The Assets: Cancelled As Soon as Shown

We are watching The Assets, described as a period drama, thus the dramatization of a real event, the CIA’s identification and arrest of Aldrich Ames as a CIA mole in 1994. This is a superbly made series, available from Netflix, originally shown by ABC in 2014. It has a kind of paradoxical feel to it because the Cold War had as good as ended, ended for a time, at least, and another major thing, the War on Terror was about to launch. Yet in the bowels of the intelligence services, people were obsessedly engaged in doing what John le Carré had first unveiled.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of The Assets—as a marker of how time has changed—is that  ABC cancelled the series abruptly. Its pilot episode had the lowest ever viewership in the 18-49 demographic among the big three networks. A death sentence. Too sophisticated, too complicated. All that stuff, you know… Yesterday.

Tinker, Tailor—and Notes Taker

We watched the last disk of John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Alec Guinness working in splendid company. The book was published in 1974, made into the miniseries in 1979; the Cold War was still lingering on, in other words, and the Tenth Crusade had not yet begun. The experience of that series, which I followed up with starting to read an old copy of Smiley’s People (1979), left its mark on my sleeping self. The works of Le Carré serve as reminders of how society operated at certain levels in the twentieth century, best rendered as dark, dark. It occurred to me this morning, shaking off the shadows as the sun labored to shine, that in the very far away future, by contrast, the twentieth will be remembered as a fabulous and magical time owing to the Twins: Technology and Oil.

Another note occurred as we were watching the segment where the “mole” offers an explanation for his treason to Queen and Country to George Smiley. In the 1970s, quite obviously, the great paralysis that had gripped the world with the Capitalist-Commie polarization, lasting from 1945 right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, had temporarily preserved a widespread perception that civilization was still something real—rather than, let us say, a lifestyle choice; and that it mattered which side you were on though both were monstrous. That civilization was in major crisis, and right on the brink of a precipice, was clearly present in Le Carré’s mind. But it still mattered enough to write about. Interesting how, since then, everything has…how should I put it? Well, how everything since has come so visibly unraveled.