Backdrop of betrayal in Clapton’s story
Television has been obsessed with difficult men since Tony Soprano. Combining a cantankerous and frequently maddeningly selfish character with all the hallmarks of the standard rock hagiography, “Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars” (9 p.m. today, Showtime, TV-MA) is at least an hour too long.
But for fans who never minded the 7-minute singles like “Layla,” or the 16-minute indulgence of “Toad” on Cream’s “Wheels of Fire” album, the length may seem just about right.
“12 Bars” offers a wealth of footage of Clapton as he made his way through The Yardbirds, John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, Cream, Blind Faith and Derek and the Dominos. We also learn of Clapton’s peculiar and painful upbringing and its explanation for his rather cool and casual treatment of bandmates, friends and lovers over the years.
A shy and artistic youth, Clapton only discovered when he was an adolescent that his older “sister,” who had left for Canada, was actually his mother and that his “mum and dad” were his real grandparents. His mother would stage a reunion with young Eric only to
cruelly reject him all over again.
This tragic tale of betrayal offers a backdrop to Clapton’s story, particularly his soap-opera efforts to steal the wife of his best friend, George Harrison, and his attachments with various fellow guitarists, including B.B. King, Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman.
The film all but runs out of gas when it asks viewers to endure a long slog through Clapton’s heavy-drinking years in the late 1970s. Clapton remains true to a blues philosophy throughout. When he learned that Hendrix had died in 1970, he declared that he was not sad that he was gone. He was sorry that “he hadn’t taken me with him.”
BALL BACK ON HBO
“Here and Now” (10 p.m. Sunday, HBO, TV-MA) brings creator Alan Ball (“Six Feet Under”) back to the HBO lineup. Greg (Tim Robbins), a philosophy professor, and Audrey (Holly Hunter), a therapist-turned-mediator, live in Portland, the capital of progressive lifestyles and the go-to place for scripted TV to send up liberal guilt. Over the decades, Greg and Audrey have blended a multicultural family, adopting children from Asia, Africa and South America to join their biological daughter.
The show begins at Greg’s 60th birthday party, an event Audrey has prepared with her typical passive-aggressive zeal. Thoroughly miserable, Greg gives a speech that seems to renounce his life and his work only to be interrupted when his son Ramon (Daniel Zovatto) has some kind of hallucination that forces him into therapy with Iranian-American Dr. Farid Shokrani (Peter Macdissi), a man with an exotic 21st-century family of his own.
At its best, “Here and Now” offers the same focus on interesting characters and the novelistic sense of detail that delighted viewers of “Six Feet Under.”
Unfortunately, this is a bad novel, frequently humorless and obvious. It’s supposed to use its characters to explore contemporary issues, but the forced topicality arrives in ways that make Freeform’s “The Fosters” seem subtle. A disappointment.
SHOWTIME POLITICS
Showtime doubles down on our relentless national obsession with the man in the Oval Office with “Our Cartoon President” (8 and 8:30 p.m. Sunday, TV-14) as well as the seventh season of “Homeland” (9 p.m. Sunday, TV-MA).
Similar to “South Park,” “Our Cartoon President” strives to send up the most current events and still fails to appreciate the fact that its quicksilver subject has made himself all but immune to parody.
As this season’s “Homeland” begins, the authoritarian and increasingly paranoid President Elizabeth Keane (Elizabeth Marvel) has declared war on the intelligence community, jailing more than 200 American spies and military officers accused of plotting a coup.
Carrie (Claire Danes) is knee-deep into the resistance, so deep that her sister, Maggie (Amy Hargreaves), fears that she’s off her meds.
Over the years, “Homeland” worked best when it sought to humanize both victims and enemies in America’s unending war on terror. Like “24,” it commented upon current topics from an oblique angle. This season’s storyline is a tad too on the nose, and as with “Our Cartoon President,” it’s likely to be upended by an onrush of real news that arrives at a dizzying pace and is frequently far stranger than fiction.
CELEBRITY PROFILE
The Reelz network interrupts its steady rotation of dead-celebrity profiles to offer “The Price of Fame: Johnny Depp” (9 p.m. Sunday).
Kevin McDonough can be reached at kevin.tvguy @gmail.com.