Marvel vs. DC, movies vs. television

The weekend grosses for DC’s major release Justice League are in, and the results are not good for DC.  Justice League may be the worst DC opening ever, and the first to open below $100 million domestically.  This follows on the heels of the successful opening of the latest Thor movie, Ragnarok.  The primary explanation for Justice League’s failing is that despite some major script doctoring and reshooting by Joss Whedon, Justice League still share the DNA of such dour fare as Superman vs. Batman and Man of Steel, neither of which were laugh fests like Whedon’s The Avengers or its far less superior sequel.

Of course, the whole “Marvel vs. DC” thing goes way back and is bigger than one film.  What I find interesting is that the images of the two comic universes are completely reversed if you switch from the TV universe and the movie franchises.

On TV, DC has The Flash, which was great in its early days precisely because it was a breath of fresh air after the gloomy Batman trilogy and all its angst and gloom.  The series stumbled last season by getting a little too dark, but seems committed to going back to more light-hearted fare this season.  Arrow, despite being pretty angsty, has consistently embraced its inner silliness.  Legends of Tomorrow started off as deadly earnest and was a bore its first season; then the show decided to just go with the silly and has been a rejuvenated show ever since.

Marvel’s TV image is far more glum.  Agents of Shield started out light and breezy, but once it started taking its plot points from the movies (see below) a lot of the humor went away.  Marvel’s newer offering, The Gifted, is nothing but perpetual angst as the forces of the US Government torment and harass mutants on a weekly basis, with the government agents all but cackling with glee. I tried to watch The Gifted mostly out of loyalty to Amy Acker, but I gave up after six episodes.  Another recent Marvel offering, Inhumans, was described by the LA Times as, “tr[ying] for a joke now and again, but it is overall somnolent and solemn.”  I haven’t been watching Inhumans as the first episode was described in one review as the worst thing Marvel ever produced, and other reviews have produced a Metascore of 27.

In movies, the opposite is the case.  DC has been slammed for bleak products like the aforementioned Zack Snyder offerings, while Marvel went with the master of mixing superpowers and humor, Joss Whedon, and reaped the biggest superhero film ever, The Avengers.  The Marvel X-Men franchise started out light and quippy as well, and the franchise tried to sell the heavier ideas it possessed with a spoonful of humor.

I don’t know why both studios should be so schizophrenic about the tone of their products.  There has been some blurring recently; as I said, once Agents of Shield started to incorporate plot points from Winter Soldier it started getting less fun, and DC has tried to lighten the image of its films by bringing Joss Whedon on board for rewrites and reshoots (I would love to bet that every punch line in the Justice League trailer was written by Whedon; each one sounds like something that was an outtake on Buffy).

The Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy demonstrated that comic books (excuse me, “graphic novels”) could be taken seriously; maybe a little too seriously.  I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to watch the first few episodes of The Flash and see a superhero who was happy and liked using his powers to help people.  But things change, and now it seems that audiences want a lighter touch when viewing the activities of their favorite metahuman, or X-man, or whatever.

The fact that Thor: Ragnarok has succeeded as a comedy is the best proof of this.  The first two Thor films were the least amusing of the Marvel entries, and the second one, The Dark World, was, well, dark (the one great moment in that film was a supposedly ad libbed moment by Chris Hemsworth when Thor entered Jane’s apartment and politely hung his hammer on an umbrella hook near the door). Ragnarok’s success, combined with Justice League’s unimpressive first weekend opening under $100 million, would seem to show the writing is on the wall.

It’s a narrow path to tread; be light and carefree, but don’t fail to take your material seriously.  Joss Whedon did this better than anyone for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the fact that he couldn’t quite rescue Justice League indicates to me that it must have been pretty far gone.  Both studios could learn from each other, with Marvel’s TV programs taking a cue from Legends of Tomorrow and the DC movie producers finding writers capable of finding the funny.

In the NFL, the inmates ARE running the asylum

So it’s come to this: I defend Roger Goodell.

A few weeks ago, Houston Texan’s owner Robert McNair made headlines when it was revealed that he said that the NFL should be tougher in dealing with protesters because they couldn’t have “inmates running the prison.”  There was some initial debate if he misspoke and meant to say “inmates running the asylum” because supposedly comparing NFL players to insane people was less insulting than comparing them to convicted criminals. 

I don’t think it really makes a difference, either sentiment displays the attitude of many owners that the team owners don’t just own the teams, they own the players just like slaveholders in the Old South owned their slaves.  The players and the owners are supposed to be partners, but some of the rich White men who own the teams have a contemptuous opinion of their supposed “partners.”

Then last week Dallas Cowboy’s owner Jerry Jones threatened to individually sue any fellow owner who approved a contract extension for Roger Goodell, an obvious response to Goodell finally being allowed to impose a 6-game suspension of Cowboy’s star (pun not intended) running back Ezekiel Elliot.  Jones has been dismissive of the entre process, opining that the penalty was an excessive response to the allegations that Elliot merely physically assaulted his girlfriend.  I guess Jones’ opinion is that if a man can’t smack his girlfriend around, what is this country coming to?

Jones is now saying the NFL penalty mechanism is so unfair he will sue if it is enforced against his team.  Of course, he said nothing against the decision to suspend Patriot’s quarterback Tom Brady for four games, so his outrage is selective.

If the other owners are smart they will ignore his threats a go ahead and give Goodell the extension he probably doesn’t deserve.  Al Davis occasionally challenged the NFL, but that was about marketing his team, not on-the-field advantage.  If the owners cave, then Goodell will be loath to impose any future penalties on a Cowboys player, lest he face the wrath of Jerry Jones.

Of course, the other owners could take this as an opportunity to strip the Commissioner’s office of all authority to impose suspensions, but given the public outrage over many of Goodell’s decisions to impose mild penalties for perceived faults (most notably the Ray Rice case, lest Jerry Jones think that no one cares about domestic violence cases) I think the owners would recognize that having some sort of figurehead is a good idea.  Especially since Goodell has proven effective as being a punching bag for public outrage.

Can Jones make good on his threat to sue the other owners?  Sure, in America anyone can sue anybody for anything.  The deal to extend Goodell’s contract was approved unanimously, meaning Jones supported it.  And Jones agreed to participate in the NFL and abide by its rules, including the method of determining Goodell’s salary, so it is a little late in the game for him to decide the rules aren’t fair.  And as noted above, he never had any problem with the NFL’s suspension process until his star player was suspended. Given that he agreed to everything, and has never said anything about how the process has worked in the past, it is hard to see how a lawyer could make a case that Jones’ suit is anything but a self-serving attempt to give his team an on-field advantage by being allowed to play players despite their breaking NFL rules.

I think Goodell has been largely incompetent in the penalty aspect of his job, botching the Ray Rice investigation, the deflate-gate situation (Brady was guilty, but even I think a four-game suspension was too harsh), and also not responding quickly enough to concussion concerns, the anthem situation, and the blackballing of Colin Kaepernick.  The contrary argument is that he’s made a lot of money for the owners (including Jerry Jones), but I am in the camp that believes a trained bonobo as Commissioner could have overseen the economic boom of the NFL.  The American appetite for violence is insatiable, and the NFL is the country’s primary distributor.

By the way, this is why I dismiss any claim that people aren’t watching NFL games because of anthem protests.  The anthem is usually not telecast, and besides, where are these people going to get their weekly dose of violence?  Watch soccer?  NASCAR?  If people aren’t watching the NFL it is because overextension has diluted the product, and because major athletes are getting injured at an increasing level because safety concerns have been ignored for years.

Looking at the disarray among the NFL owners over Roger Goodell’s contract extension, one can only conclude that Robert McNair was correct; the inmates are running the asylum.

The first 2017 cancellation has occurred!

One of the evolving aspects of the new media culture is the reluctance of television networks to decisively “cancel” TV shows.  There used to be an annual deathwatch to identify the first series to be axed, with speculation based on quality, time slot, and the star power associated with the show.  But in recent years, the wait for the first cancellation of the TV season has been attenuated by networks refusing to make a firm irrevocable decision about the fate of all of its series in favor of the more flexible option of simply not ordering more episodes of a show and letting the series die a peaceful death.

The 2017 TV season has apparently claimed its first fatality, as CBS has pulled the plug on Me, Myself, & I, its high concept comedy about a man facing issues at three different stages of his life.  The show wasn’t “cancelled,” but its time slot will be given to another show; the fact that the other show is the critically reviled “Man With a Plan” (Metacritic rating 36; named one of the 10 worst shows of 2016) indicates that the network has lost faith in a show.  Of course, they say the show will return, but if so it is likely to have its episodes burned off during the wasteland of January.

What I find a little odd about this is that Me, Myself & I didn’t look like a candidate for the first cancellation of the year.  The show had an unspectacular but decent Metacritic score of 57, with a respectable User Score of 6.3.  The show starred Bobby Moynihan, a popular alumnus of Saturday Night Live, and John Larroquette, a TV acting legend who won four consecutive Emmies as a Supporting Actor in a Comedy for Night Court.  The first casualty is usually a low brow comedy critics hated (2008’s Do Not Disturb, Metacritic score of 21), or possibly a high concept drama with expensive production values (The Playboy Club, 2011).  This season, for example, ABC’s Ten Days in the Valley hasn’t been cancelled, but being moved to Saturdays is not a sign of support by the network.

I watched the first three episodes of Me, Myself and I, and I enjoyed it while being aware of its limitations.  While the show could have the pilot episode, and first few regular episodes, deal with plots that would engage the main character as a youth, a middle-aged man, and a retiree, I couldn’t see how the show could develop its characters moving forward.  I also felt the show did a bad job of handling the main character’s occupation as an inventor, which seemed to revolve around him coming up with “wacky” props that all seemed silly.

I did stop watching the show, but only because my DVR only permits me to watch one show and record another, and once Supergirl and Lucifer were going head to head during the same time slot, I had no choice.  I could have watched the show on demand, but quite frankly I didn’t care. 

In looking over the list of each season's first show to be cancelled, one stands out.  In 2002 ABC ran a show created by Ben Affleck called Push, Nevada.  The show was reminiscent of Twin Peaks, but with a gimmick; every week there would be a clue, and once all the clues were revealed the first person to figure out the puzzle would win a cash prize.  The show was critically well received, with a Metacritic score of 70, way higher than any other first-to-be-cancelled show since 2000.  I enjoyed it, but for whatever reason ABC pulled the plug after 7 episodes.  However, under federal rules they had to complete the contest, so the actor who played the lead character appeared during a break on Monday Night Football and dumped the rest of the clues all at once.  I liked it.

For reasons that escape my understanding, Me, Myself, and I’s partner in the early Monday time slot for CBS, the incredibly lame-looking 9JKL (Metacritic score 36, User Score of 1.8), has not been relegated to a January burn-off.  In fact, it will take over Me, Myself, and I’s time slot while Man With a Plan will take over its slot.  Me, Myself & I had an initial rating of 1.6 which fell to 0.7 (among viewers between 18-49).  Last week the Monday lineup lost Big Bang Theory as a lead-in as it moved back to Thursdays, which caused the following CBS line-0up to fall in viewership.  9JKL had a rating of 0.8 on October 30, the same week Me, Myself, & I was 0.7, so I guess that extra 0.1 was enough to keep it on the air.

While I wasn’t a fan of Me, Myself, & I, I am sad it was the first casualty of the 2017 TV season.  Larroquette was a joy as always, and the premise was not the usual cookie-cutter product most TV series are (for example, 9JKL is about a son moving in next door to his parents; wasn’t that Everybody Loves Raymond’s plot?).  Buck up, all you unemployed actors; the new TV pilot season is only a few months away!

Divisiveness and Star Trek Discovery

I don’t need to tell you that America is a divided place right now.  Red states vs. blue states; anthem standers vs. kneelers; smooth peanut butter vs. chunky.  But it used to be there was something most of us could agree on, and that is that Star Trek is awesome.

But the Star Trek concept of IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) is being strained by the response of fans to the latest incarnation in the Trek oeuvre, Star Trek Discovery.  CBS just announced that it was renewing the show for a second season, so the experiment of only making it available on a streaming platform instead of broadcast television must have worked.  But there is a civil war brewing about the show and the direction of Star Trek into the future.

I cannot comment on the quality of the show because I won’t sign up for CBS All Access just to watch a new Star Trek series.  I can go back and re-watch The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine on Netflix if I want my Trek fix (sorry, Voyager was never my cup of tea), not to mention the movies (at least the good, even numbered ones).  I did watch the first episode that was broadcast, and I thought it was terrible.  Of course, it’s hard for me to make an informed decision because what they showed on CBS was not the first episode, but only the first half of the first two-part episode.  Note to CBS—if you say you are going to show the first episode on broadcast TV, then show the ENTIRE episode and don’t end on a cliffhanger and say, “to be continued” on part 2.

Metacritic gives Star Trek Discovery a respectable critical rating of 72 out of 100.  But then I checked the User Rating and saw it was a measly 4.5 out of 10, worse than mediocre.  Looking at the summary, it was what we in the statistics biz like to call a bimodal distribution—163 negative reviews vs. 82 positive reviews, with all the 10’s and 1’s averaging out to just under 5.  Very few people are on the fence.

I got the sense of the controversy looking at the comments on the AV Club review of the most recent episode.  In my history of reading reviews at AV Club I had never seen so many comments taking issue with the position taken by the reviewer, which pointed out the inconsistencies with the Star Trek universe and questioned the purpose of setting the series in the Star Trek universe then feeling the need to rebrand certain aspects (like largely rebooting the Klingons).  Comments on AV Club reviews sometimes have commenters pose slight disagreements with what other commenters have posted, but rarely have commenters taken the offensive to unilaterally disagree with the approach the reviewer took in critiquing the show itself.

The major reason for the split of opinion could be because we are now into the third generation of Star Trek fandom.  The First Age of Star Trek was the original show and the big screen movie version of Star Trek and its immediate sequels.  These stories were about Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest, and were based on a unifyied concept.

The Second Age of Star Trek was the re-birth and rise of the television franchise, from The Next Generation through Enterprise.  These projects were one step removed from Gene Rodenberry’s original vision, but close enough to avoid any major issues with continuity.  Yes, Klingons now had forehead ridges, but the best explanation for that was contained in the Deep Space Nine episode Trials and Tribble-ations (as Worf explained, Klingons did not discuss the change with outsiders). 

The Third Age began with the movie franchise reboot, where Chris Pine reinterpreted the role of Kirk.  One of the clever things done to avoid the whole consistency “tar baby” was to make everything due to a temporal anomaly, so that the events that followed would NOT be consistent with the events of the original TV series.  This was taken to a somewhat tedious extreme by Star Trek Into Darkness, which (spoilers!) was essentially a remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan but with events slightly altered due to changes in the timeline.

So now there are two, maybe three, groups of fans: those loyal to the original Star Trek series and its characters (these people are pretty old at this point); those raised on The Next Generation and the subsequent TV series which tried hard to toe the corporate line; and those who came aboard with the recent movie reboot who see no reason to drag a 50 year old TV series into imposing limits on a new science fiction TV franchise.  Thus the split in opinion over how dedicated any new incarnation of Star Trek has to be to the details of what has come before.

I’ve written before that my theory for the decline in quality in the Star Trek franchise, starting with Voyager and the later seasons of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, was that they started hiring writers based on their knowledge of Star Trek trivia over having actual writing talent.  The first year of the original series featured scripts by noted science fiction authors like Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Frederic Brown and DC Fontana, mainly because in the mid-1960’s there were few science fiction writers working in television.  More recent writers developed episodes with major plot points based on nuances that were probably not-thought-out details about Klingon physiology or Ferengi psychology; namely, they were Star Trek insiders and not graduates of screenwriting classes.

So, we’ll have to agree to disagree.  I will continue to think that Star Trek Discovery is a major misfire, while I watch City on the Edge of Forever and Our Man Bashir on Netflix.  Trek fans younger than me will eat up Discovery and believe that Star Trek Beyond is the best Star Trek movie yet.  If the Federation and the Klingons can co-exist, I suppose the various schools of Trek fandom can learn to live together.

The GOP Tax Plan

In case you haven’t heard, Republicans want to pass a “tax reform” measure.  Of course, being Republicans, when they say, “tax reform” they mean “tax cuts” primarily for the rich (because cutting taxes for the poor doesn’t accomplish very much).  Since this would dramatically increase the federal deficit, and because a lot of Republicans don’t like that idea, they have to look for ways to raise tax revenues without increasing tax rates, which can be tricky.

 One idea that was reported by respectable news sources is a plan to cap employee contributions to 401(k) plans, which are used by employees to save money for retirement.  The current cap limits tax deductible contributions from $18,000 to $24,000 a year; Republicans want to lower that amount to an amount possibly as low as $2,400 per year.

 Before I discuss the implications of this proposal, a little history of 401(k) plans is in order.  When 401(k)s were created in the 1970’s, they were a way to give highly paid executives a higher retirement income without raising benefits for everyone in a company’s pension plan.  Contributions to a 401(k) were treated as non-taxable income; taxes were paid when the money was withdrawn during retirement, at which point most company executives would be in a lower tax bracket, thus creating an incentive for the executive to squirrel away money.

 However, the tax code has changed a lot since the 1970’s.  Upper brackets were eliminated by the Reagan tax reforms, and companies found ways to compensate executives with stock options and the like which reduced the incentive for highly paid executives to use 401(k)s.  As private pension plans were eliminated during the late 20^th century (for reasons that I will leave to be explained another day), most private companies made 401(k)s the principal method of retirement saving for rank and file employees.

 One consequence of this is that the tax-deferred advantage of investing in a 401(k) has largely gone away.  It used to be said that retirees could live on 70% of their final income, mainly because presumably their house was paid off, but now many people refinance their housing instead of paying it off.  Also, medical expenditures are increasing for people of retirement age, so now people are expected to need about 90% of their final income in retirement.  This means that people who retire are in the same tax bracket as when they were working.

 So, the tax-deferral aspect of 401(k)s is just that—deferral, not avoidance.  What that means is that the Republican plan to cap 401(k) contributions won’t raise more tax revenue; it merely shifts when the taxes are paid from the future to the present.  So, the Republican plan mortgages the future in order to write down the deficit-enhancing aspects of the tax cuts.

 Shifting the tax payments means that the economy will be stimulated now, creating more jobs and, as I said, reducing the deficit now.  But there is no free lunch—the economy will be depressed in 10, 20, 30, or 40 years in the future when retirees retire and find they don’t have enough income to live on.  So not only will tax revenues be lower in the future, but there will be an increase in demand for government services as an increasing number of older citizen find they need government assistance to make ends meet.

 Taking public sector employees off pensions and putting them into 401(k) plans has been a Republican mantra for decades.  Now Republicans essentially want to take 401(k)s away (a cap of $2,400 per year would not allow people to save enough to live on when an employee reaches retirement age).  This means that the Republican plan would essentially mean that most workers couldn’t afford to retire, they would have to keep working until they die.  This may not be an issue for people in white collar jobs (California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is 84, announced she is running for re-election, meaning she plans on working until she is 90), but people in blue-collar trades often can’t physically continue to work when they get older and can’t meet the physical demands of their job.

The concept of “retirement” is a relatively new one; before the Great Depression (the one in the 1930’s, not the one in the 2010’s) pretty much everyone expected to work until they keeled over at their work station.  Thanks to the 20^th century development of pensions, enough could be set aside for future costs so that people might enjoy a few years of rest between work and the grave.  Then businesses decided that pensions were too expensive, so switched to 401(k)s, and now Republicans think that 401(k)s defer too much spending. 

 In a perfect world, everyone would save enough for their golden years.  In case you haven’t noticed, the world is less than perfect.  According to the Federal Reserve, Americans have a credit card debt of a little over $5,000 per person with a credit card, or $9,600 per household with credit card debt.  In our consumer culture, saving for the future is not as exciting as buying a really neat boat (or renting a one-bedroom home in the San Francisco Bay Area).  401(k)s are one of the few resources that people have to make wise decisions about savings, but the Republicans want to take away people’s futures in order to give the wealthy a tax cut.

TV Review: Star Trek Discovery

TV Review—Star Trek: Discovery

One of the dangers of trying to revive a beloved but dormant franchise is that you’ve got several million viewers ready to jump on even the slightest error or misstep of interpretation.  You have to be true to what made the previous incarnation great, but be able to innovate in order to reach a new audience.  It is what the creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation succeeded at.  It was what the creators of the new Doctor Who succeeded at. 

It is what the creators of Star Trek: Discovery failed at.

I can’t write off the series based on one episode, but one episode is all that is being provided before the show goes into “access mode” on CBS’ streaming platform.  Based on what I saw, I won’t be signing up.

Where does the show go wrong?  First, there is the inherent problem of setting a series using today’s filming technology ten years before the Original Series was set.  The sets, costumes, and make-up have to look better than they did when the Original Series was filmed in the 1960’s.  The most glaring example—Star Trek: Discovery has characters communicate with people far away by using holographic imagery.  Did Kirk ever use holograms to communicate with Star Fleet?  No, of course not.  So how do you explain Star Fleet having hologram technology ten years before the Original Series but not then?  Of course, the answer is because now we can film scenes using simulated holograms and we couldn’t in 1966, but that’s a meta answer that takes the viewer out of the experience.

Speaking of make-up, the creators of Discovery have decided to give the Klingons yet ANOTHER makeover.  Next Gen famously gave the Klingons a forehead ridge, a development wonderfully mocked in the DS9 episode Trials and Tribble-ations when digital technology was used to insert Commander Worf into footage from the Original Series episode The Trouble With Tribbles (when asked who Klingons used to look more human, Worf replied that it was something Klingons didn’t discuss). 

Klingons have been revamped, and so help me they look like Vogons from the BBC Production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.  They had a domed, turtle-like head and don’t look the least bit menacing, at least to me.  Their ship, which used to be the height of sparse, utilitarian design, has so many ornate carvings and elaborate moldings that it looks like a Orion brothel (or at least what I assume an Orion brothel looks like, since I don’t believe Trek has ever shown one).

There is also the age-old problem in Star Trek that they have to find ways for there to be problems despite futuristic technology.  The opening scenes show the Captain (Michelle Yeoh) and her First officer Michael Burnham (series lead actress Sonequa Martin-Green) trudging through a desert, and the Captain complains they are lost.  Lost?  My car has a GPS system, you’re telling me that a couple of hundred years in the future Star Fleet doesn’t?  Okay, maybe there is some “magnetic resonance” preventing GPS from working; the fact remains that they could have transported directly to where they were headed instead of risking getting lost in the desert.

What is the most important criterion upon which I will judge a TV show, or movie, or book?  How well does it solve the problems that it sets up?  The Original Series set up problems quickly, then let Kirk, Spock and McCoy wander around for 45 minutes before they reasoned out a solution.  The Next Gen usually had Picard, Riker, et al wonder what the problem was for 45 minutes, then when they realized what it was all Picard had to do was order Geordi to modulate the framistan to create a cascade effect on the whatzitz.  Not as interesting.

Unfortunately, I can’t evaluate how well Discovery solves the problems it presents because the first episode is a freakin’ cliffhanger!  Of all the cheap, manipulative ways to suck people in to signing up for CBS All Access, that’s the only way to find out how the plot of the pilot episode is resolved. 

Since that’s not possible, let me see how they resolve a smaller plot point.  Burnham flies off in an EVA suit to investigate a ship that sensors can’t discern.  Why the first officer and not a more, ahem, expendable crew member (*cough red shirt cough*)?  No idea.  She’s told that the radiation will kill her in 20 minutes, so she only has 19 minutes before she must be back.  She encounters a problem, the ship loses contact with her, and after the deadline her EVA suit reappears but the ship cannot establish remote control.  How is she saved?

We don’t know; they cut to commercial and then pick up with Burnham in sick bay being treated for radiation burns.  There is some hand waiving about how she was brought back on to the ship, but it is a deus ex machina conclusion to a relatively simple problem.  If she can’t be out for more than 20 minutes, then her suit’s computer should be giving her warnings when she needs to start heading back. 

There is also the problem that the ship’s third in command is an alien whose race is, apparently, cowardly by nature and is always recommending retreat.  I am all for affirmative action, but isn’t it a liability to have a command officer who will never engage in hostilities and will probably surrender to any ship they encounter that goes, “Boo!”?

I had low expectations for Discovery and they were NOT met.  The last two movies have been mediocre, and now an all-star assemblage of notables (Nicholas Meyer from The Wrath of Khan, Alex Kurtzman from the Star Trek movie, Bryan Fuller who wrote for Voyager and created the wonderful Pushing Daisies) has created this mess.  I am not subscribing to CBS All-Access; I think my time would be better spent re-watching Deep Space Nine on Netflix.

2017 US Open--the most unpredictable tennis in decades

The 2017 US Open was one of the most entertaining US Opens that I can remember.  The tone of the two weeks was set on the first night when unseeded Maria Sharapova, coming off a 15-month suspension for PED use, defeated the number two seed Simona Halep in the opening round.  Even granted that Maria Sharapova is a former Grand Slam winner, that match confirmed what we knew going in—it would be a wide-open tournament.

That was certainly true on the women’s side, due to the absence of Serena Williams who was otherwise engaged.  One can sum up the situation with the observation that the number one ranked player, Karolina Pliskova, had never won a major.  There are relatively few women players who have won majors, because Serena has won so many lately, and those who have won majors have fallen off after their victory (a surprising lot have trouble dealing with the “pressures of success”).  There were a number of potential favorites (mostly Eastern European women whose last names end in “a”), but the field felt wide open.

The situation was not quite as extreme with the men.  Several possible champions were missing the tournament, namely Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray and Stan Warwrinka.  Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were the heavy favorites, but both were older players with a history of injuries, so anything could happen.  In the end, in the quarter-finals only 2 of the 8 players would be seeded in the top 10, and only 3 would be in the top 16.

The past 13 years have been incredibly stable for men’s tennis.  If you look at any 5-year period from the start of the Open Era (1968) you’ll find somewhere between 8 to 12 men won the 20 major titles in that period.  Doing some random sampling the smallest number I found in the 20^th century was 7, between the years 1978-1982 (Vilas, Borg, Connors, McEnroe, Teacher, Kriek, and Wilander).  However, between 2006-2010 and 2007-2011, only 4 men won a major title (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Del Potro).  The number went up to 5 when Andy Murray started winning majors in 2012, and from 2010-2014 until 2013-2017 each 5-year span has had only 6 major winners (Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, Warwrinka, and Cilic). 

The opportunity to win a major seemed to energize a lot of the players who otherwise might have just gone through the motions before being eliminated by Serena or Roger.  The Sharapova/Halep match featured inspired tennis on both ends.  Subsequent matches featured a number of upsets, with an unlikely quartet of US women sweeping into the semi-finals.  Venus Williams, seeded ninth, was not quite a surprise, but Madison Keys (15 seed), Coco Vandeweghe (20 seed), and Sloane Stephens (unseeded) were not projected to get that far.

But in the quarter-finals Vandeweghe got past number one seed Pliskova, Williams beat 13 seed (and two-time Wimbledon winner) Petra Kvitova, Keys beat an unseeded player named Kaia Kenepi, and Stephens won a three setter over 16 seed Ana Sevastova.  Pliskova was the only top-8 seed to make it to the quarter-final, a sign of all the upsets that occurred on the way there.

Sloane Stephens, who had been ranked in the low 900’s earlier in the year, decisively beat Madison Keys in the final to win her first major title.

The men’s side was also filled with upsets, with only two top ten seeds (Nadal and Federer) making it to the quarter-finals.  The biggest disappointment was when Juan Martin Del Potro thwarted the chances of the first ever meeting of Nadal and Federer at the US Open by beating Federer in the quarter-finals.  Del Potro won the 2009 US Open title by beating Federer, making him the only player outside the “Big Three” to win a major from 2006-2011, so this was the second time he blocked Federer’s path to the Open title.

It was almost an anti-climax when Nadal beat some guy named Kevin Anderson, the 28 seed at the tournament.  Nadal managed to win his 16^th major, but to do so he needed a field so weak that he never faced anyone in the top 20.  He faced only two seeded players, Del Potro (24) and Anderson (28), which was a lot easier than having to beat Djokovic, Federer and Murray all at the same tournament.

Having a period dominated by possibly the two greatest men’s tennis players ever (Federer and Nadal), along with another all-time great (Djokovic) has produced some incredible tennis.  And having a period of women’s tennis dominated by arguably the best female tennis player of all time (I'd still give that crown to Steffi Graf) has been entertaining.  Predictability is nice, but unpredictability is more interesting.

But after the excitement of the 2017 US Open, I am looking forward to a period where there is a little more variety in the number of winners at Grand Slam tennis tournaments.