The Plot Against America 1.1: Yet Another Alternate Nazi History, with Forshpeis

I find myself in the less than jubilant position of reviewing the third television science fiction series about Nazis - science fiction, loosely defined - in the past three days.  The first would be Hunters (my review here), the second Westworld (more, precisely it's season three coda; my review here), and now The Plot to Against America on HBO.  I'll leave it to you to explain why Nazis are so popular on American television these days.

The Plot hinges on Charles Lindbergh, who in real history was a non-interventionist and likely Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s, bur did fight against the Nazis and Japanese in the Second World War. In the television series, he beats FDR in the Presidential election of 1940, and (though I haven't read the 2004 novel by Philip Roth or seen more than the first episode of the series) presides over an America in which anti-semitism is rampant.

Philip Roth and Philip K. Dick are two very different kinds of brilliant writers, so don't expect any Man in the High Castle (in my view, probably the best science fiction series ever on television) in The Plot Against America alternate history.  Instead, think about Roth's other notable works, like Goodbye Columbus, which focus on the pleasures and problems of Jewish life in mid-20th-century New Jersey.  You'll find lots of that in the first episode of The Plot Against America, which introduces the extended Levin family, its struggle to move up in the middle class and fend off the rising Nazi tide. 

The details in 1940 Newark are spot on, ranging from the Esso gas station to the clothing to the Yiddish sprinkled in the conversations.  This has to be the first time I've heard the word forshpeis in an American TV drama.  It brings back wonderful memories of both my grandmother's voice and her forshpeis.   

The acting in The Plot Against America is top-drawer, too, with Winona Ryder, John Turturro, and David Krumholtz in important roles, eating rolls that made me hungry, and I'll be back here next week with a review of the second episode.

 

The Deuce 3.1: 1985

The Deuce was back tonight with its final season on HBO with another step into the future, New Year's Eve 1985, that is, the last day and evening of 1984.  The big villain, at this point, is AIDS.  Bobby's afraid he has it (he likely doesn't, at least yet).  Gene seems set up to get it.   And a lot of people, including Abby on the East Coast and Lori on the West Coast, aren't feeling too well.

Well, Lori's just getting out of rehab, and she's soon on her way to going back, i.e., hooked on some other substance.  Candy and Harvey seem physically ok, but they're at odds, as always, on the porn business they helped bring into being the previous decade.  Harvey, always concerned about "the p and a," as he says (meaning, what? profits and ass?), wants Candy to be less arty, and she, of course, resists.

The New York City scenes, as always, are gritty and right.  The LA scenes look right, too, but I wasn't out there in the mid-80s so I don't know from first-hand experience. The acting is outstanding.  James Franco has aged his twin parts well.  David Krumholtz, now pretty much the same weight as his character Harvey, is also totally believable in that part,  And the same for Maggie Gyllenhaal as Candy.

I do miss Elvis Costello's opening music from Season 2, but otherwise I'm looking forward to seeing how our surviving characters fare in the brave new technological world of the mid-1980s.  No early Macs or IBM pcs in sight, as yet, but I'm guessing we'll see some of those as this season progresses.  Porn had not yet migrated to the Internet - that would be at least a decade away - but there was lots of book-keeping done on those early computer beasts, and book-keeping was always essential to mob and porn activities.

See you back here next week.

See also The Deuce Is Back - Still Without Cellphones, and that's a Good Thing ... The Deuce 2.2: Fairytales Can Come True ... The Deuce 2.3: The Price ... The Deuce 2.4: The Ad-Lib ... The Deuce 2.6: "Bad Bad Larry Brown" ... The Deuce 2.9: Armand, Southern Accents, and an Ending ... The Deuce Season 2 Finale: The Video Revolution

And see also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and "Working with Marshall McLuhan" ... Marilyn Monroe on the Deuce 1.7 ... The Deuce Season 1 Finale: Hitchcock and Truffaut 

  
It all starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" ..


my story "The P & A" in this issue

"Working with Marshall McLuhan" and Marilyn Monroe on The Deuce 1.7!

Just caught up with The Deuce 1.7 tonight - it was on HBO on Sunday - and was delighted to find it joined the eminent ranks of The Sopranos and Mad Men, with a reference to Marshall McLuhan!

It happened liked this ...

Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) working on a porn film with Harvey (David Krumholtz, who is getting to look a lot like Ron Jeremy) - actually, I guess you could say Candy is Assistant Director, or Assistant to the Director, I could never make sense out of those titles - buys a red bed cover, to replace the green one, which is making her "sea-sick," and may or may not be the underlying reason for the listless sex acting.

Krumholtz left, porn filmmaker Ron Jeremy right,  see what I mean?



Harvey asks Candy how much she paid for the "schmata" (inexplicably slightly but distinctly mispronounced, with no emphasis on the "schma") - but my ears perked up immediately, as they do anytime I hear Yiddish on a television show.

"Red is a horny color," Candy replies.  "you ever see a car ad?"

And Harvey comes back with "What, I am working with Marshall McLuhan?"

Now, that's not the best reference to McLuhan I ever heard - nothing about hot and cool, which would've worked well here - but, then, the references to McLuhan on The Sopranos and Mad Men were no great shakes, either.  And then there's this: The Deuce takes place in 1971, which is a little after McLuhan's heyday in the 1960s, and before he came back with the now classic appearance in Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977), so would a porn film director really have come up that reference at that time? But, hey, I'm not complaining, I'm happy.

And The Deuce 1.7 was excellent in other ways, too, with Candy really beginning to make her mark (I was going to say, come into her own, but thought the better of it) as a porn director, and a surprise shooting (of a gun) which changes a lot of things.  And, as icing on the cake, Marilyn Monroe was mentioned in the episode (icing on the cake certainly for me, since my Marilyn and Monet was just published last week).

This is an excellent series, not surprising with David Simon, Richard Price, and George Pelecanos in creative production roles, and I'd be enjoying it even without the nudity and mentions of McLuhan and Marilyn.



here's a panel we did about Marshall McLuhan just last week - I
actually sing a few lines from a Paul McCartney song at 1hr 3min 32 sec

 
And here's my novelette just published about Marilyn Monroe -
which starts in the hot summer of 1960, when Marilyn walks off the set
of The Misfits and begins to hear a haunting song in her head,
"Goodbye Norma Jean" ..


See also The Deuce: NYC 1971 By Way of The Wire and Mad Men 1.6. The Medium is the Message! -- and Max & Domino for more on Marilyn


and, ok, you twisted my arm - here's a recent little
book I wrote about McLuhan

The Playboy Club

I twisted my arm and saw the first two episodes of The Playboy Club on NBC - reviewing is a tough job but somebody has to do it.  The Playboy Club would make the second new series - along with Pan Am - inspired by the success of Mad Men and its 1960s setting.

But make no mistake about it.  Although The Playboy Club takes in place in early 1960s Chicago, it has little of the meticulous period detail that dresses up Mad Men and Pan Am.   What The Playboy Club does have is very pretty women - including, like Pan Am, a blond lead (Maureen, played by Amber Heard) who is knock-out gorgeous - and a lead man (Nick Dalton, played by Eddie Cibrian) who looks a lot like Booth from Bones and sounds like Don Draper.

The story mines the sleazy side of 1960s Chicago - with a corrupt Mayor Daley, and a big mob presence in the town as well as the club.  The plot has Maureen accidentally killing a mob boss, as she was defending herself from his attempt to rape her in a back room of the club, and Nick coming to the rescue to dispose of the body.  Turns out he used to do this very work for the mob.  But he now he his eye on the State Attorney job (what is it with State Attorneys in Illinois on television these days? - the job also figures in The Good Wife).   He also has his eye on Maureen, even though he has a relationship with Bunny-Mother Carol-Lynne, whom he genuinely cares for.

The real Hugh Hefner did the voice-over intro for the pilot, and his character has a continuing role in the story as a faceless character shot from behind or in ways that otherwise obscure his face.   David Krumholtz plays Billy, who runs the club, but they have poor David looking like Bosley from the original Charlie's Angels (what's the point? - that the only kind of a guy who can work around highly attractive women is someone who looks like a frog?).

Playboy - the magazine and the clubs - has been controversial, to say the least, in reality.   Hefner has always claimed the magazine broke through the repression of sexuality in the 1950s (undoubtedly true) and empowered women (that's the point that's controversial).   The series gets points for continuing this theme, but would be worth watching even if it didn't.

---

                 Special Discount Coupons for Angie's List, Avis, Budget Car, Garden.com, eMusic

---

---

The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

---

Enjoy listening to audio books? Get a free audio book copy of The Plot to Save Socrates - or any one of 85,000 other titles - with a 14-day trial membership at Audible.com ...

Numb3rs

I thought it was long since time to review Numb3rs. The series will resume its 6th season this Friday on CBS - shortened from 22 to 16 episodes, and likely to be canceled, according to industry intelligentsia - which would be a shame. Numb3rs is the only show I know that presents full-fledged mathematical and scientific theories, with a unique cast of engaging characters. Charlie (David Krumholtz) could probably give a pretty good exposition of infinite regress in philosophy and numerical sets, and it would play a decisive role in a life-and-death case that his brother Don (Rob Morrow) and his team were pursuing for the FBI.

The last episode in the Fall - 6.10 - shows how good Numb3rs can be. Don and the team may have a solid lead on the D. B. Cooper case, the most famous unsolved hijacking and robbery on the books. Cooper jumped out of the plane with anywhere from 200,000 to 1,000,000 dollars. Neither he nor most of the money have been found.

Colonel Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan) of Battlestar Galactica plays the presumed Cooper, and the show is worth seeing just for that. But add into that Henry Winkler as a retired cop that Don has had dealings with before, Judd Hirsch as Don and Charlie's father Alan, some unresolved issues over the Vietnam War, and you have a pretty fine, even riveting, hour of television.

In fact, I think the show has been improving over the years, and this season is the best yet. David (Alimi Ballard) and Colby's (Dylan Bruno) have become more clearly defined, Charlie's fiance Amit (Navi Rawat) is looking better than ever and has a more prominent role in the cases, and the music is great. Dylanesque Blitzen Trapper had the closing song - Furr - for 6.10.

Numb3rs also has memorable occasional supporting characters. In addition to Henry Winkler, Lou Diamond Phillips checks in as Agent Ian Edgerton a few times each year, and was the focus of one of the best episodes of the series - "Hostage" - in the Fall.

About the only ingredient Numb3rs lacks is a female agent as captivating and powerful as Ziva on NCIS. The women agents have been good, but they've been transferred in and out at least three or four times in the series, and their stories therefore have not been told as well as David's and Colby's.

But this is a small tick in what is otherwise a highly original, exciting, and enjoyable series. I know that ratings are king, Numb3rs has not had the numbers this year, and six years is a respectable, excellent run, but I hope CBS continues the series. I'll certainly be reviewing every episode starting this Friday and from now on.

Meanwhile, here's a little of Blitzen Trapper's Furr ...

---

The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!