the first time a sitting Vice President was elected to the presidency since Martin Van Buren was elected in 1836 (other Vice Presidents had become President since then, but usually after their predecessors died or resigned mid-term, with the exception of Richard Nixon, who lost his first presidential bid in 1960 but then won on his second attempt in 1968\u2026 when his opponent was the new sitting Vice President).<\/li><\/ol>\nSo it was by no means a foregone conclusion that George H. W. Bush would win the 1988 election. The Democrats stood a very good chance of winning that election, which makes this series\u2019 depiction of the Democratic race for the presidential nomination just that much more interesting. Things were arguably very up-in-the-air at that time.<\/p>\n
And now, my episode-by-episode comments:<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Tanner \u201988<\/i> episode 1:<\/b> Oh, what a blast from the past. The \u201980s hair. The big glasses. The Kaypro portable computers. The styrofoam McDonald\u2019s packaging.<\/p>\n
And the politics. Tanner \u201988<\/i> is a political mockumentary directed by Robert Altman and written by Doonesbury<\/i>\u2019s Garry B. Trudeau, about a former congressman running for president, and it drops lots<\/i> of names that I remember hearing back in the day, including some that continue to loom large on the political scene. The first episode even features cameos by Gary Hart (who had recently re-entered the Democratic race, following the Donna Rice scandal), Bob Dole (who went on to be the Republican nominee eight years later) and Pat Robertson (who ran for the Republican nomination back then, and still<\/i> does the televangelist thing on The 700 Club<\/i>).<\/p>\n
I hadn\u2019t realized, until I looked up the miniseries\u2019 Wikipedia page, that it was produced over a six-month span, essentially covering the Democratic nomination process in real time, and sometimes going for almost a month without a new episode. (There are 11 episodes in total, all released between February and August of 1988 \u2014 basically spanning the period from before the New Hampshire primaries to the Democratic National Convention.)<\/p>\n
The series was produced for HBO in 1988, and then it was aired again, with new one- or two-minute intros for each episode, on the Sundance Channel in 2004 \u2014 and the Criterion Channel has the intros as well as the original episodes. So the characters are looking back on the 1988 campaign after a 16-year gap, and I am now watching the series 16 years after those intros were recorded, which is nicely symmetrical. And the intros do draw attention to the coarsening of American culture \u2014 pop culture and political culture alike \u2014 in the years between 1988 and 2004. Tanner himself, in his intro to Episode 1, comments on the fact that Johnny Carson may have told a few discrete jokes about Gary Hart\u2019s sex scandal in 1988, but Jay Leno was doing six blowjob jokes a night ten years later during the Bill Clinton scandal. (And now, of course, Trump is president after bragging about the size of his penis during a Republican primary debate.) Tanner also talks about the fact that George W. Bush hired someone to dig up dirt on himself<\/i> in 2000 as a sort of pre-emptive move, which was apparently not a common thing before that.<\/p>\n
From today\u2019s<\/i> perspective, possibly the most interesting thing is the references to Joe Biden. Much of Episode 1 revolves around a focus group that has been asked to watch a political ad, and the focus group complains that the ad has too many references to other<\/i> people\u2019s ideas, so much so that one person compares it to the plagiarizing that Biden was accused of at the time (\u201cIt\u2019s almost like Biden. Instead of coming out and just plagiarizing, he puts these old faces around him. It\u2019s the same thing. He\u2019s not saying anything. He\u2019s letting other people speak for him\u201d). And at the end of the episode, Tanner complains about how Biden dodged a \u201cWho\u2019s your favorite Beatle?\u201d question by saying he always preferred jazz. (Tanner says something like, I\u2019m ten years older than Biden but I was paying attention in the \u201960s and he wasn\u2019t.)<\/p>\n
We also see campaign posters for Al Gore (who got elected vice<\/i> president four years later), Michael Dukakis (who did get the 1988 nomination in the end) and Paul Simon (no, not the singer, the other<\/i> guy, the one who always wore a bowtie).<\/p>\n
It\u2019s fun to see Pamela Reed as one of the campaign staff; I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve seen her in anything since 2000\u2019s Proof of Life<\/i>, but she popped up in a few things I saw back in the early \u201990s. And a very young Cynthia Nixon is here as Tanner\u2019s daughter; the character is 19 (and her father is surprised to learn that she has a driver\u2019s license!), and the actress turned 22 while the series was being produced.<\/p>\n
So, a very interesting watch, especially in an election year.<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Tanner \u201988<\/i> episodes 2-3:<\/b> These episodes aired almost a month apart \u2014 in March and April 1988 \u2014 but they seem to take place (at least partly) on the same night, at a Nashville concert for Tanner featuring Waylon Jennings and a few other musical acts. (Politics and country music in Nashville? Sounds right up director Robert Altman\u2019s alley!)<\/p>\n
Amusingly, a fight breaks out while Tanner is speaking to the audience and it is assumed that an attempt was being made on Tanner\u2019s life. It turns out that this assumption was incorrect, but Tanner\u2019s staff say it\u2019s great news either way, because \u2014 in addition to the free publicity \u2014 it now qualifies him for Secret Service protection.<\/p>\n
It is mentioned a few times that Tanner has beaten Al Gore in the primary in Gore\u2019s home state of Tennessee. In reality, Gore won his home state (and six other states) but ended up withdrawing from the race on April 21, nine days after Episode 3 aired. That left Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson as the only major contenders left for the Democratic nomination.<\/p>\n
(Both names \u2014 Dukakis and Jackson \u2014 were mentioned in Episode 1 but I don\u2019t recall them coming up in these two episodes. Incidentally, in Episode 1 there was a scene where someone said the voters were looking for \u201ca white Jesse Jackson\u201d, and someone else replied, dimwittedly, \u201cOr a black Bruce Babbitt!\u201d I know nothing about Babbitt \u2014 who withdrew from the race on February 16, just a few days after Episode 1 aired \u2014 so I have no idea if there was any deeper subtext to that line aside from the race-reversal and, I dunno, the alliterated name or whatever.)<\/p>\n
(On another side note, I remember reading an article in Time<\/i> magazine back then about how George Bush\u2019s success against Dukakis in the election was partly due to their differences in dealing with the religious leaders who had run against them in the primaries, i.e. Bush knew how to corral the support of Pat Robertson and his constituency, but Dukakis did not know what to do with Jackson and his<\/i> constituency.)<\/p>\n
(By the way, you know whose name hasn\u2019t come up at all<\/i> so far? Bill Clinton. And he\u2019s the guy who actually won<\/i> the nomination \u2014 and the election \u2014 just four years later. I\u2019m aware that Clinton didn\u2019t campaign at all in 1988, but it\u2019s kind of funny how this snapshot of Democratic politics in one election cycle sheds absolutely no light \u2014 so far, at any rate \u2014 on the person who ended up winning the next cycle.)<\/p>\n
One bit I found rather interesting in these episodes is a scene where Tanner\u2019s staff tell him to avoid being seen carrying his own suit bags, like regular folk. It doesn\u2019t look good, they say, if a politician carries his own stuff like regular people do. Voters want a politician who is so comfortable with power that he shares<\/i> it, by delegating<\/i> jobs to people! And to prove the point, they play back Bob Dole\u2019s cameo from Episode 1 and show how Dole, when handed one of Tanner\u2019s campaign buttons, immediately passed it to a member of his entourage \u2014 a designated button-catcher! You might think that being surrounded by an entourage would make a person look out of touch, etc., but the idea that voters want a leader who can delegate<\/i> puts an interesting and more positive-sounding spin on that.<\/p>\n
Side note: Veronica Cartwright has joined the cast, as one of the reporters following Tanner! And Cleavon Little appears as a civil rights activist who is an old friend of Tanner\u2019s but is rightfully wary of their friendship being exploited for political gain.<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Tanner \u201988<\/i> episodes 4-5:<\/b> In which Tanner gets arrested while taking part in an anti-apartheid protest \u2014 which immediately gets spun by some as a possible boost to his campaign, though Tanner himself is not convinced.<\/p>\n
One of the cute ironies of the arrest, though it\u2019s not dwelled on particularly, is the fact that Tanner recently qualified for Secret Service protection \u2014 so he\u2019s got Secret Service agents declaring that they can\u2019t let the cops arrest him.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Tanner\u2019s daughter (the 19-year-old Cynthia Nixon character) gets really excited by the fact that the arrest gives her<\/i> a platform to speak out against apartheid (not just in front of an audience, but on TV, where her speech is broadcast). Tanner, for his part, seems embarrassed by the whole thing and tells his team to get \u201cAmy Carter\u201d off the stage.<\/p>\n
(Among other things, the Cynthia Nixon character demands to know why Jesse Jackson wasn\u2019t at the protest. We are also informed that Tanner\u2019s civil-rights-leader friend \u2014 the one whose friendship with him was awkwardly exploited by the campaign staff at the end of episode 3 \u2014 came out in support of Jackson the next day.)<\/p>\n
In the 2004 intro to one of these episodes, Tanner comments that getting arrested for political reasons might work as part of your narrative if you\u2019re a politician in Argentina or some such place, but not in America. He then says the kind of arrest that works for an American politician is the DUI charges that surfaced during George W. Bush\u2019s campaign in 2000, because they show he\u2019s a regular manly guy. I\u2019m not sure that that\u2019s fair, though, as my recollection is that those DUI charges came up very late in the campaign and were thought \u2014 by some, at least \u2014 to be the reason Bush lost the popular vote and came very close to losing the Electoral College as well. The DUI charges cost Bush rather than helped him.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, we get a sea of cameos at a campaign party in episode 4, but the only face that jumped out at me was Chris Matthews (he had apparently become the Washington, DC bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner<\/i> one year earlier; he published his first book, Hardball<\/i>, the same year this miniseries aired but wouldn\u2019t launch the TV show of that name until 1997). Even after seeing the list of \u201cas themselves\u201d names in the credits at the end of the episode, I still didn\u2019t recognize anyone but Matthews. Meanwhile, Bruce Babbitt has an extended cameo in episode 5 as he goes for a walk with Tanner and gives him some advice.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, two possible scandals emerge:<\/p>\n
First, Tanner\u2019s videographer snoops around in his journals and creates a political campaign ad that would reveal Tanner\u2019s use of drugs during the \u201960s, as part of a \u201cget real\u201d approach encouraging the legalization of drugs. Tanner and the rest of his campaign staff are shocked by this. But of course, it was an issue that everyone knew was lurking right around the corner: the baby boomers were on the verge of moving into the White House, and everyone knew that many\/most of them had used drugs at some point, so finding a boomer candidate who hadn\u2019t<\/i> used drugs would have been very very difficult, but there were still a lot of older voters who would have rejected out-of-hand any candidate who had<\/i> used them. And thus, four years after this miniseries aired, Bill Clinton had to do that whole song-and-dance about how he once put a joint in his mouth but supposedly didn\u2019t inhale. (Things were a lot<\/i> different in 2008 \u2014 twenty years after this miniseries \u2014 when Obama got elected and nobody cared that he had talked in one of his memoirs about doing various drugs including cocaine.)<\/p>\n
Second, previous episodes have hinted at the fact that Tanner has a\u2026 girlfriend? mistress? what\u2019s the word we should use here? Lover, maybe. (Tanner isn\u2019t married.) Anyway, episode 5 reveals that his lover happens to be working on the Dukakis campaign, which apparently comes as a shock to a member of Tanner\u2019s staff who is thinking of defecting to the Dukakis team. I\u2019m not sure how long it\u2019s been since a major American candidate was unmarried, but it\u2019s hard to imagine that a candidate these<\/i> days would have to keep his lover secret from the world, if indeed he (or she) had one. The fact that Tanner\u2019s lover works for the other side is also interesting in light of the fact that, just four years later, the Bush and Clinton campaigns would be run by real-life lovers Mary Matalin and James Carville (who got married after<\/i> Clinton beat Bush in the polls), and there was no attempt to keep their<\/i> aisle-crossing relationship a secret.<\/p>\n
Edited to add: The videographer mentions that his Handicam cost $2,700. That\u2019s in 1988 dollars. Converted to today\u2019s dollars, that would be about $5,800. Can you imagine spending that much for a handheld video camera nowadays \u2014 let alone one with such low picture resolution?<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Tanner \u201988<\/i> episodes 6-7:<\/b> These episodes aired in June, by which point the Democratic race had long since narrowed to Michael Dukakis and Jesse Jackson \u2014 so the series can no longer keep those guys off-screen, treating them as just two more candidates, like Tanner, in a wide-open race. Instead, the series has to incorporate them into the action somehow \u2014 or, perhaps more accurately, the series has to incorporate Tanner<\/i> into the action, by making him one of three<\/i> Democratic contenders who have refused to throw in the towel (even though a weak candidate like Tanner almost certainly would have withdrawn from the race for real by now).<\/p>\n
And so, we get a scene in which Tanner takes part in a televised debate with Dukakis and Jackson. We see the debate entirely from backstage, as it were, as the reporters and the campaign staff watch from the sidelines and the actual debaters appear only on the monitors. (I assume the series uses footage of an actual<\/i> debate between Jackson and Dukakis and throws in a few clips of Tanner as well.) Tanner gets a few zingers in there and comments afterwards that he might have offended some of his own staff, and he worries that the debate format is more about \u201cgreat television\u201d than anything else \u2014 which is an interesting comment to make in a series like Tanner \u201988<\/i> which is partly a Democratic wish-fulfillment fantasy (what if a candidate openly endorsed drug legalization?) and is also nothing if not, well, television.<\/p>\n
Episode 7 also concludes with the media exposing Tanner\u2019s affair with Dukakis\u2019s campaign co-chair. This really<\/i> upsets Tanner\u2019s (female) campaign leader, who accuses him of being another Gary Hart (but Hart committed adultery, whereas Tanner is divorced and, thus, available) and of embarrassing two<\/i> campaigns, both his and Dukakis\u2019s. Again, this whole subplot seems very strange in hindsight, given that James Carville and Mary Matalin were quite open about their own relationship \u2014 and they worked for entirely different parties! \u2014 just four years later. Maybe the fact that Tanner is the actual candidate<\/i> changes things, but then, that raises another point: When was the last time the Democrats or Republicans nominated \u2014 or even seriously considered nominating \u2014 someone who wasn\u2019t married? And, given that no one expects couples to wait for marriage these days, what sort of expectations would there be for an unmarried president and the kind of relationships he might have? I imagine there would be security concerns, and diplomacy concerns, etc., etc.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, along the way, Tanner stops at a daycare centre and starts talking to the preschoolers about \u201ctax abatements\u201d, and Rebecca De Mornay hosts a get-out-the-vote rally and Tanner\u2019s staffer tries to fill him in on pop-culture references and box-office statistics. (When she mentions that Tom Cruise starred in Top Gun<\/i> \u2014 the top-grossing movie of 1986, which was only two years earlier \u2014 Tanner replies that he thought they weren\u2019t making Westerns any more. Tanner, remember, is the guy who complained at the beginning of this series that Joe Biden wasn\u2019t paying attention to pop culture in the \u201960s.) The movie-biz stuff is kind of funny to watch, now, given that director Robert Altman went on to revive his big-screen career with the cameo-filled Hollywood satire The Player<\/i> just four years later.<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Tanner \u201988<\/i> episodes 8-9:<\/b> Things get serious when Tanner pays a visit to the black community in Detroit.<\/p>\n
I could be wrong, but I assume that much of the conversation here is essentially improvised. Tanner says he\u2019s there to listen, not to speak, and it certainly feels<\/i> like the filmmakers wanted to give members of the black community an opportunity to express their pain and frustration. The thing is, the people doing all the speaking are speaking to a fictitious<\/i> candidate for president \u2014 and the fictitious candidate in question also happens to be a bland white man at a time when a black civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson, was the only real-life contender giving Michael Dukakis a run for his money. So it\u2019s not like any of these people would have pinned any real-life hopes on Tanner.<\/p>\n
In fact, one thing that stands out about the scene is how Tanner repeats what he said in the debate a couple episodes ago, about the need to legalize drugs. The vast majority of the black people he speaks to are against<\/i> legalizing drugs because of what drugs has done to their community. So that\u2019s another<\/i> reason why it seems unlikely that Tanner could be building any sort of bridge between his campaign and this community. It just underscores the fact that, in real life, a weak candidate like Tanner simply wouldn\u2019t be in the race any more \u2014 he\u2019s not making any headway here \u2014 and it leaves you wondering if maybe the series should have expended its dramatic energies elsewhere\u2026<\/p>\n
\u2026but then you get to the next episode, which focuses more on the purely dramatic\/fictitious side of things, and it\u2019s hard to buy into the reality of this<\/i> episode, too, because this is the one in which Tanner and his lover, the former Dukakis campaigner, decide to get married \u2014 right in the middle of his campaign! Mere days, if that, after he proposes to her offscreen!<\/p>\n
Admittedly, I have no idea how the American public would react now<\/i> \u2014 much less 32 years ago \u2014 to the discovery that a candidate for president had a secret girlfriend, and whether the public would expect the couple to get married at all, and whether it would matter to the public whether the marriage took place before or after he was nominated by his party. But the decision looks pretty rash, and when it falls apart on the wedding day itself, Tanner and his girlfriend decide to get married in November instead, i.e. after the election. (I do like how Tanner\u2019s daughter has made napkins for the wedding that feature the couple\u2019s names and the campaign slogan \u201cFor real.\u201d)<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Tanner \u2014 who hasn\u2019t picked a VP yet \u2014 announces his cabinet, and so we get cameos from Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem, Art Buchwald and others. (Tanner\u2019s campaign chief exclaims at one point, \u201cWhat a coup! Do you know how many people have been trying to talk Nader out of his political virginity?\u201d Nader, of course, would eventually be widely blamed for stealing just enough votes from Al Gore twelve years later to cost Gore the Electoral College, thus throwing the 2000 election to George W. Bush, the son of the Republican who was running for president when this series aired.)<\/p>\n
There\u2019s also a funny scene where Tanner\u2019s very grumpy father (played by E.G. Marshall) talks about how he<\/i> proposed to Tanner\u2019s mother, and it has something to do with giving Tanner\u2019s mother a diabetes shot on their first date. Something to do with the trust it took the mom to let a boyfriend do that, and the love it took the dad to be willing to do that so early in the relationship.<\/p>\n
Also: Jeff Daniels has a bit part in one of these episodes as a park ranger. It\u2019s a bit odd seeing an actor of Daniels\u2019 stature in such a tiny role (he had already starred in 1983\u2019s Terms of Endearment<\/i>, 1985\u2019s The Purple Rose of Cairo<\/i> and 1986\u2019s Something Wild<\/i> by this point), but anyhoo.<\/p>\n
Episode 9 ends with Tanner checking out the stadium where the Democratic National Convention is going to happen, and the set is being built as he walks around in there. It\u2019s a nice \u201cdocumentary\u201d moment in a generally fictitious storyline. (This episode aired July 17. The actual convention began July 18.)<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
Tanner \u201988<\/i> episodes 10-11:<\/b> The Democratic National Convention!<\/p>\n
It\u2019s kind of fascinating to see how the series weaves fiction and reality together here. For the episode set during the Convention itself, the series pretty much limits itself to backroom shenanigans as Tanner\u2019s crew work the phones and try to get as many delegates and\/or superdelegates as possible to do whatever it takes to give their candidate a shot. So the episode blends documentary<\/i> footage of votes being counted on the floor with dramatic<\/i> footage of things happening behind closed doors, and it all feels very urgent and dynamic.<\/p>\n
Then, after the Convention is over and Michael Dukakis has secured the party\u2019s nomination, the final episode turns to whether Tanner will openly support Dukakis or continue to run as an independent, thus possibly splitting the Democratic vote and guaranteeing the election of George Bush. And in the middle of all this, Tanner\u2019s girlfriend \u2014 the former Dukakis campaign worker \u2014 has a meeting with the actual Kitty Dukakis (!) who assures her that the split between Tanner\u2019s girlfriend and the Dukakis campaign is water under the bridge, and that family is important but so is party unity\u2026 So the series ends with Tanner\u2019s girlfriend asking him if he\u2019ll endorse Dukakis, and Tanner looking away and leaving the question hanging there \u2014 which is really kind of amazing to see in an episode that, on some level, bears the Dukakis family\u2019s imprimatur!<\/p>\n
These two episodes aired in August, over two months before the actual election in November, and in the bonus feature, Garry Trudeau and Robert Altman talk about how they were hoping to do another three or four episodes following Tanner\u2019s independent run for the presidency \u2014 but they were still working on this episode when they heard that HBO was going to end the series here. Personally, I think the series ends on a perfectly ambiguous note, but I must admit I am curious to see how they would have kept their candidate in the race long after the real world had passed him by. (We saw the series insert Tanner into an intra-party debate between Dukakis and Jesse Jackson; would they have tried something similar with the inter-party debate between Dukakis and Bush?)<\/p>\n
Incidentally, the reason<\/i> we are given for Tanner\u2019s possible independent run is that his campaign chief spoke to all the Democratic Party higher-ups and sensed that they were so \u201cunenthusiastic\u201d about their candidate that Bush could win the election \u2014 so perhaps a third-party candidate like Tanner, who is even more liberal than Dukakis, could have a chance. That matches what I<\/i> remember about the mood during that election season; I have a vivid memory of my first-year university professor talking about how the American political process had resulted in two candidates \u2014 Dukakis and Bush \u2014 that no one really wanted<\/i> to vote for, but everyone knew the presidency would end up going to one of those two guys.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, for the time capsule: The Convention chair tells the delegates that a woman is going to come and explain to them the \u201cnew process\u201d that will allow them to cast their votes using \u201celectronic devices\u201d. One of the women working the phones says she\u2019s speaking to someone who is pregnant and going to the hospital, and she has to clarify for her boss that the woman she\u2019s speaking to is using a \u201ccar phone\u201d. We see what looks like a Confederate flag hanging next to the U.S. flag, but it\u2019s actually the state flag of Georgia (which is where the Convention took place) \u2014 and I learn from Wikipedia that the Confederate flag was added<\/i> to the state flag of Georgia in 1956, and it stayed there until 2001.<\/p>\n
And in the bonus feature, Altman says shooting the episode with the representatives from the black community a few episodes back marked the first time he had ever heard of rap \u2014 which is striking, to me, as I was a big fan of Christian pop singer Steve Taylor at the time, and Taylor had done his own version of a rap song (\u2018Bad Rap (Who You Tryin\u2019 to Kid, Kid?)\u2019), which mentions other rap artists like Grandmaster Flash by name, way back in 1983, five years before this series was produced.<\/p>\n
So, that was a fun watch. There was a sequel miniseries in 2004 called Tanner on Tanner<\/i>, but I\u2019m not sure if it\u2019s available anywhere. If I can find it, though, I\u2019ll try to watch it \u2014 even though it won\u2019t be quite<\/i> the blast from the past that the 1988 series was.<\/p>\n
\u2013<\/p>\n
One extra comment: It was only while prepping this blog post that I realized the actors who play Tanner and his lover \u2014 Michael Murphy and Wendy Crewson \u2014 were a real-life couple who got married the same year the series aired! I wonder which came first, the relationship or their work on the miniseries? (I interviewed Crewson<\/a> in 2002, and she mentioned her marriage to Murphy during our chat. The couple divorced in 2009.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 1988 mockumentary miniseries was written by Doonesbury<\/i> cartoonist Garry Trudeau and directed by Robert Altman (M*A*S*H<\/i>, Nashville<\/i>, The Player<\/i>, etc.).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[5150,5207,828,5141,5129,5174,5180,5177,5162,3675,5132,5210,5237,5125,5126,5144,440,5204,5240,3674,5183,5138,5213,5171,5147,5135,5198,5246,5186,5153,4063,5159,2873,5156,5195,5201,5189,5243,5122,190,5119,5192,5165,5168,4061],"class_list":["post-67384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-al-gore","tag-art-buchwald","tag-barack-obama","tag-bill-clinton","tag-bob-dole","tag-bruce-babbitt","tag-chris-matthews","tag-cleavon-little","tag-cynthia-nixon","tag-donald-trump","tag-donna-rice","tag-e-g-marshall","tag-franklin-d-roosevelt","tag-garry-trudeau","tag-gary-hart","tag-george-h-w-bush","tag-george-w-bush","tag-gloria-steinem","tag-herbert-hoover","tag-hillary-clinton","tag-james-carville","tag-jay-leno","tag-jeff-daniels","tag-jesse-jackson","tag-joe-biden","tag-johnny-carson","tag-kitty-dukakis","tag-martin-van-buren","tag-mary-matalin","tag-michael-dukakis","tag-michael-murphy","tag-pamela-reed","tag-pat-robertson","tag-paul-simon","tag-player-1992","tag-ralph-nader","tag-rebecca-de-mornay","tag-richard-nixon","tag-robert-altman","tag-steve-taylor","tag-tanner-88","tag-top-gun-1986","tag-veronica-cartwright","tag-waylon-jennings","tag-wendy-crewson"],"yoast_head":"\nTanner '88 -- some notes on a political comedy from 32 years ago<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The 1988 mockumentary miniseries was written by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau and directed by Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, etc.).\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2020\/07\/tanner-88-some-notes-on-a-political-comedy-from-32-years-ago.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Tanner '88 -- some notes on a political comedy from 32 years ago\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The 1988 mockumentary miniseries was written by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau and directed by Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Player, etc.).\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/filmchat\/2020\/07\/tanner-88-some-notes-on-a-political-comedy-from-32-years-ago.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FilmChat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-07-26T14:00:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-07-26T15:49:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2020\/07\/tanner88-Edited.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Peter T. 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<\/a><\/p>\n