Braindead

It was the torture episode on CBS's political satire, Braindead, that convinced me that this series is unique and well worth following.  The heroine, Laurel, is in the custody of the FBI and various governmental agencies want her tortured -- of course, as is generally the case, the nature of the information that they wish to elicit from her is uncertain:  the torture is more or less for the sake of torture.  Laurel is an aide to rabidly liberal senator and she has stumbled onto an alarming secret.  In a series of Kafkaesque scenes, Laurel is confronted by bizarre accusations, said to have asserted with known Jihadists, and, then, solicitously and politely interviewed by government physicians and their henchmen to determine the nature and exact amount of torture to which she can be subjected without risk of death -- the government doctors are exceptionally kind and professional, much better than the Mayo Clinic physicians with which I have had contact, but, of course, their agenda is completely contrary to all medical ethics.  After the interview, Laurel is strapped to a table and a very gentle-looking, if efficient, torturer gets ready to administer something called "controlled immersion" -- that is, the new version of "water-boarding" that the political administration has approved.  (This is so that the FBI officials can claim that they don't "torture" or "waterboard" when they are compelled to testify to oversight committees.)  As it happens, Laurel's brother is a senator and he gets wind that his sister is in custody -- he reneges on his earlier approval for the torture once he concludes that Laurel will be the subject and, then, convenes an emergency security counsel meeting.  When the vote seems about to go against him, he embarks on a desperate filibuster and, at the last moment, a couple of Laurel's friends, also investigating the mystery, intervene in a surprising and comical way to save her.   The torturer is nothing but friendly and regretful -- the very opposite of a sadist:  he offers to give Laurel a ride home and, then, shakes her hand when he lets her out of his car, indicating how thankful he is that the didn't have to torture her.  This episode of Braindead, although very funny, is also terrifying -- the Kafkaesque machinations of the FBI and other security apparatus are deeply alarming, and, I assume, mostly realistic:  the people in charge of the torture refuse to explain the threat or, even, who is in custody and simply revert to slogans like "ticking time bomb."  The pompous posturing of the senators, whose performances are being filmed for CSPAN, are shockingly true to life.  And the episode's race against time plot is fantastically gripping -- because the mechanics of the whole thing are so convincingly portrayed, you feel Laurel's peril in the pit of your stomach.  When she is rescued, the sense of relief felt by the viewer is palpable -- this is one of the rare TV shows in which viewer becomes emotionally invested. 

I was resistant to Braindead initially because of the series' look.  The show is efficiently shot and looks, more or less, like a standard version of a cop or lawyer show, something on the order of NCIS or Law and Order -- the lighting is clear and schematic, there is zero Stimmung or atmosphere, and the actors are all pretty as can be, almost glossy in their miniature movie star way.  There is a lot of sex implied in a smarmy way but not really shown -- after all, this is network TV.  Much of the dialogue is clunky and expository.  The show's premise is derivative -- it's a Washington-based version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Aliens in the form of ants creep into people's ears and begin devouring their brains.  Ultimately, the ants take over the person and, if they all fart at the same time, the victim's head explodes in a raspberry-colored mush.  The show's political satire, however, elevates this material from the quotidian -- the first effect of ant infestation is that people start listening voraciously to the Cars "You Might Think"; this is because the bass line apparently communicates something to the ants.  Then, the victim becomes rabidly partisan -- if the victim is a Republican, he becomes a parody of Jesse Helms or Orrin Hatch, mouthing bigoted nonsense; Democrats turn into ranting maniacs that make Bernie Sanders' seem conservative.  Of course, no one will listen to anything that the other side is saying and, so, the insect-controlled senators simply rant at one another in a government that has ground to a complete deadlock.  The senators, themselves, are a vile lot -- even Laurel's reasonably conscientious liberal brother immediately signs the torture order before he knows that it involves his own sister.  There are craven, servile interns, hyper-vigilant secretary-receptionists, and megalomaniacal government officials and deceitful press secretaries whose every word, including "if" "and," and"but" are lies.  Tony Shalhoub plays an avuncular, even charming, senator with the secret demeanor of Caligula -- he's the show's villain and does an excellent job with the part, channeling his inner Nixon in combination with Ted Cruz.  Shalhoub's character harbors the queen ant and, periodically, she comes out of his ear to strut down his arm to lay more eggs and, thereby, spread the contagion.  And in about every episode, someone's head gaudily explodes, a form of "bio-terrorism" promoted as the outcome of "radical Islamic Jihad".  (Some of the plot turns seem to have been scripted by Wilhelm Reich -- the insects can only be driven out of the brain by activating the libido and other pleasure centers:  when Laurel gets infected,  she has to have hook-up sex with another senate aide, all the while snorting cocaine and feasting, while engaged in coitus, on whole bars of Toblerone and buckets of fried chicken; needless to say, she's pretty embarrassed to encounter the man with whom she hooked-up the next day. This is a smart, cleverly plotted show that deserves your attention -- it is a CBS prime-time show, airing on Sunday nights in opposition to HBO's addictive The Night of.  But you can catch the show's past episodes on "on demand."