On Christmas Eve at the end of a long, exhausting year, disgraced actor Kevin Spacey released a video that amounted to just over three minutes of bizarre holiday programming, on the heels of news that he was due to be arraigned in January on a felony charge of allegedly sexually assaulting a teenager in 2016. The already infamous “Let Me Be Frank” video saw Spacey decked out in a Santa apron affecting the drawl of Frank Underwood and delivering a direct-to-camera monologue that could have as easily been about his deceased House of Cards character as his own year of personal, professional, and legal tumult. It was both an unnerving bit of theater and, uncomfortably, a fitting capper to a strange year. What may be even more disturbing is how many people tuned in.
Theres no doubt that YouTube views are an imperfect metric. Who knows how many times, say, Netflixs legal department replayed the video trying to parse where Underwood stopped and Spacey began? With 6,423,150 views and counting less than 48 hours after being published, the poorly lit, low-res video has more views than tickets sold domestically to either Paddington 2, First Man, or Widows and is roughly on par with the audience of Pacific Rim Uprising. It has nearly 5 million more views than, reportedly, the final season of House of Cards. And in the realm of holiday entertainment, Spacey has pulled in about 2 million more views than NBCs traditional Christmas Eve broadcast of Its a Wonderful Life, where the angel Clarence saves Jimmy Stewarts George Bailey from ruin and despair.
But somehow, Spacey stealing the spotlight on Christmas Eve is exactly right for this moment, the possible midway point of the Donald Trump era in which each dystopian reality show–esque twist is more exhausting than the last. Its hard to say why so many people tuned in. Holiday boredom? A need to escape family? A burning desire to know what political pundits and Rob Lowe alike were reacting to on Twitter? The cold comfort that no matter how off-putting ones own holiday plans were, they had to be better than this? But in a year where an adult film actress emerged as a defining cultural icon, a once-beloved family TV star officially reached rock bottom, and each day brought some fresh new hellish Twitter provocation courtesy of either Kanye West or the President of the United States, it can hardly be surprising that such a performance from Spacey—with its callous disregard for the men and women impacted by his alleged behavior over the years—was the lump of coal waiting in our stocking this Christmas.
The Trumpian tones of Spaceys video are hard to ignore—especially given the fictional TV president the two-time Oscar-winner is invoking. But its perhaps unfair to lay all of our holiday rubbernecking at the feet of Trump and the exhausting media environment that surrounds him. Spaceys healthy 6-plus million views are, after all, merely a drop in the bucket when compared to the roughly 95 million viewers who tuned in to watch the similarly shocking sight of the police chasing O. J. Simpsons white Ford Bronco down a Los Angeles highway more than 20 years ago.
But while we may be as tempted as ever to stop and ogle human trainwrecks like Simpsons or Spaceys, whats seemingly changed is the ability of these moments to have profound, instructive impacts on the culture. There is, instead, a low-level numbness to the strangeness of our current climate. However captivating at the moment, one doubts that Spaceys stunt will endure in the nonstop news cycle long enough to even be spoof-worthy by the time Saturday Night Live returns in 2019. While his hold on the cultural conversation may not last, Spacey still managed to get many of us to ignore our better angels, including Clarence, this Christmas Eve.
Get Vanity Fairs HWD NewsletterSign up for essential industry and award news from Hollywood.Joanna RobinsonJoanna Robinson is a Hollywood writer covering TV and film for VanityFair.com.
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