1,000 Greatest Drivers: Juan Manuel Fangio

Can you repeat the question?

As I mentioned a couple times already, I watched all of Malcolm in the Middle including the sequel series over the past couple of months, almost always multitasking by entering data simultaneously for this project. I never watched it when I was a kid. Although I’m pretty sure I watched every episode of The Simpsons through like 1996 or something at the time, I abruptly stopped watching everything animated right around then and I don’t remember why. Maybe some feeble attempt at wanting to grow up even though most of the things I was still watching then were worse? While I liked The Simpsons, it never had any kind of big influence on me the way it did most of my fellow early millennials. When I saw everybody saying “said the quiet part out loud” and stuff like that, I had no idea they were Simpsons quotes because even if I did watch that episode, it was 30 years ago and I didn’t re-watch every episode 20 times like it seems like so many of my peers did. Honestly, I preferred the schlocky family sitcoms that The Simpsons was rebelling against more back then, and I think I know why. When you grow up in a poor, dysfunctional family an aspirational portrait of the family you wish you’d had can appeal more, even if the writing was worse. At least I never became a South Park fan, which would have made me even more insufferable.

So I missed that entire block when Malcolm was originally on, but I’ve wanted to watch it for a long time, in keeping with how I’m always 20 years behind the times. As someone who identifies as both trailer trash and a nerd with Malcolm’s character being the archetype for that rare fusion, I really thought I’d relate. But it was never really syndicated anywhere back then and when I was watching lots of old TV shows on Netflix when I used their DVD service (which I always preferred to streaming from them), only the first season was ever released on DVD so I didn’t bother. But when I got a Disney Plus subscription to watch the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, I saw this was on there and I went for it. It was good timing both because of Frankie Muniz’s bizarre NASCAR excursion and because of the sequel series that came out a couple weeks ago. I did already watch Arrested Development so I knew what I was in for. I had largely stopped watching traditional television except for racing and news for most of my adulthood after graduating college, so I’m way more knowledgeable about ‘70s-’90s television than anything from this century, especially anything considered “prestige” although there was a period when I went through and liked most of the key 2000s teen dramas. And I liked Arrested Development too despite hating what the show represents. It was well-written and funny enough to overcome my complaint but it is a big complaint. That show is intentionally designed to cater to an audience of intellectuals only and then whines in the text of the show that it doesn’t get better ratings. That reminds me of that apocryphal quote Adlai Stevenson probably didn’t say when some woman came up to him and said, “Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you.” To which he probably never replied, “Madam, that’s not enough. I need a majority.” Obviously, Malcolm in the Middle started the movement that Arrested Development was part of. Not just single-camera sitcoms ‘cause there had been plenty of those before, but the particular style with quick cuts, postmodern narrative structures, and where nearly every single character is a loathsome human being. So I predicted that I would like it with reservations and that is indeed correct.

My first point is that the show may be about white working class people, but it isn’t actually for them, is it? This is an important distinction ‘cause there had been plenty of smash hit working class family sitcoms from the ‘70s-’90s, starting with All in the Family and Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons going on to Roseanne and Family Matters and Home Improvement (really more working class in affect than in actuality, but it was still part of this wave) and Grace Under Fire. The difference is in those days, television success was based on overall ratings and the goal of a TV show in this period was to get the maximum possible audience for itself, full stop. When I grew up, newspapers would always display like the top 50 highest-rated programs each week and enraptured as I was with any kind of statistical minutiae, I read that stuff all the time.

By the 2000s, this had changed. This is the era when suddenly marketing demographics mattered more, the overall popularity of a show mostly stopped mattering, and all anyone cared about was how popular a show was amongst 18-to-45-year olds with money because advertisers no longer wanted to cater to anyone else. I first learned about this when my favorite show when I was in college, Joan of Arcadia, got canceled even though it was acclaimed and its overall ratings were fine because it had too old an audience. As the then-CBS head Les Moonves put it in an immortal line I have never forgotten, “Ghosts skew younger than God.” I’ve been hating on him ever since and boy, was I vindicated when I found out later how he took a personal vindictive pleasure into ruining Janet Jackson’s career when Justin Timberlake caused that incident anyway.

So from what I remember The West Wing was the most profitable show even though it was neither the most popular (American Idol) or the most acclaimed (The Sopranos) because it had the widest possible appeal among professional managerial class yuppies who the advertisers wanted to market to. The point I’m trying to get to here is that while I admired both Arrested Development and Malcolm, the big difference between them is that I laughed very often at the former and almost never at the latter, and I think I know why. Arrested Development is punching up and making fun of the foibles of the rich, while Malcolm is punching down and making fun of the foibles of the poor. The difference between Malcolm and all those earlier working class shows is because it was going after the hip yuppie 18-45 audience of educated intellectual professionals because that’s where the money was. So as a result, a show like Roseanne in striving to attain the biggest possible audience for itself successfully pandered to both the genuine working class as well as the people who wanted to make fun of working class people at the same time. Malcolm, by contrast, because like Arrested Development it seems to want only an audience of smart people, actually ends up holding the working class in contempt. Personally, while it’s better to pander to no one, I prefer a show that panders to everyone over a show that panders only to a specific demographic niche if the quality of the writing is the same. So, I still don’t like Malcolm as much as the first six seasons of Roseanne for this reason even if it’s become impossible to defend now considering everything she has done in the last decade.

Any “comedy” you get from Malcolm for the most part comes from making fun of poor people. With the old style of multi-cam working class sitcoms, you were laughing with the characters. With the new style of single-cams, you are laughing at them, and I find that deeply annoying. The implicit message of Malcolm seems to be a very neoliberal one where poor people deserve to suffer due to their bad decisions. If you’re trying to appeal to a group of urbane 18-45 year old hipsters with money, I guess that’s how you have to write it. All those poor people wuldn’t have any problems in their life, don’t you know, if they didn’t do things like intentionally steal a car and drown it in a lake, or blow up a refrigerator, or steal $10,000 from their children to buy an antique dollhouse that immediately catches on fire, or waste money they don’t have to send a son to military school, or rip one of the teeth out of their mouth, or crash a hot-air balloon into the window of a church, or accidentally remain on a 1-900 paid sex line for hours because you forgot to hang up the phone, or set fire to your friend’s house or camper, etc…, etc…, etc… The hidden message is that you’re supposed to point and laugh at poor people and argue that they wouldn’t have any problems if they didn’t do any of these cartoonish things that almost no poor person actually does and that really bothers me.

I also don’t get why people praise it for its realism. I guess it was one of the few sitcoms of its time that even tried to depict the working class after every other sitcom was trying to copy Seinfeld and Friends with all these people living in spacious apartments despite doing little work. But the cartoony elements constantly undercut the realism to the point that it ends up almost something like Family Matters where on one episode, you have a seriouss discussion of racism and then the next one, Steve Urkel invents a dancing robot. There are so many instances where in real life, any of the kids would have been killed doing many of the stunts they end up doing, but it’s in there for the lulz. I’m sort of reminded of a couple Roger Ebert quotes here: one of them from Home Alone 2 where he wrote: “The problem is, cartoon violence is only funny in cartoons. Most of the live-action attempts to duplicate animation have failed, because when flesh-and-blood figures hit the pavement, we can almost hear the bones crunch, and it isn’t funny.” I think most people actually disagree this since I think most people like slapstick, but I think I agree with it.

The other one that comes to mind is from his review of Napoleon Dynamite: “I’m told the movie was greeted at Sundance with lots of laughter, but then Sundance audiences are concerned with being cool, and to sit through this film in depressed silence would not be cool, however urgently it might be appropriate.” Now, he’s definitely wrong about that movie and I think it’s great and I don’t think Malcolm is bad either, but I think the quote applies. I almost never found myself laughing or even relating to these gruesome characters, but as a grim, Todd Solondz-esque sociological study, I think it’s very successful and I do like it.

I definitely do not relate to Malcolm as I was expecting I might. All we really ever had in common was an ability to do quick arithmetic in our heads, a certain kind of shrill whininess, and a tendency to be clingy with the few people who ever gave us the time of day. That’s not nothing, but the biggest problem is that like all his brothers, he wants to beat the others up, blow things up, engage in wacky antics, and engage in dangerous activities. I don’t relate to any of that at all thankfully. The secondary problem is his refusal to own his own nerdiness. He ends up ultimately becoming the uncoolest person in the series not because he is a nerd but because he tried to deny it. That I can relate to. Almost all Malcolm’s classmates in the gifted “Krelboyne” classes are much more obviously nerdy in their mannerisms or unable to mask their autism in the modern parlance, but they are who they are and they don’t thirst for coolness and they accept their marginal social position and own it. The Krelboynes and the first teacher are actually the only characters in the entire series I think I like. I know when I was denying my nerdiness in middle school despite my thick glasses, protuberant stomach, social ineptitude, lack of fashion sense, and dominance at math, spelling, and computers, I was way less cool and popular and picked on way more than in tenth grade when I embraced my nerdiness and stopped trying to mask. Of course, at that point, I didn’t even know I was autistic because the criteria were much stricter back then. But it seemed like Malcolm never learned that lesson, so even if Stevie (my favorite character) is way nerdier on the surface, he is also cooler because he’s not trying to be something he’s not.

One thing I do really like is that it’s one of the few shows I think I’ve ever seen that tried to depict both gifted and special ed classes. As a formerly-twice-exceptional fellow, I was enrolled in both kinds of classes, which gives me more of a perspective on this. Dewey’s special ed classes seemed more true to life to me than Malcolm’s gifted classes. I realize I went to the worst of the Syracuse public suburban high schools, but I was the class nerd and neither I nor anyone I met in school was doing the kind of chemistry experiments shown in this show in their free time (another place where the supposed realism fails). Even when I was on the bus going to the state math league meets as both a junior and a senior, even nobody at that level would have thought to do “9,801…9,604… bottles of beer on the wall” by squaring all the numbers from 99 down in descending order as is depicted on that show. I will admit that made me laugh though.

The special ed classes felt more true to life and perceptive to me: how nobody is really disturbed all the time, how most supposedly “disturbed” people can really act normal most of the time but it can be punctuated by outbursts that seem to come randomly out of nowhere. I definitely related to that more than any of the gifted stuff where none of those people were written like any high schooler I ever met. I had a ton of temper tantrums in elementary school through ninth grade and was considered disturbed by a lot of people. It mostly stopped after that, but I know I got in major trouble in second grade when I pushed a desk over even when I hurt no one. There was one psychologist who I think was trying to throw me out of the school and at the very least declare me to be hyperactive (this was in 1993; I guess that’s before ADD and hyperactivity were combined?) I don’t think I ever had ADHD and the child psychologist my parents took me to said no but somehow, the Asperger’s was missed. So, I feel the show handles emotional disturbance better than giftedness, and I have to give a thumbs-up for that.

As for the other characters I have less to say. I have to say Francis’s storylines were probably the most unique. You’re not going to find many works set in an Alaska diner or on a dude ranch. Although I hated Francis at the beginning, I kind of liked him at the end, maybe because he was the only brother who basically gave up on violence at a certain point. I kind of even wish I had an on-location job like that since I am so lonely and isolated and I glamorize community to such an extent that working in some weird on-location service job rather than the various unending string of online gig jobs I’ve had might give me the community I crave so much. Reese is certainly the most loathsome character, but although he’s supposed to be stupid, I find myself never being convinced by that. He’s very smart in his scheming and the way he manipulates people and his ability to remember sordid details to torture people with, and he primarily seems dumb because he’s impulsive (like all the brothers are), naive (which most of them aren’t), and makes no effort in school because he didn’t see the point (and honestly, he was correct). Honestly, for most of the series Hal seemed dumber than Reese to me, and he irritated me more than most. Dewey mostly doesn’t bother me but using his cuteness to manipulate people got very tiresome over time.

As for Lois, I guess the question is whether she abuses her kids and they act out as a sign of rebellion or the kids rebelled first and this was her attempt to obtain a nexus of control. It’s probably a little of both. I never like her but for the most part she doesn’t seem that unreasonable until the very end of the series when she steals Malcolm’s money, buys the aforementioned dollhouse, and then tells Malcolm she was intentionally making his life difficult so he could run for President. Like huh? You need charisma to succeed in politics and Malcolm’s skills are mainly in math and science. Who elects a socially inept scientist for President? All the Democratic Presidents are lawyers and all the Republican Presidents are crappy businessmen these days. I wouldn’t call him a scientist, but it’s not like Mark Zuckerberg’s political career went anywhere because of the creepy vibes he gives off and Malcolm gives off similar vibes. Obviously, that was just something they threw in for the finale to change the meaning of everything that came before, but I can see why someone might say it ruined the series.

Nowadays, I think most people would realize that a guaranteed $100,000 a year job is probably worth eschewing college entirely for. One thing that’s always bothered me about high school shows (especially the working class ones) is that they never seem to acknowledge that student loans exist. On Roseanne, Becky runs off (as an excuse for her actress to leave the series before returning and then re-returning) because she doesn’t have a college fund so they’re not eligible for full financial aid, and the way Malcolm depicts it, somehow they needed to raise all the money for him to go to Harvard themselves with student loans not even being discussed at all. I suspect this is because these shows were written by boomer writers who didn’t understand how college had changed since they were in college. Furthermore, I learned years after the fact that Princeton offered a free ride to anyone accepted there starting around 2001 or so, and Cornell offered a free ride to anyone with a family making less than $75,000 literally the year after I graduated (and I was fucking pissed, man). The time the end of Malcolm is set is probably around the time Harvard itself offered a free ride to anyone, and the Ivy Leagues decided to do this 1) because they had big enough endowments to do it, and 2) because it greatly increases the number of applicants, therefore lowers their acceptance rates, improves their college rankings, etc… So if you can get into an Ivy League, it’s actually worth it now because they’ll all pay your ride if you’re poor. Anything else if you need to take loans, you probably shouldn’t bother, and this was already changing around the time that was written. I will say this: if I knew Princeton alone offered a free ride when I was graduating, I might have targeted them instead, but I suspect my SAT scores exceeded the Cornell level but weren’t good enough for Princeton.

I like listening to a lot of episodes of the Michael and Us podcast where they analyze movies from a socialist perspective (even though I don’t quite share their politics and share their cultural tastes rather less as I actually like the kind of middlebrow schlock they tend to abhor) and they’re always going on about “End of History” movies that were written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War when Francis Fukuyama declared the “end of history” before deciding he was wrong. It’s the moment of time when people believed neoliberal capitalism would continue to stampede across the world for the rest of time. A lot of this stuff from the late ‘90s has aged really strangely, especially any Gen X works capturing the ennui of suburbia and how unsatisfied people are with their cubicle jobs, which I know a bunch of embittered failed PMC millennials like me sometimes longingly wish we’d had. But I do actually think Malcolm is an exmple of this tendency also. The family gets in more and more and more debt, blows up/destroys/sets innumerble things on fire, yet never suffers any consequences. This wouldn’t be possible except in a bubble where people believed everything was going to continue to improve forever, and then the end of history ends with the Great Recession almost immediately after Malcolm in the Middle does, so it becomes an unintentional period piece.

I’d also say the same thing for a different reason. One of the other distinctive features is how nearly every single character is a reprehensible human being, and I think that is connected to the rise of George W. Bush and the neocons as well. In the ‘90s, both the Democrats and the Republicans were going on about family values. Politicians of both parties were going afte violent music, movies, and video games. The PMRC was obviously a Democratic thing since Tipper Gore ran it. Then on the Republican side you had Dan Quayle condemning the TV character Murphy Brown for being an unwed mother and George Bush, (Sr.) literally saying American families needed to be “more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons”. (I’m not gonna say Bush was wrong about that necessarily. I never watched The Waltons but from what I know about it, it’s a tight-knit family building solidarity during the Great Depression, and that does sound like the kind of attitude we might need today. But boy, was he the worst possible messenger for it, and of course I’m sure he did not exactly reflect the economic values of that show.)

But, in the 2000s, that started to change. As Aaron Renn wrote in his famous article on evangelicalism, religion was generally seen positively by the average American prior to the ‘90s, neutrally in the ‘90s and negatively in the last decade. You would get social benefits from being religious in the 20th century and now you get social benefits from being atheist. But I think what Renn is talking about is broader than that. It seems like the idea of virtue itself is something nobody takes seriously now. Granted, I never took it seriously from the Republicans in the first place. But at a certain point, it seems like people stopped believing virtuous characters were realistic because so many people who claimed to be virtuous were hypocritical about their ideals. So nothing is seen as realistic anymore if it aspires to virtue or even optimism, and I think that’s the other thing Malcolm leans on a lot. Showing an exaggerated version of people’s depravity might have been a necessary corrective to the smarminess of ‘80s/’90s family sitcoms, but it also reflected a change in how trustworthy people felt the average person was, and exemplified America’s collapse into a low-trust society where everyone is out to get everyone else and nothing else is seen as “realistic”. I strongly dislike this trend and I see Malcolm as a part of it, but I’m not one of those who think TV shows really cause it. I get that it was a cartoon that was designed to be funny (although I insist that it’s hard to laugh if you’re genuinely working class yourself and not somebody looking down on the working class who want to use it as an example of why poor people shouldn’t get benefits since they’re only poor because of the bad decisions they make). I know Calvin and Hobbes has skewered this idea: "Yes, we all know how funny good role models are." But honestly, I think there have been plenty of shows where likable characters could be funny. Even the adult sitcoms. My all time favorite sitcom is WKRP in Cincinnati and I would say six of the main characters in that ensemble are likable (all except Herb and Les and I suppose you could debate Les). It’s definitely possible to write funny characters who aren’t loathsome, but it seems like at a certain point, people stopped trying because they viewed even aspiring to virtue as unrealistic.

Unfortunately, I think the character who reminded me most of me wasn’t Malcolm, but Craig minus his gross womanizing. A slovenly nerd with strong ambition in his personal projects but minimal career ambition who is the butt of everyone’s jokes and seems to have more shit happen to him that isn’t his fault than any other character. It really bothered me that I related to him of all people more than any of the other characters. I definitely never liked him, but then I never liked me either so that tracks.

As for the reunion series, I’ve got to say I was disappointed they made all the kids successful. You’d have to figure as maladjusted/socially inept/abusive as all those kids were, at least one of them would have to still be living at home under Lois’s thumb? Especially with their poor socioeconomic background, their bad attitudes that would keep anyone from wanting to hire them (the number of jobs they had in the show is something I actually find unrealistic at that time), multiple recessions, and the general tendency for most millennials to be less successful than their parents, the fact that not one of them (especially Dewey) “failed to launch” did not ring true to me.

I also feel like the family really should have lost their house in the Great Recession considering how overextended they were on credit, but one of the defining unrealistic tendencies of this show is that “status quo is God” and that nothing bad seems to stick for more than one episode. The most hilarious example of this (and not in a good way) was when in one episode, their refrigerator is repossessed and in the next one, it instantly returns without any explanation. THAT’S how real life works, am I right?

No TV revival will ever be as good as the original show, and I don’t think it was bad exactly, but I’ve got to say the Roseanne and Gilmore Girls revivals were more brave by showing the kids utterly failing and coming back home to live with their parents. That captures the reality way more than anything I saw in the Malcolm revival. Rory Gilmore’s story was way closer to mine than any of the Malcolm children (at least if you erase all her philandering ‘cause I never have had or presumably will have sex), and that seemed most true to life to what would really happen to a gifted child with low ambition and a bad attitude.

I know I talked a lot of shit, but I still did like it and do recommend it (both the series and the revival) even if I think it succeeds as a sociological study about a white working class family exaggerated to cartoonish extremes more than it succeeds as comedy. And I will end this by sharing what I think the two best quotes from the entire series are:

“I’d rather you were the best toilet scrubber in the world than a slapdash Supreme Court justice.”

“Maybe you believe that because all you’re good at is thinking. And if the world isn’t logical, then you’re lost.”

So, Greg Shahade ended Jamie Ding’s 31-game winning streak on Jeopardy! I didn’t realize this until I saw him comment on it on a Reddit thread, but I had actually read his post on how he ascended from the very lowest tier of LearnedLeague (lower than where I was) to the top tier in only a year and a half right after I joined LearnedLeague myself. Made me wonder briefly if I should try the same thing he did. But now that I watched him lose only three games later, I’ve probably concluded that it wouldn’t be worth it.

While I was watching all the Malcolm episodes, as I said I was also entering data for this project, even if I wasn’t uploading columns sometimes. Typically, I’ve been going through ten of my lock drivers a day and rating all their seasons. I now have a bunch of seasons that are “overextended”, where I have more drivers I want to place in certain tier groups for each year than the number of slots I have available, and I want to consistently keep to my usual rubric of 25 E and E- drivers and 50 C+, C, and C- drivers for each post-World War II year, so I’m going to have to rejigger a lot of these drivers to shift them up or usually down tiers when necessary, but I think I’m going to wait to do that until at least I’ve gone through all my lock and near miss drivers. I’ve already gone through all my bubble drivers.

I’ve been going through the Ls and Ms, and I ended up dropping six drivers I originally had as locks to the bubble category: Andy Lally, Pierre Lartigue, Robin Liddell, Herbert Linge, Attilio Marinoni, and Jaime Melo. For Lally and Liddell, the issue is that I just don’t think that during the IMSA split that Grand-Am’s GT class had competition anywhere near as strong as the GT classes in the American Le Mans Series, so I’ve tended to downgrade a lot of those drivers, and that’s part of the reason why I currently have Boris Said and Joey Hand out too. For Linge, he had an awful lot of World Sportscar Championship class wins, but these were usually in small classes that only had a few entered cars and he had no overall wins and was usually many laps behind the overall winner, so I thought he should be dropped especially when I realized I had Edgar Barth on the bubble as well and Barth was a Porsche contemporary of Linge who was probably better. Finally, Lartigue was a three-time Dakar Rally winner, but my issue there is that’s all he did. I realize a lot of the Dakar winners didn’t typically enter any other rallies, but I tend to prefer the WRC drivers who competed in a wide variety of major rallies around the world than those who competed and won in only one, even if it was the more prestigious one. Marinoni was the first three-time 24 Hours of Spa winner, winning this race three consecutive years in 1928-1930 each time with a different co-driver, but I ended up lowering him because I award fewer points to the pre-World War II era and also because I had to take Woolf Barnato, who won all three of his 24 Hours of Le Mans starts (coincidentally each time with a different co-driver himself) over him those same years. Nonetheless, I still have all six of those drivers on the right side of the bubble currently.

I also moved up Jon Fogarty and Alex Gurney. I decided to give them both E’s for their seven-win 2007 Grand-Am season instead of the E-s where I previously had them. They did really dominate the season and it was even with both drivers leading over 300 laps. This elevates Fogarty from the bubble into lock status and elevates Gurney from near misses to the right side of the bubble. I’m sure I’ll continue to tinker things like this in the years to come. I tend to be at my least accurate with evaluating sports car drivers (along with drag racers and grassroots drivers). And I ended up dropping Andrea Aghini to the near miss category when I realize I had overrated one of his WRC seasons, but I may change my mind on that later.

I spent way too much time on my regular work and also thinking of Malcolm so I blew off a number of the scheduled posts, but maybe I made up for it with this one. And I paired my long entirely unrelated intro with a post profiling a driver who a lot of people consider the best driver ever. Maybe for some of the mega-legends like Fangio, I should extend the limit beyond my usual 500 words and I’ll think about doing that at some point later. For the time being, I’m gonna stick to 500 words for each driver though. And I probably should have combined the review with a less important driver…