30 Rock is coming to an end, and sometimes, it’s seemed like that might be the end of Alec Baldwin on television. But the actor just signed a two-year contract with Universal, the studio that produced 30 Rock. And hopefully we’ll get some new projects out of it. While I’ll always miss Jack Donaghy, here are five kinds of roles I’d love to see Baldwin in once he’s no longer committed to wearing tuxedoes after six o’clock.

1. A show about the Mayor of New York: When he’s talking about his career after acting, Baldwin has frequently speculated about running for political office, including for Mayor of New York. Now that Starz has cancelled its drama Boss, which starred Kelsey Grammer as Mayor of Chicago, there’s space for a prestige drama with a middle-aged prestige actor chewing political scenery. Baldwin loves a juicy line reading, and he’s got the elegance to carry it off. Post-Sandy, post-Occupy, and post-crash, it’s time for a show about New York that isn’t confined to Brooklyn a Girls or 2 Broke Girls, and that isn’t confined to young people in New York, either.

2. A romantic comedy about a middle-aged man: Baldwin’s heartbroken, nostalgic visitor to the Italy of his youth was the best part of To Rome With Love. His relationships with powerful women were some of the most entertaining parts of 30 Rock. And from profiles of him, it seems like he’s a romantic in real life. There aren’t enough good romantic comedies for actual adults. And I have mixed feelings about Nancy Meyers and It’s Complicated, in which Baldwin also starred as hound dog rather than as a romantic. But it would be nice to see Baldwin get to indulge those impulses, to be a man who’s sincere about love rather than blowing it off, and experiencing some of the yearnings and insecurities that normally are reserved for women.

3. A mid-life crisis show: Mid-life crises are big for women on television: Laura Dern’s melting down on HBO’s Enlightened. Annette Bening will be doing the same thing on NBC in Save Me. The Newsroom was supposed to, in part, be about a middle-aged man trying to be a better person, but it wasn’t willing to be nearly hard enough on Will McAvoy to be interesting. Watching someone like Baldwin actually go through radically reevaluating his life would be fascinating to watch.

4. A reporting show: Speaking of The Newsroom, television really needs a show that actually understands how reporting works. Thinking of how much fun Bill Nighy has chomping scenery in things like State of Play and Page Eight, I realized that Baldwin may be the closest thing he has to a potential American equivalent. He’d be a delightful editor character in a multi-generational newsroom drama.

I don’t agree with everything Dan Harmon says in this talk about the television business model, though I think it’s definitely of interest to anyone who likes his work and wants to understand the dynamics around his dismissal from Community better:

One of the things that’s fascinating here is the extent to which Harmon’s lecture is a love letter to FX, which has both let a lot of low-budget creativity thrive and, though this is a factor Harmon doesn’t really discuss, has figured out how to financially support that creativity. Something like Sons of Anarchy had a lot of time to grow into the relative ratings success it is now, and has merchandising deals that help support its production. And as much as I dislike it, making Anger Management on the cheap and syndicating it is a way of financing both that patience and wild experiments like Louie. In a way, this talk clarified something for me: I’m very interested in how we make the production of certain kinds of content that I think are important first sustainable, and then how to build the audience or expectation for them so they can be successful. Harmon seems to be saying that sustainability eventually turns into expectations of larger profits, and the murder of creativity. There’s tension between those ideas, but I think in an ideal world, we need both sustainable models and people working at the frontiers to build the markets for ideas that will eventually improve whatever’s being produced by a profit-oriented model.

Over at New York Magazine, Heather Havrilesky has a great piece that posits an answer to one of the things that gets me twitchiest about post-apocalypse stories: the lack of an explanation for how everything got so terrible in the first place. She argues that the point of shows like The Walking Dead or novels like Colson Whitehead’s Year Zero is to clear away some of the complications of modern society and to let us revel in the possibilities of stark choices or stark scenarios: the opportunity to wander around a city alone, unencumbered by security guards or a need to justify turning up someplace, the possibility of nobly sacrificing yourself for your baby, the opportunity to demonstrate your love and commitment to someone you love who is in danger in a visceral, even violent way. She writes:

The focus of these novels isn’t on the shape and form of the catastrophe; those details are often pretty vague. The apocalypse mostly serves as a way to turn up the contrast on a hero’s solitary battle to adapt and sally forth. Stripping away the complications and distractions of the modern world, what is our protagonist left with? The same melancholy and longing he or she always had, of course, but with far more of an excuse to feel these heavy emotions at every turn. Instead of injecting desperation, romance, solitude, and morbidity into a banal tale, these qualities are encoded in the apocalyptic novel’s DNA, minimizing the trivial clutter and heightening the stakes. Values and ideas about morality are stripped down to their essential nature: Kill or be killed? Conform and tolerate oppression or escape and risk death? Somehow, though, even in older works like Ballard’s The Drowned World, such disturbing questions are savored and relished. There’s an obvious delight taken in the awfulness of the transformed planet. In his survey of science fiction, A Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss refers to this tendency of authors to concoct enviable end times as “the cozy catastrophe.” As others suffer and die around him, our hero runs wild, enjoying the fruits of the worldwide holocaust.

This fascinates me in part because I think my reaction to post-apocalypse fiction, and really, all sorts of futuristic narratives, is to be more interested in how we got there than what we do when we’re there. I love the first two books in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy because they’re all about the choices the characters make to extend their lifespans, to terraform Mars, to embrace new religions, and ultimately, to declare independence from Earth, but I’m relatively bored by the third novel, which is about all the sex and drama a new generation has once the future’s finally arrived. Reading The Hunger Games, I always want to know how the Capitol seized enough power to bring the Districts to heel enough to set up the Games in the first place. I wonder about first contact and the Bugger Wars in Ender’s Game, though I think Orson Scott Card is smart enough to weave a lot of backstory about the way the world changed into his story about what it’s become now. I love Contagion so much because it’s the rare, beautifully optimistic movie about how we avert a post-apocalypse, rather than bowing down to the inevitability of disaster.

The bridge is yours.

-Guys, I am worried about The Hobbit.

-Ashton Kutcher as Steve Jobs.

-The romance that could improve Once Upon A Time.

I skipped Black Rock at Sundance, even though I love The League‘s Kate Aselton, because it takes a lot to get me to watch a horror movie. The last one I watched was Drag Me To Hell, which I watched because it was about the mortgage crisis, and from which I learned that you should never foreclose on a powerful gypsy. But Black Rock looks like the rare horror movie that could lure me out from my general moratorium:

There’s something really powerful about the promise of a piece of popular culture that insists that a woman has the right to say no at any point in a sexual encounter, no matter how flirtatious she’s been or how willing she’s seemed up until that point, and that she has the right to say no without being judged or attacked. And it’s even more powerful to make that point, and then emphasize how terrifying it is to live in a world where people feel like they’re entitled to sexual access to you, and if not to that access, to enforce the way they think you should behave. In fact, watching this trailer felt like a metaphor for doing feminist work, particularly on the internet: it can be frightening, and it can be hard, and sometimes people appear out of the blue to turn on you. But when you fight back, and when you see the people who are fighting back with you, sometimes you end up recognizing capacities you didn’t realize you had, and support you didn’t realize was there the whole time.

Coming to the end of my day of writing on Monday, I realized something: I was exhausted by my last several days of watching television. It’s not just that Sunday has become so jam-packed with strong, interesting shows that my weekends feel more like a build-up to my craziest work day than a chance to relax, or the fact that I’m in the middle of a barrage of mid-season finales. It’s that that almost all television now, particularly in drama, seems to be operating in a sphere so intense that it’s impossible to relax—and sometimes impossible to watch, or even to follow what’s happening on-screen. Every show has a conspiracy. Shocking violence has become the norm, and seems to be escalating quickly. The stakes are constantly so high in every episode of television that plot is often swamping strong character dynamics. It made me wonder if our television needs to take a chill pill for a while, if only so we can start thinking more carefully about what kinds of storytelling tools are most effective.

The shows that got me thinking about this phenomenon were Scandal and Homeland, two shows that purport to operate in very different environments, network and cable, soap and anti-hero drama, but this week had a plot element in common. It’s not as if political assassination attempts are taboo on television: West Wing shot President Bartlet in its “In The Shadow Of Two Gunmen” episode, though the show made clear relatively quickly that the President himself would survive, and drew much of its drama from the grave threat to the life of one of his chief aides. But in that case, it felt like assassination was reserved for a moment of extreme gravity in the narrative arc of the show. In four days last week, we had two shows that had as their plot points attempts to kill a high official of the United States government. On last Thursday’s episode of Scandal, President Fitzgerald Grant was shot on the way to his birthday party, in what seems to have been a plot set in motion by his wife—it was the presidency as soap opera subject. And then on Sunday’s episode of Homeland, former prisoner of war Nicholas Brody, who has declined to murder a bunker full of government officials, got a chance to kill just one, the Vice President of the United States, the man responsible for the drone strike that killed Brody’s surrogate son and the biological son of the super-terrorist Abu Nazir. Last year, Brody’s decision not to commit an assassination was one of the most exciting episodes of television on any network.

It’s not only that more than one show is now fantasizing about killing high officials, a highly sensitive subject, that diminished the power of Homeland. It’s that the conspiracy around Brody has gotten significantly more complex. There are more people in play on the ground, journalist Roya Hamad, a munitions expert and his team, Abu Nazir himself, who seems to have strolled over the border. The scheme is grander, an attack on a welcome home ceremony for Marines, in front of Roya’s camera crew. The shock of Brody’s true nature would be even bigger now that he’s a Congressman. All of these elements amp up the magnitude of the plot against America. But they also introduce the possibility of inconsistency, implausibility, of error, and of emotional discontinuity, or losing track of characterization. And yet people continually seem to think these sorts of escalations are worth it, to believe that plausible character development and the emotional stakes that come along with being a human in a high-pressure situation aren’t actually enough to sustain our interest, and there has to be a giant conspiracy (as was the case with Lost Resort and remains the case with Revenge) or mystery or the promise of bloody destruction to keep us in our seats. It’s too bad, because some of my favorite shows—Sons of Anarchy with the cartels and the Irish, Homeland with Nazir, and Revenge with its shadowy initiative—have spent a lot more time on conspiracies that seem like they must eventually be dissolved or dismantled than on their main characters emotions, and have done so at moments when the actors on each shows are hitting high-water marks.

And it’s not just complicated serialized storytelling that can be getting in the way of experiencing genuine emotion on shows. One of the things that’s marked the search for increased intensity in our television watching is increasingly escalating violence, disgustingness as a signpost of how serious a situation. In 18 hours yesterday, I saw two of the grossest things I’ve ever watched on television, Glenn yanking an arm bone out of a zombie’s rotting flesh on the mid-season finale of The Walking Dead (I couldn’t make it through the rest of the episode) and a scene from an upcoming episode of television that was much more viscerally upsetting for taking place in a non-genre setting. This is not to say that grotesque violence can’t be powerful signposting: the latter incident is so powerful and so keeping in character that I’m still having a physical reaction to my revulsion hours later. And for those of you who know what’s coming in the Song of Fire and Ice universe, I’m bracing myself for some truly horrific things coming down the pike in Game of Thrones that will literally test my ability to keep my eyes on the screen as they occur. But I’m curious about the extent to which it’s actually necessary to holding mass interest.
Read more