Philip Roth’s alternative history grips in HBO’s superb, unfolding drama; Iraqis relive Saddam’s downfall; and the ‘enigma’ of Rupert Murdoch remains just that – for now
The Plot Against America (Sky Atlantic) | sky.com
Once Upon a Time in Iraq (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty (BBC Two) | iPlayer
The Other One (BBC One) | iPlayer
I’m going to stick out my scrawny neck now and suggest The Plot Against America might just be this year’s Chernobyl. In its slow-burn intensity, its willingness to take its time and to show not tell, its relentless accumulation of detail, but above all in its triumphant celebration of television as an adult pursuit, it asks big questions and doesn’t spoon-feed us facile answers.
On first and many other sights the two have little in common: the one a real-life tragedy, the other a realisation of a 2004 novel; and writer Craig Mazin was, pre-Chernobyl, known for little more than Scary Movie 3, whereas David Simon and Ed Burns have The Wire in their backpack, and Philip Roth is hardly an unknown quantity. One refreshing aspect that bonds them, however, is a relatively unstarry cast, which allows the likes of Zoe Kazan and Morgan Spector to excel themselves with long-form subtlety. (Not that there’s exactly anything wrong with starry casts, with Ms Blanchett currently stapling herself to our eyes over on Mrs America, but…)
This, then, is the tale of the Levins, a blue-collar Jewish family in Newark, watching the rise of professional aviator hero and keen amateur xenophobic bigot Charles Lindbergh as he battles FDR, on an anti-war and appeasement ticket, for the US presidency in 1940. The Levins, part of a tight, warm, battling, very human community, watch this with degrees of horror, anger, apathy and eyes on the main chance, and their tale will be a four-year one of quiet betrayals and encroaching menace.
Even as Lindbergh wins, in Roth’s alternative history – competing radios have a young Sinatra crooning through the election results, nicely meshing fact and fiction – the threat to America’s urban Jews is slippery, nebulous, often dressed as benign or as economic self-advantage. The pointy hoods don’t appear until the final episode. One thing I relished is that The Plot Against America doesn’t fetishise Nazi iconography, as so many of these things seem to do: the high drapes, the lightning bolts. Even such quality offerings as The Man in the High Castle and The Handmaid’s Tale have fallen prey, the art direction simply unable to resist the visually thrilling menace of that scarlet-monochrome mix.
But this never feels too much, the threats never overt, the boots hidden firmly in the attic for four long years. And, crucially, Lindbergh is kept as a cipher, with a dull simplistic anti-war slogan. The chief job of villain falls to John Turturro, a charismatic southern rabbi who will go on, through desire for personal political power, to effectively “kosher” Lindberg, diluting and legitimising the threat for years. And, of course, to the great American public circa 1943, kind or warm or bigoted or in many cases all three, and increasingly unafraid to let the masks slip.
David Simon, approached to take this on a few years ago when Obama had just been re-elected, “just didn’t see it” as relevant to the age or capable of happening in America. That, as they say, was then. In crackly radio reports of protesters being blamed for the violence against them, in the increasing use of “loudmouth” or “uppity”, this magnificence could hardly have landed at a more starkly relevant time.
Twice in one week we got the same shots of the bombing of Baghdad, cameras panning over the night Tigris, lit only by green stuttering thunder. One came courtesy of the first episode of Once Upon a Time in Iraq, which promises to be an enthralling five-part account of the 2003 invasion, told not through the mouths of generals or politicians but of normal Iraqis, many of them fresh and young at the time.
Those mouths, mostly fun and thoughtful and charming, told a tale of a Saddam revered and loathed in roughly equal measure before the fall, but a Saddam who, say what you will, kept the lights on and the streets safe. (Except from him.) Now, they tell as one of an Iraq that has been mired in lunacy, and arguably (as more than one argued here) the seeds of Isis were sown as far back as then.
I remember being there just after the ugly fall of that ugly statue, and going into an asylum through whose gates a US tank had accidentally backed. Inmates fled. A dust of trampled drugs lay on all floors. And three inmates had actually broken back in, the streets, they said, rendered too tribally dangerous now by the Americans who had broken Baghdad and now squatted safe in their tanks in darkened streets. Hmm, I wondered, in my slow dullard way: does this bode a bright future?
The first part of a purported high-end series, The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty, rightly concentrated on one event, Hayman Island in 1995, the luxury executives’ confab to which famously flew Tony Blair (now godfather to one of Murdoch’s daughters), all the better to charm the mogul. This and I’m sure the following episodes are great on the mutual wooing between Murdoch and Blair, and on his wizardry at understanding changing media, and adapting a still-basic business plan through the globe over half a century.
But, but. “Rupert Murdoch is an enigma,” began the voiceover in the first few seconds, and we might have concluded there was an implied promise that the enigma was going to be unpeeled. Yet – so far – we have not understood one smidgen of the man’s soul. Why he left wife Anna. Whether he is, at least a little, in love with the simple mechanics of newspapers (I suspect so: the few quarter-smiles on the face of the younger Rupert were in inky shirtsleeves), or are the presses, to him, just cash-printers? Where his politics, in fact, lie: is it, just, mafia-like, in what’s good for business, not personal, or does he actually tend, like all of us, to believe things and change beliefs? Importantly, why so shamelessly gung-ho about Iraq?
The Other One, Holly Walsh’s gleeful twin-family saga ended (if you’ve been watching in real time) on a real high. It had many terrific lines, mainly – as usual – from Ellie White as Cathy, whom you suspect the writer most identifies with. One clue: she gives her the sharpest lines. After she has been given a particularly gaudy tiara-and-mascara makeover by Cat (Lauren Socha), dowdy safe Cathy declares to the mirror: “Oh My God! I love it… I look like I could have my own show! On ITV3!” Marilyn (Siobhan Finneran) finally makes it out of the house, Rebecca Front’s Tess finally forgives cheating Colin (Simon Greenall) and, after a cheeky red herring, the stage is well set for a second series. There have been harder recommissions to predict.