…AND MAYBE THEY COULD HAVE COME UP WITH A MORE ORIGINAL NAME, TOO.

10/21/11

For the last several weeks, there has been much talk around town of the new Starz series “Boss,” which features Kelsey Grammer as the fictional Mayor Tom Kane of Chicago. As you might guess, people have been asking me about the series for obvious reasons. So it was with great eagerness that I awaited the premier episode of “Boss” and thus the opportunity to say something at least halfway insightful about the production. While I cannot pretend to be entirely objective in my observations, I certainly approach the series with some degree of knowledge about the purported subject matter and an appreciation for a good story well told.

The most salient and overriding observation about “Boss” is that it is hopelessly and, more importantly, needlessly over the top. The annals of Chicago politics contain enough true stories that are entertaining, compelling, and thought provoking. We don’t need to make up silly stuff like

--the mayor and his daughter buying drugs either on the street from shady dealers or in run down, pathetic drug houses or what we used to call “shooting galleries”,

--aldermanic henchmen cutting off people’s ears and the cuttee delivering the product of such butchery (The thugs gave him his ears severed back as a souvenir? Really?) to the mayor at a formal dinner, with the mayor then flushing said ears down his garbage disposal, which breaks in the process,

--the mayor’s key aide looking and dressing like she just walked off the pages of Penthouse magazine, which was gratuitous enough without said appearance making one of its consequences as predictable as a Chicago mayoral election involving an incumbent named Daley,

--the mayor physically beating up an alderman in his office (Admittedly, give the incumbent enough time in office and such behavior may not be all that far-fetched.),

--an anonymous mayoral operative administering temporarily disabling drugs to the mayor’s personal physician whom, incidentally, the mayor manages to visit in an old slaughterhouse without the city’s press crew ever noticing,

--completely closing a City Council meeting to the press to the point of seizing all of the aldermen’s personal communications devices, and

--perhaps most preposterously, a substantial bloc of opposition aldermen in the City Council.

Stories of our great city’s politics don’t need such off the charts silliness. The real stories imbedded in Chicago’s political history are sufficiently interesting, entertaining, hilarious in some instances and tragicomic in others that we don’t need to make up story lines that could have been lifted from any number of the banalities that dominate television in this country. That is why my books, The Chairman and The Chairman’s Challenge, though they are works of fiction, are based on the real stories behind, and the real history of, Chicago politics. With very few exceptions, every story that makes up the tapestries of those books is based, with varying degrees of tightness, on a true story.

So what did I like about “Boss”?

--Mayor Tom Kane’s City Hall roof top oration on Mayor Anton Cermak, the founder, if you will, of the Chicago Democratic Machine, was pretty much on the mark, though Grammer’s character underestimated Pushcart Tony’s charisma; lines like “I admit I didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but I got here as soon as I could” didn’t emanate from a stiff. The camera effect (i.e., the replacement of the city’s current skyline with the skyline as it may have appeared in 1931) was stunning and helped the Cermak oration make its point with eloquence and almost eerie effectiveness. But even this high point of the show was diminished by the realization that a deal involving the betrayal of a sitting governor would never take place on the roof of City Hall. Such a meeting might take place in the back room of a restaurant in Mt. Greenwood or Bridgeport, but not on the roof of City Hall and not in a discussion directly between the two principals involved.

--Grammer is a great actor. His facial expressions as he was told the bad news at the very beginning of the story were a masterpiece, immediately dispelling any doubt that the man can carry a dramatic role with even more aplomb than he so adroitly handled his former comedic roles. He is spectacular, if a bit over the top, in keeping with the general tone of the series, in the role of Tom Kane. Perhaps he’d like to play a far better role, that of Eamon DeValera Collins. But I digress.

--The city of Chicago looked great, as it always does. But it would be nice if the people in Hollywood (I know the series was shot at the old Ryerson Steel facility, located, perhaps ironically, around Cermak and Rockwell, not in Hollywood. But I speak here of "Hollywood” as an industry, much like one speaks of “Wall Street” not as a physical location but as an industry.) would realize that there is more to Chicago than downtown, the generic ghetto, and the generic yuppieville that are depicted as the three facets of Chicago in any movie or television show attempting to depict the world’s greatest city.


I will doubtless watch “Boss” again because it was entertaining, at least for an hour. I fear, however, that it will ultimately prove about as compelling as the last show about Chicago that was such a flop I can’t even remember its name. Maybe you can help me: It centered on a tough, bad boy cop partnered with a rookie and reporting to a young, beautiful woman police commissioner who was fighting a corrupt mayor who in turn was battling a corrupt black alderman who was consorting with an Irish street gang. The show, whatever its name was, lasted about four episodes and the above description of it explains why. The show was supposed to be about Chicago’s unique political culture but instead was a boring assortment of banausic story lines that could have fit in any of the shows that pass for dramas on network television. I hope the same thing doesn’t happen to “Boss,” but I fear my hopes may be misplaced. Then again, I’ve only seen one episode, but the snippets of next week’s episode that followed tonight’s did not offer much promise that “Boss” will indeed be different from the tawdry yawners that comprise so much of today’s television, network or otherwise. “Boss” is no “Sopranos,” at least as far as I can tell from tonight’s episode.

What would be different would be a screen version of The Chairman and/or The Chairman’s Challenge. Such a production would be far more interesting, thought provoking, and, most important from Hollywood’s perspective, entertaining than what “Boss,” at least so far, seems to be. And a film version of one or both of my books would provide the viewer with a window to the reality of Chicago politics, to the way things really work around here, a story so compelling that it needs no added nonsensical fluff to provide the “wow” factor seemingly so necessary in today’s media world.