Over the past several years, I’ve been alternately amused and horrified to watch Donald Trump’s antics as he’s tried to expand his franchise beyond the NBC reality television franchise, The Apprentice, that returned him to relevance after his real estate empire fizzled by turning to politics. His dabbling in everything from conspiracies about President Obama’s birthplace to the integrity of the 2012 election results has allowed Trump to tap into new veins of support. And he’s been so successful at it that for a brief time, Trump managed to keep both the Republican presidential primary and NBC’s scheduling department, which might have had to yank The Apprentice, on edge as he pretended to consider whether to run for president.

Since then, Trump’s continued to irritate both political observers and NBC. The day after the presidential election in November, Trump attacked his network colleague Brian Williams for covering Trump’s comments about the campaign on Rock Center. So it’s no surprise that, at the Television Critics Association press tour, NBC Entertainment Chairman Bob Greenblatt was asked how he manages Trump, and whether he’s asked his star—who didn’t appear for the panel presenting the latest edition of The Celebrity Apprentice—to tone it down.

“We live in this country where you can sort of say anything you want as long as you’re not harming other people,” Greenblatt said, sounding deeply unenthusiastic. “And he’s got a political belief system. And we talk to him all the time. But I really don’t think that what he’s doing kind of in his personal life is going to corrupt what is happening on the show. That said, if he sort of becomes somehow hurtful or says things or does things that cross a line, I guess we would figure out what to do about that.”

As much as I’ve long though NBC should fire Trump for not being a team player, it makes sense that Greenblatt wouldn’t pull the trigger unless Trump’s behavior made the brand he’s created unviable. And given that part of the brand of The Apprentice is Trump being an abusive, self-important blowhard, him applying his blowhardiness to politics doesn’t actually undermine the image that he’s sold as a product to NBC.

And as much as I wish Trump didn’t have airtime, it would be great NBC would get rid of him because he’s a terrible example of what a successful executive would actually look like. He’s filed for corporate bankruptcy four times, and he’s done so not because he’s made different errors, but because he keeps heavily leveraging his hotel and casino businesses. It’s true that bankruptcy can be a way to restructure companies, but it’s still a drastic way to get to that point, and one that can be damaging to Trump’s partners and investors. Trump’s frequently embroiled in litigation of one type or another relating to his business or his images. And now, he’s trying to get out of paying some taxes on the Old Post Office, a government building that is tax exempt, which Trump wants to turn into a luxury hotel. It’s not surprising that Trump would want to get out of the higher taxes, but it’s still a particularly craven move, given how much of the District is government property, and how much the city government needs to get tax revenue back when for-profit organizations take over government buildings.

But then, if NBC had wanted a business leader who is both effective and consistently ethical, they never would have hired Donald Trump in the first place. The show’s the thing. And Trump, no matter what you think of the quality of the show, always provides plenty of it.

On August 31, 2010, Lizzy Seeberg, a 19-year-old freshman at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, was allegedly sexually assaulted in the room of a football player at the school’s sister college, Notre Dame. On September 10, Lizzy Seeberg committed suicide.

Tonight, Notre Dame will take the field in the BCS National Championship game hoping to win its first national title since 1998. Old Notre Dame’s return to the top of college football has been the story of the season, and we’re sure to hear commentators waxing poetic about how football means so much to Notre Dame and how Notre Dame means so much to football. Head coach Brian Kelly and Rev. John Jenkins, the school’s chancellor, will be hailed for returning the Fighting Irish to the promised land, and for doing so “the right way.” This university has long lived off its mystique, off the idea that it is a more moral place because it could win even more football games if only it would compromise its academic values.

But as was the case at Penn State, site of the most damning scandal in the history of college football, the definition of “right way” falls short when it comes to sexual misconduct. And so tonight, we won’t hear the story of Lizzy Seeberg, the girl who was allegedly victimized by an athlete who was doing things the “right way” on the field and in the classroom and ignored by a program that was doing things the “right way” in its balance of athletics and academics. But when Seeberg’s life was ruined, our deference to and reverence for the “right way” mentality never wavered.

Seeberg’s story hasn’t been ignored by the national media; in fact, Notre Dame’s appearance in the title game has brought it back to life, if begrudgingly so. Still, the focus of the sports media has remained largely on Notre Dame’s improbable rise to back to the top of college football decades after its heightened academic standards supposedly rendered it irrelevant. Editorials and columns have praised Notre Dame for combining academics and athletics in a way few, if any, other schools do. The school stands as a beacon of hope that football programs can “do things the right way” and still win games.

You’d think we’d have learned what our reverence for and deference to supposed “right way” institutions has wrought. Penn State under Joe Paterno was an institution that won the right way, right up until it was revealed that the school went to impossible lengths to cover up the molestation of a dozen children by former coach Jerry Sandusky. From South Bend to State College to Steubenville, misplaced priorities and win-at-all-costs mentalities have left women and children vulnerable to sexual assault and, worse, have made victims feel that reporting those assaults will lead not to justice but to character assassination and harassment. But misplaced priorities aren’t only to blame. So to is blind reverence and deference to the “right way” mentality, the idea that certain institutions are above it all. As Seeberg’s case points out, focusing solely on the balance of academics and athletics is an incredibly shallow view of what constitutes the “right way” to build a winning football program at a top-tier academic institution.

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In an age of Judd Apatow movies and the trend of schlubs paired with babes, pop culture often preaches that humor and kindness are all—and I really do mean all, in some cases, a steady job isn’t even really a necessary credential at the start—a man needs to achieve romantic success. It’s a view of the world that both isn’t realistic to men’s dating experiences in real life if the Nice Guys Of OkCupid are any indication. And it’s one that doesn’t address men’s struggles with their own looks, whether in the context of the kinds of makeover montages that are so common in stories about women, or in their own right. But watching a number of Steven Soderbergh’s smaller recent movies, I’ve been struck by a common theme: an intriguing—if indirect—exploration of the all-too-rare subject of male body image.

Soderbergh’s plumbed the idea that women aren’t alone in having anxieties about their looks. In 2009′s The Girlfriend Experience, Chris, the boyfriend of call girl Chelsea, works as a personal trainer, surviving the recession on the anxieties of more privileged men. Magic Mike, his 2011 movie based on star Channing Tatum’s experiences as a stripper, young, beautiful Tampa men try to use women’s desire for their bodies to lever themselves up the economic ladder in a recession, and the movie’s action comes from Mike’s gradual realization that objectification and the enjoyment of it have distanced him from his values and from other people. And in Behind the Candelabra, his upcoming Liberace biopic for HBO, Soderbergh’s not just examining the pianist himself, or his younger lover Scott Thorson (on whose memoir the movie is based), but what happens when someone has unfettered access to plastic surgery, weight loss drugs, and wardrobe budget.

Given that recent strain in his work, I was eager to ask Soderbergh about it at the Television Critics Association press tour. And while Soderbergh said that he hadn’t intentionally planned the movies as a series, he was very matter-of-fact about the idea that men experience bodily anxieties in a way that isn’t often acknowledged in popular culture in the same way it is for women.

“I guess I just feel those are very common feelings,” Soderbergh told me. “We all get up in the morning. We put clothes on and we look in the mirror and we make a judgment about how we feel about our appearance. Not all of us have the opportunity or the resources to indulge in plastic surgery or even, you know, an incredible wardrobe.”

HBO hasn’t distributed screeners of Behind The Candelabra yet, but Matt Damon, who plays Thorson, and Michael Douglas, who’s playing Liberace, said that despite the over-the-top elements of Liberace’s personal style, and the presence of Rob Lowe as Liberace’s cat-eyed plastic surgeon—Soderbergh said that producer Jerry Weintraub once referred to the project as “La cage aux folles on steroids.”—the movie was respectful of the men rather than a catty deconstruction of them. “I’m fascinated by Liberace’s wardrobe,” Soderbergh explained. “I mean, that stuff’s pretty fascinating to look at and imagine someone wanting to make that appearance. It’s pretty extraordinary…I can’t imagine going to work in these outfits.”

And that’s a really interesting question to ask. We may not be done with the conversations, but we’ve at least asked the initial questions about why a size two or four is the only acceptable dress size for women, why makeup has become mandatory, why heels become standard footwear. Soderbergh’s work is, if not always directly, asking why muscles are important enough that men will hold onto their trainers in a recession (or teenage boys will go on serious hormone regimens before they’ve finished growing), how men adjust when their bodies are treated like consumable objects in the way women’s have been so often, and now what happens when one man wants to remake another in his own image enough that he’ll ask him to submit to dramatic plastic surgery. That’s an incredible and worthwhile project. And even if it’s not a conscious effort on Soderbergh’s part, I hope other writers and directors take note.

It’s easy to dismiss reality television as a table-flipping, backbiting, redneck-baiting mess, to judge by some of the shows that top the ratings and garner press that ranges from clucking disapproval to horrified fascination. But one of the best things about the cable presentations at the Television Critics Association press tour, which I’ll be at until January 16, is a reminder of just how big the landscape is, and how much fascinating, substantive reality and documentary programming is coming up over the next six months. These are the five shows and documentaries that I’m most looking forward to after hearing their creators and casts talk to us in Pasadena:

1. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence In The House of God, HBO, February 4: Alex Gibney’s documentaries are always fierce and compelling. But he’s found a particularly enraging and moving subject in this novel take on the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic church: the attacks on a group of boys at a Catholic school for the deaf, by a priest who was the rare hearing person at the time to speak American Sign Language, an ability that enhanced his sense of priestly authority. Watching the men talk about their experiences as children, and what it meant to them to gather the courage to write to the Vatican to testify to their abuse, to find each other and learn they weren’t alone, and even to confront Father Murphy, who managed to convince the Vatican to let him stay a priest by arguing that he’d repented, is shattering and triumphant. They are, as Gibney put it during the panel for the movie, “people who were voiceless in the hearing world, who nevertheless had their voices heard.”

2. The President’s Gatekeepers, Discovery, July TBD: From Jules and Gédéon Naudet, brothers who were working on a documentary about New York firefighters on September 11 and ended up making 9/11, an insider perspective on the tragedy instead, this documentary includes interviews with all 19 living White House Chiefs of Staff. Executive producer Chris Whipple said it was fascinating to see how, despite the extreme partisan reputations of Chiefs ranging from Dick Cheney, who worked for President Ford, to Rahm Emanuel, the job itself, which most of the Chiefs described as the hardest they’d ever had, involved intense bipartisan cooperation. And the Naudets promise fascinating inside stories, like Bill Daley’s account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Apparently, Daley asked Obama to postpone the White House Correspondent’s Association dinner, but Obama demurred, insisting that everything proceed as normal. During the dinner, Modern Family star Eric Stonestreet got an email that his White House tour had been cancelled, and started asking Daley if something momentous was underfoot. Daley told him a pipe had burst in the White House and promised to personally conduct the tour at a later date. The rest is history.

3. March To Justice, Investigation Discovery, February TBD: I’ll be fascinated to see this movie, if only to see more of Carolyn McKinstry, a survivor of the Birmingham, Alabama church bombing—and a subsequent bombing of her home. At the panel on Saturday, she spoke about the psychological toll of the bombing, and changes in trauma treatment for children in the years since, where early psychological intervention has become the norm. “There was not that type of opportunity for us back then. In fact, we didn’t even talk about this bombing in my home. The only people I talked with were the FBI. They came through regularly, asked questions, and recorded your answers,” she explained. “But my parents didn’t talk about — they didn’t say, ‘Are you afraid? Do you want to talk about what happened? Do you miss your friends?’ We didn’t talk about it at home. I went to school Monday morning at 8:00. No one said anything. It wasn’t mentioned ever at church, at home, or at school.” She’s a powerful reminder that the past isn’t really past, and that we’re grappling not just with the policy implications of the Civil Rights movement, but with the direct and personal memories of people who lived through it.

4. Inside Combat Rescue, Nat Geo, February TBD: One of the aspects of war that’s least reflected in popular culture is the logistics it takes to wage one, whether it’s the actual size and complexity of American forward operating bases, or the supply chains it takes to keep soldiers armed, fed, rested, and protected. For that reason alone, I’m fascinated by Inside Combat Rescue, which documents the efforts of the medical teams who head out in helicopters, retrieve, stabilize, and bring American soldiers back from the front lines of our current conflicts. I’ll be curious to learn more about how Nat Geo worked out the ethics of filming wounded subjects. But it’s a powerful illustration of the cost of war.

Going into the Television Critics Association press tour, one of the shows I was most excited to see shake out was a procedural called Deception, about an African-American police officer, played by Meagan Good, who returns to the white, wealthy family she grew up with because her mother worked for them as a housekeeper to investigate the murder of her childhood best friend. It wasn’t that the show was revolutionary, in fact the reverse: it’s a mashup of ABC soaps like Revenge and Scandal, with a hint of Damages, thanks to the presence of Tate Donovan as the murder victim’s older brother.

But the show operated at the intersection of race and class at a way I thought was fascinating and promising. Good’s Detective Joanna Locasto, only the second woman of color to be the main character on a currently-airing television show, was returning to a setting where she’d grown up on the wrong side of the class divide, not with more money, but with the power of the state on her side. And she and her boss, Will Moreno (Laz Alonso) were in a position that strikes me as almost unprecedented in popular culture: as people of color with substantive power, and particularly police power, who were tasked with investigating and—and personally judging—a decadent and corrupted white family, and with whom the audience is intended to sympathize with absolutely.

That’s an extraordinarily rich scenario, particularly for a network television show. And it’s one that came about in part, as NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke explained in NBC’s executive session yesterday morning, “That was a family that was conceived and cast began to be cast as a white family. And we insisted that there be a diverse woman in that role.” I was excited to discuss that scenario and all of its potential with Deception‘s co-creators Gail Berman and Liz Heldens. And so it was disconcerting to see them retreat from the idea that they’d discuss race at all, and to do it as quickly as possible.

“It is a way to sort of deal with race without actually having to talk about it,” Heldens said when I asked her about their plans for dealing with the intersection of race and class issues. “But it’s not really something we talk about too much in the writers’ room.” When Hitfix critic Daniel Fienberg pushed her on it further, citing her experience working on Friday Night Lights, a show that was both diverse and explicitly conscious of racial issues, she retreated even further. “Why it’s not a discussion? I don’t know,” she told him. “I just think it’s sort of there, and, you know, whenever you’re writing a script, you’re always trying to get your page count down so they can shoot it.”
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This post discusses plot points from the first episode of the third season of Downton Abbey. If you’ve seen subsequent episodes aired in the UK and want to discuss events that happen in them, please flag your comments as such.

Much of the discussion of the residents of Downton Abbey, the great house at the heart of Julian Fellowes’ series of the same name, is whether things ought to change. Much of the tension of the series comes from the fact that, no matter what anyone might wish on the subject, change is coming anyway. And after a season of Downtown Abbey that felt stuck, and in some cases silly, I’m glad to see change, both much-desired in the form of Mary and Matthew’s wedding, and greatly feared in the form of the loss of Cora’s fortune to a bad investment, come to the characters and the series itself.

One of the most intriguing new additions to the show in this episode was the discussion of Downton’s role in the larger economy of the region. It’s telling, of course, that the characters themselves have never really discussed their larger obligations as job creators until they’re faced with an existential threat to the continuation of their own privileges—much like the billionaires who found themselves deeply aggrieved by the tone of the latest presidential election. And it’s even more intriguing that Downton Abbey itself, despite its continual feints in the direction of class, has avoided this obvious source of both personal and societal drama until now.

But it makes sense that we’ve gotten there, even by a belated way. If life at Downton Abbey seems feudal, that’s because in a fundamental way it is. Robert may not be directly renting land grants and cottages to villagers in exchange for silver pennies and chickens, passing some share of the profits up to the king in the form of wax candles, grain, and coin, as his ancestors would have done. But he’s overseeing an estate that is meant to be a linchpin in the local economy, and an economic intermediary between the people and their government. And in his meeting with his banker in London, it’s clear he feel that responsibility powerfully. “I refuse to be the Earl who dropped the torch and let the flame go out,” he insists. “The estate must be a major employer and support the house, or there’s no point to it. To any of it.” That’s not to say that he’s solely concerned for the welfare of the poorer people in his orbit. But without the ability to generate jobs, Downton isn’t just economically unviable—it will come to be seen as morally indefensible to the people who have previously accepted its paternal influence on the region.

Or as Violet puts it at dinner with the family, her bluntness in service of a useful honesty, “It’s our job to provide employment. An aristocrat without servants is as much use of the county as a glass hammer,” a beautiful, profoundly stupid object. I’d argue that Downton Abbey is a relatively conservative show, one that likes to set up radicals and reformers like Branson, and to a lesser extent, Lady Edith, as naive and ineffectual. Even Branson finds himself pulled into another way of seeing things as he’s absorbed into the family, telling Matthew the night before his wedding “It’s strange I’m arguing about inherited money and saving estates. The old me would like to put a bomb under the lot of you.” But this episode mounted as effective a version of the job creators’ argument for the maintenance of their privilege as it’s possible to make, largely because we actually like someone like Lady Mary vastly more than we like Charles and David Koch, and thus are more receptive to her insistence that “I shall be Countess of Grantham one day, and in my book, the Countess of Grantham lives at Downton Abbey.”
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