Hacks is Back For A Glorious Third Season

 

Looking back on my history with Peak TV, I find an interesting pattern emerging. While I very quickly became enamored with the dark antiheroes and situations that made up the best dramas of the first decade of this century, I had a much more difficult time finding a rapport with almost any of the comedies that came from the same networks.

This was especially true with Showtime. I spent much of my early career boosting all of his incredibly dark dramas such as Dexter, Homeland and later on series such as Billions as being the equal if not superior to so many of the dramas that were airing on HBO. But I never found the same enjoyment of so many of the comedies that aired for longer on Showtime. With exception of Nurse Jackie (and even that began to wear on my in its final seasons) none of the female-centric comedies of the network such as Weeds ever appealed to me. I never truly got into the adventures of the Gallaghers and it still appalls me that Don Cheadle appeared in not one but two of the least enjoyable comedy series of the entire decade. There were exceptions Episodes in my opinion was a highly underrated gem but they all seemed unpleasant rather than funny.

Similarly while I devoured most of the great dramas of HBO in the first decade and several in the second, I generally disliked if not loathed all of their comedies. Not just Curb Your Enthusiasm which never seemed to go away but also Entourage and Veep – which I found distasteful and unpleasant before the leadup to 2016. I’ve often wondered why I spent so much time enjoying network comedies over cable ones and now I think I know why.

For all the snideness and sarcasm in so many of the celebrated comedies of the era – The Big Bang Theory and 30 Rock – there was always more of a sense of community among the laughter. Yes there was a lot of bad behavior but in so many of the best shows you could sense a real fondness for the characters that I found lacking in almost every major comedies on cable. There may very well be more Selina Meyer’s in politics than there are Leslie Knope’s but there’s no question as to who I’d rather spend half an hour with given my choices.

When streaming services became a big deal about ten years ago, I found myself noting a theme in so many of the comedy shows that I was attracted to: we were still laughing at many of the characters but it wasn’t because the characters were behaving unpleasantly (though in many cases they were). Rather they were the kinds of characters that were part of the world that was ignored by most people and were coming to grips with it.

 Netflix’s Grace & Frankie and The Kominsky Method showed just how horrible it can be to be in your seventies and eighties and trying to live knowing that death is coming closer every day. Dead To Me brilliantly showed the story of two women bound by tragedy and how their efforts to connect and move forward became simultaneously sadder and farcical. Amazon’s breakthrough series Transparent brilliantly showed Jeffrey Tambor realizing that he had spent his entire life as the wrong gender and both him – and his family – coming to grips with it. And I think it’s telling, at least for me, that when I finally started watching Hulu regularly it was not The Handmaid’s Tale that drew me in but rather Ramy, a show which illustrated just how hard it was to be not merely a Muslim in America, but not even a very good one.

If there is a common theme in these comedies, it’s that so much of the laughter comes from these characters trying – and failing as often as they succeed – to live their best lives. Something about this is more appealing – and in my opinion, funnier – then watching Larry David being called an asshole by everybody and not seeming to learn anything no matter how old he gets.

I think that, certainly as the new decade has begun, there has been a trend in what we might called kinder, gentler comedies. It was made very clear when, in its final season, Schitt’s Creek swept the Emmys for its final season in 2020. Ever since then we’ve seen an increase in these kinds of shows in the Emmy nominations for Best Comedy. This was clear when Ted Lasso became the sensation of the world in the winter of 2020 mainly because the title character believed in the moral goodness of people. The other show that came around in 2021, just when we needed it, was HBO Max’s Hacks.

I mentioned that in my first review I didn’t much like it and in hindsight, maybe its because I’d only seen the first two episodes and what it seemed like was another cruelty based comedy. Deb Vance and Ava were drawn together out of mutual need, the two of them genuinely seemed to loathe being in each other’s company and there were very clear signs of abuse. I was prepared to abandon in after two episodes and it was only after the Emmy nominations came out that I very reluctantly resumed so.  If you read my blog, you know how quickly I changed my mind: I ranked it number 3 of my top ten of 2021 and by the time of the Emmys in September I was fully onboard with Hacks taking as many awards as it could.

Even in a year when most of TV was on hiatus, Hacks got a lot of love from the Emmys getting fifteen nominations and in a year that was justifiably dominated  by Ted Lasso, it managed to win four Emmys, including Best Directing and Writing in a Comedy. Lucia Aniello won the first and shared the second with her husband Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky. Jean Smart deservedly took the Emmy for Best Actress in a Comedy, though even as brilliant as the show was, the field she was competing in was relatively barren.

Hacks was renewed for a second season and when the normal TV returned, it was, if anything, stronger than before with the Emmys receiving sixteen nominations, second to Ted Lasso. It also dominated the Best Guest Actress in a Comedy category, something that had been one of the sole categories of Saturday Night Live for nearly a decade. Laurie Metcalf ended up taking the prize as the series took another  three Emmys, including Smart’s second consecutive one against a much tougher field.

The series has been dominating the awards circuit the first two years. Because the 2022 Golden Globes was not televised, no one noticed that Hacks took Best Comedy and Jean Smart Best Actress. Smart managed a clean sweep of every major award, including the brand new HCA TV Awards. Hannah Einbinder has not seen a similar recognition from the Emmys, but she has already won the first two HCA TV Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Streaming Comedy. (The first year she shared the prize with Hannah Waddingham; the next year she got it on her own. The series has taken prizes from every major awards show, winning two awards from the WGA and the AFI award for TV program of the year. Even the MTV Movie and TV awards have been kind to it, nominating Hannah Einbinder as their Breakthrough Performance and Megan Stalter for Comedic Performance in 2022.

We’ve had to wait a long time for Season 3. We’ve been through a strike in Hollywood and while Jean Smart has been recovering from heart surgery. (She wasn’t able to pick up either the Critics Choice Award or SAG award she won in 2023 because of it.) Now nearly a year and a half after Season 2 ended we are back in the world of Deb Vance. And while I’m not glad that I had to wait this long, I’m so overjoyed they’re back.

Last season ended with Deb finally having the career breakthrough she had spent her life working towards. However, at the end of the season she fired Ava. While she told Ava it was because Ava had her own mountains to climb, there was a cruelty to it that she clearly sensed and we’ve been wondering what would happen.

The first season opens with Deb being named one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 and finally becoming the worldwide phenomena she has never expected. The problem is, now that she’s bigger than she thought she has realized the truth of Oscar Wilde about the only thing worse than getting what you want. Everyone laughs at her jokes without her even having to tell them. Her staff basically tells everything she loves is fabulous as we see in a hysterical moment when she tries on a hideous dress from the 1980s and everybody in her entourage tells her it’s wonderful.

Ava has moved on in the past year. She has career success, writing for a Daily Show type new parody On the Contrary. She’s also in a healthy relationship with a female DC star and in the second episode its clear the two of them have a robust sex life. But Ava clearly still misses Deb, to the point that when she sees her on a billboard she rear ends a bus.

The season premier begins at the Just For Laughs comedy festival where Jimmy (Downs!) and  Kayla, his partner in his new agency (Megan Stalter again perfect) are trying to recruit talent. They have what seems to be a base of senior clients which has made them a joke among the younger talents. Kayla is still as blissfully clueless as ever, renting a $300,000 Lamborghini to the event which Jimmy is terrified to drive, telling Jimmy that they should recruit a new young comic who was on Stage 4…only to be told he’s dying (“Oh, he has stage 4!) and still not very good when it comes to helping him recruit people. (“Do you know Reese Witherspoon? I feel like I know her.)

All four of the leads intersect in Montreal and when Ava learns Deb is here, she panics and tries to avoid her, and naturally ends up in the same elevator as her. Their initial encounter is sweet, so Ava then knocks on her door and demands to know why Deb didn’t insult her haircut.

Their first reunion is hysterical for a while. Ava is dying to try the Tom Cruise coconut cake and when she sees Deb’s dress is the only one who tells her the truth (“I’m sensing Big Bird energy!”) She then gets an unbiased opinion from a bellhop (a gay one, per Deb’s request) who tells Ava what she thinks and then backtracks when Deb appears. All of this is per usual, until Deb asks Ava for help with a joke.

Ava for the first time explodes as we see how much her being dismissed hurt her. The loss was so great that she and her girlfriend had to go into couples counseling and she’s still infuriated that Deb didn’t bother to respond to any of her texts. But even after this there’s a sign of the bond between them: at the end of the episode, Ava gives her the punchline.

The next episode shows Ava and Deb have started texting again and its clear that it’s helping Deb. She’s been having trouble sleeping for a while but the teaser ends with Deb passed out in her bed and her loyal maid texting her back. In the second episode Jimmy confronts Deb about appearing on late night, something she’s been terrified off since she lost her show half a century earlier. She agrees to come on (and to create a new story, she plays a prank on Carrot Top) but the night she does, the host gets sick. They agree to have Deb guest host and Deb then finds herself in the midst of some truly clueless writers. Naturally she calls Ava, who picks up immediately and helps talk her through the jokes. Deb asks Ava to show up but Ava is disconnected – because she opens the door a moment later.

The sequences where Deb hosts Late Night are among the most poignant Jean Smart has ever done. There’s a moment where we see  a reflection of the young Deb from nearly half a century ago before she comes out. Then she does go out and from beginning to end absolutely kills. Every moment is hysterical. Then when the show is over she asks the producer for a moment to decompress. The lights go out and we see a sadness on her that we almost never see – Deb never lets her guard down. In the final minutes Deb learns the host is going to retire and she sees an opening. She asks for Ava’s help.

One of the great joys of the era of Peak TV has been seeing that Jean Smart can do anything. We saw her play Martha Logan in the best season of 24,  Christina Applegate’s bewildered mother in Samantha Who? an underrated gem of the 2000s. Then in the 2010s we saw her play the head of a Minnesota mob family in the brilliant second season of Fargo. Leading up to her return on Hacks she received back-to-back Supporting Actress in a Limited Series nominations for two very different roles in very different HBO limited series: an aged and bitter Silk Spectre on Watchmen and Kate Winslet’s mother on Mare of Easttown. You throw in all of the guest roles she had before, including memorable stints on both Frasier and Harry’s Law and it somehow seems wrong she only won three Emmys prior to taking on Hacks. Admittedly, the competition has been pretty cutthroat in every category she’s competed in over the years,

But watching Smart over the first two seasons is one of the great joys of the last decade because there’s an icy cold exterior that is very difficult to penetrate. But if you cut Deb Vance, she does bleed. She tries her best to hide it with equally cutting jokes,  but she knows the failures that’s she had to undergo to get to where she is. There are failed marriages, few friends, and as we’ve seen her relationship with D.J. (Kaitlin Olson, who we will see soon) has been a jagged pile. Now Deb sees a chance to realize her dream. The question is, what will she do to get there?

Hannah Einbinder’s Ava has quickly become one of my favorite characters on TV. We’ve learned a lot about her over the last two seasons – her struggles with her sexuality, her parents inability to accept her career and her father’s death at the end of Season 1. Ava also has an innate ability to get in the way of her own happiness. We see it very clearly as she and Ruby plan to a vacation together and Ava finds a ring while packing and believes Ruby’s about to propose. But when Ava decides to choose Deb and wants to propose to Ruby, she is cut short when Ruby tells her the ring is actually a prop for the show.

Now I’ll be honest, I am fully Team Ava and Ruby’s attitude in the aftermath of this is horribly cruel. But the fact is there is something weird about Ava and Deb’s relationship. There is love there – I’ve seen it play out so many times in the last two seasons and I know the two of them care for each other. But a part of Deb still thinks of Ava only as an employee and Ava still seems to like some part of the abuse she has undergone.

Yet that dichotomy is still why I think Hacks is a revolutionary series compared to much of the previous decade. Deb is the center of the universe and many of the characters orbit her, but there’s genuine compassion for all of them. This is true of Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins) Deb’s aide-de-camp for decades. A black gay man who has put so much of his personal needs after Deb’s, there’s clearly respect and devotion between the two. Marcus cares for Deb in a way not even Ava will and he can see around corners and find new avenues for her that Ava still can’t. Marcus, like Deb, has a business like exterior but a warm interior, though its even harder to get beneath the surface there. We see it in a scene in Season 2 when Marcus goes to see a man making knock-offs of Deborah Vance merchandise and the two get into a hysterical debate about who the bigger Deb Vance is. But when this man tells him that he is only filling a need and if he doesn’t someone else will, Marcus listens and takes the idea to Deb. She jokes about it but she agrees to a pitch as well.

There’s a similar attitude between Jimmy and Kayla. Paul W. Downs may have gotten this role because of who his wife is but every time Jimmy’s onscreen you can see how much he’s willing to do for it. Jimmy spent the first two seasons trying his best to handle Deb and Ava because no one else would but when his agency was going to terminate her, he decided to go with Deb on his own. Kayla’s decision also showed her own devotion: she may not have much of a brain and she shoots from the lip, but she does have a good heart. Stalter steals every scene she’s in but you can see that’s there’s someone who knows she’s the subject of the joke but still wants to be able to tell them.

As I’ve mentioned much of the best comedy in the decade has been more towards the disenfranchised trying to make the best of a world against them (Abbott Elementary, Reservation Dogs) or comedies that try to build bridges between generations rather than put walls up (Only Murders in the Building, So Help Me Todd) Hacks has been one of the very best shows in this new era and it is likely as the Emmys moves into a period of transition this year that it will do even better than it has in its previous two seasons. Already Jean Smart is looking like a formidable force for her third Emmy in this category; Hannah Einbinder is rising fast to contend against, of all people, Meryl Streep for Best Supporting Actress and Clemons-Hopkins and Paul W. Downs look like they will be forces in the Supporting Actor category.

I should mention that MAX is now following the pattern some streamers do and dropping the first two episodes at once and then the rest on a weekly basis. This may be the first time in my entire life that I’m actually irked that a streaming service of any kind is actually following a pattern I have spent a fair amount of time advocating for even at this blog. Because the moment I saw the first two episodes of Hacks, I immediately wanted to watch the next one and indeed the entire series, I know even without having to watch the next few episodes this show will be on my top ten list for the year (in 2021 and 2022 it was third both times). Shows like Hacks have always been treasures. We need them now more than ever and not just because we always need to laugh.

MY SCORE: 5 stars.

 

 

2024 Jeopardy Masters Recap Part 1: Introduction And Day 1 Results

 

 

The path to the 2024 Jeopardy Masters has been problematic, to say the least. First we’ve had to go through the long, seemingly endless Bataan death march to go through the Jeopardy postseason just to get to the Tournament of Champions. Much of this was, as we all know, brought on by the stubbornness of the producers to go on with Season 40 despite the strike as well as the decision to expand the field all the way up to 27 competitors.

After the season was nearly half over we finally got to the Tournament of Champions. While that was thrilling from beginning to end, for understandable reasons many fans were not happy with the player who ended up winning. Yogesh Raut, the three-day Jeopardy champion who had controversially blasted both the show and the players after his original run back in February of 2022 had been invited back to compete. Offered a chance to apologize, he remained unrepentant. Then he managed to climb all the way to the cop and win a thrilling six-game final to become the winner of the Tournament of Champions. Despite his incredible play, Jeopardy fans didn’t easily forgive.

Then the first ever Jeopardy Invitational Tournament took place with the winner coming back to compete in the Masters. The three players who had been eliminated: Amy Schneider, Andrew He and Sam Buttrey, were among those invited back along with 24 other players who were more than qualified. However as first the quarterfinals and then the semi-finals took place with none of these three former Masters competing against each other fans and even some competitors were irked by this, particularly as it seemed likely that we might end up with a rematch between the three finalists in the 2022 Tournament of Champions. That didn’t happen as Victoria Groce, known more for her role as ‘The Queen’ on The Chase then her one game victory back in 2005 (even though that victory had been over 19 game winner and fellow invitee David Madden) first defeated Sam Buttrey and then prevailed over both Amy and Andrew to earn a spot in the Masters.

Then two weeks ago the final blow came. For months we had been told that the final spot would be filled with a ‘producer’s choice’ that would be name after the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament took place. At a live event in Hudson Yards, the producers announced that the final spot would go to…Amy Schneider, who had finished second in the Invitational. This led to a firestorm on the internet, as most fans had speculated it would be someone who had not participated in the Invitational that had just happened but someone who had been withheld – possibly Brad Rutter, the biggest money winner in Jeopardy history. Many thought this rendered the entire purpose of the Invitational moot. Michael Davies did nothing to improve the optics by saying after the announcement that he knew the fans would be outraged but he didn’t care because it was his job to come up with what was best for the show’s ratings. No one applauded at the time these remarks and his attitude led to a torrent of abuse from those came fans for his entire cavalier attitude. (This was a bridge too far for me, and I have called for his resignation)

But all of this remains irrelevant now that the 2024 Masters is upon us. The fact remains four of the greatest Jeopardy players of all time are going head to head against two newcomers to the field. And we know that the second time around is going to be tougher in the first. Can we match the same expectations as before? Can this new blood keep up with this new talent? And of course the big question: who would win this time?

The format, as they reviewed as Ken Jennings walked us through in the beginning of the Tournament, begins with the first six episode each featuring twelve matches in which all six players will face off.  Success is measured in match points. The winner gets three match points, second place gets one, third place gets zero. Therefore the usual strategies of trying to win not apply and wagering is important even in runaway games. This became all too clear in almost every quarterfinal match James Holzhauer participated in.

After each episode, the winners of the first two quarterfinals compete against each other in the second quarterfinal game of the next episode. The winners of the two quarterfinals in that match then compete against each other in the third match and so on. (It is hard to find a pattern in the first matches of each successive game; I was unable to find one.)

After 12 games the four players with the highest number of match points move on to the semi-finals. Here we have four games following the same format, and again the three players with the most match points go into the finals. (In case of a tie, as was the case last year, the tiebreaker is the player who gave the most correct responses in the three games involved: this put Mattea Roach in the finals over Andrew He.) The final is a two-game total point affair, with the winner getting half a million dollars. Second place gets $250,000; third place $100,000. All three players return for the following Masters.

I should note going into my recaps that the most controversial decision of the Masters – revealing to the audience the location of the Daily Doubles in each round – was removed this year. I guess most fans were outraged at the idea and the producers listened.

So let’s start the recap with the first two games.

May 1, 2024: The Queen Rules And The Final Boss is Beaten

 

If we had any doubt this would be a whole new ballgame going in, the tone was set on the first match. I imagine many were questioning how the new blood: Victoria Groce and Yogesh Raut would prove themselves against four of the greatest players of all time. In each of their respective appearances, they staked their claims very quickly and impressively.

Match 1 put Victoria against Mattea and Matt. Mattea found the Daily Double on their first pick but that was the only sign in both games that the Masters were picking off right where they ended last year. Mattea ended up getting it wrong and starting in the red. Victoria jumped into the lead with 5000 points to Mattea’s 3400 and Matt’s 3200, so all three players started out basically dead-even. But in Double Jeopardy Victoria went on a tear early in the round putting both Mattea and Matt at a disadvantage. By the time Matt found the first Daily Double he had 8000 points to Victoria’s 16,600 so betting everything was really his only option

“In 1873 Helen Blanchard received a patent for one of these that could zigzag.” Matt struggled and guessed scissors rather than sewing machine.

 By the time Victoria found the other Daily Double not long after she already had 20,200 points and just needed to put some distance. She wagered 7000 points in a new category AARON BURR & FRIENDS. (Each response involved a person who, like Aaron Burr, had their names start with 2 consecutive letters of the alphabet.)

“In 1877 Congress commissioned the Electoral Commission after he got   184 electoral votes but needed 185; it did not end well for him.” Victoria knew it was Samuel Tilden (he lost the Presidential election to Rutherford Hayes and her lead was now insurmountable. Victoria’s performance was at Masters level: 26 correct responses just one incorrect one.

At the end of Double Jeopardy not only had Victoria run away with the game with 31, 600 points, we already knew who was going to finish second and third with Matt at 800 and Mattea at 7400. All three players could therefore have turned Final Jeopardy into a joke but as a credit to all three, they all took it seriously.

The Final Jeopardy category was LATIN SCIENCE TERMS: “In 1694 the latest in bio-knowledge was Tournefort’s ‘Elements of Botany’ listing 698 of these, like ambrosia and chrysanthemum.” Matt was the only player who knew the correct response: “What is genus?” Mattea thought it was Flora and Victoria thought it was species. Finishing her response with her trademark Hi Nora! And a heart symbol, Victoria drew first blood with 3 match points.

James Holzhauer was facing off against Yogesh and Amy in Match 2. But whereas Holzhauer went in claiming he was the final boss of Jeopardy;  Yogesh got the last laugh by trouncing him. If James Holzhauer was Bowser, Yogesh was the unlikely Mario.

There were signs early on this would not be business as usual. All three players got off to an even start in the Jeopardy round but when James got to a Daily Double and once again bet all his chips, this time it didn’t go his way. The category was THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: ‘loc.gov gives access to a huge collection of this, printed documents of transitory value intended to be thrown away. James thought it was rubbish rather than ephemera. He lost everything and finished the Jeopardy round in third place with 3000 points to Amy’s 3400 and Yogesh’s 7800.

Within two clues in Double Jeopardy Yogesh had made Double Jeopardy almost entirely his own. With 9400 points he bet everything in AUTHOR’S FICTIONAL PLACES. He knew that Eastwick, Rhode Island was a location of John Updike and very quickly had 18,800 points. Amy and James spent the entire round trying to catch up to Yogesh. And neither had anything resembling a chance. When Yogesh found the Daily Double in the category KERNEL OF THE CLUE ( a category that was already given everybody agita) he wisely chose to bet only 5 points and lost just that. Yogesh finished Double Jeopardy with 26,395 points to James’ 10,200 points and Amy’s 7000. Yogesh had become not only the second player to defeat James but the first time since the GOAT in 2020 where James had been on the losing side of a runaway game. (Ken Jennings was kind enough not to rub it in that day. He might bring it up later.)

All three players, just as in Game 1, took Final Jeopardy seriously though in James’  and Amy’s case they both had too, considering second place was up for grabs. The Final Jeopardy category was WORLD HERITAGE SITES. “This entire world capital is a world heritage site ‘linked to the history of the military and charitable order of St. John of Jerusalem.” All three players knew the correct response: “What is Valletta?” (the capital of Malta) None of them could agree on the spelling. James was the only player to bet anything – 3010 points – in order to ensure he would have second place.

 

LEADERBOARD AFTER DAY 1

Victoria Groce – 3

Yogesh Raut – 3

James Holzhauer – 1

Mattea Roach – 1

Matt Amodio -0

Amy Schneider – 0

The tiebreaker for first is based on correct responses. Victoria gave 26; Yogesh 24.

I should mention the spirit de corps that was part of the original Masters was on full display here as much as before. Victoria was overjoyed to be playing among the greats; Matt mentioned how much he’d enjoyed the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament but how terrified he’d been about the winner; Mattea expressed appreciation for the entire group considering how bad things were during last year’s Masters (their father had passed away). James welcomed his father as an attendee and again revealed the whole ‘game show villain’ thing is a façade; he was the first to shake Yogesh’s hand after losing and mocked himself by saying that his father had admonished him for wagering in Final Jeopardy in the climatic match.

And Amy did address the elephant in the room during her introduction: “I came into the Jeopardy Invitational Tournament not even thinking about Masters because I just came away disappointed with myself and I was just there to get my confidence back. But then I didn’t win, and I didn’t qualify to get into this. And I do think I belong here and I’m grateful for the opportunity…But it also feels like it gives me a little bit something more to prove, that I didn’t earn my way back in the same way that the other contestants did.”

Credit to Amy for not only dealing with this situation with dignity but putting the onus back on Michael Davies for putting her in this situation to begin with. I didn’t think I could love her more.

I’ll be back with the next blow by blow after the next two games once we have gotten a clearer picture of what we see next. It looks like we’re already in for a hell of a ride.

 

Why The X-Files And Lost Mythology Comparsions Are A False Narrative

 

As I mentioned in my previous article about the thematic comparisons between The X-Files and Lost, I mentioned the biggest similarity was that both were mythology based series. Indeed an interview Chris Carter gave a portentous warning that he knew from past experience “if you stumble, you fall.”

When Season 5 ended many people seemed certain they wouldn’t fall. After the series finale, just as many thought that Lost  had fallen even further than Carter had.

But even then it was clear that there was a difference between the mythology, and not merely that The X-Files had to do with aliens and Lost’s had to do with an island in the Pacific. The biggest difference had to do with when each series was filmed and how each network was willing to deal with the creators. As I have written in other articles Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, near the end of Season Three, negotiated with ABC how they wanted to ended the series. They intended to have three more seasons which would contain 48 episodes at which point they would conclude the show. ABC was reluctant to do so -  the Season 3 premiere had drawn in over 20 million viewers – but the executives conceded and they stuck to the plan.

Chris Carter had a similar structure in mind when The X-Files was renewed: the show was originally planned to run five seasons at which point it would conclude and the franchise would continue in feature films. Had it done so, there would have been logic to it: the final season would lead to a cliffhanger and the movie  Fight the Future would have been the first of many. The problem was, by the time the film was greenlit in 1997, The X-Files had become one of the biggest hits on television. After an episode aired after the Super Bowl 27 million viewers tuned it and the show was averaging more than 20 million viewers for the rest of the year. At that point Chris Carter and Fox decided that the series was going to run at least two more seasons.

This led to multiple problems, starting with Season Five. The X-Files had to spend the next twenty episodes essentially running in place, with no new storylines that could not be developed to spoil the movie, which by the fall of 1997 had already been filmed. The mythology has been stumbling here and there over the first four seasons (we’ll see why in a bit) but at least it had been stumbling forward. Now it’s momentum had been halted and it never regained it after this point. The fact that fight the Future was neither highly regarded by critics or fans of the series did nothing to improve the opinion of this decision.

The series then had another chance to bring things to an end by Season 7. By that point Duchovny’s contract was coming to an end and he had made it clear he didn’t want to return. There were rumors that Duchovny and Anderson were falling out, and both stars admitted they’d be relieved if the show was cancelled. It didn’t help matters that Season 7 is  by far creatively the worst one in the entire run and it shows throughout: the storylines keep getting lazier, both the monsters of the week and mythology episodes are running on empty and Duchovny and Anderson frequently seem like they are going through the motions throughout many episodes.

For reasons that have never been made clear to this day, the show was renewed for an eighth season after the Season 7 finale Requiem, which ended with Mulder’s abduction by aliens and Scully, who had been rendered barren by the experiments on her, inexplicably pregnant. Duchovny agreed to appear for what would turn out to be twelve of the 21 episodes of the season, Season Eight was framed as the search for Mulder and Robert Patrick was signed as John Doggett, an FBI agent tasked with finding Mulder and then becomes lead investigator on The X-Files.

While there are sparks of occasional brilliance, the show handles both of the cliffhangers of the Season 7 finale by essentially ignoring them: the manhunt for Mulder is essentially forgotten for a long series of Monsters of the Week’s and Scully doesn’t even mention her pregnancy (or even show) for the first half of the season. It’s not until the second half of the series that its sensed that Scully’s pregnancy may not be entirely human, Mulder is found halfway through the season dead and is buried – but he gets better – and the season ends with Scully giving birth in an unforgiving landscape.

 If you think can see connections between this part of the mythology and much of Lost’s (Claire’s giving birth to Aaron and his importance for the first half of the series; John Locke dying and apparently resurrecting) I can assure that Lost handles them both infinitely better and they certainly do a much better job of explaining them. By the time Season 8 ends with Mulder and Scully holding their son, once again the show has been given a chance to fade out – and again, it decides to keep going.

And if you’ve followed this description so far, you’ve got to be thinking by now: “Were Carter and his writers just making this up on the fly?”  This is the biggest difference between Carter and Darlton. While the writers of Lost had to improvise after the show became not just a hit but a huge hit, they manage to spend each season after the first one working out the details, figuring out the links between each season and the last one and what their next steps would be. While we might disagree with how their plans worked out (and given the ending of the show, that’s a massive understatement) at the very least they had a plan going forward.

By contrast while reading Monster of The Week, one of the definitive episode guides of The X-Files, we learn at one point that Carter never had a plan for the mythology of the series, that he never even believed in a ‘bible’ the way that so many showrunners then and today did when it came to a plan for their series. Apparently the way he would handle the mythology was to meet with Frank Spotnitz (part of the show since Season 2) would sit down and discuss what the serialized storyline of the season was going to be. “He wanted an endgame or a target, but he didn’t want to be obligated.” He also was collecting events from the news, such as an alien autopsy tape that was critical to Season 3 or a rock with life from Mars in Season 4.

Part of the problems with the mythology were in part because Carter wanted to give the writers freedom to generate new and exciting ideas. The reason he didn’t come in with a bible was that “if the writers who came on would just consult that and wouldn’t watch the show.” There is a certain logic to that: writers were always coming and going from The X-Files over the years but as a result there was no document and nothing in writing and nothing they could look at to remind themselves of where they’d been.

I have to tell you learning this came as no shock to me because by this point The X-Files had released the mythology episodes in a series of DVDs. They were divided into such blocks as “Abduction”/Black Oil/Colonization/Super Soldiers.”  Throughout the series The X-Files kept insisting, literally to the end, that all of this was connected to one grand plot linked together over nine seasons. By dividing the mythology this way, Carter was basically acknowledging that there was no grand theme, he was just making it up as he went along.

So as disappointing as some of you might find the ending of Lost, it’s hard to pretend that whatever problems you have with the ending of it are based on those that was with those of The X-Files. There is something to be said for the style of television that was becoming the focus of the 21^st century they knew it was going to be a serialized show and while there were themes at the center of each season, there was clearly an overriding link between them

With each season Darlton and the writers they assembled clearly had an overriding theme. In Season 1, the survivors of Oceanic 815 were trying to survive and figure out the mysteries of the island around them. That meant learning the stories of the characters before they came to the island and the framing of the narrative around Jack and Locke as opposing forces. Jack was the leader because he was trying to find a path towards survival and rescue. Locke was on his own journey to find out what secrets the island held. Halfway through the first season he would find ‘the hatch’ spend much of the season trying to get it open, and by the season finale the two ambitions of the leaders would collide combined with a crisis of the natives of the island or what would be called ‘The Others’

By comparison The X-Files first season was a combination of monsters of the week and the idea that there might be a government conspiracy about the existence of aliens. Trying to point to mythology episodes in the first season is hard to agree on. We meet an informant Mulder calls ‘Deep Throat’  - even though like many characters on The X-Files he has no name and is only described in the script for the viewer’s purpose. It's not until the season 1 finale: ‘The Erlenmeyer Flask’ that we finally seem to get definitive proof that aliens exist and the government is trying to cover it up.

It is the endings of each season finale that are the clearest difference between the mythology. For all the controversy about after the hatch was blown open, the season ended before we could go inside when the second began, Lost followed through. We spent the next season largely in the Hatch, got our first insight into the Dharma Initiative and began to add new characters to the mix. In this case, it was survivors of the tail section of the plane who had been living on the other side of the island and whose numbers had been decimated by the Others. Our questions would be answered but all they did was lead to more questions.

By contrast when everything is within Mulder and Scully’s grasp at the end of Season 1, it is immediately taken away from them: either by the deaths of those involved, the disappearance of the evidence and in the final minutes The X-Files are closed down. This becomes the pattern of every time the mythology episodes that take place: every groundbreaking revelation that Carter and the show promise are snatched away by the time the episodes are over. Mulder and Scully are always looking for the truth but holding on to it is as elusive as sand.

By the time the aliens begin to take a greater role in the middle of Season 2, the mythology is starting to fray. The series makes it work for an extensive period – at least until Season 3 – by trying a far more daring argument that The X-Files has nothing to do with aliens but rather experiments on humans. This is generally agreed by fans to be the most emotionally satisfying part of the saga because it argues the sci-fi trappings of the conspiracy are merely cover for something simpler and therefore more evil. We’re told that former Axis and Japanese Scientists have been experimenting on humans in our name since after World War II ended, that Scully herself and so many other women have been experimented on by these scientists – and as a result all have cancer that will kill them. Indeed in Season 4 Scully does develop cancer and it is terminal. (Spoiler: she gets better.)

This part of the mythology is in keeping with much of Darlton’s original idea that nothing on Lost could not be explained by science. There are parallels between this throughout the series, particularly in Juliet’s saga. Juliet is a fertility specialist who has completed a groundbreaking procedure that enabled her sister, who was decimated by cancer, to become pregnant. She is ‘recruited’ to the island under false pretenses in order to help resolve a problem that pregnancy will kill the women on the island, a story that is critical to several of the female characters. At one point Juliet demands to go home only to be told by Ben that her sister’s cancer has recurred but if she stays and helps them Jacob will heal it. Juliet agrees to stay on the island, only to be horrified when she learns that Ben – who told her there was no cancer on the island – has a fatal tumor on his spine. Much of Season 3 is built around Ben’s cancer and his manipulation of the survivors of the crash and Juliet’s has now seen being able to tell women they were pregnant essentially a death sentence.

Had The X-Files been willing to stay in the idea that the government conspiracy was about human experimentation, the show probably would have been better but more powerful. But then Carter introduced the idea of ‘the black oil’, which in many ways was a parallel to the smoke monster. Even there Darlton handled it better. They claimed each time we saw the monster throughout the series, we learned more about it and they never changed any of the old details. The ‘black oil’ by contrast essentially was whatever Carter wanted it to be at any given time. In Season 3, it was close to ‘the sickness’ something that controlled people without their awareness. In Season 4, if it possessed you, you were essentially in a vegetative state and extraction of it would kill you. In Season 5, it was essentially the life force of the aliens being used for colonization but it could be removed with a weak vaccine that ‘The Syndicate’ had been working on for half a century to develop to combat the aliens. After that it was mentioned a few more times but then Carter got bored with it and basically dropped from the narrative.

There was also a very clear pattern by now when it came to the characters on the series. Carter was never willing to get rid of them permanently. It seemed in the first two seasons that the biggest threat of the alien was ‘The Bounty Hunter’ and that the only way to kill him was to pierce the back of his neck with a stiletto. At the start of Season 4, after a long and protracted chase, Mulder did just that to the Bounty Hunter.

Except…rather than kill him off, turned out Mulder had missed. The Bounty Hunter roared to life and resumed stalking Mulder and Scully for the next three seasons until Scully finally managed to kill him with a gunshot to the back of the neck (I guess Carter was bored with the stiletto by then.) It’s worth noting that at the end of the season 8 premiere, we saw Mulder prisoner on a spaceship, surrounded by Bounty Hunters all of whom looked exactly the same. It makes you wonder, if that was true, why would Carter spent so much time keeping the first one alive: clones had been a big part of the show since he had shown up. But naturally, immediately after this Carter got bored with this kind of alien and completely abandoned the concept that he’d held for six seasons to move on to ‘super soldiers’ (don’t ask)

This was the pattern with characters throughout the series: we always thought characters we’re being killed off but Carter never gave us closure. The Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis) is the most egregious example. At the start of Season 5, the characters goes to Mulder’s apartment and is shot by an assassin. Mulder is told by Skinner that he is dead, even though no body has been found. We never even get a reason why they killed him and by the end of the season, he’s back where he was leading the Syndicate as if nothing had happened. We never get an explanation.

When the Syndicate ends up getting burned to death by another group of aliens in Season 6 (I’ll get back to that too) CSM manages to walk away just before it happens. In Requiem, he’s in a wheelchair, dying of cancer when he pushed down a flight of stairs. He shows up at the end of the series when he is apparently blown to bits by helicopters in the series finale. Naturally when the series was revived fourteen years later, he’d survived that too. (Maybe he knew about the island and took vacations there?)

This was always part of Carter’s pattern: he never wanted to wrap up the mythology he’d created; he kept expanding out further and further. The consequences were the longer the series was on the air, the more Mulder and Scully’s role in the mythology seemed increasingly redundant.  The idea of them exposing, much less stopping this massive government conspiracy seems increasingly impossible even by the time the series was half-over. An overarching question of the series was, if Mulder was so dangerous, why didn’t the Syndicate just kill him? We never got a good answer, but maybe underlying it was they barely considered him a real threat.

Say what you will about Lost’s issues with the mythology: when they ended a storyline, they ended it and when a character died, they stayed dead. We would see them through flashbacks and certain characters (such as Hurley) would see them after they died, but they knew they were ghosts. When John Locke resurrected in the middle of Season 5, Ben told Sun he was terrified because in all his years on the island, he’d never seen anything like that: “Dead is dead,” he told her. “You don’t get to come back from that.” Even Richard, who had an advisory position to Jacob and himself didn’t age, said he’d never seen anything like this before. And indeed, Locke was still dead – he was in that form due to the writers plan for the final season.

The closest parallel between The X-Files mythology and Lost’s comes with the struggle between Mulder and the Smoking Man. They are seen as the forces of good and evil – much like Jacob and the Man In Black. There is a familial connection which we learn about in Season 2 in which Bill Mulder (Peter Donat) is revealed to be a colleague of Smoking Man and was involved with the conspiracy that may have led to his daughter’s abduction. Since the driving force of the series is the search for Samantha Mulder, this is the clearest link we’ve had that this quest for the truth may involve skeletons in the Mulder family closet.

We get the clearest link to that in Talitha Cumi, the Season 3 finale when CSM has a meeting with Teena Mulder. Like with his father there’s a shared history but by the insinuation of CSM, it is implied that he might very well actually be Fox’s father which would explain why he’s protecting him against the Syndicate’s better interest.

The problem was the show was willing to stick with this idea for long. This became clear in Season 5 when we met Cassandra Spender (Veronica Cartwright) and her son Jeffrey (Chris Owens). Cassandra was a multiple abductee but Jeffrey believed she was deluded and didn’t want Mulder anywhere near here. In the middle of that episode we learned not only that CSM was alive but that he was Jeffrey’s father, something he acknowledged.

By Season Six Jeffrey Spender is in charge of The X-Files but is there primarily at the service of CSM. When his mother is returned to him in the midst of a series of fiery deaths, she asks to see Mulder, not him. The Smoking Man – or GCB Spender as his name seems to be – tries to keep Mulder away but Jeffrey begins to buck from what he has learned.

By this point the mythology was so messy trying to put the pieces together was impossible. And if the writers had been willing to make this whole galactic struggle centered around the Mulders and the Spenders,  they’re might have been a human element to it. But when they did Carter said very clear Fox was Bill Mulder’s son, and Jeffrey was the Cancer man. Davis’s  character even said as much – just before he shot Jeffrey. And then not one season later, it became canon that CSM was Mulder’s father.

Then just to make a bad matter worse, in the final episodes, it turned out Jeffrey hadn’t been killed but experimented on by his father and the syndicate for years. He came back to the FBI, heavily scarred and mutilated but the DNA match said he was Mulder. Scully knew he was Jeffrey Spender. To be clear, not even half-brothers have the same DNA (something Lost fans know) but Carter was just doing this because the series was nearly over and he didn’t care what happened.

So for Carter to admonish the writers of Lost about what happens if you stumble really was hypocrisy. Whatever failures can be linked to the ending of Lost, it was more because by the final season it was increasingly clear that either all of the questions fans had were not going to be answered or that some of the answers they got were not satisfying as the ones in their minds. Much of this is clearly more of the problems of mythology series in general where the final reveal can never truly be as impressive as the buildup to it.

That is not the problem of The X-Files and that’s true going into the final season of that show. By the time the series was cancelled in February of 2002, it was well past its prime creatively. Even the most devoted fans had thrown in the towel that the mythology was ever going to make sense and in many cases the fact of its existence without David Duchovny (he left the show for good after Season 8 ended) was considered offensive. The monsters of the week had lost any creativity that they once had (with few exceptions). Things actually got worse after the cancellation: as in the final weeks, the writers killed off The Lone Gunmen one of the few supporting characters that had lasted the entire run of the series in a manner so anti-climactic it seemed like the writers were checking a box. The next episode William, the magical mystery baby who seemed to be the new Christ-child was injected with a serum by Spender and became ‘normal’ – so Scully naturally gave him up for adoption. This wrapped up a horrible two-season storyline in a way so unsatisfying it actually makes the resolution of Ben-Widmore’s conflict seem like a Shakespearean masterclass of plotting by comparison. (And just so you knew, when the series was revived sixteen years later, William came back. I guess now that he was an adult they knew what to do with him.)

By the time the series finale aired in May of 2002, perhaps the only reason fans were tuning in – and I include myself – was because David Duchovny was coming back. We wanted to see how the Mulder-Scully reunion would play out and how the series would conclude that relationship more than anything else. As we shall see Carter completely ruined that for us to.

In the last article in this series, I will describe my personal experience watching ‘The Truth’, it’s importance to series TV if not when it comes to its quality and what the showrunners of Lost might have taken away from it when it comes to the failures of that episode – and why it’s clear Lost’s is superior.

 

 

Recapping Amy Hummel's Five Game Win On Jeopardy This Week

 

 

When Season 39 came to a conclusion last July many fans were irked that Jeopardy would ‘allow’ a Tournament of Champions with only one female participant. While these fans clearly didn’t comprehend how you qualified for the Tournament of Champions, the fact remained that season there had been exactly one female contestant who had qualified for the Tournament Hannah Wilson, who won 8 games and just under $230,000.

Well, we’re less than a month into regular play in Season 40 and already we have more female contestants who have qualified for the next Tournament of Champions (whenever it happens) then in all of Season 39. Because less than a week after Alison Betts was defeated having won five games, Amy Hummel has punched her ticket in to that same tournament having completed a five game run of her own. Lisa Ann Walter won Celebrity Jeopardy, so if the rules that applied to this year’s apply to the next one that means so far the Tournament of Champions is an all-female affair.

Amy and Alison are essentially what we call very good Jeopardy players as opposed to the super-champions we’ve become accustomed to over the past three years. In that sense, it is as much luck as it is skill that leads to them winning five or more games, and much of the time it involves the failures of their opponents as there own success. This has certainly been true of Amy since the start of her run last Wednesday. There were few signs of it in her first appearance as she slowly worked to the lead in the Jeopardy round of her first match and while she did build a substantial lead in Double Jeopardy she then undid almost all the good work on a Daily Double late in the round that cost her $4000. Fortunately there were not enough clues left on the board to seriously threaten it and she went into Final Jeopardy with a relatively good lead with $13,200 to her opponents $9400 and $8600.

The Final Jeopardy category was HISTORIC TRANSPORTS: “Decorated with an illustration of the Montgolfier’s’ craft, the smoking room aboard this could be accessed only via an airlock.” All three players knew the correct response: “What is the Hindenburg?” and Amy won her first game with $18,900.

In her first defense of her title, she was challenged severely in the Jeopardy round by Tyler Jarvis who led throughout. However early in Double Jeopardy she pulled ahead helped by the first Daily Double in VOCABULARY: “Italian gives us this word for an outline of what could happen, also an old word for screenplay.” She knew it was a scenario, gained $3000 and built a lead she would never relinquish. She was helped by the fact that many clues went either unanswered by everyone and her dominance of the round. She had $18,800 at the end of Double Jeopardy, just enough to run away with the game.

The next game was tougher as challenger Dan Byrne led through the latter half of the Jeopardy round. But again early in Double Jeopardy she got to the second Daily Double ahead of Tyler.in BURIED AT ARLINGTON: “Interred in 1993, this Howard University law school grad led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational fund early in his career.” She knew it was Thurgood Marshall gained $1500 and she built a large enough lead never relinquished. It wasn’t quite a runaway this time but she managed to get Final Jeopardy correct.

In her fourth game she really got lucky. She played decently against Ferdinand Percente in the Jeopardy round and they were tied at $3400 apiece at the end of it. In Double Jeopardy, however, everything went Ferdinand’s way. He got to both Daily Doubles made them both pay off for $9000 in total and only a late run by Amy kept Ferdinand from completely running away with the match. Even then going into Final Jeopardy the outlook wasn’t good: he had $21,600 to her $13,800.

The Final Jeopardy category was NICKNAMES. “Surfing legend Duke Kahanamoku has been called by this 2-word nickname that describes any dominant person or expert. Amy wrote down: “What is Big Kahuna?” That was correct and she nearly doubled her score. Ferdinand wrote down major domo and as a result Amy had come from behind.

Her fifth game against Bryan Carrasco and Laura Bligh started out in the Jeopardy round with everybody playing brilliantly. At the end of it Amy and Laura were tied with $4800 apiece and Bryan was only behind by $600. Bryan got off to a fast start in Double Jeopardy and had $10,200 when he found the Daily Double. He wagered everything and lost. Almost as if it were a signal, all three players began to collapse. Everyone started making mistakes and no one could give a correct answer in a category called THE GAP ON THEIR RESUMES. It was only because Amy got a $1200 clue in that category correct the same time Laura got it wrong that she was able to move into a tie for the lead with $7600.

The category for Final Jeopardy was FICTIONAL GROUPS. “Maybe because he was too Baroque, Bernini was rejected as a name for a member of this group created in 1983.” Bryan knew it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (all of whom are named for Renaissance artists) He doubled his score.. Laura wrote nothing down but she lost nothing. Amy knew it was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and bet everything to win her fifth game and cross over the $100,000 mark.

But luck eventually runs out for everyone and that luck ended yesterday. Going in against Weckiai Rannilla and Nils Cousin, Amy spent much of the Jeopardy round battling for her life. When it was over she was in third with 43000 to Weckiai’s $5600 and Nil’s $6000.

Amy spent much of Double Jeopardy trying to ring in ahead of Weckiai (Nils didn’t do much) and was at $7400 when she got to the first Daily Double in KISS & TELL: “The title character of this Puccini opera kisses her son goodbye before taking her own life with her father’s dagger.” Amy struggled before guessing: “Who is Carmen?” instead of Madama Butterfly. She dropped to $3400.

She got the other Daily Double two clues later in -OLOGIES. With little choice, she bet the $4200 she had: “Remove 2 letters from the study of weather to get this, the study of weights and measures.” Again she guessed: “What is meterology?” It was actually metrology,

Amy managed the moral victory of building back up to $3600 but she was had little chance of prevailing in Final Jeopardy. Weckiai had $11,400 and Brian was at $6400. Final Jeopardy dealt with EXECUTIVE ORDERS: “On November 15, 1961 JFK suspended the 8-hour workday at this agency, saying its work need to proceed ‘with all possible speed’. Amy guessed: “What is the CIA?”  Logical, she was thinking of Cuba but it was wrong and she lost all but a dollar. Nils also wrote down the CIA and Weckiai was thinking similarly with NORAD. It was actually NASA, in conjunction with the space race and Kennedy’s promise to man on the moon. Weckiai lost $1401 but that was enough to make her the new champion and end Amy’s run after five wins and $100,994.

Amy’s run may not seem remarkable in comparison with the one the more recent Jeopardy viewer has been accustomed to in the post-Trebek era but it has always been closer to the norm. It’s easy to forget since the galvanizing arrival of James Holzhauer five years ago which has led to the super-champions seeming to come every other day how rare they were in the fourteen years when Ken Jennings was simply playing the game rather than hosting it. Those who have wondered whether the recurrence of so many Jeopardy Tournaments would lead to supersaturation have forgotten – or more likely not have been watching long enough to know – that Jeopardy has been made far more of players like Amy Hummel and Alison Betts than they have Mattea Roach or Cris Panullo. It doesn’t make them any less good then the super-champions but it makes us realize just how difficult it is to win on Jeopardy as well as make us appreciate those super-champions even more.

And as this week marks the 2024 Jeopardy Masters debut, we will have a chance to appreciate these Masters again along with the new blood. I’ll begin reporting on that this week.

Anti-Commencement Speech Given In Colleges Across the Country This May: Satirical Which Means It Will Probably Happen

 

Introduction: We all know the expression: “Laugh so you don’t cry.”  I live in New York. I saw a lot of footage last night on TV and I’ve been trying to process a lot of things for a while. This is the only way through for me. This isn’t meant to be taken seriously which means that no matter how I label this column, people still will. I’ll probably have to deal with it seriously, but not today.

 

Peaceful Progressive Quote of the Day

“Extremism at the expense of liberty is no vice! Moderation in the face of tyranny is no virtue!”

 Whoopi Goldberg at a cow pasture in San Francisco

Good afternoon, my fellow warriors. Before I begin my address let us observe a moment of silence for those of who gave the ultimate sacrifice of having their cellphones taken away while we were being hauled off to holding cells so they could not live stream our arrests on Instagram.

 

Looking out on this vast field of students, I see people of all groups from the wealthy white students to the middle class white students who got her on a scholarship. I see students who overcame immense hardship, such as having to type their admission essays on a laptop to those who had to take their SATS three times to get a mark high enough to qualify for admission. I see students who have come from the worst and most backwards parts of the world such as Montana, Mississippi and that most goddess-forsaken land of all, the non-Austin sections of Texas. I see people who have worked long and hard minutes researching their papers on google on such difficult and complex subjects as Racism in The Negro Leagues and The Laissez Faire Economics of Cuba. I see people who have spent hours and hours haranguing their professors and teachers to turn their D- papers into A- and after being hauled off by security, posted anonymous twitter threads to get those same professors cancelled on social media.

I see a group of students who in their vast life experience of anywhere from 21 to 22 years clearly and completely understand the geopolitical world and the values of society infinitely better than every single recorded generation in human history, from those who existed as long ago as twenty years ago to those who graduated last year. I see people who understand that the world is and has always been irrevocably broken since man climbed out of the primordial slime and refused to acknowledge that there were as many genders as we say there are now.

In all the millennia that have gone by since then, civilizations have all failed and all forms of government have been disastrous for the simple, inescapable truth. Not a single one of those people who lived thousands of years ago was smart enough to have the values that we do today. Every single person who has lived on the planet before us, whether they be slave or slave owner, white man or suffragette, abolitionist, civil rights marcher or those have made any progress in society in what we call ‘the past’  did not, as we know, truly accomplish anything of meaning.

It is a truth that seeps down to every level of America’s society. Every single ‘great leap’, from the wheel to art to exploration to what we laughingly call ‘democracy’ was always designed to do more to repress society then it was too liberate anyone. Apologists will claim that the men who wrote the Constitution were working on the best framework that they had a time. As we all know that is just an example of stupidity. If our ‘founders’ were so smart they would have amending the constitution as symbol as downloading an app on your phone. Those who say things such as that telephones didn’t exist back then are racists apologists and we have disregarded them.

Over our lifespans we know that this is by far the hardest period in human history to live in and that America is the most fascist society on the planet. We have learned that every generation who has lived before us has been racist, homophobic, misogynistic and guilty of maintaining a white supremacist state. I mean, how could the generation before us tolerate three different white actors playing Spider-Man? But what can we expect from an era so backwards that they paid to go to movies? And watched television shows on cable?

Long interruption of assent with murmurs such as ‘My parents still watch TV shows on Netflix.”

I know, I know, it’s amazing we’ve come through as well-adjusted as we have. And as we all know we’ve proved again and again these past few months. After October 7^th we knew first hand where the greatest source of evil in the entire world was. Sure most of us couldn’t find Israel on a map before that and some of us still can’t and most of us think all forms of religion are archaic and stupid but we all know one indisputable truth: whoever is in charge of the government of any country around the world is automatically wrong and all of their actions are repressive and illegal. And those of us who didn’t know that heard somebody say that they’d heard from somebody who’d seen it on TikTok and as we all know that makes it an undeniable and irrefutable truth.

Then our generation did what our generation has done best. We formed an opinion that fit with our doctrine of belief and we stuck with it regardless of what was anyone else tried to tell us. Then we did what has always made the greatest leap forward in our society: long, loud demonstrations with simple catchphrases that were easy to repeat and we didn’t understand the meaning of.

We were aided by the university professors on this campus who agreed with certain parts of our world view and are therefore the only trustworthy authority. Because they have spent their entire lives in academia rather than in such worthless pursuits as ‘government’ or ‘democracy’ we knew that were completely informed on the methods they told us about. And they were completely trustworthy. Our history professor told us that he had spent 1968, breaking windows, screaming at policeman and throwing pigs blood on soldiers to stop the Vietnam War and just seven years later, the war ended. And our literature professor told us how his work for George McGovern, the only respectable politician, had single-handedly led to him carrying the state of Massachusetts in the 1972 election. Their credentials were impeccable when it came to accomplishments.

They told us that the best way to accomplish things was to make loud demonstrations, scream at anyone who passed by call everyone who tried to make reasonable debate ‘a fascist’  keep chanting about the imperialistic state, and make the campus’ so unsafe that the University had to close them down for the rest of the semester and hold commencements as virtual events. Many of these professors graciously agreed to cancel all their classes, stop marking our papers and even make appearances on TV arguing for us. Some of them have even been making tours out of state defending us while telling us exactly what to do over the phone.

It is a shame that none of the professors or advisers who helped us with these protests could be here this day.  But we will honor them in spirit with their request to delete all of texts and communications with them from our phones.

I remember the last conversation I had with my media studies professors before he decided to go on the run in the West Indies the night before we were going to storm the academic halls. “Some of us are beginning to have doubts about the mission,” I told him. “They are afraid that they will be expelled from college, that they might go to prison and that their entire futures will be destroyed on what some of them – not me – consider a symbolic gesture that won’t change anybody.”

I’ll never forget his inspiring words. “People will tell you that these marches and protests drive away more people than they win to their cause. That none of this will change anything that happens in the Middle East. That the reporters who’ll want to cover the story will have to divert it to these protests. That moderates and undecided voters, who might swing elections this year, will be isolated by what they see on TV and vote Republican or not vote at all. That we are creating the fascist dystopia we are trying to prevent.”

“But as you know as well as I do, those people are racist simply uneducated idiots who have spent their whole lives working for a system that you personally benefit from but don’t have to give anything back towards in return. They believe in primitive outdated ideals such as ‘free speech’ and ‘equality for all’ and ‘democracy’.”

“You know in your hearts the same thing that me and my fellow leftists have believed for generations: the only true society we can accept is one that is utterly perfect. Where people who have a different point of view then us are not allowed to have an opinion because they aren’t smart enough or are too old or from the wrong part of the country.  Where the only people allowed to have a voice are the people who agree lockstep with every part of our agenda, even the parts that we invent on the fly. Where we can grant equality for people of all races, genders and sexual identities as long as they agree to accept every other part of our agenda, even if it conflicts with their own personal beliefs. Where people are excluded from society not because of the color of their skin but because of the content of their character – specifically our character.”

“Until that time we must do the only thing that can propel our society forward: meaningless, empty gestures that don’t win hearts and minds but make us feel like we’ve actually accomplished something. And we must keep in our hearts our certainty that the definition of progress is doing the same thing over and over and getting the same results.”

And of course like all of us here today, that instantly assuaged my doubts. I mean, it’s not like I was going to do something stupid like vote in the next election.

(Laughter for more than a minute.)

And now we stand in the aftermath of a historic victory. I mean some people – such as our parents – might question us. “You were expelled from college. You’re facing criminal charges for trespass. You destroyed your future. And for what?”

Such backwards thinking is to be expect from people who still get their news from TV. Because we all know what this long and costly battle got us. Before this protest on April 18, we had 798 followers on our social media page. And now, we have 811!

(Cheers and screaming fill the throng)

And sure in the comments sections there are a few voices of dissent and the hashtag ‘useful idiots has  three million followers linked to the footage of our protest. But we made national headlines. Sure a bipartisan accord condemning our actions passed both Houses of Congress unanimously and the entire board of our college had to resign. And yes, my parents have told me they will never speak to me again and my grandfather who helped liberate Buchenwald suffered a stroke when he heard the news and died, but all of these are the cost you bear when you’re doing your part for the cause. I’m still not sure what the cause is but I know that you have to be on the right side of history even if you don’t know the particular history or what the sides are.

That is lesson we all need to take away from this as we go into tomorrow as we take on the burden of applying for jobs at 7-11s across the country. These are the battles we have fought and will keep fighting, impervious to reason and sure in our self-righteousness. Remember as we go forward our battle cry

“Solutions are for idiots!”

I’ll see you all in three days at the Impressionist Exhibit at MOMA for the climate change protest. Remember to bring your permanent markers and bright red paint!