Kate Winslet Rules. The Regime, Not So Much

 

Was the winner for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series coronated last night? It might seem premature to consider that. Before 2023 ended, two exceptional actresses have been formidable contenders: Juno Temple for her superb work in the fifth season of Fargo and Brie Larson in the Apple series Lessons in Chemistry. (I will be reviewing the latter soon, I promise.) The partisans of Night Country will almost certainly be pushing Jodie Foster for her work and the voters will have a devil of a time determine which of the brilliant actresses cast in Capote Vs. The Swans will be nominated for Best Actress or pushed into Best Supporting Actress. Naomi Watts will almost certainly be in the former category and its just as likely Chloe Sevigny will be included as well.

But if history is any indication when The Regime debuted its first episode last night, Kate Winslet moved to the top of the list. Because when HBO and Winslet join forces, the Emmys are powerless to stop either her or her series.

Back in 2011, Winslet took her first Best Actress in a Limited Series for her work in the sterling adaptation of Mildred Pierce which would win six Emmys, including Best Limited Series and Best Supporting Actor for Guy Pearce. Almost to the day ten years later Winslet was at the top of the contenders for a very different limited series Mare of Easttown. In what was a far more formidable field of contenders than a decade earlier, Winslet managed to triumph again for Best Actress over Anya Taylor-Joy, who had dominated the awards to that point for her work in The Queen’s Gambit. While Mare took both Supporting Acting awards, Gambit prevailed for Best Limited Series.

Now less than three years later, Winslet is the lead in a limited series that is completely different from either of those two prestige projects, most critically in tone. While Pierce was a melodrama and Mare a procedural The Regime is a very dark satire with Winslet playing the chancellor of an unnamed Central European country. According to the summary The Regime takes place over the course of a year, at which point (supposedly) there will be a revolution. Whether that actually happens remains to be seen, but what is clear is that Winslet, like with her previous two projects, is the primary draw.

For more than thirty years Winslet has been one of the greatest actresses of all time but in that period she has done precious few comedies. The better ones, including the spectacular Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind always show Winslet has a figure of steadiness. Sometimes there have been contrasts, most notably in the divine Little Children, but in almost all of her work Winslet keeps everything her characters are feeling beneath the surface. When Winslet says in interviews that she has never played a character like Elena before, that’s pretty accurate. Because while her public persona as chancellor is that of someone who is in control, in private Elena is a complete and utter mess.

Elena has been elected Chancellor seven years earlier. (And I’m sure that by doing those calculations we reach 2016 is a complete coincidence on the writer’s part.) The entire ministry and inner circle that surround the chancellor do not so much rule the country as make sure that Elena always feels that she is the center of attention. That means attending to her every whim, no matter how ludicrous. The action of the first episode (and based on how the series looks, likely the entire six episode run) takes place entirely within the palace which Elena has not left in at least a year, possibly longer. Her father died of a lung disease the previous year and she has kept his body in a room in the palace, unwilling to have him buried or likely even embalmed. The palace is old and in need of renovation because of mildew and rot within. (Subtle The Regime isn’t.) The series begins with a soldier, known as Herbert, nicknamed the Butcher (German Actor Matthias Schonaerts) who has been called in to serve as someone to monitor the amount of humidity in the air every time the Chancellor is around.

Herbert, if anything, is far more emotionally broken than Elena is. He is one of the soldier who was part of a slaughter of twelve miners at Pit 5. The official story is that they were putting down a rebellion; it is more likely that they were protesting the horrific conditions and Herbert panicked. He arrives in the palace in a combination of being sedated and some kind of PTSD, combined with whatever else is wrong with him. He can barely answer any of the questions of the chief of staff (Andrea Risborough) before he is led into Elena’s presence. She is about to give a speech and a stage light goes on behind her. “Did I see you in my dream?” is her first line of dialogue.

Elena is beyond psychologically damaged, with the kind of phobia for germs that Howard Hughes might find excessive. She has the attention span of a five year old and cares more for her health than the economic business of the country. She is caring for a young boy that is her chief of staff’s son but that she has come to believe is her own. A dinner that she gives for industrialist is a celebration of her performance ability even though she cannot sing. In the midst of the dinner she turns on Herbert for making her look like an idiot, and it is likely he would end up executed has it not been for the finance minister’s intervention. Herbert spends the night audibly berating himself and punching himself in the face.

That night, a miner gets into the palace because of Elena’s insistence that the windows be kept open in order to deal with the mildew. He gets right up to her bed when Herbert intervenes and basically beats him to death. Two weeks later, Elena is even more behind locked doors than usual but Herbert seems to have taken more care of her because of his saving her life. Near the end of the day Elena has a conversation with Herbert and tells her that he is a nobody and that is why she can trust his opinion in front of her followers who tell her everything she wants to hear. She wants to know what the people truly think of her. Herbert tells her what he believes they think, and by the end of the episode she has thrown her chief ministers in prison and has decided to break a major deal with the Americans, on the basis that the attempt on her life was an attempted coup.

The Regime has a taste of the bizarre and satire that has rarely been seen in most HBO projects with the notable exception of White House Plumbers. If there is a resemblance between the two, it is the idea of the kind of hysterical insanity that often starts within the corridors of power. But it’s one thing to laugh at the incompetent antics of Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, it’s a lot harder to do so when that same insanity involves getting people killed on a whim. Perhaps David Mandel was wise when he chose to keep Richard Nixon offscreen in Plumbers; if we’d actually seen him give orders, it might not be as much fun to see what was going on when  they were carried out.

There is a similar willingness to go over-the-top on the part of the entire cast which is more than up to the challenge. Winslet is clearly having a ball as Elena. For a woman who has been known for primarily playing upright British and European heroines, she’s clearly relishing being able to play someone who is clearly unbalanced and has no filter at all. Schonaerts has a much tougher job than Winslet, but by playing someone who is unstable in a far more different way than Elena it is a darker performance. I hope we get to see more of what is beneath of the surface – if there is anything.

Like most HBO prestige limited series, the guest cast is impressive. Later episodes will feature an American diplomat played by that brilliant talent Martha Plimpton. (And the fact that she bears a slight resemblance to Hilary is another coincidence.) At some point Hugh Grant will grace the stage as the leader of the opposition, which means his character isn’t likely long for this world. Given the nature of this show, I’m expected a body count, though in this case the violence will far more likely occur offscreen – until the end.

The show is directed by one of the most gifted craftsmen Stephen Frears. Frears has been, in a sense, working in this field his entire life, starting with the first and by far best adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons. He brought into the corridors of power with The Queen and more than a decade later showed the ugliness of it in the superb Amazon limited series A Very English Scandal. A brilliant film director, he’s honestly better served in television, while there have been brilliant movies such as Florence Foster Jenkins and Philomena, he’s been better served with work in such series as The Loudest Voice and Quiz. It comes as little shock that the producers are among that gave us Succession.

The question is, however, aside from Winslet, is there anything really deep in The Regime? Winslet has been able to carry lesser projects with sheer force of will (I don’t think The Reader would have been able to work with anyone else as the lead; it barely did with her). But most of those projects have some subtlety to them or something to say. The Regime, by contrast, is mostly style over substance, and at least in the first episode there isn’t much in the way of style. The performances are generally superb but that’s true of even the HBO limited series that are flawed (see Night Country). White House Plumbers, the closest comparison, did have a deeper story to tell underneath the bizarre and often comic flaws. The Regime, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have any story to tell, at least not yet.

If you’re willing to embrace both the madness of the story and the brilliance of Winslet gone wild, you may very well love The Regime. But right now the HBO project this reminds me the most of so far is not Mare of Easttown or the first season of The White Lotus but rather, sadly, Night Country. If anything, I’m more inclined to think less of The Regime because as I said after everything I had been through with True Detective my expectations were not that high for Night Country. I had higher ones for The Regime and so far, they haven’t been met.

I intend to stick with The Regime for the future, because of the presence of Winslet. But whether they last may depend on the kind of projects I see as March progresses: there are quite a few series opposing it that I may find more interesting. I’m sorry Elena. I can bless you, the show’s another story.

My score: 2.5 stars.

  

Progressive Presidential Campaigns, Part 4: Henry Wallace's Rise and Fall In Politics and His Decision to Run For President in 1948

 

In 1940 FDR’s decision to break historical precedent and run for a third term disturbed many Americans – not all of them Republicans. Announcing his campaign for reelection to the Senate in Missouri, Harry Truman made it clear that he thought this was a violation of the Constitution.

But with the crisis in Europe worsening by the day and it looking increasingly like America would be drawn into conflict, FDR decided and the Democratic Party reluctantly agreed that he would run for a third term. After he was nominated practically by acclimation, however, circumstances almost caused him to withdraw – and it had to do with his choice for Vice President.

Henry Wallace had been named FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture upon his election to the White House. Wallace had been tireless in implementing the New Deal policies for agriculture as well as one of FDR’s biggest advocates for those policies. Because of his loyalty to FDR, Roosevelt returned it. Which was good for Wallace because he was, to put it mildly, eccentric. He spent much of his time attending seances where ‘spirits’ would tell him what kind of agricultural policies to follow. He believed in the practice of eugenics. And he was increasingly susceptible to flattery from the wrong people.

However Wallace was the first man to endorse FDR’s run for a third term. And FDR wanted him to run as his vice president for that third term. This enraged the party elders. One governor said Wallace was his second choice for VP. Asked for his first choice “anyone -red, white, black or yellow – who can get the nomination. The convention nearly revolted and FDR grew unpleasant saying that if they didn’t take Wallace he wouldn’t run. Only an unprecedented speech by his wife Eleanor calmed the crowd – and even then, Wallace only managed to win by a hair about Speaker of the House Dan Bankhead.

FDR easily won a third term, but Wendell Willkie his Republican opponent carried Iowa  - Wallace’s home state – by a significant margin. Wallace became Vice President and had a more significant role in FDR’s administration than any previous Vice President, often going on significant foreign missions. However, this power led him to increasingly become influences by the Soviet Union speaking that a war arise ‘if we double cross Russia.” In a world where many Americans had long thought the Communists were a worst threat to Americans than the Nazis – and continued to think this even long after America entered the war, Wallace’s words made many uneasy.

By May of 1944, Wallace was sent on a ‘fact-finding mission’ to Siberia. Witnessing a Soviet concentration camp, Wallace gushed about paintings done by the prisoners, and talked about becoming fond of the leader of the Soviet secret police.

By the spring of 1944, a group of party bosses were’ conspiring’ to remove Wallace from the ticket in the election that was quickly approaching. Part of it had to do with the fact that some of them thought Wallace’s views were going to cost the party in November. Unspoken among them was something that everyone in Washington knew but no one was telling the public.

FDR’s health was beginning to noticeably deteriorate. At one point his private physician told him that, if he took care of himself, he might live another year. The possibility of a man like Wallace becoming President terrified, with good reason, many Democrats and they began to seek an alternative.

They did so, it is worth noting, without the input of the man who really should have been concerned. FDR spent the entire spring and summer basically toying with every single prospective candidate or anyone who might advise him as to who he should choose. He did so, it’s worth noting, with Wallace himself, who knew the vultures were circling and even showed a poll showing that more than 60 percent of all Democrats wanted him to remain on the ticket. FDR told him: “I hope it will be the same old team” and then went to discuss the possibility of Jimmy Byrnes, his head of War Mobilization who was considered the ‘assistant President’ by many as the best man for the job if he died. FDR could have resolved the issue with a single word but he never did. Whether it was because of his focus on the war or because of his genuine indifference will never be known.

At a certain point the Democrats decided they wanted Harry Truman to be Vice President. Truman, its worth noting, did not. While he might have harbored Presidential ambitions himself the idea of being Vice President was something that he didn’t want something he told everybody who asked him. At the Democratic Convention when Byrnes called him, so the story goes, he agreed to nominate him for Vice President.

By that point the party had managed to convince – no one knows how – FDR that Truman had to be on the ticket. This decision was not entirely in his hands. At the convention in Chicago Wallace gave the greatest speech of his political career, a yelling for all of the liberal causes that the Democrats must follow in the new term. This led to a demonstration so loud with the delegates shouting: “We want Wallace” that lasted for an hour. Claude Pepper, the manager of the team for Wallace, knew that this momentum could carry over to get his candidate nominated by acclimation and tried to get to the lectern. But the Mayor of Chicago adjourned the session. When the balloting finally began the next day Wallace took an early lead over Truman on the first ballot and held it well into the second, but clever maneuvering got Truman in the lead and eventually got him the nomination for Vice President.

Even then, many wondered if it would make a difference. In Truman’s one meeting with FDR before the fall campaign, Truman was so shocked by the President’s poor health – his hands were shaking so badly he could not stir his coffee – that he knew that he would soon be President. One of his Secret Service men actually thought FDR wouldn’t even make it to November and Henry Wallace would become President after all.

FDR’s opponent Governor Dewey considered making FDR’s health an issue of the campaign, but afraid it would backfire, never put it front and center. FDR’s entrance into the campaign starting in late September, showed a master campaigner who seemed more active than possible. FDR won reelection with 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99.

He did so, it is worth noting, with the full support of Wallace who even after being discarded campaigned sixteen  hours a day through the summer and fall. After helping swear in Truman in January, as a balm, FDR offered Wallace any government position he wanted save Secretary of State. Wallace chose to be Secretary of Commerce. It was clear that he was not wanted in the administration but part out of duty, and part out of spite, he stayed.

Three months later, FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs and Truman became President. His first act, in keeping with every Vice President who had ascended to the Presidency since Andrew Johnson, was to retain every member of FDR’s cabinet. In the case of Wallace that would soon come to be a major mistake.

As World War II came to an end, Truman was immensely popular with most Americans. But as the Cold War began and the reality of economics in a post-war world began to hit America, Truman’s popularity plummeted. He made many blunders, in part because of some of his initial appointments to many cabinet posts. Wallace, however, put a very big knife in Truman’s back.

On September 12, 1946, Wallace addressed a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden. By now Wallace was firmly pro-Soviet Union and the crowd was majorly on that side. Truman okayed Wallace’s speech but the program’s organizer insisted he excise the parts that were against the Soviet Union. Wallace agreed to this and in a speech clearly anti the administration’s policy he concluded it in such a way that the Washington Post reported:

“Mr. Wallace put it this way. On our part, we should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe that Russia has in the affairs of Western Europe, Latin America and the United States.”

That paragraph caused Truman to see Eastern European voters across the Midwest fleeing the Democratic column in 1948. Truman himself compounded the error in a press conference less than four hours after the speech when he claimed they were in line with his administration even though they were a direct violation of the policy his own secretary of state Jimmy Byrnes had been working with him on.

Hearing this Byrnes threatened to resign. “You and I spent fifteen months building a bipartisan foreign policy,” he told Truman. “Wallace destroyed it in a day.” Truman seethed in private: “Wallace is a pacifist,” he wrote. “He wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin. I do not understand a ‘dreamer’ like that.” Not long after Wallace leaked a letter he wrote to Truman in which he criticized the administration’s plan on atomic energy and justified a Soviet dominated security zone in Eastern Europe. Truman demanded Wallace’s resignation, which he did.

The midterms, as I reported in an earlier article on Thomas Dewey were a disaster for Truman, as the Republicans won sweeping majorities in the House and Senate for the first time in fifteen years. Truman increasingly looked almost certain to lose reelection in 1948.

In 1947 Truman addressed Congress about the threat of Communism. In a policy that would become known as The Truman Doctrine, he founded what would become known as the policy of containment. This decision was perfectly logical politically. By October of that year, a poll indicated that 62 percent of Americans thought the nation ‘too soft’ on Communism”: a phrase that would haunt politicians of both parties for the next forty years. Only 6 percent thought Truman’s policy were too tough. Among those six percent was Wallace.

When Wallace left Commerce, he accepted an offer to edit the then leftish journal The New Republic. The offer came from a former FDR speechwriter – who was also a covert Soviet agent. It would be the first of a long line of Communist influencers who would become part of the Wallace cadre. In the journal, he argued for reconciliation with Moscow, opposed aid to Greece and Turkey and would turn against the Marshall plan once Moscow turned against it. Wallace went on a European tour and began to have conversations with communist agents in France. When he left for Europe, 125 supporters signed a petition of support, including former Mayor La Guardia, six U.S Senators and two prominent Congressmen, Helen Keller, Elliott Roosevelt – and quite a significant number of prominent celebrities, including composer Aaron Copland, actor Gene Kelly, and playwrights Lillian Hellman and Arthur Miller.

Returning stateside he was greeted by huge crowds in Middle America, including Chicago, Detroit and more than twenty thousand in Los Angeles. In May of 1947 Wallaceite Charles Savage defeated a Truman Democrat in a House primary in Washington. IN November a Wallace candidate in Chicago polled forty percent of the vote.

On December 29, 1947 Wallace flew to New York for a private address of a thousand supporters. He announced that he would be running for President on what would be known as the Progressive ticket. Over nationwide radio, he attacked the Democratic party as made of ‘lukewarm liberals’, attacked the draft and corporate profits. He concluded:

“We have assembled a Gideon’s Army, small in number, powerful in conviction, ready for action. We have said with Gideon: ”Let those who are fearful and trembling depart… A just cause is worth 100 armies…We owe no allegiance to any group which doesn’t serve the common man.”

In D.C. California Congresswoman Helen Gaghan Douglas, an early supporter of Wallace heard the news and despaired for her friend. She had been told of this in private and her friends had “said good night politely and piled out the door as if fleeing a bad odor.” She stayed but warned him that what little support he would enjoy from his friends – even her. Wallace only looked hurt.

Later she encountered a  fellow Congressman Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who was ebullient. He told her Truman’s forces would rip Wallace apart by painting him as a Communist sympathizer – something that he was looking forward too and that Wallace would spend the next year doing everything in his power to make a reality.

In the next article in this series I will deal with Wallace’s campaign for the Presidency, how it quickly deteriorated and increasingly became a cult of personality, which in the midst of 1948 increasingly made Wallace look more and more foolish – something he did everything in his own power to help himself do.

Lost Rewatch On VHS: LaFleur

 

 

VHS Notes: Nothing immensely differently than the last couple of weeks of promos, though it is worth noting that we see a preview for the Nicolas Cage thriller Knowing, a movie whose reputation was initially negative but overtime has been viewed as a masterpiece. I am inclined to agree with those who think so.

 

The nature of television has been, at least in the era before cable TV, was that in order to bring the viewer back week after week, not only the formula of a show but the characters could not change. Over a period of years they might be along to evolve but for the most part – as with the believer/skeptic role that Mulder and Scully maintained well past the point of credulity on The X-Files – television broke that model its peril. Character growth was possible – Andy Sipowicz on NYPD Blue was the most obvious example – but it took place gradually over years.

The Sopranos threw in a wrench in this by arguing that not only was change not possible over extended periods of time but if anything, characters could regress over time. There are countless examples of television following this model for during the period but for the sake of this section, I’ll just deal with the dramas that were being nominated for the Emmy during the same period Lost was on the air.

Shows like Six Feet Under and The West Wing, which argued for character growth, were increasingly becoming aberrations. It’s hard to figure out how 24 fits into this, given the amount of time frame over a season, but the fact that a character was allowed to lose their moral compass for a greater good was increasingly a theme that became prominent on so many law enforcement dramas. Shows like House and Boston Legal argued that the male leads could behave monstrously in their moral and career behavior and go unpunished as long as they got results. Grey’s Anatomy allowed for the women to behave as badly as the men and go just as unpunished.

By the time Lost returned to the Best Drama category in 2008, the second wave of Peak TV was coming along and a new and more complicated group of characters with mixed messages. Mad Men famously argued that men were incapable of behaving morally but that women could make strides up the ladder. Damages argued that women could engage in the same ruthless behavior as Tony Soprano or Vic Mackey to anybody – including their loved ones –  and be viewed as heroines by the masses because they engaged in a greater good. Dexter followed a different concept: a character who knows that he is a monster and tries to hide who he is but who finds himself making more human connections – and those are the ones that cause more harm. (The Trinity Killer saga was the best example of this) And Breaking Bad famously showed how Mr. Chips became Scarface and brought ruination to all around him.

Lost was an outlier series in many ways but one of the more significant ones had been how the first four seasons unfolded. On most shows over four seasons, four years go by but on Lost on 100 days had passed in the timeline since the Pilot. As a result while we can see certain amounts of character growth in many of the survivors, with few exceptions, they’ve mostly been nuanced to the point the average viewer could be forgiven for missing them. When the flashforwards were put to full use in Season 4, we began to see how that growth was possible when it came to the Oceanic 6 and in the first half of Season 5, we have seen how that applied to Desmond and Ben.

Now in Lafleur, we finally see what happened after Locke pushed the wheel way back in This Place is Death. The final flash has put the remaining survivors in 1974 at the time of the Dharma Initiative. And during this three year period, the remaining survivors have become part of Dharma and Sawyer has now taken on the name of Lafleur and become the head of security in Dharma.

In a way, it’s fitting that this episode is Sawyer-centric because while it has been difficult at times to see the changes in many of the characters over four seasons, with Sawyer its incredibly easy. Because at the start of the series Sawyer was a selfish bastard, hoarding all the medicine and goods, doing everything in his power to keep himself separate from anyone who even tried to get close to him. And now, in both the aftermath of the final flash and in the ‘present’, everyone trusts him. He manages to persuade Amy to trust him on a moments notice = though to be fair, it only lasts until they get to the fence. He manages to help the Initiative through a crisis and persuades Richard Alpert to stand down, something that impresses both Richard and Horace Goodspeed.

In the present his lackeys, such as Phil, are clearly a little afraid of him. He has the authority to give orders to an intern and say that he’s speaking for Horace and that Amy is willing to listen to him. Horace is now a trusted confidante. And everyone else who came with him now trusts him in a way they just didn’t. Jin and Sawyer have had a decent relationship since their time on the raft together but the fact that Miles is willing to take orders from him is a real shock. (Perhaps the last three years has revealed what kindred spirits they truly are.) And of course in one of the great joys of the entire series, Sawyer and Juliet are now a couple.

There has been a lot of discussion, starting in the episode guide, as to why Sawyer has been having the island searched grid by grid. Juliet is right when she says that waiting for Locke doesn’t mean anything: they are already saved. It’s also a very real argument that the Oceanic 6 never had to be brought back to the island, that Locke was operating under false pretenses and that Jack basically convinced everyone to come back out of his own guilt. (But they don’t know that yet.) Nikki Stafford makes a very convincing argument in this part of the book that in the final act of the episode when Sawyer talks about Kate and tells him that he’s gotten over her after three years, he’s lying to himself as much as Horace. And based on the expression on his face when he sees Kate for the first time since he jumped out of a helicopter so that she could get rescued, there’s a good argument for that fact. Much of the debate in the second half of the season is whether Sawyer has been yearning for Kate all this time and that everything that follows is in part because of that.

There is a certain truth to this. But I think there might be a counterargument, and to understand it we have to review what we know about Sawyer. James Ford’s life has been shaped by the con man who he blamed for conning his mother, which led to his father killing her and then himself. He spent his entire adult life searching for the real Sawyer, eventually taking his name and essentially ‘becoming’ him. He is a very capable con man but as we have seen both in his flashbacks and on the island, he’s the easiest person to con – indeed, it was a con by a man named Hibbs that landed him in Sydney and on Oceanic 815 in the first place.

Throughout the first three seasons Sawyer continuously alternated between a selfish jerk with bits of compassion: he was willing to hand over his liquor to try and save Boone without any questions (he even offered to help, but Kate told him there were too many people); he made an effort to get off the island that nearly got him killed, then he went on a rescue mission to try and save Walt, that ended up with him being taken prisoner by the Others. During Season 3, there were signs of a more compassionate person but when he actually found the real Sawyer – Anthony Cooper – and ended up realizing his search of 30 years, it left him emotionally empty.

In Season 4, he found a way forward. When the barracks were attacked he risked his life to save Claire, put a gun on Locke when he threatened to take Hurley with him, and led a group of people through the jungle, searching for Claire when she disappeared. Something had shifted in Sawyer by then. The old Sawyer would have shoved Hurley out of the chopper rather than jumped himself.

Sawyer spent the period during the flashes, trying to deal with his loss and everything else. He spent time following first Dan, then Locke, but he didn’t have any plan. Now when the flashes end, Dan is a quivering mess incapable of leadership. (Jeremy Davies is exceptional in his few scenes; babblingly incoherently as to what happened to Charlotte, proceeding through the island dully with no interest in his life, and then watching as Charlotte as a toddler goes by him.) Sawyer doesn’t have a plan either; something both Miles and Juliet take the piss out of him for. But at this point, he’s now the kind of person willing to risk his life for others. So when he sees Amy being attacked by two Others, he and Juliet risk their lives to defend them.

At this point we know how good Sawyer is at improvising on short notice. (He’s actually as good at this as Ben is.) He comes up with a story that is not that far removed from Rousseau’s and throws some elements involving local color. (When Horace tells him that he’s never heard of the Black Rock, we know that Horace is just as good at lying.) But Sawyer by now knows more about the island then many of the residents do, which is another good trick of the con man. He should not be able to outwit Richard,  but it’s clear when he casually says: “Did you bury the bomb?” that he’s clearly caught the eternally calm Richard by surprise.

But here’s the thing. He also knows about the Purge. Juliet knows about it, and at some point she would have told Sawyer. We also know that he’s been listening to Dan (who doesn’t seem to be on the island three years later) and that it doesn’t matter what they do: “whatever happened, happened.” Sawyer has to know that if his friends don’t come back to the island, he and everyone he’s responsible for will die. Yet when they come back his reaction is to try and assimilate them rather than make any effort to go home; indeed he’ll spend much of the rest of Season 5 trying to keep up the life he’s built.

Why does he not do anything? It’s simple. For the first time in James’ whole life, he’s happy. Josh Holloway has taken his acting up to the next level in Season Five, but he rarely does so to an extent the way he does in Lafleur. There’s an ease in him that we just haven’t seen, either on the island or in any of his flashbacks. Everyone in Dharma treats him with respect and compassion – something that we rarely saw any of his fellow survivors try to do. He’s not running through Dharma with desperation like we see everybody on the show, he’s running with purpose and confidence – something we never have seen any character show. Lafleur doesn’t ask questions because he’s probing for weaknesses; he genuinely cares about people in a way Sawyer never did. The smiles on Holloway’s face throughout the episode are remarkable because they’re genuine.

And a large part of the reason is the woman he’s living with. Elizabeth Mitchell has always been a superb actress and has been up to her usual caliber in Season Five but watching her in Lafleur is a whole different story. When she and Sawyer banter, there’s a genuine treatment of equals that we’ve never seen Sawyer show – not even with Kate. Kate kept keeping him off balance because she was never sure of what she wanted; something Sawyer was reminded of time and again.

Juliet is a different story and frankly, it’s kind of remarkable considering Sawyer spent most of Season Three not trusting anything that came out of her mouth. There were signs of a bond when she went back with him to save the ones left on the beach (Sawyer clearly saw it then) but they went in different directions in Season Four and they didn’t really talk until they thought they were stranded again. Watching their interactions while the flashes were going on it was clear the two of them were connecting in a way that usually takes more time. Did the two of them sense that connection way back in Season Three? Maybe. Because when Sawyer cracks a joke just before she gets on the sub, Juliet gives the first laugh – actual laugh – she’s managed in the action on the island. Juliet has always been guarded throughout the first two seasons, which is why many fans had trouble trusting her.

And the smile the two of them exchange is open and honest in a way we’ve rarely seen two people get a chance to show on Lost. Most interactions on this series have been borne out of desperation, given how quickly everything moved, no one has any time to relax. Now the two of them are stranding on a desert island in 1974, completely isolated in space and time from everyone and everything they care about. Yet in that moment, they look freer than they’ve ever been.

So maybe long time fans were stunned when Sawyer strolls through the Barracks, picks a flower, walks into a house and presents to Juliet. I have little doubt much of it had to do with those who were still shipping Kate-Sawyer. But there’s something joyous about it when you see these two souls who have been lost for a long time, holding each other completely unironically and saying “I love you” to each other. The look on their faces is that of a fondness we have seen between Sun and Jin on the island and Penny and Desmond when they reunited.

So yes Lafleur is lying about having forgotten Kate but he’s also telling the truth to Horace at the same time. He hasn’t forgotten what she looked like, but he has found happiness and security in a way he would never have had with her and he knows this. And I think that maybe one of the reasons he doesn’t immediately tell Juliet what’s happened when Jin calls and tells him that the people that he has been searching for the past three years have returned.

He's built a nice life for himself in Dharmaville. Shame his old friends are about to blow it up.

Carrie Preston Is Elsbeth! Need I Say More? OK I will

 

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote a love letter to what I considered one of my favorite series of all time and one of the greatest in history: The Good Wife. Arguably the greatest series of the 2010s (with only The Americans rivaling it for consistency and high quality) it was without question one of the greatest network dramas in the history of the medium. I can’t tell you how many times during the decade I was infuriated beyond words with the Emmys maddening decision to recognize shows like Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones over it during its peak. It is in part because of the failure to recognize series like this that I trace network TV’s slow decision to move more towards reboots and procedurals over the brilliant dramas that it had been showing during the previous decade. What’s the point of doing great television if cable and streaming were going to get all the nominations?

Immediately after that, of course, This is Us became the first network drama to be nominated by the Emmys in that category. But at that same point the first spinoff of The Good Wife, the equally brilliant Good Fight, would be completely ignored by the Emmys despite its often equally high quality. Robert and Michelle King were all too aware of the double standard the Emmys had towards cable TV (it actually became a running gag in the later seasons of Good Wife) and the fact that another show on a streaming service was ignored might have been a sign the Emmys were never going to recognize the Kings for their work, nor matter where they aired their incredible TV.

I’m getting agitated on what should be a joyous occasion. Let me start again.

Over the many years I watched The Good Wife with my mother, the two of us were in awe of what we saw. Not just the brilliant dialogue, the sexiness that was honestly better than some Shondaland series and the wonderful performances by every lead, but all of the incredible secondary characters that would show up maybe two or three times a season. We loved watching Michael J. Fox play an attorney with so little moral compunction that he would use his impending death as a tool to manipulate Alicia and her associates. We were overjoyed every time Martha Plimpton showed up, somehow always pregnant and always able to manipulate the judges that way. But there was one character that every time she appeared onscreen I told my mother: “She should have her own series.” That character was, of course, Carrie Preston’s Elspeth Tascioni and now my dream has come true – as has that of nearly every fan of The Good Wife.

One can debate which characters on the show were the most fun, the most sexy or the most devious. But there’s no argument that Preston’s Elspeth was the most lovable. Words like ‘eccentric’ or ‘scatter-brained’ could be used to describe her every time we saw her and they didn’t seem to go far enough. Sometimes you thought that if you looked up ADD in a medical glossary Elspeth’s picture would have to be next to it as she seemed incapable of holding a thought in her head for more than a few seconds and was capable of changing subjects on a dime so quickly that it left everybody behind. But as Will Gardner pointed out in Season 4 Elspeth ‘was Rambo.’ 

It is the nature of the recurring character that you never know for certain how much of what you see is truly what you get: it was always a question whether what Elspeth was doing was an act or this was just how she did her job. What was always clear is that once she was on your side, the opposition had no chance. Elspeth was clearly both a legal genius and used her kooky façade to lull her opponents in to a false sense of security. And the reason you were always fooled was because…she was just so darn nice.

Here's the thing about Peak TV; in the last twenty years, genuinely nice and pleasant characters have been driven to near extinction. I’m not just talking about the age of the Antihero; in the world where the best television has always been dark, even the comedies we spent so much of the last twenty years enjoying have featured characters who are basically dicks. This has been just as true of all the shows that had female leads; from Nancy Botwin to Selina Meyer to Fleabag, we’ve mostly been laughing at bad women doing bad things. This has been true even in the ostensibly more cheerful comedies; Alex Borstein was perpetually dour on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And for all the strong female characters that Shonda Rhimes may have given us over the last twenty years, ‘nice’ is not a word one would use to describe the majority of them.

But over the last few years, particularly in comedy, there have been some promising changes. We see them in Abbott Elementary, Hacks and Somebody Somewhere; we saw in the messy relationship of Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini in Dead to Me. And of course there was Ted Lasso who in a way is a descendant of Elspeth. The opening scene of her in Elspeth, shows her as the sole passenger on the upper level of a ‘hip-hop’ bus in NYC, wearing a Statue of Liberty crown with a huge smile on her face. One is reminded of Ted’s journey to England, including the way she gets off the bus and says: “This is my stop, but you keep going.” She has that same goofy grin on her face even as she is walking through police tape and a crime scene. Even if you knew nothing about The Good Wife, how could you not fall in love with her from that moment?

Once I describe the formula of the series, I imagine fans of the King’s work might be disappointed because by far Elspeth is the most conventional show they’ve ever done, at least from the perspective of the pilot. Elspeth Tascioni has left her home of Chicago and has been enlisted by the Justice Department to do legal oversight for the NYPD after a huge number of overturned convictions. (All right, that part’s keeping on brand with the King’s work.) Once she appears on scene, she uses her talents as an observer to realize that a death that has been staged as a suicide is a murder and she begins to investigate it against the police’s wishes.

This is nothing we haven’t seen before, and the fact that we have a red-headed mostly comic actress who can tell when things aren’t what they seem involving suspicious deaths would naturally make us think of Poker Face. That show itself was an homage to Columbo and Elspeth takes on much of the same format, badgering the murderer who we’ve already seen commit the crime in the opening scene (again like Poker Face) and making a nuisance of herself to anyone who will listen.

But there is a critical difference between Charlie Cale and Elspeth, aside from, you know, all the real ones. Charlie from the moment we meet her is naturally, unabashed cynical and refusing to trust anyone. Whereas Elspeth is…pleasant. After watching the entire pilot, I am beginning to think that with Elspeth what you see is what you get. I’m not saying she’s shallow or naïve (anyone who watched her over her tenure on The Good Wife would know that’s just not true). It’s just that she has empathy and kindness even for the people she knows are killers.

Let’s deal with the pilot. An acting teacher at a New York school (Stephen Moyer, who no doubt Preston lured in from their days on True Blood together) has just killed an underage student he was having an affair with and was going to expose him. He has staged it to look like a suicide, and we see just how he did it at the opening of the episode.

It is this crime scene that Elspeth wanders on to and realizes that because of the deodorant in the mirror and the fact the victim was wearing a diaphragm that she was very likely murdered. The police, who don’t want her there, are incredibly annoyed and the only reason they don’t tell her to get lost is because they get a call from the captain (Wendell Pierce) who tells them to humor her. He then immediately calls the Chicago Justice department. “Who have you stuck me with?” he tells the representative of the Attorney general. Laughingly, he tells the captain to give her a chance. “You’ll like her,” he says.

Elspeth very quickly realizes that Moyer’s character is responsible for the death and spends the rest of the episode (politely) hounding him. Tellingly, the instructor never gets outright angry but holds his temper in check, no doubt because he doesn’t want to give anything way.

Over the episode Elspeth becomes aware that he has a habit of sleeping with his students, giving them good parts and then moving on to younger faces. Elspeth then goes to approach the instructor who thinks that he’s outmaneuvered her. The cops have a suspect who they think is guilty and he confesses. It is only after Elspeth watches the ‘entire’ confession that she realizes that the man has been manipulated. (This is keeping with the King’s brand of not being able to trust the police outright.)

Elspeth is told to apologize to the teacher because he has registered a complaint. She comes to him, grovels and brings him cookies. She then has a conversation with one of the officers whose befriended her that the teacher clearly overhears. Later that night, he is about to kill the patsy he’s framed and while he’s doing so, the police walk in to arrest him.

A brief moment: in my review of the proposed spinoff, I suggested that if Elspeth were on the case if Elspeth were on the case not only might she catch such notorious killers as Zodiac, they’d say thank you when they did. Well, let me describe the ending:

Moyer is arrested. Elspeth apologizes. “What did I do wrong?” he asked her curiously. “Acting,” she tells him kindly. “In real life people don’t do that.”  He tells her he enjoyed the chess game. “Did you get tickets to Cats?” he asks. (She’d asked about it in her first meeting.) “I’m seeing it tonight,” she tells him. “Think of me when you see it,” he says as he is walked off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen on any procedural a debriefing for the killer, let alone one done with something that almost resembles respect on that person’s part.

And it gets better! In the last scene with the captain, Elspeth is gloomy. “I really liked him,” she tells him. I don’t even think Columbo was ever upset about sending a murderer and a sexual predator to prison. She hates what he did, don’t get me wrong, but she didn’t like doing it. That’s empathy. Hell, even in the last scene when he learn that Elspeth is there to see if there is corruption in the NYPD, she tells the man who sent her there that she doesn’t think the man she’s investigating could be guilty. Don’t get me wrong; if he is, I have no doubt she’ll spend all the energy in the world to track him down, but she won’t feel the least bit good doing it.

Reader, I laughed almost all the way through the first episode of Elspeth and when I wasn’t I was smiling. Part of it may have been the realization of something I have spent a decade hoping would happen, but part of it was just because, well, I love Elspeth and I think she’s the kind of character that TV needs as it heads into its new phase. As I’ve mentioned before, it looks very much like Peak TV will be driven by both females and kindness, both of which Carrie Preston’s character has in spades. And as procedurals go, this is also the kind of procedural that network television needs. It may be too much to analyze after just a single episode (the next one will not air until April) but it may be the Kings are reinventing the procedural the same way they tried to reinvent the legal drama with The Good Wife back in 2009. (That it failed was more due to the fact the courtroom drama was in retrograde; such exceptions as For the People did not last long.)

 There are also, to be clear, elements of so much of the King’s work throughout, despite the differences: investigations, lest we forget, were part and parcel of The Good Wife, and we constantly get signs of the oddities of the world. At one point Elspeth interviews a former student who is starring in a Broadway musical mashup of The Singing Nun and The Flying Nun and in the midst of the interview, is lifted into the air and starts to trill. There are references to the world we live in; the teacher commits the murder because he’s afraid of being ‘cancelled’ and the performance itself has the appearance of some of the avant-garde productions we’ve seen over the years in The Good verse. There are also links to the past: Elspeth pushes the captain to his limit, but when she hears she might be replaced  by Cary Agos, she grows serious for one of the few times in the episodes. (Will we see Matt Czuchry? Hope springs eternal.)

I want Elspeth to succeed and flourish. Not just because I love Carrie Preston and want her to get another Emmy for this role. (She won one for Best Guest Actress in 2013 and was nominated for two more.) Not just because I want the show to succeed. No, I’m hoping, as I said in this article, that if the series is a hit CBS, which as we all know, loves to do spinoffs, will invent an entire Good Wife universe, not unlike the ones that Dick Wolf has used to occupy two nights of NBC programming. However, considering these are the Kings and we’ve already seen what they can do with one Good Wife spin-off, the last thing we’d get is business as usual. Hey, it’s an election year. What’s Eli Gold up too?

My score: 4.75 stars.

 

Progressive Presidential Campaigns Part 3: Robert La Follette's 1924 Presidential Campaign

 

One of the interesting side notes of La Follette’s career is that while he was never able to realize his ideals as President, America managed to get behind them without him leading the way. Part of that was due to the work of the man who became President due to the split in the Republican Party in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson’s reputation has taken a hit over the past decades because of his segregationist views and his single-mindedness towards obtaining his ideals. (Ironically, this behavior is one of the habits held by Progressive extremists such as La Follette.) This is ironic because his platform and the first years of his administration were at least as progressive as  Theodore Roosevelt’s had been, if not more so. His platform included a lower tariff, enforcement of antitrust laws, utility regulation, direct election of senators and worker’s compensation. Despite the fact that these were just as much part of the progressive platform, during the campaign La Follette’s repeatedly called it inferior. La Follette, like too many of today’s Progressives, continued to see all things in terms of black and white with no shades of gray.

La Follette helped pass many bills he had either introduced or long endorse, including the income tax, and a bill that helped protect Sailors under the thirteenth Amendment. However he was a major opponent of the passage of the act promoting the Federal Reserve Act and when the Clayton Bill, which strengthened labor managed passage, Progressives considered it weak no matter what representatives of labor said. No matter how progressive Wilson was  - and during the first two years the sixteenth and seventeenth amendments which guaranteed both the Income Tax and direct elections of Senators as part of the Constitution, progressives like La Follette were never satisfied. Because Wilson, like TR was compromising, La Follette refused to accept them as actual victories.

This became increasingly clear as the War in Europe became more and more likely to involve America in the conflict. He attempted to run for the Republican nomination for President in 1916 even though he was facing a close reelection campaign for Senate that same year. He had already proposed bills opposing the draft and broadening exemption for conscientious objectors, he also supported non-intervention which drove men like TR – his most direct opponent for the GOP nomination – to distraction. La Follette applauded Wilson’s determination for neutrality and then would later attack the newspapers as being influenced by the mission for preparedness discussed avidly by men like Roosevelt, led many to think that he had lost whatever sanity he had. La Follette again easily won reelection to the Senate but refused to endorse his Republican nominee for President Charles Evans Hughes for the Presidency.

La Follette’s behavior increasingly isolated him from much of Washington. When William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’ Secretary of State and a pacifist resigned after the Lusitania was sunk, La Follette defended him. He was convinced the ship contained munitions despite their being no evidence. La Follette’s opposition to war remained steadfast even in the face of the attacks of Germany. La Follette repeatedly spoke towards non-intervention. When Congress finally declared war, he was one of only six senators to vote against it. Then when the Treaty of Paris went to the Senate, La Follette voted against all the versions of it . “He voted against war, now he voted against peace,” a Democratic senator justifiably sneered. He railed against Wilson even after the President suffered a stroke. When his junior Senator Irvine Lenroot ran for reelection, he unsuccessfully campaigned against him because he thought his votes for, among other things, the League of Nations were a betrayal of the American people. La Follette might have been on the right side of history but he was unwilling to share the spotlight with his rivals and would turn on anyone who he considering acting against Progressive ideals – which in La Follette’s mind, were anything he did not agree with.

In 1919 the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted woman’s Suffrage, was ratified by the Senate and would be ratified a year later. It was one of the major causes of La Follette’s entire career. But while it’s ratification was taking place, La Follette yet again lost the Republican nomination for President, this time to Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding. Harding’s campaign slogan ‘A Return To  Normalcy’ lead the Republican to a landslide victory in November – and the end of the Progressive Era. The end of World War I would lead to the Roaring Twenties and the era of conspicuous consumption, something that horrified the world of men like La Follette. La Follette was one of the major investigators into the Teapot Dome scandal  that would eventually bring down the Secretary of Interior Albert Fall.

With the Senate back in Republican control La Follette had an influence in an administration he had not had since the end of Taft’s term. This increased after the 1922 midterms when the Republicans lost seven seats in the Senate. La Follette’s influence over 20 of the Republican Senators gave him a power he had not had in years and with the influence among Progressive democrats, many thought he might have a chance for the Presidency again.

La Follette made a European tour in 1923 and while he did show some foresight when he saw the conditions that Mussolini’s fascist government had laid in Italy, he also showed the naivete far too many leftists would demonstrate when it came to the newly formed Soviet Union. Despite the growing totalitarian nature of the state, he believed that “Russia would become one of the greatest democracies on Earth,” even going so far as to invite Russians to come to Wisconsin to study the reform he had implemented there.

In late 1923 La Follette suffered a series of heart attacks but despite that determined to make a third party run for the Presidency in 1924, believing that the progressive senators would not do well without his leadership. By this point Calvin Coolidge had ascended to the Presidency, by far the most conservative President La Follette had served under and whose popularity showed America’s satisfaction with the status quo.

After the 1924 Republican Convention ended with Coolidge easily winning the nomination in his own right, La Follette announced that he would run as an independent. The Progressive platform involved his own platform for the party and among its twelve planks was the proposal of a ‘constitutional amendment giving Congress the power to reenact a statute over a judicial decision.”  This decision caused huge controversy even among progressives and many were angered by his refusal to denounce either the Ku Klux Klan, which had become a major figure in American politics or Prohibition. But the latter decision, which went against the fundamental idea of checks and balances,  destroyed whatever glimmer there was for a La Follette candidacy.

Of the progressive campaigns for the White House, La Follette’s 1924 run was the most grounded in reality, albeit a remote one. La Follette believed that he could carry enough states in the west and northwest to deprive Coolidge of a majority in the Electoral College. This would move the election to the House which was under Republican control and La Follette would have a chance of victory. But La Follette was already 68 and in poor health, and even supportive publications acknowledged even if this happened, any realistic possibility of realizing his agenda was non-existent.

La Follette hopes for victory were in large part driven by dissatisfaction with the corruption in the Harding administration and the near collapse of the Democratic party. The 1920s would be the nadir of the Democrats existence in the balance of power and it did not help matters that their candidate for President John W. Davis was colorless and unexciting. Davis was a Wall Street lawyer who had only won the nomination for President after an exhausting Democratic convention that had lasted two weeks and required 104 ballots before compromising on Davis almost out of exhaustion. (In a different series I will explain how these circumstances came about.) Both Coolidge and Davis were among the most conservative candidates for President in either parties history to that point in time.

La Follette reached across the aisle for his running mate, Burton Wheeler, a Democratic senator from Montana who would overtime develop a reputation as a progressive Democrat. Reformers across all social platforms endorsed La Follette from W.E.B Du Bois to John Dewey to Jane Adams to Helen Keller. Even some of the most unlikely of sources supporting him. H.L. Mencken, a markedly conservative journalist gave full support to La Follette in his columns. “What if more people were like La Follette? What a sweet world this would be!” one of the most famous cynics of all time wrote in one of many columns endorsing him.

La Follette managed to get his name on the ballots of all but one of the forty-eight states (Louisiana). Not all of them were under the label of Progressive, he was also listed as an Independent, a Socialist or Farmer-Labor. La Follette tried his best to win over former Bull Mooser’s, something that did not appeal to the former supporters of TR.

La Follette began his campaign on Labor Day when he gave the first political address ever delivered on radio. He was also one of the first Presidential candidates to give an address on film with sound, an innovation that was slowly beginning to become part of the industry.

Both parties went out of their way, rather than campaign against the other, to use La Follette as the boogeyman going out of their way to say he had more support than he actually had. Coolidge’s campaign actually went so far as to argue that voting for Davis was fundamentally voting for La Follette while Davis’s advisers him not to take swings as La Follette because they thought he would take states away from Coolidge. Some press reports actually thought La Follette could carry anywhere from eight to twelve states and throw the election to the House.

Most of La Follette’s campaigners were realistic about their chances. Few thought La Follette had any real chance of winning the Presidency. La Follette, however, initially did harbor some hope of victory. As the campaign progressed his chances grew dimmer as prices rose for farmers, one of the critical demographics to his chances.

The 1924 Presidential election bares the dubious distinction of having the lowest voter turnout percentage of the 20^th century, with less than 49 percent of all eligible voters casting a ballot. Coolidge won in an electoral landslide with 382 electoral votes and more than 16 million popular votes. Davis did little better than James Cox four years earlier, getting barely 9 million votes and 136 electoral votes.

Robert La Follette’s performance seemed poor compared to TR’s 12 years earlier; he only carried his home state of Wisconsin and its thirteen electoral votes and while he received nearly five million votes, his total percentage of the vote was roughly 17 percent compared to TR’s total of nearly 26 percent of the popular vote and six states. But in hindsight La Follette’s campaign was the most successful Progressive campaign for the White House.

La Follette finished second in ten states, including California, Minnesota and Washington. He came within eight thousand votes of winning Montana and just five thousand of winning North  Dakota. While most of his second place totals were in smaller states, he did surprisingly well in many of the bigger electoral prizes, capturing nearly half a million votes in New York, over 300,000 in Pennsylvania and more than 400,000 in Illinois. An analysis revealed he took more votes from Davis than Coolidge, nearly a quarter of the vote in the ten largest cities in America and thirty percent of the vote in the Pacific and Mountain states. This total is more remarkable when one considers the money the campaign spent. The Progressive campaign could only amount less than 10 percent of the funding of both major parties, and by the measure of the dollars at the time, it cost him less than five cents for every vote he won, as supposed to the Bull Moose campaign which spent 16.2 cents for every vote it got. Considering that much of the 1912 campaign’s success was much due to the presence of Roosevelt on the ticket, La Follette’s totals are actually more remarkable. No third party candidate would do nearly as well on the popular vote from until George Wallace in 1968, and Wallace’s campaign was the polar opposite of everything La Follette stood for.

It was the old warhorse’s last hurrah. His health got worse at the end of the campaign and on June 21, 1925 he died just four days after his seventieth birthday. In a special election  not long after his death, Wisconsin voted for his son Robert Jr, to take over his father’s seat in the Senate. He would hold the title and the Progressive Party mantle in his state for more than twenty years, until he was defeated in a Republican primary by Joseph McCarthy in 1946.

Many senators baring the progressive mantle continued to have a vital role in the years to follow, including Hiram Johnson, George Norris and Burton Wheeler. However the Progressive mantle began to move away from the Republican party to the Democrats with FDR actively seeking their support  starting in his 1932 run for the Presidency.

Robert La Follette represents Wisconsin in National Statuary Hall is D.C. and in 1959 he was named one of the five greatest Senators in the history of the body. John C. Calhoun’s legacy has always been questionable and in recent years we’ve had reason to frown on that of conservative Robert Taft. But there are few senators in the twentieth century – with the exception of Hubert Humphrey – with a devotion to liberal causes as well as being on the right side of history, often far ahead of his contemporaries.

I will deal with some of the problematic issues with La Follette as a Senator and presidential candidate at the conclusion of this series but I admire and respect the reasons for running in 1924. At that point both major parties were more conservative than they would be at any time in the 20^th century and La Follette’s cause, futile as it was, was necessary to offer a true progressive alternative that many voters clearly deserved. The policy of laissez-faire and the business of America is business, the doctrine of Coolidge were one of the most critical factors in the Great Depression that would come at the end of the decade and La Follette was far more ambitious to the ideas that could have stopped it. Many of the progressive ideals he founded were at the center of the New Deal and it is possible he could have helped lead the nation out of the spiral it was headed to. La Follette may not have had the character to be a great President but he had the great ideas and in a world where so many politicians have none, that is something to be admired.

In the final part of the series I will relate the career of Henry Wallace, how he chose to run as a Progressive in 1948, and how his campaign very quickly took on the worst aspects of so many leftist ideals in the worst possible of eras.

 

 

Will Trent Is Back For Season 2

 

 

During 2023 I quickly became a huge fan of ABC’s Will Trent, arguably the best network drama in all of 2023 and a series that very quickly has the potential to become one of the best new dramas as Peak TV enters its next phase. Over the last several months, various awards shows (if not the Emmys) have been more than willing to give the show its due. Ramon Rodriguez was nominated for Best Actor by the Critics Choice Awards this December and Rodriguez received a corresponding nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards. The show itself was among the most nominated network series in the HCA TV (now Astra awards) in the summer of 2023, receiving eight nominations. It deservedly took the Best Network Drama prize in January. I’ve been waiting for a lot of series to return after the strikes in Hollywood spent five months delaying things but there are few dramas I’ve been anticipating more. Finally last week Season 2 began, and while it wasn’t worth the wait (because of the reason we had to wait) it has not disappointed one bit.

Before we get into what has happened in the two part series premiere, I think its worth doing not only a review of what happened last season but the differences between the series and the Karin Slaughter novels which have been its inspiration. While I was spending months waiting, I have since read a total of seven books in the Will Trent series, though I have read them almost entirely out of order. However, since I originally wrote an article about the differences last spring I think its worth dealing with the similarities as well, because both of them are part of why I think Will Trent is as good as it is.

In Slaughter’s novels, Will is a tall, bulky and blonde which Ramon Rodriguez is not. That does not change the fact that Rodriguez is still the perfect Will Trent because he has both the awkwardness of the novel around so many other people, difficulties bonding with other people and the scars of his life in foster care. During the two part season finale the series paralleled a major storyline from the book involving Will’s backstory, which was related in the novel Broken. Will was the child of a prostitute who was tortured and eventually murdered by a serial killer whose identity was not revealed until the end of Season 1. (I am grateful I hadn’t read the books until that point.) The crimes were investigating by a young Amanda Wagner and Evelyn Mitchell, both beat cops in 1984 Atlanta. In the novel both women are white; in the series both are African-American.

I suspect in part this change was due to the series taking place in 2023 as opposed to the novel which takes place in 2014. The hills women had to climb in the 1970s are paralleled by the ones that African-Americans had to climb in the 1980s, and the fact that the series like the novel, is set in Atlanta is part of the reason. In both the book and the series, the killer is revealed after he begins a series of murders in the present and in both cases, the killer is Will’s father who is revealed to be the slimy attorney James Ulster. Greg Germann gives arguably the greatest performance in his career on television as Ulster; almost all of his characters drip of slime but this is the first one where you can practically smell the sulfur coming from him. At the climax of Season 1, Will delivered a beatdown, but stopped short of killing him choosing to arrest him for the murders he committed. (I’ll get to the consequences later on.)

Amanda is played brilliantly by Sonja Sohn in the series. (Sohn deservedly was nominated for Best Supporting Actress by the Astras.) In the novels there is no real sympathy in Amanda Wagner at all. She is a bully to everyone, including Will and Faith, never admits she is wrong on anything and almost never shows a sign of humanity. There is an assumption much of this is due to how she came up in the ranks of law enforcement in Broken but it does not make her character any more likable when we see her in action.

Sohn has the same toughness and brutality to her, but there are always signs of humanity in her that make the series work far better. In the first season finale she confided in Evelyn (Lisa Gay Hamilton) that she had been hiding the truth about Will his whole life. “Will is gonna hate me forever. He almost does already,” she confided. When she tells him about how she ended up discovering him and that she knew who his mother was, it was a painful scene but Sohn showed in it how much it broke her as well, something I can’t imagine playing out in the novels. The final scene of Season 1 showed the two of them talking and for the first time Amanda seemed fragile. We’ve seen scenes of humanity in Amanda throughout the first season and the second that I really think the character would have needed if the show was going to work, and in that sense Sohn is perfectly cast.

Faith Mitchell is played exceptionally by Ianthe Richardson and while her character is African-American in the series, every other aspect of her is the same. Will did end her mother’s thirty year career because of a corruption scandal and she was very reluctantly paired with him. Faith is diabetic and Will was one of the first people she confided in. Faith also had a child when she was only fourteen and both her mother and Amanda went out of their way to make sure she’s had next to no interaction with the boy’s father ever since. Faith has had a problematic relationship with her mother, but there have been signs it has been improving over the last few episodes. At this point in the series Faith and Will have a real rhythm that is more than earned.

Perhaps the biggest deviation has been the character of Michael Ormewood. If you are familiar with the novels you know all too well that Ormewood is the villain of the very first novel and doesn’t survive it. The decision to make him a foil of Will rather than a heavy has been one that has been slowly paying off as the series progressed. Jake McLaughlin has been doing a solid job as he has been an Atlanta detective with family issues. (At one point he had an affair with Angie, and its clear that there have been many. One of the nicer stories has been the parallel of Angie and Ormewood’s partnership with that of Will and Faith’s. He was a critical part of the Season 1 finale and McLaughlin’s work has been a service.

The second critical change has been that of Angie Polaski. As in the novel Angie is an Atlanta detective who was in many of the same foster homes as Will. They have been on and off throughout their whole life and they can’t decide whether they are good for each other or bad for each other. In the novels, there’s no question as to that: Angie is poisonous to Will. The books tell us that she has been abusive, refusing to ever offer comfort, calling him an idiot and a loser, utterly horrible to be around. The two are married in the books but it is more out of a dare than love: Angie is an agent of chaos. She is also barely capable of functioning as a cop. She has been using drugs and alcohol for as long Will knows her, has been having multiple affairs with people of both genders, and has committed countless illegal acts.

This is a polar difference from the version we see played by Erika Christensen (like Sohn, also nominated for an Astra). Angie has been sober for more than a year when we first meet her and her relationship with Will, while not healthy, is also not toxic. Angie also has been able to turn to Ormewood to deal with her demons and has a support system she clearly didn’t in the novels. That does not mean she isn’t capable of spiraling – late last season, a former foster father who had molested and impregnated her at fourteen, resurfaced and she spent much of the second half of the season, alternating between helping the new family he found and planning to kill him. That led to her ultimately being suspending from the force and at the climax of last season, abducted and nearly killed by James Ulster.

Now that I’ve brought you up to date on the difference, it’s time to deal with Season 2. Will has spent the first two episode, dealing but not really dealing with the trauma of last season. He has been learning Spanish in a way to be closer with his birth mother but he’s also had to deal with the fact that Ulster has been stalking him from prison. We learn that he has spending much of the last few months receiving lavish gifts from Ulster which he has been disposing off. The trauma is still haunting him in a way we haven’t seen before.

Angie has spent the last several months going through physical therapy. She and Will have not been together since then (the first time we see her, she’s having sex with her doctor – and using the opportunity to coerce him into signing her physical report) something they are both aware of. They haven’t spent a lot of time together in the first two episodes; Angie’s trying to put her own life back together. In the second episode, she was a sponsor of a teenage boy and spent much of the episode trying to get that kid out of his house. But she also encountered Crystal, the teenage girl she tried to ‘rescue’ from her foster father and who ended up killing him. I have a feeling this is going to be an issue going forward.

The first major investigation that made up the series involved a series of car bombing and a blackmail scheme that operated out of an Atlanta prison. The first episode had some superb moments as Will and Faith tracked down one of the targets, played with superb humor by that brilliant character actor Clark Gregg as he spent the episode trying to deny that there was anything that had gone wrong. Will also spent much of the episode in a flirtation with an explosives expert played wonderfully by Susan Kelechi Watson. When she managed to defuse a bomb Will told her: “I want to have dinner with you then go home and have sexual intercourse” with an enthusiasm we hadn’t seen in a while. But in keeping with how TV works, she died sacrificing herself from another bomb at the end of the first episode in front of Will’s eyes.

This led Will, still bearing the scars from the explosion, to go into the maximum security prison to find the men behind the bombing. When told by Amanda no one would talk to him, he said he knew someone who was dying to – and the season premier ended with him face to face with Ulster.

The second episode was far darker. Will spent the start of the episode using Ulster to get intelligence on the bomber – and when that led to him getting a beat down, he watched over a close-circuit feed for quite a few minutes before saying that should intervene. The smile on his face was not one we liked. As the investigation continued Will eventually found himself trapped in a cell with Ulster, answering questions he did not want to, clearly using every impulse he had not to snap his neck. The episode ended with Will tracking down the mastermind – and Ulster killing him in front of his eyes. “I killed for you,” he told Will proudly. I have a sinking feeling this is far from the end of it, and not just because Ulster is a prominent character for several of Slaughter’s novels.

Ormewood has spent the first two episodes dealing with his wife having an affair and the fact that his family may not love him. During the first episode Ormewood had a fight with his teenage son and ran through the Atlanta station that might soon blow up hoping the find him. He also spent much of last night’s episode helping his son with a science project and showing a familial warmth that the novels would never show. It’s not clear the fate of his marriage (that’s completely off-canon) but it’s a credit to the writers of the series that we care about this as much as anything that Will and Angie are dealing with.

There’s also the fact that Faith has hooked up with a reporter during the last few months and the two have been getting close. If you know the novels, you know that at some point Faith is going to get pregnant again. Amanda has spent the last two episodes with more of a human touch, in the last episode helping Angie rescue her sponsor. As always Amanda denied that she was doing it for anything other than selfish purposes.

If you’ve never read a single Karin Slaughter novel, you will absolutely love the series. If you have read every single Will Trent novel (another one came out this past year) I think you might be able to love the series despite all the differences. It is possible that the version we are getting is in part due to the fact it is on ABC and not cable or streaming. Had the novels been adapted for, say, Netflix or Showtime, we might get a version that is far closer to the original. There are TV version of mystery adaptations that follow this: Bosch from the Michael Connelly series that has been a staple of Amazon almost since it got into original programming or Dark Winds, which are a faithful version of Tony Hillerman’s novels. Considering the high quality of both series, it’s easy to imagine that a Will Trent series might follow a similar version: spend an entire season on a single novel and be closer to it in characters and personalities that what the ABC version is.

But honestly, it’s hard to imagine that potential cable or streaming version being anywhere near the caliber of the one ABC has produced. And just as honestly,  this Will Trent is the kind of series that network TV – and in fact all TV – needs more of going forward. There’s an elegance to every aspect of the series – from writing, directing and acting – to all of the technical aspects (by now the viewer loves waiting to see how the title will appear on screen). And Will Trent has a humanity and layers to its characters that far too many of the current crop of ‘appointment TV’ (I’m thinking of Euphoria and The Morning Show in particular) don’t even pretend to have for either its characters or the viewers. You connect with the characters in Will Trent in a way that is absent from too much of the best television these days and that’s a quality I cling too.

Can Will Trent break into the Emmys this year? That may not be impossible considering that much of the 2024 nominations for Drama will be dealing with the ramifications from the strike. With Succession gone, The Last of Us and Yellowjackets not due back until 2025 and House of the Dragon not coming back until the summer, there will be a lot of gaps to fill in the drama category this year. Will Trent certainly has the capability to do it and a high caliber list of performers who could. I hope that when it comes to recognizing quality, the Emmys can be as observant of this show as the title character is of practically everything around him.

My score: 5 stars.