After I wrote yesterday about feeling overloaded on both violence and baroque plot mechanisms that ratchet up the intensity of shows, Linda Holmes at NPR wrote a wonderful piece about what we lose about focusing on violent death as the only possible stake for dramatic storytelling:

But what is concerning is that this revolution has been deep but narrow; it’s like we have an army of dazzlingly fluent poets who all write in one language. That doesn’t, of course, make all the poetry the same, any more than all English-language poetry is the same. These shows are varied in many ways: The Wire is not the same show as The Walking Dead just because people get shot and otherwise brutalized, and American Horror Story and Boardwalk Empire are hardly identical twins. But they share elements, one of which is that the stakes involve — not solely but largely — avoiding being violently killed. And for that reason, they ask the viewer to want to watch people being violently killed now and then, and sometimes now and then and then and then, because otherwise the threats are false…

The “television versus film” debate is absurd and always has been; there’s no way to attain a weighted average of all of television and all of film, nobody sees all of either one, and comparing best versus best ignores everything else. But at some point, if dramatic television wants to be considered as vibrant and exciting as film can be, it needs a better mix. It needs love stories and family stories, workplace stories and friendship stories, and they can’t all be soaked in blood. Inevitably, there is a portion of the audience that is — as Alyssa pointed out — eventually exhausted by that. Not offended; exhausted.

I also took some time yesterday to talk to Maureen Ryan of Huffington Post both about Sons of Anarchy and some of the issues I raised in my piece. Sons fans may be interested in the whole diavlog. But I wanted to pull this section of it, where we talk a bit about how to work our way out of hugely complex plots that are dependent on violent stakes. We talked a bit about British series, which have developed in the opposite direction that Linda described, exploring a broad range of forms and tones but without delving deeply into a limited set of tropes and themes. And I suggested that maybe we need a halfway point between traditional procedurals, which devote very little time to long character arcs and keep their plots largely confined to single episodes, and serialized dramas, which have both very long plot and character arcs. Mad Men, after all, is fundamentally a procedural, a show that has a discrete task per episode, often one that very clearly snaps onto the previous episode’s task like a Lego in the construction of the major goal of the season, and one that leaves significant space in every episode for character development. And it’s avoided the trap of both the traditional procedural, and of violent death stakes as the only ones:

Almost immediately after Kansas City Chiefs lineback Jovan Belcher committed suicide outside the Chiefs’ practice facility — less than an hour after police say he murdered his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins in their home — discussion turned to the role concussions and brain trauma may have played in the deaths. That isn’t surprising, given that the link between football and long-term brain trauma has sparked a nationwide conversation about the safety of the men who play the game.

That’s an important discussion: protecting the men and boys who play football from long-term brain injuries sustained on the field is imperative. But because the manner in which he killed himself eliminated any chance doctors have of diagnosing chronic traumatic encepholopathy (CTE), concussions, or other brain trauma, we will never know for sure what role concussions played in the tragedy.

What is painfully evident though is that the murder of Kasandra Perkins was a blatant act of domestic violence, and the combination of that murder and Belcher’s ensuing suicide followed a path that is common in our country. And yet, while we seem willing to drift to the easy conversation (about concussions) or the politically charged conversation (about guns), we’re ignoring the painful truths about domestic violence and murder-suicides in American society. By focusing so intently on a conversation with no immediate answers, we’re missing the conversation that is so evident.

“We don’t have all of the details about whether or to what extent he’d been abusive before this, but when you pick up a gun and murder your girlfriend, that’s domestic violence,” Shaina Goodman, the public policy coordinator at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told me. “This is what domestic violence homicide looks like.”

And sadly, it looks like that all too often. There are 12 murder-suicides a week in this country, according to one study, and most are domestic in nature. Three women a day are killed by intimate partners. 91 percent of domestic murders are committed by men, 88 percent involve a firearm. The most dangerous combination of killer in domestic abuse cases, according to David Adams, co-author of a report on domestic murders, is a “jealous substance abuser with a gun,” and such a combination “was present in about 40 percent of the killers” Adams interviewed for his study.

Is that Jovan Belcher? It’s hard to tell. In college, he punched out a glass window over a woman, according to crime reports from the University of Maine, and police were called to his college home another time over a dispute, though not violent in nature, with a woman. Other news reports have indicated that Belcher and Perkins were at a rocky point in their relationship, that he was visiting another woman he identified as his “girlfriend” to police, and that he exchanged text messages with a friend in which he called Perkins “crazy.” Belcher was a “heavy drinker,” intoxicated the night before the incident, and abused prescription pain medications, according to other reports.

I don’t think any of that proves that Belcher has a history of domestic violence, but according to Adams’ study (also authored by professors Jacquelyn C. Campbell and Richard Gelles), only 25 percent of murder-suicide incidents indicated previous cases of domestic violence in arrest records.

Whether Belcher fits the perfect profile of most men who commit murder-suicide or not, it’s more clear that this is a case of domestic violence than it is that concussions or brain injuries played a role. And this isn’t just about Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins. It’s about all of the men who commit domestic homicides and all of the women who die in them each year in our country.

So while it’s important to continue exploring the link between football and brain injuries and the societal effects those brain injuries can have, using concussions as a catch-all explainer of Belcher and Perkins’ death strikes me as a convenient way to gloss over the tougher-to-handle fact that this may have simply been a case of domestic violence. By using concussions or CTE as such a catch-all, we miss the chance to explore the prevalence of domestic violence in our society and the mores, norms, and gender roles that make that violence so prevalent. We miss the opportunity to examine policies we could enact (like the Violence Against Women Act, which will come in front of Congress again this month) and societal changes we need to make to ensure that domestic violence — and murder-suicide — is less likely to occur in the future.

“Talking only about brain injuries makes it about the individual,” Goodman said. “To respond to this incident as only about mental health problems ignores the systemic, cultural level of domestic violence, the reality of what it looks like, and the serious prevalence of it. In the end, and in addition to whatever other important issues this incident raises, this is a domestic violence issue and it needs to be identified as such.”

Netflix’s attempts to develop original content has frequently been puzzling to me, given its focus on resurrecting dead masterpieces like Arrested Development, remaking masterpieces that don’t necessarily translate to new settings like House of Cards, keeping alive shows that no one really believed needed to be kept alive like Terra Nova. But its latest move, to outbid other competitors for Disney’s back and future catalogue, actually makes perfect sense to me:

The agreement is the first time one of Hollywood’s big studios has chosen Web streaming over pay television. Netflix has made similar “output” deals with smaller movie suppliers like DreamWorks Animation and the Weinstein Company. But all of the majors — Disney, Paramount, Universal, Warner Brothers, Sony and 20th Century Fox — have stayed with Starz, HBO or Showtime until now.

Library titles like “Dumbo,” “Alice in Wonderland” and “Pocahontas” will become available on Netflix immediately, Disney said. Netflix will begin streaming new release Disney films starting in late 2016, when the current accord with Starz expires. The deal announced on Tuesday includes direct-to-DVD movies…With the Disney deal, Netflix will be able to offer customers exclusive access to a pipeline of films that are reliably some of the year’s biggest box-office successes. Netflix has also made it a priority to strengthen its children’s and family offerings.

What’s smart about this is that it’s Netflix identifying an actual niche in the market. Hulu’s done this already in a lot of ways, doubling down on content that will appeal to serious television and film fans, whether it’s streaming foreign and foreign-language content like Hatufim, historical shows like Ironside, or even films from the Criterion collection. It’s true that Hulu is building its audience with a lot of tiny Legos, but the bricks in that wall don’t cost them a lot either, and it means they can easily adjust should one of those investments fail to pay off.

Investing in children’s and family programming is an unsexy way to build a firewall, but it’s an important one. Parents who want access to content for their children, but are worried about their youngesters wandering elsewhere in the cable lineup, or who don’t want to shell out cable prices when they only want some of the content, are a perfect audience for Netflix. And they’re a much clearer audience than whoever Netflix thought it was aiming Lillyhammer at. I don’t think it’s dumb for Netflix to experiment with original content. But until it figures out an actual successful strategy there, it makes much more sense to me for the company to spend $300 million a year on Disney content than for it to spend $100 million on 26 episodes of House of Cards

The bridge is yours.

-We’re not getting any more Super Best Friends Forever because everything is terrible.

-James Poniewozki has convinced me to catch up with Boardwalk Empire.

-I would totally get behind a campaign to keep L.A. Complex alive.

-Curious as to whether Parenthood will work in the end of Asperger’s syndrome as a diagnosis in DSM-V.

-And because we occasionally all need a dose of delight:

It’s kind of too bad that Newt Gingrich’s appearance on Parks and Recreation is the result of a drive-by coincidence, rather than an extended engagement, which I bet the former Speaker of the House would chow down on with serious relish:

Filming at Indianapolis’s St. Elmo Steak House (Ron Swanson, you ol’ devil), Parks and Recreation ran into the one and only Newt Gingrich. Showrunner Mike Schur “quickly huddled with the episode’s writer and director to incorporate Gingrich into the script,” reports the Indy Star. “It was a completely random chance,” Schur said. “But you can’t pass up on an opportunity like that.” Gingrich will now follow recent appearances by Vice-President Joe Biden and Sens. John McCain, Olympia Snowe, and Barbara Boxer.

The news that this was happening actually helped me put a finger on what’s been bothering me about this season of Parks and Recreation. Ron Swanson long gave in to Leslie’s charms, and made an exception to his general libertarianism when it comes to her efforts to improve Pawnee. On City Council, I thought she might face actual intellectual challenges of the sort that Ron used to face, perhaps in the form of the oft-glimpsed but not-fully-developed Councilman Hauser. Instead, we’ve just gotten Councilman Jam, who is a jackass rather than a representative of an actual philosophy of governance, and an old white supremacist. As a result, Leslie hasn’t forced the kinds of challenges that would require her to test her convictions and level up. Instead, she’s stumbled into unforced errors, and so has the show. I’d like to see someone like Gingrich, who’s a big character, and who represents a worldview that Leslie would actually be forced to test herself against.

The late Christopher Hitchens’ article in Vanity Fair arguing that women aren’t funny has done a lot of harm over the years, lending pedigreed intellectual credence to an argument made by lots of incredibly dumb comedians and commentators everywhere. But one useful thing the response to the piece has accomplished is to push Vanity Fair to do somewhat better at covering female comedians. There was the 2008 feature “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” The “What Tina Wants” profile of Tina Fey from 2009. And now, even better than separating out female comedians from the pack, the magazine is doing its first ever comedy issue, putting female comedians, including non-white ones and non-tiny ones, on three separate, great-looking covers.

And even more than that, it’s published an interesting poll, conducted through CBS facilities, of 1,132 adults, that suggest some revealing things about how audiences view comedy. More men than women think sexual assault is the one topic they’d most like to see comedians put off-limits: it was the choice of 38 percent of men, and 32 percent of women, ahead of “September 11,” “the sick and disabled,” and “religious figures.” The second most-popular response for women, at 28 percent, was “all of them,” the choice of only 14 percent of men. So maybe women do have a sensitive streak when it comes to humor generally. But among everyone else, men may be just as uncomfortable with bad jokes about sexual assault as women are, even if they aren’t as vocal about it. Comedians who assume they’re on safe ground in mostly-male audiences might want to check their set lists twice.

Both men and women in the survey think men are funnier than women—65 percent of men said male comedians were funnier and 54 percent of women agreed. 30 percent of women said women were funnier, compared to just 13 percent of men. And 18 percent of men and 12 percent of women said that there was no difference. Some of this may just be a result of who men and women see being funny in our media environment: there are a lot more extremely famous male stand-ups than women, and more male sitcom stars than female sitcom stars. Or maybe it’s Hitchens, and Adam Carolla, and everyone else. But that perception does suggest that women going into the comedy business face some hurdles in convincing audiences that they can be just as funny as men.

I’d recommend taking the survey with a grain of salt—after all, its best sitcom of all time question didn’t even offer up the option of I Love Lucy. But it’s still nice, in a debate that is on a lot of levels completely and utterly ridiculous, to see an organization that has a record of Not Helping, at least pulling together a little data that can help us have more productive conversations.

This post discusses plot points from the fifth season of Sons of Anarchy through the December 4 finale.

From its pilot episode, Sons of Anarchy has made one of its hallmarks out of its musical montages to close out episodes and particularly seasons. The sequences can be thunderingly literal, though in terms of blunt force, they’re on the gentler end of the tactics Kurt Sutter’s retelling of Hamlet employs to underscore its arguments about power, masculinity, and loneliness. And so one of the things I enjoyed so much about the finale to this fifth season of Sons, a season that despite its flaws restored my faith in the show in some significant ways, can be summed up by the music that bracketed this episode, which for once came at the two main points the episode was trying to make sideways.

It began with Lulu’s “To Sir With Love,” and a focus on Gemma and Tara. This is a song with a rather literal origin, as the theme song to the 1967 movie adaptation of the memoir of the same name: when Lulu explains that “The time has come / For closing books and long / Last looks must end,” she was actually talking about a school year. Here, the men about whom Gemma and Tara think that “And as I leave, I know that / I am leaving my best friend / A friend who taught me right from wrong / And weak from strong that’s a lot to learn,” have taught them, but not exactly by example.

The strongest arc of this season of Sons has been Tara’s moral education, and it makes sense that her journey, which began with an image of her and Jax fading into an old photograph of Gemma and John, ends with Gemma resuming her place behind the man at the head of the table, telling Jax “It’s okay, baby.” This is the story of the failure of a grand experiment, of Tara trying on being a traditional old lady, blind to her husband’s flaws, having hair-pulling fights in the example of her mother-in-law, and deluding herself into believing that she could manipulate a man like Otto Delaney. That example’s been proved wrong at almost every level. Otto manipulated Tara into facilitating what will likely be his last murder. The fight between Carla and Tara fixed none of Tara’s long-term problems and contributed to Carla’s suicide. Like the nerves in her damaged hand, Tara’s old self, and the old moral sense that propelled her out of Charming so long ago are growing back, an inevitable life force.

Perhaps the most telling moment in the end of Tara’s experiment is that when Wendy tells her “You have no idea what happened to me last night, do you?…Jax came to see me after Tig dropped me off. Told me to back off from his family and threatened to tell my work that I came here looking for Abel high and out of control…Unfortunately a positive drug test might make it true. Because he banged a speedball into my shoulder,” Tara believes her, almost immediately. She doesn’t question Wendy’s version of events, or her motivations. She heeds Wendy’s warning to “Believe it. The MC, this town. It kills all the things you love…Trying is never going to get you out. Go to Oregon now, before something awful happens to you and your sons.” Rather than letting Jax talk her back into believing that Wendy’s a danger to their family, she tests him and when Jax tells Tara “She can’t prove shit. She’s just a junkie. She’s never gonna get custody,” he fails.

And when Tara confronts Jax, truly, about what their life has become, and forces him to make a decision, it turns out that, as he’s alluded to in the past, Jax isn’t much for the idea not just of living off his wife, but by bowing to her moral code. “I’m just getting things in order,” Tara tells Jax when he discovers the paperwork she’s filled out to provide for their children if something should happen to them. “She’s the best choice. You shouldn’t have attacked her, Jax.” “Is that what this is?” he demands of her. “You trying to teach me some kind of lesson?” She tries to lay out a vision of old ladyhood that could bridge the gap between them, maybe even provide a bridge to a new kind of life. “I used to think if I gave up on the club, or Charming, I’d somehow be betraying you and I didn’t want to do that,” Tara explained. “And then I realized my job as your old lady is to be strong when and where you can’t be. That’s what this is, baby. I took that job in Oregon. It starts in two weeks. The boys are coming with me. And if you love them, and if you love me, you’ll follow us up there. We both know if we stay here we’ll end up like the two people we hate the most. And our boys will be destined to relive all of our mistakes.” But it’s too late for them, as she’s taken off to jail, though whether by the machinations of Gemma or former U.S. Marshal Lee remains unclear. The season ends with Abel pulling one of Jax’s rings off his finger, looking at it as a mysterious object, and then placing it carefully on his own finger, too big for the weight now, but the boy has time to grow. It’s a quite moment, but one of the most forceful statements Sons has ever made for the power of fate over free will.
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