Watchword: An Explanation

I’ve always watched a lot of television. By today’s ample streaming options, the three networks-plus-public television offerings I subsisted on as a kid might seem a bit 1970’s—limited in range and largely lacking in depth: Medical Center, Room 222, Get Smart, Julia, Brady Bunch, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, M*A*S*H, The Love Boat, Good Times, All in The Family, One Day at A Time. The Olympics. And Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares? My (sort of) first gay uncle! And Zoom, that’s the original Zoom-- that 0 2 1 3 4 theme song still bangs around my brain. 

Like most of my friends whose parents saw television as the post rock-and-roll phenom that would corrupt their children’s minds, I didn’t have an entirely unobstructed view: only one hour a day. But unlike anyone else I knew, my parents banned us from watching one show in particular- Let’s Make a Deal —too crass, they thought. Around this same time, nutritionally awakened mother replaced our endlessly trade-able Twinkies and Ho Hos in the lunch box with trail mix, then introduced as “GORP.” As our intellectual guru, our mother also made us spend an hour each day pursuing a “growth and change” activity, meaning something enriching—that is, to the mind, not the body.  

That’s because in my family, our bodies existed largely from the neck up: we were forbidden from jumping on the trampoline, for example, and my parents were happy to write a note to get us out of gym class or to dodge the likely humiliation of after-school sports. But if television then didn’t exactly rot my brain, it did reinforce so many now debunked mythologies about America and Americans, about humans and their humanity. But streaming choices today? They really do go deep and broad in showing us who we are, and aren’t.

Since the pandemic, like almost everyone else I know, including my parents, I’ve clocked a dozen marathons worth of streaming. Here’s a smattering: Star Trek: Picard, Watchmen, The Bureau, Borgen, Veep, Billions, Succession, Pen15, Work in Progress, Killing Eve, The Stranger, I May Destroy You, A French Village, Call My Agent, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Barefoot Contessa, This is Us, Line of Duty, Broadchurch, The Crown, and various documentaries on animals, nature, the royals, American family dynasties and presidencies. I just finished The Beatles: Get Back and The Girl from Oslo. Generally, I don’t go for sci-fi, but I’m very moved by Station Eleven, sad it will soon end. More on that in a sec.

So with Watchword, I’ve decided to transform hours of nightly streaming into a new version of our requisite ‘growth and change’: writing about television.

Which brings me to Station Eleven, a pandemic Russian doll. A sci-fi show about a pandemic during a pandemic; and a survivor allegory where the play’s literally the thing: a life and death drama about actors depicting actors who show us how art, especially ensemble art, can seed an imaginable future even in at the risk of their lives. It’s not without constant and often painful conjuring of the past. Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, is made new against a backdrop where past and present merge and diverge, sometimes in the same frame. 

Spoiler Alert. There’s a lot of death in this show -- it takes place after a near total die-off of the human species, after all. But there’s one death in particular that I can’t get out of my head, and it’s supplanted another death—from 1998—that until now, I’m embarrassed to admit, rated top on my TV death chart. 

In Episode Seven, “Goodbye My Damaged Home,” the eight-year-old Kirsten, writes, stages, directs, costumes, and acts in her rendition of the play, Station Eleven, based on the eponymously named graphic novel she’s committed to memory. Her two co-stars are the brothers Chaudury, Frank and Jeevan, both gifted, and both lost in their professional frustrations and failures. But if they are less than accomplished professionally, as humans they are utterly complete. The brothers are flawed but loving caretakers, who shelter Kirsten from their own simmering, sibling resentments. Holed up in Frank’s Chicago’s lakefront apartment two months into the pandemic, Kirsten, Frank and Jeevan are running out of food and must leave home, or die of starvation. But Kirsten is a painstaking artist and insists she needs one more day- to finish the costumes, to complete the blocking and make sure the brothers have their lines down. As she stages their scene, though, she allows their characters to play out all their love, and resentment. Under Kirsten’s direction, we see them transported from tenderness to fear and back, as Jeevan’s character fails to prevent Frank’s character’s murder. His throat slit by a cardboard machete, he collapses, releasing on cue a red streamer of “blood.” Dying, he looks up at Jeevan’s character and says “say your line, say it.” But Jeevan, who has a knack for seeing the future, can’t stay in character. 

Seconds later, as if stepping into the breach, a terrifying supremacist-esque pandemic survivor storms into Frank’s apartment, “I live here now,” he bellows. Having just faked his character’s character’s death in Kirsten’s play, Nabhaan Rizwan, the actor playing Frank, is now bleeding out from a serrated hunting knife’s abdominal stab wound, flowing with “real” blood. Rizwan’s face and eyes show us the culmination of Frank’s awareness for months now, well before the pandemic, that somehow fate just had it in for him, that he deserves to die. The relief he feels- that it wasn’t Jeevan, that it wasn’t Kirsten, is unmistakable. Kirsten, who has been mentored by another actor in a pre-pandemic production of King Lear, reassuringly tells the grieving Jeevan that she almost cast him as Frank’s character, but, “You were really good as Dr. Eleven.”

Taking place as the coda of his theatrical death and as the prelude to the next chapter in Kirsten’s life as an artist, I find it the most powerful fictionalized television death I’ve seen in decades, supplanting by orders of magnitude the death that used to rank at the top—Bobby Simone’s 1998 death from cardiac infection in NYPD Blue. I now see that one as totally cheeseball -- Jimmy Smits does some great deathbed babbling, to be sure, but the dialogue with someone -- I guess his father—and his carrier pigeons and the rooftop and the depiction of his flight to heaven? Very soap opera. But in 1998, we were still living, at least television-wise, in an emotionally sanitized world of sorts, when a Latino actor passes as some generically ethnic cop and delivers a death scene in which he shows almost no pain, and I’m sad to admit, little pathos.  The contrast shows what good writing, brilliant acting and the pain of our pandemic context can do. Don’t miss Station Eleven. It’s packed with scene after scene of riveting emotion. Not just death- lots of life, too. And I’m not even a sci-fi fan. 

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What’s next? With the exception of today’s explanatory post, I promise to keep these short- under 500 words or so—and not to post them daily. And here and there I’ll probably include some thoughts about an exhibit or a book or an essay. Please send along your thoughts, reactions, and recommendations, and feel free to forward this to anyone you think might have a minute for Watchword.