TV Watch: Still reeling from the news about Betty on last week's "Mad Men"? (Yes, we're down to the final episode)

I assumed we could get some sort of relevant clip from the Mad Men page of the AMC website, but right now it's a pile of worthless, stinking crap, at least on the browsers I have available as I write. (Confidential to Web designers who think all of their clients' potential users chase the latest browsers: Get your heads out of your butts, morons. And to the clients thusly hornswoggled: Oh jeez!) So we have to settle for this "cast's favorite scenes" feature, which you should find here. Above, of course, we see Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson), January Jones (Betty Francis), John Slattery (Roger Sterling), and Christina Hendricks (Joan Harris).

by Ken

A lot of Mad Men fans seem to be. And we know that, at least as of the end of last week's episode, "The Milk and Honey Route," poor Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley) was still reeling. Whereas, perhaps surprisingly, Betty herself (January Jones) wasn't. Consider that there aren't many people who know Betty better than daughter Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), and it was Sally who assumed that the news would bring out her mother's drama-queeniness.

Among many other things, it was a big Sally episode, confirming what we've already known and noted repeatedly: how interestingly Kiernan Shipka has grown up over these years, and how ably she can handle whatever series creator Matthew Weiner and his team ask her to do. There was a wonderful low-key ease and playfulness to her long-distance phone conversation with Don (Jon Hamm), high drama in the unexpected visit she received at school from stepfather Henry, the combination of updated ancient routine and event-driven edge as she found herself back in the kitchen sitting with her out-of-the-loop little brothers, and of course the great scene with her mother.

It was all around, I thought, an exceptionally fine episode, with Don off on his quest-or-whatever-the-hell-it-is; Betty pursuing her long-delayed college degree; the left-behinds at what's left of the erstwhile Sterling Cooper team scrambling toward their new lives in the new agency world; and in particular Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), lured into an enervating entanglement with our old friend adman-turned-headhunter Duck Phillips (Mark Moses), deciding to go all out for an unexpected rearrangement of his future.

This last plotline that meant not just for another extendsive appearance by one of the series' most wonderful actors and characters, Alison Brie as Trudy Campbell, but as a mile marker for the life distance we've traveled with the show's characters. We began with astonishment way back when that someone as sane and centered and beautiful as Trudy would want anything to do with, let alone consider marrying, the creepy Pete we knew back in Season 1. Now here we are, all these years later, in which Trudy has worked so hard to wall off her feelings for Pete, and it turns out that maybe she was the only one who was right about him. Is there anyone who doesn't wish that, among the fates series Matthew W has in store for his characters, there's something good for Trudy?

I was so impressed by the episode that I was caught up short but also fascinated by a comment from a legendary adman, Tom Messner, who rose through the ranks at Carl Ally (later Ally and Gargano) before going out on his own (widely remembered as the creator of the advertising that put MCI on the telecommunications map), at a nifty panel put on Wednesday night by the Museum of the Moving Image: "The Real Mad Men: A Discussion with Leading Creators and Executives." Tom had gotten to talking about present-day TV, and said how impressed he is by the production values of current shows like Game of Thrones, and by contrast how meager he'd found the produciton values of last week's Mad Men episode, done mostly in simple closeups and two-shots, looking like it was made with a near-zero budget. The panel moderator, Barbara Lippert, a longtime columnist at Adweek and now editor-at-large at the website Media Post, pointed out that Matthew Weiner has complained frequently about the budgetary economies AMC has forced on him.


Meet Tom Messner in Yahoo's Giants of Advertising series.

Also on the panel was Ken Roman, who rose the rank of chairman and CEO of Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide before finding himself at the shaft end of the kind of British-takeover deal that's not unfamiliar to Mad Men viewers, though the MM version, it was suggested was perhaps a decade premature. And providing insighto the TV world's view of the advertising world, there was longtime NBC and RCA high-ranking executive Herb Schlosser (it was under his watch at NBC, and under his order, that Saturday Night Live was created -- though he has always clear that beyond the mandate the actual creation was done by the creative team. And crucially there was Helayne Spivak, who had worked for Tom Messner at Ally and Gargano and subsequenly worked her way up, through, and around the advertising business (she was reported to have told the panel organizers, "I'm Peggy"), and was able to tell us that the show's portrayal of the minimizing and outright abuse of women looked only too familiar to her.

It was a funny and illuminating panel, especially enjoyable for the opportunity to get a little sense of how these four exceptionally successful people had made their ways through their assorted careers. Regarding advertising, one point they agreed on is that they don't recognize the unrelenting angst of the show's portrayal of the advertising business. They did it, agreed all the ad people on the panel, because it was fun. (One other thing the panelists agreed on: None of them was familiar with the term "mad men," which they insist is Matthew Weiner's invention.)

One of the questions that came up was whether in the real world an agency guy could pull a Don Draper and just disappear for a week or a month. Much to my surprise, the general feeling, as articulated first by Ken Roman, was that "those creative types" could get away with just about anything!

In case it isn't obvious, I'm writing today in anticipation of the soon-to-be World of No More Mad Men. For Museum of the Moving Image members, there is at least a grand send-off in the form of a gala celebration Sunday evening culminating in a communal viewing of the final episode, "Person to Person," on the museum's largest screen. I signed up for that as soon as the e-announcement went out, wanting desperately not to be left out. Oh, I'll be recording the episode as well, but I think I'll be happy to see it first in the company of all those other devotees.

For one thing, I'll bet it plays really well on a large screen before an appreciative audience. As I've mentioned here many tiimes, my introduction to The Sopranos was on the not-as-large screen of the not-as-large old Museum of the Moving Image, the summer when the first show's first two seasons were binge-screened (before there was such a thing!) at an eight-episode-a-weekend clip, a project that was curated -- and is, understandably, still fondly remembered -- by the museum's current chief curator, David Schwartz. And wildly fondly remembered by me. For a newcomer to the show, it was an amazing immersion -- seeing not just how remarakable those two seasons' worth of episodes were but seeing how amazingly good they looked on a movie-theater-size screen, and how well they played to a live audience.

I know there's a popular impression that we're now in a golden age of grown-up cable TV drama, but that isn't how it looks to me. The way I see it, there was Oz and The Wire and The Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and maybe a few honorable mentions (Boardwalk Empire had its attractions, and I stuck it out with Tremé, crazy as it drove me at times). And then?

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TV Watch: Further thoughts on the short final season of "Parenthood" -- and the question of how long a TV season should be

A promo for last week's episode (No. 5 of Season 6) of Parenthood

by Ken

Almost exactly a month ago I voiced mixed feelings about the launch of Parenthood's sixth and final season, in a 13-episode format. The good feelings had an obvious cause: the return of a show I'd joined well into its run but come to value a lot. And the not-so-good feelings had equally obvious causes: the "final season" part, and the "13-episode format" part. Although he show in fact launched in 2010 with a 13-episode season, Seasons 2-5 contained 22, 18, 15, and 22 episodes.

I did note, however, that "judging by the expert way showrunner Jason Katims handled the shorter seasons imposed on him later in the run of Friday Night Lights, he's probably as good a writer-producer as there is at taking advantage of whatever program arc he's given. And five episodes into Season 6, I can declare myself fairly well pleased. There's a highly workable assortment of plot lines: patriarch Zeek's (Craig T. Nelson) open-heart surgery; granddaughter Amber's (Mae Whitman) pregnancy; the brewing crisis in Crosby's (Dax Shepard) life; the train wreck of Sarah's (Lauren Graham) boyfriend Hank"s (Ray Romano) relationship with his out-of-control daughter (with Hank's ex); the apparently final collapse of Julia and Joel's (Erika Christensen and Sam Yaeger) marriage.

And, oh yes, the launch of Kristina and Adam's (Monica Potter and Peter Krause) school. I hope the remaining scripts deal with Kristina's so-far-displayed stunning incompetence at the role of school headmistress, for which after all she has no training. Even apart from her stunning refusal to even try to distinguish between her relationships with Max as a student and as her son, she keeps blurting out nonsense about what-we-do and what-we-don't-do at the new school, nonsense that's making her look as if she shouldn't be allowed any role in the running of the place.

As we wait for the remaining eight episodes to roll, I'm also thinking that maybe the six seasons of Parenthood will be enough.

But there's still that age-old question of just how many episodes there ought to be in a TV season. I should stress that Jason Katims's 22-episode seasons, of both Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, have been outstanding from a creative standpoint. As he himself noted in a Friday Night Lights DVD audio commentary concerning NBC's cutback order, while he liked the idea of being able to focus on a 13-episode arc, at the same time it almost meant all but eliminating the secondary plots that had lent such extraordinary richness to the show's first season. I suppose, however, that from the network standpoint, you have to hope for higher ratings than Jason's shows command to justify that 22-week commitment, and he is starting to look like kind of a 13-episode kind of guy, commercially if not creatively, if we include his newest show, which I'm just catching up on as it starts its second season:

• Friiday Night Lights (2006-10): 76 hour-long episodes in 5 seasons of 22, 15, 13, 13, 13

• Parenthood (2010-15): 103 hour-long episodes in 6 seasons of 13, 22, 18, 15, 22, 13

• About a Boy (2014-present): so far, 1 completed season of 13 ½-hour episodes

22 EPISODES IS A LOT OF EPISODES

And what's wrong with being a 13-episode kind of guy? I don't know that three's anyplace else in the world where even the current U.S. network standard of 22 episodes would be regarded as anything other than nuts. By coincidence, this week I happen to have received my DVD orders of the complete runs of two much-loved shows, which both ran for seven U.S. network seasons. On consecutive days my mail persons brought me:

• the long-available individual-season sets of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1971-77): 168 ½-hour episodes in 7 seasons of 24 episodes each

• Shout Factory's lovely new boxed set of the complete Hill Street Blues (1981-87): 146 hour-long episodes in 7 seasons of 17, 18, 22, 22, 23, 22, 22

I don't suppose this seems exactly a killing pace when you look at, say:

• Perry Mason (1957-66): 271 hour-long episodes in 9 seasons, of 39, 30, 26, 28, 30, 28, 30, 30, 30

Even at the "slimmed-down" U.S. season length, if you stay on the job, the episode totals really mount, as for example:

• M*A*S*H (1972-83): 256 ½-hour episodes in 11 seasons of 24, 24, 24, 25, 25, 25, 26, 25, 20, 22, 16

• Or especially Law and Order (1990-2010): 456 episodes in 20 seasons of 22-24 hour-long episodes (except Season 18's 18)

Yikes! As I've mentioned, I'm not in possession of a boxed set of the complete 456 Law and Order episodes. It's kind of like a piece of furniture. However, the current U.S. network standard still makes for one heckuva lot of production. And I know of one great U.S. TV-maker who seems still mad as hell and still determined not to take it anymore.


ANOTHER APPROACH TO THE TV "SEASON"

I've mentioned before the glorious evening at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria -- despite the torrential downpour outside -- when David Chase was on hand to talk about The Sopranos after a screening of the show's first and last episodes. As I've mentioned frequently, before The Sopranos Chase was already one of my TV heroes from his work on three sensational -- and different-as-could-be network series: The Rockford Files, Northern Exposure, and I'll Fly Away. So I was a little surprised to hear him speak with what sounded like stingingly present bitterness, or even horror, at the factory-like way network series are produced.

His case in point was Universal, where of course he cut his TV teeth, and where at the time almost uncountable hour-long series were being churned out in full-network-season helpings. And I guess that's an experience, as both participant and observer, that can leave permanent scars. The obvious question, which has been raised frequently, is how it's possible to produce creative work of top quality in such quantity. It sure sounded as if Chase isn't likely to go back to that world anytime soon.

Cable, of course, has offered TV auteurs a different way to go. Compare:

• The Rockford Files (1974-80): 2-hour TV movie pilot + 123 hour-long episodes in 6 seasons of 23, 22, 22, 22, 22, 12 (the latter owing to James Garner's physical incapacitation)

• The Sopranos (1999-2007): 86 hour-long episodes in 6 seasons of 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 12+9

In the wake of The Sopranos, other TV auteurs have taken excellent advantage, as for example:

• Mad Men (2007-2014): 92 hour-long episodes in 7 seasons of 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 7+7

• Breaking Bad (2008-13): 62 hour-long episodes in 5 seasons of 7, 13, 13, 13, 8+8

Still, the networks, major and minor, aren't likely to be converted to this model anytime soon. It just doesn't fit their economic model, in terms of either program scheduling or the aftermarket where U.S. TV shows finally pay dividends -- syndication and, now, DVD sales. Amazingly, some awfully good work gets done. In addition to the shows just mentioned, think of:

• The Good Wife (2009-present): so far, 112 hour-long episodes in 5 completed seasons of 23, 23, 22, 22, 22

• House M.D. (2004-12): 177 episodes in 8 seasons of 22, 24, 24, 16, 24, 22, 23, 22

• Gilmore Girls (2000-07): 153 episodes ini 7 seasons of 21, 22, 22, 22, 22, 22, 22

But my goodness, it's hard. I can scarcely begin to imagine the kind of fanatical dedication it took, and the toll it took, on Gilmore Girls creator-showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino to maintain the episode-to-episode quality of her show through the six seasons she survived with as little help as her network provided, only to be forced out over that very issue.


MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE POND

As I noted above, seasons of this length are, as far as I know, a uniquely American phenomenon, and are endured because the potential financial rewards are so large. I've also been looking at the numbers of some British shows, and I want to continue with that in a 9pm PT/12 midnight ET post.

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Moving Image Watch: From "The Sopranos" to "Breaking Bad" (by way of "Rear Window") --

TO MY OTHER FAVORITE

W.W.

IT'S AN HONOUR

WORKING WITH YOU.

              FONDLY

                              G. B.

by Ken

Maybe if I'd had any idea it was there, I wouldn't have been so taken aback. But suddenly there I was, standing in front of the glass case, with a pair of headphones on listening to the audio of one of the exhibit video displays, and it slowly dawned on me that I was looking at The Book!

Tell me these things don't all fit together! It was just last week in TV Watch that I wrote about the book -- the fateful copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass inscribed so affectionately to Walter White by the late Gale Boetticher! For a while I thought it was just some sort of mockup or something. But I kept looking and gradually grasped that no, this was the actual book. Okay, it's possible that the Breaking Bad props department cooked up more than one copy to cover themselves when the book was shot in Walt's bathroom, where it produced one of the series' more dramatic moments. So maybe there was another copy, and perhaps even another, on display in other museums. But there was no doubt that this was the real thing.

And then the museum guard was tapping on the glass, signaling that there was only five minutes to closing. I hadn't really left myself much time for browsing. Mostly on Thursday I had just wanted to actually get out to Astoria (Queens), taking advantage of my Rosh Hashanah PTO day (God will just have to understand) to present my about-to-expire Groupon voucher for membership in the Museum of the Moving Image, comfortably situated in part of the old Kaufman-Astoria Studios complex (part of which has for some years once again been a working studio, probably New York City's premier TV and film production studio, where shows like Cosby and Seinfeld have been filmed).

The young woman at the desk cheerfully attended to the paperwork, and when I asked if I could make a reservation for Friday evening's screening of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, which I don't think I'd ever seen on a big screen, she did me one better: She produced an actual ticket, so when I made the return trip to Astoria from work last night, I could head straight to the theater.

I had meant to make the first trip on Saturday of Labor Day Weekend, when I could also have availed myself of the opportunity to see two of the last films in the summer series Fun City: New York in the Movies 1967-75,: Milos Forman's first American film, Taking Off (1971), and from the same year his countryman Ivan Passer's Born to Win. I don't think I'd ever seen Born to Win, but I sure had seen Taking Off, when it first came out, and as best I recall hated it. The museum description calls it "the sweetest of generation gap movies," but I remembered it as the hamfistedest of pseudo-parodies of '60s-'70s counterculture. But I didn't remember it as an especially New York movie, but the blurb recalled that it "was shot in and around New York during the summer of 1970," and that "the director discovered his 16-year-old star in Central Park hanging with the hippies around Bethesda Fountain." For all that New York-itude alone it might be worth another look.

Well, I didn't make it. And Sunday, when the series concluded with the classic Panic in Needle Park (also 1971) and Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon (1975, which I remembered more fondly, I wasn't available. I had a walking tour in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge scheduled, which I wound up missing. The trip from Washington Heights took me an hour and three-quarters (complicated by weekend transit changes, which I thought I'd worked around cleverly, but turned out to be not so clever), and while I'd planned to allow a full two hours, I wound up compressing that to an hour and 35-40 minutes -- close but no cigar. My time management lately has sucked. Add the hour-and-three-quarters return trip, and it was one of my longer trips to nowhere.

So my Rosh Hashanah trek to Astoria represented a comeback of sorts. I hadn't left myself a lot of time to wander around the museum, though, which is how I wound up being caught short when I stumbled across the exhibit "From Mr. Chips to Scarface: Walter White's Transformation in Breaking Bad." That "startling transformation," the museum description says, "with costumes, props, selected scenes from the series, and behind-the-scenes footage." The costumes and props were on loan from Sony Pictures Television -- including, of course, The Book. The exhibit runs through October 27, so I will definitely have to get back. I see that I missed an evening with series creator and mastermind Vince Gilligan when the exhibit opened in late July. I would gladly have forked over the $12 member price.

Then again, the interviewing was done by Charlie Rose, and that I could live without. By coincidence, in my quick wandering through the museum, the first thing I encountered, which I watched for a while before finding out what the heck it was, was an exhibition called "Cut Up" (running through October 14): "From supercuts to mashups to remixes, Cut Up celebrates the practice of re-editing popular media to create new work, presenting contemporary videos by self-taught editors and emerging artists alongside landmarks of historic and genre-defining reappropriation." I had just sat down and watched for a while, and while most of the "cut-ups" I saw seemed to me more facile than clever, there was a hilariously surreal several minutes, called either "Charlie Rose, by Samuel Beckett" or vice versa and featuring Charlie Rose interviewing Charlie Rose, with interviewer Charlie asking pompously incoherent questions and interviewee Charlie providing mostly mute but even more incoherent replies. The short was credited to Charlie Rose as executive producer, but I had a feeling that was part of the cut-up piece.

Although nothing about the joint looked even vaguely familiar, this wasn't my first membership stint at the Museum of the Moving Image. I had joined way back when, when the museum screened the first two seasons of The Sopranos, which at the time was all there was, with Season 3 still in the works -- I'm guessing it was the summer of 2000. The schedule was intense: eight episodes a weekend, two in the morning and two in the afternoon both days. And since at the time I didn't have cable, let alone HBO, this was my first direct exposure to the series, which of course I'd been hearing about endlessly. And it played simply incredibly on the big screen. Since Seasons 1 and 2 of The Sopranos comprised 13 episodes each, the series must have filled three eight-episode weekends and overlapped into a fourth. It was one of my all-time great viewing experiences, and it was a great relief to me that I was able to rearrange my life circumstances so that I was able to watch Season 3 (and subsequent seasons), albeit on a mere 31-inch conventional CRT TV.

But again, these things come around. As I believe I also mentioned last week, I just replaced my Sopranos Season 1-3 VHS tapes and Season 4 DVDs with the complete-series DVDs, which I've just begin watching on my first-ever HDTV, bought shortly after my knee-replacement surgery in April -- as a reward of sorts for my old bedroom TV having conked out just a week or two before the surgery, so that I had no TV in the bedroom in the early weeks of convalescence. (Well, it sure got me out of bed! Like I can live without a TV.) It's not quite re-creating the experience of those first two seasons, but as I've written here frequently, every time I dip into The Sopranos, whether for a bloc of episodes or an isolated one or two, the show just keeps playing better. And on DVD on the 42-inch HDTV, it looks pretty darned fine too.

Oh yes, I had a swell time at Rear Window last night. The 35mm print looked kind of grainy to me, but it was a pleasure to be able to watch the unfolding of the ongoing minidramas staged in all the "rear windows" the Jimmy Stewart character is reduced to watching all day and most of the night during his confinement to a wheelchair with a broken leg. And memory impairment can be a blessing. It can't be that long since I watched the picture on DVD, but I mercifully remembered the later plot unfoldings sketchily enough that I was able to be caught up deliciously in the final build-up.


Ah yes, Miss Torso -- the most scenic of the "rear window" vistas viewed compulsively by shut-in photographer "Jeff" Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window

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

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.

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Countdown to the season premieres of "The Good Wife," "Homeland," and "Dexter"

Homeland's sensational Damien Lewis

"The advantage that English people have and that I have is that we grow up with so much American television. We're all used to hearing it all the time. And the other advantage is Americans are not used to growing up with television from anywhere else or hearing any other accent, so they assume, they are much more forgiving of someone's bad accent."

-- Dominic West, The Wire's Jimmy McNulty

by Ken

Of course my pleasure in anticipating the premiere of the show in the above group I really love, The Good Wife, is tempered by the traditional CBS Sunday-night scheduling debacle, which as I suggested a few weeks ago all but dares viewers to try to watch its best show in the aftermath of NFL game pushback.

I think I've got it under control for tonight, since as of 8pm ET the schedule seems to be pushed back only a few minutes, and that's without the half-hour network-wide pushback that was supposed to be in effect at least on Sundays when CBS has a late football game, as I think it did today. I guess it's not important that I understand; it just matters that I had time to extend my scheduled Good Wife recording enough to cover the estimated overage and then some.

Of course that means I had to cancel the scheduled Homeland and reschedule that for the later broadcast. And the whole thing has left me drained before the evening even starts. It's just a lucky thing this damned football season is almost over.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I cherish The Good Wife because it has a raft of characters -- within lawyer Alicia's family, at her law firm, and at the states attorney's office overseen by her estranged husband Peter (the one she stood loyally by when he was enmeshed in a sex scandal and forced to step down) -- I not only find believable but am able to care about, quite a lot, in fact.

I came late to the first season of Homeland, via On Demand, for which I am once again profoundly grateful. I had bad feelings about the show's terrorist-plot-or-not thriller formula, which smacked of tapping into the cheesy free-floating paranoia that seems (as best I can tell) to fuel a pile of insulting crap like 24. In fact, though, I found the show pretty involving -- quite credibly written within the credibility-stretching boundaries of its spy vs. spy format, and perhaps more importantly blessed with a terrific cast doing lots of fine, believable, involving work.

It was a stroke of genius to cast the amazing Damien Lewis in the central role of the U.S. marine who, in Season 1, might or might not have been "turned" during his long captivity by an Iraqi terrorist chief. Could any actor be more "English" than the Damien Lewis we've seen do such splendid work as his Soames Forsyte in the Forsyte Saga remake? Of course he already showed in Band of Brothers how credible he could be as a true-blue American, and as Homeland's inscrutable Brody, he has been just fantastic.

The trickle has become a flood: British actors enacting more interesting and credible American characters than an awful lot of American actors. Think of Hugh Laurie as House MD, The Wire's Dominic West and Idris Elba, Brothers & Sisters' Matthew Rhys -- all just terrific. West has some seriously interesting things to say about the success his countrymen are achieving on American TV in the BBC News Magazine interview from which I snatched the quote at the top of this post. Not just that the Brits have the obvious advantage to parsimonious U.S. producers of coming cheap, given the limited star power they bring to the negotiating table.

There's a possibility that we are possibly better in an ensemble or less geared to being a huge star or more resigned to not being a huge star. Because in America, it seems to me that everything is "you've got your one shot at the top and you've got to make it there, you've got to get there." In England, I think we're more philosophical about that because there's less chance of it here.

In The Wire, there was no star actor. It was an ensemble serving the writing and maybe in America agents have become more involved in trying to make a star in whoever was acting in it.

There's maybe a readiness to be part of an ensemble which goes slightly against the grain of how the Americans view celebrity and show business.

Interesting. Is it just a coincidence that for a serious discussion of the subject we have to turn to a British source?

I'm not going to say more about Dexter. The idea of involving myself in the doings of a conscienceless serial killer continues to surprise me, but each season I find myself watching again. Maybe it has something to do with Dexter's struggle against his sociopath's lack of normal human emotion and response, and the confusion, bordering on turmoil, he's thrown into as he begins to experience some of the above. The writers do seem to have some serious thoughts about these basic paramaters of humanity, and once again they've got a really terrific regular cast with which to explore it, and a history of bringing in terrific people for each season's weirdos and victims. I don't know that I've seen John Lithgow do anything better than his really chilling super-"straight disciplinarian" serial-killer wacko.

Boardwalk Empire seems to me off to a solid start in its third season -- a noticeably bloody one, with Bobby Canavale doing his increasingly predictably splendid character work as a terrifying thug the viewer can really believe could kill anyone he meets at any time.

As it happens, I've just been watching Cannavale's brilliant turn as Dr. Mike Cruz, the new hospital honcho in last season's Nurse Jackie episodes. Rewatching the complete season via On Demand confirmed just how splendid it was. Via On Demand I've also rewatched the first three seasons of The Sopranos (after which they stopped, alas), and am reworking my way through The Wire, with still-growing amazement and delight.

I suppose it's unrealistic to expect all TV producers to aspire to that standard. (I can't think of a broadcast network show other than The Good Wife aiming that high, but I'll certainly credit AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad teams with trying.) But it seems to me that it doesn't get much better than that.


AFTERTHOUGHT: I shouldn't have made it sound like a criticism, pointing out how bloody a start the new Boardwalk Empire season is off to. After all, these Prohibition-era mobsters are a ruthless, bloodthirsty lot, and if the show sugarcoated this, I hope I'd be bitching about that.

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Life is either "a big nothing" (Livia Soprano) or "just random" (crazy Nellie on "The Office") -- with a nutty Brit's take on the American dream

In this week's episode of The Office, "Get the Girl," crazy and incompetent Nellie (Catherine Tate), whom we thought we'd seen the last of in Tallahasse when Sabre CEO Robert California (James Spader) pulled the plug as humiliatingly as possible on her retail-store project, has unaccountably turned up in Scranton -- and literally walked into the absent Andy Bernard's (Ed Helms') job as branch manager.

by Ken

As I've mentioned, HBO is currently working its way, at a glacial pace through the whole saga of The Sopranos on its On Demand channel. Even though I've been checking frantically for a "new" block of episodes to be posted, when I saw the last four episodes, 10-13, of Season 2, I thought I'd somehow missed a block, and went to my VHS edition (yes, I have the first several seasons on VHS -- you wanna make something of it?) to plug the gap.

Gradually, episode by episode, I realized that I had indeed watched Episodes 6-9 during their On Demand cycle, but I watched them again anyway on the videotapes, amazed at how much I either couldn't get enough of or still hadn't registered properly even on such a recent re-viewing. I don't know how many times I've already paid awed tribute to the entire team assembled by creator-mastermind David Chase, both behind and in front of the cameras, but I don't see any way of avoiding doing it once again. The attention to detail in every aspect of the production remains so extraordinary that each viewing overflows with both grand and tiny matters to savor and resavor.

The one sad note is the illness-limited presence in Season 2 of Nancy Marchand as the massively looming Soprano family matriarch, Livia. I don't think it's possible to overestimate the impact she had in her sadly foreshortened presence in the series. The scene I've transcribed here wasn't one I'd forgotten. It strikes me as pretty much unforgettable. But that doesn't make it any less astonishing on each reencounter. One thing I didn't try to transcribe is how, in the course of this diatribe, Livia -- who so often announces her martyrdom by refusing to eat on the ground that she's not hungry (something that's all but unimaginable in this family) -- begins eating the hospital meal on the tray she's previously left untouched. Talk about attention to detail!

LIVIA SOPRANO: "IN THE END, YOU DIE IN
YOUR OWN ARMS. IT'S ALL A BIG NOTHING"

Young Anthony Soprano Jr. (Robert Iler) has, unknown to his parents, come to the hospital to visit his grandmother Livia (Nancy Marchand), who has been banished from her son Tony's life on account of conspiring to have him whacked at the end of Season 1. At the moment, A.J. is suffering an acute case of 13-year-old's angst of life's purposelessness, to the despair of his parents. (Tony, of course, has his own generally violent-toward-others way of experiencing despair.) He's sitting in a chair beside Livia's bed, where she's lying back on the pillow as we intrude here.

A.J.: What's the use? What's the purpose?
LIVIA [sitting up in bed]: Why does everything have to have a purpose? The world is a jungle. And if you want my advice, Anthony, don't expect happiness. You won't get it. People let you down. And I'm not namin' any names, but in the end, you die in your own arms.
A.J.: You mean . . . alone?
LIVIA: It's all a big nothing. What makes you think you're so special?

-- from "D-Girl," Season 2, Episode 7 of The Sopranos,
written by Todd A. Kessler

AFTER TRANSCRIBING THE ABOVE SCENE, I WAS TRYING
TO CLEAN UP THE STORED PROGRAMS ON MY DVR --

And I discovered that for some reason I had paused rather than deleted this week's episode of The Office, which I was pretty sure I'd watched all the way through. So I hit "resume play," and realized why I'd kept it: because I'd meant to do some transcribing here, specifically of the end-of-episode monologue given to crazy Nellie, now apparently safely ensconced in Andy Bernard's Scranton-manager's office.

I know there are a lot of people who can't imagine taking TV writing or acting seriously. And I know that this has been an exceedingly peculiar season for The Office. That said, I don't see how either writing or acting gets any better than this. ("Get the Girl" was written by Charlie Grandy and directed by Rainn Wilson, our Dwight.)

CRAZY NELLIE: "IF YOU ASK ME, THAT'S
THE AMERICAN DREAM RIGHT THERE"

"I grew up poor. I had little formal education, no real skills. I don't work especially hard. And most of my ideas are either unoriginal or total crap. And yet I walked right into a job for which I was ill-prepared, ill-suited, and somebody else already had, and I got it. If you ask me, that's the American dream right there. Anything can happen to anyone. It's just random."

Ah yes, the American dream indeed. Doesn't this help explain, at least in part, how people actually come to cast votes for worthless, dangerous, sociopathic-to-psychopathic scum like Willard Inc., "Man on Dog" Santorum, and the Big Noot?

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Rewatching "The Wire" is a great backdrop for Robert Reich's new piece on the resurgence of Social Darwinism

The "chicken nugget" scene from Episode 2 of Season 1 of The Wire

KID NO. 1: Man, these shits is right. yo.
KID NO. 2: Mm-hmm.
KID NO. 1: It's good with the hot sauce too, yo.
KID NO. 2: Most definite.
KID NO. 1: Yo, Dee, you want some nuggets?
D'ANGELO: Nah, go ahead, man.
KID NO. 1: Man, whoever invented these, yo, he off the hook.
KID NO. 2 [drawn out, dubiously]: What?
KID NO. 1: Mm. Motherfucker got the bone all the way out the damn chicken. Till he came along niggas be chewin' on drumsticks and shit, gettin' they fingers all greasy. He said, Later for the bone, nugget that meat up, make some real money.
KID NO. 2: You think the man got paid?
KID NO. 1: Who?
KID NO. 2: The man who invented these.
KID NO. 1: Shit, he richer than a motherfucker.
D'ANGELO: Why? You think he get a percentage?
KID NO. 1: Why not?
D'ANGELO: Nigga, please, the man who invented them things, just some sad-ass down at the basement of McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.
KID NO. 2: Naw, man, that ain't right.
D'ANGELO: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, "Hey, Mr. Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you"?
KID NO. 1: Shit.
D'ANGELO: Man, the nigga who invented them things still workin' in that basement for regular wage, thinkin' up some shit to make the fries taste better, some shit like that. Believe.
KID NO. 1: He still had the idea though.

by Ken

Sometimes I think digital-cable On Demand is a blessing, sometimes a curse. No, I don't mean the pay services, but the ones that are free, or rather included in the humongous sum I pay every month for my cable bill. It was bad enough that HBO's On Demand service recently started rerunning The Sopranos from the start, when I hadn't rewatched the early seasons in many moons, putting them up four episodes at a time. When I discovered it, they were already up to episodes 5-8, which I wolfed down. Then I went back to my VHS set of Season 1 and filled in episodes 1-4, since which I've been going crazy waiting for episodes 9-12.

So then I noticed that on the HBO On Demand series list, right below The Sopranos there was The Wire, so I checked to see what they had up, and it turned out to be episodes 1-4. As I've written, I had originally tried to watch the pilot episode when it was first aired, and found myself confused and not especially interested in puzzling it all out. It was only several seasons later that I dipped into the series and found myself riveted, and then managed to catch up on the earlier seasons via a non-HBO rebroadcast offered on an oddly unpredictable schedule in the wee hours of the morning, with commercials inserted. (Thank you, DVR!)

I remembered that The Wire can't be watched casually; it requires full attention. Which protected me from dipping into the On Demand offerings for a good couple of days. When, naturally, with HBO On Demand still stuck on episodes 5-8 of The Sopranos, I took the plunge into The Wire, and even though I'm pretty sure I had actually seen episode 1, I was amazed at how much seemed totally unfamiliar, and in this connection I'm not counting the wealth of detail regarding situations and characters which would have been harder for me to absorb back when I didn't know the characters (even allowing for the considerable haziness that's set in since I finally traversed the series the first time).

It's a lucky thing that both The Sopranos and The Wire engage in such riveting story-telling, because otherwise it would be all too easy to become hopelessly mired in awe at the contributions of the huge numbers of people, behind as well as in front of the cameras, involved in such productions, as marshaled by creator-overseers David Chase (The Sopranos) and David Simon (The Wired). All of these people have gone on to other things, many of them concerned chiefly with keeping a roof over their heads and their families fed, and so it may not be in the forefront of their daily thinking that they contributed to such landmark productions, both of which carved out significant chunks of our social fabric and explored them in remarkable breadth and depth. When you do a job really well, it stands a chance of staying done.

After I'd laboriously done the transcription of the scene at the top of this post -- which is to say before I found it posted on YouTube, which would have made the transcription far less laborious than doing it from On Demand -- I was directed by Nation of Change to a swell new post by Rober Reich, "The Rebirth of Social Darwinism," in which he asks, "What kind of society, exactly, do modern Republicans want?"

I’ve been listening to Republican candidates in an effort to discern an overall philosophy, a broadly-shared vision, an ideal picture of America.

They say they want a smaller government but that can’t be it. Most seek a larger national defense and more muscular homeland security. Almost all want to widen the government’s powers of search and surveillance inside the United States – eradicating possible terrorists, expunging undocumented immigrants, “securing” the nation’s borders. They want stiffer criminal sentences, including broader application of the death penalty. Many also want government to intrude on the most intimate aspects of private life.

They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, laws against child labor, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve.

They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. . . .

What Reich has to say gibes neatly with a pair of pieces I sort-of-wrote about earlier this week, Reich's own "Restore the Basic Bargain" and Jeff Madrick's "American's New Robber Barons."

Season 1 of The Wire dates back to the prehistoric time of 2002, when it was possible for most Americans to believe that this terrifying portrayal of inner-city life had nothing to do with them. By then more and more Americans had already tumbled to the expedient of walling themself off from lower-class nastiness behind gated walls and fences.

By, say, 2009, when the final season of The Wire had already concluded, a shitload of middle class and upper-middle-class and even lower-upper-class Americans were learning that once people with the wherewithal start walling themselves off, it's a natural progression to narrowing the perimeter of those walls, eventually to protect only the wherewithalliest. (Jeff Madrick in his piece devotes a fair amount of attention to debunking the idea that the protected class is as large as the top 20 percent, arguing that 1% is an altogether reasonable number, though the reality is probably more like .1%.)

It seems safe to say that the upper half (or whatever fraction) of the 99% never saw it coming. Hell, incomprehensible numbers of them still don't. Unfortunately for them, for most of us in the 99%, Social Darwinism doesn't have "cutoff " points. The Social Darwinians get to decide who stays in the magic circle with them, and the fewer people they let inside their gates, the fewer people they have to share their booty with. Of course, as Bob Reich pointed out in that earlier piece about the rupture of the old economic "basic bargain," whereby the workers who produce goods are paid fairly enough to be consumers of the goods they produce, and you have an economic as well as social system capable of sustaining itself.

If you want to see what it looks like when that system begins to break down, The Wire is an excellent place to look.

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Revisiting "The Sopranos" -- the final season looks better than ever

The famously (and deliberately) enigmatic final scene of The Sopranos, as the Soprano family arrives one by one -- or nearly, since Meadow doesn't quite make it inside -- at the agreed-upon dinner site, Holsten's

by Ken

Thanks to the miracle of "On Demand," I've been taking a riveting trip through the "final season" (really two not-quite-full seasons) of The Sopranos, from 2006-07, which HBO has been posting in blocs of four episodes -- three for the 12-episode Season "6A" and two for the 9-episode Season "6B," with those final five episodes appearing in time for this weekend, when I devoured them rapaciously.

I don't have anything startling or, really, new to say about the show. There is, perhaps, the obvious question to answer: How does the show hold up? And the answer is: It looks better than ever. Now that it's no longer necessary to focus on the progress of the assorted plot lines, it's easier to focus on the stunning precision of detail, and how brilliantly creator and master producer David Chase's extraordinary team of writer-producers -- developed and mined the roster of characters created in the earlier seasons. This is still something that top-quality TV-makers can do which can't be done in any other medium, and while Chase certainly didn't invent it, he brought it to a level that I don't think anyone else has matched.

David Chase had done brilliant work as a writer and producer on The Rockford Files, I'll Fly Away, and Northern Exposure, but The Sopranos was his own creation, for which as overseer he also assembled the amazing team.

In the Season 6-es we see the full development of Tony Sopranos monstrousness, but we also see a renewal of the fascinating relationship between the Soprano children -- such different people (Meadow who fails at hardly anything she tries, Anthony Jr. who tries hardly anything and usually screws up what he does) and yet still bound by that special closeness of siblings, at least on Mead's part. There's so much more that I wouldn't know where to begin.

A re-viewing naturally also makes it possible to appreciate in greater depth and astonishment the work of the entire huge cast and of all the behind-the camera people, not to mention the corps of directors. And in some way I'm most awed by the size of the team Chase assembled -- so many amazing writers, directors, actors, and all the categories of technical people, all producing work of such uniform terrificness.

As for the legacy of The Sopranos, the Season 6-es continue to showcase the work of one of the series' mainstay writers, Terence Writer, now the driving creative force behind HBO's terrific Boardwalk Empire, and even more the work of future Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, who had emerged as a Sopranos writing force in Season 5 and now, a full-fledged executive producer, emerges as the most important single writer.

Next I guess I'm going to have to go through the whole series, an undertaking complicated by the fact that I have the first few seasons on VHS. (I was a late convert to DVD.) The nice part is that I have a feeling the show is going to continue looking better and better.


It never occurred to me to check it out, so I only just realized that Holsten's is an actual restaurant, in Bloomfield, NJ.

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Tony Soprano weighs in (sort of) on the NYS marriage-equality battle

On last night's show, Anderson Cooper talked to Freedom to Marry's Evan Wolfson and CNN legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin.

"I don't give too much of a shit what people do behind closed doors with, uh, consentin' adults. Although [wagging finger at DR. MELFI] don't forget, I'm a strict Catholic. I agree with that Senator Sanatorium, says if we let this stuff go too far, pretty soon we'll be fuckin' dogs. . . .

"What the fuck, I suppose somethin' inside me says, 'God bless, a salut', who gives a shit?'"

-- Tony Soprano, to Dr. Melfi, in Episode 6,
"Live Free or Die," from Season 6 of The Sopranos

by Ken

In case you were wondering, even though the New York State Legislature's session has officially been over for days, negotiations -- principally featuring the players who used to be known as Albany's "three men in a room," the governor, the Senate majority leader, and the Assembly speaker -- are continuing to hammer out agreements on rent-regulation renewal and a property-tax recap, and in there amidst the horse trading is the issue of whether Republican Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos will allow the marriage-equality bill approved by the Assembly to come to the floor for a vote. (Unless he does, it appears that we'll never know whether the pro-equality forces have enough votes to pass it.)

In case you missed it, the lowest-life-form National Organization for Marriage, the direst enemy and sane and decent conception of marriage could ever imagine, pulled a stunt yesterday that seems outlandish even by its lower-than-low standards, putting out a press release claiming "victory" in the campaign against marriage equality, a claim that was an out-and-out fabrication. Oh, it could just be that they're morons, but it seems pretty clear that at a time when no actual news was emerging from behind those closed doors, the NOM morons were trying to manufacture a bogus reality-on-the-ground that might actually influence the real, or rather realish, reality in Albany. The bogus NOM story was gleefully picked up by National Review Online, which then had to pull it for revamping.

I want to get to some striking and unusually personal comments by that outstanding reporter Paul Schindler in a piece today for Gay City News (of which he's the editor in chief), but I've been sidetracked -- and I hope you'll see the connection -- by a dazzlng scene from
On its "On Demand" channel HBO has been rerunning Season 6 of The Sopranos, episodes I've probably seen less frequently than any of the earlier seasons' -- probably just once each. In fact, there was one early episode, in the arc of hallucinations as Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) fights for life from the gunshot wound inflicted by his Alzheimer's-afflicted Uncle Junior, from which I remembered hardly anything, though enough to know that I must have seen it.

To my delight I'm finding that these episodes look if anything even better than they did originally, with some distance in time and of course knowledge of how events play out. The precision of detail is kind of breathtaking -- as with the hilarious phone conversation between Tony and the road-construction worker who picks up the ringing cell phone that we realize is the very phone the flying-the-coop captain Vito Spatafore (Joseph R. Gannascoli) threw out his car window in his flight to New Hampshire, one of the series' most memorable subplots.

I expect I'll want to write more about the experience of re-viewing Season 6, but for now I'm stunned and delighted by this therapy session with Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) in which Tony grapples with the reports that Vito is gay. The writing seems to me just amazing in its depiction of the detritus stored up in Tony's head, realted and not-so-related to the subject of homosexuality, and of course the way everything turns out to be about him personally. (The script for "Live Free or Die" is credited to series creator David Chase and three Sopranos stalwarts: executive producer Terence Winter, more recently the creator of HBO's terrific Boardwalk Empire, now in production on its second season, and the wife-and-husband writing team of Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, more recently creators of CBS's Blue Bloods, recently renewed for its second season.) I did this quick -- well, quickish -- transcript of the whole scene, which begins just as you read here.

DR. MELFI: You didn't know he was gay?
TONY: Actually, I had him pegged the whole time, but --
DR. MELFI: He a close friend?
TONY: Not only that, he's one of my most valuable guys. He's ambitious, he's focused. When I was in the hospital, he helped Carmela tremendously when we were strapped.
DR. MELFI: You've implied you have millions of dollars. Your hospital stay was actually that costly?
TONY: [Mutters bits of words, then -- ] Huh? [Pause] Is that the issue?
DR. MELFI: You tell me, what is the issue?
TONY: He's a fa-ag! [Holds hands out questioningly] Now what am I supposed to do?
DR. MELFI: About what?
TONY: I know what. [Sarcastically] They're born that way. It's not their fault. Well, frankly I think they go about in pity for themselves.
DR. MELFI: I don't think they see it as a fault.
TONY: In your circle I'm sure you've got all kinds of, uh, gays and, uh, trans-whatevers, of all stripes, but not where I come from.
DR. MELFI: You personally, how do you feel about homosexuality?
TONY: I find it disgustin'. Men kissin' men, holdin' hands in the street. Every fuckin' TV show now, they rub your nose in it. Although that . . . the lesbian thing with the, uh, Jennifer Beals -- it's not bad. She a dyke in real life? [DR. MELFI gesticulates that she has no answer.] I don't give too much of a shit what people do behind closed doors with, uh, consentin' adults. Although [wags finger] don't forget, I'm a strict Catholic. I agree with that Senator Sanatorium, says if we let this stuff go too far, pretty soon we'll be fuckin' dogs.
DR. MELFI: I hear a lot of ambivalence.
TONY: This guy that got outed, look, the guys that work for me are askin' for head. His head. What the fuck? You know, him and me, we're in the construction business. Now some of these union old-timers, the contractors, they're not gonna wanna be seen with him, and I'm talkin' huge deals, major fuckin' dollars.
DR. MELFI: A lot of your circle must have done jail time. They can't be strangers to male-male sexual contact.
TONY: You get a pass for that.
DR. MELFI: Well, that's nice.
TONY: Well, Whaddaya gonna do? There's no women there. You're there, uh, five, ten years. [Pause] Just for the record, my incarceration was, uh, very short-term, so I never had any need for any anal, you know --
DR. MELFI: So this fellow who's been outed, what's he saying?
TONY: You think I'm lyin', don't you? About when I was in jail.
DR. MELFI: I've given you no indication I think you're lying.
TONY: [Long pause, as TONY shuffles in his chair] What the fuck, I suppose somethin' inside me says, "God bless, a salut', who gives a shit?" I mean, I had a second chance, why shouldn't he?
DR. MELFI: Part of your new outlook?
TONY: Maybe.
DR. MELFI: I salute it then.
TONY: Tall fuckin' order, I can tell you that.
DR. MELFI: How so?
TONY: You can talk about every day bein' a gift, and stop for the smell of the roses, but regular life's got a way of pickin' away at it. Your house, the shit you own, it drags you down. Your kids, what they want, one bad idea after another. Just workin' a cell-phone menu's enough to make you wanna scream.

NOW TO THAT PIECE OF PAUL SCHINDLER'S

Paul's Gay City News piece this morning, called "Anxiety, Great Expectations & Weariness, Too, begins like so:

For the past ten days, like many gay and lesbian New Yorkers, those of us here at Gay City News have watched the unfolding events in Albany with rapt attention and no small amount of anxiety.

June 13 and 14 were two of the most spellbinding days I have spent as a journalist covering gay politics. After a concerted six-month campaign by leading professional advocates, grassroots activists, and the governor of this state, we arrived at a moment where four of the remaining six State Senate votes we needed to enact marriage equality –– a deficit that had not budged since last November’s elections –– materialized in a single press conference.

The following day we picked up another vote.

We were just one short of our goal.

And we’ve stayed in that place for the eight days that followed. Each morning, we’ve wondered where the 32nd –– and winning –– vote would come from and whether the Republicans who run the Senate’s agenda and bill flow would allow a measure most of their members oppose to see the light of day.

It is clear, as of this writing, that we will not hear about any more Republican supporters of marriage equality until we learn whether the majority is willing to allow a vote. James Alesi of Rochester and Roy McDonald of Troy either bucked their party leadership in announcing their support before the conference considered the matter or they were allowed to go public because their votes alone would not put the issue over the top.

The GOP was unwilling to allow a marriage vote to move forward until they had extracted as much as they could in their negotiations with the Assembly Democrats and Governor Andrew Cuomo on other important issues, such as a property tax cap and renewal of the New York City rent stabilization law.

In and of itself, that strategy is hard to criticize. Politics is about negotiation, horse-trading, and compromise.

But in their protracted stalling on marriage, they gave credence to a grab-bag of wild fears, some half-truths at best, and other outright misrepresentations about the potential threat marriage equality poses for religious freedom: A clergy member could be sued for refusing to marry a gay or lesbian couple. Parishes and synagogues declining to rent out their halls for gay wedding receptions might lose their tax-exempt status. Catholic adoption agencies would have to abandon their mission ––that charge made in spite of the fact that adoption has nothing to do with the state’s marriage law.

Paul notes the difficult position of the Senate Republicans: under fierce pressure from the hard Right (including the implacably anti-marriage-equality state Conservative Party and the state's Catholic dioceses, who are in all-out war mode) to maintain an unyielding "no" position, on an issue where for a number of them a "no" vote too may spell political doom. Paul even allows for the possibility that a lot of the Senate Republcians' posturing may have to do with providing themselves political cover for a fight they know they're eventually going to lose.

After all, the Republicans could kill the bill outright simply by refusing to allow a floor vote. Apparently, the strong polling marriage equality enjoys statewide and the glare of so many TV lights have convinced them that denying us our vote is politically untenable.

Their dithering, it seems to me, is an acknowledgment they know they will lose. Otherwise, they would have grabbed their victory already.

And then, as I mentioned at the top, Paul gets personal.

In the meanwhile, I have to reflect on an emotion I’ve experienced separate from anxiety and anticipation. Namely, irritation.

Part of that stems, no doubt, from my great disappointment in coming out with our Gay Pride issue with this battle so close to conclusion, but not quite there.

But the larger measure of my frustration comes from the unpalatable experience of sitting and waiting day in and day out while a nearly opaque political dance unfolds that is, in fact, a referendum on my dignity as a citizen. The fact that my equality –– which according to core American values is God-given or, in more secular terms, mine by right of birth, should be in the hands of elected officials who show such cavalier disregard for basic notions of fair play and equal treatment is a truth I will never be able to accommodate myself to.

As I write these words, I remain confident that our goal is within reach. But at moments on the journey, there are bittersweet reminders of the injustice that has defined far too much of our lives.

This is an argument that would surely go over the head of Senator Sanatorium (I don't know about you, but I now find it possible to think of the Rickster as anything but Senator Sanatorium), but one that even that "strict Catholic" Tony ("Who gives a shit?") Soprano could grasp -- in his more lucid moments.


POSTSCRIPT: IN CASE YOU WERE THINKING THAT
THE NYS SENATE CAN'T GET ANYTHING DONE . . .

Our friend Phillip Anderson reports on The Albany Project that he's been "awfully busy lately with doctors and job interviews," but --

I am happy to say I am back. And just in time! The New York State Senate has FINALLY decided what our official state rock should be. WHEW!

NY State Senate passes bill naming Herkimer Diamond as official state mineral

The state Senate today passed a bill that would designate the Herkimer Diamond as the official state mineral.

Sponsored by Sen. James Seward, R-Milford, who represents Herkimer County, where the doubly-terminated quartz crystal is found, the legislation passed unanimously.

"The Empire State has a proud tradition of recognizing and trumpeting the features that make it unique. Certainly, the Herkimer Diamond is one of those rare treasures well deserving of 'official' statewide status," Seward said in a news release.

He noted that New York's Legislature has previously designated an official gemstone (garnet), fossil (sea scorpion), shell (bay scallop), bush (lilac), salt water fish (striped bass), and reptile (snapping turtle).

An identical version of the bill is pending in the Assembly.

So glad we FINALLY have a state rock! Awesome!

Marriage Equality, fracking, rent regulations...all that stuff...will just have to wait.

So you see? Our NYS Legislature at work.

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As "Boardwalk Empire" tells us, pols come and go, but the people who pull the political strings are "here to stay"

Nucky Introduces Margaret

In the opening episode of HBO's Prohibition-era miniseries Boardwalk Empire, at the birthday bash Atlantic County Treasurer (and boss) Enoch "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi) threw for himself, he introduced his Irish-immigrant working-class "discovery" (and future mistress, or rather one of his mistresses), Mrs. Margaret Schroeder (Kelly Macdonald), to his great political hope, Sen. Walter Edge (Geoff Pierson), and his great intrastate rival, Jersey City Mayor (and boss) Frank Hague (Chris Mulkey).

"Guys like Edge will come and go. But bosses, like us -- we're here to stay."

-- Mayor Hague to Nucky, in episode 6, "Family Limitation"

by Ken

There's a lot that I'm liking a lot about Boardwalk Empire, but especially now in this season of political saturation what I think I'm liking best is its angle on corruption, and I mean corruption of all kinds: financial, political, sexual, and just plain personal -- categories that of course overlap all over the place.

New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin made a point in the Oct. 4 issue which doesn't get made often enough. In attempting to sort through the fall season's pile-up of new shows, she pointed out that networks generally send out pilot episodes of new shows long in advance, presumably hoping to generate buzz, in contrast to cable channels' frequent practice of sending out half a dozen episodes closer to actual air time, so that "first responders have the privilege of witnessing work that has some shape, some vision, some story line."

The second and third episodes of a show may reveal themselves to be not very different from the first, but it's quite often the case that not until you get past the logjam of plot-and-names-and-relationships-establishing in a pilot do you get an idea of what a show is really aiming for. I feel as uncomfortable judging most shows on the basis of one episode as I would buying a pair of shoes based on the way one shoe fits. Actually, watching only a pilot is more like buying shoes online -- you have no idea whether they'll fit at all. If TV series are books, pilots aren't first chapters; they're forewords, or jacket copy.

I should add that Franklin is well aware of how often network shows live or die by that first episode. She makes what seems to me the unimpeachable point, in this case in the context of a much-ballyhooed but short-lived Fox show I never did see:

If a show like "Lone Star" really does have promise, a network should figure out a better way to sell it and to let it find an audience. What's genuinely strange, from a creative-business standpoint, is that the networks seem to care both a lot and hardly at all about how their shows will fare.

[Here Franklin goes on to talk about broadcast networks' habit of promoting pilot episodes to death, including soliciting feedback based on mere teasers of clips posted online, vs. the frequent cable practice of providing those half-dozen episodes.]

I should add that, grateful as I am to Franklin for making this point, I've never found her useful a critic, and a case in point is her review of Boardwalk Empire, which I just stumbled on and glanced at while searching online for the Oct. 4 piece. Her exhaustive cataloguing of previous work of various participants strikes me, as a reckoning of this show, as screechingly stupid.

DOESN'T THE NEW YORKER HAVE EDITORS WHO
CAN SAY, "NANCY, THIS IS REALLY, REALLY DOPEY"?

Really now, by the time you've reached the point of damning Boardwalk Empire for having Tom Aldredge play the father of Nucky Thompson and his fascinatingly maladroit brother Eli, the Atlantic County sheriff, on the ground that Aldredge played the father of Carmela Soprano in The Sopranos, shouldn't you really be looking for a more suitable line of work? Aldredge is a really good actor who has given really good and quite different performances of these two very different roles, neither of which is by any stretch of the imagination central enough to cause any confusion for any viewer with a working brain. (Is an actor of Aldredge's age no longer allowed to play anyone's father? Should he wait to be cast as, say, a bat mitzvah girl?) Doesn't The New Yorker have editors capable of saying, "Jeez, Nancy, even if we have readers who are total morons, isn't this over-the-top dopey?"

I think the shoe-buying analogy is indicative of a deep-rotted problem. I'm sure Franklin knows that shoes and TV shows have pretty much nothing in common as consumer products. However, it didn't seem to occur to her how wrong-headed the analogy is. The "fit" of a pair of shoes, as far as I can tell, could hardly be less like the "fit" of a TV show.

And as I think about it, while I was at first inclined to give our Nancy the benefit of the doubt about why it's so hard to judge a show from the pilot, as I think about it I'm not so sure. Yes, it's possible that what she describes can happen, that "until you get past the logjam of plot-and-names-and-relationships-establishing in a pilot do you get an idea of what a show is really aiming for. But when she write about later shows possibly not being much different from the first, I think we have to say that she's attributing the problem to the show rather than the way we take it in. In my experience, in almost all cases where it took me a while to "get an idea of what a show is really aiming for," the problem wasn't the show, it was me.

When the show's creative team is aiming for something genuinely its own (dare I say "something original"?), it can take awhile to tune into the correct frequency -- as happened to me just last season, some readers may recall, with Modern Family. In all those cases, when I went back to the pilot, I discovered that it was all, or mostly all, there from the start; it just took me time to "get it." I don't think this is at all what our Nancy is suggesting.

Certainly Franklin is right to care about a show's pedigree, but they seem to matter to her in a very different way from the ways in which they matter to me. Among the many names involved on the creative side of Boardwalk Empire, the one that really got my attention is that of the credited creator (though only one of the predictably many executive producers), Terence Winter. Among the amazing team of writer-producers David Chase assembled for The Sopranos, Winter seemed to occupy a position of particular prominence.

Of course even the highest-level contribution to a show created by somebody else doesn't tell you what somebody's going to do when he/she is the principal creator of his/her own. Still, if you're looking for some kind of guidance as to which shows may be worth looking at, this kind of credit rates high with me. In the case of Boardwalk Empire, now that I have six episodes under my belt, the Winter connection seems to me to have paid off handsomely.

It's hard to talk much more specifically about this theme of corruption that so intrigues me about Boardwalk Empire without going into exhaustive detail about plot and circumstances. In general terms, though, in every episode we've gotten what seem to me beautifully detailed portraits of how deep that impulse to corruption runs. Hand in hand with the impulse to establish rules that make human society possible is an impulse to game those rules, to find ways above, below, around, and even through them for those various kinds of personal advantage I noted above.

Prohibition, which is about to begin as episode 1 does, is a splendid backdrop for this sort of inquiry into, or maybe exposition of, corruption. It would be hard to overstate the level of hypocrisy involved in the madness that overtook the country and allowed undoubtedly understandable pleas for temperance to be blown up into a constitutional amendment, the 18th, permitting the prohibition of "intoxicating" beverages, and the Volstead Act, which made Prohibition a reality, which instead of ending the production and consumption of alcoholic beverages had the obvious effect of transforming it into an underground enterprise, doing little to reduce consumption, but making it more expensive and more dangerous, and of course creating a whole new class of criminal enterprise, into which there were, naturally enough, no shortage of low-life types ready and willing to move. (The show does a lovely job of showing us Women's Temperance League types being played for patsies by Prohibition profiteers.)

And so we have Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson not just controlling illegal-alcohol sales in his county but smuggling in product (and adultering it to increase the supply) to wet the whistle of what seems like half the country. Boardwalk Empire does a dandy job of portraying the layers, from top to bottom, of financial, political, and moral corruption needed to get the job done. The series is also wonderfully alert to the general power dynamic, in terms of the services a smart boss like Nucky (and Steve Buscemi is really sensational in the role) has to provide his constituents to maintain the base for his, er, more lucrative activities.

Sexual corruption is also much on display. Prostitution fits the model perfectly: In exchange for that small bit of control the money earned gives the women over their lives, the prostitutes make big-time money for their male bosses, and have the additional privilege of servicing their other needs. Poor Mrs. Schroeder, whom we see above in the first episode, is tailor-made for exploitation. She starts out as a battered wife, then has the good fortune to have her beast of a husband killed, except that the good fortune turns ugly when she has to find a way to support herself and her two small children, which in turn sets her up as a prime candidate for sexual exploitation.

There's even some sort of deviant governmental-sexual corruption (or maybe governmental psycho-sexual corruption? I don't have a name for it!) embodied in the square-jawed, zealous Internal Revenue guy, Van Alden (Michael Shannon), pressed into service as a pioneering Prohibition enforcement officer, whose single-minded focus goes beyond obsessive devotion to duty, as was finally made clear in the freaky ending of episode 6, into the realm of the psychologically whacked-out.

BUT I SET OUT TO TALK ABOUT THE
DEEP ROOTS OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION

In this connection the line I've quoted up top, from the mouth of the fictionalized version of Jersey City boss Frank Hague, really grabbed me. As represented in the show, Hague is the Democratic-aligned North Jersey boss and Nucky Thompson (based, it appears, on a historical personage name of Enoch L. Johnson) the Republican-aligned South Jersey boss. In the series so far, we've seen them sparring over federal and state money for roads, road-construction money being of course already in the '20s a prime target for a political boss, because that money travels through him to all sorts of people he controls, or wishes to control, or at least to influence.

Nucky's need is even more basic, though: For Atlantic City's development, he needs decent roads to connect both to New York City and to Philadelphia, to make his bailiwick an easy destination for revelers from the big cities. In this scene he has been trying to intimidate or at least coopt Hague with the future importance of Senator Edge, whose path he thinks he can grease all the way to the White House. (Hey, a boss can dream! Geoff Pierson does his usual bang-up job of giving us an outward appearance of hearty wholesomeness that just barely conceals a core of utter rot.) Hague doesn't intimidate or coopt that easily, and clues Nucky in that his Republican golden boy may not have such a straight path to the White House, what with his involvement in business hanky-panky in the boss's Democratic precincts. Nucky wants to know why Hague is sharing this information, and the Jersey City boss provides the touching homily quoted above.

Change the names and identities just a bit, and you've got American political life in the year 2010. Why, we even have the Teabaggers playing the role of the temperance-league patsies. Not to mention this stirring tribute to the principle of bipartisanship as practiced in an era earlier than our own.

[New episodes of Boardwalk Empire air Sunday nights at 9pm ET on HBO, with the usual round of repeats throughout the week. Earlier episodes can be seen via On Demand, and are bound to be "marathonned."]

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