Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Tanner 88

Tanner 88 aired from February until August 1988 on HBO.

Garry Trudeau, creator of the Doonesbury comic strip, teamed up with director Robert Altman on this satirical look at an American presidential campaign.Michael Murphy starred as hopeful Democratic nominee Jack Tanner. Also featured were Cynthia Nixon as Alex Tanner and Pamela Reed as J.T. Cavanaugh. Some real life political figures also made cameo appearances on the twelve-part series, including Bob Dole, Bruce Babbitt and Kitty Dukakis.

An Article from The New York Times

Like a Real Candidate, Tanner Falls Flat in Hollywood

By ALJEAN HARMETZ, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: May 18, 1988

The Democratic Presidential candidate Jack Tanner came to Hollywood recently for the usual purpose - to raise money.

The movie industry, which is generally apathetic this year about the real Presidential candidates, was equally unmoved by the fictional one. Almost no one showed up for the fund-raising party.

Tanner, the dark horse, is a creation of Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who draws ''Doonesbury.'' The liberal Democratic candidate is played by Michael Murphy in a series of half-hour programs directed by Robert Altman and presented by Home Box Office.

Carrying his own suit bag, against the advice of his campaign managers, Tanner moves with the primaries from state to state, interacting with such real candidates as Bob Dole in New Hampshire. In future episodes, Tanner will be interviewed by Linda Ellerbee and share bagels and philosophy with Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona Governor, who warns Tanner not to make the same mistakes he did in running for the Presidency. The Hollywood fund-raising episode will be broadcast on June 6, the eve of the California primary. Ignored by Hollywood Stars

Although Mr. Altman says the ABC correspondents David Brinkley and Sam Donaldson have asked to interview Tanner, Hollywood didn't rush to join the fun. The only well-known actor at the Beverly Comstock Hotel, where the cocktail party was shot last week, was Rebecca De Mornay, the co-star of ''Risky Business,'' and Ms. De Mornay is engaged to a member of the cast, Richard Cox.

''I couldn't get any name actors,'' said Mr. Altman. ''Their agents wouldn't let them come. Sue Mengers was horrified.'' He was referring to the head movie agent at William Morris. '' 'All our actors are working,' she said. I said, 'On a Sunday?' ''

According to Mr. Trudeau, the original idea of ''Tanner'' was ''to let the audience feel they're eavesdropping, to create a sense of authenticity by observing the process, to follow campaign culture in all its tribal rites - not to make a topical movie about 1988.''

In the Hollywood episode, as elsewhere along the campaign trail, Jack Tanner is beset by ''the small moments of humiliation that pile up during the day,'' Mr. Trudeau said. ''The Hollywood party is a party by and for the young. Jack, who has presented himself as a generational candidate and prides himself on knowing the names of the Beatles, has to be briefed about the actors and doesn't even know what movies they were in. After all, the Beatles were 20 years ago. Jack has a look of befuddlement, like he's visiting Tibet.'' 'Never Had So Much Fun'

''Jack is a decent guy who gets in over his head,'' said Mr. Murphy of his character. ''His basic decency is what I have to protect. More than with any other character I've ever played, if the audience doesn't like him, they won't watch. Tanner isn't corrupted, but he comes out of the process less naive.''

''I've never had so much fun in my life,'' Mr. Altman, the director of ''M*A*S*H,'' said of ''Tanner.'' ''It's two-thirds scripted and one-third found art.''

The encroachment of reality in the show was originally accidental but has since been nurtured. When Tanner hands out campaign buttons to real Tennessee politicians, the buttons carry a proper union inscription because that's the first thing politicans look for. ''Everybody just accepts it when I'm at a shopping center and I say, 'Hi, I'm Jack Tanner, I'm running for President,' '' said Mr. Murphy. ''I guess they get so used to people hustling them. And one woman said, 'We see stuff for you on television we don't see for other candidates.' ''

Mr. Altman said: ''CNN wanted to cover us, and I said, 'Fine, but we'll shoot you, too. We'll be in your picture. You'll be in our picture.' I think in terms of filling in the squares, like a cartoon. Like a political cartoon -and hopefully as educational - we are disclosing a process that people are generally not aware of.''

During one of the two California episodes, Jack Tanner is coached by Dorothy Sarnoff, who has taught numerous real candidates how to appear charming on television. Tanner thus gets his image polished in the land of polished images.

An Article from Slate Magazine

Primary Colors
Robert Altman's Tanner '88 exposes the fiction of democracy.
By Dana Stevens
Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2004,

Tanner '88, the TV miniseries from that year directed by Robert Altman and written by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, accomplished the impossible: It made me nostalgic for the 1980s. What a time it was: heavy-metal hair bands, chain-smoking women in power suits, and the last gasp of the kind of rough-and-tumble American politics that makes the pussyfooted pandering of the 2004 Democratic primaries look even sadder by comparison. The 11-part series follows the campaign of a fictional progressive candidate, Jack Tanner (Michael Murphy), from the New Hampshire primary through the Democratic Convention in Atlanta. Thanks to some anonymous programming genius at the Sundance Channel, Tanner is being rebroadcast in its entirety over a period that corresponds almost exactly with the schedule for this year's primary races. Tuesdays at 9 p.m., (beginning last night, Feb. 3) you can watch a diverse group of Democratic hopefuls in a tight race for New Hampshire, all of them looking to beat a sitting Republican named George Bush. Wait, wasn't this on last week?

Besides the eerie synchronicity of the two campaigns, Tanner boasts another element that will be familiar to the 2004 electorate—sorry, I mean audience. More than a decade before the ascendance of reality television, the series slyly blended fiction and documentary, with real-life political and media figures—Bob Dole, Bruce Babbitt, and Linda Ellerbee among them—crossing paths with, and commenting upon, Tanner's grass-roots campaign. But Tanner's formal complexity—a loose, layered blend of group improvisation, scripted set pieces, and the intervention of pure chance—manages to point up not only the laziness of reality shows like Survivor and The Bachelor but their moral and political vacuity. Rather than create a simulacrum of the "real" through a process of contrived isolation, Altman engages in a kind of guerrilla filmmaking, following the primaries to six different cities, running a candidate of his own, and seeing if anyone notices. Like a sculptor using found materials, Altman ingeniously deploys media sound bites to rewrite the history of the '88 campaign, as in the scene that appears to place the fictional Tanner in the midst of an actual televised debate between Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis. Notice how Altman's choice of frame takes advantage of obstacles (bustling journalists, a television set) to emphasize the question of perspective, the difficulty of seeing what's "really" happening before our eyes. Sure, the camera "tricks" us into thinking that Tanner was present at the Jackson/Dukakis debate, but is the average viewer of any televised political spectacle any less deceived?

Between the murky sound mix and the cheap-looking newsroom video, it's easy to feel that Tanner is a bit of a mess—that is, until you realize that Altman's freewheeling use of image and sound is the cinematic equivalent of the mess of democracy itself. Tanner is the kind of ensemble comedy that made Altman one of the great maverick filmmakers of the 1970s: People wander in and out of frame, off-camera grumbles overlap with muffled laughter from a separate conversation across the room. But story arcs slowly emerge from the seemingly random exchanges, with that special Altmanian grace that David Edelstein recently noted in his review of The Company.

One of the running gags of the show is that Jack Tanner is always either a victim or a beneficiary of dumb luck; as his tough-talking campaign manager T.J. Cavanaugh (Pamela Reed) observes after yet another photo-op gone wrong, "This man is constantly being overtaken by events." It's only well into the series that we realize that Tanner's passivity is Altman's point. This is not a show about one man's fake candidacy, nor even about the "real" '88 election, but about the American political process and its reliance on the media to court an increasingly fickle electorate. In this clip from early on in the series, Tanner's candidacy gets a sudden boost when he's filmed without his knowledge from beneath a glass coffee table as he gives his exhausted staff an impromptu pep talk on democracy. Once again, the framing is key: Like the voter, the viewer is trapped by a frustratingly limited perspective, straining to see the "real" Jack Tanner through a glass darkly. Nonetheless, the raw, heartbroken patriotism of Jack's speech convinces us that we've glimpsed something genuine—until we realize that his staff cameraman has captured the whole thing on film, to be used as a campaign ad promoting the new Tanner slogan: "For real."

And yet both Trudeau and Altman, peerless satirists though they are, evince a surprising amount of hope in the American political process, reminding us that there's a big difference between satire and cynicism. The series has a fearsomely catchy theme song, written by longtime Altman collaborator Allan Nichols, which re-emerges in various versions throughout—picked by a bluegrass band in Nashville, piped into hotel lobbies as Muzak, screeched by heavy-metal rockers at a Hollywood political rally—encouraging listeners to "Pick the proper candidate/ You can change the course of fate." It's hard not to hear the song's exhortation as a message and to come away tapping your toe while thinking, "Gee, I'd better double-check my voter registration before the primary."

For this re-airing of Tanner '88, Altman and Trudeau have teamed up with the series' three principals (Murphy as Tanner, Reed as Cavanaugh, and Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon as Tanner's idealistic college-age daughter, Alex) to tape a one- to two-minute prelude to each episode. These segments, in which the actors reflect, in character, on the '88 campaign from the perspective of the present day, are as well-written as, if not better than, anything from the original series. The characters have aged, as have their politics, and we see how the various stances they take—Tanner's wry irony, Alex's cheerfully outdated utopianism, and Cavanaugh's pugilistic Realpolitik—constitute a kind of trinity of possibilities for the left. If, in the form and the content of his work, Altman is our most democratic filmmaker, perhaps the unresolved tensions Tanner leaves in its wake are a deliberate suggestion that our future can only be arrived at through (and as) that murmured cacophony of voices.

For an episode guide go to http://www.tv.com/tanner-88/show/23661/summary.html

For more on Tanner 88 go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanner_'88