TNT's Public Morals TV Show: Meet Your New Landlords

Deep, dark, funny, and reflective is the TNT television show Public Morals. It airs on Tuesdays at 10:00 p.m. My wife kept telling me to watch it so finally I did.  I’m really a tough TV audience—which is not to say that I don’t watch a fair amount of it with lukewarm results.  I’ll often watch “bad TV” just to see what people are tripping on. It’s like watching a sociological experiment, much of it discouraging.

But Public Morals wasn’t discouraging.  Even before I picked up on the story line, I was  immediately struck with the writing and acting. I'm no gangster, you’ll be glad to know,  but I've known more than a few questionable people and I’m quite sure some of them were. And I sometimes used to hang out in the Hell’s Kitchen area during the 60s era and quite well remember what it was like, colorful and exciting, seedy and disreputable, abject to great heights.  It was a place of contradiction, those contradictions being well displayed in the TV show Public Morals.

I kind of related to PM too b/c a while back I almost got jammed up in one of those "Westie" Hell's Kitchen Irish mob places where a guy like Richie Kane (he’s a character in the show played by Aaron Dean Eisenberg) came in and called out the restaurant-bar manager or owner and scared the shit out of everyone. I got out of there in a hurry, didn't even want to know what was going on. Public Morals made me remember that.  I like the way the show feels, real people, nice people, flawed people.

I'm big on realism. For me, there’s too little realistic material on TV and way too much fantasy.  Everything's about gadgets & technology, and avoidance of reality.  Not so with Public Morals. It’s a big plus that the Public Morals actors all seem to know what that New York thing is/was about. I don't normally gush about TV programs but I have a strong feeling about PM and urge you to watch it if only for my sake. 

  I try to write myself so I know how hard it is to do something creative without falling into rubber stamped formulas. I was just very impressed with the way Ed Burns put the whole thing together—writing, directing, acting, casting.  It's very hard to do just one of those things and he's done them all. 

He found all these great down to earth actors with some keystone figures like Brian Doheny playing the Irish first generation who worked their way up to power and influence. I never watch the “extras” that come with the On Demand versions but I watched nearly all of the short interviews with Burns. He was so honest and without pretension, as were the actors who shouted out to me on Twitter (to my great surprise and delight).

.Have to say the sets are great, so are the period idiosyncrasies, costuming, graphics. Watch it if you want to see that great old pre-hipster good bad old New York complete with the hookers on Times Square we used to try to talk to when we were kids. 

The individual scenes flow nicely and are knit together well. I like the way everyone has one attitude or another. There's a lot of ironic humor in the writing, too; it’s brilliant writing. Alright, this is TMI, I know. Too bad I'm not some kind of big deal critic, right?

Just watch it, okay. I’m telling you. And repent your sins, for chrissakes! 

Hillary Clinton’s Hard-Won Coronation by Default

  

“I’ve always thought this was going to be a competitive primary and I’m looking forward to it,” declared Hillary Clinton, as she surveyed the political landscape.  Believe that and she’ll tell you another.

There is no competitive political landscape with the Democrats.  The Democrats in 2016 will have a coronation, unless there is a criminal indictment, which could not possibly happen until after the 2016 elections.

There are two candidates on the Democrat side, Jim Webb and Martin O’Malley who are barely registering a heartbeat, and then there is Bernie Sanders, a socialist running as an independent. Then there is Joe Biden, the wounded bird of the Democrat party who has a great chance to win the Democrat’s primary until he actually decides to run.

Should that latter occur, the clickbait media will de-louse itself from Donald Trump’s hair and spend a pious week wringing their hands over the Veep’s tragic life, culminating most recently with the death of his son from brain cancer.  This is indeed sad stuff, and we are sorry for anyone having to grieve the loss of a child. However,  the trope that Beau Biden’s dying wish was that his dad would run for president a third time has to be seen as a family Disney opportunity made for TV.

“Don’t worry about me, dad. I’ll rest in peace knowing you’re the president.” Violin music.

That image, superimposed as it will be over previous images of a creepy uncle with grabby hands, will garner considerable votes among Democrats who neither trust nor like Hillary Clinton. But keep in mind that Bernie Sanders has already drawn off most of the Hillary Hating Democrats. Moreover, Hillary Clinton manages a smooth running, well-funded, corrupt, but large organization which can only be defeated if all the moneyed elite Brahmin Democrats who interposed Obama the Great on Hillary in 2008 would do the same for Biden.

There’s fat chance of that happening. Deals have likely already been negotiated and the ink was dry on those contracts when Hillary assumed the Secretary of State position.

There are presumed  Republicans on Twitter who are gleeful that an NBC-Marist poll Sunday shows that Bernie Sanders is ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. http://cnn.it/1JOOI8h  This is but one example of the fatuousness that passes for ‘conservative’ thought these days:  ““Uh oh! Looks like Sanders is going to beat Hillary in Iowa and New Hampshire.” This is based on early polls, the type of polls which had Ross Perot and Herman Cain far ahead at this time in previous elections.

Yet, across the board, among liberals and conservatives, the activists and liars who are sampled in the early polls are in a rebellious mood.  This is the wave that breaks on the beach before the real storm comes.  Hillary knows this and knows also that when she beats Sanders back to Vermont with his tail between his legs it will look like some sort of triumph that the CNN, MSNBC sycophants will gush about. A bigger triumph will be when she does the same thing to Biden, although not without making at least a small and solicitous effort. As in: “Here are your bedroom slippers, Joe.”

How will Hillary Clinton defeat her non-opponents?  First of all, it’s a situation where less is better. The GOP has been especially good at defeating itself, especially considering that members of its fringe now have the loudest voices.

While the media is following Hillary around, anxious to ask her again and again about the government records she destroyed, she’s well advised to stay in hiding.  The less Democrats see of her, the better. Expect her to come out of hiding in well-controlled staged events where the press corps can’t get to her.  When it’s time to comment, she’ll pick favorable venues and issue well-vetted sound bites like the one she levied recently against Donald Trump and his promise to round eleven million illegals up and herd them across the Mexican border. I suppose the wall Trump says Mexico will pay for will have a giant golden door wide enough for everyone to pass through in the four years of his term.

Hillary loves Trump, prays that he’ll stay in the race right up until the end, becoming the indelible face of the GOP in another can’t lose election which they will lose.  In a closed speech before a friendly select audience, Hillary pointed to the contradiction of a party that touted small government and yet had, as their front runner, a guy who would require the most massive of government interventions. That's just a sample. It's not exactly inspired, but it will suffice against a party where the tail is wagging the dog. 

  Immigration authorities can’t handle the workload now, but the Trump reverse diaspora, Clinton points out, will require a far more massive bureaucratic processing effort, assisted by immigration agents and National Guard.  There was no mention of how the “boxcars” Clinton mentioned would pass through the Wall of Trump, but expect she’ll have further comments on Trump’s plan in the coming days.

Okay, suppose Biden runs. Biden is the typical Democratic “establishment” candidate.  That alone is enough to pull some away from the lunatic fringe the party has almost entirely become under Obama, Pelosi, Warren, Jarrett, not to mention the foreign policy apologists who manned posts at Foggy Bottom.

My guess is that Biden will decide against running after many public Hamlet soliloquys. But he’s a shot fighter, and even in his prime wasn’t much more than a journeyman, chosen by Obama to provide much needed gravitas  to an administration on training wheels. He’s generic, plain vanilla. It must have been hard for Obama to swallow down when Biden described him as “clean-cut and articulate” as if that was an anomaly for a black guy. 

Biden doesn’t have the cleverness, the slipperiness of the Clintons, he doesn’t have the money or the organization, he’s inclined to entertaining gaffes, and he’s emotionally wasted, older than in previous contests, worn out. 

So unless an indictment comes early, Hillary’s path is still as certain as it ever was. She’ll brazen it out.  She’ll claim selective amnesia and rely on the public tendency for self-delusion that produced Obama. Her biggest worry is that Trump will fall before he does enough damage to the GOP. Her greatest most irresistible desire is that he makes it all the way to GOP nomination.