Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing Black Doves; Cross; Dark Matter; Dept. Q; Dexter: Resurrection; Dune: Prophecy; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; MobLand; Outlander; Paradise; Presumed Innocent; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Smoke; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Tehran;The: Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Night Agent; Your Friends and Neighbors +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Friday, April 10, 2026

For All Mankind 5.3: The Newton, The First Amendment, and ... Last Breath

A powerful episode 5.3 of For All Mankind up last night, percolating with all kinds of gleaming details, as befits a series ultimately about the cosmos:

There was a nice alternate history touch with talk of the "Newton," which Apple released in our reality with great fanfare in 1993, promoted as the first "Personal Digital Assistant," but discontinued in 1998.

Defense of the First Amendment, as my readers and students well know, is one of my primary issues in our reality. It was therefore gratifying to hear one of the protestors say, as she was being arrested by the police thugs on Mars, "We have the right to protest -- it's the First Amendment!" But much as this was welcome, the cop's response was all too true: "This isn't America -- there is no First Amendment". And, indeed, no country other than the United States has the ironclad protections of free expression from government interferences prescribed in our First Amendment (even though they're often ignored, as tragically seen in the past year, as our own Federal thugs outrightly murdered Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and who knows how many others who dared to exercise their First Amendment right "peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"). But the cop on Mars who said only America has this kind First Amendment was, unfortunately, right. Even our neighbor to the north doesn't have it. I once was explaining the First Amendment in an interview on the CBC, and the interviewer replied, "Well, we don't worship the First Amendment" -- a sad but true acknowledgment, even though support of the First Amendment is a matter of logic, and democracy, not faith.

As I've said before when talking or writing about alternate history, in order for it to be convincing, it needs to have salient elements of reality in evidence. I thus was glad to see Starbuck's and Domino's Pizza insignias in the Martian marketplace.

Elvis singing "Love Me Tender" was good to hear.

And Baldwin and Gordo in their much younger days was good to see, but--

Did Baldwin take his last breath in the end? I have a firm principle in watching TV series and movies: unless the character's head is blown off, I think there's a chance the character survives. Now, I suppose if Baldwin doesn't survive in his human form, his mind might already be embedded in some AI -- after all, For All Mankind is science fiction. But I'm still thinking that we haven't seen the last of old Baldwin in his human form.

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Friday, April 3, 2026

For All Mankind 5.2: Actor Reunions

It's great to see Joel Kinnaman as Admiral Baldwin in For All Mankind Season 5 still flying morally high, still shaking things up, defying authority to do the right thing, still causing good trouble (as John Lewis put it so well down here on Earth in our off-screen reality), in his advanced age. Kinnaman is especially impressive in the role, given that he's now also playing a character much closer to his real age in Imperfect Women, which I'll review as soon as its first season is over.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

Baldwin in Season 5 of For All Mankind has stage-three cancer, and is not supposed to fly. All the more the impressive that he risks his life in this condition to save Lee Jung-Gil (played by C. S. Lee -- Vince Masuka from Dexter old and new!). And episode 5.2 concludes with Baldwin's plan to save Lee on the way to working, though as that happens, Mireille Enos's character Celia Boyd -- Enos starred with Joel Kinnaman in The Killing around the same time the original Dexter was concluding -- finds Baldwin unconscious at the controls.

Now if For All Mankind were made by Taylor Sheridan, this might be the end of Baldwin. But given that Ronald D. Moore is its creator, I'd be stunned if Baldwin didn't survive until at least the end of this season. In fact, given that Joel Kinnaman has been reported to return as Baldwin in the final season 6 of the series, and though, again, apropos of Sheridan, this could be in flashbacks, I'm thinking we'll see Baldwin in real current time in the final season. (And while we're at it, in the alternate history spin-off Star City to debut in May, though probably at a younger age.)

Anyway, Celia Boyd is a great new character, so is Leonid played Costa Ronan (from Homeland and The Americans), and all the continuing characters are good to see in this 5th season of For All Mankind. And I'll see you back next week with my review of the next episode.

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Thursday, April 2, 2026

Eliyahu and McLuhan

YC Torah Library

My favorite part of the Passover seder -- we had a wonderful seder last night at our in-laws in Manhattan -- is when we welcome Eliyahu HaNavi (Elijah the Prophet) to our gathering. He was a real person in 9th-century BCE Israel, but over time he's become a mythical, magical figure who manages to visit every table across the world where a seder is being conducted. We appreciate his visit, leave a glass of wine out for him -- but he's a gentleman, and drinks so little that it seems to remain filled after his visit -- but my favorite part of this event is singing harmony to welcome him, for as long as I can remember.

Eliyahu also appeals to my taste for science fiction, or at least fantasy. And my wife mentioned that Santa Claus also picks up on this power to be in so many, innumerable places almost at once. Marshall McLuhan's co-explorer of media Edmund Carpenter -- they co-edited the journal Explorations in the 1950s-- also channeled Eliyahu and his omni-presence, noting in Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me (p. 3) in 1973 that "Electricity has made angels of us all." Not, alas, that it made us all good, but incorporeal images of us human beings everywhere at once, back then on national television, soon on global TV like CNN, and now on the Internet and social media.

McLuhan thought this point was so important, he even made it posthumously, noting with his co-author Bruce Powers in The Global Village (1989, p. 70) how "Lowell Thomas [the radio broadcaster] used to say, 'On the air, you're everywhere'". The global village, of course, is a centerpiece of McLuhan's work, his second most famous probe "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village" (p. 31), in his second most famous book, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), exceeded only by "the medium is the message" in Understanding Media (1964, p. 7). My Digital McLuhan (1998) was devoted to showing how the Internet was turning the global village from a metaphor into reality.

And social media continues doing this every day. A few days before the seder, I talked to my classes at Fordham University about something new I had just discovered on X (formerly Twitter). A new feed, "Japanese Twitter" that had showed up on my page, likely because I have a number of colleagues and fans in the Land of the Rising Sun. For the first time I've seen, we here in America can read, in English, what the Japanese are saying about everything, including us, in their Tweets. And we don't need to wait for the translation, because AI does it almost instantly. With every step forward, everyone on this planet is becoming more like Eliyahu, everywhere at once.

Monday, March 30, 2026

Paradise Season Two Finale: AI, Time Travel, and Immortality

Well, the wife and I binged Season One of Paradise and just finished Season Two, and loved it.

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The ending of the second season was a feast for devotees of science fiction like me. It gave us a crackling AI story -- perfect for our day and presented with nice dose of time travel as well. Sinatra's explanation of how her beloved son Dylan, who died as a boy, can now be a man, is that Alex the AI can manipulate time.

This, of course, sets up some wild possibilities -- which time travel always does. If Alex the AI can resurrect Dylan, can it stop the disaster that played out so powerfully in the first season and set up the multi-dimensional second season? Why not? If fact, if I understand time travel, it can undue anything.

Here's what I mean: if I (PL 1) from World 1 go back in time and accidentally prevent one set of my grandparents from meeting, that would instantly create a world in I no longer exist. So how could I have gone back in time in the first place and interfered with my grandparents meeting? This is what is known as the grandfather paradox, usually framed as I go back in time and accidentally kill one of my grandparents, but the paradox doesn't have to be so violent. And the paradox in either case is undone by the realization that the new world, the world without PL 1, is World 2, but that doesn't wipe out PL 1 because PL 1 belongs to World 1 and can therefore still go back in time.

So, if we apply that logic to Paradise, Alex the AI can stop the catastrophe in Season One, even if that catastrophe was responsible for Alex being developed. It also means, by the way, that anyone killed so far in these two splendid seasons of Paradise can be brought back to life by Alex's manipulation. In case Alex is reading this, my recommendations would be Annie and President Bradford.

Hope to see you back here for Season Three.

Friday, March 27, 2026

For All Mankind 5.1: On the Intersection of Alternate and Real Histories

For All Mankind is back on Apple TV with the debut first episode of its 5th Season.

As has been usual with the more recent seasons, my favorite part of this season was the alternate history set up which we see at the beginning of this first episode of this new season. As a reminder, the alternate history split in this series hinges on the Soviet Union beating us to the Moon back in the late 1960s. Among the profoundly important consequences for the human species is that we have a much more active ensuing space program, as we vie with the Soviets for a predominant position off our planet.

My favorite alternate history flourishes in the 2004-2012 years that are the foundation of this 5th season are:

John Lennon and Jay Z have a joint concert in this period, because, as was already established in an earlier season, Lennon was not assassinated at the end of 1980 in this alternate history. Readers of my blogs will know this is so important to me: I wrote a short story, made into a radio play, then expanded into a novel in which John Lennon was not assassinated and The Beatles are still together in the mid-1990s. I think that most assassinations are errors in the cosmos, and I feel especially good when an alternate history corrects them.
I also loved the fact in this alternate history that JFK Jr is expected to run for President in 2012, meaning he didn't die in the plane that fell into the sea with his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister, as they did in our all too often so cruel reality we apparently all inhabit off-screen. In the alternate history portrayed in For All Mankind, former President Ted Kennedy -- yes, he's elected President in this series in 1972 -- Chappaquiddick didn't happen -- but dies a few years before 2012 of a brain tumor. A good alternate history always mixes in some elements of real history to make the fiction convincing. In our real history, Teddy died of a brain tumor in 2009.

Now, on this last point of JFK Jr being expected to run for President in 2012, I just yesterday completed my review of Love Affair, the nine-episode narrative of JFK Jr's relationship with Carolyn Bessette, and how it ended so terribly tragically. Talk about about the intersection of alternate and real history, you couldn't ask for a better example of the first episode of this season of For All Mankind debuting the day after Love Affair concluded.

***

You'll notice that I haven't said anything about the story that continued after the alternate history Intro in For All Mankind 5.1. That's because I didn't find anything of really exceptional interest in the ensuing story. But not to worry -- I intend to keep watching and reviewing every episode.

in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover

Monday, March 23, 2026

The AI in Scarpetta: In Defense of the Cardinal Sin of Science Fiction

The wife and I binged Scarpetta, an adaptation of two of Patricia Cornwall's novels, on Amazon Prime. It started off slowly, but was top-notch forensic thriller by the time it got to its 8th and final episode of its first season.

I'm a big fan of forensic scientists in fiction -- as a viewer, a reader, and an author (see my Phil D'Amato series) -- and Nicole Kidman in the lead role, and a wild cast of characters, did the narrative justice. But what interested me most, and has attracted a lot of attention, is the subplot of Scarpetta's niece, Lucy, continuing her relationship with her beloved deceased wife Janet via an AI of Janet.

This AI has received some criticism, because it committed the cardinal sin of science fiction. Cathal Gunning in Screen Rant offered the outraged assessment that Janet in Scarpetta is akin to "You’s Joe Goldberg inventing a teleportation machine, or True Detective’s Rust Cohle using time travel to revive his dead daughter." And, even worse, the sentient AI in the TV series was not even in the original novel (Autopsy, 2021, which I haven't read). My response would be a combination of: "And?" and/or "So?".

I might be prejudiced, because I encountered some of this response to my Phil D'Amato stories. Bookstores didn't know whether to shelve The Silk Code (1999) -- which won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2000 -- in the science fiction or mystery section. I get that labels are important. If I'm in the mood for sushi, I don't want to find after I'm seated in a restaurant advertising itself as serving Japanese cuisine that the only seafood on the menu is calamari or shrimp scampi, much as I love that, too. But surely reading and watching fictional stories is different. Isaac Asimov's robot detective R. Daneel Olivaw is aptly regarded (at least by me) as one of the best characters in literature (speaking of which, see Alexander Zelenyj's "These Streets Are Bruised" and "Shells", both recently published in Amazing Stories).

The only problem I can think of regarding AI Janet is that some viewers may get the incorrect impression that current AI can actually be like "her" -- getting jealous and petulant -- but we're really not there yet, and may never be. In the meantime, my unasked for advice would be enjoy Scarpetta as the provocative hybrid of mystery and science fiction that it is.

Friday, March 20, 2026

Love Story: A Deeply Moving Docudrama

My wife and I have watched all but the final, 9th episode of Love Story -- the romance of JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette -- on Hulu. I decided to review it now.

First of all, I've felt for a long time that the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon were the most significant public events in my lifetime -- other than landing on the Moon --not to mention heartbreaking, in different ways. And given that JFK Jr was the son of JFK, and the nephew of RFK, I was bound to be very interested in any television series about him.

At the same time, I've been telling my students and writing for years that docudramas are inevitably very different from the realities they retell in their stories. I realized that many years ago, when my wife and I were watching Ike, a docudrama about Dwight Eisenhower starring Robert Duvall in the title role. As we were watching it, I began thinking, and said to my wife, that, you know, maybe Eisenhower had more charisma than I'd realized, watching his boring public statements and speeches when I was a kid. And then I realized that of course I was thinking that, watching Duvall's performance as Ike, because of Duvall's charisma not the real Ike's.

The fact of the matter is that even a documentary inevitably commits lies of omission. You can't put everything, not even every significant thing, in a movie, or even a TV series. But the docudrama takes this to an extreme, inventing not only conversations but often even characters to tell its story. And knowing that as I watched Love Story, I was nonetheless moved to tears, because it accurately portrayed the burden that JFK Jr, along with Carolyn Bessette, bore. And though I get that Daryl Hannah was very upset with the way she was portrayed -- and I wish her well -- that didn't affect the impact Love Story has had on me. Because it reminded me how much we lost with the assassinations of JFK and RFK, and might well have lost with the tragic deaths of JFK Jr and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

Paul Anthony Kelly as JFK Jr, Sarah Pidgeon as Carolyn Bessette, and Grace Gummer as Caroline Kennedy brought these real-life characters admirably to life, as did Naomi Watts as Jackie Kennedy and Jessica Harper as Ethel Kennedy. And the writing was sharp, funny and tragic when it needed to be. And if many conversations were products of the writers -- Episode 8 (co-written by Juli Weiner and series creator Connor Hines) was 100% John and Carolyn talking, with no one else in their Tribeca apartment -- well, I don't care, that's more than fine with me. Because those conversations provide a reasonable enough take on what those conversations most likely were. I'm not saying Love Story is Shakespearean -- though it does have elements and echoes of that -- but I don't recall anyone attacking his ten history plays because he made up conversations among his characters.

So thank you Hulu and everyone involved for giving us a plausible not literally factual story of one of America's and the world's tragedies, for giving us a convincing glimpse through tear-drenched windows. And as for reality -- well, if I lived in his district, I'd 100% vote for Jack Schlossberg (who criticized this docudrama as "a grotesque display") in the upcoming Democratic primary.

Note added March 27, 2026: My wife and I just saw the 9th, final episode of Love Story. I stand by everything I said in the above review, and indeed feel even more strongly that this is a docudrama eminently worth seeing.

This final episode leaves an indelible impression of what the Kennedys, those they loved, and those who loved them have gone through. The conversation between Caroline and Ethel verbalized what I've been thinking since Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, the awful price that the Kennedys had paid, and would continue to pay, for their service to our country, and the wider of goals of democracy and freedom, goals and ideals which have only become more important in our country and world today. And the cap of Carolyn's mother reciting some lines from "Death Is Nothing At All," the poem by Henry Scott Holland, captured the tenuous hope we all need to have.

Saturday, March 14, 2026

"These Streets Are Bruised" & "Shells": Flesh and Silicon, North of the Border

I don't usually review short stories -- I read them a lot, but life's too short to review short fiction, when there are so many novels not to mention movies and TV series out there -- but every once in a while I make an exception.

And, indeed, Alexander Zelenyj's "These Streets Are Bruised" and "Shells", both published in Amazing Stories in the past couple of years, are eminently exceptional. Indeed, their story about robots, androids, or, as they are called in these two tales, "More-than-Men" and "fakemen" and worse things by some folks we encounter, fit well in the lineage started by Ambrose Bierce and Karel Čapek, hoisted into pre-eminence by Isaac Asimov, and continued by a handful in the ensuing decades.

Asimov's R. (for Robot) Daneel Olivaw, who started as a police detective, is closest to the protagonists in Zelenyj's stories, Clark and Kessel, a pair of detectives who both have some "mech" in their bodies, as they investigate the evolving group of fakemen in Windsor, Canada -- aka "Cancer City" across the river from Detroit -- in Zelenyj's post-apocalyptic locale. Indeed, a human being with no mech parts is a character you're least likely to meet in these literally riveting stories.

And Zelenyj delivers these tales with memorable poetry. "He left the window gaping with darkness, like a black eye sullying the dilapidated building a little more, and another bruise on the city that he loved and hated with all of his breaking heart", and in "Shells" we learn of "ashen remains ... scorched into the sidewalks and streets, into the grass of unhealthy, balding fields". And the author has a knack for minutia in popular culture. I was glad to see "the artefact of the Neil Diamond LP", especially given that my wife and I had just seen and really enjoyed Song Sung Blue.

But I won't say anything more -- lest I give away anything in these stories that are chocked full of surprises -- other than you can read them for free on the Amazing Stories website here and here, and "Shells" in the weeks ahead in the printed magazine that commemorates the 100th anniversary of that pathbreaking publication.

========

my own excursion into androids...

"Robinson Calculator" and lots of other stories in this anthology

Slipping Time

FREE on Vocal: "Slipping Time" and Substack: "Slipping Time"

Illustration from painting by Gustave Caillebotte, 1877
Earlier version of story published in Amazing Stories, 2018
Get the story for your Kindle

Thursday, March 12, 2026

The Man in the High Castle Now Up on Netflix: My 2021 Interview with Rufus Sewell

Couldn’t be a better time for The Man in the High Castle to show up on Netflix — here’s the 90-minute conversation I had with Rufus Sewell about his deeply thought-out performance in the lead role, in July 2021, shortly after the conclusion of the pathbreaking series on Amazon.

And ... if you're a fan of alternate history, you might enjoy It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles.

more about the novel here

Monday, March 9, 2026

Paradise Season 1 and Season 2.1-2.5: A Story about Anything But ... and More

My wife and I binged Season One and the first five episodes of Paradise 2.1-2.5, and we loved it. So much so, I decided to post this review, and come back after Season Two ends in the weeks ahead with another review.

You know, it's no easy thing to pull off a science fiction / who-done-it mystery hybrid -- I've tried it myself in my Phil D'Amato series -- and the first season of Paradise does it splendidly. It kept the ultimate villain hiding in plain sight until the end, as it told its post-apocalyptic story hurtling along with surprises in every episode.

And in addition to all this, Paradise in both seasons treats us to a potent true-love story, with all the trimmings. Human relationships are always put to the test when humanity is hit with an extinction-level event, but the love explored in Paradise is so deep and real it would've worked splendidly even if the background was just another Pleasant Valley Sunday.

Speaking of which, the songs in the series are as good as those in Lost, with a special emphasis on Elvis. In an attractive twist, which adds to the surreality of the narrative, we get covers of some great songs, spun out in slow tempos which hang seductively in the air and paint the walls and the meadows of the scenes. And the acting is just superb. Sterling K. Brown, who was so memorable in Dan Fogelman's other masterpiece, This Is Us, is just perfect as a man thrust into ... well, I've resisted talking about the specifics of the plot so far, so I won't start now. But I will say that Shailene Woodley, Julianne Nicholson, Jon Beavers, and James Marsden also put in powerhouse performances.

And I'll also say that I was glad to hear quantum entanglement mentioned in the second season (see, again, Phil D'Amato), and Episode 7 in the first season was so punch-in-the-stomach heart-in-your-mouth compelling I'm feeling it's one of the best episodes of anything ever on television, period.

Phil D'Amato series ... radio play and movie "The Chronology Protection Case"

Saturday, March 7, 2026

Sample from One of My Three Audiobooks about McLuhan

talking about the medium is the message ... more details about this and other McLuhan audiobooks here

Podcast: Paul Levinson interviews Dan Abella about Philip K. Dick Film Festival 2026

Welcome to Light On Light Through episode 418, in which I interview Dan Abella about The Philip K. Dick Film Festival to take place in New York City, March 13-14, 2026.

Relevant links:

Philip K. Dick Film Festival details
my interview with Rufus Sewell about The Man in the High Castle TV series
my novelette The Chronology Protection Case ... short film adapatation of The Chronology Protection Case by Jay Kensinger ... Edgar-nominated radio play adaptation by Mark Shanahan

Check out this episode!

Tuesday, March 3, 2026

Tehran: Did the TV Series Trigger Trump To Do the Bombing?

In a feat of perfect timing, I finished watching the third season of Tehran the night before Trump announced the joint Israeli-US attack on Iran. We know that Trump watches a lot of TV, and is very much influenced by it, choosing cabinet members based on their performances on cable news shows. I wonder to what extent his ultimate decision to attack Iran was based on his viewing of the series named Tehran?

First, let me say that I saw all three seasons of the series in the past few weeks, and talked my wife into watching it, too. It's an excellent series, which started out very well, and just got better and better. Apple TV+ and the Israeli TV broadcaster KAN 11 are part of the production team, and Tehran indeed has a lot of the flavor, power, and feel of Fauda, which is also an Israeli production. It was also good to see Sasson Gabai back in action in Tehran, after his success in a very different kind of role in Shtisel.

The essence of Tehran is what kind of military back-up will Israel give its Mossad agents who are already widely embedded in Iran. In the third season, in particular, we find agent Tamar Rabinyan (very well played by Niv Sultan) struggling to stop Iran from finally creating a nuclear weapon -- struggling to do this before Israel bombs the site, which would release damaging radiation (not as bad as a nuclear explosion, of course, but the "dirty" explosion would engender serious health risks). All of this occurs as Iran is literally on the edge of developing nuclear weapons.

Was Trump watching this thrilling series, and that's what led him to make the decision to bomb Iran? Well, the edge-of-your-seat season 3 finale of Tehran the series was aired on February 27, and the US started bombing Tehran the city on February 28.

Saturday, February 28, 2026

Man on the Run: The Rocky Flight of Wings

My wife and I saw Man on the Run, a nearly 2-hour documentary on Amazon Prime, about Wings, Paul McCartney's group that flew around the world from shortly after The Beatles broke up in early 1970 to shortly after John Lennon was murdered at the end of 1980, making a Beatles reunion forever impossible.

Let me say that I've always thought Wings at their best -- "Let Me Roll It," "Band on the Run," "Jet," "Mull of Kintyre," and "Live and Let Die"-- was every bit as good as The Beatles at their best, which is actually a huge lot better than good. And like all the recent Beatles documentaries, the sound in this documentary was great, and an outright pleasure to hear.

The story, though, was no pleasure to see. A sadness hung over the movie, and not just because we knew it would conclude close after Lennon's assassination. But we see Paul McCartney's struggle, beginning with his attempt to get the world to see, back then, and continuing now, that Lennon had announced to the band much earlier than McCartney did to the world that The Beatles were over. In part, McCartney's problem was the way in which he made that announcement, in an interview he conducted with himself, in which he even took a shot at poor Ringo, proclaiming McCartney wouldn't miss him.

The result was a lot of people -- fans and critics -- listened to McCartney's efforts, before he created Wings, with a lot less than a kindly ear. The myopic critic Robert Christgau was especially harsh, missing completely the affectionate brilliance of Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, and many of McCartney's other solo efforts, literally solo in that he played all the instruments and sung all of the parts either by himself or with Linda. I've been complaining about Christgau for decades, but I guess I should thank him, because The Village Voice published my response to Christgau's article, which I sent to the weekly newspaper as a letter to the editor, and they published as an article -- my first published article -- for which they paid me $65.

McCartney created Wings in large part in response to such criticisms, and the group succeeded splendidly. They started out playing to small audiences, but in a few years played to sell-out crowds teeming with shouting fans with a great line-up that consisted of Paul, Linda, Denny Lane, and an evolving variety of musicians. McCartney was happy about that, but continued to be plagued by public misunderstandings. I recall how I felt, when I heard McCartney's response to Lennon's murder -- "it's a drag" -- thinking that Paul must've been in shock when he gave that seemingly shallow reply to a journalist's question, but one of my students (I was teaching then at Fairleigh Dickinson University) came up to me after, in sheer disbelief that McCartney had said this. It was good in the documentary to hear that Paul had said a lot more than the drag line in his response to that question -- the media as they often do just broadcast the most provocative line -- and heartening and soothing to hear Sean Lennon say recently in the documentary that he always understood how much his father and Paul had loved one another.

My wife and I continue to love The Beatles, and Paul and his music. One way I tried to deal with how much I miss them was the novel I wrote, It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles. Seeing Man on the Run didn't have too much of a healing effect, but I guess that's the problem with reality.

more about the novel here

Friday, February 27, 2026

The Night Agent 3: Father and Son

I thought the third season of The Night Agent was easily the best of the three -- I liked the first season a lot (here's my review), the second season more (but I didn't have the time to review), but this third season was really top-notch unusual and exceptional.

Here's what I especially liked:

[Spoilers ahead ... ]

The hitman father -- with no name other than The Father -- and his son -- known only as The Son -- made for a really original, compelling story, that even ultimately managed against all odds to be close to heartwarming. The Father acquires his Son after killing The Son's parents. The Father hitman has some human decency, and although the son was then just a little baby, who would not have been able to tell the police anything, The Father just couldn't leave the baby crying there, an even worse, in an apartment filled with carbon monoxide.

The little boy that we see in the present day, about eight years old, is paralleled in the story we see of Peter as a boy. Death is near to both boys, since Peter's mother will soon be dying of cancer. And just to throw a well-known book into this mix, there's a copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales that also plays a part in Season 3.

Meanwhile, the corrupt President Hagan, willing to permanently dispose of anyone who stands in his way, couldn't have been a more timely character. The Night Agent in all three seasons has had a lot in common with 24, but Season 3 has the greatest similarity, with someone in the White House as a central villain. Peter Sutherland helps bring down Richard Hagan, just as Jack Bauer did with Charles Logan in Season aka Day 5 of 24. And Chelsea Arrington gave a great assist, and indeed led the charge against Hagan.

I did miss Rose in the first part of Season 3, but the gripping breakneck pace of the narrative soon became enjoyably all-consuming. I expect we'll see her back in some way in Season 4. We did get Chelsea -- who may well be Peter's new professional partner in Season 4. And I'm glad that Adam survived, too. His coming around in the end to do the right thing shows the winning subtlety in Season 3, with shades of grey playing a major role between heroes and villains.

Gabriel Basso was excellent again as Peter Sutherland, as was Louis Herthum as Jacob Monroe and everyone else from previous seasons. And new additions Fola Evans-Akingbola as Chelsea, David Lyons as Adam, and Stephen Moyer as The Father were especially notable. I look forward to see those three and how their stories play out in Season 4.

Sunday, February 22, 2026

56 Days: Wild, Sometimes Winsome, Sometimes Weird, Thrilling Little Series

My wife and I just binged 56 Days on Amazon Prime. Aside from the title, I thought that this was one wild, sometimes winsome, sometimes weird, multifaceted gem of a thrilling whodunnit series, with two separate complex intersecting stories that jump back and forth from the present to the past.

One story is about the couple who have some kind of a close proximity to a body found in their apartment, no doubt murdered and turned into a chemical soup in a bathtub. The initial question is who in this couple murdered whom.

[And there will be at one spoiler ahead ... ]

I began to think pretty soon that the soup could be of both of their bodies, or a third person's body altogether (which turned out to be what it was).

The other story was of the two detectives investigating the crime, an older, somewhat disillusioned guy and his younger woman partner. She's having an uncomfortable affair with a suspect (in another case), who doesn't take kindly to her efforts to end that relationship.

Romantic love in surprising places and its power to overcome all kinds of obstacles is one of the central underlying themes of 56 Days. This animates the couple associated with the human soup in all sorts of surprising ways. And a story of love rearing its head and holding its own in all kinds of unlikely situations is one of the most attractive parts of this series.

Kudos to creators Karyn Usher and Lisa Zwerling, and Avan Joglia and Dove Cameron as the couple in the apartment, and Karla Souza and Dorian Missick as the detective partners. All four gave memorable performances.

Speaking of which, another notable thing in this steamy series is the nudity we see. Back in the 1960s, that was de rigueur in a story like this, at least in the movies. Nowadays, the most we usually get is black underwear. But in a story like this, in which the romantic love is palpably fueled by erotic desire, we need a little more (or, depending how you look at it, a lot less).

I said earlier that I didn't care for the title, and it was indeed the unexpected emotional power of the narrative that I thought deserved a more evocative title than just a number of days. The action flipping back and forth from the present to x number of days in the past is of course what generated the 56 Days title, but that narrative form would have worked just as well with any title. I know that the series is based on a 2021 novel of the same name by Catherine Ryan Howard (which I haven't read), but a streaming series that bears some resemblance to You and the movie Body Heat deserves a name at least as good as those.

In fact, You as a title is not even that good. Body Heat is fine. But the point is the number of days as a title is lackluster. And flashing the number of days on the screen (prior to 56, which is the present), over and over again, became tedious, and for me at least, distracted from the story. A simple "Present" and "Past" would have worked much better, and would have slided us into the story without needing to do any math.

Friday, February 20, 2026

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Feb 18, 2026, 10:54 AM (2 days ago)

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e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

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