Date of airing: November 15, 1997 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 13.55 million viewers, 8.8/15 in Households
This was a political episode without being particularly political. After having gone through four years of the crapshow that was Donald Trump's presidency, as well as the even crappier show that followed (and is still going on), this episode felt like it stood the test of time, even though it never should have done so. Nazis were about to conquer the world in the 1930s and 1940s, and almost succeeded if it had not been for the Allied block and the Soviet Union (the only Russian thing you can be thankful for these days). They should have been extinct following their defeat after World War Two. Yet here they are, still doing their evil thing, still marching, still attempting to push their narrative and their worldview on unsuspecting people and children. Nazis should have been non-existent in the 1990s, and this episode of American television should have never existed. But for some reason, they are still around, like cockroaches in your kitchen cabinets.
In a way this episode was topical back then, and is still topical now, thanks to the world we are living in now, although I would argue that this episode was still stuck in the 1990s when it comes to delivering a story with politics in it, because white supremacy was the only thing the 1997 CBS viewers could handle. I don't know a lot about what American politics looked like in the mid-90s, and if Newt Gingrich, who was Speaker of the House between 1995 and 1999, was already on an active warpath against Democrats in Washington (history says that he started his vicious attacks in the late 1980s against Democrat Jim Wright, then the Speaker of the House), but the writers of television dramas were not ready to dip their scripted narratives into real-life politics – as if it was a forbidden fruit, not to be taken from the tree in the Garden of Eden, or else, you might alienate your entire audience with politically driven speeches, when it was "a given" that the TV audience was apolitical (but were they for real?). All you could do as a TV writer was to create a clear-cut villain for a political episode like this. Hence the Nais. Even if they were only called "white supremacists" here.
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| Neo-Nazis once marched in uniform. Now they're on social media in their underwear. |
The biggest moment of today's partisan politics babble in this episode was when Stephon’s father told Lance
that “your kind isn’t welcome here,” which is quite a thing to say for
an African-American to a white kid. I'm sure that was an intended image here, to force the audience to look into a mirror and face their own history – a history that Florida's governor Ron DeSantis would love to make you forget about. In the big picture of the story at hand, Stephon was probably too young to
have learned even an ounce of knowledge about Martin Luther King and
Emmett Till (I for one heard of Emmett Till for the first time in 2018, during the 50-year anniversary
coverage of the MLK assassination, but then again, I am not American), so there was at least a logical way for the writers to not include any racial tensions between the white supremacists and their black counterparts on the bridge.
Another moment of "Whoa!" was when I spotted a MAGA sign during the march across the bridge near the end of the hour. If Trump ever thought that his campaign slogan was a unique choice of words of his, then I have to disappoint him, although I don’t know when he created the slogan the first time around and if he actually thought of it by himself (instead of stealing it from someone else, as he usually does). I definitely know he has been using it way before his presidential run, and that it might have even been in his mind when he ran for the Reform party bid in 2000, but this episode was still shot in 1997, and there was a supremacist walking down a bridge with the words “Make America Great Again,” just in case liberals needed one more reason to connect this phrase with supremacy.
The only reason this episode is worth thinking about in proper television terms (as in, what does the story do to the characters?) is because of the difficult relationship between Lance and his father. Here was a kid, about to be groomed into hatred and violence, and there was a father, not caring a bleep in the world about how his cause was inciting said hatred and violence, and how it affected the people around him, including his son. Not only were the writers sure to include the only form of politics in that part of the story (the only thing white supremacy cares about is beating people up and ransacking restaurants of innocent people – so yeah, maybe you shouldn’t allow white supremacists to have permits for demonstrations and marches), but there was actual drama in the story, and even I was unsure whether Lance fill fall into the rabbit hole and stay with his father, longing for acceptance and love (it smells like a political domestic abusive relationship), or if the most obvious outcome of the episode – Lance joining Stephon on the bridge – would actually happen. And since EARLY EDITION is still a TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL-type show, it was pretty obvious that Lance would be the leader here.
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| Make America Great Again - the 1997 edition. |
After all, watching
this episode now and comparing Lance's decision to be a leader here and "convincing" his father's followers to disperse and give up, it reminded me of the leadership teenagers showed after the 2018 Parkland high school shooting, or the documentary feature DEAR FUTURE CHILDREN, or the activities on the streets that came with Greta Thunberg's decision to silently sit outside the Swedish parliament to strike for climate change (not to mention that Greta herself was inspired by the actions of the Parkland students and their March For Our Lives demonstration). If these real kids and one fictional t(w)eenager can do this, maybe so can we. And it doesn't even matter if it's about climate change, Nazis on the streets, or too much sugar in your ice cream.
