James Poniewozik

In 2011, Donald J. Trump, host of “The Celebrity Apprentice,” was the star of a Comedy Central roast, a familiar ritual for showbiz personae. The guest of honor sits stage center and gets insulted, then everyone laughs it off as all in good fun.

The State of the Union address, under President Trump, has become something like a celebrity roast in reverse. In this ritual, the center of attention stands at the podium, he says things about working together and getting along, and after it’s done, everyone goes on their way, assuming he didn’t really mean it.

So while the advance spin about the president’s speech Tuesday was that it would emphasize “unity” and “bipartisanship,” the pre-address coverage on cable news was less credulous than before. Trump had, perhaps, finally been the wolf who cried boy too many times. (He had, in a lunch with news anchors that same day, already called Sen. Chuck Schumer a “nasty son of a bitch.”)

Beyond that, there was a sense, with Democrats having swept into control of the House and opponents lining up to run in 2020, that the president was no longer the sole focus of the show. Having served, since announcing his campaign in 2015, as the norm-breaking antihero protagonist of America’s political TV serial, he now had to share billing with a vast ensemble of co-stars.

There was, of course, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ubiquitous new representative from Queens, doing interviews before the speech on CNN and after it on NBC. There was a house full of adversaries and potential opponents in the room, as the cameras darted from face to face to catch the reactions of Sens. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and more.

Arguably, the expressions of incredulity and sardonic shade were statements as politically significant as anything Trump read from his text. It was like a miniature primary of smirks and grimaces, pitched to any of the Democratic base watching, or catching up on social media.

One declared Democratic candidate, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, sent out one of her reaction GIFs on Twitter to raise campaign donations mid-speech. Elsewhere on Twitter, Trump detractors circulated a picture of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, perfunctorily applauding in the president’s direction, as if handing him one small clap on a tiny hors d’oeuvre tray.

And the promised bipartisan rhetoric? There were gestures toward it in the speech. There was also combativeness, and fearmongering about immigrants, and boasts specific and unquantifiable — America’s economy was “the hottest,” as if Trump were pitching a new hotel — and introductions of guest after emotional guest, all stuffing a Dagwood-sandwich speech.

Trump, never a strong reader off the prompter, read through sections at a slow cadence, then slam-cut through jarring segues. As at his rallies, and on reality TV, he was more comfortable in the moments he could improvise and play off the crowd. As he introduced a Holocaust survivor celebrating his birthday, the room broke into “Happy Birthday,” and Trump made an orchestra-conducting gesture.

But there was more dissonance than harmony. An upbeat section on the economy closed with a dark warning that investigations of him would bring it all crashing down, wrapped up with a Johnnie Cochran-esque rhyme: “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation.”

The speech made hairpin turns from uplift to fearmongering and back. Stacey Abrams, the former candidate for governor in Georgia, gave the Democratic response. This is typically a thankless job, but her speech may have benefited simply from being comparatively short, focused and sustained in tone.

Fittingly, the most boisterous cross-partisan cheers were ironic. When Trump referenced the women’s employment rate, a crowd of Democratic women celebrated — many of them having taken the jobs of the president’s supporters.

It was one of many striking visuals of the night, and not just because the congresswomen were dressed in suffragist white. The new class of representatives also contrasted sharply with the throngs of Republicans — mostly white, mostly men — who lined the aisle to glad hand the president as he walked into the hall.

Trump extended the moment. “Don’t sit, you’re going to like this,” he ad-libbed, adding that there were now more women serving in Congress than ever, which was the closest he came in the speech to congratulating his opponents on their win. They cheered even louder, if more defiantly than he might have planned.

For the former TV host, it was perhaps the old showman’s trick of seeking to hang onto the spotlight by ceding it. For them, it was a chance to emphasize that this new face of the Congress likely would not be there, if not in reaction to Donald Trump.

It was the one point in the State of the Union on which he and they could all agree to give him credit.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/arts/television/trump-state-of-the-union.html" id="2aef76e8-0f80-30eb-a95b-8f4d965b6cc9">The New York Times</a>.

Trump, Political TV's Protagonist, Now Has to Share the Spotlight

(Critic's Notebook)

If you prefer to be totally surprised by your TV shows, put down this review and watch “Russian Doll” when it comes out on Netflix on Friday. It’s eight short, acerbic, wittily profound episodes with a richly satisfying ending(s).

If you don’t mind a teensy spoiler, without which we can’t really discuss the series: The protagonist dies. This is not as big a surprise as it might seem. Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) is at a party for her 36th birthday, downing booze, sucking down a joint laced with a certain something and contemplating her self-destructiveness and mortality. “I smoke two packs a day,” she tells a friend. “I have the internal organs of a man twice my age.”

Good news: Her lungs don’t kill her. Bad news: A car does, later that night.

Disorienting news: She comes back to life, in the bathroom of the same downtown New York apartment, at the same party. Then she dies again and materializes in the bathroom again, over and over, reviving each time to the tune of Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up.”

While this might seem to tell you everything about “Russian Doll” — another variation on “Groundhog Day,” premiering, wink wink, the day before Groundhog Day — the story is barely getting started. It’s the way the series twists and complicates the premise that makes it much more than a copycat.

And that, finally, I will not spoil.

A party is the right place to meet Nadia. She’s a gregarious loner, warmly embracing her boho friends but allergic to any long-term attachment or dependence. She keeps a still-devoted former lover (Yul Vazquez) at arm’s length. Her longest-running relationships are with Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), a family friend and therapist, and Oatmeal, the cat whose custody she shares with a local bodega. Like Nadia, Oatmeal likes to keep things open-ended.

Lyonne created “Russian Doll” with Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler, and it’s a terrific match of performer and character. Lyonne’s throaty rasp sounds like a cigarette would if it could talk, but she also has a presence and an impish spark that cuts Nadia’s cynicism. She’s both ancient and brand-new, or as Nadia describes herself, “like if Andrew Dice Clay and the little girl from ‘Brave’ made a baby.”

When Nadia first dies and comes back to life, she suspects it may be a bad drug trip. When it happens again — well, kill me once, shame on you. Nadia, a video game programmer by trade, approaches her Groundhog Night dilemma accordingly. To break the loop, she needs to figure out the rules by which this recurring game works. Then she needs to debug it, and thus herself.

Life, Nadia discovers, is a very complex program, and her attempts to relive it take on a different cast from the romantic comedy of “Groundhog Day.” “Russian Doll” is more a detective story, with elements of slapstick, sci-fi and even horror. She’s not trying to mechanically create the perfect day so much as to, per the title, delve through her concentric shells and find her kernel.

If you watched, and I use the term loosely, Netflix’s interactive “Black Mirror” fiction “Bandersnatch,” you will recognize a parallel. That story too was about a game programmer, and it invited the viewer to send him down different life pathways — many of which ended with him dead — before starting over.

“Russian Doll” is a linear story, yet it has a greater sense of possibility and variety than that choose-your-own-adventure. It acknowledges that the other characters in Nadia’s story also have volition, that they too are capable of choosing differently — of having their own do-overs — when the same scenario repeats.

This becomes important when Nadia strikes a connection with Alan (Charlie Barnett), an uptight stranger wrestling with his own crises, whose path crosses and recrosses hers in significant ways. Nadia tells him that her idea of hell is to have to depend on another person, and he points out that she’s said as much through one of the games she programmed, “an impossible game with a single character who has to do everything on her own.”

For all its memento mori philosophy, the show is a hoot, as adept with physical comedy as with its quips — watching Lyonne navigate a flight of stairs on which she’s met several demises is priceless. If you spend a lot of time walking in New York (or anywhere else, probably), “Russian Doll” will leave you conscious of the myriad ways death could be around any corner, or teetering on any windowsill.

Which is not the worst service a TV show can provide. “Russian Doll” joins a boomlet of eschatological TV comedies (“The Good Place,” “Forever”) that use death and rebirth to attempt screwball inquiries into how to live.

Like its peers, “Russian Doll” resolves on the necessity of human connection, a familiar homily, but it’s too inventive and irascible to feel pat. This is a show with a big heart, but a nicotine-stained heart that’s been dropped in the gutter and kicked around a few times.

“Russian Doll” is lean and snappily paced; it even managed the rare feat, in the era of streaming-TV bloat, of making me wish for a bit more.

Would it kill Nadia to keep the story going just a little longer? The answer, of course, is yes.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/arts/television/russian-doll-netflix-review.html" id="ac06b287-2ade-3de8-a59d-6b0d4be98368">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

'Russian Doll': Programmer, Debug Thyself

The year 2018 ended with a TV event that offered multiple resolutions. The year 2019 is beginning with the anniversary of a TV series that, famously, left us with no resolution at all.

“Bandersnatch,” the new interactive — episode? movie? game? — of “Black Mirror” on Netflix, and “The Sopranos,” which began 20 years ago Jan. 10, are products of two different TV eras. The former lets the viewer direct the story (sort of) through a series of choices. The latter was the work of a creator who resisted catering to his audience and ended his series on a big, fat question mark.

But as different as the two works are, they’re oddly complementary. Each is an example of the tension between two ways of seeing fiction. Is a story a puzzle to be solved or a mystery to be pondered?

“Bandersnatch,” released Dec. 28, is full of tricks. It allows you to control Stefan (Fionn Whitehead), a video game designer in 1984 creating his own choose-your-path game. Along the way (limited spoilers ahead), you can learn codes that release mysteries from a vault. You can kill your father, or not. Somewhere, there’s a 1980s-style console game you can unlock. And after you reach an ending — most of them unhappy — you can try for another.

But the biggest trick “Bandersnatch” pulls off is to convince its audience that it offers more possibilities than other stories do. In fact, it offers far fewer.

Every story — be it a novel, movie or TV show — is full of forking paths: points at which characters could have chosen differently and events could have unfolded differently. In a linear story, you can never know any of these possibilities, and therefore they are infinite. The fact that one can only go forward and never know what might have been is part of what gives a story heft and poignancy.

The same is true in life. Living with regret is why we have entire spiritual practices devoted to letting go of the past and the unborn futures and accepting the moment.

But the moment can be unsatisfying. It can be infuriating. It can tease you with the thought of a better moment, somewhere on an alternative line of reality. You want to reach it. You want a do-over. You want to know what would have happened.

This has been the idea behind stories like “Groundhog Day” and “Sliding Doors.” (In the Netflix series “Russian Doll,” coming in February, the protagonist, played by Natasha Lyonne, keeps reliving variations on the last day of her life.)

“Bandersnatch” literalizes this idea: Go back, do something different, get a different result. (Fans on Reddit have already mapped out the branching and conditional options of the story in massive flowcharts.) Repeat your actions and you get, generally, the same outcome.

There’s an egocentric fallacy in a choose-your-own-adventure: that you alone, represented by the protagonist, have volition and the ability to change your decisions. You are the special one. You have choices; you, in any moment, might do a number of things. Everyone else, however, is an automaton character, answering a given input with a predetermined — and replicable — output.

That’s a fiction itself. You might make different choices if you could relive a key scene from your life. But so might your parents, your lovers, your boss, your dog. Taking one different action would not guarantee a certain outcome in life. But in “Bandersnatch” it does. By quantifying the resolutions, “Bandersnatch” limits them.

“Bandersnatch” is not unaware of the limits of interactive storytelling; it is at its best when it has fun with them. In one ending, where Stefan produces the most successful version of his game, he explains his secret: “I’d been trying to give the player too much choice,” he tells his therapist. “Now they’ve got the illusion of free will, but really I decide the ending.”

Still, like all games, “Bandersnatch” has ideas coded into it. Chief among them is the fantasy that life can be gamified, that the uncertainty can be hacked out of it, that taking a different turn in the past (you learned piano! we nominated Bernie!) would have one, and only one, determinable outcome.

“Bandersnatch” can be fun, if you’re entranced by its puzzle structure, or if you’ve always believed TV episodes would be better if only you could spend hours grinding through them again in order to watch 45 seconds of new footage.

But it doesn’t make for much of a story. This is partly because the core plot is uninspired; Stefan is a struggling genius with a foundational trauma (the death of his mother, which you get to relive umpteen times).

More important, Stefan isn’t much of a character because he can’t be — he’s a vehicle. You’re making decisions that are not determined by what he wants or who he is but by your desire to see more cool things happen. (“Bandersnatch” nods at this in a thread where Stefan becomes aware he’s being controlled, another meta wink that acknowledges the flaw but doesn’t make it better.)

Does this make “Bandersnatch” bad? Well, it’s neat. It’s occasionally genuinely moving. But it’s not haunting in the way that comes from reaching the end of a story and realizing that the only “What now?” answer you get will have to come from you.

It might have been more compelling, in a perverse, Banksy-an way, to create a version of “Bandersnatch” that ran exactly once for every viewer and then deleted itself. You’d get the ending you got. You’d compare with your friends. You’d wonder if anyone you knew — anyone at all — had unlocked the happiest result. You’d have to accept never knowing.

But a lot of people really hate not knowing. For proof, we have the return of “The Sopranos,” and with it, the revival of the argument over its famous final cut to black as mob boss Tony Soprano sits with his family at a diner.

The debate will likely be reignited by a quote from the series’ creator, David Chase, in the new book “The Sopranos Sessions” by Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall. In an interview, Chase refers in passing to the last moments of “The Sopranos” as “that death scene.”

He doesn’t even realize he’s said it, or what it implies, until Seitz points it out, upon which Chase curses and says he was referring to an earlier ending idea, in which Tony died at a meeting with another mobster.

If the years since the show’s finale in 2007 have taught me anything, it’s that a certain set of fans will analyze that snippet like it were the love child of the Warren Report and the Steele Dossier. Did Chase spill the goods? Or did he simply add another layer of could-have-been before returning us to the ambiguous status quo antipasto?

I will submit, probably pleasing no one, that it doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter even if David Chase held a news conference tomorrow and announced that Tony sleeps with the fishes, and it would not matter if he changed his mind five years later and declared that Tony was eating onion rings at that moment in New Jersey.

Maybe Chase intended a specific thing by that cut to black. Maybe he didn’t. He certainly could have punctuated the ending with an unambiguous hail of bullets if he had wanted. (No one questions whether Bobby Baccalà is dead.)

But once Chase, like any creator, ended his creation, it was loosed into the world and became everyone’s property.

This does not sit well with some fans, who have marshaled batteries of evidence and relaunched the argument every time Chase has opened his mouth. (The “Tony’s dead” camp seems to be more vocal than “Tony’s alive,” if only because they’re out to prove an ending rather than the absence of one.)

To insist that the ending of “The Sopranos” is a puzzle with one correct solution is to crave a “Bandersnatch"-type certainty: that Tony went down a certain path on his flowchart and reached a point where only one outcome was possible, only one answer is correct.

Fans today have been trained to expect answers. They’ve watched series, like “Westworld,” that structure themselves as riddles and invite sleuthing. They’ve seen authors like J.K. Rowling dispense ex post facto addendums to their novels long after the presses rolled.

To this mindset, when there is no fact that can’t be deduced or retconned or cleared up in a prequel, there must be only one definitive solution — and it’s in David Chase’s head; he just needs to spill the damn beans.

But you won’t get that in this world. In this world, we fight it out.

I have a dog in the fight as much as anyone: To me, ending “The Sopranos” on Tony dying would have been a bad, uncharacteristic move. It would slap a typical mob-story finish on a show that was anything but typical, a just deserts ending on a show that operated on the belief, as Chase once put it, that “crime does pay.”

That’s what I think! But I don’t know the truth any more than you do. The ending of “The Sopranos” creates an atmosphere of tension in which Tony could die, or not. Then it leaves you without certainty; it leaves you knowing that you could die and never see it coming; it leaves you to wonder what ending you were hoping for and why.

You might see it differently, and someone else might differently still, and no Redditor will ever beat the final boss level and unlock the answer. We all just have to argue and second-guess and marinate on that black screen until our own lights go out.

We’ve got a word for that kind of fiction: interactive.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/arts/television/netflix-bandersnatch-the-sopranos.html" id="9b250bae-90a3-355d-a4d5-3ed5d087ec00">The New York Times</a>.

'Bandersnatch,' 'The Sopranos,' and the Myth of Certainty

President Donald Trump, as his Twitter feed amply demonstrates, is more of a Fox News guy than an HBO guy. It’s too bad. Mornings might be less stressful if the president spent them opining on “My Brilliant Friend” rather than on “Fox &amp; Friends.”

But he has lately developed an affinity for one of HBO’s shows. Or at least its advertising.

In November, announcing sanctions on Iran, the president tweeted out a picture of himself on a mock “Game of Thrones” promo, with the caption “Sanctions Are Coming,” a variation on the show’s tagline “Winter Is Coming.” He apparently liked the image so much that he bought the poster. A copy lay in front of him at his Cabinet meeting Wednesday.

Thursday, on his Instagram account, he rolled out the sequel: “The Wall Is Coming,” with the president giving an Ice King stare over a rendering of a spiky barrier.

It was, superficially, an apt use of imagery. HBO’s epic does feature a massive border wall, stretching across the border wastes of the fantasy realm of Westeros. The slight problem — spoiler alert for anyone who isn’t caught up, including, apparently, the entire White House staff — is that at the end of the most recent season that wall spectacularly collapsed, done in by the (blue) fire and fury of a zombie dragon.

But there’s a bigger dissonance than that. Trump is a fan of tough-guy imagery, and he, or whoever makes his memes, probably just liked the idea of depicting himself as the patriarch of House Trump — First of His Name, Protector of the Realm — going medieval on national security.

However, he might not like what “Game of Thrones” actually has to say about leadership in general, and walls in particular.

Certainly Trump could find role models on the show. It involves the rise to dominance of a cunning, wealthy family that doles out power positions to relatives and has a penchant for gold. (Although there is some question as to whether Trump, like the Lannisters, pays his debts.)

And yes, looming over the whole thing, there is — or was — a great, big, beautiful wall. But it was never intended to keep out people.

In the story, based on a book series by George R.R. Martin, the ice wall was built thousands of years ago, with magical assistance, to keep out the White Walkers (the “Others” in the novels), a race of frigid beings dedicated to snuffing out all life. (I’ll let you Google the details.)

But as the Walkers lay dormant for centuries, people in Westeros started to forget. This nightmare enemy of all mankind, they decided, was a fairy tale. Instead, they came to believe, the wall was there to protect the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros from the “wildlings” — their term for the poor suckers who happened to live on the desolate northern side of the wall when it went up.

Over generations, the Night’s Watch — the force created to patrol the Wall — changed its self-image too, thinking of itself as a kind of border patrol, an icebound ICE, there to defend Westeros from what it saw as savages who wanted to pour over the border and steal the riches of honest, hardworking Westerosi.

If you’ve watched “Game of Thrones,” you know where it goes from there. The Walkers rise again, and the Night’s Watch leader Jon Snow (Kit Harington) wants to make common cause with the wildlings. “They were born on the wrong side of the wall,” he says. “That doesn’t make them monsters.”

His comrades, declaring this fake news, stab him to death. (Only temporarily!) But by the most recent season, with the zombie army encroaching, a resurrected Jon has convinced the squabbling armies of Westeros to pause their war for the Iron Throne — sort of — to fight the undead.

In “Game of Thrones,” in other words, nationalism and tribalism are not essential forces for preserving society but an existential threat to survival. The Wall is a mighty symbol of protection but ultimately an ineffective one; the only salvation, if there is one, is people deciding they have more to gain by working together. And the worst leaders (if sometimes the most successful) are those like Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), who see disaster as an opportunity to decimate and divide rivals.

The president is a creation of TV and a voracious consumer of it, but his tastes are limited and specific. He likes cable news in general, and news about himself best of all. He became a star in reality TV, which relies on condensing human experience into catchphrases and simple, broad symbols, and he applied its lessons on the campaign trail by rendering the idea of security as a great big wall.

He has never, however, seemed to be much of a follower of scripted TV dramas, which at their best draw out life’s complexities.

So to him — or the social-media staff in charge of realizing his worldview — “Winter Is Coming,” the motto of House Stark, is a macho threat. (Better look out, sucker! I’m bringing some winter down on you!)

As any fan of the series knows, it’s not; it’s a warning, a caution, a reminder that if we fall into pettiness and division, the storm will come for us all, all the same.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/arts/television/donald-trump-game-of-thrones.html" id="d530c4f2-2c2f-3842-a025-34b0e68a5243">The New York Times</a>.

'Game of Thrones' Does Not Say What Donald Trump Thinks It Does

(Critic’s Notebook)

After Wednesday’s opening impeachment hearings, there were complaints, in some pundit analysis, that the sober testimony of two U.S. diplomats was insufficiently whiz-bang. One write-up from NBC News, seeming to channel a talent scout from the 1930s, said the hearings lacked “pizazz.”

Obviously, you will find the word “pizazz” nowhere in the impeachment section of the U.S. Constitution. More to the point, an audience can be drawn in by a slow-burn narrative as well as by shocking twists.

That said: Did Friday have enough pizazz for you?

If Wednesday, in the serial impeachment narrative, was a carefully expository documentary, Friday’s testimony from Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, was a little bit “Homeland,” a little bit “Sopranos,” a little bit “Law &amp; Order.” It had stories of international danger and violence, government backbiting, threats — and, at least virtually, a surprise (and perhaps ill-advised) guest appearance by President Donald Trump.

Yovanovitch’s prepared testimony essentially picked up on the big-picture Wednesday story line and zoomed in to ground level, describing the hazards of foreign-service work, the real costs of corruption in Ukraine and her creeping realization that elements in her own government were working to smear and undermine her.

There was nothing academic and theoretical about her account. The stakes were concrete and physical. She described being recalled home over concerns for her “security,” and learning that she was fired while attending a ceremony for a Ukrainian activist who was assassinated in an acid attack.

And she described the palpable feeling of hearing that her own president had told Ukraine’s president that she would be “going through some things.” Someone who watched her read the remark, she said, told her “the color drained from my face.”

Then — like a furious defendant jumping out of his seat to scream at the witness on a courtroom drama — Trump himself joined the episode, via Twitter.

Rep. Adam Schiff was in the middle of asking Yovanovitch about a report that the State Department had refused to make a statement supporting her, for fear of being undercut by a Trump tweet. Now new evidence had flown to him on little bird wings. Like a live-show director resetting on the fly, Schiff seized on the tweets as Exhibit A of what “going through some things” looks like.

“As we sit here testifying, the president is attacking you on Twitter,” he said. Yovanovitch grimaced and seemed to tense up and take a second to compose herself. Schiff asked what effect the attack might have on other potential witnesses. “It’s very intimidating,” she said.

It was a remarkable fourth-wall-breaking moment, the smartphone screen crashing into the TV screen. We watched a real-time meta-confrontation between a diplomat and her former boss, the most powerful man in the world, who has the enhanced ability to make people go through some things with a few angry taps of his thumbs.

And it was one more example of the reality-TV president’s compulsion to both surveil his TV coverage and inject himself into it — his insistence on being the show’s star, producer and agitated binge-watcher.

On Wednesday, it seemed that one of the chief attack lines of the White House and its defenders would be to dismiss the impeachment proceedings as not just invalid but “boring” — nothing to see here, folks, why not check out what’s on HGTV?

Whether or not Trump ever believed that, his longtime celebrity’s instinct to create drama wherever he goes betrayed him just two days into the hearings. If tedium is his ally, pizazz is his addiction. (And this isn’t even counting the post-credits scene involving the conviction of Roger Stone, after the House committee broke for a recess, which occasioned another round of rage-tweets.)

The reviews were not kind, even on Trump’s TV home away from home, Fox News. “The president was not advised by counsel in deciding to do this tweet,” said Kenneth Starr, who prosecuted the impeachment case against Bill Clinton. “Extraordinarily poor judgment.”

The subject of this impeachment inquiry seems instead to be following the legal counsel of that legendary pizazz lover, Billy Flynn of the musical “Chicago”: “Give ‘em an act with lots of flash in it/And the reaction will be passionate.”

Whether that passion helps or hurts Trump, he’s going to have a hard time staying out of the spotlight.

This article originally appeared in

The President Bursts Through the Virtual Courtroom Doors

In the middle of the testimony of William B. Taylor Jr., the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, that opened the House impeachment hearings Wednesday, a guessing game broke out on social media.

He sounded like someone, didn’t he? His deep, assuring, steady voice reminded some people of Tom Brokaw. No, maybe it was Walter Cronkite? Edward R. Murrow?

It’s telling that all those comparisons were to old-school news anchors. Because I think what people were hearing in Taylor’s gravelly composure was the voice, not so much of another person, but another time — a time of authoritative voices that a wide audience found credible.

It was like a science-fiction story in which someone turns on an old radio and hears a staticky broadcast from the past. Even the text of Taylor’s introduction had a Cronkitian ring: “I am not here to take one side or the other,” he said. “My sole purpose is to provide facts as I know them.” And that’s the way it is.

But this was in fact 2019, where there’s no unified audience willing to accept a single way that anything is.

The Democrats running the House Intelligence Committee investigation, led by Rep. Adam B. Schiff, used the testimony of Taylor and his colleague George P. Kent, a senior State Department official, like the opening scene of an international-intrigue drama: two diplomats becoming aware of disturbing news in a foreign land.

Taylor’s testimony was a tale of two channels. There was the regular channel of diplomacy, he said, aimed at supporting Ukraine’s newly elected government. And there was an “irregular channel” — one of several terms the day’s proceedings added to the lexicon of scandal — working, in his testimony, to strong-arm that government into helping President Donald Trump get reelected.

But there were competing channels in the committee room as well. The Democrats, in charge of the proceedings and witness list, were starting to craft a story arc of presidential threats and self-dealing. The Republicans seemed less interested in offering a unified counternarrative than in preempting it with a series of program interruptions.

In his opening statement, ranking Republican member Rep. Devin Nunes decried the investigation as a “theatrical” performance. But it was his party’s performance that was belted most stridently — and maybe pitched toward one particular viewer on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Nunes reached presidential-tweet levels of rancor in denouncing the investigation as a “carefully orchestrated media smear campaign.” Rep. Jim Jordan, riffing like an angry auctioneer, closed the hearings dismissing them as a “darn sham.”

This is not the first impeachment proceeding to play out in the era of 24-hour electronic news. But there’s a difference between today and the Bill Clinton impeachment of the late 1990s. Back then, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC all covered the damaging and salacious details with similar fervor.

Wednesday, both broadcast and cable news carried the hearings live — but depending where you watched, the on-screen graphics could tell a very different story. During Taylor’s testimony, an MSNBC caption identified him as “Top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine since June.” A label on Fox read, “President Trump dismissed Taylor as a ‘Never Trumper.’”

The awareness of Fox’s influence on the conservative base never seemed far from mind. Indeed, some of the Republicans’ lines of questioning seemed unintelligible — like a storyline from a larger cinematic universe — unless you were familiar with the countertheories about Ukraine and the 2016 election favored by that channel’s opinion hosts and elsewhere in the conservative mediasphere.

As for Fox’s viewer-in-chief, the president insisted that “I haven’t watched for one minute” (though he did retweet several supportive tweets during the hearings, some including video). But his presence was felt, and not just among Republicans: Rep. Eric Swalwell asked Kent and Taylor if they were “Never Trumpers,” an accusation the president had tweeted again that morning. (Both men denied it.)

Wednesday’s testimony was the first installment in a series of unknown length, and it showed the hearings’ potential to tell an involving story and to enable grandstanding. The afternoon segment, in which committee members took turns questioning, was heavy on the posturing.

But Taylor’s lengthy statement was absorbing, not just because of that 20th-century-anchor voice. “Mr. Chairman, there are two Ukraine stories today,” he said. One was the notorious story of arm-twisting and election interference. The other was a “positive, bipartisan one,” about a country developing an inclusive identity, “not unlike what we in America, in our best moments, feel about our diverse country.”

There are going to be at least two competing stories as this narrative unfolds. And in this programming era, the positive, uplifting ones don’t always adapt well to American TV.

A Tale of 'Irregular Channels,' Playing on Many Channels

The breathtaking thing about baseball is how drastically the momentum can shift in a single at-bat.

So it went at the World Series in Washington on Sunday, not on the field — where the Houston Astros won a 7-1 blowout — but in the stands, where the jeering crowd delivered President Donald Trump a late-innings reversal to his day.

For a president created by TV, the video bookends of the day could not have been a starker contrast. The morning began with one of the most auspicious video appearances of his presidency, as he went on camera to announce the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State. It ended with a Bronx cheer by the Potomac.

Trump’s announcement of the successful raid in Syria recalled President Barack Obama’s 2011 surprise appearance to tell Americans that the al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was dead. Certainly Trump, engaged in an eternal contest with the predecessor he never ran against, seemed conscious of the parallel, calling al-Baghdadi “the biggest there is.”

The difference between the two presidents’ TV appearances encapsulated the difference in the style of their administrations, and not only because of Trump’s penchant for comparing sizes.

Obama spoke coolly and matter-of-factly, sharing few details of bin Laden’s actual killing. Trump, began his scripted remarks with “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead,” hitting “is dead” like a snare drum, then went on to detail the target’s last moments with relish. (“I got to watch much of it.”)

Obama’s speech assured Americans that the brutal deed was done and over. Trump’s invited them to relive the deadly operation vicariously through him.

Obama framed the operation in terms of history and justice for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Trump emphasized, as he often has as candidate and president, the satisfaction, in itself, of destroying and humiliating one’s enemies.

Of course, as much as the two presidents’ speeches differed in tone, they shared a subject: The end of an enemy whose cruelty Americans of many political persuasions could agree on. So you might think that Trump, who had already planned, that evening, to attend Game 5 of the World Series, would expect to enjoy a rare moment of his presidency — a public and unanimous round of applause.

This was not coming. Trump is still under impeachment investigation; he is still the president who has gloried in the pain of his adversaries; he is still the man who reveled at his rallies as his fans cheered about his opponent, “Lock her up!”

Sunday night, his pitch was hit back at him.

As the president appeared on the stadium’s big screen, the roar from the stands pitched into a howl of boos, like a movie score shifting into a minor key. Fans pointed and yelled, “Lock him up!” On camera, Trump stood clapping through the catcalls, his beaming smile turning hard and determined, then melting.

By Monday morning, the host Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” — first the enabler of candidate Trump, then frequent critic of the president — deplored the fans for mimicking the president’s own crowds.

But the catcalls were, less than a momentary breach, a resumption of the verbal total war practiced by a president who has always treated life as a personal, incessant fight: “a series of battles ending in victory or defeat,” as he told People magazine in 1981.

The moment — Trump, in a rare appearance in front of a hostile crowd, exposed and taunted — recalled a different clip from spring 2011. This was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where he was roasted by Obama just the day before the bin Laden announcement.

Obama, at that point aware of the operation against the terrorist leader, had just released the long-form version of his birth certificate, to quell Trump’s racist fiction that the president had been born in Africa, not the United States.

Trump, a guest at the dinner, was roasted by the host, the comedian Seth Meyers. He was also done to a turn on camera by the president, who urged him to focus on “the issues that matter: Like, did we fake the moon landing?” Trump, at the time famous for delivering zingers on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” was stuck at his table, a stiff grin on his lips, as his face journeyed toward the red end of the color spectrum.

On Sunday, Trump may have thought that he would get, that he deserved, his own bin Laden moment. But it was typical of this febrile time that the moment would be shouted over, within the same day, by a parody of a campaign-trail taunt.

Mockery feels good, but it can have unintended effects. According to some Trump associates, his 2011 filleting goaded him to run for president four years later. Said the former “Apprentice” contestant and future Trump administration staffer Omarosa Manigault: “Every critic, every detractor will have to bow down to President Trump.”

But now he was president, and they were booing, not bowing. Maybe the Washington crowd’s chant will fuel the president, and his supporters, in his reelection campaign. For this evening, however, there was nothing to do but grin — that grin fading to a grimace — and bear it.

A Terrorist Is Defeated. Trump Is Jeered. We've Been Here Before.

On one level, I suppose, you could say that being cast on ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” is punishment enough. It is not generally a sign of a thriving career. You don’t have to be a scandal subject or a public joke or an “Oh yeah, it’s that guy” to get cast on the show, but it doesn’t hurt.

All of which may be reason to ignore the fact that “Dancing” has cast former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, heretofore best known for tap-dancing to his boss’s tune and waltzing past the photographic evidence to insist that President Donald Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest of all time, period.

Certainly I’m giving the show precisely what it wanted when it cast Spicer, which is publicity. And I’m probably giving Spicer what he wants, which is attention as he takes one more step toward an imagined life in which he’s no longer a buffoon, where people shrug off his mendacity and say: “Hey, what was he supposed to do? Everybody’s gotta keep the boss happy, right?”

Besides which, it isn’t cool to get mad about things like this. It’s so strident. It’s so earnest. If you high-mindedly wrestle with a goofy sideshow like “Dancing With the Stars,” you just get glitter all over you, and the show gets ratings.

But this is one time when we should get uptight. “Dancing With the Stars” is just a silly, innocuous reality show, that’s true. And that’s exactly why it shouldn’t be helping Spicer dry-clean his reputation.

I’m not saying there’s nothing funny about Spicer. There’s always something funny about incompetent deception. Melissa McCarthy, playing him as the administration’s hapless Baghdad Bob on “Saturday Night Live,” made him hilarious.

Since he resigned from his job in 2017, Spicer has tried to use the jokes as a giant whoopee cushion to land on, bounce back from and move on to some undetermined, respectable future. At that year’s Emmys, he showed up behind a moving podium, playing McCarthy playing him.

He’s tried, not much more artfully than he spun in the press room, to walk a line between sort of apologizing for his behavior as press secretary and sort of remaining a defender of the administration for which he set his credibility on fire. His 2018 book, “The Briefing,” neither an apology nor tell-all nor loyalist defense, was not well-received.

Enter “Dancing With the Stars” to present him as a good sport who can laugh at himself, who is out there willing to try some dance moves and maybe look silly and hey, can’t we all just let bygones be bygones?

Now, look: It’s not as if reality shows cast only paragons of honesty. But this is not simply a matter of Sean Spicer’s having lied. It’s a matter of Sean Spicer’s being a liar, professionally.

That is, he’s not a famous person who happened to do something dishonest. He is a person who is famous — singularly, even in an era of “alternative facts” — for spreading disinformation, about the inauguration, about the president’s claims that he was wiretapped by the previous administration, about Michael Flynn’s resignation. At least publicly, dishonesty is his brand.

So, OK, maybe “Dancing,” like the Emmys, sees the casting as a joke that Spicer is the butt of. At Wednesday’s announcement, the host, Tom Bergeron, gibed that Spicer would be “in charge of assessing audience size.” Later, he seemed to dissent from the casting decision on Twitter, saying he had wanted the season to be “a joyful respite from our exhausting political climate.”

In the past, “Dancing” cast Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader indicted in a money-laundering scandal, without reviving his political career. But it’s not as if people don’t come back, and even benefit, from being stunt-cast as the joke on “Dancing With the Stars.”

Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry did the show after an excruciating mental short-circuit at a 2011 presidential debate in which he forgot the name of the Department of Energy. He now heads that department for Trump. (And if you still don’t think a reality show can burnish and enlarge a public reputation, maybe Google what Trump was doing from 2004 to 2015.)

I know it’s not as if ABC just hired Spicer to anchor the evening news. I know I might sound like a humorless scold for attacking the stunt-casting of a silly reality show.

But that’s just the point. To treat Spicer, and his reason for notoriety, as a harmless joke is to whitewash the harm of what he did, which was to say things so absurdly false that he invited his political side to join him in denying their own eyeballs, to encourage people to believe that facts don’t matter if they hurt your team.

To put him on a silly reality show is to say that he committed a silly offense and that you’re silly if you still make a big deal about it — everybody lies; everybody does what they’ve got to do to get by; everything’s a joke; just stop being such a fussbudget and enjoy the show.

Letting Sean Spicer tango onto prime time this fall is not the largest disgrace of all time. But it’s still a disgrace. Period.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/arts/television/dancing-with-the-stars-sean-spicer.html" id="d32a526c-8475-33f5-a364-9afa89653464">The New York Times</a>.

Don't Let Sean Spicer Tap-Dance Out of Infamy on 'Dancing With the Stars'

How did I, 12 or 13 years old in a Rust Belt small town, even know that there was such a thing as a preppy, much less that I was anti-that? Why would I care enough to plaster my enmity across my chest? The closest thing to an elite preparatory institution in my hometown was the Catholic school. The most coastal element of my experience was Lake Erie. I didn’t know any Muffys or Trips; I doubt I ever met an actual prep-school graduate until I went to college.

What I knew of prepdom was the version that had percolated into the shopping centers and school hallways of the Midwest, thanks to “The Official Preppy Handbook.” The slim, plaid-jacketed guidebook, edited by Lisa Birnbach and written by her, Jonathan Roberts, Carol McD. Wallace and Mason Wiley, promised its reader virtual entree into the squash courts and folk ways of the old-money elite.

It sold more than 1 million copies, swathing a nation of copycats in popped-collar Lacoste alligator shirts and sweaters knotted at the neck. It would create a pop-culture shorthand, launch a thousand trend stories and inspire characters like Alex P. Keaton, the Reaganite Ohio teen of “Family Ties.”

I never owned a copy. I’m not sure I ever saw it outside a mall bookstore. All the same, it was everywhere. I knew it secondhand, through its resonance in news features and on TV and in the pastel-and-khaki transformation of the popular kids. That was all I needed to know that I hated it and everything it stood for.

Like many adolescents before the internet, I cobbled together my sense of the world and my place in it from pop culture affiliations. I watched slobs-versus-snobs movies like “Caddyshack” and “Animal House,” where the villains were country clubbers, frat boys, the rich kids at the camp across the lake. I read “Doonesbury” and “Bloom County.” I watched Hawkeye Pierce prank snooty Charles Emerson Winchester on “M.A.S.H.”

I wore T-shirts from Kmart. Neither of my parents had gone to college. If it was the snobs against the slobs, I knew which side I was on.

But the sides were shifting. The year 1980, when the “Handbook” appeared, was a weird in-between moment in American culture. The decade had arrived on the calendar but not quite in the zeitgeist. Jimmy Carter was still president; the book appeared in stores just a few months after Ronald Reagan was nominated in a Detroit convention hall a short drive from my home.

The book seemed to rise on the updrafts of his election and the pop-culture shift that accompanied it, from the underdog sympathies of the 1970s to overdog fantasies like “Dynasty,” from hating the rich to envying them to loving them.

The “Handbook” was one of the first touchstones of an era that celebrated coveting, from the bubbly home tours of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” to the upscale-aspiration of MTV’s early videos. It was OK to want stuff again. This was a shift with broad social and political implications, even if at the time, I saw those reflected mostly in my classmates with their dumb alligator shirts.

I’ve been thinking about this period a lot over the last couple years, while writing a book that involved diving into the cultural history of the 1980s. For research, I dug up the “Handbook,” no longer an easy feat; the decade-defining icon has been relegated to used-book bins.

The book I read was little like the one I’d let live rent-free in my head. Yes, on the surface, it’s a how-to guide to prep life, with vast, closely observed entries on picking the proper school, the proper clothing, the proper pet (a dog). There’s a page on caring for genuine madras (it needs a 24-hour soak in cold salt water[!] before first washing) and one devoted entirely to ducks (“the most beloved of all totems”).

But it’s also trenchant and hilarious. It can be as cutting as Lucille Bluth on her third martini. Birnbach — no lock-jawed Connecticut Mayflower descendant but a Jewish New Yorker who took on the book project as a 21-year-old Village Voice writer — approached it, she would later say, as an “insider-outsider.”

She’s affectionate but acerbic. One section is titled “Prep sex: A contradiction in terms.” A diagram of preppy college fashion takes a Margaret Mead tone: “For the first time they are in a community of many different types of people, and this very functional uniform helps them to identify one another in a crowd.” The illustrations of athletic, cheerfully boozy white people are archly annotated in what would become the manner of the elites-puncturing Spy magazine (where Birnbach later worked).

Birnbach described her tone as “loving irreverence,” but it’s a cleareyed love that sees its subjects as charmed goofballs with safety nets under their safety nets. It’s not quite celebration and it’s not entirely satire; it’s halfway between roast and toast. Birnbach sees prepdom as enticing, faintly ridiculous and thus essentially harmless. She sees a species anxious about its perpetuation, seeing its place in the world sinking like the evening summer sun off a bayside dock.

This deeply ironic, conflicted work became an unironic hit, much like, say, Madonna’s “Material Girl” would. It was bought as a style bible and gentrified department-store shelves until, in the words of a 1984 article in The New York Times on troubles at alligator-shirt-maker Izod, the youth of America “moved on to the ‘Flashdance’ look.”

In 1980, the “Handbook” was a fun lark. Read today, it’s an ambivalent document of a transitional moment, when the blue-jean populism of the 1970s was giving way to designer-jean materialism, eventually ushering in a capitalism more rapacious and untiring than the blue-blood leisure Birnbach’s prepsters aspired to. It reads especially quaint and wistful now that the cultural markers it delineates have been scrambled, with conservative self-described anti-elitist “deplorables” pledging fealty to a country-club owner.

I didn’t know about any of those nuances at the time, just as I didn’t realize how much of the anti-snob comedy I loved — “Doonesbury,” “Animal House” — was in fact created by alumni of Yale and Harvard universities. I didn’t really understand the American class system that the “Handbook” described and that the mass-market preppy fad elided. I thought of my public-school classmates, buying boat shoes at the mall, as preppies. Had I read chapter six of the “Handbook,” about life in the suburbs, I would have known that “What Preppies don’t need are good public schools and a shopping mall.” (Ouch.)

When it came to prepdom, I didn’t know what the thing was. I just knew that being not that thing was key to being who I was.

And who, I guess, I am. I have no idea what happened to that “ANTI-PREPPIE” T-shirt. In my closet now are several solid-color, basic-dad polo shirts. They’re simple. They’re comfortable. They’re no big deal. None, however, has a little alligator on the chest. Some allegiances you never quite shake.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/arts/preppy-handbook.html" id="27296595-94dc-3a49-afdf-ba52f9c01a6e">The New York Times</a>.

Somewhere among my family’s mementos there is a photo, which I will make certain you will never see, of me in the early ’80s, wearing a goofy smile, a prodigious bush of hair and a T-shirt with the block-lettered slogan, “ANTI-PREPPIE.”

The 'Preppy Handbook' and Me

After the first night of CNN’s bipartite Democratic debate, the network’s analyst John King discussed the import of the event for the primary candidates’ “survival,” but interrupted himself midthought: “I don’t want to make this into reality TV.”

James Poniewozik

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