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Posted November 3, 2003
Film critic Amy Taubin writes in the November/December 2003 issue of Film Comment magazine: "What would Andy Warhol be interested in if he were alive today? K Street. Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney's 10-part HBO series is the ultimate postmodern object, the proof that the camera creates its own reality, making fact and fiction inoperable categories and performance the only truth. K Street stars political spinners James Carville and Mary Matalin, playing themselves in quasi-fictional circumstances: they run a start-up D.C. lobbying and consultancy firm. So far, the series has attracted an alarming number of prominent political figures to appear as themselves. The likes of Barbara Boxer, Charles Schumer, and Rick Santorum have proved as adept at buying into the 'as if' of an improvisation as Edie Sedgwick and Ondine, although the series has yet to find its Viva. K Street's most flabbergasting moment of cause/effect collapse took place in the first episode when Howard Dean is initially shown being coached by Carville and Paul Begala and later appears on an actual television broadcast delivering the joke Carville had placed in his mouth. Less noted was that in the same episode Begala mentions that Bush is a great politician because 'he never does hypotheticals.' A few days later, there was Wesley Clark on TV answering the 'Would you have voted for the war?' question with the lifted line, 'I don't do hypotheticals.' K Street is itself a hypothetical that, in the simulacrum of television, is as close to the truth of politics as anyone gets. But another reason the show is such a pleasure is that Soderbergh, who directs, shoots, and edits each episode in five days, is clearly working without a net in a medium otherwise governed by the law of covering one's ass. And it's clear he relishes every minute of it."
 About Film Comment.
Posted November 3, 2003
Need help identifying the people who appeared as themselves in the latest episode?
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Posted October 9, 2003
Here's your opportunity to pose questions to the minds behind HBO's K Street.
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