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One of the many things I’ve learned from watching the Science Channel documentary seriesThrough the Wormhole With Morgan Freeman is that someday, maybe, quantum physics will tell us conclusively whether God exists. If that happens, we’ll be able to put that question aside and devote ourselves full time to pondering the existence of Morgan Freeman.
Here are some generally accepted, Google-verifiable cts aboutMorgan Freeman: He was born in Tennessee in 1937. He started acting young but made the transition from the New York stage to movies relatively late — he didn’t make his first credited feature-film appearance until 1971, when he was 34 and played a character called Afro in a Jack Klugman vehicle called Who Says I Can’t Ride a Rainbow! By then, he was already on his way to becoming a TV star, albeit in the parallel universe of children’s television, as part of the cast of the PBS program The Electric Company, the funkiest educational kids’ show of all time. He was on that show from 1971 until 1977, which meant that throughout the blaxploitation era in Hollywood — when many black actors of his generation found work playing pimps and hustlers out to stick it to the Man — he was playing characters like Easy Reader, a bell-bottomed word hippie bridging the gap between Hendrix and Hooked on Phonics.
He has occupied a unique position in the universe of screen acting ever since. He did eventually play a pimp, in 1987’s Street Smart, opposite Christopher Reeve,Nike Air force. and garnered the first of five Academy Award nominations. (He has won once.) He said that, in a way, that pimp, Fast Black, was his vorite role,Nike mercurial vapor superfly because it allowed him to access a part of himself on-screen that he has never been called upon to use again. Instead, he went on to more virtuous roles. He had a great 1989, playing a Civil War hero in Glory, the baseball-bat-wielding high-school principal Joe Clark in Lean on Me and Jessica Tandy’s kindly chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy. He described that last one as the big mistake, because although it got him an Oscar nomination, it also led to his being pigeonholed as Wise, Old and Dignified. As typecasting goes, that’s a pretty benign box, particularly for an African-American actor,air max shoes. but it’s still a box. Freeman could play Iago as easily as Othello, the critic David Thomsonwrote. Bdry humor definitionut can he expect that offer?
Even Henry Fonda, with whom Freeman has often been compared, got to use his noble, serene screen presence against itself on occasion, like when he played a coldblooded villain in 1968’s Once Upon a Time in the West. He kills kids! Nobody has found a way to use Freeman as effectively in a bad-guy part (see Wanted or Lucky Number Slevin. Or don’t. Seriously, don’t.) His IMDb page is a roll call of avuncular, tough-yet-benevolent authority figures — generals, presidents, veteran police detectives; the director of the C.I.A.; Nelson Mandela; and, in Bruce Almighty and Evan Almighty Nike soccer cleats, a wry, white-suited God. A couple of years ago, some Internet wags created a funny, instructive org chart ofThe Morgan Freeman Chain of Command, which power-ranked his major roles, from God to president (in Invictus, as Mandela, and in Deep Impact, where he was totally believable as a black chief executive 10 years pre-Barack Obama) on down to prison inmate (Red, in The Shawshank Redemption, the film that made Freeman a weekend-TBS omnipresence); freed slave (Amistad) and, at the bottom of the chain, Miss Daisy’s driver. All these characters, regardless of their social standing, seemed equally noble because they were played by Morgan Freeman.
At this point, there’s a little bit of God in everything Freeman does. It’s as if he has transcended race by transcending human frailty. He seems less like an actor and more like an emissary from some higher, more decorous plane, which makes him the ideal host for a show like Through the Wormhole,Nike soccer shoes a brisk and accessible primer on the various ways that today’s way-out-there science is becoming indistinguishable from science fiction.
In the hands of a goofier host — and let’s ce it, anyone other than Freeman would by definition be a goofier host — the series could have been Ripley’s Believe It or Not with string theory, or a bottomless can of mind-Pringles for freshman-dorm Castanedas. (Representative episode titles include Does Time Really Exist? and Beyond the Darkness; presumably, the producers are saving Have You Ever Looked at Your Hand — I Mean, Really Looked at It? and No, Seriously, What if Our Whole Reality Is Actually Just a Cat’s Dream for next season.) And given that it’s a show about math and particle physics and speculative neuroscience built around interviews with prominent academics, it could also have been as dry and airless as deep space.
Instead, it’s the best pop-science TV show since Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Journey — a whirlwind tour of the fourth dimension with a sense of wonder and a sense of humor. And a lot has to do with Freeman. He’s one of the show’s executive producers, and supposedly a lifelong space buff, but he’s also clearly in on the meta-joke of recruiting President God to narrate a show about whether there’s a Creator. Can we travel through time? Is our universe just one bubble in a sheet of cosmic Bubble Wrap? Are there aliens? Are we all just Sims? Maybe, Freeman says, in that miliar cracked-leather baritone, and you can’t not believe him a little bit.
The show’s focus on actual mathematicians, physicists and neuroscientists helps distinguish it from the various strains of paranormal crackpot-tainment with which it shares the cable landscape — all those bro-friendly ghost-hunters running around with night-vision cameras, all those fleece-clad Bigfoot-ologists tracking Sasquatch in the woods. And Through the Wormhole avoids the old science-doc cliché of brainiacs in book-cluttered offices by filming its subjects doing something physical (playing the drums or surfing or walking in nature) in order to establish them as edge-pushing explorer types. Or they’re doing something prosaic/sensual, like eating in a restaurant and using bananas or chocolate soufflé to illustrate the basic forces of the universe, the way Harold Ramis used a Twinkie to explain psychokinetic-energy buildup to Dan Akroyd in Ghostbusters.
A version of this article appeared in print on August 28, 2011, on page MM53 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: A Sense of Wonder and a Sense of Humor.
Teaching children to play music they love doesn’t dumb down music education. It enriches it.