EW’s Ken Tucker, in his season-end roundup of the year in television, is sick of anti-heroes, or more specifically, turned off by American Horror Story, which he calls “a deeply despairing show.” He writes:

Indeed, at this point, the edgiest thing a producer could do would be to mount a stylistically daring, well-acted show that was free of bleakness, snark, or the promise that we are being shown the corrupt underbelly of any given profession. Even though I’m not a great fan of it, Once Upon a Time exhibits a generosity of spirit I can applaud, and I’m glad it’s a success. While it comes on as a dark, edgy show, Person of Interest is another ratings hit that is actually, if you watched its progress over the season, quite open to the goodness of humanity — for what is this show really about, at bottom, if not the redemption of the wounded souls of Jim Caviezel’s Reese and Michael Emerson’s Finch, and those to whose aid they come? A Gifted Man might have been similarly uplifting in an interesting way, but something about the show took a wrong creative turn early on; perhaps that’s what star Patrick Wilson was at least in part referring to when he said the series was ultimately not what he “signed on for” in a tweet after it was canceled. And Smash: For all the carping that I and other critics did about it, there was never any doubt that creator Theresa Rebek wanted to share with network television viewers the same bursting joy for the musical-theater experience that she has felt, even if it was only Megan Hilty who occasionally came close to embodying it.

At Salon, Willa Paskin has noted something related, though not precisely the same: a return of moral clarity and easily hateable villains to shows like Downton Abbey, where good and evil are precisely delineated in sweeping, emotional terms, and Game of Thrones, where loyalties may shift constantly but Bad King Joffrey is the worst.

One of the things that’s interested me about the Age of Anti-Heroes is a sense in many of the great cable shows that it takes a bad person to accomplish certain kinds of things. On The Wire, Jimmy McNulty would be vastly less effective if he was a paragon, a knight of Baltimore flashing brass instead of Valyrian Steel. In Damages, lawyer Patty Hewes has to be ruthless to the point of murder because the corporations she goes up against are so powerful and amoral that someone has to sacrifice herself and her humanity to oppose them effectively. Breaking Bad initially considered whether cancer-stricken chemistry teacher Walter White had options other than cooking meth to provide a nest egg for his family after his death when his son set up an online fund for his treatment, but moved past that idea. And part of Walter’s evolution into a monster has been his inability or unwillingness to stop his life of crime once he’s laid away that money and his wife has found a way to launder it—he doesn’t just need to be the one who knocks, he wants to be. The Sopranos is entirely dedicated to the question of Tony’s efficacy: he enters therapy in the first place because his issues are making him ineffective, and Dr. Melfi ultimately decides she can’t continue to participate in perfecting him.

But in this new crop of clearer-hearted shows, there’s much greater trust in the idea that you can still be a decent person and beat the bad guys. On Once Upon a Time, Emma Swan may get a little feisty occasionally, but she’s fundamentally a good-hearted person, which is precisely what makes it possible for her to pick up a sword in the finale and slay a dragon. Her goodness gives her courage. Downton Abbey operates on a much smaller scale, but the show is fundamentally a romance that trusts Matthew and Mary to find their way to their hearts and to each other. Now that they’ve come around to each other and plan a union that will both satisfy their families’ financial needs and the pulls of their own hearts, does anyone seriously doubt that Sir Richard will emerge victorious? Revenge has an anti-heroine for its lead, but she also has a best friend who constantly tries to draw lines for her, who doesn’t want to see her debased both for her own good and for the success of her plan. On Grimm, Nick’s work against fairy-tale monsters has two purposes: it keeps his community safe, and brings him closer to a true understanding of his family. And of course Parks and Recreation finished its fourth season with an affirmation of the idea that a passion for public service and kindness can put you over the top, even in a world and in an arena that doesn’t often reward those values.

None of this means that anti-heroes can’t be good spiky fun (ditto for villains). But there’s something morally and artistically reinvigorating about the idea that there’s more than one way to tackle difficult problems, and that the struggle to hold on to goodness is a worthwhile enterprise to engage in and story to tell in and of itself.

I quite like Emily Nussbaum’s deconstruction of Scandal in this week’s New Yorker, which is really a way for her to discuss the various uses television shows make of race and colorblindness. But I wanted to highlight a different part of the review which explores something that I think can be a real straightjacket for shows: the need for female characters in general, and Olivia Pope in particular to be either good or evil, to embody an entirely different kind of black-white divide. Scandal is increasingly dull, Emily says, because Olivia Pope’s theoretical flaws all turn out to reinforce her status as a paragon:

Thirty-eight years have passed, but, in certain ways, little has changed. Shonda Rhimes, who created “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Private Practice,” is still the sole prominent black female showrunner in television. (The most powerful black male showrunner is Tyler Perry, on TBS.) Although the heroine of “Scandal,” Olivia Pope, would never go in for Christie Love’s salty back talk, the two do share some qualities: they are incorruptible superprofessionals, worshipped and desired by everyone around them. Pope, once the President’s most trusted aide and, for a while, his secret mistress, is now the biggest fixer in Washington. (Her career is based on that of a real person: Judy Smith, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney and deputy press secretary in George H. W. Bush’s White House.) In other political narratives, the fixer might be a cynical alcoholic, or a gleeful player like Gloria Allred. Not Pope. She’s the BlackBerry-wielding flack as avenging angel. Her employees, each of whom she’s rescued from rock bottom, describe themselves as “gladiators in suits”; they say that their boss “wears the white hat.” Despite, or perhaps because of, these dollops of praise, Pope comes off as a bit of a buzzkill, all glares and Sorkinesque lectures, eyes welling with righteousness…Olivia Pope’s greatest character defect is her sexual history with the President, but that just suggests she’s a woman worth risking the White House for.

An even better example of this, I think, was the incident a couple of episodes ago when Olivia asks Huck (Guillermo Díaz), a former CIA operative with what seems like a serious case of PTSD, to torture one of his former employees. It’s a totally horrific thing for her to ask, and the scene that follows is shocking, Huck relapsing like, as he describes himself, an addict, the whir of a drill, a man screaming, bleeding onto sheet plastic. It’s a doubly awful thing she’s done here, not just ordering someone tortured, but asking Huck to do something she knows will damage his already flimsy soul. And there’s no indication that she needed to do it at all to get the information she needs (the show reinforces the misconception that torture produces accurate intelligence)—a reporter for a Washington paper even beats Olivia to the killer’s identity simply by using the tools of his trade. The show just seemed to expect that we’ll trust that Olivia is On the Side of Right rather than wondering how far this woman’s self-righteousness will lead her, how willing she is to crush people to fulfill her aims.

A story about a Washington woman who is an amoral fixer would be pretty interesting, and Scandal has the ingredients to be an interesting anti-heroine show. Scandal’s at its best when it’s a story about people who are channeling their worst tendencies, whether it’s womanizing or a talent for snooping, towards good projects, when Olivia’s firm functions as a form of rehab. And with the other characters in the show, Shonda Rhimes seems relatively comfortable portraying them as broken or fallen in a way that makes them more interesting. Olivia, by contrast, is less a gladiator in a suit than a ruler-wielding Mother Superior whose authority is unimpeachable. She’s not to blame for ordering torture because her cause is just. She’s not doing anything wrong by schtupping the president because he started it, and besides, his wife is the worst.

What makes anti-heroes fascinating when they work is that they make decisions are reprehensible, but that we can understand and even sympathize with given the framework and worldview those characters are operating within. The fact that unlike Walter White or Jimmy McNulty, Olivia’s always in the right actually means that she her and the show she’s operating within are more potentially amoral: her permanent correctness means a moral reckoning isn’t necessary. I can’t help but thinking of Patty Hewes, the lawyer on Damages who makes Olivia’s so-called Gladiator in a Suit look like a fluffy baby duck. She is a wretched mother, a deeply unpredictable mentor, a person who does overwhelming harm to the lives of people she encounters. But unlike Olivia, Patty appears to know who and what she is. It would be nice if Scandal developed the self-confidence to give Olivia the same kind of self-awareness.

I admit I’m totally shocked by this statistic. But it turns out that 60 percent of the audience for Girls, Lena Dunham’s post-Sex and the City take on the lives of sheltered young post-graduate women in New York City, is male. MediaPost, the source of that statistic, suggests that some of it might be men sticking around after Game of Thrones, though if those men were uninterested, you’d think they’d burn off during the half hour airing of Veep that happens in between the end of Game of Thrones and the start of Girls.

I’d be curious to know why those dudes are watching—and Slate’s deconstruction of the show every Monday by a slate of male viewers has become one of my must-reads to start the week. Is it to get insight into the lives of young women? Is it to laugh at Hannah and her friends because their lives are such a horror show? I’m glad for the evidence that men are more than capable of turning out for a show about a female protagonist, an anti-heroine, even. I just hope they’re not turning in because they hate Hanna Hovarth more than they’re actually interested in her.

Next week, I’ll start a new regular feature where I discuss Veep, HBO’s new comedy about a bumbling female vice president, and Girls, Lena Dunham’s sly deconstruction of Sex and the City, together, because I’m struck by their riffs on the same themes. But I did want to talk a little bit about last night’s premiere of Girls.

You all, by this point, know that I love the show—it’s all over the top of this blog. But I know not all of you did. Twitterer Rhiannan Root told me she expected “more attitude from the lead. She put up with a lot of BS in the pilot. I expected her to have more respect for herself.” MsCareerGirl said that she “was really disappointed and kinda grossed out by the characters.” I don’t think those reactions are wrong—how much you like Girls entirely depends on how much tolerance you have for the deep well of humor that can be found in grating and pathetic behavior, and how much you enjoy recognizing that in yourself (the answer for me is a whole bunch). But I do think they say something interesting about male and female anti-heroes, and why we have a bunch of the former and almost none of the latter.

The male anti-heroes that we have tend to employ what we understand to be traditionally male traits, just in excess. Walter White’s first step down the road to perdition comes out of a sense that his family will have no means of supporting themselves after he’s gone (an interesting, inherently arrogant assumption that the show’s never convincingly examined, turning Skyler’s attempt at running a business into black comedy). Tony Soprano is excessively decisive. Seth Bullock is preoccupied with honor and justice and defending both. Stringer Bell is engaged in the quitoxic project of turning a drug gang into a legitimate business. All of these are active rather than passive traits, and the characters tend to err when they take action rather than when they delay it.

Hannah Hovarth, by contrast, is an anti-heroine precisely because she doesn’t act, and when she steps, wrong-foots herself dramatically. She puts up with absolutely ridiculous treatment from Adam, who she’s sleeping with but is definitely not her boyfriend. When her boss at the publishing house where she interns dismisses her smugly, she has precisely no response for anything he’s saying (even though she could probably put the Labor Department on his ass). She can confront her parents only when she’s high, and then not with anything close to efficacy.

Passivity, and dependence are all traits that we find humiliating, no matter the proportions they come in, while decisiveness, activity, and standing on principal are all traits we have positive associations with, and so we’re attracted to the people who exhibit them, even when they’re wildly misapplied. The former set of traits is coded as female, the latter as masculine. It’s one thing to respond to a female anti-heroine who is defined as such by her masculinized behavior, whether it’s Sarah Linden’s single-minded focus on her career and bad mothering in pursuit thereof, or Cersei Lannister’s impressive cruelty. Whether a mass audience is ready to embrace a female anti-hero whose anti-heroicness is defined by an overabundence of negatively-coded feminine traits is another question entirely. And it suggests that maybe we’d be better off if we found Tony Soprano’s murderousness less endearing as well.

There’s been a lot of debate recently about how to define the Golden Age of television, whether it’s through Vulture’s Drama Derby, which set up a March Madness contest between great shows of the last quarter-century, or conversations between critics like NPR’s Linda Holmes, the Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman, and Time’s James Poniewozik on Twitter. But wherever the conversations are taking place, they keep coming back to a central question. When we’re picking the pool of shows, why does the critical consensus tend to come up with a list that’s, well, awfully dudely?

The best answer anyone seems to have come up with is that there are more male characters of a particular variety that we’ve come to hold up as a gold standard: the middle-aged anti-hero. There are a number of answers as to why that’s the case: the number of middle-aged men who have been given the opportunities to make their dream shows; the fact that female characters are still under pressure to be perfect in every area of their lives, much less downright evil or morally depraved in one of them; or the fact that women, even as Christopher Hitchens said we aren’t funny, have found a great deal of creative life in comedy rather than in drama. Addressing all of these elements are important, and I’ll have some thoughts on them in weeks to come.

But if middle-aged anti-heroes are what we’ve decided give us an opportunity for moral sophistication as viewers and for complex, intriguing storytelling, where would we start in creating these kinds of women? It’s possible that one answer lies in a rising boom: fairy tale villainesses. Fairy tales are full of older women who are trying to hold onto the kinds of things about which great dramas about men are made: their power within their professional setting, their sense of sexual desirability, their status within their personal communities. In the trailers for Snow White and the Huntsman, we’re clearly meant to side with Kristen Stewart’s insurgent Snow White. But I’m intrigued by Charlize Theron’s evil Queen, who speaks of giving her fallen world the ruler it deserves, who commands armies and welcomes challenges.

And as production ramps up on the Maleficent movie, Angelina Jolie told People Magazine that she felt some ambivalence about defending her character (the movie will be told from the perspective of Sleeping Beauty’s rival for the throne): “It sounds really crazy to say that there will be something that’s good for young girls in this, because it sounds like you’re saying they should be a villain. [Maleficent] is actually a great person. But she’s not perfect. She’s far from perfect.” But why should we be so squeamish about suggesting that we should sympathize with female villains? Especially in settings where women have to be unusually tough to hold on to power and authority (which, let’s be honest, is not so different from the tightrope women have to walk today)?

If boys can grow up to sympathize with Tony Soprano, why shouldn’t women get a world where it’s permissible to sympathize with the stepmothers, crones, sorceresses and evil queens we taught were lying in our paths growing up? Reclaiming fairy tale villainesses wouldn’t just give us a crop of powerful female anti-heroines—it would help break a cycle of storytelling that valorizes younger and prettier women overthrowing older ones. Sisterhood is weird, and complex, and powerful.

Anthony Paletta has an interesting, though I think not wholly convincing, essay in National Review arguing that liberals don’t like vigilante movies because we don’t want to see people use force on criminals:

What, then, is the problem? A closer look at these criticisms seems to suggest that a core objection is to the justification of any violence against criminals, or the presentation as crime as something without empathetic roots. It’s one thing to point out that some villains in these films are cartoonishly evil; it’s another to object that this portrait lends undue justification to violence. Vincent Canby, after sneering at the simplistic portrait of criminals in Death Wish, notes that it “sometimes succeeds in arousing the most primitive kind of anger.” Christopher Orr, in his The Brave One review, tires of the usual litany of “Big Apple baddies” and says that the film “unambiguously endorses vigilante killings.” The principal objection, in each case, seems not aesthetic, but moral; the offense is to create one-dimensional criminals that one need not regret seeing handled with summary force, with nary a glance at their broken homes, or hungry children, or kindness to animals. It’s tut-tutting not unlike wondering just how many maidens are actually tied to railroad tracks by top-hatted brutes each year, and whether this really justifies sending them over waterfalls without due efforts at rehabilitation and legal counsel.

I do think that the liberal and conservative approaches to criminal justice are different. But artistically, there’s something else going on here. Vigilante movies and television shows tend to lay out a solution to a problem: criminals are punks who need executing or something short of it, and if only our police officers could act in accordance with our emotional revulsion, we’d clean up our streets in a hurry; or, if only men were men, punks who want to rape and torture women would get a nasty surprise; or whatever variant of the week you prefer. Such a worldview seems to assume that crime is inevitable and can only be dealt with after the fact and through deterrence.

Anti-hero stories tend to be ways of explicating problems, rather than offering solutions. Futzing around with criminals’ backstories is an act of sympathy, but it’s also an attempt to figure out why crime happens in the first place and to consider whether we could have prevented it. Breaking Bad isn’t an argument that we should tolerate Walter White being a dreadful human being who sells drugs, watches people die of overdoses, misleads his family, and induces old men to act as suicide bombers. It’s a question about whether if Walter White had adequate health care coverage, a decent pension, and life insurance, he’d have done terrible things anyway, or if he’s a small, angry man who turns to evil because he wants to be recognized by the universe. The Wire isn’t a story about how we should substitute Inspectors General for putting Omar Little in the witness stand and being generally amusing. It’s an explication of how ridiculously difficult it is to build a safety net and put the right incentives in place to help people keep from using drugs and to encourage them to work legitimate but less-remunerative and less-reliable jobs and to build legitimate businesses. It’s a simultaneously optimistic and pessimistic perspective on crime: a belief that we can stop it before it starts, but that it’s very, very hard to do so and requires considerable investment.

I also think Paletta underestimates the extent to which vigilante fantasies are really fantasies when it comes to cops who use more force than their departments want them to. We’ve got a vigorous public debate going about the right to videotape incidents of the police using force on suspects precisely because the police use considerable force on suspects in public often enough to be uncomfortable about having it documented. In the 1990s, police brutality cases were expensive enough to spark a debate about whether they were worth the bite they took out of city budgets when the money could have gone towards hiring more beat cops. People who want to be entertained by the prospect of an unfettered police force battering criminals into submission can find plenty of real-life examples.

By Ryan McGee

If you believe the economic realities on display in several of ABC’s recent comedic programming, then you think that current vocational trends predominately favor women. In terms of television, however, this “mancession” simply doesn’t exist, especially when it comes to developing strong three-dimensional women that can support a program’s narrative. Characters like Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation and Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife are exceptions that prove the rule, to an extent. But even their arcs are based within an ensemble structure, a structure which has strengthened the shows even while decentralizing their female protagonists.

Should shows be built around a single character pillar, regardless of gender? That’s a perfectly good question to ask. Breaking Bad didn’t really gain power until Walter White stopped overshadowing his onscreen compatriots. And Parks started to flourish only after simultaneously toning Leslie down while expanding the world around her. But it’s infinitely more likely to launch a show based around a chemistry teacher gone to seed than an overly optimistic female government worker seeking to improve her community. We’re somehow more OK with the former than the latter, at least in our entertainments.

The problem isn’t just that there are so few females in the anti-hero position. It’s that the anti-hero position is such a default in television following The Shield that it’s limited the way in which stories can be told on the small screen. Leslie Knope’s optimism is downright revolutionary in comparison to her narcissistic, self-loathing, yet self-justifying counterparts in primetime. It’s not enough to simply be an ordinary person that strives to do good only to face obstacle after obstacle in achieving that goal. We have to watch shows give us walking talking figures that are grotesque, funhouse mirror versions of our own worst impulses in order to either work through our own issues or take heart in knowing our vices pale in comparison to the Tony Sopranos, Vic Mackeys, and Jax Tellers of the world.

When females do end up in this “anti-hero” slot, the shows don’t often know what do with them. A long string of semi-recent Showtime programs have dealt with complicated women, but often in uncomplicated ways. Other than The United States of Tara, which spent three seasons coming to grips with its own conceit, the network’s signature female-led shows demonstrate women behaving badly without true context for their actions. As such, their supposedly outlandish behavior exists in a curious vacuum in which Jackie Peyton, Cathy Jamison, and Nancy Botwin pantomime grief, rage, and illicit behavior in a relatively sterilized environment. They don’t get into the true moral muck of their male counterparts, often because the shows shy away from making these women into the monsters men are so often allowed to become.

All of which makes me wonder why we’ve decided that horrible people need to be at the center of shows, when simply having flawed ones will do. Enter Cordelia Chase, someone not high on the list of even Joss Whedon acolytes as the poster child for basing an ideal television lead upon. I’m not here to start a flame war over whether or not Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel was the overall better show. But I am here to say that I tend to prefer Angel by a slim margin, and Cordelia Chase helps tip the balance in that show’s scale. That may make many of you reach for your replica Mr. Stabbys and seek to stake me. But hear me out.

Cordelia Chase appeared in the very first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on March 10, 1997, and made her finale appearance on Angel in its 100th episode nearly seven years later. Like many characters on Buffy, she was initially written as a stereotype only to reveal hidden layers along the way. Big deal, you say: so did everyone else on that show. Which is fair, but what’s intriguing about Cordelia is that her story, like that of Xander’s, was initially one in which she was an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Buffy was the Slayer, Willow eventually turned into the world’s most powerful witch, and Giles was both a Watcher and an excellent performer of Who covers.

But Cordy? She didn’t have anything going for her except the nagging feeling that she should be doing more with her life. Her original status as the Mean Girl stemmed from economic and social superiority, but like many pop culture figures in that position, it was a façade more than a reality, a role that she played because she saw no other way. It’s interesting that what inspires her trip to Los Angeles (and, by extension, over to Angel) after graduation from Sunnydale isn’t anything demonic, but rather mundane: tax fraud. Stripped bare of both economic comfort and psychological comfort post-graduation, she moves to LA to become an actress. Of course, what she finally finds is purpose.
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The bridge is yours.

-The Force is growing stronger. Particularly in the Czech Republic.

-Anti-heroine recommendations from the great Heather Havrilesky.

-James Franco, jerk.

-Piracy turns out to be irresistible even to the people who fight it, sometimes.

-Are these the most underrated actors on television?

The bridge is yours.

-Get banned from Modern Warfare 3, come back in 13.5 years.

-Howard Stern will helpfully inform us who has talent.

-Hey NPR, antiheroes aren’t a sudden new trend.

-If you win the Millenium Falcon in a game of sabacc, I guess you get to give it as a Christmas present.

-Gary Busey deals Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign a critical blow.

-Woo Wild Flag!

The charming and ridiculously smart Douglas Wolk did me the favor of sending me the Judge Dredd trilogy “America,” “America II: Fading of the Light,” and “Cadet,” about a singer, an anti-Judge activist-turned-terrorist, and the child they eventually have together, and then asking me to discuss it with him. Our very long conversation about the books, including their startlingly beautiful and fully-realized backgrounds, and their pretty awesome gender politics, as well as whether it’s possible for fascists to embrace reform, is up here. Some thoughts on the core story about pro-democracy terrorists taking on the Judges:

As a former student activist, I have a somewhat complicated relationship to America, the Democrats, and even to Total War. I should be clear that most of my activism was working through the democratic process—registering voters, agitating down at City Hall, asking questions in forums—though I did get arrested for occupying the admissions office at my college as part of an action to push the university towards more progressive financial aid reform. (Pro tip: singing the same folk song as a round for three hours will speed up the rate at which the university decides to arrest you, which can be useful when you’ve been sitting in the same hallway all day.) And so part of what strikes me about America and her cohort is that they’re kind of terrible activists. The march is a good idea—but the Democrats don’t plan for there to be instigators in the crowds, or to document their work. There doesn’t appear to be much of an organizing program. The terrorist campaign waged by Total War is fairly stupid as propaganda: yes, killing Judges demonstrates their vulnerability, but it’s guaranteed to bring down reprisals. And their plan to kill celebrities during an awards show without any plan for a communiqué is a huge wasted opportunity to reach the masses. I’m frustrated with them because I’d like them to be better.

And of course, that’s sort of the point of the book. We see the Democrats and Total War from the perspective of a very weak sympathizer. And we see the Judges from the perspective of their most articulate representative, who gets space to break down ideas about why democracy isn’t particularly representative. Nobody gets a fair chance for a rebuttal. The comic works for the same reason the Judges maintain an effective hold on government—they control the narrative.

This was my first go-round with Judge Dredd, but I’ll definitely be back. The character’s obviously been around for decades, but he feels particularly timely, a logical extension of both our law and order fetishes and our anti-hero obsessions in a way that subverts both.