...having our precious lives, but not our friends.



I am really, REALLY looking forward to the first episode of Treme tonight. Sometimes, while looking forward to the beginning of a series like Treme, I consider how lucky I am to be living in this golden age of television, when so many are doing so much that is interesting with the form, and I could almost weep from excitement.  It feels, without exaggeration, like what it must have felt like to the avid theatregoers of London or Madrid in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, waiting for a new Shakespeare or Marlowe or Lope or Calderon piece to appear.  Never forget that those were the reviled and revered pop forms of those eras.

In almost equal measure to my excitement about this show, I am distressed by the recent death of David Mills on the set of the show.  He was a Washingtonian by birth, a Maryland Terrapin by education, a journalist with a gift for controversy of the most illuminating kind, and the screenwriter for some of the most admired episodes of some of my most admired shows (Homicide and The Wire).   It was only in the aftermath of his death, alas, that I learned about his very entertaining and thought-provoking blog, Undercover Black Man.

And so, by way of tribute, I offer this really brilliant clip from UBM, a clip that Mills was himself offering up as a tribute to Martin Short.  Because what is there not to love about a good meta-Broadway critique of race in musicals?