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A precious new vein of IP: fish-out-of-water stories about Westerners living not in the third world where they become white saviors (there’s plenty of those), but in places, like contemporary Japan, where they suffer the reverse. Stigmatized outsiders—called gaijin in Japan—stuck below a glass ceiling. Discriminated against for skin color and origin.
These stories are particularly interesting now, with Asia ascendant, and because they’re so rare. I can think of only two on-the-ground gonzo reports about the Tokyo underworld. Tokyo Vice, the memoir behind the HBO show, and People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Perry, imho the most underrated literary true crime book of all time, about the murder of a British hostess club girl in Roppongi. Roppongi is Tokyo’s Red Light District, motto “High Touch Town” because American GIs once high-fived (“high touch”) after nailing hookers there. In Tokyo Vice, Rachel Keller also plays an Roppongi hostess club girl, a Geisha-like role we don't have in the West. It’s compelling to see Western women wrangling with exploitation by a foreign culture as we’re accustomed to handwringing over the opposite.
In consuming either Tokyo Vice or People Who Eat Darkness, I'm struck at how completely under explored the dark side of modern Asia is in the Western mind. We crave this stuff, in large part because we're so sick of hearing about our place atop our own glass floor. But since Japan has, unlike the West, a strong immune system against foreign meddlers, it’s unusual for these reports to make it out. (It’s the reason I self-published my sadly-malformed first book, about a summer working at a M&A firm in Saigon, but let’s not get into that now).
Tokyo Vice on MAX is very good. Not great like Sopranos or True Detective Season 1. Just very good. A rootless kid from Missouri named Jake Adelstein moves to Tokyo to work at a prominent local newspaper and immerses with Yakuza. In the early scenes, the newspaper brass, testing him, asks, “Some Japanese believe Jews control the world economy, is that true?” Jake, played by Ansel Elgort, responds with “if we did, you think I’d be okay with the salary you’re paying me?”
This is supposed to be a clever retort that puts an end to the issue, but it places the otherwise innocent and fumbling Adelstein in control, where he should be flailing. This comment should throw him off, as it surely did in real life. A-grade writing would add another beat, the managing editor responding, “If you did, you wouldn’t care what salary we paid you at all.” Jake would frown. The scene would end there. Ambiguously. Stressfully. What the tenor of the moment calls for. Flat writing like this plagues the show.
There’s also borderline woke bits—a cranky editor draws the comment “he’s a racist/nationalist…you have those too right?” from a sidekick of Adelstein’s—and generally the dialogue is strained and less interesting than it could be. Writing lags behind design, photography, acting because only words can be, on their own, racist. They and their writers get censored. Design, no matter how fascistic or problematic in aesthetic, does not.
Because, besides the mediocre writing, Tokyo Vice very, very good. Lives up to co-creator Michael Mann’s reputation visually. The characters feel real and nuanced—it captures the high peaks and low valleys of a white person working in Asia, the strange friendships with locals with whom you can never quite tell where you stand. Ansel Elgort a strong B+. Like his fellow pedigreed theater mischling Timothy Chalamet, he’s selected for the gay gaze, but he’s a better actor than Chalamet, a generational talent that maybe really could turn into a grown up man one day, if only they let him. Rachel Keller, playing a Mormon missionary broken bad, gives a 10/10 performance that would’ve won every Emmy had HBO-MAX-MAXO-BOMAX not hung Tokyo Vice out to dry.
“But it’s not on HBO, it’s on MAX!" No, they market the living shit out of other MAX shows like Hacks, just not this one. The network make a distinction itself—search for MAX shows and HBO shows like The Regime and True Detective Season Garbage pop up (and are very heavily marketed). Besides, it’s not just a marketing blackout with Tokyo Vice, it’s an algorithmic blackout as well.
New WB/Discovery head David Zaslav seems intent on drawing as little distinction between HBO MAX HBMAX and MAXBO as possible. He’s a money guy, an audience-servicer. He's known for slashing and burning budgets and shows in the name of the algorithm.
But for some reason, with Tokyo Vice, he refuses to service the audience: e.g. me. It has solid viewership, season 2 just premiered, but I didn't know until word of mouth got to me two years late. I shouldn't be able to say HBO without a notification reminding me to check out Tokyo Vice.
It’s absent from on MAX Roku app and desktop site. I have to dig for it. We know that censorial PMC-types train algorithms/AIs to steer us around problematic ideas. Could that be happening with Tokyo Vice?
MSM excitedly manufactures the demise of the show:
“While the series has its admirers (there are dozens of us!), it doesn’t seem to be contributing much to Max’s streaming imperatives in an era of shrinking TV budgets, nor has it attracted much awards hype to warrant shooting in Tokyo, which surely commands a hefty sum.”
Still pretending that “awards show buzz” isn’t 100% driven by the publicity arms of the studios themselves. Even non-Hollywood people know this, yet here the propagandists want us to believe that "awards hype" simply "hasn't been attracted."
A beautiful Michael Mann crime show set in modern Japan, an IP rarity, featuring our best young actors giving top quality performances. Dark, gritty, edgy with a growing organic audience. It has every mark of a HBO hit. MAX should be salivating.
My explanation combines a few different strains. Elgort is cancelled lite via a 17-year-old groupie who slid into his DMs when he was a 20-year-old internationally famous heart throb (New York age of consent 17 so never prosecuted).
Also claims Adelstein fabricated original memoir.
Beyond these, however, I think there’s something else going on. The blackout around Tokyo Vice reminds me of another strange marketing omission in HBOs rapid self-immolation. The Anarchists is a 2022 documentary series about a crypto-anarchist conference in Acapulco that ends in murder. Also not great, but very good, and extremely topical. It focuses on problematic tech bro Jeff Berwick. As a male, tech-adjacent viewer, the show should’ve been fed to me early and often in my suggested mentions. Yet I discovered it only years later through word of mouth, and was completely addicted from beginning to very-disturbing end. Where is the data-driven marketing that has supposedly eaten Hollywood?
Perhaps HBO doesn’t spend heavily to market male-centric shows likely to spread via word of mouth anyway. Better to spend on diversity shows that 1) have a chance of winning awards and 2) can’t rely on word of mouth cause they suck. Zombie True Detective, for instance, was almost instantly renewed for another season despite everyone agreeing it was horrible. But that still wouldn’t explain the discoverability fail. The whole point of streaming is that it cynically serves your interests. Surely they could’ve put these shows in my suggested mentions, or social feeds, without implicating PR. Right?
Wrong. I think Tokyo Vice gets buried is because it makes people with algorithmic control uncomfortable. It’s made by white men, and depicts a white man treated as “less than” by a foreign culture. The female lead is a badass, but she’s basically a sex worker. There’s the aforementioned Jewish stuff. And the Elgort stuff. And the Adelstein stuff. Problematicness leveles too high for the “fearful women" who control MAX’s marketing, and perhaps even Zaslav himself, to handle. They’re happier to rule over the ashes.
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Perfect tribute to Tokyo Vice. Criminal how underappreciated it is. Warrior is great too - originally Cinemax, struggled to gain traction but now on MAX and Netflix.
S2E6: I don't believe the Yakuza embrace two Japanese men in bed, butt naked having sex together. I lived in Japan for 10 years, but don't call me an expert. But I am sure producer Watanabe knew that scene would appease the U. S. “diversity” Gestapo.