A couple of years ago I left a dysfunctional, unappreciative charity board and surprised myself by taking the high road.  Go figure.   

It got me thinking about farewell addresses over time.   

Generic advice from Toastmasters or the Kiwanis Club about retirement speeches has a basic template: 1) Acknowledge the room and situation, 2) Share a memory or two, 3) Express gratitude, 4) Look to the future, 5) Bring it home with warm wishes or a toast.  That’s all fine for a boilerplate retirement.  But some situations where important people are stepping down have bigger things to say. 

In reality, there are a lot of different ways famous people have gotten something off their chest as parting comments.  Sometimes it’s a noble warning about the future, and sometimes it’s basically the middle finger on their way out the door.  Let’s take a look. 

The Parting Shot 

I don’t normally empathize or identify with Richard Nixon, but he made one hell of a pissed-off departure that I admire.   

No, it wasn’t when he resigned the presidency after Watergate.  At that one he was in pure spin mode, pretending he was a statesman after being busted and revealed as a petty, paranoid political operator (“But as President, I must put the interests of America first.”) 

The angry departure I have to tip my cap to, and we all might relate to was in 1962 after Nixon was soundly defeated in the California gubernatorial election.  Losing hurts and it’s natural to turn on the public.   

“You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” 

Who can’t relate to that one?  If only he had kept to his word and not resurfaced six years later.

Biblical Goodbye 

Characters from the Bible can get petty, too. 

There’s Moses, who might have the most justified list of grievances in the history of farewell addresses. After 40 years of leading the ungrateful Israelites through seemingly endless travails and wandering, he finally got them to the precipice of the Promised Land, despite how they ignored him at just about every turn. The catch: he’s not going with them. 

In the opening chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses takes the opportunity to review the journey, reminding his people of their repeated disobedience, their lack of faith, their endless bitching, and the various ways they’ve made his divine job considerably harder than it needed to be. He even asks, “How can I bear your problems and your burdens and your disputes all by myself?” 

To be fair, his address has a helpful purpose.  Moses knows he’s leaving them in Joshua’s hands, and he wants this generation to learn from the mistakes of the last one. Moses warns about what happens when they make empty promises and lose faith.  

But there’s also something deeply satisfying about watching a leader finally get to tell his awful people exactly what he’s been putting up with for four decades. He’s got a lot to say, and they’ve got to sit there and take it.  By the way, Moses never gets to the Promised Land himself.  I’d be pissed too. 

The Real Statesmen  

When it comes to a “farewell address”, one stands out above the rest: George Washington stepping down as President.   

Here in the era of “No Kings” protests, it could be easy to forget that the yielding of presidential power was not something the Founding Fathers thought of or put in the Constitution.  If Washington wanted to, he could have stayed on and run for, and won, the presidency til the day he died. 

Instead, he voluntarily relinquished power and warned the country about political factions and permanent foreign entanglements. 

“It serves always to distract the Public Councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the Community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another.” 

Yup, that was pretty right on about the danger of political parties.  Lesson not learned.

Another president, Dwight Eisenhower, had a farewell address with an important lesson to teach the nation in his last speech in office.  His predecessor, Harry Truman, started the tradition once television was in more homes. 

Eisenhower, in his farewell address, famously warned about the military-industrial complex. 

“Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” 

When are we gonna start actually listening to great speeches when they happen? 

If this piques your interest in presidential farewell addresses, check out this great archive.

Late-Night Emotional Goodbyes 

Strangely enough, three late-night TV hosts had goodbyes mixed with emotion and a real message for the audience.   

Conan O’Brien: At the end of the Jay Leno vs. Conan O’Brien dustup, Conan was leaving the Tonight Show.  The last run of shows featured incredible lineups, it seemed like every big or cool star in show business was on Team Coco.  But his final Tonight Show episode showed an incredible amount of gratitude, affection, dignity, plus a refusal to let NBC’s treatment of him define his farewell. 

“Please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.  Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you, amazing things will happen.” 

Jon Stewart: The Daily Show was a comedy show which covered the news.  They did it either so well, or the news media was doing their job so poorly that The Daily Show became strangely important. His departure from The Daily Show was partly dealing with the difficulty of leaving something.  But his farewell was a warning to news consumers and fellow citizens: 

“Now, the good news is this: Bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected. And looking for it is kind of a pleasant way to pass the time. Like an ‘I Spy’ of bullshit.  I say to you tonight, friends, the best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.” 

Jack Paar: The second Tonight Show host back in the early 60s.  He got to make two farewell speeches.  The first was in 1960 when he hastily walked off after an incredibly benign joke was censored.  A perfect example of the ticked off, you-know-what-you-can-do-with-this-job exit:

“I’m leaving The Tonight Show. There must be a better way of making a living than this.” 

He came back, then his real retirement in 1962 was not only about gratitude, but graceful about how the older generation should make room for the new: 

“There are great opportunities for new talent in television. I know from my own beginnings in radio how important that first break can be, and I’ve tried to offer such a beginning to new performers on this program.  Having run out of fresh, exciting, new ideas to bring you myself, I feel I should give somebody else a turn.”

THE Sports Farewell

Retirement announcements for athletes and coaches are well and good.  But there’s really one end of career speech that stands out above the rest: Lou Gehrig’s “luckiest man on the face of the earth” fan address at Yankee Stadium. 

If we are talking about gratitude, it’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer.  Gehrig was diagnosed with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”), and went from being a 36-year-old superstar first baseman one day to facing a terminal diagnosis the next.  At the end of any playing career, time runs out and retirement is forced; as they say, “Father Time is undefeated.”  But Gehrig’s case was orders of magnitude more extreme.  It was a death sentence. 

So, for him to show this level of gratitude is simply amazing: 

“For the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.  So, I close in saying that I might have been given a bad break, but I’ve got an awful lot to live for. Thank you.” 

His number 4 was the first to be retired in Major League Baseball. 

Fictional Characters “Controlling the Narrative” 

In Jerry Maguire, the character Jerry Maguire is let go from his high-paying, high-powered sports agency job.  It’s underhanded the way it all went down and on the way out, he gives a very particular farewell address – saving face.  He tries to turn an embarrassment into a triumphant departure which turns into more embarrassment: 

“Don’t worry. I’m not gonna do what you all think I’m gonna do, which is just flip out!  Let me just say, as I ease out of the office I helped build, I’m sorry, but it’s a fact that there’s such a thing as manners. A way of treating people. 

“These fish have manners. These fish have manners. In fact, I’m starting a new company, and the fish will come with me. Call me sentimental, but the fish are coming with me. 

“But if anybody else wants to come with me, this moment will be the ground floor of something real and fun and inspiring and true in this godforsaken business, and we will do it together.  Who’s coming with me? Who’s coming with me? Who’s coming with me besides… Flipper here?  [silence]  This is embarrassing.” 

That was a terrific enough of a scene.  But then came the 1998 stoner movie Half Baked, a fun and sometimes hilarious misfire of a comedy.  In it, we get a two-fer of saving face retirement scenes. 

But then the movie features the greatest walkout in the history of employment, when Scarface quits his burger job.  It’s the mic drop we all secretly wish we could pull off after being let go. 

Fictional Hard Feelings 

On just about every best episodes of TV list that you’ll ever see, the Season 2 hour, “Two Cathedrals” from The West Wing appears. 

President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is in the middle of a presidency-threatening scandal about not disclosing his medical condition, then his secretary dies tragically.  He’s getting hit by all sides and trying to decide if he wants to seek reelection or let his vice president, John Hoynes, get the party nomination instead.  After the funeral, he addresses God by himself in the National Cathedral (just make sure to get to the end)

It’s not a farewell address, but that is how I want my spiteful side to emerge on my angry way out the door.  “You get Hoynes” (meaning: you don’t deserve me, I’m leaving, enjoy my hacky successor).   

My Exit 

In case you were wondering, my departure day has come and there was easily an opportunity for me to make a farewell address.  But I didn’t. 

Maybe a president has the gravitas or the interested audience to take well-meaning advice.  I didn’t try to take the bait on face-saving or sounding pompous with words of wisdom.  Just a more standard appreciation and thanks, then that was it.  

But I’ll tell you now, if they had understood the reference, all I would have said was, “You get Hoynes.” 

As I was listening to Jack Coyne talk about Track Star, he noted how much the way we discover new music has changed. It used to be you’d listen to the radio, watch MTV, read music publications, use Napster, or even buy whole albums for very little money on a Russian-run mp3 site. Now that streaming is all the rage, no one needs to buy music anymore. And because very few people are purchasing music regularly, streaming services do what they do best: serve you “more-of-the-same” playlists based on what you’re already listening to. 

That makes organic discovery challenging. Sure, you could get music recommendations from friends, but where are they finding new music? Likely from the very same streaming services that use an algorithm to feed you songs it predicts you’ll like.

Well, since I still listen to a lot of what’s sent to me by publicists, recommended by music sites I trust, and shared by friends (who happen to be music journalists), I don’t feel the need to create a profile on Track Star just to say, “Hey, here’s something I think is worth your time—and I’ll tell you why.” 

So with that, here are three songs I’m currently crushing on. Maybe you’ll dig them, too.

“Requiem for a Village,” Steven Wilson

Being a fan of Steven Wilson is much like following David Bowie or Kate Bush—you have to be open to wherever his musical journey takes you next. Rarely repeating himself across his nine solo studio albums, Wilson is driven by pure experimentation. 

On “Requiem for a Village,” the title track from his album that’s coming out on November 6th, Wilson shifts gears from the space-themed concept of  The Overview. Instead, he presents an inward-looking, narrative-driven album that views a tiny village in the British Isles through a Gothic lens. 

This track stands out for its use of live instruments—guitar, bass, drums, and keys—which lock into a drum ‘n’ bass-like groove. The song builds, bursts, and pauses, taking the listener on a manic progressive journey.

“Accelerator,” Kid Sistr

This LA-based trio, originally from New York, features three young women who capture the true spirit of rock-and-roll. Comparing Kid Sistr to KISS might seem unusual at first, but hear me out. In their prime, KISS was a hard rock band defined by youthful, unapologetic sexual energy. Kid Sistr brings that same vibrant energy to their music, but with a fresh, queer perspective. One listen to “Accelerator” and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. The band is about sex and rock-n-roll (not sure about the drugs part) — especially on this song.

To put a fine point on it, when Paul Stanley of KISS sang, “Put your hand in my pocket/Grab onto my rocket” it was a good example of what bassist Derek Smalls said in “This is Spinal Tap” about their song “Sex Farm:”

Derek Smalls: Now, I mean a song like “Sex Farm”, we’ve taken the sophisticated view of the idea of sex, you know, and music…

Marty DiBergi: And putting it on a farm?

Derek Smalls: Yeah.

So, if Paul Stanley and the fictional Spinal Tap can be silly and transgressive about hetero sex, Kid Sistr can be equally so about lesbian sex: “She’s a vegetarian, she doesn’t eat meat/But she likes a little honey and she’s down to eat me all night.” I gotta say, it’s good to hear overt sexual playfulness in rock music again. But the real hook is the infectious main guitar riff on “Accelerator.” It’s catchy as hell!

Oh, and their video more than suggests Kid Sistr is having a blast just fucking around — in more ways than one.

Just remember ladies: have a good time…all of the time.

“Empty Stadium,” Tinashe

Just as Steven Wilson hooked me with his nods to drum-n-bass, Tinashe does the same with this cool, hypnotic deep cut. “Empty Stadium” isn’t a single, but it’s the track I kept returning to on her latest album, Popstar. Now on her eighth record, Tinashe is making music entirely on her own terms. While that kind of creative freedom can sometimes lead to self-indulgence, here it spans from the standard to the sublime. It’s always exciting to hear an artist break out of their genre-specific silo, and Tinashe does exactly that. “Empty Stadium” stands out as one of the most musically satisfying moments on an album that is solid from beginning to end.

It’s been a decade(!) since my last Mix Six, and even longer than that since a Mix Six with a Halloween theme. This year seems like a good time to revisit a long-dormant feature on Popdose, and one with a genuine throwback quality, since the post contains something that’s fallen by the wayside in terms of its convenience and controversy:  the mp3. Yes, that scary file that changed the music industry. We’re also living in a time of immense change that can feel hellish at times, so why not embrace the doom and enjoy six tunes (with fun little soundbites in between) that’ll make your Halloween slappin’

“Hell,” Squirrel Nut Zippers (1996)

Who could have guessed (or bothered to guess) that this song, released in June (June!) of 1996, would become a Halloween classic 30 years later? Sure, someone lurking in the murky bowels of an AOL chat room probably called it an insta-classic back then, to mixed reactions. But for the rest of us in the know, it was met with plenty of ghoulish delight. It certainly was for me when I first heard it on the radio. It still brings a cavity-filled grin to my melting face whenever I dust off the CD (Wait. What? Compact Disc!) and plop it into my Sony CD player from that era. (Yes, it still works just fine. Thanks for asking.) If you’re in a gallows-humor mood, sing along:

Now the D and A and the M and the N and the A
And the T and the I-O-N
Lose your face
Lose your name
Then get fitted for a suit of flames

“Goo Goo Muck,” The Cramps (1981)

The ’80s weren’t really “The ’80s” yet when this song came out in ‘81. If you’re an old fossil who was in high school back then (like the guy writing this old fossil of a Popdose feature), you may remember what kind of music ruled suburban high schools. No? You don’t know? Google’s AI hasn’t summarized the past for you in a neat, easy-to-read format so you can sound smart around your fellow humans? Okay, I’ll tell you. If you listened to bands like The Cramps at a typical suburban U.S. high school in 1981, you probably kept it to yourself, or shared it only with your fellow freaks and geeks. One listen and it’s easy to hear why this song wasn’t sharing space with the Journey, Van Halen, AC/DC, and REO Speedwagon tunes that dominated the airwaves at the time. It’s far too ’60s-sounding, and the album cover just screams “Not Safe for Jocko Homos.”

“Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps),” David Bowie (1980)

For David Bowie, this album was a hit in his native UK, and even in the U.S., it peaked at number 12 on the Billboard 200. Critics loved it. His record company poured a ton of money into the video for “Ashes to Ashes,” and the single knocked ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” out of the #1 spot in the UK. You’d think that kind of success, plus inspiring what became known as the New Romantic movement (most folks just called it New Wave), would make Bowie feel relevant. Nope. He felt Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) was a stiff, as lifeless as a corpse with rigor mortis, so he went from the funk of feeling irrelevant to funky Top 40 guy with Let’s Dance three years later. How wrong he was about Scary Monsters. It’s a sleeper, but contains some brilliant songs.

“Tear You Apart,” She Wants Revenge (2004)

I caught these cats at the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena in 2025, and they were fantastic live. Full disclosure: this is the only song of theirs I really know, and since I’d never seen a video of them, I had no idea what they looked like until I saw them in 2025. In 2004, I fully expected the band to look like Kraftwerk-style robots since, as I joked to my wife and kid back then, this song sounds like a robot falling in love with a woman and going berserk. How wrong I was. Still, it has a clinical, David Cronenberg body-horror quality that makes it a perfect fit for Halloween.

“Heads Will Roll,” Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs (2009)

Remember those wonderful early days of the internet (back when it was likely spelled “Internet”)? An artist would finish a record, ship it off to the CD factory, and crank up the PR machine to build buzz and (hopefully) robust sales, only to have some asshole leak it online before release day. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the victims of that particular horror movie. Or, as the band’s Wikipedia page puts it, in rather understated fashion: “The album was slated for release in April 2009, but an internet leak of the material occurred in February, much to the band’s dismay.” Dismay? More like cue Karen O’s screaming in “Art Star.”

“(Everyday Is) Halloween,” Ministry (1984)

Before Ministry evolved (devolved?) into the industrial Ministry we know today, they had this synth-pop earworm that’s perfect for Halloween. I mean, c’mon, it’s got “Halloween” right there in the title. Not sure if Al Jourgensen was trying to create his own underground holiday hit, but at the time, he was definitely dressing up his act with a faux-British accent. Hey, if you can’t pretend to be someone else on Halloween, what good is Halloween?

And with that, Popdosers, I hope you have a terrifyingly good time this Halloween.

Every time I saw Kenny Rogers – in cable-staple Six Pack, one of the 5 (count ‘em) movies made from his song “The Gambler”, as a relaxed guest on The Tonight Show or on a stage – I always got the impression that he was a nice guy.  That reputation has been backed up by so many people in entertainment, including his longtime manager Ken Kragen, also known as one of the nicest guys in music.   

So, it might come as a little bit of a shock that Kenny Rogers has recorded some of the darkest pop songs to ever get heavy radio rotation, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” and “Coward of the County.” 

“It Wasn’t Me That Started That Old Crazy Asian War” 

Sure, it’s a toe-tapper with a catchy kick-drum heartbeat and fingerpicking guitar solos.  But you are aware that this is the tale of a paralyzed veteran who routinely watches his wife leave to see other men and he contemplates killing her.  

Kenny goes dark.  What’s even more depressing is that Kenny doesn’t sound like a man losing control. The narrator sounds like someone resigned to this whole shitty situation and who’s been thinking about this for a long time.  

She’s leavin’ now ’cause I just heard the slammin’ of the door
The way I know I’ve heard it slam 100 times before
And if I could move, I’d get my gun and put her in the ground 

Oof. 

“And There Were Three of Them”

Guess what, “Coward of the County” is way darker than even “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”   

It’s my go-to karaoke song.  When I start, right up through the second verse it sounds like a charming crossover country song that seems to be a tale of an upright young man trying to live up to the standard his jailed father imparted to him.  Then the end of the second verse.  Boom. 

Years ago, Norm Macdonald was on the Adam Carolla radio show breaking this down and they described the lines that follow as an “emotional haymaker” that comes out of nowhere. 

One day while he was working, the Gatlin boys came calling 
They took turns at Becky an’ there was three of them 

At karaoke night, you can feel the air rush out of the room when I hit that spot.  And then you get the fake out that Tommy is going to chicken out but he has frontier justice on his mind: 

The Gatlin boys just laughed at him when he walked into the bar room 
One of them got up and met him half way cross the floor 
When Tommy turned around they said, “Hey look! Old Yellow’s leaving” 
But you could’ve heard a pin drop when Tommy stopped and locked the door 

Twenty years of crawling was bottled up inside him 
He wasn’t holding nothing back, he let ’em have it all 
When Tommy left the bar room, not a Gatlin boy was standing 
He said, “This one’s for Becky”, as he watched the last one fall 

It’s followed by a twist that, despite Tommy’s father’s wishes, “sometimes you have to fight to be a man.”  But the damage had been done by that point. 

All the while Kenny’s voice doesn’t get overly excited or even emotional at any point.  Ice cold. 

Oh, Those 1970’s 

These two Kenny examples of 1970s songwriting aren’t outliers.  There were routinely some really brutal songs out on the radio.  Where children listened in drive time.   

• The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia – Another country-pop classic.  It starts out rough enough with a murder and a wrongful execution.  Fine.  The sweet-voiced narrator reveals that she’s the actual killer.  

• Ode to Billie Joe – A family discusses ordinary dinner-table business while a young man’s suicide and the mystery surrounding it hangs in the air.  It sounds so down-home but make no mistake, this is dark. 

• Billy, Don’t Be a Hero – A young soldier ignores his girlfriend’s plea to stay out of danger and dies in battle. The upbeat arrangement and tragic ending do not fit.  At all.  By the way, the full Dewey Cox version of this song is not to be missed. 

• The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald – Gordon Lightfoot, like Kenny, can seem kind of milquetoast, but not when he sings about 28 sailors dying on a lake?! 
• Angie Baby – Helen Reddy has a similar soft rock feeling, perhaps the female Kenny Rogers.  This one is a sweet, tasty little pop song about a lonely girl who lives in a fantasy world, a creepy neighbor who, let’s face it, tries to rape her – and then a radio that may or may not swallow him whole. By the end, Angie has apparently disposed of a man through the power of her imagination and/or some kind of supernatural appliance.  I’m not kidding.
• Chevy Van – Sammy Johns’ not-quite hit is about a rambling guy with a windowless van.  The song isn’t quite as explicit, but a few listens and we can all tell what happened here.  The narrator picks up a teen runaway, fucks her, puts her out on the side of the road without her shoes, and he moves on with the whole thing being a pleasant memory for him. 

Seriously, look at the Billboard Hot 100 in any year of the 1970s.  This kind of gnarly truth cloaked in soft pop is omnipresent.  Even something like C.W. McCall’s 1975 CB-radio anthem “Convoy” by the end has truckers wanting to run over state troopers in an act of vehicular manslaughter. 

Maybe We Should Have Seen This Coming 

“Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” was recorded by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, well before Kenny’s amiable superstar image solidified. The song is a psychedelic trip with a genuinely unsettling edge. 

Kenny had a long and varied career.  

The killer about “Coward of the County” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” is that they both sound superficially similar to “The Gambler,” with light country arrangements and genial-sounding storyteller. But the narrative content is worlds darker than “The Gambler.” 

Just as Randy Newman is celebrated for singing through characters that don’t share his point of view, Kenny Rogers seemed to relish the idea of a pop-country character study, all the while remaining one of the most beloved stars in music. 

It’s important to remember, as Kramer says of him in the Kenny Roger’s Roasters episode of Seinfeld, “Kenny never hurt nobody!” 

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.