The Good Wife 7.6: Hillary, Trump, and Alicia

An excellent episode 7.6 of The Good Wife last night.  It's been great all season - I don't miss Will at all - and it's been especially cool in picking up the prevailing winds and managing to stay current in the 2016 campaigns for President.

I don't know when last night's episode was written or recorded, but it talked about Hillary Clinton (not surprising) and Donald Trump (a little more surprising).   What would The Good Wife do if Carson surges even more in the pools, and Trump, unhappy with being in second place, throws in the towel?

That's unlikely, I think - that Carson will surge more, and that Trump will leave if he does - but the uncertainty and excitement of real politics has given The Good Wife a real edge this season.   Peter's announcing his run for President actually makes sense in our reality.   Martin O'Mallley is at three percent in the polls, which means there's a lot of room between him and Bernie.

Alicia likes that possibility, too.  The best scene in the episode is the look in Eli's eyes when he sees Alicia standing next to Peter on that announcement stage.  Eli realizes how much Alicia is enjoying and inhabiting the moment.  Peter and Alicia on stage have been iconic heralds of where the narrative is going from the very beginning and throughout the series.    Just about every time there's a major moment in their lives, Alicia on that stage has set the agenda with her expression and nonverbal tone.

And now she's setting the agenda again.  She's contemplating what it would be like to be First Lady, and she likes it.   Apropos Hillary, Alicia knows just where that could lead - she could be announcing a run for the White House someday, too.

In a way, The Good Wife has always been another retelling of the Bill and Hillary story.   But there's still a long way to go.   Peter can't win the Presidency in an election on television, in which Hillary, who's running in real life, is also a character who's running for President.   But, until Hillary in real life actually chooses a VP running mate, that fictional path is open to Peter.

Hey, I'm hoping we'll see Hillary herself have a conversation with Peter and Alicia.   Impossible? Not at all - equivalent things have been happening on The Good Wife and throughout the history of television at least as far back as Walter Cronkite putting in an appearance on the Mary Tyler Moore show.

See also The Good Wife 7.1: Shake-Up

And see also The Good Wife 6.4: Run-up to Running ... The Good Wife 6.10: Cary's Fate ... The Good Wife 6.11: Kalinda for Cary

See also I Dreamt I Called Will Gardner Last Night

And The Good Wife 5.1: Capital Punishment and Politicians' Daughters ... The Good Wife 5.5: The Villain in this Story ... The Good Wife 5.9: Reddit, Crowd Sourcing, and the First Amendment on Trial ... The Good Wife 5.11: Bowling Bowls and Bogdanovich ... The Good Wife 5.13: NSA on Television ... The Good Wife: 5.15: Stunner! ... The Good Wife 5.19: Tying Up Loose Ends ... The Good Wife Season 5 Finale: Musical Chairs

And see also The Good Wife 4.1 Meets Occupy Wall Street ...  The Good Wife 4.2: Reunited ... The Good Wife 4.3: "Template-Based Link Analysis Algorithm" ... The Good Wife 4.5 Meets The Sopranos ... The Good Wife 4.20: Anonymous ... The Good Wife Season 4 Finale: Good Twist!

And see also The Good Wife 3.1: Recusal and Rosh Hashanah ... The Good Wife: 3.2: Periwigs and Skype ... The Good Wife 3.7: Peter v. Will ...  Dexter's Sister on The Good Wife 3.10  ... The Good Wife 3.12: Two Suits  ... The Good Wife 3.13 Meets Murder on the Orient Express ... The Good Wife 3.15: Will and Baseball

And see also  The Good Wife Starts Second Season on CBS ... The Good Wife 2.2: Lou Dobbs, Joe Trippi, and Obama Girl ... The Good Wife 2.4: Surprise Candidate, Intimate Interpsonal Distance ... The Good Wife 2.9 Takes on Capital Punishment ... The Good Wife 2.16: Information Wars 

#SFWApro


                                   the Sierra Waters trilogy

The Americans: True and Deep

The Americans, with Keri Russell as one half of the Soviet sleeper spy couple so deeply undercover in Washington they're more American than most of us, debuted on fx last night.  It was superb.

First, about Keri Russell, there are two interrelated things about her past as an actress that make her appearance in The Americans especially interesting.  She is best known for her breakthrough Felicity roll a while ago,  one of J. J. Abrams' early series about a college student.  And Abrams' next series was Alias, which featured Jennifer Garner not Russell as graduate student turned spy, but which had a major continuing storyline about a Soviet agent under cover in the United States - Sydney Bristow's (Jennifer Garner's) mother, Irina/Laura.   I like these sort of complex prior histories to television series.

In Alias, the Soviet spy (played by Lena Olin) was married to an American spy (played by Victor Garbor) - all powerfully acted, by the way.  In The Americans, both Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) and her husband Phillip (Matthew Rhys) are Soviet spies, and their acting is top-notch.  In fact, just about everything in this series seems to be, so far.  Plot twists, unexpected bursts of action, frank sexually vivid (not quite explicit) language combine with the acting to made the premiere never a dull moment.

Russell, especially, has a way of getting just the right pitch in her voice.  When her husband, wanting to show her a little affection and getting rebuffed, protests that he's her husband, Elizabeth responds "is that right?" with just the right slight cutting sarcastic edge.  This is because their marriage is their job as spies, not a true aspect of their lives.  But, as William James the American psychologist noted more than a century ago, when you go through the actions of something, often enough, you begin to grow real feelings for those actions, too.

Elizabeth and Matthew have been at this for more than a decade.   They have two children, a daughter age 13 and a son a little younger.  So of course they have some real feelings.  It's just that, at the beginning of the show, Matthew is more in touch with them than is Elizabeth.  But that changes at the end, in a sequence of events which show that, as much as Matthew has become a truly happy suburban American father, he's still tough as nails underneath.

The one part of the premiere episode that jangled a bit is the FBI guy who moves next store.  This can't be coincidence - which Elizabeth and Matthew seem to realize - but so far the show is playing it as coincidence one-hundred percent.  I expect we'll find out before too long what's really going on with the neighbor.

There's also great 1981 scenery, with talk about Reagan as a lunatic from the Soviet perspective, Walter Cronkite on television, and all sorts evocative 1981 music.  At this point, The Americans is looking to easily be one of the best new shows on television, with only The Following as any real competition.

                                                           

Olbermann vs. Koppel: I Mostly Agree with Olbermann

So, we were just treated to one of Olbermann's "Special Comments".  It was advertised as about Ted Koppel, which indeed it was.  I consider Koppel one of the greats of TV news people - successor with his Nightline (which I watched raptly for more than 25 years) to Murrow and Cronkite.   I was prepared to say in this blog post, well, I came to Olbermann's defense over MSNBC's inane suspension of him last week, but now I'm back to disliking his tone and even the content of many of his "Special Comments".  Except - I think Olbermann is mostly right in what he just said about Koppel.

Ted Koppel's op-ed in the Washington Post - Olbermann, O'Reilly, and the death of real news - is what, understandably, attracted Olbermann's attention and ire.   You all know the points that Koppel makes - that Fox and MSNBC are conservative and progressive equivalents,  presenting opinions not news, and their success has destroyed "objective" i. e., "real" news.

I agree completely with Koppel on the first point - the style and partisan equivalence of Fox and MSNBC - and that's in fact the one big point Olbermann made with which I flatly disagree.  I don't know why Olbermann and Rachel Maddow and others on MSNBC insist that they are more factual and less partisan than Fox.  Maddow made this same point to John Stewart, in her superb interview with him last week. 

But otherwise - neither Fox nor MSNBC are newsless.  Indeed, the news reporting of Bret Baier and Shep Smith on Fox is every bit  the factual equivalent of actual news that is reported on MSNBC throughout the day and night.   On that point, then, Koppel is point blank wrong, and Olbermann is wrong in saying that MSNBC has more respect for facts than does Fox.

Were this where Olbermann vs. Koppel ended, I might give the match to Koppel - right where Olbermann was wrong on the first point (Fox and MSNBC are indeed equivalent), then both wrong on second (Koppel that neither Fox and MSNBC present facts, Olbermann that Fox does not but MSNNC does).

But Olbermann showed his mettle and rose to the occasion with as lucid an analysis as ever I've seen about the myth of objectivity in news.  It was never true and therefore, of course, is not today.

I often make the point to my classes that when The New York Times says "all the news that fit to print" - who are they kidding?  What we're really getting is all the news that the Times deems fit to print - i.e., selects for us to read.  And the same for Walter Cronkite, "and that's the way it was".  Not really.   A more truthful tag line might have been "and that's what the editors here at CBS thought you should think it was".  This is called gate keeping, and it's one of the things the Internet, and what I call new new media, have reduced and in some cases eliminated.

Olbermann correctly cited the finest moments of Murrow and Cronkite as not being objective, but partisan - as when Murrow called out Joe McCarthy and Cronkite spoke out against the Vietnam War.   The fact is that the public is best served not just by blind reporting of the facts, but by strong opinions and keen analyses right along with the facts.  That's what op-eds in newspapers - such as Koppel's about the death of news - are all about.  That, as Olbermann correctly noted, is what Koppel and the news media did not do during the build-up to the Iraq War, when all that was reported was the "fact" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

Olbermann's  point - that the pursuit of the illusion of objectivity in journalism may hurt the democracy that journalism serves - may just be the important point Olbermann ever made.  It's certainly not made clearly or often enough.

Obama Takes Cheap Shot at 'Blogs' and 'Tweets' at Cronkite Memorial

I was disappointed to hear Barack Obama take a gratuitous cheap shot at blogging and Twitter in today's otherwise moving and eloquent memorial for Walter Cronkite at Lincoln Center in New York City earlier today.

After admonishing his media-celebrity audience about the decline of good journalism in our era - itself questionable, because there is lots of good journalism being practiced, along with the bad, as it ever has been - the President went on to wonder if Walter would "have been able to cut through the murky noise of the blogs and the tweets" to get the truth and tell it the American people.

That's an odd statement indeed coming from someone who has by and large benefited enormously from the truth and opinions expressed by many bloggers and tweeters, especially during the 2008 campaign. No doubt Obama is aggrieved by the garbage that has proliferated on some right-wing blogs, but attacking the process (blogging) rather than the content (the lies spread about Obama's health care reforms, for example), badly missed the point.

And that point is that blogging, Twitter, and what I call "new new media" (new new, because they improve on just new media by making consumers producers) have enhanced the democratic process, by giving far more voice to the people than we had in Walter Cronkite's day.

I say this as someone who admired Walter Cronkite, who enthusiastically voted for Obama, who strongly supports his health care reforms, and who frequently blogs and tweets about this.

Links:

transcript of Obama's speech

my book, New New Media

Walter Cronkite Reaches the Cosmos

And Now Don Hewitt, 1922-2009

Been a tough summer for the titans of early television. In front of the camera, Walter Cronkite was taken from us in July. And now comes the news that Don Hewitt, as great behind the camera as Walter was in front, has joined Walter.

Don Hewitt was 86. He is best known as the inventor of the tv news magazine - 60 Minutes, which debuted on CBS in 1968, and is the longest running prime time show on network television.

But Hewitt was there - meaning, here, on the screen, with us - far earlier. My parents bought their first television set in 1951, when I was four years old. I can't say that I remember the first broadcast of See It Now, with a cameo by Don Hewitt, on November 18, 1951 - but I know my parents did, because we talked about it years later.

Jonathan Sanders, formerly at CBS News, and now at Fordham University (I was pleased to bring to our faculty when I was Chair, several years ago), was good enough to send me this clip from that 1951 premier, now on YouTube. Jonathan notes Edward R. Murrow's classic line, at the beginning of the clip, "This is an old team trying to learn a new trade."

Keep watching, and you'll see and hear a little of Don Hewitt (bringing producers out front on a show was not an invention of Saturday Night Live....)

Nowadays, in the age of Twitter and YouTube and other new new media, we're all an old team learning a new trade - and it's never been more fun.

Thanks, Don, for helping blaze this trail that got us here.



See also Walter Cronkite Reaches the Cosmos

Walter Cronkite Reaches the Cosmos

Sad but not unexpected news ... Walter Cronkite has died.

He placed first in a Gallop Poll in the 1970s ... the "most trusted man" in America. News anchors were held in a lot higher regard then than now.

He was our public companion during the momentous decade of 1960s. He told us about JFK's assassination, about Martin Luther King's. He called out the "thugs" who were shoving Dan Rather around on the floor of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago (the thugs were convention "security"). He bore witness almost speechless with awe and wonder to our first steps on the Moon, almost 40 years ago to this day.

I thought he retired too early when he stepped down from the CBS Evening News in 1981. Dan Rather was great - but I would've liked to have seen a few more years of Walter.

Now he's stepped up to the cosmos of our memories.

Edward R. Murrow to Tim Russert

The outpouring of grief over Tim Russert's untimely death today, at age 58, shows both the high esteem and affection that Americans hold for television journalists who protect our interests as untiring champions of the First Amendment.

When Thomas Jefferson and our Founding Fathers made the press the crucial guardians of our government - the watchdogs whose job it was to report to the American people what their government was really up to - Jefferson must have the likes of Tim Russert, and his unceasing speaking of truth to power, in mind.

He was not only the moderator of Meet the Press since 1991 - by far the most memorable - but he was NBC News' Washington Bureau Chief. He was one of the few who spanned traditional network and cable news, with his CNBC/MSNBC interview show. And he made a great guest appearance on Homicide: Life On Street, playing himself as character Lt. Megan Russert's cousin.

There are less than a handful of television reporters and anchors who in their different ways defined their genre and their age. Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite (who is still with us), and Tim Russert.