Tanner '88

In honor of the current primary season, and to make up for lost time, I've been watching my recently purchased DVD of Robert Altman's Tanner '88. It's sometimes described as a "mockumentary" - a fictional, episodic narrative of the failed campaign of former Michigan congressman Jack Tanner, who sought the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1988. The series was filmed by Robert Altman, scripted by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, and is probably most famous for including some of the key players of the real 1988 presidential race - Pat Robertson and Bob Dole appear in early episodes, not just woven in from documentary footage, but actually going along with the storyline, treating Tanner as a legitimate candidate. It made for an attractive selling point, to create audience curiosity when the show was first aired in weekly installments on HBO. The series as a work of art definitely has a "made up as it went along" quality, and abundant entertainment value as it portrays so many aspects of American life - the political process, the role that orchestrated media images play in our view of what's meaningful and important, the personal foibles of people who influence and manage our larger cultural narratives, and more. I'm only into the fourth episode. Never had a chance to watch it before - Julie and I were too broke to afford HBO back in 1988 (three children aged 3 and under that year) and besides that I was not in the right political mindset to enjoy the series at the time anyway. The series was also rebroadcast on the Sundance Channel in 2004 but that option wasn't (still isn't) available in our Expanded Basic cable package so I missed it there too. But I got the DVD a few weeks ago, figuring now that we're in another primary season, this is a good time to catch up on what I missed.

I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Since I haven't seen enough to make fully informed commentary on where the series goes over the course of eleven episodes, this entry will be brief. But if anyone reading this has questions or more to say about the series, I'm opening it up for discussion.