This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the second season of Downton Abbey.

So, caveat! I am almost but not entirely caught up on the first season of Downton Abbey, so I am relying a little bit on Wikipedia for backstory here. I will be caught up by next week, but for now, please be merciful.

I really am struck by the atmosphere of creative destruction in this episode, the way the war clarifies and distills the characters priorities. I agree with critics who say that Downton Abbey is predictable, more a product of its genre than a subversion of it. But it’s the rare thing that both can be qualified that way and that is executed so strongly that it’s a bracing reminder of why these cliches exist and are powerful. Even when I can see something coming from a mile away, whether it’s a hand injured in the war, a maid’s disappointment or a nobleman’s wrongfooting, it still lands like a blow to the chest. And there are enough surprises that are true to character that there’s fresh air in it.

The walls between the upstairs and the downstairs were already crumbling in the first season, whether in Lord Grantham’s tie to Bates or Carson’s confession to Lady Mary that “even a butler has his favorites” after he reassures her that her life isn’t over yet. But the war’s brought them down in force, with Isobel as something of an intermediary. First, there’s Sybil, who, after realizing bitterly that “Sometimes it feels as if all the men I ever danced with are dead,” decides she wants to try nursing, and by extension, learn how to be a functional woman rather than an ornament of the aristocracy. “Have you ever made your own bed, for example? Or scrubbed a floor?” Isobel asks her gently. The scenes of Mrs. Patmore and Daisy trying to teach her how to do the simplest tasks, including filling a kettle without drenching herself, are kind, revealing Sybil’s foibles but helping her work beyond them. It’s fascinating to see Violet and Lady Grantham’s response to her desire. Violet, surprisingly, sides with Isobel, insisting that “You can’t pretend it’s not respectable when every day we’re treated to pictures of queens and princesses in a Red Cross uniform.” And Lady Grantham’s concern for Sybil ultimately undoes her objections: her daughter’s emotional well-being trumps her concerns with propriety. “I was worried about Lady Sibyl. But I’m not worried anymore,” she tells the butler. “Carson, the cake will be a surprise whether you approve of it or not, so please don’t give it away.”
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The requirement that after this year’s ceremonies, to qualify to be nominated for an Academy Award, documentaries must both screen in Los Angeles or New York and be reviewed by a theatrical reviewer by the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times are obviously wildly restricted. But this is downright puzzling:

According to Academy COO Ric Robertson, the new requirement is a further step in eliminating docs that have no real intention of gaining distribution or having a legitimate theatrical run. A common practice in recent years has been for faux theatrical docs (and even some animated feature and VOD entries) to attempt to skirt the rules by quietly ”four walling” a qualifying run on an obscure screen — often on the outskirts of the city. In some cases, it is the last movie screen these movies play on their way to TV. The new rule will confirm the credibility of a legitimate contender by requiring a movie (not TV) review, tied to the opening of the film, in one of those two major newspapers. Trade reviews out of a film festival would not meet the requirement.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me, but it seems pretty strange that someone would go to the work of making a documentary without hoping that it’ll find distribution and a home in theaters however brief the run and however long the shot. Is there some sort of epidemic of people making Bowfinger-like documentary productions, or fooling people into participating only to get their hopes up and crush them? That seems…strange. And the end result will be super-vindictive to movies that are struggling to find distribution that might well be worthy. The movie business is not precisely what I’d call a meritocracy. And increasing the link between awards and commercialism is a less-than-inspiring prospect.

At a lively session at the Television Critics Association press tour this morning, ABC News President Ben Sherwood pushed back against charges that his network was airing more soft news, explained Christiane Amanpour’s departure from The Week, and drew distinctions between his programming and that of NBC News.

“I reject completely these distinctions and these labels, totally,” he said when asked whether the perception that ABC focusing on soft news, like interviewing kidnapping victim Jaycee Dugard, at the expense of reporting. “We believe our guiding philosophy is relevance…we believe that our mission as you saw is to give people the whole picture so they can change their futures…we have had exclusive interviews with Mubarak and Assad..our anchor Diane Sawyer was the only evening news anchor to go to Japan to cover the Biblical disaster here…We will cede no ground on investigative journalism, on hard-hitting news.” But he also suggested that it was no longer the role of news anchors to act as “priests of news [who] presented at the end of the day one menu of news that they had decided was the most important in the order of importance,” saying it was much more critical to look to the audience’s needs. He cited aggressive coverage of Bank of America’s proposed $5 debit card fee as the kind of story that was responsive to the economic concerns of viewers. And he argued that Christiane Amanpour’s interviews and coverage of the Arab Spring were proof that Nightline was not a lifestyle program.

Speaking of Amanpour, who had her last day on The Week yesterday, Sherwood said that the move was part a product of a desire to focus on American politics in an election year, recasting the charge that Amanpour couldn’t deliver domestic nes as a strength: “We thought her tremendous strengths, her world-beating strengths, are best deployed in her area of strength and also her personal passion.” He insisted that despite the decision to move Amanpour away from The Week, 2011 was “probably one of the greatest years of her career this year. If you look at her domination in terms of big interviews all across the Arab Spring, just an incredible year.” And Sherwood said the move would allow Amanpour to work with CNN in a “unique arrangement.”

And Sherwood set his sites on NBC. In response to one question about whether NBC was trying to imitate George Stephanopoulos by hiring the daughters of former presidents like Chelsea Clinton, saying Stephanopoulos “is a first-rate journalist. And he has, over the last 15 years, developed an incredible set of skills. He’s developed a whole new set of skills in the morning…I think that is an unfair question.” More substantively, Sherwood praised Good Morning America for cutting the Today Show’s lead by “30 to 40 percent.” He acknowledged that “the Today show is very mighty, and they’ve been very mighty for a very long time,” but said of Good Morning America that “It’s dynamic, it’s incredibly watchable, it’s surprising, it’s really fun.” Earlier in the week, NBC’s Bob Greenblatt said that he hoped and expected that Matt Lauer would remain on Today, so it’ll be fascinating to see that rivalry heat up in the year to come.

Since I read it, I haven’t been able to stop thinking reading Amanda Marcotte’s excellent essay on why the television shows that are critically considered to be the best we’ve seen in the last decade all focus on men, almost all of whom are anti-heroes. There’s no question that some of this is a result of who’s creating these critically-lauded television shows: lots of Davids for the big three of Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos, and lots of dudes generally. But it’s not that men are incapable of creating astonishingly good female characters, and in fact, many of the shows that occupy the second tier of great television programming feature innovative, emotionally compelling female characters. It’s not a question of creating great women. It’s a question of getting them at the center of the frame, and of getting their perspectives to be the dominant ones for a change.

To try to figure out how to do that, and what we can learn from some of the best female characters of the last 10 years, I’ve asked Amanda, Ryan McGee, and Rowan Kaiser to put some thoughts to paper about the fictional women who have touched them most. Amanda’s post on Community‘s Britta Perry will go up tomorrow, followed by Ryan on Buffy and Angel‘s Cordelia Chase, Rowan on Veronica Mars, and me on Gemma Teller Morrow on Friday. I’d be curious to know what some of your favorite women are, particularly if there’s someone you think I haven’t come across yet but who I might love.

At the ABC Family session at the Television Critics Association press tour this morning, I asked the network’s president Michael Riley about the fact that Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation had named ABC Family the leader in portrayals of gay characters, particularly in creating gay characters who weren’t just white men in urban areas. His answer suggested some forward-thinking about diversity — he was the first executive on press tour to talk about the changing demographics of the country, even glancingly:

For us everything we do at ABC family is grounded in storytelling and iconic characters. We never set out to portray anyone anyway. We build up those characters from a multi-dimensional standpoint. We couldn’t be more proud to receive that honor. For us, it’s very much about how we ground everything we do in great story-lines and characters. Millennials are a diverse ground of people. We want to make sure out storytelling really reflects that diversity, and that’s something we keep doing not only in that space but in other multi-dimensional spaces.

He hammered home the generational message over and over again. “Millenials are absolutely voracious around technology,” he noted, talking about the Twitter buzz around Pretty Little Liars. “We always capitalize on anything we can do..for us it’s about being part of that conversation.” And he said, in an assertion I’m intrigued by and would love to see more support for, “Millenials aren’t genre-specific. We aren’t genre-specific.” Now, of course, all of this makes sense for a network that’s specifically aimed at young people. But at some point, all the networks are going to have to make the shifts. ABC Family’s thinking about diversity is a valuable model.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

The Good Wife returned from its holiday hiatus last night with an episode that focused almost solely on the firm, rather than Alicia’s personal life, while losing none of its usual stakes or tension. The case of the week involves a couple called the Huntleys who are suing Lockhart/Gardner for alienation of affection when they represented the wife in their divorce two years earlier. David Lee, the head of family law, claims the case was straightforward, but it soon comes out that he, or maybe Kalinda, hired a stripper to get Huntley drunk and caught in a DUI sting so that his wife could get full custody of their daughter. He didn’t tell the client that he did this, and now she’s claiming that David hired a stripper to seduce her husband so that they wouldn’t reconcile. Alicia assisted with the case in her first year with the firm, so she’s put in the middle of things: in her deposition, she is first accused of using the events her own personal life to create false rapport with Mrs. Huntley and convince her not to reconcile, and then she comes dangerously close to perjury when she’s asked whether David hired the stripper. Alicia neatly skirts this: she can truthfully say that David did not hire the stripper to seduce Huntley, because he in fact hired the stripper to get the man drunk. The fact that Alicia is both willing and able to thread that needle illustrates the way she’s learning to play the game without completely abandoning her principles.

Alicia is more directly involved, though, when the Huntleys give up on the alienation of affection suit and instead accuse Lockhart/Gardner of fraud. David got one of Huntley’s companies for Mrs. Huntley in the divorce, and Julius’s department later helped her sell it in a way that resulted in the firm ultimately making more from the deal than the client did. This shouldn’t be an issue because there’s a standard rider that clients sign in divorce cases like this that waives this conflict of interest – but no one can find the rider, and Alicia is on record as the one who filed the final paperwork. Alicia tells Kalinda that she can’t actually remember filing it – and then David appears, claiming to have found it misfiled in Cary’s old paperwork. Alicia, to her credit, immediately goes to Diane with her suspicion that this is a new piece of paper that David had slipped in with some other paperwork so she’d sign it unnoticed. Diane tells her to stick with her “best memory,” which is of signing the paper, and insists that “testimony isn’t about right and wrong.” The Huntleys’ lawyer is suspicious too, and when he’s unable to break Alicia, he deposes Cary, assuming bad blood between Cary and his former employers. But Cary offers a full-throated defense of Alicia and the firm in general, as Alicia appears equal parts surprised and touched and Diane looks on like a proud mother. Afterward, Alicia expresses her surprise to Cary, who just says, “Wow. Things change.” When they worked together, Alicia was identified as the naive idealist and Cary as the amoral striver; neither was ever really that extreme, but now they’ve all but met in the middle. And when Cary, in seeming good faith, publicly pronounces that Alicia has a level of integrity that Alicia herself questions, it’s another reminder that on this show, it’s dangerous to assume that our guys are the good ones and the other side is all bad. Indeed, Diane ultimately wins not through proving the firm’s innocence but by producing more pictures of Huntley with a woman not his wife.
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A number of you have been telling me to watch Switched At Birth, and after today’s panel at the Television Critics Association press tour, I can see why you’re all so enthusiastic (I also have the first season DVDs now, so I’ll get on that, likely on the plane home). The show’s creator Lizzy Weiss said it was so important to her that the character of Daphne Vasquez be played by an actress who was deaf or hard of hearing so they would both be fluent in ASL and have a sense of the cultural implications and perspectives of deafness that she limited casting to candidates who didn’t have all their hearing and searched beyond established actresses to find someone who would be right for the part before eventually casting Katie Leclerc, who has Meniere’s disease, for the part.

“It was important to me that the character feel and sound more deaf than Katie is,” Weiss said. “Having a deaf accent is part of being distanced from someone deaf, and I wanted her biological family to feel uncomfortable around her at first…Katie will tell you she worked with people to get that accent right.”

It was genuinely touching to see the rest of the cast talk about what learning ASL — or working on an ASL-friendly set, in the case of Sean Berdy, who had an ASL translator working with him — had meant to them. Vanessa Marano, whose father is a language professor, said she grew up being taught that it was important to be bilingual, and since the show has started, she’s been touched by the fact that the show is used to teach students about ASL and to consider learning it as a second language. Constance Marie, who plays Regina Vasquez, teared up talking about the conversations she’s had with deaf people who have been moved by her portrayal of a hearing woman learning ASL to communicate better with her deaf daughter. All in all, it sounds like a show where the cast ended up having a particularly good experience by learning about a world that wasn’t their own. I’ll check back in once I’m caught up with some thoughts whether that’s made for good TV, too.

The bridge is yours. Lots of news to come from the ABC Family Panels today.

-Hulu continues its quest to beat BBC America with more commonwealth dramas.

-George Clooney has heard me and is trying to get back into my good graces.

-Want to write about arts policy? This is the fellowship for you!

-MTV, bringing you all the gay subculture reality shows you could want.

-Making money off of sexism: less than awesome.

I recently read David Michaelis’s Schulz and Peanuts, which is a kind of depressing, if enlightening enterprise. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised than the man who created Charlie Brown was chronically depressed, but the story of his infidelities, and in particular, the way he pressured his oldest daughter to get an abortion in Japan and then barely acknowledged what he’d done when she got back, is less than gratifying.

But I think the counterfactual question that stood out at me most when reading the book is what it would have meant if Schulz or Peanuts had spoken out against the war in Vietnam. Michaelis writes in particular about Snoopy. In one strip, “Snoopy, invited to make a distinguished-grad speech at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, finds himself caught up in a riot protesting the drafting of dogs to serve in Vietnam…Snoopy, at the podium, his hit with a dog dish, then teargassed.” He writes “One of the few ‘enemies’ that Americans could agree on in those years was the Red Baron…From 1966 to 1969, Snoopy could be found pursuing—or being pursued by—the Red Baron wherever American explained itself to itself.”

The answer as to why Schulz didn’t come out against the war lies in this observation: “His opinions on subjects ranging from the miniskirt to the sexualizations of Peanuts were surprisingly tolerant, indeed hospitable.” You don’t get to be a national sage without being largely agreeable. But that quality also denies you your ability to speak forcefully and decisively on divisive issues without alienating somebody. It’s the same thing as perpetual reelection to Congress: if staying the nation’s tolerant Grandpa, or staying a member of the House becomes more important than anything you actually do with the position, you’ve got to start wondering what the point is.

This post contains spoilers through the pilot of House of Lies.

So, this show. As I wrote in my review of this show, I think it basically think this show has a “When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid” problem compounded by the fact that it doesn’t seem totally clear to the folks running it (though I will ask them later this week) what the strongest parts of House of Lies are. And so we have the gamut tonight of the awesomeness of the team’s evil pitch to MetroCapital, and the awfulness of That Scene in the restaurant.

The good stuff first. I think House of Lies will end up being a really fascinating test of how far our tolerance for anti-heroes can go. It’s one thing to get emotionally invested in Tony Soprano or Walter White, because even though their acts are heinous, there’s an almost-zero chance that we’ll ever come into contact with anyone like them. There is a vastly less-than-zero chance that we know people who have been deeply affected by the economic downturn. And depending on where you went to school, there’s also a chance that you know a whole bunch of management consultants. So are we willing to tolerate realistic awful acts in our entertainment? Will we be entertained by Marty and company, and do very little about their real-life counterparts? Will we turn away from both in disgust? Or will House of Lies drive more of us to the 99 percent movement? The MetroCapital stuff is so blunt, and so believable, and it’s a reminder to interrogate the motivations of corporate do-gooderism.

I also really like Marty’s home life. There’s something kind of powerful at a time when the networks can’t put out a show centered on a black family, and when we’re awash in ridiculous conversations about the pathology of black men, to see a program that takes for granted the idea that a white audience will tune in to watch a three-man black family do its thing. Glynn Turman can pretty much do no wrong, as far as I’m concerned, and I enjoy watching him go from Mayor Royce to a retired-therapist semi-hippie. And I think Donis Leonard Jr. is doing a nice job as Roscoe, a role that could be super-cliche but that feels human because of his relative blitheness. I also really appreciate the fact that the show is telling a story about a child that doesn’t have a parent be pure evil or saintly. Parents of gay or trans kids aren’t perfect. They make compromises. They make mistakes. Capturing that and encouraging people to keep working at it, rather than castigating themselves for or shutting down over making mistakes, is an important cultural message.
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I’ve been thinking about this a lot since the finale of the first season of Homeland, which I enjoyed, but I gather a lot of people were vexed by in various ways. But Carrie’s decision to undergo electroshock treatment, even at the cost of her memory and some valuable analysis, reminded me the theme of self-sacrifice in Sucker Punch. As I wrote at the time:

This is a distinctly female story. And I’m surprised no one’s discussing the ending, and the complicated themes of self-sacrifice at its core. Going into the movie, I expected a bunch of sexy asskicking. I didn’t really expect Snyder to pull a Joss Whedon. In the course of this movie, three of the main characters die, and their deaths are genuinely shocking. Malone throws herself in front of a knife to save Cornish, playing her sister. Vanessa Hudgens’ and Jamie Chung’s characters are murdered. And, that moment between Abbie Cornish and Emily Browning? At the end of the movie, Babydoll sacrifices herself to save Sweet Pea, gives herself up to Jon Hamm’s lobotomist as a distraction so another woman can run away. They all choose collaboration. The price of getting just one woman to freedom is so high. And while that’s less dramatically true in the world at large, I think it’s still true

I wonder if there’s something to both of these stories that’s an interesting anecdote to the Strong Female Character nonsense, and to the triumphal narratives of action movies in general. There’s a difference between tearing your female characters down before building them up, the process Tad Friend described in his critically important profile of Anna Faris last summer, and recognizing that it’s extremely difficult to win. Particularly if you’re a woman. It is harder to beat a man of equal fitness in a fight. It may be harder to convince people of something terrible that’s happened to you or your family — or to the country — if you’re at risk of being dismissed as a crazy, hysterical woman whether that’s an accurate description of your brain chemistry or not. Women may be more accustomed to compromise, to accepting outcomes that are less than ideal for them if they think it’s the best deal they can get. That might not make for action movies or thrillers that are satisfying in the straightforward ways that most stories in that genre are. But they could be the basis for something more complex and uneasy, and very interesting.