The Mother of All Soap Operas

This December will mark a lame-duck session in a lame-duck era. All is uncertainty.

We think there will be a same-sex marriage law, but the rest is a mystery. Will the GOP crazies let our nation walk a straight line in the middle of a three-year pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since WWII? We don’t know. Will Ukraine finally win a pyrrhic victory against Russian Nazism? We don’t know.

Will the agonizingly slow uptake of our state-of-the-art vaccines slowly conquer the ever-evolving pandemic that has made life universally hard for almost three years? We don’t know. Will Congress do anything to stop the surging epidemic of gun slaughter that has become another pandemic? We don’t know. And will the Demagogue, like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, rise out of his dark filth one last time to threaten all of us? Or will he finally subside into the slime of his own making and trouble us no more? We don’t know.

So as Winter Solstice comes and goes, and the days stay short and cold, we will all need some good TV.

Fortunately, there’s a remedy. A brilliant series about a mega-preacher and his extended family offers some of the best drama I’ve ever seen on TV.

I’m not much of a soap-opera fan. I’m usually a sci-fi guy. But this is soap opera with a difference. It’s soap opera as great drama, with indirect commentary about many things that trouble us today, including child abuse.

Everything about it is superb—from the acting, through the writing, to the sets and photography and the occasional celestial religious music. The costumes are often works of art. Even the background for the opening credits is inspired, evocative and mercifully short.

Like all great drama, the series addresses the essence of the human condition. It probes what people do for, with and to each other. It examines how they let great sins slide by out of inertia and a quest for a false peace of mind. It shows what happens when they address those sins too late, and why the ancient paradigm of alpha-male leadership still prevails in the age of nuclear weapons, the Internet and mRNA vaccines.

The show has beautiful people, good people, a few very bad people, and a lot of confused people, just as in real life. There is marvelous dialogue, with occasional, sudden shots of humor, and occasionally brilliant prose poetry. Late in the first season, after the mega-preacher expounds his personal vision of Hell, you may remember his answer for the rest of your life. There are occasional allusions to Shakespeare, including Lady Macbeth. (You’ll know who she is when you first meet her early in the first season. Lady Macbeth as an “iron magnolia”—who would’ve thought?)

But the best thing about this show is its inescapable realism. At first, the characters seem a bit cartoonish. But as the episodes roll on, they change. They grow or diminish. They do things you don’t expect. They suffer doubt, hesitation and confusion. And sometimes, when they rise up and challenge the fates that others assume for them, you want to stand up and cheer. If you enjoy never being able to predict where a story is going, this show is for you.

But why write about a TV show on Daily Kos? Because I’ve saved the best for last.

Nearly all the characters and actors are Black, as is the producer, Oprah Winfrey, who appears occasionally as an important subsidiary character. The story focuses on a huge and complex extended family, living under circumstances of extreme opulence that few of us whites associate with Black people. And while all the characters (except perhaps the bad guy) express some belief in religion, most carry their own internal visions of Heaven and Hell.

A few white actors appear in minor roles, where they begin to look uncommonly pale. The contrast made me, a white anti-bigot, wonder whether that’s how some Black people see us—as occasional, pale wraiths flitting through their lives, without much consequence. On a political level, the show’s self-evident quality gave me a taste of the joy and hope I felt while attending Barack Obama’s first inauguration, or (more recently) seeing Wes Moore and Hakeem Jeffries celebrate their well-deserved political victories.

But the show isn’t about politics at all, except incidentally. It’s just a fine work of art. It’s right up there with the best of streaming TV available, including “West Wing,” “Grantchester,” “The Crown,” and “Downton Abbey.” But it’s not on PBS; it’s on Netflix. If you like good TV, this show alone is probably worth the price of a subscription.

It’s title is “Greenleaf,” the surname of the fictional family that runs the fictional mega-church. Watch it, and the odds of your surviving this long, dreary lame-duck winter with your humanity and optimism intact might just go up.


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