Better Late Than Never: Lessons in Chemistry

 

Every writer has a series of works that they think about doing but never complete. For me I once considered a series title in the spirit of Allan Ginsburg: “I Saw The Best Actors of My Generation Cut Down By Marvel.”

I have made little secret that I care very little for the Marvel Cinematic Universe for many reasons, and one of them is how it has taken some of the greatest performers of my generation and essentially forced them to spend years, sometimes a decade, in the midst of movies that I find, to put it mildly, beneath them. No matter how good the work of Samuel L. Jackson or Robert Downey Jr. has been in the various films, I am often reminded of what we have lose by these movies. Scarlett Johansen had, at an impressive age, built up a resume of superb performances that had earned her four consecutive Golden Globes nominations in such masterpieces as Lost in Translation and Match Point. Ever since she became the Black Widow, that’s all she’s had time for and I don’t think it’s a coincidence she got her first two Oscar nominations after Endgame. Jeremy Renner had gotten two consecutive Academy Award nominations for The Hurt Locker and The Town before he was cast as Hawkeye. With few exceptions he has rarely moved outside the world of the action film, and it is only now that he is beginning to return to form in Mayor of Kingstown. And for all the awe that Tom Hiddleston has earned for his work as Loki over more than a decade, part of me truly mourns the great Shakespearean actor we lost and the subtleties he displayed in what was his last ‘serious role’ the title character in The Night Manager.

But of all the performers whose work has suffered the most it has to be Brie Larson, which is doubly unfair because she was cursed even before she appeared onscreen. A child actress, she had made her breakthrough in the Emmy winning United States of Tara, had delivered superb supporting performance in The Spectacular Now and Short Term 12 before she got her first leading role in the exceptional film Room. She won the Oscar for Best Actress and the sky seemed to be the limit.

 Then she was cast as Captain Marvel and became the subject of the culture wars. One side excoriated her for being cast as a character that had originated been male. Another side celebrated her to the rafters for ‘finally’ being the first actress to be the lead in a Marvel movie, as if that was something an actress had wanted when she began her career. I saw Captain Marvel in the theater (reluctantly, as I’ve said the MCU has never appealed to me)  and thought it no better or worse than any comic book movie. It was at best a mediocrity, hardly worth all the invective that has been spewed at it.

For the better part of the next four years Larson has been held prisoner by the Marvel Machine. The movies and shows she has done are among the worst reviewed in the MCU, hated by one side, defending regardless of their quality by the other. Larson, who can’t exactly have loved that she was the subject of so much loathing, has remained stoic and took it. I admit, if I were in her shoes, I would have begged to have my character killed off, no matter how implausible if only to be free to do something, anything else.

So I was overjoyed back in the fall of 2023 to finally see that Larson has returned to her roots in the Apple TV limited series Lessons in Chemistry. The early reviews have been superb and award nominations have been coming at a rapid pace, not just for Larson but the entire series. She has already been nominated for a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice award for Best Actress in a Limited Series (she lost both to Ali Wong in the understandable awards throng to Beef) and it looks very much like the series will be among the contenders for Best Limited Series this coming fall. Earlier this year, the show received three nominations from the Directors Guild for Television in Limited Series and took the prize. I’ve been meaning to get around to it for the last several months, and I have finally managed to get through the first three episodes. And it is as impressive as its pedigree and reputations suggests.

As many of you no doubt already know Lessons in Chemistry is based on a best selling novel by Bonnie Garmus. I didn’t know that and have yet to read the book it is based on (those of you who follow my column know that is something I don’t do in these reviews, so as not to have a bias) but the summary and Larson’s presence were enough to intrigue me. Larson plays Elizabeth Zott a chemistry PhD, who as we see in the opening minutes of the series has become the star of a 1960s cooking show where she applies science to food. I have yet to learn how she got to that point but just having watched the first three episodes, even without the series opening in media res I’d still have wanted to watch.

The series opens with Elizabeth working as a lab tech at a university known as Hastings in the mid-1950s. Elizabeth is understandably subject to the sexism of her male colleagues but just as much from her female ones who can’t understand why she isn’t interesting in finding a husband or appearing in the Miss Hastings pageant with all the other women who work as secretaries. Elizabeth is brusque with everyone she deals with and a lot of it has to do with a sexual assault she suffered when she was in the process of passing her fellowship. This is shown, with a trigger warning in the second episode, and as traumatic as it to watch, I found it all the more appalling the next day when Elizabeth talks with her faculty advisor and is told that she must apologize to the man who tried to rape her for stabbing him. The advisor, for the record, is a woman and has no sympathy for Elizabeth, calling it a misunderstanding. We realize very quickly why Elizabeth is only a lab tech and how so many of her problems have been amplified by living in this world.

Early in the first episode she meets Calvin, the brilliant physicist who won a Remsen Grant two years ago and who has barely been seen since. Lewis Pullman is superb as Calvin, a man who is as eccentric as Elizabeth and who is the only person at Hastings who realizes what a genius she is. They begin to share lab space together and their relationship is at first a meeting of the minds more than anything else. Calvin clearly recognizes a kindred spirit; Elizabeth is as much an exile from society as he is, only he is tolerated because he brings in money for the university. He knows if it were not for that, he would be discarded.

Naturally, when the two begin working together its makes both of them look worse. When Cal doesn’t show up for a meeting, the head of the university tells him that if he doesn’t come up with a project, he will start firing people – the women, of course, and he will tell them Elizabeth is responsible. Cal and Elizabeth then begin to bond more than before, and the fact the two of them fall in love comes as a surprise to these two intelligent people but not to the audience: the ‘chemistry’ is palpable.

The two of them come across the possibility of a scientific breakthrough that involves a theory known as ‘abiogenesis’. Cal lets Elizabeth present and before she can even get started, her theory is dismissed as junk. It is phrased in the fact that she is ‘a lab tech’ but its clear that Hastings doesn’t want a woman involved. The two of them decide to work alone if necessary, and they have just about formed a true bond – when Cal is hit by a bus and killed.

Elizabeth’s situation, if anything, gets worse. There is no sympathy for the loss she has suffered and she is not allowed to be part of the scientific community. Her research is the property of Hastings and it is very clear that the suits intend to carry on with and not give either Cal or Elizabeth any credit for it. In the midst of this Elizabeth finds out she is pregnant and does everything in her power to conceal. When it is discovered, the head of the university says he intends to fire her because she is pregnant and unwed. When she asks if they’d do the same if the man had been in the situation, he tells her: ‘it’s not the same thing.” Elizabeth is determined to find a way to carry on.

I have not yet begun to touch on all the bits and pieces of what makes Lessons so wonderful. I’ve seen examples of sexism in the workplace in so many period dramas from Mad Men to Masters of Sex, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where its just so accepted not only by the men but by the women. I’m not necessarily saying this is a metaphor for so much of today’s politics but it’s a clear message to those who argue somehow the 1950s were ‘the good old days.” Elizabeth, Calvin and Harriet Sloan (I’ll get to her in a minute) are among the few people in Lessons who refuse to accept the status quo and who are being nailed down at every chance.

The third prominent character is Harriet. I have seen Aja Naomi King in How to Get Away with Murder and like everyone else among the Keating Five, I dismissed her as being wasted in Shondaland. She had appeared in a leading role in Emily Owens, M.D and Black Box but none of her work as Michaela seemed of any real value. So her work as Harriet is a revelation, at least to me. Calvin lives in what is essentially an all-black neighborhood and Harriet lives across from him; at the start of the series, you get the sense she is his only other human contact. Harriet spends much of the first two episodes trying to work to stop a freeway that California is trying to build and drive out her neighbors and in the second episode, makes her voice very loud at a public meeting. But when Calvin doesn’t show up for it because he was busy, she has a cold exchange with him – the last before he is killed.

Harriet takes Calvin’s death more emotionally than Elizabeth does. When his obituary is published, she is enraged by it and hammers on Elizabeth’s door demanding she go with her to have it retracted. Elizabeth, numb with grief, barely interacts. Harriet then goes to the paper and demands the reporter retract it, but he tells her gently: “that’s not how news works.” She manages to persuade him to come to a board meeting where she discusses in great detail the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to the council.

The third episode, which is as far as I have gotten, shows the two women finally interacting. Elizabeth hasn’t talked with anyone since Cal died (and she doesn’t really talk with many people before) so Harriet may very well be the first female friend she’s ever had. Their bond is initially over Cal, but she is the first person she tells of her pregnancy. Harriet also tells her that Elizabeth has to grieve – and its not longer after she does that she finally allows it.

Lessons clearly shows a deal of intellect that we see in so many series – discussion of science is critical to it – but it also shows a heart that is lacking from many of them. At one point Elizabeth adopts a dog that she names Six Thirty because that’s when he wakes her to rummage through the trash. Six Thirty becomes a prominent figure in the relationship of Elizabeth and Cal – in fact, Cal is running with him when he is hit by the bus. The third episode is narrated by Six Thirty (BJ Novak does the voice) and it is as heartbreaking as anything as I’ve seen in Peak TV. We learn of Six Thirty’s origin, how he thought he could keep his family safe, and how he failed. We see how Elizabeth grieved after Cal’s death through his eyes  and how he knew about the baby before she did. Six Thirty has resolved in this episode ‘to protect his family’ and that is what he will do. I’ve seen some moving things in my years of watching television but this was as heartwarming and heartbreaking as I’ve ever seen.

I haven’t seen how the show will progress and how Elizabeth Zott the chemist becomes a TV chef (though there have been hints along the early episodes). But I am more than along for the journey. Lessons in Chemistry is a marvelous piece of worm, for many reasons, not the least of which it has a heart that even the best Limited series don’t have and compassion that has been lacking. (In all honesty, the last one I can remember with a soul at the center of it was Maid.) And it represents a brilliant return to form for Larson who gets to show a range  she hasn’t had a chance to since she took on the role of Carol Danvers. Elizabeth Zott is as much a superhero as Captain Marvel is but she’s infinitely more relatable.

Perhaps the demise of the MCU (at least the financial one) may give a chance for some of the other brilliant performers in that world to have more creative freedom. Mark Ruffalo, who was never quite as locked in as the rest, received his third Oscar nomination for Poor Things but he will almost certainly lose to Robert Downey Jr. for his masterclass in Oppenheimer. Next month we’ll get to see another sign of Downey’s return as he plays four different roles in HBO’s The Sympathizer. Angela Bassett is back at work on 9-1-1 where we need her and Renner, after managing to escape death, has returned to filming another season of Mayor of Kingstown, which now airs on Showtime. I realize that there will be many who are mourning the death of Marvel as we know it and some who argue it hasn’t been good for a while. For my part, as long as the end result is that allows performers like Larson to do the kind of work like Lessons in Chemistry, well, maybe it’s better for the viewer over all.

My score: 4.5 stars.

 

After Tonight, I'm Going to Have To Completely Rethink Celebrity Jeopardy

 

Those of you who have read my columns about Jeopardy over the past few years know that while I have a very high regard to the show there has been one key element that I not only disdain but think is something of a disgrace to the format. On more than one occasion I’ve actually written that when it comes to Celebrity Jeopardy the wonderful parodies that Saturday Night Live wrote with Will Ferrell wonderfully mocking Alex Trebek, were understating how truly horrible these matches were the witness.

At a certain point, I can’t even recall when I began to stop watching the Celebrity Tournaments that Jeopardy did on an annual basis. While there had been some exceptions over my first decade of watching the show by certain individual celebrities, these matches eventually became grotesqueries of everything I held dear about the show I loved. There were some critical exceptions over the years – I wrote a column saying that such surprising talent as Cheech Marin and Michael McKean very likely would be able to play well in a regular match -  but by and large I considered them outliers in a vast array of fools. The matches increasingly seemed more for demonstrations of proving just how dumb celebrities truly were as they could not even answer questions that seemed directed deliberately towards them. (The most famous example being Bob Woodward’s inability to respond to a clue involving All the President’s Men.)

Consequently when Celebrity Jeopardy returned, this time in a prime time format back in the fall of 2022, I made it very clear that this was one particular Jeopardy event I had no intention of watching. I ended up partially rescinding on that decision last summer, mostly watching several of the semi-final matches. I will convince the play of many of these celebrities did impress me. Brendan Hunt of Ted Lasso was superb in both his quarterfinal and semi-final match. The play of Patton Oswalt was rather remarkable and I did eventually come to admire the work of Ike Barinholtz. I was also glad to see so many of my favorite Jeopardy super-champions taking a turn reading clues to celebrities after years of watching celebrities do the same. I was glad to see Austin Rogers read categories about bartending, Amy Schneider about the Golden State Warriors and James Holzhauer’s reading clues about gambling. I also thought Mayim Bialik was generally superb as the hostess of the match.

But my opinion stopped there. And when I heard that the winner of Celebrity Jeopardy, Ike Barnholtz, had been granted a spot in the hollowed Tournament of Champions I thought it was a joke and not a very funny one. To be fair I had not done my due diligence on Ike’s play in that tournament. In his very first match, he gave a total of 51 correct responses (over three round of play) and didn’t make a single mistake. He did nearly as well in his semi-final match, 37 correct responses only 1 error. And in his final, he gave 41 correct responses and only made two errors. Even if you allow for the, let’s be generous, easier clues in Celebrity Jeopardy rule, it’s still a masterful performance by any standards.

That said, even I had known the numbers, it probably would not have changed my opinion one iota. For any true fan of Jeopardy, the Tournament of Champions is something sacred and profane and in the last two seasons it has been under attack. Last year’s Second Chance Tournament bothered many fans of the show, it’s amplification to this degree at the start of the year far more and the Champions Wild Card was not much of an improvement. Inviting the winner of the Celebrity Tournament seemed like a bad joke; a sop to the studio bosses who wanted the Tournament to get higher ratings.

I have gone out of my way, in every article I have written on the upcoming Tournament, to not hide my feelings on this matter. I purposely did not mention Barinholtz in my initial run-up to the Tournament two weeks ago because it left a horrid taste in my mouth. And while my reaction may have extreme, I’m not entirely certain how seriously the rest of the world, those around Jeopardy and those involving Hollywood, were willing to take this. Part of me suspects that the writers of SNL might well have been planning to find someone to play Jennings in a sketch in the aftermath of the tournament in order to lampoon both the idea as well as Barnholtz himself.

Well tonight he played. And if that sketch was written, it has to be torn up. Because the rules of how the world views Celebrity Jeopardy and the contestants who are invited back have to be completely rewritten in the aftermath of tonight’s quarterfinal match. And people like me have to eat a lot of crow, not to mention rethink how I have looking at Celebrity Jeopardy or at least the new version of it.

To Ike’s credit, he clearly knew how much pressure he was under. In the interview segment he joked and said he was: “a guinea pig.” He also self-effacingly said how much he had been told by friends how smart he was. He also treating the game with the serious it deserved: there was only one, maybe two jokes but he did nothing to distract from what was happening. No doubt he was aware of the significance of his being invited as well as a couple of other critical facts. The clues were not going to be nearly as easy as the ones he had no trouble answering less than a year, and more importantly his fellow competitors were not in awe of his celebrity status. Indeed Melissa Klapper and Ray LaLonde wanted to win as much as he did, if not more. In addition to advancing to the semi-finals whoever won could argue forever put on their resume (in addition to everything else) that they had beaten Ika Barnholtz.

Now I get to the game itself. Tournament of Champions games are difficult; but these questions were at a tougher level than usual. There were twelve questions that stumped all three players – and for the record, myself as well. I can often do very well playing along at home, even in the Tournament of Champions.  To give you an idea  how much trouble I was having, I couldn’t come up with a correct response until the ninth clue of the Jeopardy round.

For the record Ike managed to get two right before I could. But all three players, I need to make this clear were all playing extremely well from start to finish. They might have not been able to answer twelve clues at all, but they didn’t make a lot of mistakes the rest of the way. This was a closely fought match. Melissa managed to move into the lead on the Daily Double in the Jeopardy round but it was the smallest of margins. By the end of the Jeopardy round Ray had a narrow margin with $5400 to Ike’s $4800 and Melissa’s $3800.

The start of Double Jeopardy was just as close. By the early stages of the round Ike had moved into the barest of leads with $7600 to Melissa’s $7400 and Ray’s $7000. Then he found the Daily Double in NUMERIC MOVIE TITLES (Ken told each title only consisted of numbers.) Perhaps realizing the significance, Ike rolled the dice:

“Fellini felt he’d directed 7.5 films before making this 1963 gem.” Ike knew that it was 8 1/2 and jumped into a commanding lead. Unfortunately that’s where he started to stumble though I really do need to be fair to him. None of the clues he got wrong were obvious and all of them stumped his fellow champions

NUMERIC MOVIE TITLES, $800: Loosely based on a classic legal film, this Nikita Mikhailov drama pits a racist juror against a pensive foreman.” Ike rang in and then realized he’d be wrong when he said: “What is 12 Angry Men?”  He had the right idea, but the film is just called 12.

Then he got two straight incorrect responses in 5-SYLLABLE WORDS. “If you’re using metaphors and similes to make a point, you’re speaking this way.” He guessed metaphorically, which cost him $1200. No one else could come up with figuratively, not even me.

The next one was for $1600: “Frances Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, was one.” He guessed: “What is a teetotaler?” Now that’s what she was but it doesn’t have enough syllables. I realized it was prohibitionist. Not long after this Melissa managed to get to the other Daily Double in LANGUAGES, got it right and gained $8000, putting her in the lead. Ike managed to get $1200 back in the remainder of Double Jeopardy but Melissa finished in the lead.

The game its worth noting was played brilliantly by all three players. Both Ike and Ray got 17 correct responses apiece, but Ike gave the three incorrect answers I listed while Ray did not make a single mistake. Melissa ‘only’ gave fourteen correct response, but they included two Daily Doubles. Melissa had a significant lead with $21,400 to Ike’s $14,800 and Ray’s $13,800.

At this point Ike had done far more than any reasonable fan would have expected him to do as a contestant. He had faced off against two  Jeopardy champions  -including, it’s worth mentioning, a man whose thirteen wins and nearly $400,000 in regular earnings were among the highest won by any Jeopardy player in history and played at their level and led on many occasions in the match. He had treated the event with seriousness, applauding Melissa’s correct responses on both her Daily Doubles. (She and Ray, in turn, did the same when he got his correct.) Not only had he not made a fool of himself – which I have to tell you going in was a threshold I did not think he could meet – but he exceeded the expectations of any fan of the show.

The Final Jeopardy category was one that would cause even the best Jeopardy players to sweat: POETS OF ANCIENT ROME. The clue was: “Far from Rome, this first century poet wrote, “The leader’s anger done, grant me the right to die in my native country.”  I was playing along at home, and full disclosure I didn’t have a clue who this was referring too. Ultimately I wrote down: “Who was Cicero?”

Ray’s answer was revealed first: “Who is Ovid?” As Ken pointed out: “The great Roman who died in exile for writing erotic poetry that was a little too erotic.” Ray gained $8000, putting him at $21,800. Ike’s response was revealed next. He too wrote down Ovid. He wagered $13,801, enough to beat Ray. Then came Melissa who since Ray’s response had been revealed had a furtive look on her face. She had written: “Who is Juvenal?” She had bet $8201, which dropped to $13,199 and made Ike Barinholtz, a ‘producer, writer and actor from Chicago,”  a semi-finalist in the Tournament of Champions.

This is where I officially apologize to Ike Barinholtz. I am sorry that I did not think you deserved to be invited in the Tournament of Champions. I’m not certain I would extend this invitation to past winners of these tournaments but the fact that you played so well against two extremely qualified champions has clearly made me change my view of you and your fellow celebrities. It’s not that I thought you were all stupid, of course, but I was clearly letting my own biases get in the way.

I also must admit that, not having watched Celebrity Jeopardy to any real extent since at least 2004, I’ve very likely underestimated many fellow celebrities who have played over the years. I don’t know by how much or even if you and some players from the first Celebrity Tournament are the exception, but it is now more than clear, given what has happened that I must rethink what has happened.

And that will start by rewatching this past year’s Celebrity Jeopardy when it is inevitably rerun this summer. Apparently Lisa Ann Walter was the winner of the Tournament this past year and is, therefore, been invited to the next Tournament of Champions. Her work in Abbott Elementary has already made me inclined to love her and the fact that she managed to get to win this tournament makes me appreciate her even more. I don’t know when the next Tournament of Champions will take place or if they will follow the same rules as before. What I do know is that I will not dismiss Lisa’s presence going forward and will report her accurately in the next leadup. This will be part of my making amends.

And as for the writers on SNL, you may have to make at least a partial apology tour. At the very least Celebrity Jeopardy can’t be considered the automatic laugh it used to be. At least I won’t.

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.