Decision 2024: As Jon Stewart Returns to the Daily Show, A Refresher Course and A Wish List

 

In one of Jon Stewart’s final episodes of The Daily Show in July of 2015,  he and Jordan Klapper dealt with Trump’s announcement for the Presidency by arguing how significant it would be if he became President. The gag was if Trump won, he would become the first ‘asshole’ ever elected President.

Klapper argued that Stewart was anti- and Stewart said that ‘some of my best friends are a—holes.” He named Paul Rudd. Klapper said that wasn’t true, Rudd (who was about to be interviewed) walked on next to Klapper and said deadpan: “I saw your father (bleep) your mother. Trump 2016” and walked off. Klapper acknowledged he’d been wrong. Stewart argued that there had been asshole presidents before and the debate ended with Stewart mentioned Nixon. Klapper acknowledged that Nixon was an asshole, but a closeted one. “Trump would be the first asshole who acknowledged his identity.” Klapper said.

I’m not just saying this to remind everyone that Stewart, like so many other people in news, underestimated Trump. I need to make this clear because The Daily Show had endorsed Trump for the Presidency – in 2012. Lewis Black had spoken about it heavily in one of his ‘Back in Black’ segments and when Trump said he was thinking about holding a debate, not only was Stewart thrilled about the idea, he showed footage that made it clear in 2011 just how horrible a person Trump was. And when Trump said he was considering running for President that year, Stewart cut to the famous footage from Apollo 13 of Mission Control applauding.

When I heard that Jon Stewart was returning to host The Daily Show on Mondays, starting this week, I won’t deny I was thrilled and delighted. Stewart is the kind of entertainer America needs more than ever during an election year. But whereas the left is overjoyed because of what Stewart represents to them, I think we need Stewart’s presence for another reason.

Now I wrote in an earlier article that I was one of Jon Stewart’s biggest fans when he was hosting the Daily Show. I watched the first episode he hosted in January of 1999, which dealt with Clinton’s impeachment and the last episode he did just prior to the first Republican Debate in 2015 and I think I missed only a handful in between. I watched him through Indecision 2000 (a branding that eventually Stewart said: “We had no idea you would take this and run with it) in the aftermath of 9-11, the leadup to the Iraq invasion which became referred to by the show as MESS-O-POTAMIA, four different Presidential elections, the financial crisis, Bin Laden’s assassination, the Tea Party and everything that happened up until 2015. I was personally going through some dark times through much of the first decade of Stewart’s tenure but he and his team could always make me laugh even when things were miserable for me and the country.

I’ll admit that, for much of the period, I did follow it for news purposes as much as anything but not once did I ever take its label “The Most Trusted Name In News” seriously. I knew that Stewart was entertaining more than he was informing and that he was one of the greatest satirists of all time. His work inspired a whole generation of similar comics, many of whom started their careers on The Daily Show. Stephen Colbert and John Oliver are the most successful, but Wyatt Cenac and Samantha Bee had brilliant comedy series for long periods and Steve Carell, Al Madrigal, Jason Jones, Ed Helms, Aasaf Mandvi, Jessica Williams and John Hodgman all launched successful careers under his mantel. I knew that this was here to make me laugh first.

But I also knew very clearly the targets of Stewart’s rath. The first was attacking partisan politics. Even before the rise of Trump, before Citizens United, Stewart could see just how far out the Republican Party was becoming. Much of his energy was spent on the Republicans obsession with the Iraq War, the way the Party spent every primary pivoting to its extremist and then moving back to the center for the general. He spent a lot of time antagonizing John McCain and Mitt Romney – Republicans now considered sainted by so many today – as panderers to their base doing anything they could to win the Republican nomination. When McCain railed against the Tea Party, he berated this as hypocrisy for his choice of Sarah Palin as his Vice President in 2008. When Michael Steele was elected chairman of the RNC in the wake of Obama’s election, Steele was parodied by a Sesame Street Muppet. (Eventually he interviewed Steele after he was fired.) He went out of his way to ridicule the extremists such as Herman Cain and Michelle Bachman, utterly tore apart Newt Gingrich and loved it when Rick Perry and Rick Santorum had their moments of ridicule in the 2012 race.

But he also went out of his way during this period to do everything in his power to show that Democrats were incompetent and easily cowed. After the 2002 midterms, he said that the Democratic Party was dead. He mocked the idea of John Kerry as a Presidential candidate, even after he got the nomination. And he never was won over by the idea that so many voters had that Barack Obama was a savior. Yes he was angry that the GOP had wanted him to fail and questioned his citizenship but he had no illusions about Obama’s ability to manage legislation as early as the spring of 2009. Stewart’s politics were that of a Democrat, but he had no illusions as to the flaws of the party and he pointed them out on every opportunity possible.

The bigger target of his wrath was, of course, cable news. And despite the rose colored glasses, he thought all cable news was ruining our political discourse. Yes he went out of his way to rail as Fox News referring to it over and over as ‘Turd Mountain’ and he pointed out with great relish every single mistake they made. But he was just as relentless about the punditry that existed everywhere on every single network, particularly MSNBC and CNN. Over and over he mocked their inability to focus on present and to always focus on the next election and who might be the next President. He pointed out that they were almost always wrong with their predictions – and that they never suffered any consequences for it. Most people who are that wrong at their jobs would have been fired years ago, but the same pundits who were working twenty years ago are still working today with little sign of recognition of their failures.

He was, if anything, willing to give credit to Fox News when they did something right. He might have hated Bill O’Reilly, but there was clearly some respect. At one point he referred to him as the Hulk: “Usually he’s a monster but point him in the right direction and he becomes a hero.” He didn’t feel that way about all Fox News broadcasters (he had much disdain for Glenn Beck) but he was willing to acknowledge every so often that the Lou Dobbs of the world were right. The left never does that now; I don’t see any media sources doing that, and if they do, it’s only with disdain.

And he spent more energy berating CNN – indeed all 24 hour news networks – for failing at their jobs. He was painfully aware of how much the media was focused on scandal and would just as soon leave stories at the point there might be news, let alone acknowledge their own failings.  Most of his tenure was spent ridiculing how all cable news was failing and that they were doing a horrible job informing the public.

And as we all know the targets of his satire – politicians and reporters – did not take this as the warning was intended to be. Instead, they seemed to enjoy being in on the joke. They loved appearing on Stewart’s show, they loved using clips of his show for entertainment purposes to propel their own messages. Fox News said he was clueless, MSNBC said he spoke truth to power, CNN loved being part of it, none of them got the message. Jon Stewart spent fifteen years telling the world to beware the political media industrial complex. And just like when Eisenhower gave his famous warning before leaving office, we all ignored it.

But as we know when it comes to assessing what’s wrong with the system, everybody will do anything but look in a mirror. When Jon Stewart came back to TV with The Problem With Jon Stewart,  younger reviewers and certain identity groups chose to blame him for the mess America was in. Identity groups blamed him for creating Tucker Carlson after the notorious Crossfire incident (ignoring that again he was blaming the media for creating the problem) that he was too centrist and compassionate towards the right wing when he had spent his entire career being bipartisan in his satirical attacks,  and for still trying to see both sides of an issue when both sides refuse to listen to the other.

Now, with both Comedy Central and The Daily Show in a crisis Stewart has returned to it in an election year. This is welcomed with great joy by entertainers and of course left-wingers who think, in the same way that Taylor Swift can influence elections, Stewart can keep Trump out of the White House. Stewart, of all people, knows he does not have that power.

I look forward to Stewart’s return to The Daily Show and I wonder what he will do this year. What I hope he’ll do is show the fearlessness he did in his first fifteen years on the show. And that means that he will use his comedy to speak truth to power – all power.

I don’t know if, a decade later, Stewart still has the ability to draw in the kind of names that he used too. Considering he was able to do so on The Problem, I think that’s possible. Whether they’ll show up is another question but here goes.

I want him to ask Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio how they can support for President a man who spoke at a rally where the supporters tried to have them killed. I want him to ask, how after barely surviving it, they could return to their seats and just keep doing what they had been doing originally. I want him to ask Lauren Boebert why she didn’t want McCarthy to be Speaker and why she voted to remove him. I want him to ask Roma McDaniel why she forsook her uncle for a man who cast her aside when she became an inconvenience to him. I’d like him to talk to Alina Habbas and ask whether she believes the arguments she says in court.

I want him to ask AOC that, if she truly supports social change in America, why she is supportive of a group of fundamentalists who believe many of the people’s right she embraces have no right to exist. I want him to ask Ilhan Omar and Rashida Taib if they believe Hamas actions’ were justifiable. I want him to ask Bernie Sanders that if he had been elected President how he would have carried out his platform.

I want him to ask George Santos what he was thinking when he ran for office. I want him to ask Robert F. Kennedy Jr if he thinks his family proud of him. I want him to ask Liz Cheney why she went along with Trump for as long as she did. I want him to ask  I want him to ask Hakeem Jeffries why he let his caucus vote McCarthy out of the Speakership when the procedural vote was called. I want him to ask Claudine Gay why she couldn’t give a simple answer to the easiest question possible. I want him to ask Chuck Schumer if he thinks the Republican Party is loyal to America. I want him to ask Mike Johnson if he thinks the Democrats are.

And I want him to ask of any  who was working for one of the cable media networks during the ten years he was off the Daily Show and has since retired from the profession if they have learned anything from what he was trying to tell them for fifteen years about how badly they were failing at their jobs right up until the moment he left. And if they tell him he was wrong about Donald Trump to, I want him to give the only answer he has to: “I was never a journalist. I’m only an entertainer. What’s your excuse?”

Whether any of them will give an answer remotely resembling honesty is impossible to say. But Stewart has often been able to get answers that reporters weren’t and even if he doesn’t, it will be entertaining to watch them squirm in a way that it just isn’t anywhere else.

Lost Rewatch on VHS: This Place Is Death

 

VHS Rewatch Notes:  Some of the commercials for this episode at the

time involve trailers for series that were going to debut soon. Among them were an ad for Castle which would premiere in a few weeks and become one of ABC’s biggest hits. We also see ads for the brilliant but cancelled far too son Better Off Ted, whose fate is still bemoaned more than a decade after it was cancelled. And we see a preview of what would be the first Grey’s Anatomy/Private Practice crossover, which involved a complicated brain surgery on Addison’s brother and the first part in a storyline that would led to a mental breakdown by Derek.

There are also previews for several upcoming films. By far the most significant was Zach Snyder’s Watchmen a box office failure at the time, now considered a masterpiece. My north star Roger Ebert thought so when it debuted and time has proven him correct.

Now a note on the episode. There is a disagreement between Finding Lost and Lostipedia as to which characters are the center of it. Nikki Stafford says that it is Rousseau centered as well the catch-all ‘Everybody’. Lostipedia says that it is Jin and Sun centric. Their argument is that every time the episode flashes to and from the island it is always on Jin on the island and Sun off it. In this case I am inclined to believe that this episode is based on Sun and Jin overall and that Rousseau’s story is one of the stories that the island is telling.

One of the focuses of this episode was that the writers were following through on their promise to tell the story of Rousseau, something they’d apparently been promising since Season Three and had kept pushing even after Rousseau’s death. They kept their word as the first two time jumps on the island show us how Rousseau came to the island and much of what happened to her that led to her becoming the shell of the woman that Sayid would meet in Solitary. There are inconsistencies between her narrative and what we see but while that could be a flaw in the writers approach, it could just as easily be due to her state of mind. In the space between the first two jumps, only a few weeks have gone by and it’s pretty clear she’s been driven close to insane already.

The story unfolds from the perspective of Jin, and there’s something appropriate about that. Not only does Jin not know enough English to tell them what’s going to happen in the future (assuming he ever knew, that’s never been clear) when the crash happened he was isolated from the other survivors because he couldn’t speak or understand English. Rousseau was similarly an outsider from the moment we met here and while she would occasionally ally herself with the survivors her objectives were always different from theirs. Furthermore when Jin finds the French team, he has lost his wife and is looking for her and Rousseau spent the first three seasons looking for her daughter.

As we watch the team go into the jungle, tracking the  radio signal that is the numbers we see the parallel between the first excursions into the jungle by the Oceanics, most significantly the six survivors who were trying to get the transmitter to work in the second half of the pilot. Both teams have four men and two women, both are hoping to get a signal and both encounter a creature in the jungle. The difference is all the Oceanics survive their encounter with the polar bear. The team runs right into the monster.

When Nadine disappears Jin knows what is coming but like a Korean Cassandra his warnings go unheeded. Melissa Fairman is brilliant in her scenes as the young Rousseau. There’s innocence in her eyes at the start, compassion towards Jin and protecting him as well as the love she clearly has for Robert and the child she’s carrying. The moment Nadine disappears, she is concerned and when she sees her body, she’s clearly shattered.

Then the monster grabs Montand and pulls him towards the wall of what turns out to be our first glance at the Temple, which we’ve heard discussed since the end of Season 3. Montand’s arm is pulled off, and when the team hers him speaking in a voice for help, they go in after him. The fact that he just says, “I’m hurt,” and is not screaming in agony should have been a clue but no doubt everyone is stunned by what just happened. Jin manages to keep Danielle from going underground – and then there’s another flash.

Here we see the scene Danielle described to Sayid in Solitary about how ‘the sickness’ has infected everybody. It plays out just about as she describes and there’s a good indication that no matter how quickly she killed Robert, it must have been a huge blow emotionally. There’s a very good sign this helped push her to the very edge: later this season we’ll seen the final push.

Jin ends up reunited with the remaining survivors and there’s genuine joy at this – followed by the fact of what happened to Sun. Locke tells Jin that they have to go to the Orchid to bring Sun back and Jin is understandably baffled by this. Locke’s argument: “Because she never should have left’ clearly doesn’t convince him and it’s telling that the person in the group who should really want the survivors to return is fuzzy on the issue even by the time the flashes start to come faster and furious.

All of the performances in this episode are strong, but it’s hard not to say the ones were seeing on the island are far more powerful. Charlotte begins to mentally degenerate, and she seems to be feel an accelerated version of what Minkowski and Theresa are going through. She is clearly flashing back to her childhood and beyond, but it’s worth noting that in her final moments when she shouts the title of the episode, she is giving a warning to everyone else, Locke in particular. That Locke chooses to keep moving regardless is revealing both in his certainty of his mission – as well as the blind faith.

Dan stays behind, telling Charlotte she will be all right when he clearly knows better. Jeremy Davies gives a truly incredible performance as the woman he loves tells him why she came to the island, that she was part of Dharma – and in the biggest shock, that Dan may have warned her not to come to the island as a child. Their final scene together is a masterpiece for both Davies and Mader, as Charlotte has a moment of lucidity, then returns to her childhood…and then dies. Daniel is clearly broken by this in a way we’ve never seen this calm scientist be  - and it will change his actions for the rest of the season (though he’s going to be absent for much of it)

When what’s left of the group reaches the Orchid – and then another flash erases it, they are left clueless. Until they walk through the jungle and find a well – just as Charlotte said. The scene that follows is one of the best for Season Five for all concerned. As things have gotten worse Miles has lost his sarcasm and he increasingly becomes serious and afraid for the first time all season. Josh Holloway is superb all episode (he’s been upping his game a lot) but he’s increasingly becoming nervous and when the next flash comes (from inside the well) he grabs the rope and when the well isn’t there anymore, he’s genuinely scared and starts frantically digging in the dirt. Elizabeth Mitchell manages to remain calm through most of the episode, and when John is about to go into the well she tells him that if this works, thank you. This is a big deal both for Locke and Juliet; Locke has been standing in the way of rescue since she became aware of him and now she decides to put her trust in him. It’s an even bigger moment for Locke, though he tries to hide it. For the last four seasons he’s been so sure that everything he has done has been in their best interest, and even when he was helping the group he was frequently taken for granted or shamed. Now finally someone simply thanks him for doing something that he knows all too well may get him killed. It clearly means a lot.

But the major scene is between Daniel Dae Kim and Terry O’Quinn. As much as Jin wants to see Sun, he does not want her to come back to die. It’s not clear if he’s thinking of her pregnancy killing her or Charlotte’s words, but in either sense he knows how deadly the island is. He loves Sun so much that he is willing to pretend he is dead in order to ensure her safety.

Locke’s final scene before he leaves the island is, in a way, a microcosm of everything he’s already gone through. He falls to the ground and checks his legs. This time, getting up seems impossible: he’s shattered one of them. (Eww!) He seems helpless and alone. Then Christian, who is the representative of the island, shows up mysterious and tells him he’s here to help him. John does not question how he’s here. Christian does not actually help him stand and get to his feet. He berates John and says that he failed in his instructions and tells him he trusted the wrong people. He reminds John of his mission, emphasizes it must be everybody and tells him where to find someone – Eloise Hawking. He tells John that he believes in him, and when Locke says he tells him he might have to die, not only does he not deny he says: “That’s why they call it sacrifice.”  Locke is brave, I have no doubt of that but this is yet another example of how much this bravery is based in a blind faith.

In the present we resume right where we left off. Sun says hello to her daughter, tells her family she’ll be back the next day and takes out a gun. She has every indication of killing Ben. But Ben doesn’t seem at all surprised, and indeed he tells her husband is alive. He says he will show her proof if she comes with him to see someone to take him back to the island.

Kate and Sayid do the smart thing. Kate walks back to the car, and calls everybody crazy. Sayid follows her and says he doesn’t want any part of this. The fact that Ben, even with a gun in his face, still thinks he can persuade Sayid to do anything, shows just how desperate he is.

Much has been discussed about how after Jack says if Ben is lying he will him himself that Ben slams the brakes and says with fury that everything he has done has been in their best interest and if you knew what I’d been doing the past three years, “you would never stop thanking me.” The thing is, we’ve heard this tone before. He said it to Mikhail when the man doubted him about jamming the signals in the Looking Glass was what Jacob wanted. He said it to Locke when he went into the Orchid where a team of mercenaries was waiting and said: “I always have a plan.”  Ben is always good at persuading people who should know better to let their guard on just long enough to trust him. And it’s not like Sun is the first person in this series who’s had a gun to his head or that Jack hasn’t threatened to kill him before.

I think Ben’s frustration is built more on the fact that he’s lost two more of the people he has to bring back and he has no clear idea how to do so with time running out. He’s a little irked that Jack, having been following him by the nose for the last few episodes, is actually angry at him but he figures it’s a temporary condition. He also knows that much as Sun wants to kill him, as long as there’s even a chance Jin is alive she’s going to play it out. He knows something about wanting to avenge a death, but he also knows how to hold hope over a person’s head as a carrot always out of reach.

And when he produces Jin’s ring when they reach the church, we are now certain of how far Ben will go to achieve his ends. We’ve suspected for a while than Locke’s death wasn’t a suicide, but this is the first clear indication Ben knows more than he’s telling about it. Locke did keep his promise and never went to see Sun, meaning as far as she knows Jin’s dead. Ben clearly lied about not seeing Locke, and he’s clearly not keeping up the story Locke told. That Ben is doing what Locke swore not to shows that Ben has no interest in going back to the island to help anybody but himself.

But he’s not the only visitor at the church. Desmond has just arrived. It’s clear the moment Ben sees him that he realizes that he can check one last thing off his to do list before going back to the island. But something very telling happens when Desmond says that Eloise Hawking is Faraday’s mother. Ben is struck silent. This is a man who seemingly knew every detail of the freighter folks biography but he clearly did not know who Faraday’s mother was. (There’s a good chance he didn’t know who his father was either, but we’ll get to that later.) Yet again we wonder why Ben, who never trusts anyone blindly, has decided to put his faith in a woman who is clearly knows more about what will happen then he does.

And it’s striking that when the group assembles in the church in the final scene (and Desmond clearly recognizes Hawking the moment he sees her) she doesn’t seem the least bit bothered that Ben couldn’t complete his task.

It is the last scenes that actually do begin to make us question Ben for the first time in a while. Throughout the nearly three seasons we’ve known him, Ben has always seemed to be the one pulling the strings of the survivors. He clearly did it on the island, he did it to Sayid in the flashforwards and we’ve seen him manipulating them to get back to where he needs them. But there has always been signs that Ben has had less control than he thought, and where on the pecking order he was. Richard was clearly willing to let Locke supplant him when he thought Ben was weak, Ben spent much of Season Four claiming that Jacob wanted him to do things even though we still haven’t seen him, and now Ben is willing to answer to a strange woman who speaks in ominous tones but refuses to explain how she knows anything. Ever since we’ve met Ben we’ve known we can’t trust a word he says and that he always has a plan. This is the first time (but far from the last in Season Five) where we begin to wonder if he’s as much a puppet as the survivors whose strings he’s been pulling all this time. And it terrifies you about what may happen when they get back to the island.

 

The Female Murder Police of Homicide, Part 1: Melissa Leo and the Incomparable Kay Howard

 

In the spring of 1997,  not that long after I was becoming truly obsessed with Homicide, the show began airing in syndication for the first time. Its reruns aired on Lifetime a network that then and now prided itself on female oriented program. (Indeed in 1997 it’s slogan was ‘Television for Women’.)

Up to that point Lifetime, like most cable networks in the 1990s, was built entirely on syndicated series. Most of the series were some of the best shows of the 1980s and 1990s – China Beach, L.A. Law, thirtysomething – but given the tenor of the kinds of roles women were limited to back then, even the more complex roles on network TV had the woman as basically a caregiver as well as professional and most of those series had a fairly closer ratio between female and male co-stars then Homicide did to that point. There was only one female regular the first two seasons and only two the next three. I already knew that Homicide was a masterpiece but airing it on the same network known mainly for airing reruns of TV Movies adaptations of Danielle Steel and Judith Krantz seemed to be pushing the term. And that seemed to be how Lifetime viewed it. It only aired late at night for the rest of 1997, moved to the very early morning in 1998 and by the start of 1999 Court TV – a more fitting home for it – was airing the reruns instead.

Today, much as thirty years ago, Lifetime is still fundamentally dominated by reruns of female dominated TV series. But there’s a significant difference in the kinds female-centric shows. Now most of their programming is devoted to Rizzoli & Isles, The Closer and it’s spinoff Major Crimes and Castle, where the major character’s focus in on NYPD detective Kate Beckett. Correlation does not equal causation, but it’s difficult not to see these kinds of female led procedurals (and as we knows this is just the tip of the iceberg) without some of the work of the groundbreaking character that Homicide created in the 1990s.

Homicide never had the same kind of representation of female detectives and other professionals that we ended up seeing on its far more successful procedural NYPD BLUE. During the six season the two series were contemporary Blue had seven different female cast regulars and five of them were either detectives or police officers. There were more to come after Homicide was cancelled in 1999; four different female regulars appeared on the series, and three of them were detectives. But there were key difference between the female detectives on Blue and those on Homicide.

 For one thing, all of them from Amy Brenneman to Jacqueline Obradours were all closer to the kind of sexual beings that network TV relies on for female leads of any kind. No one could call actresses like Melissa Leo or Callie Thorne unattractive but you couldn’t mistake them for runway models. For another, almost every female character – even when they were as brilliantly layered as Kim Delaney’s Diane Russell – was as much part of the series because of their sexual partnerships with the detectives as their prowess as investigators. Leaving aside the nudity and sex that made Blue so controversial, that wasn’t the kind of show Homicide was. All of the female characters had sex lives, but that was never part of their identity the same way it was on Blue. (Generally speaking, it mostly wasn’t part of the male characters identities either.)

I have written many articles about Homicide over the past several years and will write many more but I found that I have not given enough due to the  actresses on the series. This isn’t intentional but considering how much of the industry seems to be looking at the kind of perspective it looks at how female characters are portrayed in a culture of ‘toxic masculinity’, I think it’s time to look at the women of Homicide. There were very few female characters (such was the case of television in the 1990s) but what they lacked in quantity they more than made up in for quality. And it’s only fitting to begin with a female detective without whom we wouldn’t have the Olivia Bensons or most of the females who are at the head of procedurals in the last twenty years – but who TV still hasn’t been willing to try and make another of.

 

One of the first characters we meet after the opening credits of Homicide  comes when a doe-eyed Tim Bayliss walks up to a desk and says: “Excuse me. Is this Homicide?”

A red headed detective looks at him and cynically says: “Homicide? We work for God.”  With her very first line of dialogue it was clear that Kay Howard was not going to be the kind of policewoman that we had seen before on TV, though to be fair, there had been very few to that point.

When Homicide was being cast, there were originally no women on the show. This was mainly because in Simon’s book he had not followed any detectives. (There was one female detective in Baltimore at the time, but Simon had not been permitted to cover the shift she was working on.) NBC, frantic to avoid charges of sexism, demanded a female character be developed. The character of Kay Howard was created and the cast in the role was Melissa Leo on her way to becoming one of the greatest character actresses of all time.

The usual model for policewomen to that point was to have them be sexual beings first, incompetent at their jobs and needed the instruction of an older male detective. (Think Heather Locklear on T.J. Hooker and you’ll get the idea.) Shows like Cagney & Lacey had been an outlier and Hill Street Blues had fundamentally been dominated by male police with the few women being officers rather than detectives. In the partnership of Kay Howard and Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin) Fontana and his writers flipped the script. Howard was the consummate professional and Felton was the one who was barely treading water. The first time that the phone rings, he’s terrified to pick up because his clearance rate is so low and Howard at the time has closed 12 consecutive cases. Howard picks up the phone and is called in to investigate the death of Henry Biddle. They know who the killer is and, in keeping with the nature of the show, he actually calls his house and the detectives invite him to meet with him. “You’re amazing,” Felton says in admiration.

Leo was attractive but not drop dead gorgeous the way most of the woman on Blue were and within two seasons, Howard stopped wearing makeup altogether. This was never officially spoken of on the series but the implication was that this policework was more important to her than glamor. It would be nearly a decade before Mary Lynn Raskjub broke a similar mold on 24 as Chloe, the blunt professional who didn’t have time to get dressed up and by Season 6, she had become more glamorous.

Howard’s portrayal could be more maternal than anything; she spent the pilot prepping Bayliss for his first case as primary and often was a sympathetic ear to her fellow detectives. Her relationship with Felton was often problematic, mainly because his personal life was perpetually falling apart. Howard had empathy for Felton, but it was also built on concern for her job; she was angry when he was sloppy because it affected her ability to close cases. When he showed up hungover having lost crucial evidence she berated him as being a sloppy drunk. “Why don’t you go across the street and have another drink?” she sneered at him.

Nor did this sympathy extend to fellow female police. At the start of Season Three with the promotion of Megan Russert to shift lieutenant, she initially spoke in admiration and respect of her. By the end of the episode, she was calling her ‘bitch’ under her breath. Furthermore she learned that Russert and Felton were having an affair (he had told her) and she confronted Russert angrily about it. She didn’t care so much for Felton’s wife – the few times we saw her, Beth Felton was clearly unbalanced – but she resented being stuck in the middle of their separation and she knew how the Baltimore department worked. She had no intention of having her ability to do her job impeded because her partner was having an affair with a superior and she told her so.

 That’s not to say Howard wasn’t a sexual being – she was, but mostly she kept her private life private. She had relationships on the show, the most public being with States Attorney Ed Danvers (Zeljko Ivanek) in the first two seasons. One of the most hysterical scenes in the entire series occurs when Kay is trying to quit smoking. (Homicide may very well have been the last network show where almost every regular smoked at one time or another.) Pembleton, the one person she respects and a fellow smoker, says this is about sex or money. “The only two things more powerful than tobacco,” he says wryly.

He talks to her about her relationship with Danvers and she starts to blush a little. “Ed Danvers is a stallion among ponies,” she then brags. “A man larger than life,” she says after Pembleton doesn’t seem to get the hint. Frank, rarely, is baffled – Danvers is not exactly a model. “He makes me see stars,” she keeps going. “He makes me feel sweet pain. I had to set boundaries…He can’t touch me in a church.”

Frank, who he even then always had something to say, is momentarily dumbstruck. Then Howard says she did quit smoking for Danvers: “I did it for me.” Frank looks her relieved and says: “So all of that was just…” Howard nods and says: “Yes.” Then she smiles and says: “No.” “Oh, come on!” Frank says. Howard smiles and says: “I guess you’ll never know.”

In the days before Sex and the City, I don’t think I’d ever seen any female character on TV before – and rarely since -  engage in such blatant locker room talk with a male character and leave the male character wanted to blush. That it involved Andre Braugher makes the joke even funnier.

The one trait about Howard’s character that might be something to nitpick was that during her entire run on the show she had a 100 percent clearance rate. To be fair, Howard was the only character in the entire run of the series who had a perfect clearance rate; it was certainly obvious on the board that the red ink was prevalent on every other character. But it was the rare misstep for a series that was almost always purely authentic. Homicide, to be fair, never made a big deal about after a certain point and indeed, it eventually became significant only after Howard had an open case she couldn’t close.

But in retrospect that may have been by design. It was clear watching Homicide how proud Howard was of having a one hundred percent clearance rate and when she was assigned the case that broke it (one of the open investigations after Crosetti’s death) she publicly bitched about. “It’s a dog,” she told Gee. The episode ‘Nothing Personal’ featured some of Leo’s best work as she pursued a case that had been cold for six months with the approach of someone determined to close it out purely out of pride rather than the pursuit of justice. She spent that episode snapped at everyone, starting with Lewis (Crosetti’s partner) for not doing a good job investigating, berating Felton for bad procedure work and sniping at anyone such as Bolander or Russert who offered help. Only when Bolander told her: “A good detective sometimes knows when to move on” could she let go – and the case remained a thorn in her side for the next year, something her colleagues needled her, albeit good-naturedly and which she always responded personally to. “It’s open until I close it,” she kept saying.

During Season Three Howard, Bolander and Felton were shot while serving an arrest warrant on a pedophile name Glenn Holton. Howard was shot in the heart and not expected to recover. Felton, who was only minorly wounded, spent the next two episodes upset because he was the better shot and he felt if he’d gone in first, this wouldn’t have happened. When Howard regained consciousness, she reminded him that she had insisted on going first because she was the primary and she would do it again.

One of the grudges I bear against Homicide during Season 4 and 5 was that after Baldwin and Ned Beatty departed, instead of being put more in the spotlight, Howard was actually used less. In the opening of Season 4 she took the sergeant’s exam which she passed but that role actually led to the diminishment of her character on the series rather than expanding it. There were clearly possibilities as a detective who now has a higher rank that the detectives she works with and the difficulties her character faced. Instead Howard essentially faded more into the level of support, and never investigated a case as a primary for the remainder of her run on the series. It was never clear why this was decided; Howard’s name was still on the board and her perfect streak was still going on but for whatever reason, Leo was less central to the action in her final two seasons then she was in the first three.

That didn’t mean there still weren’t opportunities for Leo to shine. In ‘Heartbeat’ she and Munch (another character who was never utilized as much as he could be) investigated the entombment of Eugene Elwin in a wall in what was a tribute to Baltimore’s poet laureate Edgar Allan Poe. Munch spent the episode confiding in Howard in a way he didn’t usually and we also saw her superstitious side when a black cat entered the squad room and she frantically began a ritual. Her interactions with Gee became more central to the series and it was often fun watching her work between covering for her detectives and keeping her boss in the loop.

And in the two-part Season 5 finale when Beau Felton, who’d been gone from the force for two years, was found with his head blown off, Howard went back in the spotlight. As she dealt with the death of her former partner Leo was shown off to great extent. But the final episode also demonstrated the kind of sexism we rarely saw in regard to her.

When the investigation was ruled a murder Pembleton who was the primary got into a pissing contest with Howard about how to handle the investigation. Howard erased Felton’s name from his part of the board and wrote it under hers. “Problem solved,” she said as Frank burned. Gee then called her into his office and told her outright she could not investigate because this case was ‘too personal’.

As the investigation stalled she demanded to be put on the investigation and pointed out a clear parallel: when Crosetti had committed suicide Lewis had abandoned an active murder and had openly hampered the investigation at every turn. Ironically Felton, with Howard’s help, had closed the murder Meldrick had been investigating something Gee had told Lewis. Not only did Giardello not back down, he refused to acknowledge he’d made a mistake then. It was the rare example of Giardello not being willing to see false equivalences based on gender or race.

At the end of Season 5, Leo (along with co-star Max Perlich) was written out of the series. No explanation was given at the time as to why. Leo was in the middle of a tabloid spat that was going on with John Heard at the time, but Fontana said that he “had gotten tired of writing for her character.” This went over badly with fans of the show at the time; despite the diminished role of Howard over the last two season, I was angry at the decision. The explanation the show gave was based in a new process being introduced by the Baltimore P.D. at the time; detectives were being shifted from crime to crime on a three month basis. (We’ll see how Homicide handled it when I get to the second part of the article. When Season Six premiered, all of the detectives who spent the last three months on rotation returned to Homicide, except Howard who was still on the fugitive squad. Leo never returned to the show during the remainder of its original run.

 It took a few years for Leo to get her career going again. She spent the next several years mostly in small roles in mediocre films or guest shots in TV series that were one-offs (Criminal Minds, Veronica Mars, Law and Order. Then in 2008, she was given the lead role in the brilliant independent film Frozen River. She got her first Oscar nomination for Best Actress and won the Independent spirit award for Best Female Lead.

Then her career got launched into the stratosphere. In 2010, she took the supporting role of Alice Ward in The Fighter and won basically every award leading up to a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. That same year she reunited with David Simon in his follow-up to The Wire, Treme. She played Toni Bernette, an attorney doing everything in her power to learn the truth of what happened to the dead in the aftermath of Katrina, the suicide of her husband and the deterioration into drugs of her daughter.

For the next ten years she has become one of the most regular working character actors in film in television, playing Lady Bird Johnson in All The Way and Madeline Murray O’Hair in The Most Hated Woman in the World. She won another Emmy for a Guest appearance on Louie, has starred in such brilliant limited series as Mildred Pierce and I know This Much is True and had an exceptional role as Goldie in I’m Dying Up Here where she played a character as close to an antiheroine as she had managed to find in her career, as a bullhead 1970s owner of a comedy club who loves to control every aspect of the comedians she says she nurtures. In between she has appeared in such undervalued masterpieces as Prisoners, The Big Short and Flight.

I’m always gratified when a performer I respect from a series I watched years ago achieves success in another series or show. This has been a constant truth for most of the cast of Homicide but few are more deserving than Melissa Leo. Her work helped create a model for female detectives for the last twenty five years but there still have been very few detectives like Kay Howard and that is a tribute to her work.

In the next part of this article, I will deal with the female detectives who appeared in the seasons that followed Howard’s departure and created some of the more iconic moments in the last two years of the show.

School is Back In Session: Abbott Elementary Season 3 Review

 

 

Considering that Quinta Brunson is one of the greatest hyphenates working today and considering that Abbott Elementary, among its many, many other virtues, is the current representative of the workplace comedy, I was curious to know if when the first two episodes premiered last night whether Brunson (who wrote the first two episodes) was going to acknowledge the strikes that crippled the season. And of course she did, gently.

When the camera crew entered the school, every single member of the faculty welcomed back saying that they’d missed them for the last five months – almost to a day how long each of the picket lines were. Jacob (Chris Perfetti) in an aside mentioned that the camera crew had apparently been mugged five months ago and it had taken them this long to get new equipment. This actually became a running gag at the midpoint of the episode. Then as the episode opened there was some rumbling about the presence of the representatives of District. Ava grumbled and put on glasses with fake eyes on them, clearly intending to sleep through it. Barbara, usually cynical, said that some of these people seemed good at their jobs. Then came the representatives of district for Career Day, and wouldn’t you know it, one of them was Janine.  Telling everybody she worked for district now, Brunson looked at the camera and said: “You guys missed a lot.”  Yes we did and we certainly missed Abbott Elementary.

The network season of 2024 has been returning in a piecemeal fashion over the month of January. NBC has been moving forward first, with the return of Dick Wolf’s two blocks of TV,  one set in Chicago, the other his Law and Order bit, along with the return of Night Court. I’ve been watching what has been filmed of Irrational and Quantum Leap, but for my purposes the 2024 network season began last night with the return of two of the greatest examples of network comedy Not Dead Yet (I’ll get to that next week, but it looks as great as ever) and of course Abbott Elementary. For seven months we’ve been eagerly and frustratingly trying to see what would happen after Gregory and Janine confessed their attraction and then Janine broke everyone’s heart by saying she needed to be on her own. That hasn’t quite been resolved yet (Brunson’s no doubt smart enough to know how long to keep the tension boiling) but we’ve been seeing a lot in the last two episodes.

For one Ava (Janelle James, your Emmy is waiting for you) came back from summer break having attended Harvard. Well, she sat on the campus and took computer courses and was wearing a shirt with the AVA section of Harvard highlighted but she came back determined to be a good principal. It was hysterical watching Ava trying her hardest to deny her worst instincts throughout the first half of the episode and just as funny to see her showing us all that ‘the only thing worse than her being a bad principal was her being a good principal). Eventually, the faculty tried everything to get Ava to return to her old self, and hysterically it really looked like she’d reformed. Not even the sexy appeal of Gregory’s forearms was enough to make her resume her old ways. (Tyler James Williams reaches new levels of being uncomfortable.) Finally, in desperation Barbara put on the one thing that could bring her back to herself – her music. Ava naturally heard it and began to dance wildly.

Janine seems to have spent the summer with some of the bloom leaving the rose. Watching her in the first part of Career Day, there was a certain resigned air to her thinking that all she can do now is be the best teacher possible. When new representatives of District showed up (the former superintendent had been arrested for taking bribes) they seemed remarkably optimistic and committed to doing their best work. As you’d expect the faculty all greeted them with cynicism, particularly Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph). Still, it’s clear that they are committed in a way that we have yet to see on Abbott Elementary, particularly Manny, a young man whose mother was an educator and who spent her life complaining about how horrid the situation was. They know what they are up against and Manny spent the first half of the season premiere trying to woo Janine to a fellowship at District where she might be able to make change. She spent the first half trying to figure out whether or not to take it, and eventually after several discussion with the group she chose to do so.

The second half was Career Day and Janine was more than willing to bring in the people requested. Eventually it got hijacked when Melissa’s group – a ticket seller for the Philadelphia Eagles – managed to get Jalen Hurts to appear. And because this was Philadelphia every single student ran to her classroom. Janine spent the rest of the day improvising a way for this to work out and seemed disturbed it ending up not going perfectly. But Manny assured here that being able to improvise is a sign of a good researcher. There’s a lot of humor to be played out with these district people; Janine genuinely seems to fit in with them in a way she doesn’t always with the rest of Abbott (Ava dismissed them all as nerds at one point). But there’s clearly a camaraderie between them and they have good jokes. Will Manny become a love interest with her?

That doesn’t mean it was all fun and games. Indeed, we had a moment of genuine heartbreak. Melissa’s boyfriend had spent much of the episode trying to convince her to marry him and at the climax of it, managed to get the Eagles team to give a proposal -which Melissa refused. Melissa has been married and does not want to go down that road so when the two of them broke up, it was like a punch in the gut. As always the moments were balanced with humor; Jalen Hurtz was very respectful and when Janine asked him if he’d considered teaching he told her it might be possible: “I only work on Sundays.”

And to be sure there were wonderful moments throughout career day. The funniest was when Jacob managed to get Mr. Johnson (William Stanford Davis) to talk to his class. Johnson has had such a deep backstory that Jacob wanted to hear it as much as anyone else and David kept delivering. “Now I’m sure you wondering how I became a United States Senator?” he says at one point. “Yes!” Jacob says. The episode also ends with Johnson talking about a mafia experience, wrapping things up and receiving a standing ovation from the crowded classroom. Barbara spent the episode being given makeup tips from a cosmetologist and thanking her: “I would never have the time to do this, but it’s good to know I can look like this” she said sincerely. And Gregory managed to find a botanist for his class – but really for him. Gregory, it’s worth noting spent his summer working in Camden Yards and had what seemed to be ‘an incident involving the turf’ that has since gone viral.

Janine clearly misses her job teaching but its clear she likes what’s she’s doing. We also saw (because Ava naturally installed cameras in the halls of Abbott) that she and Gregory had an awkward moment together before she chose to go to district five months ago. It looks by the end of the episode their friendship and banter is back on track, though it will no doubt be another one or two seasons before they finally decide to, well, you know. As always the faculty is still torn; Jacob is trying to be on the side of ‘Team Gregory’ and Ava was watching it with popcorn.

The brilliance of the first season of The Bear aside, I still believe whole heartedly Abbott Elementary deserved infinitely more love than it got from the Emmys last month. How the momentum shifted from one brilliant series to the other I still don’t know but Williams almost certainly should have won and Brunson deserved at least one more Emmy. I’ll get to the second season of The Bear in the weeks to come; given the recognition it got from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards last month for Season 2, I suspect that there will be a similar war to the death between the two series for the next year. But few can deny that Abbott Elementary is still a masterpiece and, in conjunction wit such brilliant new series as Ghosts, Not Dead Yet and the new Night Court, signs the network sitcom is now in full revival. I couldn’t be happier that school is back in session.

My Score: 5 STARS

Is Night Country Being Too Harshly Criticized By True Detective Fans?

 

A couple of weeks ago, in what was a long overview of True Detective I reached the conclusion that the critically acclaimed first season was never as remarkable as millions of fans have thought for over a decade, that Night Country was not particularly a good installment of it and that, having watched the first two episodes, I had no particular desire to finish it all that quickly. As I mentioned there are very better procedurals on Sundays at 9pm anyway and after two episodes of Monsieur Spade and The Woman In The Wall, it’s clear the former is more fun and the latter more layered than Night Country is. My plan, which I have every intention of following through on, is to DVR the remaining episodes and at some point when time permits it watch the remaining four episodes, not anticipating much. So when I say I have no dog in the fight over whether Night Country is a masterpiece or an offense to fans of the original, I think you can believe me.

That does not mean I’m unaware of the war that has been being fought among critics, fans and right now the two creative forces behind the show about whether Night Country is any good. The critical response I’ve read has been mixed. The reviews have been favorable by some, but the advance reviews I’ve seen online have considered it basically a mediocrity which would fit in with the two episodes I saw. However in the last few weeks Nic Pizzolato, the creator of the first three seasons and Issa Lopez, who created Night Country have begun an argument about Night Country that basically sums up the opposing points of views.

Pizzolato, who is credited as a producer of Night Country but has no association with it, has vocally admonished Lopez for utilizing so many Easter eggs from Season 1 in Night Country, something that many critics and even fans have considered a distraction from what is working about this version. Lopez, by contrast, has argued that fans of the original series are ‘review bombing’ the show on Rotten Tomatoes out of a combination of toxic masculinity and the internet attitude towards making something they consider precious ‘woke’.

 I will grant you I haven’t watched the last two episodes of the show to know how much of these criticisms are merited. However, as someone who has a certain level of detachment – something that is a commonality between every character on True Detective – I think I can make some observations on this argument.

First of all, if you are a reader of my column you know that I vehemently loathe even the concept of review bombing. The rush to judgment to destroy a work of art because the too-often juvenile mindset of the internet argues that any change to something that they consider ‘sacred’ appalls me as a critic. Far too often this judgment is made before the series even airs a single episode: I saw it done with the reboot of The Wonder Years, the reimagining of Quantum Leap and most recently the prequel of Sexy Beast. If nothing else, these arguments make the jobs of critics like myself so much harder; most of these ‘critics’ will never even watch an episode of these series: the mere idea of it is enough to cause them to reach a certain level of insanity far disproportionate to the nature of the offense.

 At the very least they should watch an episode before they decide it deserves their loathing and in the case of Night Country that actually seems to have been what’s happening. Pizzolato has admitted the point when he says the easter eggs are distracting. That said, I’m not entirely certain he’s an unbiased observer when it comes to this. It’s not clear what connection, if any, Pizzolato actually has to the fourth season of the show. The series is based on True Detective as opposed to being part of the universe, which may very well mean he had nothing to do with any part of its production. He may be offended that Lopez is taking liberties with his series that he did not give permission for, and that may be a legitimate complaint. But considering the level of criticism that has been lobbed against his version of the series for the levels of misogyny in it as well as the more than five years between the third season and the fourth, we can’t say for sure whether he was fired from the show he created.

That deals with Pizzolato’s perspective. Now let’s move on to Lopez’s.

There’s a very good argument that if this show had just been called Night Country Lopez might never have been able to get it sold, much less get the kind of viewership that she and her fans are crowing about. Having seen the first two episodes, had it had no connection to True Detective, there wouldn’t have been much to recommend it to me save the presence of Jodie Foster. I admit the idea of setting a show in Alaska in the middle of perpetual night has elements of a mystery that is interesting, as well as the fact that the two detective investigating the crime are female. But the basic setup is not far removed from say, Mare of Easttown and I didn’t have much of a reason to watch that series either. (My mistake I admit.) The only reason I paid attention to this show was because it was labeled True Detective. And Lopez has to know that’s why 2.5 to 3 million people are watching it.

Furthermore if Lopez wanted to make Night Country her own, she could have done it by telling her own story. There was absolutely no need to put in the symbols that represented ‘The Yellow King’, the fact that the Tuttles are involved or that Rust Cohle’s father might have originally lived in Ennis if she was devoted to telling her own mystery that was merely ‘based on True Detective’. She didn’t need to put in the Easter eggs and she certainly could have spent the leadup to Night Country by saying this was an independent story. Her decision to put the Easter eggs in was as much a lure to the fandom of True Detective as the references to the source material has been for House of The Dragon and The Last of Us. Indeed, many of them were deliberately put in the trailers for this version.

Lopez spent a lot of time and energy luring an audience in with links to the first season. In my opinion, her statements saying that the former fans of the series are now review bombing the show because they are offended by it has a hypocrisy that most of these reimagined versions do not. She went out of her way to try and get them on the hook and now she and her ilk are repudiating them because they find it offensive.

In my opinion this is much ado about nothing because if you’re a fan of True Detective, you are getting exactly what you expect from Night Country: a lot of great atmosphere, apparent philosophic behavior, a ritualistic and brutal murder, a toxic relationship between the two lead detectives based on an event in the past, a prominent set of two performers at the start, and a sense of something greater and supernatural that at the end of the day will just lead to something anticlimactic. The argument between fans of Pizzolato’s work and Lopez’s version truly goes to show how hollow so many of these internet squabbles really are: both sides are utterly convinced the other is destroying something brilliant when there was nothing great in the original to be ruined and there isn’t anything that great in the remake. In this case it’s about a prestige TV show rather than a comic book character or a sci-fi franchise, but its fundamentally a wasted dispute because both sides are so dug in on their divides, they refuse to even admit there was nothing that great about their story in the first place.

While I may lean closer to Pizzolato’s side than Lopez’s in the argument about Night Country, ultimately I can’t bring myself to care either way. True Detective is, at least for me, as unimportant to me as Star Trek or Star Wars, and I care as much about how much Night Country is affecting the ‘franchise’ as I do about Discovery or Ashoka doing to theirs. For the next few weeks I will be finishing up the series I mentioned and waiting for The Regime to debut on – that actually looks original and fun, something I can not say for any version of True Detective, past or present.

 

 

 

Why Print Journalism Was Always Going to Die And Other Myths About It Those Mourning It Refuse to Share

 

 

““You have preserved in your own lifetime, sir, a way of life that was dead before you were born.”

A New Leaf (1971)

 

“ I didn’t kill it. Don’t blame me. It was dead when I got here.”

Other People’s Money (1991)

 

Over the last couple of years I have dealt with many of the major flaws that so many apparently well-educated people have in their arguments about the demise of basically any major institution – politics, movies, sports, television, even criticism itself. I have spent a lot of time and energy trying my very best to debunk so many of these arguments.

In hindsight, I think the summation of both sides can be put up in these two quotes from two very different forgotten movies filmed twenty years apart. The details about so many of why things have declined varies on the topic, but the crux of it always has the tone of the nostalgia factor, which is best summed up in the first quote. The main reason that all of these things were ruined usually comes down to different details all of which involve some combination of money, progress and the change in generations.

 My answers have had some variation on why those people who have been arguing that it was better before are guilty of what politely could be called selective omission of how things have always been and were even back then. It is only now that I realize the people who have been bemoaned the deaths of these institutions to progress and economy could best be answered by the speech that Danny DeVito gave that contains that same quote. His argument is defending greed but its also a real-eyed look at the march of how progress goes. “Once upon a time there were lots of companies that made buggy whips” he tells a bunch of stockholders. And that’s fundamentally true of basically every single institution that has ever existed. Eventually they have to evolve or they die. In many cases – such as film, television and baseball – the institution recognizes it has to evolve and takes steps to do so to survive. That’s when the oldest and loudest voice make arguments that any change to these institutions is an obscenity and the people who are trying to do change them are destroying what they love. They always forget that the thing that it is an amusement to them is a livelihood for the people running it.  In their minds, it would be better for the industry to go bankrupt  - and by extension, completely disappear – then lose its purity. In some cases the loudest voices are the ones who made a living in the business and now call it an art. The logic is hard to comprehend.

A couple of years back I encountered a column by media critic Jeff Jarvis arguing that television was dying. I won’t repeat his criticisms but they essentially came down to that there might be good TV on certain services but he didn’t want to pay for it and that the only hope for the future of the medium was in glorified fanfiction for television. This was an easy argument for me to dismantle. Last month, Jarvis was announcing the eulogy of the demise of print journalism and while some of the details were different than the ones I’ve heard for film, books or television, much of it comes down to the same myth that it was a good thing – a calling -  before money was involved.

I wrote a longer criticism on his post, which keeping within the tradition of someone not wanting to puncture their bubble, he has not answered. I’m now going to put in a longer form. Perhaps he’ll see it; more likely he’ll just call me uninformed even if he does. Nevertheless, I’ll try.

The idea of a newspaper ever being something that was purely objective, a calling that was beyond trustworthy, something that was ruined only when money came involved is a myth. One that you’d think a man who calls himself a critic of media would be aware of. From the founding of the Republic newspapers and magazines have almost always had agendas that were built on the ideas of the men who founded them. The agendas were political, though in the first century of the United States, much of that agenda was based more on location than anything else. The wars on slavery were divided on where the papers were and broke down essentially on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line was. If journalism was truly impartially, the attack of Charles Sumner would have been viewed nationwide as an atrocity; instead the North considered Preston Brooks a villain and the South was angry he had left Sumner alive.

Newspapers have always been at their core operating on a political agenda. Indeed Horace Greeley, hailed by media historians as a hero, was the definition of a journalist who used his publication to meddle in national affairs. Greeley was as much a thorn in Lincoln’s side as the Radical Republicans could be, and he made no secret of judging every move that went on in D.C. through how he thought it should be done. Greeley was a national celebrity because of his paper. It did not make him a bastion of journalistic integrity.

And it’s not like the papers that followed in his footsteps in New York were any different. For over a century the gold standard of journalism has been the Pulitzer Prize. How many reporters – how many people in media – know that every time they win it or are nominated they are involved in what has been a century of whitewashing or that for all intents and purposes, he was as devoted in the same kind of sensationalism most people today think Rupert Murdoch invented?

For his entire career Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst engaged in newspaper wars in order to peddle their financial and political influence. It was their battle for New York readers that was one of the causes that led to the Spanish-American War. “You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war,” is famously attributed to Hearst, but it’s not like Pulitzer himself was a saint. During the 1890s, he and Hearst competition led to what was called yellow journalism, which featured sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors. That is what journalism has been based on for a centuries, not some great idea of investigative work. Both Pulitzer and Hearst had political careers that were aborted and they spent their lives influencing every aspect of politics for the rest of their lives. Pulitzer’s recruitment of the iconic Nellie Bly was to sell papers, more than any belief in social progress or even what kind of reporting she was capable of. He left $2 million to Columbia in his will, and they founded the Columbia school of Journalism. For all the good it may have done, it is built on the same kind of exploitation that the other ‘robber barons’ such as Rockefeller and Morgan are infamous for. The media hasn’t done as much to remind us of that. They know where their bread is butter.

After Pulitzer died, Hearst basically kept on going as did so many other mass publishers including Henry Luce. The muckrakers that ended up breaking through – Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair – were no doubt writing to expose the ills in society. They were not doing it for free. Nor were the publishers of the papers they worked for doing it for social change; they wanted to make money and seeing the ills of society was just another form of sensationalism. There’s always money in showing how badly people are being exploited; that’s as true today as it was a century ago.

And these same publishers were just as intent in maintaining their hold on political power as the media has always been.  All the way through FDR’s first reelection campaign, two-thirds of the nation’s newspapers backed Alf Landon. In one of the most infamous polls in history the Literary Digest, the first political poll, argued that Landon would be elected  with 360 electoral votes. FDR won with 523, every state but Maine and Vermont. The publication folded not long afterwards.

The only kind of newspapers that advocated as much for social change as much as financial success were those run by African-Americans. Publications like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender might have been pushing sensationalism but they were trying to raise social awareness and force equality. They were hoping for integration to succeed even if it meant that their businesses would, as a result, have to go under. Men such as Wendell Smith might be amused – or annoyed – that this generation of African-Americans is now angry that their vision succeeded as well as it did: they argue for both equality and independence, something that many of the publications at the time would have considered impossible. (But that’s another story.)

For those like Jarvis who might argue that social media has killed print journalism, it was going to happen for the same reason that we don’t have any need for the manufacture of buggy whips any more. When movies came along, they were able to spread reporting to a national audience. When radio became effective, local newspapers became less pertinent to their readers for national news. The nightly news did more damage and when CNN was founded in 1980, the death of print journalism was inevitable.

 For the past forty years, the newspaper industry has been doing everything in its power to avoid the fact that they can not stop the march of time. I read newspapers every day growing up and well into my forties but I’ll be honest by the time I was in my twenties; their values were out of habit more than any real value. TV was already able to report long stories in the same detail the day they happened, had the budget to do more research and work and do so more efficiently. What’s the benefit in reading yesterday’s news when the TV is always going to have today’s? All that social media and the internet have ever done is hasten the inevitable. The fact that these days MSNBC is bemoaning the death of newspapers strikes me as a cruel joke: I’m reminded of a serial killer wearing a human mask of their victims.

The newspaper reporter, in all honesty, has been an anachronism for at least half a century maybe more. Do you know the real reason you’ve survived as long as you have, the real reason so many of you are mourning a way of life that perished well before you were born?

Hollywood. Ever since The Front Page was nominated for Best Picture in 1931, the movies and later TV have made your job look glamorous, glorious and even sexy. That actual investigative journalism is nothing like what we see in movies and TV has done nothing to diminish its appeal to Hollywood, because the industry relies on a formula and reporting has made it one. (Hell, The Front Page was remade for movies four separate times, and the last one moved it to television.)

I guarantee you that over the last half-century many of the women who have gotten into journalism did so as much to be Lois Lane as they did Nellie Bly or became photo-journalists to be Peter Parker rather than Jacob Riis. If you can’t actually be a superhero, the next best thing is the alter ego of one. Hell, we’re in the 2020s and Lois Lane is still a former newspaper journalist on Superman & Lois. You’d think by now she’d have at least become a reporter for a Metropolis local news station but the nostalgia factor plays out.

And it’s not like it’s changed when it came to stories of real-life investigative journalism. This may end up being part of a larger column but I really think the reason political journalism became a huge thing after Watergate was because of the film version of All The President’s Men. The 1976 film, it’s worth noting, comes to an end right before all of the Senate Hearings that really led to Nixon’s downfall – we see all of the highlights being played out on a typewriter typing all the headlines. I don’t deny Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting helped, but it was just the first domino that led to Nixon’s downfall – and it’s something they themselves know all too well but have spent half a century more than willing to wear the mantle of single-handedly bringing down Richard Nixon.

That’s the myth Hollywood has played in helping journalism for the last half-century: if you become a reporter, you can be played by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman. This is something that film has leaned into hard for half a century and print journalism does nothing to diminish. Even though reporters say over and over “we’re not the story’, they don’t seem to object when they are portrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal in Zodiac or Michael Keaton in Spotlight. Truffaut misspoke: all movies get reporting wrong because they all make it look glamorous. This is something they should have telling new interns before they ended up taking unpaid jobs at the Boston Globe.

That’s the real reason that I think so many old men and women are bemoaning the demise of journalism. They’ve been reading their own books, seeing the films and shows made about them and talking in their inner circle for so long that they believe their own press clippings. Journalism has never been some higher calling the way that Aaron Sorkin described in The Newsroom; it is and has always been a business built on economic realities and never immune to the march of time. Newspapers have always been the subject of political agendas, the whims of the millionaires and built far more sensationalism than anything else. At a certain point progress was always going to catch up with it and we now seem to be at that point.

Jarvis and his ilk bemoan this as a great lost for the world and while there is some truth to it, it still requires the kind of selective vision and idealism that the first quote that headed this article has in just about every context.  Collectively their attitude here is akin to that of every other time progress comes to something they love: it is Canute trying to hold back the tides. The tide they claim that did the job is the Internet. To that I’ll just remind of them of the second quote. Don’t worry. Like everyone else, you can make a good living on other forms of media, bemoaning the loss of the thing you held dear. For people whose career was built in writing, you never seem to have learned about irony.

 

 

 

Historical Figures Series: What History Gets Wrong - And Right - About Andrew Johnson, Part 5

 

Part 5: The Myths of Reconstruction

And Why Andrew Johnson’s Reputation Has Parallels to

Contemporary Events

 

One of the major stories of Reconstruction that has been discussed ad infinitum by historians, African Americans and leftists alike is that after the Civil War, there was a huge opportunity that men, primary under the leadership of Andrew Johnson squandered. Given a chance to fully bring the South into the modern era and achieve full and equal rights for African-Americans, there was a period where it seemed like these things were possible – but Johnson and the men who succeeded him as President wasted the opportunity by making the term for reunifications far too loose, not fiercely punishing enough the man who led the insurrection, and after a decade, abandoning the South to its own devices and abandoning the freedman for eighty years of Jim Crow.

This myth is not as widespread as that of the Lost Cause in the South, but it is just as much in denial of reality and selective omission. And while many Presidents and leaders are blamed for it, Johnson by far takes the brunt of the abuse. This has led to his reputation for being one of the worst Presidents in history, remembered only until the late 1990s as the only President to ever be impeached. Since most of the time context is removed from the conversation, the implication has been by most Americans that, like Richard Nixon, he was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and that he only escaped removal because of extenuating circumstances.

Much of this treats Johnson unfairly. It is true that he was a Southern Democrat and had been a slaveowner until the Civil War. It’s also true that while he supported the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, he mainly did as an act to preserve the Union more than any desire of slavery as a moral wrong. This feeling was held by many people in the North of both parties at the time, and right up until its abolition.

It’s also true that Johnson’s approach towards Reconstruction was based more in politics that Lincoln’s world have been. Johnson was hoping to win the Democratic nomination in 1868 and he hoped to do so by unifying the Democrat wings of the party around him. That those policies would be fundamentally different from Radical Republicans and men like Stevens and Sumner particular should not be shocking. But one of the great ironies of Reconstruction is that, while Johnson’s approach was, though too forgiving, far closer to Lincoln’s approach than the plans that the Radical Republicans had already presented before Congress and that Lincoln had been refusing to endorse.

We will never know for certain what Lincoln’s policies for Reconstruction were but based on his pocket veto of the Wade-Davis Bill and his discussions with Stevens and Sumner before his assassination, it is clear that he was leaning more towards forgiveness than punishment. The ideas of loyalty oaths and military governing, the heart of the Wade-Davis bill, were abhorrent to Lincoln’s basic views of reconciliation.

A question rarely posed by historians is whether Lincoln, had he lived, might have faced many of the same obstacles Johnson did in regards to reconstruction. The Republicans had overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress after the election. They had tolerated Lincoln before the war, but with it being over – and Lincoln a lame duck – they might very well have carried out the same measures they did in Johnson’s presidency and passed them over whatever vetoes Lincoln might choose to invoke.

And even had Lincoln managed a more equitable solution than Johnson ended up with, it is very difficult to imagine the end result being any different. The South had lost the war, there would have been military occupation of some form, and even if there had not been, they would still have to enforce an amendment that they had seceded from the Union rather than face its existence. The history of Reconstruction during the Presidency of Grant was filled with outbursts of violence against the soldiers, the White House sending reinforcements to suppress it, and the violence resuming once it was withdrawn. During the era of Black Power, there were chants of getting your rights through the barrel of gun. One wonders if those children of the era knew that had actually happened in the South a century before – and it had ended up failing. If the only way to enforce equality is at gunpoint, then is it really equality?

There’s also the question that has the clearest parallels to today: the decisions to not try the leaders of the Confederacy such as Jefferson Davis for treason. Again before the war ended, Lincoln had made it clear that the best thing for him might be for “Jeff Davis to leave the country while I wasn’t looking.” Several key Confederate figures – including Judah Benjamin, who at one point was Secretary of State for the Confederacy – did just that. But eventually Davis was captured trying to flee the country and imprisoned

For three years Johnson’s administration struggled with the question: should they try Davis for treason and insurrection? Clearly there was an argument to do it; the new Southern states had just returned to Congress three former Confederate officials – including Alexander Stephens, the former vice president of the Confederacy – to the Senate. The idea of returning to the government these men had actively fought against was clearly repugnant and something needed to be done.

But it always comes to the question of how. Who could claim jurisdiction over the crimes that Davis had committed? Jurisdiction was one of the biggest problems. Where were the crimes committed? And where could a man like Davis get a fair trial? Certainly not in the North and at one point Robert E. Lee acknowledged that a trial in a place like Richmond among its citizens would be impossible to get a trial where he might be found guilty? At one point, a jury of newly freed slaves was empaneled to hear the arguments. But if you truly believe that the head of the Confederacy could get an impartial verdict from the men he had spent a lifetime saying deserved to be in bondage and led a failed nation based on that concept, well, you have a better opinion of human nature than I do. Even the nature of punishment and fairness was held differently by many. Horace Greeley, the newspaper editor whose paper had been one of the strongest endorsers of Republican policies during the war, would post bail for Davis before his trial – an action which  caused millions to consider him a traitor himself.

 The trial never took place after it was empaneled and at the end of his Presidency Johnson issued amnesty for every major official who’d served in the war. This was regarded with hostility at the time and still is today. But it’s hard to imagine Lincoln doing anything much different given the opportunity. He believed in reunification and the national healing; something that could not have been accomplished by putting the heads of the Confederacy on trial for weeks, if not months at a time, with the stories being the subject of the papers and the public, no certainty of a verdict of guilty and the end result being rejecting by one half of the country as illegitimate. Trying to find solutions for the present by blaming past failures is something contemporary historians have absolutely no problem doing without context. At best if the trial had taken place for men like Davis it might have served as a model for what to do and what not to do. That its mere existence would no doubt have made the post war era   infinitely worse for a country trying to heal after so much death and destruction never enters into the mindset of armchair historians.

And it’s worth noting at least his first Reconstruction actions – recognition of the government of Virginia, and amnesty for all ex-rebel soldiers, as well as the ordering of constitutional conventions in former rebel states – received considerable public support in the North. Johnson mistook this as unconditional backing for quick reinstatement of the South and underestimated the Northern public opinion that the war had not been fought for nothing. Johnson’s theory on reconstruction was different than most Northerners – he believed that they had never truly left the Union, and though they should be recognized once loyal citizens formed a government.

So no matter how much we might want to blame Johnson for not holding the South more accountable for their actions, in the interesting of national healing it was almost certainly the right call. However one has to hold him to a greater accountability for his other sin – his failure to enforce civil rights in the aftermath of the war.

It’s worth noting black suffrage – one of the major issues of the Radical Republicans – was less important for most Northerners. Only a handful of Northern States, mostly in New England where the lion’s share of Radical Republicans were from, had equal suffrage. And in late 1865, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Connecticut had voted down African-Americans proposals to vote by significant margins. The general Northern opinion of Johnson’s inaction on this issue was mainly conditional, something  to be allowed only  if it quickened the Southern acceptance of defeat. Even for many of the Radical Republicans their belief in enfranchisement was as much about self-interest as equality – it was thought that freedmen would vote Republican out of gratitude for emancipation and therefore keep Republicans in power and Southern Democrats, including the rebels, out of influence. In fact, that is what happened in the South during Reconstruction; granted suffrage, African Americans would help Republicans win landslide victories for Grant both times he ran for office.

Johnson’s support in the South did embolden them to pass black codes and Johnson was conciliatory his annual message to the Confederates who were elected to Congress in December of 1865. Congress refused to seat them.

Johnson’s major flaw came when Congress returned to session in 1866. The President was unhappy about the South’s provocative actions, but he made no public statements, believing their actions were right even if he thought them unwise. And then he made his great mistake, one which his ambitions for the Presidency clashed with what likely was best for the country. He made a decision that to help him politically he needed a showdown with the Radical Republicans, so that his vision of it would prevail and not there’s.

Lyman Trumboll, the leader of the moderate wing of the Republicans, wanted to reach an understanding with Johnson. He ushered through Congress a bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau beyond its scheduled abolition in 1867 and the first ever Civil Rights Bill, which granted citizenship to freed slaves. Trumbull was convinced after several visits with Johnson he would sign these measures into law. But he was opposed to them because he felt they were infringements on state sovereignty and because their unpopularity with White Southerners were necessary to the coalition he was hoping to build.  Johnson vetoed the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, angering and puzzling Republican legislators. When they failed to override in the Senate the following day, he considered himself vindicated. He believed the Radicals were now isolated and that the moderates would fall in behind him. He’d misjudged that they too believed firmly in Civil Rights.

A few day’s later on Washington’s birthday, Johnson gave an impromptu speech in which he referred to himself 200 times in nearly an hour and called Radical Republicans such as Sumner and Stevens as well abolitionist Wendell Phillips, not merely opposed to the Union, but plotting his assassination. That speech was viewed as a declaration of war by Republicans and one Democratic ally said it cost the Democrats at least 200,000 votes in the midterms that year.

A month later he vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, concluding his break with the Republicans. One of the major objections he had was that it ‘discriminated in favor of African-Americans’ and against whites. Three weeks later for the first time in American history, Congress had overridden his veto. This miscalculation set the tone of perpetual confrontation with Congress for the remainder of his Presidency. Not long after both Houses of Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act again and when Johnson once again vetoed it, they overrode it this time. The Fourteenth Amendment went before the states during this period and Johnson’s home state of Tennessee ratified it despite his opposition.

In the election of 1866, with Southern states not allowed to vote, Johnson campaigned vigorously throughout the Midwest. It was politically disastrous, with Johnson comparing himself to Christ and arguing with hecklers. The Republicans gained 23 seats in the House to the Democrats 14, making their margins 173 to 47 Democrats in the House. In the Senate, the Republicans now held 37 seats to the Democrats 10. In both cases, they had more than sufficient margins to override any vetoes he might invoke. Johnson’s National Union Party – the party he hoped to win election with – was a nonstarter.

Once Congress reconvened in December of 1866 the era known as Radical Reconstruction began, passing legislation that Johnson would veto and Congress would override. While some of this had less controversial aspects – DC voting act, Nebraska being admitted to the Union – in January of 1867, Stevens introduced legislation to dissolve the Southern State governments and reconstitute them into five military districts. In effect, the Republicans were calling for martial law and conventions in  which African-Americans could vote for delegates and be elected to these offices and Confederates could not participate. But by far the most controversial act was the Tenure of Office Act in March of 1867 which required Senate approval for the firing of Cabinet members during the tenure of the President who appointed them and for one month after.

And it’s worth noting even before the crisis that led to his impeachment, Radical Republicans were looking for an excuse on what was fundamentally flimsy grounds. In his first run for office Benjamin Butler had essentially ran on a platform that the sole purpose of his election should be to impeach Johnson. Much of the platform he used was essentially based on the policy differences between the Radical Republicans and Johnson, rather than any argument that he had committed ‘high crimes and misdemeanors.

In the next article I will deal with the reasons for Johnson’s impeachment and that at its core, it really was a political witch hunt.