"I imagine that had they survived, Rob and Michele would be more heartbroken than furious."

"I do not think they would have wanted to see their son castigated as he has been.... Even in conversation with me, a person they had dined with only a few times, Rob and Michele Reiner recognized the depth of their son’s suffering as a call for their own compassion, and they recognized that Nick’s behavior was often outside his control.... The law proposes that he either knew, or could not know, right from wrong. But psychotic logic does not translate this way.... [H]is crime is itself his punishment; the horror of awakening to one’s own psychotic acts exceeds any third-party punishment. Under the Trump administration, aggressive 'justice' and judgmental positions that ignore scientific expertise are in fashion.... His case will be heard in California, where, one can hope, understanding of human suffering can still sometimes outstrip rageful cruelty. Nick Reiner’s parents were not vengeful people; no one need be vengeful on their behalf."

Writes Andrew Solomon, a professor of medical clinical psychology, in "My Hope for Nick Reiner" (NYT).

Famous.

I'm reading "Conan O'Brien Party Guests Recall Nick Reiners 'Creepy' Questions Hours Before Parents Slain" (Enstarz):

Guests at a holiday gathering hosted by Conan O'Brien said they were unnerved when Nick Reiner repeatedly asked strangers "creepy" questions hours before his parents, Rob and Michele Singer Reiner, were found slain in their Brentwood home, police and prosecutors said. According to RadarOnline, attendees described the questions — "What's your name? What's your last name? Are you famous?" — as abrupt and repetitive, delivered without context and continuing even after people tried to disengage.... 'It didn't come across as simple curiosity — it felt driven and repetitive,' one guest said. 'You could see people growing uneasy.' Hosts later asked him to leave, according to two attendees....

Hours later, Nick Reiner made himself famous. The murder he committed is a famous murder. It is now the most famous thing about his long-famous father. 

It shouldn't be possible to become famous through murder, but it very clearly is.

"I was a little bitch. I just complained about everything."

Said Nick Reiner, questioned by Howard Stern about why he had written a script portraying his father as an asshole.

"What was the biggest complaint?" Stern wanted to know. The son could not itemize, in fact, he couldn't even stand by the assertion, in his movie script, that his father was an asshole. He took the blame onto himself: "I was a little bitch. I just complained about everything."

Howard keeps trying: "But was he not there enough for you, in your opinion?" Nick answers with exasperation: "No, he was there." 

Howard restates the question, as something of a joke: "He should have not been there?" Robin echoes: "He was there too much." Howard: "Yeah, big pain in the ass."

And the conversation moves on to the next topic. I can't find the full episode, but there is this contemporaneous (2016) written recap at Stern's website. I was interested in Rob Reiner's rejection of medical professionals and embrace of the idea that the parent know what is best for his child:

"But [Rob Reiner's] films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay."

So writes David Thompson in "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," read out loud on the New York Times "Daily" podcast today by the NYT critic Wesley Morris.

Morris uses that book to try to get to an honest assessment of the career of the recently murdered film director. I don't know if I'm getting the punctuation right, but from the transcript of the podcast, Thompson seems to have written:

"As a director, [Rob Reiner] seemed more struck — or poleaxed — by the notion that niceness could save the world. It is a petty thought, but one that stifles so many human and social realities. And so his work turns to pie in the sky with good and bad all too clearly labeled. He's carried along by a fundamental decency and a sense of scenes that play. But his films are predictable from their first moments, and they begin to establish a weird, dumb orthodoxy that if we're good to our kids, everything will be okay. This is not true. Life is more interesting."

More interesting and, at times, far far more horrible. 

But Thompson's words are left to speak for themselves as Wesley Morris makes a quick turn to a happy ending. He says: 

“If you read between the lines, it’s not that bad."

Said Rob Reiner after reading Roger Ebert's famous "Hated It" review out loud, for laughs:

It's a funny punchline, reminiscent of "Dumb and Dumber"'s "So you're telling me, there's a chance?"

But what was it that bothered Ebert so much about Reiner's movie, "North"?

Here's more of Ebert's review:

[The main character is] a kid with inattentive parents, who decides to go into court, free himself of them, and go on a worldwide search for nicer parents. This idea is deeply flawed. Children do not lightly separate from their parents – and certainly not on the evidence provided here, where the great parental sin is not paying attention to their kid at the dinner table. The parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander) have provided little North with what looks like a million-dollar house in a Frank Capra neighborhood, all on dad’s salary as a pants inspector.

Challenged on his statement about Rob Reiner, Trump explained, "Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all.... I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form."

Let’s be clear about something.

Trump wrote this morning that what happened to Rob Reiner and his wife Michele was a very sad thing and may they rest in peace.

He didn’t celebrate his death.

He did say how he felt about the man who hated him with every ounce of his being… pic.twitter.com/wdSuwjWDQr

— RealAF Patriot (@RealAF_Patriot) December 15, 2025

The full quote: "Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. He said — he knew it was false, in fact it’s the exact opposite — that I was a friend of Russia, controlled by Russia. The Russia hoax — he was one of the people behind it. I think he hurt himself, career-wise. He became like a deranged person. Trump derangement syndrome. So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country."

Compare that to his earlier statement, and you'll see that a big difference is the omission of a reverent acknowledgment of the profundity of death. The original statement begins and ends with what we would expect from a decent and conventional reaction: "A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood.... May Rob and Michele rest in peace!" It's the stuff in the middle that was the problem. Notice the multiple elements to this filling. I'll color code them:

Trump accuses Rob Reiner of causing his own death through "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

Here's what Trump posted at Truth Social:

"A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!"

Reiner's son Nick has been arrested for the murders. Assuming Nick Reiner is indeed the murderer, he was certainly angry at his father, but it's absurd to think that the son's anger toward the father is about the father's recent political expression. 

Virtually everyone else has responded to the news of the murder with praise for Reiner's work as an actor and director and has chosen to leave politics for another day. Trump went to the complete opposite extreme, speaking not just about his political opposition to the man but blaming Reiner for his own death and making it all about Trump and larding his statement with self-praise — surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness! — to the point where many readers will wonder whether this is satire.

I mean, is it possible that Trump believes he is doing satire in honor of a great satirist?

"Join legendary director Rob Reiner and his son Nick Reiner as they discusses their new film 'Being Charlie,' about a troublesome 18-year-old..."

"... who breaks out of a youth drug treatment clinic, returns home to Los Angeles, and is given an intervention by his parents and forced to go to an adult rehab...."

"Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, were killed by their son, Nick, according to multiple sources who have spoken with family members."

"Police have not yet confirmed the account.On Sunday, Dec. 14, at about 3:30 p.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) was called to a home to provide medical aid, the LAFD told PEOPLE. Upon arrival, they found a man, 78, and a woman, 68, dead. Sources confirm the victims were Rob and Michele. Police say Nick, 32, is alive and being questioned. No arrests have been made...."

People reports.

From the NYT obituary: "Mr. Reiner, who initially rose to fame playing Meathead, Archie Bunker’s son-in-law, on the sitcom 'All in the Family”' in the 1970s, went on to become a remarkably versatile film director. He seemed equally adept at the mockumentary ('Spinal Tap,' 1984), the coming-of-age film ('Stand by Me,' 1986), the children’s classic ('Princess Bride,' 1987), the romantic comedy ('When Harry Met Sally …' 1989) and the courtroom drama ('A Few Good Men,' 1992)."

He contributed so much to the culture we Baby Boomers lived through in the 70s and 80s. 

Here he is talking to Bill Maher for an hour and a half, just last September, on the occasion of the release of the 40-years-later sequel to "Spinal Tap":

REINER, at 3:40: "Nobody's ever done a sequel 41 years after the first one."

MAHER: "It's great that they're all still here."

REINER: "Yes. It's a plus. It's a plus. Although we have a bit, we have a bit in the second one, which I hope you'll see at some point... where the, a guy who's a promotion guy... says to... them, listen, it will help your legacy if at least one of you were to die during the concert, because... you know...."

MAHER:  "So true. I mean, it's the best career move anybody ever makes."

REINER: "Right. And yeah. And... Chris... as Nigel says... I don't wanna die. And then McKean as David says, but you settle for a coma. And he says, oh, well, that, that's very good. Thinking outside the, outside the literal box...."

One thing and one thing only...

Let’s be clear. The refusal by Republicans to hold Trump accountable for committing the worst violation of the Constitution by a President in our Nation’s history is about one thing and one thing only: White Supremacy.

— Rob Reiner (@robreiner) February 16, 2021

ADDED: I wonder where Rob thinks he is in the "regime of whiteness":

ALSO: 10 minutes after I published this post, 5 commenters had already independently addressed Reiner as "Meathead."

AND: Is there any hope that Reiner is doing humor? He is more or less considered a comedian, but I don't think he would tell this joke. The self-seriousness of an erstwhile comedian is a gristly matter. 

Bret Easton Ellis explains his feeling of being "anti-anti-Trump."

The anti-Trump people who bother him so much are the elitists who reacted when "this boorish clown... walked into the china shop and started knocking things all over the place with his orange skin and his weird hair." Their problem is, according to BEE, that they take Trump "literally" instead of getting the "overall message."

Now, that's mostly wrong, in my view, even though I too have the feeling of being "anti-anti-Trump." I'd say the anti-Trumpsters don't stick to the literal text of what Trump says. They move to the level of "overall message" and they get a very alarming message.

BEE is making his argument too easy. In the end of that video, he tells his fellow elitists that they've got to start "realigning" how they "feel" about Trump. Why? If it's all about feeling, why should they reject their initial feeling? Is BEE saying that because Trump looks funny — orange skin and weird hair — the initial feelings of elitists ought to be risen above while other people's feelings are better for some reason? Who is feeling this out the right way?

Speaking of judgment based on the way people look, here's a photo I took of Rob Reiner freaking out about Trump. This was on the Chris Matthews show on Friday. I took this photograph of my TV screen because I thought Reiner looked like a man drowning and paddling furiously to keep his head above water:



Here's the text of what Reiner was saying as he looked like that:

"There were five hard examples of obstruction of justice laid out in the Mueller report. What else do you need? The guy’s working with the Russians. He says he is going to continue working with the Russians. The Russians are already playing. We’ve seen the Senate Intelligence Committee tell us that they’re playing right now and they’re working hard to defeat us. Are we now saying that we’re just going to give ourselves over to the Russians? We beat them in the Cold War, and they’re beating us now in the cyber war. And if we don’t stand up to them, it could be the end of our democracy."

That's awful as a literal text and I was reacting to the way Reiner looked. Would BEE critique my anti-anti-Trump feeling because I'm seeing Reiner as a boorish clown and paying attention to his actual words? Would BEE say that I need to be more sophisticated, overcome that reaction, and understand Reiner's "overall message"?

FOOTNOTE: The expression is "bull in a china shop," not "clown in a china shop." For a lengthy discussion of the expression "bull in a china shop," read this post from 2017.

"I picked up a copy of Vogue just because I was, like, I need to know about women’s fashion now, because I’m gay."

"Jack and Will make fun of everything Grace wears on 'Will & Grace,' so I need to be like that."

Said Phillip Picardi, quoted in "Condé Nast’s 26-Year-Old Man of the Moment/Is Phillip Picardi, a former intern who now heads up Teen Vogue, the future of Condé Nast? Anna Wintour seems to think so."

Mr. Picardi grew up in North Andover, Mass. His father, a devout Catholic, owned a technology company. His mother was a homemaker and an executive assistant.... It made for a sometimes challenging environment for the young Mr. Picardi. “I was gay,” he said. “G.A.Y., with an exclamation mark and a little asterisk.”

He came out to his parents in the summer before ninth grade. It was 2 in the morning, and Mr. Picardi, who had just finished watching “Queer as Folk,” burst into their bedroom and said: “Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you.” His mother sobbed as he said everything he had to say. Ten minutes later, his father rolled over and asked what was going on. He had slept through it.

His parents sent him to a Catholic therapist and instructed him not to tell his neighbors, his friends or his younger brother. Before coming out, he had wanted to be a lawyer. Now, he decided, he should work in fashion.

“I watched ‘Will & Grace,’ and that’s what it felt like they were doing, more or less,” he said.

TV is influential!

You know, I find "Philip" such a hard name to spell. It it one L or two? It's hard to see, because the lower-case i also looks like an L. Picardi is a 2-L Phillip. He even spells "Phill" with 2 Ls, which seems excessive, but it was "Will & Grace," not "Wil & Grace."

Philip means fond of horses. "Phil" is love, of course, as in "philanthropy," and "ip" is the same as "hippos," which means horse. (A hippopotamus is a horse of the patomos (the river).)

Anyway, did you as a child get any ideas about how to live and be your true self by looking at some TV-show character? Here's a list of the top-rated TV shows when I was in 9th grade. Who would I have looked at and thought, well, that's where I'm going? I see 3 housewives and a "jeannie." The jeannie and one of the housewives had superpowers, and the other 2 were Laura Petrie (Mary Tyler Moore) and Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor). I can see why I was so deeply affected when the hippies suddenly appeared on TV...



And, people, Gomer was gay.

ADDED: I found that 1969 Gomer clip because I was looking for things with "Goldie" (that is, Leigh French), and I did not recognize — until EDH asked about it — that the other hippie there is Rob Reiner. And here's Reiner as Mitch the hippie in a scene in a 1969 episode of "The Beverly Hillbillies":