ROBERT ALTMAN

Tanner ’88

Ah that new year smell around here. Ok, so it’s March, but still! 2026 has started off basically just like 2025, not a lot of movie time, but the spirit remains intact. One thing I have noticed over the last few years is that there is quite a bit more initial inertia required to start back up again with this project, if I’ve been unable to move forward for a while. Ah well, perfection is the enemy of doing anything, as they say.

So. I started watching this series in... checks notes... 2020! Wow. That’s, uh, that’s a while ago. I remember it very well though. We had fled the pandemic and were living in a house in the Black Forest in Germany. Watching this series, while waiting for the results of the 2020 election, it felt so relevant. Then life got in the way and I finished the whole thing five and half years later. Well then indeed.

This is fantastic. It’s naive but thinks it’s incredibly worldly. It’s funny and a bit maddening. It absolutely predicts the next few decades of politics, but arguably doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. It’s well made, well acted, well scripted, irreverent, fun. I really enjoyed it. Watching it in 2026, ten elections later... man, that hits a bit different.

I don’t think you could do a show like this today. In a post Ali G world, a world of media training, social media, instant access, self paparazzi. I just don’t think something like this, embedded in reality but outside of it, could work. It’s therefore a relic of a simpler time. Like a bizarre companion to The West Wing only with mostly real people.

One final anecdote. I was in elementary school in 1988, in a liberal part of California. We did a vote at my school for president, as a part of learning civics. I will never forget excitedly telling my parents that “no-one” was voting for Bush because only four kids in the school had. I predicted Dukakis in a landslide. That was the moment my parents had to explain to me exactly what a bubble was, and how we were living in one. - Mar 27th, 2026