Read More Novels

I was lucky to get a whole bunch of great books from my wife for Christmas this year, including the novel The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. Now I might be partial to it considering that a lot of the early parts take place in the corner of Nebraska where I grew up, and a lot of the rest of it takes place in the city where I work (New York), and in between there's life on the road, which is one of my favorite places to be. Even taking away those ingrained advantages, the book completely entranced me. I loved the multiple perspectives, the characters, and how it held me in suspense. Reading the book on the way to and from work on the train became a highlight of my day. Now that I am done with it, I feel an actual loss in my life, a hole in need of filling.

During the week and a half when I was reading the book I tried and failed to watch American prestige television. A really good novel truly CONSUMES me like nothing else, it dominates my thoughts in the day's idle moments. By comparison prestige TV felt far less vital, far less interesting, and far more formulaic. I tended to know which way things were going on the TV when The Lincoln Highway surprised me in every chapter. The characters felt two-dimensional, and I could never truly put myself in their heads. The beats and formulas of prestige television in the US are pretty well established. The thing is, if I want formula I would much rather read a spy novel or watch an old episode of The Rockford Files. 

Neither of those things pretend to be something that they aren't. They also do far less to waste my time. After an hour of The Rockford Files everything has been nicely resolved. The prestige TV format typically includes episodes that fill time and do little to drive the plot forward or even develop the characters. I have so little time in my day, and hearing someone say "you have to watch the first few episodes before it gets good" is the surest way to never get me to watch something. 

I should also add that this is a problem with American TV in particular. While I was reading the novel my wife and I watched the Swedish show Anxious People on Netflix, and I really enjoyed it. It was only six episodes and the first one left such a strong impact I definitely wanted more. It's also a show about LIFE, a topic one tends to find much more in literature than in American prestige television, which relies on some kind of high concept, even for the good shows. A mob boss who goes to therapy. A serial killer hunting serial killers. A chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. And so on and so on and so on. Yawn.

Not that I won't pick up a new show to watch. We just started Station Eleven, for example, and I like it a lot. It has even forced me to reckon with the losses of the pandemic in ways I tend to place out of my mind. At the same time, the story is taking forever to unfold and a lot of the beats feel overly familiar. 

There's another thing too: The Discourse. The Discourse has warped viewership of prestige TV to the point that I can't watch anything without feeling like it's been talked to death already. My expectations are too fully formed by the time I put on the first episode. Novel reading is not something beloved by the people participating in The Discourse, thank God. I can read a novel without thinking that reaction to it is taking some kind of side. Even better, it's something I don't talk about online with strangers, it's something I share with my friends. And let me tell you, they are far more fruitful conversations to be had with the latter group.  

So while I am enjoying Station Eleven, what I really want is a new novel, one as good as the last few that I've read. Something to consume me. Goodness knows I need it right now. 

The Consolation of M*A*S*H

I have recently returned to an old ritual to help me weather the hard days at the end of the long road that's been teaching and parenting under COVID: watching M*A*S*H reruns. Instead of catching them in the late afternoon or late at night on the local CBS affiliate as I used to, I can binge to my heart's content on Hulu.

Some of the attraction is just pure comfort, like an old sweater or a family recipe. The sound of the theme song and the cast's distinctive voices is a kind of salve to my soul. Back in my Chicago days my friend and roomie Dave and I would watch the daily nighttime rerun for that reason. It was a great way to disengage and take a break from life for awhile.

Under COVID, however, the show's deeper meaning has become clearer and clearer. It is a show about people doing absolutely necessary work in disheartening conditions beyond their control. It is about doing that job when your bosses, coworkers, and general circumstances are conspiring against you in completely unpredictable ways. It is about maintaining your humanity and good humor when everything around you is broken.

I must admit, this is the feeling I had as a teacher-parent in the last fifteen months. I know my job is important, I know if must get done, but some days can just be completely agonizing. We have had so many instances this year of having our work or child care arrangements changed at the drop of a hat. At the height of the pandemic I pretty much stopped planning anything more than a day in advance because any plan was bound to get shattered. 

The characters on the show can never relax either, because a crisis is always ready to happen or a helicopter full of wounded is about to arrive. The downtime isn't really relaxation because they can never fully let their guard down. The still in Hawkeye's tent stays humming because booze is the only surefire escape. Let's just say I know a thing or two about this dynamic. 

Even though the members of the 4077th are supposed to be united in a common cause, they are riven by divisions and resentments. Despite the horror of the circumstances Frank Burns still does his power plays and members of the unit clash and snipe with each other. The experience of surviving this situation simultaneously draws some people together and pushes others apart. When the worst crises hit, however, they mostly find a way to get the job done. I will be diplomatic and say I understand this dynamic too. 

The same can be said of the ways that leadership behaves in M*A*S*H. Colonels Blake and later Potter are kind and understanding, but when any general or other outside bigwig appears they just end up causing problems and wasting people's time. The running character of intelligence officer Colonel Flagg does not not do anything other than antagonize the doctors and push them around. There are constant reminders that the doctors of the M*A*S*H unit are grunts whose life-saving labor is barely acknowledged by the powers that be. It is akin to how educators are often seen as an obstacle rather than a resource by their administrators. 

COVID for teacher-parents like myself has a been a kind of purgatory, much like the Korean War in M*A*S*H. You know someday it's going to end, but you have no clue when. You hope to get back to "normal," but you know deep down that normal is never coming back and that your experience has permanently altered who you are. The show's last episode was the most watched thing in television history when it aired in 1983, and not just because it was a popular show. Plenty of other shows have been more popular. There was something deeper going on there. The characters on the show meant something to the audience, who needed to see them finally escape and go home.

After all, that was not a foregone conclusion. The killing off of Colonel Blake has to be one of the most shocking moments in TV history. It was done because the show's creators wanted to remind everyone that this was indeed a war they were witnessing, and wars have casualties. I have been lucky this year not to lose anyone to COVID but at the height of the pandemic riding the train into school while all my white collar professional friends were at home I was keenly aware that my health and perhaps my life were on the line. 

So at the end of my work day, which usually involves passing out on the train at some point, and my post-work day of grading and answering emails, I put on M*A*S*H reruns. The theme song and opening credits, perhaps the most melancholy in television history, hit me like like a shot of spiritual novocaine. The credits are a reminder that the doctors are only stitching up wounded soldiers so they can get sent back into the line and shot again. There's no better metaphor for the necessity and futility of my daily life since March of 2020. 

Watching The Brady Bunch With My Kids

 

The world's most wholesome Zoom meeting

This week marks five months of quarantine and the most time I have ever spent with my children. It was been good to be with them so much, but at this point in the quarantine and summer my patience is completely shredded. I have so much work to do to prepare for school, and I can't work for more than ten minutes at a time without being interrupted. In past summers when this happened I would take a couple of hours and go to a coffee shop and bang out what I needed to do. Under covid, that's not an option. 

It's not just that I can't work on school stuff, reading for pleasure or doing my own writing is a constant exercise in stress and frustration. (Just now one of my daughters came to bother me about how long her pizza would take in the oven. And to ask what anchovies are. There are no anchovies on her pizza.) The only surefire way to get my children to leave me alone is to let them take their iPads to their rooms. (Between the last sentence and this one my kids got into a screaming fight with each other.) This strategy has a lot of problems, not least of which that my children will just watch YouTube videos that are essentially toy commercials, or play games that make them even more agitated. My wife and I eventually hid their iPads for a week and removed YouTube from our Roku.

The effect has been mostly positive. They no longer act like crazed junkies without their screens and have stopped constantly asking to look at toys online to buy with their allowance money. Desperate for distraction, we have also discovered that there's pretty much only one activity that soothes them and makes them less difficult: watching The Brady Bunch. One morning my wife put on the first episode for them, and they were completely hooked. It's a comforting nostalgia trip for me, since I used to watch The Brady Bunch every day in reruns after school when I was young. 

This is also why I was surprised that my kids like it so much. The 70s wood panelling and houndstooth pants in the Brady household looked old-fashioned to my eyes in the 80s, and the traditional family sit-com themes could not be more dated. My daughters love the overheated, self-consciously hip live action Disney TV shows full of obnoxious tweens and teens, which could not be further away from the earnest, unironic world of the Bradys. I expected my children to be even more put off by the show than I was as kid. I soon realized that while the show comforts me as nostalgia, it comforts my children in a different way. 

My daughters are more than aware of how the coronavirus has upended their lives. They know it's why they haven't been inside their school for five months. They know it's why we didn't have a vacation this year or see their grandparents in Nebraska. They know it's why we barely ever leave the house and haven't been able to do all kinds of things they love to do. They don't express a lot of outward emotional anguish about this, but I know it isn't easy on them, either.

One consistent theme on The Brady Bunch is that the children are always loved and cared for. There are problems, but they are always so small that they can be fixed. In a world that is so uncertain, that must be really comforting. As my wife told me, it's also a sign that my daughters have felt loved and protected in their own home during all of this. With everything going to hell around me and nothing being certain, that's pretty much the best I can hope for right now. I'll take it.

Waylon Jennings, "Only Daddy That'll Walk The Line"

I did a little extra work at my job last week, and I used the money to buy the DVD set of highlights from the Johnny Cash Show, which ran from 1969 to 1971. Unlike most country music television it wasn't syndicated but a major network production and the performances crackle and pop in ways that variety show TV rarely did. 

Variety shows seem to have disappeared after the 70s, which is a damn shame. Sure they're as cheesy as all get out, but I'd rather watch great musicians do their thing than some rich failson or trophy wife clown in from of the camera on a "reality" show.

One of my favorite performances on the DVD is Waylon Jennings doing "The Only Daddy That'll Walk The Line." It's a song from his pre-outlaw days when Nashville just didn't know what to do with him. While Jennings languished a bit in those days, this track has the bite and rhythm that his future outlaw classics would show. 

On the Johnny Cash Show Jennings turned in a great gritty performance of this song, breaking it out of the shackles of the Nashville Sound. He also performs a truly baller move (as the kids say) when the band strikes up the song while he is still being interviewed by Cash, Jennings strides across the stage and grabs his guitar to join in at the exact right moment. 

It's a moment that's both contrived and spontaneous, and the kind of thing, for better or worse, you just don't see on television anymore. 

Sharp Objects And The Power Of Led Zeppelin

Prestige television has all kinds of genre conventions, from "complicated" leads to eerie opening credits. One of the more inconsistent is the use of popular music. I guess we can blame this on David Chase, who used music masterfully on The Sopranos. Few of his imitators are as good.

It'd been awhile since any TV show had used popular music in a way that excited me. Plenty, like Handmaid's Tale, were so ham-fisted and maladroit in their use of music that I had to stop watching them. However, Sharp Objects actually did something interesting.

There's a lot of Led Zeppelin, which was a shock since Page and Plant are very protective of having their music used by others. For a long time they would just not license anything. The very fact that they gave their assent was a sign that something good was happening here. After the last episode I thought that I would never be able to hear "Thank You" or "In The Evening" the same way again.

It's rare that a film or TV can alter the meaning of music that is so ingrained in the culture. Usually this happens with obscure songs that get used in things, allowing people to discover them by associating the song with the film or show. Quentin Tarantino has a strong track record of this kind of thing going back to "Stuck In The Middle With You" in Reservoir Dogs, for instance.

Jean-Marc Vallee pulled off this coup because he understands the deeper currents in Zep. On the surface level, Led Zeppelin are the avatars of cock rock, the unfortunate wellspring for every hair metal band in the 80s. (Those groups always name-checked Zeppelin in their interviews.) This is the Zeppelin of "Black Dog" and "Whole Lotta Love," a swaggering parody of male sexual desire.

However, there is another, better version of Zeppelin. Their best songs are less bombastic and more mysterious, evoking uncanny and spooky feelings. Even some of their most famous tracks, like "Kashmir," have this element. Vallee used one of their later tunes, "In The Evening," for this effect. While the lyrics are very cock rockish, the start is spooky, and the riff that comes crashing in has a loopy, disoriented quality to it. The uncannyness of Zeppelin is why I tend to listen to them the most in the spring and especially the fall, when you can feel the life of the earth draining away on a brisk October evening. This feeling is perfect for the very spooky and unsettling Sharp Objects.

Led Zeppelin had an infamous reputation in the 1970s, from the "shark incident" (look it up, if you dare) to Jimmy Page having a relationship with a teenaged girl. The misogynistic pig culture of 70s rock bands was turned up to 11 with them. However, Sharp Objects shows how the music itself is often very appealing to young women. It's a young woman who turns Camille on to their music. When I was in 10th grade it was a junior girl whose Zeppelin fandom inspired me to listen deeper than "Stairway to Heaven." The Led Zeppelin tribute album that came out in the mid-1990s had a couple of good tracks amidst the dross (as all tribute albums do), and Tori Amos' take on "Thank You" was probably the best.

That song was meant as a romantic dedication from a man to a woman, but in Sharp Objects it stands in for the relationship between Camille and the young woman who introduces her to Led Zeppelin in the mental hospital. "Thank You" probably works better as a hymn to deep friendship than romantic love, and that's how I'll hear it from now on.

That such a reinterpretation is possible is down to the depth of the source material. "Thank You" is almost fifty years old now, but hardly feels so. Sharp Objects stands as a reminder that Led Zeppelin made far more meaningful music than we often give them credit for.

Why The Sweeney Is Still My Favorite Cop Show

Last night I watched an episode of The Sweeney for the first time in a bit, and remembered how much I love it. I have a strange obsession with the grimy, broke-down, grey world of 1970s Britain. It's a society in decline, like ours, but it's got more panache. Dingy pubs choked with tobacco smoke, boxy cars, and flared trousers paired with wide lapeled blazers and loud ties. It's a shitty world I like to spend time in to escape from the shitty world I live in now, which is a lot worse with a lot less character. As I was thinking about the show, I remembered that I had written a thing about it a few years back. So here's a goodie from the archive.

***
As those who read this blog should know by now, my pop culture interests are heavily Anglophilic and 1970s obsessed.  These two loves of mine come together quite nicely in one of my favorite television shows ever: The Sweeney.  A Brit former colleague of mine turned me on to it after I had discussed my affection for the UK version of Life on Mars, a show set in the 70s that often made implicit reference to the characters and style of The Sweeney, from two-fisted cops to Ford Grenadas driven with reckless abandon.  Imagine the Beastie Boys' video for Sabotage brought to life and transported to Blighty, and you pretty much get the picture.

It's a breath of fresh air today in a television world populated by incredibly lame and predictable police procedurals.  The only American cop show worth a damn in our time has been The Wire, and that's a show that's really more about Baltimore as a city than it is about police and crime fighting.  I know the current crop of crime shows well because my wife watches them obsessively.  I jokingly call her favorite programs "dead body shows," since they usually revolve around the solving of murder through the use of forensic evidence found on a corpse.  I find these shows -the various Law and Orders, Criminal Minds, the CSIs, etc- to be dreadfully boring and full of totally uninteresting characters.  It's hard to feel any emotional connection to the police figures, mostly because they so are so two-dimensional that they make Mitt Romney look human.   The criminals are very likely to be mentally deranged; they commit their crimes because they are psychopathic rather than opportunistic.  I find this convention, which is especially pronounced on Criminal Minds, to be incredibly tiresome.  If the criminals are just monsters and demons, they can never be interesting as characters, since their warped nature is their only motivation for their crimes.  I've noticed a strange phenomenon whereby the lovers of these shows are able to sit down and watch one after the other for hours, as if in some kind of trance.  The monochromatic and formulaic nature of these shows are what makes such marathon viewing possible.

The Sweeney is something else entirely.  The two main characters, detective Jack Regan and sergeant George Carter, are fully-fleshed out people with quirks, personal demons, and an ambiguous relationship with the audience.  This is especially the case with Regan, played outstandingly by John Thaw, who often comes across as crass and thuggish.  (Just watch him action, uttering the immortal line "Get your trousers on, you're nicked!")  He seethes with working class resentment, clashing with his superior Haskins in ways that betray his anger at having to be told what to do by one of his social betters.  Carter is less volatile, but after losing his wife in the second season, he begins to act more and more Regan-like.  He is a man caught in a tug of war between the better angels of his nature and Regan's willingness to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

One thing that contributes to the show's greatness is that dead bodies are few and far between.  Carter and Regan are members of the eponymous Sweeney, which is a Cockney rhyming slang term for the Flying Squad, the London police's armed robbery unit.  The criminals (called "villains" by the cops) are not obsessed with their mothers or looking to jizz on a corpse, but are practical-minded careerists who commit robberies to make money, and for their own personal enjoyment.  Among my favorite characters in the second season are Colin and Ray, two flamboyant Australians who enjoy living the high life and making fools out of the poms.  For the most part, the criminals on the show come from the same working class roots as Carter and Regan, and tend to take a practical, hard-nosed approach to their careers in crime.  The lines between their world and profession, and that of the police, blur considerably.  The cops know the world of the criminals well, and even consort with them to get information.  Sometimes you get the feeling that the roles of cops and criminals could be reversed, and that Regan could just as easily used his wits and fists to steal and thieve as to catch the crooks.

That ambiguity reflects a general realist feel to the whole enterprise.  The people on the show look and dress like regular people, right down to the flared trousers, brown color palette, and explosion of corduroy that one would expect to find among the less sartorially sophisticated gents of the polyester decade.  The grit of the streets coats the film, and you can practically smell the stale reek of ashtrays in the police office scenes.  Characters sport thick accents, bad haircuts, and look old for their age, ground down by life.  While there is the occasional bank hold-up hostage plot and take-down of terrorists episode, the ongoing struggle between professional criminals looking to make some quid and professional police trying to lock them up feels much more real to me than any serial killer plot.

Furthermore, like few other shows of its ilk, The Sweeney excels in the ancient and lost art of car chase scenes.  The modern cop shows betray their lack of excitement when an hour goes by without a single screeching tire or bent fender.  The beginning of the episode "Stoppo Driver" might be my favorite tv cop show car chase scene ever, not least because it looks like the chase is on real streets, and the action isn't hacked to bits by overactive editing, as is so often the case today.

Last but not least, The Sweeney has perhaps the best closing credits ever.  Whereas the opening theme pulsates with energy and a skanky beat, the closing is meditative, showing the detectives putting their coats on at the end of the working day, conscious that many more days of work lie ahead.  It's a world-weary close, and it never allows the show to end with cheap triumphalism or a totally happy ending.  Carter and Regan may have nicked some villains today, but more await tomorrow.  That sense of life as never-ending toil reflects the show's working class ethos, a voice sorely lacking in American popular culture these days.

Life During Wartime

I got today off from work, but my wife did not, and my kids are in school. Because our dog passed away recently, this meant I was going to be home totally alone today, something that I had not yet experienced in this house.

Initially, I barely noticed. I spent the early morning grading papers and banging out letters of recommendation, but after awhile I needed to take a break. At that moment I started to think long and hard about the state of the world. Nowadays when there is nothing to distract me (which is rare with my hectic schedule) I am paralyzed with despair over the state of this country.

At that point I realized I needed to get to the gym. I exercise only enough to avoid a heart attack and to balance out my love of bad food, but the endorphins are a nice side benefit. While I tried to listen to my favorite podcast while I was on the cardio machine, my eyes could not help looking up to the bank of TVs hanging from the ceiling. Since the advent of streaming I've pretty much stopped watching anything live on TV that isn't sports or TCM or Maddow or Rockford Files re-runs on MeTV. I had forgotten about the awful, disgusting horror of daytime television. There were insipid talk shows, dumb game shows, infotainment local news, lamebrain cable news, and worst of all, sports opinion shows. All I kept thinking about is how our country is being run by a homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, poor-hating, administration headed by an ignorant, lazy, traitorous, kleptocrat.

My mind kept going back to the DREAMers who are being used as hostages by Trump to extract his stupid fucking wall. I kept going back to the fact that each day brings evidence of how Russian intelligence manipulated our soulless internet companies to help put this horrible person in power. I kept thinking about the invisible people in Puerto Rico fighting for survival. I thought most of all about how our president is treating threats of nuclear war as a reality TV show.

Looking at that bank of atrocious television, it was clear to me more than ever that Trump is the perfect byproduct of this nation's worst tendencies. In other nations when autocrats try to grab power the people take over the main square. Here in America we have immersed ourselves so thoroughly in the cesspool of our empty, soulless consumerist nightmare that we are actually comfortable with a man like Trump in office. This goes even for those who don't like him, who chew their popcorn as they watch yet another episode of the Trump Show on Twitter, shouting their objections into the void but sitting on the couch rather than doing anything real.

Things are bad. They are getting worse. I have zero confidence that we are prepared for that. I feel like yelling out, like a GI from a Hollywood film from 1944, "Hey, don't you know there's a war on?!?"

Trumpist Politics As Spectacle

I just finished teaching a class on World War I last week, and we ended with the last chapter of Modris Eksteins' Rites of Spring, wherein he connects the cultural modernism unleashed by the conflict to Nazism. Eksteins shows how fascism was politics as theater. Outside of its upper echelons its followers were drawn less by ideology and more by membership in a massive spectacle. In those torchlit parades and glittering rituals giving oneself over and turning off one's mind became a whole lot easier. The Triumph Of The Will is to this day a horrifying document in its ability to make evil seem attractive.

As I read that chapter I realized that a lot of people (myself included) who have discussed Trump in the context of fascism have missed the boat when it comes to this particular issue. I was suddenly reminded of the point when I realized that Trump's candidacy stood a good chance of succeeding. It was in September of 2015, when he gave a speech on the deck of the decommissioned battleship  USS Iowa. He did not speak for very long, and he did not seem all that coherent in what he said. The optics, however, were very good. He was positioned right below the massive guns of the ship, leaning over the podium with a red Make America Great Again cap pulled low. This man who dodged the draft bloviated about veterans, the subject of what he was saying, as always, more important than the actual content. Most importantly, he was shot from below, giving this ridiculous figure an air of command. In that moment I realized that the inchoate longings for an authoritarian ruler that have long lurked beneath the surface of American society could be called forth by this man.

Trump is described as a real estate developer, but he is in reality a television personality. His ability to manipulate the levers of television was his huge tactical advantage. He made himself into the spectacle that got the ratings, and so the news stations just aired his rantings unfiltered and unmediated. Too many journalists, happy to cash their checks, failed to take him seriously. I remember watching that speech in September, and Rachel Maddow cutting back in and laughing bemusedly at what she had just witnessed. Too many realized too late that, in the words of Morrissey, that joke wasn't funny anymore.

Trump's obsession with spectacle continues. He still attacks "fake news" even in interviews with the AP and other mainstream news outlets that give him a platform. In his most recent interview he has infamously gloated about how his ratings on cable news were the highest since 9/11. He has defended Sean Spicer's ineptitude by citing his "ratings" as well. He dropped the much-promoted "Mother Of All Bombs" in a military operation that was more spectacle that war. He has called the entire Senate to come be briefed by him in what is likely a photo-op rather than a national security summit.

However, I see signs of hope in all of this. Trump's main avenue of spectacle is indeed cable news, which would have been much more effective in the 1990s. Outside of a campaign, his rallies are only preaching to the converted. Trump may be trying to utilize politics as spectacle, but their effectiveness may have hit their peak in November of 2016. He has built a house on shaky ground, and it is our duty to provide the earthquake.

Westworld, Stranger Things, And The Need For Joy

I am not a binge watcher, which these days feels almost like an admission of fuddy-duddyism. I am a full time teacher (and now grade dean) with a long commute and two four year old children. I have precious little free time, and honestly, television shows expecting me to sacrifice twenty hours of something I get for MAYBE two hours a day are asking way too much. My commuting and child rearing have reinforced my reading habits and podcast addiction, instead.

I long for old school TV watching habits, and so last night my wife and I sat down to watch Westworld, both of us fans of the dark hard sci-fi that spawned the original, and intrigued by what would be done with the update. I also just thought it'd be nice to have a show to watch on the regular, once a week, without feeling any pressure to give it a chunk of time that I just don't have.

I thought the show was worth the watch, and I think I'll watch it next week, but it had many of the hallmarks of HBO TV that I don't really care for. Were women other than the leads unnecessarily naked a lot? Yes. Was there a constant "dark gritty" overtone? Yes. Were the opening credits an eerie song beneath metaphorical graphics? Yes. Was there constant, gratuitous violence? Yes. Was there rape and violence against women? Yes. At least there wasn't a "complicated" male protagonist or an ironically sordid suburban setting.  The show raised enough questions about human behavior and artificial intelligence that I was willing to let my annoyance with the formulaic elements take a back seat.

Since watching it I've been thinking a lot about Stranger Things, I show I LOVED in ways that I don't think I have ever loved a television show. We had the time to binge watch it this summer, but spaced out the episodes because we didn't want it to end. (I felt the same way about Jessica Jones.) Was some of this nostalgia for all the things it referenced and the mood it evoked? Maybe.  But here's the deal: the things it reminded me of worked for the same reasons that Stranger Things worked. I really liked the characters. It actually showed a working class household with some measure of accuracy. The bad boyfriend ended up becoming a mensch by the time all was said and done. I could actually ROOT FOR the characters I loved to survive and emerge victorious without feeling ambiguous. (There's a reason Barb has become a meme. WE CARE FOR HER.) The show was still emotionally complex, and managed to touch on parenthood, adolescence, social class, bullying, and friendship. Pleasing the crowd does not mean sacrificing depth.

Wanting someone to root for seems to have become a no-no in the age of "dark and gritty" and "complicated." Look, I love 70s cinema and films like Chinatown and The Godfather, so I'm all about complicated protagonists. But on prestige television it has become a hoary cliche, just as it has in so many superhero movies. I think The Force Awakens succeeded because when Finn and Poe are escaping the Star Destroyer and shouting "woo!" in their TIE fighter it is such a moment of joy and fun. It just made me so damn HAPPY. And that feeling could still coexist with the sad story of the Solo family's disillusion.

Darkngritty for the sake of darkngritty is getting tiresome. When Walter White became progressively more evil, it pained me to see a man sell his soul a piece at a time, because I was allowed to root for him early on. Years from now Game of Thrones might end up being seen as a massively deleterious force on the course of television, just the same as Star Wars' unintended consequence was to squeeze out all those creative 70s cinema trends I mentioned before.

Baseball Thoughts

Baseball season is tantalizingly close. I will be happy to have my daily friend back in my life, a welcome distraction and easy to access obsession. As I get older, I dread the winter more and more. Each day is a reminder that everything dies, and that I will be down under the ground before too long. When baseball comes it comes with spring and Easter, signs of hope and regeneration.

One of my favorite songs on this theme is Frank Sinatra's "There Used To Be A Ballpark," which came out in the 1970s, well after his heyday, and is appropriately elegiac. Sinatra sings of a non-descript city block that once had a ballpark, and was full of joy and wonder. Those days are over, but the memories faintly remain. I've been thinking a lot about this song, since the ballpark in downtown Newark is due to be torn down. I see it every day during my commute, and looking at it in the winter has long been a way for me to dream of better times. I saw some games there, it was a good place, and I'm sad to see it go. I wonder if the people who will live in the high rise to be built there will smell a faint whiff of hot dogs or hear the crack of a bat talking in the wind.

The breeze yesterday was cool but pregnant with spring's life, the kind of air that can stir memories of my youth this time of year, much of which was spent collecting baseball cards.  Before the season started I'd be buying pack after pack of Topps, Fleer, Donruss, and Score. (I thought Upper Deck was ridiculously priced. I am my father's son.) I'd pore over the stats from the year before, and rank the players at there positions and come up with predictions for the season, written down and saved until the October. I've long stopped putting them in blog format, since I tend to be ridiculously wrong. I still remember the 1990 season, and thinking that the acquisitions of Mark and Storm Davis would put the Royals over the top for a championship.  Boy was that wrong. On the bright side, I never would have thought last March that there was any chance that the Mets would go to the World Series.

It's strange to think of what it was like to follow baseball in the 80s and early 90s. Nowadays due to my mlb.com subscription and cable services I can see every single baseball game, and through the magic of DVR can even watch them after the fact with ease. My phone gives me real-time scoring updates, and baseball-reference.com allows me to look up any player's stat at any time. Back then, when baseball first put its hooks in me, things were different. I could watch all the Braves and Cubs games I wanted due to TBS and WGN, but for other games I relied on NBC's Game of the Week on Saturday and Monday Night Baseball (remember that?) on ABC. To get scores immediately I would tune into CNN Headline News at either 19 or 49 minutes past the hour, back when that station just ran a half hour newscast 24 hours a day. (I miss the esoteric days of early cable.) I could also wait for the nightly Sportscenter broadcast or for the box scores in the next day's paper. Speaking of the newspaper, the sports section of the Sunday Omaha World-Herald did a great service by printing a complete list of of all the players' stats up to that point in the season, as well as the team stats. That could occupy me for hours, much as baseball-reference.com does today. Baseball is often too laden with nostalgia, but in this case I have none. After all, who wants to go digging through newspaper box scores?

Speaking of the NBC Game of the Week, Joe Garigiola, one of that telecast's defining voices, passed away last month. More than any other sport, baseball relies on its broadcasters. The great announcers have to be narrators and conversationalists. Since there's 162 games, the folks you listen to on the radio or hear and see on TV have to be engaging and interesting enough, lest you get sick of them by August. The Mets have great TV and radio teams, which has made it easy to follow them. My favorite announcer, and probably the favorite of most hardcore baseball fans, is Vin Scully. He is set to retire after this season, after broadcasting Dodger games since 1950. To put that in perspective, he was calling games with Jackie Robinson and Stan Musial on the field. I first encountered him as a broadcaster for NBC in the 80s, both on Game of the Week and in the World Series. Thirty years ago he was already legendary, a fount of diamond wisdom. Scully also clearly understood how to enhance the events on the field without overshadowing them. (Notice how he calls Hank Aaron's record breaking homer in the clip above.) When the crowd went crazy he dialed it back, letting the moment speak for itself. He calls the games by himself, which feels like sitting down with a friend. Every now and then I watch a Dodgers game during the season just to hear him call it. I know I will be there this season to hear his last one.

The Low-Rent Glory That Was USA Up All Night

This week I got quite a surprise while checking in on Twitter.  It seems that Rhonda Shear is now following me, which was quite a thrill considering that I used to watch her and Gilbert Gottfried practically every week on USA Up All Night.  I hope it's not some computer glitch or something because this is one of the most flattering "follows" I've had.

For those who don't know, Up All Night ran on the USA network back in the late 80s and early 90s in a legendary era when cable was not a fountainhead of daring, original programming.  Characters were not yet welcome, nor was there anything you could call "very funny."  Nope, it was a low-rent district filled with reruns and old movies, and I loved it.

Up All Night was great because it took some of the lowliest garbage and showed it to the viewer in a knowing fashion, with a wink in the case of Rhonda and a derisive laugh in the case of Gilbert Gottfried.  The network was basically admitting "hey, we've got to fill time here and we've got a lot of crap to do it with."  The films were often cheap horror, exploitation flicks, or second tier boob comedies with all the boobs edited out (although I do remember at least one case where the editor didn't quite catch everything), taking away their main redeeming feature, from my point of view.  It was via Up All Night that I learned methods to enjoy trashy entertainment and B-movies, a skill further strengthened when I starting picking up on Mystery Science Theater in my late teens.

I watched Up All Night a LOT because it came on every Friday and Saturday, when I was allowed to stay up late, and because I was not the most socially adept young man.  If I wasn't hanging out in the basement by myself, I would maybe be at a friend's house hanging out in their basement.  Either way, Rhonda and Gilbert were on.  Gilbert tended to be more straight-ahead, mocking the film in his abrasive way, whereas Rhonda played more of a deep game.  I was rewatching some of her promos and host segments, and was struck by how atractive she was, which I am willing to bet was a big reason a lot of viewers tuned in.  I was struck I think because even though I was a hormone addled teenager, I was actually watching her for her humor rather than her looks. (Yes I know this sounds like someone saying "I subscribe to Playboy for the articles," but I'm not fooling.)

Her character in the promos was a kind of a big-haired, big boobed Hollywood bimbo, but it was obvious that Rhonda was having fun and in on the joke.  She taunted men and let the viewer know with a sly smile that she was really much too smart to be taking any of this seriously.  Her famous catchphrase "UP all night" with the first word spoken in a high octave exemplified her campy persona, someone who was playing with the expectations that hetero men had of a woman who looked and talked like her.

Sure it's cool that there are all kinds of networks producing original, high quality television, but in my cultural world I don't just want filet mignon and cabernet, I also need Funyons and Miller High Life sometimes, too.  Today that televisual junk food is mostly reality shows, but give me godawful movies interspersed with funny host bits any day of the week instead.

Letterman, Mad Men, and TV's Future

In 1982 Andy Kaufmann and Jerry "the King" Lawler did their legendary wrestling feud on Letterman's show

It’s an interesting coincidence that Mad Men and The Late Show With David Letterman both had their last episodes this week.  Both are shows that radically challenged venerable genres, and their trip into the sunset ought to prompt questions about those genres’ futures.

Mad Men was the first “new TV” show to hook me in.  I didn’t have HBO during the heyday of The Sopranos and The Wire, but when Mad Men came on I was working my first job, and at least had the dough for basic cable.  While there have always been aspects about Mad Men that bug me (especially the smugness about how far we’ve come as a society), I think it’s a great show, and more importantly, a pathbreaking one.  It introduced a drama of true complexity and characters of great depth, qualities absent in the television landscape at the time.  It felt less like older dramas like NYPD Blue or thirtysomething and more like European art cinema.  It allowed space for the equally important and morally complex Breaking Bad to appear on AMC.

The finale showed just how vital and inspiring Mad Men could be.  With this show gone and Breaking Bad before it, I feel a real emptiness.  Sure, there’s plenty of good television out there, but nothing that really MATTERS like Mad Men did in its earlier days.  To put it another way, current television drama lives in world created by that show, but does not seem poised to generate a program as revolutionary for the foreseeable future.  (Adam Kotsko puts it better than I can.)  In terms of narrative television, it's the satirical comedy shows that I make time for like Veep and Silicon Valley.

David Letterman's been on TV so long that it is very hard to remember just how revolutionary he was in his early days.  Since moving to CBS in an earlier time slot, his show has gotten glitzier and his guests higher caliber.  As a child in the 80s I was rarely awake late enough to see Letterman's show, but the times I did I was struck by just how DIFFERENT it was.  I was the kind of strange kid who idolized Johnny Carson (I was a very old soul in my youth), and was thrown by Letterman's deliberate amateurishness. There were jokes beneath and between the jokes I didn't quite get.  Once the early 90s rolled around my sense of humor had matured, and started to "get" it.  Thinking back on my youth in the televisual dark ages, when network TV aimed for the lowest common denominator and cable was reruns and cast offs, Letterman was providing the one outlet for truly edgy humor and an out of the mainstream sensibility.  Until shows like In Living Color and The Simpsons came on the scene, you'd have to stay up real late to get a dose of comedy that wasn't just overcooked sitcom gags or glib Carson-esque joking.  (Keep in mind I still loved Carson, though.)

The "guy in a suit who tells a monologue then interviews guests with a comedian or musician thrown in" genre of late was perfected by Carson in its original form; Letterman made it more responsive to the 1970s revolution in stand-up comedy.  Hosts who've come later, from Conan to Fallon to Kimmel have followed in Letterman's footsteps, not Leno's.  Leno got the plumb gig at the Tonight Show, but lost out to Letterman when it comes to respect and influence.  The current late night landscape has become rather calcified, however.  None of the current hosts seem willing or able to break the basic mode that Carson made and that Lettermen altered.  This isn't to say that I don't enjoy watching the occasional Fallon episode, but that the genre of late night, like that of TV drama after Mad Men, doesn't seem poised to outdo that which has come before.  I hope someone is out there to prove me wrong.

Low Rent Cable Commercial Memories

It's hard to believe that I was so impressed with cable back in the 80s.  We only had about thirty channels, compared to today's hundreds, and most of them were full of bad World War II movies and syndicated reruns.  (It's no wonder MTV had a leg up, since they had outsiders paying all the money to create the content.)  The commercials on cable were also suitably low rent, full of all kinds of weird gadgets, doo-hickeys, and music compilations all magically priced at $19.99 plus $4.95 shipping and handling.  Many of those commercials were more memorable than the stuff I was watching at the time.  Here's a sampling.

A friend posting the link to Freedom Rock on Facebook set off this blog post.  I grew up in such an isolated place that standard classic rock music wasn't that easy to come by anymore in the late 80s-early 90s, and so this commercial's music intrigued me, even if I spent most of my time laughing hysterically at the burnout hippie characters promoting it.  Their counterculture vibe also seemed strange when compared to the album's patriotic cover motif.



Not only did cable let you buy music that you couldn't get in stores, it also sold cleaning products with miraculous powers.  If the commercials were to be believed, Didi Seven had magical qualities that no stain could ever stand up to.  I wondered if this stuff was made out of hydrochloric acid or something.



Without Zamfir, how would I ever have known about the sublime beauty of the pan flute?

 

Aw, Sy Sperling.  As a child of Nebraska his Nuu Yawk accent greatly amused me, as did the fact that his miracle hair grow product had its own newsletter.  Remember, he's not just the president, he's also a client.  I'm sure that gave a lot of balding men great confidence in the product.



Before Alfonso Ribeiro was Carlton, he was a break-dancing machine.  Not only did you get an instructional book and double-lp dance music compilation with your order, but a sweet breakin' pad too.  I have to admit I found this product rather tempting.

Track of the Week: The Monkees, "The Door Into Summer"

The Monkees hit their mid-80s comeback right around the time I started to discover the music of the 1960s.  For a couple of years there I rated them with the Beatles, but by the time the 90s rolled around, I saw my former love of the Pre-Fab Four to be a huge embarrassment.  After all, wasn't music supposed to be "authentic"?  Weren't bands supposed to write all their own songs and play their own instruments in the studio?

In recent years I've met folks whose musical tastes I respect who happen to like the Monkees.  That got me to rethink things, but nothing changed my mind like their movie Head, a crazy psychedelic nugget where they provide a withering metacommentary on their own fame.  Since then I've picked up some of their albums, and have been pleasantly surprised at just how good they are.

One of my favorites, especially this time of year, is "The Door Into Summer."  It comes from their Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones Ltd. album of 1967, and while sung by Mike Nesmith, was penned by Chip Douglas and Bill Martin.  There's a lot going on here, from the catchy chorus to the hippy lyrics criticizing war profiteers.  I just love the feel of it, since it has that kind of relaxed mid-tempo vibe made for a leisurely suburban drive in the summer time.  (Maybe that's why this CD is currently on heavy rotation in my car.)  It doesn't hurt that the trebly organ sounds like a circus calliope.

Listening to this song is also a good time to contemplate what the Beatles wrought.  They made it is so rock bands were expected to write their own material, but few groups can actually muster up a lot that's profound.  That being the case, I'd rather listen to a song performed by crack studio musicians and written by professional, award-winning songwriters than the half-baked compositions of a second-rate rock band.  Perhaps the Monkees were on to something after all.

TV Break: The Resonance of Taxi

I am a pathetic old man, since I primarily use my Hulu subscription to watch old reruns of 70s television shows rather than keeping up on the latest stuff.  I've recently grown partial to Taxi, a show I saw quite a lot as a child, even though it started airing before my time.  Back in the olden times before my family had cable, my TV options were rather limited, and certain hours of the day were very TV intensive.  We used to eat dinner early, about 5:30-6 o'clock, farmhand hours.  In the Central time zone back then networks would run a half-hour rerun after the local news and before the regular prime time schedule got started.  Three shows dominated the reruns in central Nebraska back then, Benson, The Muppet Show, and Taxi.

While I tended to watch the Muppets, I liked Taxi, too.  Living in such a rural place, I got a kick out of the whole notion of taxi cabs, much less the shot of the New York skyline refracted through the 59th Street Bridge in the opening credits.  (When my family crossed a tiny cantilevered bridge in Red Cloud, Nebraska, my sisters and I called it "the Taxi bridge."  Needless to say, we were unaware of the scale of the 59th Street Bridge.)  I loved Danny DeVito's wily and rascally Louie DePalma, and got a kick out of characters like Latka and Reverend Jim.

It was a very adult show, so nowadays I appreciate it on a whole other level.  Almost all of the characters were driving taxis because they were struggling to succeed in their chosen fields, or had failed out of them.  Many of the characters are lost souls, like 60s burnout Reverend Jim, and confused immigrant Latka.  It's a show born in the economic downturn of the late 1970s, and for that reason reflects our own economic hard times.  I have plenty of friends who have had to give up their old dreams for the reality of needing a steady gig.  What starts as a way to make money while searching for better opportunities becomes the only option left.

What Taxi shows is that while few of us ever realize our dreams, it is important to have the right kind of people around us in our day to day lives.  The cabbies form a kind of family, united in their affection for each other and their resistance to their tyrannical boss.  In a time when employers hold all the cards, and plenty of folks are working full time at was once supposed to be a transitional day job, it's a show that's more relevant than ever.

When Cable Sucked

Many things about our 21st century existence never cease to amaze me, and I am not talking about the device in my pocket that can be a computer, phone, and hold my entire music collection.  I am equally amazed at the vastly superior quality of coffee and beer in this country compared to three decades ago, and with the rise of basic cable television to respectability.  I want to talk about the latter today, because back in the 1980s few could have imagined shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men even existing, much less on the lowly and much-maligned medium of basic cable.

In the first place, the cable pre-history before digitization meant only a limited number of channels were available, and there was no "guide" function to tell you what was on.  My mother is an assiduous neat freak, and as a child I had to watch the TV listings section of the local Saturday paper like a hawk, lest my mother toss it out with the rest of the newspaper.  (Her TV watching habits are so regular, rare, and narrow that she never needed the listings.)  Much of what was on consisted of cast-off, unwanted crap from the networks.  The reruns were often shows so slight that they never made it to network syndication, and the movies of B-grade quality.  Cable was so scuzzy that they had their own awards show (The Ace Awards) because no cable show was ever going to win an Emmy.

It's hard to say when exactly cable started getting respectable.  It became less of a joke roughly between 1987 and 1991, dates that marked the advent of NFL games on ESPN and CNN's coverage of the Gulf War, respectively.  I miss my old low-rent cable, and here are some reasons why:

Cubs and Braves Games

My love of baseball was nourished by WGN and TBS, since they were so starved for programming back then that they broadcast all of the Cubs and Braves games, respectively.  I really learned about baseball by listening to Steve Stone's commentary during Cubs games, and to this day will watch games played at Wrigley on TV just to rekindle old childhood memories.  Oddly enough, the experience never turned me into a fan of either team.  I got sad in later years when both networks cut back on their baseball coverage.

USA Up All Night

My love of guilty cinematic pleasures and so-bad-it's-good movies originates in many a Friday and Saturday night spent watching the fare on USA Up All Night hosted by Gilbert Gottfried on Saturday and Rhonda Shear on Friday.

Music Videos On MTV

I read an oral history of MTV a couple of years ago, and realized that the folks behind MTV were ingenious because they got their programming for free.  The record labels paid for all of those videos, which were much more interesting and compelling than anything any one cable company could have afforded to produce at the time.  I've written a lot about music videos on this blog, suffice to say that they captured my youthful imagination like little else at the time.

Odd Movies

Every now and again I will be flipping channels and see that a cable station in running a Star Wars or Indiana Jones marathon.  Such a thing would have been a complete impossibility in the days of old cable.  On old cable you'd be much more likely to see a Billy Jack or Walking Tall marathon.  Yes those movies are silly by comparison, but they are damn hoot, something there's just too little of these days.

Odd Sports

Before ESPN was the "Worldwide Leader" they filled their hours with roller derby, monster trucks, kick boxing, and Australian rules football.  My dad and I loved to watch these events together, it was a real bonding experience for us.  We especially loved Australian rules football, a sport that combines some of the best attributes of football, soccer, and rugby.  The international programming that ESPN resorted to probably made me a more cosmopolitan, broad-minded person.

Old School CNN Headline News
I was a huge lonely nerd as a kid and abnormally obsessed with the news.  Our local podunk paper had little international news, so I loved watching CNN, back when it was a hard news channel with a heavy emphasis on global events.  I liked Headline News best, since I could get a thirty minute newscast any time of the day, complete with sports highlights at 19 and 49 minutes after the hour.  I was bored and living in the middle of nowhere, so there was nothing more exciting than seeing footage of things like the anti-poll tax protests in Britain or the Ayatollah's funeral.  This once humble channel, which is now a haven for bad morning shows and Nancy Grace, did a lot to educate me about world events.

Jay Leno and the Triumph of Mediocrity

Jay Leno is leaving the Tonight Show again, this time it appears for good.  The Tonight Show has been cursed by its success, meaning that Jimmy Fallon will be under the tremendous and unmeetable expectations set by Johnny Carson, the undisputed king of late night.

Jay Leno never bothered to exceed Carson or to bring anything new to the table.  Instead, he found the sweet spot of mass media mediocrity that will get you showered in dollars if you can find it.  No one in the comedy community or anywhere else, for that matter, seems upset by his ride into the sunset, in sharp contrast to the outpourings of emotion when Carson retired.  Even people who like Leno have nothing invested in him.  His ratings quash those of his rivals, but when Jon Stewart or David Letterman retire, I can guarantee you that the encomiums will flow from the comedy community and their fans.

On my old blog, this is what my guest-columnist Cranky Bear had to say about Leno when he decided to go back to the Tonight Show and push Conan O'Brien out:

"His borderline sexism, constant harping on cheap and east targets (Slick Willie and OJ), unnervingly stale "Headlines" bit and the kinds of jokes I normally hear middle-aged golfers tell over their Tom Collins have been repeated to the point of nausea. Worse still, he has used his televisual power for evil, giving Arnold Schwarzenegger an opportunity to make his case for the governorship in what amounted to a right-wing coup against Gray Davis stoked by Enron's intentional ass-fucking of the state's energy markets.
Leno's return to the Tonight Show represents the ultimate triumph of mediocrity. The same people who like Mitch Albom books and eat at Appleby's like Leno. The same people who "wear" Snuggies and put ribbon magnets on their cars like Leno. The same people who listen to Three Doors Down and wear crocs like Jay Leno. He is the ultimate avatar of the ubiquitous tastelessness and braindead consumerama that passes for culture in our corporatized shitscape of a society."

While Cranky's words may be impolitic, as usual, I agree with the gist of them.  I don't know anyone who LOVES Leno, but he gets millions of people to watch him every night.  Like the Doritos he used to hawk, Leno is selling a cheap, easily edible product lacking in substance, originality, or sustenance.  I can't blame him too much, since he's only giving a large chunk of the people what they want, or at least what they'll settle for when they don't want to look too hard for something else.  It's perhaps the same reason why Two and a Half Men has been on the air so long, that KFC's "famous bowl" has been a success despite its manifest grossness, that the sanctimoniously boring Joe Buck still gets to call the biggest games, and why voters keep pulling the lever for the same shitty incumbents, election after election.  Make no mistake, mediocrity holds sway in America.  How else could George W. Bush been elected to two terms, and the likes of Jay Leno dominate late night?

TV Shows I'd Like to See

When I have spare moments, such as on a snow day like yesterday, my mind wanders in odd directions.  I often get ideas for television shows, especially those that challenge the many ossified genres and tropes we see on TV nowadays.  Since I am not a television producer and do not have the ability or time to write scripts, I settle for writing my ideas down here.

Bridge and Tunnel
Friends and its imitators have made New York City out to be some kind of happy playground for twenty-somethings while not acknowledging its expense and inaccessibility.  Bridge and Tunnel would be a show about long term friends who work in New York City, but live in New Jersey because their unpaid internships and low paid entry-level jobs make it too expensive to live in the city.  Plenty of hilarious scenarios can ensue, such as one character trying to find dates while living in her parents' basement, or getting the goat of condescending trustafarian co-workers who live in a Manhattan apartment with the rent money provided by their parents.  The foil for the main characters will be a insufferably narcissistic Manhattanite "writer" named Vanna Vorhath.

Undercover Boss: University Edition
In this version of the reality show university presidents and chancellors would have to work as adjuncts or go through the tenure review process and all the while follow all of the nit-picky policies they helped put in place.  Somehow I think the experience still won't give them any sympathy for their employees.

Internal Affairs
On this Law and Order type show investigators in the NYPD strive to uncover corruption and police brutality while opposed by political cover-ups and the Blue Wall of Silence.  Too often the television version of the police are presented in a sanitized and propagandistic way, this show could discuss issues such as stop and frisk, kickbacks, prisoner abuse, the shooting of unarmed suspects, and coerced confessions.

Blue Guy, Red State
This is similar to Northern Exposure, but a drama, not a comedy.  The main character is "fish out of water" as a new assistant professor at a rural college in a small Great Plains town.  He soon finds that his urban background and cultural sophistication make him a feared outcast.  Each season, like the cast of Gilligan's Island, he strives to get a job elsewhere, but due to the contracting job market must stay put.  Rather than learning to love his new location over time, he develops a mean drinking habit and spends as much of his free time traveling as possible before his spirit is broken and he accepts his fate and starts conforming, Stockholm Syndrome-like, to his surroundings.

The Rices
I see this as an HBO-style series in the vein of The Sopranos, Treme, Deadwood, or The Wire.  Partially inspired by the story of Spotswood Rice, the series would, over the course of several seasons, tell the story of the Rices, an enslaved family.  It would begin with the outbreak of the Civil War, and through an ensemble cast, tell the story of slaves and their struggle for freedom during that conflict.  Some members of the family manage to escape and join the Union army as contraband workers or soldiers.  Others must face being "refugeed" by their masters to Texas.  Eventually one of the soldiers in the family will return to the plantation in uniform, and personally free his family.  Once the conflict is over, they strive mightily to reconnect with family members who were sold off to other plantations.  The Rices also try to take advantage of Reconstruction, and also face the consequences of Klan violence after getting involved in politics.  The epic of the African American experience during the Civil War and Reconstruction is so vast and sweeping (and dramatic) that it could not be confined to a feature-length film, we really need a series to do it justice.

Real Reality TV
This "reality" show will put cameras in the living rooms of ordinary Americans as they sit on the couch and watch reality television.  It doesn't get any more real than that, does it?

A Scene From My Commute That Says A Lot About America's Moral Failure

My daily commute from the Ironbound in Newark to the Upper West Side of Manhattan has become so rote that I hardly notice anything along the way to work and back.  While on the train I am absorbed either in a newspaper or book, headphones firmly planted on my ears.  Once my morning train pulls into the polluted, congested rabbit-warren of Penn Station I am focused on rushing through its grimy tunnels to get to my subway train. In that state of single-minded focus, I get tunnel vision, and I don't notice a whole helluva lot.

However, on Friday, I saw something that I could not ignore.  As I bounded through the subway turnstiles and rounded the corner to the stairs to the uptown bound 3 train, I saw a homeless man (an all too common sight in Penn Station) sitting dejectedly between an incredibly gaudy poster for the reality show The Shahs of Sunset.  The whole poster was gold colored, with the titular reality tv personalities standing confidently around a pyramid of glasses brimming with champagne.  It is an image that so perfectly captures the amoral, materialistic excess that is the one value that our feckless economic elite holds scared.  That image made quite a contrast with the indigent man forced to bed down in a dirty tunnel.

I am well aware that New York City presents examples of its extremes of wealth and poverty every day, signs and signals that have become so common to me that I barely notice them anymore.  This particular sight has stuck with me because it's indicative of the ways our entertainment industry aids and abets the increasingly ironclad class system in our country.  There are so many reality television shows about wealthy bores with endless reservoirs of crass narcissism.  I know people who claim to like them who say they see them as ways to mock the wealthy, or as simple escapism.  However, the more we see such self-centered materialism on television, the more that behavior is normalized and even implicitly justified.

Not to preach too much of a jeremiad, but I really and truly think that there is a moral cancer in our society that I fear may be inoperable.  Greed and selfishness have become virtues, and the plight of those who suffer from the greed perpetuated in this country are left on the dung pile to rot.  Even worse, many more people would rather follow the lives of materialistic moral cripples on television rather than contemplate the man sleeping in a dirty subway staircase, or bother to think they are much more likely to be in his shoes than topping off a champagne pyramid.  Until there are more people who feel moral outrage at elites living to excess while others starve than there are people who follow what TMZ has to say about the Real Housewives of New Jersey, nothing is going to change.

Why I Love The Rockford Files

Unlike a lot of people, I can't just sit down and burn through whole seasons of television in a day.  The repetition gets to me, plus I'd rather be reading.  However, there are some shows that I have slowly been working my way through over a matter of years, enjoying them like a fine aged whiskey rather than a case of Busch Light.  One of these shows is The Rockford Files, one I am a little embarrassed to love so much.  My requests to put an episode on usually results in a groan of pain from my wife, and my effusive praise of the show to friends and colleagues is normally met with a kind of exasperated silence.  I don't care what they say, I love it.

In case you don't know the show, it stars James Garner as Jim Rockford, a wrongly convicted ex-con who works as a private eye.  He lives in a trailer on the beach with his disapproving father Rocky, and usually ends up getting roughed up and not getting the girl or a big payday.  The supporting characters include Dennis, a grumpy cop who sometimes helps Rockford, Angel, a friend from prison with a knack for weaseling out of situations Rockford has to clean up, and Beth, his liberated woman lawyer and sometimes paramour.

As a fan of all things seventies, I love how the show (which ran from 1974 to 1980) epitomizes so much about the polyester decade.  Although Garner has a ruggedly handsome face, he is no traditional tough guy PI, and reflects the less orthodox masculinity of the time.  He keeps his revolver in the cookie jar, and rarely uses it.  He often gets beat up by roughnecks, harassed by the police, and harried by his dad.  Rockford is more likely to use his mouth and wits to get what he needs, rather than his fists or his gun.  Instead of working out of a fancy office, he takes calls in his trailer, and when he's not around, an answering machine, not a secretary, takes his calls.  The latter device is also used in the opening of every episode, where there's a different message on the machine each time, usually from a bill collector or Angel with a problem or wacky scheme.  Originally released in the midst of the mid-1970s stagflation, Rockford is a hard luck hero for people living through hard times.  Reflecting the Watergate era and general distrust in authority and elites, the villains are usually wealthy, connected types who the police have been unable or unwilling to bust.

All in all, Rockford is just a much more human hero than we're ever allowed to see.  The shots inside his trailer home show the faded wood paneling and the stains on his pot holders.  He inhabits a very unglamorous, low budget Los Angeles, full of strip malls and industrial parks.  The opening montage shows him fishing and buying groceries, fer Chrissakes!  Unlike with modern day shows, he's not laden down with all kinds of psychological or supernatural bullshit.  He is not a serial killer, does not suffer from a mental disorder, does not have a secret family, is not involved in organized crime, etc.  He's a likable guy, what's wrong with that?  Watching all these shows where I am supposed to have ambivalent feelings about the protagonist is just getting old.  It was an interesting twist back when Tony Soprano and Don Draper first went on the air, but enough already!  Can't I just watch someone I want to root for?

Beyond all that The Rockford Files gets all the small touches right.  Rockford drives a gloriously gold Pontiac Firebird, wears open collar shirts with sports jackets (my preferred professional look), and it's got an endlessly catchy theme song.  What's not to like?