Tanner ‘88 (dir. Robert Altman, 1988, A-)

There hasn’t been a better time in the two decades since it originally aired to revisit Tanner ‘88 – the Robert Altman-directed HBO miniseries about a fictional Michigan Congressman seeking the Democratic presidential nomination — than right now. The Sundance Channel replayed its 11 episodes in 2004, prompting several critical reappraisals, and while that year’s general election ended up looking a lot like 1988’s (unappealing Dem vs. a Bush), the show is all about the primary season. And since this current one will not fucking end, a good skewering of the process is just what we (meaning “I”) need to keep our (meaning “my”) sanity. I actually got the series through Netflix all the way back in October, watched one episode and stored it away. It looked like something taped for public access, and, as with a lot of things Altman, it was obviously going to take some patience to get into. But, as I have officially grown exhausted with the “Long, Flat, Seemingly Endless Baatan Death March to the White House” (c) Daily Show, I wanted to see if things were as fucked up back at what was essentially the dawn of the current Media Age. Writer Gary Trudeau doesn’t prove to be prophetic — Tanner is friends with a black minister, but he isn’t caught on tape damning any countries to hell or claiming the government invented any incurable diseases — but for those of us whose only concern at the time was catching the latest episode of Sledge Hammer!, what he captures is an electoral process that, even without YouTube and 24-hour cable news channels, looks like a similar (if primitive) version of the one we’re witnessing today: skeezy journalists digging through the candidates’ personal trash; campaign managers and other hangers-on who think they’re the ones running for president; general scandal and sensationalism trumping issues. If anything, Tanner ‘88 seems less satirical now and more like the straight-faced documentary its shot to resemble.