Boss

I invested ten hours, maybe more, in Boss, a political drama featuring Kelsey Grammer produced by Gus Van Sant for cable TV (Starz). The series features great locations in Chicago, stunning skylines, and a lot of melodramatic theatrics by Doc Frasier. Grammer, who has played Macbeth on Broadway, seems determined to “tear a cat” and “out-Herod Herod” with his “plummy” faux-British diction, glaring eyes, and melodramatic mood swings. Most of the time, Grammer, who plays Tom Kane, a surrogate for Rahn Emmanuel and Boss Daley, specializes in rococo verbal abuse, arias featuring the word “fuck” ornamented with spectacularly vile threats – it’s a lot of fun to watch Grammar hamming it up, but, I must say that you are unavoidably reminded of the actor’s brilliant voice work for the vicious cartoon psychopath, Side-show Bob, on The Simpsons. Grammer wants to prove that he is a great actor and plays the beleagured but resourceful Chicago mayor as a combination of King Lear and Hannibal Lecter. Unfortunately, he’s upstaged by the Danish actress, Connie Nielsen in the role of his steely and heartless wife, Meredith, a clone of Lady Macbeth if there ever was one. (The women in this show are more memorable than the men – but they are all, more or less, the same: fantasy versions of Hilary Clinton, incredibly intelligent ball-busters, burdened with pussy-hound husbands for whom they have complete contempt, Machiavellian, and spectacularly faithless and disloyal themselves: on several separate occasions, the women savagely upbraid their weak husbands, saying “I don’t care where you stick it, but you must toe the line when it comes to preserving the family franchise – that is control of Chicago and Illinois.) The series is relentlessly sordid; everyone is corrupt or gets corrupted and, ultimately, the show is a little monotonous. The skies over Chicago are always wet and grey and the episodic plot can’t really be characterized as dramatic – there’s no drama when everyone is more or less equally vile and power-mad. But it’s amusing to watch these monsters inflicting intricate forms of torture on one another. Kane wriggles out of one tight spot by having his own daughter (a hapless liberal do-gooder qua drug addict) arrested in a drug bust; he goes on the TV and sanctimoniously praises himself for having sent a SWAT squad to capture his own flesh and blood. Martin Donovan, one of my favorite actors – he was a staple in Hal Hartley’s movies – plays the cerebral Himmler-like factotum to the Mayor, Ezra Stone; his female counterpart is the delicious Kitty O’Neill (Kathleen Robertson), a nymphomaniac who enjoys casual sex in public places. Even in this respect the show is relentlessly one-note – Kitty looks amazingly like a female version of the bland, hyper-intelligent and absolutely amoral Ezra Stone; they could be twins. Each week, when I tuned in this show, I was distressed by how totally predictable it all was – but, also, each week by the grim and horrific end of the show (each episode concludes with some fresh monstrosity of depravity), I had to admit that the thing had me hooked. My daughter, who watched much of this series with me, told me that she much prefers the avuncular, vain, but kindly Frasier to Tom Kane – so do I, but the spectacle of a beloved TV comic playing Caligula is worth, at least, a glance. The appeal, I suppose, is the same that which attracted literate Romans to Seneca.