television

Podcast • September 8, 2016

Election 2016: Unreality T.V.

Barack Obama has kept his distance from this campaign, but he did intervene last month to remind Americans that they’re not voting to give someone a recording contract: “This is a really serious job. This ...

Barack Obama has kept his distance from this campaign, but he did intervene last month to remind Americans that they’re not voting to give someone a recording contract: “This is a really serious job. This is not entertainment. This is not a reality show.”

Hillary Clinton likes that line, too, and has used it more pointedly against the former host of The Apprentice: “You can’t say to the head of another nation’s government… if you disagree with them, ’you’re fired!’ That is not the way it works in the real world!”

It’s true, of course—but the rise of Trump reminds us that American politics lost their humble, aldermanic relationship with a simple “real world” a long way back.

Obama’s own victory was telegraphed and televised—the dignified, better-than-human First Black President got screen-tested more than once in Morgan Freeman and Dennis Haysbert. And a Brooklyn-ready media rollout teased an age of “hope” and “change” that the candidate was unable fully to bring about.

The gap between the real and the imagined isn’t a new phenomenon—it’s old as politics itself, and only accelerated by TV. As early as 1960, Norman Mailer read John F. Kennedy aright—not as a job applicant but as an avatar for two Americas, old and new:

this candidate for all his record; his good, sound, conventional liberal record has a patina of that other life, the second American life, the long electric night with the fires of neon leading down the highway to the murmur of jazz.

The author and journalist Ron Suskind is in our studio—he was the one who transcribed a gem of ideology from a secret source in the Bush White House:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Trump may be imperial in that same sense, if Matt Lauer’s botched tackle of the two presidential candidates is anything to go by.

For more on the realm of unreality we’re in, we turn to Veep‘s Frank Rich, and The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum (above), if the age of mass-media politics that began with the glow of Kennedy is ending with the groan of Trump—himself made-for-TV. His unpredictability, his familiar pout, his Lorax coloring and proportions are keeping him in a race and a conversation he might have lost, on the merits, long ago.

To millions of Americans, Trump has some real effects; he represents hope—maybe for boardroom efficiency or a frank simplification of political questions—or a change in atmosphere, away from managed expectations and polite coastal contempt. His may be a dark fantasy, but he sees that politicians, like TV personae real and semi-real, are in the business of fantasy, and that the “show horse” part of the job can’t be so easily shrugged off.

How do we talk about political reality from so deep inside the world of the reality show?

Podcast • November 4, 2009

"The Wire" Rewired

“The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (“Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not ...

“The Wire” was the genius series on HBO that “revealed” Baltimore today (“Bodymore, Murderland”) the way Dickens’ Bleak House and Oliver Twist revealed 19th Century London. It was “reality television,” finally, about no-go America: not just terror-stricken drugged-out public housing but the complexity of human responses inside it. It was the new-media breakthrough that made producer David Simon an authority on how and why old media failed. It was the series that retired in glory after five years, but in DVD release is still challenging all our mythologies of drugs, race, schools, work, want of work, and police work.

First Middlebury, then Duke, now Harvard are teaching courses around The Wire, because as the esteemed Harvard Sociologist William J. Wilson put it, the show goes deeper into the challenges and inequality of urban life than social science ever has. This is television that changed also the people who made it. Our conversation is with two of the key contributors who are part of teaching the Wire are also still dealing with what it stirred up in their own lives. First, the real Donnie Andrews, a “ghetto famous” free-lance killer of drug dealers in Baltimore who fired up the idea of The Wire and inspired “Omar,” a main character in it. Ed Burns, later a co-producer of The Wire, was Donnie’s arresting officer. David Simon covered the story for The Baltimore Sun:

It was during a time when I think I was at my lowest point, because I had just lost a very dear friend of mine, who died in my arms… As he was dying, he asked me who he was, who was I? And I told him: Donnie. He said “Donnie, I can’t see you.” At that point I realized, I couldn’t see myself either. That was the turning point for me. It was like we had a war going on, a drug war, in Lexington Terrace. We were always assigned to take somebody out. And the guy I took out, I already put like 4 bullets in him, and I stood over top of him, and he looked up and asked me: why? I stood there for what seemed like an eternity trying to figure out that question, why am I doing this? He’s black just like me, got a mother, brother, sister, family, just like me, and I just took everything from him. And I don’t even know why. And at that point it began to turn my life around. So I went home and I read the Bible. Paul. I read Paul. I didn’t come out of the house for like 2 days, and I just kept reading Paul over and over. Finally I realized that if Paul, who did basically same thing that I did, God forgave him. And converted him, so maybe he can do the same for me. So I got on my knees and I prayed.

Donnie Andrews with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009.

And the actress Sonja Sohn, who played the often anguished narcotics cop, Kima Greggs:

My first year on The Wire was absolute torture. For some reason, and I didn’t know at the time, I would get on the set, and many times I couldn’t remember my lines, I would go into a little bit of a panic, and it just – it was something I just couldn’t figure out. And I thought, gosh, am I really this bad of an actor? I later started learning about complex PTSD, and realized that a part of my brain was just shutting down, the entire year I was shooting The Wire. I’ll give you an example: my mother was battered by my father on a somewhat regular basis. And in the neighborhood, you don’t ever call the police, ever. You don’t snitch and you don’t call the police. But there were a number of times when I thought my mother was going to be killed by my father, and I would go upstairs and call the police, hoping that my mother was going to be alive when they came. And the police would come – and I thought “wow, thank god, they’re going to take him away.” And they would talk a little bit, and they would leave my father there. I would go, “why aren’t they taking him away?” and then after a course of time, third, fourth time, they would come and just sort of smirk and snicker, just kind of pooh-pooh this thing away. And I started to hate the cops, because I thought “you guys are supposed to help me, you’re supposed to save my mother, and it’s not happening, and as a matter of fact, you’re now laughing at my family.” So I realized, one reason I couldn’t step into the character of a cop is because I had such deep resentment for the cops, and a lot of pain, that eventually I had to unravel.

Sonya Sohn with Chris Lydon in Cambridge, October 30, 2009.