Dead To Me Is Back For Its Third Season

 

One of the streaming series that helped get me through 2020 was when I basically binged (read: saw two episodes per week) the first two seasons of Netflix’s remarkable Dead to Me.  To try and describe the story of the series to this point would read somewhere on the level of the most twisted soap opera, the darkest of dramas and a French farce, and its remarkable that no matter how many plates showrunners Liz Feldman and her fellow writers keep spinning, they never seem to drop any.

To give the briefest of synopsis: Jen is a forty-ish widow of two children whose husband died in a hit and run who goes to a grief support group and meets Judy, who starts out by claiming she’s lost her son which is a lie. She’s actually had a messy life, she’s suffered four miscarriages – and actually goes through a fifth in Season 1 – and even though they’re incredibly different – Jen is absolutely dark and pessimistic, Judy relentlessly optimistic – they end up becoming friends and Judy ends up moving in with Jen and her children. What Jen doesn’t know is that Judy was the driver in the hit-and-run that killed her husband and that Judy’s ex, Steve has been helping her cover it up. In Season 1, Steve confronted Judy at Jen’s, attacked her and Jen killed him in self-defense.

Things actually got simultaneously darker and more farcical in Season 2. Steve’s identical twin brother, Ben showed up when Steve ‘disappeared’. Ben then began an affair with Jen, Judy began a lesbian relationship with the ex-girlfriend of the cop investigating Steve’s disappearance,  we learned of the involvement of Ben’s involvement with the Greek Mafia and how he had used them to finance Judy’s art career and Season 2 ended with Jen’s oldest son Charlie reading a letter where Judy’s confessed (in a way) to his father’s murder, the cops discovering Steve’s body, Ben learning about his death, getting drunk and in the last minute of the finale, Jen and Judy being involved in a hit and run in which Ben was the other driver, because of course, that’s how their lives work.

Incredibly, it actually seems like Season 3 might get darker and more complicated still. Arriving at the hospital, Jen came away with extreme back pain and a concussion. At the hospital, Jen learned from the cop about the discovery of Steve’s body. Ben showed up drunk and in his wrecked car, and Charlie had to drive him to the hospital, which of course was where both Jen and Judy were in recovery and Ben connecting the dots. In the final minutes of the final, the doctor thinking Jen was Judy (clerical mix-up) told Jen that Judy might very well have cancer. The next episode only seemed to make things worse, when Charlie confronted Jen and Judy about what happened with a gun and Jen and Judy made up a cover story where Judy has had an affair with Ted before she died. In the course of this the cops showed up to investigate the hit and run, and now Jen knows that because she buried the body on government land, the FBI is going to get involved. Ben then showed up at their house (of course) with a gift basket and had to see Jen tell Sam (her youngest) that there’d been a hit and run a little more than a year after Ted died. Then Jen finally told Judy she had cancer, and that’s not even the biggest shoe that dropped this episode.

These contortions are so dark and twisted, so utterly bizarre and often leading with even more darkness that you honestly would have expected them in a 1930s melodrama. So now I need to tell those of you who have yet to watch Dead to Me  (the third season finally dropped on Thursday) that this is arguably one of the funniest shows that you can find anywhere.

I have left out to this point the actresses who play the leads, and it may tell you everything you need to know that they are two of the greatest television actresses in history. Jen is played by Christina Applegate, who you fell in love with in the first five minutes of the series when you heard decompressing by listening to death metal in her car when her cars were asleep. Judy is Linda Cardellini, relentlessly cheerfully, oblivious to many things but never entirely of the chaos around them. Both Applegate and Cardellini have been acting since they were almost out of the womb: both shot the stardom in two of the most unappreciated series of all time: Applegate as Kelly on Married…With Children, a series so overt in its bathroom humor, most of us missed the subtleties of the satires; Cardellini in Freaks and Geeks, one of the brilliant one season wonders in television history, one that the NBC executive who cancelled it has been kicking himself about all the years since.  Applegate has starred in some truly undervalued comedies: Up All Night and Samantha Who.  Cardellini has worked more in the drama field, including the second half of ER and an Emmy-nominated stint as one of Don’s lovers on Mad Men.   It’s not much of a stretch to say that both are doing their best work here; it’s certainly the one that critics have been willing to acknowledge the most (Cardellini received one Emmy nomination for Best Actress in a Comedy for; Applegate two.)

I didn’t have to wait quite as long for the third and final season of this show as I did for the second season of Russian Doll (it’s been more than two years between the second season and the third) but I was waiting nearly as eagerly, if for different reasons. Russian Doll is an exercise in the fantastic and surreal; Dead to Me is simultaneously incredibly dark and pure farce. Both series would not work out without the incredibly women in the lead roles.  Jen and Judy know just how complicated their lives are and they never get time to breathe before the next one hits.  But you never doubt for a moment the body between them because of the exceptional performances of Applegate and Cardellini; it’s like watching a 1930s comedy team constantly reacting to the insanity around them; it’s sort of like watching the Marx Brothers acting in a Eugene O’Neill play.  And the reason you believe it is that they never act inappropriately: the house of cards they’re building keeps getting shakier but they’re determined to keep it from collapsing.

It doesn’t hurt that the bond between Jen and Judy is one of the strongest between two female characters I’ve seen in any series in Peak TV. It is so rare to see two women at the center of any series on television and even rarer to not see them always in competition but trying to keep a friendship together.  And it is because of this darkness that they went through before and keep determined to come out of that makes you believe it no matter how unrealistic the bonds are.

I should add, by the way, this series is far from a two women show. James Marsden has been putting on a master class for two seasons, first as the initially charming and loving, and then cold and cruel Steve, now as his warm and open Ben.  I am reminded of the work that Yael Gregorias did on the similarly convoluted and delightful Jane the Virgin as twin sisters: this time you can tell the two of them are the same person in appearance, but they also both have demons that they are dealing with – Ben was just better burying his than Steve was. We’ve seen that Ben is already haunted by both his actions in the second season finale as well as the death of his brother, and we know he has (by accident) a piece of evidence that could bring the house of cards crashing down on Jen and Judy.

There’s also the wonderful Valerie Mahaffey, bringing us with yet another mother figure you can’t help but hate, determined to rub Jen’s face in it in every way. When she arrives at Jen’s house (unannounced) and sees her daughter-in-law in a neck brace her reaction is: “You finally had your neck done?” (I won’t reveal was she says when Jen’s tell her why she’s in a brace. Ed Asner is to be missed of course, but we will soon be granted the presence of another of television’s great talents Garret Dillahunt as the FBI agent assigned to investigate Steve’s death. (Another great call back: Dillahunt played Cardellini’s ne’er do well ex-boyfriend who eventually went to prison, kidnapped her and her son, and her character ended up killing him. Knowing this show, I think it could play out the same way, though I haven’t read all the spoilers.)

Dead to Me is another one of Netflix’s minor masterpieces, another brilliant comedy series with the same brilliance as The Kominsky Method  or Russian Doll. This is the last season of the show and I’ll be sad to see it end – and I imagine many more will. As we all know, Applegate was diagnosed with MS last year. Feldman offered to end the series putting her well-being before the series, Applegate refused but has made it clear this is very likely to be her final project.

Which gets me to one more point.  Applegate has been nominated for five Emmys and won one for Guest Actress in a Comedy but she has never won Best Actress in a Comedy. She lost in 2019 to Phoebe Waller-Bridge for Fleabag and to Catherine O’Hara for Schitt’s Creek in 2020 and it’s hard to argue that either was an unworthy choice.

I don’t know if Applegate (or indeed, Cardellini) will be nominated for their work in the final season of Dead to Me. It’s possible, even likely, it will happen. It’s not just that several previous members of the category from the last two years – Issa Rae and Tracee Ellis Ross being the most obvious -  are ineligible and it remains to be seen if some of last year’s – Kaley Cuoco and Elle Fanning – will get a third season for their series by this year.  And its not like institutional memory for the Emmys works the way it used to; it certainly didn’t work for Natasha Lyonne this year.

I know it’s early and there are no doubt going to be a lot of contenders for Best Actress in a Comedy, many of whom in new shows and returning ones that haven’t debuted yet. And even if Applegate were to get nominated, it’s not like she would be the best or funniest lead in the series -  we all know how extraordinary Quinta Brunson and Jean Smart are. But just speaking for myself, I really hope that next fall Applegate ends up on the dais. It would do my heart good, for both the character she plays, the performer she is, and the person she is. It really would.

My score: 4.75 stars.

People Were Fine With Presidents Running for a Third Term. Then FDR Did It.

 

 

Many of the people who criticize the Constitution these days and say that the founders didn’t take in to account the modern world usually don’t take consider the way America worked back that. The idea of term limits, for example, is something that is fundamentally criticized by commentators and pundits as Senators and Congressman tend to serve well into their nineties.

They also never seem to take in to account the fact that when the Constitution was written, the average lifespan was forty-eight. Men like Benjamin Franklin were anomalies at the time of its writing. In an era with no vaccinations, far more deadly illnesses, and modern medicine not that much above bleeding, the founders could never have foreseen generations living into their eighties. This continued until the beginning of the 20^th century, when the average lifespan was still not that much above fifty.

Furthermore, term limits were not considered serious option because well into the beginning of the twentieth century, many elected officials to Congress did not serve more than one term. Lincoln, when he was elected in 1846 to the House, only served one term because he had promised a colleague that he would let him run in the next election. Parties may have held seats for protracted periods, but the people who served in them constantly fluctuated. Term limits weren’t discussed because of the constant rotation of many congressmen. This began to change slowly but surely in the nineteenth century and became more of a habit after the Civil War.

Of course, those people who argue against term limits tend to ignore the fact that there is a position that has one: the President. It has become so much of a part of history and because there has been only one violator of the two term limit that has been part of it that I have little doubt that the major reason FDR’s decision to run for a third term in 1940 caused such uproar as many thought he was turning the Constitution upside-down. What is mostly forgotten  is the fact that, like so many precedents, it was such a part of history that it was implied no one would dare violate it. In fact, several times in the 150 years leading up to FDR’s decision, several presidents considered breaking it – and were only stopped from doing so by outside factors. So let’s consider the history of the two terms tradition, and how and several presidents did not consider it valid.

As we all know after George Washington decided to step down from the Presidency in 1796, he spoke against the idea of any president running for a third term. He no doubt could have gotten another one should he have desired it, but he was tired of the responsibility. In 1796, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson ran in the first contested elections. Adams and because he finished second, Jefferson became his vice-president, despite the fact they were of different political parties. Congress changed the rules in the next election that only the two highest recipients of votes from the same party would serve as President and Vice President. Of course, in 1800 Jefferson and his Vice President Aaron Burr received the exact same number of votes, leading to another crisis. (If you’ve seen Hamilton or have a fundamental understanding of history, you know how it was resolved.)

Jefferson won reelection in 1805 and made a similar speech saying that no President should serve more than two terms. But unlike the previous alterations that the Framers made with the two previous elections, no one felt any need to amend the Constitution to say so. Madison and Monroe followed up by each serving two terms apiece. Then came the 1824 election, which was a clusterfuck: Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and a plurality in the Electoral College, but not a majority. One of his defeated opponents Henry Clay and the decided distaste for Jackson led to the House picking John Quincy Adams. 

The outrage in the country led to Jackson running for President and ushering in the age of what would become known as Jacksonian Democracy. It was not particular popular among the elites of the time – in 1834 the Whig Party was formed almost entirely based out of outrage to Jackson and his policy – but Jackson was still extremely popular by the end of his second term and might have well wanted to run again. But he was nearly seventy and not in the best of health, so he followed the principles set by Jefferson and stepped aside in the next election for his Vice President Martin Van Buren.

From then until the beginning of the Civil War, no one considered the two term precedent because nobody was winning more than one term. After Van Buren’s electoral defeat in 1840, due to a series of illnesses among elected presidents and the unpopularity of many of them while holding office, not one President won reelection. Some of this was because they were Vice Presidents whose ascent to power had left many of their fellow politicians unsatisfied with their hold on the office. Some were so unpopular with their party that winning renomination was basically impossible. Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 was remarkable not just because it happened in the midst of wartime, but because he was so unpopular with his own party at the time that many people wanted another candidate to try and save the Union. Lincoln himself thought it highly unlikely he would win reelection until the success of his generals managed to turn the tide for the war effort. Even then, considering that most of his opposition wasn’t part of the county at the time, his share of the popular vote – 55% to 45% - was a lot more paper thin that you’d think.

After Lincoln’s assassination and the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, the Republicans turned to the Hero of Appomattox, Ulysses Grant. Grant won in a landslide and despite the manifest number of scandals in his administration, won reelection by a bigger one. Even after all the scandals were fully revealed by 1876. Grant seriously running for a third term but the party thought he was deadweight.

Their opinion had changed four years later. In 1880, Grant became the first president to try to run for a third term. His major opponent at the Republican National Convention was James G. Blaine, an immensely popular but equally scandal ridden Congressman. For thirty ballots, the two men deadlocked. Then the party began moving towards an undeclared Congressman from Ohio James Garfield, a man who demanded that his name not be put in nomination. His words were ignored and Garfield ended up winning the nomination on the 36^th ballot. Grant was disappointed but came out in favor of Garfield anyway.

Blaine eventually won the nomination in 1884 and then lost by the skin of his teeth to Governor of New York Grover Cleveland. Cleveland was immensely popular at the time and easily won renomination four years later. The Republicans were more unsettled and after seven ballots chose Benjamin Harrison, governor of Ohio.

Cleveland won the popular vote over Harrison by more than half a million cast, but thanks to Harrison taking the key states of Pennsylvania and Indiana by slim margins, he managed to eke out an electoral win. He was never entirely popular with his own party and was fortunate to win renomination in 1892. Cleveland was not much more popular with the Democrats, but he too won renomination, the first – and only – defeated President to win renomination. (That doesn’t mean other former Presidents didn’t try, but that’s an issue for a later article.)

Cleveland won reelection by a landslide in 1892. Despite the fact he had served two terms, he was the incumbent and could have gotten a third term had the party leaned his way. But not long after winning reelection, a national depression struck the country and despite his best efforts, members of his own party began to undermine him to his financial policies. By the time the Democratic Convention met that summer, he was considered dead weight by the party and his name was not even put into nomination. That does not mean his political career was necessarily considered finished: in 1904, facing the possibility of a Democrat defeat, many wanted Cleveland to run against Theodore Roosevelt. He briefly considered it, but finally turned him down. (The Democrats in this period were in a rut in seven presidential elections between 1884 and 1912, they would nominate Cleveland or William Jennings Bryan six times.)

Theodore Roosevelt, who ended up taking office after McKinley’s assassination in 1901 was a different story altogether. Neither the Republican elite nor the Democrat power brokers liked or trusted him. The people, however, loved him. He was easily elected to a term in his own right in 1904. Then he made what he considered the biggest mistake of his life by announcing he would not run for reelection in 1908. Both parties no doubt breathed a sigh of relief that they were going to be rid of that ‘damn cowboy’. They clearly didn’t know TR.

As history has recounted countless times, by 1912 TR had grown unsatisfied with his chosen successor William Howard Taft. More importantly, so had many other Republicans. In the first presidential primary contest, TR won 9 out of 12 primaries and Taft won just one. But the political delegations were controlled by the party and were eventually awarded to Taft. TR and his followers walked out of the convention, and formed the Progressive, or ‘Bull Moose Party.”  TR might have been able to win election had the Democrats followed their standards and nominated a conservative candidate. Instead, they went with the nominally progressive Woodrow Wilson (after 46 ballots) and the divide in the GOP led to Wilson sweeping the nation electorally.  Based on the fact that he received 43% of the popular vote to TR’s 26% and Taft’s 23%, it’s crystal clear that if the GOP had lined up behind one candidate, Wilson would have lost. TR knew this.

In 1916, with the war in Europe raging nearly as hard as TR hatred of Wilson, he began a shadow campaign for the Republican nomination. The GOP, however, was still bitter about the last election, and refused to let him in. He managed to gather some support at the convention, but ended up losing the nomination to Charles Evans Hughes, future Supreme Court Justice. Roosevelt spent little campaigning for Hughes but rather against Wilson and for involvement in the war. The results of the election were the closest in over thirty years, with Wilson barely eking out a victory with 277 electoral votes to Hughes’ 254. (Wilson went to bed election night thinking he’d lost.) TR was blamed for the defeat by some, but when America finally joined the war in April of 1917, there was a mass realization that his thinking had been correct. Almost automatically, he was the Republican frontrunner for the 1920 nomination. After an exceptional midterms just before the Armistice, TR despite his poor health, was preparing for another term in the White House.

Then in January of 1919, he died throwing the GOP into chaos.

The Democratic Party was, if anything, in worse shape. By all rights, Democrats should have been considering likely nominees for the 1920 campaign. The problem was the man in the White House. It wasn’t just that Wilson was incredibly unpopular and basically unable to fulfill his duties. It was despite that; he wanted a third term in order to get vindication for the failure of his League of Nations. His doctors and even his wife tries to convince him to let go, but he held on to the idea throughout the nomination process. When the ticket was formed in 1920, he said very little in praise of it, even though the candidate for Vice President was his own Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

FDR had wanted to try and get the Presidential nomination himself in 1920, but his youth was against him. The only reason he got the VP nod was, frankly, because the bosses thought the last name Roosevelt would help add votes to a Democrat ticket that looked doomed to defeat. It counted for little: when November came, Warren Harding’s Republicans swept the country, beating the Democrats by a margin in the popular vote of nearly two to one. Harding was the first candidate to receive over 60 % of the popular vote.

By this point, we all know FDR’s story as well. It is not clear if he ever seriously considered the idea of a third term when he won his second term in 1936. But considering that he had won an even a bigger share of the popular vote than Harding had sixteen years earlier and had carried 46 of 48 states, it’s hard to imagine that at the time Republicans would have been terrified by the idea and Democrats would have considered a realistic possibility. Then he overreached himself, first with his plan to pack the Supreme Court, which many in his own party rejected, and then his decision to try and ‘purge’ his party of Southern conservative Democrats in 1938, which ended in what was considered a political overreached and ended in little but defeat. After the 1938 midterms and a recession that followed, FDR was considered a lame duck and he began to consider a life outside the White House.

Then World War II began and FDR changed his mind. This was not popular within his own party as those who had been hoping for a future afterwards. Nor was it necessarily popular among the rank-and-file. Announcing his reelection campaign for the senate, Harry Truman said that he thought the idea of violating the third term precedent was dangerous for any candidate. Indeed, even going so far as the convention, it looked unlikely that FDR could manage his ‘draft’ for his third term. It took the efforts of the Chicago bosses and intervention by Eleanor to arrange it.

FDR won reelection for a third term over Wendell Wilkie in November. And despite FDR’s horrid health conditions in 1944, the party determined that he needed to run again. He won reelection and of course died in April of 1945. It is far more likely due to their disgust with FDR as well as the fact that their pointed out in his last two campaigns had failed to raise much heat with voters, that the Republican controlled Congress managed to get the 22^nd Amendment passed in 1951, officially limiting President to two terms. Yet even then, they were willing to make exceptions: the incumbent Truman was considered ineligible from it. How seriously he may have considered running for a third term will never be known for certain: he eventually decided against it after Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Senator, managed to defeat him in the New Hampshire primary.  It’s unlikely he could have won given his own unpopularity at the time as well as the fact that Democrats had held the Presidency for the past twenty years. But it was still something the GOP were willing to grandfather him in for.

I have a feeling the main reason that it took such a long time to write into the Constitution a prohibition against third terms was because of another trend that had gone on just as long and would, in fact, outlast the 22^nd Amendment by quite a margin. That was the tendency of losing presidential candidates to attempt to regain the nomination of their party after being defeated in a previous election. Since this too is a subject of considerable interest to many at this time, in my next article in this series I will deal with this exact subject – though as political historians know, most of those candidates had even less luck than those who would try for a third term.

 

Homicidie Life on The Street Retropsective, Perfect Partnership, Imperfect Men

 

While going through several online sites, I found myself looking at an article listing the greatest TV characters of all time, a list that is almost always in flux. I was not surprised (but very happy) to see Frank Pembleton, even more than a quarter of a century, is still on the list. I was overjoyed to see that Tim Bayliss was on that list as well.

In one of my initial blogs for television, I wrote that Kyle Secor’s work as Tim Bayliss was by far the most underrated character portrayal in the history of television. My opinion on that has not fluctuated one iota since I wrote that column. Andre Braugher may have been the engine that drove Homicide for most of its run, but Kyle Secor’s Bayliss was the series’ conscience. Even as he turned from a wide-eyed rookie to an increasingly harden cop over the series, echoing the words that Pembleton himself preached to him as gospel, going from an utter novice to being considered a ‘legend’, you could see that there was still a soul in him, struggling against the ugliness of Baltimore. It was a masterful character study that Secor never got his due for at the time.

If the first go-to image of Homicide is Pembleton in the box, the second must always be of Bayliss and Pembleton in a car together, debating every issue of life, in complete disagreement on everything except the job (and sometimes even on that) One critic once referred to Pembleton and Bayliss as ‘the greatest love story on television’ which is kind of true, but for the length of that story, it always seemed like is one sided (Bayliss) and unrequited. Most cops partnerships are a marriage, but the union of Bayliss and Pembleton was that of a couple who argued about everything. I could give countless examples of this from the show, but it’s best summarized in a scene followed by a perfect juxtaposition.

In a fourth-season episode ‘Stakeout’, the squad is in the process of trying to identify victims of a serial killer. Bayliss has just returned to the squad when Pembleton, in his curt fashion, tells Bayliss to match dental records of missing teens to John Does at the morgue. Bayliss, for reasons I will go into below, balks complaining that Frank never says ‘please’ or ‘thank you.’ Frank reacts naturally: “Please don’t be an idiot. Thank you.” Bayliss starts to rant about how he doesn’t have to be in this job, that he could leave and pursue other options. Again, Pembleton doesn’t bat an eye, and asks him to do so or go back to the morgue. “In any case, stop wasting my time. All you ever do is keep repeating yourself over and over again.” Immediately, we cut back to the house where Howard and Lewis are using as their stakeout and we hear the husband walk right past them saying to his wife: “You keep repeating yourself over and over again…”

This is a very funny scene, and the reason it resonates so much with the viewer is because it sums up perfect what Bayliss and Pembleton’s relationship has been like to this point in the series and will basically continue to be the rest of the way: Bayliss begging for even the barest modicum of respect and dignity from his partner, Pembleton refusing to give him more than the barest crumb and almost deflecting when he does so. Later in this same episode, Bayliss complains that he’s been in the squad three years and he's never even been to Frank’s house. Frank immediately says he spends all day and some nights with him, why would he want him in his home? The fact that Frank is essentially married more to his job than his wife is a contradiction that Frank fundamentally doesn’t see. (I will get back to this later on in the article as it is actually critical to understand the relationship between both men.)

Both men fundamentally needed each other, but only Bayliss would be willing to acknowledge it. Pembleton spent most of the series denying it. This couldn’t have been clear in situation when both men either considered – or actually did – quit the force.

In the middle of Season 3, Frank was called in by Deputy Commissioner Harris to investigate the attempted kidnapping of a Congressman.  Frank would learn the kidnapping didn’t happened and had been an act by the Congressman to get revenge on a male staffer who’d be having a homosexual affair with. This would have been a problem, except the Congressman had filed a false police report. Under the direction of the Commissioner, Pembleton agreed not to charge the Congressman. The media found out, however. (All of this, for the record, is an accurate portrayal of an incident in Simon’s book.) When Pembleton was called in by Barnfather and Harris, Harris denied that he’d order Frank to do so. After he was suspended and Gee refused to back him, Frank resigned from the force.

In the final scene, Bayliss tries to persuade Frank not to do this, saying that he’s his friend. Frank, naturally, says to him: “You’re not my friend. I don’t have friends.” When Tim says that Frank’s a murder police, he tells Tim: “I’m looking forward to tomorrow when my shifts normally over and I haven’t seen one dead body.”

Of course, Frank’s attempt at being a domestic is an utter failure: he shows up at the Waterfront, which is just a few days away from opening telling Tim he’s burnt the dinner he was cooking for his wife and for a drink. Tim tries to lure him in by discussing his most recent murder, and Frank doesn’t give him the time of day. (After Frank leaves, Tim takes the money for his drink and hangs it over the bar; it remains there until the final episode.) Frank intends to testify about what happened despite the consequences, but at the last moment, he takes the responsibility himself. We’re never entirely sure why he does so (it’s certainly not for the Commissioner who he dresses down at the attempt of an apology in the next scene) but in the next scene, he’s back in Gee’s discussing Bayliss’ case, and with a minimum of groveling, Giardello gives him his gun and badge back (in a sign he knows his best detective, it’s still on his desk.) “Besides,” Giardello says, “Bayliss needs a partner.” He opens his office door, and like a puppy, Bayliss is there.

A year and a half later, Bayliss is considering resigning from the job because he feels a disconnect from everything. “I try not to care,” he says to Howard, “because if I actually do stop caring, I stop being who I am. No job is worth that.”) This scene takes place in ‘Stakeout’ where Pembleton and the Bayliss on the self-same serial killer case. Near the episode Frank is having a discussion with Gee, and Al asks him if Bayliss is considering quitting the force, a rumor that has spread from detective to detective from the start of the episode. Frank doesn’t deny it. “Is he serious?” Gee asked. “Yes,” Frank says simply.

In the last scene before the killer is captured, Pembleton reminds Bayliss that he is considering taking a security job. Bayliss acknowledges as much. Rather than tell Bayliss to stay because he needs him – Frank would never do that – he tells Bayliss he needs to stay in homicide, because it is the highest calling. “We speak for those who can speak for themselves no more,” he said in one of the show’s defining statements.  After the killer is caught and the names on the board are being changed from red to black, Pembleton asks almost casually: “Are you still thinking about quitting?” Bayliss paused, looks at the cases under his name, and his eyes meet the one open case. “Not until I close the Lambert case,” he says and walks away. Pembleton waits until Tim has left before the briefest of smiles crosses his face. It’s as close to an acknowledgement that he needs Tim aa much as Tim needs him as he will give until Braugher’s final episode on the series.

But no matter how much they need each other, every partnership has struggles. And in what would be its single most daring storyline, Fontana and his writers would give lie to the idea that personal trauma is the kind of thing that brings partners together.

 

In the fourth season finale, Pembleton and Bayliss are interrogating a potential suspect in a robbery that resulted in two deaths. Frank is standing over the suspect and his attorney when he grabs his head, begins to seize and collapses over both of them. When the medics arrive, one of them diagnoses Frank with what looks to be a stroke. Everyone goes to the hospital but when Giardello tries to convince Tim to leave the return to the interrogation, Tim refuses. During the last minutes of the episode, Tim sings Frank’s praises, and expresses his fears whether or not he’ll be as good a detective without Frank around.

When the fifth season begins, everyone is waiting for Frank to return. Tim is preparing a special chair for Frank before he and Munch are called out on a case. (Munch is not particularly glad to see Frank back; we will later learn that he called him multiple times but Frank never returned his calls. In a rare display of sheepishness, Pembleton admits he got them but didn’t think Munch would care that much.)

Pembleton walks into the squad with a shuffling step, a slur in his words, and gaps in his memory. He has been assigned to do administrative work until he can qualify on the firing range again, something he resents because he’s ‘always been a lousy shot.” Frank’s tongue may have been cut out but his personality is still the same. He will spend the first half of the season proving as much.

When Bayliss sees Frank, he runs to him and embraces him. In a reaction that perfectly describes their relationship, we see Pembleton recoil at the touch. Tim spends the remainder of that episode and much of the period of his recovery, acting like a nursemaid something Frank openly resents. “Stop clucking over me,” he says when Tim asks for what has to be the hundredth time whether he’s taken his medicine.

It becomes fundamentally clear that Frank wanted to come back to the job, working with Tim was not necessarily high on his list of priorities. And for all of Tim’s desire to see Frank again, when he begins offering advice about investigating certain cases, Tim barely pays it any heed.

After nearly a third of the season has gone by, Frank finally passes his firing exam and is allowed to return to the street. He and Bayliss catch a triple homicide and from the start they are clashing about everything. So far, everything’s business as usual. But when they are interrogating the man both think is guilty of the murders, Bayliss hauls Frank out of the box and says their rhythm is off and that he is genuinely terrified about what happens if his ‘head explodes’. Frank waves it off and the two manage the get the confession they need. But it is a sign of problems to come.

Their difficulties collide in one of the most critical episodes of the series ‘Betrayal’. Finding a child who was beaten to death by the side of the road, Bayliss and Pembleton find themselves involved in the case of the Thomsons, a mother who is so used to being beaten by her boyfriend that she is willing to cover for him even after he’s beats her daughter to death. Going back to the murder of Adena Watson, Bayliss has always had problems with the murders of children, but this was in particular enrages him. He yells at everybody, threatening to lock up a social worker for not doing her job to the DA who will end up giving the killer a reduced sentence. All of this leads to one of the most gut-wrenching moments in TV history when Frank finds Bayliss, heavily drunk and saying: “Every murdered child, every abused child, I understand, because those children are me.” He then reveals that when he was a boy his uncle sexually molested him and when he told his father about it, his father sided with his uncle over his son. (This storyline unfolds so naturally from what we know about Bayliss that it’s actually astonishing that Secor himself suggested it to Fontana.)

This is the kind of moment that in any other show would lead to something that would bring partners closer together. But when Frank tries clumsily to embrace Tim, it’s Bayliss’ turn to recoil. “That’s not why I told you,” he shouts. “I don’t want to be partners with you anymore,” he says as the episode ends. And when Tim says he didn’t mean a lot of what he said that night, he makes it very clear that he was serious about ending their partnership.

To explain how the story resolves, I must now turn to Frank’s marriage. While we saw relatively little of the detectives’ families throughout the series, we were privy to a large extent to Mary Pembleton (Ami Brabson, Andre Braugher’s real life wife). We spent much of the third season learning the two were trying to have a child, Mary was pregnant at the start of Season 4 and gave birth at the end of the season. (It is telling that for much of that season Tim was happier about the impending blessed event than Frank was.) Mary had always been supportive of Frank, and throughout the fifth season continued to demonstrate it, driving him to work every day, dealing with his stubbornness, showing support to Gee. But in Season 5 we could see there will be fault lines.  The medication Frank was taking led to impotence and in a very beautiful scene, he went to see his doctor to tell him how badly he wanted to make love to his wife again. Of all the detectives in the squad, Frank alone seemed to be a ‘role model’.

Not coincidentally, the episode after Frank and Tim terminated their partnership, Mary suggesting that the two of them should go into counseling, something Frank dismissed. That same episode, Mary went to see Tim and they actually went into the box. “Being a cop is all Frank’s wanted to be,” she told Tim. “I’m just not sure being a cop’s wife is what I want to be.” Bayliss reached out to Frank about partnering again that episode, and this time Frank rejects it out of hand.

In the ironically titled episode ‘Valentine’s Day’, Frank’s marriage seems to collapse. We see him in a therapy session where he is openly hostile to both the therapist and Mary. In a telling scene, she tells him he did everything to recover so he could get back to his job, not to her. In that episode, Frank agrees to have their daughter baptized but doesn’t show up until its over. That is the last straw for Mary; she moves not only out of the house but with her parents in a different state.

Frank spends the next episode reeling in his low point in the box, he is trying to get a confession from a suspect when Howard walks in telling him that they have evidence of the right person. That night, he invites Tim to dinner and tells him that Mary has left him. That night, he says he doesn’t know who he is anymore: “I was your partner, Mary’s husband, Olivia’s father…” Perhaps Frank knows if he’s to have any chance moving forward he has to mend his relationship with Tim first.

The rebuilding takes a while: they slowly begin partnering again, but Tim spends much of the rest of the season out of the squad visiting his old and now senile uncle. “What do I do with my hate?” he asks him at the end of one episode. And he spends the rest of the season trying to care for him. When Frank finally finds out the truth about what Tim’s doing, he asks if it makes him resolve things. Tellingly, Tim never answers.

In the season finale, dealing with the murder investigation of Beau Felton, Frank finally calls his wife and does everything short of begging her to come back. (We learn almost casually that’s she also six months pregnant with their second child.) Mary returns that night, and Frank leaves an investigation to beg her to come back. “Your home is here,” he tells her. When she admits she could have used the phone to yell at him, the joy in Frank’s face – something we almost never see – is palpable.

It is telling that when the sixth season begins after a shift in robbery, Frank’s priorities have shifted slightly. He still likes working murders, but he thinks more about his family than he ever did before. He actually talks about them, not only with Tim but with other detectives. At this point in his career, he actually seems to have mellowed slightly. He’s willing to work with other detectives with far less conflict than was usually the case before, admit when he has made a mistake, and give praise to other detectives when they’ve done a good job. (Some of them know as much: accepting praise from him, Falsone says: “Coming from you, that really means something.”) He is also more willing to go to bat for Bayliss than he has been in the past: when Tim spends much of the next season experimenting with his sexuality, Frank is not comfortable with it, but when other detectives take shots at him, he goes out of his way to defend him.

All of this comes to the surface in the final episodes of Season Six. Trying to bring down the Mahoney organization after the squad room is shot up, Frank has a clear shot at a dealer, but freezes. Tim jumps in front of him and takes a bullet. “My partner’s down!” he shouts in genuine despair.

At the hospital, Gee pulls him away from Bayliss and he is infuriated, first by the fact the bullet tore through his vest and then Gee forces him back to the squad to find the truth about how Mahoney died. It is for that reason as much as the fact that Gee refuses to let these be written up as murder that Frank hands in his badge that night. “I know that smell,” he says about Bayliss in his hospital bed. “Smells like death.”

Frank says a prayer over Tim’s bed to a God he has spent this entire series saying he barely believes in. The last shot of the episode is of Frank standing over Bayliss’ hospital bed, holding his hand. But he is true to his word and is gone by the next season.

Many – myself included – have critiqued Bayliss character in what would be the final season of Homicide, his Buddhist attitude and his continued exploration of his sexuality irritated many fans who had grown to love this character for seven seasons. But in a way, there’s a good argument that Tim is trying to find his way in a unit that no longer has the man he considered his partner and his friend. Bayliss does many questionable things in the final season, and there’s an excellent chance none of them would have happened with Frank there to serve as his anchor. When he departs the squad in one of the last scenes of the series, it is not just because of his own actions, but because he just can’t work in a world where Frank isn’t there to guide him when he needs him.

As far as the world of procedurals goes, the partnership of Frank Pembleton and Tim Bayliss is the gold standard that to this day, no other police drama has ever been able to surpass and almost certainly never will be. It’s not just that the procedural has almost entirely become plot rather than character driven. It’s because no police drama has ever tried so hard to show two detectives who complement each other perfectly on the job and will never get along anywhere else. Even with the perfect partnership, the writers of Homicide went out of their way to make sure that we knew that the detectives involved were never perfect, as well as that they needed each other desperately and would never acknowledge it even to themselves.

 

Homicide Life On The Street Retrospective: Partners in Blue, Part 1: Exploding the Myth of the Partners as Soul Mates

 

 

Almost from the beginning of television as a medium, the police procedural has always believe in the idea of eternal partners. No doubt the lion’s share of this is due to the idea of consistency among audiences: the idea that the viewer will only tolerate the same old, same old week in and week out. Either they would work as a team, as they did in Dragnet or Hill Street Blues, as part of a squad, as they did in Barney Miller or as the seventies and eighties would make a habit of, by themselves, most famously in shows like Columbo and lesser series like Banachek.

This pattern was not something even the constant rotation of cast members in Law and Order would alter. There was always a constant for the  length of the procedural: Chris Noth might have given way to Benjamin Bratt and then to Jessie L. Martin, but Jerry Orbach was always there: for all you knew, they were the only two cops working murders in the 27^th Precinct. NYPD Blue might have been willing to do radical things with language and sexuality, but it fundamentally didn’t alter that format throughout its entire run. Dennis Franz would work with Jimmy Smits, then Rick Schroeder, then Mark-Paul Gosselaar.  Admittedly, there were some variations: by the time the series reached season three, there were four other detectives in the precinct and that basic number would be the same until the end of the series. But it remained fairly consistent in that line of partnership for most of its run: Nicholas Turturro worked with Gordon Clapp, Kim Delaney with Andrea Thompson, and the only changes came when one or more left.  Rare was the time you would ever see, say, Medavoy working with Russell, and usually it had to do with one of their partners being injured or on leave. Even when the squad worked together on the same murder, these partnership almost never varied.

This pattern remained true throughout the 21^st Century. Benson and Stabler worked together for more than a decade together, and the only time Benson wasn’t there was when Mariska Hargitay was on maternity leave. After Chris Meloni left the series, her character rarely worked with anyone else, and I think that more than any other reason is why she is now the head of the Special Victims Unit.  Criminal Intent essentially followed the original’s pattern verbatim throughout its run: even when there were more than one set of partners, the twain rarely met.

Nor did this fundamentally change anything when it came to Peak TV. The Shield., in all the ways it fundamentally broke the mold, was traditional in that sense: Claudette and Dutch were essentially working cases throughout the length of the series, and only after Claudette became head of the squad did Dutch work with someone else. Shows like The Closer, Major Crimes, and even The Wire didn’t alternate from that pattern: Provenza and Flynn worked together from the Pilot of The Closer and stayed together pretty much until the last episode of Major Crimes.  There were some alterations with The Wire – Bunk worked with McNulty and Lester throughout the show – but it never seemed as critical to the series, because so much of the police work was based on the detail, not the Homicide Unit.  The CSI franchise was formulated entirely on cops working with investigators and there wasn’t much alteration even with the constant shift of actors. Not even the most highly acclaimed procedurals like, say True Detective, have dared mess with this format: it didn’t matter how much time passed, Woody Harrelson was still working with Matthew McConaughey. That’s the formula and no one will dare screw with it.

Or almost no one.

I’m not necessarily saying that Homicide when it began its run in 1993 had an any intention of violating even this myth. There is a huge argument that circumstances forced the change. But to their credit, once this change was forced upon them, Tom Fontana and his writers spent the remainder of the series steering into it, and willing to do anything to mess with the viewers comfort level.

When Homicide began its run, there were eight detectives and four partnerships. Steve Crosetti (Jon Polito) and Meldrick Lewis (Clark Johnson); Kay Howard (Melissa Leo) and Beau Felton (Daniel Baldwin); John Munch (Richard Belzer and Stan Bolander (Ned Beatty) and Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) and rookie Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor). In the pilot, the other detectives publicly groused about how Pembleton never worked with a partner which made Giardello intend to force him to work with Felton, who clearly disliked him. In that episode, the two of them are taking a car to a murder when Pembleton can’t find the keys to a squad car and rather than go up and get a new set, spends the next two hours methodically going through every car in the lot. Howard has taken Bayliss to see a dead body, and when they arrive in the squad, Pembleton is still searching. Howard finds her suspect and by pure chance, Bayliss takes a ride with Pembleton.

All of the partnerships in the first couple of seasons (together adding up to thirteen episodes) reflect variations on a theme. Crosetti and Lewis are the two detectives who work together well; Felton is supporting of the only woman in the squad, Munch is constantly trying to win Bolander’s approval, a man constantly speaking up his old partner, and Bayliss is the rookie trying to fit in with a man who openly disdains much of his values. They will spend the entirety of the series becoming friends, and at least on Pembleton’s part, denying that he is Bayliss’ friend.

It is conceivable that this would have remained the status quo for the series had not outside factors intervened.  The first prior to the third season when Jon Polito either resigned or was fired (the truth has never fully come out even nearly thirty years) and was replaced by Isabella Hoffman as Megan Russert. The eventual explanation for Crosetti’s departure led to one of the great episodes in television history when Crosetti, having supposedly been on vacation for a month, is pulled out of the bay. The squad spends the episode trying to deny the obvious, which is that he has killed himself and none of them will ever know the reason why.

Almost any other series would have immediately named another detective to the squad. Homicide didn’t, using the very plausible argument that there was no money in the budget for another detective.  So instead Lewis spent the entirety of Season 3 essentially floating from detective to detective on cases, usually with deeply flawed results each time. Sometimes they were hysterical as when Lewis drove Bayliss and himself to a crime scene and wrecked the squad car when they finally got there. Some of them led to far less congeniality as when Bayliss and Pembleton worked together on a shooting, and fundamentally disagreed about whether the shooter came from the black side of town or the white side of town. (Meldrick was convinced they should start with the latter; Pembleton believed the former.) Not once did of these occasions lead to a necessary click: though Meldrick would work with several of the detectives again over the years, he had never had the same comfort level with any of them.

Lewis, for better or worse, would become the detective who ended shifting partners the most over the series. When Season 4 debuted the next year, he finally got a permanent partner: former arson detective Mike Kellerman (Reed Diamond). There was mockery from the other detectives on the squad at his inability to keep a partner, and the assignment seemed random more than anything else. The two worked well together and formed the base of a partnership for the next season, with far less stress. But in Season 5, the partnership would fracture because of Kellerman’s issues, both of which I have detailed in earlier articles: his investigation for bribery and the shooting of Luther Mahoney. More out of guilt than anything else, he switched partners again to new detective Paul Falsone (Jon Seda) in Season Six and finally to Renee Sheppard in Season 7 (Michael Michelle). Even then, he continued to cause conflict, not being able to stay with either partner do mainly to his own actions.

Indeed, in the final season we got a sense of just how false the idea of partner loyalty could be. He had been working for Sheppard for half a season and in the middle of an investigation into a crack house, Sheppard was beaten up and her gun was stolen. An infuriated Meldrick went on a rampage and stormed into a nightclub, demanding the gun back. At the end of the episode, he brought her gun and all seemed forgiven. But over the next several episodes, a nasty streak began to emerge. When Renee returned to the squad in the next episode, he brought her ‘a present’ – his hat with the bullet hole from the shooting still in it. The next episode, to welcome her back into the rotation, he switches calls with Falsone, giving himself an ‘easier case’ because he thought Sheppard wasn’t up to it. Sheppard found out, was angered, and spent the rest of the season infuriated with Lewis. Both detectives spent the rest of the show working with every other detective in the squad, before finally making peace in the final minutes.

Nor was this pattern entirely due to Meldrick. At the beginning of Season 4, both Daniel Baldwin and Ned Beatty resigned from the series due to the fact the show had to live on the bubble the first three years and that it had harmed their chances for opportunities. Felton and Bolander were both suspended due to drunken and disorderly behavior at a New York Police convention. Bolander’s character would retire at the beginning of Season Five; Felton’s final fate would not be known until the end of Season Five. (See earlier articles for more details.) This left both Munch and Howard without partners.

The series didn’t handle this transition quite as well. In the opening of Season Four, Kay would take the sergeant’s exam and get promoted early in the season. Unfortunately, sergeants are more advisory that they are investigators and her character became increasingly superfluous to the show as the series went on. She basically stopped working cases on her own, and much of the next two seasons had her barely out on the street backing up her fellow cops. She was essentially deskbound the rest of the series, even when Felton was found out to be murdered.  Leo’s characters was written out of the show at the beginning of Season Six.

They handled Munch’s situation much better. He spent a fair amount of that season mourning the departure of Bolander and took it incredibly personally that he was ignoring his phone calls and refusing to talk to him. In a sad episode, Bolander has promised to show up at the Waterfront for a night of revelry but calls Bayliss and tells him he can’t make it, refusing to even talk to Munch.

Munch takes the loss of Stanley far more personally. When Megan Russert is demoted to detective halfway through the season, she ends up taking Bolander’s desk, and he tells her ‘not to get comfortable’. The two end up working together for the rest of the season, but this partnership is far more awkward than even his and Bolander’s: Russert presses him on his laziness throughout the rest of his run.

Naturally, when Isabella Hoffman left the series in Season 5, Munch spent that season a wanderer again, now trying to understand why his partners as well as his wives keep leaving him. Another series might have tried to force him and Lewis together during Kellerman’s suspension, but the two only work together once, and they barely talk to each other.

He eventually ends up working with Kellerman in Season 6, and while this partnership works a lot better than his last two, it ends the same way. In the final season, Munch finds himself working mostly with Bayliss (I’ll get to that reason a little later) but Bayliss’ personality after his shooting “rubs my rectum the wrong way.”  He spends as much of Season 7 working with other detectives as he does with Bayliss.

As new editions came to the squad in the last two seasons, there were some partnerships with a certain amount of steadiness. Stu Gharty (Peter Gerety) and Laura Ballard (Callie Thorne) essentially worked together the next two seasons with no real problems, despite their age difference as well as some prejudices. Similarly Falsone would spent much of the last two seasons working with former narcotics detective Terri Stivers (Toni Lewis) and even less conflict. But even here, there was constant room for variation. Ballard would spend a fair amount of time working with many of the other detectives in the squad and Gharty and Falsone would do the same. A lot of these shared investigations would be rockier than others: in the aftermath of one, Munch would nearly hit Gharty with an ashtray and in another, Lewis would work with Ballard but spend a lot of time dismissing and demeaning her. But it is notable that by this time in the series run, the show had become comfortable with the idea of using the cast changes to create interesting variations on their themes.  Lewis was just as likely to get into a pissing contest with Falsone as he was with Munch, and it was just as likely that Pembleton could get along just fine with Falsone.  Homicide constantly believed in shaking up the viewers comfort level. The fact that it chose to do so with the basic tenet of the idea of the partnership was one of the best moves they made.

They were even willing to do that constantly with the partnership that was essentially the core of the series for the majority of its run. In the next article in this series, I will discuss the complicated relationship between Bayliss and Pembleton and how the writer’s decision to turn this partnership on its head led to some of its greatest moments for both actors and the series.

 

 

Why Jackie Robinson's Path To Integrating Baseball Was The Only Way It Could Have Worked

 

Something that I truly loathe about many of the revisionist historians everywhere – and that’s not limited to this site – is that they almost universally seem willing to condemn anybody who doesn’t have the values that they are universally accepted now but have only become accepted in this century.  I acknowledge the fact that so many people in positions of power across the country and the world are so rigid that feel the values that were established hundreds of years ago are still the only standard we should live by is ridiculous. But I also think that condemning those same people who lived hundreds of years for not being able to see the future is equally ludicrous. Hindsight is always 20/20. I never heard anyone ever say that foresight should be as well.

And yet that’s the argument that so many people across the ideological spectrum seem not only to hold too, but simultaneously blame all of the people in power for not having. This level of conceit is irrational, not only because it blames people for not having values that – to repeat – almost no one, not just these historical figures  - had.  The fact that Lincoln managed to free the slaves – something no one else of his time was willing to consider – is somehow not good enough because he didn’t believe black people were the equal of whites. There were some politicians at the time who did think so – Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler among them – but they were in a decided minority of the entire population.

Furthermore, so many of this things seem to almost by design condemn so many of those crusaders for not doing enough. All of them did the best they could at the time under the structures that they had available and often in a system and society that firmly rejected change. But in the eyes of future generations, incremental changes are never enough. That actually brings me to the purpose of this article.

While watching a documentary this week on Willie Mays, the story of integration of baseball was brought up. There was a commentator who attacked the way Jackie Robinson was signed and the integration of baseball as a whole by saying the ‘right’ way to do it would have been to sign entire Negro League Teams and put them in the majors. I’ve actually seen a version of this argument before in Howard Zinn’s writings on baseball, and this blanket statement demonstrated both the magical thinking of so many revisionists with complete and utter denialism of the reality of the situation at the time. So in this article, I will make it very clear why such an idea, as ambitious and as much of a panacea as it sounds to moderns was utterly and completely implausible at the time, almost certainly could never have worked in practice and at the end of the day could have been far more destructive to integration in major league baseball and perhaps American race relations as a whole.

And let’s start this decision with a story about baseball that involves a certain kind of magical thinking. For a while, it was believed to be true and is now most likely apocryphal. But because it plays into this scenario that they are discussing, let’s act as if it was.

In 1942 Bill Veeck, on his way to becoming baseball’s greatest showman and iconoclast was planning to buy his first major league team: the Philadelphia Phillies. The Phillies had spent the better part of that century in last place, and Veeck intended to change that. He intended to stock the entire roster with Negro League stars. He wouldn’t have had to go far to find them, either: two of the greatest franchise in that league, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays were practically the Phillies neighbors. And unlike Branch Rickey did with Jackie Robinson, he intended to fully compensate all the teams for their value. Given the quality of baseball during World War II, he was certain this would take the Phillies from eighth place to a pennant contender overnight: a safe assumption.

According to him, he made one mistake. Before purchasing the Phillies, he informed Commission Kennesaw Mountain Landis of his intentions out of respect for his office. Landis then went out of his way to make sure the Phillies were purchased by someone far less competent: less than a year after buying the Phillies, he would be suspended from the game for betting on baseball.

Veeck told this story in his autobiography and it was repeated as truth by various sources, including Ken Burns’ Baseball.  Research has led some historians to believe it is apocryphal, but the reason it sounds believable is when you consider both individuals involved. Veeck’s real history on the integration of baseball is one of the best of any owner in history. When he bought the then Cleveland Indians in 1946, he would integrate the American League, first by purchasing outfielder Larry Doby, then signing the legendary Satchel Paige. Their contributions led to Cleveland setting American League attendance records and winning the World Series just two years later. When he purchased the White Sox in 1958, he was responsible for signing several excellent Latino ballplayers, among them Luis Aparicio one of the greatest fielding shortstops in history. In his last stint as owner, when he ran the White Sox in 1976 to 1979, he made a different kind of history, hiring Doby to manage the team in 1978. Doby was the second African-American to manage a baseball team.

Landis, by contrast, was considered an autocrat, and while he might not have agreed with the racial policies that governed baseball, he did nothing to change it. This is critical because Landis was the only commissioner who the owners obeyed rather than the other way around. If Landis had said at any time that Negro Leagues should play the game, the owner might have acquiesced. His actions speak otherwise. During the 1920s, he made it a rule that barnstorming teams could take the names of professional ball clubs. He didn’t want any Negro club to be able to say that they beat the Yankees or the Giants even in exhibitions. He stopped the signing of Josh Gibson by multiple teams. And when during the war, black reporters pressed Landis for integration, he bluntly said: “I’ve said everything I’m going to say on the subject. The answer is no.” So I fully accept why this story would ring true.

Now let us look briefly at the record. Branch Rickey was smart enough to wait for Landis to die in 1944 and for the war to end before he began his process of scouting the Negro Leagues. There was an unofficial straw polls of the sixteen clubs about signing black players before the 1945 season. Rickey’s Brooklyn Dodgers were the only team to vote yes.

The only hope there was that the tides might turn was with the new commissioner Happy Chandler.  Chandler’s claim to fame in baseball is that he basically said that it was all right for black people to play baseball. There is no evidence on the record that he did anything to make it easier for Robinson or other teams to integrate. But the implication that the commissioner was behind this may have given Rickey enough motivation to go forward. The other owners did not support this – indeed, many of them called them to condemn him for doing so and would be among his greatest adversaries in this struggle – but as long as the Commissioner was not directly on their side, Rickey could say that he had backing.

(It’s interesting to consider why Chandler might have done this, and it might have been due to his political aspirations. Chandler had been a Senator from Kentucky before taking the job, and it is possible he thought leading the way on the integration might lead to higher office. When he left baseball, he became Governor of Kentucky, ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1956 and was, in a situation filled with irony, considered by George Wallace to run with him as an Independent. Chandler eventually lost the job because Wallace thought his racial record was too inclusive for him to add the ticket, while Wallace’s eventual choice of Curtis LeMay ended up being the biggest drag on his run.)

Repeating the struggles that Robinson went through in his rookie year is almost superfluous at this point, so I’ll just mention that none of the owners wanted to experiment to succeed. The Phillies manager went out of his way to racially bait Robinson the first time they came there. The St. Louis Cardinal threatened to boycott the team. And in their club meetings, Rickey was privately and publicly ridiculed. It was not until the Brooklyn Dodgers won the pennant and at the gate that the owners began to change their mind. Even then, they might have considered otherwise had not Veeck’s Indians won the AL pennant and World Series that year.

Even after all that, the progress was incredibly slow for some teams to even go through with token integration. I wrote in an article last week about how reluctant the New York Yankees were to go through with it, but they were just among the most extreme example. It was not until 1959, when the Boston Red Sox hired the utility infielder Pumpsie Green, that baseball was completely integrated.

Now that one is reminded of all of this history and these struggles, the idea that somehow an entire team could have been signed and integrated should be acknowledged would have been impossible. But let’s indulge that magical thinking and try to play out that scenario that so many smart people think could happen.

 

First of all, I don’t believe for a second the owners would have allowed this happen even if he’d done this after Landis had died. Given how litigious and conservative ownership was basically in every aspect of the game prior and after this, they would have moved heaven and earth to stop it. They would have gone through the courts and found sympathetic judges to stop the sale from every happening.  They would have gone to every big name in Philadelphia – including Connie Mack, who ran the crosstown Athletics, who was still the games biggest icon in his eighties and who vocally opposed integration. And most importantly, they would have issued blanket statements that none of their teams would ever play a professional team run by Veeck. (Most of them would end up hating Veeck when he actually became an owner because he viewed all of them pretension elites, which was an accurate assessment of the whole bunch.)

But say Veeck was capable of doing what he said he did. Say he filled a team with Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston, etc. How would he have managed to get them to spring training in Florida and Arizona? He sure as hell wouldn’t have received any backing from his fellow owners, who had absolutely no problem putting Jackie Robinson through the ringer a few years later. They would allow for the cancellation of as many exhibition games as possible, refuse to let them take warmups on their fields, not let them use the dugouts. Hell, they’d probably pay extra for hecklers to do their worst.

That’s just the pre-season. Assuming they got through all that, can you imagine a season actually happening? Robinson spent his rookie year being spiked, thrown at, jockeyed unmercifully by players, coaches, and managers. Multiply this by twenty-five and try to imagine all twenty five players getting through a single game with no incidence. And that’s only in the home games; I don’t want to think what would happen when they went on the road. The entire team would have to stay in separate hotels, eat at separate restaurants and then come to the stadium and witness a torrent of booing and garbage being thrown from the entire stands. It would not surprise me if a riot broke out – which the owners would have wanted.

And of course the ownership would want this experiment to fail and would do everything to isolate the white management and owners who worked for the team. I’m pretty sure Veeck would not have been able to negotiate a single deal with the front office team as long as he owned the Phillies.  Not that many of the white players would object to this, given how many Dodgers signed a petition against Robinson joining the team in 1947.

Now I imagine there would be a counterbalance: turnout among African-Americans would surge in every city they played. Does anyone see a scenario where that could work out particularly well? There had been fighting in the stands and brawls well before this, but by the twentieth century had basically eliminated. I could very well see owners encouraging this kind of behavior as well to make everything uncomfortable for any black person who dared to attend a game.

I imagine the owners would let something like this happen for a season and then go to Chandler, or whoever was Commissioner, and say with straight faces: “You can’t let this continue. Veeck is doing everything possible to destroy the integrity of the game and its existence as a business. You have to remove him as owner.” And the Commissioner would do it. Without blinking. Every commissioner has to protect the business of baseball, which was shaky after the Depression and the Second World War.  They would argue it was for the good of the game.

Now consider the ripple effects of all this.  The owners now have a justifiable reason to put off integration even longer. “Well, we tried to let those people into the game and they nearly destroyed it. It’s better for baseball that they stay in their own leagues.” The ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ would go back into effect. Any attempt at integration would be put off for at least another decade, maybe longer. And here’s one more pleasant thought: what if the ripples didn’t stop there? What if black people, having seen what happen when the National Game gets full integration, now decide to pull back from trying to integrate more important movements? Is the civil rights movement itself delayed for longer as a result? Does the argument for racial equality, which was powered by the defeat of Hitler, lose momentum after this among the rich and powerful?

I admit this last bit might be purely dystopian thinking on my part, but I’d make the argument is far more grounded in the reality of 1940s and 50s America than the magical thinking that says that the best way to have integrated baseball was by putting an entire Negro League Team as part of it.

Now I grant you that the death of the Negro Leagues was a tragedy, but it was also an inevitable and I’d say necessary one. One black sportswriter wrote at the time: “Nothing was killing black baseball but democracy.” The law of the supreme court for half a century in America, not just baseball, was ‘separate but equal’. And those two are, and have always been, mutually exclusive.  I don’t deny that the institutions of America are dominated by white supremacy, I don’t deny it’s unfair that so many qualified minorities of every race, gender and sexual orientation have to work so much harder to get what a white cis man has. But that’s the thing about democracy: it’s about compromise. And that is the price of compromise. If you want to participate in all of the major institutions of America, you have to be willing to do the work. That change is incremental at times – the actual process of the integration of baseball demonstrates that. There are inevitably, counter-reactions to this, and there are definitely occasions where the needle moves in the other direction – the fact that there were no black players born in America in this year’s World Series for the first time since 1950 is a clear sign that the institutions can reverse themselves. Institutions by definition are imperfect, but the idea that they are irreversibly flawed, deserved to be abandoned and could only have worked properly if they’d done the impossible is one that too many people genuinely seem to believe.

I don’t expect this article to change many people’s point of view: it is the nature of the revisionist to view everything their way regardless of the facts. But I want you to just take this one small case and put it in context. Was the method that brought Jackie Robinson to the majors flawed? Yes. But even in hindsight, it is impossible to imagine any other way integration would have worked. It is a credit to both Robinson and Rickey that it worked at all.

 

 

 

Constant Reader Book of the Month November: The Turnout by Megan Abbott

 

 

I have been a patron of the arts for almost my entire life, and I have never quite been able to appreciate ballet. Musicals have always been an object of attraction, and while I don’t fully appreciate opera I can on some occasions, under the majesty of it. But ballet has always been a mystery to me.  How can one tell a narrative,  a story, simply through the art of dance of movement, with no dialogue? It is a visual art more than the others, but at the same time it also involves restraint. The dancers faces are usually expressionless if you can see them at all.  They must show us everything through movement.

And it’s an infinitely more demanding art that the theater or opera. Ballet is practically a competitive sport based on the demands it has on the body. Your career in ballet is inevitably far shorter than that of a professional singer as the body itself gives out over the cost of the strains on the muscles and bones.  Consequently, much like with professional sports, the career for the ballet dance often begins much younger than that of the professional singer, is over far earlier, and can often end far more abruptly.

What is the cost to those who devotes their lives to it? Not just physically, but emotionally. Two of the greatest films in history have been made about ballet, and both of them have an almost surreal nature to them. Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes was a great film that dealt with the story of ballet, expressed through a love triangle between two ingenues and an impresario. It has one of the most famous and still inexplicable endings in all of cinema, one that even now no one can truly explain. In 2010 came Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, which started in the world of surrealism where not even the protagonist could tell what was really happening half the time. The ending was just as mysterious and inexplicable as The Red Shoes; people are still trying to interpret it. Buried under both of them are messages of what it costs to be the greatest in your profession, at the expense of all else, including love and really any other human emotion: both movies end with the heroine appearing to give everything for art’s sake.

It's very hard to read Megan Abbott’s The Turnout and not think of either film at least once. Not just because both the movies and the novel are set in the world of ballet, or because both films deal with how being raised to be the best in a certain way comes at the expense of everything else, but because you spent much of the novel dealing with the idea of the unreliable narrator. Not even the person the story is told from truly accepts any aspect of what she sees as real because she can only view it from one perspective and that one has been warped and flawed pretty much since she was born.

I recently discovered the wonders of Megan Abbott this year when I finally read Dare Me, a novel about a high school cheerleader team that could be described as Bring it On meets Richard III without doing it justice.  Throughout the novel we find ourselves looking at two leaders of a cheer team engaged in a power struggle with their coach and we leave with no more understanding then we did at the beginning as to what makes these teenage girls the way they are.  Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised because they aren’t either. This summer I read The Fever a novel that takes place in a high school and involves a serious of mysterious illness that afflict first one girl, and then half the class, leading to an outbreak of hysteria among the student body, the teachers, and the community at large. An explanation for what happens comes at the end of the novel that doesn’t truly explain anything, perhaps not even to the girls who know why it happened.

These brief summaries may make you think that Abbott doesn’t believe in resolution for her novels, and maybe she doesn’t. I didn’t find this a flaw in either book because her prose is masterful, the pace is lightning fast and the characters are fascinating. In both novels, there was an underlying theme in the danger of sexuality among teenagers and how the adult world tends to view it as dangerous. All the main characters in The Turnout are adults, but Abbott clearly suggests that same tone of the danger of sexuality and just how much danger it comes in the teenage years.

At the center of the novel are Dara and Marie Durant, two sisters who have been dancing pretty much since they could walk. ‘Dara and Marie were the same, but different,” Abbott says early in the novel. “Dara was cool, but Marie was hot. Dara was dark, but Marie was light.” They spend their childhoods in the worship of their mother (we don’t learn either her or the father’s real name) a legendary dancer who runs the Durant School for Dance. Both of them grow up worshipping her and dance.

The warning signs in an Abbott novel tend to come fairly early; in this case, they start coming by the first few pages. Their parents pull them out of school before they leave grade school, and they are homeschooled from that point on. They spend almost all of their childhood, then their adulthood in the house where they grew up. Charlie, another dancer becomes their mother’s prize pupil when he is  barely thirteen. At some point, he ends up moving into their house and he and Dara lose their virginity to each other when they are fourteen, something that their mother doesn’t seem to care about. “It was the three of them. Always the three of them. Until it wasn’t. And that was when everything went wrong.”

The novel is narrated entirely from the point of view of Dara, who from the beginning of the novel seems to be the strong one, the leader  of all of them. But even from the beginning of the book, we sense that her attitude is deeply flawed in ways that she thinks are normal, but that are bizarre to anyone else. Until a few months earlier, the three of them lived in their house together and when Marie moved into the spare room above the studio, Dara seems to consider that an affront. Then in the midst of rehearsals for The Nutcracker, the highlight of their year but something she considers  ‘a necessary evil’, there is a fire in the studio. Dara, almost irrationally, thinks it’s Marie’s fault. Repairs are necessary. A contractor is needed and recommended by Mrs. Bloom, whose daughter Bailey is one of their students.

The contractor is Derek. He’s fifty, big, brutish, an oaf.  Dara looks down on him, but that’s nothing new; she spends the novel looking down on everybody including her sister.  Derek offers to repair the studio, but then he offers more, the idea of expanding. He does not impress Dara, Marie seems scared, and Charlie speculates. Why play it safe? Dara is persuading when he uses the magic words: “It’s what your mother always wanted.”

Dara goes along with it. The repairs proceed apace. And then one day Dara comes to the studio early and Marie is with the contractor. “Like animals,” she thinks to herself.

And now I think I’ve told you enough about the plot. In a sense, it does unfold like the typical noir: financial scheming, an unwanted interloper into a safe environment, a dangerous affair, increasingly reckless behavior, and finally a brutal death. You might be able to see some of the twists and turns coming and it’s not like Abbott is subtle about them. The reason I think The Turnout is such a brilliant book is because it’s a story not about the horror show that unfolds but that somehow it’s taken this loss for something like this to happen.

The hints are there throughout the novel. Derek makes a discussion about friends, and Dara says: “We don’t have any friends.” Her constant looking down at everything Marie does to assert her independence as if somehow that is an affront to everything they stand for. Her disgust at basically everyone, with the possible exception of some of the students she monitors. And the message of sexuality throughout the novel in a dangerous way, how Dara constantly thinks of waking Charlie in the middle of the night for sex by use of a stimulus that is excruciatingly painful.

Most of all, there is the worship of the Durant mother and the condemnation of the father. Everything we learn about the mother throughout the novel would be considered aberrant if not perverse by any reasonable standard.  The father is rarely shown, but always as the villain in the story, the brute her mother had to live with. Only as the novel progresses to we get to see that the mother was no doubt as bad as the father at times and no doubt did psychological damage that everybody = Dara, Marie, and Charlie – have never been able to escape from.  Their parents died in what was considered an accident for which Dara has always blamed her father, even though her mother was driving the car at the time.  We don’t realize why until the very end of the novel, and it makes almost everything else the mother did far worse by comparison.

There is a clear reason as to why all three are as badly damaged as they are. The final revelation comes in the last thirty pages, though Abbott has hinted at it several times before. It is one of the most shocking details I’ve read in a contemporary novel but what will now doubt shock the reader the most is how even when it is revealed, Dara is still trying to defend it. “Some people can ruin  everything,” she says when the ugly truth is revealed and the fact that she still is defending explains that of the three, she is by far the most broken, probably beyond repair.  The three of them have been controlled all their childhood by the mother, and even decades after the fact are still under her spell. It  explains the actions of at least two of them and explains Dara’s counter reaction by default.

And gliding over all of this is The Nutcracker: the dramas that go on between all of the dancers, particularly Bailey Bloom. In a lesser novel, Bailey’s struggles as Clara would just be a sub-plot barely paid attention too. In The Turnout, Abbott spends nearly as much time with the rehearsals and actions going on as she does to what happens the plotting go on in the studio itself. The show must go on, as they say, and the Durant sisters do everything in their power to keep it going, even as the repairs drag on and wreck the studio inside and out, as the fights go on, not even the suspicious death can stop the show…until something they can not control does.

Equally important to the novel is the idea of construction and buildings. The repairs of the studio take on a life of their own and a pure cataclysm, literally involving fire and floods. The house the Durants live in has the sanctity of a cathedral, with basements and rooms with bunkbeds and furniture that lingers.  At one point, we learn about the construction of a bathroom and how that person says: “I wish I could burn this place down.”  Buildings are given the illusion of permanence and Derek is the force who keeps tearing them down. Nature always seems to triumph over whatever we mere humans can accomplish, and this seems abundantly clear by the last section of the novel.

I began this review by mentioning The Red Shoes and Black Swan. One of the things they both have in common is that the story of each ballet underlies the plot. In The Red Shoes, a woman puts on a pair of the title objects and dances until she dies. In Swan Lake,  we are told of the story of the Black Swan and White Swan, portrayed by the same dancer showing us the duality of a person,

Why did Abbott use The Nutcracker as the ballet at the center of The Turnout, aside from the fact it’s the most well known ballet in the world? As Dara tells us the story of the ballet and the folk tale it is based on have very different endings. In the ballet, the heroine is Clara who follows the Nutcracker to a magical world but at the end of it must return to the ordinary world. In the folk tale, the heroine ends up staying in the magical world forever.

In the folk tale, the heroine is called Marie.

The ending of The Turnout is not obscure the same way The Fever or Dare Me is. It seems perfectly clear what everyone’s fate is. But nevertheless, when the book was over I kept asking myself the same question that may occur to the reader? Which sister is Clara, the one who escapes? And who’s Marie, the one who stays in the world of fantasy forever?