Tag: Web Series

Harry Shearer’s New Series on Richard Nixon

Nixon Web Series

Actor Harry Shearer, famous for his work in This Is Spinal Tap, Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons, is tackling a new character with his YouTube mini-series, former president Richard M. Nixon. In the new series, entitled Nixon’s the One, Shearer portrays Nixon by following transcripts of actual audio recordings of Nixon. The results are both illuminating and funny.

Shearer and Nixon scholar and author Stanley Kutler listened to Nixon recordings to find segments that reveal Nixon’s everyday life. Shearer explained to CBS that he always felt that portrayals of Nixon missed something about the man. Shearer sees him as “this strange, self-torturing, self-destroying guy who was, in my point of view, darkly comic.” These new episodes attempt to capture that tragic and comic part of Nixon.

This segment of Nixon’s the One gives a hidden-camera view of Nixon talking to Henry Kissinger about John F. Kennedy.

The following episode captures Nixon’s conversations as he prepares to give his speech to the nation announcing his resignation. As Nixon engages the reporters in small talk as he prepares to resign, the result is funny but also heartbreaking. Certainly, it captures the loneliness of Nixon at that moment. Check it out.

It should not be too surprising that the man who does the voice of Mr. Burns would help us see another side of President Nixon. Check out other segments of Nixon’s the One on YouTube. If you want to compare the resignation video to the real thing, see below.

Who is your favorite actor to portray Nixon? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    “High Maintenance” Shows the Potential of a Web Series

    High Maintenance

    The New Yorker recently had a story “Taster’s Choice” about the web series High Maintenance. The series stars the show’s co-creator Ben Sinclair as a nameless pot dealer. Each episode, which runs only around 6-15 minutes, features the dealer dropping off weed to a customer in New York. There is no ongoing storyline, and each episode is a complete short story on its own, featuring different characters getting a delivery by the dealer.

    While the professionally made show is about a pot dealer, it is about more than marijuana. And while the shortness of each episode means we are not talking about War & Peace here, there is a completeness to each tale. So watching episodes becomes like sitting down with a bag of potato chips: Each bite is satisfying but also leading you to try one more.

    Some episodes will make you laugh, and some are poignant slices of life, like the episode below that is entitled “Brad Pitts.” There is a sadness to the story but also something redeeming. Check it out. It only takes less than nine minutes.

    High Maintenance // Brad Pitts from Janky Clown Productions on Vimeo.

    Three episodes of High Maintenance are released every few months on Vimeo, where they stream for free. Although the episodes have been mostly funded by Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld (Sinclair’s wife and the show’s co-creator/co-writer/co-director/casting director), Vimeo plans to provide funding for upcoming shows. So it will be interesting to see what comes next for Sinclair, Blichfeld, and High Maintenance.

    Thanks to Executive Producer Russell Gregory for a correction to an earlier version of this post. What do you think of High Maintenance? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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