Timely Television
I think I may have seen the timeliest piece of televised fiction I’ve ever seen. I had a little bit of ironing to do for the next day (can’t possibly show up to work looking all wrinkled and disheveled!) and I turned on the TV. Nay was TiVo-ing “Boston Legal”.
SIDENOTE: What is the proper conjugation of the recently minted verb “Tivo”?
Anyway, the main non-William Shatner character, Alan Shore, played by James Spader, is arguing in front of the US Supreme Court, whether a mentally deficient man who was convicted of raping a child in Louisiana should be put to death.
Okay, so, not more than a few days earlier (4/16), I’m listening to NPR’s All Things Considered, and I hear this: listen.
The article (in case you don’t want to listen to the whole thing) is all about a case that’s headed to the Supreme Court to decide whether Louisiana has the right the execute a man convicted of rape of a child.
Whoa. Seriously?
I just heard this piece on NPR and a few nights—just a few—I’m watching it play itself out fictionally on national TV. Without going into the particulars of my own belief in the death penalty (that the practice should be discontinued), and avoiding the political diatribe into which Spader’s soliloquy descended (which I ultimately found distracting), I have to say, this is the single most timely piece of fiction I have ever seen on TV.
