First, one of the mere details along the way:
Munch, the self-romanticizing former 60s radical finally gets his FBI file, which consists of a single page. It dismisses him as a dilletante, occassional journalist for an alternative weekly who has no real invovlvement with radical politics.
This neatly dovetails with a recent episode which revealed his neo-Archie-Bunker flavored nemesis to have been dishonorably discharged for attempting to prevent a civilian massacre in Vietnam when he was a fresh-faced 19-year old.
Just a little bit of deconstruction, "Homicide"-style.
Second, the real kicker:
McCoy goes up against a truly obno independent counsel, and comes this close to going to jail to protect a potential witness who was promised her identity would be kept confidential.
Later, the women's identity is gotten anyway, and at the very end the possibility that there really IS some kind of dark political connection is raised, promising to take center stage on "Homicide."
In short, the two shows promise to offer attacks--not broadsides--on everyone all around, while neatly tearing apart whatever simplistic categories comfort us most.
I'll take them over Chris Hitchens & Marc Cooper any day of the week.
Oh, and BTW, "Buffy" has just jumped a quantum level or two in the past 2 weeks, as slayer #2 (it's a long story), Faith, accidentaly kills a human and sends the whole show into much darker terrain than ever before.
Just one teeny tidbit: Buffy confronts Faith as being in denial about what she's done, and Faith counters that Buffy's the one in denial, who needs Faith to act out what she's afraid to. Buffy doesn't respond verbally at all, instead her body language shows how torn she is by what Faith says.
This is nothing new, folks. When McCarthyism almost totally shut down substantive political discourse, there was a veritable explosion in pop culture--some of it due to blacklisted writers under psuedonyms, to be sure, but certainly not all.
I wouldn't exactly compare "Buffy" to "The Twilight Zone", but then, Sterling never did succede with anything that took a lot of time and careful crafting, as a series does. Both shows have a surface appearance that belies their seriousness, just as the politics of the world around them had a surface appearance that belied their absurdity and tragic silliness.
(Snitchens DEFINITELY included.)
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"