Like those of a previous generation remembering November 22, 1963 or December 7, 1941, most of us alive today will never forget “where we were” that dark day ten years ago, when the world changed.

But TLC’s controversial All-American Muslim series rings in the New Year with a provocative new telecast (10pm Eastern and Pacific on most cable systems) on Jan. 1st, which gives its cast of Midwestern Muslim believers a chance to look back on Black Tuesday from their own very unique perspective. On the day that, as one put it, “I realized that people [started looking] at me as less American.”

The clip I have seen shows Deputy Mike Jaafar (who participated in a 9/11 tenth-anniversary memorial tribute at Tiger Stadium), agonizing over the deaths of so many of his brothers and sisters that day — brother and sister police officers and firefighters, that is.

Other participants, though, tired of 9/11 being used as an excuse for what they feel to be jingoism and/or anti-Islamic hate speech, were distinctly less inclined to do anything other than try to forget the day of infamy.

All-American Muslim, which we earlier reviewed here, has attracted sponsor-boycott controversy (particularly from the Lowe’s store chain), in reaction to what some people (ironically enough, many of them religious fundamentalists of a different sort) feel is a glamorous whitewash of a radical religion. But whatever one’s personal beliefs, Sunday night’s show might be a thought-provoking way to start off the new year, against the reruns and after the run-out sports events, to see the day that defined the past decade (at least until the financial collapse) through an entirely new set of eyes.

As we say goodbye to 2011, here’s FrumForum’s look back at the year in politics and popular culture — and the way the two keep intersecting year in and year out. It was the year when John Boehner replaced Nancy Pelosi as the House’s number one power broker — or so he wished. (With Eric Cantor and a rebellious Tea Party caucus standing in back of him, how’s that Speakership workin’ out for ya?)

2011 began with a tragedy that dwarfed electoral politics, when a madman went on a shooting spree at an Arizona campaign event on January 8th, assassinating a federal judge and gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ). Miraculously, Giffords returned to the chamber after a grueling recovery to cast a vote on the year’s other biggest domestic story – a debt-ceiling standoff that dominated worldwide headlines and threatened everyone from Main Street to Wall Street.

Meanwhile, speaking of federal judges, the courts (and in at least one case, the Supremes) took on the issues that will no doubt define the 2012 election more than anything besides the unemployment rate: the individual mandate, nationwide gay marriage (Prop 8), and the Arizona immigration law.

But even this seemed tame compared to massive, widespread revolution in the Middle East, which saw decades-old dictatorial dynasties like those of Mubarak’s in Egypt and Quadafi in Libya topple like so many dominoes. And after taking their cue from these bottom-up democracy movements — and the exponential growth of “social networking” sites like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter over the past half-decade — the Occupy Movement became the biggest financial news story of the “fourth quarter” of 2011.

With the stress-o-meter set to “tilt”, it’s no wonder people kept looking to films and TV for some release, escape, or catharsis. As the dust settles of 2011, here are the events that left the biggest pop-cultural footprints:

The Departure Lounge: The Law & Order family took its second hit this year, with the windup of Vincent D’Onofrio’s scene-stealing showcase on Criminal Intent. Denis Leary’s fiery Rescue Me was extinguished, Steve Carell bid farewell to The Office, Patricia Arquette’s Medium had her final vision, and Brothers & Sisters broke up. And fans of Desperate Housewives, 30 Rock, The Closer, and House have been given fair warning — enjoy them while you can, because they won’t be there to celebrate the next New Year.

But four TV departures ranked head and shoulders above all the rest. The year began just after Larry King signed off of his 25-year-old CNN interview show, even as his contemporary Regis Philbin, a small-screen fixture since his 1960s days as Joey Bishop’s sidekick, gave his “final answer” 11 months later.

So much for the Kings of TV talk — but 2011 was also the year when the Queen herself, Oprah Winfrey, decided to end her 25-year-old talk show, still top-rated after all these years (and a key player in President Obama’s election), to focus on her troubled OWN cable network. Yet even Oprah’s departure was dwarfed by the worldwide headlines made by Charlie Sheen’s messy, melted-down and drugged-out exit from the wildly popular Two and a Half Men, and his successful replacement by Ashton Kutcher (who also endured his own tabloid traumas).

Closing the Book(stores): Likewise in book publishing and home video, it was more of a year of traumatic endings than beginnings. Borders and Blockbuster both began the year by shuttering many if not most of their walk-in stores, and while Blockbuster has been given something of a second chance (if a heavily reformatted and refocused one), the presses stopped rolling for Borders permanently in September — an unimaginable development even 10 years ago.

Nice Jobs, Steve (and Hitch): Unimaginable, perhaps, to everyone except for the late techno-wizard and visionary, Steve Jobs, prematurely dead at 56, after years of battling cancer. Along with his contemporary Bill Gates, perhaps no one else had as much influence on modern life as the man who really essentially “invented the Internet”, and turned the lowly telephone into a Pandora’s box of informational pleasures and possibilities.

Jobs’ nearest-equivalent as the preeminent Boomer barometer of his time, Christopher Hitchens, also lost his long and painful battle with cancer at 62. Those who believe God has a sense of irony might find it interesting the inveterate atheist (who once even took on Mother Teresa) died at the height of the Christmas season. But what made Hitch’s writing divine is how he refused to submit to dogmatism and groupthink at any cost, and his willingness to hit all sides with equal lethality, based on the considerable courage of his provocative convictions.

The Last Axis: Three other deaths deserve special mention, of people just as notable as Jobs and Hitchens — but for all the wrong reasons. How appropriate that the year America “celebrated” (if that’s the right word) the 10th anniversary of 9/11 would be the year that Osama bin Laden would meet the same richly deserved fate he meted out to 3,000 innocent civilians – who most assuredly never deserved it. His longtime contemporary in Middle Eastern terrorism, the author of 1988’s Locherbie horror, Muammar Quaddafi, died at the hands of his oppressed people, at the age of 69.

And anyone who believed communism to be “Godless” obviously never got a look at the open idolatry, 24-hour propaganda, and virulent bastardization of Christian and Buddhist themes (a thousand cranes taking his father, Kim Il-Sung, to the afterlife in 1994!), that characterized North Korean “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il’s reign of horror.

While state reports had Kim dying on a train, selflessly working round-the-clock as usual to better North Korean society, the CIA suspects Kim succumbed in bed — obese, sickly, aged 70, after a lifetime of gorging himself on fine wine, gourmet chocolates, and imported lobsters while his people died of famine in genocidal proportions. Probably surrounded by his library of some 20,000 DVDs, even as his people faced no-knock midnight warrants to ensure that they aren’t committing the “thought crimes” of watching Japanese or South Korean movies and TV, or trying to access the Internet. “Evil” is an overused word — but sometimes, it’s the only one that fits.

Feminine Mystique: Back on the tube, young women continued to shatter whatever’s left of the glass eye’s glass ceiling, withWhitney and Up All Night serving as moderate hits and Two Broke Girls emerging as a breakout. Cold Case veteran Veena Sud effortlessly segued from that show’s cancellation to running her own dark, literate (and controversial) procedural on AMC, The Killing, which traced a Twin Peaks-style murder mystery over the course of a full 13-episode season.

ABC also scored big with a considerably lighter female forensic thriller, Dana Delany’s stylish and sassy Body of Proof(which shoots it out with Poppy Montgomery as an Unforgettable policewoman with total memory.) Indeed, Tuesday officially joined Sunday (Desperate Housewives, The Good Wife, True Blood) as TV’s Ladies Night, with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s stylish and witty thriller Ringer facing off against Zooey Deschanel’s adorably goofy New Girl.

The Year of Magical Thinking: Notable art films included The Tree of Life, a pretentious hodgepodge (or gourmet feast, depending on your point of view) of pseudo-Biblical symbolatry, while the forthcoming Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close uses an imaginative autistic child as a guide to post 9/11 trauma.

Woody Allen returned to the screen with the time-tripping Midnight in Paris, while the considerably less literate Super 8 looked at working-class 1979 with a supernatural twist. Miranda July had a terminally ill cat wryly narrate, Desperate Housewives/Sex and the City style, her witty “mumblecore” look into The Future. And vampires, werewolves, and zombies continued to show strong signs of life, with The Walking Dead, True Blood, Being Human, The Vampire Diaries, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and the latest Twilight film packing ‘em in.

Politics in Cinema: There were plenty of provocative political films the past year, as Meryl Streep added the next famous face to her gallery of real-life portraits as The Iron Lady (which will release January 13, along with our review). The horrors of Saddam-era Iraq were brilliantly essayed by Dominic Cooper as The Devil’s Double, while Demian Bichir’s illegal-immigrant father sought A Better Life for his son. George Clooney and red-hot Ryan (Drive) Gosling bewared The Ides of March, and J. Edgar got a big-screen biopic courtesy of Clint Eastwood and Leonardo DiCaprio.

FF Remembers: Hollywood lost its Queen, Elizabeth Taylor, who left us in March aged 79, joining fellow Old Hollywood superstars Farley Granger, Harry Morgan, Anne Francis, Dana Wynter, Elaine Stewart, Jackie Cooper, and Betty Garrett.  John Dye really was Touched by an Angel, as his compassionate Angel of Death went on his way due to a heart attack, as did Familymatriarch Sada Thompson and British acting royalty Margaret Tyzack. And Columbo solved the ultimate mystery, as Peter Falk exited at age 83.

Character acting champs Jeff Conaway, Dan Frazer, Alan Sues, Sid Melton, Alan Fudge, Charles Napier, Doris Belack, Michael Tolan, Dolores Fuller, Mary Fickett, Claudia Bryar, GD Spradlin, Phyllis Avery, Jill Haworth, Peggy Rea, Cynthia Myers, David Nelson, Pete Postlethwaite, Maria Schneider, and Marian Mercer went to that great repertory theatre in the sky.  Pioneering female film execs and writers Polly Platt, Laura Ziskin, and Sue Mengers faded out, as did I Love Lucy’s Madelyn Pugh and her fellow sitcom-creating superstars Hal Kanter, Sol Saks, Bob Banner, Sam Denoff, and Sherwood Schwartz.

The typewriters silenced for screenwriters and playwrights Arthur Laurents, David Zelag Goodman, Kevin Jarre, Del Reisman, Christopher Trumbo, Lanford Wilson, Shelagh Davis, Leonard B. Stern, and Norman Corwin, as well as bestselling mystery novelist Lillian Jackson Braun. The cameras stopped rolling for Sidney Lumet, Ken Russell, Peter Yates, and Reza S. Badiyi, while Lynn Samuels, Fred Imus, and Andy Rooney gave their last broadcasts.

Fitness legend Jack La Lanne worked out to the ripe old age of 96, joining Joe Frazier, Virgil Atkins, and Duke Snider in the locker room, while record execs Sir Jimmy Savile, Don Kirshner, and Randy Wood had their biggest “hit” yet. Big-band legends Dolores Hope, Margaret Whiting, and “Champagne Lady” Norma Zimmer stopped the music, along with Gerry Rafferty, Dobie Gray, Ferlin Husky, Phoebe Snow, Andrew Gold, Andrea True, and composers Fred Steiner and Jerry Lieber. Clarence Clemons, Uan Rasey, “Blues Brother” Alan Rubin, and Gil Scott-Heron joined Gabriel’s horn section.

And pioneering politicians Sargent Shriver, Mark Hatfield, and Warren Christopher, fearless feminists Geraldine Ferraro, Betty Ford, and Dorothy Howell Rodham, and Vietnam “veterans” Nguyen Cao Ky and Mme. Nho Dinh Nhu, also bade us a fond farewell.

All in all, after a year like this, who can blame someone for going completely blotto this New Year’s Eve! (Although all of us at the FrumForum wish you a safe and sane start to 2012 — we don’t want anything to happen to our readers!)

And as the very “interesting” — in the Chinese sense of the term, I fear — election year of 2012 kicks off, I wish you all a Happy New Year. And as an even greater writer than I once said, “God bless us, every one.”

Last week, I took a (semi) objective look back at the 1990s nostalgia craze in our politics, from Democrats who remember the time with all the glory and majesty as the most ardent Fox Newsie remembers the Reagan ’80s, to Newt Gingrich’s comeback on the Republican side of the ledger.

Before I sign off for the year next week (I’ll be back with reviews of two late December/early January wide releases, Meryl Streep’s look at Britain’s indomitable Iron Lady, and the awards-bait adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything is Illuminated), I thought that perhaps a more personal look back at what and where I was “coming from” in that article was in order, having come of age in the 1990s myself.

People in my age group — the tail end of “Generation X” (born from 1975 through 1980) — are a funny lot. We were too young to be a part of what is now recognized as “Generation Jones”, the in-betweeners of the Boomers and their children (e.g. President Obama, Bret Easton Ellis, George Stephanopoulous, The Brady Bunch kids). But we’re too old to identify completely with the Millennials of 1985 and 1990 vintage. We still have (and are the last people to have) a working memory of a world before social networks, Wikipedia, iPhone apps, and electronic-based media and magazines took over completely.

And just as my Millennial kid brothers and sisters defined themselves politically by (or in opposition to) Bush II and Cheney in their twilight, and Obama in his rise, my beginning political consciousness was first truly shaped under Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the very beginning of the Bush II era.

When I was in my high school and college years, it never even occurred to me that I would have it “easier” or better than my parents and grandparents, whose glory years came at the height of postwar, pre-global prosperity. In the Roger Sterling 1950s and ’60s, “orderly”, “stable”, and “reliable” were the signs of proper, effective management. But by the time I became an adult, well after the Donald Trumps, Michael Milkens, Barry “Killer” Dillers, and Michael Eisners had taken the reins, those old buzzwords were the textbook definitions of lazy, bad, fire-able management. You wanted a marathon runner, not someone hobbling along on crutches!

And after I watched Bill Clinton wail about “feelin’ yer pain” shortly after assuming office, my teenage heart didn’t bleed; my stomach turned. Watching Clinton reduce the very real fear and pain of Roger & Me and Roseanne-era, lower-middle-class America to drag-queen burlesque–with every teardrop and bitten-lip strategically timed for maximum ratings impact–seemed as offensive and tasteless then as the worst of Bachmann and Palin today. In eight long years of Bill Clinton’s televised reality soap opera, one looks for even one scene that could be described as heroic or graceful or even in good taste, and comes up almost empty.

Then again, being alienated from (and amiably contemptuous of) the antics of my parents generation seemed to come with the territory. My generation came of age watching movies like Clerks and Spanking the Monkey, about smart young men thwarted by their surroundings, whose parents didn’t “get” them (and didn’t want to). We watched TV shows like Friends, 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dawson’s Creek, and Party of Five, where people over 35 all but didn’t exist, like the wah-wah trumpet grownups in a Charlie Brown cartoon.

And if I seem coldly indifferent to the so-called ”prosperity” of the late ’90s, it’s because I was indifferent to it, because it was indifferent to me (and my friends) as we entered our 20s. As a sassy sitcom housekeeper on a 1990s TVLand rerun might have said, “Wasn’t doin’ anything for me, honey!”

After Geocities and Blogspot suddenly made everyone an (unpaid) ”writer”, why, we simply couldn’t have just anyone thinking that they are an Author, a Critic, dahlink! Agents and editors began referring to themselves as “gatekeepers”, and with rejection rates driven well past the 90% margin, those gates became more iron-clad than ever. (It also created a booming business for scam-artist and incompetent “agents” and “editors”, too.) Even veteran authors and journalists started saying that this was the “worst [climate for publishing] they’d ever seen,” that they could “never have made it if things had been like they are today.” (Little did they know what was still to come!)

By the end of the 1990s, unknown writers starting out were suddenly expected to come pre-equipped with bulging “writing portfolios”, referrals from name authors at conferences or tony colleges, and a well-known literary agent representing them before they would even be considered by a major house or magazine. (Unless they testified at OJ’s trial or ran a call-girl operation or got a big rating on MTV Live or Springer — then the industry would come to them.) Freelance paid writing gigs became almost nonexistent.

Of course, expecting all this from some struggling young writer-guy (or gal) waiting tables or clerking at a video store was so laughable in its unrealism, it made the Tea Party’s economic theories look worthy of the Baron de Rothschild. But in this Brave New World, that was filed under the category of “too bad”.

Ditto my friends and acquaintances. Despite our alternative lifestyles and social libertarianism and pro-choiceness, in many ways, we were all as conservatively idealistic as an Ayn Rand character, as we hung out at all the CD stores, Blockbuster Videos, bookstores, and non-Starbucks coffeehouses, that now a decade later exist only in the twilight of our collective memory.

We all thought that, yeah, we’re going to have it harder than before, but still, if we just kept at it, the publishing/media/art/music world would eventually take care of us, just the way it had punched our parents and grandparents generations’ tickets. Everyone’s gotta pay their dues at first, right? Right??

It was during the “prosperous” late ’90s when I had to brutally un-teach myself everything my well-meaning grandparents (who had raised me along with my mother) and my Professor Fifty-Year-Olds had told me. It was when I (and my other friends) learned, to put it coarsely, that simply being polite, sober, and putting up good work on time didn’t get you “jack” in a world where, “I’m not sure I really respond to this,” “We’re undergoing a re-branding”, “That’s not our target demographic”, and “Because I said so!” were the super passwords.

But while publishing (and US manufacturing) “got there first”, at least witnessing this panic-button lockdown gave me a head-start on anticipating the 2000s economy. From the energy companies faced with global warming to the US manufacturers faced with global competition, decades-old business models were upset on an almost daily basis during the past decade.

And most of their leaders would react like the Cookie Monster let loose at Hometown Buffet — mindlessly devouring everything whole in sight while they still could, until things just plain ran out. (Hiya there, Kenny-boy, Dick Fuld, Uncle Bernie!) Why “save” and “plan” for the future, after all — if there might not be a future for your business anymore?

I can still remember the day in January 2000 when I left the theater after seeing my favorite movie that year (and there were a lot to choose from in ‘99 and ‘00), Magnolia. The Aimee Mann/Jon Brion songs played over the closing credits were called “Save Me” and “Nothing is Good Enough”. A perfect capper, I thought, for a decade that didn’t deserve a kiss goodbye, so much as it deserved to be kissed off.

If someone had told me then — or on the two days when the 1990s really died (September 11, 2001, or the day exactly nine months earlier when the Supremes decided Bush vs. Gore) – that one day I or any other thinking person would recall the 1990s as halcyon “good times”, I would’ve laughed in their face.

Yet even I now look back and sometimes think, “Gee, it wasn’t really all that bad.” But I also realize that this is the nostalgia a bypass survivor has for cheeseburgers and chili dogs, that the recovering “alkie” or drug addict has for his dance hall days, that the incest survivor has before she remembered. It’s for the last time we could still pretend that things might work out the way we were always told they were “supposed” to — and get away with it, even for a second.

Perhaps the other best summary of how I feel about the 1990s came from the 1995 memoir of the noted literary author Carolyn See, as she visited her much younger sister (who’d had a serious drug problem). See asked her Sis if there was anything she wished she could do over again. Her sister immediately remembered her late boyfriend, a handsome dealer who’d drowned in the swimming pool after a drug-induced heart seizure. She said wistfully, but with little hesitation, “I wish [he] were still alive and we were back in business. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but it’s true.”

I think that’s how many of us look back on the ’90s today, even if we enjoyed them at the time. We all know deep down that it really wasn’t very good for us. But somehow as we look back today, that doesn’t seem the point anymore.

The holidays are always a time for nostalgia, and this year has seen a growing outbreak of nostalgia for one decade in particular. Democrats are ranking Bill Clinton (who left office ranked by most historians in the 25-30 range of our forty-odd Presidents) now tied with JFK (and well ahead of that Cold War “perpetrator” Truman, as Democrats of the Gore Vidal/Howard Zinn school remember him). And the face of 1990s Republicanism, Newt Gingrich, is now poised to win the 2012 nomination.

One of the best politico-cultural books published at the end of the ’90s was David Frum’s bestseller, The ’70s: How We Got Here. It rightly pointed out that years after “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!”, barking civil-rights dogs, and even the early ’70s “Impeach Nixon” were consigned to the ash heap of history, it was the Ford/Carter era — gay rights, abortion (Roe vs. Wade) and women in the workplace, quota-based affirmative action and busing, violent slasher movies and “jiggly” nighttime soaps, and the 1978-80 “tax revolt” — that really established the grammar of domestic politics for the next two decades.

As someone who came of age in the 1990s, I’m becoming more and more convinced that we might be in need of a “sequel” (and what could be more ’70s, or ’90s, than a sequel?)

At the time, the 1990s suffered from a self-hatred worthy of a Philip Roth novel. Conservatives called them the “Holiday from History”. Liberal Newsweek contemptuously damned the 2000 election that capped them off (which turned out to be the most important and divisive election in postwar history) as “The Seinfeld Election: A Show About Nothing.” Yet the more I look back, and the more ’90s nostalgia rises today, the more I’m convinced that it was the other great decade that gave us life as we know it today — for better, and for worse.

For one, just as Ronald Reagan today is remembered for his myth than his (mostly positive) reality, every sentence about the 1990s is now legally required to begin with, “What didnt’cha like about it — the peace, or the prosperity?” in Democratic circles, just as Reagan’s name must always be mentioned with cathedral-like reverence on FoxNews. It seems today’s Democrats have decided if they couldn’t “beat” the canonization of St. Ronnie, they could at least join the game.

But ominously for today, the prosperity of the 1990s didn’t always work for those employed outside of Wall Street or Silicon Valley. If you went to work on December 30, 1989 at a thriving auto-parts factory in Flint Michigan, or a booming aerospace plant in Lakewood, Santa Ana, or Seattle — and ended your workday on December 30, 2000 greeting people at the big-box store or rockin’ a telemarketing cubicle, the 1990s were anything but “prosperous”.

In the Human Resources 1990s, the days when a Mary Richards or Peggy Olsen could walk into an office with their community-college degree, answer an ad, have a hiring interview, and start work all in the same day or two, faded to black. Technological change, while primitive by post-IPad standards, was hitting photon-torpedo speed: in 1989, “Email” was barely a word, and as late as January 1995, there were barely 10,000 known Internet websites, not just in America and Canada, but in the entire world. Just four or five years later — at the height of the Yahoo-Google-AOL ”dot com” era (with 3 million websites and counting) – we were living in a different virtual reality.

And while there was “peace” (except for little tiffs like Oklahoma City, Columbine, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Elian Gonzalez, Haiti, Bosnia, Mogadishu, Somalia, the 1998 embassy bombings, the USS Cole…) it was the decade when the homefront culture war boiled over. As the Cold War wound down in 1990, a Russian politician famously joked that the Russians were going to do the worst thing yet to the United States. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, “We will leave you without an enemy” to unite the USA.

Once Reagan and Bush were gone, for the first time since Watergate, the Republican party was left without a unifying center of attention — and with a power vacuum the size of the Milky Way. Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, and Dick Cheney quickly inserted themselves in that vacuum — but uber-powerful as they all were, one wonders if they would’ve had a chance of really “taking over” had Reagan or Bush I still been ruling the roost.

Today, as we look at what recently happened to the Republicans after “Dubya” bid us farewell — Palin, Bachmann, Perry, Gingrich, Cain, et al — sound familiar?

Ditto the Democrats — in reverse. Before Clinton, the Democratic party was almost as dysfunctional as the Tea Party-era Republicans are today. By 1995 however, most other A-list Democratic voices had been silenced: Mario Cuomo, Ann Richards, Willie Brown, Kathleen Brown Rice, David Dinkins, Tom Bradley, Dan Glickman.

To paraphrase Susan Hayward’s signature line in Valley of the Dolls, “There’s only ONE star in a Bill Clinton Democratic party, baby — and you’re lookin’ at him!” 1995 was when today’s business buzzwords like “re-branding”, “talking points memos”, and “target demographics” truly arrived at the political railway station.

The 1990s were also when James Carville and Karl Rove’s “permanent campaign mode” came into full effect, with a heapin’ helpin’ from CNN and an upstart called FoxNews. As such, the punishment for anyone who went “off message” — no matter how desperately needed their council was (Brooksley Born and Robert Reich warning against mortgage deregulation in 1998-99; Paul O’Neill battling Cheney on the budget in 2002) — was immediate and intense.

This enforced fear and “party discipline” debased our already garbage-strewn political dialogue into today’s junk-food soundbytes, which happen upon actual middle-class reality only occasionally and by accident, if at all. For those who were (rightly, in my opinion) nauseated by “Death Panels”, “Making Our Own Reality”, and “Deficits Don’t Matter” — remember the equally intelligence-insulting ”Recession-Proof” economy (1999), or the “Irrational Exuberance” of 1997? (They got the “irrational” part right.)

By 1998, people were in such a media-induced Fantasy Island that New Republic plagiarist and fact-cooker Stephen “Shattered” Glass even published an article about a cult of stockbrokers who “worshipped” Alan Greenspan (then modestly branded by Republicans and Democrats alike as “the greatest central banker in modern history”.)

I was even younger and presumably more “innocent” than Glass at the time, but what shocked me wasn’t that Glass had faked his story. What scared me was that even The New Republic was so Kool-Aid-drinkingly irresponsible by then that it could believe such a thing as anything other than Conan O’Brien/Jon Stewart style satire. Instead of being a warning, however, it was a portent of things to come.

The 1990s were when the Snooki-ization of book publishing and the Ann Coulter vs. Michael Moore rebranding of ”news” shows began: OJ Simpson. The Menendez Brothers. Tonya vs. Nancy. JonBenet Ramsey. Rodney King. Robert Blake (if early 2001 counts). Was there ever a previous decade with more hyped-up, race/sex overtoned celebrity crimes and “trials of the century?”

Here’s a listing from a typical TV day in 1998, taken from an old TVGuide (back when TVGuide actually had local listings — remember those?) Geraldo, Jerry Springer, Jenny Jones, Maury, and Ricki Lake ruled the daytime, while Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, Hard Copy, American Journal, EXTRA!, and Access Hollywood owned the weeknights. And that’s not even mentioning the reality-show explosion that was just around the corner, when Survivor and Big Brother knocked it out of the park in 2000.

Finally and perhaps most importantly of all, the 1990s was when the “Red State” vs. “Blue State” divide really reared its ugly head. California voted Republican for President in 1988; New York and Massachusetts did likewise in 1984. As late as 1994, multi-ethnic, gay-friendly powerhouses like CA, NY, Mass (and the cities of LA and New York) elected Republican governors and mayors — a feat demographically impossible in those areas without strong African-American, Latino, and liberal Jewish crossover.

But by decade’s end, what little was left of the midcentury Great Consensus was not just merely dead, but really and most sincerely dead. Red States became increasingly immune to Democrats, except for the occasional “DINO” like Baucus, Nelson, or Lincoln; while Republicans disappeared from the coasts, except for a tiny handful of openly pro-gay and pro-choice Rockefeller Repubs like George Pataki and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

All in all, the 1990s were a lot of things, but a “Holiday from History” or a “peaceful”, contented paradise they weren’t. Yet despite all the megabytes that have gone under the bridge since then, from Facebook and Myspace to iPads and Twitter, however you remember them (to quote George H.W. Bush’s excellent Inaugural reference to Vietnam), it seems that even in today’s Reality 2.0, its that decade which “cleaves us still.”

As we noted last week, TLC recently premiered a multi-part documentary miniseries on the lives of All-American Muslims (airing Sunday nights at 10pm Eastern/Pacific), looking at the day-to-day lives of what is perhaps the last minority or religious group that its socially acceptable to (openly) demonize.

The series’ candid cameras have zeroed in on the seemingly-unlikely haven of Dearborn, MI – home to perhaps the largest per-capita concentration of Muslims in the US and Canada. (Many bars refuse to serve hard liquor, football jocks take time out to attend to afternoon prayers.) “Being in Dearborn allowed us to practice our religion”, one participant notes, while another reminds how “hostile” the larger environment became after 9/11.

The opener, aired last Sunday, focused on an Islamic woman who was about to marry an Irish Catholic man. She wanted her boyfriend to convert to ensure her children would be born into Islamic culture and to please her old-world father, more than out of sincere religious or philosophical observance, but her soon-to-be husband had some serious queries, to be sure. Another subject was a liberated, stylish, and sexy young businesswoman who looked far more like the stereotype of a blingy reality show queen than a “burka baby”–a party and events planner who dreamed of opening up a club in Dearborn, to the raised eyebrows of her family and friends.

And this weekend’s coming episode focuses on the town’s Muslim football coach, as he tries to reconcile his predominately Muslim athletes’ desire to observe the upcoming Ramadan holidays with their near-religious devotion to sports.

Back in 2005, I wrote about an excellent lo-fi documentary film called Back to Bosnia for the American Film Institute, which told the story of a young woman who returned to Bosnia with her family to try to reclaim their old family apartment, only to realize the sad truth of the old saw, “you can’t go home again.”

This young lady, born in 1977 as I recall, came of age as the Cold War was thawing out fast–she remembered MTV, Madonna, Beverly Hills 90210, blockbuster movies, and all the other favorites of “decadent” Western culture from her youth behind the fraying iron curtain. But Milosevic’s war of terror finally forced her family to flee to the US, until the coast was clear. Her Muslim identity was never exactly a secret, but it wasn’t the central thing in her life, and she certainly bore no resemblance to the submissive child-woman or cold-eyed fanatic of Islamic stereotypes – something that amused and irritated her in America whenever she told people that she was indeed a Muslim. “It’s like they expect me to go around in a burka or something.”

In much the same way, All-American Muslim is skillfully edited and features respectful yet sometimes heated discussions among the subjects about real issues (instead of just fashion faux pas or voting off the island.) The program takes pains to show how ordinary and normal most of the profilees are (while their religious and cultural commitments vary wildly from person to person, there don’t seem to be any cartoonish firebrands among them.) Indeed, you’d never know some of them were Muslim – which is partially the point.

Much of 20th century literature was devoted to the ins and outs of assimilation, or the impossibility thereof, and the price that melting into the melting pot could extract. First there were the rich girls and poor boys, the handsome young British or New England junior shopkeeper, working ”in trade” while scheming to get together with the pretty young heiress from the centuries-old “good family.” Then came the Jewish princes, Irish Catholic fighters, and Italian mafiosi, bound by family and tradition to one world, even while lusting after total acceptance in a new one. And when the glass ceiling that kept African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians out of mainstream novels and serious films was finally shattered, the question of how “white” one had to force oneself to be to succeed in the larger world began to be addressed.

Adding something as subjective and volatile as religion to the mix only thickens the plot, whether in reality or even just reality TV. You have a beard-and-tassel wearing Jewish man, with two dishwashers and sets of plates and silverware to keep extra kosher, living in an Orthodox community. What does he think, within himself, of his secular cousin with the Catholic wife and “inter-faithless” kids, whose favorite food is lobster bisque and most observed charity is the ACLU?

Likewise, the John Hagee or Jerry Falwell fundamentalist, with their literal belief in eternal hellfire and judgment, waving their Bible in the face of gays and feminist women, certainly thinks that they are following in Christ’s example. But so does the John Shelby Spong or “Jesus Seminar” postmodernist, even as they defiantly un-believe in such Christian basics as a resurrection, a prayer-answering God, or even a conscious afterlife. And both of them would hold the other in the utterest contempt, barely recognizing each other as fellow human beings, much less as “Christians”.

So what makes a person a “Muslim” in America, in our polarized, post-9/11, Tea Party vs. Occupy, culture-warring world? Is it the religion itself, in its literal or basic interpretation, or the larger culture and tradition of the Islamic community? And how can one person commit the worst atrocities since the darkest days of the Cold War or Auschwitz in the name of Allah, while another follower of the Koran can look and act and conduct their family and lifestyle just like you and me?

These questions may never be possible to entirely answer. But All-American Muslim does deserve credit for asking the questions on a large and watchable cultural platform, with relatable-seeming people, and letting each subjects try to answer this question for themselves–in quintessentially American fashion.

One of the things America loves (or just loves to hate), about its political leaders, are the schizophrenically Shakespearean levels some of them are able to approach in simultaneously doing so much good, and yet also so much harm. Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush are all major contestants in this competition.

Like the proverbial “girl with the curl”, when they were good, they were very good, and when they were bad — look out!!

But perhaps no other figure of the past century of American life had both as big a credit — and debit — column as the late founder and director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover, who’s life gets the big-screen treatment starting this week, courtesy of director Clint Eastwood, screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk), and a bravura starring turn by Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role.

The film jumps across decades from Hoover’s youth in the returning postwar (World War I, that is) Washington and his 1930s heyday (the Lindbergh kidnapping, Al Capone and Prohibition/Depression era organized crime) to his twilight years under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. But its central characters stay constant: besides Hoover, there is of course his longtime partner at work (and at home), Clyde Tolson (beautifuly played by Armie Hammer, who played both Winkelvosses, or the “Winkelvii” as Aaron Sorkin’s Mark Zuckerberg called them, in last year’s The Social Network).

The only other person whom Hoover truly loves on the same level (emotionally and perhaps physically) is his executive secretary (for 54 years!), Helen Gandy (Naomi Watts). When they first meet around 1919-20, Hoover is so taken with her he almost immediately proposes marriage, which the young woman almost as immediately shoots down. At first Hoover thinks it’s because she’s turned off by him, or doesn’t respect him; yet her real reason is completely to the contrary.

As anyone who’s read The Feminine Mystique knows, in those days there was almost no slopover between a “career girl” and a married woman — especially for educated women with well-off professional husbands. (Think Julianne Moore in Far From Heaven or Betty Draper in Mad Men.)

If Miss Gandy were to marry Hoover, it would have essentially required (and resigned) her to a life as one of the “ladies who lunch” in Washington, and she might have had less contact (and perhaps even less sex) with J. Edgar than whomever took her place in the office. Remaining part of the adventure as his private secretary, she realizes that she can be the best wife he could ever have, and Hoover soon realizes it too.

The fourth wheel of the “triangle” is Hoover’s mother, with whom he lived until her death, played with royally subtle menace by Dame Judi Dench. She’s “Mrs. Bates” all right — but more fascinatingly, she’s Gypsy’s mother on Broadway, too. Mrs. Hoover unrelentingly stage-manages and backseat-drives her son’s career to the center of Washington influence, devoted to seeing her son “restore” her family’s social lines in DC society.

Hoover’s uglier sides are shown in miniature — his marrow-level hatred for Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders (a feeling foreshadowed by his mother, who fired a black housekeeper for being uppity), though his own live-in housekeeper was a dedicated African-American woman. Also Hoover’s jealousy and dislike of the Kennedys, Bobby Kennedy in particular (played neatly by Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donovan.) The movie shows Hoover listening in on tapes of Dr. King having sex with a mistress, and apoplectic with rage when King defies his blackmail to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

But the passive irony of J. Edgar’s story, at least the way J. Edgar tells it, is that Dr. King probably could not have accomplished what he accomplished had it not been for the legal and procedural precedents that Hoover had created.

I can remember watching Al Sharpton on MSNBC when he said to the effect that the main accomplishment of the Civil Rights Movement was that “ONLY the FEDERAL government can decide!” the bottom line on domestic, as well as foreign policy – education, healthcare (see ”individual mandate, the”), housing, employment, and all the rest.

And as far apart as the Rev. Sharpton is politically, on that rhetorical point, J. Edgar Hoover couldn’t have agreed more.  Much of the story of J. Edgar (and J. Edgar) is devoted to showing how dedicated Hoover was to the federalization of law enforcement — indeed, virtually all law — and how he insisted his agents be the near-antithesis of the proletarian, Gunsmoke-style town sheriff. The proud Washington U graduate demanded prestige university educations for all applicants, in an era (the 1920s and ’30s) when someone with an 8th-grade education was almost upper-middle-class.

Watching J. Edgar, we’re watching both a proud intellectual “elitist” and the ultimate “big government conservative” at work. And Hoover’s reaction (some might say over-reaction) to the early wave of post-WWI “Bolshevik” radicalism is a clear metaphor for today’s controversy over how-far-is-too-far in violating civil freedoms to fight a terror threat.

The movie briefly touches on Hoover’s fascination with celebrities, and his eagerness to exploit the fearless, tough “G-man” image in everything from comic books to movies and TV. But it mostly ignores the unhealthy interest his FBI took in the personal and sex lives of stage and screen stars and singers. (This omission rather shocked me, especially in a Hollywood movie — it seems almost like doing a biopic on Joe McCarthy without even mentioning the Blacklist.)

Even if you think that his other civil-liberties violations were for the greater good, what possible excuse can there be for the numerous red files and “investigations” on closeted gay movie stars, actresses and singers who were having affairs or had an abortion, who in Hollywood and Broadway was an alcoholic or used drugs, et cetera – all of which Hoover’s FBI routinely opened up?

More unrealistically yet, one of the last scenes shows Hoover and Tolson, now “the old married couple” having dinner together (and showing every liver-spotted year of their advancing ages), recoiling at a newly-inaugurated President Nixon’s demand that they launch files and investigations on top newspaper editors and network news anchors. Hoover seems both appalled and threatened that Nixon’s first question to him was ”Where’s MY file, and what does it say?”

Like a villian at the end of a classic Columbo episode, Hoover is shocked, shocked, that someone else knows exactly how he operates and is openly “on to” him – and might even be better at the game (that he invented) than he is.

(I have no idea what basis there may or may not be in such a conversation, but my smell-detector went off. From what’s come out about Mr. Hoover’s tenure in the FBI, I would be dumbstruck if he had any First Amendment qualms at all about zeroing in on the press for blackmail or intimidation, especially as the film shows how he made a practice of blackmailing every US President in his reign. Although he did resent Nixon for poaching on his turf — a resentment shared by more than one of his staff. Remember that Watergate’s “Deep Throat” was top-level FBI man and Hoover protege Mark Felt.) Although in fairness, the scene ends with an emotional payoff that’s almost worth any factual inaccuracy.

As to the Big Question: do Hoover and Tolson ever, to put it coarsely, “get it on” in the film (or for that matter, Hoover and Miss Gandy)? The answer, for better or worse, is no. J. Edgar is, just as Hoover would have wanted, much more concerned with showing how his business life and upbringing shaped his personal life, rather than the other way around.

I will offer this “spoiler”, though – Hoover does put on a dress and jewellery in one scene — although, believe it or not, there is no camp or comedy value to the scene whatsoever; the context in which he does “do the deed” is both ghastly and heartbreaking.

And it’s also worth remembering today that, for all that has come out (in both truth and rumor) about Hoover’s arm-in-arm assistance of Joe McCarthy’s witch hunts, his civil rights abuses and racism and homophobia, there was and is something truly heroic about this unique and uniquely American man.

What would have become of America during the very real “subversive threats” of World War II and the Cold War, had it not been for the intelligence gathered by Hoover’s FBI? Would every major police force have even half theCSI-technology they do today (and would it be accepted in court) had it not been for men like Hoover, who championed the basics of forensic investigation (fingerprints, blood spatter and wood/material patterns, footprints, bodily fluid evidence, etc)? Could policework ever have seemed as glamorous as a life of colorful crime — be it the Edward G. Robinson and Jimmy Cagney movies of Hoover’s younger days, or the countercultural rebellions of Bonnie & Clyde andEasy Rider near his end — in popular culture, without him?

J Edgar goes far — perhaps too far — in projecting Hoover as almost as much of a hero as his highly-controlled PR would have had it during his lifetime. Yet while the real J Edgar would have probably hated to see any of the secrets the film discloses (or even implies) come out in the end, one still gets the feeling that in the end, J Edgar is exactly the kind of biopic he’d have wanted.

A new and very different kind of reality show that will be premiering this Sunday night at 10pm (ET/PT) on TLC–one that is perhaps the flip-side of Sarah Palin’s recent reality show–called All-American Muslim. (We’ll be giving the show a full review the week after next, Nov 18th, after we look at the new Clint Eastwood-directed J. Edgar.)

We wanted to note the show’s premiere in advance, as it covers the lives of five Muslim-American families in the seemingly-unlikely locale of Dearborn, Michigan, which has one of the highest per capita concentrations of Muslims in America, and is home to the largest mosque in the US.

According to the series release, “The families featured in the series share the same religion, but lead very distinct lives that often times challenge the Muslim stereotype. From getting married and the birth of a first baby, to juggling busy careers while raising a family, to managing sibling dynamics, All-American Muslim shows how these individuals negotiate universal family issues while remaining faithful to the traditions and beliefs of their faith. Through these families and their diverse experiences, we will explore how [these families] blend their values and traditions with everyday life in America.”

As I’ve noted here before, 2011 has seen many a milestone anniversary for some of the most iconic big screen and small screen achievements. Last December and January, Hill Street Blues, Dynasty, and Magnum PI blew out the candles on their 30th birthday cakes, while All in the Family and Masterpiece Theatre turned the big 4-0.

As such, how can we forget the 70th birthday of what is still considered by most people (both foreign and domestic) to be the greatest movie of all time, Orson Welles’ 1941 tour-de-force, Citizen Kane.

Probably more articles, dissertations, and books have been written about Kane’s effect on cinematic storytelling and screenwriting style than any other movie or TV show, ever. This spot is long enough as it is, so I’m going to leave that largely to those other sources. But this being a political blog, I feel it only right to note the immense — and often comparatively overlooked — sociological and political points that Citizen Kane brilliantly made.

While Kane was a clear allegory to the egomaniacal, late newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst (with some Howard Hughes accents for spice), many of today’s viewers probably see more than a little Rupert Murdoch in the great and powerful Charles Foster Kane. And Kane, both as a person and a movie, made the point that if America and Canada were to ever fall to an authoritarian Dear Leader (unlike say, Russia or Germany), he would probably emerge not from politics, but from the mass media. That he would be an opinion-maker and shaper–rather than a politician whose career depended on shaping his opinions to fit a fickle electorate.

But that’s still only the beginning. For one, the movie is almost worthy of Edith Wharton or Agatha Christie in terms of subtly referencing the iron-handed social class system as it existed a century or so ago. While Mr. Kane wants to keep his young son, once his gold claims have come in, young Charles’ status-conscious and ice-cold mother (played perfectly by future Bewitched witch Agnes Moorehead) knows best.

Clearly the smarter of the two, she knows that for her son to take his now-inevitable place in the elite, he has to be entrusted to the care of the bank guardian and the finest prep schools and Ivy colleges. The best he could become at Ma and Pa’s boarding house was a Beverly Hillbilly; she knows her newly-rich son now needs to learn the “grammar”, the Rules of being ruling class.

Later on, in a blatant reference to Hearst’s longtime relationship with his mistress, silent star Marion Davies, Kane embarks on a romance with a a vulgar vaudeville singer from the nightclubs and “speakeasys”, played by Dorothy Comingore. (In real life, Hearst was noted for insisting that Davies, a talented comedienne in the Lucy/Carole Lombard mode, play in turgid, Joan Crawford-style melodramas, which he thought held more prestige.)

The idea of an upper-class statesman like Kane being involved with a “madcap”, a “flapper”? Maybe as his still-closeted mistress, but now out in the open? Unthinkable! So she had to be most unsuitably remade into an opera diva, into something acceptable to the prevailing standards of “high culture”.

(Today, of course, it is just as often the opposite — the wealthy young party-girl heiress or the “Real Housewife” takes her cues from Britney and Lindsey and Christina Aguilera, much more often than the young actress or model tries to act “upper class”.)

Kane also makes brilliant light of the shameless warmongering that many news titans of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Hearst, Pulitzer, and later, Henry Luce, never tired of, and of the Teddy Rooseveltian notion of war as a spectator sport, instead of a human tragedy. But even it doesn’t quite touch upon arguably the ugliest of Hearst’s biased, real-life legacy: his support for eugenics, and the open racism of his papers against blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and especially Asians (the “yellow peril”) — which gave a “scientific” validation to the idea of “lesser races”, and paved the way for Nazi science.

And on that note, let’s take a look at the America that existed in Charles Foster Kane’s day (and Hearst’s, and Pulitzer’s). America was certainly (and shamefully) segregated by race – but that was just for starters.

From the wintry Wisconsin farmhouse with its German and Scandinavian immigrants, to the julep-sipping Southern ”Big Daddy” on his decayed, post-Civil War plantation. From the Jewish and Irish immigrants in the sweatshops and sewers of New York and Boston, to the grizzled old Butch Cassidy veterans of the Gold Rush, having 25-cent steak and whiskey dinners over poker at Miss Kitty’s in Nevada or Sacramento. These people were all isolated from each other, living effectively in different cultures, different countries, even different worlds.

It was the partial-birth abortion of this very separate and not terribly equal America that is the essential story of our history from Kane’s era until today. Kane died in 1941, just before Pearl Harbor. By the end of the World War II that followed, everyone from Democrats like Dean Acheson to Republicans like Whittaker Chambers, not to mention returning WWII “dogfaces” like William F. Buckley and John F. Kennedy, were coming to realize that this self-contained Old America had become simply untenable after Hitler and Stalin. (Not to mention a little something called the Civil Rights Movement.)

A jerry-rigged, syndicated network of self-contained regions and cultures could never defeat a Nazi Germany or a Soviet Union. (Or compete in today’s merciless global economy, for that matter). Only American could. Only if we were forced — kicking and screaming — to become one nation under God.

And what Citizen Kane both anticipates and teaches is that this would be near-impossible without a national, centralized media to write the all-important “narrative”. Just try to imagine World War II, the Cold War, civil rights, Vietnam and Watergate, the hostage crisis, or all the rest without Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times.

Now as to Murdoch. While Rupert can be accused of pushing a right-wing agenda and enabling the Tea Party extremists on his news channels and newspapers, a look at his recent entertainment offerings tells another story. When I turn on House, New Girl, The Simpsons, Rescue Me, Nip/Tuck, Archer, The Shield, Fringe, something tells me I’m not watching Ralph Reed or James Dobson’s TV Top Ten. The Fox feature films being made by Oliver Stone, let alone the gay-friendly indies and slasher films of Fox Searchlight, aren’t exactly a typical “conservative” clarion call, either.

Likewise in Citizen Kane, Charles Foster Kane had no real political ideology other than himself. His story is about the pursuit of raw power, to remake the world not in a “conservative” or “liberal” image but in one’s own image. And that may be Kane’s clearest analogy yet to Rupert Murdoch, and other modern, aging Old Media titans like Ted Turner, Barry Diller, or Sumner Redstone.

In that way, the ironic ending, as Kane deliriously flashes back to his lost, simple, small-town boyhood and his childhood sled, symbolizes Kane’s greatest fear. That in the end, all that he stood for, all the influence and power that meant so much to him, would be burnt up in the incinerator of time and history, just like old “Rosebud” was.

He needn’t have worried. Today, almost all major book publishers, TV and cable networks, and feature film studios are owned by no more than 6 or 8 international conglomerates. So much so that the one thing Ann Coulter and Michael Moore can agree on is that it’s the “monopoly media”, an “opinion cartel”.

But while Old Media moguls like Murdoch and Redstone are in their eighties, a new generation of would-be Kanes is reshaping American culture, with a socially-networked, wired world where everybody is a “journalist”. How many people — including and political leader, even Bill Clinton or George W. Bush — have had the influence on the lives of most Americans, or on the economy itself, that Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and the late Steve Jobs had over the past 10 or 20 years?

So let’s all look back at what is still arguably the Greatest Movie Ever Made, for its stunning artistic and cinematic achievements. But let’s also bear in mind that we’re watching the first “meta-media” movie too, where the subject of the 20th century’s greatest form of mass communication was mass communication itself. The perfect movie metaphor for the past 70 years, where The Media itself became — and continues to be – The Message.

For the next month, starting this Sunday, PBS takes a most interesting four-week look back at America in Primetime, a production of the late Peter Jennings’ Documentary Group, in association with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.

The series appropriately coincides not only with many PBS station fundraisers, but more portentously with the infamous November “sweeps” period, which will decide what new shows get a January renewal, and which shows will fade to black for good, in the commercial TV sphere.

America in Primetime is the latest in PBS’ recent explorations of our small-screen sociopolitical scene, coming on the heels of the second batch of their Emmy-nominated Pioneers of Television specials (which, full disclosure – I worked on) and which aired in January and February in most markets. (A prior season ran in early 2008.) The difference being largely that while the star-studded Pioneers focused on genres of programming (talk/variety and game shows, sitcoms, crime dramas, Sci-Fi, Westerns, and so forth), Primetime utilizes more of an “auteur theory” towards TV producer-writers and showrunners, as well as the stars, and zeroes in on the different archetypes and themes explored on television.

The premiere episode (Oct. 30th on most PBS stations, with reruns during the week) focuses on “The Independent Woman”, tracking the evolution of women on the small screen from zany housewives like Lucy Ricardo and Laura Petrie to high-powered executives like Murphy Brown, the Grey’s Anatomy gals, and The Good Wife. And perhaps most importantly, the transitional figures — Mary Tyler Moore’s immortal Mary Richards (and today’s flashback proto-Mary, Elizabeth Moss’ Peggy Olsen on Mad Men), followed by working-class heroine and “domestic goddess” Roseanne.

Episode Two (Nov 6th), flips the coin to “The Man of the House”, focusing on sitcom daddies and family patriarchs, from fathers of the year like Ward Cleaver, Father Knows Best, Cliff Huxtable, and Ray Barone, to edgier dads like Archie Bunker (and his near-antitheses, gay papa bears Cameron and Mitchell on Modern Family.) The series’ third installment (Nov 13th), mines the rich territory of high school and college horrors and TV’s freaks and geeks, from Gilligan of Gilligan’s Island to producer/screenwriter Vince Gilligan’s creation on Breaking Bad, in “The Misfits”.

But it’s the fourth installment that saves the best for last, especially from a political or social point of view, in the somewhat mistitled Nov. 20th finale, “The Crusader”. While a “crusader” might suggest Dr. Quincy or Lou Grant tearing some bureaucrat or abuser a new one in a Very Socially Relevant Episode, or a white-hat hero like Perry Mason, Marshal Dillon, or Joe Friday (who are used as contrasts), the real focus here is on TV’s more recent, deeply flawed, often anti-social anti-heroes.

From Jack Bauer’s impossible moral dilemmas between torture and murder on one hand and stopping global terror and assassinations on the other on 24, to the frankly abusive and beyond-politically-incorrect policemen like NYPD Blue’s Det. Sipowicz and The Shield’s Vic Mackey; from crime-causer Tony Soprano and white-collar sociopath Don Draper to Andre Braugher’s tortured tour-de-force as an African-American Jesuit Homicide (Life on the Streets) sergeant. All of them, searching for the meaning of life (and often coming up empty) amongst their parade of ruined lives and helpless victims, doing the dirty work and cleaning up the messes most of us would rather avoid or pretend weren’t there. This episode is especially “must see” TV for small-screen sociologists and politically-minded viewers.

The only major drawback of the documentary is the amount of material left behind, which many discerning viewers and TV aficionados might notice. While M*A*S*H, All in the Family, and Mary Tyler Moore are covered (and how could they not be?), the series essentially flashes from the beginnings of modern television to the present (mid-to-late 1990s to today) with little bridgework in between.

An episode on TV’s “Independent Women” without reference to Angie Dickinson’s Police Woman, The Avengers’ Emma Peel, or even That Girl or Cagney and Lacey? A “misfits” episode minus Jimmie Walker from Good Times, Lieutenant Columbo, Mr. Spock, or Al Bundy? Even in the last episode’s hall of TV heroes, the likes of Kojak, Cannon, Mannix, Captain Kirk, Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-0, Jim Rockford –even Thomas Magnum and the Hill Street Blues — are almost nowhere to be found.

However, this is a query which I point out mainly because, having worked on programs like these, I can say firsthand that one of the most painful and tiresome parts of the writing and editing are the decisions of what to leave on the cutting room floor. More often than not, one is writing with the eraser as much as the pen. And for better or worse, there’s no narration — and fortunately no heavy-handed or shoehorned theories, either. America In Primetime lets the storytellers (the actors and producer/writers) tell the stories.

The documentary does seem top-heavy on cable offerings of recent years, reflecting PBS’s similar upscale-educated demographic (which cable shows crave), although especially in its final installment, top-quality networkers like House, Twin Peaks,and NYPD Blue get equal billing.

More than anything else, though, America in Primetime succeeds in provoking fodder for discussion and argument within oneself as well as “with” the programs itself, about what is and isn’t there, as well as with any interested family and friends. Just like – I hope – a good movie or TV review occasionally does.

America in Primetime runs October 30 through November 20 on PBS, check your local listings.

This week, Kevin Spacey and Stanley Tucci lead an all-star cast (including Demi Moore, Simon Baker, Paul Bettany, and Jeremy Irons, plus rising Star Trek newcomer Zachary Quinto) in the latest cinema exploration of The Day The Money Died, Margin Call.

Set over the course of a single day (clearly sometime between June and September of 2008), Margin Call is a The Queen-like “reimagining” of what might have gone on the day Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns collapsed, from within the locked-down walls of the company itself.

The other highest-profile financial-meltdown movies, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps and HBO’s Too Big to Fail were all flash, infusing almost every frame with grand, almost Shakespearean “epic-ness”, plus Sorkin-esque rapid-fire dialog and frantically paced action.  They wanted to tell the whole “macro” story of the 2008 collapse in broad strokes and grand scenes.

In contrast, writer/director J.C. Chandor largely locks us into the top-floor board room that’s now become a war room, in the deserted midnight high rise that now overlooks the destiny of American finance. The movie is shot in the same ice-water cold, wintry bleached tones one might remember from a ’70s paranoia thriller like Three Days of the Condor or All the President’s Men, or a low-budget, light horror indie, with a slasher movie’s ever-increasing sense of dread.

The day starts badly, with a brutal downsizing of the company’s “risk management” department, including its senior supervisor (Stanley Tucci), who’s in the midst of preparing a report about some “irregularities” on the company’s balance sheets.  (His firing is a straight homage to Jason Reitman’s wonderful Up in the Air, complete with business-buzzword speaking lady executives and campy “career transition” packets.)

Tucci’s character himself is a blatant metaphor for the real-life Cassandras (such as Bill Clinton’s chief regulator Brooksley Born and George W. Bush’s Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill) who saw what was coming – and were summarily kicked to the curb because of it.  His newly-eviscerated department also mirrors the willfully lax accountability and oversight that characterized the late ’90s and ’00s financial world.  Nothing can be allowed to upset “market confidence” or distract from the all-important “narrative” that Things Just Get Better All The Time – least of all in the “crisis management” department!

But Tucci’s already turned over some of his findings to a young protege (Zachary Quinto), who’s a real rocket scientist — literally.  (He moved away from engineering new technologies to high finance because “the pay was considerably better”, just as Tucci himself now regrets having abandoned civil engineering to put his mathematical formulas and algebraic equations to use in the service of mortgage-backed securities.)  Quinto downloads the files that Tucci secretly passed him about their asset/balance sheets, and sees that the company, despite maintaining an illusion of health, is literally hemorrhaging red ink, thanks to the first signs of decline as the real-estate bubble starts to deflate.

With the firm already leveraged to the hilt, they’ve already passed the point of insolvency and bankruptcy. And if house prices were to decline 25% from their peak over the next year or two (which already happened in real life during the last big slowdown — the early ’90s recession in southern California or late 1980s Texas, for example), the company will be in The Producers territory, owing 100% of values to multiple investors.  The party’s over.

Now the big guns descend on the firm, literally like locusts (ferried to the top of the building in their executive helicopters), for a long day’s journey into morning, a morning that will see a brutal wake-up call for the world economy.  These designer-clad sharks and cobras — played by Spacey, Moore, Baker, and uber-boss CEO Irons — now have only one decision left to make.  (Irons’ character is named “John Tuld” — as close to “Dick Fuld” as you can get without being criminally libelous or committing plagiarism.)

Like a company debating whether or not to dump a gusher of steaming, hazardous waste into a pristine lake, while everyone else tries to kid themselves, the cold-bloodedly logical Irons knows that when a ship as big as their firm sinks, a domino-effect panic and Wall Street meltdown will be all but inevitable anyway, one way or the other.  The only question is, do we take our medicine along with the rest of the suckers, or are we the first ones to jump off the Titanic and save at least part of our shirts, by knowingly misrepresenting the value of the stocks in a marathon sell-off, until the jig is up?

While the established stars have the showoff roles, perhaps the heart of Margin Call beats in Gossip Girl stud Penn Badgley’s chest, thanks to his brilliant, lizardly-yet-sympathetic performance as Quinto’s company sidekick and best friend.  Just 24 hours ago, he was breathing a sigh of relief that he’d survived the initial downsizing, was on the fast-track to success, partying and cruising and doing cocaine, a king of the world.

Now his firm is going down, and as 23-year-old startup-man on the totem pole, Baker and Irons are going to dispatch him with extreme prejudice — and he knows it. “All I wanted was to do this!” he begs, breaking down in the men’s room, as Baker’s casually cruel ice-king continues shaving without even cutting himself.

Of course, we live in a world jam-packed with people who “just wanted” to work at all sorts of once-viable careers and businesses — but they can’t anymore, because the ground’s shifted beneath their feet.  And Baker’s dispassionate shrugging off perfectly mirrors our current political system’s response to these people’s plight (which seems basically to be, “Well, sucks to be you…”)

“Look at them,” Badgley sighs earlier, indicating at the break-dawn traffic, as he and Bettany drive outside the office on a mission to bring Tucci back before the news gets out. “They have no idea what’s going to happen to them today.”  Spacey even allows his own son, who has investments in the company, to take a brutal loss, albeit he apparently let him know before he lost everything. (How very kind of him.)

In perhaps the film’s key scene, Baker exhales that he feels like he’s fallen into a bad dream.  “That’s funny,” Spacey replies mordantly.  “I feel like we’ve just woken up.”

In a previous article of mine, one of my commentors wondered, “What kind of economic Kool-Aid were we drinking?” to think that the across-the-board, postwar prosperity that ran from Truman and Ike until Ford and Carter — which most Americans still regard as the benchmark of “normal” – could’ve been sustained indefinitely? Even in spite of massive global/geopolitical and technological change?

So instead of dealing with these inconvenient truths and paradigm shifts, we spent the last 15 years papering them over.  And the movie makes it crystal clear that these Wally Wall Streets realized that’s exactly what they were doing with their careers — and even told themselves that there was maybe a sort of “nobility” to it.  A dot-com bubble here, a real-estate boom there, a fresh coat of surpluses and a new lawn of tax cuts, and presto!  The dilapidated old fixer-upper with the leaky plumbing and termitey roof could still pass for new.

Until September of 2008, that is, when the place finally collapsed on itself.  But even in (or because of) disaster, as Irons notes – for some, there’s money still to be made.

Ultimately, like a David Mamet or Edward Albee stageplay, with its heightened drama in claustrophobic surroundings, Margin Call asks the morality-play question:  Would you do the “right” thing?  Especially if you knew that the economy was probably about to collapse anyway, and it’d just be a matter of degree?  Or would you take the $2 million bonuses and golden parachutes and dump the toxic assets, knowing full well you were lying to people whose lives you would ruin – but at least you’d have protected your family and your otherwise very precarious future?

Unlike the grand opera (if not opera buffo) stylings of Too Big to Fail and Money Never Sleeps, Margin Call brings things down to your level — whether you want it to or not.  What would YOU do, if you were in these Masters of the Universe’s designer shoes?