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.

But the twilight zone was also a safe space, an underground meeting place to talk about things you couldn’t talk about on TV. Serling, a playwright harried by network censors in the 1950s, saw that he could tell unsettling stories — about prejudice, conformity, human frailty — if he dressed them in monster masks and alien goo. The show’s title came to define anything uncanny, any situation in which our sublimated nightmares became manifest.

So anyone remaking the series in 2019 has to answer, not just what is “The Twilight Zone” 60 years later, but where is it? In an age when there’s little you can’t show on TV, where are the forbidden zones? What is it people can’t say — or, at least, won’t say?

The new “Twilight Zone,” which arrives Monday on CBS All Access, does not lack for talent, big names or production resources. But as for finding its own distinctive place, it’s still looking.

If there’s one person I’d trust to channel our culture’s furtive whispers, it’s Jordan Peele, whose symbolic chiller “Us” is now in theaters and whose “Get Out” used horror to tell a complex story of racial appropriation. (His “sunken place” immediately became as vivid a metaphorical otherworld as, well, the twilight zone.)

Peele produces and hosts the new series, as Serling did. (The episodes playfully deposit him in the midst of the set — at a diner, on an airplane’s video monitors — giving a dead-sober read on Serling’s much-parodied introductions.) But except for a shared “story by” credit on one episode, he didn’t write. And the new series misses having a unifying sensibility or voice.

The show starts, unfortunately, with the two least-successful installments of the four previewed for critics.

“The Comedian” stars Kumail Nanjiani as Samir, an ambitious comic who bores crowds into silence with his high-minded riffs on gun control. His idol, J.C. Wheeler (Tracy Morgan), tells Samir he needs to make his act more personal. The catch (of course): When Samir shares stories about the people in his life, he’ll lose them, more literally than he first expects.

“Modern-day Faust” is about as classic a “Twilight Zone” setup as there is. In “The Comedian,” it plays out for nearly an hour with no real suspense, surprise or tragedy. It is, I suppose, a parable for the power of words and the selfish impulse of art, though I’m not sure it can qualify as parable when the characters tell you that repeatedly and overtly.

The second episode, “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet,” reprises “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” the classic in which William Shatner plays a man recovering from a nervous breakdown who is the only one on his airplane to see a hideous gremlin on the wing.

The new version improves only on the altitude. This time the woeful passenger is Justin (Adam Scott), a journalist with PTSD, who listens to a podcast that describes the disappearance of the very flight he’s on. This “Black Mirror”-flavored tale of fate is a more entertaining yarn than “The Comedian,” but it charts a course early for a twist ending that I suspect viewers will pick up on radar well before arrival.

With “Replay,” showing on April 11, the series finally feels fully charged. Nina (Sanaa Lathan) is on a road trip taking her son (Damson Idris) to college when they have a driving-while-black encounter with a menacing state trooper (Glenn Fleshler). Nina discovers that her old camcorder has the power to rewind time — leaving her to try, desperately, to find a sequence of events that does not end tragically.

It is not subtle; it would probably be more effective with a little less speaking-the-subtext-aloud. (Honestly, that was also true of some original-series episodes, like “I Am the Night — Color Me Black,” in which the hatred in a small town manifests literally as a darkness obliterating daylight.)

But “Replay” has a fresh, visceral horror, thanks to Lathan’s anguished performance. Nina is the only one who retains the memory of each do-over, bearing and hiding the burden from her son, wishing she could give him a new start free of her terrors.

The writer, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, uses the premise as a metaphor for black Americans’ being stuck in history and unstuck in time, living in both the present and the inescapable past. (Fleshler’s highway trooper could have driven in from the Jim Crow South.) When Nina wonders, “Did we go backwards in time?” she’s not just speaking for herself and her son.

The last episode previewed, “A Traveler,” is a step sideways, a wry, spooky Christmas tale about a charming mystery man (Steven Yeun) who sows paranoia and havoc at a remote Alaskan police station run by an egotistic captain (Greg Kinnear). It’s written by “X-Files” veteran Glen Morgan. It’s a very good “X-Files” episode.

That comparison brings up an issue that is out of this series’ control but hard to put out of mind. This is not the first time “The Twilight Zone” has been revived; CBS and the late UPN took forgettable stabs in 1985 and 2002. But really the show has been remade in spirit many times: in “The X-Files” and “Black Mirror” and boutique anthologies like HBO’s “Room 104” and various other creepshows.

The best of these series know why they exist and what they exist to say. So in 2019, a “Twilight Zone” without a specific perspective on the nightmares of its time is just a collection of creepy stories, an exercise in nostalgia. (The episodes are laced with playful nods to the past: Keep an eye peeled for Shatner’s gremlin buddy.)

This new series shows signs of developing that distinctive voice, and certainly Peele is capable of it. For now, “The Twilight Zone” is an anthology of anthologies, a signpost that’s not up ahead but, for the most part, in the rearview mirror.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/31/arts/television/twilight-zone-review.html" id="0dfa7ff7-3bbe-36d9-ae4e-e1e55787ab9d">The New York Times</a>.

When Rod Serling opened “The Twilight Zone” for business in 1959, it was a single, specific location. He defined it, in his signature Professor Spooky voice-over, as a place between light and shadow, science and superstition — you know the drill.

Review: A 'Twilight Zone' Trying to Find Its Dimension

“What We Do in the Shadows,” beginning Wednesday on FX, has an advantage on that last front, and not just because its characters, a gang of eccentric vampire housemates, are already dead. The 2015 movie, from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, already played like a tight, brief season of TV, in the most pleasurable way.

The mockumentary, about a group of bloodsucking ancients navigating modern life in Wellington, New Zealand, was driven more by character than plot, much like a hangout sitcom. Like Clement’s “Flight of the Conchords,” it had a deadpan — rather, undeadpan — sensibility and a penchant for characters who were less cool than they imagined themselves.

The FX version recasts and relocates to America while retaining the core premise. Staten Island, apparently the New Zealand of the tristate area, is now home base for Nandor the Relentless (Kayvan Novak), a medieval Ottoman warrior; Laszlo (Matt Berry), a Romantic-era English dandy; and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), Laszlo’s rapacious old flame and now hunting partner with benefits. (Clement and Waititi, who co-starred in the film, each write and direct several episodes.)

Having undead roommates, it turns out, is just like having mortal ones, except that you have all eternity to get on one another’s nerves. Early in the premiere, the anxious, fussy Nandor holds a meeting to deal with housekeeping issues, such as the problem of people leaving their guests sitting around half-drunk. (In this case, it means that they’ve been half-drunk.)

Rounding out the house is Colin (Mark Proksch), an “energy vampire” who drains people’s life forces rather than their blood, usually by drawing his officemates into long, boring conversations. So far, in the four episodes provided for review, it’s one of the less-successful additions to the story, a one-joke premise that “Saturday Night Live” might have done as an overlong sketch.

The series focuses more than the film did on the “familiars”: humans who serve as personal assistants to vamps in hopes of someday getting the neck-bite of immortality. Guillermo (Harvey Guillén), an earnest nerd, is tasked with procuring the group virgins (“It’s their favorite food!”), whom he sources locally by finding a college medieval LARP (live-action role-playing) group. One member, Jenna (Beanie Feldstein), takes the vampires to be LARPers themselves.

Which, in a sense, they are. A bit like the Chechen mobsters in HBO’s “Barry,” the vamps of “Shadows” seem to be cosplaying themselves, comically performing a received, pop-culture idea of scary-sexiness. (Nandor prepares himself for a special occasion by putting on body glitter, “like ‘Twilight’!”)

In reality, they’re underachievers, more bark than bite. (There is some bite, though, the episodes of violence played for over-the-top, blood-spritzing slapstick effect.) When an ancient overlord shows up to find out why the Staten Island vampires haven’t yet conquered the new world, it provides the (presumably) ongoing story line for the series.

As in the film version, the action is captured by a documentary film crew, though the device recedes more into the background (as it did in long-running mockumentary series like “Modern Family” and “Parks and Recreation”).

But the series retains the screwball-vérité look established in the film by Clement and Waititi, combining naturalistic shaky-cam with exaggerated levitation effects. In an age of inkily-lit cable dramas, this is the rare series where the nighttime palette actually makes sense.

The big question early on is whether most of the best jokes have already been told. The vampires’ feud with an aggro band of werewolves played out better in the film, which focused on the lycanthropes’ embarrassed efforts to control their transformations. But the show comes together in the fourth episode, in which the housemates trek to a nightclub in Manhattan — “Manhatta” in Laszlo’s archaic tongue — to impress a sleazy downtown vampire (Nick Kroll).

If “Shadows” doesn’t seem entirely necessary, it’s perfectly fun. Its pleasures are in the goofy details, like the way Laszlo exclaims “Bat!” as he transforms into one, or the vampire nightclub in which the equivalent of bottle service is waiters carrying a human body on a bed of ice.

I’m still not sure whether there’s a long run of TV in this resurrected premise. But there seem to be some tasty drops left before it’s entirely sucked dry.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/arts/television/what-we-do-in-the-shadows-review.html" id="12753a3a-988f-39d3-a6b2-c50eb1ec1c5c">The New York Times</a>.

A key difference between movies and TV series is their relation to mortality. When a movie becomes a TV series, the creators must adapt a finite story into one that can unfold indefinitely. A movie, as a rule, must complete a world; a series must keep building one. A movie must end (at least until the sequel); a TV series must proceed as if it might never die.

Review: In 'Shadows,' on FX, Laid-Back Vampires Return for Another Bite

When “Catastrophe” began in 2015, its title seemed to refer to a discrete event. Rob (Rob Delaney), an American businessman visiting London, had a whirlwind fling of marathon sex with Sharon (Sharon Horgan), who got pregnant. He stayed, they married, they bumpily transitioned from unplanned pregnancy to an unplanned life.

By the raunchy, glorious end of its fourth and final season, arriving on Amazon on Friday, Rob and Sharon have been through health scares, family losses, infidelity, alcoholism and the sundry exhaustions of life with two small children. “Catastrophe,” it is clear, refers not to a single occurrence but to a state of being — the chaos of life, which this comedy depicts with deadly honest charm.

One thing that sets the series apart from other rom-coms is its maturity, which is to say, age. Rob and Sharon, both in their 40s, already know themselves. They’re conscious enough of each other’s flaws to adapt, experienced enough not to expect the other to change.

Sharp-witted and outspoken, Sharon can be a bulldozer; she’s the more cynical of the two, but therefore often the more perceptive of the two. Rob’s more laid-back, but his swallowed-down stress can turn into passive-aggression. It’s also expressed itself in a drinking problem, which he had under control until the end of Season 3.

The final season picks up after Rob’s car crash under the influence has cost him his driver’s license, put him in a neck brace and left Sharon wary of trusting him. She’s known about his alcoholism since she met him, but it’s different, she says, now that his drinking is more than “folklore.”

It’s not a spoiler to say that they get through this; getting through is in a way the subject of “Catastrophe.” Rob and Sharon’s relationship is a love story, a war story and an alliance. They spar terrifically, with an absurd edge — “Do you know how hard I’d laugh if you killed me?” Rob says during one quarrel — they get it out of their systems, they move on to the next calamity.

Their marriage isn’t storybook, but it works; emphasis on work. It’s a grown-up romance, and the final season leans into the themes of middle age and maturity (or lack thereof). Rob and Sharon’s friends are dealing with midlife variously, be it splitting up their marriages or getting really into disaster prep.

The season also introduces Rob’s sister, Sydney (Michaela Watkins), who’s become a Quaker, a peaceable practice that baffles her brother and sister-in-law, who can’t believe you can just train yourself never to be angry. (Spoiler alert: You can’t.)

As for Rob and Sharon, parenthood itself concentrates one’s focus like the prospect of an execution. “Having kids,” Rob tells a starry-eyed new-dad friend, “is like strapping yourself to a Formula One race car, you know? Boom! Your life is over. But not in a bad way!”

“Yeah,” Sharon says. “You just have to take everything you ever wanted and put it in a box because you never ... but yeah! It’s great!”

The idea that falling in love and having kids isn’t the start of a limitless adventure but a narrowing of life paths isn’t a typical rom-com conclusion. But where is the lie? “Catastrophe” is smart and aware about the costs of commitment, especially for women. It’s also the rare feminist TV comedy whose perspective is split evenly between male and female protagonists.

The perspective pays off especially well in the fifth episode. which I would call #MeToo-inspired, except that it hits themes the show’s had since it began. Sharon has an uncomfortable encounter with a superior at her job and Rob may be the beneficiary of a sexist boss (Chris Noth) at his, two parallel stories that swing between the need to speak up and the difficulty of sacrificing one’s self on principle.

Like the previous seasons, the final installment of “Catastrophe” is six short, neatly contained episodes. It’s the rare series in this era of streaming binge marathons whose seasons actually feel too short. With less than three hours to play out, the emotional turns can feel abrupt and the resolutions sudden.

But it also finds the greatest emotional depths of the series in a story line that acknowledges the real-life death of Carrie Fisher, who played Rob’s mother, Mia, and co-writers Delaney and Horgan maintain a tone of mordant optimism. Falling in love, this series suggests, is a sort of self-imposed extremity, like marooning yourselves on an island. It’s never easy, but you survive by pulling together.

“When is it all going to stop being such a slog?” Sharon asks Rob at one point. There’s no answer, except the one that this show has acerbically given for four seasons. It doesn’t stop until everything does. The slog, the catastrophe, is life.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/13/arts/television/catastrophe-review.html" id="d542be1a-71a5-3b46-aad7-42517685aab7">The New York Times</a>.

(Critic’s Pick)

Review: In 'Catastrophe,' True Love Is Not Convenient

On Thursday, Netflix canceled “One Day at a Time” after three seasons. This was a loss for fans and for TV. It was a sharp, funny sitcom, full of heart, that also represented groups of people who don’t get enough screen time: Latino, working-class, gay, nonbinary, military, recovering addicts, immigrants. It combined a classic TV form — the studio-audience family sitcom — with a sensibility that was utterly of the moment. It was one of TV’s best laughs and best cries.

Well, as the theme song says, “This is life.” And this is TV. Deserving shows have gotten canceled since TV sets had rabbit ears. What was unusual this time was that Netflix put out an announcement on Twitter, explaining and mourning its own decision.

I am not a mind reader. Maybe the sentiment is sincere, maybe it’s spin, maybe a little of each. Either way, Netflix is trying to throw away its cake and get credit for having baked it.

TV outlets cancel shows all the time. But more often than not, they let the news come out quietly. In this case, Netflix, maybe anticipating a backlash, wanted to present itself as the disappointed fan as much as the practical-minded enterprise.

So it frames the cancellation as less Netflix’s decision than something that just happened to it. “Simply not enough people watched.”

You could write a book about all the complications packed into that “not enough.” First of all, neither you nor I nor anyone outside Netflix’s Fort Knox of data knows how many people watched “One Day,” nor any other Netflix show, because Netflix — with the exception of the occasional cherry-picked example like “You” — does not release that information.

We have some objective sense of how many people watch “American Idol” and “The Walking Dead” and all the non-streaming shows measured by Nielsen. With Netflix, we have only its very vague word.

And even if we knew how many people streamed “One Day,” would we know how many people short of “enough” that was? We would not. Possibly Netflix does not. Netflix sells subscriptions, not ads, so it’s not as if X number of viewers translates into Y dollars for a commercial. Instead, Netflix, like HBO, has to perform a calculation that may be more art than science: To what extent does this show yield subscribers?

This is complicated by other unknowns. How much does the show cost to make? (Multicamera sitcoms tend to be cheaper than dramas with ambitious location shoots.) How does the show’s ownership factor in to the calculation? (“One Day” is produced by Sony, not Netflix.)

In the end, though, “enough” means what it always does: A show gets canceled when it’s no longer worth it to the company that makes it.

Netflix, like a lot of companies these days, likes to present itself on social media as having a personality and a playful voice. It doesn’t just want your patronage; it wants a relationship. It wants to be your TV buddy you spend time with. It wants to assure you that it loves the TV that you love, the better for you to transfer some of your affection toward its #brand.

But Netflix isn’t your buddy, any more than ABC or HBO or whoever made your TV set. No corporation is. It is a concern whose purpose is to extract money from you in exchange for entertainment. Hopefully this transaction is worth it! But it remains a transaction.

Yet Netflix’s statement — praising the cast and crew (rightfully) for their great work, saying the show “felt like home” — positions Netflix as a disappointed fan, rather than a business that made a choice.

“Don’t take this as an indication your story is not important,” it says to fans who finally saw themselves represented in the show. That’s … nice. But canceling a show is literally a judgment of importance — you’re deciding what’s more important than the money you’d spend making the program.

“We must continue finding ways to tell these stories,” it says. Hey, I found a way for you! Keep making the great story you already have, using the same money gusher you used to pay $100 million for reruns of “Friends”!

On some level, I know, I’m being unreasonable. I’m not entitled to more seasons of a show just because I love it. TV needs more of the representation that “One Day” delivered, but Netflix is no more at fault for airing a mere three seasons of it than other networks that didn’t air it, or any show like it, at all.

Netflix is not a charitable enterprise. It’s well aware that appealing to diverse audiences is not just good citizenship but key to a future in which it wants to be indispensable to as many people as possible. It tweets about representation for women of color; it’s invested in series like “Dear White People” and diversely cast romantic comedies.

But long-term investment sometimes mean that when you have the high-class problem of creating an acclaimed show that doesn’t have as many viewers as you’d like, you stick with it. Or at least, you don’t cancel it yet try to retain the audience’s good will for the price of a few tweets. Yes, TV is a business. And one of the oldest principles of business is that talk is cheap.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/arts/television/one-day-at-a-time-canceled-netflix.html" id="9f1510ee-f9fe-3754-ac1f-fdad96055448">The New York Times</a>.

'One Day at a Time' and Why Netflix Is Not Your Friend

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.”

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?

James Poniewozik

Articles written by the author

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

The 'Preppy Handbook' and Me

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

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