Tomorrow night brings, at last, the "Better Call Saul" premiere, and another episode of "Grantchester"

Bob Odenkirk talks to Jimmy Kimmel about Better
Call Saul, and shows him some, er, surprising clips


Jimmy tells Bob he's really enjoyed the two episodes he was given to watch. Bob tells Jimmy he's only seen one -- but hopes the second one turned out well. "I spent 14 hours on my knees in the desert for that second one."

by Ken

Okay, friends, it's finally here: the two-night premiere of AMC's Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul, created and overseen by Breaking Bad mastermind Vince Gilligan and collaborator Peter Gould -- tomorrow and Monday nights at 10pm (or possibly some other time where you are -- you know about checking your local listings, right?). Then, as a commenter noted her previously, the show settles into the Monday-night time slot. (That's a great relief for me. Sunday is the one night of the week I can barely manage, even with the DVR at full throttle.)

In a more "normal" clip, the creative team and cast
introduce us to "The Characters of Better Call Saul"



BUT LET ME ALSO PUT IN A GOOD WORD FOR PBS
MASTERPIECE MYSTERY'S GRANTCHESTER


In Episode 1, the vicar of backwater Grantchester, Sidney Chambers (James Norton), has his seemingly inauspicious but in fact fateful first meeting with local police Inspector Geordie Keating.

It sounds like a scraping of the bottom of the British-mystery-possibilities barrel: In 1953, the vicar in an English backwater, who suffers nightmarish wartime flashbacks, teams up with the local police inspector to -- yes! -- solve crimes. (It's based on a series of Grantchester Mysteries by James Runcie.) And yet, three episodes in, out of a first series of six (Episode 4 airs tomorrow night on most PBS stations, but again, check your local listings), I'm not only enjoying it but looking forward to more.

Certainly an important part of that appeal is the interestingly delineated pair of central characters.


James Norton and Robson Green talk about the show.

Sidney, for starters, isn't just any vicar. Oh, he's totally serious about his job, but it's not lost on anyone, least of all himself, that he's a heartthrob-quality hunk with unconventional interests, at least for a vicar, including a soul-mate-type relationship with ravishing young Amanda (Morven Christie), the upper-crust daughter of a "sir" of some sort, a schoolmate of Sidney's scholarship-student sister Jenny (Fiona Button).

Although Sidney's relationship with Amanda showed signs in Episode 1 of significant degress of inappropriateness, there is of course nothing inherently inappropriate about an Anglican priest enjoying the company of women. In fact, a lot of Sidney's parishioners, not to mention the vicarage housekeeper Mrs. Maguire (Tessa Peake-Jones), seem concerned that he still isn't married, as a proper vicar ought to be. What's never stated, and took a slow-on-the-uptake viewer like myself a couple of episodes to puzzle out, is that a match between them is unthinkable on grounds of class incompatibility.

Despite Sidney's history of hobnobbing with his social betters -- it's not hard to see why he was so popular among Jenny's heavy-breathing schoolmates -- and his status as vicar allows him to fraternize, up to a point, as we see in this clip from Episode 2, he's treated by Amanda's father, Sir Edward Kendall (Pip Torrens), with a combination of long-time acquaintance and a condescension that borders on contempt. (It won't be long before we see Sir Edward's condescension cross theborder.) In the clip we see Sidney suffering through an engagement party for, yes, Amanda! The guests include his sister Jenny (the blonde) and her escort, Johnny Johnson (Uweli Roach), and insufferable other school friends.



Inspector Geordie, meanwhile, is thoroughly, defiantly, chip-on-his-shoulder working-class, and it's quite charming to see Robson Green in a role that makes no claim to stylishness or glamor. And I think he's quite terrific here. Geordie is as dedicated to his job as Sidney is to his, and once Geordie begins to discover that the vicar is almost as much an outsider relative to the area swells as he is, he mellows enough to allow for the possibility of a friendship. That friendship is handled much the way of one of the all-time great screen friendships, that of Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern: By the end of Episode 1, the possibility of a thaw was established, and by Episode 2 they were best friends.

The friendship between Sidney and Geordie is as intriguing and appealing as it is improbable. Now we just have to hope that the creative team continues to find crimes that can plausibly be solved by the copper-and-priest crime-fighting duo.

It should still be possible to catch up with the earlier episodes online or "On Demand." The PBS Masterpiece website has Episode 1 (through February 15), Episode 2, and Episode 3. If you miss Episode 4, I expect you can find it in turn in the same places.

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For Super Sunday, one last game note and one last alternative-programming suggestion

Have you been watching The Great British Baking Show on PBS? Today Episode 5, "Pies and Tarts," airs (or aired) in most locations.

by Ken

Okay, Bob, makes sense

This afternoon about I happened, totally inadvertently, to land on NBC's pregame coverage. It was still about four hours before game time, so that would put it at about our 13 of the pregame festivities. And I paused to listen to Bob Costas talk about the possibility that in this day and age it is still possible under the rules for a Super Bowl that goes into overtime to end with the team that wins the extra-period coin flip to score and win the game without the other team touching the ball -- the game thereby being decided by the coin flip. This isn't good, Bob said, and it's hard to disagree. He proposed that the overtime rules be changed, just for the post-season, to provide for a succession of ten-minute periods, as many as are necessary for the game to end with a clear winner.

Obviously, as Bob pointed out, it's too late to do anything about Super Bowl XLIX, but there's plenty of time to fix this for Super Bowl L. Well, okay, I thought, that makes sense. And as I made my escape, I wondered if that might not be the high point of the Super Sunday festivities. That or maybe the commercials. I know a lot of people watch the game just, or mostly, for the commercials. Which would be fine except that most of the commercials suck too. You have to hand it to the NFL marketing team. Making a big annual production out of the things that your customers are paying you -- through the nose -- to show and you're forcing your viewers to watch! There are several life lessons buried in there, none of them encouraging.

In my never-ending spirit of public service, I've been trying to come up with an angle that might lend the game itself some actual football interest. Of course there's always the possibility that it might be a good game. It has happened. Not often, but it has happened. Still, nobody can control that part of it, and we don't want to leave the thing to chance.

No doubt there's some interest in the fact that Seahawks coach Pete Carroll is matched up against the team, and indeed the owner, that fired him after three decreasingly successful seasons, 1997-99, a decision that owner Bob Kraft has said was one of the hardest he'd made. Carroll's replacement was none other than -- Bill Belichick! That was Pete's last NFL job until his 2010 return with the Seahawks, following his shaky-starting but ultimately triumphant run with the USC Trojans -- triumphant, that is, if you don't count the small matter of the Reggie Bush recruiting violations, which led to the NCAA's retroactive giant smackdown, in the process undoing a good deal of what Pete did at USC. You could say that he got out of town just in time. And now here he is in Seattle as the defending Super Bowl champ.

Okay, that's something. But it doesn't pack all that much drama. I'm thinking that the gut-level connection here is the grudge match between two former NY Jets head coaches from the Jets' now-decades-long Era of Despond.

I know people complain that I spend an inordinate amount of time making fun of Washington Redskins buffoon-owner Daniel Snyder, considering that my hometown New York Jets have been showcasing managerial buffoonishness for as back as the normally burdened mind can encompass. But Jets fans are used to it by now, and really don't know any other way. More importantly, I don't see why this has to be an either-or situation -- ridiculing either the Redskins' ownership or the Jets'? Isn't it possible to ridicule both?

I've already called attention to the bizarre episode of Belichick's almost-seconds-long tenure with the J-E-T-S Jets, which remains for me one of the strangest episodes in the annals of professional sports. Here again is Wikipedia's summary:

Belichick had two different stints as Head Coach of the Jets without ever coaching a game.

In February 1997, Belichick, who had been an assistant coach under Bill Parcells with the New York Giants and New England Patriots, was named the Jets interim Head Coach while the Jets and Patriots continued to negotiate compensation to release Parcells from his contract with Patriots and allow Parcells to coach the Jets.[10] Six days later, the Patriots and Jets reached an agreement that allowed Parcells to coach the Jets and Belichick became the team's assistant head coach and defensive coordinator.[11] When Parcells stepped down as head coach in 1999, he had already arranged with team management to have Belichick succeed him. However, Belichick would be the New York Jets' head coach for only one day. When Belichick was introduced as head coach to the media—the day after his hiring was publicized—he turned it into a surprise-resignation announcement. Before taking the podium, he scrawled a resignation note on a sheet of loose leaf paper that read, in its entirety, "I resign as HC of the NYJ." He then delivered a half-hour speech explaining his resignation to the assembled press corps.[12]

Soon after this bizarre turn of events, he was introduced as the Patriots' 12th full-time head coach, succeeding the recently fired Pete Carroll. The Patriots had tried to hire him away from Parcells/the Jets in the past. Parcells and the Jets claimed that Belichick was still under contract to the Jets, and demanded compensation from the Patriots. NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue agreed, and the Patriots gave the Jets a first-round draft pick in 2000 in exchange for the right to hire Belichick.[13]

Pete's Jets career was a good deal less strange. Here's Wikipedia again:

His success [as defensive backs coach] with the Vikings led to his hiring by the New York Jets, where he served as defensive coordinator under Bruce Coslet for four seasons (1990–93). When there was an opening for the Vikings' head coach position in 1992, he was a serious candidate but lost the position, again to Green.[8]

In 1994, Carroll was elevated to head coach of the Jets. Known for energy and youthful enthusiasm, Carroll painted a basketball court in the parking lot of the team's practice facility where he and his assistant coaches regularly played three-on-three games during their spare time.[11] The Jets got off to a 6–5 start under Carroll, but in week 12, he was the victim of Dan Marino's "clock play"—a fake spike that became a Miami Dolphins game-winning touchdown. The Jets lost all of their remaining games to finish 6–10. He was fired after one season.[11][12]

Considering the levels of futility at which more recent Jets coaches have managed to hold on to their jobs, a single 6-10 season and out seems a trifle harsh. Then again, there's that late-season fold that happened again in New England, and it could be that both the Jets' and Pats' ax-wielders had it right. Clearly the Pete Carroll who built the Seahawks into the solidly competitive team they are today isn't the same coach who cut such an appealingly earnest young figure only to bomb out of his first two NFL head-coaching jobs.


NOW AS TO THAT PROGRAMMING ALTERNATIVE


At the starting gate: The 12 original Great British Baking Show contestants

I've already called attention to TBS's Law and Order Super Sunday marathon. Alternatively, depending on where you live, you may still be able to check out PBS's offering of what it's calling The Great British Baking Show, a runaway hit on British TV as The Great British Bake Off. (That name couldn't be used here because of trademark restrictions.) If I've got the schedule right, today they're at Week 5 of a 12-week run, and in some places today's episode hasn't aired as of the time this post goes up. Here in NYC, I gather WNET is airing the show Sundays at 4pm. (DVR-equipped Gothamites take note: There's a repeat airing Tuesday morning at 4am.) However, in the D.C. area, where Bonnie S. Benwick has just been extolling the show's virtues ("'The Great British Baking Show’ on PBS: Food Network, take note."), it airs on WETA at 8pm. As the prophets say, check your local listings.

I haven't seen the show myself, but it should be possible to catch up with most if not all of it online. (On the WNET website, I see, as of this moment you can watch Episodes 2-5.) Bonnie Benwick casts her piece in the form of a letter to Food Network; regular readers may recall that I have been transformed from a TVFNaholic to a Food Network hater, now that its motto has become "Sure, our programming eats toxic sludge, but you barfbrains are watching it, aren't you?" So I'm pleased to see that Bonnie has some nicely nasty things to say about Food Network. Here's what she has to say about the show:

Dear Food Network,

Loving the new baking show — on PBS. Even those of us who would rather pluck a bucketful of fresh thyme leaves than watch competitive cooking on television are, in a word, enchanted. We are eating up every episode of “The Great British Baking Show,” nee “The Great British Bake Off,” whose last-season finale drew more than 13 million U.K. viewers, a 50 percent audience share.

Want to know why? Here’s hoping you do. It’s partly about culinary education, but mostly about authenticity.

As in, contestants are allowed to be real, not presented as archetypes. Everybody’s civil, respectful, even — judges and funny hosts, too. We get the impression they’re all mates who like to share a pint at the pub. In fact, the amateur bakers did just that, each week, before the cameras began rolling.

“We don’t like editing people to look mean,” says British food writer and former BBC producer Diana Henry.

Contrast that with American reality TV. Here, said PBS chief programming executive Beth Hoppe, “we cast for LOUD” (with the exception of PBS).

Exactly.

The show tests the skills of 12 home bakers over the course of 10 weeks, as they all perform in a specially outfitted tent on the grounds of a manor house in county Berkshire; we see black lambs gamboling between action shots. Men and women, teens and sexagenarians, shire-born and immigrants are vying for the title of top baker. They have regular lives and jobs. They practice at home during the week, based on a list of broad categories provided by the show, and spend 10-hour weekend days on the set. Each episode comprises three types of “bakes,” and a star baker is crowned.

Judges Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry
and hosts Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc

The competition doesn’t lack for drama. It’s writ small, though, like in a home kitchen (with the exception of Iain Watters’s BakedAlaskaGate). [Hint: You definitely want to check out the BakedAlaskaGate link. It's a pip. -- Ed.] Cakes crack, fillings ooze. Thanks to a spot-on production crew, we get to see those moments, plus the kind of second-guessing and oven anxiety we’re prone to ourselves. When contestants are chuffed, we surrender to Anglophilia. When an effort falls short, judgment is delivered with kindness and understanding.

Sometimes judges Mary Berry, something of a national culinary institution, and celebrity baker Paul Hollywood throw a spanner into the works, but the challenge is reasonable: The baking time or oven temperature might be omitted from the directions, and the bakers manage based on their experience. The lesson to be gleaned from crafting a “Chopped” main course from, say, fish heads, peanut brittle and lime gelatin seems less significant, in comparison.

Lincolnshire grandmother Nancy Birtwhistle has a homespun contraption to aerate her fennel and rye crackers. Must try that. North London builder Richard Burr’s chocolate fondants are perfectly proportioned and executed, prompting Berry to pipe up, “Now that’s what I call a sauced pudding!” Enwezor Nzegwu, a business consultant from Portsmouth, alas, is gone too soon. But there will be no clawing his way back into the competition through cutthroat capers.

And now we know from sauced puds, Victoria sponges, Swiss rolls. To U.K. viewers and expats, it’s the stuff of memory and tradition. For America, it’s a window on the world of the baked goods Brits hold dear. “When I grew up, you were supposed to be able to be good at an eggy sponge, a light cake,” says food writer Henry. “It’s in the DNA here.”

The production crew seems to capture the technique involved in every step along the way, for each baker. Those comparisons offers much insight, really, into how home bakers perform similar feats and achieve different results.

We have long looked to public television for helpful cooking instruction. (Cue “The French Chef” theme music.) “GBBO,” as the Twitter hashtaggers call it, proves that the format can offer genuine entertainment as well. Hoppe says she tried to acquire the British series a couple of years ago but was outbid by CBS, which effectively took “GBBO” off the table so it could develop and air 2013’s “The American Baking Competition.” (That judge-host combo didn’t work so well, and poor ratings canceled the show.)

When “GBBO” became available again, “it had gone bonkers in the U.K., along the magnitude of ‘Downton Abbey,’ ” Hoppe says. So she brought it to PBS and promises we’ll see the next season as well. U.S. viewership thus far stands at 2.5 million, for a network whose prime-time average is about 1 million viewers.

Yeah, Food Network, your ratings are up around that number on Sunday nights. But some of us have been turning the sound down for years.

And what does the last baker left standing on “GBBO” get? Neither prize money nor a Ford truck nor his or her own show that will wind up in a desperate time slot. The winner receives an engraved cake plate.

What fame brings ’round afterward has gotten formulaic, even in Great Britain. Media coverage of contestants’ home kitchens and cookbook deals are common; Richard Burr this week is putting the finishing touches on his collection of 78 recipes, a project that took him away from work for two months. He has 30K Twitter followers.

“Third of February, I’m fitting kitchens again,” Burr says. “But it’s been nice getting messages from a lot of men who bake. It makes me happy for fellas to go and make a mess in the kitchen.”

P.S., Food Network: Can you forward this to your buddies at Bravo?

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How happy for the NFL that ESPN has decided -- entirely of its own free will -- not to pile onto the league's violence problem

HuffPost reproduced this series of tweets from Sports Business Journal's John Ourand in which both the NFL and ESPN proclaim their innocence of collusion in ESPN's sudden withdrawal from collaboration with PBS's Frontline investigation into the NFL head-injury mess.

by Ken

I suppose it's possible to believe it's possible that ESPN suddenly withdrew yesterday from its collaboration with PBS's Frontline on an investigation into the concussion-and-head-injury mess confronting the NFL without any consideration of its business relationship with that same NFL. Which is to say it's possible to believe that ESPN only just came to this realization, contained in the statement it issued yesterday following PBS's announcement that the collaboration with ESPN is kaput:

Because ESPN is neither producing nor exercising editorial control over the Frontline documentaries, there will be no co-branding involving ESPN on the documentaries or their marketing materials. The use of ESPN's marks could incorrectly imply that we have editorial control. As we have in the past, we will continue to cover the concussion story through our own reporting.

Hey, these things happen. I can certainly understand ESPN's concern that "the use of ESPN's marks could incorrectly imply that we have editorial control." Sure, that concern seems to have come on rather suddenly, especially after what the Frontline statement described as "a collaboration that has spanned the last 15 months and is based on the work of ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, as well as FRONTLINE’s own original journalism."

For the record, here's how the Frontline people characterized yesterday's development:

rom now on, at ESPN’s request, we will no longer use their logos and collaboration credit on these sites and on our upcoming film League of Denial, which investigates the NFL’s response to head injuries among football players.

We don’t normally comment on investigative projects in progress, but we regret ESPN’s decision to end a collaboration that has spanned the last 15 months and is based on the work of ESPN reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru, as well as FRONTLINE’s own original journalism.

Over that time, we’ve enjoyed a productive partnership with ESPN’s investigative program, Outside the Lines, jointly publishing and co-branding several ground-breaking articles on our respective websites and on their broadcast. We’ve been in sync on the goals of our reporting: to present the deepest accounting so far of the league’s handling of questions around the long-term impact of concussions. This editorial partnership was similar to our many other collaborations with news organizations over the years.

If it only now dawned on the ESPN people that the use of ESPN's marks could lead people to believe that the network had editorial control over the film, then it needed to act promptly, however belatedly.

And it would be malicious to suggest otherwise, as HuffPost reports some nasty fellows at the New York Times have been doing:

Citing two unnamed sources described as having "direct knowledge of the situation," James Andrew Miller of the New York Times reported that the NFL pressured ESPN to pull out at a lunch meeting of top officials from both sides. . . .

[T]he New York Times reported that the NFL began pressuring ESPN after the trailer for the documentary was released on Aug. 6. The trailer shows people discussing players suffering from dementia and brain disease as a result from playing professional football. The NFL is being sued by thousands of former players claiming that the league hid information linking football-related head trauma to brain injuries.

Frontline Deputy Executive Producer Raney Aronson-Roth told James Andrew Miller "that ESPN executives had for more than a year understood the ground rules of the collaboration: Frontline would keep editorial control of what it televised or put on its Web sites, and ESPN would have control of everything it televised or posted on the Web." She also said --

that until last Friday, there had been no hint of trouble between Frontline and ESPN. She said that Frontline had worked “"in lockstep" with Vince Doria, ESPN's senior vice president and director of news, and Dwayne Bray, senior coordinating producer in ESPN's news-gathering unit.

As to that lunch meeting, here's what the Times's Miller reported:

Last week, several high-ranking officials convened a lunch meeting at Patroon, near the league's Midtown Manhattan headquarters, according to the two people, who requested anonymity because they were prohibited by their superiors from discussing the matter publicly. It was a table for four: Roger Goodell, commissioner of the N.F.L.; Steve Bornstein, president of the NFL Network; John Skipper, ESPN's president; and John Wildhack, ESPN's executive vice president for production.

At the combative meeting, the people said, league officials conveyed their displeasure with the direction of the documentary, which is expected to describe a narrative that has been captured in various news reports over the past decade: the league turning a blind eye to evidence that players were sustaining brain trauma on the field that could lead to profound, long-term cognitive disability.

If Patroon's current main dining room isn't to your taste, the Aretsky's Patroon website announces: "We are very excited to present a sneak peek of our new look, coming soon."

To prove that the lunch had nothing to do with ESPN's decision, the NFL points out, as noted in the tweet above, that it was scheduled several weeks ago, and at ESPN's request:

Greg Aiello, a spokesman for the N.F.L., said Friday morning that the lunch meeting was requested by ESPN several weeks ago. "At no time did we formally or informally ask them to divorce themselves from the project," Aiello said. "We know the movie was happening and the book was happening, and we respond to them as best we can. We deny that we pressured them."

There is, you'll note, no discussion of the "combativeness" of the lunch meeting, as James Andrew Miller characterized it base on the characterizations of those two anonymous rats, who know perfectly well that they're not allowed to talk about . . . you know, this stuff.

It's understandable that the NFL doesn't like people talking about . . . you know, this stuff. The league knows perfectly well that it has a critical violence problem. It also knows that:

(1) Its fans like violence, especially in the sanitized way it comes to them on their TVs, which makes it look sort of like Road Runner cartoons.

(2) Given the size and strength to which all those bodies colliding on the field have grown, there may not be any realistic way of dialing down the violence level enough to bring those brain injuries down to an acceptable level.

And anyways, can't the NFL commissioner just have a friendly -- and maybe occasionally feisty (possibly a few drinks were drunk?) -- lunch with a few high-level broadcasting buddies without a federal case being made of it?

By the way, Front Line has scheduled League of Denial (do you suppose it really took much persuasion to persuade the ESPN honchos, who after all are business partners of the NFL, that they don't want to be associated with a production bearing that title?) for October 8 and 15.

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

Dimwitted right-wing "gotcha"-ista "catches" Sen. Sherrod Brown and columnist Connie Schultz canoodling

Plus Sunday Classics bulletin: PBS's Kansas City concert-hall telecast airs tomorrow night

If Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz don't watch out, some right-wing lunkhead might do an exposé claiming that they're, you know, involved.

by Ken

Conflicts of interests -- in every imaginable format, size, and shape -- are right-wingers' stock-in-trade. It's almost impossible to imagine them surviving un-enmeshed in webs of conflicts. So perhaps it's only natural that they have a heightened ability to "spot" such conflicts, whether real or (more often) imagined, in their enemies. After all, these are people who seem always to be looking in the mirror, and never to actually see anyone except themselves, regardless of whom they think they're looking at

In his Washington Post "In the Loop" column, our pal Al Kamen passes on this tale-- file it under Annals of True Romance -- of a modern-day right-wing "investigative" idiot who went wading in the pseudo-journalistic kiddie pool and found himself way out of his depth.

Some bedfellows are stranger than others

Connie Schultz isn’t naming names. The nationally syndicated columnist wrote a post on her Facebook page Tuesday about a “conservative blogger” who ­e-mailed her to say he or she was working on an “exposé” about journalists getting cozy with elected officials.

The blogger had seen many photos of Schultz with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Gotcha!

But wait, not so fast.

Schultz e-responded to the conservative muckraker, admitting that she had, in fact, been caught in a compromising position with Brown. In fact, she had a lurid-sounding confession: “I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.”

Cue conservative blogger drooling on keyboard. This exposé just got its lead sentence.

But then Schultz continued with some deflating details. “He’s also my husband. You know that, right?”

Schultz tells the Loop that she’s not identifying the blogger, in the hope of turning the incident — which has prompted plenty of online discussion — into a teaching moment. She surmises that the blogger is an intern for a conservative outlet, and she figured that rather than simply shaming the young pup, she might impart some journalistic and political wisdom. An intern, after all might be “salvageable,” in a way the editors might not be, she says.

“I wanted to teach the bigger lessons here,” Schultz says. “First, do your research before you call. Second, some of us liberals are not out to make you look bad.”

PBS AIRS KC CONCERT HALL
TELECAST TOMORROW NIGHT

Our Kansas City-area friend Robert Dagg Murphy alerted us awhile back that PBS had a broadcast in the works spotlighting the concert hall in Kansas City's new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, whose acoustics Robert described as "amazing." The documentary-plus-performance is scheduled for tomorrow night, at least in my corner of the PBS universe (as always, check local listings), built around a concert conducted by Kansas City Philharmonic music director Michael Stern and featuring a "homecoming" for KC native Joyce DiDonato -- the mezzo's first performance in the Kauffman Center

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"Go to death, and go to slaughter!": The un-glorious carnage of war is just one thing that Series 2 of "Downton Abbey" is capturing strikingly

"Go to death, and go to slaughter;
die, and every Cornish daughter
with her tears your grave shall water.
Go, ye heroes, go and die!"

No, Series 2 of Downton Abbey hasn't become a battlefield drama, but World War I looms over everything that's happening so far, and we even get some effective glimpses of the battlefront in France, with not a lot of glory involved. That's conniving Thomas, the mobilized Grantham footman (Rob James-Collier), in the foreground.

Major-General Stanley has called on the gallant young Frederic to "let your escort lion-hearted be summoned to receive a general’s blessing, ere they depart upon their dread adventure" -- going into combat against the dreaded Pirates of Penzance. "Dear Sir," Frederic replied, "they come." Indeed they do. The "escort lion-hearted" turns out to be the local constabulary.

Enter POLICE, marching in single file. They form in line, facing audience.

SERGEANT, with POLICE: When the foeman bares his steel -- tarantara! tarantara! --
we uncomfortable feel -- tarantara! --
and we find the wisest thing -- tarantara! tarantara! --
is to slap our chests and sing -- tarantara!
For when threatened with emeutes -- trantara! tarantara! --
and your heart is in your boots -- tarantara! --
there is nothing brings it round
like the trumpet’s martial sound,
like the trumpet’s martial sound.
ALL: Tarantara! tarantara!, etc.
MABEL: Go, ye heroes, go to glory,
though ye die in combat gory
ye shall live in song and story.
Go to immortality!
Go to death, and go to slaughter;
die, and every Cornish daughter
with her tears your grave shall water.
Go, ye heroes, go and die!
GIRLS: Go, ye heroes, go and die!
SERGEANT, with POLICE: Though to us it’s evident -- tarantara! tarantara! --
these attentions are well meant -- tarantara! --
such expressions don’t appear -- tarantara! tarantara! --
calculated men to cheer -- tarantara! --
who are going to meet their fate
in a highly nervous state -- tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
Still to us it’s evident
these attentions are well meant -- tarantara! tarantara! tarantara!
EDITH: Go and do your best endeavour,
and before all links we sever,
we will say farewell forever.
go to glory and the grave!
GIRLS: Go to glory and the grave!
For your foes are fierce and ruthless,
false, unmerciful, and truthless;
young and tender, old and toothless,
all in vain their mercy crave.
SERGEANT: We observe too great a stress,
on the risks that on us press,
and of reference a lack
to our chance of coming back.
Still, perhaps it would be wise
not to carp or criticise,
for it’s very evident
these attentions are well meant.
POLICE: Yes, it’s very evident
these attentions are well meant, etc.
CHORUS OF ALL BUT POLICE:
Go, ye heroes, go to glory, etc.
CHORUS OF POLICE:
When the foeman bears his steel, etc.
MAJOR-GENERAL STANLEY: Away, away!
POLICE [without moving]: Yes, yes, we go.
MAJOR-GENERAL STANLEY: These pirates slay.
POLICE: Tarantara!
MAJOR-GENERAL STANLEY: Then do not stay.
POLICE: Tarantara!
MAJOR-GENERAL STANLEY: Then why this delay?
POLICE: All right, we go.
Yes, forward on the foe!
MAJOR-GENERAL STANLEY: Yes, but you don’t go!
POLICE: We go, we go
Yes, forward on the foe!
MAJOR-GENERAL STANLEY: Damme, you don’t go!
ALL: At last they really go!

-- from Act II of The Pirates of Penzance (1879)

The shivering-in-their-boots police, spoken for by their intrepid Sergeant (Donald Adams), are exhorted on to glory by Major-General Stanley's daughters Mabel (Valerie Masterson) and Edith (Ann Hood) and prodded on -- in mounting exasperation -- by the general himself (John Reed). Sir Malcolm Sargent conducts the D'Oyly Carte Opera Chorus and the Royal Philharmonic in this 1965 recording.

by Ken

I enjoyed Season 1 of Downton Abbey without quite getting what the uproar was about, on both sides of the Atlantic. So while I certainly intended to watch Season 2 when it arrived (which it did last night on many PBS stations), I also had a little trepidation about it. I mean, how much more mileage could you get out of the premise, which was sort of moving Upstairs, Downstairs to rural Yorkshire and the estate of an almost too-good-to-be-true earl (Lord Grantham, played by Hugh Bonneville, pictured here in uniform) whose immediate family faces something like eventual ruination due to the preposterous law that makes it impossible for either the title or the estate to pass to any of his three (shudder!) daughters? And never mind that the not-so-near cousin to whom the title will instead pass, Matthew (Dan Stevens), doesn't want anything to do with it.

I have to say, I was encouraged by the premiere episode last night. As I usually do, I had avoided reading or hearing about it as much as I could, which I would have done even if I was waiting on tenterhooks for it. I want the story told by the storytellers -- the writer (once again series creator Julian Fellowes) and the teams of actors, directors, and producers. (UPDATE: And of course the legions of other behind-the-camera people. They're part of the storytelling too, and I don't know how I could have left them out.)

I had nevertheless become aware that Series 2 would be interacting with World War I, and I can't say that encouraged me either. Hasn't that been, you know, done? Yes, but as it turns out, it can be done again, and still show us some powerful things about what it means to go to war, things I'm afraid we still need to be shown quite a lot.

The new series jumps two years from the end of Series 1 to 1916, meaning that the "Great War" is well under way and our characters have all had time to adjust to the new realities of national "glory" and horrific carnage. It's still possible for one of the servant characters (Thomas, wasn't it?) to rattle on about his willingness, no eagerness, to serve "King and country." But it may be that the very absence of any discussion of the geopolitical issues of the war serves to underscore how little idea these people have as to why they're fighting this unimaginably horrible war.

Already by 1916 the scale of the dying -- and the maiming -- has become a horrifying reality for most everyone. And one of the fascinating realities is how war intersects with the entrenched class system. The war doesn't break the system down, but it sure gives it a mighty shaking, and the Downton Abbey team so far is doing a dandy job of showing us how the experience of war is filtered through the characters' very different class situations, including the way people of different standings were forced into interactions that just wouldn't have happened otherwise, to the frequent befuddlement of most and the consternation of some.

The team finds all sorts of interesting ways of dramatizing the preposterousness of those class differences. Maybe it's just me, but something as simple as the arrival of a train from London at the little local station packed a wallop, as people emerge so differently from adjacent third-class and first-class carriages, even before we become aware that two of "our" characters are among them -- Lord Grantham's valet Bates (Brendan Coyle) emerging from third class and the eldest Crawley sister, Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery, pictured here), from first. In all the scenes directly related to the war -- in the trenches in France, in the hospital back home -- there's the preposterous reality that officers are officers simply because they did so much better a job at being born, and are attended by batmen who are in all likelihood older and wiser.

We're also exposed to the reality that especially by 1916 the country wasn't by any means unanimous in its thirst for military glory. Oh yes, life could be made unpleasant for able-bodied men not in uniform, but we also see our share of men by no means eager to be drawn into the fray.

And of course the war also wreaks havoc on that other "settled" great division: the one between men and women. The youngest of the Crawley sisters, Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown-Findlay), driven by her war awakening ("Sometimes it feels as if all the men I ever danced with are dead," she says), seeks a way of serving in the war effort, and determines to become a nurse. The evil middle sister, Lady Edith (Laura Carmichael), learns to drive a truck (shocking!) -- and manages to do evil while ostensibly helping a local farmer. And poor Mr. Carson, the Grantham butler (Jim Carter, pictured here), having lost both his footmen to the war effort, and after experimenting disastrously with using His Lordship's new valet, Lang (Cal Macaninch), via whom we're introduced to the new and improved phenomenon of "shell shock," has to contemplate the unthinkable: having women serve at table!

Sure, you notice plot mechanics creaking around the edges. But the reward for having establlshed such a nice set of characters in Series 1 (many of whom I haven't mentioned, only because they didn't happen to come up here -- the huge cast is really all awfully good) is that you can get a lot of mileage by adding the new reality of war to the already-established battlefields of class and gender inequality. It's early yet, of course, but there's the potential for Series 2 of Downton Abbey to be better than Series 1.

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The final episode of "Any Human Heart" (on "Masterpiece Classic") is shaping up as an event

Watch the full episode. See more Masterpiece.

The final episode of Any Human Heart airs this week on most PBS stations. In the New York area, for example, it's tomorrow night on channel 13 and Monday night on channel 21. I'm hooked enough that I may actually watch it in real time tomorrow night. (Episodes can be viewed online, by the way, so if you've got some free time, you could get caught up in time to watch the finale in real time too. Or you can watch the whole thing online, of course -- through March 22.)

How can a man in the bloom of youth, pursuing writing and sex with equal vigor, end up grizzled, old, and surrounded by piles of boxes and paper, the detritus of a life? The answer is the story of Logan Mountstuart, who believes, "Every human being is a collection of selves...we never stay just one person." And the twentieth century provides the perfect backdrop for Logan to live out his lives, drinking absinthe with Ernest Hemingway, initiated into intrigue by Ian Fleming, and embroiled in the arch expat world of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. A novelist, war correspondent, father, spy, prisoner of war, art dealer, husband, and many times over, a lover — an Everyman of sorts -- Logan is played at three junctures of his life by Sam Claflin, Matthew Macfadyen (Little Dorrit), and Jim Broadbent. An intimate take on a sweeping century, Any Human Heart is based on the bestselling book by William Boyd and also stars Kim Cattrall (My Boy Jack), Gillian Anderson (Bleak House) and Hayley Atwell (Mansfield Park).

-- PBS's (pretty accurate) descriptive blurb for
the Masterpiece Classic series Any Human Heart

by Ken

I really wasn't expecting much (anything?) from Any Human Heart, in part because the promotional materials place such stress on the "historical" figures who litter the screenplay, written by William Boyd based on his own novel. I have to say that, two episodes in, the series has gripped me to the point of making me curious about the book.

Those historical figures actually do matter, but they're not used in the way you might expect from description like that in the above blurb, though the portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (Tom Hollander and Gillian Anderson), whom we meet first as the prince of Wales and his mistress, is scabrous enough -- and deservedly so, I gather -- as to be worth the price of admission by itself. But, just to give you a sort of example of how the material seems to me to work, the chief takeaway from our protagonist Logan Mountstuart's acquaintance with the Duke and Duchess is his head-on encounter with the concept of betrayal, being branded a Judas when for one of the few times in his life he is actually behaving in a competent and scrupulous fashion.

Perhaps I should explain the narrative format of the show, which shows us Logan at the various stages of his life: as a child in Uruguay (his mother was Uruguayan), as a university student and up-and-coming graduate (played by Sam Claflin), as a mature adult (played by Matthew Madfadyen -- Tom of TV's MI-5, or Spooks, if you want to be pedantic), and as an old man (played by Jim Broadbent). Mostly what we're seeing is the aged Logan literally going through and burning that "detritus" of his life cited in the PBS blurb, and in so doing, with an assist from the journals that seem to be the closest thing in his life to an honest accomplishment, reviewing that life.

Since, apart from bits of voiceover, Jim Broadbent as the aged Logan is given no dialogue, at least in those first two episodes, any sense we get of what the scenes from his life mean to him or add up to him has to come from watching his late-life reactions. In general, those reactions seem to range from distressed to appalled.

Matthew Macfadyen, Jim Broadbent, and Sam Claflin as Logan

If you're at all susceptible to this kind of material -- that is, attempting to encompass the totality of a life in a single large gulp -- Any Human Heart is fascinating, and devastating. Again going only by those first two episodes, what we see is mostly Logan stumbling through life, mostly unaware of anything except his urges of the moment, under the pretext of living according to the principle passed down to him by his ailing father: that life is just a matter of luck, your good luck and your bad luck. (It's worth considering that those words had a distinctly different import coming out of the mouth of a man who, however tedious his career path to running a highly profitable food-processing company may seem, actually worked, and worked hard, for everything he got in the way of a living.)

Mostly, Logan enjoys good luck, but he does as little to deserve that as he does to deserve the stroke of hellaciously, cosmically monstrous luck that in time befalls him. Which again is why his encounter with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor seems so tragicomically appropriate. Though appallingly ill equipped for the mission that puts him in their semi-royal company in the Bahamas, he tries for once in his life to act responsibly, and is treated like . . . well, like a Judas, as the Duke and Duchess put it so graphically.

I have to admit that on one count I've overstated a bit. I've been claiming to have watched the first two episodes. In fact, I haven't quite finished the second. I've had the DVR on pause while I wrote this. I'm going to go back now and finish up the second episode, and as I wrote in the caption for the above clip, there's a good chance that I'll watch the final episode in real time tomorrow night.

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"SCTV Golden Classics" should bring back some of the funniest stuff ever on TV

Ohmygosh, they're . . . Canadian! Early-career SCTV troupers (clockwise from left) John Candy, Rick Moranis, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Catherine O'Hara, Dave Thomas, and Andrea Martin. A special SCTV Golden Classics airs tonight at 9, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Chicago's legendary Second City improv-comedy troupe (which was last night, actually), on Long Island public television station WLIW and perhaps other PBS stations, with regular broadcasts beginning in March. This is one of those deals where you really do have to check your local listings.

by Ken

I must have heard both Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, and probably other of the SCTV-ers as well, tell the story of how two burdensome TV realities led to the invention of "Great White North." It was, first, the spread of the originally Canadian show -- it was spun off from Second City's branch in Toronto -- to the U.S., which meant separate U.S. and Canadian editions of each show, thanks to all those splendid U.S. commercials. Somehow the extra Canadian air time had to be filled, and filled with content that wasn't going to be seen in the U.S. At the same time the troupe was under pressure from the Canadian TV powers-that-be to ramp up the show's "Canadian content." It must have been either Moranis or Thomas, the future McKenzie brothers (Bob and Doug, respectively), who wondered aloud what the heck "Canadian content" was -- two guys sitting around in lumberjack shirts drinking beer and saying "eh?"? Voilà "Great White North."

Of course it quickly became so popular that it un-solved the first problem; there was soon no question of leaving it out of the U.S. edition. Here the boys, having heard about a guy who found a mouse in his bottle of beer and got a whole free case, explore the topic of "How to Get a Mouse in a Beer Bottle."



Then there's the sublime team of John Candy and Joe Flaherty as Billie Sol Hurok (maybe my favoritest name in the history of nomenclature; if you young-uns don't get it, look up "Billie Sol Estes" and "Sol Hurok") and Big Jim McBob of "Farm Film Report," where good entertainment is defined as seeing stuff -- ideally people, better still celebrities -- get blowed up, blowed up real good.


Here's a "Farm Film Report" in which Big Jim and Billie Sol, after disposing of the porkbellies, review -- hold your breath -- European movies, and it turns out that Big Jim has a favorite director: that Michael Angelo Antonioni. Of course at the end of his Zabriskie Point everything blows up. A big disappointment, however, was Antonioni's Blow Up, where nothing blows up -- Big Jim got his money back on that one.

One of the things you learn in the 1969-78 volume of Michael Palin's diaries, which covers most of the Monty Python period, if you didn't already know it, is that one area of tension that developed among the Pythongs was over "thematic" shows, which MP and Terry Jones thought would give the more scope and focus while John Cleese was adamantly opposed. (In the Cleese-less fourth season, they did more of it.) SCTV was theme-bound from the outset, telling sketch-comedy tales of life at fictional TV station SCTV in fictional Melonville, owned by the super-sleazy and sinister Guy Caballero (another Flaherty character) and overseen by station manager Edith Prickly (sorry, no pair of adjectives I can think of will convey this protean character portrayed by the great Andrea Martin), and featuring a cast of semidemiluminaries written and portrayed by the high-power team of writer-performers pictured above (joined later by Martin Short).

The folks at comedy-friendly WLIW are pretty juiced about SCTV Golden Classics. Here's their précis:

SCTV, or Second City Television, followed the exploits of an aspiring fictional television station, led by Owner and President Guy Caballero (Flaherty), and the inimitable personalities who starred in its local programs. Spoofing TV programming staples like game shows, talk shows and film shows, famous sketches featured in SCTV Golden Classics include “The Great White North” with Canadian brothers Bob (Moranis) and Doug (Thomas) McKenzie; “Monster Chiller Horror Theatre” Host Count Floyd (Flaherty) previewing “Dr. Tongue’s 3D House of Stewardesses” starring mad scientist Dr. Tongue (Candy) and hunch-backed servant Bruno (Levy); hillbillies Big Jim McBob (Flaherty) and Billy Sol Hurok’s (Candy) “Farm Film Report” blowing up Neil Sedaka (Levy); and parodies of Jeopardy! (“High Q with Alex Trebel” with Levy as host), The Merv Griffin Show and The Dick Cavett Show, both featuring Moranis as host. Laugh-out-loud celebrity impersonations and musical numbers include Candy as Pavorotti in a chewing gum ad; Levy as Perry Como singing disco hits; O’Hara as Katherine Hepburn and washed-up singer/actress Lola Heatherton; Martin as Ethel Merman and Indira Gandhi; Short as Jerry Lewis and pointy-haired nerd Ed Grimley; Leutonian polka stars The Happy Wanderers featuring the Shmenge Brothers (Candy and Levy); and barbershop-style vocal group 5 Neat Guys (Candy, Flaherty, Levy, Thomas, and Moranis) singing their neatest hits “She Does It,” “Who Brought the Egg Salad Sandwiches” and more.

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When Bill Moyers goes, will anyone on broadcast TV uphold proper journalistic standards -- or even have any idea what they are?

Bill Moyers' Journal, which Bill will draw to a close on April 30 of next year, began with a momentous report called "Buying the War," on April 25, 2007. It was a simple but searing look at the stunning, near-complete breakdown of the infotainment-news media while the Bush regime was lying gullible Americans into war against Iraq. The shameful truth explored in that report was that there were non-Beltway journalists doing an actual job of reporting. In this all-too-brief clip, he notes of people like Knight Ridder's Warren Strobel (working with the solid backing of his bureau chief, James Wolcott), "They went about their reporting the old-fashioned way, with shoe leather, tracking down and meeting with sources deep inside the intelligence community." But no one paid attention to Knight Ridder; they weren't Beltway players. And for the journalists who tried to get the story right, there was no reward, and often punishment, while most of the people who got it wrong -- all wrong, dead wrong -- saw their careers flourish. (By the way, a DVD of "Buying the War" is still available, and two and a half years later seems every bit as pertinent. Maybe PBS could just keep recycling old BMJ reports?)

by Ken

Say it ain't so, Bill.

From Elizabeth Jensen's Friday night NYT "Media Decoder" blogpost:

Mr. Moyers said he had been planning for some time to retire the program on Dec. 25, but was asked by PBS to raise the funds to continue through April, which he did.

“I am 75 years old,” he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a “good run of it,” he added in a telephone interview on Friday, “so I feel it’s time.” He said he was not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.

No, it's not fair to badger Bill simply because of the gap his departure will leave. If anybody has earned relief from the grind of producing a weekly hour of solid investigative reporting, it's Bill Moyers at age 75. It's not his fault that there's nobody to replace him. Actually, my guess is that over the years he's worked with, inspired, and trained enough TV journalists that there are people who could carry on his work, but they don't have his name or his ability to squeeze money out of public-television donors.

The fact that there's nobody to replace him works out fine, since it turns out that PBS really has no interest in replacing him. Note that the PBS wizards are taking this opportunity to dump Now on PBS as well. From Ms. Jensen's report: "John Siceloff, the executive producer, said the program, hosted now by David Brancaccio, had been “a unique voice at a time when outlets for insightful journalism are diminishing. We’re all looking for places to continue that work.” Of course there isn't anyplace -- at least not in broadcast TV -- to continue that work.

I'm sure a lot of higher-ups at PBS, many of whom proclaim the highest admiration for Bill Moyers, and some of whom may actually mean it, are breathing easier now that they don't have Bill M to defend anymore. We all know how crazy he drives the loony, lying Right, people who would be incapable of championing fair reporting if their toxic lives depended on it. Bill Moyers as a journalist has always been obsessed with real fairness, the kind that's pinned to truth, as opposed to the kind drooled about by the lying liars of the Right. (When they talk about "fairness," what they mean is "lies the way we like 'em, to suit our delusional, psychotic prejudices.")

Maybe equally important, because the bias of right-wing news outlets like Fox is so blatant and egregious -- to everyone, it appears, except the American journalistic establishment -- Bill Moyers has stood brazenly apart from the muddled mob mentality of Inside the Beltway journalism, whose overriding mission is to coddle the preconceptions and prerogatives of the ossified Village establishment. Even Beltway journalists who privately sneer at the Fox Noisemakers wax indignant when it's suggested that they have abandoned pretty much any pretense to doing actual journalism in exchange for the privilege of being thought of as "insiders" in the corridors of power.

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That said, I have to admit that I haven't watched Bill Moyers' Journal all that often. I should be ashamed to admit it -- heck, I am ashamed to admit it -- but his TV hours are simply too filled with reality, of which my system these years can absorb only so much, even from someone as kindly and gentle as Bill. I'm still hopping mad from "Buying the War," and thinking about coughing about the $29.95 to buy the DVD. But realistically, in terms of the decisions that even well-meaning TV executives have to make, if somebody like me isn't watching the Journal, how big an audience can they hope for? Especially when measured against the nonstop raucous roaring produced by the Right-Wing Noise Machine in response to any attempt at honest reporting.

Still, it was always reassuring, when Bill was doing a regular program, that he was there, meaning that somebody on broadcast TV was practicing journalism.

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NOW-- ON PBS: DONNA EDWARDS vs THE MACHINE

Last night PBS' NOW ran a show, "Democrats Divided 2008," featuring the contest between Donna Edwards and Al Wynn. It starts off with a bias that drives me insane. "Can moderates from the Party's Establishment turn back a challenge from the progressive wing?" asks the putatively authoritative announcer, David Brancaccio. What makes the behavior of Al Wynn "moderate?" He voted with Bush and Cheney on Iraq and he is a consistent supporter of the radical right corporatist agenda-- owned, lock, stock and barrel by sleazy lobbyists. Is that the new definition of "moderate?" He then goes on to claim that "the middle of the road policies shaping by Bill Clinton and embraced by many party leaders are now under attack." Who wrote this for him? Rahm Emanuel. What makes the Clinton-Bush trade policies that have ravaged the American middle class "middle of the road?"

Brancaccio and his Emanuel-scripted blathering soon gives way to Maria Hinojosa talking about "Democracy in action" and focusing on Donna Edwards' campaign in Maryland's 4th congressional district-- for 2 seconds. And then she's yammering on how "by anybody's definition Al Wynn is a liberal Democrat, well-matched to his district." I nearly turned it off at that point. I'm glad I didn't because it soon gave way to footage of Donna explaining the real differences-- differences apparently too subtle for Hinojosa or Brancaccio-- between Wynn and herself. And then... Matt Stoller gets his say. Matt's is one of the most articulate and brilliant voices in the blogosphere. He's able to explain the race-- crashing through the subtleties in a way even a Brancaccio or Hinojosa can understand. And Matt, doesn't use the Establishment propaganda language-- accurately replacing "moderate" when talking about reactionary Democrats with "conservative."

The funniest moment in the show is when Wynn, acknowledges the public record that shows him taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from big business interests. "I think there's too much money in politics," he agrees. "But I don't write the rules." [He doesn't? Isn't that exactly why there's too much money in politics-- because corrupt, self-serving incumbents like Wynn and Emanuel do write the rules and because they write they to serve their own narrow interests?] "What I do say to voters is 'Look, you can look at my record both on the contribution side and on the vote side and I can show you instances where I have voted against the interests of people who have given me contributions." [It's true-- he regularly screws the members of Establishment puppet labor unions like AFSCME by voting against their interests while the corrupt party boss, Gerald McEntee, dances to whatever jig Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi are playing for him.

The show uses Donna's campaign against the corrupt and reactionary Insider Wynn to show the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party between the grassroots and the Inside-the-Beltway Establishment. You can watch the video at the PBS page, here. If you watch it, though, beware that Matt Bai is also on it, spouting his regular, ignorant nonsense.

After you watch it, please consider going over to Blue America's Act Blue page and contributing to Donna Edwards, John Laesch, and Mark Pera, all of whom face Insider hacks in primaries next month.