Television Hash

Thanks to proliferating streaming and premium channels, there’s too much TV to watch and no digital equivalent of “TV Guide” that I’ve found to help separate the wheat from the chaff. You’re stuck with trial and error. Here’s a report from the threshing floor.

First, one’s viewing life seems increasingly to be dominated dramas described as “genre-bending” or “mash-ups.” There’s nothing new in this. Shakespeare was a master of the game and even made fun of it, having Polonius praise the players as the best in the world for “pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical.”

I understand that the creators of entertainment may get bored recycling the same old genres that movies and TV have relied on for a century — weepies, oaters, swashbucklers, noirs, whodunits, biopics, romcoms. Still, you knew what to expect. As Kenneth Burke famously said, “Form is a satisfied expectation.” That is, a sonnet is 14 lines rhymed in a certain way, a tragedy is a hero undone by his own hubris, and so forth. The trick is creating something original within such constraints.

Most often the melding of two genres seems intended to please two audiences, but is likely to satisfy neither unless an actual reason exists for doing the trick. The result can seem like complication for its own sake, creating a work that is too clever by half, literally.

“Altered Carbon” (Netflix) is alleged sci-fi, but is actually nothing more than a noir detective story where the rich and powerful are up to no good. It’s just that, in this neighborhood, those with enough money can transfer their consciousness to as many spare bodies as they can afford. Who cares? At its heart it’s still Phillip Marlowe, a man of honor prowling the mean streets in search of justice. The main reason to watch this farrago is the female lead, Martha Higareda. She is new to me but apparently a considerable star in her native Mexico. She steals every scene she’s in.

“Counterpart” (Starz) is essentially a Cold War spy thriller even down to its setting, Berlin. It is tarted up by imaging two parallel universes where everyone has an almost identical twin, and espionage and sabotage take place across a Checkpoint Charlie sort of passageway. Is the sci-fi embroidery necessary? Not really,

It does gives the admirable J.K. Simmons a chance to play two very different parts, an uxorious, innocuous government functionary and a brutally efficient undercover operative. The
murky plot generates some suspense, as one side of the divide blames the other for a plague it has suffered and seeks vengeance. And the cast includes first rate performers including Stephen Rea, Olivia Williams, Nazanin Boniadi, Sara Serraiocco, and Richard Schiff — each more untrustworthy than the one before.

A couple of episodes in, it looks like Bill Hader as ”Barry” (HBO) will be fun. He plays a sad sack contract killer whose pursuit of his latest target leads him unwittingly into an acting class. He decides L.A. and acting look like more fun than murdering people in Cleveland. Far from being original, this particular genre straddle is habitual enough to qualify as a sub-genre. “Grosse Pointe Blank,” “Mr. Right,” “You Kill Me,” “The Whole Nine Yards.”

“Marseille” (Netflix) has Gerard Depardieu as the long-time mayor of that city beset by a sea of troubles — organized crime, an ailing wife, and a substance abuse problem. He’s ready to turn over the job to a protégée who suddenly betrays his trust. The show poses as a political noir, but turns out to be a family saga/soap opera on the order of “Dallas” or “Dynasty.” It comes complete with long hidden, dirty secrets, questions of paternity, cheating spouses, drug addiction, careless love, a tragic disease, election meddling, graft, and plenty of betrayal. The only thing missing is amnesia, but stay tuned. Or not.

“Here and Now” (HBO) is essentially one of those shows about a prosperous, dysfunctional but loving family, like “Brothers and Sisters,” “This Is Us,” and so on. Here the Portland, Oregon parents, Tim Robbins and Holly Hunter, are having their midlife crises as their ethnically-diverse adult, adopted children screw up in various ways. Except, one of them has hallucinations that turn out not to be mental illness but psychic visions channelling his shrink’s own troubled past. Really? Is this trope necessary?

Best for last is the British miniseries “Collateral” whose genre one is tempted to say is David Hare. The esteemed playwright is a master of crafting griping entertainments that have embedded in them a scathing critique of politics, patriarchy, anti-semitism, the national security state, or whatever bad news gets his dander up. His plays, films and movies include “The Hours,” “Damage,” “The Reader,” “Denial,” “Plenty,” and “Skylight.”

The Worricker trilogy of TV dramas was a spy thriller that took aim at corruption and usurpation of power at MI6. “Collateral” appears to be a simple, police procedural about a London murder of a pizza delivery boy, but a superb Carey Mulligan refuses to take the crime at face value when things don’t add up. This is her first big case as a detective, she is in the advanced stages of pregnancy, her sexist superiors expect her to screw it up, yet she is tougher than any of them and doggedly pursues the evidence where it leads.

The ripples of the pizza boy shooting spread out to expose a web of deceit and criminality including illegal immigration, human trafficking, parliamentary complicity, and even willful blindness and bigotry at the Church of England. Too much? No, just enough. Cleverly written, and Mulligan, though familiar in plucky ingenue roles, here performs in a whole new key.

Also excellent are Nicola Walker and Billie Piper, probably most familiar to American audiences from “Last Tango in Halifax” and “Penny Dreadful,” respectively. The prominence of actresses is no accident since a subtext of the piece is the mistreatment and disrespect accorded women by individuals, co-workers, and institutions — everything from Church to State. A reminder that in the hands of a master, a lowly genre can be the vehicle for dramatic art.

Who Elected Senator Thom Tillis?

Part of the peevishness of Podunk stems from the fact that we are aware of our lack of importance on the world’s great stage. We rarely produce presidents, titans of industry, cutting edge innovator, and if we do they move away. Nor do we wield economic or cultural power.

Once every few years, if there’s a contested primary, the caravan rolls through but soon is gone. Once in a while we send a major league embarrassment to Congress or figure in a notorious court case involving civil rights, environmental degradation, or gerrymandering, The rest is silence, except for ACC basketball.

But all of a sudden, the Junior Senator from the great state of North Carolina, Thom Tillis, has been sideswiped by history, earning him his fifteen minutes of infamy. Tillis was the Speaker of the NC House and as such the tool of the Art Pope machine, the local arm of the libertarian Koch cabal. As speaker his major accomplishment was to slash education spending in a state already 39th in the nation.

Then he ran for Senate in 2014 and was elected over Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan by 50,000 votes out of 2,915,000 cast. She led until the final weeks. What happened? A post mortem by “Roll Call” purported to explain how Tillis beat “One of 2014’s Best Campaign’s.” The answer was, by doing what yokels in Podunk do, outsourcing his campaign to the big city boys.

So Tillis, having been vetted by the machine, soon had a campaign well-funded and managed by the machine, including Crossroads GPS. It is Karl Rove’s dark money front allowing conservative donors to hide their identity. In 2014, it spent $26 million to elect Republicans in just six states.

As “Roll Call” reported, Tillis also got money from the Republican Party, desperate to gain the five seats needed to win control of the Senate. As the election neared, Obama’s poll numbers were down due to an Ebola scare and an Isis atrocity. Advertising for Tillis hung those issues around the neck of Hagan.

This account of the winning strategy is true, as far as it goes, but now we’ve begun to learn, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. The first hint that something was hinky came when Tillis, normally all but invisible, began to pop up in the news.

As senator his role has been largely to apologize for Trump’s incompetence and transgressions. When Trump said we should confiscate guns first and worry about due process later, Tillis said he didn’t believe “in my heart of hearts that’s exactly what he meant.” On other occasions he excused Trump craziness by saying he’s “not a legal scholar” or “was not really up to speed” on some policy. You think?

More interesting is his recent execution of the very rare double flip-flop. Last summer he tried to act like a purple state senator by co-sponsoring with Democrat Chris Coons a bill to codify Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s independence and immunity to firing.

In January, however, he backed off when real threats against Mueller began to emanate from the White House. Clearly Tillis didn’t want to be on the other side of a constitutional struggle from his President, his party, and his donors. But then a week or two ago, he flipped back and began pushing for the protection of Mueller again. Why?

Could it be because Tillis knew he was about to become news in a very dangerous way, as a beneficiary of the Russian-Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Bannon-Mercer, election-theft apparatus? He was suddenly anxious to look like he was all for Mueller getting to the bottom of things, rather than look like he was trying to cover up the fact that he was one more politician who owed his victory to a cabal of tech oligarchs, or Vladimir Putin.

Turns out the money behind his 2014 win came not just from the national Republican slush fund and the Crossroads dark money pit, but from the super PAC of John Bolton. He’s the foreign policy extremist who is about to become Trump’s NSC director. Or was, until the facts about his PAC became public. Bolton may now be in trouble, and Tillis is getting splashed with the mud.

Bolton’s PAC was largely funded by the anti-government billionaire Robert Mercer who also controlled the Steve Bannon-run Cambridge Analytica. It used an app devised by a Russian to weaponize Facebook data to tilt the 2016 election for Trump and against Clinton.

This nefarious scheme got its trial run in 2014 when, according to reporting by the “New York Times,” “using psychographic models, Cambridge helped design concepts for advertising for candidates supported by Mr. Bolton’s PAC, including the 2014 campaign of Thom Tillis.” Oops! So, the Bolton PAC, funded with Mercer money, hired the Mercer-owned Cambridge to get the Mercers (and possibly the Russians) the Senate they wanted.

If voters had known who was really manipulating the election, would they have cast the same votes? Without Bolton, Cambridge, Mercer, and Putin, would Trump be President? Would Tillis be Senator? And do we now know the full extent of the corruption? Or are we all in the same position as the cheated lover in the old Eddy Arnold song who lamented, “How many, how many, I wonder, but I really don’t want to know?”

Alt-Wrong Roseanne

Once upon a time you could have a sitcom on TV about a blue collar family and politics, thank God, wouldn’t enter into the fun. The locus classicus is “The Honeymooners.” Though it aired in the mid-1950s at the height of the Red Scare, Cold War and burgeoning civil rights protests, the lives of Ralph, Alice, Ed and Trixie were unaffected by current events.

By twenty years later, Archie Bunker was a paragon of political incorrectness and the ongoing battle between him and his liberal son-in-law represented the era’s culture wars writ small — and funny. Fast forward to Roseanne’s return. Her first incarnation was more “The Honeymooners” than “All in the Family.”

This time, however, she has advertised her affinity for Trump, and he has followed his golden rule — “Say something nice about me, and I’ll say something nice about you.” So he phoned her to congratulate her after the premier, and crowed about her 18 million viewers on the stump, as if they were his. And possibly they are.

Republican pundits were quick to use the show’s popularity, especially in markets in Middle America, to cudgel Hollywood with. They claim the views and taste of all those red state people have been consistently treated with contempt or ignored and their moral sensitivities offended by the programers who preside over the Sodom and Gomorrah of the coasts.

Great talking points if they were true, but let’s not get carried away. First, it’s a ridiculous claim when the airwaves are full to overflowing with entire red state channels offering fare that includes “Duck Dynasty,“ Honey Boo-Boo, “Jersey Shore,” talent shows, reality shows, repulsive housewives from hither and yon, “Friday Night Lights,” country music awards, Nascar, and on and on.

Second, its entirely possible many people tuned into Roseanne’s return to gawk, but how many of the 18 million will stick with the show for episodes two through eight? Fewer, one would guess. Curiosity does not equate with approval.

Third, it is a lot easier to claim “Roseanne” as a conservatism-exalting comedy if you didn’t bother to watch the show. In fact, it seemed to make a pretty strong anti-Trump case. Yes, Roseanne, the character, says she voted for Trump because he’s going to make America great, but her liberal sister in the Meathead role seems to get the better of most of their exchanges.

And the situation of the Conner family is not exactly an advertisement for Trump’s America. The elders have to cut the pills subscribed by their doctors in half because their can’t afford to take the whole dose. Dan spends his time drinking out in the garage. Their daughter Darlene is a single mother who has been forced to move back home with her two children because she’s been laid off. Their other daughter Becky is underemployed and is thinking of renting her womb as a surrogate mother for enough money to afford a car, a down payment on a house, and an education. And one of the kids is bullied in school for being unusual, having an interest in fashion.

This is the kind of rainbow coalition family you might find in shows scorned as liberal, like “Here and Now” and “This Is Us.” And the Conner menage is also more an argument for the policies of Bernie Sanders than those of Trump. They ought to be voting for free tuition, improved public schools, universal healthcare, a living wage, easily accessible social services, respect for working class and minority Americans, getting big money out of politics and a tax system that addresses growing wealth inequality.

Finally, Roseanne herself, not the character she plays, makes a peculiar conservative poster girl. Yes, her origins are blue collar and she’s now a Trump supporter, but that doesn’t necessarily make her a conservative in the traditional sense. She’s spoken in favor of gay marriage, has behaved in ways usually described as feminist and is a devotee of the Kabbalah. It may be her affinity for Trump is more due to a shared enthusiasm for grabbing media attention by means of outrageous stunts and opinions. She recognizes a kindred spirit.

Who can forget her vulgar, comic rendition of the National Anthem that George H.W. Bush called “disgraceful,” her posing as Hitler, her tweeting the address of George Zimmermann to encourage vigilantism, her race for President on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket and for the nomination of the Green Party, and her floating the idea of running for Prime Minister of Israel?

Like Trump she has been frequently and flamboyantly married (she leads, four to three), and subscribes to lunatic, internet conspiracy theories, including the belief that the Mueller investigation is an attempt to distract attention from a pedophile ring run by Democratic members of Congress.

Though she, and the president, both pretend to be blue collar champions, they may actually represent another familiar American cliche — the spoiled nouveau riche nut job. It is a strange fact that some of the richest people in the America and the most economically stressed share an alt-right mindset, though often one group is selling the Kool-Aid and the other drinking it.

Roseanne can afford to dabble in blue collar rhetoric, but she is insulated from living the reality by her net worth, $80 million in her case, and the attorneys, accountants, and PR people money can buy. She doesn’t have to care about the actual lives, feelings or prospects of the kind of people she plays on TV. They didn’t escape the working class she came from. She did, and can cultivate her alt-right image and the macadamia nuts on her $2 Hawaiian plantation while they live hand to mouth, watching her network show because they can’t afford cable.