Hail Caesar! Hail HBO!

Last evening I brought myself up to date with two praiseworthy HBO original series. Oddly, I find I can’t write about tv the way I write about film. When you stop to think about it, they are different aesthetic experiences. A film seems a self-contained object, which can be judged objectively, with whatever subjective shading. A tv series on the other hand is more like a transaction between sender and receiver, a developing relationship which grows closer, uncritically, or fades away to pointlessness. I certainly formed a bond with Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus of the series Rome, watching riveted to the final shots of their first season. And also with Julius Caesar, as embodied nobly by Ciaran Hinds, memorable as Captain Wentworth in the superb film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It won’t be giving anything away to reveal that he dies at the end, a bloody corpse on the Senate floor. It’s good news that the rest of the characters we’ve come to know -- maternal monsters, mealy-mouthed polticos and martial heavyweights, would-be emperors and their families -- have been renewed for a second season. It really does bring ancient history alive, in a variety of ways. On a different scale from my film ratings, I would give Rome an A- as a tv series, ranking just behind The Wire and The Sopranos.

Incidentally, HBO will soon start rebroadcast of the first three seasons of The Wire, leading up to the premiere of season four, which may yet overtake Buffy the Vampire Slayer as my favorite tv series of all time. I for one will have my TiVo revved up to catch season three, not yet available on DVD. And while I’m at it, I may give the first season of Deadwood a try, now that it is on DVD.

In a different vein, HBO also produces the Paradise Lost documentaries of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. I’d heard good reports on the original, but it wasn’t available on DVD till very recently; the sequel was, but I avoided it till I could see the first. A third is now in the works, and it is not hard to see how the story compels an ongoing fascination. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Woods (1996) details the grisly case of three mutilated young boys found in a drainage ditch in West Memphis, AK, and the trials of three teenaged boys charged with killing them in a satanic ritual. The original documentary is credited with unblinking objectivity, but certainly seems to make the case for the railroading of the charged youths, seemingly more for their taste in clothes and music than for any actual evidence. You begin to assume that this film, like Errol Morris’s Thin Blue Line, will get an unjustly condemned man off death row. But no. Ten years later Damien Echols is still on death row, and his two friends in prison for life without parole. Reasonable doubt? There’s plenty. After the original documentary an internet-spawned group grew up to “free the West Memphis Three,” and they become the focus of Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (1999), along with the deeply scary stepfather of one of the victims, a drug-fueled camera-hound redneck behemoth who makes himself the best candidate for the actual murderer -- all he lacks is a leather mask and a chain saw. The amazing access, to families and suspects and lawyers and the court proceedings themselves, that drives the original, is shut off in the sequel and many key moments are covered by text on a black screen that explains they were forbidden to film. The film, however, compels one to the website -- www.wm3.org -- where one discovers the legal battle is ongoing, with the U.S. Court of Appeals just last month granting a plea of habeas corpus to Damien, who has also published poetry and a memoir written from solitary confinement. Not a word is said about the death penalty itself, but the whole case suggests the capriciousness with which it is sometimes dispensed. This is certainly a real-life courtroom drama to trump any fiction on the tube. As a tv series, it’s a definite A; as films, I would give the first a *7+* and the second a *7*, both essential representatives of the power of the documentary form.