Portside Date: February 14, 2016

Author: EMILY NUSSBAUM

Date of source: February 12, 2016

The New Yorker

For voters who’ve been around for a few decades, this election season has often been an agonizing time-loop back to the nineteen-nineties, to old debates, to long-dormant controversies, especially when it comes to Hillary Clinton. If you’re seeking perspective, I have an offbeat suggestion: go to Hulu, then watch one of the most indelible episodes of “A Different World”: “The Little Mister,” from 1992. It’s a message in a bottle, a piece of forgotten pop culture that suggests, as Mark Twain once put it, that history may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

For those who don’t remember, “A Different World,” which ran from 1987 to 1993, was a spinoff of “The Cosby Show,” set at a fictional black college, Hillman. Although it began as a vehicle for Lisa Bonet, the focus became a loving, sparring romantic couple: Kadeem Hardison as the geeky Dwayne Wayne and Jasmine Guy as the Jack-and-Jill princess Whitley Gilbert. Around them swirled a diverse ensemble of African-American actors, a rarity then and now. Most unusual, the show dealt directly with politics, including sexual and intraracial politics, in a way that “The Cosby Show” never got near. It was a radical show in a conformist era for TV, taking daring, even avant-garde aesthetic risks along the way.

In this late episode, which aired in the final season of the show, Dwayne and Whitley, newly married, host a Halloween Party, at which Whitley dresses up as Angela Davis and Dwayne as Malcolm X. While the party rages, the two argue about “The Year of the Woman”—which is what people were calling 1992, when a handful of women ran for Congress and Bill Clinton (along with a prominent Hillary) was trying to unseat George H. W. Bush. “We talk more about Hillary and Barbara than we do about the issues,” Dwayne gripes. Whitley shoots back, “One of which is women’s rights!” Whitley complains that Dwayne doesn’t respect women, and that he doesn’t understand the particular pressures women operate under. He gyrates toward some dancing hotties, joking, “They earn my respect.”

Later on, when they’re drunkenly cleaning up, Dwayne argues that Whitley’s the one who doesn’t get it: if women ran the world, they’d know how hard it is. He peels off his mustache and sticks it on Whitley’s upper lip. He pulls on her Angela Davis wig. And then he passes out. The rest of the episode is Dwayne’s nightmare, a song-and-dance sequence that is a brightly lit and explicitly stagey carnival, directed by the show’s brilliant showrunner Debbie Allen, and inflected by the experimental theatrical tradition of plays like Adrienne Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro.”

In Dwayne’s vision, the 1992 election plays out with genders switched. Dwayne is a male version of Hillary Clinton, here called “Hilliard Blinton”—and married to Presidential hopeful, “Governor Jill Blinton,” played by Whitley. Jenifer Lewis is President “Georgia Mush,” married to the gray-haired “Bob.” Karen Malina White nearly steals the show as “Rose Godot,” complete with Ross Perot ears. There’s also a “Patty Buchanan”—a satire of the arch-conservative commentator and political operative Pat Buchanan, who upended the Republicans with his hate-filled speech at the convention—and “Johnny Weed,” a.k.a. Gennifer Flowers, the sleazy singer with whom Jill Blinton is having an affair.

The episode is so rich with provocation that it’s worth watching as a whole. But the central theme is that Hilliard gets crushed by the political machine, which fears that he’ll hurt his wife’s campaign: he’s too mouthy, too independent, and way too left-wing. (This is the same slam that hovered over Michelle Obama, of course, early in 2008.) During media training, Hilliard describes his love for children—but when he adds, “One out of five children grow up in poverty,” he’s told to keep quiet. At the Republican convention, his picture is flashed on a screen with a “no” circle superimposed. In a thundering screed before delegates who are actual sheep, Patty Buchanan (Jada Pinkett) rails that while Jill is bad, it’s Jill’s spouse, Hilliard, who is the “real snake.” He’s “a man that believes in radical macho-ism. Men in the military. He even believes that ‘happy’ people should have the same rights as the rest of us . . . People aren’t born happy! Happiness is a choice.” Twenty-five years before Hillary was criticized for being too anti-gay, she was singled out for being too pro-gay.

As with “Hamilton,” the fact that these are not merely men playing women and women men, but also white politicians played by black actors, provides a latent racial context, which simmers through every scene. (It also includes old-school nineties slang: “Yo, Governor Blinton, peep this!”) Convention speeches are performed as gospel songs or in preacherly cadences. A white-robed choir provides the Greek chorus. In a large hat, President Mush fans herself, as if at church. It’s a technique that disrupts the self-seriousness of politics, by applying a fresh cultural filter, but it also provides startling imagery on its own, like the sight of a confident black female President in the Oval Office. There’s a passing mention of “Supreme Court Justice Anita Hill.” The entire story feels informed by nineteen-nineties debates about black masculinity, not to mention the parallel that’s suggested between Malcolm X with Angela Davis and Bill with Hillary. To some degree, the episode feels like a precursor to the way “Scandal” wittily uses soap opera and pumped-up R. & B.—a feminine genre scored to an African-American beat—to dissect white Washington power.

In the episode’s climactic sequence, Hilliard has an emotional meltdown. When he sees Bob Mush, Hilliard complains that the First Gentleman’s criticism of his active politics feels particularly unkind: Mush is a man, after all, and he knows what it’s like to be crushed into the submissive role of a political spouse. “I’ve learned to smile, gaze, barbecue,” Hilliard says, in distress. “The only thing radical about me is how much I’ve changed.” He bursts into tears. Initially gruff, Bob pulls out a handkerchief. “Here, here, Hilliard,” he growls. “Listen, you have to learn to turn it off and on.” “I don’t want to turn it on and off,” weeps Hilliard.

It’s a peculiarly touching sequence, twenty-five years later—a reminder of the origins of the skilled debater Hillary Clinton has become, and the hyper-controlled persona that she’s had to maintain, during decades in the public eye, to avoid triggering the contempt of voters. (If she shouts, she’s shrill; if she’s quiet, she’s robotic; if I include this parenthetical, people will roll their eyes.) While the male Hillary is portrayed sympathetically, the script, written by Glenn Berenbeim, is scathing about both parties and the media, painting the Presidential race as a literal circus. The big debate is nothing but buzzwords. President Mush screams “Trust!” (and vows, “No New Taxes. Read my lipstick!”); Blinton emptily promises “Change!”; Godot talks money. In harmony, they wail, “What about the economy!” “What about your character!” “What about my billions!” Hilliard moans, “Stop! Please! You have to focus on the issues!”

Dwayne wakes up—he’s “woke,” in the modern sense. (When Whitley says, “Well, wake up,” Dwayne marvels, “I think I just did.”) He can see what Whitley sees: that this is a cooked process, for women, when it comes to political ambition. He still won’t kiss her with the mustache on, though.

Beyond the gender analysis, “The Little Mister” offers up a reminder of how tiny, easily forgotten factors frequently steer entire elections. Few people remember now how much a quirk of television timing hurt the Republicans: because Pat Buchanan’s speech ran, unintentionally, during prime time, his overt bigotry hurt the Party’s brand. (“It probably sounded better in the original German,” the liberal pundit Molly Ivins famously cracked of his “culture war” speech.) Ross Perot was the wild card before Nader, the “outsider tycoon” pre-Bloomberg and pre-Trump. But it’s also true that few of us remember 1992, these days, as the Year of the Woman. It was a big deal to have four women elected to the Senate. It’s painful to think back on those depressing media obsessions, about headbands and cookies, that dominated Hillary’s early career: it was a humiliating period, a kind of cultural hazing.

Most of all, the episode is a reminder of the many ways in which our interpretation of history can shift, as we change and the world changes. Two days ago, in a tormented essay in Slate, Michelle Goldberg wrote about how she moved from hating Hillary to voting for her, not despite of but because of Clinton’s history. “Since the 2008 election, I’ve grown more understanding about why Clinton made some of the ugly compromises I once held against her,” she writes, describing research that she did for an article. “I was reminded that before she was excoriated as a sellout corporatist, she was excoriated as a feminist radical. She was widely seen as being to her husband’s left, in a way that threatened his political viability. Time after time, under intense pressure, she would overcorrect, trying to convince a skeptical mainstream press that she was a sensible centrist.”

The result for Clinton, Goldberg argues, “is an almost tragic irony. She is now struggling to convince voters that she is the person she was once widely assumed to be.” That’s definitely one revelation of revisiting “The Little Mister.” The other might be that, whatever the outcome of this election, we may need to wait until 2026 or beyond to understand it, possibly through Broad City chips implanted in our brains.

Emily Nussbaum is the television critic for The New Yorker. She has written about “The Good Wife,” “Girls,” “Mad Men,” and “Scandal,” among other shows. Previously, she worked at New York for seven years, editing the Culture Pages (and creating the Approval Matrix) and writing both features and criticism.