Over at Slate, Joanna Weiss has a piece about the fascination with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that strikes me as working a bit backwards. She argues that anti-hero dramas have convinced us that we can understand mass killers:

We can’t fathom how a pot-smoking 19-year-old, widely liked by teachers and classmates, could place a bomb in a backpack a few feet away from an 8-year-old child. And so we look at his path from slacker teen to calculating killer and assume that it had some discernible arc, one that passed through some series of formative events. We imagine that his actions were preventable, if only something had gone differently or someone had intervened…

Tony had a psychiatrist to guide him—and us—through the process. But in plenty of Sopranos successors, it’s the show’s writers who connect the dots for us, helping the viewer process how a likable guy can do terrible things. Showtime’s Dexter is a serial killer because of the bloody trauma he witnessed as a child. On AMC’s Breaking Bad, a cancer diagnosis launches Walter White on the road from mild-mannered teacher to vicious drug kingpin. In the recent Mad Men season premiere, Matthew Weiner seemed to draw a straight-line between Don Draper’s womanizing ways and the time he spent in a whorehouse as an impressionable child, glimpsed in a flashback. And on Homeland, Brody becomes a true-believing terrorist—for one season, at least—after a child he loves is killed in a U.S. drone strike.

The thing is, fascination with mass killers—or really criminals of any kind—dramatically pre-dates the rise of the anti-hero drama. David Berkowitz, who confessed to the Son of Sam killings, was the subject of immense media speculation, and participated in it by writing about his motives for the New York Post. President Nixon accused the mass media of an unproductive obsession with Charles Manson, and Manson violated a gag order placed on him during the trial. Former Mafia underboss Sammy Gravano did an interview with Diane Sawyer and wrote a book about his work for the mob. Lots of killers have been eager to make themselves understood, and judging by the followers they’ve attracted, the ink columnists have spilled on them, and the armchair speculation the public has always engaged in about them, we’ve always been eager to engage in that project with them.

What I think anti-hero dramas actually do is engage with a different set of questions, namely, how people doing extraordinarily deviant things manage to conceal their actions from the other people in their lives, and how people who are friends or family of people who turn out to be terrorists or killers manage to overlook clear warning signs that the people they love have strayed far from the norms of human behavior. Tony Soprano, to a certain extent, lives out in the open, in part because mobsters have a certain cultural capital and system of plausible deniability that serial killers or terrorists lack. And Carmela Soprano knows who she married, but ultimately can’t resist the fur coats and the ability to purchase social status that marriage to Tony provides her. On Dexter, Deb’s love for her brother helps her overlook his oddities, but her skills as a detective help her understand what he is, and when she finds out, she has a reaction that’s perhaps more appropriate than any other anti-hero’s wife or family member: she vomits. Breaking Bad follows what’s perhaps the most realistic trajectory for an anti-hero’s wife: Skyler White sees that things are strange with her husband, but she can’t actually figure out what’s going on because it’s genuinely beyond her conception that her husband could be cooking meth. Once she learns the truth, she dallies with the idea of participation in Walt’s crimes until she fully understands what he’s become: then, she stays out of fear.

We’re all familiar with the idea that people’s minds can decay, that ideological and political grievances can turn toxic, that profit can induce otherwise unimaginable human behavior. I don’t actually think that confuses us much, even if we’re fascinated by the case-by-case specifics. But the real mystery—and the thing that scares us most because while almost none of us believe we’re at risk for becoming sociopaths, I’d imagine all of us are afraid that we’re being fooled—is the people who miss the signs or who know and stay. We may thrill to get in Tony Soprano or Walter White’s head because it feels naughty and exciting. But the parts of anti-hero dramas that really scare us are the ones that are potentially about ourselves.

Given how much—well, pleasure, might not be the right word—excellence he’s given us over the past five years, Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan is probably entitled to heighten our anticipation as the show heads into its final eight episodes this summer. Yesterday, he gave the Daily Beast the first sense we’ll probably get of what the finale might be like:

“Anyone anxious that there won’t be resolution enough at the end of these eight episodes can rest assured that the story very much reaches resolution,” Gilligan said Monday in his most extensive comments on the Breaking Bad finale to date. “It will not end in any kind of open-ended sense.”

Speaking from Los Angeles, where he was busy editing the final batch of episodes—”We’re about halfway through,” he explained—Gilligan struggled to “say something of substance” about the end of Breaking Bad without “giving anything away.” After much hemming and hawing, he finally settled on a single word to describe the finale: “victorious.”

“I’ll say this much,” Gilligan began. “I’m surprised by how victorious, in a certain sense, the ending feels to me.”

Obviously that’s not much to go on. But victory isn’t an uncommon emotion to Breaking Bad—it’s just that what those victories mean in the context of the show has changed over the years. When Walter White, the show’s chem-teacher-turned-meth cook survived his initial encounters with the violent criminals who run the Albuquerque-area drug trade, it was easy to root for him over them, and to be relieved that he was still alive to build his legacy for his family, and to hope that once he’d done his share of damage to public health and safety, he’d retire to a more decent end of his life. But as Walt’s own sense of right and wrong let him do things like watch an addict choke to death on her own vomit, it was harder to root for him relative to other characters on the show. By the time he blew Gus Fring, his boss in the meth business, to high heaven at the end of the fourth season, and was revealed to have poisoned a small child, the impressiveness of Walt’s technical prowess and the means to which he put it were no longer in alignment. It was easier to root for Gus, a man who had no compunction about slitting an employee’s throat with a box cutter or poisoning an entire cartel, than for the disappointed family man in the tighty whities.

So what would a victorious end to Breaking Bad look like. It could end in Walter White’s triumph and our utter despair. Though if that were the case, we wouldn’t have gotten Walt alone on his birthday making numbers out of bacon and a gun in the trunk of his car his only present. And the ending of last season, in which Walt sits back to launder his millions and throw family barbecues, his browbeaten wife reconciled to him, his son and daughter home might have been the place to stop, with a searing portrait of the rot that underlies his particular American dream, might have been the better place to stop. But it might also be too simple for Breaking Bad to turn out to be a classic morality tale told from the perspective of the villain rather than an anti-hero drama, and for Walt’s brother-in-law, Hank, to put him away or put him down. Death in a gun battle seems too fair for Walter White, and time to reflect on his megalomania in jail seems unlikely—under those circumstances, it seems like Walt might use his technical prowess to hack the prison and let Heisnberg rule over his fellow inmates, rather than recognize the enormity of his crimes. Maybe Walt will win by losing, his cancer coming back and denying anyone the satisfaction of imprisoning him or fully unraveling his schemes.

And the truth is at this point, Walter White’s victory over both his physical disease and the corruption of his ego don’t matter very much to me. Real triumph to me would be Jesse Pinkman finding a way to make a live with Andrea and Brock, having taken away from his time with both Walt and Mike that he has actual capacities, and finding a role for himself as something other than predator or prey. Victory would be Skyler White finding a way to make good, to protect her family, and in some way make recompense to Ted, her boss, who ended up crippled by Skyler’s fling with criminality. It might even be Marie and Hank finding a way to have a child after years of infertility, or Holly, Walt and Skyler’s daughter, growing up safe and under circumstances where she sees Scarface at an appropriate age. If the true source of Walter White’s criminality isn’t cancer but a need for greatness, maybe happy normality is the real victory.

I was sorry to read yesterday of the death of children’s and young adult author E.L. (short for Elaine Lobl ) Konigsburg. She’s best remembered for her 1967 novel—one of two published that year—From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, about siblings who run away to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, memorably bathing in the fountain at the cafe, sleeping in an antique bed, and treating themselves to lunch at the Automat, a kind of restaurant I dreamed of eating at for years afterwards. But as much as the running away details of Mixed Up Files are memorable, much of what I love about both it and A Proud Taste For Scarlet and Miniver, Konigsburg’s less-read book about the life of Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the way both books gave girls and young women credit for intellectual curiosity, and trusted them to handle big emotions and ideas, like whether or not it matters that a piece of art is by Michaelangelo, or what it means to build a good marriage.

Claudia, the main character of Mixed Up Files, first earns our respect for the gift of logistics she applies to running away. She lifts train tickets, picks her younger brother as a runaway companion because he has managed to stash away a reasonable supply of travel money, and figures out a way to make sure the two of them don’t get caught by Met security guards (this is all in an age before pressure sensors and electric alarms). But what ultimately makes her admirable, and what wins her the respect of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, a wealthy art collector, is much more ephemeral. During Claudia’s time living in the museum, an overpoweringly beautiful statue of an angel goes on display, and becomes a phenomenon. Part of the curiosity is inspired by the fact that it’s not entirely clear whether the statue was produced by Michaelangelo. But Claudia becomes obsessed by the question, and she and her brother track down Mrs. Frankweiler in search of answers.

Once they do, the older delivers one of the most valuable lessons on education anyone could give to children. “I think you should learn, of course,” she tells Claudia, who doesn’t want to go back to school, feeling that her experience on her own has been more valuable than any education. “And some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow.”
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Yesterday at The Daily Beast, I got to dig into an idea that’s been striking me for a while: that in the age of anti-hero dramas, teenage girl characters have become almost as prevalent as middle-aged men with dark secrets who we shouldn’t root for, but do. In a look at Game of Thrones, Homeland, Mad Men, and The Americans, I explained:

Like almost every major anti-hero drama on television today, Mad Men is also a story about what it’s like to be a young girl discovering the realities of the world she’s living in. The secret of today’s prestige television is that it can all be read as young adult fiction….

In Homeland, Sgt. Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), the prisoner of war who returns home after years of captivity by the terrorist Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), reconnects most easily with his daughter Dana (Morgan Saylor). She’s pulled into her father’s plan to become a suicide bomber and the CIA efforts to stop him when agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), deep in a bipolar episode, asks Dana, in desperation, to help stop him. Dana insists that she doesn’t believe he could possibly be a terrorist, but calls her father anyway. A year later, when Carrie is interrogating Brody, she tells him, “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Dana, whether she intended it or not, has become a full participant in the moral world of grown-ups, due to her father’s plot. And she finally reaches maturity in the second season, when she realizes that Carrie was right, though for the wrong reasons—she’s finally capable of seeing Brody independently, rather than through the haze of daughterly love…

Mad Men has always had Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), who was a little girl for much of the series, but one with secrets of her own, including her relationship with Glenn Bishop (Marten Holden Weiner). But this year, she is growing into maturity. After Betty’s cited for reckless driving, Sally tests her mother’s limits, announcing to Henry, “Isn’t somebody going to say something? Betty got a ticket.” She may have rushed home after getting her period last season, but now Sally’s shutting the door on Betty’s face to have some privacy on the phone and asking to go to New Year’s Eve parties.

The regular presence of teenaged girls, particularly teenaged girls in juxtaposition to anti-heroes, isn’t a new development, either. The Sopranos had Meadow Soprano, Tony’s daughter, The Wire had Felicia Pearson, 24 had Kim Bauer, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer let the teenaged girl herself be at the center of the frame—and even sometimes let her be a little bit anti-heroic herself. At this point, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are notable in part for having teenaged boys in relation to their main characters, and in giving them fewer opportunities to critically assess their parents than shows like Homeland, Mad Men, or The Americans do, and Justified and Sons of Anarchy are notable for not really featuring teenagers at all.

What’s interesting—and I think considerably unremarked on—about the rise of a teenaged girl as a staple of big, prestige, often anti-heroic dramas is that these characters function as built-in critics of the behavior of the adults who are at the ostensible centers of the shows they share. Sally Draper is one of the first people to really see the cracks in her family’s facade, whether her parents are late to pick her up from ballet practice, or failing to be on the same page as parents, with Betty shunted into the role of enforcer while Don gets to be Fun Dad. One of the things that’s made Morgan Saylor’s performance as Dana so impressive on Homeland is the way that Dana simultaneously loves her father deeply and comes to see his true flaws—not the conversion to Islam that upsets her mother so much—more quickly and clearly than anyone else in her family. On Game of Thrones, teenaged boys like Jon Snow, Robb Stark, and even to a certain extent Loras Tyrell, get sucked into pre-packaged narratives of chivalry and bravery, while it’s teenaged girls like Sansa and Arya Stark, Margaery Tyrell, and Daenerys Targaryen who see the real truth of the system in which they’re forced to live their lives, and find ways to circumvent or expand the boundaries placed upon their lives. And while in The Americans, it’s probably too early for Paige and Henry to figure out the real nature of their parents’ work and marital arrangements, their experiences with American consumerism, latchkey kid culture, and emergent sexuality are as important expressions of the show’s themes as Elizabeth and Phillip’s dalliances with sources and conversations with Claudia, their handler.

This isn’t to say that Don Draper, Tyrion Lannister, Nicholas Brody, or Elizabeth and Phillip Jennings don’t matter. But if you want to know how to judge the dark princes and princesses of prestige television drama, you might be better off keeping your eyes on the girls standing off to the side, rather than watching the throne.

Red Widow, which follows Radha Mitchell as Marta Walraven, a woman who grew up in the Russian Mob in Marin County, only to find herself pulled back into the world of crime she tried to leave behind after the murder of her husband, premiered on ABC last Sunday. At the Television Critics Association press tour in January, I spoke with Melissa Rosenberg, who created Red Widow fresh off her stints writing the Twilight franchise, about what mothers are allowed to do on television, what parts of sex can and can’t get past Standards and Practices, and what it’s going to take for women to succeed in Hollywood. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

How did you decide that Red Widow was going to be about the Russian mob?

Well my first decision was where I was going to set it. The original is set just outside Amsterdam, and had this sort of suburban community versus in-town, so I was looking for that. And because I’m from Marin County, in NOrthern California, that was a natural place. You’ve got Marin County and you cross the bridge into San Francisco, which has become emblematic of the bridging of two worlds. And so I began to look at what was the organized crime situation in San Francisco. While the Russian mob isn’t the largest group in San Francisco, it’s one of the top three. So then we were fortunate enough to find the former head of the FBI organized crime branch for the Russian mob in San Francisco and he became our technical consultant…So everything we do is checked with him. We do a lot of research on the internet obviously and everywhere we can. But we’re always conferring with him as well.

In terms of that sort of mob tradition, one of the things I’m curious about in that context is how the mob culture interacts with the way that Marta and Evan are raising their children? I thought that sequence in the pilot where Evan tells their son to kick his brother, he gives his daughter the money for the paints, he’s very sort of emotional and undisciplined and she wants to set boundaries. I was curious how that interacts with the larger mob story and the larger mob culture.

What’s interesting is, you know, having come from Marin County, and we all have these experiences growing up. You think you are raised in, you think that is everyone’s reality. And when you finally leave that nest, you realize, oh, the Marin County way of thinking and being is completely different from the rest of the country. It’s a sort of rude awakening. But there’s part of it that’s always living with you. Things that seem very odd to the rest of the world are just the norm to me. I mean, I htink that’s very much the case with Marta. A lot of people would think that having your husband exporting pot, it would be “Are you frickin’ kidding me?” But for her, it’s in the realm of “I don’t love this, I’d rather you didn’t do this.” But it’s not this huge moral violation in the way it would be for anyone else in the world who had a different background than her. So it’s always exploring the line for her, it’s an unclear line, and it’s different from what a lot of other people’s experiences might have been.

I wonder if we’ve had so many of these anti-heroes who are fathers because of TV tropes about men as bumbling dads, they’re not really involved, so their betrayal of responsibility to their kids doesn’t hit as hard?

There is definitely a much higher standard for characters who are mothers. There are a couple of things you don’t do. You don’t kill a dog. You don’t have a mother betray her children. You’ve lost your audience on either of those two fronts. And it’s just something embedded in our culture that we are less forgiving. And that’s always the line we’re going to be riding with her. She’s never intentionally betraying them. She’s never intentionally putting them in danger. She’s doing the very, very best she can. As we all are!

I love the sex scene in the pilot, and I am consistently cranky about sex on television. This looked like people who were having intercourse like real people. Can you talk a little bit about the process of writing that scene—and was there anything Standards and Practices wanted you to cut or change?

There’s always a few grinds and pumping, I can’t remember the word—

Thrusts?

You can’t thrust! When we shot that scene, it was one of the most intense shooting days of our pilot, because those two have amazing chemistry. You really felt that you were stepping into a very intimate relationship. We had a very closed set. These two actors, both of them, have a lack of vanity, and will just fling themselves into something. There’s a lot of footage that will never be scene, 95 percent of it, because it’s just so outrageous in an incredibly fantastic way. What it got pared down to, you still get, it’s a very sexy scene, it’s not pretend, it’s not “And now we’re doing this for the cameras because it looks really hot.” It’s two actors as directed by Mark Pellington, who’s a very real director, who basically let the room disappear for them and immersed themselves in this moment.
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In keeping with some of the things that I and Linda Holmes have been writing about an obsession with darkness and grit that’s become more for its own sake than it is for a larger narrative purpose, Stephen Lloyd Wilson has a good piece at Pajiba about the difference between plot complexity and moral complexity:

And even in this hair-splitting description, the language doesn’t quite work right, because complexity also has implications of plots that resemble spaghetti, which isn’t exactly right either. What we’re really trying to get at is moral complexity, not plot complexity. Difficult questions are not the same as complex ones.

In the second season of “24”, the last one I bothered watching, there’s a wonderful illustrative example. There’s the conspiracy to blow up a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, thwarted by bravery and pluck, and for a several episode sequence all evidence points to the plot being a joint effort by several Middle Eastern governments. Planes are in the air, ambassadors are recalled, the world is on the brink. And of course Jack Bauer discovers the key evidence that reveals that the cabal was actually within the American government itself. Complex? Well that isn’t a simple plot. Dark? Well there were nukes and people dying. But morally complex?

All the air went out of the show at the exact moment of that reveal because it turned a terrible moral question of how to respond to a horrific act of war (do you drop the bomb even though the plot failed? Invade three other countries?) into a simple question. Find the bad guys. Shoot them.

I’ve been thinking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a lot in this conversation, because it’s a show that largely eschewed physical disgustingness—the Gentlemen and their jars of hearts were about as gross as the show ever got—but had plenty of moral complexity. The fifth season of the show feels to me like a perfect example of a way to pose a range of morally complex questions that aren’t limited in stakes to avoiding violent death, and to do so without communicating those stakes through grotesquerie. Among the issues at stake: what does Buffy owe Dawn, the girl she is brainwashed to think is her sister, but who is actually a construction of ancient monks? Who is Buffy without her mother? What does it mean to parent someone? How do we handle death? How do we—or in this case, Xander and Anya—know when we’re ready to get married? When is self-sacrifice selfish, and when is it necessary? How do we handle people who are, in themselves, innocent, but who can’t help committing unspeakable evil? In the case of Spike, how do we know when someone evil has truly reformed?

There are a lot of plots in play in Buffy, but as a network show, it had a longer season to let them all flesh out—and one downside to the shorter seasons of prestige cable is that sometimes showrunners try to stick too much plot spaghetti into their fewer episodes, rather than limiting the amount of story they try to tell. And the basics of the season were fairly simple: Glory, the main Big Bad of the season, sometimes was stuck in the body of a doctor named Ben, who also happened to be treating Buffy and Dawn’s mother for cancer. The dynamic animating those elements was fairly simple: Glory looked for Dawn, the gang tried to keep her from figuring out what Dawn was, once Glory knew Dawn was the key, the gang tried to keep Glory away from her. There were variations, but the core structure was strong. Sometimes, it seems, moral complexity is actually served by plot simplicity. And as the end of the fifth season of Buffy should serve to remind us, sometimes death is most effective when it comes imbued with deep love, rather than simple brutality.

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.

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:

My friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have a long and marvelous (and I’m not just saying that because they are my friends) conversation about Alan’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised (about which more later) up at Press Play. And something Alan said helped a lot of my thinking about the era of anti-hero television over the last year or so snap into place. He told Matt:

When Carolyn Strauss told me that HBO’s decision of what to do as their first show after Oz came down to The Sopranos or something by Winnie Holzman, the creator of My So-Called Life, about a female business executive at a toy company, I immediately stopped paying attention to the interview for a good five minutes, because all I was thinking about was an alternate timeline where this Winnie Holzman show was the next big HBO show. I was asking myself, would the other show have spawned imitators? Or would it not have, because “Female business executive at a toy company” is not as inherently cool as “New Jersey wiseguy in therapy”?

It’s striking to me that while both of them talked about this alternate world, neither, at least in the edited version of the interview that appears online, mentioned Sex and the City. There’s no question that The Sopranos, which began airing seven months after the debut of Sex and the City in the summer of 1998, is the more formally ambitious show. But Sex and the City has never really gotten the credit it deserves for its deeply probing discussions of, among the factors my friend Emily Nussbuam at the New Yorker has identified, romanticism and cynicism, second- and third-wave feminism, and libertinism and prudishness, nor for its foundational role in the rise of HBO. Both in terms of acting as a destination show that brought viewers to the network while it elevated the traditional sitcom, and in the income it provided to HBO through syndication, Sex and the City deserves both critical and financial recognition for its role in elevating both the network and cable television in general.

And it, and the possibility of this long-lost Winne Holzman, raise the specter of an alternate universe of prestige television drama that’s dedicated to the rise and deconstruction of female fantasies in the way that shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men paint glorious specters of masculine badassery that are the primary draw for some viewers, and then reveal the rot in them, a process that’s the primary draw for others. I can dream up a lot of the kinds of shows that we’d have in that bizarro world: in genre, the She-Hulk procedural I bring up so often I know it’s annoying, a functional version of Powers with Katee Sackhoff as Deena Pilgrim, in period shows, something about Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of women’s magazines, or a kicky vision of the seventies and eighties in Washington and New York through the eyes of a woman suspiciously like Nora Ephron, in crime, maybe a story about the DC Madam. I suspect the dynamics of this world would be similar: a period of establishing the competence and coolness of these women, followed by overreach, downfall, and accountability (arcs, by the way, that Sex and the City and Girls‘ most determined critics never give those shows enough credit for following). But the details would be different: we’d have to have audiences that accept private lives as important as power struggles, sex as something to be explored rather than simply had, frivolity as not more condemnable than violence or anger.

I wouldn’t want to have to choose between this fantasy world and the one we’ve got. I don’t want to give up Game of Thrones or The Wire for any of these other things. I just wish they could exist too, that Sex and the City wasn’t written out of history, and that Damages could have worked better on FX and on DirecTV, and that we weren’t still stuck on the idea that male fantasies are the stuff of literature, and female fantasies are treats.

This post discusses plot points from the October 30 episode of Sons of Anarchy.

“What you going to do, prez?” Nero asks Jax towards the end of last night’s episode of Sons of Anarchy. “You going to beat the shit out of your mom? Ain’t that been done enough by your family?” It’s telling that, even though Nero hasn’t known Gemma and her family very long, he can already see the toxic dynamics embedded in it even more clearly than the Teller-Morrows can. One of the best things in this flawed season of Sons has been the presence of Nero and Damon Pope, men who are more competent at violence and corruption than SAMCRO is, but who also have much more clearly articulated values outside of their criminal activities. As the Teller-Morrows have become increasingly contemptible and incompetent, Nero and Pope serve to illustrate the gap between who Jax Teller is and who he might have been.

Pope, in this episode, represents the value of patience and the danger of impulsiveness. “Five years from now, this will be affordable housing. Multi-family units. Retail. Park. MARC Station,” Pope tells Jax meditatively when they meet at the rail yard. “Where do they put your bronze statue?” Jax asks him sarcastically. “Somewhere they can’t chop the hands off,” Pope tells him. Their immediate conversation is Jax’s belief that Pope targeted him for assassination, but of course Jax is both wrong about that, and missing Pope’s larger point. SAMCRO’s protected Charming from outside harm for years, but it’s rarely done much to build the town up. Jax sees Jacob Hale’s Charming Heights project as a tool rather than as a potential legacy. And even when he looks to tools, he misidentifies them. “What was I supposed to think?” Jax asks of the hit. “That someone wants you dead and hired a black guy to do it,” Pope tells him patiently. “Unemployment’s crushing the hood. Brothers need work.” If Jax wants to not just survive, but thrive, he needs to develop the ability to see around corners when right now, he can barely see what’s in front of him.

If Pope represents the possibility of becoming a criminal mastermind, Nero’s begging Jax to consider an exit strategy. “You got a beautiful wife, you got two healthy kids, you need to accelerate the end game,” he tells the younger man. “Get away from this shit that’s trying to kill you.” But Gemma and Jax may be too deeply enmeshed in their family culture to start living a new way, and making a living by new means. As Clay put it to Juice, after learning the secret of his parentage, “Everybody at that table’s done something that puts them outside the Reaper. Self-disclosure kills the group.” That’s not just a rule for the club. Gemma and Clay have long hid the secrets of John’s death from Jax, and as they’ve been revealed bit by bit, those half-truths have given the family gangrene. They’re like a patient that can’t bear to give a limb up as lost, and risk dying as a result.
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