Sunday, May 25, 2008

Recounting the 2000 Recount

HBO wasted two hours of viewers' lives tonight with a docudrama, "Recount." To the painful injury of the original experience itself, it added the insult of gratuitously inventing dialogue and caricaturing some of the principals to no dramatic purpose whatsoever. (Howard Kurtz explains it all in the Washington Post.)

A Russian expatriate once told me about the night he was thrown out of a theater back home for interrupting a boring production of "The Cherry Orchard" by yelling at the actors, "Stop talking, sell the furniture and go to Moscow."

The writer of "Recount" is no Chekhov, and dramatizing the Florida fiasco with invented details and no new insight offers no emotional catharsis for those who were either disgusted or gratified by the original on the TV and cable networks.

Forgive me, Kevin Spacey, but a well-made documentary would have been a better idea.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Um, and in 3 out of 4 of they kinds of counts the press could come up with, Bush won, didn't he?

And in the USSJC, he won 7-2, too?