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CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
begin quote from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/arts/television/dnc-roll-call-vote.html
The D.N.C. Offers Calamari Counterprogramming
At the pandemic-altered convention, the usually dull roll call became a travelogue of American diversity and comeback squid.
O beautiful, for spacious skies, for … amber plates of calamari?
The presidential convention roll call, where delegates shout their states’ praises while enumerating their votes, is an institution, for better and worse. If you’re a political reporter or elections junkie, it’s a nostalgic callback to the days when nominations were decided on the floor in throaty, smoky fights. If you’re a typical viewer, it’s time to click over and catch a few episodes of “House Hunters.”
This year’s roll call at the Democratic National Convention, like so many pandemic-required improvisations, was different: It stitched together video from iconic sites in 57 American states and territories. But unlike some other changes, it was neither weird nor unnerving. It was, dare I say it, better.
The nomination of Joseph R. Biden turned into a tour of a geographically and culturally diverse country, an eye-catching video civics lesson, homespun and corny in the best way — a surprisingly moving virtual travelogue for a time when most of us can’t do much traveling.
The package kicked off in Selma, Ala., where Representative Terri Sewell spoke from the night-lit Edmund Pettus Bridge, the site of the legendary 1965 civil rights protest, connecting the country’s history to the recent racial-justice demonstrations, the death of Rep. John Lewis (who was nearly killed in the original protest) and the party’s call for a renewal of the Voting Rights Act.
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From there, we skipped across landscapes and oceans: an environmentalist call on the shore of Alaska; masked soldiers and colorfully dressed delegates in American Samoa; a middle schoolteacher backed by cactuses in Covid-stricken Arizona. In Colorado, an immigrant family worried about sending their kids back to school. My own home state, Michigan, parked its shiny cars on America’s lawn for a few seconds.
Most memorably, and memeably, a Rhode Island speaker with a chowder-thick accent boasted about the efforts of seafood industry to survive the pandemic in the state — that’s “the calamari comeback state of Rhode Island” to you, pal — while a beefy, masked chef stared silently at the camera, hoisting a platter of the crisp-fried squid appetizer.
If I were running a food channel, I’d have been on the phone this morning greenlighting the reality show “Calamari Comeback.” The whole thing, in fact, reminded me of reality TV — but a different kind than has informed the political style of the “Apprentice” host president for the last four years.
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Donald Trump is a star of reality TV, but in a very specific genre — the competition reality show, with winners and losers and backstabbing and vicious eliminations. His entertainment brand has been his political brand: He sees a zero-sum America where you’re either crushing the losers or joining them, and he’s cast himself as the president of the winners.
The Democrats’ reel, on the other hand, recalled a different kind of reality show that also makes up a big chunk of the TV universe: the noncompetition show that surveys subcultures and explores a varied world. It made me think of “Taste the Nation,” the Padma Lakshmi Hulu series that combines mouthwatering American regional cuisines with dives into cultural history and issues like immigration.
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Even calamari, after all, is political: It is a product of cultural identities and regulatory systems and government responsibilities, like managing public health, that can keep you in business or put you out of it.
The roll call, connecting panoramas and policy, was a reminder of this. It was counterprogramming to the Trump-TV aesthetic of eat-or-be-eaten. But it also made an intangible emotional statement. It acknowledged what the pandemic, a political theme of the convention, has cost us: not just lives and jobs, but one another.
It was also, in a key way, an accident. Some of the better moments of this unusual convention have come out of necessity. Conventions, like other rituals — TV awards shows, say — are creatures of habit and obligation. You do things because you’ve always done them or because if you don’t, someone will feel slighted.
The pandemic-compressed proceedings, for instance, had the loquacious former president Bill Clinton speak for only around five minutes. (Even if arguably, in the first convention of the #MeToo era, it might have been better if he hadn’t spoken at all.)
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And if not for the virus forcing the proceedings out of the Milwaukee convention center, I doubt that Jill Biden would have spoken about her husband from the classroom where she once taught.
The speech, which connected Mr. Biden’s personal tragedies to the country’s current grief, was emotional and personal in itself, even if Ms. Biden, not a practiced speaker like Monday night’s closer Michelle Obama, showed some understandable nerves.
But the location spoke as much as anything: a classroom, a place meant to be buzzing with life and noise and fidgeting students, now eerily silent.
That absence, that loss — which the Democrats repeatedly blamed on the Trump administration’s denial and mismanagement — was as much the message of the night as were policies (for which the two hours were short on specifics) or Mr. Biden’s biography. And even as the nominee joined his wife at the end, those empty desks lingered.
It was a different image from the brief escape of the colorful, bountiful roll call, but the two visuals seemed to connect. Beyond our stilled, socially distanced rooms, the program said, there’s a whole beautiful if troubled country out there. We just have to figure out the way back.
More on the Democratic National Convention
James Poniewozik is the chief television critic. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. He previously spent 16 years with Time magazine as a columnist and critic. @poniewozik
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