The Americans.

   The Americans ran for six seasons on FX with showrunners Joe Weisberg, a former CIA agent, and Joel Fields.  It was a show about two Russian spies who embedded themselves in Washington D.C. during the Reagan administration, raising two children and running a travel agency as cover.  The show was successful on a number of levels, as a procedural about complex spy operations as well as a low-key essay on what it means to be a citizen of one country while living in another and undermining it.  I think one was sympathetic to Russian spies Elizabeth and Phillip (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) because of the show's unusual point of view, i.e., America seen through Russian eyes.  I worked for "The Nation" in the 80's and in those days there was still a great deal of sympathy for Russia.  I even heard James Weinstein, editor of "In These Times", say that he sympathized with Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs if they were in fact guilty of spying because he would have done the same thing himself.   Who can say whether they really know who was truly in favor of peace?

 Elizabeth and Phillip killed at least a dozen people, most of them innocent, to protect and further their ends.  To them Reagan was as dangerous to the Russians as he seemed to think the Russians were to us and yet one felt torn when Elizabeth and Phillip recruited their own daughter Paige into spying, though their daughter choose to stay in America when her parents flee to Russia after being exposed by a neighbor who worked  for the FBI and thought Phillip was his friend.  The show was a successful period piece that dealt with the politics of the time while generously allowing the viewer to come to his own conclusions. 

The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling

Judd Apatow's HBO documentary about Garry Shandling takes four hours to demonstrate that Garry Shandling was not funny and neither is Judd Apatow, in person or in the movies he directed.  The biggest problem with most comedy today is how inward it is directed, how it avoids any relationship to the real world.  It is interesting that Shandling decided to go to Hollywood because of a few kind comments from George Carlin at a club in Arizona, since Carlin was the only heir that Lenny Bruce had, in his willingness to confront the absurdities of the world.  Shandling and Apatow and the rest of their ilk (Jerry Seinfeld, et al.) make jokes about themselves and about show business.  Shandling turned down offers to host late-night shows and instead did an unfunny parody of them on HBO -- The Larry Sanders Show -- complete with plenty of four-letter words, even though The Tonight Show and The Late Late Show themselves were already what Dwight Macdonald called "self-parodies: unconscious."

Shandling was restless, neurotic and insecure, still grieving about the death of his brother when they were children.  He could never commit to anything for very long and gradually grew more and more inward as he became interested in Zen Buddism.  He never married or had children and spent years building a house that was apparently never finished.  He mentored lots of other comedians but was quick to fire staff members that he perceived as disloyal.  In the final analysis his comedy was mostly unfunny self-pity.

The Oscars 2018

Why is the Oscar show so tedious?  There are few movies of good quality and even when there are they are usually not nominated; the presenters read tedious justifications for each particular award; the recipients read dull and predictable thanks to everyone they've ever known (almost every recipient spoke from their own script; there was less spontaneity than ever); all the nominated songs are insipid and over-produced; there was little acknowledgement this year about the sexual harassment scandals; the host, Jimmy Kimmel, is not at all amusing and has no relationship to the movie industry, etc.

There were only two winning films that I had seen:  Coco as best feature animated film, and Jordan Peele for writing Get Out.  Coco I have already written about in my movie blog.  Get Out, like most contemporary films, looks as though D.W. Griffith had never lived.  Get Out, however, is at least a passionate and personal film and is an impressive attempt to make a film about racism that avoids the perils of didacticism by placing itself loosely in the horror genre.

Director Glenn Weiss kept the Oscar show moving as quickly as he could but, as usual, there were too many gimmicks, including a visit to a movie theatre across the street (they could better thank the movie audience by making better movies and fewer cartoons and superhero films) and a jet ski for the shortest acceptance speech (at least they didn't use music to give people the bum's rush or have someone saying "get out," as Kimmel threatened). In spite of constantly reminding us that these were the 90th Academy Awards there was little attempt to connect the current show with the past, except for some hurried montages and a tribute to those who died last year,  from which many deceased were absent..

It's clear that the Oscars serve no useful purpose, except perhaps to keep people from making up their own minds what movies are worth seeing.  It's not even clear who the members of the Academy are (mostly older white males, as far as we know), whether they have even seen the movies they are voting on or how the nominations are chosen and by whom.

Designated Survivor

"Designated Survivor" is back after a ten-week hiatus, with an impressive and moving show from showrunner Keith Eisner and director Timothy Busfield, who also plays President Kirkman's (Kiefer Sutherland) shrink, helping him to deal with his wife's death.  Busfield handled the flashbacks of Kirkpatrick telling his kids their mother would not be coming home with intelligence and sensitivity, showing how deep Kirkpatrick's grief was by the intensity of his expressions and, in the same way, showing how deep his anger was when he talked to the driver who killed his wife.

I like Eisner's tendency to concentrate on the President's foreign policy, avoiding the difficulties of domestic problems in a turbulent era by focusing on what is happening internationally.  In this week's episode the focus was on Cuba, as some rebels there kidnapped a Congressional delegation that included Maggie Q, one of the strongest female characters in a series with several of them. The question was whether President Kirkman is too grief-stricken to make forceful decisions.

The American Experience: The Bombing of Wall Street

History can help one understand the present.  Unfortunately there is little history taught these days in schools simply because one cannot teach history without offending some person or other or some point of view.  Most students these days don't know when the Civil War was because it can't be understood without attempting to understand slavery, for example.  The American Experience, on PBS, is one show attempting to put things in the context of history.

Those who think terrorist bombings are something new should watch 'The Bombing of Wall Street", written and directed by Susan Bellows for The American Experience.  The bombing at Wall and Broad Street on Sept. 16, 1920 killed thirty-eight people and injured hundreds of others.  The perpetrators were never found, though the general thinking was that it was the work of Italian anarchists, followers of the deported Luigi Galleani.  Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and Justice Department investigator J. Edgar Hoover (who believed Russians were behind the bombing) started keeping lists of suspected "subversives," and the FBI continued to do so for many years, as Italian and Irish immigrants were replaced by Hispanics, Jews and others.

PBS and Turner Classic Movies are the two stations I watch the most.  Before cable TV I would be amused by those who said they only watched Channel 13,  but the station has remained true to itself  (see my posting of Feb. 17, 2017) while all the channels around it have changed and meretriciousness reigns supreme.

Truth and Lies: The Tonya Harding Story

Truth and Lies: The Tonya Harding Story (broadcast recently on ABC, David Sloane executive producer) makes an excellent case (unintentionally)  for abolishing the Olympics, which has become a sordid mess of cheating and obnoxious nationalism, where the only thing that matters is winning.  It is still unclear whether Harding knew about the physical attack on her main competition, Nancy Kerrigan, before the 1994 Olympics but Kerrigan still won a medal there and Harding did not.

I find figure-skating a dubious "sport," since the judging is necessarily subjective.  Harding was the first skater to do a triple axel in combination with a double toe loop and even she was unable to describe what exactly that was and what it meant. Perhaps it is something of the equivalent of the thirty-two fouettes in Swan Lake, though that is only a small part of the complex characterization required in that ballet.  But figure-skating has other problems, particularly its elite image, which was not particularly enamored of lower-class high-school-dropout Harding, though she had many fans who appreciated how she overcame her poor and abusive childhood.  Still, many of those who think in terms of class may be more offended by her use of "drugged" as a past tense of drag than the fact that her mother beat her with a hairbrush after she was drugged into the bathroom, and equally amused by Tonya's mother saying "we were not trailer trash; we had a brand-new trailer."

It is an unfortunate aspect of our consumer-mad society that sports and the Olympics are seen as a way to become rich and famous, even if it means cheating to win.

TV: Fall 2017

With more and more TV options, including Netflix and Amazon, there are fewer quality shows than ever.  I find myself returning regularly to channel 13, the local PBS station, where there are fewer meretricious shows than elsewhere, including the most recent Ken Burns effort (co-directed by Lynn Novick, with voiceover narration written by Geoffrey Ward) "The Vietnam War."  The series, for what it has to say, is rather bloated with war footage but does two things quite well:  it empathizes the lies told by those in power to the American people and it includes interviews with many regular soldiers and their families --from all sides -- avoiding, mostly, listening to those in power who sent people to die and who killed millions of Vietnamese in a war that they knew from the beginning could not be won. Like too many documentaries there is much fudging of footage, from dubbed rifle fire and other noises to footage that may or may not be related to the battle being narrated, but I did learn things I was not aware of when I was dodging the draft (first with a student deferment, then with number 350 in the Shirly-Jackson-like lottery, though I was required by my hometown draft board to take the army physical), including how Le Duan was running the Viet Cong long before Ho Chi Minh died in 1969.

My favorite scripted show this fall was TBS's "The Search Party," written and directed by
Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers and Michael Showalter.  It ran for two seasons of ten episodes each and starred Ali Shawkat as a recent college graduate named Dory trying to find a school chum who has disappeared.  She and her friends, who have dubious jobs as interns of various sorts, spend more and more of their time looking for Chantal and when they do eventually find her disaster ensues. The show is something of a dark comedy of social and generational observation, with entwined elements of mystery and melodrama.

Speaking of melodrama, I also liked "Somewhere Between", on ABC for ten episodes.  It was based on a Korean melodrama, "God's Gift:14 Days" (written by Dong-hoon Lee and directed by Ran choi) --which I have not yet seen -- about a mother going back in time to try to keep her daughter from being murdered.  This kind of theme is apparently popular in Korean TV and movies (Hong Sansoo's movies, for instance, often have people trying the change the past)  Stephen Tolkin was the writer and producer of the series (he used four different directors) that had almost as many coincidences as a Wilkie Collins novel (that's a compliment; I'm a great admirer of Wilkie Collins).

I do also like David Guggenheim's "Designated Survivor," though it is still a little unsure of what it wants to be: a political series like Aaron Sorkin's intelligent "The West Wing" or more of a thriller aligned with star Kiefer Sutherland's previous show "24."  Guggenheim is struggling to combine the two.