I was in Washington last week, speaking at Johns Hopkins on the future of global supply chains:
“My skepticism is not that it [demonstrated LLM business impact on Supply Chains] is zero…it’s not [going to be] infinity.”
This time I went to the Bombay Club (rather than Rasika): Neela Martini, Plain Naan, Bhindi Masala, Cucumber Raita, Gulab Jamun (with vanilla ice cream).
I had been watching Silo, Reacher and Lioness. Slow Horses had me spending almost as much time in London, and The Diplomat is waiting in the wings to connect the two capitals all over again.
Apparently my fall television schedule has become a national-security seminar.
Not entirely. Widow’s Bay, which I have highlighted in an earlier blog post, went on to win a gratifying haul of Emmys—always delightful when one’s enthusiasms are subsequently ratified by the Academy. Furious is likewise worthy television, with Emmy Rossum gives the awards committees something to think about. And Ride or Die is something else altogether: a lightweight romp that knows it is a lightweight romp and, rather charmingly, works.
But Washington and London kept calling.
I merely wanted to savor dinner.
The coincidence became more amusing when I looked at what these shows were doing with place. I had been spending an extraordinary amount of my time in two cities: Washington and London. Not the cities of monuments and museums, but their streaming doubles.
Lioness gives Washington the polished tables where terrible decisions are discussed quietly. Power wears a good suit and knows where to have lunch. Reacher gives Washington conspiracy: power behind power, with one exceptionally large man wandering through the machinery and discovering that the machinery is usually corrupt. Slow Horses gives London almost the opposite of Washington polish—Jackson Lamb, Slough House, bad food, worse clothes and the bureaucratic rubbish heap of the intelligence establishment. The Diplomat occupies the bridge between the two capitals: an American ambassador in London discovering that the Special Relationship is partly diplomacy and partly marriage counseling between countries.
And Silo, wonderfully, reverses the direction of travel. After two seasons underground, its third season lets Washington enter the story from another direction. The familiar city becomes strange simply because we have spent so long beneath it.
Five shows, two capitals, several intelligence agencies, one apocalypse.
And I had gone to Washington to talk about supply chains.
Perhaps that was why dinner at the Bombay Club felt oddly familiar. Taylor Sheridan loves restaurants. In Lioness, Washington power frequently sits down to eat before deciding what somebody else must do. White tablecloths, wine glasses, discreet waiters; civilization discussing violence between courses.
I ordered Indian food and a sapphire-colored martini.
Nobody asked me to invade anything.
Back in Pittsburgh, I continued watching Lioness. And, by one of those coincidences, the book I am reading is The Age of Movies, the selected writings of Pauline Kael.
Somewhere between Zoe Saldaña and Pauline Kael I arrived at Ingmar Bergman.
The essay was Kael’s 1968 review of Shame. Its title was “A Sign of Life.” This turned out to be less random than it sounds. Kael had gone into Shame almost dreading it. Bergman had become, for her, too private, too solemn, too enclosed within Bergman. And now Bergman on war? Yet Shame surprised her. War forced him outward. People, houses, meals, fear, humiliation and survival came into view. The abstractions had acquired bodies.
So that phrase—“a sign of life”—has stayed with me.
Kael wanted to feel somebody alive inside the machinery.
Which seemed a useful test for all the machinery I had been watching.
Slow Horses is ostensibly about MI5, but its sign of life is Jackson Lamb: brilliant, disgusting, loyal, cruel, funny, and almost aggressively resistant to the sleekness we expect from television spies. The espionage plots matter; Lamb’s humanity, usually concealed beneath several layers of insult and poor hygiene, is why the show breathes.
The Diplomat performs a different trick. International relations becomes personal relations. Alliances resemble marriages; marriages resemble negotiations; negotiations sometimes resemble divorces conducted while nuclear powers wait outside the room. The machinery of statecraft keeps collapsing into the awkwardness of people trying to understand one another.
Silo begins with machinery in the most literal sense: thousands of people surviving inside a vast engineered system whose rules they do not understand. But the thing that keeps pulling us through its tunnels is curiosity. Somebody keeps asking why.
Reacher has perhaps the simplest formula of all. Institutions become complicated; Reacher does not. Put corruption, secrecy and bureaucracy in front of him and he applies an almost Newtonian moral physics. It is ridiculous. It is also satisfying.
And then there is Lioness.
Taylor Sheridan writes as if civilization were being held together by six exhausted people in windowless rooms in Washington and another six carrying automatic weapons somewhere unpleasant. Everyone knows something we don’t. Nobody sleeps. Every twenty minutes somebody explains that the world is much more dangerous than civilians could possibly understand.
It ought to be unbearable.
Quite often, it is terrific.
Zoe Saldaña is a large part of the reason. She doesn’t so much play Joe McNamara as compress herself into her. Joe is brave, loyal, ferocious and sometimes monstrous. Her drug isn’t danger exactly. It is necessity. She needs to be the person who must go because nobody else can.
That distinction may be Sheridan’s most interesting idea. Intelligence agencies think in missions; people live with consequences. What one side calls a completed operation may be, for somebody else, the event that changed everything.
Operations end. Consequences don’t.
Streaming television, of course, calls that another season.
And here Kael came back to me.
What Kael admired in Shame was that war had forced Bergman’s solemnity outward. It happened to people. It invaded domestic life. It made ordinary things—food, a room, a body, a glass of wine—matter.
Lioness is not Shame, and Sheridan is certainly not Bergman. It might be a very Sheridan-like act of escalation to put that comparison into a briefing memo.
But all these shows, at their best, do something Kael might have recognized. The apparatus—CIA, MI5, diplomacy, conspiracy, apocalypse—is not enough. The apparatus has to produce a person.
A Lamb.
A diplomat trying to keep a country and a marriage from exploding.
A woman in a silo asking why the world is the way it is.
A gigantic drifter who believes, with touching confidence, that complicated evil can sometimes be solved by hitting the correct person.
A CIA officer discovering that necessity has a price.
Signs of life.
Perhaps that is also why Washington and London work so well on television. They are cities built to make institutions visible: White House, Capitol, embassies, ministries, intelligence agencies, ceremonial rooms, monuments. Television then sneaks around the back and asks what happens to the people inside them.
Mr. Smith went to Washington and discovered politics.
Professor Tayur went to Washington and began to suspect he was living in a streaming series—while watching streaming series.
A sign of life?
Or just MyAmpleLife.
