In Which We Interrupt To Bring You A Special Broadcast

Sixty Minutes

by KARA VANDERBIJL

The Hour
creator Abi Morgan
Wednesdays at 10 on BBC America

Imagine for a moment that Ben Whishaw last appeared on screen as John Keats. We might feel a little impatience towards his character, Freddie Lyon, in Abi Morgan’s summer drama The Hour. How can a man whose latest accomplishments involved stroking small woodland creatures, kissing Abbie Cornish and dying of consumption convince us that he is anything other than the tender romantic? We knew nothing of Whishaw before he was the perishing poet, yet Freddie is as far from Keats as a puppy is from a man.

The eager curls have been greased back. His lips harden around a cigarette. Any residual softness hides in the huggable tweed suits, in the circumference of fingers around a steaming cup of tea. In a show that is half the actual life story of Peter Jennings and half an Agatha Christie mystery, Whishaw’s character balances precariously between the romantic and the cynic. He carries the show as gently as he carries the raincoat of a man he killed. The image has not been altered in any way, but it has been tailored to fit all of your secret fears.

Clocks appear in almost every scene of The Hour, yet for the entirety of the first two episodes almost nothing progresses. A watch on Freddie's wrist moves in and out of focus. He and Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) work for the BBC, which in 1956 primarily aired newsreels of society's upper echelon getting engaged and winning croquet tournaments. He is idealistic, she ambitious.

They have tired of the mundane, and it seems like they are about to get a break when an acquaintance, Clarence Fendley (Anton Lesser), organizes a team for a new current affairs program called "The Hour" and nominates Bel as its producer. Tempers flare when Freddie’s attempts to become the face of the show are thwarted by the charming Hector Madden (The Wire's Dominic West), a disaster barely appeased by Bel’s promise that Freddie can work with her to make the show everything they have always dreamed a news program should be.

Ruth Elms

When his childhood friend Ruth Elms (Vanessa Kirby) asks Freddie to investigate a hastily dismissed murder, he finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy that eventually leads to her death, rumors of Soviet espionage and the involvement of the British secret service, MI6. To make matters worse, the BBC refuses to endorse or help Freddie in his investigation.

Everything stagnates until the crisis in Suez, when Bel and the team step up to the plate and deliver the story from an angle nobody else in England is brave enough to explore. Their insistence to bring an unbiased presentation of facts to the British people gives the show popularity while dealing out obstacles that they will have to fight to overcome.

People nowadays watch the news for entertainment, a concept that had just begun to expand in the late 50s. Word of the Suez crisis has the office assistant Sissy Cooper (Lisa Greenwood) panicking — but with excited eyes — about the outbreak of a third World War.

Outside of the television studio characters grapple for copies of old newspapers, search dusty archives, protect sensitive film reels from the elements. News still took time to travel, arrived by precious mediums, and the consumption of it hinted at privilege. Freddie brings home hot chips wrapped in old newspapers to his father, who devours them eagerly. This is decidedly British but it is also decidedly symbolic. Freddie only picks up a pen to decode the printed word, to turn it into "real" information — that which is seen, that which comes to pass. A viewer of "The Hour" confides that watching the program makes the world seem unbearably real. What did people do before live footage, before blog posts with pictures?

Bel jokes that "The Hour" is "a news show, not vaudeville" but it is farce that drives the story: the farce of British democracy, the farce of an illicit love affair, and the farce of Soviet spies in the BBC.

The ability to make somebody afraid of something constitutes true power, one that Bel and her colleagues attempt to dispel by showing the story behind the rumors. Hector Madden’s wife discovers that Bel has been sleeping with her husband under the pretense of "work" and reduces her to tears over a cup of tea. Freddie discovers that it is his father — not secret agents — who has been sacking the apartment looking for artifacts of the past. Truth is beauty. If it is not beautiful, make it so ugly that the spectator will be unable to tear his eyes away.

Chemistry between the characters gradually loosens into a sort of comfortable tension. Freddie loves Bel, which she either does not realize or pointedly ignores. Bel’s feelings for Freddie range between maternal protectiveness and intimate friendship; Hector, weirdly inarticulate and married, fails her again and again yet still manages to get in her pants.

Antagonists rise and fall like playing cards, each less threatening than the last. Morgan would have us believe that people slept together in narrow twin beds and survived solely on a diet of buttered white bread, chips, and whiskey. The Hour's six episodes have been helmed by three different directors, each defining the relationships between characters with dramatic lighting straight out of a film noir, faces blurring in and out of focus. Stark, almost industrial interiors contrast sharply with the modernity of Bel and Freddie’s project.

The Hour is particularly unkind to the elders, depicting them as senile or desperate for another bout of youth. Bel’s mother paints her face garishly and stuffs a middle-aged body into a slinky dress for a night on the town. Freddie's father spends his evenings moving chips from the paper to his mouth in front of the television, refusing to answer his son’s questions. Head of News Clarence Fendley cannot be trusted in a moving vehicle.

We might arrogantly suggest that the rapidly modernizing world — a world of nukes, of strange overturned revolutions and faces in front of a camera — belongs only to the young. In a tender, more wistful way The Hour tips its hat to a generation of people who gave up their best years to survival, to evenings in the basement with the blackout curtains drawn. We tried to make the world better for them, and succeeded in making it complicated.

Mad Men forever defines anything pre-1970; walking in the footsteps of this giant,  Morgan tries hard not to drown in its shadow. The script aspires to something like His Girl Friday and fails, while misogynistic jabs thrown in Bel’s general direction sound like they have been included just for the sake of it. Romola Garai consistently seems as if she is about to say something, but then she never does. The era undoubtedly sells well, but requires more than a few nice costumes, people enjoying smoking and clever parallels between their political situation and ours before we'll buy.

Kara VanderBijl is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about how to become an Anthropologie girl. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which It Was Nothing New For David Simon

First Folklore

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

In 1993, the year that Homicide: Life on the Street debuted on NBC , the number of murders in Baltimore hit an all-time high of 379 deaths. (Coming out of the crack epidemic of the ‘80s, the murder rate for that year was 48.1; New York City’s was nearly half that at 25.9 deaths per 100,000 people.) The series was based on the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, written by a journalist named David Simon, who had five years earlier — at the age of 28 — spent a year following Baltimore’s premiere men in blue as they investigated the city’s most violent crimes. Since the publishing of the book and the series’ seven-season run, Simon has earned the reputation as being one of the nation’s most talented crime-folklorist for his work on The Wire. With the critically acclaimed show, the portrayal of Baltimore that Simon had been building for years became an urban legend.

A circa 1989 David Simon with real-life detectives Sgt. Terrence McLarney, Det. Robert McAllister, and Det. Robert Bowman.In his book (and in the series), Simon’s focus was not on the crime figures of Baltimore, but on the occupational culture of its police force — not an easy topic to parse. The psyche of his detectives reflected the complexity of their role in the community. Constant exposure to the depravity of humankind isolated them from family, from lovers, and from the communities they’d sworn to protect. No matter the color or income of the neighborhoods the detectives found themselves in, they were nearly always confronted with civilian antagonism stemming from deep-rooted notions of police corruption, racism, and paranoia.

Their relationship to their job was further complicated by a lack of support from the brass upstairs, knowing that the only thing the captain wanted to hear was that the clearance rate was going to please the politicians and that the latest red-ball case was staying out of the news. Even their relationships with each other were dysfunctional.

At the center of the Homicide was Lieutenant Al Giardello’s squad. The shift lieutenant was played by Yaphet Kotto. His magisterial onscreen presence was perhaps due to his royal lineage (he claims Queen Victoria as an ancestor). The Sicilian he played was always the tough but fair leader.

Melissa Leo played Detective Kay Howard. The daughter of a Chesapeake Bay fisherman and a thorough and observant detective, Howard passed the sergeant’s exam halfway through the series.

First appearing as a lieutenant, then as a captain, then finally demoted to detective is Megan Russert talking to Ned Beatty’s seasoned Det. Stanley Bolander.

Detective Mike Kellerman joined the squad from the arson department. He would become disgraced first through allegations of taking bribes and later the shooting of drug kingpin Luther Mahoney. Here we catch the detective in a pensive moment.

The baby-faced Det. Bayliss was haunted throughout the series by his first case as primary detective — the murder of Adena Watson. The young girl was mostly likely killed by an arabber she had befriended, however Bayliss was never able to get a confession out of the man and put the red ball down.

Perhaps the most memorable character of the show was squad diva Det. Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher). He was the undisputed master of the Box. If you were lucky enough to catch him at work from behind the small brick room’s one-way mirror, you’d witness something closer to an opera than the questioning of a suspect.

Homicide was an attempt to not only show the detective’s mind state, but also the slang, the rituals, and the tools of the occupation. One professional tool that became an integral part of the show was the bureaucratic relic of the criminal justice system known as the Board. It served as a stubborn reminder of the current year’s death tally. The Board was a white board that has been divided into columns — one for each detective—and under each of the detectives’ names, a list of victims, either in red or black depending on the case’s open-or-closed status. As the year moved on the list got longer. It was where the life of a murder detective and the life of a victim intersected.

Simon described the Board allegorically: "In the time that it takes the coffeepot to fill, shift commander Lieutenant Gary D’Addario (Al Giardello in the series) can approach the Board as a pagan priest might approach the temple of the sun god, scan the hieroglyphic scrawl of red and black below his name, and determine who among his [detectives] has kept his commandments and who has gone astray. The board reveals all: Upon its acetate is writ the story of past and present. Who has grown fat on domestic murders witnessed by half a dozen family members; who has starved on a drug assassination in a vacant rowhouse. Who has reaped the bountiful harvest of a murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession; who has tasted the bitter fruit of an unidentified victim, bound and gagged in the trunk of an airport rental car."

Like any good scholar of folklore, Simon knows the vernacular of his subculture. The two terms used throughout the book to describe a case are dunker and whodunit. The case of the murder-suicide complete with a posthumous note of confession is a dunker. The unidentified victim in the trunk of an airport rental car is a whodunit. The detectives of the network TV series were of course able to solve both — either by luck, following the evidence, or a psychological beat-down in the Box.

The Box refers to the interrogation room and setting of the show’s most dramatic moments. Inside the Box a carefully acted seduction takes place, with the detective exploiting the criminal’s stupidity and fear for a confession. “The effect of the illusion is profound, distorting as it does the natural hostility between hunter and hunted, transforming it until it resembles a relationship more symbiotic than adversarial. That is the lie, and when the roles are perfectly performed, deceit surpasses itself becoming manipulation on a grand scale and ultimately an act of betrayal,” writes Simon.

What a suspect could expect to be confronted by once inside the Box. From l to r: detectives Meldrick Lewis, John Munch, and Tim Bayliss.Simon wasn’t Baltimore’s only proponent to take part in the series. The patron saint of Charm City’s freaks and deviants, John Waters appeared as a prisoner being escorted by Chris Noth in one of several Law and Order crossover episodes. Barry Levinson was the show’s executive producer. In his "Baltimore films,” Levinson wrote and directed four fables of growing up in the city in the ‘50s. As he did with his semi-autobiographical films, Levinson weaves himself into the series in a self-referential episode where a suspect is chased into an alley where the director just happens to be shooting a show called Homicide.

Levinson with squad videographer J.H. Brodie and Det. Lewis. Homicide was primarily filmed in the historic Fell’s Point neighborhood of Baltimore.Not all of the show’s action took place on the job. We also got to learn more about the detectives through their barroom philosophizing. The storytelling tradition of law enforcement officers has long found sanctuary in the cop bar.

Stories bearing the trademark gallows humor of the profession are passed down from veteran to rookie. There is the one about the polygraph-by-copier (now a staple of cop lore), where a confession is obtained after a suspect has been tricked into believing a Xerox machine pre-loaded with paper bearing the statements Truth and Lie is tracking the veracity of his answers.

There is the one about the black widow Geraldine Parrish (Calpurnia Church), a part-time voodoo priestess who collected life insurance on five husbands before finally getting caught after the ploy to collect on her niece’s life is botched. There is the one about the petty thief with the unfortunate nickname of Snot Boogie.

Baby Gyllenhaal and Robin Williams, Steve Buscemi in the Box, John WatersBy calling Simon a folklorist, I don’t mean to detract from the authenticity of his work. After all, the reporter’s attention to facts that goes into his writing is a major reason he has been so successful. My point is that Simon’s work concerns itself with the ways in which people make meaning in their lives. As the scholar Mary Hufford has said, "folklife is lodged in the various ways we have of discovering and expressing who we are and how we fit into the world.” Homicide looked at the role of Baltimore’s murder detectives in the national ethos.

Benjamin Botkin, considered a father of the study of folklore, was one of the first academics to recognize oral history as a legitimate historical source. In 1954 he wrote a book called The Sidewalks of America: Folklore, Legends, Sagas, Traditions, Customs, Songs, Stories, and Sayings of City Folk. Simon’s A Year on the Killing Streets is in effect a modern regional translation of the work. Like Botkin, Simon understood the importance of an authentic conversation with the subjects of his work and the honest relaying of their stories.

The best known piece of lore to come out of the city was written by lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key while locked aboard the HMS Tonnant during the Battle of Baltimore. The now-sacred text, with its imagery of the broad stripes and bright stars and the rockets’ red glare, is grandiose and inspirational, but its pomposity doesn’t resonate with everyone. For others, the truth and spit is in the tales swapped at 3 a.m. at the desolate end of Clinton Street over cheap beer and whiskey — it is in the blue-blooded story of Bodymore, Murderland.

Helen Schumacher is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and here.

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In Which We Are Really Disappointed In David Simon

Dark Legacy

by ELEANOR MORROW

True Blood

creator Alan Ball

It is known to be impossible to write about The Wire. What is there to say about art that claims to be portraying every aspect of life?

There is little space for audience participation in The Wire. Most of The Sopranos ended up being sly jokes and interpretive fun for the viewers; the kind of drama that inspires discussion in order to resolve its dilemmas. Lost required a lot of googling. The Wire required nothing of you. During The Wire, the cops were always complaining that no one got to see their point of view of what things were really like. This was extremely ironic, since the police are the subject and heroes of The Wire, with the drug dealers following shortly behind. Someone also had to win during Stalingrad.

you guys...barbershop quartet??? After watching The Wire in its entirety, there is really only one appropriate response - to look at the Baltimore skyline, and think about why it really had to go down like that, and if Stringer Bell is looking at us all from heaven. My least favorite parts of The Wire are the recurring images of the city, which makes it all the more strange that David Simon would feel the need to make a series composed entirely of just that without changing any of the cast.

Lester got with that hooker, and everything was great, and now this But it's not just the excruciating/compelling Treme that has followed in the large footsteps of serial television's signature achievement. Although The Wire believes it knows everything about its subject (and it may be right), its fake adherence to a convincing portrait of reality masked its storytelling weaknesses. Show a young, African-American kid who doesn't want to be a drug dealer, but is. Demonstrate the untimely death of this person. Sob, rinse, repeat. The Wire got away with this because, hey, that's Baltimore.

how dare you try benko's opening motherfucker As the opening scene of a light fictional documentary about the drug trade, bottoms up. As the opener to the new season of Desperate Housewives, incredibly lazy storytelling. The Wire had its most devoted audience among television writers, many of whom have adopted its techniques and adapted them for other dramatic subjects. But there's a big diffference between pretending something that never really happened, and pretending something that supposedly did.

This can turn out well, as in the groundbreaking way Breaking Bad uses the techniques of fiction and documentary to maintain its crazy diegesis. And it can also turn to complete chaos, which brings us to the long-awaited third season of True Blood. No less than eighty-seven characters are featured this season, an astonishing feat when you realize six major characters died in the run-up to the end of last season. I had strongly hoped Lizzy Caplan would also be dead in Party Down so I wouldn't have to watch her reluctantly make out with Adam Scott for the twentieth straight episode. (They did the same thing with Michael Imperioli to make him seem less gay.)

should you really be taking away from Ken Marino's screen time? The first two seasons of True Blood were slightly altered versions of Charlaine Harris' mediocre Louisiana mysteries. Now that Harris is so rich that she bought Nicolas Cage's home in New Orleans just in case Alan Ball wanted it for a set, she doesn't give two shits about Alan's ideas for changing her books. This is actually well and good, because it took Harris about five minutes (most of it spent looking at True Blood gifs) to come up with the stunningly dreadful plots of these beauties. While the books primarily focus on Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) as the primary locus for all that occurs, she's just a blonde observer on the television show.

Harris' mind-reader Sookie Stackhouse never actually reads minds anymore, but that's OK. She gets a second chance to do vampires the right way this time, now that Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer got married between seasons. Have you ever seen the part in Hannah & Her Sisters where that old guy lectures Barbara Hershey about the Holocaust documentary he watched? Their marriage is like that, but with more tolerance for elective plastic surgery. Bill Compton's facelift made his mug tighter than Eric Northman's stomach.

remember bonanza? keep remembering it for another minute  Besides the protagonist, here is the tentative list of major characters on the show, along with whether they have a convincing accent: Hoyt (no), Jessica (no), Sam (no), Tara (no), Lorena (no), Tara's mom (no), Andy (no), Jason (no), the Queen of Louisiana (no), the Magister (no), Pam (no), Eric (no), the British vampire (no), Bill (no), Arlene (no), Alfre Woodard (no), Bud (no), Terry (no), and Lafayette (yes). And I have not even included any of the werewolves.

you will always be an integral member of 'Newsradio' Khandi  There haven't been this many terrible accents on one television show since...The Wire. Like True Blood, The Wire was more likely to ruin an actor's chances of success in another role than help his chances. The reason for this is simple: casting relative unknowns into major roles has its benefits for the audience, but the realistic and more importantly lengthy presentation means that Bunk Moreland is forever Baltimore's best homicide detective. He's not some musician who used to be married to Khandi Alexander. Likewise, I don't believe that John Goodman knows anything about New Orleans. In fact, I know he doesn't.

then I did Blues Brothers 2000, which was perhaps something of a misstep In this third season, Ball's version of the old story involves (shock!) conflict between vampires and werewolves. This is a really sad way for Stephenie Meyer to discover that she didn't create this dichotomy. The true story is that she just watched Underworld really late at night and assumed it was a very creative dream she was having. This is not to say we can't still enjoy what True Blood has become, more gif than mere show.

Alexander Skarsgard hasn't shown this much of his body since Coachella, and he's about to embark on a tryst with Sookie that will leave them both changed forever. As we know from the sensual and caring sex dream Sam Merlotte had about Bill Compton, after you've digested a vampire's blood, he haunts your dreams, and usually after a solid haunt, he asks for money.

What role is Skarsgard possibly going to be able to play after this show other than the villain in Gus Van Zant's shot-for-shot Die Hard remake? He's going to be Eric Northman forever.

This is why, when The Wire started getting a teensy bit bogged down by its enormous cast of characters, it could have really used a spinoff. Would anyone be disappointed that Omar had moved to West Hollywood and was still robbing drug dealers, only with a more fabulous attitude? After so much promotion that there was actually promotion of the promotion, new viewers of True Blood might be shy to handle 40 protagonists with about two antagonists.

meredith, may I just say - you look GREAT Granted, it's no fun to have shows that relentlessly re-explain their premises. (All discerning people are still wondering if Ellen Pompeo realized they recast her part while she was still on Grey's Anatomy.) It is, however, worse to have a show that is incapable of explaining its original premise. I would need an L Word-style flow chart to keep track of who on the show has drunken vampire blood and can sense their feelings. This week's episode introduced about seven antagonists, none of whom were successful at harming or even unnerving the protagonists.

But whatever, as long as you're going to be campy, and spend half your time making inside jokes to ONTD, you should have Bill Compton ride off on the white stallion of the Queens of Mississippi. And I can't say I don't enjoy it when Bill growls and lights his maker on fire, or that I won't enjoy it when Jason Stackhouse gets bitten by Calvin Norris and turns into a werekitten. If we flashback to Eric Northman saving Anne Frank and killing John Lennon I'm going to have to respectfully switch the hour per week I spend on this show to gardening. True Blood has so much going on, that if you get bored, you can just wait for the next thing.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She last wrote in these pages about Elmore Leonard and Justified.

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Loving You Always Omar

ATTORNEY: Mr. Little, how does a man rob drug dealers for eight or nine years and live to tell about it?

OMAR: Day at a time I suppose?