James Poniewozik

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

(Critic’s Notebook)

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.

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.”

Oh, go ahead. You might as well call the thing what it is.

That “Survivor” state of things — a desperate contest among a crowded field to avoid elimination — was not wholly of CNN’s making. It was created in part by the party’s decision to set the bar for the early debates at ankle height, and by the ability of a couple dozen Democrats to imagine themselves in the Oval Office, or at least imagine themselves imagining it.

And now, they were facing a mass group culling, since the tighter rules for the September debates will likely leave half or more of them out. Inevitably, people would act out to stand out.

That’s reality TV, but it’s also the hard reality of the race.

That said, CNN also did plenty to goose the drama, starting with its live Powerball drawing to determine the two nights’ lineup. Each night of the debate began with a hyperdramatic clip reel suited to an “Amazing Race” finale, giving candidates thumbnail descriptions and setting up the night’s story arcs. Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were “longtime friends fighting for the same cause — and the same voters!” Kamala Harris was “not backing down after clashing with Biden over race!”

Its contestants sorted into two tribes, CNN then tried to strike sparks off the debaters, using questions based on their past criticisms of one another to goad them into faceoffs.

That does not necessarily mean a shallow discussion; indeed, this kind of nudging can be the job of a good debate moderator. Both nights of debate opened with long and substantive arguments about health care, a top issue for Democratic voters and one on which the party’s factions have legitimate differences.

But since the format split the show’s “stars” over two nights, CNN did what reality producers do, which was to “cast” the available talent into roles that served a promising story line, then create the conditions for drama — generally, with the enthusiastic cooperation of the contestants looking for screen time.

One arc of the primary has been the divide between the party’s moderates and its left. Tuesday, the left was generously represented, with Sanders and Warren.

But with the moderate front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, offstage, former Rep. John Delaney, heretofore the trivia question of the 2020 race, became a co-star for one episode, enlisted to badger and get battered by Sanders and Warren. He grinned gamely through it all; if nothing else, he was getting the sort of meaty edit a reality contestant gets just before being eliminated in an early round.

On Wednesday, CNN’s fight-night intro highlighted the “critical rematch!” between Harris and Biden. But this time, the candidates needed less direction from the moderators to clash.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard attacked Harris. Nearly everyone attacked Biden. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City attacked nearly everyone else — including the moderators — and in turn was attacked by protesters angry over his handling of police violence. He was like a one-man band of conflict, a debate unto himself.

Of course there was discord on the stage. There’s disagreement within the party. That’s politics. But it was compounded by the anxiety over making the next debate, and multiplied by CNN’s smackdown aesthetic. You fight or you die — the price of attention is combat. The candidates who didn’t lash out, like Sen. Amy Klobuchar, tended to fade away.

The candidates, however, weren’t the only ones under pressure. The moderators, Dana Bash, Don Lemon and Jake Tapper, had a lot of debaters to attend to in limited time (further limited by CNN’s spending the first chunk of the debates on introductions and the national anthem). They enforced the time limits strictly, especially Tuesday, clipping many answers with a knuckle-rapping “Thank you!” as the candidates were building to a finish.

To be fair, moderators get criticized when they let the candidates stampede over them and blow past the time limits. It’s tough to land between free-for-all and free-for-none, but that’s where the sweet spot is: not letting the rules get in the way of the responses that the audience is watching for. It is, maybe, less like policing and more like running the Oscars — knowing when to play someone off and knowing when you’re witnessing a moment that you need to let run.

The moments still came, like Sanders cutting off Rep. Tim Ryan’s doubts about his Medicare for All proposal with, “I wrote the damn bill!” Marianne Williamson continued to make her oddly transfixing case for the election as a psychic-spiritual crucible.

But one of the most pointed applause lines came from businessman Andrew Yang — an attack not on his opponents or even on the moderators but on the premise of high-octane, high-gloss televised debating.

“Instead of talking about automation and our future,” he said, “we’re up here with makeup on our faces and our rehearsed attack lines playing roles in this reality-TV show. It’s one reason why we elected a reality-TV star as our president.”

His speech was, dare I say it, a reliably effective reality-TV strategy: reminding the audience that they’re watching a performance, thus implying that, even as you participate in the same artifice, you are the one keeping it most real. And he got some of the most enthusiastic cheers of the night for it. Sometimes hating the game can be as strategic as hating the players.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/arts/television/democratic-debates-cnn.html" id="05d96d10-d6d8-31e2-ab72-2818d37c7be2">The New York Times</a>.

CNN's Democratic Debates Give Conflict a Reality-TV Boost

(Critic's Notebook)

It is a perennial question for TV programmers, from “The Thorn Birds” to “The Handmaid’s Tale”: How do you successfully adapt a big book for the screen?

The further challenge of the congressional committees questioning former special counsel Robert Mueller on Wednesday was that the book in question — Mueller’s two-volume report into election interference and possible obstruction of justice — did not want to be adapted.

The book sat in front of them, in the person of Mueller, who at a news conference in May essentially pleaded that the report be his last word. He brought a thesaurus’ worth of ways to say, “No comment.”

Faced with a laconic, literally by-the-book lawman, members of both parties used him as a prop in their own testimony. One party wanted to create an episodic narrative of the report’s findings; the other wanted to demolish or muddy that story. The Democrats sought to read the book to Mueller. The Republicans sought to throw the book at him.

The idea behind the Democrats’ subpoenaing Mueller was to create a TV version, or at least an audiobook, of the much-discussed and less-read Mueller report. Since the author was not about to expand on his writing — or even read aloud from it — they would do it for him.

Some of the most memorable and quotable moments came in the first few minutes. The House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., asked a string of yes-or-no questions about President Donald Trump’s claims that the report found no collusion and no obstruction.

“Did you actually totally exonerate the president?” Nadler asked. “No,” Mueller replied — an answer that dominated headlines and TV news captions for much of the morning. In a surreal moment, Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, challenged the answer in the afternoon hearing, showing a screenshot of CNN’s coverage of the morning hearing.

But much of the testimony, especially in the morning, involved reading back long stretches of the report’s legalistic language. Viewers were asked to parse nested double negatives and weigh the difference between deciding not to prosecute and deciding not to decide to prosecute. It was not unconfusing.

To some extent, the Democrats tried to make the book into the show. Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee gave a dramatic reading of one passage that quoted the president, cleaning it up for morning TV: “This is the end of my presidency. I’m effed.”

They brought graphics with quotes from the report. If Americans weren’t going to read the Mueller report as a book, they would at least get it as a PowerPoint.

The Republicans, on the other hand, seemed to be producing an episode of “Hannity.” Their questions — heated and rich with references to the Steele dossier, purported conflicts of Mueller’s staff and charges of witch-hunting — seemed aimed less at a general audience than one of intense Fox News viewers. (Maybe one intense Fox News viewer in particular. I’m just guessing.)

The president’s defenders didn’t seem to expect answers; more than one, in fact, cut Mueller off when he did try to answer, citing limited time. They had their own show to perform. “Donald Trump is not above the law,” Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, told Mueller, “but he damn sure should not be below the law.”

Generally, Mueller’s answers were parsimonious. Often, they were abrupt. Occasionally, they were coy. When Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, asked Mueller about the “constitutional processes” that might deal with accusations against the president, he answered, “I think I heard you mention at least one.” Was it impeachment? she asked. “I’m not going to comment.”

It was like some sort of obscure riddle contest, with questioners trying to guess the magic words that would get the sphinx to reveal its secrets. (If only someone had asked, “What have I got in my pocket?”)

Of course, the expectation was that the hearings wouldn’t break new information. In that sense, they didn’t disappoint. The real calling card was an extended appearance, at last, by Robert Mueller, national man of mystery — someone who, as Lester Holt put it on NBC, “has figured in our conversations for more than two years now” yet “a lot of us don’t remember or hadn’t heard his voice.”

That voice was of someone who wanted to speak as little as possible. He spoke carefully, at times halting and fumbling for words. He grew more forceful as the day went on, especially regarding Trump’s embrace of WikiLeaks’ release of stolen campaign material, which Mueller permitted himself to call “problematic.” But he was not about to write himself an Aaron Sorkin moment.

He came across as neither the avenging angel of Resistance fan-fiction nor the rabid partisan of Republican portraiture. He was no myth. He was just a man, cautious, maybe a bit hard of hearing, leery of over-speaking and overstepping, bound to the proprieties of another time.

In that other time, a book two years in the making might have spoken for itself. In this one, it needs to enter the raging mediasphere. That required an event, and Mueller was drafted to be it.

And now his story goes back to the scrum, with Chuck Todd scrutinizing the “optics,” the president retweeting the Fox News verdict (“a disaster”) and analysts solemnly debating whether it was a “game changer.” Mueller is done talking. The rest of the world is glad to keep speaking for him.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/24/arts/television/mueller-testimony-trump.html" id="7867ca2c-c908-3bf6-a527-ee8918030d34">The New York Times</a>.

Asked to Put on a Show, Mueller Wishes You'd Read the Book

Democracy, as a certain other news outlet has famously observed, dies in darkness. But if you just want to beat it up and humiliate it for an hour, simply stick it in a box.

Or two boxes, to be more precise. The devices that CNN deployed Thursday night, in a prime time live drawing for the July 30 and 31 Democratic debates, turned a momentous and fraught election into a farcical combo of the NBA draft and a Lotto drawing.

The drawing took place in three rounds, separated by generous commercial breaks, and was analyzed before, after and during by Anderson Cooper and a seven-person panel. Brianna Keilar, Victor Blackwell and Ana Cabrera got the job of shuffling clunky placards with candidate names and debate-night dates, as if they were running the world’s wonkiest three-card monte game.

They drew cards. They read cards. They drew. They read. The production crammed 60 seconds’ worth of news into 60 minutes.

Is it any surprise that CNN, the home of saturation coverage and interminable countdown clocks, would try to wring more airtime out of the debates? The first pair, hosted by NBC News in June, smashed ratings records for the Democratic primaries. They were the hit of the summer, the biggest thing on TV since Daenerys Targaryen went negative on King’s Landing.

Now CNN would get “Game of Podiums,” albeit only for two nights. But … what if there was a third?

So CNN spun one out of thin, hot air. It concocted what the historian Daniel Boorstin, writing in “The Image,” termed a “pseudo-event” — although in the quaint 1960s, Boorstin was writing about publicity firms passing off stunts to news outlets, not news outlets passing off stunts to us.

So CNN’s panel spent several excited segments speculating about a drawing that the network controlled and could have completed before the first ad break. “This is the luck of the draw, literally,” Gloria Borger informed us. John King broke out his magic screen to highlight potential matchups by scrawling the word “Vs.” Wolf Blitzer added whatever quotient of this-is-big-news-because-Wolf-Blitzer-is-here that his presence implies.

It was a rare chance to see a network generate punditry and render it useless in real time. When the drawing was two-thirds done, CNN’s political director, David Chalian, declared, “Tuesday night is going to be moderate night!” Then, left-leaning Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren were added to the lineup, and suddenly it wasn’t.

This wasn’t covering the news. This was manufacturing the news, while commenting on the dexterity and suspense with which CNN was creating it. It was political journalism as Penn &amp; Teller act.

The network did have a rationalization for the special: “transparency.” As Cooper explained, the best way to show suspicious voters there was no funny stuff going on was to shoot the entire process live, complete with overhead skycams.

Maybe so; it didn’t require an hour in prime time, though. (And times being what they are, you still needed only do a quick search on “CNN” and “rigged” to find debate-draw truthers.)

There’s nothing wrong with a 24-hour news network devoting some of those endless hours to providing forums to a political audience hungry for them. CNN usefully held a string of early town halls, which gave candidates famous and obscure alike a valuable chance to make connections and explain themselves in depth.

This, on the other hand, was an empty tease, a meta-event that exploited viewers’ antsiness for an election months before anyone will cast a vote. There must be events. Things have to happen, or seem to happen.

You could say the whole stunt was harmless and silly and we’ll all forget about it tomorrow. But that’s exactly the problem. The election isn’t meaningless. It isn’t a harmless laugh. Those mammoth debate ratings are high for a reason, and it isn’t the dazzling special effects.

To the extent, as Chalian pointed out, that Democrats are paying closer attention to this primary than they had in 2008 and 2016, it’s because of a feeling of crisis and civil chaos, a sense that toxic forces are roiling and reshaping America’s character. One night before, on live TV, a rally crowd enthused by the president chanted that one of his political critics should be kicked out of the country.

None of this is a game, not for the participants, not for the spectators, not for the chanters or the people being chanted about and not, I would hope, for the journalists at CNN.

But for one night, the channel became a cross between ESPN and the Game Show Network, and we all got played.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/arts/television/cnn-debate-lotto.html" id="e4619529-8551-30c8-a85e-ec813750e670">The New York Times</a>.

The Night Democracy Became the Lotto

But also, it was simply big — teeming, packed to the ceiling with characters and story — in a way that becomes clear when you peek at Netflix’s spoiler list for its final season.

Oh, the things I cannot tell you about this show! Deaths and releases and imprisonments. Reappearances and disappearances. Love and change and illness and new circumstances and more death. A dozen and a half characters are named; far more are implied.

The list does not say anything about the chickens, though. So I will tell you about the chickens.

If you’ve watched “Orange,” you remember the chicken, in Season 1, rumored to be roaming the grounds of Litchfield, the women’s prison at which the series is set. The bird became a legend, a talisman, a symbol of elusive liberty and hope.

In one of many callbacks to the series’ beginnings, the final season features more chickens, being raised as part of a program for the prison’s “neurodiverse” inmates. One clucker meets a bad end, and Suzanne Warren (Uzo Aduba) becomes convinced that there is a murderer among the flock. She tries separating them, confining them, surveilling them. You can’t be too careful with chickens, she says. They’re “superpredators.”

The prisoner becomes the jailer: OK, it’s not subtle. But the chicken is a pretty apt metaphor for “Orange.”

Chickens are, after all, confined animals. They are — like the women locked up by a private prison corporation — creatures kept for profit. They are especially associated with the maternal, that is, the egg. They can’t fly very well, which is to say, they are grounded by factors beyond simply their cages. They maintain, within captivity, their own pecking order.

A chicken is not a lofty winged symbol of freedom, like the eagle or butterfly. Yet it scratches out a living. It perseveres. It is, like “Orange Is the New Black” itself, an odd, sometimes ungainly, yet majestic being.

I’m not sure what to call the current creative era of TV — the one that began, roughly, with the twilight of cable classics like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad” and with the dawn of streaming television. The Netflix era? The post-antihero era?

But whatever it is, “Orange Is the New Black” was the beginning of it.

When it arrived in summer 2013, it was not the first original series to air on Netflix. But it was really the first “Netflix series” in the sense we think of it now. “Lilyhammer,” in 2012, was a Norwegian import; “Arrested Development,” earlier in 2013, was a revival. Even “House of Cards,” for all the attention it got when it debuted a few months before “Orange,” was a dark drama about a brooding, dastardly alpha male that could have aired on Showtime.

“Orange Is the New Black,” on the other hand, was an original story, as opposed to “Cards,” which had been adapted from a British series. (The creator, Jenji Kohan, used Piper Kerman’s prison memoir of the same name as a jumping-off point.)

It had some of the markers of old-school network TV but the specificity and scope of premium cable. It was nuanced and ambitious, but also broad and unpretentiously bawdy. It was dedicated to telling underrepresented stories.

It was something else, and it spent seven seasons establishing exactly what.

An Immersive Blueprint

When Netflix first started making programming, it wasn’t clear what “Netflix shows” would look like, even to the people making them. “Arrested Development” Season 4 was a four-dimensional web of narrative, within which you might chase a plot thread from Episode 3 forward to Episode 8 and back to Episode 1. “House of Cards” simply approached streaming as premium cable by other means.

“Orange” was the first series to show us how streaming TV would really work and to teach us how to watch it.

The show looked like traditional TV, even more so than its fancier recent contemporaries in cable. It didn’t aim for the striking images of a “Breaking Bad,” the lapidary indie-film intimacy of “Enlightened” or the meticulous design curation of “Mad Men.”

Its aesthetic and composition were utilitarian, drab even, fitting its institutional setting. It achieved its effects more through conversation than through luminous visuals, much as early TV modeled itself on theater as opposed to cinema. It even had a TV schedule, of a sort; it came out once a year, always in June or July.

But in practice, in the way the viewer encountered it, it was like little that preceded it. Its distinguishing assets were size and time: The seasons and episodes could be vast, and you could watch them as fast as you wanted.

This was immersive, and it was suited to a story that began with a character being thrown into the deep end. Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a Brooklyn artisanal soap maker convicted on a drug charge, has to suddenly acclimate herself to a sprawling society of women of far less privilege. The enormous catalog of characters and alliances, which was a barrier of entry with sweeping weekly series like “The Wire,” was easier to take in when you swallowed it whole, rather than in weekly bites.

But watching a show is only half the cultural experience of TV. The other half is the conversation around it, which changes when you no longer have people watching one show on one channel on one night. The audience would not be aggregated, they would have to find one another — something enabled by social media, which helpfully rose around the same time.

As one of the first streaming phenomena, “Orange” taught us about this, too. Its cultural reach wasn’t immediately apparent; we didn’t, and still don’t, have the kind of independent ratings figures for it that we do for network and cable series. Netflix shows — like Amazon shows, and Hulu shows, and presumably all the shows to come on HBO Max and Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus and so on — would not announce themselves overnight with big Nielsen numbers. They would rise up and percolate outward, like the whispers around a cell block.

Then there was the matter of whose stories “Orange” told. The era of celebrated TV that preceded it had a preferred protagonist type: mostly white, mostly men, mostly like the sorts of people who ran TV networks. The next era would be open to a wider range of identity, color, sexual orientation and life experience. And “Orange” was instrumental in busting those gates open.

At first, it seemed like it would center privileged, WASP-y Piper as the audience’s guide into a world of black and brown and lower-income women. But she turned out to be the series Trojan Drug Mule. She smuggled the viewer in; once inside, we found a series in which anyone, any episode, could be the lead.

“Orange,” though it had its share of male guards and significant others, was thoroughly and unapologetically woman-centric. It was polymorphous in gender and sexual identity. Its inmates were transgender, straight, bi, gay, “gay for the stay.”

More than diverse, it was complex. Its prison cliques tended to divide along racial lines, but within those groups were subdivisions, differences that came from generation, from background, from the simple fact that every person is an individual.

The episodes’ structure bolstered that philosophy, interweaving flashbacks into the present-day narrative. We learned how Tiffany Doggett (Taryn Manning), introduced as Piper’s belligerent, Bible-thumping antagonist, had her sense of self-worth destroyed in her childhood; how Dayanara Diaz (Dascha Polanco) evolved from a dreamy, artistic young girl into a hardened felon; how Gloria Mendoza (Selenis Leyva) landed in prison while escaping an abusive relationship.

The series was an illustration of the principle that, when it comes to representing people, quantity sometimes does equal quality. When you have an abundance of characters of different colors, ethnicities and class backgrounds, you can show that none of those groups are monoliths, because no one person has to represent an entire demographic.

In a way, the composition of “Orange” — a vast ensemble, composed of subgroups that break down into sub-subgroups — was a metaphor for Netflix, and the ways in which it was and wasn’t like mass-media TV of the past. Like the old broadcast networks, it aimed to make TV for everyone. But like the niche cable channels, it didn’t try to make each individual show appeal to everyone. It was macro and micro, a confederation rather than a monoculture.

To tell its story of a new America, “Orange” used one other old-TV trick: It had a flexible timeline, in which a little more than a year passed in prison time, yet the series ran from the mid-Obama years to Donald Trump’s 2019, with each season reflecting the politics of the outside world.

In the final season, this means a #MeToo story line and a brutal arc about ICE and immigration detentions. In another series, this might seem like a forced attempt to keep up with current events. In “Orange,” it works; its prison world is one where time moves differently than on the outside, where the names and policies may change, but the essential divide remains between those who get to cross the wall, and those who can’t.

Horror and Hilarity

This is a good place to point out that, however heavy the material, “Orange” is consistently a laugh riot, even when it has involved actual riots.

This is the final way in which the series is a work of this TV era, in which the best work is dominated not by comedies or dramas but by series — “BoJack Horseman,” “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “Atlanta,” “Better Things,” “Transparent,” “Fleabag” — that exist in the uneasy and fertile zone between the two.

“Orange” defies categorization more fiercely than most. Literally, in awards competition, it’s been submitted as both a comedy and a drama, underscoring how arbitrary those categories are to begin with.

In part, this is in the show’s creative DNA. Kohan previously made “Weeds,” a dark Showtime comedy about a suburban widow who takes up drug dealing. In part, “Orange” is an update of satires like “M*A*S*H,” which steered as hard into the absurdity of institutional bureaucracy as it did into the tragedy of war.

But its unnerving blend — not “dark comedy” or “light drama” but straight-out hilarity intercut with stark horror — might also be the only honest way to capture the complexities of its subject and its characters.

Some of the inmates are nonviolent offenders; others have killed. Some have suffered bad breaks, abuse or straight-up injustice; others are dangerous, vicious and unrepentant.

“Orange” extends understanding to all of them (as well as to bullying guards and cynical prison executives) while not simply excusing anyone. If it’s jarring in how it can shift from laughter to shock, slapstick to shivving, it may be because accepting the complexities of real, flawed humans in a flawed system is jarring, too.

This has honestly made the seven years of “Orange” a tough balancing act. It was strongest in its first four seasons, at the end of which the young, hopeful inmate Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley) was choked to death while being restrained by a guard. Her wrenching, violent end alienated some viewers to whom it prodded at the wounds of real-life police brutality cases, or recalled an ignominious history of series killing off lesbian characters.

The incident was polarizing, but it was not handled lightly or forgotten. In retrospect, it was the fulcrum of the series’s whole run, and its repercussions continue through the end of the final season. In Seasons 5 (set during the resulting riot) and 6 (dealing with the riot’s aftermath), the series tilted more toward the somber, and the comedy felt more discordant.

Season 7 — not to violate the perimeter of Netflix’s maximum-security spoiler list — is, if not the show’s best, a return to form. The centerpiece is the story of Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson (the outstanding Danielle Brooks), facing life in prison for a murder she didn’t commit during the riot. The first person Piper met in Litchfield, Taystee, in retrospect, is the actual aching heart of “Orange.”

The season steers between nihilism and false hope. It recognizes that the weaknesses of the justice system and the forces behind the cycle of crime may be intractable. (In another blunt metaphor, a reform-minded new prison official asks how she can adjust a chair in her office; “You can’t,” she’s told. “It’s broken.”) Yet it holds out the possibility of redemption, small acts of decency and strokes of luck.

“Orange Is the New Black” is not the best series of its time, but it just might be the most representative of what is best and most exciting about TV during this period of intense change.

Is it comedy or drama? Is it an old-school throwback or a harbinger of the future? Is it a show formed by the imperatives of streaming or a show that created the genre’s rules? The beauty of a series this expansive and polymorphous is that it can be all of these things at once. It is the chicken, and it is the egg.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/arts/television/orange-is-the-new-black-final-season.html" id="a649e45b-6b99-36c6-a8da-5b804693dfc6">The New York Times</a>.

“Orange Is the New Black,” finishing its seven-season run on July 26, was big. Big in its reach (presumably, though actual viewing figures for Netflix series are still an occult mystery). Big in its influence, as one of the first genuinely original programs in the new medium of streaming. Big in its ambitions to represent faces and situations that had been left off TV screens.

'Orange Is the New Black' Taught Us What Netflix Was For

Q: Then what does all this — the yacht, the bronze tower, the casinos — really mean to you?

A: Props for the show.

Q: And what is the show?

A: The show is “Trump” and it is sold-out performances everywhere.

— Donald J. Trump, interview with Playboy magazine, 1990

The show, as it turned out, had been going on for longer than people realized — long before it ended up on NBC and Fox News. The set design was not subtle, but it was effective. And the production went far more over budget than we knew, until now.

James Poniewozik

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