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| Adlai Stevenson and Richard J. Daley at the podium for the 1956 Democratic convention, via Chicago Collections. |
Covid-19 is a pretty terrible thing, but after a couple of hours of this year's Democratic convention I would like to praise it for one thing: dealing a deathblow to the post-1972 institution of the overstuffed, overblown, visually dead and dead boring political TV convention, with its vast convergence of people to whom favors were owed and every conceivable tendency and intersection lumbering on and off the stage creating hours of virtually dead air and opportunities for the stupidest TV pandits to argue about who "won", generally invidiously and in favor of the speakers offering the least content.
I was watching on MSNBC, which took a pretty reverent approach, with just one break (I think during an unexcited performance by a peculiar couple, the Broadway star Billy Porter and the old-line Laurel Canyon rocker Stephen Stills, who gave a heartwarming interview to Variety if you're interested, but whose contribution was leaving me unmoved, don't @ me), without commercials, and I don't know if other venues gave it the same courtesy, but I was just transported much of the time, and I hate to say it because it might sound cynical, but I believe the production values had a lot to do with that.
Because the demands of the pandemic preventing it from taking place in a single location forced a level of planning such as doesn't normally go into these productions. It was practically edited in advance of the performance, and the care, far from harming the spontaneity of the occasion, brought it to emotional life, from the passionate start of a song written for the occasion by Bruce Springsteen (when I recognized his voice is when I started telling myself, "This is going to be all right"). Which was real, that's why I don't think I'm being cynical in bringing it up.
