Tanner 88 (1988)

In 1988, renegade filmmaker Robert Altman and Pulitzer Prize–winning Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau created a presidential candidate, ran him alongside the other hopefuls during the primary season, and presented their media campaign as a cross between a soap opera and TV news. The result was the groundbreaking Tanner ’88, a piercing satire of media-age American politics, in which actors Michael Murphy (as contender Jack Tanner) and Cynthia Nixon (as his daughter) rub elbows on the campaign trail with real-life political players Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, Bob Dole, Ralph Nader, Kitty Dukakis, and Gloria Steinem, among many others. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the complete eleven-episode television series—more relevant today than ever.

Reviews for the miniseries seem to improve over time. In one of the earliest reviews of the pilot episode, The New York Times called the show an "interesting misfire" that "insists too much on its own sophistication about politics". The same paper held the second episode in higher esteem, calling it "humorous cinéma vérité" that's "slick and occasionally witty."In its "Best of 1988" look at television, Time magazine called it: "the year's definitive satire of media politics."

In a 2003 review of K Street, the New York Daily News said "Tanner skewer[ed] brilliantly the insanity and inanity of presidential politics." By 2004, Slate was saying: “More than a decade before the ascendancy 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.”

In 2004, Altman said "I think it's the most creative work I've ever done."

Altman won a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing in a Drama Series for the episode "The Boiler Room." Reed won an ACE Award for Best Actress in a Dramatic Series.

For those of us who love Altman, the series provides a cornucopia of small joys, and the concept behind it, after all, is ideally suited to the man. It’s frightening to consider how easily Jack Tanner, a phantom politician and a creation of the entertainment industry, could move undetected in the real political arenas Altman lampoons. That’s a testament to Altman and Trudeau, but it’s a testament with a scary aspect to it, too.





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