Stevie watches more TV

In my previous installment of television commentary, listing my top ten shows of all-time, perhaps the most anomalous choice was Buffy the Vampire Slayer at #4, which in fact represents slippage from #1 since The Wire supplanted it.  Soon after my ranking exercise, it came to my attention that Hulu offers the entire 7-season, 144-episode run of the show (1997-2003), so I took another look at some well-remembered episodes.  And believe me, the show holds up -- in its own right, but especially as the unlikely forerunner of the era of quality TV that continues to this day.  Whatever else the show’s cultural influence has spawned (I can’t remember willingly watching any further teen vampire romances, such as the immensely popular Twilight series), Joss Wheedon’s creation opened the way for witty, clever, audacious, and metaphorical approaches to network series. 

Remember the boastful slogan:  “It’s not TV.  It’s HBO.”  Now there are a dozen HBOs out there, producing quality content on a regular basis.  But it was a break-through for a show of such bold wit and intellectual heft to appear on a network catering to a teen audience.  Buffy’s appeal extended to any adult who had ever been a teen.  The niche became the norm.

Sure, you had to endure several minutes out of every 44 watching martial arts hijinks, but it was a small price to pay for the humor and insight of the rest, and the storytelling on several levels of meaning and irony.  Aren’t all high schools built over the Hellmouth, when you think about it?

While the young ensemble of actors has not gone on to the estimable careers of those from Freaks & Geeks, for example, they were all very well schooled in delivering the snappy dialogue and banter created by Joss and his team.  And despite the stylization, they came across as genuine teens, exploring all kinds of authentic emotions.  It was also bold at the time for one of the main characters, perhaps the most endearing, to come out as lesbian, and wind up in bed with her girlfriend.

I started my retrospective with the musical episode from the sixth season, “Once More, with Feeling,” where a spell compels everyone to sing their dialogue, and was immediately hooked all over again.  Then there was “Hush,” where all the characters are rendered mute and have to communicate in pantomime.  At the other end of the spectrum are episodes like “The Body,” where Buffy comes home to find her mother dead, in a realistic and empathetic survey of the types and stages of shock and grief (providing the antithesis to all the bodies that pile up – or rather, go poof – in each episode).  After watching more than a dozen episodes, I've refreshed my memory well enough to dip back in anywhere.

For another way Buffy demonstrates the emergence of an era, watch as the first season struggles to find its tone and substance, then the second really develops continuity, and the third achieves genuine cultural cachet.  Then the fourth adapts from the old tv aspect ratio to the modern 16x9 frame, with high-def video, and thereafter the approach becomes fully cinematic, and anything goes in terms of subject matter and style.

As it happened, I was re-watching Buffy episodes at the same time I was re-watching much of Normal People, and while they couldn’t be more different in approach, they shared one trait in common – authentic understanding of young adult emotions and relationships.

And that’s my segue to a more current recommendation.  My Brilliant Friend (MC-88, HBO) represented another recent instance when my appreciation for a film adaptation has been enhanced by not having read the book on which it was based.  I went into this series cold, despite the huge success of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.  Even better reviews for the second season than the first, finally led me to give the series a try.  It takes a while to get acquainted with all the story’s characters and their relations, especially after the time jump in the third episode, in which all the young actors change.  So for those unfamiliar with the books, I definitely recommend studying the HBO graphic guide to “The Neighborhood.”  Both the younger and older girls playing Lila and Lenu are fantastic, and equally well-paired.  And the whole ensemble is very effective, as is the recreation of a lower-class housing project in 1950s Naples.  A lot of the masculine violence and domination casts an unfortunate light on my ethnic background, but director Saverio Constanzo also recalls the glories of Italian neorealism.  But the relationship between the two girls is what makes the series, and is highlighted by HBO’s accompanying documentary My True Brilliant Friend, about how both sets of girls were found and trained, and the developing relationship between them that shines through this story of young female friendship (it’s also one of the best making-of docs I’ve ever seen).

Having now watched the second season of My Brilliant Friend, I redouble my recommendation, as the girls go into marriage or college in the Sixties.  The mix of realism and melodrama is perfect, the acting and staging are exemplary, the story is serious yet full of twists, immersing us in the fates of these characters we know so well, despite their enigmas.  Now I see an apt comparison to one of my favorite films of all time, The Best of Youth, the Italian family/historical epic from 2003, so I appropriate my comment on that:  “[This series] is transformative, endlessly involving, like life itself, so sad and yet everything is beautiful. You are put through an emotional wringer, as the hours and years go by, and yet you love it and come out wiser at the end, just as we wish with life itself.”  I eagerly anticipate two further seasons to match Ferrante’s quartet of books, may even have to read the books themselves.

I Know This Much is True (MC-67, HBO), only Mark Ruffalo makes this HBO limited-series misery-fest watchable.  Adapted by Derek Cianfrance from a Wally Lamb novel, this is the story of twin brothers played by Ruffalo, one of whom ends up in a mental institutional and then prison after a shocking act of violence.  The other wants to be his brother’s keeper, but has more than enough problems of his own.  Really, I can’t even tote up all the horrific anguish this series depicts, reaching back generations to the malevolent patriarch who immigrated from Sicily.  Ironic that HBO is concurrently running two series that cast a harsh light on the liabilities of my ethnic manhood.  Rosie O’Donnell is a pleasant surprise as a prison social worker, but overall this series is not worth the pain it inflicts. 

Ramy (MC-85, Hulu) returns for a second season, and Ramy Youssef is not here to make himself – or you – comfortable, but to render an authentic slice of Arab-American experience.  Though he comes across as sensitive, serious, and even sweet, he is always making bad choices, especially damaging to other people, not so much with the best of intentions, as because he is myopically self-absorbed with his own needs, both physical and spiritual.  The Muslim Millennial perspective is very fresh, and in this season Ramy’s quest for his Islamic roots takes him to a Sufi mosque, whose sheikh is portrayed with Mahershala Ali’s trademark gravitas and sly wit.   Hiam Abbass returns as Ramy’s mother, wonderful as ever (compare this character with the third Mrs. Roy in Succession, then go back and look at her native Palestinian roles in films like Lemon Tree).  She gets an episode all to herself, as do Ramy’s sister, father, and uncle, all straddling the generational divide between being Egyptian and being American.  For a comedy, it’s awfully serious, and for a drama, it’s awfully funny, but not at all joke-based.  You will wince as often as you laugh.

I went on to another selective retrospective of one of my Top Ten TV series, Friday Night Lights (2006-11, MC-83, Hulu).  Let me make one thing clear from the start – I have not been any kind of football fan since the genuine Browns left Cleveland in 1995, and even before that, only out of hometown loyalty, and not out of any appreciation for the violent and militaristic attributes of the sport.  But I loved, and continue to love, this show.  As with Buffy’s martial arts, you have to put up with on-field action for several minutes in most episodes (very well done, I must say), but this series is not about high school football, but about family and community in a rural Texas town, with a strong documentary quality backed by a large and talented cast.  Coach T and his wife Tami, played with touching authenticity by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, are front and center through all five seasons, but the circle of players and families is extensive, and ever-changing.  Michael B. Jordan is the most famous of the young actors to emerge from this series, but many got to do their best-ever work, under the encouraging impetus of the freedom they were given to develop their own characters.  With all the camera work at the service of spontaneous performances, most scenes were shot in one take with three cameras, giving the series a hurtling you-are-there sensation.  This series is also outstanding in its ability to reinvent itself from season to season, with new characters and new storylines, which all add color and dimension to a small-screen masterpiece.  Follow this team and these kids all the way to State!

And She Could Be Next (PBS), a two-part documentary on “POV,” is a stirring and hopeful documentary about women of color running for office in 2018.  We follow a handful of campaigns that give an overview to the movement, both its successes and the obstacles encountered.  Most attention goes to Rashida Tlaib, the Palestinian-American who won a Congressional seat in Detroit, and Stacey Abrams, who was deprived of an historic win for governor in Georgia by blatant voter suppression.  There are also congresswomen elected from Texas and Georgia, a Latina elected to the California state senate, and a very young Muslim woman making inroads in Skokie IL (I’m old enough to remember the neo-Nazi demonstrations that MLK confronted there).  The film is heartening for the mobilization depicted, and frightening for the blatantly anti-democratic corruption of voter suppression, which will certainly be a feature of the 2020 election.  Will righteousness or repression win out?  Watch this miniseries to see what’s at stake.

Another excellent two-part PBS documentary, this one from “American Experience,” The Vote (PBS) commemorates the 100^th anniversary of women’s suffrage across the U.S.  This program has two exceptional attributes: a clear and comprehensive account of a scandalously little-known passage of American history, and marvelous documentation through period photos and film, much more interesting visually than mere talking heads.  It definitely rewrites the standard story of women being “given” the vote in 1920 by the 19^th Amendment, and shows that the vote was won by a generations-long struggle of political will and strategy by courageous women.  Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are well-known, but not the latter’s daughter, Harriet Stanton Blatch, who carried the torch for many years, until the narrow victory was achieved by the inside-outside, political-militant combo of Carrie Chapman Catt and Alice Paul.  Now I know why the new dorm my son lived in at Swarthmore was named for the latter, and was quite thrilled by an actual unpublished letter that Alice Paul wrote to my partner’s grandmother, just after they both graduated from Swat, in which she tells of going to her first suffragist meeting with another young woman, in the midst of a roomful of grey heads.  She would soon bring her youth and energy to the cause, through audacious militancy over an extended period, developing a new playbook for political movements.  Essential viewing!

I watched the documentary Slay the Dragon (MC-73, Hulu) with the expectation that I might get a glimpse of my brother Chris, since he’s been so involved in trying to slay the gerrymander in PA, but this film focuses on different initiatives in MI, WI, and NC.  The film is still well worth seeing for its recapitulation of the issue, and for its focus on one activist in particular, a young woman in MI who could easily be part of a sequel to And She Could Be Next.  I’ve got to admit she’s cuter, and possibly even more effective, than my egghead brother.   

One last documentary to note:  A Secret Love (MC-77, NFX) is a modest home movie that blossoms into a number of larger themes.  Chris Bolan made this film, with great intimacy, about his aunt Terry, who was a catcher in the women’s baseball league portrayed in A League of Their Own, and her “longtime companion” Pat.  We follow their 70-year relationship from the necessary secrecy of the 1940s to their late-in-life marriage, with lots of fascinating period photos and film.  They are filmed in their later years, as they move from the Chicago area house they shared for decades to an assisted living facility and finally back to family in the wilds of Western Canada, from whom they were closeted for 60 years.  Aside from a story of gay liberation, this film turns into a study in gerontology, which for some reason is a subject of growing interest to me.  You wouldn’t regret the time you spend in this couple’s company.