"My personal sense of the show was that the first half dozen episodes were too freighted with Presidential heroism."

"It seemed that every episode was an exercise in saving the world, with virtually no attention paid to the reality that even the most powerful person on earth – the President of the United States – is faced daily with the frustrating limits of that awesome power. Their were other issues as well, including overly melodramatic 'B' stories involving the President’s children – an eight year old daughter and twin teenage siblings (brother and sister), as well as a whole bunch of satellite characters who were truly under characterized and under served. Nevertheless, as fantasized as the show ['Commander in Chief'] was, and as much as there were elements in it I didn’t much care for, there was something fundamentally appealing about the show. It had a good heart. It wanted to be a hit, in spite of itself. It had real stars in Geena Davis, and the remarkable Donald Sutherland, as her antagonist....

"Donald Sutherland... had had strong opinions and feelings about every single word of every single script we wrote... And yet... [h]e was a delightful man, erudite and intelligent, and we often found ourselves engaged in deep conversations about world affairs, politics, and our personal lives. Geena was altogether another story. I would get long, detailed critiques of our scripts, and copious notes and questions about every scene she was in. Okay, I get it. She’s the star of the show. She’s being protective of her character. Fair enough. But I would almost always get these tomes about particular scenes on the morning of the day we were to shoot them. It was virtually impossible to carry on a dialogue since a) she was on the stage already doing the work, and b) there simply wasn’t time to intelligently debate and/or alter the scenes without stopping production.... Geena was severely undermining our efforts on her behalf, and it was clear that while she wouldn’t outright say it, she was definitely not on board with the direction in which I was steering the show. It was inevitable then, that the network started hectoring me about the scripts, in eerie lockstep with Geena’s objections...."

From "Truth is a Total Defense: My Fifty Years in Television," by Steven Bochco, which I just put in my Kindle, for reasons discussed in the previous post.

Questions I invite you to discuss:

Was there any sexism in Bochco's comfort with Donald Sutherland and resistance to Geena Davis? Do you think a powerful man might accept critique from another man but experience the same kind of contribution from a woman as annoying and chaotic?

Do women — or did just Geena Davis — tend to have a more chaotic, irritating way of attempting to contribute to a joint project?

Do you think that playing the role of President of the United States affected the mind of Geena Davis, creating something of a delusion that she could, even at the last minute, imperiously expect that things would be done her way?

Do you think that being President of the United States creates a delusion that you can instantly and imperiously expect that things will be done your way?

Do you think the actual President of the United States feels something like an actor playing the part of President of the United States and that has created something of a delusion that he's doing a TV show and a TV show President of the United States would act like a major film-star diva given a TV show where she gets to play President of the United States and acts like a big drama queen annoyingly, chaotically, and imperiously expecting everyone to go along with whatever spontaneously rises to the surface of her big brain at any given moment? (By the way, both Geena Davis and Donald Trump are people who claim to have a very, very high IQ.)

Do you think that the Trump presidency suffers from the same problem Steven Bochco detected in the scripts for "Commander in Chief" — and makes every episode "an exercise in saving the world, with virtually no attention paid to the reality that even the most powerful person on earth – the President of the United States – is faced daily with the frustrating limits of that awesome power"?

"When Did You Realize TV Could Be Art?"

Asked Matt Zoller Seitz, back in 2012. Seitz was born in 1968, so he didn't live through "The Twilight Zone," 1959-1964. I was 8 to 13, in those years, and even today, seeing that question — "When Did You Realize TV Could Be Art?" — I'm inclined to say, I never "realized" it, because I don't remember a time when I didn't know "The Twilight Zone." I immediately thought of the episodes "Eye of the Beholder" and "The Monsters Are Due on Main Street." And just the opening credits.

But maybe you think "art" is more about serious adults in complicated, serious situations and rule out anything that accepts the label "science fiction." That's a conventional viewpoint adopted by Seitz:

As an American boy in the seventies, I saw plenty on TV that scared, disturbed, or upset me: the bigotry and brutality of Roots; naked prisoners being led into a gas chamber on Holocaust; Farrah Fawcett's torment in The Burning Bed. But I didn't realize commercial TV could be art, or even aspire to artfulness, until I started watching Hill Street Blues.

Seitz was 13 when that show premiered (in 1981, the year Ronald Reagan became President).

In many ways the godfather of today's melancholy, morally ambiguous cable dramas, the Steven Bochco series imported seventies movie values to NBC. There were content restrictions, some of them jarring (the cops never used any curses milder than "damn" or "hell" )...

TV meant, for nearly all of us, broadcast TV, subject to government censorship, despite the First Amendment....

... but for the most part, the show's situations were rougher and rawer than TV's norm. The stories dealt with adult issues — sex, race, class divisions, petty office turf wars, political chicanery, alcoholism, drug addiction, you name it — and while some of the characters were more sensible and ethical than others, the show never seemed to judge any of them. There were no bad guys on the show, just people living their lives according to whatever personal code they'd cobbled together....

I'm reading that this morning — and thinking about TV art — because it's quoted — sad to say — in a tribute— written by Fred Barbash in WaPo — to Steven Bochco, who has died (at the age of 74). The most interesting material from that tribute is quoted from Bochco (from this book):

“The idea of almost every other cop show was that the private lives of these folks was what happened the other 23 hours of the day that you weren’t watching them,” Bochco told the New York Times, “and we turned that inside out. 'Hill Street' was a show where their personal lives kept bleeding profusely, hemorrhaging if you will, into their professional lives. Where you had ex-wives coming in inappropriately and disrupting proceedings. You had Furillo’s lover getting into horrible arguments with him about the law. And you had an alcoholic, J. D. LaRue. All of this stuff just kept intruding and informing how these men and women went about their business.”...

“On our scripts,” Bochco once said in an oral history, “we had double columns of dialogue, ’cause we scripted everything in the background. EVERYTHING in the background. We realized we had so many characters that the only way to service all those characters was to have multiple story lines. The only way to service multiple story lines was to let them spill over into subsequent episodes. So half the time, things that were going on in the background were in fact the elements of stories and character relationships that would emerge in the foreground two episodes from now.”

In “Trial by Fury,” for example, the rape of the nun and the confessions weren’t enough for Bochco. When Bochco first saw the script — featuring only that sequence — he felt there was something missing, “some sense of how life isn’t fair.... So we added a small story about another murder, of a bodega owner named Rodriquez, who had been gunned down in a robbery. It happens every day on the Hill....and is far less sensational than the rape-murder of a nun, which is why the bodega murder doesn’t get the cops’ full attention.... What we come to realize is that the bodega murder will go unsolved: the price of catching the killer of the nun …. The kind of systemic cynicism that the two stories, side-by-side, exposed dramatically made the hour terrific conceptually."

Topics I'm inviting you to discuss: What is art? Is cynicism or complexity or density the key to answering the question? Does it matter whether television can be art and whether a particular show was art or do you only want to talk about whether television is great? When is television art, but bad art? When is television not art, but nevertheless great? Was there ever a TV show that made you think, like Seitz, hey, wait a minute, this isn't just TV, it's art!? What's your favorite episode of "The Twilight Zone"? Is it the same episode that would make you say, that one was art!? Did you watch "Hill Street Street Blues"? What impact did it have on you? Did it open up new vistas of what television could be? Do you realize now — with our endless access to complicated, adult dramatic series on HBO and Netflix and Amazon — how different and important "Hill Street Street Blues" was in its time? Do you think it had anything to do with Reagan?

I'm interested enough in that last question, that I just bought Bochco's book so I can see what he says about Reagan. If the answer's interesting, I'll do a separate post. If it's not, I'll update here, very soon.

UPDATE: Bochco never mentions Reagan in his book. I did a separate search for the word "President," and what I got were lots of mentions of various corporate presidents, a risky Obama joke...

I have been pissing, vomiting (lot of dry heaving — almost as much fun) and leading from the rear (apologies to the President) for about three or four days.

... and something about the TV show "Commander in Chief," in which Geena Davis played the first female President of the United States. Bochco was asked to take over, 2 years into the show's run (in 2007). I'll make a separate post out of this part.

CORRECTION: Bochco was asked to take over after 6 or 7 episodes had been filmed and only 4 had aired. The show had been getting great ratings, but there were production problems, that the original show runner couldn't handle, which is why they brought in Bochco, who replaced the writers and changed the show, and the ratings crashed.