings for the first time, several players who got a bye almost won their match, and several Tournament of Champions winners were defeated in their first-round match. So it is possible I am overexaggerating and the risk to these champions being defeated is no greater than any other multiple game winner in any other Tournament of Champions. All of this is a very roundabout way of saying anything can happen, and I expect millions to tune in to see if it will.

            So far this season Jennings has been the sole host. Bialik has been busy so far with the Prime-Time Celebrity Tournaments which as I said, I am inclined to ignore. (I may DVR them just in case we get a good one.) Bialik will share duties with Jennings in the Second Chance Tournament and will take duties over after the Tournament of Champions ends in late November. Jennings has settled into his duties well, for the record but I still think the decision for the two to split host duties is the right one: they complement each other well.

            We are still clearly at Peak Jeopardy, given how the season is unfolding so far. And there may be even more Jeopardy to come producers are discussing the possibility of a show featured more on sports and pop culture and a so-called ‘champions’ league. The former has had variations over the years (Rock and Roll Jeopardy aired on VH-1 in the late 1990s-early 2000s and a sports version has aired online) and I would be more than delighted to see such a champions’ league. (Though I have reservations which I will relate in a later article.) There will be more to come in the weeks to follow. Stay tuned next week when I relate the Second Chance Tournament.

Great To Be Back In Big Sky Country

 

 

            A confession: despite my considering Big Sky one of the best series of the last two years, my schedule got so crowded in the early months of 2022 that I ended up abandoning it when it returned to the airwaves in February.  Therefore I have no idea just how the search for Ronald and Scarlett ended or how things ended for Wolf.  Nevertheless, I decided to do something I rarely do when I stop watching a series and start over relatively fresh when Season 3 (branded ‘Deadly Trails’ by ABC) started a few weeks ago.

            I was relieved that the series has decided to start with a relatively new mystery this year – as well as starting out with occasional procedurals as the season opens. This is a pattern that Justified one of the great accomplishments of the 2010s was superb at and, given that the open plains of Montana are the same kind of breeding grounds for the outlaws we would meet in Harlan County, is a fair comparison. 

            To catch up, Cassie (Kylie Bunbury) is now working on her own since Mark and Jerrie are apparently chasing down the Syndicate that was exposed back in Season 1.  Jenny (Kathryn Winnick) is still at the Montana sheriff’s office and is now working with the new sheriff Beau Arlen. Jensen Ackles is the newest addition to the cast, and after spending so much of Supernatural impersonating lawmen, it’s good to see that he can actually play a real one. Like Dean Winchester, he has a family connection nearby (we’ll get there) and he’s easy on the eyes. Jenny is wary of him; Cassie and he are circling each other and Denise… clearly wants to jump him. (Dee Dee Pfeiffer continues to have the time of her life on this show.)

            The underlying plot of this season involves a camping troop in the mountains headed by the butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her mouth (but strangely enough, does in her coffee) Sunny (Reba McIntire) She is perhaps the most obnoxiously cheerful troop master you’d ever meet, and she needs that cheer because the guests she’s got on her trail are ornery. There’s Paige and Mark, who are bickering from the moment we meet them…and whom we very quickly learn are not who they seem to be. There’s Emily, Beau’s daughter who’s doing a podcast and whose stepfather (Henry Ian Cusick getting to play someone untrustworthy for a change) is trying to keep a tight leash on her but seems far too curious about the secrets she’s keeping.  There’s Beau, the hunky guide and her new husband who seem to be big one happy family… until you learn he’s her second husband. And then there’s the clearly disturbed young man whose wandering in the woods and who kills a hiker in the opening trailer.  We’re not that surprised to learn Sunny is his mother or that she’s been covering for his crimes. It is, however, a surprise to learn just how long she might have been doing it when Denise relates a story of the ‘Bleeding Heart Killer from twenty years ago’ and all the hearts we see carved into trees. All of this would be a major juggling act for Sunny, and things have already disintegrated when Paige and Mark disappear…and only Mark comes back. We saw Mark in the last episode, and he didn’t look like someone who just got lost. How long will Sunny be able to keep juggling these chainsaws, especially considering Cassie is looking for the missing hiker and Beau is very nervous about his daughter BEFORE that?

            Meanwhile, the past is coming for Jenny in a big way. In the last episode, we met her mother Gigi, (Rosanna Arquette, how great to see you again.)  Gigi is a grifter who was conning her way across Idaho, and whose latest partner grifted a Montana rancher.  From the moment the two are in the same room, we can sense the history between them and none of it is pleasant. For all the darkness and cynicism we see in Jenny towards her mother, there’s a small glimmer in her that really wants to believe in the good in her. So when the final con is played, and she learns yet again that her mother has betrayed her – this time stealing $30,000 from her – there’s a brokenness in her that we haven’t seen since she learned Cody was dead. And she will be even less thrilled when she learns that Gigi has teamed up with last season’s major villain, Tonya which has officially confirms Jenny’s certainty that she hasn’t got legit.

            Big Sky is one of those series that has always been willing to swing for the fences and often they have done so by casting so many characters against type or have them lean in. Reba McIntire’s acting and music career has been built on being wholesome and trustworthy, so the writers are gambling that her image is a mask for a darker kind of evil.  The fact that evil is masked under the idea of ‘family values’ is actually on brand.  A similar change is done with the character of Tanya, who is played by Jamie-Lynn Siegler known to the world as Meadow Soprano. Meadow spent much of the series verging between resentment of her father’s crimes, but ultimately decided to pursue a path as a lawyer to represent the mob by the series end. It is interesting to consider Tonya as a version of Meadow fully mature, someone who can appear to be in the world of legitimacy that her father could never truly represent but have a seamy underbelly. Jenny and Cassie know better, but they can’t prove it, partly because when Tonya smiles, you can’t read it the same way you knew by Tony’s pleasant face that it was clearly a mask.

            There’s all the long overdue fact that this is a crime procedural where the protagonists and the villains are both women – something that I’ve never seen on network television before and whose only example I have on cable or streaming is Damages, another excellent and underrated FX series.  When a network series is willing to swing at two of the greatest undervalued shows of all time, you know that its doing something right. Big Sky is not as ambitious or excellent as either of those series were – yet – but every so often, it sings that way.  If I were the kind of person to make unnatural comparisons, I could compare Cassie or Jenny to Raylan Givens, Sunny to Mags Bennett and Tonya to say, Lydia from Breaking Bad. But that would be giving the writers too little credit. All these characters are original, fully drawn, and fascinating. ABC has gone out on a limb to keep Big Sky alive all this time, and I hope they continue to have faith in this product because it’s nothing short of brilliant.

My score: 4.75 stars.

No Bill, Wokeness ISN'T Why You Haven't Won An Emmy: (Sigh) Bill Maher Forces Me To Write Another Comment About him

 

 

            I have gone a fair amount of heat the over the last several months about much I dwell on Bill Maher, his unfunny comedy, how he’s always had conservative values despite claiming he was progressive, how he is a misogynist, how he has more conservative guests than he does liberals, etc. There’s more I could have said about him as time has gone by – I had a piece comparing him to H.L. Mencken that wasn’t flattering to either of it – but I took the hint of my readers, and I ignored him.

            But sometimes when a guy throws you a fat pitch, you just have to swing it. And that is what happened when Chris Cuomo (who you’d think would know better by now) interviewed Bill Maher on his new show a few days ago.

            In his typical smarmy fashion Cuomo said Maher “crushes Trevor Noah and John Oliver in the ratings.” Well, Noah’s on every day and Maher’s once a week so that’s not a fair comparison Chris, but why kick a guy when he’s down. “But Noah and Oliver always win the Emmys.” (Noah has never won an Emmy; you’re thinking of Jon Stewart, a man who Maher has only mocked, but fine keep digging your own grave.) “Why do you think that is?”

            Maher in his humble fashion says: “I tell the truth to my audience. The Emmys are too woke.”

            Wow, Bill. I mean seriously. That’s the first thing I think of when I think of the Emmys. An organization that only gave its first Best Actress in a Drama series six years ago and has only recently enjoyed its second Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy award in its history. An organization that has never given an Emmy to an Asian American and barely has a track record with Latinos. An organization that earned the hashtag #EmmysSoWhite last year. An organization, for the record that has never nominated a female run show in the same category you have gotten nominated in seventeen consecutive years. Tell Samantha Bee, Chelsea Handler and Desus and Mero just how woke the Emmys are with a straight face.

            I know that Hollywood is woke. They’ve told us in every awards show how woke they are even though the people who vote in them look a lot more like you then the people they want to reach out to. I know you never look at a movie except to complain how big budget or depressing they are, but award shows for Film and Television have a really bad track record when it comes to nominating minorities. I realize you don’t pay attention to the Golden Globes because they wouldn’t nominate you for anything, so I guess you missed the fact that they weren’t aired on NBC this year because of the racial makeup of their membership.   Seriously when I think about an organization with a long history of recognizing minorities, particularly series created and run by women, African Americans, LGBTQ+ or anybody who doesn’t like you, my thoughts immediately go to the Emmys. And when I think of diversity of choices, my first thought goes to an organization Julia-Louis Dreyfus six consecutive Emmys. She was on your network, Bill, you should remember that! I may care about who they nominate far more than you do, but I am not blind to their flaw.

            But you’re a little right about why you’ve never won an Emmy. It’s not because you tell the truth, though, everyone else in the category does this, with subtlety and in ways you never have. It’s not because the Emmys have the repetitive habit of recognizing the same shows over and over again, and you had the misfortune of competing against Jon Stewart for a decade. (Though again, he was funnier than you, not to mention humbler, nicer and actually being an advocate for things.) And yes, you have you used racial slurs on your show which you won’t apologize for, have had said bad things about being vaccinated, and argue that anybody who complains who doesn’t like you is ‘whining’. But that’s still not the reason you haven’t won. No, you have never won an Emmy and never will for reasons that have to do with how the Emmys have always given awards and who they give awards to.

            Now, maybe you are legitimately not the kind of person who wants to kiss ass or do anything to advocate for your own series. Hell, maybe you think that your shows should win only on its own merits (though I’ve watched you long enough to know you’re not that naïve.) But honestly, I don’t think that’s why you do it. I think if you actually won an Emmy, you wouldn’t be able to swallow your pride for thirty seconds speech and be humble. I think you’ve spent so much time in your own bubble, only hearing your audience laugh at your stale jokes, doing the same schtick for thirty years that you can’t accept – or legitimately understand – what makes your material inferior to Stephen Colbert’s or John Oliver’s – people who have had to work their way up the ladder to get where they are where as you, as I have explained, are a legacy comedian. And for the record, you work for HBO. You know as well as anyone that once you get nominated for an Emmy in a certain category, you stay there forever.  There has to be a radical improvement in talent – or your show has to really drop in quality – for the nominations to stop coming.  ER  was on the air for fifteen years, but after eight they stopped nominating it for Best Drama. Law and Order was on the air for twenty years. They stopped nominating it after eleven. You’ve been on the air for nineteen years. Take the hint.

            So no, the Emmys are not nominating you anymore because you are too much of a truth-teller. They are not nominating you because they think other Late-Night Comedy Series are better. That they nominated you for so long over Seth Meyers and Samantha Bee is actually a far greater travesty but as we know very well, you’re only in this for you. So go ahead,  sulk in your tent like Amy Poehler and Jimmy Kimmel. Oh wait, they don’t sulk when its time for awards shows. They host them. Something that you would never demean yourself to do even if it might help you win an Emmy.

Ignore The Evil Leapers: The Quantum Leap Reboot Is Worth Your Time

 

 

            Last year around this time, I spent a lot of time explaining why I thought the upcoming reboot of The Wonder Years – this time done with an African American family – might have even more potential than the original. When it debuted last year, many critics considered it superb. I gave it five stars and ranked it among my ten best series of 2021. The series received multiple award nominations from the Image Awards and the HCA.  But even before it had debuted, far too many people had already made up their minds.

Before a single episode aired, it had been giving an overall rating of 3.5 at imdb.com. The average rating after the first season was roughly seven, which is closer to accuracy but I wasn’t entirely stunned – any more than I was given the reaction to the CW’s  Tom Swift – who I’m willing to bet nobody on the internet had even heard of -  had been changed to a gay African-American was a violation of a sacred text or the fact that Amazon had decided to turn off reviewing for its Lord of the Rings spinoff when trolls decided that because people of color were playing critical roles, it was a violation of everything Tolkien stood for.

Because, as we should all know by now fantasy, like space exploration set far in the future, historic pieces done in the past and time travel, all belong to white men. They are the only people who can truly do justice to the genre – any genre, really. Because it’s fine for a time lord to regenerate a dozen times, but they must only do so as white men, never women or people of color. That’s the companion’s job and honestly, we’re not really happy about that. Similarly, they must only travel to alien worlds, not any part of the past that is relevant.  Comic book heroes are always straight white men; any attempt to make them anything else is ‘political’ and that’s not what comic books are about. And we don’t put our hands on Star Trek or Star Wars; those are gospel.

Honestly, the lunacy to this has reached incredible levels. Earlier this year, Disney Plus released Obi-Wan where Ewan McGregor reprised the role, he’d played in the first three episodes of Star Wars. You remember those, right? The series that everybody said ruined their enjoyment of the original series. The episodes that basically featured actors people loathed in stories that made no sense. That relied on CGI that so many people hated. This is the prime example of the exact kind of series that nobody asked for, and there was outrage when it came out. But not because of that. Not because people hated the idea. No, all of their loathing was directed to Moses Ingram’s portrayal of an African American female Jedi. If I remember some of the criticism, she was ‘taking attention away from the series.’

If this doesn’t prove that the trolls on the internet on spoiled fanboys, I don’t know what will. At this point, I honestly if Plan 9 From Outer Space was remade and the Bela Lugosi character – who you might not know died two days before filming and was replaced by a non-actor who hid this face – was replaced by Morgan Freeman, the Internet would react by saying this was ‘turning a classic film woke’.  Really at this point, I honestly think what the fans really want when they say they want a ‘reimagining of a classic franchise’ is literally shot-for-shot remakes of films and TV series with better effect and different actors. Of course, when Gus Van Sant does this with Psycho, they torch him for being derivative. But considering how the fanbase reacts to anything they consider classing being altered when its remade, I honestly think it’s the only thing that will satisfy them. For more than quarter century fans were obsessed with Battlestar Galactica  -  a series that was never a ratings success and nothing more than a Star Wars rip-off – being remade. And when it was with Starbuck being played by a woman, they turned on it immediately called it ‘Galactica in name Only or GINO. Hmm. Interesting acronym. Perhaps there’s some connection to something else.

Anyway, when I was writing my first article on The Wonder Years reboot, I pondered that I actually thought there were some series that would benefit from a reimaging, and one, surprise, surprise was Quantum Leap.  I thought that much of the series potential was unrealized (rewatching many of the episodes in syndication have convinced as much) that the series was cancelled a season before Donald Bellisario wanted to end it (it was just starting to reach its true potential in what turned out to be its final year) and that there might be a way to do and bring closure. But of course, when the new version of the series was announced, the same old haters came out saying ‘how dare they’ and this series was sacred. Right. A series about time travel with a white savior leaping into the lives of African Americans, women, a chimp and in one case an amputee was perfect. A series where one of the two leads was a middle-aged hologram who wanted to sleep with every pretty woman who appeared in Sam’s leaps, had been married half a dozen times, and who we would later learn was sleeping with at least two women on the project. That’s not the point, they’d argue, never telling us what the point is. I will get back to these haters a little later. (Or maybe I won’t. I’ve considered a column or two raging against them, but time -ha-ha – has convinced me to think better of it.)

Well, I’ve seen the first three episodes and while I don’t think it’s nearly as superlative as the new Wonder Years was at this point, it is certainly far more ambitious than the original was at this same point (or indeed the first season). The pilot begins with us meeting Ben Sung (Raymond Lee) the man at the center of the new Quantum Leap project with his entire team – which includes his fiancée.  (For the record, this is keeping to canon: eventually we learned that Sam Beckett’s wife was part of the project from the start. The series is just playing fair with us from the start.) Then Ben ends up going to the project ahead of schedule (like Sam did in the original) and leaps into a bizarre situation – this time as the driver for a robbery. He is given support from a hologram – only he doesn’t know that it’s his fiancée.

The basic premise of the series has not changed: Ben is leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, has no memory of his past, and is ‘hoping the next leap will be the leap home’. The major variation is that we spend nearly as much time with the team as we do with Ben as they try to figure out what’s going on with Ben. This is actually something I would have preferred the series have done more often and far earlier than it ended up doing: when it went to the imaging chamber and beyond it actually was intriguing. (One of my favorite moments in the series is when Sam has leaped into Lee Harvey Oswald and Al is trying to find out exactly what the world’s most notorious assassin actually was planning.)

At this point, the team (led by Ernie Hudson as Magic) is proceeding not only trying to figure out why Ben ended up leaping before the project was ready. We have already that he has been working in secret with Al Calavicci’s daughter who was never part of the project. (Some would argue Al never had a daughter, but this is possible: in the original series finale, Al and his first wife were reunited as Sam’s last leap and the subtitles said they had several children.) She’s working for some purpose that remains undetermined at this time but given that she was willing to drug her own mother to get some remnants from the project that Al was holding on, it ain’t for any good reason. We have also learned that part of the code that Ben was working on with here has changed things: in his last leap, he managed to leap outside his own lifetime. (Sam actually did that in one of the series last episodes, ending up in the body of a pre-Civil War ancestor, but let’s let that go.) And apparently, he has arranged things so that he can leap to a specific point in time. Is it possible that Ben is trying to find a way to locate and rescue Sam Beckett himself?

Now I imagine this is the point where all the trolls come out and complain about the hologram being a young woman and the team including an Asian woman and a non-binary tech support guy. I could make the argument that the original team was made up of at least three women, one of whom was African American and that Ziggy itself was such a diva, that if a computer could be gay, it would be. But I know better than to try and use logic with trolls and I’ve spent far too much of this review ranting. (I will no doubt do so again when this happens.) I’ve described why I think this new version of Quantum Leap works and why I think it has potential. I think the cast and the writing are still finding their legs in the actual leaps, but so was the original at this point in time. I think it is worth watching to see where the series goes. If this review encourages you, then I’ve done my job. If it doesn’t… well, I still haven’t given up. I’m hoping that the next review will be the one that convinces you to change your mind.

My score: 3.75 stars.

Reflections on Ken Burns' Baseball, Part 2: What Burns and Company Left Out (And I'm Not Just Talking About Warren Spahn)

 

As I said I believe Ken Burns’ Baseball is a great triumph of documentary filmmaking that holds up even after more than a quarter of a century. But after several rewatches in recent years, it has become clear that are certain things that Burns and his writers deliberately left out.

And no, I’m not just talking about how so many of the greatest ballplayers of the twentieth century are basically ignored. I imagine true fans of the game are still irked that in nearly twenty hours, Baseball didn’t think to mention Lou Brock or Rickey Henderson’s accomplishments in stolen bases; the high average hitting of Rod Carew or the massive home runs struck by Harmon Killebrew; that George Brett and Wade Boggs are only mentioned when it comes to being born, and that several of the greatest pitchers of all time such as Warren Spahn, Whitey Ford, Nolan Ryan and yes, Steve Carlton are either ignored or mentioned in the television equivalent of footnotes. No documentary of baseball could ever adequately pay tribute to every single player who made it to Cooperstown even thirty years ago: frankly, it’s impressive the job that the filmmakers managed to pull off.

No, what Burns leaves out of the documentary is far subtler and something that even the most loyal fans of the game and all but the most devoted historians would have noticed. It’s something that I didn’t pick up on even after years of reading about so many of the players that are featured.  But it is something that once you know how the sport has worked since it became a professional sport, seems very hard to understand why it was done. Let me give you the most obvious examples.

In telling the saga of Grover Cleveland Alexander, one of the greatest and most tragic characters in the history of the sport in The Fourth Inning, this is how the narration says he ended up with the Cardinals:

“In the middle of the 1926 season, the Chicago Cubs let Alexander go…But Branch Rickey had seen something in the old man…and hired him for St. Louis.”

The Cardinals win the pennant that year and…well, if you don’t know the story, by all means see the documentary: it is one of the greatest stories in the history of  sports and it is spellbinding even if you only get an oral description of it. But look at the way it’s phrased: Alexander is let go and Branch Rickey hires him. This leads to you believe the Cubs had no faith in Alexander, and Rickey (who I’ll get back to later) was a genius to see his skill. The thing is that’s not what happened. Alexander wasn’t released. He was traded from Chicago to St. Louis. It’s a small detail, but a telling one. It makes you think Alexander had control of his fate. If you’ve been watching the documentary to this point, you know perfectly well he doesn’t.

A more telling example of this comes in the eighth inning.  Here’s how we hear part of the saga of Frank Robinson:

“Cincinnati let Robinson go, saying he was too old at thirty. He wasn’t. He signed with Baltimore.”

This is something that not only fans of that era know is false but is actually part of pop culture by this point. Anyone who saw the movie Bull Durham will remember how Susan Sarandon in describing bad trades says: “Who can forget Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, for goodness sakes?” It’s harder to overlook this particular deviation considering how much of the eighth inning is devoted to the labor struggles of baseball: Marvin Miller is interviewed and the episode ends with Curt Flood’s response to being traded to Philadelphia and the groundbreaking lawsuit he filed.

Burns is a brilliant filmmaker and his team does their research. You could blame some of this on this being a relatively early feature in Burns’ work or that so much of the work they have to do is separating from truth from anecdote. I can’t see it that way, for a very good reason.

From the start of the documentary, Burns and his writers are at pains to mention the reserve clause, the controversial part of every ballplayer’s contract that made him property of his club for life. They are very clear at the unfairness of it for the first eight parts of the documentary, how it kept salaries artificially slow, smacked of slavery and essentially made the owners control the player’s destinies. They visit every consequence of this action: the Players’ League revolt of 1890, in which players formed their own league to try and break the monopoly of the owners. The Federal League in 1914 where millionaires formed their own leagues where the players were allowed to become free agents and how many league baseball used it powers to ultimately crush it. There is an implication that the Black Sox threw the 1919 World Series in part because Charles Comiskey used the reserve clause to pay his players so poorly. Even in the 1960s when they gloss over Frank Robinson’s trade, they discuss in detail Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale’s joint holdout in order to get bigger salaries. They argue firmly that baseball players are, to quote Flood, little more than well-paid slaves.

And then, in the last inning, there’s a key change. After the Seitz decision which obliterated the reserve clause, there’s a change in tone. We see an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, a devoted Red Sox fan, in which she speaks in a disenchanted tone about ballplayers choosing ‘to search for more money rather than stay with the place that loves you.” The lockout of 1972 is not mentioned. Neither is the strike of 1981 that nearly destroyed the season. The owner’s decision to collude and destroy the free agent market is mentioned, but in a segment far shorter than the one dealing with Pete Rose’s gambling scandal. It is mentioned near the end that in 1976, the average ballplayer made eight times the working man’s wage but in 1992, the average one made over 100 times that amount. This is bracketed by clips of enormous contracts being given to many players and a piece showing autographs and baseball cards being sold for millions, to ‘Money, Money, Money’.

And I find it very telling that of all the ballplayers they could have interviewed to express an opinion on free agency, the one they choose to talk to is Bill Lee, one of the most contrarian players in history who first calls it ‘The Emancipation Proclamation of baseball’, refers to teams as ‘plantations’, and that the only people who lost were ‘the fans, the integrity of baseball… and eventually the planet Earth.”

I’ve been watching Ken Burns for a very long time and the way he makes the radical turns around of ballplayers as employees for eight and a half innings and then turns them into little more than ungrateful millionaires is kind of astounding.  (On a side note, I find it fascinating that Goodwin and George Will, who have the opposite political views on everything else, have reversed their politics on this: Goodwin takes the socially conservative position on free agency and Will describes himself as a ‘neo-Marxist’ thinking the players should get ‘the lion’s share of the rewards.) How dare the ballplayers, who spent a century being traded and treated as chattel at the whim of the management of their club, pursue money and freedom?

Burns goes out of his way to make the viewer believe that ballplayers stay with clubs for their entire careers because they love the fans and the team. With very few exceptions he never mentions the trades that even the legendary players had to suffer through when they outlived their usefulness to the team. If you saw this documentary, you would think that Ted Williams stayed with Boston or Bob Feller with Cleveland for their entire careers because they had a choice. They don’t mention how Willie Mays spent the final two years of career after being traded to the Mets or that Ty Cobb, who spent twenty years with the Tigers, spent the last two years with the Philadelphia A’s. Connie Mack is portrayed as a saintly gentleman who owned the Philadelphia Athletics for fifty years. The fact that he sold of two different championship teams, the latter time dooming the franchise to disregard until it was forced to leave Philadelphia is basically considered a quirk. (The irony that this documentary originally aired in a season that a strike cancelled the postseason is not lost on me.)

This level of the basic disregard to human decency even spills into the story that Burns wants us to consider the greatest moment in baseball: Jackie Robinson’s integration with Brooklyn. Branch Rickey is set up, if not the hero of Baseball, then perhaps the main character: he is the only individual mentioned in every episode either in a direct appearance or in passing. Rickey’s history is revealed and his determination to integrate baseball after the Second World War considered a triumph of morality.

But it glosses over one critical detail. In 1945 Jackie Robinson was playing with the Kansas City Monarchs, part of the Negro National League. They were one of the oldest – and best – black baseball teams in the country. When Rickey signed Robinson, not only did he ignore that he had a contract with Kansas City and not compensate them for taking a player off their hands, he dismissed the team – and by extension black baseball as ‘not a real league’.

Now I know Burns’ is trying to put a halo on both Rickey and Robinson but considering that he spent most of the previous part, explaining how remarkable black baseball was – going so far as to say it was ‘separate but athletically equal’, this is pretty hard to overlook. The fact that this decision, which ended up destroying black baseball as a business, was essentially founded on a white man stealing from black men – no matter for how noble a reason – can not just be swept under the rug. Yet that’s what Burns does.

He even goes so far to do so when it comes to the end of Robinson’s career. In the Seventh Inning, he says that Robinson had ‘chosen to retire in 1956’. In point of fact  before he could announce, the Dodgers traded him to the Giants. There is no mention of this either. (Perhaps it is followed up on in the documentary Burns did on Robinson more than twenty years later. My focus is on Baseball.)

The follow-up documentary The Tenth Inning, made fifteen years after the original, does a good job of dealing with many of the flaws in the previous one. It acknowledges that, at least in part, the 1994 strike and its aftermath may have led to the owners deciding to ignore the steady and increasingly visible use of steroids in the game in order to protect their box office. It makes it very clear that what players like McGwire and Barry Bonds – the lead who you come across with more sympathy for when you know his life story – were enabled by an ownership gun-shy because of the aftereffects of the strike, a press that didn’t want to hurt the game, and a fan base that was ignoring the obvious and then turned on the players when they learned the truth.  The players and owners are forced to bear equal responsibility for the strike and for everything they have done and that does seem to be the overriding message that we should take from it.

So when you watch the documentary – and if you subscribe to the MLB network, you will get several chances starting in November – do what I should I’ve done. Watch the whole thing, take pleasure in the anecdotes, marvel in the quality of the filmmaking.  But a word of caution. If you’re nostalgic for the days when ballplayers were ‘loyal’ and weren’t ‘obsessed with money’,  Baseball will make you believe in the lie. But keep in mind that’s not how the game ever worked. And for those of you who think the game was better before, there’s a quote in the first hour of the first part that will make you laugh out loud as a veteran from the 1860s tells you: “Somehow or other, they don’t play ball like they used too.” You would do well remember that…and Burns would have too.

 

Reflections on Ken Burns' Baseball, Part 1: How the Documentary Made me A Lifelong Fan and What It Does Perfectly

 

 

          It has been a great year for baseball even if you haven’t been paying attention. This past May Miguel Cabrera, one of the greatest hitters of all time, took his official place among the immortals when he obtained his 3000^th hit. (I personally witnessed numbers 2997-2999.) Albert Pujols, one of the greatest players in the history of the game, has been enjoyed a well-earned career revival with his old team the St. Louis Cardinals; a week ago became only the fourth player in history to reach 700 home runs and we will see him in the postseason. Of course, the story that has captivated the world beyond baseball has been Aaron Judge’s pursuit of the American League (and in the minds of the many, the genuine) home run record held by Roger Maris for 61 years. It was a frustrating week for millions before he tied it Wednesday night against the Blue Jays with his 61^st home run. It seems inevitable he’ll break it – but he was stuck on 60 for more than a week. Will he do it?  Will the Yankees manage to win the World Series? Will Judge win the Triple Crown? And most of all, will Judge stay with the Yankees this year?

            I have been a more or less devoted baseball fan for my entire life. But the reason I’m writing this article is that my path from casual observer to full-on fanatic took a route that I’m pretty sure most fans don’t follow.

            Growing up, I was a casual baseball observer. I followed the Mets and Yankees on PIX 11 and Channel 9. I would occasionally watch Nolan Ryan pitch with my father. And I did watch every World Series. But back then, it was just something I did because the TV was always tuned to those games in our house. I did the same thing when we watched the Giants and the Jets and football in general. It was something to do. My transformation did not begin until September 1994 (which is ironic for reasons that I will soon explain)

            One Sunday night, while channel chasing, I tuned to PBS which was in the middle of showing a documentary series called Baseball. I knew vaguely who Ken Burns was, but it would have meant nothing. I spent the next hour and a half riveting as the tones of John Chancellor took me through the summer of 1941, while Joe DiMaggio was engaged in a fifty-six-game hitting streak and Ted Williams was batting .406. There were several interviews with Williams. I then watched the story of baseball during the second World War and eventually learned the saga of Jackie Robinson, which Burns made the center of the second half of the episode. I was riveted.

            I watched the next three ‘innings utterly fascinated. When the documentary was rerun two weeks later, I more or less watched the entire thing. Less than three weeks later, I persuaded my father to spend over $150 for the entire series on VHS. I’m still not sure how I managed to win him over.

            I would watch and rewatch the entire documentary at least half a dozen times until I graduated high school. The VHS had a prominent place in our house to this day, even in the age of DVDs.  And that was the beginning of my devotion to baseball, though even then it took a circuitous path.

            I still followed the Yankees, the Mets and the postseason (the former two overlapped with the latter quite a bit in the late 1990s) but my devotion to the sport followed what could be best described as a literary path. I began reading every single book I could find in both my school and local libraries about baseball. The history of the sport, of the players and many of the teams. Much of this ended up focusing on the Yankees (it’s nearly impossible to separate from the sport) but much of it also focused on many of the individuals who were highlighted within that same documentary, many of whom had devoted their lives to the sport. I tracked down the collections that Roger Angell had written over a quarter of a century in The New Yorker (I may even have gotten a subscription under the possibility of reading his articles which came quarterly well into his eighties). I did the same for Thomas Boswell, a sportswriter for The Washington Post who for most of his life didn’t have a home team to root for. (He focused many of his articles on the Orioles, which was a decent substitute – for a while.) I found the definitive biographies by Robert Creamer of Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel. The first book of Doris Kearns Goodwin I ever read was not a historical biography but a personal one of growing up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

            By the time, I graduated college I was a full-fledged fan. Oddly enough, much of my fandom has rarely been for the home teams or even out of state teams but more often for individual players. I spent much of teenage years following Tony Gwynn of the Padres, perhaps the last true high-average singles hitter baseball has ever seen. I marveled at the accomplishments of what may be the greatest three-man rotation in history – Greg Maddux, John Smoltz and Tom Glavine of the Atlanta Braves.  And I was not immune to the home run chases that happened in the late 1990s by McGwire, Sosa and Bonds (though I was pulling for Ken Griffey Jr, who as far as we know was never used steroids.)  In that sense, while I think the records are tainted, I don’t blame any of the hitters of that era for doing what they did. The sport, the press and the fans all deserved to be unindicted co-conspirators in what happened.

            More to the point, as a fan of baseball I spent much of the last twenty years rooting for – and appreciating perhaps more than any New Yorker can – the obliteration of so many 20^th Century curses. I agonized during the 2003 postseason, watching the collapse of the Cubs in Game 6 of the NLCS and Pedro Martinez kept in far too long in the ALCS.  I think I agonized over the 2004 ALCS even more than that year’s election and considering how the World Series ended that year, I probably made the right call. I may have had more sympathy for the White Sox the next year – who hadn’t won a World Series since 1917 or a pennant since 1959 – when they managed to go all the way that year. And the 2016 World Series between the Cubs and Cleveland was one that any true baseball fan in the world must have agonized over.  It was great for the Cubs to win; the fact that Cleveland still has the longest drought without a championship in baseball history is one that is agonizing. (Maybe this year.) And I appreciated it when the Washington Nationals won the first World Series for their city for the first time since 1924. I will confess that I spent many years rooting for them and other second tier teams like the Pirates and the Reds to finally prevail. I hope it happens someday.

            I truly believe my utter devotion to baseball would not have begun had I not seen Burns’ documentary. I’ve seen several of them in the more than thirty years since, and I don’t deny that most of them are extraordinary. His documentaries on the Vietnam War and World War II were master classes. I found something in his work on Country Music that I didn’t think possible. And I have a personal admiration to his work on The Roosevelts. But at my core, I still consider Baseball his crowning achievement, perhaps because it was the first one, I saw but perhaps mainly because it’s the one I’ve seen the most. This is due to the fact that the MLB Network every time the postseason ends spend the fall and winter months mostly airing movies about baseball, fictional and non-fiction in prime time. The documentary airs, on average, at least three to four times in its entirety over those four to five months, two or three times over a two-week period; two or three times in marathons. And almost inevitably every time it is rerun, no matter what else is airing on other channels, I will stop what I am watching and spend half an hour at least, watching several of my favorite segments if not the whole part.

            I admit the documentary is far too laudatory to the sport it admires, talking about it in rapturous and often poetic terms in stretches. But that doesn’t change the fact that its an extraordinary piece of filmmaking. If you knew nothing about the history of baseball, this is as good a primer as anything. It’s not a perfect overview of the history of baseball, but no single documentary not even one that clocks in at nineteen hours plus over nine parts, could.

            What Burns, Geoffrey Ward and his team of filmmakers do is what they have done so many times afterwards. They collect information, have a single narrator (Chancellor in this case) tell the overriding story and through pictures, commentary and voiceovers tell the overarching and individual stories of their subject. The ‘main characters’ of Baseball are essentially two teams: the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Red Sox.  I have no doubt this was a deliberate choice: Burns could have focused on the Yankees (they are a presence in almost every chapter), but Burns chose to focus on two of the most intimate, historic and perennially frustrated fandoms. The Dodgers spent their history the joke of New York (and indeed much of the country) until finally achieving greatness, spent years being frustrated by flukes that only seemed to happen in Brooklyn (a missed called third strike, The Shot Hurt Round the World and the only perfect game in a World Series) finally manage to win a world championship only to be pulled out of Brooklyn two years later in a move that the borough is still recovering from. The Red Sox (at the time of the documentary) were one of the storied franchises of the American League, winners of the first world series and four more after that before…well, much as the documentary argues, it really had nothing to do with Babe Ruth. They spent the next seventy-five years suffering some of the most ignoble fates in the history of baseball – and the documentary doesn’t touch on some of the worst.

            One might argue that for a documentary about baseball, there are few actual players interviewed. But what players. We get to hear Bob Feller talk about coming up as a pitcher; Ted Williams as he discusses hitting .400 and his last day in Boston; Mickey Mantle, coming up as a Yankee and his own disappointments, and Henry Aaron discussing just what it meant to break Ruth’s record. We also spend a lot of time with Curt Flood, who might be the most important ballplayer you’ve heard of, and Bill Lee, who within two minutes you understand why he was nicknamed ‘Spaceman’.

            As always, many of the ‘characters’ in Burns’ documentary are voiced by legendary actors, and it’s a perfect mesh. Gregory Peck takes on the voice of Connie Mack, the greatest owner and manager you’ve never heard of. Jason Robards is Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of baseball and the one man who ran the game with the owners’ dancing to his whims.  Eli Wallach and Ossie Davis are constants as sportswriters, talking through the history of the game. And relative unknowns such as Philip Bosco are perfect as saying everything.

You almost regret as the sport passes into the era of motion pictures and television because you genuinely want to hear more of the legends voiced by these acting legends. But it’s hard not to argue that they don’t have their own merit as you get to hear and see so many of the greatest moments in baseball history related by the men and women who witnessed them: Angell talking about baseball in New York in the 1950s; Doris Kearns Goodwin about following Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers; Billy Crystal about his memories of Yankee Stadium and his encounter with Ted Williams, and all of the encounters we get with Buck O’Neill, a Negro League manager and player who was by far the breakout ‘star’ of this documentary.  And we get to hear two of the greatest legends in broadcasting – Vin Scully and Red Barber relate their experiences with the Dodgers, and Barber in particular telling the saga of Ebbets Field, Branch Rickey and his immediate reaction to Robinson’s being recruiting. (He contemplated resigning, but his experiences with Robinson changed his mind.)

And there is footage of legendary moments: the Shot Heard Round the World, told from every perspective. Willie Mays’ legendary catch in the 1954 World Series, seen half a dozen times in the most primitive of angles. Bill Mazeroski’s home run to win the 1960 World Series. Bob Gibson striking out 17 Detroit Tigers. And Game 6 of the 1975 World Series, which ended in joy for the Red Sox… and Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, which ended in despair. Bob Costas, a constant throughout the series, tells us what it was liking watching the 10^th Inning in the Red Sox locker room. It’s one of the most shocking play-by-plays in the history of broadcasting.

The series also spends much of its time giving us the sagas of the legends: we spend the first four parts following John McGraw and Ty Cobb, learn the saga of Walter Johnson and Grover Cleveland Alexander, and end up following the story of Babe Ruth. Overriding much of the documentary is the bigotry that poisoned the game – we learn that one of the greatest stars in 19^th Century baseball may have caused the exile of black players, who were making an inroad into the sport in the 1880s, from being exiled from it for sixty years. We hear attempts to integrate that failed, the efforts of Rube Foster to build a Negro League and in the most daring episode of the series ‘Shadow Ball’, Burns and his writers spend the majority of the running time following the Negro Leagues of that era. It climaxes with O’Neill relating a confrontation between Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige in the Negro League World Series. It doesn’t matter if historians say it never happened: when O’Neill relates it, you see it. And all the other archives of pop culture in the world series: the history of ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ and Casey and the Bat, and novelty songs about ballplayers I’m certain no one knew existed before this documentary. (The end credits of Season 7 feature Natalie Cole singing her heart out of one on Jackie Robinson.)

Baseball is one of the great triumphs in documentary filmmaking in my opinion. But with all that in mind, I must admit that having rewatched it several times in the past few years, I can’t help but notice some of the blinders and gaps that Burns either chose to ignore or deliberately omitted. I will go into them in the ‘bottom’ of this article.