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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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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How do you plan to spend Election Night?

Hmm, maybe I should catch up on my sudden backlog of unwatched episodes of The Wire. Great entertainment, and a message depressing enough to suit tomorrow night's worst contingencies. (I've already seen season five, so as I've caught up on seasons one through four, I already know how things turn out for the wily and strangely charming Proposition Joe [Robert F. Chew, above]).

by Ken

So, how do you plan to spend Election Night? Partly I'm curious, and partly I'm looking for guidance. I haven't figured it out for my own self yet, and time is getting short.

I suppose I could latch onto some liberal-symp group preparing to make whoopee. But I'm not so good in groups, especially groups of strangers.

And most of all, I'm consumed with secret terror about the outcome tomorrow.

Oh, I know all about the polls, and all the even more encouraging private polls. Of course I know logically that it should be a GOP rout. And yet, deep down, I don't know. I guess I'm so used to Election Day horror shows that my psyche naturally gravitates to scenarios whereby it all comes undone.

Remember, we were being told in 2004 that Kerry was gonna win.

And besides, I can't forget that:

(a) there are going to be a lot of really terrible Democrats among the winners,

(b) the Democratic congressional leadership has yet to show that, even if it gets substantially larger majorities, it holds any priority higher than showing Corporate America that it can be just as stoogelike as that other party they usually support,

(c) the problems facing President-elect Obama (I don't even want to think about the alternative) are so monumental that even if it turns out that I'm comfortable with his proposed solutions (not at all a sure thing given our ideological gap), can anyone cope with the wreckage)?, and, perhaps most worrying,

(d) the McCranky campaign's strident, even violent across-the-board rejection of every vestige of reality and decency has almost certainly hardened some 40-45 percent of the electorate into a blood-oath-sworn commitment to lies, delusion, ignorance, hatred, and obstruction -- is this country even going to be governable?

A good part of me just wants it to be over, one way or another. If it all goes well, there will be plenty of time to celebrate -- after taking some really deep breaths of relief. If all doesn't go well, well, won't that be easier to absorb in one crushing blow than to spread out the agony over an indefinite period? My even more distrustful friend Peter has applied this attitude as much as humanly possible toward the whole 2008 election process. He says just wake him when it's over, and he'll deal with whatever needs dealing with then. (Of course he hasn't been able to completely avoid news of what's going on. Still, I have to admire the ideal.)

When I talked to Howie about this yesterday (in the online era I've wound up spending a good part of a bunch of Election Nights IM-ing with him, but I would be up to even that this time around, and in any case he has commitments for tomorrow night), he asked when I would be likely to arrive home, and when I said that it couldn't be earlier than about 7, he pointed out that by then we may have a pretty good vision of what's happening. The Virginia results, for example, should tell us a lot.

I could go to my (sort of) second job, as I used to do on Tuesday nights before my schedule got upended. There is a TV in the office, but without cable. But I guess tomorrow night even the networks will be in Election Night mode by 7.

I thought maybe this would be a good night to shell out the $12 or whatever ransom they're asking these days to see a movie. I know if I go straight home at some point I'll give in to the temptation to sneak a peek at The Show. I noticed that BBC America is carrying the BBC's coverage -- that might be a way of giving the bloody thing a veneer of civilization.

My backup plan is: Suddenly I've got a backlog of unwatched episodes of The Wire stored up on my DVR, from BET's weirdly scheduled wee-hours rebroadcast. (The backlog is probably in part the result of my now having to spend two and a half hours each weeknight with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and Jon Stewart.) Maybe this is my chance to get caught up. The show is so amazingly well done that it's a treat to watch, depressing as the overall message is.

Hmm, a depressing overall message . . . I could be on the right track here.

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As David Simon of "The Wire" collects his Drum Major for Justice Award, he'll know it's worthwhile when I burble, "Gosh, I'm a really big fan," at him

In David Simon's landmark HBO series The Wire, Baltimore Sun City Editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) talks to three of his reporters, Mike Fletcher (Brandon Young), Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Paress), and the infamous M. Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), an ambitious young man who refuses to let mere facts, which are not only dreary but tedious to gather, stand in the way of his fast-track career path.

Okay, it's an odd name: the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. I expect that every first conversation everyone has with anyone associated with the Brooklyn-based progressive think tank begins with, or at least includes, the question, "So what's the deal with the name?"

But DMI does terrific work, producing usefully down-to-earth, solidly grounded studies of economic-based issues that affect our everyday lives, always accompanied by carefully considered, thorough research--with a special emphasis on urban living (meaning cities--you know, those densely populated places that disappear as if by magic during presidential campaigns, except of course when cash-starved candidates sneak into them to shake their money trees). Howie and I are both fans, and were happy to be included on the Blogger Host Committee for DMI's annual benefit, scheduled for later this month, before it even occurred to me to check out the link for the benefit I'd been given.

I knew the bash was Tuesday evening, May 20, at Cipriani 23, Fifth Avenue at 23rd Street in Manhattan. Beyond that, not being exactly what you'd call a habitué of the banquet circuit, I wasn't giving the event itself much thought. Then I checked out the benefit link, and that changed in a hurry.

There are three winners of 2008 Drum Major for Justice Awards, and I'm afraid I'm going to give unfairly short shrift to two of them:

* Melissa Mark-Viverito, an energetic longtime community activist and labor organizer who is now a member of the New York City Council. She's being honored--

for outstanding work on behalf of her diverse urban district and city-dwellers nationwide,

and--

* Steve Phillips, a longtime education reformer and civil-rights and employment-discrimination lawyer who founded PowerPAC.org, "a statewide social justice organization working with community organizations and activists to build political power in California." He's being honored--

for his work to advance a progressive agenda in California.

I'm sure they're both committed, productive individuals whose accomplishments make them richly deserving of this honor. I am looking forward to learning more about and from them.

But the other honoree is:

* David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who burst into the world of big-time network TV when his nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, his gritty account of life on the city's drug-infested streets, was turned into the great 1993-99 NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street by one of my favorite film directors, Barry Levinson (another Baltiimorean) and writing-producing partners Paul Attanasio and Tom Fontana. Simon then applied the TV smarts he acquired working on Homicide as a writer and producer when he turned his later book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood into the HBO series The Corner. And that, of course, set the stage for The Wire, of which Simon was (as Wikipedia puts it) "the creator, show runner, executive producer and head writer."

(The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood was written with Ed Burns, who would be a key collaborator on The Wire, and again on Simon's new HBO project, a seven-hour miniseries adaptation of Rolling Stone writer Evan Wright's Generation Kill, his account of being embedded with Marines during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, scheduled to air in July.)

The Wire may have had the most remarkable word of mouth of any TV project I'm aware of, including The Sopranos. As far as I can tell, there are two categories of people: those who didn't see the show, and those who regard it as one of the great achievements in television.

My experience with the show was a little strange. I watched the first couple of episodes, none too carefully, and found myself already way behind in keeping track of the characters and plots. And I didn't feel terribly compelled to catch up. I let it go. Over the next few years I kept hearing about The Wire, though. Not enough to make me watch. After all, if I'd been unable to keep up after a couple of episodes, what were my chances of getting caught up at that late stage? But enough to make me curious, and steadily curiouser.

Finally, as the fifth and final season approached, I was hearing such remarkable things about the series from such serious people that I took the plunge. I caught reruns of the last episodes of the fourth season as HBO was running up to the new-season premiere, and became familiar enough with the characters and plot to be prepared for the final sprint.

And I have to say, it was one of my great televiewing experiences, with the series' remarkably precise and powerful dramatization of the local drug lords and their pervasive corrupting influence on their neighborhoods; the neighborhood folk who scratch out existences in their orbit; the city criminal-justice establishment (both police and prosecutors) and its top-level political hierarchy; and, most fascinating to me, a fictional version of Simon's own alma mater, the Baltimore Sun. Simon gave us what seemed to me an eerily believable representation of the process whereby an overweeningly ambitious but lazy and fact-indifferent reporter can hornswoggle a set of pompously self-satisfied but pathetically gullible top-echelon editors.

Clark Johnson--a Homicide veteran, of course--in addition to directing a bunch of Wire episodes did a bang-up job in the sweetheart role of City Editor Gus Haynes, perhaps the only wholly sympathetic character I saw in Season Five. Gus's old-fashioned dogged journalistic creed, shared by a sprinkling of similarly uncompromised denizens of the city room (which is under intense and growing morale-crushing pressure from the paper's relentless waves of staff cutbacks), tries to resist but is ultimately mowed down by the phony reporter. (The twittish higher-ups are played with repellent persuasiveness by David Costabile, as Managing Editor Klebanow, and Sam Freed, as Executive Editor Whiting. But then, the whole massive cast is uniformly sensational.)

One nice thing about television is that, at least for shows that make it to and stay on the air for at least a while, they never disappear, thanks to all those thousands of cable channels desperate for programming, and of course the ubiquitous DVD. I've found Wire reruns running on BET, and I'm sure they'll be turning up elsewhere, including HBO itself. Of course the earlier seasons are out on DVD, and no doubt we'll soon have a "complete" package.

Buffalo (New York) Mayor Byron Brown will be on hand to present Simon's Drum Major Award, which, by the way, is being given--

for deftly exploring the realities of America's neglected cities.

I suppose not everyone at the shindig will be in awe of David Simon. For example, the friend I'm going with doesn't own a TV. There's really no point trying to explain to him the state I'm in anticipating the big moment when I get to shake Simon's hand and say something timelessly clever, like, oh, "Gosh, I'm a really big fan." Let's hope there aren't going to be any video cameras.

(A couple of years ago Howie got me into the annual fund-raising shindig of People for the American Way, of which he's a board member, and I went kind of nuts imagining what I could say when I met PFAW founder Norman Lear, of whom I'm in unmitigated awe, both for his remarkable TV producing career and for his outspoken, unabashed liberal advocacy. Perhaps I was lucky to be spared my "Gosh, I'm a really big fan" moment--I never did get to meet Norman.)

The DMI benefit link includes all the info about the event, including the attendant auction and ticket information.

AFTERTHOUGHT

I feel rotten about my characterization of City Editor Gus Haynes as "the only wholly sympathetic character" I encountered in The Wire Season Five. Unfortunately I still don't know how to put it better. Gus for me is the most something character, but I don't quite know how to put a finger on what.

In fact, though, there are lots of enormously sympathetic characters among the victims of hopelessness in the Baltimore streets, like poor Bubbles (Andre Royo, above), trying so hard to escape his drug addiction, and of course all those all-but-doomed kids. I guess the difference between them and Gus Haynes is that Gus has resisted corruption as a matter of choice--he had realistic alternatives.

Even among the other "have" characters, there are altogether admirable ones, like Assistant State's Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deirdre Lovejoy) among the prosecutors and Detective "Bunk" Moreland (Wendell Pierce) among the cops. While so many of the people around them are compromising themselves or simply taking the easy way out, they achieve near-heroic status.

One of the amazing things about The Wire is the astounding number of characters created in genuine depth. And fortunately, among all the monsters and go-alongs there are a good number of "good guys" we can root for. They may be outmanned, but they keep putting up their best fight.

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