The Female Murder Police of Homicide, Part 2: The New Breed

 

In the first act of ‘Bad Medicine’ an early season five episode Meldrick Lewis bursts a locker room and demands to know where Stivers is. “I’m gonna smack him,” he shouts. A petite African-American woman looks at him and says: “Take your best shot.” Meldrick blinks: “Terri Stivers. You a woman.” Stivers looks at him: “You Homicide detectives are as quick as they come.”

Technically Stivers, played superbly by Toni Lewis, is the last female detective: Lewis did not become a series regular until the final season of Homicide. But since she is the first one we meet and appears in more episodes than either of the other two, it’s best we start there.

At the time we meet her Stivers is working narcotics. She is investigating the murder of BoJack Reed, a local drug dealer who is lacing heroine with Scopolamine, leading to dozens of overdoses. Reed has been murdered because he has been labeling his bad batch with double stars, which is the trademark of Luther Mahoney,  who was about to become the archvillain of Homicide.

Stivers appears in six episodes in Season Five, all of them pertaining to Luther Mahoney, the murders his drug ring commits, and eventually his shooting by Kellerman, the flashpoint of the series. Her major role is that of a window into the drug ring and her interactions are with Lewis and Kellerman. Stivers proves herself both streetwise and tough; in her second appearance when Junior Bunk ducks out the back door to avoid a collar, she’s waiting and has been him hogtied before Lewis and Munch can get there.

When everything comes to a head in Deception, Stivers runs in with Kellerman to see that Meldrick, who has laid an ass-whupping on Luther, has his gun on Lewis. Mahoney puts his gun up. “What you gonna do detective?” he says to Kellerman. “Read me my rights.” In a moment that would be repeated over and over for the next year on recaps, Kellerman (Reed Diamond) says coldly: “You have the right to remain silent,” and cold-bloodedly puts a bullet in Mahoney’s chest. After he dies, he says: “Anybody got a problem.” Just as coolly, Meldrick says: “Nope.” Stivers doesn’t say a word, but it’s clear watching her that she’s horrified.

Of the three detectives Stivers has by far the biggest problem going along with the lie about the Mahoney shooting, and she is appalled how coolly the other two are handling it. Two days later she tells him she hasn’t slept or ate, and that she has doubts. Kellerman, who seemed jealous that she had some of Meldrick’s time to begin with, basically tells her to get over it. She won’t.

Stivers spends the first half of Season 6, rotating from division to division. In the season premiere, she’s working robbery; a few episodes later, she’s been moved to vice. But she cannot let Mahoney go and neither can the Mahoney’s. In the season premiere, Stives is taking a woman’s statement when the woman is shot in front of her. Eventually, it becomes clear that Junior Bunk – who has been taking shots at Lewis and Kellerman – aimed at Stivers and missed. For the rest of the season Luther’s sister Georgia Rae (Hazelle Goodman)  haunts the detectives, constantly bringing up the ghosts.

And throughout this period both Lewis and Kellerman refuse to give her the time of day. When Georgia Rae tries to blackmail Kellerman by saying she has footage of the murder, Kellerman spends weeks before he talks about it, and he purposely goes to Stives last. Not long after Georgia Rae launches a wrongful death civil suit against the three detectives (among many others) and when Lewis is suspended for assaulting Georgia Rae, Stivers is rotated into the division and Kellerman takes his wrath out on her – particularly when she takes Meldrick’s desk.

The Mahoney crew begins to self-destruct, in large part due to Meldrick’s influence and bodies begin to fall, most of whom Stivers recognizes. When Meldrick’s suspension is lifted, Stivers is not particularly thrilled to see him and when the squad is shot up and three police are killed (I’ll get to that below) Stivers finally goes to Gee’s office and tells him this is all on her. When Pembleton reopens the shooting in the season finale, Lewis tells them to leave Stivers out of it and Kellerman eventually resigns ostensibly to protect Meldrick and Stivers.

Stivers role in the final season, comparatively speaking, is diminished compared to the two previous seasons. She has been partnered with Falsone (Jon Seda) since Season Six and she mostly remains so the rest of the years. She investigates many murders (including the last case that is closed in the series) but she is less prominent than she was in the previous two years. What may be her best moment comes in the midst of Kellerman’s two episode return to the series. Stivers goes out of her way to avoid Kellerman (who is working as a private investigator) and when she does, he audibly says: “Bitch.” Stivers explodes at Kellerman, after nearly two years of bottling it up. Stivers, it’s worth noting, is completely in the right: Kellerman is apparently outraged that she isn’t grateful to him for leaving the squad so that he and Lewis wouldn’t be charged. Stivers fires back and tells him that if Kellerman hadn’t shot Mahoney, none of this would have happened and she doesn’t owe him anything. As far as we know, the two never speak again.

By the time Lewis was made a regular, two more females characters had been named to the squad. The most well developed by far was Laura Ballard, played by the exceptional actress Callie Thorne in one of the first major roles she had over the next quarter century.

Ballard is a recent transfer from Seattle, and when we first meet her in Season 6 she has become the star of Homicide. Giardello, praising the three new transfers calls her, ‘a godsend’. He could have been speaking for the show at large. Melissa Leo had been written out at the end of Season 5 and as I wrote in her entry, for the better part of two seasons her character had nothing to do. In Season 5 Michelle Forbes had joined the cast as Medical Examiner Juliana Cox, but despite the exceptional talent of Forbes, the medical examiner has almost nothing to do with the action on the show. (Forbes would be written out in the middle of Season Six.)  Ballard was a shot in the arm to the series, and Thorne’s work would be one of the reasons I consider Season Six the best overall season in the entire series.

Thorne is attractive, but like Leo, not conventionally pretty and in a department that has been fundamentally male Ballard thinks she has a lot to prove. The series threw her in at the deep end in the three part opener to the season as she immediately clashes with Pembleton, still the heart of the show.

Pembleton and Bayliss have just been transferred back from robbery and on their first day back Pembleton takes a call at the Belvedere Hotel, where a dead woman has been found in the men’s room. There is a major function going on in commemoration of Felix Wilson (James Earl Jones) a producer of snack cakes known as a prominent figure in the African-American community. The murdered woman, Melia Brierre is a Haitian domestic – who worked for the Wilsons – both of whom are close friends of Giardello.

The usually all-out aggressive Pembleton treads on eggshells around the Wilsons, something that Ballard immediately clashes with Frank on. Indeed, during the second episode while Pembleton is pursuing what is ultimately a longshot lead on an old boyfriend of Brierre’s, Ballard and Gharty begin to investigate the Wilson family. Gharty (Peter Gerety) believes that Pembleton and Gee are “covering Wilson’s ass because it’s the same color as theirs’, something that Ballard is reluctant to say that bluntly but is clearly puzzled why Homicide is working with kid gloves. Pembleton is pressured by his fellow detectives to bring Wilson in – and is clearly surprised when Wilson reveals he’s been having an affair with her.

By the end of the arc (I won’t reveal how the investigation ends) Ballard comes to see Pembleton, who is stewing. As she walks off, he tells her: “Your instincts were right. Mine, for once, were not.” For a man described as the All-Mighty, this is a huge concession on his part and a compliment.

Ballard fades into the background for the next few episode but she is fairly prominent starting with the Christmas Episode ‘All Is Bright’.  This is the first story completely centered on Gharty and Ballard, which in itself reflected a change. It had been a long time since the series put two new characters at the center of the same case at once and both Thorne and Gerety (as they would throughout the series) rose to the occasion.

They are investigating the murder of Philip Longley, a ladies man who is eventually revealed to be HIV positive. The case eventually leads them to Rita Hale (Kathryn Erbe) who Longley infected and is dying of AIDS. Rita does not bother to hide the fact that she loathed Longley and is more than willing to confess to her murder, but Ballard is reluctant to interrogate her, inclined to take her side rather than that of the victim. Even after she confesses Ballard tries to persuade Gee that the murder is self-defense because she does not want Hale to spend her last months in jail. Gee refuses to bend. In the last act of the episode Ballard and Gharty inform the other women that Longley was sleeping with that he was HIV positive and at the end of the episode asks Cox if she can be tested for HIV herself. It’s not the first time (or the last) we see a detective personalize a case, but it’s rarely been done to better effect.

The Ballard-Gharty partnership is one of the more stable ones in the entire series: it is rare in the final two seasons that either goes to investigate a murder without the other. (There is one notable exception I’ll get too because it’s pertinent to the series.) Gharty is significantly older than Ballard but he lacks the credentials – or indeed the dignity – to be an elder statesman. But their friendship is solid in a way few partnerships on Homicide are and there’s clearly a lot of respect between the two. At the climax of Season 6 Gharty and Ballard are both seriously wounded by the shooting in the squad room; Gharty takes  a bullet in the chest, Ballard is hit in the foot and there is a very good chance at first she will lose it. (Ironically neither have investigated a single murder involving the Mahoney’s). The first thing Ballard does when she can leave her bed is visit Gharty and tell him: “We made it.”

Unfortunately in the final season Ballard is involved in the worst single storyline the show ever did: the romance between her and Falsone. Intrasquad hanky-panky is taboo in police departments  -something that most cops shows chose to ignore but Homicide had enforced – until the final season. It is my assumption that the network more or less forced in on a series that was perpetually under watched in a misguided attempt to gain eyeballs. It backfired among most fans (many of whom never liked Falsone that much in the first place). The series actually made things worse when Giardello discovered the affair, ordered the two detectives to break up – and at the end of that episode the two of them hooked up. This was one of the major reasons the last season of Homicide is considered its weakest by fans of the series – though the last major female detective may have been a factor.

On a series that went out of its way to make sure its leads looked like ordinary people; Renee Sheppard was going to be alienating from the start. A tall, leggy and drop-dead gorgeous African-American woman, almost from the start her purpose seemed to be more the younger male detectives to drool over her. It didn’t help that part of Sheppard’s backstory was that she was a former pageant queen (Miss Anne Arundel County) and her first episode ended with Sheppard wearing a dress that showed a lot of leg. Most fans hated her from the start. I was willing to give her a chance, and eventually she earned my respect.

Sheppard was played by Michael Michelle. Michelle had been acting for a while, most notably in New York Undercover and Central Park West. The latter series, a soap opera that was quickly cancelled, did not lend her appeal to the show’s fans. Neither did most of the stories she got in the first half of Season 7, though things began to change when she was partnered with Bayliss, perhaps the only man in the squad who was inclined to see her as a detective first and not a woman. By this point Bayliss was essentially an elder statesman, but his determination of himself as ‘bi-curious’ had isolated him with some of his fellow detectives. Perhaps he saw a kindred spirit in her.

Sheppard’s effective coming out party was Shades Of Gray, one of the best episodes of the series. In it she and Lewis are tracking down a Jamaican who is a witness in an investigation of excessive force. The two of them go to a crack house. Sheppard knocks on the front door, and Lewis waits in the back, expecting naturally that the suspect will run out that way. Instead, he comes out the front beats Sheppard down, takes her gun and shoots at Lewis.

In her sickbed, Sheppard confides to Gee that she expects to be transferred after she got beat down and her gun taken. She knows the rap against female police in Baltimore – something Meldrick has no problem ranting about: “She ain’t 130 pounds soaking wet!” as if explaining why this happened. Meldrick goes to a hangout of the suspect and demands the gun be returned that night. At the end of the episode, he brings it back to her.

On another show, this would be the kind of event that bonds the two partners. Homicide was never that kind of show. Instead, Meldrick spends the rest of the season openly resenting Sheppard. When she comes back to duty he “brings her a present.” It’s his hat with the bullet hole in it. When Sheppard is put back in rotation, Lewis convinces Falsone to trade cases, so that Sheppard can get a ‘dunker’ on her first day back. Sheppard realizes this and is resentful not only of Lewis but Falsone.

Indeed, the assault on Sheppard brings out sexist attacks from both the male and female detectives. Stivers and Ballard –  both of whom are considerably shorter than Sheppard – talk about her behind her back, both in whether this would happen to them – or whether it makes them look bad. Lewis tells Falsone that his initial reaction was pure adrenaline and he is now truly worried whether Sheppard can be adequate backup going forward. For the rest of Season 7, he refuses to partner with her and is frequently judging her behind her back – and to her face.

Sheppard is still reeling from this when she ends up investigating her first ‘red ball’ with Bayliss. A serial killer is killing women on the internet (a bigger deal in 1999 than it might be today.) and Sheppard is lead investigator. She claims she’s up to the task, but she shows shakiness throughout and the bosses doubt her. That is amplified when the killer announces his next murder, the team races to stop him before it takes place – and they are led to an empty house with a computer taunting the detectives. Giardello demands Bayliss take over, something he refuses to do and Sheppard is resentful initially when Bayliss attempts to help. Eventually, though they do catch the killer and Sheppard is allowed to give the press conference.

Homicide had been struggling in the ratings and in April the show was cancelled. This was a shame because by the second half it had regained its quality and showed it had the ability to surprise. Never was this more clear in what was the next-to-last episode aired: “The Why Chromosome”

Sheppard takes a call at the start of the episode and asks Ballard to ride with her. This is a monumental moment because it is the first time in the entire series that two female detectives are running an investigation completely. Fittingly the series involves women in a level that most Homicide stories don’t.

The two detectives are called into investigate the murder of a fifteen year old with the street name destiny.  The series had often investigated the gangs of Baltimore, but this was the first time it looked at the teenage girl’s perspective, and they were just as tough as the men. Eventually Ballard and Sheppard find themselves looking Destiny’s sister who demonstrates her own toughness, showing the scars she has from the life of abuse – including her own father.

Ballard does not want to believe these girls are capable of killing each other. She eventually settles on a gangbanger named Casper. (JD Williams, halfway through his stint on OZ and just a few years removed from his incredible run as Bodie on The Wire, plays an early version of both characters her.) Casper views himself superior to women, even the ones who can put him in prison. He casually mentions how women get into gangs (rolling bones, you roll dice and whichever number you get is the number of the man you have to sleep with). His alibi is the mother of his child, even though he has no problem screwing other women and he honestly doesn’t believe that a woman could have killed Destiny.

 

The brutal cycle of gang violence ends up playing out the same for girls as it does for boys. Denise Raeburn learned that Destiny had sex with ‘her man’, dressed up a guy to throw suspicion off, and shot her. Crystal finds out about this, and kills out of revenge, and is caught by Sheppard and Ballard before she tries to run. Danvers will make a deal for manslaughter in this case, but Crystal seems just as certain she will end up dead in prison as on the street. And when it’s all over Ballard admits that she didn’t want to believe that women could be as brutal as men. Before Crystal goes to prison, she takes care of her younger sister and  tells her to be good. The last image in the episode is that of teenagers leaving flowers on the grave of another murdered girl – an image we’ve sadly gotten used to on the show.

After Homicide was canceled in 1999, Toni Lewis more or less stopped acting. She made small appearances in both Oz and The Wire but essentially retired from acting in 2006.

Michele was immediately cast as Cleo Finch in ER and appeared on the show until 2001. She has worked regularly in film and television since, with recurring roles on Gossip Girl, Queen Sugar and as a series regular in the CW version of Dynasty. She never forgot the writers of Homicide for giving her the chance to stretch. (She was nominated for an Image Award for Best Actress in a Drama in 2000 for Homicide.

Callie Thorne would play Jimmy McNulty’s ex-wife on The Wire, have a recurring role in Season 12 of ER. Her biggest role in Peak TV was Sheila Keefe, who had a complicated messy relationship with Tommy Gavin for the entire run of Rescue Me After that she got  the  lead role in the USA series Necessary Roughness. She has worked less frequently since then, most notably as recurring characters in NCIS: New Orleans and Law & Order: SVU.

In a world that has been dominated by female-run procedurals for the last twenty years, it is hard to imagine a series like The Closer or Major Crimes existing without the work of someone just Melissa Leo’s Kay Howard. In Laura Ballard and Terri Stivers, we see the kind of detectives that would be at the forefront of Saving Grace or Mare of Easttown. And in an era when African-American women got little representation on television at all, much less allowed to be anything but token to the male characters, it’s impossible not to see the work of Stivers and Renee Sheppard as forerunners of the characters Shonda Rhimes made the center of her work – though I have to say even Renee Sheppard has a self-determination to not let her sexuality be a factor in her work that I found sorely lacking in Olivia Pope or Annalyse Keating.

Even when it had three female regulars, calling Homicide Television for Women would have been pushing the term. But without the brilliant female murder police and the extraordinary actresses who played them, I don’t think a lot of television for women – or even by women – would have been possible.

 

Quantum Leap's Second Season Shows That Love Can Transcend Time - And Perhaps Alter It

 

 

A perhaps inevitable result of the era of Peak TV has been that, in the age of the antihero and dark cynicism, love, that purest of emotions, has become too cliched for most TV series. We still find it on almost every comedy in some form, to be sure, but these days even few of the network dramas are willing to embrace it as something transcendent.

Part of this I blame on Shonda Rhimes who believes with every fiber of her being that love is a temporary condition for her characters, something always interchangeable with sex. But it is a trend that most network dramas have also followed – mainly because the chase is always considering more exciting than the resolution.

The sole exception – not only in broadcast dramas, but almost all of them – was Lost. The series believed in deep philosophical ideas to be sure, but no one who spent six seasons watching the series can pretend that by far the best moments in the series had to do with love stories. The saga of Desmond and Penny is by far one of the greatest stories in all of television history and it led by far to some of the show’s – and indeed TV’s greatest moments. The series also used time travel as a theme starting in Season 3, but it had a famous approach that changing the future was impossible – ‘whatever happened, happened’ is one of the most quotable lines in the series.

That concept is anathema to Quantum Leap, of course, both in its original version and the reimagining whose second season just concluded last night. But what makes this season special – and may very well lead to the pinnacle of Peak TV itself – was that throughout Season 2 it argued that the power of love was not only something that might save us, but that it too could change the future.

For most of Season 2 we have watched Ben and Addison have dealt with the repercussions of three years passing between Ben being lost in time, presumed dead and the team finding him again. Addison had moved on to another man and she and Ben spent the first half of the season trying to figure out their relationship. Ben spent much of that time saying it was too painful to be around Addison, leading the rest of the team to spend time as his hologram. But while this was going on the series tried something that the original had only tried once before in what would be its last season.

At the start of the season Ben encountered Hannah Carson (The 100’s Eliza Taylor), a waitress in 1947. He helped influence her to move forward and it was clear there was a spark. Two leaps later he encountered her in Princeton in 1955, where she was working as a scientist. Ben broke protocol and told her who he was – something Hannah, who had a brilliant scientific mind, accepted easily. Just before he leapt again, they kissed.

Two episodes later Ben encountered her in 1961 Cairo and Addison realized that the two of them kept finding each other because they were in love. Addison had been dealing with her own grief and she decided to accept a proposal from Tom – only to learn that they had found hidden in the files an equation from DARPA (an intelligence program) that might bring Ben home.

Ben ran into Hannah again, but now she was married and had a young son named Jeffrey. Just before he leapt he learned that her husband had a heart condition. Before he could tell her, he leapt again but in his next leap wrote a letter to her trying to tell him what would happen to her husband. It only put off the inevitable – two years later, Hannah’s husband died in a car accident.

While this was going on, a parallel story was unfolding involving the project. We had learned early in the season that Quantum Leap had been shut down but Ian had kept it going by using technology from a tech billionaire named Gideon Rich. Rich was a shadow hanging over the season much of the way, a billionaire whose reputation was that of a monster. Late in the season, we finally met him (James Frain) and it became clear that he wanted to take over.

In last night’s brilliant two part finale, all of these lines came together. Ben leapt into 1974 New York as a firefighter, who found himself in the same building as Hannah. Her husband had died and her son Jeffrey clearly had her brilliance. Throughout the episode he did everything in his power to save them both from an inferno, but Hannah, who had spent her life studying physics, was now convinced this was the last time they would meet. That seemed nearly inevitable when she got trapped under rubble and Ben made the choice to save Jeffrey.

Addison stood guard over Hannah, and even though she couldn’t see her, she began to write down an equation. This equation was the same one they had discovered half a century later – and it offered the idea of ‘a swap’. In order to bring Ben home, someone would have to take his place.

Ben did save Hannah at the end, but Jeffrey watched it happen. One of the things he had saved was the letter Ben had written Hannah – and when Ben leaped it was clear that he knew something had changed. In the present Gideon had taken over Quantum Leap and forced everyone out of the project at gunpoint.

In the second part, everything came together. Gideon entered the chamber and revealed who he actually was – Jeffrey Carson. It is a credit to the writers that this revelation, which should have been obvious given the physical appearance of the young Jeffrey, came as a shock: the writer’s had hidden in plain sight. Jeffrey had figured out during the last two of Ben’s leaps what was happening and had used the random information he had made – and his own intelligence – to become Gideon Rich. Furthermore, we learned that when Hannah’s husband found the letter, he got into a fight with her, drove off angrily – and died in the crash that killed him. Jeffrey has held that grudge for half a century and it seems he has spent his entire life determined, not only to travel through time but to get revenge on the man he believes he destroyed his family.

The finale featured a wonderful mix of the old and the new. Magic (Ernie Hudson) had called on Jennifer Calavicci (Al’s daughter who had been the initial villain of Season 1) for assistance along with her mother. When everyone asked why they were doing all of this for a project that had destroyed their father’s life, Jennifer reminded everyone of what happened in the series finale. Sam had leapt to see Al’s wife, who believed her husband had died in action, and told her Al was alive. Because of that they were reunited – and Jennifer was born. The show also had a wonderful Easter egg in which Jennifer handed Addison ‘Ziggy’.

Ben spent the season racing to get to Hannah and Jeffrey in order to try and change the future. During that race to their house, Addison had to witness the death of Jen over the hand link – something that shook Ben more than Addison. For the first time, he had begun to doubt his mission. When he reached their house, he was about to destroy the computer that might start Jeffrey’s rise – but hesitated because it felt morally wrong. Instead, he decided to show the compassion that we’ve seen him use in every leap and try to convince Jeffrey there was something to be gained in saving a life and how much loss than destroy you.

The final act was brilliant: Ben and Jeffrey drove back to the racetrack, where the subject of the original leap was suffering a heart attack. He talked Jeffrey through building what amounted to a portable defibrillator which helped save this man’s life. The moment this happened, ‘the butterfly effect’ took place – and the future changed. As we later found out, Gideon Rich was now secretly funding the project to help save Ben.

Ben said goodbye to Hannah, and she thanked him for everything he had done for her in the time they had met. He also told her that despite everything, Addison was his soul mate and he would find her again. In the present, Addison – who was the only one who knew of the alternate timeline – decided to show her love for Ben and leap to take his place.

The final scene showed Addison completing her original destiny and going into the accelerator. Addison was in the past and so was Ben. The two of them watched to each other – and for the first time in years, held each other and kissed. Their love had brought them back together.

It remains unclear what direction the third season of Quantum Leap will take. (It’s own future is murky; though it’s ratings have gone up nearly five percent this season, its hard for any network series to survive these days.) Could this series continue with Addison and Ben leaping together, now forever linked? Could Ben end up going home and Addison being left behind? And is there still a chance that Sam Beckett is out there and that their goal is to help him come home? Will they meet the power that Sam thought was causing him to leap in the first place? (Bruce McGill is still alive, after all.)

What I do know is that the new version of Quantum Leap is, in two seasons, far superior to the original in five. Raymond Lee (nominated for Best Actor by the Astras) continues to illustrate just how fine an actor he is time and again. The series still has the humor, but it has infinitely more heart and it is more willing to take risks than the original ever dared too. Some of this is because of the willingness to beyond one’s lifetime that the original didn’t even hint at, but most of it is because the show is willing to tell stories that the original series could even hint at, and more importantly, was willing to expand the universe far beyond what we got in the first series.

And by making this show about kindness and compassion being the key to putting right what went wrong, Quantum Leap shows a generosity of spirit that is sorely lacking in most dramas anywhere these days. That alone should be a reason for this to keep on going until everything is resolved, something the original never could. I’m hoping for the show’s future, and to quote a phrase that Desmond on Lost was found of, I really hope to see all of them in another life.

 

Jeopardy Has Been Nonpartisan for 40 Years - And Despite What You Might Think, Final Jeopardy Tonight Did Not Change That

 

 

One of the many, many things that I appreciate about Jeopardy  - even more than you can imagine over the past decade – is that it is still one of the few parts of my life that has no agenda or axe to grind. Some on line might complain about certain contestants not knowing the correct responses to clues that have to do with African-American or other minorities in history or pop culture, but that has nothing to do with any bias on the shows part.

Certainly in the thirty years I have watched Jeopardy, I have never once seen a clue that might suggest some kind of political agenda one way or the other. They have spent as much time devoting categories to Nixon and Reagan as they have FDR and JFK; they deal with Democratic and Republican candidates for both houses of Congress with no real judgment and have no problem showing that members of either political party – or for that matter in any country in the world – is capable of being an idiot. They go out of their way to avoid controversy with their clues when it comes to elected officials, which I greatly respect in a world where everything has a political agenda.

And I have to say this has even been in regards to Trump. Now they mentioned him quite a lot before his Presidency as indeed they would any major public figure. However, while they referred to the 2016 election on more than one occasion in Final Jeopardy over the years, in the decade since he entered the political arena his name has almost never been mentioned. They haven’t mentioned Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden, either, for that matter. It’s not that they’ve ignored him – I remember two years ago Mar-A-Lago was the correct response to Final Jeopardy – but they also mentioned as a correct response to a clue referring to Trump’s wedding to Ivanka once, so even that’s not much. Even in the last three years, as Trump lingers over the rest of the world, they have still not referred to him. They have mentioned many other Democratic and Republican office holders, they’ve talked about the Supreme Court, they’ve even mentioned some of his most vicious detractors such as Liz Cheney. But when it comes to one of the most talked about figures in America, Jeopardy hasn’t talked about him at all.

As someone who has spent the last eight years with 45 living in my head rent-free much of the time, for this relief much thanks. And I hoped very much that, in what will be a long year that Jeopardy will continue to be this oasis.

Then on Tuesday’s Final Jeopardy, I had a sinking feeling that the writer’s were going to break this long-standing rule and, even by absence, take a side.

Tonight’s Final Jeopardy category had to do with PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS. This in itself meant nothing: The Presidency is a category that Jeopardy has dealt with countless times in Final Jeopardy and has had variations on the elections more times than you can count. The fact that this is an election year made it a near inevitability it would come up at least once and I imagine we will see some version of it quite a few times before November and maybe once or twice after.

Then came the clue: “He’s the most recent presidential candidate to have officially declared his opponent in that campaign the victor.”

I could see three groups of people reacting when that clue was read out.

PROGRESSIVES: “Yes! Jeopardy is finally going to take a stand on the last election.”

CONSERVATIVES: “Jeopardy’s about to demonstrate that it’s part of the Hollywood elite.”

JEOPARDY FANS: “We’re about to become part of cancel culture, aren’t we?”

The latter was my reaction, at least,  and as I tried to work the clue out in my head, I had this sinking feeling in my gut that this would be the end of the bubble my show was in. While I was doing that, I did was all of you did -  I misread the clue.

This was for the record, the last semi-final game in the Champions Wild Card so a lot was riding on it anyway, but I forgot that.

Kat Jepson was in third. Her response was: “Who is McCain?” That was incorrect.

Next came Alex Gordon. His response: “Who is Mitt Romney?” That’s what I thought it was and I blinked when I heard it was incorrect.

 Next came Jesse Matheny who was in the lead. He wrote down: “Who is Al Gore?” And once Ken Jennings ruled it correct, he explain why it was and then I realized  how I’d misread the clue.

You all did the same thing. We all thought that this meant which defeated presidential candidate conceded the election. The thing is that’s not the same thing as declaring your opponent the winner.

As Ken Jennings pointed out: “it is the sitting vice president who certifies the Electoral College Count, and the last sitting Veep to lose to his opponent was Al Gore.”

I’ll admit Jennings proceeded this with the fact that “as I think we know now” but that’s all the editorializing he did, and considering how much news we have all heard about this over the past three years, that’s not so much editorializing as reminding. This is part and parcel of any Jeopardy host, Trebek, Jennings or all the guest hosts in between, so don’t anyone say that Ken Jennings is some tool of the leftist machine because he simply stated what anyone whose watched the news for the last couple of years has known.

Now in case either side is trying to read something into the fact that he mentioned Al Gore, who as we all know lost the popular vote to George W. Bush, remember the phrasing of the clue: most recent. That means it has happened before. Indeed, it’s happened more often than you might think.

In 1860 John C. Breckenridge was James Buchanan’s Vice President. In that year’s election, the Democrats split into Northern and Southern factions; the Southern factions nominated Breckinridge for President; the Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas. That year Breckenridge had to declare that the winner was Abraham Lincoln. That said, Breckenridge would eventually leave to join the Confederacy, so I don’t know for certain he actually performed his duties but it would have been his role.

Exactly one hundred years later Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice President had to certify the winner of the 1960 election and declare John F. Kennedy his opponent, the victor. Eight years later, Nixon was on the other side of this as his defeated opponent Hubert Humphrey had to do the same and declare him the victor. And though it’s not quite the same thing, after Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, Walter Mondale had to do the same when he was elected President but that’s a different story. (I only mention it because Mondale ran for President four years later; if I had to do this with every incumbent Vice President who had declare someone they were defeated by as the winner, we’d be at this a lot longer – though not as long as you’d think.)

Now in case you were wondering, there have also been four occasions when the Vice President declared himself the victor of the election just passed. In fact the first two ‘official’ elections for President involved that exact event. John Adams declared himself the victor over Thomas Jefferson in 1796 and four years later Jefferson did the exact same thing (though if you remember your history, there was a lot more than that to get there.) In 1836 Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson’s second Vice President declared himself the winner after defeating, among others, William Henry Harrison for President. And in 1988, George H.W. Bush declared himself President over Michael Dukakis.

Now I have little doubt, because everything anything does is under a microscope, that Jeopardy will be critiqued by countless people for taking a political stand by one side or the other even though all it really did was basically do what it has always done in some form, force its contestants to rack their brains on historical knowledge. Just a reminder, neither Jennings nor the writers acknowledged either candidate in 2020 or anything that happened in the aftermath. All they did was deal with a historical fact, like they have countless other historical facts. They’ve mentioned elections in the past before; they’ll do it again.

All I care about now is that when I realized that Jeopardy was simply trying to educate us rather than take a side, I not only breathed easier but was reminded of this fact. This fact, like it does with so many other Final Jeopardys caused me to do some research which leads me to explore fascinating layers of information that I often do not consider. Try to take that away from you tonight, you know, rather than argue that Jeopardy is either, you know, part of the deep state or trying to be both-sided. It hasn’t been that in forty years; it won’t start now.

Constant Reader Book of the Months 2024: Wilder by Andrew Simonet

 

 

I’ve ready countless books in which the protagonist comes across as sympathetic initially and turns out to be a monster. I’ve read a similar number where the reverse is true. But Andrew Simonet’s Wilder is the first books I’ve read where our first impression of the protagonist’s vile nature is obvious from the start and that the author does nothing to alleviate the rest of the way. If anything by the time the book is over you realize that this character was never deserving of our sympathy, even if he‘d wanted in the first place. This is something, for the record, he makes clear in the book he doesn’t want.

Jason Wilder, to be clear, also doesn’t like it when you hate him, avoid him or are embarrassed by him either. Jason also doesn’t really like anybody either. At the start of the book he is in the rubber room of his high school because he set off fireworks that led to an arson which led to an eight year old suffering serious burns. He feels no empathy for that child either, something he makes clear in one of many frightening scenes. “He had some scar tissue on his back and hands, but he was totally back to his regular life,” he tells us. That this child will never have anything resembling a regular life again is something that Jason doesn’t seem to get. All he cares about is the consequences which have made his life the way it is.

Listening to Jason, I am reminded of a description Mulder gave off a serial killer in one of the earliest episodes of The X-Files. “Some people are product of their environment. Others are acting out past abuses. Jason Wilder hurts people because he likes it.” This is something Jason makes very clear at a critical point in the novel that eventually leads to him being incarcerated. In fact, he says is the only thing he shows enthusiasm for:

“The things you want, the ideals you hold, the people you love, that’s well and good. What you do when the shit goes down, that decides your future…what separates you from the whiners and yammering grievance keepers.”

The only people who think like this are serial killers, something its very clear by the end of Wilder Jason is well on the way to becoming.

The kindest thing you can say about Jason is that he has nothing going for him. He is growing up in a rundown town called Unionville (we never know what state its in) but it’s clear it’s the kind of town that is proud of the violence it undergoes regularly. Jason’s father is an ex-convict, his mother is an alcoholic who has repeatedly fallen for the wrong men and ruined any chance Jason might have for a future. AT the start of the novel his mother is currently in Florida with her latest ‘loser ex-boyfriend’ and has abandoned her son. This is an irritation to Jason only because the terms of his probation say he has to remain with a parent or guardian, something he has been lying to his teachers about well before the start of the novel. He has been ignoring the mail about this for a while, forging signatures, going through the motions of trying to find employment when all he really does is go from the rubber room to his home and watch TV,

Jason is also, speaking generously, a moron. He knows he isn’t that smart and he knows he has nothing going for him. It’s because he is such an idiot that when he encounters Meili (“That’s her real name” he tells us) in the Rubber Room and she isn’t immediately repelled by him, he grabs on to her like a drowning man to a life preserver. Because she’s not from America and is only passing through Unionville, he thinks he has a clean slate with her. He doesn’t realize from the moment he meets her Meili is only interested in him because she’s so bored that she would cling to anything to make her life interesting.

Throughout the novel, Meili demeans Jason at every opportunity, frequently calls him names, mocks every element of his life and does everything in his power to make his already miserable life worse. It’s clear to the reader but not to Jason, who keeps referring to her abrupt change in subjects and tones as ‘swerves’. The charitable explanation is that Jason has lived such an abusive and miserable life that he mistakes Meili’s interest in him for genuine love.

Jason is obsessed with Meili solely because he has nothing going on in his life. There are warning signs that blind people could see if they paid attention, starting with the fact that Meili is living with guardians and that one of the people who is her ‘caregiver’ is Manny, a man who is a gangster in all but name. Jason constantly makes things worse for Meili, so in one of their last conversations Manny says he has to protect her. Jason takes Meili to his house and they spend the next several days having sex.

It’s clear here that Meili is using Jason out of boredom more than anything else, that she has no use for him beside sex and a target for her own issues. Meili has been moving from town to town for a year because her father, an Asian businessman, is either in criminal trouble or is testifying against the wrong people. Meili isn’t sure and she keeps ‘swerving’ so that Jason isn’t either. Jason doesn’t have the mental capacity to keep up with the kind of stories that Meili tells him and he is a horrible conspirator. But because Meili has not been immediately repelled by his violence, he clearly thinks she’s the only thing he can depend on. He believes at the end of the day, he’s her protector.

The problem is Jason has no idea what being a protector means. Over and over he says he’s misunderstood: “How can I explain that even though I threw the first punch I didn’t start it?” he tells us. In Jason’s eyes any remark that he deems offensive is a reason to get in a fight and as we quickly learn Jason considers basically anything he disagrees with offensive. It’s not like he makes much of an excuse, fighting is what he lives for.

And Jason is such a fool that when he receives a phone call from Meili that sounds like it scares her, he leaves school, drives home and then goes to a local restaurant where he gets to the parking lot, sees Meili’s car parked in so she can’t leave, in his mind that is a justification to go into the restaurant and start hitting people.

Jason then beats the lawyer to a pulp on another perceived slight and the Lackey beats his brains out. Jason actually admires him for it and realizes that for all his abilities as a fighter, in the world Meili lives in he’s purely an amateur. This section is the only part of the novel where Jason shows a real interest in what is actually happening and it’s quietly horrifying. He is so obsessed with violence that when Meili, who now clearly realizes what a monster he is, reacts in horror and wants to get away from him, he honestly can’t believe that she is appalled by him. Meili actually tells him flat out how out of control he is and he can’t accept that fact.

It is a level of how genuinely clueless Jason is that even when he ends up in juvenile detention after everything that happened, he still thinks he’s the good guy here. That he has no one to come and help him, that he has no one to corroborate his story, that he has no defense to his actions other than his own words, does not matter to him. When he meets with his court-appointed lawyer, it becomes increasingly clear that Jason has been lying about many other things and that his fixation on Meili has gotten to the point where he might very well be delusional. Even when his court-appointed attorney tells him outright what Meili said not only at the time but in retrospect, Jason refuses to accept it and actually takes it a reason for more violence.

I realize that in my description of Wilder I may have made it sound a brutal read.  On the contrary, I tore through it with the same pace I have of so many other books with protagonists infinitely more sympathetic. Jason Wilder is a monster, or at least one in the making, but as we see is not atypical of so many of the other citizens of Uniondale. Violence seems to be a common theme throughout the book. The town itself is rundown and decrepit with very little to recommend its citizen. Jason also has enough self-awareness to know that he will never leave Uniondale because it is who he is.

In the saddest scene in the book, Jason goes to a party which is being held by college kids. Meili is in attendance but is spending time with a smarter teenager who is clearly more her speed and sends him off to get a drink. As he wanders off, he asks what he’s doing here and realizes that this is Meili’s world, and he doesn’t fit in.

He has a conversation with a college kid who is clearly intoxicated and when she flirts with him, he acknowledges: “I’m shallow and typical.” It is the only time in the entire book he shows doubts and the only time he realizes that he doesn’t belong. He wants to hook up with this girl but he knows he doesn’t deserve her. He can’t even work up the nerve to ask the question. Then Meili intervenes and he realizes he has to go with her. He can only accept her form of love, not someone else’s.

This is Andrew Simonet’s debut novel and he shows a remarkable steadiness throughout. There is absolutely no reason you should feel anything other than disgust for Jason, and there is no time he deserves my sympathy. But there were many times I empathized with him, almost against my will. There are many Jason Wilders in our world, young men prone to violence, towards bigotry, towards abuse. Many of them live in towns like Uniondale and have families like his. Jason Wilder does deserve his eventual fate, I won’t pretend otherwise, but the sad truth is even had Meili not come into his life, it’s hard to imagine him ending up anywhere else. At one point a teacher tries to make a discussion about his future after high school and Jason blows her off. He may be an idiot, but he knows enough not to have dreams or ambitions. The worst thing Meili does to him – and she is never anything resembling nice to anyone in the book – is offer the illusion of hope. She never promised him anything, something he comes to accept by the end of the book at least partially, but it doesn’t change the fact that he was the only good thing in his life at the point. I almost wonder if for Meili this is part of a cycle. Every time she goes to one of these towns, she finds someone like Jason, uses him up and then leaves them behind in a place nearly as bad as Jason’s eventual fate.

Perhaps that is the reason I came away with understanding for Jason at the end of Wilder. In a funny way Jason is a victim – not just of Meili but of a larger world that has no place for him. We hear countless stories of Jasons throughout the news cycle and we dismiss them as ‘deplorables’. Because of where they live or what they think, victims of anything from partisan politics to violence in the media. I don’t like Jason Wilder, but I won’t soon forget him. If our society is to move forward, we must find a way to find compassion for the Jasons in it.

 

 

Decision 2024: 20th Century Electoral College Scholarship

The closer we get to November you are going to hear far more than you ever want to about the flaws in the electoral college. There’s been a drumbeat about since 2016, but it’s going to be impossible to ignore it for the next ten months.

I have heard these argument countless times before over the past decade and will hear them countless times again. They argue that is the product of an outdated system that is fundamentally broken and racist. They argue that if we live in a democracy, we must let every vote count and not let the states have all the power. They will argue that it is part of a system that allows power to be in the hands of the few and not the many. And some variation on it will be echoed on every news media outlet, every late night comedy show and every progressive and Democratic website, all of which comes down to the same message: to save America, we must abolish the electoral college.

The fact that almost all of the people pushing this message are members of the Democratic tent is something that they will try their hardest to make you forget. They will say that this has to do with saving the country from Trump or the Republicans (one in the same in their eyes) and nothing to do with the fact that, in the 21^st century had their been no electoral college, the Democrats would have won five of the last six Presidential elections by the popular vote. Don’t pretend that any of the people shouting the loudest are doing this out of the desire to completely save democracy.

And it doesn’t escape me that by far the loudest shouters on this are leftists who never miss an opportunity to make it clear that all Republicans do not deserve to have a voice. At all. Not their own news networks, not in the mainstream media. To them, the sole purpose of the Republican party is someone Democrats can defeat. They love to scourge all Republicans – not just their officials but people who vote for them – as evil incarnate and unworthy of living in this country, much less voting in an election. I’ve already written how when David Brooks pointed out that 2500 regions of the country voted for Trump in 2020, Slate reacted to this by saying ‘nobody lived there’. So many of these people think that red states have too much power as it is (read, any). By making sure the popular vote was the only way to count Presidential elections, they would be removing the necessity to have to court Republicans in those same states and just concentrate on building their bases in the regions ‘where everyone lives’.

All of this is a horrible idea, obviously. But what makes it more telling is that this a strategy the Democratic Party has actively been playing towards for longer then you might think – before the Tea Party, before Fox News, before Rush Limbaugh, before Reagan even. Indeed when you look at the three closest Presidential elections in terms of the popular vote leading up to the 2000 election, you realize that the Democratic Party has slowly but surely been building a strategy designed for the model they seemed locked into today.

In this article I will look at the three closest Presidential election in the 20^th century: 1960, 1968 and 1976. In it I will show how the Democratic Party has slowly but surely been turning away from the rural voters for even longer than the Republican tried to embrace them – and how the one major attempt in the 20^th century to reform the Electoral college may have had less to with electoral reform then trying to negate a threat to the established order.

(Note: I have gone over much of this material in many of my historical series in 2023 many of them involving the same figures I will list here. I will do my best to avoid repetition.)

As I mentioned in my article on the Kennedys, in the 1960 Presidential election it was Republican Richard Nixon who attempted to run the first ever 50 state campaign. He spent much of the election attempting to build on the coalition that Eisenhower had managed to assemble in his two Presidential landslides, winning between a third and 35 percent of the African-American vote while making major inroads into the South.

What I did not mention was that the Kennedy campaign chose a procedure that, in hindsight, bears a resemblance to 21^st century Republican campaigns, an effort to win just enough votes to get the Presidency and no more. This decision meant focusing on the biggest electoral prizes which at the time were New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Texas and California. They also decided to focus most of their campaign in regional areas, mainly the South, New England and the Atlantic States.

This decision did not sit well with many party elders or for that matter Democratic Congressmen who wanted the Presidents help in close elections but could not get their time on campaign swings.

Here is an electoral map of the 1960 campaign:

 

 

 

First note that both strategies bore fruit. Nixon carried far more states than Kennedy (26 to 22) as well as more of the country; as Theodore White wrote in his book on this election, Nixon carried five regions of the country, while Kennedy carried only three.

Second, Kennedy did carried five of the seven states that were prizes, losing only California and Ohio. (We shall leave out the cases for fraud in Texas and Illinois.) Those five states amounted to 145 electoral votes, more than half what Kennedy needed to win. The Kennedy campaign had made clear the Democrats could do better if they concentrated more on the urban states than the rural ones, a lesson that would be hard to unlearn.

Moving on to 1968, it is worth noting that one of the biggest factors in that year’s race was the threat that George Wallace was to both parties. As I mentioned in my article on Wallace, both the Republicans and the Democrats were aware of the threat he mustered. Nixon, who was relying on a Southern strategy, was competing more for Wallace’s votes in the South, while Humphrey spent much of the campaign hoping that the presence of Wallace in the North could take enough votes away from Nixon for him to win. Everybody was terrified at the possibility Wallace could carry enough votes – 70 to 80 – to throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Here’s a map for the final vote of 1968:

 

 

 

 

Several things to note. In 1964 LBJ had carried 44 out of 50 states with 486 electoral votes. Four years later, Humphrey carried 13 states and the District of Columbia. LBJ had won 61 percent of the popular vote; Humphrey got 42.7 percent. And yet despite the fact that an overwhelming majority of the country had lost faith in the Democratic Party over the last four years, Humphrey very nearly won.

In part that is because, like JFK eight years earlier, he managed to carry four of the seven greatest electoral prizes: Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New York. These four states accounted for 118 electoral votes, more than sixty percent of his final count. Nixon, it is worth noting, carried almost every state he had won in 1960 (Washington and Maine went back to the Democratic side). The major difference was, not only had much of the south gone Republican, but he carried Illinois. Had California gone to Humphrey, the election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives.

I think it is in part to avert this chaos that in 1969 Birch Bayh and Emmanuel Celler worked together to produce the electoral reform act. That said, part of me also wonders how much of it was done to negate ‘the Wallace factor’.

Wallace had managed to get 10 million votes and carried five states. He had nearly achieved his goal of throwing the election to the House. Both parties were terrified of the threat Wallace had demonstrated – not necessarily because they disagreed with his rhetoric or even some of his goals, but because how much of a threat it was to the political system. For the next decade both parties would spend a fair amount of time trying to win Wallace voters,  and part of me wonders if the reason this reform received such initial massive bipartisan support was in order to negate him as a threat. The fact that Nixon gave initial support for the reform may have been to the results of the 1968 election and his fears for his own reelection.

In any case the vote ended up dying in the Senate to a filibuster, as has been reporter. Left out of the discussion is that after the 1968 election, the Senate was still overwhelmingly Democratic (58 Democrats, 42 Republicans.) Furthermore the motion to deny cloture on the filibuster was denied by 36 votes from Senators from Republican and Democratic states. Yes most of the Senators were from small states who would lose power if this happened, but it does not change the fact that fifty years earlier, even after an election that could have led to weeks of chaos in the aftermath of a tumultuous year, neither side wanted to change the system. The bill died after the 1970 elections.

Let us wrap this up with the 1976 election. It is worth remembering that, for all the beatification Jimmy Carter has received both by Democrats in the left in the last quarter of a century, for his Presidency and his campaign for the Democratic nomination, most of the Democrat establishment had little use for him. Those who viewed him at all only did so as a force to remove George Wallace, now in a wheelchair but still viewed as an electoral threat, as a force in national politics. After Carter managed to defeat Wallace, the rest of the party wanted to get rid of him but he had built up to much support.  The liberal wing – particular those led by the Kennedys – never warmed up to him.

It also must be remembered that in the fall campaign, Carter campaigned poorly. After the Democratic convention, he had a 38 percent lead over Gerald Ford. After the Republican convention nominated Ford, it had dropped to eighteen percent but Carter still had an overwhelming margin. Over the next three months Ford wore it down until on election day, it was considered a tossup:

Here are the final results for 1976:

 

 

 

For the third straight close election, the Republican candidate  had carried more states than the Democrat. Ford had managed to win 27 states to Carter’s 23 and DC. Indeed, had only 38,000 votes flipped from Democrat to Republican in Ohio and Mississippi, Ford would have won in the electoral college 272 to 266, even though he would have lost by over 1.5 million votes in the popular count.

The map, it’s worth noting, has a striking resembling to both 1960 and 1968, though there are difference. Ford carried the entire Western United states as a block, but he also carried three major electoral prizes, including Michigan and Illinois. Carter carried four of the seven major electoral prizes: Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio which count for 119 electoral votes. Like Kennedy, the major reason for Carter’s triumph is because he almost entirely carried the South. In this case, it was a necessity because unlike Kennedy and Humphrey, he did poorly in the Midwest and also lost Connecticut and New Jersey. (New Jersey was worth 17 electoral votes and a major prize.) Carter was only able to make up for this loss to carrying Mississippi and Alabama, something neither of his predecessors had managed to do.

All three of these maps show very clearly that as early as 1960 the Democrats were doing extremely poorly in the plains states and the Southwest, ‘where nobody lived’. It also makes very clear how well the Democrats were doing primarily in the urban states. Obviously there were countless other factors that led to this but it does not change the fact that the Democrats had decided that campaigning in the rural states was increasingly becoming a losing proposition.

This problem became existential when the South essentially became Republican after Reagan’s landslide. There had been signs of it well before this, as I have mentioned, but this one-two punch crippled the Democrats ability to campaign nationwide to the point that they have practically never recovered from. With the exception of Howard Dean’s 50 state campaign in 2006, they have not tried since despite the fact of Obama’s landslide  2 years later.

Much of the argument to abolish the electoral college is based on a sort of geographical prejudice by many in the Democratic coalition. They argue that red states gave up on progress years ago, so why should they bother reaching out now? What these electoral maps shine a light on is the real fact that the liberal establishment made the decision to give up on them, and the red states have decided to return the favor ever since.

Criticizing Criticism Peak TV Edition: Brettt Martin's Difficult Men Takes a Sexist and Deeply Flawed Approach to the Era of Peak TV

 

As the ‘death knell’ for the era of Peak TV is sounded by basically everybody who should know better, there continues to be reflection on why it was go great and why it is now going to be doomed. I’ve already written multiple articles about why I believe this is something that is basically based in the critics’ rose-colored perspective view of  the art of television rather than the fact that it’s always been a business and always will be. I don’t expect that’s going to change the hearts and minds of the critics themselves: in their ivory towers, art has always existed independent of commerce and trying to convince them otherwise is so often a fool’s errand.

So what I’m going to do in this entry – actually two different entries – is to look at two different books that both take a look at the era that is Part 1 of Peak TV, covering 1997 to 2012. I’ve discussed both of them before and you may very well be familiar with at least one if you are a scholar of the subject. The more famous one is Difficult Men by Brett Martin, and the slightly less well known is The Revolution Was Televises by Alan Sepinwall.

I own both volumes and have repeatedly used them as reference for my column dozens of times over the last eight years. That said, I am convinced Sepinwall’s book is superior to Martin’s in almost every way. I admit that Sepinwall is a TV critic who is still publishing for various magazines and online sites and I have read much of his work which may count for a personal bias. But that does not change the fact that Sepinwall’s volume has a far more objective perspective into the era, clearly has conversations with more sources that Martin does (though both men are using the same subject manner) and that Sepinwall pays more attention to detail than Martin.

To be fair Martin’s book is not the same thing as Sepinwall’s. Revolution is a critical review of several series that he considers among the greatest of all time and he relates many of his experiences watching these shows and tells the reader why he loves them and what they made them great. Difficult Men, by contrast, is essentially a behind the scenes volume of the making of many of these series, a brief history of the medium, and in-depth discussions with many of the writers. Perhaps part of the reason I prefer Sepinwall is that he explains what it was like to watch them and why it was so much fan. Martin, by contrast, rarely dwells on the shows themselves, focusing his energy on the behind the scenes action. His fandom is for the writers, and, with few exceptions, barely seems to even discuss the shows. You almost wonder if he even watches these shows regularly for all the excitement he says about them.

I think it’s easier in this case to start with Difficult Men which the more often I read it, the more clear it is how problematic it is. I discussed some of the larger issues in a profile I did on David Chase last month, but in reread it became clear that there’s a larger problem with the entire publication, one that shows not only Martin’s bias but does a disservice to the very subject he claims to want to reveal the secrets behind.

A major flaw in both volumes, I should say right now, is that neither of them see fit to cover comedy.  However in Martin’s case, it’s part of a bigger problem with his entire volume: Difficult Men is about the brilliance of cable, and as he puts it network comedy is as good as cable in that regard.

Martin’s decision to look only at cable is just the start of many issues with the book, all of which seem to come down to an underlying sexism that becomes increasingly clear on multiple readings. Perhaps we should not be shocked: the book is titled Difficult Men, after all. But as I mentioned in my criticisms of Chase, Martin takes the view that these men are artists, and that as artist their horrible behavior should be excused in the creation of their art.

This is a horrible perspective to take for any writer and it’s very clear in Chase’s entry that there’s a clear misogyny in his behavior. Worse is the fact that throughout the book Martin consistently defends Chase’s behavior no matter how toxic it is. The worst example comes with the firing of Robin Green who was a friend of Chase’s for over a quarter of a century and of the original writers on The Sopranos lasted the longest. By Season 5 Green tells Martin that Chase had moved her chair around the writer’s conference table so he didn’t have to look at her. He refers to her arguments as ‘ truculent and obnoxious’. Green tells Martin there was a physical feeling of discomfort around him. Eventually Chase fires Green when her husband comes into the room. He gives a list of infractions, dating back 20 years. This is the definition of toxic masculinity – and Martin bends over backward to say that Chase was in the right.

But this is to be expected of Martin’s entire approach to Difficult Men in which he argues that the only reason any of the great series of the era becomes a smash is solely the original creator. As far as Martin is concerned, the directors, the actors, even the other writers, are merely satellites in orbit around the great showrunners. Chase is the worst example of this behavior by far but only because Martin has decided to make him the center of Difficult Men. As far as Martin is concerned, Chase is the Revolution.

And this does a disservice to basically everyone else. It’s not just that Chase decides to focus entirely on the men behind the series, it’s that all of his shows are male centric. This is a mistake, for the record, Sepinwall doesn’t make. Even though he admits it does not fit the normal parameters of his book, he devoted fifteen pages to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only series that is center not just around a female heroine but is dominated by female characters. As he acknowledges, it debuted six full months before OZ and nearly two years before The Sopranos, but as far as he’s concerned you can’t talk about the revolution and not include it. (Slayer is actually part of the subtitle of the book.)

By contrast Martin barely talks about any of the female characters in the series he covers. That’s not much of a slight; he’s not interested in the shows rather then the creators. But there’s a bigger flaw that few might notice. I’ve mentioned multiple times how Todd Kessler after being fired from The Sopranos may have created Damages as an act of creative revenge. What I left out is that in his description of the series Martin leaves out the fact that both the lead characters were female (Glenn Close and Rose Byrne).

 He gets to it eventually when he reveals Close took the role in Damages but not before he mentions her taking a guest role in the fourth season of The Shield. He devotes an entire chapter to The Shield; Damages gets a total of two pages. He acknowledges that Patty Hewes is the sole female character in the Third Golden Age to fight as an equal to her male protagonist but does not think the show is worthy of its own chapter, despite the fact that Todd Kessler was a Sopranos alum and he devotes the very next chapter to Mad Men, which was written by Matthew Weiner who is also one. There are countless reasons why Martin could have chosen this approach – he gives an explanation in the opening that seems to cover it – but I can’t help but think it is in part because this is the only female centric show among them.

Indeed, part of me wonders if the reason that Martin chose to exclude both network dramas and comedies was in large part for this very reason. Anyone who knows the history of Peak TV knows all too well that while drama may have involved difficult men, comedies on cable and network TV frequently involved difficult women. From Weeds to Nurse Jackie, from Enlightened to Girls, many of the most well-reviewed and watched cable comedy series featured incredible female roles and in many cases had female showrunners. The case was just as true on network TV, from Gilmore Girls to 30 Rock and Parks and Rec. And as much as I have little use for any of the shows she has made over the past twenty years to not even mention Shonda Rhimes once in this book can only be seen as a sign of sexism writ large.

And even for someone who puts all his focus on HBO, there’s a clear sexism there. Carolyn Strauss was an essential part of the revolution. She was one of the first come up with the idea of the antihero and approached Alan Ball with the idea that became the foundation of Six Feet Under. She was one of the biggest defenders of The Wire far more than Chris Albrecht, who barely could tolerate David Simon. But when Albrecht is removed after an assault charge, he quickly finds work again and Martin just nods and says of course. He is far more offensive when it comes to Strauss, who he has writers comment on as being weird and uncomfortable. When she gets pushed out, there’s a sexism in it seen as ‘the prom queen lose her crown.” The fact that she might have been more responsible for the success of HBO than Albrecht means nothing.

And even in a comment of support Martin lets slide one of the most blatant errors in the entire book. According to them, the reason so many people wanted to push out Strauss was because they were tired of HBO winning the Emmy every year which just wasn’t true. In fact during the era in which Martin devotes his energy to HBO, the network won a Best Comedy trophy (Sex in the City in 2000) a full three years before an HBO series took Best Drama (The Sopranos). Indeed, while HBO has regularly led all services in Emmy wins and nominations since 2000, during the period under Martin’s era, the lion’s share of those Emmys were either technical awards or far more often for the Mini Series and TV Movies that had been among its dominant productions well before it even got to original series.

In fact, HBO’s track record with the Emmys during this period is a very mixed bag. The Wire was famously unrecognized during its run, Deadwood only received a single nomination for Best Drama (critically in a year when The Sopranos was ineligible) and while Six Feet Under was nominated for Best Drama during four seasons, not only did it never win it never won a single award for any of its lead actors or any of its writers. This was not because of the presence of The Sopranos, by the way, two of the years it was nominated The Sopranos wasn’t eligible. The awards both shows won were entirely in the Creative Arts categories.

The Sopranos had a better track record but it only won Best Drama twice, in 2004 and for its final season in 2007. Much of this had to do with the conventional nature of the Emmys at that period; the fact that The Sopranos lost Best Drama to The Practice in 1999 seems like a spectacular error in hindsight. But it also has to do with the fact that, during this same period the networks were willing to fight alongside HBO to try to beat them at their own game. (I’ve written about this an earlier article.) The fact that Martin chose to ignore this showed that he was doing a huge disservice for the era he was covering at the time. If Aaron Sorkin doesn’t meet the definition of a difficult man during this period (he had a drug problem and was forced to resign from The West Wing in 2003)  then who is? I can’t help but think that Martin’s bias towards Chase, who famously loathed not only Sorkin but men like David Milch is at least partially responsible for this.

There’s something very selective even among the Difficult Men Martin chooses to focus on, something that shows his own bias in so many ways. David E. Kelley was the head writer of six different shows during this period and he isn’t mentioned at all. No mention of Howard Gordon, even though he was a critical force behind 24 and while this book was being written was the major force on Homeland. The fact that he worked alongside Vince Gilligan who Martin is happy to write on is vexing, as is the fact that while Martin focuses on how Shawn Ryan worked for Nash Bridges before coming to The Shield, he leaves out mention that Carlton Cuse worked there too – and therefore doesn’t have to bother with Lost.

It’s a curious jumble Difficult Men. It was always going to be difficult to try and live up to the subtitle – Behind The Scenes of A Creative Revolution – but even the rest of that amounts to  false advertising. If you want to know about The Sopranos and The Wire, you’ll get more than you ever wanted to know. Mad Men and Breaking Bad, which is the second part of the surtitle get forty pages combined near the end of the book. If you want to learn how much Shawn Ryan and David Simon hated each other’s work or how much of a bastard Matthew Weiner could be to Jon Hamm, then I suppose this is your book. If you actually cared about why any of these series led to some of the greatest television in history – such as say why the first episode of The Shield was so revolutionary or what was so remarkable about the fourth season of The Wire – then you will come away decidedly empty handed.

At the end of the day Difficult Men does deliver the title because you definitely come away thinking that many of these people are just that, in their own way. You will also get the feeling that many of these geniuses are horrible bosses who love harassing their employees and treat everybody with toxic behavior. I suppose that’s what some people might want to know one way or the other, but as someone who has never given a damn about how the sausage is made for his entertainment, it’s a huge mess that looks through a vague lens at the business it promises to uncover.

In the next part, I will deal with The Revolution Was Televised and explain why that is the book you should reach if you want to know about what makes great television – as well as not losing sight as to why these shows were allowed to thrive in the first place.