…And this is the best season yet! It’s sensational for new viewers but even more rewarding for longtime fans like myself.
Characters back from the dead (Carollo and DLP)! Multi-generational rivalries (Suarez v. Carollo)! Racist race-altering cops (Ortiz)! Teen boys groped (Pedrosa)!
There is nothing on TV as unpredictable and salacious as the incestuous cesspool at City Hall.
¡Escandalo!
Miami-Dade has always been like Game of Thrones in paradise — with slightly fewer dragons — but our namesake municipality is the sh*t show that keeps on sh*tting.
¡Ay dios mio!
Here are just a few of the best characters and storylines:
Joe “My Dad’s Hurting My Mom” Carollo (aka Crazy Joe, aka Commissioner Comemierda) has gone from throwing terra cotta teapots at his wife’s face to flinging dung right between Francis Suarez’s excessively manicured eyebrows.
There’s a fantastic Biblical quality to this — real “Sins of the Father” stuff — for those who recall the good old bad old days when Francis’s papi Xavier (aka Mayor Loco, aka The Midnight Rambler) snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 1997 mayoral election. He may have gotten more votes than his opponent Joe Carollo, but some of them came from dead people (RIP Manny Yip, go easy bro). So a judge, in the wake of rampant absentee ballot fraud that led to the arrests of about 20 people, removed newly elected Mayor Loco and reinstalled defeated incumbent Crazy Joe.
¡Esuper Delicioso!
Carollo is Biff, the DeLorean and the sports almanac — all in one — and has knocked Francis into a nightmare alternate 1985 timeline he can’t escape (to use a Back to the Future II metaphor). Francis doesn’t even recognize his own life or political career anymore. This is not how it was supposed to be. Papa Xavier’s dream of the Cuban Camelot that will sail like Balseros into the Governor’s Mansion is deader than Fidel.
Joe knows how to push Francis’s buttons and it’s wild to watch. Francis can’t cope with the guy who beat his dad beating him up every damn day. In drama, the only thing more exciting than a protagonist and antagonist doing battle is an antagonist and antagonist going at it. They deserve each other. And Joe isn’t even Francis’s biggest enemy. Francis is Francis’s biggest enemy.
Javier Ortiz (or is it Ortizberg?): the notorious racist Miami cop — who would be in prison if we had a real state attorney — has decided, when it comes to black people, he can beat them AND join them. In a twist worthy of The Crying Game, Ortiz, a Cuban-American male, attended a city commission meeting and came out of the closet as a Jewish black man! Madre de Sammy Davis Jr., esta es una gran televisión!
And finally there’s the sad sackless Castrated Ken Russell: thank goodness the man can yo-yo — because he’s got nothing else to do for the next four years.
You’d have to be out of your mind to live, invest and/or be in business in Miami right now. It would be like moving to Caracas. It’s an unstable regime paralyzed by corruption, dysfunction and nonstop construction. I’ve always said Miami City Hall is a crime scene. Now, thanks to Francis Suarez, it’s official.
On the upside, the city government is doing the best thing it can do: nothing! As long as they keep that up, they’re stealing a little bit less from us.
And the residents? ¡Pobrecita! In the immortal words of Jack Kirkpatrick in the 1980 classic Airplane: “They bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let ‘em crash.”
Next time on The Billy Pulpit: I’ll tell you why Francis Suarez won’t/shouldn’t run for re-election in 2021. #BecauseMiami
Billy Corben is a native Floridian, lifelong Miamian, and the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning co-founder of rakontur — creators of such documentaries as Cocaine Cowboys, Dawg Fight, Screwball (now streaming on Netflix) and the ESPN 30 for 30s The U, The U Part 2 and Broke. You can find him at twitter.com/billycorben
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