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marmar

(77,102 posts) Sat Jul 2, 2022, 09:16 AM Jul 2022

The Jan. 6 Hearings Are a TV Hit With an Unexpected Main Character

The Jan. 6 Hearings Are a TV Hit With an Unexpected Main Character
The breakout show of the summer has it all.

BY LAURA MILLER
JULY 01, 20222:37 PM

(Slate) The surprise summer hit series—Survivor in 2000, Stranger Things in 2016—has been a phenomenon ever since television broke away from its old fall-centric schedule. But this year, for the first time, the summer’s most addictive, talked-about limited series is the work of a congressional committee. Even before the shocking, last-minute testimony on Tuesday by Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, the hearings of the House’s Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol have presented sleekly mounted, smartly constructed narratives full of revelations and portent. Hutchinson merely provided the late-season twist to turn the hearings into a bonafide barnburner, politics transformed into prestige cable drama with a cast of indelible characters to debate around the water cooler.

Former ABC News president James Goldston, brought in to help the committee organize a vast amount of material into a coherent presentation, has been credited for much of this success. That said, plenty of the grabbiest techniques used in the hearings come not from news reporting but from scripted fiction. Episode 2 ended with a tantalizing preview, a clip of former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann—the source of much enjoyably salty videotaped testimony—saying “I told him, ‘You’re out of your effing mind!’” without revealing who exactly he said it to. You had to tune in the next week to find out. (It was the disheveled kooky-uncle figure in the story, John Eastman, the main proponent of the theory that Mike Pence could overturn the election on Jan. 6.)

Of course, the major players in this saga—Trump and his loyalists—are largely missing from the stage, even if they do appear in video clips. The dominant Trump wing of the GOP refused to participate in the hearings, presumably so it could denounce them as a partisan “kangaroo court.” This move left the committee able to craft a tight, suspenseful story free of the usual grandstanding and objections typical of proceedings like the two Trump impeachments. In place of the expected bloviating, bickering, time-wasting politicians, citizens see a sober assemblage of grown-ups shaking their heads over the depths to which the Trump administration sunk, along with helpful graphics and shocking footage of unhinged fanatics screaming for Mike Pence’s head on the Capitol steps.

Presiding over it all are the grandfatherly chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson, (D-Miss.) and vice-chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who resembles one of those formidably capable moms who never has to shout at her kids because her I’m-so-disappointed-in-you face is the most devastating reproach conceivable. Neither displays any anger publicly—always a tricky proposition for a woman or a Black man—just sadness, dismay, and an immense amount of concern. For Cheney in particular, this is a tough needle to thread at a time when any white woman who seems scoldy gets dismissed as a Karen. She pulls it off masterfully, to the degree that I’ve even seen a few men, otherwise opposed to Cheney’s policy positions, confess online to having developed sheepish crushes on her. Thompson and Cheney have described themselves as “friends” with the kindly Thompson—reassuring Shay Moss not to be nervous about testifying and warmly greeting her mother, Lady Ruby—playing approachable good cop to the sterner Cheney. It’s always Thompson, for example, who makes the committee’s plea to potential witnesses to come forward. Wouldn’t anyone rather confess to him? ..........(more)

https://slate.com/culture/2022/07/jan-6-hearings-cassidy-hutchinson-liz-cheney.html