I’ve written before about the ways in which anti-heroes wives tend to get judged even more harshly than the villainous men they’re married to. And in the Los Angeles Times today, the great Meredith Blake talked to me, the New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum, and Jezebel founder Anna Holmes about why that’s the case. Meredith, Emily, and Anna pointed out something I think is critically important: these characters are initially set up as obstacles at a point in the story when we still want to see these men succeed:

Shows like “Breaking Bad” encourage viewers to relate to men who do truly unspeakable things (poisoning children) while judging their wives for much smaller transgressions (retaliatory affairs). If they stand up to the men in their lives, they’re irritating obstacles; if they don’t, they’re hypocritical colluders. See also: Soprano, Carmela. “These women are called upon to provide the drama, to serve as roadblocks that the male protagonist has to get around,” says Anna Holmes, founder of the feminist website Jezebel.com.

The phenomenon frightens and perplexes series creator Vince Gilligan. “Skyler compared to Walt is Mother Teresa. She’s the hero of that duo, yet so many viewers are saying, Man, I wish she could get bumped off, killed off or otherwise get out of his way so he can really break bad,” he told The Times in an interview earlier this year. “I want as many people as I can to watch the show, but wow, I hope I’m not living next door to any of them.”…

“They’ve designed Betty as a character you’re supposed to react against. Even if you wanted to be sympathetic, it triggered in you as a viewer this kind of ‘Ha-ha!’ Nelson reaction,” says Nussbaum, referring to the bully from “The Simpsons.”

It’s one thing to have your characters have arcs and grow over a series of several seasons. It’s a harder thing to completely reverse polarity on your characters when you’ve established it so strongly from the beginning, too. While that’s an orientation that makes it easier for audiences to hate female characters than male characters, it’s a problem that also gets in the way of viewers appreciating the downfall of male characters, too. If characters don’t want to see Vic Mackey or Walter White punished, then they might find it frustrating to discover that the creators of their favorite shows side with the wives, rather than their anti-heroic husbands.

The bridge is yours.

-Google just gave the Geena Davis Institute a whole bunch of money to analyze the roles women play in film and television.

-Tony Horowitz on where Lincoln went wrong on Lincoln.

-These stills have me pretty excited about Ender’s Game.

-Also, Casey Affleck does the Boston Strangler? Yes, please.

-The U.K. may be going in on tax cuts for video game companies.

I’ve been looking forward to Star Trek Into Darkness, which, judging by the first trailer, looks gorgeous, and has appropriate amounts of Cumberbatchiness, though I am somewhat concerned about the levels of Karl-Urban-as-Bones:

One thing I’d note, though: I kind of appreciated the ludicrousness of the Red Matter-driven explanation for Nero’s actions in the last movie, if only because of the way they removed the movie from contemporary geopolitics. Nero was acting like a terrorist, but for reasons that had to do with failures of diplomacy, bonkers science, and personal grief. Star Trek Into Darkness looks like it could be considerably more engaged with our own environment, and I’m not sure how that will play out.

The voiceover from Benedict Cumberbatch’s villain here lays out are a sort of inverse of the current justifications for our security state. Currently, we convince ourselves—and pop culture plays a role in this, from the veneration of Abu Nazir on Homeland to Silva in Skyfall— that we’re under constant threat from hyper-competent terrorists, even though all of the potential attacks on the U.S. over the past couple of years were small-ball affairs that were easily foiled, in part because they were carried out by laughably incompetent figures. Cumberbatch, by contrast, tells Kirk (presumably) that his society is complacent, saying “You think your world is safe. It is an illusion. A comforting lie told to protect you,” and then setting out to prove it. Even though these sentiments come from different places, they’re both fundamentally oriented towards ramping up security, towards the maintenance of a certain level of paranoia. I’m looking forward to seeing how the movie handles that challenge, especially in the political context of the Federation, which is much more interconnected than our own world.

The vicious and ugly coordinated campaign to drive video blogger Anita Sarkeesian off the internet for the temerity of trying to raise money to support a series about the depictions of women in video games was one of the biggest stories in the feminist and geek spheres this year, and I’m glad to hear from Sarkeesian herself, through a talk she gave at TEDxWomen, precisely how unsuccessful that campaign was:

It’s amazing to hear that Sarkeesian is able to do this work full time, that a curriculum came out of her efforts, and perhaps most encouraging, that video game studios have invited Sarkeesian in to speak to them—the organizations that make the games that Sarkeesian’s haters would like to see stay reductive and as attuned to straight male fantasies turn out to be interested in her voice and perspectives.

But even more than knowing that Sarkeesian is still standing, still fighting, and appears to be bearing up psychologically just fine despite a campaign even more intense than some that have succeeded in pushing other women offline or out of covering certain areas of popular culture, it’s the way she explained what happened to her that is important. The attacks on her, she explained, were coordinated like a massively-multiplayer online game. Participants psyched each other up like they were fellow guild members, providing reinforcement for each other even as other voices condemned their actions. The escalation of the campaign was a form of leveling up. And Sarkeesian herself was turned into a boss character. That dynamic made the game sustainable, encouraged other people who might have otherwise sat on the sidelines to join in, and incentivized steadily worse behavior towards Sarkeesian. It worked at getting people participating. But at the end of the climactic boss fight, she’s still standing. For people who are considering gaming dynamics as an organizing tool, this is a powerful, if very negative, lesson about how to get participants to enlist in a campaign, if not how that campaign can be successful.

And the designation of Sarkeesian herself as an ultimate enemy is very telling. It’s one thing to enjoy depictions of attractive people of whichever gender you happen to be attracted to. It’s another to think you have a right to depictions of those people. And another entirely to be so attached to those depictions, and so uncomfortable or insecure about acknowledging that they might be problematic, talking about it, and enjoying them anyway that you get hysterically angry when someone proposes simply to analyze them. That says a lot more about you than your rational, intelligent, easily-supportable target. And it means that even if you succeed at whipping up a small, dedicated subculture to try to shut the thing you hate down, your chances of succeeding, and of being taken seriously by the outside world, are necessarily going to be limited. In a way, Anita Sarkeesian’s haters are like the Westboro Baptist Church: they can cause real emotional pain, but not substantive change, and they mostly exist as a reminder of their own increasingly marginal role in cultural or political life.

It’s been, if I’m to be perfectly honest, a disappointing season of fall television. Promising shows like The Mindy Project haven’t lived up to their potential. Sophomores like Homeland have given me heartburn, even if they still have credit to draw on. And even a new show I love, Nashville, hasn’t attracted viewers in numbers that would make me feel secure about its future. As with baseball, this is a wait until next year kind of game, which is why I was so excited to get my hands on Josef Adalian’s guide to the dramas in development for the 2013-2014 fall television. These are seven of the non-S.H.I.E.L.D. shows that have me feeling most excited, which doesn’t mean that they’ll actually make it to the air, or be good when they get there, or last. But hope springs eternal, and here are the things that will carry me through the upcoming hiatus and hopes of better when we return in midseason.

1. LA Woman (NBC): Graham Yost, who runs Justified, on a network, with what sounds like a female main character, in a spy drama? Yes please. Maybe they can get Carla Gugino, who’s been spending a lot of time on television as a guest star of late, to star and make us all remember Karen Sisco.

2. Meridian Hills (The CW): I like feminism, Mila Kunis, and period pieces, so the idea of Mila Kunis producing a period piece about the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment that’s about feminism invading the country club, sort of like The Help but without all the condescending soft racism and stereotyping, sounds like something that would make me very happy. Also like the strangest thing to make it on air ever, if that actually comes to pass. But I’m glad to see Kunis’s Seth MacFarlane-assisted clout’s at least going to some interesting chance-taking.

3. Untitled Surgeon General show (NBC): As someone who interviewed not one but two surgeon generals when I was in high school, and who loves David Kessler’s A Question of Intent , I am naturally predisposed to be excited about the idea of this project. For the rest of you who aren’t similarly hilariously dorky? This show has the potential to do two different things: come up with a way to make a medical procedural that’s about health policy, and offer up a reminder that there are parts of the federal government that do things other than try to catch terrorists.

4. Untitled George Washington show from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson (NBC) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Fox): My belief that we should have a lot more Revolutionary War and colonial America in our popular culture is a matter of public record. Washington isn’t necessarily the character I’d choose, but the Hudson River Valley is a fascinating place. And I’m glad to see some networks making the effort to tap a weirdly untapped part of our history and cultural memory.

5. Sex Diaries adaptation (ABC): Since I complained yesterday that our television has gotten more violent and more interested in violence without any corresponding interest in sex and sexuality, I’m curious to see what will come of this adaptation of one of New York Magazine’s most famous features. Also, just from a format perspective, I’m curious to see how ABC adapts the feature. Will we spend an episode on a character? Have the show follow a small bundle of characters whose sex lives are interacting with each other? Pass off from miniseries to miniseries?

6. Wired (The CW): With the exception of The Big Bang Theory, television spends a lot of time wedging geeks into stories as medical examiners, or quasi-hackers, or nerds at the edge of social circles. I like the idea of a show that recognizes that geekiness is also a big business, and tells an origin story about the rise of Silicon Valley. Think the Nolan Ross stuff that’s been the best part of Revenge this season, but with more room to breathe.