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Kennedy: The TV End
So that was it.
The end of a half century of American political life and American cultural life. Or a full century, if you wish to include Honey Fitz, and I think someone did yesterday. Everything faded to blackness, complete total blackness, as if there was nothing else to see, and nothing else to say. Ted Kennedy was laid to rest and no one could see anything - not the anchors or viewers or maybe even family. Someone had forgot to send someone to CVS or Walmart to get a box of candles; that would have made the TV picture to remember, with the glow of a dozen spots of light on a dozen somber faces. Instead, pure black - as much the enemy of television as pure silence or pure white or pure anything. TV abhors vaccums of any sort, and Ted - who gave the networks half a century of pictures and tumult - left them with nothing in the end.
In fact, all in all, the coverage yesterday was just about perfect because there really was so very little to say other than the obvious. I spent most of the day with NBC and Fox - for no particular reason other than the fact that even TV guys can't watch ten networks at once. They were both fine, but it wasn't about who was "good" yesterday; for the networks, the cup overflowed. The Mass in particular. There was no shortage of money shots - four presidents, three, maybe four, generations of America's most famous family, and a casket with a wayward piece of cloth that Ethel (I think it was Ethel) tidied up before the first reading. The best part of the day, the one that everyone will talk about, and the eulogy that eulogists will once day eulogize, was the memorial by Teddy Jr. I couldn't tell who he was at first - squint and it looked like Al Franken was at the podium. The supers finally cleared up the mystery, and so did the closeups - undeniably the son. His language was spare and clear - all the better to direct listeners straight to the emotional core of what he was saying. It was marvelous. I kept thinking of the famous Yeats line, or a paraphrase thereof - that his glory was that he had such friends. Kennedy's glory was that he had such a son (and sons and daughters.) And a glorious televised departure.
Tags: ted kennedy , ted kennedy jr. the funeral mass , tv coverage
