Stupid Pet Tricks

National Review Online, September 30, 2003

Even at the best of times there is something about a monkey that mocks our delusions of grandeur, and this was not exactly the best of times. The monkey, burdened with the name of "ET" and the undignified habit of chewing his tail, looked first irritated, then puzzled, then sarcastic, and then, quite frankly, appalled, as a striking sixtysomething Englishwoman peered intently into his cage, called him "sweetie pie," claimed to read his mind, mentioned some personal matters that ET would rather not have had aired on national television and then smothered his hands with kisses. Poor ET had just survived a close encounter with Sonya Fitzpatrick, America's most famous pet psychic. As for Sonya, she knew what was wrong. How could she not? ET had told her. There was a parasite under that much-chewed tail (pointing at, her, well, tailbone, Sonya explained that she could feel the parasite's energy — and the itching — here) that the vet had somehow missed. Her solution? Very dilute, it turned out. Something homeopathic would do the trick, but there was, Sonya warned, another problem. ET was missing his pal. Amazed, ET's keeper explained that the luckless primate had been picked on by most of the other monkeys ("he thinks they are extremely rude," interrupted Sonya sympathetically), and so had been moved to separate quarters. She did, however, remember that ET had got on rather better with one monkey, the accurately but unimaginatively named, Buddy. Sonya's remedy once again came in very small doses — from time to time Buddy should be allowed to come over to visit. Case closed!

And that's how it usually goes on The Pet Psychic, Sonya's TV show, 45 minutes of critter clairvoyance, menagerie miracles, and fauna trauma that stand out as some of the more intriguing viewing on the Animal Planet channel, no mean feat against competition such as Amazing Animal Videos, Animal Cops, Animal Precinct, Emergency Vets, Pet Story, Pet Star, Judge Wapner's Animal Court, and Total Zoo. The Pet Psychic is weirdly compelling watching, a chance to gape at poor dumb creatures and the odd bond they form with Sonya. I'm referring, of course, to the humans that agree to appear on the show alongside their pets, weeping, sniffling, shyly laughing, or revealing too much of their lives — they make a spectacle far more entertaining than anything that our four-legged friends could ever provide.

There's Lisette, for example, flirty in her apartment as she confessed the details of a love life that has, Sonya concludes, thrown her marmoset, Peyton, into jealous turmoil (Peyton fancied Lisette's ex) or the strain on Dawn's face when she revealed that the relationship between her husband and "her soul mate" (Boogie the show horse) had degenerated into outright violence — Boogie had bitten the poor man's backside — leaving Dawn to worry that (to quote the Animal Planet website) that "his actions could prevent him [the horse, not the husband] from performing."

Sometimes, there are life-and-death decisions to be made. "There's something with the bladder," suggests the great psychic, nattily shod in her trademark riding boots and staring intently at Kramer the dog. Indeed there was. Kramer looked humiliated, but embarrassment was the least of his problems. There had been talk that it was time to put this pooch to sleep. Everyone began to sob, while Kramer lay flat on the floor doing his best to imitate a canine corpse.

In the event, Sonya prescribed understanding rather than the needle, but even if the verdict had gone the other way, Kramer would have had nothing to fear. To Sonya, animals aren't dumb even when they are dead. As she explains in her book, What the Animals Tell Me, "animals are spiritual beings. When they die, they do not go off into a void...they go to a place of unearthly beauty [after swimming through "healing waters"], where joy, peace and happiness reign supreme; where memories of pain, care and worries fade into bliss." Later, after, presumably, consulting the angels that await them on that "golden shore," they may choose to reincarnate or, perhaps, just come calling, "understand that they have not left us; they are still with us and they visit us in their energy bodies." One way or another, Kramer will be back.

This may be dodgy theology, but it makes for a happy ending, and a cheerful — if usually tearful — conclusion to the segment of the show dedicated to pets that have "passed into spirit." The messages from the other side are usually upbeat and reassuring. Kerry the spaniel was grateful ("thank you, thank you") for the fact that he was put to sleep, and there was "a tremendous amount of love" coming from Sasha, a sub-Scooby Great Dane, who was "very happy in the spirit world" and quite understood that Maria, her "mum," did not have, ahem, quite enough time for her in her final illness.

Don't worry: The show doesn't only feature conversation with pets that have petered out. As we've seen from the cases of Peyton and Boogie, Sonya, a blend of Dr. Doolittle and Dr. Strange, claims to talk to living animals as well as dead, thanks to her innate telepathic skills (Good news: We all have them!), brought out in her case by profound childhood deafness. As animals, she says, communicate telepathically (Forget Mister Ed or garrulous, unsubtle mynah birds), it was no surprise that they became young Sonya's closest friends. Sadly, a bloody incident involving geese, her father, and Christmas lunch led her to force "a door shut in [her] mind for what [she] thought would be forever."

The door opened again over 40 years later in, rather surprisingly, Houston, with the appearance of first an angel ("large wings...beautiful and gentle face") and then St. Francis, both of who told Sonya that she was going to be working to help animals. It was God's work. And who's going to argue with Him? Not Sonya. She put two and two together and made a TV show, a writing career, and, at a reported $300 per hour, a consultancy business out of her long dormant skills, telepathic or otherwise.

Sonya has plenty of satisfied customers. According to the Animal Planet website she has "helped more than 3,000 clients worldwide in many capacities — to achieve a better understanding of their pets, to solve behavioral problems, and to cure their animal friends of physical ailments." Her show is filled with guests who are astonished by her insights. How did she know that Bill the cat liked to play with a "round thing"?

Hmmm, I grew up with one Clumber spaniel, two unfortunate hamsters, and a budgerigar. Excluding, perhaps, the moment that the budgie was killed by the dog, they were all a remarkably uncommunicative lot, so, on the assumption that the whole thing isn't rigged, my best guess is that Sonya is guessing. Viewers aren't told how The Pet Psychic is edited. The hits are shown, but not, I suspect, the misses. As for those hits, well, Sonya is a highly intuitive woman and thus, despite the occasional odd coincidence, they are probably the product of either luck, carefully vague language, or skilful "cold reading," the old carny technique of questioning the subject (or on this show the subject's "human companion") in a way that throws up the clues needed to come up with some miraculous "insight." TV's John Edward (a well-known human psychic) almost certainly uses the same trick, and it is no surprise to discover that he (and his dogs) have been on Sonya's show for a "meeting of minds."

Most important of all, Sonya benefits from people's willingness to believe in what she has to peddle. There's nothing startling about this. We live in an age where superstition seems set to scupper skepticism. Society's reluctance to assert that anything is false — a product of postmodernism, politeness, and, ironically, the decline of some of the more established churches — has left us prepared to accept that just about any old nonsense could be true, the more exotic the better, particularly when it comes clothed in vaguely "spiritual" dress and builds on the existing beliefs of the more credulous among us.

Sonya's angels and the chatter from beyond the pet cemetery are tailor-made for such an audience, while, like any savvy modern spiritualist, Sonya throws in just enough "scientific" language (all that talk of "energy," and even Einstein rates a mention) for her fans to be able to comfort themselves — falsely — that their regression to the pre-modern is not yet complete. Besides, telepathy is practically a mainstream science in a time of alien abductions, healing crystals, and the Kyoto treaty. Only the most pedantic will want to challenge Ms. Fitzpatrick's claim that a telephone call with a pet's owner may be all that she needs to make that crucial connection.

There will be very few such challenges, for Sonya tells people what they want to hear. Her practical advice on animal care is benign and — once back in the material world — generally pretty sensible. The rest of what she has to say, normally delivered against a backdrop of the sort of soothing, simpering piano music more usually heard in a New Age bookstore, is deeply reassuring for anyone who can't be bothered to think too hard. It's a fashionably humble philosophy (we can learn so much from the simple wisdom of the animal kingdom), but conveniently egocentric, too: Not only do we have hidden powers (it's the telepathy, stupid), but in return for a little kindness (or, in the case of Sasha, benign neglect) our cats, dogs, iguanas, and parrots will love us now, and for all eternity. It's also attractively optimistic. We all get to Heaven. We don't really die. Our pets don't really die.

And even this show is probably good for nine lives.

Testing Our Mettle

Mister  Sterling

National Review  Online, Jan 31 2003

There's a nasty little truth about network TV's portrayal of an idealist — right-wingers need not apply. Doctor, say, lawyer, or teacher, the careers of television's paragons may vary, but their politics rarely do. There are many Josiah Bartlets, but few John Galts. And, as might be expected from the network that spawned The West Wing, NBC's Mister Sterling is no exception. As NBC describes it, the new drama is dedicated to "chronicling the daily struggles of [a] well-intentioned young senator…who brings a fresh perspective — and his own agenda — to Capitol Hill." "Well-intentioned" with a "fresh perspective"? Anyone familiar with the entertainment industry's idea of political thought (or writer Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., a veteran of the West Wing and a former Democratic chief of staff on the Senate Finance Committee) will know what that means; and, trust me, it's not an enthusiasm for trickle-down economics.

O'Donnell himself appears to acknowledge this, sort of. According to the New York Times, he sees his hero as an "activist" rather than someone who is particularly Democratic or liberal. He then goes on to note that it "would be a little problematic dramatically if you tried to make a show about a conservative and the Republicans would probably agree. They want to do less in government, and that's a trickier thing to go at in drama. How does a scene work when your character is the guy who doesn't want to do something? It's a trickier thing to find the drama in that. So for a TV show, being activist is a good thing."

It's a nutty argument, and one that must rely on the assumption that there can be no real (or, at least, no real likeable) activism on the right. Of course, Mr. O'Donnell is quick to deny that he is trying to use the show "to teach any lessons," a claim that reveals he has indeed found his true vocation in fiction.

When we first meet young Mr. Sterling (Josh Brolin — with a dour, holier-than-thou attitude and the biggest hair since LA Law's Michael Kuzak) he is working as a teacher, a top profession in the world of prime-time altruism. Nobler still, his school is inside a prison. As if all that wasn't enough, when the governor of California comes calling, Sterling keeps him waiting — naturally he is not prepared to interrupt a lesson or — whatever Mr. O'Donnell may say — ever stop giving us one.

The governor, Carl Moreno, a wily and enjoyably sly Democrat nicely portrayed by Bob Gunton, has arrived at the big house carrying a ticket to D.C.'s upper house — the Senate. One of California's Democratic senators (so crooked that he is known as "Senator Scandal") has dropped dead, and who can blame him? The threat of indictment with, presumably, a stint at Sterling's grim little class to follow, was simply too much to bear. Moreno needs a safe replacement to serve out the remainder of Scandal's term — and Sterling, the squeaky clean son of a beloved former Democratic governor, has the good name and the lack of a bad reputation that Moreno needs.

Needless to say, Sterling, a hipper, less agrarian Cincinnatus, has to hesitate before taking the job. To be too quick to accept would be to show too much ambition, an unacceptable emotion in this universe, albeit one that is necessary if this series is to proceed beyond its premiere. This difficult dilemma is resolved by virtuous posturing ("I don't like politics"), self-important posturing (can he be replaced at the jailhouse schoolhouse?), Top Gun-style "rebellious" motorbike ride posturing (against a setting sun backdrop, inevitably), self-indulgently melodramatic father and son posturing (Sterling Junior has a tricky relationship with Sterling Senior) and, finally, of course, by an agreement to serve as old Scandal's successor.

The D.C. Sterling finds is the Washington of John McCain's more fevered propaganda — a fat-cat fat city of vulpine corporate lobbyists, where senators might be won over by the price of a good breakfast and no meal can pass without glad-handing interruption from big-business shills. The first lobbyist he meets represents nuclear power, the second something even less popular: Wall Street. Of those other, more politically correct, lobbyists, the environmentalists, the "good government" types, the trial lawyers, the race hustlers, and the unions, no mention is made.

So far, so predictable. More surprising is the revelation that Sterling is not actually a Democrat. Unknown to those who had appointed him their man is, in fact, a "registered independent." His team, all of whom were happy enough to work for the crooked Senator Scandal, are horrified — financial unorthodoxy is one thing, but political unorthodoxy, it seems, is quite another. Sterling's replies to a quick quiz from a panicked staffer provide just enough reassurance — it turns out that he's anti-death penalty, pro-choice, and, forced to decide between a capital-gains tax cut and healthcare spending for the elderly, he reveals himself to be no supply-sider — the green, he agrees, should be reserved for the gray. In a rare — and welcome — nod to the dark side, Sterling does, however, favor drilling in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, ("better than on the California coast, don't you think?").

So, if he's an independent, he's been house-trained in the big-media consensus. Karey Burke, EVP for development of prime-time series in NBC told the New York Times, "It's the same thing we saw with E.R. Those were the doctors you wished could treat you. With Mister Sterling, these characters are the people we wish had these jobs in Washington in real life."

And what "we" want, it seems, is a liberal.

When it comes to his independence, Sterling is Jim Jeffords, not Teddy Roosevelt, and, like the Vermont "independent," he is a committee whore. Sterling has arrived in a Senate where the Democrats are in control, but only by the narrowest of margins and, sensing his opportunity, he bluffs their leadership into thinking that he will only support them in exchange for seats on a couple of key committees. These maneuvers could have been a nicely cynical touch, but they are merely used as a device to underline the youthful vigor of the new arrival, impatient with world-weary Senate convention and eager to press ahead with that sanctimonious "agenda" of his.

And as to what that agenda might be, we can only be sure of two things — it will come drenched in sub-Capra corn (the first item on Sterling's wish list is, for D.C., pathetically modest — $38,000 for his former jailhouse school, an echo of the boy's camp that Jimmy Stewart's Mr. Smith wanted when he went to Washington) and it will be liberal. The senator may not formally be a Democrat (indeed, Mister Sterling's roster of the villainous, cynical, and complacent includes a fair number of Democrats), but the show's scripts are designed to leave viewers in no doubt that virtue is generally found on the left.

So Sterling's only real problem with his father's party is that it is not liberal or "authentic" enough. Thus he marches (despite being told that "senators don't do marches") with protesting farm workers (cue: jolly Mexican music — if there's one thing less subtle than Mister Sterling's script, it is its soundtrack), adding to the pressure on the (Democratic) California governor to sign a bill to give these fine, hardworking but oppressed folk more rights.

Of course, (well, this is network TV) the new senator's policy prescriptions are not so iconoclastic that they might alarm the show's presumably upscale target demographic. Sterling is in favor of the "decriminalization" of marijuana, but (the wimp) not its legalization. Similarly, the new senator may have taught in a jail, but he's no softie, he's also a former prosecutor and (we have been told earlier) a supporter of military tribunals for suspected terrorists.

The only hint, so far, of any originality in this series came with the appearance of a Native American character in the second episode. Under the conventions of contemporary television this is normally the prelude to faltering flute tunes, embarrassingly banal folk wisdom, and dollops of environmentalist pap. Senator Jack Thunderhawk Jackson (portrayed with devious aplomb by the always watchable Graham Greene) is made of sterner, more cunning, stuff. He is a man who knows how to play the Indian card. His office is filled with more upscale Native American kitsch (Teepee-shaped lamps! The rugs! The Remington warrior!) than a Santa Fe furniture store, and so is his conversation. Over a shared pipe of sage-scented tobacco Jackson cleverly manipulates Sterling's reflexively deferential attitude towards a representative of a wronged, but noble people.

As a result Sterling agrees to co-sponsor a bill that supposedly allows Indian tribes to control the access to their reservations, only to be told later that its real purpose is to allow them to use some of their land as storage for nuclear waste. Whoops. Has a saint just been tricked into endorsing Satan? Pressed by his staff to renege on the deal, Sterling confronts Jackson, who explains that the bill will never pass, but the mere fact that Thunderhawk has found it another sponsor will be seen by Native Americans as a sign that they too should believe in the legislative process. Sterling's gesture will thus be both meaningless yet mean a lot. Sterling agrees to stick with this flawed, cynical, yet good-hearted plan.

In a show that is rarely able to rise beyond the level of the crudest of morality plays, it was a surprisingly subtle storyline. With more like it Mister Sterling might deserve a full term.

Goodnight, John Boy

National Review Online, October 11, 2002

The Pax TV network promises "quality, family-friendly entertainment, free of senseless violence, explicit sex and foul language." That's one good reason for me to avoid it. Just Cause, a new show that premiered a couple of weeks ago, is another. Described by the self-proclaimed "feel good" network as a "compelling legal drama" this dreary offering is, in fact, no more than populist pabulum for the age of Enron. Promoted with the slogan "Cleaning up America…one crooked CEO at a time," Just Cause is a gimcrack morality play tailored for dunces. More ominously, it is almost certainly an early example of how the recent corporate scandals have, once again, turned bashing business into showbiz fare. The show's premiere opens in a women's prison, that familiar location for overheated fantasy, which on this occasion involves not sex (well, this is Pax), but racial harmony, pizza deliveries, benignly butch wardresses and a rendering of "I Will Survive." The occasion is the release of Alex DeMonaco (played by the marvelously named Lisa Lackey), paroled towards the end of a five-year sentence for insurance fraud. Naturally, like many of her fellow inmates, she is a "bona fide member" of the "been done wrong by a man club", a victim, not a criminal. In her case, she has taken the fall for her crooked lawyer of a husband, who has, the brute, disappeared with the loot, taking the couple's young daughter with him. In a final confirmation of this monster's wickedness, we learn that he used to wear a $3,000 suit, while poor Alex had to make do with "pantyhose with holes in them."

Alex, however, did not entirely waste her time in prison. Not only did she find true friendship amongst the salt of the cellblock, but she also managed to complete a law degree. On leaving prison, Alex works as a cleaning woman, but not for long. This very briefest of stints amongst the working poor was probably included only to establish her street credibility — her coworkers are impressed that she's a "home girl" from East L.A., who can speak Spanish. She then manages to talk herself into the offices of Hamilton Whitney III, a tony (we know that because of his name, his number, and the fact that he is the last man in America to wear a three-piece suit) San Francisco lawyer, whose firm's caseload will, after the arrival of Alex, move decidedly downscale.

As Jacqueline Zambrano ("a surfer and a Buddhist," according to a press release), the show's producer and co-creator, has explained, "We kind of feel like we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore… Our stories are going to be about corporate greed, drug companies that don't give us disclosure, the Army [not paying] for Agent Orange veterans, fast-food companies that give us breakouts of [bacteria]," a predictably shrill agenda so narrow-minded that to describe it as one-sided would be a compliment.

None of this seems to worry Hamilton Whitney III. His pleasantly profitable commercial practice (described in Pax's promotional materials as "helping rich people keep their money") will probably be wrecked by the militantly anti-business DeMonaco, but, by the end of the first episode, Alex's crusading zeal has fired up Whitney's old enthusiasm for the legal profession (apparently the practice of corporate law doesn't really count as a truly satisfactory calling) and the ex-con has become a member of his team. Perhaps casting is to blame. Whitney is played by Richard Thomas, an actor who became infamous as "John Boy" Walton, that simpering scion of a sanctimonious clan which, for all its supposedly conservative appeal, always seemed more Roosevelt than Coolidge.

Revealed as a man with a painfully clichéd social conscience, and thus, in all likelihood, a bore, the character of Whitney runs the risk, despite the best efforts of the amiable Mr. Thomas, of being too dull to watch. To spice him up a little, the show's scriptwriters have given this antiseptic attorney a racy past that is more Fox than Pax. Whitney III has three ex-wives! The problem is that, as a Casanova, the erstwhile sage of Walton's Mountain simply does not convince, and nor, for that matter, does Rebecca, the only one of his former spouses to make an appearance so far. Presumably one of the show's promised "comedic undercurrents," she's a curvy FBI agent in a Sue-Ellen Ewing power suit sashaying through her scenes in a way that reminds us yet again that the departure of a far more likeable G-woman, the restrained and classy Dana Scully, was a tragedy for the discerning viewer.

As for the series' storylines, they operate as little more than a showcase for the scriptwriters' ideological posturing. The premiere was, opportunistically but understandably enough, dedicated to financial and other shenanigans in an Enron-like corporation, Coltar, "a Bay-area energy giant." While aspects of the drama (the way in which the document shredder has become the getaway car of early twenty-first century robbery) were bang up to date, many of its characterizations were archaic caricatures, not much fresher than that old cliché of the capitalist bogeyman in his top hat and frock-coat, albeit adapted to the movie of the week sensibilities of contemporary TV.

Thus, while Enron's real-life chieftains seemed to have succeeded in maintaining at least a veneer of sophistication, the Coltar entourage includes a posse of Texan Neanderthals, complete with bolo ties, hee-haw accents, talk of executive jets, and a deplorably sexist attitude towards poor, pawed Alex, who is referred to as "Honey" and, in the ultimate display of crassness, asked to stick her "pretty finger" into the coffee "in order to sweeten it up." It's not only the bad manners that are exaggerated — Coltar's crimes are also far worse than anything now alleged about the home of that infamous crooked E.

Given Enron's current difficulties, it's difficult to become too upset when that company is parodied, even if unfairly. Suspicions, however, that the evil Coltar was being used as a device to make broader comments about the wickedness of corporate America were confirmed in the second episode of Just Cause. This saw the scriptwriters turn their attention to a far-less-deserving target: the pharmaceutical industry, a familiar punching bag for the unthinking Left. The story revolved around a rogue drug company testing its possibly dangerous products on an appropriately helpless community (the patients of a free clinic in an impoverished part of town). That's not an outlandish plot for a TV drama these days, but what marked out this episode was a series of observations by Alex that seemed to suggest that our heroine wants to see the U.S. adopt a Soviet-style medical system or, failing that, revert to the era of the apothecary and the leech.

On asking the clinic's doctor (long-haired, sincere, sympathetic) why a pharmaceutical company should want to manufacture a drug almost identical to one that is already available, Alex is told that the answer is "greed." If a company sees a competitor's product doing well, it will want to "whip up a me-too product and get a little of the action." Alex shakes her head at this disgraceful example of free market competition, mutters angrily about "capitalism at work" and looks sadly across at, you guessed it, some children. Needless to say the principal victim in this episode is also, Rodham-style, a child — of Russian immigrants, no less. Within minutes of his mother telling him about the joys of being brought up in the United States, the land of equality and democracy, the unfortunate tyke has (like, I suspect, most of the Just Cause audience) fallen into a coma. In poor Yuri's case, the grasping capitalists of the American pharmaceutical industry are to blame. Subtle, this show is not.

Other contributions by Ms. DeMonaco to the healthcare debate include misleading statistics hurled into the conversation in a way rather reminiscent of The West Wing and, in a comment on the drug companies' efforts to develop their business, the remark that "pushers aren't just on the street." There are, quite clearly, few depths to which this tawdry piece of agitprop will not sink.

So, Ms. Zambrano says that she is as mad as hell. I don't know about that, but she certainly ought to be embarrassed.

The Ex-Files

National Review Online, May 17, 2002 

It has been a rough couple of months for fans of 1990s television. Waifish Ally is waving goodbye, ER's noble Mark Greene has already passed beyond the help of the most dedicated trauma surgeon, and even simpering Steve from Blue's Clues has abandoned his cerulean canine in favor of a beard and a band. Sunday, though, will truly see the end of an era. With the airing of its final episode, the X-Files will x-pire. Like Samantha, Fox Mulder's abducted sister, the series will be sorely missed. Its tales of alien mayhem and spooky intrigue are a dark, twisted delight, an unreality show that took paranoia to prime time and made suspicion a star. Brilliantly written and beautifully shot, the X-Files is film noir for color TV. Chiaroscuro interiors echo themes of a world lost in the shadows of conspiracy and moral ambiguity, while the series' pale landscapes are vistas of a not-quite-normal America, a place where everything is bleached out, other than the bizarre.

And, half-lit in the gloom, or, sometimes, seen as no more than a blur, there emerges a cast of characters to savor (occasionally, given the writers' rather unhealthy interest in cannibalism, quite literally so): monsters, mutants, maniacs, murderers, mechanical cockroaches, prehistoric mites and, most frightening of all, white men in suits. But there's no need to worry too much. If they can actually manage to avoid death, disease, demons, alien bounty hunters, abduction and walking off the show, Mulder and Scully will be around to protect us.

Strangely romantic heroes in an unromantic age, this oddly matched duo search for truth in a maze of lies. The eccentric interplay between them only adds to the show's offbeat appeal. Working with the exasperating Mulder, poor Scully finds herself in an often-thankless role. Sancho Panza and Doctor Watson would feel her pain. Played by Gillian Anderson, a strikingly attractive redhead (Doctor Watson would have approved), Dana Scully is the scientist, balanced, skeptical, and altogether quite sane. None of these adjectives apply to David Duchovny's Fox Mulder, a man with the soul of Don Quixote, the beliefs of Shirley Maclaine, and the mind of Sherlock Holmes. He is clever, cranky, obsessive, and inspired. Crumpled and faintly saturnine, there is also something of Sam Spade about him, but without the booze or, usually, the broads (despite getting lucky with a trainee vampire, Mulder's love life — and death (but that's another story) — is generally confined to pornography).

The X-Files has been a critical and popular triumph. At its peak four or five years ago, the show was regularly drawing audiences of around 20 million in the U.S. and it has been broadcast in well over a hundred countries (although what they make of it in Yemen is anyone's guess). With success came spin-offs (the X-Files movie, the Lone Gunmen TV series, various X-Files novels, video games), paraphernalia (t-shirts, action figures, trading cards, an "X-Files Ken and Barbie," comic books, posters, CDs, calendars, and no fewer than six "official guides") and, of course, learned tomes (Conspiracy Culture from Kennedy to the X-Files, Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files, and a lengthy (and invaluable) section in Paul Cantor's Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization).

Launched in 1993, the series was also one of the first cyber-sensations. Its conspiratorial themes and otherworldly subject matter were at one with the weirdness of the amazing, expanding web. The brave new show and the brazen new medium echoed each other, and as the thoughts and the ideas bounced between them, rapidly amplifying and becoming ever more absurd as they did so, they helped create an intellectual climate in which the X-Files could thrive.

This new means of communication was also used to create some old-fashioned buzz. As science fiction with more than its fair share of gore, the X-Files attracted its first viewers among exactly the same 18-34 (largely male) demographic that was the source of the Internet's most enthusiastic early adopters. Word of mouth recommendation was said to be the most effective advertising. Word of web turned out to be even better. It is impossible to quantify the contribution made by the Internet to the build-up in the X-Files' audience (from an average of around seven million in the first season to the high teens of millions two years later), but the show's creators were always careful not to neglect the geeks' dank ghetto, a recognition that reached its height when they listened to cyber-feedback and made heroes out of the Lone Gunmen, three nerds whose idea of fun was "hopping on the Internet to nitpick the scientific inaccuracies of Earth 2."

However, it is not necessary to be Clyde Bruckman (the insurance salesman with the ability to predict the manner of someone's death) to realize that the X-Files would eventually have to close. The truth may still have been out there, but fewer and fewer have seemed to care. The number of viewers has fallen to around 8-9 million, and Agent Mulder hasn't been seen for weeks. Scully seems distracted and disengaged, a woman with more than autopsies on her mind, played by an actress who has now been in a period film (House of Mirth! Edith Wharton! Costumes!) and may be a tad too grand these days for little green men. And, yes, before anyone writes in, I know that aliens are gray. The more recent recruits, Agents Doggett and Reyes, are New Coke to Fox and Dana's Classic, perfectly acceptable, but not really worth the effort.

As even the makers of M*A*S*H eventually realized, no series can last forever. What was once original goes stale, innovation turns into a formula that even alien DNA cannot keep alive. While the X-Files has never been shy about repeating itself (we have seen a mutant that munches on human livers, a mutant that feasts on human fat, a mutant that is hungry for human hormones, and a mutant that browses on human brains) there comes a moment when there really is nothing else to say.

More than that, the X-Files is a product of a time that has passed. It is a relic of the Clinton years as dated as a dot-com share certificate, a stained blue dress or Kato Kaelin's reminiscences.

It's the attitude, stupid. Typical of that era, the X-Files combines credulity (too many episodes show alarming signs of a New Age "spirituality") with cynicism, irony, and a notable sense of detachment. This is a show where, for all the drama, no one seems genuinely involved — even with each other. There has clearly been an attraction between Mulder and Scully almost right from the start, but for many years they could not be bothered to do very much about it (Scully now appears to have had a child by Mulder, but that's a more complicated matter than it may first seem). Meanwhile, the underlying plot has twisted and turned, sometimes into deliberate self-mockery, sometimes into incomprehensibility, sometimes into real suspense. There are episodes that teeter between horror and comedy, while there are others (some of the most effective, interestingly enough) that are just played for laughs. This is Po-Mo Sci-Fi, a wild, self-referential, but essentially meaningless jaunt into the unknown. It is Seinfeld with flying saucers, another show, ultimately, about nothing. Nothing serious, anyway.

Nothing serious? Apart, that is, from the existence of a vast conspiracy involved, somehow (more details on Sunday?), with covering up, and perhaps assisting, the planned alien colonization of this planet. But aliens were the pet rocks of the mid-90s, and it's too soon for nostalgia. The X-Files' continuing obsession with our gray-skinned tormentors is, well, so over. The same is true of its conspiratorial premise and all those suggestions of an irrevocably untrustworthy and malevolent government. While Chris Carter, the series' creator, seems to see himself as a left-libertarian (it is not necessary to be an Earth 2 nitpicker to detect in the X-Files a worldview a little closer to that of Oliver Stone than the Cato Institute), it is not surprising that the show found a mass audience in that now bygone era, the epoch of Reno amok and the Gingrich revolution.

Of course, there's no real mystery as to why Chris Carter had to turn to aliens, the feds, and sinister "syndicates" for his dark side. As he once put it, "With the Berlin Wall down, with the global nuclear threat gone…there is growing paranoia because…there are no easy villains anymore." At the time, viewers seemed to agree, but we have since been taught that such an assumption was hopelessly, tragically wrong. With Duchovny largely absent (he'd had enough: E.T. was not really to blame), the X-Files would have been set for decline even without 9/11, but you would have to be Norm Mineta to avoid noticing that ratings fell almost 25 percent between the May 2001 season finale, and the ninth season's premiere last November. The X-Files was a show for self-indulgent, more complacent times, an entertainment for before. That is something that makes one aspect of the series' 1993 debut seem, now, eerily appropriate.

Its date — September 10.

Embassy Sweet

National Review Online, March 11, 2002

If you want to see yet another unexpected consequence of our new, more disturbing era, take a look at The American Embassy, which premieres on Fox tonight. As a result of 9/11, this fledgling show already faces a once unimaginable identity crisis and a number of difficult decisions about what it wants to do when it grows up. Back in the more frivolous times when it was first imagined (the initial episode was filmed a year ago) everything was all so straightforward. The new series (then planned to be called Emma Brody) was clearly intended as a replacement, or at least a dietary supplement, for Ally McBeal. Ally is losing viewers at about the same pace as Calista Flockhart is shedding pounds, and it must have seemed like a good idea to take the same recipe (attractive, slightly neurotic yuppie, unlucky in her relationships) and try to bulk it up with a foreign location (London!) and a potential love interest (not Robert Downey Jr.!) able to pass a urine test.

And indeed, The American Embassy may succeed on those terms despite creaky dialogue and story lines so derivative that this show's premiere already feels like a rerun. As a not-quite innocent not-quite abroad, Emma (pleasantly played by Arija Bareikis), the not-quite Ally, makes an appealing heroine. Other elements shamelessly borrowed from the McBeal playbook include girly introspection, a wacky office, occasional pratfalls, and large amounts of slightly goofy sex for people other than the heroine.

The closest (in the first episode, at least) that Emma comes to consummating a relationship, and it is pretty close, is in an airplane lavatory. At the last moment, however, the mile-high club is exchanged in favor of the mile-sigh club as Ms. Brody decides this brief, but passionate, encounter has to end respectably. The restroom Romeo is a future colleague and thus, under the rules of today's stern morality, untouchable. For the time being, anyway. As is traditional in these dramas, we can expect plenty of "will they/won't they" suspense over the months to come. In the meantime, viewers are left to wonder why exactly it was that the scriptwriters chose to burden this supposedly romantic character with the unappetizing last name of "Roach."

What is different, of course, is the series' international location, which does, it has to be admitted, add a certain inaccurate glamour to the whole production. Emma is starting work as a vice consul at the U.S. embassy in London and her adventures take place in a charming, storybook city, a Windsor wonderland beyond the boasts of the most brazen travel agent, a fairytale capital of, as Ms. Brody describes it, "backwards traffic and awe-inspiring grandeur." I noticed no fewer than 20 shots of the houses of Parliament, a couple of views of St. Paul's cathedral, a glimpse of Tower Bridge and, as would be expected, an ogle of Buckingham Palace.

This "London" is a fantasy metropolis (trust me, as a former Londoner, I know), something that may lead to bitter disappointment when the first The American Embassy fans show up on Oxford Street, and are confronted by a city that is somewhat grubbier than this show would have them believe. Emma inhabits a London without burger joints, public housing and, it would seem, any architectural development since the Edwardian age. A subplot of the first episode concerns a missing child. Has she been murdered? Is she sleeping under a bridge, or prostituting herself for a line of coke and a slice of bread? Not a bit of it. She turns out to be holed up in a houseboat moored in "Little Venice," a picturesque canal quarter in the west of the city. This is not a show for fans of gritty urban realism.

Even the U.S. embassy itself has gone through a mysterious, and flattering, transformation. America's diplomats turn out to have been moved from the glass and concrete box that can, in reality, be found in Grosvenor Square to altogether more picturesque surroundings, a rather elegant redbrick establishment that, like so much of Emma Brody's London, I found myself recognizing without quite being able to place. Also, can it really be right that her supposed flat is located in a building that looks suspiciously like that wonderfully gothic hotel near St. Pancras railway station?

If Emma's London conforms to the popular stereotype, so do Emma's Londoners. We get to know three, all guys, in the course of the first episode, a transvestite, an aristocrat, and a wimp, which pretty much sums up the traditional American view of the rich range of British masculinity (Full disclosure: Not only am I a former Londoner, I am a British former Londoner). Cross-dressing Gary is Emma's loveable neighbor, smooth Lord Wellington is the potential suitor, a well-bred rival for the lecherous Roach. Finally, there is the local recruit, an embassy clerk with narrow shoulders and a faint resemblance to a Harry Potter gone to seed, who is, at one point, addressed by his American boss as "Brit Man."

Brit Man? Yes, with its foreign locations, exotic natives, and teasing nicknames, there are ways in which this series can sometimes, appear a little, well, colonialist, with the embassy staff in the imperial role, a role that includes living a life largely divorced from that of the inhabitants of the country in which they find themselves. Perhaps it is the same for all diplomats everywhere, but these Americans appear to live an insular existence, seemingly content to socialize amongst themselves, secure in their little corner of a transplanted homeland, happy to play (American) football in front of the Victorian splendor of Hyde Park's Albert Memorial.

Then, right towards the end of this first episode, the outside world comes crashing in. A terrorist bomb explodes outside the embassy. This highly effective sequence was shot some time before the events of last September, but it gains added power from them. The footage turns from color to black-and-white and back again. Scattered scraps of paper float through the air in what is now an eerily familiar nightmare. We see, poignantly, that the flag still flies over the assaulted building, but there are corpses on the sidewalk. The shock of these concluding images is heightened by the contrast with the carefree nature of what has preceded. These scenes may have been filmed as fiction, but they will be viewed as history.

And that is where the once innocuous decision to locate the series in an international outpost of American power has left its producers with a problem not faced by, say, the more domestic (even if it is set in the city of Ground Zero) comfort programming of Friends. In a year of living dangerously, the emotional intrigues of a young vice consul abroad may no longer be enough to convince or satisfy the necessary audience. This may have already been acknowledged by the decision to change the show's name from Emma Brody to the more serious-sounding The American Embassy, a place, claims Fox, "where the challenges of America's controversial role in the world of nations are an everyday reality." The focus seems set to shift away from personal to international affairs as we are promised "an array of stories of much greater complexity than one could ever imagine."

Whether this is what is delivered, and, more importantly, whether we want to watch it, will be one small measure as to whether we, and our popular culture really have changed in the aftermath of that blue, bright, murderous morning.

Raising the Clark Bar

National Review Online, January 13, 2002

The last months of last year were a frightening time for this country. Former certainties seemed shifting and elusive, no more substantial than the dust of two towers once destined to stand for centuries. In their search for reassurance many Americans seemed to turn to the security of a sometimes imagined past, with all its perceived strength and sense of a now lost normality. Televised tributes to Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball were surprise successes, while the usually youth-oriented WB network enjoyed high ratings for a new show dedicated to a hero first spotted in a quiet town in Kansas over 60 years ago.

You remember him. That tall dark-haired fellow with a firm jaw and rock-solid principles, a little staid, perhaps, even if he did wear tights, but always someone who it was good to have around in a moment of peril. Well, just when we need him, Superman is back. He has not yet made it to Metropolis, but WB's Smallville is proving a perfect venue for the Man (or, at least, High-School Student) of Steel.

This latest incarnation, as has often been the case in Superman's somewhat tangled biography, involves a considerable reworking of his previously known history, but this is unlikely to worry a fan base which has previously weathered conflicting versions of, amongst other minor points, their idol's powers, family, childhood, vulnerability to kryptonite, and (poor Lois!) marital status.

WB's take on the myth centers on a young Clark Kent, growing up in the unambitiously named Smallville, Kansas. This Smallville is, as in earlier versions of the super saga, a nostalgic slice of the Heartland, a dreamscape of rolling prairie, grain silos, and red-painted barns, but brought subtly, and undidactically, closer to early 21st-century realities. The coffee shop serves lattes, many of the local farms are in financial difficulty and the high-school principal's last name is Kwan. Clark's social circle is also more diverse than in the past, and now includes feisty, and vaguely feminist, Chloe (Allison Mack). Meanwhile, two familiar characters, redheaded love interest Lana Lang and blond Pete Ross both appear to have taken a spin in Dahr-Nel's Plastimold (a machine which, Nixon-era geeks will remember, was used by Lois Lane to alter her ethnicity in a 1970 story, the remarkable I am Curious (Black)). These days, likeable Pete (Sam Jones) is African-American and Lana (Kristin Kreuk) is played by a raven-haired beauty of partly Asian heritage.

Mild-mannered Clark himself is largely unchanged, although in a skilful performance the almost ludicrously handsome (this is the WB) Tom Welling manages to portray him without the nerdiness that will make his adult self the laughing stock of the Daily Planet newsroom. Other basic plot details follow the traditional pattern. The emerging Superman is still the orphan from outer space being raised by the kindly Ma and Pa Kent (in an enjoyably anarchic piece of casting, the role of Martha Kent is filled by Annette O'Toole, Lana Lane from Superman III). Clark's unusual talents continue to remain a secret, carefully hidden from a dangerous world by his protective adoptive parents. On occasion, however, he has to use these powers, for idyllic Smallville is not as safe as it first seems. Clark's capsule was not the only galactic debris to have landed near this tranquil Kansas town. The same night as Clark's earthfall, the whole area was bombarded by other remnants of his shattered planet in a meteor shower of such ferocity that Lana Lang's parents were killed and a nine-year-old Lex Luthor became a candidate for Rogaine. Even worse, twelve years later, fragments of Krypton are still scattered all over the neighborhood with, all too often, the nasty habit of endowing someone who encounters them with unpleasant, and usually lethal, powers.

It is a clever narrative device, rooting the action firmly in Clark's hometown. Like Buffy The Vampire Slayer's suburban Sunnydale, farm-belt Smallville becomes an appropriately sized arena for a superhero on training wheels. A fireball-tossing football coach is extinguished, a high-voltage villain is short-circuited, and an insect boy's sinister schemes are nipped in the bug, but these are all relatively small fry, vaguely believable so far as super-powered human mutants go. The same could never be true of the far greater evildoers that Clark Kent will encounter later in his career, which is why, when it came to the bad guys, Christopher Reeve's Superman movies tended to descend into camp. By contrast, like most successful science fiction, Smallville can be, and is, played straight.

This low-key approach also leaves more room to explore the nature of Smallville's inhabitants. There is little of the sort of characterization usually labeled, well, "comic book." Even the twentysomething Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum) is presented as a complex, complete individual. He is a fairly sympathetic figure, fruitlessly trying to work out "issues" with his megalomaniac father, while at the same time being unfairly snubbed by the rather stern Pa Kent (John Schneider, no longer so easygoing as in his days as Hazzard County's Bo Duke). Only when Luthor encounters a clairvoyant are viewers given a warning of the horrors to come. Of course, as would be expected from the Dawson's Creek network, much of the drama revolves around adolescent angst. There's a hint of Archie about this Superman. In a nice touch, shy Clark finds that his adored-from-afar Lana quite literally makes him go weak at the knees (her kryptonite necklace is to blame), a perfect metaphor for the awkwardness of high-school romance. Lana, meanwhile, thinks that she loves the dreadful Whitney (Eric Johnson), a WASPy jock with the sort of preppie good looks that will almost certainly ensure him a future role as the date rapist in a Lifetime movie.

But the core of the show is, properly enough, Clark, and a great deal of its charm comes from the degree to which we are shown a very human side of the man who will be steel. There are, as one of the writers has explained, "no tights [and] no flights." Young Clark's powers are underplayed and the red cape, mercifully, is absent. We are free, instead, to concentrate on Clark Kent himself. This is only right, for it is the existence of his very human alter ego that has always helped make Superman the most enduring and endearing of all comicdom's superheroes. In Smallville, as elsewhere in the canon, Superman is shown living an ordinary, rather humdrum existence among the rest of us, concealing his extraordinary abilities until the arrival of those dangers that call upon him to use them. Job done, he then returns to his everyday routine. Adding to his appeal is the fact that this is also an archetypically American story. Superman is an immigrant, a refugee from a ruined older world, who successfully adopts the values of the corn-fed heartland that becomes his real home.

Much of the interest in Smallville itself comes from the fact that the early signs of what lies in store for Clark are already becoming visible. He is on Earth, the Kents repeatedly explain, for a purpose, even if that destiny is still not yet manifest. The easy option (football stardom, in one episode) is not for him, and nor, it is understood, is the dark side. This Superman will be no Nietzschean lout. In the meantime Clark wrestles with the conundrum as to who he is, and what he will become. In the end, of course, we know that he will embrace his humanity, his extraterrestrial strengths, and the responsibilities that come from both. Except in the most literal sense, it is not Superman's powers that make him special, but what he chooses to do with them.

It is a potent, and benevolent message, and one that should always find an audience in this most optimistic of nations. Its traces were even visible in a New York Post cartoon published in the bleak days immediately after the World Trade Center attack. It shows a Ground Zero fireman being asked for an autograph by an awestruck clutch of superheroes. These include Superman, which should be no surprise. As Clark Kent would always agree, heroism can take many forms. Yes, some heroes may leap over tall buildings.

But, in real life, others run into them.

Dead Men Talking

National Review Online, August 12, 2001 

Who, these days, is prepared to act their age? Teens carry on as if they were 30, the middle-aged think that they are 20, and now, if a new TV hit is to be believed, the dead are behaving as if they were alive. The show, Crossing Over with John Edward, a surprise success for cable's Sci-Fi Channel, stars the eponymous Mr. Edward. He's a fast-talking psychic with slow-witted fans, many of who like to believe that this former ballroom-dancing instructor can put them in touch with the dear departed.

For what is, presumably, a matter of fantasy, Crossing Over is surprisingly matter-of-fact. The introductory tune is mildly spooky, with a hint of the X-Files, but the rest of the format is more daytime talk show than nighttime séance. There are no Ouija boards, no startling emanations of ectoplasm, no tables are tipped. Those who prefer more mumbo in their jumbo need to look elsewhere (perhaps to Mr. Edward's series of audio tapes: his Unleashing Your Psychic Potential, for example, offers listeners the recipe for a ritual psychic spring-cleaning, something, in case you are wondering, which involves sage and plenty of Kosher salt).

On Crossing Over, the tone is conversational and relaxed. The audience sits in front of the seer, ranged in expectant rows on a dais. By talk-show standards, it appears to be a fairly upscale crowd, ranking perhaps half way between Oprah and an Al Gore town meeting. Well, I did say "fairly" upscale. Women outnumber men, and if the dead are present, they are low key and discreet, at least to start with.

Mr. Edward begins the proceedings briskly. As his fans will already understand, the great man is surfing the interred-net hoping to pick up a name, a fragment of a name, or any clue, indeed, that will sound vaguely familiar to one of the people in the room. It doesn't take long (for a show about eternity, Crossing Over is very rapidly paced). Mr. Edward typically comes out with a syllable or two, "Francesca," say, or "Francis" or "Fran." After a few moments, a member of the audience will normally react, eagerly proffering a candidate, "Francesco," perhaps, for consideration. If Francesco turns out to have "passed" ("kicked the bucket," "bought the farm," or "croaked" are not acceptable terms on this program), that will be enough for the psychic. He'll turn into a quick-fire interrogator, Sam Spade on Speed, with a bewilderingly fast Q & A designed to show that ex-Francesco is now in touch.

Mr. Edward will ask the audience member about cats, dogs, colon surgery, mantelpieces, ceramic teapots, anything. Surprisingly often (and surprisingly quickly), the psychic will succeed in turning up some precise little reference that could "only" have come from the dead man. Let's say that ex-Francesco loved ceramic teapots. By supposedly prompting the psychic's question about ceramic teapots, ex-Francesco will, to use the jargon of the show, have provided "validation." The dead guy will have "come through" by putting the idea of ceramic teapots in John Edward's head. Well, that's what the audience clearly wants to think. Crossing Over is a show for the sort of people who would have preferred The Sixth Sense to have a more upbeat finale. The amiable Mr. Edward is pleased to oblige. Bereaved relatives turn out not to be so bereaved as they had once thought, and the ratings keep on rising (particularly among women, a group previously under-represented among the dank ranks of Sci-Fi Channel viewers).

To be fair, some of Mr. Edward's findings are indeed remarkably specific. These discoveries are usually accompanied by little gasps and shouts of recognition among the not-so-bereaved-after-all. Their astonished comments are always along the same lines, "oh my God how did he do that wow that's amazing," but subtitles are provided when the exact wording of the audience's amazement comes across a little inarticulately. This happens more often than you might think. If there is one thing muddier than the reasoning on Crossing Over, it is the diction.

Then again, I have no idea either how Mr. Edward does it. Maybe it is, as is claimed in the introduction to the show, all "real." The only people who know for sure are the dead and they are not talking, to me at least (Granny, phone home). If I had to make a guess, Mr. Edward is probably an extremely able "cold reader." Cold reading is an old "psychic" trick. The term is basically a fancy way of describing the use of intuition, empathy, guesswork and, initially, very, very general questions (Francis, Francesca, Fran) to come to that one remarkable revelation that convinces the credulous that the spirits are indeed "coming through." It takes skill, which Mr. Edward certainly has, and it also takes, how can this be put politely, a certain special something in the minds of his subjects.

It cannot be put politely. Those special somethings are naivety, superstition, and a problem with rational thought, qualities that are all too common in this supposedly sophisticated country's current high tech re-run of the Dark Ages. It is a ridiculous phenomenon, and Crossing Over is very far from being its only example. What makes Mr. Edward one of its more representative figures, however, is not only his show (or considerable commercial success), but the peculiarly maudlin banality of his vision of the afterlife. It is the vision that is the sub-text to Crossing Over, but which is set out more explicitly elsewhere, notably in Mr. Edward's "inspirational" novel, What If God Were the Sun? This is a book modestly described by its publisher as "incomparable" (and, in a way, it is) but the seagulls on the cover are fair warning. Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s know what that can mean.

To describe this novel as sugary is an understatement. Diabetics should not read it except under close medical supervision. For page after page, the reader is subjected to a sickly sweet mash of simpering truisms and New Age folklore. The conclusion, of course, is that there is no conclusion. As he "crosses over," the narrator, "Timothy," finds himself floating through a "tunnel of light" with a "sensation of overwhelming love and peace," which, mercifully for the rest of us, he cannot "put into words."

Arrival on the other side is, it turns out, a little bit like Thanksgiving, only worse. All the relatives are in town ("Uncle Dominick and Aunt Gina…Aunt Marsha and Grandpa Jack, too") and so are in the in-laws (including those impolite enough to die before our hero had the chance to get to know them first time round). Before you ask, yes, this is meant to be Heaven, not Hell. And that is to be expected. The notion of Hell is far too judgmental, far too demanding for this sort of New Age cosmology. There's no St. Peter blocking the gate, just a rather vague "life review" designed to give "a type of closure." We leave Timothy surrounded by his family and his "oldest and dearest" friend, his dog Chester. "It's so wonderful to know that our beloved pets are waiting on the other side to meet us, too!"

It's not exactly Valhalla, is it? Other belief-systems have offered the prospect of a rather more inspiring afterlife than this perpetual family reunion. Unfortunately, these usually came with a fairly substantial downside. Just ask Dante. To take another example, the Ancient Egyptians believed that the newly deceased had to appear in front of Osiris, the Judge Bork of the Underworld. This was a "life review" with consequences. The hearts of those judged guilty would be fed to a beast that was part-lion, part-crocodile and part-hippopotamus. There would be no Chesters in their future.

That is not the sort of talk that many of Mr. Edward's fans would like to hear. They are looking for the comfort of faith without its rigor. They want the prospect of Heaven without the danger of Hell, and, above all, they seem to need the cozy reassurance that nothing has consequences, not even death. And why shouldn't they? After all, it would seem to be a perfect creed for a society that sees the term "endless self-indulgence" as a promise, not a criticism.

Wait a minute. Didn't I say that Crossing Over was a "surprise" success? What was I thinking?

The Horror, The Horror

National Review Online, May 17 2001

You don't need to have seen Scream to know that horror movies have conventions that must be followed. For example, from almost the first few minutes it is generally possible to guess who will survive, and who is going to die. Typically, a nice, likable character will be one of the first to perish. Such a death sets a suitably downbeat tone, and previews the implacability of the torment to come. So it was on last night's season finale of West Wing. It was a weirdly lurid episode, which made little or no sense until one understood it for what it was, a tribute to the cinema of fear. The story begins, therefore, with a good person in a coffin. President Bartlet's big-hearted secretary, loyal Mrs. Landingham, is dead. In fact, the scriptwriters were in such a hurry to get moving with the plot that they had killed the poor dear off in the previous episode. Bartlet, meanwhile is wrestling with an emerging crisis in Haiti. Haiti? That's no coincidence, RKO's land of voodoo can always be relied upon to add menace to any tragedy.

Next, of course, there has to be rain, wind, and lightning. Last night's West Wing was no exception. As the show progressed we learn that Washington is to be hit by a strange unseasonable storm, the worst, Bartlet is assured, for more than a century. Naturally, when such a storm is raging, one of the characters has to run through the tempest looking crazed. Shakespeare famously used such an opportunity to tear out Gloucester's eyes in King Lear. Bartlet merely turned down the offer of a raincoat, and went for a stroll in the deluge.

Add in some terrible childhood trauma to the mix. Flashbacks give us the young Bartlet as a pupil in one of those 1950s prep schools where everyone wears a tweed jacket and sensitive students feel guilty about their privilege. Unfortunately for the future President, Bartlet Senior is the headmaster and he is not played by Robin Williams (but by MSNBC pundit and West Wing writer Lawrence O'Donnell). In the space of a few minutes we watch this ogre hit his son, sneer at Catholicism, support censorship, and underpay his female staff. Well, what else can you expect from a WASP in prime time?

Not, probably, shouting at God in Latin in the National Cathedral, which is what we find President Bartlet doing at the end of Mrs. Landingham's funeral. What a display! He hurls abuse at the deity for allowing bad things to happen, particularly to a man such as himself, who has, he whines, been a good president (there then followed a laundry list of achievements that sounded suspiciously like those once claimed by Bill Clinton). It was Martin Sheen's most spectacular hissy fit since that Saigon hotel room in Apocalypse Now and about as convincing, a piece of ripe ham to add to the West Wing's usual baloney, and an ominous warning that this show was about to turn very dark indeed. For incantations in Latin are never good news. The last time one was tried in a Washington drama was for The Exorcist, and that succeeded in riling up the Devil.

Bartlet gets off lightly. The only apparition he raises is that of the late Mrs. Landingham. She returns to the Oval Office, the first dead left-wing lady to show up there since the days when Mrs. Roosevelt would drop in to chat with Hillary. Mrs. L., of course, is on a mission. In the horror genre, the dead always are. Bartlet, you see, is in crisis. Tantalizingly, at least for viewers on the Right, there is a chance that scandal (but only of the noblest sort: he concealed his Multiple Sclerosis) might cause the president to drop any bid for reelection. Mrs. Landingham will have none of it. She reminds him of the poor, the sick, and the dispossessed (of whom there seem to be a quite a lot, despite all those presidential successes that Bartlet had so recently been recently been discussing with God). The implication is clear: These are problems that need the intervention of big government and a liberal president. There is work to be done, but no one called "W." could do it. Bartlet is the man for the job.

The show ends with a reinvigorated Bartlet at a press conference. The journalists all want to know. Will he run again? Officially, we won't be told until the series returns, but take it from me, this is no cliffhanger. Bartlet will be back. That's the rule. Just ask Freddy Krueger.

In horror, there's always room for a sequel.

Grating Kate

National Review Online, March 11, 2001

"Daddy, we saw a naked lady!" That was the first significant on-screen dialog ever spoken by the actress Mary Stuart Masterson (as little Kim Eberhardt in The Stepford Wives). Don't expect any such excitement from Ms. Masterson's new TV show, Kate Brasher (Saturdays, CBS). Billed as an "inspirational family drama," Kate Brasher does everything it can to deliver on the grim threat implicit in those three sinister words. Kate, we are told, is a "loving, hardworking mom who will do anything to give her kids every advantage." This, presumably, is why she decided to name her second son, Elvis. When we first meet her, she is a feisty waitress in a LA diner, making jokes about the eatery's pizza and tipping food into the lap of a lecherous customer. And this is not Ms. Brasher's only job. After hours, she works as a cleaner at a bowling alley. With her two boys, Daniel and the unfortunate Elvis, to support, Kate seems to exist in near Joad-like poverty (a sub-plot in the first episode revolves around Daniel secretly buying Elvis a pair of socks), although she does manage to decorate her apartment with a certain austere Pottery Barn chic and drive a vintage Volvo.

Failure on this scale takes some explaining in the prosperous America of the last ten years. This show does not try. To start with, it is simply mis-cast. To play a convincing hardscrabble mom, you have to have a convincing hardscrabble face. Rosie O'Donnell or Roseanne Barr come to mind. Played by the attractive Ms. Masterson, an actress with the refined looks of the fourth generation Wellesley alumna that she is, it is simply not credible that this bright, articulate woman is unable to have gotten herself a better job. Maybe Kate's ex-husband, Al, is to blame. He is long gone, of course, and so is any realistic hope of child support. In a brief phone call during the first episode, Al reveals himself as the formulaic male of contemporary drama, shifty, evasive, and exploitative.

Oh yes, this is going to be a family show all right, but one where there is no room for dad. And that little omission should, also, give Touched By An Angel fans and other traditionalists a clue as to the "inspirational" nature of the show. While it is true that Kate does turn to random sentences of the Bible for fortune cookie-style advice, she ultimately finds her salvation in the here and now. She becomes a social worker with a local community center, the nauseatingly named Brothers Keepers. It is a career move that should tell everyone everything they need to know about the series' ideological leanings.

This job change is triggered by dark dealings at the bowling alley. The boss, a man, turns out to be shifty, evasive, and exploitative, and he tries to cheat his all-female workforce out of their hard-earned wages. Kate turns to Brothers Keepers for help. When she shows up at the community center for the first time, its premises are bustling in that purposeful, important way that Hollywood uses to show organizations of which it approves. The staff are harried and under pressure as they nobly attempt to repair the shattered lives of their clients. Joe Almeida (Hector Elizondo), director of the center, does, however find time to shout at a couple of property developers, who are portrayed in the way that Hollywood uses to show people of which it disapproves (WASPy, smartly dressed). He also participates in a sting operation against another shifty, evasive, and exploitative male, on this occasion, yes, you guessed it, a deadbeat dad.

Eventually, Kate manages to attract the attention of Abbie Schaeffer, one of the center's in-house lawyers. In a move that could have saved this miserably uplifting show Abbie is played by Rhea Perlman, Carla from Cheers. At last, a heart of stone. But it is not to be. Despite a few flashes of the old venom, Abbie is no Carla. What's more, she manages to help the women of the bowling alley prevail over their evil employer. In the meantime, Kate solves the mystery of a deranged old lady, who (wisely, given the quality of the scriptwriters) has been hanging around the center refusing to speak to anyone. This success convinces Joe to offer our heroine a job at $500 per week as a trainee social worker. This is, apparently, a pay cut for the struggling waitress, but even though she needs every last dollar for her children, she decides to accept. Well, what else can we expect from a woman who, according to the promotional literature for the series, "remains steadfast in her belief that, no matter what, the universe will provide"?

With Kate installed as a social worker, the program can follow a comfortably predictable path. Brasher home life will be heart-warming, but ostentatiously impoverished (Week 2's crisis involved the affordability of dessert topping). Beyond Kate's immediate family, men will continue to be shifty, evasive, and exploitative. Just so that viewers did not forget the crimes of this ghastly gender, the second episode featured a divorcing husband attempting to swindle his soon to be ex-wife. She, of course, was about to be made homeless, while he was attempting to hide $95,000 in salary. The main exceptions to this rule of male nastiness are likely to be either men like Joe Almeida, who are left-wing and at least vaguely "ethnic" or, as an alternative, those guys fortunate enough to have some redeeming disability. We were allowed, after a while, to come to like the tetchy dad of hyperactive Simon, but only after we discovered that the lucky fellow was blind.

Hyperactive Simon? Oh, he was an artistically gifted ten-year-old, who ran around the center at great speed and painted murals. Simon was also the subject of a sub-plot about Ritalin-doping by our schools system. To be fair, that was a refreshing subject for this show to take on, but its impact was somewhat diluted by the humiliation of Elvis. Elvis is a smart kid, and finds his English teacher hopelessly inadequate. We are told that he should not complain. In a way that bears some resemblance to the treatment of Simon, Elvis is coerced into shutting up. He comes to accept that the teacher has more important work to do than worry about the needs of her more clever pupils. An embarrassing public apology ensues, and the show has reinforced its anti-elitist credentials.

Hyperactive Simon was more fortunate. Gloria, the rich lady performing community service at Brothers Keepers, was able to pull strings with the lieutenant governor and get him placed in a school for the gifted. However, this is not a show that likes the wealthy. Gloria is a caricature plutocrat straight out of the pages of Trotsky, a domineering, insensitive woman with no practical skills. Her one good deed is quickly canceled out by her sneering refusal to have anything to do with the center once her sentence has concluded. As she leaves, an angry Joe Almeida is quoting Malcolm X.

Well, we should not be surprised. Ms. Masterson is one of these actresses who like to see themselves as "activists." She has been quoted as saying that there is a political agenda to the series.

Indeed there is, but does it have to be quite so dull?

The Earth Is Round!

National Review Online, March 1, 2001

He was a liberal hero once, a brilliant policy wonk at the pinnacle of government. He was their martyr too, a victim of a vast right-wing conspiracy, the target of a vicious congressional witch hunt. In the end, he had to admit to perjury, but that was a petty matter, a trumped-up technicality designed only to save a vindictive prosecutor's face. Now, at long last, liberal opinion is changing. There is new evidence that their hero was flawed after all, that he may indeed have been the crook that the Right always said he was. One by one, former defenders are beginning to change sides and admit the truth: Alger Hiss was guilty. Yes, Alger Hiss. Did you think that I meant anyone else?

The latest condemnation of the treacherous Mr. Hiss came, rather surprisingly, in the usually predictably liberal TV show, The West Wing. Last night's episode featured a sub-plot in which Donna, one of West Wing's more irritating staffers (we have been waiting for her to start an affair with her boss, the sanctimonious Josh Lyman, for far too long) is approached by an old friend, Stephanie. Stephanie wants a presidential pardon for her grandfather. Her grandfather, a billionaire commodities trader, has been on the run from justice for the best part of two decades, and is accused of having traded with enemies of the United States. Actually, I made that up, no one would ever believe that that sort of person would ever be eligible for a pardon.

No, Stephanie's grandfather, Daniel, was something else. He had been a high government official in the 1940s accused of spying for the Soviets. The espionage was never proven, but Daniel Galt was convicted of perjury. He served six months, and died some years later, still proclaiming his innocence. He is, of course, the show's proxy for Alger Hiss. The reason that Stephanie wants the pardon is that her father (Daniel Galt's son) is now near his deathbed. A pardon would be a farewell gift to the dying man.

Donna puts Stephanie in touch with Sam Seaborn (played by Rob Lowe), the White House's deputy communications director, an always entertaining figure who is part George Stephanopoulos, part Melrose Place. Sam is having an emotional crisis, but agrees to help. Some work he had done while at Princeton supported the case for Galt's innocence.

To move the pardon forward, Sam calls the First Lady's brothers, followed by the president's half-brother and a number of Democratic fundraisers. No, I made that up too. This West Wing has some sense of propriety. Sam goes through more normal channels. He shows up at the FBI to give them a heads up about a possible pardon. The meeting goes badly, the FBI man is not enthusiastic, and it concludes with a rant from Sam making the case for Galt. Anyone who has followed the Alger Hiss saga in the pages of the New York Times will be familiar with the arguments (never proven, unreliable witnesses, post-Soviet exoneration, anti-Communist hysteria, madman prosecutor and so on).

So far, so predictable, but then there is a surprise. Sam is summoned in by the national-security adviser. She hands him what is, in effect, the fictional equivalent of the Venona intercepts. As everyone should know, (but too many still do not) these intercepted (and now declassified) Soviet signals prove conclusively that Hiss was, indeed, in Stalin's pay. Their fictional equivalents do the same for Daniel Galt. The liberal martyr, Sam discovers, was guilty after all. Galt was a Communist spy. Sam decides to proceed no further with the pardon. Unfortunately, after a tense discussion with Donna, it is decided not to explain the truth to the traitor's dying son. They blame the lack of a pardon on bureaucratic delays. Daniel Galt will be allowed to get away with one last deception.

But this is to quibble. In showbiz terms, the unmasking of the treacherous Galt/Hiss was real progress. A prime-time liberal TV show was essentially admitting that Whittaker Chambers was right. Hiss was a spy, a liar, and a friend of the Gulag. This guest of honor at so many liberal soirees was revealed as nothing more than an accomplice of mass murder, a glorified Jeffrey Dahmer with a tweed jacket, clean hands, and a dirty ideology. Of course, this truth was obvious years ago, but even if the moment was long overdue, it was good to hear it in a ratings-topping Hollywood show.

And this trend is set to continue. Next week, apparently, Sam Seaborn will discover that the Earth is not flat.