Countdown: A Touch of 24 and More

My wife and I saw the first three episodes of Countdown on Amazon Prime last night -- the debut of the 13-episode series, which will proceed one-by-one until it concludes in September -- and we liked it a lot.

It reminded me in some ways of 24 -- a very good thing, because we were devoted fans, and I put the best of 24 in the Top 10 of all-time best television series.  I mean, there's no Jack Bauer, and no ticking clock, and each hour-long episode is not an hour of the same day unfolding in the story, but it is called Countdown, it does say "every second counts" in the above poster, and the good guys are struggling to prevent a terrorist attack in Los Angeles that would take as many lives as September 11th did in New York City.

[And there are some slight spoilers ahead...]

And what Countdown also has in common with 24 is some of the good guys, a task-force taken from several Federal agencies, get killed in the ongoing narrative.

And Countdown has something which I don't recall seeing in 24:  Mark Meacham (well-played by Jensen Ackles) has a glioblastoma tumor in his brain which will drastically shorten his life.  His doctor advises him to head off to some tropical isle to enjoy what's left of his life, but Meachum would rather spend his remaining time bringing down these bad guys.  This makes him a unique agent, who can be fearless to the max in fighting human monsters because he has literally almost nothing to lose.  (Incurable optimist that I am, I'm nonetheless hoping that he gets some new immunotherapy, and lives on beyond the end of this season -- or, if renewed, which I hope does happen, beyond the end of the series.)

I also have to say that it does my heart and soul good to see Federal agents doing what we need and want them to do -- fighting terrorists and true enemies in this country and keeping us safe -- rather than pulling good and decent people off the street because they weren't born in this country, or attacking a US Senator because he dared to pose a question to the Secretary of Homeland Security while she was talking in Los Angeles.  In other words, I'm glad to see a narrative like Countdown because I'm sad, to say the least, about what's really happening in our country.

See also Countdown Season One Finale

Senator Alex Padilla vs. the American Gestapo

  

The above is the complete extant video of what happened to US Senator Alex Padilla the other day in California, the state he represents.  We don't see what happened before this, but the video begins with Sen. Padilla being pushed by some kind of Federal agent.  Padilla tells his assaulter who he is -- "Senator Padilla" -- and his assaulter's response, joined by other assasulters, is to wrestle the Senator to the ground.

I use the word "assaulter" because assault is defined as any offensive or unwanted touching of the body.  Assault is a crime, and it doesn't matter whether the assault is done by whatever kind of Federal agent.  The job of any kind of police is to apprehend criminals, and stop crimes from happening if the crime has not already occurred.   Their job is manifestly not to assault a US Senator, or any other person exercising their Constitutional rights --  in Senator Padilla's case, the right to free speech guaranteed in the First Amendment.

And assault, unfortunately, is not the worst crime that can be committed.  In 1970, four unarmed protestors at Kent State University were shot dead by National Guardsmen sent there by the governor of Ohio.  None of those murderers were ever brought to justice.

I call them, and their current incarnations, Gestapo, because that's what this flagrant disregard of rights, and appliance of violence to crush those rights, ultimately leads to.  Whether it's a US Senator pushed to the floor and handcuffed, or Marines facing down peaceful protestors in Los Angeles today, these assaults on our democracy need to stop.  And their perpetrators, and the people who put them in that place, need to be brought before a court of law.

Law enforcement needs to stay focused on the prevention and solving of real crimes, like the assassination of Democratic State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in Minnesota early today.

***

And here's another video of Sen. Padilla at Secretary Noem's event*. That video shows that Padilla was a little rude, for asking a question (in a conversational tone of voice -- certainly not shouting) while Noem was talking. Certainly not grounds for being forcibly removed from the event. Had I been in Secretary Noem's place, I would have answered the question and invited the Senator up to join me on the stage.

*Thanks Frank Tomasulo for sending me this URL for the two videos in this post.

The Better Sister: A Better Who Dunnit

My wife and I binged The Better Sister on Amazon Prime the past few nights, and we really enjoyed it. Here's why:

• Top-notch cast:  I mean, you can't go wrong with Jessica Biel (a sister) and Kim Dickens (a police detective).  And Elizabeth Banks (Love and Mercy!) as the other sister was superb.  (She was also in an hilarious episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm -- actually all its episodes are.) It was great to see Gloria Reuben (playing a lawyer) back on the screen, and Michael Harney (NYPD Blue!) playing Doorman Arty.  Also Corey Stoll and Matthew Modine with less time on the screen, were memorable too.
• The story was pretty strong, too.  I did guess who did the killing pretty early on.  But that's just me, and it was fun to see the story unfold.
• The title itself was good, because it invites you to think about who the better sister is, as the plot unfolds.
• It takes place mostly in New York -- in both the Hamptons and NYC -- always a plus with me.
• It's a summer story, with lots of swimming, that plays all kinds of roles.
• And The Better Sister moves quickly, in a stylish way that avoids swagger. 

All of this based on a 2019 single novel by Alafair Burke, herself the daughter of crime novelist James Lee Burke, and she's also a professor of law at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY (where I used to teach before coming to Fordham) a little over an hour west of the Hamptons.

Will there be a second season?  No current plans for one, but I certainly hope there is one.

Brian Wilson: What He and His Music Mean to Me

I grew up listening to rock 'n' roll, which was half doo-wop, and half Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and Elvis.  As the 1960s began to emerge, the Four Seasons in 1962 and the Beach Boys in 1963 carried on with a modernized, popified doo-wop sound.  The Beatles were closer than just around the next corner.  And that was the milieu in which I formed my first group, The Transits, slightly more old-fashioned than the Four Seasons and the Beach Boys, but covering their best songs.

The Transits sang at the YMHA on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a stone's throw from Yankee Stadium in early 1964.   "Dawn" and "Rag Doll" by the Four Seasons and "Surfer Girl" by the Beach Boys were at the top of the list of the songs we covered.  As I walked a girl home whom I'd met at the concert, I told her I was tired of being in a group that sang those kinds of songs -- I wanted to be in a group that sounded more like The Beatles.

The Four Seasons would never progress very far beyond their pop doo-wop origins.  But the Beach Boys under Brian Wilson's leadership sure did.  As is well known, The Beatles' Rubber Soul in 1965 inspired the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds in 1966 which in turn inspired The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967.  While The Beatles were recording and releasing Sgt. Pepper, the Beach Boys were doing the same with their Smiley Smile album featuring "Heroes and Villains" (also released as a single).  So the two groups were not only inspiring one another, they in effect were co-creating across the continents, a musical incarnation of Marshall McLuhan's global village, which he prophetically wrote about in The Gutenberg Galaxy back in 1962.

For a variety of reasons, however, "Heroes and Villains" didn't get the immediate acclaim it so eminently deserved.  It has been one of my all-time favorite recordings since the moment I first heard it, though I can't quite recall where that was.  The harmony in that recording -- like the harmony in the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B" adaptation on Pet Sounds -- is in the stratosphere, the ultimate evolution, at least as of now, of multi-dimensional doo-wop.

Brian Wilson did not get the adulation at first hearing that "Heroes and Villains" amply merited.  But I touted it everywhere I could.  My wife Tina and I were thrilled to hear Brian sing it in the Beach Boys reunion tour, at their performance in 2012 in White Plains, NY.  It was a sad night, not only because of course Dennis and Carl Wilson weren't there, but because WFUV disc jockey Pete Fornatale, who had been one of the champions of everything Beach Boys and Beatles on his Mixed Bag shows, had recently unexpectedly passed away.  (Come to think of it, I may have first heard "Heroes and Villains" on Pete's original "Mixed Bag" show on  WFUV back in the 1960s.   Pete, by the way, is the hero of my 2024 novel, It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles.)  But it was wonderful indeed to see and hear Brian in person.

I still think The Beatles are the best rock group to ever have written and recorded myriad forms of rock music.  Over the years, I've switched back and forth between the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones as to which is the second greatest rock group in history.  But I think I'm content now to leave it with both of them tied for second place, and every other great group vast caverns below them.

Thank you Brian Wilson, rest in peace.  Your "Heroes and Villains" will always be playing somewhere, and you are its hero.

MobLand: The Godfather of Streaming Television

Just saw the finale of what will almost certainly be the first season of a tour-de-force series about warring crime families on the other side of the pond, i.e., the UK.  MobLand has everything -- a powerful, unpredictable story bristling with what The Godfather and its sequels did so well in movies.  That would be a potent, explosive blend of violence and family dynamics that can make your head spin.

Here I'll talk about two ingredients that brought this kick-in-the-solar-plexus across: the music and the acting,

First, MobLand has one of the best theme songs I've heard in years:  "Starburster" by Fontaines D.C.  I mean, I'm no expert in hip hop, but I know "Starburster" has powerful elements of it, and the recording suits the story to be told in every episode to a tee, as well as being instantly unforgettable mind candy. 

And that's just for literally starters.  In the finale alone, we get major songs by Johnny Cash (sung twice) and The Rolling Stones.  Like in The Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas, and all immediately classic crime family dramas, the music of MobLand is at once avant garde and classic.  

Now let's get to the acting.  Pierce Brosnan gave an astonishing performance as Conrad Harrington, the anti-hero crime boss whose gang is at the center of the action.  This man played two characters who were suave to the max -- Remington Steele and James Bond -- and in MobLand he trashes those icons and goes vehemently in the opposite direction, cursing and screaming and giving loud and withering vent to his anger and his other moods with the best of 'em.   Meanwhile,  Helen Mirren, a world-class actress, is every bit as vicious and violent in her role as Maeve Harrington, Conrad's wife..  Neither of them are youngsters, but I wouldn't want to meet either of them in a dark alley.  Or a lit one, either, for that matter.

And alongside these veritable criminal forces of nature -- Emmy-worthy spectacular -- we have Tom Hardy's portrayal of Harry, the Harringtons fixer (a lot of "Har"s in that sentence).  He's calm, contemplative but deadly when he needs to be.  Like Brosnan and Mirren, Hardy is a world-class actor, great in just about everything he does, but yet to establish himself in a role as luminary as James Bond, Vito Corleone, or Michael Corleone.  But his performance in MobLand could move Hardy into Al Pacino territory.

The lesser-known actors in MobLand were excellent, too.  Paddy Considine (House of the Dragon) as one of Conrad and Maeve's sons, gives a heart-rending performance, as does Joanne Froggatt (Downton Abbey), for different reasons, as Harry's wife.   The truth is, there's not a weak performance in this powerhouse of a series.

Hey, I managed to review MobLand without even a hint of a spoiler.  I'm going to listen to some more Fontaines DC music now.

Dept. Q: Nordic Noir in Scotland

I've always been a big fan of Nordic Noir.  That might seem a bit unusual for a bigger lifelong fan of science fiction, as well as an author of science fiction novels and stories.   But the two genres are close cousins -- if detective mysteries are whodunnits, science fiction can be aptly read and seen as whatdunnits -- and some authors combined the two genres, as Isaac Asimov astutely did with his robot detective novels (I took a crack at that genre blend as well, with my Phil D'Amato stories and novels).

But Nordic Noir -- which can be geographically identified as stories that take place in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland -- has a special zing, a platter of gruesome crimes, investigated by slightly cracked but brilliant detectives who also manage to have a wicked sense of humor.  Dept Q., which takes place in Scotland, has all of these characteristics in gleaming pitch black spades.

The TV series, which debuted on Netflix at the end of May, is based on a series of novels by the Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen.  My wife and I binged the nine episodes over several evenings concluding last night.  (Is watching nine episodes over several nights rather than in one sitting aptly termed "binging"?  You tell me. I will say thanks Netflix for putting all episodes up at once, which permits binging, whatever exactly that means.)

The transplantation to Scotland works great -- it is, after all, in the northern part of the British Isles, and many of the characters have Nordic names.  The cold case team that investigates the disappearance of Prosecutor Merritt Lingard is, as per Nordic Noir protocols, a group not of three misfits, but of deeply wounded, highly talented people.  DCI Carl Morck was nearly killed in a previous case that left one of his partners (James Hardy) unable to walk, and killed another. Akram Salim is a Syrian immigrant with a calm Sherlockian logic and demeanor and a harrowing past (one of my favorite characters now in any series).  And DC Rose Dickson is on desk duty at the beginning of the series, traumatized because she accidentally killed an elderly couple with her car.  See what I mean about deeply wounded?

And to make matters worse for our characters, but better for the series, they're actually embroiled in one way or another in at least three horrendous cases:  the disappearance of the prosecutor, the shooting that hit Morck (he's physically healed but psychologically struggling), and the case that Lingard tried and lost before she disappeared (in which a man who probably killed his wife was found not guilty).  And indeed there are all kinds of other murders that come to light as the story proceeds, propelled by gunfire, tempestuous family relationships, various kinds of romance, dreams, and a hyperbaric chamber.

The great story is served by memorable acting, with Matthew Goode as Morck, Alexej Manvelov as Salim, Leah Byrne as Dickson, Jamie Sives as Hardy, and Chloe Pirrie as Lingard.  And hats off to Scott Frank and Elisa Amoruso for inspired directing.  I give Dept. Q my highest recommendation and can't wait to see more.