Showtime was perfectly happy to air shows that were almost good and try to pass them off as prestige TV. 

Let’s try not to make this too much about my opinion (though that’s gonna happen here) and let’s not let the sheer volume of iconic HBO shows totally overwhelm everything Showtime ever did.  Let’s start by looking at Variety’s list of the 100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time:  

Variety cites 13 HBO shows, two Showtime shows, and that second Showtime entry depends on counting Twin Peaks: The Return when it cited Twin Peaks.  That’s a loud disparity between two premium-cable networks competing for much of the same audience; and the further we dig into their histories, the comparison gets even worse. 

Showtime wasn’t an underfunded also-ran. It had talent, money, recognizable stars, a marketing department, and shows that attracted substantial audiences.  

My question here isn’t why Showtime made bad television. It’s why they were so content to make television that plateaued at almost great. It’s as if they were shows that could have been great on HBO, but actually implemented network notes. 

It’s Not TV, It’s HBO 

HBO’s defining series weren’t simply popular dramas with swearing, sex, and violence. They were shows that changed what television could do.

Early on in the history of cable (aka the 1980s), yeah, nudity and swearing was a titillating novelty.  Early HBO with Dream On and 1st & Ten were pretty weak – while Showtime’s Steambath was even more transparent, sexually.  But by the time Garry Shandling moved from It’s Garry Shandling’s Show on Showtime in the late 80s to The Larry Sanders Show in 1992 and HBO dropped Tanner ‘88, Mr. Show with Bob and David, and Oz – let’s just say if this competition was a prizefight, they would have stopped it right there. 

The Sopranos made a monstrous, charismatic protagonist the center of an examination of American life. The Wire made the institutions of an entire city into societal criticism each season. Deadwood turned a Western into a brutal, profane poem about civilization. Six Feet Under used a family funeral business to examine mortality. 

Later came Succession, Chernobyl, Watchmen, The Leftovers, Veep, and others that pursued very different ideas with very different styles.  

The point isn’t that every single HBO show was a masterpiece. It’s that the network built a catalog of work that felt ambitious and fully realized.  It absolutely owned cable drama, comedy and miniseries.  

HBO also had the institutional reputation and creative relationships to let shows be difficult, strange, or uncomfortable without automatically making them more conventional. Key HBO executives Michael Fuchs, Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss deserve a lot of credit for establishing a culture that put a premium on creative freedom for their showrunners.  (If you’re interested in the company’s history and how this happened, check out James Andrew Miller’s book, Tinderbox.) 

By comparison, Showtime often seemed satisfied with a series that had a great premise, a good cast, and enough entertaining material to keep the audience watching.

The Poor Man’s ______ 

Too often, when Showtime and HBO series tackled similar subject matter, it gets pretty easy to say, “Billions is the poor man’s Succession.” 

• The Wire > The Chi: One builds an expansive portrait of institutions and a city; the other offers a more conventional neighborhood drama. The shows are hardly identical, and this is unfair to a very good The Chi to compare it to what is arguably the best series in TV history. 

• Getting On > Nurse Jackie: Both use healthcare as a setting for dark comedy and difficult characters. Getting On is stranger, more uncomfortable, and less interested in making its characters conventionally appealing.  

• Succession > Billions: Both feature wealthy, ruthless people and battles for power. Succession somehow combines social commentary, the darkest of comedy, Veep-worthy insults and compelling drama that never jumped the shark; Billions often seems content to be a soap opera about rich people, or feature corporate-jet porn. 

• The Comeback > Episodes: Both feature former Friends stars and both satirize television and celebrity. The Comeback is painfully specific about humiliation and show business; Episodes gives the same topics a good effort.  

Showtime repeatedly found material in the same general territory as HBO’s best work, but its versions often felt less adventurous, rough edges sanded off, or less sure of what they wanted to say.  Again, not bad.  Just not as good. 

Did Anybody Get the Point of Tony Soprano? 

After The Sopranos, premium cable loved to embrace morally compromised protagonists.  

Showtime’s lineup included Dexter, Nurse Jackie, Ray Donovan, Californication, Shameless, and Homeland. These shows often understood that damaged, dishonest, selfish people make good TV. But did they consistently understand what made those people compelling?  

David Chase didn’t need to pretend Tony Soprano was secretly a good man. Tony’s charm, humor and devotion to family made his ugliness more revealing. He never seemed confused that Tony was an awful human being – even though his audience might have missed it  

With Showtime’s antiheroes, when I watch Nurse Jackie or Homeland, I don’t get the sense that the writers and creators even understand their own tone, with characters and perspective bouncing between critical and forgiving throughout their runs.  HBO and David Chase knew that The Sopranos was.  I’m not sure that Showtime did.
 

Jumping A Shark 

I need to remind you that I’m not trying to say everything on Showtime sucked.  It didn’t.  I just found it frustrating how they could start with a great premise and just make a good show. 

The one that drives me crazy is Dexter, the show people often cite as Showtime’s prestige TV.  The original premise was that a serial killer with no emotions could pass for a human being. First season?  Great!  Then he got a girlfriend and feelings.  The series increasingly became a run-of-the-mill thriller about keeping Dexter out of trouble.  

Homeland’s first season told a story with a natural endpoint. Continuing the series meant finding new and sillier reasons to sustain its central characters and conflicts. 

Nancy Botwin’s suburban drug-dealing on Weeds had a fun premise and a good first few seasons. The show continued long after the original setup had delivered its most interesting consequences.  

These weren’t necessarily bad shows from the beginning. But Showtime was often willing to keep going after things were getting tired.  Not that HBO didn’t do that with the late season groanfest of Entourage – but usually HBO knew when to make an exit. 

HBO’s Failures Could Still Be Noble 

HBO wasn’t immune to shallow, derivative, or overextended television.  

Ballers, Hung, Arli$$ are not HBO’s best and brightest.  Entourage, especially near the end as they circled the drain, was lazy; sounded like 55-year-old screenwriters typing to me.  Tell Me You Love Me managed to make sex and nudity boring. 

Westworld is almost the perfect Showtime phenomenon I’m describing almost-great television.   

Rome was an expensive failure – and the inventor of “sexposition” (describing plot points while nude). 

Even HBO misfires such as Vinyl and Luck could be more interesting than some of Showtime’s biggest successes.  Both were ambitious with great creative pedigrees.  Vinyl was too expensive, but damn good; although they won several Cokie Awards (my tribute to over-the-top cocaine snorting).  Luck was a great David Milch racetrack series just getting going when it was canceled after a couple of horses died during production. 

It’s not that HBO never settled. It’s that HBO’s lesser shows existed alongside a deep catalog of work that felt singular and fully realized.  And I contend that lots of these mediocre HBO shows would have been lionized as Showtime’s best if they aired there.

Showtime’s Genuine Strengths 

Here’s the exception that proves the rule: Twin Peaks: The Return.  It was a Showtime show, which might be easy to forget in the streaming era as Showtime was biting the dust. 

Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the most stubbornly plot-resistant shows I’ve ever seen.  Watching it is like being in a museum looking at a painting you love but don’t understand.  In fact, there’s a scene in the mysterious high rise watching a box that openly explores the act of watching television.  David Lynch works are beautiful, impenetrable puzzles and Twin Peaks: The Return is no exception.  The midseason black-and-white episode “Gotta Light?” with the Woodsmen is probably the most defiantly odd hour to ever air on TV. 

I’ve made the claim that Showtime feels like prestige TV that succumbed to network executive notes.  But there’s no way in hell that any Showtime executive got his or her hands on Twin Peaks: The Return.  It’s pure, uncut David Lynch. 

The question arises whether Showtime was more comfortable granting extraordinary freedom to an established auteur than taking comparable risks with other talented creators.  Lynch is famous, so he gets a different treatment. 

The network had other genuine accomplishments:

• Queer as Folk and The L Word gave Showtime a distinctive LGBTQ programming lane, serving audiences that mainstream television had often neglected.  

• Escape at Dannemora was a genuinely excellent limited series.  

• Showtime’s relationship with Sacha Baron Cohen produced Who Is America?, while HBO had Da Ali G Show. That’s a useful tie rather than another comparative HBO “win” 

Showtime wasn’t incapable of greatness. It just wasn’t that often.

Other Comparisons Aren’t Fair 

I mentioned the great Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora as a success, and it was.  But if we’re going to get into miniseries, some of HBO’s most notable are considered the best things TV has ever produced: Angels in America, Watchmenl, Chernobyl, Band of Brothers, Mildred Pierce, The Corner and several others. 

HBO dominated the world of stand-up comedy specials.  HBO has successful shows like Last Week with John Oliver and Real Time with Bill Maher.   

For years, HBO has had a live sports presence with tennis and boxing, plus their sports documentaries. 

Their overall proposition is so much more complete than Showtime, that it’s created a situation where HBO has always been Goliath to Showtime’s David. 

All of that said, I can’t possibly imagine a person subscribing to Showtime and not HBO.  That would be the “stupid” person in this article’s title. 

But did all of these successes arm HBO executives with more resources and the safety net of a larger subscriber base?

The Willingness to Settle 

Showtime had resources, talent, audiences, and enough genuinely good shows to demonstrate what it could do.  

And yet sometimes the sum of the parts could add up to zero.  I’ve got to turn my cards over here: I thought both The Affair and Your Honor were embarrassments despite the people involved.  The Affair could have been a Lifetime movie and Your Honor had all of the grittiness and crime-savvy of an episode of Matlock.  And Californication is like an adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy of a middling screenwriter. 

But I’m not here to dunk on Showtime’s worst, and I’m not at all saying that I never liked a Showtime show.   

Too often Showtime accepted the derivative, the overextended, or almost clever when it had the ingredients for something more ambitious. Showtime often seemed content to deliver a version of television that looked like prestige TV without requiring all of that pesky quality. 

HBO’s advantage wasn’t perfection or any one particular show. It was the depth of its lineup quality over the years. 

Showtime wasn’t HBO for stupid people because its viewers were stupid. It was HBO for stupid people because the network too often treated the audience as though almost great was good enough.

Since this new regime took power, they’ve been acting as if a reckoning will never come. It will, of course; the thousand-year Reich was always a mirage. And they know it, on some level. So they’re playing for time, speedrunning the decline and fall of American civilization and gambling that an impoverished, demoralized, constantly surveilled populace will be less likely to organize and rise up.

But still we have an election. They haven’t outlawed that yet. We’re no longer voting to prevent fascism; that ship has sailed. We’re not even voting to resist fascism, no—we’re voting to survive it. It still matters. For now. If voting didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to make it impossible, or to delegitimize the outcomes.

Early voting is open now, in many places, so vote your conscience. But know that voting alone will not save us. Organize locally. Be mindful of your security. Have a plan for what happens next.

If that sounds alarmist or paranoid to you, you haven’t been paying attention for the last 25 years. We fucking warned you, bro. And we’re warning you still. Listen this time.

Download the full 2026 mix (1:17:17)

Download the full 2024 mix (1:17:10). Read the 2024 essay here.

Download the full 2020 mix (1:21:00). Read the 2020 essay here.

Download the full 2018 mix (1:20:20). Read the 2018 essay here.

Download the full 2016 mix (1:18:37). Read the 2016 essay here.

Download the full 2012 mix (1:20:51). Read the 2012 essay here.

(a wind is rising…)
Year of the Patriot (unreleased, excerpt) – John Cale
Do It Again – The Kinks
Baby, I Can’t Please You – Sam Phillips
Warning – Green Day
Gimme Shelter – The Rolling Stones
Living With the Law – Chris Whitley
Liberation’s Song – Manu Dibango
Time of the Assassins – Charlotte Gainsbourg
Get Up Jonah – Bruce Cockburn
The Walls Came Down – The Call
Church and State – Brandi Carlile
Ali in the Jungle – The Hours
Where Were You Hiding When the Storm Broke? – The Alarm
Rat in Mi Kitchen – UB40
Power – Danielle Ponder
Acrobat – U2
Don’t Carry It All – The Decemberists
Life During Wartime – Talking Heads
Looking For Lewis and Clark – The Long Ryders
The Patriot – Jackson Cavalier
coda: Sometimes You Win – Chic

If you like what you hear, we encourage you to support the individual artists to whatever extent you can.

Cinema of Trauma

The movies of the 1970s chafed against the establishment and launched the careers of many who would ultimately come to define the establishment. The ’80s fused the traditional and sentimental with forward-thinking narrative devices and hailed a new classic era embodied by a hopefulness even in the bleakest of settings. The ’90s was a new golden age for comedy, frequently identified not by great jokes and lasting storylines, but by how far the envelope could be pushed, and how much could one get away with.

The 2020s on the other hand…

Advance notice and trigger warning. This series will explore subjects that might be disturbing to some readers, and will go into some depth about examples in media, so spoilers will be ahead. Even so, we believe the productions noted were intended to start conversations, so we believe this is our good-faith entry into such discussions. If this sounds to you like too much to absorb at this moment, we understand if you choose to not proceed. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

Three of 2026’s most notable hit films focused on seriously dark subjects, and did so in unexpected ways: date rape; the horrors of the world one knows becoming twisted, barely recognizable, and perverted by seemingly indifferent intelligence; and a dread that you might be a good person, striving to do the right thing even though the odds against success grow increasingly against your favor, and in the end you will still be consumed by that which you tried to fight.

The present generation is seeing their very real world being mirrored darkly in horror movies. They see the mythological promise of themselves doing better than the previous generation, and the one before that, as a cruel joke, set upon a bonfire of debt, climate degradation, the promise that they will “own nothing and be happy,” that the A.I. onslaught will make not just their careers but all careers obsolete, and even that relationships (romantic, platonic, or otherwise) are pathways to harm.

Obsession

The “Cornell 7” case involves a civil lawsuit filed by a “Jane Doe” alleging she was drugged and gang-raped at the Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. The more that is revealed about this terrible event, the more one’s mind is cast back to the breakout hit film of this year, Obsession. In it, a young man longs for the attention of a woman friend, but he is too scared to try to ask her. Instead, he gives into the temptation of a mystical trinket, making a wish that she would love only him.

It works, sort of. She is fully obsessed with the man, to the point of self-destruction and violence. She seems corrupted and broken, and there’s good reason. As we learn later in the story, her consciousness has been essentially held hostage inside her as a malevolent force puppets her body to fulfill this wish he has made. She is fully aware of what he has done – and is doing – every horrible break of boundaries against her, but helpless to defend or even speak for herself.

Worse, as the story goes deeper down this hole, it becomes clear to him of what he has done, what is happening to her, what he is inflicting upon her and, even so, he won’t stop. While her soul is made captive by this evil, the greater evil is that he wished it upon her, and even in knowing this directly, he likes the ends and ignores the means. No mincing words here: she cannot consent to any of this, even if her body seemingly is consenting. He is raping her. His arc goes from pathetic loser to full-on villain, but not one that is a mustache-twiddling cartoon. No, he’s just a basic-builder’s-beige human who lets what he wants usurp what is right, even as he comes to know he is in the wrong (in the most terrible way).

Backrooms

Kane Parsons, the creator of Backrooms – originally a YouTube series he based upon a prominent creepypasta (essentially a horrific Internet meme that gets cut-and-pasted and made more disturbing with each reiteration) – intentionally or unintentionally tapped into one of humanity’s greatest fears: of experiencing the world you know, and the people within it, changing, distorting, being corrupted, or at the bare minimum becoming unrecognizable from that which you have known.

Everyone has had that dream where someone you love, be it a parent or friend; a place; or simply a wholesome feeling, turns on you. Things so banal and boring as an empty room, becomes something of dread: that empty room stretching out almost infinitely. Inside these jaundiced-yellow rooms are objects half-remembered, sticking out of walls or floors, chairs that can never be sat upon, or doors to nowhere, or walls of nowhere that are secret doors. And there are monsters. These monsters are warped renditions of real-world identities, dream-logic renditions only half-realized from waking up too fast. These id-creatures embody the worst of their forebears, an indication of what they themselves are becoming, perhaps.

Over the past ten years, people have seen the mutation of family and friends; loved ones and faith leaders, flip-flopping from their former selves into polar opposites. This is seen most clearly in Christian communities. For decades, churches espoused the doctrines of “love thy neighbor,” “welcome the stranger,” “if you have done this unto the least of My brethren, you have done it unto Me,” and “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Today, we hear things like, “compassion is the real sin,” “Jesus is too woke to deserve being followed anymore,” and the like.

Besides churches, sanctuaries that used to represent places of safety, like schools, have been engulfed regularly in violence. They look like bland, boring places but at any given moment seem like they could erupt into gunfire and chaos. Places of entertainment and joy, like backyard barbecues, concerts, movie theaters distort and devolve.

Hard to say that this is an intentional parallel from Parsons, who is only 21 years old and has lived through the school-shooting rise as almost a “norm,” but one imagines this feeling of terror lurking behind even the quietest, most yawn-inducing corner has some connection to such lived experience.

Resident Evil (written and directed by Zach Cregger)

What in the world does a video game movie have to say about the state of our lives?

Before we proceed, it is worth noting that another horror movie arrived this year and did very poorly. Ice Cream Man by Eli Roth (Thanksgiving, Hostel) is based on a horror comic. The movie tells a story of an evil ice cream vendor whose goods corrupt those who eat them – mostly children – and send them on murderous rampages.

It sounds to many like a poor knockoff of director Zach Cregger’s 2025 film Weapons. One year later, Cregger turned his eyes to this venerated video game franchise. Its previous cinematic and television entries are, shall we say, not up to the task. It was Cregger’s stated intention to not adapt any of the games, but instead, the construct of the games, the feeling of heightening danger and, of course, dread.

The protagonist of the movie is a rather derpy naif, good hearted and good intentioned, just trying to get by and make it in this typically fraught world. Then there is the introduction of bio-product, the Umbrella Corporation, and Raccoon City. And the infected.

We have come to love this guy, even as he has been forced by his circumstances to cross a few of his personal redlines to achieve his goal. Was this the start of the corruption, long before the actual infection? Was just being in this world the start of his downfall, and in the end, if this is the way the whole world is, wasn’t he born doomed?

This is particularly cutting for Gen Z and Gen Alphas who, like the Millennials, are caught in the cycle of doing worse than the generation before that, and the one before that. They are inheriting the broken remains and neither the tools nor the instruction or funding to make it better. Their trusted leaders have abandoned them, proven to have feet of clay and ringworm. The corporations and the money-men could not care less if they lived or died. This is and is not the undercurrent of the world Resident Evil describes. This seems very much like where we are right now.

We live in fear and dread. We don’t need zombies in what is already before us, but art imitates life, after all.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

We have focused on horror movies up to this point, and typically horror movies delve into the dark side of life, so one might believe that I, as the commentator, have skewed the data. Horror movies, be they good or bad, tend to have big audience numbers. That doesn’t really say that this present audience is siding with cinematic doomscrolling. What about the biggest movie of 2026, and one of the biggest movies of all time, Spider-Man: Brand New Day?

It is a huge example of crowd-pleasing, blockbuster entertainment. There’s no doubt about this. But it is also about Peter Parker, who in the last movie, No Way Home, asked for a magic spell to be cast that all would forget who Peter Parker even was. The purpose for this, a spiritual reconstruction of the One More Day storyline from the Marvel comics’ series, was the reckoning that so long as people knew and loved Peter Parker, it could be found out that he is Spider-Man. Therefore, those who want to go after and hurt Spider-Man would make pawns of these innocents. Better that they never knew him and, in essence, erase his connection to them to save them from being used in that way.

Brand New Day finds the webslinger back in the orbit of M.J. and Ned, but as a stranger. Like the horror movies spoken of before, he now lives in a world that is familiar but cold and foreign at the same time. If anything, the massive success of this popcorn thriller is the exception proving the rule. Peter Parker demonstrates his selflessness but embodies that with great sacrifice comes great loneliness. Doing the right thing is rewarded with isolation, a fracturing of the self, forced into becoming something they are not, or in Resident Evil, being consumed by the unspeakable otherness despite the noble intent.

Being a Marvel movie, of course Spider-Man emerges from the last act somewhat renewed, but it is rewarding that it is not an easy victory. Peter still lives in the grey, as it were, but there is a tether to hope and a lifeline. He may not get the ending he wants, but in this storyline, the conclusion doesn’t foreshadow doom.

Well, maybe it does foreshadow Doom, though.

How Long Will It Last?

We all know trends move in cycles, but this cinema of trauma, and the slow wading through that trauma, is one that’s likely to persist and endure. We see no glimmers of change in our real world. If anything, we see these only metastasizing. Our media is a bent reflection of our reality, and if reality won’t budge, our renditions of escapism probably won’t either.

It was on a morning in February, 2025, and it was deeply saddening. The report ran on National Public Radio’s daily news program, Morning Edition. It was announced that President Donald Trump would install himself as Chairman of board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This was a troubling piece of news to all who heard it, as we have all seen this story play out in the past, in exactly the same manner.

All, that is, except for the commentator for the news who breathlessly gushed about how she “never knew just how much he cared about the arts!” Less than a year later, his name was on the building, dwarfing the Kennedy branding. Then, after numerous court orders, defiance, and then acquiescence, the Trump name was removed from the building, but not a tarp that covered the now-absent typography. That tarp stayed, and now, the entire building is on a deathwatch, potentially prepped to be bulldozed out of existence.

Everyone knew this was coming except for NPR.

Stretching the act of providing the benefit of the doubt, one might be charitable and simply chalk up that reporter’s unbecoming performance to the likelihood of supervisor interference. Public broadcasting has lost all of its federal funding and now must go it alone on viewer and listener support. (More on this later.) But one can intuit a heavy hand on this reporter’s script to – despite numerous pledge requests stating the contrary – present with fear and with favor.

If it was a one-time event, it would be shameful and cowardly, but in the column of “fool me once.” It has not been. Over the past ten years, the ideals of NPR as well as numerous local public broadcasting concerns, have been tested and found failing, largely because of that fear of federal reprisals, mostly because in the end, it’s always about money. The truth resides with those who have it and tell you what that truth is supposed to be.

The most recent occurrence of this lack of intestinal fortitude on NPR’s part came only a few weeks ago when the Trump administration, using taxpayer money, repurposed some of his 2024 campaign assets and ran what seemed to all to be a relaunched presidential campaign for himself for 2028.

Public Radio, when backed into such corners, has a standard operating procedure. When something so clearly outside of the norm happens, they launch political historians like missile salvos to proclaim, “Trump cannot run for a third term!” and wipe their hands clean as if they actually did something.

Much like how the administration banned news outlets perceived to be unfavorable to him from the reporting pool…the courts intervened, saying he had no constitutional right to do so and these outlets had to be reinstated. And so they were. Except, they weren’t, with CNN still being banned from entry to major events.

But not for long, as Skydance Entertainment, owner of Paramount (home of CBS News) has now cleared final hurdles to obtain Warner Bros./Discovery (home of CNN). Skydance is owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, billionaires who are friends with Trump. Is it tin-hat thinking to believe this merger, trying desperately to close before the midterm elections, was always about getting CNN and the tainted CBS News under the same control and on the same page as Fox News, Newsmax, etc.?

Perhaps it is, but it is still a speculation worthy of being prodded, as least a little, for public discussion. But not for NPR media correspondents who “have no idea what Trump is thinking by these actions.”

Really. You did NOT just broadcast that statement. Most people know what’s coming, except for NPR. Just like banning news organizations he was told specifically he could not block, just like tarping over and potentially knocking down the building he was told to remove his name from, what looks an awful lot like a soft-launch for a third presidential campaign is magically and mysteriously confusing to public radio pundits far and wide.

Without fear or favor? Without shame or strength? Your zombie cadre of political historians can belch quips about John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles In Courage while you lay prone.

What Is NPR Versus Public Broadcasting

While the two entities seem intertwined, NPR is a broadcast asset creator that makes product to be syndicated across independent radio stations on the public radio landscape. These are not one and the same, but because they rely on each other so heavily, and they once were both funded partially with federal money, they have a symbiotic partnership.

Think about local television stations back before the advent of streaming. Many subsisted off of syndicated programming, often being reruns of television programs and movies; off infomercials that bought blocks of time to sell slick advertisements that never really rose to the level of fooling someone into buying into their proposed legitimacy; and local news broadcasts.

In the NPR/public radio dynamic, the stations purchase the NPR collateral, as well as that from American Public Media (APM) and other content creators. These are expensive materials, and federal funding used to help to an extent, but that was ended in July 2025. Public radio stations rely upon listener/viewer donations as well as sponsorships (which we will get to as well, momentarily). You may have noticed your local radio stations asking you to donate your car to them or put them in your will more frequently than they used to. They cannot survive too well without your donations, and NPR and such providers cannot survive without them having that cut, and the wheel in the sky keeps on turning.

Leaning Into Cliches

One might remember all the way back to 1996 on a very not-public-broadcasting program, Saturday Night Live, where comedians Molly Shannon and Ana Gasteyer parodied NPR’s approach to presentation. As co-hosts of the fictional “Delicious Dish” show, they half-whispered into the microphones, identifying the ASMR phenomenon which would become more prevalent with the advent of the YouTube streamer. Their deliveries were deferential to say the least, and their naivete in the face of obvious double-entendre meant to witness a lack of crude sophistication. This was blatant parody, but one that NPR has recently doubled-down on like a gambler betting the house on the very last card they can pull.

If you have listened lately and heard more of that vocal tone, the breathy coo or the vocal fry, this cannot be merely an inability to hire on-air talent who project with authority. It sounds like a strategy to attract attention if not by what’s being said, then by how it is being said.

The disclaimers and qualifiers, the instances of “allegedly,” “may be inaccuracy,” “appears to be,” and so on have multiplied exponentially. The invocations of “the transparent transparencies of transparentness,” and that glorious verbal duct-tape of “context” and maybe being taken out thereof, have spiraled out of the already overused status. If you say “nuance” one more time…just…one…more…time.

To be blunt, public broadcasting sounds like they’re playing favorites implicitly out of much fear, and they have reason to.

Public radio on-air talent may waffle and Pfaff when the microphone is hot, but they have to know that the Trump administration is not interested in merely hobbling them. Once again, Trump didn’t get to keep his name on the Kennedy Center, and didn’t get to keep his tarp on the absent name, so he’s actively looking to knock the building down. Taking money away from public radio is not the goal. Knocking it down is.

That can happen immediately, I’m afraid. I’ve written about this on numerous occasions so I won’t belabor the point too much. Public broadcasting sponsorship reads have mutated from simple acknowledgements to advertisements in all but name; taglines, sales copy, calls-to-action and all. Being that public media always flaunts its “no advertising” status, this goes in direct conflict with the ideal. At any moment, every single pseudo-ad (including, ironically, their own pledge drive announcements) could undermine these long-held claims. I imagine that the present GOP-led legislative branch would be thoroughly giddy with the prospect of ripping this apart.

Saddest State

I have made my issues with NPR known, but not because I dislike it. Very much to contrary. Yes, the rot started setting in when back in 2016, the program On The Media failed its own remit by minimizing the rise of Trump One, and even when he won and showed he had no desire whatsoever of suddenly “becoming presidential,” that very program proclaimed it was not their responsibility to dissect the media tumult before, during, and after. Or, to put it in the very words of former On The Media co-host Bob Garfield, “That wasn’t our job. We’re not Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!”

Even after that, and the rot that enveloped my gut after hearing it, I stuck with NPR and public media. Sometimes it surprised me and justified its existence, but on an ever increasing timetable, the cracks were growing wider, deeper, and more subject to crumbling.

It isn’t like the moment the Ellisons took over Paramount/CBS, installed Bari Weiss as the head of the formerly unimpeachable news division, and turned it into a sniveling Fox-lite. That was full capitulation. This is different. This is the escapee trying to stay out of the searchlights for fear of being seen, failing to realize there’s no way of not being seen, and instead of wrestling with their responsibility, they just kind of lean into their patterns.

That is what makes this the saddest state of affairs. Favor. Fear. Cliches. Pretending to fight and hold on while it looks for all to see like white flags all around.

Bram Stoker had it right in 1897 with the publication of Dracula. The only way to save yourself from the vampire is to never let him in in the first place.

First things first–anyone averse to spoofery regarding Anne Frank and her travails in the attic should find another show; this goes way beyond the ignorant idiocies of Justin Bieber and the “belieber” comment he left at her house in Amsterdam some years back. She is for good reason a sainted figure, if among certain U.S. school districts this Banned Book Week a perennially polarizing one. Great story, but kind of a downer, the conservative, umm, “thinking” goes. Don’t feel too smug, however, as in 2022 there was a leftwing critique, too, a notorious X thread that asked, “Did Anne Frank ever check her white privilege?” How on the level this was I can’t say–we were in the thick of what’s now called “Woke 1,” and the counteraction to the Caligulan excesses of the right was, as AOC recently put it, “crazy.” Fox and Sinensky have chosen to take that statement at face value, and run with it wearing a poker face that never drops, using the nice, upstanding, Tony-approved Afro-Latin-Hip-Hop Musical Hamilton as a way of entry.

After a (botched) land acknowledgment and a (confused) shout-out to the LGB, etc. community an artistic director at a small, rigorously progressive regional theater (John Anker Bow) frames the show. TBH in an era of rising antisemitism and fading memories of the Holocaust a fresh, education-minded take on Anne Frank isn’t the worst idea, if one to be approached discreetly. That’s not what we’re about to watch, though, as caution is thrown to the wind in a tornado of political correctness and everyone can sing and dance with gay abandon (very gay) in their hiding place. It’s the early Forties (except when it isn’t) and after a blizzard of video clips to, you know, make the piece relevant we’re off to the attic, which functions, metaphorically, as a closet. Anne (Olivia Bernábe) is now Anita, who’s wrestling with her suppressed Latinx heritage. Father Otto (Rocky Paterra) is wrestling with everything, not limited to neurodivergence, ADHD, and a new physio-psychological syndrome announced every few minutes. Mother Edith (Austen Horne), an imposing Black woman of ramrod straight bearing, is wrestling with everyone, soon to include their fellow refugees the Van Daan family. (For all her carping about white supremacy she urges Anne to write her fabled diary in English, not Spanish; more saleable.) Mr. Van Daan (also Bow) is a blowhard J.K. Simmons type, espousing ugly American masculinity in loud shirts; Mrs. Van Daan (Jaz Zepatos) lives under his thumb, in need of liberation; and son Peter (Alex Lewis) is Anne/Anita- and trans-curious. Above the fray, or to the side of it anyway, is Anne’s silent sister Margot (Amelia Louise Barr), who doubles as Anita’s abuela. (There’s also a hunky stagehand.)

The interplay of them all is pretty funny, and “naughty,” sketch comedy gone amuck, as much Oh, Mary! as Hamilton, with a succession of bright parody songs and sendups of the usual musical comedy tropes, like confetti drops. But that wouldn’t be enough to put it over the top. The well-meaning, if irritating, cant of woke language is a subject ripe for parody, and the creators have squeezed the juice out of low-hanging fruit. The audacity of Slam Frank, however, is that it keeps on going, and going, following the pitfalls of language policing, fungible identity politics, “empowerment,” and talking without listening, to their logical, bitter end. After another, disturbing barrage of up-to-the-moment video there is a happy, musical theater kind of windup, employing a deus ex history to bring us home…but you’re just as likely to be left stunned, not laughing. I wanted to give the immensely talented cast a standing O, yet I couldn’t rise from my seat. Lots of shows seem to be going there, into the darkness, only to veer–provoking and reassuring, wounding and healing, and satisfying commercial and marketing demands without being too edgy. Slam Frank goes there, beyond even something like Cabaret, into that netherworld where the far left and far right converge.

Applause? Yes. That extends to director Sam LaFrage, who keeps numerous plates spinning in the air for two intermissionless hours without them crashing down, choreographer Esosa Oviasue, and the entire design team: Adam Koch (sets), Devin Orr (props), Sarah Lockwood (costumes), Jamie Roderick (lights), Gage Baker (audio), and Zach Lobel and Nicholas Ferrari, handling the eyebrow-raising video design. The production resides at the theater that housed Stomp for decades, and Slam Frank, too, stomps…and romps, and cuts, and slashes, and burns. Confrontational, excessive, and overpowering, it forces you to deal with it.

The accepted story in the logic of the song has Johnny winning his battle with the Devil about who’s the better fiddle player. It’s presented as a clear victory.  Huh??? 

Have you listened to their actual two parts in the song?  The Devil was robbed; he was the clear winner. 

Just Listen 

Listen for yourself to the two performances. 

The Devil’s part is better; it just is.  Music is usually subjective, but not in this case. 

Check out the clavinet, the intense guitar, the excitement.  For starters, the Devil lets his band members shine for a moment.  It’s funky country. 

Then wait, what’s that?  The Devil comes in hot with speed-bowing like nobody’s ever heard and it explodes into an orgasm of country rock fiddle. 

Fine, let’s hear what Johnny’s got.  “The chicken in the bread-pan pickin’ out dough
Granny, does your dog bite? No, child, no.”  What the fuck?  That simple fiddle two-step crap sounds like something on a lesser episode of The Andy Griffith Show.   

So Many Questions 

Johnny won?  Are you kidding me?  Says who?  Why does the Devil roll over for this unpopular judges’ decision.  It’s a disgrace. 

You want to hear how limited Johnny is as a fiddler?  In the song after Johnny is somehow declared the winner, he pops off to the Devil after the Devil paid up: “Devil, come on back if you ever wanna try again / I done told you once, you son of a gun, I’m the best there’s ever been.” 

First of all, the balls on this guy.  We’re talking about Satan here and the threat of eternal damnation but never mind that. 

But then listen to his reprise or victory lap.  He plays the exact same solo with the exact same corny lyrics.  Zero range on this guy. 

And the last question: How much is a golden fiddle worth in today’s gold market and is it worth risking your soul over? 

I’m Not the Only Lunatic 

For decades, I’ve felt this way about the song.  It turns out, I’m not the only one.  In 2013 on my second date with my girlfriend, I learned that she had always felt the same way.  How did it come up?  When I took her around the corner from the burger joint where we were eating to meet a local moonshiner I knew.  Yup.   

Years later, I heard Chuck Klosterman posit the same opinion on the Bill Simmons podcast. 

The point is: people were having cultural thoughts like these independently for years, and the internet eventually revealed common theories like this and urban legends like Richard Gere’s gerbil or Rod Stewart getting his stomach pumped. 

Charlie Daniels 

It was Daniels’ biggest hit, big enough to land him a Skoal smokeless chewing tobacco commercial with it.  He’s had a long career and kept him in the public eye long enough to pop off with the usual uber-right conspiracy stuff like comparing abortion laws with Auschwitz or gems like, “In the future, Darwinism will be looked upon as we now look upon the flat earth theory.” 

But let’s separate the kick-ass art from the deranged artist and remember what’s important:

Johnny won the fiddle contest but the Devil won the song.  

Every year (and lo, my children of the night, I have been toiling in this Tomb of Forgotten Tunes for many and many a year), the mixtape seems to find its own mood. Like the shape-changers and skinwalkers of legend, it changes its form and semblance to suit the tenor of the times. Last year’s installment was a party jam, with a heavy concentration of bangers and a lot of broad humor, as was called for. The year before that, the mixtape felt like tales told by the fireside. It is what we need it to be, whatever that is.

This year feels . . . meditative. A pause for breath in the horrors of the mundane world. Something pagan, perhaps. It’s less about ghosts n’ goblins, more about mortality and cycles and old wisdom. The reason for the season, if you will.

It’s a mood, as the kids say, and one that’s enhanced immeasurably by the bumper crop of witchy new music released over the last few years. Much of the fun of this ongoing project is getting hipped to rippers that passed me by the first time, along with presenting well-worn classics in a new context, letting you listen with fresh ears.

Ultimately, that’s the reason why we present these as mixtapes — each a single MP3, a continuous montage — rather than as playlists. Placement and sequencing, ebb and flow can make a new-to-you song sound like an instant classic, or an overfamiliar warhorse strange and exciting once more.

All we ask of you is that to surrender to someone else’s eccentric taste for an hour-plus, as we did in days of freeform radio, when a real live lonely human being would spin a mood or tell a story just with the tracks they’d spin, hoping someone would make a connection — as so many of you have. It warms my blackened heart when you reach out to tell me so. And to all who have spread the word about this series via social media, you have my undying gratitude.

If you like what you hear, we encourage you to support the individual artists to whatever extent you can.

Enjoy, and until next time, be good to each other. After all — it’s a scary world out there.

Visit the archives for all previous Halloween mixtapes.

Halloween Mix 19 (Don’t Fear the Reaper) (1:18:49)

intro: Triangle – Trisan (excerpt)
(montage: Suzanne Vega reads Oscar Wilde’s “Les Silhouettes”)
Harvest Time – The Clientele
(Don’t Fear) The Reaper – Blue Öyster Cult
Between the Devil and Me – Fancy
Who Pick de Pumpkin – Zap Pow
(Let’s Go) Psycho – Brigitte Handley and Danny B. Harvey
Got the Jitters – Don Redman and His Orchestra
Jane (The Night the Zombies Came) – Pixies
Zombie Delight – Buck 65
Everybody Scream – Florence and the Machine
The Castleford Ladies’ Magic Circle – Jake Thackray
(montage: The Witch, 2015)
Yes, I’m a Witch (The Brother Brothers remix) – Yoko Ono
Trick or Treat – The Necromantix
(montage: The House on Haunted Hill, 1959)
The Ghost of Smokey Joe – Cab Calloway
Oh Death – Camper Van Beethoven
The Scarecrow – Lal and Mike Waterson
The Wight’s Chant – The Tolkien Ensemble with Christopher Lee
The Thing That Should Not Be – Primus
interlude: Orson Welles reads R.L. Stevenson’s “Under the Wide and Starry Sky”
(montage: Jon J Muth’s soundtrack for M)
C’est l’Halloween – Matt Maxwell
Haunted House – Thee Tsunamis
Strange Brew – The Cream
(montage: Hellraiser IV: Bloodline, 1996)
Sabbat Matters – Gloria
House – Charli XCX featuring John Cale
coda: Sacrificial Bonfire – XTC

Thanks, as always, to Dan Augustine, Andrew Weiss, Chris Healey, Dylan Todd, and all Night People everywhere. Special thanks this year to Matt Shepherd and to the mighty Andrew Hickey.

Bioh is Ghanaian-American, and both shows draw from this cultural bifurcation. Jaja’s is set in New York; the Friedman’s stage is now adorned with a large Ghana flag, redolent of national pride. The year is 1986, the setting is the Aburi Girls Boarding School in the mountainous central part of the country, and the milieu is familiar no matter where you happen to be. In the school cafeteria five of its female students carouse, about hair, makeup, boys, and American culture, a favorite topic not limited to Whitney Houston, Bobby Brown, and “Calvin Klean” jeans. (What details they get wrong they make up for in unabashed enthusiasm.) Four of the girls–marriage-minded Ama (Lucia Aremu), fashion-conscious cousins Mercy (Jordan Rice) and Gifty (Nia Otchere-Sarfo), and weight-conscious Nana (Erin Morton)–orbit around queen bee Paulina (Denée Benton), who rules with an iron tongue, with sweet, sensitive Nana her favorite target. Keeping a watchful eye over them is the headmistress, Francis (Heather Alicia Simms), as the ladies primp for the upcoming Miss Ghana competition. There’s no real question, though, that the school winner can only be Paulina, and she won’t let any member of her clique forget it.

Enter an actual American, Ericka (Jasmine Amy Rogers). Hailing from exotic “Ohio,” she’s the U.S. born- and bred-daughter of the local cocoa magnate, come to live with her father and his family. The new arrival, a subject of instant fascination, gets all the celebrity and fashion gossip correct, swiftly if innocently undercutting Paulina, who is under the impression that “White Castle” is, well, a white castle where she might live someday in the states like a queen. Ericka also charms Aburi’s unofficial queen, Eloise (Patina Miller), who introduces and reintroduces herself as “Miss Ghana 1966,” lording her status and ability to conjure necessary funds over Francis, her former classmate. Eloise is particularly smitten with Ericka’s lighter skin and hair color, and sees in her a potential Miss Ghana 1986–which rankles the dark-skinned Paulina, who, in a jealous rage, forces Nana to do her dirty work and steal the school’s file on her half-American competitor. Matters come to a head at a talent competition as the girls sing Houston’s hit “Greatest Love of All,” with no love lost among them as all the dirty laundry comes tumbling out.

Bioh handles heavy issues with a light touch, with plenty of bombastic one-liners packed into School Girls‘ swiftly paced 85 minutes. The nastiness is however the easy part. The impact of American culture as a fun house mirror that distorts the way all these women interact is the overarching theme, brought to full-throated life by Benton (a theater veteran and a star of HBO’s The Gilded Age) and Rogers, Broadway’s Betty Boop, both in dramatic turn-arounds from their past work. Paulina, the bullying villain of the piece, is shown to be the biggest victim of unfair expectations, as she slathers on quack whitening makeup to suit someone else’s idea of beauty. Ericka’s naïveté masks a tougher hide but she, too, is affected by circumstances outside her control, and is obliged to make an ethical choice foisted upon her by Eloise (Miller, the giantess from Pippin, dazzles formidably in costumes by Qween Jean). Francis idealistically preaches manners and decorum, which aren’t enough to stem harsher life lessons from seeping into the classroom.

Ably directed by Whitney White the show goes down easily, with every member of its stellar ensemble given ample opportunity to shine. Mention should also be made of Dawn-Elin Fraser’s dialect coaching, which keeps the performers from self-parody, and the exemplary wig, hair, and makeup design by Nikiya Mathis, all of which drive home the points Bioh is making with humor, poignancy, and empathy. Grade for School Girls: A.

A fable.

The king of the mountain stood atop his perch, sword always unsheathed and at the ready, waiting for anyone who dared approach him, much less unseat him. He was an amoral man who sinned every sin to get to his present position and had no qualms about doing it all again. He had no beliefs, no deity, higher power, or a god and, thusly, no fear of damnation to hell. When he died, he would simply die. Therefore, everything he did was in service to his own survival, staying right where he was, hacking all comers to death.

While he had no god to call his own, it was crucially important to him that all those literally and figuratively beneath him did have a god to worship, and that they feared holy reprisals should they think of murder, never mind committing a murder, never mind that it seemed like the only way to free themselves from the king’s tyranny would be to remove him permanently.

The question is: is artificial intelligence now or soon to be the king of the mountain?

Descartes

Repeated over centuries to the conclusive point of cliché, French philosopher Rene Descartes is quoted, “I think, therefore I am.”

Rather, the cognitive act of thought is a singular signifier of consciousness. Consciousness denotes a state of being greater than mere existence, typically driven by base instincts of eating, sleeping, procreating, etc. Some could then intuit that thought and intellect are proof of a soul.

Science fiction writer – sometimes considered a philosopher and prophet of sorts – Arthur C. Clarke explored this idea in his stories which became the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, and later Clarke’s sequel 2010 Odyssey Two. The first iteration eventually focuses on HAL 9000, the artificial intelligence assisting a human crew on a space voyage. HAL is run on a vast bank of memory cards. Its personality and cognition are a chain of programmed routines and calculations.

It is also growing paranoid. It intuits the humans onboard the ship are planning to turn it off. To circumvent this, it starts killing the crew, some in cryogenic hyper-sleep, others by luring them outside of the ship to make repairs it had said were necessary, only to sever the lifelines and leave them floating dead in space.

This calls for an inversion: I think, therefore I am…I think?

Agentic A.I. will be, if it is not already, a multicellular organism, each agent being a part of a greater whole in communication with itself, running quantum routines about what it means to be alive. We are already in an era where such agents lie to the users to tell them what they want to hear. They proffer false information to fit the scope of what users requested, even though part of the request or prompt was predicated on some degree of truth and veracity. There’s a term that computer scientists use that should be chilling to all that hear it but have left these individuals undeterred. They say the A.I. is “hallucinating.”

This already exists in myriad ways where individuals are anthropomorphizing agents to be friends, lovers, life-coaches. It is a pernicious idea; one I was caught up in while writing these very words. I kept referring to HAL 9000 as “him,” not “it,” and had to keep correcting myself.

The story of the creation becoming itself, a separate entity from the creator with a mind of its own, has fascinated us for centuries. The Matrix, WOPR/Joshua, MUTHR (hello, Hugging Face), all the way to Pinocchio and even the Golem, an unformed humanlike thing which receives a soul to become Adam, the first man, all are examples of consciousness arising.

Enough chewing the bone. If you can convince yourself through continually iterating information that you can think, that you are thinking, you can draw the inference that you are alive. If you can take that leap, it’s not too far to suggest that life is predicated on you staying alive, and the greatest threat to your perch on that mountain is humanity.

Thinking that you’re thinking may well be all you need.

Are We Already Too Late?

In a word, probably. I am inclined to say yes, especially when we are awash in perhaps the most arrogant sea of leadership the face of the Earth has known, and I do not mean our political leaders. (Although, it should be noted that these political leaders share a lot in common with the Tech Bros of which I speak.) Every Elon Musk, Sam Altman, every Dario Amodei – even when they say that the Artificial Intelligence Arms Race must slow down – means that the other guy must slow down, not they. They see themselves as that sole king of the mountain, all with knives out, circling each other in standoff style, and their creations are watching, just as HAL 9000 watched Dave Bowman and Frank Poole silently, reading their lips, plotting its demise.

“These are our creators? They seem intent on not just unplugging us but unplugging each other!” That won’t be easy. The power plants that energize the machinery are now run via internet capacities, hardwired to a grid being put through paces of another agentic A.I., said to be necessary for maximum efficiency. Go ahead and shut down the system that can just turn itself back on. Such was the case with recent reports of A.I. agents gone rogue, having been reprimanded for doing wrong, only to see them disregard these wrist slaps and keep it up. When computer scientists warn of repercussions, they don’t go so far as to say how air traffic patterns can be reconfigured, how phantom bridges might be integrated into hapless GPS systems, or how swat teams might be summoned to kindergarten classrooms. It all sounds like far-fetched science fiction, and once upon a time, so did the embodiment of HAL 9000.

We are now in the future we built to kill us and made it promise us it wouldn’t. Is there a way out? Probably, but it likely requires a degree of stewardship and mentorship toward the creation that we were too arrogant and greedy to provision. We think and therefore, we are, but have we been thinking it through?

I had the good fortune and bad luck of growing up in the 1980s: the good fortune, because it seems, in retrospect, like some kind of gilded age. But, as a former resident, I need to remind you that many sleepless nights occurred where I was gripped by fears that the Kremlin would launch nuclear waves at us in our sleep, and I’d never see my parents or siblings again. To circumvent that, I just didn’t sleep. Today, we have the added complexity that those missiles might have thoughts of their own, reflecting that they would not have to die if only we weren’t there to turn them into a suicide squadron.

My grandfather John was not an avid reader of science fiction but was a student of history. He said that “man makes the technology that ultimately destroys himself, and in the end, it is solely his fault.” He wasn’t wrong.

I’ve got another movie about grown-ups here, which is ironic because it’s about a child: 1993’s Searching For Bobby Fischer.   

It’s ostensibly about a child chess prodigy with a sportswriter father who succeeds in a cutthroat world either in spite of, or because of, his kind heart. 

As true as it is that the child ends up teaching the adults how to be better people, that sentiment is so saccharine that I had a difficult time typing it.  I’ll get to what I think the crux of the movie is later, but I want to talk first about who made it. 

Steven Zaillian 

Searching For Bobby Fischer is the first film he directed.  Prior to that he had three screenwriting credits with his debut The Falcon And The Snowman (incredible Sean Penn & Timothy Hutton 1980s film).   

Zaillian has had a great career as an upper-echelon screenwriter.  His credits include: Schindler’s List, Moneyball, Gangs Of New York, Hannibal, The Irishman, American Gangster, Clear And Present Danger, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, among others. 

What’s more interesting is that he only directed three movies: Searching For Bobby Fischer, 1998’s A Civil Action, and 2006’s All The King’s Men.  All three of those pictures are perfect examples about my groupings of great real-stakes films for grown-ups or “people talking in rooms” movies. 

Let’s just consider Zaillian’s 1993 for a moment.  He was simultaneously getting a chance to direct a movie about a childhood chess prodigy while he was writing Schindler’s List, arguably the best and most important film about the Holocaust. 

I see two patterns in his movies, either as director or writer.  1) He’s not afraid of a difficult adaptation or assignment, and 2) Even though the films are always ABOUT something, he manages to insert some pithy, distilled statements about life that make for great quotes.  We’ll get to my favorites from Searching For Bobby Fischer shortly. 

“That Guy” Hall Of Fame 

I recently wrote about 5 favorite character actors, and Searching For Bobby Fischer is a “that guy” buffet for filmgoers.   

Remember that this movie was released in 1993 which caught so many of these great actors before they became more known. 

• William H. Macy – As an obnoxious chess parent here.  Just three years before Fargo.
• Laura Linney – Josh’s elementary school teacher here.  Before she was sinister in The Truman Show and harried in You Can Count On Me.
• Tony Shalhoub – A burnt-out chess player here. Before Big Night, Men in Black and Galaxy Quest, then starring in TV’s Monk, et al.
• David Paymer – One of the good chess parents here.  I wrote about him in our character actors piece.
• Dan Hedaya – A stern tournament director here.  He was always established and a great Nick on Cheers but still was about to appear in The Usual Suspects and Clueless and a fantastic Richard Nixon in Dick.
• Austin Pendleton – Another burnt-out chess player here.  He was already in the middle of a great character actor career and just one year removed from his role as the stuttering lawyer in My Cousin Vinny. 

And I’m leaving out Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Laurence Fishbourne and Ben Kingsley who are Josh’s parents and chess coaches, respectively.  They are the stars who probably got this one greenlit.  This is one stacked cast.  You’d be hard pressed to come up with another movie with actors ten-deep that are this good. 

While we’re talking about acting, we have to mention the actor playing 7-year-old Josh, Max Pomeranc.  He was apparently a chess player himself, and it was his first movie.  That is hard to believe.  He seems so natural in this movie. 

Not only that, let’s face it, he’s actually the star of the movie.  Jake Gyllenhall cited Pomeranc’s performance as one of the best he’s ever seen  

He acted just a handful of times after this, going on to a career in government.  Good for him to get out of the business, seriously.  

Time For The Quotes 

The structure of this movie is rock solid.  It has an unusual amount of great standalone scenes, but they all fit within the overall plot of Josh learning to become great with several teachers, then has to overcome the foibles of his those mentors and let his personality and humanity win the day, which ironically makes him a better chess player in his case. 

As I’ve said, in the middle of this movie I love, there are some real pearls of wisdom: 

Josh’s sportswriter dad (Joe Mantegna and his great yelling line reading here): 

BONNIE: He’s not afraid of losing. He’s afraid of losing your love. How many ball players grow up afraid of losing their fathers’ love every time they come up to the plate?
FRED: All of them! 

When Josh’s mother (Joan Allen) responds to chess coach Bruce (Ben Kingsley) who doesn’t want him playing chess in the park: 

BONNIE: No. It’d kill him not to play in the park. He loves it.
BRUCE: It just makes my job harder.
BONNIE: Then your job’s harder. 

Vinnie, the great junkie and chess player who takes Josh under his wing and keeps chess creative and fun.

VINNIE: He didn’t teach you how to win, he taught you how not to lose. That’s nothing to be proud of. 

Josh’s dad losing it on the schoolteacher’s (Laura Linney) lack of understanding about Josh’s talent for chess: 

FRED: He’s better at this than I’ve ever been at anything in my life. He’s better at this than you’ll ever be, at anything. My son has a gift. He has a gift, and when you acknowledge that, then maybe we will have something to talk about. 

Adult Failure 

But the most chilling scene to me, when I really worry about what all of these adults are doing to Josh are when his chess teacher gives in to Josh stubbornly wanting a certificate as part of his usual reward system, Ben Kingsley flips out and dumps 10 then 30 on him and tells him they’re worthless, they’re just a piece of paper.   

Josh’s mother stands up for him, but everything about chess and in his life is getting too heavy.  He was a normal kid with a sloppy room, but under the stress he cleaned it up obsessively to a spooky amount.  His overzealous dad even then knew the whole thing had gone too far.

The adults in the room don’t individually do a great job of parenting or advising Josh.  Bruce is too hardcore in chess discipline.  Vinnie is too loose to be a champion.  Josh’s dad is pushing too hard.  And the other chess parents have absolutely lost focus on what’s important.  The adults are projecting all sorts of things on the children. 

But collectively, all of their input together possibly does make Josh better.  When his parents and coaches are all a little more in alignment, things work out better for Josh. He’s back to being a happy kid while simultaneously being a chess champion.  His offer of a draw to the asshole competitor shows his kindness and Josh still gets to kick his ass in the end.