This post contains spoilers through the January 29 episode of House of Lies.

I thought it was smart of House of Lies to move beyond Marty a bit this week to start fleshing out the other characters. But the way it happened reaffirmed for me that the show should really be an hour rather than a half-hour, given how surprising some of the character reveals were, and how little we still know about Clyde and Doug other than a semi-generic bullying story.

First, take Jeannie. We’ve had essentially no sense of her personal life at all before it’s suddenly revealed that hey! she’s engaged!, her future mother-in-law is a drunk, and her fiance is a semi-conventional but very rich dude. It doesn’t strike me as particularly surprising that Jeannie is resisting introducing him to, as he puts it as they head off for their respective engagements, “these guys I share you with every week,” given that they’re jerks. But it does suggest that there’s a totally different Jeannie than the relatively restrained one we’re seeing as part of the team. The show’s version of introducing us to that side of her is to have Jeannie moon over a bad cafe musician in San Francisco all night, and then go to bed with him. It might be a meaningful sequence if we had any sense of Jeannie’s relationship to her boyfriend-now-future-husband and why she might be anxious about the engagement (given her behavior at the end of the episode, she appears to be hiding his very existence from Marty and company). I’m more inclined to believe Jeannie when she tells her hookup “You, this, tonight, and your penis, and your mediocre weed, they don’t have anything to do with my real life,” than I am to believe the musician who is psychoanalyzing her. But something’s up, and we don’t have the context to be able to think about it in a meaningful way*.

Speaking of context, I’m getting increasingly frustrated by the dynamic between Clyde and Doug. Honestly at this point, Clyde may be the character I least enjoy watching on television, and as y’all know, I watch a lot of television. The hookup points schtick is sort of gross on its own, and given that we’re getting the impression that’s what Clyde lives for, that it may be the sole substance of his personality other than humiliating his friends on airplanes and giving terrible advice about “being Clooney,” he’s not a person I want to spend any time with whatsoever.

Doug, on the other hand, has some interesting things going on. His over-identification with Harvard is understandably irritating to his coworkers, but it’s at least an indication of some deeper need. And I appreciated the way he clumsily tried to step up with Roscoe tonight, whether asking if he needed to be watched going to the bathroom, hitting up food trucks with him, or solving his “case.” “There was a kid who was handsome, not in the classic sense but smart, but handsome, and smart, genius-level, and there was this other kid who tortured him,” Doug tells Roscoe. “He really just tortured him. And the kid’s mom was like ‘Stop all the crying, doug.’ But then this kid realized that the other kids were just jealous. That’s all. Jealous of his awesome awesomeness. He went on to be super-awesome. And today that kid is Justin Bieber. True story.” It’s a nice little moment, and it made me want to get some more details about Doug’s backstory. He deserves more than tics and a Harvard-seal-embossed briefcase.

Then, there’s Marty, who’s stuck with the client from hell, abandoned by his father, who’s left him “off to speak to a bunch of swooning Jungian analysts in Taos,” and feeling angry at his unreachable ex, who is”dependable, that is, in her psychosis.” He does badly with Roscoe in San Francisco, pawning him off on the team and feeding him out of vending machines, and I wish the show hadn’t pulled a punch by letting him off the hook for it, and having Roscoe over his bully problem by the time Marty got around to paying his son a little attention. I’d honestly watch a family show about Marty, Jeremiah, and Roscoe with a dose of Roscoe’s mother on the side, and even though I know this show is not that, I can’t help but treasure the moments when we see glimmer of the real pain, and fear, and love they’re all experiencing together. There’s something genuinely tragic about Marty’s rant on the phone to Monica that “You know what he understands now? He understands that life is unsteady, and full of regret and recrimination. You have let our son down because you are not there.” But like so many other things in House of Lies, this would be better if Monica was an actual person, if Marty had to take real responsibility, if we could spend time with the story of his mother’s death instead of some fraud-committing former-hacker twerp.

By Kate Linnea Welsh

Last night in “Another Ham Sandwich,” the legal proceedings against Will that The Good Wife has been teasing for weeks finally got started, and the grand jury hearing – which almost resembled a bottle episode – provided a showcase for excellent work by many of the show’s skilled actors. First, a note on the title: in case you, like me, didn’t recognize it, it’s a reference to a comment supposedly made by a New York State judge about how a grand jury could be made to “indict a ham sandwich” if that’s what a prosecutor asked; Tom Wolfe made the phrase famous in The Bonfire of the Vanities.

As the grand jury hearing gets underway, Diane must tell the rest of the firm – but first acknowledges Alicia’s hitherto-unspoken involvement by taking her aside and telling her first. Two things of note here: Alicia is honestly shocked to learn of what’s really been going on, and Diane is unswervingly attesting to Will’s innocence as a matter of course. Is she really that sure of him, or is her reputation and livelihood so entwined with Will’s that she can’t let herself admit any doubt? Or, for Diane, is there any difference between the two? She also tells Alicia not to feel responsible, which of course ensures that Alicia will feel responsible. (Although really, this is Alicia. She’d feel responsible anyway.) Alicia immediately makes an appointment with Peter – supposedly to discuss his mother – and then finds Will and Elsbeth outside the grand jury room. The reason Will offers for not telling Alicia sooner isn’t about privacy or embarrassment or putting her in the middle, but rather about his own psychology of self-preservation: “This is legal. It’s not personal. If I told you it would become personal.” And Alicia wastes no time in allying herself with Will against Peter, going so far as to tell Elsbeth that she wants to use “what [she] know[s] about the State’s Attorney” to help. Her public decisiveness surprised me a little until I realized that, personal feelings aside, Will is in the right and Peter’s office is in the wrong, and black-and-white moral judgments tend to be Alicia’s fallback when she has to justify her decisions to others – or to herself.

Alicia and Peter do finally talk about the grand jury trial, but Peter insists “It has nothing to do with us.” “Peter, how can it not?” Alicia asks. “Because I won’t let it.” And here we have the trifecta, along with Diane’s unshakable belief in Will’s innocence and Will’s insistence that the investigation isn’t personal if he doesn’t tell Alicia. This show is full of people who believe they can create the world in their image if they say things forcefully enough, and their shifting alliances control which world exists at any given time. Those three, Eli and Alicia, even Elsbeth and Wendy – that’s how they operate. The exceptions here are Kalinda and Cary: their strength comes from observing rather than dictating reality, which in part explains why they can be so effective, why they always seem slightly out of place, and why they have such a unique rapport with each other. Alicia finally gets Peter to admit that “of course” the issue is that he thinks she’s sleeping with Will – and then she looks him in the eye and says she isn’t. Which is true, as far as it goes, but Peter knows something’s up and almost smiles as he marvels, “My God, you have changed. I used to be able to tell when you lied.” Alicia offers up a substantial amount of personal and political capital when she asks Peter to just stop the hearing, hilariously implying that he’s been corrupt forever, so why stop now? But Peter – running for governor, don’t forget – refuses to go back to his old ways on behalf of his romantic rival: “Will Gardner is not my family.” Fair enough, but his children are his family, and they’re likely to be hurt in this. And if Peter is thinking about his campaign, I’m not sure the benefit he gets from keeping his office clean outweighs the risk of public reaction to his wife carrying on an affair with someone convicted of judicial bribery.
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