Do You Go For The Gold? Or for the Clicker?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I will admit it.  When my sister and I were kids, say, 8 and 5? We would do Olympic events in the living room. The couch was both pommel horse and balance beam. Much to the chagrin of my mom.  It never worked very successfully. (In the winter, we would ice skate in socks on the slick wood of the hallway. That was incredibly successful, and gave me much confidence.  Unfulfilled on real ice.)

We just saw a very wonderful documentary about the Boys on the Boat, the 1936 Olympics. So great.

Do you watch the Olympics?  (I do.) (Pretty much.) (My station is an NBC affiliate.) 

Why?

Claire Booth--whose new book THE BRANSON BEAUTY is getting amazing reviews, and so well-deserved, has some thoughts.

Go for the Gold

   By Claire Booth

The Olympics start tomorrow. I can’t wait! I am a hopeless Olympic romantic. I’m in love with them. I love sports as it is, but the Olympics take my enjoyment to a whole new level. The competitions, the flags, the tears. The sappy athlete profiles from NBC.

Yes, I’m not ashamed (too much) to admit that I love the vignettes that the Peacock Network subjects us to during their Olympics coverage.

Sure they’re slick and overproduced, and sometimes overwrought, but they’re stories. Little books in miniature, where the only thing missing is the ending – how will the determined athlete do? And so of course, you watch the event and you cheer even more than you would have, because now you’re invested.

You’re kidding, she never even got in a pool until she was fifteen?! Oh my gosh, he’s come back from two broken feet to run in this race!

Say what you want about NBC, they make you care whether you intend to or not. Which is not unlike, say, a novelist.

Writers have to get you to care about the characters. They have to manipulate your emotions. If they’re really good, they make you laugh, or cry, or gasp in surprise. And they convince you to stick around for the finish.

 (Billy Miles wins the 10,000 meter race at the 1964 Olympics. Credit: U.S. Marine Corps)

Sometimes, though, no matter what novelists come up with, reality beats us at our own game.

At the 1936 Olympics, an African American athlete named Jesse Owens won four track and field gold medals. In Berlin. In front of Adolf Hitler.

In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. In response, President Carter decreed that the United States would boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. American athletes became pawns in the Cold War.

There are many more instances, of course, where real world politics mixed with the sports of the Olympics. As a former journalist, I have to admit that I follow these stories particularly closely. This year, I’m really looking forward watching the refugee team, made up of athletes from South Sudan and other war-torn nations that don’t have Olympic squads, compete.

There is always so much to learn about storytelling from real life, and there’s no better microcosm of the world today than the Olympics and its athletes.

Reds, do you watch the Olympics? Which events are your favorites? And do you sit through the athlete profiles or prefer to go straight to the action?

HANK:  Summer Olympics? Gymnastics. (Nadia!) Track and field. Not so much beach volleyball.

Winter? Figure skating.   I am SO predictable. (Torvill and Dean!)

And I have a t-shirt, because I work for NBC, that’s the official NBC 1980 Olympic t-shirt. Except it turned out to be an event that they did not cover.

How about you? Olympics? I give them a…9.5.  (Except for that doping and cheating thing.)

And have you read Claire's THE BRANSON BEAUTY? It's a marvelous locked room--er, boat--mystery. I loved it! So much--that I'll give a copy to one lucky commenter!

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Claire Booth spent more than a decade as a daily newspaper reporter, much of it covering crimes so convoluted and strange they seemed more like fiction than reality. Eventually, she had enough of the real world and decided to write novels instead. Her Sheriff Hank Worth mystery series takes place in Branson, Missouri, where small-town Ozark politics and big-city country music tourism clash in, yes, strange and convoluted ways. Find her at www.clairebooth.com.

THE BRANSON BEAUTY 

The Branson Beauty, an old showboat, has inexplicably crashed on the waters of the Ozark mountain lake it’s been plying for decades. Hank Worth is still settling into his new job as county sheriff, and when he responds to the emergency call, he knows he’s in for a long winter’s day of ferrying more than one hundred passengers to shore. But he doesn’t expect to find the body of a high school track star locked inside the Captain’s private dining room. Now he must navigate small town politics as he tries to figure out who killed the talented local girl.

A visit from a TV Bad Guy

RHYS BOWEN: Not all crime stories end up as books. Some find their way to the screen and today we have a first for Jungle Red--a cute hunky guy who is an actor on the new US series Prime Suspect.

You remember Helen Mirren and the iconic British TV cop show. Well, now there is a US version with a female New York cop, and our guest today, Blake Berris will be appearing on next week's episode.

Here's what he has to say:

Hey I'm Blake Berris. I played Nick Fallon on Days of Our Lives for three years and have since been working independent film and other primetime TV such as The Mentalist, The Big Bang Theory, and Breaking Bad. Next week I have an episode of Prime Suspect airing on NBC. .

RHYS BOWEN: Welcome to Jungle Red, Blake. We are delighted to have you here. So first question. This show is about the NYPD. Was it shot in NY? Tell us a bit about your character.

BLAKE: NBC's version is reimagining of Prime Suspect in a NY setting--although the show is shot entirely in LA. My character, Gary Tibbits, is taken in by Maria Bello's character and her team for questioning. Let's just say he's not a good guy on the show. But it's a fun character for me and one I haven't played yet. He's a blue-collar new york dude who doesn't take Jane and the other police seriously.
I had fun chase sequence which I hadn't done before either. Great experience on set. Definitely a show where they weren't afraid to deviate from the script a little in order to make all the moments believable. Bryan F. O'Byrne (Detective Reg Duffy) is an actor I have always looked up to and he could not have been greater onset. Maria Bello is as cool as it gets. Almost intimidatingly cool. Smart, sexy, and unbelievably self-possessed.

RHYS BOWEN: Have you played in a cop show before? What's it like playing a bad guy?

BLAKE: This was my first cop-show experience.As far as playing a "villain" you can never think of it that way as an actor. No matter what your character does or where he comes from, you've got understand him. If you don't, you are not honoring a human beings experience. This is why being an actor I think gives you great compassion for others. If you can't directly relate to something a character does, you need to find an analogy from own experience. I was in a Shakespeare class in England and Alan Rickman was speaking to us, someone asked him "You've played a lot of villains.. how do you not judge them?" And he said (very dryly), "Well it sounds like you just answered you're own question. You do exactly that... As far as I'm concerned I haven't played a lot of villains

RHYS: Did you watch the UK version of the show?

BLAKE: don't have a strong connection to the British show, but I am a big Helen Mirren fan.
RHYS: Blake, thanks so much for stopping by. We'll all be watching the next episode!