An International Man of Mystery

National Review Online, February 17, 2018

Afew weeks ago, a British actor died at the grand old age of 90 (probably). Peter Wyngarde’s death was accompanied by wryly affectionate obituaries and, among Brits of a certain age, a certain sadness: For a brief iridescent moment, one of the zanier icons of their youth had shone. Now he was gone.

According to an early-1970s survey, 40,000 Australian women chose Wyngarde as the man to whom they would have liked to lose their virginity. He was voted Britain’s best-dressed male personality, admittedly no great feat, in 1970 and then again in 1971. Mobbed by tens of thousands of women — how many virgins is unknown — on his arrival in Sydney, he took three days in hospital to recover.

Despite an “amorous” crowd, held back by 50 policemen, there was a gentler conclusion to Wyngarde’s opening of a menswear store in Plymouth, a city in the more sedate southwest of England. A writer for the website Hellfire Hall, “part of the official Peter Wyngarde Appreciation Society,” recalled that Wyngarde, “wearing a grey speckled suit with a mauve shirt and matching tie, tried on several garments…before settling for a black leather jacket and an aubergine-colored suit.” (Aubergine is British English for eggplant.)

This might be the moment to mention that Wyngarde, or rather Jason King, the character and self-caricature (“a romantic extension,” he explained) he played on television as the Sixties seeped into the Seventies, was the inspiration for Austin Powers. An old episode, or even a still, is all it takes to understand why.

Wyngarde reached this peak after appearances on the stage, in a film or two, and, increasingly, in television drama. The Sixties being the Sixties, he gravitated towards roles in telly-time treats designed for a Britain beguiled by James Bond. He showed up in The Prisoner, The Saint, and (most notably as the Hellfire Club’s John Cleverly Cartney) The Avengers. The latter two were part of a stable of not-always-so-serious action and adventure shows produced by ITC, a company run by a wily British TV mogul with an eye on the American market.

ITC enlisted Wyngarde (he signed his contract on a napkin over a meal) in Department S, a new series about three agents working for a crack Interpol unit. There was a former G-man and a female computer expert, and then there was King, best-selling crime writer, ladies’ man, charismatic, eccentric, flamboyant, witty, ingenious. His moustache was dramatic. His tailoring was epic. His fights didn’t always work out too well, but his shrewd, knowing performance stole the show, and in Jason King he was given his own.

King’s big-knotted wide ties were often — just as on that day in Plymouth — the same color as his shirts, another trademark. His boots were snakeskin, his dressing gowns silk, his foulards silk, his cravats silk, his voice silk. His coats were sweeping, his caftans evoked decadence in Tangier rather than a grubby pilgrimage along the hippie trail, and his tight leather outfit was worn with obvious and unashamed delight.

Wyngarde fell short of the matinee-idol standard (ITC’s boss grumbled about his failure to look like The Saint’s Roger Moore), but women, sometimes in hot pants, sometimes in less, sometimes in more, didn’t seem to mind as they succumbed, not always one by one, to King’s louche charms. A medallion swung and so did King, a Lothario, but despite the occasional appalling comment (a habit he shared, like so many others, with Wyngarde), no Weinstein.

Nearly a decade after Jason King had ended its run, readers of the X-Men comic books discovered that the original name of the villainous mutant Mastermind, a member of another Hellfire Club who looked — how can I put it — somewhat familiar, was Jason Wyngarde, evidence — as if any were needed — of how tricky it was to work out where Wyngarde ended and King began. To judge by some unflattering comments from one or two of his colleagues, Wyngarde may have not found it too easy to do so himself. He even “lent” King his clothes, and with them, much of his style: “I was inclined to be a bit of a dandy, I used to go to the tailor with my designs,” he confessed later, surprising nobody.

On the show itself, King’s adventures were interwoven with those of Mark Caine, his fictional creation and alter ego: In its first episode, King, the author, pitches a Mark Caine adventure to an American TV producer. The fictional Caine is played by the fictional King and the fictional King by the real — that adjective will have to do for now — Wyngarde playing Wyngarde as Wyngardewanted Peter Wyngarde to be seen by his fans.

The X-Men’s Mastermind had the ability to project illusions, to make people see what he wanted them to see.

In 1970, capitalizing on the success of Department S, Wyngarde released an LP, modestly called Peter Wyngarde. RCA had told him he could do what he liked. Fools! What the record company got was what Wyngarde’s obituarist in the London Times describes as a “revoltingly seedy album,” a bizarre and pretentious collection of songs, more spoken than sung, and, in its saner moments, designed (we must hope) as a not entirely serious showpiece of what a Jason King (who gets a shout-out at its nadir) might relax to or seduce to:

Do go in
No, the lights haven’t fused – it’s candlelight.
Now what would you like to drink — I’ve started on Champagne.
That is a beautiful dress! Do sit down
No, not over there – it’s too far away.
Come over here, it’s closer to everything.

Other tracks veered onto far more dangerous ground, most notoriously the supposedly jokey, undeniably very creepy “Rape,” about which the less said the better. RCA pulled the album after its first pressing. Decades later it was reissued by an independent label under the title “When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head.”

By then, sex had done rather more than that: In 1975, Wyngarde was found guilty of committing an act of “gross indecency” with a truck driver in a provincial British bus station. This followed an official warning for something similar the previous year. Wyngarde blamed a “mental aberration” (the first incident had been a “misunderstanding”). He received a token fine, but the spell was broken. His career never recovered. Prejudice played its part, but the scandal had shattered an image inextricably connected to that of King’s globe-trotting Casanova. Making matters worse, within a year or so, the bleakness of late-1970s Britain, and the fashions that came with it, had reduced King to an embarrassing memory too recent for nostalgia to rescue. Wyngarde’s mannered style of acting only reinforced the impression that time had passed him by. A battle with alcohol and a reputation for being “difficult” won’t have helped either. His best-known role after his fall was in Flash Gordon, where he played the sinister General Klytus, face hidden behind a golden mask.

But Wyngarde’s mask was subtler, a flickering, layered creation. Sometimes it wasn’t even there at all. If he hid, this King’s Road magnifico, known (some say; along with so much else in Wyngarde’s biography, there is a debate about this) in some showbiz circles as “Petunia Winegum,” hid in a way still possible before the Internet’s panopticon gaze, not quite in plain sight, but not far from it either. There are hints in Department S and Jason King that all was not as it seemed (and even more so in that infamous LP), although the reality may have been less clear-cut than newspaper headlines and men’s-room walls after Wyngarde’s conviction liked to suggest. We will never know for sure: Thus there was a marriage in the 1950s, and something seems to have happened with Vivien Leigh, Scarlett O’Hara no less. Years later, when there was no longer any need to pretend, there was still a touch of King in the way Wyngarde described past encounters with the opposite sex, perhaps even with an approximation of accuracy. Who’s to say? The mask was allowed to slip only so far. It had, after all, been the work of a lifetime, a product of necessity, fantasy, and ambition.

The early sections of Wyngarde’s Wikipedia entry (at least as I write) are evidence of a wild reimagination at work: “Peter Wyngarde’s date and place of birth, his birth name, and his parents’ nationalities and occupations are all disputed.” Well, yes. He was born between 1924 and 1933 in either Marseilles or Singapore (probably in Singapore in 1927, although Wyngarde preferred to cite Marseilles in 1933). His father was not a diplomat named Wyngarde, but Henry Goldbert, a naturalized Brit from Ukraine, who seems to have been a merchant seaman, at least for a while. His mother was either a French or a Swiss national and may have been Eurasian. Wyngarde said she looked like Claudette Colbert and was a racing driver. Then again, Wyngarde also claimed that he was a nephew of the French actor Louis Jouvet (he wasn’t), that he’d studied for a few months at Oxford (he hadn’t), and that Peter Wyngarde was the name he was born with (Cyril Goldbert just wouldn’t do).

It is true that he was interned by the Japanese during the later stages of the Second World War in a camp near Shanghai. The British writer J. G. Ballard, a rather more highly regarded teller of tales, was also there (an experience that inspired his Empire of the Sun) and remembered him (as Goldbert) from those years. For his part, Wyngarde said that he had no memory of Ballard. Maybe it was too awkward to admit to the connection: Ballard had known him while the mask was first being assembled. Goldbert, unlike Ballard (who was interned with his parents), was alone. It was there that he turned to acting and not, I suspect, only in the camp’s makeshift theater. His performances included a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which he played every part.

Oh Captain, My Captain! Kirk and me.

National Review Online, September, 28, 2007

It wasn’t on some alien world that we saw him, but in a Midtown Manhattan steakhouse. He wasn’t battling Romulans or Klingons, just a gigantic piece of meat; Porterhouse, if I had to guess. My parents had flown in on a Jumbo from England the day before and he, well, he had flown in on a starship from a distant galaxy and my even more distant childhood. “Look,” I said, “there’s Captain Kirk.”

“Who?” asked my father, the only remaining carbon-based life form within one hundred parsecs not to know.

“Oh dear,” sighed my mother, something of a Star Trek watcher herself in an understated, only-if-there’s-nothing-else-on sort of way.

Who was Captain Kirk? Who was Captain Kirk? Good grief. Not since a former girlfriend had disgraced me in the presence of Captain Picard (it’s a long story, but if I tell you that she also managed to “lose” the autographed copy of George Takei’s memoirs I gave her, you’ll understand that those were tricky times indeed) had I known such shame. What if he, The Captain, had heard? I was also alarmed. I know a lot of things about James Tiberius Kirk, and one of them is that it’s never a good idea to get on his bad side: Just ask replica upperclassman Finnegan (Shore Leave).

And then the memories came. Or did their best to. To be frank, I cannot recall the exact date of my first contact with the space ‘n Vegas of the theme tune, the hissing sliding doors, the cheeping, chirping sensors, the burbling transporters, and the choppy, grand rhythms of high Shatner dialog, but it would have been via the BBC around 1969 or 1970. I’d have been eleven or twelve years old and on a break from a British boarding school where the only permitted television fare was a rugby show hosted by an enthusiastic Welshman with very little to be enthusiastic about. If the Sixties were swinging they were swinging by me, by him and, almost certainly, by most of the population.

Olde England was not then as merrie as it once had been said to be. In fact it was, let’s face it, a little on the drab, crabbed and dingy side. And not only the weather was to blame. The postwar economic recovery was running out of steam, the labor unions were running wild, the taxman was running greedy fingers through the nation’s wallets, and we no longer seemed to be running an empire. But by night, television was showing images of another country where the natives spoke English, appeared friendly, and looked to be having a great deal more fun than we were. The Pilgrim Fathers voyaged to America on the Mayflower, I traveled there by TV.

I loved American television for its wild, goofy, frivolous, gadget-and-bullet, candy-colored, exuberantly plastic, manufactured, frivolous non-BBC joy. I thrilled to the exploits of Napoleon and Ilya, those jester James Bonds from U.N.C.L.E, I wore Bruce Wayne’s mask and cape (there was no Robin: my younger brother refused), I laughed along with F-Troop, and I knew that there was something I found very interesting indeed about Samantha the suburban sorceress. When Britons gathered round the telly in their millions to watch Coronation Street, an endless soap (it continues to this day) set in a depressed northern town, all I wanted was to hop on the last train to Clarksville, wherever that might be. If it was good enough for those sun-kissed blissed-out Monkees, it was good enough for me.

Capping it all, glittering, tantalizing, but oddly accessible, was space. If anyone was lost in there, it wasn’t those lucky Robinsons (yes, I envied them), but me. These were the golden years of NASA (and the rocket men of Baikonur too — I followed that program just as enthusiastically) and as I watched those glorious Apollos rehearse, dance and glide their way to, around, and eventually, on, the moon, the USS Enterprise seemed to be just over the horizon, a part of that same dream, and despite the best efforts of all those Vostoks, Sputniks, and Lunokhods, it was a very American dream.

And Star Trek was a very American show. Sure, Mr. Chekhov was up there in the old NCC-1701, along with Spock and the universe’s stagiest Scot, but everything about the Enterprise, from its name to its Iowa-born captain (we won’t mention the Canadian thing), suggested that those ambitious thirteen colonies had just kept on growing. Whatever the legal structure of the Federation (not something I would have thought about much either then, or for that matter, now), it was quite obviously just the United States writ large, Manifest Destiny boldly going where no Manifest Destiny had gone before, and I, sitting staring at the television was paying plenty of attention. This enchanting exciting country called America was not only fun; it also appeared to be going places.

It speaks volumes that the wonderfully entertaining Doctor Who, deservedly British TV’s most popular sci-fi hero of the era, was played as an eccentric vaguely Edwardian gentleman, whose travels through space and time could just as easily take him into the past as the future. While the original Star Trek offered occasional visits to yesteryear (Tomorrow is Yesterday,The City on The Edge of Forever, Assignment Earth, All our Yesterdays), its basic trajectory was always forward-looking : the Enterprise hurtled through the 23rd Century with few signs of the backward glances and nostalgic appeal that made up so much of Doctor Who’s very British charm.

Star Trek was also, at its core, an optimistic, and to me, more attractive, vision of what was to come than anything likely to emerge out of the U.K., a Mission Control future of engineering savvy, technical marvels, and big, impressive machines, something that I was specifically beginning to associate with that land of wonders apparently located on the other side of the Atlantic. Britain’s feeble attempt to send a man into space had been abandoned years before, our manufacturing industry was crumbling, our autos were a joke, and our technological showpiece, the Concorde, was over budget, behind schedule and, most dismayingly of all, a joint project with those unreliable people, the French. America, on the other hand, it was clear, worked, and I was impressed. British-made tricorders? Wasn’t going to happen. If I wanted the future, I knew where I’d have to go to find it. And in the end, I did.

Looking back now at the original Star Trek, it’s striking to see how much of it came freighted with a strong ideological subtext. A veteran of the Pacific War himself, Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, brought to the series a strong Greatest Generation sensibility, both sharpened and softened by the tough-minded liberalism of the two murdered Kennedys. Time and time again, the Prime Directive was superseded by Kirk’s willingness to use fists and phasers to push alien societies a little further along the way to life, liberty, and the pursuit of extraterrestrial happiness. This clearly reflected the self-confidence and sense of global mission that had prevailed in America since the Second World War, even if in at least two episodes (A Private Little War, The Omega Glory) it’s possible to detect hints of the way that the gathering Vietnam disaster would shake that faith.

I cannot be sure now how much of this I grasped back then, but I certainly understood that the crewmembers of the Enterprise (and not just those landing on Ekos in Patterns of Force) were descendants of the Yanks who had stormed the beaches of Normandy just a quarter of a century before. They may have been in strange uniforms and carrying ray guns but they were recognizably the American soldiers I knew from countless war movies, brave, profoundly democratic, free spirited, good guys trying to do the right thing. In reality, that wasn’t too much of a myth then, and, for all the flaws, mistakes, blunders and worse, I suspect that if you go to Iraq and Afghanistan today, you’d see that it’s not too much of a myth now.

And nor, I now knew for sure, was Captain Kirk. Not that my father, duly enlightened, informed, educated, and possibly a little bored, appeared quite as impressed as he should have been. To some people, a TV show is just a TV show. The conversation moved on, but then, as it happened, an hour or so later the Stuttaford and the Shatner parties left the restaurant at the same time. As we all walked down Third Avenue, I noticed my father (who is both a doctor and a journalist for the London Times) looking at the lion of Starfleet with sudden interest.

“You know what,” he said, “he’s bow-legged. He walks like a cowboy, not a spaceman. Fascinating. I must write that up.”

And you know what, he did.

Shamed again.

Dangerous Litigation

Damages

National Review Online, August 7, 2007

If the summer schedules were once a sun-ravaged, derelict playground for television’s has-beens, no-hopers, bums, and re-runs, that’s no longer inevitably the case, at least so far as cable is concerned. In recent weeks, TNT has launched Saving Grace, a show starring Holly Hunter as a self-destructive detective being bugged by an angel, while AMC is offering up Mad Men, a series set in the golden age of advertising, a time of lies, treble martinis, and fumbling attempts at sophistication, a time when cigarettes soothed your throat and no liquor company would ever have dared tell its customers to drink “responsibly.” Meanwhile those prepared to fork out for truly premium cable can look forward to the glorious prospect of Fox Mulder gone wild as David Duchovny hunts the foxes of Showtime’s forthcoming Californication.

That sounds like challenging competition, but if there’s anyone tough enough to see it off, it’s Glenn Close or, rather, Patty Hewes, the litigation lawyer she plays to icy, intimidating and savage perfection in FX’s new Damages. After a stint as the LAPD’s Captain Rawling on The Shield, Close is already a highly decorated FX veteran, but this latest incarnation shows that there’s a casting genius at work at that channel. Ever since boiling her way up into public attention as Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest, one of the most horrifying embodiments of male (yes, male) guilt, resentment, and rage ever to stalk the big screen, Close has established herself as one of this country’s most formidable actresses. In England she would have been appointed dame; in America she just has to make do with vice president (Air Force One), First Lady (Mars Attacks!), chief justice (The West Wing), and Cruella de Vil (twice).

As the creators of Damages have obviously understood, this is an actress who is at her most alarmingly imposing when the character she plays is in control not only of those around her, but of herself. Alex Forrest may have been dangerous, but she was also dangerously unhinged, a wreck of a woman, desperate and, ultimately, weak, beaten off with little more than bathwater and a bullet or two. Compared with Close’s devious and manipulative Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, wacky Alex was, so to speak, a loveable little bunny. That’s not to say that the wicked Marquise did not have her own vulnerabilities, more specifically, a rancid mix of over-competitiveness and frustrated, only half-acknowledged, desire that eventually triggers her emotional and social destruction. So it is with Patty Hewes: there are chinks in her armor too, in her case a troubled relationship with her adolescent son. Very The Devil Wears Prada, you might think: the strong woman plagued by trouble on the home front, retribution (or so it is hinted) for success at the workplace.

Fortunately, Damages is subtler than that. As we get to know Hewes’s principal adversary, Arthur Frobisher (a terrific Ted Danson, a long, long way from Cheers), we discover that he too can be hurt through his offspring. Frobisher is an Enron-style entrepreneur who has not only been acquitted at his criminal trial, but has also managed to hang on to his billions. Patty Hewes, representing Frobisher’s former employees (who have, as is the way of such things, been left with pink slips and empty retirement accounts) is after that money. The imminence of yet more embarrassing litigation is proving too much for Frobisher’s wife, and she’s threatening to leave, taking their children with her. That would be bad news for Frobisher financially and legally (his loyal spouse has been a courtroom ornament and splendid p.r.), but what really frightens him is the thought of losing his kids. Judging by one Sam Malone interlude in a car (sort of; teetotal Sam would not have snorted the cocaine), Frobisher could get over his wife. His children would be a different matter.

Rapacious businessman? Wronged employees? We’ve been here before. Despite this, Damages shows remarkably few signs of falling into the trite, exhausted routines of the standard tenacious-lawyer-versus-greedy-capitalist morality play. Frobisher is ruthless, and richer than most studio executives and thus, by Hollywood convention, not only guilty, but bad, bad, bad. Nevertheless both the screenplay and Danson’s performance hint that there’s more to this evildoer than the usual by-the-numbers villainy. As for Patty, well, she’s rich too, and something of a monster, a brutal, controlling, ends-justifies-the-means gal, capable (at the very least) of intimidation, deceit, and — shades of Cruella — arranging for the killing of a dog belonging to a potential witness. What is it about Glenn Close and pets?

Quite how all this will resolve itself is, at this stage, a mystery (and, after two episodes, I’m gripped enough to want to find out). Its resolution will, apparently, revolve around the fate of Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), a young attorney recently hired by Hewes & Associates. Damages opens with images of her fleeing a smart Manhattan apartment building, covered in little more than blood and a raincoat. Most of what we see in the show turns out, in fact, to be flashback, set in the months leading up to that terrified, terrifying dash through the streets. In a clever twist, however (and Damages is nothing if not clever), the narrative moves on two separate time tracks. While the bulk of the story is, in essence, an extended flashback, that flashback is sporadically punctuated by footage that shows what happens after Ellen’s flight ends up with her in the hands of the police.

At first the cops assume that she is the victim of assault, so sad, so everyday, but then their inspection of her apartment quickly reveals a battered, bludgeoned corpse. Is Ellen a victim, a perp, or both? Viewers are put in the entertaining position of following the police investigation while simultaneously watching the events that preceded it, events that may enable them to decode the riddle ahead of the detectives working on the case.

It’s when it comes to the recruitment of Ellen, and her subsequent involvement with Patty’s scheming, that Damages stumbles, if only slightly. Ellen is bright, she’s driven, she’s of fairly modest origins, and, as this aspect of the tale unfolds, it becomes evident that she’s taking the audience into familiar, somewhat clichéd territory. In deciding to join Hewes, she naturally ignores the warnings of the silver-haired mentor, shrewd, decent and old school, at the white-shoe firm where she had previously interned, a mentor of the type played two decades ago in Wall Street by Hal Holbrook, who was, course, ignored in his turn by bright, driven, humble origins Bud Fox.

As is traditional in these dramas of associate temptation (The Firm, The Devil’s Advocate, take your pick; there are plenty to choose from), Ellen’s new employer does things like buying her fancy clothes, and finding her a spiffy apartment. By contrast, her future in-laws (regular folks, playing by the rules) can only come up with a voucher for two at, good grief, the Olive Garden (and if you think that you detect a touch of condescension from the scriptwriters you’d be right), at which point the sole remaining question, experienced viewers will realize, is just how low will Ellen be willing to go. Judging by the carefully calibrated manner in which Rose Byrne is handling the role, I’d guess quite a long way. Mind you, if the alternative is a life where the Olive Garden is the acme of fine dining, who can blame her?

But, however clichéd this aspect of Damages may be, it doesn’t seriously detract from the enjoyment of watching a first-rate cast helping an ingenious storyline twist and turn its way through feint, subterfuge, conspiracy, and murder. Above all though, see this show for Glenn Close, an actress in her element, and in control, her strong, expressive face, sometimes smiling, sometimes not, but always a mask, necessary camouflage for a predator tracking her prey in the avenues, mansions, and office suites of our new gilded age.

Brava!

Ohhh, Henry

The Tudors

National Review Online, April 2, 2007

No television series boasting an opening sequence that includes a brutal assassination, ecstatic adulterous sex, the gorgeously bared breasts of Ruta Gedmintas, and an angry, thoroughly deserved, shout of “French bastards” will ever get too harsh a review from me. With HBO’s The Sopranos currently being whacked into syndication at the end of this season, Showtime is now trying to win viewers over with The Tudors, a tale drawn from the history of a family infinitely more dangerous than those departing New Jersey mobsters. Judging by the sex, violence, and splendor of its wickedly entertaining first few episodes it might just succeed.

Don't be put off by some of the comments made by Michael Hirst, the show’s creator, ahead of its debut last weekend. Seemingly desperate to reassure a potential audience more familiar with the lost underwear of the Bada Bing! than the lost Palace of Whitehall, he explained that The Tudors wasn’t “another Royal Shakespeare Company or Masterpiece Theatre kind of thing,” ominous, patronizing, and rather surprising words from the writer of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998), a subtle portrayal of the pre-modern roots, ritual, and appeal of monarchy.

Henry VIII himself, well, the actor (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) who plays him, also did what he could to harvest a few more coach potatoes. The Tudors, he announced, is “sharp; not a slow ten hours of period puke. Nobody wants a history lesson. It’s boring.” Yes, that’s right. That’s what he said. Another day, another actor saying something stupid, you know how it goes. However, to be fair to Rhys Meyers, The Tudors is fast-paced, and, at its best, it is as sharp as the headsman’s axe. However, by the deeply undemanding standards of the entertainment industry, it’s not too bad a history lesson either.

Let’s not overstate this: Showbiz being showbiz, and Showtime being Showtime, poor Clio emerges from The Tudors with disheveled hair, suspiciously rumpled clothing, and a great deal of embarrassment. To list the historical errors that litter this series would try the patience of the most indulgent editor, but for an understanding of their function, check out the treatment of the composer Thomas Tallis (Joe van Moyland, a remarkable resemblance incidentally). Tallis may have been a master of polyphony, but polyamory, apparently, was quite beyond him: He’s shown turning down two groupies (excited, I presume, by the thought of his canon), behavior that would be as shocking in The Tudors as an orgy in The Waltons, were it not for its eventual explanation. Tom’s gay! That’s a revelation that will surprise historians, but it could (possibly) boost ratings, and which do you think counts for more?

The same mixture of historical vandalism and commercial opportunism can be seen in the treatment of Henry’s older sister Margaret (played by the lovely Gabrielle Anwar in a rare escape from the made-for-TV movie wasteland she usually inhabits). The Tudors’ Margaret Tudor appears to be a composite character made up of a few fragments of the real Margaret, rather more of her younger sister, Mary, and then finished off with a titillating veneer of total fiction, wild fantasy and madcap speculation. These include the idea that Margaret smothered her enthusiastic, but unattractive bridegroom, the aged king of Portugal, a sort of Iberian J. Howard Marshall, with a pillow.

As a response to an arranged marriage to a hunchbacked, goatish monarch, a man more simian than regal, this would have been a perfectly reasonable response, but it never actually happened. Margaret Tudor’s first marriage was to a king of Scotland, not Portugal. He died, respectably, in battle. Now it’s true that Margaret’s sister Mary did manage to kill a much older husband (he wasn’t the king of Portugal either, but, poor fellow, of France), but she did it between the sheets, not with a pillow. A strikingly attractive young bride, she wore her unfortunate (if that’s the adjective) husband out after less than three months of marriage.

However, even if we allow for the impact of ACNielsen, there is something almost pathological about the extent to which this show’s creators have chosen to fool around with history. It’s as if the stories of the past are no longer quite good enough. There are traces of a similar attitude in the way that Hirst so relished savaging older versions of this tale with their “English actors in period costumes with elaborate and totally contrived mannerisms.” Of course, he has a point: the BBC’s Emmy-winning The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) has aged very badly, but there’s something about the way he makes it that is both arrogant and shortsighted. Today’s realism has a nasty way of becoming tomorrow’s contrivance. Hirst may believe that his Henry is authentic, definitive, the one, but, give it a couple of decades, and The Tudors will almost certainly be no less dated than the BBC’s Keith Michell and those six carefully enunciating, excruciatingly stagy wives of his.

For all that, The Tudors does succeed in giving a good sense of an era at the hinge of history, a time when medieval certainty was being elbowed out by new, exciting and disconcerting intellectual experiment, and a more assertive, less Heaven-hobbled view of what it meant to be human. In The Tudors we see a glittering court filled with people who were, quite literally, full of themselves. It’s a peacock-splendid, hypnotic and frequently cruel spectacle, but one clearly pointed towards the future, away from a past that no longer had much to offer other than stagnation, mysticism, and the appeal of what always had been.

That said, there’s a decent argument to be made that the picture this paints is too generous. There is little in The Tudors to remind viewers that those great palaces were as dirty as they were imposing, grubby, magnificent islands in a sea of mud, squalor, and decay. It’s also reasonable to ask whether Henry’s entourage can really have been quite so good-looking as this series suggests. The Tudor court did indeed attract the young and the beautiful, but the casting of this show clearly owes more to the aesthetics of Abercrombie & Fitch than those of Hans Holbein.

Be that as it may, Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s performance makes the best possible case for the idea that the glitz and glamour of The Tudors might be quite helpful in explaining the events it describes to a contemporary audience. Too rigid an insistence on warts and all that can sometimes distract as much as it enlightens and is often no less an illusion than the alternative.

Besides, when it comes to the young Henry, there are not that many warts to conceal in the first place. Beyond his dark, hard, small, porcine eyes, he bore little resemblance to the bloated tyrant of later years. He was unusually tall, well proportioned (particularly proud of his calves, as it happens), athletic, good-looking, blessed by a head of red-gold hair, a seemingly perfect physical embodiment of the Renaissance man that, in many respects, he was.

Rhys Meyers looks very little like that. He is dark-haired, blue-eyed, much shorter than the king he is meant to be playing (if it’s a doppelgänger you’re after, there’s always Ray Winstone in his Henry VIII), his face that of a fallen angel, a Caravaggio fantasy, a mask of unsettling, compelling sensuality. However, within minutes of his first moments onscreen, the differences in appearance between king and actor cease to matter. In his youth, his energy and his magnetism, in the intelligence he conveys, and the sense of power that envelops him, Rhys Meyers is Henry, right down to the way that those eyes of his never cease to hint at the horrors to come.

And a strong cast doesn’t hurt. As Thomas Boleyn, Nick Dunning is cold, shrewd, and necessarily suave, cynically pimping out his daughters in the family interest. First Mary, then Anne, whatever it took. The always reliable Sam Neill is a watchful, calculating, Cardinal Wolsey, the butcher’s son who rose to become alter rex, Lord Chancellor of England, comfortable with power, and the dangerous games that came with it. As Sir Thomas More, Jeremy Northam is, perhaps inevitably, unable to shake off memories of saintly Paul Scofield and that hagiography for all seasons. Nevertheless, as a skilled and subtle performer, he does at least manage to smuggle a subversive note of smugness into his portrayal of an individual who was, in reality, a far more troubling figure than popular myth would suggest.

Then there’s Anne, seductive, dangerous, clever, fatal, doomed Anne. It’s true that the irresistible Natalie Dormer (the scene-stealing virgin in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova, come to think of it, probably the only virgin in Lasse Hallström’s Casanova) doesn’t have the large, sloe-black eyes for which Anne Boleyn was so famous. In all other respects, however, projecting determination, cunning and an unconventional, feline, allure, she is all too believable as the woman who beguiled a king, dethroned a queen, and changed the course of history.

For there can be no doubt that’s just what she did. To criticize The Tudors as soap opera, a Hampton Court, say, rather than a Melrose Place is to miss the point. In an age of dynastic power, the personal was political. Yes, it was absurd, and thoroughly demeaning, that the state religion of England was under foreign control, but that’s not why Henry VIII broke with Rome. The English King, Defender of the Faith no less, smashed ties that had endured for a millennium for one reason, and one reason only: his infatuation with Anne Boleyn. That comes across very clearly in The Tudors, and it’s why this series, for all its flaws, is not only a naughty treat, but a pretty good history lesson too.

Sorry, Jonathan.

Here’s Lucy

Dirt

National Review Online, January 9, 2007

Thanks to the combination of curiosity, camera-phone, the Internet, and, now, YouTube, the culture of celebrity, never that sane in the first place, has seemed to have taken another lurch deeper into the madhouse. In recent weeks those of us who could spare time from the Lohan implosion, the Kramer collapse, or the vital Simpson debate (Jessica or Ashlee?), and who were so inclined, could have seen much more of seedy Britney than nasty Kevin has managed of late, or, if we preferred, we could have contemplated the rise, fall, and possible rise again of this nation’s most recent “troubled” Tara, That’s Miss USA, not, for once, Ms. Reid.

Not enough for you? Well, there was plenty more where that came from. We could, as usual, have feasted on Nicole Richie’s missing meals, or, perhaps, taken a little time out to wonder about Kate Bosworth’s disappearing body and Cameron Diaz’s disappearing Justin. Then there were all those images, so, so, many of them, annoyingly blurry, frighteningly clear, snatched, deer-trapped-in-the-headlights, embarrassing, banal, sexy, grotesque, compelling, sort-of-interesting, sort-of-not: shopping trips, nipple slips, fashion disasters, velvet-rope battles, parking dramas, minor traffic accidents, and, repeatedly, and why not, Jessica Alba and her bikini. Oh yes, there’s Paris too. We’ll always have Paris, epicenter of global trivia, and, for that matter, the most successful grande horizontale since Pamela Harriman swam her last lap, even if, in a confusing development, Miss Hilton has now declared a moratorium on dating in favor of nights with Brigitte Bardot, her pet monkey.

But try as hard as they might, those who now drive these stories are not from television, newspapers, or even those mags that take the edge off the supermarket checkout line. The people to watch these days are something new, amateurs or freelancers dreaming of the big time, and, while they are at it, ripping, and riffing, off the more established media they both need and threaten. Even the once-mighty paparazzi are looking a touch passé, their Leicas, Nikons, and elaborate stakeouts now menaced by an observant passer-by with his or her Nokia, Samsung, or Motorola. The Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds, may have exaggerated a little when he wrote about the appearance of an Army of Davids, but there isn’t much doubt that an army of Peeping Toms is among us and that, as a result, the gossip bazaar will never be the same again. Will we need People quite so much when the malicious are working their keyboards, online, on time, and, all too often, with that addictive extra slime?

The answer, in fact, almost certainly, is “yes,” but the magazine may have to take a different tack from the (generally) respectful approach that it now takes. There will always be a market for adoring, star-struck coverage (indeed in the U.K., the publishers of Hello have made a very good living doing just that, and then over here there’s Larry King), but gush about the “gowns” of Oscar night now has to compete with commentary like this (about an unfortunate skirt worn by the only truly convincing reason to have ever watched The OC):

When there's nothing left to believe in, believe in Mischa Barton. Because she will always wear something that cheers you up instantly. Take this joke of a skirt, for instance. It's like a clown repurposed a blazer and wrapped it around her waist. Amusing, but not in a complimentary, deliciously whimsical kind of way; it's more of a hideous Fisher Price "Baby's First Buttons" kind of funny. Mostly, I just want to tug it down so that I don't accidentally get a view of her birth canal. Still, at least we're laughing. Maybe for that, we owe her a debt of gratitude. Maybe we should all stand in front of her and join in a thinly harmonized chorus of "For She's A Jolly Good Fellow," led by Tim Curry, because the world needs more of him. And maybe, if we lavish her with enough giggles and praise, she'll back away slower than a gun-toting Mrs. Peacock, wary of our ulterior motives and never to be heard from in this capacity again.

I’d be expecting a little more bitchiness from People before too long.

None of this is to claim that that celebrity coverage was, in the past, as consistently fawning as some of today’s generation probably imagine. Just ask Fatty Arbuckle. Sure, there was Rock Hudson, but then there was Billy Haines too. Yes, there was a highly effective star machine, and those old studio chiefs certainly knew how to put a stop to unhelpful talk in the press about dangerous liaisons, dying marriages, and fatal car crashes. But by the mid-1950s, excitingly named scandal sheets like Confidential, Exposed, Whisper, and Private Lives boasted a combined circulation of more than ten million, and drove Hollywood to distraction, and, inevitably, the courts (to stave off an indictment, Confidential’s publisher, Robert Harrison, the “King of Leer” agreed to switch his magazine’s approach to flattery and puff pieces: naturally, circulation collapsed), not that, in the end, it was to do much good.

How, and why, so many people are so fascinated by celebrities is hard to explain. It’s something to do with mankind’s urge both to create, and to destroy, idols, it’s obviously also deeply rooted in our primate DNA, and it clearly owes a great deal to the fact that most of us live lives that are dull, dull, dull; vicarious thrills are better than none at all. Nevertheless, even if America’s obsession with celebrity has lasted a long time (and it has), its current incarnation seems more consuming, more demanding, more worshipful and more malicious than in the past. Almost certainly, that most reliable of scapegoats, the Internet, bears much of the blame. In creating its illusions of intimacy, access and authenticity, it persuades us that we ‘know’ these stars far better than ever before. At the same time, its limitless appetite for content makes celebrities out of D list riff-raff with “narratives” that would disgrace a trailer park, yet only add to the frenzy.

Throw in the fact that this new celebrity culture is both manipulated by the entertainment business and beyond its control, and there is obviously an ideal opportunity for a new Nathanael West or Ernest Lehman to tell us what’s going on. Instead, we got Courteney Cox. Her new TV series, Dirt (Cox is both star and executive producer), was billed as a show that would offer a revealing, clever, and sexy glimpse of gossip and its markets. Unfortunately, what we get is occasionally sanctimonious, slightly stale, and, rather too often, simply dull. Even the sex (Dirt is shown on FX, so viewers do get to see some) seems self-consciously “edgy,” contrived, and, at times literally, mechanical. Dirt may have been designed to appeal to the audience that FX has found with the wonderful Nip/Tuck, but it lacks the relentless perversity, carnivore morality, and wild melodrama that make a visit to McNamara/Troy a highpoint of the viewing week.

Of course Courteney Cox is as icily beautiful as ever, a John Singer Sargent portrait come to life and toned at the gym, as she plays the ruthless (yet curiously vulnerable) tabloid editor Lucy Spiller. She’s powerful, abrasive, and feared, but, as usual when we see women in such roles, there’s that pesky vulnerability and a Devil Wears Prada, what-has-she-given-up-to-get-where-she-has subtext to her role — clichés that subvert the very power that her character would ideally project. Was there a limit as to how unsympathetic a Lucy that the former Monica Geller was prepared to play? If so, that’s a mistake.

But if Cox has failed to see what fun, and what good box office, a truly vicious role could be, her show, so far, also seems to be missing an even more interesting opportunity, the chance to comment on what the Internet has meant to Lucy’s grubby universe. There’s a sense in which (judging by its first three episodes) Dirt’s underlying premise is, well, a little dated. That tabloids like Lucy’s are not quite as central to the gossip trade as they once were is not touched on, an odd omission given Courteney Cox’s own extensive experience, good and bad, of the sharp end of the celebrity obsession. True, Lucy’s two publications, Drrt (kind of like an upgraded National Enquirer, and, yes, that’s how it’s spelled) and Now (a Life/Newsweek hybrid) appear to be under great financial and competitive pressure, but we are never told why. Similarly, a conversation in which she tells one movie mogul that as much as he and his “Hollywood pals” hate to admit it, they need her, points to another worthwhile direction in which the show might evolve. An examination of the conflicted, and ever more complex, relationship between Tinseltown and those who make a living out of its dirty linen would be well worth watching. Sadly, with the exception of one rather lame sub-plot that I cannot be bothered to discuss, the episodes that I have watched show no sign that Dirt will go down that route.

That’s not to say that the show is entirely without merit. Very occasionally, some encouraging hints of what could be are allowed to surface. So, for example, in the first episode we catch Lucy at a Hollywood party eyeing an incident here, hearing a remark there, and, as she does so, we see (with the help of some clever graphics) how she visualizes the scandals behind them appearing on her next cover. It’s a nice touch. So too, a couple of cast members show promise. Hogwarts disgrace Ian Hart (that rotten Quirinus Quirrell) is impressive as “functioning schizophrenic” Don Konkey, Lucy’s favorite paparazzo and, it appears, only true friend. In a strangely understated show, his lurid hallucinations, virtuoso twitches, and fumbled prescriptions stand out. Sure, there may be a touch of Coney Island about the whole spectacle, but Konkey’s psychosis would make for compelling viewing even without the welcome bonus of his intriguing relationship with a rather pretty dead girl (Shannyn Sossamon). Nevertheless, it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that, as with Tony Shalhoub’s only marginally less twitchy performances in Monk, an initially watchable mental ailment will become increasingly less so as the series progresses, particularly if its peculiarities are used as a lazy substitute for a plot. Other than Hart, it’s also worth keeping an eye out for the progress of Alexandra Breckenridge as Willa, the ingénue reporter clearly on her way to the way to the dark side. Her early moments in the show have included deceit, drug use, and a slight suggestion of the Sapphic. Well done!

Finally, and rather surprisingly given the impressive tawdriness of the celebrity circuit, the stories that Dirt digs up add up to less than Page Six on a slow day: sports star cheating on his wife, starlet suicide, action star hires interior decorator (uh oh), and, wait for it, turns out to be gay, you know how it goes. It says a lot about Dirt, and, some would say, even more about our society, that the best story it has generated emerged not from the series itself, but from one of its reviewers. In short, Lucy Spiller’s battery-powered orgasms led a critic at the San Francisco Chronicle to publish an unfortunate and possibly (it’s debatable) unchivalrous comment about the fair Courteney. Jimmy Kimmel is also involved. As this is National Review Online, not Drrt, or, for that matter, the San Francisco Chronicle, I am not prepared to go into the distressing details, but, if, on the other hand, you are one of our more broad-minded readers, or just plain nosey, the offending review can be found here, Jimmy Kimmel’s dramatic encounter with the poor, possibly slighted Ms. Cox can be seen on YouTube (of course), and, in a desperate attempt to draw a conclusion to the whole shocking affair, the Chronicle’s caddish critic has now published an “erotic retraction” on his blog. Make of it all what you will.

As for me, I’m just pleased there’s going to be a fifth season of Nip/Tuck.

Something in the Air

Miami Vice

National Review Online, August 15, 2006

Michael Mann’s somewhat disappointing new movie may be called Miami Vice and the names of some of its characters may trigger recollections of explosions, pastel, linen suits, stubble, wisecracks, gunplay, and music-video brio, but it has little to do with the ground-breaking television series of 20 years ago. And no, the tawdry remake of Phil Collins’s Michelob anthem that accompanies the film’s closing credits won’t fool anyone that using the old title is anything other than an attempt to cash in on a legendary brand. This movie is Miami Vice in name only. Accept no imitations.

For the real thing, there’s the DVD player (the first two seasons of the original are available), the random enchantment of reruns or, for those of us who were around back in the day, fond memories of the evening we first saw those speedboats dance to Jan Hammer and two cops escape from the monotone restraints of conventional detective drama into the bright sun and subtropical colors of a city that didn’t quite seem to be part of America, not back then, and was like nothing else we had ever seen on television, not back then.

Quite where the idea sprung from is lost in time and competing reminiscence. Most credit the TV executive who had the idea about “MTV cops,” but Anthony Yerkovich, the show’s creator, has reportedly said that the inspiration was a magazine article on how law-enforcement agencies could use booty confiscated from the bad guys in other, unrelated, investigations. That would explain, just, the Ferraris, the powerboat, and the yacht: the threads always remained something of a mystery. What is clear is that Miami Vice would never have made the impact it did without the highly stylized vision of Michael Mann, something that was already taking shape way before (check out his 1981 movie, Thief) Ricardo Tubbs agreed to take up a “career in southern law enforcement.” As to where it came from, well, maybe there really was something in the air.

Even amid the wastelands of taste that were the 1970s there were sporadic signs of a sleeker aesthetic struggling to be born, and with the end of that decade, the end of Carter, the end of earth tones, and the beginning of better times, the country was finally ready for designer hedonism, Bright Lights, Big City, and the profound pleasures of a materialism without shame, guilt, or hair-shirt carping. The ersatz Appalachian sanctimony of the Walton clan was replaced by the glitz, bitches, and riches of those big feuding, big-spending Carringtons, and TV was all the better for it: Good riddance Mary-Ellen. Well, hi there, Fallon. Alex P. Keaton became a national icon and everyone went to the mall. The Eighties, thank God, had arrived. It was the perfect moment for Crockett’s Armani to replace Colombo’s raincoat, and thanks to Michael Mann it did. With its flash, dash, and images of consumer delight, music that was part of the script, and wildly eclectic celebrity guest stars (Lee Iacocca! G. Gordon Liddy! Little Richard! Ted Nugent!), Miami Vice reflected, shaped, and, ultimately helped define the best of all decades (oh yes, it was), and, while it was at it, transformed notions of what television could do.

But for all its innovation, the show also drew its strength and, I suspect, much of its success, from older traditions. Its hard-edged, gleeful, glittering, and sardonic portrait of a city of hoods, hoodlums, hookers and not quite hookers, crooks, cops, dames, sleaze, death, graft, and excess marked a triumphant reworking of classic film noir, the genre that, perhaps more than any other, reminds us that this country has traditions far darker than apple pie and white picket fence. For all its pastel shades, blue skies and architectural splendor, Miami Vice had much of the look, feel, and, sometimes, dialogue of a show from the gat, gal, and gumshoe days.

Crockett: “What a mess…and for what?”

Tubbs: “It’s just a job man. You’re telling me you’d rather be pushing papers in some white-collar cubicle?

Crockett: “This stuff keeps rolling in. We’re just a tollbooth on the highway.”

Tubbs: “Singing the vice cop blues again.”

Philip Marlowe would have understood.

But for all the tough talk, it was never just a job. Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) and Crockett (Don Johnson) may have inhabited noir’s corrupt, morally ambiguous, fallen world, but, like that world’s occasionally upstanding heroes, the two detectives were ultimately on the side of the angels, knights in designer armor, with, needless to say, hints too of the old west about them: Crockett’s white suit, the cowboy’s white hat.

And then there was the buddy thing, another American staple, Butch and Sundance, Starsky and Hutch, Turner and Hooch … well, you know what I mean. True to the conventions of that amiable tradition, Ricardo and Sonny were often defined by the differences between them: Tubbs, for example, seemed so much happier than the perennially haunted Crockett (Vietnam, Sheena Easton, amnesia, there were plenty of traumas for the poor fellow to choose from), but there was never any question about the bond they shared. In Michael Mann’s new take, by contrast, Farrell and Foxx are chillier than Charles and Diana and more distant than a pair of Garbos. There’s no hint of Johnson and Thomas’s sly, affectionate joshing, and the movie’s the poorer for it.

But if Miami Vice reflected and helped shape its times, it also foreshadowed what was to come. There will be some schlubs in Sears suits who still curse them for it, but there’s no doubt that, heterosexuality pointedly buttressed by guns, girls, and macho banter, Miami-Dade PD’s two clotheshorses both anticipated the metrosexual moment and did their bit to pave the way for it. Even more interestingly, their show was an early primetime acknowledgement that America’s ethnic kaleidoscope, so long usually reduced (however inaccurately) to stark, simplistic black and white, was again being changed. From the night clubs, to the streets, to the drug lord’s high-walled mansion, Crockett and Tubbs found themselves strangers in an increasingly strange land, lawmen operating in a disconcertingly alien territory, the country’s latest frontier, where old, familiar ideas of American identity were melting, shifting, and disappearing into Miami’s new mix, the exception that became a precedent.

Good times never last. Perhaps it was inevitable in so distinctive a show, but it wasn’t too long before Miami Vice began to succumb just a little too often to its own clichés, and it wasn’t much longer before Johnson and Thomas got a bad case of the Shatners and decided to record Heartbeat and Living The Book of My Life respectively, a couple of clunkers that gave early warning of hubris and trouble to come. Budgets began to be cut, fashion sense started to fall apart. A mullet was spotted. Michael Mann reduced his involvement. By then he’d already started work on the sadly underrated Crime Story, and served up a first helping of Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter. Miami Vice itself lingered on until July 1989, and not without some grace notes, but the Eighties were petering out, the Gipper had gone, George H. W. Bush was mumbling about a kinder, gentler America, and, since February of that year Columbo’s shabby raincoat, rumpled harbinger of a more earnest era, had again been disgracing network TV.

Later, the gorgeous disillusionment of Miami Vice was extended into the darkness and depth of Mann’s three neon-flecked neo-noir epics, the elegiac Heat, the preachy The Insider and the almost faultless Collateral, three reminders that moral murk still plays well in a country that, beneath the prosperous veneer, is as restless, uneasy and uncertain as the nation to which the troops returned six decades ago. As for the rest of the old crew, only Edward James Olmos, the dauntingly dour Lieutenant Castillo, has, after a depressing run of inspirational movies, found himself the perfect role as Battlestar Galactica’s dauntingly dour Admiral Adama. Perhaps he could find a berth somewhere in his rag-tag armada for the man who was Tubbs, the highlight of whose later career was, take your pick, either acting as spokesman for the Philip Michael Thomas Psychic Connection or supplying the voice for Lance Vance in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Don Johnson did a little better, gamely returning to police work in Nash Bridges, a pleasure, but no Vice. Nevertheless, proving that you take the boy out of the Eighties but not the Eighties out of the boy, he did manage to marry a Getty. Well done, pal.

Satisfactory though that is, it’s somehow even better that, for all Miami Vice’s impact on television in general, and the cop show in particular, its most obvious successor on our screens today is located not in a police precinct, but in a plastic surgeon’s office, somewhere they really know that it’s surface beauty that counts. With its photogenic cast (headed by the love/hate buddy duo of McNamara and Troy), high production values, inspired use of music, and seductive mix of sex, scenery, cynicism, and scalpel, Nip/Tuck is an elegant, compelling, and thoroughly trashy tribute to the myth that Mann built.

And of course it’s set in Miami.

Mad, Bad & Too Dangerous To Show

Byron

The New York Sun, October 21, 2005

There is something a little peculiar about the BBC's advance publicity for "Byron," a half-hidden hint of embarrassment, a discreet cough of discomfort, which suggests it's a touch worried that this glossy, entertaining new biopic might, like the unfortunate Lady Byron, be taken the wrong way.

Could it be that "Byron," which airs at 9 p.m. this Saturday on BBC America, is an unsuitably aristocratic topic for the obligatory, if strained, New Labour egalitarianism of the British broadcaster? Just in case it could, the BBC takes pains to quote earnest claims by "Byron" star Jonny Lee Miller ("Trainspotting" and Angelina Jolie), that the wicked Lord B. - a man who spent a lifetime milking his aristocratic status for all it was worth, and who was ready to use the poetry of social disdain against those who crossed him (such as his wife's governess, "born in the garret, in the kitchen bred") - "wasn't a snob."

Or was the relentlessly preachy and tiresomely progressive BBC worried that this largely sympathetic drama could be seen as condoning the sexism, and worse, of a man all too often capable of the epic cruelty of the incurably selfish? To name just a few of the women left wailing and wrecked in the Byronic wake, his wife was driven to leave him; his daughter Allegra (the mother, alas, was not poor Lady Byron) was neglected; and when naughty Susan Vaughan, one of his servants (and the mother of yet another Byron bastard) was impudent, and tactless, enough to enjoy a quick fling with Robert Rushton, Byron's, ahem, page (Byron, needless to say, had already done the same thing), she was fired.

None of this is likely to endear Byron to a modern audience; it didn't play too well even back then. Once again, the trusty Lee Miller tries to come up with the necessary unguent, but I'm not sure that it does the trick: "I certainly don't like the way he treated some people, but the lighthearted side of him surprised me." Oh well, so long as he was "lighthearted."

As it happens, the page and the maid had finished their frolics before the period covered by "Byron," the last 12 years of the poet's life, a time in which he found celebrity, scandal, exile, and, finally, redemption and an odd sort of martyrdom. Confining the story to Byron's most eventful years makes narrative sense, but it also comes with another advantage: It allows this drama's creators to sidestep the inconvenient fact that a good number of Byron's earlier lovers were too young, and too male, to be altogether seemly in a romantic idol.

The BBC may be intent on selling the idea of "a poet who lived fast and died young," a James Dean with quill pen and social conscience, but the real Byron ignored convention in ways that made Dean seem like a bishop. He also had a predatory side difficult to reconcile with current notions of what a liberal hero should be. Fully told, Byron's exploits would make very uncomfortable viewing indeed - which is probably why the writers of this production don't try to do so.

What we get instead is a glittering, fast-paced, well-written, wonderfully acted, beautifully scored, and entertaining historical drama; classic BBC, in other words. As usual with such productions, its audience of diligent and studious viewers is, as it should be, rewarded with gratuitous sex, landscape, nudity, architecture, and gossip. Yes, yes, with the exception of some coy looks, dark remarks, and a make-out session on a Greek beach, Byron's boys are banned, but that still leaves a lush, pouting parade of noblewomen, prostitutes, bluestockings, and groupies to lift their skirts for the smoldering poet.

Then there are the three women who defined Byron's final years in England. These were the two (principal) mistresses: Augusta (Natasha Little), his (half) sister, who was, awkwardly, related to him and married to someone else (their first cousin, confusingly), and his "wild antelope," brilliant, crazy Lady Caroline Lamb (Camilla Power), a cross-dressing, vengeful psychotic who makes "Fatal Attraction's" Alexis seem like Sandra Dee. And, oh dear, oh dear, there was the Unsuitable Wife, the pious and mathematically gifted Annabella (Julie Cox), who wandered out of Jane Austen's orderly England into the mayhem of Byron's psyche and found herself seduced, sodomized, scandalized, and spurned by the man she so foolishly married.

Natasha Little and Camilla Power both turn in strong performances, but it is the delicately attractive Julie Cox's touching portrayal of the heartbroken Annabella that lingers. Finally, we should not, could not, forget Lady Melbourne, Caroline Lamb's cynical but entertaining mother-in-law, and, typically for this story, Annabella's aunt. Lady Melbourne was never Byron's lover (she was 60-something, and even he drew the line somewhere), but as his confidante, meddler, and provocateuse she is interpreted with brio and malice by an on-form Vanessa Redgrave inspired, quite clearly, by the badly behaved granny she plays on "Nip/Tuck."

As for the sun around which all those pretty planets revolved, old Rhyming Byron himself, Jonny Lee Miller does a terrific job in conveying the charm, neuroses, poses and danger of this extraordinary man. Sick Boy, it turns out, makes a remarkably convincing peer of the realm. If there are any weaknesses, they belong to the script. There are, sadly, few signs of the wit that could flash from those "fluent lips" (check out his letters to see just how funny Byron could be), and we are left with too little sense either of his poetry or of quite why he became the icon that he did. What's more, his brave, significant, and ultimately fatal intervention in Greece's war of independence is downplayed into a muddy, soggy fiasco.

Nevertheless, despite these (and other) historical lapses and all the Bowdlerizing, this enjoyable production is an excellent introduction to Lord Byron, and, as he might have said, that's not a bad way to spend an evening.

Prime-Time Space Invaders

Invasion

Threshold

Surface

The New York Sun, September 20, 2005

Be afraid, very afraid. Someone somewhere, probably in a French newspaper, is soon going to make a big deal out of the fact that all three U.S. television networks are debuting series about extraterrestrial invasions of Earth. Much as the enjoyable, and perfectly straightforward, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has long been reinterpreted as a parable of Cold War paranoia (it was nothing of the sort, of course), so "Invasion" (ABC), "Threshold" (CBS), and "Surface" (NBC) will undoubtedly be viewed as an expression of American unease at the threat posed by the alien civilization of Islamic extremism, and, yes, this too will be nonsense.

The coincidence that ABC, NBC, and CBS are offering viewers little green men - or eerie white lights ("Invasion"), or nasty spinning things ("Threshold"), or savage sea monsters ("Surface"), or whatever - owes a great deal to the success of "Lost" and has nothing at all to do with a malevolent and murderous crank firing off fatwas from a cave somewhere in Central Asia. That said, it's also true that since the days that all our species lived in caves, we have enjoyed frightening ourselves with tales of gods, monsters, ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. The evil menace from beyond the stars is just an old bogeyman in a new spacesuit, and as ABC, NBC, and CBS know well, he can still be a good source of chills, thrills, and ratings success.

"Threshold" boasts a hipster hip high dwarf (Peter Dinklage), a beauty who has appeared in both "Sin City" and "Spin City" (Carla Gugino), the return of Lieutenant Commander Data (Brent Spiner), and movie-standard production values. Despite all that, the storyline - involving aliens, secret government agencies, and offbeat protagonists - brought back too many memories of the much-missed Mulder and Scully, and it suffered by comparison. I'll give it another episode, but I'm unconvinced that this threshold is worth crossing. Turning to the next of these three shows, I should confess that I haven't actually seen "Surface," but as, by all accounts, it needs to sink very quickly, that's probably just as well.

That leaves ABC's "Invasion." Its creator, Shaun Cassidy, was responsible for the Mayberry-gone-bad of television's disgracefully underrated "American Gothic," one of the spookier shows of recent years and, as a former teenybopper idol (and the half-brother of another), he's someone who knows a thing or two about the dark side. "Invasion," sadly, does not live up to this promising pedigree, but does have, instead, a certain simple-minded charm. So pull out the popcorn, crack open a beer, and switch off your brain.

"Invasion" is not just cliched, it embraces cliche, and it does so with panache, verve, enthusiastically awful acting, and the hokiest use of sinister background music that I have heard in quite a while. We have the iconically-named American small town (Homestead, Fla.) under threat, we have the "typically" fractured American family (children shuttling between rancorous ex-spouses, new significant others on the scene, and so on), and we have the idiot American conspiracy theorist (played, confusingly, by someone trying to impersonate Jack Black) who is likely to be proved right in the end.

The sense that I had seen this all before didn't stop there. By the end of the first episode, there were dark "Body Snatcher"-style hints that neither the hero's ex-wife nor her current husband may be who she or he seems; the Jack Black impersonator had discovered that it's a bad idea to reach down into the swamp for a mysterious underwater light in the course of a scifi show; and a young child had searched the woods for her missing cat in the middle of a raging, lethal storm to, predictably, the wails - between recriminations - of those estranged parents of hers.

Awkwardly for ABC, that raging, lethal storm was a hurricane. As the devastation caused by Katrina became clear, the network pulled commercials for "Invasion," but ultimately decided that the show must go on. That was fair enough, although, ironically, the devastation portrayed in "Invasion" seems feeble when compared with the real horrors inflicted on the Gulf, and loses much of its power as a result. Equally, any Katrina survivors who see this depiction of a prompt, smooth recovery effort in the aftermath of a hurricane will be under no illusion that what they are watching is anything but fiction.

Nevertheless, while "Invasion" is certainly very far from being the best new sci-fi series now on television (that honor is reserved for the reworked "Battlestar Galactica"), those sparkling lights were intriguing enough to me to merit hanging on for at least one more episode. But be warned: Two weeks ago I took time out of a vacation to visit a UFO watchtower in Colorado, so my standards may be less demanding than yours.

Stoned in Stepford: Suburbia on high.

Weeds

National Review Online, August 15, 2005

When the New York Times refers to a new show as "transgressive," it's a bad, bad omen, and when the theme song of that new show, Showtime's new series Weeds, a satire of suburban life, is Malvina Reynolds's antique, condescending and trite "Little Boxes," the signs are even worse.

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes all the same,

There's a green one and a pink one

And a blue one and a yellow one

And they're all made out of ticky tacky

And they all look just the same.

Oh good grief, not another attack on the suburbs, not again. The supposed horrors, concealments, conformity, and emptiness of suburban life have been the targets of scriptwriters with a grudge but no clue since about the time that the first construction truck rolled into Levittown. And they still are. Beneath the Botox, the wildly over-praised Desperate Housewives is a show about suburban ennui. In the even more wildly over-praised American Beauty, life in the 'burbs was portrayed as being so awful that the movie's whiny hero was still grumbling on about it after his suicide.

Weeds begins in very much the same vein. There's that theme song (Malvina Reynolds was seemingly unaware of the irony implicit in a leftist writing lyrics that attacked conformity), and a clever, if predictable, title sequence of identical SUVs, identical commuters, and shots of the sort of upscale suburban community that you can find across this nation from Nashville's Green Hills to Updike's Connecticut to Fox's OC.

And truth to tell, there's much about Weeds, which is set in the affluent suburb of Agrestic, California, that continues in this all-too-predictable vein. We have the alcohol, we have the Ambien, we have the bored, bitchy, and—let's admit it—desperate housewives, the usual villains of such pieces, and we have their bored, desperate, and hapless husbands, one of whom, needless to say, is enjoying an understandable affair with Helen, his foxy tennis pro. The only family in the show that appears, at least initially, to have any warmth or, even, any honesty is the Jameses, a family of African-American drug dealers.

Drug dealers? In a show set in an upscale suburb? Ah yes, the central conceit of Weeds is that the only way that the recently widowed Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) can support her big house, SUV, two kids, and insatiable craving for iced latte is by selling pot to her neighbors. The Jameses are her wholesalers. And if you think that the economics of Nancy's plan are ludicrous, you'd be right. Gas is at $2, iced latte is at $3. Selling a few baggies of grass to the feckless dads of Agrestic is not really going to sort out the financial mess in which Nancy finds herself. And then there are those pesky legal risks...

But all this is to miss the point. The idea of a pillar-of-society pot-selling mom (which owes more than a little, incidentally, to the delightful British movie, Saving Grace) may contribute to what the New York Times's Alessandra Stanley described, rather sternly, as Weeds's "amoral underpinnings," but, in reality, that naughty plant is little more than a handy plot device, of no more real significance than the moonshine in Hazzard County. Not so coincidentally, however, it's a plot device that comes with other advantages. It has attracted plenty of publicity and has also semaphored Showtime's supposed sophistication, edginess, and, most potentially lucrative of all, freedom from the restrictions imposed on luckless broadcast media by the Comstocks at the FCC.

And if the drugs are not too much worry about, nor is the show's somewhat stale critique of suburban life, bourgeois hypocrisy, WASP repression, and all the rest of the routine liberal blah, blah, and liberal blah. Yes, Agrestic (the word "agrestic" actually means rustic, rural, or uncouth, but its suggestion of aggression, majesty, and witless pomposity makes it a believably bogus name for a place such as this) looks pretty nice to me, and characters saying that there is "not enough pot in the world to get these people stoned enough to forget where they live" are both irritating and ungrateful, but these flaws don't really do very much to detract from Weeds's agreeably dark and splendidly dyspeptic comedy. It's not necessary to agree with a satire to enjoy it.

Besides, although the foibles of designer suburbia take a drubbing in Weeds, so does the behavior of that family of drug dealers (not as loveable as it first seems). The scriptwriters enjoy poking fun not just at McMansions and those who live in them, but at just about everyone else as well. This refreshing cynicism paves the way for some nastily entertaining jokes, not all of them in the best of taste (one of the funniest, I fear, indirectly involves Anne Frank) and the wholesale mockery of, well, just about everyone—from over-censorious evangelicals to those who take unseemly advantage of California's medical marijuana laws to treat their "arthritis"—or is it "anxiety"?

When the laughs dry up (as they do from time to time: The scriptwriters are not quite as witty as they clearly imagine themselves to be), there's always the skillful soap operatics of the plot to keep viewers engrossed. Weeds is Soap, and it's Knots Landing too. But any successful drama needs a strong cast, and in this respect Weeds does not disappoint. The delicately pretty Mary-Louise Parker is compelling as a Nancy Botwin who is never too far from the edge, and may, indeed have already crossed over it, but the real scene stealer is Elizabeth Perkins as Celia Hodes, the best friend that Nancy only likes "mostly."

Celia is an uptight controlling bitch, Mrs. Robinson rather than Stifler's mom, who appears to delight in making life miserable for all those around her. One daughter is exiled to boarding school, the other, Isabelle ("Isabelly"), is repeatedly taunted by her mother for being overweight. At the same time, this Mommie Dearest never descends into caricature—Weeds, and Perkins, are too smart for that. There's a sadness—and an intelligence—about Celia that we sense early on and then see fully revealed in the course of later episodes, not least when she dons her old roller-girl duds and wistfully remembers the cheerful hedonism of her life way back when.

Weeds also benefits from its strong supporting cast, notably Saturday Night Live's Kevin Nealon (who knew?) as Nancy's dryly amusing, but hopelessly lost, stoner accountant and Tonye Patano as Heylia, the Jameses' tough matriarch, but above all there's Justin Kirk as the late Mr. Botwin's errant brother Andy. Andy, a handsome Harry Connick Jr. look-alike, at first appears to be a free-spirited charmer of a type generally used in TV drama to show up the emptiness and hypocrisy of the more staid members of his conventional bourgeois family, but that's not how it turns out in this show. Andy is the snake in Agrestic's neatly manicured grass, a louche grifter who shows up to mooch off his widowed sister-in-law, and then distinguishes himself with a bout of cyber-sex with his young nephew's 15-year old girlfriend. Oh yes, the poor girl is deaf as well as underage. Later this paragon tries to muscle in on Nancy's business.

And you thought that your in-laws were bad guests?

It's too much of a stretch to see the worthless Andy as some sort of backhanded endorsement of the proprieties that the upper middle class try so hard (if not always successfully) to sustain, but his appearance in Weeds is yet another reminder that, despite its slips into stereotype, the show's writers understand that there's rather more to suburbanites than the usual clichés would suggest and that, no, Malvina, the inhabitants of those little boxes are "not all the same."

Time for a new theme song, I reckon.

Jokers You Can Sing Along With

Monty Python

The New York Sun, March 18, 2005

More than 30 years after its final, Cleese-less season limped to its cheerless end, the buzz surrounding "Spamalot" is yet another reminder that Monty Python is far from dead, deceased, shagged out, stunned, or even resting. For more than three decades, that dodgy old circus has flown on, soared even, through an astonishingly successful afterlife that has included movies, books, albums, documentaries, critical acclaim, condemnation by religious fundamentalists, spin-offs, the occasional reunion, a performance in the Hollywood Bowl, earnest academic analysis, a litigation victory over ABC, cult status on both sides of the Atlantic, and now a debut on Broadway. That's not bad for a show that premiered on the BBC at 10:55 p.m. on a Sunday night in 1969, immediately after a broadcast of theological commentary by Malcolm Muggeridge.

But this Monty Python, squire, this flying circus, what was, well, it like? Looking back now at some of the earliest episodes, it's striking to see how much Python was a creature of its time and of its place. It was often inspired, occasionally pedestrian, sometimes sublime, and all too frequently silly, very silly, but never quite so "completely different" as it so smugly liked to announce.

It was, really, a typically English show, filled with more bobbies, vicars, colonels, tweedy eccentrics and class consciousness than a Sunday night on PBS - Miss Marple with laughs, something that may help account for its remarkable success in America. Those bobbies, vicars, colonels, suburban accountants, and bowler-hatted stockbrokers who accompanied them were all archetypes of a gentle, genteel, fading country still caught in a way of life that had managed to survive the onslaught of the Third Reich and linger on into the 1960s, but would finally be buried by the unlikely combination of the Beatles, Mrs. Thatcher, and the Labour Party.

Even the contributions of Terry Gilliam, the Pythons' lone American - the weirdly gifted illustrator, cartoonist, and designer (I don't know the appropriate word to describe this polymath), who was later to make a career out of filming visually striking, but interminably dull, movies - were, like the artwork of "Sergeant Pepper's," the retro schmatta sold in Carnaby Street's Lord Kitchener's Valet and so much else of the pop culture of swinging London, steeped in nostalgia for the high summer of Britain's late Victorian and Edwardian heyday. This era was long remembered in England, fondly if not altogether accurately, as the last truly good time, a sun-speckled Arcadia lost to the dark horrors of the 20th century.

Likewise, the delirious, delightful sense of the absurd that permeated Python had deep roots in an English tradition of whimsy that stretches back to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and beyond. Even the show's frequent descents into violence - those interludes of hacking, chopping, and blood so playfully mixed into the fun - will be nothing too new to anyone who remembers what young Alice witnessed in the course of her more disturbing adventures in Wonderland:

The players all played at once without waiting for turns, quarrelling all the while, and fighting for the hedgehogs; and in a very short time the Queen was in a furious passion, and went stamping about, and shouting "Off with his head!' or 'Off with her head!" about once in a minute. Alice began to feel very uneasy: to be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, 'and then,' thought she, 'what would become of me? They're dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there's any one left alive!'

Closer to the Python era, the unsettled and unsettling nature of the postwar years meant that surreal, absurdist humor found a mass audience amongst Brits, most notably with the "Goon Show," an anarchic, and (to me) painfully unfunny, radio comedy that has the dubious distinction of being beloved by the (to everyone) painfully unfunny Prince Charles.

When former Goon Spike Milligan emerged long enough from manic depression to produce the oddball, chaotic, wildly entertaining, wildly hit-and miss "Q5" for television earlier in that annus mirabilis of 1969, the proto-Pythons were appalled. Milligan's madcap stream-of-consciousness comedy, sketches without structured beginning or formal conclusion was exactly what they had been planning to do. Milligan, it appeared, was Neil Armstrong and they were Buzz Who.

The Pythons' response was to use Terry Gilliam's animation as (to quote Eric Idle) "the link thing." It was a stroke of genius. Mr. Gilliam's artwork gave their new show a look that was distinctively its own, and, more importantly, gave it the illusion of structure. It made Monty Python accessible in a way that "Q5" never was.

We should not be surprised that the Gilliam gambit worked so well. The Pythons may have been intellectual (self-consciously so - who else would, or could, have included a nudge, nudge, aside about Charlotte Corday and Jean-Paul Marat in the middle of a television sketch?), innovative, and inspired. But they were also industry professionals, clever Oxford and Cambridge boys who had already used talent, connections, and very shrewd networking to build television careers that even before Monty Python were remarkable for their success and their precocity.

It was, perhaps, always inevitable that their television show would burn itself out so soon. For a brief, shining moment, six extraordinary, talented individuals took advantage of the extraordinary, experimental 1960s to give birth to a marvel. Then the moment passed. With the exception of the wise and wonderful "Life of Brian," a film even more relevant today, the Python movies never really recaptured the original magic. It was time to move on. Ever showbiz savvy, the Pythons finally did just that.

There have been other highlights - most notably John Cleese's terrific reworking of the sitcom (a genre the Pythons once looked down upon) in "Fawlty Towers" and Michael Palin's lovely, nostalgic return to that long Victorian summer in both "American Friends" and "The Missionary," but, for the most part, the Pythons' solo efforts have fallen far short of what the ensemble once achieved together, a fitting enough fate for a team once known as the Beatles of comedy.

But like the best of the Beatles, that old Flying Circus will continue to delight, even if it does not resonate now in quite the same way it once did. Devoted audiences will still cherish those sacred scripts, keep dead parrots alive, and gleefully sing along to songs of Spam, lumberjacks, and the bright side of life. Monty Python, meet Gilbert and Sullivan.