"Plan bee" (Samantha Bee)/ "Not a ‘sucker or loser': Vietnam vet’s obituary takes aim at reported Trump comments"

 Jan. 7, 2017 "Plan bee": Today I found this article by Ellen Vanstone in the Globe and Mail.

This article is about Samantha Bee and late night political shows.  I don't watch those, but this was a really good article and interview about Bee, Trumpism, and feminism: 

It was a funny segment about rape kits that really made me sit up and take notice of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.

The show had already garnered a lot of press when Samantha Bee debuted last year as the “only woman in late-night,” bouncing around the stage in a colourful blazer instead of sitting behind a desk and lacing her rapid-fire commentaries with breathtaking profanity. 

When Donald Trump boasted about groping women and newscasters groped for P-word euphemisms, Bee cheerfully rattled off 25 synonyms for female genitalia that rivalled Carol Shields’s poetical penis paragraph in Larry’s Party.

But the rape-kit segment was a particular highlight.

It opens with news clips about untested kits across the United States, including more than 20,000 in Texas (“Omigod, we get it, Texas, everything’s bigger there”), 

then shows untested kits being tossed to save space (“You guys are taking the Marie Kondo method a little too far”), 

followed by news of a bill requiring rape-kit testing that passed unanimously in Georgia – only to be blocked by Republican Senator Renee Unterman. 

Bee consults a Feminist Rule Book (“No rape jokes. And don’t be mean to other women”). 

She tosses the book ("Thank you for your service”) and addresses Unterman directly: 

“Woman, have you lost your [effing] mind? If the Confederate clown car that is the Georgia House can come together on this bill, who are you to block it?”

By the end of the segment, both Bee and her audience are slightly breathless, but many rewatch online for the novelty of what Full Frontal offers: authoritative reporting on important issues, delivered with unapologetic emotion, overlaid with the kind of sharp comedy that obviates disempowering female victimhood. 

Bonus gift: The rape-kit segment had an impact, inciting so much media backlash that political insiders credited Full Frontal for helping the requirement finally pass, folded into a different bill that squeaked into law one minute before a midnight deadline.

As Full Frontal went from strength to strength – ratings to rival The Daily Show, where Bee, 47, had been a correspondent for 12 years; U.S. cable channel TBS ordering a second season (it returns Jan. 11 on the Comedy Network in Canada); multiple awards and an Emmy nomination – and as Bee, along with the rest of us, excitedly anticipated a Hillary Clinton presidency, a lot seemed right in the world of comedy and politics.

Then Trump happened. And things weren’t so funny any more. Whatever the reason for the election upset – e-mails, xenophobia, Jimmy Fallon and the Donald practically braiding each other’s hair on NBC – he won, the reality paradigm shifted, and suddenly comedy felt different, too.

For liberals raised on the feel-good (or at least superior) political satire of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Bill Maher et al., the clever jokes of late-night suddenly felt beside the point, verging on tasteless in an uncertain world. Yes, Full Frontal’s approach was qualitatively different.

But would it hold up in a Trump presidency?

Could Samantha Bee’s smart, dirty, non-patriarchal mouth save us from a man who will soon be the most powerful, lying, race-baiting misogynist in the world?

Reinventing late-night on her own terms

Samantha Bee is sitting in her corner office on West 57th in Manhattan, across the street from the CBS studios where her show is taped. The room is tastefully appointed, except maybe for the large framed photo of Burt Reynolds. Bee exhibits that combination of friendly openness and polite reserve which, since she’s from Toronto, I’ll describe as typically Canadian (she also has U.S. citizenship). 

She has a calmness that’s at odds with her onstage persona. In performance mode, she never stops moving – swaying, bobbing, with an intense, unconscious facial expression, even when she’s off-camera, that reminds me of a pro athlete in the zone.

She laughs when I tell her this. “I’m the most unathletic person in the world.”

But she takes the “what now with Trump?” question very seriously.

“I’ve been thinking about that since he won. On the night of the election, we were all here until the middle of the night, watching the results come in and slowly retreating into our blankets. All I could think was: What is this going to mean for the show?” She laughs. ” 

’F--- the world!’ No, I mean, I care about the world, too. But that’s a separate conversation.”

The question, she says, is “how to give the office some level of respect, because it is the highest office in the land. Do we have to? Or do we go in harder?

“The main thing we have,” she says, “is that we are very honest.” From the second TBS offered her a late-night slot, she says, she knew she wanted to do a show that came from a visceral, instinctual place: “I call it my ‘inner swamp,’ which is what we called it in theatre school, which sounds really disgusting, but I really like it.”

Bee wasn’t asked to replace Jon Stewart when he left The Daily Show, and whatever she may have felt at the time, she’s grateful to have created her own show. In the world of late-night, following in Stewart’s footsteps would have locked her into a traditional format: the desk, the guest interviews, the inevitable comparisons with hosts who preceded her. 

With Full Frontal, Bee has been able to reinvent the genre on her own terms. The closest any other host comes to her passionate, rabble-rousing style is John Oliver, but Bee takes the profanity beyond his mere A-holes and F-bombs.

In a patriarchy that has conditioned all of us to struggle with sexist preconceptions, it may appear as a contradiction – how can this respectably married (to former Daily Show correspondent, Full Frontal executive producer and fellow Canuck Jason Jones), cake-baking, erstwhile mommy-blogger with three children under 12 go off to work and shamelessly turn the air blue on national TV? 

It tends not to be the kind of question that John Oliver, also married (to a war vet), also a parent, also fond of spluttering expletives, gets asked. It helps if you realize that, by using language traditionally meant to demean and intimidate women, Bee is co-opting and neutralizing its destructive power.

When I ask Bee how she’d define the difference between other late-night shows and Full Frontal, she offers an example: “On The Daily Show, I did a piece about rape victims who have to fight for custody if a child was born. Even if their rapist was in prison, he could make a case for custody and visitation. 

I thought it was 100-per-cent worth telling, but there were a lot of goofy jokes in it to lighten the mood, and in the end, I think we pulled it back from the edge in a way I wouldn’t choose to do on my own show. I don’t fault Jon – it was his sensibility and his show, and he cared deeply about the story. But it was a really great lesson in what you can do when you’re not telling the story through someone else’s editorial point of view.”

With her own show, she gets to dictate tone and content. “I will say, I think it’s really refreshing to talk about abortion. It’s actually more challenging for people than anyone would think.”

As for whether Full Frontal with Samantha Bee can save the world from Trumpism, it’s the kind of question she’s possibly tired of answering. The night before, when an audience member asked, “Do you feel your show has a responsibility to the world, and not just to make funny jokes?” Bee got a laugh with her one-word answer – “no.” 

Asked to elaborate, she says, “I’ll never, never, never go there. There’s a really fine line between the comedy we do and activism. If you step over that line for ‘good,’ your comedy show is dead.”

And yet, you can see where viewers might get confused. For one thing, she exhorts. At the end of the rape-kit piece, she wishes someone would run against “ding-dongs” like Unterman. She buys a “s--- ton” of Girl Scout cookies after the Archbishop of St. Louis, Mo., asks parishes to cut ties with the Girl Scouts, citing conflicts over contraception and abortion. 

Her website provides donor info for refugee causes and Syria’s White Helmets, and she raises money for Planned Parenthood by selling T-shirts featuring an obscene epithet taken from one of the misogynistic tweets that she, like all opinionated women, must endure in this business. 

After the mass shooting in Orlando in June, Bee and her staff revamped the entire show overnight to address gun violence. Bee, her voice shaking with anger, began with: “Hey, is it okay if instead of making jokes, I just scream for seven minutes?”

The sense of mission is felt behind the scenes as well. Full Frontal’s diverse staff is setting a new standard for late-night, and even crew members see Bee as a crusader. Head utility technician Kevin Whitfield tells me he’s been at CBS for 43 years, his uncle was the first black cameraman at CBS, and his feminist wife is appalled at his postelection optimism. But he’s confident Full Frontal will make a difference: “This show is one of the vehicles that’s going to help people get together.”

In the Full Frontal offices, serious political discussions are constant. Supervising producer Pat King is mulling over an idea about how the word “conservative” has lost all meaning. “You go back to the birth of conservatism with Edmund Burke and he supported the American Revolution because, yeah, these people aren’t being represented well but they basically want to keep the structure of government they have in place.

 But he didn’t support the French Revolution because those people just wanted to burn everything to the ground. You look at conservativism now, and it’s burn everything to the ground – privatize Medicare, get rid of Obamacare. These things are radical. They’re not conservative in any way.”

In the next office, showrunner Jo Miller, who worked with Bee at The Daily Show (and was the first person Bee called when she got her own late-night slot), rails about the left: “We are just completely fed up with the term ‘identity politics’ being thrown around and the panicked Democratic response to loss being to throw black people under the bus and everybody move to Wisconsin and hold hands with a farmer.”

But there’s no mistaking this is a workplace also committed to having fun. On Miller’s wall is a poster of Woodrow Wilson labelled with the same epithet Bee gets called on Twitter, overlooking 50 bottles of bourbon Miller received from fellow producer Tony Hernandez for her 50th birthday.

As we’re talking, executive producer Miles Kahn sticks his head in the door to discuss a cartoon for that night’s show: the Statue of Liberty setting New York Harbor on fire in 1939 to block an incoming boat of Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich. But the fact-checkers are saying their boat didn’t actually enter the harbour. Miller says she doesn’t think there was actual fire in the torch either. It’s a metaphor. Kahn dryly answers, “Look, I wasn’t there. That was a pre-post-truth society, so we don’t know what happened.”

Over two days of formal interviews and many casual conversations with Bee’s staff, no one would agree with me that Full Frontal leans more toward journalism and advocacy than humour.

“My job is to make a comedy show,” writer and correspondent Ashley Nicole Black says. “If I focus too much on the changing-the-world aspect, the comedy suffers.”

 If anything, the show has changed her, she says. As a black person trying to get white Republicans to say “black lives matter” in one segment, she says, “I had so many people put their arms around me and very kindly say some of the most racist things I’ve ever heard in my life. 

My conclusion is they’re good people, but they’ve been fed a steady, non-stop Fox News diet of hateful information, and they’re trying to square off in their head, ‘How can I love this person who’s in front of my face, because I’m a loving person, when I have all this information about how terrible black people are?’ ” Getting out to meet those people, “and connect with them and talk to them,” she says, “has just really expanded my idea of what America is.”

Kahn, whose 92-year-old grandmother appears in a samanthabee.com video wearing a T-shirt with – yep – the ever-popular obscene epithet (“My grandson Miles tricked me into wearing this T-shirt on his fakakta show!”), says they’re always “striving to come up with new ways to tell complex stories, and then somehow make them funny. We really want to hear people out – have good arguments and then make a dumb joke too.”

Miller will go so far as to say, “I think being funny is a necessary part of changing the world.” She cites the Kabarettists of 1930s Germany. “I was reading the first-person account of a man who went to see Werner Finck” – an anti-Nazi comedian – “with his girlfriend, and they emerged with the feeling of courage for the first time. 

Now, we are not living under Chancellor Hitler, and free expression has not been outlawed, and I’m not making an equivalence. But the role of laughing, of showing people how to laugh, not just in the darkness, but at the darkness, I think is helpful to people.”

Ultimately though, “comedy and satire has very little effect on the world,” she says. “If that was our aim, we’d probably all kill ourselves.”

’It’s all of us against Trumpism’

Bee’s final show of 2016 was classic Full Frontal: a focus on local politics, exhortations to action and small encounters between unlikely characters.

The local politics are in North Carolina. After chastising whiny liberals who wanted to subvert the U.S. Electoral College, Bee shows how state Republicans gerrymandered districts to gain power, then abused that power to kneecap an incoming Democratic governor.

Bee delivers a Rick Mercer-style rant: “While Democrats are busy signing petitions and frantically googling the word ‘emoluments,’ savvy Republicans get elected to the state house, shut the door and go hog-wild, until one day you wake up and wonder, ‘Hey where’d the Planned Parenthood go?’ and ‘Why is my tap water so thick?’ So if you’re looking for a place to put your energies, stop trying to overturn a national election and start working on a local election. They matter.”

The unlikely combination of characters are Veterans for American Ideals and Syrian refugees. Full Frontal correspondent (and Bee’s long-time friend and fellow Torontonian) Allana Harkin cites charges that refugees are draining resources from homeless vets. Then, animated love hearts float around her head as former marine Phil Klay explains media are falsely pitting the two groups against each other: “It’s absolutely important to take care of veterans. It’s also pretty important to take care of refugees.”

The capper is a segment with Bee interviewing Glenn Beck at his radio studio in Dallas. After years of hateful right-wing rhetoric, the talk-radio host has apologized for dividing America and helping Trump get elected; he’s also contributed clothes, toys and $2-million (U.S.) in food to undocumented immigrants on the U.S. southern border. 

But Beck’s still an arch-conservative, so it’s funny but tense as he and Bee warily eye each other and trade a few insults. Then he asks why she invited him on her show. “I think our future is going to require a broad coalition of non-partisan decency. It’s not just individual people against Donald Trump. It’s all of us against Trumpism,” Bee says.

“I agree,” Beck says.

Later, I ask Bee how having Beck on her show is different from Jimmy Fallon messing up Trump’s hair on his show during the election campaign – which Full Frontal attacked as the endorsement of a “race-baiting demagogue.”

“I absolutely think there’s a difference,” she says. “Glenn Beck has something to say. He’s apologetic for the damage he did. He’s putting goodness back in the world.”

The idea first came up, she says, when they thought Clinton would win. “I’m not even kidding. And because we’re such amazing people, we wanted to make this magnanimous gesture to the ‘losing’ side, reach across the aisle and find a way to heal the country.”

After the election, they decided to pursue Beck anyway. “I think it was us kind of desperately reaching out to someone we thought we might have a similarity with. He owns the role that he played in dividing the country, in a way that is so refreshing and that I really respected. He’s done more for humanity at this point than I have ever done, so I take a lesson from that.”

Samantha Bee is not going to save the world. It’s the kind of silly proposition one uses to frame an article such as this, while trying to figure out what exactly she is doing.

Which now seems obvious: She’s making a comedy show with a strong point of view that suggests we save ourselves. Get involved in local politics. Start building bridges with unlikely one-on-one connections. Stop seeing aggressive, opinionated women as a contradiction in terms.

As I leave the building, Bee walks out with me, and we chat about non-late-night stuff. She and Jones have another show on TBS, a half-hour sitcom called The Detour (season two returns on the Comedy Network in February), which Jones also stars in, and is the kind of show Bee would be happy to go to if the late-night thing blows up.

As she walks down West 57th, unrecognizable inside a giant down parka, she talks about keeping things in perspective. “I don’t take all of it too seriously, maybe because I’m Canadian,” she says. “I have a life outside of this. I have my kids. I was a waiter before. I can go back to it.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/full-frontals-samantha-bee-may-be-americas-best-weapon-againsttrump/article33526438/

Sept. 18, 2020 "Not a ‘sucker or loser': Vietnam vet’s obituary takes aim at reported Trump comments":

The obituary for a Vietnam War veteran targeted alleged comments made by President Donald Trump about military members.

Mark Schroeder, a 70-year-old New York man who died Sept. 10, served in the United States Army from 1969 to 1971, his obituary states.

The obituary mentioned several titles Schroeder had, including “father,” “hero” and “teacher.” It then took aim at the president.

“One thing he was not, Mr. Trump, was a sucker or a loser! He was a proud veteran till the day he died,” the obituary on the Prudden & Kandt Funeral Home website states.

As originally reported by The Atlantic, Trump said after canceling a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France in 2018, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” He also reportedly referred to the 1,800 Marines who died in Bellau Wood as “suckers”, the publication reported.

The quotes disparaging war veterans were confirmed by a Fox News reporter.

Trump has repeatedly denied he made the remarks. In a town hall event Tuesday, he said “it was a fake statement. I never made those statements,” CNN reported.

The alleged comments have been used against him in an ad by the Lincoln Project, a conservative anti-Trump group.

Calling him a “sucker who got played,” the ad goes on to say, “On November 3rd, he’ll be the biggest loser, sucker in American history.”

People who did not know Schroeder commented on the obituary thanking him for his service.

“I did not know Mark. I do know many veterans who have served our country,” Saeed Payvar began. “I find them to be amazing people, not losers, not suckers, just amazing people. I am thankful to Mark for his service.”

“Rest In Peace, Mark. I did not know you, but I assure you and your family and friends that you were not a sucker or a loser for serving our country. Thank you,” another person commented.

https://ca.yahoo.com/news/not-sucker-loser-vietnam-vet-125819373.html

This week's theme is about the American President Donald Trump: 

"The power of persuasive political storytelling"/ "Five key revelations from Donald Trump's tax returns"

http://badcb.blogspot.com/2019/12/political-articles-storytelling.html

"TV and the Trump challenge"

http://badcb.blogspot.com/2020/08/trump-2-done.html

My week: 

Sept. 26, 2020: Last week I wrote this:

Sept. 20, 2020 Call Centre #1 sexual harassment: One time I called a guy to do a survey.  After I said my preamble, he asked me what kind of underwear I was wearing.  

Tracy: One moment.
My supervisor Laurier was walking by.
Tracy: Hey Laurier, this guy is sexually harassing me on the phone.
Laurier: Say "thank you for your time" and hang up.

I hung up.

I thought this was going to happen: Laurier was going to get on the phone and yell at him:

Laurier: I'm her supervisor.  You're sexually harassing her.  You should be ashamed of yourself!

http://badcb.blogspot.com/2020/09/job-articles-lisa-talbot-harassment.html

Now I want add: I'm sure some of you guys are saying: "Well why didn't you yell at the man on the phone?"

I was shocked, and the only rude thing I could do was hang up and not politely say "Thank you for your time."  

Raised by Wolves: I saw this promo for this show on CTV Sci-fi.  I went to my Telus on Demand to watch the pilot.  This will be available on ToD until Nov. 11, 2020.  This was directed by Ridley Scott.

"Androids are tasked with raising human children on a mysterious planet."

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9170108/?ref_=hm_rvi_tt

My opinion: The show is well- written with really good production value of the special effects.  However, this is set in space and I'm not really interested in that.  Also this is set in a dark future, and I don't like depressing futures.  I'm not sure if I will continue watching this.

Sept. 27, 2020 TV show reviews: This week I'm writing my TV show reviews.   I am excited for some of the Fall 2020 TV shows.  I have to mitigate my excitement by writing about my old pilots I watched.

Rereading TV articles: I have also been rereading some old TV articles saved onto my drafts.

Sept. 29, 2020 "Teacher says his tattoos and surgically blackened eyes cost him his kindergarten job":

PALAISEAU, France — A schoolteacher whose body, face and tongue are covered in tattoos and who has had the whites of his eyes surgically turned black said he was prevented from teaching at a French kindergarten after a parent complained he scared their child.

But the teacher, Sylvain Helaine, 35, still teaches children from the age of six up, and said that, after an initial shock when they see him for the first time, his pupils see past his appearance.

https://nationalpost.com/news/teacher-says-his-tattoos-and-surgically-blackened-eyes-cost-him-his-job

My opinion: When I saw that his face (and body) was covered with tattoos and the blackened eyes, I was scared. 

There are a lot of negative comments:

1 HR AGO

I can't believe this guy equates people's reaction to his tattoos to racism or homophobia. Race and sexual orientation are something that you are born with; tattoos are a choice.

Sept. 29, 2020 "Investigations launched after Indigenous woman records Quebec hospital staff uttering slurs before her death":

As she lay dying in a Joliette, Que., hospital bed, an Atikamekw woman clicked her phone on and broadcast a Facebook Live video appearing to show her being insulted and sworn at by hospital staff.

Joyce Echaquan's death on Monday prompted an immediate outcry from her home community and has spurred unusually quick and decisive action on the part of the provincial government. The mother of seven's passing will be the subject of both a coroner's inquiry and an administrative probe, the Quebec government said today.

And a nurse who was involved in her treatment has been dismissed.

Echaquan's relatives told Radio-Canada she was admitted to the hospital on Saturday with stomach pain, had a history of heart problems and felt she was being given too much morphine.

In the video viewed by CBC News, the 37-year-old is heard screaming in distress and repeatedly calling for help.

Eventually, her video picks up the voices of staff members. One hospital staff member tells her, "You're stupid as hell."

Another is heard saying Echaquan made bad life choices and asked her what her children would say if they saw her in that state.

Mary Hannaburg, vice-president of Quebec Native Women, said the video is a "very hard thing to hear and to listen to."

"The statements that are made are not going to be tolerated. Those are of a racist nature," she said. "We will not tolerate racism in any given form toward Indigenous women."

At a news conference about COVID-19 on Tuesday afternoon, Quebec Premier François Legault said the situation was "not acceptable" and that one of the nurses involved had been laid off.

https://ca.yahoo.com/news/investigations-launched-indigenous-woman-records-201905460.html

My opinion: 

1. At least Joyce Echaquan filmed this on Facebook Live so everybody can see this.  

2. A nurse was dismissed.

3. That this is in the news and we're all discussing about racism.

Oct. 1, 2020 "Overwhelmed Ont. school staff member shares heartfelt post":

Leslie Lascelle, an elementary school office administrator, shared an emotional Facebook post last week which has gained traction with people online.

She shared a tearful picture with a caption detailing her stressful experience working during COVID-19 where she has cried multiple times, been yelled at, and disrespected on the job.

The post comes after a rough start to the school year in Ontario as teachers, staff and parents say they have a lack of guidance, shortage of staff, and COVID-19 policies to navigate from the government.

“I cried at work yesterday. I also cried 3 different times last night after getting home from work,” Lascelle stated in her post. “I am an Office Administrator at an elementary school, and this is how my day has gone.”

Lascelle shed light on how staff are overworked and operating under difficult conditions on the job.

“I’m crying because the work and expectations that have been put upon us with the added ridiculous time frames are overwhelming,” Lascelle said.

She explained that she is crying from hearing the concerns of families, sending sick children home, being talked down to, all while trying to keep the school functioning.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/overwhelmed-school-office-administrator-shares-job-stress-224234072.html

My opinion: I feel sorry for her and the school's staff.  I hope we all read her story, and learn to treat people with respect.  A lot of people don't know how their actions affect others and this would help them see that.

Renewal reversals: I already wrote about Stumptown getting renewed and then getting cancelled.  I then read more of the article and noticed this:

The series is the latest of several recent renewal-reversals, including Comedy Central’s Drunk History and Tosh.0, TruTV’s I’m Sorry and Netflix’s The Society.

https://tvline.com/2020/09/16/stumptown-cancelled-season-2-abc-cobie-smulders/

The Craft: Legacy: I mentioned this way before in May 2020.  Donald McClean Jr. from Nurses is in this.  

Friend's Facebook conversation: I just saw the trailer and then I go to my friend Heather's Facebook page.  She already shared the trailer on her page.  I then commented:

Tracy: Hi, I just saw the trailer, and I came over to your page to tell and show you about it. It looks like you already beat me to it. I remember on your 13th birthday party I saw this movie. Do you remember?

Heather: I hardly remember anything from back then now; you have a good memory! Lol

Tracy: I also remember I gave you a Charlie Brown calendar as a birthday gift.

Heather put a heart on that last comment.

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi647414041?ref_=tt_pv_vi_aiv_1

Tell Me a Story: I just finished watching the last 2 eps of season 1 on the CW.  They will air season 2 on Tues. Oct. 13.  When the show came out, I was mainly only interested in Jordan's storyline and the 3 pigs who robbed the jewelry store and killed his fiancé.

However, the last 2 eps were really well- written with lots of drama, conflict, and tension as the storylines got resolved.  There was a shootout and fight scenes. 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7695916/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

"TV and the Trump challenge"

Jan. 14, 2017 "TV and the Trump challenge": Today I found this article by John Doyle in the Globe and Mail.  This is a really good article about Trump being being the president and how this affects TV.  I don't like political dramas, but I do like this article:

Early on the morning after Meryl Streep unleashed her scolding of Donald Trump at the Golden Globes, and then Trump, aided by his supporters, hit back at “liberal” Hollywood, the fight continued. 

CBS came here to the TV Critics Association press tour and introduced The Good Fight, a drama that will, it seems, pivot on themes arising from Trump’s election as president. That is, Trump’s election symbolizes changes that impact a major character in a very bad way.

The Good Fight is a spinoff series taking characters from The Good Wife forward, and it is mainly about lawyer Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) and her descent into a hellish existence. She retires and then learns that she’s lost all her retirement savings in a Ponzi scheme. And that’s just the start.

The husband-and-wife team of Robert and Michelle King, co-creators of The Good Wife, also created The Good Fight.

And Robert King made it crystal clear at the press tour that the new show is firmly rooted in new, Trump-era America. “The election gives us a spine,” King said. “ The Good Wife was always a little bit about the Obama years. I think this election gives shape to a new show which is, well, a matter of ‘this is all gonna change.’ Some people say for the better, some say for the worse.”

You could posit that U.S. television offers U.S. society a mirror to itself. Network TV programs, aired within weeks or days of being written, reflect the mood and contemporary tensions with an intuitive accuracy. In a country where every president is a magnetic centre of attention, the president becomes an instant archetype.

The thing us, when you posit that TV is a mirror to society, you’re thinking old-school. In this age of what’s called “Peak TV,” there is a staggering amount of great TV being made and aired across multiple platforms.

The rote explanation for the explosion in quality content is the expanding number of cable channels and the arrival of multiple streaming services. Like the United States itself, politically and culturally, the TV landscape has fragmented. The mass audience, such as it exists, is much smaller.

Free of the restrictions placed on network TV, cable and streaming services deliver sophisticated, adult content. Much of it is challenging and some of it challenges the status quo and tradition.

 And audiences are drawn to it. While conventional network TV remains a vital force in the arena, and sometimes achieves a remarkable degree of urbanity and finesse, it has diminishing significance.

What the entire TV industry, but especially conventional TV, faces now is stark choices. Does it continue to create content that might arouse the anger and derision of Trump supporters and the right-wing media that helped get Trump elected? 

Or does it somehow seem to support Trump by celebrating figures like him and reflecting the views of pro-Trump viewers?

Or does it veer toward escapism that cannot be interpreted as having any political context or meaning?

Trump and his supporters have accused the news media and Hollywood of drooling over Barack Obama. And it’s certainly true that the content of much television presented here is a snapshot of the Obama years, especially in matters of race.

Go back to the Bill Clinton years and remember that he was perceived as smart but immature, selfish yet sensitive and, most of all, unwilling to fit into the straitjacket of age and responsibility.

 It’s no coincidence that on Seinfeld, Jerry and his callow friends George and Kramer became iconic figures just as Clinton became president. The typical male figure on U.S. television during the Clinton presidency was a boy in a grown-up’s body.

But that was in a different TV era. So now what? The various networks and cable channels presented their wares to critics just days before Trump’s inauguration. As the producers, execs and actors put on their sales pitches, simultaneously the country was changing the guard – there were cabinet-confirmation hearings in Washington, Obama gave his farewell address, there were salacious, unproven allegations against Trump and, of course, his train-wreck press conference.

The talk at the critics’ press tour, an event about entertainment content, was Trump and then more Trump. At times it reached a point of absurdity. CBS introduced a new sitcom, Superior Donuts, set in a doughnut shop (based on the play by Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Letts), and the shadow of Trump loomed briefly over the presentation. 

See, Superior Donuts is a comedy that’s vaguely topical, with current-affairs issues turning up in the plot and dialogue.

Judd Hirsch plays a rueful former sixties radical who now owns a doughnut shop in a Chicago neighbourhood; Katey Sagal plays a regular customer who is a cop. Jermaine Fowler is a new black employee. Jokes about cop shootings and racial profiling abound. One critic asked if Trump supporters might be put off by the anti-establishment jokes.

Hirsch bristled: “What comedy would not take advantage of the fact that this is a funny thing that happened to us in this country? Any administration is funny. Everything that’s present tense is up for grabs in this country, and that’s what makes great comedy. I mean, if you don’t do it, it looks like you’re hiding. That would be crazy.”

Then producer Bob Daily explained: “The pilot was written a year ago, and I think a lot of these issues, sadly, are evergreen, like gun control and racial profiling. So I don’t think that the change in the administration will change what we’re doing. I think it will just continue on that same path.”

This, note you, was part of a discussion about a pretty innocuous CBS sitcom. CBS is not in the business of being political, of disturbing anyone’s views. It’s the No. 1 network because it offers a lot of harmless escapism.

But in the tense, pre-Trump period everything seems weirdly and intensely political. And here’s the key thing – like Superior Donuts, most of what mainstream television will offer this year comes directly out of the Obama era. It will reflect Obama-esque issues and topics. 

Some might see that as a kind of resistance movement. Especially Trump himself, since he pays close attention to the entertainment world and seems to get a lot of information from TV.

All of this will make American TV at the start of the Trump era especially charged, laden with meaning. Do viewers make their TV choices based on real political events in the world, by political affiliation, or do they even care about political context and subtext? That’s the taxing question that television is dealing with. 

Like the United States itself, the creators and producers are divided. Some see their shows as a kind of resistance to Trumpism. Others see opportunity, and many are very wary of being seen as politically motivated at all. Right now, it’s the entire industry that’s a mirror to the United States, not just one or two shows.

Robert and Michelle King, The Good Fight people, are proudly liberal, and in fact the pilot episode of The Good Fight was being filmed during the week of the U.S. election, which, they say, shifted its direction. The character Diane, a feminist who had a framed picture of herself with Hillary Clinton in her office, is personally devastated by the outcome and her world crashes, and not simply because she’s been left almost broke. She’s obliged to return to work but must toil surrounded by men, and confront financial fraud. It’s a much more cruel world, this Trump era she experiences.

Said Baranski: “I think the interesting thing is you have a lead character who is in a practical free fall in a similar way to what the country is feeling right now. How do you take the next step up when there’s no foundation? Where are we? Where are we morally?”

At the same time, Shonda Rhimes, whose hit series Scandal is set in Washington and has White House figures as central characters, wants no perceived connection between her show and the new Trump administration.

Rhimes, a very successful black woman who has created multiple hit series, is a fascinating figure in the current entertainment climate on the cusp of the Trump era. She was a Hillary Clinton supporter and produced the short film that introduced Clinton on the night she accepted the Democratic nomination, a film that had endorsements from Obama and Bill Clinton. 

The most recent season of Scandal featured a presidential election and the tagline was, “The balance of power is about to shift.” Yet Rhimes told critics here that there was “no correlation” between Scandal and real political events.

As it happens, the return of Scandal was postponed by ABC to accommodate the Jan. 19 airing of an interview with Trump on a 20/20 special. Asked if this bothered her, Rhimes said, “I’m not going to comment on a conversation I had with my boss, because I like my job.” And she described any detected connection between her politics, the show’s fiction and Trump to be “irrelevant.”

If Rhimes wants her material seen as escapist rather than political, her bosses at ABC are proceeding with two very political productions early in 2017. Coming in February is When We Rise, a four-part miniseries about “the real-life personal and political struggles, setbacks and triumphs of a diverse family of LGBT men and women who helped pioneer one of the last legs of the U.S. civil-rights movement.” 

This chronicle of the gay-rights movement will be aired over four consecutive nights and stars Rachel Griffiths, Mary-Louise Parker and Guy Pearce.

The creator, Dustin Lance Black, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Milk, told the critics, “Loud and clear, I want to say this show is under attack by the alt-right online. We have been targeted. We will get absolutely zero ratings on every Internet platform. Listen, there’s a negative idea about this show out there in some small groups. And let’s be real. I don’t think there’s a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump who will love this show.”

Further, ABC will air the third season of American Crime, its serious-issue showcase drama series. Like the first two, this one is substantial in intent, searing at times in examining toxic issues of race, religion and class. It has a very sharp edge, and is focused on real social issues that have a visceral impact on American society. 

This edition, which is superbly nuanced and poignant, is about the exploitation of immigrant Mexican workers and about sex trafficking. Creator John Ridley was wary of linking the drama to Trump’s politics. 

The series argues forcefully that migrant workers are exploited by rich businessmen, but he doesn’t want this American Crime to be seen as political commentary. “There’s an infrastructure in place that unfortunately allows these things to continue. This story would have been told irrespective of who is in the Oval Office. It’s the bigger picture.”

Fox will air the miniseries Shots Fired as an “event” this spring. The drama is about the explosive aftermath of two racially charged shootings in a small Southern town.

According to co-creator Gina Prince-Bythewood, the show’s origins lie in a decision by Fox CEO Dana Walden, who went to veteran TV and movie producer Brian Grazer and said she wanted him to develop a project that would “take on the issues Ferguson brought up,” referring to the racially charged riots in that suburban Missouri city. 

The riots erupted after a St. Louis County grand jury, of nine whites and three blacks, decided in November, 2014, not to indict a police officer in connection with the shooting of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man.

Grazer enlisted Prince-Bythewood, and Grazer says the point of the series is “to do an autopsy of a town like Ferguson.” The show is forceful in asserting that white politicians simply fail to understand the lives of black citizens and turn a blind eye to racism from police and other authorities. 

Prince-Bythewood has said previously that she was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement while working on the show.

At a presentation of the series, actor Richard Dreyfuss, who stars in it, said, “This is probably the most current show you’ll ever see. This is now. This is America.” What was striking, however, was a shift away from the creators emphasizing racially charged political commentary in the series. 

Prince-Bythewood kept telling the TV critics that the series is entertaining as well as serious. “The mystery element is highly important,” she said. “And we knew that we wanted to create a great narrative that would, ideally, keep the audience at the edge of their seats. 

We had a creed for the show, which is to get the audience to the edge of their seats and, while they’re leaning forward, hit them with the truth. It’s a whodunit and a whydunit.”

That wariness about being observed as Obama-ish in content and intent is palpable here. Not everyone is prepared to be as blunt as Robert and Michelle King about their politics and where their show stands as a commentary and disapproval of Trump and what he stands for.

On the cable side of things, though, at least one executive seemed to relish the arrival of the Trump era. Showtime Networks president and CEO David Nevins was asked how a Trump White House would impact any shows he has on the air now or “what you choose to put on the air in the future.”

Mainly, it seems, he sees opportunity. HBO has had huge success with John Oliver’s weekly political satire and commentary show and Nevins thinks Showtime could go in that direction.

The channel had the highly engaging political-reporting series The Circus airing almost every week during the long U.S.-election campaign and Nevins is thinking it could be a permanent fixture. To begin with, there will soon be an extralong episode of The Circus covering the period between election night and the inauguration.

“It has big-time potential besides an election,” Nevins said. And he added, “We have a lot of shows that are very political.” He noted that the thriller Homeland, returning for a sixth season, reflects the political world, and that the money-based drama Billions is about “power politics in New York City,” and is about the nefarious manipulations of an actual billionaire character. 

Nevins seemed happy to report that “a Donald Trump administration will be filtered through in a lot of ways” on Showtime.

Particular emphasis was given to Homeland by Nevins. “Homeland went into production in August and was written in the months before that. It deals with an incoming administration, a transition period between administrations, and it deals a lot with issues of trust and distrust between the permanent state, the intelligence community and a new president. … So it reflects that.”

While Nevins describes Homeland as “prescient,” the new season actually features a new female president, not a Trump-like figure. It does, however, also depict a deep distrust between the intelligence community and the president-elect on the show.

 It’s just that the distrust is less toxic than the real discord between Trump and U.S. intelligence agencies. And in terms of reflecting the Trump-era reality, main character Carrie Mathison, played by Claire Danes, tackles the hostility toward Muslim Americans and grapples with the matter of whether they should be considered potential terrorists.

Nevins and Showtime might well be blithe about how the coming Trump era will change television content, but Showtime is a premium cable channel that does not rely on advertising. 

It would be unaffected by the disdain of Trump supporters and attacks from pro-Trump media.

The reality for conventional American TV is very different. It must adapt. It will adapt. That hasn’t happened yet. It seems the creators and producers in that arena did not expect a Trump victory. 

And if the Trump era is looming ominously for some in the industry, that’s because TV is still in Obama mode. There are a lot of Meryl Streep types in U.S. TV, and a lot of nervous people too.

Still, if you ask me, as a critic who has been on these press tours many times, the nervousness is unnecessary. The cable and streaming services will continue to produce baldly compelling, unalloyed and often unnerving content that might disturb pro-Trump viewers. But it matters little.

 There is a massive, established audience that doesn’t want only escapism. Obama’s legacy might be in doubt, politically and socially, but on the best of television, it is safe.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/john-doyle-trump-era-america-is-challenging-the-tvindustry/article33620845/

"The power of persuasive political storytelling"/ "Five key revelations from Donald Trump's tax returns"

Dec. 20, 2019 "The power of persuasive political storytelling": Today I found this article by Judith Timson in the Star Metro:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, American author Joan Didion famously wrote. We also tell ourselves —and others—stories in order to understand what in today’s truth-challenged political landscape, good political leadership is all about.

Whose story speaks to us? How did they tell it? Did it hold up?

Take U.S. Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s deliberately solemn and even stern face Wednesday evening as she informed the House of Representatives and more importantly the public that indeed the results showed they had voted yes on two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump. It was an historic game on.

On air commentators remarked on Pelosi’s seriousness, and how she underscored the fact that it was a “sad” day for her.

That was the most effective way she had to tell the story so far of the Democrats impeaching a corrupt Republican president.

Pelosi, who when she regained her job as Speaker of the House almost a year ago, had first presented herself as a reluctant impeacher, apparently insisted that from her side anyway (the yes votes were all Democrats) there would be no outward jubilation, no applause in the House. Her mouth twisted a bit as it does, and she demonstrated what some called “the flick” as she pre-emptively with one hand, waved away any possible cheering in the background.

Any comparison of Pelosi to a mom telling her kids or grandkids to shush misses the point.

She is a masterful political strategist and thus far kept her cool—even so much as delaying sending the now ratified articles of impeachment immediately to the Senate as she figures out how to achieve a fair trial or even sell the story of Donald Trump’s impeachment to a somewhat distracted American public.

She will need every bit of cool and strategy to outFox the fabulist-in-chief, Donald Trump, who himself stood at a rally and joked, despite being furious: “It doesn’t feel like we’re being impeached.”

That’s Trump’s story —that it’s all a “hoax”—and he’s sticking to it. Crafty use of the word “we,” in an attempt to convince his base that they are being put on trial along with him.

It may be the only strategy available to an unfit president who in abusing his power, has always only been out for himself.

The impeachment vote and how each side portrayed it reminded me, before everyone pauses briefly for that convivial holiday eggnog, that it is always how persuasively you can tell your story that determines personal and political victory.

Newly dispatched federal Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who resigned under pressure and to avoid a Conservative party fracas, was clearly leaving out a few less than salutory details when he repeatedly told his story—that of an “ordinary” man running against an entitled and “phony” elitist prime minister Justin Trudeau.

It was an odd narrative to pick, as Scheer himself has comfortably lived in grand Ottawa houses on taxpayer money as both speaker, and then as the leader of the official opposition.

After Scheer failed to unseat Trudeau and his Liberal government, his own party exposed the cracks in his tedious “ordinary” guy story. He is now, as the party turns its attention to a leadership race, having to justify quietly using party funds to pay for his children’s private school fees.

That seems like an internal matter, approved or not by party officials, but you cannot frame your story as Mr. Everyman and have party member-subsidized private school fees undercut it.

Scheer had already come across as ineffectual and, as a social conservative not quite supportive enough on issues like LGBTQ rights.

Because he had little prowess in telling or selling his story, Scheer missed his chance to prevail over Trudeau whose own story had been spectacularly upended by past improprieties and the SNC-Lavalin affair, in which he and his government were accused of interfering in the judicial process by pressuring Jody Wilson-Raybould then Minister of Justice and Attorney General to consider a softer deal for the giant Quebec-based engineering firm accused of bribery.

The company avoided trial this week by pleading guilty to one charge of fraud and agreeing to pay a $280 million fine. They can still bid on future contracts. The deal seems similar to the one that the Trudeau government had formerly urged Wilson-Raybould to consider.

Which brings us to the story of the year, according to senior Canadian news editors, who named Wilson-Raybould as “newsmaker of the year.”

Wilson-Raybould, the first Indigenous woman to be Justice Minister was eventually turfed out of the Liberal caucus and ran and won as an Independent in her Vancouver riding.

Her story was not without its own problems—including the fact that as a member of the cabinet she had covertly taped a conversation she had with a Trudeau government official.

More recently, there was the odd matter of Wilson-Raybould refusing to vacate her ministerial suite of offices after the election even though she had zero claim on them. Was that a sign of her own overgrown sense of entitlement?

https://www.thestar.com/life/opinion/2019/12/19/nancy-pelosi-donald-trump-and-the-power-of-persuasive-political-storytelling.html?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SocialMedia&utm_campaign=800pm&utm_campaign_
id=Opinion&utm_content=nancypelositrumpstorytelling&utm_source=facebook&source=the%20toronto%20star&utm_medium=SocialMedia&utm_campaign=&utm_campaign_id=&utm_content=

Sept. 28, 2020 "Five key revelations from Donald Trump's tax returns":

Trump earned money from foreign officials, wrote off haircuts and even got a multi-million-dollar tax refund from the IRS

U.S. President Donald Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017, an investigation by the New York Times published Sunday revealed. Trump has spent his entire tenure as president avoiding inquiries into his financial affairs by journalists, opposition politicians and prosecutors. Here are five key revelations from the Times’ investigation:

1. The president has paid virtually $0 in federal taxes in the past two decades

In 11 of the past 18 years, the president did not pay any income taxes to the federal government. In addition, for 2016 and 2017, he paid $750.

Despite an overall decline in how much the ultra-wealthy pay in federal taxes, America’s affluent still contribute a substantial portion to federal income tax. In 2017, the average federal income tax rate for the top 0.001 per cent of America’s highest earning tax filers was 24.1 per cent.

Each year for the past two decades the Times investigation examined, Trump paid $400 million less in combined federal income tax than those in the highest tax bracket. While in office, Barack Obama and George W. Bush paid more than $100,000 a year.

2. Trump received a $72.9-million refund from the IRS

Trump earned huge success with his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” which saw his tax bill rise. He initially paid $95 million in federal income taxes over the 18 years, but later recouped most of that money starting in 2010. The president applied for and received a $72.9 million tax refund, which also included interest.

In 2011, the IRS began an audit of the refund but nearly a decade later, the case remains unsolved for unknown reasons.

3. The report indicates Trump leveraged his business losses to avoid paying taxes

Trump found large success in selling his image of an ultra-wealthy businessman who made his fortune through shrewd business management. From 2004 to 2018, the Times calculated he made $427.4 million from selling his image — through his show “The Apprentice” and other firms paying for rights to use his name, especially in real estate.

At the same time, since 2000, Trump has reported losing more than $315 million at his golf courses, the heart of his real estate empire. He has also posted large losses from his businesses.

He has used his business losses to offset the fat profits from selling his brand. The Trump Organization — a collection of more than 500 entities, nearly all owned entirely by Trump — then used the losses to claim the organization earned no money and therefore does not owe taxes.

4. Many personal expenses were written off as the cost of business, including $70,000 for hair styling

When filing taxes, companies can write off business expenses, which ultimately reduce their tax bills.

Trump’s residences are part of the family business, including his golf courses. The cost of his private aircraft, used to take him to his homes around the country, has been written off as a business expense. Haircuts were also written down as a business expense, including $70,000 to style his hair during his reality TV show and $100,000 paid to the hair and makeup artist of his daughter, Ivanka Trump.

5. Trump received money from lobbyists, politicians and foreign officials

As a private businessman, Trump has received large amounts of money from lobbyists, politicians and foreign officials.

Since 2015, a surge in new members at the famous Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida brought in an additional $5 million each year. In 2017, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association paid at least $397,000 to Trump’s Washington hotel, where it held at least one event during the World Summit in Defence of Persecuted Christians.

In 2016 and 2017, Trump received $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey for projects in those countries.

https://nationalpost.com/news/world/five-key-revelations-from-donald-trumps-tax-returns?utm_source=distroscale&utm_medium=native_ads&utm_campaign=on_network_boosting&utm_content=trending_broadsheet