The evolution will be televised
The Jan. 6 hearings have been a lean, articulate, persuasive inquiry absorbing the beats and nuances of today’s TV. And get the popcorn: Season II is in production
C-SPAN may not be your go-to for prime-time drama. You probably wouldn’t drop it in the same sentence as Peacock or Hulu or Amazon Prime as a source of gripping destination viewing. But there’s good reason to believe that could change — that it’s already changed — by way of a fresh, comparatively bold approach to the way congressional hearings look and feel on today’s TV.
Capably borrowing from series television’s dynamic, and with a pace and timing scriptwriters would do well to emulate (and a penchant for surprises Aaron Sorkin is surely enjoying), the House Select Committee hearings into the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, have become our latest form of Must See TV.
Some 18 million people watched the eighth insurrection hearing on Thursday, July 21, more than watched either the 2021 or 2022 Academy Awards. Refreshingly, for those millions of Americans, the antic dysfunctions of a presidency, and the chronology of that dysfunction, have become a highly civic form of prime-time TV obsession. And stay tuned, the committee has the opportunity to lock that viewership down even more: Mississippi Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, the hearings chairman — physically absent due to COVID lockdown but appearing in a video —announced that more hearings will be held in September. That’s right, folks, cliffhangers! Easter eggs! The Popcorn Hearings: Season II is In Production!
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That trope-phrase of modern television creation isn’t used by accident. The Jan. 6 hearings have adopted the rhythms of streaming series television, and with the first season wrapped, it’s clear they’ve done it convincingly. From the beginning weeks ago, we’ve watched as Thompson and Wyoming GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the hearings, effectively became showrunners, the majordomos required to get and keep a television series up and running.
With the help of TV production specialists, and their own well-tuned sense of drama and the power of language, Cheney, Thompson, GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Virginia Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria, et al., delivered a lean, articulate, persuasive, surprisingly human series of congressional hearings that absorbed the beats and nuances of today’s TV, combining live inquiry of witnesses with video segments that deepened our sense of the gravity, the importance of what was happening.
Example: On July 21, the hearing’s producers released a video presentation showing Trump’s actions the day of the attack matched contemporaneously with what was on Fox News at the corresponding time in the insurrection. Trump, an admitted Fox News addict, was known to have been watching the rioting on Jan. 6 on Fox News. The match of excerpts of Fox programming with same-time video or snapshots of Trump in the residence at the White House — the construction of a visual timeline of 187 minutes of presidential indifference — was nothing short of journalistic.
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We can thank technology for a lot of that. Oh, technology and journalism were very much a part of the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings, which brought Sen. Sam Ervin, Sen. Howard Baker and others into American living rooms in those distant analog days before CNN and the interweb.
Those long-ago hearings were a windy, often dull testament to democracy as an utterly procedural bureaucratic undertaking. They make watching paint dry look like a Michael Bay movie by comparison. But the January 6 hearings have been something else again, evidence of an evolution of information technology and proof of our ability to make sense of events because of that technology.
With the interrogative drive of documentary films, the hearings have tapped into our current embrace of serial storytelling, one episode naturally following the one before, making use of compelling visual testimony and on-scene evidence, building an inescapable case of Trump’s deep and personal involvement in the metastasis of the events on Jan. 6, 2021, the most fateful day in the republic since the start of the Civil War.
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Republicans and conservatives have griped that the hearings offered no contrasting — contrary — point of view, no counterweight to the scope of information unfavorable to the former president. They fail to realize, or admit, that this was never a prosecution or a sentencing in the first place, nor a trial at any judicial level. As much as or more than anything else, Season I of the insurrection hearings was a riveting, enlightening petition to the court of public opinion — a candid set of informed speculations and facts submitted to an equally candid world. Submitted in the medium that’s made that information not just palatable, but digestible too.
So far, that’s been more than enough.
In the weeks since Season I ended, we’ve seen jaw-dropping plot twists off-camera, the kind of things that a real television series couldn’t easily pull off: Giving viewers the drama of the characters’ lives and fortunes when viewers aren’t around. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who guest-starred in a previous episode, was just subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury, a fact certain to curtail more of his previous bids to assert executive privilege on Trump’s behalf, the better to maintain his own state of silence.
So what are we gonna call this series, anyway? The more-or-less formal title —the House Select Committee Investigation of the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol — is waaay too hard to remember. Somebody somewhere is no doubt already hard at work on a fitting name. Regrettably, though, the best names are out of reach. Stranger Things is already taken, of course. And we’re hard-pressed to improve on the name of former Attorney General William Barr’s book, taking another view of the same lamentable administration: One Damn Thing After Another.
