Ryan McGee has a great post up in defense of comedies that don’t have traditional jokes, like Louie and Girls, and that end up confounding audience expectations as a result. He writes:

We don’t expect our dramas to be comedy-free. In fact, we’d lambaste such programs for having an enormous stick up an enormous orifice. “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad” quite often is the funniest show on television on the week a particular episode airs. And we don’t ding them critically for making us laugh. If anything, the ability to make us laugh AND cry is seen as a bonus. Why do hour-longs get the benefit of the doubt while the 30-minute shows are greeted with widespread befuddlement when attempting the same magic trick?…Shows like “Modern Family” thrive because people understand what they will be getting. The ability to repeat that type of content is admirable, and certainly serves a purpose that television has provided as a genre for decades. But it’s time to also point out the shows that constantly have fans wondering what type of show they will be watching that particular week as well.

I’d actually go a step further than this—there’s something odd about assigning comedies thirty-minute slots and dramas to full hours. I understand that it may be more difficult to keep jokes coming over 42 minutes of programming as opposed to 22, and that some dramas require 42 minutes (or on premium cable) an hour to unspiral whatever problem’s been set up for the characters in any given week. But something like Louie’s “Duckling,” a predominantly funny episode of television with some documentary qualities, filled an hour easily last year and to great acclaim (and the next two episodes of the show could easily form an hour whole). And a show like Law & Order, which split episodes fairly evenly between cops and lawyers, shows a model for how you could make half-hour dramas—I feel like a half-hour drama about public defenders catching cases or cops working smaller crimes could work well. In any case, it’s a funny restriction, and it would be interesting to see people experiment around it.

“For the first time in my life, when confronted with a horrible, insensitive person, I knew exactly what I wanted to say and I said it,” bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly exults in You’ve Got Mail, when she finally delivers the perfect zinger to Joe Fox, the chain store mogul who is putting her out of business. In Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Evelyn, the unhappy housewife who’s kept silent her entire life, finally finds her words after an obnoxious teenager steals her parking space and tells her “Let’s face it, lady, I’m younger and faster than you are,” totaling the younger woman’s car, and declaring “Let’s face it, honey, I’m older than you are and have more insurance than you do.” It’s a very specifically female dream, I think, to be able to deliver an cutting line, to express yourself and your anger perfectly, without censoring yourself in the name of politeness, or fear. And it’s a dream that Political Animals, the USA Network’s new miniseries, which started last night running against Breaking Bad, expresses perfectly.

As I explained in The Atlantic, Elaine Barrish, the show’s stand-in for Hillary Clinton as a former First Lady turned Secretary of State:

Is brilliant and competent, and one of the pleasures of the show comes from seeing her as a version of Hillary Clinton who is tougher on her Bill (here called Bud, and played with a thick coat of oil by Ciaran Hinds) than in real life. “I know, given your epic levels of narcissism, that it’s impossible for you to fathom this loss has nothing to do with you, but imagine for a moment that it doesn’t,” Elaine tells the husband she’s about to kick to the curb in the pilot episode, after she concedes her run for the presidency. “The country loves you, Bud. They will always love you. It’s me they have mixed feelings about.”

Greg Berlanti, who created the series, gives Weaver lots of juicy lines with which to zing the powerful, entitled men who make her life more difficult—it’s a terrific fantasy of having exactly the right words precisely in the moment that you need them. After Victor, the Russian ambassador, cops a feel while she’s giving a speech, Elaine remains composed. But in the hallway afterwards, she confronts him. “Did you enjoy the ass-grab, Victor? Good, because the next time you touch me, I’m going to rip off your tiny shriveled balls and serve them to you in a cold borscht soup,” she tells him, before switching into Russian to inform him “I will fuck your shit up. Do you hear me?”

A lot of the time, fantasies about strong women turn strong into invulnerable. As much as it can be fun to see Angelina Jolie kick ass, her lipstick perfect even as she rappels down a building, that requirement that female heroes have no flaws or weaknesses except those that can provide a few brooding, Bond-like shots per movie or television season, creates problems for how we talk about strong women on television. On The Newsroom, MacKenzie McHale isn’t grating because she has vulnerabilities, but because she seems to lack capabilities: we see only hysteria, not her ability to work through it, to procure a source, to effectively fire Will up. By contrast, Elaine has a deep attachment to the man she was married to for thirty years, but she works through those feelings as opposed to being ruled by them.

The requirement to be perfect, impregnably principled, unswayed by those who’ve done you wrong, is exhausting. And it’s narratively uninteresting. As I wrote in Slate:

In the second episode, there’s a flashback to Elaine and Bud’s time in the White House that acts as the corrollary to the questions Susan asks of Elain. Bud says to his wife, “You should leave me. I’ll cheat again. And I’ll lie again. And I’ll break your heart again. Retain Stacy Phillips. You have to come out of this looking good. You get no flack from me, Elaine.” But she stays until the moment, impossible to explain or justify to anyone, where she’s finally had enough.

As much as I wish I could save myself some heartache, there is no clear answer as to how Hillary and Elaine ended up with Bill and Bud, why Hillary stayed, and why in Political Animals, Elaine left. Hillary and Elaine are reminders that strength and brilliance won’t save us from complexity, confusion, error and pain. Instead, they’re tools to use to work through the most difficult decisions of our lives.

I don’t want to pretend it’s easy or clear to walk away from a man you were married to for thirty years no matter how he hurt you, or that work-life balance is simple. I don’t want my heroines, my strong women, to be without weakness and vulnerabilities. I want to see them possessed of the self-awareness to recognize those points in themselves, and the capacities to grapple with them. If men are allowed to fall into error around power and violence and remain fascinating anti-heroes, women should have room to do the same about love and family as well. It’s not the site of your weakness that makes you a rich and serious character. It’s how you deal with the dark places in your heart.

The Arizona Cardinals last month donated $5,000 to the political action committee affiliated with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), a move that, according to Politico, “appears to be the first time a National Football League club has institutionally contributed to a federal super PAC,” the organizations that can raise unlimited amounts of money from corporations and individuals thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC.

The Cardinals’ donation to Brewer isn’t huge, and given the nature of Brewer’s PAC (aptly named JAN PAC), why the team made the donation now is unclear. The implications for the future, however, aren’t hard to imagine, as the franchise’s choice to get political demonstrates how the Court’s decision in Citizens United, together with subsequent decisions expanding the allowance of corporate campaign cash in our elections, has changed the game for professional sports franchises the way it did for other corporations.

Across the country, professional sports franchises have negotiated various tax breaks and other public financing deals to get what they want — new stadiums, improved infrastructure, a more generous split of gameday (and non-gameday) revenues. The deals are popular with politicians, who soak up the promises of economic boosts and who, faced with threats of the team moving to a new city, are scared to be part of the group that let the team walk away. Popular as they may be, though, the deals leave taxpayers footing the bill when they fail to provide the promised economic boom, instead pushing cities and states into debt.

If politicians were easy to entice before Citizens United determined that a sports franchise (and its owners) could dump unlimited amounts of cash into their political action committees, imagine how easy they’ll be to sway now. Sports teams had amazing success extorting new stadiums and other deals out taxpayers even before they could flood politicians with unlimited amounts of cash. Now that they can, it isn’t hard to envision those politicians rushing to approve new deals for stadiums and revenue that benefit wealthy owners like the Cardinals’ Bill Bidwill and are as bad — and perhaps even worse — for their constituents as earlier deals. When franchises can open their wallets to buy political friends, taxpayers will have to open theirs even wider to pay for the luxuries the teams want.

The bridge is yours.

-The actors AMC really wanted to play Walter White.

-New No Doubt.

-Patton Oswalt says more reasonable things about Daniel Tosh than he did last week.

-Why Political Animals is getting better reviews than The Newsroom.

-A Legend of Korra-ized Catwoman is a neat idea:

This post contains spoilers through the first episode of the fifth season of Breaking Bad.

This season of Breaking Bad begins with Walt attempting to behave like a human being, and ends with him acting with chilly menace. It’s a fitting frame for the major question posed by the final season of this masterful show: is Walter White a man or a monster? Can chatting with a cheerful diner waitress who encourages him to take a birthday deal because “Free meal. Free is good, even if I was like, rich,” talking about Boston’s science museum, leaving her a hundred dollars as a tip, be Walt relearning what it is to be a human being? Or has he passed beyond a veil such that he’ll always be the man telling his fearful wife “I forgive you,” unable to acknowledge the grave harm he’s done other people?

Part of the reason Walt seems unlikely to reembrace his humanity is that Hank is always standing in his way, the recipient of the praise, the potential great man Walt thinks others should understand him to be. Walt may tell Skyler “I won” after he kills Gus, but he can only feel his victory for a moment before his son begins attributing it to Hank. Walter Jr. remembers visiting Los Pollos Hermanos with Hank, who was “Just toying with the guy, like I got my eye on you, like that…When this hits the news, Uncle Hank is going to be a hero, even more so than before,” Walter Jr. enthuses to his father. Walt can never be as good as Hank. But he can be definitively, memorably worse.

And one of the things this episode establishes is how disgusted and intimidated other bad men are by Walt. Mike would love to be “done listening to this asshole talk,” but Jesse intervenes. “Oh, Jesse. Jesus. What is it with you guys? Honest to God,” Mike wants to know. There’s something incredibly sad about watching Jesse defend his original mentor, the man who’s done him so much wrong even as he’s kept him alive, against the man who might have given him some sort of code and respect even as he introduce him to life as a criminal. Mike’s a practical man, recognizing that Walt is right about the cameras, collaborates in their scheme to discover where Gus’s laptop is being held. I love his dry sense of humor as he identifies himself on the phone as “Inspector Dave Clark, Dave Clark, like the Dave Clark five,” a perfect execution of an obviously ludicrous detail. But Walter’s chilly intelligence and entitlement are repulsive to Mike, who tells Walt “You know how they say it’s been a pleasure? It hasn’t.”

While Walt needs to deal with Mike as an equal, he’s viciously condescending to Saul, telling him “You’re not Clarence Darrow. You’re a two-bit, bus-bench lawyer, and you work for me.” And Saul is withering in his assessment of his complicity with “Beg borrow or steal I’m your Huckleberry, I go the extra mile. Only you never told me that kid would end up in the hospital. Take that and get out of here. You and me, we’re done.” It’s a testament to Walt’s growing arrogance that he can threaten the man he once relied on, that he’s confident enough in his ability to extricate himself from trouble that he no longer needs to cultivate Saul, that he can treat him like an errand boy in Walt’s own schemes.

And his plan to erase Gus’s hard drive is a wild act of genius, dark magic wrought by magnets. But if you mess with forces of nature, sometimes they mess back. Inspecting Gus’s laptop, a cop discovers something different. “Fring, Gustavo, laptop computer. Glass screen is broken and in pieces, bag still sealed.” Cop “Fring, Gustavo, framed photograph of two men, damaged. The glass is broken,” and he notices that the photo’s slid down, revealing a name, Banc Cayman, and some numbers. “Huh. Check it out. That’s not on the manifest.” Walt can’t predict anything. His belief he can seems likely to be his downfall.

Murs’ video for “Animal Style,” a story about the tragic consequences of internalized homophobia and closeting, was planned long before Frank Ocean released the liner notes from Channel Orange that tell the story of his first love. But the timing’s been such that it enters an existing conversation that’s already underway:

The video itself plays into some very old narratives about self-hating black gay men that, while they may be a powerful dramatization of the worst consequences of internalized homophobia, are hardly the sum of the experiences of non-straight African American people. But there’s still something bracing about Murs’ willingness to play a gay man even though he’s straight and married, without any of the coyness or shock-value courting of Lil B’s I’m Gay (I’m Happy) album.

But no matter the content, one of the things that’s fascinating about the reaction to the clip is the anxiety some people appear to feel about its existence. “Since when is HIP HOP and being GAY ever intertwined,” complains one commenter on World Star Hip-Hop. “Wtf , why are rappers trying to capitalize on this gay shit now,” whines another. The idea that hip-hop has somehow been captured by a gay takeover is ludicrous, of course. But it’s amazing how threatened people feel by even a couple of positively-received efforts by rappers and R&B singers to explore sexuality and homophobia. Frank Ocean, Lil B, and Murs are a beginning of a conversation, rather than the end of it. And some people seem very nervous about the prospect of that conversation taking place anywhere, even if there’s absolutely no requirement that they participate in it, if only because they know that it means their views may no longer be dominant.

This concludes our discussion of the first season of The Wire. For Monday, let’s watch episodes 1-3 of Season 2.

For all The Wire gains its credibility from its naturalism, its first season follows a formally precise arc. It begins with Kima and D’Angelo delivering a set of lessons, and ends with Bodie, Poot, and Herc passing those lessons on to a new generation of cops and hoppers. The show goes from McNulty marveling at the pristine federal resources that are being diverted from the war on drugs to the war on terror to federal authorities who would rather pursue a political corruption case than pursue the people who contribute to the misery of Baltimore’s least empowered. This is a story about how little time good people have to pass on their knowledge, and what lessons the people under them actually absorb. And it’s a reminder of the mesmerizing power of ugliness, and the occasions when we’re surprised by joy.

“Down here we make big cases…and all that mess you call police work in the districts…that won’t fly here,” lectures Herc, the most unlikely of educators, and the least-cerebral member of the task force, lectures new cops back in his old command at the end of the season. “This is what makes cases, gentleman. Remember that.” He’s absorbed that strategy and cleverness can be useful, but hardly the whole approach that leads Kima, still confined to her hospital bed, to tell Bunk “Sometimes, things just gotta play out,” when he asks her to sign a photo array she doesn’t have confidence in.

And when he finds out that Carver and other men have been skipped over him to be promoted to Sergeant, Herc complains “It’s gotta be all the brutality complaints, which means it’s never going to matter how I do on no fucking tests.” He hasn’t seen what Daniels has—that it’s Carver’s decision to play politics and report to Burrell that won him his promotion, not Herc’s failings. “This” may be how cases are made, but it’s how careers are made, too. And those two objectives aren’t necessarily compatible. But perhaps it’s one he’ll absorb with Daniels, who, when Burrell demands officers back from the task force, demurs, telling him “I have no opinion. Take your pick.” Revealing your preferences, as McNulty learns to his sorrow, may cost you much more in the long term than it wins you in the present. But unlike Herc and Carver, Prez, who has one of the quietest storylines this season in the snatches of excitement he finds from learning his fascination with puzzles may give him value in the department in a way his impulsive, violent performance on the street never did, may have absorbed the most from his time in the detail. “I’d be careful with that,” Daniels tells him, saying in a gesture what he can’t say directly. “I understand the trigger pull used to be light.”

The finale sees Poot passing on D’Angelo’s lessons to new members of the Pit crew who haven’t yet been taught to break up the parts of a drug transaction. “The way you doin’ it, someone snapping pictures got the whole deal,” Poot lectures. “We gotta tighten up around here, yo.” But D’Angelo was snapped up before he fully developed his McNulty-fueled vision for a version of the drug game without violence, much less before he tried to implement his hazy ideas. And his lieutenants learned how not to get caught, but not how to re-conceptualize their business in any more fundamental way. In Wallace’s final days, D’Angelo’s compassion towards him was bewildering to Bodie and Poot, who expected D’Angelo to bust Wallace back down to running and require him to work his way back up. Wallace didn’t have a chance to think” about going back to Edmonson like we talked about,” before Stringer offered Bodie a chance to both advance in the organization and to re-integrate the worldview D’Angelo’s upset by killing Wallace.
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