‘Empires of New York’ a tabloid fantasy
Paul Giamatti (“Billions”) lends his voice to “Empires of New York” (8 p.m. Sunday, CNBC), narrating a tabloid fantasy disguised as a history of the 1980s.
“Empires” profiles seminal figures from the period, junk-bond king Ivan Boesky, hotelier and “Queen of Mean” Leona Helmsley, gangster John Gotti, prosecutor and future mayor Rudolph Giuliani and media-savvy developer and future president Donald Trump.
The five-part series runs through Dec. 27, chronicling a decade that saw New York City rise from squalor and bankruptcy to a kind of feisty glitz, even if much of it was financed by sketchy debt and speculation.
Curiously absent among its major profiles are Ed Koch, the mayor associated with the city’s 1980s turnaround, and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who used the tabloid New York Post and later his Fox empire to celebrate law & order politics, tax-cut conservatism, sleazy celebrity gossip and vulgar and ostentatious displays of wealth. Both were more influential at the time than the five profiled in “Empires.”
There’s a certain sleazy audacity to this series. Three of its five main figures spent time in prison and the remaining two, Trump and Giuliani, have uncertain legal futures.
Above all, it presents a “legend” of the 1980s with a certain slapdash approach to history and fact. Early in the first episode, while covering the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan is referred to as “an unlikely candidate” who had come out of nowhere. That would have come as a surprise to anybody who had seen him almost wrest the nomination from sitting president Gerald Ford in 1976. Calling Reagan, always a front-runner in 1980, “unlikely” flies in the face of reality. But tabloids don’t report events, they shape them to their narrative.
Curiously, “Empires” airs as New York City undergoes an economic meltdown and identity crisis. New York isn’t the broken-down city depicted in the beginning of “Empires,” but its future may be even more uncertain.
› Directed by Errol Morris (“Thin Blue Line”), “My Psychedelic Love Story” (9 p.m. Sunday, Showtime, TV-14) recalls a curious chapter in the history of the counterculture.
Employing striking graphics, reenactments and period footage and photography, “Love Story” offers an extended interview with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, who spent her 20s as the lover of LSD guru Timothy Leary, when he was on the run from the U.S. government after being sprung from prison by the Weather Underground.
Recalling a hallucinogenic odyssey that took them from Switzerland to Kabul, Harcourt-Smith’s recollections evoke the political paranoia of the time. She wonders aloud if the entire escapade wasn’t some elaborate trap set up by the government to ensnare Leary, a former Harvard professor condemned by President Nixon as the most dangerous man in America.
Fans of Morris’ documentaries are used to his habit of following peculiar characters down rabbit holes. But for all of her youthful beauty and exotic radical chic, Harcourt-Smith is an unreliable narrator. What would you expect of somebody who took acid every day for years?
Her story seems better suited as one chapter in a richer tale. Spending two hours with her is wearisome. I learned more about her story reading her obituary. Harcourt-Smith died on Oct. 11, 2020.
› Just a day after Disney+ debuted its new “Black Beauty,” HBO presents “The Call of the Wild” (8 p.m. Saturday), a 2020 adaptation of Jack London’s 1903 novel. The modern-day “Beauty” relates the tale of a mustang ripped from the wild to the posh domesticity of a Long Island paddock. “Wild” sticks closer to London’s story of a family dog taken from the comforts of his California home to the tooth-and-claw savagery of the frozen north.