Democratic National Convention was one of the best TV series of the year thanks to its use of nostalgia

Vulture

"The Democratic National Convention is one of the best television series I’ve seen this year," says Jen Chaney. "That is a weird sentence. It is a sentence I would never have imagined writing even six days ago. But it is, to borrow a phrase from Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s acceptance speech, the unvarnished truth. The four-day semi-virtual convention, format courtesy of COVID-19, turned out much better than most of us would have expected. Thursday, the closing night, when Biden officially accepted the party’s nomination for president, cast the widest tonal net of the week. Against all odds, it mostly worked." Chaney points out that the Biden campaign leaned "more toward what I’ll call Mad Men Kodak Carousel nostalgia, something, to riff on Don Draper’s words, that’s more delicate but still potent. The fact that this year’s convention took something familiar and had to present it in a new way tied beautifully into that particular strain of nostalgia."

ALSO:

• Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth documentarian Davis Guggenheim shot most of Joe Biden's Democratic National Convention videos: "It’s easier to tell a story about someone you’ve never met. It’s a little harder to tell a story of someone you think you know. Everyone knows Joe Biden a little bit, right?" he says of his videos. "Each of these films was seen as a reset to do a deep dive into this one moment and this one characteristic of him. That was the core and tonal objective – how do you be authentic and real? Let’s have other people speak to specific experiences of their time with Joe. So, whether it was Cindy McCain or the train conductor. This was an opportunity to get to know him for real."
• What worked and what didn't at the DNC: Brief speeches like Joe Biden's and the roll call were successful, but comedy acts like Sarah Cooper and Julia Louis-Dreyfus didn't work out so well.