I’ll admit, I watch a couple of reality TV shows: Big Brother and Chrisley Knows Best. Big Brother starts in a couple of weeks and watching the conniving unfold is somehow entertaining. It is also a reminder of how few personality types exist in our society. But by a long shot my favorite reality show is Chrisley Knows Best.
Todd Chrisley — a fashion-crazed father of five — tries to run a tight ship in his Georgia household. But with two teenagers and a nine year old still at home, he’s not always up to the challenge. Once you’ve watched about 10 minutes of the show you realize just how scripted it is, but Todd’s one-liners and his interaction with his family is still funny.
Having parents raised in the South, I have heard quite of few of the one liners, but Todd’s comedic timing is impeccable. That doesn’t mean he’s the only one who is funny, his children, wife and mother-in-law can all hold their own.
In this season’s opener, Chrisley’s daughter tries to pull one over on her Dad by using her older sister’s ID — after all, the teen Savanah reasons, borrowing a real ID is a misdemeanor while having a fake one is a felony. Of course, good triumphs over evil when Savanah’s older sister, realizing the error of her ways, takes back her ID.
But the funniest part of the episode is when the entire family is interviewed at their home for a magazine. The mayhem in the house, the one liners and the interaction between the family is priceless.
So, if you have a half-hour to kill, and want a chuckle or two, the show airs on Tuesday nights on the USA Network.
During my recuperation from gall bladder surgery, I needed something to binge watch — and I came upon the Amazon original Alpha House.
I was pleasantly surprised.
Less than a year ago, I ventured into the world of political news coverage mainly because I could not understand how a district represented by the Speaker of the House — a man who is two heartbeats away from the presidency — could be so impoverished. According to Census reports, as many as 20 percent of the children inside Ohio’s 8th Congressional District grow up in poverty.
Learning that fact alone sent me on a mission to better understand our political system — and I’ve learned enough to know it is not as simple as conservative vs. liberal and that wedge issues are simply a distraction. Heading down this path to political enlightenment, though, has also meant I have watched a lot more politically-themed shows, like Veep, for example.
Alpha House is somewhat along the same lines as Veep in that it is filmed as if it is a reality TV show, but the language in Alpha House is more sanitized. Also, Alpha House is about the Senate, not the vice-presidency.
Shows’ Premise
The show centers around four Republican Senators who live in the same D.C. home. The star — Senator Gil John Biggs (played by John Goodman) is a former basketball coach who is jaded by politics, but is undergoing an awakening — mainly because he is being forced to actually campaign (in North Carolina) to retain his seat. In the past, he has always coasted to a win without campaigning.
Then there is the Senator from Nevada — a Mormon with a strong right-wing base — who seems to know more about women fashion than the average man. The senator, Louis Laffer (Matt Malloy), faces a tough re-election bid because a Tea Party candidate — who has legally killed three men — is challenging his manhood. Fortunately for Laffer, despite being outfitted in state-of-the-art body armor on a Congressional trip to Afghanistan, the senator still manages to sustains a serious leg injury when the camp is attacked. As a result of the incident, he becomes a war hero and celebrity — sealing his re-election win.
Despite their quarks, the other two senators are just as likeable as Biggs and Laffer. Pennsylvania Senator Robert Bettencourt (Clark Johnson), a light-skinned black man with a fondness for expensive suits, faces an investigation and possible indictment for illegally receiving gifts during the first season. While freshman Senator Andy Guzman (Mark Consuelos) of Florida is the most outgoing of the four is on a mission to bed as many women as possible en route to the presidency.
Plenty of Humor
Since the show is written by Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury), the show has a left-slant. But the real quality of the show is the four main characters are endearing enough that even when they are screwing up, you want them to win. If you are a political junkie there are enough variants in the show to keep it interesting (like contractor names being read into the Congressional Record), but even a political novice will find the overall theme of the show (four guys shacked up together and the mayhem their living arrangement causes) enjoyable — even if the political humor is secondary.
Best Episode
The best episode is Season One: Ruby Shoals. In this episode, Biggs is forced to face the reality that what the current Republican Party is — is not what it was when he signed on. Things the Party opposes today — like infrastructure projects, for example — are the very things they supported when he first became a Senator. After coming to terms with what it means to be a worthy politician, Biggs sets off down the road to earn his re-election bid.
Notable Mentions
Several well-known actors play support roles in the series. Comedian Wanda Sykes brings some depth to the show as the Democrat neighbor of the four Senators and she eventually becomes the love interest of Bettencourt. Cynthia Nixon (Sex and the City) plays a Democrat who heads up the ethics committee, but Nixon’s most powerful moment in the series is when she speaks at the funeral of a despised Senator who died under suspicious circumstances. Unlike her peers, she calls it like it is and pulls no punches.
Rated: 4.5 out of 5. The only part of the show I did not like was the way the Koch Brothers are represented. In an effort to prove they are all-powerful and ever present, the writers place the pair on monitors attached to drones — which comes across as silly instead of funny. Since they are drones, the brothers are able to chase down anyone they want — prompting Biggs, in one episode, to shoot them out of the sky with his shotgun.
Some TV shows are meant to expose the truth while some are designed to entertain. The best TV shows, though, entertain while exposing the truth which is what Veep has accomplished in its first three seasons.
The HBO show, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is a political comedy that follows the life of Selena Myers (Louis-Dreyfus) an incompetent vice-president with an incompetent staff.
But, if the show was only about her incompetence — no one would watch.
It is the keen observations of the writers and actors that make the show a telling — albeit dark — account of modern-day Washington D.C. The jokes are crude, the language is rough and no one in D.C. is exempt from the spotlight’s glare. Politicians and businessmen are all fair game.
The series begins after Meyers’ unsuccessful bid for the president lands her in the vice-president role. In this powerless position she plots, plans and connives in preparation for the next presidential election so she can claim her rightful place in history.
As the show progresses, her platform changes as needed until near the end of the third season, she ‘decides’ to let the powerful political party leaders tell her what to do. In the meltdown, she repeats that it is her decision to let them tell her what to do.
But it is not just powerful political leaders Meyers has to deal with — it is also young, wealthy businessmen who fund her campaigns.
In another 2014 episode, Meyers is forced to ‘play nice’ with the billionaire owner of Clovis (which is a caricature of firms like Google or Facebook), but she can’t do it. From the owner’s arrogance to the ‘kindergarten’ setting of the workplace — she has had enough, but she still finds a way to leverage the situation for her political gain.
When she notices the allegations of torture attributed to her opponent playing on the screen behind her at Clovis, she uses the technology of the day to manipulate what she says into a sabotage against the opponent. As Meyers publically denounces the story (that presidential candidate and war-hero, Danny Chung was involved in the torture of Iraqi prisoners), she intentionally (or clueless?) repeats the words Danny Chung and torture — linking the terms together forever in the virtual search engine driven world.
In an effort to give the show its authenticity, the actors visited D.C. before the series began to get a better understanding of politics. It’s this insider’s look at D.C. that gives the show its edge.
Matt Walsh, who plays Mike McClintock — Meyer’s in-over-his-head communication director — noted this is a 2012 article on Politico,
“One big insight to me was that you can get success over wording — if you can change the wording of some bill, then you can give your state another $20 million, if you can just change a sentence,” he said. “To me, that was really insightful as to why the works get gunked up so much, because everyone’s fighting for their constituents.“
Rated 5 out of 5: Louis-Dreyfus is brilliant, the cast is superb and the subject is one everyone loves to hate: incompetent politicians. Although the show is Not Rated, it contains R and MA rated material.
D.C. In A Day
If you have not watched the show, it is a great candidate for binge-watching. With less than 30, 30-minute episodes through three seasons, it can be easily watched in one weekend. Veep: Season 1
Although this site began as a repository for American history stories, over time it essentially became a 'brain dump.' For more than a year, I've used the site to work through my beliefs and opinions in this post-truth era of political illiteracy.
Charlie R. Claywell 