This post contains spoilers through episode 9 of the second season of The Wire.

The Wire tends to explore worlds that operate by separate sets of rules and principals, and the show focuses on the police in part because law enforcement is one of the primary points of contact between those disparate universes overlapping within the same city limits. But I always enjoy it when The Wire turns to the subject of communication and code-switching within those communities themselves, or between residents of one of those universes and the people who cater to both. Omar’s confrontation with Levy in the courtroom during Bird’s murder is so shocking and funny precisely because it calls into question Levy’s ability to work with the Barksdale crew without becoming a citizen of their society. And episodes seven through nine of the second season of The Wire are full of these kinds of communications errors and code-switches, delineating the city’s complexity.

When Bodie goes into the florist’s to pick out an arrangement for D’Angelo’s funeral, the core joke is the separate set of designs the man ends up keeping out in the back of the shop to cater to his criminal cliental without disconcerting the citizens who patronize his shop—”That gat and grip thing over there sells a lot,” the man tells Bodie. But the even more telling moment comes before he guides Bodie into the back room when he asks his young customer “Something in particular?” “Funeral,” Bodie tells him, and when the man says sorry, Bodie misses that he’s uttering condolences. “Nah, a funeral, you know,” he clarifies, puzzled that the man wouldn’t know what he means. “No, I mean, I’m sorry for your loss,” the florist clarifies. As D’Angelo found out at dinner with Donette, it’s the little gaps in your knowledge and familiarity with social cues that end up betraying you the worst.

Nicky Sobotka, beginning his successful career as a drug dealer, is in the opposite position, exposing other people’s efforts at code-switching and their ignorance. “I don’t know how to tell you this without hurting you deeply, but you happen to be white,” he tells Frog, who wants in on what he’s dealing as the city faces a somewhat watered-down supply. “I also happen to be white. Not hang on the corner don’t give a fuck white. But Locust Point, IBS 47 white. I don’t work without a contract.” With Ziggy, he’s kinder. After Nick buys a new truck on a no-interest loan, Ziggy wants to know “Money’s cheap. What does that mean?” “It means I got a good deal, you peckerwood,” Nicky joshes him. But even the little slight burns. Ziggy’s aware that he faces some serious deficits in reading people, but he keeps falling for bad jokes anyway, whether it’s for Maui’s rather sophisticated prank on him, or for his coworkers suggestion that he could avenge himself on the bigger man with a punch. He’s literally and figuratively a little man windmilling wildly at a big world and his continued failure to land a punch seems to be stoking a fatal fire.

Then there’s McNulty, who has charm to burn even when he’s drunk to the point of passing out, but finds that it doesn’t work on the target he actually cares about, his soon-to-be-ex-wife Elana. “I can care about you. And I can want us to be friends. And if you give me enough time, Jimmy, maybe I will even want you to be happy. But how am I supposed to trust you?” she asks him as they share a peaceful evening in the back yard while their sons camp in a tent. When he and Beadie share a beer after work, McNulty discerns that she’s single, but once they’re in her home, he investigates her domestic happiness like a crime scene and then withdraws, whether because he thinks he doesn’t deserve her, or because he sees his potential to wreck it. The fear isn’t unreasonable—McNulty may have turned down a shot at the same bar where the previous night he drank himself senseless, grabbed a woman he didn’t know, and left to crash his car and then sleep with a random diner waitress whose response to “Can I get scrapple with that?” is “You can get anything you want.”—but that does not make him a reformed man.

I tend to find the idea of anti-heroes as sexual catnip frustrating, whether it’s Vic Mackey’s fling with the women’s shelter head or this, and it’s frustrating here that The Wire makes the waitress fall all over the bloody, drunken mess of our hero just so the show can complete his degradation by making him have a fling he’s ashamed of, the blood from his hands all over her sheets in the morning in a kind of inverse loss of virginity. But then, it does make Kima even more right than usual that it “Takes a whore to catch a whore.” And it makes the “What the fuck did I do?” that follows even more hollow than usual.

The London Olympics, as I wrote two weeks ago, turned out to be a great showcase of female athletic talent and the progress American women — and women in general — have made in sports, particularly in the 40 years since Title IX became law and guaranteed them equal access. Today’s announcement that Augusta National Golf Club — the Georgia country club that plays host to men’s professional golf’s biggest tournament — is admitting its first female members would seem, then, another sign of progress for female athletes just a week after the Olympics ended.

Not hardly.

Chairman Billy Payne certainly deserves a little credit for taking a step the men before him would not and admitting the club’s first two female members — former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and business executive Darla Moore — both of whom immediately accepted. A little praise, however, is all Augusta deserves for progressing roughly (no pun intended) three quarters of the way through the 20th century.

Augusta, full of green-clad white men who for years denied women and blacks the opportunity to join and play its fabled course, has long epitomized the worst stereotypes of golf, a sport that has made genuine efforts to increase opportunities for women and minorites in recent years, as a game for the white, male one-percent. It didn’t admit its first black member until 1990, 15 years after Lee Elder became the first African-American to play in the Masters. Now, it is admitting its first female members a full 63 years after the foundation of the Ladies Professional Golf Association.

The club didn’t relent on its membership policy when it faced widespread criticism and a mass protest led by Dr. Martha Burk in 2003; instead, it dug in deeper. And it didn’t relent earlier this year when it didn’t extend membership to Virginia Rometty, the chief executive of IBM, one of the Masters three chief sponsors (the CEOs of the other two sponsors, as well as Rometty’s predecessor at IBM, are members). In 2011, it banned a female journalist from the locker room, drawing protests from news organizations and other reporters.

Augusta, make no mistake, is still the bastion of inequality and elitism it has always been. It’s just a little less so now. As far as credit for the “progress” Augusta National has supposedly made, I’ll reserve that for the day the club hosts a women’s tournament and finally joins the rest of us in the 21st century.

The bridge is yours.

-Ukraine is pretty sure SpongeBob SquarePants is gay and here for your children.

-The Lannisters as the Addams family.

-Steampunk Huck Finn is a thing that’s happening.

-The moral center of Political Animals.

-Is Brooklyn the new Hollywood?

-A month and change to the new Homeland, which from what I’ve seen, is very good:

The kind folks at Bloggingheads were good enough to ask me to do a regular show over there, which means you’ll be getting a lot more culture alongside your politics. I’m lucky enough to have as my first guest the AV Club’s television editor and one of my absolute favorite writers on any facet of culture, Todd VanDerWerff:

There’s a lot in this conversation, including a discussion that I think is really important: which networks and services see themselves as in competition with each other. If HBO, Netflix and FX see themselves in competition with each other, it’ll have a dramatic impact on which movies and premium programming are available elsewhere. Networks like Showtime are in an interesting position here—if they’re not in direct competition with Netflix, there may be fewer pressures on them to invest in streaming products like Showtime Anytime, which it’s preparing to roll out more widely to customers of more cable providers, but it needs to not make the strategic mistake of restricting access to its content to the viewers who might need to sample it to get hooked and subscribe. This is really about the integration of two existing industries—movies and television. And the space for a more truly disruptive product, like Hulu, is wide open.

In any case, I hope you’ll swing by. And if you have requests for folks I should have on the show, holler. I’m excited to spend a lot more time talking to my critic friends, and not only at great length on Twitter.

I’m waiting to see how Copper, BBC America’s first original drama, which follows the rudimentary police force in 1864 New York, turns out over the coming episodes. There’s a lot of promise there: an exploration of the settlement of Harlem, the challenges of standing up a law enforcement system in the aftermath of the Draft Riots, the impact of soldiers returning from the war, and rich cross-class dynamics. But across its first two episodes, Copper does something that I’ve gotten increasingly tired of in period dramas set in the late nineteenth century. It defaults to making significant female characters prostitutes, seemingly as a way to give female characters a credible amount of autonomy in a time when audiences imagine them cloistered by corsets and yellow wallpaper.

Of the five significant female characters in Copper, three are prostitutes: Eva Heissen (Franka Potente) runs a saloon and is a madam, Molly Stuart (Tanya Fischer) is an ambitious hooker in her employ, and Annie Reilly (Kiara Glasco) is a ten-year-old runaway who was forced into prostitution. Hell on Wheels, AMC’s show about the construction of the transcontinental railroad, gave Eva (Robin McLeavy) an adventurous backstory—she was first kidnapped and tattooed by Native Americans, turned to prostitution, and now is married. Deadwood, which portrayed sex workers with more nuance and humanity than any of the shows that’s followed in its footsteps, had depressed madam Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), her partner in a brotel start-up Maddie (Alice Krige), and Trixie (the spectacular Paula Malcomson) as a working prostitute with connections to almost everyone in town among its main characters, and many other working girls as minor ones.

Now, there’s no question that there are some legitimate reasons to portray prostitutes in period dramas. Sex workers had a certain amount of autonomy not always available to gently-bred ladies, and while I tend to think it’s a mistake to prioritize external action over interior, domestic drama—Deadwood, to its credit, always knew that Alma’s life was as interesting and rich as Trixie’s—if you want women present in seedy 19th century neighborhoods, prostitutes are a good way to get them there. At best, these kinds of stories can also be powerful testaments to the cheapness of female life, something that Deadwood played masterfully in its Francis Wolcott storyline about a serial killer of sex workers who believed himself to be sanctioned in his darkness, and that Copper is trying to replicate here with its opening story about a killer of child prostitutes. And if these shows want to tell stories about adult sexual relationships as we understand them today, with sex outside of marriage, prostitutes are an easy fall-back if you’re looking for the kind of woman who would be willing to have that kind of sex, or that kind of relationship that wasn’t necessarily on the road to marriage.

But prostitutes weren’t the only kind of women who moved freely about the world in the latter half of the 19th century, or who helped push the world and our thinking about gender into a more modern era. Victoria and Tennessee Claflin, who advocated for “free love”—a movement that really was about giving women rights in their marriages, the ability to divorce, and the freedom to bear children as they saw fit, though it did include legalizing prostitution—are precisely the kind of people who, if they showed up in a period drama, would be declared too advanced for the time. Victoria was a healer, the first woman candidate for president, and she and Tennie, backed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, became the first women to own a Wall Street brokerage firm, using the profits to finance their newspaper. Nellie Bly did the reporting for Ten Days in a Mad-House, her undercover expose of the treatment of the mentally insane, and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, an attempt to beat Jules Verne’s novelistic record, between 1887 and 1890—and when she married and retired, ran her husband’s iron company. Actress Sarah Bernhardt left a string of lovers across Europe, slept in a coffin to help prepare for dramatic roles, worked as a courtesan, set up a makeshift hospital during the Franco-Prussian War and made the jump from stage to silent film.
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This post contains spoilers through the August 19 episode of Breaking Bad.

It says a lot about how frightening Breaking Bad can be that as Walt, Mike and Todd prepared to dispose of the dirt bike of the child Todd murdered at the end of last week’s episode, I became increasingly anxious to not see Jesse among their number. As the minutes ticked by, I found myself typing “Where’s Jesse?” and then more urgently, “Where the fuck is Jesse?” My anxiety had a happier answer than D’Angelo Barksdale’s queries. But as Breaking Bad nears its conclusion, it was an emotional reminder that anyone seems to be fair game in this fascinating, terrifying television show.

It was a fitting key in which to begin an episode that helped me pinpoint part of what I find so heartbreaking about Jesse. I have a weakness for characters who are trying hard to abide by social norms to be decent to people, but who end up failing or embarrassing themselves. When Herc asks out Beadie in the second season of The Wire, the worst part isn’t even her rejection of him—it’s Carver cracking on him for trying to be polite and classy. Last night it was agonizing to watch Jesse, stuck acting as a buffer between Mrs. and Mrs. White, try to turn a miserable situation into decent conversation, fail utterly both because the Whites are at war with each other, and because he lacks the resources to draw Skyler in.

“I like how you’ve got the slivered almonds going,” he tells her, the phrasing and the contents of the complement fitting awkwardly together. When she tells him that “They are from the deli at Albertsons,” her refusal to cook a gesture of contempt for Walt, Jesse keeps trying, insisting, “Well good work on your shopping then, because these are choice.” As he stumbles forward, the gap between his conversational aspirations and the emotional vocabulary he’s acquired becomes even more obvious, even as Jesse ends up articulating a painful truth about the confines of the life he’s cobbled together for himself. “I eat a lot of frozen stuff. It’s usually pretty bad,” he tells Skyler, who has no intention of engaging with him. “But the pictures are so awesome. it’s like, hell yeah, I’m starved for this lasagna. And then you nuke it, and the cheese gets all scabby on top, and it’s like you’re eating a scab. And seriously, what’s that about. It’s like, yo, whatever happened to truth in advertising? Yeah, it’s bad.”
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