"All I want is a story. If you have a message, send it by Western Union." -- origin unknown.
"On the other hand, if you have a really awful, zombie political message that should have gone to its grave 30 years ago, get a former NBC News president to send it via Netflix." -- driftglass
I'm reposting a few choice paragraphs from this review of the Netflix movie "Day Zero". When I read it, it prompted two "Of courses" and one "Damn it!' from me.
See if you can guess what they were.
From Slate:
Robert De Niro’s Big Netflix Show Is Self-Congratulating Centrist Fan Fiction
Zero Day stars the actor as a Joe Biden stand-in. It goes about as well as his debate.
Although conspiracy thrillers don’t often tend toward optimism, Netflix’s Zero Day, a six-episode miniseries about the aftermath of a deadly cyberattack, plays like a window into an alternate reality somewhat sunnier than our own. Sure, some unknown party has managed to seize control of every connected device in the United States, turning all of them off just long enough to cost thousands of lives, and leaving behind an ominous push alert that “This Will Happen Again.” But even as the nation is seized in the grip of panic, they turn for reassurance to a universally beloved former president, who is able to silence a restive crowd with an inspiring reminder that “We’re all supposed to be helping each other.”
Created by veteran journalists Noah Oppenheim, a former president of NBC News, and Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, along with producer Eric Newman, the series holds out the promise of an insider’s view of a country on the brink, a darkly compelling fable, burnished by real-life details, of how a crisis can turn the best intentions lethal. What we get instead is a pundit-brained muddle designed to exploit national anxieties while studiously avoiding any hint of a point of view, riffing on recognizable figures but ignoring the context that produced them...
Of course Netflix has cobbled together Frankenstein's monster of shopworn Both Siderist claptrap designed not to offend anyone by not saying anything. Netflix is teevee and teevee is all about maximizing eyeballs.
And of course the one of the captains steering this iceberg into the ratings shipping lanes would be someone like Noah Oppenheim. A man who spiked Ronan Farrow's excellent reportage of the grotesque Harvey Weinstein scandal while standing foursquare behind embarrassing network mediocrity Chuck Todd.
Bonus: here is a YouTube short of Todd trying to stutter and stammer his way through an answer to a simple question without saying "Because I'm a credulous idiot"
But the damn it part is, damn it DeNiro. You of all people --
-- allegedly fucking well knew better.
What was it? What made you take a starring role in a production that sands the real and important divisions in the country all the way down to the kind of Both Siderist glop that helped put Trump in the White House in the first place? Was it the money? Was it just getting too hard to to find honest work at 81? Or did you think placating the fascists by joining the Blame Both Sides brigade would save you when they come for you?
On the other hand, work this bad usually disappears right down the memory hole never to be heard from again. So the very undistinguished timidity of the work itself may save all concerned from it ever being mentioned again.
On the other, other hand, sometimes a work of televised ethical prostitution becomes legendary. Sometimes it inspires some mouthy cornfield blogger to remind his readership that teevee almost always lags miles and miles behind culture because, as has already been mentioned, teevee is all about maximizing eyeballs.
From me in 2019 (the new Before Time?) writing about Rod Serling's introduction to the paperback edition of Patterns from 1957. For those of you doing the math, that's 68 years ago. I added emphasis indicating where you should read the text aloud in the voice of Rod Serling, because that's just more fun for everyone! (To practice your Serling-voice, I've embedded video of Mike Wallace's famous 1959 Serling interview which is also full of goodness, including a story of the Right's coordinated efforts to lean hard on sponsors to censor any hint of "liberal" subject matter long before the internet existed.)
Sometimes television is faced with a problem where it is physically impossible to substitute an idea.
Last year I was faced with such a problem when I wrote a script called The Arena, which was done on Studio One. In this case, I was dealing with a political story where much of the physical action took place on the floor of the United States Senate.
One of the edicts that comes down from the Mount Sinai of Advertisers Row is that at no time in a political drama must a speech or character be equated with an existing political party or current political problems. Some of these problems, however, are now so hoary with age and so meaningless in modern, context that they are stamped as acceptable. Slavery, for example, can now be talked about without blushing. Suffrage is another issue that need make no one wince. The treatment of the lunatic in chains and dungeons can no longer be considered controversial.
But The Arena took place in 1956, and no juggling of events can alter this fact. So, on the floor of the United States Senate (at least on Studio One), I was not permitted to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political scene was absolutely prohibited.
So, on television in April of 1956, several million viewers got a definitive picture of television’s concept of politics and the way the government is run. They were treated to an incredible display on the floor of the United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting, gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk.
There were long and impassioned defenses of the principles involved in Bill H. R. 107803906, but the salient features of the bill were conveniently shoved off into a corner of a side-of-the-mouth sotto voce, so that at no time could an audience have any idea what they were about. In retrospect, I probably would have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive...
Here's Serling again, showing that he understood the medium in which he was working very well:
And finally here I am again, this time from 2020:
There is no explanation for the ongoing failure of the American media to speak plainly and clearly about the long, public descent of the Republican Party into fascism and madness other than a fear of audience reaction. A fear that not only would have Republicans making open warfare on the press (spoiler: they already do) but that the vast and cowardly Middle that believes everything is fucked because of The Extremes on Both Sides and depends on the media to feed them reassuring bromides about their moral superiority would cancel their subscriptions and changing their channels in droves.
This is a fear which, in a health democracy, would never be allowed to polluted the coverage of the collapse of the GOP by a free and fair press.
Sadly, in case you hadn't noticed, we do not live in a health democracy. We live in a corporate oligarchy where pleasing the advertisers by not driving the audience away with scary truths they do not want to hear is the Prime Directive.
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