Unreality TV

 I've been streaming "Bosch" lately, on YouTube TV. Really like it. I did kinda an odd thing by first streaming "Bosch: Legacy" which is the sequel to Bosch and more current, season 3 having ended in April of this year. In Legacy, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is an ex-cop now Private Investigator in Los Angeles, the one in California. In the original Bosch, he's a homicide detective. Titus Welliver plays him very well. Great actor. He's playing his character as a very flawed, every man kind of guy rather than a superhero. You look at the actor and, well, he can't be a hunky superhero. He's got kind of a "Deputy Dawg" look about him, that reminds me of two guys I've known, Harvey Haircut and Kevin Kleinschmidt, so I would imagine a middle-aged LA detective would look like that, even though neither of those guys were cops. Except for "Columbo", TV detectives and PI's tend to be handsome fellas. Men want to be them; women want to be with them. That's Hollywood! And Bosch works Hollywood Homicide so, that really IS Hollywood! 

Harry Bosch is a bit of a rogue cop. We've seen that before on TV; the guy who bends the rules- but gets things done- dammit. Welliver and the writers pull it off quite well. I admit that I get a little lost at times in the plot details, but that may well be me more than the writers. I don't really know, and I don't care that much because the characters make it all come together. It's a great cast. They make it all seem so natural and real. 

I was thinking last night as I watched a new case develop, that as much as I like Bosch, I probably won't re-watch the series. If you know anything about me, you probably know that I've rewatched "The Sopranos" five times. If you know anything about the Sopranos, you might know that my five viewings of the entire series likely make me look like a piker compared to thousands of other fans. The Sopranos ended some 25 years ago, and people are still crazy about it. Evidently my subscription to Max ran out recently. I went to watch John Oliver Sunday night and that's when I found out. I debated for about a second if I should part with $79 in these trumpian times, but fvck it- I KNOW I will rewatch The Sopranos again. I dropped the hammer. Can't let Trump ruin everything.

As I mentioned recently, I suspect Trump is a Sopranos fan. I learned last night too that he watched the old Clint Eastwood film (Trump called it a "fil-um") "Escape from Alcatraz". He liked it so much he tweeted on the official White House official business site- Twitter- that he's going to bring back Alcatraz as an official prison. He wants to make it for the worst of the worst of the nation's criminals. I guess the Supermax prisons are just for slackers. Trump is sad that the long-shuttered Alcatraz is but a tourist attraction now. This fits Trump's neonatal conservatism to a tee. Take a business that is doing fine (making money) as a museum and pour millions into it. Alcatraz was state of the art in the 40's and 50's, but outdated in the 60's. That's why it closed. Technically, no one ever officially escaped from it. Cool. But prison escapes are not as common or as easy as the movies might make them out to be. 

We've never had a president so influenced by television and movies, like Trump is. You and I can watch The Sopranos or Bosch and not become gangsters or homicide detectives. We can separate fiction from reality. Trump can't. Whether it's getting shot in the ear and wearing a square bandage like Tony Soprano or bringing back Alcatraz after a viewing of an old Eastwood movie, this president is not acquainted with reality. What will he be watching next, and how will it affect us? I hope it's not "The Day After". Maybe he should watch "Paddington".