38 minute read
The Big Question
THE BIG QUESTION
What public spot are you most interested in returning to post-pandemic, and why?
JOHN CUMINGS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, A. JAMES CLARK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
What I most want is to go out on a date with my wife, which seems crazy, given how much of our time is spent together at home. We’d probably just have dinner and then walk around until we’re tired.
JULIE GABRIELLI
CLINICAL ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ARCHITECTURE, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, PLANNING AND PRESERVATION
I dream of running again in the Baltimore Running Festival. The quirky neighborhood vibe makes for an unforgettable race. Halloween costumes and mimosas in Patterson Park, keg beer in Charles Village, a five-piece bluegrass band on 33rd Street. A woman in rainbow shorts and a Ravens jersey plays the “Rocky” theme on her trumpet. On this day, the runners own the city, and it puts on a glorious show.
ASHISH KABRA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF DECISION, OPERATIONS AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES, ROBERT H. SMITH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
Museums and board game bars. Where else do you think nerds go to socialize?
ISAAC LEVENTON
ADJUNCT LECTURER, FIRE PROTECTION ENGINEERING, A. JAMES CLARK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING
There is a unique energy (and distinct smell) in the frigid locker room of an old ice rink after a long skate. Normally, I coach a pair of hockey teams and skate with two more: I most look forward to being back there together.
IDIL YAVEROGLU
MARKETING LECTURER, ROBERT H. SMITH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
I am most interested in returning to campus and reuniting with students face to face. Even though online teaching has its benefits, I miss observing their body language, their curious eyes and their nodding heads while teaching.
ZEENA ZAKHARIA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
The airport—no question. The moments after passing through security, and before boarding that final flight on the long journey home, are marked by anticipation and joy unique to homecoming. I long to stand in that space and embrace the promise of seeing my family again.
JIE ZHANG
HARVEY SANDERS FELLOW OF RETAIL MANAGEMENT AND PROFESSOR OF MARKETING, ROBERT H. SMITH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Performing artists’ lives and works have been completely upended by the pandemic. I long to see them going back to live performances and to cheer them on with other audience members.
Share your answer and see more faculty responses at terp.umd.edu/BigQ11. Suggest a future question at terpfeedback.umd.edu.
Robert Klemko’s family photos include (from left) him playing football for James Hubert Blake High School in Maryland; his father, Alex Klemko, with his grandmother, Antonia McDonald; and him with his dad at their home in Silver Spring, Md.
THE FIRST TIME I talked with a Black NFL coach about overcoming bigotry, he dished out more of the same. I was a first-year NFL reporter for USA Today in 2012, a young Black journalist interviewing this prominent coach on background, meaning nothing could be attributed to him by name. Though my job was to cover the X’s and O’s of the game, I asked him over our lunch if he thought there would ever be an openly gay player in the NFL. “No,” he said casually, between bites of beef au jus. “No one wants to shower with a f-----.” The answer ignited a distinct kind of anger, one that slowly transforms into disappointment and, finally, pity. It was what I had felt as a teenager when I spoke to my grandmother about the Nazis arriving at her Ukrainian village during the summer of 1941 and marching her neighbors to their deaths. I had asked her then what seemed like the most urgent question: Did she want to help them? “No,” she said, recoiling. Why? “Because they were Jews.” Now, at age 24, hearing something that offended me just as deeply, I wondered: How will I ever stick to football? I dwelled for weeks on his words and what they meant for my career. It was a reminder there would always be this tension between covering a sport, and covering people, and all of our fears, insecurities and hatreds. It took nine years, but eventually, the tension forced me to choose the latter. My dad, despite being raised by that angry, sneering woman, shared none of her values. He would have loved to talk to me about my recent career change, but by the time I made the switch, it was too late.
Clockwise from top left: Robert Klemko shown as a boy; as a baby with his parents, Dr. Lisa Bradley Klemko and Alex Klemko; and with his father. Alex’s mother shunned him for five years after he told her he was dating Lisa, a Black woman.
—ROBERT KLEMKO
T
HAT COACH’S COMMENT also wasn’t so different than one my mom had heard a couple of decades earlier. A fellow veterinary student at UC Davis, a white man, told her there was no way he would be “sharing a locker with a n-----.”
My mother, Dr. Lisa Bradley Klemko, came to the University of Maryland in 1984 as a young veterinarian and retired in 2018 as an assistant dean in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Aware how difficult life could be for aspiring Black doctors, she fought for inclusion and helped transform UMD into one of the nation’s top universities for sending people of color to medical schools.
In 1987 she met Alex Klemko, a white man, at a bar in Dupont Circle. He showed up to their first date the next week wearing a clown suit in full makeup to take her out to dinner on Halloween. She reluctantly ate Korean food with the clown, whose lack of embarrassment won her over.
He was eccentric, hilarious and hardworking. He lived for a good prank. If he’d ever submitted to a sit-down with a shrink, the doctor might’ve said he was compensating for a joyless childhood.
He emigrated from Heidelberg, Germany, to the U.S. as a boy with his mother, Antonia, a Ukrainian World War II refugee. As he grew up with her in Alexandria, Va., her romantic partners often treated my dad like a servant, he said; one of them forced my kindergarten-aged father to spend his free time in the garage brewing beer. He joined the Navy to pay for college and served in Vietnam. He married, divorced and then met a young veterinarian from the Bay Area who had traveled across the country to take a job at the University of Maryland.
Antonia was thrilled my father was dating a doctor. He and his brother struggled to come up with ways to break it to her that she was Black. Their mother had arrived in the U.S. with few skills, knowing little English, but got by as a live-in maid to wealthy white families, clinging to the desperate notion that she—a white woman—could at least look down on Americans of color.
One day, several months into the relationship, Antonia phoned her son to let him know she’d be dropping by his house to pick something up. That’s great, he told her. And you can meet my girlfriend ... but I have to tell you, she’s Black. She paused for a moment, then said two words: “F--- you.”
She didn’t speak to her son again for five years.
When they married, Antonia gathered most of my father’s childhood pictures— black and white images that served as the only record of his youth—and destroyed them. What few she didn’t burn, she set aside and blacked out my dad’s face with a marker. Then she wrote “N----- LOVER” on each picture, put them in an envelope and mailed them to my parents.
Antonia never apologized. My father saw her privately over the years on weekends. He rejected her racism and built a family, but never fully turned away from her. He never let her forget what she did to his pictures. In high school I was allowed to meet her for the first time. As uncomfortable as my mother was with the idea, she felt we needed to know more about the woman who tried to tear apart our family before it started.
She was kind, gracious and excited. She made me a Napoleon cake. I didn’t say much. Soon after that, I interviewed Antonia and what she told me about her life in the war sticks with me to this day.
“... because they were Jews.”
O
N MY FIRST DAY of Blake Morrison’s feature writing class at Maryland, he asked each of us to share one thing about ourselves that nobody knows. To our shock, he followed up each disclosure with a fact he knew about our lives. He asked me to tell the story of an iguana tearing my pinky finger off in third grade. (In case you’re wondering, it was re-attached.) He later told us he had messaged some of our friends on Facebook when he got the class roster, mining for anecdotes about us. It was a lesson in the lengths good reporters go to get information, but it was also a lesson in ego.
It felt good to have this person care enough about my story to go around asking friends I hadn’t talked to in years about me. It endeared him to me, and it helped me understand Antonia. Until then, I couldn’t understand why she was so eager to talk about such a deep, personal flaw. Morrison’s simple but profound philosophy of interviewing gave me the answer: “People just want to tell their story.”
That’s why Antonia was willing to tell her Black grandchild that she was still an unapologetic racist, that she had no regrets. She wasn’t necessarily proud of her story, or even confident it would be received well, but it was hers, and no one had ever held out a recorder and asked her to tell her story.
I learned this over seven years covering the NFL: If you give people the chance to tell their story, their way, they often take it. At my worst, I was access-hungry, still covering the mechanics of the game of football and vying to be close to the people who could make that job easier. At my best, I covered it as a cultural phenomenon, zeroing in on one person’s story and letting it tell me and my readers something about the world. I wrote about racial disparities in NFL hiring practices. I chronicled the journey of the NFL’s first openly gay player, Michael Sam (two years after my chat with that homophobic coach). I interviewed a woman who’d been repeatedly beaten and harassed by her boyfriend, an NFL player, and what the league had and hadn’t done to stop it.
Then I was dispatched to cover my first trial: the rape allegations against former NFL tight end Kellen Winslow II. According to police and a jury of his peers, this member of NFL athletic royalty—a collegiate national champion and All-American and the son of a pro hall of famer—had brutalized the most vulnerable people in our society: elderly, indigent and homeless women. I watched those women describe what Winslow had done to them on the side of the road, in hot tubs, in his SUV. I talked to doctors and psychologists, and I wrote about what I learned.
Then I went back to covering NFL games. A few weeks later I sat in a stadium press box, laptop and catered meal in front of me, and thought, “What the f--- am I doing here?”
At right, Alex Klemko aboard a Navy supply ship during the Vietnam War and Robert Klemko as a boy.
—ROBERT KLEMKO
I
WAS FOUR MONTHS into my new job as an investigative sports reporter at The Washington Post when the pandemic began in the U.S. The national news desk asked for volunteers to cover it. Having no experience covering health, infrastructure, government or anything outside of professional football, I thought there was probably only one thing I can do as well as anyone else: I can be available.
It was something my dad taught me. As owner and lead salesman at an office moving company, he could eyeball a few floors full of offices and tell you exactly how long it would take to empty it and what it would cost. And then you’d probably find him at the move, from start to finish. He was always there, always available, through recessions, through multiple cancer diagnoses, through a pandemic.
COVID-19 and lewy body dementia finally ended his ironman streak. Unable to drive or hold a coherent conversation, he spent the last year of his life grounded and isolated, all while my world was finally opening up.
My wife became pregnant with our first child, a boy. And a few weeks into the pandemic assignment, the world shifted again. George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, face-down in the street, choked under a police officer’s knee. Editors sent me to the city, where I arrived to find a police station in flames and rioters waving stolen handcuffs and batons, screaming into the night.
Black Lives Matter became a coverage priority again. I went to Tulsa, rented a scooter and followed protesters approaching a rally for then-President Donald Trump.
Trump supporters haven’t been easy interview subjects for some time. Introduce yourself to them as a Washington Post reporter, and you can expect to be called “Fake News” nine times out of 10. In this case, they were leaving an indoor rally during a pandemic, maskless, and immediately suspicious of anyone wearing a face covering.
As I saw a little girl among the Trump supporters begin to cry amid the shouting, the demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, and her father kneel down to comfort her, I had an idea for an approach that felt fresh: What are Trump supporters telling their children about their opponents?
I knew what my parents had taught me about people who thought Black women shouldn’t be veterinarians, or that mixedrace families shouldn’t exist. I was told that those people needed to be listened to and learned from, so that we might understand how people learn to hate.
So I asked a bunch of families leaving the rally if they’d share their thoughts with me. I laughed off their taunts to take off my mask. I declined to shake their hands. I said I didn’t know about all that “fake news” stuff, because I was a sportswriter (my new, very effective cover).
After all that, they were happy to tell me their story, how the president hadn’t fanned the flames of racism, how Black Lives Matter had been funded by powerful, anti-American Jews, and who the “real racists” were: social justice activists. They were uninterested in the perspectives of their opponents, and they were passing that on to a new generation, illustrating anew the depths of our national divide over race. It was hard to talk about, and equally difficult to write about.
It was a lot like that interview with Antonia, the tape of which I’d stuffed away in a box in the garage.
Alexander Robert Klemko died Jan. 9 at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center. I was able to say goodbye to him, in a way, when a kind overnight nurse held up a phone to his ear while he lay unconscious in the hospital. I knelt in the lawn in front of the hospital and wept, knowing finally he wouldn’t meet my son, due in May.
When he died, I knew there was no keeping Antonia, Alex and Lisa’s story in a box. It was painful, sad, angering, heroic and worth telling and learning from.
After speaking to those parents in Oklahoma, I realized what I want most for my son, after good health and good friends. I want him to grow up with the confidence, experience and courage it will take to tell me when I’m wrong. terp
Robert Klemko is a 2010 graduate of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and a staff writer at The Washington Post covering criminal justice and the broader movement for police reform. He covered the NFL for Sports Illustrated for six years.
BY LIAM FARRELL
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JACQUI OAKLEY
Almighty Cod The IT WAS THERE at the tentative beginnings of European voyages to the New World, traveling alongside the wooden cargo ships and, once caught and dried in the cool salt air, fueling the crews that skirted the edges of the earth.
In the shadow of climate It was there when Leif Erikson set off more than 1,000 years ago for Greenland. He became lost in the churning waters of change and overfishing, a UMD the North Atlantic, and when he finally came upon land—someresearcher finds answers for today’s oceans in the centurieswhere near Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, historians believe—it confounded his expectations. He saw fields of wheat, luscious vines sprouting grapes and maple trees of enormous size. old bones of a North Atlantic fish. But while divine providence was assumed to have played a role in the safe return of “Leif the Lucky” from what was thereafter known to his people as Vinland, there was a humbler reason for his survival as well—one that would keep swimming through history’s tides.
This is a story about a fish.
Not in the sense of, say, a tangerine clownfish swimming into forbidding open ocean to search for his abducted son; nor in the sense of an old man battling for days off the coast of Cuba with a marlin hooked to the end of his line, or the lies of a fabulist friend about an early morning on a lake. This story is about a fish that has lived in giant schools off North Atlantic shores and, through historical ubiquity and gastronomic utility, supplied ancient explorers, helped build world powers, and lately become a flashpoint between modern science and modern fishermen over how to shepherd its now-struggling population.
And while the importance of the North Atlantic codfish, from its explosive colonial economic impact to its devastation from overfishing in the 20th century, has been explored in academic papers, books and documentaries, a new project led by a University of Maryland researcher aims to see what new lessons can be pried out of bones—specifically, by examining cod bones dug out from places the fish has been eaten, processed or prepared for sale over hundreds of years. George Hambrecht, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Anthropology, is heading a team including researchers from Alaska and Iceland on the initiative, funded by a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation, to use cutting-edge analysis on bones dating from the ninth to the 19th centuries and dug from archaeological sites in Iceland and the Faroe Islands over the last 30 years. In essence, they are making the cod the protagonist of its own environmental story.
“We have the human side, the cod side and the climate side,” Hambrecht says. “We are putting more emphasis on the cod side.”
Prized for its white flesh, low fat and high protein, Gadus morhua is a voracious, omnivorous eater whose territory stretches from America’s Gulf of Maine to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and onward past the shores of Iceland into the North and Baltic seas. It can live for 20 years, grow longer than four feet and approach 80 pounds. Living in the cold, close to the ocean floor, the cod have had such a high spawning rate that Alexandre Dumas speculated 150 years ago that “it would take only three years to fill the sea so that you could walk across the Atlantic dryshod on the backs of cod.”
The project’s end result, says Hambrecht, an expert in zooarchaeology, will be an updated 1,000-year history that will not only deepen our understanding of how humans have historically interacted with a critical species, but also provide information that could guide decisions on managing waters and fisheries confronting a rapidly changing environment. “We’re doing this in part because we’re all sort of history geeks,” Hambrecht says. “But we’re also doing it because there is a good chance historical data can be mobilized to deal with issues coming out of climate change.”
One place where such new knowledge could be put to use is New England, where the fish had near mythical importance for generations of European settlers—it was the source for the name of Massachusetts’ cape, was on the seal of the court that held the Salem witch trials, and formed the basis of a Daniel Webster speech in the U.S. Senate about the benefits of chowder. In one regional folk telling spun from the Bible story, the fish’s telltale white stripe extending from head to tail came from when Jesus handed it out along with bread loaves to feed the masses.
It wasn’t just “cod;” it was the “sacred cod.”
—GEORGE HAMBRECHT, ASSOCIATE ANTHROPOLOGY
PROFESSOR
WHEN JOHN ADAMS TRAVELED to Paris as part of the team negotiating the end of the Revolutionary War, he carried the interests of fishermen with him.
By the latter half of the 18th century, cod had become one of the most important commodities in the British colonies, particularly for New England and Adams’ native Massachusetts. Dried and salted cod was the fourth-most valuable export, trailing only sugar, tobacco and grain, and New England fisheries processed more than 39 million pounds of it in 1765.
The cod trade also played a significant role in the growing economic—and political—independence of what would become the United States. In addition to sending cod to Britain, a lower-grade product was also shipped to feed enslaved people on sugar plantations in the West Indies in exchange for the molasses needed to manufacture rum. Adam Smith, in his seminal “The Wealth of Nations,” praised the money brought in by American fisheries as an example of the prosperity fostered by untrammeled free trade.
And as the mother country began to wield a stronger hand in both taxation and commerce, Adams thought the restraints put on fishing and fishermen were “sundering this country from (Britain), I think, forever.” The sometimes literal fights over such fishing laws, he believed, would eventually achieve greater infamy than the Boston Massacre.
Adams’ success in maintaining American access to the fertile cod grounds of Canada as part of the Treaty of Paris was, then, a prime political achievement—particularly after the members of what was essentially the first United States Navy had so successfully shifted those same cod trades from molasses to ammunition.
For “how could we restrain our fishermen, the boldest men alive,” Adams once asked, “from fishing in prohibited places?”
George Hambrecht doesn’t mind
harsh weather. For him, the North Atlantic, with its sharp winds, dramatic waves and rocky shores, feels less like the end of the world than the start of an entirely different one to explore.
He grew up in San Francisco (“I love fog,” he says) and earned a degree in history from Bard College in 1995 but didn’t take a single anthropology or archaeology course while at the Hudson River school. He speculates now that a bout with what was likely cholera on a high school trip to Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula partially soured him on the prospect. Hambrecht also didn’t immediately go to graduate school after completing his bachelor’s degree; he returned to California
and worked in the wine business until he came around to the notion of combining his enjoyment of the natural world with his interest in studying the past.
“I loved working outside and being in dirt. I didn’t want to be stuck in an archive or a library,” he says. “Dirt plus history equals archaeology.”
So Hambrecht went to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and embarked on a career that has included excavations on everything from an 18th-century colonial estate in Barbuda to the hidden yellow fever burial grounds of Washington Square Park in New York City, before coming to the University of Maryland in 2011.
One of his longest-running professional fascinations has focused on Iceland. For almost 20 years, Hambrecht’s been working amid a landscape of volcanoes and glaciers, one of the last places on Earth colonized by humans. In particular, he’s been digging at a bishop’s farm at Skálholt for centuries-old bones of sheep, cattle and—yes—cod.
With isotope analysis, Hambrecht says, researchers can glean incredible amounts of scientific detail from a bone. By cataloguing levels of chemical elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur, it’s possible to figure out where an animal was born, what kind of environment it lived in, and where it died.
“You are what you eat, drink and breathe,” Hambrecht says. “All of us are basically sponges, sampling the environment around us at all times.”
But he also sees animal bones as an artifact like a sword hilt, statue or stone foundation, a clue to the framework of past human life and how our ancient ancestors coexisted with animals.
“There’s a huge amount we can tell about subsistence, diet, way of life,” he says, “everything from what (people) ate to ideas of the afterlife.”
And in the places that the cod trade built, people soaked up more than just traces of chemicals from food, water and air. In the intertwined relationship between human and animal, they also built an entire culture wrapped around the fortunes of a fish.
ABOUT 30 MILES NORTHEAST from a cod sculpture hanging in the Boston statehouse, Gloucester fisherman Al Cottone does his best not to catch any of the fish that once created his state’s foundational merchant class and strengthened a burgeoning independent spirit.
The son of Sicilian immigrants, Cottone started regularly working on the water with his father as a teenager and is still a full-time fisherman in addition to holding side duties as executive director of the city’s fisheries commission. While even 10 years ago his seasonal cod quota was 35,000 pounds, it’s now down to 1,800—a result of restrictions meant to revive the fish population after its collapse in the 1990s. Now when he sets off in his 40-foot boat, he’s looking for haddock or flounder.
“We call it the Cod Avoidance Program,” he
—AL COTTONE, FISHERMAN
says. “I’ve caught more than that (cod quota) in five minutes.”
Cottone and his fellow fishermen are frustrated by the limits; they are convinced the stock assessment surveys and methods used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration underestimate the amount of cod they see every day in the water, but NOAA has already declared that a decade-long plan to rebuild the New England cod stocks won’t meet its 2024 target.
And even if cod quotas were voluminously increased overnight, it’s questionable whether Gloucester, a town with an 8-foot-tall dockside bronze statue memorializing fishermen who died at sea, still has the infrastructure to bounce back to its storied past. Hemmed in by catch limits and a flood of imported fish, Cottone estimates, Gloucester has lost as much as 90% of the boats that were there in the 1980s, creating a domino effect on everyone from dock workers to ice sellers. At age 55, he believes he’s probably the average for a graying workforce, and is trying to brainstorm ways to pass on fishing skills to younger generations before it’s too late.
“We need to keep what we have going,” Cottone says. “Every boat we lose, every captain we lose, we’re losing the heritage and experience that could be passed on.” The spark for the Atlantic cod proj-
ect was research conducted in the Pacific Ocean.
Through a grapevine of professional organizations, Hambrecht came across the work of Nicole Misarti, a research associate professor and director of the Water and Environmental Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Misarti had been combing through everything from isotopes to hormones in bones and trace elements in teeth to examine the Pacific walrus over several thousand years.
It’s been a productive exercise. In walrus teeth, Misarti’s team discovered multiple spikes of elements associated with petroleum exploration, air pollution and sea ice melt during the latter half of the 20th century. The group also found that walrus have a more varied diet during periods of low sea ice, likely due to difficulty in accessing preferred hunting grounds; the modern walrus, however, has become more reliant on invertebrates than its ancestors, and less likely to eat seals or birds. And similar levels of cortisol—the so-called “stress hormone”— between modern and ancient walruses may indicate physiological resilience in the face of increasing pressure from climate change.
The pair thought that turning those techniques to an animal with a much more extensively documented historical tie to humans—“(We) look at both species as a partnership,” Hambrecht says—would be fruitful.
So using samples that have already been excavated and are held in labs from Maryland to Norway by members of a scholarly cooperative called the North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation, the researchers will analyze bone slices and powder not just for details on a particular fish itself, but for clues they can provide about population-level genetic changes and ecological shifts over time such as ocean temperature and acidification, as well as how the species fit into the wider food web.
“What changes occurred in this fish stock in particular, and how did that affect the humans that were relying on them?” says Misarti, who is also a principal investigator on the project. “There’s not a lot of other fish stocks that have the written history to go along with the archaeological history that can give us a 1,000-year picture of what’s going on.”
Their ambition is to create a new starting point for proposed solutions to climate change and overfishing. Maybe more answers can be found, Hambrecht says, if our idea of what is “normal” shifts from taking into account just the past century or so and instead moves “that baseline back.” Archaeology is ultimately not predictive, but gathering centuries of data on the cod and its fluctuating relationship to humanity and the environment may provide clues on how to better support a species that has played a crucial role in geographical, economic and cultural development, and is now facing unprecedented ecological change.
“We’re never going to find an exact parallel to what is happening now,” Hambrecht says. “But we at least think we can broaden our ideas of what is possible.” TERP
Even in the dullest,
darkest, most depressing days of the pandemic, we could always slide into the usual booth at Monk’s Café with Jerry Seinfeld.
We formed never-spreader pods of sorts with old friends, whether we hit the streets of West Baltimore with Omar Little or knocked back Duffs with Homer.
As the pandemic surged in 2020, traditional TV viewing increased for the first time since 2012, according to eMarketer, and a Wall Street Journal analysis estimated that streaming services saw a 50% jump in subscribers. (So if your screen time has spiked, you’re right on trend!)
What TV-bingeing Terps might not realize, though, is just how many fellow University of Marylanders they’ve virtually invited into their living rooms—as actors, directors, producers and writers of some bona fide favorites, promising pilots and cult classics. Some are stage-trained actors from the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, while others studied journalism, government and politics, and marketing.
So whether you’re diving into a new show or revisiting an old standby, we’ve created the ultimate Terp TV guide for future viewing.
THE UNDENIABLE CLASSICS
SEINFELD As LARRY DAVID ’70 and his comedian pal chatted about products on the shelves while grocery shopping in 1988, they realized they never heard such mundane conversations on TV. That idea for a “show about nothing” turned into 180 beloved episodes, giving us gems like “yada, yada,” “a Festivus for the rest of us” and “No soup for you!” (Fellow Terp PETER MEHLMAN ’77 wrote and/or produced more than 100 of those.) David, who also wrote and produced for the hit sitcom, last year revealed his favorite episode, a “master”ful half-hour entitled “The Contest.” If nine seasons aren’t enough, see “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” created by and starring David as himself. It’s pretty, pretty, pretty good, too.
THE WIRE Widely considered one of the best TV series of all time, the crime drama created in 2002 by former Diamondback editor and Baltimore Sun police reporter DAVID SIMON ’83 chronicles the drug scene in Baltimore, exploring the role of law enforcement, schools, the media and other institutions in a major American city. “We knew we had to make the story entertaining,” Simon told Vanity Fair in April 2020. “But our reasons for doing it were so that we could sustain a sociopolitical argument. That was why we got up in the morning.” The story had staying power: When COVID-19 lockdowns began last year, viewership of the series nearly tripled on
HBO Now, according to parent company WarnerMedia. But if you’re looking for something new, try Simon’s latest HBO miniseries, “The Plot Against America,” or “Treme,” “Show Me a Hero” or “The Deuce.” THE SIMPSONS With around 700 episodes and counting, the animated comedy featuring a donut-downing oaf and his Springfield-based family and neighbors is the longest-running scripted series in TV history. Former Terp DAVID SILVERMAN produced, animated and/or directed hundreds of those, helping to create Lisa’s pointy hair, Mr. Burns’ sneers and Bart’s seminal Gen-X wisdom: “Don’t have a cow, man.” But the show was more than just a silly cartoon, with a revolutionary take on animated satire for adults that lampooned everything from politics to Live Aid-style benefits. “The Simpsons” even eerily seemed to predict the future on multiple occasions, including Donald Trump’s presidency, the Ebola outbreak and most recently, the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “The secret is that we travel through time,” Silverman joked in a 2020 roundtable.
THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED NEXT GENERATION
THE GOOD PLACE Ever wonder how exactly earthlings make it into heaven (or get sentenced to hell)? This forking fresh comedy offers its take, with Kristen Bell starring as Eleanor Shellstrop, who navigates the afterlife and what it means to be a truly good person. BETH MCCARTHY-MILLER ’85 directed six episodes of the four-season hit, which racked up two Golden Globe and 13 Emmy nominations during its 2016-20 run. “A show like this, every script is a blessing,” she said on “The Good Place: The
Podcast.” McCarthy-Miller has been behind the camera for a slew of other successful shows, including “30 Rock,” “Modern Family,” “The
Kominsky Method” and over 200 episodes of “Saturday Night Live.” INSECURE Searching for a witty, stereotypebusting comedy? This look at the awkward experiences of 20-something Black women in Los Angeles delivers. NATASHA ROTHWELL ’03 plays Kelli, a college friend of main character Issa (played by co-creator Issa Rae), who never shies away from speaking her mind. The show, which has earned 11 Emmy nominations and one win since its 2016 debut, mixes laughs and raunchiness even as it delves into social and racial issues, such as mental health and workplace racism. “It’s been really cool to see audiences be so provoked by the show and engage in conversation,” Rothwell told Essence last year. When she wasn’t busy side-eyeing as Kelli, the former “Saturday Night Live” writer stepped in as a story editor. MRS. AMERICA Between working on the irreverent “Reno 911!” and the upcoming thriller “The Devil in the White City,” STACEY SHER ’83 was producing the mini-series “Mrs. America,” released on FX on Hulu last year. The 10-time
Emmy-nominated drama stars Cate Blanchett as conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, a fierce opponent of modern feminism and the Equal
Rights Amendment in the 1970s. “I thought it would be really interesting to tell the story about the ERA and the fight about the ERA from the point of view (of) the spoiler,” Sher said in an interview with Deadline.
THE MARATHON-WORTHY MYSTERIES
LAW AND ORDER When you hear that iconic “Dun DUN,” you know you’re about to witness one of the more than 450 crime investigations featured on “Law & Order.” DIANNE WIEST ’69, who you might know from movies like “Bullets Over Broadway” and “Hannah and Her Sisters,” stepped onto the small screen in 2000 to portray interim district attorney Nora Lewin in 48 episodes. She replaced Steve Hill, who had played the show’s D.A. for 10 years. “The first woman at the top of the list was Dianne,” producer Dick Wolf told Variety at the time. “Quite luckily she was intrigued. Not in your wildest imagination could you pick up not only a single but a double-Oscar winner.” BLUE BLOODS This hit crime drama centered around a family of New York cops allows ABIGAIL HAWK ’04 to transform into Detective Abigail Baker. The School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies alum was a struggling actor working retail in New York City before landing a guest starringrole in 2010. Around 200 episodes later, she’s still assisting Commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck). “Baker and I have led quite parallel lives,” she told the website Showbiz Cheat Sheet last year. “She has matured and flourished under Frank’s mentorship.” The series returned for season 11 in December with an interesting approach: skipping over the pandemic to depict a post-COVID world even as it confronted the timely topic of police brutality. MONK For a bit of lighter material, comedy-drama “Monk,” which ran on the USA Network from 2002-09, features a former detective turned private eye who’s battling obsessive-compulsive disorder. By Monk’s side for three seasons is nurse and assistant Sharona Fleming, played by BITTY SCHRAM ’90, who’s not afraid to show her boss some tough love. While you might remember Schram as the teary baseball player at whom Tom Hanks yells, “There’s no crying in baseball!” in “A League of Their Own,” this role earned her a 2004 Golden Globe nomination.
UMD Shows Strong Character
Beyond the fourth wall, even fictional Terps have made their mark in the TV universe.
“30 Rock” protagonist Liz Lemon, the hardworking yet awkward comedy sketch show writer—played by and loosely based on Tina Fey—attended UMD on a “partial competitive jazz dance scholarship,” as revealed in season 4 episode “Lee Martin vs. Derek Jeter.” A quick Lemon flashback gives viewers a glimpse of her leotard-donning days on Maryland’s campus.
Another strong female lead, FBI agent Dana Scully of “The X-Files,” also counts herself as a Terp. The scientist, dedicated to an evidence-based approach to her work, got her start as a physics major at Maryland. Season 4 episode “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” offers a look at her 1986 senior thesis, impressively titled “Einstein’s Twin Paradox: A New Interpretation.”
THE TEEN HITS (THAT ADULTS CAN ENJOY, TOO)
NEVER HAVE I EVER In what critics call a “fresh take” on a coming-of-age story, this 2020 Netflix comedy follows the angst and antics of an Indian American teen, who’s navigating high school while still coming to terms with her father’s death. POORNA JAGANNATHAN ’96 plays Nalini, the well-meaning mother of main character
Devi; the show earned praise for developing complex, diverse characters. “It’s certainly the most empowered I’ve ever been on a set,” Jagannathan, an immigrant herself whose father was an
Indian diplomat, told UMD in June. “The show was set within my cultural context, so anything from props, to costume, to food—my opinion helped shape how things came together.” Bonus for Terp fans: Alums ADAM SHAPIRO ’02 and
ADRIYAH MARIE YOUNG ’13 also appear.
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
While a high schooler hunting down vampires and other mystical evils might not seem like the formula for a classic teen show, critics have suggested that “Buffy’s” combination of horror, comedy and drama—with a strong female lead— helped transform TV for good. Producer GAIL BERMAN ’78, who owned the rights to the movie by the same name, helped turn the supernatural story into the popular television show, which ran from 1997-2003. “There weren’t a lot of empowered young women on TV at the time,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. “This show was important for female storytelling, for genres like ‘Twilight’ and anything that came after ‘Buffy.’ It changed storytelling.”
Berman went on to produce 110 episodes of the spin-off show, “Angel.”
Also Seen on Screen: UMD’s Campus
Terps watching CBS comedy “Young Sheldon” this spring might’ve noticed some familiar scenery as the kid genius started classes at East Texas Tech—even if they’d never been to the Lone Star State.
These episodes featured an aerial view of McKeldin Mall, with a few adjustments: The crisscrossing sidewalks vanished, the ODK Fountain shrank to make room for a flagpole and a giant faux logo was mowed into the lawn. It’s not the first star turn for
UMD’s campus, which has also made appearances in the TV series “Veep” and “Savage U,” as well as movies including “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “National Treasure II:
Book of Secrets” and “Species II.”
Read more at today.umd.edu.
COMING SOON TO A TV NEAR YOU
HOW TO BE SUCCESSFUL WITHOUT
HURTING MEN’S FEELINGS Inspired by the book by SARAH COOPER ’98, this single-camera comedy, being developed by CBS, will follow three women as they tackle gender politics at a male-dominated company. Cooper rose to TikTok fame last year with her viral lip-sync impressions of former President Donald Trump.
CLAP WHEN YOU LAND In another book-to-TV adaptation, production company Made Up Stories in December acquired the rights to the bestselling
novel by ELIZABETH ACEVEDO MFA ’15. In the young adult book, Acevedo, the daughter of Dominican immigrants, writes about two fictional sisters who don’t know about each other until their father dies on American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed and killed 265 people on its way to the Dominican Republic in 2001.
THE BOONDOCKS AARON
MCGRUDER ’98 created and produced a version of the satirical comedy, which ran for four seasons and was based on his former nationally syndicated comic strip—early versions of which appeared in The Diamondback. The show provided more biting, incisive perspective on Black culture as it followed a family from the city to the suburbs, touching on topics like Barack Obama’s election, white people using racial slurs and America’s progress (or lack thereof) toward civil rights. A reimagined series is set to premiere next year on HBO Max.
