Emily Nussbaum, the television critic at the New Yorker, writes in an even-handed review of David Simon’s HBO series about New Orleans, Treme, which was just renewed for a shortened fourth season, than an episode of the show “made me wonder if, rather than a novel or a movie, a TV show could be a poem.” It’s a perfect way of encapsulating why Treme is both important and sometimes infuriating: it’s a show that challenges our conception of what a television show can be, but that may end up reaffirming our basic demands of the form.

In another television show, if I wished the dialogue would stop so I could listen to a musician finish out a song, watch an artist stitch beads into a badge, or a cook plate a dish, that would be a grave sign of trouble for that show. Given the relative pedestrian nature of much television cinematography and music,Treme stands out for its the quality of its musical performances, its attention to the kinds of details of craft that don’t always drive plots, but that can give an audience profound and vicarious sensual pleasure. I could hang out in LaDonna’s (Khandi Alexander) bar for an entire afternoon watching Albert’s Mardi Gras Indians practice their routines, as they do this season, or at a music showcase watching Annie try out new songs as she prepares to record a studio album. In an episode in the middle of this season, Toni (Melissa Leo) and her daughter Sofia (India Ennenga) go to a performance of Waiting for Godot at the point where the levees were breached. As moving as it was to watch a man in the audience declare Godot isn’t coming, to see Toni tear up at his anger and pain, I almost would have rather been there with them in the audience, experiencing the play for myself. The art Treme puts on screen is almost enough for me to not need the plots and characterization that surround it.

Treme isn’t alone in playing with the potential of television. Breaking Bad, in particular, plays with cinematography much more aggressively than Treme. But that show’s dramatic color saturation, shot composition, and unnerving images are in service of the show’s clear moral throughlines. And Breaking Bad has always paired its striking cinematography with sleek, efficient storytelling. If Breaking Bad‘s A, B, and C storylines are hanks of hair being plaited together into a smooth braid, Treme‘s much larger cast are threads on a loom, showing occasional flashes of jewel color, but often just providing the supporting warp and weft to get us to one performance to the next.

That’s not to say that there aren’t engaging characters or moving moments in Treme outside of the musical performances. There’s joy to be had in watching Antoine Baptiste grousing about a cab fare he believes resulted from an inefficient route, telling the driver “It’s basic geometry, bro…You need to get with the hypotenuse. Don’t believe me, believe Pythagoras. He invented the sides of this shit,” or Ladonna seeking affirmation from a customer, asking him “What do you think about this here? This bar. My bar,” only to get back: “It’s here. And so am I.”

And the Treme is dense and smart on its core theme, how New Orleans alternately neglects and mythologizes itself, and how its most creative tendencies sometimes undermine its chances for success. In this week’s season three premiere, as Davis McAlary (Steve Zahn) takes a group of tourists to what he’s trying to tell them are important sites in New Orleans musical history, they become progressively more disgusted with the disarray of the stops along the way. “You mean they can’t manage to clean up a park after two years?” one asks him. “Did you people ever actually preserve anything of note?” another wants to know. They’re not wrong. Meanwhile, Delmond Lambreaux (Rob Brown), who recorded a well-received album that combines jazz with his father’s Indian tribe, gets asked “Where in your imagination did all that come from?” by a purported fan who’s totally unfamiliar with the history of the music he’s enjoying. Next week, Antoine, now teaching music, tells a student “Jennifer, you sound good, girl. You got that real New Orleans riff.” But regretfully, he tells her to get back in synch with the other members of his marching band. “This here is about playing in unison,” he tells her. “When the time comes, you can let that rip.”

And that’s sort of Treme‘s problem. The show isn’t willing to shrug off narrative conventions entirely and spin off into sensory experience. But on the ground, it’s pulled in too many directions, and as a result characters have to tell what they don’t have time to show. Television may have dramatically expanded the emotional and moral weight it’s able to convey in the last decade and a half, and thanks to the widespread availability of cheap flatscreen televisions and prestige cable budgets, television productions are more visually ambitious than they’ve ever been. But Treme is a reminder that for all of these advances, television remains primarily a narrative medium, and we’re a long way from the show that’s really ready to let it rip and step out of line.

Ian Parker’s new profile of J.K. Rowling in the New Yorker is—with the exception of a weird and utterly egregious comment on her makeup—a fascinating ramble through literary analysis of the Harry Potter books, British press law, the extent to which Rowling may have exaggerated her own poverty, and the touchiness of celebrities who want to be left alone. It’s also one of the first hints we have at the core conflicts in Rowling’s upcoming first novel aimed primarily at adult readers than young ones, The Casual Vacancy. And to a certain extent (and to my excitement), it sounds like the novel has some of the same themes as Parks and Recreation. In keeping with some of Harry Potter‘s concerns, the central conflict is a class one:

Barry’s civic influence is revealed by his departure, rather as George Bailey’s is in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The story is driven by the long-standing frustration that some of Barry’s disagreeable and right-wing neighbors have about the town’s administrative connection to the Fields, an area of public housing and poverty on the edge of a larger, nearby town. Historically, children from the Fields have had the right to attend primary school in Pagford, a place of flower baskets and other middle-class comforts, and the town has also supported a drug-treatment clinic that serves the neighborhood. In the absence of Barry’s righteous influence, the anti-Fields faction sees an opportunity to rid Pagford of this burden. This is a story of class warfare set amid semi-rural poverty, heroin addiction, and teen-age perplexity and sexuality.

It’s tonally that I see the potential for a Parks and Recreation parallel:

“It’s been billed, slightly, as a black comedy, but to me it’s more of a comic tragedy,” she said. If the novel had precedents, “it would be sort of nineteenth-century: the anatomy and the analysis of a very small and closed society.” A local election was “a perfect way in,” she said. “It’s the smallest possible building block of democracy—this tiny atom on which everything rests.” One could say that national politics does not rest upon local politics, and that no modern British town is a closed society; some of Rowling’s characters may seem eccentric for the earnestness with which they regard a local election. She acknowledged that the scale of parish-council decision-making is “easy to laugh at” but said that “part of the point is that those decisions that are being made do dramatically affect people’s lives, up to life and death sometimes.”

We’re a ways from knowing whether The Casual Vacancy will be any good, though I’m looking forward to finding out. But learning more about the subject matter and tone has definitely more excited to give Rowling a shot.

I skipped out on watching the Emmys ceremony last night to watch the Ravens-Patriots game, which I think was the right decision for both the football and the spectacle. The game was a high-scoring brawl between teams who are developing a fantastic and eminently watchable East Coast rivalry. And towards the end of it, enraged by a series of decisions by the replacement referees, the game’s attendees provided some theater of their own, loudly and repeatedly calling out the officials.

Maybe the most striking thing about the game wasn’t that the fans booed the replacement referees over a series of blown calls, but that NBC aired their repeated chants of “bullshit,” without obscuring the sound. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ducked how to handle fleeting expletives on television, including this summer, when the Court refused to consider the First Amendment questions in Fox and ABC’s disputes with the FCC, though it said the agency had to give networks fair warning of what make them vulnerable to fines. The chants in the game happened after the end of primetime at 11 PM, so NBC may have considered itself less vulnerable to censure. But they also weren’t exactly fleeting: they went on for an extended period of time and served as a sonic backdrop to the announcers’ criticism of the replacement referees performance. In a sense, the decision not to obscure the chants or to turn the volume down on them was one of the gutsier editorial decisions NBC could have made, illustrating a clear consensus between the fans and the experts on the damage the replacements had done to the game.

At halftime, word came down that, after a Sunday devoted to negotiations between the referees’ union and the National Football League, there were still “substantial differences” between the parties and that no more negotiations were scheduled. It’ll be intriguing to see if this game changes the NFL’s sense of how long it can maintain its position in this particular standoff. I think NBC’s presentation of the game—and its announcers willing to criticize the replacement referees—are more likely to shake loose this particular standoff than to move the Supreme Court. But I’m glad to see them air a newsworthy reaction by fans, especially after the Justice Department dropped its pursuit of Fox, which had refused to pay an FCC fine over an episode of television that depicted strippers. If the Supreme Court isn’t going to make itself clear, the networks should push for as much latitude as they can get.

The bridge is yours.

-SEK is now tackling the first season of Game of Thrones. Take note.

-James Poniewozik gets the Emmys right.

-Why 2000 AD comics matter so much.

-I love reading Andy Greenwald on NBC’s Thursday night comedies.

Last week, I went long on the future of popular culture about gay people and a pet peeve of mine: the treatment of homosexuality as primarly a source of problems instead of joy, whether it’s in the historical pop portrayal of gay people as deviant, miserable, and damned, or of homophobia as the primary dramatic story engine for gay characters. As is always the case on this subject, my writing was informed by conversations with friends and writers like Tyler Lewis, who writes better on the specific experiences of black gay men than anyone I know, and Slate critic June Thomas. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to sit down with June and tape our conversations for a new Bloggingheads episode:

It was a conversation that helped mentally crystallize for me the extent to which non-straight characters are written for the enjoyment of and in deference to the perspectives of straight people. Shows and movies that aren’t made specifically for gay people, like both iterations of Queer as Folk, are allowed to have one gay person or gay couple. We don’t get to see gay people in gay communities, to see gay men who are friends with lesbians (though that seems like it could change on The New Normal, where creator Ryan Murphy has announced plans to introduce a gay couple) because shows with gay characters are so often about gay characters’ relationships to a straight-dominated world, or more often, about straight people’s relationships to gay people, no matter whether or not straight people are the gay characters. Cultural signaling, like a man’s interest in fashion or a woman’s interest in sports, or is less about fleshing out the personalities and interests of the characters who possess them than in signaling to straight audiences about story developments: Kurt’s clothes on Glee mean there will be bullying, parental difficulty, a change of wardrobe, a revitalization of his confidence, and an eventual journey to the big city. Homophobia is something for gay characters to overcome, but also for straight characters to learn from, for straight viewers to use as a self-congratulatory benchmark, assuring themselves that they’d never behave so badly.

I’m being harsh here. I know that. The process of straight people learning and appreciating, rather than demonizing, gay people’s lives and challenges and gay cultures, such as they exist, is not an irrelevant process. But I’m tired of the constant need for accommodation. I’m tired of the idea that straight people are going to be most interested in stories about themselves than in stories about gay people even if the execution of say, an excellent love story about two men like Keep the Lights On is richer and deeper than so much romantic comedy claptrap. I’m tired, similarly, of the idea that stories about men are the default, that both men and women will turn into them, and that stories about women are somehow niche, that men won’t tune into them. In both of these areas, people who limit themselves to stories about themselves are both denying themselves great pleasure and beauty. And they’re defaulting to the privileged position of being able to expect that Hollywood will continue providing them stories about people whose lives are a heightened version of their own. At the end of the day, if people want to cut themselves off from stories that could move them, that’s their loss. It’s just frustrating to me when someone else’s lack of curiosity reaffirms Hollywood’s own, and limits what options are available to the rest of us.

This post contains spoilers for The Master, in so much as an essentially non-narrative movie can be spoiled.

The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s gorgeous, confounding, and sometimes irritating new movie, has been assumed to be about the history of Scientology almost since the project’s existence became public. Movie fans buzzed. Harvey Weinstein hired extra security for the premiere to protect the movie from protest. But anyone who went to the movie expecting a searing expose was disappointed. The Master, which follows Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply alienated Navy veteran who finds his way into the guidance of a charismatic fraud (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in the wake of World War II has very little to say about Scientology. But it is a dense, powerful movie about worship, sacrament, and what we take from belief.

We first meet Freddie on a Navy ship, awash in both the baptismal font of the ocean and a rush of religious imagery. General Douglas MacArthur prays “That God will preserve it always” in a broadcast about America and the end of the second World War, and by extension, the demobilization of the system that’s given Freddie both structure and an identity. A lecturer speaking to him and other men who, by implication, are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, tells them “You men are blessed with the rejuvenating power of youth.” In a session with a therapist, the man asks Freddie “According to the history here, it says you saw a vision of your mother.” Freddie skitters away from the implication of contact with divine—or insanity—cautioning “It wasn’t a vision. It was a dream.” Back on land, Irving Berlin’s “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” plays as Freddie takes department store photographs as static as Russian Orthodox icons. When, on the run from the Salinas fields where he was picking cabbage, Freddie stows away on a pleasure boat, the one he hops is called Alethia, the ancient Greek word for truth, and the term Martin Heidegger used to mean “unconcealedness,” the revelation of the contours of the world. As the Aletheia sails off into the sunset, and towards the Panama Canal and its ultimate destination of New York, its masts are twin white crosses against the night sky.

Freddie isn’t capable of reading, much less noticing the existence of such signs when we meet him, but much of what’s compelling about the early scenes of The Master is the way the movie captures the larger context those signs give meaning to: the way we evade and disguise the needs we desperately hope will be fulfilled, be they spiritual or bodily. Freddie, a desperately lonely man, finds a way to be part of his fellow sailors’ playful day on the beach when he pretends to have sex with a woman they’ve built out of the sand. But while the joke is his means of participation, his need is real: Freddie masturbates on the beach, ends up curled up next to the figure in the sand as the other sailors slip away. But when he finds himself in proximity to connection, Freddie can’t help but treat the practices of the people around him as a bit of a joke, a tool to get what he wants without actually having to make commitments or risk vulnerability. When he joins the acolytes of Lancaster Dodd, the man who was dancing with his wife on the deck of the Alethia when Freddie decided to stow away, at a table where they’re taking notes on a series of recordings, Freddie passes a note to one of them asking “Do you want to fuck?” even as the voice on the tape tells him “You are not ruled by your emotions.” When Freddie trails in Lancaster’s wake to New York, he pockets a statue of a reclining nude woman that he finds in the house of one of the Cause’s benefactors, only to put it back.

Dodd gives Freddie both the structure to restrain and channel his behavior, and a sanctification of his talents for both violence—and for the first half of the movie more significantly—brewing bizarre cocktails made with everything from photographic chemicals to paint thinner. The first person Freddie tries to share his potions with is a pretty department store clerk who sips, coughs, and is dismayed when the sacrament, rather than bringing them into closer communion, makes Freddie fall asleep on a restaurant banquette. After fleeing the store and his job as a portrait photographer, Freddie works as a farm laborer, where he doles out drinks of his next batch fretfully, warning the Filipino pickers who work with him not to drink too much. This time, the results are worse than a lost shot at a relationship: one of Freddie’s coworkers dies. “I didn’t poison him,” Freddie insists. “I didn’t do anything wrong. He took the drink himself.” The thing that connects Freddie to other people ends up polluting his relationships to them.

That is, until he meets Lancaster Dodd, who tells Freddie that “I sampled it and ended up drinking it all,” in a less-than-subtle foreshadowing of how deeply Freddie will imbibe Dodd’s improvisational theology. Dodd is himself a bit of a symbol, speaking for Freddie to the first time in a red dressing gown that, combined with his pale hair, conspire to make him look like Santa Claus, and at a wedding dinner, making himself out to be Saint George with a story of a defeat of a dragon: “I wrestle, wrestle, wrestle him to the ground. I say sit, dragon sits. I say stay, dragon stays.” Fittingly, the exchange between Freddie and Dodd is a ritualized exchange over Freddie’s liquors. “I have no idea of the contents of this remarkable potion. What’s in it?” Lancaster asks Freddie. “Secrets,” his protege promises. Dodd is intrigued by both the effects of Freddie’s potion and his encounter with a bullshit artist who may not have Dodd’s own flair with a concept, but whose work produces more immediate results on the appropriate converts. He asks Freddie to cook up another batch, which Freddie does, tapping powders into glass vessels, streaming chemicals through bread, adding a stand-in for the Body to his version of the Blood. But Dodd, unlike Freddie, has the sense to check one last time on what he’s imbibing before he commits fully. “Is this booze you make poison?” he asks Freddie, mixing the question in with a series of other queries during the interrogations Dodd refers to as “processing” and that make up a fundamental part of the Cause. “Not if you drink it smart,” Freddie swears to him. Dodd’s approach to Freddie’s hooch will prove to be more meticulous and self-preserving than Freddie’s fevered quaffing of the elixir Dodd offers him.
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Homeland‘s complete domination of the drama Emmy Awards last night—Claire Danes and Damian Lewis won for their lead performances, and the show took home awards for writing for a drama series and for best drama series—was a surprise for many of us watching at home, whether we doing so for personal or professional reasons (or in my case, watching football while following along on Twitter). It’s possible to quibble with some of the awards. Breaking Bad, in particular, had an extremely strong season, and I might have gone with Bryan Cranston over Lewis just for the sheer range he was required to deploy. But on the whole, I’m very happy with the drama awards (vastly less so with comedy, but that’s another story). And there’s something exciting to me about watching the enthusiasm for Homeland on display last night.

On Twitter, a number of critics I care for dearly and admire were quick to declare Mad Men a vastly superior show to Homeland, which in the final analysis of history, may prove correct. But there’s something brave and bracing to me about the way Homeland has tackled the issues and environment of our own time, rather than reaching back into our history to explore the psychological contours of debates that are essentially settled, and settled for the better. Mad Men explores a broader universe through the lens of its advertising agency (and its much larger core cast) than Homeland does from within the intelligence community, but it sometimes does so with less courage. It’s a show that’s much more interested in exploring Don Draper’s reaction to having to put up with a token black employee than with the experiences of Dawn, SCDP’s African-American pioneer, herself. The show tells us that sexism is damaging to both men and women, and than white men could be shocked when their obliviousness was breached. These are things I think we know, gussied up in beautiful clothes and gilded with performances that are sometimes exceptional.

Homeland, by contrast, is concerned with the urgent present rather than the weight of history. At a moment when President Obama’s drone program raises profoundly difficult questions about how to regulate the president’s right to kill, Homeland has charged into the debate with an exploration of the impact of the people who are killed because they are in the way of drone strikes, and how those strikes can be used to powerfully shift opinion against the United States. At a time when large numbers of Americans persist, against all evidence and reason, in believing that our president is a foreigner and a secret Muslim so they won’t have to accept that their nation actually chose a black man to occupy its highest office, Homeland has given us a sensitive, even tender portrait of a convert to Islam, presenting the practice of his faith as beautiful and sanctified, who hides his religion (something that will become an issue in the second season premiere next Sunday). And in Carrie Mathison, Homeland‘s given us a female lead who is damaged less by history than by the things that make her brilliant. These are narrower concerns than the broad societal forces Mad Men explores, but that specificity doesn’t make the show less bold: instead, it makes it more painful and immediate.
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