Law & Order: SVU 27.1: Olivia Benson vs. ICE

Just caught up with the season 27 debut of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC this past Thursday evening. It was excellent in all kinds of ways, but none as ethically important and politically relevant as Olivia Benson standing up to the American Gestapo aka ICE as they do their utmost to impede Captain Benson and the NYPD from bringing a rapist to justice.

ICE is bent on taking Benson's witness into custody and having him deported to El Salvador or who knows where.  Never mind that the witness is here legally.  He looks like a foreigner and that's all Trump's racist goons need to haul him off.  When Benson attempts to stop them, she's taken into custody.

Benson's arrest is actually the least of what these Federal criminals have been doing in real life to fair-minded, hardworking people in government who try to do their job and stand up to ICE when necessary, which is all too often.  Alex Padilla, US Senator from California, was thrown to the ground, when he tried to ask Homeland Security Kristi Noem a question, by another branch of Trump's Storm Troopers a few months ago.  But it was good and important to see a fictional character, wonderfully played by Mariska Hargitay all these years, do the right thing in New York.  Hats off to NBC.

Would a real captain of the NYPD do what Benson did?  I would certainly hope so, but I don't know that I would bet on it.   I don't know that other networks and streaming services would have characters in their dramas do what Benson did, either.  I'm a lifelong devoted Yankee fan, and it's always great seeing them play baseball on YES.   But I was very disappointed to see ads for ICE more than once in between innings on YES in the past few months.

Baseball is about American as you can get.  ICE is about as un-American.  Good to see NBC and Olivia Benson on the right side of this battle for our democracy.

'

Cowardly Republican Party Threatens NBC and CNN

Did you see this?  The Republican National Committee has threatened NBC and CNN - the RNC will veto any Presidential debates held on NBC and CNN, if the two networks go ahead with their plans to air a mini-series and a movie about Hillary Clinton.  Reince Priebus, RNC Chair (to my science fictional eyes, the name sounds like he comes from some villainous planet in the Foundation series), says that he thinks airing the Clinton shows will give her an unfair advantage in the 2016 Presidential election.   Pressing the networks is villainous enough in itself - a heavy-handed attempt to regulate the free flow of information in our country.

The threat is also clueless.   Hillary Clinton is already world-famous whether she runs for President in 2016 or not.  As a former First Lady, former Senator from the great state of New York, close contender in the 2008 Democratic Presidential primary, and most recently Secretary of State, her life already has ample accomplishment and profile for the making of all kinds of movies and TV shows.   Priebus, desperate, is just doing what he can to limit the public's knowledge of an iconic figure who will continue to be iconic and better-known than any Republican candidate regardless of these dramatizations.

I try to be even-handed when I criticize politicians and parties about their interference with dissemination of information.   For example, Democrats like Chuck Schumer have been as dangerously wrong as his Republican counterparts in his caterwauling about Edward Snowden being a threat to national security.   But the Republicans still have the stage all to themselves when it comes to misunderstanding a media situation, and calling for de facto censorship.   Here's my advice to the GOP: try coming up with policies that Americans like, and stop trying to win elections by badgering the media.

The Playboy Club Closes on NBC

Nervous NBC, never one to stay with a series that shows any signs of weakness, has canceled The Playboy Club after three episodes.

The series did have plenty of weaknesses -

• no nudity - NBC, like all networks, still marches in lockstep to the FCC's unconstitutional restrictions -  The Playboy Club would have done better on a premium cable station, with no restrictions on dress or language
• no great acting from most of the bunnies, who tended to rattle off their lines
• a gay story that made no sense (unlike the way it was treated on Mad Men)

On the other hand, the music was appropriate and fabulous.  The third episode featured someone who sounded and looked like Leslie Gore singing "It's My Party" (probably the singer and the actress were two different people).  You don't see or hear Leslie too often these days.

And the political story - the lead male running for State Attorney, and having his sights on higher office - was pretty good.  As was the mobster story.

But the Parents Television Council - self-appointed guardians of our welfare - launched a campaign against the show.  And with ratings not the greatest to start with, advertisers were happy to leave the show, and NBC, as per usual, almost eager to admit to poor judgment in programming (not poor moral judgment, but mistaken programming because the show was floundering in the ratings).

And so it goes.   The course of true television programming never did run smooth.

See also The Playboy Club

---

                 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 ...

NBC and Apple Split: Much Ado About Nothing

Much hand wringing, phosphor, and ink over the news that NBC shows won't be for sale any more on iTunes. According to Apple, that's because it didn't want to go along with an NBC price hike that would have raised the per-episode download price to consumers from $1.99 to $4.99...

But, you know what? They're both wrong. NBC's wrong, sure, for wanting to get more money for its downloaded shows, but iTunes and NBC were both wrong, in the first place, for even the $1.95 charge.

Most people already know that that you can see episodes of most major shows for free, on the NBC or whatever network's web site - not to mention bittorent and all the rest.

The world of television consumption is changing, almost by the minute, and it's going in the direction of people watching whatever they want, when they want, and not paying for it. Actually, there's probably a shorter distance between this and traditional free television in your living room than download and pay.

NBC and Apple are usually ahead of the pack in understanding this. Maybe NBC does understand this, and wants to drive more viewers to its own site.

But whatever the reasoning, it's a safe bet that corporate, profit-per-item mentality is a stubborn old bird, and doesn't die easily, even in the digital age.