As I mentioned last month, one of my favorite TV shows from last year was Pluribus, from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan.
Rhea Seahorn (also of Better Call Saul) stars as Carol, a best-selling but unfulfilled romantacy author who turns out to be one of about a dozen people in the world who can resist an alien virus-type-device that transforms the rest of Earth’s population into a gigantic hive mind. Some people also can’t survive the transformation process, including Carol’s wife.
None of this can constitute spoilers, by the way – it all happens in the first episode. Some of what I talk about below falls into that category, however, if you care about those kinds of things.
So Carol begins the story not just literally cut off from what is now the human experience but in grief. She’s angry about what she’s lost personally and acts on that anger. She’s not, at this point, all that tuned in to what it might mean for humanity to be a big hive mind (good or bad). Carol’s pain and anger is personal, small, and, in some ways, petty.
To her surprise, this puts Carol at odds with the rest of the dozen or so folks who haven’t been absorbed yet. While she’s pushing for fighting back, they’re largely OK with it. Not for nothing do they have connections to this new hive mind, in the form of loved ones or friends who are part of it (or are they?). Carol is all alone and that loneliness is what largely drives her.
This does start to change about midway through the season. She accepts the help that the hivemind can offer (there’s a fabulous scene where a wave of drones show up to restock a Whole Foods just so she can go shopping). She accepts the presence of a companion, a woman sent to her by the hive mind because she resembles the hero from Carol’s books (the version she always wanted to write, anyway). There’s even a kind of romantic connection that develops. None of this suggests that Carol has fundamentally changed who she is or what she thinks about the hivemind, but she’s learning to live with it.
Things come to a head when Manousos, another of the unabsorbed who had locked himself away in Paraguay, makes the long trek to New Mexico to find Carol, whose early radio pleas for help indicate she’s a kindred spirit. Always more radical than Carol, he’s chagrined to learn, when he shows up, that she appears to have lost whatever fighting spirit she once had. When he starts trying various ways to injure hivemind members (and perhaps restore their individuality) she objects.
Yet, that’s not where the end of the first season leaves us. Manousos stays in New Mexico while Carol and her companion jaunt around the world, the kind of bucket-list vacation you’ll never get to take in real life. It’s during that that she learns that the hivemind’s ultimate goal of assimilating her (along with the others) could be done without her consent. This snaps Carol out of it and she returns to the Albuquerque cul-de-sac and Manousos just in time for a crate containing an atomic bomb to be delivered. End season one.
So, in a way, Carol ends the season just where she began – committed to acting against the hivemind and, maybe, saving humanity. I saw a lot of complaints online after the season finale to the effect of “she’s the same she was from the beginning, what was the point?” It made me chuckle, since that seems to miss the entire point of the season.
To a certain extent a season of TV, or a book, is a journey you send characters on. In many instances you’re literally getting them from Point A to Point B, whether those are actual physical locations (a quest from home to a far away land) or something internal (an emotionally wounded person learning to love, etc.). But sometimes, the journey looks like it brings the character back to where they began, only the character has changed.
I hate to fall back on cliche, but sometimes the journey itself is more important than the destination. While end-of-season Carol seems like she’s basically in the same place as start-of-season Carol – s resist the hivemind! – she’s there for a different reason. Earlier Carol was reacting largely from ignorance. She wasn’t interested in listening to the few other people in her situation about whether the hivemind was good and, perhaps, worth joining voluntarily. End-of-season Carol has some perspective one what the hivemind can offer, albeit a limited one.
Carol, as a person, has grown over the course of the season. She went from essentially lashing out from pain and grief to finding a resolve to fight because of what joining the hivemind would mean to her. So while her ultimate goal appears to be the same now as at the beginning, the motivation is different. That matters, at least in fiction.
That will probably not content those who didn’t enjoy the first season of Pluribus. It was definitely a slow burn (probably helped that we binged it at the end of the season), but it was going somewhere and it was important that Carol get there. Does that make for a compelling season of TV? Not for everybody, but I was definitely down for it.
I’m a child of the 1980s. By the time Ronald Reagan took office I was old enough to be aware of the wider world. That included the Cold War and the fact that there was a looming threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads. That’s a lot to handle for a ten-year old.
Thankfully, I had my (decade) older brother, Todd, to put it in perspective. He assured me there was no point in worrying because there was nothing we could do about it, anyway. Beyond that, where I grew up in South Charleston, West Virginia, was a hotbed of the chemical industry and was likely a first-strike target. If the Soviets loosed the dogs of war, my brother said, we’d be vaporized in an instant, with no pain or worry about how to survive.
Once the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell apart the specter of superpower-led nuclear annihilation faded in the face of terror attacks and climate change. But the potential for nuclear apocalypse is still with us and fiction (in its various forms) is still trying to deal with it. What’s so utterly fascinating – or depressing – is how similarly the topic has been treated over the years.
I fell down this rabbit hole last fall, starting when I saw A House of Dynamite, the latest film from Kathryn Bigelow.
It’s about a sudden, unexpected launch of an ICBM from the Pacific which, initially, everyone figures is just another test that will eventually fall into the ocean. It doesn’t take long, however, for the math to show that it’s headed for the Midwest and, more specifically, Chicago. Over the course of three 17-minute loops we see people on various levels trying to deal. An attempted shootdown fails, leaving the president with a decision about retaliation. But against who? And how much?
Watching A House of Dynamite brings out some sickening déjà vu if you’ve consumed almost any nuclear fiction in the past. Inevitably, we hurtle toward the only response that ever seems to be an option – full retaliation, because if we don’t we might not get a chance to do it later (and the American people, what’s left of the, wouldn’t tolerate that).
A House of Dynamite feels like it’s in conversation with some earlier movies, even if only subconsciously. The one that immediately sprang to mine for me, and which I rewatched immediately afterward, was 1983’s WarGames.
The first loop in A House of Dynamite takes place in the White House situation room, which has a wall full of monitors displaying data. The pivotal scene in WarGames takes place deep inside the mountain headquarters of NORAD, which has an even more immense wall of monitors.
Our characters are all locked in there because the computer that controls the United States’ nuclear arsenal (installed after actual humans failed to launch missiles during an exercise) tries to launch a retaliation for a Soviet attack that is, in fact, just a simulation. In order to teach the computer the error of its ways, it’s forced to play Tic-Tac-Toe against itself to discover the concept of futility. Then it switches to running through scenario after scenario for nuclear war, all of which lead to the same end – complete destruction. Disaster is averted when the computer, famously, realizes:
The tie in with A House of Dynamite, for me, is that regardless of which “variant” the computer entertains – from all-out initial attack to “minor” exchanges by smaller countries – the result is the same: everybody throws everything they have at each other. There is, it appears, only one end point to any nuclear exchange.
In that sense, the other movie I immediately thought of, Fail Safe, actually has a happy ending!
I actually read the 1962 book Fail-Safe before rewatching the 1964 movie and, I have to say, this is one of those situations where the movie greatly improves on the book. Fail-Safe, like many of these movies and books, has a great ticking clock creating dramatic tension. The book wastes too much time getting there, while the movie is much more efficient.
“There,” in this case, is a mistake involving “fail-safe points” used by the United States Air Force. American bombers would fly toward those points, waiting for a recall notice that would turn them around. Without the notice, they go on to hit their targets in the Soviet Union. Most importantly, they ignore any attempts to turn them around. Due to some kind of glitch (the book and movie differ on precisely what) one squadron doesn’t get the recall notice and heads for Moscow.
What follows is a very tense unravelling of expected behavior. Trying to stave off starting a nuclear war, the Americans help the Soviets try to shoot down the bombers, but one still makes it through. Meanwhile, a debate rages in the United States about what to make of all this and whether it could be an opportunity to strike the Soviets for real (a theory pushed in the movie by . . . Walter Matthau?!). In the end, the president comes up with a horrible bargain – once the American bombers hit Moscow, another American bomber will drop the same bombs on New York City. An eye for an eye, essentially. The movie ends in pretty chilling fashion.
But, as I said, this is actually a happy ending! Rather than falling into complete catastrophe, the higher ups in the United States and Soviet Union manage to at least limit the damage and prevent an all-out nuclear war. Regardless, the message of the book and movie are clear – we don’t have a good grasp on nuclear weapons and how they might get used by mistake and what that means for the world. I’ll add that the attempt by some to avoid responsibility for all this by blaming the machines sounds very loudly in the modern AI-besotted world.
Compare that to, say, 1964’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which shares a lot of plot scaffolding with Fail Safe (to the point there was litigation about it). Strangelove offers no hope whatsoever – not only is there nothing you, personally, can do to stop a nuclear apocalypse, the people that could do something are venal idiots that are likely to fuck things up in the end. In Strangelove’s world the only thing left to do is laugh (and crank up the Vera Lynn – anybody remember her?).
What all these works share, however, is a focus primarily on those people making the decisions. A House of Dynamite’s three loops work steadily up the chain, from information gatherers to experts to political end decision makers, but these are all still people whose jobs are to deal with the possibility of nuclear war. Given that I’m not sure what it says that, in all of them, the nuclear wars never start (or almost start) on purpose. It’s always an accident or someone else’s fault. As Men At Work sang, it’s a mistake.
That’s not the case when the focus is on regular folks dealing with the impact of a nuclear attack.
Growing up, the most famous version of that story was The Day After a 1983 made-for-TV movie (directed by Nicholas Meyer, fresh off Wrath of Kahn) that depicted a nuclear attack on the United State through the eyes of regular folks in Kansas and Missouri (what’s the hard on for nuking the American Midwest?). I don’t remember the actual movie itself, but I do remember the fallout (so to speak) from its broadcast. It hit pretty hard, even getting to Reagan.
Years later, I heard about the “British version” of that movie, called Threads. It has an epic reputation that’s on par with Magma albums or aggressive art installations. I figured this was a good time to check it out.
Threads stands in Sheffield for the American Midwest, but more importantly it depicts a population that has no plausible connection to their fate. The Americans in The Day After, theoretically, had a say in who ran the country and built up the nuclear arsenal that was unleashed. A strong theme of Threads is that the citizens of Sheffield were likely to be atomized in a conflict in which they had no part to play, aside from radioactive cannon fodder.
For that reason it’s, truthfully, the first third or so of Threads that really worked best for me. The way it portrays society starting to fray at the mere possibility of the bombs dropping (we learn, entirely from news reports, that the Soviets invaded Iran and the United States is pushing back) is entirely too realistic. Police crack down on protestors, some people just don’t want to think about it, others are obsessed. It feels very real and human. The stuff after the bombs drop, by contrast, is horrifying and depressing but also completely one note. There’s no humanity left in the aftermath, which might be realistic but feels too pessimistic even for my cynical heart. That said, had to have a lot of puppy therapy after Threads.
Even worse, maybe, in its own way, was On the Beach.
I read the 1957 book by Nevil Shute, forsaking the movie version starring (among others) Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire, which just doesn’t seem like his kind of movie. Set in Australia, it’s the story of several people – all connected to a US naval officer and his Australian liaison – riding out a nuclear exchange and waiting for the fallout to slide far enough south that it kills them. As in some of the WarGames scenarios that flash on the screen, this war started small but bloomed into a world-engulfing conflagration. But, as with Threads, it had little if anything to do with the Australians who make up most of the cast.
The driving force of On the Beach is fatalism. This is a story of people who are waiting to die, not trying to figure out how to survive what’s coming. Nobody mentions a shelter, nobody works on how to live with fallout. The most you get is a futile submarine voyage that confirms that everybody else on the planet is dead.
And everybody is fairly stoic about it. There are various forms of denial, sure, but nobody decides to go indulge in any horrific or taboo conduct now that the end of days are on the horizon. One character (the one played by Astaire in the movie) manages to get his hands on a Ferrari F1 car and enters it in the most ghoulish motor race ever put to the page (makes 1955 at Le Mans seem tame), but that’s about it. Mostly, everybody kills themselves once the fallout starts to settle in.
So, yeah, not the most uplifting of reads. But I think it definitely captured a feeling of the time, one that people probably didn’t want to think about too much.
To round things up, a shoutout to a recent American Experience documentary, Bombshell.
Not fiction, but about fiction – specifically, the propaganda efforts around the development and deployment of the atomic bombs against Japan. Covering only up to about 1948, it shows how even from the dawn of the nuclear age there have been stories told about it, outright fictions (largely, attempting to cover up the effects of fallout after the bombing of Japan). There’s always a narrative, somewhere, that somebody has to sell.
Where does that leave us in 2026? Fuck if I know. What nuclear fiction has taught me is that we’re likely to blunder into something awful and be unable to contain it. And that for all the decades we’ve lived with these weapons, we still don’t really know what to do with them. Which is terrifying. In which case, we’re right back where I was in the 1980s listening to my brother – ain’t nothing we can really do about it and hope one hits nearby and puts us out of our misery.
It’s January once again, which means it’s time for me to take a quick look back at my favorite things from the year before. A reminder that these posts include both truly new stuff and stuff that was “new to me” from last year. And, as always, I’m talking about personal favorites and don’t argue that any of these are the “best” of their kind. Still, I’d recommend everybody check them out.
With that said, let’s kick things off with the small(er) screen . . .
2025 was a hell of a year for television. Either that or I just did a better job of keeping on top of new series that it really seemed like a hell of a year. In fact, going back over my notes, just about everything that caught my attention in 2025 was actually new.
The Pitt, for example, was just as good as everybody said it was.
We came to it late – in fact, for months all I really knew about it was the legal wrangling over its status as an unauthorized ER sequel. I’m not the hugest fan of medical dramas, but it was hard to ignore all the buzz. We binged it over a weekend once all the eps were dropped and, needless to say, that was a pretty intense couple of days. The series is really good, though, as provided some moments of light and dark humor so it doesn’t feel like crushing dread all the time.
By the time we got to it The Pitt wasn’t a surprise, but Adolescence sure was.
I was sold on the format before I read any real reviews – the story of a teenaged girl’s murder and the hand of similarly-aged boy, told in four single-shot episodes – that I was in. That it touched on crime and the mechanics of the (British) criminal justice system was even better. Each episode was great, with the third episode – a suspect and interrogator (in this situation, a forensic psychologist) bottle episode that reminded me of the classic episode of Homicide – a true standout.
I’ve written previously about how the formats of The Pitt and Adolescence impacted their stories here.
Less formally inventive, but visually dazzling, was Common Side Effects.
Created by (among others) one of the minds behind the equally excellent Scavenger’s Reign, it’s the story of a schlub who discovers a mushroom in South American that has amazing healing properties – but also causes those to take to start seriously tripping balls. The show takes full advantage of the limitless possibilities of animation to demonstrate these freakouts and show a story of corporate corruption and deep paranoia. Can I say, as a public defender, how much I loved the lead pair of cops?
My pleasant surprise for 2025 was Chief of War, the Hawaiian historical drama from (yes) Jason Mamoa.
It was, honestly, a little bit of “what if Shogun, but Hawaii?,” but it looked amazing and it was very cool to have another story like this that centered the indigenous people and culture. It doesn’t quite live up to Shogun in terms of the script or acting, but it’s a solid historical adventure with some big bloody set pieces, not to mention lots of Mamoa running around without a shirt on (if you’re into that kind of thing – my wife is!).
Last of the new stuff that I really enjoyed was Pluribus.
This was another one I was down for the moment I heard that it was from Vince Gilligan, he crafted it for the criminally un-Emmied Rhea Seehorn, and he was returning to sci fi (he wrote for The X-Files, remember). I will admit that I admire Pluribus more than I loved it. Seehorn’s character is hard to take at times (hitting a little too close to home sometimes, too) and, having binged it, I can grasp why people think it’s slow. Still, I think folks who are looking to solve mysteries on the show are doing it wrong – it’s about Carol and her changes (or maybe lack of changes), of which I’ll write more later.
As for “older” stuff (for a certain definition of “older”), the one that really jumped out, from the unusual locale of being a Peacock original, was Hysteria!
From 2024, but set in the suburban 1980s, it’s the tale of a shitty heavy metal power trio trying to get off the ground just around the time of the Satanic Panic. They, naturally, rebrand themselves as Satanic and start to draw a following. I thought the show was really funny and well done (the music was spot on), but ultimately the show didn’t quite know whether it was about the panic or actually something demonic happening. Would have gladly watched more, but it was cancelled after one season.
Other than that, the notable departure for the year was Andor, which wrapped up its second and final season.
Was it a great series in its own right? Yes. Was it the best bit of Star Wars to come down the pike for a long long time? Also yes. Did it suffer from a need to tie into Rogue One and the rest of the established cannon? Unfortunately. Not enough to ruin it or drag it down too much, but it was particularly noticeable as the series came in for landing. Still, the build up was excellent. More like this, please.
That’s it for the small screen – next week, let’s talk tunes.
But there’s an inherent problem with prequels – they’re playing in a universe in which the future is already known to us. That can box writers in and sometimes make it difficult for the prequel to stand on its own as a piece of compelling drama, something we should care about for its own merits.
I was specifically talking about Obi-Wan, the Star Wars prequel series that covers the time leading up to the original Star Wars movie. It has a kidnapped Leia in danger and multiple show downs between the younger Obi-Wan and Darth Vader, but there was a lack of tension since we knew that all of them have to make it into Star Wars in one piece.
Ironically, I contrasted that with another Star Wars prequel:
Star Wars knows how to do this. Rogue One is regarded by a lot of people as the best Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, even though we knew precisely how it was going to end. What made it work was that existing characters were largely absent and we got to know and care about a whole new cast so that when they made the necessary sacrifices to complete their mission it landed with some heft.
I say “ironic” because having finished up the second (and final) season of Andor I realized how much of a prequel problem that show had in the end.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise, of course, given that Andor is a prequel of a prequel – Rogue One. What was surprising is that the issue wasn’t so much knowing who was “safe” draining the tension. It was that the series was so set on getting to Rogue One that it dashed along from event to even without leaving a lot of time to breathe and develop characters more.
By modern streaming standards Andor had a long run – only two seasons, but 12 episodes each, which feels positively indulgent compared to some (looking at you The Last of Us). While the first season was basically a straight running chronology, the second seasons breaks the episodes into four three-episode hunks, with each hunk separated by a year or more.
As a result, what at first felt like a slow burn character study of Andor and the people in his orbit turned into a sprint through important events necessary to get him to the beginning of Rogue One.
Does this mean that the sprint wasn’t rewarding? In a lot of ways it was. Apparently Ghorman and its fate is something that’s come up in other Star Wars properties, but I knew nothing about it, so the whole development there I thought was really well done. When the final hammer comes down it does feel earned, even if you wanted to know more about some of the locals before we saw them cut down.
Not too long ago I wrote about how, sometimes, form dictates how fiction turns out. I didn’t think about it then but “prequel” is another kind of form that forces creators to do certain things in certain ways. That’s not an inherently bad thing, but just as I talked about with the formal restrictions in that piece, it makes a difference in the end product.
Would Disney have ever let Andor play out over four or five seasons to dive really deeply into who all these people were (between Andor and Rogue One I still have no solid idea of Saw Gerrera or what exactly he’s up to)? Probably not. For all its quality and praise, my understanding is that Andor is not one of the Mouse’s hottest streaming properties. Without that time would it have been better not to rocket through years of things happening just to make sure we get to where we need to get? Maybe, but that was always the assignment and it’s impossible to say that Andor failed in it. What I am fairly certain of is that if the same folks had been given the freedom to tell a Star Wars story that didn’t have to plug into an existing narrative at some point the end result probably would have been even more rewarding
All art is driven by form, to a certain extent. Deciding to tell a story by writing a novel means a different form, with different strengths and weaknesses, than telling the same story by making a movie (which is why it’s often fruitless to compare adaptations to the source material). But sometimes creators will intentionally confine themselves even more, prioritizing form over traditional storytelling techniques. There’s recently been a couple of really interesting examples of this on TV.
Set in a takes-all-comers trauma center ER in Pittsburgh, the show’s catchy gimmick is that the 15-episode first season follows a single shift in the ER in real time (if you’re thinking such a shift couldn’t really be 15 hours long – it’s not an average day!). Noah Wyle (yes, of ER fame) plays the head doc as he rides herd over a bunch of residents, med students, and other medical professionals through the day.
The second to premier, which it did with a blast, was Adolescence, a British Netflix limited series about the investigation of a teenager’s murder of a teenaged girl.
As with The Pitt, Adolescence has a structural gimmick, too – each of the four episodes is done in one shot, so that it not only plays out in real time (for the hour – the series actually covers months of time in the end) but pretty much in one location. The first episode starts when police raid the suspect’s home, then follows him and others to the police station and the eventual reveal that he did, in fact, kill the girl. Other episodes feel a little more contained, particularly the third, which is basically a pas de deux with the killer and the psychologist trying to understand him.
In both cases, the format of the shows put limitations on how those stories were told. With The Pitt that began early, as they had to build the labyrinthine ER set before they could actually write anything. Given the “real time” framing, they had to know how long it took for people to get from place to place and what would be visible in the background of shots to know how all the pieces fit together. Likewise, in Adolescence the one-shot conceit meant there were no quick cutaways to other locations and other characters. That led to a tight focus on the killer and his family, to the exclusion of the victim or her family. As a public defender I found that focus refreshing, as often not enough attention is paid to the toll that crime takes on the perpetrator’s family. Nonetheless, it did lead to some criticism of the show for that focus.
What does that mean for how the form of these shows impact the viewing experience? I think the one-shot conceit for Adolescence makes a bigger, and more powerful, impact. The first episode expertly hands off from character to character, setting the scene at the station leading up to the killer’s interrogation and eventually admission. There are times when he disappears as the camera follows other characters around, reinforcing his isolation. The final episode, which includes a drive to the UK version of Home Depot after kids vandalize the killer’s father’s van, uses the drive time to supreme effect, giving us genuine human moments that, in other formats, might not land as well. The third episode, which is just the killer and the psychologist, is the least flashy but is intense. Only the second episode, where cops go to the school where the killer and victim went, feels a little hard done by the format, mostly because it’s a pretty big campus and there’s a lot of walking to be done.
The conceit feels less present in The Pitt. The most notable thing about it is that it avoids the typical medical drama pattern of wrapping up particular patients at the end of the hour. Some patients linger (and linger) for several “hours,” giving a better sense of how long ER visits tend to be. That said, aside from the slowly ratcheting up of tension over the hours there wasn’t one point where I was like “and that’s why they did it this way!” And the “one shift” idea drags down the reality of it a bit as no such horrible ER shift has ever existed in the history of the world. I would have liked to have seen a down hour where nothing major happens, people get a chance to breathe, and such. In the end the format works, and it doesn’t get in the way, but I’m not sure how essentially it is to the end result.
Art isn’t created in a vacuum. It’s shaped by the times in which it’s made and by the people who make it (who, themselves, are products of the times in which they’re made). Sometimes, artists will add additional barriers that shape their work and it can produce something really cool.
NOTE: This post contains spoilers for the third season of The White Lotus, so if you care about that kind of thing come back later.
One of the things about oral argument is that appellate judges love hypotheticals. Even garden variety criminal appeals can present issues that will resound through multiple cases in lower courts, so judges like to use hypos to test the limits of potential holdings or outcomes in any given case. Judges hate it when they ask a hypothetical question and the answer from counsel starts with, “that isn’t this case, Your Honor.” No shit, counsel, now answer the damned question!
I got those kind of vibes reading some of the criticism of the season finale of The White Lotus and the reaction to it of the show’s writer/director/creator, Mike White.
So far, all three seasons of The White Lotus are setup the same way – we initially see a dead body at an outpost of the titular resort, then rewind to a week or so earlier as we see the events that lead up to that death. This season, the finale included a gun battle that ended in a higher-than-usual body count (five dead, by some reckonings).
Some folks (myself included) complained that the swift manner in which the episode and, therefore, season, ended felt rushed, as the main characters (who weren’t dead) departed on schedule and apparently unaffected by the carnage around them. It’s not unreasonable to think the Thai police would sweep down on the place and question these folks or that some of them might be so shattered by the experience that they needed some kind of assistance (a trio of main characters were right in the middle of the firefight!).
Mike White, the show’s creator, thought the armchair critics were being too literal, calling them the “logic police” in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“This isn’t a police procedural, this is a rumination-type show,” he said. “It makes me want to pull my hair out. Is this how you watch movies and TV shows?”
There’s a fine line in criticism between knocking something for failing at what it’s trying to do and for not being what you think it ought to be (see, e.g, this review of Warfare that seems to condemn it for not being something other than it is). I’ve seen authors say they have a hard time reading for fun anymore because they can’t turn their writer-brain off and will try and think of how they’d have told the same story in a better, different way (I’m not casting stones – I can lapse into that mode, too). That seems to be what White is accusing critics of doing, but it doesn’t wash.
Nobody wanted or expected the show to turn into Law & Order: Thailand for the last half hour of the season (although a season arranged so that we know who died from the jump, with cops pushing rich dipshits out of their comfort zone, might be interesting), but it feels off to present not just on screen death but straight up murder (with multiple fatalities) and have it vanish into the atmosphere. Moreover if the show is, as White puts it, a “rumination-type show,” what event can cause more intense ruminations than witnessing a mass shooting? Granted they’re very different shows, but you can bet there’s some “rumination” going on among the characters of The Pitt following their mass shooting event.
Look, endings are hard and I understand that White had a lot of stuff left on the editing room floor due to time restraints, even with an hour-and-a-half finale. Still, sometimes it just doesn’t work or at least leaves people scratching their heads (as Bruce says, “not everything everybody does works all the time, son”). That doesn’t ruin all that came before it (it’s more about the journey than the destination, right?), but that also doesn’t mean people don’t have a point.
Sometimes you just have to accept the thing didn’t work and move on.
Last fall one of the great injustices of the streaming world was remedied when the entire run of Homicide: Life on the Street (including the wrap up TV movie) was finally available to stream on Peacock.
Yes, some of the music cues had to be changed due to rights issues (miss my “No Self Control” drop!), but otherwise the show looks and sounds better than it has for years. Created by Paul Attanasio (with an assist from director and Balimore guru Barry Levinson) and based on a book by then-journalist David Simon called Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the show broke a lot of ground for network TV and helped usher in the cable shows we now think of as peak TV, including Simon’s The Wire.
I wish I could say I was into Homicide from the jump, but the truth is I only remember being able to drop in here and there during the show’s original run. I liked what I saw, but it was harder to watch a specific show back in those days, kids (it was on Friday night for part of its run, for fuck’s sake!). Where I really picked up the show was on cable a few years later and, ultimately, by getting the entire series on DVD. In spite of having it right there, I hadn’t really watched it for years until it hit Peacock last year.
The relaunch on streaming led to a good deal of reportage on Homicide’s place in the TV pantheon, which caught my wife’s attention. She’d not seen much of the show, but decided it was worth diving in in light of the hype. How does the series hold up during a full-length rewatch after all these years?
Dramatically, Homicide holds up remarkably well. Part of that is due to the fact that it doesn’t look or feel like a product of 1990s network TV. If you listen to the (hopefully not gone for goode) podcast Homicide: Life on Repeat, Kyle Secor and Reed Diamond talk a lot about how differently the show was shot and other technical things that are, mostly, above my head. Still, it doesn’t feel like a TV show from thirty years ago, from an era with commercial breaks and network censors looking over everyone’s shoulders.
That extends to the storytelling itself, of course. The cops of Homicide are not (generally speaking) heroes out there braving the mean streets to make the world safe for democracy. They’re just men (mostly) and women trying to do a job and get through days filled with horror, pain, and uncooperative witnesses. Cases frequently remain unsolved (the “board” – a large dry-erase board that lurks to one side of the squadroom tracking open and closed cases – is practically a character itself). Unlike it’s NBC stablemate Law & Order things rarely go to court, so most often it’s the arrest, the clearance of the case, that matters, not ultimately whether justice is actually done. Homicide depicts police work as a grind, as a kind of assembly line, rather than a great, noble calling. It’s not unlike the practice of law, in my experience.
None of that would work without amazing work from the cast, both the series regulars and guests (again, like Law & Order, there are lots of “hey, they went on to . . .” moments). Secor, as Tim Bayliss, provides the perfect audience surrogate, the new guy to the squad who has to figure out the rhythms of the work and whether he should really be there are all. Andre Braugher rules as Frank Pembleton, master of “the box,” and the last person you want to sit down with for a chat. That the series doesn’t shy away from the fact that interrogations are often about tricking idiots into incriminating themselves adds a sleazy sheen to proceedings.
I’ve already mentioned Law & Order a couple of times and it’s impossible not to compare the two shows. I’m no Law & Order hater, in spite of my profession, but that show does seem to have a more upbeat attitude toward police work than Homicide does. A great example of that is two stories that dealt with suspects who really looked guilty, but the facts didn’t show it.
On Homicide, Bayliss’ first case as a primary is the sexual assault and death of a young girl, Adena Watson. Through most of the first season he and Pembleton try to build a case against a neighborhood fruit seller who really appears to be the best suspect, but they can never actually pin the murder on him. An entire episode is devoted to his interrogation, after which nothing has changed. The case remains unsolved (as did the real life inspiration in Simon’s book) and haunts Bayliss through the rest of the series. Viewers are left without any real closure, either.
Compare that to the Law & Order episode “Mad Dog” from 1997, in which a rapist prosecutor Jack McCoy had convicted years prior is released on parole, over McCoy’s furious objection. Shortly thereafter, there is a rape/murder in the neighborhood that bears the released guy’s modus operandi, but no real evidence to connect him. Detectives and prosecutors spend most of the episode deploying various tools of surveillance and coercion to trip the guy up, to no avail (McCoy is even chided by his boss for “dragging the law through the gutter to catch a rat”). It could have ended like that, with a sense of unknowing and asking serious questions about police conduct. Instead, a second assault is interrupted by the would-be victim taking a baseball bat to the skull of her attacker – who is, of course, the recently paroled rapist. In a flash we get closure and knowledge that not only had the cops and prosecutors been right all along, but that the bad guys’s dead, to boot.
All of this leads to an interesting question rewatching Homicide after all these years – is it copaganda? That is, do the stories it tells valorize police in a way that polishes their public image in a manner that can lead to the public letting police get away with stuff they never should get away with? Although it’s hardly a new phenomenon, I don’t remember “copaganda” being a term back during the show’s original run or it being discussed as such. There are certainly moments when the show leans that way – for all their faults, the cops are still fairly noble and have a sense of purpose as “murder police” (as Meldrick Lewis would put it), but overall it doesn’t really feel like it. These cops cut corners, unashamedly treat some murders as more worthy of solving than others, and worry about bulking up overtime. It’s not pure copaganda, at any rate, which makes sense given the issues many of the characters’ real-world analogues have had.
But I might be biased. For all the glory heaped upon The Wire, which is great, I always held Homicide in higher esteem. It seemed to get there first, but did it with constraints that would strangle a modern “prestige TV” series. After rewatching I still do. It’s an amazing achievement and, if you’ve not seen it, you owe yourself some binging.
Revenge is a dish best served cold. – Klingon proverb
Revenge is an evergreen character motivation. Everybody, regardless of their station in life or what they do for a living, has gotten pissed off enough by someone to at least contemplate getting revenge. But how far can revenge get you in a story? Does there come a point where even the most righteous revenge starts to curdle?
I thought about this a lot while the wife and I were watching The Glory.
A South Korean drama from Netflix, it sprawls out over 16 hourish-long episodes (apparently originally released in two parts). The further on we got the less invested I was in the main character’s revenge arc – not because it wasn’t well founded, but because I had so much time to think about it.
The main character is Moon Deun-eun, who while in high school is constantly bullied by a group of classmates led by Park Yeon-jin. “Bully” here is really too tame of a term – they tortured the poor girl, which we see in fairly graphic detail (burning with a curling iron, for instance). They get away with it because their parents are rich and connected and Deun-eun is basically fending for herself (her father is absent, her mother worthless). After she drops out, Deun-eun struggles for a while until she dedicates her life to getting back at Yeon-jin and crew.
And she plays a long game. Over the course of years Deun-eun trains to become a teacher, eventually worming her way back into the lives of her tormentors by becoming a teacher in the school of Yeon-jin’s young daughter. From there she unwinds a pretty clever plot in which she does little herself to hurt anyone, but turns the others against one another in a way that leads to a fairly satisfying payoff. But it takes an awful long time to get there and, along the way, you start to wonder if revenge is really that great a deal, even if fully warranted.
To be fair, The Glory doesn’t let Deun-eun go quietly into the sunset when it’s all over. She’s basically stripped of her reason for living and only gets back on track by deciding to help her boyfriend get revenge on the man who killed his father. Nonetheless, your sympathies lie with Deun-eun only so far as the hot coals of revenge keep burning and I didn’t feel it at the end of 16 episodes.
Maybe it’s just the law-talking-guy in me but, in the broad view, revenge is bad. Bad for the soul, probably, but certainly bad for society. The law, in all its manifestations, is largely designed to replace systems of private justice – a.k.a. revenge. If your neighbor steals from you, you don’t break into his house and get your stuff back – you call the police or sue him. If someone kills your loved one, you don’t get to track down the offender and kill them yourself – that’s a job for the police, prosecutors, and the courts.
Emotionally revenge can be very satisfying, at least in fiction.
I mean, who couldn’t get on board with something like this:
On the other hand, being the better person just doesn’t have the same zip to it:
But for that very reason I think revenge works best in movies or a shorter series. There’s enough time to get you fired up and fully behind the main character’s scheme without giving you time to really think if they should be doing it in the first place. Revenge fiction works best when it harnesses that initial “this is bullshit!” reaction to learning about someone being wronged. The more time you have for that to ebb away, the less interesting the ultimate revenge is.
The quote at the top, of course, comes from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Critically, part of why that works so well is that the revenge seeker is the bad guy.
I continue my look back at the year just past and highlight some of my favorite, or just most interesting, media I consumed (not necessarily new, but new to me). This week let’s watch some TV . . .
Mrs. Davis (2023)
I can only imagine that the brainstorming sessions for this show must have included some mind altering substances. A nun scours the globe, with the help of various other colorful characters, in order to fight an out of control AI that might be taking over the world. Should this work in any way shape or form? No. Does it? Amazingly, yes. It’s funny, thrilling, compelling, and hits you in the feels. In a world overrun with IP-driven reboots and rethinks we need more Mrs. Davises.
Shogun (2024)
Not an original thought, I know – this once-limited series has been praised to the hilt since it premiered. Pleasantly, it completely lived up to the hype. Having no familiarity with either the original novel or miniseries (I’m not that old) I can’t say how it compares to those sources, but as a stand-alone piece of work it was brilliant. Was the ending kind of a cop out? In a way, but isn’t that what life’s like sometimes? Besides, there’s a second season coming to stir things back up!
The Sympathizer (2024)
This is another show that probably shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. The titular character is a North Vietnamese spy who infiltrates the office of a South Vietnamese general so thoroughly that when the general flees to the United States the spy goes along. What follows is a twisting examination of being and identity, punctuated with a lot of black humor. There’s a movie within the show that sends up Hollywood and Robert Downey, Jr. shows up in multiple roles. It doesn’t all work all the time, but, as with Mrs. Davis, this is more of the odd kind of storytelling TV needs.
Say Nothing (2024)
Say Nothing is one of the best books I’ve ever read (as I’ve noted before). When I heard at TV adaptation was in the works I was skeptical that they’d be able to pull off the same trick of telling some very relatable, personal stories about people involved in The Troubles while also providing enough high-altitude context to explore the wider conflict. The show, of course, doesn’t quite do that quite as well, but by paring things down a bit the story told wound up very powerful. The series performs a neat sleight of hand by setting the first few episodes as kinetic pieces of lawlessness and violence done for the cause and then pivoting to explore the long-term consequences of participating in those things. Excellent on its own, even better if it makes you want to read the book afterwards.
We Are Ladyparts (2021, 2024)
It’s a great elevator pitch – a series about a group of young Muslim women in Brittain (of Pakistani background) who form a punk band. Could be a heavy, maudlin examination of the struggle of outsiders in the modern UK, right? Or, it could be a very funny show with deep-down laughs and fun songs that also manages to dig into themes of belonging and identity. I was completely captivated, in spite of a couple of music-related nitpicks (the music isn’t really punk, even if the attitude is, and their plan for success sounds more out of the 1980s than 2020s). Hoping for more!
The Life of Rock with Brian Pern (2014) – Brian Pern: A Life in Rock (2014) – Brian Pern: 45 Years of Prog and Roll (2016) – A Tribute – At the BBC (2017)
While watching stuff I frequently hop over to IMDB to figure out why a familiar face looks so familiar. I don’t know what we were watching or who I was looking up, but one of their prior works was Brian Pern: 45 Years of Prog and Roll – needless to say, it piqued my interest. Brian Pern is a parodic version of Peter Gabriel – lead vocalist of a prog-rock band called Thotch in the 1970s who went on to a genre-defining solo career (he frequently states that he invented world music). Across three short seasons (three episodes each, plus a couple of later specials), Pern first chronicles the history of rock and roll then navigates his own failing career, which ends in a botched Thotch reunion and death in an unfortunate Segway accident. There’s a lot of very funny stuff over the seasons (which includes appearances from the likes of Rick Wakeman and Gabriel himself), but the first is the best. If you’re a fan of prog at all, or much mockumentaries, you owe it to yourself to track it down online.
DISCLAIMER: Again, this post gets into very spoilery details of a couple of recent Apple+ shows, Sugar and Disclaimer. If you’ve not seen either and want to experience them cold, bookmark this and come back later. Otherwise, onward!
There are, at least, two kinds of twists that writers can employ. One simply pulls the rug out from underneath you and changes the game going forward, but doesn’t do much to recontextualized what you’ve already seen. A few weeks ago I talked about the big “Colin Farrell is a blue alien” twist on Sugar, which falls into that category. Whatever the reveal entails for the show’s second season, it doesn’t cause you to look back at what came before and nod knowingly about how things have changed.
Another kind of twist is just the opposite, one that really turns all that came before on its head and makes you seriously rethink all you’ve already seen. Another recent Apple+ endeavor, Disclaimer, does just that.
Written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron (adapted from a novel of the same name by Renee Knight), Disclaimer is about a celebrated journalist/documentarian and mother, Catherine, (played by Cate Blanchett) whose life is turned upside down by the appearance of a slim work of fiction (no way it’s long enough to be a “novel”) that appears to be based on a traumatic event from her past. The book is self-published by the father, Stephen, (Kevin Kline) of a 19-year-old son, Jonathan, who died in said traumatic event, although the book was written by his deceased wife.
This is all, it turns out, a plot of the Stephen’s to ruin the Catherine’s life, as well of that of her husband and adult son, Nicholas. The book tells the story of a younger Catherine seducing Jonathan who then, in his besotted horniness, drowns rescuing five-year-old Nicholas from dangerous seas. It paints Catherine as not just an adulterous but a bad mother, concerned only with her own hedonistic pleasures rather than taking care of her kid.
But that story is, of course, fiction. You can tell by the way it’s shot and the fade ins/outs used to transition in and out of those scenes. Fiction can get at big truths sometimes in a better way than nonfiction, but in terms of the details of reality it has issues, particularly given the fairly flimsy basis (some apparently-sexy photographs) upon which this fiction is based.
The twist, which finally arrives at in the seventh and final episode but isn’t much of a surprise,* is Catherine’s side of the story: it was not a fling, an affair, or a lost weekend, it was sexual assault. She tells Stephen about how she didn’t actually know Jonathan, but that he managed to get into her unlocked hotel room, threaten her and her son with a knife, and then repeatedly assault her over the course of hours. This, of course, makes all we’ve seen before feel very different as a lot of what Catherine does can be viewed through the lens of her being a survivor of sexual assault, not just a brittle hothead.
Does that mean the twist works? I think it depends on the audience. This review goes into good detail as to why it doesn’t, although it can be summed up fairly succinctly: it’s not really much of a twist. It’s not hidden where the book comes from or what it is (apparently there’s a little bit more mystery in the novel) and you quickly realize that what you’re seeing in the gauzy Italian flashbacks is the product of someone’s imagination. It’s only a matter of figuring out when the other shoe drops, which the show gives away easily. Seriously, there’s a trigger warning before every episode about (among other things) sexual violence, none of which shows up in the first six episodes – guess what happens in the seventh?
But that assumes that the only point of a twist is to shock and surprise, to leave an audience thinking “I did not see that coming!” What if you’re after something else? Interviews with Cuaron (like this one) suggest that he was more interested in luring viewers into the headspace of those who read the book cold – several of whom comment that the Cahterine stand in “got what was coming to her” and that was a good thing – to judge her as a mother and a human being. The twist, then, forces viewers to confront their own biases and assumptions. It should make them feel bad about themselves.
Still, the “this is not exactly a twist” does undercut that idea a bit. So does the fact that Disclaimer is so very much. Cuaron is on record as saying this couldn’t have been done as a movie, but lots of viewers and critics, including yours truly, think otherwise. It would have to choose which movie to be – the serious study of grief, untold truths, and the aftereffects of abuse or the very pulpy revenge story in which Kevin Kline in old man makeup turns into a would-be murderer (the whole time I kind of wanted him to slip it Mr. Fischoeder territory, maybe have a golf cart). Part of the issue with the series is that it whiplashes back and forth in tone.
And then there’s the endless voiceovers (in at least two, if not three, voices and POVs) that mostly exist to make sure anybody who’s never watched a moving picture before doesn’t miss important stuff. There’s one scene, a flashback when Stephen and his wife go to Italy to recover their son’s body, and he finds evidence the kid’s been smoking again in his hotel room. The wife snaps that it was probably due to the girlfriend, and the Kline in voiceover explains that the wife never really liked the girlfriend. No shit!
Which is frustrating, because there are several good stretches in Disclaimer, some good performances, and it looks great (in the sense that sometimes “great” means drab and dingy). And the whole idea of luring viewers into one state of mind about Catherine then pulling a switcheroo has promise, but the whole fails to come together as a whole. And the twist, while vital to what it’s trying to do, doesn’t land like it should given what came before it.
As I said in my other post, twists are hard to get right. They’re also risky. If the point is to change a viewer or reader’s focus on all that came before it risks ruing it. A “gotcha!” twist my land flat, but it doesn’t necessarily blow up the rest of the work. I’m not saying the twist in Disclaimer ruins it, but I think there were much more interesting ways to reach the point it was trying to make.
JD Byrne 