We needed some really good TV to balance out the presidential race (more on that below), and did we ever get it. ABC has really stepped out this season as a network with cable-level series. There's nothing better on all TV land right now than American Crime. With the most complex gay storyline that we can recall and extraordinary acting, American Crime is a series that peels back the intersecting layers of classism, racism, homophobia and violence. It's chillingly good. For those of us who grew up in the self-loathing atmosphere of compulsory heterosexuality (that would be all of us to some degree), there have been scenes that have taken our breath away. As the season has progressed, storylines have taken truly shocking turns, and we are not used to being shocked by TV.
Most compelling in American Crime has been the line between sex and violence and how that line is blurred by homophobia, particularly for young men who are acculturated to address everything with violence, particularly their own sexuality. How Taylor Blaine (played by Connor Jessup with a nuance actors twice his age have yet to achieve) comes unraveled, how the prevalence of guns in America alters so many lives: it's just such an honest and believable (because so many of us have lived it) story, it's often hard to watch. Yet watching, you feel a part of the story. Too often, our own story.
The Family debuted on ABC March 3, and the cast is what works best here. Tony winner and Oscar nominee Joan Allen is amazing, but so are Alison Pill, Rupert Graves and Zach Gilford. Margot Bingham is a standout, not just as the only main character who is black, but also as the only main character who doesn't make your skin crawl, the story's moral center.
HBO's The Leftovers was the darkest series of 2015, and will return for a third season sometime toward the end of this year. The Family has the grimness of The Leftovers, plus the stellar acting, but the debut did not show us a path toward the light. It deals with some of the same issues highlighted by American Crime, notably male-on-male violence with a sexual element infused. It has a similar tone to BBC's Broadchurch, which was beautifully re-created for Fox as Gracepoint. Though almost unremittingly dark, these series have revealed something we need to see as a society: that for some men violence and sexuality are so interconnected that heinous crimes are bound to occur. The Family explores these issues, but needs to slow down the pace from the TGIT line-up fast-pace it debuted in to the more languorous pacing Fox allowed Gracepoint.
The topic is, alas, too real: a boy is kidnapped from a fairground and is presumed dead, raped and murdered by a neighbor with a history of sexual deviance. The neighbor goes to prison, the family mourns and is sundered from within. Ten years later the boy, now a young man, returns, battered and broken by a decade of imprisonment and rape, the flesh of one hand evulsed as he pulled it out of handcuffs. To say the crime is ghastly is to understate it, and the cast makes us feel the suffering on a visceral level.
The Family is well worth watching, but it leaves a mark. And fair warning for triggering if you've been a victim of sexual assault. As Adam (Liam James) details the rapes and abuse to Sgt. Meyer (Margot Bingham), his parents can hardly stand to be in the room. They don't want to hear "when the man lied on top of me" from their son. Nor do we. The difficulty for the audience and for us as LGBT viewers will be refusing to conflate such abuse with homosexuality. No one conflates the kind of abuse in The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt with heterosexuality, but we know the rules are different for us.
On a much lighter note is the current ramping (or should we say vamping) up of the lesbian storylines on Grey's Anatomy. Undaunted by her ex Callie being partners with Penny, Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) is playing the field. Which has made her friend and former boss, Dr. Webber (James Pickens, Jr.), who's been her "wing man" at the bars for some months, to voice his concern in the March 3 episode. But it initially sounded like he was coming on to her.
Arizona told him she was flattered, but said, "I'm super gay. The gayest of gays." To which Webber replied he was just worried about her losing her way, sleeping around. Arizona told him not to worry, that she needed this. "You helped me be slutty again. You helped me fly!"
To which we say, yes! Finally a woman doesn't have to get married on the first date and can embrace her sexuality as freeing and joyful. Plus, Arizona is one of the few lesbian characters on the tube who has never wavered in her lesbianism. Which almost never happens.
Less gleeful is the end of our affair with Downton Abbey, which ended its sixth season March 6 not with a bang but a dying fall. No spoilers, but if you somehow missed being on this train, the entire series is on Netflix and is worth watching, not just for the fabulous acting and stellar costuming, but for placing women in a range of contexts in an historical period close to our own yet of which we know surprisingly little. DA is the sort of thing PBS does best and reminds us of why we need public television, even in the era of all-cable, all the time.
Political lunacy
In an election season where a portrait of George Washington was taken down at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery to make room for one of Frank Underwood, the fictional president on the Emmy-winning drama House of Cards, the line between reality and the surreal has got really blurred. We were never a fan of Donald Trump's NBC reality series The Apprentice, and we were never a fan of the GOP, so the confluence of the two this election season has been disturbing. Everything we dislike about reality TV came to an unpleasant head on March 3 at the GOP debate held by Fox News.
For days prior to the debate, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) was implying at rallies that Donald Trump had a small penis by continually asking (gleefully, if you saw the video on national news) "You know what they say about men with small hands?" He repeated his implication at the debate, which promoted Trump to say, "And he keeps referring to my hands. If they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee." This really happened.
At one point the exchange between Trump and Rubio was nothing but the two of them calling each other "con artist" and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) stepping in to chide them both.
Fortunately, we have the sanity of the Democrats, where the most substantive difference between the two candidates is that one has major foreign policy experience and the other doesn't. It doesn't make for explosive TV, but it should make for a seamless transition from President Obama.
The person we never expected to see re-enter the national stage was Mitt Romney, but there he was on our TV a few hours before the debate giving what for him was an impassioned plea for the GOP (or anyone) to stop Trump. After the Super Tuesday results, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who had dropped out of the presidential race last month, was interviewed on CBS News. Graham said Trump would decimate the GOP and "make Hillary Clinton our next president." Like it was a bad thing.
Gay rights was a topic at the March 3 debate, and unsurprisingly it did not go well for us. Cruz called last June's Supreme Court decision legalizing marriage equality an "illegitimate" ruling. Kasich said gay men and lesbians should stop demanding services from business owners who didn't want to provide them. We should just go find another baker for our wedding cakes or whatever. But we should not sue. The fact that Kasich is a former prosecutor and knows that businesses refusing service based on sexual orientation are breaking the law wasn't part of his commentary.
Rubio and Trump finally found agreement that gay men and lesbians shouldn't have the right to marry, and Trump and Cruz agreed that the states should be allowed to decide whether or not gay men and lesbians can adopt children. It was not a good night for us.
Yet we've seen equally awful things in the past couple of weeks on TV that left us speechless, like a heated debate between former Obama staffer Van Jones and former Reagan staffer and Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord after the Super Tuesday results. The topic? The KKK.
Yes, the KKK. Former Grand Wizard David Duke, also a former state representative in Louisiana, endorsed Trump. Yet when Trump, in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, failed to renounce either the endorsement or the KKK, things got ugly. So much for post-racial America. Jones and Lord went at it while CNN watched their ratings soar. Conservative commentator S. E. Cupp criticized Trump for what she called "dog whistle" racial implications of his comments about Mexican immigrants and calling for a ban on Muslims entering the country. Lord shrugged, noting any Republican criticizing Trump was being disingenuous.
"I hate to say this about the Republican establishment," Lord said, "but their view of civil rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club."
Jones said Trump was dismissing the KKK in ways he would not terror groups like ISIS. Lord replied that Democrats were the ones with the race problem, and said the KKK was a "leftist" organization. There's something lurid about this kind of discourse playing out the day after Black History Month ended.
Meanwhile, MSNBC, which dumped its last black pundit, Melissa Harris-Perry, a few days before Super Tuesday, had its own stunning racist moment. Chris Hayes interviewed Jane Sanders about her husband's crushing defeat on Super Tuesday. Mrs. Sanders, who has been largely absent from the limelight, chose this moment to reveal that black voters were pretty inconsequential to the general election.
Hayes said, "Exit polling showing Bernie Sanders losing black voters by 85 to 14, losing in those states with very high percentages of black voters across the South. I mean, it just seems impossible to me for someone to win the Democratic nomination in the age of the Obama coalition who is losing by those margins among black voters."
Mrs. Sanders replied, "Well, the age of the Obama coalition was 2008. This is 2016." She went on to say if black voters knew her husband better, they'd vote for him and that anyway, the states where Hillary Clinton was winning really weren't relevant to the general election. Yikes.
Meanwhile, some faces well-known to the LGBT audience, Caitlyn Jenner and RuPaul, came out for their candidates in different ways, each as their new seasons debuted. Magic Johnson, the first major sports star to announce he was HIV+, told Anderson Cooper in an interview last week, "I feel Hillary Clinton will be a great president for the American people. She will make sure everyone has a voice." Lady Gaga, whose performance at the Oscars was the highpoint of the night, is also a Clinton supporter, while comedian Sarah Silverman is a staunch Sanders supporter, as is late-night talk-show host Stephen Colbert.
While it was unsurprising that major LGBT-friendly TV celebs were supporting Clinton and Sanders, Jenner's announcement that she would like to be a "trans ambassador for Ted Cruz" was a bit shocking. We all knew she was a Republican since she announced it in her interview with Diane Sawyer. And we knew she was against marriage equality and abortion rights since she told Ellen DeGeneres that. But Ted Cruz? USA Today reported Jenner saying, "I like Ted Cruz. I think he's very conservative, and a great constitutionalist, and a very articulate man." She added, "But I also think he's an evangelical Christian, probably one of the worst ones when it comes to trans issues."
She's got that last part right. During the fight over the HERO bill in Houston, Cruz told ABC News, "The federal government is going after school districts, trying to let boys shower with little girls."
Jenner said, "I get it. The Democrats are better when it comes to these types of social issues. I understand that." But, USA Today reported, "If we don't have a country, we don't have trans issues. We need jobs. We need a vibrant economy. I want every trans person to have a job. Socialism did not build this country. Capitalism did."
We love democracy, but we take issue with idiocy. In reality (as opposed to reality TV) the economy isn't what's keeping trans, lesbian, gay or bi people from finding employment. It's discrimination, being led and fomented by people like Cruz. The second season of I Am Cait debuted on E! March 6, and politics is a Big Topic, so expect the fur to fly.
There was a great reality TV moment this week, but it had nothing to do with politics. Kata Hay, a lesbian contestant on The Voice, told judge Christina Aguilera, "You're my official first girl crush" after Aguilera praised her performance. "Shall we just make out now?" asked Aguilera. Pharell Williams' mouth opened and didn't close. Hay went over to Aguilera and the two kissed. Works for us.
So for the reality and the surreality, the highs, the lows and the just-plain-fun entertainment that won't turn America into Weimar Germany writ large, you know you really must stay tuned.