Historical Figures Series, The Electoral Path of Ronald Reagan, Part 2: 1968, The Campaign That Never Got Off The Ground

 

 

Hard as it may be to believe in this era of it being a Democratic bulwark, for much of the 20^th century California was essentially a swing state. Harder to believe, much of that period it was reliably in the Republican corner.

Of course back then, Republican had a different definition and that was particular clear of California. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party manage to take the state. In 1916 California showed its electoral importance for the first time in a Presidential election. Charles Evan Hughes looked like the likely winner on election night but after the votes were all counted, Woodrow Wilson ended up winning by a mere 1300 votes. The thirteen electoral votes it carried ended up being the difference in that election as Wilson won with 277 electoral votes to 254 for Hughes.

For the next three straight presidential elections, California was solidly in the Republican column. Indeed in 1924, Democrat John W. Davis finished third in the popular vote in California to Calvin Coolidge and Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollette, running on the Progressive ticket. Like most of the country California went into the Democratic ledger in all four of FDR’s victories and as I mentioned in my series on Tom Dewey, not even the presence of Governor Earl Warren was enough to stop it from it going to Harry Truman in 1948. Richard Nixon’s presence on the Republican ticket under Eisenhower no doubt played a large part in its returning to the Republican fold in both of his victories and even when JFK won in 1960, the state had gone to Nixon. The fact that LBJ had managed to carry in his landslide victory of 1964 meant nothing to the Democratic establishment; they knew they’d have to watch it carefully four years later.

For that reason when Ronald Reagan managed to upset Pat Brown in 1966 in his race for Governor, the Democrats took as a sign that problems would be on the horizon two year later in that state. Reagan was not yet being considered as a serious candidate for national office yet, but the fact that he was governor of one of the biggest states in the union meant they couldn’t outright dismiss him.

During the last twenty years California political figures had become considered likely candidates for the Presidency. In fact, when he made a stop there in advance of the California primary in 1956, Theodore White thought that there might be as many four serious contenders for the Republican nomination in years to come from that state: Nixon, Earl Warren, William Knowland, then the minority leader in the Senate and Goodwin Knight, the incumbent governor. The latter three had all won election the last time around by winning both the Republican and Democratic nominations for their office. While Pat Brown had never made much of a national impact, his defeat of Nixon for reelection in 1962 had raised his national profile – and his stunning loss to Reagan had raised his.

Reagan clearly had a desire to try and earn the nomination for President in 1968 but would get off to a late start mainly when the conservative branch of the party wanted to stop Richard Nixon.  I find it hard to believe that even if Reagan had made more of a concerted effort to do so that year, he could have gotten the nomination for what was probably the most obvious of reasons.

Just four years earlier, the conservative wing of the GOP had nominated Barry Goldwater and it had ended in disaster for the party. Most of the conservative wing had retreated into the shadows but Reagan was by far the most obvious face of it, having made one of the most famous campaign speeches for him a month before election day. Considering the Republicans clearly had an opportunity to win the White House just four years after LBJ’s landslide seemed to have completely destroyed the party as force, it is highly unlikely that the old guard would have let Reagan do so.

Still the same forces that had been the architect of the Goldwater campaign, including Clifton White had been determined to make the effort. Reagan had been ambitious to make the fight but in the summer of 1967, a scandal erupted in the governor’s office. His chief of staff, Philip Battaglia was discovered to be openly gay and was having affairs with his junior staff. Nine of them went to Reagan and demanded that Battaglia be fired. At the time Reagan had a decent relationship with the gay community in Hollywood but the national attitude and the California electorate forced him to replace him with William Clark. This decision effected his confidence and made him cautious. It is likely that if Reagan had just said the word at any point in 1967, Reagan could have taken the Southern bloc of delegates and deadlocked the convention. But he tarried along the way and by the time he made his move before the convention, Nixon’s men had snatched them all up.

Reagan’s name was written in on many of the primaries  but he did not make an official try until the Nebraska primary on May 14^th. He obtained 21 percent of the vote but Nixon still won in a landslide. Two weeks later, he managed to get roughly the same amount in Oregon while Nixon again destroyed the competition. Nixon stayed out of the California primary and Reagan took the entire delegate slate unopposed. Reagan would also win the North Carolina primary, the only Southern state on the ballot without even campaigning.

The liberal wing of the party was headed by Nelson Rockefeller who was even now more out of step with the party. While he managed to defeat Nixon in Massachusetts by a small margin, any chance Rockefeller had for the nomination would only be possible if a stop-Nixon movement developed at the convention. It would come down to a decision by the governors in the Southern states who were inclined to support either Nixon or Reagan, and whether there were enough Eastern states that could support Rockefeller.

Reagan’s conventions effort were geared towards ripping away the southern delegations from Nixon, South Carolina which was commanded by Strom Thurmond (in Nixon’s camp) and Texas, led by John Tower while Rockefeller would do the same for the East. The problem was twofold. Reagan and Rockefeller both wanted to stop Nixon, but neither was willing to let the other be the force of stopping it. And second, with the memory of the chaos in the 1964 Republican convention fresh in everyone’s mind, no one truly wanted there to be a fight on the floor. No one truly loved Richard Nixon, but it was not worth destroying a golden opportunity to win the White House, particularly in a year with so much chaos in the country.

For all that, the final tally on the first ballot was less imposing than it appeared. Nixon won the nomination with 692 votes to Reagan’s 182 and Rockefeller’s 277. However, Nixon had needed 667 to win the nomination – and only received 25 more than that. There had been room for all sorts of possibilities. If the Reagan people had managed to get Florida and its 34 delegates away from Nixon on the first ballot, Nixon would have been short. Similarly Rockefeller’s decision to take to long to announce had changed Spiro Agnew, then the Governor of Maryland who had been a staunch Rockefeller advocate for a year, to eventually give his states eighteen delegates to Nixon. Arkansas, which was governed by Winthrop Rockefeller, Nelson’s brother, could have gone for either man and Reagan’s decision to tarry had cost him the South that would be his base. Reagan no doubt could have been the victor on a second or third ballot.

However, I feel very strongly that even had Reagan managed to start his campaign early, win over the South, managed to prove himself to the Old Guard and get the nomination – all of them big variables – he would not have prevailed in a general election against Hubert Humphrey.

The first and most obvious problem would have been that of George Wallace. As we shall see Reagan’s base was in the south and much of the Reagan vote would be the kind of voter Wallace appealed to. It is likely the two would have divided the South even more than usual. However, at that point Reagan did not have a general appeal within the North and Eastern states and it is far more likely that the votes that ended up going to Nixon in 1968 would have gone to Humphrey instead.

There are other questions in place. Unlike Nixon who refused to debate Humphrey, it is likely that Reagan might very well have accepted Humphrey’s challenge to debates. It is unclear, however, if this would have helped him or hurt him. Reagan was a skilled orator and debater but at that point in his career he was far less polished, particularly in comparison to Hubert Humphrey, who few questioned was one of the greatest campaigners and orators of his era. Humphrey would not have underestimated Reagan and would have been more than prepared for him. Considering that he had a gift for humor and language, Humphrey very likely would have outshone him.

Just as important was the likelihood that Wallace would have been invited to participate. Much as few people would have wanted to give Wallace a podium, his polling numbers were high enough that it would have been foolish not to. And unlike Jimmy Carter, who would famously refuse to debate John Anderson in 1980, Humphrey would no doubt have been more willing to share the stage with Wallace.

If that happened, who could say what the end results would have been? Few could accuse Wallace of not being as gifted at his oratory as Humphrey or Reagan. Could he have risen in national prominence by such a debate? Or would have potential voters listened to both Reagan and Wallace, found there wasn’t much difference, and gone for Humphrey instead? It is  impossible to say for sure.

But perhaps the most important issue of the campaign would definitely have hurt Reagan: the Vietnam War. Reagan was notoriously a hawk and while much of his rise to prominence had been due to his ‘law and order’ agenda, his particular wing of the party believed more in escalation in Vietnam than a negotiated peace. (Reagan would famously oppose the Nixonian policy of détente and berate the eventual defeat in the years to come.) It is hard to picture a world where this particular campaign attitude would have helped him in a general election, even if he had been willing to moderate. For all of Nixon’s false promises in having ‘a secret plan’ to win the war, I’m relatively certain given the national mood Reagan’s attitude of open escalation would have helped him.

Which brings us to the final wrinkle. As I mentioned in the Humphrey article, in the days before the campaign LBJ looked like he was about to bring a negotiated peace in time before Paris pulled out – due to the machinations of the Nixon campaign. At that time Reagan did not have the international connections to do such a thing and (if I’m being honest) he did not have the kind of personality to allow that to be done in his name. It is likely that this would have probably led to a Humphrey victory. (On a side note if Reagan had actually gotten the nomination in 1968, the end of the Vietnam War might have been something we could have thanked his candidacy for.)

So I think if Reagan had somehow gotten the nomination for President in 1968, he would likely have gone down defeat. Probably not as badly as Barry Goldwater four years earlier (it would probably have been as close at the actual 1968 election) but his political future very well could have ended right there. And just as certainly the conservative movement in the GOP might well have been finally crushed. It would have been one thing to lose to LBJ in a landslide, but if the circumstances had been lined up for a Republican win and the conservative movement had somehow snatched defeat from the jaws of victory anyone even associated with the Reagan and Goldwater campaigns would have been drummed out of the party. Given the state of our politics today, it might not have been the worst thing for the GOP.

But Nixon had managed to win a narrow victory. Reagan no doubt was going to have to bide his time. In the next article in this series, I will look at the era between Nixon’s 1972 electoral landslide, how Reagan’s hopes for the White House no doubt could have been crushed for good had Watergate never happened and how he finally decided to take on Gerald Ford in the critical 1976 Republican primary.

 

 

Criticizing Criticism: I Don't Know Art But I Know What I Don't Like...Usually Without Having To See It

 

 

“Several people have told me dubiously they heard that the movie was fictionalized. Well, of course it was. Those who seek the truth about a man from the film of his life might as well seek it from his loving grandmother. Most biopics, like most grandmothers, see the good in a man and demonize his enemies. In dramatizing his victories, they simplify them. And they provide the best roles to the most interesting characters. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t pay to see them.”

Roger Ebert his 1999 review of The Hurricane

 

I have always considered Roger Ebert my north star when it came to criticism of any kind. Ebert was not merely a great writer and critic; he had that great ability that so few of us – particularly critics – have the ability to do; admit when they have made a mistake.

You can find this level of nuance in particular when you read his series of reviews in his Great Movies collection. In the four volumes that were published, you constantly see how his positions have evolved over time, particularly when it came to movies years after the fact. He thought less of Cool Hand Luke after forty years even though he admitted it was still well done; he acknowledged that Steven Spielberg’s A.I.,  which he had just thought was fair in 2001 was an unqualified masterpiece a decade later. He was also will acknowledge that some films that were groundbreaking at their inception were problematic decades later: he acknowledged  that both Birth of A Nation and Gone With The Wind were horribly racist films and that after seeing Triumph of the Will years later after calling it the greatest documentary in history that it would only be seen as such if you were already a Nazi.

Because he not only showed great wisdom and because he believed that film criticism was something that should not be studied only by critics, he was regarded with hostility by many of his peers throughout his career, and it no doubt didn’t help his cause when he was willing to acknowledge that blockbuster films like those of Phase One of the MCU and the Daniel Craig Bond movies were among the best films of the years they were in. And while his personal politics were fundamentally Democratic, he did not think all Republicans were evil and would not fundamentally dismiss a movie that had a conservative message out of hand.

When The Passion of the Christ came out in 2005, he might very well have been the only critic I know of who was willing to give the movie a review on its artistic merits as much as the religious message. He gave it four stars and his only real problem was that it was a sign that the MPAA was never going to give an NC-17 to a film based on violence alone. “I think if anyone other than Christ had been the subject of the film, the NC-17 would have been automatic,” he wrote. Other than that, he had no problem with the films message or how Mel Gibson had told it. Perhaps we should not be shocked by that, considering that he later consider Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ ­ - a film that in 1988 was so controversial Scorsese would face death threats – another of the greatest films ever made. Similarly when the first part of Atlas Shrugged came out not long before he died that while he disagreed with Ayn Rand’s philosophy, he gave it a one star review because it was an incoherent mess that made no sense to him in the stand point in terms of narrative or character development.

What I remember most about Ebert was that this was a man who believed all movies should be seen by the general public before they are judged and was in favor of restoration and never censorship. I imagine he would be appalled that so many on the left would want Gone With The Wind taken out of cable services in the last few years. I imagine he would have written a long essay to that very point, explaining why this was wrong. That’s the other great thing about Ebert: even when he virulently disagreed with you, he would at least hear you out. One finds that not only in his criticism and essays but in the letters he would exchange with his fans up until the day he passed.

Perhaps most importantly Ebert never judged a film without seeing it. In the busy life of a critic, there are many films that you just can’t see over the course of a year or even your life. He made it very clear when he argued about the merits of certain films and that he hadn’t seen some of their earlier works, even if they had been box office hits or critically acclaimed. The idea of making a judgment on any work of art, sight unseen or based on your political beliefs, was abhorrent to him. As it is to me.

I have found this increasingly clear as the summer has progressed and two very different box office smashes have been held to high regard by one side and utter loathing by the other, usually without having even seen the film. So let’s discuss two summer blockbusters.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie has been one of those movies that has been held with immense anticipation from filmgoers since the trailer was dropped last year. (I’ll admit, given the natural order of things, Roger Ebert would probably have seen Oppenheimer first but because he would have respected a filmmaker like Greta Gerwig he would have given her a fair shake.) For the last several months, the right wing media has been excoriating the film, sight unseen because of the messages they have no doubt sensed from the trailers and the cast. Most of them have to do with what they consider the emasculation of male figures (I don’t think anyone would consider Ken such a thing, but still) the idea that this movie regards men with utter hostility and the fact that it has transgender performer Hari Nef in a brief role. This is the kind of ridiculous prejudgment of any artwork that I loathe anybody making, no matter what who you vote for.

Naturally, leftist newsletters delighting in sending up just how ridiculous the right-wing sounded in their screeds, deifying what the film stood for, and were joyous when the film broke office records. It did not particularly shock me when I learned in some of them that none of them had seen Barbie either. (One actually closed their column by saying not that the right’s latest cancellation effort had failed, they were going to see Barbie.) Considering how much the left says that they loathe everything that corporations stand for and that Barbie is by definition a product placement movie (albeit one that takes nothing the product stands for seriously) you’d think that would factor into their thinking before deciding to revere it, sight unseen. But of course, in the political world of outrage and counter-outrage, the cinematic merit of Barbie is not the point, so much as that one side has decided to destroy it.

Now consider a more unlikely box office success from earlier in the summer: Sound of Freedom. The movie tells the story of Tim Ballard (Jim Caviezel) a government agent and how he quit his job to help break a vital child trafficking ring. Critics, by and large, have hated this movie but it has become a huge box office success that to date has grossed over $127 million in a little more than two weeks.

Now because Caviezel is known for his conservative beliefs (he has been a loyal Trump supporter) and because many believe the message is not a true picture of child trafficking, the left has been just as determined to tear down the success of the film. They have said that it is essentially a fantasy designed by QAnon, that the story is heavily fictionalized and that it plays into a major right-wing conspiracy theory. Most of them, to be clear, also haven’t seen the movie but at least the people on the right have.

In both of these box offices smashes case, the artistic merit of the film does not truly matter to either side but rather the message of the film. The right no doubt does like Freedom, but I imagine the fact that it is a box office success plays into the message of ‘owning the libs’, which to be clear Sound of Freedom clearly does considering how much the left berates it. They choose to repudiate Caviezel (and in many of their critiques, choose to trash Passion of the Christ because they didn’t like what it stood for either), argue that the film is heavily fictionalized (a trope that, sadly, so many people seem to genuinely think is more important to a biopic or historical film these days than its artistic message) and that it is a box office smash because it plays to what conservatives want to believe rather than anything else.

Now I haven’t seen Sound of Freedom and may not for a while, but it seems to me that the hatred on the left for the movie comes more from their hatred of conservatives in general. In a bubble where it is increasingly becoming clear that the left does not think conservatives are entitled to the same rights that they are, the judgment against Sound of Freedom is actually doubly hypocritical. If you seem to believe that conservatives live in their own world, you’d think they’d be entitled to at least have movies designed for their audiences. But the hatred for this film sight unseen belies that concept and is yet another argument that the left doesn’t think that, when it comes to right,  separate but equal is good enough. Or perhaps they can’t accept the idea that since the movie has been released nationwide, some people from blue states must have been going to it – and worse liking it.

As to the right’s narrative against Barbie I truly think that this is just another example of neither side being able to take a joke. Every aspect of Barbie (again, I haven’t seen it, but I’m basing it on the trailers and reviews) makes it very clear that it is a complete and utter satire of a toy that, politely speaking, has been one of the most problematic toys over the last forty years. I actually am inclined to give credit to Gerwig that she was able to get all of this in what was, basically a film that is supposed to be a product relaunch for a company that is having major financial problems and turn it into an utter lampoon of every single thing that product had claimed to stand for. From the moment the movie was pitched, everyone thought it would be just another one in a long line of celebrations of children’s products such as G.I. Joe and Transformers. Instead, at first glance, it looks like she has completely revolutionized what these films could be the same way The Lego Movie managed to do.

But because neither side can grasp nuance, the right has decided that this is a film that is an example of ‘toxic femininity’ while the left argues that it’s a celebration of the toppling of the patriarchy. I think both sides have clearly overshot. Barbie is a movie for kids. Like the best movies for children, it is clearly layered with so many deep and telling reference that the parents will have a blast and probably laugh harder at the jokes that the children who want to see it with them. But it is still a children’s movie first and everything else second.

What would Roger Ebert think of either film if he were to see them? I honestly can’t say about Sound of Freedom. I imagine he try to keep an open mind about it, using the same detachment he managed to do his entire career, and view the film as an artistic work first. Because he was a human being, his politics might have affected his judgment, but he would do his best not to let his critical opinions overreach.

With Barbie he might actually have a higher standard. This was, for the record, a man who did not like when filmmakers he truly loved seemed to be slumming in what he considered lesser films. (The only Phase One Marvel Film he truly hated was Thor and I’m inclined to think he didn’t like it because Kenneth Branagh, who he adored, was slumming it.) That said, if it managed to outdo the preconceptions he had about a film (like he thought with Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight series) he might admit that he found the film brilliant and charming. And considering that this was a man who sometimes found merits in movies that were truly terrible (he is the only critic I know who gave a positive review of The Happening) and underestimated movies that were classics (he gave a purely negative review of The Usual Suspects) his review would be imperfect. I imagine that it might come along the lines of ‘Better Than It Has Any Right to Be.”

And as all the noise and ‘controversy’ surrounding both films, I imagine he would urge them all to at least see the movie before they hated it.  He would urge in both cases to his readers to disregard the noise and judge for yourselves. And I’m pretty sure at the end of both reviews, he would tell his audiences to do what I’m going to do this weekend: see Oppenheimer first.

What Should Jeopardy Masters Do for An Encore? Suggestions for Contestants for the Next Edition

 

 

As I made very clear when I spent much of the month of May detailing every match, I was in awe of the inaugural Jeopardy Masters Tournament. It is pretty clear that I was not alone in that conception: the first version of the tournament averaged more than seven million viewers per episode and was nominated by the Hollywood Critics Association for Best Game Show.

While I’m hoping that we still get a special tournament to commemorate Jeopardy’s 40^th season, I have to say that if this becomes the equivalent of a yearly super-tournament I would be far from displeased. At the end of the final episode Ken and Mattea Roach, who finished second that by doing so they had automatically qualified to participate next year. Few who saw them play both in that tournament and in their previous appearances could argue that they hadn’t earned it.

Friends of mine who are fans of the show were troubled that the first version featured only five players from the previous season and one from a few years earlier. I’ll confess I was initially dismayed by this as well but I did understand the logic. To launch a tournament of this magnitude in prime time,  you needed to included both the most successful players in the show’s run and those who were the most recently well known. That was no doubt at least a partial reason that Andrew He and Sam Buttrey, who had been finalists in the 2022 Tournament of Champions were invited back instead of some of the more famous players from even the last decade.

But now that the tournament has become a ratings success Jeopardy can now concentrate on bring back famous names from more than just five years back. So who should participate in the second Jeopardy Masters next May? Considering that ABC is rerunning the series in the coming weeks and since I have proven that I know Jeopardy better than most, I’ve decided to offer my humble suggestions for the next one. Here are ten of the greatest contestants that I think deserve to return.

 

Brad Rutter

In all honesty the first Masters Tournament really should have including Brad. While he did lose his undefeated title in the Greatest of All Time match back in 2020, he remains Jeopardy’s all time biggest money winner, having won nearly five million dollars over twenty years. Considering that Ken Jennings knows better than anyone just how brilliant a player Brad is – the hard way, Brad defeated him in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions, The Battle of the Decades and The Jeopardy All-Star Games – I am slightly surprised Jennings did advocate for him. Especially considering their shared history over more than fifteen years, we could have had nearly as much with the back and forth between him and Brad as we enjoyed between Ken and James. If Brad doesn’t come back next time, it will be severely disappointing.

 

Roger Craig

There was a period where Roger Craig may have been the third greatest player in Jeopardy history: certainly Alex Trebek considered him such when he faced off against Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in the finals of the Battle of the Decades. And even though his original streak was relatively short compared to others on this list, it’s hard not to consider him one of the greatest.

He broke Jennings one day mark of $75,000 on only his second day as champion. While he only won six games, he won $230,200 in them, which at the time of his original appearance was good enough for third of any player in their original run. (The other two were Ken Jennings and David Madden.) He also managed to win the Tournament of Champions that year in very impressive fashion and he did make it to the finals of the Battle of the Decades and very easily could have beaten Ken or Brad had a Daily Double gone the other way. There was a reason he was invited back to play in the Jeopardy All-Star Games in 2018 and why he was drafted relatively quickly. In the days of the super-champions his marks might not seem as impressive, but he’s still one of the greatest ever.

 

Larissa Kelly

Way back in May of 2008, Larissa Kelly became the first female champion to win six games on Jeopardy. Lost under that was that she had won $222,597 which at the time was the third highest total won in competition.

Larissa then narrowly missed winning the 2009 Tournament of Champions, but still took home $100,000. Her six games were not surpassed until Stephane Jass won seven games in 2013 and the money she had won by a female contest was not surpassed until Julia Collins did so until 2014 (and not to take anything away from Julia’s accomplishments but it did take her eleven games to surpass Larissa’s original mark.)

Larissa was dominant in her match in the Battle of the Decades until a late Daily Double and a tough Final Jeopardy caused her to lose her match to Russ Schumacher. She more than made up for it when she was invited back to play in the All-Star Games and was picked to play by Brad Rutter. She was a vital part to Brad’s success in the tournament and as a result, Team Brad would win the million dollar grand prize. Julia’s combined winnings over those tournaments (estimated at roughly $660,000) were the high water mark of a female contestant until Amy Schneider came along.

In a sense she deserves to come back to fight against a play of the caliber of Mattea Roach and James Holzhauer. Besides given her track record, it would be around time for her to be invited back anyway

 

Julia Collins

There was a time when Julia Collins had the second longest streak of all time on Jeopardy with her twenty wins set in 2014. Over the last five years, she has fallen quite a bit on that list: indeed four of the five people ahead of her participated in the first Masters Tournament.

Julia’s stint as the winningest female contestant did not last much longer. When she participated in the All-Star Games, her team performed the poorest and left first. (That is why Larissa Kelly was back ahead of her when Amy Schneider began her remarkable run back in 2021.)

For both those reasons, I think it would be sporting for Julia to be brought back for the next incarnation. She would have to face off against at least two of the people who unseated her in both games and money won Holzhauer and Roach. Besides considering that she is one of those players who in the opening titles of the original show we occasionally see, its clear that the show considers her a master.

 

Buzzy Cohen

It would have been just as interesting to see Buzzy invited back to the first Masters Tournament as it would have been to have Brad brought back, especially since, like Ken, he knows what its like to be on the other side of the lectern. There has been so much controversy surrounding Buzzy for reasons that I don’t fully comprehend that it overshadows his accomplishments which are considerable.

Buzzy won nine games and just over $164,000 in them in his original run in the spring of 2016. He then managed a remarkable victory in the 2017 Tournament of Champions in one of the most astonishing comebacks in more than thirty years. Naturally he was invited to come back in the Jeopardy All-Star Games two years later and under his leadership, his team did something that had not been done to that point in Jeopardy history: it nearly overcame Brad Rutter’s team. Only by poor luck did Buzzy not manage to become a finalist: as it is, his team still performed remarkably well. Considering that Buzzy has a considerable history with game shows and is currently appearing with Brad Rutter and James Holzhauer on The Chase, he would add both incredible competition and a lot of fun to the next incarnation.

 

Austin Rogers

In the 2022 Tournament of Champions Sam Buttrey may have been the first Jeopardy champion who won admirers as much because of his personality as his play. The last notable player to do so was Austin, in part of his hysterical antics and gesticulations. Often forgotten was the fact he was one of the greatest players of all times.

In 12 games he won $411,000, which at the time was the fifth highest amount won by any player in history, and the first player in Jeopardy history to win more than $65,000 in back-to-back appearances. He ran into a rough patch in the Tournament of Champions but was in the best position to win at the end of Game 1. The Final Jeopardys in both games were incredibly tough.

Less than a year later he was the captain of his own team in the All-Stars and has the misfortune of running into Ken Jennings in his first match. A hard fought wild card match again gave him a good chance to win redemption but a failure in Final Jeopardy brought him up short.

Austin was already a celebrity among Jeopardy champions, and even gave clues in a Jeopardy category in Celebrity Jeopardy. I’d love to see him go head to head with James Holzhauer and I think all fans would love to see him back.

 

David Madden

Given how frequently we seem to have a super champion on Jeopardy these days, it might come as a shock to the relatively recent viewer to learn that there was a gap of nearly eight years the second place total for a Jeopardy champion was locked in at nineteen wins. Even more stunning was that this mark was set little more than a year after Ken Jennings had his run of seventy four games.

And yet at the conclusion of season 21 and for the first few games of season 22, David Madden did just that winning nineteen games and just over $430,000. Strangely enough he did not have a successful run in the Tournament of Champions, ending up being flattened in his semi-final appearance. Nor did he appear in the Battle of The Decades in 2014, much to my disappointment. There was apparently some kind of contract problem and he did not think he could appear. Alex Trebek announced this and admitted he was missed.

The problem was apparently resolved by the time of the Jeopardy All-Star Games and he came back swinging when he was part of Brad’s team. He got both of the Final Jeopardys he had to answer correctly, put up a big lead in the Jeopardy round of the final, and shared in the prize of a million dollars.

Since then, of course, he has fallen even further down the list of all time winners than Julia Collins: he may not even be in the top ten when it comes to games won anymore. That said, with the exception of Ken Jennings, he was the original super-champion and more than deserves to be brought back to fight against some of the newer breed.

 

Matt Jackson

Along with Julia Collins, Matt Jackson was the first in the vanguard of super-champions we see today. His thirteen wins were the fourth longest streak during his run in October of 2015. Just as impressive was how he won: in four of his matches he won $40,000 or more in four games and only two of his wins were not runaway victories.

He seemed likely to be an unstoppable force in the Tournament of Champions that season…then he ran into an immovable object in Alex Jacob. (Alex himself deserves to return in a future Masters Tournament; he won his Tournament of Champions in what was arguably the most dominant victory in the format.) Matt did his very best but had to settle for second place and $100,000.

Ken Jennings respected his talent so much that in the Jeopardy All-Star Games he chose him as his teammate. Matt more than lived up to the billing, being nearly as dominant as Ken was in his play. Only the dominance of Brad’s team in the second game of the final would moot his efforts, he would still share in the $300,000 second prize. Few would argue Matt deserves to be considered a master.

 

Pam Mueller

Pam’s appearance on this list is entirely about what Jeopardy fans would consider ‘the postseason’. She has only won the 2000 College Championship to her name and was a semi-finalist in the 2001 Tournament of Championship. But you underestimate her at your peril, as countless veterans found out firsthand in the Ultimate Tournament of Champions as she climbed the ladder to the semi-finals and fought one of the hardest matches in Jeopardy tournament history before being sent home with just over $102,000. In a field of 145, she would finish fifth in money won.

That dominance got her invited back to the Battle of the Decades where she was nearly as superb, defeating two previous Tournament of Champions winners in her first match, going into Final Jeopardy in the quarterfinals in the lead against two more (she ended up qualifying for a wild card) and going toe to toe with Roger Craig and Colby Burnett in the semi-finals before losing. She went home with $25,000.

Of all the players in the Jeopardy All-Star Games, her appearance was chronologically the earliest. Colby Burnett chose her for his team, and she would help Team Colby make into the finals where she went head to head with Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Her team left in third place but she shared in $100,000.

She does not have the same success as such female champions as Amy Schneider or Julia Collins, but in a way Pam is one of their ancestors. Throw in the fact that she has one of the most memorable and charming personalities in Jeopardy history and I have no problem calling her a Master.

Sam Kavanaugh

I’m pressing the definition slightly when it comes to including Sam. He may have won $156,500 in five games and did win the 2021 Tournament of Champions but looking at the field, it’s hard to argue he was the most qualified member of his own bracket. Jason Zuffranieri won 19 games just after he was defeated and more than half a million dollars. In the 2021 Tournament, three women managed to win eight games apiece and in the case of Jennifer Quail and Mackenzie Jones, considerably more money in their original run. Jennifer finished second in the Tournament to him

So why I am giving the nod to Sam over any of these players? Honestly the sympathy vote. When the first lineup for the Jeopardy Masters was announced, Sam posted online that he was somewhat sad not to be included. One of the posts expressed empathy…then admitted that they had to google Sam to remember who he was. He had, remember, won the Tournament of Champions, eighteen months ago. Such, far too often, can be the short shelf-life in the memory of most fans of TV of the average Tournament of Champions winner and if I’m being honest, he was certainly more qualified than either Andrew He or the other Sam who got invited back.

So yes, there are other Masters more qualified. But out of deference to the fact he wasn’t chosen first, he should probably be brought back for the second one.

 

Those who are long term fans of the show will notice that with the exception of Pam and Brad, all of them date to after the five game limit was abolished and the doubling of the money that began in the 2001 season. Am I being unjust to those who came before? No, because I have a strategy, and in a follow-up that will come next week, I will reveal it to you as a pitch to the show’s producers.

2012 Film Series: The Dark Knight Rises

 

I have never really liked most comic book movies for a very bizarre reason. They don’t take place in the real world.

I’m not talking about the aliens or the demigods or the costumes. I mean that none of the problems that Superman or Wonder Woman or Spider Man or almost any of those beloved costume heroes are dealing with exist in a recognizable world. It’s that the only think that happens in these worlds are alien invasions or interdimensional wormholes or crises with mutants or threats that can be resolved in two hours. The comic book world has always solved crises but not problems. Perhaps that is the real reason so many of us have been drawn to Watchmen: it shows that at end of the day, the smartest man in the world or a man who can see every bit of time and space still can’t do anything to stop the fact that mankind will destroy itself even with them existing. (At  some point I will review both the film and HBO adaptation of Watchmen because I do consider them both masterpieces.) Superman might be able to get the earth to rotate backwards, but can he stop bigotry? Can Wonder Woman stop poverty? At least Tony Stark was willing to spend some of his money on saving a city rather than giant iron suits.

The only comic book character who I have ever thought existed at least in part in the real world is Batman. And that’s because he’s not a superhero in the conventional sense. For all intents and purposes, he’s a vigilante. The only think that truly separates him from the criminals he spends the nights beating up is that he has decided he wouldn’t kill any of them, and we all know that’s done more harm than good. Bruce Wayne by any definition of the term is insane. All of the criminal he fights are institutionalized rather than jailed. Christopher Nolan has acknowledged as much in The Dark Knight. In the midst of locking up Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) Batman yells at some fellow vigilantes: “I don’t need any help.” Scarecrow says: “That’s not my diagnosis” and he’s spot on. Rachel Dawes, the woman Bruce Wayne loves, knows this and tells him so at the end of Batman Begins. He never gets a letter from her before she dies that she knows that he will never not need the Batman, that Bruce Wayne is essentially the costume.

Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy will, in my opinion, always be the gold standard for all comic book movies and while individual films within the DC universe and the MCU might surpass some of the films in quality, I feel assured that none will ever surpass the accomplishment that Nolan showed in these three films. There are many reasons for this but there are three critical ones. The first is simple: Nolan uses his three films to tell a complete saga from beginning to end. In the more than a decade since The Dark Knight Rises Nolan has never attempted to revisit the world he has created and while the most recent version of Batman at least tried to hit on some of the themes Nolan did, Matt Reeves film essentially started with Batman essentially in media res.

The second equally important one, is that from beginning to end, much of what happens in the Dark Knight series is based in real life situations. Only Nolan has ever used the lens of the comic book movie to hold a mirror to the world we currently live in. Many people considered The Dark Knight the most accurate reflection of the War on Terror that we saw in the first decade following 9/11. Few movies – and fewer comic book films – have raised the moral issues about the compromises we make as a society for security and how thin the moral layer that we consider truly is.

The third is subtler but no less important. Nolan’s movies are as much about Bruce Wayne as they are about Batman. Indeed, in The Dark Knight Rises Batman has much less screen time then he does in the previous two films. The Caped Crusader only appears in a short sequence halfway through the movie, a major fight sequence about twenty minutes later and then only for the film’s final half-hour. The rest of the time the movie is focused on Bruce Wayne. In that sense The Dark Knight Rises is unique among comic books movies as it as much about the absence of its hero then his actual presence. This gives Nolan a chance to do something I never saw any other comic book film do actually argue whether the hero at the center is even a positive force in his own franchise.

I don’t think this could have been done with any other character but Batman, who has been famous for more than eighty years not only for being isolated but not truly highly regarded by even the people he wants to help. Batman has always been regarded as a menace, not only by the villains and criminal elements of Gotham City, but by law enforcement and indeed most civilians. In a sly referral to this in The Dark Knight, a media figure spends much of the movie considering that Batman is a threat that needs to be stopped (in typical fashion Batman saves him by the end of the film) but it’s clear that he is speaking for the majority of the public. Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) is the only true ally he has among the police force and throughout the first two movies he is barely tolerated. It is only when we meet Jon Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) that we realize Batman has had a positive impact at all, and he has to threaten to expose him in order to even get in the door of Wayne Manor.

The Dark Knight Rises makes perhaps the strongest argument possible that Bruce Wayne and by extension Batman’s quest is ultimately futile: that he needs it more than Gotham City does. The movie opens eight years after the end of The Dark Knight and not only has their been no sign of Batman since then, Bruce Wayne has disappeared from sight as well. Early in the movie a Congressman says that Wayne spends his days ‘peeing into Mason jars’ and he’s not far off. Alfred tells Bruce early in the film that you stopped being Batman “but you didn’t get a life. You’ve just been waiting for things to get bad again.”  When Bruce begins to take on the mantle Alfred keeps warning him not to get involved. “You’re afraid I’ll fail.” Bruce says. “No. I’m afraid you want too.”

In the eight years between the films, it truly seems like Gotham has recovered. The Mayor tells a crowd that the city has seen a historical rebirth, and while this is clearly only on the surface it is very clear that Wayne has been waiting all this time to be proven wrong, for him to be needed again. Commissioner Gordon seems to have taken a similar approach: in an early scene we see him by the ruins of the Batsignal and he actually seems to be happy that a Congressman has been abducted. (In truth, he’s just gotten drunk and run off with Selina Kyle as leverage.) In both his case and that of Bruce Wayne, you realize that they have never stopped waiting for things to go wrong, no matter how great the cost. Gordon’s wife and son, who he risked his life to save at the climax of the last film, have left him in the interim and Gordon had chosen the city over his family. In Bruce Wayne’s case Rachel’s words have proven a prophecy: he will always need it more than human contact.

The Dark Knight Rises bares the closest resemblance to any actual comic book storylines: Knightfall, the saga in which Bane arrives in Gotham, breaks Batman’s spine in battle and he spends months in recovery; and No Man’s Land, when the government decides that Gotham is a lost cause, essentially isolates from it the rest of America, and the city is left to fend for itself. However as with the previous movies in the trilogy, Nolan uses the trappings of the comic book to paint a larger picture of our society.

In the years that followed many would consider the actions of Bane to be a parallel of the populism and politics of rage that would be the focus of the 2016 election. Despite so many of the scenes that show the rich celebrating in glamor, an action by Bane at the stock exchange in which the head insists that it’s a robbery (“It’s everybody’s money” he says when a police official balks at stopping the trading first) and the nature of Bane’s ‘revolution, Nolan would say that this message was unintentional. I am inclined to view the film as a continuation of the story that Nolan was telling in The Dark Knight about the consequences of the War on Terror, particularly long term.

When the film begins, the Mayor is celebrating the anniversary of The Dent Act, which we later learn is an action to lock criminals up in a maximum security prison known as Bloodgate and deny them parole. The Mayor says when it comes to repealing the Dent Act, “Not on my watch.” It is hard not to think of both the passage of the Patriot Act after 9/11 and the problems we’ve had closing Guantanamo. When Bane (Tom Hardy) begins his revolution, one of his first major acts is to reveal the reasons behind the Dent Act were a lie, and that these criminals were falsely imprisoned. This lie is in fact called out by Blake to Gordon over TV. Gordon gives a speech about how there comes a point where the rules become shackles and that there will come a point when you’ll want ‘a friend like man, willing to bloody his hands to keep yours clean.” Blake says to Gordon: “Your hands look plenty dirty to me.” That he comes around to Gordon’s way of thinking at the end of the film basically takes the form of the ends justifying the means – which has been one of the basic tenets of the War on Terror.

The symbolism is clear in other forms; some more direct. Bane begin his attack on Gotham after a young man sings the National Anthem at a football game. His comments while it is going on are: “That’s a lovely voice” before he says: “Let the games begin!” and then blows up the field while the players are still on it. The image of a running back eating up yardage while the field collapses behind him is one of the most striking in the film. Like all of Nolan’s films, he is a master of the visual: the movie opens with a scene where Bane uses a larger plane to kidnap a doctor in mid-air that I have never been able to forget. Just as he takes the man hostage he says: “Now is not the time for fear. That comes later.”

Hardy’s portrayal of Bane took a lot of abuse at the time because filmgoers had difficulty understand his speech during the movie. I never had any real difficulty with that when I saw the film. Lost under that is the fact that Bane is by far the most interesting villain in Nolan’s world (though as we find out, he is in a sense a red herring) Bane comprehends what Bruce Wayne has fundamentally been in denial about in all his years in the comics: that Gotham is beyond saving. Bane wants to torture both Gotham and Batman who he is sees as two sides of the same coin.

 In this sense, he decides to use methods that are not unlike the ones we see the government using in both Afghanistan and Iraq: by using the threat of destruction to get the military itself to hold Gotham hostage by essentially making the city a nuclear deterrent. There is footage of the military looking on from TV and we see an official saying: “We do not negotiate with terrorist but we do accept reality.” Nolan is no doubt using this as a metaphor for the failed occupation of Iraq; at one point, he uses the government’s attempt at obtaining intelligence by ‘hanging them where the world can see’. One can just as easily see this as a metaphor for Al-Qaeda’s beheading of American soldiers online. The fact that Bruce Wayne in his prison around the world has a television perpetually tuned to what is happening  in Gotham is a metaphor for how America views so much of foreign policy these days.

One admits that there are flaws in the film that don’t make sense as part as canon of the world of DC but I’d argue that they make sense in part of the larger narrative Nolan is telling. A third of the way through the movie, Alfred tells Bruce that he has no intention of helping him any more and that he won’t watch him die. While this is inconsistent with the narrative we saw in Batman Begins where Alfred was Batman’s biggest cheerleader, one can see this as part of Alfred’s own arc. Over more than a decade, he has seen the man he considers a son essentially lose any human contact he might have for a city that thinks nothing for him and who refuses any desire to try and move past it.

This has honestly been a flaw that many long time fans of Batman have discussed. It’s worth noting that while Bruce is being held prisoner he has a vision of Ras (Liam Neeson) and in a sense, his subconscious is telling him what he has to have known: “You thought the evils of Gotham. With all your strength. All your resources. All your moral authority. And the only victory you could achieve was a lie.”  It is worth noting that Bruce returns to Gotham only to save it from being wiped off the face of the earth. At a critical moment Selina Kyle tells him: “You don’t owe Gotham any more. You’ve given these people everything.” Bruce says: “Not everything.” In a sense his actions in the final third of the film are perhaps his epiphany: that the battle will never end, and that only by giving his life can he finally be free of the struggle.

Because Batman is fundamentally absent from the film for much of the movie, far more attention is focused on the police, most notably Gordon and Blake. Oldman does some remarkable work in the film that shows his power as an actor. He spends the first half of the movie in a hospital bed recovering from an earlier attack. When Bane launches his attack on Gotham, he sends two of his henchmen to seek him out. Blake runs through the streets and we intercut between the men, Gordon in the hospital bed, and finally Blake arriving to hear gunshots. He reaches Gordon’s room to find his bed empty. Then we hear a gun cock. “Clear the corners, rookie,” he says simply. “Get my coat.”

Gordon spends most of the film to try to organize a resistance, tracking a truck that has the bomb, determined to find a way to stop it. Near the end of the film, he tracks down a colleague of his (Matthew Modine)who has lost his nerve and urges him to find a way to fight: “This only gets fixed from inside the city!” he shouts. When the final battle for Gotham rages we see Modine in his dress blues with a baton, walking down the streets. When the military tells him to disperse he says: “There’s only one police in this town.” The final battle for Gotham is not so much between Batman and Bane but between the police and the army and its more brutal than anything we’re used to in this kind of film.

The last half hour of the film have been said to have so many flaws that they stop The Dark Knight Rises from being a true masterpiece the way the second film was. Perhaps Nolan, who had basically spent most of the movie ignoring typical comic book references, decided to satisfy the fanboys and put in one too many easter eggs. Yet as a body of work  the film is a fitting conclusion to the trilogy because Nolan makes clear it’s a conclusion. Batman might well exist in some form, but Nolan has made it very clear in the age of the endless sequels and reboots that he has no intention of ever revisiting the world of Batman. And he does not need too. His saga of Batman had a beginning, middle and end. In the world where everything has to be a franchise, that’s a testament to him as an artist.

Nolan has been one of the greatest filmmakers in the 21^st century, one whose films appeal to your brain as much as the eye. Such has been the case since he broke on to the national scene with Memento one of the true masterpieces of independent film and one of the greatest mindbenders in history. When he took over the world of Batman he completely redefined what a superhero movie was capable of. Nor did he rest on his laurels: before The Dark Knight came out he made the remarkable The Prestige and before The Dark Knight Rises, he brought us Inception. People are still trying to figure out what the endings of those films meant years after the fact, but few would deny the visual power and the way they make you think.

After The Dark Knight Rises, he created the complicated space opera Interstellar,  a movie that dealt with the possibility extinction of humanity, the limits of space and time and how love can drive us. Dunkirk told the story of one of the most famous events in World War II from three very different perspectives. (By Nolan’s standards, it was a short film, clocking in at an hour and forty five minutes; most of the films he’s made since Batman Begins have been in the two and a half hour range.) Tenet, which Nolan insisted have theatrical release even when the world was in lockdown, would unlikely have been a box office success even had it come out in a normal release; it is far too confusing and cerebral to follow even after multiple viewings but few filmmakers would have bothered to tell a story this complicated at all.

From the moment Oppenheimer was greenlit in the spring of 2022, many entertainment critics viewed that it might very well be the last of its breed: a big budget studio epic that was going be released in multiple theaters. Even when Americans lit up at the sight of the trailers and the early critical praise began to roll in, few really thought that audiences would go to see an R-rated three hour film in the middle of July. On its opening weekend, Oppenheimer grossed $81 million domestically and over $180 million internationally, one of the best starts ever for either an R-rated movie or a biographical drama. Christopher Nolan has managed many remarkable feats in his incredible career. If he manages to completely change how studios think about releasing serious movies in the summer and funding them at all, that is a far greater act of salvation than anything Batman ever accomplished Nolan made about him.

How HBO's Three First Great Dramas Each Presaged The Inevitable Outcome of The Strikes in Hollywood

 

 

Few people will debate the fact that when the New Golden Age of TV started, it was led by three of the greatest writers in TV history who at HBO created three of the greatest series in TV history. By pure chance, they all happened to share my first name: David. Chase created The Sopranos; Simon created The Wire; Milch created Deadwood.

At the time, every critic and viewer recognized that these series were breaking ground that had never been explored before on television, when it came in terms of profanity, violence and subject matter. Most of us also recognized that these were the kind of stories that had never been told on television before. We had never seen a series which features mobsters fighting over turf with such immorality; a police procedural where the slingers were as fascinating – and in some cases, more moral – then the cops chasing them, or a Western where the man who wore a white hat and represented the law had to make deals with a man who had no compunction about slitting anyone’s throat.

But because it takes a while for even the most brilliant minds to realize connections, I don’t think it was until years after the fact that we realized the larger stories that all three men were trying to tell, and certainly not the basic similarity between all of them. A larger analysis of all three series is obviously required (and have indeed had multiple volumes written on each story) but it’s now clear that each one was in a sense telling a saga about the failure of the American Dream. The Sopranos told the story of the cynical nature of humanity and how most people, left to their own devices, will do the thing that requires the least work on their part, no matter how much violence it involves to others. The Wire believed that the institutions that have been established grind down whatever goodness an individual might have. Both shows are about the death of the American Dream. Deadwood is, in a sense, the most optimistic as it argues that selfish and the criminal can come together in service of a common goal, but it is heavily balanced by the fact that civilization and capitalism will at the end undo all of it.

(I spent a lot of time raging against Succession because I argued that all three of these series had told that same story before and better. In hindsight, I did not see that Jesse Armstrong was, in his own way, writing a natural progression of all three stories. In the Roy family we see people whose wealth has corrupted them to the point that they don’t even have connections to human beings {this was seen particularly in George Hearst on Deadwood} that the family was as incapable of change even though they had all the privilege that no one in anyone in The Sopranos had, and that even though they all had more power than anyone in The Wire could hope for, they had no idea how to use it.)

All three of these classic shows, in a sense, have had major storylines that foreshadowed the labor strike going on in Hollywood as we speak. I think its fitting to start with The Wire because Simon actually dealt with this the most directly. (There’s a deeper irony to that which I’ll get to at the end of the article.)

The second season of The Wire has never been granted to same respect as the other four because the investigation has almost nothing to do with everything we spent Season 1 dealing with. But it is by far the most pertinent to where America is today in a way that some of the more groundbreaking stories just don’t realize.

At the center of Season 2 is Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer). Frank is the head of the Baltimore dockworkers union which, like all labor unions, has been struggling and is nearly collapsing. As a result in order to survive Sobotka has been allowing containers to arrive on his docks from a Russian enterprise that contain contraband such as drugs and illegal prostitutes. Like most of the criminals on The Wire, Sobotka is a sympathetic one: he does not take his money out of greed but has put every cent of it towards keeping his failing union going forward. The lion’s share of his money has spent towards obtaining political influence, both with a lobbyist friend and trying to reach out to political figures.  He has spent all of his time and energy on protecting his union on dreams – he spends the entire season desperate to make sure the canal is dredged so more ships might come – that it has blinding him from the reality of the world around him. When he sees that machinery is likely to take over most of the worker’s jobs he is horrified because he knows it is  the death knell of his union. At one point he shouts that: “it breaks my heart there’s no future for the Sobotkas on the waterfront!” and it’s particularly telling because he has fundamentally neglected his family as a result, including his own son Ziggy.

The irony is Sobotka could no doubt have gotten away with his crimes and no one would have cared. What brings him down is the vanity of a rival of his Lt. Valchek. Valchek is upset that he can not get a window of a policemen at a critical position in his church because Sobotka made a larger contribution to get one of a dockworker there. Sobotka has, to be clear, made these donations because the monsignor is a colleague of then Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski and he wants to get face time with her. Valchek wants the window out of pure ego, and it is for that reason that he demands a detail to investigate Sobotka.

Another irony is that Sobotka is small fry compared to what the detail discovers: it’s clear that there is an illegal smuggling operation going on and it is connected to fourteen homicides. Sobotka, as we learn, doesn’t even know the real names of the ringleaders. But when Valchek learns the case is now ‘bigger than Sobotka’ his pettiness gets in the way and he calls in the FBI. By this point in the series we know the Bureau doesn’t care about things like drug dealing but union racketeering is a major deal. Their involvement ends up compromising the integrity of the investigation but Valchek never cares. All he gives a damn about is getting to slap cuffs on his rival and perp walk him before the cameras.

At the time, few viewers cared about the depths of the story because they didn’t realize the scope of what Simon was trying to tell: in the second season, he intended to tell the sage of ‘the death of work’. Near the end of the season after he has been arrested Frank tells his lobbyist friend: “You know what the trouble is…We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hands in the next guys pocket.”

In that sense, Simon presaged the labor struggle in Hollywood. In a narrow sense that’s what streaming is. It is doing for the entertainment industry what so much of the regular industry has been doing for years: it has been outsourcing its chief rivals (which include HBO) and providing it for a cheaper rate to the American public. The fact that it has become clear recently that so many of these streamers such as Netflix have been lying about their viewership for years and now face financial turmoil mirrors so much of the way that blue collar jobs were outsourced to other American industries. And as a result, the worker on these shows – the writer and actors – have become to starve.

Left out of the saga on The Wire was how this happened in the first place. If the lead of the show was Baltimore, why did it fall on hard times? Simon never gives an explanation, but implied is that so many Americans don’t care about actual change but the illusion of it. We see this in just how badly broken the policing and political systems are in Baltimore, but its clear in so many other ways, not the least of which is the rest of the country is indifferent to it.

We get another version of this in what would be the final season of Deadwood. During that season George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) uses almost all of his time and energy to manipulate and destroy the power structure in Deadwood. You could see Hearst as the living embodiment of all of the corporate bosses that are willing to let the writers and actors starve. Hearst is detached from humanity in a very basic concept: the only things he cares about are ‘the color’ (gold) and bending the population to his will. In what would be the series finale, when he has finally managed to obtain the last major claim he has spent all season trying to obtain, Seth Bullock tells him he’s scared, Hearst replies with detachment:

“You mistake for fear what is in fact preoccupation; I’m having a conversation you cannot hear.”

In the audio commentary on this scene on the DVDs, Milch says something chilling: “That’s what Rupert Murdoch tells himself every morning.” You can imagine so many of the billionaires running the studio telling themselves the same things.

Interestingly while this storyline was unfolding, a theater company would arrive in the camp led by Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox!). While this overarching storyline is considered a weakness for the third season (the kindest thing most fans will says is that it was laying the groundwork for a fourth season that never happened) at the time and afterwards Milch thought that it was just as important as Hearst’s presence:

“When the bosses seem in charge, there’s always room for art as a contemporary dynamic. I think that what we do in our society, the best of us as storytellers, present an alternative to the story the bosses are calling.”

I don’t know what the bigger irony about that statement is: the fact that fans responding to this concept so poorly or that Deadwood was cancelled because of a conflict between the storyteller and the bosses, mostly out of the same financial reasons driving Hollywood today.

The final part of the saga of our problem can be found in The Sopranos. Throughout the saga of Tony and his crew, Chase consistently made it clear that not only were the New Jersey Mafia small time to other mafia, but to the rest of the world. Indeed in the final season, this was compared to Hollywood itself. Christopher, who is trying to get his slasher film made travels to Hollywood to try and get Ben Kingsley to star. He is dismayed to find just that a movie star’s lifestyle is far more gluttonous than a wise guy could dream of. (Daniel Baldwin eventually is cast in the lead.)

This story, like almost every major story in The Sopranos, deals with the dissatisfaction of one’s lot in life and the fundamental inability to do anything to try and change it for the better if it means doing something difficult. That this is usually shown in terms of violent action was clearly by design by Chase, but it’s clearly just an extreme example of everything that happens on the show. Throughout the series we see every major character refuse to make any sacrifice that would make their lives better in favor of the choice that involves the least work.

And that part combines to get to the heart of why the writers and actors strike is ultimately doomed to failure.

The reason that this strike is happening is because of how streaming works. It pays a lot short term and almost nothing long term for the creative forces.  One does not blame them for not being able to foresee the future; no one could have told this would be an obstacle. The larger issue can be found in the underlying theme of all three series.

The Wire foresaw how this battle of blue-collar and outsourcing of jobs would lead to the conditions today. Deadwood showed us a world where capitalism will run roughshod over our best ambitions. The Sopranos told us that humanity does not like change. And all of these combine to the real obstacle the creative forces have.

The viewing public, which at its core is exactly like the indifferent society that plagues The Wire and is find with letting the bosses run the show in Deadwood as long as they get their art. As for raising a fight and support, like everyone in The Sopranos, it would take too much work. And because we live in a society where the worst thing for many of us is an inconvenience, it is an inevitability that they will turn against the strikers. They had little sympathy for getting their entertainment being delayed during Covid, why should they care if they starve? I’ve read more than enough articles on this site where the public increasingly doesn’t want to pay for its entertainment at all. They don’t care about the writers or actors who might be making less than some of them.

And if you think the bosses are willing to only sacrifice the rank and file, here’s a story you might not have heard yet. David Simon walked the picket line in the early days of the writer’s strike. Not long after that HBO officially cut ties with him. Never mind that Simon had worked for them for twenty years, had created some of their greatest work, and more or less made them what they are today. HBO cut him loose with less affection than Frank Sobotka showed for his union in Season 2. Why are we surprised that they’re willing to let the strike carry on until most of the writers are on the verge of losing their houses? As far as they’re concerned, it doesn’t matter what you contribute to us. You’re a worker and you better get in line. Simon might have been angry to learn this truth, but like his colleagues who helped essentially make HBO what it is, he can’t have been surprised. As he famously told us at the start of The Wire: “This is America.” And we all know the America Simon  - and Milch and Chase – lived in.

Lost Rewatch: I Do

 

At this point in Lost we know that none of the memories the survivors have are happy ones. We’re still not sure what force drew them to the island (though in this episode we do get our first hint) but at this point one of those commonalities might be the misery that the survivors endured before they got on the plane. All of their backstories involve painful memories and even the ones that show them truly happy are tempered either by the fact that they end up on the island in the first place or in some cases, flashbacks that show the future of these outcomes. Most of the time it is because of their families; just as often it has to do with romantic love.

We’ve seen this play out with Jack’s marriage, Locke’s relationship with Helen, Jin and Sun’s troubled marriage before they got on the plane and Sun’s illicit affair with Jae Lee and just two episodes ago, Sawyer’s relationship with Cassidy. When we see Kate in the motel room with Kevin, what’s particularly remarkable is that Kate spends the lion’s share of the episode looking genuinely happy in a way we haven’t seen on the island or any of her flashbacks. Kate has spent her life lying to people about who she is, but we’ve always known that she cares too much about people and it always comes back to bite her. Even as she goes through her wedding to Kevin, its obvious she’s spent their entire relationship lying (he only knows her as Monica) which makes it ironic that this love and marriage may be the most pure happiness Kate has known to this point in her life. (And I’m not just talking about her husband; her clear fondness to Kevin’s mother in their brief scene speaks volumes about just how little love Kate has known from her own mother in her life.) The smiles that we see her show in the first several flashbacks are the broadest we’ve ever seen from Kate – really from any character in their flashbacks so far.

But we know that Kate can’t stop running. When she calls the Marshall and tells her that she wants him to stop chasing her, the fact that he choosing to mock her relationship with Kevin is not just his typical level of brutality. She calls Mars for a very sad reason: this is one of the longest relationships she’s ever had and for all his sadism, he is telling her a brutal truth. When she takes the pregnancy test in this episode, she clearly has decided if it was positive she’d stay. That said, when Kate tells Kevin in the final minute about how she can’t be a mother or domestic, it’s not just her trying to make Kevin hate her. At this point in her life, she truly believes she is both unworthy of love and that she is unfit to mother a  child. (There is a bitter irony in this considering the radical turn of events for her in the second half of the series.) Kate might tell herself she did what she did because her cover might be compromised or because she didn’t want to hurt Kevin. The truth is simpler: just like with Jack on the island, she doesn’t think she deserves a man as good as Kevin and she doesn’t want to hurt him by being near him.

Now events in the cages are moving towards their climax. Jack tells Ben, without surgery he will be dead soon – and that he has no intention of operating. I have to tell you I took a particular relish in the scene between the two. Jack has been cruel and malicious so often; this is the first time he is actually acting that way towards someone fully deserving of his contempt.  Jack knows fully well these people can not be trusted and that he holds all the cards.

The problem is the Others do still have leverage and they are prepared to use it. Pickett spends much of the episode itching to kill Sawyer and for most of the episode Sawyer barely seems willing to fight. Kate basically is told by everyone that Sawyer’s number is up. Alex shows up in the middle of the episode for the first time since Kate and Sawyer went on the chain gang and she now sounds desperate in her search for Karl. If we ever had any doubts that Alex has never been drinking the same Kool-Aid, it’s very clear by her actions in this episode: she tells Kate what’s going to happen to Sawyer before Juliet tells her the same thing. (This is incredibly ironic considering in the next episode we will learn who Alex is – or rather, who she has been led to believe she is.)

Juliet then brings Kate into see Jack. This is the first time Jack has seen her since the three of them were taken and the scene between them is heartbreaking. Both of them are desperately trying to keep a brave face through most of it – until Kate tells her why she was here. Jack has frequently treated Kate unjustly in the past two seasons, but it’s hard to blame his feeling of betrayal here when she tells him why. That Sawyer actually takes Jack’s side on this when Kate tells him about where she went is another brilliant irony.

The scene that followed was subject to interpretation at the time. Nikki Stafford believed that Kate’s decision to have sex with Sawyer was possibly another manipulation by the Others, that they did all this so that Jack could see and that this would end up making him into the willing surgeon. I don’t blame Stafford or her followers for thinking this way but I never bought into this theory for several reasons.

First, there’s the timing. Pickett has made it very clear he’s going to kill Sawyer the next day. As we see, this is a promise he has every intention of keeping regardless of Jack’s accommodation. (There’s a deleted scene in the episode where Ben tells Danny to lay off Sawyer and its clear he’s not happy about it.) Sawyer has just made it very clear to Kate that escape is not possible: they are on a different island and they have nowhere to go. At that moment, Kate has no reason to believe that her fate will be any different from Sawyer’s, given how Jack reacted when she pleaded with him.

Both Kate and Sawyer have spent their lives on the run – Kate from the law; Sawyer from any human connection – and at this point, they realize there is nowhere left to go. Kate may very well love Jack more than Sawyer, but the two have been violently attracted to each other all series and at this point, she needs to feel a connection to somebody to fend of the loneliness that’s going to come.  Neither feels they have anything left to lose, so they just give in.

The second part of the theory is that Jack was let out of his cage in order to see the video of Kate and Sawyer in the cage, post-coital. I don’t believe this either, because we hear the voice of the person who let him out and its clearly Alex. We might not yet know of the connection between Alex and Ben but given what we saw before we have no reason Alex wants to help him. (Again, that deleted scene would make this very clear.) I genuinely think she was trying help Jack escape to destroy Ben. I think there’s a possibility Ben might have let Alex do this – he is a master manipulator, after all – but it would have been a huge gamble on his part: Jack very easily could have put a bullet in him right there.

And last, it’s worth remembering that Jack did not agree to this surgery with the sole intention of helping Ben. When Jack and Juliet are scrubbing up, the way he behaves we wonder if he’s decided to go along with this because he believed Juliet’s video dumbshow the previous day. Then the operation begins and we realize that Jack, at least right now, still thinks that Juliet is an Other.

The final five minutes are among the best moments that the series has done so far. Just as Ben goes under, Pickett storms out and we realize that he never intended to give Jack the benefit of the doubt. (He mentions in passing “Shephard wasn’t even on Jacob’s list.” We’ve just heard the magic word for the first time on Lost – and in typical fashion, it’s complete misdirection.)

Pickett pulls Sawyer and Kate out and there’s another brutal struggle. Again Sawyer has the drop on him, but again Kate’s vulnerability causes him to give up the advantage. He drops to his feet, knowing death is coming.

The last three minutes of the episode feature some of the best moments Evangeline Lilly has shown on the series so far. Kate keeps so much inside that she has rarely shown emotion on the island, except in moments of guilt. Now Sawyer is facing an execution, right in front of her and she is in turmoil. She begs in a way we just haven’t seen and it’s on deaf ears. There’s something just as heartbreaking as Holloway says: “Close your eyes” as he kneels before Pickett.

But just as fate intervened before Sawyer’s near certain death at this point in Season 2, it does so again here – only this time it’s a much closer factor. Because Jack has taken control of his destiny and made it very clear that he has every intention of letting Ben die if his terms are not met. (Credit to M.C. Gainey as Tom in this scene; this is the first time we’ve seen his character truly shaken in a way.) Jack then makes it clear that Kate needs to run for it. She has one hour to get away and if she doesn’t, he will let Ben die. Of course, he doesn’t know when Kate tells him that she can’t leave, she’s being literal.

Jack’s shouting: “Damn it Kate, run!” was the perfect cliffhanger for the fall finale of Lost, as the viewer really didn’t know at the time how this would turn out. Even at this point, we figured all three of the leads were going to live at least a couple of more seasons but they were in a place where escape looked impossible. Was Jack just going to let Ben die? (They had just made Michael Emerson a regular, but we’d been down that road in Season 2 as well.) It was the kind of moment that usually made TV fans count the weeks until the show returned – which is why it was so bizarre that when it came back in February, many fans did not.

As I said before I don’t deny the opening six episodes of Season 3 didn’t have their issues and its hard to entirely blame them. Eko died last week and not only do we barely mourn, we only have two short scenes with the people who witnessed it. And that’s just that group; we’ve still barely spent enough time with most of the survivors on the beach. Nor will these problems be resolved with the show’s return; there will eventually be a partial reunion and then yet another division of our characters. Throw in the fact that are quite a few weak episodes to come and is understandable why some viewers would have thrown up their hands and decided that this island just wasn’t worth it any more.

But I was loyal to TV series to a fault back then. I still had faith that the mysteries would be revealed (I had always been a sucker for mythology shows) but more importantly, I was deeply invested in the characters. At this point, I wasn’t invested in the end game (though in the next few weeks, we would learn just how the series would play out) so much as I still wanted to see what would happen next. And when the show came back in February, it more than delivered.

 

Note: In a note that presages his future, the first time we see Nathan Fillion as Kevin, he is in a police officer’s uniform. Three years later Fillion would move from cult star to TV sensation as the title character in Castle and follow it up in The Rookie. I guess he was destined…to always do police work on ABC,