"Mr. Malinin started skating to the 'Succession' theme last fall, but he has yet to watch the show. 'I don’t have a subscription to HBO'..."

"... he said in an interview. 'But if I did get it, I’d definitely watch.' The network’s programming has influenced his performances before: Last season, he performed a free skate program set to a selection of music from the series 'Euphoria.' 'I didn’t watch "Euphoria" either,' he said, 'but I’ve heard it’s a really good series.'"

From "'Succession' on Ice/Ilia Malinin, an American teenager, won the men’s World Figure Skating Championships with a performance set to the theme of the HBO series" (NYT).

For my post with videos of Malinin's amazing performance, go here.

ALSO: From the NYT article: "In the coming months, Mr. Malinin plans to 'take the time to mentally prepare for the idea of trying' the quint jump, he said. 'I like to push the boundaries of physical abilities and the boundaries of this sport.'"

The article headline is "'Succession' on Ice," but Malinin isn't in any way interpreting the story or the characters from the show. It's completely abstract music to him (and his choreographer), I presume. For a viewer of the show, however, the music calls up those associations. It's not just music. It's a particular, awful family... that has nothing to do with Malinin.

The NYT reveals its shortlist of 25 books, one of which will be named "the best book of the past 125 years," and "Gone With The Wind" is on the list.

Isn't that weird?

I read that book when I was about 16, and I thought: This is the best book I have ever read, and I don't think I will ever read a better book, because how can any book be better than this? 

There's a lot in the book that's not in the movie, as I was disappointed to see when I finally got a chance to see the famous flick. I was 16 in 1965, and back then, you could only see an old movie if it showed on TV or played in a theater. "Gone with the Wind" never played on TV, not until 1976, but it did have a theatrical rerelease in 1967, which I missed, and another in 1971, which is when I did finally see it.

What I remember loving in the book and missing in the movie was all the detail in Scarlett O'Hara's experience of other women — her mother, Melanie, (the prostitute) Belle Watling, etc. Scarlett was always on the lookout to see what made a woman great, wanted to see herself as a great woman, and she kept needing to recognize that other women were great.

Anyway, that made a big impression on me, more than half a century ago, but I'm surprised to see something so out of step with the times making the NYT shortlist. I haven't delved into what the NYT is saying it means to be "the best book of the past 125 years," but I wonder if what is "best" is to be judged by the standards of our point in time or whether we are somehow counting what the book meant to people at the time it was published and what it has meant to people over the course of time.

Here's the whole shortlist:

The ambiguous "drops."

Headline at Hollywood Reporter: "HBO Drops Pair of Mike Judge Comedy Series."

I know "drops" is supposed to sound cool, like when some pop star "drops" a new recording. But it's such a saggy, sad word, and sometimes — as in that headline — it sounds like the very thing they're trying to get us excited about just got cancelled. 

Oh, no! Wait. I'm reading this article now:

'QualityLand' and 'A5' will not move forward as the 'Silicon Valley' co-creator continues to juggle the new take on 'Beavis and Butt-Head' for Comedy Central.

These shows did get dropped in the old-timey sense of cancelled/rejected. The word has ambiguity whichever way you want to use it. 

And by the way, what does it say about America that something new called "QualityLand" is shunned and they're bringing back "Beavis and Butt-Head"? Personally, I loved "Beavis and Butt-Head" — as an MTV show in the early 1990s. It's a quarter century later, though, America. 

I thought I was a little childish watching that when I was in my 40s, but who would have thought that 20+ years later, a reboot of the thing would be what was happening on HBO? What was on HBO, 20+ years ago? Here's a list of the best of HBO in the 1990s, topped by "The Sopranos." 

Watching "The Sopranos" in the 1990s, I might have wondered, What would HBO be in the 2020s? If the only fact I had from the future was HBO will be generating new episodes of "Beavis and Butt-Head," I would have been terrified. What the hell will have happened to America?!

"The Week Old Hollywood Finally, Actually Died/The streaming services are in charge, and bringing a ruthless new culture with them."

A NYT article by Ben Smith.

[O]n Aug. 7...  WarnerMedia abruptly eliminated the jobs of hundreds of employees, emptying the executive suite at the once-great studio that built Hollywood.... In a series of brisk video calls, executives who imagined they were studio eminences were reminded that they work — or used to work — at the video division of a phone company. The chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, Bob Greenblatt, learned that he’d been fired the morning of the day the news broke.... Jeffrey Schlesinger, a 37-year company veteran who ran the lucrative international licensing business, complained to friends that he had less than an hour’s notice....

The new WarnerMedia chief executive, Jason Kilar, spent the formative years of his career as the senior vice president of worldwide application software at Amazon, known for its grim corporate culture.... Many of the new leaders are admirers of the culture at Netflix, which is hardheaded and unsentimental....

WarnerMedia includes HBO, which has its new streaming service, HBO Max.  The executive in charge of it is Casey Bloys, who is, we're told, "a great programmer, not a power player or politician of the old model. "

He has, he said in a telephone interview, told his new team that he wants programming on the streaming service that will complement the buzzy, complex adult shows like “Watchmen” and “Succession” that HBO is best known for. He is pointed [sic] to straightforwardly fun titles that appeal to younger audiences like “Green Lantern” and “Gossip Girl" as models for broadening out the service....

"'Gone with the Wind' was pulled from HBO Max while the long-running TV show 'Cops' was outright canceled..."

"... a sign that entertainment companies are re-examining the content they offer in the wake of nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality.... In a statement, HBO Max said 'Gone With the Wind' is a 'product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.' When the movie returns to the platform it will be 'with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. If we are to create a more just, equitable and inclusive future, we must first acknowledge and understand our history.'... On Monday, John Ridley, who won an Oscar for the adapted screenplay for the movie '12 Years a Slave'... call[ed] for 'Gone With the Wind' to be taken off HBO Max.... 'Cops,' once considered a groundbreaking look at the day-to-day life of police on the beat is now also out of fashion. Featuring the song 'Bad Boys'—with the lyrics 'Bad boys, bad boys whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?'— ...  'Cops' presented a very positive look at policing, showcasing officers handling everything from domestic disturbances and drunken driving to robberies and sex crimes...."

The Wall Street Journal reports (and this was not behind a paywall for me).

"A few months before he died, in 2018, [Philip] Roth told me in an interview that he never intended his book as a political allegory. But by then, with the Trump administration in full swing..."

"... he agreed that the parallels between the world he invented and what was happening in contemporary America were hard to ignore: a demagogic president who openly expresses admiration for a foreign dictator; a surge of right-wing nationalism and isolationism; polarization; false narratives; xenophobia and the demonization of others."

From "‘The Plot Against America’ Imagines the Rise of an Intolerant Demagogue/David Simon has translated Philip Roth’s 2004 alternate history novel into an HBO mini-series, Simon’s first literary adaptation" by Charles McGrath (NYT).

From McGrath's 2018 interview with Roth:

ROTH: However prescient “The Plot Against America” might seem to you, there is surely one enormous difference between the political circumstances I invent there for the U.S. in 1940 and the political calamity that dismays us so today. It’s the difference in stature between a President Lindbergh and a President Trump. Charles Lindbergh, in life as in my novel, may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to Fascism, but he was also — because of the extraordinary feat of his solo trans-Atlantic flight at the age of 25 — an authentic American hero 13 years before I have him winning the presidency. Lindbergh, historically, was the courageous young pilot who in 1927, for the first time, flew nonstop across the Atlantic, from Long Island to Paris. He did it in 33.5 hours in a single-seat, single-engine monoplane, thus making him a kind of 20th-century Leif Ericson, an aeronautical Magellan, one of the earliest beacons of the age of aviation. Trump, by comparison, is a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.

"Earlier this summer, HBO quietly removed erotic adult movies and TV shows from its channels and streaming services."

The L.A reports that includes...

... “Taxicab Confessions,” the documentary series “Real Sex” and “Cathouse,” which chronicled life in a Nevada brothel, and specials featuring adult film star Katie Morgan... [and] adult feature films....

"Taxicab Confessions"! That doesn't seem to belong in the set, and not just because I love it and don't care at all about the rest.

“Over the past several years HBO has been winding down its late-night adult fare,” an HBO representative said. “While we’re greatly ramping up our other original program offerings, there hasn’t been a strong demand for this kind of adult programming, perhaps because it’s easily available elsewhere.”...

HBO developed and launched most of its adult programming in the early 1990s when the internet was still nascent and the network was not yet a major producer of prestigious scripted series such as “The Sopranos.”...

“It really is a vestige of a previous era,” said Jones, co-author of “The Essential HBO Reader.” “Especially the more soft-core stuff that gave HBO its mantle of ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO.’ You weren’t finding those shows unless you subscribed to the Playboy Channel, and most people did not want their wives to know that they watched that stuff.”...

"HBO’s would-be minders are experts in distribution systems and profit margins who know little or nothing about the ego-fueled dramas that help put the show in show business."

"Will these telecommunications executives be able to put up with the producers, directors and stars whose work gave the network 29 Emmys last year? 'HBO’s and AT&T’s cultures also come from a very different financial perspective,' said Gary Arlen, the head of Arlen Communications, a research firm that examines the media and telecommunications industries. 'AT&T comes from a legacy of rate regulations, and every expense has to be justified.'"

From "Will AT&T Be Able to Handle HBO?" (NYT). The article refers to AT&T as "a conservatively run company based in Dallas." I don't think "conservatively run company" should mean politically conservative, and I don't think there are any references politics in the story. It's more a contrast between numbers-oriented businessfolk versus the magical creatures who make art happen, but I'm guessing the NYT is concerned about the freedom of HBO to continue a left-wing mission, and that anxiety slipped out in the words "conservatively run."

"7 Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO's 'The Final Year'" — a documentary about the last year of the Obama Administration.

I saw this tweet...

Ben Rhodes reacting to Hillary Clinton's hilarious defeat in 2016 is the funniest part of the new Obama Documentary on HBO.

What makes it even better is throughout the documentary he brags how she is going to win. pic.twitter.com/MGBQNE5ATY

— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) May 30, 2018

... and it made me check out a bit of "The Final Year," but I thought it was such a bad documentary. They didn't seem to have any good footage of anything. Mostly shots of various people, e.g., Samantha Power, musing flatly in dull language. I amused myself briefly by testing out the theory that people were paraphrasing the stock line "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

Anyway, I bailed out and went looking for some reviews and found "7 Funny, Fawning Reviews of HBO's 'The Final Year,'" which expands the scope of the badness — the media's mediocrity on top of the filmmaker's.

I like this: "HBO's Dishonest Obama Documentary Is Fantasy Foreign Policy Puffery" (Reason).

In reality, it's less a documentary than a wet goodbye kiss to Obama, as well as a personal PR document for a few key members of his foreign-policy brain trust, employing that term loosely....

The Obama team repeatedly boasts that its three signature achievements are the Paris climate accord, the rapprochement with Cuba, and the Iran nuclear deal. But of how these agreements were reached, or who opposed them and why, there's not a word.

And even less is there an explanation of why, if they were so important, the Obama administration let them stand on a foundation of executive orders, rather than seeking congressional approval to make them law.

The consequence of that decision is that barely a year after he left office, practically nothing is left of what Obama policy-makers regarded as their most important works. ...

Some people love this new trailer for HBO's "Fahrenheit 451," but I think it perversely makes the argument against reading books.

If books are what the book "Fahrenheit 451" makes them out to be, then you should read the book "Fahrenheit 451." If you want a movie with maximum action and fire effects — which is what this trailer vigorously promotes — then you are evidence for the proposition that books are not longer essential to human life (or you are part of the redefinition of human life that excludes the reading of books).

From the 60th Anniversary edition of the book, with lots of introductory material:

"I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction."

Writes Roxane Gay (in the NYT) on the occasion of the announcement that HBO will be doing a series called "Confederate," an alternative history story based on the interesting if obvious premise that the South pulled off its secession from the Union and kept slavery going.

When I first read about “Confederate,” however, I felt exhausted, simply because I have long been exhausted by slavery narratives...

This show’s premise highlights the limits of the imagination in a world where oppression thrives. These creators can imagine a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War and black people are still enslaved, but they can’t or aren’t interested in imagining a world where, say, things went in a completely different direction after the Civil War and, say, white people are enslaved. Or a world where slavery never happened at all. What would happen in a show where American Indians won the conflicts in which they were embroiled as the British and French and other European nations colonized this country? What would happen if Mexicans won the Mexican-American War and Texas and California were still part of Mexico?

It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed....

We do not make art in a vacuum isolated from sociopolitical context. We live in a starkly divided country with a president who is shamefully ill equipped to bridge that divide. I cannot help worrying that there are people, emboldened by this administration, who will watch a show like “Confederate” and see it as inspiration, rather than a cautionary tale.

"I covered the confirmation hearings in 1991. HBO’s movie heavily edits history to favor Anita Hill."

Writes Stuart Taylor Jr.

Despite a surface appearance of fairness, “Confirmation” makes clear how it wants the hearings to be remembered: Ms. Hill told the whole truth and Mr. Thomas was thus a desperate, if compelling, liar. Her supporters were noble; his Republican backers were scheming character assassins.

This is consistent with how the media conveyed the story at the time and, especially, in the years hence. Yet immediately after millions of people witnessed the hours of televised testimony, polls showed that Americans by a margin of more than 2 to 1 found Judge Thomas more believable than Ms. Hill. Viewers of “Confirmation” were deprived of several aspects of the story that might have made them, too, skeptical of Ms. Hill. The most-salient of many examples....

Go to the link for the details.

I haven't watched the show. I'd have to force myself. I remember the original quite clearly and don't feel any urge to watch actors endeavoring to seem like the real people or to worry about how HBO is trying to manipulate us in the direction I would assume they'd manipulate us. For me, there's no entertainment value and no educational value. I'd rather see a documentary about sexual harassment and the American public mind in the 1990s, beginning with the you-just-don't-get-it scolding that was delivered over the high-tech-lynched body of Clarence Thomas followed by the it's-just-sex championing of the Democratic Party hero Bill Clinton. That was one hell of a transition.

"They weren’t thinking about me, just about my mother. They just ripped me out and tossed me aside," said Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra was a gigantic baby, the year was 1915, the setting was the family's kitchen, and the midwife had to call for the doctor, who arrived, with forceps, to save the mother. 

The doctor cut the cord and laid the boy - huge and blue, bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, then quickly shifted his efforts to ­saving the nearly unconscious mother’s life.

The women all leant in, shouting advice in ­Italian. At the back of the scrum, one of them looked at the seemingly lifeless baby, picked up it up and, just in case, ran ice cold water from the sink over it and slapped its back. It snuffled and began to howl....

In a nightclub with a lover named Peggy Connelly, he flinched when, in the dark, she caressed his left cheek and her fingertips touched his ear. Though she had barely noticed the deformity, he told her how sensitive he was about it....

Connelly recalled: ‘There was no ­outburst of emotion, just a ­lingering bitterness about what he felt had been a stupid neglect of his infant self to concentrate on his mother, otherwise his torn ear might have been tended to in time.’

As for the mother, Dolly Sinatra:

After Frank was born, there were no more babies, possibly because the birth rendered Dolly unable to have any, but more likely because she ­simply decided — and she was one of life’s deciders — she didn’t want to go through that again.

But she compensated for her trauma in the strangest of ways. She chose to become a midwife and an abortionist, for which ­illegal activity she got the ­nickname ­Hatpin Dolly and a ­criminal record.

The link goes to an excerpt from the book "Frank: The Making Of A Legend" by James Kaplan. I ran across that this morning because last night we were watching the new HBO documentary "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All," which isn't based on Kaplan's book, but goes through the same story of the birth and contains that brief, startling fact: Sinatra's mother was an abortionist.

We were watching the Sinatra documentary because we'd gotten tired of that other, much more noticed HBO documentary "Going Clear," which is based on the Lawrence Wright book "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief." I'm sure the book is much more worth your time. The movie is just too dumb for my taste. In the part I put up with, there were too many boring people on camera stating that they were indeed taken in. But why? Some of the clips of L. Ron Hubbard were interesting. He was brilliant/crazy/devious. He's a good character. The rest of the cast... well, one wonders what they would have done with their lives if they hadn't entered the "prison of belief" in Scientology.

I was surprised to see that both documentaries were made by the same guy, Alex Gibney. If he could have been allowed to stay with the interesting character in "Going Clear," I might have liked it as much as "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All." But left to delve into the mystery of ordinary people getting and staying inside of religious belief, he had little insight. At least not in the part I put up with.

Maybe I'll finish it at some point... or, more likely, switch to Wright's book or just Wright's New Yorker article, "The Apostate, Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology." I could get interested in Scientology's complicated legal problems, but I don't want to hear long accounts of dumb people getting trapped in "the Prison of Belief." Why are other people's beliefs a "prison"? If some beliefs are prisons, what beliefs are not prisons? Now, if the point is, the organization threatens and bullies anyone who tries to leave, then it's not belief that is the prison.

ADDED: Lawrence Wright goes on the podcast "Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin" which I was in the middle of listening to when I tried to watch HBO's "Going Clear." This morning, having given up on "Going Clear," I went back to the podcast and was surprised to get to hear Alec Baldwin complain that what the movie was missing was just about exactly what I'd thought. Go to 23:32. Baldwin had seen the movie, and he said: "There wasn't any sense, to me, of: What are the people who are in Scientology, who remain in Scientology, who are dedicated to this, what do they perceive they're getting out of it?... What does it do for them? Why are they there?" Baldwin suggests "maybe it's in the book," and Wright is able to give some answers — but these are answers that make me want to ask whether the motivations are different from what brings people into other religions.

By the way, at the "Here's the Thing" site, the title of Wright's book is misstated as "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Unbelief." That's a good (if unwitting) response to my statement (above) it's not belief that is the prison.

"'What the hell did I do?' Mr. Durst whispers to himself in an unguarded moment caught on a microphone he wore during filming."

I'll put the rest after the fold in case you haven't watched the final episode of HBO's 6-part documentary "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst."

When Bob Dylan had gotten "deeply into Jerry Lewis" and came up with an idea for a "surrealist comedy series for HBO."

This was back in the 90s. He was working with Larry Charles (a producer and writer known for "Seinfeld," "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and "Borat"). I like this scene where Dylan pulls the old hot coffee trick on Charles:

"So they bring a hot coffee for him, like a cappuccino, and they bring the ice coffee for me and they put them together in the middle of the table, and he immediately grabs my ice coffee and starts drinking my ice coffee," Charles said. "And I'm watching him drink it and I'm not touching the other thing. I don't want the other thing. And finally he almost finishes my drink and he goes, 'Why aren't you drinking your drink?' And I'm like, 'You're drinking my drink.' And he laughed and that broke the ice. It's like a test. Like, he drank my drink. How would I react?"

Yeah, that's comic and surrealistic. Then there's the old box-of-scrap-paper trick:

Charles recalled Dylan bringing a box of scrap paper with phrases written on it and dumping it on the table. "I realized, that's how he writes songs," he said. "He takes these scraps and he puts them together and makes his poetry out of that. He has all of these ideas and then just in a subconscious or unconscious way, he lets them synthesize into a coherent thing. And that's how we wound up writing also. We wound up writing in a very 'cut-up' technique. We'd take scraps of paper, put them together, try to make them make sense, try to find the story points within it. And we finally wrote...a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff."

What a cut up. HBO greenlit the project, and Bob immediately performed another scrappy switcheroo: "I don't want to do it anymore. It's too slapsticky." Love that Bob!

The comeback of "The Comeback."

HBO is bringing back my all-time favorite sit-com. "The Comeback" was cancelled after one season 9 years ago.

I said at the time:

I love HBO, but...

I am so mad at them for cancelling "The Comeback." I thought they were known for giving a show the chance to catch on, and "The Comeback" was notorious for the way people didn't get it at first. (Chez Althouse, we got it, but for some reason, people found it hard to get.) But only 1 million viewers saw the finale. I guess there's a limit to what is worth supporting.

What's wrong with people? The low popularity of that show makes me feel so lonely!

ADDED: You can buy the full set of the original "Comeback" season here. Highly recommended!

Lots of HBO coming to Amazon Prime video streaming.

Unlimited access all of "The Sopranos," "The Wire," "Deadwood," "Rome," "Six Feet Under,""Eastbound & Down," "Enlightened,"and "Flight of the Conchords," lots of comedy specials and miniseries (e.g., "Band of Brothers" and "John Adams") and much more.

If you don't already have Amazon Prime let me recommend using this Amazon Prime link. Like other Amazon links I put up, it let's you make a contribution to this blog without paying more for something you want to buy anyway. I'm genuinely encouraged by the appreciation for this blog readers have shown by using these links. Thanks to everyone.

Here, HBO is letting you watch the whole first episode of Mike Judge's new series "Silicon Valley."

Via Metafilter, which says:

The AV club calls it "incisive satire" (while comparing it [favorably] to Entourage). Some people in the real Silicon Valley are not happy about it.

"I think there is a gay mafia. I think if you cross them, you do get whacked."

Said Bill Maher, on the "Overtime" portion of his HBO show "Real Time," and this really annoys me, because I watched the whole damned show last night, hoping he'd do this issue, and the show was pretty bad and boring, never getting to this issue, and now I see it was dumped in the on-line only part?!

How did that happen? Hmm??? I suspect The Gay Mafia!

"Why did I stop midway through episode 2 [of 'True Detective']? It wasn't the sex. It was the mumbling."

"Between McConaughey and the other guy who looks too much like him (Woody Harrelson), it was way too much 2 guys mumbling. This show could not fill the aching gap left by 'Breaking Bad,' which we watched, all 60 episodes in just about exactly 60 days. In 'Breaking Bad,' not only was it easy to tell Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston apart, but the 2 actors frequently spoke quite clearly."

That's what I wrote yesterday, and a reader sent me this spoof from "The Soup" which had us laughing here at Meadhouse at 5:50 a.m.:

)