I’m excited for Sons of Anarchy to return to FX tonight and for the debut of Lost Resort on ABC (it’s available online, but airs for the first time on September 27). They’re both ambitious shows with big ideas, Last Resort about nuclear weapons and the geopolitical stability, Sons of Anarchy about masculinity and fraternity. And they’re both shows with diverse casts, from creators with interesting, if contrasting, thoughts on the best way to get television to get more like the people watching it.

Both Ryan and Andre Braugher, who stars in Last Resort, were asked about Braugher’s status as the rare African-American lead on television at the Television Critics Association press tour earlier this summer. Ryan pointed out that this wasn’t the first time he’s had a black male lead in one of his shows—Dennis Haysbert came first in The Unit. But Ryan said he thought that a color-blind approach was the best way to get television functioning like a true meritocracy for people of color.

“I just never looked at it that way. I’ve wanted the best actor for the role. I try to be as color-blind as possible in most roles that I cast,” he said. “You know, when we put together a list for this role, there were various ethnicities involved, the same for Sam, you know, literally every role. You know, networks want people to watch their shows, and a lot goes into who the audience is. I just don’t concern myself with that. I concern myself with how good can the show be? And you’ve heard Andre speak here today. What writer wouldn’t want him saying their words? So things are changing. Thing are getting better, I think. I feel like I’m doing my part…And I actually do believe that Hollywood is the kind of place where merit can and is rewarded, and so I assume it will be nice when these questions don’t get asked anymore, when Andre can just be an actor playing Marcus Chaplin and portray him and get praise for his performance, but unfortunately, we are not to that point yet. But it feels like we are better off than we were 15, 20 years ago, and hopefully, 20 years from now, we won’t have to worry about it.”

When I spoke to Sutter a few days after the Last Resort panel, we chatted about the arc of Sons of Anarchy in terms of its approach to race, particularly given last season’s plot in which Juice, a younger member of SAMCRO, is blackmailed over his father’s race and lead to believe the fact that he is part African-American could lead to him being expelled from the motorcycle club.

“The interesting thing about MCs, or maybe interesting is the wrong word, but the fascinating thing about the racial component I always felt was the idea that we have a very grey areas. They’re not really defined,” he told me. “It was important for me to separate [the club the show focuses on] from white supremacists in the first couple of seasons, and I did want to acknowledge there is this antiquated bylaw in most of the larger clubs. How did that play out? In some clubs, it’s very rigid. What happened to Juice, he definitely would have been drummed out. Other clubs, not so much.”

In the course of talking about Juice’s plot arc the last season, Sutter pivoted to talking about race more generally, and offered something of a counterpoint to Ryan, with whom he worked on The Shield.

“I just like the reality of bringing in people of color in terms of the show,” he said. “I was just reading Shawn Ryan’s TCA [session] this morning about casting Andre Braugher as a lead of that show. And I think it’s important, and I think there’s a certain responsibility that we have to do that. I try to, even though I write a show about a bunch of white guys riding motorcycles, I probably have as many or more people of color employed on my show than most shows.”

The reality of it is that Hollywood probably needs both of these approaches. Shows and movies that aren’t explicitly about race won’t get more diverse unless the people writing casting notices truly mean it when they say they want people of all races and ethnicities to read for roles, and make that desire clear all the way down their chain of command. And it would help if more white creators were genuinely interested in race, and felt comfortable and confident creating characters of color while remaining aware of the dangers of racial ventriloquism. We need a lot of kinds of stories, and a lot of kinds of characters, and it’s going to take people with a lot of different visions to make them.

Last night, Encore began airing the miniseries adaptation of The Crimson Petal and The White, Michel Faber’s novel about Sugar (Romola Garai), an enterprising Victorian prostitute, William Rackham (Chris O’Dowd), the industrialist who becomes infatuated with her, Agnes (Amanda Hale), William’s anorexic wife who becomes convinced Sugar is her guardian angel, and Sophie (Isla Watt), William and Agnes’s daughter, who bonds with Sophie. The series, which continues tonight at 8 PM, weaves a rich tapestry out of the contradictions of Victorian sexuality, the ways in which the rigidity of gender roles damaged both men and women, and the importance of writing for people who were constrained from speaking freely to each other by social mores. As Sugar is drawn deeper into William’s life after he first buys the right to be her sole customer and then moves her into her home, she learns both the limits of the man she believed could rescue her from a life in London’s worst quarters, and the value of her mother, Mrs. Castaway’s (an astonishing Gillian Anderson) bitter perspective on life, even as she summons the courage to truly make a life for herself.

I spoke with The Crimson Petal and The White‘s writer Lucinda Coxon about the challenges of adapting Faber’s extremely dense novel, the meaning of writing for her characters, and the medical abuse of women in Victorian England. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This is very much a miniseries about writers. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the characters’ relationship to their writing. That scene where William, who dreams of being a famous novelist instead of working for his father’s business, is just awful to his mentally ill wife Agnes about her intentions to write as a novel struck me as really one of the saddest scenes in the series.

Agnes, it’s something we develop slightly more than in the book, is that Agnes will write on anything. She’s writing on the windows in the steam of her own breath. I think it’s fantastic that these characters who are incapable of actually speaking to each other and confiding in one another and expressing themselves in any way to one another are all busy desperately committing their passions to paper and imagining that somehow that means they told somebody something, or they’re fulfilled in some way.

I think it is a story about stories, in a sense. It seems to me it’s about whether you can write your own story, whether you can escape the hand you’ve been dealt by writing your way out. And Sugar is, in a sense, writing her way out. She brackets the whole film in a sense. That voiceover is in a sense part of her writing…She’s taught herself to read as kind of a survival mechanism. It’s how she bonds with William in the first place. It’s how she seduces him. She realizes he fancies himself as a writer and that’s what she deploys.
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The bridge is yours.

-Hungry for comics? Get thee to Top Shelf’s $3 sale, which is awesome.

-Yay new Missy Elliott.

-Avatar‘s sequels: not coming easy.

-The origin of Chris Traeger’s Parks and Recreation catchphrase.

-Lincoln, without the vampire hunting:

Chris Brown, having graduated from tossing chairs at windows after interviewers have the temerity to ask him about his battering of then-girlfriend Rihanna, has apparently decided that violence against women will be his new hallmark. He’s tattooed an image of a battered woman, which looks strikingly like the images taken to document Rihanna’s injuries though he of course denies it’s her, on his neck:

I’m not sure what’s less attractive—that Brown would document his assault on a specific woman he was in a relationship with, or that he wants to bear the image of a random battered woman on his body. Either way, whether he intends penance or defiance, Brown’s guaranteed that no one will be able to look at him without a reminder that he attacked a woman. Whether that image wears on the people who have defended him thus far is an open—and perhaps more important—question. The ability of famous men to abuse women and get away with it depends significantly on a public willingness to excuse them, a level of protection extended by men and women alike.

It’s been a long summer, hasn’t it? In between the resurgence of the War on Women, the torments of The Newsroom, and the slog of the political conventions, I’m ready for it to be fall–and for the return of the fall television season.

This autumn is the beginning of a big turnover for NBC on Thursday nights, as The Office and 30 Rock head into their confirmed swan songs, and Coommunity and Parks and Recreation enter what could also be their final seasons. Fox is more stable, but investing in female-centric comedy as it adds Ben & Kate and The Mindy Project to run alongside New Girl. ABC, coming off a fourth-place finish in the ratings, is throwing everything at the wall, but with more joie de vie and less desperation than NBC. And while I never thought I’d say this, one of the more intriguing dramas of the fall is taking its bow on CBS. To help you sort through the new offerings, here’s the complete ThinkProgress guide to fall television.

SEPTEMBER 11

Show: Go On (NBC)
Time: 9:00
The Concept: A radio host (Friends vet Matthew Perry), in deep denial after losing his wife unexpectedly, gets ordered to a support group by his boss (John Cho). There, he meets a possibly-underlicensed group leader (Laura Benanti), a widowed lesbian with anger issues (a fantastic Julie White), a taciturn young man whose brother is in a coma (Tyler James Williams), and a middle-aged Latina woman who’s lost her entire family (Tonita Castro).
Watch If: You appreciated Community‘s ability to pull off a relatively low-concept episode. In a lot of ways, Go On feels like the show NBC initially hoped Community would be, about misfits who choose and build an adult family for themselves. You’re interested in seeing more diverse casts on television. Your mileage may vary on Perry’s white-dude cheerleader effort, but Go On may have the most diverse cast of any network pilot ever, and makes that a strength of the show rather than an excuse for lazy racial and ethnic humor. You like Matthew Perry, who could have the opportunity to do some really interesting work here.

Show: The New Normal (NBC)
Time: 9:30
Concept: A gay couple, Bryan and David (Andrew Rannells and Justin Bartha), decide to try to have a baby by surrogate, and end up working with Goldie (Georgia King), a single mother, who decides to act as a surrogate to fund her dream of going back to law school to give her daughter (a sharp Bebe Wood) a better life–and to escape from her narrow-minded mother (a sharp-tongued Ellen Barkin).
Watch If: You miss the days when Glee had actual focus. The New Normal doesn’t improve on some of Glee‘s core problems, including a weird distance from lesbians and Ryan Murphy’s fondness for stereotypical gay men, mean older women, and Nene Leakes. But at this point, it’s got at least a core story that in some places comes across as deeply felt. You want to see more gay families on television. I’m more curious how Go On will pull off Julie White’s character’s family, but hopefully, Murphy can pull off a gay-headed family with a couple that has more sexual chemistry than Modern Family‘s Mitch and Cam.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about the season finale of Breaking Bad over the past week, and in a way, I’m glad the episode aired while I was on vacation so I had time to consider it. I think I’ve liked a lot of this season more than some viewers have, in part because it’s borne out some of my theories about Walter White’s core personality. But there’s a major question that this episode of Breaking Bad didn’t answer for me, and I think it’s a problem for this season as a whole: why does Walt decide to stop cooking meth?

There are a number of possibilities here: that he’s bowed to Skyler’s reasoning, that in that pile of money, he’s finally found satisfaction, that having gotten the meth business running smoothly and efficiently, he’s no longer attracted to or challenged by the prospect of perfecting his operation. That, or it’s possible that he’s lying, and he intends to continue cooking.

But that decision, which comes at the end of yet another jaunty cooking-and-distributing montage (though the first that really moves time forward significantly) invalidates much of the emotional heft that the season had been building prior to this point. If he’s able to stop cooking so easily, was Walt lying to Jesse when he invoked his dream of a well-run meth empire, to Mike’s connections when he invoked himself as Classic Coke? If Walt is willing to take Skyler’s judgement of a situation seriously, and to take it on the subject around which he’s build his identity, what happened to change the dynamic between them? It’s true that up until the montage, Breaking Bad had essentially covered a year in time, and that it’s possible many things in the White household could have changed during the period of time represented by the montage. But simply jumping forward and giving us a very new set of conditions in the White household was a decision that both forfeited substantial dramatic tension, and left unresolved the question of where Walt’s identity currently truly lies.

It’s just a shame to me to give Skyler her shattering confrontation with Walt, to see her tell him “I don’t have any of your magic, Walt, I’m a coward. I can’t go to the police, I can’t stop laundering your money. I can’t keep you out of the house, I can’t even keep you out of my bed. All I can do is wait. It’s the only good option…For the cancer to come back”–and then to restore tranquility to the White household so easily, without exploring whether she embraced a kind of moral compromise and showed steel that gave her credibility in Walter’s eyes, or whether something happened to make him want his family back badly enough to return to himself. I want to know what’s happened to Walt himself in this time, to know if success has calmed and healed the scars left behind by Grey Matter, if he’s found his way back to an identity that isn’t based primarily in dominance and manipulation.

I agree with what seems to be the consensus view, that Breaking Bad needs for Hank to figure out Walt, for the good, dogged, unbrilliant, crude man to crack the sophisticated, clever, arrogant genius. But while that basic structure for the show’s finale season is important, it also matters what condition Walt’s soul is in when Hank cracks him. If he’s Heisenberg, still confident and arrogant, Walt’s moral reckoning will involve the utter dismantling of his identity. But if Walt’s grappling towards decency, his reaping of the whirlwind will involve different kinds of pain, shame, and disbelief. If it’s to be the former, we need to know how Skyler came to be able to live with him, to laugh through dinner with Hank and Marie, to enjoy watching her children play together. If it’s the latter, we need to know how Walt found his way to a third self, neither the emasculated Mr. White nor the dominating Heisenberg. I hope the final eight episodes of Breaking Bad answer those questions. I’d hate to think that “Crystal Blue Persuasion” is supposed to cover both three months and these critical bits of character development.

I want to extend a huge thank-you to Alan, s.e., Jessica, Mychal and Zack for taking care of the blog while I had a chance to go off and get recharged. I can’t say how grateful I am. If you want to find continued chronicles of their work, you can do so on Twitter, where they are @PykeA, @sesmithwrites, @JessicaWakeman, @mychalsmith, and @ZackBeauchamp. And now that I’m back, expect a lot of blogging on the new television season, as well as Gone Girl, The Song of Achilles, and if I’m feeling feisty, maybe even Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, and class and detective stories.