Ronnie: This is an important episode, which seems absurd to say when the logline is Night Man impersonates a wrestler to prove another wrestler didn’t commit a murder. But it is, because “You Are Too Beautiful” was written by Steve Englehart, creator of the Night Man comic book. Steve Englehart also has a website at which he writes about his experiences writing comic books and, in this case, a television show. You know what that means: we actually have primary source documentation from someone involved in the making of Night Man. He can’t answer questions related to undergirding aspects of the program (why the jazz hologram? What’s with that dumb whirring noise when he turns on his gravity belt?), but Englehart’s website provides a look into the making of the series. His involvement was not contractually obligated so he essentially cold called Glen A. Larson for a script job and was told to write one script, its acceptance contingent on not having to be rewritten too heavily. In fact, Steve’s script required no rewriting. Keep that in mind: everything in this episode comes from the typewriter of the guy who created Mantis. Mantis the Marvel Comics character, not M.A.N.T.I.S. the handicapable black superhero who eventually got killed by an invisible dinosaur. One gets the sense from the website that Englehart is a little self-aggrandizing and ready to talk himself up, but by comic book creator moral standards he’s John Stamos.
As Englehart explains, this show is less about the main character and more about telling a story that happens to have Night Man in it. Think of that anthology series Spider-Man’s Tangled Web. Johnny Domino’s Spit Valve. Rod Bannerman goes from handsome bank robber to masked superfreak when he robs a jeweler (a stepfather and daughter operation, with the father played by “Jerk Store” Reilly from Seinfeld/Fuchs from The Thing and the daughter played by Meredith Monroe of Dawson’s Creek and Criminal Minds fame) with the wherewithal to place an explosive device into a bag of surrendered jewels. He spends 5 years in prison and upon exiting he’s immediately given a job offer in the lucrative world of pro wrestling. You see, having a hideous face there is not disqualifying. In many cases it’s a perk. Fortunately, Jessica the club owner who’s barely been in this fucking show has free wrestling tickets to offer the boys. That’s how you connect jazz club to wrestling: have the seldom appearing owner come up with tickets out of her ass.
“Hey Golden Boy, the ocean called–“
Meredith Monroe is seated next to Jessica, wondering just who sent her this wrestling ticket in the mail. I like how she has so little going on that she’ll attend whatever is mailed to her. There’s a dispute going between Rod (now the wrestler Golden Boy), his promoter/manager Paddy Ladbroke, a name that hasn’t been used since the days of “Irish Need Not Apply”, and Meredith Monroe, because Monroe causes Rod to lose interest in wrestling, which obviously doesn’t sit well with Paddy O’Potatofamine. A dead body complicates matters. Wrestling groupie Tiffany wanted Golden Boy’s entire body, yet she reacted to him taking off his mask like he’s a Universal monster and not, like, a disfigured guy. Then she’s found strangled to death. She was seen by Golden Boy last, but he claims he didn’t kill her. If you can’t trust a bank robber cum masked wrestler, who can you trust? The characters uncover similar murders of beautiful young women on the circuit and conclude a wrestler must be behind the slayings. Surprised Criminal Minds never did a wrestling episode. That industry is rife with premature death.
Johnny’s evil radio tunes in when in an elevator with some wrestlers, so he needs to narrow down the suspect pool by going up to each wrestler and seeing if their vibe is cool. This seems like a shitty mission in a video game. Meanwhile you’ve got the relationship between Rod and Meredith Monroe, which actually isn’t too bad. He tries to woo her as Golden Boy and she puts 2 and 2 together pretty quickly, revealing she knows he’s the bank robber from 5 years ago. I think a lesser script would keep her in the dark unnecessarily to set up a She’s All That twist later on. It gives her a more active role rather than making her a one dimensional object of affection. Dare I say her character is two dimensional. By the time Reilly Fuchs shows up and it turns out the whole robbery was an inside job to scam the insurance company, I’m like, okay, enough. Steve, you know Night Man isn’t supposed to be this complex, right? It’s just a load of nonsense and bad greenscreen for 43 minutes. Effort goes against the point, man. What say you, Chris? I thought this was actually a good episode when judged against the whole of Night Man so far. Maybe tapping an experienced comics writer instead of your dipshit son for scripts was a good move by Glen Larson.
Chris: You once said to me that the average comic writer couldn’t get a job writing for Guiding Light, and “You Are So Beautiful” neither reinforces nor undermines your assertion because Steve Englehart is an exceptional comic writer and Night Man makes Guiding Light look like Breaking Bad. I assume. I’ve never seen an episode of Guiding Light. I will say that I agree that this is probably the closest NM gets to being good television, and is the best episode of the show so far, and that, to me, is entirely due to the script. Englehart is from that third wave of comic writers who came to comics in the 70s, after guys like Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko introduced continuity, melodrama, and irony to superheroes in the 60s, and before guys like Frank Miller, Neal Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore broke through to the mainstream with their post-modern deconstructions. Like his contemporaries, Denny O’Neil, Gerry Conway, and Len Wein, Steve Englehart was responsible for adding modern and/or literary flourishes to the more elemental work of their predecessors. They wanted to add some weight to what had come before but were also all in on the silly, disreputable reputation that comics still had in the art world. This all to say that a superhero getting sidelined in his own story so as to focus on a weirdo Phantom of the Opera/Beauty and the Beast pastiche set in the world of Professional Wrestling seems like exactly the kind of the thing that would have happened to Batman in 1977. Also that’s a compliment. Bruce was wearing a lot of turtlenecks at the time, and lived in a penthouse at the top of a Wayne Foundation skyscraper that also had a revolving restaurant and, no shit, an enormous tree growing inside it.
“I wanna see The Mask” “We have The Mask at home” The Mask At Home:
You can tell almost immediately that a professional had somehow gotten past whatever goons Glen Larson had posted outside the Night Man writers room because “You Are So Beautiful” actually gives the supporting cast something to do. Club owner Jessica gets tickets to a wrestling match from a friend, but she doesn’t know anything about the sport, and it turns out that Raleigh and Frank are wrestling fans, while Lt. Dann gets to be the this is stupid but all my friends are going so I guess I’m going too guy. So, like, the characters get to bounce off one another and react differently to situations and that gives you a sense of who they are and what they’re about. You know, like a writer might have them do. And Johnny gets to sit back and react to what’s happening around him instead of being the engine that everyone else is reacting to. It’s a nice change of pace because, as we’ve said many times, Matt McColm isn’t what you’d call a “great” or even “serviceable” actor. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say he “fits the dictionary definition” of what we would call an actor. His job for the majority of the episode is to look natural in a collared, button up, short sleeve shirt. He is almost up to the task. But he is getting better at certain things. Like, he’s pretty good at being comfortable in groups. When the whole cast is around him doing shit, he actually looks engaged and amused by what’s going on around him. This might seem like a shot but it’s not, you watch actors who are playing main characters in shows and they can look impatient or bored when other actors are on screen with them. McColm sparks (to the degree that he can spark at all) when he’s a part of a group and he gets to watch what everyone else is doing.
What’s more inexplicable and odd (so, more traditionally Night Man) about “You Are So Beautiful” is the C-plot about pretty-girl Meredith Monroe and her asshole step-dad. To say step-dad appears to hate his pretty step-daughter would be a gross understatement. The first time we see him he’s yelling at her for being stupid enough to not intuit that a handsome guy looking at jewels in their jewelry store was about to rob them, and then later, when she gets a bouquet of flowers at the store, he yells at her again, and throws the flowers into the street. Now, with hindsight, I guess we’re supposed to think that the flower incident is a panic-move related to his knowledge that her secret admirer is the guy he conspired to commit fraud with. And maybe if there were scenes of him being kind and loving towards his step-daughter to provide context, that would play. But as it is, the guy just comes off like a hateful belligerent prick, and when the step-daughter says something about how much she loves him you’re just like what, why? It doesn’t help that Monroe comes off as the sweetest woman in the history of the universe. As an actress she’s barely above replacement in the Night Man League (NML) in most respects, but she sells being smitten with Golden Boy, and she has a smile that I have no trouble believing would steer a jaded crook onto the straight and narrow. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could be as thoughtlessly cruel to her as her step-father. I was sitting in my house alone hissing at him like he was a silent film villain.
This is the kind of well choreographed action we’ve come to expect from Night Man.
Ronnie: Well, good news because Reilly the evil stepfather dies in a struggle with Golden Boy and it’s not really addressed the rest of the episode? You’d think Golden Boy being partially responsible for her stepfather’s death would sour the romantic feelings Meredith Monroe feels towards the guy, but not so. I guess that’s why Reilly is a stepdad instead of a biological father. Someone kills your dad and you become Inigo Montoya. I’ve never heard of anyone avenging their stepfather, by contrast. Even Uncle Ben for Peter Parker, that’s a blood relation surrogate father. Before step relations became an easy means for pornography to bypass prohibitions about depicting incest, stepparents were usually of a wicked variety and Reilly is no exception. This is really a Cinderella story where instead of whisking her away because she can fit her foot into a glass slipper the prince fumbles with a gun and in the ensuing scuffle the evil stepparent gets shot. Not sure how the carriage magiced from a simple pumpkin fits in, give me some more time.
She should have those same bandwagon pennants Homer Simpson would have for, like, midseason television and the XFL.
We’re so in the weeds with this series it’s pretty difficult to tell whether “You Are Too Beautiful” is good or just good by Night Man standards. The relevant aspect is I enjoyed myself way more than other hours. Englehart does a good job at creating multilayered characters over the course of 43 minutes. They’re not too complex, but there’s something there. It’s also certifiably insane like Night Man should be. Right after Rob leaves prison, for example, there’s a guy outside who immediately offers him a job professional wrestling. Now as fantastical as that may be, I don’t think there actually is pro wrestling recruitment outside prisons. That seems like a joke in a heightened reality like in The Simpsons. But hey, even a seasoned writer like Steve Englehart is not immune to Night Man’s, well, Night Man-ness. I do think it’s the best of the series so far, but what does that mean, really? Englehart only writes two more episodes of the series and they’re both in Season 2. I have to imagine next time it’ll be back to same old same old and no lessons will be learned by Glen A. Larson et al.
Chris: Englehart says on his website that he turned in the script and it aired pretty much word for word what he wrote. He said the showrunner told him that otherwise never happened. Here’s my theory: I don’t think Larson read the script at all. Makes sense, right? In fact, it pretty much explains every episode we’ve seen so far. Like, what if the showrunner was being honest but also omitting the detail that every script was done as-is on Night Man. He could very easily have been telling Englehart the truth when he said it almost never happened, he just might have meant it more as an explanation for what the fuck was happening that our man Steve mistook as a superlative about his writing. Or maybe it was both. Maybe the guy was saying “Jesus, your script reads like it was worked on by a group of professionals instead of the transcribed ravings from psychopaths on work release from the local hospital from the criminally insane”. Then he’d take a beat and go on “because that’s who we’ve hired for the writers room. We have no budget and they’re basically slaves”. Another pause. Then “it’s actually grossly inhumane. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I’m snapping at my kids. My wife is talking about a trial separation. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t know who I am anymore. I think this job is killing me.” It makes as much sense as anything!
Odds & Ends
-Englehart’s page on this episode can be found here (https://www.steveenglehart.com/Film/NightMan-Too%20Beautiful.html).
-One of the wrestling matches is between The Hillbilly and Captain Omen, the latter of whom looks like he belongs in a KISS cover band. (Maybe they’re already looking for an Ace Frehley replacement…)
-Tiffany suggests to Johnny they have a private pajama party. He declines. This is a woman who recognized Johnny at a wrestling show; jazz fan and wrestling fan is a rare pairing to say the least.
-Rob Bannerman adopts a pseudonym, “Tom Hammersmith”. I don’t know why. His parole can’t preclude involvement. If we prohibited all ex-cons from wrestling the “sport” would be on life support. Also, isn’t the point of a pseudonym to be less obtrusive than your real handle?
1X14 “DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?”
Ronnie: I’m so glad that by magic the show means sorcery and not the kind of jackass bullshit that makes up Now You See Me and its sequels. I can’t deal with those guys. Things start off with a bang as a sultry lady walks into the House of Soul and immediately triggers the radio tuned to evil, depicted by a demonic version of the actress saying “come and get me, Night Man”. Said actress, Jacinda Barrett (the ice bath kidney kill in Urban Legends: Final Cut that got added in reshoots because the film needed more death), poses as “Lucy Devlin”, a staff writer for BillBoard Magazine who is interested in interviewing Johnny. Man. Lucy Devlin is on a level of on the nose not seen since “Damien Faustman” in the Ben Stiller Show sketch “Low Budget Tales of Cliched Horror”. When Johnny asks Jessica to meet Lucy, she’s nowhere to be found and her business card is that of a car wash. When she later crops up as a magician, because I guess jazz clubs book magicians now, Jessica won’t believe Johnny when he says he’s seen her before. Next thing you know she’s disappearing people like a magical Pinochet.
The disappeared people actually go to another dimension of sorts. The effects are, as to be expected, awful. Imagine Sliders but somehow worse. Charlie Dann ends up in a prison cell with Bubba Carson, a burly biker type who Dann saw executed five years ago. That doesn’t matter in this realm. Frank follows him and his nightmare vision provides us insight into Johnny’s childhood. See, Frank was always working the beat and that meant he neglected his wife, Johnny’s mother Betsy. This is shown by him being late to his son’s birthday party, a birthday party at which Johnny wears a grim reaper mask because he wants to be creepy for no apparent reason. I appreciate fleshing out the Dominus line, and that Betsy looks straight out of Mad Men makes it funnier. Things take a turn for the baffling when Raleigh is banished to the hell dimension and he’s pulled over by a racist version of Lt. Dann for joyriding in Johnny’s Prowler. Of all the things Night Man is ill-equipped to discuss, race is at the top of the list. I don’t need to see Night Man’s techie buddy Rodney King’d, you know? (There is a funny moment when Lt. Dann meets his superior, who is also Lt. Dann. Perhaps it’s like Pokemon and all police officers look like Michael Woods.) Let’s assess: Dann’s nightmare is being put in a cell with the likes of whom he sent to prison; Frank’s is disappointing his family; Raleigh’s is being subject to police racism. Fortunately, Night Man–the Mightiest of Whities–saves Raleigh from a beatdown by the racist Danns only to start strangling him to death for taking the Prowler without asking. Good thing it’s all an illusion and the show never establishes the parameters of these illusions.
Lt. Dann is Overdrawn At The Memory Bank!
Patrick Macnee, trouper that he is, lends some credibility and exposition to the proceedings. He also provides the key to solving the episode’s problem: Johnny has to use tarot cards to go to the nightmare dimension and retrieve Lt. Dann and Frank from their fears. This consists of beating up a fat man and what would be an emotional reunion between a mother and a son she never got to see grow up that is stymied by Night Man being incompetent and terrible at everything it tries to accomplish. A final battle proceeds, which ends with… Johnny waking up in his chair? And then the events of the episode happen with a different hired magician, and then Johnny sees Lucy Devlin again, only this time he turns down her interview request? Chris, help me out. What the fuck is this ending?
Chris: It’s an ending, Ronnie, and I think we need to be satisfied with that. Did anything in the episode actually happen? Was it all a dream? Was it a kind of supernatural riddle that he solved thereby causing things that actually happened to collapse in on themselves and become dreams retroactively in a kind of Ghost-Of-Christmas-Future Road-Not-Taken morality play? I’m gonna go with sure. To all of it. Narrative is like science, whatever we want it to be (this is a 30 Rock reference, Ronnie). I don’t know if “Do You Believe in Magic” is the worst episode of Night Man we’ve seen so far, but it is the most episode. And that’s kind of like being the worst because Night Man is a really bad show so the episode that’s the most Night Man would be the episode that embodied its properties (in this case badness) to the maximum effect. But there’s a paradoxical quality to the whole production that makes it hard to write off so easily. Because Night Man isn’t bad in any lazy conventional way, it’s hard not to be struck and engaged by just how thoroughly the show’s reach exceeds its grasp, and that means that an episode that mosts its badness is also really striking.
I want to start with Johnny’s first encounter with Ms. Devlin. She gives him her card, right? And then she disappears and the card turns into a card for a car wash. I wish I knew how they ended up with that. Like, why wasn’t the card just blank? Or he put the card down on the counter and then it just disappeared like she did? Why a car wash? It’s not like Johnny goes to the car wash later and gets some clue because it’s an evil and/or haunted car wash. Like maybe it was built on an unmarked graveyard where the prison buried people they executed or something so that’s where she materialized and then transformed into her earthly base of operations. And it’s not like the show runs out the “Everyone Thinks Johnny is Crazy” plot because he keeps insisting something spooky is happening but nothing he’s saying is lining up with what everyone else is seeing. But they don’t bother with that either. Instead the car wash business card is thrown away and never mentioned again. It’s a deliberate detail the show takes the time to include and then does nothing with. And that’s a small, petty detail to focus on, but TV shows are often built out of tiny details the same way letters make up words make up sentences make up paragraphs. Big things are just giant collections of little things.
And we’re supposed to take this seriously, huh?
And when you get a look at the big things that all the little things add up to, it just gets more confusing because in “Do You Believe in Magic” Raleigh gets lost in a racist nightmare where his police officer friend profiles and terrorizes him and Johnny is sexually propositioned by the ghost of his mother. Two difficult subjects that the show has never approached previously and then decided to just dive headfirst into. And the manner the show decides to approach any of it makes the whole thing weirder and worse. The handmade effects and dreamy circular quality of Raleigh’s nightmare combined with the curdled Norman Rockwell psycho-sexual perversion of what goes down with Johnny and his mom suggest someone in the writers room rented Fire Walk With Me at some point and became angry and confused. I don’t understand how we got here and I want to leave. Here’s my point, nothing on this show makes sense. It doesn’t make sense on a plotting level, on a thematic level, or on a prop level. It doesn’t matter how broad or focused you get. It’s fractal. Is it all a dream or what? What’s the deal with the business card? Did Johnny’s mom just try to fuck him? No one question has any more or less weight than any of the others and none of it connects to anything.
I think we’re in hell.
Ronnie: That’d be fitting. You know how in They Live Rowdy Roddy sees the alien on TV and goes “figures it’d be something like this”? It figures our Hell would be a bad syndicated superhero show from the 90s. Whatever we did, we earned this. But let’s not dwell on what we’ve done to deserve this and try to move forward. I like how neither of us have thus far mentioned the baffling decision to have more than one sequence of the Night Man costume coming to life and attacking Johnny. Rare compliment here: the Night Man costume sans an actual occupant is pretty disconcerting. In a better show it might even be disquieting. But the show isn’t better so it’s not. I bring it up because there are multiple components of “Do You Believe In Magic” that do not square with anything else in the episode. One instance is Patrick Macnee is cut off when stating Selene’s real name. You’d think it would be a plot point, like she can be defeated if someone knows her true name, as if she’s a demonic entity. Nope! It’s nothing, another loose thread left hanging.
Tongue designed by Erik Larsen
The end really soured me on this one, I’m sorry. I spent minutes after the thing wrapped up, puzzled. Did any of the episode happen? What parts of it were a dream Johnny had, a dream that emphasized his different need for sleep since the accident occurred? Rather than just ask questions I won’t get answered, I’m going to try to mount an explanation. So Selene’s last line is “be careful, we’ll be watching you” and then Johnny wakes up. I take this to be a premonition, an outgrowth of his power. He meets people and then he can intuit their intentions, either something bad they did or something bad they’re going to do. Sleeping takes it into overdrive, hence the elaborate fantasy. This time he rebuffs Selene and that’s enough to get her to decide “screw this, I’m not interested in fucking with Night Man”. It doesn’t make total sense but it’s enough, I think.
Selene definitely has the makings of a recurring foe, so of course we’re never going to see her again, nor are we ever going to find out who the “we” are that are watching Night Man. Shitty show, terrible job!
Somehow the costume has more charisma when Matt McColm isn’t in it.
Chris: I mean yeah, this is Dumb TV ground zero territory in that it’s clearly going for a Smart TV makes-you-think kind of twist and totally screwing the pooch. Because, like, take Total Recall, okay? The idea behind Total Recall is that the whole Rekall experience is a metaphor for going to the movies. That instead of going and having authentic human experiences as people we instead go and consume these manufactured experiences designed to let us take a break from boring reality and instead live in fantasy wish fulfillment for a second. The joke of Total Recall is that our “fantasy wish” is, when you think about it, appallingly hateful and violent. If the protagonist of Total Recall is dreaming, then his ultimate fantasy is to kill his wife and best friend, go to another planet, kill a bunch of people there, and have sex with a space prostitute. We’re doing what he’s doing means we want what he wants means we’re pretty fucked up, get it? It’s a classic Verhoeven yuck-em-up because it asks us to consider our own violent misogynistic subconscious desires and our complacency towards a culture that celebrates those toxic values. That scamp!
Is “Do You Believe in Magic” attempting a similar kind of psychological character study slash post modern critique of the values of the average Night Man fan? Are we supposed to infer, assuming that it was all just a dream of Johnny’s, that we’re seeing what Johnny believes his friends’ greatest fears are? Like, does he believe that Raleigh is terrified of being profiled and persecuted by the police? Is that supposed to suggest that Johnny is very progressive and woke or does it mean that he can’t see past race and assumes that because Raleigh is black that his deepest fear must be of experiencing violence at the hands of the police? Because, and I can’t stress this enough, the show has never feigned in that direction for a single solitary second before “Do You Believe in Magic” so it was so out of nowhere and was therefore extremely jarring. The answer of course, is almost certainly that they didn’t intend for any of that and were just trying to figure out how to wrap that whole mess up and forget about it so as to move onto whatever bullshit was up next. But I can’t help wonder about it because I don’t have that much going on during the day and I have to think about something. Which is why I think everyone involved with the show should be brought up on charges. I don’t know what exactly they did wrong, but I know it shouldn’t be allowed to happen again.
Odds & Ends
-Selene literally says “do you believe in magic, Johnny?”.
-Racist Lt. Dann calls California the granola state because it’s “nothing but a bunch of fruits and nuts and a whole lotta flakes in between”.
-The Betsy Dominus actress actually did appear on four episodes of Mad Men as Ted Chaough’s wife, Nan.
Night Man Nights: “You Are Too Beautiful”/”Do You Believe In Magic?”
1X13 “YOU ARE TOO BEAUTIFUL”
Ronnie: This is an important episode, which seems absurd to say when the logline is Night Man impersonates a wrestler to prove another wrestler didn’t commit a murder. But it is, because “You Are Too Beautiful” was written by Steve Englehart, creator of the Night Man comic book. Steve Englehart also has a website at which he writes about his experiences writing comic books and, in this case, a television show. You know what that means: we actually have primary source documentation from someone involved in the making of Night Man. He can’t answer questions related to undergirding aspects of the program (why the jazz hologram? What’s with that dumb whirring noise when he turns on his gravity belt?), but Englehart’s website provides a look into the making of the series. His involvement was not contractually obligated so he essentially cold called Glen A. Larson for a script job and was told to write one script, its acceptance contingent on not having to be rewritten too heavily. In fact, Steve’s script required no rewriting. Keep that in mind: everything in this episode comes from the typewriter of the guy who created Mantis. Mantis the Marvel Comics character, not M.A.N.T.I.S. the handicapable black superhero who eventually got killed by an invisible dinosaur. One gets the sense from the website that Englehart is a little self-aggrandizing and ready to talk himself up, but by comic book creator moral standards he’s John Stamos.
As Englehart explains, this show is less about the main character and more about telling a story that happens to have Night Man in it. Think of that anthology series Spider-Man’s Tangled Web. Johnny Domino’s Spit Valve. Rod Bannerman goes from handsome bank robber to masked superfreak when he robs a jeweler (a stepfather and daughter operation, with the father played by “Jerk Store” Reilly from Seinfeld/Fuchs from The Thing and the daughter played by Meredith Monroe of Dawson’s Creek and Criminal Minds fame) with the wherewithal to place an explosive device into a bag of surrendered jewels. He spends 5 years in prison and upon exiting he’s immediately given a job offer in the lucrative world of pro wrestling. You see, having a hideous face there is not disqualifying. In many cases it’s a perk. Fortunately, Jessica the club owner who’s barely been in this fucking show has free wrestling tickets to offer the boys. That’s how you connect jazz club to wrestling: have the seldom appearing owner come up with tickets out of her ass.
“Hey Golden Boy, the ocean called–“
Meredith Monroe is seated next to Jessica, wondering just who sent her this wrestling ticket in the mail. I like how she has so little going on that she’ll attend whatever is mailed to her. There’s a dispute going between Rod (now the wrestler Golden Boy), his promoter/manager Paddy Ladbroke, a name that hasn’t been used since the days of “Irish Need Not Apply”, and Meredith Monroe, because Monroe causes Rod to lose interest in wrestling, which obviously doesn’t sit well with Paddy O’Potatofamine. A dead body complicates matters. Wrestling groupie Tiffany wanted Golden Boy’s entire body, yet she reacted to him taking off his mask like he’s a Universal monster and not, like, a disfigured guy. Then she’s found strangled to death. She was seen by Golden Boy last, but he claims he didn’t kill her. If you can’t trust a bank robber cum masked wrestler, who can you trust? The characters uncover similar murders of beautiful young women on the circuit and conclude a wrestler must be behind the slayings. Surprised Criminal Minds never did a wrestling episode. That industry is rife with premature death.
Johnny’s evil radio tunes in when in an elevator with some wrestlers, so he needs to narrow down the suspect pool by going up to each wrestler and seeing if their vibe is cool. This seems like a shitty mission in a video game. Meanwhile you’ve got the relationship between Rod and Meredith Monroe, which actually isn’t too bad. He tries to woo her as Golden Boy and she puts 2 and 2 together pretty quickly, revealing she knows he’s the bank robber from 5 years ago. I think a lesser script would keep her in the dark unnecessarily to set up a She’s All That twist later on. It gives her a more active role rather than making her a one dimensional object of affection. Dare I say her character is two dimensional. By the time Reilly Fuchs shows up and it turns out the whole robbery was an inside job to scam the insurance company, I’m like, okay, enough. Steve, you know Night Man isn’t supposed to be this complex, right? It’s just a load of nonsense and bad greenscreen for 43 minutes. Effort goes against the point, man. What say you, Chris? I thought this was actually a good episode when judged against the whole of Night Man so far. Maybe tapping an experienced comics writer instead of your dipshit son for scripts was a good move by Glen Larson.
Chris: You once said to me that the average comic writer couldn’t get a job writing for Guiding Light, and “You Are So Beautiful” neither reinforces nor undermines your assertion because Steve Englehart is an exceptional comic writer and Night Man makes Guiding Light look like Breaking Bad. I assume. I’ve never seen an episode of Guiding Light. I will say that I agree that this is probably the closest NM gets to being good television, and is the best episode of the show so far, and that, to me, is entirely due to the script. Englehart is from that third wave of comic writers who came to comics in the 70s, after guys like Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko introduced continuity, melodrama, and irony to superheroes in the 60s, and before guys like Frank Miller, Neal Gaiman, Grant Morrison and Alan Moore broke through to the mainstream with their post-modern deconstructions. Like his contemporaries, Denny O’Neil, Gerry Conway, and Len Wein, Steve Englehart was responsible for adding modern and/or literary flourishes to the more elemental work of their predecessors. They wanted to add some weight to what had come before but were also all in on the silly, disreputable reputation that comics still had in the art world. This all to say that a superhero getting sidelined in his own story so as to focus on a weirdo Phantom of the Opera/Beauty and the Beast pastiche set in the world of Professional Wrestling seems like exactly the kind of the thing that would have happened to Batman in 1977. Also that’s a compliment. Bruce was wearing a lot of turtlenecks at the time, and lived in a penthouse at the top of a Wayne Foundation skyscraper that also had a revolving restaurant and, no shit, an enormous tree growing inside it.
“I wanna see The Mask” “We have The Mask at home” The Mask At Home:
You can tell almost immediately that a professional had somehow gotten past whatever goons Glen Larson had posted outside the Night Man writers room because “You Are So Beautiful” actually gives the supporting cast something to do. Club owner Jessica gets tickets to a wrestling match from a friend, but she doesn’t know anything about the sport, and it turns out that Raleigh and Frank are wrestling fans, while Lt. Dann gets to be the this is stupid but all my friends are going so I guess I’m going too guy. So, like, the characters get to bounce off one another and react differently to situations and that gives you a sense of who they are and what they’re about. You know, like a writer might have them do. And Johnny gets to sit back and react to what’s happening around him instead of being the engine that everyone else is reacting to. It’s a nice change of pace because, as we’ve said many times, Matt McColm isn’t what you’d call a “great” or even “serviceable” actor. I wouldn’t even go so far as to say he “fits the dictionary definition” of what we would call an actor. His job for the majority of the episode is to look natural in a collared, button up, short sleeve shirt. He is almost up to the task. But he is getting better at certain things. Like, he’s pretty good at being comfortable in groups. When the whole cast is around him doing shit, he actually looks engaged and amused by what’s going on around him. This might seem like a shot but it’s not, you watch actors who are playing main characters in shows and they can look impatient or bored when other actors are on screen with them. McColm sparks (to the degree that he can spark at all) when he’s a part of a group and he gets to watch what everyone else is doing.
What’s more inexplicable and odd (so, more traditionally Night Man) about “You Are So Beautiful” is the C-plot about pretty-girl Meredith Monroe and her asshole step-dad. To say step-dad appears to hate his pretty step-daughter would be a gross understatement. The first time we see him he’s yelling at her for being stupid enough to not intuit that a handsome guy looking at jewels in their jewelry store was about to rob them, and then later, when she gets a bouquet of flowers at the store, he yells at her again, and throws the flowers into the street. Now, with hindsight, I guess we’re supposed to think that the flower incident is a panic-move related to his knowledge that her secret admirer is the guy he conspired to commit fraud with. And maybe if there were scenes of him being kind and loving towards his step-daughter to provide context, that would play. But as it is, the guy just comes off like a hateful belligerent prick, and when the step-daughter says something about how much she loves him you’re just like what, why? It doesn’t help that Monroe comes off as the sweetest woman in the history of the universe. As an actress she’s barely above replacement in the Night Man League (NML) in most respects, but she sells being smitten with Golden Boy, and she has a smile that I have no trouble believing would steer a jaded crook onto the straight and narrow. It is inconceivable to me that anyone could be as thoughtlessly cruel to her as her step-father. I was sitting in my house alone hissing at him like he was a silent film villain.
This is the kind of well choreographed action we’ve come to expect from Night Man.
Ronnie: Well, good news because Reilly the evil stepfather dies in a struggle with Golden Boy and it’s not really addressed the rest of the episode? You’d think Golden Boy being partially responsible for her stepfather’s death would sour the romantic feelings Meredith Monroe feels towards the guy, but not so. I guess that’s why Reilly is a stepdad instead of a biological father. Someone kills your dad and you become Inigo Montoya. I’ve never heard of anyone avenging their stepfather, by contrast. Even Uncle Ben for Peter Parker, that’s a blood relation surrogate father. Before step relations became an easy means for pornography to bypass prohibitions about depicting incest, stepparents were usually of a wicked variety and Reilly is no exception. This is really a Cinderella story where instead of whisking her away because she can fit her foot into a glass slipper the prince fumbles with a gun and in the ensuing scuffle the evil stepparent gets shot. Not sure how the carriage magiced from a simple pumpkin fits in, give me some more time.
She should have those same bandwagon pennants Homer Simpson would have for, like, midseason television and the XFL.
We’re so in the weeds with this series it’s pretty difficult to tell whether “You Are Too Beautiful” is good or just good by Night Man standards. The relevant aspect is I enjoyed myself way more than other hours. Englehart does a good job at creating multilayered characters over the course of 43 minutes. They’re not too complex, but there’s something there. It’s also certifiably insane like Night Man should be. Right after Rob leaves prison, for example, there’s a guy outside who immediately offers him a job professional wrestling. Now as fantastical as that may be, I don’t think there actually is pro wrestling recruitment outside prisons. That seems like a joke in a heightened reality like in The Simpsons. But hey, even a seasoned writer like Steve Englehart is not immune to Night Man’s, well, Night Man-ness. I do think it’s the best of the series so far, but what does that mean, really? Englehart only writes two more episodes of the series and they’re both in Season 2. I have to imagine next time it’ll be back to same old same old and no lessons will be learned by Glen A. Larson et al.
Chris: Englehart says on his website that he turned in the script and it aired pretty much word for word what he wrote. He said the showrunner told him that otherwise never happened. Here’s my theory: I don’t think Larson read the script at all. Makes sense, right? In fact, it pretty much explains every episode we’ve seen so far. Like, what if the showrunner was being honest but also omitting the detail that every script was done as-is on Night Man. He could very easily have been telling Englehart the truth when he said it almost never happened, he just might have meant it more as an explanation for what the fuck was happening that our man Steve mistook as a superlative about his writing. Or maybe it was both. Maybe the guy was saying “Jesus, your script reads like it was worked on by a group of professionals instead of the transcribed ravings from psychopaths on work release from the local hospital from the criminally insane”. Then he’d take a beat and go on “because that’s who we’ve hired for the writers room. We have no budget and they’re basically slaves”. Another pause. Then “it’s actually grossly inhumane. I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I’m snapping at my kids. My wife is talking about a trial separation. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t know who I am anymore. I think this job is killing me.” It makes as much sense as anything!
Odds & Ends
-Englehart’s page on this episode can be found here (https://www.steveenglehart.com/Film/NightMan-Too%20Beautiful.html).
-One of the wrestling matches is between The Hillbilly and Captain Omen, the latter of whom looks like he belongs in a KISS cover band. (Maybe they’re already looking for an Ace Frehley replacement…)
-Tiffany suggests to Johnny they have a private pajama party. He declines. This is a woman who recognized Johnny at a wrestling show; jazz fan and wrestling fan is a rare pairing to say the least.
-Rob Bannerman adopts a pseudonym, “Tom Hammersmith”. I don’t know why. His parole can’t preclude involvement. If we prohibited all ex-cons from wrestling the “sport” would be on life support. Also, isn’t the point of a pseudonym to be less obtrusive than your real handle?
1X14 “DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?”
Ronnie: I’m so glad that by magic the show means sorcery and not the kind of jackass bullshit that makes up Now You See Me and its sequels. I can’t deal with those guys. Things start off with a bang as a sultry lady walks into the House of Soul and immediately triggers the radio tuned to evil, depicted by a demonic version of the actress saying “come and get me, Night Man”. Said actress, Jacinda Barrett (the ice bath kidney kill in Urban Legends: Final Cut that got added in reshoots because the film needed more death), poses as “Lucy Devlin”, a staff writer for BillBoard Magazine who is interested in interviewing Johnny. Man. Lucy Devlin is on a level of on the nose not seen since “Damien Faustman” in the Ben Stiller Show sketch “Low Budget Tales of Cliched Horror”. When Johnny asks Jessica to meet Lucy, she’s nowhere to be found and her business card is that of a car wash. When she later crops up as a magician, because I guess jazz clubs book magicians now, Jessica won’t believe Johnny when he says he’s seen her before. Next thing you know she’s disappearing people like a magical Pinochet.
The disappeared people actually go to another dimension of sorts. The effects are, as to be expected, awful. Imagine Sliders but somehow worse. Charlie Dann ends up in a prison cell with Bubba Carson, a burly biker type who Dann saw executed five years ago. That doesn’t matter in this realm. Frank follows him and his nightmare vision provides us insight into Johnny’s childhood. See, Frank was always working the beat and that meant he neglected his wife, Johnny’s mother Betsy. This is shown by him being late to his son’s birthday party, a birthday party at which Johnny wears a grim reaper mask because he wants to be creepy for no apparent reason. I appreciate fleshing out the Dominus line, and that Betsy looks straight out of Mad Men makes it funnier. Things take a turn for the baffling when Raleigh is banished to the hell dimension and he’s pulled over by a racist version of Lt. Dann for joyriding in Johnny’s Prowler. Of all the things Night Man is ill-equipped to discuss, race is at the top of the list. I don’t need to see Night Man’s techie buddy Rodney King’d, you know? (There is a funny moment when Lt. Dann meets his superior, who is also Lt. Dann. Perhaps it’s like Pokemon and all police officers look like Michael Woods.) Let’s assess: Dann’s nightmare is being put in a cell with the likes of whom he sent to prison; Frank’s is disappointing his family; Raleigh’s is being subject to police racism. Fortunately, Night Man–the Mightiest of Whities–saves Raleigh from a beatdown by the racist Danns only to start strangling him to death for taking the Prowler without asking. Good thing it’s all an illusion and the show never establishes the parameters of these illusions.
Lt. Dann is Overdrawn At The Memory Bank!
Patrick Macnee, trouper that he is, lends some credibility and exposition to the proceedings. He also provides the key to solving the episode’s problem: Johnny has to use tarot cards to go to the nightmare dimension and retrieve Lt. Dann and Frank from their fears. This consists of beating up a fat man and what would be an emotional reunion between a mother and a son she never got to see grow up that is stymied by Night Man being incompetent and terrible at everything it tries to accomplish. A final battle proceeds, which ends with… Johnny waking up in his chair? And then the events of the episode happen with a different hired magician, and then Johnny sees Lucy Devlin again, only this time he turns down her interview request? Chris, help me out. What the fuck is this ending?
Chris: It’s an ending, Ronnie, and I think we need to be satisfied with that. Did anything in the episode actually happen? Was it all a dream? Was it a kind of supernatural riddle that he solved thereby causing things that actually happened to collapse in on themselves and become dreams retroactively in a kind of Ghost-Of-Christmas-Future Road-Not-Taken morality play? I’m gonna go with sure. To all of it. Narrative is like science, whatever we want it to be (this is a 30 Rock reference, Ronnie). I don’t know if “Do You Believe in Magic” is the worst episode of Night Man we’ve seen so far, but it is the most episode. And that’s kind of like being the worst because Night Man is a really bad show so the episode that’s the most Night Man would be the episode that embodied its properties (in this case badness) to the maximum effect. But there’s a paradoxical quality to the whole production that makes it hard to write off so easily. Because Night Man isn’t bad in any lazy conventional way, it’s hard not to be struck and engaged by just how thoroughly the show’s reach exceeds its grasp, and that means that an episode that mosts its badness is also really striking.
I want to start with Johnny’s first encounter with Ms. Devlin. She gives him her card, right? And then she disappears and the card turns into a card for a car wash. I wish I knew how they ended up with that. Like, why wasn’t the card just blank? Or he put the card down on the counter and then it just disappeared like she did? Why a car wash? It’s not like Johnny goes to the car wash later and gets some clue because it’s an evil and/or haunted car wash. Like maybe it was built on an unmarked graveyard where the prison buried people they executed or something so that’s where she materialized and then transformed into her earthly base of operations. And it’s not like the show runs out the “Everyone Thinks Johnny is Crazy” plot because he keeps insisting something spooky is happening but nothing he’s saying is lining up with what everyone else is seeing. But they don’t bother with that either. Instead the car wash business card is thrown away and never mentioned again. It’s a deliberate detail the show takes the time to include and then does nothing with. And that’s a small, petty detail to focus on, but TV shows are often built out of tiny details the same way letters make up words make up sentences make up paragraphs. Big things are just giant collections of little things.
And we’re supposed to take this seriously, huh?
And when you get a look at the big things that all the little things add up to, it just gets more confusing because in “Do You Believe in Magic” Raleigh gets lost in a racist nightmare where his police officer friend profiles and terrorizes him and Johnny is sexually propositioned by the ghost of his mother. Two difficult subjects that the show has never approached previously and then decided to just dive headfirst into. And the manner the show decides to approach any of it makes the whole thing weirder and worse. The handmade effects and dreamy circular quality of Raleigh’s nightmare combined with the curdled Norman Rockwell psycho-sexual perversion of what goes down with Johnny and his mom suggest someone in the writers room rented Fire Walk With Me at some point and became angry and confused. I don’t understand how we got here and I want to leave. Here’s my point, nothing on this show makes sense. It doesn’t make sense on a plotting level, on a thematic level, or on a prop level. It doesn’t matter how broad or focused you get. It’s fractal. Is it all a dream or what? What’s the deal with the business card? Did Johnny’s mom just try to fuck him? No one question has any more or less weight than any of the others and none of it connects to anything.
I think we’re in hell.
Ronnie: That’d be fitting. You know how in They Live Rowdy Roddy sees the alien on TV and goes “figures it’d be something like this”? It figures our Hell would be a bad syndicated superhero show from the 90s. Whatever we did, we earned this. But let’s not dwell on what we’ve done to deserve this and try to move forward. I like how neither of us have thus far mentioned the baffling decision to have more than one sequence of the Night Man costume coming to life and attacking Johnny. Rare compliment here: the Night Man costume sans an actual occupant is pretty disconcerting. In a better show it might even be disquieting. But the show isn’t better so it’s not. I bring it up because there are multiple components of “Do You Believe In Magic” that do not square with anything else in the episode. One instance is Patrick Macnee is cut off when stating Selene’s real name. You’d think it would be a plot point, like she can be defeated if someone knows her true name, as if she’s a demonic entity. Nope! It’s nothing, another loose thread left hanging.
Tongue designed by Erik Larsen
The end really soured me on this one, I’m sorry. I spent minutes after the thing wrapped up, puzzled. Did any of the episode happen? What parts of it were a dream Johnny had, a dream that emphasized his different need for sleep since the accident occurred? Rather than just ask questions I won’t get answered, I’m going to try to mount an explanation. So Selene’s last line is “be careful, we’ll be watching you” and then Johnny wakes up. I take this to be a premonition, an outgrowth of his power. He meets people and then he can intuit their intentions, either something bad they did or something bad they’re going to do. Sleeping takes it into overdrive, hence the elaborate fantasy. This time he rebuffs Selene and that’s enough to get her to decide “screw this, I’m not interested in fucking with Night Man”. It doesn’t make total sense but it’s enough, I think.
Selene definitely has the makings of a recurring foe, so of course we’re never going to see her again, nor are we ever going to find out who the “we” are that are watching Night Man. Shitty show, terrible job!
Somehow the costume has more charisma when Matt McColm isn’t in it.
Chris: I mean yeah, this is Dumb TV ground zero territory in that it’s clearly going for a Smart TV makes-you-think kind of twist and totally screwing the pooch. Because, like, take Total Recall, okay? The idea behind Total Recall is that the whole Rekall experience is a metaphor for going to the movies. That instead of going and having authentic human experiences as people we instead go and consume these manufactured experiences designed to let us take a break from boring reality and instead live in fantasy wish fulfillment for a second. The joke of Total Recall is that our “fantasy wish” is, when you think about it, appallingly hateful and violent. If the protagonist of Total Recall is dreaming, then his ultimate fantasy is to kill his wife and best friend, go to another planet, kill a bunch of people there, and have sex with a space prostitute. We’re doing what he’s doing means we want what he wants means we’re pretty fucked up, get it? It’s a classic Verhoeven yuck-em-up because it asks us to consider our own violent misogynistic subconscious desires and our complacency towards a culture that celebrates those toxic values. That scamp!
Is “Do You Believe in Magic” attempting a similar kind of psychological character study slash post modern critique of the values of the average Night Man fan? Are we supposed to infer, assuming that it was all just a dream of Johnny’s, that we’re seeing what Johnny believes his friends’ greatest fears are? Like, does he believe that Raleigh is terrified of being profiled and persecuted by the police? Is that supposed to suggest that Johnny is very progressive and woke or does it mean that he can’t see past race and assumes that because Raleigh is black that his deepest fear must be of experiencing violence at the hands of the police? Because, and I can’t stress this enough, the show has never feigned in that direction for a single solitary second before “Do You Believe in Magic” so it was so out of nowhere and was therefore extremely jarring. The answer of course, is almost certainly that they didn’t intend for any of that and were just trying to figure out how to wrap that whole mess up and forget about it so as to move onto whatever bullshit was up next. But I can’t help wonder about it because I don’t have that much going on during the day and I have to think about something. Which is why I think everyone involved with the show should be brought up on charges. I don’t know what exactly they did wrong, but I know it shouldn’t be allowed to happen again.
Odds & Ends
-Selene literally says “do you believe in magic, Johnny?”.
-Racist Lt. Dann calls California the granola state because it’s “nothing but a bunch of fruits and nuts and a whole lotta flakes in between”.
-The Betsy Dominus actress actually did appear on four episodes of Mad Men as Ted Chaough’s wife, Nan.
Ronnie Gardocki