America Meets Its Darkness: A Look at HBO's Westworld

Maryann Price singing "I'm an Old Cowhand" with Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. She knows all the songs that the cowboys know, 'bout the big corral where the dogies go, 'cause she learned them all on the radio, yippee-i-o-ki-ay. There are fake cowboy visitors in HBO's new series Westworld too, but they're not so nice.

by Gaius Publius

I'm a fan of science fiction, especially when it reflects and comments on the state of our national affairs — and our national affairs are definitely in a state. Which brings me to the new HBO series Westworld.

Westworld is derivative in some ways. It takes off from a pleasant mid-1970s film entertainment by Michael Crichton and starring Yul Brynner, also called Westworld, in which an android-populated theme park goes chaotic and androids starts killing the visitors. But this new version adds in much of the violence and dark tone from HBO's excellent, realistic Western drama Deadwood, plus a lot more brutal sexuality than the earlier film, similar to that in Game of Thrones and other recent productions.

Yes, the visitors to the original Westworld theme park could "encounter" the saloon girls at will, all of whom would be willing, and shoot up the android locals, but that part was downplayed in the film. As Rick Perlstein amply documents in Nixonland, America of the 1970s was starting to come to grips with its darker self, with the world of the My Lai massacre and police brutality, of brutal sexism and incentivized social conformity, and it dealt with that encounter by trying to turn away, by trying to re-enter the world of American myth that Ronald Reagan ultimately shepherded us to.

Just one example: The 1968 My Lai massacre was prosecuted, sort of, but what was done, there and elsewhere, was never absorbed, understood or metabolized as a wider problem within the American psyche — particularly the male American psyche, since the soldiers involved in all these massacres were indeed male. So the pushback, the effort to start the forgetting, began. As early as 1970 mainstream propagandists were working to blunt Vietnam era awarenesses and counter-cultural challenges with, for example, "folk" groups like entirely anodyne New Christy Minstrels, who were introduced at Super Bowl IV as "young Americans who demonstrate — with guitars."

Bottom line, in the 1970s the country was in the process of trying to sanitize itself, and there was an ongoing public "discussion," both explicit in public conversation and implicit in the media and public entertainment. The original Westwood was part of that effort, if unconsciously. As I said, a pleasant entertainment, and in fact a watchable film.

America Meets Its Darkness

America today is a much different place. The Reagan Revolution is over — Reagan, the agent who engineered our re-entry into American counter-factual myth — and the brutal facts of our darker nature are now coming home to stay, in the form of murderous counter-strikes from abroad and at home, and an economically induced opioid-and-suicide crisis that won't cease until our rulers cease the economic pressure that drives it.

Which they will never do. And which everyone knows they will never do, everyone at least who watched the determined effort to destroy the Sanders campaign by anyone with a stake in the status quo. Trump voters, those not driven mad by demons of race, have parallel fears.

In short, America is having dark dreams about itself, and those dreams are beginning to be represented even in mainstream entertainment, like the new Westworld.

Here's what Rolling Stone critic Rob Scheffield says about this series:

What 'Westworld' Says About America Right Now

HBO's big-budget reboot of the Seventies sci-fi movie is really about masculinity – and Rob Sheffield thinks it could not be more timely

In a better time for this country, Westworld would feel a lot more like science fiction. Instead, this HBO show is a bloody, pulpy, breast-intensive satire of the American male psychosis at its most demented. It's set in a futuristic theme park where guests pay thousands of dollars a day to live out their Wild West fantasies, which mostly involve shooting or torturing the robot "hosts" who populate the park. Saloons, whorehouses, six-shooters and Stetsons: all an excuse for the clientele to act on their most depraved urges. One of the human masterminds behind the park sums up the guests as "rich assholes who want to play cowboy." The robots bleed real-looking blood – buckets of it, in fact – but it's all fun and games as long as they don't really feel or remember anything, right? Like the replicant hunters in Blade Runner would say, they're just skin jobs.

Except what happens if these hosts develop their own consciousness – androids who dream of electric tumbleweeds?

In this Westworld, the androids who permanently inhabit the park are not the villains, but the victims of "rich assholes who want to play cowboy" — victims of wealthy visitors who see others in the world as toys for their entertainment (sound familiar?). And now those toys, previously unaware of their own low status in a world they thought was theirs, are starting to wake up.

How's that for a concept that perfectly captures the times?

More from Scheffield:

Evan Rachel Wood, by the way, is easily the best thing about Westworld – she's the spark of raw humanity who makes it all compelling. Her Dolores is a doe-eyed rancher's daughter who exists to be either rescued or abused, depending on the whims of the paying costumer. And since it's usually abused, she lives out the same loop over and over again, a loop that ends as her blood gets wiped away and her memory gets reset. But before the technicians send her back to work on the bunny ranch, they test her with one query: "Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?" As long as she keeps saying no, she qualifies as a good little robot sexpot. Except she's unmistakably showing signs of logging memories and figuring out what's going on, which means she's showing signs of becoming disturbingly human.

And something else, something that Scheffield isn't saying, is that Wood's character is learning to lie to the technicians about what she knows — a detail that gives the series an added dramatic punch.

You'll need to be clear about the premise before you begin to watch, though; the pilot is confusing. I think the film-makers were counting on the grit and gore to keep you tuning in until the tragedy of that world becomes clear. It's not immediately obvious, for example, who's not an android and who is, and I almost stopped watching. But if you're forearmed with enough information, you won't make that mistake.

"Minds destroyed by madness"

This isn't so much a movie review as a nation review. Like Allen Ginsberg, we are watching, not just the best minds of this generation, but also the worst "destroyed by madness," trapped in a world they can neither tolerate nor change. The Sanders-side electoral rebellion has failed, for whatever reason, and the Trump-side uprising, fueled by the radical mix of forces that drove that rage, will likely be snuffed there as well.

Where do the American people go from here? Do they endure till they die in the hole they live in, dreaming of "freedom" via thirty-second offroad truck commercials? Or do they do something else? What will Evan Rachel Wood do after the third or fourth brutal rape, somewhere in midseason, when she realizes she doesn't have to execute her programming and can execute ... something else? Will her reaction be sanctioned by law, or by the keepers of the world she can't escape? The dramatic possibilities, in the series at least, are endless and exciting.

I don't expect to say the same for the larger Westworld that created the smaller one, certainly not with the word "exciting" attached.

"But I saw you and you saw me, mostly"

Let's end, however, on a cheerier note, with the scat-singing of the above-mentioned Maryann Price, performing a song I call "But I Saw You and You Saw Me, Mostly," but which Dan Hicks called "Shorty Falls in Love" or here, "Another Night."

Ignore the odd laughter and applause — it's a rehearsal for the Flip Wilson comedy show on what may be a crowded practice set.

We sped around the world
To see what we could see,
But I saw you and you saw me mostly

Eyes for each other and not for the world. Maybe there's a lesson there.

GP
 

"The Jinx" still seems to me to have been a rotten idea for a TV series. Was I wrong?

This is just a screen grab. If you want links
you should be able to find 'em yourself.

by Ken

"Gut-wrenching, remarkable television," eh?

Further, from the blurb for the respective entry on today's NYT "Today's Headlines" e-newsletter, I learn further: "HBO pioneered a new kind of appointment television on Sunday night." Okay then, please cancel my appointment.

I really can't say anything about The Jinx itself. I didn't have any interest in watching it, and I still don't. And The life and times of Bobby Durst still seems to me a wretched idea for a TV miniseries. And yet . . . and yet . . . .

This bit from the New York Times's Charles V. Bagli and Vivian Yee's "Robert Durst of HBO's 'The Jinx" Says He 'Killed Them All"" may provide some sense of how I looked at the project before it aired:

The amount of press coverage Mr. Durst has generated is topped only by the volume of work he has made for his lawyers and police investigators in Westchester, Los Angeles, Galveston and beyond. Yet he had rebuffed overtures from journalists until he saw “All Good Things,” a lightly fictionalized film the producers had previously made of his life in 2010, and approached them to tell his story.

“I will be able to tell it my way,” he said in the second episode of “The Jinx.”

Well, Bobby, it didn't quite work out that way, did it? As by now everyone knows, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst was about as far from a whitewash as it could be.

I should explain that the last time Howie wrote about the 2000 murder of his close friend Susan Berman, in a December 5 post called "Odd The Way The 1% Get Away With Their Crimes -- Even Murder Sprees. Are We In Russia?," he explained that he always knew the man who's assumed to have murdered Susan by everyone who knew her, and also by a lot of other people who've looked into the case, as "Bobby," one of Susan's "rich friends."

I always knew him as "Bobby," another of Susan Berman's rich friends. Now he's Robert Durst. I didn't know any rich people-- only poor people like myself-- when I was hanging out with Susan, except for her and the rich friends she introduced me to.

So "Bobby" it'll be. However, since the case spans an enormous amount of time, and a weird assortment of detail, it might be well to go over some basics. Here's the start of the above-referenced NYT report by Charles V. Bagli and Vivian Yee:

Since his first wife vanished more than three decades ago, Robert A. Durst, the eccentric and estranged son of one of New York’s most prominent real estate dynasties, has lived under the suspicious gaze of law enforcement officials in three states.

They have followed his path from New York City to Los Angeles, where one of his closest friends was found dead in her home in 2000. They have tracked him to Galveston, Tex., where he fled after investigators reopened the case of his wife’s disappearance, and where he posed as a mute woman and shot and dismembered a neighbor in 2001.

Mr. Durst was acquitted in the Texas killing, and was never arrested in the disappearance of his wife or the death of his friend. But on Saturday, he found himself in custody once again, arrested on a charge of murder as he walked into a New Orleans hotel he had checked into under a false name.

On Sunday night, in the final moments of the final episode of a six-part HBO documentary about him, “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” Mr. Durst seemed to veer toward a confession that could lift the shroud of mystery that surrounds the deaths of three people over the course of three decades.

“What the hell did I do?” Mr. Durst whispers to himself in an unguarded moment caught on a microphone he wore during filming. “Killed them all, of course.”

In the years since his wife, Kathleen Durst, disappeared in 1982 after spending the weekend at the couple’s country home in Westchester County, Mr. Durst has bounced in and out of jail for other crimes, cut ties with his family, remarried, and sued his brother for a $65 million share of the family fortune. Through it all, he has maintained his innocence in the disappearance of his wife, while also denying any role in the 2000 death of the Los Angeles friend, Susan Berman.

His arrest on Saturday in a Marriott on Canal Street in New Orleans was in connection with Ms. Berman’s death, though the Westchester authorities said they were still investigating him in his wife’s case. Mr. Durst was walking toward an elevator and mumbling to himself when F.B.I. agents intercepted him at the hotel, a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said. He had checked in under the name Everett Ward, not the first time he had used an alias.

Mr. Durst is believed to have left Houston in a Toyota Camry on March 10, headed for New Orleans. Investigators involved in the case said they feared that the renewed attention brought by “The Jinx” would lead him to try to flee the country. . . .

WHEW! GOT ALL THAT?

I realize I'm poaching on Howie's turf here, and perhaps he may yet have more to say about it. He's just begun a really grueling week of treatments, though, and I can claim a sort of semi-personal semi-interest in the subject, having heard Howie talk about Susan for a lot of decades (he's figured I must have met her, just as over time I met so many of his friends), and since her murder I've heard him talk a lot about Bobby.

Already, you'll note, that title he put on his December post, "Odd The Way The 1% Get Away With Their Crimes -- Even Murder Sprees. Are We In Russia?," is looking less certain as it applies to Bobby, and this is at least in part thanks to both the attention focused on the case by The Jinx and more specifically to what may be fairly important evidence turned up by the filmmakers in the course of their years of digging into the case.

One fan of the show is former Westchester County D.A. Jeanine Pirro, whose office spent six years investigating the disappearance of Kathleen Durst, the first of Bobby's suspected victims, in 1982. She told the Times team:

These two producers did what law enforcement in three states could not do in 30 years. Kudos to them. They were meticulous. They were focused. They were clear.

It might be more interesting to hear Ms. Pirro talk about why the Jinx-makers were able to do what she and the authorities in California and Texas were unable to do: pin the crimes on Bobby. But I guess that's unfair. The filmmakers spent ten years on the case, and it was their only case.

It still troubles me, to put it mildly, to think that this is the shape of things to come in the world of crime-solvingnow the only way we can get crimes investigated -- if they have the stuff of "gut-wrenching, remarkable television" (or radio, for that matter, in the case of NPR's Serial)

That said, I've discovered in the Times piece and in a NYT joint phone interview with Jinx co-writers Andrew Jarecki (who also directed) and Marc Smerling (who was the cinematographer and editor) that there are in fact pretty good answers to questions about the project that I once thought smugly were patently unanswerable.

Like, what made Jarecki and Smerling think this should be a project to begin with? Well, it turns out that they didn't. What happened is that Bobby was impressed enough with their fictionalized film account of his story that he came to them. After all the time they'd invested, they found themselves in a position where the subject himself was apparently prepared to talk to them about it. What were they supposed to do? Tell him to take a hike?

And when they went into the "project," it really wasn't a project. They had no idea where it would go -- just, I imagine, that after all they'd invested in the subject, they couldln't afford not to find out. Marc Smerling says:

We didn’t know that was going to happen in the beginning. In reality, we were making a documentary about Bob Durst, and then the relationship between Andrew and Bob became closer as the film went on. Then we found new pieces of evidence, and everything changed. It became an investigation, and all of a sudden, we were in the film. That was not planned.

Another obvious question concerns what they knew and when, and how they could have kept such explosive matters as the letter and the "confession" to themselves. After all, these were crimes they were dealing with. And the answers are that they thought long and hard about what they could reveal to the authorities and when, because of all sorts of legal ramifications and complications, but in fact they eventually did begin sharing what they knew, and what they shared clearly had a major impact on the investigation of Susan Berman's murder and Bobby's eventual arrest.

The NYT interview (by Bruce Fretts) goes into considerable detail about the life and complications of the project, including the obviously crucial matter of their relationships with their subject, and the filmmakers shed all sorts of light on how and why they did what they did over the course of it. As for nondisclosure of what they were sitting on for the last two episodes of The Jinx, well, I give them credit for keeping their own counsel and not trying to stage a publicity coup with it. They seem to have been confident enough in the integrity of their work that they didn't need to do their own PR offensive to counter, for example, the misimpression that the series was going to whitewash Bobby.

All in all, it still seems to me to have been a lousy idea for a TV series. And yet it seems to have been done in a remarkably responsible way, and to have achieved some impressive results. Don't ask me what the moral is.

#

TV Watch: HBO's "Looking" goes into tonight's episode with a huge jolt from last week's gorgeous one

Episode 15: Inside the Episode -- a lovely one for Doris and Dom

by Ken

The early Season 2 episodes of Looking weren't easy for me. What attracted me to the show in Season 1 had a lot to do with the fact that I felt so comfortable with the characters -- not just because they're (mostly) gay but because they're people whose life struggles I can recognize and easily associate with. This season, not so much. In particular, I was on the outside looking in at this gay world that thrives on giant parties, with hideous loud music and rampant substance abuse. I'm not saying such things don't exist, or aren't an important part of some people's lives, but they aren't part of mine and at this point I don't see much hope that I can develop any more interest in them. So, ironically, instead of feeling, for once, included in a show, I feel, all too familiarly, excluded.

To make matters worse, the last of the party-riots was Patrick's Halloweed shindig, which brought out the worst in everyone, not least Patrick. Again, not in any way believable, but in this case fairly painful. As I've already said, I like Patrick (Jonathan Groff) a lot. Maybe I guess I wish I were Patrick, except maybe for the part that, with all he has going for him, he's still unhappy. And a lot of that unhappiness he brings to his own party -- the "party" of his life, I mean, although come to think of it it was totally true of the metldown he suffered by the end of his Halloween party. And the meltdown too was all too believable, one of those proverbial train wrecks you see coming and are powerless to prevent.

I suddenly found myself thinking of Ted (Josh Radnor) in How I Met Your Mother, who could seem for a while, maybe a few seasons, like a victim of cruel fate, just never able to make the romantic connection that such a fine fellow deserves. Until it gradually emerged that the biggest holdback to Ted's hopes wasn't fate but, well, Ted. I guess the giveaway in Patrick's case was when we finally met his mother (played so beautifully by Julia Duffy), and instead of the rigid, overbearing suffocator we'd been getting through Paddy's eyes, she turned out to be the smartest, sweetest, most caring and understanding and unjudgmental mother you could imagine. Of course other people's mothers are a totally separate case from one's own. For that matter, one's own mother can look incredibly different to other people.

I loved that for last week's episode the writers left Patrick in that hideous post-party situation. He didn't just humiliate himself at the party, he annihilated himself. And no, Patrick, it wasn't your friends' fault for letting you mainline the tequila. Who drank the damned stuff?

So Patrick was very much part of the episode. But otherwise it was given over to Dom (Murray Bartlett), the oldest of the cetnral group of friends, the guy who is only now, at 40, beginning to experience some blemishes in his heretofore unblemished record of sexual conquests, and his clearly close straight friend Doris (Lauren Weedman). And the two of them just lit up the screen.

It has been obvious from the start that they have some kind of history, and in this episode it was laid out for us as they traveled back to their shared roots in Modesto. It was a really beautiful episode, built around the sudden death of Doris's father -- traumatic for her not because of tension with her father, but because there wasn't, really, and his death not only is a terrible loss but takes her right smack back into the hometown she had to, and did, escape. Which, as it happens, was exactly the case for Dom as well. For both it was time traveling back to a past they haven't by any means finished processing.

And in this case the Aunt Sarah conjured for us in Doris's rememberings turned out to be all that and then some, but also a little different, in the formidable person of Mary Kay Place. The tug of war between them over Sarah's brother and Doris's father isn't ended by his death, and neither Doris nor Dom can quite get "their" Modesto in focus now that they're plunged back into it, with all the hopes and dreams they carried out of it. Then throw poor Patrick into the mix, glad for the opportunity to briefly escape his San Francisco world, which has gone so wrong, but being plunged into this other world that's freaking his friends out and confuses the heck out of him, and we had an episode that was just breath-taking.

Of course you can't do that every week. How often in life do you get a combination of circumstances like Doris's, Dom's, and Patricks's last week? If I've got the episode count right, there are three episodes left in the ten-episode Season 2 (and, I worry, three episodes left for the show), and no doubt they're going to give us something very different. Already by the end of last week's episode Patrick's life had taken a markedly different turn. I'm feeling better about the season as a whole, though.

#

News Watch: This may be the best promo I've ever seen

"In Season 2 he's changing everything up. . . .
Maybe he'll add a pony . . . a crime-solving pony."

Says John, "We were just really assuming the show was going to be basically the same." The good news: He gets to keep his glasses.

by Ken

This promo was actually first posted about seven weeks ago, and we're already three weeks into the season it was promo-ing. But it's still maybe the best promo I've ever seen for anything. I don't know how many times I've seen it, but it delights me as richly as it did the first time.

At the end of the promo John expresses speaks rather forlornly about his hopes for this "one more year." After Episode 2 of the new season aired, HBO announced that Last Week Tonight will be around not just for the season-in-progress but for two more, of 35 shows apiece, in 2016 and 2017. Let's hand it to the HBO programming people for getting this call triumphantly right. The Last Week Tonight team has consistently managed to make the show among the funniest and the most informative broadcasts we've had.

Of course John was a pretty thoroughly known quantity by the time the show debuted, thanks to his years remarkable work on Comedy Central's Daily Show with Joh Stewart, including his well-deserved stint as substitute host during Jon's leave. What wasn't known was just what sort of show he and his people would be putting together at their new address.

The format they came up with is simple but durable; it just depends on the huge amount of work and wit it takes to stuff it with content. First there's a roundup of relatively short items plucked from the week's strange-but-true events. Then the latter two-thirds or so of the show is given over to a really extensive look at a single subject.

I would think that even the most casual observer can see how much research and screening and writing and rewriting and materials collection that half-hour broadcast entails. Still, the point seemed to be lost on Charlie Rose, as I discovered when, in order to see John, I broke my standard no-Charlie-Rose rule (which can be stated roughly, in case the point needs clarifying: "No Charlie Rose!"). Charlie, apparently genuinely surprised to hear John say that no, there's no way he could do LWT on a = nightly basis -- like, you know, The Daily Show. Of course it's possible that our Charlie, for all his seemingly sincere aura of fandom, had never actually watched either The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight. The fact remains that he seemed sincerely confounded by the idea that the way the shows are produced is different in any way except the number of times a week each is produced.

The big challenge for the LWT team, obviously, is the "big" segment of each show: finding subjects that lend themselves to their kind of treatment at 18-or-so-minute length, and then putting together a segment that fills those 18 minutes at peak news and comedy value. I think it's pretty extraordinary how many such subjects they've imagined and executed so successfully, coming up with an astounding array of information, most of which is genuinely shocking -- and side-splitting, often at the same time. One obvious result is that each episode of LWT has enduring rather than merely topical value.

I can't think of a better example than the "Tobacco" segment from this season's Episode 2.

Ep. 26 Clip: Big Tobacco's Still At It

#

Premium-Cable Premiere Night brings us the return of "Looking" and "Episodes"

HBO's trailer for Season 2 of Looking -- the new season launches tonight.

by Ken

It's Premium-Cable Premiere Night tonight, meaning most importantly the start of the new seasons of HBO's Looking (Season 2) and Showtime's Episodes (Season 4), both of which had simply spectacular seasons last time out. At the same time it's possible to be cautiously optimistic about the return of Showtime's Shameless for Season 5, in which (I see from the promos) the Gallaghers will be grappling with the onset of gentrification in their heretofore lost-and-forgotten slice of Chicago. And HBO has a new series called Togetherness that looks to be worth at least a look.

Then there are HBO's Grrlz and Showtime's House of Lies, which I know will be welcomed back by their devoted fans. And I suppose a case could be made that, because they deal almost exclusively with characters so vile and obnoxious that one could hardly wish enough bad things to happen to them, and not nearly enough do, they are truer representations of real life. However, I had the misfortune, while rewatching the whole of Season 1 of Loving, of being subjected to endless repetitions of the promo for the new season of Grrlz, and it looks even more revolting than when I finally gave up on it despite its creator's obvious talents.

(You know how lately I keep enthusing over shows that dish out spectacular scripts to spectacular writing to spectacular casts and puts the actors in circumstances to produce their best work? Here's one that dumps assaultively cretinous writing on actors who may or may not have talent but here puke up mostly inept, repellent work, in the apparent service of the revenge fantasies of a young person who, although one of the luckier people on the planet, sees herself as one of life's great victims. It's hard not to appreciate the element of fiscal reality captured in the lives of these young people, and it may just be an unreasonable personal reaction that even this is undercut by their creator's personal unfamiliarity with those circumstances. Nevertheless, it's hard to care about characters who for the most part don't seem even to try to grapple meaningfully with the hard questions of life. There's no easy answer to the question of which proposition is truer: that the only thing more appalling than the Grrlz of Grrlz is the Guyz," or that the only thing more appalling than the Guyz is the Grrlz.)

ON A MORE HOPEFUL NOTE --

Season 4 of Episodes (created by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik) really caught me by surprise. I'd been kind of dutifully following the story of British TV writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsan Greig) who come to the U.S. to write what they assume will simply be an adaptation of a hit series of theirs, which turns out to be a total degradation rewritten to the talents, such as they are, of a fictionalized version of Matt LeBlanc. But somehow last season, either I finally really "got it" or the show itself took off -- I thought it was sensational. And since the season ended with Sean and Beverly, determined to haul their battered bodies and souls back to England, being powerfully lured to stay on in Hollywood to work on what they're assured will be a correctly done version of a show they're actually interested in writing, there's plenty of room for fun in the new season.

But the show I'm really looking forward to is Looking. I reallze that it may be of less interest to viewers who aren't interested in gay-male relationships, but the thing about the central characters of Looking, produced by a creative team of a Brit, Andrew, and an American, Michael Lannan -- and the peripheral ones too, for that matter -- is that their sexual orientation is merely a part of who they are, and really doesn't have much to do with the struggles they're going through to make sense of their lives.

It's impossible for me to ignore the mad crush I have on Patrick (Jonathan Groff), both the character and the actor, a San Francisco transplant from Colorado who at 29 has been historically unable to open himself up personally enough to have a shot at a real relationship, until last season he began to do so with a chance-met Mexican hottie named Richie. Late in Season 1 we finally got to meet Jonathan's family, who turn out to be terrific, and refocused our view of the strain his his relationship with his mother (a really spectacular performance by Julia Duffy).

But the second time through I found myself significantly more engaged with his friends Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez; a college friend and, since then, longtime roommate), a struggling artist, and the turning-40-waiter Dom (Murray Bartlett), an even more personally closed-off type than Patrick. There's an awful lot more, including another really spectacular performance by Scott Bakula as a successful businessman who gets involved in Dom's dream of opening up a restaurant featuring Peruvian peri-peri chicken. One just hopes the team can sustain the level of Season 1 into Season 3.

#

Odd The Way The 1% Get Away With Their Crimes-- Even Murder Sprees. Are We In Russia?

I always knew him as "Bobby," another of Susan Berman's rich friends. Now he's Robert Durst. I didn't know any rich people-- only poor people like myself-- when I was hanging out with Susan, except for her and the rich friends she introduced me to. Bobby Durst was someone she knew from boarding school, after her parents were killed in Mob hits, if I remember correctly. Her dad was a Vegas Jewish Mafia big shot-- not on a Sheldon Adelson level-- but a real big shot nonetheless. David "Davie the Jew" Berman. She wrote a book about it and got famous. I'm pretty sure I took the inside jacket cover.

I don't know filmmaker Andrew Jarecki; he left a helpful comment on post I did about his Bobby Durst film in 2010, All Good Things, starring Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst, which he filmed in 2008. The release was successfully sabotaged the the powerful Durst family and didn't come out until 2010, when it flopped badly. In the movie, Susan was renamed Deborah Lehrman and played by Lily Rabe (Sister Mary Eunice McKee and Misty Day from American Horror Story). Jarecki isn't done. He just completed a 6-part HBO documentary on Durst-- The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.

His estranged family is as unenthusiastic about this one as they were about All Good Things. This week, the NY Times reported that Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman for the Durst Organization, called the documentary "a self-indulgent work of fiction. Given that Robert is likely underwriting the film, it should rival the great works of propaganda."

[Durst]was investigated, but never charged, in the mysterious disappearance of his young, beautiful first wife and the mob-like execution of a close friend in Los Angeles. He beheaded a cantankerous neighbor in Texas in what he described as an act of self-defense, cross-dressed to conceal his identity and then escaped the police, whose nationwide manhunt took them to Northern California, then New Orleans and, finally, Bethlehem, Pa., where Mr. Durst had gone to college.

But other than a few cryptic asides to reporters, Mr. Durst, 71, has kept his own counsel.

Until now.

HBO is announcing this week that it plans to broadcast a six-part documentary called The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst. Made with Mr. Durst’s cooperation, HBO says, the documentary, to air this February, will unravel the disappearance of Mr. Durst’s wife, Kathie, in one of the most notorious unsolved mysteries in New York history, and expose long-buried information about the man suspected in that and other unsolved crimes.

It is based on nearly 10 years of research by the filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling, who made the 2010 film All Good Things, a lightly fictionalized account of Mr. Durst’s life. The filmmakers say they reviewed thousands of court documents and interviewed more than 100 friends, investigators, prosecutors, journalists (including this reporter), defense lawyers and relatives of Kathie Durst and Mr. Durst’s friend Susan Berman.

But the core of the documentary is more than 25 hours of interviews with Mr. Durst, who in his slow-paced, gravelly voice talks about his privileged upbringing as a member of a family that owns 10 Manhattan skyscrapers and numerous apartment buildings and became a force in New York City politics.

He describes a tangled relationship with his powerful father, Seymour, and the betrayal he felt when his younger brother, Douglas, was tapped to take the reins of the family business.

The documentary’s producers declined to detail the topics Mr. Durst discussed, but they seem likely to include his mother’s suicide when he was 7; his wife’s disappearance in 1982; the killing of Ms. Berman, his confidante, in 2000; and the dismemberment of his neighbor in a $300-a-month rooming house in Galveston, Tex., in 2001.

“Certainly the things he’s been accused of are tabloid-worthy,” Mr. Jarecki said. “But what’s clear about Bob, if you spend five minutes with him, is that he’s a deeply complicated person who cannot be summarized in a simple way.”

But why, after 32 years of silence, did Mr. Durst decide to talk now?

“I think he felt understandably frustrated by the fact that he has not been able to speak for himself,” Mr. Jarecki said.

Mr. Durst has long been estranged from his family, and 13 of his relatives have obtained orders of protection against him. The Dursts did not cooperate with the documentary and once threatened to sue Mr. Jarecki over All Good Things, which they said unfairly characterized their family.

...Durst severed connections to his father and family in the mid-1990s, roughly a decade after the disappearance of Kathie Durst, five months before she would have graduated from medical school. By most accounts, their marriage had descended into violent confrontations.

The case lay dormant for 18 years, until a New York State Police investigator began tracking new leads in 2000, setting off a bizarre series of events. Mr. Durst fled New York, renting an apartment in Galveston, disguised as a mute woman.

His friend Ms. Berman, who had been his spokeswoman after Kathie Durst’s disappearance, was found dead in her Los Angeles home on Christmas Eve, shot in the back of the head. No one has been charged in that case.

Mr. Durst was then charged with murdering and dismembering a former merchant seaman who lived across the hall from him in Galveston. A jury acquitted him of murder, accepting his account of an accidental shooting that occurred as he tried to defend himself. Mr. Durst did spend more than three years in prison for bail jumping and other crimes.

It should be interesting to see if HBO is really presenting a "propaganda" film financed by Bobby, as the Durst family claims. I was thinking, though, that a good way to prepare for it-- better than reading tabloid stories about the seedy Dursts-- like this one from last week-- would be to go back and get to know Susan, our mutual friend who he executed in Los Angeles. This is a transcript from an Ira Glass This American Life show, 1997, 3 years before Bobby killed her.

Act Two. Mobster Daughter.

Susan Berman

It was 1957, and I was 12. They said it was the largest funeral Las Vegas had ever seen. There were thousands of mourners. The pall bearers were men I had known, Gus Greenbaum, whose throat would later be slashed in Phoenix, Willie "Ice Pick" Alderman, who would die on Terminal Island, while serving time on a mob extortion rap, Joe Rosenberg, one of my father's partners, who was known as his mouthpiece, Nick the Greek, the famed odds maker. Squat Jewish men surrounded Uncle Chickie and me at the funeral, saying, "We don't expect trouble."

Ira Glass

Susan Berman's father was Davie Berman, a Jewish gangster who was one of the founders of modern Las Vegas, trusted confidant of Meyer Lansky, Frank Constello, and Bugsy Siegel. Susan Berman

The son of a Russian-immigrant rabbinical student, he built his own gambling empire when he was just 16 and went on to become a bootlegger and bank robber, whose face appeared on dozens of "Wanted" posters. He was the brazen kid who engineered one of the first kidnaps for ransom, escaped death in a Central Park shoot-out, and was described by a detective on the front page of the New York Times as "the toughest Jew I ever met."

Ira Glass

One of the most romantic and appealing notions about gangsters is the idea that they're cold-blooded tough guys while they're out in the world, but loving family men when they're at home. And while that's obviously not true for lots of real-life mobsters, it does actually seem to be true for Davie Berman. When his wife was ill and away from home for months, he was almost a new-age dad, 1990s-style dad, taking care of his daughter himself, spending time with her every day, helping her with her math homework in the casino's money counting room. Davie Berman was an owner of the Flamingo and Riviera hotels. And in those same rooms, they would skim the profits off for his mob bosses back east.

This is an excerpt from Susan Berman's memoir Easy Street. The book is filled with scenes of this odd collision of worlds. Her father's world, she writes, was dangerous and violent and severe. But he crafted a childhood that seemed to her at the time to be completely normal. She had no idea about his criminal ties.

Susan Berman

I thought we had no house key because, as he said, "Somebody is always home." Mob members never carry keys, because if they're kidnapped, a rival could get to their families. My father was austere. He didn't gamble, drink, or smoke.

He told me he didn't like to stay in small rooms for a long time because he felt confined. I later learned that he had served seven years in Sing Sing, four in solitary confinement on a 12-year sentence. I thought we had no checking account because, as he said, "Everybody knows us here. We just use cash." Mob members prefer to keep cash boxes and few visible assets.

He told me our late night jaunts to Los Angeles were a vacation. He'd wake me and tell me to get dressed. We'd drive to McCarran Field and fly to LA. I'd be kept at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a few days with a couple of his men friends.

They took me to Uncle Bernie's toy store in Beverly Hills to drink lemonade from the lemonade tree. And we ordered coffee ice cream in our room from MFK's drug store in the hotel. Then my father would reappear magically after two days and take me to the Brown Derby for dinner. We'd sit under Ingrid Bergman's picture. And he'd order "lamb chops with pink skirts for Susie" and put me on a red, leather child seat, so I could join in the conversation. In fact, these "vacations" were flights to freedom when there was mob unrest, and I was in danger.

I knew my father's partners only from a child's perspective, the same way I knew my father. There was Willie Alderman, called "Ice Pick" Willie in his youth because he allegedly killed people with an ice pick. Willie was my favorite, a big, lumpy, silent man who greeted me every day with, "How you doing, Susie?" He was always at my father's side.

There was Gus Greenbaum, a junkie and alleged killer. Gus was an older, dark-skinned man who smoked cigars and growled. He never paid any attention to me and never smiled. Once I kicked him as hard as I could in the ankle just to prove I existed. He said, "Davie, the kid takes after you." I asked my father if he had kicked big, mean men too. But my father said, no, and not to kick Gus again.

My father's mother, Clara, or Bubby to me, would show up unannounced at our home in Las Vegas once a month for her "pay-as-you-eat Shabbes dinner." Around 2:00 PM on a Friday, Bubby would pound on the front door, yelling, "Davie, Lou, Susie, let me in. Hurry up." Of course, my father was never home from the hotel in the afternoon, but she'd act as if he should have been. She'd run all over the house looking for him, then go right into the kitchen and sneer, "So where's Davie? Working again?"

Without waiting for an answer, she'd throw down her shawl and start unpacking two huge needlepoint bags full of groceries. She was in a frenzy, her white hair standing up in wisps as it came out of her bun. She was short, and stout, and smelled like old rouge. As soon as she washed the carrots for the matzo-ball soup, she yelled at our bodyguard, Lou, to "Come and chop these carrots into little pieces." Lou dutifully went into the kitchen. She took an egg beater from her purse and started making matzo balls and washing the chicken.

After about an hour of intense preparation, during which she yelled at me to, "Stay out of my goddamn way," and said, "ach" several times, and "oy vay" if Lou wasn't fast enough on the chopping. Bubby hit the telephone and had all my father's friends paged in the casino. "Hello, Gus? Clara Berman. I'm making a Shabbes meal at Davie's tonight. Be here at sundown. You eat good," she'd say, as she rang up Willy, Joe, Mickey Cohen, and others, usually about eight men.

Around 6:00 PM, the sleek, dark Cadillacs would roll up. Gus, Joe, Mickey, Willie, and others arrived, and the hungry Jewish men took their places around our table. My father entered with an expression that said, "Oh, no, not again." But he kissed Bubby hello and sat down too. They ate with the gusto of men starved for a matzo ball. It was always a silent dinner except for slurping noises from the soup bowls.

Bubby lit the menorah on the mantle. She kept shoving food onto my father's plate, saying, "Davie, you're too thin." And Gus came in for chiding if he didn't finish every drop. "Whatsa matter? You got an ulcer from the hotel business? You can't finish the tsimmes?"

When the strudel was gone, Bubby would remove her apron and announce, "Fine, first you eat, then you pay. I need gelt for my City of Hope project." And she'd go to each man and hold out her fat hand.

My father looked embarrassed to death and said, "Momma, I'll give you the money. You promised you'd never do this again. Please?" But she knew her victims. $100 bills flowed out of their pockets while I watched in fascination. She put a rubber band around the take and threw it into her needlepoint bag.

Ira Glass

...So let's say that your father is a big-time gangster and, like the men in The Godfather movies, actually does try to protect you from ever knowing what exactly he does for a living. What happens when you find out? Well, Susan Berman's father died of natural causes when she was 12. Her mother died a year later. And the first time anyone directly told her about her father's underworld ties was when she was in college. Another student told her about this new book that talked about what her father really did in Las Vegas.

Susan Berman

I rushed to Martindale's Book Store, which was in Beverly Hills, no longer existent, and quickly found this book The Green Felt Jungle. There was a huge display of them. And I quickly looked at the index, "Davie Berman." And it did. It had a whole chapter on the Flamingo Hotel and Ben Siegel's death.

And it said that after Ben Siegel was dead, that Davie Berman-- and then in parentheses, "Who could kill a man with one hand behind his back." And a little later in the chapter, it said that he had been "wounded in a shoot-out with an FBI man in Central Park and done 11 years in Sing Sing." And then it went on to talk about his other partners. Well, I started to throw up in the book store. I was so shocked.

Ira Glass

You literally threw up in the bookstore?

Susan Berman

Literally. How gross, right? It was just a visceral reaction. I couldn't believe it. And of course, I didn't think it was true.

Ira Glass

As Susan Berman describes in her memoir Easy Street, she worked so hard at believing this wasn't true that eventually, she forgot the incident ever happened. Years later, she was a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner and interviewed Jimmy Hoffa just a month before he vanished. He and his men all knew her dad. One of them said he was, quote, "much smarter than the guys running the outfit now," end quote. And still, she did not want to believe that her dad was with the mob. Finally, when somebody showed her her father's FBI files, finally then, reluctantly, she believed.

There is literally not one friend of Susan's who isn't 100% certain that Bobby killed her.

Let the games begin! John Oliver introduces us to FIFA, the World Cup™ governing body, and Michael Palin introduces us to Brazil

Following a collage of clips from various countries where it's claimed that soccer is a "religion," John jumps in: "And they're not exaggerating. When David Beckham got a tattoo of Jesus, the response of most soccer fans was, 'Well, that's, that's huge for Jesus. That's, that's a big deal for him.' "

"I know that in America soccer is something you pick your ten-year-old daughter up from. But for me, and everyone else on earth, it's a little more important."

-- John Oliver, in last night's report on "FIFA and the World Cup"

by Ken

Last week I encouraged you to watch the whole of John Oliver's amazing Last Week Tonight rant on the gathering assault on net neutrality, which enough people seem to have watched and taken to heart that it's now theorized to have been caused the FCC's website crash. Last night it was the turn of FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), the Zurich-based governing body for, most importantly, the World Cup™ -- or the FIFA World Cup™, as FIFA likes to call it.



With 2014 World Cup™ Brasil about to begin, John introduces us at the outset to his personal World Cup™ dilemma: that while the World Cup™ is for him one of the most important things in the world, it comes to us via FIFA, "a comically grotesque organization" that he proceeds to show us is so thuggish and corrupt that thuggery and corruption seem to be its actual businesses.

As observers point out, the World Cup™ isn't an economic boon for host countries, but only for FIFA. For host countries it's usually an econonomic nightmare. Brazil has spent something like $1 billion on the games, including "investments" like the $270 soccer stadium built in the Amazonian metropolis of Manaus, which will be used for four World Cup™ games and after that for pretty much nothing that can fill it, en route to becoming, as John puts it, "the world's most expensive bird toilet."

And don't think that FIFA contributes anything in taxes. It pays none whatsoever to the host country, in the case of the 2014 games a windfall for FIFA -- and a deprivation to Brazil of some $250M. FIFA is a supposed nonprofit that happens to be sitting on a bank balance of a billion dollars, which we hear described in the report by FIFA's president since 1998, Sepp Blatter, as "a reserve."

For thuggish clownery, though, it may be hard to top FIFA Secretary-General Jérôme Valcke, who journeyed to Brazil as an enforcer to put an end to any foolishness about the FIFA World Cup™ possibly being subject to Brazilian law, specifically a 2003 law banning alcohol from soccer stadiums, a law put in place in the hope of putting a dent in then-out-of-control stadium fan fatalities.

"The only problem is," says John, "Budweiser is one of FIFA's key sponsors, and they sell a product they reflexively insist on calling 'beer,' and FIFA seemed anxious to protect Budweiser from a law designed to protect people, which is why FIFA's secretary general went to Brazil with a simple message":

I'm sorry to say, and maybe I look a bit arrogant, but that's something we'll not negotiate. I mean, there will be, and there must be as part of the law the fact that we have the right to sell beer.

You'll have to see for yourself John's take on possibly-a-bit-arrogant Jérôme, but rest assured that FIFA got what it insisted on -- what's known as the "Budweiser bill," ensuring stadium beer sales. "At this point," says John, "you can either be horrified by that or relieved that FIFA wasn't also sponsored by cocaine and chainsaws."


ON A HAPPIER NOTE, JUST IN TIME FOR THE WORLD
CUP™ WE HAVE BRAZIL WITH MICHAEL PALIN

And a new Michael Palin travel film should in itself be an occasion for joy. In my neck of the woods, at least, PBS is showing the first two parts of Brazil with Michael Palin tonight and the last two parts tomorrow night.

Here's a preview from the episode "Into Amazonia":


From my PBS station: "Join Michael Palin in Brazil, where he travels from the lost world of Amazonia to the buzzing metropolis of Rio de Janeiro, meeting the people and visiting the places that shape this South American nation. Monday, June 9 at 9 p.m. and Tuesday, June 10 at 9 p.m."

#

"The point is, the Internet in its current form is not broken. And the FCC is currently taking steps to fix that" (John Oliver)

No, sorry, I'm not even going to tell you about the coyote urine.

by Ken

Quietly, and often not so quietly, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart has served as a launching pad for gleefully troublemaking media talent. I would hate to try to rank the bulging roster of impressive Daily Show alums, but by any standard the amazing John Oliver is pretty amazing. And HBO's late-night Sunday Last Week Tonight with John Oliver has quickly shown amazing energy and grit.

But this week's take on net neutrality was something else again, starting from the premise that few things are as dull as the phrase "net neutrality" or the way it's often talked about, and yet it remains a subject of considerable performance. You really do have to watch it, so I'm not going to attempt to parse or break it down for you. I know I hate it when blogger-type people do that -- try to make me watch a clip whether I want to watch a clip or not. In this, case, though, you'll thank me. I'm not even to tell you the part about the coyote urine.

However, Daily Kos's Joan McCarter has a fine post about it: "John Oliver on net neutrality: Call it 'preventing cable company f***ery'."

#

TV Watch: "Girls" update -- Creator Lena Dunham seems to want us to know about the time when she was a 19-year-old virgin

Can't wait for Season 3 of Girls? Here's a tease. This post pretty much wraps up TV Watch's coverage of the show.

by Ken

As I believe I reported at the time, I checked out of HBO's Girls -- created by, largely written and directed by, and starring Lena Dunham -- at the outset of the last season. Much as I admire Dunham's obvious talents, my feelings from the outset were decidedly mixed, but I tried to reserve judgment until the thought of watching any more of it became unbearably oppressive.

Lena's on-screen alter-ego, Hannah, seems to mirror Lena in wanting desperately, with every fiber of her being, to be a writer. For me there were just two problems.

* First, and this appears to be true only of the fictional Hannah, she not only doesn't know but has not the slightest interest in finding out what it takes to become a writer and how one might go about doing it. The real-life Lena seems to have had no problem on this front, judging by the quantity of professional work she's already racked up. But nothing she may have learned seems to have been applied to Hannah's wish to become a writer. It's like those contestants on Chopped, who seem to think that what's required to win the competition is wanting it really, really badly.

* Second, neither Lena nor Hannah seems to have anything to say as a writer. With Hannah, again, the subject never seems to come up, or it didn't in the amount of it I could stomach. With Lena, judging by what I've seen of Girls (I haven't seen any of her earlier work), there seems to be a heap of self-justifying and score-settling, but her idea of young people grappling with finding a satisfying path in life seems to consist of sex and drugs with, again, no clue as to where one might begin to look for meaning and satisfaction in life.

Once I realized that no, I really didn't have to watch those episodes piling up on my DVR, I felt enormous relief, and realized how little I liked what I had seen, despite the obvious skill in creating characters whose situations might have been believable and involving if their creator had the slightest clue what to do with them. I also realized there was no point in trying to deal with the mass of "criticism" the show had spawned, that the frenetic encomia were outrageous bullshit, writers working out their own issues as badly as the show's characters work out theirs.

Still, even I have to acknowledge that Girls -- and, I fear to think, shows like it -- is where it's at now in the world of pseudo-hipness. So, with thanks to the gang at The Frisky, I herewith offer TV Watch readers a fix of Lena, from the POPSUGAR Love & Sex website (with lots of links onsite), prompted by Lena's own Instagram postings.

That Time Lena Dunham Was a 19-Year-Old Virgin

by Tara Block

She may bare it all on the sex-filled, skin-filled Girls, but in 2005, the 27-year-old writer-filmmaker-actress Lena Dunham was just a 19-year-old virgin (like many of us), looking for some advice. In honor of throwback Thursday, she posted a series of clippings on Instagram -- here, here, and here -- illustrating her letter to Jamie Bufalino, the sexpert in Time Out NY, along with his response. Below are both her inquiry and his advice (which is quite sound). And Lena didn't have to wait too much longer; she had sex for the first time her sophomore year of college.

Q: I'm a 19-year-old girl who has been reading your column since its inception, and I've always wanted to write in. Well, I finally have a question. (What a rite of passage! I feel like I'm in a Judy Blume novel: Are You There Jamie? It's Me, Margaret.) Okay, so here it is: I have a reasonable amount of sexual experience, but somehow I have managed to stay a virgin (as have a few of my friends). Once you're 19, people seem to expect that you're done it six ways to Sunday. So it can come as quite a shock when a girl my age admits that she's still on the v-team. In fact, I speak for all my virgin friends when I say that confessing we are virgins has stopped more than one sexual experience from progressing further. It seems to freak guys out, like they think that you're going to get too attached to them if they devirginize you. Either that, or they find it really sexy in a somewhat pervy way. I don't need to be in love when I finally have sex (Lord knows I don't love most of the guys I've hooked up with, and I've still enjoyed it), but I do want a comfortable and respectful situation, so I feel the guys should know I'm a virgin. But if I tell, I risk seeming like a huge dork and having him stop the whole thing in its tracks. (It has occurred to me that guys might think it isn't worth their time to sleep with an inexperienced girl.) What do you think is the proper etiquette? I'd like to get rid of the v-card before I turn 20.

Get Jamie's advice after the jump!

A: Who knew that kids today were using antiquated phrases like six ways to Sunday? As for you, young lady, hang on to that v-card until I tell you it's time to relinquish it. There will be no deadline-setting or peer-pressuring. You will simply live your Intermix-clad, iPod-accessorized, O.C.-obsessed life until you meet a young man who doesn't give a whit about your sexual status, but just wants to express his love for you through three timid thrusts and premature ejaculation. Putting yourself on a schedule to lose your virginity within the next year will only increase the potential for bad decision making (how do you think Paris Hilton got herself into the fix she's in?). Since any postpubescent schmo with a penis, a functioning circulatory system and the most minimal grasp of anatomy has the ability to deflower you, you need to be extremely discriminating and remain on the lookout for someone who actually deserves the honor of ushering you into the next sexual stage of life. The last thing you need is some sly strategy for dropping the v-bomb on someone. All you have to do is proudly announce your status, and gauge a guy's screw-worthiness by how he reacts to the news. If he's standoffish or pervy, then ditch the loser. Remember, you want the first time you have sex to be memorable (and not in a bad way), so trust your instincts and cool your jets. Besides, you'll have plenty of time in your twenties and thirties to sleep with total bozos.

By the way, I might add that in the time that I read Time Out New York -- until my free subscription finally ran out (with no solicitation that I was aware of to pay to continue) -- I quite liked Jamie Bufalino's sex-advice column.

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Larry David's definitive statement about apologies: All that matters if if you're ACTING sincere

Says Nathan Flomm: "Apologies don't have to be sincere. It's just the act of the apology itself. It's only -- all that matters is if you're acting sincere."

by Ken

In Saturday's "TV Watch preview" I was caught up by a segment of the trailer HBO put out for its film Clear History, premiering that night, starring Larry David as a marketing genius who walks away from what turns out to be "literally a billion-dollar idea" and becomes an object of national scorn.


The trailer for HBO's Clear History

WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: I'm really sorry.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: It doesn't matter if you apologize if it's not sincere.
WIDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER [exasperated]: Apologies don't have to be sincere.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: That is literally the only thing an apology has to be. I'm sorry it had to be like this.
WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: You see? You apologized, but you didn't mean it!

I just loved this. As I wrote Saturday:

We're living, after all, in the Age of Apologies, where putatively sentient humans devote an ever larger portion of their waking hours to demanding an apology from so-and-so, without any clear indication that so-and-so is the least bit sorry, even if his/her handlers decided that he/she really should issue the demanded apology, which in any case is likely to take some form of the weaselly "I'm sorry if anyone is offended," which of course makes it pretty clear that the alleged apologizer isn't sorry about what he/she did, but only about the possibility that some beclouded soul might have been somehow offended by the words or deed.

In this clip the Wildly Enhairified Larry David Character merely takes the reality one step further, to the entirely reasonable destination where sincerity doesn't even come into the matter of an apology. If this sounds like pure Larry David, bear in mind that all three writers and the director were ranking collaborators of his on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. (It still sounds like Larry to me. Do you suppose the NSA has surveillance video of the Clear History writers' room?)

After watching some of the movie, I added this update:

The movie turns out to be harmless enough, and as I feared, the "apology" exchange is the best thing in it. In fact, the trailer version is seriously truncated. Since I wasn't recording the 9pm airing, I can't transcribe the full version, but I'm recording the 12:45am rebroadcast, and by tomorrow I should have the complete version to post.

FIRST, LET ME CORRECT MYSELF ABOUT THE WRITING CREDITS

I identified the writers of Clear History as David Mandel, Alec Berg, and Jeff Schaffer, thinking I was dutifully transcribing the information given on the HBO website. Or perhaps I should say "the always-dreadful HBO website," which loads like a tortoise and, as it demonstrated once again, yields up information with the greatest reluctance. And since the credits don't appear until the end of the film, even when I watched most of it I didn't see that Larry David is indeed listed first among the four writers, with his longtime collaborators Mandel, Berg, and Schaffer.

NOW BACK TO THE APOLOGY, IN THE FULL VERSION

Nathan Flomm (Larry David), known for the marketing genius he displayed at Edible Arrangements, was hired by Will Haney (Jon Hamm) as marketing director for the revolutionary new electric car he has invented. But Nathan, who is also a 10-percent investor, "drew the line" when Will announced that the car was to be named the Howard -- after his precious son, who's named after The Fountainhead's Howard Roark. "Nobody's gonna buy a car named Howard," Nathan insisted. "It's like naming a restaurant Hepatitis." When Nathan suggested to the mortally aggrieved Will (remember, he named is son Howard) that he buy out his share, Will happily did.

Only to leave Nathan derided by his wife and friends, who insisted he had to go back to Will and get his job back. With this result.

NATHAN: I actually love the name Howard. Yeah, I was thinking about that name last night. It's a solid name. Howard's a good guy. There's a lot of good Howards. They're average. They're an average guy, doing average things, and this is the campaign: solid, dependable, trustworthy -- that's our Howard.
WILL: The name that yesterday you had nothing but disparaging comments about.
NATHAN: I'm really sorry. I am. I'm sorry.
WILL: It sounds to me like you're sorry you fucked up, but not, you know, not for what's underneath it.
NATHAN: I apologized. That's what's important.
WILL: It doesn't matter if you apologize if it's not sincere.
NATHAN: Apologies don't have to be sincere. It's just the act of the apology itself. It's only -- all that matters is if you're acting sincere.
WILL: That is literally the only thing an apology has to be, is sincere.
NATHAN: Oh God, Will, I completely disag- . . .
WILL: Otherwise it's just words.
NATHAN: I'm acting sincere. Of course I don't believe it.
WILL: Here, at this company, we believe in sincerity. You had the opportunity to meet my son yesterday, the one thing in the world that I happen to care about more than this company. What did you do? Do you remember? You talked about his nanny's hair, and how much it might stink.
NATHAN: Nope, nope, never said the nanny's hair stunk. I never said that. I never said it stunk.
WILL: You know what you didn't say?
NATHAN: What?
WILL: "Cute kid."
NATHAN: I was gonna get to that.
WILL: "What a nice son." "What a great job you did raising your son as a single parent. What a nice job. Seems like a good kid." You know what? You don't "get to that," you lead with it.
NATHAN: How could you lead with it if somebody's shampooing once a week?
WILL: Janine has your severance package at the front desk. Your things have been packed up. You can tell the delivery company to take them wherever you need them to be. I'm sorry it had to be like this.
NATHAN: Are you sorry? Are you really sorry?
WILL [after a pause]: No.
NATHAN: You see? You did the exact same thing I did. You apologized but you didn't mean it.
WILL: Janine has your things. The delivery guys need an address.
NATHAN [gets up, walks toward the office door, then turns around]: You know, I was an early investor in this company. I believe in this car. I thought we were good friends. Will, this isn't fair. It's not fair.

In the next sequence a CNN talking head is declaring, "The Howard is the Model T of its time. It's literally a billion-dollar idea. . . ." And Nathan is a national laughingstock for walking away from billions.

Okay, you could watch the movie -- it wouldn't kill you. But the genius part is still the part about apologies. Really, is there anything more preposterous than the demanded apology? It would be one thing if the offending individual actually showed, not just remorse, but genuine understanding of what in his/her statement or action is objectionable.


CONSIDER THE CASE OF IOWA LOON STEVE KING

Let's imagine -- and I realize it's quite a leap -- that Congressman Steve had an impulse to damage control that included a lick of sense or decency. (I warned you that this would be a really big leap.) He could, of course, apologize if anyone was offended by his remarks. He could even attempt an apology in which he does his best to act sincere. But if he wanted to make it right, what he would need to offer is not an apology but an education to anyone who might have taken those remarks the least bit seriously -- an education as to why what he said was wrong and why it's dangerous for people to spout such evil gibberish.

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

TV Watch preview: Larry David on apologies, plus (finally!) the final episodes of "Breaking Bad" begin

A trailer for HBO's Clear History

WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: I'm really sorry.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: It doesn't matter if you apologize if it's not sincere.
WIDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER [exasperated]: Apologies don't have to be sincere.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: That is literally the only thing an apology has to be. I'm sorry it had to be like this.
WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: You see? You apologized, but you didn't mean it!

by Ken

I don't know much about this HBO film Clear History (written by David Mandel, Alec Berg, and Jeff Schaffer and directed by Greg Mottola, with a cast including -- in addition to Larry David and Jon Hamm -- Bill Hader, Philip Baker Hall, Kate Hudson, Michael Keaton, Danny McBride, Eva Mendes, Amy Ryan, and J. B. Smoove), which has its premiere tonight, but on the basis of the exchange I've transcribed above, I will absolutely give it a shot.

UPDATE: The movie turns out to be harmless enough, and as I feared, the "apology" exchange is the best thing in it. In fact, the trailer version is seriously truncated. Since I wasn't recording the 9pm airing, I can't transcribe the full version, but I'm recording the 12:45am rebroadcast, and by tomorrow I should have the complete version to post.

We're living, after all, in the Age of Apologies, where putatively sentient humans devote an ever larger portion of their waking hours to demanding an apology from so-and-so, without any clear indication that so-and-so is the least bit sorry, even if his/her handlers decided that he/she really should issue the demanded apology, which in any case is likely to take some form of the weaselly "I'm sorry if anyone is offended," which of course makes it pretty clear that the alleged apologizer isn't sorry about what he/she did, but only about the possibility that some beclouded soul might have been somehow offended by the words or deed.

In this clip the Wildly Enhairified Larry David Character merely takes the reality one step further, to the entirely reasonable destination where sincerity doesn't even come into the matter of an apology. If this sounds like pure Larry David, bear in mind that all three writers and the director were ranking collaborators of his on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. (It still sounds like Larry to me. Do you suppose the NSA has surveillance video of the Clear History writers' room?)

Anyway, the premiere showing of Clear History is at 9pm tonight at 9pm, at least here in the Eastern time zone. (Please don't ask me about other time zones. If you got to this post, you presumably have computer skills. HBO has a website, hbo.com.) Which means that if you're in this time zone, and you're reading this post close to its posting time, which is 9pm ET, the thing may still be playing on your cable box, so if your cable system has the "START OVER" feature and if it works better than mine, you can still catch the premiere. Otherwise you'll be reduced to catching one of the million repeat airings.


TOMORROW NIGHT AT 9pm ET, OF COURSE< IT'S THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR AMC'S BREAKING BAD

"I could not be more excited about these final eight episodes. An awful lot happens, probably enough to fill 20 episodes."

-- Breaking Bad creator and exec producer Vince Gilligan

"These episodes take on a trajectory that we haven't experienced before."

-- Bryan Cranston (Walter White)

"It's a violent, brutal sprint to the finish line. We only have eight hours left to tell the story, and so there's no episode that allows the audience to kind of take a breather."

-- Aaron Paul (Jesse Pinkman)

That's right, the final sequence of eight episodes, the "second half of Season 5" (even though it's actually launching a bit more than a year after the start of the "first half os Season 5") begins tomorrow night.

Sorry, I once again had to put this clip at the end in order to avoid losing all my line breaks. So now -- once you get past the commercial -- you can see and hear these worthies say the above, along with assorted other contributors, all of whom are pretty good (I'm happy to say) at not giving away actual plot information.

TV Watch: James Gandolfini (1961-2013)

Tony takes care of business in "College" (Season 1, Episode 5).

by Ken

It so happens that a couple of nights before word reached us that James Gandolfini had died of a heart attack in Rome at 51, I watched most of a Sopranos episode that I happened to notice on one of the HBO channels.

I missed the beginning, but it was easy enough to recognize as the season-opener (Season 5, as it turns out) that includes a TV-news announcement about the paroling of a large number of mob inmates, which served as a means of injecting a clutch of new characters for the upcoming season, though I was reminded that the two really important ones didn't actually appear until the season's second episode. (That would be Tony Soprano's cousin Tony Blundetto, played by Steve Buscemi, who had directed a couple of Sopranos episodes, including what may be the most famous single one apart from the finale, "Pine Barrens," and the pain-in-the-ass "old school" New York captain Phil Leotardo, played so memorably by Frank Vincent.)

I bring this up for, basically, the same reason I've brought up Sopranos-related subject fairly regularly over the years here at DWT: The show is tightly interwoven in my cultural consciousness. My mind is in an ongoing state of bogglement at the achievement of creator David Chase and the simply astounding company of associates he assembled, on both sides of the camera, to pull the project off: writer-producers, actors, and all the crews. I've never had any reason to doubt that the show was in every way Chase's vision, but it couldn't have been done without that enormous number of hugely talented people, brought in from a staggering range of backgrounds, and enabled to work as a team.

Obviously the most visible face of the enterprise was Gandolfini as Tony. It's hard to disagree with all the tributes that have poured out since the awful news Wednesday. I don't think it's possible to overstate the success of his contribution, giving us a character who could withstand and even flourish under the enormous amount of screen time he racked up over the show's six seasons. We were compelled by him as a dominant but constantly struggling force in both his families, his real one and his, er, professional one. There was Tony's likable side, but also his monstrous one.

I was surprised to be reminded, in checking the records, that the episode that for me at least permanently changed the relationship with Tony happened as early as No. 5 of Season 1: "College," in which Tony drives his daughter, Meadow, to Maine for a round of college vists and spots a mob informant who has been living in Witness Protection, and after an elaborate cat-and-mouse chase winds up strangling the guy with a piece of wire. Boy, did that drive home how Tony's business went beyond "waste management."

(I see in the Wikipedia episode guide: "The episode was rated as the best of the series by Time magazine and was ranked #2 on TV Guide's list of 'TV's Top 100 Episodes of All Time.' " Also, "James Manos, Jr. and David Chase received the Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series for their work on this episode." I was also reminded of a charming detail in the episode: that at Bowdoin College Tony "is struck by a Nathaniel Hawthorne quote on display in the admissions office: 'No man . . . can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true.' " Is that wonderful or what?)

On one point, though, I'm going to disagree with a widely voiced accolade for Gandolfini: that he "made" the show, that it couldn't have succeeded nearly as well without him. Again, I don't want at all to diminish his achievement, but that achievement was as the most visible member of the Sopranos team.


Consider just one aspect of Tony: his utterly baffling irresistibility to women. Yes, he buys lots of them (namely, anytime it suits his pleasure), but we see time after time women who are unable to resist his, um, "charm." When I describe this as "baffling," I don't mean to say or even suggest "unrealistic." We know that such things happen in the real world, and are for a lot of us a source of fascination. You could have a jolly time "explaining" Tony's magic touch -- the attraction of power, of danger, and so on and so on. The writing of those six seasons' worth of episodes will sustain all manner of fascinating discussion. But I'm going to argue that the achievement was mostly in the writing and in the reaction of all those intersecting actors. I don't think Gandolfini "did" anything to make it credible; it was made credible by the way all those other characters clearly (and credibly) believed in Tony's irresistibility.

I think it's important to remember that it was David Chase who chose Gandolfini for the role, and Chase had been casting both expected and unexpected actors as mob figures from the highest echelons to the lowest for a long time -- his "mob" episodes of The Rockford Fils are some of that extraordinary show's most wonderful. I think it's safe to say that nobody except Chase would have made such a choice. I would assume that the quality above all that commended Gandolfini was his ability to credibly portray a North Jersey Italian-American lug of a head of household, off of which so much of the show would play. And it was a brilliant choice. I just want to suggest that there were probably any number of other choices he could have made, and the show would have worked just as well, because the writing, ensemble, and production would almost surely have been good enough to make any of those other choices work.

I've mentioned before that I saw Chase, as part of a panel of Sopranos people appearing before a cheering audience while the show was still in production, field a question from an audience member: Could the show have been done for a broadcast network? (We know that Fox was supposed to do it originally but turned chicken.) Clearly the question was intended as a sort of self-congratulatory hat tip to HBO, for its tolerance of the terrible language and terrible behavior. But Chase took the question literally, thought about it briefly, and replied that yes, he thought it could have been. Adjustments would have to have been made, but yes, it could have been done.

Still, it was James Gandolfini who was chosen, and who for six seasons produced episode after episode of such remarkable work. Every time I dip back into The Sopranos, I find that it looks as good as it ever did, if not better -- because with some removal in time and additional exposure, I not only treasure things I've already noticed (including many I've noticed and forgotten), but see all sorts of things I didn't before.

ONE ADDITIONAL NOTE: THE FRIENDS OF DAVID CHASE

Here's where it pays to be an attentive viewer, at least a more attentive viewer than I often am. In that Season 5 opening episode I was talking about, with the TV-news report about the outflow of all those mob parolees, there's an interview with a self-proclaimed Mafia expert about the significance of the development. It was only while I was sifting through Sopranos material for this post that I discovered that the blowhard was played by Matthew Weiner, who had just joined the team as a writer-producer in Season 5. In fact, Episode 2, in which Tony Blundetto and Phil Leotardo are actually introduced, was his first Sopranos writing credit.

I've read that Weiner had already written and unsuccessfully shopped a pilot for what became Mad Men before he was taken on as a key member of the Sopranos team for Seasons 5 and 6, and that David Chase had seen the script and that was one of the reasons he hired him. We also have one of the longtime key Sopranos writer-producers, Terence Winter, serving as the creative driving force for Boardwalk Empire, and Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green masterminding Blue Bloods -- and of course erstwhile Sopranos cast members all over the tube. The show, beyond its own merits, seems to have served as a TV academy of sorts.

#