Zoë Heller is a total ninja of a critic, and I think everyone should read her review of Salman Rushdie’s new memoir of his fatwa years, Joseph Anton for its evisceration of Rushdie’s self-regard (the stuff on his marriages sounds like it may not even be believed if it is seen), and even more particularly, for her explanation of a contradiction that’s evolved in Rushdie’s work. While he initially argued that literature shouldn’t be exempt from political criticism, now, Heller writes, Rushdie’s falling back on arguments that fiction of sufficient quality to be considered literature ought to be somehow exempt from political criticism:

More troubling, however, than his exaggerated claim to naiveté is the case that Rushdie seems to be making for fiction’s immunity from political or religious anger. In a departure from the standard, liberal notion that literature must be free to offend, he proposes that literature, properly understood, cannot offend. Muslims who were insulted by The Satanic Verses were guilty of a category error: just like Anis Rushdie, in his “unsophisticated” reading of Midnight’s Children, they had confused fiction with other sorts of speech…

In his famous essay “Outside the Whale,” written five years before the fatwa, Rushdie attacked various books and films for propagating imperialist myths about the nature of Indo-British relations during the Raj. (He argued, for example, that the rape plot at the center of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet endorsed a racist fantasy about the sexual threat posed to white colonial women by “lust-crazed wogs.”) Novels, he claimed, could not be excused from criticism of this sort on grounds that they were “just” fiction: all art, in as much as it ventured to assert “what is the case, what is truth and what untruth,” was inescapably political, and part of “the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history.”

It is not surprising that Rushdie should be a little warier of history’s storm these days, but his impulse to quarantine literature from “the cacophony of other discourses, religious, political, sociological, post-colonial” is an unhappy one, nevertheless. Certainly, not all opponents of The Satanic Verses were as alert to the ludic techniques of the modern novel as they might have been. But to claim that their wounded reactions were inconsistent with Rushdie’s artistic motives cannot be the end of the argument. Had Paul Scott been around to answer to Rushdie’s critique of The Raj Quartet, he might well have insisted that he had not meant to be racist. He might even have accused Rushdie of engaging in thin-skinned identity politics. But these rejoinders would hardly have embarrassed the legitimacy of Rushdie’s complaint.

I wish she’d made the point that quality conversations and political ones aren’t separate from each other. Falling into dreadful politics can also mean falling into cliche without transcending it. Ignoring the details and realities of life in your search for “what is the case, what is truth and untruth,” a failure to reckon with politics, can mean a failure to tell a truly engaging and revealing story. Good politics aren’t enough to make literature, of course—there’s a lot of awfully stiff execution of noble ideas. But an entirely careless approach to the politics of your subject is a danger, too.

My friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have a long and marvelous (and I’m not just saying that because they are my friends) conversation about Alan’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised (about which more later) up at Press Play. And something Alan said helped a lot of my thinking about the era of anti-hero television over the last year or so snap into place. He told Matt:

When Carolyn Strauss told me that HBO’s decision of what to do as their first show after Oz came down to The Sopranos or something by Winnie Holzman, the creator of My So-Called Life, about a female business executive at a toy company, I immediately stopped paying attention to the interview for a good five minutes, because all I was thinking about was an alternate timeline where this Winnie Holzman show was the next big HBO show. I was asking myself, would the other show have spawned imitators? Or would it not have, because “Female business executive at a toy company” is not as inherently cool as “New Jersey wiseguy in therapy”?

It’s striking to me that while both of them talked about this alternate world, neither, at least in the edited version of the interview that appears online, mentioned Sex and the City. There’s no question that The Sopranos, which began airing seven months after the debut of Sex and the City in the summer of 1998, is the more formally ambitious show. But Sex and the City has never really gotten the credit it deserves for its deeply probing discussions of, among the factors my friend Emily Nussbuam at the New Yorker has identified, romanticism and cynicism, second- and third-wave feminism, and libertinism and prudishness, nor for its foundational role in the rise of HBO. Both in terms of acting as a destination show that brought viewers to the network while it elevated the traditional sitcom, and in the income it provided to HBO through syndication, Sex and the City deserves both critical and financial recognition for its role in elevating both the network and cable television in general.

And it, and the possibility of this long-lost Winne Holzman, raise the specter of an alternate universe of prestige television drama that’s dedicated to the rise and deconstruction of female fantasies in the way that shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men paint glorious specters of masculine badassery that are the primary draw for some viewers, and then reveal the rot in them, a process that’s the primary draw for others. I can dream up a lot of the kinds of shows that we’d have in that bizarro world: in genre, the She-Hulk procedural I bring up so often I know it’s annoying, a functional version of Powers with Katee Sackhoff as Deena Pilgrim, in period shows, something about Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of women’s magazines, or a kicky vision of the seventies and eighties in Washington and New York through the eyes of a woman suspiciously like Nora Ephron, in crime, maybe a story about the DC Madam. I suspect the dynamics of this world would be similar: a period of establishing the competence and coolness of these women, followed by overreach, downfall, and accountability (arcs, by the way, that Sex and the City and Girls‘ most determined critics never give those shows enough credit for following). But the details would be different: we’d have to have audiences that accept private lives as important as power struggles, sex as something to be explored rather than simply had, frivolity as not more condemnable than violence or anger.

I wouldn’t want to have to choose between this fantasy world and the one we’ve got. I don’t want to give up Game of Thrones or The Wire for any of these other things. I just wish they could exist too, that Sex and the City wasn’t written out of history, and that Damages could have worked better on FX and on DirecTV, and that we weren’t still stuck on the idea that male fantasies are the stuff of literature, and female fantasies are treats.

The bridge is yours.

-Two perspectives on Liz Lemon’s wedding last night.

-CBS is adapting Under The Dome.

-A good point on medical marijuana and Parenthood.

-An app for my fellow Game of Thrones fans.

-We’re finally getting a Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell series.

I’m looking forward to heading back to Park City in January, but this news about the Sundance Film Festival’s lineup this year is making me particularly enthusiastic about getting back to the press tent:

In what festival programmers say is a Sundance first, fully half of the narrative features were made by women.

Culled from 1,227 submissions, the 16 dramas playing in the 2013 festival announced Wednesday cover a wide array of subjects and are populated by well-known actors (Casey Affleck, Daniel Radcliffe, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Biel) and complete unknowns. Many of the films, perhaps as a reflection of the gender of their directors, focus closely on personal, and often highly sexual, relationships.

“They are very much women’s stories,” said Trevor Groth, the festival’s programming director. In the 2012 festival, only three of the 16 dramatic competition films were made by women. According to San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, only 5% of the 250 highest-grossing films last year were directed by women.

It’s great that Sundance has hit this milestone, and hopefully now that they’ve gotten there, they’ll try to maintain the ratio. But it’s also an illustration of how easy it is to get these numbers right if you really want to. This isn’t even a matter of a couple hundred television writing jobs. It’s eight movies.

It’s the top-ten list time of year, and as I’m catching up on some shows and sifting through my list of favorites, I’ve been struck by how many fantastic performances we’ve seen in television this year. While some are obvious continuations of dominant streaks, like Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s turns on Breaking Bad, or Tina Fey’s embrace of happiness on 30 Rock, there are some truly astonishing turns going down on shows that almost no one is watching, or in shows that are so crowded with flashy performances that these are in danger of being overlooked. Here are five of the actors whose work hit me hardest this year:

1. Khandi Alexander, Treme: I ran a little behind Treme this season, but catching up on it this week, I regretted that. Much of that regret comes from how marvelous Alexander is as LaDonna Batiste-Williams. As a bar owner trying to keep her place alive, and determined to see through the prosecution of the men who robbed and sexually assaulted her, Alexander is by turns moody and joyful. Whether she’s feuding with her husband’s wealthy family, cooly cussing out a man demanding protection money from her, finally taking the stand in her much-delayed trial, or developing a tender friendship with Albert Lambreaux, Alexander’s been given the chance to be as complete a female character as I’ve seen on television in a long time. “Burnt me out for nothing,” she said in the season finale when her case ended in a heartbreaking mistrial. But it’s not nothing to those of us who have been watching at home.

2. Andra Fuller, The L.A. Complex: It is a source of considerable sadness to me that so few people found it in themselves to watch The L.A. Complex, an incredibly sharp ensemble show about what it actually takes to become successful in the entertainment industry. The cast is strong up and down the lineup, but if there was justice in the business, this should have been a breakout performance for Andra Fuller as closeted rapper Kaldrick King. King is one of the most sexual and emotional gay characters ever to appear on network television, and as he battered a young lover, made amends with him and reconnected with his father, and began a relationship with a handsome young lawyer who gave him the courage to come out, Fuller acted the hell out of every scene.

3. Eliza Coupe, Happy Endings: I spoke to Eliza Coupe earlier this season about her approach to physical comedy, playing uptight, and being half of one of only a few interracial couples on television. Since then, her performance as Jane Kerkovich-Williams has only gotten deeper and funnier. Whether she’s going overboard in enjoying being the breadwinner in her family, sneaking a perfectly-prepared turkey into her sister’s house to ensure that Thanksgiving isn’t a disaster, or revisiting the origin of her relationship with her husband Brad, Jane’s exploded the idea that being controlling means you have to be a humorless bitch, and I love her for it.

4. Charles Dance and Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones: Peter Dinklage probably has Game of Thrones‘ acting awards slot locked up as long as Tyrion Lannister lives. But that’s too bad, because Dance and Williams spent this year putting on the best cross-generational acting clinic on television as Tywin Lannister and Arya Stark. They’re people who should be mortal enemies, but, isolated from their families and in service to larger causes, find themselves understanding each other. I could watch the two of them dance around each other in Harrenhal’s great hall for ten hours a year.

5. Walton Goggins, Justified: Goggins, who’s been everywhere from Sons of Anarchy to Lincoln this year, probably has the best shot of anyone on this list of scoring an actual Emmy nomination. As Boyd Crowder, Goggins has taken an archetype, a racist redneck, and infused the role with an injection of coal-country rage, tenderness towards his surrogate father Arlo Givens, and a spiky relationship with Arlo’s son Raylan, who is his sometime-enemy, sometime-ally. I can’t wait to see where their rivalry heads next. Goggins was good on The Shield, but I think he’s even better on Justified.

This post discusses plot details from the November 29 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Even before Parks and Recreation fully hit its stride in its second season, I enjoyed the funny little town that it started to build in its uneven first year. Pawnee, with its cheerful cults, horrifying murals, vicious rivalry with Eagleton, and deadpan public radio station, has always been a perfectly surreal little riff on middle American small towns. But in this fifth season of the show, I’ve started wondering if we’ve reached Pawnee’s borders. Parks and Recreation has been acting as if it’s winding up its characters lives, pairing up its singletons, sending its young people on paths to stable adulthood, and leveling up Leslie, if not towards her dreams, at least towards higher tasks than fixing the pit behind Ann’s house.

This episode did precisely what a number of other episodes have done this season: it revisited an old storyline, namely, Leslie’s hatred of her true hometown, Eagleton, with the long-standing issue, Leslie’s desire to build a new park in the former pit. The show moved forward these stories a little bit, by having Leslie find and accept the decency of the only Eagletonian who doesn’t share the sentiments of the town’s “Now entering Pawnee. Good luck with that,” road signs. It’s nice to have her overcome that prejudice, but the story felt more like a tying up of loose ends than a genuinely funny riff. Neither the evil Eagletonians’ fake park, nor the return of Season 1 Leslie in the form of her attack on the urban planner, were innovations, or even welcome returns to truly hilarious jokes past.

Both the B and C subplots, with Tom getting Rent-A-Swag up and running, and April finding a way to help Andy realize his actual talents as a potential cop were stronger, particularly the latter. I’d been worried that Andy might get knocked off his ambitions to become a cop, turning it into just another dream like Mouserat as a stadium-filling band. “I did everything I was supposed to go and I walked around the building four times and only twenty minutes have gone buy,” he explained of the job that Chris got him working as a security guard to give him experience prior to taking his police academy exams. “I got so bored I started thinking about existence.” But April’s turn as Judy Hitler, however accidentally, exposed that Andy’s actually excellent with children: he may be bored a lot of the time, but when he’s activated, he’s perfect. And while April and Andy’s fantasies used to be an expression of a genuine yearning for an entirely different life, they seem to have settled in to the marriage and the jobs that they’ve got. Their fantasies are fun for them, and for us, but they’re no longer a means of escape.

And maybe that’s where we leave them. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Pawnee tremendously over the past four and a half years—it’s been some of my all-time favorite television viewing. But I’m wondering if it might be time for this city mouse to leave the country. I just wish Parks and Recreation was going to leave me devastated that I have to go, rather than doing something I haven’t done since the show’s first season: checking my watch during episodes, waiting for my flight out of town and on to the next thing.