The #1 TV show on Netflix last week was Baby Reindeer, an excellent seven-part limited series about a struggling comedian/bar worker and his middle-aged female stalker.  Adapted by comic performer Richard Gadd from his one-man play, it is based on a true account of events, many of which happened to him.

There are a lot of ways to describe each of the half-hour episodes of this riveting story and, knowing I’d be recommending it to friends, students and readers, I’ve struggled in how exactly to describe it.

It’s funny but it also deals with trauma, mental health and sexual abuse.  So my plan to simply call it a dramedy felt a bit like a cop out. 

Wikipedia refers to it as a black comedy drama-thriller miniseries but, well, isn’t almost everything on TV that’s not Young Sheldon?

Netflix wisely doesn’t put it into any category except #1, which at the end of the day is what almost every distributor, network, studio, streamer or executive of any kind cares about anyway.

Apropos of this and more, I just read that as he fired many creative and business people under him, and gutted many of his company’s most beloved divisions (Note: TCM, anyone?), Warner Bros/Discovery president and CEO David (The Zazz) Zaslav saw his yearly salary rise 26.5% in 2023 to $49.7 million (Note: All that for elongating the writer and actor’s strike in order to punish content creators for ….something, and renaming HBO to the somehow slightly sleazy-sounding MAX).

And on the agency side, Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel’s 2023 pay package was $83.9 million, including salary, stock and bonuses, with a lot of it coming from his role as CEO of Endeavor-controlled WWE (Worldwide Wresting Entertainment) and UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). 

Nevertheless, when you make four times what you made the previous year, in most corners these days it’s counted as a win-win-win-win. Who cares that longtime WWE founder/leader, as well as Trump bestie, Vince MacMahon, finally resigned only a mere few months ago while under criminal investigation for longtime sexual abuse and trafficking charges?  A buck’s, a buck.

But I digress.

Though perhaps not.

Because all this got me thinking once more about the obscene amounts of money to be made from just about anything, or any type of behavior, in fiction or in real life, whether it be categorized as great, awful or, well, something in between.

There used to be a sort of universal definition for all kinds obscene behaviors (Note: Or wins, as some of these behaviors are now considered) in financial and personal interactions.  This is not to say there were always immediate consequences or that we could always define what obscene, or synonyms like abhorrent, truly were when accepted by people or in behavior.

Yet as US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously stated in a 1964 ruling about the definition of pornography, and by extension obscenity, in a famous case where he wound up declaring Louis Malle’s 1958 film The Lovers, was, indeed, NOT the latter:

I know it when I see it.

Still, audio this week from the five male conservative SCOTUS justices indicates they think a US President (Note: Donald Trump) might be immune from criminal prosecution for trying to pressure and cajole legislators and election officials, as well as cheat and otherwise try to undo his 2020 election loss.

Obscene?  Abhorrent?  Or just plain reasonable behavior?  What say all of YOU?

And then imagine what the line of agreement will be between “those guys” and the other three liberal, and one only “strangely conservative,” FEMALE SCOTUS justices over what kind of behaviors, actions or even thoughts constitute PORNOGRAPHIC or OBSCENE???

The mind boggles. 

And apologies for planting those images in your mind.

But this all somehow leads to the single intersection I had this week of HOPE with that dark, and ever darkening, side:

-Those themes of violence and abuse etched amid the jokes and humanity in Baby Reindeer.

-That gross imbalance of paydays certain top industry CEOs received last year while actors, writers, and below-the-line crews in IATSE, the people who create their content, the gas fueling their gargantuan paychecks, were left no alternative but to strike for many months or endure endless, arm-twisting renegotiations for even a vaguely fair deal.

-The unapologetic, very partisan and very extreme conservative agenda of every male member of the US Supreme Court as they brazenly rule to take away women’s rights over their own bodies and now attempt to bend long held common sense legal norms in order to excuse the bad and often heinous behavior of one of their politically like-minded, presidential-level BROS, and future BROS.

And no, that intersection of HOPE won’t be ushering in the return of Barack Obama to the White House in some fantasy presidential draft, much as you might be hoping for that.

Oddly, it was the comments made by SNL’s Colin Jost in his comic roast of journalists, current events, Trump and, yes, President Joe Biden, at this weekend’s annual Washington Correspondent’s Dinner that brought HOPE home for me.  A dinner that for 100 plus years has given scholarships to young, aspiring reporters and awards for outstanding  journalism in the country during the past year.

After a bunch of very pithy, and even some flat-footed lines and jabs on presidential politics, this year’s candidates for POTUS, the reporting of news and the slow unraveling of the American social fabric that used to bind red and blue America together, Jost concluded his remarks with a touching and telling story about his recently deceased firefighter grandfather.

He noted his family hails from the predominantly Republican N.Y.C. borough of Staten Island, where “70% were for Trump” in the last election. Yet he said that the last time his 90 plus year-old grandfather voted, he told him he cast his ballot for Biden.

At which point he turned directly from the center stage podium to Pres. Biden on the dais and said:

He voted for you in the last election he ever voted in.  He voted for you, and the reason he voted for you is that you’re a decent man. 

My grandpa voted for decency and decency is why we’re all here tonight. Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight. 

Decency is how we’re able to make jokes about each other and one of us doesn’t go to prison after….

 …And when you look at the levels of freedom throughout history and even around the world today, this  is the exception  This freedom is incredibly rare.  And the journalists in this room help protect that freedom and we cannot ever take that for granted. 

I’m not much for moralizing but it made me wonder if it’s true decency that we crave. 

Not decency dictated by the resurrected rules of an obscure, 1864 anti-abortion law in Arizona, but 21^st century decency that takes into account the beliefs of the majority of Americans living here today.  This includes not only freedom of speech but freedom of the press.

Here are some actual words, names and adjectives Trump publicly used when he was president, and in the years since, to describe reporters and other members of the media:

Truly sick people, fake news, enemy of the people, totally corrupt, an evil propaganda machine, total losers, out of control, dishonest, crooked, deranged, pure evil, scum of the earth, lying and disgusting.

Not to mention the public mocking imitation of one disabled reporter, the chants of lock ‘em up and threats to take away broadcast licenses and change the libel laws in order to prosecute newspapers and radio/TV outlets for printing or reporting stories one (or HE) disagrees with.

It makes you think about constitutes true decency and more than hints at what is truly indecent in 2024.

Elvis Costello & The Attractions – “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding”